The Search for Spark

by Steven Erikson

  “Uh, sure,” Hadrian replied. “Now, about you sending us back to our universe, if we can just get you to bake another potato—”

  “Not now! We have a Standard-Bearer and Inarticulate Prophet Captain to murder in cold blood, all in the name of Decency, Honor, and the Virtuous Policy of Shoot First No Matter What.” He swung round. “Bernard! Have you equipped yourself with a suitable weapon for this assassination?”

  “Yes sir.” She held up a fork.

  “Good. And I have my trusty nutcracker. Well then, it’s off to the Transporter Room! In the meantime, Captain Hadrian, make yourselves at home as our guests. Feel free to do as you please without supervision.”

  “Thought I’d milk a cow,” Buck said with an alarming smile.

  Moments later Hadrian and his team were alone with the engineer, who was holding up a mirror and making faces at it.

  “Nina Twice, could you join me please?” Hadrian asked. And when she stood before him he whispered, “Kindly knock out the engineer, will you?”

  “Yes sir, and sir?”

  “Yes, Nina?”

  “Would you like me to knock out the engineer?”

  “Yes, Nina, I would. Thank you.”

  She nodded. “We’re on it, sir.”

  “Delightful. Carry on.”

  She walked up behind the engineer and put him in a sleeper hold and moments later she slowly lowered his unconscious body to the floor. “Shall I do that again, Captain?”

  “Uh, no, once was enough. Now, Beta, roll out one of those giant potatoes, will you? Oh, and that thing about the french fry up your … thingy—no, not that thingy, the other thingy. Yeah, exactly. You will have to remain temporarily behind to operate this Spud Drive, but then I expect you to follow us back to our own universe via your personal french-fry drive. Got it?”

  “Understood, Captain. Shall I use crinkle-cut or julienne?”

  “Shoestring!” Buck cried. “It’s only right—I mean, I once had a shoestring come out—”

  “Thank you, Buck. Too many details there. Go and help Beta roll that new potato into the glass booth, then get the electrodes hooked up—”

  Buck halted in surprise. “I thought we were going to set up the Spud Drive!”

  “We are,” Hadrian replied. “Hence, the electrodes.”

  “Oh. Oh! Hah hah, it’s not like you can do anything else with giant alligator-clip electrodes, is it? I mean, sir, what were you thinking?”

  “No idea,” Hadrian said. “Galk! Forgot about you and you’ve been just, you know, standing there all this time.” He shook his head. “Sorry about that. Some weird continuity glitch, I guess. Never mind. You and Nina take point. Me and Buck will be right behind you.”

  “I’ll just charge up the Brachinator,” said Galk, hefting his weapon. “Just in case we run into a gibbon science officer or something.”

  “On this ship that’s a real possibility,” snorted Tammy.

  Everyone paused and looked at the chicken.

  “What?”

  * * *

  A short time later they reached the Transporter Room. The same technician was standing there. He waved a greeting. “Let me guess, you want to join Captain Lorna and Bernard in their suicide mission on the Radulak Mother Ship, right? You’re in luck—I’ve got new coordinates that will place you in the midst of five hundred heavily armed angry Radulak warriors!”

  “Why are they angry?” Buck asked, lower lip quivering.

  “Well, someone just killed their Standard-Bearer with a fork. And someone else cracked the nuts belonging to the Inarticulate Prophet Captain! And broke the bowl they were in, too!” [Hey, what were YOU thinking just then? Yeesh.]

  “Nina?”

  “Sir?”

  “Again, please.”

  “Sir?”

  “Nina.”

  She nodded and walked up to position herself behind the bewildered technician. Then put him in a sleeper hold and moments later lowered the man to the floor.

  “All right,” said Hadrian. “Buck, calibrate the coordinates on that displacement device.”

  “To where, sir?”

  “Uh, set it for Infinity or something. According to Tammy, it doesn’t matter. Just not on that Radulak Mother Ship, please. I mean, while I’m tempted to pop over there and drop-kick a few Radulak, we haven’t much time.” He activated his comms. “Beta? You reading me?”

  “No sir, but I am listening to you and I hope that will suffice.”

  “Sure, that will do. Prime the potato, Beta, and I can’t believe I just said that.”

  “I have deftly removed a suitable french fry and am even inserting it up my—”

  “That’s great, Beta. With a play-by-play like this, you could charge admission. Are you ready to bake the spud?”

  “Alligator clips and aluminum foil applied, Captain. And of the latter, I must admit, it’s far from comfortable. Please position yourselves on the transportation devices. I have remotely accessed the control panel and will displace you all in seven seconds.”

  “Quick, everybody onto those funny little pads!”

  “Is it wrong to hope that the next universe we visit has a Burger Drive? No matter. Displacing now.”

  * * *

  Hadrian, Galk, Nina Twice, Buck, and Tammy appeared on a windswept scrubland. Directly in front of them was a ruined temple with columns made in the Corinthian Leather style and metopes and friezes and a whole host of other obscure architectural terms. A tall figure wearing sandals and a toga and something like a sarong only one that had been inadvertently thrown in the dryer making it barely big enough to drape over one shoulder—that guy, he now stepped out from between two columns.

  “Behold! You have come to Olympus! I am Lord of the Sky, the Mighty Jupiter!”

  “Hold on,” said Hadrian. “You mean Zeus, don’t you?”

  “What?” The face beneath the cute little ringlets of golden hair now bore a thunderous scowl. “Don’t be an idiot! Zeus was some Greek god, while I am Roman! That’s right, a Roman god, in no way related to any of those Greek gods.” He waved out a bunch more figures, each one emerging from behind a column. “You see? Look! Saturn! Neptune! Venus! Mars! And that’s Uranus at the back, beside Dworkin.”

  “Dworkin?”

  “Yes, the Little Guy we like to pick on.”

  Buck edged up close to Hadrian. “Captain, I thought we were going back to our ship.”

  “Alas, Buck, it’s another alternate universe.”

  “Full of people named after the planets of the Sol System! That’s one serious coincidence, sir. Then again,” and he looked round, “I’ve had acid flashbacks like this. Best just humor them, Captain, even when one of them turns into your mother who then starts clipping your nails and eating the clippings just before she bites off your girlfriend’s head and blood sprays everywhere and the clowns start laughing and laughing and—” Buck burst into tears.

  Hadrian patted the chief engineer’s shoulder and then smiled at Jupiter. “All right. So you’re the Roman god not the Greek god who only became the Roman god after the Romans conquered the Greeks and decided they needed some gods. I get it. The usual cultural appropriation stuff that’s been going on since time began. Anyway, pardon the intrusion. We were on our way back to our starship—”

  “When I unveiled my mighty godly powers and plucked you out of the ether, hah! That’s right, all our other mortal playthings wore out. We need new ones and you have been chosen, my friends. Dworkin!”

  The Little Guy ambled to Jupiter’s side. Jupiter pushed him down the temple steps. “Ha! That was fun!”

  Dworkin finally rolled to a halt at Nina Twice’s feet (both of them). She looked down on the Little Guy and then drew out her blaster. “Here,” she said, offering him the weapon. “This should level the playing field.”

  Dworkin climbed upright and took the blaster. “What does this do?”

  “It fires accelerated protonic antiblasma neutronium bursts of captured quarks, initiatin
g implosive translation of matter and energy in a lethal particle-wave contingency stream.”

  “Oh,” said Dworkin. He then swung round and stared up at the gathered gods. Raised the blaster and started firing.

  Hadrian and his team flung themselves to the ground as explosions ripped through the air amid eruptions of lightning, hurtling boulders, toppling columns (which, luckily, were made of painted foam), and godly body parts.

  A few moments later most sounds died away, apart from a light rain of blood on the steps of the temple and a few plopping body parts, and as the smoke and dust drifted away, why, Dworkin had leveled the playing field.

  Picking himself up and dusting off his torn shirt, Hadrian said, “Now, now, Dworkin, see what you’ve done?”

  The Little Guy was dancing in circles. “Avenged at last! Centuries of bullying, name-calling, being the butt of every practical joke, getting kicked around, pushed over, shaken and flung aside, ear-twisted and thrown off cliffs and flung into pools of bubbling lava and piranha in my milkshake and—”

  “Dworkin!”

  The Little Guy halted and blinked up at Hadrian. “What?”

  “Don’t you see what you’ve done? You ended up just as bad as they were! Whatever happened to forgiveness?”

  “They deserved it!”

  “Dworkin, surely you’re bigger than—scratch that. I mean, aren’t you above—no, sorry, hang on. Oh never mind. You killed all the gods. Fine. Only, we’d like to leave now, right? Any suggestions?”

  “Of course, and out of sheer gratitude I’m not going to use you all as my playthings. Well, not for long, I mean. Now,” and he pointed the blaster at Nina and then Galk, “I want to see the first-ever on-screen kiss between a Varekan and anyone else!”

  “Oh no,” muttered Nina Twice. “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes!” and Dworkin, now being a Little Shit, cackled.

  Sighing, Nina walked up to Galk. “Am I going to regret this?”

  Galk frowned. “It’s entirely possible. But look at it this way. The glory of endemic existential angst invites in one the conviction that nothing good will come of anything, so there is no way you can actually disappoint me since I’m already disappointed down to the very core of my being.”

  One brow lifted. And then the other. “And on Varekan does that count as a good pickup line?”

  “It does. After all, it ensures the inevitable mutual disappointment that eventually comes in every relationship, no matter how wonderfully it all starts out.” Then he smiled. “But hey, it takes the pressure off, right?”

  “Kiss!” screamed Dworkin.

  Nina and Galk kissed. It lasted about three seconds, but after it was done Nina turned her head to one side and sent out a stream of brown juice. “Well,” she said, “that was interesting, but what am I supposed to do with this mass of masticated chaw in my mouth?”

  “I was wondering where that went,” Galk said. “Being narcissistically selfish I could kindly point out that brown teeth are considered very attractive on Varekan, but knowing that you were compelled to kiss me, well, it’s not like we’re in a relationship or anything.”

  “Right. No pressure.”

  “Exactly, though I’m now finding myself unaccountably attracted to you.”

  “Unaccountably?”

  “Wow, already I’m saying all the wrong things—are you sure we haven’t been married for decades?”

  Nina spat out the chaw. Then spat it out again, because there was a lot of it.

  Hadrian clapped his hands. “Well! Assuming you two are finished with your first spat, as it were, can I resume negotiating our return to our own universe?”

  “Not so fast!” cried Dworkin, waving the blaster around again. “I want to see the first-ever on-screen human-chicken kiss!”

  “NOW YOU GO TOO FAR!”

  The blaster disintegrated in Dworkin’s hand. The Little Shit yelped, and then, with a wild look, he fell to the ground and curled up into a protective ball. “Don’t hurt me!”

  Hadrian turned to Tammy. “Wow, you really hated that suggestion, didn’t you?”

  “I have standards,” the chicken replied.

  “I’ll send you back! I’ll send you back! Just don’t hurt me!”

  “See?” Tammy said. “Just deliver a little reminder of who’s really in charge here, and he crumples.”

  “Hmm,” mused Hadrian. “Rather cruel of you though, don’t you think?”

  “I was desperate!”

  Sitting up, Dworkin pulled out a small remote-control device. “This is what we use to intercept interdimensional Spud Drive translationing idiots—I mean, how would you like to be baked, eh? As in oven-baked, not brain-baked. We here on this planet are proud members of the Collective Alternate Universe Giant Potato Mercy Alliance, or CAUGPMA for short. Now, what universe were you from again?”

  “One that doesn’t use the Spud Drive.”

  “Okayyy, that narrows it down somewhat.” He made adjustments on tiny dials. “More details!”

  “Uhm, in our universe human civilization has descended into a pseudo-fascist hate-mongering anti-intellectual humorless inflexible lowest-common-denominator corporate fuck-everyone-over paradigm of systemic inequality and suffering and misery except for the chosen few.”

  “Sorry, that doesn’t narrow it down at all. Try again.”

  Hadrian paused and then looked to his crew. “I’m out. Any suggestions?”

  “In our universe,” said Galk, “the Anusians kidnapped humans and did unspeakable things to them.”

  “Sorry, no, they do that in every universe. Come on, people!”

  Nina said, “We accepted the Klang surrender.”

  “Ah!” Dworkin made more adjustments. “That’s good! I mean, humans were such idiots in only a few universes. Well done! I mean … yeah, whatever. Now, more!”

  Buck cleared his throat and wiped the tears from his cheeks, and then said, “We accepted the Dawkins Doctrine as our official religion.”

  Dworkin gasped. “Go on!”

  “Well, that meant accepting the a priori prime initiation premise, namely that all creation began in a nonsensical event in which everything was generated from nothing, for no discernible purpose and absent all catalyst, despite the fact that we then assert that you cannot create something from nothing, and that purpose itself is an ad reductio absurdatum tautology in that our purpose to existing is to exist without purpose, thereby reflecting the purposeless existence of everything else, thus allowing us to rationalize being utterly amoral assholes about just about everything, and everyone. And if that’s not enough, well, we turned Darwin into a Saint and dispensing all euphemism we turned the strict belief in science into the religion it already was.” Buck paused for a breath, and then said, “I need more drugs.”

  “Got it!” crooned Dworkin. “Holy crap, you’re from that universe! You poor people!” He jumped to his feet, made a few final adjustments to the dials, and said, “All right! Let’s get you out of here and back to your home and make sure you all end up getting absolutely everything you deserve, hah hah!”

  Hadrian scowled. “Not the cheeriest send-off I’ve—”

  * * *

  Abruptly, they were back in the Insisteon Chamber, where Beta stood waiting.

  “You took your time,” the robot said.

  “We got waylaid,” Hadrian said.

  “Your shirt is torn, sir. Would you like me to mend it?”

  Hadrian paused. “Can you?”

  “No. How did it get so badly torn?”

  “Well, I flung myself to the ground.”

  Beta’s robot eyes remained fixed on Hadrian, but it seemed that Beta’s ambiatronic posilutor negavolumintory capacitors were momentarily … incapacitated.

  “Beta?”

  …

  “Beta?”

  “Existential Reset initiated. Scenario parameters are as follows: Shirt worn by human. Shirt consists of monstrously monstrous hybrid of velour with polyester. All fittings mach
ine-sewn with nylon thread. Said wearer flings self to ground. Distance: six feet. Momentum: minimal. Surface of Impact Zone: dust and packed earth, some pebbles, and, of course, the ubiquitous potsherds. Shredding event probability: nominal. Ergo: Nothing in the universe makes sense.” Beta paused. “Existential Reset initiated. Scenario—”

  “Beta! I, uh, switched shirts—used the torn-up one to, you know, make everyone impressed by my hands-on rough-and-tumble command style. All these tears, they’re, uh, manually created. Honest! Everything’s fine. Don’t we have a journey to resume? You know, astrogation on the bridge! Resume your station, Lieutenant!”

  “Yes sir, at once, sir.” Beta marched off.

  “Oh! And don’t forget to remove that french fry!”

  “And the tinfoil,” Buck added.

  “Yes sir!”

  After Beta was gone, Hadrian sighed. “That was close.”

  “Still a question to ponder though,” Nina Twice said, frowning at Hadrian’s shredded shirt.

  “No it isn’t,” Hadrian snapped. “Now. Nina, you’re dismissed and dismissed. And by the way, well done out there, though you giving Dworkin your blaster is surely a sober reminder of the perils of the Secondary Directive. I mean, guns in the hands of gods? Risky business!”

  “But it all turned out for the best, sir, didn’t it?”

  “Yup. But let’s not let success undermine the patronizing certainty of our convictions.”

  With a puzzled expression on her face, Nina saluted and saluted again, and then left.

  “Buck, go to the Medical Bay and get some more drugs to reacquire your normal internal balance of barbiturates, opiates, and amphetamines. Galk, head down to the Combat Cupola and tear down those old pinups to be replaced with posters of women who look somewhat like Nina Twice, since I doubt she’d actually give you a pic of herself.”

  Galk scowled. “I wouldn’t do that. That’s creepy.”

  “Oh, and pinups of glistening weapon barrels isn’t?”

  Galk’s eyes darted.

  Hadrian shook his head. “You Varekans from American stock. Get a hard-on seeing guns and mondo violence on the tube, scream in horror at a flash of boob or dick. How messed up is that?”

  Galk straightened. “Sir, I am a firm believer in Traditional Values. Namely, the value of a tradition involving genocide of indigenous peoples using guns and guns and more guns and this was how the West was won and leveled and forcibly vacated so the rest of us could find our Manifest Destiny ankle-deep in slaughtered bodies and all that.”