Theatre of the Gods

by M. Suddain

  ‘We can wait.’

  ‘No you can’t.’

  Later that night the cook entered and asked if he would be willing to join with him in overthrowing the surgeon. ‘I have the surviving seamen in hand, and all the children.’

  ‘Let us out and we’ll consider it.’

  He did not let them out. Later, Descharge heard a hoarse shouting on deck, then a weak scuffle, then silence. Knowing that the time had come to make his move, he woke Roberto. Roberto nodded. He raised his small hand and summoned a flossy streak of energy from the transformer on the wall as if it were the most natural thing in the world. When he touched a glowing finger to the magnetic latch it popped without protest. They crept upstairs. On the engineering level Roberto put his hand to the wall, and Descharge felt the ship sigh as all its non-essential functions were instantly shut down. ‘Good boy,’ he said.

  The scene they found on deck was so bloody, so frightening, that I can hardly bring myself to describe it to you. Roberto was sick into an empty water barrel. A number of seamen lay dead. G. De Pantagruel and G. Scatolletto lay in a twisted heap. As they lay dying, the pair had become entangled in a deadly soixante-neuf, with each continuing to try to eat the other’s leg. The poet lay bleeding in a sluice-gutter. Only a faint sobbing came from his hip. The surgeon was almost dead. He looked up at Descharge, smiled, and said, ‘Onward,’ before passing on himself. The children were cowering, weak, in the galley. Descharge went first to the engine room where he broke open the reserve refrigeration condenser and drained the water. He was able to fill four buckets with the precious liquid, which he put through the ship’s filter. Then he and Roberto went around the children and surviving seamen and gave them each a mouthful of water. Following his instincts, Descharge made a thorough search of the surgeon’s cabin and found a small cache of food. Then he went to the private cabin he’d been given aboard the Necronaut. It had been searched, though not well, and he recovered his secret supply of chocolate – a present from his mother – and he gave each of the children a small square. Then he went on deck and gave the cook a spoonful of water. ‘Oh, thank you, boy, thank you,’ said the cook.

  ‘You’ll be kept alive so you can be hanged,’ said Descharge. Then he went to the galley and placed all the supplies on the table and said, ‘This is what we have to survive. Anyone who tries to take food will be hanged. I want the flesh and organs of the dead cured with salt and placed in the refrigeration area. They are a last resort. Anyone caught eating raw human meat will be hanged. You have one hour to get this ship back in shape and then you’ll get another piece of chocolate.’ And that’s how Descharge retrieved the very last crumb of his unconquerable fleet.

  *

  Descharge loved to sail. His father had taught him how to navigate by the stars; he showed him how to sit in the bow of his boat and steer with the weight of his body, so that even a rudderless craft could make it home. Descharge didn’t know where they were. All he had was an obscure coordinate given to him by a fleshless angel of death. But it was better than nothing. He knew that Roberto could take them back to the others – if they could somehow find a place to replenish their ship’s fuel. They had no energy left to run the ship’s magnetic engines, they would have to make do with the sails. He took a magnetic reading and picked up the weakest signal from a shipping channel. He picked up a faint energy from a group of old stars and tacked along it, and slowly, as happens in a frictionless environment, they picked up speed. He threw every piece of surplus equipment overboard to lighten their load. He ordered all the dead’s machine parts to be ‘buried’ in space, except for the batteries for their pacemakers, which he kept, cleaned and stored away. He rigged a gravity pump, normally used for heating, to give them thrust. Descharge stood in the wheelhouse, read the almost undetectable shifts in light, and watched the stars in the distance grow brighter. Somewhere among those stars, he hoped, was a society who could give them food, give them water, give them the energy to power up their RIPS so that they could return to their shipmates. Weeks passed. The poor children wasted away.

  But none died, and the sense of relief when they saw a ship in the distance was like a volcano going off. The children, who had hardly been able to lift an arm before, were now dancing on decks. But soon they saw that the ship was not a ship at all, it was a sign, many miles high, and the sign was flashing words, and when they drew closer they could make out the glowing green text.

  ‘Patush’

  ‘Kushir’

  ‘-=-==-=’

  ‘Silenci’

  ‘Silence’

  MASTER OF THE MIND

  The Well Dressed Man felt tremendous. He had set up base camp at the foot of the ice wall in the unfathomable lantern dreamscape of Lenore’s mind. Not that this was a dream, or a simulation. This was real. When the Well Dressed Man entered Lenore’s mind he put himself in true danger, so he needed his full concentration. If she set a trap for him he could be stuck inside her mind until he starved to death. He had brought in equipment: two huge iron furnaces with steam-powered bellows and iron spouts to blow hell-fire directly at it. He had them working in tandem, and already there was an impressive-looking crater, ten foot wide and at least as deep. The surface had vitrified. He was beginning to see black forms hiding in the glassy waste. Secrets were floating to the surface. What he had learned so far had increased his power a hundredfold. Soon he would be unstoppable. Armies would cower before him.

  ‘You may as well give up,’ he said. ‘You can’t possibly hold me out for ever.’ He turned back to tend his furnaces, expecting the silence he was used to. But this time …

  ‘I don’t have to do it for ever though, do I?’

  The Well Dressed Man stiffened. The girl’s voice had come from inside his own head. He opened his eyes. On the chair opposite him the small figure was faintly dressed in a shimmering green light.

  ‘I only have to last for as long as you’re alive. You’re only a mortal, after all. Some days you will slip, then I will hurt you.’

  The Well Dressed Man quickly composed himself. Smiled. Closed his eyes again. For all the inconvenience this girl was causing, he had to admire her style.

  ‘Yes, I am learning quickly,’ the girl continued. ‘Watch this.’ And the Well Dressed Man was stunned to see his lovely furnaces begin to spew a torrent of ice.

  ‘Stop that!’ The Well Dressed Man swept his hand and the jets of fire resumed. ‘I could kill you in a blink. A blink!’

  ‘So why do you not, Mr Powerful? Because you need something first. You know I have mind-treasures. And also you are waiting for something. For Roberto? Roberto has the file. You can’t end me until he comes back. You need to destroy the file. That’s why you’ve been asking so much questions about him.’

  ‘You don’t know as much as you think.’

  ‘Ha!’ Her laugh was like a gunshot in his head. ‘You didn’t know that I could read your thoughts.’

  ‘I could kill your friends.’

  ‘Then you know I’d kill myself. I’m the chicken who lays gold eggs, and if I die … no more omelettes.’

  More laughter. It was a demonic laugh.

  ‘You know,’ said the Well Dressed Man, addressing this new voice, ‘you really don’t have to be here.’

  ‘Oh, but I want to be here,’ said Carrofax. ‘I’m enjoying myself. And I need to keep an eye on this one.’

  ‘You can’t meddle in matter.’

  ‘I can still be useful.’

  ‘Doesn’t it gall you to be a slave to a human? Isn’t it demeaning for a demon to have to bend to the will of a man?’

  ‘I am not a demon, flesh-monkey. Isn’t it demeaning for a man to be foiled by the mind of a little girl?’

  This time Lenore laughed loudly. It was a bell’s laugh, as bright as summer, and it made the Well Dressed Man bloom white-hot with rage.

  *

  There were times, people noticed, when the fog of mental enslavement, if not the snow of papal dominion, would lift. The
citizens of Diemendääs would be skipping about their business, shovelling slush, or delivering pies, when all of a sudden they realised they were walking again. Fabrigas noticed it first. He theorised that these rare moments of mental freedom were coming when the Well Dressed Man was concentrating fully on breaking the mind of Lenore, aka the Vengeance. He could only control so much at once, this master mesmerist. The hours he spent each day in her cell were the hours when life on the surface returned almost to normal.

  Fabrigas woke at dawn to the sound of the prisoner being taken out. ‘Am I not to even get a trial?’ cried the prisoner. The timbre of the voice made Fabrigas sit straight up in his bed. There was something terribly familiar about it.

  And then another voice: ‘I will not be troubling the courts with your sorry lies.’

  ‘That’s outrageous! If the Emperor finds out –’

  ‘He will not.’ The other voice, too, was oddly familiar.

  ‘That’s utterly reprehensible!’

  ‘So is kissing my wife!’

  The second voice, Fabrigas thought – no, knew – was a general’s. He even knew the general’s name. Fabrigas sat breathless on his bed, hands shaking in his lap. Reality was crumbling around him, and the walls of his belief were being smashed apart; the floorboards of his knowledge were being torn up, to be replaced by the carpet of incomprehension. He rushed to the window just as the prisoner was being stood against the far wall. The pieces of cannon were brought out by the guards. The first pale light had appeared in the skies, the new birds were singing in the nest beside his window, last night’s snow had melted leaving the ground and every surface wet and shiny. As the newly assembled gun was wheeled into place, the sun was peeking over the horizon. In the distance, the market cries were beginning. By the time the cannon had been aligned and the prisoner blindfolded, the birds were ravenous, but the mother bird was nowhere.

  It was a bright and hazy morning. The Black Widow slept fitfully in her cell in the city near the army barracks. The Emperor was having his breakfast. Lenore was dozing on the chair in the room the Well Dressed Man had prepared for her in a cave in the mountain high above. The market was soon in full swing and the sun was blazing into the courtyard. Time seemed to be moving on at an incredible speed, and Fabrigas felt as if he might tumble. ‘Load the cannon!’ The general cocked about, and Fabrigas saw the prisoner straighten. The red rag was like a smear of blood across his face, and his brow was wet and glistening with sweat as the old him gripped the bars around his balcony. As the ball was set and nudged along the barrel he cried out, ‘Listen!’ and below he thought he saw the shoulders of the prisoner – his own proud shoulders – stiffen.

  THE ARROW OF TIME

  Looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight, Master M. Francisco Fabrigas is able to explain what happened, but not to accept it. It is simply beyond the boundaries of comprehension and mathematics. It used to jolt him awake in the night, and I for one have heard him scream.

  ‘Listen!’

  He watched events unfold again exactly as he remembered, but from a new perspective. The ball placed down the barrel stops and he can hear, even from up high, even above the merciless buzzing of the bees, that the cannon has been loaded incorrectly. It was as if a voice whispered in his ear. He can’t hear exactly what the figure in the red blindfold says, because now the morning breeze has built enough to carry off his words, and the birds are chirping brightly right beside him, and the market is in full swing. But he knows what the prisoner is about to say. He sees him wriggle from his rag. He sees the prisoner straighten like a soldier and speak. The prisoner says, ‘Gentlemen. There is no space. There is no time.’ These are his final words: ‘All reality is a continuum of every possible event. This is the immutable truth available to us: that all that was, and all that will be, exist at once in a magnificent spectrum of possibility. Life. Death. These do not factor. Our experience of reality is simply a hero’s quest to preserve the idea of our Self in a sea of selflessness, and in our quest deny the truth: that reality knows no Self, that we are simply part of a great and everlasting instant. It might be possible to use this knowledge to build a machine which circumvents the constraints of time and space. But this is not certain. Knowing this, I do not see any reason for wishing to preserve my Self. But that cannon is loaded incorrectly and will explode.’ He sees the general raise his monocle and lever at the waist to inspect the gun. Then straighten, frigid with alarm, then wheel, astonished, to face the guilty figure. There is a pause before the general says, ‘Reload!’

  Reload. The word clatters around the old man’s head like a bearing in a drum. Reload? Reload! The general takes his hat and slaps the boy who fouled the priming. This is happening. The rag is hauled again across the prisoner’s gleaming eyes. Once more the blood-red slash across the pale wall. Once more the ball rolled down the barrel. Once more the general’s voice rings out, ‘Aim!’ And then. And then …

  *

  As the Emperor sat on his balcony with his breakfast he heard the shot tear a hole through the morning, and he saw the birds collected rise like bubbles in a flute; he felt a shift, the feeling that a new machine had just been set in motion, a machine that couldn’t be stopped. The birds and bees dazzled the sky.

  Miss Maria Fritzacopple, aka the Black Widow, aka Penny Dreadful, was taken from her waking nightmares by the cannon. She stood and went to the window of her cell before she remembered that her cell had no window – just one small aperture in the ceiling to let in light, snow and sometimes birds.

  When he heard a cannon-shot from the city below, the Well Dressed Man opened his eyes briefly to consider it, then shrugged and returned to his work. Things were under control on the streets of Diemendääs. The Pope’s ground troops stood guard among the mindless legions. He and his prisoner were in a well-fortified cave high up on the mountain. He’d been surprised, admittedly, when he’d gone outside for air and found it snowing, but you can’t predict everything.

  Fabrigas meanwhile fell back against the bed and let out a noiseless cry, like a trumpet blown through without a note, and he would have stayed there with that limp, ragged picture in his mind, splattered across his brain like blood upon a courtyard wall, if some sensation had not reached him from the yard below, an entanglement beyond space and time which made him stand, turn his face towards the rising sun, and the bright, red chirrups of the birds, then go to the window and cry, ‘My friend! I am here!’

  Sweet mercies, I can hardly hold this story together! The old man has simply turned on the faucet of his memory and aimed the hose-end at my face. He recounts his life not in the way a skilled storyteller would: in an orderly progression from calm beginning, via an increasingly turbulent middle, to a storm-wrecked climax, before finally easing into the calm lagoon of resolution. The old-beard at the table will be racing along upon a story, on a collision course with a cataclysmic incident, when of a sudden he’ll fly off a thousand years or more to tell an incident from boyhood which has nothing to add to the story at hand, leaving the tale flapping like a flag as he talks of a treasured toy, or a lost friend, or simply recites over and over: ‘Keep a good ship. Yes, keep a good ship.’ And there’ll be nothing I can do to snap him from his trance. He’ll go into the abyss, and I will stagger upstairs to the room I’m occupying, to sit bewildered with my stack of notes written in a very specific kind of shorthand I invented to record the words of a lunatic.

  And yes, I know full well what the notices will say about this book: ‘Volcannon makes excuses for the fact that his ambitions far exceed his talents!’ ‘Too many characters! Too many threads!’ ‘Two thumbs downwards!’ But I ask you: what is the artist supposed to do here? These are the confessions of M. Francisco Fabrigas: scientist, explorer, dreamer, liar, traitor, fool. This is the tale which came tumbling from the old man’s mouth, and I have altered it hardly a bit. At least every second word is true, and that is more than most books. He casts his memories the way an aristocrat casts garments, and I, like a se
rvant, scurry to collect them. So I say this to you, reviewers professional and amateur: save your rancorous reviews and scarlet epigrams – you who take a few coins for skimming the first hundred pages of a book with one eye closed, and another on the betting forms. Put your poison pen back in the tray, for it stings less than the spiny harpoons fate sent me when it made me a pathetic novelist, when it tossed me on this orphan moon with this great bearded lunatic.

  Or perhaps grant me this: prove to me at least that you have read this far, that you are ‘… on this ship until the end’. To do that will only take a slip of the pen. Let me propose that if you happen to be writing a notice, that you include in it, somewhere, a secret word. Let us say, for argument, the word ‘homunculus’. Include this word somewhere in your notice and we will all know, regardless of the quality of your analysis, that you have at least done us all the most basic courtesy: that of actually finishing the book. Likewise, any review appearing without the word ‘homunculus’ will reveal that the reviewer felt it unnecessary to read the entire book, but instead felt it was acceptable to read but a portion of a work that I have spent a lifetime on.

  So it is decided. ‘Homunculus.’

  And now, back to the action.

  HOMUNCULUS

  It takes forty-seven people to bathe the Pope. It takes a small team to run his bath, another to prepare his lotions. Still another team readies the Pope for his bath, getting him into his robe and warming his towels, and there are two men in charge of the steam jets, and two large men whose only job is to lift the Holy Father into the tub. Then there is the lift-out team, the drying and powdering squad, and the clean-up crew. He also has a man to look after his battle-toys.

  The Pope was steaming in his steam bath, in his star palace, high above the surface of the conquered city. But the bubbles, the star palace, the conquest brought no joy. Below was a city begging to be crushed, and he wasn’t able to do a thing. Every time the thought to act arrived in his mind, it vanished. What good was being Pope of the universe if he couldn’t make people love and fear him? He had been sent to bring this Devil Girl to justice, and where was she? Somewhere else. And where was he? In his pool. Hopeless. Even the snow falling on the city below brought him little joy. And he thought he’d seen the men in his bathing crew looking at him funny, mocking him. Did they think he was weak? He put a finger on the top of one of his boats and pushed it beneath the bubbling water. That’s what he’d do to people who mocked him. He would show them all. Suddenly, an idea began to form in his mind. And it stuck, finally, like a pure flake upon a frozen pane. Ideas took a long time to form in the Pope’s mind, and when they did they took a lot of polishing, but in the end they were always as hard and bright and cold as diamonds. Yes, this was a good idea. Yes. This is what he’d do. And ‘Yes!’ he said as he splashed the bubbles with his palms: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’