The Management Style of the Supreme Beings

by Tom Holt

  They knew their constellations as thoroughly as any professor of astonomy, and measured out the interstellar distances with serious precision, using their fingers as dividers. A faceted blue and white pebble was Gnoth, the home planet of the galaxy’s most advanced species. Wrapping-paper rings encircled the grim ill-omened pebble of Snooi, home to the dreaded Bolons. Ninety-seven pebbles orbiting twelve shining stars made up the Proob Confederacy, aloof guardians of ancient wisdom, whose space extended from the Core to the broken rubber gasket that represented the Uboth Anomaly. Squatting on the pavement in the crushing warmth of the summer evening sun, they were lords of infinite space, distant but fascinated spectators of the joys and sorrows of innumerable tiny lives, any of which they could change utterly or sweep away with a flick of the fingers. It was a good game. Without it they would never have survived.

  And then one day Ab asked Snib where the bag was, and Snib said he’d thrown it away. The game was kids’ stuff, he said, and they weren’t kids any more. But it’s all right, he said as his brother’s eyes filled with tears, some day we’ll have a real galaxy, dozens of real galaxies. I promise you, he said with that quiet, fierce intensity that scared Ab sometimes, who couldn’t quite bring himself to say that he didn’t want a real galaxy to rule, the cardboard and tinfoil one was just fine, and what was wrong with being poor and hungry and cold sometimes, as long as they were together?

  Snib Venturi had made good on his promise, and the territory they controlled was so vast that if you stood back and looked at it from a distance, you could actually see the curvature of the Universe, where the gravitational pull of Time warps infinity into a perfect sphere. But Ab Venturi’s most treasured possession, which his brother knew nothing about, was a suitcase. In it was a galaxy set. It wasn’t much like the old one they’d made out of trash. The suns were crafted from genuine neutronium, the nebulas were priceless wisps of znui gossamer, the planets were gemstones and the black holes really were tiny miniature portals to alternate realities, which made packing them up again a bit awkward. Every evening when Snib had gone to bed, he’d retreat to his room and set out the galaxy, painstakingly measuring the interstellar distances with fingers that were thicker now but still accurate enough as they paced the luxurious deep-pile gveep-wool carpet. It was his greatest pleasure, but it wasn’t the same when it was just him. On one point, though, he was absolutely determined. Snib must never know. He’d think it was childish, and get angry because he’d think that Ab wasn’t grateful for everything Snib had done for him.

  Snib was sitting up late tonight with a big pile of papers, business stuff. It happened sometimes, when there was a lot going on, and Snib was perfectly capable of working round the clock if he had to. When that happened, Ab didn’t play the game, just in case Snib wanted something and came looking for him. But this particular spell of being-busy had lasted three days and three nights, and it was a long time since Ab had gone three nights without playing the game. It was calling to him; the suns and planets and the little people on the planets needed him. He could almost hear their voices in his head: Our god, our god, why have you forsaken us? It wouldn’t hurt, surely. Three days and Snib hadn’t come charging in at three in the morning. He decided to risk it. He pulled the suitcase out from under the bed, snapped the catches and swung back the lid.

  He was in the middle of calculating the trajectory of a multiphasic ion storm through the asteroid belt of Fni when the door opened, hitting him in the back. “Ab, I need you to sign this. Hey, bro, what you got there?”

  Ab couldn’t speak. His hearts had stopped beating. Slowly Snib knelt down and picked up a yellow giant.

  “Hey,” he said. “Cool.”

  “It’s neutronium,” Ab whispered.

  “It’s great. Where’d you get it?”

  And then a sudden and quite unexpected inspiration struck Ab like a thunderbolt, and all the black clouds of despair lifted and the sun shone gloriously. “I got it for you,” he said. “It’s a present.”

  Snib looked at him. Incredibly, he smiled. “Aw, Ab. You shouldn’t have.”

  “It’s to remind you of the old days. You know, when we were kids.”

  Snib beamed at him. “That old galaxy set we made. I’d forgotten about that.”

  “We had so much fun.”

  “Didn’t we ever.” Snib was grinning. “They were hard times, bro, but in a way they were good times too. We made them good times, didn’t we?”

  “We did that.”

  Snib picked up a planet and rested it on the palm of his hand. Around it, three tiny moons buzzed in slow elipses. “Amazing detail,” he said. “The moons actually move.”

  “It’s got real gravity and everything. Look.” With the blades of his fingernails Ab picked up a tiny asteroid and held it close to Snib’s planet. It leaped a whole centimetre through the air and was drawn into geosynchronous orbit.

  Snib laughed for pure joy. “This must have cost plenty.”

  “Well—”

  “Worth every cent. Hey, bro, that’s great. Thank you.”

  Ab smiled broadly, but his heart twisted inside him because Snib would take the game away and put it in a cupboard somewhere, along with the few other bits of cool stuff he’d acquired and never played with. “That’s all right, Snib. You do so much for me.”

  “Tell you what,” Snib said. “We’ll put this on the table in the living room. Permanently. After all, this is our place: we live here. We don’t need to pack our stuff away every night any more.”

  There is more joy in Heaven. “Sure,” Ab said. “I’d like that.”

  “The only thing that’s wrong,” Snib said, “is the Core.” He picked it up. Sinteraani glerqsmiths, the finest in the galaxy, had wrought it out of the purest kprz’wweebi, but Ab knew what Snib meant. It wasn’t quite right somehow. “We’ll have to get a better one. Say, remember that old screwed-up sheet of paper? That made a great Core. I wonder what happened to that old galaxy set.”

  Ab took a deep breath. “I don’t know, Snib. I guess I must’ve lost it somewhere.”

  “Doesn’t matter. This one …” He stopped and grinned. “This one’s almost as good.” He turned and sat down. It was so long since Ab could remember seeing Snib sit on a floor.

  “There was something you wanted me to sign.”

  “What? Oh, yes, right. Doesn’t matter, it can wait.”

  “You’ve been awful busy these last few days. I’ve hardly seen you.”

  Snib sighed. “It’s this damn insurgency thing,” he said. “I kidded Whatsisname, the guy we bought this place from, into paying for an army to take out the fat man.” He closed his eyes and massaged his forehead with his fingers. “You just can’t get good mercenaries these days. I’ve been on to Xxxplui and Freem and Gamma Orionis Four, but they’re all booked up till Galactic New Year. And the trash they’ve been offering me—”

  “Couldn’t the Security guys handle it?”

  “You know what Mum always used to say, if you want something done …” Snib sighed and picked up a lesser Magellanic Cloud. “You’re right,” he said. “Let them do it. That’s what I pay them for. You know what, bro? I feel tired a lot of the time these days.”

  “You work too hard. You always have.”

  “No such thing as working too hard,” Snib said, then grinned. Mom had said that a lot too. “Well, maybe. But this stupid insurgency is getting on my nerves. We didn’t have all this on Beta Coriolis Six.”

  “It’s just one guy and some old leftover thunder god.”

  “The thing is, it always starts with just one guy. Then, before you know it, you’ve got Doubt. I gotta stomp on it, Ab, or it’ll get out of hand. We got five galaxies watching us, bro, every little thing we do. The first tiny sign of weakness, they’ll be on to us like snakes.”

  A great wave of sorrow swept through Ab Venturi. For a moment there his brother had been happy; now he wasn’t, and it was all this damn Christmas man’s fault. “You get him, Snib. Get him real g
ood.”

  “I intend to.” For a split second he looked really scary. Then his face fell, and he just looked very, very tired. “As soon as I can find him. And then …”

  “Yes?”

  “He’d better watch out, is all.”

  46

  The Red Lord wasn’t happy. “He’s back?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “He didn’t get captured?”

  “No, boss.”

  “But it was a trap.” The Red Lord scowled. “Fetch him here. Now.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  The Red Lord poured himself a big drink of milk and scattered nutmeg sprinkles on the top with a silver spoon. For a cup he used the jewel-encrusted skull of … Actually, he couldn’t remember the guy’s name; it had all been so long ago—some minor vegetation god or river spirit who’d tried to muscle in on his turf back in the old days, when stuff like that had actually mattered. He could sort of remember himself standing over the poor fool’s twitching corpse and roaring, “I will drink my milk from your skull for the rest of eternity,” or some such garbage, but what the quarrel had been about or how he’d overcome him he had no idea. And, ever since, the elves had been washing up the skull and putting it out for him every morning, and it was just the way things had been, were now and probably ever would be. A nice glass, which held more and didn’t chafe your fingers, was probably out of the question.

  Jersey limped in. His clothes were torn and his face was covered in bruises, and he didn’t smell very nice. “Oh,” the Red Lord said. “It’s you.”

  Jersey slumped down in a chair. “Yup.”

  “You got away.”

  “Barely. The girl,” he said bitterly, “rescued me.”

  “Shouldn’t that be the other …?”

  Jersey shook his head. “Apparently not.”

  “So where is she?”

  “She’s still there. Didn’t want to leave.”

  “Ah.” The Red Lord cheered up a little. “You mean she’s betrayed us?”

  “Nope. Just didn’t want to be rescued by me, that’s all.”

  The Red Lord could see her point. Even so. “You clown,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Clown,” the Red Lord repeated deliberately. “You’re useless.”

  “Yes,” Jersey said wearily, “I think I probably am. Thank you so much for confirming it.”

  The Red Lord drank his milk. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “Probably not. I’m not very bright. Apparently.”

  The Red Lord was annoyed but not entirely incapable of sympathy. “You really thought she liked you.”

  “Yup. Wrong about that too.”

  “Ah well. Look at it this way. Would you really want to form a meaningful and lasting relationship with someone so shallow and lacking in character that she’d willingly reduce herself to the level of sidekick? Fine now, but imagine what it’d be like in ten, twenty years’ time. This dumb, oxlike creature following you around all the time and needing to be rescued every ten minutes. You’re better off.”

  “That’s what the stormtroopers said.”

  “Well, then.” The Red Lord sighed. “Meanwhile, you’ve screwed up all my plans.”

  “Have I? How like me.”

  “The idea was,” the Red Lord explained patiently, “that you’d be captured and forced to reveal the location of my secret fortress—that means this place here—whereupon Snib Venturi and all his goons would be here like a shot to get me.”

  Jersey nodded. “And that would be a good thing. I see.”

  “Yes,” said the Red Lord, “because my elves are good enough lads in their way, but there’s not nearly enough of them to risk a pitched battle in the open, whereas they can hold this place against a besieging army pretty well indefinitely.”

  “Which is what you want?”

  “Yes,” the Red Lord said, “because after a week, at most, Snib Venturi will be terrified that the market analysts across half the known Universe will be saying the Venturi boys can’t even put down a little local rebellion, they must be losing their touch, and after the shellacking they took over the Bank of Ultimate Truth—”

  “The what?”

  “Doesn’t matter. The point is, it’d look bad, and the Venturis could lose a lot of money. So they’ll give up, make some plausible excuse about restructuring and go away. It was the only way we could win. And you—”

  “I blew it.”

  The Red Lord nodded. “One simple thing. But never mind. I’ll just have to think of something else.”

  Jersey was looking at the sole of his shoe. The Red Lord clicked his tongue. “Sorry,” he said. “Am I boring you?”

  “Maybe I didn’t screw up after all.” With the back of the Red Lord’s teaspoon he picked something out of his shoe.

  “Oh look,” the Red Lord said. “It’s a tiny little electronic tracking device.”

  Jersey looked stunned. Then he grinned. “I didn’t escape. I wasn’t rescued. They let me go.”

  “Presumably. Why are you smiling?”

  “It means I wasn’t rescued by some dumb girl.”

  The Red Lord smiled sadly. “They may have let you go,” he said, “but if you ask me, yes, you had a lucky escape. And even more so,” he added kindly, “did she. Now, piss off and get some weapons from the armoury.” A warm red smile lit up his face, and Jersey backed away nervously. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  The Red Lord rubbed his hands together. “Snib Venturi is coming to town.”

  47

  “Jay,” hissed his father, “cut it out. People are staring.”

  It had been a long ride on the red-eye transdimensional conduit from Sinteraan, stopping at all the little planets along the way to deliver sacks of mail and crates of chickens. The nearest to Earth the conduit had taken them was Proxima Centauri. From there they’d hitched a lift from a saucer of bug-eyed monsters who were going to a poetry reading on Ganymede. The rest of the way they’d walked. Jay’s feet hurt as a result, so he was resting them by hovering six inches off the ground. He’d hoped nobody would notice. “Sorry,” he whispered back, lowering himself until his blisters rested on the hard asphalt.

  “The last thing we want to do is draw attention to ourselves,” Dad said. “We’re not supposed to be here, remember.”

  “Can we stop and rest for a bit? I’m bushed.”

  They weren’t supposed to be there because the contract with the Venturis specifically forbade them to visit Earth without six weeks’ notice and written consent. To begin with, Jay had found the idea of doing something he wasn’t allowed to strangely alluring—his first time, after all—but the thrill had worn off long ago, along with most of the soles of his shoes.

  To his surprise Dad said, “Sure, why not?” So they sat down outside a cafe and ordered coffee.

  “This was a mistake,” Jay said, gingerly prising his shoes off his feet and flexing his toes. “We shouldn’t have come, We should’ve stayed on Sinteraan and done the deal from there.”

  Dad winced. Jay contradicting him was something he was having trouble getting used to. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think we need to be here, on the spot, seeing what’s going on for ourselves. And then, when we get our planet back—”

  “If we get our planet back.”

  “When we get it back, we can get started straight away on putting things right.” He sighed. “I admit it, son: you were right and I was wrong. We should never have sold out to the Venturi boys.”

  Jay didn’t say anything, and the waiter brought them their coffee. After he’d gone Jay leaned across and whispered, “Dad, did you bring any Earth money?”

  “What? No. Did you?”

  “We might find it a bit difficult paying for the coffee in that case.”

  Dad grunted. “Appeal to the waiter’s better nature,” he said. “You’re good at that stuff.”

  “I’ll text Gabe. He’ll lend us the money.”

  Gab
e didn’t seem particularly happy to see them again. “Boss,” he said, “what are you doing here? You know you’re not supposed to—”

  Dad silenced him with a wave of his hand. “Lend us five dollars.”

  Gabe put a coin down on the table. Dad picked it up and eyed it with distaste. On each side was a portrait; Snib on one side, Ab on the other. “So what are you doing here?”

  Before Dad could speak, Jay said, “Have you heard from Kevin lately? How’s he doing?”

  Gabe hesitated. Dad said, “Don’t tell me. He’s got himself in trouble.”

  “No,” Gabe said quickly. “Not yet.”

  “But he’s about to?”

  Gabe shrugged and told them about the miracles, and how Nick had tried to talk to the boy but he wouldn’t listen, and how the miracles were trending on social media like nothing else on Earth. When he’d finished, Dad gave him a sour look and said, “I thought I told you two to look after him.”

  “We tried,” Gabe said. “But what could we do? His heart’s set on doing this stuff. Lucky for him, Snib Venturi’s all preoccupied with the tinsel-and-presents guy. Otherwise …”

  Dad and Jay exchanged glances. “Looks like we got here just in time,” Dad said. “All right, where is he?”

  “Last I heard, he was in Tromso. That’s a city in—”

  “Thanks, I can remember where Tromso is,” Dad snapped. “What’s he doing there?”

  Gabe looked down at his shoes. “He, um, filled the main tank at the city aquarium with doughnuts. People loved it. It cheered them up,” he added defensively, “and he made sure all the fish and stuff were OK. No rare species were harmed during the making of this—”