The Garbage Chronicles

by Brian Herbert

  “Damn fool Corker,” Prince Pineapple muttered, watching the car speed away, heading for one of the drag strips. “Those fellows haven’t got a lick of sense. Half the time they’re out on their feet, drunk on the grain alcohol they carry in their packs. They’re born tipsy, you know. I hear fermented grape juice runs through their veins.”

  “Your king is a Corker too?” Javik asked.

  “We call these Earth Games,” Prince Pineapple said, disregarding the query. He hurried along the path, adding, “Conceived in one of Lord Abercrombie’s dream messages.”

  They rounded a corner of the grandstand, placing them out of view of the action. On this side the ground was littered with Corker backpacks and other debris. The prince kept looking up nervously at the grandstand. Then he yelled, “Look out!” and pushed Javik and Evans off the path.

  A large bottle crashed to-the ground where they had been, followed by two plastic backpacks, partially full. Wizzy scurried away from a big splash of dirty-colored grain alcohol.

  “It gets a bit rough back here during the games,” Prince Pineapple said.

  An inebriated Corker approached, weaving from side to side on the path. Short and round with a plastic grain alcohol pack strapped to her back, the grenache purple Corker had peculiar, scaly skin with bumps on it like flattened grapes. As she neared, Javik heard odd sucking sounds. Looking closely, he noticed she was sucking at a tube that led from the backpack to her mouth. Black, brackish liquid dripped down her chin.

  Prince Pineapple nodded dutifully to the Corker as they passed. She did not acknowledge the gesture, and instead coughed, hawked, and spit a ball of black phlegm on the ground.

  Javik wrinkled his face in revulsion as the Corker passed. “Smelly little brute,” he whispered to Wizzy.

  Still on Javik’s shoulder, Wizzy went into a discourse on the smelliest, most vile things in the universe. After less than a minute of this, Javik stuffed the little comet in his jumpsuit pocket and zipped it shut. From the pocket, Javik still heard Wizzy’s muffled voice, saying something about the slime in which Esterian pigs liked to root.

  “We must go faster,” Prince Pineapple said, seeing shadows lengthen across the path.

  They moved more quickly now, crossing a footbridge over a highway of vehicles that were pulled by carrot people. Each vehicle carried a different variety of Fruit person. Javik noticed that some of the carriages were a good deal more extravagant than others, with longer cabs, more silver or gold trim, and longer teams of carrot people.

  Wizzy fell silent in Javik’s pocket, realizing just then what had been done to him.

  Javik asked about the vehicles.

  “They reflect status in the Royal Family,” Prince Pineapple said. “Every Fruit is a member of the Royal Family. The king has a carriage pulled by one hundred carrot men. No one is permitted to have more.”

  “I see,” Javik said. I wonder if they call it carrot power, he thought.

  “Carrot people are strongest of the Vegetables,” the prince said. “Health fanatics. They make ferocious warriors for the enemy, excellent slaves for us.”

  “Who are your enemies?” Evans asked.

  “The Vegetable Underground,” Prince Pineapple said.

  “Fruits against Vegetables?” Javik asked, bemused but trying not to show it.

  “Since time immemorial,” came the reply. “But it is not a perfect system. Even drunkard lowlifes such as the Corker we passed at the grandstand have a good deal of status . . . simply by virtue of their close juice relationship to our king.”

  They could see the castle now, at the crest of a Vegetable garden terraced hill. “We grow our own slaves,” the prince explained.

  The Corker castle was massive, constructed of native charcoal stones in the Earthian medieval manner. Imposing ramparts of dirt and stone surrounded the structure, and Javik counted eight guard towers on this side alone, each flying a triangular purple banner.

  “What is your position?” Evans asked of the prince.

  “Number One Adviser to King Corker. We Pineapples are extremely intelligent—but not entirely appreciated, I fear.”

  “How so?” Evans asked, catching up with the prince and walking at his side.

  “Important matters do not require brains here. Decision Coins are flipped. Whenever the king asks me for my opinion, I am expected to flip a coin.”

  “That sounds dumb.”

  “You think so too?” Prince Pineapple asked, pleased.

  “Definitely.”

  “We pineapples might have taken control of the planet on the First Day . . . if the blight had not hit us. Things would be different today if only . . . ” He hesitated.

  “What happened?” Javik asked, catching up and walking on the prince’s other side. Planet of the Grapes, Javik thought, making a play on an ancient, tattered paperback book Sidney once had shown him. It was one of the illegal things Sidney kept hidden in his safe.

  “A strange malady,” Prince Pineapple said. “Only affecting pineapples. Some say the Corkers . . . ” He sighed.

  “The blight was intentionally inflicted?” Evans asked. “A power grab?”

  “I have said too much,” Prince Pineapple said. And I am supposed to be so intelligent! he thought, raging inside.

  “We will not repeat it,” Javik said.

  The prince’s gaze flitted all over the place, like a moth near light. “I have been fortunate personally,” he said, “though recently in disfavor with the king. That’s why I’m so anxious to take you straight to his court. He has been most unhappy with me of late.” A half-truth, he thought, recalling his clandestine plans for that evening.

  They reached a section of uphill straightaway lined with high English hedges. Ahead, Javik saw a wide moat and the castle’s main drawbridge.

  “The Corkers were destined for power anyway,” Prince Pineapple said, attempting to change his image to the Earthian visitors. “They arc our best fighters, having six legs instead of two like the rest of us. This gives them great individual speed and mobility on the battlefield.”

  “The ones I’ve seen don’t look so ferocious,” Javik said. Glancing through an opening in the hedge, Javik saw a wrinkled old prune woman sitting on a wooden bench. She smiled softly at him. It was an all-knowing smile, a haunting smile, the sort of smile that numbed you with its intensity.

  They crossed a drawbridge over a wide, murky moat, then stood at the castle gates. Javik saw watermelon men guards along the wall above. Looking back, Javik was disturbed to see the old Fruit woman staring at them from across the moat. “Who is that?” he asked.

  “Just a prunesayer,” Prince Pineapple said. “I think you would call her a soothsayer, I’ve heard the word in the Earthian vocabulary.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Morovia: A planet dominated by the police magician Lancaster IX. Linked through Dimensional Tunnels 901 and 902 across the universe to the planets Cork and Agrippa.

  From A Magician’s History of the Universe

  Standing naked next to the dirt hole in his Soil Immersion Cavern, Lord Abercrombie mentoed the white rectangle on his wardrobe ring, activating a dry shower. The rectangular white stone on his AmFed ring glowed, giving him a low-level electrical tingle through the epidermis of his fleshy half. He watched dirt fall from his body.

  Wait a minute, he thought, looking at the back of his hand. A freckle just fell off too!

  He soon forgot about this and mentoed the ring’s turquoise stone. A blue, yellow, and white striped caftan with gold scroll sleeves stitched itself over his half body. Following his form, the caftan covered only his right side. Extending his single foot, he watched a white crew sock and brown patent leather shoe appear there. Then he felt a crown of thistle circumnavigate the outer portion of his nearly bald half skull.

  Lord Abercrombie glided regally across the cavern floor, passing cardboard boxes and plastic crates of recycled products, so numerous that he had only a narrow pathway through them. In the rock-lined passage
way outside, it was the same, with finished products stacked to the ceiling on each side. He entered a complicated maze of rocky tunnels which he had committed to memory. This led to glassplex tunnels which his meckies had constructed for him. Through the clear glassplex, he could see ancient underground firebat caves and irridescent, multi-tiered waterfalls.

  He floated by a wall sign that read “don’t abuse it! reuse it!” In a moment of sadness, he considered how tarnished was his success, limited only to making recycled goods. He had no distribution system. No other human in the universe knew the goods were there.

  “I’m not a Job Support criminal!” he yelled into the empty glassplex tunnel. “It is fair to repair!” His words echoed down the passageway, heard by no human except himself.

  Now he floated by caverns filled with robotics-operated machinery—hundreds of recycling machines forming the heart of his enterprise, each with a hopper on top. He paused to watch a yellow meckie load old clothing into a hopper. Behind the machine a noisy, loose-belted conveyor carried freshly wound spools of recycled thread to the boxing room meckies. Meckies in other rooms recycled plastics, metals, glass, and paper.

  But it was quieter now than it had been, with many machines idle. He was running out of raw material.

  Presently he entered a wide cavern which had three walls of mirror glassplex. The side opposite the doorway was a black abyss, the opening to the Dimensional Tunnel. Fifteen large trunks on wheels were chained together in a train at the center of the cavern, with a rock-filled dummy chained at the rear of that. A frigid galactic wind howled through this room, causing Lord Abercrombie’s fleshy half to shiver.

  Pausing to light a lavender tintette in front of the mirror, he used his human eye and the bank of visual sensors on his magical side to study the reflected inner workings of his head and neck: an exposed pink cerebrum and a cerebellum that throbbed as his arm moved with the tintette. There was a clear, glossy surface over the exposed inner parts, through which he saw his open nasal cavity, his half tongue and half mouthful of teeth surrounded on the fleshy outside by an ebony beard. Below that was a split windpipe with a pink, lumpy thyroid gland next to it.

  I look like someone sliced me down the middle, he thought. From my head all the way to the ground. Lifting his robe with his single hand, he saw one leg hanging oddly by itself, just centimeters off the ground.

  Trailing lavender tintette smoke, he glided past the trunks to the edge of the black abyss. Here the wind flapped his robe and howled with an eerie, hostile loudness. He saw the blackest black imaginable from this spot, so dark that Abercrombie knew no artist could ever match its pigmentation. The Dimensional Tunnel was a powerful thing, an awesome thing. Lavender smoke disappeared into the abyss. He tossed the tintette in too.

  So many tests! he thought. And what do I learn from them?

  He considered throwing himself into the Dimensional Tunnel at that very instant. In a wild flight of fancy, he imagined finding the tintette again and smoking it in some strange and distant place.

  Surely I would land in a place where my enemies could not find me, he thought. But what new dangers await me out there? Throwing himself in the Dimensional Tunnel was but one of his options if he decided to remain a fleshcarrier. In another scenario, he would remain on Cork in his fleshy form, using salvaged Earthian disaster control equipment to impose his will on the planet and its inhabitants. But that reverse rain problem . . . and planetary magnetics. What did it all mean?

  Wearily, Lord Abercrombie trudged to the lead trunk in the train. Grabbing a side handle on this trunk, he used it to pull all fifteen trunks and the dummy toward the Dimensional Tunnel. They rolled effortlessly.

  Reaching the edge, he glided to the rear of the procession of trunks and gave them a mighty push. Sidestepping the dummy, he watched the lead trunk disappear into blackness, followed quickly by the others and the dummy.

  Fwooshl They were gone.

  He thought of the option being tested here, a scenario whereby the trunks could be filled with recycled goods and a meckie, just enough trinkets and a helper to get him started comfortably in a new place. If he chose flesh. That was a very large “if.”

  Now he wondered, Should I ride in front of the trunks? Or at the rear? How about inside one? He knew there was no way to answer this question with such a limited experiment. He could not see the other end of the Dimensional Tunnel: His laboratory was universe-size. But the experiments gave him time to think. He was considering all the possibilities he could, preparing a mental balance sheet of flesh versus magic.

  With his caftan flapping in the wind, he shouted into the blackness of the Dimensional Tunnel, “Is there another place for me out there?” The words barely touched his ears and tympanic sensors before they were gone, sucked into the howling abyss.

  He worried about missing a greater opportunity, a higher calling. Maybe there was a beautiful planet waiting for him out there in the Great Beyond.

  But what if every other place is taken? he thought. I might be murdered as an intruder.

  The unknown terror nearly overwhelmed him.

  “Why wasn’t Cork taken?” he yelled. “Why was this place left for me?”

  There was no answer, only the ceaseless, eternal howl of galactic winds.

  His human side felt lonely. It was an intense loneliness, as deep and black as the universe itself.

  In the box-lined passageway outside, Lord Abercrombie was stopped by a silver mid black female meckie.

  “Would you answer a question for me, please?” the meckie asked. A white dome light on its top pulsed.

  “What is it?” Abercrombie snapped. He was irritated, for there were important matters on his mind.

  “You are always speaking of the great joys and benefits of recycling,” the meckie said. “But isn’t that a new outfit you’re wearing? Shouldn’t you be wearing recycled clothes?”

  “Report to Servicing!” Abercrombie commanded. “A meckie cannot be expected to understand such things!”

  The meckie rolled backward, shocked at the outburst. Gears ground. Then, dutifully, the meckie retreated under the weight of Abercrombie’s ferocious glare.

  Moments later, Lord Abercrombie was in the history wall cavern, watching the blue linguistics meckie carve Abercrombie’s story in the limestone with a sharp piece of obsidian.

  “I didn’t use cartoons, Lord,” the meckie gargled. “That is in my artistic program, but I didn’t think you wanted humor.”

  “This is fine,” Abercrombie said, studying a straightforward pictorial depiction of him under pursuit by evil, white-robed sayermen.

  “I’m getting to the time you found the Sacred Scroll of Cork.”

  “Good.” Lord Abercrombie glided to another section of wall and studied the circle/magnetics symbol which was beneath a cartoon of a plant being. “This circle,” he said. “Could it represent Cork?”

  “A planet? Sure.”

  “And the magnetics part . . . Couldn’t the whole symbol refer to planetary magnetics?”

  “Hmmm . . . Yes. Very possible. Maybe that’s what defeated the other magicians. An imbalance in planetary magnetics which prevented their magic from operating efficiently. Come to think of it, that could account for your problems with disaster control equipment, too. Your laser shots can’t get around the magnetic disturbances.”

  “Where do you come off saying such things? You’re just an artistically programmed linguistics meckie.”

  “Uh,” the meckie gargled with synthetic nervousness. “I saw a math and science program lying on a table in Servicing —quantum mechanics, geology, advanced math. Kind of a shotgun tape on a lot of things.”

  Lord Abercrombie glared at the meckie.

  “I asked for it, Lord.”

  “You asked for a program without checking with me first?”

  “Yes, Lord,” the meckie said timidly. “I’m sorry, Lord.”

  “Get your metal ass into Servicing,” Lord Abercrombie said, shaking his head
. “Then get back here and finish this project.”

  “Yes, Lord.” The meckie placed its piece of obsidian on a wall ledge, then turned and whirred out of the cavern.

  Rebo had only one name. This was the way it was far across the universe on the dimensionally connected planet of Morovia. One person, one name.

  With his head bobbing, he loped on three legs in front of his small band of black-jacketed cutthroats. Dark brown hair covered his bulky body, with one stocky leg at the front and two at the rear—a tricycle arrangement of calloused paws instead of wheels, with a large oval head that jutted forward on a mane-covered neck, a knotlike, knurled chin, and wide, cuplike ears. An arm to each side of the front leg had six slender fingers, which he used on one hand to grasp a long knife. The polished steel blade glinted in low light from the street lamps which burned wearily overhead. This was a tired neighborhood on the Southside of Moro City.

  Scraps of paper and a piece of yellow cloth swirled in a warm breeze at Rebo’s feet. It was the height of the Morovian summer. He felt beads of perspiration all over his body, culminating in sticky pools of moisture at his arm and leg pits.

  Pausing at a street corner, he glanced up to see a curtain move in a third-floor tenement window across the street. Someone was pulling it shut. Rebo dropped his gaze to the main level of the tenement, to Marnus’s Flower Shop, one of many tiny mercantile businesses huddling side by side in the tattered block. The flower shop was dark, save for one light at the rear,

  “Old Marnus can’t hurt us,” a woman’s voice husked from behind Rebo. “Let’s leave him alone.” The only female in the gang moved to Rebo’s side, brushing against him.

  Glancing at Namaba in the low light, he saw her rest on her haunches. With soft, golden-brown hair and a long golden mane, Namaba wore the scaly black obbo skin jacket of the club, with its wide-winged grapple bird insignia across the back. A yellow ribbon with black polka dots adorned her mane.