"Yeah, okay, that explains a few things," polkingbeal67 mused, pursing his lips. "Like your choice of music, for example."
Melinda looked mortified. "Oh no!" she wailed. "I see what you mean." 'Oh Happy Day' and 'Stayin Alive' now seemed such a curious choice of songs.
While the other guests and grievers headed towards the spacecruiser park, polkingbeal67 and Melinda were met on the steps of the leader's beautiful and impressive residence by the palace adviser and translator, nipkow4, who spread his hands, palms upward, and let them drop again in a courtly gesture of sympathy. Addressing Melinda respectfully, if a little long-windedly, as "our revered deputy leader and heir apparent", he advised her that the senior chillok ambassador was requesting an audience with her, presumably to seek further redress for the Niffis atrocity.
As they passed through the reception hall, bedecked with seaweed, volcanic magma, porcelain ornaments and figurines fashioned out of goopmutt horn, alongside various portraits of Mortian celebrities, the revered leader emerged from a corridor and beckoned to them. Following a complicated ritual of bows, bobs, curtseys and hand waggles, the leader looked askance at polkingbeal67 and said: "It's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten."
Polkingbeal67 made a slight gesture of incomprehension with his hands, so nipkow4 offered an interpretation: "Our revered leader believes you should not have returned."
"Beware, lest you give your enemies the means of your own destruction," said the leader, nodding meaningfully and shooting a glance towards the small ante-room where the senior chillok ambassador awaited them. "As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly."
Placing a hand on polkingbeal67's shoulder, nipkow4 explained, "You'd better make yourself scarce. The chilloks probably don't know you're here." He hesitated for a second. "Er, and don't come back."
Polkingbeal67, who was only too aware that he was the prime target for chillok retribution, nodded in agreement, but he felt a surge of anger erupt inside his heart. Believing that the spirit of a war hero coursed through his blood, it tore him up to be reduced to this kind of humiliating retreat. "Running away from an ant!" he muttered bitterly through what would have been clenched teeth if he had had any. Suddenly overcome with feelings of disgrace and dishonour, he curled into a foetal position and made a low growl in the back of his throat.
The leader turned to the translator with an innocent, almost childlike look of inquiry.
"He's trying to suppress a sense of anguish and betrayal," nipkow4 clarified for the leader's benefit, before moving closer to polkingbeal67 and hissing, "Don't do this!"
If polkingbeal67 had had any eyebrows, he would have arched one of them. As he did not, he settled for a vinegary scowl. Melinda, unsure how to react to this exchange, waited quietly and patiently with a sympathetic look on her face.
The leader set a determined jaw and folded his arms resolutely. "Do not believe that you will reach your destination without leaving the shore," he warned.
Nipkow4's expression turned to one of puzzlement and concern. He turned from one to the other before venturing a cautious, "Er, get going? And you'd better travel well away from here?"
"Okay, I'm going," snapped polkingbeal67. "Maybe that Guy Fawkes had the right idea after all," he added darkly.
As he left the building, trailing gloom and despondency, the others went into the ante-room where the senior chillok ambassador was waiting for them in the middle of a small circular magma table, standing on his back legs like a tiny rubberised poodle with an excess of limbs, craning over towards a myrmecam, pre-installed and pre-configured for translation purposes. "Urbes constituit aetas, momentum temporis dissolvit!" he snarled, flicking his antennae at the Mortian leader.
Nipkow4 translated: "A city built during a lifetime is destroyed in a moment."
The ambassador, barely allowing time for nipkow4 to finish, spat again into the myrmecam: "Si vis pacem, para bellum!"
"If you seek peace, prepare for war!"
While the Mortian leader gathered up his garlands of seaweed and fidgeted in anxious agitation, Melinda approached the table and spoke defiantly. "Really?" she said, "Are we going to start this conversation with negative attitudes and threats? Literally?"
Slightly nonplussed, the chillok did not reply, just stared at Melinda and waved his antennae with hesitant animosity.
"Sit down!" she barked at him. "Or whatever it is you do."
A little fazed, the ambassador duly dropped down on all six legs.
Melinda pressed home the advantage. "Right," she said. "Are you sitting down? Literally?"
The ambassador swished his antennae in irritation, walked up to the myrmecam and butted it.
Melinda dismissed the theatrics with a withering look. "Whatever," she said. "Listen, you're just trying to provoke us so as to have a pretext for war. Well, we're not having it! Not by a long chalk. Literally. To declare war on us, you've got to be able to justify it, you've got to be able to show, er..."
Nipkow4 came to her assistance. "Just cause," he said. "And a just war can only be waged if it carries sufficient moral weight. The Intergalactic Court is perfectly clear on this point."
Determined not to flinch again, the ambassador remonstrated with nipkow4, arguing that the Niffis massacre was sufficient provocation for all intergalactic treaties between the two peoples to be revoked. His people were determined to put right an egregious wrong. No terms short of unconditional and immediate surrender of polkingbeal67 by noon the following day would be acceptable to the Muqu chilloks. These, he insisted, were generous terms that were offered without prejudice.
Nipkow4 turned to Melinda and spoke in a low undertone, "Do you think we should do it?"
"What, knock him onto the floor and stamp on him?" Melinda responded as calmly as she could.
Genuinely shocked, nipkow4 coughed, stepped up to the myrmecam and bowed obsequiously to the ambassador. "Excuse us a moment," he said deferentially. Switching off the myrmecam and taking the leader aside by his arm, he murmured, "What he's offering is a compromise that we should probably accept."
Nodding in agreement, the leader whispered, "The sheep has no choice when caught in the jaws of the wolf." They both knew that the failure of diplomacy could have dire consequences. The loss of polkingbeal67 could be considered a small sacrifice if it allowed them to deal with the chilloks in anything approaching a rational discourse. They exchanged glances and then quickly turned to Melinda. It was glaringly obvious that any such deal would be totally unacceptable to her. Nevertheless, they looked at her entreatingly.
"What?" demanded Melinda, shaking a finger in reproachful disapproval. "You're going to give up polkingbeal67 just like that?"
The leader raised his shriveled and trembling hands beseechingly. "We must not attempt to extract a tooth from the tiger's mouth," he counselled. As Melinda just fixed him with a blank, uncomprehending stare, he tried something else: "When it's raining you should not refuse an umbrella."
"Excuse me, but if I was some sort of animal dentist, I wouldn't want an umbrella. I'd want a roof!" Melinda protested, her exasperation mounting steadily. "Why would a dentist work outside anyway? Literally. Listen, just stop it with all your stupid wise sayings and tell this ridiculous insect where to get off! There's no way we're going to let him take polkingbeal67 prisoner! Right?"
Retrieving some nail clippers from her purse, she advanced menacingly towards the table, flicked the switch on the myrmecam and bared her teeth at the ambassador. "Look, chief," she said, "I'll fix your teeth for you!" The ambassador recoiled in fright. Melinda continued, "I may be a rubbish deputy leader, whatever, but you... you're an insect, a bad insect, a very small and helpless insect!" Nipkow4 snatched the clippers, switched off the myrmecam and ushered her outside.
The Mortian leader stood rooted to the spot while the chillok ambassador hurled Latin curses and invective at him. Challenged like never before to represent his people and shelter them from the threat of war, the leader dr
ew himself up to his full height, raised his right hand and spontaneously delivered the most impressive speech of his entire career, a speech clever enough to outwit the most cunning of villainous masterminds, moving enough to make rocks weep, powerful enough to inspire an entire auditorium to rise to its feet in joyous acclamation. He had always known he had a speech like that in him (after all, he had spent years studying the most celebrated speeches in human history). As he nodded to the ambassador to signify that he had finished, he realised that the myrmecam was switched off and his oratory had fallen on deaf ears.
You can never repeat the magic of the original. And so it was with the leader's second address to the enraged chillok ambassador. Upset and flustered, he started badly by raising the wrong hand and allowing a capacious garland of seaweed to slip from his shoulders and collapse in a pool at his feet. "We bow before the wisdom of the chilloks," he began, stooping to pick up the seaweed. "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. This is not the beginning of the end for our special relationship. Nor is it the end of the beginning. Rather, it is a joyous daybreak to end the long night of our misunderstanding. We judge you not by the number of your legs but by the content of your character. Never have so many legs been marched by so many around so few. Once bitten, we shall fight the urges to scratch those parts of our body to soothe the pain. We shall fight them with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall fight them in the hills; we shall never surrender." Bewildered and exhausted, he put his hands on his haunches and added, "I have a dream."
Not only was this officially the end of the conference, it was also officially the start of hostilities between the Mortians and the Muqu chilloks.
. . .
The senior chillok ambassador had stage-managed the whole thing. Not just the declaration of war, which bothered him no more or less than a rogue pheromone on a food trail, but much, much more, including the mental deterioration of the Mortian leader and his appointment of Melinda Hill as his successor.
To understand how he could have achieved this, you need to be aware that Mortians were peculiarly susceptible to braintuning, an insidious practice whereby chillok entities implanted themselves in the brains of unwitting hosts for the purpose of inducing temporary hypnosis or, indeed, applying longer-term psychological modifications. Rumours of these brain-invading entities, often described as disembodied rogue spirits, occasionally flew around the intergalactic community, but the Mortians were only vaguely aware of the sinister technique, labouring under the misapprehension that its use was largely theoretical and that the Muqu chilloks, as full signatories of the statutes governing the Intergalactic Court of Justice, Arbitration and Conciliation, would never have dared to commit such a violation for real. As it happens, such deluded thinking may have been as damaging as the braintuning itself. The fact is, not only had the chilloks infiltrated the mind of yukawa3 to prepare him for exile in a parallel universe, they had also accelerated the cerebral decline of the Mortian leader as part of their agenda for a large-scale colonial Muqu settlement on Smolin9, their plan being to replace him with a popular but inexperienced leader who would be incapable of resisting their imperial ambitions (Melinda Hill from Earth fitted the bill quite nicely). I might also mention that they had braintuned the Mortian aphids to surrender themselves in droves. There was nothing loftily ambitious about this - they just found the sweet, sticky substance excreted by the plant-sucking insects utterly, utterly irresistible!
No one knew it, but the entire population of Mortians had been at the mercy of the chilloks even before any formal declarations of war. The hapless planet was like a festering, partially cooked chicken infected with salmonella, and the future looked unutterably grim for all concerned (except, of course, the salmonella germs). They say the greater part of our happiness depends upon our dispositions and not upon our circumstances, but if the Mortian people had had any inkling of the plight they were in, they would have been about as happy as ducks in a desert.
If the intellectual superiority of the chilloks was at the heart of the debacle, the acquiescent conduct of the Mortian government was certainly a contributory factor. A policy of preferential treatment for disadvantaged peoples had spiraled out of control. The authorities espoused a doctrine known as 'identification', a programme for social inclusion and respect for diverse lifestyles and cultures across the entire panoply of interplanetary relations. It seemed noble enough in its intent, but critics were becoming wary of a system that required them to respect civilisations they considered abhorrent. It had come to the point where ordinary Mortian natives were beginning to feel decidedly second-rate, convinced that they were being denied the rights enjoyed by non-natives. Hamstrung by its own political correctness and self-defeating groupthink, the government had blinded itself to the abominable intentions of the chilloks, who, not in spite of, but precisely because of their diminutive stature, were prospering in the hospitable climate afforded by these liberal sensibilities. Even before the Niffis incident, the chilloks had harboured thinly-veiled contempt towards Mortians (and others), but the planetary administration had seen fit to compromise the rights and status of the indigenous population by refusing to entertain the notion that such a disadvantaged species as the chilloks might subvert or infiltrate Mortian society. To make this a whole lot less clear, the Mortian government actually consisted of an array of artificial intelligence systems programmed in accordance with the ideology determined by the electorate. So, of course, despite all their protestations and dissent, the Mortians only had themselves to blame.
It could have been worse by a factor of the x and y components multiplied by the GPS coordinates. The chilloks would have achieved intergalactic dominance long ago, were it not for the bitter schism between the Muqus and the Naaffabs. Deeply held resentments had simmered for eons, but renewed tensions had flared up on the chilloks' home planet of Oov during the last baktun when trouble broke out during a festival to celebrate the birthday of the great chillok potentate, Da'Qunaa. The celebrations culminated in a giant parade through the subterranean passages of Niffis, when the Naaffabs suddenly reneged on a promise to avoid ostentatious rattling of antenna rings, provoking a violent response by the aggrieved Muqus. The death toll was such that chillok society had remained polarised along sectarian lines ever since.
Polkingbeal67 knew as much about these issues as a goopmutt knows about ballet dancing, so there was a good chance he was not contemplating them as he made his way to his demipod. However, his encounter (or rather, his notable non-encounter) with the senior chillok ambassador had left him feeling decidedly jaundiced towards the consummate arthropods who held his fate in their miniscule mandibles. His mind went back to a few random incidents that had occurred during his last visit to Earth, like the time Melinda had flicked away what she thought was an ant from yukawa3's back when they were on South Georgia Island, and the time he had thought he had seen a cloud of flying ants ascending from the pavement in Ushuaia right before yukawa3 had vanished forever. For a brief moment, he wondered if these apparently innocuous incidents might signify chillok involvement in the cadet's disappearance, but his mental equilibrium was so out of wack that the simple matter of putting two and two together eluded him and he dismissed his suspicions as misplaced distrust.
Yes, dear reader, you are right - this wishy-washy forbearance was quite out of character, probably symptomatic of an undiagnosed and mysterious medical condition, or so polkingbeal67 himself concluded later when he reflected on the day's events over a vitalmados lozenge. If you suspect that the chilloks were attempting to braintune polkingbeal67 in the same way as they had braintuned yukawa3 and the Mortian leader, then you would be right. But it was more complicated than that. Yes, they could easily have dispatched him to a parallel universe prison (well, I say easily, but it had taken a few abortive attempts before they had finally succeeded in ensnaring and incarcerating yukawa3), but the chilloks had other objectives to consider. Avenging the Niffis massacre
was obviously high on their agenda, but it was secondary to their overriding pursuit of intergalactic dominion. If anyone should doubt that destiny has a sense of humour, they should reflect on these tiny creatures endowed with the fiercest and most relentless ambition.
Given the networked nature of their intelligence, the chilloks did not have a need for leadership as such. While it is true that they had a senior ambassador, this was a largely symbolic role concocted for the purpose of cooperating with the Intergalactic Court. They all aspired to the same deeply held but unwritten ideals and they all knew intuitively that if they wanted to win the dirty game of intergalactic politics, they would have to pay at least lip service to the rules. That is why they were represented on the ICJAC. That is why they made every effort to conceal their designs on Smolin9 and other planets. And that is why they had attempted to use diplomacy rather than force to bring polkingbeal67 to justice. Yukawa3 had been considered an easy target, but polkingbeal67, a high profile Mortian war hero, was a far stickier proposition. Not that they were ever likely to back down. Like all members of the family Formicidae, chilloks were tenacious and they would never quit. If they had it in their minds to get somewhere and you stood in their path, they would find another way. They would climb over, under, around, and keep looking for a solution. Eventually, they would get where they intended to go. In this case, although their patience was nearly exhausted, they were loath to fly in the face of intergalactic law. The Niffis issue was a controversial one. Contrary to nipkow4’s analysis, the ICJAC was actually quite ambivalent about 'just causes' of war. Broadly speaking, it may have been considered legitimate to seek redress for an act of aggression, but many affiliates of the Court insisted that a war of punishment could never be a ‘just’ war.
Polkingbeal67 decided he needed a plan. Life had been conspiring against him recently and it was time to show initiative and wrest control of his destiny from those who wished to subjugate it. It was not going to be easy and would require the stimulating effect of a foaming vial of vitalmados. Several vials later, he still needed a plan. At one point, he was sure he could visualise a plan hovering fitfully on the far side of his demipod. Gossamer-like and translucent, it trembled like a floating veil and he dashed across the room to seize it, but it evaded him like a slippery fish and he collided heavily with the wall like a cartoon dog getting wacked with a frying pan. Sitting there, nursing his wounds, sipping another vial of invigorating vitalmados, he took stock of his situation and tried to recover his resolve. Nothing, he told himself, would be better than a good plan. So nothing was exactly what he did.
Through The Wormhole, Literally Page 30
