Tropic of Skorpeo

by Morrissey, Michael

  A vast mass of blood-red water sprang into existence overhead and threatened to engulf Lord Maledor, who calmly diverted the deathly fluid into a lake before causing a whirlwind to lift it heavenwards once more, and discharge it into the distance, where he presumed his adversary stood. The crimson cloud disgorged pieces of offal, poisonous frogs, snakes, and other assorted creatures…

  “Come sir – show yourself!” Lord Maledor shouted into the chaos.

  “Why?” said a voice behind him, almost in his ear. He whirled, glimpsing a dark shape out of the corner of his eye.

  “Very amusing,” he said. “The great evil one is nothing more than a puff of smoke.”

  Instantly, a humanoid form, immensely tall, thin as a reed, face hidden by a cowl, appeared some five metres ahead.

  “And to whom do I have the honour of –”

  “The Dark Magician.”

  “Your name has not gone before you, sir,” said Lord Maledor. “Do you practise magic or magick?”

  “Words are not my game, and you are correct – I keep a low profile. But Teleporteus is one of mine, as Queen Beia is one of yours – except that she has run off the rails and even now is trying to side with me. You have lost control of your own creations.”

  “I shall soon have control over you, sir,” Lord Maledor retorted. “Your phantasmagorical ebulliences do not impress me in the least.”

  “Do you really believe I showed you all my powers? That was merely a flourish.”

  “Well, parry this, then!”

  A bolt of black energy shot from Lord Maledor’s fingertips, cracking the air with enough force to cleave an asteroid in twain. When the cloud left in its sizzling wake had cleared, the Dark Magician was nowhere to be seen. Had Lord Maledor succeeded in vaporising this brazen sorcerer?

  “Is that the best you can do?” an irritatingly calm voice said from behind him.

  “Enough of this nonsense,” snapped Lord Maledor. “Let us have a duel of minds rather than a clash of energy bolts.”

  “Agreed,” replied the Dark Magician with a confident smirk. “My mind is the most powerful in the galaxy, and when I vanquish you with conceptual weirdness, I shall show no mercy. I shall give you the chance to capitulate now, and let you become my slave. There could be a place for your low-grade talents in one of the more remote regions of the galaxy.”

  “You arrogant nonentity. I’ve a good idea to vaporise you on the spot.”

  “Try it, you broken-down eviling. You forget that I have seen your work already today, and basically, you couldn’t vaporise a soap bubble.”

  Lord Maledor narrowed his eyes. “Prepare yourself for the ultimate game – MindClash fought with the Weapons of Conceptual Weirdness.”

  “Let the battle commence,” said the Dark Magician formally.

  “To death, or insanity?”

  “To your death, and your insanity,” said the Stygian sorcerer.

  Freed by the chaotic forces of Random, Lord Maledor and the Dark Magician met in disembodied mind space, which was somewhat like a video game from Erath in the 1980s, though infinitely more subtle.

  “How can you tell I’m telling the truth?” Perfect Liar asked.

  “How do I know you’re the Perfect Liar?” replied Pedantic Questioner.

  “Because everything I say will be a lie.”

  “Is what you’ve just said a lie?”

  “I am lying. Why don’t you believe me?” asked Perfect Liar coyly.

  “Because you are a liar,” retorted Pedantic Questioner. “Besides, liars only have power over believers. And I have ceased to believe.”

  “You are assuming you to be you. You are assuming a personal speaking voice. But ‘you’ do not exist.”

  “Admittedly,” admitted Pedantic Questioner. “However, I am a witty approximation.”

  “That’s true,” conceded Perfect Liar. “Nothing can ever reach its target, not even an orange tip. In order to reach its target, it must traverse half the distance between itself and the target. And in order to traverse that, it must traverse half that distance, and before that half of that, and before that…”

  “You see you are lying. Because things do reach their target.”

  “All men are tall, and ostriches are tall, therefore all men are ostriches,” said Ludicrously Logical.

  “Eagle-headed lions swim in orange seas,” said Old Fashioned Surrealist.

  “Concupiscent, coaxial conduits orchestrate incongruent extortions,” said New Fashioned Language Poet.

  “Are you a Tiger Lily dipped in Blood, or a Vampire Pack Lunch?” asked I Never Call a Spade a Spade.

  “What’s this used condom doing in the cucumber sandwiches?” asked Slightly Disgusting.

  “Nothing will come of nothing,” said Perfect Vacuum.

  “The perfect ideology is one which controls language, because in controlling language, you control thought,” said Politics is the Art of the Pissable.

  “Infarcated plosives manipulate raucous orpiments. Mould askews ructive fenestrated embarrassments. Solid doughty mepacrines mazurka up sneaths.”

  “Skive peons thearchy prebend lollipops.”

  “ Extraneous disobligers cromlech nacarat.”

  “Heigh nematocyst plagium ricercar smytrie thurible.”

  “Tickey wanty zho tessitura sinciput banausic.”

  “Very well,” said Lostifar in a cosmically weary voice. “The Dark Magician has admitted contemporary inanity – damn it, now you’ve got me talking nonsense. Let me rephrase. The Dark Magician admits defeat, induced by contemporary insanity.”

  Lord Maledor was not so sure. Perhaps the shape-shifting charlatan was playing possum, making a strategic retreat – a strategy that had even been used by Satan himself (or so he claimed after Michael pushed him down to Hell with a single drop of blood from his glittering wings).

  An ambush was imminent.

  “Thank you, Most High One,” said Lord Maledor. “Now, since love is the most evil thing in the universe, let me, in my own subtle way, destroy the love of Rhameo and Juraletta.”

  “Do your worst, Maledor. And I must warn you – if you fail, I will do my worst. Meanwhile, the Dark Magician will be demoted to the level of Twilight Trickster.”

  Now that he had vanquished the Dark Magician, though only formally, Lord Maledor felt a wave of benignity towards his former foe. He picked him up from the galactic trash heap onto which he had been cast and offered him a stiff pull on his quixota weed. Within a few seconds, the fearsome pair were guffawing like demented apes. They howled, gibbered, and jabbered, and told jokes about how much they enjoyed the power of evil and the squirm of pleasure induced by manipulating an unsuspecting victim, the veins standing out on their domed foreheads like thick worms before the punchlines of their jests even crossed their blackened lips.

  In his Stygian zone, Lostifar glowered like an exploding star casting forth tentacles of anti-matter. Evil entities were supposed to fight to inglorious death, not be mates. Friendship was poison – it upset the immoral order. These two degenerates had lost the idea of evil. Pride, envy, lust, sloth, gluttony – these were the jewels in the crown of evil, and yet this pair had squandered them like children let loose in a candy shop. Jagged thunderbolts he threw their way were parried with thought-shields.

  “If you two clowns want to play dirty,” Lostifar muttered, “then I’ll play filthy… especially if Lord Maledor fails in his avowed mission to befoul the obscenity of love.”

  Meanwhile, the Dark Magician stumbled home and began planning his next quixota weed binge. This extraordinary plant, found within the Gardens of Fleschimor, allowed the mind to reconcile beauty with death, love with hate, jealousy with benignity, greed with charity, then jazz them all up with neon hallucinations such as might be found in that queen city of neon far out on the Nevada Desert. Cactus like the jaws of a green dinosaur, luminous umbrellas of exploding fire, starfish like the arms of the Fornax System, pumpkins with the wisdom of sages, silhouettes like
sixteenth-century maps of unexplored coastlines, footnoted with warnings against dragons… visions, lucid and compelling, of unexplored sectors of the mind.

  “There is more to insanity than an arcane vocabulary,” muttered the Dark Magician.

  Rhameo and Juraletta lay curled up against each other like contented spoons. The giant, wrapped in heavy chains, slumbered as peacefully as a baby skyray, while the unicorn, now apparently spell-less, amused himself by endlessly tossing the dwarf’s cap into the air and catching it on the end of his horn. Gorgon fought off boredom by turning bits of the unicorn’s coat into tiny stones, forming mosaic patterns on its flanks. Astroburger was slumped in a corner, wondering how things had gone so wrong so quickly – one minute he had been enjoying a love-fest with Queen Beia, and the next she was off with that bastard Teleporteus and he was chained up in a dungeon that was cold, dripping, forbidding – a place that might have been celebrated in the darker verses of an epic poem written by a manic-depressive genius during the worst downswing of his mood. ‘ABANDON DOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE’ might have the inscription on its mossy lintel, but it was as barren as the womb of a neglected nannybat.

  Cross-legged, the dwarf sat gazing into space, a somewhat gloomy expression inscribed on his piquantly compressed features. He was thinking nostalgically about getting a fug up. Sometimes, he had managed to get six cosy fugs up before breakfast…

  “Any ideas on how we can get out of this mess?” he asked.

  “By escaping,” said the unicorn, catching the dwarf’s cap once more, and whinnying with pleasure.

  Everyone looked as blank as a sheet of paper minus an obligatory sentence. “Astroburger, have you any bright ideas?” asked the dwarf.

  “Not a glimmer,” said Astroburger after a few seconds of vacuous silence, “though I do have a few dim ones.”

  “It’s a pity we are manacled,” sighed the dwarf. “Manacles are counterproductive.”

  “Couldn’t we un-manacle?” asked the unicorn.

  “I know!” cried Astroburger, a phrase that he was rather good at crying having, done so since time immemorial. “Gorgon, isn’t it true that if you stare at something hard it turns to stone, and if you blink it returns to its former state?”

  “More or less,” said Gorgon, blushing modestly as a scatter of stones fell from the unicorn’s shoulders.

  “Well, if you blink hard at these manacles they should turn back into what they were before they were manacles!” said Astroburger.

  “Good God, man!” said the dwarf. “Metals are formed when stars go nova. If she blinks too hard, our manacles would turn into nuclear furnaces!”

  “Don’t worry, dwarf. My stare only turns things into stone,” explained Gorgon. “I could change you into stone and back again, if you like.”

  “Astroburger – another idea please!” commanded the dwarf. “And this time, not so dim!”

  “We could try forming a thoughtball,” said the ever-resourceful scientist. “It’s like a football… made of circular thoughts.”

  “Very helpful,” said the dwarf, falsetto voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “Can you give an example?” asked Juraletta.

  “I was wondering when you two were going to stop your canoodling,” said the dwarf, who, like most people, disapproved of two beautiful people having fun when he wasn’t invited to join in.

  “Don’t you mean ca-nudeling?” asked the giant, never one to pass up an opportunity for a groan-inducing pun.

  “I have wings therefore I can fly; I am flying therefore I have wings,” said Astroburger.

  “Sounds like two thirds of a syllogism,” observed the dwarf.

  “Think it through quickly and it becomes circular. A number of people thinking similar constructs at the same time forms a thoughtball,” explained Astroburger.

  “And how will this help us escape?” asked Juraletta. Rhameo also looked puzzled.

  “All we have to do is think, ‘I am not manacled, therefore I am free; I am free, therefore I am not manacled,’ and if we do it hard enough, we’ll be free.”

  They all closed their eyes and tried to think up a thoughtball. While they were thus engrossed, a Punkoid guard entered with a few bowls of stinking gruel.

  “Quick!” hissed Rhameo to Gorgon. “Petrify him!”

  Gorgon turned on the Punkoid, who was immediately transformed into a green-haired statue. Rhameo stretched up, grabbed the Punkoid’s keys, and undid his manacles. He was about to set Juraletta free when tears formed in Gorgon’s eyes, for being a moisture bundle, the sight of two lovers about to escape from prison was too romantic a sight for her to bear. As those tears filled her eyes, Gorgon blinked, and the guard sprang back to life.

  “Escape, my love!” cried Juraletta. “Rescue us later!”

  Rhameo considered trying to overpower the Punkoid, but the disfigured mutant was already reaching for his blaster. Agonised, the naked Rhameo ran from the room. Juraletta consoled herself by observing Rhameo’s naked form, muscular and lithe, buttocks clenched and pert as he ran to freedom.

  Within seconds the emerald prince was plunging headlong through the gloomy corridors of the Sargassean dungeon. Despite the almost Stygian dark, his sharp eyes could discern an egress through passages without bumping into the walls or tumbling down staircases slick with Octopoidal secretions. He regretted that he had not tarried to overpower the Punkoid guard and seize his primitive blaster, but even as this thought crossed his mind he knew that he had made the right decision – it would have been all but impossible to tackle a blaster-wielding Punkoid, but out here, in the depths of the Octopus’s lair, he could formulate a plan to save them all.

  Up ahead, he heard the unmistakable sound of tugga tugga-juiced Punkoids revelling – even here in the dungeons! Rhameo dropped to a crouch, and moved stealthily. He peered around a corner and saw two Punkoids, intoxicated and stumbling, headed his way. Hidden in the shadows, the naked phantom sprang, silent as a tiger.

  Though his fighting abilities had been sneered at by his treacherous brother, Rhameo was an expert in stolka, a form of unarmed combat that had been taught to young warrior Skorpeans for twenty-eight centuries. With a lightning chop to the neck he stunned the first Punkoid, and he disabled the second with a thrust just below the heart. As they fell unconscious, he stripped them and tied their hair together, then lathered their hair in the Punkoid styling gel that he found in one of their pockets – bound together, they would never escape!

  Rhameo pulled on one of the sets of Punkoid rags and, trying not to breathe through his nose, moved through the corridors of the fortress in search of freedom…

  Teleporteus, conscious of the muskiness of his magnificently squalid quarters and the lewdly entwined statues displaying every form of copulation known to his degenerate mind, looked at Queen Beia with disdainful arrogance. He didn’t like her. In fact, he didn’t like queens very much on principle, for why should any woman be equal to a king? And yet, there was something about her that teased his mind. For a women, she seemed unusually devious. Almost equal to me, thought the prince.

  “I get the feeling you’ve been trying to attract my attention,” he drawled, eying her figure up and down like a stockbroker at a financial meltdown. “Now, why would that be? Are you randified? Do you seek the embrace of the two-backed beast?”

  “I like strong men,” breathed Queen Beia, playing up to his gaze. “For too long I have ruled over drones. I believe I am worthy of bigger things – worthy of an empire!”

  “Apparently you already rule a tinpot little world.”

  “Simulacra may be small, but my word is law,” she said proudly. “You cannot make that claim of Skorpeo.”

  “Your word was law,” snapped Teleporteus. “Now you are my prisoner. And my word is law, as far as you are concerned.”

  “Together we could rule Skorpeo!”

  “Let’s see what you have to offer. Strip! Show me your assets!”

  This command was scarcely necessary as Queen
Beia was already attired in the skimpiest of torn rags – nevertheless, she obeyed. She belly-danced, she undulated, she contorted, wriggling like the lewdest of whores as she slid each rag along her limbs before letting it drop to the chilly obsidian floor. Slyly, she glanced at the arrogant young prince to gauge the effect of her libidinous display, but he remained aloof. A cool customer indeed!

  “An empire together, oh Mighty One! – with me as your queen.” She concluded her nude cavortings at his feet.

  “Why should I share Skorpeo with a Replicoid?” asked Teleporteus.

  “I am no Replicoid,” insisted Queen Beia. “I am an original being – a queen in my own right!”

  “According to my information, you are part of an experiment by the greatest evil scientist in the galaxy.”

  “Perhaps,” she said in a surprisingly mollified tone. “Yet I live, and I breathe, and make love like no one else. I can give you great pleasure, Teleporteus!”

  He said nothing in reply. Though he had not been unmindful of her charms, he could not stop thinking about the impending battle, and the Skorpean fleet was strong…

  “My Lord’s brow is vexed,” observed Queen Beia. “What troubles his great mind?”

  “I know you’re just flattering me to get on side and further your ambition. I have used such methods myself, so do not think I will fall for your tricks.”

  “I speak only the truth,” she said. Glistening with sweat, her face was a cameo of sincerity. “And would the mighty Teleporteus prefer a lily-white maiden of milk by his side?”

  “I admit you have a point. Very well – I’ll tell you my problem, and you may offer a solution. If I like your ideas I will spare your life and may even make you my que… well, we’ll see. If you fail, I’ll hand you back to the Octopus or throw you to the Slothlings. I believe they make love very slowly and in the most unusual ways – unfortunately, no one’s ever lived to tell the tale!”