Tropic of Skorpeo

by Morrissey, Michael

  “If I’m starting out of sequence I can start anywhere I like,” protested Gorgon.

  “Either we have a rule about alphabetisation or we don’t,” said the dwarf. “Since we have abandoned our initial rule, Gorgon has the floor. She can begin wherever she likes.”

  “This will create chaos,” said the giant in a sepulchral voice. “It will be like a small chunk of Random.”

  “That is typical giganticism,” sneered the dwarf. “Just because you are yourself of an exaggerated size, you see everything in terms of exaggeration.”

  “Argumentum ad Hominem,” said the giant. “It won’t wash around here.”

  “Better than Argumentum ad Hedginem,” said Juraletta.

  “Does anyone want to hear my story?” cried Gorgon, all her snake heads standing up and rolling their eyes.

  “I believe these two gentlemen have more important things to discuss,” said Astroburger disdainfully.

  “In that case, I withdraw my offer to go first,” said Gorgon.

  “Gorgon is sulking,” said Astroburger.

  “I certainly am not sulking,” replied Gorgon. “Gorgons do not sulk.”

  “A unicorn…” said the unicorn. “You see I have begun with the letter a – I have conformed to your silly system. A unicorn has been traditionally associated with virgins and that might, to some degree, explain why the princess here was so drawn to me and my horn –”

  “I wasn’t drawn to you or your silly horn!” cried Juraletta.

  “However, it is a very little known fact,” droned the unicorn, “that unicorns are not born in the customary way. They grow out of hedges…”

  The unicorn’s story was interrupted by a loud snoring.

  “You’ve put one of our number to sleep,” observed the dwarf.

  “Hopefully we’ll all nod off,” said Astroburger. “Time spent chained in a Sargassean dungeon passes rather slowly.”

  “Not if you play the alphabet game according to the rules,” said the dwarf huffily.

  The Gardens of Fleschimor were a fabulous creation aimed at the hearts, minds, and bodies of sensualists. Curved, perfumed, voluptuous, the flowers looked like women, while the women, also curved, perfumed, and voluptuous, looked like flowers. Young men with faces like the fabled Adonis were available to those with deep pockets. To fully relish the pleasures of this artificial paradise for voluptuaries to the full, extraordinary sexual stamina was but a base requisite, for desire alone was insufficient – the psyche must be vigorously attuned to all the nuances of a subtle lubricity and an ingenious hedonism. For those who immersed themselves in its holy delights, the erotic quotient was compulsorily ionospheric, and the body needed a surgical makeover.

  Despite being a dedicated hedonist and a militant pagan who loved to conjure up arcane sorceries and enthusiastically decamp in sensuality for as long as it took to obtain a temporary nirvana of the flesh, the Dark Magician’s more sombre magicks periodically chanced upon an eager vacation in a virtual Tahiti. When this epicurean vacuum instantly engorged with a lather of guilt, he felt compelled to blubber to Uranian beggar boys that he, the worst of sinners, had committed unspeakable deeds in full sight of the rings of Saturn and as a consequence must now humble himself before superior gods as though he was an acolyte eagerly knuckling the adamantine doors of heaven. The abasement of guilt and the shame of sorcery mingled in a jetty entrepot of regret that left his limbs shaking like a committed drinker afflicted with a king-hit of tugga tugga hangovers.

  Begone guilt! Return desire! The Dark Magician shook his lean but muscular shoulders like a bull sea lion emerging from a cold rinse of liquid salt so dense it was impossible to drown in its Dead Sea sludge except by fatalistic resolve. Many a time and oft, he had indulged a wallow in the amnesiac pleasure domes of rare device. Like many an intergalactic aristocrat, he knew that continuous pleasure dragged a person through a spinning vortex down into a bottomless maw –

  “Courtesan Veronique!”

  He stood outside the filmy membrane of rubied lace that masked the entrance to the Gardens of Fleschimor.

  “Courtesan Veronique!” he repeated, louder this time. “Where is my favourite odalisque?”

  The courtesan, pearled and pomegranated, pale belly undulant, appeared like a sanctimonious apparition that could work a miracle if the prayers of entreaty were sufficiently well-intentioned and passionately uttered.

  “I’ve come in quest of a nor’-nor’-west,” the Dark Magician announced.

  “What does that encompass?”

  “I’m sure Madame knows my tastes by now.”

  “Ah taste… it is a wondrous thing. Some have it –”

  “Some do not,” he said with a smile.

  “And to which camp do you aspire to belong?”

  “I would never dream of joining any camp that would admit such a degenerate as myself.”

  “Your modesty, sir, is only succeeded by your –”

  “Good looks?”

  “The Gardens of Fleschimor keep complexions tastefully well-shadowed.”

  “Madame’s is an adornment seldom if ever exceeded.”

  She laughed softly. “I am not immune to those with a silver tongue. However, a nor’-nor’-west is out of the question.”

  “Sou’-sou’-east?”

  She slapped his face. “All points of your compass are off limits with me.”

  “What seems to be the problem?” It was Madame Court, tall and erotically elegant, imperiously beautiful, the very incarnation of delectable carnality. Her lips parted like small, wet animals, her smile megawatting the chamber like a Christmas tree on steroids. “What doth his lordship seek?”

  “I am no lord, but assuredly you are the finest of ladies.”

  “I see the Dark Magician has lost none of his swarthy charm.”

  “Your Ladyship is most gallant.”

  She bowed slightly. “We could compliment each other all night, but what is your desire, sir? The ordeal of the ten petticoats, perhaps?”

  “A nor’-nor’-west.”

  “I see no problem – providing you are hygienic.”

  “How about a sou’-sou’-east?” Lord Maledor said, a dapper ghost appearing from the shadows. His adventurous though expertly barbered moustache had never looked more sinister. His air of refined aristocratic confidence had never soared higher into the empyrean of conscious superiority – he looked as though he expected empires to cringe at his feet, queens to suck his toes, young girls to garland his taut neck with spring blossoms, and archbishops to sprinkle him with holy water. His face, as glorious as a Renaissance tableau, sheened by the aeons of centuries, looked like a visage chiseled by Phidias when he took a moment from creating his ivory-clad masterpiece of Zeus.

  “Why not?” smiled Madame Court, ever confident of her gifts for osculation and the handling of unorthodox requests.

  Lord Maledor nodded slowly. “How about if I join forces with the other gentleman?”

  “Fine with me,” said Madame Court.

  “You’ve recovered from our little duel, I see,” said the Dark Magician, a single eyebrow raised.

  “I never unleashed my full powers,” said Lord Maledor.

  The Dark Magician let his eyebrows reply.

  “Are you game for a trio?” Lord Maledor asked.

  “The Dark Magician never declines a challenge.”

  And so the two sensualists, both tall, both goatee of beard and coat hanger of build, both lordly in their demeanour and self deceit, took their pleasure. During this lively congress they shouted encouragement, criticism, and ironic entreaty of each other’s performances.

  “Don’t climax yet, old boy!”

  “Is your member as grand as your reputation?”

  “How say you to a simultaneous little death?”

  Truly, Madame Court decided, boys will be boys.

  Not bad for a lovebot with a fifteen-hundred-word vocabulary, thought Lord Maledor.

  Meanwhile, the Dark Magician,
who despite an outer cool was in fact a clandestine romantic, concluded that Madame Court was the best of all possible ladies and perhaps, in some forbidden zone of the psyche, wished she was the daughter he had never had. Apart from such divinations, intuitions, and machinations, she reminded him of a misspent youth to which he no longer seemed father.

  Ensconced at the sou’-sou’-east location, Lord Maledor mumbled to himself – whether in truth, in rort, or hopeful desire, only the gods can decide – and deployed a scarcely audible though not untuneful ululation, that these were his finest creations so far.

  “You’re wasting time, Maledor!”

  “You – come with us.”

  Juraletta looked up at the Slutoid who stood over her, dressed in the tallest high heels she had ever seen, a short leather skirt, and a filthy bra. “Me?”

  “Yes you, choirgirl.”

  A Punkoid unshackled the princess, and before she knew what was happening she had been led away, deeper into the dungeons until they stopped in a… It took Juraletta a moment to work out where they were. A fashion boutique?

  “I saw you when you arrived,” the Slutoid said. “And I said to myself, ‘Voluptua, that bitch needs work.’ ”

  “Work?” the princess asked.

  “Yes – work. And I, Voluptua Slutza, High Priestess of the Slutoids, am here to give it to you. Work in the form of state-of-the-art fishnet stockings, nine-inch heels, ripped jeans to give that recently ravished look, and lashings of maroon-metallic makeup so that you resemble a robot love doll.”

  “Won’t six-inch heels do?”

  “Six-inch heels are for nuns – nine inches is the norm around these parts. You need thigh-high PVC boots that make a metallic slithering sound as you totter around. Breasts are out, tits are in. Chest rockets are the name of the game.”

  As she spoke, Voluptua went to work on Juraletta, strapping a new costume to her youthful curves.

  “When I hear the word ‘breasts’ I think of warm milk and squidgy little neonates, and that makes me want to puke,” Voluptua went on. “We Slutoids don’t do babies. We do short ripped skirts, vertigo-inducing heels, and lipstick blacker than deep space.”

  Lipstick was slapped around Juraletta’s mouth, makeup on and around her eyes.

  “And in order to be a well-made Slutoid, a slut proud to stick her chest rockets into the ozone, you will need an iPox Cyborgian Smart-Kisser phone unit with a 55-mental-patient camera, high-definition 6.8a diagonally enhanced gazillion screen, and a lottawatted megahurtx processor with a portable 73-degree SLAMFAT garotting card, four speed throttle alternators together with insurgent feedback plus micromanaged G-force actuators, moron buttons, imbecile switches, buggerised boom box, tweeter fulminators, popsickle ratifiers, and vertical aspects of strangeness, muteness, and wireless connectedness. Without all of the above, it won’t damn well work and you might as well kiss your social status goodbye and throw the whole caboodle into Stygian oblivion. You’ll be a space corpse that no one wants to shag.”

  Boom! Juraletta’s hair was set in the sluttiest of vamp coiffures.

  “And another thing – though it’s state-of-the-art when you slam it on your galactic credit card, by the time you leave the shop your phone unit will be so laughably obsolete it will be socially apocalyptic to carry it and may well make you the target for hyperspace bullying. If you use it more than a few minutes a day you will become the manufacturer’s sex slave – these nanometric toys are designed to be addictive to your hypothalamalogical centre. When it fries your brain you’ll get cortical cancer, but who the fuck cares?”

  Juraletta took all this in with a slightly surprised look on her face. “Does it plug in?”

  “Of course not – it’s wireless and cordless and tasteless, and it draws energy from the sun only during lunar eclipses, which is why it doesn’t work most of the time.”

  “I’ll take one. Then will I be cool?”

  “Yeah – as cool as a Ganymedean wedding cake left in the deepest of deep-space vacuums, but do be careful because you could find yourself molecularly destabilised with your arsehole in your armpit, which is handy for frotteurists during subway rides on the Brontobyte Express, but not much good for anything else. The important thing is attitude. Your attitude needs to be that you don’t have attitude – that is a seriously bad attitude. Your large dopey eyes make it look like you’ll start crying as soon as I bite your chest rockets, but if the Lolita effect kicks in, I suggest you granny-knot a gaudy ribbon in your hair and think of Qwerty.”

  Having awoken refreshed, Rhameo returned to his purloined spaceship and took off. It was clear that no liquid uranium was to be found on this dreadful world, and with insufficient fuel to make it to Skorpeo, he resolved to return to the Sargasso and rescue his companions by stealth and guile.

  He thought fondly of Princess Juraletta’s purple curves, her slender limbs, her warm, open face. Her hair as soft as clouds, her teeth the amiable knives of memory. How she would welcome him when he reappeared to rescue her, how she would reward him on their return to Skorpeo… She was so hot she ought to be pixelated.

  As he drew closer to the Octopus’s home world he could not think of any stealthy or guileful schemes. If only he had some of the baser aspects of Teleporteus’s psyche within his own! But instead, he was only a plain-thinking Skorpean who lived for his hunting, and that might not be enough for the assault he now had to undertake.

  As Zoah accompanied the tangarine-haired Punkoid aboard the war-battered grey and rainbow-striped destroyer pirate ship, he couldn’t fail to note that it was bristling with illegal fissionic poniards, and as they roared back through the wastelands of space to the Rhomboid System and the horrible Sargasso, he pondered the oddness of Pundit’s advice. What was this Trojan horse? Who was Troj? Come to think of it – what was a horse? As usual, Pundit had talked in riddles, but the empress had always said that if you could understand the riddle, it would be good advice.

  He observed the mutant’s profile with distaste. It was bad enough that he had three arms (two of which were on the controls while the third pointed a laser pistol at him), but fancy dyeing your hair orange. What barbarism!

  “It’s not dyed,” said the Punkoid.

  “You’re a mind reader?”

  “Only in a crude way. I could sense you looking at me with distaste. We Punkoids are quite sensitive, you know. Over thousands of years of dyeing our hair, the practice has been acquired by our Lamarckian-interface-adaptable genes and now all Punkoid babies are born with spiky orange hair. Some of the more individual of my kind dye their hair green – though not through any desire to emulate Skorpean characteristics, I assure you. As you can see, I am also a three-armed freak, which is very handy (if you will pardon the pun) for as you can see, I can fully control the ship and keep you under guard at the same time. So relax, Mister Emperor, and enjoy the ride. His Supreme Oiliness looks forward to the pleasure of your company.”

  “And how did the senile old emperor accept your demands?” asked Queen Beia. She and Teleporteus were relaxing in a bath of warm, glowing crystals that emitted a melodious hum. It was like connubialising in a love tub of ginger-lashed honey.

  “What do you mean, ‘my demands’?” sniggered Teleporteus. “I made no demands. It was the Octopus who insisted that Zoah visit us alone and unarmed – in order that his two finest sons be freed. How foolish and trusting my father has become in his dotage. Apparently, he acquiesced like a lamb.”

  “What’s a lamb?” asked Queen Beia.

  “I have no idea,” said Teleporteus. “It’s just a figure of speech.”

  “Presumably a symbol for supine weakness.”

  “My dear, who cares about symbols? We are our own symbols.”

  “Symbols of power, glory, and – lust!” Queen Beia concluded, enthusiastically sitting down squarely on the Teleportian member.

  Their crystalline dalliance was interrupted by the arrival of a distressed Punkoid guard.

  “Please excus
e the intrusion into your exalted coupling, oh Mighty One – I have bad news. Prince Rhameo has escaped!”

  “Get one thing straight, you worthless hunk of space trash – Rhameo is a prince no longer! Now where has my stupid brother escaped to?”

  “We do not know – we are combing the dungeons.”

  “He’s probably in space by now, you orange-tufted fool!”

  “We will comb all zones, oh Mighty One.”

  “You should comb your hair, you ugly mutant – then you might be able to think properly.”

  “Yes, oh Mighty One.”

  “Teleporteus…” sighed Queen Beia as the verbally abused mutant retired to implement his master’s orders.

  “Yes, my scheming queen?”

  “I just adore your brutality.”

  “You bring out the best in me – I am glad to be able to share my ambitions with one as unscrupulous as you. Have no fear. We shall catch my brother and feed him to the Octopus.”

  “And while the Octopus drains him of his last miserable drops of blood we will lie back and make love to his screams,” shrilled Queen Beia.

  “Queen Beia, you are my kind of galactic whore.”

  The giant’s snoring grew louder as the unicorn droned on, telling a tedious tale about its younger days in the nursery, then being transplanted, and growing up in the garden to become a strong and leafy hedge. It talked of pruning and budding, summer rains and winter snows, and the caterpillars it had called its friends. Within a few minutes the entire dungeon was being shaken by stertorous rumblings.

  “For God’s sake – wake him before he shakes the place down!” cried Gorgon.

  “That may be a desirable outcome,” said the dwarf. “It could well free us.”

  “More likely bury us.”

  “Watch out!” cried the dwarf. “Here comes a chunk of the wall now!”

  The reverberation of the giant’s mammoth nasalities had broken loose a large piece of the slimy masonry over their heads. It tumbled slowly, and the rest of the dungeon looked set to follow suit.