The Young Dictator

by Hughes, Rhys

  “That looks like Bellatrix ahead,” said the navigator.

  The three of them crowded at the forward porthole. Old Young Eyes was very excited. He had never been in outer space before. He pointed at the comets and giggled like a lunatic.

  “We’re in orbit around Bellatrix Three now,” remarked the navigator about half an hour later. “The computers did a good job of getting us to these coordinates. I thought that the black hole might have damaged the circuits, but they seem absolutely fine.”

  No sooner had he finished speaking, than there was a sizzling and a stench of burning plastic. “Oh dear!”

  “Are we stranded up here?” wailed Old Young Eyes.

  The navigator frowned. “No, I suggest we wait until a rescue craft is sent up from the surface. That’s best.”

  “Switch to manual control,” ordered Jenny.

  “But you’re not a pilot! You don’t know how to fly this thing!” cried the horrified navigator. She glared.

  “Are you disobeying one of my commands?”

  “No, no, no!” he squeaked.

  Jenny positioned herself in the pilot’s chair. She gripped the levers and turned the necessary dials and the spaceship entered the atmosphere of Bellatrix Three. The hull began vibrating and the portholes flexed in such a way that they acted like the membranes of loudspeakers, making a din in the cabin. The navigator shouted:

  “We’re descending too fast! We’ll crash!”

  “The accelerator has jammed,” said Jenny. “There’s nothing I can do to make it go any slower. Too bad!”

  “If we hit the ground at this speed we’ll be concussed to death!” cried the navigator, waving his arms about.

  “Go outside and crawl under the spaceship,” Jenny ordered him, “and hold on until I give further instructions.”

  “What? You want me to leave the spaceship in mid air?”

  “You can be our shock absorber.”

  The navigator laughed at the joke, but Jenny’s expression quickly shut him up. She was serious. He looked at Old Young Eyes, hoping for moral support, but it wasn’t forthcoming. The keeper of the kilogram stared at the floor and whistled tunelessly.

  “Outside!” growled Jenny. “Or else…”

  The navigator sighed. He went to the airlock and opened it. A bitterly cold wind entered the cabin, scattering the charts and lollipops. Clinging precariously to the handholds on the outside of the spaceship, he slowly made his way down the rungs to the base of the craft, where he found a couple of brackets set into the metal of the underside of the vessel. This was peculiar. Why would they be here?

  It was almost as if the designer of the spaceship had anticipated just such an emergency as this one. Weird!

  Slotting his feet into two of the brackets and clinging to the other two with his hands, he hung at full length under the spaceship, a living shock absorber, an involuntary sacrifice to save the greatest known dictator. He thought about all the things he wished he had done in his life. Too late to worry about such things. How sad!

  The ground was rushing up below him.

  He closed his eyes tight.

  The spaceship landed with a squelch.

  The force of the landing compressed him and increased the pressure of the blood inside his body to such a degree that he exploded at both ends, his head shooting off in one direction and his feet, still inside their shoes, in the other direction. But the spaceship was undamaged! The ramp slid down and Jenny staggered along it.

  Old Young Eyes tottered after her. Both were dazed.

  “My, that was a rough landing!”

  The crystal palace loomed in the distance.

  They began limping towards it.

  And from one of the highest towers, Gran watched them come with a telescope and a belligerent grin.

  It took Jenny several days to recover from her ordeal. She ate sweets and drank lemonade until she was better. Then she went back to work. First she gave Old Young Eyes an official job, designating him as the Keeper of the Royal Kilogram. He didn’t need to do much really, just oversee the creation and preservation of a new IPK. Gran gave her a report of all the things that had happened in her absence.

  “I made contact with Earth,” said Gran, “and it appears to have a new ruler, a girl called Maya who is very keen to meet you. I think it would be a good idea for you to travel there…”

  Jenny frowned. “I have a rival, do I?”

  “Oh no! She’s not a rival. I think you would get along together. Why don’t you set off for Earth tomorrow? I have already prepared a spaceship for you, an unarmed one, of course!”

  “Unarmed? Isn’t that a bit reckless?” cried Jenny.

  “Not at all. It’ll be exactly what they aren’t expecting us to do. That’s called utilising the element of surprise!”

  “I didn’t know surprise was an element. I thought it was a molecule. I learn something every day,” said Jenny.

  Gran eyes went misty. “When I was a tadpole, we didn’t have surprise or even astonishment. And elements were still at the planning stage. That was before I decided not to become a frog after all, the conditions weren’t right and I didn’t like the neighbours.”

  “I never knew you were ever a tadpole, Gran!”

  “Only for a short time. I don’t recommend it, but it’s nice to try things for oneself, just for the experience.”

  Later that evening, Jenny logged into her Fascbook account. She did a quick search and saw that Maya Duesing was there, so she put in a friend request. Then she enjoyed a bit of amusing banter with Benito and Adolf before going to bed. They were thinking of throwing a party and she was invited, of course. How thoughtful!

  In her dreams, she saw Ralph standing in the distance. He was crying and beating his brass chest in grief.

  Jenny had no time for this. “Grow up, you soppy amalgam of copper and zinc!” She hated being made to feel guilty by her own dreams. How dare her subconscious tell her off?

  “I’m warning you,” she said to it, “that if you don’t obey my ego, I’ll have you locked up in prison. I can do that, you know! I can arrange for bars to be inserted into my brain and for my subconscious to be jailed in a cage for the rest of my life. Some of the surgeons in my service are good enough to do that. So take due care!”

  Her subconscious must have been listening, because it never made her feel guilty ever again. Ralph dissolved from the dream and was replaced by a table piled with cakes and peanuts.

  “That’s more like it, buster!” she said to herself.

  She slept soundly afterwards.

  In the morning, she went down to breakfast.

  “Your spaceship is fuelled and ready to leave,” said Gran, “and I think you ought to take Old Young Eyes with you. He can be your ambassador, if you like. I’ll stay here on my own.”

  “Very well,” agreed Jenny. “If you think it’s a good idea.”

  Gran nodded vigorously. “Sure, dude!”

  Jenny ate her breakfast, carefully spreading the cakes with jam before sprinkling sweets over the top. When she had finished, she went to her chamber and logged in to Fascbook. She noted that Maya had accepted her friend request and left a message on her wall. The message said, “So you think you are the greatest dictator in the entire galaxy, do you? Well, you don’t scare me! Not for a moment.’

  Jenny checked Maya’s personal information and saw that she had no intention of giving up control of planet Earth; she had issued a challenge to anyone who felt able to try. Jenny chewed her lower lip. Maya wasn’t keen to meet her after all! Clearly Gran had been deceitful again. Perhaps this was part of her education, conditioning her to suspect betrayal even in her closest advisors? Who knew?

  But she was Jenny Khan, the most shrewd of all little girls, and she felt confident in her ability to reclaim the Earth for her own empire even without using any weapons. She switched off the computer and wandered back to the throne room. Old Young Eyes was weighing her throne on an enormous pair of scales. She coughed.


  He looked up at her. “I like weighing things,” he explained. “I hope you don’t mind?” He pulled his beard.

  “How heavy is it?” asked Jenny.

  “Eight hundred kilograms,” answered Old Young Eyes.

  “How did you lift it up?”

  “I didn’t. It’s far too heavy for me. I slid the scales under it by digging away part of the floor with a chisel.”

  Jenny nodded. “We’re leaving for Earth today.”

  He jumped for joy. “Earth? That’s where France is. I can’t wait to get back. I don’t mean to be ungrateful…”

  Jenny raised a hand to silence him. “Don’t worry. I don’t get offended easily. Or rather, I only get offended when I choose to be offended, and in this instance I’ve decided not to be.”

  “You are a very wise and sagacious ruler!”

  “What does ‘sagacious’ mean?”

  “Er… it just means ‘wise’, your majesty.”

  “So there was no need to say it twice, was there? But yes, you’re right, I’m a wise ruler, for the time being at least! Tomorrow, of course, I might feel less wise and have you chopped.”

  “Chopped? With a cleaver, you mean?” he gulped.

  She nodded. “Or a guillotine.”

  Old Young Eyes licked his dry lips. “If you do that, will you give me a chance to weigh the blade first?”

  Jenny considered this request. “Why not?”

  She threw back her head. What a kind and generous tyrant she was! It couldn’t be disputed that she had a wonderful character. But this was no time for self-praise. She had to get ready for the journey to Earth. Packing was always such a tedious chore!

  The journey to Earth was uneventful. She went with an even smaller team than had accompanied her to Hell. Gran had cheerfully waved them off, but Jenny was quite wary of her now. Mind you, it was better to be kept on one’s toes. Stopped one going soft.

  Old Young Eyes wanted to be taken directly to Paris, but Jenny told him to be patient. She decided to land in Carrington instead, in her own garden. The spaceship was larger than Boris’s shed had been and it took up the entire available space, squashing the vegetables that her Mum was growing and grinding gnomes to dust.

  Her Mum threw open the back door and shook a fist.

  “Look what you’ve done to my lovely courgettes! I was planning to enter them in a competition next week!”

  The hatch of the spaceship slid open and the ramp was extended. At the top of the ramp appeared Jenny.

  “Hello Mum!” she said casually.

  Mum struggled to find the appropriate words.

  Eventually she stuttered, “Where the hell have you been? Your dinner went cold last year and then it went off and then it bred maggots and they turned into flies that went off too!”

  “Yes, I am somewhat late, aren’t I?”

  Mum screwed up her eyes, studied the spaceship from top to bottom. Dad suddenly appeared behind her. He was biting dried glue off the tips of his fingers and Jenny guessed he had been busy working on his model of Mum. “Well now,” he spluttered.

  From between his legs ran Chairman Meow.

  “Hello puss!” cried Jenny.

  She was delighted to see him again.

  “What have you done with Gran?” demanded Mum.

  “I left her on Bellatrix Three. That’s a planet orbiting a distant star. I doubt you’ve even heard of it.”

  “Humph! What a smarty-pants you’ve become!”

  Jenny shook her head. “No, Mum. I was always a smarty-pants. That’s nothing new.” She strolled down the ramp. “What can you tell me about the current political situation here?”

  “Oh, you’re not planning to stand for election again!”

  Jenny waved a dismissive hand. “No, all that stuff’s behind me now. I just want to know who’s in charge.”

  “World President Maya, that’s who,” said Dad.

  “And where does she live?”

  “She has many residences. She never spends a night in the same place. Tonight she’s in Buckingham Palace.”

  “With the Queen, you mean?” Jenny asked.

  “The Queen doesn’t like it but she doesn’t have much choice. She is still loyal to you actually,” said Dad.

  “Hush!” hissed Mum. “Don’t help her in any way.”

  “It’s nice to know that some people aren’t traitors and that the Queen is reliable. Unlike the pair of you!”

  And Jenny gave her parents a massive sneer.

  “My! That’s big!” Dad gasped.

  “It’s my biggest,” confirmed Jenny. “If I tried to do a bigger one then my mouth would fall off my face.”

  “Go on, try it!” maliciously urged Mum.

  “No. I refuse. I am going back inside my spaceship now. Don’t try to grow any courgettes in my absence. I’ll only come back and squash the new ones if you attempt that…”

  And Mum knew that this threat was serious.

  Jenny turned on her heel, strode back up the ramp and went inside the craft. The hatch closed and the spaceship rose quietly into the sky. Mum and Dad watched it go and sighed.

  “I always knew she would go far,” said Dad.

  “Not far enough!” spat Mum.

  Dad shrugged and went back to his matchstick model.

  The model never nagged him.

  Buckingham Palace was directly below. Jenny gave the command to land on the roof of the building. The spaceship dropped down through thick clouds and nobody saw it, not even the tourists who loitered at the gates of the palace with cameras; but the Queen heard the bump as it settled above her head. She was in the attic.

  She had been searching among the junk that filled the dim and dusty room, peering into old boxes and suitcases that contained stuff stored here by previous monarchs. There were no windows, but she had a lantern. At the moment, she was bending over an old sea chest. It contained what she first thought were puppets but which on closer inspection turned out to be a collection of mummified midgets.

  “Some of my ancestors were very strange people!” she said to herself as she slammed the lid of the chest.

  Then she straightened, adjusted her crown and picked up the lantern. It would be a good idea to climb up on the roof to investigate the source of that noise. There was a secret stairway at the far end of the attic. Just to be on the safe side, she picked up a rusty cutlass from a rack of weapons that had once belonged to her mother.

  She threaded her way between the piles of clutter.

  Such a mixture of valuable antiques and worthless rubbish! Here were the stilts that Queen Victoria had used to reach the gin bottles on the high pantry shelves; and there the giant abacus that Henry VIII had calculated his wives on, applying the principles of compound interest; and Richard III’s artificial hunch was over there…

  Fascinating to the historian perhaps but so messy!

  The Queen swung the cutlass as she went and it made a swishing noise through the dense mote-speckled air.

  Just as she reached the narrow door that led to the secret stairway, she heard footsteps beyond it. She reached out and yanked the door open and raised the cutlass for a fatal blow…

  And there stood Jenny Khan, blinking in surprise!

  “Your majesty!” cried Jenny.

  “Your excellency!” blurted the Queen.

  They hugged each other in joy.

  “Ow! Watch what you’re doing with that sabre!”

  “It’s not a sabre, Jenny,” corrected the Queen, “but a cutlass, a kind of sword designed for close combat in places where it’s impractical to wield a long blade, on the deck of a ship for example, or in the confines of such an attic as this one. But anyway…”

  “I’m glad to see you again, my loyal vassal,” said Jenny.

  “Thank you, your excellency!”

  “How is life in London these days?”

  The Queen sighed, adjusted her crown again with her free hand, pulled her chin and replied, “Times have been hard
for me lately. There’s a new dictator on the block and although she’s much more enlightened than you ever were, I just can’t bring myself to obey her. I pledged myself to your service and my loyalty is unshakeable.”

  Jenny ground her teeth together. “It’s a pity the same can’t be said of some others.” With an effort she forced herself to smile. “But that’s none of your concern. Come, stand up!”

  And she aided the Queen, who had been kneeling submissively before her, to totter off her callused knees back to her feet. Jenny said, “There’s much for us to talk about. I rule the entire galaxy now, all of it apart from Earth. That’s why I came back now.”

  The Queen digested this information and said:

  “The new dictator of Earth, Maya Duesing, is staying here tonight. In fact she’s here right now. I couldn’t bear to be near her so I came up into the attic to do some tidying instead.”

  “That was a good excuse,” remarked Jenny.

  The Queen smiled. “Yes. I hate this room really. It’s full of the oddest things. The Kings and Queens who reigned before me were mostly totally mad! Most of the things that belonged to them are useless, but I did find an inflatable emergency floating throne owned by King Canute more than a thousand years ago. I like that one.”

  “I suppose I ought to go down and meet Maya.”

  The Queen licked her lips. “I’m not sure about that. Do you have any backup with you?” She blinked anxiously.

  “I have a dozen warriors in my spaceship. And a man who knows all there is to know about kilograms…”

  The Queen shook her head, but her crown didn’t move. “That’s really not good enough, Jenny. I think that Maya will throw you in a dungeon as soon as she claps eyes on you and finds out who you are and what you’ve done. You need some decent support.”

  “You’ll lend your sword arm to my cause?”

  “Naturally! But I’m just one person. Maya controls the armies of the world. You don’t happen to be on Fascbook, do you? There are fantastic dictators on there who might help you.”