‘Well young Hoop, that was a very silly thing to do.’
‘Yes, it seems so.’
‘You do know the surface of this moon is so poisoned, you’ll probably be dead in a few days.’
‘No I didn’t,’ Hal said in a now fully defeated tone.
‘Well, I don’t want any dead bodies in my store. Especially a big one like yours, so you’d better come with me before you start to decompose.’
‘Er, yes sir,’ Hal replied obediently and somehow just a little relieved and followed the old man who was already on his way, walking briskly but with a noticeable limp. ‘Hurry up, I haven’t got all day,’ the old man growled as Hal skipped to catch up with him.
‘Can I ask you your name sir?’ Hal asked when he caught up.
The old man kept walking and it was nearly a minute before he answered.
‘Septimitty Fish-Roe. With a hyphen.’
‘Nice to meet you Mr Fish-Roe.’
‘Hmmmph.’
Hal walked in silence wondering what came next.
After a few minutes walk, the old man stopped, bent down slowly and pulled open a rusty, hinged plate imbedded into the ground, revealing a ladder leading downwards.
‘Down you go. Quick smart. Wait for me at the bottom.’ Hal obeyed immediately and had to breathe in deeply to squeeze his large frame through the narrow opening in the ground. He then climbed down slowly until he reached a small dark landing that seemed to lead nowhere. He looked up to see Fish-Roe slowly descending, and waited. When he finally arrived, Fish-Roe moved to one side of the landing and simply opened a door that Hal hadn’t noticed at all. There was a dim light, and a tunnel.
‘Follow me,’ Fish-Roe barked and Hal followed.
‘Where are we going?’ Hal asked, but was ignored completely.
After a short distance, another door, and a long stone stairway leading further down. Another landing and another long stairway. It reminded Hal of the way down to the Cavern of Clavius and the Star Chamber. Another landing, another stairway and finally another door, but this one had a small panel of two buttons. Fish-Roe pushed one.
‘What is it?’ Hal asked.
As the door slid open to reveal an elevator, Fish-Roe finally replied. ‘It’s an elevator you idiot. Don’t you know anything?’ He pushed a button marked ten, and the door closed. Hal stayed silent.
‘With me,’ Fish-Roe ordered when the door opened, and Hal followed. Entering what seriously looked like an entry hall in an old Victorian house, they then entered an impeccably clean, and standard looking kitchen. Fish-Roe went to a cupboard and grabbed a clear bottle containing a greenish blue liquid.
‘Here, drink this.’
‘All of it?’
‘Yes, all of it.’
‘What is it?’
‘Questions, questions, questions! Just drink it unless you’d prefer to be dead young man.’
As Hal started to drink, he couldn’t help but notice that it tasted extremely vile. He stopped after his first mouthful and pulled a very sour face.
‘Keep going. All of it. It’s an antidote for the surface poison you fool.’
Hal took a deep breath, and drank more.’
When he’d finished the bottle, he waited. The old man took it from his hand, gave him a glass of water and said, ‘Well done. You’ll need more later. Now sit down there and I’ll get you something to eat.’
‘Does everyone live underground?’ Hal asked as the old man started preparing some food.
‘Unless you want to die, yes.’
‘And how many people live here?’
‘Mainly the smelter people, but they don’t stay long. Only a few of us who live here permanently.’
‘So why do you stay?’
‘Things to do young Hoop. Things to do,’ was his cryptic answer as he dropped a plate of something on the table in front of Hal. ‘Now get all that into you.’
‘What is it?’ Hal asked.
‘Is that all that can leave your lips young Hoop. What is it? What is it? What is it?’ he grumped.
‘I don’t know much, do I Mr Fish-Roe?’
‘Obviously. And it’s Furrding. A green leaf plant. It’ll help your iron and vitamin C deficiency.’
‘Tastes like spinach,’ Hal said approvingly after his first mouthful.
‘By the way, you can call me Sep. I hate being called Mr Fish-Roe.’
‘Yes sir,’ Hal replied.
*****
After his feed of Furrding and a cup of hot coffee, Sep prepared a small room for Hal, and told him that he would need at least seven days of treatment to be sure his body was cleansed of the surface poison. He also told Hal to keep out of his hair, as he wasn’t used to having visitors.
‘Now, stay here, behave and I might return to feed you later,’ Sep said grumpily, put on his cape, and promptly went to the elevator and disappeared.
Hal had a quiet and very careful wander around and discovered to his amazement a very ordinary apartment. Bedrooms, laundry, bathroom with a separate shower, two toilets, a dining room and a reasonably spacious and comfortable living room. Plainly and sparingly furnished, with nothing resembling a television or hi-fi system. No books and obviously, no windows. Quite suddenly, he felt very drowsy, so he returned to his room to take a nap. The next thing he knew was Sep waking him up.
‘C’mon young Hoop. Up you get, it’s dinner time,’ he bellowed from Hal’s bedroom door.
‘Oh, I don’t know what happened,’ Hal said with a huge yawn.
‘The Trikcyliate you drank. It tends to knock you out.’
‘I see,’ Hal said with another yawn as he struggled from his bed.
‘Get moving, dinner’s ready,’ Sep barked and hobbled off.
Hal sat down at the kitchen table, still yawning.
‘Right young Hoop, get some food into you, then I want to know how a primitive from Erde ended up here.’
‘Primitive?’
‘Yes. Everyone knows Erde is a planet worth avoiding. A whole planet of mongrels dead set on killing each other.’
‘Why do you say mongrels?’
‘Because Erde is populated by hundreds of species of monkey descendants, all intent on wiping each other out. Everyone in the Twelve Sun Systems knows about this. A Gloth experiment that went horrendously wrong.
‘What? Earth, er I mean Erde was created by Gloth?’
‘No, only the semi-intelligent species. It was an economic experiment to exploit the planet’s resources. But it went horribly wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All of the populated planets in the Twelve Sun Systems are single and pure race. This means they are homogeneous and politically and culturally very stable with normally one head of state. But Erde was so fragmented from the beginning that Gloth tried all sorts of controls, but all ended in failure and local wars. Totally unstable and next to impossible to control, let alone make a profit from it. So Gloth gave up on it altogether.’
‘But I was a member of a group called the Camera Stellata that I discovered was run from Gloth. So they didn’t give up.’
‘They did, but only recently, just a few hundred years ago in fact, Gloth initiated a half hearted plan with an Erdean, Ugo Boncompagni, who convinced Gloth to try again. He was better known on Erde as Pope Gregory and went about gaining a modicum of control and more importantly, realising a small profit. Then a little while later came your secret clan who teamed up with a successor to Pope Gregory.’
‘And made a profit for Gloth.’
‘Yes. A very healthy profit in fact.’
‘How do you know all this Sep?’
‘Eat you dinner, it’s getting cold,’ Sep barked.
Stuck
‘What do you do here Sep?’
‘None of your business. Now drink it!’
After four daily doses of Trikcyliate, it didn’t taste any better to Hal. He gulped and struggled to get it all down, but with Sep’s encouraging words that he’d be dead in week if
he didn’t swallow it all, Hal kept gulping. He knew what came next as it was now becoming a daily ritual. Sep would leave; Hal would get drowsy and wake up when Sep returned later in the day. Two more days Sep told him. Hal wondered why he hadn’t sneezed for five whole days.
‘It still tastes vile Sep.’
*****
It seemed strange for Hal. His first morning without his regular bottle of Trikcyliate but Sep was leaving as usual. The only difference was that Sep fussed about for a while then finally found what he was looking for. A reader, which he turned on, located the volume he was looking for, and then handed it to Hal. ‘Read this if you get bored,’ he said before leaving.
Once Sep had gone, Hal looked at the title of the volume. ‘The Pure Blood of Gloth.’ He read the first few paragraphs, made a coffee, then sat down to read. It was a history of the tribes of Gloth, and the first chapter dealt with the facts surrounding the creation of the Glothic race millions and millions of years before. On the day of creation, twelve bolts of lightening delivered twelve jet black Dodecahedrons, and inside each one, six men and six women; the twelve genetic mothers and fathers of the twelve tribes of Gloth.
The second chapter recalled the very early tribal and then civil wars on the planet, which lead to a unification of the Glothic race under a single Supreme Potentate. Not usually an avid reader, Hal got comfortable and settled in for a full day’s reading.
By the time Sep returned, Hal had almost finished the volume.
‘So you can read then I see.’
‘Yes Sep, I can read.’
‘Good, I’ll ask questions after dinner,’ Sep sneered then scurried off to the kitchen. Hal got up from the sofa and followed.
‘There’s a lot in the book that I don’t understand Sep.’
‘That’s not a surprise young Hoop. You Erdeans have been treated like mushrooms.’
‘What do you mean, mushrooms?’
‘Kept in the dark and fed on rubbish!’ Sep laughed for the first time that Hal could recall.
‘I still don’t understand Sep. What’s so funny?’
‘When you lived on Erde, did you ever look up at night?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘So what did you see?’
‘Stars.’
‘How many?’
‘Millions I suppose.’
‘And what are stars?’
‘Suns I think.’
‘Yes, a good number of them are. Now what orbits suns?’
‘Planets.’
‘Good work young Hoop. Now, while you were being treated like a mushroom on Erde, did you ever consider that some of those planets might be populated?’
‘Well, yes and no. It was all sort of science fiction stuff. You know, little green men and stories.’
‘All in the realm of myths, legends and weirdoes?’
‘Pretty much, yeah.’
‘So why do you think it’s like that? Considering that you’ve now had a little look around a small part of Sun System One.’
‘I don’t know Sep. I really don’t.
‘To keep the universe safe.’
Hal started to laugh. ‘Whatever do you mean Sep? Erdeans are some kind of dangerous creatures set to take over the universe, are they? Looks like I failed miserably then.’
‘Here, your dinner’s ready. I’ll explain after my dinner’s digested.’
‘More Furrding?’
‘Yes. Now shut up and eat before I throw you out. I’m not used to having house guests,’ Sep grumbled then starting eating his dinner.
Hal offered to clean up after dinner, and for the first time Sep accepted, then wandered off muttering ‘and bring coffee,’ as he made his way to the living room. When Hal arrived fifteen minutes later with two cups of coffee, Sep was deep in concentration. He had some sort of oval shaped device in his hands and was moving his thumbs up and down the sides of it.
‘Coffee Sep.’
‘There,’ Sep snapped and pointed to the table. ‘Quiet for a minute.’
Hal sat quietly, sipping his coffee watching Sep’s thumbs almost dancing on the sides of the black oval device. After nearly twenty minutes, he stopped and put it down, and then drank his cold coffee.
‘It’s cold!’
‘I’ll make you another one Sep,’ Hal offered.
‘No need. Now? Where were we? Ahh yes, you pesky Erdeans.’
‘You make it sound like we’re the most unpopular race in the universe.’
‘You are.’
‘But why?’
‘Genes.’
‘I’m lost again Sep, I’m sorry.’
‘Right young Hoop. Let me start at the beginning. A long time ago, Gloth had a great idea to economically exploit Erde, but as it was only populated by bacteria, plants, insects and savage wild animals, they thought about colonising the planet. But it would’ve been too expensive and taken too long. So the good men of Gloth had another idea. Hybridised Uniform Manipulation And Naturalisation, or HUMAN. They genetically implanted Glothic genes into a vast number of monkeys, apes and a whole bunch of other banana eating species and waited for the population to evolve into a form of semi-intelligence. During this time, the HUMAN program was overseen by the Glothic Oversight Detachment, or better known then as GOD.’
‘What?’ Hal exclaimed in disbelief. ‘You must be kidding me. Human and God are acronyms?’
‘Yes. Now, where was I? Oh yes. So anyway, it all fell into ruin as all these different species evolved into different races and all started fighting each other. You know the history I’m sure. Rape, pillage, burn, torture, war and genocide. All wonderfully Erdean pastimes. Finally Gloth gave up. Not because you were killing each other, but because the Erde project was a financial disaster. So they put up a network of barrier shields around the entire planet to protect the rest of the Glothic Empire from being infected by the genetics created by the experiment.’
‘And these shields are still there?’
‘Oh yes young Hoop. There have been suggestions at various times of destroying the whole planet, but it would be such an expensive exercise. So the shields have stayed.’
‘But what about Neil Armstrong going to the moon, and satellites to Jupiter.’
‘Never happened.’
‘What? What about NASA and the Russians?’
‘Gloth controls it all. It’s theatre. They started it all when Erdeans started to get a little curious and somehow developed flight without the technology coming from Gloth. So they had to take control of it before it got out of hand.’
‘Technology from Gloth?’
‘Yes, you don’t think monkey descendants just suddenly got clever one day and started building transistor radios, do you?’
‘How do you know all this Sep? I mean, here you are living on a dead moon in a bunker.’
‘Now,’ Sep said and ignored Hal’s question. ‘The shields worked well, and Gloth could control all traffic to and from Erde, so the planet was well quarantined. Until one of our Supreme Potentates, December The Ninth, got greedy, and decided he could make a profit from Erde. He came to a deal with an Erdean, Pope Gregory the Thirteenth, to take control. Anyway, to cut a long story short, this Pope Gregory character ended up not only marrying December The Ninth’s daughter and bringing the Erdean gene to Gloth, but then somehow became Supreme Potentate and created a singular royal line.’
‘So that wasn’t popular.’
‘The introduction of the Erdean genetic code to Gloth was bad enough, but then to make this mongrel bloodline a royal family was heinous. The eldest son of December The Ninth, February, who should’ve rightfully had an opportunity to be elected to the Potentate was exiled after he rebelled against Gregory.’
‘Who was his brother-in-law?’
‘Yes. Until Gregory, all Supreme Potentates were elected. Usually a member of the High Council, or sometimes the eldest son. But there was always an election. Gregory banned elections and made the Supreme Potentate hereditary.’
; ‘So what happened to February?’
‘He was exiled to Terranova Two.’
‘Where I was?’ Hal said in complete surprise.
‘Yes, and it was from there that he started the Blood Brotherhood of Gloth.’
‘What? A rebel movement?’
‘Against the power and weaponry of Gloth he stood no chance of ever mounting a rebellion. But he believed that he had a responsibility to keep the pure bloodline of the ruling elite of Gloth alive.’
‘So this Blood Brotherhood of Gloth are his descendants then?’
‘No, not all. The Brotherhood was formed by a number of equally annoyed offspring of some previous Potentates. We’ve been scattered around the distant planets, moons and asteroids of the Sun Systems since then. Like hermits.’
‘But ready to take back the throne one day so to speak.’
‘Well, that might’ve been an initial intent, but nowadays, it’s just about trying to minimise Erdean influence on Gloth.’
‘So are you one of the Brotherhood Sep?’
‘February was my great-great-great-great grandfather.’
‘So, you don’t like Erdeans either?’
‘Well young Hoop, let’s just say that I really believe you belong on Erde.’
‘Me too,’ Hal smiled.
‘Possibly, but easier said than done. The other Erdeans we’ve located have all been sent to Lacertilian.’
‘What? Where the reptile race comes from?’
‘The Lacertilians have been very helpful to the Brotherhood. Since the advent of the Erdean Gregory, the Lacertilians have felt persecuted, so have become an ally in a way.’
‘So that’s why Nox and Lik helped me?’
‘And Addly Sniddleykrimp.’
‘He’s in the Brotherhood?’
‘Well, how do you think we found you?’
‘I don’t understand Sep. Why bother getting me off Terranova Two? At least I wasn’t going to die of surface poisoning there.’
‘It’s not about you young Hoop. We try to track down all Erdean intruders and keep the Glothic Empire pure.’
‘You make it sound like you’re a racist.’
‘We are.’
‘So what’re going to do with me? Ship me off to Lacertilian?’
‘I’d like to, but it’s impossible right now. Glothic High Command heard about one or two previous Erdeans we sent there, and are now scanning every craft in and out of Lacertilian. So for the moment, you’re stuck here.’
The Adventures of HAL: The Second Hilarious Glothic Tale (The Glothic Tales Book 2) Page 15
