Emperor of the Universe

by David Lubar

  “Think so?” Clave asked.

  “Picture it,” Nicholas said. “Imagine how amazing it would be to see a sfumble with you and me at the viewport. Behind us, Morglob’s estate shrinks from a huge sphere to a tiny dot as we fly away from it. And then, you announce that you, and you alone, have the exclusive rights to record sfumbles of Nicholas the Slayer.”

  Nicholas bit back the urge to add more. He hadn’t felt this persuasive since he’d talked his language-arts teacher into giving him another week to write his book report on Great Expectations. Not that even fifty-two additional weeks would have made a difference.

  “Exclusive?” Clave asked. “Seriously?”

  “Exclusive,” Nicholas said. “Totally seriously.”

  “Let’s do it,” Clave said. “This is going to be a world-shattering relationship.”

  Those words, coincidentally, would prove to be significant very soon in more ways than one.

  JOIN THE PARTY

  When news of the destruction of Menmar reached the planet Volg, where six Menmarians were on tour as part of the Bareknuckle Road Show (a fighting extravaganza that was especially popular on planets where the inhabitants lacked knuckles), the fighters commandeered a ship. They vowed to find Nicholas and kill him. While not as fond of inflicting pain and suffering as the Craborzi, the Menmarians were pretty much on the same wavelength when it came to a thirst for revenge and brutal love of executions.

  HATCHING AN ESCAPE

  That night, when Morglob was asleep, Nicholas and the others followed Spott down the corridor to a side door, and then through a winding path to an engine room. Once inside, Spott knelt and pointed to three tiny knobs that were placed along a wall right above floor level, too far apart for a single person to reach at once. “We have to turn all three at the same time to cut off the power to the tractor beams. That’s why I was so relieved when the two of you showed up.”

  “Three of us,” Henrietta said.

  Four, Jeef said.

  “Three who can operate a knob.” Henrietta held out her front paws and turned a tiny imaginary knob.

  Three who would be welcome in a barn, Jeef said, and not be poisoned on sight.

  “Stop it, you two, or I’m pulling this spaceship over and you’re both getting out.” Nicholas grinned. He’d always wanted to use that line, even though, as an only child, he’d never been on the receiving end of it.

  “Walking in space without a suit would be rather fatal,” Clave said.

  “It’s a joke,” Nicholas said. “Parents say that to their kids who are fighting in the backseat of a car.”

  “Barbarians…” Clave said.

  “We need to hurry.” Spott put his hand on the center knob. “It doesn’t matter which way you turn them.”

  Nicholas headed for the knob on the left. As soon as he and Clave were in position, Spott said, “Ready … Twist!”

  They twisted.

  As Nicholas’s knob clicked into position, he said, “Why would they need three knobs to turn off the power to the tractor beams? That seems unnecessary. Separate knobs seem more like something you’d use to launch a nuclear attack or do some other serious stuff that more than one person needed to decide about. And why are the knobs on the floor? And why are they so tiny?”

  “More questions,” Clave said. Then he turned his head sharply. “What was that?”

  Nicholas noticed the sudden absence of sound, too. For an instant, the hum of engines and generators seemed to stop, as if the entire ship had been startled into a silence that boomed through the air.

  Breaking the silence, a pleasant male voice said, “Self-destruction sequence initiated. Have a nice day.”

  “Self-destruction?” Nicholas screamed.

  “Oh, dear. What a dreadful mistake for me to make,” Spott said. “I guess we have no choice, now. We need to get to your ship, Nicholas. This way!”

  “My ship,” Clave said.

  “You tricked us,” Nicholas said.

  “For your own good,” Spott said. “Let’s go. Hurry!”

  Nicholas knew this wasn’t the time to discuss the decision. Or the deception. “Can you keep up with us?” he asked Jeef.

  No problem, Jeef said. She rolled across the floor and bumped into Nicholas’s ankles.

  Clutching Henrietta, Nicholas followed Spott to the hangar. When they reached Clave’s ship, Spott pointed to the ramp, which was still down, and said, “You get on board. I’ll trigger the air lock. Be quick.”

  As soon as Spott joined them in the bridge, Clave closed the ramp. “Come on!” he said, aiming those words in the direction of the exit hatch as the air was pumped out of the chamber.

  The self-destruction countdown continued: “Thirty seconds…”

  “You didn’t think this out too clearly,” Nicholas said to Spott.

  “I thought about it every day. We’ll be fine.” Spott turned to Clave. “Just hit the hatch with your cannon.”

  “I don’t have a cannon,” Clave said.

  “Twenty seconds…”

  “What about the thing you used on the Craborzi ship?” Nicholas asked.

  “Too light for this,” Clave said. “And the panels aren’t hinged.”

  “Ten seconds…”

  “It’s opening,” Spott said.

  “It’s still too narrow.” Clave moved his hands in the navigation field, and the ship rose from the floor, hovering midway to the ceiling, directly in line with the hatch.

  “Five … four … three…”

  “Go!” Nicholas screamed. He pressed against the back wall to brace himself for the thrust.

  Clave sent the ship hurtling toward the hatch. A grating screech tore through the cabin on all four sides as they wedged past the opening and broke free. Nicholas watched on the inset rearview image as the enormous disco ball started to fall to pieces. There was no explosion that he could see. Glittering panels drifted loose. A few broke off at first, in seemingly random places, and then a flurry of them tumbled into space, followed by pieces of the interior. Cloud Mansion Intergalactic broke into a shower of confetti. One wall of the landing area spun past them, tumbling wildly. If they’d been inside when everything came apart, they would have been badly mangled.

  “It’s sort of beautiful,” Clave said. He captured the scene for a sfumble.

  “What about Morglob?” Nicholas asked. As despicable as the creature was, Nicholas hated having another death on his conscience, even if he’d been tricked into bringing it about.

  “He’ll be fine, unfortunately,” Spott said. “He’s a Pflemhackian. They can survive in space. I think they can survive anywhere.”

  “Now what?” Nicholas asked. “Can you get some more j-cubes and take me home?”

  “Not at the moment,” Clave said. He pointed to the instrument panel, where dozens of purple lights flashed. “The hull took a pretty bad hit. We need to find somewhere to put down for repairs before one of those gashes becomes a breach.”

  “I really hate that color,” Nicholas said. “Will the ship be hard to fix?”

  “No,” Clave said. He played with some of the displays beneath the violet lights. “The standard patch kit I carry is good enough. It just has to be applied on the outside and inside. Outside is a bit unreachable at the moment.”

  “Wait.” Nicholas didn’t like the idea of leaving the hull unpatched a moment longer than necessary. He thought about Earth’s own space program, and the videos he’d seen of astronauts making repairs. “Don’t you have some sort of space suit?”

  “I do. But…”

  “But what?”

  “You’re scared to use it, aren’t you?” Spott asked.

  “No, I’m not!” Clave shouted, a bit too loudly. He stomped out of the bridge and opened a door in one of the storage lockers that lined the wall between the cockpit and the living quarters, revealing a space suit far less bulky than the ones Nicholas had in mind. “You don’t know anything about me. If you’re so eager to take a space walk, help y
ourself.” He kicked a smaller door below that one. It popped open, spilling its contents, which included a tool kit and a hand-operated jet pack.

  “I’ll go!” Nicholas said.

  “You have no training,” Clave said. “You can’t just hop into one of these suits and take a stroll out through the air lock.”

  “I would if I could,” Spott said. He tapped his snout, which was definitely too long to fit inside the helmet.

  “So would I,” Henrietta said.

  Me, too, Jeef said.

  “I’m sorry,” Spott said. “I shouldn’t have questioned your courage. You’re right. I don’t know anything about you. Please accept my sincere apology.”

  “Just leave me alone so I can find a place to set down,” Clave said. He returned to the navigator’s seat.

  Nicholas followed him. He realized he’d have a much better chance of getting home soon, and getting amazingly rich, if he explained to Clave how valuable gold was on Earth. But he knew better than to jump right into the topic when Clave was obviously upset.

  “So, how’s the hit count going?” he asked.

  “I haven’t checked, recently.”

  Nicholas knew this was a lie. Clave was constantly checking his stats.

  “It’s pretty cool you know how to pilot a ship. Was it hard to learn?”

  Clave stared at him for an uncomfortable period, then said, “What do you want?”

  “Look, gold is like the most valuable stuff on Earth, except maybe for diamonds. I think an ounce is worth a couple thousand dollars. You must have tons. We can split the money.”

  “So I get Earth dollars for the gold. What can I do with them?”

  “Are you kidding me? Who’s the barbarian now? You buy stuff with money. That’s what you do.” Nicholas smirked and shook his head.

  “That money is only good on Earth, right?” Clave asked.

  “Of course,” Nicholas said. “But there’s plenty of awesome stuff you can buy there.”

  “Like what?” Clave asked.

  “Anything you want,” Nicholas said.

  “Well, I’d like to buy a better ship,” Clave said. “But I doubt they make those on Earth.”

  “You could buy diamonds,” Nicholas said.

  “The universe is rotten with diamonds,” Clave said. “Pretty much every mineral is abundant somewhere. Watch.” He tapped the console and said, “Find jade.”

  The display filled with colored dots.

  “Find sapphires,” Clave said.

  The dots shifted.

  “Find chromiated onyxite.”

  The dots shifted again.

  “Find—”

  “Okay!” Nicholas shouted. “I get it. Earth money is worthless to you. But it would be amazing for me. So, can you please take me home, and let me have the gold?”

  “Absolutely. As soon as we get the hull repaired, and I make some deliveries,” Clave said. “Though it would have been a whole lot easier if you’d just signed that contract with Morglob.”

  “I doubt it,” Nicholas said.

  Clave turned his attention to finding the nearest safe place to set down and repair the ship. He had three j-cubes left, but he didn’t want to risk using more than one. He checked all the destinations they could reach with a single jump, looking for the one with the least travel. The nearest planet was Zeng. Unfortunately, it was not the nearest safe one.

  FIRST, A WORD

  This would be a good time to talk about firsts. Even in infinite stretches of space and time, there has to be a first instance of each type of event, action, or item. (Unless time stretches infinitely in both directions, but that’s the sort of thing it’s best not to think about for more than a very limited amount of time.) There was the first star to form, the first animal to achieve self-awareness, the first person to accidentally make blue cheese, the first Bilgerian who realized he could travel through the air by lighting the gas that Bilgerians expel in high volume and staggering quantity from the tail end of their digestive systems, and the first civilization to venture into space and encounter other intelligent beings. That civilization would be the Dragu.

  When the Dragu, after visiting countless lifeless planets, discovered Benbennebneb, something astounding happened. The two groups did not immediately launch into a prolonged, senseless, and destructive war, despite the fact that both the Dragu and the Benbennebneb had waged countless destructive wars, conflicts, and skirmishes among themselves for thousands of years. This was actually a lucky break for the Dragu. During the whole time the Dragu had been investing their efforts in conquering space, the Benbennebnebers (who are generally called Fourbees, for obvious reasons, and occasionally called Fourenners by people who think they are being far more clever than they actually are) had given their attention to weaponry. After evolving through phases of blunt things, pointy things, slashy things, and shooty things, they had discovered their purpose in life and developed a stunning variety of explody things. The reason for this, at least in part, is that if you blow a Fourbee (who looks somewhat like an inverted bowl of butterscotch pudding with eye stalks) into pieces, the pieces ooze back together with no lasting scars. (Fourbees are heartless in the best of all possible meanings of that word. And gutless.) The majority of Fourbees actually find the experience somewhat pleasant.

  The Fourbees had achieved the capability of blowing spaceships out of the sky before they even knew spaceships existed. The presence of seven moons around their planet, and the persistence of a primitive belief that the lights in the sky were barely more than a stone’s throw away, gave them a lot to aim at. Fortunately for all involved, the appearance of a Dragu expedition ship was startling enough that the Fourbees didn’t immediately blow it out of the sky, or turn its landing spot into a crater by way of any of the hundreds of explosive projectiles or matter disruptors they’d created. Having never met anyone who was permanently harmed by explosions, they couldn’t conceive of any reason to do that, especially since it was considered bad manners to blow someone up without asking permission, except during National Boomboom Day.

  The Ubiquitous Matrix allowed the Dragu (who looked sort of like a molten lava cake with feelers) and the Fourbees to communicate. Eventually, proving that love truly is blind, they intermarried. Their offspring also ventured into space, evolved, mutated, and crossbred with a variety of gooey and gelatinous species. Millennia later, one of those descendants, a Pflemhackian who had no idea about his distant origins, became the most powerful talent manager in the universe, and eventually got launched into space when his estate was destroyed.

  As for those who fled this citadel, Nicholas, Clave, Spott, Henrietta, and Jeef were about to be the first aliens to land on Zeng. There were five continents on Zeng. On two of them, most of the natives would have fled in terror from a spaceship. On two others, the natives would have attacked the ship with weapons less effective but no less deadly than those of the Fourbees. Clave didn’t land on any of those four continents. He had the misfortune to land his nameless ship on the continent of Sperno, in the city of Lix, where he and his companions were greeted with joy as heroes who fulfilled an ancient prophecy. While prophecies can serve a valuable purpose, giving hope and guidance to entire civilizations, being the fulfilment of one is rarely a pleasant or positive experience.

  BITS AND PIECES

  Nicholas cringed when the hatch opened. Zeng smelled like old bloodstains and overboiled shrimp. A crowd had already gathered outside the ship, which Clave had landed near the first city he spotted. It was dark, but the sun was close to rising, and it cast enough light to reveal a land of gently rolling hills.

  “That’s a lot of people,” Clave said. “Probably fans.”

  One of the Zeng, whose name was Marrow, came forward as Clave walked down the ramp.

  Nicholas couldn’t help staring. The Zeng resembled feathered centaurs with arms that reached all the way to the ground. He halfway expected them to have wings.

  “Hello,” Clave said. “Would you be inte
rested in exchanging j-cubes for…” He paused, as if searching through his inventory for the best item to offer. “How about an antimatter power core? They’re amazingly useful. It could change your lives forever.”

  “I don’t know of these things,” Marrow said. “Though we have many advanced technologies. As you surely know, the atomizer needs constant maintenance and enhancements.”

  “Surely,” Clave said, though his slightly lowered left eyebrow and marginally tilted right one would have betrayed his lack of a clue, had the Zeng any familiarity with Menmarian facial expressions.

  “But come,” Marrow said, “you must wish to rest up from your trip across the stars and prepare for the glorious ceremony.”

  “Yes, we must,” Clave said. He flashed Nicholas a let’s amuse the barbarians smirk, which Nicholas returned since he was now a sophisticated intergalactic traveler who swooped among the stars, and no longer a member of the great unwhooshed.

  The group followed Marrow through streets lined with gathering Zeng. Word must have spread rapidly. It seemed as if every resident of the city wanted to catch a glimpse of the visitors.

  “The Sanctuary has been kept ready for you,” Marrow said when they reached a square with a small six-sided stone building in the center. He led them to the door, opened it, and said, “The one becomes the many becomes the one.”

  “Right,” Clave said.

  Nicholas, feeling he had to respond in an appropriate manner, sifted through his brain and came up with, “One small step for man.” It seemed better than any of the other ones that came to mind.

  He followed Clave inside. “What was all of that about?”

  “I have no idea,” Clave said.

  “Me, neither,” Henrietta said.