by Barry Lyga
A moment later, Bluko whistled, too. Thanos sighed.
CHAPTER XV
WHEN THE DOOR TO HIS LORDSHIP’S PERSONAL DINING hall slid open, Thanos beheld a long, scarred table with only one chair at the far end. His Lordship sat there, attended to by a woman Thanos had never seen before—silvery skin, pale-yellow hair, a kerchief tied around the lower half of her face. Robbo shoved past Thanos and took up a position at His Lordship’s right.
“Thanos!” His Lordship boomed with exhilaration. “You marvelous lavender bastard! I heard the engines start up ten minutes ago. Have a seat,” His Lordship invited, gesturing.
Thanos looked around. There were no other chairs.
“Oh, for Eternity’s sake!” His Lordship fumed. “Someone get the man a damned chair! You just made me look like an idiot!”
Robbo and the woman exchanged a meaningful glance, then another, and another, clearly each telling the other You go! Finally, the woman exited through another door and returned a moment later with a fragile-looking chair, which she brought to Thanos’s end of the table and placed there without so much as a glance in his direction.
“Have a seat!” His Lordship said again, with the exact same expression and intonation, as if the previous invitation had never happened.
Thanos gingerly perched on the chair. It creaked and complained at his weight.
“Bring us some food,” His Lordship commanded, then did a double take when he saw that the woman had already begun serving him.
“Damnit! Wait until I give the command before you start! There’s no point to the command if you’re already doing it!”
“My apologies, my lord,” she murmured, bowing her head.
His Lordship shook his head. “You just can’t breed good help anymore,” he complained. “Five, six generations of them on this ship, and I think they’re starting to get inbred. Some of these species aren’t biologically compatible with each other—to say nothing of anatomically compatible—so you start the incest train, and that never ends well. Oh well.” He shrugged and sampled something from his plate. “Bungling idiots make useful cannon fodder. We’re going to need a lot of cannon fodder where we’re going.”
Thanos wasn’t sure if he was supposed to ask a question at this point. The woman had just put a plate before him. The food upon it was gristly and swam in a malodorous gravy that jiggled on its own. Still, it was the most appetizing meal he’d seen since boarding the Golden Berth.
“Do you know why I had Googa killed?” His Lordship asked.
“No.”
“Because he was useless to me. You found the solution, and you were able to execute it. I had no more need for him. I have to run a lean ship, Thanos. Resources are scarce.”
The food on Thanos’s plate, while vile, was easily equal to five times his typical daily ration. Yes, scarce. Intentionally so. But this was not the time to debate economics with His Lordship.
“Couldn’t you have spoken to Googa?” Thanos asked. “Expressed your displeasure in another way and given him a chance at something else?”
“Conversation is all well and good, Thanos, but sometimes only brute force will suffice. I sense you understand this.”
No, Thanos did not. His own plan for killing people had been humane and compassionate. He’d developed an alpha wave emitter that would quietly shut down a victim’s conscious thought, then disrupt the autonomic nervous system. A quiet, peaceful, painless death. It would have been his own.
It still could be. If he could only return to Titan.
“I am a man in exile, Thanos of Titan,” His Lordship was saying as gravy dripped from his lips and slid down his wattles. “You get that?”
“More than you’d think.”
“Ha! Ha! Well then, I was exiled from the planet Kilyan about three, four hundred years ago. I lost count at some point.”
“Your people must be long-lived.”
“I hope so,” His Lordship said. “I hope the bastards who kicked me off the planet are still alive when we get there.”
“You’re going home?” This much Thanos could understand and empathize with.
His Lordship nodded and explained: The plan was simple. He’d liberated the Golden Berth from its previous owners a hundred years ago, out by the galactic rim. The ship had been new then, and he’d decided to use it to return to Kilyan, kill those who’d deposed him, and retake the planet.
But Kilyan was far, far away. And he knew that he would be dramatically outnumbered.
“I wasn’t terribly popular as a ruler,” he admitted.
“I find that hard to believe,” Thanos said, careful to keep the mildest trace of irony out of his voice.
“And yet it’s true! They didn’t appreciate me, Thanos. I let them keep half the grain they grew, half the livestock they tended! And for my generosity, I was booted off the planet and cast halfway across the universe.”
“How did you survive?” Thanos stirred the food on his plate and then, reluctantly, dug in. Better than usual was still wretched.
His Lordship waved off the inquiry and kept talking. Once he was back in space and headed home, he realized that he would need an army. Unable to pay one, he decided to fall back on the time-tested method of simply conscripting those he needed. It was working well for him so far.
“So, you provide food and shelter,” Thanos began.
“And transportation!” His Lordship admonished. “And a cause! Don’t forget that, Thanos! A cause! I give meaning to the lives of these poor benighted wretches.” He belched and drained his goblet. “Present company excepted. You’re not a wretch. There’s something almost noble about you, Thanos.
“When we get to Kilyan, my army will conquer the planet. And then you’ll all have the honor of serving me in my palace. Which is quite nice.”
“I see. So, the indentured servitude does not end with the army’s victory?”
His Lordship sighed wearily. “Don’t be dim, Thanos. Of course not! I’m going to need protection from the people we’ve defeated. A lot of them will die, but not all. I have to leave some alive to rule over, right? Think! Use that misshapen purple thing on your shoulders for something other than supporting that ridiculously huge chin.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll like Kilyan,” His Lordship said airily. “The gnat season only lasts a few months, and when the monsoons hit, the sky goes a lovely shade of black for days on end.
“I want you to be part of my inner circle,” he went on. “Like Robbo and Kebbi here.” He jerked a thumb at the woman by way of introduction. “Run the ship’s engines. Keep us going in the right direction. And you’ll have a pretty good life when we get to Kilyan.”
Thanos said nothing.
“Don’t be an idiot,” His Lordship said, raising a goblet. “There’s no better offer for a million kilometers in any direction. What do you say?”
What choice did Thanos have? With a grim smile, he raised his goblet as well. “Proud to serve,” he said, and drank.
That was his last night in his shared quarters with Cha. The next day, he would be moved to a new chamber, closer to His Lordship.
“Do you think he’ll bother telling me his real name?” Thanos mused, lying on the bottom bunk.
From above, Cha responded. “That is his real name. Had it changed legally a while back. First name: His; last name: Lordship.”
Thanos groaned.
“When you think about it,” Cha commented, “it’s really not that bad.” He rolled onto his side and poked his head over the edge of the upper bunk. “Since you’re leaving in the morning and I won’t see you again—”
“You’ll see me. There’s nowhere to go.”
“—I wanted to ask you one question. May I?”
“You saved my life. You’re entitled.”
“Titan’s a nice place, I hear. Why would you leave?”
With a sigh, Thanos turned away from Cha. “It was not entirely my decision.”
“Not entirely?”
> “Not at all,” he admitted.
Cha whistled lowly. “What did you do? To get kicked off Titan?”
Thanos thought for a long time, but in the end, the simplest explanation was also the truest: “I tried to save the world.”
This did not faze Cha in the least. “Ah. I see.”
“Do you?”
“History is replete with tales of the emissaries of good sense and virtue who were disbelieved in their time, much to the woe of the unbelievers. You will find your just due, my friend. Good things come to those with patience. Flowers grow with time, not immediate gratification.”
With a grumble, Thanos spat out, “Spare me. This optimistic, mystical nonsense is an egregious flaw in an otherwise perfectly acceptable friend. Why do you bombard me with this claptrap?”
Cha did not answer for a long time, so Thanos rolled over to face out again. Cha’s face peeked out from above, his expression deadly serious.
“Because I believe you, more than perhaps anyone I’ve ever met, need it,” Cha said quietly. “When we came upon you, you were ten seconds away from death.”
“Coincidence.”
“I have been on this ship for thirteen years. Not once has His Lordship deigned to send a rescue crew to a ship adrift. He usually either has it blasted out of space or avoids it. But he saved you.”
“A mere glitch of compassion.”
“No, Thanos. Some whisper of goodness spoke to His Lordship and stayed his finger on the trigger. You came on a path to us when you were aimed elsewhere. Perhaps your exile was meant to put this all in motion.”
“There is no meaning to it,” Thanos said with finality. “The only plan is the plan we are forced to create.”
Cha retreated from the edge of the bed, and Thanos heard him settling into the cross-legged position for his evening orisons.
“The glorious thing, Thanos,” his voice floated down after a moment, “is this: I know in my heart that your presence here is for a reason. You disbelieve it with equal ferocity, clinging to your rationality and your logic. But no matter how fiercely you believe it, you can never prove me wrong.”
Thanos opened his mouth to speak but realized, to his dismay, that he had no rejoinder.
CHAPTER XVI
AND THAT NIGHT, HE DREAMED. THE DREAM OF HIS COMA. It came to him again.
He dreamed her. She came to him. She touched him. She told him what to do.
Remember when you wake, she told him. Remember what I have told you.
I will, he promised, but even in the dream, he knew that he had made this promise before and broken it. He feared that once more he would awaken and forget, that he would fail at so rudimentary a chore.
This time he did not. This time he awoke with her words still resonant, still alive. This time was different.
In the morning (what passed for morning aboard the Golden Berth, in any event), Thanos awoke and lay in his bunk, blinking up at the bunk above him. He heard, saw, and felt Cha move above him, vaulting down from his berth to land on the floor. Still, Thanos lay still.
Cha stretched, yawned, and turned on the water in the little rusty sink they shared. The rust had eaten a hole through, so they had an old helmet underneath, turned upside down, to catch the drainage. Cha performed his morning ablutions, then turned to address Thanos.
“You look awful,” Cha said. “Breathe deeply. Find your center.”
Thanos gave him a withering glare.
“What are you still doing here?” Cha asked. “I thought you’d be gone and in your new quarters before I even awoke.”
“I had a dream,” Thanos said slowly, reluctantly. “A recurring dream.”
“Such dreams illuminate the underlying structure of the serendipity of the universe,” Cha said with great seriousness.
“Stop it.”
“No, truly. When you have a dream more than once, that is the universe speaking to you. It’s a serious thing, Thanos.” Cha crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the sink, a perilous feat, given the sink’s lack of structural integrity. “Tell me about it.”
With a sigh and some effort, Thanos drew his knees up to his chest and rested his forehead against them. The dream… The damned dream…
He was a creature of reason and science, not of intuition and superstition. He knew that dreams were nothing more than the brain’s garbage disposal, a way for images, thoughts, and ideas that had gathered in the subconscious mind to be purged. They were nonsense and they were useless, and yet this one… This one seemed different.
“I first had it aboard my ship, when I was in my coma. I dreamed of… someone I once knew.”
“Who?”
Thanos ground his teeth. “A woman. Nothing more matters. In the dream, she’s dead, yet she speaks to me.”
Cha raised an eyebrow.
“She whispered to me. She told me something.”
Now Cha stood away from the sink, coming close, kneeling down by Thanos’s bunk. “What? What did she tell you?”
And Thanos lied: “She told me to save everyone.”
The lie was close enough to the truth. He yearned to return home, to see her again, to make things right.
But he was trapped. And no matter how much he plotted or planned, the collar and the rickety ship and the vacuum that waited outside to kill him stood implacably in his way. For the first time in his life, he could not think his way out of a problem.
“Save everyone,” Cha mused. “A noble goal.”
And an impossible one, Thanos did not add.
On the first day of his second new life, Thanos passed Demla and Bluko in the corridor on his way to the engine room. Demla offered a jaunty “G’mornin’!” and Bluko cackled madly. Thanos resisted the urge to pulp the shift-blot between his hands. Today, it had taken on the appearance of a throbbing globule of pus, with the mouth of a dog and the ears of a wombat.
“Engines at full,” Demla reported. “Off t’ break m’ fast!”
“Breakfast!” Bluko howled, and Thanos ground his teeth together.
In the engine room, he checked power levels, assessed the state of the fusion reactor, and commenced routine maintenance. All the equipment—every last bit of it, including the maintenance drones—was on its last legs. The entire propulsion system needed a complete overhaul, but there were no resources to perform such drastic upkeep. As best Thanos could tell, the ship’s engines had another five years in them. And that was under the most optimistic scenario.
He was beginning to think that Googa had lucked out.
Speaking of Googa—there was a wet stain still glimmering on the underside of the control board. Thanos wiped it off with a resigned sigh. He’d have preferred His Lordship not killed Googa, but since Googa was dead, there was no point being sentimental about it. Once someone was dead, what more could one do? His Lordship put it best—Googa had no longer been useful.
He had lied to Cha about his dream. Partly because he was still uncertain about what it meant, but mostly because he had no desire to hear Cha excavate his subconscious for any inane pseudo-significance.
And because far beyond saving everyone, right now he couldn’t even conceive of a way to save himself. He would die on this ship, perhaps today, perhaps five years hence, but either way, he would die here, without a way home, without a way to save the people of Titan.
And because…
And because to think of her, to see her… elicited a very special sort of pain, the sort that was almost indistinguishable from pleasure.
When Robbo came to the engine room to check on Thanos’s progress his first day, Thanos took the opportunity to attempt to gain some information about His Lordship’s homeworld and the trip there. He had little data to go on, and more data was always good. The more information in his possession, the better he could plan. Were there star charts to show the best route to Kilyan? Was there a map of the local jump gates? Most interstellar travel was performed through jump gates or naturally occurring wormholes. Faster-
than-light engines were expensive, fragile, and difficult to maintain. The Golden Berth’s sublight engines were far more common, though Googa had done poorly at keeping them healthy and running. He’d been chief engineer because his father had been before him, not because of any skill in the area. Thanos suspected—more like, hoped—that he could find a quicker way to Kilyan. The planet didn’t sound like much of an improvement over the ship, but it had the benefit of an atmosphere… and not blowing up.
At the mention of star charts, Robbo only chuckled ruefully and shook his head.
“There are charts, but they won’t help you.”
“Why not?”
Robbo looked around suspiciously. There were other minor functionaries in the engine room, but they were busy scuttling around, patching the ever-rupturing pipes and ductwork.
“Never mind. Forget I said anything.” The majordomo wiped a bead of sweat from his upper lip.
“I have a job to do,” Thanos pressed him. “I would prefer to do it well.”
“We got something here called ‘Need to Know,’” Robbo said. “And you don’t.”
Thanos furrowed his brow. Robbo knew something. More, he wanted tell Thanos. It was so obvious. People with secrets longed to reveal them—they only needed justification.
“I am the engineer now. I have to perform the tasks His Lordship wishes me to perform. If you know something that can help…” He trailed off, giving Robbo the opportunity to jump in and spill his guts.
Which is exactly what Robbo was dying to do.
“You’re in His Lordship’s inner circle now, so I suppose I can tell you…”
“Of course,” Thanos encouraged.
“There is no Kilyan.” Robbo said it with a combination of relief and sudden shock in himself.
It took Thanos a moment of confused blinking to process this statement. Even then, all his mighty intellect could produce only a whispered and stunned “What?”
“I mean,” Robbo said hurriedly, “there’s a planet, all right. We passed it about ten years ago. Whole surface was wiped out. Neutron bombs. Buildings still standing, but everything living was dead and gone. Place was so radioactive that if you so much as sneezed in its direction, you’d start losing hair.” Robbo patted his own balding pate somewhat nervously.
