She was caressing a dying Technotops, trying to comfort it as it made its way to the Land of Scrap. (I had hurt this one by tying a vine to a large bolder and pushing it off a cliff, so it swung in a lethal arc in the direction of the stupid beast.) “Hey, tootse.” I said, lighting another joint. She looked up, disgust registering briefly on her face before she could dissolve her reaction to my bark in the universal solvent of tepid politeness. It was too late—I already hated her.
“Hello! My name’s Eva. What’s yours?”
This woman could only have been the product of an evangelical genetics lab. She spoke in perfect, charming Provisian, millennia before the language had developed. Her body told me unpleasant stories of sexually repressed fundamentalist lab jockeys trying to do the Gods’ work through her design. Her large green eyes whispered of ignorance as a virtue.
“My what?” I asked.
“Your name, silly.” She said sweetly.
“Guess that’s up to you.”
“You’re the first one besides me and Aaron who could talk.” Apparently this place didn’t get a lot of tourists.
“That’s no accident.” I told her. “I was the first draft of Aaron.”
She paused. “First…draft?”
“Nothing is ever right the first time you do it, honey.” I said. “My bark is worse than my bite.” I chuckled. “What are you waiting for? Commence naming.” Sometimes you have to serve up your own heepshit to survive in a world of heepshitters.
“Gramiphonius told me that he first made the other creatures, then Aaron, then me.”
“How do you explain me, then?”
“I…”
“I’m still waiting for a name. Let’s get cracking.”
“And…I shall call thee Proto-Aaron, since thou were the first unsuccessful attempt to make Aaron.” She intoned seriously.
“Excellent. Thank you.” Eva went back to caressing the Technotops.
“You shouldn’t do that. It’s best to put them out of their misery quickly.” I reached behind the creature’s skull, found the pressure panel, and ejected the memory card. It was dead in an instant. A single tear rolled down her cheek. My hatred for her was mounting. It was time to make more bad things happen.
“So where is it?” I asked.
“Where is what?”
“The fruit, obviously.” By some Satanic miracle I had remembered the missing part of the creation myth. It was something about a fruit they weren’t supposed to eat. Perhaps this would get things in motion.
4
Eva handed me a white apple. I hefted it, weighing it in my hand. It wasn’t an apple so much as a three-dimensional symbol of an apple. Its skin was smooth and white, almost metallic, and a suggestion of a stem levitated magnetically above its base. A representation; a logo made into forbidden fruit.
“This looks pretty tasty.”
“We can’t eat it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because Gramiphonius told us not to. Also, the seeds contain important data that Gramiphonius needs to have access to in order to finish Creation.”
“Look, I’m not saying you have to give any of it to me. But you should really hook Aaron up with this apple.”
“That’s against the orders of my God, the esteemed Gramiphonius.”
“Right, you said that. But you have a duty to your husband. Do you even know any other men besides Aaron?”
“Well, no…”
“Take it from me then, sweetheart. Aaron’s testing you. If you want to be a good wife you have to take care of him regardless of what Gramiphonius says. Otherwise he’ll find someone else who will.”
(This was obviously a highly flawed argument, in light of the fact that Eva was the only woman in Previsia. Also, even if he left the time zone somehow, he’d be hard-pressed to find another woman who could compare with her. She had the looks of a pin-up model and was wonderfully stupid.)
My logic seemed sound to Eva, and I waited as she took the apple to Aaron, a more or less conventional lab-grown pretty boy. He examined it, touching the floating stem, and finally bit into it. That was when I heard a booming voice in the distance.
“EVA!” A mighty voice thundered. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”
“Done? Gramiphonius, my Lord, I have not done anything.”
“YOU AND AARON HAVE EATEN OF THE TREE OF USEFUL DATA! I DIDN’T HAVE ANY OF THAT INFORMATION BACKED UP!”
I heard weeping, and something mighty stalking off into the distance.
“UNBELIEVABLE--I MIGHT AS WELL START THE WHOLE THING FROM SCRATCH NOW. I MUST OPEN THE MOUTHS OF THE EARTH AND TRY AGAIN.”
There was a sound like subterranean thunder as Gramiphonius opened the mouths of the earth for a righteous flood. I found myself clinging desperately to an uprooted tree as the waters rose higher and higher. I fought my way up until I was sitting in one of the hollows of the trunk.
“Proto-Aaron!” Eva gasped. “Help me! Hel…” She coughed and spluttered, clawing desperately at the branches of my raft.
“The name’s Forrest.” I said. “Forrest, like the idyllic one you used to have before I came. You shouldn’t have upset me. You don’t judge a book by its cover.” I kicked her into the bottomless depths. “You judge it by the footnotes.” I pulled out my pager. Now it was time to request extraction.
5
The room they put me in after extracting me from Previsia was windowless and grim. They had given me a towel, but unfortunately the only change of clothes they had on hand was an academic uniform that had been left by some morbidly obese bourgeois university student. The robe hung off me in preposterous folds, like the skin of an erudite elephant.
The door opened. I was filled with dread, but it wasn’t really a problem because Dread is a personal friend of mine, a badass parachuting instructor with long hair that he ornaments with tiny shrunken skulls. When I’m filled with Dread, I always have a conversation with him.
“Hey, Dread.”
“How you be doin’, mon? How’s every’ting?”
“Not so good. I just tricked this chick into re-enacting an ancient transgression that supposedly doomed humanity thousands of years ago, and Gramiphonius got so pissed off about it that he flooded an entire amusement park.”
“Dat be of no consequence. The world is vast, mon. Times are strange. We all be squares if not some be deranged.”
But that was all in my mind. It was really Doug from accounting who opened the door. “See here, young man!” I said. I tried to spring to my feet, but I was clumsy, stumbling in a sea of ornate linen . “I am a very important person! This flooding was part of a highly classified mission for the Royal Command Black Ops unit. I would be well justified in killing you just because you know what I just told you. Return my clothes at once and get out of my way.”
“It’s OK, Mr. Cromwell.” The accountant said. “It’s OK that you flooded Previsia. Our insurance covers it, and now we’ll be able to rebuild it independently without intervention from any religious groups.”
“Oh.” I said. I was unsure how to react, because usually my lies are not so quickly dismantled. This Doug was clearly an estimable fellow.
“You’re free to go with no liability or threat of legal action, on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“That you never write about this or speak of it to anyone.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Doug,” I said, “You can trust me 100%.”
I walked out of Previsia with my clothes in a dripping bag. They smelled terrible. I took them to get them cleaned and then went to go pick up some more typewriter ribbons. The Previsia story was due in an hour, and I had a deadline to meet.
“KILL THE UMPIDER”
1
The Provisian World Series is an opportunity for Provisians everywhere to celebrate our national pastime. The series provides an escape from one’s problems—in my case, having destroyed a creationist theme park last month while consuming embarrassing amounts of
drugs. Word was that the Church of Provisian Saints was still distributing wanted posters with my very own barky likeness on them all through the realm. It was a good time to get out of town and cover a story, especially since the Series is always a chance for me to get out of debt by fixing the outcome of the game and writing obnoxious articles about it.
Money was tight and times were tough. A loan shark was after me and it was time to skip town and do what I do best—wreak havoc for fun and profit. Infiltrating the Championship planetoid is half the fun of the game for me. Last year, for instance, I hired a friend of mine to disguise me as one of the stage crew orcs responsible for maintaining the cameras and equipment. A former major in cosmetic sciences, she had attached a prosthesis to my body to make me look like a big ugly motherfucker of the orcish variety. Of course, I didn’t speak orcish, so I had to feign muteness using the universal ‘I’m mute’ sign.
This year I had done a bit better—I had actually managed to get my hands on a press pass. I rented a small space craft from a desperate POGO scientist and charted a course for the Championship Planetoid. This year, the Epic Questball League had cut some sort of deal with Elephantine Waste Disposal Solutions, and the entire atmosphere of the planetoid was toxic. The game was to be waged in a labyrinthine system of caves, tunnels, and caverns, populated with a ‘third force’ of decidedly unpleasant subterranean creatures.
The space ride was going to take a while, so I tried to formulate the best strategy I could for fixing the game. It was a rare opportunity this year, because the two teams were so preposterously poorly matched. The Archland Angels are truly abysmal, having won only one Championship in the entire 164-year history of the sport. I hadn’t been tuned in much this season, but I gathered that they had only made it this far because of an embarrassingly easy schedule and some absurd flukes that allowed them to dispatch their more competent opponents. In one game, they had stumbled upon the grail after 17 minutes on the clock. They shrugged, made their way back to the transporter, and beat the Briarstone Bandits in the shortest match in the history of the game. There were no casualties and no fatalities, which is completely unheard of in Epic Questball.
It was also said that they defeated the Omni Bay Oligarchs when one of them accidentally cast an enchantment. To give you a sense of the improbability of what happened, imagine that you were goofing off with your friends and singing a nonsense song in another language. Suddenly, you found to your surprise that you had conjured up a fleet of demons from another dimension that dedicated their entire transitory existence to doing your work for you. And that was the playoffs.
And so, it seemed that the Archland Angels were star-crossed and fated to win the Championship, and I had still gotten excellent odds because they were still, on paper, one of the most brainwarpingly bad teams in the long life of the league. I wasn’t taking any chances though, and that was why I had to start thinking about how to make sure they beat their opponents, The Trash Junction Tyrants.
There were, of course, the obvious methods. Given the toxic atmosphere of the planetoid, I could probably mess with the directional signs in the caverns and trick them into going to the surface and being poisoned. I could also sabotage their weapons in the dead of night. There were options.
My craft pulled into the receiving port. The airlock closed and there was a five-minute wait as a roaring air filter cleaned the vile smog. Even so, the place stank; it smelled like garbage on holiday in a septic tank. The port was not at all what I expected—I seemed to be the only spectator, press or otherwise. The only other ships were junk and waste barges here to dump their load on the surface and get the fuck back to Provisia. The ceiling was so high I couldn’t see it, though harsh fluorescent lights must have been hanging from somewhere. An eight-foot-tall orc checked my press pass with something like incredulity on his asymmetrical features. He muttered something in guttural orcish, adjusted his loincloth, and waved me on. That should have been my first sign that something wasn’t right here. What kind of major sporting event is conducted without an audience?
2
The press box was more a state of mind than an actual location. I had to sign a few draconian agreements and then I was free to wander the planetoid at will, as long as I didn’t try to influence the outcome of the game. Rules were made to be broken, and draconian agreements were made to be signed without being read.
I took a press tram to the Tyrants’ base or ‘dugout’ as it is called in Epic Questball parlance. I could look for sabotage options while ostensibly seeking interviews.
I hadn’t seen such a crew of tough bastards since I met the ’86 Pillagers when I was a kid. I grew up in Oily Peaks, and so most of the guys I ran with were Pillagers fans. This kid I knew had an uncle or something who owned like 1% of the team.
The Tyrants were tough. One of them kept biting off his fingers with his filed teeth and then regenerating them through sheer will-magic. Another was patiently sharpening the spikes on his morning star. Their fashion sense reflected the fact that Trash Junction is Provisia’s biggest dump, but no one in their right mind would tell them that. Scrap metal gauntlets still hurt if you get smacked in the mouth.
“Ready for tomorrow?” I asked.
I had been prepared for icy stares or murderous confidence, but what they actually said surprised me.
“No. The game’s fixed. We’ll be lucky to get out of this with our lives.”
“Fixed? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Isn’t it obvious? The Archland Angels are here because someone with pull wants them to be here. I’ve heard of luck, but no one’s that lucky.”
If what he was saying was true, I was in great shape. The game was already rigged. Another Tyrant spoke up, dashing my hopes.
“Maybe whoever fixed the other games just wanted the Angels to reach the Championship but not actually win.” He suggested. He was polishing a sword that looked like it had been made from a salvaged chainsaw. “The big boys do long-term gambling. Probably someone put big money on a bet that the Angels would make it to the Championship and then get massacred. Improbable enough to get excellent odds, and no need to interfere on the big day.”
I felt my stomach sink into my testicles. What this guy was saying made perfect sense. I was in deep shit.
3
I walked out of the dugout in despair. I had a one-way ticket to an early grave or debtor’s prison. I was starting to get the Fear. It was impossible to cancel my bet at this stage. I had missed the last tram back to the media center. Now I had even more problems—I had to find my way back to my lodging without being devoured by a decidedly unpleasant subterranean creature. It had finally happened; the tottering tower of desolation I had spent my life building was preparing to come crashing down on my head.
I pulled out my machete and started walking back in what I thought was the right direction. In my mind, every sound I heard was a hive of arterial tunnel weevils; every shadow was a hungry cannibal mole.
I nearly bumped into one of the Umpiders. “Easy there, fella.” He said, as he sidled a safe distance away from me on six legs and adjusting his facemask with two more. Eight compound eyes glowed beyond the grid of his safety mask. Ordinarily I welcome anyone whose comparative ugliness assuages my insecurity about my bark. But there’s something about the hairy body of an Umpider stuffed into an armored ref uniform that makes me shudder. It doesn’t help that a race bred as impartial referees are the natural enemies of those trying to fix sporting events. I tried to play it cool.
“Sorry about that.”
“You miss the last tram? Want me to call someone to pick you up?”
“Yes.” I said, “That’d be great. Thanks.”
The Umpider started off towards a call-box. I felt a wave of relief, which quickly subsided when I realized that I had only solved the problem of immediate death. I had to act quickly. I snuck up behind the Umpider, who was fiddling with the call box. I got him in a half-nelson, my machete poised just above his heart.
“I really do need a ride.” I said. “But I also need the grail. Where is it?”
“I can’t tell you that.” He said levelly. A race that has been bred for fairness needs a lot of persuasion before they’ll help you cheat. I was about to say something threatening when I felt a harsh splatter against the back of my neck. The next thing I knew, I was being pulled backwards onto the ground and wrapped tight in a sack of webbing.
“Nice timing, Casey. I think that crazy bastard was going to kill me. That definitely would have damaged our ability to fairly judge the outcome of the Championship.”
“No sweat. Don’t you know who this guy is?” I looked up desperately at the two Umpiders, wishing I had known that they could target their webs and yank you down like that. “This crazy crankshaft is Forrest G. Cromwell, the demented Outlaw-Journalist who works for Roaming Tome.”
“No shit! Who let him in? He’s on the watch list. He’s rigged a bunch of times before.”
“Well, not this year.” I felt something heavy crash against my forehead.
4
I was in the courtroom the next morning, with a public defender and an enormous bump on my head, like a filch parasite waiting to be born. The swelling was so bad my bark was warping. I know every knob and knot on the rough tapestry of my body, and this new welt was the biggest and worst. They made me trade in my shorts and loud shirt for a prison uniform, complete with ancle chains. The whole thing felt excessive.
When I told you earlier that Outlaw-Journalists are the ugliest of the ugly, I lied. The ugliest class of people in Provisia has got to be Ignoble-Judges. After the disastrous schism back in ’72, the losing faction of the gentry was cast out from power. They were stripped of their nobility and instead became “Ignobles.” This disgrace was not sufficient punishment; in the interest of preventing future conflicts among the ruling aristocracy, the Ignobles were punished with a mandated surgical procedure known as ‘intentional disfigurement.’
Fables of Failure Page 3
