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Chapter 1: The End

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Like a seed borne on a stray wind, the ship drifted through the great night of space. The view-screen was thick with stars, and the three occupants of the craft huddled around it for warmth, and drank hot lemonade.

“Which one is Cartonia Red 3, then? I wonder what it’s like there. I bet it’s lovely!” squeaked King Cigarillo.

“You can’t mean you’ve never been there?” asked Jennifer the Complete. “You’re in the same solar system, after all – you’re practically neighbours.”

“Until recently, my subjects and I have but rarely felt the need for company,” answered the King sniffily. “We had always followed the sage advice of our Ancient Mother Goddess, who bade us Never Talk to Strangers. And perhaps we would have done better to heed her words, given recent events.”

There was a pause, during which all three companions conveniently pondered the tumultuous proceedings of the previous few days. When Milon the Assassin and Jennifer the Complete had arrived as guests of honour at the unparalleled debauch held on long-sequestered Cartonia Orange to celebrate the wedding of Prince Cigarillo to the Queen of Knives, they had little suspected that events would take such an inexplicable turn. Who could have foreseen that Milon would seduce the King and, branded a Jack Diddler before the assembled representatives of the QGA, elope with his deep-pocketed lover into the still deeper void of interplanetary space? As he recalled those times of innocent joy and devious pleasure, Milon’s heart beat more quickly behind his knee.

Or that Jennifer the Complete would inadvertently cause the utter destruction of her home world, the already barren and unlovely Forty-Four, by an unusual silver entity whom she had, through an unfortunate cultural misunderstanding, mortally offended? Forty-Four’s tourist industry would take years to recover, thought Jennifer ruefully.

That Jennifer would eventually team up with FlightofFancy, suspected QGA spy, meta-psychotic and both hireling and unrequited lover of Queen Knives, in a desperate attempt to ensnare the absconding lovers, was an eventuality beyond the most feral imagination. But even the far-sighted Complete One had not questioned their decision to abandon FlightofFancy, drooling and braying like some demented man-donkey, on the inexplicably turfed moon C07–D. For now history had swept FlightofFancy aside, to chew a bitter cud of his own making.

And had the King imagined that he would fall foul to the machinations of his own silicate spouse by falling in love with Milon and thereby not only forfeiting his share of an enviable wedding list, but also giving Queen Knives the perfect opportunity wage an expansionist war on the Cartonian solar system, why he would have thrown back his silly little head and laughed loud and long!

Nor did any of our three happy wanderers entertain the least suspicion that their sudden and freakish reconciliation might have been the work of Dr Bloom, who on the distant and improbable planet of Fragrancia was even now, overwhelmed by his own waves of good-will, allowing his infant child to toy with the controls of his prototype Hypnotic Peace Ray, that which been sending out its beams of Universal Love into every nook and cranny of the universe, dissolving all conflict and war into a sticky puddle of affection.

Having thus considered the intricacies of their situation, Jennifer weighed her response to Cigarillo’s barb. She drew herself up close to Cigarillo’s Kingly visage and blew a long, wet raspberry in his face. There was an awkward silence. Milon tried to ease the tension by blowing bubbles through his straw.

“Hey gang!” he cried at last, throwing his arms around both of them somewhat self-consciously. “Hey-ho me-hearties! What about the frolicking and singing? What about joy and laughter, and rolling on the grass? Aren’t we forgetting a little something called Love?”

“Yes of course!” they both chorused, and all did a little dance around the cockpit. When they finally collapsed, giggling like imbeciles, the King patted his pockets for something to wipe the saliva from his face. “Always manage to leave the house without a handkerchief slave,” he muttered. But after a momentary puzzlement, he thought nothing more of the matter.

The seconds passed. “I’m bored,” moaned Milon. “What’s there to do on this bloody boring bloody spaceship anyway?”

“Virtually every form of entertainment, past-time and dissipation known on Cartonia Orange 7 is available from our on-board computer via TR,” boasted the King.

“TR?” asked Jennifer with her eyebrows.

Milon rolled his eyes. “Total Reality, my little pigeon-brain,” he drawled. “It’s like the other Realities, only more real.”

“What reality are we in at the moment?” asked Jennifer. “I’m always forgetting.”

Milon paused, then counted on his fingers for a moment. “Well we were in Sort-of-Reality on Tuesday,” he mused, “So it must be Carpet-Reality. But that can’t be right.”

He was interrupted by a short series of sound-effects as the King passed his hands apparently at random over a bank of unlabelled flashing blue and orange control buttons. On a nearby viewscreen data began to scroll past their eyes at high speed. The King casually surveyed the list of amusements.

“Has it got an Android Disco?” asked Jennifer.

“Yes.”

“What about a Nose Exchange?” queried Milon.

“Why naturally.”

“A Prancing Parlour?”

“Indeed it has.”

“I bet it hasn’t got an Anti-gravity Milk Bar,” suggested Jennifer. The King wrinkled his pretty little forehead in exasperation.

“Look,” he said. “I just told you it had everything. Every form of distraction or amusement known on Orange Seven, the most decadent planet in the known galaxy, legal or otherwise, is available from Q-004’s computer banks.”

“Does it have vole-baiting?” asked Jennifer.

The King started as if struck. He turned to stare at her across the blinking, twinkling cockpit. A silence grew between them, a thick, almost palpable and noiseless enmity that stretched back into the distant past, encompassing ancient feuds and tribal wars, grudges unforgiven and vendettas passed cold and fresh from generation to generation down the ages. Long-fossilised racial memories were awakening and they thrived in the fetid quiet.

“Vole-baiting?” breathed King Cigarillo at long last. “So. It’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me,” replied Jennifer, and her eyes blazed with a new light. “And it’s you. And here we are.”

As if from another world, Milon’s voice piped in: “Hey hey! Remember what we said? Happy dancey? Remember the Love?”

But neither combatant would avert their grim gaze.

“Screw the Love,” growled the King, in a voice like stone.

“Wow man, that’s pretty harsh,” Milon tried to say, his voice breaking with emotion. But his words seemed to shrink, stranded by the flowing tide of silence.

At that moment there was a tremendous explosion behind them. The ship shook, and all three passengers yelped in pain as they were thrown against a rack of sharp levers and buttons. It seemed to have broken the spell. “It’s an asteroid hit!” shouted Jennifer above the blare of the alarms. The cockpit flickered in and out of darkness. Smoke begin to plume from sparking circuitry.

Cigarillo pushed them towards a hitherto unnoticed hatch. “Quick!” he yelled. “We must get to the escape pods!”

“What about the ship?” Jennifer shouted back at him as they jogged down a darkened tunnel that rang loudly beneath their feet.

“What about the Prancing Parlour?” rejoined Milon. “I didn’t even get to have a go…”

“There’s no time!” cried the King, urging them on. Beyond steaming vents they could barely make out an airlock at the far end of the tunnel. With a strength that belied his delicate frame, the King rapidly disengaged the locking mechanism and pushed the bewildered pair through the gap. Once the door was secured, Milon and Jennifer watched as their host located a small control panel in the wall. He pushed a single button, and all three were suddenly pinned to the floor. Jennifer felt her stomach sink. Milon did not.

The escape-pod was surprisingly roomy and comfortable if the décor wasn’t as fashionable as Milon might have wished. As the thruster rockets slowed, the party regained their feet. The King trained a viewscreen on the rapidly disintegrating hull of the Q-004. As they watched, the ship’s immense fuel reserves exploded, and spinning fragments of burning spaceship were hurled in all directions.

“Arse,” said King Cigarillo.

Milon crossed his arms sulkily. “Well, this stupid escape-pod had better have a Prancing Parlour too, or else I’m going to hate you forever,” he whined.

“Don’t be like that baby,” said the King, but Milon shook him off and stuck out his bottom lip.

“Leave me alone!” cried the petulant assassin, and crawled behind a chair at the far end of the room, where he could be heard quietly sobbing to himself.

But Jennifer said nothing. For even she watched, the blackened cockpit of their erstwhile craft had loomed suddenly large in the viewscreen, and lodged firmly in its shell was an object utterly unlike an asteroid…

* * *

It was far from the most pleasant journey Jennifer had ever undertaken. That would probably have been the first time she sat astride the mandibles of her adoptive insect mother as they scoured the wastelands of her native Forty-Four in search of nutritious moulds. But what with Milon’s tantrums and King Cigarillo’s great stupidity, and only a handful of old board-games for amusement with complicated rules and pieces missing, space travel was beginning to tell on Jennifer’s patience, Hypnotic Peace Ray or no Hypnotic Peace Ray.

The days passed. Driven by its weak engine, the pod ambled towards Red Three. Harmony on the Q-004 escape-pod waxed and waned, as if mastered by some capricious god. Group hugs and tickling alternated with quarrelling and tears in rapid succession. Milon and Jennifer’s QGA mission lay dormant, if not quite forgotten. It was only after countless days of tedium, during one of many games of Spoggle, that the King suddenly asked, “Why are we going to Cartonia Red Three?”

Milon and Jennifer exchanged a quick glance.

“It’s just that I’ve completely forgotten what I’m doing, and why,” he continued.

“You’re running away from your problems,” said Jennifer, thinking quickly. “It’s all the rage.”

“And it’s your Spog,” rejoined Milon. “Or else forfeit another toe.”

King Cigarillo prepared to make his next move, and had he not been interrupted by a tremendous explosion, he may well have won that game of Spoggle. Only the Fates may know that secret, though many have tempted madness and sought the answer in arcane lore. As it was, the game pieces slid from the board, and all contestants were thrown across the pod. “Oh! Ow!” they cried, as they fell on the pointed metallic spogglets and jagged dobble discs.

“Damn! The viewscreen’s shorted out! Is it another meteor?” wondered Milon, gaining his feet at last.

“It must be!” lied Jennifer.

“I’m never playing that stupid game again!” cursed the King as he nursed his smarting backside.

For a brief, hopeful moment, stability returned to the craft, but fire alarms continued to sound, and clouds of white smoke began to billow out of the floor vents.

“Maybe it was just a glancing blow,” suggested Milon. “I think we had a lucky escape!”

“No! More will come! We can’t stay here!” cried Jennifer, and in her eyes Milon was surprised to see something like fear.

The King seemed unshaken. “Well, I don’t see the problem.” he retorted. “And anyway, how do you know that no more will come?”

“What?” snapped Jennifer in irritation.

“Well you just said that no more will come!”

“No I didn’t!”

“I just heard you saying it in your stupid whiney voice! Milon! She did, didn’t she?”

There was another, smaller impact, and they struggled to stay upright.

“I think,” said Milon, “that she may have meant the first word to stand alone, as an exclamation.”

“Oh so you’re taking her side now are you?” shouted the King, his face reddening. “I trusted you! Now I see where your real loyalties lie!” And a tear began to roll down his ash-streaked face. Jennifer thought she saw a shadow of guilt on Milon’s plastic features, and it incensed her.

“Why are you doing this?” she screamed at the weeping King. “Why are you trying to turn him against me? I hate you! And I didn’t want to tell you this, but…your stupid planet smells of wee.”

Milon turned away and hid his face. The King began to make some agonised wordless sobbing sound.

He was interrupted by another explosion. The floor lurched away from their feet, and for an endless instant they floated up towards the ceiling, surrounded by a bright constellation of Spoggle counters. The lights went out. There was screaming, followed by pitiful snuffling. One by one, the alarms, drained of power, died away, to be replaced by the low hissing of automatic fire extinguishers, to be replaced after a while by silence.