LOOKING BACK THROUGH THE FIREBALL
Copyright Tom Leonard
Edinburgh June 2022
4.THE ISLE OF MAINAU
That evening, Pippa and Slim, looking remarkably spruce and smelling of roses, attended a convivial St. Crispus Eve reception in the hotel drawing room, hosted by the Living Incarnate Sir Aristides Sunkist and his delectable Apollo Alpha fifth wife. The crystal glass chandeliers descended from the lofty ceiling like Orchanusian sex-predators in wait.
Although Dreyfus wasn't invited, he gatecrashed the proceedings, limping slightly after a brief visit to the blacksmith, in the hope of drinking with Pippa.
Zoe left her fiancée hobnobbing on the podium to talk to her buddies, but Pippa was button-holed by a minor official. So Slim and Zoe made their excuses, and retreated, quietly, to the terrace.
Dreyfus crept closer to the podium and hid behind a huge Talking Cyclops, in time to overhear a piece of dialogue that seemed to be of vital importance:
“...and my dear brother King Mark is waiting in Constanţa for the Homo Erectus troops to arrive from around the Land of Qet,” Prince Alfred was saying. “After taking care of the home guard, they'll join forces with the Royal Pelimodes and march on Trivoli, uniting the factions of Apollo revolutionaries as they go. My darling mother will follow with the uranium-powered battle-tanks. She'll blow 'em away.”
“You're doomed to failure,” retorted Sir Aristides Sunkist. “My colleagues will never countenance such an outrageous adventure. You're from an inferior sub-species, the whole damned lot of you!”
“But you promised us your support,” protested the prince, “at the Summer Solstice Weinfest in Garmisch.”
Sir Aristides grimaced. “You stupid fool! I said that totally in jest. Moreover, the Nineveh Boys on Tiberius Ptolemy still blame you for your mass slaughter of their aristocrats during the Zintian wars. You cut off the counts’ ears and put them in a sack! Several eminent Apollo Penguin economists at the Galton-Booth School of Business would like to see you dead, and Stag Kissinger is out for your guts.”
“Now I see your pretty game,” growled the prince. “We will nevertheless proceed at pace, and the Emperor and his sycophantic acolytes will bite the dust.”
Slim and Zoe got on remarkably well on the terrace, and hid behind a Periboea tree for a cuddle.
The Goddess Asherah was surveying the reception on her Mainau-app, from the holy space station Castellos, where she and her long-estranged husband Yahweh lived in different macro-capsules (each the size of a small planet and connected to the enormous, central Creative Evolution Unit by long, concentric corridors). Asherah wondered about the potential import should the delightful couple on the terrace have sex together. The goddess smiled serenely, perched her admirer Mercury on her massive knee, and invited him to drink a wee dram with her.
Dreyfus was taking a bite out of a delectable hors d'oevres when Lady Jemima Sunkist crept up, like a witch in fine clothing, and whispered, “My father deigns to invite you for fun and group frolics in the Bridal Suite.”
Dreyfus flapped his wings in consternation. “What!” he exclaimed, feeling more than a bit itchy.
Asherah and Mercury thought about the implications of that. They wondered whether to interfere via the Aphrodite waves, but decided to let nature take its course.
At that moment in time, there was a concordance of consciousness across the planet. Three wizened old creatures in Ur 573 stirred in their beds, and visited the loo.
“Unto us a Child is given!” wailed the one with the false teeth.
“Looks as if we're going to have to head west again,” slurped the incontinent dribbler, “searching for some stupid heavenly star.”
The morning after the capers of the night before, the senior Janians and repressed youngsters set off from the Hotel of the Purple Habsburgs, and headed, on foot, for the Ape-Swan's Nest, with Sleeping Sparrow and his ever attentive partner in tow. They were followed by Prince Alfred's glazy-eyed, purple-haired toy-boy, who looked if he’d been put through the wringer the night before.
When the party reached the Dealey knoll, a guard of twelve pectishes emerged from a raddle-copter, sawn-off shot guns at the ready. Pectishes sport lower arms with large fists, which they can clench like a vice, and the claws in their feet can take off a head in a blink.
The woodland trail merged into a wider, dung-ridden track. A cylindrical truck roared along it, towards the dense thicket. The visitors and frosty pectishes followed on foot, while having to jump into the nettles, whenever another truck zoomed by. When they emerged, in a fine state, from the other side of the thicket, the trucks were unloading their wares, onto a ledge overhanging a redstone crater.
Pippa peered nervously over the edge, and was awestruck by the bubbling, bluey-green waters of Lake Spectrum, over eight hundred feet below. In the middle of the lake stood a towering, white castle keep. Pippa loved the flowering mango trees on its roof.
Prince Alfred, trying his best to sound endearing, explained to Slim that they'd need to go down on the heavy traction elevator that was riveted to the rock-face. Slim told the prince to take a running jump.
Pippa didn't dare to look sideways when the jam-packed cage went into slow descent. After what seemed an eternity, the exit gate crashed open, and Pippa saw a team of pectishes herding a flock of yellow, woolly sheep, onto an ancient royal barge.
The Janians and their friends piled onto the barge amidst the sheep. The lake was teeming with ape-swans, and broods of tiny ape-cygnets playing in the reeds.
“Beware the Tower of Infamous Iniquity, where Hitler's eagles are afraid to fly!” cried an elderly ape-swan, with emeralds for teeth.
“Beware the alt-right-fascists, the misogynistic Taliboo, and the festering race scientists too!”
“The Taliboo cut my tiny sister’s wings to shreds,” shrieked a fluffy-feathered ape-cygnet, “and they’ll do worse to you.”
The portcullis was raised just as the barge reached the water-gate. Dreyfus raised his eyebrows in surprise. There on the crustaceous, stone steps stood the delightful wife of the Living Incarnate, looking most replete.
"Lovely to see you in daylight, darlings,” the Apollo Alpha contentedly declared. “My husband is waiting for you in the chapel with a bottle of vintage Colston Cream.”
After an apéritif in the Chapel of St. Vincula, deep inside the White Tower of Mainau, the teens from Nod were given a bottle of coke-bloat, and told to vamoose to the Qinview room.
The senior Janians and two Heptagons pursued their confabulations around the oval table in front of the altar. To his misfortune, Prince Alfred failed to notice Jemima spiking his drink with Eyedrops. Aristides Sunkist nodded, barely perceptibly, in approval, scratching his wrinkled skin.
“In the name of the First Living Incarnate of the divine Janus, the much revered Prince Felixos von Attenburg!” announced Sir Aristides, rapping the table with his long brass Onassis pipe.
“All praise to Janus and the White Christ!” declared Ket Martingale, rubbing his glistening red neck.
“There are two items on the agenda today,” announced Sir Aristides. “Let’s kick the ball off with our peace or war negotiations with the Heptagon scum...”
Dirk Eradacus’s sideburns bristled like a hedge-fund Talking Porcupine. “I’d prefer,” he interrupted, “to firstly consider how harshly to put down the violent revolution by the homo erectus and their gang of obnoxious rebels in the East.”
“I object!” burbled Prince Alfred, glazy-eyed. “The homo erectus simply seek confirmation of their ancestral rights to control the eastern trade routes. The greedy, macro-microaggressive Icarians grabbed them off us in 2321, and they've been milking our resources ever since.”
Sir Aristides Sunkist straightened his UCLA Alumni tie. “Tough on you, you pompous, traitorous dork,” he roared. “The golden master race rules, and all inferior, grovelling hominids will bow to our wishes.”
“Our Pelimode and Sigmoid allies will put you trumped up colonialists in the shade,” raged the prince. “We'll trample all over you, once and for all. We'll run you out of every archipelago on the planet!”
Sir Aristides bared his silver-plated teeth. “Your own attempts at colonialism are an unmitigated disaster, you blithering fool. But enough of your irresponsible jackernapery! I call upon Ket to address the important issue of the day.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” enjoined Ket Martingale, himself a high bred Icarian. “Those stuck up Erecti should seek solace with the Howling Dingos.”
“Get on with it!”
“Natürlich, mein Doppelführer. The profits in the Heptagon’s highly disreputable casinos are excessive, and in breach of the fair trade laws. Our much fairer roulette wheels have only two zeros, and glean a long-run profit of only a nineteenth of all money bet. It is essential to avoid discrimination against our hard-working fair-traders. The Heptagon should clean up their act!”
Sleeping Sparrow flexed his shiny, bronze muscles. "Our nation faces far deeper problems. We're getting starved like convicts in our tiny reservations, we're freezing to death in North Artica owing to the high price of fuel, our children are receiving scant remedial education, and no free milk or lunch.”
“So what?” retorted Martingale. “The Heptagon are ruining our resources and wasting our space. You're all over the place!”
The Heptagon chieftain lost his cool at that. “It's the land of our bronze forefathers, you've genocided fifty million of us already, and yet you still sterilize our mothers following the births of their first children. Two of your officials even came into my wigwam last month wanting to neuter me with a sharp pair of snipper-snappers! This isn't equitable either!”
Tredgold gritted his teeth. “This raises the question as to whether we should throw all the surviving Heptagon, the entire caboodle of them, into our glacier camps in South Artica. The Pelimodes would be only too glad to ply our bronze inferiors with lentils and rice, while they dig deep for the hubric, and expend themselves according to an actuarially efficient death rate.”
Sleeping Sparrow blew a gasket, and flopped forwards onto the table in dismay.
Eradacus chuckled, and wagged his finger at Dr. Tredgold. “Now now, Sarg! You've been sounding off like the seven-headed goat of Persepolis 88.”
“Genocide them!” reacted Tredgold. “Grind their children to dust!”
Eradacus tried to look as wise as George W. Bush. “Maybe some sort of make-shift compromise with the Heptagon would be preferable.”
“Spoken like a true, pox-ridden gibbon!" howled Prince Alfred.
“The homo erectus will never kowtow to indigenous low-life. Strafe the Heptagon with scyon gas, that 's what I say!”
“Debating with you is like playing squash with a dish of scrambled eggs,” raged Eradacus.
“Your blue matter's as scrambled as a two-faced baboon's,” blustered Prince Alfred.
Lady Jemima frowned. “You look a touch drowsy, dear. Why don't you go and relax on the davenport in the Goering Room?”
“No chance. I'm only just getting started.”
The meeting was about to fall apart in disarray, when the ape-swan assistant hurried in from the turret suite. “You should come to the turret quickly, Your Grace,” she articulated. “There's trouble in Constanţa.”
“I'll be right there,” responded Sir Aristides, with a distinctly audible wheeze, and so he was.
When Sir Aristides returned to the meeting in the Chapel, he ensconced his hefty backside on his beautifully embroidered armchair, and smiled. The prince's Cnupian slave peered at him from under the table, and wondered what devious nonsense was afoot.
“What was all that about?” burbled Prince Alfred, stirring himself from his slumbers.
“A mere detail,” answered Sir Aristides, with an imperceptible wink. “A small technicality that needed to be sorted out in Constanţa.”
“I'm surprised you're " involved,” blustered the ponderous prince. “My brother Mark is in control there, and as far to the west as the eye can see.”
Aristides chuckled, and performed the Sign of the Skewed Cross. “God's fucked him rotten, and now the old goat will screw you to the rafters!"
That was when the Eyedrops really set in. The prince keeled over sideways and fell to the floor, into a loudly snoring coma. His purple-haired slave smirked and went to fetch a couple of pectishes. They took the prince to the Goering Chamber, and kicked him onto the bed.
The teenagers were watching Big Boom Theory in the Qinview Room, and laughing their heads off at Shellfish getting into yet another twist, when the screen went blank. When the image of an agitated Talking Sea-Lion emerged into view. Dreyfus was gobsmacked at hearing something dead serious.
“Breathtaking news, Breathtaking News!” screeched the sea-lion. “Rebel forces have stormed the Regional Parliament building in Constanţa. Here are the renegade King Mark of the Homo Erectus and the obesely overweight Dowager Queen Maggie waving to the crowds from the balcony of Wellington Palace’
“Troops from the Royal Pelimodes are protecting the forecourt, and putting scores of loyal citizens to the sword’.
“Crown Prince Hoglet of the Homo Erectus is leading an attack on the Qinview Broadcasting Station by the harbour. His élite Apollo Snake bodyguard is meeting scant resistance from the Green Berets, most of whom have been dispersed along the beach. Over to our political analyst, Guth Gungepipe."
“Revolt!” shrieked Dreyfus. “Take the Capitol Building, and let the people decide. Revolt!”
“This is a dire situation indeed,” continued Gungepipe, “If the Homo Erectus take the military base at Cluj, then the entire eastern battle-fleet will be at their disposal, together with eighty uranium-powered battle-tanks. To be frank, the omens do not look good. The regional government has completely lost control. Furthermore, several battalions of the Imperial Pectish Pink Berets have just deserted to the Homo Erectus.”
“This is getting mighty confusing,” objected Zoe. “The pectish are on both sides at once.”
“...The Homo Erectus are in a strong position in political terms. They regard the Land of Qet as encompassing the entire eastern peninsula, and they may well decide to secede from our beloved empire, but they could try to advance upon Trivoli and seize the entire empire for themselves, God forbid it.”
Pippa and Slim rushed into the chapel.
“The Homo Erectus are taking power,” bleated Pippa. “They could destroy all civilisation on this planet for good.”
Sir Aristides chuckled like a geeky narcissus. “Don't worry, kiddies. Everything's under control. I'm the arch-manipulator on this planet!”
Sir Aristides tried to distract his guests from the situation in Constanţa by taking them to the ninth floor to see the Huxley Collection; the exhibits included hundreds of grisly humanoid remains from the Kaiser-Wilhelm Anthropological Institute in Berlin 7.
However, Dreyfus opted out. He stayed slouched on a beanbag, only to be distracted, at some point in time, by the sound of the blaring of trumpets.
“Breathtaking Breaking News!” screeched the Qinview presenter.
“The homo erectus rebels have stormed our transmission station in Constanţa, God curse them, but we're still receiving sufficient footage. Here's their trumped up king in the Rose Garden, greeting his new subjects. And this must be Crown Prince Hoglet, returning to take the credit for his troops' shameful victory on the beach…...’
“…...but why are those those Pink Beret pectish acting up? They’re deserters from their turncoat Imperial Pectish battalion! What the hell are they doing with those flamethrowers?…...Yeeeeeeeeeeeeesh!”
To Dreyfus's consternation, the 'double turncoat' Pink Beret deserters scorched the homo erectus royal family to excruciatingly painful deaths. Prince Hoglet's eyes burst out of their sockets, as he fried in the cinders, and Dowager Queen Maggie evaporated in a cloud of steam.
Horribly ghastly scenes ensued as the crowds ran towards the harbour to escape the devastating heat. Scores of Pelimodes leapt, burning, over the harbour wall, only to drown, gurgling in the stinking mud. Dozens of homo erectus lay sizzling on the lawn, as the eye-jabbing albatross circled expectantly overhead. A crowd of schoolchildren were caught in the flames, and perished in agony.
It was more than Dreyfus could take. He collapsed in a heap, crying his eyes out.
When they visited the horrendous Huxley Collection, Slim inquired which of the evil Huxleys it was named after.
“Aldous, of course,” replied Sir Aristides, “He was no liberal. He wanted to create his uniquely repressive, brave, new world.”
Sir Aristides took his guests to watch a film about the Musso-fascist genocide on Planet Felix Five, before inviting them up to the ornate roof garden for meagre refreshments. Slim felt hemmed in by the suffocating foliage, and by the sandstone cliffs that towered above him on all sides. What a stupid place to hide, he thought.
Pippa saw Sir Aristides and the ape-swan conversing in sign language.
A few minutes later, Dirk and Ket wandered up.
“Sir Aristides says that the events in Constanţa have been taken care of,” said Dirk, with a fickle grin.
“And now we're ready to take you and Slim down our very own Centre for Rassen-Hygiene on floor minus eleven,” said Ket. “It’s just above the canal from Machonik, where we bring our living specimens in.”
“We'll show you what our research into scientific racism [the study of any empirical evidence that might be used to attempt to falsely justify racism] is about,” said Dirk. “We're funded by the Rockerwell Joyous Life Foundation.”
Ket gave Slim a barely noticeable, Cuomo-esque squeeze. “It's all part of our master plan for your careers, you see. You'll be helping us there during your vacations when you attend university.”
When Pippa and Slim saw the humanoid suffering in that despicable establishment, they shed tears of despair.
Meanwhile, Prince Alfred Saxe-Hanover, a direct descendent of King Ethelbert the Boneless and the seventh Christ, lay in a chemically-induced coma on the davenport in the windowless Goering Chamber, dreaming about seven well-hung hominids and an ill-fated princess with huge golden calves.
"How could you be so horrible!" howled Bra Quantum, the leader of the Qinxhunters, rushing into the prince's dreadful dream.
"It's my birthright," protested a voice. "Some are born to rule. Others to grovel."
"Take this!" howled Bra, throwing the Spear of Destiny at the prince's greasy navel.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg!" howled the voice. "You send me to eternity from my fantastical fantasy."
The prince found himself lying, muggle-headed, on the couch, and, before he could find his bearings, a stroppy pectish with a flame-thrower loomed out of the gloom, flexing the claws in its feet.
"Are you part of my dream?" asked the prince, reaching for his high-powered Earp-pistol.
“Not that one,” chuckled the pectish, pulling his trigger, and the scorching flame burnt a hole through space. When the dust settled, Alfred's faithful slave came in with the hoover. Alfred's burnt guts were all that was left.
That's all four of those dumb Erectus royals disposed of, reflected the crafty Living Incarnate of the Janians. I owe my success to the fickle pectishes, and the way I manipulated and bribed them from afar. The revolution will fail.
Following the 2712 Massacre of Constanţa, all adult homo erectus on Qinsatorix were put to the sword, their cities, towns and villages razed to the ground. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
