The clone catastrophe, p.2
The Clone Catastrophe, page 2
“Relax,” Clave said. “They wouldn’t endanger the emperor. At least, not intentionally. And a bubble has never collapsed.”
“Almost never,” someone said in a voice that sounded like it was being spoken through an electric kazoo.
Nicholas spotted a dull yellow fish the size of a manatee, with the head of a frog and more rippling fins than he could easily count, putting its purple lips against the other side of the bubble.
“That makes me feel so much better,” he said.
The dozen Perlaki who were there to meet him insisted on honoring him with their traditional greeting dance of the five thousand fins and flippers. The walls of the bubble rippled and danced, too. Nicholas started hyperventilating in preparation for a frantic swim to the surface. This was a tragic mistake, given the current stench in the air.
Fortunately, nobody burst his bubble.
Once the seemingly endless greeting was over, the Perlaki who had already spoken to him introduced itself as Mibble von Algae and praised Nicholas for his lack of foot odor.
“Thank you, I think…” Nicholas said. “Why did you ask me here?”
“Our planet is drying up,” Mibble said. “Our orbit shifted.”
“So all you need is more water?” Nicholas asked.
“That’s all,” Mibble said.
“Or a return to the original orbit,” Nicholas said as he thought about some of the things that could go wrong when elements and compounds were shifted on a planet-wide basis. He forced his mind to shut out the images of entire planets on fire.
“That would work, too,” Mibble said.
Nicholas could easily see a dozen other ways to fix that problem. It was hardly rocket science. Though a really enormous rocket could possibly fix the problem. He suggested some more solutions. The Perlaki cheered. He crossed the flimsy floor again and returned to the shuttle—though not before hyperventilating through the seemingly endless Perlaki farewell dance of ten thousand fins, flippers, tails, and gills.
“Why did you even bring me here?” he asked Clave when they took their seats. “Anyone could have taken care of this. It definitely isn’t worth getting put at the top of the list. Or even the bottom.”
“I misunderstood their need,” Clave said. “It’s not easy dealing with all the requests we get. And, as you could see, they were not really deep thinkers. They didn’t do the greatest job of explaining their need in their request.”
As Clave babbled on far too long with excuses, Nicholas examined his face. Something in his voice didn’t sound right, but the Menmarian’s range of facial expressions, from pure rage to total joy, always showed so little emotion that it was hard to judge his sincerity. Nicholas was glad he’d never have to play poker against him.
ELSEWHERE IN SPACE AND SLIME
When Cloud Mansion Intergalactic, the massive spacecraft that served as his home and base of his operations, self-destructed—with a bit of help from Nicholas, Clave, and the Beradaxian singer, Spott—Morglob Sputum, the universally famous Phleghmhackian talent agent, was in his office, near the center of the complex, negotiating a contract with a pair of Cygnian flamenco dancers. Thus, he wasn’t ejected into the bleak vacuum of space at a high velocity. It was more of a gentle-but-insistent nudge. Four days later, he was still traveling at pretty much the same speed, since Isaac Newton nailed it when he observed that a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force, even if that body happens to resemble an enormous sneeze.
Morglob was basically coasting.
The Gristidian pirate ship he encountered was another matter. It was accelerating at full throttle, racing toward a rumored incapacitated freighter carrying a precious cargo of Swerdlian tongue swords. Morglob met this external force head on—or would have, if his anatomy had contained a discernable head—splorking into it with enough force to smear himself into a thin jelly across several square meters of the outer hull. The ship’s captain noticed a glitch in the instrument readout, indicating a minor collision. He ordered a crew member to suit up and examine the hull.
While the crew member was pushing herself into a spacesuit, Morglob was pulling himself back into a thicker form. When the crew member entered the airlock, Morglob was in the process of flowing toward the small hatch on the outside of that same airlock. When the outer hatch cycled open, he splashed inside, startling the crew member, who was in the process of attaching her safety line. She lost her footing and stumbled into space, untethered.
By the time someone thought to check on the drifting crew member, it was far too late to try to find her. Not that they would have made the effort, even if they’d seen her drift past the viewport, waving frantically and trailing her safety line like an umbilical cord. The pirate code of honor specifically forbids honorable acts. Or codes. This is just one of the many reasons why pirates tend to have very short careers.
When the remaining crew members eventually cycled the airlock and admitted Morglob, they formed a circle and stared down at the slimy, glistening creature. “Down” was quite far since the average Gristidian stood around seven feet tall, and nearly all of the crew were above average in that particular category. (The list of traits where they were below average would require far more pages than it merits.)
“What is it?” the first mate asked. He prodded Morglob with his foot.
“Jelly?” the second mate suggested.
“I like jelly,” another crew member said, extending a tentative finger halfway toward the red-tinged blob.
As they stood there, discussing the virtues of jelly, along with their perpetual tragic lack of toast, and daring each other to give the currently available jelly a taste, Morglob glorped across the room to an air duct. It wouldn’t work as well as his normal speaking tube, but it would have to do. He flowed around it and said, “Bring your captain here.”
The pirates stared at each other. The captain had just retreated to his cabin for a nap. They argued among themselves about whose turn it was to wake him.
“Now!” Morglob shouted.
Losing his home had made him cranky. The long drift through space afterward had not improved his mood. It had, however, given him ample time to contemplate various means of revenge against the monsters who had destroyed his home. They would pay. And they would suffer. He did not know, yet, of the events that had transpired after he was booted into space. He had no idea Nicholas the Betrayer, as he thought of that ungrateful biped, was now the emperor of the universe.
Morglob would learn this soon enough, since Nicholas seemed to be a favorite subject of newscasts, sfumbles, and reality series. That information would make his task far more simple, since an emperor would be a lot easier to find than a quisling little human. As would his companions, the treacherous Beradaxian, Spott, who had showed no appreciation for the steady job Morglob had given him, and the insufferable amateur sfumbler, Clam or Craig or whatever his name was, who also needed to be punished.
Morglob chuckled, producing a sound best described as a small wet fart made by someone sitting in a mud puddle, when he realized this recent event would make their eventual destruction all that much more enjoyable, since they would fall from great heights—figuratively, for sure, as well as literally, if it could be arranged. Morglob issued further glorbles of happiness as he pulled free of the register and awaited the captain, who, if all went according to Morglob’s rapidly forming plan, would soon lose his position of power, as well as something much more precious. The sound caused the pirates within earshot to glance nervously at the seat of their own pants.
“The betrayers will suffer,” Morglob said. “And then they will die.”
He was currently unaware that he was not the only one with plans of vengeance. He’d learn about this, too, soon enough.
OUTCLASSED
One month ago, on the day Nicholas returned to school after being crowned emperor of the universe, he’d seen, for the first time, the alluring Stella Galendrea, the much-younger cousin of his algebra teacher and a fairly perfect embodiment of his ideal girl. She looked like a seventh-grade version of the enthralling newscaster, Stella Astrallis, with hair only slightly less flowing, eyes only slightly less dazzling, and a nose only slightly less cute.
The newscaster had been designed by computer scientists and psychologists to appear to each person as their ideal partner. She was irresistible to anyone who wasn’t totally self-absorbed. Nicholas’s classmate, on the other hand, had been designed by nature and genetics. And yet they could have been drawn by the same hand. After all that he’d experienced during the adventures that led up to him becoming emperor, Nicholas was no longer troubled by coincidences. He just viewed the good ones as gifts, and the bad ones as cosmic mistakes.
As for the flesh-and-blood Stella, every time Nicholas had tried to start a conversation with her—which was pretty much every time they were within three feet of each other—he’d experience a curious physical phenomenon not unlike the law of conservation of energy or the balancing of an equation. When he opened his mouth to utter even a single-syllable greeting, his throat closed down proportionally. It was as if his tongue and larynx were wired together. He was fairly sure if he opened his mouth as wide as possible, his throat would shut down completely, and he would suffocate. Fortunately, he was also vaguely aware that a hugely gaping mouth was not his best look.
It was not surprising, given Nicholas’s limited communication skills, that nothing much changed on a daily basis. But two weeks ago, as Nicholas was heading out of algebra, Stella demonstrated that her own vocal components were not wired in the same debilitating manner.
“Hi,” she said.
Nicholas’s brain responded by briefly becoming as empty as the space between galaxies, after which it flooded with an abundance of clashing thoughts.
I’m the emperor of the universe, Nicholas told himself after he’d regained partial control of his brain, in an attempt to find enough courage to respond. That helped.
He bolstered himself a bit more.
I’ve traveled across the universe and cheated death.
That reinforcement of his self-image enabled him to gasp out a version of “hi” that, though lacking in a good portion of its initial consonant, did convey the required long vowel sound. Though, as far as length, it was on the short side of long.
“You’re kind of quiet,” Stella said.
Nicholas nodded. He really couldn’t argue with that. His brain gave him a clever response—I can only agree by making that statement untrue, which sounded like something Jeef would say. His mouth wisely refused to take part in this and remained closed. On the positive side, his throat continued to allow air to flow to his lungs, and from there to his brain.
Stella stared at him, as if expecting him to take a more active role in the conversation.
Say something! Nicholas gave himself an order, but failed to obey it. One tiny portion of his brain wandered off to contemplate the irony of the emperor disobeying his own command, but the remainder was still locked in semi-paralysis.
Stella issued the tiniest of sighs. “Well, I need to get—”
Before she could hit the last word of that sentence, her eyes widened slightly, and her gaze dropped to Nicholas’s chest. Or, more accurately, his shirt pocket.
He glanced down, too, knowing there could have been only one thing that would draw her attention to that exact spot. Henrietta was peering out. She’d placed her adorable paws on the edge of the pocket and lifted her adorable head high enough so her adorable pink ears were visible.
Don’t scream, Nicholas thought, as he continued his silent part of the conversation.
Happily his highly stereotyped fear that Stella would be terrified of mice, like most highly stereotypical fears, was unfounded. Her expression of surprise flowed into a smile of delight that was, itself, delightful.
“How cute,” she said.
Nicholas was vaguely aware that students were flowing past the two of them, leaving algebra behind and moving into the hallway toward the next precisely metered segment of their education.
Stella extended her hand toward Henrietta. “May I?”
Henrietta and Nicholas both nodded.
Stella skritched Henrietta gently on the head with one pink-painted nail. “How cute. What’s her name?”
“Henrietta,” Nicholas said.
“That’s a pretty name. Why is she here?”
“She likes algebra,” Nicholas said. He wasn’t sure where that answer had come from. Though Henrietta had never given him any reason to believe that she disliked that branch of math, or any other. So it wasn’t really a lie.
Stella smiled, and then laughed. “That’s funny. But I can’t blame her. Algebra is great.”
Nicholas wasn’t sure whether to respond to that with a laugh of his own. But Stella didn’t seem to be joking. And they’d actually had an exchange of words that resembled a normal conversation.
After giving Henrietta a second skritch and a parting pat, Stella headed off. If the ball was now in his court, Nicholas had no idea how to proceed. He wasn’t even sure what sport they were metaphorically playing.
“I wish I had an older brother,” he whispered to Henrietta. “I could use some advice.”
“You have the universe at your fingertips,” she said.
“Yeah. But a Rigelean or a Panaxpolivan isn’t going to have a clue about how an Earth boy asks an Earth girl out for a date.” He paused to marvel at how many alien races he knew about. It definitely wasn’t a small world, after all.
“Good point,” Henrietta said. “You could ask Clave. He’s fairly humanoid. And older.”
“His people like to eat their own children,” Nicholas said. “I suspect there might also be other differences, large and small, between Menmarians and humans.”
“Another good point,” Henrietta said. “With Clave, it always seems the best strategy for advice is to ask someone else.”
Nicholas stared up at the ceiling. “Jeef, any advice?”
Be yourself, Jeef said.
“Any useful advice?” Nicholas asked.
Probably not.
Nicholas decided further discussion wouldn’t help.
“Things will work out,” Henrietta said.
Nicholas hoped she was right.
That evening, as he was getting ready to teleport to The Nick of Space, there was a knock on his door.
He checked the time on his phone. Clave would be waiting for his I’m ready message. “I’m busy,” he said.
“What are you doing in your room?” his mom asked through the door.
Nicholas felt a wave of warmth flow across his face, and a ripple of guilt grab his stomach. “Nothing.”
“You go there every night at exactly the same time,” his dad said. “And you’ve been acting really strange ever since we got back from Australia. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Open the door,” his mother said.
“I’m not really here,” he said as he started to type a message for Clave. “This is a trick.”
“Very funny,” his dad said. “Open the door right now.”
Nicholas put his phone in his pants pocket and crossed the room toward a door he really didn’t want to open.
YOUNGEST EMPEROR
It would not be unreasonable to wonder whether Nicholas was the youngest emperor of all time. But “reason” is the construction of sentient beings, and the universe doesn’t care what they want or need. It is reasonable only by accident. As for younger emperors, there were many, including Grabinch Memumet of Sligbar XII, who was inaugurated at birth, and fled the position as soon as they were old enough to understand that their duties would interfere with their nap time. While inauguration at the age of zero might seem the youngest, many believe the record was held by Smehn Verd Cophre, whose egg was named emperor two weeks before it hatched, due to a series of miscommunications among the Syndics.
But the average age, either the mean or the median, would be far higher than Nicholas’s tender span of a dozen years, given that some emperors have lived for hundreds of years, and at least one, Cyril the Overstayer, just made it past the age of one thousand before he was assassinated by his great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Debnik the Impatient. To her dismay, she was not chosen by the Syndics to fill the vacancy.
Historians have found no correlation between the age of an emperor and outcome of his reign, unless they were hoping to find one before they started looking. In which case, that’s exactly what they found. History is not immune to biases.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT
“Roach brains,” Nicholas muttered, tossing out his favorite expression of dismay quietly enough so it wouldn’t be overheard. He opened his door six inches and faced his mom and dad, who both wore that worried expression parents have when they’re afraid they’re going to have to give their kid a serious lecture about the dangers of some sort of bad or reckless behavior.
While Nicholas’s behavior had been unusual, deceptive, and secretive (not counting his recent outburst), it could not in any way be labeled as bad. It could get wildly dangerous, but that was part of the fun, and not something he’d feel guilty about sneaking off-planet to do or concealing from parental units.
Until this moment, he’d felt fairly secure about his chances of avoiding detection, since his parents generally spent their evenings engrossed in movies from the 1970s, or rehearsing new songs for their act. They seemed oblivious to the fact that they attracted an audience so young that the kids would happily listen to the same song over and over for the entire length of a concert. They almost never showed any interest in whatever happened to their son in his room when the door was closed. Or even when it was open. And he’d resisted the urge to fill his room with some of the amazing alien technology he’d encountered across the universe, like a Thinkerator, a news portal, or a dual-handled tusk buffer. (While he had no tusks in need of buffing, the device sounded like an authentic light saber when set to ULTRA SPEED BUFF, and was a lot of fun to slash around as its seventeen high-speed motors tried to gyroscopically wrestle themselves free of his grip.)
