The Very Best of Tad Williams (32 page)

“Libogran stood a long time, thinking uffishly, then lastly said, ‘Let me make sure I have apprehended you carefully, worm. You state that you are a Magic Wishing Dragon, that it was her greed for this quality of yours which cost the unfortunate princess her life, and that I should tell you my three wishes and then leave, preferably to a distant land, so that you may grant them to me in the most efficacious manner.’

“‘Your astutity is matched only by the stately turn of your greave and the general handfulness of your fizzick, good sir knight,’ your Great-Grandpap eagerly responsed, seeing that perhaps he might escape puncturing at the hands of this remorseless rider after all. ‘Just bename those wishes and I will make them factive, both pre- and post-haste.’

“Sir Libogran slowly shook his massive and broadly head. ‘Do you take me for a fool, creature?”

“‘Not a fool creature as sort,’ replinked your Grandpap’s Daddy, trying to maintain a chirrupful tone. ‘After all, you and your elk might be a lesser species than us
Draco Pulcher
, but still, as I would be the first to argue, a vally-hooed part of Clawed the Flyest’s great creation...’

“‘Come here, dragon, and let me show you my wish.’” Your Great-Grandpap hesitated. ‘Come there?’ he asked. ‘Whyso?’

“‘Because I cannot explain as well as I can demonstrate, sirrah,’ quoth the bulky and clanksome human.

“So your forebear slithered out from the cavernous depths, anxious to end his night out by sending this knight out. He was also hoping that, though disappointed of his foreplanned feast, he might at least locate some princessly bits fallen off in the cave, which could be served chippingly on toast. But momentarily after your Great-Grandpap emerged into the lightsome day, the cruel Sir Libogran snatched your ancestor’s throat in a gauntleted ham and cut off that poor, innosensitive dragon’s head with his vicious blade.

“Snick! No snack.” This treacherness done, the knight gathered up the princess’ tree-tattered torso and emancive pate, then went galumphing back toward the castle of her mourning, soon-to-mourn-more Mammy and Daddums.”

“But how can that be, Mam?” shrimped wee Alexandrax. “He killed Great-Grandpap? Then how did Grandpap, Pap, and Yours Contumely come to be?”

“Fie, fie, shut that o-shaped fishmouth, my breamish boy. Did I say aught about killing? He did not kill your Great-Grandpap, he cut off his head. Do you not dismember that your great-grandcestor was dragon of the two-headed vermiety?

“As it happened, one of his heads had been feeling poorly, and he had kept it tucked severely under one wing all that day and aftermoon so it could recupertate. Thus, Libogran the Undeflectable was not aware of the existence of this auxiliary knob, which he would doubtless of otherwise liberated from its neckbones along with the other. As it was, the sickened head soon recovered and was good as new. (With time the severed one also grew back, although it was ever after small and prone to foolish smiles and the uttering of platitudinous speech—phrases like, ‘I’m sure everything will work off in the end’ and ‘It is honorous just to be nominated,’ and suchlike.)

“In times ahead—a phrase which was sorely painful to your Great-Great-Pap during his invalidated re-knobbing—your G-G would go back to his old, happy ways, horrorizing harrowers and slurping shepherds but never again letting himself even veer toward rooftopping virgins or in fact anything that bore the remotest rumor of the poisonous perfume of princessity. He became a pillar of his community, married your Great-Grandmammy in a famously fabulous ceremony—just catering the event purged three surrounding counties of their peasantly population—and lived a long and harpy life.”

“But Mam, Mam, what about that stark and wormy Sir Libogran, that...dragocidal maniac? Did he really live hoppishly ever after as well, unhaunted by his bloodful crime?”

“In those days, there was no justice for our kind except what we made ourselves, my serpentine son. No court or king would ever have victed him.”

“So he died unpunwiched?”

“Not exactly. One day your Great-Grandpap was on his way back from courting your Grandest-Greatmam-to-be, and happened to realize by the banners on its battlements that he was passing over Libogran’s castle, so he stooped to the rooftop and squatted on the chimbley pot, warming his hindermost for a moment (a fire was burning in the hearth down below and it was most pleasantly blazeful) before voiding himself down the chimbley hole into the great fireplace.”

“He couped the flue!”

“He did, my boy, he did. The whole of Libogran’s household came staggering out into the cold night waving and weeping and coughing out the stinking smoke as your Grand’s Grandpap flew chortling away into the night, unseen. Libogran’s castle had to be emptied and aired for weeks during the most freezingly worstful weather of the year, and on this account the knight spent the rest of his life at war with the castle pigeons, on whom he blamed your Great-Grandpap’s secret chimbley-discharge—he thought the birds had united for a concerted, guanotated attempt on his life. Thus, stalking a dove across the roof with his bird-net and boarspear a few years later, Sir Libogran slipped and fell to his death in the castle garden, spiking himself on his own great sticker and dangling thereby for several days, mistaked by his kin and servants as a new scarecrow.”

“Halloo and hooray, Mam! Was he the last of the dragon-hunters, then? Was him skewerting on his own sharpitude the reason we no longer fear them?”

“No, dearest honey-sonny, we no longer fear them because
they
no longer see
us.
During the hunders of yearses since your Greatest Grandpap’s day, a plague called Civilization came over them, a diseaseful misery that blinded them to half the creatures of the world and dumbfounded their memories of much that is true and ancient. Let me tell you a dreadsome secret.” She leaned close to whisper in his tender earhole. “Even when we snatch a plump merchant or a lean yet flavorful spinster from their midst these days, the humans never know that one of us dragons has doomfully done for the disappeared. They blame it instead on a monster they fear even more.”

“What is that, Mam?” Alexandrax whimpspered. “It fears me to hear, but I want to know. What do they think slaughters them? An odious ogre? A man-munching manticore?”

“Some even more frightfulling creature. No dragon has ever seen it, but they call it...Statistics.”

“Clawed Hitself save us from such a horridly horror!” squeeped the small one in fright.

“It is only a man-fancy, like all the rest of their nonned sense,” murmed his Mam. “Empty as the armor of a cracked and slurped knight—so fear it not. Now, my tale is coiled, so sleepish for you, my tender-winged bundle.”

“I will,” he said, curling up like a sleepy hoop, most yawnful. “I s’pose no knights is good nights, huh, Mam?”

“Examply, my brooded boy. Fear not clanking men nor else. Sleep. All is safe and I am watching all over you.”

And indeed, as she gazed yellow-eyed and loving on her eggling, the cave soon grew fulfilled with the thumberous rundle of wormsnore.

W
hat’s that, you say? You want to hear how I first met Omnitron, my robot servant, the admirable, clanking Crichton who has saved my bacon more often than a pig-herder with a Tommy gun? Very well, but I warn you—it is not a pretty tale.

Like many grim things, it begins with an aunt. You all know what it is to have an aunt, I think. It is much like having a fish, and a cold one at that, if said fish had control of your finances and conceived you to be a complete waste of human tissue. And if there was anyone who was an authority on the subject of human tissue, it was my Aunt Jabbatha, owing to her having lost most of hers.

As usual, when she deigned to see me at all, I found Aunt Jabbatha floating in her transparent vat in the day parlor, while all manner of supporting devices hissed and gurgled. The gimlet eyes of aunts are not made softer when couched in a disembodied head floating in a very, very large jar, with only a kelplike swirl of spinal cord and branching ganglia washing softly back and forth to keep them company. Downright eerie, some might call it, but we Boosters are made of stern stuff.

“Werner Von Secondstage Booster,” she proclaimed by way of a greeting, “you are a waste of human tissue.”

“Of course, Aunt Jabbatha. I think we established that fact in our earlier interviews. Every single one of them.”

“Don’t talk dribble to me, boy. We have a family emergency. You are being pressed into service.”

There is only one word more frightening to a Booster than those dreadful two syllables, “service,” but in deference to those of tender feelings, I will not disclose that word at present. “But I don’t want to be of service to anybody, Auntie.”

“And you’ve made a splendid start, because you are completely useless.” Her head floated up to the front of the glass and bumped against it like a withered olive in an extremely unappetizing martini. “But that’s about to change. Your cousin, Budgerigar Scallop, is eloping with a young woman of very dubious parentage from some backwater outer rim planet. Her biology militates against her inclusion in this family.
You
will put a stop to it.”

“But Aunt Jabbatha,” I said, hoping desperately to stall long enough for something on the order of a medium-large meteor strike to cripple civilization yet again and distract her, “how could I possibly do that? Budgie never listens to me. Besides, I’ve been invited to a rather jolly costume ball at the Suborbital Drones Club...”

“Hang your costume ball. And hang your cowardly piffle, Wernie, you worm. This is your chance to redeem the dreadful failure that has been your life so far.” She floated higher in the tank so that she was looking down on me, rather like a child’s balloon with the face of a gargoyle. “The shuttle for the HMSS
Chinless
is leaving tonight from Luton Spaceport. Your cousin and his...inamorata will be on board. So will you, because we have booked you a place. You will bring young Scallop back untethered, or you will throw yourself into the nearest star. Actually, no, if you fail, you must still come back and receive your punishment in person.” She frowned. “I may have other plans for you, even if you manage to botch this, as you have botched almost every other small favor I’ve asked you to do.”

Her confidence in me was so inspiring I thought I might as well leave on this high note, and so rose to my feet. But it was not to be!

“You will be accompanied on this voyage by my butler,” she said. “At least then there will be some chance of everyone surviving your involvement. Omnitron, come in.”

What stepped from the shadows then was something like a man, but more like an espresso machine. It had the futuristic gleam that one associates with the hood ornaments of very fast hover cars, and an air of confidence not usually seen in the lower classes, especially the artificial ones.

“Omnitron,” Aunt Jabbatha said, “this is my famously worthless nephew, Werner.”

“Sir.” It tilted its shiny chin ever so slightly toward its shiny chest.

“You will make sure he gets on the shuttle and then onto the
Chinless,
Omnitron. If he does not fulfill his duties as I have detailed, you have my permission to twist off his ear. Ears are worth little. They can be grown on a saltine cracker these days.”

The robot bowed with a whir of well-oiled gears. “As you wish, Madame.” Then he lifted me up and tucked me under his arm as easily as a padded matron might hoist a small dog dressed in an embarrassing sweater, and carried me out of Aunt Jabbatha’s parlor.

“Try to get things right for once,” she called after me. “Don’t be a weed, boy!”

I wasn’t sure what a weed was—something that used to grow on the planetary surface, I suspect, before the Big Oh Dear—and so my flashing riposte was delayed until after the lift door had closed behind us.

“See here, Omnitron,” I said as I surveyed my cabin. “This will never do. Old Budgie has a stateroom the size of Berkshire, but I seem to have been stowed in one of the laundry room dryers.”

“I admit the room is not large, sir,” said Omnitron, “but it was the best that could be done with a last minute booking—the ship was quite full. All that was available was Third Class.”

The purser, who seemed to have taken against me since my first cry of “Yo ho ho! Where’s my bottle of rum?” as I walked up the gangway, surveyed me with cool disdain. Considering that he had those glowing red cybernetic eyes so many people are wearing these days, it was most unappealing. “Does sir have an objection to the accommodations?” he asked.

“Oh, of course not,” I replied, rapier-like. “Who could jolly well object to a stateroom the size of a face flannel? And where am I supposed to sleep?”

The purser again fixed me with his smoldering gaze. He was a small, thin man, the kind who look as though they only enjoy themselves at funerals. “Ah, but sir misunderstands. There
is
a bed. It folds down, thus.” He fiddled with something on the wall and let down what I swear was a child’s toy ironing board. It had a teeny tiny blanket, and a pillow that had probably been stolen from a gerbil. “I’m afraid those who wait until the last moment to book passage cannot blame the staff for the lack of choice, sir.”

“No,” I said under my breath, “but I can blame the staff for being unpleasant, abominable, red-eyed swine.”

The purser, who had been about to leave, turned and squinted his glowing cyber eyes at me, which gave rather the impression that a couple of maraschino cherries had leaped out of a Manhattan glass and rolled into a deep ditch. “Beg pardon, sir?”

“My master merely asked for some of that pleasant Andromedan red and white wine,” Omnitron cut in—quite deftly, I thought, for something that looked like a washing machine hammered into the shape of William Gladstone. This Omnitron fellow was nothing to sneeze at. “Mr. Booster likes to drink both sorts at the same time. Thank you for your help.”

“Hmmmph,” said the purser, and went about his business.

“Thank you, Omnitron,” I said. “Considering that you are a robot, you are still a vastly superior human being to that fellow. Did you see him sizing me up? You’d think I had snuck on board in a fishing net.”

“Quite, sir. A bad sort, no doubt. But now I think you had better put on your dress coat and make your way up to the Lido Deck. Your cousin and his friend will be there.”

“No time for a little room service, or a swift nap? That shuttle flight took it out of me, Omnitron. I had the vacuum-hose to my mouth the whole time. Dashed bumpy.”

“I’m afraid not, sir. But I understand your aunt has provided you with the wherewithal for a couple of free drinks.”

“Say no more—it’s Booster into the breach. Lido on, MacDuff.”

The scene on deck was quite cosmopolitan, with not only all manner of Earth quality present, but the wealthy and well-fed from many other colonies and alien cultures as well. In the midst of all those unfamiliar green and blue and occasionally downright startling faces, it took me no small time to locate Cousin Budgie, but at last I spotted his generous silhouette. Budgie is a well-fed sort himself, and his cummerbund bulged like a mainsail in a stiff breeze.

“Hullo, Booster,” he said as I walked cautiously across the antigravity dance floor. “What brings you out here? Didn’t think this was your sort of picnic. Because it costs money and all.”

I scowled as pleasantly as I could at this unneeded reminder of my current financial inconveniences, namely my continued debt-slavery to Aunt Jabbatha and the collection agents of several well-known Fleet Street touts. “Cheers, Budgie, old sprat!” I replied. “And who is this lovely young lady...?”

I almost didn’t finish the sentence, because in point of fact his companion was indeed rather lovely—no, rather stunning, to be brutally precise. Black hair, raven’s wing, that sort of thing, and a face like a Tanagra figurine, except less terracotta-ish, if you grasp what I mean. Clear, limpid eyes (Why do people say that anyway? Weren’t those a kind of shellfish once?) and a figure that, beneath her modest netwear, would have made a tea-sipping vicar choke on his profiterole.

“This?” asked Budgie. “This lovely creature is my fiancée, Krellita Thoractia Du Palp, from the planet Cunabulum. I suppose you ought to call her Krelly, like I do.” He turned to the wondrous female creature next to him. “Say hello to Wernie, Krelly, darling. He’s a bit of a worn old sock, but he’s good for some laughs.”

She greeted me demurely. Budgie went off to find more drinks.

“And how did you meet my cousin, hey?” I asked her. “House party? The Hunstman’s Ball?”

“His private cruiser crashed in the jungles of my home planet.” I could hear the tiniest trace of an accent.
Ha,
I thought.
That proves she’s a gold-digger. She’s foreign!
“I nursed him back to health,” Krellita explained, “and we became fond of each other. He is everything I ever wanted in a man. He is ideal.”

I watched Budgie coming back, doing a sort of clumsy samba to avoid spilling the three Scorpio Slings he was carrying. It was hard to think of my pale, pudgy cousin as a man, let alone an ideal, but I supposed that on whatever backwater world Miss Du Palp came from, the pickings might be a bit on the slender side.

“Yes,” I said, deciding to get to work. “And he’s coped so brilliantly with his illness.”

“Illness?”

“Oh, nothing serious. In most cases it has run its course and the victim is dead long before he reaches the homicidal insanity stage.”

She gave me a startled look, but before I could elaborate (and believe me, I was prepared to elaborate—I’d spent the entire shuttle trip up to the
Chinless
thinking up things to tell her to frighten her off) Budgie reached us.

“Oof!” he said. “What a crush! Some bounder elbowed me right in the brisket, Wernie. Can you imagine that?” He turned to his fiancée. “What do you say to a little whirl around the floor, my dove? They’re just starting up with the Neptunian Tango and the gravity’s turned way down low, the way you like it.”

“No, thank you, darling,” Krelly said, “though it
does
sound terribly romantic. You dance, if you’d like. I’ll watch.”

He shrugged and made his way off again in search of suitably bipedal partners, which were a bit thin on the deck tonight.

“Brave, brave lad,” I said, shaking my head in admiration. “He’s always put such a courageous face on things. Acts just like everyone else!”

“Are you certain he has this...illness?” Krellita asked. “Because, well... we have plans.” She brushed prettily. “We’re going to have a family.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that,” I said. “I’m quite certain good old Budgie will be an excellent papa, until he gets to the screaming stage.”

“Screaming stage?”

“Oh, you know, when the pain of the disease becomes so great that the sufferer begins to screech continuously and tear off their own limbs and skin. Same disease took Budgie’s uncle, poor old fellow. They found the old man’s bloody fingertips and nails all over the National Library, but nothing else of him. Sad. Their first edition of
Burke’s Peerage
was unusable afterward—they could never get the stains out.”

“Oh, my!” she said, those lovely clear eyes wide. “Why didn’t Budgie tell me this?”

“Oh, I’m sure he wanted to spare you the worry,” I said. “Most sufferers shoot themselves long before most of the other things happen, so it seldom gets to that point. He was just looking out for your happiness.”

Krellita Du Palp’s eyes now narrowed, precisely like those of any young tootsie on the make who has just discovered that her golden goose is really a sitting duck. (Or something like that. To be honest, I’ve never really got the hang of metaphors.)

I looked up to see Budgie dancing with a long drink of champagne from the Proxima colonies. His partner was nearly eight feet tall, so he was having trouble not treading on her feet. The trotters in question were about the size of my stateroom bed—small for a bed, but perhaps a touch overlarge for a young lady.

“Poor man,” I said, sipping my drink and reaching behind Krellita to the buffet table, having orbed a sumptuous, steaming ham that was almost begging to become part of Greater Boosterdom. “So brave, our Budgie, when he must already be losing control over his neuromusculature.”