Foul Ball

  In fact, they made the transporter, which Cormack was surprised to see miraculously intact, in good time and Proton was, once again, feeling positive.

  ‘Back on course, Bernard,’ he said to the Sibyl, who had decided once and for all to make a break with his past and abandon the Shamanic Throat in the hope that it had returned to the Luminous Pool. ‘How is the Negus?’

  ‘I think he’s feeling a little worse for wear,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Cormack, are you OK?’

  ‘Can you take off the handcuffs?’ said Cormack. ‘They’re very tight.’

  ‘Cormack, it’s for your own good. You’ve been a naughty boy and you’ve caused me a lot of trouble.’ Proton pointed to the tear in his bodysuit where the chair leg had been thrust. ‘These things don’t repair, Cormack,’ he said and then he turned to Meson and told him to put Cormack in the ship where he could be interrogated further.

  ***

  Chapter Sixty Five

  They carefully prised off one ceiling tile and peered below.

  It was dark in the room, save for a purple neon glow that came from all around the bottom of the donut. They could make out the silver form of the Opikarp, about three feet long, in the bend nearest the door, resting on the pebbles at the bottom of the tank, knifed against the flow being generated by the pumps.

  ‘Good, he’s sleeping,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Now I’m going to tie the rope round your feet and you’ll jump into the tank.’

  ‘Into the tank?’ said Douglas. ‘Why do I have to go into the tank?’

  ‘See the red handle,’ said Geoffrey, pointing to the part of the tank furthest from where the Opikarp lay.

  Douglas could see a round red tap on the floor of the Perspex tube, blurred with the flurry from the artificial current.

  ‘That is the outlet valve. That is what you need to open. But the moment you hit the water, he’ll know that you are there. You’ll have to work fast.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to get wet, Geoffrey.’

  ‘Turn it clockwise and the water will drain from the tank.’

  ‘I’m not dressed for it.’

  ‘Do it fast and I will raise you straight back up and we will be done.’

  ‘I thought we were going to shoot him.’

  ‘He’s a bloody fish. You don’t shoot fish, do you? That would be ridiculous. Very difficult too.’

  ‘Is there no security? Won’t the guards come running?’

  ‘He is unprotected – disavowed by the Senate. Consider it a state-sanctioned execution.’

  Geoffrey uncoiled the rope he had brought with him and Douglas reluctantly allowed him to tie it round his legs.

  He was wearing chinos and a white polo-necked shirt, which he imagined made him look like a cat burglar. It had been that or the paisley v-neck and the denims. The new impetus of the Resistance under Geoffrey’s aggressive leadership had taken him by surprise and he hadn’t had time to update his wardrobe for guerrilla tactics. In fact, he hadn’t had time to update his sensibilities for them either, the thing had been ladled on so thick. Geoffrey had become emboldened by the success of Mrs. Bellingham’s detonation, assuming it as a personal triumph, and was anxious for more.

  He tied one end of the rope to a grating on the air conditioning above, looped the rest through his arms, and, making sure it had enough play, signalled to Douglas with an urgent nod that it was time to jump down.

  Douglas moved slowly to the lip of the ceiling tile, crawling commando-style and peered below. He checked the position of the fish. He checked where the plug was.

  ‘Come on, Douglas,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Dive for the tap. I will pull you straight back out.’

  ‘Oh hell!’ said Douglas and pulled himself a little further over the gap in the ceiling and felt the tile that supported the bulk of his weight give way, so that it bent in two along a crease like the flap on an aeroplane wing, and he reached out his arms before him in the diving position, and scrabbled a bit with his feet, almost undoing the knot that secured him to the rope, and was over, unexpectedly quickly, and down in the water with a huge splash.

  The karp awoke immediately and whipped his tail so that he was pointed round to where Douglas had landed.

  Douglas had recovered somewhat and managed to make the best of a bad job and headed penguin-like with thrusts of his tied legs to the red tap.

  The karp was on him with two flicks of his tail.

  ‘What have we here?’ he said, his clear, metallic voice, ducted and relayed through loudspeakers, sounding crisp and brittle and resonant in the water.

  Douglas began to try to turn the handle. He could barely move it. It was far too stiff. With an enormous effort, he had it round one quarter turn. A succession of tiny bubbles fizzed to the surface, announcing it was partly opened, but the water was dribbling out only very slowly.

  The karp watched him, allowing him to surface.

  ‘What are you doing?’ shouted Geoffrey from above, as his head rose above the water.

  ‘Can’t get the bloody thing opened. It’s too tight.’

  ‘Get out of the damn tank!’

  ‘Pull me up!’

  ‘The fish is behind you!’

  ‘Pull me up!’

  Geoffrey pulled up the rope, but Douglas, his clothing soaked, was unexpectedly heavy and Geoffrey had to reposition himself to get a better purchase, so that he was sat down on the struts with the rope between his legs and his heavy boots, as he pulled, buckled the frame of the ceiling.

  ‘Get out of the damn tank! I can’t pull you out!’ he shouted down to Douglas. ‘You’ll have to do it on your own!’

  Douglas, beyond fear, scrambled at the Perspex, reaching for the edge, and had one hand up and was about to pull the other over, when the Opikarp came at him, charging fast from below. He shot at him like a torpedo, trailing a side-stream of silvery bubbles, and struck him from below, between his legs, knocking him from the side to the centre of the tank.

  ‘Oh, my Lord!’ cried Geoffrey from above and in his panic to get away further along the roof, scrambled a little too fast. His leg slipped as he grabbed at the rope and it unfastened from the grille. The tiles gave way. He fell from the ceiling and landed in the tank with another huge splash.

  ***

  Chapter Sixty Six

  The Opikarp turned from Douglas to Geoffrey, flailing in the water.

  He flicked his tail and raced around the tank, building up a furious speed, and then he came at him, head on, striking him in the belly. Geoffrey was winded and stunned. He flopped forward, then spluttered back up again when the water filled his lungs.

  Douglas tried again for the tap, now the karp was distracted, and opened it a little further. There was a visible spill to the floor outside.

  ‘We can catch him!’ said Douglas to Geoffrey, when he surfaced.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Catch him! I can get his tail. He’s innocuous. He’s a fraud. He’s only trying to frighten us. He’s an overfed freshwater Opikarp. We can have him.’

  The karp was lining Geoffrey up again.

  Geoffrey obviously wasn’t convinced that he was a fraud, because he was scrambling desperately for the side.

  Douglas moved closer and as the karp struck, Douglas reached out and grabbed at him.

  ‘See!’ he said.

  He was holding onto the base of the tail, a fan of vicious spindles, with both hands. The Opikarp was roaring and cursing through the loudspeakers, flapping ferociously, but he couldn’t get free.

  ‘Very good!’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Let’s throw him over the side.’

  Douglas pulled him to the side. Geoffrey got underneath and with two hands scooped him from the tank, up and over the side. The karp fell to the floor, flapping and rolling and making horrible choking noises.

  He was out and suffocating but he could see the water flowing from the opened valve and flopped towards it. There was a little pool of water by the tap now, just enough to contain him. He rea
ched it astonished and lay gibbering.

  ‘Hell!’ said Geoffrey. ‘The water's collecting outside. The room is bloody watertight! We’ve got to get out and finish him off.’

  But try as they might, and they tried everything - giving each other jacks and lifts and standing on each other’s shoulders - they couldn’t get over the walls of the tank.

  It had a slight curve to it. It was horribly slippery. The water level inside was falling rapidly.

  They tried to shut the valve but the tap wouldn’t move either way now.

  When the water was halfway out, and they realised there was now no way they were going to scale the sides, they had to give up.

  They stood, shivering, amidst the fish weed, staring at the karp outside. He stared back from his pool, quite large now, that had splashed from the outlet pipe to the floor. He was controlling the flow with his lips, so that it washed around and over him.

  ‘He's a nasty bugger, Geoffrey. And very resourceful for a fish. Look at his eyes. Beady. I expect that's why they made him Governor.’

  They could hear a horrific rasping and coagulated breathing coming from the loudspeakers.

  ***

  When the guards opened the door the next morning to feed the Opikarp, they found him bubbling plein de vigueur, swimming quite robustly in the foot of water that had collected on the floor below the level of the doorstep. Within the dry tank was the diorama of a shipwreck: one man, dead from fright, and the other they had a fine time with - chasing him round the donut, and shooting at his feet, then drowning him by degrees.

  ***

  Chapter Sixty Seven

  Cormack was in the same freezing hold that the cow had occupied all those weeks before. It seemed a lifetime ago.

  He wondered how she was doing. He missed her conversation, her optimism, her gusto, the way she held her head on one side and scrunched up her eyes when she was trying to be serious, the rough licks she had given him in the abandoned forest outside of Shambalah…

  Proton arrived soon enough and his good mood appeared to have been sustained. He had found a bottle of the Glenrushen he seemed to have enjoyed so much on their previous flight and might even have been a little intoxicated.

  ‘Cormack, Cormack, Cormack,’ he began repetitiously. ‘Mate…We need to talk.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘That Stanton Bosch creature…What’s he up to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He was in your wardrobe and we found a communications device on you that seems to indicate that you were in contact with him. You know, the bastard came at me with a chair leg.’

  ‘Yes, that was unfortunate.’

  ‘There was a whole army of them – Boschs the lot of them. They routed your army.’

  ‘Well, that is upsetting…’

  ‘I know you have feelings for the cow, Cormack. The cow was with the army. We haven’t gotten confirmation yet, but she might not have made it, Cormack. We need to get this thing sorted out – for the cow’s sake.’

  ‘You know, Proton, leave the poor cow out of it.’

  ‘But the cow is right in it, Cormack. You made a mistake. You got involved with this Stanton Bosch character and he promised you something. What did he promise you, Cormack?’

  ‘He didn’t promise me anything.’

  ‘And as a result of your actions, your friend the cow is probably dead. Probably dead horrifically. Those Boschs wouldn’t want to take any chances with a rabid cow.’

  ‘She’s not rabid.’

  ‘Make amends for her sake. What does this Stanton Bosch fellow want with you?’

  ‘I don’t know what he wants.’

  ‘You know, Cormack, you’re killing me, mate. I thought we were like this.’ Proton put the index and middle finger of right hand together to indicate exactly what he thought they were like. ‘We had plans, hopes, dreams. We went through so much together. And you want to throw it all away to be with…that…wizened….old…fisher trout? You know, you disgust me, mate! Disgust me!’

  So saying, Proton got up and left the hold.

  Cormack would have got up too but he was chained to the luggage rack.

  No matter, because Proton returned almost immediately.

  ‘I’ve decided,’ he said.

  ‘What have you decided?’ said Cormack.

  ‘To not let this thing come between us. Let’s make a new start. We have business to resolve. There’s going to be challenges ahead on Zargon 8. You made a mistake. I think you’ve been punished for your foolishness. We’ve gotten confirmation, Cormack. Your girlfriend, the cow, is dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to let you go, Cormack, but you need to promise that this foolishness ends right here. You’re with me now, kiddo. You understand? You understand how this ends?’

  ‘I understand, Proton.’

  ‘Good. That’s my boy. That’s my Cormack.’

  Proton knelt on the floor and put his arm round Cormack down there as best he could and gave him a little hug before rising and leaving, shutting the door with a kick of his boot.

  ***

  Chapter Sixty Eight

  In fact, the cow, far from being dead, was feeling frisky. She was consulting with Stanton Bosch and Traction. They had all decamped to the Tropico, after the triumph of the Bosch army in what was now being stylized as the Battle of Bartislard, and were enjoying light refreshments on the sundeck.

  The residents and tourists of Bartislard appeared, as was their manner in the face of most peculiarities, to have taken the whole thing in their stride and life in the city continued as normal, except that the Municipal Sanitation Authority had to divert excess capacity to the strip of forest where Cormack’s army lay routed.

  Stanton Bosch was hale and hearty, inveighing Traction and the cow with anecdotes about the day’s adventures.

  ‘I did gets the skinny man a good one,’ he said, chuckling. ‘Scared to hell to see me inside his wardrobe…’

  The cow had adopted sunglasses, ostensibly against the harsh glare from the SplatterHorn, which gave her a peculiar European demeanour, as though she were an international arms dealer, or model on assignment, and she laughed politely at his joshing, but her face was fixed with a distracted air and it was obvious that, today, she found his company trying.

  ‘To return the day’s business,’ she said seriously.

  ‘Aye, the day’s business…’

  ‘What plans for the mock Negus now?’

  ‘We does follow him to Zargon 8. That much is clear…’

  ‘Does he still carry the tracking device?’

  ‘There ain't no need to track him now, Traction. We does know where they be headed.’

  ‘They will meet with considerable resistance.’

  ‘And they don’t have an army now.’

  ‘I don’t think that army was ever much use to them.’

  ‘I suppose they will try to raise popular support. The certification of the Throat still carries weight in certain parts of the Empire.’

  ‘We follows them to Zargon 8 and then we makes our move,’ said Stanton Bosch with a snort and raised his filthy glass to toast with the cow, but she turned her head from him haughtily and stared hard-faced towards the SplatterHorn. Its cold, ridged flanks were all he could see, reflected in the lenses of her sunglasses, as he tried to fix her with his sky-blue eyes.

  ***

  Chapter Sixty Nine

  Cormack was released and allowed into the main cabin, where he assumed his assigned commander’s chair with an air of resigned inevitability and sat despondently, barely able to twiddle the knobs on the console, the skein of doom all over him.

  ‘Cheer up, mate!’ said Proton. ‘I’ve forgiven you.’

  ‘You know, it’s not all about you, Proton.’

  ‘No, it’s all about you, Negus.’

  ‘And don’t call me Negus. I’m not your Negus.’

  Proton went back to being Captain-like, judging that Cormack was best
left alone. He issued various commands that sent the transporter hither and thither. It seemed to Cormack that he was only doing it to annoy him and he judged himself confirmed in his opinion when Proton, after several minutes, got frustrated and rested his microphone back down and turned to him, telling him, ‘Cormack, Cormack, mate! The attitude cannot continue! We need to work together! We need to help each other! There are dark forces gathering.’

  ‘What dark forces?’

  ‘We need to get our message out there.’

  ‘Out where?’

  ‘The uniSwarm. The Intergalactic Information Superhighway. Now we’re finally off Foul Ball we have a uniSwarm connection. You want to help me, don’t you, Cormack?’

  ‘I’m not sure I do, Proton.’

  ‘Will you do one thing for me?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘It’s in your interest too, you know. We need to help each other.’

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘Appear with me on a uniSwarm broadcast. We’ll release it when we’re on Zargon 8. It will generate enthusiasm for our mission.’

  Cormack was about to open his mouth to protest but Proton hushed him immediately with an ‘Uh, uh, uh!’

  ‘You won’t even have to talk,’ he said. ‘Just stand next to me. I’ll do all the talking. Cormack, mate, why do have to spend all my time trying to persuade you to do things? Dealing with you is just so frigging frustrating. I am trying to help. I’m trying to help you be all you can be. Do you understand?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘You’ll do it for me, won’t you?’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  ‘OK, not for me – for Pranzi.’

  ‘No.’