Report in Goliath Today!, July 17, 1988

  How was your day?” asked Mum, handing me a large cup of tea. Friday had been tuckered out by all the activity and had fallen asleep into his cheesy bean dips. I had bathed him and put him to bed before having something to eat myself. Hamlet and Emma were out at the movies or something, Bismarck was listening to Wagner on his Walkman, so Mum and I had a moment to ourselves.

  “Not good,” I replied slowly. “I can’t dissuade an assassin from trying to kill me; Hamlet isn’t safe here, but I can’t send him back; and if I don’t get Swindon to win the SuperHoop, then the world will end. Goliath somehow duped me into forgiving them, I have my own stalker, and also have to figure out how to get the banned books I should be hunting for SO-14 out of the country. And Landen’s still not back.”

  “Really?” she said, not having listened to me at all. “I think I’ve got a plan how we can deal with that annoying offspring of Pickwick’s.”

  “Lethal injection?”

  “Not funny. No, my friend Mrs. Beatty knows a dodo whisperer who can work wonders with unruly dodos.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’ll try anything, I suppose. I can’t understand why he’s so difficult—Pickers is a real sweetheart.”

  We fell silent for a moment.

  “Mum?” I said at last.

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think of Herr Bismarck?”

  “Otto? Well, most people remember him for his ‘blood and iron’ rhetoric, unification arguments, and the wars—but few give him credit for devising the first social security system in Europe.”

  “No, I mean . . . that is to say . . . you wouldn’t—”

  At that moment we heard some oaths and a slammed door. After a few thumps and bumps, Hamlet burst into the living room, stopped, composed himself, rubbed his forehead, looked heavenwards, sighed deeply and then said:

  “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!”1

  “Is everything all right?” I asked

  “Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d his canon ’gainst self-slaughter!” 2

  “I’ll make a cup of tea,” said my mother, who had an instinct for these sorts of things. “Would you like a slice of Battenberg, Mr. Hamlet?”

  “O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable—yes, please—seem to me all the uses of this world!”3

  She nodded and moved off.

  “What’s up?” I asked Emma, who had entered with Hamlet, as he strutted around the living room, beating his head in frustration and grief.

  “Well, we went to see Hamlet at the Alhambra.”

  “Crumbs!” I muttered. “It . . . er . . . didn’t go down too well, I take it?”

  “Well,” reflected Emma, as Hamlet continued his histrionics around the living room, “the play was okay apart from Hamlet shouting out a couple of times that Polonius wasn’t meant to be funny and Laertes wasn’t remotely handsome. The management weren’t particularly put out—there were at least twelve Hamlets in the audience, and they all had something to say about it.”

  “Fie on’t! Ah, fie!” continued Hamlet. “ ’Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely—!”4

  “No,” continued Emma, “it was when we and the twelve other Hamlets went to have a quiet drink with the play’s company afterwards that things turned sour. Piarno Keyes—who was playing Hamlet—took umbrage at Hamlet’s criticisms of his performance; Hamlet said his portrayal was far too indecisive. Mr. Keyes said Hamlet was mistaken, that Hamlet was a man racked by uncertainty. Then Hamlet said he was Hamlet so should know a thing or two about it; one of the other Hamlets disagreed and said he was Hamlet and thought Mr. Keyes was excellent. Several of the Hamlets agreed, and it might have ended there, but Hamlet said that if Mr. Keyes insisted on playing Hamlet, he should look at how Mel Gibson did it and improve his performance in light of that.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Yes,” said Emma. “Oh, dear. Mr. Keyes flew right off the handle. ‘Mel Gibson?’ he roared. ‘Mel ****ing Gibson? That’s all I ever ****ing hear these days!’ and he then tried to punch Hamlet on the nose. Hamlet was too quick, of course, and had his bodkin at Keyes’s throat before you could blink, so one of the other Hamlets suggested a Hamlet contest. The rules were simple: they all had to perform the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, and the drinkers in the tavern gave them points out of ten.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Hamlet came last.”

  “Last? How could he come last?”

  “Well, he insisted on playing the soliloquy less like an existential question over life and death and the possibility of an afterlife, and more about a postapocalyptic dystopia where crossbow-wielding punks on motorbikes try to kill people for their gasoline.”

  I looked across at Hamlet who had quieted down a bit and was looking through my mother’s video collection for Olivier’s Hamlet to see if it was better than Gibson’s.

  “No wonder he’s hacked off.”

  “Here we go!” said my mother, returning with a large tray of tea things. “There’s nothing like a nice cup of tea when things look bad!”

  “Humph,” grunted Hamlet, staring at his feet. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any of that cake, have you?”

  “Especially for you!” My mother smiled, producing the Battenberg with a flourish. She was right, too. After a few cups and a slice of cake, Hamlet was almost human again.

  I left Emma and Hamlet arguing with my mother over whether they should watch Olivier’s Hamlet or Great Croquet Sporting Moments on the television and went to sort some washing in the kitchen. I stood there trying to figure out just what sort of brain-scrubbing technique Goliath had used on me to get me to sign their Forgiveness Release. Oddly, I was still getting pro-Goliath flashbacks. In absent moments I felt they weren’t so bad, then had to consciously remind myself that they were. On the plus side, there was a possibility Landen might be reactualized, but I didn’t know when it would be, or how.

  I was just getting around to wondering if a cold soak might remove ketchup stains better than a hot wash when there was a light crackling sound in the air, like crumpled cellophane. It grew louder, and green tendrils of electricity started to envelop the Kenwood mixer, then grew stronger until a greenish glow like St. Elmo’s fire was dancing around the microwave. There was a bright light and a rumble of thunder as three figures started to materialize into the kitchen. Two of them were dressed in body armor and holding ridiculously large blaster-type weapons; the other figure was tall and dressed in jet black high-collared robes that hung to the floor in one direction and buttoned tightly up to his throat in the other. He had a pale complexion, high cheekbones and a small and very precise goatee. He stood with his arms crossed and was staring at me with one eyebrow raised imperiously. This was truly a tyrant among tyrants, a cruel galactic leader who had murdered billions in his never-ending and inadequately explained quest for total galactic domination. This . . . was Emperor Zhark.

  17.

  Emperor Zhark

  The eight Emperor Zhark novels were written throughout the seventies by Handley Paige, an author whose previous works included Spacestation Z-5 and Revenge of the Thraals. With Zhark he hit upon a pastiche of everything a bad SF novel should ever be. Weird worlds, tentacled aliens, space travel and square-jawed fighter aces doing battle with a pantomime emperor who lived for no other reason than to cause evil and disharmony in the galaxy. His usual nemesis in the books was Colonel Brandt of the Space Corps assisted by his alien partner, Ashley. There have been two Zhark films starring Buck Stallion, Zhark the Destroyer and Bad Day at Big Rock, neither of which was any good.

  Millon de Floss, The Books of H. Paige

  Do you have to do that?” I asked.

  “Dowhat?” replied the Emperor.

  “Make such a pointlessly dramatic entrance? And what are those two goons doing here?”

  “Who said that?” said a muffled voice from inside the opaque helmet of one of his minders. “I can’t see a sodding thing in here.”

  “Who’s a goon?” said the other.

  “It’s a contractual thing,” explained the Emperor, ignoring them both. “I’ve got a new agent who knows how to properly handle a character of my quality. I have to be given a minimum of eighty words’ description at least once in any featured book, and at least twice in a book a chapter has to end with my appearance.”

  “Do you get book-title billing?”

  “We gave that one away in exchange for chapter-heading status. If this were a novel, you’d have to start a new chapter as soon as I appeared.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing we’re not,” I replied. “If my mother was here, she’d probably have had a heart attack.”

  “Oh!” replied the Emperor, looking around. “Do you live with your mother, too?”

  “What’s up? Problems at Jurisfiction?”

  “Take five, lads,” said Zhark to the two guards, who felt around the kitchen until they found a chair and sat down. “Mrs. Tiggy-winkle sent me,” he breathed. “She’s busy at the Beatrix Potter Characters Annual General Meeting but wanted me to give you an update on what’s happening at Jurisfiction.”

  “Who’s that, darling?” called my mother from the living room.

  “It’s a homicidal maniac intent on galactic domination,” I called back.

  “That’s nice, dear.”

  I turned back to Zhark. “So what’s the news?”

  “Max de Winter from Rebecca,” said Zhark thoughtfully. “The BookWorld Justice Department has rearrested him.”

  “I thought Snell got him off the murder charge.”

  “He did. The department is still gunning for him, though. They’ve arrested him on—get this—insurance fraud. Remember the boat he sank with his wife in it?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, apparently he claimed the boat on insurance, so they think they might be able to get him on that.”

  It was not an untypical turn of events in the BookWorld. Our mandate from the Council of Genres was to keep fictional narrative as stable as possible. As long as it was how the author intended, murderers walked free and tyrants stayed in power—that was what we did. Minor infringements that weren’t obvious to the reading public, we tended to overlook. However, in a masterstroke of inspired bureaucracy, the Council of Genres also empowered a Justice Department to look into individual transgressions. The conviction of David Copperfield for murdering his first wife was their biggest cause célèbre—before my time, I hasten to add—and Jurisfiction, unable to save him, could do little except train another character to take Copperfield’s place. They had tried to get Max de Winter before, but we had always managed to outmaneuver them. Insurance fraud. I could scarcely believe it.

  “Have you alerted the Gryphon?”

  “He’s working on Fagin’s umpteenth appeal.”

  “Get him on it. We can’t leave this to amateurs. What about Hamlet? Can I send him back?”

  “Not . . . as such,” replied Zhark hesitantly.

  “He’s becoming something of a nuisance,” I admitted, “and Danes are liable to be arrested. I can’t keep him amused by watching Mel Gibson’s films forever.”

  “I’d like Mel Gibson to play me,” said Zhark thoughtfully.

  “I don’t think Gibson does bad guys,” I conceded. “You’d probably be played by Geoffrey Rush or someone.”

  “That wouldn’t be so bad. Is that cake going begging?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Zhark cut a large slice of Battenberg, took a bite and continued, “Okay, here’s the deal: we managed to get the Polonius family to attend arbitration over their unauthorized rewriting of Hamlet.”

  “How did you achieve that?”

  “Promised Ophelia her own book. All back to normal—no problem.”

  “So . . . I can send Hamlet back?”

  “Not quite yet,” replied Zhark, hiding his unease by pretending to find a small piece of fluff on his cape. “You see, Ophelia has now got her knickers in a twist about one of Hamlet’s infidelities—someone she thinks is called Henna Appleton. Have you heard anything about this?”

  “No. Nothing. Nothing at all. Not a thing. Don’t even know anyone called Henna Appleton. Why?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. Well, she went completely nuts and threatened to drown herself in the first act rather than the fourth. We think we’ve got her straightened out. But whilst we were doing this—there was a hostile takeover.”

  I cursed aloud, and Zhark jumped. Nothing was ever straightforward in the BookWorld. Book mergers, where one book joined another to increase the collective narrative advantage of their own mundane plotlines, were thankfully rare but not unheard of. The most famous merger in Shakespeare was the conjoinment of the two plays Daughters of Lear and Sons of Gloucester into King Lear. Other potential mergers, such as Much Ado About Verona and A Midsummer Night’s Shrew, were denied at the planning stage and hadn’t taken place. It could take months to extricate the plots, if it could be done at all. King Lear resisted unraveling so strongly we just let it stand.

  “So who merged with Hamlet?”

  “Well, it’s now called The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and features Gertrude being chased around the castle by Falstaff while being outwitted by Mistress Page, Ford and Ophelia. Laertes is the king of the fairies, and Hamlet is relegated to a sixteen-line subplot where he is convinced Doctor Caius and Fenton have conspired to kill his father for seven hundred pounds.”

  I groaned. “What’s it like?”

  “It takes a long time to get funny, and when it finally does, everyone dies.”

  “Okay,” I conceded, “I’ll try to keep Hamlet amused. How long do you need to unravel the play?”

  Zhark winced and sucked in air through his teeth in the same manner heating engineers do when quoting on a new boiler. “Well, that’s the problem, Thursday. I’m not sure that we can do it all. If this happened anywhere but in the original, we could have just deleted it. You know the trouble we had with King Lear? Well, I don’t see that we’re going to have any better luck with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.”

  I sat down and put my head in my hands. No Hamlet. The loss was almost too vast to comprehend.

  “How long have we got before Hamlet starts to change?” I asked without looking up.

  “About five days, six at the outside,” replied Zhark quietly. “After that, the breakdown will accelerate. In two weeks’ time, the play as we know it will have ceased to exist.”

  “There must be something we can do.”

  “We’ve tried pretty much everything. We’re stuffed—unless you’ve got a spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve.”

  I sat up. “What?”

  “We’re stuffed?”

  “After that.”

  “A spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve?”

  “Yes. How will that help?”

  “Well,” said Zhark thoughtfully, “since no original manuscripts of either Hamlet or Wives exist, a freshly penned script by the author would thus become the original manuscript—and we could use those to reboot the Storycode Engines from scratch. It’s quite simple, really.”

  I smiled but Zhark looked at me with bewilderment. “Thursday, Shakespeare died in 1616!”

  I stood up and patted him on the arm. “You get back to the office and make sure things don’t get any worse. Leave the Shakespeare up to me. Now, has anyone figured out yet which book Yorrick Kaine is from?”

  “We’ve got all available resources working on it,” replied Zhark, still a bit confused, “but there are a lot of novels to go through. Can you give us any pointers?”

  “Well, he’s not very multidimensional, so I shouldn’t go looking into anything too literary. I’d start at political thrillers and work your way towards spy.”

  Zhark made a note.

  “Good. Any other problems?”

  “Yes,” replied the Emperor. “Simpkin is being a bit of a pest in The Tailor of Gloucester. Apparently the tailor let all his mice escape, and now Simpkin won’t let him have the cherry-colored twist. If the Mayor’s coat isn’t ready for Christmas, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “Get the mice to make the waistcoat. They’re not doing anything.”

  “Okay,” he sighed, “I’ll give it a whirl.” He looked at his watch. “Well, better be off. I’ve got to annihilate the planet Thraal at four, and I’m already late. Do you think I should use my trusty Zharkian death-ray and fry them alive in a millisecond or nudge an asteroid into their orbit, thus unleashing at least six chapters of drama as they try to find an ingenious solution to defeat me?”

  “The asteroid sounds a good bet.”

  “I thought so, too. Well, see you later.”

  I waved good-bye as he and his two guards were beamed out of my world and back into theirs, which was certainly the best place for them. We had quite enough tyrants in the real world as it was.

  I was just wondering what The Merry Wives of Elsinore might be like when there was another buzzing noise and the kitchen was filled with light once more. There, imperious stare, high collar, etc., etc., was Emperor Zhark.

  18.

  Emperor Zhark Again

  President George Formby Opens Motorcycle Factory

  The President opened the new Brough-Vincent-Norton Motorcycle factory yesterday in Liverpool, bringing much-welcomed jobs to the area. The highly modernized factory, which aims to produce up to a thousand quality touring and racing machines every week, was described by the President as “Cracking stuff!” The President, a longtime advocate of motorcycling, rode one of the company’s new Vincent “Super Shadow” racers around the test track, reportedly hitting over 120 MPH, much to his retinue’s obvious concern for the octogenarian Formby’s health. Our George then gave a cheerful rendering of “Riding in the TT Races,” reminding his audience of the time he won the Manx Tourist Trophy on a prototype Rainbow motorcycle.