Theatre of the Gods Read online

  About the Book

  This is the story of M. Francisco Fabrigas – explorer, philosopher, heretical physicist – who took a shipful of children on a frightening voyage to the next dimension, assisted by a teenaged Captain, a brave deaf boy, a cunning blind girl, and a sultry botanist, all the while pursued by the Pope of the universe and a well-dressed mesmerist.

  Dark plots, demonic cults, murderous jungles, quantum mayhem, the birth of creation, the death of time, and a creature called the Sweety: all this and more waits beyond the veil of reality.

  About the Author

  Author, journalist, dramatist, publisher, minimalist composer, digital socialite, liar, M. Suddain is Founding Editor of Blacklist Publishing Co. Ltd. – a small firm dedicated to the preservation of lost or forbidden works of art and literature, most notably the once-famous travelogue series Worlds’ Fair.

  www.blacklistpublishing.com

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781448130924

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Jonathan Cape 2013

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © M. Suddain 2013 M. Suddain has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Jonathan Cape, Random House, 20 VauxhalI Bridge Road, London SWIV 2SA. www.vintage-books.co.uk.

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm.

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780224097062

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  ‘Destroying a book is not the same as destroying a human life,’ argued the artificial philosopher Photozeiger. ‘It is much more serious. For when you end the life of a book you destroy the ideas of countless thinkers who inspired it, and condemn future generations to darkness and ignorance.’

  At Blacklist Publishing we dedicate our lives to saving censored, suppressed and orphaned works: ‘The Forbidden, the Forgotten, the Condemned’. As such, we are proud to present this edition of Theatre of the Gods. It is one title from a grand travelogue series, ‘Worlds’ Fair’ – arguably the most famous and widely read of its age. It was rare for a home library of the time not to contain even a few titles from ‘The Fair’ – as it was commonly called. And yet Gods is one title from the series few will ever have read. Its subject had been sentenced to death in absentia as a traitor and heretic. The book was banned soon after publication, denounced by the publishers, and even the author, who risked his life to track down the explorer M. Francisco Fabrigas and record his confessions, was blacklisted, and forced into exile, simply for suggesting that his hero may have been misunderstood.

  His work raises many questions. How was an itinerate writer able to locate the greatest fugitive in the universe when all the agencies in his Empire could not? Is what he transcribes the truth? Part truth? Anything but? Volcannon claims to have researched this voyage to the finest detail, and yet he takes bold liberties: embellishing episodes, recreating conversations for which there is no record or surviving witnesses. Did Volcannon embellish Fabrigas’s story? Did he invent their entire meeting, even? We will never know. Upon publication he too was accused of treason. He vanished into exile. He would never write another title for ‘Worlds’ Fair’.

  We have done our best to translate and present this complex work as accurately as possible so that you may judge for yourself. The original Gods would of course have been a hyper-dimensional text, giving the purchaser an immersive, ‘omni-sensual’ reading experience. Sadly, this data has been lost, leaving us only the flattened text – the ‘book-data’, if you will. Are words upon a page enough to hold a reader’s attention? We’ll let you be the judge.

  The original edition would have featured hyper-illustrations, borders, miniatures and ornamental scrolling type typical of illuminated manuscripts of its time, found today only in dedicated hypertext museums. Sadly, all the illustrations from the original edition have been lost. Nevertheless, we think it is a fine oddity. This is, after all, the job of the historical publisher: to recover frail embers from the flames of history, and to carry them, carefully, to the fires of our own age, so that we might have some grasp of the grand sweep of time, and also a sense that, though our lives are brief sparks, each has its moment within the epic story of human existence.

  Onward!

  M. Suddain

  Blacklist Publishing Ltd

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Publisher’s Note

  Illustrations

  A Note from the Author

  Dedication

  Encounter

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  Epilogue

  The Little Page of Calmness

  User’s Manual

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  [Missing from this edition.]

  The box at first seemed empty, black … Then a pair of brass spheres rose slowly, almost shyly from within, peeking out like a pair of rising suns

  The Necronaut pushed a short knife to the man’s chest, took his huge weight on his shoulders, and lowered him quietly to the ground

  We were attacked by a serpent, but it was only a baby, it could hardly wrap itself around our ship. Everyone came on deck to coo and gurgle

  ‘Stowaways. They’ve been living off the bats in the nose-cone, roasting them with a candle, buttering them with algae’

  ‘He also says we’ll be eaten … some of us two times’

  DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!

  Fabrigas strode into the glade with his arms raised. ‘Bear!’ he shouted, and the creature turned its huge head

  On the giant screen above the navigator’s station they could now observe the silvery whorl of their new Glory Hole

  He saw them tumble over and over, their arms stretched out in the shape of a plane

  ‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Are you with us?’

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  What can we really know about truth? Reality? You are reading a book – that much is true. It is a book based upon the confessions of one of the greatest living souls of all time/space. Although whether my subject is still living (indeed, whether he is even in time/space) remains a mystery.

  Whether M. Francisco Fabrigas really was the greatest human explorer will be debated by scholars for generations, while the issue of whether the human creature even possesses a ‘soul’ is an argument which might survive time/space itself.

  So let’s just say you are about to read a book. And if, in fact, this book is about to be read to you, well … let’s all say nothing of it.

  *

  ‘Every word you hear about me is a lie! Even these ones!’ So said M. Francisco Fabrigas: explorer, philosopher, heretical physicist, mystic, transmariner, cosmic flâneur. ‘Do not believe a single word I say, for they come from the inky black tongue of a desperate fool. Me!’ Imagine the mad old m
an sprawled across the filthy table as he says these words – of which only every second one, at best, is true. ‘I came from another universe!’ the fool rasps in a voice like a bare branch clawing at a window. ‘I was a great explorer. I was shipwrecked seventy-nine times. I caught sleeping fever, laughing sickness, bohemian rhapsody. I almost died in the jungles of Dyspepsia, where there are so many tribes of cannibals it often rains teeth! I stared into the eye of the tyranykon, the triple-headed mastodon, I stared into the fiery eye of hell!’

  But don’t believe him. Or at best believe only some of what he tells you. The strange and impossible stories. How he escaped a gang of mind-pirates by lining his hat with foil and singing love songs. How he lived in the stomach of a dinosaur plant, surviving on rations found in the pockets of decomposing sailors. All lies. And then the most fantastical story: how he agreed to undertake a voyage beyond this universe for the glory of the Empire. How he went to the next universe with a boy who couldn’t hear, and a girl who couldn’t see. How he lost the brave deaf boy, and the cunning blind girl, had to watch as they were cast into a black hole, their very atoms pulverised by unfathomable forces. How he returned to this universe alone, to live a broken man, in this house, on this orphan moon, to tell these stories – of which perhaps one on every page is a complete and utter lie. You should read every single word in this book, and think very hard, because it is a good story, and because every single word, even these very words, are true.

  *

  It is no lie that M. Francisco Fabrigas possessed one of the most brilliant and inventive minds of his age. He mastered seventy-eight languages and claimed to dream in forty-six – though he seldom slept more than one or two hours in a night. He had a photographic memory, a phonographic memory, and a bibliographic memory – he never forgot a single thing he read. He invented the X-ray photokamera, the four-dimensional compass, the radio-chronomatic receiver (a device with which you can hear the past – which is useful if you want to settle a thousand-year-old argument). He patented an anaesthetic hat for inducing sleep in patients and loud children, as well as a device for communicating with human babies (which, in the end, only proved that babies know very little about anything, and an awful lot about nothing). He was also the first human to realise that there were other universes – most likely an infinite number – and that it might be possible for people to travel there. He was the first to go beyond the membrane of his universe and return alive. Where he went after that has been a profound mystery.

  After fruitless years spent trying to solve the mystery of M. Francisco Fabrigas, I became desperate. I was down to a single clue – obscure, laughably speculative – but I followed it anyway, and it led me all the way to a remote and deadly region of space. There I was caught in a solar storm and forced to crash-land on an orphan moon. And how fateful that I did. I found myself near a wrecked mansion above a disused uranium mine beside a sea lorded over by mighty serpents. The mansion was vast and crumbling, its roof torn open, its windward wall split like a serpent’s gullet, disgorging ancient furniture and priceless rugs down the face of a cliff. Upstairs in the master bedroom I found the doors to the balcony open. Two elegantly dressed skeletons still sat there in their rocking chairs, staring out to sea.

  The stair wood sang like crickets as I went into the cellar vault, expecting to find nothing, but finding in the darkness, surrounded by the rotting casks and family urns, an old, old figure (though with the passing of the years he was now more beard than man). I cannot forget a thing about him: his great height, his formidable presence even in that decaying state – and those legendary eyes: eyes that seem to be looking out from the dawn of time, and on towards infinity. For days I could not get him even to acknowledge my presence. Eventually he rose from his stupor, looked around him and said, ‘This is not my house. How did I get here?’ and as if in answer the breakers smashed upon the stones below, and the serpents cried, just as they’d done for endless centuries.

  After weeks of effort I was able to fully break him from his trance and encourage him to tell me his version of a tale I knew well from other sources: the story of the Great Crossing – the first time a human being was able to leave his own universe, and return. I carefully took down every word he said, every curse and every mutter, the whole rambling adventure: the brave deaf boy, the cunning and beautiful blind girl – though he was continuously interrupting his own story to cry, ‘Lies! It’s all lies! What is life but a web of lies!’ I bore witness to his great suffering. Over the course of weeks, as he retold his story, the old man became more unstable, particularly as his tale reached its terrible conclusion, with the casting of the two innocents into the jaws of a black hole. Certainly, the old man never saw these children torn to bits by the forces of the abyss. He watched only as they fell, arms in the shape of a plane, towards the gnashing jaws of space. He could not watch the last bit. He had to look away and bite his finger … nghn! But if there’s one thing we all know it’s that no person can survive being thrown into a black hole. That’s simply the way things are. Oh, I know what you’re thinking now: this is just an author’s trick. We think they’re going to die at the end, these beautiful children, but in a final twist they’ll both be saved. Listen to me very carefully. Come closer so I can lower my voice to a whisper as I tell you: that … will never … happen. There is no way that some brave fool will sweep in, scoop the children up in his strong arms. This isn’t like the moving cinemagraphs where the heroes live, the villains die, and everyone has cake. This is life.

  One night, during a terrible storm which threw itself against the mansion, I challenged the old master on a point of fact – a contradiction between two versions of events. The ancient man flew into a rage, suddenly accusing me of plotting to distract him from his studies. In a fury, Time’s Traitor seized my notes, intending to throw them on the fire. I managed to snatch most of them away and leap through a window as he hurled antique clocks and vases after me. I hid for several days.

  *

  Upon my return I found the mansion empty. There was no sign of any craft landing there, no footprints around the house or on the shore. On his table I found, held in place by an oily stone from the shore, a brief note:

  If the ages say something about me, let it be this:

  That within this common shipwrecke I, above all life’s servants, was uncommonly placed to observe the secret beauty hid in ordinary things.

  If they say something else, let it be that I was handsome.

  M.F.F.

  The story of M. Francisco Fabrigas and the Great Crossing is a strange and wonderful tale and I’ve done my best to present it as it was told to me by the old master. I have spent an ungodly amount of time fleshing out his confessions, following the path of the Necronaut and its crew of misfits, speaking to eyewitnesses, hunting down fragments of journals and news stories, checking and rechecking every detail, and compiling a meticulous account of this historic human voyage through the Omnicosmos. For what it’s worth, I believe the old man really did undertake an expedition to the next universe, aided by a handsome deaf boy and a beautiful and cunning blind girl. He failed, of course, and the children died horribly. But I hope you enjoy this story anyway. For as I said earlier, practically every word is true, others less so, and some, like these, are not true at all.

  Yours in greatness,

  V. V. S. Volcannon

  ENCOUNTER

  Two encounters in deepest space. The first, terrifying enough; the second, far too terrifying for those involved.

  The MOS-DEF, a research vessel on a mission to find a species of space leech thought to contain plague antibodies, finds not a leech. Their leader, a doctor, a passionate man who has given his entire life to this mission, stands for thirty-nine nautical hours on the observation deck. He does not move. His men bring him chocolate, he will not drink. His men bring him blankets, he cares not for warmth. Finally, when the doctor calls back that he can see a giant squid, the crew prepare to sedate him.

  They
are all surprised to find a live squid just off their bow (though not as surprised as the squid). The beast is vast, pinkish-blue, and gazes at them with sad, wet eyes. It floats calmly, its tentacles wave softly. When the ship pulls close with nets it surrenders like a baby. When the squid is examined, the barnacles and starfish scraped from its soft flanks, the scientists determine that there is nothing at all strange about the squid. Except that it isn’t from our universe. Our space cannot support a beast like this. Which is in itself, they have to admit, very strange.

  The squid has nothing to say.

  But to the second and far more terrifying event. Three years later, in another dark region of space, the Vangelis, a warship thrown off course when its navigation equipment malfunctions, discovers a ship.

  It is a galleon – the kind built for sailing on terrestrial seas, yet somehow cast adrift in space. Its sails are shredded by the ages, but its rig is set for a steady sea wind (though of course there is no sea wind where this ship has found itself). When the crew of the Vangelis venture aboard they find the boat deserted. There are bowls of food on the table, a pot of soup still on the stove, all preserved by the icy cold of space. They can make no sense of the language in the ship’s log, or in the passengers’ journals, or in the children’s picture books they find, and the maps in the navigation room are a guide to seas unknown. There is no explanation for what the ship is doing in this part of the universe – or for what it was doing in this universe at all. ‘A ghost ship!’ someone cries. He is an idiot. The truth is far, far stranger.

  In the storage bay the crew find a small girl frozen in a block of ice.

  *

  There is near-mutiny at the captain’s suggestion that they bring the ship home. Captain Descharge has to whip two men before anyone will agree to go near the frozen creature. A skeleton crew stays aboard, some blubbing quietly, some clutching holy books, and none able to look upon the ghastly cell of ice. And well they should be terrified, for within that icy sepulchre it is possible to see the corpse at rest, her pale hands enfolded ’cross her chest. Her eyes are open, her breathless lips a dreadful blue. She is dead, most certainly. Most certainly.