Emperor of the Universe Read online

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  For Douglas Adams, who planted the seeds of this book in my mind nearly forty-two years ago. Thanks for all the laughs

  PREPARE TO LAUNCH

  The universe is big, my friend. Bigger than you can imagine. Bigger, even, than you can imagine you can imagine. And yet, despite the vastness of the universe, there is one emperor who rules it all. Amazingly, for the first time in the history of universal emperors, that ruler is a human being. Astoundingly, he is fairly young, as human lifespans go. Astonishingly, he never asked for power. He never wanted to rule anything or anyone. He never even knew the possibility existed. He just wanted to rescue his gerbil and get back home before his parents discovered he was missing.

  And how, you may ask, did this unlikely rise to power come about?

  Well, that’s a big story. But not bigger than you can imagine. Or bigger than I can tell. Even so, it will take some time on my part, and some effort on your part, for us to share this tale. Quite honestly—and please don’t be offended by this—there’s a lot about the universe that you don’t know. It’s not your fault. The same holds true for most creatures who’ve spent their life confined to a single planet.

  Fear not. I’ll supply all the essential information, for I know many things. I am nearly omniscient. (I say nearly because certain things are unknowable. But that should not cause us any problems.) Some of what you hear may surprise you. Some of it may appear contradictory, unlikely, absurd, or flat-out impossible. That’s the nature of the universe. Throughout our journey, you’ll need to open your mind and unleash your imagination. But I know you can do that. Let us begin.

  GONE IN A FLASH

  Nicholas V. Landrew was not a typical seventh grader. That isn’t surprising. There is no typical seventh grader. Or eighth or ninth grader. Or teacher or parent. Or rodeo clown or oyster shucker, for that matter. But Nicholas was not far from what was considered normal by the social standards of his place and time, or the judgment of his peers. He couldn’t shoot milk from the corner of his eye, like Nikolai C. Landrew of Oxnard, MI, dousing candles at ten feet; or memorize the serial number of a dollar bill on sight and extract the square root to seventeen decimal places, like Nicole D. Landrew of Harrisburg, PA. On the other hand, neither Nikolai nor Nicole would ever rule the universe, so we will not speak of them again.

  Nicholas V. Landrew lived in Yelm, Washington, with his parents. Though, at the moment, he was home alone, thanks to an enormous lie. That lie, itself, became possible thanks to a pair of terrible decisions, which we’ll get to in a moment. As for the parents, Nicholas’s father, who bore a strong resemblance to a bearded John Lennon, and his mother, who bore a startling resemblance to a young and beardless Paul McCartney, formed two fourths of a Beatles tribute/parody group called the Beegles.

  They wore beagle masks and sang songs with titles like “I Wanna Shake Your Paw,” “While My Guitar Gently Barks,” and “Yellow Snow Submarine.” (If you find yourself wondering why look-alikes would wear masks, you are not alone. Mr. and Mrs. Landrew, while highly creative, fun loving, and musically talented, were not deep thinkers. They could have used a good manager.) Despite their hopes of capturing the lucrative teen market, their core base of fans were mostly not even preteens but pre-preteens in the four-to-six age range who had absolutely no idea who the Beatles were, and absolutely no clue how clever the Landrews thought they were being by intentionally misspelling their band’s name.

  The Beegles were currently on tour in Australia, but Nicholas’s parents kept in touch with him through lengthy voicemails, to which he responded with brief texts. They rarely communicated directly, unless they were in the same room. And not always, even then. Mr. and Mrs. Landrew do not play a major role in what is to come. Beagle faces, on the other hand, do. As do managers. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

  As for Nicholas’s face, he shared his parents’ dark hair, which he liked to keep cut fairly short. He had his father’s narrow nose and his mother’s soulful eyes, making him more attractive than he realized. He was two growth spurts away from his adult height, which would put him slightly above average. He weighed no more than ten pounds above average weight for his age, according to the height-weight chart in his doctor’s office, which seemed to be designed for assessing the health of skeletons and stick figures.

  It is just as well the elder Landrews were absent. Nicholas had been slapped with a two-week suspension for bringing a light saber to school. It wasn’t a real weapon. It was made of the sort of soft plastic that could do about as much harm to a living creature as a pool noodle. He’d only brought it because he thought the battery-operated whoosh it made would sound awesome in the empty gym. But unlike the plastic light saber itself, the rules against bringing weapons to school were rigid. This was his first terrible decision.

  After the gym teacher who’d snagged Nicholas brought him to the office, the principal tried to call his parents.

  “They just left for Australia,” Nicholas said. “They’re in the air somewhere, right now.”

  “So who’s watching you?” the principal asked.

  Two of Nicholas’s relatives, who each lived about twenty miles away, took turns staying at the house when his parents were on tour. Aunt Lucy had been a Marine, now worked as a prison guard, had strict policies against everything Nicholas liked to do, and felt he would benefit from a rigorous jog each morning. Uncle Bruce was a goofball who collected and repaired pinball machines, taught juggling at his local community college, and lived in a house built into the side of a cave. The choice was easy.

  Nicholas pulled up Uncle Bruce’s number on his phone and slid it across the desk to the principal.

  After a brief discussion, where Nicholas’s crime and punishment were outlined, the principal said, “He wants a word with you,” and handed the phone back.

  “Sorry, Uncle Bruce,” Nicholas said. He was pretty sure he wasn’t about to be told to drop to the floor and do fifty push-ups.

  “Sounds like a windbag,” his uncle said.

  “Yup.” Nicholas fought back a grin. His uncle would probably never mention the suspension to his parents.

  “How’d the light saber sound in the gym?” his uncle asked.

  “Amazing.”

  “I’ll have to try that sometime,” his uncle said. “Hey, I almost forgot. It looks like I’ll be getting there pretty late tonight. Probably way after midnight. Something came up. Are you okay by yourself until then?”

  “It’s Aunt Lucy’s turn,” Nicholas said, making his second terrible decision of the day. The lie came so easily, he startled himself. But it made sense. He’d been telling his parents for over a year that he di
dn’t need a babysitter anymore. He knew he could take care of himself. This was his chance to prove it.

  “Excellent!” his uncle said. “This will work out perfectly. One of my teacher friends owns a cabin in the Catskills. He invited me to go hiking and fishing during his spring break. I thought I couldn’t, but now I can. So, I guess I’ll see you next time. Have fun.”

  “Oh, I will.” Given that the suspension ended the day before the start of spring break, Nicholas was basically facing three weeks free of the classroom. That was fine with him. He didn’t mind being alone. And he was struggling a little with algebra, despite it being his favorite class of all time. Worst of all, he was flunking French, which was definitely his least favorite class of all time. He’d be happy missing two weeks of that.

  While we have little interest in Nicholas’s family, or his education, Nicholas’s gerbil is another matter. Nicholas loved Henrietta. He could talk to her without being judged, and look her in the eye without feeling uncomfortable or awkward. She never made fun of his fondness for cheesy science-fiction films, or his taste in clothing. She never questioned his enthusiasm for squirting ketchup on his potato chips. And she never mocked his inability to tell even the simplest joke without messing up the punch line. This made her unique among his acquaintances and small circle of friends.

  Then, during the third week of Nicholas’s solitary stretch, Henrietta vanished.

  Poof! (A sound that never, in the entire history of vanishings, has ever actually been made. An authentic vanishing sound, created as air rushed in to fill the void, would be more along the lines of schwupf, fwomph, or smafbap.)

  Had Nicholas not been there to see the laser-bright flash of purple light that accompanied Henrietta’s disappearance, he naturally would have assumed she’d flattened her body enough to escape beneath the door of her cage and then scrambled off in search of greener pastures. Or, at least, greener nuggets of gerbil chow. Nicholas might have searched and mourned. He even might have created a LOST GERBIL poster and papered the neighborhood with copies, enhancing the suspicion among some of the more elderly residents of his neighborhood that there was something just a little bit odd about that Landrew boy. But he never would have known Henrietta had been abducted by aliens.

  His hand reflexively went to his shirt pocket, where Henrietta liked to nestle when he took her out of his room. She wasn’t there. After staring at the empty cage for a minute or so, as if an unexplained disappearance might magically become balanced, like an algebraic expression, by an unexplained appearance (along with a resounding foop), Nicholas slid the door of the cage up, reached through the opening, and explored the bedding. He noticed a warmth to the cedar shavings right at the spot where he’d last seen Henrietta, which meant she’d been there until very recently.

  Though far from omniscient, Nicholas was highly intuitive. On a hunch, he went to his kitchen, extracted a two-pound family-size package of vacuum-sealed fresh-ground hamburger meat from the refrigerator, and placed it in the cage, directly on top of the warm spot. Nicholas had purchased the package on a whim during his weekly trip to the supermarket. He’d also bought seven boxes of cereal, which explains, in part, why the beef had remained untouched.

  Nicholas watched the cage and waited for something to happen. It didn’t take long. That was fortunate, given Nicholas’s short-to-moderate attention span. In another moment or two, had nothing happened, he would have begun to question his intuition, and returned the meat to the refrigerator. But before doubt could inspire him to abandon his experiment, the meat disappeared in an identical laser-bright flash of purple light.

  “Roach brains!” Nicholas exclaimed, blinking against the yellow afterimage that had painted his field of view. The origin of this phrase as his favorite expression of surprise and/or dismay is tied to a catastrophically disastrous science-fair project he attempted in third grade, and is best left undescribed for now.

  “I’m coming, Henrietta,” Nicholas said. He pictured himself bravely leaping into a raging river to rescue his gerbil, or commandeering a passing motorcycle to give chase to the unmarked white van that had abducted her. (Abduction vans in Nicholas’s heroic rescue fantasies were virtually always white, and passing motorcyclists were inevitably generous about allowing unlicensed youths to borrow their wheels for reckless pursuits. His fantasy rivers were always raging, and filled with dangerous rocks.)

  Having no such river from which to pluck Henrietta, or a fleeing van of any color to chase, Nicholas contemplated placing his hand where the gerbil and the hamburger meat had been. But the image of his hand disappearing in a flash of laser-bright purple light while the rest of him remained in his room sickened him as much as his third-grade science-fair project had sickened numerous classmates, three teachers, two administrators, and one custodian who was definitely working in the wrong field.

  Nicholas unlatched the top of the cage, lifted it up on its hinges, and stepped inside. His feet barely fit, despite the fact that Nicholas had splurged on a cage far larger than any gerbil might need. Maybe this is a bad idea, he thought, as the image of a missing hand was replaced with one of a missing foot. He stared down at his shoes just in time to catch the laser-bright purple flash of light enveloping his body.

  A BRIEF, BUT USEFUL, MORSEL OF HISTORY

  From the moment that one race ventured off their home planet and stumbled across another inhabited world, there has always been an Emperor of the Universe. While the emperor has a variety of traditional duties, which we can look at later, each emperor has the power to choose how to rule the endless worlds. Grashich Imrosi, for example, decided to dominate the universe with the iron fist of a dictator. He spread terror wherever he went. He was an idiot. He also holds the records for the shortest reign and the most painful death.

  His successor, Fleh the Transparent, wisely decided to do nothing and keep a very low profile. Coincidentally, she had the second-longest reign, was universally beloved, and died peacefully of natural causes.

  Unlike planetary emperors, tsars, kaisers, or khans, the position of Emperor of the Universe is too important to be passed along by means of heredity, though there is no rule against the offspring of an emperor taking the throne. That has happened countless times, both peacefully and violently. And hasn’t happened, countless other times.

  And now, let’s return our attention to a very specific, and very unpleasant, spot in the universe as Nicholas makes his arrival and an unforgettable impression.

  TAKE ME TO YOUR BLEEDER

  Nicholas felt, briefly, as if he’d been shaken hard enough to turn inside out, while sequentially being inflated and deflated. Spatial displacement by means of teleportation has that effect on creatures with inner ears or upper intestines. Having both of those makes the sensation particularly unpleasant, though mercifully, the feeling didn’t last long, thanks to the convenient appearance of temporary oblivion.

  Nicholas was totally unaware that from the moment his molecules were loosened enough for transportation until the time they were restored to their natural level of atomic bonding, he ceased to exist as a person. He wasn’t unconscious or asleep. He wasn’t dead. He just wasn’t. Period. But since there are no memories of any interval during which one ceases to be, that interval of nonexistence, which occurred between the feelings of inflation and deflation, didn’t itself exist as far as Nicholas was concerned.

  He found himself inside a three-sided cage in what seemed to be an uninhabited windowless chamber filled with unfamiliar electronic equipment, none of which rose above the height of his knees. The air was chilly, and smelled like a mixture of candy corn and budget-priced window cleaner. The bottom of the cage was slightly springy. Nicholas stepped forward through the opening, onto more solid flooring which clanged against the impact of his heels.

  The seeming lack of occupants turned out to be the sort of misconception common to those who expect all others to be like themselves in all ways. When Nicholas looked down, after scanning the room at eye level severa
l times, he discovered he was far from alone. There, at his feet, seven creatures huddled around an ankle-high table, facing Henrietta and the hamburger meat. Both the gerbil and the beef were fastened to the table by a network of straps.

  These aliens, from the planet Craborz, resembled caterpillars that had sprouted tentacles. Though caterpillars rarely grow to the size of Chihuahuas, and tentacles generally don’t terminate with three-pronged claws. Nicholas was somewhat phobic about caterpillars. He wasn’t all that fond of Chihuahuas or tentacles, either. The combination did a magnificent job of igniting his fight-or-flight response.

  Flight, at the moment, was not an option.

  Nicholas screamed. And, despite the fact that the Craborzi clutched various scientific instruments that would have indicated to anyone who’d taken the time to calmly analyze the situation that they were an intelligent life-form, Nicholas stomped repeatedly on these aliens as he made his way around the table, performing what would later be described by the more lurid chroniclers of his story as the Flamenco Dance of Death. (Flamenco dancing has inexplicably appeared on nearly every planet where the inhabitants possess any body part that can be repeatedly tapped against any hard surface without causing too much injury to either the body part or the surface.)

  Before you paint Nicholas with accusations of mass murder, xenocide, entomophobia, or other judgmental labels, keep in mind that the Craborzi were about to do pretty much the same sort of thing to Henrietta, though in a slower and highly scientific manner. It would have been more along the lines of a slicing and peeling, layer by layer, than a stomping. But the end result would have been no less lethal. It would also have been far slower and much more painful, because that’s how the Craborzi liked their science. (And their elections, but we won’t be getting into that.)