Amaranthine Historica Read online

  “You’re mine!” Olfus spluttered as his veins throbbed and popped.

  “Take a chill pill man! You’re gonna give yourself a stroke, before anyone else gets a chance to trim your head! Why don’t you go out there and give it your last best? Who knows? You might be able to persuade some of them; although I doubt it. Adios Amigos!”

  Olfus & Co. watched in disbelief. What ever happened to PURE sweet Dorion?

  “I tell you, you are mine! You’re my clone! I can prove it!” Olfus screamed. “Here! Your Top Secret records, straight out of my own personal safe. Somebody stop him! Block the doorway!”

  Nobody moved. Dorion delayed his exit. A change of heart? Was he touched by divine grace or diabolical madness? He turned around and beheld his Creator. Janie’s face was beaming. What was going to happen now? Olfus was being undone before her very eyes. She swished over to him, her lips feathering his ear. With candied vengeance she whispered, “Hickory Dickory Dock... Not a creature is stirring, not even a... Ferrett!”

  “You treacherous strumpet! Mother warned me about you!”

  “Olfus, you’re a sad cliché,” they hammered in unison—all, except Dorion, who stood still, wearing a bittersweet grin. It was all a bit spooky. “Look here old man,” he said. “I am not you and I’m not yours. Keep your Biblehub humbug for somebody else. I will not live—or die—in glad submission.”

  “Aren’t you shocked and destroyed—even ever so slightly?” Olfus stuttered.

  Dorion swung the question back with an eerie inside-out stroke. “Aren’t you? I might gouge your eyes out,” he said. The gory scene from the Blade Runner flashed before everybody’s eyes and made them squirm. Dorion’s villainous cackle bounced off the walls, as his smart phone captured images of the God of biomechanics quivering behind the resplendent Belladonna.

  “Come out, come out,” preyed the Lamb of God. “Oh, heavenly Father,” he beguiled piously. And just as Olfus’ face lit up like a firefly’s butt, the Lamb chopped his Creator’s last hope of salvation: “I ain’t hangin’ on no spit roast for you!” That was Dorion’s final verdict. As Dorion slammed the door, a finely polished agate bottle fell, spilling its blood-red wine onto Olfus’ newly stained parquet floor. Dorion’s last words were: “To hell with it! Everyone has a skeleton in the closet. I guess you’re mine!”

  The Dream was supposed to end with the crowd swelling like a tidal wave and gulping Olfus. However, this is not what happened. As the sentence ‘Time to die’ was proffered, Olfus pressed the Abracadabra button on his fitness watch, and with a bang and a sizzle, he vanished. What happened? Was this the Disappearing Girl Trick? Did he—like Lucy—break on through to the other side?

  Pharaona’s latest hit called ‘Sleeping With Sirens’, closed the show. She wrote it specifically for liars. Here it is:

  “Lie! Liar, you'll pay for your sins

  Now! Liar, I know all the places you've been

  Forgiveness—this taste all but poisons my mouth

  I scream but nothing, nothing will come out.”[54]

  The curtain fell. The spectators in the Dreamtime Aquarium applauded madly with standing ovations, as Olfus’ mummified Amarantis rose from the dead.

  CHAPTER 16 - Was It In A Dream, Was It Just A Dream?

  Olfus awoke, his heart pounding with blood and music: ‘Was it all a dream, was it just a dream? It seemed so very real’. He looked around; all was in place, including the ARC’s golden croquembouche roof. “That sandy harpy was just screwing with my mind again,” he murmured to himself, heaving a sigh of relief. However, when he buzzed Zippo for his breakfast, there was no answer. He pressed lots of buttons, rummaged the ARC for staff and other stuff, but no one was there. He was all alone inside the belly of his plush mammoth.

  Suddenly Eleni’s bullhorn cries funnelled through the limestone walls: “You faecal pile of treachery! Man up!” And everywhere Eleni went, Georgia was close by. Georgia’s indictment didn’t take long: “Liar! We’ve never been nuked! There’s no enemy at the gates! You’ve kept us prisoners for years!”

  “Egads! Something is rotten in the State of Amarantis!” he thought as he rushed to put on his face. He peeked through his periscope and saw his archenemy Dorion addressing an ironfisted mob. The Holy Passion wasn’t over. No. Far from it. His Judgement Day had come. The same Olfus fiends who once applauded him so fervently, were now screaming for his blood. He heard, “Throw that bag of bones to the dogs!” Insane thoughts bounced around his mind. Who said that? Was it Dorion? Then somebody else screamed, “Let it be done to him as he does!” Would Amarantis send him to Quality Assurance? No, he couldn’t bear that! To be recycled by his own machines? Unthinkable!

  He fell to the ground into the puddle of spilt wine, decrepit and powerless, gouged by the hatred and despair that he kept – not in a jar by the door – but in a coffin by the heart. They say the first cut is the deepest. Lucy Ferr was definitely his first and deepest. The second was Janie. And now, the trinity was complete, with his one and only Dolly, his Lamb. Oh what pain, shame and sorrow!

  He frenziedly searched for safe passage out of the quagmire, but resigned himself to the inevitable conclusion; there was no way out. An unusual surge of necessary ‘bravery’ whipped him up and spat him out on the ARC porch, at the top of the Staircase of the Giants. He was almost face-to-face, nose-to-nose, with his voracious subjects. They were only about a thousand steps away from him. The ‘Rotten Ten’ took root, bore fruit and multiplied into what seemed like the ‘Rotten Ten Thousand’. His ‘house pets’ had turned into a buzzing killer-bee hive. There they were, hooting, sneering and jeering—cheering, of course, was out of the question. “Liar, liar, pants on Fire!” they screamed. “You stole our lives!” they accused. “Recycle him!” they demanded.

  “People of Amarantis, I feel your disappointment, but only the Council of Eight has the power to judge me. I ask you therefore, to go home and wait patiently for their independent and impartial decision”.

  “Independent and impartial decision? From your Council of Eight?” the crowd bellowed, until their laughter of ridicule gave way to more vicious snarling.

  “Fear is violence!”

  “Traitor! Shove him in the Rock’n Roll Pyramid!”

  “Let him be devoured by Time! Sisyphus him!”

  Olfus’ blood went cold. The Rock’n Roll Pyramid was a custom-made House of Horrors designed by him, Darkstorm and Ferrett. The Sisyphus Sentence was the harshest; those condemned had to roll their rock up and down a hill non-stop, day in day out to the end of time. Quality Assurance was nothing compared to the Rock’n Roll. Wolfie had to change tactics—Subito! “People of Amarantis,” he said, “our democracy has been the victim of a most brutal and cowardly attack. Our technology has been crippled. My name has been muddied by scoundrels, and now you got clouds on your lids and your faith’s on the skids.[55] You blame me and nobody else but me, but my fellow Amarants, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”[56]

  “Wot? Wot's he talkin’ about, eh? Mug off, you daft twat!” a strange voice, neither male nor female, rang in the air! Olfus looked around suspiciously and said, “Are there any Bions here today?” No answer. “Hmm, bizarre,” he thought, “I know that voice, but it can’t be... I’m sure 33 said all Bions were destroyed!”

  “Lord of the Lies! Boo!”

  “You hate me because you still love me.[57] For most of you I am the only ‘father’ you have ever known. If you look back over your whole life and say, ‘My father has always been good to me’ you are indeed fortunate. If not, your heart is pained and your image of me needs psycoding.” Olfus paused here—pretending that his voice was about to crack—and rubbed his eyes until they flooded with timely tears. The crowd went silent. He wiped his face and heard some GROMly whispers: “Tis true that he created us! And made us superhuman!” But another group of GROMs intervened with: “If he loves us so much, why are most of us sitting ducks at the Western Front?” Then Hound D
og screamed: “You’re not my father! We know about the rescue ships!” There was a downright uproar.

  Olfus gazed, horror-struck, as he desperately tried to stomp out the fire of dreadful truths and accusations. What did they know about the D-Day rescue ships? They didn’t. They couldn’t. “Rescue ships are a myth, fake news,” he said trampling over scarred glances. Then just as quickly, he shifted from ‘fake news’ to fake empathy. “I know each and every one of you, like the back of my hand. I know how you have felt, people of Amarantis, at hearing the speeches of my accusers; but I tell you that they have uttered not one word of truth. You shall now hear from me the whole truth.” Bingo! Olfus managed to subjugate enough ears to borrow extra time, but the persisting eerie rustling of the crowd kept him on his toes. Without his mind-control tools, he had to rely exclusively on old clichés from the Ministry of Truth & Arts; Den Mother and Cage Master had done a runner. There were no more magic ‘Truths’ to peddle. Olfus spurred on. “As you know, the Amaranthine Oracle decreed that I am the One! Your natural ruler!”

  A dissenting choir roared: “Your Amaranthine Oracle! Sure!” The earlier strange, epicene voice became a war horn tooting, “Your Oracle! Your Council!” echoed by an army of vengeful voices. “Lick the dust! Drop dead!” they commanded. Clearly, Olfus wasn’t out of the woods.

  “People of Amarantis, do not interrupt, but hear me. I would have you know that, if you get rid of me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me. I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think, but for yours, that you may not ruin yourselves by condemning me. For if you get rid of me, you will not easily find another like me. If I had been like any other, I would not have neglected my own concerns during all these years, devoting myself to you like a father.”

  “Boo! You dog! You Scullion! Rampallian!”

  Olfus swallowed hard and cleared his throat. “Let’s bury the hatchet, wipe out the past,” he pleaded. The crowd retorted, “You’ve already wiped out our past! You’re not wiping out our future!” He threw up more stale verbiage, “You're not the only ones, with mixed emotions... To err is human, to forgive divine!” The resounding response was: “It’s over! It’s all over!” And in the face of such overwhelming negation, it was obvious that there was no room for negotiation.

  Poor star-stricken bereft Olfus! His hell-broth of boil and bubble, his whole life’s toil and trouble, had turned into vapid, yucky, flat soda. Pharaona’s haunting prophecy swirled in his misty mind, and he felt like a Humpty Dumpty in a very bad bind. Against all odds he battled on: “We, the best scientists and only survivors on this planet, carry a great weight on our shoulders. We’re in a state of emergency. Darkstorm and her team have examined the evidence as to who hacked SkEyeClops and—”

  “Burn the Emergency Constitution!”

  “Boo! Throw him in the Rock’n Roll!” shouted the Fearless Four.

  Olfus responded with: “I hear what you say! I’ve ordered a leadership reshuffle! No more Rock’n Roll! The Sisyphus Sentence is henceforth abolished!”

  The protest went wild, the children were chanting “Power to the People!” and “Freedom! Freedom now!”

  The cluster’s rocky rage made Olfus’ mind tick-tock in sync with his racing heart. He was about to short-circuit! No spin was going to spin him out of this hot turbine. His own laws condemned him—and this was really not the best time to respond with ‘Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal’. SkEyeClops had been permanently crippled and 90% of his GROMs were twiddling thumbs on the battlefront. Even if all GROMs were ordered back to base, they would need hours to traverse on foot. “Oh misery!” he thought. The image of the dodo harpy flashed before him in replay mode: “Let accursed fear ravish your maddened heart! When the ‘O’ becomes an ‘Ω’ you’ll be stripped of all!”

  He retreated into the background as Dorion’s voice thundered, “Amarants! Don’t give yourselves to brutes; people who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural people, machine people with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are living beings! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate—the unloved and the unnatural!”

  “Oh Dreaded Denebola! Raaaaaa, are you cheating again?” Astellaria slammed the ‘Pause’ on the reel. “The Dream is over! No more interfering Madam!”

  Pharaona giggled and wasn’t at all sorry for her mischief.

  “Now you’ve got Dorion stealing Charlie’s speeches! Really?”

  “Don’t get yourself into such a knot Twinkie! There’s no copyright in Dreamtime!”

  Astellaria’s face was as cold as Neptune. “You know what I mean, don’t pretend you don’t!” she said, shaking her head disapprovingly.

  Pharaona giggled some more. She was getting her own dose of ‘tragic pleasure’. “My sparkly little snow globe, in the words of Egghead himself, ‘Extraordinary events call for extraordinary measures!’ I merely slipped a snippet into Dorion’s head... and it happened to roll off his tongue.”

  Astellaria smirked and pressed ‘Play’.

  Dorion’s plagiarisms ended with, ‘you, the people have the power, the power to create machines. The power to create happiness—to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.”

  “I fully agree!” cried Olfus in solidarity. “Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to happiness for all!”

  “Oh shut up you moron!” Janie’s biting mouth clipped him. She popped out of nowhere with Victor teeter-tottering close behind her.

  “And you, Brutus? My Stormy Queen, my Tempest!” whined Olfus, as his regal vixen swaggered past. Then he remembered that fateful night of the hot scarlet moon, when ‘Gateway Shell’ brought hell; and his Queen’s icy voice decreeing, “Then, let it be so!” He looked up at the fiercely pregnant moon hanging above him only to hear the same voice cut into him. “I’m a realist Wolfie, not a poet,” she said with a nonchalant shrug. “You want me to stay on this rotten carcass of a ship? The very rats instinctively quit it.”

  Olfus’ gaze absently followed her as she started towards the Emerald Staircase of the Giants. “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero!” he lamented. She stopped briefly; just long enough to get the last word. “No, Wolfie: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.[58] Besides, what’s the point of us all going down? How necessary or practical is that? Just look at all this as... um... an opportunity... to view horror as a scientific challenge. Cheerio! Chin up, darling!” Having had the last word, she sprightly but elegantly swept her way down the grand stairway to join the raucous rebels. Victor threw his own little dart as he scampered off behind her: “You wanted to be Captain? The Captain goes down with the ship.”

  Olfus ran out of aces. The only thing left was a desperate plea for mercy—his last shot. He, who had none, was about to beg for it. And he did it in the way he knew best; he continued to rip off the most famous defence[59] recorded in History. Of course, it didn’t work out so well for the accused in that trial, but Olfus was no quitter. “People of Amarantis, hear me out. What do the slanderers say? They say I am an evildoer, and a curious person, who searches into things under the earth and in heaven, distorting nature. That is the gist of the accusation. But the simple truth is, dear Amarants, that everything I did, I did for you.”

  “Rock’n Roll!” exacted the crowd, “Sisyphus’ rock!”

  Miraculously, Olfus stayed focused. “Since I’m incapable of intentionally wronging anyone, I can hardly intentionally wrong myself by proposing an unjust penalty. What should be done to me then? Doubtless some good thing, People of Amarantis. What would be a reward suitable to a man who is your benefactor, who desires leisure that he may improve you? There can be no more fitting reward than maintenance in the Amaranthine Empire Hotel. That is the penalty I deserve People of Amarantis, for I have brought you a b
etter life. And if I am to estimate the penalty justly, I say that maintenance in the Amaranthine Empire Hotel is the just return. I refuse to give up my science; the unexamined life is not worth living. Therefore allow me the leisure of continuing my life’s work for the betterment of all life.”

  “Oh the cheek of him!”

  “You’ll have plenty of leisure where you’re going!”

  Olfus’ cold cauldrons could cook up no ‘singular charm’ to sway this crowd.

  “I see... I see... You’re no different to me, People of Amarantis. I’ve a good notion of what’s coming to me. The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”

  “No exit! Death is too good for you!”

  “The curse of the Sibyl on you!”

  Olfus shuddered. Immortality in a derelict body suffering the worst ailments of old age! He remembered the Sibyl’s lament from ‘The Wasteland’—‘I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die’.[60] Olfus prayed. He was sure that he could’ve been saved by a providential April shower tapping on the heartstrings of anyone remembering dying Roy’s ‘Tears in Rain’. But April was the cruellest month, not one clatter patter of rain, not one white dove. Olfus’ tears poured under the freezing grey sun. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” A dung beetle kissed his nose and flew away.

  With those words Olfus turned his posterior to the collective populace and furtively headed towards his ARC. Before he could sneak inside through the ARC’s regal emerald doors, the O-shaped Membrane Dome caging Amarantis cracked open. Olfus looked up and on seeing an Ω-shaped rainbow, he stumbled and fell. Dorion charged to the rescue. He picked him up saying, “Where d’you think you’re goin’ ol’ man? You’re ours!”