BEFORE WE BEGIN
Emperor Nicholas Landrew has become unstuck in space.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. And shamelessly stealing and modifying an amazing line from an amazing novel you will encounter later in your life, when you are ready to absorb it. (If you have no idea what I am talking about, ask a librarian, assuming they, and Earth, are still around by the end of this latest misadventure. They know these things, and many others. Though I guess that if Earth isn’t around by then, you aren’t around to read this.)
Here is where we are. When I, as Jeef, told you how young Nicholas Landrew of Yelm, Washington, became the emperor of the universe, I had the advantage of telling the tale after I’d lived through all of it. I guess I’d also sort of died through it in various ways, and undergone my first transformation. Wait. Make that my second transformation. I suppose becoming a package of grass-fed ground beef was the first. Though, mercifully, I have no memory of my final moments as an ordinary cow. The main point is that I had survived to the end of the tale. With the benefit of hindsight, I could craft the account of Nicholas’s first adventure in a way that would entertain you and hold your attention. There’s no point writing words that nobody will read.
And then, when I returned to tell you the tragic tale of the exploited clones, including Nicholas’s battle to triumph over his mortal enemies, his quest to find a purpose for his time as emperor, and my own battle to stop from fading away as I expanded with the universe, I was once again telling the tale after it had happened. Though, if you’ve traveled that road with me, you know that I, Jeef, became we, Jeefella, at the end of that adventure, when I merged with the artificial intelligence–driven newscaster, Stella Astrallis. (We have a bit more to tell you about that later.)
We all hoped that the end of that tale also marked the end of life-threatening adventures for Emperor Nicholas, and his companions, Henrietta the gerbil, Stella the assassin, and Clave the pilot. (And yes, as we’re sure you noticed, there are two Stellas. Or at least there were two Stellas until one of them underwent a merger.)
But, despite our hopes for a period of peace and quiet during Nicholas’s reign, a far greater threat has emerged, far too soon. This time, however, the tale we’ll tell has not quite come to an end. The climax lies ahead of us. We don’t know how this adventure will end, or even whether our heroes, or you, will still be around at the end. All we know is that the impossible has happened, and things have gotten very bad for everyone. The fate of the entire universe is once again in the hands of the emperor and his companions.
Let us begin, and let us hope we can reach a happy ending one more time.
WE INTERRUPT THIS MOMENT
On the last minute of the last class of the last day of seventh grade, Nicholas Landrew, emperor of the universe, made a much more dramatic exit from school than the joyful leap off the front steps he’d planned. So did every other student and teacher in any classroom that faced to the east, along with those whose classes were oriented toward other views once word had spread about the disturbance.
But let’s back up a few minutes, to where Ms. Revner, Nicholas’s language arts teacher, was discussing several of the key literary terms she felt the students needed to keep in mind during their summer reading. She’d already covered figurative language, foreshadowing, and characterization. After touching briefly on the somewhat more complex topic of point of view, which was a personal favorite of hers, she wrote a foreign phrase on the board:
En medias res.
“This means in the middle of things,” she said.
“We know,” nearly all of the students, except for the perpetually well-behaved, replied.
Like most people on Earth, Ms. Revner was still having a hard time remembering that everyone had inexplicably gained understanding of other languages. This ability even applied to dead languages like Latin, as long as they were still being widely studied. (It should be noted that roughly half the foreign-language teachers in the school were deliriously happy that their students were doing so well, while the other half felt crushed by a tragic loss of purpose.)
Ms. Revner, who was as incapable of making rapid directional changes as a fully laden ocean liner traveling at full speed, carried on with her lesson plan, despite the reminder that her explanation was unnecessary.
“Medias,” she said. “Think of words like medium. I’m sure you can think of many related words with the same root.” An expert teacher, she knew that knowledge, by itself, wasn’t enough of a gift to her students to help prepare them for life outside the classroom. Students still had to make connections, and to learn how to apply that knowledge. “As for en medias res, pay attention to the manner in which the novel you’ll be reading starts. Or each story, if you chose a collection. How does it open? Is something happening? Is there a fight or a chase or an explosion? Or is the author setting up the scene or the characters, first? Is there action or description? Ask yourself if the writing draws you in. Does it make you want to keep reading?”
She circled the phrase, and repeated it.
That’s when the spaceship landed in the middle of the football field to the east of the school, rattling the windows with the rumble of its retrothrusters. Even if Nicholas hadn’t recognized the ship by sight or sound, he was pretty familiar with the less-than-smooth landing it made, though he’d usually experienced this abrupt and jolting contact with solid planetary surfaces from the other side of that particular ship’s hull.
As his classmates scampered to the window for a better look, Nicholas caught Stella’s eye and said, “I think that’s here for us.” He glanced down at his pocket, where Henrietta, his sentient and highly articulate gerbil, had been taking a nap.
“I think you’re right,” Henrietta said, after a brief yawn and a quick scratch.
“Us?” Stella asked. She’d appeared at his school the week after he’d become emperor, and bore a startling resemblance to the girl of his dreams. He’d accepted this coincidence as just the way things seemed to go in his life. They’d become close friends ever since she’d decided to disobey her order to assassinate him.
“Sure,” Nicholas said. “We’re a team. Right?”
“Right,” she said.
“Shall we?” he asked.
“I’d love to,” she said. “I wonder why he’s here.”
“It has to be important,” Nicholas said. “I mean, he just basically announced that flying saucers are real. Not that The Nick of Space looks anything like a saucer. But it’s obviously not from Earth.”
“Clave’s idea of important might not be the same as yours or mine,” Stella said. “He can be pretty self-centered.”
“Definitely,” Nicholas said. “Either way, he’s here, and the whole world is about to get a big surprise. I guess, sooner or later, people had to learn they aren’t alone in the universe. I was hoping to come up with a gentle way to spread the news. It looks like that’s not going to happen.”
By then, the classroom had emptied out, except for Nicholas, Stella, and Henrietta.
“We should get down there before someone calls in a drone strike,” Henrietta said. “You humans are horribly enthusiastic about blowing things up.”
“Good point,” Nicholas said. “Though that’s pretty much true of most of the life forms I’ve met.”
They dashed outside and pushed their way through the crowd that was standing on the near side of the football field. In the distance, Nicholas could hear sirens. Fortunately, the sky held no sign of drones, attack helicopters, or fighter jets yet.
The boarding ramp descended. Behind Nicholas, half the crowd inched closer, probably expecting an amazing alien unlike any creature they’d seen before, with an enormous head, translucent skin, and eyes the size of dinner plates. If they managed to catch even a small glimpse of the occupant, they would have been deeply disappointed by his basic humanoid appearance and highly expressionless eyes.
The other half of the crowd scooted back, picturing a variety of fantastic horrors—from hideous snarling beasts charging out, firing unimaginable weapons that vaporized everything they hit, to swarms of unstoppable voracious insects, to cold steel robots that crushed everything in their path. They were unaware that the fierce and lethal attacks would come later.
As for now, Nicholas boarded the ship and took a seat on the floor, leaving the seat next to Clave free for Stella.
“What’s the emergency?” he asked as Clave closed the ramp.
“The universe needs you,” Clave said. “You have to fulfill your pledge.”
It took Nicholas a moment to realize what Clave was talking about. And another moment to realize there didn’t seem to be any real emergency. “You didn’t have to come all the way down here and scoop me up so I could take the blame for whatever it is. I can do that from anywhere. I don’t even need to take it. Everyone pretty much gives it to me automatically.”
One of only two jobs the emperor had to swear to fulfill was to take blame for anything for which there was no blame. Nicholas turned out to be quite gifted at that pointless task. Even before he’d become the emperor, he’d had a lot of practice taking the blame for things for which he was actually to blame. That abundance of blame-worthy stunts came naturally for any twelve-year-old kid who had an active imagination and an overabundance of curiosity. And the absurdity of the rule about unearned blame would not be surprising to anyone who had to deal with both parental and school regulations.
“I wish that was the reason,” Clave said. “This isn’t about blame. It’s the other thing.”
“The other thing?” Nicholas asked. He’d pretty much forgotten his promise, since he’d dismissed it at the time as not ever happening. He thought back to that moment, which felt like five lifetimes ago, when the Syndics who ran the imperial stronghold and elected each new emperor had told him he needed to take a vow. He could still hear them asking the final question:
“Will you accept blame for all things for which there is no blame?”
But before that, they’d asked something he didn’t pay much attention to because it didn’t make much sense:
“Do you swear to defend the universe from all attacks?”
As the ship rose from the football field, he said to Clave the same thing he’d thought when he’d first been asked the question: “That’s impossible. It can’t happen. There’s no way the universe can be attacked.”
“True,” Clave said. “It can’t happen. But I guess it did, somehow. We’ve been attacked.”
“But the universe contains everything,” Nicholas said.
“That’s true. This universe does,” Clave said.
“This universe?” Nicholas asked. “What do you mean?”
“Apparently, there are other universes,” Clave said. “And we’ve been attacked by one.”
NOT IN THE MIDDLE
As exciting as it is to start in the middle of things, with a spaceship landing on a football field, that approach can leave out lots of the less explosive but still important events that might be of interest to you, or important for your ability to understand what is going on. For instance, there was the moment a week before that dramatic landing, when Nicholas actually got an introduction to the topic that would become vitally important to him very soon. Though we realize that while Nicholas was in the dark before that moment, those of you who read about our first adventure were treated to several encounters with the topic. We do like to talk. Though you can be forgiven if those mentions have slipped from your memory. We’ve covered a lot of ground, and space, in very little time.
Either way, let us visit that moment when Nicholas was happy to not be in the middle of things.
Wait. There’s one more bit of backstory to clear up. Since we have a role to play in that scene, let’s avoid confusion by explaining our new name. At the end of Nicholas’s last adventure, we’d been named Jeefella, since we were both Jeef, the sentient package of grass-fed ground beef who’d been spread throughout the universe, and Stella Astrallis, the artificial intelligence–simulated newscaster who’d been designed to resemble each viewer’s true love. (The other Stella had been chosen by the Unilluminated from among all of their available assassins, and sent to Earth with that name, because she resembled the Stella that Nicholas saw when he watched newscasts.)
We were not fond of Jeefella as a name. It felt too much like it was cobbled together, and didn’t really fit either of us. So, in the spirit of how “Jeef” came about by means of Nicholas shortening “grass-fed” to “GF,” and then to the sound-alike name of “Jeef,” we looked at our initials. J for Jeef and S for Stella. “J and S” sounded sort of like “Jess” and sort of like “Janice.” It was also a bit like “Janus,” but we didn’t think we wanted to be named after a Roman god, even if he was somewhat suitably depicted as having two faces. In the end, we decided on Janice, since it also rhymed with Stella’s last name of Astrallis. So we are Janice. There are other aspects of our merger that will play a role in the story, but they can be saved for later.
And now, let’s visit the moment in question, just a few days before Clave’s appearance in the middle of things.
Copyright © 2023 by David Lubar
