Captains Stupendous Read online

  CAPTAINS STUPENDOUS

  OR:

  THE FANTASTICAL FAMILY FARAWAY

  Rhys Hughes

  Published in the United Kingdom by Telos Moonrise: Steampunk Visions

  (An imprint of Telos Publishing Ltd)

  5A Church Road, Shortlands, Bromley BR2 0HP, UK

  Captains Stupendous or The Fantastical Family Faraway © 2014 Rhys Hughes

  Cover Design: David J Howe

  Cover Art: Martin Baines

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-84583-886-7

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person then please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedicated to:

  Safaa Dib

  Praise for Rhys Hughes

  ‘Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet’s literature ... As well as being drunk on language and wild imagery, he is also sober on the essentials of thought. He has something of Mervyn Peake’s glorious invention, something of John Cowper Powys’s contemplative, almost disdainful existentialism, a sensuality, a relish, an addiction to the delicious. He’s as tricky as his own characters ... He toys with convention. He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible and the comic hints at subtle pain. Few living fictioneers approach this chef’s sardonic confections, certainly not in English.’ Michael Moorcock

  ‘Quirky and fantastic and sometimes quite twisted, Rhys Hughes is a treat for those in the mood for something utterly different.’ Ellen Datlow

  ‘Rhys Hughes is an accomplished player with words, plots, effects, relationships, sensibilities; you name it, Hughes tries to stand it on its head. More often than seems attributable to mere chance, he succeeds.’ Ed Bryant, Locus

  ‘I wore throughout the undisplaceable, unsequelchable rictus of a grin of both delight and amazement.’ Michael Bishop

  ‘Hughes’ world is a magical one, and his language is the most magical thing of all.’ T E D Klein

  ‘There are no easy phrases to describe Hughes’ fiction; it’s so exotic. His writing is incredibly precise and at the same time his imagination is so unfettered.’ Jeffrey Ford

  ‘Hughes’ similarity to Spike Milligan runs deeper than the occasional shared lurch of phrase, for he writes as though he’d been bloodied in the same wars Milligan fought for eight decades: the same up-yours melancholia about the malice of the absurd – about the absurdness of the world defined not only as an inherent lack of species-friendly grammar in the convulsion of the real, but also a sense that anyone who acts as though he believes what he is told by our Masters will almost necessarily inflict pain on others.’ John Clute

  ‘It’s a crime that Rhys Hughes is not as widely known as Italo Calvino and other writers of that stature. Brilliantly written and conceived, Hughes’ fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumphantly parades across all bestseller lists. ‘ Jeff Vandermeer

  ‘A dazzling disintegration of the reality principle. A rite of passage to the greater world beyond common sense. Raises the bar on profundity and sets a comic standard for the tragic limits of our human experience. Like Beckett on nitrous oxide. Like Kafka with a brighter sense of humor.’

  A A Attanasio

  ‘Dazzling prose. Put your feet up and dip in. Life will never seem quite the same again.’ The Third Alternative

  ‘The incredible richness of language, the inexhaustible array of puns, double entendres, weird metaphors, non-lexical use of words, and original turns of phrase ... Rhys Hughes is essentially an absurdist humorist, though often of a peculiarly black, tricky and sometimes bloody sort. Much of his work is travesty, drawing for substance on other works, which he uses as a basis for destructive humour, for reinterpretation in a different mode, or as a starting point for his own work. This statement is not meant in disparagement, for Hughes’s new versions are highly original in conception and often brilliant.’ Supernatural Fiction Writers (Scribners)

  ‘Rhys Hughes is one of the most wildly inventive talents we are graced with today.’ All Hallows

  ‘What do I like about Rhys Hughes’s work? Fun. Hughes sees and precipitates in words the latent humour in almost anything. Ranging from what our culture considers pleasing and smilingly ridiculous to horrors that have to be laughed at if they are faceable at all, Hughes is a laughing observer, both inside and outside. With Hughes you get humour that is white, various shades of grey, black – and I don’t know why humour cannot be characterised by other colours. I am also enormously impressed by Hughes’s stylistic brilliance. The richness of language, the occasional Cambrianisms, the inexhaustible array of puns, weird metaphors that form the point of a story. And I envy him his netted imagination. As a man who sees connections where others do not, he offers enough ideas, if parcelled out, to fill a catalogue of fantasy for a generation of writers.’ E F Bleiler

  ‘Every Hughes story implies much, served with wit and whimsy and word-relish, high spirits and bittersweet twists.’ Ian Watson

  ‘So you want to know about the Faraway Brothers, do you? Born somewhere in Gascony, they were, in the 1880s, all three of them birthed at the same time from the same womb of the same mother. Grew up in the same household, they did too, eating the same food, reading the same books, counting the legs on the same spider because the family couldn’t afford a real clock; but later on they went their separate ways. Scipio took to the sea, to ships, islands and women; Distanto took to the air, to balloons, islands and women; Neary, unluckiest of the triplets, remained on land, taking only to locomotives and stations and chastity. Many adventures they all had and often their paths crossed and sometimes they clashed, and I happen to know a song about it that goes something like this… Hey, where are you going? Come back!’

  The Ballad of the Fantastical Faraways

  Contents

  PART ONE: SCIPIO 14

  THE COANDĂ EFFECT 16

  The Iceberg 17

  The Airshow 23

  The Bicycle 27

  The Sailor on Land 31

  The Collector 33

  The Modern Pirate 39

  The Oasis 43

  Into the Atlantic 47

  Meanwhile in Romania 51

  Blood and Fog 55

  The Iron Coffin 59

  The Converter 65

  The Coloured Glass 71

  The Bandit Queen 77

  The Morning After 83

  The Demonstration 87

  The Letter 93

  The Arrival 97

  The Ending 105

  PART TWO: DISTANTO 113

  THE GARGANTUAN LEGION 115

  The Lance 117

  The Tavern 123

  Shipping Out 127

  Distance is no Object 131

  Bicycle Interlude 135

  The European Desert 139

  The Syndicate 145

  The Great Work 149

  The Stealth Empire 153

  Flock of Assassins 159

  Higher Noon 165

  Gathering Storm 169

  The Point 175

  Suited to the Task 179

  Conflicting Rascals 185

  The Legion of Legions 191

  The Third Prong 199

  Quaint Little Pillage 203

  Shangri-La Farce 2
07

  PART THREE: NEARY 215

  THE APEDOG INCIDENT 217

  The Bone Banana 219

  The Fungus 225

  The Clean Balloon 229

  The Midget 233

  The Monogorgon 237

  The Steam Elephant 243

  Locomotive Breath 245

  Brigands 249

  Various Other Doings 253

  A Transindianocean Tunnel, Hurrah 257

  Next Stop the Future 263

  Humanzeeville 269

  The Finnish But Not The End 275

  The Promised Digression 281

  The Xylophone 289

  Coincidence 295

  Apedog At Last 303

  The Final Chapter 305

  The Book Group 309

  PART ONE: SCIPIO

  THE COANDĂ EFFECT

  The Iceberg

  Atlantic Ocean, 15 April 1912.

  The iceberg that struck and sank RMS Titanic the previous night now proceeded on its way south, borne by strange currents; and a Czech sailor by the name of Stepan Rehorek managed to take a photograph of it as his own ship passed, but he wasn’t fully aware of its historical significance. The floating mountain of murderous ice was already melting rapidly and soon would be gone completely.

  Or so he assumed; but he was wrong …

  A melting iceberg will fizz as trapped air bubbles thousands of years old are steadily released into the atmosphere of the modern world; and because the mass shrinks far more quickly at the base than the summit, it becomes unbalanced and abruptly rolls over to achieve a new stability. This periodic turning is a dramatic and sometimes catastrophic spectacle to behold, according to witnesses.

  Rehorek’s photograph shows the Titanic iceberg to be of the ‘drydock’ type. There are three main categories of drifting iceberg: tabular, pinnacle and the irregular drydock. Ultimately all have their protuberances, peaks and edges dissolved away and become relatively smooth spheres of ice in the final stages of their dissolution. Finally the last ice crystal deliquesces and vanishes and becomes part of the ocean once more, endlessly diluting itself in the unfathomable depths.

  On this occasion, that didn’t quite happen.

  There was another ship in the vicinity; posterity never mentions it, for it was on a secret mission, and the captain responsible for controlling the shady sailors that crewed it was a tight-lipped character who never spoke of his work to anyone and even kept his men in ignorance of destinations, commissions and legality. Marlow Nullity was his name: pirate, smuggler and blockade-runner. A scoundrel.

  He had accepted an assignment from a certain Mr Hugo Bloat, richest dweller of the town of Porthcawl, in the country of Wales, and a collector of morbid curios. Bloat lived in a house full of objects that normal people would deem unwholesome or malign: skeletons of criminals, tombstones, voodoo masks, a library of occult books bound in lizard skin, charms and fetishes from numerous exotic cultures, a golden knife said to be from the lost city of Ubar in the Rub’ al Khālī.

  Bloat was cruel but not dull and he kept himself alert to potentialities in his particular sphere of interest. He read a dozen or more newspapers every day and possessed a private radio transceiver more powerful than anything owned by many European governments at that time. Prolonged study of weather reports for the Atlantic had convinced him that a disaster involving an iceberg was very likely, and he decided that an opportunity for an extremely unusual addition to his collection of bizarre artefacts had presented itself. He chuckled horribly.

  He sent a message to Captain Marlow Nullity and ordered him to sail his ship into the designated danger zone and wait for further instructions. Thus when Hugo Bloat picked up the distress call of RMS Titanic on his radio, he was able to relay the message to Captain Nullity and guide him to the scene of the grim accident more rapidly than any rescue vessel; but picking up survivors formed no part of Mr Bloat’s plan. His interest in the sunken liner’s passengers was minimal.

  It was the iceberg that compelled his attention.

  Captain Nullity intercepted the mountain of ice shortly before Rehorek passed it, but his nameless ship was on the far side of the frozen mass and doesn’t appear in the photograph. Neither crew was aware of each other, a stroke of luck for Nullity and his decadent employer. Bloat wanted him to keep the iceberg always in sight, to follow it until it shrank to manageable size, however long that might take. And so Captain Nullity trailed it south for weeks, watching it roll and dissolve.

  At last it reached the specified dimensions. He steered alongside it and ordered a sailor on deck to fish the thing out with a net attached to a long pole. The infamous iceberg that had claimed so many lives by sending an unsinkable liner to the seabed was now no larger than the fist of a child. It took the sailor several attempts to catch it. He drew it up and passed it to Captain Nullity, who carried it to his cabin, nodding stoically as it rapidly numbed all feeling out of his fingers.

  In one corner of his cabin was a metal box, some sort of refrigeration device, festooned with pipes that gurgled; and into this apparatus Captain Nullity lowered the chunk of ice. Then he sealed it tight and adjusted the thermostat downwards, grinning to himself. Mission accomplished! Time to sail for Porthcawl and claim his reward from Hugo Bloat. Within a few weeks he would be fairly rich again.

  His nameless rusty ship with its peculiar cargo steamed northeast and took care to avoid the conventional shipping routes. Once past Cornwall it would be a simple matter to enter the Bristol Channel and arrive at the harbour of Porthcawl in the dead of night. Mr Bloat had bribed the local coastguard; no problems from the authorities were anticipated. This was the easiest part of the entire adventure.

  But events didn’t go quite to plan. There was a storm and freak waves smashed a hole in Captain Nullity’s hull. He gave orders to abandon ship and he took to the lifeboats with his crew. That was at 45°N, 15°W. The refrigerator containing the shrunken iceberg floated free of the wreck and was carried by currents parallel to the coastline of Portugal, all the way to the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea.

  The refrigerator contained its own power source, powerful batteries in waterproof casings. Sealed in its special tomb, the ice didn’t melt. Slowly the box drifted through the Pillars of Hercules. Unseen, it continued on its way eastwards, past Italy and Greece.

  It took months for the box to float the length of the Mediterranean. By chance it passed through the Dardanelles and the Bosporus into the Black Sea. After drifting randomly for another month it was eventually washed up on the beach of Costineşti, a fishing village close to Romania’s border with Bulgaria. The peasant who found it was collecting seaweed; with the aid of a rope he dragged it to his hut.

  An engineer by the name of Dumitru Banuş was staying in Costineşti at the time, recovering from injuries he had sustained in an accident in his workplace. The peasant attempted to sell the mysterious piece of flotsam to Banuş; and after a quick scrutiny of the object in the gloom of the hut, a price was agreed. Banuş’s curiosity had been whetted by the dullness of life in the village and thus he welcomed any distraction. Opening the box, he was bewildered by what lay within.

  But he shut the door of the refrigerator and decided that his colleagues at the university should be given an opportunity to examine it. There was no telephone line between Costineşti and Bucharest; he had to hire a boat to take him to the spa at Eforie Nord, a dozen kilometres up the coast. He called Professor Bogdan Velicu from the hospital there. Velicu listened to his friend in respectful silence, then promised to set off personally for the fishing village the following morning.

  Banuş returned in the boat to Costineşti; and when Velicu arrived in a motorcar the next day, he opened the box to show the scientist the frosted sphere inside. Velicu inserted a hand into the vaporous space, touched the surface of the gleaming sphere and licked his finger. Then he gasped and for a few moments shivered uncontrollably. With Banuş’s help he carried the refrigerator to his motorcar. They lowered it gently onto th
e back seat. With a sombre expression, Velicu said:

  ‘I think it’s better if proper tests are conducted at the university. I don’t know why, but I feel there’s something peculiar about this block of ice. It might be argued that scientists shouldn’t act on a hunch, but it would be a shame if we missed a spectacular discovery because of restraint! I’ll write and keep you aware of developments.’

  Banuş nodded and waved farewell to Velicu. The professor began the drive back to Bucharest with his prize. A few days later the sphere of ice was housed in his low-temperature laboratory while a methodical battery of tests was applied to its shining form. Velicu subjected it to many kinds of radiation; to amplified sound and radio waves; electromagnetic fields; he refracted and reflected light with it; inspected it through microscopes; weighed, prodded and photographed it.