Terry Bisson - The Fifth Element

mechanics. Hundreds of people who will be able to feed their children tonight, so that those children can grow up to be big and strong—have children of their own, and so on and so forth, adding to the great chain of life!”

Cornelius sat in silence.

“So you see, Father, by creating a little destruction, I am, in fact, encouraging life. You and I are in the same business.”

“Hardly,” said Cornelius. “Destroying a glass is one thing. Killing people with the weapons you produce is quite another.”

Zorg’s dry laugh was as harsh as wind in dead leaves.

“Let me reassure you, Father, I could never kill as many people in my entire life as religion has killed in the past two thousand years.”

He raised the glass. The cherry bobbed at the bottom like a severed head.

“Cheers.”

He tipped the glass back and took a deep drink. The water disappeared.

Then the cherry disappeared.

Zorg’s eyes grew wide. He dropped the glass. He pointed at the glass and then at his throat.

“You’re choking?” asked Cornelius. He watched as Zorg fell, writhing, onto his massive teakwood desk.

Zorg’s arm flailed about, reaching for the desktop communications console. His hand stabbed blindly at the row of buttons.

The phone lines lit.

The fax machine booted up.

The lights went on.

A CD recorder rose from a well in the desk.

A TV monitor emerged from the wall.

“Where’s the robot to pat your back?” Cornelius asked. His voice was as dry, his tone as sarcastic as Zorg’s had ever been. “Where’s the engineer, or the mechanic—or their children, maybe. All of whom you claim owe their very lives to you?”

Zorg’s hand continued to stab blindly at the console.

The door to the office slid shut, cutting off the two men from all hope of outside assistance.

A panel opened in the ceiling and a cage descended.

In it was a fat multicolored alien beast, a sluglike reptile with a trunk like an elephant’s: Zorg’s pet—a Souliman Aktapan named Picasso.

The cage landed on the desk, and Picasso stuck his slimy trunk through the bars to lick (or whatever) the twitching hand of his half-dead master.

Cornelius got up from his leather chair and walked around the desk.

Slowly.

“We were not put upon this Earth to destroy each other, Mr. Zorg, but to reflect the goodness of life—the infinite possibilities of life.”

He paused to admire the view out the window, turning his back on Zorg’s all but lifeless form.

“That is our mission—and not to decide who lives and who dies. And if you forget that…”

Cornelius picked up the stem of the cherry from the desktop, where Zorg had dropped it.

“…nature will remind you. See how all your so-called power counts for nothing? See how your entire empire of destruction comes crashing down because of a little cherry?”

Zorg was turning blue.

Picasso, to whom blue was a sign of affection, was turning green with happiness.

“The truth is, my son, that life is a blessing,” Said Father Cornelius. “A precious gift, given with love—as I now give it to you.”

Cornelius whacked Zorg on the back.

The cherry flew out of his mouth, striking Picasso between his beady eyes.

Zorg sat up, dazed. He looked around and pressed a button on the desktop console.

The office door slid open.

“You saved my life,” Zorg said to Cornelius. “So Pm going to spare yours—for now. Guards!” Two armed guards rushed into the room. Right Arm was right behind them.

“Throw him out!” said Zorg.

“You are a monster, Zorg,” said Cornelius as the two guards dragged him from the room.

Zorg seemed finally to have regained his composure. “Thank you,” he said. “I know.”

He saw his secretary at the reception desk, doing her nails. She nodded at the priest being dragged from the room toward the elevator.

“Have a nice day, Father,” she said, as the office door slid shut and the elevator door slid open.

Zorg opened the cage door and took out Picasso and held him in his arms.

Right Arm stood quietly, watting for the orders he knew would be coming sooner or later.

“Torture whoever you want,” Zorg said. “The President, if you have to. But I want those stones.”

Right Arm nodded.

“You have one hour.”

Right Arm nodded and left the office.

Zorg sat for a Jong time, petting his monster and watching the sun set over the vast and troubled city.

Light years away from Zorg and his pet, three warships were positioned in front of a dark shape that had congealed into a planet.

The warships were the cream of the United Federation fleet. The best of the best.

The planet was the worst of the worst—a dark conglomeration of an intelligent, or at least responsive, anti-matter. It seemed to literally eat light, leaving a null darkness from which the eye could not be averted.

Small bright specks were being drawn into it.

One winked in from a far distance and disappeared. Then another, from another sector of the galaxy.

They were drawn to its darkness as bugs are drawn to light. It was an anti-light, a vacuum that sucked in information, a black hole that ate technology.

“It’s gobbling up all the communications satellites in the galaxy!” exclaimed a voice from one of the watching ships.

Thanks to the magic of FTL (faster-than-light) plasma optics, the dark planet also appeared on a viewscreen in an office in Manhattan.

The voice from the ship was heard there too.

The listener was a large black man slumped over in a chair bearing the seal of the United Federation.

The President.

“Why the hell is it eating up all those satellites?” he asked.

A grim-faced scientist stood at his elbow.

“We’re working on it, President Lindberg.”

“It should only choke on them,” groaned the President.

General Munro entered the office as the scientist left.

Also entering the office was a small cockroach—or what appeared to be a cockroach. The tiny antennae on its back revealed it to be a genetically altered biological (GAB) listening device.

Connected to the scurrying GAB was a man in a small room across town, listening on earphones.

Right Arm.

General Munro saluted the President. “I managed to contact the Mondoshawans,” he said. “They deplore the incident, but accept our apologies.”

The President breathed a sigh of relief. “And the stones? Did you find them in the wreckage of the Mondoshawan ship?”

“The Sacred Stones weren’t aboard the ship.”

“What?” The President was all ears.

So, thanks to the magic of nanotech, was Right Arm.

“The Mondoshawans never fully trusted the human race,” said General Munro. “So they gave the stones to someone they do trust. Her name is Plavalaguna.”

“Plavalawho?”

“Plavalaguna,” said Munro. “She’s a famous diva, and she’s going to sing at the charity ball on Fhloston Paradise in a few hours. She has the Sacred Stones with her.”

“Excellent,” said the President, taking off one shoe.

Excellent! breathed Right Arm to himself.

“Damn bugs!” said the President. He smashed the cockroach on his desk.

WHACK!

And Right Arm’s earphones flew off.

Thanks to the magic of audio amplification.

“I want this operation to be as discreet as possible,” said the President. “No troops, no big operation. The council doesn’t have to know about this yet. I want your best man on this.”

“Hmmmm,” said Munro. “I have the perfect man.”

Munro’s perfect man was throwing up into his toilet bowl.

His cat looked on through the open bathroom door. People had the strangest habits. But hair ball?