The Broad Shouldered Hero

(by Noah Emmet)

The broad-shouldered hero came down to the beautiful planet Pletunia one summer’s eve and surveyed the war.
The purple Napoleons had been at war with the fuzzy Blurtovs for as long as anyone could remember. The Napoleons lived in house trees, and disposed of empty beer cans by tossing them out the window. The Blurtovs lived far below on the forest floor and played loud music too early in the morning. The two species hated each other.
Much effort was spent developing new and exciting ways to kill one another. They fought with ouch whips, electric baseballs and large bullets. They set traps with flame gardens, poxic free t-shirts and demolition puppies. They hardly had time to sleep, and REM deprivation was a major health concern.
From his space boat high above the treetops the broad-shouldered hero pondered the Napoleons and the Blurtovs for a long minute. How could he help these war-torn peoples and their succulent planet?
“I’ve got it!” cried the broad-shouldered hero. And with the press of a button he let loose a terrible flame that boiled the sea and turned the mountains to glass.
Huddled in the smouldering ruins, surrounded by ashen tree stumps and dead compatriots, stood the last two Pletunians.
Lora, a Napoleon general of the zamboni navy, took her daily planner from out her pocket and crossed off some things.
The Blurtov Woody Allen (no relation), a former puppy farmer, coughed. It was his birthday.
“I hope your genitals are compatible,” said the broad-shouldered hero— “not really,” said Lora —“cause you've got some fucking to do!”
And with a cry of Hero Away, he flew off for do-goodery on a planet far distant.
The two Pletunians looked at each other for a long while.
Woody lifted his laser pointer to Lora and pulled the trigger. But the Blurtov arms network was down, and his weapons had no connect. The gun sparked and fizzled, and Woody tossed it away.
It was getting cold. They gathered some tinder and built a fire.
They sat and shivered and Lora talked about a gelato place that used to be around here and Woody thought about a dog he once had, before the broad-shouldered hero killed it and the rest of his family.
The stars came out and Woody hoped something romantic might happen but Lora was busy planning. In the morning, she made an announcement.
“We will build a star ship,” she said, “and find the broad-shouldered hero, and kill him.”
Woody guessed he had nothing else to do.
So they gathered blackened logs and carved rickety planks and nailed together a star ship. It took most of the afternoon. Lora was captain and Woody her co-pilot, though he didn’t really know how, but the cockpit only had one switch anyway and Lora said she’d bother with it. They diplomatically eschewed a countdown (one of the key factors of the war was their number systems, which counted opposite from one another) and Lora flipped the switch and the crisped planet Pletunia shot away from under. Woody pressed into the branches of the observation deck and watched his village shrink away, and then he had a nap.

Aboard the space boat Bicepsual

The alarm cadoodle beeped and bleeped and whinnied annoyingly. The broad-shouldered hero hadn’t the faintest what any of it meant, but he wasn’t worried. He was drunk.
He stretched in his captain’s chair and belched contentedly and flexed his forearms, which were developed in the way that the mosquito-farming planet of Malaria 8 was not. His muscles burbled like a tempest brook beneath his tight red-and-white smock, his chest hair poking out his collar and rippling under the air-recycling unit; an auburn field of virile wheat planted atop a fertile ground of sinewy soil.
The broad-shouldered hero pressed the switch and summoned his intimacy bots. These life-like-ish robots were rare and expensive in this lonely universe and the broad-shouldered hero had four of them. They glided into the control room on gilded foot-rollers and positioned themselves robotically in front of their captain. Two of them began correcting his breakfast crossword and the other two got out q-tips and worked his ears, erotically. The broad-shouldered hero chuckled in the manly fashion he’d been born with — never had to practice — and pulled out a book he’d begun some space-years ago. It was about the alphabet, and damned if this wouldn’t be the space-year he finished it.
The book was tedious and confusing. The broad-shouldered hero threw it across the room.
He needed something to clear his head. Something jovial, or nippy, which were words he liked. He cratered his chin into his fist and thought hard. He could take a spin around that new vortex that just opened up, or catch a monkey-fight at the Monolith Café, or have his picture taken at the theoretical ball of string; he could sign up for a two-dimensional circle jerk, or a five-dimensional sex tesseract, or maybe even he could finally maybe show up for naked jury duty. The broad-shouldered hero was young, mostly, and the night was young, and you could chase the night forever if you had a space boat.
Leaning back he felt a pain in his stomach. What could this be? The broad-shouldered hero grew quizzical, and a chiseled brow furrowed his face. There was, he recalled, a scientific process for identifying unknown pains that he had learned in Space Academy.
“Computer,” said he in a deep and studied voice. “My stomach hurts.”
Computer focused a laser on the hero’s tender tummy.
“Captain,” said Computer sultrily, “you’re hungry.”
“Ah yes,” mused the broad-shouldered hero wisely, “I thought perhaps. Computer, prepare for I a banquet, as filling and terrifying as the stars themselves, for mine is a mighty appetite and the wine of victory must be paired with the solace of warmed foodstuffs.”
“Very well,” said Computer. “How does space hotdogs sound?”
“That sounds fine, Computer,” laughed the broad-shouldered hero. “In fact, that sounds…superbulous!”
Later, during the feast, a Blurtovian bomb puppy exploded outside the hull, but the broad-shouldered hero was choking on a dehydrated carrot and did not notice.

High stakes at the Monolith Café

Lora pulled into the well of a nearby comet and did some quick math.
“Our weapons are ineffective,” she said with a frown. Napoleons in general, and this general in particular, did not like ineffective weaponry; it was the Napoleon social equivalent of walking outside with no pants on.
They had brought with them some berries for nutrition, but the berries, while nutritious, had very little fiscal worth. Weapons, particularly the ones required to off a hero, were expensive. The harsh realities of extraterrestrial warfare were such that a modern space-faring armada, seeking to equip itself with the sleekest and spankiest of weaponry, would often have to endure any number of financial humilities, indentured servitude such as, or meat donation, or even sometimes bank loanings — and woe to he who would visit that bank later the month, freshly armed but head low, feet shuffling, to meekly demand the emptying of registers and wallets under the whispered snickers of knowing tellers.
Lora knew a better way.
The Blurtovs were passionate lovers but notorious cheaters. Tales of their extracurricular exploits were passed down to youthful generations by bragful school teachers in the stead of geography and math. The last monogamous Blurtov had died off years ago, before even Woody’s father's fathers' time, at the hands of a jealous gigolo who’d shown up too early for a certain party. But their sexy, thrill-seeking adulteries paled in all ways to their love of card cheats.
Gamble theft was taught by anxious parents before speech, or toilet, and was widely considered to be one of the highest forms of Blurtovian art. Once, in a regrettable moment of economic panic, the Blurtovian Senate outlawed illegal gambling from the hours of four to five in a last-ditch attempt to stem an unsanctioned currency transition from the official Blurtovian peso to the less value-retentive Friendly Reverend Artie’s All-Purpose Wagerin’ Buck. All six senators were mobbed and feathered that same day, though they later won back their freedom in a rigged game of five-card parrot.
Lora jammed the berries into her wallet and flung the ship towards the galaxy’s most popular casino.
The Monolith Café was carved from the husk of the largest monolith ever excavated and furnished with the gold-silk embryos of Chunglovvey carpet monkeys (it was a bit tacky). It circled the moon of the planet on which was built the galaxy’s most lucrative child-care center and orphanarium.
The greeting bay was packed of course and they had to wait in their wooden ship a few hours for docking clearance but finally they got in. It was another 15 minutes on the travelling sidewalk past the advertising booths and around the neon flesh arcade and then a quick jaunt through a fragranted buffet pavilion and then there they were, tiny and awed, in the cold heart of the too-bright casino that had felled kingdoms, bankrupted once-prudent democracies and was responsible, some economists believed, for the future collapse of the Big Three blackhole warpshares market.
Instinct deep and rooted and older than the monolith itself washed over Woody like berry wine. His ears drew back and the small hairs of his neck pricked
up, and when he drank deep of the air he smelled the dirt of his home. He floated to a table like a fish to its spawnery.
Woody bluffed with three eyelids open. He played razor blitz and slipped the deuce into his elbow slit. During a game of olympic pinching he made eyes at the dealer. He pocketed the cabbage *before* the second round of Johnny the farmer. He traded mink.
He was discretely sprinkling itching powder over a deck of blind bus driver when a sleeve emblazoned with the official pinstripes of the Security and Reimbursements department wrapped itself around Woody’s neck and squeezed in such a way that his tongues bulged out from between his beaks and the left side of his body went limp.
A trumpet sounded and the lights went down and a deerlight flipped bright and it pierced Woody to the floor. A voice spoke booming over the jangle of cheap and exciting sound effects and its words were to Woody the deliverence of God.
“How ya’ll doing tonight!” spoketh the voice. “Like you to meet somebody. Woody Allenini Zartini enjoys stealing, cutting you off in traffic, cheating on his wife and being the last of his kind. He survived the total annihilation of his planet, but can he survive one hour in… the Freedom Hole?”
Woody did not want one hour in the Freedom Hole. I don’t blame him. He fought and bit and scratched and spit. It was quite the spectacle! But the casino people were well trained, five-day course, and off they went, to the cheers of a gathering mob, past plastic slots and stale plantlife, through swinging door and dry fluorescent, to a horrible pit patroned by bored degenerates who wailed and gnashed and threw their money and laughed at the alien’s hilarious misfortune.
Lora had no time to watch. She collected her reward from the snitch desk and hopped a bus to the gift center. She grabbed a convenience basket and into it she threw some Class D discomfort pellets, a fungus cannon, one shrimp net, two whole boxes of heat-seeking Eskimos, an eccentric badgering ram and a vial of battlecoke, for luck. The total was a bit more than she’d expected and she had to put back some Eskimos.

Planet of the broad-shouldered heroes

In a garden by a palace on a hill under a setting sun there stood a courtyard filled with statues. The broad-shouldered hero reclined in a hammock and sipped a rhubarb daiquiri and regarded these statues, hundreds of them, thousands maybe, and what each one had meant, and what each one had cost.
They stretched across the great plains in every direction, isles of stone effigies dancing across the red horizon, twisted under his direction into gruesome diorama. Chains of marbled warrior men swatted frozen swarms of brumbled bee-rats, idols of bootheeled soldiers stamped the surprised faces of indigenous ant-schmucks. A panda-leather tapestry of the Incident at Fuzzyland Parks & Slides swam lazily over an explicitly detailed fountain alter commemorating the seducing of the He-Rock, and the victor was always the same, and each was the broad-shouldered hero.
The moon on which he was vacationing was what he liked to consider a gift from some defeated race of now-forgotten moonrock craftspeople. He'd parade-tractored it home and tethered it to his planet with a yawning space elevator that bisected the skyline and ferried forth food, an occasional esteemed guest and the statue delivery guy. There remained two peach trees from which now hung his victory hammock, but most of the moon’s native flora had been replaced by a neatly kept lawn of imported glitterweed that shimmied like disco under the shine of the planet above and satisfied the broad-shouldered hero’s modern taste for décor minimaliste.
He came here to relax and de-stress, and he came here often, because although the quests and interplanetary libations were still fun, and of course they were why-wouldn’t-they-be, they took place very far away from each other and he sometimes had trouble following directions. The broad-shouldered hero shifted, restless, and stole down his hand to stroke the hump of a leathery kittenbat. He felt a feeling in his gut for which he had no word, and no matter how much he ate it would not go away.
There was a tic in his peripheral and he looked up and saw that the planet was bright in the sky. As he watched, there appeared over its surface a fleckering of light, almost invisible but for the hero’s trained eye. A party? The broad-shouldered hero perked up.
The planet was his home, his nesting ground; it housed the birthing pod where he’d been born and the Space Academy where he’d been learned. Oh, the times he’d had! He remembered first-contact training the best. The sun jousting. The moon-lit peasant hazings. And the women. Supple, large-breasted nursewomen who glistened in the wet city lights under weekly rotation. His mates called him The Harpoon because, well.
He was thinking fondly of his planet, pointedly sighing and murmuring and gazing languidly at its swirled clouds, when it exploded into a searing cornucopia of color that burned out the back of his eyes. There was a silence, for a moment, and he thought, this is nice, and then the space elevator cracked much nearer and that was quite noisy. The moon loosed like a sling at the break of its tether, and then it fell, pointless and cruel, like a brick in a movie theater.
The daiquiri dropped from his hand and shattered on the lawn. He tripped out of the hammock and landed on broken glass and cut open the flesh of his palm but did not notice it yet.
“Computer!” he screamed. “Computer where are you!”
But Computer was far away and could not hear him.
The planet! Space Academy! His stuff! He raised to his knees and strained his neck and his arms toward the sky but his sight was being curious and all that he saw was a not-quite color he could not understand. He touched his hands to his face and felt something wet and heat and thicker than blood that was perhaps eye gooze.
The shockwave struck with a temperature he couldn't register and it knocked him onto his back. He lay there in the hard grass and tried not to breath and rested like that for a while.
All around him was the rasping of broken peach leaves and the crashing of sundered freight car. What would happen to the seasons, the clocks? The planet was where they got all their gravity from. Already he could feel the tides stopping. Would fishes still swim? Would bunnies still hop? Would the migrating kittenbats find their way to the dazzling shores of the crystal—
Shit.
His golf swing!

Revenge of the Blind Sighted Hero

(Coming soon!)