The planet’s vibrations worsened. Cracks appeared in the rock. The women realised a child had been caught. A cry went up and they fell to the ground, beating it with their hands. Tancredi looked back through the window. Bile rose in his mouth. The General was holding Solange by her hair. He knelt before her, bent back her neck, then opened his mouth.

Finally, on the brink of extinction, this was it. The abyss. A continuum of thoughtlessness. The coalescing of everything most foul in a dark cave on a rotten planet where thinking didn’t exist. So why should evil have an end?

Tancredi staggered backwards, unable to watch. This was beyond words, beyond comprehension, beyond madness. He stumbled about mindlessly, as if drugged, his sense of defeat complete. The twilight of the world had reduced visibility to a murky fog. He fell head-first into a spinning tea cup which contained the package of his possessions kept by Tamany. The ground trembled against the Satanic forces of destruction. Great fissures opened in the earth. Cocomo was dead, Tamany trapped, Kasbek lost, Solange – he couldn’t bear to think – and he was coiled, pathetic, in a spinning tea cup.

Tancredi took a final decision. He attached the methane pannier to the back of the teacup. As Ylang Ylang began to disintegrate, he ignited the gas and shot off the planet towards Surprise.

XXIV
Surprise

All across the Universe people linked arms. On Sanitalis, the monster stopped his ravages and joined arms with an invalid. The populace of Eros Two came together in the divorce stadium. The man-pigs of Scoop oinked into a kicking formation. On Obesitas, the bulky inhabitants hovered about the Game Show Hall, stretching out fleshy limbs. The people of Correctomondo donned safety gloves and formed a line. On Comfortably Numb, the party-goers joined in for fun. The tribes of Ylang Ylang congregated in circles in the desert, they would kick the highest. On Earth, across green fields and grey cities, people linked arms.

Surprise was ringed by satellites for the occasion. Billions of eyes were focussed on the moment of explosion, the signal to begin the can-can. These same eyes now saw a lone figure in a spinning teacup, hurtling towards the star. Next, they witnessed the figure collapse. Something had come alive and toppled Tancredi. Kasbek shook himself from sleep and stood up to face the end of the Universe with his master.

A strange energy came off the star as they approached, infusing Tancredi’s possessions with an unexpected result. Tamany’s pin transformed into a sword, the Matron’s bedpan became a shield, the fool’s cap from Eros turned into a helmet. As Tancredi tore towards Surprise, Obesitan game show cloak streaming in his wake, he was bathed in a red glow that emanated from the Star of Lenin given to him on Correctomondo.

Tancredi and Kasbek landed on Surprise, a sea of fires and lava flows. The ground shook with the power of ten thousand earthquakes, and fierce winds swept the face of the star. Tancredi, protected by his martial outfit, looked down at Kasbek sheltered beneath his shield and stroked his head for the last time. This is what he had always wanted: to face death standing, weapon in hand. The Universe watched as he raised his sword and strode into the heart of the inferno. He was last seen bending into the wind, Kasbek by his side, a great fireball of light thundering towards him.