O Cowboydan, world of several places,

Planet of some large objects,

Where is your glory, if you’re so

Great?

Now Arruckus, now, there’s a planet—

Things happen, events exciting.

Action, adventure, romance, intrigue.

Let us go, then, you and I,

Aboard that big silver bird up in the sky,

To Doon, to Doon, to Doon, to Doon,

To Doon, to Doon, to Doon, to Doon.

As our caissons go rolling along.

—from “Hymns, Prayers, and Show Tunes of Mauve’Bib.” compiled by the Princess Serutan

The Lady Jazzica, her hands tied behind her and her mouth gagged, struggled to adjust her position in the orthodontothopter. Beside her, Pall lay similarly bound, but without a gag.

“Eh, Skagg, look a’ tha’ ‘un wiggle,” rasped one of the two guards, a stocky thug named Krudd.

His companion, piloting the craft, guffawed. “Wot a pity if’n we let ‘er go ‘thout a li’l fun, eh mate?”

Jazzica sought to calm herself. They had been loaded onto the ‘thopter after their audience with the Baron. She was certain their fate was to be killed, then left for the pretzels to destroy. These poor fools, she thought, glancing at her captors. They themselves’ll surely be killed when they return. The Baron wants no witnesses. Then whoever kills them’ll be killed too. Then the killers of the killers’ll be killed, and so on, until no one in the universe’ll be left alive. The import of the thought sent her sensorum reeling. That’d be terrible!

“Aye,” the one called Krudd said, ” ‘ere, now, Skagg. You fly the bird a bit an’ I’ll ‘ave a li’l fun. Then we’ll switch, ‘ow’s ‘at, then?”

“Waw,” the other replied with a grunt. ” ‘f you ‘ave all the fun first, there won’t be any left f’me, innit?”

“Kah-mawn, Skagg—I won’ use up alla fun. I’ll leave you a bi’, now, there’s a good lad.” He turned his attention toward Jazzica, said with a rheumy-eyed leer, ” ‘ere, then, Miss—d’you come ‘ere often?”

Jazzica shook her head. Outside the window she could see they were flying over the Shield, heading for open sugar country.

“Right,” Krudd said with leering satisfaction. ” ‘ere, then—wot’s a nice bit like you doin’ inna place like this?” Then he turned to the man piloting the ‘thopter, slapped his knee, and chortled, ” ‘ey, this is fun!”

I’d best humor him, Jazzica thought. She spoke; the gag impeded her mouth movements, resulting in making her answer a foreign, indecipherable thing: “Unh-unh-uhnnah-uhn-uhn.”

“Get—” Pall said, then swallowed in a dry throat.

He’s trying to use the Cook-Voice! Jazzica thought.

It was a Boni Maroni thing, a technique she had taken pains to teach him.

“Each human,” she had said as he had listened wide-eyed, “has a specific sonic range of tolerance for voice communication. Study carefully all you meet. You will learn to focus on the narrow range-spectrum of susceptibility in each individual. By pitching your voice to that precise frequency, you will be able to—”

“—make anyone do what I want?” he asked with a child’s eagerness.

She had permitted herself to smile. “No, Pall. But the race-instinct of every human being compels him to want to snoop in the kitchen while you’re cooking. To look in pots, take little tastes, and use your cutting board for making gin and tonics while you would see to adequate food preparation.”

He had nodded solemnly—a boy, yet already displaying a man’s stoicism in the face of the cruelty implacable of life’s truths.

“By mastering the Cook-Voice, you may irritate, and thereby banish, anyone you choose.” Then she’d paused, her mind a galloping boil of doubt.

Dare I reveal to him the esoteric technique? she brutally introspected. But he was heir to her genetic bequeathment, and to that of the Duke. Who, if not he, deserved inheritance of the legacy?

“Now, repeat after me, in this precise tone,” she’d instructed. ” ‘Get out of the kitchen. It’ll be ready when it’s ready.’ “

“Get out of the kitchen,” he’d attempted. “It’ll be ready soon.”

“Again. And do not omit the second ‘ready.’ ” He had applied himself to the study with a single-mindedness and focus of attention worthy of a monk of the sect of the Organized Confucians. One day he had surprised his father during a high-level staff meeting in the Great Hall. Wandering in amongst the assembled officers and aides, he had suddenly whined, “Get out of the kitchen, Lotto. It’ll be ready when it’s ready.”

A silence had fallen; men exchanged sharp glances dense with piercing meaning. There had been something so annoying, so irritating, so enragingly nasal in the boy’s bitch-tone.

Then Lotto had stood up, said, “My son learns the Boni Maroni Ways and Means. It is good.” To Pall he had said, “Remind me to give your mother a raise.”

Now, Jazzica realized, Pall was attempting the Cook-Voice with these two henchmen. Would it work?

” ‘ere, now, lad,” the one called Krudd said to Pall, ” ‘ow can I ‘ave any fun wi’ you talkin’ a’ me?” He reached his hand out toward Jazzica’s dress and slid it under, up her legs.

Carefully pitching his voice, Pall said briskly, “Get out of the kitchen.”

” ‘eh? Wot?”

“It’ll be ready when it’s ready,” Pall said.

“Cor, don’ like ‘is voice much,” muttered the pilot, Skagg.

“Get out of the kitchen!” Pall said more harshly, and watched impassively as the two men winced. Krudd withdrew from Jazzica and clamped both hands over his ears. “Stop! Stop!” he cried.

“It’ll be ready when it’s ready!”

The ‘thopter took a sudden dip as Skagg, shaking his head in agony, cried, “I’ll set ‘er down ‘ere! Let’s dump ‘em! Anythin’ t’ stop that ‘orrible sound!”

Krudd nodded, stared fearfully at Pall.

“Untie her,” Pall said.

The man looked doubtful, said: “Cor, dunno, lad. We’ve orders to—”

“Get out of the kitchen!”

“There there, lad. There, there…” Hastily he untied Jazzica’s hands, removed her gag, untied Pall’s hands. In a moment the ‘thopter touched down on a stretch of flat white sugar and rolled to halt.

Pall opened the hatch and prepared to leap out. Jazzica looked at the two men. “Give us your knives and canteens,” she said.

Skagg said anxiously, “O, we couldn’, Milady. ‘f we ‘ave to explain back at the base where they went, we’ll get in a peck o’ trouble—”

Jazzica called on her years of experience to pitch her Cook-Voice to its most devastating whininess, said: “How can I make your dinner if you get in the way all the time?”

” ‘ere!” Skagg cried, shoving toward her two knives, two canteens, and a complete Freedmenmen kit for surviving on open sugars. “Jus’ go—and to hell with ye! I’d like t’see you try usin’ that voice wi’ the pretzels…”

Pall leaped out of the ‘thopter, found footing on the sugars, and helped his mother out. They stood back as the craft took off. In a minute it was but a speck on the horizon, then was gone.

They stood still amid the silence in the vastness of the Great White Way. Each small step produced an abrasive rustle, as below their feet loose topsugars shifted and crunched. The land was slightly rolling, with occasional rock-candy outcroppings to punctuate the eye’s reading of the terrain’s sentence. Above, the Arruckusian moons hovered in twin orbs of icy white, paired after-dinner mints set in a field of glittering silver-blue jimmies.

“What about pretzels…?” Jazzica breathed.

“We’re safe for now,” Pall said bluntly.

“Poor Lotto—”

“He’s fired. Either that, or laid off.” Pall sneered. “Small difference.”

She stared at him. His tone—so cold! So brutally frank! “Pall—!”

“In any event, we’re on our own,” Pall said. “I see it all now. Oyeah cooked the books, left an opening for the Emperor and NOAMCHOMSKI to oust Father and reinstate the Baron. Probably brought in Hardehaurhar disguised as Shriners. Drunken and Gurnsey are in hiding. Safire Halfwit is fatally embarrassed. Now the Baron sits in Arrucksack, waiting to hand over Arruckus to Filp-Rotha, his nephew. The Guild won’t squawk—they care only about beer. All we have on our side is the Freedmenmen—the weirdest people in the galaxy.”

“Pall!” she hissed. “How can you… know these things?”

“Just a hunch.”

Pall stared off into the distance. Thoughts raced each other through his mind.

What mattered now was survival. His parents had grown up in their world—but their world was gone. With his father ruined, whatever inheritance Pall could have looked forward to was moot. The usual professions for young people like him—as lawyers, investment bankers, financial counselors, pension fund managers—would now never be. He was stuck on this crappy sugar-covered planet, with no academic degree, no chance to get into a decent college, and no connections. His training as a cook was next to useless on a world devoid of entrees. He had his mother to look after. He was barely fifteen, and his life was an over-and-done-with thing.

“Wait a minute,” he murmured. “The beer…”

“Pall—!” his mother said, understanding everything.

“You understand everything, Mother?” he said savagely. “We must find the Freedmenmen. They control the beer. If we can control them, we can do business with everyone—the Emperor, the Guild, everyone.”

“Control them?” Jazzica asked, jarred at the deepest levels of awareness by a monstrous hint-implication suggested by her son’s talk-words. “How?”

“I don’t know yet,” Pall said. “We’ll have to join them first.”

Jazzica stared. Could it be? she thought. That strange and savage people, the Freedmenmen—is it truly necessary we ally ourselves with them? To live as they live, dress as they dress, survive on nothing but beer and pretzels and desserts until we, like they, end up red-eyed and disgusting and FAT—!

“NO!” she cried. “It… must not be!”

“Be quiet,” Pall said. And Jazzica was shocked by the man-tones and shut-up harmonics in his voice. “We’ve no alternative. They already think me the Mahdl-T. Very well—there’s a start in that. But it’s an insufficient thing…”

Jazzica felt fearful of the cold precision of his being, yet could not but query, “But what if it turns out that you’re not their Mahdl-T? What if you’re only our Kumkwat Haagendasz?”

“I don’t know!” he cried. Whirling on her, his eyes raged wild. “I don’t know if I am the Kumkwat Haagendasz or not! I have no idea what the Kumkwat Haagendasz is!”

Jazzica stared at him. Scare-raspings of skin terror clawed along her epidermis. Tiny needle-pointings of not-knowing-what-to-think dread echoed somewhere in her mind. Somewhere within her generous mouth she tried to swallow in a dry throat. “Neither do I,” she at last confessed.

“You don’t!”

“No,” she stammered. “All my Boni Maroni teachers referred to it as if we all knew its meaning.”

“And no one did?”

“No… Pall.” She looked away, abashed. “I think it has something to do with being able to prepare many dishes so they all end up being ready at the same time—”

“Be quiet.”

Pall turned away, suddenly absorbed in the capacity of his mind for calculation. The inflow of data proceeded steadily, inexorably, and the computations that arose from it fed back into the system. He was vaulting up notches of awareness in the levels of his conscious apprehension, yet he was also not subsumed by those very streamings of thought. He was therefore able to know, at that precise instant, that what he was engaged in at that moment was called thinking, and the climax-resolution-solution process that seemed so ineffable was in reality nothing more—or less—than having an idea,

“—that maybe even the Revved-Up Mothers don’t know what the Kumkwat Haagendasz is,” his mother was saying.

He whirled to face her.

“It doesn’t matter,” Pall said. He rose and clambered atop a small rock-candy ledge, held his arms out and intoned to the entire Great White Way, ghostly in the moonlight: “It doesn’t matter! All that matters is, I have a great idea!”

He leaped down and confronted her, wild-eyed, his eyes burning with an inner great-idea-having-fire. “I have need of a job, Mother. And the Freedmenmen can give it to me. We must find them. We’ll tell them I am the Kumkwat Haagendasz. Since no one knows what it is, no one’s to say it isn’t me.”

Pall saw it all in that stopped instant of mental imagining. The Missionaria Phonibalonica had been here. Pall’s claim at Kumkwat Haagendaszitude would be credited. From that would emerge the necessary thing—what his father had called beer power.

And Pall felt a great peace suddenly blossom within himself. The question that had plagued him since the moving day on Cowboydan had been answered. He sagged, fell to his knees, and felt tears streaming from his eyes and coursing down his youthful cheeks. He lifted his face to the twin moons of his new homeworld. “Father!” he cried. “I have a career!”