The Fifth Element

14

Thai Fly By was nothing if not fast.

Ten minutes after Korben’s call, the little hovering mini-restaurant was secured to the window of his apartment.

It looked like a cross between a Chinese junk, a Viking raider and a giant red-enameled pooper scooper. But the smells that wafted up from its tiny kitchen were delicious.

Korben, seated at his table, and his cat, seated on the table, were sharing a single disposable plate of rice noodles, spring rolls and assorted Thai appetizers.

“So you forgive me?” Korben asked.

“Meow,” said the cat, scarfing down another expensive sliver of sesame oil roasted fish.

The Thai cook knocked on the windowsill.

“You got a message,” he said, pointing to the glass message tube that served all the modular apartments in this mega-racktower.

“I know,” said Korben. He ignored the blinking light.

“Not going to open?”

“Later,” said Korben.

“But could be important…” said the hovering restaurateur.

Korben shrugged. “Sure. Like the last two messages I got. The first one was from my wife, telling me she was leaving. The second was from my lawyer, telling me he was leaving too. With my wife.”

“Oh!” said the Thai cook, “that is bad luck. But mathematically, luck must change! Grandfather say: ‘It never rain every day!’ This is good news guarantee! I bet you lunch!”

“Okay,” said Korben. “It’s a bet.”

He pulled the message out of the tube and handed it to the Thai cook.

The cook opened the paper and read it with a smile that quickly faded to a frown.

“I lose bet,” he said. “You’re fired!”

Korben smiled. “At least I won lunch.”

“Good philosophy,” said the flyby cook, sharpening his chopping knife on the side of his hovering mini-kitchen. “See good in bad! I prepare number one dessert, especially for you and pussy.” “Meow,” said the cat.

Dessert was also being served at Father Cornelius’s spartan apartment across town.

Leeloo was finishing off her angel food cake, daintily sucking her elegant little fingertips, one by one.

Meanwhile, the novice, David, was seated at the computer. The search engines clanked and groaned, and the screen was filled with darting digits of data.

“I got it!” David cried triumphantly. “Everything we need to know about Fhloston Paradise— and a detailed blueprint of the entire hovering hotel.”

“Good work, my son,” said Father Cornelius. “Now all we need is a way to get there.”

David scrolled on down, through reservations.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he said. “There’s a big charity ball on Fhloston tomorrow. The flights have been full for months. And with all the celebrities, the hotel will be guarded like a fortress.”

“There must be a way… “Cornelius was saying, when the doorbell rang.

He got to his feet. “I’ll get it.”

It was Right Arm with an armed guard. An ugly, intimidating armed guard.

Not that Father Cornelius was intimidated. A man who has been preparing all his life to battle the Ultimate Evil is rarely shaken by the lesser varieties.

“Father Cornelius?” asked Right Arm.

“My son?”

It was the first time anyone had ever called Right Arm “son.” Even his own mother had called him “Hey You.”

It took him a moment to recover his composure. “Mr. Zorg would like a word with you.”

“Mr. Who?”

A few minutes and a few thousand vertical feet later, Father Cornelius was ushered into a corner office high above Manhattan.

“Zorg,” said Zorg, rising cordially to greet his guest. “Jean Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg. Nice to see you again, Father.”

He motioned to a leather chair.

“Again?” Cornelius studied the scarred and delicately hideous face. “I remember you now. The so-called art dealer.”

“I’m glad you got your memory back,” said Zorg. “Because you are going to need it. Where are the Sacred Stones?”

“Why on Earth do the stones interest you?”

asked Cornelius.

“On Earth!?!” Zorg chuckled. “Personally, the stones are of no interest to me. I’d rather sell weapons. But I have a customer for them. So tell me…”

“Even if I knew where the Sacred Stones were,” said Cornelius, “I would never tell somebody like you.”

Zorg looked offended. Or perhaps flattered. Or perhaps a little of both.

“Why? What’s wrong with me?”

“I’m a priest,” said Cornelius. “I’m here to serve life. All you want to do is destroy it.”

Zorg shook his head pityingly.

“Ah, Father,” he said in the tone one might use to a dense child, “you are so wrong. Let me explain.”

He picked up a pitcher of ice water off a side table.

He poured a glass half full.

“Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Look at this glass.”

With one finger he pushed the glass toward the side of the counter.

“Here it is, peaceful. Serene. Boring. But if it is destroyed…”

He pushed the glass off the edge.

It smashed on the floor.

Immediately, the floor was swarming with tiny nanobots, cleaning up the splinters of broken glass and mopping up the water.

“Look at all these little things. So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. What a lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. So full of… life!”

“Life?” Cornelius watched scornfully. “They are robots.”

Zorg poured water into another glass.

He pulled the stem off a cherry and dropped the cherry into the glass.

It sank.

“Yes, they are robots, but who designs them?” he asked Cornelius. “Builds them? Engineers, technicians,

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.