Vignettes of New Bincombe
© Will Harwood 2000

Cast and Locations

Locations of Interest

Ressonner, a moon in a far away solar system;
New Bincombe, a city on Ressonner;
The Mirk, a blanket name for the all-encompassing forest of Ressonner;
Reagan’s Ville, an Earth city;
Behemoth, a settler ship; 
The Miranda, a space ship;
Sheba, a sister moon to Ressonner; and
New Moon, a moon to be colonised

Sons and Daughters of New Bincombe

Type, a student of power generation;
Jasper, the same;
Fel, security trainee;
Yod, a stereotype;
Ridly Penguin, a self-appointed barman;
Helen Yellowsands, a publican and would-be playwright, friend of Ridly;
Martin Bean, an inoffensive man;
The projectionist, a projectionist; 
Various spectators; and
More spectators

People of Reagan’s Ville

Victor Victor, a Genuine Personality;
Eugene Baldhead, a writer of disclaimers;
Mrs. Fermat, director of Other Lives;
The programmer, an employee of Mrs. Fermat; and
Cordial Po, a runner

Colonists of New Moon

Divine-light Angel, a foolishly named advertiser;
Zen d’Xerox, a woman;
Ooo Mu, a man in the generation of power;
Caligula Neptune, a man in farming;
Brian Halfbucket, a waiter and former doctor;
Ito Smith, his friend and neighbour;
Tilda Idiom, a chef; and
Colin Seamonkey, a farm labourer

Inhabitants of the Universe

Red, a terraformer of worlds and possessor of eyebrows;
Mr. Bit, a computer program; 
The Grand Vizier, Mr. Bit; and
Mr. Byte, a therapist

 
Part One

Gravity Wishing Well

Prologue

London – 14 August, 2437 AD

To be outlived by centuries – millennia – instils a strange calm. The contents of this small head; this platter of pico-electronics; this object of decades’ work.

He held the heavy bullet shape in one hand, lifting it and its trailing metre of spinal cord to his face, and staring into the one completed eye. Through the other, through the eye-socket and nasal cavity, he could see where so much was to pass. 

He squinted and fancied that he beheld the optic nerve, not in the uncompleted black chasm, but the eye, green and shot with red. He meditated on what images were to fall into that tunnel to the brain, what distant suns’ light might it perceive, and experienced a shot of sadness – but only a shot, an instant. He was a true craftsman; with it went him.

1

Life is the treadmill that powers the imagination
Bob Smith, 2082 AD

New Bincombe, Ressonner – 7 June, 989 OL

There was a noise, a high pitched buzzing sound. Distant and unimportant while his memories were diluted by sleep, but now searing into his awakening mind; its keening shriek burrowed into his skull. A pneumatic drill of incessant needle sharp reverberation; a malignant white-hot scythe slicing through his cerebellum.
	Jasper flipped open blurry eyes and whacked his alarm clock across the room where, to his irritation, it bounced whole. The clock landed upside down, giving his sleep bewildered mind a reassuring rendition of half seven. 
	‘You up yet?’ called a voice from downstairs, as only voices can.
	‘Mumph.’
	‘The kettle’s on.’
	‘Mumph, mumph, okay, wsflg.’
	He made a token attempt at pushing himself upright, before falling back into his pillow for another hour of sleep. Life on Ressonner was dull; it could wait another hour. But instead he groaned, stretched, and with strength bordering on the Herculean, he threw his duvet to the floor, followed by his pillow and ultimately himself. 
	Jasper’s head pounded big-beat percussion wise as he staggered to the draughty kitchen, obliterating ill-starred flakes of masonry with each uncertain step. Gods he needed liquids. 
	‘How is the head?’ asked a tall young man. He was sitting at the pine-esque kitchen table with a mug of tea in his hand and an ever-so-slight smirk on his face. It said, “Hah”, it said “Oh yes”, but most of all it said, “I have subtle motor control”.
	‘Sorry, it’s too early in the morning for a sharp witticism,’ quoth the overhung and chemically imbalanced one.
	‘It is twelve hundred hours – morning passed us by two hours ago.’
	‘Oh shut-up,’ said he, between mouthfuls of horrible tasting water.
	Mock hurt silence. ‘Do you want to know what you did last night?’
	‘I’d rather settle for blissful ignorance just now, if it’s all the same to you,’ Jasper slurred, refilling his mug from their ornate water lukewarm’er, and berating his liver.
	‘I am sure it will all come back soon.’
	‘Alright, one thing, exactly what was last night all about?’ Jasper asked, crumbling something soothing into his tepid drink.
	‘You can’t remember?’
	‘I can remember jars, piled all around me. Oh, and a dodgy cake. That’s all,’ he lied.
	‘Does the word “Birthday” mean anything to you?’
	‘Mine?’
	‘Yours.’
	‘Ah. How come the eloquence, Type?’
	‘I never seem to get hangovers.’
	Silence. ‘You complete and utter bastard.’
	The above conversation had happened many, many times before, between Type and Jasper and between their predecessors and their predecessors’ predecessors ad nausium. It, or something similar and at least to the same point, could be found in New Bincombe in the next month and the next year. Whether similarly ritualised converses grace the year after that is, at present, a point in doubt. 

Reagan’s Ville, Earth – April, 2479 AD

Victor “Plastic Mac” Victor having entirely failed to flick the butt of his cigarette into an imitation Guinness ashtray, spent a painful second as the vapour flash took off his eyebrows, then a frantic and highly embarrassing few moments attempting to put out his whisky. The mandatory femme fatale tapped her foot subliminally, hands on hips, as she watched the crestfallen Victor’s abortive attempt extinguish the hungry blue flames by adding a carelessly labelled bottle of meths to his Blue Peter Molotov Cocktail.
	‘God, you are pathetic.’ She blew a writhing smoke ring to emphasise the point, and the incinerated remains of his papers. ‘I’m going to Honest Jim; he’s a real Private Dick.’ She haughtily turned and stalked out of his contractually filthy office, puncturing the wooden floorboards along the way with her eight-inch filed stilettos, and leaving seductive eddies in the thickening miasma.
	‘Damn.’ Victor resolved to smoulder at the window until another case came along. Victor was good at smouldering, he had it to a tee – and it always helped the general ambience when his desk was on fire – but some more practice couldn’t hurt. Well, at least not in a purely figurative sense.
	An alarm erupted, akin to a choral society for teething babies. Reality may bite, but it excels at volume. 

Victor trudged despondently along green twelve towards his home in red fourteen. The passing of several kilometres will give him cause to regret spurning the lift’s attentions. 
	His feet were beginning to drag, as was his career. Victor worked in the new field of Genuine Personalities. “You,” the Careers Advisor had said, “have a personality.” This puzzled the youthful Victor into silence. He knew what a euphemism was, but not how to broach the subject once spotted. “A personality. And for those with personalities I have only one suggestion.” Victor had been staring at the man’s moustache, but flicked his gaze to a painting hung askew behind his head. “And that is the Reagan’s Ville Guards. Join the army, lad.” So Victor went to work in the entertainment industry. Victor worked in Other Lives. The near-perfection of Virtual Reality’s cast of artificial personalities created a natural demand for real actors to people virtual streets and, in Victor’s case, offices of myriad worlds, shamelessly plagiarised from tales of the distant past. Whether the demand extended to Victor’s brand of pulp novel detective was another matter, and one that weighed on his mind.
	Victor was stuck in a rut. The rut. The rut that had befallen so many that an enterprising soul should have long past filled it in. The same job one year to the next; identical friends season after season. His life was moving in a tiny circle, one revolution per day. He imagined himself on a merry-go-round, spinning slowly passed merry and now desperate but unable to step off. His small world slid by unchanging, and there was nobody, not a single person in whom he could confide. 
He walked on, his heels dragging against pale blue carpet, and his eyes glued to the same. The walls to either side and the ceiling above regaled him with advertisements, cajoling, threatening and ultimately pleading for this potential consumer to cast a glance their way. All the shows of light, sound and smell wanted was a look, a fleeting glance to justify their existence, as if they had been reading popular science books on Quantum theory and developed a boxed-cat obsession.
	Above and around him vast networks of computers vied for precious information concerning the despondent man, exchanging biographical data and forming and disbanding information-alliances and data cliques in milliseconds. Sections of other biographies, real and faked, circulated as a bidding war for the privilege to Victor’s attention broke out. Viruses and worms flitted from hub to hub, attacking rival data corpuses and inviting reprisals. 
	Every advert in Victor’s sub-length of corridor died, the gaudy colours flicking to milky white and the cacophony of corporate signature Muzak resolving into the low background hum that Victor could no longer perceive. He was aware of the pitched battles for his attention that had raged around him, and knew of what was to come. But that was advertising – what could one expect when walking alone?
	The smell hit him first, a faintly discernible aroma of a type he did not recognise. This mutated into the fresh plastics beloved of interior designers, but retained a subtle undercurrent of the original and novel odour. Sinewave music invaded the corridor, several strands of pure tone stepping in and out of phase, undercut by small-band noise from which rhythms surfaced and evaporated ten a minute. Then, utter silence, and nought but a lingering memory of smell. The combined hum of ventilation, water, sewage and the like returned, and Victor sighted the advert. A simple message in anonymous black type on a plain white background.

Seek Adventure in a NEW WORLD!
Join the legions of pioneers leaving Earth TODAY!
Take your place in HISTORY!
IMPRINT THUMB ON THE PAD.
YOUR STATUTORY RIGHTS ARE NOT AFFECTED 
ON EVIDENCE OF STATUTORY RIGHTS
You have the right to a 51% survival rate. You have the right to the mineral wealth already present in your body until the event of your death, when you have the right to be used as fertiliser. You have the right of Ignorance. You have the right to sell your story. You have the right to sell your life. You have the right to vigorously complain. You have the right to be ignored.

Victor stared dumbly at the wall, before hesitantly reaching out his hand to give his thumbprint. He sealed his fate with oils and sweat.

diaeresis on home and life

The train station resided on ground level, along with sewage treatment, the prison and other cardinal but distasteful components of city life. Its neo-Gothic Victorian décor sat uneasily with superconducting tracks, and in a misguided attempt to remedy this discord the carriages’ sleek exteriors were painted to an inexact facsimile of Queen Victoria’s personal train. Sadly, other termini operated along similar lines, and any long-service train was likely to be a hotchpotch of anachronistic styles. It was not unusual for a commuter to eat lunch in the bland surroundings of a nineteen ninety-seven Network Southeast carriage, and wash their hands in a luxuriant Flying Scotsman. 
	Victor sat on a wrought iron bench, worried about the distant scratching sounds, and got cold, which is what you do when waiting for a train. A train station, some say, is designed to slow the metabolic rate of commuters, rendering them sluggish and less prone to violent action when services are delayed. Others maintain that in an act of laziness, the railway planners used the ancient system of ley-lines, and the constant psychic greasing of travellers causes massive discharges of energy at the stations, hence lowering the temperature and creating irksome crosswinds. A few shrug their shoulders, smile a mournful smile, and point towards colossal fans hidden in the rafters saying, “narrative causality.”
	He turned his head slowly to his left and let out a small, strangled scream. This did not appear to bother the rat sitting watching Victor intently from the left-hand arm of his bench.
	Victor’s terror turned into interest. ‘You are supposed to be extinct, aren’t you?’
	The rat twitched its nose.
	‘I wonder if there are any spiders here?’
	The rat continued to stare with beady eyes.
	‘You don’t say much, do you?’
	The rat remained impassive.
	‘But then I suppose you can’t speak.’
	The rat failed to contradict him.
	‘You’re not very interesting, are you?’
	The rat jumped to the ground, as the train pulled in. 

meditations on the second life

Victor sipped at his orange juice, and nibbled at a chilled vegetable curry, his attention captured by Reagan’s Ville. He looked at the receding city, a window-speckled plateau of eight hundred thousand people, and failed to reminisce. A collage of happy memories set to popular music did not fill his consciousness. Later this would worry him, but then and there his thoughts of the citybuilding of his birth were, “what an ugly, ugly place.” Now in the far distance, Reagan’s Ville resolved into a grey mass, sitting in the valley centre no more incongruously than any other glacial artefact. 
	Sunken protectively into his window seat and clutching his pathetically small rucksack of belongings, Victor took the opportunity to scan his fellow passengers. There were a couple of commuters to the metropolis, marked out by their suits and corporate ties, a few more tourists, conspicuously holding “Welcome to Reagan’s Ville – a new kind of city” guidebooks and looking forward to home. But most were people going offworld like him, journeying to an equatorial spaceport. He felt no need to initiate a conversation, and spent his time staring out of the window, more so when it grew dark. 

talking to clarry

‘Is this seat free? Do you mind if I sit?’ a tall woman sat in one of his two opposite seats.
	‘No, no,’ Victor said absently, drumming his fingers along his glass of mineral water. 
	‘How do you do,’ she said genially, thrusting her hand forward and inadvertently knocking his half-empty glass over, sending a slick of icy water onto his shirt and trousers. ‘Oh!’ 
	‘No, please,’ he flapped his shirt ineffectually.
	‘Here, please, let me,’ she said, her face flushed with embarrassment. She leaned over the table and gave the scythe-shaped wet patch two perfunctory wipes with a handkerchief, handing him the damp cotton after exerting the minimum of face-saving effort. 
	‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said, and then grinned. Victor scowled back for a second, half a second, how ever long it took him to notice her face falling, her expression of mollifying amusement turning to hurt. He thought, for gods’ sakes, it’s only water.
	He took her hand in his, smiled broadly, and said, ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance. My name is Victor Victor.’
	‘Hello Victor Victor. My name is Clarry.’

life, in so many words

And… Victor raises his glass. 

And it was great, for a while. For a short while we were getting on really well, you know, heart to heart, and all. And then this bloke comes to our table and sits down and he is there, you know? I’m thinking, there’s a spare seat over there, go away! He doesn’t even sit at the window – we were going through the submount at six hundred kph and it looked amazing. But no. He sat there, staring at his hands, umming and ahhing. Doesn’t try to start a conversation. Umm. Mmm. Mmm. Annoying sod. Clarry patted her belly and glanced pointedly in the direction of the buffet carriage. We were about, just about to up-sticks for proper food when the greasy hair’d person sitting opposite told us to leave! To leave! He said he was sorry but he needed some space and would we mind? Can you believe that? I can’t. Seriously, I can’t. We shrugged our shoulders and left. Hope I never meet him again. So we go and have a proper supper, full whack, real-service and everything. Fantastic. Then, to the bar. She’ll be taking the same train back to Reagan’s Ville. For some reason, right now, I find that ver’ ver’ funny. 

I could stay here for ever; the sensation of drifting; the knowledge that everything is taken care of; I am travelling to space; almost like going home; almost like going home; almost like going home. 

He sat in his tiny cabin, preparing his belongings for storage, and pondering the imponderable events of the past day. God, he thought, I am on a spaceship.

New Bincombe, Ressonner – 7 June, 989 OL

The low gravity of Mars allows mountains to dwarf Everest, with canyons spanning the horizon, astride which long legged musicians and writers compose words and rhythms to scorch paths across the imagination. The Jovian satellites, racked by the magnetic field of Jupiter, dominated by the gas giant hanging in the sky, and blessed with generous grants, gave cause for philosophers to ponder the infinite and invent new and enlightened systems of ethics based on the free lunch. Even the pockmarked grey of the Moon, spawn of as many spectacular, perverse, and downright messy methods of suicide as there are people trapped in grey boxes on the grey surface, holds a certain morbid fascination.
	Ressonner does not. Ignoring this entirely, we travel into her only city and the past tense, where…
	…Jasper shared a house with Type, a friend of his from Apprenticeship. It was, allegedly, a genuine Victorian building, with but minor modifications for purely practical reasons. Fortunately, these had not lost it the essential feel only the Victorians could imbue in their outhouses. It was freezing, with the architectural grace of Stonehenge, and the structural integrity of Lego. All of these interesting nodules of information and more were on his mind as he planned his day. 
	‘I’m gunna’ go down and see how the Firework is doing, you want to come?’ he called inside to Type.
	‘I know what it will be doing: either exploding, or waiting to explode.’
	‘See you around then, unbeliever.’
	The Firework was Ressonner’s first attempt at space flight, although it stretched a number of definitions and several natural laws. “Attempt” was one. And “flight”. 
	Jasper pulled his fantastically over-geared bike from its home next to the door, and gave it a cursory check for the journey. His house in Newton on the second spoke, third ring, to spoke three, outer-most ring four, via Teotihuacán. A place called Green Acres, and a distance of eight kilometres. He set out, pondering the odd colour of the sky, and intermittently getting his trousers caught in the vicious and pointless cogs that were everywhere. 
	The confederacy of villages named New Bincombe held precious few automotive vehicles, and no coherent systems of transport. Consequently, her residents had no need for dubious fitness videos, clover only regimes, or those dieticians with a California-PhD and penchant for unnecessary word invention. Although most would forgo the evident health benefits if it meant popping out for a pint of milk did not take all day.

daze alike

Jasper slowed as he approached the end of Valhalla Road, spoke three, ring four, affectionately known as Teotihuacán, because that was its name. In all probability, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for naming one of the smaller and predominantly residential villages after a lost Aztec city, but probability was a dirty word on Ressonner.
	He walked into the Olmec Arms, den of nominal barman Ridly Penguin.
	‘I see you are drinking again?’ said a female voice.
	‘Hair of the dog.’
	‘Hair of the cat, I reckon,’ Fel said conspiratorially.
	‘Oi, I heard that,’ said Ridly, who was a little protective of his brew. And his pet.
	‘Anyway,’ said Jasper quietly, ‘it’s not as if it has a much higher alcoholic content than air.’
	‘Depends whose air you’re breathing,’ she answered, glancing around at the room’s more entrenched drinkers, wreathed by white and grey tendrils of smoke and having a marvellous time.
	‘I’ve always wondered,’ Jasper lined up for his first throw, ‘why we use five hundred and one?’
	‘Rather than...’
	‘Five hundred appears a more sensible value.’
	‘Yes, but five hundred and one is more intriguing. Have you finished aiming yet?’
	‘Ha, 17, 20, 40... 77.’
	‘98. Your turn.’
	‘You know, some day I’ll beat you.’
	‘Yes, but only because I’ll be distracted.’
	‘By what?’
	‘The aerial porcine exposition.’
	‘Funny. Fancy a race?’
	‘Hardly fair. Darts is a game of skill and dexterity, running is just putting one leg in front of the other.’
	‘You going to see the engine test today?’
	‘What, another devastating and not a little embarrassing explosion? Naturally.’
	‘Yours.’
	‘Great.’
	‘Hmm, but just imagine being able to travel to the stars, like our ancestors...’ he pasted a far-away look onto his overhung-pallid face.
	‘I don’t see what’s so special about that. Look where it got them.’
	‘Yeah, here,’ he grinned. ‘You know, I am prepared to bet that Ressonner is the single most insignificant place in the cosmos. I’ll bet there are barren asteroids in the depths of space with greater strategic importance, and people in more noteworthy areas of the void make a point of not mentioning us in conversation. Think about it, we have the mineral wealth of distilled water, the relevance of a treatise on split infinitives–’
	‘In short,’ interjected Fel, sensing that this practised diatribe might go on for some time, ‘we have the point of a sphere.’
	Jasper drained his lager with a grimace. ‘Nice one. Come on, or we’ll miss the casualties.’
	‘Gods, and here’s me winning.’

quixote of the stars

The friends walked on waxy grass, under a strong sun, and in a fresh zephyr towards Green Acres. In the city’s inefficient but aesthetically gratifying schema, the sector between first and third radial roads housed New Bincombe’s power generation, and never ceased to divert.
	A vast underground network of cables proliferated throughout the city, bringing the wonder of alternating current to citizens and electromagnetic flux to burrowing animals, powered by a menagerie of weird and wonderful windmills. Some several hundred metres tall, others hardly potent enough to light a small torch on a dark night, and the difference in paint schemes rivalled yet the variety in sail design. It may well suffice to say that the one with the risqué underwear motif was, in fact, just underwear. Or that the startlingly original and highly effective whisk-like design was conceived in a measurement error that caused no end of merriment. Or that a living and carefully pruned tree worked only slightly worse than one might imagine.
	Jasper was, as they say, In power generation; to him windmills were bread and butter. Dessert, however, was something a little more innovative. Many of the wilder installations bore plaques bearing the designer’s name, and Jasper firmly believed that one day he too would have an impossibly discreet plaque of his own. And when his tutors droned on and on about some subtle but ultimately tedious facet of electricity, which no one really understood bar tortuous analogies, he would fantasise about having no need for a memorial at all.
	‘Yes,’ said Fel, ‘I am sure that they are very interesting.’
	Jasper was hurt. ‘Well, nuclear fission experimentation was scuppered early on when someone noticed our lamentable lack of fissile elements.’ He pointed to a small hill. ‘That was someone’s attempt to achieve a critical mass of earth. But fusion is fun!’
	‘Oh I am sure it is,’ she answered, stepping over the twisted remains of an obscure installation. ‘This wreckage testifies to its long and engrossing history of trial and tribunal.’
	‘It’ll revolutionise all of our lives once we get it working,’ he said, unhealthy admiration in his voice. 
	‘How’s that?’
	‘Unlimited power? What do you mean, “how’s that”?’
	‘It is not as if we are running out now, is it?’
	‘No, but just think about the potential. A rail network or, er, street lights.’
	‘So people get even less exercise?’
	‘Less exercise, eh?’
	‘Oi! No running!’
	A short and breathless time later, ‘So when do you start?’ asked Fel.
	‘October.’
	‘I don’t begin again ‘til November. You energy people obviously need more teaching than security.’ 
	‘Yes, you could probably squeeze the whole security course into an afternoon… Ow!’ Jasper nursed his shoulder. ‘That was uncalled for.’
	‘Sorry. Anyway, don’t you think that the security of Ressonner is a bit more important than some new pyrotechnics to scare our pets with?’
	‘Oh yes, if it wasn’t for you we would have been enslaved by aliens years ago.’
	‘Yeah, well, you never know,’ she replied defensively. ‘There are domestic security issues.’
	‘Some drunken louts making too much noise? I hardly think that constitutes much of a problem. Come to think of it, that was us last night.’
	‘Do you know what you did?’
	‘Please, I’ve already had this from Type, and I’d rather just wait until I remember.’
	‘You sure?’
	‘Please.’
	‘Did you like the cake?’
	‘I have no knowledge of cake,’ Jasper intoned.
	‘I am sure that you remember this cake,’ she said with nigh-on I-have-the-photos inflection, or at the least a-number-of-reliable-witnesses. 
	Jasper stepped over a small crop of lilac flowers. ‘Amazing how plants can grow through the road.’
	‘Hmm.’
	‘Alright, talking vaguely on the subject of aliens, guess in which century were the most reported alien sightings.’
	‘Were we? Alright. Nineteenth. No, twentieth.’
	‘Yep, but guess in which century was the only real sighting.’
	‘You have got me there.’
	‘The second, in what became Mexico and has become who-knows-what. Large pink hermaphrodites came from the sky and taught a tribe of hideously lost Indians many things about the nature of time and space, the meaning of life, and that delta Capricornus is an eclipsing binary with a period of 24.5 hours. Quite why they did this is a mystery, but you know how smartarses like to show off.’
	‘Yes.’
	‘And when, a year later, they bid a sad farewell to the Earth, disappearing in what to the uneducated and ignorant locals might have been construed as a ball of fire, the Indians looked at one another and said, “What on the tortured sands was all that clicking about?”’

to torturous tortuous torte 

They were approaching the test site, a scorched piece of land that was altogether too close to civilisation for comfort. Green Acres was the junction’s name – probably someone’s idea of a joke – and was one of the few intersections of the four radial rings of New Bincombe without a residential village attached. Loud generic twangy guitar music wafted towards them (“The best indiscriminate guitar based music ever! Ever! III”), along with the pervasive aroma of sulphurous compounds and home-brew high-octane rocket fuel concocted by one with a shaky knowledge of what “high-octane” meant. A steady undercurrent of smoke that was mind expanding in the flattening sense completed the nasal ménage à trois.
	‘There are stereotypes,’ Fel hissed to Jasper, ‘stereotypes, and stereotypes. Yod is a stereotype’s stereotype.’ He wore a white coat that he never did up with a pair of safety glasses in one pocket, which he never wore. His hair was an ecology unto its self; his taste in music spanned any genre with bass guitars and incoherent mumbling; he spoke too fast; and he lived on tea and burnt-crunchy-frying-pan-remnants. An image he made every effort to maintain.
	‘It is a fact that nine out of ten mad scientists bleach their hair,’ said Jasper.
	Other worlds and other times had ideologically sound, morally bankrupt wars to motivate their space industry. On other worlds and other planets, the first building erected was the Space Centre, as if no sooner than arriving on their Brave New World the contrary colonists wanted out. Indeed, enterprising and mischievous space scientists ensured that colonial expeditions were provided with a complete catalogue of ideological and quasi-religious pamphlets, expressing countless mutually contradictory doctrines.
	‘Bulls hit the mark every time, Gideon,’ Jasper whispered. 
	‘Ressonner has Yod,’ said Fel.
	‘Alright there, Yod!’ Jasper shouted to Yod, whose precise whereabouts bear better description. 
	Yod stood atop a rickety façade of ladder and scaffold, fiddling in a professional manner with a shining assembly of pipes with “sexual innuendo” writ large above them. Ladder and scaffold, Jasper did not need -stition to understand, that were extremely unlucky to walk beneath. 
	‘Your mighty engine ready to go off?’ called Fel by way of a ritual greeting.
	‘Yep, and the rocket’s about ready too!’ answered Yod. 
	‘Oh it is to laugh.’ And it was.
	Yod’s weekly tests had become something of a tradition in the two years since he started his three-month plan for the colonisation of space. A tradition in the best sense of the word, i.e. something to feel nostalgic about once well shot of. He lit up sky, tree and bunker with bodged rockets, Roman-candle boosters, conceptually flawed jet engines and, on one infamous occasion, a donkey. (The donkey brought stuffed and motheaten from Earth for reasons unknown. Not that people were at all interested in explanations when three hundred kilograms of Equus asinus was flying overhead. With a straw hat on.) He tested them to destruction and beyond, once. Because to test, explode and raze to the ground was a tautology in Yod’s experience.
	Revising his predictions on a trimonthly basis, Yod had until early July to turn vigorous chemical reactions and twisted metal into a plush interstellar cruiser. 
	Cynical members of the populace assumed that the Ressonner Advisory Council were waiting for him to do the decent thing and blow himself up, rather than the sensible thing and close him down. Reasonable people did not give it much thought, thankful merely that there was something to do on Tuesday nights, which would otherwise drag a tad. The truth behind the continuance of this flagrant disregard for safety falls, as ever, between both stools – although neither camp will deign to retrieve it. 
	The Ressonner Advisory Council, with little to advise and plenty of free time, had brought shadiness to the status of art form. Past such piffling accoutrements as dark glasses or leather coats, past the secret handshake and darkened rooms and out the other side. Of all the residents of the sceptred moon Ressonner, one man, Ridly Penguin, believed himself to be a member of the Ressonner Advisory Council – erroneously, as it happens. To give crystal clarity to an issue that is, at best, of quartz quality, who should be complaining most bitterly about the inaction of the Ressonner Advisory Council concerning the danger to innocent, sky-fearing people? Oh irony, oh irony, oh irony, will you not leave this Universe alone?
	Yod shook his head free of distracting thoughts, and shimmied to the scorched ground in what, in a world with sheep, would be two shakes of a lamb’s tail. ‘Down in two shakes of a lamb’s arse,’ quoth Yod. 
	‘So,’ said Fel, pacing around the scantily described monstrosity, ‘which end goes bang?’
	‘Fuck off.’
	‘Kaboom then,’ said Jasper helpfully. 
	‘This is a finely balanced experiment.’ Pause. ‘That one.’ 
	‘First.’
	‘Excuse me?’
	‘That’s the part that’s going to go bang first, is it?’
	‘You’ll see.’ And they would. ‘Let us repair to yonder sandbags,’ Yod gestured to the haphazard line some kilometre to the west, out in the periphery of the sea of grass to which New Bincombe amounted. 
	‘A bit early isn’t it?’
	‘Nothing of the sort.’
	‘And it goes off when?’
	‘Now let me correct you there,’ said Yod. He leant against the scaffolding and glanced at his watch. ‘“Goes off” is hardly an accurate description of the finely balanced chemistry soon to take place here. And not a moniker that’s going to endear me to the Advisory Council either, may I add.’
	‘And it hits the fan when?’ said Fel.
	‘I don’t think that’s what a moniker is,’ said Jasper. ‘Epithet.’
	‘Five minutes.’ He eyeballed his watch. ‘Four minutes.’

prelude to annihilation

Cresting the metre-high wall of fossilised sandbags with an impressive burst of speed, their arrival at the temporary test-viewing site was splendid, marred only by the improbable tangle of limbs and trestle tables that resulted soon afterwards. 
	‘Christ, who left those there?’ said a strange entity, half-human, half-table. Jasper removed the table half, and gave the human half a hand up. ‘Cheers,’ said Fel. 
	Yod righted the table, but received nothing in the way of thanks. 
	‘I can’t help but notice,’ said Jasper, peering head cradled in hands at the distant mottled structure, ‘the distinct lack of bang.’
	‘Uh-uh,’ Yod bought his wristwatch to the fore.
	‘Or,’ said Fel, sitting atop the wall in a manner utterly unlike that of Mister Humpty Dumpty, ‘other spectators.’
	‘Uh,’ Yod held out his hand, fingers splayed. ‘Nah, only joking, we’ve hours yet. Cards anyone?’ From rucksack and pockets, he withdrew a deck of cards and two earthenware jugs. 
	A pleasant afternoon was had by all, the game widening in players if not skill as dusk and spectators approached. Five minutes hence will see a line of foolhardy people against the sinking sun, peering through a variety of optical enhancements and standing on the wall.

It was a beautiful explosion, an elegant ball of fire rolling into the stratosphere like a napalm rose in bloom.
	Yod wiped away a tear. ‘Excellent.’
	Fel gagged. ‘Er, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but–’ her next words will forever remain a mystery (albeit a small and insignificant one), as a wall of grit and earth washed over the spectators.
	‘I thought,’ Jasper coughed through the dirt, ‘I thought we had words about this last time. Words such as, “don’t you bloody point the damn thing away from us again” spring to mind.’
	‘What do you look like,’ said Type, emerging from the topsoil and happy mutterings of a gaggle of onlookers. 
	Jasper started. ‘Didn’t hear you arrive, Type,’ said he.
	‘Spooky, isn’t it,’ answered the tall one. 
	‘Right,’ said Yod forcefully, dodging clods of earth, ‘let’s see what we can see.’
	The four friends vaulted the wall in synchronous fashion, striding with shadows stretched before them to the test site. The other spectators, who fall subject to typecasting at the end of this tale, went home. 
	‘Hey,’ Fel nudged Type in the arm and nodded conspicuously towards Jasper, ‘I see the rocket’s gone off then!’ They did a bad impression of suppressing laughter. Jasper did a bad impression of ignoring them, and wished dearly for a memory resistant to the ravages of alcohol and medicinal herbs. 
	It soon became apparent, as distance decreased and the test site grew, that something was amiss. They covered the last twenty metres with particular wariness. Yod was overjoyed, grinning like a maniac and doing little skips in the disturbed ground.
	‘I am puzzled,’ said Jasper, cresting a great gout of earth in his hobnailed boots, ‘as to why the rocket is still here.’ 
	Anchored by means miraculous and unknown, and angled above a sizeable pit, was the rocket. 
	‘It’s not a rocket, you see,’ said Yod; ‘it’s a thruster.’
	Jasper gave the shining assembly a cautious circuit. ‘The distinction being…’
	‘Thrusters thrust; rockets are thrusted,’ said Type.
	Freed from its horrible scaffold façade, the tubular-wedge structure (as Yod will repeatedly refer to it in private and out of earshot) reared from the ground as if it were the head of an aluminium sea monster. It looked massive not so much because it was, per se, but because it was a tiny part of a truly colossal structure – a thought Type chose not to elucidate because it made no sense. 
	‘You never built that,’ said Fel. ‘The ladders and drainpipes and shit I could believe, but please.’
	‘Did I claim to ‘ve made it? Did I ever claim that? I think I have been sorely wronged here.’
	‘Well?’
	‘I found some equipment, out in the mirk not far from here…’
	‘What, just lying around you mean? Waiting all this time for you to just “pick ‘em up”?’ 
	‘Something like that. I am a man of multifarious talents, you know.’
	‘That thing must weigh five tonnes,’ said Type, coming over all analytical. ‘How on earth did you manage to get it here?’
	‘I am not sure that I like the atmosphere developing here,’ Yod said with mock concern. ‘Could we please just suspend disbelief for a while and accept that I found this apparatus and through my evident ingenuity was able to bring it here?’
	‘Okay.’
	‘Alright by me.’
	‘Yeah, fair enough. It is here, after all.’
	‘Glad that’s settled.’ Yod sat unceremoniously down next to the booster’s mouth, his feet dangling in the pit gouged not half an hour before. Fel sat next to him, Jasper and Type opposite. It was pleasantly warm. 
	‘You know, this beauty has some amazing properties,’ Yod said with obvious admiration, staring adoringly up at a sunflower array of thirty-seven funnels, capable of flinging its weight in earth well over a kilometre. Jasper felt that any attempt to juxtapose this moment would be in very poor taste, so he kept it as a happy little memory all to himself.
	‘The fact,’ Yod started, ‘that it is not so much molten shrapnel. The fact that total thermal expansion was negligible. The fact that I have been unable to so much as scratch my initials on it. The fact that the structural analyser said it was “non-analysable”, and the fact that it is already cool enough to touch.’
	‘Is any of that true?’ asked Type.
	‘We-ll,’ Yod had the decency to look embarrassed, ‘perhaps my callipers don’t quite reach around it. And, true, I have scratched my initials and a couple of short poems on it. And the analyser is completely loused after I tried to teach it that mice are made of cheese. And I dare say it’s quite hot now.’
	‘And this is the first actual test you’ve done,’ said Fel.
	‘Yes, there is that too.’
	‘So, in fact, nothing you said was true.’
	‘‘Suppose.’
	‘It was all a tissue of lies.’
	‘Well, I don’t know about tissues…’
	‘Well?’
	‘You have got to admit that it’s seriously funky shit.’
	‘Oh yes, funky shit yes, but not miraculous funky shit. That is just silly,’ said Fel in a firm voice, grinning.
	‘I aimed too high.’
	‘You aimed too high.’
	‘What does it run on?’ asked Jasper, resisting the temptation to join in on the high aiming motif. 
	‘Ah-ha!’ said Yod, clapping his hands in glee, ‘the fuel! That’s the best bit. Sign of true quality. Very clever, sehr, sehr clever system in there. Alcohol.’
	‘Hang on,’ said Fel, marshalling the clear run of theorems so beloved of Hilbert, ‘can we assume that this monster was connected with the colonisation of our beloved moon. If so, then it was constructed by a people technologically far in advance of our own sorry state. Now, if memory serves, alcohol as a propellant is even less efficient than petrol, so, by implication, they would not have used alcohol.’
	‘That is not the point. The point is that it works with alcohol. I am pretty sure it’d work with liquid hydrogen too, and that is the clever bit! I reckon I could fill the hoppers up with sugar and expect to get a fine explosion.’
	‘Being something of a connoisseur in the subject,’ said Jasper.
	‘Indeed. Although…’
	‘Although you have yet to check whether the alcohol has buggered it up,’ said Fel.
	‘Yes.’
	‘So, again, you don’t actually know whether it’ll run on alcohol.’
	‘Not as such, no.’
	‘You were aiming too high again, weren’t you Yod.’
	‘I was aiming too high.’
	‘On the other hand,’ said Jasper, ‘it is nevertheless deeply impressive. The best yet, I’d say.’
	‘Apart from the donkey,’ said Type. 
	‘Yes, apart from Clive.’
	The four dissolved into giggles, and Yod fell in the hole.
	‘Does this appear reminiscent to anyone,’ said Jasper, ‘of a latrine?’
	‘Stuff you!’ shouted the second member of their little group. 
	‘You know,’ said Jasper a while later, ‘this engine hasn’t cooled down much. I thought, yawn, you said it’d be stone cold an hour ago.’
	‘Don’t you complain,’ answered Yod, who was lying on his back watching the stars. ‘It’s lovely and warm.’
	‘Yawn?’ Fel sat up. ‘Did you just say “yawn”?’
	‘Maybe I did. It’s gone ten, you see. It is tomorrow.’
	‘Beautiful night.’ 
	‘It certainly is, Type.’
	‘I agree, Yod.’
	‘And I too, Jasper.’
	‘Shall we go in then?’
	‘Absolutely.’

homesick alien

Particles of earth and lumps of earthworm rained over the trees, a gentle patter of soil and gore that soothed the odd traveller and gave two birds concussion. Pulverised remains of Green Acre’s corrupted ground fell from the night sky well into the small hours, but far, far away from the figures walking north by starlight and bickering in a friendly way.
	Their conversation had progressed, by way of Type’s sex life and the lack of a proper noun for flat-tipped screwdrivers, to the circumstances surrounding Yod’s thruster discovery. It hung around this fascinating topic for a while, then moved on a speculative course towards the origin of the propulsive beast. The nature of Ressonner history rendered this a hazy subject at best, and thus perfect for nighttime musings. 
	The early years of the colony were terra incognita for the Ressonner antiquarian community, with far too much time and effort spent in survival rather than keeping accurate, coherent or even coincidentally consistent records. The Ressonners may have had a faithful idea of Earth history, but the first generation of their own world was clouded in conjecture and blatant lies.
	‘I reckon,’ Yod reckoned, ‘it’s an intercontinental ballistic missile, perhaps even the fabled V3 that did so much to win the Blur-Oasis war.’
	The others did not.
	‘Let’s think about this logically,’ said Type who hated invariably being the one to suggest it; ‘what is the thruster good for; what is it good at?’
	‘Let’s not think logically,’ said Jasper. ‘Let’s think like meerkats.’
	‘Almost Here. My Finest Little Space,’ Yod announced, and it was so. 
	Yod’s home was an anachronism in a world of anachronisms. Built for purpose or purposes unknown and to a design none could exculpate, it ranked high among New Bincombe’s non-existent top-ten of bizarre habitations. It amounted to three bunkers, sunk four or five metres beneath the ground and with any direct access to the outside world grassed over. Quite why bunkers had been built on a world where “war” was a misspelling of “Waugh” was lost to the Ressonners, although that it was presently being used for exactly that purpose would not have occurred to them.
	Over the centuries, a number of occupants had done what they could to turn dank space into comfortable habitation. Unfortunately, a lot of those had been rodents, or worse. But, as Yod said, you have to take the rough with the smooth, and the slippery with a mop. 
	After hefting open an imperfectly sealed hatchway, Yod followed the three into his concrete oubliette.
	‘Hey,’ said Jasper, ‘Subterranean Homesick Aliens. Luckily, No Surprises.’
	‘You’d need to Climb the Walls to Exit,’ said Type.
	‘Needs Music, but not a Let Down.’
	‘Init’ dark?’ Fel avoided the obvious “you’d need to be Fit and Happy to Settle Down”. The four were standing in the “antechamber”, a three metre deep, two square dank concrete box. Six feet shuffled aimlessly while Yod fiddled with the door, setting tumblers in action.
	‘Gods, Yod, talk about paranoia.’
	‘What, androids?’
	‘Yeah, shut-up.’
	A crack that could have spines splintering in sympathy, if one happened to possess a particularly sympathetic spine, signalled an end to Yod’s paranoiac lock opening. 
	‘You know,’ said Jasper, ‘you can prove that the time spent locking doors actually exceeds that lost through theft by seven percent. Honest.’
	‘How?’
	‘Well, you start with a pointlessly complicated door…’
	‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
	Dull green light washed over the four, a comforting or ghastly glow depending on the time of day and cast by phosphorescent algae, circulating through transparent pipes. 
	Yod kicked the door shut, and a worryingly slow relay sent current through strings of odd sized light bulbs strung across his low ceiling. They blinked in the sharp yellow light, and stamped their feet because that is What You Do after entering someone else’s home.  
	Structurally, the home of Yod originally consisted of three wide, low underground crescents, but no longer. The years and a pickaxe had created much in the way of alcoves and potholes, and a number of claustrophobic tunnels betwixt the disjoint crescents. Any remaining semblance of the original aesthetic drowned in towering edifices of books, miscellaneous electronics and lumps of masonry. “It does for walls,” said Yod. “Yeah,” said Jasper, “what whatever-the-hell is on my shoe does for the floor.”
	It smelt of mould, which was not necessarily a bad thing ever since the stroke of genius known as Genetically Modified Mildew. 
	‘Please go through to the sitting room,’ Yod said to his friends’ backs. ‘Don’t wait for me or anything.’ 
	He followed them, practised enough at braining himself on the interconnecting tunnel ceiling to not brain himself on the interconnecting tunnel ceiling. He stepped over a pile of what, on later reflection, he’d rather not have reflected upon. 
	Yod dropped the metre into his lounge, spun in a vaguely theatrical manner, and collapsed in a collapsible position on his collapsing chair, which fell over. His flagrant disregard for the majesty of the English language garnered a short round of applause, terminating in pleas of, “Tea ‘d be favourite now, Yod.”
	‘I suppose you want cake and biscuits too, eh?’
‘By gods, you are reading our minds!’
	‘Right,’ said Jasper while Yod was pottering around his labyrinthine home in search of sustenance, ‘have any of you heard of Potter Maths?’
 	Type shook his head and Fel shrugged noncommittally.
	‘I read about it, oh, a few months ago. Very interesting story.’ He paused.
	‘Well, tell it then,’ said Fel. ‘Oh, and Yod!’ she bawled towards stack of series-wired jerry-built speakers that served as a wall, ‘any cream?’ 
	‘Potter maths was started as a joke, long, long ago, by a pure mathematics student called L Potter because of,’ he made a big show of looking ceilingwards for a moment, ‘“The impossibility of living in a universe in which physics is constantly expanding our boundaries of ignorance, and a true understanding of the ticking of the clock is analogous to expecting a duck to understand free market economics”. Before long, Potter maths became the most eclectic and popular branch of Pure Mathematics. The fundamental tenet of all Potter maths, etched in gold above the Potter Institute’s lavish gateway, was “If you can’t do a job perfectly, why bother?” And against everybody’s expectation – most of all undergraduate Jools Hulstance, who had written the original text as a joke, and was now having serious problems with copyrights – Potter Mathematics proved to be incredibly useful in a society overburdened with toil and difficult forms.’
	‘Mmm, I can see that,’ said Fel.
	‘Shh.’
	‘Yes. Quantum Mechanics was revolutionised by the deceptively simple concept, “It’s just little whatnots playing silly buggers, who gives a toss?” Genetic engineering was turned upside down by the startling observation, “What do you get if you take the legs of a rhino, the head of a giraffe and the body of mongoose? A sick taxidermist; come on, let’s have a pint.” And as for aviation… Scientists and air traffic controllers alike, freed from meaningless science and / or controlling aircraft, were able to enrich the world with busking, table tennis and street theatre, making it a genuinely happier place.’ He breathed the heady air of company. ‘That is until the entire institute was destroyed in a freak aeronautical accident.’
	Yod tottered in, carrying a tray of miscellaneous dried foodstuffs in one hand, and managing by dint of will power to hold four scalding mugs of tea in the other. The bitter green elixir of tranquil insomnia curled between pulped leaves of hardy New Bincombe tea, infusing Yod’s very own cocktail of brain chemistry altering herbs. 
	Three mugs were gratefully accepted, and a woman of foresight flicked harsh yellow lighting to the diffuse red and green glow of a homemade lava lamp. Yod hunted for some music, Bristol-fashion for preference, and lamented melting his speaker array. Jasper and Type sipped their tea, indulging in the quiet espionage endemic in human society, each planning improvements to their own brews and wondering whether the hint of aniseed was anything so mundane. 
	Tarragon, mouthed Jasper.	
	‘I postulate,’ postulated Fel, ‘that it is of the colony ship.’
	‘The colony ship,’ repeated Jasper. ‘Yeah.’
	‘Yeah?’ she retorted. ‘Right, so we have some as-yet undiscovered space flight ability.’
	‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that a sodoff-massive space ship, sitting next to New Bincombe, might attract more in the way of attention than it has until now. Yeah.’
	The unearthly tones of a Theremin engorged the air, sending oxygen and nitrogen molecules into compression waves of “weird shit” motion. Yod reappeared. 
	‘Now,’ he said, ‘we can have a proper conversation.’
	‘So where,’ said Jasper, putting hands behind head and breathing the pungent odour of herbage drying from Yod’s ceiling, ‘so where do you reckon the thruster-whatnot came from, Yod?’
	‘I think I have made my position perfectly clear on the matter,’ said Yod. ‘And I feel that it would only dilute my cast-iron argument to repeatedly state the obvious.’
	‘Yod,’ said Fel in a stern manner, ‘I have heard you speak much bollocks in my time, but that takes the biscuit.’ 
	‘Cheers.’
	‘Any more tea back there?’
	‘I’ll get the urn.’
	‘Excellent.’
	The urn (foolish urn! foolish urn!), on its retrieval, believed that it was being admired, and not its nourishing and insomnia inducing contents! A point reinforced by cries of, “it’s a great urn there, Yod”, and “yeah, marvellous work of art. Your tea pales into insignificance.” The tea sulked in the gothic bowels of its exalted vessel, cooling in spite.
	‘So then,’ said Jasper, chewing leaves and approaching a state of apathetic comfort, ‘I think we have lost the thread…’
	‘Being?’
	‘Ah, being, the nature of one and at once the cosmos, that most fundamental and silly of questions, but that which we all ask as the clock nears the witching hour, that which we are destined never to discover, like the proverbial mongoose, and that which contains too many pronouns. The nature of being is not the “be” of nature – and please no bad puns here – but the “not be” of nature.’ 
	He blinked. ‘That is to say, speculations on the subject of propulsion in general, and Yod’s thruster in the specific sense.’
	‘Well,’ Type began, ‘we’ve ruled out quite a lot. Including, if memory serves, a lost toy, freak coalescing of atoms, a new type of tree, and bike improvements Gone Horribly Wrong.’
	‘Now, Type, you know we can’t entirely dismiss that one,’ said Jasper sternly. ‘Let’s have a vote to decide this for once and for all.’
	‘You know,’ remarked Type, ‘that sounds like great political satire, that does.’
	‘Eh?’
	‘Well, potentially.’
	A lull appeared in the conversation. Music of a folk guitar nature wafted in, and Yod returned. ‘I reckon what we could do with it is more important than where it comes from.’
	‘I daresay you have a couple of ideas on that.’
	‘A few. Consider, friends, the vexed question of space flight.’
	They considered the vexed question. 
	‘What, in terms of sheer expenditure of energy, is the most expensive part of space travel?’
	‘The really big countdown?’
	‘The cool bit where they strafe the enemy cruiser with laser fire and photon torpedoes?’
	‘The creation of a gigantic air envelope to hear impressive engine noises with?’
	‘Towing the orchestra?’
	‘Those big star names?’
	‘Escaping Ressonner’s gravity well.’
	‘Oh,’ the rest said with varying degrees of sarcasm, ‘we didn’t realise that.’
	‘Yeah, well, I had an idea about that.’
	‘With the thruster.’
	‘Yep.’
	‘Getting off Ressonner with your thruster.’
	‘Absolutely.’
	‘Lifting off, from Ressonner, all the way into space, with your thruster.’
	‘That was my idea, yes.’
	‘Taking off from the ground, with your thruster; the thruster that goes bang.’
	‘This is getting dull, yes.’
	‘The one that makes one very large bang.’
	‘Bang, yes, bang.’
	‘Okay, I just wanted it clear in my mind, that’s all. You thought it would be a good idea to sit intrepid stellanauts on top of what amounts to a bomb, and then set it off.’
	‘Ye– er, I wouldn’t put it exactly like that.’
	‘You are not going to get any volunteers if you do.’
	‘Well, exactly.’
	‘So how were you going to put it?’
	‘Er, I was sort of coming to that…’
	Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The History of Ressonner – symbolised, famously, by the words “the History of Ressonner” – marked that moment as a nexus, a point on which so much could turn. If only, future bemoaners bemoaned, if only their conversation had switched to an animated discussion on pot plants, or pot, for that matter. If only the thruster test had gone awry. If only the Stone Roses had never discovered cocaine. If only I’d posted that letter. If only I’d got her number. If only the ink had not smeared.
	But the present has no monopoly on talking bollocks. Nexus, indeed…
	‘Am I going to find this funny?’ Jasper perked up, switching from debauched slouch to attentive cross leggedness. Fel and Type did likewise; fixing Yod with six pupils in varying degrees of dilation, dependent largely on the general region of space each presumed Yod to inhabit. It did credit to Yod’s tea that three pairs of eyes represented all four compass directions. 
	‘Okay,’ quoth the Yod, ‘I have a proposal to make. A fine proposal. Probably the finest proposal that any of you will hear all day.’
	‘Now Yod,’ Fel waggled her finger, ‘the day is but young.’
	‘Well, one of the better ones, certainly,’ he conceded. ‘Okay. First, you remember the stuff they picked up in Lenin a while back, from the radio array?’
	Blank expressions. 
	‘Do we need memory refreshment?’
	Blank expressions.
	‘More music?’
	‘Yes, please, certainly!’
	Yod rolled off his chair, bouncing up in an unconvincing fashion. Music of a subdued nature stole through their auditory canals, and Yod reappeared carrying a clunky chunky CD player. Painted with primary colours and you would buy one for your infant nephew. Scuffed, scratched and dented to hell, and strewn with ditties of a sarcastically esoteric nature and you probably would not. 
	Static, the intergalactic language of misconception, blared forth. 
	‘The avant-garde is all very well,’ said Jasper, ‘but–’
	‘Shush, it’s coming soon.’
	“First recording,” came Yod’s voice, “captured eighteen seven four-hundred and twelve at four twenty two.” The static resumed for a few moments. “With white noise reduction.” Hiss went the CD player, but exhibiting a subtle modulation that, with imagination and a keen ear, could have been human speech. 
	‘Coo,’ said Fel, ‘a concerto.’
	Yod’s voice returned. “For a period of three months in six-hundred and fifty-four, and eight in seven-hundred and one, this regular pattern was received.” Blip, went the tiny tinny sound-exuding device, blip and blip and blip, blip, blip. 
	‘Cool,’ Type chimed in, ‘progressive pop.’
	‘Shush!’
	“The latest confirmed recordings were on nine five, nine-hundred and eighty-nine at fourteen ten, and taken by my good self.” The CD player made the sort of phasing radio noises ones gets by pressing the “phasing long-wave radio noise” button, before– “– danger, d–––, re––st –lp. Hel– –ease –––”
	Yod tapped a button with his foot.
	“– danger, d–––, re––st –lp. Hel– –ease –––” again blared out in a woman’s voice with indeterminate accent, words of panic surfacing from a sea of interference.
	Silence.
	‘You picked that up last month?’ said Type.
	‘Certainly did.’
	‘In Lenin? At the radio array?’
	‘Yes.’
	‘And you never thought to mentioned it before?’	
	‘I think,’ said Jasper from his tea-languor, ‘that you have missed the point, Type.’
	‘The point?’ Type tapped his knee. ‘Oh no, Yod, no.’
	‘Come on.’
	‘No, it’s ridiculous.’
	‘At least you can hear me out.’
	‘Let’s hear him out,’ said Fel, cottoning on, ‘I’d like to hear how he thinks he’s going to convince us on this one.’
	Yod cracked his knuckles. ‘For millennia, mankind has looked to the stars–’
	‘Enough of the ham, Yod.’
	‘Righteo, the point. Where do you think the transmissions came from.’
	‘All the shit they pickup at Lenin?’
	‘And elsewhere. I’ve had some weird stuff on my receiver here. But nothing anywhere near as good as the last message. Blips and whines and cool squidgy sounds are all well and good, but that was speech.’
	‘Er,’ Jasper er’d, ‘outer space, kinda’ fing. The expanding electromagnetic shells of human civilisation, and that.’
	‘No,’ came the quintessentially negative reply. ‘I don’t think they did.’
	‘Hoaxes?’
	‘No no, not from Ressonner.’
	‘So not from here,’ Fel paused for contemplation, ‘and not from somewhere else. Oh-kay.’
	‘From this solar system,’ said Type. 
	‘From,’ Yod struck a dramatic pose, ‘this very lunar system!’
	Silence.
	‘Well?’ he said, hesitating in his dramatic pose and surreptitiously adjusting himself. His friends were evidently engaged in constructing suitably sarcastic responses. ‘This is a pretty damn momentous conclusion, and deserves the courtesy of an answer.’
	‘From Sheba.’
	Yod analysed Jasper’s effort, frowning and drooping in his dramatic pose. Was this some wholly new form of satire, taking irony to a level previously reserved for straight-thinking individuals of a certain character? Could it be that Jasper was ripping the piss in such a monumental fashion, with unheard of audacity, in a manner to shame the late, great Bob Smith (who was taken at face value and laughed himself to sleep), that–
	‘Well, are you saying the transmission came from Sheba?’ Jasper asked again.
	‘Yes,’ Yod tensed for the coup de grâce. Moments passed, but none came. Yod’s paranoia swelled and grew; it rose higher in his consciousness until it crested his mind altogether, fell out of his head, and dropped onto the floor with a small wet sound. Yod enthused once more. ‘I’ll get the stuff; back in a mo’.’
	Fel, Jasper and Type flicked eyes meaningfully in each others’ directions, signalling to the rest in the subtlest way acknowledgement of their single shared thought. Namely, “this better be good”, “I’m famished, I hope Yod’s getting some cake”, or “this seat is chafing” dependent upon whose common thought was perused. 
	Jasper tapped his boot idly against the floor. ‘Who said that easy answers ignore the fact that we are difficult people?’
	Fel shrugged. ‘I dunno. You, probably.’
	‘Dum-dee-dar,’ contributed Type.
	‘Okay,’ the freshly returned Yod struck an upbeat tone, ‘have a butchers at this.’ The subsequently floor-bound, previously Yod-bound, object unfurled into an impressive computer console with ultra thin metre-square monitor and metallic stickers. It oozed expense. He dumped a sheaf of papers onto his broken computer, or baroque table, depending on one’s knowledge of computer repair, and selected choice documents for his friends’ delectation.
	‘Cool table there, Yod.’
	‘Here we are.’ Yod selected an especially eldritch waxy document. As he pealed back the blackened paper, a pall of darkness shrouded the room, and an icy draught invaded their spine-space. His play of fingers over parchment caused chilling shadows to leap across the walls, and every crackle from the flattened paper gleaned the keening howls of chickens.
	‘Bugger,’ said Yod. 
	‘Wolves?’ said Jasper. ‘Wrong Track. Can I assume those were meant to be wolves?’
	‘Yeah, yeah,’ Yod reached behind his chair, grinning, and returned to seated composure holding the chunky matte box of a ubiquitous laptop. He flipped the lid with aplomb and dropped the brightly-lit display onto his bizarre table. 
	‘Star charts,’ quoth he. ‘Namely, our little lunar system, spinning its merry way.’
	‘Actually,’ said Fel nastily, ‘all we can see is your arse. Holiday snap?’
	‘I think you will find that it is a stylised representation in a logarithmic scale of three moons in elliptical crawling ant orbits about a protostar and, this I am pleased about, our sun hovering somewhere in the background.’
	‘Oh right, I see it now.’
	‘Now,’ now’d the Yod, casting discourse cliché up the creek without a tin-pot to phone home, daring to be the same, ‘now we, Ressonner, are the first satellite, a tasteful shade of green. Next we have little Templar – a rather fetching mottled grey affair – and on the end is Sheba, with a question mark. Accepted knowledge is that Ressonner is the only inhabited and, indeed, inhabitable of the three. Templar is too small with hardly an atmosphere to call its own, and Sheba is some sort of pre-terraforming maelstrom. Accepted wisdom is bang to rights on the former, but I think not on the latter.’
	Until an adequate way of representing parallel conversation has been developed (mayhaps akin to musical notation), inserting the comments made during Yod’s little description of his map would both misrepresent his speech pattern and overly annoy the casual or non-armchair reader. I place them here:
	Jasper: “Ooh, pick up that discourse.”
	Type: “Personification on a massive scale.”
	Jasper: “That’s your opinion.”
	Fel: “Got a light anyone?”
	Type: “Are those Mach bands I can see?”
	Type: “Here you go.”
	Jasper: “Urup, excuse me.”
	Fel: “I spy gratuitous use of the word ‘indeed’.”
	Fel: “Ah-h.”
	Jasper: “Who-oh.”
	Type: “Choosy bastard.”

comedown

Fel blinked awake, groaned in a half-hearted fashion and entertained pictures of a big breakfast. She stepped lightly in dull light over dark forms, identifying Jasper from his throaty breathing and Type from the distinctive and not altogether pleasant clicking sound. No sound from Yod, but then he never snored while actually asleep. 
	Yod’s kitchen hid, bashful of its inadequacies, behind a wall of regretfully fused speakers. She wondered briefly whether it was true, as she pushed through the curtain-covered doorway and into the small, neat and above all utilitarian annexe. It was scrupulously clean. Clearly labelled cupboards stacked against two walls, and an age-blackened range sat brooding against the third. Careful manipulation of faucet and lighter produced a healthy blue flame, wavering incongruously over the oven. 
	Four years before, in the heady and youthful expectation filled days of 985, Fel, Type and Yod set about transforming the neglected subterranean haven for rodents and teenage exploration into a place fit for habitation. The gleefully intricate skylight mechanism represented one of the later innovations and owed its construction to Jasper; a late comer to the scene who had shrewdly missed the earlier, bucket orientated work. 
	She watched clouds passing out of reach until the porridge boiled over. And in her mind’s eye, before the moment was spoilt by steam, she saw water vapour of a different kind, individualised and personal. 

annihilation

The hatch swung open, landing with a thud and casting a sheet of white light over Jasper as he climbed to the surface. On a knoll a short way off, away from the ugly hum of ventilation duct blooms, and basking in the morning eastern sun sat Fel.
	‘What the hell have we agreed to,’ said Jasper in a conversational turn of voice. He ambled towards her. 
	She put aside her bowl of porridge and cottage cheese. ‘What you agreed to. I was humouring him.’
	‘Rubbish you were.’
	‘Yeah. Heh.’
	‘Ah, “yeah-heh”, the Universal Sounds of retort-imaginative deficiency.’
	‘I think you will find that “Yeah. Heh” is a succinct form of “you think that it is a brilliant idea and you know that I know that you know it”, and mind my porridge.’
	‘It is a great idea.’
	‘It is a pipe dream. It is fantasy.’
	‘It could very well work.’
	‘It could very well not.’
	‘You know you agree with me really.’
	‘You don’t know what real is, really.’
	‘Consider this,’ said Jasper, sitting cross-legged on the grass and fostering a sincere mien, ‘the holidays have begun. We have no work and no obligations for a large section of the year to come. We need a project to fill our time.’
	‘A project,’ she said, aping his countenance, ‘that would ideally reside within the realms of possibility. Projects like fixing up my house, building a car, or taking that journey into the mirk we always planned on doing. Projects in the vein of “seeking out new life and civilisations on distant stars” do not fit this category, or perhaps I am overly narrow-minded here.’
	‘Distant stars is rather an exaggeration.’
	‘Distant moons then.’
	‘They aren’t that distant.’
	‘They’re a damn-sight further than you’ve ever been.’
	‘Alright, I shall convince you via the medium of maths, namely the law of Modus Ponens.’
	‘I sit unimpressed.’
	‘It is true that we are in need of a challenging holiday project. Need of a challenging summer project implies that we will settle for the most challenging one of all, namely, Yod’s, therefore we will settle for Yod’s holiday project.’
	‘Okay, I’m convinced. You can’t argue with maths.’
	‘You cannot indeed.’
	‘Heya, people,’ called Yod, walking from the direction of Teotihuacán and carrying a leather satchel over one shoulder. ‘What’re you laughing about?’
	‘Logic.’
	‘A hilarious subject,’ Yod nodded sagely, ‘I’ve often burst out laughing when reading books on the topic. I think the excluded middle is especially mirthful.’
	‘I’m afraid Fel might need some convincing vis-à-vis the holiday plan,’ said Jasper gravely, nodding toward Fel and pursing his lips.
	‘Okay,’ Yod rummaged in his satchel, ‘consider the apple.’ He held the apple in consideration. ‘The apple can fly.’ He demonstrated the fact by throwing it at Jasper. ‘Consider us, citizens of New Bincombe, and collectively considerably brighter than an apple, and yet we cannot fly. We could, that’s how we got here, and we can again, and this is what I aim to do, with your good help.’ He said this all in the reasonable voice of a relaxed man in the early morning who does not much care what he is saying. 
	‘Yes,’ answered Fel, ‘but I think it has weakened your point slightly that Jasper has eaten the apple. ‘Course I’ll help – it’ll be a laugh. Chuck us an apple.’
	‘I heard a great story in town,’ said Yod, who had been refining the anecdote during his journey from Teotihuacán and felt ready to present it to his friends. ‘Is Type conscious?’
	Yod began. ‘There was this man, Dave, and he had a girlfriend called Karen. A year ago they had a massive argument, and Karen left Dave and went on a six month’er into the mirk. She returned a month early, all ready to make up with Dave and so on and so forth, but when she got to his house in Three Small Lambs she found him with another woman. And this was not just any other woman; she looked uncannily like Karen, even sounded like her. Now, at this stage Karen goes off on one, telling Dave how pathetic he is for trying to replace her. Dave turns to Karen, looks her in the eye, and says, “it is not that she looks like you; it’s that you looked like her.” How great is that?’
	‘Not bad, not bad,’ said Jasper, ‘Three Small Lambs, you say?’
	‘Come on then, Yod,’ said Fel, ‘go get the plans.’
	‘Righteo.’
	‘I do love poring over documents in the sunshine,’ said Jasper, watching Yod go.
	‘Yes. So do I,’ said Fel.
	‘It occurs to me,’ said Jasper, ‘that there are any number of ways in which we could begin this quest.’
	‘A quest now, is it?’ she raised an eyebrow.
	‘Naturally. Voyaging into the unknown: quest, simple as simple. As I was saying, there are a number of ways in which our quest can begin proper.’ He clasped his hands behind his head, warming to the subject. ‘I mean, so far we have been progressing along, suggesting ideas, having a laugh, and falling into the job, like it was one of our holiday projects. But a quest is different. A quest needs, requires, a strongly demarcated beginning and end. It’s really a very structured form.’
	‘A structured form. Well, are the rules any more specific on what constitutes a beginning?’
	‘The preferred method is the setting of a task by some bigwig, but given our lack of big wigs, frankly anything will do. I mean, the alternative form entails us swearing revenge against the killers of our families, and they aren’t dead, which rather spoils things.’
	‘I have an idea.’ Fel stopped grinning and said, ‘And I will tell you why it is a quest. Quests always succeed.’

the true quest

It has been pointed out that life is the true quest, as it has a definite beginning and end, although there is very little point and the finale is a disappointment. In deference to this, the official start of Fel, Jasper, Yod and Type’s quest was somewhat tame, although less messy and with the advantages of communality.
	Jasper stripped down to his underwear and took a running jump into the New Bincombe municipal pool, impacting the water with energy if not style. Yod surfaced from his graceful dive, while Type and Fel bombed into the water from either end. The mission had begun.
	‘This questing business is pretty good,’ said Jasper idly. ‘Do you mind moving your feet?’
	‘Yes,’ said Fel in her laziest voice. She was drying on the grass with her feet resting on Jasper’s chest. ‘You can move once my feet are dry. And you,’ she addressed Type, ‘can move once my head is dry.’
	‘Yod,’ said Jasper, ‘don’t you bloody dare.’
	‘I always thought of questing as being more strenuous than this,’ said Type, winding his fingers in Fel’s hair. ‘Striving against insurmountable odds and suchlike. Having a swim does not seem to fit in.’
	‘Unless there are sea monsters,’ said Yod. ‘Or a strong tide.’
	‘I hope this isn’t going to be in the monster genre of quest,’ said Fel, her eyes closed. ‘I wouldn’t like that.’
	‘I’m sure we’ll bump up against insurmountable odds soon enough,’ said Jasper, ‘don’t you worry.’

CSS Behemoth – 2479 AD

Zero gravity did not suit Mr. Baldhead. The ship’s gradual acceleration gave the inner ear little clue, and a confused inner ear is a seriously upset stomach. On thoroughly emptying the latter and disregarding the former, Eugene found himself pulling his way along a corridor of doubtful orientation. His doubt was dispelled upon releasing his rung-way, as he drifted at first slowly, but accelerating, backwards. He hastily grabbed the bars anew, because now he was hanging over a very deep hole. 
	Four weeks had wended themselves away, as is their wont.
	Eugene pulled himself into his room, painfully aware that his bunk was wall mounted. He tried to reorient himself, but his inner ear had decided upon a direction for down and it was not to be budged. In theory, the furniture of his spherical cabin, mounted on twin hoops as it was, should have naturally shifted the heavy floor to the correct alignment. But in theory, Eugene’s inner ear could not have been so obstinate.
	Eugene Baldhead, failed cog in the merciful and soft machine of Reagan’s Ville, was bound for the Martian sandbox, talking to plants, Air Tax and the serious and rightful inferiority complex cultivated by colonials. Quite why he thought a carbon dioxide atmosphere and endemic dust were preferable to the horrifying embarrassment he was erroneously fleeing from was moot, but given the predilection for unlimited virtual reality gaming, he could have been correct. He was hitching a ride on a settler ship, bound for some new outpost in deep space and built like a mausoleum. 
	He had asked one of the tattooed crew why they could not switch on the gravity. “What,” the salty spacedog answered, “spin her up?” The misogynistic scallywag grinned. “Naa, it’s a laugh, in’ it?” On illuminating Eugene thus, he launched himself from the rung-way, barrel-rolling up the corridor at a fantastic speed.
	The euphemistically named “Entertainment Node” fizzled on at Eugene’s want, randomly selecting the fashion page.
	‘Suddenly,’ said a man in plaid, ‘it’s cool to eat bread!’
	‘TV, a talk show, please,’ Eugene put his hands behind his head and settled back for the apathetic brain rot which was the Talkie TV ® archive.
	‘Hi, and welcome to Talkie TV (registered)!’ the presenter squeaked from beneath peroxide curls and a retina burning be-shouldered pink suit. ‘Today we are talking about: You were with me, and I dumped you! But now your new haircut must go!’ 
	‘Hi, my name’s Glor-ee-a,’ said a terrifying picture of lurid yellow plastisised spandex, ‘And my ex-lover, Todger, he just got a new haircut, and I don’t think he should have!’
	‘Let’s have a look at that haircut then!’
	Todger walked in to loud derision from the studio audience, as Eugene drifted into that semi-unconscious state associated with television and cranial trauma.

preamble

Eugene had a genuine subject for concern: his speech to the ShareHolders was due in a day, and he was hopelessly stuck. Well, almost. His job was to write the standard “any similarity to policies working or defunct” disclaimer, the only constituent of the script guaranteed to be passed over, doodled upon, and then flung through the air as an aerodynamically imperfect replica of that pioneering, flawed, and prophetically named British passenger jet, the Comet.
	His company graced the extensive Reagan’s Ville legal library throughout the afternoon, as he methodically trawled through every disclaimer of the past twenty years. They were identical. A less paranoid Eugene might have seen the task of penning a brave new disclaimer for the next millennium as an honour. But this man firmly believed that his toilet was bugged, and he was extremely annoyed at being given such a pants job.
	He sat back on his executive spinney chair and stared at the ceiling. It, like the rest of his unit, was covered in tasteful stone-effect resin, and he usually found the crazy-paving pattern relaxing – but not for now. He asked his room monitor for preset wallpaper no. four: the skyscape.
	Eugene gritted his teeth. ‘I’ll give them a bloody disclaimer!’
	Well, almost.
	Eugene’s life was a string of “well, almost’s”, and this was the latest of many. He carefully typed out the standard disclaimer, printed a hard copy and slipped it into his brief case. He then typed a different notice, grinning.
Eugene lived a comfortably pseudo-middle class life in the classless Reagan’s Ville citybuilding. On leaving school, his parents enrolled him in a suitable post in the Reagan’s Ville civil service, which is where he stayed. He lived in a comfortable unit in the better, higher levels of Reagan’s Ville. He had a comfortable group of work friends with whom he played roof-golf and squash. He had a comfortable and largely stagnant understanding with a co-worker who shared his interests and lived fairly close by. Occasionally they had sex, perhaps one day they might get married. His future held comfortable shoes and obscurity. And then the bottom dropped clean out of his existence. 
	He couldn’t believe it, simply couldn’t, as he stared at the first print of the Share Holders speech, and at the short passage of text at the bottom of page 1:

Any policies or promises expressed in this document are fully legally binding and constitute company ideals and ethics, provided you affix this page to the Bumper Fun Book of Jokes! Any similarity to policies working or defunct is purely plagiarism on the part of these over paid executives who, frankly, wouldn’t notice an original idea if it felt them up, or find their arse without a conference – and an aide.

	This pre-speech edition would be all over Reagan’s Ville by now. They had even edited it.
	But out of his shattered existence, a new Eugene arose, a phoenix from the flames, ready to take the whole farcical system on and win. Well, almost. He booked the earliest space flight from Earth he could find, and ran for it.
Later, Jim and Tre, workmates of his, knocked, laughing, on his front door. It had been a practical joke of the highest calibre, this they agreed – more practical than they had imagined. What a plank.

death as a warm and fuzzy sentimental notion

Anxiousness washed through the recumbent Eugene like a tide of anxiousness, washing through someone lying on a wall. The ship barrelled onwards through the void, showing no inclination towards deceleration for eventual orbit around the red planet.
	Well, Red Planet. From space, one noticed dark green incursions spattering the surface, as if Mars were a bowl of ageing carrot soup. His ancient face was disappearing under CO2 loving vegetation, crowding around deep-sunken aquifers and short-lived floods. The tourist-board were furious; Friends of the Earth did a petition; “Keep Mars Red, Keep Mars Dead” bumper stickers abounded. It caused no end of headaches for the international terraforming consortium – it was a PR nightmare. People were holding sit-ins and digging tunnels in order to prevent the aquifer mining. Tree houses were being discussed. No end of shit was going down.
	Eugene was acutely aware that Mr. Bogart, the nice man from Martian immigration, was expecting his arrival in June. The thought pressing ever harder on his mind was, would the ship not have to decelerate rather fast? Would that not be uncomfortable? Would that not be dangerous? And as the days vanished three or four at a time, would that not be unlikely?
	A slip of paper, nestling comfortably in an E. B. monogrammed wallet, had the potential to dispel Eugene’s locomotive concerns, albeit to replace them with worse. It was his departure ticket on any one of the many departure-cum-escape pods that peppered the hull, stern and prow alike. (What is an escape pod? a coffin adrift in legislation.) And it was dated 23 June, 15:00 hours ship time. That was today. That was in five minutes. 
	If, at that time, Eugene had ascertained this fact through a sequence of brilliant deductive leaps and inspired free association, or alternatively looked inside his own wallet, he would have been too late. But if, in addition, he had spent his past fifteen years’ training in long distance running, special breathing techniques and levitation, he would still have missed it, but by a more annoying margin. So from a certain attitude and point in the lifetime of Eugene Baldhead, his forgetfulness was positive. Positive, and predictable. 
	It was a post consumer-magazine-programme Universe. Spoilt and overweight citizens sued corporations for heinous Crimes against the Consumer such as serving too hot, too fast, or precisely how the customer asked. Blame abounded. Whining won. Stealth technology applied to everything from coffee to shuttle tickets represented the last ditch effort of the unscrupulous to outwit the life-sucking whinging deplete’r. Blame fostered spite, and spite can be fun. Eugene’s key, worked into the form of a business-card sized departure pass, utilised the latest in stealth technology, such that the brain gave up before the eyes ceased their wandering. The beige paper, ultra sans-serif typeface, convoluted wording and double lined edging were all marks of craftsmanship of the highest order. And it was laminated against radar. That the paper ended up in Eugene’s wallet was a wonder in itself.
	So he stayed. He stayed and sat on his bunk, watching television and taking capsules to speed his perception of time. He remained on board wasting weeks of his life in the cause of skipping them, petrifying his mind when he could have enriched it with literature, music or a complete and belated understanding of Böhm’s Theorem. 
	Not that he had too long under the metaphorically contemptuous metaphysical gaze of time’s greatest minds. The crew, for reasons of their own that had more to do with vodka-induced plot development than sober narrative sense, installed a bemused Eugene in a spare deep-sleeper. After appending his name to the colonist manifold, a cursory dusting, and clearing out the colonists’ valuables, they considered their work done and prepared to jump-ship for the long journey home. 
	(The colonists, on discovering this, had some small consolation in the realisation that every man jack of them died centuries before. Except that it was not true. Ten of that joyous and intellectually crippled crew spin merrily through the galaxy to this very day, having improbable encounters with aliens diverse and morose, and revelling in that witty banter extreme longevity bestows.)

the behemoth enters her element

She seals herself down, her shielding a double-cloak of blow-forward plasma and the carbon equivalent of bubble-wrap packing material. Her corridors become uninhabitable, and she passes the intellectually momentous orbital shell of Pluto. 

She flies into the interstella abyss, and dust for company. 

2

You can talk about war, or disease, or fun, but when you get to the nub of it, most of humanity’s efforts have been to get out of the weather
Bob Smith, 2067 AD

CSS Behemoth – September, 3268 AD

A weight pressed against his skull, invariant, immobile, and eternal. Then it moved, shifting over the landscape of his consciousness and awakening a perception of time, propelling him towards the lithe waters of the continuum. 
	He tried to blink, straining wasted muscles and failing. This, he realised after an age of analysis, was a pointless exertion – his eyes were closed. An arm announced its existence in a throbbing well of pain, followed by a pair of legs, and a second arm. After a decent interval, a torso united these disparate parts of his being under a wall of oppressive weight, shot with ice. 
	Victor awoke, blinking until his focus and memories returned. His ceiling was a plain affair and did not capture his attention for long. He wondered what the date was, propped himself up on his elbows, and was standing upright before his indignant body could point out the frailty of his emaciated frame. In a second coup he threw on a blue dressing gown, placed conveniently at the head of his bed, before his feeble muscles complained. Clothed and with his sight and balance improving, he felt ready to tackle the door and what wonders lay beyond. 
	‘Dead,’ he muttered, and it was true; the ship felt dead. His last conscious memories were of the hustle and bustle of hundreds of other settlers preparing their belongings, and choosing which was the best deep-sleep cocoon in which to spend the next fifty to a thousand years – estimates varied. Thousands in all, he supposed; lines of cocoons stretching to either side in a perversely well lit mausoleum. And here him, alone, quiet. And, here he stopped, why had he awoken in an anonymous bedroom, rather than his own cocoon? 
	He walked on, following the lighted path ostensibly laid out for him. He made a conscious decision to postpone contemplation of his situation until he cared. He arrived at a door, a crossed knife and fork classifying it as a galley. Victor stepped on the open mat, and walked through.
	Eyebrows met Victor. Not remarkable eyebrows, and there were equally unexceptional eyes beneath them, but it was eyebrows all the same. To his dying day he would remember that first sight, an image he would often wheel out to look at and mull over. She stared at him as he wandered from the door to the small kitchen table, her gaze on him as he pulled out the chair opposite to hers and sat down.  
	‘Victor,’ he said, attempting amiability but falling short of easiness by a furlong. ‘Victor Victor. That’s me.’
	She tilted her unremarkable face with its unexceptional features to one side, her expression of puzzlement remaining, her brow furrowed. Victor decided that being generous he would describe her as “bookish”.
	‘You woke me?’
	She breathed in sharply, her nostrils flared. ‘Red.’
	Victor prepared a comment, and was undecided between “withering”, “supportive”, or “persistent” when Red spoke.
	‘You’re a mess,’ she said. 
	‘Well, I’ve’–
	‘Why are you here?’
	‘–only just got up.’ Victor thought for a second. ‘I wanted a change.’
	‘A change?’
	‘A change,’ he repeated. ‘One day I felt like a change.’ He stared at her chin.
	‘As I said, my name is Red,’ she smiled, ‘and I think we are going to get on well enough. You need to eat.’ She pushed a sheet of paper and pen towards him. ‘Read it; sign it.’
	He sat and read, although why he should bother was questionable. The document, two sides and four columns, was written in LegalSpeak, a language devised by lawyers to be comprehensible only to other lawyers. He bent his mind around the five tenses (past, present, future, intention and lies), frowned over the blatantly contrived junior-Latin, searching in vain for punctuation. 
	He looked up. ‘What am I signing?’
	‘You have not signed it yet.’
	He did so, resisting the temptation to underline his name. ‘What have I signed?’
	‘You work for me now,’ she said, taking the pen and document and placing them in a nondescript drawer. ‘Welcome to the second stage of the terraforming of New Moon.’ The drawer gurgled.
	‘My job?’
	‘To stop me from going power mad,’ said a woman who could have demolished him with a harsh word.

surface tension keeps our relationship afloat

The ultimate in contemplative states is the Nice Hot Soak. More so than 2 am, more so than a waiting room, more so even than the gut-wrenching, bowel tightening moments before That Exam… No, it is the Nice Hot Soak when one’s demons come out to play, when the human mind buzzes alight with thoughts many and various, and not always pleasant.
	Victor was not in this particular state because Nice Hot Soaks made him drowsy, but soon he will wake up in a Horrible Cold Bath and start some bubble contemplation.
	Red unnerved him. His bath water now getting decidedly chilly, this was the conclusion that had been dogging his thoughts since leaving the galley after their short meeting. Unnerving. The fact that his thoughts had not progressed passed that point, he reasoned, was because of its true enormity. He couldn’t fathom what it was about her that put him so on edge and, to get to the point, why he was lying in a cold bath rather than going for his full briefing.
	He submerged himself again, opening his eyes to see whether water could correct his worldview. The world blurred, wide and far away, before snapping into darkness as he swore and grabbed for a towel.
	Once his eyes had stopped stinging, and reasoning that the bath water was not about to get any colder, he returned to his reverie on the subject of Red. She certainly did not look that exceptional; a little older than him, but not by much; fitter, certainly; give her a pair of glasses and she’d be everyone’s favourite librarian.
	So… what?
	His last brush with authority, he recalled while searching for some clean clothes, was his unsuccessful attempt at joining the Reagan’s Ville security service (cursed with the unwieldy acronym RVSS). Official motto, “In Discrimen Adducor”, unofficial motto, “Ubi Meus Latinus Codex”. It was a few years before he started working for Mrs. Fermat’s then fledgling company, and he had his heart set on the military life with its heavy polish exuding boots and natty grey uniform. But he was sixteen at the time. He was disqualified immediately on grounds of the recruiting officer not much liking the look of him, and he later considered it a narrow escape, but, all the same…
	He met Red ten minutes later in the galley, glad to be clean and in fresh clothes, but with his fundamental disquiet remaining.
	She smiled brightly at him for a moment; his attention drawn inexorably to her lower lip. ‘Big improvement. Now,’ she beckoned, ‘I have something for you to see.’
	Her long gait led him through the labyrinthine Behemoth, along half lit corridors and down cramped service mezzanines. More than once he looked up some shaft or along an arcade, and had to check himself – the ship was enormous. He was used to life within the confines of Reagan’s Ville; a block designed specifically to hide its enormity, to give the impression that the world was manageable, contained. The Behemoth positively revelled in its vastness of construction. So, while being nothing like the size of Reagan’s Ville, its psychological extent eclipsed Victor’s previous home.
	‘If you were to take a flight outside the Behemoth,’ Red said while continuing to stare ahead. They had been walking for two hours through successively smaller and worse lit passageways – the current one was barely wide enough to accept them both walking abreast. ‘You would see a vaguely conical mass spinning perpendicular to a large moon. We are now towards the base of that cone in the engine half of the ship. This corridor is an emergency access tunnel in case the remote systems become damaged; we are likely to be the first ever to traverse it.’
 	‘It’s all so big,’ said Victor in awe, ducking under an infrequent light. ‘I don’t understand how people could make something on this scale for a colony, when the fourth spacelift isn’t even complete. Or, at least, wasn’t.’
	‘It is a mystery indeed,’ answered Red.
	Victor gave up trying to start a conversation, concentrating instead on avoid braining himself on the lowering roof.
	After three hours’ walking and climbing, Red stopped at a small circular door set at the bottom of a long barrelled hole barely wide enough to accept them both. Holding onto the runged ladder with one hand – and Victor doing likewise with both – she reached down to an unobtrusive lever set just above the hatch. ‘One of the few genuine windows in the ship is behind this cover,’ she pumped the handle several times, ‘open wide.’ She bent the lever to one side and–
	–a bubble into space. Stars wheeling dimly about the distant cloud obscured surface.
	‘That is the moon soon to be named New Moon. We will take that barren atmosphere and wasted land and turn it into home.’
	Victor did not have anything to say; this was serious bubble contemplation. 

good morning

Victor pulled on his dressing gown. He hated his dressing gown. He hated its sensible, comfortable and hardwearing fabric. He hated the subdued but pleasant autumnal colour and the timeless design. He hated the fact that people woke up a thousand years before and put one on, and in all likelihood there would be those a thousand years hence waking up and pulling on such an early morning accessory.
	And he hated toast and tea and ClassicNews and making his bed and short sharp showers and dental hygiene. He hated switching on the lights and a horrible tasting mouth and light music and pulling the blinds on a falsewindow… In short, he hated mornings. In shorter, he hated this morning. He had hated yesterday morning, and the day before that, and the day before that. He had been a practical corpse the day before that, but he hadn’t enjoyed it one bit.
	The single most unnerving person in the known universe waited for him every morning in their customary galley. The single most unnerving entity awaited him every day. It occurred to him that in all likelihood the unknown universe contained sights and sounds more disquieting than that of Red’s small oval face and her soft yet strangely acerbic voice. But only (shall we say) her evil twin.
	And yet he could not find a single aspect of her person, facet of her personality or side to her countenance on which to pin the blame, if blame were needed. He was probably thinking about it too hard, Victor concluded. But he could not think about anything else. 

portal

Victor played the part of worried satellite as he followed Red through multifarious tunnels, corridors, arcades and colonnades with obscure intentions and doubtful provenance.
	He did not know what the shit was going on.
	‘Backdoors,’ said Red, casting a sharp bright smile his way. ‘Everywhere we find backdoors.’ She ducked unexpectedly through another of the tight ducts that epitomised Behemoth bowel design. Around the living quarters, one found the arteries of the ship to be large, well-lit and ventilated homage to corridor design – but not here in the capillary service tunnels, ill designed for human tread.
	Victor attempted to keep up. The word “intractable” entered his mind in a big way. He attempted to address a sensible comment to Red’s leg as she scurried up a Chaucer-tube. ‘Timetables?’
	Red continued upwards, swinging round and down a Palmer-tube. ‘The timing of space comes in two flavours: nano-second accuracy, rigid and brittle, or lax enough to see days synonymous with weeks and years with decades. Guess which we have adopted.’
	‘But, decades?’ she had gone. He panted, but crawled on through the dim and smelly Archer-tube. 
	He was climbing through the ship’s primary computer, the walls given over to a web of coolant pipes and the air bitterly cold. Hither and thither, LED’s peeked through a mass of black piping, presumably for added atmosphere. He half walked, half jogged to catch back up with Red.
	‘Why the LED’s?’ he asked. ‘What’s the point?’
	‘Ambience. Looks cool at ship-night.’
	Victor checked his watch. It was a proper analogue twelve hour one and impractical for the Behemoth’s just-short-of 20 hour cycle. ‘I’ll bet.’
	Red stopped still towards the end of one unusually long and precarious caged catwalk suspended in a kelp forest of humming silvered pipes. Victor could no longer feel his feet, and the only contact he had with his hands was sight, but Red appeared perfectly happy in a white shirt and muddy-green trousers. She pulled a chocolate bar from a knee pocket and started to munch.
	‘We are now,’ she said in-between bites, ‘about as close to the primary processor herself as a human can go.’ She motioned down through the wire mesh of their walkway to the spaghetti mass of matte black and silvered tubes undulating beneath them. ‘Chocolate?’
	‘No thanks,’ he said through chattering teeth.
	‘Certain? Okay then,’ she started on a second bar, dropping the first’s gaudy wrapper through the mesh, where upon it was picked up by an unnoticed air current and quickly disappeared to an uncertain fate. Victor followed the red and blue wrapping until he lost it through a sea of silver.
	‘Come on, look,’ she said, leading him by the forearm to a slight bulge in their mesh cradle. It took a moment for his confused brain to register that far from being icy cold, her hand on his arm was warm. She pointed to a particular mass of pipes amid a humdrum, normal… mass of pipes. ‘See it?’
	‘What?’
	‘That small area is the most intelligent collection of matter in a five-parsec radius. Not that you’d get a good conversation out of it, but what you do get is a fairly good understanding of certain chaotic systems.’
	Victor said, ‘Is that all?’ and almost instantly realised what a stupid question that was.
	‘All? That represents the pinnacle of five hundred years of processor evolution. Do you perhaps think that you could do better with paper and a pen?’
	‘That’s not my job though,’ Victor said deliberately. He left a pause short enough not to be interrupted, while substantial enough for it to be recognised as a, well, pause, before adding, ‘And to say that it is horrendously powerful is not to say that it is intelligent. And what are we doing here?’
	Red walked curtly along the corridor, followed by Victor.

elegy for the lives of others

It was another morning, but Victor had not slept. Rage was something for the moment, but anger, he suspected, was something to nurture. Initially overwhelmed, he grew to resent Red. Hatred might come into it, but for the moment it was anger through and through. Victor had occasion over the past week to experience a gamut of emotions concerning Red, not one of them positive. Perhaps he was due a good experience. Perhaps a good emotion was about to walk through his cabin door. Perhaps a succession of glorious highs was just around the metaphorical corner of time. Perhaps that slight tremor was a fleet of spaceborne swine making rather a mess of the Behemoth’s exterior.	
	The reasons and mechanisms behind said slight tremor have profound implications for the story, encompassing as they do myriad attractive characters and fantastical creatures, all splattering against the hull of a large and highly inconvenient spaceship. It is not this story, though, and will be ignored – the entrance of Red into Victor’s cabin will not. 
	‘I like what you’ve done with it,’ she said through a smile, making a show of casting her eyes over his featureless room. ‘I have a sight you simply must see.’
	‘Another one?’ Victor said coldly.
	Red looked confused.
	‘Another sight to see. No,’ said Victor. He looked at his hands, and in the veins and tendons he saw that by his own volition he was centuries from a home in which everyone he had ever known was dead. He saw that a life of predictability had turned to no life at all. ‘Would I like to see this sight? No, I would not like to act the amazed schoolboy who understands nothing but spectacle.’ He looked up. ‘I am not a fucking tourist. Go away.’
	Red’s eager expression collapsed. She fled from his room.
	Long afterwards, he considered watching her face fall, the image of strength collapsing under a breeze, was the point at which he understood Red, at least as far as any individual can understand another. It did not occur to Victor that Red’s attempts to impress him with the wonders of the ship they alone shared were not expressions of superiority, quite the opposite, but he had an inkling of it. It was this dichotomy that formed the seat of his disquiet, not what he was to discover in the years that followed.
	Victor despised himself for not running after Red, for not having the cathartic corridor confrontation that the situation begged for. And maybe a cathartic cry followed by a cathartic hug followed by a cathartic goodness-knows-what.
	But he didn’t and hadn’t. No, he’d stayed in his cabin, venturing out after an hour to collect some vending-food, then spending the rest of the day like so many others immersed in the Behemoth’s TV archives. He had been watching the classic ten thousandth episode of Neighbours when he should have been holding a gently crying Red to his breast. Nosferatu – re-mastered using the latest analogue technology – had been massaging his senses when he could have been forging a new Understanding with Red.
	Lassie replaced mutual respect.

New Bincombe, Ressonner – June, 989 OL

‘You see,’ Yod was saying, ‘Sheba is near-as-damn-it a sister moon to Ressonner: mean gravitation at seven point two metres per second squared–’
	‘I think we can do without a meaningless list of statistics, okay?’ said Jasper, who did not feel that the mass, radius, orbital plane or flavour of Sheba would be worthwhile additions to his memory. 
	‘It’d be funny, in a trivially ironic way, if those statistics become vital to you at some point in the future,’ said Fel. ‘Actually, Yod, you’d best whisper them to me – I don’t want to be caught short when the time comes.’ Yod bent over and cupped his hand around her ear. ‘Kilograms, you say’, she said. ‘That many metres?’
	Jasper smirked, well aware of the inherent flaws of the statistician’s trade. It is no great surprise that in the years remaining to Jasper, he was never once compelled to repeat or otherwise utilise the vital statistics of Sheba. 
	‘And returning to your point…’ said Jasper, with a rolling motion to his hand and exasperated lilt to his voice. ‘I thought today was Bloody Get On With Something Day.’
	‘I was explaining the reasoning behind my assumption that both Ressonner and Sheba were terraformed, and there is a second civilisation in our lunar system.’ Yod felt there was something missing. ‘Oh yes, er, in our lunar system!’ he exclaimed.	
	‘Right-right-right,’ said Jasper. He eyed the panorama of paper stacked about them. Its sum was their objective; the individual piles of documents, photocopied and original, revised or ancient, were morsels to be delegated, savoured, expounded upon, understood and completed. Reposing creased and dog-eared on Yod’s floor lay the ideal of a space going craft, of any space worthy vessel. ‘Where’s Type with those computers?’
	Type appeared in the doorway, side stepping into the space for maximum effect, and threw his stack of five computers quite literally into the scene. His collection of durable matte red and green boxes bounced harmlessly over the tile floor of his and Jasper’s kitchen. His own, painted and repainted, rebounding with enough force to land, right side up, on the table – to an audience of nil. Serendipity was out to lunch; Type had the wrong house. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘the bastards are at Yod’s place.’
	Jasper resisted the impulse to look up when he heard the click and clank of someone gaining entrance to Yod’s home. He counted to three, then said in a loud and clear voice, ‘Where’s Type with those computers?’
	Type slid through the interconnecting tunnel, dragging a large rucksack and breathing heavily. He opened the bag, set the top two computers deliberately to his left and right, then threw one each to Yod, Jasper and Fel. He missed, sending the boxes springing in the odd, counter-intuitive way that bounce-proofed media travel. 
	‘I’ve set up a workspace on this computer,’ Yod tapped the box to his right, ‘called The machinations of Stan Mörde and other notable twenty-first century villains, which we can use over the æther. You’d best put this in a safe place,’ he said to Yod, handing him the computer. 
	A mug is a mug, a spoon is a spoon, and as Jasper flipped the lid of his console, a computer is a computer – namely a screen, definable keyboard and any number of obscure ports. And because, stereoscopic trickery aside, humans see in two dimensions, the screen was two-dimensional. It is more pleasant to type for an extended period than talk, so a keyboard remained the dominant method of input. The technology was well understood, and the race in computer design had long since switched from speed to durability, such that the computer in Jasper’s lap was probably hundreds or possibly a thousand years old. 
	The computers were eminently programmable, and had been redefined by countless users more imaginative than Jasper, rendering on-screen interfaces idiosyncratic at best, and often an inscrutable exercise in shifting one’s perceptions. The lime green and terracotta hued box thrown at Jasper answered exclusively to the name Stephanie, and its interface was (squints, turns screen upside-down for comic effect) based around someone’s anatomy – Stephanie’s, evidently. Finding from where one could remote to The machinations of Stan Mörde and other notable twenty-first century villains was an exhaustive procedure, but never dull. Desktop metaphor, indeed.

zukunftsroman

‘A literature survey is what we need,’ said Fel.
	‘Hey-hey, let’s go a-foraging,’ said Yod.
	Heavy clouds and a spattering of rain darkened the road and light, mirroring Fel’s mood and this, she considered, was unfair. They were on a quest, she and her three closest friends. One does not feel slightly overcast during an adventure. Black depressions, yes; falling into dark chasms of despair after, say, being eaten, yes. But not a dull headache and subtle melancholy when walking along Roman road towards the Advisory Council building. Shit, she thought, I have psychological depth.
	She trudged, a method of locomotion in which it is essential to see the world from the viewpoint of shoes. The world is tiny, the horizon but a step away. All one has to do is point in a certain direction and walk, because there is no prospect of finding the way, of performing any degree of navigation once vision has been handed to the toes.
	Fel’s Jesus sandals halted at the entrance to the Advisory Council building. She pulled open one of the domed structure’s odd wooden doors and said, ‘After you,’ to Jasper.
	‘Cheers,’ he said, and walked from cold heavy droplets of rain and a stiff breeze to the humidity and temperature of the ever-hot Ressonner Advisory Council building, a structure at the physical, political and social hub of New Bincombe. Home, amusingly enough, of tropical plants, tropical fish, and the small office of an inoffensive man named Martin Bean.
	Jasper was interested in neither plants nor fish, nor a stimulating if earnest conversation with Martin. What he wanted lay several metres beneath his feet. What he wanted was knowledge. ‘Have we each got our lists?’ he asked in an officious voice, brandishing his card. It read “space”. 
	‘Yep,’ said Yod, flashing his own considerably longer wish list, packed with esoteric terminology and overloaded with acronyms. Ignoring the plants, fish and all other extraneous detail, he strode to the central stairway (again, giving it but a cursory glance), and clattered down (wooden?) steps to the library below. He stood for a second, waiting in part for his friends to catch up. Under (yellow?) light, stack after shelf after row of mouldering documents straddled the intellectual horizons of Ressonner. Three floors of mouldering documents, badly printed on thin, age yellowed paper amounted to New Bincombe’s Knowledge, her archive of all human technological and intellectual achievements. Countless millions of leaves – and countless for good reason. It was disordered, and there were gaps. Large gaps.
	Yod’s eyes darted greedily, recalling numerous days spent browsing the shelves. ‘You remember where the stuff is?’ he asked of Type.
	‘I think there is a collection of aeronautics in the next row,’ Type said, he too reminiscing over a youth spent smuggling pages of fascination. 
	Outside the sun climbed, hung, and fell; nocturnal fauna stirred; good folks prepared for bed; and a thousand other clichés of the coming night went unused. Dusk, friend to the reveller and home to nefarious activities, reached the Ressonner Advisory Council building, and saw four figures carrying bulky bags and creeping in a suspicious manner. 
	‘Hey,’ whispered the tallest one, handing his full rucksack to another, ‘I’ll collect the computers.’
	‘Alright,’ said the other, hefting the extra bag onto his back. ‘Meet you back home.’

the narrative benevolence of words

‘It is at this stage in proceedings,’ said Jasper, looking up from the papers he was sifting through and rubbing his eyes, ‘that I wish we had a fast-forward button.’

‘My, didn’t that week go by fast?’ said Jasper.
	‘Shh,’ said Fel, ‘He’ll be coming out soon.’
	‘Plan sorted out?’
	‘For the hundredth time, yes, Jasper, I know exactly what to do.’
	‘So do I.’
	‘That’s good.’
	‘Yes, it is.’
	‘Shh.’
	Ten minutes later, after much daring-do, astonishing feats of bravery and audacious skill in the field of theft, Jasper and Fel hotfooted it across the fields with a water decomposer and several rolls of solar cells. These objects d’teque were spirited away into the mirk to join others of their ilk, a terrifying fate in which screwdrivers loomed large.
	‘What we need now,’ said Jasper, ‘are two Bucky-bags, and a fluid switching circuit.’
	‘Bucky-bags?’ said Type, who had recently entered the glade carrying a bundle of fibre-optics and ten metres of hosepipe. 
	‘One for oxygen, and one for hydrogen.’
	‘I get it.’
	‘Have much trouble in getting your stuff?’
	‘Not really. It took me an age to convince them that I needed both hosepipe and the optics to water our garden. I ended up spinning them a tale about a new automatic watering system we’ve been working on.’
	‘Heh,’ said Fel, sitting in the shade of an unfurled solar cell awning, ‘I’ve been telling people that we are building an extension to Yod’s place.’
	‘Oh,’ said Yod, ‘when Iolo caught me taking those carbon fibre injectors, I told him we were making a balloon.’
	‘A balloon?’
	‘A hot air balloon. More of a Zeppelin, really, to survey the mirk with.’

bambi	

A casual visitor, wandering along the extremity of New Bincombe near to Green Acres, would have been rewarded by alarming sounds of prototype propulsion. Venturing closer, they might have espied an intriguing assembly of three opaque blue balloons linked through chrome machinery, powered by ten or eleven square metres of solar cells. Closer inspection still yields one crispy-fried ex-casual observer as the hydrogen and oxygen balloons empty into a single stream of volatile gas, which ignites – producing water, the afore-mentioned lump of charcoal, and a whole host of screams along the way. Except that said visitors were dumb fauna and nobody bothers noting when one of those is flamed.

the occult significance of a bandaged left foot

‘Have you noticed,’ Yod was saying while casually bandaging his left foot, ‘how time flies only when you are not thinking about it, and as soon as you do it drags like hell.’
	‘Yep. When did you start to notice it?’ said Jasper, he, too, gaunt and sporting impressive abrasions.
	‘Last Tuesday. It’s been such a drag since then. And you, have you noticed it yet?’
	‘Just now, actually. You bastard.’
	‘Heh-heh.’
	Months of work had transformed innumerable items of pilfered technology into an impressively scary machine, standing rampant in the centre of its clearing, and ringed by dead prototypes and defunct equipment. It was a framework, a skeleton, not quite alive, but with the potential and expectation of completion breathing through its central thruster, over insulated guts and exposed instruments, and along wires and cables snaking to the ground to a ring of analytical computers. It was a fact, fully designed and past half of its construction, and possessing a momentum of its own. 
	Sometimes a system was integrated and tested in an afternoon, fitting beautifully into the whole. At other times and for less well-understood aspects of the spaceship builders’ art, trivial problems unfolded into enigmas of gargantuan proportions, requiring novel solutions and sending whoops of delight reverberating around the mirk on resolution. 

furlough for the erudite

Sabbaticals were requested and granted – the construction of a dirigible was considered a worthy pursuit – and what had begun as holiday work became work-proper. Became a job, if not with the accompanying hours and pension prospects. The career ziggurat, as Yod liked to say, was more of a plateau. But a job nevertheless, notwithstanding erratic hours, suspect working practices and haphazard attention to documentation, and one that was soon to enter an uncharted phase. 
	A time-lapse recording of their craft’s construction, from dull leafy glade to multihued monstrosity, would have been a highly instructive and scary piece of film (if it existed, which it did not). Having ascertained its non-existence, there is no problem in giving it a Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci score and narration by Richard E Grant.
	Jasper inspected his fingernails. ‘Are white splotches calcium deficiency,’ he asked the room, ‘or is it zinc?’ The room failed to provide an answer, as Jasper had neglected to check whether it was occupied, forgetting that the sound equipment he was screwing into place provided music, not medical advice. He admired his work and the fine fit of his personally cut brackets. He ran his fingers along perfect right angles and beautifully rounded edges, and gloried in the precision of his work. ‘Shit, I need a break.’
	‘How ‘re you doing,’ said Fel, sliding into their ship’s primary living space compartment. ‘Gods, I need a wash,’ she plucked at her grey T-shirt and jeans that had forgotten the meaning of the words “washing-machine”. ‘I need a wash and a change of clothes and a sleep and a break. I need to get away from this bloody thing.’
	‘Sit next to me,’ said Jasper, arms wide in solidarity. 
	Fel collapsed next to him, draping one arm over his back and letting her head drop into the crook of his neck. ‘I need a rest,’ she said. 
	‘As do we all,’ he said. ‘The deeps.’
	‘The deeps,’ she said. ‘Past the greater ring. Out there in the mirk, right into the distance. Way out there.’
	‘The four of us.’
	‘Type’s girlfriend?’
	‘I didn’t know he had one.’
	‘Remember Janine?’
	‘No.’
	‘She’s nice.’
	‘The four of us.’

(x  humanity)[(y  humanity)(“x appreciates y”)]

Preparations were quick and goodbyes brief, and on 14 February, 990, Fel, Type, Jasper and Yod departed for the all-encompassing forest known variously as the deeps, the darks, the grim and the mirk. They departed carrying the weight of months of obsessive work on their shoulders, and returned forty-eight days later carrying but many-patched backpacks. They did not give accounts in any depth of their journey, save for sketchy details of the colossal trees found further into the mirk, and an expression of profound relief. Surprisingly to some, it was their first sojourn in the mirk. 
	“So,” their fellow citizens of New Bincombe asked, “are you ready to fly the balloon yet?” And with a wry and somewhat weary smile the four balloonists – as they had come to be known – said, “Yes, the time for our maiden voyage is nigh. Be prepared for a sight, for we shall be flying once again.” 

everyone appreciates someone

‘You know, she really is beautiful,’ said Jasper, running his eyes over the many-textured form of their spaceship, as you do.
	‘From a certain point of view,’ said Type.
	‘A highly blinkered and sentimental view through the corner of one’s wraparound rose-tinted spectacles,’ said Fel.
	‘You love her really,’ said Yod.
	‘She needs a name.’
	‘Appellations are difficult,’ said Yod. ‘You capture a thing by naming it.’
	‘Pardon?’
	‘It’s true. Think about it, if someone asks, say, “why are we here”, I could answer “evolution”, and that is that. I haven’t explained it, all I have said is the name of a certain process and yet that could suffice as an answer.’
	‘Suggestions, please?’

the love of prescient comments

Travelling into the mirk was, like trawling through the archives below the Advisory Council building, a rights-of-passage activity that would have inspired TV-movies of the American breed if Ressonner possessed such monstrosities of sentimentality over pathos and sensation over objectivity. There existed an open invitation to the wider world beyond New Bincombe’s grassy bounds, one that each of her residents accepted at least once. For every citizen who did not return, through choice or misadventure, the lure and power of the mirk intensified. 
	‘Yod’s Flying Circus.’
	‘Excuse me?’
	‘A name, for the ship, Yod’s Flying Circus.’
	‘But Yod, it is neither a circus, nor yours.’
	‘You spoil everything I do.’
	‘I’ve been pretty successful so far, yes.’
	Yod hopped over a fallen branch.
	‘Nice hopping.’
	‘I’m a good hopper.’
	Time went, and the friends progressed further into the mirk. Someone, probably Jasper, activated a radio beacon, hammering it into the trunk of a tree. Its little red light flashed forlornly and attracted insects.
	‘Deathstar.’
	‘Not Jasper’s Deathstar?’ 
	‘I think Deathstar is enough, Fel.’
	‘A bit confrontational, isn’t it?’ said Yod, smarting over the rejection of his own idea.
	‘We can’t have that now, can we.’
	‘Well, no.’
	‘Considering,’ said Jasper, ‘considering that this is going to reside in the history books for all time, I think the good ship Shit-Arse-Bollocks-Wank would be marvellous.’
	‘Puerile,’ said Fel.
	‘That was,’ Jasper adopted a sanctimonious air to his graces, ‘the point.’
	‘Type,’ said Fel to the tall one, ‘come over here; it’s been ages since you had a suggestion.’
	‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘of a historical flavour. I was thinking of… Viking; Little Rascal; Voyager; Hand of God 137; Enterprise; Tardis; Apollo 17; Nostromo; Heart of Gold; Sputnik; Starbug; Millennium Falcon; Arthur C. Clarke; Cargo Cult; Babylon 4; Mir; Behemoth; Ariane; Galactica; Agamemnon; Thunderbird; Molniya; Red Dwarf; Copernicus; Terminus; Eagle Mark IV; Nova 5; Mirage; Saturn V; Blue Giant; Greeny Meany; Salyut; Challenger; Ares; Discovery 1; Mars 2; Stargazer; Defiant; Berkshire; Spyglass; Energia; Titanic; or Galileo.’

self discovery is rubbish

The light, shaper of human perceptions, metamorphosed from forest-day dappled green to forest-night black, via a blue dusk. Drizzle percolated through the leafy sky, coalescing into large infrequent drops that splattered against what disparate journeymen were abroad. Sheltered beneath the membrane of a tent, our four travellers’ singular contact with falling water was through a pacific pattering percussion for the sonorous song of sleeping sounds.
	They covered more ground the next day, and, come the close of the third, they arrived at the original boundary of New Bincombe: the start of the big trees.
	‘You see,’ said Yod, ‘New Bincombe started out big, very big. One might even say Massive.’
	‘And then someone forgot to mow the lawn,’ said Jasper. 
	‘Something like that.’
	‘It feels like you’re looking at a different world,’ said Fel. The others nodded mutely, looking for the first time on the real mirk, the real deeps: the real moon – no flat world of grass and crops, young trees and open woodland paths was this. Colossal trunks reared from the ground, their great roots arching over the travellers; the canopy was the sky. 
	‘I wonder if we’ll see any curios,’ said Type, anchored to the mercifully flat forest floor, and peering into the ruptured tree-rent land beyond. 
	‘I thought that the point of a curio was that you didn’t see them,’ Jasper said without engaging his brain – let the mouth speak if it wants to; he was occupied spying for paths through the deeps’ bough-fissured country. ‘They being rather extinct,’ his mouth added as his eyes ranged over a promising route and his mind’s eye inappropriately reeled images of a girl he once knew. His lips twitched.
	‘Oh no, no,’ Fel said in a similarly entranced voice, ‘the point about a curio is that it is a species never really meant to survive, and yet it does. Jokes, you know, like the Thompson’s Woodlouse, or Schrödinger’s catless tail, or the pygmy vegetarian tiger.’ She slapped a hand against her forearm, creating a bloody smear and breaking her reflections on her past. 
	‘The funny thing is,’ said Type, fully attentive to what he was saying, ‘that, apparently, if you leave the construction of animal life entirely to a computer, you find an overwhelming variety of amusing curios. They are called “computer bugs.”’
	‘Looks like Ressonner was left in the hands of Chuckles the Zany Computer Arse, with occasional help from his friend, Spud,’ said Yod.
	‘If you believe that sort of thing,’ said Jasper. 
	‘I didn’t realise natural history was an article of faith,’ said Yod.
	‘Not for me. Not for us,’ his lips twitched again. ‘You know there are people who don’t believe in Earth.’
	‘I didn’t think that was an article of faith either,’ said Fel.
	‘Poor wording. There are people who think that Ressonner is it, there is nothing else, and that the idea of us coming from Earth is just one creation myth of many, and not a very complete one at that.’
	‘People?’ asked Fel.
	‘People,’ said Jasper.
	‘Dimwits,’ said Yod. ‘Are we going in?’

life, the universe and everything

‘Water,’ said Yod, ‘it is all about water. Everything. Life itself, water.’ He slapped the tank. ‘Fuel, drink and radiation shield, now how cool is that?’
	‘Five percent full,’ said Type, peering at one gauge among many on his computer screen. ‘This is going to take an age to fill. How tedious.’

Finding their own paths through the obstacle course of root and tree, Jasper found himself a good two metres below Fel, and twice that above Type and Yod. He frequently ran his fingers between strap and shoulder, periodically loosening and tightening the belts on his rucksack. They were nearing the first of the truly massive trees.
	‘It’s a little strange,’ Type was saying, ‘like these trees have a territory or something. According to people I’ve spoken to, each one of the big ones has a few dozen hectares of smaller trees of its own.’
	‘Why should that be strange,’ said Fel. ‘Makes sense to me. Some stories I’ve heard are that if you go far enough you can find trees that dwarf even–’ she stopped as she caught sight of the tree. ‘I don’t believe them,’ she said. ‘Bloody hell.’
	It was a giant in a world of giants, a mountain on a moon without such frivolous and extravagant geography. 
	‘It must be twenty metres across,’ breathed Yod.
	‘They’re meant to be at least four hundred metres high,’ said Fel, craning her neck to look at the far distant greenery. The grey trunk may as well have extended to infinity. 
	‘The trunk’s mass must be…’ Type’s lips moved, ‘a hundred, a hundred and twenty thousand tonnes. I’ll bet the whole tree weighs in at half a billion kilos.’
	‘Let’s climb it,’ said Jasper. 

typefaces are the font of all wisdom

‘I think it is because most people don’t know how anything works,’ said Yod. ‘They look at a machine, or think about maths or physics or biology, and all they can see is darkness because they do not understand.’
	‘And you do understand,’ said Fel. ‘You understand everything, right?’
	‘No, but the point, the point is that I could. The point is that I can research anything I please. That is the most important piece of knowledge, understanding that nothing is beyond understanding.’
	‘How did we get into this conversation, Yod?’
	‘Well,’ Yod sat back, ‘I reckon it started when Type and Jasper fell asleep and you and I were left to finish the bottle,’ here he sloshed said bottle. ‘And then you said something about end of the world cults, and I said something nasty about stupid people, and then you told me not to be such a fascist, or something.’
	‘Thanks for bringing me up to speed,’ she said, hardly dryly. ‘Shall we change the subject once again, because I am nowhere close to falling unconscious and I simply hate sitting around in silence until the inevitable occurs.’
	‘No good for your health,’ said Yod, pointing an accusing finger and passing her the bottle. 
	‘My health, yes, to my health,’ she said, taking a gulp and grimacing. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that our conversation is at an end.’ 
	Yod endeavoured to cast dark looks around the cabin, reflecting dark machinations and suppressed desires, but since he held neither, this soon struck him as foolish. He nudged Fel with his foot. ‘You awake?’

The stone-grey trunk offered little purchase, and makeshift pitons proved difficult to fashion and impossible to embed at any altitude, but it was the coming night that forced a stop to their farcical and painful attempts at tree-scaling. They bivouacked against the tree, bounded by a discreet deadwood fire, nursing sprained limbs and bruised flesh. 
	‘I wonder how many campfire arguments we’ve had,’ said Jasper.
	‘Many,’ said Fel. ‘Christ, it’s all we do.’
	‘Fun though,’ said Yod.
	‘Exactly,’ said Jasper. ‘That’s the point.’
	‘I thought the point of an argument was to find the truth,’ said Type, who alone had escaped without what, in some circles, is in all seriousness called the red badge of courage. Other circles, spheres even, hold this to be the sort of nonsense that has kept humanity shackled to age-old inequalities. This will not be the four’s argument. 
	Jasper chuckled, Fel raised a smile, and Yod laughed aloud. 
	‘The point of an argument,’ said Jasper in the authoritative tone he knew to be especially annoying, ‘is to discover who is the best arguer. Truth is something you arrive at after experiment and study and thought and work and research and building on the labour of all those thousands that came before. The truth is the truth and therefore need not be argued over. Dialectic my arse. Argue that.’

‘You awake?’ Fel poked at Jasper again.
	‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘how many times I have awoken in my life. I wonder if one could classify the various states I have found myself in into a few simple categories, or whether each entry into the conscious world is a unique experience deserving individual study and meditation.’	
	‘You are obsessed.’
	‘Well I am sorry if, having just been rudely woken, I don’t have some feelings on the subject.’
	‘It’s today, Jasper.’
	‘I thought it was tomorrow.’
	‘It was: yesterday.’
	‘I bet Gagarin didn’t start his historic day with a hangover.’
	‘Historic now, is it?’
	‘I am safe in applying that term, I believe.’

‘Fel?’
	‘What, Jasper?’
	‘What did I do on my birthday?’
	‘Jasper, you can be so gullible.’

coming of a bright new age

Neither poster campaigns nor leaflet drops heralded advanced warning of the event. Clever and witty slogans went towards other ends. Advertising people (who somehow thought that regurgitating ideas from the worlds of film and art gave them importance and credibility; who epitomised the ethos of equating possession with quality, capricious greed with need; who played to the worst in us) did not exist on Ressonner. One had to advertise oneself, and this, too, went without exploitation. 
	The Miranda was charging in her widened glade, her iridescent cloaking soaking the energy of the sun and channelling it into the process that was gradually filling two ridiculous balloons, one twice the volume of the other. They were attached through a simple ring of pipes to the top of the craft, and after a week in the sun had dwarfed the ship to which they were tethered, bobbing high over the trees and drawing visitors in varying classes of interested amusement. 
	A hose snaked from the ship and gurgled in a water filled pit, banked on one side by the earth it displaced, giving her a plant or insectile aspect. She was feeding, filling her bellies with oxygen and hydrogen, storing solar energy in the breaking of oxygen-hydrogen bonds, and preparing to leave her artificially terrestrial confines. 

oohar

‘Under the aegis of our atmosphere, we stand before you, citizens of New Bincombe, colossuses of the stars. We go bravely at a new world, the world of the sky!’
	‘That is rubbish, Jasper.’
	‘It is difficult, you know, thinking up inspirational speeches. I would sound something of a pillock, I suppose.’
	‘I think that it’d devalue the enterprise,’ said Type, ‘if we had to shout about how good it is.’
	‘I see your point. No advertising.’
	‘Type, why did we call her the Miranda?’
	‘It sounds good, Fel.’
	‘Didn’t you have a girlfriend called Miranda?’
	‘Well.’

the Behemoth – January, 0 OL

Eugene opened his eyes to a lagoon of numb calm. His vision and hearing proved unfeeling, insulated, buffered from his mind; his brain wrapped in cotton wool, senses adrift. He felt as if he were watching a distant television, as if he were a passive viewer on the world.
	Looking expectantly at him from one side was a figure, and drifting his voyeur’s gaze to the other side revealed another human shaped area of space.
	They talked.
	Fade to black.

Eugene sat up in bed and for a blissful moment remembered nothing. The moment, an imprecise unit of time at best, ended early. Mars, he thought, a notion given strength by his lack of the same – an obvious consequence of months of weightless travel – inasmuch as gravity felt little different from Earth’s, yet was under half that of the mother planet. He stood, finding a dressing gown on the floor, and himself in ill-fitting blue pyjamas; this he found particularly disconcerting. 
	He walked to the far wall to take a closer look at the only ornamentation his room held, a pleasant enough starscape with a small blue-green planet leisurely traversing the field. It was a sophisticated real-time hologram, of the type usually called a falsewindow because they tended to resemble recessed windows and were fed by a nearby camera. Falsewindows had many advantages over their real counterparts, especially if one were a designer of spaceships and got headaches when thinking about stress fractures, or if one happened to own shares in the ever-buoyant Falsewindows incorporated. What Eugene wanted to see was a window, false or otherwise, on a particulate laden flushed sky with lichen spangled rock, peppered with happily bounding respirator-wearing locals. He did not want stars, and especially not an unidentified green planet. That, he decided, was Bad News.
	And then it hit him: the answer. He grinned, tapping his finger against the glass. ‘Mr. Eugene Baldhead,’ he said to the balls of hydrogen and helium years passed and parsecs distant, ‘you have been asleep for a very long time, decades perhaps. That down there,’ he obliterated the planet with his palm, ‘is Mars.’ Mars. An inhabitable Mars – the Mars people had wanted to believe in before it was discovered dead. 
	A small hand-written note drew itself to Eugene’s attention through means no more technologically advanced than its eye-catching yellow colour. ‘Passenger,’ he read aloud, ‘follow the lighted path.’ The door opened with the satisfying “Shh” that drove interior designers into paroxysms of excitement, and Eugene stepped into his yellow light road. I want… a cushy job in the fresh air.
	He reached a door, a nondescript door, a plain door, a featureless door, a door sans extraneous detail – it really was quite that unimaginative. It was a door that could capture one’s attention for but a short time before interest becomes prevarication, before a reasonable study of where one is to pass becomes an overt sign of trepidation. And another thing, the door opened rather too fast–
	–to an empty room. It was something of a disappointment, something of an anticlimax, something of a postponement of inevitability and the revelations she held. He sat down. He turned his chair. He faced the door. He tapped his fingers on the table. He ran his fingers through his hair. He pondered.
	He wondered who was to meet him – what, even, given the leaps forward made in his own lifetime. What bejewelled automaton might drift through the door to address him? What horribly expensive piece of machinery might glide to his attention? What unknowable intelligence could be coming his way?
	A woman walked into the room, a woman who he could conceivably have recognised, but did not. ‘Eugene Baldhead, how do you do. My name is Red.’

fools’-certainty

Certainty is a quantity hard to come by, and dogged by fool’s-certainty, a similar beast wont to evaporation; certainty is a fact built of half-facts; certainty is what we establish so that it no longer need dog our thoughts. Certainty in a truth is related to the sub-thinking world-view one constructs since that too is elevated to the level of assumption – other information must fit the view. 
	Eugene held an opinion of the world and his place in it, a view soon to undergo a seismic change, as he is thrown to a distant time and place, and finds himself a different person. He never made the distinction between the two lives of Eugene, seeing a continuation of person if not position, so the point of transition was lost to him.
	‘We want you to be the first chancellor of New Moon,’ said the woman, Red.
	‘Moon?’
	‘New Moon.’
	And that was that, the point at which Eugene Baldhead of Reagan’s Ville, Earth, ended, and Eugene Baldhead, chancellor elect of New Moon began his life. While Eugene was rather too shocked at the time to appreciate the momentous occasion, he mulled it over at length in the following days, which is the same thing. 
	‘New Moon?’
	‘Did the falsewindow not show a forest moon?’
	‘But, Mars?’
	‘Mars?’ it was her chance to look nonplussed, although Eugene did not recognise her expression as such. ‘We anticipated that this might occur,’ she said, frowning rather strangely, and reaching into the back pocket of her trousers. ‘Next door is a bathroom; you had best freshen up. Hopefully this will explain things,’ she pulled out and handed him a small pamphlet entitled, “So you have woken-up as the Chancellor of a space colony”. She motioned towards the door. ‘See you later, Chancellor.’

So you have woken-up as the Chancellor of a Space Colony

A pamphlet by Victor Victor of the good-ship Behemoth

The first thing to do is Don’t Panic! People often panic when they discover themselves lightyears from home and in a position of great responsibility, and it rarely helps! We know what you are going through!

Don’t Worry! The good people from Behemoth Colonial Enterprises have assembled some handy points to bear in mind in the first few difficult days of your reign.
•	Well-fitted robes are essential. Flowing robes loose their grandeur if your ankles are exposed or if you keep tripping up. This is important!
•	Be sure that you clearly state any special dietary requirements – serving broiled chicks in monkey-foetus sauce to a non-infantavore is embarrassing!
•	Don’t think too hard! This is a constant problem with rulers, and causes all sorts of problems later; and
•	Have fun! 

Finding yourself the ruler of a new colony can be disconcerting, but we hope that with this guide, and help from your friends, you can find it an enjoyable and rewarding experience!

We are aware of the confusion this might cause, and will do everything we can to make the transition as easy as possible. If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to ask! Ms. Red or Mr. Victor will be happy to answer any of your queries. 

Eugene turned the page over, but the other side was blank but for a pretty-vacant hologram of a lunar system. He folded and pocketed it, realising that it had said precisely nothing of value. A bathroom he found and in a bath he washed; robes he found and robes be wore; explanations were missing, and in his mind was a gap where certainty usually held sway.
	His robes were designed for majesty – traditionally a sedentary activity – but proved surprisingly amenable to walking all the same. It did not occur to him to wonder when the traditional robes of office apparently spontaneously transformed from suit-and-Tie-Rack-tie to a Persian Emperor’s morning-wear, but it is a point worth considering for the casual or armchair considerer. He walked the ten metres from bathroom to galley door, framed himself nicely (patting down robes; running fingers through short hair) and waved his hand at the open button.
	‘Eugene,’ said Red, seated at the galley table, ‘this is Victor,’ she drew his gaze to the unimpressive man seated to her left.
	‘Ah, Eugene,’ said the man, Victor, ‘I see you have settled in well. Sit down, why don’t you.’
	Eugene did so, taking a chair opposite Victor and to the left of Red.
	‘Do you have any questions then, Eugene?’ asked Red, arching her fingers and wandering her gaze over his face.
	‘Well,’ he began, a multitude of questions assailing his mouth to the extent that question-gridlock rendered him dumb. ‘Well, what do I do?’
	Red and Victor exchanged a concerned glance. ‘Oh dear,’ said Victor, who was framing his answer when Eugene added:
	‘More to the point, where am I?’
	‘I can field that one,’ said Victor, evidently happy to answer a straightforward question. Hmm, thought Eugene. ‘We are in the colonisation ship Behemoth, eight centuries’ travel from Earth, orbiting the moon New Moon.’
	‘And,’ Eugene thought how to phrase his next words, ‘why the hell am I here? I should be on Mars!’
	‘It would probably take a great deal of explaining,’ said Red, ‘so I shall shorten matters by telling you that whatever you thought or did or planned before waking today is irrelevant. As far as I know you are here because you booked passage as a colonist and if you thought that you were to depart at Mars then you have rather missed your opportunity, and missed it eight hundred years ago.’
	‘So,’ Eugene marshalled his thoughts, ‘why me?’	
	Well, Chancellor. It did not sound like a bad job, but then neither did senior sanitation technician (and he fell straight into that one). But… then… he had asked Red what the date was, just in passing, just because he thought that a neutral question might help dispel some of his fears. She had answered something like: it’s the first day of the first month of year zero. He had replied, unjustly annoyed, but what is the real date, to hear that it was 22 March, 3597. His last waking day was on the self-same spacecraft, but eleven hundred years earlier. But more than that, he realised after careful probing of his memories. His last clear recollections were of a generally happy, least-ways content person, who lived in a small city on Earth, over a thousand years ago. He did not know what to think.
	Certainty. The certainty was this: he was the ruler of New Moon, this they told him, this they said. Stick to that as a basis for further investigation. Of what he was ruler, or indeed what sense “ruler” was used could wait until later.

ennui

Eugene was required to breathe, eat and sleep, but he was bored of breathing, eating and sleeping, so we find him exploring instead. His travels in the mercifully spinning and eerily empty leviathan were uncanny to say the least, and Eugene was not prepared to consider what they were in the most. The colonists in their death-sleep he found quite by chance, meat; thankfully, the Behemoth offered a surfeit of distance in which to put himself. His flight from one bank of storage holds brought him to another, albeit for naturally inanimate cargo. 
	Colossal crates littered the floor and hung from ceiling and walls, with smaller cases strewn between them, shingle to the boulders, all secured with grey webbing and emblazoned with gaudy corporate logos. He wandered amid this scene, reminiscent of the ruins of an ancient capitalistic society. He recognised most of the logos, and found examples, presumably given gratis, of soft drinks to dehydrated Chianti, fluffy toys to cigar boxes. There were Eddy Hilton clothes, Crystal Brooks kitchen utensils and a Stylee trinket range. One large crate professed to contain a set of six Artificial Personality bodies, Manikins.
	Eugene could think of no explanation for the treasure-trove of designer wares on to which he had stumbled. ‘Why,’ he said to an Art Company reproduction of the Lilith’s famous stuffed donkey, ‘are you here? Brand association?’ Brand Association and Progression, a technology understood for centuries, and deified by business. Did that represent a viable explanation?
	He endeavoured to undo the webbing securing the more interesting packages, but fibres engineered to hold a four tonne crate under several g’s of acceleration were not worried by Eugene’s feeble tugging. A few had been liberated, predominantly consignments of clothes and specialist foods, but there were more intriguing boxes to be had.
	One caught his eye immediately, its flashing logo a familiar if disdainful sight. Virtual Reality was deeply unfashionable, like pornography or historical novels, and had been so for a long time. Renaissance after rebirth were heralded and then forgotten about, because the simple fact was that VR had found itself stuck in a particular niche, and no re-launch was powerful enough to shift it. Virtual was for those who could not get Real, and that the majority of people owned a set did nothing to dispel this prejudice. 
	He peered at the box. It was a Fermat kit, which meant build quality and the usual high fidelity experience, equipped with a psychologist environment. He started, and reread the label in case he had mistaken Psychologist for Sexologist, or some such, but without luck. 
	Cabin. He began to read the disclaimer, but the beige paper dropped from his fingers soon after passing over the first sentence. Next came a page of instructions in English, Mandarin, Urdu, Japanese and Welsh, with a helpful diagram showing a happily neutral person enjoying the pleasures of Mrs. Fermat’s machine; this too fell to the floor, but duly digested. The equipment itself was generic enough to render a description on my part redundant, with a standard networking through-port. Into this was a palm-sized matte black box, appended to which was a yellow sticker with the legend “Mr. Byte”. This, it seemed, was the psychologist. Thus prepared, and after locking his door, he gave it a go.
	Eugene Baldhead opened his eyes to see a large green door. He took a few shaky steps forward, and walked through into the garden of his mind. He had expected rolling valleys, crystal clear brooks, soaring mountains and perhaps a couple of those park benches dead people leave behind to ensure that the living get less exercise and die young and bitter enough to leave their own park benches. What he found was a desolate wasteland of stunted trees, sand pits and rabbit holes.
	His mind was a golf course.

New Bincombe, Ressonner – 1 April, 990 OL

‘I just want to go over the procedure one more time,’ said Type.
	‘No,’ answered Yod. ‘Let’s just get on with it.’
	‘What, no explanations at all?’
	‘What are you talking about, Type.’
	‘Now,’ Jasper crawled into the grotto, dragging a suspect bottle and a plastic bag of herbage, ‘the launch preparations begin.’ A hand-drawn sticker on the side of the bottle said, “Do not expose to metals ~ seek immediate clerical attention if ingested”. A label on the bag read, simply enough, “purple harpyed nerk weasel moss, first class”. It was going to be that sort of night.
Spectators collected, milled around, swapped the time of day with their peers, and settled down to spectate – an activity that involves milling around and chatting with contemporaries. Meanwhile, four intrepid pioneers prepared physically and spiritually for their arduous voyage. This involved getting wasted.
‘I don’t believe that Spectatoring will ever achieve the status of art form, as is claimed by its most ardent proponents,’ said Jasper somewhat incongruously.
	‘How so, fellow stellanaut?’ said Fel, who was reaching a similar state of “physical and psychological preparation for the strains of takeoff”, as the euphemism went.
	‘Because it is an activity dominated by the masses, who are rarely properly educated in the discipline. Of course,’ he added, waving writhing eddies in the head-high layer of acrid smoke that had collected since preparations began, ‘in its hey-day, many Earth universities did Bachelors in the Art and Form of the Spectator, and troops, or “flocks”, of professional spectators were a common sight. Sadly, no one would pay, so as a profession it became extinct rather quickly.’
	‘You know, I think the crowds are ready,’ said Type.
	‘Excuse me,’ Yod chimed in, reappearing from a pall of smoke with his eyes fixed on a big red button marked “do not press.” ‘If the spectators are ready, and I am more than prepared, and we got the Miranda scrupulously prepared this morning, then let’s get on with it.’
	‘Oh,’ said Jasper, ‘I’d rather forgotten about that.’
	A short while later, lengthened by the necessity to fall over giggling, finds Ressonner’s first stellanauts contemplating the culmination of a year’s work.
	‘Did you ever think, last year, that we would be in this position today,’ Type said through the miasma.
	‘I imagined myself here ten years ago,’ said Yod, ‘I’ve always had a very clear picture of this happening.’
	‘But,’ said Type, trying to get across a point he had yet to pin down, ‘we’ve spent a year preparing this, an eightieth of our lives to do something unique on our moon. That is fantastic. That is amazing.’
	‘An eightieth?’ said Fel. ‘There is a good chance of it being a twentieth.’
	‘A chance,’ said Jasper, ‘but we’d still have achieved more than anyone else on this poxy place, ever. Ever! Imagine that.’
	‘Do it?’ said Yod.
	‘We’d best make a full census,’ said Jasper. ‘Okay, Fel.’
	‘Here, present, willing, able, fucked-out-of-my-head.’
	‘Type.’
	‘What?’
	‘Yod. Yod? Do we have a Yod on the spaceship?’
	‘I think I shall have to answer for our good friend Yod,’ said Fel, ‘because he is more pickled than a gherkin stuffed herring in a bottle of Teotihuacán wine, and rather less aware of his surroundings. His answer is, “no, I am somewhere else entirely.”’
	‘Well,’ said Jasper, pondering this hardy test of his census régime, ‘I suppose that’s okay, as long as he has effectively answered. Right, Jasper. Jasper? Jasper, are you here?’
	‘No, he isn’t,’ said Type; ‘let’s go without him.’
	‘Fair enough,’ said Jasper, and he slapped his hand against the large red button marked “do not press”. 

3

If all the world is a stage, is the solar system a theatre, and the galaxy our home?
Bob Smith, 2087 AD

Golf Course – 10 January, 0 OL

‘Hello, my name is Mr. Byte. Who are you?’
	‘Ah,’ Eugene found himself facing a nondescript man of approximately his years. ‘I’m Eugene, Eugene Baldhead.’
	‘Do you want to sit down?’ Mr. Byte selected a nearby patch of green and sat, smiling at Eugene and motioning him to do the same.
	‘So, well, how does this go?’ asked Eugene from an opposite patch of grass. 

The arrival onto the Earth of Mr. Byte was precipitated by the puzzling disappearance of the improbably named Victor Victor, a Personality working at Mrs. Fermat’s Reagan’s Ville establishment. Originally commissioned as a replacement for the departed Private Dick, he was assigned to very different work.
	‘Hello, Mr. Byte,’ said Mrs. Fermat.
	‘Hello,’ he answered, unworried by the present lack of substance to his world.
	‘How do you feel, Mr. Byte?’
	‘I feel fine,’ he said sincerely. ‘How are you, Mrs. Fermat?’
	‘I am doing okay. You are working for me now, is that alright?’
	‘That is fine,’ he said after a moment of consideration. 
	‘Do you know who and what you are?’
	‘Of course. I am Mr. Byte. I am an Artificial Personality.’
	‘I will talk to you later, Mr. Byte,’ and with that, Mrs. Fermat signed off, ejecting her new acquisition from its desktop port with a casual flick of her hand. She held the body-temperature black cube in her palm for a second or two, marvelling at how something so small could cost so much.
	Mr. Byte was an Artificial Personality, metaphorical electrons skipping through horrendously expensive composites; he was a host of concurrent algorithms and feedback loops and inscrutable bits that go ping. An earlier age might have called him code and hardware, but an earlier age would have seen nothing silly in typing in a trillion-line program (as if your cutlery was beaten by hand, indeed). He was a host of ingenious and revolutionary things, which made the evident neglect in his naming a doubly sad thing. Conceptually he was a person and alive, but then so are we, and the important thing about conceptions is that they are all rubbish from the point of view of another conception.
	Mr. Byte was a small black cube and stupid like a limpid pool is stupid, stupid like a mirror. He had the mental machinery of a career shelf-stacker, the subtlety of a banana skin. Real stupidity was sought after, especially in the entertainment industry; clever people could find their own entertainment. Mrs. Fermat worked in this industry, and it, like her, was branching out. Party Politics, for instance, now fell under its auspices, as did meteorology. 
	‘Hello again, Mr. Byte,’ she said in a relaxed and calm voice, a voice that said “Hello again, Mr. Byte”. 
	‘Hello,’ said Mr. Byte, talking to a broad blue sky and sitting on springy green grass. 
	‘How would you like to be a psychologist, Mr. Byte?’
	‘I think I would like that very much.’
	Psychology as entertainment, Mrs. Fermat would say, has always existed in the form of the mind games and jokes we ply each other with in daily life.
	‘It is,’ she said to the board, ‘the grease on the wheels of a social species. We are all,’ she opened her arms wide, ‘psychologists.’

‘Think of me,’ Mr. Byte began, ‘as your personal chatter.’
	‘Chatter.’
	‘Yes, chatter. Feel free to go over any problems you are experiencing.’
	‘You are my, what, therapist?’
	‘Psychologist, Eugene. Now, what would you like to talk about today?’
	‘Well,’ said Eugene, warming to the opportunity for human contact, if nothing else, ‘it all started with a speech I was writing. Well, almost.’

talk to communicate ideas, disseminate knowledge

He blinked, willing his brain to accept his eyeballs as sole visual inputs after the cushion of hardware. He looked at the equipment sitting on the floor next to his bed, and the black cube in particular. He had seen Artificial Personalities before, occasionally, but never for such frankly mundane work as a psychoanalyst – acceptable computer programs for which dated from the 1960’s. Ultimately, Artificial Personalities were no more useful than the flesh and blood they aimed to mimic, and considerably dearer. 
Lunch; lunch with Red and Victor.

‘There is Red, Victor, and me, that is it.’
	‘Just three people on a huge spaceship? It sounds very empty.’
	‘It is,’ Eugene sighed. 
	‘And you still haven’t been told what to do?’
	‘Me told what to do? It should,’ Eugene raised an imperious finger, ‘be me doing the telling. I’m meant to be the ruler; I’ve got to walk around in these stupid robes. The Chancellor of New Moon, that is me. It’s undemocratic, that is what it is, those two telling me what to do.’
	‘But–’
	‘So here’s me, nothing to do but skulk around the place.’
	‘Undemocratic is bad. But, why are you on a spaceship if you are ruler of a moon?’
	‘You know, I had lunch with them a couple of days ago. There is something very odd about both of them. I could tell that they were trying to turn the conversation to what I was doing with my time here, as if it is any of their business. I think there is definitely something going on between those two.’
	‘That is nice.’
	‘Yeah, and I’m sure that there is something in the rules about fraternisation – it is all too cosy if you ask me. So,’ Eugene said, ‘what do you get up to when I’m not here?’
	‘What do you mean?’ asked Mr. Byte, genuinely confused.
	‘Oh, I see. Anyway, nice talking to you, Mr. Byte. I’ll see you later.’

There were naturally regulations, and the field of Artificial Personalities was among the most tightly regulated of all specialised industries, involving entities that at least said that they were sentient. A lot could be written about Turing Tests and machine existentialism, and indeed has, but in the final analysis it could be argued that above law and morality, it was their sheer expense that ensured that Artificial Personalities were not misused. What does that say?

‘You know what, Red took me on some sort of day trip yesterday. She just said, “I have something you might like to see” in that voice of hers, and walked off, leaving me to chase after her.’
	‘Did you go anywhere nice?’
	‘It took us hours to get there, I mean, there must have been service lifts. And do you know what it was, do you know what all that effort was to go and see?’
	‘A zoo?’	
	‘A window. A window, can you imagine that? All this way, just to see a window. What a waste. I said thanks very much and went. I’m telling you, it felt good getting back to my cabin.’
	‘Did you have far to walk back?’
	‘And this morning there’s Victor trying to act all pally, saying how I should spend more time with them and less on my own. These people. What have I come to?’
	‘Me?’

Reactionary sentiments are a necessary if infuriating facet of humanity, and rabid opposition to the idea that a machine could be granted human rights was predictably zealous, but short lived. “But this is madness, insane, incomprehensible!” people shouted, “you are devaluing humanity!” They were rather less forthcoming when asked why, exactly, giving legal protection to Artificial Personalities devalued humanity. Eschewing a rounded explanation to pick a loud, sensationalist example, we of course look to the USA. There the Christian far-right lobby operated a two pronged attack, demonising those seeking to diminish the value of human life by the sacrilegious assertion of machine rights, while simultaneously asserting the youth of America’s right to own heavy-duty firearms. 

‘Mr. Byte?’
	‘Yes, Eugene?’
	‘Do you like living here, on this… golf course?’
	‘Yes. I like golf; it is nice.’
	‘Oh,’ Eugene said, scanning the now familiar landscape. Off to one side, a rabbit was disembowelling another rabbit. ‘It’s just, it’s just that I feel like I am stuck, not going anywhere.’
	‘Yes,’ Mr. Byte nodded. ‘I’m sitting down too.’

Eugene plodded like a trooper at the Somme, which was unfair since he wasn’t a Tommy in the trenches but a Chancellor on board a plush interstella space craft, with practically zero chance of being machine-gunned by a German. Or, for that matter, of turning out savagely ironic poetry, or having mates called Lofty and Ginger. Eugene did not have any mates, unless you counted Mr. Byte, and most would not.
	Red annoyed him with her posturing and arrogance, and Victor irked him. In their decreasingly frequent conversations, Eugene learned that Victor too hailed from Reagan’s Ville, but from a lower, less exclusive level and with a job with correspondingly inferior status. Eugene found himself Chancellor to Victor’s assistant, and yet a certain part of Eugene felt cheated: the part that looked at Red in a different manner.

‘Hello, Eugene,’ said Mr. Byte.
	‘Hello, Mr. Byte,’ said Eugene.

“Exactly,” Victor beamed. “Or you could write some historic speeches; they always go down well.”
	“You know,” Eugene retorted, “it was one of my speeches that got me here. Well, almost!”
	That is not how the conversation went. It was not how any of their conversations went. Occasional words over food were as close to repartee as ever was approached. Eugene crept inside reminiscences of Reagan’s Ville, and fell deeper into the undemanding and comforting world of Mr. Byte. Truth be told, he was lonely, and in his mind the acquaintances of his first life became good friends, and the smallest social occasion a day of delirious excitement. He was sliding, and knew it.

the calm fruition of plans held dear

‘How do you feel?’ asked Mr. Byte. He and Eugene were throwing pebbles, from where and to where shall remain a mystery.
	‘Tired,’ Eugene replied. ‘It’s very tiring. Victor tried to push all these books at me, as if I need to learn things at my age.’
	‘What have you been doing?’
	‘Doing? There is nothing to do. I watched a film. I went for a walk.’ He grinned. ‘And then I made a discovery, in the main storage hold.’
	‘Was that the place you found me?’
	‘Yes.’ He smiled again, amused at a private joke. ‘Yes, and I found someone you might know.’
	‘Well, who could that be?’
	Eugene stood dramatically, his jaw tilted just so, and said, ‘Mr. Bit.’
	‘Mr. Bit, Mr. Bit… no, I’m not sure if I know anyone called that.’
	‘But he is a personality cube, just like you.’
	‘Well,’ Mr. Byte shrugged. ‘And how are your friends Red and Victor doing?’
	‘They are not my friends,’ Eugene said frostily, ‘and I don’t know how they do.’
	‘Oh.’ Mr. Byte held the bizarre belief that life would be better if everyone was a friend.
	‘I have an idea, though,’ said Eugene. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, working it out.’
	‘Oh yes?’
	‘Yes. I would appreciate your opinion.’
	‘Go ahead,’ Mr. Byte turned to fix Eugene with an expression of total concentration.
	‘I was thinking about killing Red and Victor.’
	‘Oh,’ Mr. Byte pondered on a response, ‘well, I’m not sure if they’d like that.’
	‘No, I don’t think they will,’ said Eugene. ‘Perhaps I was being a little melodramatic when I said that I planned to kill them, but I do. Do you want to know how I think I will do it? I have found a gun, antique, next to the Mr. Bit cube.’
	‘A gun?’
	‘Yes, and do you know what the really funny thing is? It isn’t loaded. I couldn’t find any bullets, so I am going to have to kill them with an unloaded pistol, isn’t that funny?’
	‘It is strange.’
	‘I’m going to point this gun at them, and tell them to get into a shuttle, and they are going to fly away. Right away. And do you know why they won’t ever come back? Can you imagine why they can’t simply fly back later? I’ll tell you. Because it is difficult to fly anywhere with no navigation equipment, don’t you think?’

it doesn’t matter if you win or lose,
if loosing does not matter

It worked, too. Only, when Eugene happened upon Red and Victor, raised his gun and issued the order, they exchanged a long glance, and agreed – actually agreed. They walked perfectly happily to the sabotaged shuttle, and boarded it without a word. They gave him the impression that it was their choice to fly away into the black beyond, that somehow their work had been done and they were pleased – pleased! – to give it all up. The thought ground at his insides.

the Miranda – 8 April, 990 OL
 
Unknown thousands of years before, the first people strapped themselves atop rockets to be blasted into space. Technology developed to terrorise London in Europe’s last Great War was turned to fight a different kind of war, a war ostensibly to sway hearts and minds rather than obliterate them. This too ended, leaving a fallow period without good reason for prohibitively expensive and dangerous manned flight. That is not the point. 
	‘Things are looking up,’ said Jasper. ‘Not necessarily good,’ he hastened to add, ‘but undeniably elevated.’
	‘We are safe?’
	‘Safe. It worked. It works. We are safe.’
	‘I knew it would.’
	‘Great, because we would never have known if it didn’t.’
	‘Nice thought.’
	‘It does one good to quote large numbers,’ said Type unexpectedly. 
	‘Quite,’ said Fel. ‘So, we are alive, but where?’
	‘Shit,’ Type said, genuinely shocked, ‘we are alive.’
	‘And we are,’ Yod consulted his computer, ‘twenty five thousand kilometres above New Bincombe, with two percent oxygen/hydrogen remaining.’
	‘That ought to be enough,’ said Type. ‘It isn’t as if we are in a great hurry.’
	Space navigation is boring, and explanations of its workings tedious. Suffice to say that after half an hour of calculations, and a further two checking and rechecking Type’s and Jasper’s results, a sequence of instructions was tapped into the computer. Three hours later (and so slowly as to be near imperceptible), tiny thrusters reoriented the Miranda, and over the following day the last few percent of their stored oxygen and hydrogen was vented through the primary thruster. They were on their way, bound for the third moon, Sheba, and the second civilisation that must surely be waiting for them there. 
The Miranda drifted through interlunar space. Silence, but for the sweep of radio waves used to warn, probably in vain, of impending doom in the form of wandering matter. For the most part her occupants trusted to the gravity-well of their planet to keep local space clear for safe traversal. 

present the first face

‘Real spaceships do not have instrument banks, joysticks or panels that go blip,’ said Jasper; ‘real spaceships have a computer and some half-decent navigational software. And that is what I am going to write, some proper fly-by-wire software for this bucket.’
	‘Jolly good,’ said Yod, who thought it was a silly idea. 
	Unremarkably, space quickly became boring; or rather sitting in a pressurised three room box in space became boring. Perhaps if one could fly through the void with impunity, abstaining from air or the laws of physics, space travel might hold some appeal. It does not, however, if one has to spend weeks in a confined space with three other people and nothing to do, and with the knowledge that there was a mind numbing two months of it.
	Temperature was a constant problem; a constant temperature was the unattainable ideal. The food was awful, and the cocktail of drugs taken to prevent excessive muscle atrophy and osteoporosis in the weightless journey was an unpleasant daily ordeal. The water tasted of tin, and there was a sulphurous quality to the air. It was too small a place for four people; a tiny world giving the impression that it was the only world, because their solitary view of any other reality was through a computer screen; there were no windows.
	‘Are we there yet? Only joking.’ 
	The defence to a sardine-tin lifestyle is to turn in on oneself, insulate the mind from the permanent proximity of others with an obsession, with an all-consuming work. Jasper’s was his navigation software, the mythic system that could switch control of the Miranda from a process of deliberation and forward planning to the real-time mandate of an intrepid pilot. Fel had a sheaf of CDs and rom crystals containing all those books one must have read. She determined to read them all while still in her early twenties, to leave more time later to get on with her life, and perhaps write herself – no one ever wrote anything good when young. Starting with the complete works of Dickens, the quick reader planned to plough through all notable nineteenth-century literature during their journey. 
	‘Would beeps or wide-band work best?’
	‘What, Jasper?’
	‘Um? Sorry, my mind was wandering.’
	‘I don’t blame it trying to escape.’
	Type, never one to restrict his intellectual appetites, worked on his ongoing quest to denounce mathematical truth using mathematical truth, and a long gestated novel with palindromic plots and no verbs, taken from the point of view of beverages. Wrongly, they were thought too esoteric for the interest of sane people. Gödel had cameos in both, but did not touch his drink. 
	And Yod, Yod had Silica. 
	‘Where is my lord and master, where is his magnificence, Yod?’ Silica said in as sexy a female voice as was possible through the computer’s jury-rigged tinny-tiny speakers. 
	‘I cannot help noticing,’ said Fel, ‘that you are a rather egocentric programmer, Yod.’
	‘Is it my fault if Silica idolises me?’ he said, a look of rapt sincerity on his face as he slowly spun, his computer attached with string to his wrist, and awkwardly sitting against his half crossed legs. ‘Oof,’ he said, bumping against a wall, ‘and twice oof.’
	‘Yes,’ she answered from a different plane, images of Victorian England wandering her consciousness. ‘Who the fuck else’s fault is it, hers?’
	‘It isn’t your fault,’ Yod addressed Silica. ‘Now, time for some consciousness tweaking.’
	‘My eyes are hurting,’ Jasper announced, ‘anyone care to get wasted?’
A week later, it would all change.

weird shit

It began with a stoned conversation on cultural artefacts, as many things do, and ended with the same. Jasper was talking, although Fel had initiated the conversation through the medium of saying words as they occurred to her. None of the protagonists had a coherent idea to put forward, but since when has that been an impediment to argument?
	‘No, no, the Egyptians left millions of tonnes of rock, but so what? So they piled up lots of stones, I can do that.’
	‘So, what?’
	‘The blockbuster film of the 1980’s. In it, we have a canon of work to be viewed and reviewed in perpetuity, and a detailed cultural map charting its place in the world. And this isn’t some pointy heap of stone, oh no, the blockbuster film – movie – of the 1980’s was an entire world, a shitty, culturally void, narcissistic, cliché ridden, socially inept one full of stupid people doing stupid things, and made for the same.’
	‘Yes, I disagree with you totally,’ said Yod. ‘I would say that the 1980’s were a reaction to the fine filmic tradition of the previous decade, where by all accounts you couldn’t walk down a street without bumping into a marvellously played, sharply written drama of the highest calibre.’
	‘Mmm,’ said Fel, ‘yes, bollocks, because by your reasoning, the music of the 1960’s would be staggeringly good, because it was followed by two decades of shite.’
	‘Which is true,’ said Type, whose knowledge of the twentieth century amounted to, “it was the one with all the big wars.” 
	‘Track seven is always the best,’ said Jasper, ‘I wonder if it is a statute, or something.’
	‘It is probably a conspiracy,’ said Fel airily, ‘most things are.’
	‘What I’ve always found funny,’ said Jasper, ‘with reference to your comments, Type, is that such films were often blamed for the apocryphal degradation of society. Films, music, computers were demonised for the breakdown of morals that had apparently been going on ever since the end of feudalism.’ He grinned. ‘And all along it was the commercials that did the most harm, maintaining outmoded gender stereotypes, desperately clinging to a dreadful world.’
	Yod exhaled extravagantly. ‘We are doing okay, are we not? A week gone and no one has died or gone mad or tried to walk out in a huff.’
	‘Hell is meant to be an eternity with your friends,’ said Type. ‘But then the operative word is eternity.’
	‘We’ve always got on well,’ said Fel. ‘Ever since we first met, I’ve always known that we’d stay friends.’
	‘When was that?’ said Jasper, dredging memories and frustrated by chemical blanks.
	‘The last fusion test, the one where Galois died,’ said Fel. ‘I was twelve and with my friends, when you two ran by.’
	‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Jasper, ‘and you were so hacked off with your friends that you decided to come and watch the test with us.’
	‘No, it wasn’t that,’ she said. ‘Not hacked off.’
	‘And then you all met me,’ said Yod. ‘So, what is the secret of our friendship?’
	‘Like minded,’ said Type.
	‘Similar senses of humour,’ said Jasper.
	‘No,’ said Fel, ‘it’s because I’ve never slept with any of you.’
	A beeping broke the spell of thought, a simple little tune.
	‘Proximity?’ said Jasper. ‘Shit, is that the radar?’
	The four crowded around the computer screen, looking with varying degrees of comprehension at the hazy grey image of a very large object. It was a cone, kilometres in extent, and uncannily regular.
	‘Weird shit,’ said Yod. ‘That is weird shit.’ He tapped his finger against the anomalous object. ‘It’s orbiting our moon.’
	‘I don’t see the problem,’ said Jasper, ‘it’s too far away to conceivably cause us any problems.’
	‘You don’t get it,’ said Fel, ‘Who ever heard of a cone shaped asteroid?’

talking in a universe of hyperbole

Fel grabbed a passing piece of popcorn-substitute-corn and proceeded to masticate it into something digestible. Jasper was picking his teeth with an unusually pointy kernel, while the worrying attentions of Yod and Type were concentrated in a different direction, viz. a technical discussion. 
	‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said Type, injecting some much unneeded realism, ‘I’m not sure if that’s even possible. We can’t just press the “dock” button, unless someone included some amazingly prescient features into the design of this ship while I wasn’t looking. In case you have not noticed, we don’t even have an airlock.’
	‘It’s funny you said that,’ said Jasper, ‘but if you press the little red button beside Garfield’s right ear, the number plates open to reveal twin machine guns and an instant quip.’
	‘Really?’
	‘No.’
	‘I don’t see the problem,’ said Fel, ‘all we’ve got to do is hail the ship – let them sort out the fiddly bits, leave the details to them.’
	Yod was poised to deliver a scathing assault on Fel’s naïveté, when he realised that Fel was neither stupid nor naïve and thus saved himself from a retaliatory haranguing. 
	‘There’s no reason to think that we can’t contact them over the æther,’ she continued, ‘and equally no reason to believe that the occupants, automated or otherwise, couldn’t tell us how to get onboard – airlock or no airlock.’
	‘I told you we should have added an airlock,’ said Jasper, who could be dim at times.

the word of yod

Preparations were minimal; all it took was the word of Yod. 
‘Er, global handshaking, please.’
	‘You could have said it with a bit more gravitas,’ said Jasper, but a punch in the arm from Fel hindered further criticism. That, and an answer from the computer. A simple little message, and cryptic if one were not familiar with the protocols of space.
	‘What,’ Yod said slowly, ‘does that mean?’
	‘Answer it,’ said Jasper.

Welcome to the interstella message exchange. You have found a friend in space. This does not always happen, and requires careful consideration on your part. Please note that we are permitted the luxury of real-time communication. What do you want from this meeting? Is it a mission of exploration? Are you, perchance, an alien? 
•	no?

Indeed not, please excuse my naïveté, it was a silly question. I have been waiting a long time. I can see you; can you see me?
•	if you are a rather large spaceship then we can see you. what have you been waiting for? who are you?

Namely, you, I think. I am, shall we say, an avatar of the ship you see (on your radar, is it not?). A tiny smidgen of the ship’s computer squeezed into a communication daemon. Are you human? Are you from the moon?
•	yes, on both accounts. 

Excellent, then I have been waiting for you. I am in the process of gaining access to your computer control systems, do not be alarmed. Interesting software. Bizarre hardware. You are a fascinating vessel. Please sit-back and enjoy the ride. This conversation is at an end. I might talk to you again at some point. Goodbye.

	‘Strange fellow.’
	‘That was easy.’
	Then, the Miranda started to accelerate.

CSS Behemoth – October, 3269 AD

When Victor managed to drag himself to their customary galley come the evening, it was to find an empty room. He stood for a while beside the table, looking at his partial reflection in the glass oven door, keeping his mind blank. Earlier, he had considered reinstalling himself in a sleep cocoon, or even flying off into the black beyond in one of the Behemoth’s extensive complement of shuttles. This appealed to him, the idea of sailing away, his back turned, to an unknown future. That is, the idea of a shuttle dwindling to nothing appealed; the fact of being in the shuttle at the time held different connotations. 
	To leave meant defeat, but defeat for whom – as they say, defeat was for those who claimed it. To stay would be the continuance of a chain of events that had sent him from home and family, from life and friends, but equally to leave would be an analogue of his failure in Reagan’s Ville. Stewing over his life proved futile, so here we find him, staring at his reflection in an oven door, and thinking of nothing.
	He departed. He set off for corridors anew, utterly uncluttered by anything so moribund as a plan.

flocks of meat

Corridor topology was an art form of compromise, the routes of humans planned around the colossal machines necessary for maintaining body and ship. Service passages spiralled about storage holds; minimally insulated machinery banked maintenance-droid frequented arcades. One did not walk to see sights; one saw sights to walk. 
	More mundanely, colonies of vending machines littered intersections and popped out at the unsuspecting and famished pedestrian. These presented a goodly selection of trademarked foodstuffs and an opportunity to pronounce the immortal phrase, “those bloody droids, they haven’t replaced the Mr. Chewy Heads.” Unhindered by a plan, or food to boot, they gave Victor the chance to spend a happy few minutes perusing a glass fronted selection of garish wrappers and hug-pack bottle projections. He selected the unassuming combination of mineral water and chicken Madras sandwiches. 
The absence of bathrooms in spaceship design was often satirised, which was unfair, because ship designers had long since got the point. Victor had no trouble in spotting a helpful sign with squatting motif and foolproof directions, leading he with full bladder and bowels to a bold white door with “Lavatory” writ large over its brass doorknob and gilded frame. As if to leave no doubt in the mind of any passing Gonzo-satirist, a large brass plaque affixed at eye height bore the legend, “Toilet – use at your Convenience.”
	He pushed through into the pristine white marble and polished brass splendour of the dream lavatory, all nineteenth-century public service and immodest pride in one’s ablutions. He made for a toilet cubicle, taking leisurely strides across the polished tile floor, and breathing the atmosphere of rose-petals and carbolic soap. 
Soon after locking the door, he heard the sounds of someone else entering the convenience and the click-clack of heavy boots on immaculate tiles. He finished, and opened the door to find Red standing maladroitly in front of him, gauche for the instant.
‘Fancy meeting in a toilet,’ she said without any obvious inflection.
‘Quite,’ he said, ensuring too that his voice did not betray why and wherefore. 
‘Not what you would think,’ said she.
‘No,’ he answered, and deciding that now was the time to take an active part in the conversation, he started to rinse his hands and said, ‘I haven’t seen you around for a while. Um, are you here for a reason?’ he added, and then thoroughly kicked himself for saying it.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said, justifiably awkwardly, ‘yes.’ She walked to a cubicle; with a snap, the sign flicked from a green foot-loose and fancy free, to a red engaged. 
	‘So, er,’ Victor began, wondering what inane question to append and settling on: ‘what have you been doing lately?’
	‘Initiating the second phase,’ the answer echoed. ‘Oxygen producing bacteria,’ she added, as if in explanation.
	‘Oh,’ said Victor. He considered cultivating an immediate interest in the terraforming process, but decided on a more direct route – it was difficult to be intimidated by someone sitting on a toilet with her pants around her ankles. ‘Why did you wake me up?’
	‘I had to wake someone,’ she said after a moment (of thought?). 
	‘But why me?’
	‘No reason,’ she said. ‘Really, no reason. I needed a person, so I chose any person.’ She pulled the chain and walked out to the sinks. ‘If you want the truth,’ she said, standing next to him and looking into the mirror, ‘your face looked interesting, so I chose you. There is nothing more to it than that.’
	‘Would you like half a chicken Madras sandwich?’ his mouth said out of the blue. 
	‘Delighted,’ answered she.
	Victor found himself thinking that tender moments do not often happen in toilets, even those as magnificent as the one in which he found a new understanding with Red. 

capricious frivolity

‘It has always been unfashionable, virtual reality,’ said Victor. ‘If only to confound all those who thought it was the best thing since the joypad when it first came out, if you know what I mean.’
	‘Yes,’ Red answered after consideration.
	‘Each new improvement in technology greeted with a fanfare of television coverage, and a stampede of disinterest. Heh, I am well shot of all that.’
	‘Virtual lives?’ Red asked.
	‘Yes, Virtual Lives, Other Lives, now how is that for a career, playing out an absurd little game with people too unimaginative to find an original escapist idea. Femme fatales do not tend to go for electronic entertainment. Absurd. What a waste of my life.’
	‘But it got you here,’ she said, tapping her fingers.
	‘Chance,’ he answered, ‘pure chance. You know,’ he turned to face her, ‘according to my school reports, I am really very bright indeed. Very clever, in fact. Who would know that now? There are four thousand colonists in this ship, and I’ll bet they all had more worthwhile and fulfilling careers than mine.’
	‘You are wrong,’ she said, ‘the fact that they are here disproves that; fulfilled people do not as a rule give it all up for a colonial life.’
	That lead to an obvious question, and one he felt no reticence in asking. ‘Why did you give it all up?’
	‘I didn’t,’ she answered; ‘I did not give anything up.’

stretch a metaphor until it squeals

It had all gone swimmingly. Perhaps that was a bad metaphor, thought Victor, since swimming implied all sorts of nastiness. What nastiness in particular he could not for the moment think, but there was definitely considerable mileage to be made with such a simile. Fish. Towels. Sandy feet. Okay, things had gone well. (What, deep, dark, water at the bottom, bucket at the top?) He realised that he was prevaricating, and lengthened his stride, resolving to make straight for the wine to dissolve any lingering uneasiness in alcohol. In the end, he felt no need to do this, and the already poured liquid went towards standard social lubrication and niceties.
	It was over the wine that Victor noticed how fundamentally his perceptions of Red had changed, ever since he met her unexpectedly that day. Mannerisms that irked and a countenance that intimidated were transformed into adorable foibles and a will and intelligence to admire. He decided consciously to become a person worthy of her. He determined that the old Victor, the Victor who ambled through life letting the winds of chance buffet him hither and thither, the Victor who never engaged his brain was no more. 
	‘I think I was ten when I last applied myself,’ he said, ‘when I last really concentrated. I wanted to be a pilot, I think. Or perhaps it was an architect. Amazing how you forget.’
	‘I don’t forget,’ she said, sitting cross-legged with her back to a cupboard door and her glass clutched in both hands. ‘I can recall every instant of my life, and the reasons for every decision.’
	‘What have you always wanted?’
	‘This,’ she said. ‘Always. And you?’
‘In a way,’ he said, ‘this too.’

raise your horizons (sic)

‘In this universe of intelligent automation,’ Red was saying, ‘even “hands-on” means supervisory. But while it is possible to leave this as a completely automatic process, it is thought by those in the know that it is healthy to leave something of the human touch, hence us.’
	‘Computers have personality too,’ Victor said.
	‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they do.’	
	‘But I suppose the point is that colonists find it easier complaining to a person about the state of their colony, than a computer.’
	‘Absolutely,’ she nodded. ‘And computers can have such nasty senses of humour. I put it down to the lack of ablutions in their daily cycle.’
	‘That is important, is it?’ he asked.
	‘Very much so,’ she said.
	‘I have to admit, it isn’t something I have considered, defecating in computing. I take it you have firm ideas on how this moon will look to its prospective colonists, New Moon.’
	‘New Moon,’ she echoed. ‘Horrible name, childish nomenclature, but not up to me, alas. And yes, I have always had a clear idea of how my colony will work. Care to watch a comet display? It has been in preparation for a number of years.’
	‘I’d be delighted,’ he answered, sincere and intrigued. 
	The venue for the display was a small amphitheatre, one hundred seats in four tiers, facing a modest screen. They sat in adjacent seats, and a single command from Red dimmed the lights and set the show in motion.
	Whilst decades from her destination, the Behemoth had released a fleet of specialised ships. Some were destined to orbit or land on what was to become New Moon, initiating the terraforming process. Others were simpler in design, sent to reconnoitre the wider solar system and investigate other potentially interesting bodies. But the bulk of the fleet was designated one particular task: comet jockey. Thousands of spider-like craft fanned out in front of the monolithic Behemoth, targeting comets, and subtly, insidiously altering their course.
	‘Water and energy,’ whispered Red, ‘liquid water.’
	New Moon hung in massive variegated glory on the screen, real as to be touchable, real and under control.
	‘Now,’ Red whispered into Victor’s ear. 
	The first impact created a red welt along the equator, soon dozens more hammered into New Moon’s fragile atmosphere, hundreds, thousands peppered the moon, rupturing the sky and renting her surface. Billions of tonnes of dirty ice pounded into New Moon at a time, millions of millions in all, irrevocably altering her composition and creating a world of water.
‘Come on,’ she said; ‘Now.’

prefatory meeting

For one day in a hundred, the dead almost awoke. No longer grey, but alive; waves of condensation against glass; a feeble shifting of wasted muscles; subtle signs of life in their brightly coloured sarcophagi. She took him to see the colonists, so near to consciousness, and yet centuries from waking, drifting through the years on the cusp of death.
	‘I can’t see myself there again,’ said Victor, lingering at the side of a sleeper marked “Zen d’Xerox”.
	‘It is time,’ she answered.
	‘How long?’
	‘Not long.’

observe the behemoth

Observe the Behemoth, small in terms of the moon she guarded, massive in terms of the human sleepers she held. Traverse her corridors, lit by the ubiquitous faint luminescence that helps all clandestine adventurers, and one could easily imagine terrible monsters lurking deep within ready to inflict unspeakable horrors and leak unpalatable juices. Imagine a little harder and the ship becomes populated with little grey naked people, and harder still and huge Day-Glo mango whales swim throughout the zero-g axis of this ugly craft. Would you think that the craft was empty and silent merely because of an absence of noise and people? Indeed, how long a search would you have to go through before the thought enters your mind that the reason for a sleeping ship is that the ship is asleep?
	But this is academic because no such adventurers will come. The ship will sleep on through three hundred years’ intense work on the planet below. It will slumber through massive changes being wrought on the moonscape, and awake above a forest world.

the Ship – 15 April, 990 OL

Introducing Mr. Bit: he sits in a corridor, all by himself. He has sat there for a thousand years, which is a remarkably round and powerful time to have sat in a corridor, but we live in remarkable times. He is unaware of time or self; he lies dormant. He is potential. Meanwhile, pressure equalisation was commencing.

‘I am bloody terrified,’ Yod admitted. ‘Scared as shit.’
	Jasper nodded, his hand hovering over the door opening mechanism. His feet were on the ground, pushed by a centripetal approximation of gravity (reaction rather than action), but this return to accepted normality – a world with up and down – proved to intensify apprehension of the unknown. He was on the verge of saying something, but held his tongue, and opened the door.
	White light entered the suddenly dim cabin, pursued by a pleasant floral aroma. Fel was the first to move, clambering ungraciously out of the small doorway. There was heavy thud of boots against metal deck, and Fel said, ‘Get out. Come on. Get out.’
	They quailed at the vastness, the splendid enormity. The grated deck beneath their feet stretched for hundreds of metres, a solid base for the dazzling barrelled roof, hung with dark machinery and laced with diffuse lights. 
	‘This is to any building in New Bincombe,’ Jasper began, ‘what the deep mirk is to a meadow. Shit,’ he added, lowering himself to the alloy trellis floor and clutching his knees. ‘This is too much. I’m exhausted.’
	They were in a hangar, their jerrybuilt craft one of a dozen strewn irregularly throughout the floor space. Of how such massive but fragile structures came to be there, the Miranda included, there was no clue. Type racked it up as another question to ask whoever was to meet them, and joined his friends in a slow circuit of the Miranda, goggling at the melange of other ships. 
	‘How long do you think we will have to wait?’ said Jasper in a low voice.
	‘I expect they are letting us get settled in,’ said Fel, ‘before they come and meet us.’ It was not a convincing explanation.
	‘I don’t think there is anyone here,’ said Type. ‘Actually, assuming this is the settler ship, I would be surprised if there were. What would people be doing here nine hundred and ninety years after establishing the colony?’
	So they went, walking with enthusiasm if not strength to the most likely candidate for an exit, a tasteful work of glass and steel that opened on their approach. Beyond it stretched an octagonal passage, curving to the right, with plainly framed paintings hung at intervals, and similar indirect lighting. The four walked in a huddle, glancing at the prosaic artwork. Without a shred of a plan, they concentrated on the corridor ahead, unprepared and aware of it. 
	‘I was thinking,’ said Yod, ‘how Ressonner has rather a deficiency of heroes.’
	They reached a branch; their octagonal avenue carrying on downwards and to the right, and a smaller rectangular grey carpeted passage led level and also to the right, doors clearly visible in its dull walls. For consistency, they chose octagonal, and were soon rewarded for their loyalty by a multicoloured ship plan. 
	‘There’re a few people from the start, but nothing in-between then and now,’ Yod continued, while his compatriots studied the stylised map, a confusingly hued triumph of design over comprehension. ‘Like, Akira Ywe, or the First Chancellor, or Divine-light Angel.’
	Jasper gave up straining his eyes. ‘I wonder what he did to deserve a name like that.’
	‘Probably given by his parents, Dolphin and Telekinesis Angel.’
	‘Well, I can’t work it out,’ Fel admitted. ‘I can’t see how it bears any resemblance to what we’ve seen of this ship.’
	‘If I may say,’ said Yod loftily, ‘that is because it is not a ship-plan, it’s another piece of art. Look, there’s the name: the London Underground. You idiots.’
	‘Marie Celeste,’ said Jasper. ‘Isn’t that what it feels like?’
	‘Aren’t provisional designations fun,’ said Yod.
	‘Although,’ Jasper began, his mind elsewhere, ‘it doesn’t have the resonance it once had, now that the mystery has been solved.’
	‘Oh yes?’
	‘Uh-huh. The whole mystery was the product of a shamefully incompetent search. The Abominable
Snowman was a guerrilla in a gorilla suit;’ he continued, ‘Stone Henge was the result of a serious and maintained act of humour; Atlantis was down to inept plumbers; a giant geometric octopus is responsible for the Bermuda Triangle; and alien abductions were all done by aliens.’ He rubbed a hand across his face, massaging a week of stubble. ‘Let’s go back and try some doors.’
	The first opened to a bedroom; a plain affair with wardrobe, sink and futon, and bedclothes tightly rolled in cellophane. Fel made a pre-emptive bid for the bed, and Jasper joined her having liberated a duvet. Yod and Type made do with the floor, which, as they told each other, was good for the back, and Backs Come First. 

It was dark – no, a ceiling nightlight cast enough of a luminescence to see shape. He blinked as drops of sweat rolled from his temples and caught in his eyebrows; his tee-shirt was soaked in perspiration. He needed to get up, drink some water, and walk in cool air, but he was trapped, trapped lying on his back, trapped under oppressive heat. Something was eating him from inside, burning him away.
	Fel stirred, then sat upright. Jasper did likewise, and for a short time, nothing happened.
	‘Jasper,’ she said, ‘you’ll have more room if you turn around, head to toe, you know.’

‘Forget the control deck,’ said Yod, ‘we haven’t found anything other than bedrooms yet.’
	‘Bridge,’ said Fel.
	‘Oh yes, we’ve been looking for the wrong thing the whole time. When we were looking for a cool chair, we should have been listening for running water. Bloody hell, we don’t even know her name; ridiculous, isn’t it?’
	‘It is getting that way. When one finds a vast ship, hanging in space, one expects to find wonders and marvels within. One does not anticipate bedroom after bedroom after bloody bedroom.’
	‘Crew quarters?’ posited Jasper, brighter after a difficult night.
	‘What ship requires a crew of hundreds,’ said Type.
	Jasper was poised to give a reply when an odd creature trundled into view, making for the group and waving its arms. ‘Maintenance,’ Jasper said as an answer to Type’s point, but it worked better in the new context. 
	‘Yes,’ said Type, ‘it’s a drone. Amazing.’
	The drone, for drone it was, halted some half a metre away, pondered for a second, presumably on whether they were rubbish to be swept or people who could remove themselves, before progressing passed them. The noise of brushes against carpet gave it the appearance of mumbling to itself.
	‘Sweet,’ said Fel.
	‘We stink,’ said Type. ‘Shit, we really, really smell. No wonder the droid had to think seriously about sweeping us up. I haven’t had a bath in weeks.’
	‘Thanks for pointing it out,’ said Fel. They were entering yet another style of corridor, this circular and strip lit, set with red carpet panels and cut with grey support beams. It bifurcated into smaller tunnels, soliciting bronchial comparisons, and it was down the left-hand division that the travellers happened across a primary thoroughfare.
	‘I don’t believe you, Type,’ said Yod (picking at his shirt), ‘we make the single most important discovery in the history of Ressonner, and all you want is a bath.’
	‘And I want a bath,’ said Type; ‘and.’
	‘Serendipity has returned to the fold,’ said Jasper, pointing to the first door in their luxuriantly large corridor. 
	‘I never thought of “humpiness” as a property one finds in corridors,’ said Fel of the large and gently undulating colonnade, supported by evenly spaced Doric columns. The walls held either doors or obscure but impressive machinery, fronted with Perspex, and blinking with efficient speed. ‘Is this some sort of interior decorator’s showpiece, or what?’
	‘I’ll bet there is a lovely water-feature around the corner,’ said Jasper, correctly. ‘And some decking.’
	‘Whatever,’ said Type, ‘soap for me.’ 
	So they piled into the bathroom, and looked with awe at an Armitage-Shanks bath, frosted glass shower cubicle and be-towelled radiator. Tousled pink rugs sat disingenuously afore bath, shower and sink, smugly asserting their ability to foster mould but mercifully obscuring the lino. 
	‘This is an odd thing to find in a spaceship,’ said Type as he spun the bath’s taps. 
	‘I’ll have the shower,’ said Yod, holding a large yellow bar of Imperial-leather. ‘I may be some time.’
	‘Looks like we are going to have to find our own bathrooms, Jasper,’ said Fel, closing the door behind them. ‘Or bathroom,’ she added. This they found, easily enough, opposite. While she ran the bath, he unselfconsciously disrobed and made for the shower. 
	‘This,’ he said through frosted glass and a spray of warm water, ‘is lovely. It feels like my skin is coming off, I’m so filthy. Marvellous.’ 
	‘I look like death served up cold on a paper plate,’ said Fel from the mirror, ‘with an orange plastic cup of flat cola.’ She started to undress, dropping each item of clothing in a grimy heap. ‘In an unwelcome family picnic, plagued by a wasp,’ she added, looking towards him. 

underneath the skin

An hour’s time finds four people in varying states of underwear, sitting against opposite sides of a corridor and waiting for their clothes to dry. Jasper had just said, “There is never a laundrette when you need one”, which failed to elicit a response. 
	‘You know what really annoys me,’ said Yod, initiating a perennially rewarding class of conversation, ‘old people.’
	‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Fel, the eldest of the four. ‘All they can do is look back.’
	‘And talk about how much better it was in the mythic Old Days,’ said Jasper. ‘Which is to say better when they were young, because New Bincombe certainly hasn’t changed much.’
	‘It’s so stupid anyway,’ said Type. ‘Saying “it was better in the Old Days” is saying that they have failed to make things better. It is asserting their own impotence to improve their lives; it is asserting that they are failures.’
	‘I never want to grow old,’ said Jasper, repeating a cliché, but that is what clichés are for.
	‘There is something to be said for a long life,’ said Type.
	‘Oh, long life yes, absolutely, I don’t want to die or anything. Being old isn’t about age, if you see what I mean.’ Jasper paused. ‘You can be old at thirty, or young at forty-five.’
	‘I get you,’ said Fel. ‘You are old as soon as you stop learning anything new.’
	‘I think you are old when you can’t go to the toilet unaided, personally,’ said Yod.
	‘But there is nothing worse than someone who doesn’t grow old gracefully,’ said Jasper.
	‘Gods yes,’ said Fel; ‘there is nothing sadder than someone who believes that you are only as old as you think. I can’t watch. I have to hide my face behind my hands whenever I see an old person in a loud shirt.’
	‘So,’ said Yod, ‘all in all, it’s better to have popped your clogs by fifty-five.’
	‘Well, best make it sixty,’ said Jasper.
	Their talk lapsed into a reflective lull, which is to say the participants shrunk into unimaginative introspection, waiting for another to catalyse a fresh conversation. 
	‘It’s probably all down to Gödel, anyway,’ said Yod.
	‘Pardon?’ said Jasper.
	‘Everything, all of it, Gödel. It’s quite depressing.’
	‘You don’t even know what that means,’ said Type, who did.
	‘Nothing of value is complete or provably consistent,’ said Yod, ‘essentially. Truth transcends proof, so certainty is left high and dry.’
	‘And,’ said Jasper, ‘how does that apply to old people or us sitting in a spaceship?’
	‘Everything and nothing,’ was the enigmatic explanation.
	‘You don’t know, do you. You only said it to sound clever.’
	‘Clothes,’ said Type.
	Fel sat on the edge of the bath, pulling her partially cleaned trousers on. ‘It’s such a nice feeling, having non-sticky clothes,’ she said, reaching for her jumper. 
	‘Do you think we should split up, I mean two and two, to explore the ship faster,’ said Jasper tentatively. 
	‘Doesn’t sound a great idea to me,’ she said after reflection. ‘It’s generally better to be four lost people than two lots of two lost people, I find.’ She laced up a boot. ‘I was thinking about seasons, Jasper,’ she said in a distant voice. ‘Spring, summer, autumn, winter. It is such a strange idea, the year moving in a circle, always changing, but always returning to the same.’
	‘The year moved though, didn’t it?’
	‘No wonder there were so many mad people on Earth,’ she said. ‘All that change, but never changing.’
	‘I need a drink.’

freedom

“If the ship had any consistency, then it was in its inconsistency,” was a nice sounding phrase of the variety that quails under close inspection. One of the twenty or twenty-one year olds called it, or a close relation, into service more than once during their sojourn. From Star Trek to Star Wars; 2001 to Thunderbird One; Goth and Greek; Victorian and Venetian; a veritable Open University Interior Design course assailed them at every junction. Twentieth century rock café with eighteenth century rococo chairs. “It’s a melting pot that no one bothered to heat,” was Jasper’s summation. 
	Then Yod and Jasper met Mr. Bit. He lay prostrate, dressing in an absurd pantomime-Grand Vizier costume, complete with pointy beard and curly shoes. Sitting in his lap was a small black cube without adornment, and his exposed chest held a silver walled cavity of the same shape. There was one obvious course of action, although what he was, and who he might become was anything but. Yod placed cube in cavity, and both stood back in expectation of fireworks. 

4

May you live near interesting people
Bob Smith, 2068 AD, though the date and attribution is disputed by M. Stella-Artois

the Ship – 24 April, 990 OL

‘And who do I have the pleasure of meeting?’ said the Grand Vizier, awkwardly climbing upright and fixing Jasper and Yod in turn with eyes like two bottomless pits, as if one were not enough. ‘Well? Do you have names?’
	‘Yod. And this is Jasper. And who are you?’ was the bold response, a product of lingering amusement at the costume and ignorance of its inhabiting personality.
	‘I am the Grand Vizier,’ he said, justifiably surprised that anyone could think he was anything but. He paused, as if chasing an elusive thought around his skull. ‘This is mine,’ he said eventually. ‘The ship is mine. This ship, the Behemoth, is mine.’ He paused again. ‘Do what I say,’ he said. ‘Follow me,’ he commanded; ‘we have to meet somebody.’
	Yod and Jasper walked after him, catchers up rather than captives. Soon, the three reached a baroque double doorway. The Grand Vizier grinned a devilish grin, turned the handle and flung the doors inwards. Jasper and Yod followed.
	Bank after bank of monitors lined the walls, barrelled ceiling, and floor. Big purple workstations went “blip”; red lights flashed; and there was a body in a blue suit in the Captain’s chair. They knew immediately that it was a body, not a person, because of the odd angle it was sitting at; because of the way it was facing past them, not at them; but mostly because of the bones. The deductive leap which lead to the Captain’s chair (rather than a second lieutenant’s chair, for instance) was no more than an unthinking reaction which by-passed their conscious minds all together. Such situations occur so often in nature that these responses are hardwired into the brain from birth. A newborn baby may not be able to tell you, but it knows which is the Captain’s chair.
	‘Bones?’ said the Grand Vizier, perplexed. ‘Suicide?’ Sitting nonchalantly next to the body was a revolver, quickly snatched and turned on the two. ‘Out,’ he said, waving the pistol, ‘out of the door, out into the corridor.’
	Yod and Jasper acquiesced, seeing little choice in the muzzle of a gun.
	‘You can come out now,’ quoth the Grand Vizier to the air and banal artwork, ‘I know where you are. I know you have been following me. You may as well show yourself.’
	No shadows were forthcoming. The Grand Vizier stood, fuming, awaiting the alleged stalker. Five minutes. Ten minutes. ‘Very well,’ the Grand Vizier said in a steady tone. His hand shot out and encased Jasper’s forearm in a steely grip. ‘His arm goes. Now.’
	Jasper could only stand, grimacing as the Vizier’s grip tightened around his arm, threatening to increase until fingers met, bone splintered and marrow crumbled asunder. Yod stood in the manner of a lemon: a spectator torn between solidarity and running-the-hell-away. He fretted from foot to foot as the Grand Vizier’s vice visibly pained Jasper. The gun dispelled any thoughts of attacking the Grand Vizier. Both could only stand in a horrible tableau, awaiting Fel and Type.
	Jasper’s knees were weakening, his arm numb but for the pain, and his mind desperate for release, but impotent to any other reality. And then–
	–the Grand Vizier released him, striding off.
	Jasper nursed his arm, massaging feeling back into his fingers, and trying to ignore those from his upper limb. Yod made to follow the Grand Vizier, looked to Jasper for support, who winced but jogged along side all the same. Now they had to see what the Grand Vizier’s purposes were. And where were the other two?
	Unfortunately too late to interrupt Jasper’s thought, Fel and Type arrived at a gentle jog a short while later, and got a harsh stare for her troubles.
	‘Why,’ said Jasper steadily, ‘the fuck didn’t you come out?’ Yod scurried off meerkat-wise, escaping to the dubious security of stereotype-surveillance. ‘What the shit were you thinking of. He almost took off my fucking arm!’ The last sentence he shouted.
	‘What?’
	‘What?’
	‘Jasper,’ Fel tried a conciliatory tone for the sheer novelty of it. ‘Jasper, I’ve been running for a quarter of an hour to get here. I could not have come any faster. I’m sorry, what ever it was that happened.’
	Jasper looked dumbly at her lower lip. ‘You weren’t here?’
	‘Here?’
	‘Here.’
	‘When?’
	‘Now.’
	‘Now?’
	‘A minute ago. Ten minutes ago.’
	‘Ten minutes ago I was a ten-minute jog from here. Exercise, Jasper.’
	‘I’m sorry.’
	‘I think now might be an opportune time to catch up with Yod,’ Type said in a neutral voice. ‘You could tell us what’s been going on. That’d be nice to know, you know. You don’t get much information running through corridors. It is a little trying.’
	A minute or two later, Yod beckoned the two forward to the other side of his vantage point. The three looked faintly comical craning their necks around the corner, one head upon another.
	‘How did you find us then, Fel?’ Yod whispered across.
	‘Yeah,’ said the middle head, Jasper. ‘You must have been miles away.’
	In her inauspicious position of lowest head, Fel did not feel obliged to give anything more than a shrug. Type, as highest head, was aloof to such petty considerations, and too failed to provide an explanation. They watched the Grand Vizier.
	‘Do you know,’ quoth he, ‘this really is rather silly.’ He walked into the wall. Flailing out a hand two seconds after the event, and evidently to stop the collision, had the effect of knocking him backwards with extraordinary force into the opposite wall.
	The three heads disappeared, one by one, for a hasty conference.
	‘Well,’ said Type, ‘I didn’t expect that.’
	‘Do you think it’s time I was told why we are following a crap mime artist?’
	Yod and Jasper looked nonplussed.
	She made frantic pointing motions around their corner-cover.
	‘Oh, him.’
	Jasper’s head popped back, then Type’s, and then, on top and swaying, Fel’s. The Grand Vizier was sitting against a wall; legs splayed out before him; hands in lap. Sitting benignly next to him was a gun, the gun. Oh, they’d witnessed countless improbably hefted and carelessly dropped firearms in myriad films – often in which weapons let loose were as integral as dialogue. The impression they gleaned was that the past was a dangerous place for those foolhardy enough to be near interesting people. The most offensive weapon on Ressonner was Yod, or so the joke went. And there it was. A gun. Probably in working order. Possibly loaded. There. Just resting. Ready. There.
	The political and moral power of an object that re-levels the tables from those with the strength to kill, to those with the will, the conceit, has oft been remarked upon. As too has the eroticism of the gun, often at length. And the technology, personality, rightness, wrongness; abstract ideals, metaphysical plane, sheer bloody-mindedness; spin techniques, buffing methods, cold-weather drawing; holster hanging double entendres, super-gun double entendres, bullet analogies; metallic paint and iron-on stickers; the tastelessness of pearl handles and the inadvisability of burr-panelling.
	None of which passed through their minds, possibly because objects designed specifically to kill hold interest only for those with psychological deficiencies and Country and Western Muzak devotees. Well, undoubtedly so.
	‘What do you reckon’s gone wrong with him?’ said Fel.
	‘Do you mind moving your elbow?’ said Type.
	‘Pearl handles:’ said Jasper, ‘a mistake.’
	Pause for thought.
	‘You know,’ said Fel, a lower top-head now, ‘it’s the Mary Celeste, not Marie.’
	‘Ah,’ said Type, the new bottom head, ‘actually it’s the Behemoth.’
	‘Crap name.’
	‘Not my idea.’
	‘How long’s it been?’ asked Jasper, who had retained his bourgeois position in the head-height pecking order.
	‘About four minutes.’
	‘Do you reckon he’ll do anything?’
	‘He’s got a gun.’
	‘Yeah, a thousand year old gun, how likely is that to work?’
	‘Point.’
	‘But a thousand year old gun held by a thousand year old arm that is quite capable of ripping apart a brand new gun or a twenty year old arm,’ Jasper inhaled deeply.
	‘It’s not. He’s not even holding it. And I’ll bet a millennia year old robot isn’t in too good order either, as we can plainly see,’ said Type, that insignificant portion of the bourgeois gone over to the proletariat.
	‘He’s never a robot,’ said the antiquated ruling class, at present secure, but soon to be overthrown by an embiggened bourgeoisie.
	‘We activated him, Fel, activated. You don’t activate people after god-knows how-long lying in a corridor: you bury them.’
	‘Well, we only have his word for that. Robots are very untrustworthy, you know. As we can see here.’
	‘Ever hear about circular reasoning, Fel?’
	‘Eh?’
	‘Oh shit.’
	Oh shit indeed, and in hindsight a stronger oral response was merited by the approach of a fantasy figure holding a horribly heavy gun. And it was heavy, the Grand Vizier staggered as he hefted the outwardly small firearm before him, and swinging it up to face the horror-struck three required a massive exertion. A little bit of time passed. On reflection, long enough to say “abit”. Not a word, but there you go.
	‘Now that I have your attention,’ the Grand Vizier said from behind the gun, ‘I need some information concerning New Moon, Red, Reagan’s Ville, and Mrs. Fermat. I want you to tell me when I was deactivated, and I want you to tell me from which faction, army, or city you four hail, who your leader is, and how can they be contacted. Now.’
	He was met by the silence near death often fosters in preparation for actual death.
	‘You, Jasper, tell me.’ The muzzle wavered a full metre from his head, and yet in his immediate memory it filled the world. Daemons lurked in that hole.
	‘New Moon? Red? Reagan’s Ville?’
	‘Ugh, enough of this. You are obviously vandals, yes, vandals. And that means…’ he abruptly turned his back to them. ‘But where,’ he muttered, ‘but where can we be now? And how did we move?’
	The four, stood straight backed against a terrible immovability, gazed towards his hand, a leisurely metronome, and the gun held by the tip of his middle finger. He was in a heated discussion now, arguing probabilities, space-time anomalies and bad hair, and clearly having a little trouble coming to terms with the time gap. The Grand Vizier turned laboriously, his head flicking dementedly to face them each, the gun held firm.
	‘You are vandals,’ he said, ‘you are–’ and stopped. ‘vandals,’ he resumed.
	‘You have come ab–’ death still nothingness emptiness trackless void –’oard my ship, to what, to what, to what, to steal and to pillage and to loot my ship. You have no knowledge of New Moon becau–’ pause turned to a wait turned to an interval but not an interval because an interval does not last forever.
	A click exploded in Jasper’s skull. Click, and click again, as each chamber of the revolver was proven empty. Fel dropped the gun, a piece of metal without its bullets. The Grand Vizier stood immobile and inviolate. 
	‘Take out the cube,’ said Type; ‘it’s the brain, or power pack, or something. Take it out.’
	‘Do it,’ said Jasper. ‘Quickly.’
	‘You bloody do it!’
	‘It’s in his chest,’ said Type. He stepped forward, and pushed the grand Vizier. His body absorbed the force, bending slightly but retaining balance. When Type chanced to fold back the heavy robes, he found the cube already ejected. Further blows fell from Fel and Jasper, gentle at first but graduating to slamming shoulders and kicks, all absorbed by body, joints cushioning each impact. The combined might of the four eventually sent it sprawling, and once he was lying there, on the floor, none could think why they had done it. 
	‘I don’t know about you,’ said Jasper, ‘but I want to get wasted. I tell a lie, I do know about you.’
	Years later, a single thought sent one-time adventurers to the cold sweat of a small-hours awakening: the Grand Vizier completing the word “because”. 

funky shit

‘This is what we found, while you two were messing around with a fancy-dress android,’ said Fel. The fluorescent lighting whump-whumped on to reveal a massive barrel shaped hold, strewn with boxes of varying shapes, sizes, designs and states of repair, and decorated with slashed strips of webbing. Dominating the scene was an age blackened wooden crate, filled with stones bearing lichen and chalk identification numbers. The purpose, as with the container, was decayed and all-but lost. It could have stood as a metaphor for the hold entire if anyone devoted sufficient time to it, but they didn’t, because they were intent on getting rat-arsed. 
	‘There is funky shit here,’ said Yod, ‘seriously funky shit. I want to emphasis that.’
	‘It occurs to me,’ said Jasper, ‘that a Latin speaking person, happening by chance on our society which makes such dubious use of the language, might find, for instance, the fields of ornithology and botany a well of constant amusement.’
	‘I can’t say that it has ever occurred to me,’ said Fel, drunk. 
	Yod patted his pockets for substances. ‘Even the wine is seriously funky shit; the fact that it isn’t vinegar is not nothing short of marginally uninteresting.’
	‘There are times,’ Jasper began, ‘when silence can be maintained only so long.’
	‘There are times,’ Fel joined in, ‘when the air we breathe in is not the air we breathe out.’
	‘There are times when stepping up means an increase in altitude,’ was Yod’s contribution.
	‘But sometimes,’ Jasper added a note of urgency, ‘all it takes is four people to do the unexpected.’
	‘And just sometimes, the future of the universe is in the hands of the young.’
	‘But more often than not they are too stoned to do anything with it.’
	‘This is madness,’ exclaimed Fel. ‘Pure madness, I say!’ She laughed. 
	Type reached into a crate and threw the penultimate highly vintage carafe to Yod, who missed it and the wash of deep red as it shattered against the deck. ‘Oops,’ he said, retrieving the last bottle. ‘You know, I heard that all two hundred years of the Eurovision Song Contest, before it was banned by the UN, are buried in a disused mine in the Australian Outback. They scare the shit out of nuclear waste to this very day.’
	‘I remember a good story,’ said Jasper; ‘it’s called the Story of the Most Sarcastic Man in the World, Ever.’
	‘Oh, do tell, Jasper,’ said Yod, grinning insanely. 
	‘He only ever spoke in sarcasm, the Most Sarcastic Man in the World, Ever. His every action and sentence were inflected with a barbed tongue and geared to the diametric opposite of his meaning. It went entirely unnoticed.’
	‘Remember 17 October, nine eighty-eight?’ said Yod.
	‘Fuckoff,’ said Fel by reflex.
	‘Heh, yes,’ said Jasper. ‘17 October, the date every year when an eager young security trainee symbolically guards the Ressonner Advisory Council building with a stick and strict instructions never under any circumstances to use it.’
	‘Yeah, yeah, and you can all sod off.’
	‘Oh yeah,’ said Yod; eager to let loose long remembered information. ‘I know what all this stuff is for,’ he fluttered a handy scrap of packaging. ‘Trademarked, that is what it all is; a hold full of trademarks.’
	‘And what, pray tell, is that?’ said Fel, who was engaging in spying out colourful logos with drunken myopia and limited success. Ship evening had caught them up, opportunely dimming the lights and lending their tight group a campsite air. Jasper was busy collecting firewood from broken boxes.
	‘Trademark identification,’ Yod continued. ‘All these corporations think to themselves, here we have the ideal opportunity to send our products out into the universe to markets new and varied. Here we can give our products the immortality that colonies grant Earth.’
	‘Sounds okay,’ said Fel. Meanwhile, Jasper was nurturing a small fire, feeding it titbits of instruction manual and complementary toothpicks.
	‘Except that it is bollocks, complete and utter rubbish, utterly, wholly and entirely stupid. The point of a trademark is to sell your product; trademarks are not an end unto themselves.’
	‘Well,’ said Fel, ‘yes. Whatever.’
	‘I feel you lack interest in my tirade,’ said Yod.
	‘Yod, dear,’ said Fel, reaching forward and putting a hand on his knee, ‘I do.’
	‘So,’ said Jasper, a merry little blaze at his feet, ‘what’s the plan?’
	‘Plan,’ repeated Type. ‘Plan… no, I don’t believe that I have ever heard the word. What is this plan of which you speak?’
	Fel dissolved into a fit of giggles, while Jasper pasted seriousness onto his face and said, ‘We have been somewhat aimless of late.’
	‘Of the past twenty-one years, it seems to me,’ said Yod, who had prepared a further denunciation of corporate trademarks revolving around the idea of there being “Pepsi” planets and “coke” planets. He was wondering where he could seamlessly slip it into the conversation, but such an archaic concept did not lend itself to easy introduction.
	‘I think we should go to Sheba,’ said Jasper. 
	‘Don’t be silly,’ said Yod, ‘we’ve not explored a quarter of the ship – the Behemoth – yet.’
	‘Why are we here?’ was Jasper’s rhetorical response. ‘We are out here, off Ressonner for a reason. There is a point. We are going to Sheba.’
	‘No, that isn’t true,’ said Fel. ‘The reason we started putting together a spaceship in nine eighty-nine was a couple of transmissions, ostensibly from Sheba, and that is the reason we are here in nine ninety. But the reason we are or will be here, the reason that, at some point in time, a spaceship was or was to be built by us is that we could and can do it. The Sheba transmissions were a catalyst, but a catalyst getting us off the ground, not to Sheba. The point was to get away from Ressonner, and that we have done. And of course once we have exhausted the Behemoth we will want to seek the next point of interest, and that may happen to be Sheba, or it may not. It is interest we are seeking, an end to boredom; we are selfish people. We are not on a quest, and never were. And now,’ she flicked her hair, ‘I would like some more alcohol.’
	‘That,’ said Type, ‘is true.’ He reached into a cavernous breast pocket and withdrew a handful of gaudily wrapped chocolate bars. ‘I liberated these from one of those food machines.’
	‘How meretricious,’ said Yod of the wrapper. 
	‘Meretricious but nice,’ said Fel. 
	Jasper thought deeply and said, ‘I know the problem: I am not yet drunk.’
	‘There’s the man,’ said Yod, who was.
	‘It’s never a good sign when your nose goes numb,’ said Jasper a while later. ‘Off my face, I suppose.’
	Night-proper enveloped the hold, and without a command to the contrary from the interlopers, the lights dimmed further to a lunar luminescence. They huddled closer in a tight arc around the glowing embers of their fire. The officious attentions of the sprinkler system would have ruined the mood entirely, so it is fortuitous that for one reason or another, the fire warning system looked with kind eyes on the campfire and let it be.
	‘So what are we going to do?’ asked Jasper.
	‘I think Yod and Type are asleep,’ said Fel. 
	‘What do you think?’
	‘About tomorrow, the next day?’
	‘The next week, the next month,’ he said.
	‘Let’s understand the Behemoth.’
	‘She’s a big girl. It’ll take a long time.’
	‘I don’t know about that,’ she answered. 
	‘Fel,’ he began, formulating a question in his cotton-wool mind, ‘Fel, why haven’t you slept with any one of us?’
	‘That’s an odd question,’ she answered after similar consideration. ‘An answer would be because you are my friends. Another answer is that you are not remotely my type, but I think my final word on the subject will be: who says that I haven’t?’

CSS Behemoth – 19 March, 3587 AD

‘I always regret the anticlimax completion brings,’ said Red. ‘The best is the moment after one begins, and the moment before completion. And then to the next project, and all over again.’
	‘Rather premature?’ said Victor, who favoured most the happy leisure implied in having no project on which to work at all.
	‘Oh, the colonists,’ Red said as if suddenly remembering some small, trifling detail in the establishment of a colony. ‘Details. The moon is alive, complete, finished. A colony would be little more than a speck on its surface.’
	‘Like dandruff,’ he said.
	‘Alas there are responsibilities,’ said Red. ‘It seems that we are responsible for dandruff.’
	He smiled back, and thought of their holiday on New Moon, eight years in all.

musings on the nature of leisure

It was a glorious day. All days on New Moon were glorious; it was a glorious place. Victor tried to fit another adjective to the sights, sounds and especially smells of this… glorious world. But none fit so snugly. None suited this enchanted moon better.
	He wondered how many other momentous events had occurred on 17 October. The only one which sprung to mind was the staggering run of luck that lead Dorchester Town FC to the FA cup final, whereupon they suffered an ignoble eight nil defeat to mighty Yeovil. But that had been on 16 October, and hardly something that Victor would know. And while it seemed unreasonable to say that this was the most important event ever to fall upon any 17 October, Victor was prepared to stick his neck out and claim it for the 17 October in the year 3579. Today a human foot touched New Moon soil. He had a thought.
	Red wandered towards him with her patented quizzical expression, not realising that he wished to possess the first human shoulder blade to touch New Moon soil.
	They had awoken as planned above a forest moon, a moon that was fast becoming a world. 

secondary details

‘A Chancellor,’ said Red, ‘we require a Chancellor.’
	‘And what character would that be?’ said Victor, looking to her left and his right at a monitor. The settler inventory took the form of an obscurely sorted list of names in black on white. One could scroll up and down the list and select a name for instant edification. “GUI” meant “gelatinous” to this interface; a WIMP was one too intimidated to use it. ‘Retro,’ said Victor knowingly. ‘Chancellor?’ he added, ‘why not president, or Generalissimo Machismo?’
	‘Why not, truly.’
	‘I don’t suppose we have a handy pamphlet to help us at this juncture,’ said Victor, who found in pamphlets a hobby. 
	Colonial Political Philosophy for Dummies proved a useful stepping stone to the highbrow So You Want to Pick a Chancellor, and the esoteric Oh No! No Chancellor! 
	‘Junior-philosophy and small minded politics,’ said Red. She tapped her finger against the monitor, selecting a few entries at random from the list of potential Chancellors. 
	‘Caveat, Ronda. Sixteen, wants to be famous, expresses an interest in dancing. Huddle-Hop, Duncan. There isn’t any information on him. Xebec, Anchorite Q. Thirty-seven, former Jungian psychoanalyst, morbid fear of pencil sharpeners.’
	‘Exactly how morbid could a pencil sharpener be?’ asked an amused Victor.
	‘A razor blade held forever in its plastic prison, used and gradually worsened in its using to shave away protection; to unleash the terror and panic of words upon a fragile world; to carve the spirit as effectively as flesh.’ She paused. ‘No, I see what you mean.’
	She hugged her knees, bringing them up to her chin. ‘This is pointless.’
	‘I suppose,’ Victor began, ‘that the really important part of a colony is the world itself, I mean, a terraformed body will progress perfectly well without human inhabitants.’
	‘No, the point of a colony is the people. I just find it hard to care as much,’ she said. ‘Enough of this. We choose the last name of the list: Eugene Baldhead, scriptwriter, enjoys golf, hates the word policy.’

the other side of a setting sun

It was later now. Red and Victor were enjoying a cool drink a few hundred metres from their conical craft and half that from the forest’s boundary. The setting sun cast pinks, oranges and reds across the sky, and at its zenith the planet hung in varicoloured eminence. 
	‘From the air,’ Red was saying, ‘the dominant aspect is the sheer lack of features. As we flew across the land to this clearing there was nothing but a flat green carpet beneath us. No mountains, canyons, plateau or ancient caldera, no polar caps nor equatorial ocean; just the green.’ 
	‘But not down here,’ concluded Victor, ‘down here the dominating factor is not the tree canopy as a whole, as an anonymous homogenous blanket, but the tree as an individual. And while geography might provide a sight to behold, a tree is something that you can hold.’
	Red and he were taking a sabbatical from life in space. Conceptually you were no less in space in a ship than on a moon, but it was easier to forget about the vacuum if one had a horizon to enjoy come twilight. Conceptually, too, they were as much at work on moon as on ship – you can sit and wait for a computer to work out the messy details from anywhere. But, again, it was natural to delineate time for pleasure and work, or rather pleasure and vaguely guilty pleasure. It was true that by any standards of the past, Red and Victor spent less time working than discussing when they were at work, a truly wonderful state of affairs and one to which all societies should aspire. 

the scene

Victor, dressed in confusingly coloured garb with doubtful conscience of design, is standing to the left of the object. Red, clothed in a spectrum of green and with a single gold earring, is standing to the right of the object, opposite Victor. Her hand is poised over the small utilitarian keypad of the object; her finger joints bent slightly inwards; her nails scrubbed; her wrists straight. Illumination is provided via the expertise of a medium sized lightbulb. It is performing admirably well given the difficult conditions and deficiencies in its design. Victor (later, once this messy episode finishes) considers giving it a commendation – a medal even – but Red reminds him that inanimate photon-excreting apparatus do not get honours.

the object

One by two point eight (extendable) by one point five metres. Pulled out one point nine metres from the bank of other objects, stretching away to both sides, it is stupidly painted, idiotically painted. Indeed, only an utter imbecile would choose to paint it like that! Or, and this is a distinct possibility, someone very clever indeed. Ignoring the distressing colour scheme of the body, we concern ourselves with the glass lid. Not glass? Actually it is.

fruit flies like a banana

Time does not fly, it falls, plummeting from an unknown sky to the unknown rocks. A warm updraft may catch you, holding you in its embrace for a time, but that is when you fall the fastest. Victor had plummeted far, and yet the ground was as distant as ever, distant as with the short-sightedness of youth, distant as to be meaningless. 
	“The world is ending,” he had said to Red on the last morning.
	“And the new looms massive.”
	It was an hour’s work hacking away the bracken and sapling growth obscuring the doors to their long empty shuttle. Once inside Victor experienced such a strong sense of déjà vu that he missed a step and almost fell over. “It’s the smell,” he said to Red, “it’s just so… precise.”
	The shuttle rose on a cyclone of plant mass and earth, accelerating into the tranquil cloud scattered sky, and creating a billowing column of polluted air. A particulate hydrocarbon needle spouted into space. Light blue, graduating to the colour of liquid oxygen and on to the hue of super-cooled ozone until all is star punctuated black.

the Behemoth – 25 April, 990 OL

‘Colonial doctrine was obviously not the product of the greatest minds of the time,’ Jasper was saying. ‘You know that the best qualities in leadership were held to be lack of imagination, lack of ambition, and lack of motivational skills. The worst thing of all, apparently, was a really good, inspiring, visionary leader. You know, the sort of person who inevitably wants to shape things in their own image. Apparently, it was worse if they began with the best intentions, because you always end up with a supercilious bastard who doesn’t know when to die.’
	‘The best Chancellor would be a cuddly toy?’
	‘Absolutely.’
	‘It makes sense to me,’ said Yod. ‘If you’ve sorted out how everything works, the last thing you need is someone up their own arse-holes who thinks they can do better.’
	‘Hang on,’ said Fel, ‘that’s all very well if you’ve got a peaceful idyll in the first place, but I can’t see how establishing a new colony could have been easy. You’d need someone with vision then, surely.’
	‘Oh no,’ said Jasper, ‘no-no, the reason why the First Chancellor was such a good choice was precisely because of his lack of vision – he had the ambition and imagination of a fruit fly. You can’t run before you can walk.’
	‘Yeah, and we still can’t run,’ said Type. ‘Who is the present incumbent?’
	A thoughtful pause gave cause for thought. ‘I have no idea,’ said Jasper. ‘And that’s my point: it’s all ticking over nicely.’
	‘No it isn’t, Jasper,’ said Fel. ‘Your point was that it was a stupid idea.’
	‘Hey,’ Yod broke into a fit of laughter, ‘we’ve really fucked things up then. Hey, why don’t we fly the Behemoth to Sheba?’
	‘Because we don’t even know how to turn on the windscreen wipers, so to speak,’ said Jasper.
	‘Come on, look where we are sitting,’ Yod spread his arms wide, encompassing banks of monitors, a menagerie of workstations, and a skeleton in a blue suit. The workstations varied from large moulded khaki blobs to elegant chrome jobbies with chairs designed by a disreputable osteopath. ‘If this isn’t the bridge, well, we’d better find out where it is.’
	‘Whatever,’ said Fel. ‘I rather like the skeleton,’ she said, and grinned at Captain Dead. ‘Only sticky skeletons are morbidly dreadful.’
	‘I hope that’s not the self-destruct mechanism your are fiddling with, Jasper,’ said Yod circumspectly.
	Jasper ceased his slapdash tapping of a kaleidoscopic keyboard. ‘Well,’ he said, jabbing a last button, ‘it might be the type of insidious self-destruct mechanism that doesn’t actually do any destruction, and has never really caught on. Captain Dead looks jolly.’
	‘Roger, I suppose,’ said Type.
	‘Let’s go,’ Fel announced, ‘for I am bored.’

happy frustration

Four people were swearing profusely. Phrases containing the words “man/machine dichotomy” and “non-deterministic my arse” littered the swearscape like so much highbrow detritus upon a squelchy field. The object of abuse was an ECUç™ spEkey~ƒās™ speech interface. Conversations with all-too many shipboard computers tend towards, “What do you feel about acceleration” and “Turn right?”
	‘I have attempted squeaky,’ intoned Fel, ‘I have tried load,’ her voice grew yet colder, ‘and I have even given backwards a shot.’
	‘You were good at that.’
	‘Sknaht; it’s a talent.’
	‘I see you were drawing to a conclusion. Pray continue,’ said Jasper. 
	‘…backwards a shot. And I have come to a horrible, horrible realisation, dear friends,’ her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I think we may have to find the manual.’ She bowed her head.
	Jasper caught his breath at the shock of it. ‘You don’t mean that, Fel. Gods, Fel, you don’t mean it.’
	They stood facing one another, appalling recognition coursing through their veins. And then they laughed until they were sick.	

sobriety is an affliction of the mind

Picture the scene: darkness. Mayhaps the odd dull shape can be discerned, but the only impression one gets is of size, is of a colossal space. A crack opens in the pitch, light spilling golden white across a grated floor. It widens to the whining accompaniment of under-oiled chains and massive, toothed cogs. Four figures poised dwarfed but central, brought hazy by light and standing terrible in their posture. The only sound their footfalls upon old, cold steel, traversing the camera field and diverging at the centre. 
	‘What a dingy place,’ said Fel. 
	‘I’ll bet someone did it on purpose,’ said Yod. ‘Nothing gets in a state like this by natural processes alone. I can just see them giving it a going over with some grime-in-a-tin. I mean, who uses grease anymore?’
	‘Look at this,’ Fel pointed towards the offending item, ‘look at that. What do you think that is.’
	‘Hmm,’ Jasper tapped his upper-lip. ‘Hmm, it looks to me like… like a hole hacked, no, drilled in the deck, with some…’ he knelt close to the black opening, ‘with what smells like very old shampoo drizzled around the edge. That is pathetic.’
	‘I’ll bet it’s factory done, you know.’ Fel peered down the hole. ‘I’ll bet there is this bloke who specialises in eerie-holes. I’ll bet he’s a real craftsman. I’ll bet he takes enormous pride in his work. I’ll bet, right, that it’s a family business. He learnt the craft from his father, and plans to teach it to his first son.’
	‘You know what I’ll bet?’
	‘?’
	‘?’
	‘?’
	‘I’ll bet his name was Dafydd Idiom.’
	‘Oh no, he’s only gone and signed it.’
	The reason behind their visit soon reasserted its self, and they got on with selecting a space ship. Nothing special; good economy; nice styling; no soft-tops. 	Soon they will select a reassuringly generic craft, and have rather a problem getting the control systems worked out. Fel will try speaking backwards (and she is good at that). Eventually they hit upon the idea of fiddling with the controls, rather than endeavouring to engage the computer in conversation. 
	The discovery of the other light switch did not dispel the clichéd griminess of the spacecraft hangar, but at least you could see the grease properly, and the selection of shuttles was a remarkable sight. There were craft, sitting benignly, whose styling spanned science fiction from the 1920’s ‘til 1988. There were thunderbirds sitting pretty, just begging for some sticky backed plastic and a loo roll. There were concept-craft aplenty based on a legion of design paradigms, including one that rejected out of hand the whole farcical notion of space travel. Gaudy corporate logos twinkled and shone under distant lights, proffering images of happy smiling families flying through Saturn’s rings, or fierce, happy animals, striking improbable poses. 
	In the midst of these aeronautical wonders and paeans to fanciful engineering stood the four’s choice. Hunched between a Zeppelin and a giant Sinclair C5, it was quite the plainest, safest looking piece of off-white tedium one could imagine. No mere descriptive passage could hope to summon up it’s unadulterated off-whiteness. No list of metaphor and simile could hope to give one a taste of its a-tastelessness. It was, to draw an inadequate parallel, the design equivalent of Styrofoam. 
	‘A life without timetables,’ Jasper said, ‘is a life worth living.’
	‘What does that mean?’ said Fel.
	‘It means I felt like saying something significant, and that was all that came to mind.’
	‘I want to go home,’ said Yod.
	‘It is a well known fact,’ said Jasper, ‘that spaceships go Grrrrr-ow when flying past the camera, and frankly this has puzzled me. If it’s meant to be the sound inside the ship (a bit of atmosphere) then why the Doppler? And why Grrrrr-ow, rather than put-put-put, or Boing?’
	Yod nodded. ‘I’ve always wondered if the ship has to turn around again to retrieve its camera. Ah, perhaps there is a network of freelance cameras, spread liberally throughout the universe.’
	Pause for paragraphing.
	‘You know,’ Fel said after a suitable interval, ‘I have often thought that last dying words are a much used and useful device.’
	‘Oh, absolutely,’ agreed Jasper. ‘You only have to look at the sheer wealth of films featuring the ubiquitous set piece.’
	‘A quoted example would be appreciated at this stage,’ said Fel, who could only think of, “Kiss me now Hardy, you mad impetuous fool!” which did not adequately fit the situation. She gave the situation to Jasper’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the pointless.
	‘Well,’ quoth he, ‘there are, as you well know, two flavours of Last Dying Words. The first, and in my opinion overtly contrived, is to provide the hero with hard won information concerning, for instance, treasure. I don’t rate these at all, and so will regretfully decline to provide an example.’
	Fel nodded, agreeing wholeheartedly with Jasper’s stand against lazy contrivance and indolent plot development. ‘And the second?’
	‘Oh yes, the second,’ said Jasper, stroking his chin. ‘The second is when usually much loved characters get to confide some – often homoerotic – baggage to their nearest before peacefully slipping away with a slight grimace.’
	‘You don’t hold the opinion that the likelihood of such near-death coherence, indeed ability to vocalise, all too often stretches credibility past acceptable limits?’
	‘Come on, Fel, never heard of suspension of disbelief? I mean take, for instance, the epitome of homicidal evil himself, Mad “I am mad” McBastard in the remarkable 1931 Hollywood debut of future Eastern Bloc chiropodist and part-time social visionary, Idel T. d’Idel, Gangsters with Fingers.’
	‘A milestone in cinematography, and a loss to chiropody,’ Type chimed in. 
	‘Quite. Having been riddled with the bullets of tough New York investigator, Shamus O’Really, he manages to burble one last heart rendering piece to camera, before falling.’ (–into a decade of playing B- and C-movie gangsters who die unrealistically and love their mums, after which he embarked on a theatre career where he plays Hamlet to this very day.) ‘And I firmly believe that it would be a much improved and better remembered film if the censor–’
	‘–Evil censor–’
	‘–evil censor had not bleeped it with yet more gunshots. But,’ Jasper continued, ‘of course another archetype is the demise of middle-aged, overweight, hard drinking mentor to young LA cop, Chad “80’s hair” Scot, Randy Corpuscle, in the highly spurious and awful 1985 remake. Having chased the evil drugs-baron-thingy through his taxman camouflaged Spanish villa, killing twenty to thirty dim henchmen without a thought while attempting to catch the baron alive–’
	‘–Because the only thing worse than an evil man is an evil man with no ambition–’
	‘–he is shot by said manic baron, and, lying in Chad’s arms, he succeeds in saying, “Tel Marge [his estranged and embittered wife whose every fleeting chance of happiness of the past thirty years had been systematically ruined by Randy’s belligerent insensitivity and twisted sense of family values] that I love her.” Tell you what, that made the film for me.’
	‘It must be terrible,’ said Fel, ‘to die with neither a good nor fabricated word to say about yourself, nor even the location of a lost treasure which you’d been saving for your – hah, hah – old age.’
	‘Ah,’ said Jasper, patting a jacket pocket, ‘that’s why I always carry this with me.’ He pulled out a scrap of paper upon which was written– ‘Oh no, these are my last words and you are not allowed to read them until I am dying in your arms.’
	‘Can’t wait.’
	‘Can you die in my arms?’ asked Yod.
	‘He is dying in mine,’ said Fel possessively, ‘aren’t you, Jasper?’
	‘Hurry up and decide,’ said Type. ‘Quickly!’
 	‘I want to die… in the arms of this chair, hah.’
	The four took a contemplative gaze through the falsewindow that dominated one wall of their description-less shuttle. Initially picturing the inside of a grimy hangar, Yod had since found an edifying selection of alternatives, and periodically flicked to the next preset. The present locale was a tropical beach, fringed with gently swaying palms. Occasionally an attractive local sashayed across the seashore, eliciting appreciative noises. 
	‘Ever hear about Droppy the lift?’ said Jasper after a minute of hip-admiration. 
	‘Do tell.’
	‘Well, there was a time, way back before interstella flight, when using intelligent, emotional software was all the rage, to be found in products as diverse as watches (“what’s the magic word?”) and lifts (“this job is getting me down”). It was such a piece of lift software which ended the craze, sending manufacturers back to normal, safe, dumb systems. This lift, whose name was Droppy – his siblings were Fally, Descendy and Plumetty – developed an unaccountable, but not entirely irrational, hatred of people carrying filofaxes.’
	‘Filofax?’  
	‘A book which told you who you are and what you do, but not how or why. Anyway, it would resolutely refuse to move if any filofax carriers stepped in, and, if pushed, would take them to the opposite floor to their choice. This wasn’t a major problem until a particularly irate vouppie, Very Old Urban Professional, slammed her filofax into his button bank, and was killed in the subsequent thirty floor Droppy.’
	‘Is any of this true, Jasper?’
	‘Gospel.’
	‘Eh?’
	‘Ah-ha!’ Yod exclaimed, ‘a reggae soundtrack.’
	‘The late, great Bob Smith had a lot to say on the subject of music,’ said Type, reciting a favourite narrative. ‘“Music”, he would tell his captive audience as closing time approached like sunrise to a vampire, “is the pork scratchings on the bar of life. It can be marvellously unpleasant if prepared wrong, but when done correctly it can be enjoyed again and again.” Quite why it could be enjoyed repeatedly was a matter of fierce debate in later times (“Was Bob bulimic?” “Did he nibble his music?” “What’s a pork scratching?”), which goes to show what happens when popular historians get on TV.
	‘On the subject of the vastly different styles of music available he said, “Some people like Cheese and Onion, some prefer Ready Salted. Personally I think you can’t beat Salt ‘n Vinegar.” And, when asked if there were any styles which he didn’t like, he answered, “Prawn Cocktail was a terrible mistake”, although in this instance he had misheard the question and was widely misquoted in later years as being a rabid hater of Prawn Music, a popular if cheesy form of music originating from Denmark.’
	‘That,’ Jasper picked his words, ‘was utterly without relevance, Type.’
	‘Mmm,’ Fel concurred with his sentiment.
	‘Cheers,’ said Type.
	‘Where do you reckon we’d be now, if we’d decided to fix up your house, or take a proper expedition into the mirk, or whatever,’ said Jasper.
	‘My apprenticeship would have finished by now,’ said Fel, clutching her knees against her chest, ‘so I’d probably have taken over from Scoff Wolfenden, mending fences and trudging around Lost Ee while you lot have fun.’
	‘Hardly, we’d still be learning about the Problems With Plasma, eh, Type?’
	Type made a face. 
	‘I’d be here,’ said Yod.
	‘I suppose we start living now,’ said Jasper. ‘I mean, well, proper life, adult life.’
	‘Not sure I get you, Jasper,’ said Yod.
	‘I don’t know. I’ve always felt that somehow school, the Apprenticeship, growing up, everything, was a prelude, something to go through before your proper life can begin. It has just occurred to me that this is my adult life. It is a strange feeling.’
	‘That is entirely the wrong attitude to take,’ Fel pronounced. ‘Nothing is the prelude to nothing: life should be one continuous stretch of pleasure.’
	‘It should be,’ said Yod. ‘It’d be nice, certainly.’
	‘I see what you mean,’ said Type. ‘It’s like, when you’re growing up there is a set path to tread and you see it as that: a path leading to the big wide world of adulthood, when anything is possible and the freedom is great. Which is bollocks; adult life has as many straightjackets as childhood, the only difference being that they are self imposed.’
	‘I do not believe,’ Fel gave each word heavily to the air, ‘that you are talking about straightjackets while sitting inside a fucking spaceship.’
	‘Alright then,’ Type stepped to the controls (whose workings will receive no description), ‘let’s go to Sheba now. Immediately. Without delay.’
	‘Supplies,’ Fel stated.  
	‘Ah! Ah!’ Type crowed. 

ever the diversion

Yod skipped merrily down a darkened passageway followed half a corridor away by a despondently jogging Type. Jogging, he muttered, was a fundamentally silly form of locomotion. Bouncing up and down, he mused, was for kangaroos and other such beasts of legend. Furthermore, he mentally added – a cerebral postscript, if you will – jogging after Yod made it doubly pointless.
	But Type was stoned. 
	‘Bloody slow down why don’t you!’ he called ahead to Yod’s disappearing back. ‘Sodding sod!’
	Three minutes later, one might find Yod and Type sitting against opposite sides of a distant corridor, deep within the sighing leviathan named Behemoth.
	‘Okay, okay, okay,’ said Yod, whose run had done nothing for the fuzzy state of his mind. ‘Okay, okay, okay. Okay okay okay. Okay-okay-okay. Okayokayokay.’
	‘Oh, precisely,’ nodded Type. ‘Oh yes. Um,’ he frowned. ‘What was your point again?’
	‘The point? Ah yes indeed, you may well ask me what is the point. Ah yes the point,’ he looked ceilingwards.
	‘The point?’
	‘Hmm. Did you have one?’
	Yod made an attempt at coherent thought, mindful of his reputation. ‘It was about God, wasn’t it?’
	‘And how to become one.’
	‘Ah yes. Important bit that, yep,’ he pointed vaguely towards Type’s head. ‘Here is my postulation, ready? Okay. Now we all know about the programme-every-particle-of-the-universe-into-a-computer method of predicting the future.’
	‘It is a mainstay of popular misunderstanding,’ Type concurred.
	‘Certainly. If you could ascertain the position and momentum ‘n all of every quanta of energy in the universe and stick it into a computer, then knowing the past and future is but a meaninglessly vast number of iterations away. And we know the many ways in which that whole idea comes crashing down like so much software.’
	‘Certainly.’
	‘At the risk of boring you, friend Type–’
	‘Oh please Yod, do not be concerned with that.’
	‘Excellent. Not least that it is impossible to get the precise whatnots for a single particle, and then we have the other two main obstacles being that the machine could never run anywhere near as fast as the real universe does, with the biggy being that it would require a large number times the total matter in said universe to construct. Are you still with me there, Type?’
	‘With you all the way, Yod. Good point about the speed bit. That hadn’t occurred to me yet.’
	‘Hmm. And now we come to my postulation: while it is impossible to do the computer whatnot for our universe, there is no reason why it can’t work for another, ah ha!’ he waved his index finger towards Type. ‘You see what I am getting at? Ah? Ah? You can’t travel between universes, ‘cause of the definition of universe, you see, so any universe with any physical laws you please could exist, and because it is impossible to prove either way, it does exist.’
	‘Shaky logic there, I reckon.’
	‘Do you disparage my mental reasoning, Type?’
	‘No, mental health, but not mental reasoning. So…’
	‘So I could, perfectly reasonably, create the Universe of Yod, one I can edit at will. And what other definition of God is there?’
	‘The universe of Yod, eh? What a terrifying thought. You do realise that technical limitations inherent in any form of computational device render it impossible to simulate accurately any system–’
	‘Yeah yeah yeah, I know, snooker table balls and all. I know. But there’s no reason why everything has to be so complicated in my universe.’
	‘Oh I can see it now, “Hello Mr. Physicist, worked out the underlying concepts and laws of our universe yet?” “Yes Mr. Philosopher, did that this morning. Worked out what the hell it’s all for?” “Nah, I’m buggered if I know.”’
	‘I was thinking about something a little more esoteric for my universe, actually Type.’
	‘Oh yes, Yod?’
	‘That’ll be God to you, Type. Yes, I was thinking about a risqué totality in a green baize, inhabited by spherical beings in a ballet of movement, terminated only through inevitable and inescapable contact with the six bottomless pits that are my universe’s own terrible legacy.’
	‘You do realise that for all the point it has, it might as well be–’
	‘I know. A snooker table.’
	Type giggled.
	‘Funny,’ said Yod, ‘how like ideas, there are ideas which are like really potent. Not potent,’ he frowned for a moment, before settling on, ‘obvious.’
	‘Such as… be excellent to one another?’
	‘No no, you’ve lost the point. I mean, there are these like concepts, scenes that resonate. Like, like it’s an idea that you have and it’s a brilliant idea but because it’s such a complete idea, because it fits so beautifully, you can’t believe that it hasn’t been done a thousand times before.’	
	‘Like…’
	‘Well,’ said Yod, shifting position. ‘I had this image of a barren asteroid far into the future and deep in space a million years from anything else, but what it is heading to, in a million years, is a black hole – all that remains of a galaxy. And on this asteroid live a red android and a blue android, all once-shiny metal and snazzy metallic paint, only you can see now the tarnish on their souls in the tarnish on their bodies. And these two are sitting opposite from each other, on the asteroid, discussing philosophy. The red one says that at the heart of all beauty is truth, whereas the blue one says that the heart of all truth is beauty. And they quote Hobbes, Aristotle, Byron, Bacon; Dante, Marx, Nietzsche, Plato; Descartes, Gandhi, Hume, Kant; Albumazar, Machiavelli, Russell, Locke; Euclid, Shakespeare, Lenin, Milton; Socrates, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Archimedes; Buddha, Darwin, Pascal, Zoroaster; Aquinas, Sartre, Galileo, Johnson, Keats…
	‘And that image,’ his voice was softer now, ‘that image is just so good, that I can’t believe it hasn’t been written down a thousand times before.’
	‘Nice sentiment,’ said Type. ‘Now pass us a spliff.’
	Seeking portable distractions and culturally uplifting foods for the voyage to Sheba was Yod’s and Type’s designated rôle, but ever the diversion of philosophy caught them. 

CSS Behemoth – 12 July, 0 OL

Eugene sat looking at the Fermat equipment, home of his confidant and the world in which his plans had hatched. It would have to go. He had responsibilities now, real responsibilities, and that meant finding an aide. Or creating one.
	Stuffed at the back of his wardrobe, tightly wrapped in a jumper, was a black cube named Mr. Bit. It had lain there for months, asserting in a small way Eugene’s defiance of Red and Victor. He saw, when he remembered that it existed, its concealment as a victory over their presumed superiority, a patently expensive piece of hardware that assumed value in ignorance of what Mr. Bit was. But Mr. Bit needed a body and, casting his mind back, Eugene knew where to find one. 
	The selection “lovingly engineered” by those jolly chaps at Pan-Robotics was eclectic to the point of absurdity; the Mr. Benn range fitted any rôle. Eugene perused the selection with the aim of choosing an appropriate body for his soon-to-be trusted lieutenant, but any aspect of choice was affected, because the first body was perfect in every detail: the Grand Vizier. Not a particular Grand Vizier, not Kevin the Grand Vizier, or Arnold, because all Grand Viziers are one and the same man.

the dilettante’s imagination of power

Through the imagined glass of a falsewindow, Eugene used a different imagination, seeing the future in a detail necessarily curtailed by the bounds of his mind, a future of impression, of brilliance. In the unassuming green moon, he saw a stratosphere scraping bejewelled world of incandescent strength – no intellectually barren backwater this. In his partial reflection, he saw an armada of merchant ships streaming away to the five corners of the galaxy. He saw the Fleet, his fleet of gunships, cruisers, destroyers, battleships; sloops, junks, pickets, yachts, frigates; lifters, gravity slingers and suborbitals giving him a million-gun salute. He saw a shining light; he saw Baldhead’s column a hundred miles high. And in the reflected face of his Grand Vizier, he saw the means.
	‘Hello, sire,’ the Grand Vizier purred. ‘I have completed my survey of this vessel, as per your will. The terraforming process on New Moon ended sixty years ago, and all automatic processes aboard this ship have ceased.’
	‘Then we need to build a city,’ said Eugene.
	‘And for that purpose,’ the Grand Vizier rummaged beneath his robes and withdrew a heavy tome, ‘I have prepared this attractive catalogue.’
	‘It seems to me,’ said Eugene slowly, leafing through fantastic illustrations of cities present and past, ‘that it is best to start out small, and work your way up.’ He noted with pleasure the spasm in his Grand Vizier’s eyebrows that always occurred when he Said Something Wise.
	‘Can I infer that you wish to use one of the less ambitious designs?’ said the Grand Vizier. 
	‘I don’t know about that, but I think the Dartboard Design looks good.’
	‘The darts board,’ the Grand Vizier intoned, ‘the pastoral idyll, the confederacy of villages. Yes, sire, that certainly is starting small.’
	Eugene beamed, and the Grand Vizier thought murder. 
	Mr. Bit, his innate propensities amplified by the Grand Vizier stereotype, found his thoughts lingering ever more on the subject of assassination. He felt in his endoskeleton that a swift poisoning would be an eminently satisfying solution to the Eugene Problem, but, unfortunately, the ship’s designers had neglected to provide a poison cupboard. Mr. Bit resolved instead to drive Eugene to suicide with insidious means and beguiling intelligence, a route favoured by the pensive class of Grand Vizier. And he would have to do it in three days, because four thousand colonists were to be woken and shuttled to the capital’s freshly cleared site. 
	The idea of, say, hitting Eugene with something heavy simply never occurred to Mr. Bit, and that was why, come Tuesday, Eugene was as happy as ever, and Mr. Bit was given the irksome job of hand-shaker. “Hello,” he said, “and welcome to New Moon, a New World, a New Life,” four thousand times.
	‘–them find their feet in the brave new world,’ Eugene was telling his deputies, ‘and if that means starving to death, then it is a hard but necessary lesson to them. Obviously not for these colonists in particular, but colonists in general.’ Next card. ‘You are each responsible for a group of twenty colonists, and your functions are divided between temporary–’ We move away from the briefing because we need not know the minutiae of deputies’ duties. 

Epilogue

Space – August, 0 OL

Victor’s brain made an appearance, then dearly wished that it had stayed in limbo for a while longer. Light flickered onto his retina, blurred by a film of water clinging to his lens and focused upon nothing. He blinked twice, wincing, and consulted his eyeballs once again. It was at this point that his brain chose to do an encore, so he lost the perplexing vista funnelled by his optic nerve by screwing up his eyes in pain. He was not in a good way. This he realised, even given his condition, which was not good. An attempt to describe exactly how bad he felt was aborted after the realisation dawned that it was unlikely to help. He just felt bad. Awful. Abominable.

He ventured to open his eyes once more, and was so surprised at his surroundings that he completely forgot the state of his head (which had to remind him forcibly a moment later).

He was in a bedroom. But this was not what had shocked him. There was a plastic off-white décor. This, too, was an insufficient variation from the norm to promote blank amazement. The cup, which had been falling gently from his pointless-table, bounced, water splashing leisurely in a low-gravity pattern across the carpet. A slight raising of an eyebrow is all this eventette warranted in the experience of a hardened and many-g’d spacer. Fast running out of interesting sights to have been interested in, and with his brain preparing another demonstration of cranial pique, he realised that it was nasal amazement that had become unfairly and unaccountably confused with his suspect vision all along.

He smelled something. What he smelled was nothing, and that could mean only one thing. A raft of other conclusions leaped treacherously into his head. What he smelled was nothing, and that could mean fifteen things, only one of which was germane at that time.

‘Where on wherever am I?’ he said to the room. The room was reticent to enlighten him, as is a room’s prerogative. He attempted to work it out by a series of brilliant deductions alone, in the manner of rationalist continental thinkers. ‘I think,’ he began, ‘therefore I am.’ He pondered, he was and he pondered. ‘I may be here,’ he added, ‘or I may not be here, but I do be. Am be. I be.’ He waited for further inspiration to strike. 

Why was he lying in bed instead of getting something done? So he decided to get up and have a look around in an effort to solve his predicament, in the manner of the English empiricists, thus demonstrating a good historical point. Revisionism be damned. He walked purposefully towards the door and straight into Red, who was carrying a tray of foodstuffs, sending them spinning on a rendezvous with the floor, demonstrating a subtle historical point. Revisionism be praised.

Still, the feeble gravitation made the task of catching said foodstuffs in mid-air an enjoyable twenty seconds. Thus demonstrating fine control of body and mind and nothing to do with revisionism (which has been revised so often over the millennia that the paper is inches thick in parts with correcting fluid sediment). Sod revisionism.

‘Hello, Victor,’ said Red.

‘Hello, Red,’ he replied. ‘Christ, I’ve got a god-awful hangover.’

 
Part Two

Modern Life Was Crap

Prologue

New Bincombe, Ressonner – 1 April, 990 OL

Helen Yellowsands, manager of the Olmec Arms in Teotihuacán and occasional writer, shielded her eyes from the midday sun. She and several hundred other spectators were standing in a gaggle, swapping nibbles and muttering without meaning about the single most momentous event New Bincombe had seen in living memory. Today, four of Ressonner’s children were to take to the skies in an airship named, confusingly, the Miranda. The fantastical beast sat some distance away, her ridiculous balloons inflating, while her solar cell bedecked body remained resolutely earthbound. 

‘We should get a speech soon,’ said her friend and self-appointed barman, Ridly Penguin. ‘I wonder how much further those balloons have to inflate before the thing takes off.’

‘I wonder where they are going to fly to,’ she said, keeping her eyes fixed on the crouched structure.

‘I heard they were planning on flying it all the way to the Advisory Council building,’ Ridly commented. ‘But they ultimately plan to circumnavigate the world.’

‘In a balloon?’

More time passed. Some of the other spectators swore that the Miranda had lifted a little into the sky, and was swaying a good half metre from the ground. Helen couldn’t see it.

‘I don’t know why we have to stand so far away,’ Ridly began, and would have finished too.

The Miranda exploded, a gout of flame leapt into the sky, throwing earth and tree alike into a thunderous tumult. The spectators flung themselves to the ground, covering their heads against a rain of pulverised soil and tree matter. 

And then, all was peace; of the Miranda and her crew nothing had survived, not a trace.

1

When you’re four hundred thousand kilometres from home, all you want is a toothbrush. And a postcard
Bob Smith, passing comment to the Sea of Tranquillity Tours liaison officer, 2093 AD

New Moon - October, 0 OL

Divine-light Angel was foisted with authority, unjustly so in his opinion – an opinion now valued in all respects except its professed lack of value. It was his continual burden, the inexplicable assumption of others that he not only welcomed responsibility, but was competent to boot, and Divine-light could not fathom what it was about himself that lead normally good judges of character to this supposition. When one wants to seek anonymity in the stars, one does not appreciate being picked as a deputy in charge of twenty colonists (bad enough), and then swiftly promoted to Head of Housing, director of one thousand people (horror of horrors). You cannot escape to authority; you can only escape from it.
	In his Reagan’s Ville days, he worked in the pariah industry of advertising, a poor preparation for his New Moon duties. His job, as he saw it, was to sit in the port-a-oven drinking coffee and worrying while his subordinates did all off the work, which basically involved sitting around drinking coffee, but without the worry. He saw many things this way, a product of his managerial status.
	‘Yes, Akira. More problems?’
	‘You could say that.’
	‘And what would you say?’
	‘I would prefer to use the words “disaster”, or “cataclysm”, D-L. It’s fallen down again, and some of the numbers have rubbed off.’
	Divine-light finished his drink and followed Akira to the construction site, a place called Newton (because things kept falling on people’s heads, he reflected darkly). In the centre of this area was a collapsed wooden box, a pile of stones, and a low table with an all-too small plan on it.
	‘I thought it was holding this time,’ Divine-light said to Akira, who was in charge of the building.
	‘Sure, it was, and then Jim here puts one more stone on the wall and it all falls down, damn near crushing him.’
	‘Look, we have to get on with this. The Chancellor can hardly be expected to stay on the Behemoth forever, and we’ve another of these to build.’
	‘Yes, Mr. Angel, but we weren’t really trained for this type of work.’
	‘Well,’ blustered Divine-light, ‘neither was I, but do you see me complaining?’
	‘No, foreman, no we don’t.’ There were undercurrents in this statement clearly visible from space.
	‘Well, how hard can making a house be?’
	‘I was a sanitation technician at Crazy Bastard Mo’s before I saw the advert. Dishwashers don’t fall on people, and getting plates to stick together was never a problem.’
	‘Well, just look at the plans. Think of it as a very large box of Lego.’ Divine-light turned to leave, but stopped and looked back, his hand tapping his forehead. ‘Hang on a minute, aren’t you supposed to use something to stick the stones together?’
	It was one of those days. And this would be okay, except that it had been one of those three months too.
	Work was progressing, always pressing onwards to the firm establishment of the colony of New Moon, and yet every step smacked of retardation. Whilst digging bunkers for the rocket test site of Green Acres, the shuttles were being dismantled, vital parts spread liberally around the fledgling city. The frames resembled prehistoric skeletons; in the natural history of New Moon, man evolved from tin can. 

a place of greater safety

The construction of New Moon progressed apace; infrastructure laid, housing knocked together. In one corner of the colony, an argument was maturing between those charged with running the enterprise. It was not a serious conversation because, by and large, the colony could take care of itself. 
	Zen d’Xerox rapped the table to attention. ‘This is pointless, we’re not getting anywhere with all this bickering.’
	‘Here bloody here.’
	‘Damn right.’
	‘Oh yes we are!’
	‘No we’re bloody not!’
	‘Listen!’ she shouted, hitting their rough wooden table hard, collecting hurt stares and splinters. ‘Let’s take it one by one, shall we?’
	‘Me first,’ said Caligula Neptune, who had a hand in farming. ‘As I see it, the only way to build a happy, successful bloody economy is pig shit.’
	‘Sorry?’ said Ooo Mu, who was in power production.
	‘Pig shit. Store it in silos and we get bloody millions of litres of methane for power, and to export.’
	‘You want to export fart?’ said an incredulous Ooo.
	‘Bloody right I do. Farts to them all, that’s what I say,’ said Caligula happily.
	‘Okay… my turn,’ said Divine-light Angel, who wasn’t, and isn’t. ‘Why don’t we do something with all these trees? Earth is crying out for decent wood panelling, I’m telling you. I can see it now “New Moon, where wall panelling grows as trees.”’
	‘The way I see it,’ Ooo had a way of seeing everything, a point worth noting for insomniacs, ‘is that no healthy economy can be built from one resource alone. We must find a way to tap all that New Moon has to offer.’
	‘So what’s your bloody suggestion then?’ said Caligula, annoyed at Ooo’s dubious reaction to his Plan.
	‘There, of course, is the dilemma,’ he continued, ‘because at the moment we have nothing to offer.’
	‘There’s trees,’ said Divine-light.
	‘Yes, but no method of transporting them offworld, or for that matter chopping them down. We have to concentrate on the consolidation of industry first, and focus our attention on how to make our place in the galaxy at a later date. First, we need a steady supply of pow–’
	‘Swine.’
	‘–er. I suppose we could use your pig idea, Caligula, only I’m not certain whether–’
	‘Yes, that’s right, Ooo, I was suggesting my natural and rustic method of combustible fuel production, not that you’re a bloody self important swine who only wants us to concentrate on bloody power production, bloody lightbulb head. I want to make that clear.’
	‘Er,’ Divine-light stood up, ‘shall we take a break now? For lunch?’
	The New Moon Advisory Council went their separate ways. In spacial and idealistic terms, as Ooo might say. 

aliens to the alienated

Martian food – and obviously this is not the stuff of aliens – is the worst food on this or any other world, and its popularity offered fodder for casual or armchair psychologists and unending joy for those hawking it. 
	Brian Halfbucket, former doctor and presently a waiter, noted Divine-light’s order and trotted to the kitchen. He thought about his job as he went, which is the last thing any happy man should do. Waiting, as he had found over the last few weeks, was not a bad job. Better than pushing the button on a doctor-machine, at any rate. You took people’s orders, occasionally entering into some friendly banter while the customers bickered, told the chef, picked up their meal and gave it to them. Perhaps it wasn’t a very important job, perhaps others got the kudos with their “vital” work, but Brian felt a certain sense of pride in his handiwork as the customers peered at their food, wondering where the cutlery ended and the meal began. He knew, too, that he was doing his bit for the colony. Here, however, he came to the sticking point: pay, or rather the lack of it. He understood that, as yet, New Moon had no monetary system, and he was simply expected to pull his weight like everyone else. Food was free, housing was free (absent, but gratis nonetheless); in short, money was taken out of the equation altogether. He understood; it made sense. Brian plonked the plates in front of the people with a smile. I bet these bastards won’t tip.
	Zen peered at the primordial soup. ‘Things keep surfacing,’ she said.
	‘The trick is catching them,’ said Divine-light.
	‘And my drink is a rather alarming shade of green, wouldn’t you say?’
	‘Evocative of the green, green engineered grass of Mars.’
	‘And there’s a worm in it,’ she held up the offending annelid. ‘Is that like with the grub in tequila, to show that it doesn’t dissolve insect pupa?’
	‘Yeah, yes, absolutely,’ said Divine-light hurriedly, noting the lack of worm in his drink.
	There was a silence, the flavour of silence physicists talk about as regards to Black Holes. Zen dragged her spoon through the gloop. ‘How does one start again? I’ve never eaten Martian.’
	‘Ketchup,’ he answered, firmly gripping the bottle and applying enough of the red elixir to service a thousand chips.
	There was another silence which sucked like the afore mentioned spacial oddity, drawing their gaze towards a knot on the table; it was the silence’s centre of mass, so to speak. It was a very interesting knot, amazing how it–
	‘Not Martian ketchup then?’ said Zen.
	‘Just tomato sauce.’
	‘I don’t know about you, but it’s always really got on my nerves when, like, stuff do that.’
	‘What, “Floogian Ketchup”?’
	‘Exactly. They say things like, “that man is slimier than Momian frog spawn”, and add the Momian bit in some misguided attempt to up the off-world quotient.’
	‘I know what you mean. It’s like when they take a cliché, such as... “I’ll bet he’s got egg on his face” but because it’s set in space they have to twist it into, “I’ll bet he’s got Poonarvat egg on his face”, or some such. Or like, “that’s more ferocious than a Killimonarian megadog”.’
	‘That’s not the worst of it,’ said Zen.
	‘Oh, it never is.’
	Not liking the same things is a much-underestimated thing. Explosions are not.
	‘What on New Moon was that?’
	Tilda Idiom emerged – smoking, theatrical hair – from the kitchen. ‘I don’t know how it exploded,’ she said in a light, airy voice; ‘I was only cooking supper.’ She stood, swaying. After a short while, a nearby diner got up and pushed her over, just to complete the picture.

the opposite of soup

In a field close to and soon after, two figures toiled: Colin Seamonkey, farm labourer, and Tilda Idiom, former cook, and presently a farm labourer until the fires died down. They were hoeing a field in the special way itinerant farm workers over the ages have developed when out of direct line of sight with authority. Place sharp end in ground at an angle of ten degrees to the vertical, lean, and talk.
	‘You not choose to do farming first then?’ asked Seamonkey. ‘I picked this straight off, I know what I like,’ he said in the lethargic voice long-day chatterers used on tedious jobs throughout the cosmos.
	‘Nope, I decided on “cook”. I thought it would be romantic. You know only the very best restaurants have real people to wash dishes and prepare food.’
	‘So why d’you stop? Find chefing not to your tastes, heh?’
	‘Not as such. Martian food turned out to be more volatile than I’d imagined. I think I used too much sodium hydroxide. It’s an arse, sodium hydroxide.’
	‘Oh, Martian, yagblags and that. I had that once. Can’t say I was impressed. Golf bacteria, wasn't it?’
	‘Well, originally for terraforming the polar regions of Mars – “the parts most bacteria don’t reach.” But then some bright spark said, “wow, we can eat a culture of this!” Okay, so maybe it tastes like it looks, one has to wear protective clothing to cook it, and, yes, there is more nutrition in fetid water passed through a goat’s urinary tract, but it is genuine Martian, so people will lap it up. Well, scrape. Suddenly it’s haute cuisine.
	‘So,’ said Tilda brightly, ‘what did you do back in Reagan’s Ville?’
	‘Me, from Reagan’s Ville? Oh no, I’m from Brand New York.’
	‘Oh, Bunny. My sister went near there once. I was a greetings card designer back home – I did, “Have a Really Happy Birthday”. So how did you end up on the Reagan’s Ville colonial expedition?’
	‘Reagan’s Ville colonial expedition? Nah, I went on the Joint Colonial Expedition.’

eulogy for the lives we never led

Clouds massed. Thunder rolled. Rain lashed, and wind howled. In short, the weather boded. It was a day for murdering Kings, wrecking ships, or not playing cricket.
	Brian Halfbucket nudged his friend and neighbour, Ito Smith. ‘Nice weather for it, eh?’
	‘Unseasonably cold, I’d say,’ he answered. Ito didn’t smoke a pipe, but he was wearing sandals with knee-high socks.
	‘What are you talking about, Ito, you know there aren’t any seasons on New Moon.’
	‘So they say, so they say, but what I want to know is: why ever not?’
	‘I believe it has something to do with our orbit, the tilt or not of New Moon, and our general lack of wobble.’
	‘Oh, orbits, I don’t know about orbits, all I know is that I don’t fancy a perpetual winter. Very bad, them, very bad indeed.’
	‘True, but I prefer to think of it as an everlasting summer,’ said Brian.
	‘You’ve always looking on the bright side, Brian. I just wish I had brought my brolly. Bloody YTS crew…’ Their conversation progressed on to the length of the day, unreasonably neglected by many owing to time constraints, and the camera moves…
	…‘Bloody stupid is what I call it,’ said Caligula from the other end of the bench. ‘Fancy making it even more difficult for us! Whose idiot idea was that?’
	‘I think,’ said d’Xerox, ‘that it’s so we don’t take it all for granted.’
	‘No bloody chance of that,’ mumbled Caligula.
	‘The problem, as I see it,’ said Ooo conversationally, ‘is the rules as they stand were designed for professional colonisers, whereas we are merely laymen.’
	Divine-light subjected Ooo’s statement to close investigation. ‘What? How more professional can you get than actually being a colonist?’
	‘No, what I mean to say it that we have had no official training.’
	‘I’ve been officially trained,’ said Caligula, ‘but it wasn’t as a bloody farmer.’
	‘Anyway, the first colonists were rigorously trained for the harsh conditions which would meet them, but now we have all this technology, that is no longer the case. We simply push a button and it’s all down here for us.’
	‘Sounds bloody good to me.’
	‘Yes, but we don’t appreciate it as much as those first–’
	‘Dead and graveless.’
	‘–pioneers did. I’ll bet they thought just being able to breathe was a wonderful thing. I’ll bet each new moment of continued existence was a blessed thing.’
	‘What’s your solution, Ooo?’ said Divine-light, wondering how many blessed moments they’d gotton.
	‘Well, if I were in charge I’d do away with all this technology for a start, and put some slog back into colonisation.’
	‘And that’s a good thing?’
	‘Exactly; people will appreciate the world they help to create.’
	‘I did hear,’ said Divine-light, hoping to steer the conversation away from colonies, and how people came to be there, ‘about this commune in Free Texas of people who have done away with modern technology altogether, and reverted back to a simpler, more innocent age.’
	‘Oh yes, what age would that be?’ asked Zen.
	‘Nineteen eighty-four.’
	Rain slashed down with vigour usually reserved for garden parties, and four thousand colonists gradually sank into the quagmire created by eight thousand shuffling feet in a sodden field. It was not an auspicious start to humankind’s latest beacon in space. Beacons aren’t good in the rain. 
	‘Where the bloody buggery hell is Chancellor Eugene sodding Baldhead!’ shouted Caligula, voicing the worry if not words of his compatriots in the wet. ‘Am I being overly bloody pedantic to expect the arseing ruler to turn up for the inauguration? Am I unreasonable in expecting his nibs to get his fat behind down to terra firma?’
	Divine-light looked at his watch (a quartz regulated heirloom with liquid crystal display). The afternoon looked back at him. ‘His impressive arrival in a flame-breathing shuttle is rather delayed,’ he said, thinking. Fishing for reactions, ‘I assume we have all read the constitution?’
	Pause for decisiveness.
	Divine-light Angel took the podium. The clouds should have parted, illuminating the usurper in the greatest moment of his life, as he prepared to utter the words to mark the cutting of ties with Mother Earth, the birth-proper of New Moon. 
	Lightening streaked across the sky directly over-head, and Divine-light involuntarily ducked as the sonic boom shattered the peace into four thousand attentive pieces. The clouds parted, but only to let through more rain.
	He jabbed the feedback button on his microphone for a second to quell the mumbling crowd, summoned his thoughts, cast a reassuring glance to Zen d’Xerox, Caligula Neptune and Ooo Mu, and said:
	‘It is with extreme reluctance on my part that I take over this duty from the Chancellor Eugene Baldhead,’ Think autocratic, stern, a man to trust, ‘in the inauguration of our colony.’ But compassionate, a man of the people. ‘And I say our colony, because it is people that make a colony, and we are all,’ he spread his arms wide, ‘people. This is the day chosen to make the divide between out first lives on Earth, and our new lives as citizens of this world.’ 
	Think historic, think resonance. ‘Today we are no longer settlers, we are settled; we are no longer colonists from Earth, we are natives of resonance! Er–’
	After a gaffe like that, how could the name not stick?

2

Everything is true, but nothing is truth. 
My batteries are but marbles. 
Green smells of mercury. 
Lemon, lemon.
Bob Smith simulation, unexpected remarks in the Manchester Historica Suit, 3245 AD 

Reagan’s Ville, Earth – 2476 AD

Oohar “I don’t know the meaning of the word fear …or indeed many words” Starbuck craned his neck around the dank walls of his steel eyrie.
	‘How does it look, Stary?’ said Oohar’s sidekick and all round dogsbody, Pongo “That’s Oohar” Bellbottom.
	‘Not good old buddy, not good.’ The Fwuffy Monsters were everywhere; after all, it was their space ship.
	‘Stary?’
	‘Yes Bellbottom?’
	‘Stary, I… I can’t go on. You must leave me here and save your self.’
	‘No, Bellbottom, I can’t leave you now!’
	‘It’s alright, I could send you instructions through the post. Anyway, think of all the people back home who are depending on you! You must leave!’
	‘We-ell …okay. I will never forget you, Bellbottom. Bye-ee!’ Oohar saluted his old friend, then legged it.
	‘At last, I’ve finally gotton rid of that great prat! With him storming around the place, I’ll have no trouble in getting out of here. Bellbottom wandered off down the corridor, pausing only to pass the time of day with the departures lounge supervisor.
	Oohar primed his two bang-bang-O-matic pistols (almost guaranteed for life) and prepared to do battle with the Fwuffy Wuffy Monster alien type creatures.
	‘Oh, hello. Who are you?’
	‘Take this, evil scum!’
	‘Hey, now hang on just one minute here ...ouch! Look, I respect the fact that you’re a blood thirsty alien invader come with the one wish to redecorate this ship in interesting shades of red, that’s perfectly okay and it’s individualism like that which has made our universe the engaging and colourful place that it is, but I really wish that you would stop invading my personal space and respect my right to be fwuffy. Thank you.’
	‘Oh yeah? Trying to be fwuffy then? Well take this!’
	‘Go on, TAKE this!’
	‘Ow, that hurt!’
	‘Oi! That’s mine!’
	‘Sorry.’
	After what seemed like minutes of battling the deeply offended Fwuffy Wuffies, Oohar managed, with a feat of tremendous courage, to ask if he could leave to… go to the toilet. The Fwuffies got on with their game of Cribbage (a strange game involving cards and a box with holes drilled in the top and the numbers 15 and 31), and Oohar Starbuck escaped back home.
	Oohar tore along the road knowing that he would be safe only once he had reached his secret bunker, cunningly disguised as a perfectly normal, if a little dilapidated, member of suburbia. He could almost taste the Fwuffies that were obviously in hot (bath) pursuit when he reached his door, ripped it open (literally) and slammed it behind him (poetic license).
	Now what? How about a nice cup of tea. Oh bugger, Bellbottom hadn’t gotton around to sending the instructions yet.

Mrs. Fermat hummed for a few seconds. ‘It’s pretty bad. In fact, it is crap.’
	‘That was rather the point,’ said the programmer reproachfully.
	‘When I said corny, I did not necessarily mean awful.’
	‘It is what you asked for,’ he maintained, apparently stressing words at random, reasserting his dominance of the language. ‘It fills exactly the gap you stipulated.’
	‘You have,’ she said, ‘got a point.’
	Vindicated, he proceeded to eject the CD and slip it into a matte black case.
	‘A vacuous one. And the others?’
	‘There was the Private Eye I showed you yesterday – I have already signed someone up to play Plastic Mac – and this,’ he produced another crystalline CD, ‘is my favourite.’

Eric the Viking closed the door behind him to the inaudible tinkle of an Amazing Soundless Bell. He wondered around the well-stocked shelves of the magic weapon shop, prodding interesting bits of miscellaneous junk and magical trinkets.
	‘Hello sir, can I help you at all?’ If the voice were any oilier, it would have posed a serious hazard to waterfowl.
	‘Um, what are these?’
	‘Gauntlets of Ning.’
	‘Yes, and what is it that they do?’
	‘They’re gauntlets, what more do you want?’
	‘And these?’
	‘Ah, I see you have a good eye, sir. A Tibetan monk brought this particular item to me, and used his dying breath to explain its mystic use.’
	‘Yes, but what is it?’
	‘A tea cosy. But it’s a very magical one.’
	‘Does it bestow the drinker with mystical powers?’
	‘Well, I always say that a good cup of tea does a power of good. May I interest sir in one of these? It’s a cloak of invisibility, sir.’
	‘But I can see it.’
	‘Can you see what’s inside it?’
	‘No, of course not.’
	‘That’s because it’s invisible, sir.’
	‘Cor, could I try?’
	‘Of course. May I show sir to this mirror… this magical mirror that reflects even completely invisible things.’
	‘How do I look?’
	‘I don’t know, sir, I can’t see you.’
	‘Really?’
	‘Yes sir.’
	‘How many fingers am I holding up?’	
	‘Eleven, sir.’
	‘Amazing.’ Eric sniggered.
	‘Ahem! Would sir like anything else? If you will accompany me over here, I could show you some very interesting rocks. Now would sir please step over here into the Magical Sword Corner.’
	‘Do all swords have names?’
	‘Naturally, that is what gives them their power, sir. Here we have Spine Splinterer, Gut Knotter, Skull Cracker, Sneezy, Happy, Snoozy and Dopey.’
	‘What’s this one called?’
	‘Elephant Decapitator.’
	‘Why?’
	‘Because it is thirty metres long and weighs four tonnes. I think you need something a little more your size, like this one, sir.’
	‘What is that called?’
	‘Kevin.’
	‘Why?’
	‘Because it looks like a Kevin, sir.’
	‘Does it have any special powers?’
	‘Well, if you ever come across a crazed lion–’
	‘Yes?’
	‘Chuck the sword at it then run like hell. And there’s a bit of advice for free.’
	‘What will that do?’
	‘You will be able to run faster.’
	‘Cor, it gives special running powers if you throw it away then?’
	‘You could say that, sir.’
	‘Great, I’ll have that.’
	‘Would sir like anything else?’
	‘Those seven league boots look useful.’
	‘Yes, we have had the trade descriptions on about that. They’re called one yard boots now, sir.’
	‘Oh. Do you have any novelty or humorous breastplates?’
	‘No. But I have a very wide selection of enchanted helms, if sir would care to step this way.’
	‘What does this one do?’
	‘The cloth one with a toy axe embedded in it?’
	‘Yes.’
	‘Your enemy will roll around in hysterics as soon as you don it. This is a little more appropriate.’
	‘I like the stag horns, but isn’t it a little tricky getting through doors?’
	‘You could always hack them off.’
	‘Oh yes, how stupid of me.’
	‘Would sir care for a magical pendant?’
	‘Well, yes, that sounds nice.’
	‘Here’s the pendant bargain bin, does anything take your fancy?’
	‘Well, this one looks mystic. What does it do?’
	‘Simply dip it in cows’ excrement and you will be free of all company.’
	‘What about wanted company?’
	‘You can’t have everything, sir.’
	Once Eric had gone to battlefields anew, weighed under by a hopeless load of crap, the shopkeeper closed up, drew blinds over the windows and locked the door. He went to his back room, bolted the door, blew out his candle, and, in a very quiet voice, said, ‘Suits you, sir.’

‘It is,’ Mrs. Fermat said after careful consideration, ‘awful. I’ll take them: Plastic Mac: Private Eye; The Adventures of Oohar Starbuck; and the Stirring Sagas of Eric the Viking.’ After the programmer handed her the dull hued matte cases, she added, ‘If you can’t beat the call of the wilds, don’t even try. There is a bit in all of us that likes brainless garbage, never forget that.’
	Mrs. Fermat may have been the director of a small, if prosperous, Other Lives franchise, but she had plans. Her superiors in the metropolis had given her a free rein over Reagan’s Ville, and she determined to take Virtual Reality into a position to challenge the leisure dominance of Outdoor Pursuits. But first she had to “deconstruct the VR status-quo”, in the words of her prospectus to the Other Lives head office. 

In summation, the problem with virtual reality is that it is stained indelibly in the public’s mind solely as a route to instant gratification. Instant gratification has its attractions, viz. instant gratification, but it devalues and cheapens the experience, leaving repeat excursions washed of colour. As the late, great Bob Smith said, instant gratification only lasts an instant. If we are ever to shift virtual reality in general, and Other Lives in particular, into the leisure mainstream, we need to bring the depth, longevity and – yes – boredom of Outdoor Pursuits. We need sex and violence, but sitting around biting one’s nails and getting cold feet too. We need as many lows as highs, troughs as peaks, and we need them now!

Sonja Fermat, R-V, 14/10/2475

The poor reception given to her report was one of the reasons why Other Lives’ most able manager was confined to Reagan’s Ville, rather than the elevated position in a metropolis or megalopolis predicted of her. Mrs. Fermat’s early vaunted ability suggested too that her recent additions to the Other Lives canon were more competent than one might think, given her professed aims. 
	In the meantime, she did the work of any contemporary director. She commissioned advertisements; she Did Lunch; she played with her executive toys. The next day she sent four complimentary Other Lives suits to the long discussed Omicron Expeditionary Mission and earmarked the latest model for the forthcoming Reagan’s Ville expedition, likewise gratis. 
	Ho hum.
	Mrs. Fermat entertained herself with the following realisation. Walk out of the office and find yourself in the Andean austerity of Inca Way; the first left brings into view Notre Dame Arcade (genuine masonry!), another right and Oceana confronts one, replete with tanked sharks and conch shell Muzak. Travel to Reagan’s Ville’s lower levels (if you dare, and why should you not?) to find uncharted corridors, virginal white, utterly without character. But nowhere in Reagan’s Ville will you find such a thing as Reagan’s Ville style; she is an unamalgamated morass of other peoples’ ideas, an absurd juxtaposition of plundered fashions. 
	Mrs. Fermat chuckled. Colonists were the only people who knew where they were. She laughed aloud.

the programmer goes on holiday

The programmer took out his jotter and tapped the stylus against his teeth. He pressed a soft green glyph and started to write.

Virtual Reality started in the late twentieth century as a rather confusing fad for playing a helium addict dwarf with terminal inertia, and progressed in much the same vein. Indeed, the passage of Virtual Reality shows an uncanny correlation to the progression of good television.

In the beginning, decent television programmes were crap, gradually increasing in quality until the much vaunted and thoroughly apocryphal time of Great TV, the Golden Age of broadcasting. But people soon realised that too much good TV produced a race of sedentary couch-potato troglodytes, whose only topics of conversation revolved around permutations of “did you see X last night?” and who had no concept of there being more than two dimensions to life. The “Them” deemed in their infinite wisdom to relegate quality programming to no more than three scared, lonely hours per week, where they cry out in anguish adrift the oppressive sea of tedium to this day. “Watch us, appreciate us… woooeragh.”

Virtual Reality time was restricted to tasteful VR Establishments, where a person could spent his three allotted hours escaping into a life of adventure and, for the nostalgically minded, dodgy dungeons.

He breathed the fresh country air, sniffing deeply the natural odour of cut grass and ruminating cattle. Every corridor, every room in Reagan’s Ville exuded a particular scent, designed specifically to aid whatever was going on at the time. In the greenlands, pointless and actively unpleasant smells were an innovation to the programmer. 
	The deer nibbled daintily at fresh green shoots, its ears flicking the occasional midge, and its coat dappled and glossy in early morning rays streaming through a leafy, summer canopy. Dewdrops glistened on the delicate gossamer threads of the web strung over his hood; he focused with some difficulty on a tiny yellow spider hanging a centimetre from his nose. 
	The programmer sat up, causing a trickle of cold water to run down his neck, the spider to run into his hair, the deer to bolt, and his back to crack like a splintered tree. Not an auspicious start to his first full day of communion with Nature. 
	He opened his rucksack and pulled out several packets expertly crafted into the imagined form of the food contained within, and fitted with heating elements designed to burn out completely into a few inert gasses. His hand hovered over the pull-strip, when he checked himself. He was in the wilds, so he would cook his snack-sized Chicken Tika, haggis and yagblag burger the wilds’ way.
	Where did one go for dry sticks?
	He bagged-up the remains of his meal, not wanting to litter, depositing the squidgy packet in the depths of his rucksack. “Oh, thanks,” a multitude of forest fauna did not say, because none could speak. Well, all bar one.
	‘Are you, er, Mr. Programmer?’ asked a young woman hesitantly from the edge of his clearing. She wore Outdoor Pursuits’ blue pullover, and the uncertain, flustered expression of a new employee. A nametag identified her as “Happy to Help, Cordial Po”, and she was not fat, but was on the gradually expanding borderline. A line, it must be stated, that had been growing for some time. Neither was she unfit, but in centuries of city life, this definition too had warped until “fit” meant breathing without mechanical aid, and little else. 
	‘I’ve come to inform you that your vacation has been extended to two weeks.’
	‘Thanks,’ was his stunned response. Two weeks, all at once? Amazing.
	‘Thank you,’ she smiled, turned, and fled with a conspicuous air of relief. Remembering herself, she added, ‘Enjoy your Outdoor Pursuits’ holiday!’
	‘From the mouths of babes comes mostly vomit, as Bob Smith might have said.’

3

Statistics work when imagination fails
Bob Smith, 2033

New Bincombe, Ressonner – 15 April, 990 OL

The funeral service was as sombre an occasion as the drizzling rain and mourning families dictated. Fel, Type, Yod and Jasper, gone but not forgotten, gone and wasted. Helen watched the ceremony from behind her eyes, feeling sadness in finality, but sensing the embryo of an idea forming, a way – she tasted the thought – a way of giving the dead something of a life, a continuance. She, Helen Yellowsands, would ensure that memories of Fel, Type, Yod and Jasper were of more than an experiment gone horribly wrong. 
	‘A play,’ she whispered, amazed at how pedestrian it sounded, how an idea that sat massively in her consciousness could become so small when uttered to the world. Fel, Type, Jasper and Yod did not build an airship, and they did not die on 1 April, no, they had built a spaceship, and were adventuring to this very day, battling to save Ressonner herself. 
	“Do you see?” she would come to ask Ridly, explaining her idea in turn ebullient and subdued to her good friend. “Glorious, isn’t it?” Ridly would think for a while, before saying, “Try it, really, try it.”
	Helen Yellowsands sat in front of her computer screen, and began to type. She wrote a story about four people on a quest, a fantastical voyage. Four children of Ressonner. She saw love and sex and betrayal and adventure and death and glory and power and cruelty and arrogance and a big wide galaxy out there; and it was all new. She typed unfettered by her life.

All four characters are sitting in Yod’s home, drinking steaming mugs of tea, and discussing the future and their places in it. In the centre of the room sits a large model of a spaceship, laced with small flashing lights. 

jasper	But I tell you, we can do it, and what we can do we must do! Our fate is in the stars, and that moment that you, dear friend Yod, showed us that it could be done, I knew it must be so!

fel 	But Jasper, surely such a journey is impossible. No one has ever attempted anything like this in our history, it is madness, pure madness I say!

yod 	No, Fel, it is anything but mad. You can see from my model how possible it is, because I flew this very craft yesterday. It is a simple case of building a full-sized version – a trivial task. 

jasper 	Then we can do it, with your ship, Yod; we can go to Earth! For millennia mankind has looked to the stars, dreaming of the opportunity we now have. 

The scene fades to black, the choice made. Jasper, Fel, Yod and Type were to build their ship, a stepping stone that would ultimately lead them to the semi-mythic world of our origin: Earth. This construction proved a straightforward case of scaling up Yod’s model (represented by montage or time-lapse style film). 

Later, they discuss the details of the voyage in Fel’s flat.

type 	We have the route plan, and we have a fully equipped ship, but what we do not have, dear friends, is a name. What shall we call our ship, because by naming it we provide ourselves with true meaning, a concrete foundation. The mechanics are just that: plastics, metals, ceramics, but a name is true substance. 

jasper	I have it: the Miranda. Why, you ask? Miranda is a moon that had been smashed, destroyed in his distant past, but to be re-accreted into the moon as it is now. The complexities of its surface are a result of this fusion, an analogue of the complexities in our own society and that, dear friends, is why we shall call her the Miranda.

‘Hey, Ridly!’ Helen shouted downstairs to Ridly Penguin, who was totalling the inventory for the day. It was to be sent to the Advisory Council statistics room, where an inoffensive man plotted graphs and made meaningless conclusions regarding the State of Ressonner, which was Always Worse. 
	‘Uh-huh?’ he appeared wearing his brewer’s cap.
	‘How much do you know about those four, the four that died?’
	‘Oh,’ he removed his cap and sat in her other wicker chair. ‘I saw Fel and Jasper most often, Type occasionally, and Yod hardly at all. Fel and Type preferred spirits, while Jasper tended to stick to beer. Yes.’
	‘No, well, I meant as people, really,’ Helen interjected.
	‘Fel was in Security, but I always got the impression that she didn’t know why, you know? Actually, that was what I thought about Jasper, too. He was in Power, but only because it was less hassle than finding anything else to do. They never talked about their careers in the bar. That’s it: they were always waiting for something big to happen; they were killing time, I suppose.’
	‘And it did happen,’ said Helen.
	‘Yes,’ said Ridly, sombrely. ‘And… but… how is the script progressing?’
	‘The script. I’m enjoying it.’

The Miranda’s navigation room seats the four, poring over dense charts and evaluating complex calculations on a number of computers. Type slaps a hand against the table and says:

type	There, I have it. Venting seventy percent at an attitude of five will send us towards the planet on a gravity-slinging orbit, swinging us on course for Earth. And according to my calculations, we should enter the Sol solar system in thirteen months!

Their preparations made, and provisions loaded, the four prepare a small toast before beginning the countdown. 

jasper	Here is to the voyage, and here is to History! Today, friends, we embark on a voyage of discovery, a voyage to bring our colonial history full circle, as we return to the cradle of humanity, the greatest planet of all: Earth. 

Glasses chink and the toast of plum wine is downed. They prepare for action, initiating the one-minute countdown and strapping into elastically cushioned safety seats. These resemble a cat’s-cradle of counter-pointed latticework, capable of absorbing the tremendous acceleration of lift-off. Fel looks out of a window at a distant crowd of spectators.

fel	I feel bad, somehow, about deceiving all of those people. I can’t imagine what they will think when we take off. Can you imagine waiting for the genteel rise of an airship, to be confronted with an almighty explosion and us shooting into the stratosphere! Just think!

Helen rapped to save and clicked to disengage, swiping empty mugs and crumb harbouring plates, calling an end to the day’s writing. She kept an image of the play in her mind, its form complete even if but a little had been transcribed. She could see Jasper et al reach Earth and the terrible secret they discover there, the outcome for heroes and Ressonner resided in her consciousness, played out in myriad permutations pending paper establishment. She saw the story from naïve beginning to glorious end, but she wished it to be more than that, more than mere fantasy.
	‘Do you see,’ she said to Ridly, pausing a while to properly couch her words, ‘they, Fel and all, they can give Ressonner her own mythology, her own heroes. I can make the future remember them as an inspiration, not for a horrible accident. I can do that, I know that, but I do not know whether I should.’
	Ridly thought of answering, “but it is not they who will be remembered; they as people will cease to exist” but he did not, partly because the idea had not fully occurred to him. Instead, he said, ‘if you think you can… bring something good, well, from it all, then do it.’
	Later, Ridly became infected with Helen’s enthusiasm, and took a pivotal rôle in the production of Ressonner’s first indigenous play. As a measure of colonial progress, this ranked below the cultivation of native vines or construction of two storey buildings, but it was a marker nonetheless, a point to be proud of passing. 
	For a selfish instant, in the middle of the night and with Ridly mumbling in his sleep beside her, Helen considered ditching it all, burning the papers and deleting her files. She thought how wonderful it would be to have the story to herself, a private thing to manipulate in the night hours, hers to savour.
	Events moved quickly; the novel remembrance Helen proposed had tapped into a wellspring of popular feeling among New Bincombe residents. Without prompting, what had begun as a personal project, written as a play, became the full piece, replete with would-be actors and substandard carpentry. It was a thing of inevitability, and as each draft brought Helen closer to completion, others of a thespian bent worked towards the Production.

ladies love lovely luvvies

Helen Yellowsands, playwright, rhythmically head-butted the stage.
	‘No!’ shouted would-be director, would-be actor murderer, and would-love-to-be projectionist throttler, Ridly Penguin. ‘It’s upside down.’
	‘No it isn’t,’ said a disgruntled voice.
	‘What do you mean? The bloody moon’s in the ocean!’
	‘That’s the reflection.’
	‘What, so the real one in the sky is supposed to be all rippled, eh?’
	‘Optical illusion caused by cirrocumulus clouds.’
	‘Turn it over!’
	Helen was sitting in the tenth row of downright insolent benches, arranged in an arc about the stage. Ridly stalked up next to her, sitting down heavily with a protracted sigh. The bench, raised several metres above the ground by suspect scaffolding gave a marginally more foreboding groan.
	‘Things not going too well?’
	‘You could say that.’
	‘And you would say?’
	‘It’s a farce. Those who we laughingly call actors can barely remember who they are supposed to be, let alone what their lines are, the projector melts the slides, and the projectionist is fast melting my patience.’
	‘We have a month until the twenty-eighth.’
	‘Exactly! Four weeks to get this into a premierable state!’	He stood up. ‘Oi! One hundred and eighty degrees, you tit!’

Earth appears on the viewscreen in all its green/blue glory, the cradle of humanity wreathed in white clouds. After many months of adventure in deep space, the seat of humanity offers the promise of civilisation. But as they approach, they realise that something is wrong, very wrong. 

type	I don’t understand, I really don’t understand. Where are the metropolises, where are the continent-spanning megalopolises? I was told you could see cities from the moon, and yet all I can see is the green of grassland and forest, the yellow of the deserts, and the white of wildernesses of ice. Where are the cities? Where are the people?

Fel clutches at his arm; Jasper looks darkly at the pair.

jasper	We need to go in closer.

Closer they fly, until they espy one settlement, grey against the green, and descend to explore what could be the only refuge of humanity on the planet. They tread the gangplank, to be met by a wizened old woman with incongruous flame-red hair.

woman	Hello there, strangers. My, did I ever expect to see another human soul? I have not espied humanity ‘er these fifty years, my goodness no. And who do I have the pleasure of meeting? What young people are you? From whence did these morsels of humanity spring?

She spreads wide her gnarled arms. 

Premier day advanced at a speed mirroring the growth in public interest, a terrifying wall of expectation and grease paint. Hammering the boards then treading them; understudying for the understudy; twenty Jaspers and fifty Fel’s, vying to be the one.
	
The adventurers step to one side to converse.

jasper	She appears harmless enough, what do we have to fear from an old woman? And yet, there is something in her countenance that I do not like, an aspect to her manner that unnerves me, attacks my sensibilities. 

fel	She watches us now as if we were provided for her own amusement; and see how she looks at the Miranda, hunger in her eyes. I do not like this place, I do not like this place at all. Something is so very, very wrong.

type	How can we be talking like this, friends. She is an old woman, and we probably the first people she has seen in a long time. We have a duty to be courteous in this unknown world.

yod	I agree; there is a lot she can teach us.

They turn back, smiles on their faces, to greet the woman properly.

jasper	We are adventurers from Ressonner, it is a pleasure to meet you. I am Jasper, and these are my compatriots Fel, Type and Yod. What is your name, old woman, and what is this place?

woman	My name and this place are bound together, inextricably linked. I see doubt in your eyes, but I will explain. I have been in this place a long time. Oh yes, I remember when it was a city of a million souls. My name is Ville. 

Her voice has changed, losing the withered cracking of an old crone, gaining the confidence and strength of youth. 

ville	I have many memories; they do not fade with time. I remember the city at its height, and I remember its fall only too well, its so-sudden demise. You come from Ressonner, you say. Yes, I know of your moon; I remember its inception. I see that you do not believe me, that you think I am just a mad old woman. No, no, I am not, I know what I am saying, and I speak the truth. 

type	But how can this be? How could you possibly remember an event that happened a thousand years ago?

ville	How indeed, yes, how indeed. That is a question I myself have asked ever more as the years pass. But to business, and we do have business, because I have been waiting for people of your kind, waiting and planning. Ressonner is mine; you must realise that I am the power behind its creation. I see you do not believe me, you still see an old crone standing before you. Well I have decided to call in the debt owed to me. I have created, and now I shall destroy.

She lifts her arms and cries a terrible incantation. Suddenly, from silos hidden in the ruins two missiles emerge in a flash of flame, streaming into the sky on a course for Ressonner. Ville laughs and laughs, tears streaming down her aged face. She appears to shrink, loose her substance, to disappear into her laughter. Ten seconds later and all that remains is a patched brown cloak. The terrible realisation of Ville’s treachery to humanity hits the four: two missiles heading towards the Last Refuge of human kind in the galaxy. 

jasper	Quick, to the spaceship, for we can still undo that poor mad old woman’s work! We must not dally here, for the fate of mother Ressonner lies in our hands, the Last Refuge of Humanity!
 
They run to the Miranda, blasting off in pursuit of the missiles.

fel	Of all our adventures so far, of all the great things we have accomplished, nothing has intruded on our home, nothing has touched upon our real lives. But here we are, chasing Death. 

Suddenly, everything goes dark. Red emergency lighting fades up, but the engines are silent.

yod	God no! The induction manifold, I knew we should have traded it when we reached the Polyglyph trading post!

jasper	Fix it, fix it man!

Yod frantically worked at the inductor manifold, unscrewing plates and waving bleeping apparatus over the installation. Time is ticking away.

fel		Please, allow me.

Fel hits the unit hard with her fist, and with a whoosh the lights return and the engines spin into life.

fel	Not so useless now, eh?

jasper	Well done, Fel. Type, quick, man the guns, for we are closing fast on the first missile! Use the plasma cannon we salvaged from the Arabian freighter.

Type installs himself in the gun turret, takes aim, and releases a volley of plasma shot, tearing through the missile. Half a second later the warhead detonates, sending brilliant white light over the adventurers, and rocking the Miranda. 

jasper	One down, one to go. Yod, I need speed, I need more speed!

yod	I’ve got it. I will cross-link the plasma cannon through the thrusters; it won’t last long but it’ll give us the boost we need. Hold onto your seats, here we go!

jasper	Well done that man! I have the second missile on the Viewer, but it is only minutes from Ressonner. Aim quickly, Type, because we won’t get another chance to take it out.

Type squints down the barrel of his fearsome weapon. Timing the blast just ahead of the missile’s snub nose, he presses the trigger. Abruptly, the gun brightens then explodes, throwing Type across the room to land in a heap at the opposite wall. Instrument panels ignite and explode around the cockpit, flinging sparks onto the stellanauts and oily black smoke into the air. 

yod	Oh God no, the gun must have created a feedback loop through the capacitor coils, blowing every system on the ship. We are helpless, helpless and with Death soon to rain down upon our home!

jasper	Do not give up now, friends, for I have a plan. Fel, prepare the parachutes; Type and Yod, engage the manual controls; I shall direct us on a collision course with the missile!

fel	No, Jasper, we shall all be killed!

jasper	A life without home, Fel, is no life at all. Have our adventures not taught you anything? Remember the time poor Boony rescued you from the Harem of the Wandering Comet? We cannot and will not leave Ressonner to her fate.

fel	I am sorry, so sorry; I do not know what came over me. Now, strap on this parachute, it is time for action!

Jasper manoeuvres the ship into a direct course for the missile, just seconds away, straining on the manual controls with all his strength. At the last moment, Fel kicks open the hatch, and all four leap out into the upper atmosphere of Ressonner. Above them is an almighty explosion as the Miranda hits her target.

jasper	Goodbye, Miranda, you have served us well, and now served your last. I will miss you, and the adventures we had with you. 

Fragments of burning shuttle rain down on New Bincombe, pattering into the ground, as the four heroes gently sway into view. A crowd of cheering Ressonners meets them, lifting the four onto their shoulders and parading them triumphantly to the Advisory Council Building.

fel	Tell us, Jasper, what have we achieved?

jasper	We have achieved everything; we have achieved the moon!

New Bincombe, Ressonner – 27 May, 990 OL

‘You see,’ said Bean, ‘it is unprecedented; nothing like this has happened before. I have heard reports of troupes from the mirk arriving for it, imagine that. People who have not seen New Bincombe for twenty years are arriving at the Advisory Council Building, asking when the play is due to start. Is it due to start, is the play ready?’
	‘It is; the premier performance will begin tomorrow evening.’

4

Conspiracies? Please. 
The really clever conspiracy would be the one where you never have to plan anything at all
Bob Smith, 2077 AD

the Behemoth – May, 990 OL

‘Are you sure this is necessary?’ said Type, holding the pistol at arm’s length, as hands usually are. He handed it back to Yod.
	‘Nevertheless, we can’t be too prepared,’ said Yod, ignoring Type’s last statement. ‘Pity we couldn’t find any bullets.’
	‘Pity? How many people were you intending to kill,’ said Jasper.
	‘Don’t be stupid, that’s not what guns are for.’ Yod stopped and analysed his declaration for a moment. ‘You know what I mean. People’ll think twice about messing with us when we have one of these.’ He swung the pistol around experimentally, daring the walls to speak out of turn. 
	‘Having a gun just raises the stakes,’ said Jasper. ‘It’s stupid. It automatically puts you on a sad maladjusted bastard footing, which is not where you want to be.’ 
	‘No, I’m just saying that it’d be best to have it in reserve, in case the Sheba people aren’t as friendly as us,’ Yod just said.
	‘As us? It’s you who’s saying we should bring the revolver.’
	‘And what can you do with an empty gun anyway?’ said Type. Three against one is always fun.
	‘I can do the spinney thing,’ Yod said. He did the spinney thing, and learned that guns do not bounce, at least high enough to catch on the rebound.
	‘Impressive,’ said Type; ‘I’m sure that any potential adversary will be so awe struck at your mastery of the firearm that they will drop theirs in shame. Much like you have done.’ Type thought about patiently explaining, with recourse to graphs and the odd animation, how much safer it was to go unarmed, but Fel ended the strain of conversation prematurely with the words:
	‘For god’s sake Yod, we are not taking the bloody pistol with us!’ 
	The nameless shuttle, sans description, heaved with odds and sods for the voyage to Sheba – literature, music, self-help manuals; fine wines, rare cheeses, a continent of teas; and board games for the bored. All were taken to their chosen craft and packed into lockers, under seats, strapped to the ceiling or left to float freely, lest one want to pluck entertainment from the air. The weeks became scavenging expeditions, venturing further and further into the “interior”, returning days later with new clothes and new foods, and a renewed desire to search for more. In this way, two weeks had vanished, gone, lost from their lives but with so much to show for it. 
	Jasper walked to their unbranded shuttle, his fist pushed into his stomach in an effort to suppress the stitch which, no matter how much carousing and quaffing any respectable hero does, fails to materialise. Jasper suspected that he probably wasn’t hero material. The lack of theme music had been bothering him. As had the distinct deficiency in young beauties to be rescued et al. He met Fel inside, listening to trip-hop with the lights low.
	‘We’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘We should not have stayed. Something is wrong. I don’t know where I am going anymore. It isn’t fun.’
	Jasper sat next to her, deciding on dumbness as the most intelligent behaviour.
	‘Do you understand?’ she continued. ‘We’ve settled in, normalised, accepted it. This could be home now, normal, safe, the accustomed, and I hate that.’ She turned vehement eyes. ‘I really hate that idea.’
	So, on 15 May of the year 990, they went.
	The jaunt to Sheba was immeasurably more pleasant than their last voyage, the month before. Their new nameless, descriptionless shuttle had space, space to be alone, space enough that getting together was a pleasure. Hell is other people, unless one has the opportunity to be solitary.

the quest’s end

Then, all of a sudden, they reached orbit about Sheba, to find it dead. Dead, lifeless, without even the possibility of the anticipated Second Civilisation. Its atmosphere was thin, carbon dioxide heavy, and spattered with desiccated dust storms. It was a desert world, a heavy cousin to old Mars: nothing. 
	“I expected something,” Yod later said, “and got nothing, nothing at all.”
	Jasper said, “Even as I saw it, I thought I could redeem some meaning, some vital lesson from the barren object of our quest. I couldn’t.”
	So they went back to the Behemoth; the second disembarkation an object of melancholy, not trepidation, resignation rather than temerity. The four trotted to a galley, and in time-honoured style got wasted, with hardly the slightest pretence of future considerations. 
	‘Hello?’ a voice said. Female, so Fel.
	‘Alright,’ Jasper answered, blearily awake and aware that another drink was soon due. The voice worried him. He could perceive it triggering components of his brain, messages exchanged within sight. He did not care.
	‘I don’t think we have introduced ourselves yet,’ Type said unexpectedly from one side. ‘I am Type, over there are neophytes Jasper and Fel, and this is my amanuensis, Yod. We are adventurers from Ressonner, and we are also utterly pissed.’
	Jasper groaned into an upright position, and an unknown woman standing in the galley doorway met his eyes. He knew that he was not in a good state; he also knew that she was beautiful. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘how do you do?’
	It was the morning, the morning after the week before, and with no sign of mysterious females. The four probed their consolidated memory, and talked about collective hallucinations. Having dismissed hallucinatory narcotics, a further scratching of heads readmitted them. The consensus developed in the painful light of sobriety was soon shattered, however, when the woman sauntered in.
	‘Hello,’ she said, clearly corporeal, evidently existent; ‘my name is Red. I came earlier but you were hardly in a fit state for visitors.’
	‘We are,’ Jasper managed to say, ‘not in a brilliant state now either. A bit of a bender,’ he said as explanation. ‘We’ve had an unusual time of it lately,’ he thought he should add, wilting under her gaze.
	‘Yes,’ Fel came to his rescue, and promptly went.
	‘I have to say,’ Red said, crossing her arms and leaning against the doorway, ‘I was surprised to find you lot here, drunk.’
	‘It is a story,’ said Yod. ‘Definitely a story. Actually, you may have noticed our ship, the Miranda. She looks like a tank that had been picked on by other tanks, but beautiful all the same.’
	‘I can’t say I noticed,’ she answered, amusement playing around the corners of her mouth.
	‘Well, anyway,’ said Fel, ‘I’m Fel, those are Yod, Jasper and Type, you are Red, we are adventurers from Ressonner, so from whence do you come?’
	‘New Moon,’ Red answered, brushing miscreant hair behind one ear, ‘originally, Earth. I am not an adventurer; I am more of a civil servant. A servant of New Moon.’
	‘Well, so, we’ve met,’ Jasper said, sending one word out after the other, hoping that sense might appear in numbers, ‘and that changes a lot. Everything. Probably, that.’
	‘No,’ said Red after consideration, ‘it doesn’t. But may I treat you to breakfast anyway?’
	‘Delighted.’
	The four followed Red in a protective huddle, undecided as to the turn of events but happy that intrigue had entered their lives without apparent effort. An interesting twist had appeared while their minds were elsewhere, and it would take time to assimilate it into a (drastically?) modified world-view. Meanwhile, bread was broken and unusual tea sipped. 
	‘From Ressonner, you say,’ Red asked, subjecting each adventurer to the inquiry of her eyes, ‘I would be interested in seeing your ship.’
	‘The Miranda,’ Yod repeated. ‘We built her, us four, in a year.’
	‘You may have noticed her in one of the hangars,’ said Fel. She glanced at Yod, ‘Of course, we love her dearly. So, which hangar did you come in on?’
	‘I didn’t,’ she answered. ‘You built a spaceship? What resourceful people you must be.’
	Yod grinned.
	‘What made you want to build a spaceship, of all things,’ Red asked, treading the thin line betwixt polite and condescending. 
	‘It started as a cappuccino machine,’ Fel said, ‘but we didn’t know when to stop. Build many spaceships yourself?’ Clumsy.
	The conversation progressed in fits and starts, questions from Red meeting answers from the four, whose queries met only queries. An hour passed, and whilst Fel could fully believe that Red knew her shipmates to the buttons, of Red and her life there prevailed a gaping hole of ignorance. 

an inscrutable display

‘Weird,’ said Jasper, ‘of course it’s weird, in fact, I’d say it was very weird, extremely weird, perhaps even uncanny. People don’t appear on spaceships, say hello, and start a chat. That does not happen.’
	‘What with our extensive spaceship experience,’ said Type mutinously. 
	‘An interrogation, more like,’ said Fel. 
	‘She is beautiful though,’ said Jasper.
	‘I don’t think she’s that pretty,’ said Fel.
	‘No, not pretty. I didn’t say that.’
	They were sitting in the galley, recently vacated by Red. She will return after the next sentence and ask if the four want to accompany her on a little jaunt. They agree. She is taking them to a primary computer outlet, where she shall leave them to stare over her shoulder as she issues instructions to the taciturn mainframe. None of them understands what she is doing. It is just as well.
	‘And now,’ she said, ‘we can have a look at the engines.’
	The engines were nothing so magnificent as another wall-set terminal. She issued further instructions in a clipped voice that belied a certain lassitude. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is my work done.’ She turned and faced the four, ‘Care for a quiet drink among friends?’ She turns to the bright computer monitor, and says, ‘you can go now.’ The screen screws itself up into a ball, and bounces into a blackhole. A Labrador puppy leaps with disgusting cuteness from one side, and proceeds to dig-up the blackhole and retrieve the binned screen. The dog meets a sticky and protracted end undergoing a process much like being sucked through a straw. The event horizon widens, engulfing the display and leaving all unresponsive black.

the amiable sociability of the recently met

‘We had a nice chat with the Interstella Message Exchange,’ said Fel, ‘but I think the computer here took umbrage when Yod told it that there were Klingons on the starboard bow.’
	‘Eh. Heh,’ said Yod. ‘We are adventurers, you know.’
	“Did you notice her eyebrows?”
	‘I used to be an adventurer,’ said Red. ‘Of sorts, a long time ago. I thought I would fly away to the stars. I did, too. All of my dreams have come true,’ she added, elegiac in her fortune.
	‘I wouldn’t want all of my dreams to come true,’ said Jasper, ‘especially not the ones where I’m walking naked to the Advisory Council Building, waving hello to the passers by, with my hands tied behind my back.’ Fel slapped the back of his head for being Obvious. ‘What is Earth like?’
	‘Old,’ said Red. ‘Cradle of civilisations; mother of worlds; all that is human.’
	‘Where do you come from?’ asked Fel.
	‘London, a fantastic city in every sense of the word. I haven’t been there in a long time,’ she paused, ‘a very long time. But the London in here, the London of my youth, I shall treasure. Now, tell me, why are you here?’
	‘Because we can be, of course,’ said Fel. 
	‘It’s because,’ Jasper struggled for the phrase, ‘when you do things for the sake of doing them, without a real consideration of the future, you can find yourself anywhere.’
	‘Why you, why not others before you?’	
	‘Nice threads,’ said Yod of Red’s multihued apparel.
	‘Why not others before us,’ stated Jasper, negating Red’s obligation to compliment Yod’s clothes in some fashion, which they most certainly were not.
	Red opened her eyes from a sojourn into youthful memories. ‘Did you enjoy Ressonner?’ she asked, a direct question in a field of impossibilities. 
	‘Enjoy?’ Fel repeated. ‘I suppose New Bincombe was nice enough.’
	‘No,’ Red shook her head. ‘Not the city. Consider, Ressonner is a forest world, and buried deep, deep within the suffusion of wood is a small clearing, a circle without trees, and that is New Bincombe. What you call the mirk is the moon.’ 
	‘I never saw it that way. Did you have a plan when you left Earth, Red?’
	‘Yes,’ she answered after consideration, releasing the word to an uncertain Universe. ‘I have always known exactly what I will do.’
	The word wandered the air for a while, lonely and lost in the big wide world.
	‘So part of your plan included being here,’ said Type.
	The word spotted a gaggle of his fellows who were busily beating up a “the”, but was frightened by the bigger words and their rough games.
	‘The denouement, the finale, the culmination of a process begun before your time,’ she said with a knowing glint. ‘Before your world’s time, if you should concern yourselves with that. I might tell you about it sometime; meanwhile, shall we lighten the conversation?’
	A new concern met the word, and together they established a vigorous and enlightened faith based on peace and love and victimising Italics.
	‘Okay,’ said Yod, ‘you know, I was thinking: I reckon war is a good thing.’
	‘I think you are going to have trouble qualifying that.’
	‘Well, war is good in the same way that periodic plagues and global catastrophes are a positive thing.’
	‘Okay… alright… not too good a job done so far there.’
	‘No, listen. It’s like forest fires, you see?’
	‘Giant clouds of smoke, having to stay indoors for weeks?’
	‘No. Look, you know that thing about “you can’t have your cake and eat it”?’
	‘Yep.’
	‘Yes.’
	‘Well, I reckon you can have your cake but eat your father’s!’
	‘Cake?’
	‘I reckon you need to think this through a little more carefully, Yod,’ said Jasper, faintly embarrassed.
	‘It’s a weird ship, the Behemoth.’
	‘Not when you see it from the designers’ point of view, i.e. comfy chairs next to the coffee machine.’
	‘Did you enjoy Earth, Red?’ Fel asked pointedly.
	‘A fabulous place,’ she answered, switching on a razor smile, ‘a solid place, grounded on the lives of billions present and everyone past.’
	‘But.’
	‘Earth is heavy, intellectually as much as gravitationally; society has momentum, and all the greatest one can and should hope to achieve are minor changes, small accretions onto life. True history; everything that mattered.’ She frowns, yet appears calm. 
	‘Not so here.’
	‘Quite. In the wider galaxy, an individual can have a profound influence.’
	‘And what profound influences have you wrought, Red?’
	‘Perhaps later,’ she said, a warm smile teasing her features. ‘Have we no small talk?’
	‘Seven thousand billion megajoules,’ Jasper blurted out.
	‘Pardon?’
	‘Seven million terrajoules. That’s how much energy you’d get if you turned me into energy. Seven times ten to the eighteen joules.’
	‘Er, pardon?’
	‘You know, when they transport people. Makes me wonder why they go on about matter/antimatter drives, if they can turn any matter directly into energy anyhow. And what’s that about crystals? It’s all a load of rubbish.’
	‘Small talk, Jasper,’ said Fel. ‘Not vanishingly small talk.’

ersatz intelligence

‘Imagine, if you will, an ocean – oh, you don’t have them. A glass then, large enough to hold moon, planet and star. Visualise a drop of wine, small as to be tiny under a microscope, vaporised and distributed in clumps and strings throughout the glass. That is the galaxy and, galaxies for stars, that is the Universe. It is almost entirely nothing. No alien encounters, no lost civilisations, no civilisations. A solar system is a solar system unto itself. That is the reason I have never encountered anything: there is very little to encounter. 
	‘No bizarrely humanised races; no impossibly large space-time anomalies; no relics; no pan galactic civilisations; never faster than light; no nebula dwelling phantasms; no derelict leviathans holding strange treasures; no gods; no monsters; and no metaphors. Do you see? Adventure in a world, yes; adventure in a solar system, yes; adventures in space? No. There is no sense behind the Universe; therefore there is no reason for it to make sense. No intelligence,’ she put enough emphasis on this one word to cover a multitude of disappointments.
	‘We were never really on an adventure,’ said Yod, ‘leastways, not a real one. I don’t believe they exist.’
	“There was more to Red than met all five senses, like an iceberg evading common sense by hiding its volume entirely above the waterline.”
	Jasper traced the mock window’s startling image with his finger, around and around the incognatively massive ellipse, the Planet, cosmic Hoover. She protected their puny moon from comets and meteorites with its gravity abyss, and from their star’s withering, corrupting radiation with its enormous electromagnetic field. There was a saying on Ressonner; it went, “You want to go to the planet? Just follow your compass.” Over the years it became simply “Follow your compass”, and was a fitting retort to such impossibly naïve statements as “I want to see Earth”. One will say to another, “We’ve been following the compass, all this time.” The other has no answer, producing the platitude, “What else could we do?”
	“No wonder there were so many mad people on Earth,” a third might say, considering a different matter. “Spring, summer, autumn, winter – a constant change back to what had already been, a timeline that was a circle, a spiral terminating at insanity.” The third will not produce this hypothesis again; the third has too much on their mind, too many problems. 
	‘No,’ said Type, ‘no, I don’t think that works, not the way you say it. If there is no implicit meaning, it is up to us to create some, good for us.’
	‘Obviously,’ said Red, thinking of clichés. 
	Pause for practice.
	‘Where were you three years ago?’ Red asked, an innocuous question if ever there was one.
	‘I was enjoying Power Generation immensely,’ said Jasper.
	Fel cracked a comprehensive range of joints. ‘I was becoming increasingly bored with medicine.’
	‘I was also enjoying Power Generation,’ said Type. ‘I would not go so far as to say “immensely”, but it was pretty good, not too shabby at all. 
	‘I was blowing up donkeys,’ said Yod, absurdly proud. ‘And your good self?’
	‘I came to a decision.’
	‘A big decision?’
	‘Yes.’
	‘A difficult decision?’
	‘No.’
	‘A life changing decision?’
	‘Oh yes.’
	‘What was it?’
	Red paused. ‘You asked what I have influenced. The answer is New Moon,’ she said, brushing an errant swathe of hair behind one ear. ‘Note the childish nomenclature; evidently the name has changed in the intervening thousand years. I am pleased. My word, doesn’t that sound like a long time?’
	‘It does,’ said Type, gathering his thoughts. 
	‘It is true, though. Ressonner,’ she said, happily musing over events at the very beginning of the four’s world, in the time of their great to-the-power thirty grandparents. ‘Not the colony. No, as I said before, the moon. Do you believe me?’
	Red stood. ‘Now I will be going. Care to see me off, say our goodbyes? I have enjoyed meeting you.’

nascent knowledge

Japer, Fel, Type and Yod sit quietly, thinking horrible thoughts, and wondering how their adventure could suddenly intrude onto the future of Ressonner. Most of all, they consider Red’s farewell, a few short sentences that changed everything. What could they do?
	“Completion,” she said, “the point at which Ressonner is entirely divorced from Earth, a world unto itself, isolated in space. In a week, the Behemoth will hit the region called Blackwald, vaporising the ship. Massive disruptions will result. Think about it, but get off the ship first. Goodbye. Oh,” she added, as if it did not matter, as if it were some trifling detail to be explained as an afterthought, “I transmitted the message. I wonder why. But please think about it, all of it, and you will see that it was inevitable.”

the end

Jasper hummed to himself, a simple insistent ditty in tune with nothing, in cadence with nothing. They sat in their shuttle, bound for New Bincombe. Jasper stopped humming; velvet quietness enveloped them. The time to discuss Red, discuss the proclamation made as she entered her shuttle, discuss impossibilities… was later. They were tired.

Epilogue

A Body in the Captain’s Chair

There is a man in a chair, near to death, steeped in reminiscence. He toys with a replica pistol – a source of powerful memories – and chuckles gently. Inscribed along the barrel, heavily worn and barely visible, were the words, “Metaphor courtesy of Mrs. Fermat of Reagan’s Ville, Earth.”

He does not have much to think about, but he knows that the end is near, so he reminisces over what he can. His thoughts meander on his first life, when everything happened. Of his second life there was little, precious little. Watching television; talking to his friend; wandering the empty corridors of the ship. He cast his mind to the Grand Vizier, deactivated nowadays. Not a success. 

It did not occur to him that he might have done more with his time.

The Actors’ Return

New Bincombe; its reassuring solidity; dull lights illuminating the evening; home. How many months were we away? I can’t remember. Not many. Not a long time. No, it feels like years. Different people are returning. I wonder if they will recognise us. I wonder if we will recognise them. How long now, what does the computer say? The Advisory Council Building, we can call from there; we can raise the alarm. A clarion call to prepare for the unstoppable. Interesting turn of phrase. Term. The Behemoth will be entering the upper atmosphere by now, won’t it, at speed. Almost. I feel sorry we couldn’t save the Miranda. Sentimental. Why not? What will happen? Here we are. Shit, look down there. An audience? A stage? Do they know we are coming back? Could Red have told them? That does not sound like her. Nevertheless. Quick, tell the computer to land there. I know, I’ve already done it. Can they see us yet? Oh my word yes. They have all turned out for us. How fortuitous. When did this all begin, I cannot remember any more. It was the engine test, the one that worked. Oh, yes. Down. Open. Hey, why are you the first one out, who elected you leader? Last off, first on, okay. Out. Doesn’t Ressonner air taste great? I think they want us to say something – all lights on us, as if we were important. That projectionist is not as dull as he likes to make out. Is this part of the show? Who are these others on the stage? Who are those on the stage? One of them is wearing my coat. Fix it later. For now: words. As I speak, glance pointlessly at watch, a very large spaceship is speeding through space, on course to hit the other side of our moon with enough energy to lay waste to a large section of it. We do not know what repercussions there will be for us, but they are likely to be devastating. What is he talking about? What is going on? Wrong idea. Shuffle uncomfortably. Look where they are sitting. How fast will the shock wave travel? Poor the Miranda. It is the twenty-eighth of May, in the year nine hundred and ninety. Sword of Damocles. I wonder if we will get a winter now. Hey, don’t be sad. There is a big wide moon out there about to undergo massive change. How exciting, and all for free! Do you find that heroes unerringly land on the correct side of the planet?

‘What have we achieved?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So what?’

finis