Backwards

by Rob Grant

  Of course, there was a large element of the unknown in that new life. Even an admiral's pension wouldn't provide for an opulent lifestyle, and there was no guarantee his wife would decide to go with him to Venus. She might even make good her threats to divorce him, which would leave him fairly close to destitute. Still, whatever his future held, Tranter embraced it.

  As it happened, his small fears were groundless. His wife would not divorce him. They would find happiness together. And as an unexpected bonus, Tranter would finally discover the reason his career in the corps had been stymied.

  It was this simple. There was another admiral in the corps named Tranter. Dieter Tranter. A hungover clerk in central command had one day mixed up their records, and no one had ever picked up on the error. Dieter was, to be blunt about it, an incompetent. Unfortunately, all his blunders found their way into Tranter's record, while Tranter's achievements were all logged on his. The worse Dieter performed, the more he got promoted.

  The upshot was that Peter Tranter still continued to receive full pay even after his resignation, while Dieter found his salary reduced by half. Dieter never complained. For years he'd been bewildered by his own inexplicable rise through the echelons of rank, and he simply believed he'd finally been found out and was being justly punished.

  As Tranter tugged on his loafers, he heard Commander Rimmer announce 'Engaging Wildfire drive,' and glanced up at the monitor as the screen whited out. That was it. The moment of truth. After an achingly stretched instant, visuals returned again.

  Tranter craned closer to the monitor. Ace was alive. The read-outs all registered within safe margins. He'd done it. The commander had leapt to a new dimension. Rimmer's voice was carried along by the promised tachyon transmission, alongside bursts of digitized NaviComp information. For a man who'd pioneered a new frontier for humankind, his voice was astonishingly calm and matter-of-fact. 'Bingo, MC. The crate held up — chalk that one up to Spanners. Let's see...' His eyes flicked over the read-outs. 'I've arrived, but I know not where. Starscape's completely unfamiliar. Zero point of reference. That puts me gabillions of light years from home. No class M planets in the vicinity. Don't understand that one. There must be life of some kind around... hang on. I'm getting something. A ship. 'Ace's features registered mild surprise, which, in the commander's emotional lexicon, was the closest he ever got to panic. 'Oh, my godfathers. It's . . .'

  And, as the tachyon trail lost its integrity, the transmission spluttered and died.

  PART THREE

  Back to Backworld

  ONE

  The Cat watched the festering heap of dung as slimy black flies waddled on top of it, tucked their sticky wings to their sides and started crawling into their maggot skins. The white skins sealed themselves and the fat maggots began wriggling deep into the putrid mound. 'Mmmm,' the Cat said to himself. 'Lunch is almost ready.'

  The Cat, who'd experienced some extremely weird days in his lifetime, ranked the previous day as his all-time number-one weirdest day ever. It had finally ended in the early afternoon. There had been hours of raised voices, recriminations and much poring over star charts, before the Cat had finally given up hoping to get off this planet any time soon, and had slipped up the spiral staircase for a quick nap.

  He'd crashed out for twenty straight hours, which surprised him, since he hadn't been feeling all that sleepy when he'd gone to bed, despite the day's exertions. Even more surprisingly, when he woke up, he was feeling tired. But as the afternoon wore on towards lunch, the tiredness had begun to dissipate.

  He supposed that was one of the many obnoxious things he was going to have to get used to here: going to bed when he felt most alert, and getting up when he was at his tiredest.

  Well, he could live with that.

  He could live with most of the vagaries of the reverse universe.

  He could live with the fact that washing actually made him dirty, that combing his hair rendered it unkempt, and brushing his teeth left his mouth tasting foul. It stretched his patience to breaking-point, but he could even live with the concept of putting on clothes that were creased and unclean, since they smartened themselves up over the course of the day.

  What he couldn't live with was the food business.

  He simply couldn't face the prospect of sucking excreta up through his butt-hole three times a day, and regurgitating it, neat and processed, through his mouth on to a dirty plate.

  He couldn't even think about taking a leak.

  So he'd wandered out of Starbug while Lister and Rimmer were still sleeping and headed here, to a high point on the mountain, on the blind side of the hillbillies' still, to try and wrap his head around some way of throwing himself over the side without falling upwards. And while he'd been sitting and thinking, he'd suddenly developed an urge to dig a small hole by a bush. And he'd uncovered the dung.

  'Depressing, innit?' He swung round towards the sound of the voice to see Lister picking his way down the narrow path towards him. 'You should worry — I've had to put up with it for three and a half decades.'

  The Cat turned away and looked down into the green valley below. 'You're absolutely sure there's no way we can kill ourselves?'

  Lister clambered down and perched on the rock beside him. 'It's not that bad. You get used to it.'

  In deference to the Cat, they'd all agreed to make forward-speak the norm amongst them. Rimmer's speech unit had been reprogrammed in a matter of seconds, but Lister was still fairly uncomfortable in his native tongue, especially with sibilants. Still, it brought a sense of normalcy to their relationships, which they all badly needed right now, and Lister reasoned that he'd have to go through the process of re-mastering it sooner or later. Considerably later than he'd have liked, but still...

  He looked out at the glorious mountainous vista, as an eagle released a small bird in mid-flight, then swooped off heavenwards at an astonishing speed. 'At least we're on a planet. At least there are people here.'

  The Cat's furrowed features slowly morphed into a grin. 'That's true, buddy. There are people here. And some of them are female people! Now you are playing my radio station! Look out, planet Earth, sex god alert!'

  Lister held out his hand, palm up. 'Before you get all fired up, I'd like you to think for a second about what, say, a blow-job entails in this place.'

  The Cat's grin widened for a second. Then ripples spread over his brow. Then the corners of his mouth straightened. Then they drooped like an unwaxed Viva Zapata moustache. Then his nose creased up and headed towards his hairline. 'Oh, man,' he whined. 'Thank you so much for sharing that with me.'

  Lister grinned. 'You asked.' Suddenly, he felt a movement in his gullet, and something churned up his throat and into his mouth. He chewed. Some kind of meat. He spotted a bone by the foot of the rock. He held out his hand and the bone leapt up into it. He brought up a chunk of pinkish meat and plastered it to the bone.

  The Cat's features were still curled up in disgust from the sexual nightmare he'd just subjected himself to. If he wasn't careful, he was going to spend the next ten years squinting like Mr Magoo. 'What the hell is that?'

  'Not sure.' Lister regurgitated another mouthful and chewed thoughtfully. 'I think it's rabbit.' He chewed some more. 'It's good, actually.' Lister proffered the bone. 'Like to spew some up?'

  'Not just yet, bud,' the Cat smiled humourlessly. 'Ask me again in a couple of centuries.'

  Lister shrugged, withdrew the bone and hawked another chunk of meat on to it. 'You're going to have to eat sooner or later.'

  'Later. Much later.'

  'Suit yourself. Listen, me and Kryten are thinking of getting our heads together back at the Bug before Rimmer wakes up. Trying to sort out some kind of plan without the Queen of Panic flapping around.'

  'Plan? I know the plan.' The Cat spotted a small rock tumbling up the mountain's face towards him. He reached out and caught it. 'We sit here for the next decade sucking doody up through our buttocks.'

  'It's not quite that simp
le. Coming?'

  'Just give me a second. I have to... I think I need...' he nodded over at the pile.

  'No sweat.' Lister crouched on the rock and leapt a good ten feet up on to the track. 'See you in ten.'

  The Cat watched him hike off back towards the cave, then looked back at the hole and wondered if it might be possible at least to starve himself to death.

  * * *

  Lister had brought up an entire shank of the rabbit by the time he reached Starbug. There was a plate on the scanner table with more bones on it, so he dumped the joint he'd just regurgitated on to the plate and picked up another bone as Kryten stepped in from the small kitchenette that led into the mid-section, opposite the cockpit.

  'Ah. You found lunch, sir.'

  Lister waved at the bone. 'Where'd it come from?'

  'The waste disposal unit regurgitated some bones. Close analysis indicated they probably belong to a creature of the Oryctolagus cuniculus genus, a burrowing, gregarious, plant-eating mammal with long ears, and a short tail, varying in colour from brown...'

  'It's a rabbit, right?'

  'That's what I just said, sir. I found a suitably dirty plate and arranged the bones on it. Oh...' he peered at the plate. 'You've already disgorged a portion.'

  'Yeah. You'd better get a barbecue ready. We're going to have to uncook it, soon.

  ''After which, presumably I take the bloody, raw, dead carcass and try to insert it whole into its skin.'

  Lister nodded. 'That's my guess, yeah. I reckon you'll find some sort of trap to stick it in. Leave it out overnight, and bingo. Come morning he'll be frolicking around and gregariating with all his bunny friends.'

  Kryten brightened. 'Wonderful. I like a meal with a happy ending.'

  'So. I guess that sorts out where all our food's going to come from.'

  'Where?' Rimmer climbed down the spiral stairway, yawning and stretching.

  Lister tried to hide his disappointment. 'Trapping, hunting and fishing. We're living wild for the next ten years.'

  Rimmer slouched to the scanner table and flopped into a chair. 'Smeg me. I'm bushed.'

  'You'll get used to it.'

  Rimmer yawned again. 'So how does fishing work, here? You take a dead fish to the river bank, sit on the side till it starts flapping about, jam it on your hook, drop the line in the water and wait for it to wiggle free?'

  The Cat staggered bandily in from the airlock. He looked harrowed and gaunt, as if he'd just spent a year in solitary on Devil's Island and topped it off with a six-month stopover in the cool room at Alcatraz. 'I can't take it! Please, somebody shoot me in the head.'

  'Look,' Lister slammed down another completed haunch on to the plate and handed the Cat a bone. 'There's no point in bleating about it. We're stuck here. We'll live with it. You're going to have to start looking on the bright side, or go crazy. It's up to you.'

  'Bright side?' The Cat turned the rabbit bone over in his hand. 'There is a bright side, then?'

  'There's plenty of positive stuff about this planet. Nobody dies here. Diseases actually make you feel better. Sure, sex isn't quite as much fun this way round, and the toilet arrangements are a drag, but at least we know we're going to be alive and healthy for the next ten years, which is more than you can say for most universes.'

  'That's true.' Kryten waddled over to the plate and jammed the two completed half rabbit haunches together with a sticky cracking sound. 'There are lots of advantages. Take war. War is a good thing here. Why, in less than fifty years, the Second World War will begin. Millions of people will come to life. Hitler will retreat across Europe, liberate Czechoslovakia and Poland, disband the Third Reich and haul his cruddy little derrière back off to Austria. It's a pity we won't be around to see it.'

  'Maybe we will.' Rimmer coiled his arms around himself. 'Who's to say we're going to make the next flight window?'

  'Rimmer, we are definitely going to make it. I for one do not intend to spend my twilight years sitting in a high chair glooping apricot and apple dessert over some babysitter.'

  'Babies?' The Cat gagged on some rabbit meat. 'Are you seriously telling me we could wind up staying here till we're babies? I can't do that. It's impossible to be cool and be a baby.'

  'We're not going to miss the flight window. I guarantee it. Just think it through: how do you think the engines got buried so deep in the ground? How did they get all rusted up?'

  Rimmer shrugged.

  Lister glanced over at Kryten, who was beginning to suspect he'd made yet another boo-boo planning their takeoff, and then nodded towards the airlock. 'Come on,' he said. 'Take a look.'

  They trooped down the landing ramp towards the cave's entrance. Lister pointed towards the distant mountain range. 'You have to think backwards. Don't imagine we're taking off. Imagine we're landing, only we've come in too low. We just make it over that mountain ridge, but we're losing altitude quickly and we hit the tips of those giant redwoods. A couple of the landing jets get ripped off and blast themselves into the ground. We skim along on a wing and a prayer, crashing through the treetops. The final landing jet gets wrenched loose and buries itself just a couple of hundred yards down there. Now the only thing keeping us up are some low-angled retros. The treetops start tearing great chunks out of the undercarriage — that's when the fuel canister those hillbillies found tumbles out. We see this mountain looming towards us, with no chance of getting over it. Then, in the nick of time, we spot the cave. We head for the entrance, set the retros on full blast and cross our fingers. We scorch those skid marks along the cave walls, and we've just got enough to stop. Now tell me that doesn't make sense.'

  There was a long silence. Kryten shuffled uncomfortably. He was hoping no one would make the logical observation, but Rimmer disappointed him.

  'Hang on a mo. Just uno tiny momentorola, here. Are you saying we didn't actually need the jets to take off?'

  Lister shrugged. 'Like I said. Makes sense to me.'

  'It makes sense all right. It makes a horrible, alarming sense.' Rimmer rounded on the squirming mechanoid. 'Because it means we could have taken off all the time. All that hunting around for the landing jets was completely unnecessary. As soon as we blasted off, they'd have lurched up out of the ground and started re-attaching themselves.'

  Lister shook his head. 'You still can't wrap your head around the way things work here. You don't get a choice about what you do, because you've already done it. All you're doing is undoing what you've already done. See?'

  'Don't try and baffle me with all this reverse philosophical clap-trap mumbo-jumbo. We didn't undo it because we didn't try.' Rimmer leered threateningly at Kryten. 'And we didn't try because Captain Rot-mind here didn't think it through properly.'

  Lister sighed. Rimmer and the Blame Thing. Hard work. 'Rimmer, those engines were rusty when we found them. There was nothing Kryten or anybody could have done to stop them being rusty. And it took them years to get that way.'

  'But they wouldn't have gone rusty if we hadn't tried to look for them, because we'd have left before they'd got chance to corrode, yes?'

  'Look: the Bug's underside was full of freshly welded panels. If we'd been going to make the last flight window, it would have been ripped to shreds when we found it.'

  'Yes! But that's only because Kryten wasn't thinking straight!'

  'Rimmer, I'm lost here. What point are you trying to make?'

  'I'm just saying that we could have unlanded last night, or tomorrow night, or whenever the smeg it was or will be, if only Kryten had realized that we didn't need the landing jets to unland.'

  Lister nodded. 'I see.'

  'Exactly.' Rimmer stepped back, confused. He appeared to have won the argument, but somehow he felt like he'd lost it.

  'Well,' Lister smiled. 'Now that's out of the way, I guess we'd better sort out the work plan. First off, we have to remove the landing jet we just attached, and sneak it back to the hermits' shack.'

  The Cat, who clearly hadn't followed a word of the a
rgument, looked up from his half-uneaten rabbit portion and asked: 'Why?'

  'Sooner or later, those mountain boys are going to take the engine out into the woods, bury it and unfind it in exactly the place it gets wrenched free from Starbug. I'm guessing we've patched up the undercarriage to make the Bug liveable-in for the next few years. Before we hit the flight window, we're going to have to start dismantling the plates, until the belly's a complete wreck. Then we wait for the whole shebang to unrust.'

  Lister headed back up the ramp to the storerooms to search out the welding equipment. It would be a trial in itself, spending the next decade watching the rust fade away. By that time, he and the Cat would be around fifteen. Teenagers. If the corrosion hadn't vanished completely by the ten-year deadline, they'd have to wait for the next flight window.

  According to their best calculations, that particular opportunity would occur when David Lister was less than two years old.

  TWO

  Holly was trying not to think.

  Quite frankly, it was thinking that had got him into this mess in the first place, and the chances were that more thinking was only going to make things worse.

  Only a short time ago, less than two thirds of your average human life span, he had been the single most intelligent intelligence that ever intelligented.

  'Been there,' Holly nodded sagely to himself. 'Been there and bought the T-shirt.' He smiled cynically. 'And on that proverbial T-shirt, it no doubt would say: "I went to the Source of the Fountain of All Knowledge, and all I got was this bloody lousy IQ ".'

  Holly had started life as the on-board computer of the mining ship Red Dwarf. He'd been blessed with a fairly respectable IQ of 6000, which had been more than enough for him to get the job done, with sufficient brainpower left over to defeat a couple of chess grandmasters, while simultaneously composing a fugue or two and making wholesale corrections to some laughably naive misconceptions in Stephen Hawking's and Albert Einstein's entire textual output. Then a nuclear accident had killed off all but one of the crew, and Holly had been forced to spend the best part of three million years alone. The interminable loneliness had driven him, not to mince words, slightly barmy. One circuit short of a Grand Prix track. Computer senile.