by Karl Beecher
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” Colin said. “I’m already starting to turn into a vegetable? I can assure you it hasn’t taken hold yet. I’m still as lucid and sharp as I ever was. And that was pretty damned sharp. I was twice voted Best Insurance Analyst in the South-East region by Insurance Industry Voice. You don’t win awards like that by being a dummy, I can tell you.”
An awkward pause followed. Colin felt somewhat like an inept employee who had messed up and was now begging for a second chance. Tyresa looked like the boss who had already made up her mind.
“Well,” she said at last. “I’m not a doctor, not a medical one, at least. The medical equipment aboard is pretty rudimentary. We’ll arrive back at Ceti tomorrow. Once there, I’ll arrange for you to get immediate medical attention from proper specialists.” She deactivated the slate and slid it back into her jacket. “I’d say we’re done here for now.”
With that, she stood and made her way out of the room, only pausing at the doorway to mention over her shoulder, “Oh yeah, if you need anything, just ask Ade.”
Then she was gone.
“Well, that was abrupt,” said Colin. “Do you think she thinks I’m insane?”
“It is not for me to speak for Ms. Tyresa, sir,” Ade replied.
“So, what now?”
The android pondered a moment. “Simply enjoy the remainder of your journey, sir?” he offered.
Colin looked at the remains of his meal. “Not unless the food around here gets better.”
16
Colin was bursting with questions, but he continued to get little in the way of answers.
Tyresa rarely made appearances throughout the journey. In fact, she proved a rather unaccommodating host; never outright rude, but usually—on the rare occasions she showed up—speaking in clipped sentences and giving Colin orders. Colin was learning what it was like to be a pet dog.
Ade defended her by citing her busy workload. In his own way, Ade was even more frustrating than she was. Even after Tyresa had lifted her restriction on answering questions, Ade seemed unable to expound on the facts, give his own opinions, or wander onto related topics. When Colin asked something, Ade answered in a concise and straightforward manner. Most frustrating.
But maybe now he could finally get some solid information. He was presently on his way to the bridge, having received an invitation from Ade over the ship’s speakers. The elevator door opened to reveal Ade, all elegance and amiability.
“Good morning, sir. I trust you’re well today?”
Colin stepped through the doorway. The bridge looked much as he remembered it, although his memory of it wasn’t exactly strong. The last time he’d been here, he was a naked, disoriented amnesiac surrounded by smoke in the throes of a panic attack. Now, in a calmer atmosphere, he could absorb his surroundings with much greater ease.
“What are you doing up here?” came Tyresa’s voice.
Colin turned and saw Tyresa sitting at the forward console, looking at him accusingly.
Ade replied, “I thought Mister Douglass might care to witness our arrival, ma’am.”
“Oh, right,” said Tyresa impatiently. “Yes… good idea, I suppose.” She continued to do whatever it was she did to pilot the Turtle.
Colin heard the coldness in Tyresa’s voice, but it barely registered with him. Something else had suddenly grabbed his attention: through the forward window, looming large, was a magnificent ball of blue and green, hanging like a glowing marble in the blackness of space. It was a planet.
An icy shiver went up his back. He gasped. “Earth?”
“Ceti, sir,” said Ade.
“Ceti?” Colin came closer to the window and examined the planet’s surface. He realised his mistake. The oceans were blue, all right. The land was a mish-mash of greens and browns and yellows. But the shape of the continents was all wrong. It wasn’t Earth.
Ade motioned towards the front of the bridge. “Perhaps a closer look, sir?”
The android led him towards the forward console and stood beside the empty chair beside Tyresa.
She glanced up at Colin. “Oh, um… sit down,” she said with all the warmth of an unwelcoming glacier.
Colin sat, absent-mindedly going to rest his hands on the console in front of them.
“Don’t touch anything!” she barked.
Colin snapped his arms back. “Sorry.”
Tyresa shifted in her seat, seemingly trying to force herself into a more hospitable mode. She pointed towards a spot on the largest visible landmass. “Our current heading is the north spaceport of my university,” Tyresa told him. “It’s the closest one to the training hospital. They have some great medics. We’ll check you in as soon as we land.”
Colin was barely listening. His mind was a blur, overcome by a feeling of awe. This was another planet. He was about to land on another planet! A thought struck him.
“Am I…” He hesitated. “Am I going to see aliens?”
Tyresa looked disapprovingly at him. “We don’t use words like that, Colin. They’re immigrants, not aliens. After all, they’re human beings just like you and me.”
Colin frowned. “Huh?”
From behind them, Ade cleared his throat1. “I believe Mister Douglass is enquiring about non-human life forms.”
Colin nodded. “Yes. Don’t forget, I’ve never left Earth.”
“Ah, yes, that’s right,” said Tyresa, sounding sceptical.
“So? Is there life on other planets?”
“Of course,” she said.
He looked at the planet again, not daring to imagine what might be waiting for him. “What do they look like? Do they look like humans? Can they talk like us?”
“Talk?” she scoffed. “Of course not. What are you…” A look of realisation came over her. “Oh, you mean intelligent life forms. Sorry, no. None of those.”
“What, none at all?”
Tyresa shook her head. “There’s plenty of life around. Microbes, plants. A few worlds have some form of native animals. If you want something to talk to, I’m afraid it’s humans or computers—though I can’t guarantee the conversation will be any good in either case. Sorry if that disappoints you.”
On the contrary, Colin felt a vague sense of delight at the news. He recalled the arguments he’d had with Jeremy and Martin at the wargaming club. Those science fiction-worshipping philistines always argued firmly in favour of intelligent aliens existing. Colin had argued, no less strenuously, that the idea was codswallop. He wished they could have been here, just to see the looks on their faces.
Colin realized that until now, he hadn’t explicitly thought of anyone from back on Earth. He’d thought of Earth and people generally, but having conjured up in his mind specific individuals, it finally struck him: everyone he had known back home was gone. Admittedly, some things were still unclear. There was this argument over whether Earth really was Earth and just how long he’d spent in stasis remained unknown. But it was a sure bet that, either by some disaster laying waste to Earth or simply the passage of an immense period of time, everyone he had known was now dead. His friends, his colleagues at the insurance company (well, ex-colleagues), Keith and Mildred and all the other people they’d swapped spouses with, even the lady who owned the local newsagent’s, whom he’d known for fifteen years without ever learning her name, were now nothing but a memory. He shuddered at the thought.
The cryonics company had counselled Colin about this beforehand. Given the possibility of remaining in stasis for many years, they had said, he ought to say some sort of farewell to his loved ones before entering the pod. The company’s literature tried to frame this in an upbeat sense. It said:
“Tell them, ‘It’s not necessarily goodbye, just bon voyage.’”
Although a footnote added: “For legal reasons, we must stress, it’s more than likely ‘goodbye.’”
Tyresa interrupted his thoughts. “However,” she said. “Don’t let me mislead you. That’s not to say there’s never
been other intelligent life in the galaxy.”
“Oh?”
As the ship continued on its course, and the planet grew larger in the window, Tyresa explained.
It turned out Colin hadn’t technically won his argument with Jeremy and Martin after all. Apparently, a race of intelligent, spacefaring beings had existed in the galaxy long before humans had even learned to walk upright. They had become known to humans as the Predecessors. However, they had long since vanished, leaving behind almost no trace: no ancient structures, no super-advanced technologies, no alien spacecraft floating derelict in space. All that had been discovered so far were tiny artifacts: pieces of refined and exotic metals, fragments of some kind of advanced machinery, the barest remnants of building foundations. Consequently, although the Predecessors had undoubtedly existed, people knew very little about them. Judging from the fragments they left behind, they had reached a highly advanced state. But the nature of the Predecessors and their society remained a mystery. The question of what happened to them and the reason they left behind so few traces were equally mysterious.
A handful of experts around the galaxy worked to piece together the few scraps of evidence and learn more about who had made them. Tyresa assured Colin it was a competitive and exotic field to work in. Although fragmentary, the artifacts were nevertheless tiny pieces of an advanced civilisation and had the potential to radically advance human knowledge. A rich find could earn glory and recognition. Tyresa, though she said it herself, was one of the better experts. She spent much of her time going from planet to planet, hunting for artifacts.
As he listened, Colin became more and more distracted. He wasn’t being rude or growing bored, but feeling ever more anxious as the planet grew larger in the window. From what he could tell, the descent towards the surface seemed to Tyresa as everyday as parking a car since she talked casually while piloting the Turtle. As far as Colin was concerned, they were hurtling towards a planet at great speed. He squeezed his fingertips into the armrests of his chair as the ship entered the atmosphere.
As the surface grew closer, Colin watched a small, grey-brown spot in the middle of the green landmass grow into a huge conurbation. It turned out to be the most remarkable-looking city he’d ever seen. Pyramids of glass and metal stood beside Y-shaped monoliths. He saw a tower resembling a twenty-seven-tier wedding cake and another one encompassed from top to bottom by a series of apparently floating, neon rings. A spaghetti tangle of translucent tubes weaved its way among the buildings, up, down, and across, sometimes suspended as high as the skyscrapers’ peaks. This, Tyresa explained, was the city’s transit system, the hypertube. From this height, Colin could just about discern trains zipping through the tunnels.
The Turtle joined one of the streams of flying vehicles flowing to and from the city.
As Colin’s eyes flitted from one thing to the next, he asked, “Which building is the university?”
“What do you mean?” She made a broad sweep with her arm. “This is the university.”
Colin’s jaw dropped. He looked at her. “This? The whole place is one university?”
“Yep,” she said proudly. “The Megalopolitan University of Ceti. The largest and most respected institute of learning in the whole Alliance of Free Worlds. Both a campus and a city in its own right.”
“But it’s enormous!”
Tyresa nodded and reeled off more statistics. Eight million inhabitants altogether, including three hundred thousand academic staff, five hundred thousand administrators, almost two million students, not to mention fifty thousand baristas2. Two million more worked in industries feeding directly off the concentration of esteemed brainpower, eager graduates, and overly-generous grant money.
Colin sat staggered, in awe of the scale and architecture. Then, from out of the distance came a magnificent tower. Easily the tallest and outrageously ostentatious building he’d seen so far, it reached out from the ground shaped like an arm grasping a huge globe in its hand. It declared to the world its assured sense of self-importance; a glittering white tower made entirely from ivory.
“What’s that?” he said.
“That’s the economics department,” said Tyresa. “The hospital is not far now.”
17
Colin nervously paced his private hospital room, his bodily functions weighing heavily on his mind—metaphorically speaking.
Waste excretion featured strongly in his thoughts. He knew that relief to his urgent need lay just behind the door to his en suite bathroom. However, he’d already seen so many baffling, intimidating examples of new technology today, he didn’t want to open the door for fear of what he might find.
Hunger was also on his mind. He’d grown increasingly preoccupied with food and drink in the last few days as his body had shaken off the final after-effects of stasis. Right now, Colin could have eaten a horse, a phrase now rendered meaningless since horses didn’t exist here on Ceti. He had graduated from carroty things, and blue lettuce leaves up to food like bulbhangers (a starchy root vegetable that looked like altogether too much like an old man’s scrotum) and stickyblock (a sliceable protein gel that was supposed to be a meat substitute but tasted like Marmite-flavoured jelly).
The most exciting thing he’d drunk so far was watered down fruit juice, but he could have killed for a cup of tea. When he’d enquired about tea nobody seemed to recognise it, which was probably the worst news he’d received so far—the loss of Earth and the death of all his friends coming a close second. The nearest substitute was something called Skruntch, a drink made by boiling the leaves of a native Ceti plant called Dancing Daisy. He was advised to avoid it because Dancing Daisy leaves contained hallucinogens, meaning utmost care was required during preparation so as to avoid afternoon tea turning into a psychedelic episode.
Right now, tripping his nuts off in return for a nice cuppa was totally worth the risk.
In any case, he didn’t know how to get hold of a cup of anything right now. Ever since Colin arrived at the University, no-one had thought to give him a proper introduction to this new world.
Tyresa had palmed him off onto a campus doctor before quickly making her excuses and disappearing. This had left him to be subjected to a series of humiliating examinations conducted by the doctor and several associates. They had treated him with the clinical and detached fascination he imagined a bunch of scientists might treat a ten-thousand-year-old caveman freshly thawed from a glacier.
After that, they passed him onto one of their assistants, a young, bored-looking medical student, who showed him to his hospital room. The doctors had neglected to inform their assistant of Colin’s origin. Accordingly, the student had assumed Colin to be just another patient and talked him through the room as though he were reeling off a shopping list. He knew the young lad was trying to be helpful, but it did no good to be told he had a “standard hygenisoph bathroom,” his food and drink dispenser worked with his “bio-ID,” and he could operate the screen using “the usual gesticulations.” Nevertheless, Colin did the usual thing when being told a load of stuff he didn’t understand: he smiled and nodded until eventually, his host departed.
This left him in the room alone. It was hardly a luxurious space, but nonetheless clean and functional. He had elected to steer clear of the unfamiliar technology for now and instead limit himself to the old classics: the bed, table, and chair.
At first glance, the bed had looked pretty ordinary, but every time he sat on the mattress a small monitor at the head of the bed started to beep and display a selection of Colin’s vital signs and bio-functions. He couldn’t deactivate it. Every time he tried—prodding buttons and whacking it like a faulty old TV—he failed and grew angry, which increased his pulse rate and only accelerated the beeping sounds. Maybe he was overly sensitive, but Colin didn’t want a constant reminder of how many millilitres of blood his kidneys were filtering per minute.
Kidney function also reminded him how much he needed the toilet.
Enough was enough.
Things couldn’t wait any longer. He steeled himself and stepped into the bathroom, prepared for whatever techno-horror awaited him. He was pleased to find an ordinary-looking toilet; nothing weird, nothing outlandishly technical, just a bowl-shaped seat set into the wall.
Some things never change, thought Colin.
Relieved, in one sense of the word at least, he lifted his surgical gown and lowered his behind to within an inch of the rim.
Whereupon, the toilet spoke to him.
“Good afternoon, sir,” it said pleasantly.
Colin leapt away from the bowl, almost doing onto the floor what he’d intended to do into the toilet.
He stared breathlessly at the lavatory as a thin, mechanical arm emanated from its side. What the hell did a toilet intend to do with an arm?
Then he noticed the arm was holding a magazine.
“A little something to read, sir? I recommend the article on the zero-gee vineyards of Cygnus VII.”
Colin left without a word. He was in no mood to converse with a lavatory.
“See you later, sir,” the toilet called out.
As he left the en suite, Colin saw that a man had appeared in his room.
He stifled a scream, almost losing control of his bodily functions a second time.
Then he realised it was Ade.
“Good afternoon, sir,” said the android.
“Oh, don’t you start as well,” said Colin. He noticed Ade carrying several items of clothing over his arm. “What have you got there?”
“Ms. Tyresa asked me to attend to you and bring some more suitable attire.”
“Oh. So she hasn’t completely forgotten about me,” he said sarcastically. “That’s nice to know. And here’s me thinking she just dumped me in a hospital, completely alone without me knowing anybody.”
“Ms. Tyresa sends her apologies. She had several urgent work matters to attend to.”
“I see. Work comes first, eh? That’s okay. Just leave me in the lurch, I won’t complain, oh no.” Colin shook his head and tutted. “She behaved the same on the ship. Always busy doing something else.”
