If Bruce had not been familiar with the game he would still have been none the wiser after Cyprus’s explanation. None of the Skidians seemed particularly adept at explaining anything; they naturally assumed that whatever they said was always fully understood and sufficient.
“Yeah, I know” Bruce replied. “You’re just bloody useless!” he yelled as the halfback fumbled the ball beneath the number eight’s feet.
The scrum reformed and it was the opposing halfback’s turn to feed it. His number eight was not taking any chances. He picked up the ball and, with his fellow forwards supporting him, formed a slow-moving maul that rumbled ponderously down the field. Suddenly the ball popped out of the tangle of bodies to the halfback. The halfback passed the ball on to his first five, who in turn flipped it on to the fullback, bursting through outside him, exploiting a sudden gap that had formed in the opposition back line.
“Go, go!” shouted Bruce, leaping to his feet, groaning as he saw that the fullback lacked the pace to exploit his break and nobody else was supporting him. The cover defense caught him and dragged him to the ground much to Bruce’s disgust.
“You know this event?” Cyprus asked incredulously.
“Sure. Rugby, isn’t it?”
“We call it Stim,” replied Cyprus stiffly.
“Oh well, it’s a lot like rugby, a game we play where I come from.”
“Are you sure?” Cyprus did not really believe him. How could the inhabitants of such a primitive planet develop an event of such complexity and finesse, and then call it a game? Why had the medical team’s analysis of Bruce failed to mention that he competed in Stim events or something similar at least? Cyprus was appalled at the growing realization that some of his fellow Skidians might not have been as thorough in their work as they should have been.
“Yeah, play myself, mate,” said Bruce proudly.
The game developed at a fairly leisurely pace, which allowed Bruce and Cyprus plenty of time to discuss the similarities between rugby and Stim. Both of them marveled at the lack of major differences between the two forms of the game that had developed across the vast reaches of the galaxy and a shared passion for it bordering on the fanatic.
Half-time was a bit of an education for Bruce. As the spectators chatted among themselves and stood to stretch, or call for refreshments from the drones that circulated between the aisles, the two teams went into their huddles at either end of the field to drink their magic water and eat whatever passed for oranges on Skid.
Nothing unusual in that. However, while they drank, their respective coaches showed them videos in order to rectify the shortcomings of their first half efforts. Sadly, as far as he was concerned, the game as a spectacle was a disappointment. Both teams were lethargic, to say the least, in their approach, though one team was totally outclassed by the other, so much so that Bruce thought the result might have been fixed by some crooked players and their bookies.
At the end of the game Cyprus led Bruce from the stadium, though Bruce noticed the rest of the crowd was in no hurry to leave.
“Do you think I could get to play a game at some stage, Cyprus?” Bruce asked eagerly, as they popped up out of the beltway outside his new home.
“I’m sure it could be arranged,” said Cyprus, wondering how this primitive being thought he could compete with the specially trained and conditioned Skidian athletes. It would give Cyprus great personal satisfaction to see the offworlder’s ego shattered, to see him totally demoralized by some of Skid’s best athletes.
“Leave it with me, Bruce. Tomorrow I will take you on a further familiarization trip around Skid, if that suits your plans.”
“Sure,” replied Bruce; he didn’t have any plans as far as he knew. “And you won’t forget about getting me a game, will you?”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Yeah. See ya later, Cyprus,” Bruce said as he headed for his front door and Cyprus dropped from sight again.
Leaf met him on the front porch, holding the door open with the dignity of a well-trained butler.
“Good evening, sir. I trust the event was to your liking.” There was no emotion in her voice; Leaf had merely made an obligatory pleasantry.
“Wonderful,” Bruce replied, wondering what he should say.
“Is there anything I can do for you, sir? A drink of something?”
Bruce’s throat felt as dry and rough as a piece of sandpaper. “Thanks, Leaf,” Bruce drained the glass she handed to him and handed it back for a refill while Sue waited expectantly and with some apprehension for his reaction to her being there.
“Hi!” he said to Sue, “What’s the story?”
He did not wait for an answer as he made for the bedroom and his ‘proper’ clothes. Leaf wasn’t as efficient as she probably thought she was. Anybody with his best interests at heart would have told him Sue was inside.
“That’s more comfy,” Bruce said to himself as he wandered back into the lounge after swapping his long white robe for a pair of shorts and a singlet.. He wasn’t even aware of Leaf almost dropping the glass she was carrying, or her stunned look as she took in the sight of his limbs. She had never seen anybody, let alone a male, practically nude before.
“Are you okay?” Bruce asked Sue, noting her strained look.
“No, not really.”
“Tell me about it,” Bruce suggested, surprised at himself. “Come over here and sit by me.” He made a space for her on the couch.
Sue ignored the space and instead sat on his knee and wrapped her hands around his neck. At another time Bruce might have welcomed such a direct approach; for the moment, though, her attentions made him uncomfortable. Against his will, he felt an erection grow in his shorts, and his heart started to pound behind his ribs. Surely Sue must feel it pressing against her backside? If she did, she made no comment about it. Or maybe she did, because she seemed to wriggle around in his lap for far longer than it should have taken her to get comfortable.
“Let me go, will ya? I can’t breathe.” Bruce peeled her arms away. “Now, tell me, what’s the problem?”
“I feel so lonely,” she whimpered. “Please let me stay here with you for a while.”
“Women!” Bruce, who wasn’t feeling lonely at all, grunted under his breath.
“And there’s this creepy man over there who tells me he is my assistant and keeps giving me strange looks.”
“He’s there to look after you. I have one here too, an assistant I mean. Well, you’ve obviously met Leaf. So what’s the problem?”
Sue sighed. “I just don’t like it, him. Please, can I stay here just for a few days until I settle down?”
“For how long?” Bruce really wanted to be shot of her, but he weakened despite himself. “Oh I suppose so,” he agreed gruffly, “as long as you keep out of my way.”
“Thanks, Bruce.” Sue immediately brightened, gave him a hug and a peck on the cheek, and then untwined her arms from around his neck, having achieved what she wanted.
“Make yourself at home,” he grunted, a little miffed, and walked out to the patio. Bruce set his second beer on the table, slumped into one of the chairs and rolled himself another smoke. Sue’s presence was unsettling him for no good reason that he could discover; his former buoyancy had dissipated. He barely noticed her come out and sit beside him.
“Do you recognize any of the stars, Bruce?” He gazed moodily into the sky. Darkness was falling and the first stars were twinkling overhead.
“Shit, woman,” he said roughly. “We’re probably in the stars we can see from home and we must be millions of miles from there.”
“Do you think we’ll ever make it home?” Sue gripped his arm tightly.
Bruce felt in his heart there was always a chance. Nevertheless, his brain suggested it was unlikely he would ever see home again. Sensing Sue needed to be assured of the possibility, no matter how remote he said, “There’s always a chance.” Not in my lifetime though, he thought, but didn’t voice it.
He got up su
ddenly, drained his beer and announced he was off to check the dogs. He found Sue’s depression contagious. Just as he thought, even at this early stage, he might be coming to grips with having to stay on the planet for the rest of his days, he suddenly felt totally despondent about the whole thing.
The dogs started barking as soon as he approached their kennels.
“Get in, Cop.” Being the leader of the pack and having certain duties and assumed privileges, Cop had taken it upon himself to investigate the boss’s new place as soon as he was let out of his kennel. Bruce wasn’t about to encourage that sort of behavior.
“Nice doggie!” Sue had followed Bruce outside and met Cop, who wasn’t slow in coming forward when it came to a bit of attention. After a few pats he jumped up to lick her face by way of appreciation.
“Cop, you bastard!” Bruce hissed, and the dog trotted away with his tail wagging jauntily.
“Get up.”
Enjoying their brief romp, the dogs pretended not to hear Bruce. But after another terse command they leapt into their kennels rather than expose themselves to a well-aimed kick in the ribs.
Fifteen
Without a watch, Bruce had no idea what time it was, but with daylight streaming through the uncurtained window he presumed it must be morning. He hated getting out of bed at the best of times but eventually, after much procrastination, he thought he’d better get up and see what was going on.
His first port of call was the toilet and his first cigarette of the day while he wondered what he was going to do with himself. Much pushing and straining produced no result, which worried Bruce, for usually his bowels were as regular as clockwork. From memory he hadn’t had a movement the day before either. It was only much later that Bruce discovered that bowel movements on Skid, because of the structure and consistency of the diet, were few and far between. So much for the simple pleasures of life.
After it became obvious that nothing was going to happen for the moment, Bruce flicked the cigarette butt into the bowl and went to check out the bathroom. He found a disposable razor but it had no edge to it, so shaving was obviously out.
A toothbrush stood in a glass along with a tube of paste that almost tasted like toothpaste, although the brush itself was a bit soft for Bruce’s liking. “You’ve got to hand to them. At least they try sometimes, even if they aren’t always successful,” he mused as he brushed his teeth vigorously.
After he’d had a shower Bruce tramped around the house looking for something to do and bumped into Leaf, who was carrying what was looked like his breakfast out to the patio.
Bruce began to eat it. Not exactly bacon and eggs with last night’s leftover spud. More like cold porridge or stale Weet-bix.
“Can you find my tablet please, Leaf.” Bruce felt saying ‘please’ to his servant didn’t seem to have the right ring about it to him but he said it anyway. Maybe he could satisfy his daily news fix. He always began his day with a quick look at the online news and his email inbox.
Unknown to Bruce, Leaf was a privileged person on Skid. He thought she was merely a servant with no other useful skills, but not only was she a daughter of one of Skid’s more important families, she also had an occupation – though she did not exactly see things in that light. Waiting on an offworlder was not what she had in mind when her cousin Toytoo asked if she wanted to join him working on a secret project for the senate.
Aware that Toytoo had just returned from a journey to the far reaches of the universe, Leaf had imagined that her years of training as a pilot might be useful to him in some unspecified capacity. Instead she found herself being treated like a domestic drone by a being she considered her intellectual and cultural inferior. Leaf seethed with resentment at this treatment, not only in the offworlder’s casual abuse of her social status but at the thoughtless behavior of one of her peers by placing her in this almost untenable position. Even in this emancipated age she could not begin to object about Toytoo’s insensitive behavior. One word out of place, the slightest hint of dissatisfaction or insubordination about her role, and without a second thought he would simply have her shipped off to a social re-education center, from which there was no return.
The tablet duly appeared, presented with an almost mocking bow, which Bruce did not notice. However unwillingly, Leaf had to attend to the offworlder. This did not mean she had to be polite. Indeed the only culturally correct means she had available to her to respond to the situation was to be extremely impolite. But the offworlder was completely ignorant of Skidian culture and the elaborate courtesies that were an instinctive part of any interaction between Skidians, and so was totally oblivious of her calculated insults.
Bruce was looking for the news but providing a news service didn’t appear to be one of the tablet’s functions. The big television-like system in the corner of the lounge had nothing either, and all he could get off the radio was some really weird music.
The tablet did tell him that newspapers were unknown on Skid. There was no news, no current events, not even a sports news service. How did anybody find out what was going on in this place if there were no news broadcasts?
Sue did not seem to care one way or the other. She had joined him on the patio, complained about the cigarette butt in the toilet, told him off for smoking while she ate and then asked him what he was going to do for the day. Maybe the Skidians were like Sue, not at all interested in what was going on in the world around them.
“We aren’t exactly tourists, you know,” he said after hearing the list of things she had planned. He would be quite happy sitting around the place, resting. Besides, he thought he’d better stay put and wait for Cyprus.
Rather that than let Sue drag him around bored rigid while she searched out places of ‘interest’, so Bruce passed the time asking questions of his tablet.
Then he remembered the large book he had taken from the archeological site the previous day and decided to have a browse through that while he was waiting.
On the opening pages he found an introduction and brief history of the center.
Articles of Establishment 18963
By order of the Minister for the Department of Agriculture this Disaster Recovery Center has been established to ensure the availability of pure stock for the replanting of food crops after unspecified destruction of common stocks. Said stocks will be under the control of the Director of Agriculture and dispensed at his discretion at a time(s) he may deem appropriate. This center contains sufficient seed stocks for the provision of three seasons’ plantings at 18963 population requirements without replenishment.
The introduction continued in the same vein for several pages. Bruce flicked through the inventory, wondering what sort of disaster they had been preparing for and why the stocks hadn’t been used. Surely the Skidians’ technology and sophistication would have prevented any major disasters befalling them? And then Bruce thought about that properly. Nah! – as they were in the process of finding out standard human, well Skidian, hubris and an increasing reliance on their technology had just made them more vulnerable to a really sophisticated attack or major disaster.
Bruce was about to set the ledger aside when several creased pages caught his eye, offending his sense of neatness. He flipped over to the pages and found several loose pieces of paper tucked in between. He flattened them out on the table and read.
Sometime not long after the establishment of the center two events had occurred that had rendered it virtually obsolete. Until today, Bruce observed wryly. The first was that synthetic food plants were established beneath the oceans at various points around the planet.
As prototype units proved their worth, the planet’s reliance on organically produced food decreased until, within a few years, everyone consumed synthofood. At about the time the synthofood plants were reaching their full productive capacity, Skid underwent a devastating surprise attack from the inhabitants of Celcious B, a warlike race from a nearby planet.
For generations Skid had held a stranglehold on univ
ersal food and industrial production, thereby keeping the rest of the system firmly under its control. This attack was retaliation for centuries of oppression, and it nearly succeeded. Skid’s population had been decimated in the attack, its cities reduced to smoking ruins, its landscape completely rearranged by weapons too awesome to contemplate.
Luckily for what remained of Skid after the attack, in what had been a belated attempt to protect what was left of their environment after eons of ecological rape, all industry had been relocated to sites below the oceans and was largely untouched during the assault, and the population had been confined to several enormous urban areas.
The Celcions may have wreaked havoc on the planet’s surface but Skid’s industrial and military might remained virtually intact. The Skidian survivors retaliated by completely decimating Celcious B. Industrial areas were flattened, intellectuals hounded and executed, schools and hospitals closed, books burned, until the Celcions were reduced from a once-proud people to beggars existing on handouts from Skid. Stripped of potential leaders and technocrats, the Celcions were reduced to squatting about staging zones like a planet of cargo cultists or welfare beneficiaries waiting for the next payment.
Bruce wondered how super-efficient the super-efficient Skidians had really been on Celcious B. How long ago did all this happen? The date on the notes was meaningless to him, and his tablet couldn’t or wouldn’t say. It was as though a block had been put on any historical information. All he had was this minute fragment of historical data and heaps of questions.
Why weren’t the Skidians interested in history? Bruce recalled Yarad’s observations and realized that such interest must be actively discouraged, as if a call had gone out from somewhere, at some point in time, that the past had ceased to exist. Didn’t they ever question their origins, wonder where they came from? Maybe a Skidian religion provided some kind of psychological buffer against the unknown and incomprehensible? The tablet was disappointingly mute on this subject as well, saying only that the incumbent leader, in this case Inel, was the spiritual and secular leader of the planet. In other words, he’s God, thought Bruce.
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