Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

by Grant Naylor

  And he was totally alone.

  The enormity of all this was slowly beginning to sink in when Holly dropped his final bombshell. The one about the human race being extinct.

  'What d'you mean, "extinct"?'

  'Well, three million years is a very good age for a species. I mean, your average genus only survives a couple of hundred thousand years, max. And that's with a clean-living species, like dinosaurs. Dinosaurs didn't totally screw up the environment. They just went around quietly eating things. And even then, they didn't get to clock up the big one mill. So the chances of the human race making it to the big three-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh are practically nonexistent. So I'm afraid you just have to face up to the very real possibility that your species is dead.'

  Much to his surprise, Lister had let out a sob.

  'Were you very close?' Holly tilted his head sympathetically. 'Well, yeah, I suppose you must have been, really.' That was a bit of an odd thing to say, he thought.

  Lister took out his shirt-tail and blew his nose. 'So, I'm the last human being alive?'

  'Yeah. You never think it's going to happen to your species, do you? It's always something that happens to somebody else's.'

  ***

  Lister spent the next few days going to pieces.

  There seemed little point in getting dressed, and so he wandered around naked, swigging from a bottle of whisky.

  He didn't know what to do.

  He didn't know if there was anything to do.

  And worst of all, he didn't much care.

  He slept wherever he fell, a painful, dreamless sleep. He hardly ate, and drank a small loch-worth of whisky. He didn't even like whisky, but beer was too cumbersome to carry around in sufficient quantities to achieve oblivion.

  He lost a stone in weight, and started shouting at people who weren't there.

  Every evening, at around 5 p.m. he'd stagger, stark naked, into the Drive Room and, waving his whisky bottle dangerously in the air, he'd belch incoherent obscenities at Holly's huge visage on the gigantic monitor screen.

  Sometimes Lister imagined he'd heard the phone ring, and he'd rush to pick it up.

  On the evening of the fifth day as he staggered through the Red Dwarf shopping mall, toasting invisible crowds, he keeled over and blacked out.

  When he woke up in the medical unit, a man with an 'H' on his forehead was looking down at him with undisguised contempt.

  TWO

  'You're a hologram,' said Lister.

  'So I am,' said Rimmer.

  'You died in the accident,' said Lister.

  'So I did,' said Rimmer.

  'What's it like?'

  'Death?' Rimmer mused. 'It's like going on holiday with a group of Germans.' He cradled his head in his hands. 'I'm so depressed I want to weep. To be cut down in my prime - a boy of thirty-one, with the body of a thirty-year-old. It's unbearable. All my plans; my career, my future; everything hinged on my being alive. It was mandatory.'

  'What happened to me? Did I black out?'

  'Excuse me, I'm talking about my being dead.'

  'Sorry. I thought you'd finished.'

  'I'm so depressed,' repeated Rimmer, 'so depressed.'

  Over the next couple of days, Lister slowly recovered in the medical bay. One morning, while Rimmer was off reading the How to Cope With Your Own Death booklet for the fifteenth time, Lister took the opportunity to ask Holly why he'd brought Rimmer back.

  'You'd gone to pieces. You couldn't cope. You needed a companion.'

  'But Rimmer??'

  'I did a probability study,' lied Holly, 'and it turns out Rimmer is absolutely the best person to keep you sane.'

  'Rimmer?'

  Holly's disembodied head tilted forward in a nod.

  'Why not Petersen?'

  'A man who buys a methane-filled twenty-four bedroomed bijou residence on an oxygenless moon whose only distinction is that it rotates in the opposite direction from its mother planet - you seriously expect me to bring him back to keep you sane? Gordon Bennett - he couldn't even keep himself sane, let alone anyone else.'

  'Yeah, but at least we had things in common.'

  'The only thing you had in common was your mutual interest in consuming ridiculous amounts of alcohol.'

  'Selby? Chen?'

  'Ditto.'

  'What about Krissie?'

  'Dave, she finished with you.'

  'But, Rimmer?? Anyone would have been better than Rimmer. Anyone. Hermann Goering would have been better than Rimmer. All right, he was a drug-crazed Nazi transvestite, but at last we could have gone dancing.'

  'It was Jean-Paul Sartre,' said Holly, thinking it may very well actually have been Albert Camus, or yur'Flaubert, or perhaps it was even Sacha Distel, 'who said hell was being trapped for eternity in a room with your friends.'

  'Sure,' said Lister, 'but all Sartre's mates were French.'

  'I think I'm thinking, therefore I might possibly be,' Rimmer said aloud as he padded silently around the sleeping quarters in his hologramatic slippers. Try as he might, he couldn't even begin to grapple with the metaphysics of it all.

  ***

  'I think I might be thinking, therefore I may possibly be being.

  To Rimmer it was incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo. It was more baffling than the three-dimensional foreplay diagrams in Lister's zero-gravity sex manual.

  He hated being dead.

  When he was a boy on Io, he remembered witnessing an 'Equal rights for the Dead' march, where holograms from all the moons of Jupiter had rallied for better conditions.

  The Dead were generally given short shrift throughout the solar system. They were banned from most hotels and restaurants. They found it almost impossible to hold down a decent job. And, even on television, although holograms featured occasionally, they were generally only included as token deads. Not a single golf club throughout known space had a dead member.

  The living had a very uncomfortable relationship with holograms in general, reminding them as they did of their own mortality. Also there was a natural resentment towards 'Deadies'- to become a hologram, outside of the Space Corps, you had to be one of the mega-rich. The horribly expensive computer run-time, and the massive power supply that was needed, kept hologramatic afterlife very exclusive indeed.

  Sitting on the shoulders of his brother, Frank, the six-year old Rimmer had booed and jeered with the rest of the crowd. Encouraged by Frank, he'd actually personally thrown a stone, which had passed silently through the back of a hologram woman marching in line.

  'Deadies! Dirty Deadies!'

  And now he was one of them.

  A dirty Deady.

  Well, he wasn't going to let it get him down any more. He wasn't going to let it stand in his way. He was dead, there was no use bleating about it. Was that a reason to quit? Did Napoleon quit when he was dead? Did Julius Caesar quit when he was dead?

  Well ... yes.

  But that was before the hologram was invented. And that was the advantage he had over two of the greatest men in history. He may not have been the most successful person who ever lived when he was alive but, by God, he'd make up for that in his death.

  There was still that ziggurat to climb. There was still that gold bar to achieve.

  Nelson had one eye and one arm. Caesar was an epileptic. Napoleon, the man himself, suffered so badly from gonorrhoea and syphilis, he could barely pee. It seemed a veritable boon to Rimmer that the only disability he appeared to have was being dead!

  First thing tomorrow, he thought, I'm going to get the skutters to paint a sign to hang over my bunk. And he pictured it in his mind's eye, on polished oak: 'TOMORROW IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR DEATH.'

  THREE

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  A sound like a buzz-saw played through an open-air rock festival's PA system awoke Rimmer from a dream about his mother chasing him through a car-park with a submachine-gun.

  He swung his legs over t
he bunk, and tried to locate the sound of the buzz-saw played through an open-air rock festival's PA system. It was Lister, snoring.

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  The snore drilled into Rimmer's skull - perfectly even, up and down, followed by a catarrhy trill, and then the worst part of all: the silence. The silence that always made him think Lister had stopped snoring. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. He has, he has stopped snoring! Four seconds. Fi ... then, the snort, then the revolting semi-choking sound as the mucus shifted around his cavernous nasal system, and back onto the perfectly even snore.

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  Rimmer stood up and leaned over Lister's sleeping form. There was a half-empty metal curry tray lying on his chest, which rose and fell in rhythm with his grinding snore.

  Rimmer's first impulse was to reach over and pinch his nose, but, of course, he couldn't. He couldn't shake him either, or turn him on his side. He couldn't even take a thin piece of piano wire and slowly garrotte him. If he hadn't been a hologram, this would definitely have been his favourite option.

  He arched over, until his mouth was in whispering distance of Lister's car. Then he screamed: 'STOP SNORING, YOU FILTHY SON OF A BASTARD'S BASTARD'S BASTARD!!!'

  Lister jerked awake 'What?'

  'You were snoring.'

  'Eh?'

  'You were snoring.'

  'Oh,' said Lister, lying back down. 'Sorry.'

  Within three seconds Lister was back asleep. And within ten, he was snoring again.

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  The man was impossible to live with! He was an animal! He was an orang-utan! He was a hippo! He was like one of those little grey monkeys you see at the zoo who openly masturbate whenever you go round with your great-aunt Florrie! He was quite the most revoltingly heinous creature it had ever been Rimmer's misfortune to encounter. What further proof did you need that God did not exist? As if He'd allow this ... this onion! to become the last surviving member of the human race. He symbolised everything that was cheap and low and nasty and tacky about Mankind. Why him? A man whose idea of a change of clothing was to turn his T-shirt inside out, so that the stench was on the outside! Who used orange peel and curry cartons as makeshift ashtrays. Who would frequently tug out a huge great lump of rotting, fetid meat from one of the cavities in his teeth and announce proudly that it could feed a family of four! Who bit his nails - his toenails! He would actually sit there, with his foot in his mouth, and trim his nails by biting them. And then - the most hideous thing of all - he would eat the cuttings! Eating your toenails, for God's sake! This was the Last Man. The Last Human Being. A person who could belch La Bamba after eleven pints of lager.

  A man who ate so many curries he sweated Madras sauce. Revolting! His bed sheets looked like someone had just given birth to a baby on them. And he destroyed things! Not on purpose: he was just such a clumsy, slobby, ham-fisted son-of-a-prostidrold somehow he always destroyed things. Rimmer remembered once showing him a photograph of his mother and, five seconds later, turned round to see him absently using it as a toothpick! He once lent him his favourite album, and when it came back there was a footprint over Reggle Dixon's Hammond organ!

  And raspberry jam seeds buried in the groove. How is that possible? To get jam on a record? Who listens to Hammond organ music and eats raspberry jam? And the inner sleeve was missing! And there was a telephone number and a doodle on the lyric sheet! Destroyed!

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  How could anyone possible live with this man??

  HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

  How could it be that here, snoring like an asthmatic warthog, was the last representative of the human race? How was it possible that this man was alive, while he was dead?

  How??? HOW???

  HOW????

  FOUR

  Only two days earlier Lister had finally got round to collecting all his personal belongings from Vacuum Storage, and now here he was, sitting on his bunk, packing them all up again to take them back to Vacuum Storage.

  He'd asked Holly to turn the ship around and head back to Earth. Maybe the human race was extinct, maybe it wasn't. Maybe they'd evolved into a race of super-beings. Maybe they'd wiped one another out in some stupid war and the ants had taken over. But where else was there to go?

  Earth was home. He had to find out if it still existed, even if it did take another three million years to get back. So he'd decided to go back into stasis.

  What else was there to do? He certainly had no intention of hanging around with only a highly neurotic dead man for company.

  He looked down at his vacuum storage trunk. He really did have a pretty feeble collection of belongings: four cigarette lighters, all out of gas; a copy of the Pop-up Karma Sutra Zero gravity version; a hard ball of well-chewed gum, which he'd bought at a bar in Mimas from a guy who guaranteed it had once been chewed by Chelsea Brown, the famous actress; a pair of his adoptive grandmother's false teeth, which he'd kept for two reasons: (a) sentimental, and (b) they were just the thing for opening bottles of beer; his bass guitar with two strings (both G); three hundred and fifty Zero-Gee football magazines; and his entire collection of Rasta-Billy-Skank DAT tapes.

  And, of course, there were his goldfish.

  He wandered over to the three-foot-long oblong tank and peered into the murky green water. At first, he couldn't see a thing through the slimy silt. He flicked on the underwater illumination switch and pressed his face to the side of the tank. Gradually, through the gloom, he made out a moving silhouette. As his eyes adjusted, he saw it was Lennon, swimming happily in and out of the fake plastic Vatican. But he couldn't see McCartney He rolled up his sleeve and swirled his arm around in the stagnant filth, releasing a pungent, evil smell. Finally he located the missing fish, lodged in the papal balcony above St Peter's Square. It was dead.

  He shook his head, and smacked the fish violently against the corner of Rimmer's slanting architect's desk, then held the fish to his ear and listened. Nothing.

  Picking up Rimmer's Space Scout knife, he flicked out a blade and opened up the fish like a watch.

  There, was the problem! A loose battery. He prodded it back into place and snapped the fish closed. McCartney blinked back into life. He dropped the piscine droid into the water and watched as it happily swam off through the arch of the plastic Sistine Chapel, backwards.

  'Ye-es,' said Lister. 'Brutal.'

  Rimmer walked in through the hatchway and spotted Lister's vacuum trunk. 'What are you doing?'

  Rimmer listened in mounting disbelief as Lister outlined his plan. 'What about me? What am I supposed to do on my own for three million years?'

  'Well, I dunno. I haven't really thought about it.'

  'No. Exactly.'

  'Come on - you can't expect me to hang around here. Why don't you get Holly to turn you off till we get home?'

  'Because, dingleberry brain,' Rimmer rose to his feet, 'if by some gigantic fluke the Earth still exists, and if, by an even greater stretching of the laws of probability, the human race is still alive, and if during the six million years we've been away they haven't evolved into some kind of super race, and we can still understand them; if all that comes to pass - when I get back to Earth, the reasons for me being brought back as a hologram will no longer apply, and my personality disc will be neatly packed away in some dusty vault that nobody ever goes in. And that will be the end of Rimmer, Arnold J.'

  'You never know. When we get back, it might turn out that they've found a cure for Death.'

  Rimmer sucked in his cheeks and rolled his' eyes around in their sockets.

  'Well, you never know,' said Lister, feebly.

  'Oh yes. I expect doctors' waiting rooms are absolutely heaving with cadavers.

  “Ah, Mrs
Harrington. Dropped dead again, eh? Never mind - Rimmer mimed scribbling a prescription - Take two of these, three times a day, and try not to get run over by another bus...'

  'I'm going into stasis,' said Lister, picking up his vacuum trunk, 'and that's that. You don't seriously expect me to spend the rest of my life alone here with you.'

  'Why not?'

  'Fifty-odd years? Alone with you?'

  'What's wrong with that?'

  Lister stopped and put down his trunk. 'I think we should get something straight. I think there's something you don't understand.'

  'What?' said Rimmer.

  'The thing is,' said Lister as kindly as he could: 'I don't actually like you.'

  Rimmer stared, unblinking. This really was news to him. He didn't like Lister, but he always thought Lister liked him. Why on Io shouldn't he like him? What was there not to like?

  'Since when?' he said, with a slight crack in his voice.

  'Since the second we first met. Since a certain taxi ride on Mimas.'

  'That wasn't me! That guy in the false moustache who went to an android brothel?

  That wasn't me!'

  Rimmer was outraged at Lister's accusation. Even though it was true, he felt it was so out of kilter with his own image of himself, he was able to summon up genuine indignation. As if he, Arnold J. Rimmer, would pay money to a, lump of metal and plastic to have sexual intercourse with him! It just wasn't like him.

  True, he did it, but it wasn't like him!

  'I've never been to an android brothel in my life. And if you so much as mention it again, I'll ...' Rimmer faltered. He suddenly realised there wasn't very much he could do to Lister.

  'I don't get it. What point are you trying to make?'

  'The point I'm trying to make, you dirty son of a fetid whoremonger's bitch, is that we're friends!' Rimmer smiled as warmly as he could to help disguise the massive incongruity he'd walked straight into.

  'Sniff your coffee and wake up, Rimmer; we are not friends.'