Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

by Grant Naylor

  'I know what you're referring to,' Rimmer nodded his head vigorously. 'It's because I gave you a hard time since you came aboard, isn't it? But don't you see? I had to do that, to build up your character. To change the boy into a man.'

  'Oh, do smeg off.'

  'I always thought you saw me as a sort of big brother character. Heck - we don't always get on. But then, what brothers do? Cain didn't always get on with Abel. . .'

  'He killed him.'

  'Absolutely. But underneath all that they were still brothers, with brotherly affection. Heaven knows, I didn't always get on with my brothers - in fact once, when I was fourteen, I needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after all three of them held my head down a toilet for rather too long but we laughed about it afterwards, when I'd started breathing again 'You're not going to persuade me not to go into stasis. I am not spending the rest of my life with a man who keeps his underpants on coat hangers.'

  Rimmer held up his outspread palms in a gesture of innocence. 'I'm not trying to persuade you.'

  'Then what's all this about?'

  'I don't know. I'm not sure what anything's about any more.

  Here comes the emotional blackmail, thought Lister.

  'It's not easy, you know, being dead.'

  'Uhn,' Lister grunted.

  'It's so hard to come to terms with I mean death. Your own death. I mean, you have plans ... so many things you wanted to do, and now...'

  'Look - I'm sorry you're dead, OK? It was cruddy luck. But you've got to put it behind you. You're completely obsessed by it.'

  'Obsessed??'

  'It's all you ever talk about.'

  'Well, pardon me for dying.'

  'Frankly, Rimmer, it's very boring. You're like one of those people who are always talking about their illnesses.'

  'Well!' said Rimmer, his eyes wide in astonishment.

  'It's just boring. Change the disc. Flip the channel. Death isn't the handicap it once was. For smeg's sake, cheer up'

  'Well!' said Rimmer. And he couldn't think of anything else to say. So he said 'Well!' again.

  'And quite honestly, the prospect of hanging around and having to listen to you whining and moaning, and bleating and whingeing for the next three quarters of a century, because you happen to have snuffed it, does not exactly knock me out.'

  'Well!' said Rimmer.

  'Fifty years alone with you? I'd rather drink a pint of my own diarrhoea.'

  'Well!'

  'Or a pint of somebody else's, come to that. Every hour, on the hour, for the next seventy years.'

  'I can't believe' - Rimmer was shaking - 'you've just said that.'

  Holly faded into focus on the sleeping quarters' vid-screen.

  'Oi,' he said, rather un-computerlike, 'I've just opened the radiation seals to the cargo decks. And there's something down there.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Some kind of life-form.'

  'What is it?'

  'I can only see it on the heat scanner. I don't know what it is - I only know what it isn't.'

  'What isn't it, then?'

  'It isn't human.'

  FIVE

  Lister clutched the bazookoid - the heavy portable rockblasting mining laser - to his chest, and checked again that the pack on his back was registering 'Full Charge'.

  Light flitted through the wire mesh of the rickety lift as it clumsily juddered its way down into the bowels of the ship.

  Three miles of lift shaft. Over five hundred floors, most of them stretching the six-mile length of the ship.

  These were the cargo decks, where all the supplies were stored.

  The tiny, exposed cage shuddered and rocked slowly past floor after floor.

  Down.

  Perhaps twenty floors of food, vacuum-sealed, tin mountains, stretching out beyond vision.

  Down.

  Four floors of wood - a million chopped trees stacked in silent pyramids.

  Down.

  Floors of mining equipment.

  Down.

  Floors of raw silicates, mined from Ganymede.

  Down.

  Floors of water, stored and still in enormous glass tanks.

  And down.

  And the only sound was the metallic squealing of the lift cable as it plunged them deeper and deeper into the gloomy abyss.

  'I don't know why I'm scared. I'm a hologram. Whatever it is, it can't do anything to me.'

  'Thanks. That makes me feel really secure.'

  The gloom enveloped them. The light on Lister's mining helmet cut only twenty feet into the darkness. Lister flipped down the helmet's night-visor and switched the beam to infra red.

  Down.

  Then, something strange. These floors were empty. Hundreds of cubic miles of supplies were missing! Food, metal, wood, water - missing.

  'It's gone!'

  'What has?' Rimmer squinted blindly into the darkness.

  'Everything.'

  'What d'you mean, everything?'

  'All the supplies The last ten floors - they were all empty.'

  'I'm so glad I'm already dead. I'm so, so glad.'

  'You want to shut the smeg up?'

  Down.

  D

  O

  W

  N

  In the bottom right hand corner of Lister's visor a small green cross began to flicker.

  'Oh, smeg. There is something here.'

  'Where?'

  The cross crept up the visor. Lister wanted to say: 'The next floor,' but he couldn't. He couldn't speak.

  The lift coughed to a stop. The whine of the motor faded to nothing.

  There it was.

  Stretching before them, six miles in length, half-lit and desolate.

  A huge, impossible city.

  A city!

  The lift doors folded open - cher-chunk! - and they stepped out onto the rough cobbled street.

  Crudely fashioned igloo-shaped dwellings lined the roadway; hummocks of carved wood, without doorways. Each had only a slit, perhaps a yard wide and less than a foot high, cut six feet from the ground.

  Lister checked the charge on the bazookoid back pack, and they both started cautiously down the street. Before them was a crossroads. The igloo hummocks stretched out in every direction. The flashing cross in Lister's visor throbbed more insistently and indicated they should turn right.

  'What is this place?'

  Lister slung the bazookoid over his shoulder and scrambled up one of the hummocks. He poked his head through a slit and peered into the dim interior.

  'Some kind of house. But it's tiny just enough room for two people to crouch in and peer out of the gash at the top. Whatever lived here really liked confined spaces.' Built into a tiny recess in the wall was a small bookcase containing six books. Lister reached in and managed to grab three of them. He dropped down from the hummock.

  Rimmer peered over his shoulder as he opened each book in turn. Every single page in every book was blank. Lister slipped the books into his haversack, grabbed the bazookoid, re-checked the charge, and they moved off again.

  After five minutes or so, they reached a square. Rows of benches faced a television screen attached to a video recorder. Lister ejected the disc. It bore the ship's regulation supply logo.

  'What is it?' asked Rimmer.

  '...The Flintstones.'

  They turned left. More hummocks. Another square, but this time set out like a street cafe: tables with parasols; wooden chairs. And in the centre: a table, fully laid, with two gold candelabra, both lit. A meal, half-eaten, sat steaming on a plate.

  The blip on Lister's visor was pulsing faster than ever.

  'It's here!' Lister's finger tightened on the beam button of the bazookoid.

  'Whatever it is, it's right here!'

  A flash.

  A pink blur flashed from the top of a hummock, pinning Lister to the floor, and sending the weapon skittering across the cobbles.

  Rimmer watched, half-paralysed, as the pink neon-suited man wi
th immaculate coiffeur sniffed Lister, looked up with a puzzled expression, sniffed him more deeply, then finally got to his feet, took out a clothes brush and smoothed out his suit.

  'Sorry, Man,' he said, 'I thought you were food'

  SIX

  From the moment he discovered that the cadmium II had achieved critical mass, Holly had less than fifteen nanoseconds to act. He sealed off as much of the ship as possible - the whole cargo area, and the ship's supply bay.

  Simultaneously, he set the drive computer to accelerate far beyond the dull green-blue disc of Neptune in the distance, and out into the abyss of unknown space. Then he read the Bible, the Koran, and other major religious works: he covered Islam, Zoroastrianism, Mazdaism, Zarathustrianism, Dharma, Brahmanism, Hinduism, Vedanta, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinayana, Mahayana, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism and Confucianism. Then he read all of Marx, Engels, Freud, jung and Einstein. And, to kill the remaining few nanoseconds, he skipped briefly through Joe Klumpp's Zero Gee Football - It's a Funny Old game.

  At the end of this, Holly came to two conclusions. First, given the whole sphere of human knowledge, it was still impossible to determine the existence or not Of God. And second, Joe Klumpp should have stuck to having his hair permed.

  ***

  In the hold, Frankenstein's four offspring began to breed. Each litter produced an average of four kittens, three times a year. At the end of the first year, the second generation of kittens started to breed too. They also produced three annual litters of three to four kittens.

  When Frankenstein died, at the great old age of fourteen, she left behind one hundred and ninety-eight thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two cats.

  198,732 cats, who continued to breed.

  ***

  Still Red Dwarf accelerated.

  Holly witnessed at first hand phenomena which had never been witnessed before.

  He saw phenomena which had only been guessed at by theoretical physicists.

  He saw a star form.

  He saw another star die.

  He saw a black hole.

  He saw pulsars and quasars.

  He saw twin and triplet sun systems.

  He saw sights Copernicus would have torn out his eyes for, but all the while he couldn't stop thinking how bad that book was by Joe Klumpp.

  ***

  The cats continued to breed.

  ***

  Red Dwarf continued to accelerate.

  ***

  The forty-square mile cargo hold was seething with cats.

  A sea of cats.

  A sea of cats, sealed from the radiation-poisoned decks above with nowhere to go.

  Only the smartest, the biggest and the strongest survived The mutants.

  The mutants, who had rudimentary fingers instead of claws, who stood on their hind legs, and clubbed rivals to death with crudely made clubs. Who found the best breeding mates.

  And bred.

  Felis erectus was born

  ***

  Red Dwarf, still accelerating, passed five stars in concentric orbits, Performing a breathtaking, mind-boggling stellar ballet.

  Not that Holly noticed.

  He'd been on his own now for two million years and was no longer interested in mind-boggling stellar ballets. What he was really into was Netta Muskett novels.

  The young doctor had just told Jemma she had only three years to live, as he held her in his powerful masculine grip, his dark brooding eyes piercing her very soul. Outside, the suns danced into a perfect pentagon and span, end over end, like a gigantic Catherine wheel.

  But Holly didn't see it. He was too busy reading Doctor, Darling.

  ***

  Then there was a plague.

  And the plague was hunger.

  Less than thirty Cat tribes now survived, roaming the cargo decks on their hind legs in a desperate search for food.

  But the food had gone.

  The supplies were finished.

  Weak and ailing, they prayed at the supply hold's silver mountains: huge towering acres of metal rocks which, in their pagan way, the mutant Cats believed watched over them.

  Amid the wailing and the screeching one Cat stood up and held aloft the sacred icon. The icon which had been passed down as holy, and one day would make its use known.

  It was a piece of V-shaped metal with a revolving handle on its head.

  He took down a silver rock from the silver mountain, while the other Cats cowered and screamed at the blasphemy.

  He placed the icon on the rim of the rock, and turned the handle.

  And the handle turned.

  And the rock opened.

  And inside the rock was Alphabetti spaghetti in tomato sauce.

  And in the other rocks were even more delights. Sugar-free baked beans. Chicken and mushroom Toastie Toppers. Faggots in rich meaty gravy. All sealed in perfect vacuums, preserved from the ravages of Time.

  God had spoken.

  And Felis sapiens was born.

  ***

  Holly was gurning. He was pulling his pixelized face into the most bizarre and ludicrous expressions he could muster. He'd been gurning now for nearly two thousand years. It wasn't much of a hobby, but it helped pass the time.

  He was beginning to worry that he was going computer-senile. Driven crazy by loneliness. What he needed, he decided, was a companion.

  He would build a woman.

  A perfectly functioning human woman, capable of independent thought and decision-making. Identical to a real woman in the minutest detail.

  The problem was he didn't know how.

  He didn't even know what to make the nose out of.

  So he gave the whole scheme up as a bad idea, and started gurning again.

  ***

  And there was a war between the Cats.

  A bloody war that laid waste many of their number.

  But the reason was good.

  The cause was sensible.

  The principle was worth fighting over.

  It was a holy war.

  Some of the Cats believed the one true father of Catkind was a man called Cloister, who saved Frankenstein, the Holy Mother, and was frozen in time by the evil men who sought to kill her. One day Cloister would return to lead them to Bearth, the planet where they could make their home.

  The other Cats believed exactly the same thing, except they maintained the name of the true Father of Catkind was a man called Clister.

  They spent the best part of two thousand years fighting over this huge, insuperable theological chasm.

  Millions died.

  Finally, a truce was called.

  Commandeering the fleet of shuttles from the docking bay, half the Cats flew off in one direction, in search of Cloister and the Promised Planet, and the other half flew off in the opposite direction, in search of Clister and the Promised Planet.

  Behind them they left the ones who were too weak to travel: the old, the lame, the sick and the dying.

  And one by one, they died.

  Soon only two remained: one a cripple, one an idiot.

  They snuggled together for warmth and companionship And one day, to the cripple and the idiot, a son was born.

  SEVEN

  So the last human being alive, a man who had died, and a creature who'd evolved from cats, stood around the metal table that was bolted to the floor of the sleeping quarters and listened to a computer with an IQ of six thousand, who couldn't remember who'd knocked Swansea City out of the 1967 FA cup, explain what the hell was happening.

  'So he's a Cat,' said Lister for the fourteenth time.

  The Cat took a small portable steam iron out of his pocket and started pressing the sleeve of his jacket.

  Outwardly, at least, he was human in appearance - there was a slight flattening of his face: his ears were a little higher on his head; and two of his gleaming upper teeth hung down longer and sharper than the others, so they peeked, whitely, over his lips whenever he grinned. Which he did a lot.

  He didn't seem to have a tr
ace of super-ego. He was all ego and id - monumentally self-centred and, if he'd been human, you would have described him as vain. But you couldn't apply human values to Cats - there seemed to be very little connection between the two cultures. The invention which proved the turning point in Cat history wasn't Fire or the Wheel: it was the Steam-operated Trouser Press.

  Getting information out of the Cat wasn't easy: if you asked him too many questions, he just got bored, and went off to take one of the five or six showers he appeared to need daily.

  He didn't have a name. He found it difficult to understand the idea. He was of the unshakeable conviction that he was the absolute centre of the entire universe, the reason for its being; and the notion that someone might now know who he was was beyond his comprehension.

  'What about in relationships?' Lister had persisted.

  'Re-la-tionships?' The Cat rolled the word around on his tongue. The Cats had learned English from the vast number of video discs and training films that were stored in the cargo decks, waiting for delivery to Triton. But most human concepts eluded them.

  'Yeah, you know, between a man cat and a woman cat What do you call each other?'

  'Hey, you.'

  'What? In the entire relationship' you never refer to each other by name?'

  'You know how long a Cat relationship lasts? Three minutes. First minute's fine; second minute, you feel trapped! Third minute, you've got to leave.

  The very thought of a relationship which lasted longer than three minutes brought the Cat out in a cold sweat, and he had to go and take another hot shower.

  And so the evening progressed.

  When the Cat wasn't showering or snoozing' he was preening. He appeared to have secreted about his immaculate person an arsenal of combs and brushes, none of which seemed to spoil the line of his immaculate pink suit.

  For the most part, details of the Cat's background remained obscure. He found the concept of 'parents' bewildering. He couldn't believe there was ever a time he wasn't born. When he put his mind to it, he did recall two other Cats who used to be around, but most of the time they'd avoided each other. One of them, he reckoned, had probably been his mother - because she wouldn't sleep with him.

  In fact, she'd got quite angry at his approaches and hit him on the head with a large frying pan.