“I fed them to the treecats! I didn’t eat them myself!”
“Looks like you ate some of them,” I say, rudely aiming a swat at her bottom.
“Ask Harriet if you don’t believe me!”
“That’s just as bad, anyway! The point is you lied about it, and two men are dead as a result.”
“Oh, I bet you really miss Armando. Anyway, I saw you push him. Kenneth stabbed him because he thought he shoved him, but it was you.”
“Imogen,” I say with distant, false politeness, “I don’t remember if I’ve ever asked you. Why did you get fired from Samsung?”
It was Samsung that brought her out to Arcadia to work as a reverse-engineer. But then they let her go, after which she began her downhill slide from taxi driver, to sales rep, to working for us.
“They fired me for not being a team player,” she admits.
I laugh mirthlessly. “You don’t say.”
Harriet’s incomparable bullhorn of a voice comes from the forest. “Hey everyone! Wakey wakey!”
The hunting party tramps out of the trees. They have not got any game. What they have got is a dozen of the spear-hurling monkeys. These are walking with them—Harriet’s got two of them by the hands—and it’s obvious their bodies are built for walking upright, after all. They are not, in fact, monkeys. With their chubby furred bodies, white tummies, and black button eyes and noses, they look more like …
“Ewoks!” Imogen whispers, entranced.
“Sssh,” I say. “Star Wars is a sensitive subject around here.” I’ve got one hand on my lightsaber in case the little fellas turn nasty again, although they’re acting like well-behaved schoolchildren now.
“How do you mean?”
“We used to have a wookie on the crew.” Poor Woolly; the Butterfly-zillas killed her. Of course she wasn’t really a wookie. None of that sort are. It’s just cosplay taken to extremes.
But these little fellas are not cosplaying. They’re live aliens and they’re twittering at us in growly little voices that remind me of … “Care Bears,” I say out loud.
“Care Bears?” says Imogen, who is Canadian, after all.
Donal laughs. “He used to have a robot one when we were little. It did sound like that, didn’t it, Fletch?”
“Thanks for ruining my image,” I say to Donal, mock-angry, and add to Imogen in an undertone: “Don’t worry. Ewoks are only Care Bears that lost their homes in a forest fire, anyway.”
She cracks up as if she’s never heard that one before. I amble over to get a better look at the Care Bears of the Lost Planet. They’ve charmed our dour South Africans properly. Hendrik says: “They saw us throwing sticks at squirrels, and came to say, ‘You are doing it wrong.’”
“Did they actually say that?”
“No, but they use sign language.” He’s gleeful. “They want to give us spear-throwing lessons!”
It’s clear to me that the Care Bears of the Lost Planet are not saying anything. They’re just growling and waving their paws.
“They’re intelligent!” Harriet says giddily.
Oh Jesus, not this again.
I remind everyone that this is exactly what we went through with the treecats. Harriet thought they were intelligent at first, only to be disappointed in the end.
But no one’s interested in my opinion. A few spear-throwing lessons and a shared meal of roast squirrel later, they’re all convinced that we have discovered the first ever race of living sapient aliens. Gordon is recording their voices on his iPhone and running them through various pieces of software to look for linguistic patterns. The clinching piece of evidence for him was that the Care Bears of the Lost Planet know how to start fires (the Boy Scout method) and what’s more, they know how to do it safely, in a dome filled with trees. He also points out that they wear ornaments—little silvery rocks with holes through, strung on dried vines.
One unexpected ally shares my skepticism about the CB of the LPs’ sapience.
“Fletch?” says Kenneth. “I have a confession to make.”
“Do I look like a priest?”
“Not that kind of confession.”
“OK.”
“I wasn’t the pilot of the Hellraiser.”
“Erm, we already agreed on that.”
“I wasn’t the cook, either.”
“I didn’t think you were. What were you really, then? Second assistant bootlicker to the Cannibal Captain?”
“I was the xenobiologist.”
“The Hellraiser had a xenobiologist?”
“Yeah, well, I was really just cover for when people would ask ‘Why does an exploration ship need so many guns?’ It sucked.”
“OK. And?”
“Those little guys aren’t sapient.”
“That’s in your expert opinion?”
“Fuck off. I may not have gone to Harvard, but I am qualified in my field, OK?”
“I believe you, I believe you. I’m just wondering what you’re basing that on.”
“Oh, people thought dolphins and whales were sapient for ages. Billions of dollars were wasted trying to communicate with them. It turns out they’re only about as smart as elephants. Yes, they have a limited faculty for language, but that doesn’t make them sapient. Chimpanzees use tools. That doesn’t make them sapient, either. The test is, are they learning any faster than they’re evolving? And the answer is no. These little guys have been stuck in here for millions of years, right?” Kenneth spreads his hands as if to say, there’s your answer.
“Tell Harriet what you just told me,” I suggest.
He shudders.
“Well, she’ll figure it out eventually,” I say. “They all will.”
And in the meantime, what’s the harm? It’s like Imogen dreaming of building a tree house. We all need something to distract ourselves from the fact that we’re probably stuck here forever.
Humans of the Lost Planet.
Maybe a million years from now, our descendants will have evolved to have fur, and hunt squirrels with sharpened sticks.
CHAPTER 11
But all good things must come to an end, and our romance with the Care Bears of the Lost Planet ends abruptly when they get into it with the treecats.
One minute all our alien friends are lazing happily by the lake, the next minute the fur is flying.
Harriet gets badly scratched trying to pull them apart. The whole heap of them brawl off into the woods. We track them down to the tree that the treecats, true to their nature, have colonized, and discover that Fluffington, Chairman Meow, and friends have lined their nests with silvery gravel, each piece with a hole in it.
The little kleptos have raided the CB of the LPs’ village for sparklies.
This is my first visit to the Care Bears’ village, which Harriet, Gordon, and Vanessa have been raving about for days. It does look like it might have been built by creatures about as smart as, oh, honeybees. Leafy-roofed shacks (not treehouses) cluster around the roots of a forest giant the size of a California redwood. There are A-frames where they dry the beef-jerky leaves to make them even more like beef jerky, I suppose. At the sight of all the baby CBs tumbling around, even my stony heart melts a little.
The most amazing thing is it doesn’t stink. I have visited more than one ‘developing colony,’ and the thing that always sticks out is the lack of plumbing. I don’t know where the Care Bears of the Lost Planet bury their poop, but they clearly don’t shit where they live. This puts them streets ahead of humanity on at least one count.
They have little silver jingles hanging over the doors of their shacks, similar to the ornaments they wear around their necks. Out of nowhere Fluffington swarms up a doorpost and swipes a pawful of these. The baby CBs squeal in terror.
“We’re wrecking this place,” Kenneth says, stricken.
I can see what he means, as the treecats and Care Bears mix it up again. We’re worse than the idjits who introduced rabbits to Australia.
I wander away from the melee and
find Gordon sitting on a tree root, tossing a bubble from hand to hand.
The dome is full of these mysterious objects. We’ve stopped noticing them except to kick them out of the way. We tried to have a game of football at one point, but they’re too light. They work better for water polo.
“Fivebranes,” Gordon greets me.
“Huh?” I start to sit down, and spring back as a spindly metal biped stalks around the tree. It’s one of the Denebite maintenance robots Gordon predicted. Their main job is to gather up the bubbles, which is what this one’s doing now—there are loads of them trapped in the tree roots.
“They must be fivebranes,” Gordon mutters.
“What’re fivebranes?”
“Five-dimensional membranes. I’m sorry, I know this isn’t your wheelhouse. Essentially, these bubbles are spherical force fields. Solid objects can pass through them, but air can’t. Nor can electromagnetic waves. I assume that’s due to the quantum properties of objects with both electric and magnetic charge …”
He rambles on in this vein but I am not listening anymore. “Force fields!?!”
That’s only item number four, or maybe three, on the big backers’ A-tech wish lists. Imagine a spaceship made of force fields. You wouldn’t even need a hull! Imagine orbital habitats with transparent walls and floors! Imagine, imagine … imagine me claiming this discovery and auctioning off the patent to the tune of billions …
I grip Gordon’s arm. “We’ve got to get off this planet!”
“Well, yes.”
“These things would go for billions!”
“Perhaps, perhaps, but they’re not reverse-engineerable.”
The maintenance robot stalks towards us. Gordon offers it the bubble—the force field—he is holding. The robot delicately takes it and puts it into its net sack. “You’re welcome,” Gordon says dryly to the machine.
“Do they even know we’re here? The robots.”
“In a sense, I imagine. We’re furniture.”
“I’ve been called worse things.” I freeze. “Hang on, how do you know these force fields aren’t reverse-engineerable?”
“Because we tried.”
At last it dawns on me. “This is it, isn’t it? Finian’s stunning discovery.”
“Yes.”
“But you’d never been here before. You didn’t know this planet existed.”
“No,” Gordon says, and I suddenly remember him on the first day we got here, kicking the bubbles outside the dome and shouting in an uncharacteristic spasm of rage: Oh bloody hell, or something like that. “It was quite a surprise,” he says now. “We’d no idea where the things came from. We found several thousand of them on Omega Centauri 49, the planet I mentioned to you. There’s nothing particularly interesting about 49. Most of it looks like Wales, with a few Denebite ruins scattered around. Our only discovery of note was the force fields, which clearly merited study. But we had made no progress with them before Special Delivery Sam attacked us.”
“Far be it from me to question your expertise, Gordon. But the reverse-engineers on Arcadia are fairly good at what they do—”
Gordon doesn’t like this. “I assure you, we ran all the same tests they would. The Marauding Elephant has a first-class lab. Had,” he sighs. “Well, now we know where the things came from. Here.” We can still hear the noise of brawling Care Bears and treecats in the distance. “As I originally theorized, this planet must have been ripped away from its sun. The Denebites kept it going by building these domes and herding the Care Bears inside.” It’s funny to hear him unselfconsciously utter the words Care Bears. “But why? What makes the Care Bears so all-fired important? And where are the force fields manufactured? Maybe they’re just decorations. No one knows how the Denebites thought, the poxy duck-faced busybodies.”
Decorations. That sparks a connection. “The silvery ornaments the Care Bears wear, could they be—”
“Oh yes, undoubtedly.” Gordon looks around for a bubble. The robot has picked up all the ones nearby. Suddenly one falls out of the branches over our heads. “Perhaps there’s a factory in the roof,” Gordon grumps. “Anyway, look at this.” He picks the bubble up. “May I borrow your lightsaber?”
I reluctantly hand it over.
Gordon sets the beam to ‘short’ and stabs the bubble. The bright blue beam bursts it like a balloon. For a second it smells like somebody farted. Then Gordon’s hand is covered in silvery clingfilm, and he’s laughing, dropping the lightsaber, balling the stuff up. “You’ve got about thirty seconds to work it before it hardens.”
I snatch the ex-bubble from him and stretch it like silly putty.
“Ordinary lasers won’t pop them. Only the lightsabers. Finian made that discovery. No doubt Special Delivery Sam is still shooting and microwaving the things, getting increasingly frustrated.” Gordon cackles.
“Hang on, you said solid objects go through them?”
“Yes, if they’re moving fast enough.”
“But energy doesn’t?”
“No, not unless it’s the particular wavelength used by the lightsabers.”
“Then why don’t we use them to mend the Intergalactic Bogtrotter?”
Gordon stares at me. “Occasionally,” he says, “you have rather good ideas.”
CHAPTER 12
A couple of hours later we’re all out on the surface of the Lost Planet, sticking force fields over the holes in the Bogtrotter’s reactor turbine vessels and heat exchanger pipes as fast as I can deflate them with my lightsaber. Gordon keeps saying, “I think this is going to work! I think it’s actually going to work!” A frenzy possesses us. Not even I knew how badly I wanted to leave the Lost Planet until I realized that it might, after all, be possible.
At last Gordon says he’s ready to try bootstrapping the reactor. Donal and I head for the bridge. Because the Bogtrotter landed badly, with one wing buried in the snow, all the floors are tilted at a steep gradient. We pass the three Australian girls chipping their dead colleagues out of the ice deposits in the mess. Donal, being a good captain, stops to be compassionate. I carry on to the bridge and find Imogen on her knees, poking around inside that safe of hers.
“What are you doing?”
“Fuck off!”
I sense a certain froideur. She hasn’t forgiven me for uncovering her MRE theft, even though I didn’t tell anyone.
“Sure, excuse me for breathing,” I mutter, and shuffle past her to boot up the various screens and displays.
The first instrument that comes alive is the multidirectional radar.
“Oi, what’s that?”
Imogen flies to my side. “What?”
The radar’s set up to track our sats in orbit. Obviously, we didn’t drop any sats in orbit. Yet there is something up there all the same.
ESTIMATED ORBITAL ALTITUDE: 13,500 MILES
ORBIT TYPE: GEOSTATIONARY
“What the feck is that?!” Donal shoves me aside.
“It’s a ship, dimwit,” I say. And because Donal has a tendency to be hopeful when things are bleakest, I add: “Special Delivery Sam’s found us.”
After all, they’d have known where we came off the Railroad. It was the same place where they attacked us. All they had to do was come off the Railroad themselves and sniff around a bit.
“I don’t think it can be them,” Imogen says, her voice thin. “I mean, why are they just sitting up there?”
“Donal!” Harriet shouts over the radio. She always forgets that with suit-to-suit radios, you don’t have to shout. I clap my gloves pointlessly to my helmet. “We’ve got COMPANY!”
“Guess they’re not just sitting up there, after all,” I smile at Imogen, and bolt off the bridge.
We squeeze out through one of the still-unmended holes in the fuselage. The icy plain stretches bleak all around our poor, crippled ship. Harriet points up.
A shooting star. It’s getting brighter and brighter. It’s a ship de-orbiting. The same one we saw, or their friends? Who cares? There’
s another—there are three of them, and they’re coming in right on top of us!
We stumble back to the dome, strung out across the plain. When we came out, following one of the dumper trucks, we wedged this end of the airlock open with a tree branch. Thank God, the branch is still in place. We crowd inside.
It is at this point that I first question our unthinking herd instinct to run for safety. “Leave the branch there for a second, Donal!” I stand athwart it, peering through the man-width gap.
Three bombs go off on the plain, at least that’s what it looks like. Vacuum or no vacuum, I can feel the incredible noise of the thrusters in my bones. When the smoke and the fountaining snow clears away, three ships stand dangerously near the Intergalactic Bogtrotter.
They are, as I expected, up-armored DC-100s with Sam-I-Am painted on their fuselages.
Your man must have stolen a whole fleet of the things.
Almost before the thruster shields have stopped glowing red, people swarm down the steps of the DC-100s. They wear a motley variety of spacesuits, everything from marshmallows to sleek A-tech suits. I can see their guns from here, wicked sticks over their shoulders. They swarm around the Intergalactic Bogtrotter, besieging the wallies they imagine to be in there.
At the same time, others are discovering the force field bubbles littering the plain.
“Fletch, come on!” Donal begs.
The diamond-stuff the dome is made of blocks radio frequencies. I lean a bit further out, so I can get a signal, and fiddle with the wrist controls on my EVA suit until I pick up someone bellowing, “Oh my freaking God! There are millions of them!”
Maybe they’ll just load up on force fields and go away?
No sooner have I had this hopeful thought than a fountain of snow kicks up in my face. Some bastard with a long-range scope’s spotted me!
“There they are!” he, or one of his friends, yells.
Donal grabs the back of my spacesuit, yanks me inside, and kicks the branch away. The airlock slams shut.
We spill into the forest. Everyone pulls off their helmets, yammering. A group of CBs of the LP look on from the trees.
The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 15
