So I just said I didn’t fancy Finian’s chances, and that’s why I didn’t go with him. And this is perfectly true. I expect Finian will lose the battle and spend the rest of his days slaving for Special Delivery Sam in a rainy potato field. Or else the whole heap of them will be killed by Samsung’s security contractors.
“What’ll we do when they come back?” Donal said at the end of that conversation, his thoughts running along the same track as mine.
After congratulating us on clearing our debt to Goldman Sachs, the Samsung VP told us we’d better be gone when they come back for the rest of the Care Bears. This is their version of sparing our lives. We won’t kill you now. We’ll give you a couple of months to get clear.
We’ll have the Bogtrotter spaceworthy in half that time.
But where’ll we go in her? That is what Donal was asking, and when I said bleakly that I suppose we’d better go home, he got a fiery look in his eyes.
No, he said. No! We can’t go home emptyhanded.
I never planned on it myself, Donal …
And we won’t, he said. We’ll turn this thing around. All we need is one little find.
One little find that isn’t shite.
Trudging through the burnt forest towards the airlock, I preview his plan in my mind. It’s so easy to visualize, it’s as if it has already happened and I’m remembering it. We’ll return along the Omega Centauri spur to the Burren. That’s where we were attacked by Special Delivery Sam. They blew up three of Finian’s ships but that leaves two, including the Marauding Elephant. They might have taken those two away (they certainly have, in my own opinion) but the wreckage of the others will be there. We’ll forage for useful bits and parts, top up our water tanks, and then ho! for the Scutum-Centauri arm.
Donal’s eyes were glowing and he picked up my hand and squeezed it for emphasis as he spoke, like an evangelist saving me from the fires of hell.
I wanted to get out of this life. When I think about all those unexplored planets on the Scutum-Centauri arm, it just makes me tired. But I couldn’t say no to him.
Reaching the airlock, I sit down on my spacesuit and smoke a cigarette. I found a packet poor Jesse must have dropped. I’ve been eking them out, one a day.
“That’s how the fire started,” says a voice from the sky.
I nearly swallow my fag.
Sam Junior slides down the same big tree that me and Donal hid in during their raid. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in a few days. Him and his friends, the ones that didn’t join Finian, have been hanging out in a different part of the forest. When we have crossed paths there’s been blaming and posturing.
No need for that when it’s just him and me. I satisfy myself with a cold stare.
“Just make sure you put it out properly,” he says.
His hair’s growing back. He’s covered with soot and scratches. They’ve not been eating any better than we have, by the looks of him.
“You’re going out to work on your ship, aren’t you?” he says.
“Yeah, we’ll be leaving soon,” I say. “We’ll give you a lift to the Burren if you want.”
“Screw the Burren. It’s a nothing-burger.” He sits down beside me. “We found your treecats.”
“Did you?” Harriet and Vanessa will be overjoyed. “We were wondering where they went.”
“They’re in our camp. They’re hella clever, huh?” He laughs.
“Are you thinking of taking them home to your mom?” I’m just twisting the knife. He hasn’t got a ship to go home in.
“Screw my mom,” he says, and the parts of his face that aren’t soot-colored whiten with intensity. “I hope Finian kicks her ass into the Andromeda Galaxy.”
“You should have gone with them.”
“Fuck that. I’m sick of risking my life, for what? For bragging rights? Oh, I am the empress of a shitty fucking galactic cluster no one’s ever heard of. Woo-hoo. No, no, man, I’m through with that.”
“Congratulations.”
He sighs. “If you and me had taken a bunch of force fields and gotten the hell out, no one would have ever been the wiser about this planet. It would have been our own private ATM, forever.”
“I won’t say that has not occurred to me.” I drag on my cigarette and stub it out. The truck’ll be here any minute. “But I don’t believe in regrets. The best discovery is always the next one.”
“Exactly. Exactly!”
“We’re going to explore along the Scutum-Centauri arm,” I tell him. “Out on the frontier. Lots of unexplored planets out there.”
“The Scutum-Centauri arm?” he scoffs. “I’ve got a way better idea.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You’ve got a ship. I’ve got my mom’s list of contacts. And we’ve still got the treecats.”
“And?”
“Dude, didn’t you ever notice? There is nothing they can’t get into. They’re the best thieves in the freaking universe ...”
BANJAXED CEILI
CHAPTER 1
Seventh Heaven is hotter than hell, Arcadia is a mafiosi-infested version of Silicon Valley with bad lighting, and Shangri-La might be nice if it were not for the dinosaur-analogs. There’s no truth in advertising when it comes to the names that mischievous and spiteful explorers have bestowed on the habitable planets of the Milky Way.
Treetop is the rare exception. Coming off the Railroad on an interstellar shuttle, all I see from the window is treetops.
They’re amazing, these trees. They grow twelve miles tall. Their flat dark-green canopies poke up into the stratosphere, like clusters of green fried eggs with dessicated edges.
You can’t breathe up there, so the owners of the trees have built various pressurized structures to serve as parking garages. We swoop down towards an equatorially located tree with glinting bubbles dotting its leaf pads like raindrops.
I never expected to see this sight for myself in real life. I’m not rich enough. Yet here I am.
Between the trees, I glimpse Treetop’s dark mucky surface, a long, long way down.
The shuttle lands on a leaf pad near one of the bubble-style spaceport terminals, and taxis at high speed towards the silvery dome. Is it? Can it be? The dome comes nearer and nearer on my seatback screen. Everyone else squeals, impressed, as we shoot straight in through the wall. I grit my teeth. The dome is a force field—the very latest, priciest thing. Keeps air in, lets solid objects in and out if they’re moving fast enough. I discovered force fields last year, on the Omega Centauri spur.
Well, to be completely honest, my uncle Finian discovered them, and a heap of other pirates were onto them, as well. But I found out how they’re made, and I could have claimed the discovery and auctioned it off for billions, if everything hadn’t gone tits-up at the last minute.
So the patent went to Samsung. And obviously, they’ve already made some sales to early adopters, such as the owners of 12-mile-high trees.
Never mind. He who laughs last laughs best.
And after tonight I will be richer than any Big Tech executive, without the bother of running a company, either.
At the thought of the hazards ahead, nervous anticipation stabs me. I stand up and follow the other party-goers off the shuttle.
We step down onto rugged leaf-stuff, in what seems to be open space, with only a silvery glimmer at the horizon to reassure you that there’s something holding in the air. Overhead floats Treetop’s full moon, mottled like blue cheese. Just below the moon, the Interstellar Railroad bisects the sky. It looks like a thin black band against the golden evening.
Every habitable planet in the Milky Way has a loop of the Railroad around it. Earth got one in 2024, the year of my own birth, as it happens. We figured out how to use it quite quickly, given that there are no living aliens left in the galaxy to show us how—and since then it’s been one mad scramble for the treasures that the aliens all left behind when they went extinct. Treetop is one of those treasures, a jewel that’s long outlived its pr
evious owners.
The air inside the forcefield dome is on the warm side, oxygen-rich, laced with exhaust fumes from the shuttle buses, taxis, and flying cars standing around. I’m already starting to sweat inside my costume.
A flight attendant hands me a four-way leash. “Your pets, my lord. Gosh, they’re so cute!” She stoops to pet one of the treecats. True to form, the vicious little creature bites her. She pulls back with a cry of pain.
My instinct is to say something like ‘I hope you’ve had your booster shot recently,’ but I’ve got to stay in character. I sniff, grab the leash, and stalk away, following dozens of party guests dressed as aliens.
It had to be a bloody fancy dress party.
The silver lining, though, is no one’s going to recognize me in the costume I have on.
Not that they’d recognize me anyway. I am a nobody, and these are filthy-rich stackers. They’ve had all the advantages of assortative marriage, embryo screening, prenatal DNA optimization, early-childhood enrichment classes, private schools, plutocratic networks, chips implanted in their brains are the newest thing, and it’s a safe bet that every man-purse, handbag, oversized codpiece, and iPhone holster in sight holds a stash of nootropic drugs to keep their brains performing at three times normal human capacity.
And all these highly intelligent people have persuaded themselves it is a fine idea to dress up as extinct aliens.
Some of the costumes are great, actually. In the crowd waiting for the elevator, I see:
A naked Pygmy Ent—they came from Cassiopeia 2c and never got off their home planet
A Silicon Person riding on a floating gravsled
Three Sagittarians with horns and hooves
A group of Krells carrying their tails over their arms
A Puzzler whose legs really look triple-jointed; how the feck’s he managed that?
The expected rabble of Klingons (so-called because you find their 500-million-year-old corpses every fecking place)
And a lot of Denebites (four arms, beaky faces, very easy to dress up as).
I’m relieved to see that I’m not the only person with living accessories. The Sagittarians each have a flock of little birds perching on their horns, some of the Klingons are carrying tribbles (the latest alien pet fad!) and the Silicon Person has a human slave in a jewelled bikini, chained hand and foot, with a black bag over her head. Bet she’s cold.
“Baron Short!”
That’s me.
I turn, languidly, and my beak rides up over my left eye.
Yes, of course I’m dressed as a Denebite. It was the cheapest costume.
Through my watering right eye, I make out what appears to be a lean, medium-height human male.
“Ah, Short, my old chum!”
He strides through the crowd. I’m relieved to have someone to talk to, so I don’t look such a friendless wally. But I wish he’d drop the fake British accent. I’m Irish, and we’re supposed to be friends.
I adjust my beak to say, “Is that your costume? Because it looks like you’re wearing a tuxedo.”
“The name’s Bond. James Bond.”
I suppose Sam does look a bit like the new Bond, that Moroccan fella. In reality he is the son of a notorious female pirate. He ran out on his mum when my uncle Finian was about to give her a beating. This proves he’s got good timing. His judgment I am not so sure about. “You’re supposed to be in fancy dress,” I say.
“I am! I mean, come on, it’s obvious Bond is an alien! He’s been the same age for a hundred and five years!”
Sam gets a laugh for that from some Klingons. He immediately attaches himself to them and expounds on his James Bond=alien theory. Ah, he’s all right. I need to stop worrying.
We squeeze into the elevator, styrofoam falsies and painted limbs and rubber foreheads all jammed in together, and my treecats run up my legs to avoid being trampled. I end up with one on each shoulder, one clinging to my back with its six million sharp claws, and one sat on my beak, for feck’s sake, scrabbling for purchase and steadily pulling the bloody thing off my face. I pry the treecat loose and give it a cuddle.
A Klingon, pedantically: “But all aliens are extinct. The longest-lived aliens were the Silicon People. And they’re extinct now, too.”
Yes, and thank God for that. The Silicon People were villainous customers, judging by the monuments they left around the place. But they’re dust now. So is every other sapient species that once stalked the Milky Way, except us. Clearly God saved the best for last.
Sam: “OK, fine. I’m an alien who’s found the Fountain of Youth, the Gizmo of Rejuvenation! Hee, hee.”
Everyone laughs, in recognition of the fact that the so-called Gizmo of Rejuvenation is the ultimate A-tech that everyone wants to find, but nobody can, because it doesn’t exist. I break out in hot prickles of sweat, and squeeze the treecat in my arms so tightly that it nips me.
Is Sam trying to give the game away?
Or just having fun?
Either way, I don’t trust him. I wish we had left him out of it.
But we couldn’t leave him out, because it was his idea to begin with. He had the information that got us started on this … call it what it is, what we’re planning. Robbery.
My ears pop.
The elevator halts for a moment, then zooms down again.
Ten miles down.
It’s not as hard on the body as you would think, because the spaceport up top is pressurized at 0.8 atmospheres, but it takes a while, even at this elevator’s maximum rate of descent, which would leave a jet plane gasping. The bright side is by the time we reach the residential level, we’ve all gotten to know each other.
I emerge in the company of the Krells, who are charmed by my treecats. The wee bastards do have their points.
Sam roisters off with the Klingons.
“See you later, Hofacker,” I call out to him, through my beak.
We both bought our identities from the mob on Arcadia. It was the most expensive part of the entire operation. Baron Short and Lord Hofacker have unimpeachable digital histories going back to the year of their birth, 2024 in my case and 2041 in his. Jesus, he makes me feel old. Our titles are of the type anyone can award themselves if they’ve got their own planet, which we have, and no one’s to know they are rentals. I’ve never been to mine, but I believe it’s a shitehole in the Perseus arm. The minute our new identities went live, the party invitations started pouring in. Those Russian programmers are shite-hot.
“Dick! Dick, honey?”
I do suspect them of having a bit of fun with the names.
“Would you mind grabbing a drink for me? My tail kind of gets in the way,” one of the Krells says with a giggle. She has taken off her rubber head, saying she’s hot.
She is hot, without the head on. Chinese, or maybe Japanese, with a sparkling smile.
Sidling through the throng, I take in the cavernous dimensions of this hall, or ballroom I suppose it is. Knurled wooden walls shoot up to lose themselves in shadows a quarter-mile overhead. The chandeliers float lower than that, powered by anti-grav. The orchestra is also floating on an anti-grav platform, scraping out classical music. I think of my friend Donal, who could play the fiddle better than any of these gowls—maybe not Vivaldi, but no one could give you a better jig or reel.
Donal is here, right now, trapped, as I am, in this tree. A fresh pang of fear shoots through me at the thought.
But a few drinks ease my nerves and soon I’m chatting away with my new friend, the headless Krell. She tells me how grim it is being a saleswoman. This is apparently what she does when she’s not wearing an alien costume at King Zuckerberg’s biannual trainspotting bash. I make up a whole history for the treecats based on the little I know about my rented planet. The craic is spoiled only by the brooding presence of a Silicon Person, who shows no signs of life other than to extend a tentacle from time to time and drag a bottle of bubbly into its pyramid through a hatch.
And on to dinner, where I feed
my vat-grown organic venison to the treecats. Give me microwave fish ‘n’ chips any day. I’ve got no complaints about King Zuckerberg’s booze, though. It is only when I try to kiss the headless Krell (on the cheek!) and almost poke her eye out, because I completely forgot I had a beak on me, that I realize I may have had a bit much.
Well, can you blame me? I’m about to steal the single most valuable item of A-tech in the universe. The Lord himself couldn’t do this sober.
The dessert plates are being cleared away. An elderly soul rises into the air, chair and all. Jesus, it’s Zuckerberg himself, one of the original tech moguls. He was around before the Railroad came to Earth. Now he’s king of a dozen planets as well as this one. He rambles for a bit, while I sit smirking with disbelief that I am in the same room as him. Then he announces the winner of the fancy dress contest—Silicon Person!
The Sagittarians were robbed! Sure, that costume’s only made of styrofoam. I think maybe Zuck’s making some roundabout point about how true success is getting paid for doing nothing, which I concur with, but then it comes out that Silicon Person’s been broadcasting a sort of one-man play the whole time, demonstrating his/her knowledge of Silicon People culture and apparently bringing tears to xeno-archaeologists’ eyes all over the planet. He/she was broadcasting in the RF spectrum, so the stackers, with their always-on connections and this and that, could hear it, but I couldn’t.
Well, be damned to the lot of youse, I think to myself. I’m about to get up and go to the bogs when the King concludes with, “And now, let’s head upstairs and see if we can spot that train!”
The entire company rustles to its feet, nerdishly eager to be on time for the main event.
This train he’s talking about is the Ghost Train, as the media calls it. Every two years it reappears in our part of the Orion arm. Mostly it just zooms past at many times the speed of light, but at certain planets it stops for a while. Treetop is one of those planets. It will arrive in a few minutes and sit on the local loop for the next day or so, looking sort of expectant, as if waiting for passengers.
The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 19
