“It’s lovely, Sam,” I say, as if to a son.
He doesn’t know what happened to me while they were hunting. I decide he’s better off not knowing, and not merely because I don’t want to talk about it. Imogen’s hints have set off my dodgy-business radar. When I work out what she’s been hinting around, and whether it is harmful to the rest of us, I will tell Sam. Not before.
We go with him to the other end of the parking bay. This is where the rubbish hatches and the toilets are located. We tend to stay clear of this area, as it smells.
The gandy dancers drag Hippo-Arse corpses to the hatches. In they go, one after the other.
Caleb watches with addled pride. “Fourteen,” he gloats. “I got fourteen of those mofos!”
“Did you get any?” I say to Finian, who’s standing by, hands in his pockets.
He shakes his head. “Wasn’t in the mood,” and my worries about his health return.
“NOW WATCH THIS,” says Pew Pew. He adjusts his fedora.
The whole wall around the rubbish hatches goes transparent. For an instant I see a fecking mountain of rubbish, including all the gear we had the Wonder Wall make for our trip to Merrielande.
Then it’s gone, tumbling down towards the malevolent orb of the Silicon People’s home planet.
“WE USE AS RUBBISH DUMP,” Pew Pew says. “EVEN CATASTROPHIC MISTAKES OF HIGHLY INTELLIGENT SPECIES HAVE SILVER LINING.”
Finian laughs. “Sometimes I suspect you lads of having a sense of humor.”
I suspect them of being robots with very warped programming. But I smile along with him. I used to fear and resent Finian. But now that I know how ill he is, that’s changed. Now I need to protect him from whatever lies ahead for all of us.
CHAPTER 9
“Behold the galactic core,” says Caleb with the air of a proud explorer showing off his latest find.
I thought I’d had my fill of spectacular views, but now I cringe in awe. The stars are so close together that they merge into a single ellipse of light, fringed by a milky aurora of gases. It’s so bright that it blacks out the rest of the sky. The outer arms of the galaxy, including our own Orion arm and faraway Earth, might as well have been wiped out of existence. The Railroad stretches ahead of us, a gleaming bridge into the heart of the light.
It would take a poet to do justice to this, a Yeats or a Heaney. Finian’s got to see it. I jog back along the moving walkway to look for him, barricading dark fears out of my mind.
He’s in the lounge, button-pushing at the Wonder Wall. As I enter, I hear him saying: “Experidine … three hundred milligrams of nooracetam … and what was it, two hundred of desipramine. Ah, make it four hundred.” The hatch opens. Finian reaches in and takes out a paper cup. “Ah Fletch,” he says without missing a beat. “I was just getting my pills.”
The paper cup’s full of different-colored tablets and capsules. He’s been trying everything the last few days. I think it’s a relief for him to have the cat out of the bag, so he doesn’t have to pretend anymore. Imogen’s been mother-henning him, forcing him to drink all sorts of weird herb teas, which is kill or cure, as Finian told her, and he makes her try all the teas first to make sure they’re not poisonous.
He now instructs me to order one of her tea recipes from the Wonder Wall. I juggle two steaming cups as we walk back to the observation deck. I’ve got my Bushmills sticking out of my cargo pocket. That’s all that’s in there now.
“So we’re almost there, are we?” Finian says.
“Yeah, that’s what Caleb says. He’s looking forward to it.”
“A layover,” Finian says with contempt. This is what the gandy dancers have promised us.
Caleb welcomes us onto the observation deck, holding his guitar by the neck. “Just in time!”
My jaw drops. In the few minutes I was away, we’ve zoomed hundreds of lightyears closer to the galactic core. The Ghost Train is picking up speed the closer we get. Dizzy and Pew Pew explained why, although the reason escapes me now. Anyway, we’re deep in the central parsec. Old red giants and new massive stars blaze on all sides.
Dead ahead, a disk of intensely bright blue gas spirals around the center of the galaxy, with twin jets of flame shooting out on the perpendicular.
“Star pulp,” says Imogen in a whisper. “That’s what that is. Plasma juiced out of crushed stars.”
Even I, no scientist, know what’s in the middle of that gas disk.
The heart of the Milky Way is a heart of darkness.
Sagittarius A*.
A supermassive black hole with the mass of four million suns.
You know these things, but it’s so very different seeing them with your own eyes.
Without taking my eyes off the view, I set down the cups of tea and unscrew the cap of my Bushmills. I drink straight from the bottle.
A short distance ahead, the Railroad joins the stupendous gas accretion disk. That’s where we’re going. Jesus have mercy.
“INCORRECT,” says Dizzy.
“What?” Imogen shouts at her, as shaken as the rest of us. “What is fucking incorrect, you condescending little robot?”
“NOT DEAD STAR PULP. JUST STRAY GAS MOLECULES. SAG A* IS NOT FEEDING. SOME GALAXIES HAVE ACTIVE NUCLEI. THESE ARE CALLED FEEDING BLACK HOLES. SAG A* IS INACTIVE TYPE.”
I can feel Imogen’s frustration. I am not in the mood for a physics lesson, either.
But apparently we’re all going to get one. Up close and personal
Blue light fills the observation desk, blinding us until the windows recalibrate their filters to spare our eyes. The Ghost Train zooms into the gas accretion disk around Sagittarius A*, and slaloms inwards like a rubber ducky circling the drain. Whether we like it or not, we’re all about to learn how it feels to get sucked into a supermassive black hole.
I cling to the thought that the Ghost Train does come back, every two years like clockwork. So it must have done this countless times before, and survived, and Caleb’s survived with it. But he’s now looking very leery, his eyes rolling like a wild dog’s.
“I’ve got your borrin here,” he yaps at Finian.
“It’s a bodhran,” Finian says inattentively.
“And here’s your whistles.” Caleb thrusts a pair of tin whistles at Sam and Imogen.
Incredible as it is to recollect now, we’ve been whiling away the time with sessions. Neither Sam nor Imogen have an instrument, but anyone can play a tin whistle, so I got a couple out of the Wonder Wall for them, and Finian ordered himself a bodhran. When I first heard him lay the stick to the skin, the years fell away and I remembered sitting on my dad’s knee in O’Donoghue’s, sucking sherbet sugar off my fingers, enraptured by the music and the clapping. It was hot and dark and smoky and there was Finian in the corner where they’d shoved the tables back, joining in on the bodhran with some locals who fancied themselves the next Planxty. His hair and beard were yellow then. Even my dad clapped. He said to my mum, “And tomorrow he’ll be away off to outer space again. Jesus, what a waste.” I didn’t understand what he meant then. I do now.
I do not understand why Caleb wants us to strike up a tune while we plunge into a supermassive black hole. But he’s dead serious. He strums chords on his guitar. “Come on! Come on! Let’s do that gospel song we been practisin’!”
Completely loony.
“Why?” says Sam, humoring the madman.
“It helps with the stretchin’!”
An instant later I get it. My body’s being stretched vertically. My head feels too far away from my feet. I’ve not had that much to drink today …
“OK,” Sam says. “Gotcha. It’s like counting backwards from a hundred while you get whipped.” He had a terrible childhood. “OK, OK …” His face furrowed with pain, he puts his tin whistle to his lips.
They’re all on the floor now. Or so it looks to me. Everything’s so far away.
“My life flows on!” Caleb screeches. “In endless song! Above Earth’s lamentation …”
<
br /> That’s not a gospel song. It’s a hymn I remembered from Lisdoonvarna, one of the few tunes all of us know.
“I hear the real! But far-off hymn!”
The light’s overwhelming the filters, flooding the observation deck. I have to do something.
“That hails a new creation!”
Well, why not? I give the nod to Finian. He starts up the beat, and I roll out the verses.
Above all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?
I can see the light even with my eyes closed. My body is a million miles long. I’m a jellyfish spread across the stars.
But it’s an illusion, an illusion, an illusion. I still have air in my lungs, and I stubbornly keep turning the air into words.
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging;
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,
How can I keep from singing?
Just when I think I’m about to disintegrate into interstellar dust, the stretching goes into reverse. I’m shrinking back to my proper size. Hallelujah! From now on I’ll be a different man. No more lying, cheating, stealing, or miscellaneous dodgy behavior. They won’t know me in Lisdoonvarna.
(I have these fits of insanity from time to time. I always get over them.)
The sound of Caleb’s guitar dies away. I open my eyes on the ordinary dimness of the observation deck. Finian sits at my feet, slumped over his bodhran, still rattling out a drunken beat.
Dizzy and Pew Pew laugh at us. “THAT IS WORST PERFORMANCE WE EVER HEAR.”
Caleb sits up and says with dignity, “That’s ‘cos you ain’t heard me and Fletch doin’ Amazing Grace with half a bottle a whiskey each inside us.”
Sam is on his knees, throwing up.
I heave Finian to his feet and get him to sit down on the nearest bench. “Where’re your pills …?”
Imogen stands at the table with a cupped hand raised to her mouth. She swallows, sees me watching her, and looks away hurriedly.
She’s taken Finian’s pills.
All that’s left is one cup of herb tea.
Too bemused to question her behavior, I give the remaining cup of tea to Finian.
“Where’s the milk and sugar?” he says, as he always does. He’s all right.
“I have a question,” I say to the gandy dancers. “What’s that?”
That is the star now visible ahead of us in the darkness. The Railroad shoots straight towards it. I would take it for an ordinary G-type main-sequence star, like our sun, if I didn’t know that we are now inside the event horizon of a black hole. That being the case, it seems wise to question everything.
“THAT IS A STAR.”
“Really.” I thought we were sailing through the ordinary darkness of space, but now I notice something queer. There are no other stars in sight. Only this one … and the black dot of a single planet traversing across its face.
“WE ARE IN A POCKET UNIVERSE,” Pew Pew says.
“OK,” Imogen says, with a rather wild laugh. “I know the theory. So pocket universes really exist. Wow.”
“POCKET UNIVERSE, SINGULAR. THIS IS THE ONLY ONE.”
“OK. Still; wow.”
Caleb, back to his bumptious self, says, “Don’t worry! Getting in’s a lot harder than getting out. I been here thousands of times.”
I am not reassured. “So where’s this famous train station?”
We are zooming closer to the lonely star all the time. Now we hurtle towards the single planet orbiting it. The sunlit curve of its surface is dusty brown. It looks like an old planet, a dead planet, like Arcadia, a planet where every trace of life was long ago bombed into dust.
“THERE,” says Pew Pew, confirming my worst fears.
The Railroad curves in around the planet, and we hurtle in with it. But this is no ordinary local loop. We’re diving closer to the surface all the time. We whip across the nightside, where no lights are to be seen.
“I want to go home,” Sam says—the first words he’s uttered since we got inside Sagittarius A*. Shut up, Sam, I think, you’re not being helpful.
The Railroad shoots back into the sunlight. Sandstone-colored scabs bulge from the rocky surface of the planet. We’re so low now that it’s like looking down—from the cockpit—from an airplane coming in to land. The scabs are walled cities. The buildings within the walls connect to each other by flying bridges, and the highest ones sprout twin horns, a pattern which rings a bell. I’ve seen decorative horns like that before.
The Railroad crosses a flat silver sea. On the far shore, it swoops down to kiss the ground. We come to rest outside the walls of a city, near a towering gateway with no gate in it.
“WELCOME,” says Pew Pew, “TO PRON, HOME PLANET OF THE SAGITTARIANS.”
CHAPTER 10
Well, after all that, it would be daft to just stay on the train.
Imogen, however, does just that. She hides in our police cruiser, and no amount of cajoling and teasing will persuade her to come out.
Giving up, I join Finian, Sam, and Caleb on the platform. This is a ledge of reddish rock which runs along the foot of the city wall. It was the easiest disembarkation ever. We just walked out through the now-transparent wall of of the parking bay.
The air is chilly, and so dry it tickles my throat. Here and there stand signs which flicker through a dozen languages before settling on “THIS WAY.” Arrows point towards the gateway.
As we walk along the length of the Ghost Train, gandy dancers swarm out and clamber all over its hull. I should think it does need maintenance. It’s after plunging through a black hole, isn’t it? The gandy dancers pay no attention to us. Dizzy and Pew Pew haven’t come with us, either, which I must say is a relief.
“I wonder if there’s a McDonald’s here?” Sam jokes. He’s bounced back quickly from puking and wanting to go home. It’s wonderful being in your twenties, I remember.
“I wonder how far we are from the nearest pub,” Finian says.
“Hee, hee!” Caleb cackles. “You guys are gonna love this place!”
We reach the nose of the Ghost Train, which is pointing up the far side of a dip in the Railroad like the bottom of a flattened U. Beyond the tracks, a barren slope descends to the sea. I saw a film about the Dead Sea once. It’s so salty nothing can live in there. The sea of Pron looks like that.
On our side of the tracks, the city’s three-storey-high gateway frames a long, empty street flanked by towering buildings. It’s a city built for giants. This is not surprising, as the Sagittarians were giants. An average adult stood twenty-two feet tall. We know this from skeletons found here and there, usually on battlefields. They were vicious customers, almost as bad as the Silicon People, judging by the number of planets they ruined. Thank God they’re all dead now.
I walk under the arch of the gateway. My footsteps echo, and yet the echoes are flat and muffled. It’s the dead feeling of this planet. Dead weather, dead air. Sure it’s only a matter of time until we find the dead aliens.
“It’s grand being masters of the galaxy,” I say cynically. I have had this same sensation before, on other dead planets, and there’ve been too many of them. Finian’s pinched expression mirrors my thoughts. We inherited the Milky Way, and now we’ve penetrated to the very core of the galaxy, to a pocket universe that no one knew existed … and it’s the same old, fecking same old.
Everything’s dead.
“Hello, travellers! How can I help you today?”
We spin around as one—all except Caleb, who cackles. He knew this was coming.
An invisible door has opened in the wall of the building nearest the gate. It’s a normal-sized door, a human-sized door, and in it stands a creature that’s roughly human-sized … but definitely not human.
It has green scaly skin, a small horn on the top of its bald head, and a ridiculously over-developed upp
er body. With its barrel chest and short legs, it looks like a cartoon bodybuilder. Its red, slit-pupiled eyes gleam with incalculable malice. It is wearing navy tracksuit bottoms and a white polo shirt, and carrying a tablet computer, one clawed finger poised over the screen.
“Jesus,” says Finian, “it’s a Draconian.”
The remains of these aliens are often found in the same places as Sagittarian remains. It’s thought they were the Sagittarians’ arch-enemies.
“Did you win, then?” Finian says.
“No,” snaps the Draconian. “We lost. And I asked you a question. Can I help you today?”
It manages to make every one of the last three words sound like a four-letter one.
“Ah, well, sure, in that case, can I have a Guinness?” Finian says. “If you’ve got it on draft, mind. None of that canned shite.”
“Only Budweiser. In cans.”
“That’ll do us,” I say, before Finian can piss the Draconian off any further.
“I’ll have a Coke,” Sam chimes in.
Caleb has been enjoying our confusion. Wiping away tears of laughter, he manages, “Let’s go into the bar.”
With many backward glances on my part, we follow the Draconian into the cathedral-sized building. Huge carved pillars support the roof of a dark dusty hall. Another human- or reptilian-sized door on the far side leads into a fug of warmth and light. There’s the noise of talk, and a deafening clamor like a toddler banging on saucepans with a spoon, which I realize is probably the alien equivalent of muzak.
Have you ever seen the original Star Wars, from the 20th century? Remember the scene in the bar?
This is nothing like that.
At all.
Yes, it is a bar, I suppose. And yes, it is full of aliens of every species known to humanity, and some not.
But no one stops talking when we come in. A couple of them glance around with scant interest and then go back to watching television.
There is a Sagittarian-sized television-analog device at the end of the bar. That’s where the saucepan-and-spoons noise is coming from.
“They’re a bit hard of hearing,” Caleb shouts over the racket.
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