by Doug Naylor
PENGUIN BOOKS
LAST HUMAN
Doug Naylor was born in Manchester and educated at Chetham's Hospital School of Music, where he learnt to play 'Three Blind Mice' on the recorder without sheet music or a conductor. Thrown out of Liverpool University in the mid-seventies for drinking too slowly, he became a prawn-and-cockle salesman for twelve months until he could afford to get a dead-end job and concentrate on writing. His hobbies include reading, philosophy, shouting abuse at Merchant-Ivory films and not smelling offish. He has never paid tax.
He is part of the gestalt entity known as Grant Naylor, which created and wrote the Emmy-award-winning series Red Dwarf for BBC television. Along with Rob Grant he was also head writer for Spitting Image in the mid-eighties, and together they wrote two novels, Red Dwarf and Better Than Life. Last Human is his first solo attempt.
DOUG NAYLOR
Last Human
PENGUIN BOOKS
* * *
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published by Viking 1995 Published in Penguin Books 1995 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4
Copyright © Doug Naylor, 1995 All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
For Linda, Richard and Matthew
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Rob Grant
As many of you will know, the previous two Red Dwarf novels were written in collaboration with Rob Grant. In the summer of 1993 Rob expressed a desire to write a Red Dwarf novel on his own. I look forward to reading it and thank him for the sections in this book that are based on the TV scripts we wrote together.
Muchas gracias
Doug Naylor
London
February 1995
Special thanks to Tony Lacey for his support and patience. Special thanks also to Charles Armitage. Thanks also to Chris Barrie, Craig Charles, Danny John Jules, Robert Llewellyn and Hattie Hayridge. Also thanks to Helen Norman, Andy De Emmony, Justin Judd, Kerry Coldwell, Kate Cotton, Mel Bibby, Howard Burden, Graham Hutchins, Andria Pennell, John Pom-phrey, Cate Williams, Peter Wragg and all the Red Dwarf backstage crew. Thanks also to BBC Northwest. Special thanks to Robin Bynoe. Thanks also to Judith Flanders. Also thanks to Christopher White for asking me to thank him in this special thanks section when he happened to wander into my office while I was writing it.
Also my undying gratitude to all the Penguin Reps who were told so many times a Red Dwarf book was coming, only to find it wasn't. Well, now it has. No, really - this time it's true. Thank you.
PROLOGUE
Something monumental was about to happen; possibly the most monumental thing ever to happen anywhere, ever.
Hunched against the spongy base of the baobab tree, under a strake of dyspeptic sky, she gazed across the lake towards the mountains as an endless flock of hooked-beaked birds migrated across the waters.
Why wasn't he here? Why wasn't he with her?
She knew the answer. He was unreachable, two, perhaps three days away — hunting. Molasses of sweat trickled down the ridges of her brow and dribbled on to the broadness of her jaw.
Then it happened again.
It came back.
The lasso of pain whipped around her hips and slowly began to tighten. She bared her teeth and a sound that seemed utterly alien to her small frame erupted into the night sky. For a second even the cicadas were silent. Alone, and as scared as she'd ever been in her entire life, she started to cry. Why had she continued to climb up-river looking for fruit? Why hadn't she turned back when the pains first started? But she'd been carrying the child so long she'd ignored them, not realizing that her time had finally come.
Now it was too late.
Another lasso.
Her brown nails dug huge crescents into the palms of her clenched fists as the garrotte squeezed and squeezed, until it felt as if her heart were being turned inside out. She pushed and grunted and screeched and screamed, and just when she thought she couldn't bear the pain any more her body parted, and a head thrust its way into existence.
She supported the child's head in her hands and pushed. First one shoulder wriggled free, followed by a second, then suddenly the child slithered out into her arms, trailing a trembling neon black umbilical cord. She took hold of the cord and wrapped a length of twine around it, a thumb's distance from the child's stomach, then carefully bit the cord in two, another thumb's distance from that.
She held the child up and peered at it critically. A whimper of delight staggered out of her exhausted body.
It was a girl.
She licked some of the ooze from its face. She could see it better now.
But wait.
There was something wrong. She felt it, instinctively,
The child's limbs were too short, its forehead was too high and its head - its head was so large. She held it, uncertain what to do.
But she was right - there was something wrong with the child. The child was going to be abnormal.
It wasn't going to be like its mother. It wasn't going to be like its father. It wasn't going to be like anyone.
Anyone ever.
She curled the savannah grass around her sun-gnarled fingers and looked across the clearing. Here, in a huge Y-shaped gorge, in a place later called the Serengeti plains, in northern Tanzania, she had given birth to the first. The first of a species that would later take the name Homo.
That would first become Homo habilis, then Homo erectus and finally Homo sapiens. The first had been born. The first human.
She fastened the tiny creature to her breast and it started to feed. After the child was nourished, the ape woman removed the child from her breast and placed it gently on a bed of red oat grass.
The child curled itself into a ball and slept.
PART ONE
Cyberia
CHAPTER 1
Six million years later, in a dilapidated class three transport ship, the last human being in the cosmos lay in the same foetal position as his long dead sister, murmuring remarks in the gibberish of deep sleep, until a poorly digested bowl of cabbage soup caused a noisy pocket of escaping air to flee his lower intestine and rouse him from his slumbers. For a brief nano-second he couldn't recall where he was. An inner voice, thick with spite, snickered quietly in his head. 'Embrace the moment,' it whispered. 'Hang on to the amnesia, because this tiny moment of zero recall is the best thing that's going to happen to you for some considerable time.'
Naturally Lister didn't much care for this inner voice, and was doing his best to ignore it. But nothing could stop the inner voice when it had bad news to impart, news as bad as this bad news. 'Whatever you do,' it continued to bait him, 'don't access reality - you're not going to like it one little bit.'
He struggled into a sitting position and peered through the grime of the porthole. He was on some kind of spacecraft that was preparing to land, swooping down over a series of huge canyons and ravines
sculpted out of a barren sea of sandstone on a desert moon. He raised his handcuffed wrists and tried to massage a sensible expression on to his face with the balls of his palms.
Desert moon?
Why would he be landing on a desert moon? A desert moon with a complex of buildings surrounded by barbed-wire fences and tall sentry towers at each corner with huge swirling searchlights?
He pushed his face against the porthole and watched his reflection peer gormlessly back at him. He didn't recognize it at first. This hunched stranger with hooded brown eyes.
Was this him? This guy with the seven-day growth and hollow cheeks? This guy in the khaki jumpsuit and matching hat? This guy with the five rasta plaits of hair that usually slumped down his back, like slumbering snakes, but were now chained by a khaki hair-band?
Where was his usually chirpy demeanour? Where was his lopsided smile, that amiable-slob grin that was as mischievous as the fourth wheel on a shopping trolley? Where were his biker's pants, and his leather jacket strewn with badges and hand-painted graffiti?
He was staring at a stiff in a jumpsuit with a number on his hat.
He shimmied across the bench and peered down the aisle. Fifty, perhaps sixty, bodies lined the craft's ugly gun-metal grey interior — a sorry bunch of rogue simulants, renegade droids, Axis-syndrome holograms and a bizarre mix of engineered life forms.
All handcuffed.
All reluctant guests of His Imperial Majesty F'hn-hiujsrf Dernbvjukidhgd the Unpronounceable.
Then Lister remembered. He remembered everything. His face went whiter than a brand-new pair of trainers.
'Told you,' said the inner voice. 'Isn't this the worst situation you've ever been in in your entire life?'
The inner voice was wrong, but not by much.
Lister gazed out of the porthole and his facial muscles accessed the programme 'No One Home' as he began to catalogue the series of disasters that had led him to this point in Time and Space. He started to list the bad decisions, the poor career choices, the unreliable friendships that had led him here, to a prison ship bound for the most inhospitable penal colony in the outer reaches of the Cosmos. He'd never expected much from life. All he'd ever really wanted was to be a soft-metal guitar icon, thrashing out rock anthems all night to half a million fanatical hero-worshippers. Was that really too much to ask — to be mobbed nightly by hordes of emotionally unstable women who would feel compelled to smear his body with a wide range of dairy products and then remove said dairy products in a variety of interesting ways? A thin smile drove across his face and skidded to a halt at the corner of his mouth. Well, something had gone wrong somewhere. He'd never got within so much as a Whirlwind-amp-lead distance of fulfilling that particular dream.
Why? Was it bad luck? Had he just never had the breaks? Or was it simply that he'd never bothered to learn how to play the guitar?
Really play it.
Three chords.
What the hell — even four, maybe. If only he'd bought that damn book that taught you how to play in a day. One lousy day, and things could have worked out so differently. He wouldn't have wound up here, stuck in the middle of Deep Space, the last member of the human race, literally light years away from the woman he loved and a really hot curry.
Somewhere along the line he'd made a really poor career choice - he'd ignored the door that said 'Legend of Rock', instead opting for the one that said 'Useless Piece of Directionless Sputum Destined to Lose Big Time'.
Lister let out a sigh, like a newly opened bottle of chilli beer, and wondered when it had started to go wrong.
* * *
It was a mistake to wear the tie, he knew it the minute he entered the Forum of Justice. Major, major mistake. He should have worn his oil-spattered long johns with his black leathers over the top. That would have been far more suitable attire for a man on trial. Far more suitable for a man facing charges of serious crimes against the Gelf state. For a start he would have been comfortable. His one and only dress shirt was a good two collar sizes too small, and it made him feel as if all eight pints of blood had somehow been vacuumed up into his head and were trying to vacate his skull by forcing his eyeballs to catapult out of their sockets. Also, he could see now the tie itself was not a great choice. True, he had only one tie, so he wasn't exactly spoiled for choice, but on reflection a yellow kipper tie with a woman in birthing stirrups motif had probably been a mistake. Somehow it didn't give him that aura of respectability that he'd been aiming for. The wronged pillar of society number.
Silent curses chased around inside his head. If he hadn't tried so hard to look so damn distinguished he wouldn't have felt like such a schlub. He shouldn't have tried so hard to make a good impression, he should have worn his regular clothes.
It wasn't the first time he'd severely miscalculated in the ensemble department. His mind went back to the days before the radiation leak, before Red Dwarf had been sent hurtling out into the barren wastes of Deep Space while he slept, oblivious, in suspended animation.
He'd been invited to the summer party in the officers' mess.
Him, a lowly third technician.
The invitation had said the occasion was informal, so that was exactly how he'd gone - he'd worn a pair of zero-gee football shorts and a can of lager. Unbelievably, he'd been turned away by some officer in a beige summer suit. If they'd wanted him to go dressed as Noel Coward they should have said.
Now, as the mighty oak doors to the Forum of Justice hammered open and the Gelf security guards began to escort him down the aisle to his seat, he knew he'd done it again. He hush-puppied his way down the court room and took his place behind the smooth oak desk. He bowed his head in shame. Hush-puppies? He looked like a dentist.
From the rear of the Forum of Justice a door opened and the Gelf Regulator took his place on the podium. Like many of the Gelfs on Arranguu 12 he was an Alberog, a bizarre genetic cocktail of albatross, bear and frog. Seven and a half feet tall when standing upright, its body was covered in a black fur, with a crescent-shaped moon on its chest above giant frog legs. As with all Gelfs it had been programmed with slow-ageing genes, and its life expectancy was close to a thousand years.
The smooth white head with its long orange hooked bill and two eyes, colder than a doctor's hands, surveyed the courtroom then alighted on Lister. 'Do you have counsel?'
'I will conduct my own defence, my lord. During the months leading up to my trial I have made myself familiar with your legal system and I think you'll find me a pretty snazzy attorney.'
The Regulator nodded to the offence counsel. 'Let the case begin.'
Lister remained silent as the offence counsel outlined the charges against him. Finally, he sat down in a swirl of self-congratulation and Lister rose and stood before the six hooded figures of the jury. 'There is no case to answer and my defence is a simple one. I wish to take the fourth sand of D'Aquaarar and thus be protected from the breach of Xzeeertuiy by the Zalgon impeachment of Kjielomnon, as is permitted here on the asteroid settlement of Arranguu 12 during the third season of every fifth cycle.'
'What?'
A baby-sized smirk perched on Lister's face. 'I refer you to Mbazvmbbcxyy vs. Mbazvmbbcxyy. And I move for a mistrial.' He flopped into his chair, his head jutting back and forth in triumph. 'Nothing more.'
'But this is the northern sector of Arranguu 12.'
'So?'
'Not the southern sector.'
'So?'
The Regulator stared down at Lister, bewildered. 'We don't share the same outmoded, archaic, incomprehensibly bizarre legal system as they have in the south.'
'You don't?'
'Of course not. We adhere to the Jhjghjiuyhu system.'
'The what?'
'The Jhjghjiuyhu system, which is plain and straightforward and can be understood by any Hniuplcxdewn or Tvcnkolphgkooq.'
'Any Hniuplcxdewn or Tvcnkolphgkoq?'
'Tvcnkolphgkooq,' the Regulator corrected. 'That's why we always celebrate Cvcbdekijhmnhuye's day
-the day we won the right to be a self-governing state and were able to throw off the shackles of incomprehensible bureaucratic legal sludge. So what do you wish to do? Take the seventh branch of O'pphjytere or hurl your soul on the great fire of N'mjiuyhyes?'
'Uhhh,' said Lister, stalling. 'Give me the choices again?'
'Choose.'
'Uhhh...'
'Well?'
'I'll take the fourth twig of whatsit?'
'The seventh branch of O'pphjytere?'
'That's the fella.'
A tidal wave of shock reverberated around the Forum. Lister's eyebrows fossilized on his face as he craned round to gaze at the lines of disapproving Gelf faces sitting in the gallery.
'Is that bad?'
'If the Jury of Six find you guilty, then taking the seventh branch of O'pphjytere will mean tripling the length of your sentence.'
'In that case I'll...'
'You have chosen. Let us continue.'
Lister loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt and removed his nicely pressed cream slacks. He fished into his briefcase, pulled out a can of double-strength lager, crossed his hairy naked legs on the Regulator's podium and started noisily slurping his beer. Waiting to be found guilty.
CHAPTER 2
The craft's airlock door chu-chunged open and Lister and the rest of the prisoners began fighting their way down the disembarkation ramp and out on to the landing bay. A thousand minute dust particles scorched into his face, reminding him of the Moroccan after-shave Rimmer had once given him as a belated Christmas present.
Flanked by guards the prisoners straggled down the aeropad's promenade and into the domed interior of the Grand Hall. A thousand metres deep and over five hundred metres wide, it was constructed from steel, glass and reinforced concrete. Lister gazed around. It was an awesome testament to Gelf craftsmanship to have built a stadium as magnificent as this on a moon as hostile as Lotomi 5. Grandiose spiral motifs with dizzyingly high ceilings gave the hall a faint whiff of Fascist Rally, and, as with all Gelf settlements, huge green-and-black Gelf flags hung from every wall. On each was the giant double-helix of the nucleic acid DNA, and in a strange script, a sentence that read: 'The Key to Life — nothing should be denied'.
