Colony

by Rob Grant

  'In what way incomplete?'

  'There's something missing. Something big.'

  'What? What could possibly be missing?'

  'Another planet.'

  Peck's interested now. So interested, she almost forgets to hate him. 'Where, sulphur breath?'

  'Well, unless this data's been tampered with' -- and who could have tampered with it? And how? -- 'there's a planetary body about eight times the diameter of Thrrrppp... can you freeze the display?' Peck complies. Eddie concentrates hard and stretches out his pincer. '... Here.'

  'Like this?' Peck's hands dance over what must be some sort of interface with the display, though Eddie's unclear how contact is made. Extremely powerful heat sensors, perhaps? Magnetic signals from the body? Not touch, anyway.

  A large, wireframe planet appears between Eddie's stretched pincers. The dimensions look perfect. 'Yes, exactly like that.' Unbelievably accurate, to the eye at least. 'How did you do that?'

  'The size of the thing: its influence on the other planets. It has to be a gas giant.'

  A gas giant? Eddie nods grimly. 'Has to be.' Oh, crap.

  'And its orbit?'

  Eddie consults the charts. 'I can give you key frames.' He stretches across the display. 'Here, here and... here.'

  'So. Like... this?' Peck reanimates the display. The new wireframe globe joins in the complex planetary dance.

  'Perfect. That all makes sense now, doesn't it?'

  'I should have spotted that.'

  'How? The information was buried in the charts here.'

  'I should have spotted it anyway.' Peck sounds disproportionately angry with herself. Eddie looks away from the display at her hunched figure. She's clutching the edge of the table so hard the blood has drained from her knuckles. 'I shall have to chastise myself

  'Chastise yourself?' Eddie doesn't want to imagine what that could mean, but he can't help himself. "What do you mean, exactly?'

  'I mean, I shall have to take a flail to my back.'

  'You're going to give yourself a whipping?' Inside his head, Eddie is yelling 'Cut! Cut!' on his mental film set. This is not the time.

  'A cruel whipping. In penance. You wouldn't understand, incubus. Those of us who actually still possess a soul think it's quite an important thing to preserve.'

  'A cruel whipping?'

  'But first, there are one or two even more pressing matters.'

  'How cruel?' Stop it, Eddie. Stop it.

  'Such as: how does this affect our immediate plans?'

  She's right. This could complicate things. A lot. Eddie sends the film crew home, grumbling, and concentrates on the display. 'Can you plot the ship's projected trajectory through here?'

  But Peck is already on the case.

  The display freezes, and a tiny luminous dot appears, pulsating. The Willflower.

  'This is us now.' Peck's hands move and the display animates. '... Us in twenty-four hours...' The ship appears to be moving into the path of the wireframe giant. Not good. '... Forty-eight Better. The new planet's orbit seems to be steering it away from the ship. '... Seventy-two...' Now what's happening? The ship is way off where Eddie expected it to be. Closer to the planet. Far too close. The massive pull of the gas giant is dragging the Willflower off course towards it. 'And in ninety-six hours...'

  Nothing.

  The Willflower has gone.

  29

  'This is bad,' Lewis is saying, although, to Eddie, he doesn't sound like he believes it. 'This is very bad.'

  Eddie takes a clumsy step towards the priest's office desk, to make absolutely sure the good Father is looking at the correct display on the computer screen. He is.

  'I'm not sure you appreciate the full extent of the entirely lethal implications of this discovery, Padre. It's worse than "very bad". In fact, before, things were worse than "very bad". Now, we're way beyond "very bad". We're in a place where we can't even see "very bad" and sigh at it wistfully. "Very bad" isn't even on the map of the place we're at. If we tried--'

  'Point taken, Dr Morton.' Lewis actually lounges back in his seat. 'The situation isn't good. I just don't think--'

  'No.' Eddie thumps down a claw. 'No! The situation isn't "isn't good". We are spiralling out of control towards an immense, immense planet whose gravitational pull will compact this entire vessel to the size of a single constipated mouse dropping long before we even enter its atmosphere in less than five days' time. And that's a best-case scenario which rests upon the massively implausible assumption that the ship hasn't shredded itself to tiny fragments long before then. We have one engine: a single, solitary, solo engine, pointed in one direction, which is absolutely the couldn't-be-worse wrong direction, and the manoeuvring capability of a quadriplegic elephant falling from the highest parapet of the Chicago Twin Towers, tied to a grand piano with no castors.'

  'My dear Dr Morton,' Lewis smiles, 'I do believe you're panicking.'

  'No, no, Padre. I'm underreacting. This is an unbelievably muted response to the inescapable inevitability of disasters we're facing. Because that's not even the worst of it. The worst of it is, we have a saboteur on board, hell bent on compounding the disaster.'

  'A saboteur? That's putting it a little--'

  'Somebody obliterated that planet from the display. Somebody didn't want us to know it was there. Who? Who would do such a thing? And why? I'll bet my gloop it wasn't out of the milk of human kindness.'

  'It might just have been a glitch in the--'

  'Someone on the Committee,' Peck says darkly.

  'Trinity, that's a very serious--'

  'Think about it, Father: it has to be one of the Pilgrim Parents.'

  'That's enough!' Lewis doesn't raise his voice much, but it carries enough authority to guarantee attention. In the small silence that ensues, Eddie thinks he can hear a strange sound. Something like water falling, and -- it can't be -- the distant flicker of intermittent female laughter. Where is it coming from? Lewis gets up and walks around his desk towards Peck. 'There's more than a hint of hysteria in the air here, Trinity. We can't afford to be throwing unfounded accusations around. That's only going to make things worse.'

  'Father...'

  'Trinity,' he places a paternal hand on her shoulder, 'since you feel empowered to start casting the first stone here, let me ask you something: why didn't you notice the orbital anomalies in the planets yourself?'

  Peck looks down and starts fiddling with her rosary. 'You're right, Father. I was remiss. That was inexcusably negligent.'

  Lewis closes his eyes, as though he's sharing her pain, shouldering it even. 'That's all right, child. We can talk about it in the confessional. In the meantime, perhaps you might think about withdrawing to your room and whipping yourself for a while?'

  This insane suggestion brings a smile of relief to Peck's features. 'Yes. I'll do that right away. Thank you, Father. Bless you.'

  'Big strokes, now.' He pats her on the shoulder as he opens his study door. 'Don't spare the flail there, Trinity.'

  As the door closes behind the penitent, Lewis turns and grins at Eddie. 'That is one crazy chick. She's like a one-woman Spanish Inquisition.'

  Lewis is starting to seem less and less priest-like to Eddie. 'Does she really do that? She really whips herself?'

  Lewis crosses back to his desk. 'Oh yes. Would you like to see a video?'

  'A video? Of Peck thrashing herself?'

  'Incredible stuff. She's got a whole wardrobe of flagellation devices. Knotted rope, bullwhips, flails. She's even got a miniature cat-o'-nine-tails. She made it herself. Incredible.'

  'And you have it on video?'

  'I have it by the trunk load.' Lewis reclines in his leather chair, hands locked behind his head, wearing his beatific grin. 'Buckets of it. First-rate stuff. She has this ritual: she chooses a whip, then she blindfolds herself and strips. The blindfold is so she doesn't have to look at her own naked body. I'm thinking of cutting together a compilation tape and setting it to music -- I found this old big-
band number: "Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar". I was thinking of calling it Peck's Greatest Hits, but I'm open to suggestions.'

  'You have a spy camera in her apartment?'

  'I have spy cameras everywhere.' He leans forward and swings up the monitor from under his desk. On the screen, a woman Eddie vaguely recognizes from the Committee meeting is naked in a shower, locked in a lesbian embrace with a woman Eddie doesn't recognize.

  'That's disgusting.'

  'You think so? I find it intensely erotic.'

  'No, I mean filming it. That's what's disgusting. It's immoral and disgusting.' Eddie's point might be better made if he could tear his eyes from the screen. 'And immoral.'

  'And disgusting, yes.' Lewis sighs and twists the monitor out of sight again. 'But I think it's important that someone knows what's going on around this ship, don't you? You've met the Committee. You're aware of the general competence level on board. Somebody has to have a handle on things, eh, don't you think?'

  'Possibly. But chopping the sexual highlights together and dubbing on a big-band soundtrack, that might be considered above and beyond the call of duty.'

  'You don't want to see the tape, then?'

  'I would give my right arm to see the tape, if I had a right arm. I just... I could never condone anything so... so tacky.'

  'Tacky, eh? Well. You're entitled to your opinion. Wait. What do you think of the title: Im-Peck-able Behaviour? Too punny? Too sinister? Too mainline S & M?'

  'Too unpriestly, that's what I think.'

  'You think I'm unpriestly?'

  'I think that would be a fair analysis of my appraisal of your total lack of moral standards and ethics, yes.'

  Lewis sighs and reclines again. You're probably right. I do feel, sometimes, that my performance of my duties is overly hampered by my lifelong commitment to atheism.'

  'You're an atheist?'

  'I know, I know. It's a handicap to a man of my calling.' He sighs again. 'But that's the cross I bear.'

  'I don't understand. If you don't believe in God, why take to the cloth?'

  'You know the score here. I had no choice. Like everyone else on board, I inherited my job.'

  'But surely, if you explained...'

  'Why the hell should I? For an unscrupulous, non-God-fearing individual, priesthood has certain advantages. There's precious little actual work involved. These idiots confess things to me. Their darkest secrets. That knowledge gives me certain... leverage. That, and my comprehensive video collection. Then, of course, there's the asexual business. There are women who find that an incredibly horny thing. The number of times I've been led astray...' Lewis looks up to the Heaven he doesn't believe in, lost in happy memories.

  Eddie looks at the smile. So peaceful, so serene, so... contented. 'My God. You're rat slime, aren't you?'

  'Now, now, you naughty thing. You've been peeking at my CV, eh?' Lewis leans forward. His expression doesn't change, but his voice gets quieter. 'And incidentally, should you feel the urge to convey the essence of this little tete-a-tete to other parties, I might additionally point out that I am in possession of your dirty little secret -- a secret that could have you back in suspension fluid quicker than a Chinese orgasm. Are we singing the same version of the Magnificat, Dr Morton?'

  'My soul doth magnify the Lord, Father Lewis.'

  'Good. No point in our being at loggerheads. We have more urgent concerns to attend to.'

  'Yes. Such as avoiding large planets that appear out of nowhere.'

  'The truth is, that planet's turning up hardly alters things at all.'

  'Right. Hey -- what's a weeny little gas giant between friends?'

  'It simply gives us a more definitive deadline, that's all. Unless we can work out some way of manoeuvring the ship, we're on a one-way trip to oblivion, whatever happens. We've known that for some time.'

  'Up to a point, true. But we should obviously try to find out who...?'

  '"Who" doesn't matter right now. There's only one important question: "How?" Either we work out a way to change course, or we die. I suggest you might be best employed getting back to the record room and carrying on digging through that paperwork.' He treats Eddie to his best, most sincere, paternal smile. 'And God speed, pilgrim. We're depending on you.'

  Lewis jumped in a little too fast, there. Too glib. Too sincere. Too keen to stamp on any talk of the sabotage or its perpetrator? And suddenly, Eddie knows.

  He knows it was Father Lewis who deleted the planet from the display.

  30

  Eddie's in a quandary, here. He needs to know why the priest would want to conceal the imminent danger presented by the proximity of the gas giant from the rest of the crew. But who can he talk to? And how? Lewis is probably watching his every move. Probably has been watching him all the time.

  How else would he have known exactly how to deal with Peck, to cut short her accusation by precisely homing in on her guilt over the slip-up?

  Does that mean he heard Eddie trying to communicate with the computer? And if so, so what? Fortunately, the computer didn't respond.

  He's back in Planning Room Seven, now. Alone. At least, he seems to be alone. God only knows who's tuning in and observing him through various concealed surveillance devices. Peck has retired to her room, and Eddie doesn't want to think about what she's doing to herself in there. He wouldn't get any work done.

  He looks at the mounds of paperwork. It seems pointless trying to examine the ship's layout. Current diagrams bear almost no resemblance to the originals, and the persistent nature of the ship's breakdown renders even the most recent schematic hopelessly out of date. In short, it's impossible to assess the current state of the vessel, or what, precisely, is left of it.

  He has to do something. Or at least he has to appear to be trying to do something.

  More out of desperation than inspiration, he digs out the crew manifest.

  And he turns up the first promising leads.

  There are two names on the currently active personnel list that interest him. The first is interesting because he thinks he recognizes it, but he can't remember where from: a Mr Paulo San Pablos -- no listed qualification, no designated community position. Weird. The second is a strange name: Amalgam Willard-Walters. Whoever he or she is, Willard-Walters has the highest recorded IQ on board. In fact, it's the highest IQ Eddie's ever heard of: way beyond genius, and then some. Now, Eddie doesn't set much store by IQ ratings -- his own seems ludicrously high to him -- but a person with a score of 300 has got to be able to make some kind of valuable contribution to the current situation.

  He picks up the ship phone and accidentally crushes it in his excitement. He's reaching for another handset when the com screen flashes up Lewis's image.

  'You were about to call me?'

  Damn the man. Watching Eddie's every move. He doesn't even bother to make a polite stab at discretion.

  'Paulo San Pablos,' Eddie asks. 'Who he?'

  There is the tiniest of tiny blips in the steadiness of Lewis's steady, sincere stare. 'Sorry. Doesn't ring a bell.' It does. 'I'll check that one out for you.' He won't.

  OK. Let that pass for now. 'And this other one: Amalgam Willard-Walters.'

  'You mean the professors?'

  'The professors?'

  'Trust me -- you don't want to meet him.'

  'Him? Wait a minute, let's get this straight: is Amalgam Willard-Walters a single or a plural person?"

  Lewis runs a troubled hand through his hair. 'Technically, he's both.'

  31

  Eddie is travelling in the back of a corridor kart with Father Lewis. Disturbingly, two Styx drones are in the front, completely identical except for the letters on their foreheads: D and J. They are very heavily armed, which seems to Eddie both unnecessary and, given that the task of removing a ring pull from a can of beer would represent an extraordinarily taxing and bewildering intellectual challenge for the pair of them, unwise in the extreme. He tries not to notice the J drone taking imaginary pot-sho
ts at imaginary targets en route with his huge laser rifle, puffing out his cheeks to accompany his efforts with little-boy explosion noises. He tries not to think about what might happen if the gun were to go off accidentally in this confined space. He tries, instead, to listen to Father Lewis.

  'The professors are a result of a badly botched scientific experiment.'

  'Badly botched?' The D Styx snorts. 'That's an overstatement.'

  'Actually, Darion, it's an understatement'.

  'Oopsy poopsy, I made a mistake.' The D Styx slaps his forehead with weighty, laboured sarcasm. 'So shoot me in the brain with a bazooka.'

  Lewis shakes his head. 'I'm not that good a marksman.'

  'What kind of experiment?'

  'The professors, Willard and Walters, headed the community research and development team, five, six generations ago. Willard contracted a terminal illness, and the two of them agreed to graft Willard's brain on to Walters'. Two minds, one body. No sense. Are you sure you want to go through with this?'

  This was more than Eddie dared hope for. The professor/s represent a link, a bridge between his own generation and the present. With their input, it should be possible to stitch together some kind of cohesive history of the community; work out what went wrong. Work out how, for instance, the pilgrims lost the ability to read, and when. 'But how are they still...? I mean, five or six generations: that's a long time.'

  'We have them in cold storage.'

  'Cryogenics?'

  'After a fashion, yes. They're still alive in there, but their metabolism is slowed down, close to zero. Every once in a while, some bright spark insists on rousing them, to see if there's any improvement, but there never is, and so we slide them back in the freezer till the next time.'

  'You've spoken to them yourself?'

  'Spoken to them? Well, you don't exactly speak to the professors. But I've revived them a few times, yes.'

  The kart stops suddenly, with a jolt. They are at a dead end. This doesn't trouble the drones, but it bothers Eddie a lot. 'What's going on here?'

  The D Styx shrugs with his sturdy cheek muscles. 'Dead end.'

  'But there are no dead ends. The corridor system loops all the way around the ship and joins up with itself