Better Than Life

by Grant Naylor

  Rimmer blipped off, and re-formed in the hologrammatic projection unit regeneration chamber aboard Red Dwarf. Instantly, he knew something was wrong. But not with him - with Time.

  SEVEN

  Lister had his first meal in four days, sixteen hours after Rimmer had vanished.

  He sat in front of the brazier, and looked down at the grey, chipped enamel of the ship-issue plate.

  The meal almost looked nice. It was garnished with potato crisps, topped by crumbled water biscuits, sprinkled with mustard and decorated with flower-twirls of Bonjella gum ointment.

  But it was still dogfood.

  It was still rich, chunky lumps of rabbit, in a thick, marrowbone jelly.

  It was still utterly revolting.

  A dozen times he dug in his fork and held the quivering mass centimetres from his lips, but he just couldn't bring himself to put it in his mouth and swallow.

  If it had had a neutral smell, it might have been all right. But the smell of dogfood had always filled Lister with nausea. After disco urinals, his own socks and Spanish perfume, it was his least favourite smell.

  So he waited. He waited until he was so hungry he didn't care. Until the dogfood wasn't dogfood. Until it was a prime slab of fillet steak sizzling in a creamy fresh blue-cheese sauce.

  With the pinched eyes of a gourmet sampling perfection he slid the wobbling forkful between his lips. He chewed. He chewed a bit more. Then he swallowed the dogfood.

  He sat for a while. Well, he thought, now I know why dogs lick their testicles. It's to get rid of the taste of the food.

  He placed the fork back on the plate, rose and staggered uneasily to the Starbug's tail-section to try and take his mind off eating. He opened up the locker that stored the 'bug's tiny library and tried to find some distraction. It was no good. Everything reminded him of food.

  He glanced down the spines. Charles Lamb. Sir Francis Bacon. And his eyes started playing tricks: Herman Wok, he read, and The Caretaker, by Harold Pinta. He saw food everywhere, even when it wasn't there. Eric Van Lustbader - Eric Van - bread van, meat van: food.

  There was nothing else for it. He returned to the vessel's mid-section, finished off the dogfood, curled up and fell happily asleep.

  ***

  He awoke to the sound of creaking metal. Creaking metal and running water. He unzipped his sleep bag. His clothes were wet. He was sweating.

  There was a crash, and he was flung across the cabin. The 'bug was tilting. Cupboards and lockers hurled themselves open and disgorged their contents over the warm metal deck. Lister clattered to his feet and tried to scramble up the incline and into the cockpit, but the 'bug lurched again and sent him tumbling through the back hatchway and into the tail section.

  Then Starbug started to move. Slowly at first, it slid lazily backwards, its outer hull grinding against the landscape, fans and support legs bending and snapping as it went.

  Lister clawed his way up the ship, and staggered to a viewport window.

  Ice world was melting. Overnight, its Ice Age was ending. The warm kiss of its new sun was thawing the planet which had been frozen for countless millennia.

  Thick grey rivers gushed down the faces of shrinking glaciers. Mountains were moving, gliding with majestic grace across the liquid landscape.

  And Starbug was picking up speed, skidding helplessly downhill.

  Lister collapsed to his haunches, hurled his head into his hands and made strange moaning sounds.

  He was sick of it.

  All he wanted to do was go home. Get back to Earth. Find a dead-end job and live out the rest of a boring existence. But no.

  From Mimas, to Deep Space, to unreality, to this; marooned in a smashed-up spacecraft that was tobogganing down a glacier, with only three squirts of gum ointment and half a bottle of vinegar between him and starvation.

  Under the circumstances, Lister did the only sane thing.

  He went back to bed.

  Lister had a gift for sleeping. He could sleep anywhere, at any time, in any circumstances. It was a much underestimated talent, in his view. And if they'd ever held world sleeping competitions in his time back on Earth, he could have been an international somnolist. He could have slept for his country.

  He crawled back to the bunk, bent his pillow in a U around his ears, and became the first man ever to sleep through a melting Ice Age.

  EIGHT

  Something was wrong with Time.

  Rimmer stepped out of the regeneration booth into the long corridor of the hologram projection suite. The banks of machinery that lined the half-mile wall rippled and undulated as if light itself were bending. To Rimmer's right, at the far end of the suite, a glass water-cooler had toppled free of its housing and appeared to be defying gravity, suspended half-way between the counter top and the floor.

  He lurched right and started walking towards it. This turned out to be a mistake. As he raised his left leg and thrust it forward, it telescoped out forty feet down the room. Instinctively, he flicked out his right leg to retain his balance. But his right leg bolted down the room, overtaking his left. He stopped and looked at his position.

  His head and torso appeared to be barely two feet off the ground, while his right leg was eighty feet down the room, and his left leg still forty. He stayed perfectly still and wondered what to do. The water-cooler had moved a few inches closer to the floor. He leant forward, and his neck elongated out of his shoulders, so he looked like a bipedal brontosaurus, and zoomed off down the room.

  He panicked and started to chase after his neck. Suddenly, he was aware that something was overtaking him at speed. It was his right leg. Once again it stretched yards in front of him, then a flash of khaki from the other side, and his other leg loomed out to join it. He took three more rubbery steps, until a bout of nausea forced him to stop. The water-cooler was definitely moving. The closer Rimmer got, the faster it moved.

  He turned back and looked down the room towards a digital wall clock. The minute digits were hammering over so fast they were little more than a blur.

  Rimmer started to head back for the door at the clock end, to make his way to the ship's Status Room. To his alarm he found that thrusting his legs out in this direction made them shrink. They concertinaed into themselves, so he looked like a bad impression of Groucho Marx chasing after Margaret Dumont.

  Something was happening to the clock. The nearer he got to it, the slower it appeared to move. The digits were still flicking over at high speed, but it was a slower high speed than the speed he'd witnessed when he'd been standing by the suspended water cooler.

  Finally, he reached the end of the suite, and stood under the clock. Now it was moving perfectly normally.

  The digits read: Monday: 13:02.

  He walked through the hatchway and stood in the main linking corridor. The corridor ran at a right angle to the hologram suite, and appeared to be normal. The problem, whatever it was, seemed to be localized to the one room. He started to head for the Status Room.

  His right leg thumped down, short, wide and elephantine, while his left tapered elegantly out beside him. He waddled on his two strange new legs into the Status Room, sat down at the console desk and scanned the bank of security monitors.

  The problem was ship wide. Time was moving at different speeds in every single room. He glanced down at the digital clock nestled among the console switches.

  The readout was: Tuesday: 05:17.

  Two hundred yards down the corridor it was Monday afternoon. Here, it was early Tuesday morning.

  He voice-activated the external viewport scanners, and studied the screens. Rimmer could see nothing outside the ship that would explain the phenomenon. The two suns of the binary systems were still here, and so were the three planets. The only slightly odd thing was that one of the suns, the sun that lay to the front of the ship, was no longer perfectly round - it was now egg-shaped, and a thin stream of light peeled off it, tailing away into the blackness.

  The sun far off into the
distance, around which Lister's planet orbited, seemed unaffected.

  Rimmer voice-activated the monitors back to internal and scrutinized the images more closely. It took him nearly an hour to work it out. The closer you got to the front of the ship, the slower Time was moving.

  It was as if some gigantic force were sucking in Time. Corrupting it. Slowing it down.

  There were only two things Rimmer knew of that could produce such a syndrome. And since he'd never in his life consumed a magic mushroom, that left only one alternative.

  He prayed he was wrong. He was wrong about most things, and always had been. Why should he be right about this?

  No, there was some option he hadn't considered. He was bound to be wrong.

  Bound to be. He cheered up a little, confident in his own awesome capacity for incompetence, and asked the security computer to activate a sweep search for Kryten and the Cat.

  It found them in one of the engine rooms to the rear of the ship, frantically chasing around with a battalion of skutters, trying to re-start the engines.

  Rimmer called for a voice link. 'Kryten - Lister's marooned on the ice planet. He's starving to death. We've got to get down and help him. What the smeg's happening?'

  Kryten replied in a garbled falsetto before he was barged out of shot by the Cat, who was clearly impatient to deliver his own version of the facts.

  'Gubudoobeedee,' he squeaked, his hands gesticulating wildly, like a deranged street drunk. 'Gadabadabadeebee-doobeedah. OK?'

  'Speak slowly,' said Rimmer, as quick and high-pitched as he could. 'I have to speak fast and squeaky, and you have to speak slow and low. Otherwise we won't make sense to each other.'

  Kryten blinked into the video shot, and spoke as slowly as he could. He still sounded like a man with a mouthful of helium, but at least now it was intelligible. 'Something is wrong,' he chirruped helpfully.

  'Oh really?' Rimmer squeaked back sarcastically. 'How enlightening. It's Tuesday in here, Monday next door, and you think something is wrong.'

  'What are you talking about?' Kryten said. 'It's Friday.'

  He twisted the security camera so it pointed at the wall clock.

  'Friday?' Rimmer squinted at the read-out. 'It's Monday next door, Tuesday in here, and Friday where you are.' He sat and thought. 'But which Friday? Is it last Friday, or next Friday?'

  'It's this Friday,' said Kryten.

  'What's the date?'

  'Fifteenth.'

  'So it's a week next Friday.'

  There was a hiatus. Nobody could think of anything to say.

  'I'm coming down,' Rimmer said, finally. 'I'll be there in a sec.'

  ***

  'At last!' The Cat turned from testing the final piston housing and stood, hands on hips, in his red silk boilersuit with gold trimming. 'Where've you been Buddy?'

  'I ran all the way,' Rimmer panted. 'I can't have been more than five minutes.'

  'You've been over a week.'

  Rimmer glanced at the clock. It was Saturday the twenty-third.

  Kryten's head poked round the corner of the piston housing. 'We're ready and primed,' he said. 'Let's start the engines.'

  The three of them lumbered uneasily up the spiral staircase and into the Navicomp Suite.

  Kryten stabbed in the start-up sequence, and the massive pistons smashed the engine into life. Kryten clapped his plastic hands in delight. 'We did it!'

  'OK.' The Cat slid out of his silk boilersuit, revealing a quilted lame jumpsuit underneath. 'Slip this baby into reverse and let's scoot.'

  Kryten typed in the appropriate sequence, and the engine noise changed pitch, becoming a strangulated thudding whine.

  Three pairs of eyes fixed on the speed/bearing read-out. It scarcely changed.

  'More power,' said the Cat. 'Get that pedal on the metal. Sluice that juice.'

  'We're on full reverse thrust.'

  The Cat shouldered Kryten out of the way and jabbed pointlessly at the controls. 'It cannot be, novelty condom head - we're still moving forwards.'

  'Look.' Kryten pointed at the display. 'We're into the red. We're using all the power we've got.'

  'It's true, then.' Rimmer slumped into the console chair.

  'What's true?' said the Cat.

  'What's true,' Rimmer looked up, red-eyed with fear, 'is that we're being sucked into a Black Hole.'

  Part Three

  Garbage world

  ONE

  Today was the day. Today was the big one.

  John Ewe had been doing the Jovian run for the best part of twenty years. Not many people were prepared to spend their life ferrying human sewage from Jupiter's satellites all the way across the solar system and dropping it on the dump planet, but John Ewe actually enjoyed his work, and what's more, it paid well.

  It wasn't just sewage that was disgorged on the dump planet, it was everything; all humankind's garbage - nuclear waste, chemical effluence, rotting foodstuffs, glass waste, waste paper; every kind of trash - all the unwanted by-products of three thousand years of civilization. But John Ewe specialized in sewage. He was the King of Crap. And right now he was sitting on top of two billion tons of it.

  His tiny control dome, the only inhabitable section of the vast haulage ship, made up less than one per cent of the gigantic structure. The bulk of the craft was given over to the twin two-mile-long cylinders that stored the waste.

  The ship's computer indicated they were about to go into orbit. Ewe climbed into his safety webbing and switched on the view screen.

  The refuse ship powered through the thin atmosphere and hit the thick, choking black smog that spiralled up from the planet's surface. And there it was.

  Garbage World.

  Whole landmasses were given over to particular types of waste. For twenty minutes the ship flew over a range of a dozen mountains composed entirely of discarded tin cans, so high the peaks were capped with snow. It passed over an island the size of the Malagasy Republic piled high with decomposing black bin bags. It flew over a fermenting sea, flaming with toxic waste. It skimmed over an entire continent of wrecked cars: thousands upon thousands of miles of rusting chassis. It crossed a desert; a vast featureless flatland of cigarette dimps.

  And then it arrived at the continent for sewage.

  This was the moment. The moment he'd been planning for almost two decades.

  Like anyone else in a dull job, John Ewe made up games to help pass the time.

  His game was graffiti.

  And he was about to complete the biggest single piece of graffito ever attempted in the history of civilization.

  It sprawled across a continent. It was visible from space. It was written in effluence, and it said: 'Ewe woz 'ere'.

  Today he had the final two billion tons he required to complete the half-finished loop of the final 'e'.

  The bay doors on the belly of the ship hinged open and the effluence poured down and splatted into place.

  John Ewe unhooked himself from the safety harness and swaggered down the thin aisle, the cleft of his buttocks wobbling hairily over the top of his jeans. He flicked on the satellite link, and examined his masterpiece in its completed glory. He scratched his hairy shoulders and belched.

  'Bewdiful.'

  John Ewe was a colonial. He'd been born and raised on Ganymede, one of the moons that spun around Jupiter. He was aware that his ancestors had once lived here - in fact, they had originated from the dump planet - but no one, no one at all had lived there for five or six generations. He felt no affinity for the world of his forebears, any more than Anglo-Saxons felt an affinity for Scandinavia.

  Earth didn't really mean anything to Ewe - it was just there to be dumped on.

  ***

  The mathematics were simple: civilization produces garbage; the greater the civilization, the greater the garbage - and humankind had become very civilized indeed.

  Three hundred years after the invention of the lightbulb, they'd colonized the entire solar system. The solar system was soon
jam-packed with civilization too, and humankind rapidly reached the point where there was so much indestructible garbage, there was nowhere left to put it.

  Something had to be done. Firing the garbage willy-nilly off into space was cost-prohibitive. So the Inter-Planetary Commission for Waste Disposal conducted a series of feasibility studies, and they concluded that one of the nine planets of the solar system had to be given over to waste.

  Delegates from all the planets and their satellites submitted tenders to lose the contract.

  The Mercurian delegation pointed to their solar-energy plants, which provided cheap, limitless energy for the whole system.

  The study group from Uranus hinged its case on its natural stores of mineral deposits.

  Jupiter and its moons relied on their outstanding natural beauty.

  Neptune built its case on famous planetary architecture - it had been terraformed to the highest specifications.

  Saturn's rings, a massive tourist attraction, made that planet safe, and its network of moons, though often seedy and downmarket, generated a lot of business, merely because of their position along established trade routes.

  Mars was the safest of all, because it was home to the wealthy. It was the chicest, most exclusive world in the planetary system, handy for commuting to other planets, yet far enough away from the riff-raff to be ideal for the mega-rich.

  Venus took the Martian over-spill - the people who wanted to live on Mars, but couldn't quite afford it. Venus was full of people who wanted to be Martians, so much so they often quoted their address as 'South Mars' or 'Mars/Venus borders.' Still, it was a fairly wealthy planet, and the Venusians constituted a powerful political lobby.

  And so it became a straight battle between Earth and Pluto. The Plutonian delegation made rather a weak case, drawing attention to their planet's erratic orbit and its position on the edge of the solar system.

  The Earth delegation was beside itself with fury. Frankly, it was outraged that the planet that was mother to the human race, where life itself had been spawned and nurtured, was even being considered for such a putrid fate. It talked long and heatedly about how humankind had to remember its roots, and showed long, dull videos of Earth's past beauty. Of course, it conceded, the planet wasn't as pulchritudinous as it had once been. Yes, it agreed, it was now the most polluted planet in the solar system. True, most of the inhabitants had fled to the new terraformed worlds, and it was home, now, to only a handful of millions, too broke, too scared or too stupid to leave. But what about tradition, it argued? Earth had invented civilization. It had given civilization to the solar system. If civilization now turned round and literally dumped on Earth, what did that say about humankind?