Better Than Life

by Grant Naylor

  Finally Lister slowed and stopped. The cockroach caught up with him, slithered to its belly, pushed its head in the crook of Lister's knees, and nudged the back of his legs. Lister stumbled and straightened, and tried to fend it off. The cockroach nudged again. Lister walked sideways, his arms out straight, trying to keep it at bay. The cockroach butted him a third time, and Lister fell full length across its back. It raised its belly from the ground and started to waddle forward.

  It wanted to carry him.

  And when an eight-foot cockroach wants to give you a ride, Lister reasoned, probably the smartest thing to do was to let it.

  He changed his mind five seconds later. Just after he splayed his legs over its back, and tucked his fingers under the rim of its armour plating, the cockroach took off.

  The view would probably have been staggering from two hundred feet, but you had to have your eyes open to appreciate it fully, and Lister had no intention of doing that.

  He shouted and screamed and tried to steer the cockroach earthwards, but his benign captor had set its mind on its destination. It was taking him home to meet its folks.

  Half-way up a tall bottle mountain, they landed.

  The twenty or so members of the roach's clan surrounded them, whistling and clicking and rubbing their hindlegs together in insect delight.

  Plainly, Lister was a hit.

  One of the roaches retired to the back of the cave, and dragged a half-rotten sofa carcass to Lister's feet. The family looked on in mute anticipation.

  Lister did something then he wouldn't have done in any other circumstances whatsoever. He started to eat a sofa.

  This seemed to go down well. There was a cacophony of whirrs, clicks and whistles, and the cockroaches circled in delight.

  'Well, it's been absolutely wonderful,' Lister found himself saying. 'Terrific place you've got here,' he said to the mother roach. 'And you serve a wicked rotting sofa. But I really must be going.' He nodded, threw in a few clicks and whistles for good measure, and climbed on the first roach's back. It waddled speedily down the length of the cave, and flung itself over the mountain side.

  ***

  When Lister opened his eyes, he found to his alarm he was flying in formation, at the head of a swarm of cockroaches. Ten to his right, ten to his left. And as they flew down the middle of the valley, more and more were emerging from their caves, and taking up their place behind him.

  He looked behind him at the swelling swarm of buzzing roaches and yelped like a bronco-busting rodeo star.

  By the simple expedient of consuming a tiny portion of a decomposing three-piece suite, Lister had been anointed King of the Cockroaches.

  And together, Lister and his loyal subjects were going to start putting the planet back together again.

  FIVE

  The colossal cone-shaped jet housings on Red Dwarfs underbelly screamed and whined in their losing battle against the irresistible drag of the Black Hole's gravitational pull. Suddenly, as one, they ceased their pointless protestations and puttered into silence.

  All resistance gone, the massive mining vessel catapulted into the blackness towards the event horizon. Lazily, the jet housings started to rotate - 45 degrees. 90 degrees, 120 degrees, until finally they had described a full half-circle. The rotation motors wound down, and the stabilizing bolts cracked loudly into place. All the while, the ship howled faster, ever faster towards the lightless unknown.

  The jets fired up again. Thousands of hydrogen explosions harnessed the raw energy of the universe and thrust the ship forward, to the brink of demi-lightspeed, and beyond.

  'Event horizon: two minutes and closing.' Kryten pulled the safety webbing over his shoulders and inflated his crash suit.

  'Did I tell you about spaghettification?' said the Toaster.

  The Cat lurched upright from the couch bolted to the corner of the anti-grav chamber. 'What's spaghettification?'

  'I didn't mention it, then?'

  'One minute fifty.'

  'No you didn't. What is it?' said Rimmer.

  'Well,' said the Toaster, 'when you enter a Black Hole, an effect takes place, called "spaghettification”. I thought I'd mentioned it, but obviously I didn't. Anyway, just so you know, it'll happen fairly shortly.'

  'One minute forty.'

  The Cat lay back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling. 'So what the hell is it?'

  'Spaghettification. Let me guess,' said Rimmer. 'I can see only two options: one - due to the bizarre effects of the intense gravitational pull, and because we're entering a region of time and space where the laws of physics no longer apply, we all of us inexplicably develop an irresistible urge to consume vast amounts of a certain wheat-based Italian noodle conventionally served with Parmesan cheese; or two - we, the crew, get turned into spaghetti. I have a feeling we can eliminate option one.'

  'You're absolutely correct,' said the Toaster. 'You all become sort of spaghettified.'

  'Forty seconds,' counted Kryten.

  'Then what happens?'

  'Well, then you become de-spaghettified,' said the Toaster, and added: 'hopefully. Holly was a bit vague about that part. Still, he didn't seem to think it was terribly important.'

  'I get turned into spaghetti,' the Cat's eyebrows leapt to the top of his forehead, 'and that's not important?'

  Thirty seconds.'

  The Cat tried vainly to lift his head from the cranium support - he had a major collection of dirty looks he wanted to sling at the Toaster - but G-force pinned him, immobile, to the couch, so he slung them at the ceiling instead. 'Is it too late to change this plan? I have no idea what well-dressed spaghetti is wearing this year.'

  'Ten seconds.'

  'Ten seconds?' Rimmer was equally immobile. 'What happened to twenty seconds?'

  'I forgot to say twenty seconds,' Kryten apologised. 'I was listening to the Cat.' His eyes flitted to the scanner scope again. 'Oh, sorry - apologizing for not saying "twenty seconds” has now made me miss saying "five seconds”.'

  'So how long now?' yelled Rimmer.

  'Err ... no seconds,' said Kryten. And he was right.

  ***

  The combination of jet thrust and gravitational pull forced Red Dwarf through the lightspeed barrier the moment it hit the event horizon. To all intents and purposes, the ship no longer existed in the universe of its origin. It shrugged off Newton, Einstein, Oppenheimer and Chien Lau, and subscribed to a completely new set of physical laws.

  They were in the Black Hole, heading for its centre. Heading for the ring of light that swirled suicidally around the spinning singularity - the core of the dead star where all the matter sucked in by the Black Hole was compressed to infinity. And they were heading there at such a speed, they were overtaking light.

  The Cat's body started to spill off the couch in every direction. Long, thin strands of what had formerly been him slithered across the floor and intertwined with the strands that had been Kryten and Rimmer and the Toaster. The anti-grav chamber became a sea of heaving, screaming, living linguini.

  Everyone became part of everyone else.

  They threaded together and formed a new whole. They weren't four, they were one. The particles that had once formed Rimmer's intelligence, in a blinding flash of empathetic insight, suddenly became aware of the desperate, monumental importance of toast. Instantaneously, the strands that had been the Toaster were conscious of the overriding necessity for dressing well and having a really terrific haircut. The vermicelli that was now the Cat tasted the feeling of being mechanical, and knew with unshakeable certainty that Silicon Heaven existed, and the best way to get there was through diligent hoovering. Simultaneously, the macaroni that was Kryten knew what it was like to be Rimmer. He understood what it was like to have had those parents, that childhood, that career, that life. It was impossible to scream, but that's what Kryten was trying to do.

  The ship was no longer a ship, it was a huge tachyon, a superlight particle, howling through a universe outside our own. It was a
pool, then a wave, then a ball, then a dot, then it had no shape - it just was.

  The huge mound of spaghetti slithered across space/time and peered into the face of the spinning white disc.

  'Look,' said a part of the spaghetti that was mostly Rimmer.

  In the centre of the spinning light were six interlocking coils, like fibre optics, but of a size beyond size. The immense hollow cables twisted and undulated like the snakes on the Gorgons' heads. The tubes were of colours that had no meaning to the human eye. They spun and swirled in a timeless dance of beauty.

  Not for the first time, Rimmer cursed himself for not bringing his camcorder. 'What is it?' he said, but before anyone could answer the ball of speed the ship had itself become slung around the singularity.

  It bounced off the sudden cushion of anti-gravity it met there, then, like a swimmer who has dived too deep, lunged desperately for the surface, for the event horizon, for the known universe. It struck upwards, fighting off the gravity that tried to suck it back to its core at the speed of light.

  Then the lightspeed drag of gravity cancelled out the light-speed momentum of the ship, and Red Dwarf regained its physical form. Suddenly it was travelling at a relative speed of less than two hundred thousand miles an hour towards the event horizon. The metal of the bulkheads buckled and groaned. Leering cracks ripped through the metalwork and zigzagged insanely down the port side.

  The ship started to slow.

  Plasti-domes splintered and shattered. Steel mining rigs were wrenched protesting from the ship's back and swirled helplessly down into the singularity to be crushed into infinity.

  Still the ship slowed.

  The jet housings started to creak, and then, all over the vessel's belly, one by one, pinion rods snarled and snapped, and the housings came away and tumbled into the infinite abyss.

  Still the ship slowed.

  Half the propulsion jets were lost. Hydrogen fuel pumped from the jet carcasses and flooded into the relentless void. Like a harpooned whale, the wounded craft pitched wildly for the surface, for light, for life.

  Slower still.

  Another crop of housings moaned and warped and fell away.

  Still slower.

  And slower.

  And slo-o-o-o-o-o-ower.

  Relatively, the ship was moving at barely fifty miles an hour.

  Then thirty.

  Twenty.

  Ten.

  The Black Hole had just to claim one more jet housing to tip the balance, to drag the ship below lightspeed and trap it forever in its bleak embrace.

  It didn't.

  With the suddenness of an infant's birth scream, Red Dwarf exploded through the event horizon and into the known universe.

  Free of the worst of the cloying quicksand grip of the dead star's interior, the limping vessel peaked back up to lightspeed for an instant of an instant before the final remnants of gravitational drag slewed it to a halt on the very periphery of the Black Hole's influence.

  ***

  The de-spaghettified Cat looked down his body and checked it was all there. It seemed to be.

  He unbuckled himself from the couch and stood on uneasy legs. 'Everyone OK?'

  Kryten nodded, still too nauseous to speak.

  'What was that?' said Rimmer. 'In the middle of the spinning light. Those tubes.'

  'The Omni-zone,' said the Toaster. 'Holly predicted we'd find that. It confirms his theory.'

  'What theory?'

  'The theory that there are six other universes, and all their gateways converge at the centre of a singularity.'

  'There are six other universes?' said Rimmer.

  'So Holly reckoned,' said the Toaster. 'He also believed that our universe is the bad apple. It's the cock-up universe. Something went wrong with our Big Bang and made Time move in the wrong direction, that's why nothing makes sense.'

  'I'll tell you something that does make sense,' The Cat staggered over to the Toaster. 'You made me eat seventy-three rounds of buttered toast. Check that: seven, three,' he slapped his rump. 'I feel like I'm carrying around a third buttock in my pants. And I just want you to know this - I want you to live with this for the rest of your life - you,' he jabbed the Toaster with his long-nailed forefinger, 'you make real lousy toast. It's cold, it's burnt, and it's soggy.'

  The Toaster twirled his browning knob defiantly. 'Hey -what d'you expect for $£19.99 plus tax? Conversation, quantum theory and good toast?'

  SIX

  The bulging, warped cargo-bay doors refused to yield to electronic command, but they did yield to the massive volley from the mining lasers, which ripped them from their hinges and sent them spinning off into space.

  The two transport craft taxied along the take-off ramp and out through the yawning bay. They banked left and skirted Red Dwarf's mangled hull, before swooping down into the planet's atmosphere.

  When they hit the thick grey cloud bank, the craft peeled off. White Giant, with Rimmer and the Cat, took the northern hemisphere, and Blue Midget, piloted by Kryten and the Toaster, zoomed south.

  ***

  Rimmer stared unblinking into the screen of the infra-red scanner scope as White Giant swept across the surface of the planet. 'What's happened to the snow? Where's the Ice Age gone?'

  The Cat pushed aside the dangling furry dice and peered through the murk of the Drive window. 'What is all that stuff down there? That mountain - it's shining.'

  Rimmer looked over his shoulder. 'Looks like glass.'

  The Cat increased the magnification factor, and they stared at the mountain ranges of green bottles looming below them. 'Bottles? What is this place?'

  Rimmer shrugged and turned back to the heat scanner. Nothing. He voice-activated the sonar scan for signs of movement. Still nothing. 'This is hopeless. We could fly around for years and not find him. One man on a planet this size? It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. No - it's worse. It's like trying to find a hidden can of lager at a student party.'

  'If he's still alive, we'll find him. He'll have left some kind of signal.'

  'Twenty-four days he's been down there. Twenty-four days without food. He may be too weak to signal.'

  ***

  Kryten slipped Blue Midget into autodrive, and squeezed between the towering stacks of freshly baked bread that occupied eighty per cent of the living space in the craft's operational mid-section. He lifted the dozen or so brown loaves that covered the scanner screen, and piled them on top of a rack of pallets bulging with french sticks.

  'Twenty-four days without food,' said the Toaster. 'I only pray we've brought enough bread.'

  Kryten suppressed a sigh and wondered how he'd ever been persuaded to pair up with a novelty kitchen appliance.

  For thirty-six hours they tracked back and forth across the surface of the planet, hoping for a heat reading on the infrared scan or some sign of movement from the sonar. At five o'clock, on the evening of the second day, they got one.

  The signal originated from a small island, measuring barely sixty miles across, three thousand miles south of the equator. Small pockets of movement registered on the sonar. The infrared confirmed life. Quite a lot of life.

  Kryten looked at his watch, then spun off his ear, and spun it back on again, as was his habit when pensive. It wasn't possible to contact Rimmer and the Cat for another three hours. They were on different sides of the planet, and the only way to communicate was to bounce radio signals off the orbiting Red Dwarf, which was in the correct position just once every four hours. He looked at his watch again, tapped it several times, and made his decision.

  Blue Midget's retro jets blasted deep smoking potholes into the island's swampy surface, and the landing legs telescoped down into the quagmire, sinking dozens of feet before they found purchase. The hatchway opened and Kryten leaned outside to scan the terrain. He sniffed gingerly at the air to sample the atmosphere for chemical analysis. Instantly, his olfactory system went into massive overload, and his nose exploded loudly.

  H
e clucked impatiently, unscrewed the popped nose from his face and fished inside his utility pouch for a spare. He tore off the plastic packing and clicked it into place. He twisted the adjustment screw to turn the smell sense down to minimum and tentatively inhaled once more. His second nose went the way of the first. He had no more noses. He'd have to wait until he got back to Red Dwarf. In the meantime, he was noseless, which was probably just as well.

  He staggered out on to the ramp and threw the hover dinghy into the steaming marsh, then ducked back into the craft to reappear with the Toaster strapped to his back.

  'Careful!' yelled the Toaster. 'I'm only $£ 19.99. I'm not waterproof.'

  A thought entered Kryten's CPU, but it was a very cruel thought, and unworthy of a mechanical, and not the kind of thought that would get him into Silicon Heaven, so he reluctantly dismissed it.

  They sat in the hover dinghy, and Kryten checked the remote scanner. He wrenched back the joystick, and the dinghy rasped off, bouncing across the steaming swamp in the direction of the signal's source.

  ***

  The Cat was beginning to panic. He'd gone almost two hours without a bath, or even a light shower. He was beginning to smell like a human. He snapped the controls over to automatic and shimmied off to the changing cubicle. 'I'm out of here. Buddy,' he said, and flicked quickly through his emergency travel wardrobe, which contained only his top one hundred indispensable suits, and selected his seventh new outfit of the afternoon.

  Doing anything with the Cat was impossible. Rimmer looked up from his vigil at the scanner scope. 'Do you really, really, absolutely need another bath?'

  The Cat didn't even consider the inquiry worthy of a reply. Human beings - what unhygienic, dirty, revolting little creatures they were. All their priorities were wrong: they had scant regard for relaxing and general quality snoozing time. Instead, they raced around, pell-mell, getting sweaty. It was no wonder they'd invented the wheel before they'd invented the twin-speed hairdrier with styling funnel. All their values were tip over tail. Still, what else could you expect from a race whose foremost scientists believed they evolved from slime? Ocean slime. They honestly held the opinion that their ancestors were mud. On the other hand, having spent some time with them, the Cat was inclined to agree.