by Eric Brown
Out there it was hot enough now to melt lead, so hot she’d be immediately killed. And besides there was no oxygen.
The clouds overhead were thick, unbroken. A diffuse yellow light shone over baked, shattered ground. Even the geology had evolved: the emptied ocean bed was lifted up, the old mountains eroded and dipped.
Now Pod rested on a plain of shattered, broken plates.
Pod had been forced to repair essential subsystems with raw materials taken from the planet. She could see, through the canopy, that it looked as if Pod’s base had melted, flowed across square metres of the landscape, seeping into the fabric of this world.
All the oxygen in the air was gone, and carbon dioxide had baked out of the vanished ocean, the rocks, to form a blanket over the planet. The planet had become a Venus; it had fallen into the other classic stable-climate model, for a dead terrestrial world.
Her life seed had failed.
So much for the plan.
Pod showed her images it had gathered, through breaks in the clouds, and from non-optical sensors. The sun had grown huge, and it hovered on the south-western horizon. This battered old world had become tidally locked to its parent.
And there were fewer stars in the sky, it seemed to her.
She’d come so far, the galaxy itself was starting to die.
She lay down. The sub-dermals were faulty, and she had to lift them into place.
“Instructions.”
She felt a morbid curiosity. I want to see how it finishes.
“Go on. Indefinitely.”
“Instructions.”
“Until something changes, damn it.”
Maybe something would turn up, as the laws of physics unravelled.
Sure. Her situation was ridiculous. It was still less than a week, subjectively, since she’d taken that sauna in Mother, before descending on this routine survey. Now, she was probably the only human left alive, anywhere.
I wish I’d died, when Shuttle came down. At least those damn Eetees would have enjoyed a little life.
She closed her eyes.
~
There was a dull red glow beyond the canopy. She sat up, entrapped like some homunculus in a bell-jar. Through the crystal’s protection she could feel the temperature. Too damn hot. Pod was failing at last.
It was almost a relief .
The red glow was nothing to do with the Venusian clouds, which had burned away. So had the rest of the atmosphere, in fact. The planet was more like the Moon now: cracked, battered, ancient. Pod had half- melted into the regolith coating the planet, a thin dust gardened by aeons of micrometeorite strikes.
The red glow was the G8-class sun. It was leaving the Main Sequence. Its core, exhausted of hydrogen, had collapsed; helium was fusing now, pumping energy into the outer layers, ballooning them out in a last, extravagant gesture. Soon, all the system’s inner planets would be consumed. Including this one.
The warmth was pleasant. It reminded her of the Shelter on L5. When Ben had been small, and still hers.
“Crew loss scenario,” said Pod.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t be frightened.”
The canopy dissolved, and light enfolded her.
Green-Eyed Monster
The night I died, I felt great.
I emerged from the Wheatsheaf at closing time, filled with the euphoria you get from downing a gallon of ale on a balmy mid-summer’s night.
I walked down the country lane towards home. The light of the half-full moon cast a cool white glow over the beads of dew on the grass.
I’m a happy drunk, the kind of chap who will express samurai-like loyalty to you over the fourth pint. (Anne, my wife, used to say that I was compensating for being such a sour bastard the rest of the time.) And, sometimes, when the amounts and the ancillary ingredients are just right, the booze will work its mysterious magic on me and make the world seem a fine and wondrous place.
That night was just such an occasion.
I passed the field where I’d been walking with Lizzie, my daughter, earlier that day. We’d found an odd disc-shaped object there, half-buried in the ground. I’d thought of getting on to the local paper about it; maybe they could run a story in their crop-circles column. But then Lizzie had found a toad, a great big ugly brute, which she’d insisted on picking up, cuddling and taking home. The kid has her drunken father’s goodness about her, I thought in my maudlin way, and I smiled.
The artefact was still there, I noticed. It was a frisbee maybe a yard across, wedged into the ground so that only half its disc was showing. It glowed softly, with yellow light from some internal source. Odd, of course. But the rational bits of my brain had long since shut down, and I just revelled in the glow, as it beat across the grass to my face.
I thought of Lizzie and the bond she’d formed with the toad. I thought of all the living things around me, the blades of grass and the trees and insects and birds and amphibians and little scurrying mammals, with their tiny lives and consciousnesses glowing like dew drops, all of us bonded by that yellow glow, all united in the great River of Life that flowed from the primeval ocean itself.
Or perhaps towards it. Wrestling with the metaphor, I strolled on.
Anyhow it was a beautiful feeling, a fine moment. Like that Michael Jackson song about the elephant’s tusk. My heart was full of joy.
I got home. I didn’t want to disturb anybody, so I collapsed on the settee in the living room. I was expecting a bad head in the morning, nothing more.
That much, in retrospect, I might have deserved.
~
I had one hell of a dream, that night.
There was gritty red sand under my belly. I was trying to crawl, I realised, my four legs splayed around me, my flippers pawing the dry grains.
I had eight toes on each flipper, webbed over by scaly flesh. And I wasn’t so much crawling as slithering, like a snake, my body long and sinuous.
I could barely move. I felt cold, the thin air harsh on my skin.
The land was flat and bare. There was no grass, though there were some plants: mostly small, herb-like growths, and some kind of tumble-weed.
There was no sound save a low, moaning wind. The sky was covered with thick cloud. Actually it reminded me of Cleethorpes.
A few feet away was a pond, a murky, shallow puddle. At its edge was a creature like a newt, lying on its side, already dead.
I seemed to be trying to reach the puddle.
A thing like a centipede scuttled past my nose. I reached out my tongue. In the water, I’d have caught the creature. Here, so high, I could barely move.
This is one hell of a dream, I thought, hangover or not.
I turned, slithering.
I coughed. Brackish water spewed out of my mouth.
I felt as if I was drowning. I sucked at the thin, cold air.
I felt a gill-flap on the back of my head close up. But air scoured in through my nostrils, and into my lungs .
I breathed!
I scrabbled, the air like fire in my new lungs, my belly and tail working at the sand, striving to get to the drying puddle...
~
I woke up with relief.
Christ, I thought. The mother of all nightmares.
When I opened my eyes and my vision cleared, things seemed a little odd.
I found I was no longer on the settee. I was still in the living room, but viewing it from an angle wholly new to my experience. I was three feet off the floor, in one corner of the room, and seemed to be peering through glass.
Maybe I was still dreaming. Maybe I was stuck inside the TV.
Except...
The glass curved all around me. I was not inside the TV at all. I was in the goldfish bowl, on top of the TV.
I was trying to work this out when I saw the body.
It was sprawled out on the settee, belly up, eyes open and staring at the ceiling. I had never before seen a dead body, and I was shocked.
All the more, because the body wa
s mine.
My body—the body I now inhabited—was a brown sack, covered with warts. My underside seemed to be coated with slime. I had two little arms—with four long fingers each—and two big fat legs, five toes apiece .
Everything seemed dazzling bright, all around me, and I had an unaccountable urge to climb under a rock until nightfall.
I felt an uncomfortable pressure in my rear end. Without thinking about it, I pushed myself up with my little arms, and arranged my legs in an M-shape around my slippery backside.
I felt myself shudder, and a wave of pleasure broke over me.
I seemed to have developed three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, and I could see I had deposited a little pellet on the glass behind me.
Holy smoke, I thought.
I was the enormous, ugly toad Lizzie had triumphantly borne into the house yesterday afternoon.
Not only that, but I’d just had a dump in a goldfish bowl.
I just had to be dreaming... Didn’t I?
At that moment, Lizzie bounded out of bed and started her six-year-old assault on the new day. I heard the thud of her feet on the parquet flooring of her bedroom. She pattered across the landing and stomped down the stairs. I watched as the door to the living room opened and her fuzzy blonde curls appeared. She was wearing her Mickey Mouse pyjamas, with one leg rucked up past the knee. I wanted to take her in my arms and protect her from what she was about to discover .
She walked into the room and stood before the settee, her belly defiantly out-thrust.
After a second or two of blinking contemplation, she reached out a stiff forefinger and poked me—the body—in the ribs.
No response, of course.
“Daddy?”
She climbed onto the settee, then scaled the rounded mound of my stomach. She reached forward and slapped the pale cheek of my corpse with her tiny palm.
The corpse emitted a long, low fart.
Lizzie spilled onto the carpet and ran crying from the room. “Mummy, Mummy!”
By now I had control of my obese, slimy body. I could move its limbs, hop restrictedly around the bowl, blink my bulbous eyes and even croak.
What a mess. I croaked a lonely, plaintive lament, my vocal sac quivering.
Movement in the room beyond the bowl... Anne entered, followed by Lizzie.
“Richard?” she said, moving past the settee and drawing the curtains. “Do you really think this is a good example to set? How many times have I told you that four pints is your limit? Any more and, well ... just look at you.”
Then, for the first time, she did look at me.
“Richard? Richard...”
Knuckle in her mouth, she advanced tentatively on the settee, reached out and shook my—the body’s—shoulder .
“Oh my God...”
What did I expect? A nervous breakdown? Wild hysteria? At least a few tears.
Okay, so we’d had our differences of late...
Business-like, Anne scooped Lizzie onto her hip, crossed the room to the telephone-table next to the TV, and picked up the phone.
While she dialled, I tried to attract her attention. I puffed myself up to twice my size, stretched out all four limbs, and lowered my head to the bottom of the bowl. I’d have scared the crap out of another toad, but Anne didn’t even notice me.
“Hello... yes. I need an ambulance. My husband... I think my husband is dead.”
There, as bluntly as that. She gave her name and address and replaced the receiver, then hurried from the room.
I subsided like a pricked balloon.
Was this a common thing, I wondered? Did we all, when we died, transmigrate to the bodies of whatever animal was in the vicinity? In other words, were many thousands—nay, millions—of animals now roaming the face of the Earth bearing the souls of deceased human beings?
I had to dismiss the notion as absurd.
But, then, the situation was absurd!
I gave up. My metaphysics isn’t good at the best of times... Besides, I was starting to feel hungry .
My reverie was interrupted by Anne, entering the room once again. This time she was without Lizzie. She crossed to the phone table, averting her eyes from the corpse.
She dialled quickly. To my experienced eye, she seemed nervous.
“Hello? David, is that you?”
“...”
“Listen to me—he’s dead.”
“...”
“Who do you think? Richard, my husband. He’s lying on the couch stone cold dead. Of course I’m sure. No, no. I’m okay.”
“...”
“Oh, well. Yes. Come over. I don’t suppose we’re going to have to pretend for much longer anyway...” She smiled. “No, we’ve no need to wait for the weekend, now.”
My mind raced.
The weekend? My God... She’d told me she’d be away for two days on business. We knew three Davids, and now I had to guess which of them was conducting an affair with my wife!
As long as it wasn’t that egotistical creep, David Munn. Surely it couldn’t be...
“...”
“And I love you, too. Bye.”
Love! she’d said. Love ...
I jumped up and down the concave side of the fishbowl like a madman... or, rather, like a mad toad. I croaked in pain and exasperation. I wept real tears of amphibian grief. At least, I think I did. I even lost control of my bladder.
Dying and coming to life in the body of a toad was one thing. But having my wife conducting an affair with some arsehole called David really made me flip.
Oblivious of my antics, Anne hurried from the room.
I wasn’t about to sit around and do nothing. I’ve always been a man of action.
Gathering all my resolve, I squatted, kicked out, and made a spectacular leap from the bowl.
I landed with a wet thud on the Axminster. With no time to lose, I set about arranging Lizzie’s building blocks, nudging them into place with my slimy nose.
The ambulance arrived five minutes later. Anne showed two paramedics into the room. I hopped under the television, away from the giant, stomping feet.
One of the paramedics conducted a quick examination. He stood and addressed Anne quietly.
“I’m sorry. It looks like a coronary. Probably instantaneous. You couldn’t have done anything.”
Anne just nodded, feigning distress.
I willed one of the paramedics to glance down at the lettered blocks I’d arranged across the carpet.
hlep
Dammit! But I couldn’t hop out and rearrange the blocks now, for fear of being trampled .
The paramedics left the room and returned with a stretcher. I hopped up and down next to my desperate message, even croaked at the top of my tiny lungs.
To no avail.
As the medics were unfolding the trolley stretcher, one of them kicked the blocks across the room.
Lizzie ran into the room, stood watching wide-eyed as the paramedics loaded the body onto the stretcher. I hopped over to my daughter and jumped on her foot.
She looked down at me and smiled. Bless her.
I quickly hopped back to my message and croaked.
Lizzie ran over to the blocks. I rolled each one in turn with my nose.
help
“Mummy!” Lizzie yelled. “Look, Mummy!”
Abstractedly, Anne turned and read my heart-felt cry. I could have leapt with joy.
Anne nodded. “Very clever, Liz. But not now, okay?”
Exasperated, I watched the medics carry my corpse from the room, followed by Anne and my daughter.
Helpless, I hopped back under the TV, where I felt oddly safe.
Something moved in front of me, small and fast, blurring by.
I didn’t even think about it. My long toes twitched, and my tongue snapped out .
My big jaws closed, crushing something. It had a crunchy skeleton and at least six legs: an ant, or a beetle, I guessed.
As I munched at my prize, I was crushed by existential d
espair.
What a day, I thought.
~
There was a manly knock at the door.
A tall, bronzed figure walked into the living room and took my wife in his arms. I could only stare, my toothless mouth agape with rage, jealousy and disbelief.
Christ! Not him. Of all the Davids she could have chosen—not him! David Munn, all cravat, Rayban sunglasses and medallions, was a nasty Afrikaaner thug recently arrived in Britain from Durban.
He was accompanied today, as ever, by Freddy, his pet chimpanzee. He claimed that he’d rescued Freddy from poachers in Zaire. A likely story! Dressed in cut-off jeans and a white t-shirt, the chimp sat at his feet while Munn hugged Anne.
Of all the strange events of the day, this I found the hardest to stomach.
“It must have been a terrible shock,” the bastard said. I could almost hear the delight in his voice.
“It was so... so unexpected,” Anne replied, wiping an imaginary tear from the corner of her eye. “I mean, God knows, I no longer felt... love for Richard. But we had been together for more than ten years. It was such a shock.”
Munn there-there’d her with oleaginous platitudes. He even had the gall to offer financial help with the funeral arrangements. Good God—the man was so flagrantly transparent. It was bad enough to know that I was being cuckolded, but to think that Anne had chosen to replace me with this smarmy creep...
It was enough to make my blood boil, even though I was now, technically speaking, a cold- blooded creature.
Suddenly Lizzie knelt down in front of me. Her face lit up with delight. “Mr Toad! I thought you’d gone!”
She lifted me up and held me, legs dangling, before her face. “You know what, Mr Toad?” she whispered. “Daddy went to heaven today. Mummy says he’s living with the angels now. You know what as well? Mummy asked me if I’d like David Munn as my new Daddy. I said no way, José!”
My rage at Anne was quelled by a paternal delight with my daughter. I could see that we were going to have a beautiful relationship.
Anne glanced across the room at Lizzie. “Is that that disgusting creature you brought in the other day? Really,” she said in an aside to Munn, “I don’t know what Richard was thinking about—allowing that repulsive thing in the house.”
Munn grinned at my wife. “I wonder if it’s the type you can lick and get high?” He eyed me speculatively .