Through The Wormhole, Literally

by David Winship

  West shrugged. "Yeh," he said. "Of course."

  "Everybody?" Melinda inquired. All hands went up in favour. And so, unperturbed by sporadic outbreaks of dissent and invective, Melinda painstakingly began drawing up a world view that encompassed and neutralised all the ambiguities, paradoxes and contradictions that bedeviled the prospect of harmonious relations on the planet. She did not get very far.

  It was Joseph West who provoked the squabble that followed. "Fairness? Yeh, well, of course I (displeasingly) believe in fairness," he barked. "But who wouldn't? Who would believe in the alternative? This is (displeasingly) ridiculous. Like, who would start a crusade for unfairness? To be honest, it'd be better if you didn't do any of this. If you ask me, people don't wanna be defined by constitutions and all that (unpleasant) stuff. 'Cos when you break it all down, what really matters is, well, why don' you jus' let the planet be defined by the people in it? Y'know, people power an' all that."

  The senator with the oddly-shaped head laughed scornfully. "Typical earthling ignorance and stupidity! If you want freedom and tolerance and fairness, you've got to impose it, you numbskull! You've got to mould it into pointed shapes and hammer it into people!"

  West stood up. "Melinda, please tell me you don't believe this (unpleasant) rubbish! The rights an' values of the people come from nature, don' they? They can't be defined by committees or imposed by (unpleasant) laws! Seems to me the more laws you 'ave, the less justice you get. Because, I dunno, because, the really important rights an' values don' need to be written or rewritten. An' that way they can never be taken away from the people."

  Melinda was nodding her head in stunned approval, but the senator was quite beside himself. "You're an abomination, you primitive hairy-headed goopmutt-brain! Of course you'd say that - you were a criminal on your own planet!" It was true. All the earthling abductees had, of course, been taken from English prisons. "How can you have tolerance if you don't enforce it with every fibre of your being?" He turned to the rest of the assembly and, with an exasperated gesture of his hands, appealed once again for West to be ejected. "Throw him out! Why are we trying to have a sensible dialogue with this monosyllabic moron? I refuse to be lectured by him! It's preposterous! What was the point of getting to the top of the intergalactic power pyramid? Can you imagine - these backward dimwits have a planet of their own!"

  Melinda knocked on the table (the use of tables at meetings was one of her innovations). "Excuse me," she said.

  "Oh, you're different," said the senator, "You've got a Mortian heart, babe. The fact is, earthlings are..."

  "Did you just call me babe?" Melinda asked, her eyes wide with shock and consternation.

  Nipkow4's holographic image was breaking up a little. "I knew it wasn't a good idea to have a free exchange of views," he muttered bitterly.

  "Exchange this!" yelled West, aiming a right hook at the projection.

  "Hey, it's rude to hit someone in the wavefront interference patterns!" nipkow4 protested.

  The senator weighed in. "What do you expect? The average IQ of an earthling is between 90 and 109! Ha ha ha ha ha!"

  "Excuse me, excuse me!" Melinda shouted.

  "None of them get anywhere near 1000!" the senator continued, his voice getting shriller and shriller. "They're all sub-millenials!"

  "That's not even a thing," West countered, grabbing the senator by the throat. "Shows how (unpleasantly) clever you are!"

  "Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me!" Melinda chanted as West and the senator grappled and continued to throw insults at each other.

  Nipkow4 tried to restrain the senator, "What are you doing, senator? You should never lower yourself to the standards of an earth..." He managed to abort the remark and his image froze for a moment. A foolish grin plastered across his face, he turned to Melinda and added, "Not judging, your reverence, just trying to keep the peace."

  Struggling to maintain composure, Melinda scolded him through gritted teeth, "We're not as dumb as we... We're not dumb!"

  By now, a group of securibots were escorting the two assailants from the chamber, but they failed to prevent the senator aiming a punch at West, exclaiming as he did so, "Here! I'm striking a blow for Mortian tolerance!"

  Not to be outdone, West responded with a right hook that caught the senator right between the eyes. "Then you should 'ave one of these in the name of (displeasing) equality and peaceful earth-style democracy, you (unpleasant) pile of (unpleasantness)!"

  Forced to abandon the meeting and feeling generally discouraged and disappointed, Melinda sat alone in the empty chamber wondering how she could possibly achieve any form of social cohesion on this planet. Back on Earth, governments were tainted by sleaze and corruption and many of them pursued agendas that were ethically flawed. They swung from socialism to capitalism and back again, but all the political and economic systems just seemed to produce more and more worship of the golden calf. Surely, she thought, a more advanced civilisation such as this one should be capable of rising above all that? But no, the MANKIND project was clearly a disaster and she was presiding over a think-tank of ostriches. She put her head in her hands and wrestled with her gut feeling that her great Mortian dream had been exposed as an illusion, a myth of progress and prosperity through assimilation and brotherhood (and, er, sisterhood). Perhaps, after all, this was just not Melinda territory. Getting up and walking over to the window, she gazed at the dust storm outside. Stinging, blinding yellow-grey dirt swept this way and that across the plain, first coating the pods then brushing them clean again. Occasionally the plumes would rise up and blot out one or both of the suns, plunging the region into darkness, then they would subside, leaving the sky aglow with a faint orange-yellow light. Melinda could not help feeling there was a meaning in this, a real lesson to be learned from the phenomena of nature... don't be like dust, be like the wind, perhaps?

  She was still languishing in uncharacteristic negativity when smolin9 suddenly breezed through the portal and strode towards her, his dark eyes flashing like coals. Of course, Melinda was completely unaware that the figure she now clasped to her bosom was not smolin9 at all but polkingbeal67 in the physical guise of his late comrade.

  "I'm so glad you're here." Melinda spoke softly as a few tears escaped her eyes. "I'm not sure I'm cut out for this planetary leadership thing. Literally."

  "Sure you are," polkingbeal67 reassured her. "You'll be fine. Rome wasn't built in a day." It would have been, he thought to himself, if only earthlings had thought to commission a gang of goopmutts to do the work.

  "I know, but anyway..."

  Polkingbeal67 interrupted her. "You just need some time to get your confidence up," he said, patting her shoulder, trying to think what smolin9 would say. "When opportunity comes knocking, you've just got to, uh, y'know, be near a door."

  "Do what?" Melinda enquired in confusion. "But anyway..."

  Yes, polkingbeal67 thought, he knew exactly what smolin9 would do - he would spout some dumb analogy. "Listen Mel, did I ever tell you about the time we sent two envoys to Skolli to investigate the market potential for selling football-themed T-shirts?"

  "I think so," said Melinda, "But anyway..."

  "Well," polkingbeal67 continued, oblivious. "The first one came back and said, 'There is no potential - nobody wears T-shirts on Skolli'. And then the second one returned and said, 'There's absolutely massive potential - nobody wears T-shirts on Skolli!' You get it?"

  "Yeh, the second one, um, I don't know, but anyway..." She remembered hearing that the people of Skolli were not only totally ignorant about the earthling sport of football, but also they had six arms, two heads and giant spinal columns. There was no way they could possibly have worn T-shirts. "But anyway, how are you? Did everything go okay? Did you find polkingbeal67 and yukawa3? Never mind. First, I want you to just hold me for a while."

  Polkingbeal67, groping in the dark corridor of uncertainty, put his arms around her, reluctantly and mechanically, like a robot.

  Melinda pull
ed away. "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "I've got something to tell you. It's not good news, I'm afraid. Polkingbeal67 is dead."

  . . .

  An analysis of polkingbeal67's Karma 5 would certainly reveal a cantankerous and misguided character, but not a bad one, even if he was inclined to make bad judgements when acting under duress. He had not intended to deceive Melinda. In fact, he had fully intended to tell her the whole truth about smolin9's unthinkable self-sacrifice and he would have done so were it not for the emotional turmoil that had gripped him when he had found her, despondent and depressed, in the presidential meeting chamber. Unaccustomed to experiencing emotional vulnerability, his psyche had gone into a kind of meltdown when Melinda had held him in her arms, and he had discovered he simply could not bear to inflict further pain on her. Although he had resolved to find the right time to tell her the truth as soon as possible, polkingbeal67 had found himself a victim of his own sensitivity and diplomacy, for a lie, once told, takes on a dynamic of its own and can even begin to sound like the truth.

  There are those who believe that lying is an intrinsic part of human nature. Others maintain that it is always wrong to tell a lie, even if it is told for the best of reasons. Lies, at some point or other, invariably hurt the person who is lied to, but they can also hurt the liar. Polkingbeal67 now had to deal with the immediate fallout from his error, namely the plight of the cadet, yukawa3, who had been arrested immediately on their arrival on Morys Minor.

  Fortunately, before they had left Earth, yukawa3 had had time to comply with smolin9's entreaties and had told his mentor what had happened, including every detail of the Karma 5 switch. Let us briefly bounce back to that moment:

  Not surprisingly, polkingbeal67 became horrified and distraught by yukawa3's account of the afternoon's events. "We can't possibly leave smolin9 here," he declared. "Why did you let him do this?"

  Yukawa3, suddenly stricken with guilt and remorse, keeled over and fell flat on his back. "It should have been me! Why didn't I say something? I'm not worthy to speak smolin9's name. I'm not a nice person at all. I'm just worthless and very, very ugly! I'm a horrible shape and my eyes are ugly and my nose is ugly!"

  "You don't have a nose," polkingbeal67 reminded him.

  This did not deter yukawa3. "If I had a nose, it would be an ugly one!"

  By now, polkingbeal67 had composed himself. Time was running out anyway. Smolin9 had clearly thought everything through - once a wormhole traversal had been put in motion, there could be no delaying it. "Okay, shut up!" polkingbeal67 told the hysterical cadet. "We've got to go through with this now. We've got to leave before the HDA wears off. This is what we're going to do: we're going to go back to Morys, tell Melinda everything and tremble before the voice of Mortian justice. Listen, I believe we will not be denied. I believe that our justice system bears the fruit of compassion and understanding. I believe we will be exonerated and reinstated and free to continue our work in honour of our great friend and comrade who lies here..." He bowed his head and suppressed a sob.

  Yukawa3, who had sprung to his feet, was flailing his arms around like a hellfire preacher warning of Armageddon. "Yes! Yes!" he yelled, tears streaming down his face. "I was about to say that! I was about to say that!"

  The Mortian equivalent of a high-five was a head-butt. Suffice to say, there was a wild and frenzied exchange of head-butts between polkingbeal67 and yukawa3 before they took their final, grief-stricken leave of smolin9.

  "Why can't we take him with us?" yukawa3 wailed. "At least he'd get a proper funeral with full state honours among his own people in his own community."

  "Because he's not dead yet," polkingbeal67 reminded him sombrely. "He wouldn't survive the HDA. Are you prepared to kill him?"

  They looked at each other, aghast. The thunderstorm had abated a little, but the frequent flashes of lightning, combined with his partial metamorphosis, lent smolin9 an ethereal, luminous quality. The rain continued to lash down relentlessly. Then it became even heavier, gathering pace as the clouds careered across the sky. One last glance at their friend lying prostrate and helpless on the bed, at most a few hours from death, and they were gone, propelled through the vortex of space-time. There was a shrill protracted howl, like the banshee scream of an electric guitar outro. It could have been a rip in the fabric of space. It could have been the wind screeching through a crack in the ill-fitting window frame. It could have been a yell of anguish.

  But all that had happened light years away on Earth. Back here on Morys Minor, polkingbeal67 now faced several dilemmas of his own making. Having failed to reveal the truth, he had, to all intents and purposes, abandoned yukawa3, not only to face the full force of the law on his own, but also to face the realisation that his mentor had betrayed him. Actually, yukawa3 had not yet figured out the betrayal - his mind had become fogged with confusion and disorientation. Rational thought was beyond him, much to the consternation of his defence counsel.

  Having held a preliminary hearing on the planet Veritas, the ICJAC determined that the case against yukawa3 should proceed to trial. Charges against the Mortian leader had been dropped on the basis that he could not possibly have issued an order to destroy Niffis (or, come to that, any other intelligible command). Polkingbeal67 was presumed dead. No further delays would be tolerated.

  An intergalactic jury was convened on Morys and the first day of trial was in full swing in the presidential grand chamber. The Mortian leader attempted to throw a curveball, declaring the proceedings erroneous and void on a technicality. He argued that Morys Minor was no longer the planet's name and that the trial should therefore be adjourned until the paperwork could be amended to reflect this. Unfortunately, Melinda had not got around to endowing the planet with a new moniker and the leader's objection was dismissed out of hand.

  Yukawa3 did not contest the facts of the charges against him. There were eye-witnesses (Muqu rebels were in court to submit their evidence) and compelling forensic testimony along with circumstantial evidence such as the discovery of a crumpled yellow sou’wester at the scene of the crime. The key element in the case hinged on the question of intent. In allegations of genocide, this had always been a controversial issue. Certainly, yukawa3 did not endear himself to the Court when he turned on the chilloks who were lined up behind a myrmecam in the witness box and told them, rather threateningly, that they should remember with gratitude how, as a child, he had probably shared many picnics with them. His prospects took another turn for the worse when nipkow4 felt compelled, under oath, to tell the prosecuting counsel that during MMBC's coverage of the Niffis crisis, yukawa3 had, on more than one occasion, referred to chilloks as ants and had proposed using insecticide to resolve the conflict.

  Sitting in the court, absorbed in the proceedings, polkingbeal67 realised that damage limitation was the only viable strategy. He would have to come up with a massive counterbalancing factor that would show the hapless cadet in a new, different and favourable light - an example of yukawa3’s behaviour that would be universally hailed as noble and humanitarian, an act of ethical altruism.

  He took a break from observing the trial and wandered around the presidential gardens, deeply engrossed in puzzling out the problem. Then he stopped and gazed at the rusty, battered car chassis and the parabolic dish antenna half-buried amongst the ponds and fountains. Dear reader, if you had two planets, one named Morys Minor and the other Earth, which one would you think would value old classic vehicles the most? You would be wrong. On Morys Minor, abducted vehicles of all types, including Voyager 1 and a Morris Minor two-door saloon, were abandoned and left to decay under the elements.

  Tapping the Voyager antenna as if expecting it to ring or start blaring out a fatuous and bombastic message from Earth, polkingbeal67 grinned a bigger grin than anyone would think him capable of. The solution to the problem had hit him like a keg of vitalmados. "This is going to be good," he said to himself. "This is going to be very good. It'll be the most dramatic mitigation anyone coul
d possibly think of! And no one anywhere gets hurt or scared or anything! Ha ha! I don't think there'll be too many complaints from those earthlings about having better things to do - not this time!" He was gone from the courtroom for the rest of the day.

  Yukawa3 was back in his detention pod after the day's proceedings when he received an unexpected visit from Melinda, who had pulled rank to obtain a confidential interview with the accused. Having more time on her hands following the leader's return and feeling depressed about polkingbeal67's supposed demise (her mood ring had turned decidedly grey), she had taken up painting as a hobby and had brought some examples of her work to show the prisoner in the hope that he might appreciate some diversion. Her ulterior motive was to discover a bit more about what had happened back on Earth.

  "What's this one?" yukawa3 asked, studying one of the canvasses.

  Melinda grimaced slightly. "It's a self-portrait."

  Yukawa3 looked at it obliquely. "Of who?" he inquired.

  Melinda thought there was something ironic about this. She had in fact been suffering a bit of an identity crisis, made worse by her perception that smolin9 had changed since his return from Earth (we, of course, are privy to the reason for this).

  When yukawa3 responded to her tentative enquiries about polkingbeal67's tragic death by insisting his mentor was very much alive and had been sitting among them in the courtroom that very day, Melinda began to fear for the poor cadet's mental stability. She resolved to speak to the judge about it immediately. Then she left with her paintings.

  The following day, it was clear that Melinda's intervention had borne fruit. The prosecution counsel was instructed that new information made the case against yukawa3 untenable pending psychiatric evaluation. Attention switched to polkingbeal67 and his complicity in the Niffis massacre (on Morys Minor, people were routinely tried posthumously). When yukawa3 was called to the stand as a witness to answer some routine, factual questions about his mentor's movements on the day in question, he caused a stir by pointing to the figure he knew as polkingbeal67 and saying, "Well, there he is! Why don't you ask him?" The judge took pity on him and told him to stand down and rest for a few hours.