by Dave Barsby
“You know, statistically, if you spend one hour on each colonised planet and the rest of the time travelling, it will take twenty seven lifetimes to see it all.”
“But I can still dream about it,” she points out. “Even if the goal is unattainable in reality.”
I realise this is the first time I have known her to do something that normal people might do. I absently wonder if there is anything else in her past that may allow her to relate to the ‘commoners’, but I can’t really see her as the type to drunkenly fall over her own front doorstep or fart in the bath.
She raises her head slightly to direct her next question at Rogdo. It is a fruitless gesture because she still can’t see him without craning her neck higher.
“Mr Flavian,” she calls. “How many planets have you visited?”
“Dunno,” Rogdo answers quietly, then takes another sip of his whiskey.
“Rough estimate?”
“A thousand.”
Larisa lays her head back down. “There. You see? A thousand. One thousand planets. Each with its unique environment, each with its own culture nurtured for possibly thousands of years. One thousand planets.” She smiles happily.
“Into the billions and you might be getting there,” I point out. “Do you know what the population of the universe is?”
“Well…no.”
“Well, you can’t just do a head count, because the universe is widely considered to be infinite. Therefore there must be an infinite number of stars. So, we have to work it all out mathematically. Not every star has a planet, not every planet is populated. So there has to be a finite number of populated planets, and therefore a finite number of people in an infinite universe with infinite stars-”
“Divide a finite number by infinity and you get zero, right?” Rogdo interrupts. “It’s a bit old is that one. Did you get it from your wonderful 20th Century or something?”
“Yes, actually,” I tell him. “From a comical book about a human travelling round space. It partly inspired me to undertake this venture.” I take a moment to think about what I’ve just said. “Remind me to burn that book when I get home.”
“Well, the size and population of the universe aside, there are a great number of mysteries out there still to be solved,” Larisa says. “And a great number of beautiful sunsets to be witnessed.”
“Is that all you’d do then?” Rogdo asks her. “Visit thousands of planets, each with, as you say, a vibrant culture, and on each one you’d just watch a bloody sunset?”
“I do not expect you to grasp the romantic notion of such a thing, Mr Flavian.”
“No, I’m sure a sunset can be very pretty in the right place. But in the end it is a star sinking below the horizon. How many different ways do you expect it to sparkle on the tidal waters, or light up the jagged edges of snow-capped mountains? Five or six would do, surely.”
“Well, you are a practical man, Mr Flavian. All you have ever thought about is what upgrades to buy for your ship, where the next mission will take you, or how many drinks that spaceport floozy can take before she gives in to your charms.”
“Your problem,” Rogdo responds in a surprisingly light tone, “is that you’ve spent all your life with your head in the clouds because you’ve never actually needed to float down from there and embrace reality.”
There is a brief silence. It is strange, but I am not sensing hostility from either party. It seems that finally they have bickered each other into submission, where further jibes will be met with a noncommittal shrug of the metaphorical shoulders.
“Tima,” Rogdo calls. “Who’s winning in the put-down stakes? What’s the score now?”
“I believe,” Tima begins sleepily, refusing to move her head so talking into the ground, “that Rogdo, you are on ‘piss’, while the Princess has a score of ‘off’. I repeat, the score is ‘piss off’. Go to sleep.”
“You are right,” Larisa says. “I apologise.” She wriggles again and places her hands on her stomach, ready for sleep. “Good night, Captain,” she calls.
“G’night,” a surprised Rogdo responds with a mouth full of whiskey. He splutters a little, then I hear him removing another cigarette from the pack. Larisa turns her head to me and mouths ‘good night’. Then she closes her eyes.
I take a few minutes to study the stars, but I don’t recognise any of the constellations from this angle. I’ve never been this far from home.
I am not sure what time I wake, but the sky is blacker than before, and the cacophony of parties seems to be dying down. I can still hear the crackling embers of the camp fire. I have been woken by movement, the sound of footsteps quietly crunching on some of the charred grass. I try to focus my bleary eyes, and I can just make out the silhouette of Rogdo, standing over Larisa with his leather overcoat in his hands. He opens the coat and carefully lays it over her. My eyes give up the fight to stay open, and before I slip back into the darkness of deep sleep, I can distinctly hear his footsteps receding.
I wake again to the sound of rumbling. It is distant but clear, the grinding of gears wafting lazily over the land. My eyes again find it tricky to focus, but I prop myself up on one elbow and squint at the surroundings.
The fire is reduced to ash and glowing embers. Rogdo is still perched on his box, another hazy cigarette clamped between his lips, the whiskey bottle sporting just a few more mouthfuls. He looks up at me and drunkenly smiles.
“It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s just the Heavy Goth stages rolling by to the east. Go back to sleep.”
I lay my head back down, wondering if Rogdo ever sleeps. I see Larisa stir, open her eyes slightly and study the overcoat draped around her with confusion. She cranes her neck and briefly glances across at Rogdo before falling asleep again. She is already unconscious by the time her head bumps back onto the ground.
As I fall back into my dreamworld, I imagine the sight of black-clad dancers twirling atop a 150-mile piece of turf that rolls along the ground on castors. One of them is holding a high-powered sniper rifle, and is aiming it between my eyes.
As expected, everyone wakes the next morning relieved of the ability to move. Well, Rogdo hasn’t slept yet so stiffness doesn’t affect him, while Sanshar bounces up and spends her time licking her fur clean as she waits for the rest of us to loosen ourselves from paralysis.
I successfully manage to half-crawl, half-roll behind a large, twisted chunk of wreckage and proceed to loosen myself up in private – I don’t really know why, but I think there is something inherently wrong with stretching in a public place. Maybe I suffer from a strange form of sexual repression myself. Speaking of which, once her muscles are working again Larisa hands Rogdo his coat without a word – no thank you, no questions, just a slightly embarrassed look on her face. Rogdo immediately slips the leather back on and places what is left of his cigarette pack in an outer pocket.
We take up a large portion of the morning trying to work out what Senator Vitari is up to, but no one has their heart in it and we eventually decide it would be best to leave it and ask him in person. Breakfast is a rather paltry affair, featuring as it does two potatoes and four cookies between us. I decide to skip my share, and for my kindness I am berated about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. I choose against pointing out that their most important meal has consisted of a quarter of a spud and a few crumbs.
Entertainment is a little thin on the ground in the camp (Drift’s suggestion of another game of I-Spy is met with annoyed looks, crude put-downs and one case of grievous bodily harm with a concealed weapon on Hiaelia’s part). I attempt to get into the spirit of Festival by wandering off and sampling some of the music, but after ten minutes listening to the heavy graveyard dirges, I am in the mood to build my dream time machine just so I can go back and be aboard the Diablo when it blew up.
Larisa is, of course, the first person to voice how everyone feels, and it is a voice that is repeated every thirty minutes.
“I am so bored,” she tells u
s for the eleventh time.
“I am so homicidal,” Tima informs her. “So shut up or die.”
“I am just trying to start a conversation to keep our spirits up!”
“By saying you’re bored? Tell me, how exactly does that start a conversation, and where in that exquisitely short sentence is the part that will keep our spirits up?”
“I am not having a fun time,” Larisa answers. “Surely that will make you happy. As for the conversation…we are talking.”
Tima sighs heavily and looks away, ending the conversation just as it was about to hit its stride.
“I, for one, am enjoying the peace and quiet,” I say.
“No you’re not,” Tima mutters, staring into the distance.
“No, I’m not.”
“How about we see who can make an essential system component using these pieces in the shortest time,” Bolland suggests, casually waving a hand at the wreckage strewn around us.
“How about someone gets me some proper bandages,” is Drift’s offering, pointing at the shred of inner lining from his coat that is wrapped around his upper arm. He scowls at Hiaelia. “I can’t believe you stabbed me,” he mutters.
“We’re not buying supplies until we know how much storage space the new ship has,” Rogdo insists.
“I’m not talking about five tons of baked beans here, I’m talking about some proper medical supplies so my effing arm doesn’t fall off!”
“Stop complaining,” Tima says. “The wound is cauterised, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and thank you very much for giving me a warning before you pressed the white hot metal against my flesh!”
As you can see from the above conversations, we are desperately bored. The major problem is that nobody can wander too far because Johnson the Trader may be calling by any time soon, while we can’t get drunk in a bar because we don’t have the finances for such frivolity. The only two options are to sit around the camp and wait, or watch a band – the band watching option is out because you also have to listen.
When Johnson finally arrives at 2.30pm, around the time most of the Festival-goers are stirring from their slumber, Bolland has been banished to a corner for being too argumentative, Hiaelia and Sanshar have gone back to sleep, Dirk has failed in his attempt to offer us grass soup for lunch, Drift has managed to twist an ankle foraging among the ship wreckage, Rogdo and Tima have conspiratorially huddled to formulate an in-depth, sophisticated plan (two minutes later, they have decided on flying to Camera-7, going to Vitari’s hotel room and punching his teeth out), and Princess Larisa has announced she is bored a further five times. I, in the meantime, have studied the nearby camps in the hope of seeing something that could possibly be exciting, interesting or amusing. It is a complete waste of time - there isn’t even one argument or accidental tumble from our neighbours. One slashes her wrists open, but being in Gothland she doesn’t attract much attention.
Johnson the Trader tells us our new ship is ready for inspection at the back of his shop, as his employees mill around us and begin to gather up the Diablo III debris. I don’t like the look of some of them. Too shifty by far, especially the one who had poked his head around the workshop door at Johnson’s establishment. He has a dodgy grin permanently etched on his face for a start.
“Do you have a pet?” he asks me with a slimy leer. “I like pets.” I simply look confused at him, and he laughs once. Maybe not shifty – just mad.
We head for Johnson’s shop straight away – there isn’t exactly much of the camp we need to pack up.
Stunned silence greets the first glimpse of our new ship. It is a fairly featureless squat rectangle, around 500-ft long. It is divided into four detachable sections, each with its own access ramp. Happily flouting the concept of ergonomic design, the wormhole engine is the first compartment, the flight deck the second, storage the third and sleeping / eating quarters the final section. The colour scheme leaves a lot to be desired too. Half the ship is a dirty, yellowed off-white. The other half consists of that strange hue when dirty, yellowed off-white has been painted over patches of rust. I won’t describe the rest of the ship’s exterior or its interior because there are only so many times you can use the phrase ‘piece of shit’ in one descriptive paragraph. I will instead let you make your own conclusions from this single piece of evidence:
“Well, I guess if it moves…” Tima says. Rogdo is inconsolable.
“What shall we call it?” Drift asks.
“What?” Rogdo says, allowing his senses to return to his numb mind for a brief moment.
“The ship needs a name. For luck.”
“Not just a name, a proper christening,” Tima points out.
“You’re not going to call it Piece Of Shit, are you?” Dirk asks, a little worried.
“Hey, hey, there’s no need for that,” Johnson chides. He looks a little hurt. “We did our best, you know. What did you expect for three million?”
No one quite has the answer to that.
“I guess I’ll call it-” Rogdo begins, but Johnson puts one hand on his arm.
“Wait a minute, let’s do this properly.” He jogs the fifty yards to his shop.
“Are we really going to try moving in that?” Larisa asks with distaste. “I knew I may have to ‘slum it’, so to speak, but travelling in that will be a slow painful suicide.”
“Just think of it as the royal carriage after the cleaners have gone on strike,” Rogdo tells her.
Johnson returns from his shop. We patiently wait as he jogs up. He is out of breath and holding a small glass bottle of fizzy water.
“Here,” he breathes, stooping over and holding the bottle out to Rogdo. The Captain slowly takes it. Johnson mimics a smashing motion as he gasps for air.
Rogdo stares at the front of the vessel, depressed.
“For luck,” he says.
“We need it,” Tima answers.
Rogdo nods, readies to swing the bottle. “Very well, then. I hereby name this ship the Diablo IV.”
With that, he pitches the bottle at the ship. In an exact reversal of normal procedure, the bottle smashes through the ship’s hull.
After thirty minutes welding a new plate onto the hull of the Diablo IV and a further two hours buying and storing supplies (my datacard now has the grand total of 612 tabs on it), we finally leave Festival. The craft is so poorly constructed every piece of it rattles as we exit each artificial wormhole. The sensors are so shoddy we end up using the tracking device for Larisa’s gauntlet locator. The kitchen is on a par with the previous night’s campfire ‘barbecue’, while the beds…okay, there aren’t any beds. When Johnson said he’d strip the vessel down to its bare bones, he really meant it. Luckily we have enough cloth and packing foam from our supplies to fashion six rudimentary mattresses. With Sanshar opting out of the running, the short straw is drawn by Drift, who is given the single, hard, unyielding cockpit chair to sleep on instead. Having already received two injuries today, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for the man. Not sorry enough to give up my mattress, of course, but sorry all the same. Judging by the small and not entirely accurate wormholes the engine is able to muster up, we estimate it will take twenty nine days to travel to Camera-7.
Day six. Nothing to report. We eat, we chat, we sleep. The ship bucks like a wild stallion with every new wormhole jump. My cabin door has fallen off its hinges. I now have no privacy whatsoever. Rogdo suggests we play a game to boost morale. Hide And Seek is a resounding failure, especially when I try to hide in my cabin. Charades proves to be equally problematic because with a mercenary crew tempers are easily lost. After a few minutes of guessing a charade, any further suggestions are likely to be countered with a punch in the face (to which you really shouldn’t say “Is the film called One Last Hit?” as my bloody nose will testify). We are starting to lose patience with each other, and there is little to keep us occupied.
Day eighteen. Like a strong, adaptable, virulent disease, boredom has ravaged the will of the crew. T
he thought of another eleven days aboard has sapped the strength of even the hardiest of optimists.
Unable to take the boredom or the cockpit chair any longer, Drift has opted for a form of accidental suicide. He refuses to take his own life, but he is actively trying for a freak accident to end it all. He frequently spends his spare time in the ship’s one and only lifepod in the hope it may malfunction and blast him into deep space, and has taken to sleeping inside the kitchen’s large oven. Sanshar has started moulting and regularly prowls the corridor at night, howling in frustration. Dirk has already cooked half the food supplies and frozen them for later use, and is now seriously considering doing Drift a favour by leaving the oven on overnight. Larisa has spent three quarters of the journey crying in her cabin. Bolland has successfully transformed his lab coat and seven biros into a highly dangerous projectile weapon. Hiaelia has thrown all her weight into her hobby, living on a diet of beans and cabbage and spending her days in her cabin recording the output on her decibel counter. The last we heard of her was two days ago when Tima said she could hear Hiaelia ‘tearing up her mattress’. Considering the lack of ventilation on the ship, we are a little concerned. Rogdo has taken to composing ditties that would annoy the hell out of us if it wasn’t for the fact that his tone-deaf humming completely obscures just how bad the tune is. Tima, it seems, is coping the best out of the crew. She seems fairly normal, even manages to be upbeat and chatty during mealtime in the cramped mess hall. The only signs of strain she is showing is when she starts uncontrollably shouting at the walls and insisting something is scurrying above the ceiling.
I am coping better than most, I must say. I think the move helped me – having no cabin door, I have opted instead to live in one of the storage rooms. Plus, I have actually found something to occupy my time. I have ripped the labels off the tinned products (making some of Dirk’s meals very interesting and surprising even to him) and begun to write this book. Unfortunately, inspiration has not yet hit me and all I have managed to pen thus far are two poems that begin and end with the words ‘dull as hell’. I have even developed some of my crewmates’ symptoms. I have started hearing the scurrying above the ceiling, whistling terrible songs and crying late at night.