“Why is that?” Sam shouts back.
“Well, they’re all pretty old.” And Caleb sits back and shakes with glee.
The Draconian plonks down out drinks, including a rum and Coke for Caleb. He didn’t even have to order. They know him here.
I turn and survey the alien company once more. Yes, there are Puzzlers. There are Klingons. There are Denebites, with four arms and fierce beaked visages. I dressed up as a Denebite for King Zuck’s fancy dress party. I cringe at the memory. There are Krells, and there is a single solitary Silicon Person, floating by itself on a gravsled.
All the other aliens are also floating on mobility devices. Convergent evolution applies to machines, too. Their floating couches and chairs look very much like the anti-grav mobility chairs that have made handicapped, elderly, and morbidly obese people the terrors of Earth’s skies.
The Denebites are using walkers. Makes sense when you have four arms.
The truth sinks in. “It’s a flipping nursing home,” I say. “The Nursing Home at the Core of the Galaxy. Comfortable rooms, exercise facilities, bathing nearby, a community lounge, and round-the-clock care by a highly trained staff of Draconians. This is where aliens come to die after they’ve rampaged themselves out of business. Am I missing anything?”
“Yeah,” Caleb says. He points at the end of the room where the television is not. “Him.”
I squint into the shadows, and as I make out what’s back there, my blood runs cold.
Sitting on an enormous throne, knees wide apart, gripping the horned armrests, and glaring in our direction, is a Sagittarian.
He sees me looking at him. His lips, thin and black in a goatish face, draw back in a terrifying leer. He leans forward—it’s like one of those horrible gigantic Soviet statues of Stalin or somebody leaning down from its pedestal—and the black birds sitting on his horns flutter up in a rustle of ragged wings. The talk around the television goes quiet then.
It’s uncanny how much the Sagittarians looked like medieval pictures of Lucifer.
Look, Fletch, my boy. Look at him.
He’s not dead at all.
Jesus, I wish this planet had turned out to be just another graveyard littered with skeletons.
I sip Budweiser from the can. I’ve seldom been so shook. I can feel the Sagittarian’s malevolent gaze on the back of my neck, prickling.
Our Draconian waiter comes back and drops into a chair at our table without being asked. “They won the war,” it says morosely. “We lost. And that’s how we ended up here, slaving for him. Before you ask, there are worse fates, and I’m fanatically loyal to my master, as a Draconian should be. So don’t even think about asking me where he keeps the good stuff.”
“Where does he keep the good stuff?” Sam asks immediately.
An older hand than Sam, I am not going to fall for that one. “What worse fates?”
“Sss?” says the Draconian, obviously meaning, “Huh?”
“What’s a worse fate than slaving for a Sagittarian pub owner?”
“Planet owner. Planet owner.”
“Sorry.”
There aren’t supposed to be any living aliens. Humanity is currently the only sapient species in the universe. All the scientists agree on that. It’s what I was taught in school and all.
Cognitive dissonance smashes into me like a wave of the sea, and recedes. I can’t argue with the evidence of my eyes. And my nose. I can smell the Sagittarian from here, a faint but distinct carrion reek.
I say to the Draconian, “I’m just trying to imagine what could be a worse fate than this.” And I am thinking that the gandy dancers said we would be here for twenty-seven hours, and I will make sure we get back on board in plenty of time, because if we get left behind on Pron, I think I would have to kill myself. Even though the Budweiser, or clever-clogs advanced-science simulation thereof, is no more disgusting than American beer usually is.
“What could be worse? What could be worse? That!” The Draconian nods at the other aliens grouped around the television. “The Ordeal of Excruciating Tedium! They’re watching recordings of victorious Sagittarian battles. That’s all there is to watch. Over and over, every day, for billions of years.”
The timescales involved boggle the mind. It’s lucky we are beings of mediocre intelligence or we might be going mad at this point.
“It’s the worst torture known to man, reptilian, or other sentient species,” says the Draconian. “At least we have work to do. On which note, I have dishes to wash.” It stands up.
“Wait,” Finian says. “Why do you get special treatment? Weren’t you the Sagittarians’ arch-enemies?”
The Draconian’s red eyes bulge. “Arch-enemies? You humans really are as stupid as you look. We were their loyal partners. Still are.”
“Sure there’s not much difference between partners and slaves,” I mumble into my Budweiser. Big Tech has taught all us independent explorers that lesson.
“They were the Sagittarians’ arch-enemies.” The Draconian flicks a claw at the solitary Silicon Person. “They drove us back all the way to the Core! We had to take refuge in here, with the only planet we had left! But as it turns out, hiding inside a supermassive black hole is a war-winning move. The Ggxkt’va went wild with victory, decided to upload themselves into the cloud, and well, you know what happened after that.” It flicks its tongue disdainfully in the Silicon Person’s direction, and saunters off on bare, clawed feet.
Finian leans back, rolling his can of Budweiser between his palms. He’s been uncharacteristically quiet. I know why, too. He’s sitting across from me, with the Sagittarian in his line of sight, and I’ve seen that look on his face before: on board the Hellraiser, for example, just before he knifed the Cannibal Captain. I feel a shiver of unease.
But even Finian is not idjit enough to start trouble here. I put that worry out of my mind and lean towards Sam. “I bet I know where they keep the good stuff,” I whisper.
He’s hunched over his Bud, biting his lips.
“Sam! I know where the A-tech’ll be. I worked as a nursing assistant for a couple of years.” I take the glazed look in his eyes for surprise. I agree, it does sound out of character for me. I only did it to earn a few quid while Donal and I were building the Skint Idjit, because my dad threatened to kick me out of the house unless I got a job. “The old dears all kept their valuables in their rooms. They’d be swearing me to secrecy and slitting open the mattress to show me their collection of rare euro coins. Mementoes from the Turkish civil war and so forth.” No, I did not steal any of their little treasures. I have got some self-respect. At least, I had in those days.
The stuff was mostly worthless, anyway. But it’ll be different here. “So we’ll just have a ramble around, Sam, and if the lizard-faces ask awkward questions, we were just exploring.”
He hasn’t heard a word I’ve said.
“Sam?”
He bursts out, in a hoarse whisper: “I think my dad might be here.”
CHAPTER 11
“My dad was an explorer,” Sam says. We’re outside the bar, walking down the main street, between buildings that only Hitler could love. Finian’s with us. He listens with furrowed brows to Sam’s story. “His name was Owen Slaughtermore. My mom met him on Cygnus 2c when he tried to jump her claim. I guess it was a hate-at-first-sight thing, and then they hooked up.” Sam spreads his hands, as if to acknowledge that it’s a puzzling scenario. It’s not at all puzzling to me. “He stuck around until I was about a year old. Then he vamoosed. My mom was pissed as hell.”
That is not puzzling, either. Not if you know Special Delivery Sam. I know her by reputation only, but Finian nods. “I remember she mentioned him to me. Not in the most flattering terms.” He leans close to me and whispers, “His name was not Slaughtermore. It was Jones.”
Sam walks on, hands in his pockets. “A guy called Slaughtermore, he should have a rep, right? But I never heard anything about him while I was growing up. It was a mystery. When I got
to be eighteen or so, I asked my mom point blank if she knew where he was. And she said, ‘You’re shit out of luck, bud. He boarded the Ghost Train.’”
I hesitate. “But why do you think he’s here, Sam?” It seems to me much more likely that Owen Jones got off at Merrielande, or one of the Ghost Train’s other regular stops, assuming he was a halfway decent explorer.
“Because Caleb said so!”
“When did he say that?” Finian asks sharply.
“A couple of days ago. I was bugging him about this supposed train station. And he said there are some humans here. Like homeless people living in Grand Central, he said. I dunno about Grand Central, but that has to be my dad.” Sam gives us an anguished grin. “He was the kind of guy who could survive anywhere.”
This still doesn’t prove anything to me, but I can read the tension on Sam’s face. He won’t leave here without trying to find his father.
Finian sighs. “Sorry, Sam. I’m having nothing to do with it.”
“I couldn’t do anything to help my mom,” Sam says. “But maybe I can help my dad. I have to at least try.”
“I’d like to show them we humans are not as stupid as they think we are.” Finian gives a twisted smile. “That’s a good way to prove the opposite.”
“If I don’t at least try to find him, I won’t be able to look myself in the face,” Sam mutters.
I draw a deep breath. “OK, Sam. I’ll help you look for him.”
His face lights up. “You’re the best, dude!”
I feel a bit bad now. “I don’t think we’ll find him, mind you.”
“I just want to try.”
Finian shakes his head. “Just make sure you’re back in time for the pub quiz.”
“Pub quiz?” I say, mystified.
“Yeah, there was a sign on the notice-board as we came in. Did you not see it?”
“I didn’t even notice the notice-board.”
Finian smiles sourly. “I notice everything. It was one of those multilingual signs. It said there’s a pub quiz at thirteen o’clock tonight. Now, I don’t know how they count time here ...”
“Is it anything to do with us, though?”
“I have a feeling it is,” Finian says. “I’m going to see if I can get anything out of Caleb about it, but I’ve got a feeling it could be important.”
“I suppose maybe we’re good for one thing, and that’s entertainment value,” I say.
“Something like that. Anyway, I want all of us there. I’m assuming it’s after dark, so get back by sundown, and you should be all right.”
“Will do,” Sam says, champing at the bit.
Finian trudges back towards the Nursing Home at the Core of the Galaxy, and Sam and I split up to search the city for his dad.
At least that is what he thinks we are doing.
Wandering along a street as wide as a motorway, which is probably a Sagittarian alley, I gaze up at the horned towers stabbing the sky. It’s a dull sky, the color of an ocean covered by a petroleum slick. The Sagittarians transported this planet inside a supermassive black hole, complete with its star, and its atmosphere and everything. They moved a star! And they’ve kept this place ticking over for a billion years, give or take. I can’t even begin to conceive of the technology you’d need for that.
I do know I want it.
This is the find I’ve been dreaming of all my life.
The level of A-tech we’re talking about here, just one little sample would do me. Something small and portable.
Something I could use to foil the gandy dancers, hijack the Ghost Train, and return in triumph to dear distant Earth.
And I realize this may be exactly how Owen Jones (if he’s here) ended up trapped on Pron, but I really don’t think he’s here. Putting myself in his shoes, I’d be storming the Ghost Train right now, begging to be let back on board. But he’s not done that, and he’s had multiple chances over the last quarter-century, and he’s never done it.
The city is dead quiet, my own footsteps the only sound to be heard.
“Jones!” I halloo. “I mean Slaughtermore! Are you here?”
I’ll keep this up for a little while, so I can tell Sam I tried. Then I’ll double back and nose around the Nursing Home at the Core of the Galaxy. That’ll be where the good stuff is. I bet I can get around those Draconians.
“Slaughtermore!”
The dead air swallows my voice.
I reach a crossroads. In both directions, empty, dusty motorways stretch into the distance. The buildings on the cross street have pediments supported by fifty-foot statues of the Manager, or his hairy cousins. The statues’ eyes seem to burn into me the way the real Sagittarian’s did.
Right. I’ve had enough of this.
I turn on my heel—and freeze.
The Silicon Person from the bar is floating in the middle of the street behind me, utterly silent on its gravsled.
I assume it’s the same one from the bar, anyway. It’s a shiny black pyramid about seven feet high, coated in overlapping tiles like the hide of an armadillo. Every angle and corner glitters as if machined by a nanoscale cutting tool.
I start to sidle around it, back the way I came. The tiles near the top flutter up and down minutely. Jesus, this has to be the spookiest of all the aliens.
I stop as a thought strikes me. Before I can change my mind, I say, “Silicon Person? Have you ever seen any others like me around here?”
“Carbon-based beings?” Its voice is unexpectedly mellifluous, and yet mechanical. After all, it’s a silicon-based being. It hasn’t even got lungs.
“Well, I was specifically thinking of human beings. You know, about this tall, two legs, two arms.”
“There is another one like you over there.” A tile sharpens to a point to indicate Sam’s approximate location. “And two more in the community lounge.”
“Yeah, I know about them. This one would have been here longer. He’s … erm … Welsh-looking. At a guess.”
After a pause, the Silicon Person says, “There is an animal husbandry and crop production area outside the city. It provides calories in carbon-based format. Some of your kind work there. I cannot say if any of them are Welsh-looking.”
“Oh!” That’s promising. Sam will be off to this ‘animal husbandry and crop production area’ like a shot.
“Is there anything else you seek?”
I hesitate. “The meaning of life?”
“I am afraid billions of years of life have made me no wiser in that regard.”
“That’s all right. Everyone knows it’s 42, anyway.” I snicker to myself. The joke escapes the Silicon Person, as well it might.
“I know a great many other things,” the Silicon Person offers. “Would you like to know how to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity?”
“Erm … Hasn’t general relativity sort of been blown out of the water already? I mean, the Railroad …”
“I could explain how the Railroad utilizes the M-field to eliminate relativistic time dilation,” the Silicon Person says eagerly.
I hold up my hands. “Jesus, please no. My head’s an inch from exploding already.”
The Silicon Person draws back.
“Sorry,” I apologize. “The truth is I’m shite with equations. You know, we’re beings of mediocre intelligence. Not enough brainpower to process that kind of thing. I’m sure it’s very interesting, though.”
The Silicon Person’s lower tiles rise a couple of inches and then fall again. I interpret this for some reason as a sigh. Suddenly it dawns on me: the Silicon Person is very old, and it just wants to talk. It was the same at the nursing home in Ennis. You could do the minimum, change their bedpan, get them dressed, bring them a cup of tea, the end. But that’s inhumane. They’re human beings and you should treat them like human beings. So I’d always spend a few minutes (or a few hours) chatting with the old dears, and I ended up losing the job because my productivity wasn’t meeting the shitehead manager’s target.
“I hate it,” says the Silicon Person.
Well, that’s refreshing. At the nursing home, it would be, “Sure love, I’m grand,” and then a few months later they’d pop off from sheer despair.
“I am the last of my kind,” the Silicon Person goes on, “and I am doomed to spend eternity as a prisoner of the Manager, so that he can glory eternally in the Ggxkt’va’s downfall, and remind me every day that the Sagittarians conquered the galaxy.”
“Well, hang on. The Sagittarians haven’t conquered the galaxy. He’s the last of his kind, too.”
“Yes,” says the Silicon Person, “but he controls the Railroad. Who controls the Railroad, controls the galaxy. That must be obvious …” Even to you, remains unspoken.
“I see your point all right,” I say, and I do.
To think we humans prided ourselves on being masters of the universe. To think of the way we’ve rampaged around in our pathetic little nuclear-powered spaceships, picking up this and that and saying “Hmmm, wonder how this works?”
And all the time, the Manager was sitting in the core of the galaxy, hearing reports from his gandy dancers, I’ve no doubt, and getting endless entertainment out of our stumbles.
“So what does he think of us?” I say, with no very high hopes. “I mean, we’ve been zooming around on the Railroad that his folk built …”
“He says the Sagittarians built it, but in fact it was mostly Draconian labor.”
“Somehow I’m not surprised. But does he think … I mean, I don’t know … does he think we’re worthy successors to the Sagittarian Empire?”
I am expecting the answer to this to be a resounding NO, and so I’m surprised when the Silicon Person lifts the tiles on one side of its body, then the other side, in an approximation of a shrug. “He has not yet made up his mind.”
“Eh? He’s had forty-three years to think about it!”
The Silicon Person’s tiles all ruffle at once, making a sound like a fistful of coins dropped on the floor. “Please recall how old we are.” The bugger’s laughing at me. “Please think of forty-three human years in this context.”
The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 36