Last Human

by Doug Naylor

  His other self cackled wildly. His eyes washed with mania as the jeep circled the guards on the periphery of their range of fire.

  'Going in,' grinned his other self. 'Here we go!' Lister clambered into the front and started grappling with the wheel. His other self elbowed him hard in the shoulder and knocked him into the back. He scrambled to his feet, picked up a harpoon and slammed it into his other self's head. He slumped unconscious in the driving seat.

  Laser harpoons whistled overhead as he hauled his doppelgänger out of the driving seat and powered the jeep towards the exploded perimeter fence. He bumped it through the mangled wires and revved it down the desert road away from Cyberia.

  After almost five days and five mostly sleepless nights, he had done it. He had rescued his other self. He looked at the unconscious body, mouth angled in a deranged grin of slumber, and wondered if it would turn out to be the biggest mistake of his life.

  CHAPTER 13

  Lister dropped some brushwood on to the smouldering fire, then started peeling the red fruit from the saguaro cactus with the blade of his knife. His other self sat cross-legged in front of the camp fire, his hands bound by rope.

  'Saguaro?'

  His other self nodded, and Lister pushed the fruit in his mouth and helped him eat it.

  'Look, it was the booze. It made me go off my head.' He held up his bound hands. 'There's no need for this.'

  'You're staying like that until I know who you are, man.'

  'I've been in Cyberia four months, man. Four long months. It does stuff to your head. It takes time to adjust to reality. Don't you see that?'

  'What's in the box?' Lister pointed to the metal case sitting in the back of the jeep.

  'Just personal stuff. Letters. Photographs. Clothes. Are you listening to me? I lost everyone - Rimmer, Cat, Kryten, Kochanski — everyone, then I wound up in Cyberia for some future crime and you're treating me like I'm some major nut because when I get out I let off some steam.'

  'Mind if I open it?*

  'Open what?'

  'The box.'

  'Yeah, I do.'

  'Why?'

  'Because it's personal. There's stuff in there that no one should know about.'

  'That's why I want to see it.'

  'Look, when they put you in Cyberia for a future crime, they also get the stochastic computer to evaluate what you're going to do for the rest of your life. When you're going to die, the whole works. That's what's in the box.'

  'And you haven't read it?' 'Right.'

  'And naturally you don't want anyone to read it before you do.'

  His other self shot him a wan smile. 'I don't even know if I've got the guts to read it. Suppose I'll keep it till I've decided what to do.'

  Lister stood up and shot the lock off the box and pulled back the lid. 'You really think I'm so dumb I'll buy a story like that?' He peered inside and brought out a bag of uncut Baquaii diamonds, a box of cheap cigars, an old rad pistol — which would one day come back to haunt him - and a handful of plastic bottles containing info pills. He read the labels — the pills were mostly factual: stuff about the layout of the belt. He placed them on the floor and looked in the box once more. 'What's this?'

  'What does it look like?'

  Lister pulled it out of the box. 'It looks like an arm.'

  Lister's other self shrugged. 'Then that's what it is.'

  'In fact, it looks like Kryten's arm.' He turned it over in his hands. It was a right arm, the same as the one that was missing from the dead mechanoid on the derelict Starbug. It had been scythed off at the shoulder joint by some kind of light saw. He looked at the rad pistol to see if it had a laser setting - it had. Then he noticed the clenched fingers were holding a piece of paper. A piece of paper the mechanoid had given both his arm and his life to protect. Lister prised the hand open, and unscrolled the paper. 'Galactic coordinates.'

  His other self remained silent.

  'But galactic coordinates for what?'

  His other self shrugged.

  'You killed them, didn't you? You killed them for this. Why?'

  Before he could answer Starbug appeared on the horizon, its distinctive pear-shaped searchlights sweeping low over the desert. Lister frantically fanned the flames of the campfire, then pounded up the nearest dune, rotating his jacket over his head, jumping and screaming. Unnoticed, his other self shuffled over to the fire and thrust his legs into the flames.

  A scream, like a mournful prairie dog, spun Lister round. He watched, horrified, as his other self thrashed around in the fire, weeping and howling, until several seconds later he pulled his smouldering limbs from the flames, his rope binding burnt clean through.

  Lister ran back down the dune as his other self fell to his knees and thrust his hands into the fire. His cold, saliva-sodden scream curdled the air. He took his charred hands out of the flames and pulled his bonds apart.

  Then he rose to his feet and started to walk towards Lister.

  CHAPTER 14

  Kochanski placed the bowl of porridge on the breakfast tray beside a plate of bacon and eggs. She glanced at her watch — 2.30 p.m. ship time; he'd probably be awake now. She climbed the steps up to Starbug's sleeping quarters. 'Hey, Frog Prince, I've brought you some breakfast. Did you sleep?' She kissed him softly on the lips.

  Lister grinned back at her impishly. 'Like Tutankhamun.' He struggled to sit up while she plumped up the pillows behind his back. 'God, I've got the strength of a new-born sloth.'

  'No wonder, with what you've been through. Kryten says you have to have complete bed-rest for at least a week.'

  'I'll go crazy.'

  'Tough.' She poured milk over his porridge and drew a lazy spiral with a spoon of dripping honey. 'Listen, there's something I want to say to you,' she began. 'I'm... always, uh, ever since I was small, I've always had a big problem saying, y'know, well, apologizing and uh... and I just wanted to say, well, anyway, I am.'

  'You are what?'

  'Huh?'

  'You are what?'

  'I am... don't make me say it, you pig.'

  'Say what?'

  'Sorry, OK? There, I said it. Sorry, sorry, sorry.'

  'What are you sorry for?'

  'Besides having to say sorry, you mean?'

  Lister grinned.

  'For everything. For persuading you to go on this wild-goose chase.' She stirred the porridge round with the spoon and held some up for Lister to eat. 'How are your burns?'

  Lister looked at his bandaged feet and hands. 'Hurt like hell. Probably be weeks before I can walk again.'

  'I'll change the dressings after breakfast.'

  'I was just standing there trying to get some sense out of him and the lousy bastard pushed me in the fire.'

  She angled her head to one side sympathetically. 'It's over now. The poor crazy lunatic's dead.' She fed him another spoonful of porridge. He grimaced.

  'Too hot?'

  'No, it's just I'm not that crazy about honey in porridge.'

  She looked at him, surprised. 'You love it.'

  'What?'

  'You love it.'

  'Well, yeah, true, I used to love it. But, uh, I've kind of gone off it now.' She looked at him oddly, then smiled and started to cut up his bacon.

  He watched her as she cut up his bacon. Did she know? No, he didn't think she did. But even if she did know, what could he do? His injuries were so bad he was practically an invalid. His body needed time to heal. His hands, especially, hurt like hell — picking up that spade in his burnt, blistered balls of smoking flesh and cracking Lister across the head hadn't really done them much good.

  Neither had burying him alive, come to that.

  He stared at Kochanski's breasts. Tasty. He'd get himself a piece of that later.

  He smiled at her and she smiled back as she placed the bacon on the end of the fork and started to feed him. He felt kind of stupid, like a little boy again.

  Small and helpless. He started to remember his foster parents.

/>   Tom and Beth Thornton.

  Tom with his round, sad spaniel face and terrible posture, and Beth with her ugly smile and sickly perfume. He could smell it now. It nauseated him. He could hear Old Prune Face's laugh; the terrible, terrible braying laugh that could have sawn down Canadian redwoods. And then he started to remember the beatings with the brown clothesbrush. Now he could see Old Prune Face's eyes and the darkness that descended over her when she was 'nettled'. He could feel the rips of pain that gouged through his body, ploughing furrows through his flesh. He could hear his own screams soaked in saliva, gurgling in his throat.

  Why had he chosen the Thorntons?

  He'd known instinctively there was something wrong the first time he'd spent the weekend when he was doing the rounds of possible foster parents and Old Prune Face lost her marbles because he didn't like her raspberry sponge cake.

  'All little boys like raspberry sponge cake.'

  'I don't like raspberries.'

  'All little boys like my raspberry sponge cake.'

  'I don't like the seeds . . .'

  Then she'd started to smash the crockery. Every single piece. Which was his fault because he didn't like her raspberry sponge cake. And he was spoiling the perfect day she'd spent months planning.

  His fault.

  She'd sat in a sea of smashed crockery, sobbing quietly to herself.

  'I'm sorry, Mrs Thornton.'

  'Call me Mum-m-m-m-m-my,' Old Prune Face had screamed, her make-up smeared across her face like a road crash.

  He was too scared to tell anyone. After all she was going to be his new mummy and it was his fault. And surely to hell he could learn to like raspberry sponge cake.

  So he'd ignored the incident, pretended it had never happened. After all, the Thorntons were rich. Much, much richer than the Wilmots, the other couple who wanted to adopt him.

  He'd liked the Wilmots better. He could use them easier, but Mr Wilmot was just some jerky clerk in an office, so they never had much money. They couldn't afford to get him the electric car the Thorntons had promised; they didn't have an indoor swimming pool with an inflatable starfish, they didn't have a computer library, with every wall lined with a different arcade game. And so he'd buried all his misgivings in a secret place, he'd shushed an inner voice that pleaded with him to make the 'right' choice and the seven-year-old Lister had chosen the Thorntons.

  * * *

  Cat and Rimmer ducked through the hatchway, exchanged greetings with the patient while Kryten swivelled the flatbed scanner on to its side.

  'The navi-comp's just finished analysing the galactic coordinates, sir.' Kryten took hold of a hand-held remote unit and clicked it on. 'The results are most extraordinary.'

  'Like?' he said, straining to sit up.

  Kryten scrolled through a series of star charts. 'This is a map of the asteroid belt the navi-comp made during our crossing.' Kryten ringed a small area south-south-west. 'We are here, 3, 000 miles past Lotomi 5 and approaching these clusters here. According to the navi-comp the coordinates are three-dimensional Cartesian coordinates and they intersect here, under this sea of molten lava on this volcanic moon.'

  Kochanski peered at the flashing cursor on the map. 'Do we know what's there? Why're they so important?'

  Kryten started to pace - at first a little hesitantly. So far his repaired leg had held up most encouragingly. He and Kochanski had spent the finer part of two days rewiring all the tendons and replacing some of the electrical synapses. Now he just needed to learn to trust the limb again - something he was finding harder than he had anticipated.

  He continued: 'I've been doing some research, reading the volumes we purchased on Blerios 15 detailing the history of the belt. I believe these coordinates mark the spot of a derelict starship called the Mayflower. It was a 2 million ton space freighter that brought the Gelfs to the asteroid belt before it was forced to crash land. The ship's mission was to terraform a planet in the Andromeda galaxy. There was a mutiny en route, the navigation system got knocked out and the ship wound up getting pulled into Omni-zone, where it was ejected into this very dimension. Those who survived the splashdown grabbed what they could and took off in the escape pods.'

  'And they're the creatures who presently occupy the belt?' asked Rimmer.

  Kryten nodded. 'What they weren't able to take with them was much of the genetic-engineering technology that was onboard the ship; the technology that can create life and some of the key viruses required for terraforming planets.'

  'So how come none of these Gelf dudes returned to this ship before?'

  Kryten took out the scroll of paper that contained the Cartesian coordinates and unrolled it on the table. 'Notice anything strange?'

  Rimmer peered at it for a few seconds. 'It's been cut in four and stuck together. And all four quarters are weathered in different ways.'

  'The ship is marooned on the bottom of a vast ocean of molten lava. A salvage party would have to know its precise location to stand any chance of looting it and returning to the surface safely.'

  'So what's this got to do with the coordinates being cut in four?'

  'I believe the coordinates were split four ways by the four main Gelf species on board - some form of agreement so no single species would have sole access to it. Your other self, sir,' Kryten said, addressing Lister's other self, 'was somehow able to collate the four different pieces and with it he had access to unlimited power.'

  Lister stared at him impassively. Kochanski patted his thigh. 'So what's aboard this ship? The power to create the human race?'

  'They have the genome for all living things. The map, base by base, of all the DNA sequences of all potential life.'

  Rimmer whistled., 'The genome of all known DNA?'

  'Or, to use its acronym, G.O.D.'

  'But when we left Earth, the World Council wouldn't let that out of its sight.'

  'They must have considered the ship's mission outweighed those insecurities.'

  'But why would he want this, bud?'

  'Access to G. O. D. would make him God. He'd be able to rewrite his own genetic code — make himself immortal. He'd be able to use the technology to trade with the creatures of the belt. And, if he could get hold of terraforming viruses, maybe even sell them inhabitable planets. What would that be worth?'

  Lister gazed at Kryten through immutable brown eyes. 'If what you say is true, then we should get this — what did you call it?'

  'Genome, sir.'

  '... we should get this genome for ourselves.'

  Kryten stared at him for too long without smiling, then nodded. 'I agree, sir.'

  PART THREE

  The Rage

  CHAPTER 1

  At a different time, in a different location, in a quite different dimension, John Milhous Nixon, the third President of the World Council, stared at his ten ravaged fingers. He'd orgied on his digits in frenzied feasts of anxiety, and now as he gazed at their bloody cuticle-gnawed rawness he was filled with revulsion. He chewed on a pen-top, the nail biters' methadone, while a small-boned man with a putty-coloured face bathed the wounds with cotton balls soaked in isopropyl alcohol. Afterwards the manicurist clicked open a velvet-lined canteen that contained the president's new set of nails, and expertly started gluing them over the misshapen originals.

  'Sir, I hope this isn't out of place,' the manicurist began, 'but I'd just like to say how sorry I am, and hope everything works out.' The man's voice suddenly rose half an octave and he started to weep. 'It's so damn tragic - I just can't believe it.'

  The president's eyebrows glided up his head like two express lifts zooming up the outside of a skyscraper. 'Do you know? How do you know? It's supposed to be a state secret, for Christ's sake. Who told you?'

  The manicurist was caught in the interrogatory headlights and froze with fear. 'Sir?'

  'Who?'

  'Ernie Simpson, sir, the doorman, sir.'

  'The doorman knows about the situation?'

  'All the staff know, sir.'


  The door opened. 'Dr Sabinsky, Mr President,' an aide announced.

  Sabinsky entered with his bodyguard, a rigid young marine with a clean, crisp face and short yellow hair, like an over-harvested field of wheat.

  Sabinsky wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. 'Sorry we're late, sir. Delayed in traffic. Huge molecularization tailbacks at Washington Central. I've been waiting two hours to materialize. And then when I did I discovered they'd accidentally sent my legs to Tokyo.' He patted his thighs. 'Explained the situation - they managed to fix me up with some rentals.'

  The President dismissed the manicurist and bayoneted Sabinsky with a look. 'Everyone knows, Bob. All the staff. Everyone. I've got to have an answer.'

  'Mr President, we're simply not in any position to give you an accurate prognosis right now.'

  'The word is out, Doctor. The economy is going to be crucified. I need an answer and I need an answer today. How long?'

  'There's still a whole battery of tests, and mountains of data queuing up to be analysed and processed.'

  'Then be approximate, dammit.'

  A tight smile flashed on to Sabinsky's face, which he hoped would cushion the news. 'How long?'

  'Yes, how long, damn you - how frigging long?'

  'About four hundred thousand years, sir.'

  Nixon slumped into his chair. 'Is that all?'

  'It appears that exploding those thermonuclear devices so close to the sun -'

  'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' Nixon said testily, 'almost certainly weakened the gravitational attraction of the hydrogen molecules. I made a mistake, OK? I'm sorry!'

  'Slowly but surely the whole damn star is just going to come apart. It was a real blooper, sir.'

  'But we were just trying to control the weather. And if we could have controlled the weather it would have helped the economy. It would have been good for the stock market. I would have got in for a second term. Now I'm going to be remembered as the president who wiped out the human race and killed the solar system.'

  Two nails went pinging off in different directions across the Persian flat-weave carpet. 'How in God's sweet name am I ever going to recover from this? When a president kills a solar system, Bob, that's something the electorate doesn't forget in a hurry. The bastards hold that against you for your entire career. Not even my great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle got himself in this deep. What the hell am I going to do?'