by Roman, Mark
Alistair stood on the ground, helpless. Most of the slime making up his arm was now inside the sponge and only connected to the rest of him by a thin filament of slime in the reed tube. “How do I get out of here??” he yelled in panic.
“Don’t panic,” said the Mamm. “Just dribble out of the sponge.”
So Alistair dribbled out of the sponge. As he did so, more of him was sucked up by the capillary tube into the sponge. “Now what?” he asked.
“Keep dribbling out,” instructed the Mamm. “Until all of you has passed through the tube and sponge.”
Alistair did just that and fell with a slight splash on the ground. He felt dizzy and ill.
“How was that?” asked the Mamm.
“Awful,” answered Alistair, shaking his head groggily.
“Oh. Pity.”
Alistair fixed him with a suspicious look. “You mean I was the first one who’s tried that?”
“Well, yes,” said the Mamm. “But do you think one could get used to being in a sponge? Not a small one like this, but a bigger one.”
“Why would anyone want to get used to being in a sponge?”
“Somewhere to live. Somewhere to call home.”
Alistair tried to stay calm. “And what exactly would be the point?” he asked. “Would the sponge keep out the rain? Would it cut out the Source? Would it lower our evaporation rate?”
“No,” said the Mamm.
“Then I don’t think so.”
“But...”
“Next!”
And so the Mamm went off, looking dejected. But he was not one to be easily discouraged. He continued diving for sponges and a made a small fortune in the property market.
*
A short while later, Alistair noticed Reginald coming, or rather crawling, towards him.
“What’s up?” asked Alistair.
“I’ve been trying to brick up the whole planet,” said Reginald feebly.
“You have?” asked Alistair. He looked about him but there wasn’t a single brick in sight. “How’s it going?”
“It’s a bigger job than I thought it would be.”
“Hmm,” said Alistair. “Bricking up a whole planet. I would say that’s a fairly sizeable task.”
“I decided to start in the Sid Valley as that’s about the lowest place in these parts.” Reginald paused for breath. “I’ve done one layer and already lost count of the millions of bricks I’ve used up. And there’s still so much left to do! Just to brick up the Sid Valley, let alone the rest of the planet.” Reginald stood gasping for breath. “I can’t manage on my own,” he complained. “I need some help.” He looked at Alistair imploringly. “I don’t suppose you could give me a hand in your spare time?”
“No, I don’t suppose I could, either.”
“Please.”
“No, I’m busy. Find someone else.”
“But you’re the only friend I’ve got,” said Reginald pathetically.
“No,”
“Please.”
“Right!” said Alistair, finally snapping. “If you consider bricking up the planet is the most important thing right now, then we’d better get everyone onto it. Okay. I pronounce The Period of Deep Thinking ended. In its place we will have The Period of Bricking up the Planet!”
He glared at Reginald. “Satisfied? Is there anything else you’d like me to do?”
“No. That’s just fine,” said Reginald.
*
So The Period of Bricking up the Planet commenced. It was a long, hard period. The life was tough. Day after day of bricking. At mealtimes the Mamms would grab a handy brick and throw it at a passing animal. At night they slept in their portable sponges and dreamt of the day when their planet would be totally featureless and flat.
Many were involved in the manufacture of the bricks themselves. After several thousand years, the whole of Ground was finally completely bricked up and the final surface layer of tar could be poured on. The whole operation was completed by the laying down of the pulseways and the installation of the clever mechanisms that made the brick walls spring out of the ground across them.
When all the work was over, the Mamms settled down and prepared themselves for their new, happy existence.
*
Except that, as they soon realized, their new existence was not a particularly happy one. They could do anything they wanted, although they didn’t know what it was they wanted to do. And they could go anywhere they wanted, except there was nothing to see when they got there. All in all, they were just plain bored.
A Mamm called Gilmore thought the answer was religion. He set out on a long journey around Ground, spreading the word.
Unfortunately, no one listened. They had never heard of Gilmore so were reluctant to become his followers. Then Gilmore had an idea. He needed a well-known name behind his religion, and the best-known name of all was that of Benjamin. He called his religion Benjaminism and called a meeting to explain the philosophy behind it, as originally expounded by Benjamin at The Meeting. This meeting, not nearly as large as The Meeting, came to be known as The meeting.
The religion was based on the concept of a Beforelife.
“As all of you know,” explained Gilmore at The meeting. “Because of our evolution from slimy green pools, we are all immortal. (Except, of course, for those of us who die). Like our prophet and founder, Benjamin, died. Now, although we may be immortal, and our lives will never come to an end (except for the odd few), it is possible that this is not our first life.”
At this point there had been a sharp gasp from the assembled multitude, followed by a fevered murmuring.
“I believe,” Gilmore had continued when this murmuring had died down, “that we have all lived before. We have all lived a first life; a life before birth! And that now, in this current, everlasting life, we are to be rewarded or punished in accordance with our behaviour in that first life.”
There had been a further murmuring. Gilmore had waited before continuing. Little did he know that he was now coming to the Achilles heel of his philosophy.
“So,” he said. “If you were good in your first life, you will have fun in this life. But, if you were bad, you will be miserable. So you might as well assume the former and go and ENJOY yourselves!”
Gilmore prepared himself for rapturous applause, but none was forthcoming.
Indeed, there was a deathly hush.
Then, one of the Mamms asked the question that happened to be on the minds of all the others.
“How exactly are we to enjoy ourselves? Tell us how? This is what we want to know.”
The question made Gilmore freeze. It was clearly not one he had been expecting and certainly not one that he had prepared an answer for. He gave a cough and surveyed the sea of faces before him. He couldn’t help noticing that they no longer looked friendly.
“Er, well,” he said, his confidence in his new religion draining. “I was, er, thinking that, er, perhaps you could decide that, er, yourselves.”
At this point, Gilmore should have ducked. But he didn’t; so the first brick hit him on the top of the head. The second struck a little lower. The rest seemed to catch him just about everywhere.
Finally Gilmore ducked and ran for cover. He ran and ran until he reached the relative safety of his sponge. There he stayed until a long, long time after everyone had forgotten about The meeting and his religion.
*
But although Gilmore’s religion was a non-starter, the idea of religion seemed to catch on. A number of religions sprang up. Each was called Benjaminism as all their founders, like Gilmore before them, claimed Benjamin as the inspiration.
This made things a bit confusing for a while until one religion, Benjaminism, came to replace all others. This Benjaminism was, of course, Randolph’s Benjaminism with its belief in The Dogs – the Ultimate Inferior Beings – who would one day destroy the Universe.
Yet although this religion came to be the only one on Ground, it never really captured the
mass imagination. Only ten Mamms joined Randolph. The remaining Mamms eventually found other ways of amusing themselves – such as joining the highly exclusive Snob Blob Club.
And so, life on Ground continued fairly stably for hundreds of thousands of years. Nothing much of interest happened in Mamm history.
Nothing, that is, until the first human spacecraft landed on Ground...
APPENDIX III: DOCUMENT 7351/87-A
The following document was found accidentally one evening in the year 13 A.P-E by a historical researcher called shuX. He chanced upon it during a romantic assignation (further details unavailable) in Archive 79 of the Galactic Hyper Library of Ulalala on planet Styro. Most people would not have given the document a second glance, and would have continued with their romantic assignation, but something about it caught shuX’s eye. He immediately realized its relevance to the Top Secret Space Mission of The Night Ripple and how it helped explain one of the principal mysteries concerning that mission.
The document is a historical account of a first encounter between two alien races: the wormids and the Hodei. It has been translated, with some difficulty, from the original alien tongues in which the two separate parts were written. These two separate accounts have been spliced together according to the chronology of the events they record.
The alien encounter was nothing special – they happen all the time. What was interesting was the part that caught shuX’s eye.
The wormids were a rare and proud breed among alien species. They were one of the few civilizations that could claim to have reached the ultimate peak of Knowledge and Wisdom.
For, the wormids knew Everything.
Few other species could make such a claim. For the wormids had discovered everything there was to discover, proved everything there was to be proven, invented everything there was to be invented, and learned everything there was to be learnt.
There was nothing they didn’t know, no mysteries left to solve. The Universe no longer held, or could hold, any secrets for them.
Or, at least, that was what they thought...
*
Pfnug the Hodeus sat in his custom-built space vehicle as it hurtled through space. He stared out of the window in front of him, wondering what ugliness lay ahead. He needed to discover something really, really ugly and really, really soon, to beat Dork and win Chella. Time was running out.
He sighed. His bloated, semi-transparent, purulent body throbbed and pulsated wetly, emitting myriad stenches as it did so. His face sagged. It was covered in boils and warts, and on it were patches of sliminess and areas of hairiness and regions of mouldiness. Pfnug was not a handsome Hodeus. Indeed, there was no such thing as a handsome Hodeus. All Hodei were, not to put too fine a point on it, repulsive; it was a survival strategy evolved and perfected over many millennia. The uglier and more repellent a Hodeus, the less likely it was to be eaten. But it also made them rather solitary creatures for no Hodeus could stand the sight of any other. They could not stand one another’s sounds or smells, either. And, as for the other two senses – touch and taste – no two Hodei ever came close enough to experience such horrors which were the stuff of Hodeus nightmares. For the reader’s benefit, the delicate matter of how Hodei mated will not be described here.
Pfnug glanced at the mirror on the wall to his right. “I am so ugly,” he said and felt immediately better. His internal and external organs rumbled and squeaked and hissed causing a darkish cloud of foul-looking, and fouller-smelling, dark gas to engulf him.
*
The three wormids sat in their little craft as it sped away from their home planet, heading to a new beginning, a new future. They knew exactly where they were, exactly where they were going and exactly how long it would take to get there. The wormids, after all, knew Everything.
They stared knowledgeably, and in silence, at the darkness and stars in front of them. There was no need to speak. Conversation was unnecessary and redundant, and, in fact, quite annoying.
Names, too, were redundant as all wormids looked the same, did the same things and even thought the same thoughts. They had to, as it was the only way of ensuring they knew Everything.
*
As Pfnug adjusted a couple of his external organs in the mirror, trying to present them in a more revolting aspect, he spotted something on one of the scanners out of the corner of his rheumy, bulging eyes. His three hearts missed a beat. He stiffened as he ramped up the detector sensitivity. Yes, there it was. A signal. It had to be another spaceship. His guts squirted liquid in all directions from excitement. His face turned from red to purple to black and then to orange.
“Yesss!” he hissed.
He took hold of the controls and headed towards the spot of light, just visible through the window in front of him.
“I see it, I see it!” he shrieked in his grating, high-pitched squeak.
It looked small; a small sphere, with several bent tubes coming radially out of it, like twigless branches. It wasn’t obviously ugly. In fact, it merely looked ridiculous and impractical. But ugly? He peered at it more closely, unsure. Could it be made more unpleasant on the eye, he wondered. Perhaps under the right lighting conditions?
As he dithered uncertainly, one of his organs released a cloud of foul gas.
*
The wormids stared proudly and haughtily out of the window ahead of them. It was good to be a wormid. They were proud of their ancestors, proud of their fellow wormids and, above all, proud of themselves.
But, what happened next would destroy this self-satisfied pride forever.
A small spot of light appeared far off to the left and started growing in size. At first they didn’t see it because it wasn’t something they were expecting. Even as it grew larger and larger it failed to register. But when the spot of light had grown into a large, brightly-lit and very, very ugly object right in from of them, filling most of their field of view, they could no longer not be aware of it.
And as soon as they were aware of it, they realized that they had no clue what it might be. And that was clearly not right!
One by one, each wormid glanced haughtily at the others, to see if they were also aware of the object, but all they got were equally haughty looks back. The tension in the little craft grew, until finally, the one in the middle could stand it no longer and spoke. It was the first time a wormid had opened his mouth in a very long time.
“I knew this would happen,” he said, looking down his nose at the other two and nodding his head knowingly towards the object in the window. “I knew it.”
“So did I,” said the one on the right with equal haughtiness.
“Me too,” said the third.
The three wormids looked at one another contemptuously and turned back to the object. They knew they were all lying.
But then, they knew Everything.
*
Pfnug was still a ball of confusion and uncertainty. He leaned out of his seat and took a deep swig of the foul and revolting bodily fluids that had pooled on the floor around him. This always made him feel better. One of his stomachs produced an unpleasant burbling, which made him feel better still. And then he looked back at the object floating in space in front of his ship and, for no particular reason, threw up a vast volume of green gunge.
*
“Do you suppose the others know about this?” asked the one who had spoken first.
“Of course they know,” said the one who had spoken last.
“I know,” said the First.
They sat on in silence, thinking.
“I bet they don’t,” said the Second suddenly.
The First and Third wormids swung round in horror as though he had just uttered the ultimate blasphemy (which, in wormid terms, he had). They glared at him.
“I bet they don’t know,” repeated the Second wormid. He could tell that the other two knew he was right.
All three wormids looked slightly embarrassed, not knowing what to say or do.
Then, the First said,
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Of course,” replied the Second and the Third.
“There’s no other course of action,” he stated.
“We realize that,” said the other two.
“So, who’s going to do it?”
“I will,” said the Third. He sidled up to the steering wheel and turned it as far to the right as it would go. The craft veered to the right and, a short while later, the vast and ugly object was no longer visible.
The other two wormids stared at him in astonishment.
“What did you do that for??” asked the First.
“We’d agreed I would.”
“No,” said the First. “We agreed that there was only one course of action and that you would carry it out.”
“Which I did.”
The First was shaking his head. “But that wasn’t it!”
The Second agreed with him. “He’s right, it wasn’t.”
The Third looked at them, puzzled. “Yes it was.”
“Nope,” said the First, shaking his head.
“Nope,” agreed the Second.
“Look, if that’s what I had been thinking,” pursued the Third, “then you two must have been thinking exactly the same thing!”
“Not me,” said the First.
“Nor me,” said the Second.
The Third was really puzzled now. “Alright, then, what had you two been thinking?”
“That we should destroy the object,” said the First.
“That we should let the other wormid ships know,” said the Second.
They both stopped speaking and stared open-mouthed at one another. Not only had their thoughts been different from those of the Third, but they had also differed from one another.
The three wormids started shaking in fright and shock.
They were no longer thinking the same thoughts! This could mean only one thing: that they no longer knew Everything!
*
Pfnug awoke to realize that, in his excitement, he had fallen asleep and slipped off his seat. He was lying on the floor in the pool of his noxious juices. His throat was dry and swollen while his mouth tasted worse than usual, so he took another quick slurp of the vile liquid on the floor.