A Year Near Proxima Centauri

by Michael Martin

  We had purchased a small quantity of suitably prepared Trake bark earlier in the week from a market stall. Mr Skeg had been right. In spite of being unimpressed by it at the time, I had found myself slowly developing a strong desire to have some more. When I mentioned it in passing to my wife she said that she had too. After purchasing it, along with many other provisions, we rushed back home and prepared an infusion. Our first impressions had been mistaken, it was most certainly an acquired taste. We took out cups of Trake bark to Henry and his cousins as they waited for the delivery, and chatted to them. Alf and Don were brothers. They had both served on the Starflick refuse fleet before working for Henry, covering all the main pan-galactic communication lanes, vacuuming up stray asteroids and using them to balance moons with elliptic orbits.

  “Some of these moons get to wobble so much they play havoc with your tides,” Alf explained. I had heard about Starflick’s reputation. They won contracts by low-pricing, then instead of taking the waste out to the outer limits of the galaxy and firing it off towards the Great Attractor as all contracts stipulated, they would look for black holes to fly tip into, causing goodness knows what havoc in the other dimension. I asked Alf about this.

  “Yeah, well, it goes on, you know,” he said. “But I’ve never seen it happen.”

  Don had been present at the clear-up after tests carried out using the Cyclotrex communicator, which, together with the Cognotron, is now of course banned in the Galaxy. Scientists experimenting with particle accelerators the size of a planetary system discovered that it was possible to actually communicate for brief snatches of time with scientists in the hitherto only postulated anti-matter universe carrying out identical experiments. Protracted snatches of discussion on a whole range of subjects led both parties to conclude that they had little to offer each other that they did not both already have, without cancelling it out, leaving nothing. The matter would have rested there if Starflick had not seen this as a perfect method for bulk waste disposal.

  They persuaded the scientists to make arrangements with their anti-matter counterparts, who had a similar problem of waste disposal. They were to have an identical mass of waste ready. With perfect timing any amount of waste from one universe would cancel out a similar amount from its counterpart. This would solve for ever the waste problems of the two universes. However, the experiment misfired, the timing must have been out by a nanosecond, and the masses of waste from each universe passed each other midway and hit their opposing administration blocks with sufficient force to obliterate all maintenance records, blueprints and running instructions for the Cyclotrex. However, Starflick did not consider the experiment to be a failure. They continued attempting to operate the Cyclotrex, sending waste matter off, regardless of whether the outcome was mutually agreeable to the inhabitants of the parallel universe, or not. When this was discovered the use of the Cyclotrex was banned completely, leaving waste disposal as still the most intractable problem of the universe. Every year worse and worse waste bi-products are produced whose implications fewer and fewer creatures can grasp.

  Since leaving Conima, we no longer receive the hourly state of the universe edited highlights, or the localized galactic updates. We suddenly realized that we were being drowned in information. It was not that our memories were beginning to vapourize, as can happen to middle-aged Conimunculi, but that there was too much information for any creature to usefully grasp. The properties of raw information have long since been known on Conima. It causes more information to form on its surface which, in turn, produces yet more. In the early days of discovery the planet Lumex, central newsgatherer for the galaxy, set about collecting and storing all the known information in the universe in high-density fractal codes. Millions of years ago that was a feasible task compared with now. As the experiment approached its goal all new research was stopped until every last scrap of information was stored. This point was never reached. The exposed surface area of stored information, deprived of fresh superimposition, started to spontaneously speculate. In no time at all news broadcasts from Lumex consisted of pure speculation. How little things change. We do from time to time glance at the local news from Provender, mainly about food, and our friends keep us in touch with the plight of Conima, but we really do not have the time. Food on Provender is so time consuming.

  Henry and his cousins gave up waiting for the floor bearers. Just after they had left the bearers turned up and the driver—some kind of Spansule—had to unload them himself with a great deal of grumbling. When he had finished I offered him a Halmatrope. This seemed to raise his spirits. He sat down on the pile of bearers and brushed his eyes back out of his hair. I could see he was not a native of Provender, he spoke Spheraglese with a slur. He told me he had lived on Provender for ten years, resigning from the pan-galactic patrol. I told him how much we loved Provender and he agreed, adding that not every creature took to the place. We were obviously fortunate to have found acceptance.

  “You know what they say,” he chuckled. “If they don’t eat you in the first year, you’ll survive.”

  I laughed. I had not heard that one.

  When he left, I noticed the delivery note stuck in the end of the pile of bearers. They were stained Trake and not the imported Strollon we had asked for. When he arrived the next day, Henry did not seem surprised at this mistake. He shrugged and said there was nothing wrong with good Provender Trake, and stained up who could tell the difference? I pointed out that he should know that Trake was a poor quality material and renowned for giving way without warning. We wanted something dependable under our gratification suite. He grinned affably and flung an enormous dendrite over me.

  “Everything round here gets done in Trake, your traditional vernacular, renewable resource. Just think of the damage the Strollon loggers do, swooping down on a planet unawares, shaving it bare and then swooping off to the next one.”

  I agreed that this was not a commendable practice but I had noted that all the floors and joinery in Henry’s house were in Strollon. I made some enquiries on the ’screen. Strollon bearers had to be ordered well in advance. There was no chance of a prompt delivery. If we wanted any activity on the extension in the next four weeks we would have to settle for stained Trake.

  Before he left that evening, Henry informed us that the bearers would need to be left to settle for a day before they could work off them to build the top storey. Coincidentally, as posters all over Bepommel had been proclaiming for weeks, the next day the fair was coming to Bepommel.

  Even after the sun had set, the air was still and warm. We sat on the patio pontoon sipping a Halmatrope. Soon we would try the lagoon. I heard the shrill whistle of the ’screen, and rushed in. It was our uninvited guest, the Image Transmuter.

  “Be pleased to know I’ve bought the place now,” he said. “All mine. Shan’t be down to move in for a while, too busy. Got a Drisk to keep an eye on it. Gave her your name. Must rush.” Then he faded from the ’screen before I could ask what he expected me to do. The first thing I would have advised was to keep the Drisk as far away as possible.

  Provender fairs are renowned pan-galactically. The safety laws and punitive Species Rating surcharges on more advanced planets preclude all but the tamest sideshows. As we approached Bepommel we could hear the fair in action.

  It was set away from the town on a flattened area of rough land where a Palissandrian construction company was hoping to buy permission for a processing unit for Advanced Palissandrians, as they called their geriatrics. This particular company specialized in warden-assisted blocks housing enormous numbers, their individual units were compact and yet lavish with luxurious detail. On every floor, serving every ten rooms, were communal areas stocked with a wide range of delicacies that were painlessly fatal. As soon as the inmate decided it had lived long enough, all it had to do was slither down the corridor and eat its last meal. These blocks were springing up everywhere, but the permission was too expensive so far in Bepommel and each year, as the company haggled ove
r the price, the fair would descend and fill the plot with its dangerous machines, extortionate sideshows and unsettling, low-frequency music that rattled and clattered every loose object in Bepommel.

  We parked the Stromba far away from the fair and walked to it. The noise got louder and louder as we approached, the vibrations juddered our eyeballs and the excitement mounted. We arrived just in time to see the hastily assembled giant whirly wheel, complete with seats full of screaming creatures, come unbolted and fly through the air, landing on the Bumper Stromba Rink, run almost entirely by Drisks with Smolened-back hair. We kept to the outer edge of the activities as machinery crashed and buckled, adding to the mounting excitement. Drools clamoured to ride in the Arm of Hunger which whisked them round and round until they completely evacuated their systems. Colwigs clamoured to ride the Wall of Fear until they were so terrified that relatives had to help them home with bags over their heads. Montalbans just clamoured. There was one dangerous ride left in action but even as we watched, all the springs flew out of the base and the counterweight spun off, out of control, and landed somewhere out of sight. As the Drisks dismantled the wreckage and packed it away for the next venue, every creature moved to the sideshows.

  Scarred crossbreds in barrels glowered at each other as they histrionically tried to eat each other, Dribsmith Drools arm-wrestled with their batter arms for Halmatrope. Small groups of Montalbans cruised around jeering at other small groups of Montalbans. It was a riot of colour, activity and injury in the normally peaceful town. We were about to leave when we spotted Henry and his cousins trying their hand at the “Lift the Megalith” stall. Alf lifted one end of the lintel clear of the ground; Don strained but could not budge it, then Henry, seizing it in his mighty arms, slowly lifted it and, raising it above his head, managed to place it squarely on the stone uprights, winning himself a Grebble in a bag of water as the cousins cheered.

  With the sounds rattling in our ears, and the smells filling our heads, we stumbled back along the roads to our Stromba, remarking to each other how the excitement of a fair never seems to diminish, even as you grow older, highlighted by the larger-than-life, picaresque characters who are always associated with them. When we reached our Stromba we found it perched on two blocks of Couth with its hover fins missing.

  It was with some difficulty that we managed to find a taxi in the busy town that evening.

  Henry and his cousins returned to the stonework setting the stones on the upper storey. Work was slower as they now had further to lift the materials. As they slept through the hot afternoons we would slip into our cooling lagoon. The earlier trials and tribulations seemed to have left it unscathed, although the bottom was rather too slippery and the image of the ravenous Melek would now and again unnerve us if we bumped against each other unexpectedly.

  One afternoon, as we restfully scudded across the pool on our Flasted 49, our skins wrinkling and ever darkening in the hot sun, our peace was suddenly shattered as one after another monstrous craft shot through the sky above us. We had forgotten. It was the annual Provender “Round the Planet” Race. Entrants came from all over the galaxy. Most other systems have too tightly scheduled atmospheric space to provide a race window. We watched them roar by with bloated fuel tanks and unbaffled exhausts and we could feel the heat from them. In this conspicuous display of extravagant consumption the winner would not necessarily be the first over the line but the one who had consumed the most fuel in the fastest time during the orbit. Contestants were not permitted to refuel during the race. If they ran out of fuel and dropped from the sky they would be disqualified. Therefore, these deliberately inefficient craft, wasting energy in heat and sound and atrocious aerodynamics, had nevertheless to ensure that they had enough fuel to complete the orbit. Stringent regulations and pre-race inspections precluded the dumping of unused fuel except in emergencies. The event was sponsored this year by the Corto-Probax combine, one of the leading fuel producers.

  The noise was sufficient to wake Henry and his cousins, something we had never been able to do. We headed for the patio pontoon and tied up. Craft roared by overhead at irregular intervals. We made some Trake bark infusion for all of us, hoping that now he was awake Henry would return to work, but they stayed put, watching the craft race by for the next few hours.

  “Peregrine Bates won the last two years,” Alf said, “son of Starflick’s Managing Director.”

  “Just another form of waste disposal,” I said.

  “Life is just another form of waste disposal,” my wife added. We all looked at her.

  The last few stragglers roared over.

  “They’ll never make it,” Don said as one stopped suddenly as it was heading for the horizon. A tiny eject module flew out before the stricken craft plummeted down into the distant forest.

  Henry and his cousins struggled to seat one lintel and then went home. The extension was looking good. There was no fear of an Alien Intrusion Order here.

  JUNE

  The weather was getting hotter. We made full use of our lagoon, but day after day after day there was no sign of Henry or his cousins. In our first optimistic schedules for the extension we had fully expected it to be completed by now and had invited a host of guests to stay all through the summer. We did not want to turn away any of them, but we were a trifle annoyed that we could not yet offer them the accommodation we had planned. I called to see Henry, the ’screen being blank as usual, and I saw Henry’s wife. She told me that he had been called away unexpectedly and reluctantly to an emergency job at Felstine.

  “They have a Halmatrope festival for the whole month of June there, don’t they?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Is that so?” she said with convincing surprise and ill-concealed annoyance. Before I could ask her to ask him to give the utmost priority to finishing our job she had shut the door.

  Our guests were due to arrive from Palissandria in the early evening. We knew that they would be tired and they were never very hungry so we made sure that most of our eating was completed before they came.

  Constance and Deverell had a multiplex at the very top of the Crystal Tower Building, the tallest artificial structure on Provender. On a clear day, they could see almost half of the planet’s surface. An enormous power system, propelling the top of the building in the direction of the planetary spin, enabled it to keep up with the base instead of snapping off, as it frequently threatened to do when the power unit malfunctioned. It took courage to place one’s trust in Provender technology, I was envious of Deverell when they arrived in their Ferenziculo and I told him so. His Species Rating and government contracts had made its importation a quicker and less expensive proposition than it would have been for us, and the problems of servicing and fuel provision were dealt with by his company, style importers for the Palissandrian elite. They were both immaculately turned out as they abandoned the coolness of their vehicle’s interior for the hot dusty air. They coughed a little as they picked their way over our uneven drive into the house and Constance stumbled in her needle heels. They were evidently as disappointed as we were that the work had not been completed. Constance was halfway across the sitting room when her needle heels became so deeply embedded in the old Trake flooring that we had to lever her up and carry her to a chair. They seemed intimidated by the Hully flies that flew in through our open windows and raced round the lights. They said little as they pecked away at the delicious Nullion my wife had prepared and retired to bed early, both complaining of headaches.

  My wife and I were disappointed. We had brushed up on our Sprock so as to be able to make the most of the sparkling, intelligent conversations our friends always had with us whenever we stayed with them.

  The next day was hot. Our friends got up early, obviously refreshed. They ate thin slices of toast rubbed with the flesh of Sprillet and the blackest Robustas we could find as we embarked upon our usual breakfast. In spite of the heat, they refused to go in the lagoon but seemed happy to watch us and chat as we paddled to and fro.r />
  Deverell told us that business was booming and the wealthy of Palissandria were ever eager to seek out the best the galaxy had to offer, competing against each other for their positions on the pinnacle of taste, Constance and Deverell of course considered that they literally occupied this position in their astonishing home. They talked of humming wall coverings, hovering floor coverings and sympathetic decorations that adjusted to your mood. They talked of furniture that bonded with you, soothing and caressing away your stress. The latest line of fashions, they said, could be programmed to adopt whatever shape you desired to be, pulling you in in places, padding you out in others, or perhaps creating spellbinding effects at parties such as rhythmically undulating or completely enveloping you whenever you saw someone you wished to avoid. We felt left out of all this splendour as we sat in our light casual clothing, our deeply crevassed, dark skins radiating health. We had made our choice, to leave the hectic life of Conima that Palissandria tried to emulate, and enjoy the outdoor simplicity that all the rest of Provender had to offer.

  “But what do you do all day?” Deverell asked us just before our snack. We explained that, what with learning all the languages, customs and discovering all the myriad things there are to be discovered on a new planet, we never had a moment spare. Of course, there was all the cooking to be done too and all the purchasing of supplies, our lives were fuller and richer than ever before: we were growing.

  “Yes,” Constance said, “so you are.”

  We had hoped to walk up the hill with Constance and Deverell in the afternoon. We wanted to show them the views and Jet them experience the pleasure of walking among wild things that Palissandrians are never able to experience, but, being accustomed to personally adjusted environmental systems, they were feeling the heat and preferred to stay inside the shaded but still warm house. We had a quick dip in the lagoon. When we came back they were asleep.