A Year Near Proxima Centauri

by Michael Martin

  The directions Henry’s wife had given us were not very reliable. It was obviously not Henry’s intention that his wife should find him in a hurry. Very few streets in Bepommel have names. A few have directional names, like North Street, but, due to the Incontinent Continental Drift, there are a number of North Streets established at different periods in Provender’s history, none of which are justified in retaining the title. Very few houses have names or numbers in Bepommel either, and those that do have often chosen a number for sentimental or superstitious reasons. Seventeen is generally deemed to be a lucky number so in Bepommel there is a whole street full of number seventeens. This is a desirable neighbourhood and prices for property are high; a prospective purchaser should not, however, rate prompt delivery of goods or discovery by visitors high on their list of requirements.

  The directions we had been given took us to an area of Palissandrian holiday homes. These took no note of local styles. They were bright, light and used artificial materials. We wondered what Henry, a vernacular artisan, could find to do. We spotted his Zulex parked outside a glittering glazed orb that slowly rotated on a delicate but immensely strong shiny spike. It was obviously not a metal found on Provender. We pulled up behind the Zulex. I could hear laughter inside the orb: Henry’s rumbling chuckle and a thin, high giggle. It stopped as soon as the Stromba shut its doors. Then there was not a sound, but the orb seemed to quiver a little. It was another of those houses with no obvious door which Palissandrians in particular seem to love. It puts their guests or visitors at a loss from the outset. They can watch you make a complete idiot of yourself trying to get in and then graciously open up when it suits them. The most prestigious restaurant in Palissandria is built on these lines. It has no name. In the street outside there are no doors and no indication that there is any restaurant there at all. Those fortunate enough to gain admission sit at the mirrored windows and shriek with glee as well-known creatures try to gain entry, often unsuccessfully. Even if they do deign to admit you, once inside you are ignored completely and have to find your way through a maze of unmarked corridors to the eating area. Once there, it is possible that you will never be served. The establishment is run, most profitably, by a behavioural psychologist who monitors the whole proceedings from a control room and makes spot decisions on how to treat each customer. If they get served at all they feel so privileged that they would never dream of complaining about the food which is brought in from a cheap little restaurant that backs on to it.

  We were sure that Henry and some other creature were watching us as we stood outside and I was sure I heard a suppressed giggle.

  “This is most unsatisfactory,” I said to my wife as we drove off. “How can we ever get the work finished? What more can we do?”

  My wife was pensive on the way back home. Then she said, “We must have a party. Invite all the artisans and their wives to a party to celebrate the completion of the work at the end of the year. Then they’ll have to finish it.”

  I looked at my wife. “You know, I think that could just do the trick.” We rushed in for a snack.

  The next day Henry turned up early, on his own. I told him we had been looking for him. He seemed surprised. He said his Zulex had broken down and he had had to park it in someone’s drive.

  “That’s twice your thoroughly reliable Zulex has let you down,” I observed, perhaps a little cruelly. He grinned feebly. He said he had come to make a list of the remaining jobs so he could get everything finished. My wife went to get a celebratory Halmatrope at these words. I sat Henry down.

  “Another thing,” I said in my best Spheraglese. “We want you, and all your artisans and their wives and all who have helped and delivered and supplied things, to come and eat and drink with us in a party to celebrate the end of everything, on the last day of the year.” He looked at me and I’m sure I spotted a tear in his eye.

  “Surely not?” he said, stroking Tudor, who had leapt on to his lap.

  “No, no, we are most insistent.”

  “We couldn’t,” he said.

  “You must come and all the others. We’ll supply the food.”

  “So you say,” he said doubtfully.

  “All you have to do is get it all finished. Then we can all celebrate.”

  My wife brought in the Halmatrope and we shared a toast. “To the house and its completion.”

  Then Henry looked around the house making notes. I stopped him before he left.

  “Oh, and if you could give the gratification suite priority: we’ve been waiting all this time for the door and the extractor fan.”

  “Haven’t you used it yet?” he asked, surprised.

  “We are not going to calibrate it without even a door,” I snapped. “Different creatures have different attitudes to gratification suites and Conimunculi have a code of behaviour, no matter where in the galaxy, or the universe, they may find themselves.”

  Henry left, promising his prompt attention.

  We were enjoying a meal of the last of the Hully flies with some Brotch when George burst in to check the heating system. He seemed satisfied. I asked him if he had heard about our proposed party. He said Henry had told him, he could not believe it.

  “Why certainly,” I said, “and you and your wife will be honoured guests as the first to finish here.”

  He asked who would be doing the cooking.

  “Why, we will cook ourselves,” I said, “we’ve had enough practice.”

  He seemed surprised and laughed a little, nervously, as he left.

  That night we heard the green vapour rush along the valley. The temperature dropped suddenly and we turned our heating up and lit the first fire of the winter. In the morning the vapour was gone but the days were much cooler now and foam would squeeze from time to time. We were glad of our cosy house, but Henry had still not reappeared.

  The first drum of Smolene we had purchased when we arrived on Provender was almost finished. When I had purchased it I naturally sought the best quality I could find but I had had no idea then that there was such a range of Smolene available. Every town seemed to blend its own from the numerous Smolene refineries dotted all over Provender. These in turn received Smolene of all grades from different Smolene wells, the grades varying according to the depth it was extracted from and the nature of the overlying rocks. The Smolene extracted from beneath the sea-bed is thin and almost dear, ideal for Hollombrost and Sprillet. Whereas the deeper reserves are thicker and darker and more suitable for food with a rich enough flavour to compete with the Smolene, such as Nullion or Cutling. Before purchasing our next drum we decided to visit a local Smolene blendery and choose for ourselves. We found the warehouse down a back street in Bepommel, near the market. The vendor, a Drisk, seemed to know all about us when we said where we lived.

  “You are having a party?” he asked.

  We said we were at the end of the year, and asked his advice on our choice of Smolene.

  “What’s it for?” he asked.

  “For ourselves, mainly,” I said, “and guests from time to time.”

  “For yourselves?” he asked, laughing.

  “Why, yes, of course.”

  “Then it is true. Something subtle then, just a hint of aftertaste and a tang of complimentary flavour. You want to go down well with your guests, eh?” He laughed heartily and showed us the drum he recommended. He had blended it from fourteen different Smolenes and it made the very best of any food, he used it himself. We took the drum and left.

  Henry turned up late one morning with Neville and some doors. They worked into the evening fitting doors and tidying up the damage from earlier visits. We had insisted on Trake boarding to cover up the Moostrin which glowed most disconcertingly at night and upset the ambience of the hover lights we had purchased through Constance and Deverell at great expense. These were the males of a species of fly that hovered in one spot and emitted a warm glow whenever it saw a supine female of the species. At a given sign from the female, an involuntary shudder,
it would drop like a stone on to her and its light would go out. By leaving a small but anatomically accurate model of a female just under wherever you required light the fly would hover there all evening, feeding quietly on any Hully flies that it attracted.

  Before he and Neville left Henry told us that the gratification suite was ready and, as the sound of the Zulex faded out along the track, we tiptoed up to look. The door was heavy and the bolt sturdy. We shut the door behind us and bolted it tightly. I switched it on to warm it up and was just reaching up to switch on the extractor fan when I overbalanced and sat down heavily on the radial arm, bending it. My wife and I looked at each other. We had only just had it repaired. I wondered how I would be able to face Mr Malvern and, in the meantime, our long-awaited suite was again inoperable. We returned downstairs in silence for a large snack.

  When we arrived back from Bepommel with a few provisions we found Henry working upstairs in our bedroom, filling a hole in the ceiling he had just made with his boot. Every time it looked as if the work was almost finished something would happen to set it back even further. Alf and Don arrived with the Trake boarding for the ground floor and neatly swept a cluster of Hollombrost plaster off the ceiling. Neville hammered away in the ablution suite and a small chip of Trake flew up and chipped the Molar pan rim. It seemed impossible that we would ever have a finished house to ourselves, but we knew that it would happen one day. Then we would have the rest of our lives to learn all about our beloved Provender and share that knowledge with a few good friends with space enough for all our needs.

  We were waiting once more for Henry to return after one of his customary short bursts of activity—he had caused more damage than he had repaired on the last visit—when Trevor arrived, loudly, in his ancient Stromba. It must have been at least a month since we called him and asked him to look at our Flasted 49. He stood on the edge of the lagoon and viewed it where it lay on the bottom, beneath the cold water.

  “Too cold to go in now,” he said. We resisted the temptation to tell him how warm it had been a month earlier. “I’ll hook it out,” he said. We went indoors, well out of the way, and had a snack while we tried to ignore the sounds of Trevor’s attempts. He tapped on the door some time later to tell us he had pulled it out but that he had snapped the bowsprit in the process. He said he would come back as soon as he could to repair the hole and mend the bowsprit and could he come to our party? We told him he could, if he had it properly fixed and finished in time. He seemed pleased and eager to comply. He was about to go when he stopped and looked as if he wanted to ask us something.

  “Yes?” I said encouragingly.

  “Well,” he said, then thought better of it.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I just wondered what your taste was like.”

  “Our taste is impeccable.” I laughed at the incongruity of the question. “Surely you realize that all Conimunculi have excellent taste?”

  “Oh. Terrific. Well, I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Just get our Flasted 49 back in action.”

  “You can count on it,” he said and then drowned out all sounds for the next ten minutes as he disappeared down the valley. We were left looking at the sad wreckage of our Flasted 49 on the patio. As he faded from hearing I heard our ’screen indoors and rushed in. It was an unsolicited call, someone had betrayed our code number. This was the first we had received on Provender. We knew it would not be the last now.

  “Good day,” a small shrivelled creature, probably an Obling, screeched from the ’screen. “We are opening a new branch of the Alien Alliance Bank on a planet near you. Why not open an account with us? We know your Credit Rating is B24 and that entitles you to our unique range of services.” I tried to turn the ’screen off but they must have used an override unit which operates once you accept the call. It was not possible to question the creature, the only option being to leave the room and wait until the message was finished. “We offer competitive species ratings for Conimunculi drivers and…”I left the room. We would have to have our code changed now. No doubt countless other corporations were preparing to invade our privacy even at that moment.

  I particularly objected to the Alien Alliance Bank, it started up new temporary branches all over the galaxy, persuaded creatures to open accounts with it at attractive introductory rates and then for the first year opened at such awkward hours that few creatures could ever get to it. Then it would close, citing lack of patronage by customers as the main reason, leaving them with their next branch so far away that most creatures’ life spans were too short for the journey. We felt sure that the Galactic Bank should have put a stop to it years before if it had any claim to being the ultimate regulatory body. Instead, it got itself involved with ludicrous schemes purporting to be beneficial to the galaxy. It had sponsored the expedition that set off in search of the legendary “Lost Library of Hick”. The fully automated satellite library had suffered a power surge and withdrew itself, spinning off into deep space. By the time it was tracked down it owed itself such an enormous sum in fines that it could not afford to take itself back. The expedition therefore concluded, after checking back with the Bank’s accountants, that it was cheaper to leave it where it was. Perhaps its worst record of all has been with its Retarded Planet Rescue Plan. Their advisory panels consist entirely of accountants. For example, the problem with Gibble 8, an outer planet weaving an unpredictable orbit around the twin stars of Cuprix and Niblon, was deemed by the panel not to be its erratic climate, its thin soil or its depressingly stupid dominant race of sports-mad Tripeds, but its lack of borrowed funds. The panel decided that what was needed was a massive loan at three points above base rate. The Tripeds gratefully used it to build a massive sports complex on their only area of cultivable soil. The Bank encouraged them to hold an intergalactic clawball contest there and gave them the necessary additional finance at four points above base rate. The home planet’s team lost and a post-match scuffle by opposing gangs of clawball vandals destroyed the sports complex, the planet’s only Cosmodrome and every last remaining Triped.

  I poked my head back into the room. The ’screen message had finished. I was about to leave when the screen whistled again. I removed its core.

  DECEMBER

  We had been thinking for quite some time that our newly extended, now almost finished house, required something more beyond mere furniture to make it a home. We needed to capture the essence of Provender and place it within our walls. The creatures of Provender regard food as their art form, there are few artists using any other media. Lesley’s plasterwork was of course an artistic expression, as too were Henry’s fireplaces and Neville’s attempts to conceal some of George’s surface pipework, but these were not art for art’s sake. Constance and Deverell’s multiplex was crammed with what they considered to be art, but it was too refined and artificial for our tastes. We wanted to find a Provender-born creature who lived and breathed art, who woke up in the morning and created because it had to, because it simply had no choice. I asked Henry, when next he visited to repair a repair, if he knew of any such artists. I thought he might be scornful of such ideas, but, in fact, he knew of just such an artist, a distant cousin of his, by chance, who lived in a hovel constructed of old Smolene drums and spent his waking hours trying to coax shapes out of lumps of Drib with a batterer. We asked for directions to find him.

  “Oh, no visitors,” Henry said. “He is a recluse, but I’m sure he will visit you if I ask him. Better be well before the end of the month though, eh?”

  I told him that there was no real urgency, but bearing in mind the length of time it took for anything to happen on Provender, there was no harm in setting things in motion. We were surprised therefore to receive a visit from the artist the very next morning.

  He was larger than Henry and clad entirely in black shiny skins with blobs of Drib all over them. He wore three black eye patches and a tame Pataguin sat on his shoulder and regarded his remaining eye with evident relish.

>   “You require the services of an artist?” he asked in perfect Coniman. We were taken aback.

  “Let Rolf create for you,” the Pataguin shrieked, also in perfect Coniman. We were aghast. I had never heard a Pataguin speak. One is always put off eating anything that speaks.

  “He only mimics,” the artist laughed in Spheraglese. We asked him in and offered him a Halmatrope and he sat down with a creaking sound, deep into a chair, and looked at us unblinkingly with his eye. Tudor crept slowly towards him, then disappeared at speed when he saw the Pataguin.

  “We would like to commission a small work for our house,” I began.

  “Small?” he said. “What is begun must be finished, it may be small, it may not.”

  “Ah, yes, but not too large, if that is at all possible?”

  “Something for the fireplace? Or freestanding in the middle of a room?” he asked. Then his eye closed and he started to shake violently. The Pataguin took off and circled the room squawking, “He’s off again, he’s off again,” in Spheraglese. When his eye opened he was calm.

  “I saw it,” he said. “It was the trail of the green vapour, twisting around the stripped stems of putrage where a Cutting suckled its young.”

  “That sounds the sort of thing,” I said doubtfully. It sounded a complex undertaking to me. “When could you finish it by?”

  “A few days if you’re pressed.”

  “As quickly as that?” we marvelled.

  “It will be conceptual you understand. I have to persuade the Drib how I feel. Then it responds.”

  “Well, thank you then, Rolf. We look forward to seeing you and, and your creation.”

  He strode off down the track, the Pataguin firmly back on his shoulder. A little later I was sure I caught the glint of a Ferenziculo vanishing fast down the track into the valley below.