Colony

by Rob Grant

  Oslo and Lewis both bend forward and peer at the jar, but seem to fail to achieve enlightenment.

  'Community Planner Gordon. That's it. That's my jar.'

  Without straightening, Oslo twists her head towards him. 'You're really not adjusting fantastically well, are you?' She points a school-marmly finger at the empty jar. 'This is you...' With the same, slow, exaggerated gesture she points at the jar with Gordon's name on it. 'This has someone's head in it. See the difference? Head... no head? Empty... full? You... Gordon?'

  'I'm telling you, that's my name! They labelled the jars wrong.'

  Lewis closes his eyes very tightly. 'They labelled the jars wrong?'

  Oslo asserts, 'That's not possible,' but she sounds unconvincingly unconvinced.

  Lewis opens his eyes. 'Not possible? Bernadette, given that the average crew member on this mission would have to cram intensely for several centuries to qualify for the mental categorization "Dick-head", I find it hard to discount Piers' theory.'

  '"Charles",' Eddie corrects him unhelpfully. 'I'm telling you my name is actually Charles.'

  Oslo grabs him either side of his helmet in that way she has. Some part of Eddie that can't possibly exist any more is beginning to find it pleasant. 'Look, try and get this through your gloop: if you are not Dr Piers Morton, it's back in the jar, OK?'

  Back in the jar? Eddie looks at the rank of gawking, grinning heads. 'You wouldn't do that. That would be murder.' Wouldn't it? Can you technically murder a head and a spine? '... Or something.'

  'We don't need a frotting Community Planner,' and in her mouth, the job title sounds even more like an expletive than it always did in Eddie's mind. 'We need a doctor. We need Dr Morton. There are people, lots of people, who don't even want him. People who think bringing any of you back is wrong. Now, think very hard. Think very hard indeed. Are you Dr Morton, or are you about to rejoin the ranks of pickledom?'

  Eddie's mouth can't be dry. It's just feeling that way. He's let himself get carried away again, and done the truth thing. The truth is unlikely to be your best weapon, when you're an accountant in a world without money, who's posing as a Social Engineer, when your survival depends on being a doctor.

  The Padre sighs with an awful final-sounding cadence. 'I think we're all aware you're clutching at straws, Bernadette. Our friend here is not the good doctor. It could hardly be clearer. It's a disappointment, I know. It may even prove to be terminally disappointing for all of us. Still, no point in whipping an equine cadaver. Our first priority is to do the right thing by... you say your name's Charles? ... do the right thing by Charles here, eh? Somehow we're going to have to try and lever him out of that suit without ripping away all his sensitive nerve endings or snapping his brittle, fragile spinal column.'

  Suddenly the prospect of spending the rest of his life in a blue metal Humpty Dumpty suit sucking green gloop through his nostrils doesn't seem like too bad an option to Eddie. 'Wait -- it's all coming back-medical school... dating nurses... playing amusing practical jokes with human cadavers. Yes -- I am Dr Morton! Must have been the blow to my head -- or, rather, the blow to the entire rest of me, that had me confused for a few moments there.'

  Lewis smiles with reptile politeness. 'I'm sorry, Charles...'

  'Piers! My name's Piers! Get me a stethoscope! Give me ten ccs of anbulistic adrenaline! Where's the crash cart!? Let's move, people!'

  Before Eddie runs out of badly memorized television hospital clichs, Oslo steps in. 'Father Lewis, let's be brutal: Piers, or Charles, or whoever the frot this is, actually survived the operation to wire him into the suit. What are the realistic odds of us pulling off that little miracle again?'

  'In the low zeros, I would say.'

  'He's what? Our fifteenth attempt?'

  'Seventeenth. Twenty-first if you count the experimental monkey failures.'

  'I say this man's Dr Morton.'

  'I am! I am!'

  Lewis shakes his head. 'I understand your frustration, Bernadette. Certainly we're in a desperate situation, and any kind of help couldn't hurt, but...'

  'I can help. I'm sure I can be of major help. Just tell me what the problem is.'

  Lewis smiles a tight, last-rites smile. 'I'm truly sorry, Charles. We've hit a crisis. At this point in the mission we need someone with certain arcane skills we no longer possess.'

  'Medical skills?'

  'Much more arcane than that. We need a person who can interpret the hieroglyphic scrawls the Originals used to record data.'

  'Hieroglyphic scrawls?' Eddie tries not to look at the jars again. What hieroglyphic scrawls? 'Why would a doctor be able to interpret hieroglyphics?'

  Oslo and Lewis look worried now. The priest replies, 'We were hopeful that an antiquated medical training programme would have included schooling in that obsolete mystery.'

  Latin, are they talking about? Or ancient Greek? Could Eddie's existence actually be hanging on those dead Mediterranean languages he despised so?

  'Can I see them? Do you have an example of these hieroglyphics?'

  'Well... yes.' Lewis sweeps his arm towards a door. 'They're everywhere.'

  Eddie looks at the door. It's a commonplace fire exit. But there are no strange symbols on it, or anywhere around it. Slowly, it dawns on him that Lewis is pointing out nothing more arcane or mysterious than the sign on the door itself. The eight large letters spelling out 'Fire Exit'.

  Somehow, somewhere along the generations, the crew of the Willflower has lost the ability to read.

  21

  'You are talking about the sign on the door, yes?'

  Lewis nods.

  'The sign that says: "Fire Exit"?'

  Lewis and Oslo look at each other sideways. 'Are you telling me,' Lewis takes a step towards him, 'that you can interpret those symbols?'

  'Yes.'

  'He's lying.' Oslo intrudes coldly, but there's a hint in her voice that she wants to be disproved. 'Naturally, he's lying. He doesn't want to go back in the jar.'

  'Of course I don't want to...' Eddie can't even bring himself to say it. 'Of course I want to live. But I'm not lying. I can read.' Eddie looks around the room frantically. 'See, over there, the sign over the speaker? It says: "Ship Com". And there, over that keypad: "Temperature Override".' But Lewis and Oslo seem unswayed. This is insane. How do you prove you can read to a pair of illiterates?

  Lewis gets an idea. 'All right.' He turns and picks out one of the jars. 'Who's this?'

  Eddie reads the label.

  Lewis passes his palm over it, and the computer confirms Eddie's interpretation.

  Oslo is hard to convince. Perhaps Eddie knew the jar's incumbent, or the head bears a familial resemblance to someone Eddie did know. She makes them repeat the procedure a dozen times, until even Lewis is way beyond satisfied.

  'That's enough, Bernadette. He can do it.'

  'So do I get to live, or what? No rush. I'd just like to know what to pack for the next fifty years. Will I need socks, or not?'

  Lewis responds with a less than heart-warming: 'For now. We'll keep you in the suit for now.'

  Oslo asks: 'Do you think we should still try to pass him off as Dr Morton?'

  Lewis nods. 'I think that it might be easier to sell Dr Morton to the, uhm, dissident faction than Charles whatever-he-was, Head of Ice Cream.'

  Eddie's about to protest that Community Planner was in fact an important, nay vital assignment, but catches himself in time. The planning behind this mission doesn't appear to have yielded tremendously outstanding results. He really doesn't want to claim undue credit for it.

  Oslo looks at him with testing eyes. 'Are you up for this? Even if you were the real Dr Morton, this wouldn't be an easy ride.'

  'I am the real Dr Morton.'

  Oslo nearly smiles. 'He certainly has a Mortonesque look to him.'

  'I am so Dr Morton. I am brimming over with Dr Morton-ness.'

  'Well then,' Lewis slaps him on his metal shoulder, 'welcome aboard, Dr Morton. I'll call a pla
nning meeting right away. It's time you met the rest of the Pilgrim Parents. Bernadette, can you get him up to Planning Committee Room One without demolishing any decks?' Oslo nods. 'I'll pave the way, Piers. Talk you up, eh? I'll meet you there in fifteen.'

  Lewis leaves.

  Oslo is looking at Eddie quizzically.

  Eddie says: 'What?'

  'I don't get you, mister. You come over... well, you seem so ... stupid, I suppose.'

  'Thanks.'

  'And yet you can decipher the hieroglyphics. Where did you acquire that skill?'

  Tricky ground, this. It's in Eddie's interest to build up his rarity value. If they find out almost every one of the heads can almost certainly read, and can probably read several languages more than Eddie, doubtless many times more quickly, he won't appear such a prize. And though Eddie is probably the worst liar in the known universe, bluntly, he needs all the help he can get.

  He tries to shrug, but the movement is too subtle for the suit, and he just ends up flapping his arms. 'My degree was in Reading. I got a double first at Oxford. Reading and Writing. With honours.'

  'Writing?'

  'Oh yes. Don't like to brag, but I can actually make those squiggly hieroglyphics, too.'

  Oslo seems unimpressed. Very unimpressed. She looks at him as though he's something vile she's pulled out of her nose that shouldn't be there. Something with an exoskeleton and wriggling legs. And with a world-class sneer, she floors him with: 'Well, what the frot use will that be?'

  And she's right, Eddie supposes. He may well be the only living creature within hundreds of light years who could read what he writes.

  Oslo gives up waiting for Eddie to reply, turns and heads for the door.

  Eddie starts to follow her, but one of the names on an empty jar catches his eye. A name with something familiar about it. Familiar, but not good. Paulo San Pablos. He scans his ragged memory, but nothing comes. He needs more of a hint. He would recognize the name if he dug out the storage box that contains its personal belongings.

  Or, rather, he'd recognize the socks.

  22

  Again, the transway journey seems to take an inexplicably long time.

  Of course, Ms Oslo is not a fanatical devotee of small talk, and Eddie's questions about the make-up of the Planning Committee, its individual members and its factions -- which sounded worrying to Eddie -- are met with dismissive grunts and shrugs and 'You'll see soon enough's, which doesn't exactly make the time fly by. Still, the trip seems to take at least twice as long as it ought to.

  Eddie's mental map of the ship's topography was always less than perfect, but he tries tracking the carriage's progress anyway. As far as he can tell, it's taking an extraordinarily circuitous route; zigzagging, doubling back on itself. Quite unnecessary. Unless the ship's layout has changed dramatically.

  But why would anyone change the ship's layout, and not change the path of the main transport through it?

  He's about to ask Oslo if she's aware of any internal structural changes, when the carriage crashes, which, frankly, makes him lose his train of thought.

  There is a terrible lurching crunch, an agonized groaning of twisting metal, and as the lights go out, Eddie just catches enough of a glimpse to see Oslo grabbing on to a safety harness and bracing her leg against a seat back, before he's sent hurtling the entire length of the carriage. Eddie himself can't brace. He's incapable, even, of making his body perform the necessary reactions in time to shield himself against an impact. The impact comes, though, and it comes hard, metal against unyielding metal, and he bounces off the far end of the carriage with enough impetus to send him smashing through several seats. All the time, he's thinking about his gloop, about keeping his helmet intact, about keeping the slime inside, even though he has no idea what would happen if it did leak out.

  He stops with a final crunching sound, praying it's some interior fixture or fitting that's doing the crunching, and not some part of him he can't feel, and, please Lord, not his helmet, or the seal of his helmet, or the safety visor.

  The silence is sudden and stunning.

  There's another terrible creak of warping metal.

  And more silence.

  And he hears Oslo: 'Are you all right?'

  Eddie thinks so. 'I think so.' Is she all right? 'You?'

  'Fine. Just hang on. It'll be OK.'

  OK? A high-speed transport just got hit by something inside the ship. The transport is inside the ship. Protected by dozens of layers of impervious hull. What could cause such an accident? Something bad, that's for sure. Something big and bad. Nothing that could fall into the category 'All right', or anywhere in the close vicinity.

  'What happened?'

  'Don't worry. It happens a lot.'

  'It happens a lot?'

  'It'll be fine. We'll be back on line in a minute.'

  And, on cue, the emergency lights flicker on. Eddie is lying amid a mess of crushed metal and ripped fabric. He looks around for some kind of reflective surface, and suddenly realizes that he hasn't seen himself, yet, in a mirror, which seems a strange omission. He doesn't know what his helmet looks like from the outside. He can't even feel its shape with his dead pincers. Perhaps he's been avoiding this confrontation with his physical form. Perhaps it's some kind of denial. He drags himself erect.

  The carriage is tilted about twenty degrees off the horizontal. Oslo is still in her braced position, so Eddie decides bracing is probably a wise thing to do. He finds a seat back he hasn't yet destroyed and gently locks his pincers on to the metal bar at the top of it. He calls: 'Can you see my helmet?'

  'Can I what?'

  'Is my helmet all right?'

  'Your helmet?'

  'Is it all right?'

  'Your helmet is on your head.'

  'Is it intact, though?'

  'Intact?'

  'It's not cracked or anything? My gloop isn't leaking out? I still have all my gloop?'

  'The helmet's fine. But I've got to say: I'm extremely worried about the head inside it.'

  Eddie wonders about trying to rub one of his pincers over his visor, to see if it comes away dry, but decides against it. He's not prepared to risk misjudging the amount of strength required for the manoeuvre and wind up puncturing the helmet with his own clumsy claw.

  His grip on life seems so fragile now; so dependent on his borrowed metal body, on the despised yet precious gloop.

  There is another massive creaking of metal, and the carriage lurches again.

  It appears to be intact and horizontal. The lights flicker back on. There is a whine as the transway motor builds up again, and suddenly they're in motion.

  Eddie doesn't want to be in motion. He wants to get out of the carriage immediately. He releases his grip on the seat back and starts to lurch towards the emergency stop.

  'What are you doing?'

  'I'm going to stop the damned carriage.'

  'What for?'

  'What for? We've just been in an accident that makes the Hindenburg crash look like a bumper-car prang. You think this thing is safe?'

  'It'll get us there.'

  'How can you know that?'

  'I told you: it happens a lot.'

  'Which is a superb reason for getting the hell out of here.'

  'It's not just the transway. It's the whole ship. It happens all over the place.'

  'It happens all over the ship? Well, let me tell you, Bernadette, it's not supposed to happen all over the ship. It's not supposed to happen at all.'

  'We know that. I told you we had problems.'

  'But why? What is it? What's causing it?'

  'We think it's structural damage, caused by the accident.'

  Accident? 'There was an accident?'

  'Ooh, was there ever an accident.'

  23

  Eddie has only one major connection point in his entire remaining body: the joint of his head and spine. His neck. And it's in agony. The transway carriage crash resulted in bestowing upon him the only injury he c
ould possibly sustain: whiplash.

  The pain, combined with Oslo's pig-headed refusal to elucidate farther on the nature of the 'accident', delivers Eddie to Planning Committee Room One in a filthy mood. So he is unprepared for the emotional punch just the sight of the room packs for him.

  Planning Committee Room One.

  Meeting place of the Pilgrim Parents.

  This is really his first encounter with his previous life. The room is apparently unchanged by the passage of time. The polished wooden table, the leather-backed chairs, everything looks as if it's just been unpacked from a delivery truck. There are the same yellow pads in every place, the same fresh, sharpened pencils. Why? Some observance of obsolete ritual, Eddie supposes. The ability to make meaningful marks on the pads with the pencils must have vanished a long time ago. A culture doesn't just lose the capacity to read and write overnight.

  Father Lewis is rising to meet him.

  Eddie looks around the table. Only a handful of people make up the committee, where there used to be dozens. Perhaps this is just an emergency gathering. Perhaps the rest of the Section Leaders are busy elsewhere, attempting to repair the damage from the accident.

  The other alternative is surely unthinkable. That these people are the only senior personnel left alive.

  Father Lewis is introducing him. It's a very big build-up. Eddie wishes he'd tone it down a tad. He would have to possess the mind of Albert Einstein, the voice of Frank Sinatra and the dancing ability of Dame Margot Fonteyn to live up to the hype.

  Lewis then starts introducing him to the Parents. First, a woman. Eddie gets that twinge of recognition again. A stern-looking woman whose face is strangely exciting to him. But the recollection doesn't gel until Lewis gives her name.

  'And this is our Science Section Leader, Trinity Peck

  And the rest of the introduction is submerged beneath Eddie's erotic bath mental movie, suffused with the scent memory of carbolic soap. Peck. Jezebel Peck. For the first time in his new existence, Eddie is experiencing something close to happiness.

  And this woman is her distant progeny. The likeness is astonishing. She has the sharp high cheekbones, and that nose thing like the rest of the contemporary crew. But she has those familiarly ambiguous lips: thin yet full. She has the judgementally raised right eyebrow. She has the black hair. Black as Stalin's soul.