by Eoin Colfer
Eight more jumps to go, thought Mown. And then we get to wipe out another species.
And, in truth, the idea did not give him as much satisfaction as it should. Surely there was no greater pleasure for a Vogon than to close the file on an enforcement order, but Constant Mown was perhaps not as much of an utter bastard as his father liked to think. In fact, in recent months when Mown searched inside himself for that tough Vogon core necessary to carry out some of his more distasteful duties, instead of steel and kroompst he found sensitivity and even empathy. It was horrible, awful. How was a constant ever to become a prostetnic with wishy-washy emotions like those swilling around in his thinking gourd?
I don’t want to be a prostetnic. I don’t even want to be an enforcement bureaucrat.
Oh sure, Mown gave good Vogon on the bridge – threw his little spaghetti arms around saluting Daddy, waxed euphoric about the Unnecessarily Painful Slow Death torpedoes – but his blood pump wasn’t in it.
I don’t want to kill anyone, even with the right paperwork.
Mown had to take a few deep breaths before composing the next thought.
There are things more important than paperwork.
He said it aloud.
‘There are things more important than paperwork!’
Suddenly there was bile in Mown’s throat, but the little Vogon was so worked up that he couldn’t enjoy it. Mown tumbled from the hyperspace cradle and scrabbled along his bedside draining board until he found a drool cup to spit into.
That was better.
Had he really said that aloud? What was happening to him?
Mown lowered himself gently on to his cot, an act that would have surprised the hell out of his shipmates. Vogons did not generally have the wherewithal to lower themselves gently on to anything. Plonking awkwardly or collapsing ignominiously were the main options open to the Vogon race. Getting up again was even worse than sitting down. Rising from anything lower than a bar stool generally involved a bruised coccyx, a complicated system of weights and pulleys and several pints of splutter. But Mown possessed something heretofore unheard of among the Vogons. Mown possessed a modicum of grace.
Mown wiggled a couple of fingers beneath the mattress board and pulled out a small pink piece of plastic contraband. He slipped the item underneath a soft thigh and quorbled nervously for a few moments, building up the kroompst to bring it out into the open.
‘This is the last time,’ he promised himself. ‘One look, then I’ll get rid of it. Never again. The absolute last time.’
Look at me, said the pink thing, warm through the fabric of his trews. Look at me and see yourself.
Mown’s fingers tip-tapped on the frame and then, with a sudden surge of courage, he grabbed the plastic handle and yanked it out.
The item was a plastic Barbie mirror, purchased in a cheapo knick-knack market on Port Brasta. Authentic Earth memorabilia. Mirrors were forbidden on-board ship, because Vogons got depressed enough without looking at their own mugs in polished glass.
Guide Note: Vogons survived through determined extrospection. Apart from disdainful dabblings in the poetic arts, most Vogons try to focus their attentions very much on other species in order to avoid dwelling on their own various physical and psychological shortcomings. Vogons rarely spend time in flotation tanks, they never meditate in steam lodges and they most certainly do not gaze at their misshapen warty faces in mirrors. The only race to ever have successfully perverted a Vogon planetary demolition order were the Tubavix of Sinnustra, who sent a reformatting screen virus to the Vogon fleet which turned all their monitors into mirrors. Five minutes after the virus had uploaded, the Vogon ships turned their torpedoes on each other.
Mown looked at himself in the mirror and felt no revulsion whatsoever. In fact, he liked what he saw.
Oh my god, he thought. What’s happening to me?
Something had happened to Mown. A few months previously, his block of breakfast gruel had been cross-contaminated with the tip of a toadstool mandarin tentacle, which released just enough entheogens into Mown’s system to prompt him to acknowledge something he had already suspected.
I do not hate myself.
This was a revolutionary, if not heretical, thought for a Vogon to construct, and would surely have had Mown expelled from the bureaucratic corps had he admitted to it on his psych test. If the bureaucratic corps had a psych test.
Constant Mown had been doing more than just having the thought lately.
‘I do not hate myself,’ he whispered to the mirror. ‘In many ways I am not altogether too bad.’
And if Mown did not hate himself, what did he have to project on to the Universe? If not love, then certainly an affable, diluted version.
I like myself so maybe, perhaps, others could like me too.
‘Not if I kill them first,’ said Mown morosely to his own reflection.
It had pained him to see the Earthlings eradicated once; if it happened again, he might just come to hate himself.
Mown closed his fingers around the tiny mirror.
Why did I tell father about the colony?
But Mown knew the answer to this one.
I told him because it’s common knowledge and he would have found out, then I would have been the one who didn’t tell him. And without me, the Earthlings have no chance.
Mown smiled weakly at his reflection, then tucked the mirror under his mattress board.
There must be a way, he thought. A way to save the humans and not get myself flushed out of a torpedo tube.
7
The Tanngrísnir
Wowbagger’s ship red-shifted from the real Universe into the mysterious omni-layer of dark space. The view through the portholes was so utterly exotic that an average being could only handle a few seconds of it before either lapsing into catalepsy or replacing the actual view with some pleasant imagining that revealed a lot about the person doing the imagining.
Ford Prefect actually blushed.
‘Goosnargh!’ he squeaked, covering one porthole with his satchel. ‘I’ve seen a few things in my day and in my night too, but that right there… that is…’ And he fled the bridge, deciding that there were times in a man’s life that it was better to be alone rather than discuss the view, which he had a sneaking suspicion originated in the recesses of his own mind, particularly the recess that had been conceived one winter afternoon during the meat festival of Carni-val when he’d been dressed as a pollo-bear and had become entangled in a tower of stacked chairs, only to be rescued by a gaggle of three-legged student liposuckers who demanded a very curious reward.
‘What’s his problem?’ wondered Random. ‘All I see is nothing and more nothing. An eternity of nothing to see.’
‘You are lucky,’ said Bowerick Wowbagger. ‘There are worse things to see than nothing. Nothingness, for example.’
‘Wow, that’s cheery. You should write greetings card messages.’
‘Listen, odd child. You may learn something.’
‘From you? No thanks. I think I’d rather stay stupid.’
‘Your wish has already been granted.’
Random bristled a tad more than she was already bristling, which was a shade more than the average berry-snouted spikehog that has just smelled a hunting dog.
‘How dare you, don’t you know who I am?’
‘A member of the Cult of Ridiculousness from the Stammering Mud Flats of Santraginus V?’ offered Bowerick.
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Oh, my mistake. The Cult of Ridiculous from the Stammering Mud Flats of Santraginus V.’
Guide Note: This conversation had similar elements to the exchange that precipitated the collapse of the actual Cult of Ridiculousness from Santraginus V. The COR at their zenith had several dozen names on their mailing list, but the entire organization self-destructed following a particularly contentious Friday Q&A session when Committee Treasurer T’tal Ychune challenged Chairman Oloon Yjeet as to the validity of the society’s name. The min
utes read as follows:
Yjeet: The chair recognizes Treasurer Ychune.
Ychune: Of course you recognize me. I’m your cousin. We shanked vorkle dumplings together, or would you prefer to forget about that?
Yjeet: Please, T’tal…
Ychune: That’s Treasurer Ychune.
Yjeet: (sigh) Please, Treasurer Ychune, can we try to keep this civil?
Ychune: You’d know all about civil, wouldn’t you? Very civil it was of you to drop around with some spare contraceptives to my betrothed last week. Most civil.
Yjeet: I explained that.
Ychune: (bark of bitter laughter) Oh yes, the water balloon story. How could I forget.
Yjeet: Was there something official you wished to present?
Ychune: There certainly was. I move that the society’s name be changed from the Cult of Ridiculousness to the Cult of Ridiculousity.
Yjeet: Are you serious?
Ychune: Totally. Ridiculousness is a little dated, a little slapstick. I think Ridiculousity gives us more gravity.
Yjeet: Gravity? We’re a society that celebrates the history of absurdist comedy as portrayed on cereal box cards. Gravity. That’s ridiculous.
Ychune: Aha! You’re making my point for me.
Yjeet: (stands abruptly) Yjenean loves me, not you. Get over it. And you can keep this stupid society.
Ychune: (also standing and pulling out a large machete that he had somehow concealed in his regulation striped comedy shorts) It’s not stupid, it’s ridiculous. There’s a difference.
The rest of the transcript is rendered illegible as blood streaks have dissolved the ink. Only three phrases can be deciphered in the final lines, and these are: ‘electronically tested’, ‘call those comedy shorts’ and ‘of course elephants dream’. Draw your own conclusions.
Random crossed her arms and shifted her weight as if leaning into a strong wind. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Bowerick. You’re thinking that any second now I’ll run out of things to say and resort to “I hate you” and a stomping exit.’
‘I was rather hoping our exchange would end in the traditional way.’
‘You don’t get off that easily a second time. I’ve got the gripes of a pensioner and the energy of a teenager, so I can argue all day if that’s what you want.’
Bowerick Wowbagger pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘That is so removed from what I want, you have no idea.’
Trillian actually wrung her fingers as the exchange escalated. She was so far in the red as regards good-parenting credits that she had no idea where the high moral ground was. Even if she could occasionally glimpse it, as a myopic hiker glimpses a mist-sodden hill at night, she had no idea who currently occupied it or how to scale its slopes, should she accidentally bump into them.
‘Random,’ she snapped, then reeled it back in. ‘I meant to say Random. Softly, like that. R-a-a-a-ndom.’
‘What are you babbling about, Mother?’
Trillian felt the old virtual animosity building up, but she choked it back down. ‘I want to be gentle with you, understanding. But babbling? Babbling, Random honey? I’m more than a mother, I’m your friend. But I don’t babble, darling.’
Random turned her Goth lasers on Trillian. ‘Really? Seems to me like you’re babbling now. Babbling and hovering. Shouldn’t you be off covering a dog fair or something? Leaving me alone again with some perfect stranger, perhaps?’
Before Trillian could choose a reply then temper it with compassion born of guilt, Bowerick Wowbagger decided that he’d had enough for the moment.
‘Ship,’ he said. ‘Tube the younger female.’
The mouth of a transparent tube popped down from the suddenly liquid ceiling and wavered over Random’s head. It mimicked her movements, then whoomped down as soon as its predictive software reckoned it knew where the target was going next.
Random was enclosed in a soundproof tube and sent to sleep with a shot of twinkling green gas. Her face twitched and then assumed a strange expression that it took Trillian a moment to identify as a smile.
‘Now I’m going to cry,’ she said, gazing fondly at her drugged and imprisoned daughter. ‘I haven’t seen a smile like that for years. Not since Random was appointed Junior Judge in pre-school. She loved handing out those demerits.’
‘The child is dreaming. I can show you the recording if you like,’ offered the green ship’s captain.
There was a ball of anger clogging Trillian’s throat and now she had a legitimate reason to cough it up.
‘How dare you!’ she cried, eyes wide, chin thrust forward. ‘You sedated my daughter.’
Wowbagger picked up a small pink sliver from the floor. ‘And I cut off her index finger.’
Trillian gagged on her ball of anger. ‘You what? You bloody what?’
‘Technically, the ship did it. That tube has sharp edges – she must have stuck her finger out at the last second. Possibly to deliver some obscene gesture.’
‘My girl, my little girl. You sliced…’
Wowbagger tossed the digit towards the ceiling, which absorbed it into the plasma. ‘Now, now. Not sliced. Sliced implies deliberate intent. It was an unfortunate accident at worst.’
Trillian hammered on the tube with her palms. ‘Arthur! This lunatic is cutting up our daughter.’
‘Hardly cutting up,’ said Wowbagger, consulting his wafer computer. ‘The computer has already grown a new finger for her.’
Trillian checked. It was true – a brand-new pink index finger was steaming gently on the end of Random’s metacarpal. There was no blood and the teenager did not seem in the least uncomfortable.
‘Your daughter is relaxed and dreaming,’ continued Bowerick Wowbagger. He winced at whatever was on-screen. ‘Though perhaps it’s better if I don’t show you the dreams. They’re a little matricidal.’
‘Wake her up!’ demanded Trillian.
‘Absolutely out of the question.’
‘Wake her up immediately.’
‘Not likely. She is insufferable.’
‘And you’re not, I suppose.’
Wowbagger considered this, rubbing a thumb with his forefinger to focus his thoughts as was traditional among his people.
Guide Note: Wowbagger’s people had believed this action to be an old number-one concubines’ tale until scientists discovered pockets of natural adenosine blocker secreted below the thumb pads. A brisk thumb scratch unleashes as much energy as five medium cups of a caffeine beverage. Many people become addicted to the little highs and spend all day on the couch twiddling their thumbs.
‘I think some people find me insufferable,’ he concluded. ‘But I would bet that no one likes that child, unless they are blinded by familial bonds.’
‘So now I’m blinded?’
‘I can’t think of another reason why you would tolerate this person. She is vile, grant me that much.’
‘I will not grant you a thing!’
‘Have you heard how she talks to me? How she talks to you?’
Trillian’s cheeks were on fire. ‘We’ve had our problems. They are our problems. Now release my daughter.’
Wowbagger winced at the thought. ‘How about I put her in storage for a while? I can have the computer melt some of that nicotine from the walls of her lungs.’
‘Don’t you dare put her in storage!’ shouted Trillian, resisting a strong urge to stamp her foot. Then: ‘Nicotine? Has she been smoking?’
‘For a few years, according to my readings.’
‘Smoking! Where did Random find time to smoke? I don’t think I’ve ever seen her breathe in with all the complaining she does.’
‘Storage? Go on.’
Trillian was tempted. ‘No. No, but maybe a lung scrape.’
Bowerick waved his fingers over a few sensors and Random’s tube was suffused with flickering laser waves.
‘Random will have to sweat that tar out over the next few days. She may experience some nausea.’
‘Good. That should teach her
a lesson. Smoking.’
Bowerick reached his hand into an amorphous gel table and pulled out a mug of tea.
‘I think we should leave her in there until we reach the nebula. Nobody suffers, everyone’s a winner.’
Wowbagger had a charming way about him, and Trillian found herself forgetting the severed digit. After all, Random was perfectly fine. In fact, she was better than fine. She was mint.
‘No… I couldn’t. Could I?’
Wowbagger shrugged. ‘From what I’ve gathered, you’re hardly mother of the century, so what’s a few more days apart?’
And right there the charmingness ended.
‘How bloody dare you! You uncouth green alien.’
‘We are in open space, so technically there are no aliens here.’
‘You have no idea what I’ve been through. You are in no position to judge me!’
This was the stage of the conversation where Arthur would have sidled from the room in search of some vital but unnamed object in an unspecified and hard–to-reach location. Even Ford would have taken one look at Trillian’s face and known to shut his cocktail hole, but Wowbagger, having nurtured a death wish for several millennia, instinctively pointed his green prow towards dangerous situations.
It’s unlikely, his subconscious said. But perhaps this Earth woman, this undeniably attractive Earth woman, could do me some grievous bodily harm.
Wishful thinking.
‘Actually, I do have an idea what you’ve been through. The computer mined your memories. I have it all on file.’
‘You perused my memories?’
‘Of course. I was taking you on board my ship. You might have been a mass murderer. With any luck.’
‘You had no right.’
‘Oh, here we go with the journalist speak. What happened to “We’ll be no trouble, Mr Wowbagger”?’
‘I asked you to take a few hitchhikers on board, not to dig our memories out of our heads.’