How to Save the Universe Without Really Trying

by John Cusick

  “And bears,” finished the duchess.

  “But as I mentioned, we’re trying out some new bodies.”

  “For our vacation,” the duchess added.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Lucky.

  The boy’s face auditioned a few expressions, then settled out outrage. “Now you see here . . . Staff,” he said, reading Lucky’s uniform, “if that is your real name—”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Are you accusing us of not being who we say we are?”

  “Dear, your blood pressure,” said the girl, grasping her husband or whatever’s arm.

  “Why, I’ll have your job, you worm! Who’s your supervisor?”

  Here, Lucky hesitated. He badly needed this job, or else the bookies of Singularity City were going to remove his knees and mail them to his mothers. “Look, uh, there’s no need for that,” he said. “I’m just . . . with the new bodies, it all seems kind of . . . unlikely.”

  “Now, now, dear,” said the girl, stroking her traveling companion’s fuming brow. “It’s an honest mistake. We do look awfully different from our pictures.”

  “If maybe you have some alternate form of ID?”

  At this question the girl stopped stroking, and even the boy’s fuming seemed to pause in hesitation.

  “Um, right,” said the girl. “It’s just . . . our luggage was lost.”

  “What’s that?” said Lucky, indicating the steamer trunk.

  “You can’t honestly think,” the boy rushed in, “that the Archduke and Duchess of Sagittarius only travel with one steamer trunk.”

  “Why, this trunk is just for my sunglasses!” said the girl. “The rest of our luggage—”

  “At least twenty or thirty bags total,” said the boy.

  “—was lost. You know how airports are.”

  “Spaceports,” the boy corrected.

  “Right,” said the girl. “Lost all our luggage. Had it all sent to, um, Hoboken.”

  “Where’s that?” said Lucky. “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s an awful place,” said the boy.

  “Well, it’s not awful,” said the girl.

  “Hellish. No one should go there. Not even to retrieve their luggage.”

  “Look,” said Lucky, who was now as much out of patience as he was out of cash. “If I was a gambling man, and I used to be, I’d lay a-million-to-one odds you are not who you say you are.”

  Something flashed in the boy’s eye. “A gambling man, eh? Well, I’ll bet you two million credits you’ll let us on board.”

  Lucky blinked. “You what?”

  “You heard me,” said the boy, now taking a small black credit card from a different pocket and tapping a few icons on its touch-screen interface.

  “Okay,” said Lucky, crossing his arms. “I’ll take that bet. You can’t come on board.”

  “Well, how about that. I lost. And you’ve just won two million credits.” The boy gave the credit card a final tap. “Enjoy them!”

  The personal data tablet in Lucky’s pocket beeped. He checked it. Someone had just anonymously transferred two million credits into his private bank account, which was, to Lucky, a small fortune.

  His eyes bugged so wide Lola swore she heard them pop.

  “You’re welcome!” Phin called as the porter pushed past them and ran full tilt down the gangplank, tearing off his white porter’s jacket and cap and tossing them into the nearest trash receptacle.

  “Why do I feel like we just enabled a gambling addict?” said Lola.

  “Because we did. Sad, really.” He scanned their tickets, and the gate before them popped open with a hiss, revealing the lush interior of the ship.

  “I hope he’s all right,” Lola added as she, Phin, and their self-driving steamer stepped aboard.

  As for Lucky, it’s true he immediately boarded a shuttle for the casinos of Singularity City, where over the course of a week he gambled away the entire fortune Phin had tipped him. Broke again and miserable, he spent all but his last few nickels on a platter of franks and beans, which turned out to be the worst meal of his life. But we can’t imagine that information will be relevant later.

  Part 3

  The Archduke and Duchess of Sagittarius Run Amok

  19

  BY LOLA’S COUNT IT was seven days since they’d left port, but it was difficult to say exactly, since there was no sun to count the days by, and all the clocks on board told Frillian time, where the weekends are twice as long and brunch has been known to last months.

  “Ooh, they’re doing Kardashev tango after dinner!” Phin said, showing her the itinerary on their suite’s massive screens.

  “Sounds fun!” said Lola.

  In the time they’d been aboard, things couldn’t have gone better. Lola had worried they’d be found out immediately, but Phin had quickly charmed the other guests, and even most of the staff, impressing them with his encyclopedic knowledge of the galaxy. At Kardashev tango he danced with all the ladies and a number of the men, and both of the sphinxes. Of course, no one knew who they really were. As far as the crew and guests were concerned, the boy with the impressive two-step was none other than the rarely photographed Archduke of Sagittarius, sporting a young new body. It turned out Phin did an excellent job of impersonating a rich and important person.

  “Ooh, look!” Phin had said as they explored their suite on the first night. “They’ve got a Look-e-Me automatic outfit generator! What do you say we go to dinner dressed in full Krastle Bracken Peacekeeper armor?”

  “Sure!” said Lola.

  At first, Lola was having just as much, if not more, fun. Their suite was twice the size of Lola’s apartment back home and featured an emperor-sized bed—two, in fact, which meant Lola could stretch out like a starfish on the million-thread-count sheets, toss and turn all she liked, and stay up all hours with no one telling her it was time for bed. In the morning, the Conveen-U-Munch downloaded her favorite breakfast—espresso and scrambled eggs—and no one asked her to do the dishes. The bathroom was a palace, and no one yelled at her to hurry up, or wipe down the sink, and there was always plenty of hot water.

  “Lola!” said Phin, still sweaty from their match of Quark-Squash. “They’re doing an interactive screening of ShadowMancer Wars with live musical accompaniment after dinner! I’ve always wanted to do one of those. You’re up for it, right?”

  “Of course,” said Lola, chugging her ninth or twelfth bottle of complimentary Reconst-D. “Just . . . give me a minute to catch my breath.”

  The days stretched before Lola, each promising the most fun money could buy—from superstring yoga to levitation classes, space walks, and waterslides, and even a virtual game room offering something called Mega Conkers, where, if Lola understood the pamphlet correctly, one could smash together the planets of distant uninhabited star systems in cataclysmic one-on-one tournaments. It was the dream vacation she’d always wanted, and she was free to do whatever she pleased, unsupervised, with no responsibilities, and no one asking her to share, or slow down, or act her age.

  But over the past few days the shine had started to come off. At first she thought she was just worn out from the million activities Phin wanted to try. But it was something else. She was starting to miss the familiar comforts—and even the inconveniences—of Earth. Yes, the food synthesizer made her breakfast, but the eggs didn’t taste quite right. And it was hard to sleep without Gabby’s snoring, or the hiss of Mary’s baby monitor. And the other passengers were hardly welcoming. Some stared at Lola’s questionable table manners (hardly her fault; the dining set featured no fewer than seventeen different spoons). She tried making friends, but once the usual topics of “Which waterslide is the most terrifying?” and “What’s your score in Mega Conkers?” were exhausted, she simply had nothing in common with anyone.

  “You’re coming to the pool party,” Phin said. He was standing at the foot of her bed, holding a cricket bat (which she hoped wasn’t for her) and wearing a jumpsuit th
at blinked and shimmered and rearranged itself at will. It was sort of hard to look at.

  Lola had spent the afternoon alone in their suite, scrolling through channels on her Ultrabox 3000, hoping that somewhere, somehow, an episode of Dimension Y might be playing. But nothing seemed to have survived from Earth as she knew it. All was lost or forgotten, and Lola felt forgotten and lost, too.

  “It’s okay, you go,” she said.

  “No, no more moping,” said Phin, tapping the bedpost with his cricket bat or whatever it was. “I won’t have you getting the ultra-sads on my watch. If there’s one thing my family does well, it’s vacation. And I’m not leaving anyone out of the fun.” He batted a truffle off the room service cart, and it bonked her in the forehead. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, considering the truffle. “I guess you’re—”

  “I’m always right!” said Phin, and he skipped to the Look-e-Me to get dressed for dinner.

  A Frillian hour later Lola stood on the lido deck, watching the other guests mingling by the pool, laughing and chatting, and sipping sparkling mineral water from the ice moon Titan. Phin, or rather, the Archduke of Sagittarius, as they all called him, sat at an oversize grand piano, entertaining the party with some funny songs. “Where did you learn to dance?” they asked him. “And play the piano so well?”

  “Online courses!” he said, and they all laughed, knowing a royal such as he simply must have an army of attendants to teach him everything he wished to learn.

  The SunStar was drifting slowly through the frozen depths of space. Or at least, to Lola, it seemed to drift slowly. The stars moved in cloud-like wisps and the gentle rocking made everyone on board feel as if they were on a luxurious cruise ship chugging across the sea—rather than on a luxurious cruise ship hurtling at several hundred times the speed of light toward Alpha Centauri.

  Lola leaned against the ship’s rail and sighed. She had gone so far as to do up her hair in what the Look-e-Me device called a Bolesian twist, and even dialed up a set of Nectarian pearls for the occasion. But in the middle of getting ready she’d lost all enthusiasm for dress-up, and rather than donning the crimson gown the Personal Style User Interface had suggested, had settled on wearing her Dimension Y T-shirt and plain old battered jeans instead.

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” she mumbled to herself as Phin started a sing-along rendition of “All My Loves Are Matrioshka Brains”—a song she didn’t know and didn’t like—“but I am sick of this ship.”

  “I know what you mean,” said a young steward girl.

  Lola started, jangling the pearls around her neck. She hadn’t seen the girl standing there a moment ago.

  She was young, maybe thirteen, with red hair and freckles, tall and slim in her stiff uniform. She wore a simple charm around her neck, and her eyes sparkled like someone much too smart for her job.

  “At first this was great.” Lola almost smiled. “But now, I don’t know. I guess I’m not meant for this kind of party.”

  “No sane person is,” said the girl. She stuck out a hand. “My name is Gallabulala.” She smiled at the look on Lola’s face. “But everyone just calls me Gabby.”

  “That’s my sister’s name!” said Lola.

  “The Empress of Thraal?” the girl said, perplexed.

  “What? Oh, I mean, yes.” It was easy to forget they were here under assumed identities. “Well, we call her that sometimes.” Lola made a lazy swirl in the air with her glass, the way a duchess might. “We royals.”

  “Ah.” The girl nodded. “Are you going to see friends at Sirius Jinx?”

  “No,” said Lola, looking mistily at Phin, who had stopped playing the piano and was now tap-dancing with an eight-legged oguloid. “I’m headed home. At least I hope so.”

  “You sound a bit sad,” said the girl. Until now she’d been standing at attention with hands behind her back, but she relaxed.

  “Yeah?” said Lola. “I don’t know. I guess I should be, and then I guess I shouldn’t be, but then I am again.” She frowned. “That probably doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Sometimes,” said Gabby, leaning in, “I think I should love this job. I get to see the galaxy, travel to distant stars, meet amazing, important people.” Her smile was sad. “But sometimes you just feel . . .”

  “Invisible,” finished the presumed duchess of Sagittarius.

  “Exactly. You know,” she said, “I read about the royals. It’s kind of a hobby of mine.”

  “Oh?” said Lola. “That’s . . . interesting.”

  “You know the funny thing about the duke?” she said, and they both glanced at the pool, where Phin was showing everyone how to do the Frillian backstroke in a tux.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well,” said Gabby. “I just read on GossipX that he and his wife were arrested for crashing their limo into a fish tank,” she said. “Yesterday. On Pluto.”

  “Oh,” said Lola, panic clawing across her face. “That is . . . there must be some kind of mix-up. You know how those gossip columns—”

  Gabby laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell your secret. People always pretend to be someone they’re not on these cruises. It’s nice to get away from yourself for a while. Say,” she added. “Would you like to see the engine room? That’s another interest of mine. Engineering, I mean.”

  Lola hesitated, glancing toward Phin, who was complimenting his dance partner on her shiny pelt. “Sure,” she said, setting her jaw. “You can call me Lola, by the way.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Gabby. “Now let’s get the heck out of here.”

  Together the pair made their way through the party, and just as they were about to duck through a Staff Only door, she heard Phin call to her. She looked up to see him waving, his tux dripping pool water.

  “I just need to talk to the, uh, duke,” Lola told Gabby. “I’ll be right there.”

  Phin hobbled over, grinning and wild-eyed. Up close she could see that someone with a pair of lips far too large to be human had planted a massive kiss on his forehead.

  “You have lipstick on your forehead,” she told Phin.

  “Where are you going? Why don’t you come swimming? The water is lavender-scented!”

  “I’m good, thanks.” She tried to smile reassuringly.

  Phin’s grin remained fixed, but his eyes less so. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m not really in the mood to party.”

  Phin waved this idea away, splashing her with droplets of pool water. “Why not?”

  “This just . . . isn’t really my thing.”

  “Your Highness!” a translucent jelly woman called from the bar. “Come back! You were going to show me how to do the no-armed backstroke!”

  Fissures appeared in Phin’s smile. He glanced between the party and Lola, and she could see him deciding whether to follow her or return to the fun.

  “It’s okay, enjoy yourself!” said Lola, and before he could reply she was off, following Gabby away from the lido deck and through one of the doors leading down into the ship’s lower levels.

  Phin stood there a moment, looking hesitant, until the Lizard King of Torus G bounced an olive off the back of his head.

  20

  “TRUST ME,” SAID LOLA, “a lot farther than that.”

  “Hmm. Ursula Heptoid?”

  “Farther.”

  “Nano 7?”

  “You’re way off. Ice cold.”

  “The ice cities of Trogdor B?”

  “Nope.”

  The girls were playing a little game, wherein Gabby tried to guess where Lola was really from, and though they were both enjoying themselves, Gabby was losing terribly.

  “Wait, wait, I’ve got it!” Gabby snapped her fingers. “The Rajak Colonies of the Horsehead Nebula . . .”

  Lola waited.

  “In the Isotope Swamps,” Gabby continued, “on the left bank, in the clock tower, on the second floor, just above the falafel place.”

  “Close!” s
aid Lola.

  “Really?” said Gabby.

  “No,” said Lola.

  They were descending together through the bowels of the SS SunStar, winding through cramped corridors, climbing through hatchways, sliding down long ladders into the very bottom of the ship.

  “I give up,” said Gabby.

  “Hoboken,” said Lola. “On Carol Street, in the Mercer Tower, on the second floor, above a sub shop.”

  Gabby snapped her fingers, then confusion pinched her neat, fair brow. “Hoboken? Never heard of it. Where’s that?”

  “A long way away from here,” sighed Lola.

  They’d come to another hatch, this one much larger than the others, and it was marked Steerage. This was where the superrich stored their toys and things for the seven-day voyage to Alpha Centauri. It was a huge, cold place, several stories high and filled to the ceiling with storage containers. Most of these were flat gray, with the words Fragile or May Contain Peanuts stamped in different languages. Rustling and the occasional growl emanated from a few. One bore the message Warning: Contents May Have Mutated During Transport. Ships, at least a hundred, were parked in bays stacked on top of one another like a parking garage—but instead of sedans and minivans, here were sleek planet hoppers and star racers, astrobikes and mini yachts, tandem sub-ether surfboards, and a handful of solar-sail boats, shining, brand-new, and to the one mind-numbingly expensive.

  “Wow,” said Lola, taking it all in.

  “Which one’s yours?” Gabby asked.

  “What? Oh, none of them,” said Lola.

  “You don’t have a ship here? How did you get to Luna?”

  “Oh, we’ve got one,” said Lola, her mind still boggling at the immense displays of wealth. “Just not here.”

  “Huh,” said Gabby.

  They’d come at last to a door marked engine room. Gabby turned the crank and they stepped through the hatch. It was hot. It was loud. It was enormous. This made Lola think of something profound about luxury, and wealth, and the systems and people that keep it all in place.

  “You know . . . ,” she started, “sometimes I thiiiiiiAAHHHHHH!!!!!”