The alarm module was beeping furiously. It was obviously not furious enough, for Bill had slept for seven minutes beyond systems curfew. In a bleary panic, he sat up, shut off the warble with an ample snap of his more than ample fingers, and started up the console. He thought gloomily of the seven minutes he had missed as the beverage module produced a steaming mug of mud, and then, staring helplessly at the abominable loading screen of Astro Traveller, he thought gloomilier of which of the women he would impregnate.
Now, don’t you be jumping to your twenty-first century conclusions. Impregnation was Bill’s job. The act, however, was hardly going to be mutual.
Astro Traveller flickered into view on the non-screen before Bill’s blurry vision. Now that there was something worth seeing, the vision decided to wake up and focus. There were, of course, stars and planets and coloured swiggly lines of light in real life, right there in outer space just beyond the viewing panels of the cafe and the bar down the corridor, but, being real, they were far less entertaining. Astro Traveller was life in a way his sperm never wanted to be.
Finally, the astrocruiser was there, in front of the bed. There were a boringly wide variety of patterns to choose from in the linen depository, but Bill always selected black. Non-screens were good for people like Bill, when twenty years of non-screen viewing meant that the projection could creep first from the convenient black space between his entertainment modules, where it would forever stay for people who actually got out of bed to pretend there was something to do with their lives, and across the irksomely gleaming white tiled floor where those others would be punished for their unnecessary activity with a cruel absence of friction between tile and sock, and finally up his plush bedclothes as his eyes deteriorated from overfun. The downside was that such an advancement meant that everything behind the astrocruiser could be viewed, only partially invisible through the projection and remind Bill that he still persisted in corporeal form. And so he chose black, black for the bed and the crowded modules and the instantly adapting walls, to blend into the nothingness of space which filled his fore-view. In doing so, he had succeeded fully in replacing nothing with nothing.
He noted with disdain that the seven minutes of extra sleep had boosted his astrocruiser to the astroport he had desperately needed to astroreach in order to buy his astrofuel to astrothrust into the next astroverse. The systems curfew was vital, of course, to his continuing playtime, for shutting down all entertainment modules between the hours of eleven at night and seven in the morning allowed an enhanced pump of desperately needed oxygen into each chamber to replace that lost to the mandatory potted cactus on bedstands across the ship. Some of the more intelligent members of the crew enjoyed a good moan from time to time about why the cacti were mandatory in the first place, but that was only because the original voyagers had decided to avoid panic by omitting any mention of space balloons from future self-defence programmes. This mystery, it is safe to say, did not concern Bill. What concerned him now was that, while the extrapolation of his astrocruiser’s journey along its evening route was an annoying necessity, missing a good seven minutes of watching it slide alone through the blackness was just not on.
He looked away for a moment to adjust his next alarm to 6:53, eyed the mud module longingly, and miraculously struck the button for more mud with a violently sluggish lunge across the quilt. The mud drink slopped invitingly into his plastic beaker. The thick, steaming liquid gave Bill the reminder he needed to switch on his automated urination flask in fifty to fifty-five minutes. Right now, he was in the astroport, so he set another alarm over the top of his last and searched the astrostalls furiously for astrobreakfast and astrofuel.
A deep thrum vibrated through the chamber, which would have caused loose objects to teeter and totter and shatter violently on the irksomely gleaming tiles should every object in Bill’s life not consist of a few metal boxes on the wall. All through the corridor, however, he heard other people’s loose objects teeter and totter and shatter violently on their own irksomely gleaming tiles, and that brought him for a moment back to reluctant reality. A few voices called worriedly down the corridor. There may not be such a thing as astrobreakfast out there, but people did gather in the cafe around this time to partake in morning fuelling, and the thrum would give them something to talk about. For a few weeks or so. He smirked and claimed an astrosnail for a rock-bottom price with a point of his chubby thumb. The others were so dull.
There was another thrum, or perhaps a thrumling, for it was significantly less significant than the first. Still, a double thrum had not occurred since he was way back in the tenth or even eighth astroverse. That got him thinking real thoughts again. A double thrum like that meant the spaceship was adjusting its course well beyond its usual smidgeon. Maybe this would keep the talkers talking for years. Maybe, just maybe, he ought to don his slippers (never the socks) and go find out what was going on for himself.
Even as he let the errant thought wander, he tried to block it out. His subconscious was berating him wholeheartedly for his foolish presence. It was too late. Against the double blackness of non-screen and wall, it was easy to visualise the flick of his hand, the opening of the midnight chamber onto dazzling aqua. Like a cheery cartoon river, the blue corridor would guide him, its current gently nudging his shaking legs until he remembered the hateful concept of self-conveyance. On he would float, past sliding doors, where beaming moon-faces would grin and friendly hands would touch his arm and wholesome voices would invade his ears with the dreadful notion that it was great to be out and about.
Yes, onwards he would float, past passages where wheeled boxes wheeled boxes, past the alcoves where the relics sat on proud display, reminding them just how boresome life on Earth was and just how awesome their ancestors had been to make the decision that they should never see it. Then, the corridor would bubble out, and the real life blackness would peer in as if to snuff out the razor sharp fluorescents of the central cafe, and then -no!- then....
Then they would turn as one, smiling and giggling and arching their cat-backs and brushing aside their flowing hair in a synchronicity things like Astro Traveller had long abandoned as immersion-breaking. The women! He looked away from the cool of the bustling astroport and into the unsoothing warmth of his palm. Damn it! He was getting old. Not even eight o’clock and already thinking about work.
The worry wasn’t quite eating at him yet, but it had lost its milk teeth and was starting to realise the thin gruel of failed astrojumps it had been raised on wasn’t going to cut it in its adolescence. He was going on twenty-two now. He was childless. He would have to stop enjoying life pretty soon or discover a fate worse than death. Just one child, and he would be free forever. Not free of the nagging, oh no, but at least free of the obligation to consider the obligation to respond.
He sighed, drained his cup, set his bowel module to amber alert, and propelled his astrocruiser away for a brief mining mission to a nearby astroasteroid. He needed time to think, and looking at big numbers had never helped anybody. He sighed again, as if pleading with the walls to press him into relating his troubles.
What’s up? said the left one finally.
I need to choose, Bill replied. I need to do the sex.
Who would it be, then? He let his mind wander back to the cafe and began his choice.
Now, if your ugly twenty-first century mind is a little flustered by such an exhibit of mediocrity having such options in reproduction, don’t forget that a) it was the women’s job to have babies too and b) that Bill was actually a celebrity pioneer at the forefront of astronomical research (he had, little as he knew it, unwittingly left his door ajar one day when the publicity bot did its rounds of the private chambers, and had gained one of those parasites known as a fan back on Earth). There was a c) reason too as to why the females of the ship should be interested in Bill’s more basely functions. First-off, they too had to develop a child successfully in order to escape the fate worse than death that Bill was so slow in avoiding. And secondly, no, fourthly, I mean, d) they were richly rewarded for avoiding the genetic bottleneck upon the ship from becoming too bottlenecky. For each male the heritage clinic proved to be a father of one of their screaming little banshees, the woman would be rewarded in a variety of ‘things’ from the rewards vault: sexist things from the launch of the ship, like cosmetic and scented enhancements for the body; an increasing proportion opted for sensible things such as vaguely acceptable food, after they all realised body enhancements were just plain silly and that if they all stopped using them at once then the male mind would forget their existence in a few to several days; and finally, for truly diverse mothers, something long and thick and heavy from the erotic vault to do the things the fathers thought they were already doing. What really baffled Bill was that whilst the same horrors awaited non-performers, there was no similar tiered rewards system for the poor men who went around from chamber to chamber working hard all their lives. What about them?
At least he had dome some prep over the years. He had heard over more than one beaker of beer in the upper bar that a single impregnation could take all night. “And that’s where I’m gonna be more better than any of you ‘pros’” he mocked in a rare use of his vocal cords when the ritual jolly ribbing inevitably turned to himself one blurry evening.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ve been practising through the loading screens. Efficiency is key, my dudes.”
He’d never suffered another knock from a fellow male since. He considered them satisfactorily intimidated.
The side-mission slipped on. Bill let himself ponder the dystopia he was about to subject himself to. Would it be with Mary? Mary was nice, but the thing about Mary’s niceness was that it was the niceness you found in a nice pet mouse or ant. Mary was timidly curious, meek, mild, and just like the tiny procession of insects trotting from one sleek corner of the shelf to the little anthole across the room, something you felt the urge to pat protectively on the head and not copulate with.
From the anthole in Bill’s chamber wall, the six-legged friends ascended the outer surface and crossed a dear little plastic cord over the heads of the two-legged creepy-crawlies beneath. There, they entered the opposite chamber, the hidey-hole of another likely candidate. Felicity was an intellectual, and she was full of questions. Now, Bill liked a good question. On particularly long sections of astroroutes he asked questions himself, and even challenged himself to look for answers in the big Earth encyclopaedias lining his lower shelf beneath the entertainment modules. In the last five years, he prided himself in becoming suitably intimate with the physiology of the creature called the aardvark and hoped to move onto their habitat within the month. The trouble was, intellectuals like Felicity, the type that had the reputation of not just working hard on the crew’s single chore but doing so enthusiastically, repeatedly, and in a wide variety of ever-more creative ways, annoyingly got away with asking the sort of piercing questions that would render an inquirer such as Bill temporarily inactive following a sudden angry impact to the jaw. Deep, deep down in Bill’s subconscious was embedded the fear that an equally embedded Felicity may turn her curiosity upon his own existence, and that he may find it rather difficult to justify it. This fear naturally manifested itself as an unfathomable wariness at the perfect, squishy sphericality of her boobs. Bill thought of those boobs and decided Felicity was out of the question.
Sarah was also out of the question, as her efforts in manufacturing enough shrieking banshees had been rewarded with a small box of something out of the erotic vault that, in a twist of fate, cursed her to failing at increasing the banshee populace despite her rather vocal attempts in the private trampoline room. And, even if he were to break said curse, he was lucky enough to have foreseen that collusion with the banshee horde may from time to time endanger the subtleties of Astro Traveller’s sublime ambient soundtrack.
Constance was forever too sozzled to provide accurate docking instructions. Lisa liked cheese, which was a no-brain deal-breaker. Georgia’s name began with the letter G. And Tracy, well, Tracy had the habit -
“Hi, handsome.”
- of popping up out of nowhere at the most inopportune moments. It was an inopportune moment right now because it was a perfect opportunity to get the deed done.
“Hi, Tracy.” Bill wasn’t the most sociable of men, but this seemed like an appropriate response to the greeting.
Tracy finished hanging onto the frame of his door like a drunken monkey by waltzing over the threshold like a drunken monkey. She was carefully dressed in not a lot, but this time she had rather cunningly fished the long-shunned Astro Traveller thong from the deepest recesses of her lingerie drawer. It would all be in vain, however, as the astrocruiser blasting off into the black hole on the front was the most underpowered piece of garbage Bill had ever had the displeasure of piloting.
Tracy’s sultry eyes moved from Bill, who was making an admittedly impressive attempt to shrink back against the corner whilst locked in a cross-legged position, towards the non-screen in front of his non-presence. “Hey, cool!” Tracy exclaimed. Her eyes widened as she sauntered towards the edge of the bed. Her finger simultaneously made its way upwards to dance lightly on the tip of her tongue beyond her partly-parted lips. Until now, Bill had only seen expressions of interest involving a finger to the chin. Tracy was a strange woman. “That looks like sooo much fun. Whatcha doing?”
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Bill was almost standing in his corner by the time Tracy’s roundsome buttocks plonked down upon his prized black sheet. “I’m boosting my astrocruiser back to the astroport I’ve just astroreached to get some astrofuel to astrothrust into the next astroverse.”
Tracy’s eyes were like saucers. “Wow! Where did you get it? Let’s play together.”
Bill’s communications subroutines were kicking in. “It’s been built into the entertainment modules for the past 287 years. It’s not a two-player game.” It wasn’t really even a one-player game, thought Bill suddenly, but he wasn’t prepared to discuss the rise of semi-interactive fiction on twenty-second century Earth with Tracy before breakfast.
Tracy’s face became a sorrowful sheet of furrows and dimples that only a mother and horny crew mates could love. “But I wanna play.” She suddenly brightened, leapt to her knees, and fixed Bill with a naughty smile. “I do know some two-player games though.”
Bill was growing brave. He glanced sideways and noted that his heavy toy rocket was only one sudden lunge away. “Why are you here, Tracy? You know my urination flask is set for just after eight on weekdays. Go away. You’re not being a nice neighbour.” But then he fell silent, ashamed, because he remembered a desperate flight from the grandma corridor that time he took a wrong turn after one too many whiskeys, and saw that Tracy was a pretty decent neighbour after all. If he toy rocketed a pretty decent neighbour, he’d probably bring on the fate worse than death anyway.
Tracy was advancing on her hands and knees like an animal in heat, which she was. Bill disrupted the advance by kicking out a foot underneath her and sending her crashing to the duvet. In the grand scheme of things, this was a pretty soft fall and she was quickly advancing all over again. It was Bill’s last idea, but given the professional nature of Tracy’s work, those five seconds saved him from eternal parenthood. Five seconds after the fall, there was a second fall, this time caused by a tremendous vibration which ripped through the ship. Bill fell too, but like a cat, he shifted his weight in a nanosecond to crash unlike a cat onto the safety of his tiles to the side of the bed.
There were hurried footfalls from the corridor, followed by a few sober and solitary cries of joy quite unlike the usual cries of joy echoing down the corridor at all cursed hours of the day. The door swung open again, and Sidney, one of the long-haired louts who loitered around the music lounge all day, appeared in all his scraggly glory. He had been present when Bill had made his ill-received boast, and the fact that he managed to meet Bill’s eyes for the first time since meant that something more serious even than a phallus-comparison contest was afoot.
“The spacecruiser’s spacereaching the spaceport of the spacecivilization we’ve been spaceboosting to all this spacetime,” he puffed. Bill’s mind switched off at the first mention of space, but the way Sidney’s gaze passed straight over Tracy’s exposed boobs stirred him from his shutdown in a way the exposed boobs did not.
“Not interested. You see, my astrocruiser is astroreaching-” Then the words sunk in. The fact that the ship had reached a destination it had been working towards for 287 years, and in such an unexpected and unannounced way, seemed a perfectly reasonable reason to postpone work with a pretty decent neighbour. He leapt up, let the filming unit coat his body with standard issue insulating and thankfully opaque liquid cloth, and scurried from the workplace.
The ants gazed down disapprovingly at the pandemonium in the corridor below. They would have laughed at the so-called perfecters of the roads they had built for millions of years, had they had any form of self-awareness or laugh-producing mouthparts. The corridor, which had faithfully proved quite capable of containing moving people for nearly three centuries, was fast becoming blocked. It was in no small part to Bill, whose swinging arms had become increasingly animated with every step he took from his chamber. With every step he took, an understanding was surfacing, first through the damp and cluttered storerooms at the back of his mind and then into the clear, neat and never-used showrooms of the front. Even better, he had spotted his only true friend Terry ahead. Terry was the only equally enthusiastic player/watcher of Astro Traveller on the whole ship. They had bonded a couple of anniversary feasts ago over their shared passion, and then since maintained their friendship by letting each other get on with that passion and never seeing each other again.
“Fifty, it was. I sure will.” Bill nodded in acknowledgement at Terry’s greeting as he batted his way alongside his friend and proudly took up his position as bottleneck. It was the end of the conversation they had begun two years ago, but neither man had been involved in too many conversations since and it still seemed relevant. To Terry, at least.
Bill wished to begin a new conversation. He closed the first with an excited wave of his hand which clotheslined the small child dancing along behind. “It’s over! No more work!”
“As far as I know, you never started,” Terry observed. He had; his was the kid that had just been clotheslined, but he had not observed this unfortunate event. Being three years older than Bill, he had had to produce it to avoid the fate which was now not awaiting Bill next mission cycle, and was free to lie back and make observations all life long. He had no intention of making two in one day.
Bill persisted joyfully. “You’ve heard, haven’t you? We’re there, and the mission statement says....?”
Everyone knew the mission statement. It flared up in bright blue letters in the stock hub past the cafe like the universe’s most boring billboard. “To maintain a viable population until the destination is reached,” finished Terry dubiously.
Bill pointed a finger wildly. “Until the destination is reached,” he repeated. “It’s over! I don’t need offspring!”
Terry halted and caused a human avalanche unfelt by his ample behind. “Steady there. I think there’s wider implications here. What happens now? What are we going to have to do at this destination? It could be dangerous. There could be ten-foot razor-fanged savages the size of planets out there.” His eyes grew wide. “There might be no more Astro Traveller.”
“Of course there will,” said Bill without missing a beat. “It’s not in the mission statement, remember?” And smugly, confidently, he sped ahead and left Terry to sift through his victims.
The corridors to the private quarters all filtered out to the cafe and bar hub, and then to the place you would know about if you were actually paying attention. It was there that Bill finally had a chance to gloat at his escaped fate. He missed said chance, for the sight of the burnt-out robots in the scrap room still gave him the shivers.
The Rendezvous programme, established to develop Earth’s trade routes with rumoured spaceports around the galaxy, had but five faults. Firstly, as will now be obvious, human scientists had never developed cryogenic preservation or reliable enough artificial reproduction procedures, though many would argue the Unified Space Authority wouldn’t have found half the crews it needed for its long-haul manned voyages had this been the case. Secondly, with all the life-saving and starport-finding tools and modules and circuitry they had to worry about, their engineers never got round to making those really cool mega-fast sliding doors that every spaceship in the history of Earthly entertainment took for granted. Thirdly, though the crew were supposed to be pampered and coddled in the lap of luxury as payback for spending their entire lives cooped up on a single ship when there was so much misery to see back home, there had become apparent a small fault in the supposedly self-cleaning filters of the hygiene robots which daily scoured the vessel, most notably in places where a lot of hair accumulated such as the automated barber salon, showers, beds, urinals, the corridors leading to the love gym, the underwear purging vault, and many of the darker unspoken bowels of depravity which shall not be discussed here. As the bots fell one by one and conditions became increasingly sordid, the officers of first-generation spacecruisers all across the galaxy found themselves taking matters into somebody else’s hands. On the Mildred II, this had been the fate worse than death for anyone over twenty-three who was not contributing to the mission statement. Bill had escaped it by way of his mother pulling off a three-month sick leave many years ago in order to finish that bloody awful cross-stitch that had been hanging around the place for far too long and needed to be offloaded to someone who had too much grace for their own good.
Bill grimaced at the festering steel, hurried on around the corner and saw the fourth fault as another deep vibration rocked the ship. The vibration was followed by another, and another, until ahead of him, Vicky and Sarah exchanged glances and pushed back towards their chambers. He edged forwards and found a stationary group gawping up at the universe’s most boring billboard, which had transformed into the universe’s second most boring billboard. The letters now bluely spelt out When you land in approximately three minutes, someone needs to push the little red button on the civilisation detection scanner found in the destination vault, which has hopefully just been unlocked. We couldn’t find a way to keep its charge. The scanner that is, not the lock. Sorry for the inconvenience.
The main group could only stand and gawp because Tony had already bagsed the responsibility of opening the destination vault. After two minutes he returned, carrying a long, sleek, complicated device which Bill deduced to be a civilisation detection scanner based on all available evidence. That left another minute for awkward, expectant gawping before they were thrown off their feet by the sudden and forceful meeting of hull and rock.
A moment later, they had wobbled back to verticality, deafened by the sudden absence of engine noise they had never been aware of. A moment after that, the huge door across the blank side of the stock hub that they had never been aware was even a little door fell open with a clang which deafened them some more. A warm, scented breeze rushed in to meet them. The scent was reminiscent of decaying, rotting, crumbling starcruisers.
Bill stood on tiptoes and looked at the decaying, rotting, crumbling buildings of the starport. The decaying, rotting, crumbling buildings of the starport were surrounded by a beautiful vista of rolling purple hills, rustling stands of giant swaying ferns (also purple), and a startling purple sky, all of which did nothing to mask the decay and rot and crumble. It appeared the ship had been neatly guided onto the hill by a lingering landing system, but the pad itself had obviously got bored of the view and wandered off through the ferns to enjoy a slightly more daring angle. It was all a little disappointing after a lifetime of hoping for a better future.
Solemnly, Tony stepped forward, grasped the civilisation detection scanner firmly in one hand, and pressed the little red button. The scanner began detecting civilisations with a loud and dependable bloop. A few seconds later, it spoke in the tone long adored by citizens of Earth when something very important had been put off for too long and they seized the nearest phone to plead for their credit score. “Rotate me. Rotate me. Rotate me. Rotate me.”
Tony flexed his ankles and got to rotating. When he was all rotated out, he handed over the scanner to Bill while the others crowded in the frame of the open panel and peered out worriedly into the still and silent wreckage of the port. (Wreckage may in fact be the wrong word; it was more like the civilisation the scanner was detecting had absurdly decided that reaching blindly out to a million different species, any of which could have skipped the emotions of mercy and compassion in their rapid and omnipotent psychological development, may have been a mistake).
When Bill was all rotated out, the scanner decided it had watched the humans rotating for long enough and got serious. It made some more bleeps and Bill handed it off to the waiting Officer Dan with the leaping heart of someone who may have been responsible for something big and now wasn’t. “Scan complete. Transmitting data,” droned the scanner. And then, after a lengthy burst of static, “Data received. Authority exploratory team dispatched. Return to the ship. Return to the ship. Return to the ship. Return to the-”
The swash of gasps paused to collect its thoughts and assemble itself into words. “Where’s my space resort? With the space pool with its space babes? Where’s the space casino?” Officer Dan wailed.
“Well, is there anyone out there?”
“Do we have to build our own shelters now?”
“Whatever does it mean, ‘return to the ship’?”
The men and women milled about the threshold in distress. The shadowed facades of the space resort opposite, with its shattered space casino but sadly missing its space babes, glared back without remorse. Bill eyed the chutes of luminous plastic splitting and cracking between the hubs of the port. “I think when it says ‘return to the ship’ I think it means return to the ship.”
“What, our ship?”
“Return to the ship. Return to the ship. Return to the ship,” the scanner went on.
Officer Dan dispatched Felicity to the learning centre. She came back with the fourth edition standardised dictionary of Earth and flicked to the Rs. They all read the entry for return, but didn’t see any archaic meanings to indicate it meant go out and look for a different ship. Then they looked up ‘ship’ just in case it was one of those funny intergalactic homophones which meant exciting possibly inhabited ruins of alien settlement. Reluctantly, Officer Dan hammered an authoritative fingertip into the button and shut off the babble. “All right, guys. Return to the ship. Return to the ship. Return to the ship.”
They shuffled back onto the familiar metal grating of the open hub, craning their necks to see the dead spaceport one more time. Then, the door rumbled back into place. They stood there swaying like a herd of cows as the engines burst into life and lifted them from whatever planet they had just glimpsed, until Leanne pointed up at the mission statement with an inarticulate cry.
The universe’s most boring billboard now read: Maintain a viable population until home base is reached.
Bill read the words twice and felt the lie fall from his brain like a drape. On the drape were the words fate worse than death. He could not do what was asked. He’d tried, he really had. He’d built up the fate to build up his courage, but even the threat of whole astroverses less of Astro Traveller could not abolish the horror of whole astroverses with another human bouncing on his lap.
He looked around wildly. The others huffed and puffed and made for the consolation bar or orgy or orgy bar, and he turned and ran. He stumbled through the crowds, tumbled back with alarm as a group of offspring raced off to the climbing frame, and rumbled along to the door as the ship left the planet’s atmosphere. He wasn’t due to begin until next cycle, but he might as well start growing up. He entered the makeshift cleaners’ office and looked around in disgusted wonder. The mops, the cloths, the gloves... these were the marks of an independent man. These were his new life. Yes, he would be safe here. He would step up to the mark proudly, leave his old nagging worries behind, and-
“Hey, Bill. Wanna clean?” said Tracy as she emerged from the wardrobe of aprons in the back corner. “I’m a very dirty girl.”
It was a most inopportune moment for epiphanies.