The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 2: Intergalactic Bogtrotter Read online

  “Imogen …”

  “Yes, Fletch?”

  The tension in her voice sings like a badly bowed fiddle string. I realize now that it’s always there. It was gone for the last few minutes but now it’s back.

  “Nothing,” I say, and lay my lips on hers.

  A few minutes later, she pushes me away and carries on talking as if nothing had happened. I hate it when women do that.

  “But honestly, I wanted to retire to Treetop someday,” she says. “And this is kind of like the poor man’s version of Treetop, isn’t it?”

  I am lying on my back, breathing slowly and regularly. “Imogen,” I say, “I’m starting to think you are not taking our plight seriously.” What I mean is that she’s not taking me seriously. Or is it the same thing?

  “I’m just saying. We could build treehouses.”

  “Why would we want to?” I say grumpily.

  Because that’s what they do on Treetop, I suppose. Treetop is an exclusive yuppie planet where everyone lives in treehouses. Donal, I happen to know, had designs on a Treetop condo for himself and Harriet. I’d personally place Treetop in the penultimate circle of suburban hell, next only to Roslevan, the most yuppified suburb of Ennis, where I spent the worst two years of my life working as a assistant caregiver at a nursing home.

  “I don’t know,” she says, and there’s a catch in her voice. “I guess I just thought it would make it more homey.”

  “Ah, Imogen.” I sit up and reach for her.

  She rolls away from me, wiping the back of one hand across her eyes. With her other hand she slaps at my fondling paw. “Leave me alone! Why are you in such a hurry, anyway? You’ll get to screw me sooner or later if we have to stay here!”

  She stands up and walks off. I call after her, “Imogen!” but she doesn’t turn around, and I get the feeling it would not be a good idea to go after her.

  Left alone, puzzled and frustrated, I stare at the bubbles floating on the lake. It’s like the flipping Garden of Eden here. Well, it may have been until we arrived. The treecats have caught a bird and are ripping into its gorgeously plumed carcase.

  Could we do it?

  I mentally add us up. Me, Imogen, Donal, Harriet, Kenneth, Vanessa, Gordon, Hendrik, Shaka, Jackal, Adriaan, and by a stroke of fate all three of the surviving Australians are women. Fifteen of us, split almost equally between the sexes. We’ve got stacker expertise in the form of Gordon, and tech resources in the form of the Intergalactic Bogtrotter—she may not fly anymore, but she could be dismantled for parts. Barring unforeseen drawbacks, we could do it.

  And it doesn’t seem such a bad way for my adventuring to end.

  Sorry, Finian, I tried. At least I’ve lived up to your low expectations of me, right?

  Imogen’s walking along the lakeshore. She’s left her sweatshirt behind. I pick it up. I’ll take it to her. A pretext to ask her why she walked off.

  We could do it, I’ll tell her. And I’ll find some non-awful way to make it clear that she doesn’t have to sleep with me if she doesn’t want to.

  She’s charging back towards me, arms pumping. “Give me that!” she shouts as she gets in range.

  “This?”

  The sweatshirt crackles.

  I open the zippered kangaroo pocket as she snatches at it.

  MRE wrappers float out. Jesus, there are dozens of them, all folded up small. I unfold one and read, “Pork Chow Mein.”

  Red to the ears, Imogen scrabbles up the evidence.

  “It was you who filched those, Imogen,” I say. “And you let Kenneth take the blame.”

  “It was the treecats.”

  “It was not the fecking treecats! It was you.”

  “I fed them to the treecats! I didn’t eat them myself!”

  “Looks like you ate some of them,” I say, rudely aiming a swat at her bottom.

  “Ask Harriet if you don’t believe me!”

  “That’s just as bad, anyway! The point is you lied about it, and two men are dead as a result.”

  “Oh, I bet you really miss Armando. Anyway, I saw you push him. Kenneth stabbed him because he thought he shoved him, but it was you.”

  “Imogen,” I say with distant, false politeness, “I don’t remember if I’ve ever asked you. Why did you get fired from Samsung?”

  It was Samsung that brought her out to Arcadia to work as a reverse-engineer. But then they let her go, after which she began her downhill slide from taxi driver, to sales rep, to working for us.

  “They fired me for not being a team player,” she admits.

  I laugh mirthlessly. “You don’t say.”

  Harriet’s incomparable bullhorn of a voice comes from the forest. “Hey everyone! Wakey wakey!”

  The hunting party tramps out of the trees. They have not got any game. What they have got is a dozen of the spear-hurling monkeys. These are walking with them—Harriet’s got two of them by the hands—and it’s obvious their bodies are built for walking upright, after all. They are not, in fact, monkeys. With their chubby furred bodies, white tummies, and black button eyes and noses, they look more like …

  “Ewoks!” Imogen whispers, entranced.

  “Sssh,” I say. “Star Wars is a sensitive subject around here.” I’ve got one hand on my lightsaber in case the little fellas turn nasty again, although they’re acting like well-behaved schoolchildren now.

  “How do you mean?”

  “We used to have a wookie on the crew.” Poor Woolly; the Butterfly-zillas killed her. Of course she wasn’t really a wookie. None of that sort are. It’s just cosplay taken to extremes.

  But these little fellas are not cosplaying. They’re live aliens and they’re twittering at us in growly little voices that remind me of … “Care Bears,” I say out loud.

  “Care Bears?” says Imogen, who is Canadian, after all.

  Donal laughs. “He used to have a robot one when we were little. It did sound like that, didn’t it, Fletch?”

  “Thanks for ruining my image,” I say to Donal, mock-angry, and add to Imogen in an undertone: “Don’t worry. Ewoks are only Care Bears that lost their homes in a forest fire, anyway.”

  She cracks up as if she’s never heard that one before. I amble over to get a better look at the Care Bears of the Lost Planet. They’ve charmed our dour South Africans properly. Hendrik says: “They saw us throwing sticks at squirrels, and came to say, ‘You are doing it wrong.’”

  “Did they actually say that?”

  “No, but they use sign language.” He’s gleeful. “They want to give us spear-throwing lessons!”

  It’s clear to me that the Care Bears of the Lost Planet are not saying anything. They’re just growling and waving their paws.

  “They’re intelligent!” Harriet says giddily.

  Oh Jesus, not this again.

  I remind everyone that this is exactly what we went through with the treecats. Harriet thought they were intelligent at first, only to be disappointed in the end.

  But no one’s interested in my opinion. A few spear-throwing lessons and a shared meal of roast squirrel later, they’re all convinced that we have discovered the first ever race of living sapient aliens. Gordon is recording their voices on his iPhone and running them through various pieces of software to look for linguistic patterns. The clinching piece of evidence for him was that the Care Bears of the Lost Planet know how to start fires (the Boy Scout method) and what’s more, they know how to do it safely, in a dome filled with trees. He also points out that they wear ornaments—little silvery rocks with holes through, strung on dried vines.

  One unexpected ally shares my skepticism about the CB of the LPs’ sapience.

  “Fletch?” says Kenneth. “I have a confession to make.”

  “Do I look like a priest?”

  “Not that kind of confession.”

  “OK.”

  “I wasn’t the pilot of the Hellraiser.”

  “Erm, we already agreed on that.”

  “I wasn’t the co
ok, either.”

  “I didn’t think you were. What were you really, then? Second assistant bootlicker to the Cannibal Captain?”

  “I was the xenobiologist.”

  “The Hellraiser had a xenobiologist?”

  “Yeah, well, I was really just cover for when people would ask ‘Why does an exploration ship need so many guns?’ It sucked.”

  “OK. And?”

  “Those little guys aren’t sapient.”

  “That’s in your expert opinion?”

  “Fuck off. I may not have gone to Harvard, but I am qualified in my field, OK?”

  “I believe you, I believe you. I’m just wondering what you’re basing that on.”

  “Oh, people thought dolphins and whales were sapient for ages. Billions of dollars were wasted trying to communicate with them. It turns out they’re only about as smart as elephants. Yes, they have a limited faculty for language, but that doesn’t make them sapient. Chimpanzees use tools. That doesn’t make them sapient, either. The test is, are they learning any faster than they’re evolving? And the answer is no. These little guys have been stuck in here for millions of years, right?” Kenneth spreads his hands as if to say, there’s your answer.

  “Tell Harriet what you just told me,” I suggest.

  He shudders.

  “Well, she’ll figure it out eventually,” I say. “They all will.”

  And in the meantime, what’s the harm? It’s like Imogen dreaming of building a tree house. We all need something to distract ourselves from the fact that we’re probably stuck here forever.

  Humans of the Lost Planet.

  Maybe a million years from now, our descendants will have evolved to have fur, and hunt squirrels with sharpened sticks.

  CHAPTER 11

  But all good things must come to an end, and our romance with the Care Bears of the Lost Planet ends abruptly when they get into it with the treecats.

  One minute all our alien friends are lazing happily by the lake, the next minute the fur is flying.

  Harriet gets badly scratched trying to pull them apart. The whole heap of them brawl off into the woods. We track them down to the tree that the treecats, true to their nature, have colonized, and discover that Fluffington, Chairman Meow, and friends have lined their nests with silvery gravel, each piece with a hole in it.

  The little kleptos have raided the CB of the LPs’ village for sparklies.

  This is my first visit to the Care Bears’ village, which Harriet, Gordon, and Vanessa have been raving about for days. It does look like it might have been built by creatures about as smart as, oh, honeybees. Leafy-roofed shacks (not treehouses) cluster around the roots of a forest giant the size of a California redwood. There are A-frames where they dry the beef-jerky leaves to make them even more like beef jerky, I suppose. At the sight of all the baby CBs tumbling around, even my stony heart melts a little.

  The most amazing thing is it doesn’t stink. I have visited more than one ‘developing colony,’ and the thing that always sticks out is the lack of plumbing. I don’t know where the Care Bears of the Lost Planet bury their poop, but they clearly don’t shit where they live. This puts them streets ahead of humanity on at least one count.

  They have little silver jingles hanging over the doors of their shacks, similar to the ornaments they wear around their necks. Out of nowhere Fluffington swarms up a doorpost and swipes a pawful of these. The baby CBs squeal in terror.

  “We’re wrecking this place,” Kenneth says, stricken.

  I can see what he means, as the treecats and Care Bears mix it up again. We’re worse than the idjits who introduced rabbits to Australia.

  I wander away from the melee and find Gordon sitting on a tree root, tossing a bubble from hand to hand.

  The dome is full of these mysterious objects. We’ve stopped noticing them except to kick them out of the way. We tried to have a game of football at one point, but they’re too light. They work better for water polo.

  “Fivebranes,” Gordon greets me.

  “Huh?” I start to sit down, and spring back as a spindly metal biped stalks around the tree. It’s one of the Denebite maintenance robots Gordon predicted. Their main job is to gather up the bubbles, which is what this one’s doing now—there are loads of them trapped in the tree roots.

  “They must be fivebranes,” Gordon mutters.

  “What’re fivebranes?”

  “Five-dimensional membranes. I’m sorry, I know this isn’t your wheelhouse. Essentially, these bubbles are spherical force fields. Solid objects can pass through them, but air can’t. Nor can electromagnetic waves. I assume that’s due to the quantum properties of objects with both electric and magnetic charge …”

  He rambles on in this vein but I am not listening anymore. “Force fields!?!”

  That’s only item number four, or maybe three, on the big backers’ A-tech wish lists. Imagine a spaceship made of force fields. You wouldn’t even need a hull! Imagine orbital habitats with transparent walls and floors! Imagine, imagine … imagine me claiming this discovery and auctioning off the patent to the tune of billions …

  I grip Gordon’s arm. “We’ve got to get off this planet!”

  “Well, yes.”

  “These things would go for billions!”

  “Perhaps, perhaps, but they’re not reverse-engineerable.”

  The maintenance robot stalks towards us. Gordon offers it the bubble—the force field—he is holding. The robot delicately takes it and puts it into its net sack. “You’re welcome,” Gordon says dryly to the machine.

  “Do they even know we’re here? The robots.”

  “In a sense, I imagine. We’re furniture.”

  “I’ve been called worse things.” I freeze. “Hang on, how do you know these force fields aren’t reverse-engineerable?”

  “Because we tried.”

  At last it dawns on me. “This is it, isn’t it? Finian’s stunning discovery.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’d never been here before. You didn’t know this planet existed.”

  “No,” Gordon says, and I suddenly remember him on the first day we got here, kicking the bubbles outside the dome and shouting in an uncharacteristic spasm of rage: Oh bloody hell, or something like that. “It was quite a surprise,” he says now. “We’d no idea where the things came from. We found several thousand of them on Omega Centauri 49, the planet I mentioned to you. There’s nothing particularly interesting about 49. Most of it looks like Wales, with a few Denebite ruins scattered around. Our only discovery of note was the force fields, which clearly merited study. But we had made no progress with them before Special Delivery Sam attacked us.”

  “Far be it from me to question your expertise, Gordon. But the reverse-engineers on Arcadia are fairly good at what they do—”

  Gordon doesn’t like this. “I assure you, we ran all the same tests they would. The Marauding Elephant has a first-class lab. Had,” he sighs. “Well, now we know where the things came from. Here.” We can still hear the noise of brawling Care Bears and treecats in the distance. “As I originally theorized, this planet must have been ripped away from its sun. The Denebites kept it going by building these domes and herding the Care Bears inside.” It’s funny to hear him unselfconsciously utter the words Care Bears. “But why? What makes the Care Bears so all-fired important? And where are the force fields manufactured? Maybe they’re just decorations. No one knows how the Denebites thought, the poxy duck-faced busybodies.”

  Decorations. That sparks a connection. “The silvery ornaments the Care Bears wear, could they be—”

  “Oh yes, undoubtedly.” Gordon looks around for a bubble. The robot has picked up all the ones nearby. Suddenly one falls out of the branches over our heads. “Perhaps there’s a factory in the roof,” Gordon grumps. “Anyway, look at this.” He picks the bubble up. “May I borrow your lightsaber?”

  I reluctantly hand it over.

  Gordon sets the beam to ‘short’ and stabs the bubbl
e. The bright blue beam bursts it like a balloon. For a second it smells like somebody farted. Then Gordon’s hand is covered in silvery clingfilm, and he’s laughing, dropping the lightsaber, balling the stuff up. “You’ve got about thirty seconds to work it before it hardens.”

  I snatch the ex-bubble from him and stretch it like silly putty.

  “Ordinary lasers won’t pop them. Only the lightsabers. Finian made that discovery. No doubt Special Delivery Sam is still shooting and microwaving the things, getting increasingly frustrated.” Gordon cackles.

  “Hang on, you said solid objects go through them?”

  “Yes, if they’re moving fast enough.”

  “But energy doesn’t?”

  “No, not unless it’s the particular wavelength used by the lightsabers.”

  “Then why don’t we use them to mend the Intergalactic Bogtrotter?”

  Gordon stares at me. “Occasionally,” he says, “you have rather good ideas.”

  CHAPTER 12

  A couple of hours later we’re all out on the surface of the Lost Planet, sticking force fields over the holes in the Bogtrotter’s reactor turbine vessels and heat exchanger pipes as fast as I can deflate them with my lightsaber. Gordon keeps saying, “I think this is going to work! I think it’s actually going to work!” A frenzy possesses us. Not even I knew how badly I wanted to leave the Lost Planet until I realized that it might, after all, be possible.

  At last Gordon says he’s ready to try bootstrapping the reactor. Donal and I head for the bridge. Because the Bogtrotter landed badly, with one wing buried in the snow, all the floors are tilted at a steep gradient. We pass the three Australian girls chipping their dead colleagues out of the ice deposits in the mess. Donal, being a good captain, stops to be compassionate. I carry on to the bridge and find Imogen on her knees, poking around inside that safe of hers.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Fuck off!”

  I sense a certain froideur. She hasn’t forgiven me for uncovering her MRE theft, even though I didn’t tell anyone.