15.
Having not seen God in weeks, Emily was a little surprised by how old he looked when he turned up for breakfast one morning. His face was drawn and his beard unkempt. Even the spikes that stuck out of his head had gone floppy. He had wrinkles, definitely more wrinkles than before, his eyes had lost their sparkle and he looked like he was miles away.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Emily.
‘What, what?’ he answered. ‘Yes, yes, I’m okay. There’s just a lot on my mind. I’m worried about Earth. Actually Earth is fine, you teroids are the problem.’
‘I’ll get you a cup of tea and some breakfast.’
They sat on the sofa munching on toast and enjoying the spring sunshine.
Emily needed to get him talking asteroids.
‘Two questions,’ said Emily. ‘One, how come I get great big ocean waves when the sea is only twenty miles across? It’s more like a lake than the ocean yet we get these long swells surging up the beach.’
‘Have you ever camped next to a lake?’ asked Zeus.
‘No.’
‘Well you wouldn’t want to. The waves go: slosh, slosh, slosh, slosh, slosh. It’s very annoying, just like a dripping tap. That’s what the waves did on the smaller asteroids so we got the zinodes onto the problem. They came up with the gravity pertubator. When we drill the hole to install the black hole in an asteroid, we simply place the pertubator above the black hole on the side where the ocean is. It makes gravity fluctuations, forming waves, like a big wave pool. It is of course linked in with the weather.’
‘Bananas and mangoes?’
‘I’ve cheated a little,’ said Zeus, starting to brighten up. ‘Camillo is a temperate asteroid with a Mediterranean climate but I wanted bananas all year round, just like you have on Earth nowadays. We’ve genetically modified the tropical trees and sugar cane. There’s a bit of a microclimate around that part of your asteroid too, tucked in behind the hill, it’s always a few degrees warmer.
‘Could I have another cup of tea?’ asked Zeus, pouring the teapot and finding it empty.
‘No problem,’ said Emily, putting the kettle back on the stove, throwing in a couple of pieces of firewood and giving the grate a shake to get it burning.
After another cup of tea and toast with lashings of honey dripping off the sides, Zeus said, ‘Daisy.’
‘Daisy the cow?’ asked Emily, sucking sweet, sticky honey off her fingers.
Licking his fingers with his long pointy tongue, Zeus said, ‘Yes, Daisy the cow. We need to go and visit her.’
Holding Emily’s hand, he said, ‘Ready?’
She gave him a wink.
Zimp!
They arrived on a grassy plain; lush grass with lots of clover stretching out to the horizon in all directions. Not that the horizon was far away, this was a small asteroid, even smaller than Zeus’s.
‘It’s tiny,’ said Emily.
‘It’s the smallest we have done so far, just one kilometre across.’
‘Where’s Daisy?’
‘She’s on the other side. I need the exercise and I want you to get a feel for Panarea before we meet Daisy.’
They walked through the long grass, luxuriating in its soft, squishiness. There’s nothing like walking barefoot in grass.
‘There’s something missing,’ said Emily. ‘There’s no other life.’
‘Exactly,’ said Zeus. ‘There’s no weather, no wind, no animals; just Daisy, her oak tree and a rye grass and clover meadow.’
Being a very small asteroid, it only took a few minutes walking to be around on the dark side. The grass, damp with dew, was cool underfoot and Emily gave an involuntary shiver and wished she hadn’t left her shawl on the veranda. Soon she could make out the silhouette of a tree against the bright starlit sky.
Moo, moo.
‘Oh, hello Daisy,’ said Zeus. ‘I’d like you to meet Emily, my assistant.’
Moo, mooed Daisy, a black and white smudge in the darkness.
‘Hi Daisy,’ said Emily.
Emily stood still for a couple of minutes, taking in her surroundings. There wasn’t much to see but the smell was sweet and farm-yardy, the heavy, heady aroma of cow poo. The ground under her feet was soft and warm and squidged up between her toes.
‘Yuck!’ she said, suddenly realising that she was standing in cow poo. As her eyes got used to the dark, she saw that it was everywhere; a big mound of cow poo had built up around the tree where Daisy stood chewing the cud and contemplating the stars.
‘Do you understand?’ said Zeus.
‘Understand what?’ asked Emily.
‘What we are saying.’
‘But you haven’t said nothing!’
‘Oh, I forgot,’ said Zeus. ‘We really must teach you Unilangue. I’ll have a word with Castor and Pollux.’
‘Castor has started teaching me to think quietly.’
‘Good, he’s started then. He’ll move on to teaching you Unilangue, then you’ll be able to communicate with all living things; the trees, fish, birds, everything.’
Moo, moo.
‘When Daisy commissioned Panarea, she just wanted to look at the stars and think. No bugs or other animals to distract her, no weather because it would block the stars, nothing; just enough meadow that she could stretch her legs and think about what she was thinking about when she was looking at the stars. No contact with anyone except a daily visit from a zinode to milk her; to pay the rent so to speak.
‘Now Daisy has thought for two hundred years and is wondering what it was she wanted to think about in the first place that was so important at the time. Now Daisy is lonely. She passes her time playing backgammon with the sentry moons and the highlight of her day is the visit from the zinode.
Emily laughed, picturing Daisy squeezed into the cockpit of an SM3 playing backgammon.
‘No, no,’ said Zeus, picking up her thought waves. ‘She keeps her hooves on solid ground. We’re discussing finding some company for her.’
‘Cows?’ asked Emily.
‘No, she doesn’t want cows; they just stand around mooing and pooing all day. She wants more stimulating company.’
‘Stimulating company?’
‘Teroids, Daisy wants people up here.’
‘Why not footballers,’ suggested Emily. ‘With all the grass, it’ll be easy to put a football pitch in. Then Daisy can watch football.’
Moo, mooed Daisy, in agreement.
‘And she needs life on this planet,’ continued Emily. ‘She needs weather; she needs flies that make her flick her tail; worms to process this mountain of manure; rabbits and bugs and butterflies.’
Moo!
‘Sounds like a great idea,’ said Zeus. ‘We’ll hand it all over to the sentry slugs and let Daisy be her own gatekeeper to decide who can come in.’
He gave Daisy a brisk rub behind the ear. She pushed against him, giving little shudder of pleasure.
Moo!
Zeus held Emily’s hand and they disappeared.
Zimp!
They were floating in a little bubble high above the surface of a large asteroid.
‘Kumakiri,’ said Zeus. ‘A rare, V-type basaltic asteroid.’
‘Phew, it stinks in here!’ exclaimed Emily.
Looking down, she saw that their feet were covered with gooey cow poo half way up to our knees.
Yuck!
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ chuckled Zeus. ‘We’ll go for a swim later.’
‘Kumakiri,’ said Zeus, ‘is a special asteroid for special customers. They’re aliens but it’s in my folio because they live on Earth. Tricky customers too, they don’t want to pay; they say that we owe them!’
‘Owe them?’
‘We do! They’re called zinos. They were the inhabitants on Zinonia before someone crashed their spaceship into it, completely destroying it. They’ve been living in a remote valley in Mongolia but their habitat is being threatened by a dam project. They heard about us and commissioned Kumakiri.’
‘Zinode
s, zinos, Zinonia, it all gets a bit confusing.’
‘It does, the zinodes used to be called rastaskellions but it was a bit of a mouthful. After the crash, they started calling themselves zinodes.
‘What is really interesting about this project is that they want Kumakiri to be the same as Zinonia was; the same plants, animals, atmosphere and landscape. This is a real challenge as it was totally destroyed and all species, apart from a few zinos who teleported to safety, were totally obliterated. So, we’re recreating it from memory, what they remember it looked like, and the animals and plants were like. It’s not complete guesswork because when we refit asteroids, we often find fossils. We’ve been keeping them and have opened up a little Zinonia museum on Vespa. With the fossils we have the DNA for many species and can replicate them exactly as they were. Did you see the Jurassic asteroid?’
‘Yes, I caught a glimpse of dinosaurs on Castor’s screen. Is it real?’
‘Jurassic Park, the movie; it’s complete rubbish but, as for the idea, brilliant! We did it just for fun. It is the scariest place in the Universe. Aliens are travelling light years to come and see it. We’ve had to commission an asteroid moon for parking and accommodation.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ said Emily. ‘I saw the movie. I love scary creatures but that was close enough, it made me jump out of my skin.’
‘That’s why you need to be careful teleporting; you never know where you might end up.’
‘These zinos, what do they look like?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve been so busy discussing plans with them that I haven’t given it a thought. When we’ve made a bit more progress and have something concrete to show them, we’ll invite them to visit Kumakiri.’
‘And they’re aliens, living on Earth right under the people’s noses?’
‘Yes, let’s move onto the next project,’ said Zeus, grabbing Emily’s hand.
Zimp!
Their bubble was in orbit above an asteroid that at first glance looked the same as Kumakiri. It was a little larger and there was the gantry of a drilling rig visible on the curve of the horizon.
‘Pallas,’ said Zeus. ‘This is my baby. It’s taken a lot of lobbying and arguing to get the go ahead. I think I was such pain in the butt that they said yes just to get me out of their hair! I have several ark asteroids for Earth; extinct species, Amazonian biosphere, and the penguin project, but this is the big one, an ark for teroids.
‘With the exponential population growth on Earth and the pollution and destruction of habitat that goes with it, it just can’t last. The bubble is going to burst. Sooner or later it is all going to end in tears. Teroid tears and tears from the plants and animals that they take with them. I’m putting my money on technology. Humans think technology will be their saviour but it will be their undoing. Teroids are becoming lazier and more greedy and relying more and more on technology to archive their ends. Before long their survival will be dependent on the computers that control food production and distribution. One little virus or fuse blowing and the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down.
‘Pallas is an ark. It’s too big to fit in the factory so we’re working on it in situ. It’s a race against time as we need to get gravity and the oceans dug within two years so we can intercept Comet Elenin to fill them up and manufacture the atmosphere.’
‘Wow,’ exclaimed Emily. ‘You really are God!’
‘I try,’ said Zeus, blushing slightly. ‘But really it’s just damage control. I feel that if I’d done something different a thousand years ago we wouldn’t be in this situation now. I’d prefer to leave mankind to shape his own destiny.’
‘You’re not a nanny. It’s great that you care.’
‘I like teroids! You’re so unpredictable, so annoying at times, yet so spirited.’
Sniff, sniff.
‘It stinks in here doesn’t it?’
Zimp!
Zeus and Emily were back on Camillo. They sat on the beach and let the cold waves wash them up then suck them back down again, pressure washing the cow poo away.