Better Than Life

  And so it came to the vote.

  The vote was telecast live to every terraformed world in the solar system. A jury on each of the worlds sat patiently through all nine presentations, and then allocated points, the lowest points going to the planet most favoured for the new mantle of Garbage World.

  The show was broadcast from the French settlement of Dione, the Saturnian satellite. It was hosted by Avril Dupont, the greatly loved French TV star.

  ' 'Allo Mercury?'

  Pause. Crackle. 'Hello, Avril.'

  'Can you give us the votes of the Mercurian jury?'

  'Here are the votes of the Mercurian jury. Pluto: two points.'

  'Pluto, two points. La Pluton, deux points.'

  'Neptune, seven points.'

  'Neptune, seven points. Le Neptune, sept points.'

  'Uranus, four points.'

  'Uranus, four points. L'Uranus, quatre points.'

  'Saturn, eight points.'

  'Saturn, eight points. Le Saturne, huit points.'

  'Jupiter, five points.'

  'Jupiter, five points. La Jupiter, cinque points.'

  'Mars, twelve points.'

  'Mars, twelve points. La Mars, douze points.'

  'Venus, ten points.'

  'Venus, ten points. La Venus, dixpoints,'

  'Earth, no points.”

  'Earth, no points. La Terre, zero points.'

  'And that concludes the voting of the Mercurian jury. Good night, Avril.'

  And that was the best score Earth got.

  It culled not one single vote.

  At twenty past eleven, on 11 November the following year, the last shuttle-load of evacuees left for re-housing on Pluto, and the planet Earth was officially re-named 'Garbage World'.

  The President of Callisto personally cut the ribbon of toilet paper, ceremonially deposited the first symbolic shovelful of horse manure in the centre of what once had been Venice and declared Garbage World open for business. The President and his aides dashed into the Presidential shuttle as the first wave of three hundred thousand refuse ships swooped down and dumped their stinking loads on the planet that was once called Earth.

  The dumping areas were strictly regulated: North America, for instance, was bottles. Clear bottles on the west coast, brown bottles on the east and green in the centre. Australia was reserved for domestic waste: potato peelings, soiled paper nappies, used teabags, banana skins, squeezed toothpaste tubes. Japan became the graveyard of the motor car; from island to island, from tip to tail, from Datsuns to Chryslers, to forty-cylinder cyclotronic hover cars, dead, silent metal covered the land of the setting sun.

  The Arctic Circle was allocated rotting foodstuffs, the Bahamas was home to old sofas and bicycle wheels, Korea took all broken electrical equipment.

  Europe got the sewage.

  And over the last twenty years, John Ewe had busied himself signing his name over the corner of that once-great continent.

  ***

  John Ewe shut down the satellite link, and followed his hairy beer-belly back to the front of the ship. Before he could reach the safety webbing, a massive pocket of methane turbulence rocked the refuse craft and sent him staggering into the first-aid box. He fingered the gash that grinned bloodily on his brow and invented two new swear words. The methane storms had been getting worse over the past few years, and he knew he should have consulted the meteorological computer before he ventured from his safety harness.

  As he lurched to his feet, a second methane blast hit the ship under its belly, sending him stumbling back down the narrow aisle. As he slithered helplessly backwards, his flailing arm caught the door-release mechanism, and the cockpit's emergency exit swung open.

  His fat fingers scrambled for a hand-hold, but found nothing until he slid through the open doorway, and he grabbed the rim of the footledge.

  For thirty seconds he dangled, screaming, over Europe.

  Then he dangled no more.

  He plunged from the yawing garbage ship, and drowned in his own signature.

  'Ewe woz 'ere', it said. And it was right, 'e woz.

  ***

  The unmanned craft hacked around wildly in the sudden turbulence, the autopilot stretched beyond its capacity. The methane storm whipped up to hurricane force and sucked the ship to the ground.

  A continent of methane exploded.

  The blast triggered off a thermo-nuclear reaction in a thousand discarded atomic-power stations, and the Earth tore itself from its orbit around the sun, and farted its way out of the solar system.

  Two and a half thousand years of abuse were ended.

  The Earth was free.

  Free from humankind. Free from civilization.

  When it was clear of the sun's influence, it froze in heatless space and bathed its wounds in a perennial Ice Age.

  On it went, out of the solar system and into Deep Space, carving a path through the universe, looking for a new sun to call home.

  TWO

  Lister coughed himself awake. A gargantuan coughing tit forced his body into a ball and thrashed it about under the heavy quilting of the sleep sheet before his head finally emerged from under the covers, gasping for air.

  Air, it turned out, was the last thing he wanted. It was thick and smoky and bitter to the taste. His hand scrambled blindly for the bunkside oxygen mask that dangled above the recessed sleeping couch. He held it to his face and sucked.

  Gradually his vision cleared, and he peeked out into the murk. There was a hissing sound coming from the floor. Lister drew the blanket around him, knelt up and craned over the side of the couch to get a closer look. The whole of the steel-alloy deck was pitted with thin, deep, smoking holes, as if something were trying to burrow up into the craft from below.

  As he watched, something flitted past his face, almost brushing his cheek, landed in a loud fizzle on the deck and started to tunnel patiently through the reinforced steel.

  Lister snapped his head back into the shelter of the recess. His heart thumped a samba on the xylophone of his ribs. That could have been his head.

  He ducked low so the edge of Starbug's roof edged into his field of vision. Hollow metal stalactites hung down from the buckled structure, some of them dripping a clear, colourless liquid on to the 'bug's floor.

  Lister shot back and huddled in the corner of the recess.

  Acid rain.

  But not normal acid rain - this was acid rain. Acid rain of such concentration it cut through high-density metal as if it were full-fat soft cheese. His eyes lit on what remained of the high-backed scanner scope chair. It was now a pile of steaming gloop. Only two nights earlier, he'd fallen asleep on that chair. That gloop could have been him.

  It didn't make sense. Why hadn't the acid rain cut through the bunk roof? Why had that held out?

  Lister looked up, and got his answer. It hadn't. The roof bulged crazily, like a balloon full of water, and stalactites of corrupted metal pointed their long, threatening fingers down towards him.

  There was nowhere to go. No haven.

  Whatever Lister decided to do, he had to do it fast. He grabbed his boots from the locker behind his head, and laced them frantically, keeping his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Suddenly the area of roof just above his head started to give way. Lister rolled off the bunk, taking the mattress with him and swung into the bunk below.

  Within minutes stalactites had begun to tongue down through the roof of the new bunk. He guessed that he had about two minutes before the acid came through.

  But two minutes to do what? To go where? Up was unthinkable. Out? No way. No choice, then. Down.

  He ripped at the wooden slats underneath the lower bunk's mattress. If only he could get down to the maintenance deck below, at least it would buy him some time. He piled the slats behind him and peered down into the hole.

  Lister really didn't expect to find an access hatch leading straight down to the maintenance decks smack under the bunks, but it still surprised him when he didn't. He was shocked. He was
offended. True, the chances of there being one were tiny - why would anyone in their right mind build an access hatch underneath two bunks? What for, apart from providing a handy escape route for any space-farer who happened to get caught in a particularly nasty downpour of acid raid? But on the other hand, there had to be one - otherwise there was no way out. Otherwise, he was dead. So when there wasn't one, frankly, he was outraged. He was furious. There could have been a below-bunk access hatch for dozens of reasons. A long-forgotten disused cleaning hatch; an air-conditioning access point; a ventilation shaft - the craft was crammed full of them, why couldn't there be one here?

  But there wasn't.

  There was nothing but featureless flooring.

  He scratched futilely at the smooth metal, then smashed three wooden slats to splinters without even marking the doubly-reinforced floor that separated him from the maintenance deck. Now what?

  Lister jammed his back against the corner of the bunk and crammed his knees against his chest. He wrapped his knuckles around one of the wooden slats by his side, and jabbed it up into the metal base of the bunk above, at a forty-five degree angle from his body. Then he jabbed again. And again.

  The slat slid through the softened steel, and the acid from the bunk above began to trickle down into the feet end of the lower bunk. Lister held the oxygen mask to his face and jabbed again, widening the drain hole above him.

  He withdrew the blackened, smoking slat and jabbed again. More acid gushed in through the widening gap, melting its way towards the maintenance deck below.

  There was nothing to do but wait and see which would give first - the base of the bunk above him, or the escape hole below.

  There was a creaking sound, and the bunk ceiling lurched dangerously and ballooned down another two inches towards his head. He stabbed frantically at the floor, and wiggled the slat ferociously to increase the hole's diameter. Nine inches wide. Now, a foot. Still too small. Suddenly there was a screaming pain in his hand, in the fatty flesh between his thumb and forefinger. He held it up to his face. The acid had burnt straight through, leaving a smoking peephole. He could see through his hand.

  The escape hole was fourteen, fifteen inches wide. He tossed the slat into the gap and waited for it to hit the deck below.

  One little second.

  Two little seconds.

  Three little seconds.

  Fou...

  The wood hit the metal below.

  Thirty or forty feet.

  Without cushioning, a bone-breaking certainty.

  He kicked the gap wider. His boot came away steaming and smouldering. The hole was three feet in diameter and growing.

  He made his move. He wrapped the mattress he'd dragged from the upper bunk tightly around him, held the mattress from the lower bunk over his head, and leapt through the hole.

  The lower mattress plugged the hole, giving him perhaps five seconds of protection as he plunged towards the pool of acid that was already working its way through the floor of the maintenance deck. He flung off the mattress that was curled around him and hurled it down to the smoking pool below. He landed on his back, winded, dazed and immobile. He looked up towards the ceiling, and saw three globules of acid dropping towards him.

  He tried to twist right but his body refused to move. 'That was a hell of a fall,' it was saying. 'Let's rest here a while,'

  Two of the drops cut pennycent holes in the mattress centimetres from his groin. The third removed his left earlobe. Lister and his body had another meeting. Top of the agenda was a proposal to move, a.s.a.p. It was proposed by Lister, seconded by his body and the motion was carried by two votes to nil. He rolled on to his side as the temporary plug above finally gave and torrents of acid cascaded through the hole, crashing on to the mattress, barely a yard from his gasping, mono-lobed body.

  He picked himself up, and started to stagger down the length of the maintenance deck, looking for something, anything, that might offer some form of protection. He ripped the first-aid kit from the wall and pulled out the bottle of medicinal alcohol. He poured a generous measure over the hole in his hand, dabbed his left ear and drank the rest.

  Then he lumbered into the Engineering Supply Area. He slammed a pallet on to the forks of one of the three orange stacker trucks and piled it high with oxyacetylene canisters, blowtorches and welding gear.

  He glanced up at the ceiling. It would hold for fifteen minutes. Twenty at best. After that there was nowhere else on board to shelter. There was no more down. The only way was out. Out in the acid storm.

  For the next quarter of an hour he blowtorched steel doors from their hinges, ripped steel piping from the walls and welded together a jerry-built acid raincoat. He raced back into the engineering store and tried on the various welding helmets. He discovered that if he crammed his head into the smallest, he was then able to wear a medium size on top of it, and a large one on top of that.

  In the howling, metallic silence imposed by three steel helmets, he climbed into the suit. Six feet of solid steel on top of him, plus his helmets, plus the metal-piping sleeves and trousers - this would give him at least fifteen minutes of protection while he scampered out of the craft and sought out some kind of refuge.

  Only one problem.

  He couldn't move.

  He couldn't even nearly move.

  Stupid.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  How could he have wasted fifteen precious minutes constructing this immobile monstrosity, without realizing the damned thing was going to be too heavy to move?

  He climbed out of the suit and kicked it.

  Now he had a broken toe to add to his troubles.

  He looked up at the ceiling. The stalactites were already forming.

  He tottered over to the viewport window and stared out into the storm. He registered with a shock that the rain was local. Totally local. It just swirled around the small basin in which the Starbug had come to rest. Over the crest of the hill, the sky was clear. The crest of the hill was hardly five hundred yards away.

  Surely he could get the damned thing to move five hundred yards. A third of a mile. Come on. Think.

  His eyes swept the room.

  On the second pass, they stopped on the stacker truck.

  Lister jumped into the driver's seat and started up the motor. He jabbed the truck's forks under the two arms of the suit, and pulled back the lift lever. Slowly, the truck hauled the suit off the ground.

  He leapt down from the vehicle, raced back to the supply store and returned with a reel of steel cable. As the floor around him hissed and spluttered, he welded the cable to the stacker truck's twin joystick controls and fed it through the sleeves of the armour-plated raincoat.

  He flipped the bay doors over to manual and typed in the opening code. They remained closed. He tried again. Nothing. Acid fizzled down the doorway. The electrics were shot to hell.

  There was a rumble from the far end of the maintenance deck, and a whole twenty yard section of ceiling smashed to the floor.

  Lister was completely unaware of the tears that coursed down his grease-streaked cheeks, and of the insane babble that chundered from his lips as he raced back and climbed into the suit. He yanked the left-hand cable, and his neck snapped forward as the stacker truck lurched back and reversed fifty yards, slamming into the rear bulkhead. The suit tottered on the forks.

  If he fell now ... if he fell and lay motionless on the floor as the acid swirled in from the deck above ...

  Gently, he tugged the right-hand cable, and the truck moved forward. He tugged again. The electric motor whined to maximum pitch. The truck gathered speed.

  It screamed towards the bay doors, supporting Lister in his reinforced steel suit at the front.

  Acid drizzled delta patterns down the bay doors as Lister and the stacker truck smashed through the weakened structure and out into the eye of the acid storm.

  The truck's caterpillar tracks juddered over the basin's jagged terrain, gradually picking up the spee
d it had lost on impact with the doors.

  When Lister came to, he was half way up the basin's incline. Over the peak of the hill before him, he could see the clear sky hanging a lazy blue over the next valley.

  Two hundred yards to go.

  He scanned the ground. Bizarrely, insanely, it seemed to be composed of broken bottles. He looked around. The whole of the mountain appeared to be glass. Millions upon millions of glass bottles, all shapes, all sizes, but only one colour - green. In fact, as he looked through the acid mist, he realized that all the mountains looming around him were likewise constructed of green bottles.

  What was this place?

  Overnight Ice Ages, acid rain that cut through steel, and a landscape made entirely of glass.

  Nice place for a holiday.

  There was a muffled bang from behind him, and the stacker truck jerked and stopped.

  Lister craned round to see why. The truck was scarcely recognizable - a melting mess of metal and plastic. He tugged on the right-hand cable with idiot optimism. The cable snapped and slithered through the sleeve of his suit, gouging a thin red line of pain along the length of his arm.

  He hung from the forks of the truck as the rain rodded down and bounced, sizzling, from his suit. Helpless and immobile, he swung like a giant metal pub sign.

  He tried to lift his arms. Impossible. The suit was too heavy. So he just swung there, wondering how long it would take him to die when the rain eventually got through, and how much of him would be left for the others to find.