Better Than Life

  He sculpted his face into an elegant sneer and disappeared into the shower cubicle.

  The Cat was less than an hour into his ablutions when Rimmer spotted the Starbug.

  'Look, there it is!'

  The Cat dashed out of the cubicle, dripping underneath his bathrobe, his shower cap still in place.

  'There!' Rimmer pointed at the magnified video image.

  The Cat squelched into the Drive seat, looped White Giant over for an investigatory pass, and landed four hundred yards from the stricken craft.

  Rimmer knew there was no one alive on board long before they scrambled over the dunes of glass and stood in front of the gutted 'bug. The hatchway door was half-melted, and what was left was swinging creakily on one hinge. Inside, there was nothing; no fixtures, no fittings; just the rotting bulkhead. The roof was almost entirely missing, and cone-shaped holes gouged grotesque patterns in the three-foot-thick reinforced steel floor. The Cat curled a finger through a gap in the hull and pulled. A foot-square slab of metal came away easily and, when he tightened his fist, crumbled in his hand.

  Rimmer looked down at the pile of ashes that lay on what remained of the sleeping couch.

  'Found this on the Drive seat.' The Cat stood in the hatchway holding a melted fragment of Lister's leather deerstalker.

  'I've seen this before,' said Rimmer. 'One time on Callisto. Wiped out an entire settlement.'

  'What is it?'

  Rimmer looked up through the roof at the black knotted whisps of cloud threading across the grey sky. 'Acid rain,' he said, quietly.

  Both of them knew they wouldn't find anything, but they decided to look around anyway. None of it made sense to Rimmer. He'd left Lister on an ice planet. Somehow, the ice had melted, exposing this strange terrain of geographical features apparently built from glass.

  'Hey!'

  Rimmer looked up. The Cat was standing high on a ridge overlooking the wreck of the Starbug.

  'Look at this!' The Cat motioned for Rimmer to join him.

  Rimmer picked his way up the jagged slope of the bottle mountain and looked down into the next basin.

  Spread out below them were acres on acres of rich, verdant pasture land. Fields of wheat, fields of corn and fields of barley shimmered in the easy breeze of the sheltered valley. A long, thin stream of gurgling blue glinted its length. Trees, not very tall, but strong and young, sprouted in thick forests around the perimeter. And in the centre of the valley, in the heart of a vast olive grove, smoke curled from the chimney stack of a small homestead.

  'There.'

  Rimmer couldn't make out what the Cat was pointing at for some moments: his eyesight wasn't nearly as keen. Then he saw it. Distantly, in a thin rectangular patch of brown, a tiny figure was dragging a handmade plough across a half-furrowed field.

  'It's Lister. It's got to be.'

  They half slid, half tumbled down into the valley, and ran across the fields towards the figure. When they were two hundred yards away, they realized they were wrong. It was a human, but it wasn't Lister. It was an old man, grey-haired and slightly bent. More than a little hard of hearing, too, because he didn't respond to any of Rimmer's shouts until they were almost on him.

  He swivelled and looked at them, his fingers toying idly with his long, braided silver beard. He had the strong muscle tone and weathered skin of a farmer who's spent a lifetime in the fields. He was fit and strong, but he had to be at least sixty, maybe more. He gazed at them for a while from under the thick, furry white caterpillars of his eyebrows, then he mopped his brow with a leathery forearm and turned back to his plough.

  'Old man!' Rimmer panted. 'We're looking for someone.'

  The man stopped, but didn't turn.

  'A friend of ours. Crashed just over the hill.' The Cat pointed, but the old man didn't look. Instead, with his back still to them, he performed a passable impersonation of Rimmer's voice.

  'I'll be back,' the old man said. 'Trust meeeeeee.' He turned and pulled off his cap. He swept a liver-spotted hand through the remaining wisps of silver on his pate.

  Rimmer crooked his head to one side and studied the old man's features. It was the eyes that gave it away. 'Lister?' he said, his eyes half-pinched in disbelief.

  Lister shook his head. 'Where the smeg have you been?'

  'We got here as quick as we could.'

  'Quick?' Lister bellowed. 'Quick!?' He rubbed his legs together and made a series of bizarre clicking noises with his tongue.

  'It's only been sixteen days.' Rimmer looked at the old man Lister had become. 'My god - it must be the Time dilation.'

  'The what?'

  'The ship got stuck in a Black Hole. Time moves more slowly around a Black Hole. Relativity. From our point of view, you've only been away a couple of weeks.'

  Lister snorted, showing a row of gnarled teeth. 'I've been here, on my own, waiting for you to bring me some food' - his eyes sparkled with fury - 'for the last thirty-four years. Thirty-four smegging years.'

  Rimmer shook his head and tried to think of something adequate to say. All he could come up with was: 'Sorry.'

  SEVEN

  The Cat spun round, taking in the whole valley. 'You did all this yourself?'

  Lister grunted.

  'This was all garbage before, and you made it into this?'

  Lister grunted again. He hadn't spoken much English for over a third of a century, and his conversation was sparse. He turned and squinted across the fields. Rimmer followed his sightline towards a herd of animals grazing at the very edge of the valley. They looked too small to be horses, but it was impossible to tell at this distance. Lister slid his two thumbs into his mouth and emitted a piercing, wavering whistle.

  One of the herd looked up from its feeding, and broke into a trot. As they watched, the creature suddenly lifted off into the air and headed, skyborne, towards them.

  The giant, eight-foot long cockroach landed neatly between the screaming Cat and the hysterical Rimmer. Its mandibles rubbed tenderly up the back of Lister's legs, and he patted its thorax fondly, cooing his strange clicks and whistles all the time.

  'Yow! Warghh!' The Cat wriggled his body, as if shrugging off a thousand creeping bugs, while Rimmer convulsed quietly beside him.

  'They eat all the garbage,' Lister said, as if this were some kind of explanation, and climbed on its back. 'Hop on.' He patted the cockroach's rump.

  The Cat twisted and gyrated, scratching every spare inch of flesh. 'Yak! Wurghh! Yahhhh! It's a cockroach!'

  'You expect us to sit on this thing?' Rimmer said, between heaves.

  'It's six miles back to the house.'

  'Six miles? Is that all?' Rimmer swept both his hands forward. 'You guys go on ahead. I feel like a jog.'

  'What? No. I'm coming with you,' said the Cat, and went into another gyrating dance of revulsion.

  The cockroach clicked and whistled and animatedly rubbed his bristling back legs together.

  'He's getting upset,' said Lister. 'He thinks you don't like him.'

  'Noooo.' The Cat laughed with false amusement. 'Where'd he get that idea? I think he's really cute. Cockroaches have always been my all-time favourite insects. In fact I have a pinup of one in my locker. I especially love those black sticky hairs on the back of his legs, and that sort of slimy stuff that dribbles out of his mandibles. He's adorable! Waaarghhh.'

  'Get on. You too.' Lister nodded at Rimmer.

  They slung their legs over the roach's back, and it pattered along until it reached take-off speed, then fluttered noisily up into the sky.

  'So,' said the Cat, holding on to the shell of the roach's abdomen, 'do we get an in-flight movie, or what?'

  'What's that?' Rimmer pointed down at a field below them. There were no crops in the field, just yellow and white flowers which were arranged and planted to spell out two enormous letters; two 'K's.

  'Jasmine,' said Lister, simply.

  And Rimmer let it go at that.

  ***

  Lister's home w
as made entirely of garbage. The walls were built from wastepaper, compressed into bricks that made them as hard as any wood. The roof slates were fashioned from beaten-out flattened bean tins, and the windows were the portholes taken from front-loading washing machines. Various tubes, pipes and cables ran to a tall tower some fifty feet away, which housed a configuration of mirrors that harnessed solar energy.

  Besides the main house, there were a number of cockroach stables, and farm outhouses, which stored harvested crops, seeds and equipment.

  As they walked across the courtyard, a number of young roaches flocked out excitedly to meet them. They yapped, clicked and whistled round Lister's ankles as he patted each of them and made his way to the main house.

  The furnishings inside the dwelling were also constructed from unwanted refuse. There was a crude, but effective central-heating system made out of old car radiators and exhaust pipes.

  While Lister busied himself in the kitchen, Rimmer and the Cat sat on a remarkably comfortable sofa which was clearly three toilets lashed together, covered with bin liners stuffed with what turned out to be vacuum-cleaner fluff.

  There was an elaborate hand-carved wooden mantelpiece over the stone hearth. It looked strangely incongruous in the jerry-built room. Above it hung an ornate gilt frame, which, at first glance appeared to be empty. Rimmer stood up and strode towards it. On closer inspection he found there was a picture in the middle of it. A less-than-passport-size photograph, which had been cut out of a Red Dwarf yearbook. Rimmer squinted and tried to make out the face. It was the photograph Lister always used to keep in his wallet. The one he didn't think Rimmer knew about. It was his only photograph of Kristine Kochanski, smiling her famous pinball smile. Rimmer shook his head. Lister was still hung up on a girl he'd dated for three weeks, several thousand epochs ago. His psyche had fantasized her as his mate in Better Than Life, and now, after nearly forty years of solitude here on Garbage World, his memory still wasn't prepared to let her go.

  Lister shuffled in from the kitchen, his wrinkled hands clutching a tray loaded with roughly thrown clay pots. He saw Rimmer looking at the thumbnail-size photograph in the frame that could have comfortably accommodated a couple of El Grecos and smiled. 'One day,' he said, 'I'll get her back.'

  Rimmer and the Cat looked at the frail old man Lister had become and nodded in benign indulgence. It seemed fruitless to point out she'd died three million years previously, and even when she had been alive she'd been the one who broke off the relationship, dumping him for some guy who worked in Flight Navigation.

  'One day,' he said again. And they nodded again.

  Lister handed the Cat a mug of nettle tea and a plateful of juniper-and-dandelion stew, and sat down.

  'So what happened?' said Rimmer. And Lister began to tell them. He told them pretty much everything, missing out only the olive-branch incident, the 'deal' he'd made with the planet, which, as the years had passed by, had begun to seem more and more like a dream, unreal, half-imagined.

  ***

  'So what now?' asked the Cat, setting aside his still-full plate of juniper-and-dandelion stew, and his mugful of cold nettle tea. 'What are you going to do? Stay here, or come with us?'

  'Both,' said Lister.

  'Huh?'

  'We're going to take Earth home. We're going to tow it back to the solar system.'

  'We're what?' laughed the Cat.

  'It's possible,' Lister said earnestly. 'I've been thinking about it for the last ten years.'

  'So what are we going to do, exactly?' A patronizing smile rippled across Rimmer's face. 'Stretch a chain from the ship, and use Mount Everest as a tow hook? Then, maybe, stick a huge sign in Australia: "No hand signals: planet on tow”?'

  'More or less,' said Lister, and he was perfectly serious. 'More or less.'

  EIGHT

  The giant roach circled White Giant, then landed deftly by its side. They dismounted, and as Rimmer and the Cat walked shakily up the embarkation ramp Lister fished in his coat pocket and fed the roach some decomposing insect paste.

  The communications monitor in White Giant's control room was flashing 'Incoming transmission - response required.'

  Rimmer barked out the voice commands, and Kryten's face fizzed on to the screen. 'Ah! There you are. I've been trying to get through for two hours. I've found him.'

  'We found him,' corrected the Toaster.

  Rimmer frowned. 'Found who?'

  'Queen Isabella of Spain,' said the Toaster, sarcastically. 'Who the smeg do you think?'

  'Mr Lister,' Kryten said patiently. 'We've found Mr Lister.'

  The Cat popped his head over Rimmer's shoulder. 'What? You mean you've found some sort of remains? A skeleton or something?'

  'Read my lips,' said the Toaster, who didn't have any. 'We've found Lister. He's here. He's alive.'

  'That's not possible.'

  'Look.' Kryten swivelled the head of the transmission camera, so the figure lying on Blue Midget's crash couch swung into view.

  It was Lister.

  Pasty and drawn - his complexion had a strange wax veneer, and there was an odd soulless quality to his eyes - but it was Lister.

  At least, it looked like Lister, no older than the day Rimmer had left him marooned.

  Rimmer stared at the screen, his face bunched like a ball of waste paper. Suddenly, a gnarled hand snaked past him and flicked off the transmission link.

  Rimmer turned and looked into Lister's wizened old face.

  The Cat backed up to the far bulkhead wall. 'What's going on here? Just who are you, Buddy?'

  'I'm Lister,' said Lister, unsmiling.

  'Then who the hell's that?' The Cat flung an elegant forefinger towards the screen. 'Benny Goodman and his Orchestra?'

  'It's a Morph.'

  'It's a what?'

  'It's a Polymorph.'

  NINE

  The thing about human beings was this: human beings couldn't agree. They couldn't agree about anything. Right from the moment their ancestors first slimed out of the oceans, and one group of sludge thought it was better to live in trees while the other thought it blatantly obvious that the ground was the hip place to be. And they'd disagreed about pretty well everything else ever since.

  They disagreed about politics, religion, philosophy - everything.

  And the reason was this: basically, all human beings believed all other human beings were insane, in varying degrees.

  This was largely due to a defective gene, isolated by a group of Danish scientists at the Copenhagen Institute in the late 1960s. This was a discovery which had the potential for curing all humankind's ills, and the scientists, naturally ecstatic, decided to celebrate by going out for a meal. Two of them wanted to go for a smorgasbord, one wanted Chinese cuisine, another preferred French, while the last was on a diet and just wanted to stay in the lab and type up the report. The disagreement blew up out of all proportion, the scientists fell to squabbling and the paper was never completed. Which was just as well in a way, because if it had been presented, no one would have agreed with it, anyway.

  Small wonder, then, that homo sapiens spent most of their short time on Earth waging war against each other.

  For their first few thousand years on the planet they did little else, and they discovered two things that were rather curious: the first was that when they were at war, they agreed more. Whole nations agreed that other nations were insane, and they agreed that the mutually beneficial solution was to band together to eliminate the loonies. For many people, it was the most agreeable period of their lives, because, apart from a brief period on New Year's Eve (which, incidentally, no one could agree the date of), the only time human beings lived happily side by side was when they were trying to kill each other.

  Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, the human race hit a major problem.

  It got so good at war, it couldn't have one anymore.

  It had spent so much time practising and perfecting the art of genocide, developing more and
more lethal devices for mass destruction, that conducting a war without totally obliterating the planet and everything on it became an impossibility.

  This didn't make human beings happy at all. They talked about how maybe it was still possible to have a small, contained war. A little war. If you like, a warette.

  They spoke of conventional wars, limited wars, and this insane option might even have worked, if only people could have agreed on a new set of rules. But, people being people, they couldn't.

  War was out. War was a no-no.

  And like a small child suddenly deprived of its very favourite toy, the human race mourned and sulked and twiddled its collective thumbs, wondering what to do next.

  Towards the conclusion of the twenty-first century, a solution was found. The solution was sport.

  Sporting events were, in their way, little wars, and with war gone people started taking their sport ever more seriously. Scientists and theoreticians channelled their energies away from weaponry and into the new arena of battle.

  And since the weapons of sport were human beings themselves, scientists set about improving them.

  When chemical enhancements had gone as far as they could go, the scientists turned to genetic engineering.

  Super sportsmen and women were grown, literally grown, in laboratory test-tubes around the planet.

  The world's official sports bodies banned the new mutants from competing in events against normal athletes, and so a new, alternative sports body was formed, and set up in competition.

  The GAS (Genetic Alternative Sports) finished 'normal' sport within two years. Sports fans were no longer interested in seeing a conventional boxing match, when they could witness two genetically engineered pugilists - who were created with their brains in their shorts, and all their other major organs crammed into their legs and feet, leaving their heads solid blocks of unthinking muscle - knock hell out of one another for hours on end in a way that normal boxers could only manage for minutes.