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Website content may offend and disturb. Content includes horror, murder, torture, military carnage and occasional incidents from the adult side of adult life. |
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However -
Since it was a choice of daring the black tarj or dying of thirst, she pushed on through the black mists, and after only a few steps emerged onto a ridgeline overlooking a vast expanse of rolling hills thickly forested with pine trees. The trees were a dark luxuriant green: the hills were almost black with their massed weight of subdued color. "Is this the planet where your starship crashed?" said Ida. "No, not at all," said U-scampi. "It crashed in a kind of - well, scrap metal yard, you could call it. Rubbish all around. Nanotechnological phages. They were programmed to dismantle any kind of machine they could find. I was lucky not to get infected." "A kind of war zone, then," said Ida. "I guess," said U-scampi. "A pity you don't drink Suki-Suki," said Ida. "You could have done some great product placements." Then, cautiously, inspecting the ground for landmines - though she knew very well that she had precious little hope of spotting a mine before stepping on it - Ida scouted round the black tarj, which was a small one, barely as tall as a house. It sat amidst pine trees on a narrow steep-sided ridge, along which ran a path. Okay. The sky. The sun of this new planet was a quarter of a way through its arc, either rising or setting, one or the other. The time, then, was roughly mid-morning or mid-afternoon. It was cool, a lot of gray rainclouds in the sky. Listen. No sound of water. No sound of anything, much. "Looks good," said U-scampi. "Quiet," said Ida. "Is that a command or a comment?" said U-scampi. Ida did not reply. Her mouth was hangover-dry. She did not want to speak more than she had to. The slopes of the ridge were too steeply dangerous for her to chance a descent, so she started along the narrow path. Cautiously, for paths people. And people are dangerous. But people imply water. And, also, restaurants, double beds, bottles of wine, spaceports, telephones, television and shoe shops. Spiderweb upon spiderweb - nobody had been here recently - the trail gave way before her. If there were any shoe shops hereabouts, then, it was reasonable to suppose that they were doing precious little business. Slowly, the ridge broadened. And, at last, widened into a clearing, where there stood a log cabin. As soon as Ida saw the clearing, she stopped, and hunkered down behind a tree, observing clearing and cabin carefully just as she had seen heroes of the moid doing TV. On TV shows, isolated buildings in the wilderness tended to be associated with (a) serial killers, (b) transcosmic terrorists, (c) drug smugglers, (d) mad scientists, (e) werewolves or (f) blonde women with big bazoomas who have been cruelly hurt by men, and have vowed to have no more to do with them, but who have come to such decision without ever meeting any man as handsome, tender and sensitive as the hero who stars in the current episode. "What are we waiting for?" said U-scampi. "There might be an ambush," said Ida. "So there might," said U-scampi. "Well?" "Well what? I've told you. I'm just a camera." "I could go on strike again." "I don't think you will, you know. Come on. Be a devil. Check it out. Someone might shoot you in the face. It would make a great finish." And, with that, Ida realized that U-scampi had enough safely recorded. Whether she lived or died, she was going to be a news event in her own right. And, dying at this stage, after so many adventures, she might make a better news event than she would if alive. At last, Ida got to her feet and headed toward the cabin. The roof looked to be made of corrugated iron, and had a gutter. This suggested to her that there might just possibly perhaps - "God, I hope so - " - be a water tank round the side. And so there was. A gray galvanized tank stood at the side of the cabin. It came equipped with a tap which opened in the conventional direction, releasing water which looked to be clear. Ida investigated no further, but drank with gulping greed, slaking her thirst with the violence of overpowering physical need. "Ah," she said, lifting her head, water dripping from her chin. "Ah ...!" She felt positively animalistic. "Don't over-dramatize," she said crossly, lecturing that small but dangerous histrionic element which lurked within her personality. "You just drank some water, that's all. Come on, let's get on with it." Thus lectured, Ida pulled herself together, and entered the cabin. Inside, a rough wooden floor, a couple of wooden tables flanked by wooden benches, some bunks with mattresses covered with striped plastic covers of a faded gray, green and blue. The lowest bunks built high off the ground, leaving plenty of room for backpacks. Some spiders, some spiderwebs. A bent nail lying on the floor. A warped metal button. Glass windows, one cracked. An iron stove of the kind used for heating rather than cooking. Ashes in the stove, cold beneath her fingers. No toilet. "No toilet?" said Ida. Scouting around outside, she found the charred ashes of an ancient outhouse. And that was that. "No food, no toilet, no blankets," said Ida, assessing her equipment. Well, at least she had a notebook, so she could make scientific observations. But, despite all her journeyings in the heat of the moid, the notebook remained damp: by immersion in the seas of the beachcomber's planet it had been reduced to squidgy mass of damp paper. And, in any case, she had no pen. Okay, then, she would just have to remember her research data. Her head was spinning with it: planets, aliens, gunshots, auras, minefields, spiderwebs. "Wow," said Ida. She laid herself down on one of the bunks and closed her eyes. After a while, a faint crinkling grinkling sound like the folding up of sandpaper made her open them again. Giggles, the Zelma Kan alien she had first met in the moid, had returned, and now hung over her, mathematically deconstructing and reconstructing himself, his three-dimensional bars of color grid-graphing the gloom of the cabin. "What's your problem?" said Ida. "You want a hand job or something?" She snorted with laughter, irrepressibly amused by her own outrageous vulgarity, then closed her eyes again. With her eyes closed, she had the impression that she was falling down through darkness in a dense dark snow of drugged petals. She was being pressed down into sleep, thrust down into oblivion, crushed by the weight of fatigue and experience. "But where's my climax?" said Ida. She was a hero of the moid, was she not? And a hero of the moid was entitled to a climax in which he shot it out with the Evil Aliens and claimed the love of the Big Blonde Woman With The Big Bazoomas. "But maybe that's the difference between life and art," said Ida. "No climax. No closure." Then sleep insisted again. And, this time, Ida did not resist. Asleep, she had the oddest dream. She was going to university. But not to study xenology, no. She was training to be a dentist. For some reason, it only took two years. In her dream, she was enormously happy to be in the process of evolving into a dentist. "The world is full of teeth," said Ida, rubbing her purple buttes together. Using her theodolite, she opened the mouth of a practice patient. "Don't hurt me," said the patient. "Don't do that AI thing on me," said Ida, crossly. "You're just a Suki-Suki sump, I know that." She started to drill, using a piece of sharpened icecream for the purpose. The patient was promptly sick, splattering Ida's face with a shower of red ants. The red ants bit. The bites were painful, and made Ida giddy. The pain was so bad that Ida woke up, and found her head spinning. Worse, she felt sick. She promptly threw up all over the floor. But that did nothing to solve the mounting pain. She was hot, and sweating. Her body felt like one big rash. "What's happening?" wailed Ida. No answer came. But, through a window, she saw a fractional moon, speaking in silence of cool nights and empty eternities. A disordered thought came to her: the coolness of the moon might save her. She staggered outside, and collapsed just outside the hut, and lost consciousness. The next morning, come sunup, Ida wakened, groggy but still alive. She felt a bit shaky, but was able to walk. And, half an hour down the trail, she found a sign which seemed to explain the events of the night. A sign set up for the benefit of people going in the direction she was coming from. "Uptrail cabins closed - termite countermeasures. Toxic danger - do not enter." Which led Ida to formulate two observations. Observation the first: Reality (even Known Reality) is not only more dangerous than you imagine, it is more dangerous than you can imagine. Observation the second: The doorstep is more dangerous than the journey. "Still," said Ida, "I'm sure it all ups my value to the Suki-Suki people. I mean, it'd have been a bit anti-climactic otherwise, wouldn't it?" That day, U-scampi did a long interview with Ida, and extracted from her the story of her original encounter with the alien Giggles, which apparently was planning on keeping her company for some time. The interview was barely finished when a couple of hunters happened along, and informed Ida that civilization was barely a day's walk distant. While walking out to civilization, Ida entertained wild dreams of fame and glory. She was a survivor of the moid, a discoverer of a new kind of alien, a true "thirsts of real people" survivor. She was going to be rich, and famous, and the toast of the entire Suki-Suki organization. A week later, however, shortly after her first TV appearances, Ida found herself face to face with a battery of very angry lawyers from the Suki-Suki Bottling Corporation. "You, Ida Brahma, have appeared on TV throughout the Zafari Jahar in the possession of what is, patently, a succession of cans of bootleg Suki-Suki." "Bootleg?" said Ida. "No doubt about it. The cans you drank from - and you appear to have drunk a couple of dozen, at least - bear none of the twelve authenticating marks of a true Suki-Suki can. You are a consumer of pirated products. And the law is clear. A consumer of pirated products is a pirate in her own right." And Ida realized, with the despair of the truly doomed, that her destiny was the law courts. If she was lucky - if she was very, very lucky - she might just possibly survive to run an obedience school for dogs. |
This story,"Lost in the Moid", was first published in the Canadian magazine Challenging Destiny No. 10, July 2000 (St. Marys, Canada, ISSN 1206-6656) (pp 7-27; 7,314 words) (science fiction). |
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