Colin Greenland - Take Back Plenty

COLIN GREENLAND

TAKE BACK

PLENTY

Contents

Part One

Encounters at the Moebius Strip

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78910 11 12

Part Two

Lost in the Caverns of Plenty

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Part Three

The Many Faces of Truth

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Part Four

Captives of the Goddess of Love

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Part Five

At Luncheon with Brother Felix

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68

To the women behind the wheel

Part One

Encounters at the Moebius Strip

1

“Nabe?” said the port inspector.

“Jute,” she told him.

“Giv’d nabe?”

“Tabitha.”

“Status?”

“Owner operator.”

“Shib?”

“The Alice Liddell,” said Tabitha.

He lifted his close-shaven muzzle and looked at her hard over the monitor of his reader. “Tybe and

registratiod ob shib,” he said.

“Oh, right,” said Tabitha. “Bergen Kobold. BGK zero — ”

She shot her cuff and checked her wrist monitor. She could never remember the Alice’s registration

number without looking it up, though she saw it twenty times a day. “Zero-nine-zero-five-nine.”

“Burbose ob bisit?”

“I’ve got to see a man about a job,” she said. “Look, could you hurry it up, do you think?”

But he was an Eladeldi, he was entering everything with his paw stylus and checking her record. His

tongue was hanging out.

Tabitha sighed in annoyance and drummed her fingers on the desktop.

She looked around the hall. All the other queues were moving right along. Locals simply had to slot a

tag and step through the gate. Just her luck to get an Eladeldi.

She knew what he was going to say next as soon as he opened his little purple mouth.

“Records show registratiod ob debectib axis lock crystal,” he said. “Two budths ago.”

“Yes,” said Tabitha.

“Not yet reblaced,” he observed.

“No,” she said. “That’s why I’ve got to see a man about a job.”

But he still had to print out yet another copy of the Capellan regulations about acceptable levels of

degradation on axis lock crystals before he let her through the gate.

She stuffed the printout into her bag, where — somewhere — three other copies were already

lurking, and looked at the time.

“Shit,” she said.

The commercial terminal was closed for some kind of police operation. Tabitha found herself being

diverted down a long underground tunnel to the civil concourse. It was swarming with people. Spacers in

livery jostled with porters, human and drone. Eager evangelists pressed prophecies of the imminent Total

Merge into the paws, fans and hands of glazed-looking tourists. Holos for local businesses, net stations

and archaeological attractions competed for attention, whooping and gyrating on their daises. The

hubbub was even more deafening than usual.

Of course: it was carnival.

Tabitha’s headset suddenly locked into an ambient channel and began to tinkle with tinny salsa.

Irritated, she snatched out the earpiece and let the set dangle round her neck. She had to get a move on if

she was going to make it to the city before noon. Hoisting her bag, she sidestepped a cargo float, waded

through a crowd of squabbling Perks and elbowed between two Alteceans and a city guide they were

trying to haggle. Stepping high in the light gravity and brandishing the bag before her, she ploughed her

way out into the open air.

Outside, it was dusty and cold. Grit whirled in the biting desert winds. Half-naked children with slit

eyes and matchstick limbs worked the emerging crowd with grim efficiency. Tabitha Jute pulled up the

collar of her old foil jacket and strode off past the concession stalls, looking for transport.

The queues for air taxis would be impossible. She took the slidewalk to the canal. The queues there

were just as bad. Fortunately most of the tourists were after a robot hover, which she couldn’t afford

anyway. Then - a stroke of luck - she cut in front of a white family still cooing over the colour of the

water, and managed to sling her bag into an arriving boat.

“The Moebius Strip,” she called.

The cries of the annoyed sightseers dying away behind them, they left the wharf and slid off

downstream. Tabitha sat in the stern and watched the olive groves and sponge gardens on either bank

swiftly give way to shipyards, silica refineries and air plants. In the distance for a moment the complicated

towers of Schiaparelli rose. Then coral pink walls of rock closed about them as they took the deep cut

into Wells.

“Here for carnival?” the driver asked Tabitha, in tones of boredom and resentment which didn’t

lessen when Tabitha said no. She was a Vespan, brooding with hostile humility, like all of them. The

atmosphere had mottled her long cheeks with brown blotches. She complained about the cold.

“It was better before they knock the dome down,” she said. “Was you ever here when we had the

dome?”

“Before my time,” said Tabitha.

“We had good warm then,” said the driver. “Then they knock the dome down. They say they gone

put up solar.” Her mobile features squeezed themselves around sulkily. “They never. They still argue,

argue, who gone pay.”

She lifted her elbows. She looked like a bundle of spoiled green peppers in a brown felt overcoat.

Her glossy lobes were withered and shrunken, the soft pouches of her face sagging in permanent despair.

Tabitha wondered how long the woman had been scratching a living on the waterways, complaining to

uncaring passengers, never quite summoning up the cash or the strength to take the long haul home.

They swept along the crimson canal into the purlieus of the new city. There the cries of the

watersellers and the buzz of taxis came wafting on the wind, strident and echoing across the dirty water.

A team of Palernian prostitutes, their wool in frizzy perms, sat smoking and dangling their legs in the

sunlight on the steps below the Malibu Arcade. They hooted and waved at the boats as they whizzed by.

Tabitha’s driver started to complain about them. Tabitha shifted forward along the cracked red bench.

“I’ve got some calls to make,” she said.

She ducked into the phone hood, unreeled the plug from her headset and plugged in. The scratched

little screen played her a little tune and showed a phone company logo. Then there were ads, more than

ever for the sake of the season. In a window in the bottom left hand corner of the screen Tabitha

watched her credit flickering merrily away.

She tried the Moebius Strip, but all she got was an answering routine. She tried another number. She

waited.

They passed a sulphur felucca with a crew of children. They were towing a desert manta on a long

black line. It dipped and fluttered in the chilly air, its wings drab and flaky.

At last Tabitha got through. On the phone an oily face cracked a smile as she identified herself. “In for

the carnival?”

“No, business,” she said. “Carlos, how much is an axis lock crystal these days?”

“What you got?”

“A Kobold.”

“Still driving that old thing? She’s gonna fall apart on you one of these days.”

“That’s what she keeps telling me,” said Tabitha. “Come on, Carlos, I’m in a hurry, how much?”

He told her. She swore.

He shrugged.

“That’s what you get for flying antiques,” he said unsympathetically. “Can’t get me parts.” He

scratched his ear. “I could do you a great deal on a Navajo Scorpion.”

“Piss off, Carlos.”

She thought of the Alteceans, back at the port, snuffling over their bags and parcels. “Look, have you

seen Captain Frank lately?”

“A crystal for a Kobold, yeah, that’s about ol’ Frank’s speed,” he grinned. “Try the flea market.”

“Thanks very much, Carlos.”

“Cheer up, Tabitha,” he bade her. “It’s carnival!”

2

Carnival in Schiaparelli. The canals are thronged with tour buses, the bridges festooned with banners.

Balloons escape and fireworks fly. The city seethes in the smoky red light. Though officers of the Eladeldi

can be seen patrolling everywhere, pleasure is the only master. Shall we go to the Ruby Pool? To watch

the glider duels over the al-Kazara? Or to the old city, where the cavernous ancient silos throb with the

latest raga, and the wine of Astarte quickens the veins of the young and beautiful? A thousand smells, of

sausages and sweat, phosphorus and patchouli, mingle promiscuously in the arcades. Glasses clash and

cutlery clatters in the all-night cantinas where drunken revellers confuse the robot waiters and flee along

the colonnades, their bills unpaid, their breath steaming in the thin and wintry air.

Reflected off the oily water, a thousand coloured lights flicker and glow on the scoured faces of the

buildings. A thousand noises batter the attendant ear, calliopes and stridulators, cannonades and sirens,

all mingling with the babble and slur of happy voices. Even the screeching rasp of a police hover forcing

its slow way upstream can scarcely cut the din. The cop, a human, leans on his screamer, twice, and

stalls. In the shiny black carapace of his servo-armour he looks stiff and offended, like a gigantic beetle

beset by ants.

They pulled in at Mustique Boulevard, below the skate bowl. Grubby urchins stood on the wall,

sucking steaming mossballs and shouting abuse at each other.

“This isn’t the Moebius Strip,” said Tabitha.

The morose boatwoman jerked an elbow. “Close as I can, sister. Grand’s closed for the procession.”

Annoyed, Tabitha paid her and leapt easily to the landing stage. Her jacket flashed and sparkled with

sodium light, her boots crunched on the sandy boards.

Picture her, Tabitha Jute: not as the net media show her, heroine of hyperspace, capable, canny and

cosmetically enhanced, smiling confidently as she reaches with one hand for the spangled mist of the

Milky Way; but a small, weary young woman in a cracked foil jacket and oil-stained trousers,

determinedly elbowing herself through an exuberant Schiaparelli crowd. She stands 162 in her socks,

broad in the shoulder and the hip, and weighs about 60k at 1g, which she very rarely is. Her hair is

darkest ginger, cut in a conservative spacer’s square crop. Her skin is an ordinary milky coffee, and

freckles easily, which she hates. Here she was, in after a stiff haul back from Chateaubriand, spacelagged

and frazzled, needing a shower. There were dark olive bags under her hazel eyes. You wouldn’t have

given her a second glance that evening, amid the florid, the fancy and the flash.

Not that there was much of that around here. This was definitely the scrag end of the festivities. She

ducked beneath the concrete walkway and strode along an avenue of makeshift stalls lashed together

from pipes and planking, weaving a path between the strolling browsers. Overhead, lines of

biofluorescents snaked from pole to pole, tied on with string. Tabitha had come to the flea market after

all. Some of the stallholders had made an effort for the carnival. There were masks and bunting

decorating their displays of scuffed cassettes and second-hand knitting. Here were bright clothes:

everything from aluminium shoes to cheap and garish movie shirts of winking kittens and prancing

unicorns and swivelling strippers. Collectors rummaged in boxes of sunglasses, discussed the merits of

filched scraps of cruiseliner trim. Two scrawny women in tiny dresses sat behind a table of china animals,

painting each other’s faces by the warmth of a dilapidated reactor stove. One of them whistled at Tabitha

as she squeezed by.

A decommissioned shop robot leaned from under its canopy and fired a burst of sublim at her, filling

her head with sun-dappled pools, the smell of honeysuckle, desire. A yellow child tried to interest her in a

jar of dead flies. Round the corner were the Alteceans in their cardigans, their conical caps of brown felt,

presiding over accumulations of human refuse. On high stools they squatted, hunched in their habitual

dolour, their snouts inflamed and dripping in the irritant air. They snuffled and sighed to each other,

beckoning Tabitha, knowing a haulier when they saw one.

“Axis lock crystal?” she shouted. “For a Bergen Kobold?”

The Alteceans wheezed moistly at her, waving their paws at their mounds of surplus respirators and

dismantled heat-exchangers as if these treasures were all one could possibly require in life. Tabitha spent

a valuable minute dragging out from under a heap something that looked promising but proved to be a

caustic diffraction coil. She threw it back. She was wasting time.

Dodging a band of spacers in Shenandoah colours braying drunkenly out of a bar and shoving one

another about, Tabitha pushed ahead into the crowd that lined the banks of the Grand Canal. She

circumvented fat tourists in fancy dress, civic marshals in baggy overalls, then a personal camera drone,

its head swivelling back and forth as it scanned the canal for its owner at home. A sailing ship was

passing, its mylar sails flapping in the gusty wind. Behind it crawled a hoverbus of MivvyCorp employees

having a party. Through the rigging of the schooner a five of Palernians could be seen, making a nuisance

of themselves on a flimsy raft. They were hooting and flapping their great woolly arms as they tried to

climb on to a private jetty. A tall woman leaned from a balcony and emptied a bucket of water over

them. Hanging over parapets and out of windows, clustering in the streets and on the rooftops, the crowd

whistled and applauded.

As Tabitha was trying to get past a couple of coked-up Thrants in expensive shakos and boiled

leather, one of the Palernians turned a clumsy somersault, and one of the others pushed her into the canal.

They yoicked and whooped. A spark-boat sputtered by, filling the air with the smell of ozone. In it a

couple in electric suits were arcing and fizzing to the hefty thump of a jumpbox. The Palernians bounded

up and down in excitement, flooding the raft and endangering their coolers. As a cop arrived, his Cyclops

helmet protruding above the heads of the crowd, the woman was lowering her bucket at the end of a

rope, shouting to a gaggle of little painted boys for a refill.

Tabitha leaned out over the railing. She could see the Moebius Strip. It was only another hundred

metres: there, just beyond the float full of oversized Capellans, dummies, their huge bald heads bobbing

with grave benevolence as if conferring blessings on the excited crowd.

Carnival in Schiaparelli. Cold, dusty city, full of holidaymakers and noise and smells and dirt.

Wherever you go, now, you will meet people who will tell you that Schiaparelli was a fateful city for

Tabitha Jute. It was in Schiaparelli that she met Tricarico, who brought her aboard the Resplendent

Trogon, which led her into the presence of Balthazar Plum — and if it hadn’t been for all that, she would

never have acquired the Alice in the first place. Likewise, here she was now, years later, in Schiaparelli,

heading for a fateful encounter which would completely and utterly change her life, my life, all our lives.

She was at the top of the steps leading down to the front door of the Moebius Strip. She could see the

lights inside, the drinkers and gamblers.

And then the Perks came, scurrying up the steps on all fours like rats out of a cellar.

3

Tabitha made a mistake. She made the mistake of trying to go forward, down the steps, through the

upcoming Perks.

“Hey, woman! Woman watch it!”

An oily-pelted male with piercing green eyes reared up under her feet, knocking her sprawling on her

bottom.

At once they were all around her, perching up on their hindlegs like scrawny otters in black leather

and chrome earbands.

Not about to argue, Tabitha started to get her feet under her.

They grabbed her. Twenty thorny little paws caught hold of her jacket, her trousers, her arms. They

scrabbled at her bag.

“Hey! Get off!”

They pulled her down on her back again. She willowed in the flimsy gravity. As she scraped her heels

against the steps, trying for purchase, the alpha male jumped up on to her hip, then down between her

legs. He stood there in her crotch, weaving sinuously from side to side, hunching his shoulders, his flat

little head squealing down into her face.

“Cheeeeeeee!”

Tabitha sat up fast, jerking her hips back from the snarling Perk. Several of his cousins and brothers

went flying. She hauled her arm from the grip of two more and jabbed a finger at the little alien.

“Get out of my way!”

“In our way, woman.”

“Cheee!” they all went. ”Cheeeeee!”

The feathers were all bristling up the backs of their heads, on the tiny muscular shins that protruded

from the legs of their breeches. They flexed their claws on their medallions, up and down the zips of their

jerkins. The ones she had just knocked down were on their feet again, hopping on the steps around her.

Some of them were clutching tubes of beer, bottles of chianti. The men had exaggerated their black

eye-sockets with kohl and mascara. They sneered at her, baring their tiny incisors. Their breath smelled

of stale fish.

“Whass’n hurry, woman?” said the Perk between her legs, taunting her. “Missa parade!”

Tabitha realised he was drank stupid. She cooled a degree or two. She hadn’t time for a fight.

Clutching her bag, she tried to get up again, but they were hanging on her shoulders.

“Get off me!”

“Whassa fire, woman? Whassa party, woman?”

He made a lunge at her. She threw up an arm, fending him off.

Another one, older, the barbs of his feathers going soft and ashy, burrowed under her raised arm.

“You tread on us! You’n knock us down!”

“Okay, I’m sorry! All right? I’m sorry! Now just let go of me, all right?”

She tried again to stand up. When the wiry little creatures obstructed her again, she hauled them off

their feet. They all squealed, “Cheee! Cheee!”

A couple came out of the Moebius Strip, a yellow woman in video shades and a black one in a

tubecoat, basilisk teeth plaited into her hair. They glanced at Tabitha encumbered with Perks, forcing

their claws from her arms, standing on one foot trying to shake one that was hanging on to her leg. The

women glanced at the fracas and stepped delicately aside on the steps as they passed by. The yellow one

muttered a remark to her companion, who laughed and sucked on a cigarette.

A tall man in a cloth cap came after, hurrying to catch them up. Tabitha heard his bootheels tap up the

steps behind her. She winced as long black claws met in the flesh above her elbow. It was like being

wrapped in barbed wire by a gang of fox terriers.

She heard something rip.

The Perks come from the third planet of a G class system in the region of Betelgeuse, where they live

in warrens, underground, which is perhaps why they took so readily to the tunnels of Plenty. There may

be something endemic to the more ferocious subterranean dweller about suspicion, aggression, an

unquestioning pack instinct backed up by heedless hostility to all outsiders. Leaving the deep hearth for

whatever reason, hunger, duty, sexual imperatives, you trot along the lightless, complicated corridors of

the buried labyrinth, their ambient odour a composite of you and all your kin. Suddenly you hear the

scrabble of claws coming in the opposite direction. Friend, foe, relative, rival? Behind you lie your

siblings, perhaps your own offspring, curled and mewing, tender in the warm dark. What option have you

in that moment of social uncertainty but to bare your teeth, to ready your claws?

At any rate, it seems to be so for the Perks. There is nothing Perks like so much as a good fight.

When the time came for civilisation on the planet of the Perks, they built war-trains, undermining engines,

mole bombs. It is unclear what motivated Capella to bestow the space drive on the little rodents. In all

possibility the Perks merely infested their own elusive craft, following their urge to burrow into whatever

comes along.

Tabitha lost all patience with them. She could see her goal ahead of her, so close she was practically

inside. She had struggled halfway across Schiaparelli to get there. She was not about to stop and engage

in a scrap on the very doorstep of the bar. Nor was she about to lose her jacket to a gaggle of

overdressed hooligans. With a yell she thrust herself at their leader.

The neck of the Perk is very long. It accounts for the curious, rather comical way they have of

standing perfectly upright and perfectly still while surveying their surroundings with a quick 240o swivel,

like a furry periscope. Tabitha seized her chief aggressor by the neck with both hands. She swept him off

his feet as the forward momentum of her lunge carried her upright, shedding Perks left and right with a

shake of her shoulders.

All might still have gone well. Or ill, depending on your view of all that happened in consequence. But

Tabitha’s blood was up. She flung the choking, clawing creature from her. She flung him into the Grand

Canal.

“Cheeeeeeee—!”

Instinctively drawing in his limbs and curling his long back, the Perk sailed out of her grasp and over

the edge of the steps like a furry stone in a leather jerkin. Horrorstruck for the instant, his cronies stood

and squawled with outrage. Spectators and bystanders on the canal bank turned and stared, not knowing

what it was that had flashed past them, hurtling towards the water. The filthy, carmine, oily water. The

water he never actually hit.

For at that moment, directly below the steps that led down to the Moebius Strip, the float of dummy

Capellans was purring serenely by.

Tabitha watched in diminishing triumph and mounting dismay as the Perk fell through the smoky air

and struck one of the huge statues directly on the head. With a crack audible above the gasp of the

crowd, the impact smashed a large hole in the fabric of the great white dome. Knocked from its invisible

supporting cradle of needle-thin tractor beams, the effigy swayed. It bowed its ruined head to its chest as

if to inspect the squealing assailant now hanging from its buckled shoulder with frantic claws. It swayed,

and continued to sway. Its arm fell off, clattering to the deck with the Perk still clinging to it. Its

benevolently smiling head fell off and bounced with a sickening crunch from the beam projector into

another of the statues, knocking it off the deck of the float and into the canal. Meanwhile, breaking apart

like a toppling chimneystack, its body collapsed and felled another, which threw up an arm as it went

down, as if thinking to save itself by grabbing hold of one of its remaining upright companions.

There was no hope it could save itself; nor any for Tabitha either. Standing staring appalled at the

devastation she had caused, she became aware that the Perks had not instantly attacked her in retaliation

for their leader’s ignominious defeat. Indeed, they had melted away into the crowd. The hand that fell

upon her arm was a paw; but not a tiny black-clawed paw, a hefty one with silky blue fur protruding

from the sleeve of a night-black uniform.

It was the cops.

4

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I can’t stand it in there, Alice.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, CAPTAIN?

I don’t want to talk about it.

Why do I do these things. Alice? Why do I get myself into things like this?

INSUFFICIENT DATA

Is that an answer?

NO, CAPTAIN. I SIMPLY MEANT THAT IF YOU DON’T TELL ME WHAT YOU’VE DONE I

CAN’T

MANUAL OVERRIDE

Sorry, Alice.

HELLO, CAPTAIN. WHY ARE YOU APOLOGISING TO ME?

Oh, nothing, Alice. Don’t worry about me. I’m just in a foul mood. I just wanted some company.

THAT SEEMS TO BE ABUNDANT INSIDE AT PRESENT, CAPTAIN.

That’s why I’m out here.

DO YOU WANT TO TELL ME ABOUT IT?

No.

TELL ME A STORY, THEN.

A story? I don’t know any stories. I’m from the Moon.

WE’VE NEVER BEEN TO THE MOON. HAVE WE?

It’s boring. Nothing happens there. Nothing happened to me until I got off the Moon.

BUT YOU WERE BORN ON THE MOON.

Yes, I was born on the Moon.

WHAT WAS THAT LIKE, BEING BORN?

I don’t know! I don’t remember.

THAT’S A PITY.

There’s nothing to remember. It’s a pit, the Moon. A dead end. A black hole.

THIS IS LUNA WE’RE SPEAKING OF, ISN’T IT.

Yes.

THOSE ARE METAPHORS, THEN.

Of course they’re bloody metaphors.

YOU ARE IN A FOUL MOOD.

Well, when you tell people you come from the Moon they always say. Really? And I say. Somebody has

to be. And they say. Well, yes, I suppose so.

The next thing is, especially if they’re Terrans, they say, I’ve been to the Moon. And I say.

Everybody’s been there, but they don’t have to live there. And they say. Well, yes, and they sort of

smile. They think. She’s got a chip on her shoulder. You can see them thinking it. I haven’t got a chip on

my shoulder. It’s them, always saying the same thing.

The other thing they say, if they’re Terrans, or actually, especially if they’re not, is. Well, you must

have spent a good deal of time on Good Old Mother Earth. And we didn’t. We went down twice, to see

grandma and grandpa. We hated it. Angie and me. We didn’t like grandma and grandpa, and we didn’t

like their gravity either. I fell out of a tree. We reckoned Earth was horrible and backward. They didn’t

even have network, where grandma and grandpa lived.

DID YOU NETWORK WITH ANGIE?

Oh yes, we all did, a lot, though nobody ever talked about it. Everybody had a secret identity, so you

could say what you liked and nobody knew who you really were. Networking was encouraged. It was

supposed to be educational. It was, as long as you skipped all the educational stuff. What was good was

the gossip and the lies. Angie was a Capellan princess in exile.

ARE THERE PRINCESSES ON CAPELLA? I DIDN’T KNOW THAT.

I don’t know, Alice. I don’t suppose anyone does. But that’s what you need on the Moon. To be a

Capellan princess in exile, I mean. Otherwise it’s all just civics classes, vacuum drill, t’ai chi, monthly

medicals, cleaning and maintenance rosters and not being able to go outside. Not that there’s anywhere

to go.

I had one place I used to go sometimes, when Angie was off with her friends. I’d take a bike and

head out from Posidon across the Lake of Dreams. If you went all the way across the Lake of Dreams

you’d end up in the Lake of Death. I always thought that was about right. Five minutes out of Posidon

there was no sign of humans, no sign anyone had been there ever. Just boring brown rock and shadows

black as the sky. You didn’t go in the shadows. It was too cold.

I’d put a tape on and turn the radio off. You weren’t supposed to turn the radio off, but I used to so

they couldn’t hear me singing along with the tape.

YOU DON’T SING MUCH THESE DAYS, DO YOU, CAPTAIN?

Be grateful. I talk to myself instead.

YOU TALK TO ME.

Same thing.

YOU CAN BE TERRIBLY RUDE SOMETIMES. I DON’T WONDER ANGIE DIDN’T WANT

TO PLAY WITH YOU.

I didn’t hang around with her much anyway. The only thing we ever did together was network. And

sometimes Dad used to take us down to Serenity, to see the ships.

It was at Serenity we lost Angie, a few years later. We liked it there, when we were kids, though I

suppose it wasn’t that brilliant, looking back. The Rush Years were well over. Nobody put in there

unless they had to. The starships passed us by. It was all just small stuff, tenders and shuttles. No

offence, Alice.

On the Moon, everyone’s into austerity and teamwork. Or like my mum and dad, who were as keen

as anyone to get off Earth, but hadn’t the gumption or the connections to get a work permit on an orbital.

We used to watch them arrive, looking dazed and disappointed. Nervous tourists who couldn’t afford or

probably couldn’t bear to go out any further, or bottom-rate passengers on a stopover. Fat couples in

vacation plaids, bouncing about like toddlers in the low g and cooing over the moondirt souvenir

jewellery. Bureaucrats with grey skin and grey denims. They were always arguing schedules with the

clerks and crowding the phone stations. My dad would say, Stay well away from them, he was always

afraid they were after him for all the taxes he hadn’t paid. Engineers with goggles on their headsets and

drones hovering at their heels. Netball teams from the Church of the Star Shepherd, all perfect bodies

and gleaming white teeth. Then you’d get a bunch of compulsory emigrants, once in a while, Indians or

Chinese, all wearing identical pyjamas and shuffling along in a crowd.

There weren’t even any interesting aliens. There were only Alteceans dragging black plastic bags

everywhere, and Perks, and Eladeldi, looking like big dogs dressed up in uniforms.

I wanted a dog, when I was a little girl.

DID YOU, CAPTAIN? THEY’RE MESSY CREATURES, AREN’T THEY, DOGS?

You’d go down very well on the Moon, Alice. The only dog I ever saw there was very clean, and very

small, only about ten centimetres high. It was a holo. There was one with a monkey in too, crammed in

this little shell with the side cut away so you could see in. There was only room for the monkey. Its mouth

was open, I didn’t like that, I thought it was screaming. The dog didn’t look very happy either. It was

white, with black spots.

I’M NOT SURE I FOLLOW THIS PART, CAPTAIN.

It was at the museum. The Museum of the Big Step. My mum used to take me when I was really little. I

always went straight to the dog and the monkey. They were with all the boring stuff at the beginning, the

primitive stuff all the other kids used to run past to get to the Frasque fighter. It was a display, a what do

you call it, diorama, showing the cruelties of Pre-Capellan flight. Then they had the first ‘aided’ flights —

that was what they called them then; the first skips; some of the disasters, the ships that disappeared.

There was the fighter, a crashed one they’d rebuilt, and some stirring stuff about how ‘we’ helped

Capella beat the Frasque. And in the middle there was an area open to space, just a circle of bare

surface with a window all the way round it, and a sign on the window that said it was the site of the

Capellan arrival in the solar system.

There was another diorama there, in front of the window. It had a man with a big bald head, wearing

a sheet and shiny sandals, saying hello to a couple of stupid-looking ‘astronauts’, they called them, in

clumsy old Gore-Tex suits. The Capellan was floating above the ground, standing on nothing, smiling.

There was something funny about it, as if it had a deliberate mistake you were supposed to spot or

something.

CAPELLANS DON’T MAKE MISTAKES, CAPTAIN.

That’s what dad used to say. Dad said, Keep away from Eladeldi, because everything they see goes

straight back to the Capellans. He said stay away from Perks too. I should have listened to him.

WHY DOES YOUR FATHER DISLIKE THEM?

Oh, dad isn’t fond of any kind of aliens, really. Dad didn’t even like the Capellan at the museum, the one

in the diorama, and he had a smile like a great big teddy bear. He looked as if he was going to pat the

astronauts on the head. They just looked startled.

Dad was happy enough on the Moon, really. It was the rest of us that were so bored.

WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR SISTER?

One day she was at Serenity and she met a boy from the Holy Sepulchre of the Expanded Neurosphere,

and he told her she didn’t have to be an imaginary princess any more. She could be a little bit of God

instead.

I didn’t know about God, but that was when I knew it was serious, when she told him her secret

identity. Mum and dad argued, but it was no good. Angie was into it all the way. The Great Network in

the Sky. Sockets, wetware, the lot. She was only on the Moon in transit after all, like everybody else.

Colin Greenland - Take Back Plenty

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