Thursday, February 09, 2006

Chapter Eleven: In All the Wrong Places.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have taken that shortcut through the Teigo system.

Sure, it saved me a week or two (at first), and was a lot more exciting than the more conventional route around the asteroid fields. But somehow I was left feeling that it hadn't really been worth it. That maybe my ship had looked (and worked) better in one piece.

Still, it wasn't all bad. The Teigans who had picked me up were very nice people, and the ship's bar served a wicked Purple Frogspawn[1]. And another. And then a few more after that. I lost track around the seventh green-powder-crusted glass, and stopped caring a couple of drinks after that. Already things were looking up. So what if I was stuck on this ship for the next three weeks, and going in the wrong direction? So what if the only salvageable bits of my ship were one of the flashy bleeping panels from the cockpit and my teddy, Teddy?[3] All that mattered right now was that I had enough alcohol in my blood stream to keep me floating in this warm, fuzzy bubble of warm fuzziness for the rest of the week.

I was about to try and extend it to next week, when a slightly blurred figure stepped up to my table and sat down. Then it tilted gently to the left, along with the rest of the universe. After a few moments it reached over and pushed me upright again.

The figure launched into a lengthy monologue accompanied by expressive gestures and a lot of raising and lowering of the voice. I understood none of it, however, because I was beginning to feel slightly sea-sick and had to concentrate very hard on keeping the world at least vaguely the right way up. Eventually the figure stopped talking, in a way that made it clear that I was expected to contribute something to the discussion.

"Mmm," I said vaguely. That felt safe enough. Now if only the room would stop spinning quite so much, maybe I could work out what else to say.

The figure sighed blurrily and fiddled with something I couldn't make out for a few moments. It did something to my glass, and pointed. Drink? Now that I could do.

I did, and the world swam into painful focus. The figure opposite me dissolved into the ship's captain. It wasn't much of an improvement. Teigans are a very odd-looking species[4], their most notable features being a very thick skull and large head, and twig-like body and bizarrely long arms that they keep rolled up to their shoulders like hoses. When Teigans are agitated, their arms begin to flap uncontrollably. Right now, the captain looked as if he was about to lift off.

I stared at him, angry now that the world had lost its pink fuzzy glow. "Is something wrong, captain?" I asked. I didn't really care, but I hoped the question would annoy him.

The captain's mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and I could see his pale green teeth retracting nervously. His arms flapped even faster than before, and he started to turn slightly orange. Finally and with visible effort, he calmed down, and started to speak.

"Well, y...--"

Whatever he had been about to say dissolved into a strangled gurgle. His left arm had suddenly shot up and wound itself tightly around his neck until his eyes bulged. His mouth opened wide. His teeth were trying to escape. He slid sideways out of his seat and onto the floor, where he began to writhe, his right arm tugging at the one around his throat weakly. I began to wonder if I should try and help him, but I was still feeling a little resentful about my whole situation. In any case, it was too late. The captain had stopped writhing, twitching, and generally showing signs of life. I prodded him gingerly with my toe, but there was no reaction.

I looked around the mess hall. It had been empty when I came in here yesterday, and it was empty now. Teigans aren't really big on drinking, or indeed eating. I sauntered over to the bar, as nonchalantly as I could manage, and peered over the counter through the kitchen door. The bartender was doing something interesting to some sort of red wobbly blob that occasionally twitched. He didn't seem to have noticed the commotion in the main room.

"Excuse me?" I called.

He dropped the thing he'd been prodding, which immediately began edging towards the other end of the table, and stepped up to the bar. "Yes, madam? Another one?"

"No, thank you. I was just wondering if you could shed any light on what just happened to your captain..." I stepped aside, and pointed at the prone figure. The bartender smiled amiably. "Oh, that's because he was going to tell you about urk--" The bartender stopped smiling. His left arm wrapped itself around his neck, his hand took hold of his throat, and together they strangled him before I could even lean over the counter. He fell over limply, and the now lifeless arm began to untangle itself.

Well, this was interesting.

I headed out of the mess hall, remembered something, went back to the bar to fetch the biggest bottle of alcohol -- it didn't really matter what kind -- I could find, and then left the mess hall.

It wasn't a very big ship, which was a relief, because I had no idea where I was going. As soon as I'd come on board yesterday I'd asked my way through to the alcohol, and stayed there. Outside the mess hall was a corridor that I could have sworn I'd never seen before. I stared left and right for a little while. Both sides of the corridor looked entirely identical and unremarkable. I shrugged, and turned left.

Five minutes later I was in the engine room, sharing my liquor with an elderly Teigan engineer. I'm not sure how that happened -- I certainly didn't intend to share it with him, or anyone else, for that matter. In fact, it wasn't really sharing, because that implies that I got to drink some of it, too. So: Five minutes later I was in the engine room, having my liquor stolen by an elderly Teigan engineer.

When he'd emptied the bottle he looked at me, or at least somewhere half a metre left of me. "What can I do for you?" he asked, swaying gently.

I explained what had just happened in the mess hall. A wide grin spread across the engineer's face, and he began to laugh in a rather disconcertingly high-pitched voice. His laughter dissolved into a coughing fit, and he finally stopped.

After a brief silence, he said: "They were trying to tell you about urgleurrrgh--"


An hour later I had reached the bridge, and two conclusions. One, that there was some sort of secret that the Teigans weren't allowed (or indeed able) to talk about, and two, that they were the most stupid species in this universe. Every single Teigan I'd run into had tried to tell me why his colleague had just dropped dead, and every single one had committed involuntary suicide a second later. Even seeing what happened when someone else tried to tell me didn't stop them.

Now I was standing on the empty bridge[5], and realised that I was the only person left alive on the ship. Which suited me just fine, actually.

I surveyed the array of flashing lights, screens displaying unfamiliar symbols, and buttons and levers of all colours and sizes. I sat down in the large swivel chair in the centre of the room, placed Teddy on the console in front of me, and started looking for the button that would turn the ship around.

--
[1] The recipe is a well-guarded secret, and might well involve actual frogspawn. It's a famous cocktail not because it tastes particularly good[2], or looks particularly stylish[2], but because it contains so much alcohol that no one has ever tasted it sober.

[2] It doesn't.

[3] Not technically a part of the ship, but integral to its working properly, nevertheless. I'd lost him once, and spent an entire month in entirely the wrong part of space because my navigational computer broke without telling me. Only when Teddy turned up again the computer came back online. Just one of those things.

[4] Well, not as odd as, say, the herd of giant red buttons that live on a small green bicycle currently drifting through the Argo galaxy. But pretty odd, as far as vaguely human-shaped aliens go.

[5] Empty except for the dozen or so bodies strewn around the floor, that is.

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