Above His Station (16 page)
‘Close your eyes.’
‘Now do we get to sing hymns?’ asked the rat.
‘And most importantly…shut up!’ said Astrid. ‘I haven’t attempted transcendental transference for some time and it takes all my willpower – which, incidentally, is the only thing that has been stopping me from eating you this past hour.’
As I opened one eye I saw the rat take a nervous gulp. And then I saw Astrid raise herself up to her full height, which was quite extensive; she was long and thin like a reed. She began swaying gently from side to side, doing a very good impression of a metronome, muttering in a strange, guttural language that was almost inaudible had I not been downwind of her. Balanced on the very tip of her tail, she was almost as tall as I was. Her swaying gradually increased until she began rotating in a complete circle. Around and around she went like a Whirling Dervish, and I was forced to take a step back. Soon she was just a blur, her rotations creating a mini-tornado, whipping up the leaves on the grass beneath her. I felt something tugging at my clothes and I looked down half-expecting to see a small child, or even a dwarf, and what I saw made me wish that I’d kept my eyes shut. I watched my boots liquefy, along with my feet, my ankles and trousers, my anorak and my arms within its sleeves. Throughout my entire body I was gradually losing solidity, one atom at a time. I felt my bones lose their strength as my flesh turned intangible. I could see the nerves and muscles flexing inside my ghostly hand. I tried to scream but my mouth wouldn’t work and then I watched my skeleton step out of my body and dive skull-first into Astrid’s whirling maelstrom.
And then I saw my flesh follow after it.
‘You know that feeling you get when you think you’re going to puke?’ said the rat.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I’ve got that.’
The rat then proceeded to vomit into my anorak pocket and I wondered if my day could possibly get any worse. Well, yes it could actually. I had just been transcendentally transported approximately 1.6 billion miles across the Solar System in the blink of an eye and I now found myself stood inside a gigantic glass dome on the surface of one of the moons of Uranus with a queasy rat and an alien snake. There was nothing that I could have done to prepare myself for this moment. The opportunity would simply never have presented itself.
‘I hope you’re ready, human,’ Astrid said. ‘This will be a trial in more ways than one.’
‘I’m ready,’ I said. ‘I suppose I have to be, don’t I?’
‘And what about you, rodent?’ enquired Astrid. ‘How do you feel?’
The rat then proceeded to vomit once again, this time down the front of my anorak.
I said that my day could get worse, didn’t I? And as I looked up at the enormous building towering in front of me, I knew there was more to come. These were the offices of the Sentient Life-form Ethical Treatment and Valued Diversity Tribunal Committee. Astrid had told me very little about what any of that actually meant, but she assured me that they were the only ones in the Universe that would hear my plea to save humanity, so I had little choice but to give the snake my complete trust and hope that she wasn’t leading me astray.
‘Ashtray,’ said the rat.
‘Pardon me?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘You said ‘
ashtray
’,’ I told it.
‘I did? When?’
‘Just then!’ I exclaimed. ‘I didn’t even know you smoked.’
‘I don’t,’ said the rat, unaware that it had said anything at all. ‘How peculiar.’
*
I’d take a gamble and say that you’ve never had to walk a few steps behind an alien snake as it makes its winding way across a gravel footpath towards a bone-white municipal building on one of the moons of Uranus, but if by some bizarre stroke of misfortune I’m wrong then you will no doubt concur that it’s incredibly frustrating. I had to keep stopping and starting, careful not to step on the ruddy thing! In the end I was forced to slow my pace so much that to the casual onlooker it might have looked as if I was standing still.
If I can take a brief moment to describe the SLETVDTC building and the surrounding area, it was a bit like someone had picked up the sort of council offices that you might find in any reasonably-sized town and plonked them on a moon orbiting an alien planet. The huge glass dome above my head encapsulated the building and its extended grounds completely, even going so far as to supply synthetic oxygen into the environment, so Astrid informed me. Outside the dome it looked very much how you might imagine. The terrain was a sort of pebbly/chalky substance littered with rocks of all shapes and sizes. I had no idea how extensive Puck’s diameter was (although subsequent reading taught me that it was no more than 90 miles from one end to the other). I always think of moons as being quite small things – they look small from our perspective anyway – yet apparently Puck was one of the largest moons of Uranus. It was still big for something supposedly small, but it was undeniably tranquil with it. I thought it was a shame that I couldn’t step outside the dome, just for a moment, and then I could say that I’d officially walked on the moon (all right, so it wasn’t
our
moon, but let’s not split hairs). But then I wondered who I would be able to say it to. There was no one else, apart from the rat and the snake and they were both here too, so my boast would hardly have been met with a jealous remark.
We walked up the steps of the SLETVDTC offices and I felt my heart lose a few beats of time. I was unusually nervous. I disliked bureaucracy in any form, but seeing as this was a necessary evil in righting a terrible wrong, I put my nerves down to selfishness and followed Astrid as she approached a long reception desk just inside the revolving doors.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the old Disney version of
Robin Hood
, but in that there’s this snake that uses its tail like a helicopter’s rotor blades so it can fly about. Well, all I can say is that it’s a good job that Uncle Walt is dead because he would surely have consulted his legal team once he’d seen Astrid the reticulated python do exactly the same trick. She hovered a good 4 feet off the ground with her tail whipping up a storm, forcing the man behind the reception desk to hastily snatch up all his paperwork that took to the wind.
I say ‘man’, but in all honesty he wasn’t a man at all. He was an alien, as you might not be too surprised to hear considering my current location, and he was a rather strange one too. I say ‘he’, but really I’m only assuming this because he had a beard. I’m not usually one to point out people’s disabilities, but he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Victorian circus sideshow. He had four arms; two normal-sized ones and then two smaller ones (like a child’s) just beneath them. It looked a bit like someone was stood behind him with their arms wrapped around his waist. Besides his appendage affliction (again, I’m assuming. For all I know his extra arms made his administration duties that much easier to contend with) the alien had only one eye, but to compensate for this deficiency it was a big one, located just off-kilter to the middle of his head.
‘How y’all doing today?’ he said, enthusiastically. ‘My name is Serge, how can I help you?’
‘We’d like to see Chief Arbitrator Bloch,’ said Astrid, hovering a bit higher so that Serge could see her above the desk.
He pursed his lips. ‘The Arbitrator’s very busy today. Can I please take your name?’
‘Professor Astrid Serpiente from the Asclepian Research and Stellar Exploration department…at least, I used to be. It’s been some time since I was at my post. Long story, so I won’t bore you with it.’
‘How very thoughtful of you,’ said Serge, picking up a 1970’s style trim-phone from the reception desk. ‘Arbitrator Bloch’s schedule is totally maxed out, but let me just check with his secretary and see if we can get something in the diary for later in the week, okay? Okay.’
‘No, it’s
not
okay!’ I snapped, slapping my hand down on top of the telephone – shocking myself, if I’m honest. ‘We’ve only got 6 days left to lodge an appeal that could save billions of lives, so tell his bloody secretary to get something in the diary
now!
’
‘You know,’ Serge took an anxious gulp, ‘I think I’ll just tell his secretary to get something in the diary now.’
‘Good boy,’ I told him.
After a hushed conversation on the telephone, eventually Serge beamed me an especially false smile. ‘If you’d like to make your way over to the lifts, the Arbitrator’s office is on the seventh floor. Come straight out and turn left and it’s the last door at the end of the corridor. Now…if you’ll excuse me?’ Serge rushed off to the far end of the reception desk to answer a telephone that wasn’t ringing.
I turned around to see the astonished faces of my two companions.
‘Way to go, Gramps!’ congratulated the rat. ‘That told the smarmy git.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Astrid. ‘You were most
surprising
…for a human.’
‘You’re a fine one to talk!’ I said, with a grin. ‘You never mentioned anything about being a bloody professor!’
A pale-green flourish seeped across the snake’s scaly face and she looked almost embarrassed. ‘I don’t usually like to brag about being in the Asclepian Research and Stellar Exploration department, but it does open a lot of doors.’
The rat started to laugh.
‘What’s so funny?’ asked Astrid.
‘Oh…nothing,’ the rat said, stifling a snuffled snigger.
‘Spit it out,’ said Astrid. ‘It’s because I’m a professor, is that it? I don’t know why you should think that’s so hilarious. I told you that I was part of an interstellar exploration team, and being in the A.R.S.E space program is a highly skilled job! It requires
years
of training before you go up.’
‘Oh, I’ll bet it does,’ giggled the rat.
‘I’m being serious!’ said Astrid. ‘I’ll have you know that I spent four years at the Academy of Galactic Studies getting my meta-physics degree, plus a three year internship at the Outer-Stella Corporation, and it was another two years on top of that before I was selected to join the
Viper Explorer
’s crew!’
‘So did you have to pull your finger out before entering the A.R.S.E?’
‘I was the only student in my year to graduate the Academy of Galactic Studies with honours, if that’s what you mean,’ said Astrid.
‘And would you say you’re big in the A.R.S.E department?’
‘I used to be,’ replied Astrid. ‘But don’t forget, I’ve been stuck on Earth for years.’
‘Were you high up in the A.R.S.E? All the way up as far as you could go?’
‘I was on my way to the top, I suppose,’ replied Astrid. ‘The first thing you learn when you join any corporate-funded organisation is to look out for number one.’
‘Or number two,’ added the rat.
‘If you want to get noticed, it’s a case of keeping your nose clean and being able to deal with all the crap that comes your way,’ said Astrid.
It was all too much for the rat, and it erupted into uncontrollable spasms of laughter.
Astrid rolled her eyes at me. ‘You know, I really don’t get that creature sometimes.’
‘It grows on you after a while,’ I said.
‘So does herpes,’ called Astrid, hovering over in the direction of the lifts.
Once she was out of earshot, the rat grinned up at me. ‘No sense of humour, that’s her problem.’
‘She’s an academic, what did you expect?’ I said. ‘But I do wish you’d stop trying to wind her up all the time. At least until after we’ve managed to lodge this appeal. Not to mention the fact that she’s our only way of getting back home to Earth. Without her we could be stuck on Puck!’
‘As moons go, it’s not that bad,’ said the rat. ‘It’s just a bit lacking in atmosphere.’
The rodent held its expression until I started to smile and then its face cracked.
‘You’re incorrigible, do you know that?’ I said to it. ‘Now…stop mucking about. If this Bloch character is as slippery as Astrid says he is, we won’t get a second chance to make a first impression.’
It’s a fact that my dislike of bureaucracy extends to lawyers, solicitors, briefs – how ever you want to label them. In my (admittedly limited) experience, they tended to have thinning hair dragged across their bald scalps, and they wear spectacles with inch-thick lenses so that when they turn their heads to the side they look like line-caught mackerel. They sit in dusty back offices last decorated in the late 1970’s, with the ceilings stained by cigarette smoke and furnished with battleship-grey filing cabinets and shelves of law journals they’ve never even read. They tend to be over-officious and under-efficient, and even popping a letter into a post-box comes with an administration charge. I had a few dealings with our local solicitor when Molly died, sorting out the financial arrangements and things. She was a woman though, so obviously her hair was Diana Dors bleach-blonde and bouffant, but she still had the same vacant look in her eyes, as if she’d meant to put something on her shopping list but couldn’t remember what it was. David told me that I would be better off sorting it all out myself, but when I asked him to pop round and give me a hand, he gave me some half-hearted excuse about it “
not really being his area of expertise
”. Even Claire declined (politely, of course), saying that “
sorting out probate and all that stuff is better dealt with by someone who knows what they’re doing
” - so I had no choice but to bundle all the letters, invoices and statements into a pile and dump them on the solicitor’s desk. I think her name was Joyce (they’re always called something like Joyce or Jill or Sandra or Barbara, I’ve noticed) and I told her in no uncertain terms that Molly had looked after all the paperwork and bills over the years and all I’d done was pay for it all. I didn’t even know the name of the building society where our savings were kept until I found the chequebook in Molly’s drawer. It cost me an absolute packet to get it all sorted out, but at least I didn’t have to bother with it. That was some months back now, but that was the last time I had ever had to deal with a legal type – up until the moment I found myself in a modern-style office with wooden flooring and white-painted walls, sat across a transparent Perspex desk from a bloated alien that bore an uncanny resemblance to the product of a union between a giant slug and a sack of potatoes.
