Fourth Bear (37 page)

“…suggested we taught binary as part of the open university’s language department—I ask you…”

“…binary keyboards are much simpler, of course—only one key…”

“…seen fusion bursts above the Plain of Squrrk…”

The conversation moved around to
Big Brother
after that, and the news that Cousin Eric had applied to be on the show but had been turned down because he
lacked
severe mental problems and it might have had a bad influence on the others.

“Pudding?” asked Abigail.

“Yes, please,” said Mary, who didn’t think she could eat just chips. Abigail vanished into the kitchen and then returned with
another
basket of chips.

“Dessert!” she announced to an approving chorus from the family.

“
More
chips?” said Mary, leaning closer to Ashley.

“Yes,” he replied, “only eaten this time with a spoon—does anyone want to play KerPlunk! after dinner?”

“Can I show you something?” said Ashley once the meal was over and they had played KerPlunk! twice, and Binary Scrabble, which was fundamentally flawed, since every possible combination of ones and zeros made a word and it was impossible
not
to put down all your tiles, anywhere you wanted and in any order, every single turn.

“Sure.”

Ashley took her outside, opened the garage door and beckoned her inside. He flicked on the lights to reveal a double garage that had most of the usual junk one might expect to find: a discarded weight-training machine, a bicycle or two, a power mower, tools and a workbench. It was all aligned, precisely, of course—order pervades every aspect of a Rambosian’s life. In the middle of the garage was a large object covered with a bedsheet.

“I tinker with this in my spare time,” announced Ashley, pulling off the sheet to reveal a translucent sphere about ten feet in diameter. It was entirely smooth, was floating about six inches off the floor, had no apertures and did not seem to contain anything at all.

“Amazing!” said Mary. “What is it?”

“Step aboard,” said Ashley. “If you think my Datsun is the last word in personal transportation, think again!”

And so saying, he stepped through the translucent covering and into the sphere. The surface just seemed to part when he touched it and then close again as soon as he passed through. Mary stared at it a little apprehensively and put out a hand to touch the surface, which felt soft and warm and parted away from her fingers.

“You’re not going to abduct me and then conduct medical experiments or something, are you?” she asked.

“It’s a distinct possibility.”

Mary smiled and stepped into the bubble, which parted and then re-formed around her. She felt the whole thing sink slightly, a bit like the suspension on a car.

“Have a seat,” said Ashley.

Mary looked around. There didn’t seem to be one.

“The ship is made of a living predictive polymer,” explained Ashley. “It will form itself under you.”

Mary went to sit down, and sure enough the surface of the bubble expanded and merged to form a seat beneath her.

“How does it work?” she asked, awestruck.

“I’m not entirely sure.”

“I thought you guys were some sort of advanced super-race or something?”

“I don’t know where you got
that
idea,” he replied with an amused squeak. “Do you know how a cell phone works?”

“Not really. Something digital and radio waves, towers… and stuff.”

“It’s the same with this. There’s antigravitons and bioconducive plastoids in it somewhere, but I’m not too clear on the details.”

Ashley placed his central sucker digit on the only control that could be seen anywhere inside the strange craft—a single push-button switch.

“One button to control all this?” said Mary. “That’s it?”

“It’s a new development,” explained Ashley, pressing the button on and off so fast it sounded like a staccato bumblebee. “We used to have two buttons—one for on and one for off, but then after about forty thousand years someone pointed out you could actually do the same job with one. It destroyed the switch industry on Rambosia almost overnight. Hang on.”

The globe rose another six inches off the floor and rotated slowly to the right, then reversed into the tool bench, knocking over a half-built birdhouse that Roger had told them all about earlier.

“Oops!” said Ashley. “Sorry. We left Rambosia before I could take my test.”

He made another series of rapid clicks on the button, and the globe rotated again to the right and floated out the open garage doors, hovered over the tasteless fountain feature in the front garden for a moment and then shot high into the air like an express elevator.

“Whoa!” murmured Mary as the lights of Reading receded rapidly below them. In a few seconds, the estate streetlamps had become a long chain of fairy lights that joined together with another chain at the main road, which itself joined to another until the pattern of roads could no longer be seen, and Reading seemed like just a dense concentration of twinkling lights with radiating arms of jewels stretching away to other, smaller prickles of illumination that were the outlying towns. They continued to rise rapidly in the night sky and pretty soon the lights joined up with other towns, cities and conurbations until Reading was lost in the anonymity of distance, and the whole nation joined together in one glittering network of light that seemed to breathe and pulsate beneath them. Eventually only a narrow ribbon of darkness separated England from the Continent, where an identical smudging of randomly clumped lights continued to the edge of the horizon.

“Look over there.”

To the west the curved edge of the planet was a delicate collection of colors that ran through the spectrum in a never-ending parade of infinitely subtle hues. As they increased in altitude, the sun rose miraculously in the west, a glorious light show that bronzed the visible atmosphere and the clouds, bloodred below them.

“Your eyes are leaking.”

“It’s so…
beautiful,
” exclaimed Mary, wiping away a spontaneous tear. “The horizon over there—it’s like it’s on fire!”

“I come up here just to watch the sunset,” explained Ashley.

“By ascending as the Earth rotates away, I can watch it as many times as I want. I can even keep pace with it and hold the final dying rays of light in my hand for as long as I wish.”

Mary took Ashley’s hand and smiled at him. “Not many people get to see this.”

“Yes,” replied the small alien thoughtfully, “which is a bit strange, considering we’re only a couple of hours’ drive from Reading in the average family car.”

Mary laughed. “If there were only a road!”

He shrugged. “Perhaps you’re looking at the problem in the wrong way. There’s an easier way to do pretty much anything.”

They watched the sun set again as the Earth rotated away from them, the small globe hovering in the near vacuum of space eighty miles from the Earth’s surface.

“Hang on,” said Ashley, clicking on the switch again. Mary felt the globe move, and once more the sun rose and Europe moved away to the east as they traveled around the Earth. Ashley looked about, trying to see something. “It should be along soon.”

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

They didn’t have to wait long. Ash saw it first, a large, dark object that was almost invisible against the inky blackness. As it moved toward them, Mary could see that it was big and angular, and had long, flat plates pointing out in two directions. When less than five hundred yards away, it broke into the sunlight, the rays of the sun bouncing off the turquoise solar panels. The craft was painted flat white and seemed to be a series of knobbly sections stuck together in a haphazard manner. After the tidy simplicity of Ashley’s globe, it seemed almost shabby by comparison.

“The International Space Station,” said Ashley. “We can wave if they’re looking through the portholes. It perks up their day a bit.”

As it turned out, they
were
watching, and they waved, and Ash and Mary waved back.

“Hey,” said Ash impishly, “show them your breasts.”

“No!”

“Oh, go on. It would be funny. I won’t look.”

Mary smiled. It seemed infantile, but she thought it actually
would
be funny, so while Ash covered his eyes with his hands, Mary rolled up her top and showed her breasts to the occupants of the ISS, who
also
thought it funny and gave her the thumbs-up sign and waved some more as the space station drifted past and on.

“Have you put them away?” asked Ashley, eyes firmly closed.

“Yes.”

He uncovered his eyes.

“Tell me,” said Mary after they had watched the Earth move beneath them for a while, the shape of the North American landmasses easily recognizable by the delineating inky blackness of the oceans, “do you find humans at all odd?”

“Not really,” replied Ashley after a moment’s reflection, accelerating the globe on and moving around into the midday region of the planet to make a full orbit before returning home, “but your obsession with networks takes a bit of getting used to. Still, it’s understandable.”

“How do you mean?”

“Because networks are
everywhere.
The road and rail systems, the postal services, the Internet, your friendships, family, electricity, water—
everything
on this planet is composed of networks.”

“But why ‘understandable’?”

“Because it is the way you are built—your bodies use networks to pass information; your veins and arteries are networks to nourish your bodies. Your mind is a complicated network of nerve impulses. It’s little wonder that networks dominate the planet—you have modeled your existence after the construction of your own minds.”

Mary went silent for a moment. She hadn’t thought of this. “And you don’t?”

“We most certainly do. But we are wired more sequentially. Every fact is compared with every previous fact and then filtered to find the differences. Our minds work like an infinite series of perfectly transparent glass panels, with all our experiences etched onto them. Where clusters of certain facts appear, then we know what importance must be attached.”

“You remember everything?”

“Of course. I remember every single word you have said to me. Where you said it, and when, and what would have been showing on TV at the time.”

“That must make lying very difficult.”

“On the contrary, it makes it very easy. Since I can recall every lie I tell, I repeat the lie in every context in which it is required. Humans are such poor liars because they have poor memories. The strange thing is that everybody knows everyone else is lying, and nothing much is done about it.”

“You’re right about that,” said Mary, gazing up at the sable blackness above them. “Which is your star?”

“That one there,” said Ashley, pointing in the vague direction of Cassiopeia. “No, hang on. Over there. No… goodness,” he said at last. “They all look so similar from here.”

And they both fell silent for a while, staring at the sky, deep in thought, with Mary resting her head on Ashley’s shoulder, his thoughts and memories seeping into her like a warming stew on a cold day. She saw a green sky with a moon hanging low and dominant in the heavens, and small houses like igloos dotted about a rocky landscape.

“Do you ever think about going home?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“Reading’s my home,” he replied.

They returned only ten minutes after setting out, before Mary’s exhaled carbon dioxide had time to make itself known. Ashley piloted the small craft back to the same estate in Pangbourne, where, after knocking over the birdbath and hitting the sides of the garage several times, he finally managed to park.

“That was
amazing,
” said Mary, giggling like a schoolgirl.

“Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“We’ve got a problem. I think the birdbath damaged a thermal exhaust port… or something. Quick!”

He grasped her hand, and they jumped out of the pliable skin of the globe onto the dusty floor of the garage, then outside, where they got as far as the other side of the street when there was a
whoomp
noise and they were knocked over by a blue ring of light that shot out in all directions as the globe exploded.

“Oh, dear,” said Ashley, picking himself up and walking back to his parents’ house, which had been badly shaken by the concussion. The walls had cracked, and the roof had lost several dozen tiles. The garage itself had ceased to exist—except for a few tattered walls. Of the globe there was nothing. Isolated fires had been set alight on the lawn, which helpful neighbors were already stamping out.

“Was that you, Ashley?” asked Roger, who was standing at the off-kilter doorway of the house, wig askew and one slipper blown off.