Lolita

The Princess :

Come here — 

Still love me?

Mason :

Completely. You know that.

The Princess :

You know What I Want, 

more than anything else 

in The World?

Mason :

No. What do you want?

The Princess :

I want You to 

Be Proud of Me.

Mason :

But I am proud of you, Lolita.

The Princess :

No, I mean really 

Proud of Me.

They want me for the lead 

in The School Play.

Isn't that fantastic?

I have to have a letter from you,

Giving Your Permission.

Mason :

Who wants you!?

The Princess :

Well, Edusa Gold, 

The Drama Teacher,

Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom.

Mason :

And who might They be?

The Princess :

The Authors. 

They're here to supervise 

The Production.

Mason :

But you've never acted before.

The Princess :

They say I have 

a unique and rare talent.

Women Mean Business

  "It is a fine day in The City of London, and at an upmarket hotel just south of the river more than four hundred very smart women are gathered together. Smart, it should be clarified, in every sense of the term. Not only are the attendees all business leaders, from the top of every profession they are in, but whenever the door swings open with another arrival it is as though we are at a fashion shoot. High heels, swishing scarfs, the power clothes of the international business elite: nobody – absolutely nobody – lets the side down. And it is clear from the outset that there most certainly is a side.

  The ‘Women Mean Business’ conference has been put together by The Daily Telegraph. Its major sponsors include NatWest and BT. The day is opened by the Minister for Women and Equalities, and is followed by a panel entitled ‘How Work Needs to Start Working for Women’. Many of the most successful and well-known women in business are here, along with several of the country’s most famous female broadcasters. There is a ‘fireside chat’ between the ‘head of enterprise’ at NatWest and the first female Serjeant at Arms at the House of Commons. Then more panels: ‘What are the Real Roadblocks to Women’s Success?’; ‘Closing the Gender Gap’; ‘Are Women at a Disadvantage in a Male-Dominated Investor World?’ The panels that do address the male half of the species have titles like ‘#MenToo: Men’s Crucial Role as Allies for Women’.

  It must be said that since all this has been aimed at women and since all but a couple of the people in the room are women, the female focus is inevitable. It is also inevitable that much of the discussion centres around issues to do with women in the workplace, including childcare issues. But there is also a distinct air of alliance in the room. An alliance of people who are put-upon. Whenever somebody wants to get a warm ripple of nods or applause from the audience they stress how much we need ‘confident women’. The surest way to get the room to tut volubly is to tell a story involving the bad behaviour of any ‘alpha male’. Examples of ‘alpha male’ behaviour include stories of men dominating things by talking too much. There seems to be a clear agreement in the room that whereas there is a great need for ‘confident women’ there is also a need for ‘less confident men’. As though by these means the sexes might in time meet somewhere in the middle.

  There is one other surefire way to get the crowd on your side. And that is for a woman on the stage to express concern, nervousness or a sense of ‘imposter syndrome’. One impressive, smart and striking young woman involved in a start-up business begins her contribution by saying all of these things. She is nervous and feels almost as if she shouldn’t be there, with all these amazing women in the room who have achieved so much. They applaud heartily and congratulate her on her bravery in saying this. Women need to be confident. But it seems that one good strategy for getting other women onside is to present yourself as not being at all confident. Almost as though you fear being shot down, particularly by other women. When it comes to Q and A one attendee sends in a question asking whether any other people in the room haven’t in fact found other women to be their biggest challenge in the workplace. This female remains anonymous.

  As one of the few men asked to speak on the day, I find myself on a panel entitled ‘Is the Focus on Promoting Women Holding Men Back?’ Our chair is a journalist from The Daily Telegraph. The other panellists are a British MP called Craig Tracey who heads a Parliamentary group supporting women, the female ‘Chief People Officer’ from The Daily Telegraph and the ‘UK Head of Female Client Strategy’ at J. P. Morgan. The consensus in the room is the same as the consensus that has emerged in nearly all public discussion, and is clearly in need of disrupting.

  The most striking thing is that there appear to be a set of confusions centring around the issue of ‘Power’. Every discussion so far has centred on a presumption that almost all relationships in the workplace and elsewhere are centred around the exercise of power. Knowingly or otherwise these women have all imbibed the Foucauldian world view in which power is the most significant prism for understanding human relationships. What is striking is not just that everyone seems to have paid lip-service to this, but that these women are focused only on one sort of power. This is a sort of power which – it is presumed – has historically been held solely by mainly old, mainly rich, always white men. It is why the joking and berating about the behaviour of ‘alpha males’ goes down so well. There is a presumption that if the alpha and maleness could be squashed out of these people, in some great majestic social-justice blending device, then the power squeezed out of them might be drunk up by women like those in the room today. That it will be used to nourish, and grow, those who deserve the power more.

  Here are deep waters. But I suggest in my contribution that our conversations are being limited by this misunderstanding. Even if we concede – which we should not – that power (rather than, say, love) is the most important force guiding human affairs, why are we focusing only on one type of power? There certainly are types of power – such as rape – which men can sometimes hold over women. And there is a type of power which some old, typically white, males might be able to hold over less successful people, including less successful women. But there are other types of power in this world. Historical old white man power is not the only such source. Are there not, after all, some powers which only women can wield. ‘Like what?’ someone asks. At which point, having waded in this far it only makes sense to wade further.

  Among other types of power that women wield almost exclusively, the most obvious is this. That women – not all women, but many women – have an ability that men do not. This is the ability to drive members of the opposite sex mad. To derange them. Not just to destroy them but to make them destroy themselves. It is a type of power which allows a young woman in her late teens or twenties to take a man with everything in the world, at the height of his achievements, torment him, make him behave like a fool and wreck his life utterly for just a few moments of almost nothing.

  Earlier we heard from the young, attractive woman, who was heading a start up, that she had a couple of times in her search for capital received inappropriate advances from men who were potential funders. The room had understandably tut-tutted. For that would indeed have been an abuse of power. But there is unspoken knowledge – and there are unspoken hypocrisies – beneath all such tut-tutting. Was everybody in the hall – including the tut-tutters – absolutely sure that the woman in question did not also wield some power? Are they certain that she would have been able to raise an equally large amount of capital if instead of looking rather strikingly like an international model she had (while equally smart and savvy) more closely resembled Jabba the Hutt? Or a mangy-looking old white man? It is no disservice to the abilities of the woman in question (and no let-off for any man behaving badly) to say that even the prospect of being in future proximity to such a person may not have worked entirely against her. Studies repeatedly show that – all else being equal – people who are attractive manage to climb higher in their chosen professions than their less attractive peers. Is physical attractiveness plus youth and womanhood such a negligible set of cards? Might not one or more of the men among her investors have thought at some point that even if nothing could, would or should ever happen between them, at least investor meetings with her would be looked forward to slightly more than another investor meeting with an elderly white male? And is this not – unpleasant as it is to admit – a type of power? One which is either denied or harnessed only outside of the realms of current mentionability, but a power that exists in the world nonetheless?

  This was not a point which was received warmly in the room. This was very definitely not what attendees wanted to hear. Before being able to proceed to my next unpopular point the Chief People Officer of The Daily Telegraph decided to take us there herself. Inappropriate behaviour in the workplace was a problem to be emphasized. A lot of women had terrible stories of this. Many women in the room doubtless had stories of their own. But it was suggested that the whole matter of relations between the sexes was really a very straightforward matter to arrange. Especially in the wake of the MeToo movement, everything had become clear. Men needed to realize that there was behaviour that was appropriate and behaviour that was inappropriate. And while conceding that the categories for both had changed again only very recently, it was also suggested that the mores were in some sense timeless as well as always obvious.

  My suspicion is that anyone who has ever worked in an office knows that it isn’t at all as straightforward as that. ‘Is it permissible to ask a colleague out for a coffee?’, I wondered aloud. This appeared to be a borderline case. If the coffee was requested more than once then this was an obvious problem. ‘Men have to learn that no means no’, it was suggested. ‘Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do in front of your mother’ was suggested as one basis for a moral norm – ignoring the fact that there are plenty of perfectly legal, acceptable and very enjoyable acts that adults perform in their lives which they would not do in front of their mother. This was nit-picking, it seemed. ‘It’s really not that difficult,’ the Chief People Officer reiterated.

  Except that it is, isn’t it? And every woman in that room – like the vast majority of women outside it – knows that to be the case. For instance, they know that a considerable percentage of men and women meet their future life partner in the workplace. Even though the internet has changed much about dating life, most studies even from recent years show around 10–20 per cent of people still find their partners at their place of work. Given that successful people like those in the room are the sort of people who have a work-life balance that disproportionately favours work, they are going to be spending more time with their colleagues than at social engagements. So is it entirely wise to cordon off this significant tributary of potential life partners? Or to limit it to the tiny slivers of potential permitted by their organization’s Chief People Officer? To do so would be to demand the following: that every man had the opportunity to pursue only one woman in their work life. That that woman could be asked out for coffee or a drink on only one occasion. And that this sole shot must have an absolute, 100 per cent accuracy rating on the one occasion on which it was deployed. Is this a sensible, orderly or indeed humane way to arrange relations between the sexes? Of course most of the room laughs at the very suggestion. Because it is laughable. And it is risible. And it is also the law of the modern workplace."

The Sociological Aspect of The Mysterious Law of Fives.

George had always thought there was something witchy about Sicilians.

"Do we sign this in blood?" said Drake, removing the cloth-of-gold ribbon from the parchment and unrolling it.

George laughed nervously. "Pen and ink will do fine."

Saul's angry, triumphant eyes stare into mine, and I look away guiltily. Let me explain, I say desperately. / really am trying to help you. Your mind is a bomb.

"What Weishaupt discovered that night of February second, seventeen seventy-six," Hagbard Celine explained to Joe Malik in 1973, on a clear autumn day in Miami, about the same time that Captain Tequilla y Mota was reading Luttwak on the coup d'etat and making his first moves toward recruiting the officer's cabal that later seized Fernando Poo, "was basically a simple mathematical relationship. It's so simple, in fact, that most administrators and bureaucrats never notice it. lust as the householder doesn't notice the humble termite, until it's too late

Here, take this paper and figure for yourself. How many permutations are there in a system of four elements?"

Joe, recalling his high school math, wrote 4x3x2x1, and read aloud his answer "Twenty-four."

"And if you're one  of the elements, the  number of coalitions—or to be sinister, conspiracies—that you may have to confront would be twenty-three. Despite Simon Moon's obsessions, the twenty-three has no particularly mystic significance," Hagbard added quickly. "Just consider it pragmatically—it's a number of possible relationships which the brain can remember and handle. But now suppose the system has five elements . . . ?."

Joe wrote 5x4x3x2x1 and read aloud, "One hundred and twenty." "You see? One always encounters jumps of that size when dealing with permutations and combinations. 

But, as I say, administrators as a rule aren't aware of this. Korzybski pointed out, back in  the  early  thirties,  that  nobody  should  ever directly supervise  more  than  four subordinates, because the twenty-four possible coalitions ordinary office politics can create are enough to tax any brain. When it jumps up to one hundred and twenty, the administrator is lost. That, in essence, is the sociological aspect of the mysterious Law of Fives. The Illuminati always has five leaders in each nation, and five international Illuminati Primi supervising all of them, but each runs his own show more or less independent of the other four, united only by their common commitment to the Goal of Gruad." Hagbard paused to relight his long, black Italian cigar.

"Now," he said, "put yourself in the position of the head of any counterespionage organization. Imagine, for instance, that you're poor old McCone of the CIA at the time of the first of the New Wave of Illuminati assassinations, ten years ago, in sixty-three. Oswald was, of course, a double agent, as everybody always knew. The Russians wouldn't have let him out of Russia without getting a commitment from him to do 'small jobs,' as they're called in the business, although he'd be a 'sleeper.' That is, he'd go about his ordinary business most of the time, and only be called on occasionally when he was in the right place at the right time for a particular 'small job.' Now, of course, Washington knows this; they know that no expatriate comes back from Moscow without some such agreement And Moscow knows the other side: that the State Department wouldn't take him back unless he accepted a similar status with the CIA. 

Then, November twenty-second, Dealy Plaza—blam! the shit hits the fan. Moscow and Washington both want to know, the sooner the quicker, who was he working for when he did it, or was it his own idea? Two more possibilities loom at once: could a loner with confused politics like him have been recruited by the Cubans or the Chinese? And, then, the kicker: could he be innocent? Could another group—to avoid the obvious, let's call them Force X—have stage-managed the whole thing? So, you've got MVD and CIA and FBI and who-all falling over each other sniffing around Dallas and New Orleans for clues. And Force X gets to seem more and more implausible to all of them, because it is intrinsically incredible. It is incredible because it has no skeleton, no shape, no flesh, nothing they can grab hold of. The reason is, of course, that Force X is the Illuminati, working through five leaders with five times four times three times two times one, or one hundred and twenty different basic vectors. A conspiracy with one hundred and twenty vectors doesn't look like a conspiracy: it looks like chaos. The human mind can't grasp it, and hence declares it nonexistent. You see, the Illuminati is always careful to keep a random element in the one hundred and twenty vectors. They didn't really need to recruit  both  the leaders of the  ecology  movement and the executives  of  the  worst  pollution-producing  corporations.  They  did  it  to  create ambiguity. Anybody who tries to describe their operations sounds like a paranoid. What clinched it," Hagbard concluded, "was a real stroke of luck for the Weishaupt gang: there were two other elements involved, which nobody had planned or foreseen. One was the Syndicate."

"It always starts with nonsense," Simon is telling Joe in another time-track, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in 1969. "Weishaupt discovered the Law of Fives while he was stoned and looking at one of those shoggoth pictures you saw in Arkham. He imagined the shoggoth was a rabbit and said, 'du hexen Hase,' which has been preserved as an in-joke by Illuminati agents in Hollywood. It runs through the Bugs Bunny cartoons: 'You wascal wabbitl' But out of that schizzy mixture of hallucination and logomania, Weishaupt saw both the mystic meaning of the Five and its pragmatic application   as   a   principal   of   international   espionage,  using   permutations   and combinations that I'll explain when we have a pencil and paper. That same mixture of revelation and put-on is always the language of the supra-conscious, whenever you contact it, whether through magic, religion, psychedelics, yoga, or a spontaneous brain nova.  Maybe  the  put-on  or  nonsense  part  comes  by  contamination  from  the unconscious, I don't know. But it's always there. That's why serious people never discover anything of real importance."

"You mean the Mafia?" Joe asks.

"What? I didn't say anything about the Mafia. Are you in another time-track again?"

"No, not the Mafia alone," Hagbard says. "The Syndicate is much bigger than the Maf." 

The room returns to focus: it is a restaurant. A seafood restaurant. On Bis-cayne Avenue, facing the bay. In Miami. In 1973. The walls are decorated with undersea motifs, including a huge octopus. Hagbard, undoubtedly, had chosen this meeting place just because he liked the decor. Crazy bastard thinks he's Captain Nemo. Still: we've got to deal with him. As John says, the JAMs can't do it alone. Hagbard, grinning, seemed to be noting Joe's return to present time. "You're reaching the critical stage," he said changing the subject. "You now only have two mental states: high on drugs and high without drugs. That's very good. But as I was saying, the Syndicate is more than just the Maf. The only Syndicate, up until October twenty-third, nineteen thirty-five,  was nothing more than the Mafia, of course. But then they killed the Dutchman, and a young psychology student, who also happened to be a psychopath with a power drive like Genghis Khan, was assigned to do a paper on how the Dutchman's last words illustrate the similarity between somatic damage and schizophrenia. The Dutchman had a bullet in his gut while the police interviewed him, and they recorded everything he said, but on the surface it was all gibberish. This psychology student wrote the paper that his professor  expected,  and  got  an  A  for  the  course—but  he  also  wrote  another interpretation of the Dutchman's words, for his own purposes

Kryten

'Come on, everyone - they're here! They're in orbit! Heavens! There's so much to do.' Kryten rushed down the sloping corridor, pausing only to water a lusciously green plastic pot plant.

Things were going very well. Very well indeed. The Girls had been quiet and really most forlorn of late. Being marooned light years from home with scant hope of rescue had been very trying, to say the least. He'd done his best to keep them entertained, to keep their spirits high, but over the last few weeks, he'd felt intuitively that they were losing hope.

Even his Friday night concert parties, usually the highlight of the week, had begun to be greeted with growing apathy. Miss Yvette was especially guilty of this. She hadn't particularly enjoyed them from the beginning, and had told him so.

The concert parties always began in the same way. After baths and supper Kryten would clear the decks while the girls played cards, or read. At nine sharp the lights would be dimmed, and Kryten would tap-dance onto a makeshift stage in the engine-room, singing I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy, juggling two cans of beeswax.

And then he'd go into his impressions. His best one was of Parkur, the mechanoid aboard the Neutron Star' but none of the girls knew him, so it never went down that well. Then there were the magic tricks. Or, to put it more accurately, the magic trick. He would lie in a box and saw himself in half. It wasn't much of a trick because he actually did saw himself in half. And then the evening suffered a slight hiatus while they waited the forty minutes it took for Kryten to reconnect his circuitry.

Then he'd round off the evening with a selection of hits from The Student Prince. And then they'd play prize bingo. The prize in the prize bingo was always a can of jiffy WindoKleen. Nobody ever wanted a can of Jiffy WindoKleen, so Kryten always got it back and was able to use it as the next week's prize.

In an odd kind of way Kryten was grateful for the accident. His life had taken on a new vitality. He was needed. The girls depended on him. His days were full. There was the cooking, the changing of the bandages, the physiotherapy, the concert parties. And, of course, there was the cleaning.

Kryten took almost orgasmic delight in housework. Piles of dirty dishes thrilled him. Mounds of unwashed laundry filled him with rapture. An unmopped floor left him drymouthed with lust. He loved cleaning things even more than he loved things being clean. And things being clean sent him into a frenzy of ecstasy.

And at night, when everyone was safely tucked in bed and all the chores were done and there was absolutely nothing left to clean, then, and only then, he'd sink into his favourite chair, cushions aplump, and watch Androids.

Androids was a soap opera, aimed at the large mechanoid audience who had huge buying power when it came to household goods. Kryten had all one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-four episodes on disc. He'd seen them all many times, but he still winced when Karstares was killed in the plane crash. He still wept when Roze left Benzen. He still laughed and slapped his metal knee when Hudzen won the mechanoid lottery and hired his human master as a servant. And he always cheered when Mollee took on the android brothels, put the pimps into prison and set the prostidroids free.

Androids, he told himself, was his one vice. That, and the single chocolate he allowed himself each viewing, to conserve supplies. When he watched Androids he wasn't just a mechanoid, marooned light years from nowhere, with three demanding dependants and a never-ending schedule of work He was somewhere different. Somewhere glamorous. Somewhere else.

He was Hudzen, winning the lottery and hiring a human to serve him. He was Jaysee, swinging the mega-quidbuck deals, dining in the best restaurants, living in his vast penthouse atop the Juno Hilton.

He was someone else.

***

Kryten rushed down the slope and onto the main service deck, where the girls were breakfasting.

'Come on! They're here!' He clapped his hands.

Richards, Schuman and Fantozi didn't move. They hadn't moved, in fact, for almost three million years.

The three skeletons sat round the table, in freshly-laundered uniforms, and grinned.

'I don't know what's so funny,' said Kryten. 'They'll be here any moment, and there's so much to do!' He clucked and shook his head. 'Miss Elaine, honestly: you haven't even made an effort. Look at your hair.'

He fussed over to the table' and took out a hairbrush.

'What a mess you look.' He hummed Stay Young And Beautiful, and combed her long blonde wig with smooth, gentle strokes. When her hair was just so, he stood back and eyed her critically. He wasn't quite satisfied. He took out a lipstick that matched her uniform and touched up her makeup.

'Dazzling. You could go straight on the cover of Vogue.'

He shuffled down the table.

'Miss Yvette! You haven't touched your soup. It's no wonder you're looking so pasty. He patted her gingerly on the shoulder. There was a long, slow creaking noise, and the skeleton slumped face down into the bowl of tomato soup. Kryten threw up his hands in horror. 'Eat nicely, Miss Yvette! What will that nice Captain Rimmer think if he sees you eating like that?' He hoisted the skeleton back onto the chair, sprayed her with a squirt of windo-Kleen, and gave her head a quick polish.

'Now then, Miss Kirsty.' He waddled over to the remaining skeleton and looked her up and down: the trendy knee length boots, the chic, deep red mini-skirt and the peaked velvet cap cocked at a racy angle.

'No,' he beamed, putting the hairbrush away. 'You look absolutely perfect!'

EIGHTEEN

The Cat slinked down the docking bay gantry in his gold, hand-stitched flightsuit, carrying a two-feet-high, cone-shaped matching space helmet under his arm.

He climbed up the boarding steps into Blue Midget, where Lister and Rimmer were sitting in the drive seats waiting for him. He jumped into the cramped cabin, struck a pose like King of the Rocket Men, legs splayed, chest puffed out, hand on one hip, and said: 'Put your shades on, guys. You're looking at a nuclear explosion in lurex.' He gleamed a smile at them and fluttered his eyes.

'You're looking good,' said Lister' craning round.

'Looking good?? Did I hear the man say, "Looking only good??" Buddy, I am a plastic surgeon's nightmare. Throw away the scalpel; improvements are impossible.'

'A spacesuit,' said Rimmer, 'with cufflinks?'

'Listen,' said the Cat, dusting the console scat before arranging himself on it, 'you've got to guarantee me we don't pass any mirrors. If we do, I'm there for the day.'

Lister flicked on the remote link with Holly.

Holly appeared on the screen looking somehow different. Lister scrutinised the image. He couldn't quite work out what it was.

'All right, then, dudes? Everybody set?'

Lister twigged. 'Holly, why are you wearing a toupee?, Holly was upset. He spent some considerable time corrupting his digital image to give himself a fuller head of hair. 'So it's not undetectable, then? It doesn't blend in naturally and seemlessly with my own natural hair?'

'It looks,' said Lister, 'like you've got a small, furry animal nesting on top of your head.'

'What is wrong with everybody?' Rimmer straightened his cap. 'Three million years without a woman, and you all go crazy.'

He's right, thought Holly, who am I trying to impress? I'm a computer! How humiliating to have that pointed out by a hologram! Out of spite he instantly simulated a large and painful boil on the back of Rimmer's neck, and made it start to throb.

***

Blue Midget, the powerful haulage transporter originally designed to carry ore and silicates to and from the ship, looked strangely graceful as it flickered between the red and blue lights of the twin sun system above the howling icy green wasteland of the moon that had become Nova 5's graveyard.

Lister peered through the furry dice dangling from the windscreen. 'Nice place for a skiing holiday.'

Rimmer stared unblinkingly at the tracking monitor. 'Nothing yet,' he said helpfully. He slipped his finger down the collar of his shirt where a large boil was really beginning to hurt.

Lister struggled hopelessly with the twelve gear levers. Each provided five gears, making it sixty gears in all, and Lister hadn't yet been in the right one throughout the twenty-minute jag.

The tracking monitor started delivering a series of rapid bleeps.

'We've got it!' Rimmer cried. 'Lat. twenty-seven, four, Long. seventeen, seven.'

Lister looked at him like he was speaking Portuguese.

'Left a bit, and round that glacier.'

'Oh' right.'

***

Lister landed appallingly in forty-seventh gear. Blue Midget stalled, bounced and rocked, before settling to rest with an exhausted sigh. Lister pushed in the button marked 'C'. The caterpillar tracks' telescoped out of their housing, rotated down to the icy emerald surface and hoisted the transporter ten feet above the ground.

'Hey,' said the Cat' impressed, 'You really can drive this thing.'

'Actually,' said Lister, 'I thought that was the cigarette lighter.'

The red-hot wiper blades melted green slush from the windscreen as Blue Midget rose and fell over a series of icy dunes. As they reached the peak of the next range, they saw, in the hollow below, the broken wreck jutting out of the landscape like a child's discarded toy.

The gearbox groaned and rattled as they made their slippery descent down into the crater.

'Yoo-hoo!' the Cat squealed in falsetto, and waved madly out of the port side window.

***

'Ah, come in, come in.' Kryten ushered them in from the airlock. 'How lovely to meet you,' he said, and bowed deeply.

'Cârmita,' said Rimmer' speaking too loudly. 'What a delightful craft - reminds me of my first command.' He turned and hissed to Lister: 'Call me Ace.'

Lister pretended not to understand and walked off down the spotless, newly painted white corridor after Kryten, who was chattering banalities about the weather.

'Green slush again. Tut tut, tut.'

The Cat flossed his teeth one last time, and followed them.

Kryten, used to the strange tilt, walked speedily down the thin corridor, listing at an odd angle.

He went through a large pear-shaped hatchway, and they followed him across what must have been the ship's Engine Room. Even Lister, who knew next to nothing about these things, could tell Nova 5's technology was far in advance of Red Dwarf's. Taking up three-quarters of the room was the strangest piece of machinery Lister had ever seen: it was like a huge series of merry-go-rounds stacked one on top of the other and turned on their sides. Each of these was filled with silver discs joined by thick gold rods, and at the end was what looked like an enormous cannon.

'What's that?' asked Lister.

'It's the ship's Drive,' Kryten replied. 'It's the Duality Jump.'

'What's a Duality Jump?'

'Don't be thick, Lister. Everybody knows what a Duality Jump is,' said Rimmer, lying.

Kryten scurried through the pear-shaped exit, and Lister practically had to sprint out of the engine-room to catch up with them two corridors later.

Suddenly, the Cat swivelled, as they passed a full-length mirror recessed in the wall. His heart pounded, his pulse quickened. He felt silly and giddy. He was in love.

'You're a work of Art, baby,' he crooned softly at his reflection.

Lister turned and shouted: 'Come on!'

'I can't. You're going to have to help me.'

Lister picked up his golden-booted foot and started to yank him down the corridor. Unable to help himself, the Cat hung on to the mirror. His gloved fingers squeaked across the glass surface as Lister pulled him free.

'Thanks, Man,' the Cat said gratefully. 'That was a bad one.'

***

'I'm so excited,' said Kryten, shuffling along and absently dusting a completely clean fire-extinguisher. 'We all are. The girls can hardly stop themselves from jumping up and down.'

'Ha ha haaa,' brayed Rimmer' falsely. 'Cârmita, Cârmita'

'Ah!' said Kryten, 'Ii parolas Esperanton, Kapitano Rimmer?'

'I'm sorry?'

'Vi parolas Esperanton, Kapitano Rimmer?'

'Come again?'

'You speak Esperanto' Captain Rimmer?'

'Ah, oui, oui, oui. Jawol. Si, si.' Rimmer searched desperately through his memory for the appropriate phrase. Mercifully it came to him. 'Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston laiisajne estas rano en mia bideo.'

'A frog?' said Kryten. 'In which bidet?'

'Ha ha haaaaa,' brayed Rimmer, even less convincingly. 'It doesn't matter. I'll deal with in myself.'

***

Kryten walked round the corner and down the ramp on to the service deck.

'Well, here they are,' he said.

Without looking where Kryten was beckoning, Rimmer bent down on one knee and swept his cap 'in a smooth arc. 'Cârmita!' he purred.

Lister and the Cat tumbled in behind him.

Their eyes met the hollow sockets of the three grinning skeletons sitting around the table.

There was a very, very long silence.

It was followed by another very, very long silence.

'Well,' said Kryten, a little upset 'isn't anybody going to say "Hello"?'

'Hi.' said Lister, weakly. 'I'm Dave. This is the Cat. And this here is Ace.'

Rimmer still hadn't closed his mouth from forming the final vowel of Cârmita.

Lister leaned over and whispered to him conspiratorially: 'I think that little blonde one's giving you the eye, Cap.'

'Now,' Kryten clapped his hands, 'you all get to know one another, and I'll run off and fetch some tea.' He staggered off up the slope.

'I don't believe this,' said Rimmer, massaging the 'H' on his forehead.

Lister looked at him. 'Be strong, Big Man.'

'Our one contact with intelligent life in over three million years, and he turns out to be an android version of Norman Bates.'

'So, they're a little on the skinny side,' said the Cat, ever hopeful. 'A few hot dinners, and who knows?'

Lister walked up to the table and put his arms around two of the skeletons' shoulders.

'I know this may not be the time or the place to say this, girls, but my mate, Ace here, is incredibly' incredibly brave ...'

'Smeg off' dogfood face!'

'And he's got tons and tons of girlfriends.'

'I'm warning you Lister.

Kryten raced back down the slope' carrying a tray which held several plates of triangular-shaped sandwiches, a pot of steaming tea and a plate with seven of his precious chocolates on it. As he laid out the cups on the table' he looked up, suddenly aware of the lack of conversation.

'Is there something wrong?' he asked.

'Something wrong??' said Rimmer' aghast. 'They're dead.'

'Who's dead?' asked Kryten, pouring some milk into the cups.

'They're dead,' Rimmer waved at the three skeletons. 'They're all dead.'

'My God!' Kryten stepped back in horror. 'I was only away two minutes!'

'They've been dead for centuries.'

'No!'

'Yes!'

'Are you a doctor?'

'You only have to look at them,' Rimmer whined. 'They've got less meat on them than a chicken nugget!'

'Whuh ... whuh ... well, what am I going to do?' Kryten stammered. 'I'm programmed to serve them.'

'Well, the first thing we should do is, you know ... bury them,' said Lister quietly.

'You're that sure they're dead?'

'Yes!' Rimmer shouted.

Kryten waddled over to Richards's leering skeleton. 'What about this one?'

Rimmer sighed. 'Look. There's a very simple test.' He walked up to the head of the table. 'All right,' he said, 'hands up any of you who are alive.'

Kryten looked on anxiously. To his dismay there was no response. He made frantic signals, coaxing the girls to raise their hands.

'OK?' said Rimmer finally.

Kryten's shoulders buckled' and he dropped limply into a chair' totally defeated.

'I thought they might be ... but I wouldn't allow myself ... I didn't want to admit ... I ... I'm programmed to serve them ... It's all I can do ... I let them down so badly ... I...'

Lister shuffled uncomfortably.

'What am I to do?' Kryten said plaintively. A buzzer went off in Kryten's head.

It was his internal alarm clock telling him it was time for Miss Yvette's bath.

Automatically he raised himself and then remembering, sank back down again. He took a sonic screwdriver from his top pocket, flipped a series of release catches on his neck, removed his head and plonked it down unceremoniously on to the table.

'What are you doing?' said the Cat.

'I'm programmed to serve,' said Kryten's head. 'They're dead. The programme is finished. I'm activating my shutdown disc.'

'Woah!' said Lister. 'Slow down.'

Kryten's hands twisted the right ear off his disembodied head and pressed a latch which flipped open his skull.

'Kryten - listen to me ...'

Kryten started removing the minute circuit boards from inside his brain' and stacking them neatly on the table.

'Kryten ...'

He tugged out several batches of interface leads' neatly wrapped them up and placed them tidily beside the rest of his mind.

Finally he located his shutdown programme. 'Sorry about the mess he said, and switched himself off.

His eyes rotated back into the plastic of his skull; his body slumped forward in his seat and crashed onto the floor.

NINETEEN

'It's driving me batty. Must you do it here?' Rimmer surveyed the array of android organs spread higgledy piggledy all over the sleeping quarters. 'What's this on my pillow? It's his eyes!'

'I'm trying to fix him,' said Lister, holding Kryten's nose in one hand and poking a pipe cleaner soaked in white spirit up his nostril with the other.

It had taken them a week to transport the two broken halves of the Nova 5 back to Red Dwarf. They had needed all six of the remaining transporter craft, operating on auto pilot, to wrench the ship free of the centuries-old methane ice, but after five days of maximum thrust the small transporters had finally yanked the wreck clear, and hauled it slowly and precariously up to the orbiting Red Dwarf.

The Drive section of Nova 5 held few surprises - Kryten had meticulously updated the inventory every Tuesday evening for two million years. Most of the food was still vacuum stored. Lister had been delighted to discover they had twenty-five thousand spicy poppadoms and a hundred and thirty tons of mango chutney; enough, he pointed out at the time, to keep him happy for the best part of a month.

There was, thankfully, nearly two thousand gallons of irradiated cow's milk, and Lister had insisted the dog's milk be flushed out into the vacuum of space, where it had instantly frozen, leaving a huge dog-milk asteroid for some future species to ponder over.

'Why d'you have to keep his bits all over my bunk?'

'So I know where they are.'

'Yes, well, I'm sorry, but I refuse to have somebody else's eyes on my pillow.'

'Look - I'll have him finished by this afternoon.'

'You've been saying that, for two months. What's this in my coffee mug? It's a big toe.'

'Rimmer, will you just smeg off and leave me to it?'

'What the smeg do you want to repair him for anyway? He's just a mechanoid. A mechanoid that's gone completely barking mad.'

'I want to find out about that duality drive - I want to know if we can fix it.

And. I... I dunno ... I feel sorry for him.'

'Sorry for him? He's a machine. It's like feeling sorry for a tractor.'

'It's not. He's got a personality.'

'Yes, a personality that should be severely sedated, bound in a metal straightjacket and locked in a rubber room with a stick between his teeth.'

'I think I can fix that.'

'You think it's just like repairing your bike, don't you? Spot of grease, clean all his bits, re-bore his carburettor, and bang! He's as good as new.'

'Same principle.'

'He's got a defect in his artificial intelligence. You'd need a degree in Advanced Mental Engineering from Caltech to set him to rights.'

Lister prodded one of Kryten's circuit boards with a soldering iron. The noseless head fizzed momentarily into life...'

'Ah-ha,' it said, in rapid falsetto, 'elephant rain dingblat VietNam.' The eyes on Rimmer's pillow rotated and blinked. 'Telephone sandwich kerplunk armadillo Rumplestiltskin purple.'

'Well,' said Rimmer. 'Once again you've proved me wrong.'

***

HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhHHHHHHH

HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

Rimmer looked at his bunkside clock. 2.34 a.m.

HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

Rimmer clambered down from his bunk and looked over at Lister's sleeping body.

He was still holding one of Kryten's circuit boards in one hand, and a sonic screwdriver in the other.

And I'm supposed to keep you sane? he thought. Who the smeg is supposed to keep ME sane?

Rimmer closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH HNNNnnnnNNNNNKRHHhhhhhhhHHHHHH

It was useless. He got Holly to simulate his red, black, white, blue, yellow and orange striped skiing anorak, and decided to check out the salvage operation in the shuttle bay.

Pieta

….for The Therapy to be successful, 

the process of miniaturization, compression, 

and self-annihilation had to be completed. 

A collapsing star, A Black Hole, was created, 

from which only A God could escape, 

or An Idea. 

Not even light can escape 

from A Back Hole. 

The Event Horizon marks 

The Limit of Human Science, 

not Human imagination.

The Pietà (Italian pronunciation: [pjeˈta]; meaning “pity”, “compassion”) 

is a subject in Christian art depicting 

The Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus 

after his body was removed from the cross. 

It is most often found in sculpture. 

The Pietà is a specific form 

of the Lamentation of Christ 

in which Jesus is mourned 

by the Virgin Mary alone.