As they reached the crest, they saw it.
Any faint hopes that Rimmer still entertained that they were on Earth and in the world of reality gurgled noisily down the plug hole as they gazed up at the Cat's home.
It was a thirty-towered golden castle surrounded by a moat filled with milk.
SEVEN
The tip of the highest golden tower was almost invisible to the naked eye. The battlements were patrolled by more of the horn-helmeted, skimpily armoured Valkyries.
Lister and Rimmer clumped noisily across the wooden drawbridge.
'Halt! Who goes there, buddy?' one of the Valkyries shouted from the gate house.
'We've come to see the Cat!' shouted Lister, his voice sounding weak and ineffectual by comparison.
They were led into the castle and through a maze of chambers. The Cat's portrait hung on every wall : here clad in gleaming armour, there grinning from a rearing horse; there wrestling a lion, here draped on top of a pink piano. They followed the guards out into an ornamental garden that made the grounds of the Palace of Versailles look like a window box. Rimmer began to regret the smallness of his own imagination.
The guards were marching double time, and Lister and Rimmer felt compelled to keep up. They were getting quite tired by the time they reached the end of the gardens, which let out onto a courtyard surrounded by stables.
The Cat, in a red riding jacket, gleaming white jodhpurs and black leather boots, was mounted on a cream-coloured, fire-breathing, racing yak. There was a smell of sulphur hanging in the air as the yak reared and tried to bolt. The Cat, laughing, deftly wrestled it under control as it haughtily spouted two more jets of fire from its nostrils.
A dozen hunting dogs yapped and bayed and snapped at the leashes held by four Valkyries. As the dragon yak ceased its protestations, the Cat turned and caught sight of Rimmer and Lister.
'Hey! What's happening?' He waved his black riding cap and tooted his hunting horn, driving the dogs berserk. 'Sydney!' he called to the tallest of the Valkyries, 'Saddle Dancer and Prancer! Guys,' he turned to Rimmer and Lister, 'grab a yak!'
Rimmer mounted his flame-coloured yak with more than a little trepidation, and held timidly onto the reins.
'I've never really ridden a ... fire-breathing racing yak before,' he said unnecessarily.
Lister patted the neck of his beast, and used the resultant jet of flame to light one of the foot-long Havana cigars he'd stolen from Rimmer's study back in Paris. Then he hooked a foot into the stirrup and clambered into the saddle.
The Cat tooted his curved hunting horn and called to the Valkyries restraining the hounds: 'Release the dogs!'
The dozen hunting dogs streamed out of the courtyard. The Cat reared on his yak and bellowed 'Tally ho!', and all three of them thundered over the cobblestones and out into the dank, misty wasteland that surrounded the castle.
Lister clung desperately to the neck of the bouncing yak, the reins hanging free as it splashed through the bog land which was covered in a carpet of mist.
Before him, whenever he dared to open his eyes, he could see the Cat, straightbacked, holding onto the reins with his left hand, a silver shooting pistol in his right, while behind him he could hear the occasional low moans of Rimmer as he recited various incantations from a number of different religions.
They came to a low hedge. The dogs burst through it and the yaks leapt over. As they hammered across the hard, frosty ground, Lister saw the Cat level his pistol. He couldn't see the quarry, and he wasn't particularly keen to. They were riding fire-breathing dragon yaks. What on Earth would they be hunting? He saw the Cat's shoulder jerk back, and a puff of smoke, before he heard the crack of the pistol. In the distance, one of the dogs cartwheeled twelve feet into the air and landed, dead, on the floor.
'No!' Lister yelled as the Cat quickly picked off the eleven remaining dogs. He reined in the yak, raised his horn and tooted a victory call.
'You shot all the smegging dogs!' said Lister, gulping for air.
'They're vermin,' laughed the Cat; 'what did you think we were shooting?' He raised himself in his saddle and called to the entourage of Valkyries galloping up on horses some way behind them. 'More dogs, Sydney!'
***
They stood before the roaring fire in the vast inglenook fireplace of the Cat's baronial dining hall, drinking hot milk laced with cinnamon from pewter mugs.
The Cat stood, a spat-covered foot resting on the gold fender, his elbow crooked above his head on the marble mantelpiece, shaking his head, staring into the fire.
'You mean none of this is real? None of this actually exists?'
'Of course it doesn't!' Rimmer snorted in disgust. 'Firebreathing yaks?
Eight-foot tall Nordic goddesses? A castle surrounded by a moat of milk? Is any of it even remotely tinged with credibility? I don't understand how you could even believe it was!'
Lister thought of the Rimmer Buildings, Paris, New York, and London, but he didn't say anything.
'I mean,' Rimmer shook his head, 'at least our fantasies were possible! Perhaps not likely, but possible. But yours is just totally preposterous. It's like a Gothic fairy tale. How come you didn't suspect anything? Didn't you think it was a little bit odd the way you just acquired all this?'
'No. I just thought I deserved it.'
'Deserved it?' Lister tilted his head.
'Because I'm so good-looking.'
A naked, oiled Valkyrie banged the enormous gong and announced it was supper.
As they took their places at the long oak banquet table, the lights dimmed and a spotlight picked out Sydney holding a large silver platter at the top of a stone staircase which led up to the balcony skirting the baronial hall.
The flagstones in the middle of the hall slid apart, and from beneath a seven-piece band rose up on a hydraulic pedestal. Mozart on piano, Jimi Hendrix on lead guitar, Stéphane Grappelli on rhythm, Charlie Parker on sax, Yehudi Menuhin on violin, Buddy Rich on drums, and Jellybean on computer programs. They began to play.
'Listen to these boys,' the Cat confided; 'they really kick ass.
They had never heard the tune before, but it was so perfect, so instantly classic, Lister and Rimmer immediately started tapping along with the heavenly beat.
Sydney danced down the stairs, flanked by forty lurex-clad Valkyries, all bearing platters and singing:
'He's going to eat you little fishies,He's going to eat you little fish,He's going to eat you little fishies,Because he likes eating fish!'
Three platters were placed before them, each containing a large aquarium packed with writhing shoals of vividly-coloured fish.
Rimmer eyed his dinner with disgust. 'Don't you prefer them caught and cooked?'
'No, sir!' said the Cat, picking up the mini-fishing rod which was laid out with the cutlery by his plate. 'I like my food to move.'
'I think,' said Rimmer, draping his napkin over the fish tank, 'we've established beyond all reasonable doubt that we are playing Better Than Life.'
'Right,' Lister agreed, 'but the question is: how do we get out?'
'Why do we have to get out?' asked the Cat as he sucked a squirming angel fish off the hook of his rod.
'Because it's a computer-induced fantasy, because it's not real, and in the real world our bodies are wasting away. We're dying.'
'What are you talking about?'
Lister explained about the messages on his arms, and how it meant that someone was trying to get through to them.
'Which someone?' asked the Cat.
'Holly, obviously,' said Rimmer.
Lister shook his head. 'Maybe. We don't know. We don't know exactly at what point we started playing the Game. How much of this has been real? Did we get back to Earth? Did we fix Nova 5? Did Nova 5 exist? Maybe I started playing BTL back on Mimas, and you two don't exist. Maybe our whole relationship and everything that's happened has been part of my fantasy.'
'No, no, I exist,' said Rimmer. 'Honestly.'
'Yeah, but you'd say that even if you didn't exist,' said Lister.
'He's right, said the Cat; 'maybe I don't exist either. That would certainly explain why I'm so unbearably good-looking.'
'Oh, I don't believe this!' said Rimmer. 'Not only am I dead, I don't exist either! Thanks a lot, God!'
'No, look, I think we have to assume' - Lister punctuated ,assume' with a circled thumb and forefinger - 'that we all exist, and that we got into the Game before Nova 5 left Red Dwarf.'
'OK,' said Rimmer, 'how do we get out?'
'I think I can answer that,' said a fourth voice.
A familiar figure waddled through the stone archway and up to the banquet table.
And he started to explain everything.
EIGHT
Rimmer lurched happily down Corridor 4: gamma 311. 'It's a funny thing,' he slurred, 'even though I've had so much to drink I'm in total comfac of my mandulties.'
'Where is he?' said Lister, poking his head into another of the sleeping quarters on the habitation deck. 'Where the smeg is the Cat?'
'Master Holly says he's on this deck,' said Kryten, peering through the hatchway of another empty sleeping quarters.
'Then why the hell doesn't he answer?' said Lister, tugging the ringpull on another bottle of self-heating saké.
Rimmer's duplicate had been erased that morning, just before the gazpacho soup confession. Nova 5 was reconstructed, fuelled and ready to go. They would be back at Earth in three months, and they'd spent the day celebrating down in the Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar. The evening had gurgled by in a blurry haze of evermore elaborate cocktails before either of them had realized the Cat had been missing for two days. Lister had led the drunken safari up to the habitation deck to find him.
There were over three thousand separate sleeping quarters on this deck alone, and they had looked through more than half of them before they staggered into Petrovitch's old room.
The two lockers had been pulled away from the wall, and in a crudely chiselled recess was a stack of Game headbands. Petrovitch, the high-flying, career-minded leader of A Shift had been smuggling Better Than Life, the illegal hallucinogenic brain implant. He'd been smuggling it to the richly paid, insanely bored terraforming engineers of Triton.
The rumours were true.
This correct officer, this model, this paragon, was a low-life, scumbag Game dealer! At a glance Lister estimated there must have been a hundred headbands.
Petrovitch could safely have expected to make ten years' wages if he found a hundred suckers who were prepared to buy the cripplingly addictive nirvana offered by the deadly Game. And there always were suckers : plenty of them. Not one person ever entered The Game without believing he could take it or leave it.
Once inside, few ever made the painful journey back to reality.
The Cat gently rocked on the sleeping quarters armchair, giggling insanely. The silver headband glimmered menacingly on his head, the electrodes buried deep inside his brain. His face was painted with the harrowingly familiar vacant grin of the lost soul of a Game head.
***
The three of them sat around the banquet table in the baronial hall of the Cat's fantasy as Kryten recounted how Lister had followed the Cat into the Game.
'But Better Than Life's addictive! I knew that.'
'You were drunk, Mister David; you thought you'd be OK just to go into the Game and tell the Cat what danger he was in. But once you'd linked up to the Cat's headband, you didn't come out.'
'What about me?' said Rimmer. 'Why did I go in?'
'You were drunk too. You said you had the willpower to drag them both out. You got Holly to splice you into the Game. And that was the last we saw of you.'
Kryten told how they had wandered around Red Dwarf in the twilight zombie state the Game induced. How he'd done his best to feed them, and keep them from harming themselves. But over the months the Cat's and Lister's bodies had begun to wither. Sometimes they'd spend weeks in a single position and develop huge bedsores. They'd tumble down stairs and get up, bloody and laughing, believing they'd made a parachute jump or some such thing. How he'd once seen Lister eat his own vomit with delight, obviously believing he was enjoying some sumptuous delicacy. How, in desperation, he'd begun lasering the messages into Lister's arms to warn him of the danger. This had distressed Kryten greatly. It was built into his software that he mustn't harm human beings. Months of cajoling by Holly had finally persuaded him that not to do it would hurt Lister even more.
But still the three of them remained in the Game. In the end, Kryten had no choice but to enter himself.
'But that's stupid,' said Lister. 'You'll get addicted too.'
Kryten shook his head. 'Holly was right. I'm immune. I could have come in right at the start and rescued you.'
'Immune?' said Rimmer. 'Why are you immune?'
Kryten cracked his face into a hollow grin. 'I'm a mechanoid. I don't have dreams. I don't have fantasies the way you do. I have very few expectations or desires.'
'Very few?' said Lister. 'Then you do have some?'
A Valkyrie appeared, bearing a brand-new, freshly wrapped squeezy mop.
'Only one,' said Kryten, accepting the gift and tearing off the paper. 'Oh, wonderful. A squeezy mop! Just what I've always wanted.'
'OK', said Lister, leaning forward, 'the sixty-four million dollarpound question : how do we get out?'
NINE
The windscreen wipers patted the snow into neat white triangles on the model A's window as the car grunted past, the white-coated sign: 'Bedford Falls - 2 miles'.
Lister banged at the dashboard with a gloved hand, and the faltering heater whirred back from the dead, and unenthusiastically started to de-mist the windscreen. Lister craned over the steering column and tried to make out the grey ruts in the snow which served as a rough indication as to where the road might be.
He was leaving The Game. It was easy to leave The Game. Easier than he'd have thought.
First you had to want to leave. And, of course, to want to leave you had to know you were in The Game in the first place. That was the hard part, realizing that this wasn't reality. Then it was only a matter of finding an exit. Just that. A Door marked 'EXIT'.
'And where are these doors?' he'd asked Kryten.
'It's your fantasy,' Kryten had replied; 'they're wherever you want them to be.'
So there it was. All he had to do was imagine an exit, and go through it.
He'd pass through the exit and find himself back on Red Dwarf, probably thin and gaunt and wasted from his two years in the Game but, nevertheless, back in reality. Once back, he could remove his headband - no, destroy his headband!
Destroy them all! - then start the long haul back to health.
But it was an individual matter. They all had to create their own separate exits. Alone. You're born alone, you die alone, you leave the Game alone.
The glimmering lights of Bedford Falls twinkled in the valley below as, for the last time, he made his way down the hill to his personal Shangri-la.
Ever since he'd left Earth, every step he'd taken had led him further away from the dirty polluted world he loved. First Mimas, then the outer reaches of the solar system, then Deep Space, and finally here - in the wrong dimension of the wrong plane of reality. It was hard to imagine how he could ever be further away from home.
The Ford juddered down the main street under the strings of lights that hung between trees down the avenue. He passed Horace's Bank, and through the window saw the money still stacked in neat piles on the counter. He passed Old Man Gower's drugstore. How could he have - believed it existed? He passed Martini's Bar, alive inside with joyful revellers celebrating Christmas Eve. He headed the old car down Sycamore Avenue, and slid to rest outside no. 220.
There, in the middle of the street, a pink neon sign hung over a shimmering archway. There was his exit, just as he'd imagined it. On the other side was reality.
It started to snow. Christmas Eve.
How could he leave them on Christmas Eve?
What harm was one more day? He turned away from the dissolving exit and crunched up the drive to 220.
One more night of that pinball smile.
Just one.
He couldn't leave them on Christmas Eve.
But, of course, in Bedford Falls it was always Christmas Eve ...
