6000

'So, What Happened?'

Holly told him about the cadmium II radiation leak; how the crew had been wiped out within seconds; how he'd headed the ship pell-mell out of the solar system, to avoid spreading nuclear contamination; and how he'd had to keep Lister in stasis until the radiation had reached a safe background level.

'So ... How long did you keep me in stasis?'

'Three million years,' said Holly, as casually as he could.

Lister acted as if he hadn't heard. Three million years? It had no meaning. If it had been thirty years, he would have thought 'What a long time.' But three million years. Three million years was iust ... stupid.

He wandered over to the chair opposite the console he'd seen Kochanski operate.

'So, Krissie's dead,' he said, staring at the hummock of dust. 'I always...'

His voice tailed away.

He tried to remember her face. He tried to remember the pinball smile.

'Well, if it's any consolation,' said Holly, 'If she had survived, the age difference would be insurmountable. I mean, you're twenty-four, she's three million: it takes a lot for a relationship with that kind of age gap to work.'

Lister wasn't listening. 'I always thought we'd get back together. I, ah, had this sort of plan that one day I'd have enough money to buy a farm on Fiji. It's cheap land there, and, in a half-assed kind of way, I always pictured she'd be there with me.'

This was getting morbid. Holly tried to lighten the atmosphere.

'Well,' he said, 'she wouldn't be much use to you on Fiji now.

'No,' said Lister.

'Not unless it snowed,' said Holly, 'and you needed something to grit the path with.'

Lister screwed up his face in distaste. 'Holly!'

'Sorry. I've been on my own for three million years. I'm just used to saying what I think.'

For some time now, well, the last two hundred thousand years to be exact, Holly had grown increasingly concerned about himself.

For a computer with an IQ of six thousand, it seems to him he was behaving in a more and more erratic way.

In fact, he'd long suspected he'd gone a bit peculiar. Just as a bachelor who spends too much time on his own gradually develops quirks and eccentricities, so a computer who spends three million years alone in Deep Space can get, well, set in his ways. Become quirky. Go a little bit ... odd.

Holly decided not to burden Lister with this anxiety, and hoped his oddness would eventually sort itself out now he had a bit of company.

Another slight concern which he tried to put to the back of his RAM was that, for a computer with an IQ of six thousand, there was a rather alarming amount of knowledge he seemed to have forgotten. It wasn't, on the whole, important things, but was nonetheless fairly disturbing.

He knew, for instance, that Isaac Newton was a famous physicist, but he couldn't remember why.

He couldn't remember the capital of Luxembourg.

He could recall pi to thirty thousand digits, but he couldn't say for absolute certain whether port was on the left side, and starboard on the right, or whether it was the other way round.

Who knocked Swansea City out of the FA Cup in 1967? He used to know. It was a mystery now.

Obviously none of this missing information was absolutely vital for the smooth running of a mining ship three million years out into Deep Space. But technically he was supposed to know more-or-less everything and, frankly, there were some worrying gaps. He could remember, for instance, that in the second impression, 1959 publication of Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov, printed in Great Britain by the Shenval Press (London, Hertford and Harrow), page 60 was far and away the dirtiest page. But was Nabakov German or Russian? It totally eluded him.

Maybe it wasn't important. Of course it wasn't important.

Still, it was for Holly a source of perturbation.

It's a source of perturbation, he thought. Then he wondered whether there was such a word as 'perturbation', or whether he'd just made it up. He didn't know that either. Oh, it was hopeless.