In this extra special episode of Stories from the Hearth, flying freelancer Jahanara Khan seeks refuge in a run-down space station called the Pale Blue Dot. It is a den of depravity and illicit transactions, run by a ragtag group of aliens including a disgruntled green blob, and a frighteningly upbeat Texan automaton. What Jahanara wants with such a place, we can hardly guess. But when she runs into an old, hyper-intelligent, floating friend, her dangerous secret soon becomes everybody's problem.
In this extra special episode of Stories from the Hearth, flying freelancer Jahanara Khan seeks refuge in a run-down space station called the Pale Blue Dot. It is a den of depravity and illicit transactions, run by a ragtag group of aliens including a disgruntled green blob, and a frighteningly upbeat Texan automaton. What Jahanara wants with such a place, we can hardly guess. But when she runs into an old, hyper-intelligent, floating friend, her dangerous secret soon becomes everybody's problem.
CW: drug use, violence, sexual reference
With character design and guest voice acting from Robbie Durham, and original guest artwork and character design from Jack Magee, this is set to be one of Stories from the Hearth's most ludicrously fun episodes to date. Stories from the Hearth is an experimental storytelling experience ft. truly original fiction and thoughtfully produced soundscapes. The aim of this podcast is to rekindle its listeners' love for the ancient art of storytelling (and story-listening), and to bring some small escapism to the frantic energies of the modern world. Stories from the Hearth is the brainchild of queer punk poet, environmentalist, and anarchist Cal Bannerman. Vive l'art!
This story concludes in Episode #8 - out Sunday 9th May 2021 (09.05.21)
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Original Artwork by Jack Magee
Jack's Instagram: @mackjagee
Jack's Website: www.jackmagee.co.uk
Additional Voices by Robbie Durham
Robbie's Instagram: @robbie_durham
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"Yellow Star", "Breakdown" and "Overdriven Rain" are the work of Monplaisir and are courtesy of freesound.org, licensed under Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication licenses. To read more about the licenses, click here.
"2.12.05 elevator" is the work of BOPD and is courtesy of freesound.org, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license. To read more about the license, click here.
"Behind Our Efforts, Let There Be Found Our Efforts" is the work of LG17 and is courtesy of freesound.org, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. To read more about the license, click here.
Welcome to Stories From The Hearth, the podcast for tall tales and fantastical fiction, short stories the likes of which you might once have heard a wandering bard tell, to a group of villagers, gathered around the fire. Explore the history of storytelling in bonus series The Wandering Bard, or escape your surroundings with a brand-new story, written and performed by me, Calum Bannerman, on the last Sunday of every month. Historical, romantic, science fiction, or fantasy; these are tales to transport you, doorways into another world…
This episode is a particularly special episode of Stories from the Hearth. What you're about to hear performed was produced in collaboration with two other freelance artists, and good friends of mine.
Character voices in the story were performed by the wonderfully talented Robbie Durham, who's been an actor on London's West End, and on UK and International tours for the past eleven years; most recognisably as Johnny Cash in The Million Dollar Quartet. Robbie now lives in Edinburgh, and his performances on this episode of Stories from the Hearth, mark his entrance into the voice acting world.
The artwork for this episode, as well as the design of various characters, is the brainchild of the illustrious illustrator, my good pal Jack Magee. Jack won The British Cartoonists Association's Under-18's Young Cartoonist of the Year competition, back in 2014, and has since produced artwork for the BBC, local businesses, and now Stories from the Hearth. You can commission artwork from Jack, or just see more of his stuff over at www.jackmagee.co.uk.
Hiring the talents of other freelance artists is what I want Stories from the Hearth to be all about, and doing so for this episode has only been made possible due to the generosity of my patrons. As such, I'd like to give them all a quick shout-out before we get underway. My enormous, ongoing thanks goes to Emma Cooper, Tiu Makkonen, Lisa Sykes, Luke Gram, Ashlee Espinoza, Martin Pringle, Rory Cowan, and, of course, to my family: Jen Anderson, Vivian, Nick, Mullaidh, Ruathy, and Sandy and Jane Bannerman. If any of you listening would like to contribute, like those I've just named have, please do visit my Patreon by hitting the link down below. It helps me out, everything that you do helps me out, and if you can't afford to spend a little every month, please just tell your friends and family about this podcast. It helps me keep doing this, and it helps me keep bringing my stories to the world.
Now, on with the show. This is Episode Seven: The Pale Blue Dot (Part One)
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Jahanara Khan glided through the airlock of the Pale Blue Dot, flashing a cursory glance at the biometric scanner as she went. A small, comforting click from the doors behind coming as something of a relief. It meant that her biometrics had, by some cosmic grace, yet to be black-listed; which in turn meant that she had been granted entry to the station, just like any other galactic punter would, and would not therefore be exiting as swiftly as she’d arrived, via the de-pressurized suction of bleakest outer space.
Hoping that the bio-scanners were no longer watching, Jahanara flicked her tongue up across a choir of shimmering eyes, licking them clean of her light-refracting tears. These tears were were the innate defence mechanism of her species. To potential predators, a hundred blinding orbs of brightest sunlight, roaring in the darkness, must have been dreadfully off-putting indeed; but boy if they didn’t make it hard for Jahanara to see.
As the lobby doors crunked open ahead of her, briefly she thought of her fathers: remembered watching them, copy-catting them as they licked their own eyes clean: defence mechanism on defence mechanism. She smiled. Or, at least, she made a series of quiet, affectionate clicking noises, which as good as passed for a smile, in a species who Creation had deigned to place outside the need for a jaw.
As Jahanara Khan hovered beneath the neon lights of the Pale Blue Dot’s reception area, momentarily overcome by a wave of nostalgia, back on the landing pad outside, a small green blob trudged wearily up the gangplank of Khan’s spaceship. The small green blob was the station’s resident parking valet. It had been the resident parking valet for the best part of 4.6 million years, and recently it was beginning to grow rather tired of its duty.
Manoeuvring Khan’s chrome, comet-shaped ship into a free spot in the Pale Blue Dot’s gravitational orbit, the small green blob – lost in dreamy, aspirational thoughts of piloting more up-market models into the orbit of some classier, more-galactically-central space-station – failed to notice the approach of a quietly-purring troop carrier. It had failed to notice the troop carrier when, minutes earlier, it had pulled a sharp U-turn around a hurtling asteroid, as soon as Jahanara Khan had sped into its viewfinder. The small green blob had failed to notice the carrier turn from dull, unadorned grey to near-invisible, as it engaged its camouflage protocol: a billion microscopic lenses on the surface of its hulk turning outward to face the stars, mirroring the vast black and white canvas of space. With a sigh which sounded like a tub of wet putty being rudely fingered, the small green blob left Jahanara’s ship in orbit; and as it fell with a soft splat back to the landing pad of the Pale Blue Dot, it failed to notice the camouflaged troop carrier parking itself illegally next to Khan’s vehicle.
Of course, having said that, I’m not so sure that even if the small green blob had noticed, it would have given much of a damn. As I’ve said, it was getting rather tired of the whole routine, and short of drafting its letter of resignation, the infiltration of the station by a gang of camouflaged guns-for-hire, happening on the small green blob’s watch, might just have proved the fireable offense it was otherwise too good-natured to commit.
Back in its office, the small green blob tuned back in to the ether waves, only to discover it had missed the play of the millennium, and the Martian Rocket-Thrusters were up on the Biffenisian Blorgons by twelve over pi. The blob swore grotesquely, and decided it would have flung Khan’s keys at the wave-emitter, exploding the both of them in myriad fragments, if only its species had evolved to have arms.
*
The interior of the Pale Blue Dot had not changed a single bit, since last Jahanara had indulged in its once popular, now embarrassingly gauche flavour for hospitality. The station, moored in a sorry corner of the Milky Way by some freak accident of gravitational science, was named for the view one could enjoy from its observation deck. Namely, that remote and infinitesimally small speck of blue matter, hanging in nothingness, which was at one point in its history known as Earth.
The Pale Blue Dot was moored at more or less the exact point in space at which the Voyager 1 space probe had been commanded by its overlords to turn and photograph Planet Earth, before it left the cosmos, back in the Earth year one-thousand nine-hundred and ninety. Arguably one of the more obscure selfies of humanity’s Digital Age. The photograph, in which the size of Earth was barely that of a single pixel, had been rather dramatically entitled The Pale Blue Dot. Many, many years later, when the last refugees from Earth once more travelled the ancient route of their Voyager probe, they built this space station, to act as a waypoint for future travellers.
And, for a time, the Pale Blue Dot had attracted a good deal of custom, despite being so out-of-the-way. Seemingly, the curiosity which the possibility of viewing an abandoned planet invoked had been more than enough to fill the coffers of the space stations owners. As a result, they had grown altogether too comfortable, neglecting to update the station’s furnishings; not bothering to refresh the place with trendier lighting, or a dash of paint; leaving the hologram hostesses to slowly judder into a lagging, distorted presentational loop. Even the roster of staff, including folks such as our poor and inobservant friend the small green blob, had not once been updated. The bartenders the same, teeth-grindingly upbeat AIs they had always been.
And once the novelty of spying Earth from this cold and lonely pinprick of the theoretical multiverse had worn off, once even the term ‘Human’ or ‘Homo sapiens sapiens’ had been resigned to the history podcasts, the owners of the Pale Blue Dot had found themselves quite suddenly out-of-pocket, with no dosh to update the place whether they’d suddenly found the urge to or not. At the mercy of some of the galaxy’s most blood-hungry loan-sharks (most of whom were literal sharks, from the aqua-moon of Androgyny IV), the owners had just upped and vanished one day.
Since then, the station had been kept running, in a state of semi-competent operation, by a miscellaneous band of misfits and nomadic wanderers, for however long each of them happened to make the place their home. Them, and, of course, those long-suffering holographic, artificially-intelligent, and small, green, blobbish beings who comprised the original staff list.
Thus, nowadays the Pale Blue Dot was known not for its eponymous scenery, but as a hovel of depravity, hedonism, and criminality, the likes of which could even have turned the stomachs of the Andromedan Gastrophiles, who were, both literally and metaphorically, walking stomachs. It was not the sort of place one sought out if one was looking for legitimate work, friendship, learning, or in fact a comfortable place to rest and recuperate.
And yet, it was exactly the place Jahanara Khan had had in mind when setting her ship’s autopilot; and for one reason, and one reason only. The Pale Blue Dot was an excellent place to hide.
‘Bartender? Excuse me! Bartender!’
The lounge of the Pale Blue Dot was that evening playing host to the musical atrocities of anarcho-punk outfit The Legionnaires of Sin, a rag-tag group of alien-lifeforms with an ever-revolving line-up. Their whole shtick was that their music was written to be accessible to all. Commendable in theory, but in practice rarely practical. Presently, the band – constituting a singing cloud of stardust, a tripletoid of bass-emitting chrysanthemums, and a living, breathing Fender Stratocaster – were thrashing out a song from their 52nd EP, called 110110001110110. Most of the bar’s current patrons wore earplugs, and paid the band little attention. Toward the front of the stage, however, a small, devoted group of supercomputers were screaming their gold-lined lungs out.
As Jahanara tried and failed once more to attract the attention of the AI bartender, she saw that he, too, was enraptured by this particular track.
Presently, The Legionnaires of Sin concluded their song in a fit of ones and zeroes, before retiring through the curtain at the back of the stage for a much-applauded break. Jahanara yelled along the grimy expanse of bar, and this time the bartender turned to her, raised a finger in recognition, and wheeled himself along to face her.
‘Hullo,’ she chirped, the insectoid beeps and buzzes of her language taking longer than usual to register in the Voxbox of the robotic drinks-dispenser.
‘Weeeeell, howdy-do, miss! Seems you’re new around these parts! I do declare. You’ll be wantin’ for a–’
‘Drink, yes,’ interrupted Jahanara, gradually remembering why it was it had been so long since her last visit to the Pale Blue Dot. Earthlings and their bloody sentimentality, she thought. What would they think, she wondered, to know the last native speaker of their language is this gravity-forsaken robot?
‘Give me…’ She looked over the shoulder of the bartender, at the tall cabinet of mostly antiquated Earthling spirits, none of which she supposed tasted anything like their ancestors. ‘Gimme a gym’n’frollic, would ya? Make it a double.’
‘A mighty fine choice, miss. And a double you say? Woo-wee, aimin’ to shake the dust from your boots, I’d wager!’
‘Something like that,’ Jahanara grumbled.
‘Comin’ riiight up!’ She rolled several of her hundred eyes. ‘And how would the kind miss like to pay today?’ Asked the jolly robot, plonking a glass of mirky liquid in front of her.
Wordlessly, Jahanara unzipped her bum bag, and from some large object inside broke a tiny piece. In response to the bartender’s question, she slid across the bar something quite indescribably beautiful. Almost metallic, the little fragment glittered with the radiance of a thousand stars. Its edges were confusingly improbable, the measurements of its matter implausible, and impossible to fully quantify with the naked eye (no matter whether you had one or one hundred of them).
The robot across from her had gone perfectly silent, and Jahanara felt she could almost see the gears turning inside its ancient frame. She pushed the wee glittery thing further across the bar, a nervous trilling at the back of her throat sign of her impatience. At long last, something in the AI barkeep seemed to click. Clanging open an antique-replica cash register, he exclaimed loudly.
‘HEEE HAW! THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THERE–’
But before he could finish, he was silenced with a sharp slap from the sticky, foot-long tongue of Jahanara Khan.
‘Keep your damn fool mouth shut, cowboy, and there’s more where that came from. ¿Comprende?’
Of course, Khan didn’t actually say these words. In her language, there was no concept of bovines, let alone bovine-boys, and Spanish was the name of a modestly-sized asteroid-mining enterprise, not a language. Thankfully for her, whatever it was she did say, when translated via the robot bartender’s outdated Voxbox, made perfect colloquial sense to him. Accordingly, he shut his damn fool mouth.
Jahanara clicked her appreciation, and immediately set about the interesting task of supping her gym’n’frollic from the human-designed highball glass. The drink tasted only mildly rank, a whiff of something vaguely floral masking the worst of its flavour.
As The Legionnaires of Sin returned centre stage for Act Nine of the night, now with a line-up solely comprised of floating molluscs, Khan sank her second double-strength beverage, and ordered both a third and a fourth.
She sensed the arrival of the sentient orb a fraction of a second before it spoke.
‘Captain Khan of the Frequently Inebriated, I daresay I never thought I’d see you again. What is it brings you here this time? Business, or… business?’
*
The last time Jahanara Khan had seen Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb, the pair had been cresting the swell of a particularly nasty come-down, the morning after the night before. And the night before the last time Jahanara had seen Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb, she’d watched them vaporise half an ounce of black-market thrushweed, snort several grams of high-grade Saturnalian moondust, and still have the composure to seduce a literal herd of scorpion-people into bed.
They had been celebrating, she remembered, the equitable brokering of peace between the planet Ouch (home to the scorpion-people), and its moon, Hurt. Glorfindel had been hired by Hurt to infiltrate the inner-circle of the scorpion-people’s high command; whilst Jahanara had signed a contract with the Scorpios of Ouch, who had asked her, in no uncertain terms, to blow up their moon.
Long story short, after a brief and uninteresting squabble, Glorfindel and Jahanara had come to a rather more peaceful solution.
It had turned out, you see, that the scorpion-people of Ouch only wanted their moon destroyed because they believed that the immense shadow it cast over their world was depriving them of their inherent right to sunlight. The moon called Hurt (which was itself a conscious entity) had only hired Glorfindel out of panicked self-defence. Jahanara, sensing that the scorpion-people of Ouch were perhaps misguided in their desire for sunlight, simply had Glorfindel ask Hurt the moon to move over a little bit, and let some sunlight fall on Ouch for a little while. As she had suspected, exposed to the intense heat of their star, the scorpion-people of Ouch very quickly realised their mistake; saw that, in fact, they rather enjoyed the cold, the shade, the permanence of night which had, funnily enough, governed their evolution in the first place. The moon, realigning herself once more, had been extremely grateful to both Glorfindel and Jahanara for not blowing her up, whilst the scorpion-people of Ouch had been grateful (despite their bruised egos) for having learned their lesson, and for still having a moon, in the shadow of which they could thrive.
Jahanara’s rapidly unravelling train of thought was interrupted by the floating orb once again.
‘Come here often, then?’
He better not be trying a bloody line on me, thought Jahanara, I’m no Scorpio, and I haven’t got the bloody time.
‘I was only asking…’ said Glorfindel, the swirling colours inside their sphere turning an offended shade of orange. ‘And by the way,’ they added, ‘I’d prefer she. I’m in my feminine cycle right now, thank you very much for noticing…’
Jahanara, slurping into her fourth drink of the hour, was stunned. She turned to Glorfindel with her tongue still at the bottom of her glass.
‘Huhthehthuh… Ahem. How did you…?’
‘Read your thoughts?’
‘Eh, oh god. I’d forgotten.’ Realisation settled in Jahanara’s mind as naturally as the dust on her wings. How could she have forgotten? Glorfindel was one of a small, endangered species of extraneously-conscious light-orbs, who were not so much mind readers as mind readers. The conscious thoughts of all life forms were as visible to Glorfindel’s species as the various furnishings of the Pale Blue Dot’s bar were to Jahanara. Moreso, in fact, for by now the double gym’n’frollics were beginning to catch up with her, and everything in the room had developed a sort of fuzzy quality.
Glorfindel didn’t have to try and read her mind, they only had to look at her as she thought.
‘Buy you a drink?’ offered the orb. ‘Looks like you could use one.’
‘Eh… sure.’
‘Bartender!’
‘Yeeee-haww, what can I do ya for mam?’
Jahanara winced.
And so it was, to the sound of The Legionnaires of Sin, thrashing their instruments alongside a solemn reading of Karla Barks’ Canine Manifesto, that two old freelancers got themselves right and royally reacquainted.
Outwith their earshot, back on the crumbling landing pad of the Pale Blue Dot, in the cramped and rarely-tidied office of its resident parking valet, two shots were fired.
The first passed through a soft, green, and squishy mass of tissue as if it were jelly, the sheer heat of the quasar-blaster’s anti-matter-ammo instantly frying the splattered remains of the small green blob. The blob’s roasting gizzards smelled quite a bit like garlic, and the assassin couldn’t help but salivate.
The second shot – fired several seconds later – blew the small green blob’s wave-emitter to smithereens. The commentator, you see, had just announced that the Biffenisian Blorgons had struck back, overtaking the Martian Rocket-Thrusters at the final honk, and securing themselves, for the seventh century running, the coveted Plutonium Cup.
Aside from a sorry mess of death and destruction, all that the assassin left behind in that small valet-cubicle were the torn remains of her betting slip. Closer inspection showed that the Biffenisian game was the last in a long accumulator of games which the assassin had been correctly predicting. The Blorgons win had cost her a pretty penny.
Two, to be exact.
*
‘Ha ha ha!’
‘And then – and then he says – says, “Madam, that’s not a urinal, that’s a cake display!”
‘Ahh ha ha ha ha ha!’
The freelancers had relocated to the now rarely-visited observation deck of the Pale Blue Dot, and were currently somewhere between their tenth and twentieth drink of this most unexpected reunion.
In front of them, a wall of glass looked out across the vastness of space, and somewhere amidst the solar glares, stars, asteroids, and space dust, toward a tiny, pixel-sized speck of almost-nothing. AKA Earth, or the original Pale Blue Dot. To Jahanara and Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb, however, their seemed to be several dots out there, of varying colour and hue, for in their drunkenness the cosmos had become kaleidoscopic.
Welded into the floor by the window was a plaque. It was engraved with quite a long quote from the aspirational Earthling Carl Sagan, with regards to the ephemeral nature of human life relative to the permanence of Earth. Ironic, in hindsight. The bronze of the plaque was now dull and lifeless, and had been grossly defaced by any number of vandals over the years. Where once it had read: “Look again at that dot… On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” Now it read: “Look again at that butt… On it, every butt you love, every butt you know, every butt who ever was, lived out their butts.”
In a moment of contented silence between the two companions, Jahanara strained her many eyes, trying to focus on the plaque. She sniggered.
‘So,’ began Glorfindel, the smoky sworls of their orb a spectrum of Catherine-Wheeling colour. ‘You’ve still to answer my question. You are on a job, right?’ Their voice, though still imbued with the joviality of drink, carried the slightest hint of caution.
‘What? Eh… aw, no, no. On a, eh, on a break actually. Taking a break. Time off.’ Jahanara slurred her words. She giggled and hiccupped, then began racking up another line of high-grade Saturnalian moondust, in a bid to level her head. Glorfindel studied her thoughts carefully, but found nothing to suggest that she was lying. Unfortunately for Jahanara, however, the orb also studied her movements, and didn’t fail to notice the way two of her six hands were now tightly clutching the bum bag at her waist.
‘Well,’ replied Glorfindel, ‘you’ve chosen quite the holiday destination. Most of us here are either wasters, hermits, or in hiding.’ The orb emphasised their last words, the matter of their make-up flashing crystalline blue as Jahanara’s hands tightened even further around the bag.
Khan snorted first one line of moondust, and then another. She threw back her head. Briefly, her hundred eyes flashed with the brilliance of a nearby sun, and her whole body visibly trembled. From her throat came an excited sequence of trills and clicks. Nonsense words, exclamations of euphoria. She turned to Glorfindel, offering up the plate, but they shook their orb.
‘You ever noticed,’ said Jahanara, a little too loudly, ‘that as the Universe continues to expand and galaxies move further and further away from each other and even light-jumping between them takes longer these days – and how there’s talk that in the most remotest corners of space – a hundred thousand million parsecs from here – that all matter has been torn apart and even blackholes are dissolving, and seeing as that’s probably the fate of everything and everyone, you ever thought that maybe the Universe is just slowly erasing itself? Like it’s erasing all that it’s created up until now in some sort of like total cosmic back-to-the-drawing-board type deal until nothing exists at all except a dark-matter-flavoured quantum soup just glooping around all over the place, and that maybe that’s exactly the kind of set of circumstances that led to the Big Bang in the first place. Then don’t you think that given how Time is totally relative and not even really like a universal thing, then once the Universe has pulled itself apart, it might suddenly explode again and start all over again and that the theoretical multiverse might just be like layers and layers and layers of Universal creation and destruction and creation and destruction and creation, meaning that we might be the first, or we might be like the billionth attempt the Universe has made to manifest itself into consciousness and thus like, observe itself?
She shook her head. ‘It’s just… freaking gnarly dude.’
Jahanara’s eyes were a multiverse of collapsed and reforming universes. She paused to get her breath back, looking around for a lighter to light her cigarette with.
Glorfindel offered her theirs. ‘Good moondust then, is it?’ They smiled thinly.
‘The best,’ Jahanara nodded enthusiastically. ‘Want some?’
The orb shook their orb again.
‘Still no. Now, come on ‘Nara. Level with me. What’s in the bag?’
Jahanara, riding the high like an astral surfer rides the solar flares of a dying star, glanced shiftily around the empty room. In the observation deck of the Pale Blue Dot, there was only she, her orb-in-arms, and the chaotic quietude of space.
Wings the colour of spilled petrol, twitching in translucent arcs, the freelancer curled a lip to reveal the fleshy roof of her mouth. She clicked with a mixture of apprehension and anticipation, and unzipped her bag.
Glorfindel didn’t know quite where to look.
On the one hand, there was the contents of Jahanara’s bum bag: a sight so dazzling, so dangerous and reckless and awe-inspiring that they were struck completely dumb. On the other hand, there were Jahanara’s thoughts, currently flooding the space between them in a constant stream of contradiction: pride at her accomplishment, regret at revealing her secret, curiosity as to Glorfindel’s reaction, and a heady mix of lust, envy, and hyper-awareness. Yet, above all, there was fear. Fear of repercussion. Fear of the thing itself. Fear of being caught.
At long last, Glorfindel regained composure. Khan, her eyes drunkenly bewitched by the unquantifiable allure of her loot, eventually did so too, zipping the bag back up and returning it to the protection of her arms. She turned to face her friend.
‘That’s not…’ said the orb.
‘It is.’
‘You didn’t…’
Jahanara laughed nervously. ‘I did.’
‘But that’s…!’ protested the orb.
‘I know, right,’ said Khan, like one scheming schoolchild conspiring with another.
‘Jahanara, what the hell were you thinking?’ Glorfindel turned a sickly shade of yellow. Jahanara scoffed, a little offended.
‘Oh, come on. You’re telling me you wouldn’t have been tempted? Payload this freaking huge?’
The extraneously-conscious light-orb seemed to tremble, the transparent walls of their sphere juddering in and out of focus as they became pale and near-colourless, tiny flashes of anxious purple fluttering at the very heart of their being.
‘Khan,’ whispered Glorfindel, ‘I would roger my own grandparent for a payload that big. I would fly through the Supermassive Black Hole of the Xenovian Cluster in a tin can, blindfolded, knob first, for a sliver of a payload that fucking ginormous. But not if it meant doing what you’ve done.’ Glorfindel caught their breath, reheating the condensation forming on the inside of their shell until it turned to cloud again. They swore under their breath. ‘Who in Quantum Hell hired you?’
Jahanara avoided their gaze, shifting on her perch uneasily. ‘I, eh…’ she began. ‘I hired me?’
‘You are fucking kidding me.’ Glorfindel turned green. ‘You do know what that is, right? The thing you’ve stolen?’
Jahanara grimaced. ‘Yes?’ She hiccupped again, and finished her drink, sniffing like a scent hound.
‘You’ve not got a clue, have you? Orion’s bloody Belt, ‘Nara… you’re carrying–’
But the extraneously-conscious light-orb Glorfindel never got to finish their sentence, because just at that moment, there came an ear-splitting chorus of gunfire from the lobby of the Pale Blue Dot. The noise was followed shortly after by a sonata of broken glass, frazzled wiring, and the screeching-to-a-halt of The Legionnaires of Sin’s PA system.
Jahanara and Glorfindel spun in the direction of the ruckus, quaking in their boots. (At least, they would have, if either of them wore boots, or indeed had feet.)
As the sudden explosion of noise settled to a tinnitus hum, there came a voice from the lobby.
‘We’re here by order of the Inter-Galactic Council of Sentience. We have intelligence that you are harbouring the fugitive Jahanara Khan. She is wanted ‘Dead or Contrived’. Bring her to us, or be arrested as accessory to her crimes. Boys! Get hunting.’
*
‘Oh, Jesus Christ…’ moaned Jahanara Khan.
‘Who?’
‘Why’d the heck I have to get so druddy blunk?’
‘What?’
‘Why’d the drunk I have to get so bloody heck?’
‘Right.’ Glorfindel looked their one-time friend the insectoid up and down. When once they’d salved relations between the scorpion-people of Ouch and their sentient moon, Glorfindel had rather admired the spunk of the freelancer. Now, though, watching her tidying away a spilled gram of Saturnalian moondust like a teenager at a house party whose mum’s come home unexpectedly early, whilst, in the next room over, a band of blood hungry mercenaries tore the Pale Blue Dot a new one, this particular extraneously-conscious light-orb was beginning to regret ever having bumped into Jahanara Khan in the first place.
Momentarily, Glorfindel considered turning her in, but in a surprise turning of the tables, it seemed it was Jahanara’s turn to read minds. She turned to them, frowning. In the confines of the orb, Jahanara recognised a scheming clash of gold and, and understood at once her peril. She inverted her frown, widened her eyes, and began pleading.
‘Hey, Glor’? We – eh… We’re friends, right?’
A breath passed between the pair, taught and silent. At length, Glorfindel relaxed.
‘Damnit,’ they hissed. ‘If there’s not a drug-fuelled orgy at the end of this I’m going to be mightily peeved, Miss Khan.’
She exhaled a gargantuan sigh of relief. ‘Holy shit, Glorf. You had me scared for a minute, there.’
From the corridor through the door to their left came a scream, a thud, and then silence. Glorfindel and Jahanara looked at each other, the deluge of inebriation gradually dissipating, replaced in its stead by a bitter realisation.
‘Tell me you have a plan.’ Glorfindel tried not to let their voice shake.
Their voice shook.
They watched as the air between they and Jahanara filled with the flying freelancer’s stream of consciousness.
Plan? Plan, plan, plan, read her thoughts. Planny-planny-plan-plan. Do I have a plan? The light-orb felt weak. They had never fainted before, and whilst they were not constrained by gravity, they imagined passing out might not feel too great regardless.
Suddenly, the light in Jahanara’s centurial eyes changed. She looked up at the orb, the clicking of her throat the slightest suggestion of a smile.
Then, sweaty fingers fumbling frustratedly at first with the finnicky fly of her bum bag, she held her loot aloft.
The thing – for which the Inter-Galactic Council of Sentience had put a price on her head for stealing – was about the size of a regular Earth apple. As such, it made Jahanara look rather small. And it was very curious looking. Not as curious, perhaps, as the curiously christened Normies of Zog, whose faces were actually inverted, such that they had to reach through themselves in order to eat, but curious it was all the same.
To look directly at the thing would be to see nothing. But to hold it in one’s peripheries was to observe an object which bent, which fractured and relayed light in spectrums previously uncharted. Its edges, though confined to its roughly-apple-sized dimensions, might as well have went on forever. At the same time, it would be just as true to say that they went nowhere. The object was iridescent and candescent at the same time, both hard and soft, smooth and rough, comprehensible and completely, totally, utterly baffling. It made no sense, and yet, it made all the sense in the multiverse.
And as Glorfindel watched their companion awkwardly wrestle this thing that was no thing under her control, they were suddenly blindsided by what Jahanara did next. Squinting from the corner of myriad eyes, the freelancer located the portion of the thing she was looking for: the section where earlier she had chipped a splinter off, in order to bribe the AI-bartender into keeping his mouth shut. Then, in the blink of an eye, Jahanara darted out her tongue and prized a similarly-sized fragment from the object. Glorfindel gasped, their orb a raging ocean of sea spray the colour of the Marianna Trench.
‘Whawhowhahwyhwhewhe… WHAT!?’ they shrieked, able at last to relocate their faculties of speech. ‘Jahanara what the fuck!?’
‘What do you mean what the fuck?’ responded Jahanara, quite satisfied with herself.
‘That’s–’ protested Glorfindel, but Jahanara hushed them into silence.
‘Shh-shh-shh, it’s working… it’s working! I have an idea! Yee-ha! Glorf!’ she exclaimed, ‘I know how to get out of here. I know how to escape!’
The extraneously-conscious light-orb just stared at her, and for a second their orb turned a dense, opaque black. Jahanara explained.
‘Right, this may sound crazy, yeah? But it happened before, few times now, whenever I knap a bit of this off to pay folk, right? Soon as I knap a bit off, I get this little burst of energy. Not like moondust energy though, right, but like, mental energy. I get these thoughts, these ideas. Like how a bowl of thrushweed helps you see things differently, right, from different perspectives, except with this stuff your brain stays really clear, and it’s… shit, it’s like you can see things from every perspective, I…’ she trailed off, confused to find Glorfindel still on a different wavelength.’
‘You – insufferable – moron.’
There came another burst of gunfire, this time from the deck directly below, causing the mist inside Glorfindel to condense at a rapid rate – quicker than they could evaporate it. To witness this was to see a storm, brewing on the horizon.
‘You really have no idea why it does that, do you?’
Jahanara cocked her head, bewildered.
‘Creation be cursed. Jahanara Khan, you are holding in your hands the fixed, fundamentally standardised unit used by all sentient life to measure the exact nature of one single quota of intelligence. You fucking numbskull.’
Jahanara cocked her head in the opposite direction. Glorfindel let out a little squeak.
‘Like a – like a kilogram, you idiot! That,’ they nodded at the object, ‘is one of the original SI’s. Red Dwarf, Jahanara, SI’s! Inter-Galactic System of Units! Did you learn nothing in school? The Eight SI’s!’
In a manic spurt of nervous energy, Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb suddenly burst into song. It was a mnemonic device they had learned in their school-days, and a little like the complex algebra we learn in maths class, one they had never thought they’d ever need again, until this very moment.
The second for time
The metre to measure
The kilogram is for mass,
An ampere measures your electric current
And kelvin does your temp,
The mole is one amount of substance
Whilst candela checks for light,
But hey what’s left?
Let’s get this right:
It’s the fucking brainiac for intelligence!
‘Oh…’ Jahanara grimaced. ‘So this is…’
‘The brainiac, yes. Well done. You’ve stolen the brainiac, brainiac. Hah!’ They laughed wildly. ‘No! Better than that! It might have been the Universe’s standard measurement of intelligence when you stole it, but who knows what in space it is now. Now that you’ve chipped away at it. No wonder you feel suddenly smarter every time you break a piece off of it. You are literally lowering the benchmark for intelligence.’
‘You mean,’ began Jahanara, rather stupidly.
‘I mean that every time you lower the weight, density, mass, whatever of that thing, you are technically increasing your IQ.
I mean, technically you’re increasing everyone’s IQ,’ Glorfindel was mumbling now, ‘but I guess… don’t know… ha ha ha… proximity? Ha ha!... don’t lose it now Glorfy… lose it… ha! Wish I could lose her…’
Jahanara stared peripherally at the brainiac. It hadn’t seemed quite so important, when she’d chanced upon it in the dark and dreary annexes of the Council of Sentience’s Museum of Everything. All she’d seen was something obviously immensely valuable, sitting locked away in the bowels of some stuffy old prison for nonsense artifacts. In hindsight, the number of security personnel protecting the thing did make more sense. Shame they hadn’t proved more of a match for a flying insectoid with burning starlight for eyes. If they had, she thought, neatly shirking blame, she and Glorfindel might never have been in this mess…
Presently, Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb was spinning at one thousand revolutions per minute, and it was beginning to make Jahanara feel dizzy. She reached out to try and steady them, but only burned her claw against the friction.
‘Glorfindel,’ she tried, but the orb seemed to have turned deaf. ‘Glorfindel!’ The door on their left hissed and howled, straining to open against the makeshift blockade the pair had erected. Desperate, Jahanara fired her tongue at the orb.
The tongue’s surface, as porous as moonrock and sticky for it, stuck fast to the transparency of the gaseous freelancer. With all of her might, Jahanara flapped her wings against the pull of her spinning friend, eventually creating enough thrust to slow them down and, finally, bring them to a halt. Gingerly, she let her tongue go soggy and limp, curling it back into the folds of her mouth. Glorfindel seemed too dazed to notice.
‘Glorf,’ commanded Jahanara, ‘I’m sorry, okay. But we gotta go, and you gotta trust me. Maybe I’ve done wrong… Okay, definitely I’ve done wrong,’ she said, at a look from the orb, ‘but believe me when I tell you, this whole intelligence thing? It’s working on me. I can feel it. And I know how we can escape.
‘Now come on, we gotta go order ourselves some lunch. You hungry?’
Glorfindel looked shellshocked. Which is to say, the electro-static composition of their outer-casing seemed newly charged. ‘Wha-what?’ Then, after a moment’s thought. ‘I eh… all that booze… I, eh, I guess so, yes.’
‘Good,’ grinned Jahanara, ‘it’ll work better that way. Let’s go!’
-
You've been listening to Part One of The Pale Blue Dot. Next week, in Part Two - the conclusion - we'll find out what happens to Jahanara and Glorfindel, and whether they're able to escape the space station now overrun by armed mercenaries.
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