In this extra special episode of Stories from the Hearth, The Pale Blue Dot comes to its dramatic (and rather silly) conclusion. Flying freelancer Jahanara Khan is wanted by the Intergalactic Council of Sentience for the theft of the Brainiac - the multiverse's single standard of intelligence. But it seems all Khan is concerned with is money, and fame. Will she and her friend Glorfindel, the extraneously-conscious light-orb, escape the burning space station? Or will they fall prey to one of its many weird and wonderful alien mercenaries... such as the lava monster?
In this extra special episode of Stories from the Hearth, The Pale Blue Dot comes to its dramatic (and rather silly) conclusion. Flying freelancer Jahanara Khan is wanted by the Intergalactic Council of Sentience for the theft of the Brainiac - the multiverse's single standard of intelligence. But it seems all Khan is concerned with is money, and fame. Will she and her friend Glorfindel, the extraneously-conscious light-orb, escape the burning space station? Or will they fall prey to one of its many weird and wonderful alien mercenaries... such as the lava monster?
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!
Episode #9 is out Sunday 6th June 2021 (06.06.21)
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Original Artwork by Jack Magee
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Additional Voices by Robbie Durham
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"Breakdown" is the work of Monplaisir and is courtesy of freesound.org, licensed under a Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. To read more about the license, 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.
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 Eight: The Pale Blue Dot (Part Two - The Conclusion).
So far in the story, the flying freelancer Jahanara Khan has been reunited with the extraneously-conscious light orb Glorfindel, except not all is well, for Jahanara seems to have stolen something a little untoward, and now with the space station known as The Pale Blue Dot overrun by armed mercenaries, there seems little hope that Jahanara and Glorfindel can escape. Find out how this charmingly ridiculous duo deal with their predicament, in today's episode of Stories from the Hearth.
-
After twenty minutes at the hands of the mercenaries, the bar of the Pale Blue Dot now more closely resembled Earth in its final days. In other words, a lot of it was on fire, and everyone was trying to leave as quickly and as quietly as they could.
Toward the back of the room, the majority of the establishment’s patrons were gathered. Several were gagged or bound somehow, and many more knocked unconscious, or, as in the case of exotic dancer Zebo the Horn-Toothed Squid, had been shot dead. The captives were currently being guarded by a giant worm, whose slime was both highly-acidic and impenetrable.
The rest of the space-station was busy being systematically and thoroughly scoured by several dozen soldiers, each of whom was armed to the teeth (or actually had arms made of teeth, as was the unfortunate biological makeup of the Schneeblé System’s Molar Molanoids). From the bar lobby, one could hear the shrieks of guests and interrupted lovers, using their final moments in this multiverse to complain. Hadn’t they put the bloody ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign up? and I know the Pale Blue Dot’s hardly the Five Seasons, but buggeration if this wasn’t the worst room service they’d had in their entire… But the poor wretches never got to finish that thought.
In fact, the only resistance still holding out against the attack was that of anarcho-punk band The Legionnaires of Sin. The Legionnaires, thankful now more than ever for their infinite line-up of reinforcements, had entrenched themselves behind a hastily constructed barricade of bass-drums, sub-woofers, amps, pre-amps, guitar pedal-boards, keyboards and, unfortunately for them, even their precious rider. As the shots from the mercenaries’ anti-matter quasar-blasters ricocheted off the barricade, hundreds of bottles of snail-ale, clam-pain, and sea-quila were destroyed in a fine spray of ocean-themed alcohol. Of the moans coming from behind the barricade, only one in every ten were related to physical injury. The rest were simply mourning such a waste of booze.
Distracted by their fight with the Legionnaires, and with most of their company searching for the fugitive Khan elsewhere on the Pale Blue Dot, not one of the mercenaries in the lobby noticed Jahanara and Glorfindel, now a ripe shade of peach, as they quietly approached the splintered wreck of the bar.
*
‘Psst!’ hissed Jahanara, pulling Glorfindel’s attention back to the task at hand. ‘You want outta here alive or not?’
The pair were hid behind the corpse of a giant Venus flytrap, and as Glorfindel turned to face their companion, a stray blaster bolt hit the heaving remains, spraying the extraneously-conscious light-orb in a fine shower of viscera. Glorfindel turned the colour of diseased snot.
‘Ewww!’ said Jahanara, before she could stop herself. She reached up and pulled a sodden bar mat from the polished wooden surface. She flung it at Glorfindel, who, not having any hands to catch it with, suddenly found themselves blinded, wet, and smelling even worse than before. Decades of spilled drink, never once washed out of the bar mat, now coagulated on Glorfindel with the horrid stench of the decaying Dionaea.
Glorfindel shuddered, tilting on their axis until the towel fell free, and hit the floor with a sound like mouldy leaf mulch. The orb cycled through their colour palette until they found one which conveyed a suitable degree of rage.
‘Sorry, Glorf,’ apologised Jahanara, half-heartedly. ‘Anyway, what do you want?’ The flying insectoid motioned toward the menu, pale and Blu Tacked onto the mirror behind the bar. In all the years Jahanara and Glorfindel had been coming here, it had never changed. The Pale Blue Dot’s menu offered just two astronomically gastronomical choices.
After an unnecessarily long period of deliberation, Glorfindel finally answered Khan’s question.
‘Just the usual,’ they decided, with a satisfied nod. ‘But I still don’t understand–’
But Jahanara had stopped listening. With a quick peek over the dead flytrap, to confirm that the attentions of the mercenaries still lay elsewhere, she flew up to the bar. Or rather, what was left of it.
The old, saloon-style brass rail which had run the length of the bar, at just the right height for bipedal customers to rest their weary feet upon, was now so bent out of shape that it sooner resembled an incomprehensible modern art piece, than a footrest. And that was just the half of it. The once-polished surface of the bar, lovingly cracked and weathered by millennia of disrepair, had been thoroughly thwacked and leathered, in just a few milliseconds of wanton destruction. The area between the tattered bar and the cabinets behind – once showcasing many metric tonnes of knock-off booze, now showcasing many metric puddles of knocked-off booze – was a living catastrophe of splintered wood, shattered glass, and variously strewn robot parts.
For a moment, Jahanara worried that her plan had been foiled at the first hurdle. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror – itself somewhat miraculously undamaged – and recognised the kindling of fear-induced sunlight in each of her hundred eyes. Shit shit shit shit shit, she thought, her thoughts flashing in big red warning signs for Glorfindel to see. She licked frantically at the goo weeping from the corners of her eyes, and soon had herself back under control. She prayed that no one had seen her.
As her vision became clear once again, she saw to her enormous relief what it was she’d come looking for. There, among the wreckage, lay the AI-barkeep who had served her earlier. His wheel had come loose, and the funny screw-and-bolt fixings of his arms battered all to hell, but still he lived. And as he caught sight of Jahanara, he lived to serve.
‘Howdy-owdy-owdy do, lil miss. Lil miss. Lil-lil-lil-mees!’
Amidst the cacophonous rattle and volley of gunfire, the thundering tones of the Texan-throwback automaton didn’t travel particularly far. Jahanara flapped her wings nervously all the same.
‘Looks like I done found myself in a bit of a pickle-pickle-pickle, yeehawww! I’m f-f-f-feelin’ mighty drawn toward that big sunset in the des-des-desert, miss. Sure is gittin’ awful c-c-cold in here.’
Jahanara pulled an awkward face. ‘Jee, shucks, eh, yeah, sorry to hear that, mister, eh… what did you say your name was?’
‘The name’s Cl-cl-cl-clarence, k-kind miss, but my friends call me… Clarence. Geez, fetch a feller a blanket, would you?’
The robot bartender called Clarence was now visibly shaking.
‘Yeah, totally, no issue,’ reassured Jahanara, scraping the impressively shallow depths of her empathy bowl. ‘Just, eh, y’know, if it’s not too much hassle an’ all. We were wondering…’
‘I wasn’t!’ interrupted Glorfindel, still evidently pissed off.
‘Well, I was wondering, excusing the imposition, if you wouldn’t mind fetching us something first?’
Clarence the AI-barkeep smiled faintly, a row of piano teeth wobbling threateningly in his aluminium skull.
‘My, my-my-my, do you remind me of my good lady wife.’
‘You have a wife?’ asked Jahanara, with a mixture of incredulity and genuine curiosity.
‘Oh sure! Pretty as a darned peach, she is. Waitin’ for me back on The Ranch, too.’
The Ranch was an orbiting holding station for refugee farmers, made homeless by the infamous inter-galactic crop blight of the 43rd millennium AD (according to the Homo sapiens’ calendar, that is, for it was – in keeping with their track record – the genus Homo sapiens sapiens who had brought said blight to the galaxy in the first place, during their evacuation from Earth).
Glorfindel, growing increasingly anxious as the screams of wounded and dying aliens filled the air of the space station lobby, watched as Jahanara’s thoughts filled the air.
Jesus H. Christ, next he’ll be telling me he was on the brink of retirement.
‘Hell,’ snorted Clarence, ‘I was but three measly days from retirement, too.’ He laughed a sad sort of laugh. ‘Just about had the - had the - had the money to find me and Miss Clarence and Clarence Jr. a new home, too. Darn an’ b-b-b-b-blast it!’
Whilst Jahanara listened impatiently to the swan song of this curious relic of Earth’s final years, the door to the lobby from the upstairs rooms swished open. Pushing along a beleaguered pair of entwined Electro-Eels by the muzzle of their thot-gun, a soldier entered the room. The soldier was about nine-feet tall, and was formed entirely of molten lava – a species which neither Glorfindel nor Jahanara had ever encountered before, and not the sort of species one wants to be surprised by, in a situation such as theirs.
Jahanara swore colourfully. A rainbow of vulgarities patterning Glorfindel’s vision.
‘Right, Clarence my man, I am truly freaking sorry, okay, but I need a solid right now. Please tell me you’re still serving lunch?’
The question, out-of-context and concerning the nature of Clarence’s hospitality, snapped the dying robot from his reveries. A quiet light returned momentarily to the bulb of his ocular-socket.
‘Lunch y’ say? Why yes, indeed!’ Jahanara, Glorfindel, and anyone who had ever patronised the Pale Blue Dot had heard the coming spiel innumerable times before. ‘Here on the margins of the Milky Way, you best-best-best know what lunchtime means! There’s always time for Pork’n’Beans!’ The pieces of Jahanara’s plan moved closer to alignment. ‘Now,’ continued Clarence, ‘what’ll it be? Pork? Or Beans? Hooowee! You’re makin’ me hungry!’
Right then, three things happened at once, followed by three more things in quick succession.
Firstly, the molten-lava mercenary, attracted by Clarence’s hospitable hollerings, identified the hovering insectoid at the bar as the fugitive wanted ‘Dead or Contrived’ by the Inter-Galactic Council of Sentience, and the light-orb cowering nearby as a known accomplice. They raised their thot-gun, and took aim.
Secondly, Jahanara, a glint of success in each of her many eyes, completely oblivious to the crosshairs slowly aligning themselves with her body, ordered two portions of Pork, with two side portions of Beans, and nodded satisfactorily.
Thirdly, Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb, being the only one to have noticed the newly-directed attentions of the thot-gun-wielding magma monster, accidentally farted. The cloud, emitted from the microscopic valve which served Glorfindel as both mouth and anus, was a baffling array of colour and light, and actually went some way to camouflaging the embarrassed trumpeter.
These three simultaneities were closely followed by the following.
Firstly, Clarence the long-suffering barkeep, husband to a migrant wife, father to a migrant son, who would never have his retirement, not in this life or the next, uttered the words Jahanara had heard in her mind’s-ear, when first she’d dreamt up her plan.
‘Two Pork, two Beans, comin’ riiight up! Yeehaw!’
Secondly, the molten-lava mercenary, drawing the attention of its colleagues to the fugitives with a terrible war-cry – the sound of which could have curdled the Canadian Curds of the Planet Poutine – secured Jahanara and Glorfindel in the dual-crosshairs of its thot-gun, and fired.
And thirdly, as the phat-ass rays of the thot-gun whizzed and gibbered through the air of the space station lobby, Jahanara and Glorfindel’s perception of spacetime slowed to 1/100th of a second.
Jahanara, turning at last to take in the scene unfolding, breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Heck, that was closer than I’d planned!’
Leisurely, she winged her way off the bar and down to Glorfindel’s level, trying not to screw up her face too much at the combined stink of plant remains, stale beer, and flatulence, which surrounded the orb. The blast from the thot-gun drifted lazily through the air where seconds ago Jahanara had been perched. Glorfindel shook.
‘How di- what di- what’s the- where’s… Jahanara, what’s happening?’
‘Oh, it’s simple really,’ Jahanara beamed, more pleased with herself than ever before. ‘Time never moves slower than when you’re waiting for food!’
*
Question for you, children. Have you ever contemplated the fly?
If not, don’t worry. It’s not a test. I mean, I certainly hadn’t ever really thought of flies; until recently that is. But if you have; if you’ve mulled over mosquitoes, thought of tics, or asked after aphids, then perhaps you were inspired to do so for a similar reason.
You see, it was a hot summer’s evening, and the porch door was swinging creakily on its hinges. The temperatures both inside and outside the house were identical, but still I kept that porch-door open, hoping that some semblance of breeze might somewhere muster, and thus aerate my home.
I was taking a nip of Ursa Majoran mezcal – the only true companion in that sort of humidity, of course – when my cat Zander came stretching out onto the porch to join me. She went from downward-facing dog to upward-facing dog, then held my gaze, wide-eyed as she wrung the tiredness from her with a final stretch.
Suddenly, Zander caught sight of a big fat bluebottle, twitching lazily on the ivy-covered trellis at the end of my porch. And so I watched her: my spritely, two-year-old cat, as she crept panther-like up to the lattice, sometimes localising movement to just the tip of her tail, other times taking two or three measured darts forward. I watched her reach the trellis and wind herself up like a springbok, and then, at the very last moment, when she was sure that the fly was distracted, I watched her pounce. She flew through the air at the fly almost faster than my eyes could move. And yet, the fly had escaped.
Not only that, but it had escaped, and then returned to that same bit of trellis, just a handspan from where it had been, and it had done all of this as nonchalantly as if, like in some slapstick movie, it had simply dropped a coin and bent to pick it up, just as the assassin took a swipe at its head.
Sipping my mezcal, wiping the sweat from my brow, I watched Zander line up again, from a different angle this time, and fail once more. The fly buzzed loudly, disgruntled, and flew across the porch decking, spying out its next landing pad as carefree as if it had been picking holiday destinations from a brochure.
Fifteen minutes this went on, and the closest my cat ever got to dining on delicious fly was when she mistook a fallen nugget of my chewing tobacco for her prey. I’m sure it tasted as nice as any fly could have. All the while the fly just kept on going, swimming through the air with all the grace it’s plump posterior could muster, dodging the lightning-quick swipes of Zander as easily as one might navigate the odd floating turd in the Lazy River on Aquatica, the water-park planet.
It occurred to me then, that given Time is relative to Mass and Speed and Gravity and all, that the fly’s perception of time was drastically different to that of my cat Zander’s. In fact, to the fly, Zander’s ninja-swipes were rather predictable, unenthusiastic affairs. To put it in terms we might better understand: whilst to us it looks as if the fly moves so fast it could cross a road full of speeding cars and emerge unscathed, in fact the speeding cars are, to the fly, more like overweight cyclists, whose bikes are stuck in second gear, and who have recently suffered the unfortunate loss of both feet. Relative to us, the fly moves incredibly fast, but for the fly – we being relative to it – we move as slow as slugs.
This, then, was how Time felt to freelancers Jahanara Khan and Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb, as Clarence the AI-bartender rummaged through the wreckage of the Pale Blue Dot in search of a couple cans of Pork, and couple cans of Beans.
‘That really it, then?’ Asked a gobsmacked Glorfindel. ‘You steal the one extant standard by which the Universe measures intelligence, alter it for your own personal gain, thus increasing or decreasing or, I don’t know, just messing with the IQ of an entire Universe of life, and your big escape plan is to order dinner?’
Jahanara grinned.
‘Hey, it worked, didn’t it?’
The lobby of the Pale Blue Dot looked rather strange, slowed down. (Which is not a particularly accurate phrase, regarding the infinitely complex quantum network of spacetime, but it’ll just have to do.)
The mercenaries sent to get Jahanara ‘Dead or Contrived’ (whatever that meant), looked, well… stoned. As the lava-thing’s shots rang through the bar, the soundwaves now too stretched to be audible to Khan and co., its companions-in-arms had all started toward her. Several were reloading their firearms, several more already raising them to aim, but whatever they did, they did it so slowly that they looked simply clumsy. And so to Jahanara, it looked like they were stoned.
Gently, she moved Glorfindel out of the path of a light-beam as it flashed from the muzzle of an astronautical rifle.
‘Problem with most modern science is it’s done by people who aren’t quite smart enough,’ explained Jahanara soberly. ‘They look at a problem like ours and they’d go straight down the route of complex mathematical equations, diplomatic bargaining, philosophical reasoning, linguistic manipulation, biological reprogramming…’ Glorfindel screwed up their foggy face, unsure whether Jahanara knew where this was going. ‘Point is, they often fail to see the most obvious solution. The one staring you right in the face.’
‘Like ordering dinner to slow down Time.’
‘Right, exactly! I was sitting there, y’see, right before you came along, thinking about how hungry I was, and how stupidly long it always takes this place to reheat either of the two options on the menu. And then later, right when we needed it, I remembered that, and I knew it’s what would get us out.’
‘Mhm.’ Glorfindel imagined what it might be like to have fists. Specifically, they imagined what it might be like to have fists and to find one of them lodged at the back of Jahanara’s invertebrate skull. They took a deep breath, the mist of their orb swirling from red into a cooler, slightly calmer purple. ‘Speaking of getting out… do you think we could…’
‘Oh!’ said Jahanara, as if suddenly remembering about the tea she’d left steeping. ‘Yes of course!’
The pair were at the door of the airlock before it occurred to them to clean up the mess they’d left the poor old Dot in. They’d been patronising the place for decades, after all. It would hardly do if the station went out of business on their account.
And so, one flying, one hovering, both moving like that fly did, in and out of the flailing cat paws that were random shots, firing from a chorus of space-guns, Jahanara and Glorfindel set about freeing the mercenaries’ captives, and disabling the mercenaries in the process.
Over the lava-soldier, Glorfindel unleashed a miniature typhoon of rain, which is to say, they evacuated the stored condensation of their inner-mists in a biological excretory process we might recognise as urinating. Down the gullet of the giant, impenetrably-skinned guard-worm, Jahanara shot her very last dose of Ouch-bred scorpion poison. Several mercenaries had their own guns turned on them, just as they were squeezing the trigger, and several more were simply stabbed or bludgeoned. Glorfindel even orb-butted a particularly stubborn customer, with a shell like a hermit crab, until the shell broke and all their gloopy insides spilled out.
It was messy work, certainly, but relatively speaking it passed quite quickly, and so as Clarence the bartender was only just putting the bowls of Pork’n’Beans in the microwave, Jahanara and Glorfindel found themselves once more at the control panel for the airlock. The decompression-system worked such that when one had requested the door open at the bar-end of the space station, they then had to wait for confirmation from the landing pad that it was safe to leave. Given that Time was moving at 1/100th of a second for both the insectoid and her spherical companion, and that the last we saw of the landing pad’s parking valet and airlock operator, the small green blob, he was smeared rather gratuitously across the walls of his office, the pair had plenty of time to talk as they waited.
‘What’re you gonna do, then?’ quizzed Glorfindel, still struggling and failing to wipe themselves completely free of viscera. ‘You’re surely not gonna try and sell it? Not with the whole clout of the Council of Sentience after you?’
‘Well… I mean… I wasn’t going to say, it’s all very hush-hush, of course,’ Jahanara demurred, ‘but I do happen to know of somewhere I might find a buyer.’
‘Please don’t take this the wrong way, Khan, but you’re off your bloody rocker, if you think someone’ll take on that sort of heat.’
Jahanara considered this for a moment. She tried the airlock’s call button again, and blinked her hundred eyes as if thinking about something entirely different to the conversation at hand. Presently, she clicked a grin at Glorfindel.
‘You’re not wrong. I already got given the boot – quite literally – by the perma-clubbers on Cascada IX; even the feral Mudsplats of the Large Magellanic Cloud didn’t want it, despite my pointing out that owning something prized so highly by the Council would surely make their neighbours jealous. And you know what the Mudsplats of the Large Magellanic Cloud are like about their neighbours!’ Glorfindel nodded. ‘I suspect I gave the game away when I tried selling this… thing to the Sub-Council of Impertinence, pitching them the idea that it might attract visitors away from the Council of Sentience’s Museum of Everything, and instead drum up visitor numbers to the Sub-Council’s Museum of Almost Nothing.’ Glorfindel shook their orb.
‘Alas’, continued Jahanara, ‘I’d almost given up hope. But then I thought of the one place no one in their right minds would ever think of looking.’ She clicked excitedly.
Trying the call button again, there came a beep of red light, followed slowly by the hissing of the airlock. Gradually, inch by endless inch, the door began to slide away. Jahanara checked her bum bag, flapped her wings to settle the dust on them, and licked a little goo from her 73rd eye.
‘In fact,’ she continued, ‘it’s why I’m here.’
‘Here?’ the orb scoffed, ‘at the arse end of the Universe?’
‘Not quite the arse end though, is it?’
‘Well,’ replied Glorfindel, ‘I suppose not, if you count…’ They stopped mid-sentence, catching a glimmer of confirmation in Jahanara’s gaze. ‘You mean…’
‘Oh, yeah. I mean Earth.’ The freelancer laughed widely as the doorway slowly widened. Glorfindel was incredulous.
‘But what do you mean you mean Earth? It’s been abandoned for…’ They trailed off again, for in the air between they and Jahanara, the insectoid’s thoughts had manifested. Glorfindel concentrated, and saw what Jahanara knew, what she had discovered, about that pale blue dot, long thought abandoned, long consigned to the history podcasts as a blip in spacetime at the arse end of the Universe. Saw the plan formulating in Jahanara’s mind, to find the so-called octopus-people of Earth – a whole race on the verge of intellectual awakening, on the brink of conscious enlightenment – and like Prometheus had taught humans the ways of fire, to bring the octopuses the one tool in the theoretical multiverse that would allow them to leapfrog their evolutionary development.
Jahanara watched their pal the extraneously-conscious light-orb watching the invisible manifestation of her thoughts, and tried to withhold the thought that, after having bestowed upon these Earthling cephalopods the bountiful chalice of intellect, she might rule over them like a queen, like the captain of her own hyper-intelligent star fleet.
But, if you’ve ever been told not to think of a crocodile eating a child, then you’ll know that the first thing you think of is a crocodile eating a child. And so it was that Glorfindel saw, plain as day, the monarchic intentions of their one-time colleague Jahanara Khan. And they quailed, their mists turning a sorry brown.
‘Quantum Quasars ‘Nara, you don’t know when to quit, do you? You should leave the brainiac here, for the last of the Council’s goons to find, and you should make yourself bloody scarce. Building a subservient army of intelligent octopods is hardly keeping a low profile, is it?’
The doors of the airlock finally clacked into position. Jahanara looked at Glorfindel, with something that might once, in a distant past, have passed for shame.
‘You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?’ Jahanara bared the gummy roof of her mouth. ‘Bloody hell,’ swore the light-orb. ‘Right, fuck it. Let’s get going then, I want to put several lightyears between me and this sorry excuse for a space station before our Pork’n’Beans come through the heat.’
And just like that, as one often finds given the random chaos of the multiverse, Glorfindel’s words brought into being the actualisation of their meaning. Which is to say, the microwave behind the bar, having survived the destructive exploits of the mercenaries long enough to carry out one final task, tinged.
Jahanara and Glorfindel, their shadows barely over the threshold of the airlock door, heard the ting,and shuddered.
‘Oh shit,’ said Jahanara.
‘Oh shit,’ said Glorfindel.
‘Yee-dogie! D-d-d-d-dinner is served!’ said Clarence the barkeep, slinging two steaming bowls of greying matter through the air toward their intended masticators.
As both portions of Pork’n’Beans hit Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb squarely in the sphere, covering them for what felt like the hundredth time that day in sticky, stinking stuff, the escaping freelancers heard the dying words of Clarence, as the robot barkeep crumpled to the floor in a mess of distressed wiring and shredded metal.
‘Tell ma son, li’l Clarry Junior, tell ‘im ah loved ‘im. And to ma-ma-ma wife, tell ‘er…’ But the rest was lost in an unintelligible sequence of ones and zeroes.
As Clarence’s cry carried across the lobby, a strange sequence of events took place, ending – unfortunately for it – with the brief resurrection, and swift second-death of the Pale Blue Dot’s resident parking valet, the small green blob.
Hearing Clarence’s message dissolve into binary, the last surviving members of anarcho-punk band The Legionnaires of Sin pricked their ears. As it happened, one of the surviving members, Johnny the Mutant Albatross, was the very same member who had written their computer-friendly song‘I Want To 01000110 You’, and was therefore fluent in binary. And, given as it was that Clarence’s last garbled message to his wife was identical to the graphic title of that song, Johnny the Mutant Albatross not un-surprisingly misinterpreted it as a call for an encore.
Never knowingly having disappointed his crowd, the large oboe-playing bird rallied his band for, as he would have put it, wan mair tune.
Time was now working again at normal speed (which, to be sure, is not a scientifically accurate sentence, but is the sentence you’ll have to put up with). And to the cacophonous opening chords of ‘I Want To 01000110 You’, there came a bellow of rage.
It came not, as Jahanara had hoped, from the lungs of the band’s lead singer, but instead from a broiling mass of hissing steam and ominously glowing fire, bubbling in a pool over in the opposite corner of the room. The bellow was a response, the freelancers guessed, to the simultaneously instantaneous deaths of the lava-monster’s mercenary companions, who upon the ting of the microwave had all either been blown apart by their own trigger-fingers, were dissolved from the inside-out, or had finally collapsed due to loss of blood, from stab or thump wounds inflicted some time before (relatively speaking). As the fiery being collected itself, and rose to a new, enormous height, the igneous rock of its makeup flaring with alarming veins of orange and red, Jahanara turned to Glorfindel.
‘I thought you pissed on that guy!’
‘I did,’ protested the light-orb, ‘he sizzled right out!’
‘Jesus. Yeah, well he’s back again.’
‘Who the hell is this Jesus?’
‘What? Oh, I’m just practicing my Earth-speak. Sorry. We better go.’
Back in the office of the Pale Blue Dot’s resident parking valet, the small green blob was busy peeling itself from the walls.
A few moments ago, the blink of a light on its control panel had revived the blob’s faculties of muscle memory. Apparently, after serving the Pale Blue Dot’s customers for the best part of 4.6 million years, even the heat of its murderer’s quasar-blaster could not curtail its ingrained impulse to work.
Pathetic, it thought, as a part of it squidged along the dashboard toward the flashing light. After the light had flashed twice more, thanks to the impatience of some selfish sod on the inside, part of the small green blob finally managed to press the door-release.
So, it imagined the host of its favourite talk show, Close Encounters of the Death Kind, saying. What brought you back?
Oh, you know, it’d reply, my commitment to serving customers.
Mother of Pearl, cursed the small green blob, you really are pathetic, you know that?
Awkwardly sandwiching the last of itself together, and smelling the faintest hint of roasted garlic in the air, the small green blob trudged solemnly to the airlock.
On the other side of the door, Jahanara Khan and Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb pressed themselves. At the far end of the corridor, The Legionnaires of Sin were just cracking into the chorus of their encore, filling the whole place with a frantic energy of computational code, a heady mix of orchestral crescendos and accidental harmony, and the thrum of a double-bass approaching the speed of sound. Glorfindel exhibited a veritable lightshow of panicked colour, and Jahanara’s head spun against the noise.
But it was not the musical atrocities of the band’s encore which so occupied their attentions. Stomping into the airlock tunnel of the Pale Blue Dot, as the doors to the bar closed behind it, was the still-very-much-living, still-very-much-breathing lava monster.
It may have lost its thot-gun, but on it came nonetheless, pounding molten fist into molten palm, and grinning with teeth as white as ash. It spoke then, and as it spoke, fire spilled from its mouth, and the air around it burned, the oxygen of the airlock growing thin.
‘Looks like it’s the end of the road for you,’ said the monster, with a voice the timbre of magma. And against the opposite door, which should have lead to the landing pad, and to a dwindling promise of safety, Jahanara and Glorfindel quailed.
‘Bloody stupid egotistical self-centred rich privileged arseholes,’ grumbled the small green blob, as it rolled painfully over to the release button on the pad by the airlock. ‘I really ought to quit, you know. This whole being murdered malarky is the final straw. I swear it! It’ll be the opening argument in my resignation letter, and make no mistake!’
From the other side of the door, the small green blob could hear a banging. Pressing itself to the metal, it heard a muffled shout.
‘Impatient bastards!’ it squealed. But even as it said so, its blob was pressing down on the big red button of the control panel, carrying out its duty with the same unwavering dedication which had seen it awarded ‘Employee of the Month’ every month for the past 4.6 million years.
As the door onto the launchpad slid open, Jahanara Khan and Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb spilled out backwards. They gasped for air, found none, remembered at last to attach their outer-space breath-o-makers, and gasped again..
The small green blob, witnessing this undignified disembarkation of the station, sighed.
‘One too many Barfberry Daiquiris, I presume?’ It scoffed, shaking its head. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve remembered your valet ticket, then.’
‘Close the–’ breathed Jahanara. ‘Close – close the – bloody – door.’
The insectoid was pointing rather nervously at the open airlock. The small green blob frowned.
‘You know what?’ it said, the full force of 4.6 million years’ worth of job dissatisfaction choosing this exact moment to bubble over. ‘No. I will not. In fact, why don’t you close it yourself!’ (It should be noted that blobs, whether small and green or large and pink, were not known for passionate speeches). ‘I have been literally roasted today. Bloody miracle I survived. Just got myself back together, and now you’re shouting orders at me? No. Close the bloody-door your-bloody-self.’
Then, satisfied with having unleashed all hell on its two unruly customers, and reconsidering its decision to quit the Dot, having now blown off the steam of 4.6 million years, the small green blob sat down on the edge of the launch pad and had a little smile to itself.
Ten feet away and approaching fast, the lava monster loomed, close enough now that the immense heat emanating from its body was beginning to blister Jahanara’s exposed skin and, perhaps even more frighteningly, to evaporate the moisture in Glorfindel’s orb, dissipating the clouds which were their very being.
Glorf croaked weakly. ‘If – ever – there was a time – to use that thing again… it… it would probably be – now!’
The lava monster was eight feet away.
Jahanara unzipped her bum bag, and searched with withering fingers for the place from which she’d pealed a portion of the brainiac before.
If you’ve ever struggled to locate the start of a roll of Sellotape, in harsh lighting, with sweaty fingers, and under the immense stress that your impending death tends to induce, with the only hope of survival resting in you locating said start of the Sellotape roll, then you’ll know something of how Jahanara felt in the agonising seconds it took her to find the right notch on her stolen brainiac.
Presently, the monster was five feet away, and Jahanara could feel the edges of her wings begin to crisp.
With a sudden ‘A-ha!’ she located the knapped edge of the brainiac, and pulled. Away came a sliver of intelligence about the length of a human finger.
The monster was just three feet away.
Glorfindel, rolling like an errant marble toward the edge of the landing pad, beyond which was an infinite the drop into deepest space, went Aghhhhhuhuhuhuhhhh.
But far from joining in their anguish, Jahanara had a plan.
The freelancer picked herself up, and mustering all the energy she could into those frail and damaged wings, flew to the side of the small green blob. Oblivious to all but its own ego, the blob did not see her coming.
Jahanara scooped up the blob in her arms, and lifted it into the air, thankful for its surprising lightness.
‘What’re you–’ the blob protested.
‘You said you were roasted earlier, right?’
‘Oh, blimey! Strike-me-down! You listened did you? Hah! First for everything I suppose.’
‘Listen!’ commanded Jahanara.
The monster was closing on her, and Glorfindel, their life-mists rapidly ebbing, rolled ever-closer to the abyss.
‘You were roasted but you survived, yes?’
The small green blob grumbled.
‘What?!’
‘Yes! I said yes alright. Bloody hell. And who’s that?’ It added, spying the inordinately obvious lava monster for the first time.
‘So you’re impervious to fire… to heat, yeah?’ continued Khan, ignoring its question.
‘Well,’ replied the small green blob, puffing out its small green chest, ‘I guess you could say I am!’ It pouted. ‘But I don’t see how that’s–’ And then the blob stopped, because suddenly it did see how that might be relevant.
Jahanara, roaring a war-cry to end all war-cries, flapped her wings and rose above the erupting head of her volcanic foe. With all her might, she began tossing the small green blob up above her, catching it on an upraised fist, spinning, tossing, and spinning again. You’ve seen a pizza base being made, right? You get the picture.
Presently, as the mass of the small green blob spread out, like molecules in a centrifuge, and it became a blobby blanket of pale, translucent green, Jahanara darted suddenly out of its way. She crashed to the deck of the space station, right in time to catch her friend Glorfindel the extraneously-conscious light-orb, as they reached the edge of the landing pad, and thus saving them from losing themselves to the eternal void.
Jahanara looked over toward the airlock, just in time to see her plan working.
The Frisbee, which had once called itself the small green blob, came spinning down with such force, and with such a surface area, that it completely drowned the body of the lava monster in sticky greenish gloop.
As the two freelancers watched on, blob and lava-thing fused together, the fires of the monster turning black and smoky, extinguished at the last. And the small green blob, who had boasted so proudly in its final moments of its imperviousness to fire, was proved to be not entirely impervious. Thus, as blob and beast both met their ends, into the atmosphere of the cosmos was released the scintillating scent of garlic bread.
‘Blimey,’ said Jahanara, ‘he doesn’t half smell good.’ Then, temporarily remembering the concept of sympathy, added, ‘thanks old boy.’
She turned to Glorfindel, their orb slowly refilling with cloud and mist and fog, all tinted with golden relief.
‘Glorf, my gal,’ beamed Jahanara, ‘fancy an Italian?’ she gestured toward the faintest of blue specks out in space. ‘Still a few of them left, down there, or so I’ve heard. And they’re supposed to be darn good eatin’. Reckon I owe you one…’
*
‘The End.’
I turned to my class, their eager eyes wide and bulging from heads not yet fully grown. Their tentacles relaxed, suckers un-suctioning from table legs and pencil cases. I noticed, but did not draw attention to, several small puddles of ink on the floor. It seemed that more than one of my pupils had been too absorbed in my story to ask for the toilet-pass.
Another afternoon spent mopping up, then, I thought.
‘But miss,’ chirped up a cephalopod in the front row, her beak clacking excitedly, ‘wh-wh-what happened next?’
‘Is that an impression of poor Clarence the bartender?’ I teased, much to amusement of the other children. The girl folded four of her tentacles across herself, unimpressed. ‘Well,’ I began, ‘the rest is, in a word, history! Our Glorious Saviour came here, liberated us from the shackles of ignorance with the gift of the Mighty Brainiac, and we, my dear lass, were born!’
‘And Glorfy?’ chimed in a boy at the back of the class, in an unusual bout of oratory confidence.
‘Ah well, now Glorfindel…’ but I was interrupted by the lunch bell. To my delighted surprise, the children moaned loudly. ‘Well, children, it seems that that story will just have to wait. Now, off to the feeding pool with you, I hear scallops are on the menu today!’ Now they whooped, and I smiled. ‘Go on, off you swim, and you won’t forget who to thank for the food, will you, boys and girls?’
‘No, Miss Grimpoteuthis,’ came the reply, ‘’course not! Not after that story!’
And so off my children went, down the current toward their lunch, and as they went they sang, and hearing it I smiled, for I think she would be proud of how I told her story, and in the canteen the children would say grace, and thank her for their meal.
She, Our Supreme Leader, Jahanara Khan.
-
Thank you for listening to this month’s Story From The Hearth. If you liked what you heard, please do subscribe, and share this podcast with friends, family, and anyone you know who could use just a half-hour’s respite from the chaotic energies of the everyday. You can also now rate podcasts on Spotify, so if you’re listening to it there, why not drop us some stars. If you wish to support the podcast, please head to my Patreon by hitting the link in the description. Similarly, you can check out the podcast’s Instagram, Twitter, website and email address via the links below. Story episodes are released on the last Sunday of every month. Additional episodes in The Wandering Bard historical mini-series will pop up from time to time. Until next we meet around the fire, I’ve been Calum Bannerman, and you’ve been listening to Stories From The Hearth.