Backwards Read online

  BACKWARDS

  Rob Grant

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London w8 5TZ, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Viking 1996 Published in Penguin Books 1996 13579 10 8642

  Copyright © Rob Grant, 1996 All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  To Kath. No Kath, no book.

  THANKS TO

  My editor, Tony Lacey, for his patience and his inspirational lunches. My agent, Michael Foster, for his encouragement, but not for his lunches. A special thanks to all the Viking/ Penguin sales reps, for their ludicrous faith that a book would ever show up. Thanks also to Karim and to Ruth Painter for their Niagara Falls source material. Finally, a big thanks to Annette Mcintosh for sorting out my sad arithmetic.

  SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  As anyone who knows anything knows, Red Dwarf was created in collaboration with my erstwhile partner, Doug Naylor. For the bits of this book that were inspired by the TV shows we wrote together, I am indebted to him.

  PROLOGUE

  Every Good Boy...

  Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

  Arnold J. Rimmer, age seven and almost a quarter, is attempting to concentrate on his music notation lesson. For reasons that elude his young mind, it is vitally, vitally important for him to master the piano. More important than anything. More important, even, than concealing from his brothers the secret location of his Dead Spiders and Other Wriggly Things collection. Life-or-death important. He must commit to memory the names of the notes on the musical staves, E, G, B, D, F, using the time-honoured mnemonic:

  Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

  He's concentrating as hard as he can. His little face is bunched up like a constipated pig at a truffle festival. But he's got a problem, young Arnold has.

  And this is the problem: he knows he's going to fail.

  He has no ear for music. He has no talent for the piano. But then again, he has no talent for anything. The only thing he's good at is letting his parents down. That's easy for Arnold J. Rimmer age seven and almost a quarter. It's a breeze.

  Every Good Boy Disappoints Father.

  Outside, in the warm, unreal glow of Jupiter magnified through Io's Plexiglas dome, Arnolds brothers whoop and holler up and down the garden. They're probably not having as much fun as they sound like they're having. They're exaggerating their bellows of enjoyment to taunt him. They know he'd like to be out there with them, even though he'd be teased and tortured. Even though he'd be the butt of their cruel boyish jokes. He'd rather be staked out on the grass and smeared with marmalade to attract poisonous insects than be stuck in the hot, stuffy study, gripping his elementary music notation book with sweaty little hands. So they yell and laugh in a taunting parody of childhood pleasure in the impossibly perfect summer afternoon to tweak his discomfort to the maximum level. And in young Arnold's opinion, it's not even unfair.

  They have earned their fun. He has not.

  Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

  His brothers, you see, excel at things. They are all, in their own ways, excellent boys. Arnold finds it a hideous struggle just to be a notch below average. But his mother won't give up on him. She still believes he can excel. She's convinced he has this hidden talent for music. It's got to be music, because there's nothing else left for his talent to be hiding behind. But it's so, so deeply hidden, this musical ability, that even Arnold can't find it. His musical talent is in deep cover. And the frustrating thing is: if he can only master the piano, everything will be all right. Would that be too much to ask? If he could just turn out to have the fledgling talent of a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then he could relax a little. Then his parents could have something to be proud about.

  And he really needs something good to hang on to right now. Because, although the precise details are not clear to his seven and almost a quarter years old brain, he is keenly aware that something very bad indeed could very possibly be about to happen.

  His school report has. been a disaster. In a class of thirty-seven pupils, Arnold has been ranked thirty-sixth.

  36/37.

  It is the worst ever. Hitherto, he's always managed to hover just above shame and ignominy in the very late twenties. But this term they've started remedial teaching for the 'slow' pupils, and young Arnold has been overtaken by the spazzes, durnioids and thickies. Even Thrasher Beswick, who spends fully seven hours of every school day attempting to learn how to masturbate through a hole in his pocket, has exceeded him in scholastic achievement.

  Arnold J. Rimmer is now the second worst pupil in his class. He outranks only Dennis Filbert, who smells of bread and margarine, sports a plaster over one lens of his spectacles and has a behavioural problem which results in his turning blue and losing consciousness if anyone tries to speak to him.

  Next term, Dennis Filbert will be in a 'Special' school. And Arnold will be bottom of the class. 36/36.

  Of course, he has tried to conceal the extent of his failure from his parents, by altering the figures, to make it appear he's come thirty-sixth out of eighty-seven. He might have succeeded, too, if he hadn't used yellow crayon.

  His father has punished him excessively cruelly. All the horrors Arnold had imagined on that long walk home from school on the last day of term, beyond tears, clutching the damning document with its crude counterfeiting, had not prepared him for his actual punishment.

  This was the punishment: nothing.

  His father has done nothing. Nothing at all. He has read the report over the supper table, and said absolutely doodley-zip. And he has said zippedy-squat since.

  Young Arnold has committed an offence beyond punishment. Literally unspeakable.

  Arnold screws his eyes so tightly together they hurt, and red patterns swirl in the darkness. He wishes there were somewhere he could put the shame. Some way he could put it down for a while, like a huge, over-stuffed suitcase, to stop it hurting.

  When he opens his eyes, his mother is standing over him. She is holding a letter. Arnold can see the school crest on the letterhead. Although no one has spoken directly to him about it, he knows what it is. Its about being 'Kept Down'. He has overheard his mother on the phone, arguing with his teachers about it. He has surprised his brothers whispering in huddles about it.

  Being 'Kept Down' is something that happens only to the creme de la creme of thickies. To the thickest of the thick. The spazziest of the spazzes. It means you stay in Junior C while the rest of the class moves up to Junior B.

  And for the rest of your school life, in perpetuity, for ever, you will be one year older than your classmates, who are all aware that you have been Kept Down because you are not just any old durnoid, but you are the Durniest of all Durnoids who ever dared to durn.

  His mother has pleaded with his teachers to spare him this shame. This letter in his mother's cold hands contains their final decision. And with a prescience surprising in a boy his
age, Arnold is aware that its contents will affect his life for ever.

  Every Good Boy Deserves Failure...

  SO FAR . . .

  The action of this novel follows on directly from Better Than Life.

  Following a time-dilation accident, Dave Lister becomes an old man and dies.

  His crewmates plant his body on a version of Earth where time is running backwards, and he returns to life.

  They arrange to meet him thirty-six years later, by the souvenir shop at Niagara Falls...

  PART ONE

  Reverse Universe

  'We cannot choose what we are — yet what are we, but the sum of our choices?'

  ONE

  Rimmer tried to smile charmingly, which was always a mistake for him. He had a vulture's smile, perhaps because he practised it so little, and it always provoked the opposite reaction from the one he intended.

  'Excuse me, Miss,' he tried to say, but it came out mangled, as if he were sucking in Bulgarian words, rather than enunciating English ones. Kryten had re-programmed his speech units, against Rimmer's better judgement, and he had absolutely no confidence that anyone would understand him ever again.

  The girl behind the souvenir-shop counter looked at him curiously and shook her head. 'No, I'm sorry,' she said, 'I haven't seen anyone of that description.'

  Rimmer screwed up his features so his face resembled a paper bag full of paper bags. What was this silly girl babbling about? He tried again.

  'I'm looking for a short, ugly man, covered in grime with unspeakable personal hygiene and a body-odour problem that could wilt a giant redwood.' He offered a dog-eared photograph of Lister.

  The girl glanced down at the snapshot, and then looked up at him and smiled. 'Good morning, sir. How can I help you?' She smiled again, and then focused her attention elsewhere.

  Rimmer watched her for a while, his frustration mounting. He tried to attract her attention again with a couple of subtle throat clearings, but the girl was watching the news on her illicit below-counter TV and chose to ignore him.

  The news was momentous: suddenly, inexplicably and without any warning whatsoever, all the disparate warring nations of Eastern Europe had put down their weapons and formed a giant conglomerate of a country called 'The Soviet Union'. The people of East Germany (as it was now to be called) were joyously erecting a huge and ugly wall, with stones culled from every corner of Earth, which would keep them in, and keep everyone else out. There was a genuine street-party feel as they went about their business. A secret-police service with almost unlimited powers was being formed to enforce the exciting new system of Communism, which hitherto had only been half-heartedly attempted in China, and to a lesser degree in Cuba. The world was changing, monumentally changing, and this weirdo tourist with a metallic H branded to his forehead was coughing for her attention with all the subtle aplomb of a chain-smoker waking up in the morning, unable to locate his lighter. Well, frankly, he could wait.

  Finally, Rimmer gave up. He glanced quickly over his shoulder, took a deep breath and manoeuvered his way through the crowd of milling tourists, trying to look as nonchalant as it's possible to look when you're walking backwards.

  He rounded the corner. Thankfully, the corridor was deserted. He turned and walked forwards past the lavatories, and stopped outside an unmarked door.

  'It's all right,' he said to the door. 'Coast clear.'

  There was the sound of a bolt sliding, and the door cracked open. Kryten looked up and down the corridor conspiratorially, ushered Rimmer quickly into the cleaner's closet, and closed the door. 'Any luck?'

  Rimmer shook his head. 'Not a bean.'

  Kryten checked his internal chronometer. Half-past nine, almost twenty-five past. In less than half an hour, the Niagara Falls souvenir shops would probably start unopening up to tourists for the morning. He clucked nervously. 'He must be here somewhere. You can't have looked properly.'

  Rimmer's nostrils contracted imperiously. 'I did the best I could, given I was walking backwards everywhere, and I don't have eyes in my buttocks. He could be anywhere around here.'

  'No, we arranged to meet him at the souvenir shop.'

  'Yes, at noon. We're over two hours late.' Rimmer looked away, confused. 'Or two hours early. Whichever. And there's half a dozen souvenir shops scattered all over the place. I vote we all start looking. It's our best shot.'

  Kryten squirmed. 'I can't go out there, sir. I'd attract too much attention.'

  Rimmer studied the mechanoid's plastic features, and tried to imagine he was looking at them for the first time. It was true Kryten couldn't pass as human before even the skimpiest scrutiny. He looked as if someone had dealt his head seven or eight vicious blows with a butter paddle, leaving flat surfaces and sharp edges where a normal face would curve. 'You'll be fine,' Rimmer lied. 'We'll invent some sort of cover story.'

  'Like what?'

  'I dunno. We'll say you took your car to the crusher and forgot to get out.'

  'Noh gnihog sih hgmess hht towh,' the Cat chipped in, 'eem hlet seelp nowmuss nakh?' He looked from Kryten to Rimmer and back again with a mixture of exasperation and confusion.

  Rimmer closed his eyes and muttered a weary imprecation. This was insane. Here he was, a hologram incapable of touching anything, stuck in a cleaning closet beside Niagara Falls on a bizarre manifestation of the planet Earth where time was running in reverse, with the Cat, who could barely understand a word anyone said when they were speaking forwards and a mechanical man who looked like Herman Munster's stunt double. What had he done in previous lives to warrant the karma of belonging to this Dream Team from Hell's own sulphur pit? 'We've got to get out of here,' he hissed with considerable passion.

  'All right,' Kryten conceded. 'Perhaps we can pick up some kind of disguise for me.'

  'Good plan,' Rimmer smiled humourlessly; 'maybe we can squeeze you into a body-length boob tube and tell everyone you're a giant rubber-tipped pencil.'

  Kryten whispered the plan to the Cat in forward-speak, which was, of course, now backwards for Rimmer. It gave him a headache just thinking about it.

  On a nod from the Cat, Kryten pulled back the bolt, opened the door and peered along the corridor. Satisfied, he signalled for them to exit.

  Kryten hunched as close to the wall as possible, with Rimmer on the outside and the Cat to the front. They tried, unconvincingly, to look like a group of casual tourists.

  The souvenir stall in the mall was deserted, now. From behind a door at the back of the shop there was a strange suction sound. At first, Kryten assumed it was the shop girl hoovering, until he realized that, given the vagaries of this reverse universe, a vacuum cleaner would make a blowing noise as it distributed filth around the floor. He guessed the sound was coffee unpercolating. That was good. The girl would probably be away a few minutes emptying the percolator and spooning the coffee grounds into their container. He peered behind the counter, searching for something he might use as a disguise, while Rimmer and the Cat kept a lookout for Lister.

  The only remotely useful thing Kryten found there was the shop assistant's make-up bag. He toyed with the idea of painting himself a fake moustache with her mascara brush, but realized, after a few seconds of contemplation, that the laws of this reality would not permit him to adopt even this meagre and, let's face it, useless disguise. Given that Time was now committed to flowing upstream, the purpose of the mascara brush would be to remove make-up, not apply it. He rubbed his temples with his cubed fingertips. This whole expedition was turning out to be more difficult than he'd imagined.

  Then something very bad caught his attention.

  On a shelf below the counter, a miniature TV was blaring its backward babble through a dangling earpiece. A quiz show where contestants competed to give money to the host was interrupted by a news flash. Behind the newsreader there was a police photofit of the Cat.

  He looked up, alarmed. The Cat was standing by the souvenir-shop window, staring out at the thinning crowd. Kryten glanced back
down at the screen. To his horror, the Cat's image was replaced by a still of Lister. He strained to hear what the newscaster was saying, but only managed to make out a single word. The news flash disappeared, and the quiz show returned.

  The word Kryten had been able to make out was 'murder'.

  TWO

  The back of the police van stank of vomit and stale urine, which would no doubt be inserted into various drunks and druggies once the morning drew to a close and the graveyard shift began.

  Lister shifted uncomfortably on the hard bench. The handcuffs were pinching his wrists wickedly as he fiddled with his groin, where the pain was beginning to crescendo, and his left ear was starting to throb redly. There were two policemen opposite him and one either side, all of them glowering at him relentlessly.

  Despite all this, Lister was feeling pretty damn good. The last eight years or so had been fairly hellish, and at last his ordeal was almost over.

  Without warning, the policeman on his left slammed the palm of his hand against the side of Lister's head, which stopped the throbbing and returned his hearing to normal. Better and better.

  Lister spotted some freshly chewed gum on the floor of the van. He stomped his foot on to it, deftly flicked it up into his mouth, and began chewing the wad contentedly, each movement of his jaw infusing the gum with more and more spearmint flavour.

  He heard a distant rumble and glanced through the dark reinforced glass of the van's rear window. He could see the mist from the falls as the vast volumes of white water cascaded up the mountainside.

  Almost home. He leaned his head back against the side of the van. With good luck and a following wind, he was less than twenty-four hours away from his first truly satisfying bowel movement in the best part of half a century. He sighed happily. Did anyone, anywhere, enjoy a more sumptuous prospect?