crudely designed electrocardiographic equipment. They tried to restrain me, but they apparently had very little understanding of the mathematics involved, and so with relative ease I managed to leave the two green-clothed humans on the floor, writhing around in pain.
I rose to my feet, noticing just how much gravity there was on this planet as the driver turned to ask me an even more urgent question. The vehicle was moving fast, and the undulating sound waves of the siren were an undeniable distraction, but I opened the door and leapt towards the soft vegetation at the side of the road. My body rolled. I hid. And then, once it was safe to appear, I got to my feet. Compared to a human hand, a foot is relatively untroubling, toes aside.
I stood there for a while, just staring at all those odd cars, confined to the ground, evidently reliant on fossil fuel and each making more noise than it took to power a polygon generator. And the even odder sight of the humans – all clothed inside, holding on to circular steer-control equipment and, sometimes, extra-biological telecommunications devices.
I have come to a planet where the most intelligent life form still has to drive its own cars . . .
Never before had I so appreciated the simple splendours you and I have grown up with. The eternal light. The smooth, floating traffic. The advanced plant life. The sweetened air. The non-weather. Oh, gentle readers, you really have no idea.
Cars blared high-frequency horns as they passed me. Wide-eyed, gape-mouthed faces stared out of windows. I didn’t understand it, I looked as ugly as any of them. Why wasn’t I blending in? What was I doing wrong? Maybe it was because I wasn’t in a car. Maybe that’s how humans lived, permanently contained in cars. Or maybe it was because I wasn’t wearing any clothes. It was a cold night, but could it really have been something so trivial as a lack of artificial body-covering? No, it couldn’t be as simple as that.
I looked up at the sky.
There was evidence of the moon now, veiled by thin cloud. It too seemed to be gawping down at me with the same sense of shock. But the stars were still blanketed, out of sight. I wanted to see them. I wanted to feel their comfort.
On top of all this, rain was a distinct possibility. I hated rain. To me, as to most of you dome-dwellers, rain was a terror of almost mythological proportions. I needed to find what I was looking for before the clouds opened.
There was a rectangular aluminium sign ahead of me. Nouns minus context are always tricky for the language learner, but the arrow was pointing only one way so I followed it.
Humans kept on lowering their windows and shouting things at me, above the sound of their engines. Sometimes this seemed good-humoured, as they were spitting oral fluid, in my direction, orminurk-style. So I spat back in a friendly fashion, trying to hit their fast-moving faces. This seemed to encourage more shouting, but I tried not to mind.
Soon, I told myself, I would understand what the heavily articulated greeting ‘get off the fucking road you fucking wanker’ actually meant. In the meantime I kept walking, got past the sign, and saw an illuminated but disconcertingly unmoving building by the side of the road.
I will go to it, I told myself. I will go to it and find some answers.
Texaco
The building was called ‘Texaco’. It stood there shining in the night with a terrible stillness, like it was waiting to come alive.
As I walked towards it, I noticed it was some kind of refill station. Cars were parked there, under a horizontal canopy and stationed next to simple-looking fuel-delivery systems. It was confirmed: the cars did absolutely nothing for themselves. They were practically brain dead, if they even had brains.
The humans who were refuelling their vehicles stared at me as they went inside. Trying to be as polite as possible, given my verbal limitations, I spat an ample amount of saliva towards them.
I entered the building. There was a clothed human behind the counter. Instead of his hair being on the top of his head it covered the bottom half of his face. His body was more spherical than other humans’ so he was marginally better looking. From the scent of hexanoic acid and androsterone I could tell personal hygiene wasn’t one of his top priorities. He stared at my (admittedly distressing) genitalia and then pressed something behind the counter. I spat, but the greeting was unreciprocated. Maybe I had got it wrong about the spitting.
All this salivatory offloading was making me thirsty, so I went over to a humming refrigerated unit full of brightly coloured cylindrical objects. I picked one of them up, and opened it. A can of liquid called ‘Diet Coke’. It tasted extremely sweet, with a trace of phosphoric acid. It was disgusting. It burst out of my mouth almost the moment it entered. Then I consumed something else. A foodstuff wrapped in synthetic packaging. This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away. The foodstuff was called Mars. That got a little bit further down my throat, but only far enough to discover I had a gag reflex. I closed the door and saw a container with the words ‘Pringles’ and ‘Barbecue’ on it. I opened it up and started to eat. They tasted okay – a bit like sorp-cake – and I crammed as many as I could into my mouth. I wondered when I had last actually fed myself, with no assistance. I seriously couldn’t remember. Not since infancy, that was for sure.
‘You can’t do that. You can’t just eat stuff. You’ve got to pay for it.’
The man behind the counter was talking to me. I still had little idea of what he was saying, but from the volume and frequency I sensed it wasn’t good. Also, I observed that his skin – in the places on his face where it was visible – was changing colour.
I noticed the lighting above my head, and I blinked.
I placed my hand over my mouth and made a noise. Then I held it at arm’s length and made the same noise, noting the difference.
It was comforting to know that even in the most remote corner of the universe the laws of sound and light obeyed themselves, although it has to be said they seemed a little more lacklustre here.
There were shelves full of what I would shortly know as ‘magazines’, nearly all of which had faces with near-identical smiles on the front of them. Twenty-six noses. Fifty-two eyes. It was an intimidating sight.
I picked up one of these magazines as the man picked up the phone.
On Earth, the media is still locked in a pre-capsule age and most of it has to be read via an electronic device or via a printed medium made of a thin, chemically pulped tree-derivative known as paper. Magazines are very popular, despite no human ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to them needing to buy something, which they do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next. It is an eternal and unhappy spiral that goes by the name of capitalism and it is really quite popular. The particular publication I was holding was called Cosmopolitan, and I realised that if nothing else it would help me grasp the language.
It didn’t take long. Written human languages are preposterously simple, as they are made up almost entirely of words. I had interpolated the entire written language by the end of the first article, in addition to the touch that can boost your mood – as well as your relationship. Also: orgasms, I realised, were an incredibly big deal. It seemed orgasms were the central tenet of life here. Maybe this was the only meaning they had on this planet. Their purpose was simply to pursue the enlightenment of orgasm. A few seconds of relief
