The Ultimate Inferior Beings (37 page)

“You have?” asked Alistair.
He looked about him but there wasn’t a single brick in sight. “How’s it going?”

“It’s a bigger job than I
thought it would be.”

“Hmm,” said Alistair.
“Bricking up a whole planet. I would say that’s a fairly sizeable task.”

“I decided to start in the
Sid Valley as that’s about the lowest place in these parts.” Reginald paused
for breath. “I’ve done one layer and already lost count of the millions of
bricks I’ve used up. And there’s still so much left to do! Just to brick up the
Sid Valley, let alone the rest of the planet.” Reginald stood gasping for
breath. “I can’t manage on my own,” he complained. “I need some help.” He
looked at Alistair imploringly. “I don’t suppose you could give me a hand in
your spare time?”

“No, I don’t suppose I could,
either.”

“Please.”

“No, I’m busy. Find someone
else.”

“But you’re the only friend
I’ve got,” said Reginald pathetically.

“No,”

“Please.”

“Right!” said Alistair,
finally snapping. “If you consider bricking up the planet is the most important
thing right now, then we’d better get everyone onto it. Okay. I pronounce The
Period of Deep Thinking ended. In its place we will have The Period of Bricking
up the Planet!”

He glared at Reginald.
“Satisfied? Is there anything else you’d like me to do?”

“No. That’s just fine,” said
Reginald.

*

So The Period of Bricking up
the Planet commenced. It was a long, hard period. The life was tough. Day after
day of bricking. At mealtimes the Mamms would grab a handy brick and throw it
at a passing animal. At night they slept in their portable sponges and dreamt
of the day when their planet would be totally featureless and flat.

Many were involved in the
manufacture of the bricks themselves. After several thousand years, the whole
of Ground was finally completely bricked up and the final surface layer of tar
could be poured on. The whole operation was completed by the laying down of the
pulseways and the installation of the clever mechanisms that made the brick
walls spring out of the ground across them.

When all the work was over,
the Mamms settled down and prepared themselves for their new, happy existence.

*

Except that, as they soon
realized, their new existence was not a particularly happy one. They could do
anything they wanted, although they didn’t know what it was they wanted to do.
And they could go anywhere they wanted, except there was nothing to see when
they got there. All in all, they were just plain bored.

A Mamm called Gilmore thought
the answer was religion. He set out on a long journey around Ground, spreading
the word.

Unfortunately, no one
listened. They had never heard of Gilmore so were reluctant to become his
followers. Then Gilmore had an idea. He needed a well-known name behind his
religion, and the best
-
known name of all was that of Benjamin. He called
his religion Benjaminism and called a meeting to explain the philosophy behind
it, as originally expounded by Benjamin at The Meeting. This meeting, not
nearly as large as The Meeting, came to be known as The meeting.

The religion was based on the
concept of a Beforelife.

“As all of you know,”
explained Gilmore at The meeting. “Because of our evolution from slimy green
pools, we are all immortal. (Except, of course, for those of us who die). Like
our prophet and founder, Benjamin, died. Now, although we may be immortal, and
our lives will never come to an end (except for the odd few), it is possible
that this is not our
first
life.”

At this point there had been
a sharp gasp from the assembled multitude, followed by a fevered murmuring.

“I believe,” Gilmore had
continued when this murmuring had died down, “that we have all lived before. We
have all lived a first life; a life before birth! And that now, in this
current, everlasting life, we are to be rewarded or punished in accordance with
our behaviour in that first life.”

There had been a further
murmuring. Gilmore had waited before continuing. Little did he know that he was
now coming to the Achilles heel of his philosophy.

“So,” he said. “If you were
good in your first life, you will have fun in this life. But, if you were bad,
you will be miserable. So you might as well assume the former and go and ENJOY
yourselves!”

Gilmore prepared himself for
rapturous applause, but none was forthcoming.

Indeed, there was a deathly
hush.

Then, one of the Mamms asked
the question that happened to be on the minds of all the others.

“How exactly are we to enjoy
ourselves? Tell us how? This is what we want to know.”

The question made Gilmore
freeze. It was clearly not one he had been expecting and certainly not one that
he had prepared an answer for. He gave a cough and surveyed the sea of faces
before him. He couldn’t help noticing that they no longer looked friendly.

“Er, well,” he said, his
confidence in his new religion draining. “I was, er, thinking that, er, perhaps
you could decide that, er, yourselves.”

At this point, Gilmore should
have ducked. But he didn’t; so the first brick hit him on the top of the head.
The second struck a little lower. The rest seemed to catch him just about
everywhere.

Finally Gilmore ducked and
ran for cover. He ran and ran until he reached the relative safety of his sponge.
There he stayed until a long, long time after everyone had forgotten about The
meeting and his religion.

*

But although Gilmore’s
religion was a non-starter, the idea of religion seemed to catch on. A number
of religions sprang up. Each was called Benjaminism as all their founders, like
Gilmore before them, claimed Benjamin as the inspiration.

This made things a bit
confusing for a while until one religion, Benjaminism, came to replace all
others. This Benjaminism was, of course, Randolph’s Benjaminism with its belief
in The Dogs – the Ultimate Inferior Beings – who would one day destroy the
Universe.

Yet although this religion
came to be the only one on Ground, it never really captured the mass
imagination. Only ten Mamms joined Randolph. The remaining Mamms eventually
found other ways of amusing themselves – such as joining the highly exclusive
Snob Blob Club.

And so, life on Ground
continued fairly stably for hundreds of thousands of years. Nothing much of
interest happened in Mamm history.

Nothing, that is, until the
first human spacecraft landed on Ground...

APPENDIX
III: DOCUMENT 7351/87-A

The following document was
found accidentally one evening in the year 13 A.P-E by a historical researcher
called shuX. He chanced upon it during a romantic assignation (further details
unavailable) in Archive 79 of the Galactic Hyper Library of Ulalala on planet
Styro. Most people would not have given the document a second glance, and would
have continued with their romantic assignation, but something about it caught
shuX’s eye. He immediately realized its relevance to the Top Secret Space
Mission of The Night Ripple and how it helped explain one of the principal
mysteries concerning that mission.

The document is a historical
account of a first encounter between two alien races: the wormids and the
Hodei. It has been translated, with some difficulty, from the original alien
tongues in which the two separate parts were written. These two separate
accounts have been spliced together according to the chronology of the events
they record.

The alien encounter was
nothing special – they happen all the time. What was interesting was the part
that caught shuX’s eye.

The
wormids were
a
rare and proud breed among alien species. They were one of the few
civilizations that could claim to have reached the ultimate peak of Knowledge
and Wisdom.

For, the wormids knew
Everything.

Few other species could make
such a claim. For the wormids had discovered everything there was to discover,
proved everything there was to be proven, invented everything there was to be
invented, and learned everything there was to be learnt.

 There was nothing they
didn’t know, no mysteries left to solve. The Universe no longer held, or could
hold, any secrets for them.

Or, at least, that was what
they thought...

*

Pfnug the Hodeus sat in his
custom-built space vehicle as it hurtled through space. He stared out of the
window in front of him, wondering what ugliness lay ahead. He needed to
discover something really, really ugly and really, really soon, to beat Dork
and win Chella. Time was running out.

He sighed. His bloated,
semi-transparent, purulent body throbbed and pulsated wetly, emitting myriad
stenches as it did so. His face sagged. It was covered in boils and warts, and
on it were patches of sliminess and areas of hairiness and regions of
mouldiness. Pfnug was not a handsome Hodeus. Indeed, there was no such thing as
a handsome Hodeus. All Hodei were, not to put too fine a point on it,
repulsive; it was a survival strategy evolved and perfected over many
millennia. The uglier and more repellent a Hodeus, the less likely it was to be
eaten. But it also made them rather solitary creatures for no Hodeus could
stand the sight of any other. They could not stand one another’s sounds or
smells, either. And, as for the other two senses – touch and taste – no two
Hodei ever came close enough to experience such horrors which were the stuff of
Hodeus nightmares. For the reader’s benefit, the delicate matter of how Hodei
mated will not be described here.

Pfnug glanced at the mirror
on the wall to his right. “I am so ugly,” he said and felt immediately better.
His internal and external organs rumbled and squeaked and hissed causing a
darkish cloud of foul-looking, and fouller-smelling, dark gas to engulf him.

*

The three wormids sat in
their little craft as it sped away from their home planet, heading to a new
beginning, a new future. They knew exactly where they were, exactly where they
were going and exactly how long it would take to get there. The wormids, after
all, knew Everything.

They stared knowledgeably,
and in silence, at the darkness and stars in front of them. There was no need
to speak. Conversation was unnecessary and redundant, and, in fact, quite
annoying.

Names, too, were redundant as
all wormids looked the same, did the same things and even thought the same
thoughts. They had to, as it was the only way of ensuring they knew Everything.

*

As Pfnug adjusted a couple of
his external organs in the mirror, trying to present them in a more revolting
aspect, he spotted something on one of the scanners out of the corner of his
rheumy, bulging eyes. His three hearts missed a beat. He stiffened as he ramped
up the detector sensitivity. Yes, there it was. A signal. It had to be another
spaceship. His guts squirted liquid in all directions from excitement. His face
turned from red to purple to black and then to orange.

“Yesss!” he hissed.

He took hold of the controls
and headed towards the spot of light, just visible through the window in front
of him.

“I see it, I see it!” he
shrieked in his grating, high-pitched squeak.

It looked small; a small
sphere, with several bent tubes coming radially out of it, like twigless
branches. It wasn’t obviously ugly. In fact, it merely looked ridiculous and
impractical. But ugly? He peered at it more closely, unsure. Could it be made
more unpleasant on the eye, he wondered. Perhaps under the right lighting
conditions?

As he dithered uncertainly,
one of his organs released a cloud of foul gas.

*

The wormids stared proudly
and haughtily out of the window ahead of them. It was good to be a wormid. They
were proud of their ancestors, proud of their fellow wormids and, above all,
proud of themselves.

But, what happened next would
destroy this self-satisfied pride forever.

A small spot of light
appeared far off to the left and started growing in size. At first they didn’t
see it because it wasn’t something they were expecting. Even as it grew larger
and larger it failed to register. But when the spot of light had grown into a
large, brightly-lit and very, very ugly object right in from of them, filling
most of their field of view, they could no longer not be aware of it.

And as soon as they were
aware of it, they realized that they had no clue what it might be. And that was
clearly not right!

One by one, each wormid
glanced haughtily at the others, to see if they were also aware of the object,
but all they got were equally haughty looks back. The tension in the little
craft grew, until finally, the one in the middle could stand it no longer and
spoke. It was the first time a wormid had opened his mouth in a very long time.