Scum of the Universe Read online

  Tuesday couldn't do much, but he did all he could.

  “Well, spug me!” he said matter-of-factly.

  Tuesday then proceeded to pass out cold.

  *

  The entirety of The Mistress, the greatest of all World Slugs, twitched. She could feel a relentless pain radiating from near one of Her kidneys. The human equivalent of what She was feeling was getting a rotten tooth torn out without anaesthetic. It was something She couldn't ignore.

  For the first time in centuries, The Mistress ceased Her sunbathing and slowly began to awaken. It took a period of two hours, but nerve pathways the size of train stations sent out electrical and chemical impulses back and forth from one end to the other. Eventually, feeling and movement returned to Her extremities.

  And now She was hungry for solid food.

  Reaching out with senses that weren't understood by any other species, The Mistress was able to detect a planet relatively nearby (in an astronomical sense, at least), and decided it was time for a snack. She began the long process of moving from one point in space to the other by stimulating Her long-dormant supplies of internal liquids, sloshing them about until they converted into a highly volatile gas, and then She swelled up from a football to a much bigger basketball. Now perfectly spherical, The Mistress did a slow flip, aimed her anus right at the nearest star, and let out the largest of all farts. She blew herself clean out of orbit atop blue flames that were ten kilometres long.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BREAKFAST

  Tuesday woke up in very different surroundings. Sure, he hadn't moved an inch from where he'd passed out, but the chasm of flesh was unrecognisable. For starters, the brown jerky-like walls were now a bright pink, and they pulsed violently and continuously. Tuesday could hear unknown fluids sloshing through the World Slug's flesh.

  Tuesday got up with a lot of effort. Besides a twisted ankle and vicious slashes of bruising all over the place, he wasn't too badly messed up. Checking his wrist display, a cracked plastic dial with AIR stamped on it showed a big, fat zero. Tuesday tapped the device with one finger, and the dial twitched a little.

  Great. Could have enough air for five minutes or a week, and no way to tell.

  Tuesday’s long climb out of this pit was complicated by the new life flooding through The Mistress. As Her muscles were far more pliant than before, this made the series of cliffs that led back to the surface all floppy and slippery. This caused Tuesday to lose his grip several times, and sent him crashing all the way back down to the basement. It was just lucky that the surfaces were like worn-out trampolines, or Tuesday would have bashed himself senseless by the second slip.

  Finally, Tuesday reached the torn flap of skin he'd originally fallen through and hoisted himself up onto the back of The Mistress. Puffing as he looked up at an unfamiliar sky, it took Tuesday a few seconds to figure out what was going on.

  His heart fell.

  Thanks to the OH&S videos, Tuesday knew that a newly-awakened World Slug was capable of moving vast distances with nothing more than the near-comical method of rectal propulsion. In fact, at a top velocity of one-tenth the speed of light, World Slugs were the fastest of all known biological creatures. However, they were far slower than even the most basic of human starships, and it wasn't unheard of for a World Slug to spend a million years travelling to new stellar pastures. As they could sustain themselves on most forms of radiation and were capable of digesting nearly any kind of matter, it wasn't like The Mistress would starve to death anytime soon, even if She went through the dark zones between star systems. If She was heading for an entirely new system, though, that could mean a travel time of anywhere from fifty years to a million plus.

  Tuesday sat down heavily, slammed the face of his helmet into his gloved hands, and rocked back and forth for a while in total despair. If The Mistress was heading away from the thinly-spread human empire known as The Unison, Tuesday may not see another human being ever again. He would spend the rest of his days all alone with nothing to look forward to beyond withering away to dust without leaving a single worthwhile marker to show he'd ever lived.

  The alternative, though was far worse. If The Mistress got it into Her brain that some nearby populated world looked like a tasty breakfast after centuries of sleep, well...that mouth was large enough to swallow any man-made object that had ever been built, and that belly was far, far bigger...

  Looking on the bright side, Tuesday was relived to find that the World Slug's extreme burst of speed hadn't resulted in anything instantly fatal, such as throwing him into space or crushing his whole body to the consistency of Nutella. In fact, it seemed that The Mistress had evolved in such a way that Her unique form of interstellar travel was kind to the parasites and grubs that called Her body home, and it seemed this mercy had been extended to Tuesday as well.

  Doing his best not to look up at the terrifying sky, Tuesday used his meagre supply of common sense to figure out what the Green Hell he was going to do now. As there was only one man-made structure on the whole Slug, it was pretty obvious.

  Limping, using the self-lengthening handle of his pickaxe as a crutch, Tuesday headed for home. This would have been a good plan, except that his tent wasn't there anymore. Looking about the clear stretch of skin in confusion, positive that he'd gone the right way, Tuesday finally checked the little screen at the corner of his visor to make sure he hadn't gotten turned around.

  Yup, it was the right place. And that meant if he wasn't the one who was lost, then that meant...

  Crap.

  On a closer inspection of the area, Tuesday noticed that there was a scattering of various colours of confetti from where he stood to roughly a hundred and fifty metres in every direction. All that was left of Tuesday's worldly possessions was colourful dust. Anything bigger than a thumb had been crushed, torn or exploded into fragments. Tuesday’s tent-sweet-tent was nothing more than scraps, his endless supply of never-expiring food was now breadcrumbs and shreds of plastic packaging, and the pipes of his water filtration system had burst into a million jagged ceramic tubes no bigger than toilet rolls. Obviously he was no astrobiologist, but Tuesday was pretty sure that explosive burst from the colossal anus of The Mistress had smashed everything above the level of Her skin into powder. The destruction was complete.

  So, to recap, Tuesday had no food, no shelter, no water, no way to contact The Unison to request help, and every breath he took from his supply was rolling the dice to be his last. If another human being had ever been so totally, utterly screwed, Tuesday pitied them.

  With nothing better to do, Tuesday got on his knees and began to search through the carnage.

  *

  It took an hour of scavenging, but Tuesday eventually found a few slithers of hope. There were plenty of freeze-dried Mac&Cheese noodles that had exploded out of their packaging and drifted back down from the sky like neon-yellow rain, and after picking up the little pasta elbows from the soft, red skin of The Mistress one by one, Tuesday now had quite a supply. He kept them all in the only remaining Tupperware container he could find. Just to rub it in, the container wouldn't seal.

  Nuts.

  Water was another matter, as the entire filtration system situated next to Tuesday's tent had exploded, and there was no way he'd survive drinking raw Slug-juice. Thankfully, the pipe system below the surface of The Mistress hadn't suffered the same fate as the above-ground bits, and it seemed that the subterranean section had managed to instantly seal itself. That meant Tuesday may potentially have a small reservoir under his feet, but he'd need to dig deep, and there was a good chance the “water” would taste like ass and have the consistency of treacle. That meant risking the Screaming Squirts, which Tuesday knew to be a fate worse than death.

  Tuesday didn't give up. He walked a good two hundred metres in every direction, his rodent eyes scanning for anything shiny or intact, but as the minutes dragged on he lost hope in tiny increments. Every fragment he checked, every handful of worthless filaments that ra
n through the fingers of his gloves like dust, simply rammed home the fact that he was - technically speaking - utterly boned.

  Tuesday had become the king of confetti.

  Now absolutely baking after a mostly pointless sixty minutes of wandering, Tuesday switched off his last fist-sized oxygen tank and removed his sweaty, faulty spacesuit helmet in order to conserve his air supply. Sitting down violently, Tuesday instantly stood back up again when it turned out that the temperature of The Mistress' skin had spiked. The temperature of Her flesh had climbed steadily to the point where it was putting off visible heat distortion, and Her colour was changing from pink to a pearly white.

  Sitting on top of his dodgy helmet to avoid getting a burnt bum, Tuesday had nothing better to do than rattle his half-full Tupperware container. He'd never been poorer, even when he was living on lizards and beetles in the desert.

  Taking a few deep breaths to calm himself, Tuesday was already feeling dizzy from the smelly onslaught of overcooked trout and urine, the unmatched stink of World Slug he'd come to hate more and more each day. It took a lot of inhaling to get enough air to survive, and pretty soon Tuesday felt like he'd dropped about twenty IQ points. If anybody in history had ever been murdered by having an old salmon jammed down their throat, Tuesday knew exactly how they felt. Although every breath it was a total misery, it wouldn’t kill him anytime soon.

  Something in the sky caught Tuesday's attention, and he watched the penny-size circle in stupid disbelief for almost five seconds before realising what it was: a planet. The orb was green and blue, but not quite like the green and blue of Earth, and The Mistress seemed to be heading right for it. Sure, only going a tenth the speed of light wasn't much in a relativistic sense, but Tuesday didn't need a physics degree to know what would happen if a football the size of New York City smashed into a populated planet at such speeds. For starters, it would annihilate every living thing on the surface in an instant, then the entire planet would explode into worthless rocks no bigger than the size of a Chihuahua's scrotum. It would make the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a mild head cold. On the plus side, at least The Mistress wasn't going into interstellar space, which meant Tuesday would experience an instantaneous death rather than the slow torture of starvation and dehydration.

  Um...yay?

  Tuesday wasn't able to consider this upside for long, as the blue-green sphere had rapidly grown from a coin to a basketball in the span of a second. In another instant a total of five shiny moons could suddenly be made out by the naked eye, and for some reason they were all glowing like tiny stars. Tuesday had no time at all to consider their mystery, however, as a rapidly impending death left him uninterested in such things. As Tuesday breathed in one of his very last breaths he was able to make out the unfamiliar, jagged continents of this unknown world, and as he exhaled he could see the unmistakable straight lines and glittering embers of habitation.

  Tuesday spent his final instants cursing the name Ernest Fell as the entire sky filled with a civilisation that was about to end. Standing to attention and looking directly up, Tuesday raised his middle fingers at the Universe and bared his horrible teeth.

  And then something unexpected happened.

  The Mistress tucked in Her boneless chin, gracefully tumbled in a backflip that any Olympic diver would envy, aimed Her bottom towards the blue-green planet, and let off a ripper. The enormous fart shook cities and sent shock-waves rumbling through the world, but at least it wasn't an extinction-level event. The Mistress, now emptied of Her last reserves of propulsion gas, flattened out into a fraction of Her usual width, curved Her entire body into a giant parachute-like shape, and glided gently for the surface. However, one of those weird glowing moons had obscured Her approach, and The Mistress landed on the bright sphere instead. Whether this had been intentional or not would probably never be resolved, as World Slugs weren’t known for their conversational skills.

  The Slug landed so gently, in fact, that it took Tuesday a few seconds to register that he was alive, let alone what had just happened. After all, the touch-down was softer than fresh cotton. Gibbering, almost sobbing in relief, Tuesday suddenly punched towards the same heaven he’d just flipped off.

  “Alive!” he screamed.

  There was a deafening CRUNCH from all directions that Tuesday both felt and heard, and the entire Slug began to vibrate more and more violently. It was pretty obvious that She was having a munch on whatever this moon was made from.

  Still relieved beyond words, Tuesday took his first deep, triumphant breath on this nameless moon, but it became pretty hard to continue feeling relieved when he registered that the air tasted like unfiltered diesel exhaust mixed with metal grit. Funnily enough, for some reason it reminded him of cigarettes and antiseptic. And while that first lungful was unpleasant, the second one caused Tuesday to cough and splutter so violently that his head spun and lights exploded before his eyes.

  His entire respiratory system was suddenly filled with rusty barbed wire.

  Clutching his burning throat in agony, Tuesday realised that the World Slug had unexpectedly sucked away Her thin layer of atmosphere and was now covered by some sort of putrid gas that his lungs wouldn't accept. Due to the delicate nature of the human respiratory system, this poison could be made from any of literally thousands of chemicals in an unlimited number of combinations and ratios, and it was more than possible that Tuesday had already taken in a fatal dose.

  Tuesday's eyes burned as though full of capsicum spray and his sight vanished immediately. Gagging, rubbing ineffectually at eyelids that had puffed up, turned crimson and sealed themselves shut, Tuesday staggered towards where he’d last registered seeing his spacesuit helmet. Unfortunately, Tuesday was getting pretty lightheaded and disoriented by the crud flooding through his bloodstream, and after falling to his knees this blind groping found nothing but hot-to-the-touch Slugskin. Tuesday was soon in a fully-fledged panic, which didn’t do much to fight off the mental static from his brain tumbling towards unconsciousness and death, and he tripped over his own feet more than once. It had now been almost a minute and a half since his lungs had been assaulted by the toxic atmosphere, and everything was slowly sliding from terrifying to oddly peaceful.

  Tuesday growled and foamed at the mouth.

  Stuff peaceful! I want to live!

  Stumbling, Tuesday fell on his face yet again, but this time his face touched something familiar: it felt like vulcanised rubber, and Tuesday could clearly tell with one sweep of his nose that it had been criss-crossed by dozens of lines of duct tape. Feeling for the collar lock in a frenzy as everything receded into a distant mental echo, somehow Tuesday managed to link the magnetic locks around his steel collar to the matching one on the helmet. Just as the blackness became all-present and the last of his willpower failed, there was a deafening thud and a tremendous impact on Tuesday’s chest that forced the razors out of his lungs. His next delicious breath could have filled a Scuba tank.

  There was a loud beep.

  “Your bloodsteam contains fatal levels of chlorine, methane, sulphur and carbon monoxide, Current User,” a neutral female voice crackled into Tuesday’s left ear from an ancient speaker. “Without an immediate detox, you have less than sixteen minutes to live. Confirm detox?”

  Gagging, his burning, puffy eyes still shut tighter than bank vaults, Tuesday nodded violently. The sound of his jagged breathing was immediately drowned out by ten rapturous seconds of Locatelli's Caprice in D major performed by the great Elcor Dearheart, but then one of the greatest violin solos was immediately terminated by the unmistakeable CLANG CLANG alert of a serious system error.

  “Detox unavailable, Current User.” The suit chirped helpfully. “Please download the latest operating system firmware patch, refill the Detox cylinder, Restart, and try again.”

  “Tell me the bad news, why dontcha?” Tuesday muttered sarcastically.

  CLANG CLANG.

  “Nine minutes of air remaining, Current User.”
<
br />   Tuesday was too exhausted to respond. Somehow he didn’t even swear. He simply lay there for a time, enjoying the coolness of the canned air as it circulated inside his chest. He may be terminally poisoned, but for now it was just nice to be able to breathe in a gas that didn’t feel like a lungful of cheese graters.

  When Tuesday finally had the willpower to open his scalded eyes it was to total darkness. Blinking over and over again with absolutely no improvement, the panic immediately set in, and Tuesday asked himself all of the obvious questions. Was he blind? Had the horrible atmosphere of this moon seared away his corneas? After all, he was able to see just fine a few minutes ago...

  And then Tuesday realised - with a metric tonne of relief - that he’d simply put his spacesuit helmet on backwards. Tuesday hissed something that would have gotten him lynched in any Mansonite church, took a deep breath (just in case), screwed his eyes shut and wrestled the helmet into a more practical setting. A thin line of magnets along Tuesday’s collar THUPPED apart and CHUKKED together again.