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10 – Erf
The Desperalda plus shed drifted through the Milky Way which was like floating through a dream. Every second the view changed. Millions and millions of suns, some no larger than golf balls, some a thousand times larger than our own sun, sparkled all around them. It was unimaginably beautiful.
Jay and Kay no longer felt the slightest pangs of homesickness. They felt that leaving Earth had broadened their horizons, set them free from the normal boundaries that mere mortals lived by. Yet they still both felt a slight yearning for green fields and pale blue skies.
'Let me look through your eyes, mother,'
said Cleopatra. Kay lay back and rested while her unborn child turned her eyes from side to side.
'Wow. That is like, so beautiful.'
Soon everyone slept. The ship on auto-pilot floated through the Milky Way gently swaying from side to side to avoid the millions of gravity fields that called out to her. Only Ethel stayed awake. Above her, Loudpiss the Damp snored like an asthmatic hippopotamus. The Blind Piano Tuner had lain awake listening to her, trying to push away the new thoughts that were inside him. He dared not think the word 'love' but he knew that's what was happening. For goodness sake, they weren’t even the same species. At least he didn’t think they were. It was hard to tell. Under all the layers of clothes and dirt Loudpiss could well have been an Egyptian. She could have been any one of a number of different life-forms. It had been back at the dawn of creation, the last time The Blind Piano Tuner had been in love, not this basic earthy kind of human love but something on a far higher plane, something that had resulted in the Big Bang and the wonderful son who’s name he still couldn’t remember.
'Loudpiss,' he thought, 'what a beautiful name.'
Then he too slept.
Ethel sat in silence, watching the stars and the endless patterns their radiation created on the monitor screens. It was all just a mish-mash of random rubbish, the sort of picture you get when you pull the aerial out of the back of the TV. Now and then there was the odd flash of something else, radio waves, transmissions that told Ethel they were passing a planet with fairly advanced life on it. But they were no cause for excitement. She'd seen it all before, there were trillions of planets circling billions of suns, and lots of them had life-forms that could build radios.
Then something horribly familiar appeared on the screen.
It was a chat show and the creatures in the chat show looked almost exactly the same as humans. There was a difference but it was subtle, Ethel couldn't put her finger on it, but she knew that what she was looking at wasn't coming from Earth. Given the fact that television on Earth had ceased over a cetury earlier, Ethel's first thought was that it was some old transmission that had been bouncing round in space all this time. This seemed unlikely, so she concluded that the transmission was coming from another planet. This was even more unlikely.
'So Mr Mith, what you're telling us then,' the interviewer was saying. 'is that as far as you're concerned there are no Santa Cows?'
'Exactly,' said the interviewee. 'It's all just a fairy story. It's just people in cow costumes.'
'Do you have any evidence to back up this preposterous claim?'
'Well, er, it's not a matter of evidence,' said Mr Mith. 'It's not for me to prove Santa Cows don't exist. It's for you to prove they do.'
'So how do explain all the peasants, that are left at the foot of countless children's beds on Christmas morning?'
'Oh come on. You can't be serious.' Said Mr Mith. 'Their parents put them there.'
'I'm sorry Mr Mith, but your case just doesn't hold water,' said the interviewer. 'Next you'll be telling us there's no such thing as God!'
Mr Mith went redder and redder. He looked as if he was about to explode. The interviewer leant in for the kill.
'Do you think there's no such thing as God?' he said. 'Do you think the messages he beams us from heaven are all fairy stories too?'
The studio audience fell silent. The cameras scanned their staring faces. Four security guards began to walk towards the stage.
'Well, Mr Mith, we're waiting.'
'I er, I er,' he spluttered.
'I think you've said all we need to hear Mr Heretic Mith. Guards take him away,' said the interviewer.
As the guards dragged the silent Mr Mith away, the interviewer turned towards the camera with a self-satisfied smugness that could only have come from late twentieth century Earth.
'Next,’ he said, ‘today's drama playhouse presents 'Piss in Boots' a hilarious pantomime from the team that brought you Snow Blight and the Seven Warts, but first, Today's National Anthem,' he said.
The screen changed and the music of an old Abba song filled the cockpit –
"Can you hear the drums Fernando?
I remember long ago another starry night like this . . ."
As Ethel stared at the screen she realised what the difference was with these people. Every one of them had a big black barcode across their forehead.
Ethel switched the screen off before it woke anyone. She could hardly believe what she had seen. Somewhere there appeared to be an entire civilisation based on the radio and television transmissions from twentieth century Earth. It was almost impossible to imagine, but she had seen the evidence with her own eyes.
Her initial reaction was to wake everyone up and tell them about it, but she knew if she did that Jay and Kay would want to go there straight away. She turned the console back on and tracked the transmission to its source. It was very close and pretty well dead ahead. She turned the console off again and nudged The Blind Piano Tuner.
'I don't believe it, ' he said when she told him.
'I do little mouse,' said Loudpiss the Damp who had been eavesdropping. 'I've been there. It's called Erf and you're quite right, their whole culture is based on stuff they picked up from Earth.'
'But it's all wrong,' said Ethel. 'It's surreal garbage.'
'That's their equipment dearie. It's rubbish,' said Loudpiss. ‘It screwed up the signals so they came out distorted.’
'Do you think we should go there?' said Ethel.
‘Well, little mouse, it bea dangerous place,' said Loudpiss, ‘but we has no choice, there be something down there that we needs. We has the egg. Now we needs the spoon.’
‘Spoon, what spoon?’ said Ethel. ‘We’ve got spoons here.’
‘This be a special spoon,’ said Loudpiss, ‘endowed with strange and mystical qualities.’
‘I suppose it’s a stupid question, seeing as how they’ve based their culture on twentieth century Earth, but why is it dangerous?’ said Ethel.
'It's run by religious fundamentalists. They're very, very strict.'
'But if we told them we'd actually come from Earth,' said Ethel, 'surely they'd love to see us?'
'I doubt it,' said Loudpiss. 'They live by a religious code that is so strict you couldn't fit a cigarette paper into the cracks. They spend their entire lives trying to trick their closest friends and relatives so they can denounce them as heretics.'
'And what do they do to them?' said Ethel.
'They kill them.'
'Mmm,' said Ethel.
'What's going on?' said Kay waking up.
'Oh nothing,' said Ethel.
Cleopatra, who had been listening to everything, told Kay about Erf. Kay woke Jay and told him and as Ethel had feared the two humans were desperate to go there.
'I've got an idea,' said Jay. 'Not only can we go there, but they will welcome us with open arms.'
'It'll end in tears,' said Loudpiss the Damp. 'Don't say I didn't warn you.'
'They've based their whole lives, their culture and everything on stuff from Earth, right?' Jay explained. 'Which means they haven't had any signals within living memory.'
'Right,' said Ethel.
'Let's give them some,' said Jay. 'Let's give them some new messages from Earth.'
'Brilliant,' said Kay.
'Brilliant,' thought Ethel and The Blind Piano Tuner but they were both too annoyed at not having thought of it themselves to give Jay any praise.
'Brilliant,'
said Cleopatra inside Kay's and Jay's heads.
'Who is that?' said Jay.
'Your daughter,' said Kay.
'Wow, like really?' said Jay. ‘Wow. Hello Princess."
'Hello father.'
Ethel turned on the console again and they all watched as down on Erf a newsreader read the news.
'. . . fell ninety-three points on the Stick Exchange today. Maeve Olightly president of the Blank of England said it was just a hickory cup and nothing to worry about,' he read.
A phone rang on the newsreader’s desk, something it had obviously never done before as he jumped out of his skin. He stared at it for a full twenty second before gingerly picking it up.
'Bloody Hull,' he said, then realising he was still live on TV, put his hand over his mouth and muttered into the receiver. With a shaking hand, he put the phone down and looked into the camera
'Ladies and Mentlemen, I don't know what to say, but I have just been told the most incredible news,' he said. 'Scientists at the Great Temple are reporting new signals from the heavens. Even as I speak, messages are being received. We take you live to our reporter, Bristly Hewitt, at the Great Temple.'
The scene changed to a frantic tousle-haired woman, who obviously had not been expecting to be on TV that morning, standing in front of two gigantic solid gold doors.
'I am here outside the Great Temple, the very place where our ancient forefathers first received the seventy-eight thousand and nine holy commandments from the heavens, commandments that have shaped our whole lives and made us into the people we are today. For two centuries God has been silent but today he spoke to us again. We thought we had become unworthy of his wisdom, so unworthy that God had rejected us, but now it seems as though we have been forgiven, for God is speaking to us once more.'
The golden doors opened a few inches and a hand came out. This was in itself an Erf-shattering event. Inside the temple lived the Radio-Priests chosen, like Lamas, when only a few months old and taken to live forever inside the sacred building. This was the first time in living memory that one had ever come out. In fact it was the first time in living memory that anyone had even seen the golden doors open.
The hand tried to open the door but after centuries, the hinges had rusted and it wouldn’t move.
‘Excuse me,’ said a voice from behind the door, ‘can someone fetch an oil-can
'Oh wise Radio-Priest, oh great eminence,' said the reporter when the door had finally been opened wide enough to let the owner of the voice out. 'This is a great honour. Do you have words of wisdom from God, words of wisdom for us mere myrtles?'
'I do,' said Dorsal an assistant trainee Radio-Priest.
'Oh great wise one can you tell us what he said?'
'I can,' said Dorsal. 'he said – "is this thing on?".'
'Wow, deep words indeed.'
'Wait, there's more. He also said – "Testing, one two, one two.".'
‘And can you tell us, oh wise one, what these words might mean?’ said Bristly Hewitt.
‘Er, well, um, it’s hard to say,’ said Dorsal, ‘but I imagine that he is testing us.’
Jay picked up the microphone and in as deep and god-like a voice as he could muster began to talk.
'People of Erf,' he said, 'We are displeased with you. You have taken our words and misused them. You have used us for your own ends and created a monster.'
'And we're very, very cross,' added Loudpiss.
On the console, Dorsal fell to his knees and shook as Jay’s words boomed out of the temple behind him. The TV reporter and her film crew backed away in case a bolt of lightning came from the heavens and fried him.
'I am seriously thinking of sending down a bolt of lightning and frying you,' said Jay, now almost bursting to stop laughing.
'This is Mrs God speaking, you humble cretins,' said Kay. 'Tear down the golden doors of the temple that everyone may see inside. Bring out your Radio-Priests so the whole world may see they are false priests.'
'But . . . ' Dorsal began.
'SHUTUP!!' roared The Blind Piano Tuner.
Dorsal prostrated himself on the ground and hoped the dust would swallow him up. Jay switched off the microphone.
'Can you like, move things and do stuff from up here, 'he said to Ethel.'
'Like?' said Ethel.
'Make the golden doors fall off.'
'Oh yes, no problem,' said Ethel.
The golden doors swung wide open and one by one the screws in the six great hinges removed themselves and flew through the air onto the back of the prostrate gibbering form of Dorsal. The two doors crashed down onto the steps on either side of him and shattered into a thousand pieces.
Inside the temple, the six Radio-Priests were going frantic. Used to a lifetime of unquestioning respect from the entire population, they had at first been overwhelmed with arrogance. Who would dare encroach on their lives of lazy self-indulgence? For all their lives the great satellite dishes on the temple roof had received nothing but silence and that was how they liked it. Now God had spoken and, although none of them would ever admit it, not even to each other, they were pissed off. Life that had been free and easy, had suddenly become demanding.
'What the f. . . ' said Vautin, the oldest, and therefore theoretically the wisest, but in fact the laziest and most arrogant because he had had the most practise, Radio-Priest, as the golden doors shattered.
Daylight had only entered the Great Temple on the rare occasions a new child was brought in, to replace a dead priest. Then one door had been opened just wide enough to squeeze a baby through and then rapidly closed again. Vautin had long thought they should have made a baby-box which is like a letter-box only bigger so the new trainees could be slipped through without having to open the doors at all.
Now daylight, vast acres of it, poured into the temple. The news reporter and her team rushed up the steps. They were not brave enough to cross the threshold but from where they filmed, the entire population of Erf could see right into the temple. To say the entire population is exactly right since Erf law demanded that everyone above the age of thirty minutes watch television between the hours of six and twelve at night. Watching television was to Erf, what going to church had been to Earth in the mid twentieth century except far more popular. If there were rebel factions on Erf, they kept very, very quiet.
The inside of the Great Temple was not dissimilar to a temple on Earth. At the far end, up a few steps, there was a great altar. Leading up to it a wide aisle was flanked by rows of pews. The similarity was uncanny, or rather it would have been had it not been for the altar. It was not so much a long table with a cloth, a crucifix and candles each end but a gigantic radio set. It looked like someone had taken an old nineteen-forties bakelite radio and enlarged it until it was twenty feet tall. In its centre a huge circular dial covered with numbers glowed pale yellow and below it a row of knobs each one as tall as a man. On either side of the radio stood a bank of loudspeakers five times more complicated than the most advanced Led Zeppelin set up. Three figures knelt before the radio, shaking and terrified.
The whole place was a disgusting mess, hardly surprising since no one apart from the Radio-Priests were allowed in the temple and they were far to important to attend to menial tasks like sweeping the floor or tidying up. The floor was knee deep in rubbish, squashed takeaway containers, discarded radio equipment, thousands of miles of cable of every size and colour, dead cats, and thirteen centuries worth of Wireless Weekly. It was piled up all over the pews, stacked against the walls with only a few narrow paths here and there where it was possible to move around. Had the cameras been able to see down in the temple crypts, they would have found an even worse state of affairs, because among all the detritus of the past hundreds of years, were also the bodies of all the dead Radio-Priests and a race of small rats that had evolved to live exclusively off the remains of dead Radio-Priests.
Vautin himself stood in the pulpit wearing an enormous pair of headphones from which two long fraying wires led back in to the great radio set. The other two Radio-Priests were on the floor in the choir stalls grovelling around in a sea of old radio valves, circuit boards and half eaten instruction manuals.
‘Who on Erf are you?' said Vautin, as the camera crew peered into the temple, 'that you dare approach me?'
'Bristly Hewitt, EBC News,' said the reporter.
On the Desperalda Ethel handed Jay a book.
'Here, I think these are their national anthems,' she said.
The book was entitled – 'The Abba Song Book'
'What's an abba?' said Jay.
'I can't really remember much about it, except that it was cluckin huge,' said Ethel. 'I think it was some kind of twentieth century religious cult. Try reading a bit of it and see what happens.'
Jay switched on the microphone and read -
'But the sun is still in the sky and shining above you.
Let me hear you sing once more like you did before.
Sing a new song.'
'CHIQUITITA!!!'
sang the entire population of Erf.
'Wow,' said Jay.
'Bloody hell,' said Kay. 'Try another one.'
'There's not a soul out there
No one to hear my prayer,'
'GIMME, GIMME, GIMME A MAN AFTER MIDNIGHT!!'
sang fifty-three million people. Their voices, every one in perfect tune, every one in perfect synchronisation, became one voice. After the Big Bang it was the loudest noise that had ever been heard in all of creation. It's sound waves reached up through Erf's atmosphere. It rattled the windows of the Desperalda. It loosened the knots of the ropes holding Loudpiss the Damp's shed onto the roof. It reached out beyond the stars mingling with the echo of the big bang until it had reached into every corner of every galaxy.
Far, far away, beyond the last known universe, even beyond the imagination of the greatest minds in creation, there were other galaxies, galaxies that only existed in advanced scientific theory, unless of course you happened to live there. And like every other galaxy there were planets there that supported intelligent life.
At this point it, for those who don't already realise this, it is necessary to state the incredibly obvious. Because there are so many billions of stars, more than all the grains of sand on not only Earth but several other planets with lots of very big beaches too, the odds on there being intelligent life here and there are so high that only an idiot would take your bet. And even though the percentage of stars that have planets with life on them is less than a millionth of one percent, there are nevertheless, billions of inhabited planets. There are so many in fact that whatever culture, lifestyle, food etc. you find on any give planet is repeated almost but not quite, identically on at least ten other planets. Some people think this theory is an understatement.
So it was with Abba.
There are in the whole of creation fourteen planets where the Abba phenomenon, either exists or has existed. There are also twenty-seven where it will exist at some point in the future. On one of the fourteen, a scientist at a tracking station picked up the echo of the song from Erf and couldn't believe her ears. After generations of listening to the stars, at last there was evidence of other intelligent life.
'We are not alone,' said the scientific community.
'Wonderful,' said nearly everyone else.
'But it's wrong,' said a fifteen year old Abba fan when the news was broadcast on the evening news. 'It should be "gimme, gimme, gimme a lamb after midnight" not "a man".'
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