PENGUIN BOOKS LAST HUMAN Doug Naylor was born in Manchester and educated at Chetham's Hospital School of Music, where he learnt to play 'Three Blind Mice' on the recorder without sheet music or a conductor. Thrown out of Liverpool University in the mid-seventies for drinking too slowly, he became a prawn-and-cockle salesman for twelve months until he could afford to get a dead-end job and concentrate on writing. His hobbies include reading, philosophy, shouting abuse at Merchant-Ivory films and not smelling offish. He has never paid tax. He is part of the gestalt entity known as Grant Naylor, which created and wrote the Emmy-award-winning series Red Dwarf for BBC television. Along with Rob Grant he was also head writer for Spitting Image in the mid-eighties, and together they wrote two novels, Red Dwarf and Better Than Life. Last Human is his first solo attempt. DOUG NAYLOR Last Human 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 Alcom 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 1995 Published in Penguin Books 1995 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 Copyright © Doug Naylor, 1995 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 For Linda, Richard and Matthew ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Rob Grant As many of you will know, the previous two Red Dwarf novels were written in collaboration with Rob Grant. In the summer of 1993 Rob expressed a desire to write a Red Dwarf novel on his own. I look forward to reading it and thank him for the sections in this book that are based on the TV scripts we wrote together. Muchas gracias Doug Naylor London February 1995 Special thanks to Tony Lacey for his support and patience. Special thanks also to Charles Armitage. Thanks also to Chris Barrie, Craig Charles, Danny John Jules, Robert Llewellyn and Hattie Hayridge. Also thanks to Helen Norman, Andy De Emmony, Justin Judd, Kerry Coldwell, Kate Cotton, Mel Bibby, Howard Burden, Graham Hutchins, Andria Pennell, John Pom-phrey, Cate Williams, Peter Wragg and all the Red Dwarf backstage crew. Thanks also to BBC Northwest. Special thanks to Robin Bynoe. Thanks also to Judith Flanders. Also thanks to Christopher White for asking me to thank him in this special thanks section when he happened to wander into my office while I was writing it. Also my undying gratitude to all the Penguin Reps who were told so many times a Red Dwarf book was coming, only to find it wasn't. Well, now it has. No, really - this time it's true. Thank you. PROLOGUE Something monumental was about to happen; possibly the most monumental thing ever to happen anywhere, ever. Hunched against the spongy base of the baobab tree, under a strake of dyspeptic sky, she gazed across the lake towards the mountains as an endless flock of hooked-beaked birds migrated across the waters. Why wasn't he here? Why wasn't he with her? She knew the answer. He was unreachable, two, perhaps three days away — hunting. Molasses of sweat trickled down the ridges of her brow and dribbled on to the broadness of her jaw. Then it happened again. It came back. The lasso of pain whipped around her hips and slowly began to tighten. She bared her teeth and a sound that seemed utterly alien to her small frame erupted into the night sky. For a second even the cicadas were silent. Alone, and as scared as she'd ever been in her entire life, she started to cry. Why had she continued to climb up-river looking for fruit? Why hadn't she turned back when the pains first started? But she'd been carrying the child so long she'd ignored them, not realizing that her time had finally come. Now it was too late. Another lasso. Her brown nails dug huge crescents into the palms of her clenched fists as the garrotte squeezed and squeezed, until it felt as if her heart were being turned inside out. She pushed and grunted and screeched and screamed, and just when she thought she couldn't bear the pain any more her body parted, and a head thrust its way into existence. She supported the child's head in her hands and pushed. First one shoulder wriggled free, followed by a second, then suddenly the child slithered out into her arms, trailing a trembling neon black umbilical cord. She took hold of the cord and wrapped a length of twine around it, a thumb's distance from the child's stomach, then carefully bit the cord in two, another thumb's distance from that. She held the child up and peered at it critically. A whimper of delight staggered out of her exhausted body. It was a girl. She licked some of the ooze from its face. She could see it better now. But wait. There was something wrong. She felt it, instinctively, The child's limbs were too short, its forehead was too high and its head - its head was so large. She held it, uncertain what to do. But she was right - there was something wrong with the child. The child was going to be abnormal. It wasn't going to be like its mother. It wasn't going to be like its father. It wasn't going to be like anyone. Anyone ever. She curled the savannah grass around her sun-gnarled fingers and looked across the clearing. Here, in a huge Y-shaped gorge, in a place later called the Serengeti plains, in northern Tanzania, she had given birth to the first. The first of a species that would later take the name Homo. That would first become Homo habilis, then Homo erectus and finally Homo sapiens. The first had been born. The first human. She fastened the tiny creature to her breast and it started to feed. After the child was nourished, the ape woman removed the child from her breast and placed it gently on a bed of red oat grass. The child curled itself into a ball and slept. PART ONE Cyberia CHAPTER 1 Six million years later, in a dilapidated class three transport ship, the last human being in the cosmos lay in the same foetal position as his long dead sister, murmuring remarks in the gibberish of deep sleep, until a poorly digested bowl of cabbage soup caused a noisy pocket of escaping air to flee his lower intestine and rouse him from his slumbers. For a brief nano-second he couldn't recall where he was. An inner voice, thick with spite, snickered quietly in his head. 'Embrace the moment,' it whispered. 'Hang on to the amnesia, because this tiny moment of zero recall is the best thing that's going to happen to you for some considerable time.' Naturally Lister didn't much care for this inner voice, and was doing his best to ignore it. But nothing could stop the inner voice when it had bad news to impart, news as bad as this bad news. 'Whatever you do,' it continued to bait him, 'don't access reality - you're not going to like it one little bit.' He struggled into a sitting position and peered through the grime of the porthole. He was on some kind of spacecraft that was preparing to land, swooping down over a series of huge canyons and ravines sculpted out of a barren sea of sandstone on a desert moon. He raised his handcuffed wrists and tried to massage a sensible expression on to his face with the balls of his palms. Desert moon? Why would he be landing on a desert moon? A desert moon with a complex of buildings surrounded by barbed-wire fences and tall sentry towers at each corner with huge swirling searchlights? He pushed his face against the porthole and watched his reflection peer gormlessly back at him. He didn't recognize it at first. This hunched stranger with hooded brown eyes. Was this him? This guy with the seven-day growth and hollow cheeks? This guy in the khaki jumpsuit and matching hat? This guy with the five rasta plaits of hair that usually slumped down his back, like slumbering snakes, but were now chained by a khaki hair-band? Where was his usually chirpy demeanour? Where was his lopsided smile, that amiable-slob grin that was as mischievous as the fourth wheel on a shopping trolley? Where were his biker's pants, and his leather jacket strewn with badges and hand-painted graffiti? He was staring at a stiff in a jumpsuit with a number on his hat. He shimmied across the bench and peered down the aisle. Fifty, perhaps sixty, bodies lined the craft's ugly gun-metal grey interior — a sorry bunch of rogue simulants, renegade droids, Axis-syndrome holograms and a bizarre mix of engineered life forms.