Theme Planet (10 page)

There came a solid
clunk.
Dex felt himself jerk forward, then snap back. Tentatively, licking dry lips,
he opened his eyes. They were at a disembarkation station, and two thousand
nine-hundred and ninety-nine happy customers were disembarking, chattering
happily, faces aglow with awe and wonder, laughing and joking, giggling and
slapping backs as if... Dex frowned. As if they’d been into battle together,
and survived. As if they’d shared some common adversity!

Dex looked around, frowning, to
see if anybody else was complaining. They weren’t.

So, stubborn as a rampant bull,
he looked around for somebody to complain
to.
There was nobody.

Within less than a minute, Dex
sat alone in the
Insane
CAR with Molly and Toffee standing on the
concrete platform, staring at him.

“Come
on,
Dad,” said
Molly. “We’re the last ones out! Gross!”

“Can we do it again?” beamed
Toffee.

Dex clambered out like a monkey
with four arms, fighting himself. He was muttering. His eyes had gone hard.

“Didn’t you like it, Dad?” asked
Molly.

“Yeah. Great. Or something.”

“Haha, Dad didn’t like it,” said
Toffee.

Molly grinned with a strain of wisdom
that should have had no right crossing an eight-year-old’s face.
“I
bet
Dad thought we were really going to drown under the sea,” said Molly, to
Toffee, who sniggered behind her hand. “You know Karen Johnson at school? Well,
she came here, and
she
said that
her
dad wet his pants and
screamed like a baby! Thought he was going to drown. Complained to the
authorities, and said he was going to the papers and everything. He caused a
right stink, and they were banned from the Theme Planet, and shipped off, and
kicked out, and sent home, and everybody at school laughed at her when she came
in with the photos. They called her a lam0 and a t-plan3t n00b.” “A... a
t-planet
noob?”
asked Dex, meekly.

“No, Dad. A
n00b!”

“Oh. Yes. Silly me. Well. Ahem.”
He coughed theatrically. “Lead the way.” He followed the girls from the tunnel
complex, and onto automated walkways that whizzed them back to the surface and
Insane
’s
Landing Pad. Katrina was waiting. She was holding something. She had a look of
supreme comedy on her pretty features.

“Hey, Dexter...”

“I don’t want to see it...”

“You should see it!”

“Let me look!”

“Let me look!”

Mother and daughters spent a few
moments laughing at the photo of the three of them, caught at the exact moment
the CAR supposedly hit the sea. Dexter Colls did indeed look ridiculous. Not
just like a man having a heart-attack, and a man squeezing out a hernia, but
also like a man ready to
kill.
Only Dex saw it. In his eyes. The Hunted
Animal look. Gleaming. Deadly.

Shit. I know myself too well.

Katrina put her arm around his
shoulders and he staggered to a bench under some blue-petalled trees, sinking
gratefully into a state of non-movement and non-excitement. “You okay, Big Man?”

“Great. Great! Wonderful.”

“Was it that bad?”

“Nah, it was nothing. I think you
should have a go.” He gave her a nasty sideways glance.

“Ooh, you’re tetchy. It was only
a ride, Dex.”

Dex made a growling sound.

“Come on, Lex is taking us to
Area 5IB.”

“What happens there? They
experiment on my internal organs ‘cos I’m an alien on this planet?”

“No,
Dexter. Nothing like that. Come
on. All we have to do is watch...”

“Good, ‘cos I’m fucking
damned
if you’re going to get me on another ride.”

“Tsch.
Language.”

Dex gave her a hard stare. “Fuck off,”
he said, with zero trace of humour.

~ * ~

Dex stared at
his
food with suspicion. Dex always stared at his food with suspicion. He was what
Jones generously called “a suspicious eater.” Unless he cooked it himself, Dex
didn’t like to touch it. He was the sort of man who washed pre-washed salad.
The sort of man who cut the crusts off bread. The sort of man who didn’t like
any sort of interference within a one metre circumference of his plate of food
- for fear of it being contaminated. He once put an official complaint in at
work, citing Health and Safety legislation, because the sinks in the gents’
toilets “smelled of fish.” He was the sort of man Katrina called a “mardy arse,”
and the sort Jones referred to as a “pain in the arse.” Dex used to grin, and
tell them all to
“kiss
his arse.”

Katrina cut her fish-steak, and
allowed a morsel to melt on her tongue with a piquant delicacy. “Mmm,” she
said, eyes widening a little. “Delicious! Absolutely fabulous!”

This was Mojojos, the “fine
authentic Japachinese restaurant” which had been recommended by Lex, their PD
PopBot. The building itself was built in traditional Japachinese white brick
and terracotta tile, with -apparently - all materials transported from Earth at
very great expense during the old Transport Days, that heady period of
Outer-Planet Colonisation.

The interior of Mojojos was cool
and dark, with hanging vines and great dark pools filled with the vibrant
colours of huge Koi carp - again, transported from Earth and now bred in VATS
on the Theme Planet using Ganger technology, which although still in its
infancy, was fine for fishpond displays.

Dex pushed his decapus curry
around his plate for a while. Kat scowled at him.

“Go on. Eat some.”

“I’m
just...”

“What?”

“I’m not used to being able to
actually finish a whole bloody sentence! You know, without Molly or Toffee
kicking their way into the conversation in their size tens.”

“I know what you mean.” Katrina
looked around, in mock fear. “It’s way too weird. I just hope they’re okay!”

Dex pulled out the KidMonitor and
placed it on the table. Molly and Toffee were in the Kiddy Kid Quad of Mojojos,
designed “For Kids To Have A Super Time! And Parents To Have A Better One!”
Molly was eating pizza, and Toffee was devouring huge “chicken dippers”
although what the chicken had been dipped in, Dexter couldn’t quite make out on
the ten inch plazzy-plasma.

“They’re fine, love. Stuffing
their faces. As growing girls do,” he said.

“Go on, what’s wrong with the
curry?”

“Nothing... I just, well,
obviously I haven’t tasted it yet.”

“Taste it, damn you!”

“It looks a bit green.”

“It’s a decapus curry! What
colour would you like it to be?”

“Blue?” said Dex, a tad
cheekily...

And the waiter was there,
removing the plate. “Sir’s wish is our command...”

“No, wait,” said Dex.

“No, no, please, sir, we will be
less than two minutes...”

“Wait!” pleaded Dex as his
untouched decapus curry was hurtled away to the kitchens by a man in pink
pants.

Katrina stared at him over a
forkful of quivering fish steak. He met her gaze. “Idiot,” she said.

“I was only joking.”

“Yeah, well, they take it
seriously around here.”

Dex’s food was duly returned,
blue now, as requested. Grumbling a little, the sort of grumble that wasn’t
really words, just half-mumbled half-curses, Dex tried an experimental
forkful... and his tastebuds seemed to explode. He was hit with richness,
flavour, spice and heat. It whirled around his mouth and then his belly, and
finally his skull. It was a taste explosion. A sensory hijacking. Indeed, it
was the
best
damn curry Dexter Colls had ever, ever experienced.

He looked around at his
surroundings with renewed enthusiasm.

“Weil?” said Katrina.

“It’s brill,” he said, with a
grin, teeth stained blue.

“Not too hot?”

“No. No, perfect, in fact.”

“You mean,” Kat feigned mock
horror, “we’ve found some
alien food
you actually like? Ye gods! Wonders
will never cease, my handsome, hunky and culinarily-retarded husband.”

Dex tucked in. He must have liked
it. He stopped talking.

The food was great, the wine
superb, and - lulled by a sense of fulfilment and alcohol - Dex didn’t even
mind when three jajinga chimps came and played guitaviolins by their table. A
most hideous screeching noise, to Dex’s ears, but for some reason Katrina liked
it.
She must be lulled by the romanticism of the whole situation. No point
destroying her fantasy, right?

Later, as Lex led the children
back to the hotel and their perfectly climate-controlled rooms, Dex and Katrina
walked arm in arm down to the beach. Pretty lights illuminated the walkways in
the shapes of various Theme Planet alien constellations. At a low zezub step,
they kicked off shoes and walked barefoot in the sand, curling toes, giggling a
little, and headed towards the crashing, booming ocean. They stood, holding
hands like children, simply staring out at an alien ocean from an alien shore.

“It’s just occurred to me,” said
Dex.

“What’s that?”

“I haven’t seen a provax yet.”

“They keep a low profile in Theme
Planet areas. You should have read your in-flight literature. I told you, too.
They don’t want to get in the way of us
humans
having a good holiday.”

“Yeah, but we’re on
their
planet.”

“And they make plenty of money
from us, darling. I’ve read a lot about the provax; they’re not that different
from us. We share a similar evolutionary arc. They, too, are descended from
apes - or the nearest alien equivalent, hammered out by the same kind of
gravity.”

“Yeah, well,
The Seeding
Theory of Dr Chaos
isn’t exactly on my reading list.”

They stood in silence for a
while. The ocean boomed. Surf rolled up the sand, tickling their toes. It was a
long, long moment of perfection.

Dex turned to Katrina. He smiled
at her, and felt her face move, shift, a return smile that he couldn’t really
define in the gloom but could read in the shift of her stance. He knew her too
well, he realised.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know you do, darling. And I
love you back. Love you lots.”

“If... if I ever do something bad,
or stupid, then I didn’t mean it. All right? I love you more than words can
say. I’ll love you ‘til the stars die. I’ll love you until the last ounce of
breath leaves my body.”

She stood on tiptoe, and kissed
him, and then held him tight as the ocean sighed and fell around them.

~ * ~

Back in the
room,
Lex the PopBot had worked a miracle. The children were asleep. Trailing sand,
Dex and Katrina moved to the massive bed and stood, holding each other. Slowly,
Katrina undressed Dex, her hands teasing on his flesh, running through his
chest hair, brushing against his erection. He smiled down at her, and then
reached forward to hold her face in his hands. He kissed her, languorously.