Doug Naylor - Red Dwarf - Last Human

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.

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.

Cyberia

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.