As he threaded the bright-lit quarters of the humming monstrosity, Imago viewed his fellow crewmen sleeping. Being a barrack-room philosopher, he speculated upon the nature of the journey. He, for one, would not be able to doze off so easily, especially with all the ceiling-globes still burning - fearing that sleep would thus bring spotlit monsters of nightmare.

Unaccountably, he recalled his childhood: sitting outside the pub waiting for his Mum and Dad, stocked only with a packet of crisps and an orange squash. Then, he remembered his wife who once had an affair with an aeroplane pilot. Every Sunday, Imago had heard their engine buzzing over the suburban house where they had lived ever since the honeymoon in Clun, Shropshire.

Of the sleeping crew, Captain Urqu snored loudest. Earlier in the "day", Urqu had teased the others with tales of salt-mines and pepper-mills, to which they were en route for more than a lifetime of labour amid the thirsty, sneezy realms of a yet undiscovered planet on the sinister side of time. Imago forgot where the quote marks began and ended: some of the words were Urqu's, but most were Imago's own retrospective attempts at creating a private joke world.

Despite the apparent modernity of the craft's interior (the glistening clinical walls, the bulbless lights, the interminable smooth under-drive of its hidden power factors, the interconnecting cabins), it was furnished with squashy three-piece suites and four-poster beds dredged from old-fashioned history. Here, the off-duty crew lolled about, blowing invisible speech bubbles in their sleep. Imago creased his brows and stared into each pair of stark-staring eyes to see if he could read their dreams.

His first subject slouched in a wide-winged armchair with grease marks where the head had missed the antimacassar. This was Urqu's lieutenant, Weaver, sporting his epaulettes less grandiosely in his sleep than he did when awake and alert. The dreams capered across the eyeballs like Saturday Morning Pictures. Imago became annoyed as each dream came to a false ending and blended into the next one. He abandoned Flash Gordon in a predicament worse than death only to find himself following the eye-line of the Rocket Man into the chimney tunnels of pre-cataclysm Earth, where critters lurked...

But these were the critters Imago had feared so much in his own dreams. So, he side-stepped to the next upholstered recliner where Urqu himself snoozed. Imago stared into staring eyes. Once upon a time, Imago and Urqu had played the Eyeball game for real (when boys in a mutually synchronised schoolyard) - but a sleeper has an unfair advantage over blinks. Herein, Imago lost himself in a black and white movie from the now legendary Hollywood days. But this was a Film Noir, with only meagre light to place the protagonists into relief. Robert Mitchum's eyes were not only drooping characteristically, but closed, as he zombied around the incomprehensible plot. The film's undergrunts came faintly through Urqu's mouth, but the lips did not move. More sound than soundness.

The next sleeper was a woman. Her eye-lined dreams were rosier, more pastel, more romantic. As half a sun set into the whites, her lips made tentative kissing motions. Imago knew this woman as his wife. Somehow the old days had been forgiven and forgotten when they used to leave messages written on yellow 'post-its' stuck all over the refrigerator door for each other. He even loved her, loved her as much as he used to hate her when she emerged from the kitchen every Sunday, roast aloft on the spiked silver platter, as if she hoped it was his head, mouth propped open by a tongue swollen into a large fruit gland...

He rather enjoyed making his own Sunday dinner, when she went off with the pilot.

From the far end of the cabin, Imago blew kisses back at his wife, whose eyes flickered gradually shut with the imminence of her stirring. He dodged from the cabin, before she was fully aware of his presence. He could not expect friendly small talk, with waking up in the morning being such a pain these days. However, even her evening endearments seemed laced with sarcasm - perhaps for old time's sake.

In the next cabin, Urqu's nephew, Sisley, was already awake, which was not surprising. He had been suffering a bout of long cough which had recently turned into a bark.

"How are you this morning, Sisley?"

"A trifle dicky," Sisley replied.

"Have you tried sucking out the phlegm yourself?"

"It's getting my lips to the mouthpiece that's difficult."

Imago felt asleep himself on hearing that conversation. He pinched Sisley's arm, evoking an effeminate squeal. He asked Sisley to pinch his own arm ... but no squeal at all. Imago cursed. Sisley was probably the only one awake.

Imago, despite the doubts, wandered into the third cabin. This was as dark as a black pepper-mine. He could hear the pretentious snores of the inhabitants. These were the very critters which the crew were transporting to the outskirts of the known universe, bordering on the untenable universe, to labour in the spice lands. Trying to dodge the extraneous limbs - whiplashing from between the gaps in their crates to snarl and snag his path through the cabin - he eventually reached the fourth cabin where those on heavy duty were propped up at the engine-computer control consoles. The dual read-out screens stared into the eyeballs of their respective human parasites, hypnotising fingers in some semblance of basic logic across the keyboards.

Imago rested his hand on Neila's shoulder. He fancied her, but he did not stop for her to respond. Despite the armholes of her tunic revealing enticing swells of breast, he forged on towards the cockpit where he was supposed to be on co-piloting duty. But he had one more cabin to negotiate - the one he dreaded most. It was a long, narrow room fitted like the utility-style parlours of the nineteen fifties. His dead parents sat opposite a dim, flickering screen that, unlike those in the previous cabin, bore only blurred images and shadowy figures moving like inhabitants of an ancient B movie, ill-preserved on corroded acetate. The man and woman looked up together, in clockwork motion. They smiled at the one they considered to be their son.

"Sit down for a while, it's not Christmas every year," said his mother.

"No, Mum, you're not here for me to sit next to." He could not stop himself from feeling sorry for her. How could you blame her for being a hologram?

"I'm not a hologram, my dear," she said, as if she had read his thoughts.

"Have some consideration for your mother," chipped in his father. "She got up at an unearthly hour today to get the Christmas roast on."

Imago left the cabin, tears streaking his face as the good-to-honest, rain-sodden earth once did in his urchin days of catapults, cap-guns, marbles and conkers. His mother had given the game away, for nobody surely would have heard of holograms in the nineteen fifties. She had always been only one belt-notch away from premature senility even when she was really alive. He cast a glance back at his father who returned a knowing look - pitiful in the extreme. Imago's searching for himself in the mine of youthful memories was like delving into a bag of Smiths Crisps to find the crinkly blue tourniquet of salt.

In the cockpit, he was astonished to find the whole contraption on automatic free-wheel. The craft was cruising the urban universes, before traversing the more dangerous outspaces that, he knew, bloomed with many overlapping black-hole bubbles. His so-called co-pilot of a female persuasion roosted in the lead seat, a bright red coxcomb staircasing her longback neck, her lips already hardening into a puckered kiss that was more like a beak than anything else. Her eyeballs had slewed to the midpoint cheekbones and Imago assumed that all they were seeing were the compartmented blurs of inner space - or yet another episode of Mash or Twin Peaks. Imago took hold of the joystick and plunged it into a manual gear. The craft lurched and spun on its centre of gravity for endless seconds of pure terror. Imago could hear the screams of the other crew-members in the lower bellies where he had just completed a one man's rite of passage. He stuffed earphones into the grooved-out ears that sprouted on the side of his head - but, deep within the tinnitus of the craft's communication system, he could still hear the stifled screams of the crew.

Before he thought about dying himself, he spotted a yellow 'post-it' on the cockpit window. He plucked it off like an idle feather off an even idler portion of dead poultry.

"Don't forget you may be an alien, too, Imago," it said in recognisable manuscript. He smiled - how could he have possibly been fooled by all those implanted memories into thinking himself to be a human being? He was not really fooled by the sticker, either. As he heard the backward-buzzing of an ancient aeroplane inside his head, his mouth's last speech-bubble stated he was not even an alien, but a machine.

But Imago was none of these things, not even a hologram. Just a buzzing. More sound than soundness.


Published ‘Nova SF’ 1994