Chapter Text
Kristine Kochanski was beginning to see exactly where Jack Torrance was coming from. She was beginning to understand why after so many months snowbound in the Overlook Hotel he had tried to take an axe to his family, and empathized completely.
Kristine Kochanski was getting stir crazy. She was beginning to feel like a sardine in a tin can. Okay, a tin can the size of Alaska, but a tin can nonetheless. Everywhere you turned, dull metal bulkheads. Girders and reinforced steel. Bolts and rivets.
She was sick of it. It was making her ratty and confrontational. She kept seeing REDRUM in her mind’s eye while she bickered with Lister, which was becoming a far too frequent activity.
Her heart ached for rolling green hills and a crisp, clean wind blowing through trees. This is what motivated her to make the dubious decision to go moon hopping with Kryten.
Back in her own dimension, she and her Dave would do it all the time. They understood the importance of getting out of the ship once in a while. The crew of this Red Dwarf were much more skittish about venturing too far away from Short Red and Ugly after some two hundred and two years of searching for the misplaced mining ship.
She understood their misgivings, but she made them understand that if she didn’t get out for a little space walk she was going to kill the last man alive. It would have been her preference to go alone, but even with cabin fever at its zenith, she knew how incredibly dangerous it was to traverse space on one’s own.
Kryten was selected as Kochanski’s specific qualifications for the jaunt included “not having a penis,” and wielding a pair of industrial bolt clippers added, “accommodations can be made for anyone who wishes to tag along.” Lister, Rimmer, and the Cat, slightly green, cupped their genitalia protectively and politely declined.
Now, sitting in the pilot’s seat of Starbug, she held a mug of hot tea and watched the scanner scope for moons or planetoids with a breathable atmosphere. Kryten waddled into the cockpit with two bowls of ice cream.
“Men,” Kryten tutted. “They just don’t get it, do they?” Kochanski raised a bemused eyebrow at the mechanoid.
“Excuse me?”
“They’re so caught up with their sports and their machines… if only they would just listen once in a while and not leave wet towels on the floor.” Kryten shook his head and sighed dramatically. “Would it kill them to be a little more sensitive?”
“Kryten,” Kochanski said.
“Yes, mum?”
“Just… stop.”
“Yes, mum,” Kryten said sheepishly, nibbling at his ice cream.
He and Kochanski had become much chummier since the mechanoid had been classified as a woman by Red Dwarf’s penal system, and the two were forced to share a cell in the Tank. In spite of this, Kryten still had difficulty emulating the behaviour of proper girlfriends.
His only frame of reference was from his favourite soap opera, Androids. The women on the show mostly did a lot of shopping, drinking, and sleeping with each others boyfriends or husbands. The most Kryten would be able to accommodate would be the drinking. As much as he loved Mr. Lister, Kryten wasn’t really prepared to start lubing up his groinal socket for the man.
Kochanski studied the scanner scope with a hopeful expression.
“According to the computer, there’s a moon 12,000 gee-gooks from our location with a breathable atmosphere.” Kryten looked over her shoulder as she reviewed the read out. “Not only that, but it’s lush with vegetation!”
Starbug accelerated closer to the verdant moon.
“The scanner scope is picking up life forms,” she said. “Thousands of them.”
“Probably GELFs.”
“They seem to be concentrated in the mountains. If we stick to the valleys we should be able to avoid them.” Kryten fussed behind her, wringing his mechanical hands together.
“Surely, mum, it would be more prudent to avoid inhabited planets altogether?”
“The chances of a planet with trees and oxygen and no GELFs are slimmer than picking five aces out of a deck of cards. It’ll be fine, Kryten.”
“Alright, mateys!” Lister grinned, holding six cans of lager precariously in his hands. “It’s boy’s night!”
The Cat and Rimmer sat at the table in the sleeping quarters, the former less enthusiastic than the latter. Rimmer tried not to scowl at the feast of anus watering curries laid out before them. Rimmer hated curries, and elected to have a cheese omelet instead.
“I always enjoyed boy’s night out back on Io,” Rimmer said wistfully.
“Aren’t friends generally required to go out with?” Lister asked.
“Oh, no, I didn’t go out,” Rimmer clarified. “Boy’s night out was when my brothers went out and partied, and I was able to reorganize my trainspotting notes in peace.”
Lister sat down, pulled a cigarette out of the folded ears of his deerstalker hat, and started dealing cards. He was only into his fourth beer when Kryten’s face appeared on the quarter’s vid screen.
“Excuse me, sirs,” he said. “I hate to interrupt, but Miss Kochanski and I seem to have encountered a bit of a road bump in our trip.” The sound of a fire extinguisher could be heard in the background, its vaporous discharge floating behind his head.
“That road bump was a mountain,” Kochanski shouted in the background.
“What? Are you guys alright?” Lister asked.
“Miss Kochanski and myself are unharmed, however Starbug was damaged in the landing and is not flight worthy at the moment. We will require assistance to repair it.”
The Cat and Rimmer rolled their eyes and Lister told them they’d be on their way over.
Starbug sat smoking on the edge of a dense forest of black green coniferous trees whose tops were obscured by mist. Kryten and Kochanski spent the better part of an hour searching for one of the landing jets that had been knocked off the bug during their descent.
The pair scouted the surrounding area, Kryten scanning the local flora with his psiscan. Not far from the bug, they came across a large lake. It stood still as polished black glass. Looming ahead of them was the moon’s single mountain, its peak hidden by the mist.
A mild wind rolled through, bringing a sudden curtain of rain shower. Kryten tutted.
“We should return to Starbug.” Kochanski didn’t seem to hear him. She closed her eyes, tilted her head up, and smiled. This was everything she wanted.
Blue Midget homed in on the coordinates of the crashed Starbug, and landed with a molar loosening crunch.
“I’m telling you, it’s the gearbox,” Lister insisted.
“Not a bad place for a crash,” Lister said, looking around the dense forest. Kochanski sidled up to him with a grin still plastered to her face. “You seem to be in a better mood,” he said, surprised.
“It’s beautiful here,” she said, taking a generous lung full of the clean air. “It reminds me so much of my family’ summer home in Galloway.”
“Well, we’d better start fixing that landing jet before it gets dark.” Lister had less enthusiasm for the woods than Kochanski. He felt far more at ease in the middle of a dirty city, illuminated by the odd burning car.
“Okay, but,” her playful smile lingered, “we should camp here tonight. It will be fun.”
Rimmer’s ears perked up at the mention of camping. It would be an excellent opportunity to evaluate how much of his Space Scouts training he remembered. True, it had been almost 30 years since he was a scout, give or take three million, and the last time he’d nearly been cannibalized by the other scouts, but he was confident that once he’d gotten in to the swing of things, it would all come flooding back.
“If we’re going to stay over night, we’ll have to forage for some food,” Kryten said. “All the food supplies on Starbug are out.” Lister turned on Rimmer.
“I thought you said you’d restocked it!”
“It's on Friday’s daily goal list,” he defended.
“It’s Saturday!”
“Next Friday. It was on next Friday’s daily goal list.”
Eight eyes collectively rolled in their sockets.
“Right, well. In that case, why don’t you and the Cat look around for something edible while we repair the landing jet.”
Both the Cat and Rimmer were eager to escape any kind of manual labor and only complained minimally about their assignment. Carrying containers, the pair set off together, but it took about 0.68 seconds for them to split up.
It wasn’t long before Rimmer found bushes of fat, edible looking berries. He was able to quickly fill a good portion of his container before moving on. He came upon small clearing, the ground dotted with pale, spongy looking fungi.
Morels! He couldn’t believe his luck. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed morels. Being on the more luxury side of dining, Red Dwarf didn’t bother carrying them.
Rimmer fished out his well worn Space Scouts pocket knife and started harvesting. He was kicking himself for not restocking Starbug now. With a little butter and salt, they would be perfect.
When he’d put enough in his container, he sat back for a moment thinking. It would take them a while to fix Starbug, and they probably wouldn’t mind having him out of the way.
Rimmer gathered some twigs and dry pine needles to start a small fire and started skewering mushrooms.
After a good nap in a high tree, the Cat wandered back to “camp” with impeccable timing. Dirty and tired, the three had just finished packing away their equipment. The Cat flashed them a well rested smile.
“Where’s the food you were supposed to be finding?” Lister asked.
“Those little birdies are digesting as we speak.”
“And what about the rest of us? You were supposed to be finding food for everyone,” Lister said, annoyed. The Cat raised his perfectly groomed eyebrow.
“Do I look like a waiter to you? Do you see high-wasted pants and a clip on bow tie?” Lister was too tired to argue or able to muster up any surprise.
“Where’s Rimmer?” The Cat shrugged. “You were supposed to stick together, not wander off in an unfamiliar forest alone!”
“What’s gonna happen?” the Cat asked, phlegmatically. “Goal Post Head can’t get any deader.”
If Lister hadn’t already packed his spanner away he may have hurled it at the Cat. He just hoped the hologram had been more successful than the Cat at finding something to eat. Lister sighed. It was starting to get dark.
“We’d better go look for him. Come on.”
Rimmer was feeling slightly nauseous as he wandered around in a slow stroll, wondering if he’d undercooked his mushrooms. The breeze rustling through the trees felt good on his face. There was a slight musical quality to it, as though the leaves were made of glass, softly tinkling together.
He looked up as the rain started to drizzle again. Something dropping off the trees caught his attention. Rimmer watched as the bark on the limbs of the trees started to slough off, like layers of wet dead skin, revealing white bone underneath. Smaller branches looked like delicate finger bones, waving at him in the wind.
Rimmer stared, transfixed by this macabre sight, his stomach rolling and dropping like a rollercoaster. Leaves started falling and shattering on the ground with a loud pop, like exploding light bulbs. He thought he saw a pair of yellow eyes staring at him through the trees. Needing little extra incentive, Rimmer turned on his heel and started running full pelt in the opposite direction.
His heart hammered sharply in his chest, and sweat ran down his temples. He had no idea where he was going, all he knew was that he needed to get away. He stumbled and staggered, seeming to forget which order his legs were supposed to move in. The more he concentrated, the harder it was to propel himself forward.
Rimmer looked around for those predatory eyes and spotted Lister ahead of him. He staggered towards the man, frowning. His hand reached up and his fingers brushed against Lister’s cold, hard cheek.
“My god,” he gasped. “You’ve turned to stone.”
White stone underneath a patina of thick moss and lichen, Lister stood on a raised dais in a long robe, his hand posed in a benevolent symbol of benediction.
“Stay here,” he instructed the statue. “I’ll get help!” Rimmer pelted off, vaguely in the direction of Starbug.
“Rimmer!” Lister called out while Kryten’s eyes were glued to the psiscan, tracking the hologram’s light bee. The signal was moving erratically, and they were having difficulty following it.
“Arnold!” Kochanski called. Their voices echoed in the woods.
“I hear something,” the Cat said, stopping to listen. It was almost a minute before anyone else heard anything. Eventually the sound of rustling foliage grew louder and closer, and Rimmer sprinted out of the bushes with wild eyes.
“Lister!” He said. “You’ve got to come quick! Lister’s been turned into stone somehow. I found him out in the woods, I don’t know what happened.” Lister chewed on his lip for a moment.
“I’ve got to help you,” he said slowly.
“Yes!”
“Because you found me in the woods.”
“Yes!”
“And I’ve turned to stone?”
“Yes!”
Lister looked back at the group to make sure he wasn’t the one missing something. The others looked equally bemused. Satisfied, he turned back to Rimmer. The man was sweating and trembling, and his eyes looked glassy and black. The green of his iris had almost disappeared completely, pushed aside by his blown out pupils. Lister looked down at the container Rimmer still had in his hand.
“How many of those mushrooms did you eat?”
“What?”
“Those mushrooms in your basket. How many did you eat?”
“Eight or nine, I suppose.” Kryten scanned the contents of the container. “They’re morels,” Rimmer explained.
“These are not morels, sir,” Kryten said.
“You’re tripping, man,” Lister laughed, putting a hand on Rimmer’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s get back to the bug and you can lie down. You’ll be fine. You’ll be gonzo for a little while. Maybe a few hours. But you’ll be fine.”
Lister steered Rimmer back towards their camp and stopped in his tracks. The five crew members found themselves surrounded on all sides by warriors in shining red breastplates with intricate gold gilding, pointing fiercely sharp polearms and drawn bows, baring their long pointed teeth.
“Halt, interlopers! Your presence soils holy ground!”
“Lister, is this a hallucination?” Rimmer asked timidly.
“I don't think so,” he replied. “Look man, we just had to fix a flat tyre, and then jet out. We were just leaving.”
“Silence your fat upside down face,” the warrior hissed.
“Wait a minute,” one of the others gasped. “It can’t be. It can’t be!” A chorus of whispers trilled through the ring of warriors.
“Aye?”
“It looks just like him… it is! It’s him! Cloister the Stupid has returned to Fuchal!”
There was a collective gasp and the cat warriors lowered their weapons, followed by a loud moan from the Cat.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”