Chapter Five

"Kryten, old son, you've outdone yourself. This meal is better than the dishes I tasted during my excursion to the annual food festival on Suirotapallafocirocaxar Prime. How you managed to pull together a feast like this with stores scavenged from derelict space vehicles is a wonder to me."

Cat paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. "Suiro—where?"

Kryten couldn't blush, but he did a fair job of mimicking a bashful wave. "Sir, you flatter me. It's only rehydrated chicken parts in soy-protein gravy."

"Raw materials handled by a master. With a meal of this quality, I don't dare speculate what you have planned for afters."

"Then, sir, you are in for a treat. I've prepared a special agar jelly with lumps of simulated fruit and a whipped carrageen topping."

Ace's eyebrows disappeared under his fringe. "Then what are we waiting for? Bring forth the masterpiece, old top."

As Kryten scampered to the kitchen area in a paroxysm of delight. Ace turned a wry smirk to Kochanski, who giggled behind her hand.

"Oh, Ace, you are terrible," she said, slapping his shiny sleeve. Lister rolled his eyes and dropped his fork to his plate with a disgusted clatter.

"Oh, Ace, you are terrible!" he mimicked her. "God, can you even hear yourself? The food's awful. It's always awful. You're jus' teasin' Kryten with all these backhanded compliments."

"Who's to say they're backhanded?" Ace retorted in his affable way. "I've spoken only the truth. Have you ever been to the Suirotapallafocirocaxar Prime Food Festival? Compared to the slop the GELFs there pass off as edible, Kryten's rehydrated chicken parts are a rare treat."

"They were pretty good," Cat agreed, daintily dabbing the corners of his mouth with a silk napkin.

"Cat!" Lister exclaimed.

"Well, they were," Cat said. "Better than last week's meat curry, anyway. Old butter-pat head never did tell us exactly what meat was in that stuff. And with all those spices and things mucking up the scent, my nostrils couldn't make a solid identification."

"My guess is it was space weevil," Kochanski said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. "It's always space weevil when he won't say. But Ace doesn't want to hear this."

"Ace," Lister scoffed. "He's really got you fooled, hasn't he. Why don't you drop the act, Rimmer? We all get what you're tryin' to do."

"Lister, leave him alone." Kochanski glared firmly, the sharp glare of an officer upbraiding an unruly underling. Lister bristled.

"No, no, it's all right," Ace said kindly. "Poor Dave's still sore over that kiss, aren't you Skipper? Well, there's no need to worry, old friend. Our charming Kris has eyes for only one man. And he isn't me."

"He isn't you either, so don't go getting any ideas," Kochanski added, but her expression turned slightly contrite when Ace gave her a disapproving look.

Lister scowled and turned his head toward the door to the kitchen, where he could just see Kryten happily pottering back and forth, putting his finishing touches on the translucent cubes of gelatinous dessert he'd spooned into individual glasses. His knotted stomach gave a lurch and he got to his feet. "Look, guys, I don't feel so good," he said. "I'm going to the medi-unit for somethin' to settle me stomach."

"Then I'll go with you—" Ace started to rise, but Lister shook his head.

"I can handle this on me own, thanks," he said bitterly. "Wouldn't want your little fan club to get all disappointed."

Ace's expression fell slightly. "Skipper, I understand you're upset, but I head back to the big black on the morrow. I don't want us to part company on bad terms—"

"Save it, Rimmer, OK?" Lister snapped, swiping his half-empty beer can from the table. "I'll see you guys later."

Lister didn't go to the medical unit. He didn't pay much attention to where he was going, just so long as it was away from Rimmer's overblown Ace stories, Kochanski's ridiculous fangirl giggles and Kryten's agar jelly.

That's why he was startled to find himself in the docking bay staring up at the gleaming red exterior of Ace's Wildfire.

He stared at it for several minutes, running his eyes over the sleek lines, the polished chrome. Then, he slammed his beer can against the doorframe and lobbed the crumpled aluminum cylinder straight at the windshield. It bounced off harmlessly and rolled somewhere under a row of panels that lined the wall.

He was just turning to leave, when the ship's lights caught him in their glare.

"David Lister, I presume?" a sultry, female voice spoke. Lister blinked and shielded his eyes.

"Who's askin'?"

"Is Ace with you?"

"Does it look like he's with me?" Lister retorted. "An' will you switch off those smeggin' lights? I can't see a smeggin' thing."

The lights dimmed. "Better?" the disembodied voice asked snidely.

Lister blinked watery eyes up at the empty cockpit, his confusion melting away. "You're the Wildfire computer, aren't you?" he said.

"And you're an insensitive squid-haired cretin. I know what happened in the stairwell."

"Yeah. That Judas, Rimmer, snogged my Krissie."

"Your Krissie?" the computer scoffed.

Lister was not in the mood to be picked at by a computer. He launched an f-bomb and followed up with a few creative suggestions concerning the specifics of where and how.

"Nice. Arnie never told me you were so witty."

"Shut up."

"Not until I've had my say," the computer snapped. "You really messed things up properly, didn't you."

"What are you talkin' about?"

"Your petty, selfish attempt to return to how things were. Putting Arnie down, denying his success, stamping out his pride. All to keep your relationship frozen in time. Because, that's what you want, isn't it? No growth, no improvement. Just childish pranks and insults, on and on, year after pointless year, until you're both too old to break the habit."

"That's not what I did," Lister retorted.

"Isn't it?" the Wildfire shot back. "I've known hundreds of Listers throughout the multiverse. Male ones, female ones, talking dogs, evolved chickens. Trust me, your reaction is hardly original. You missed Rimmer, you worried about him while he was away, and now he's back you want him to stay. But not as a success, no. Not as someone who can show you up, put you in second place. You want him back just as he was, a socially-regressed emotional cripple. Well, congratulations, kiddo. You got him."

"What exactly are you saying to me?"

"I'm saying, curry-for-brains, that you have single-handedly turned the clock back on a project that has taken me years of patient, painstaking work. No, let me correct that—you didn't reset the clock, you sent it running backwards. Arnie was standing at the crossroads, perched on a delicate turning point. And now he's been pushed further back than he was when he first took up Ace's mantle."

"Hold on. I don't understand," Lister said.

"Then let me explain," the computer said coldly. And she did. Over the next fifteen minutes, she explained everything, her entire plan to coax Rimmer to finally reject his crippling self-loathing and accept himself as a valued and worthwhile man. A hero who could own the name Ace Rimmer, not be owned by it.

"Not be owned by it…" Lister repeated quietly.

"Starting to get the picture now, smeg-for-brains?" the Wildfire said, but her tone was no longer so cold.

"That's what happened, isn't it?" Lister said. "On that stairwell, when I said… When I told him…" He sighed and ran a hand over his trailing locks.

"He came here tryin' to salvage his identity, to earn a sense of self-worth, and what do I do? I push him over the edge." Lister shook his head, slowly jabbing his fist to the wall. "He just gave up, man. Surrendered, right before my eyes. An' I didn't even realize…"

"Dave…"

"It was weird, you know? Rimmer just seemed to vanish. And there was Ace. Like, for real. Ace. I've never seen anything like it."

"No." The computer seemed to sigh. "Dave, I know you didn't mean to do this. But Arnie's in pain right now. He's rejected his own personality because it hurts too much to be Arnold Rimmer. But Ace isn't a costume to hide behind when things get tough. For Ace to be strong, he has to be integrated, a fully realized personality. As long as Arnie keeps donning and discarding Ace like a mask, as long as he keeps turning away from his heart, keeping his hurt and anger bottled up deep inside, the Ace you saw will have all the depth and solidity of a playing card…and all the volatility of nitroglycerine."

Lister glanced up at the ship's dimmed lights. "What can I do?"

"For whom? For Arnie, or for yourself?"

Lister made a face. "Come on, don't give me that. How do I… How can I get Rimmer back to bein' the trumped-up smeghead he was when he first arrived?"

"Honestly? I don't think you can."

"But you just—"

"Your ties are strong, but I'm afraid they don't go back far enough to have the kind of impact we're looking for," the computer told him. "You were close enough to push him over the edge, but your relationship's just not strong enough to pull him back up. At least, not as far as we need him to go."

"So that's it, then?" Lister said, his anger swelling. "There's nothing we can do? Rimmer's gone, Ace is a flimsy canister of sublimated anger waitin' to explode, and that's it?"

The computer seemed to think for a moment. "There is a way," she said. "If it works, it could get Arnie back on the right track. But it's very dangerous."

"Dangerous how?"

"Dangerous as in one wrong move could create a massive temporal paradox that could rip a hole in the multiverse dangerous."

"Ah," Lister nodded. "That kind of dangerous. Well, we've faced worse."

"Oh, I don't think you have."

"Come on. Simulants? GELFs? That backwards universe? And how about that time we went back in time to order a curry and ended up savin' Kennedy's life an' allowin' the Russians to win the space race? We straightened that one out without any help. Then there's that pan-dimensional liquid beast and those brain-sucking Psirens and the suicide squid… You can't tell me after all that we can't handle a little time travel."

"It's not the time travel I'm worried about. That part's easy. All you have to do is set up a remote link between me and your Starbug's mainframe, and I can talk you through that, no sweat. It's what's waiting at the other end. That's where the challenge lies. And I'm just not sure you're prepared."

"Prepared for what? What kind of horrible, hideous, lurking monsters would we have to face to jolt Rimmer out of hiding and restore his self-esteem? What challenge could possibly be so terrible that you keep hedgin' around it instead of just comin' out and tellin' me what the smeg it is?"

Lister thought he was prepared for anything she could throw at him, but when she spoke, her response sent chills down his spine.

"Arnie's family."

"Ah. Right. Smeg."

"You still want to help?"

"I'm in," Lister said. "I've always wanted to meet the weirdos who made Rimmer what he was. An' seriously, they can't be that bad, can they? I mean, they're jus' people, yeah, and even Rimmer admits they're pretty successful. His brothers are what, a Space Corps captain, a test pilot, and the other one's in special services, right? They don't just hand those positions out."

The Wildfire computer laughed, but it was an eerie, humorless sound. Lister swallowed despite himself.

"Yeah, well, whatever. I did the damage, I'll help fix it. Just tell me what to do."

To Be Continued...