The Things we Find, Chapter Two

For Neetra it was business before pleasure. She spent the rest of the day looking over what Joe had brought back for her, which she had to admit was romantic in its own way, though the real romance kicked off later when she gave each of her Christingles a new candle and took a long preparatory bath in the best galactic mud. It wasn’t that the transition to her little-girl self was temporary. Neetra felt she owed it to her fringe-and-pigtails persona to do what that one had dreamed of, and liked to keep lines of communication clear to her throughout.

Two souls and satin sheets mingled in their magic ambit below the Town Hall’s rooftop dome. Oh that dirt was good stuff. Neetra’s pores were awesome in the night air. It was what Joe’s lips tasted of.

She was getting better at remembering to go easy on him. It helped that he’d been gone a while, so she wanted even more than usual for it to last.

That was why they took their time. In a light looping embrace they rested while ready for more, hearts and heavy breaths in time, the bedspread by now sodden beneath them.

Past the ring of perpendicular pillars that held the ceiling above, something was in the deep sky between the roof’s paving-slabs and the blue ringed neighbour-planet Nereynis. Just as Nottingham orbited that globe, so this newcomer appeared to be orbiting Nottingham. It was an asteroid on whose craggy silhouette a few points of light glinted, and from which two towering chimneys chugged residual plumes out unto the limpid cosmos.

Neither Neetra nor Joe smoked tobacco, but still the correlation between this last and what she and he were doing made our heroine smile.

With her damp tresses nestling quiet on his bare shoulder she watched the factory some more. They had towed it back to Nottingham. That was why it was still steaming a little. On Joe’s request Thragg and Thomthar had stoked its long-extinct boilers, lending their transport-ship the extra boost it needed to pull that industrial anachronism home on a reinforced dullivian chain.

Neetra had heard of being so impressed you bought the company. Hadn’t she admitted earlier on she found him irresistible? His moments of insanity were what did it most of all.

Joe saw where she was looking. “I am not going to leave it there,” he reassured her.

“I love my surprise,” she teased in reply.

“You presented me with a most welcome one in turn,” declared Joe. “Remarkable, and gladdening indeed, that a third member of the Special Program should have joined us in my absence. Has her acclimatization to Nottingham life been thus far without incident?”

“I hid her clothes then had Scientooth send his Fringers after her,” said Neetra.

Joe gave her a quizzical look.

“I’m just making things up to excite you,” Neetra continued quickly. “Um, now might be a good time for me to let you know what I made of the souvenirs.”

On all fours Neetra padded to the edge of the giant round bed, regretting the Mini-Flash Juniper anecdote but confident such a view of herself imitating that one’s preferred dress manner would have the effect alluded to. She scooped up the small clutch of objects by the bedside and brought them back to Joe.

“Right,” commenced Neetra, indicating the printed pages which made up the first of these. “The bad news is, I can’t make head nor tail of this written language. Not even with psychic powers like mine.”

“I could not,” Joe told her, “and suspected it would be so. As it transpired, this company’s contract was to market the television programme’s related merchandising untold distances even from where we lie, an outermost span of this galaxy all but unheard-of on the populous worlds. That its script should prove indecipherable even to you should not therefore amaze us. Had the factory’s address-stamp not deployed a simplified form, our quest should never have begun.”

So saying Joe fondly took up what he had brought with him, a small wind-up monster toy cast in lumpy black plastic. Neetra knew Flashshadow had taken custody of both these sacred relics while Joe was away, but our heroine guessed they’d now gone back to trading them on a weekly basis.

“I still don’t see why you’ve got to take that thing into bed with you,” declared Neetra. “Anyway, next up…”

She put down the document and lifted one of two pyramidal recording-devices, both of antiquated make and extremely sun-faded about the casing.

“Audio’s much easier,” Neetra announced. “The spoken communication I’m pretty sure I can figure out.”

Joe’s marvelling expression at her psionic potential brought back to Neetra the boy he’d been while she was that little girl. She felt very smug. Then she told herself in the name of the two moons to stop comparing herself to Rebecca at times like this. It was ages ago and it hadn’t been a race.

“I think you’re right too,” Neetra went on swiftly, “that the recording’s from some sort of studio session to check how these printed lines sound aloud. If so, that makes the latter our Rosetta Stone. Given time I should be able to get to grips with the writing by cross-referencing it against the speech. That’s got to be a long-term plan though. For the moment, all we have is a vocal test. Just the lines, I mean, and I’m afraid they don’t reveal what the programme’s title was. It might be included in the text, but we won’t know that until I can work out what it says.”

Joe bestowed on his Champollion a loving caress, needing nothing more to tell her his heart swelled only with gratitude and pride. There was unspoken mutual accord that it might be about time to bring the show-and-tell to a close.

“Finally,” Neetra hurried on, this in mind, “the content’s definitely narration for the film-footage on the other pyramid. I never knew there were really old ones of these that had video and no sound, but I guess that’s like back home. The picture’s so weird though. Are you sure you’re going to be able to show it?”

Joe laughed. “There is no fault with the recording-device,” he informed her. “Mr. Thragg theorizes the intended audience had three heads, each with only one eye. He is working on a means by which the visual might be realigned for our target demographic’s depth-perception.”

That seemed to have covered everything. Neetra however surveyed again the small assortment of items in her lap, and felt there was one last question that really ought to be raised.

“Joe,” she began, “if this is all you found, then is it worth my while asking why you brought the whole factory back with you?”

“The explanation is somewhat lengthy,” he confessed. “Though you have but to ask, and I shall be happy to enlighten you at once.”

Neetra moved near, to remind Joe that even if the factory’s furnace had simmered down by now, hers hadn’t.

“You could,” she replied. “Or you could give me the bum-thrashing of my life. Whichever’s better for you.”

END OF CHAPTER TWO