1. Ukstige

Thirty thousand light years from home, it doesn’t seem that far really, does it? But when you’re two feet high, wearing a rather uncomfortable uniform, and called Ig, it seems like a very long way indeed, even with the new regulation Star-drive.

The Star-ship Xlbrt 9054, (or “Brat” for short as it hardly ever did what Ig wanted it to,) was part of the Intergalactic gnome fleet. Ig was its commander, and he was very, very bored. He’d always heard tell of exciting space battles, new civilisations, friendly or otherwise, being discovered, and generally fun things like that. So far he’d been circling this non-descript green and blue planet, that glowed in the dark keeping all the gnomes awake, for three years and all he’d discovered was a plant that didn’t seem to do anything very much, except sit in a corner, reproduce, and periodically quote poetry at the poor gnomes assigned to look after it. The years of listening to “The Ballad of the Qjkdsc”, and other “classics”, can get to be very tedious indeed. In fact it was at it again…

“Oh no,” thought Ig, “It’s at it again!”

“I wander gently as a Jhrty,” quoted the plant,

“How can they be so very dirty?

One day I’m sure that I’ll know why,

That’ll be when whjrts fly.

All at once it came to me,

That is the way they’re meant to be.

It seemed to me that as I grew

There are things I never knew.

But as I sat and thought, I felt,

Life is such an awful wuirfrelt.”

Ig always came to the laboratory part of the ship when he wanted some peace and quiet, but now that the Ukstige plant had cloned itself almost continually since coming on board, it wasn’t as quiet as it used to be. Another strange attribute of the Ukstige plants that Ig wasn’t sure about, apart from the poetry, was the plants methods of producing offspring.

The first method Ig could cope with, the plant produced flowers, fruit and then seedlings, a way of doing things that seemed fairly normal to a gnome. The next method wasn’t too weird, a bulb would grow on the side of the plant, drop off into the pot, but then it would grow very rapidly, until it reached its full size in less than one day. This meant that the gnomes had to move very quickly to be able to get the plant back down to the planet’s surface before it wouldn’t fit in the transfer shuttle any more.

The third method Ig definitely couldn’t cope with, and had to leave the room if it began, as it was very un-gnomish, and, as someone had so aptly put it, “other-worldly”. Whenever a small part of the plant was accidentally broken off by one of the lab technicians as they walked around, under, and occasionally over, the plants, it would land on the floor, produce tendrils, wriggle its way to the potting bench, climb in, and plant itself within ten minutes of being broken off. This happened frequently enough that there was a constant stream of small ships down to the planet, transporting these new plants to the surface. Ig had sent out numerous memos, and given a ridiculous amount of lectures telling everyone to be careful around the plants, but so far no-one seemed to be taking a great deal of notice.

Ig always found this process very disquieting, as if the broken part had the “knowledge”” of the mother plant, which seemed to have been watching and learning from the lab techs. He had a vague niggling idea that the plants could be trained to do simple tasks, but Ig couldn’t face having poetry quoted at him 24 hours a day, least of all by a talking plant. So far none of the plants seemed to have the slightest inclination of copying the techs apart from the potting fiasco, which Ig was very relieved about.

Ukstige was also getting to be very noisy as each of the plants taken back to the surface would “know” all the poetry of the mother plant, repeat it on the planet, and so the nearby plants would also start quoting parts of the poetry, shakily at first, and then more as they learnt larger sections. None of the gnomes could now stay on the surface for more than a few hours before they all had headaches due to the “poetry-plants”, as Jant, the head lab tech, had nicknamed them.

2. Ig

“Ah well, another day, another type of boredom,” thought Ig. “I wonder what my darling wife, Kaln, and my little gnomelets are doing back on Ukwidge right now, probably sitting down to a lovely roast dinner of stoat, or fox and vegetables, or …”

“Sir, sir, sir!” This was Jate, Ig’s first officer, bursting into Ig’s reverie. Jate was a young gnome, only 75 years old, and still rather excitable. “Sir, you have to come to the bridge right now, someone on Ukstige is firing at us!”

“What do you mean firing at us? There’s no-one there to fire at us, don’t get so worried, and anyway…”

“I’m not joking sir, they really are, most of them are missing us, but we’ve already had one missile hit us right on the nose of the ship, the young gnomes are getting worried!”

“Okay, okay, I’ll be there in a minute” Ig replied.

“Honestly, young gnomes these days, far too excitable for their own good, or mine come to that,” he thought, “I nearly had a heart attack when Jate shouted through the intercom, I’m 280, and I don’t need all this noise. Mind you, it is nice to have something happening at last.” This train of thought continued until he reached the bridge, when he was jolted back to the present by the sight on the forward screen.

Thousands of missiles were heading for the ship and they were coming directly from the planet.

“What’s going on?” Ig had to shout above all the noise, and it still took three goes before he got a sensible answer out of anybody.

“We don’t know sir,” Jate sounded very apologetic, “One minute it was all quiet, and the next, well, see for yourself.”

Each missile was about a foot in length and travelling at such speed that it was impossible to see exactly what they were. Ig shuddered, involuntarily, as he remembered the dreadful fate that had befallen their sister ship, Xlbot 4037, which had been holed while orbiting around the "uninhabited" planet Ukjaft two years ago. Ig had a feeling he recognised some of the missiles as they sped past, but didn’t want to commit himself to the lunatic deck, at least not quite yet anyway.

“Get me a close up of one of those things, and then play it back very slowly,” Ig ordered Jant.

Just then Jate screamed and fainted to the floor, as he saw what was on the screen.

Each one of the missiles was a different cartoon figure, and they were all from either the magazines or vid-shows that each gnome had seen during the last three years the same amount of time that the poetry-plants had been on board Brat. The only difference being that they were bright green with a few extra tendrils that looked suspiciously like the ones the poetry-plants grew from time to time.

“Lower the shields, let a couple of them come within a few feet of the ship, raise the shields again, and then put them in Airlock Four so they can be studied.” Jant, all thoughts of panic forgotten, was the first to leave the bridge, and ran all the way to Airlock Four.

None of the “characters” had grown in their time close to or within the shields. They had remained at about a foot high, but about a dozen of them were now walking around on the hull of the ship, using their tendrils as support, as they appeared to accustom themselves to having legs and learning how to use them.

As Airlock Four opened one of the characters entered, looked around, poked its head outside the ship once more, and signalled to the other characters to “come on in”. Once they were all inside the airlock Jant shut the outside hatch, allowed the pressures to equalise, and then opened the inner hatch, wondering all the while why the “Charaplants” hadn’t exploded in the vacuum of space, and then imploded when the pressure inside the airlock was increased. He supposed that all would be revealed in the fullness of time. Once the Charaplants were all inside Hold Four, Jant walked in to see an amazing sight.

3. Charaplants

The Charaplants, as they had already been named, were inspecting their new surroundings. Most of them had now got the hang of legs, but there were a few problems with them walking into walls as if they weren’t there, and then rebounding at high speed, much to amusement of the crew watching on the bridge.

After a short time of this the Charaplants began picking up objects and trying to use them, but because they did not know how they worked they were largely unsuccessful. Jant began surreptitiously moving some of the more dangerous objects out of their reach, before they did some serious damage to either themselves, Jant or Brat. They had already managed to fire one of the blasters, which fortunately bounced off the wall, and earthed itself safely in the ceiling.

At this point, Jant picked up an old-fashioned telescope, and showed one of the Charaplants how to look through it. The Charaplant copied him, and then showed other Charaplants, who all tried to look through it at once.

“No, no, you have to look through it one at a time, on your own, yes?! You can’t all look through it at once, it’s impossible!” As Jant said this he thought, “Why am I saying this, they can’t understand me!”

But, as he spoke, the Charaplants formed a line and looked through the telescope one after the other. Jant began to try out a few simple commands, such as “Jump”, “Stop”, and “Turn left” and “Right”. The Charaplants at first couldn’t understand him, but if he showed them the commands, then they would copy him, and appeared to learn what each command meant. He repeated some of the first commands he had tried, and the plants “remembered” them. He tried more complex commands such as “Left leg in the air” and “Salute”, and soon he had the Charaplants doing the Can-Can, albeit very slowly.

This was the sight that greeted Ig as he entered the hold. As soon as Jant noticed his commander come in, he yelled, “Form up! Salute!”

“Um, eh, ah …… yeah?!” was all that Ig could think of to say as he watched the Charaplants line up and salute him. He wasn’t sure which was more worrying, the fact that he had a various assortment of bright green cartoon characters saluting him, or that they understood what Jant had said to them.

4. Surprises

A short while later Ig was having an emergency meeting in his office. All of Ig’s main bridge crew were present, as well as two of the Charaplants to act as examples. So far his crew had come up with nothing constructive about the Charaplants, and Ig was starting to become frustrated.

“That’s enough!” he shouted, “We have twenty four hours to decide what we are going to do with these things, other than teach them how to do the Can-Can, Jant, before we have to make a report to our most favourite set of gnomes, Gnome Headquarters, back on our home world, Ukwidge. Now does anyone have any sensible ideas?”

Jix suddenly piped up, “Well we could …”

“… train them to do simple tasks…” continued Blix,

“…around the ship such as …” said Jix,

“… cleaning and tidying things.” finished Blix.

Ig sometimes found the twin engineers’ way of taking turns at speaking rather confusing, and so it was a while before he replied.

“Well, that’s not such a daft idea as it may seem at first, but we don’t know, as yet, how trainable these Charaplants are. How intelligent are they? Can they learn on their own or do they need to be taught by a gnome, and then can they do the job? If they run into difficulties can they solve it on their own, or does one of us have to sort it out for them? Will they get lost on the ship, and if that happens, then will we have the Charaplants that are supposed to be cleaning the holds wandering around the bridge, and those that are meant to be in Engineering on Deck Seven rushing around the toilets on Deck Ten, trying to work out why the ship doesn’t go any faster when they flush the loo?!”

“Of course we won’t,” said a very quiet voice from the back of the room.

Ig stopped in mid-rant and, very slowly, turned to where the voice seemed to come from. “Who…said…that?” he asked tentatively.

“I did, who else is stood anywhere near us?” replied a bright green cartoon duck, with a very large bill, and stupidly small feet.

“You…you…can talk?” Ig said incredulously.

“Yes, we pick it up from you, so the more you talk the more we learn. We are not as stupid as we look,” said the cartoon mouse with big ears and an even bigger nose. “As we learn what you do, we can also learn what you say, as well as what it means.”

“Good grief! So how much…” said Jix,

“…have you learnt…” continued Blix,

“…so far?” finished Jix.

“Well, so far we do know how to clean, and we also know that flushing the toilet does not make the ship go any faster.” Ig blushed and apologised. “We also know most of the maintenance procedures, and the basics of how to fly the ship.”

“So why are you..." asked Blix

"...here? Are you going to..." added Jix

"help us, or…” asked Blix,

“Yes, we are here to help. Our planet, Ukstige as you call it, was becoming seriously under-populated, and due to your re-introduction program, unintentional as it was, has helped to rebuild our culture, and to replace some of the older plants who have died in increasing numbers in recent years,” explained the duck. “As you know, we have no animals to break parts off us, to replace the lost. As a result we had nothing on which to model ourselves to aid re-population, and so when your ships landed on our planet you caused minor damage to a few of the younger plants, from which some new plants were created.”

“When some of us were brought here, and more than were taken were brought back, we needed some way of saying thank you,” the mouse continued. “We had no way of knowing how to this, other than copying yourselves, which was deemed undesirable. When we saw pictures, or ‘cartoons’ as you call them, we then had a method of cloning ourselves and being useful to you. We hope this is appreciated, and that we can be of some help on this ship.”

Ig was very quiet for a while, and then said, “You can definitely be of help, we’ve been under-staffed since half of my crew were taken ill with space flu. What requirements do you have, such as food, sleep, anything like that?!

“We have only basic needs, a nutrient solution for one hour a day, and also one hour of rest, or sleep, as you would say. We do have one other request though…” the duck said nervously.

“Anything, what is it you want?” asked Ig.

“We would like you to carry on with your re-population program, until our numbers have returned to their normal level, and also, if the population begins to decline then start again, this would be very much appreciated,” concluded the mouse.

“That will be no problem whatsoever,” replied Ig. “We will organise quarters tonight, shifts, decks, and most importantly, names for you all, tomorrow, as it’s been a long day for all of us I think today, and we could all do with some quiet time to recover. Meeting adjourned.”

Everyone slowly filed out of the office, including the Charaplants, leaving Ig alone with his thoughts.

“It’s definitely been a very strange day, which started out so normal and boring,” thought Ig. “No complaints on that score though, and I’ve also now got some very interesting stories to tell my gnomelets when we get back to Ukwidge. I wonder what other surprises this voyage has in store for us…?”