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 twenty-four hours a day, least of all by a talking plant. So far none of the plants seemed to have the slightest inclination to copy 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 and repeat it on the planet, so that 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.

Intrigued? This is only the first part of Ig's great adventures, so if you'd like to keep reading, please click here and go to part two.