I've Lost My Mummy 2

I was sitting with Crystal in her flat drinking a cup of Venusian herbal tea.
"This is nice," I said.
"What does it taste like?" asked Crystal.
"It's hard to describe. Minty dandelion cheese."
"Do you like it?"
"Yes. I like it."
"Gianorman wants to go back to Zeta Ritculi," said Crystal. "The ship from Zeta Reticuli only comes every few thousand years "
"Do you want to go with him?"
"Yes. Neville, if I go with him I won't be coming back." This news came as a shock. I had not yet told Crystal about my strong love for her and there was no guarantee that she would feel the same way. But this news was like hammering a nail through the wires and short circuiting the fuse. The lights had gone out in my soul. "Are you all right, Neville?"
"I'll miss you," I said. Now Crystal looked shocked. "You're my best friend."
"Thank you, Neville. You will have other friends."
"Crystal, I like you as much as I've ever liked anybody." Crystal laughed.
"Do you mean you like me the ordinary way?"
"You're like my girlfriend."
"At least someone likes me," said Crystal. "Imagine going all through school with people who keep wanting me to levitate right in front of them. I couldn't get a job because l'm too clever. 'Don't do yourself an injustice, why don't you become a teacher.' I can't complain. I got A s for all my A' levels and passed my driving test first time."
"Do aliens have vastly superior brains?"
"I would prefer to say correctly functioning brains," said Crystal. "No dyslexia. Very good memories, what you would call a photographic memory. A healthy brain with none of the common illnesses of disfunctional co-ordination, visual interpretation problems or memory confusion that effect so many humans. But not superior to the most intellectual humans. They are easily just as intelligent as I am. Neville, on Zeta Reticuli I would be normal. None of the social embarrassment of being half human, half alien."
"Let other people think what they want to think," I said. "Believe in yourself, Crystal. Couldn't we just go to Venus?"
"We?" asked Crystal. "We as in we are lovers? Neville, I've always wanted to go to live on Zeta Reticuli. If I had ever felt that way about you, I'd have changed my mind, I assure you of that. If it had even crossed my mind that we might one day get married I'd have given up the chance of a lifetime. Yes I would. But my feelings for you are ordinary. We are friends, not lovers."
"Couldn't we go to Venus for a short time?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "We can. The spacecraft doesn't go straight from here to Zeta Reticuli. It has to pick up passengers. Venus, Titan, Nibiru. We can visit all those places."

Crystal drove to where the spaceship had landed in a field far out into the countryside. She drove her car right onto the grass. She would leave the car there. It would soon be abandoned. The door of the spacecraft slid open. A glowing yellow figure stood at the door. It was Gianorman. We got out of the car and Gianorman led us into the spacecraft.
"I'm looking forward to seeing Zeta Reticuli again," he said. "It's my home."
"But there won't be anyone alive there who actually knows you," I said.
"The people on this spacecraft are my family and friends. No one on Zeta Reticuli will know who I am."
"Doesn't that bother you? It will be a completely different place."
"No Neville," said Crystal. "Their civilisation is millions of years old. It changes very slowly. Little will have changed in a few thousand years."
"She's right," said Gianorman. "I'll fit in there just fine. I've made the journey to Earth before. Your civilisation is very young. You've only recently discovered agriculture. 10,000 years ago you were cave men. A hunter gatherer way of life. The world's population was small. In the last 300 years you've changed more than at any other time. Steam engines, railways, aeroplanes, cars and, in your lifetime, computers. But there comes a time when the pace of technological change slows down. It won't stop, it will slow down. Your farming ancestors followed a way of life unchanged for thousands of years, and so will people a million years from now. There comes a point where all the things that are easy enough to do have been invented. After that it's slow. It might take another 10,000 years just to make a few refinements to something that was invented a million years ago. Technological change will carry on but slowly."
"Fascinating," I said. I noticed that the spacecraft door had closed. "When are we taking off?"
"Neville, we have taken off," said Crystal. "We're half way to Venus."
"I didn't feel anything. No crushing forces of acceleration."
"It takes a whole week for the spacecraft to reach its full speed," said Gianorman.
"How are we half way to Venus already? We've only been here a few minutes."
"We've been here a few weeks," said Crystal. "We're frozen in time. And actually, we just landed on Venus." The spacecraft door slid open. Outside there were the tall buildings of an alien city full of glowing yellow aliens walking on pavements made of purple stones that led across bright yellow clouds. I stood there amazed.
"We have to pick up some of our passengers from the university library," said Gianorman. We walked into a tall building and entered an elevator. On the 31st floor we met an alien sitting behind what looked like a computer screen on the desk in front of him.
"Hello," he said, looking at me. "This is where we watch all your television programmes."
"I studied Electronics at university," I said. "The signal from a domestic television transmitter wouldn't travel this far. Even if it did, there's too many stations on the same frequency."
"You're right. Electromagnetic waves deteriorate rapidly in space. But our flying saucers hover in the clouds above television transmitters and rebroadcast the signal. 1 million watts of power and a satellite dish that amplifies the signal a million times again. It transmits a signal we can receive. We know a lot about England because it is so cloudy. Just find a good bank of cumulo nimbus above a village like Burnhope or Bilsdale. Rebroadcast everything that comes out of the local television transmitter all day." I looked at the alien's screen.
"I see you have a list of religious programmes from the BBC."
"Jesus died for aliens as well."
"Did he? Your civilization is millions of years old. Jesus died 2,000 years ago. What happened in the meantime?"
"Our holy people are kept frozen in time for millions of years until Jesus raises them from the dead at the same time that he will raise your holy people from the dead."
"But they died without hearing the gospel."
"Your gospel was only for people on Earth. We had our own gospel. The gospel of the prophets who told us about God's mercy and God's forgiveness. And that's just the planets where people actually sinned. It was even easier on the planets where they didn't."

Two aliens joined the group from the university and returned to the spaceship. The door slid closed. What seemed a few minutes later I looked at the display screen on the wall. We seemed to be approaching a big planet with huge rings.
"Is that Zeta Reticuli?" I asked.
"l'm surprised you remember the name of our planet," said Crystal.
"I've always had an interest in astronomy."
"It's nothing nearly as exciting," said Gianorman. "It's very much closer to home. That's Saturn."
"You have a base on Saturn?" I asked.
"Not Saturn. Titan. In an ocean under the ice of one of its moons." On the screen I could see one of Saturn's moons getting bigger and bigger. Eventually we seemed to fly through a big hole in the ice. Then we were surrounded by an underwater world of fish and coral reef.
"Are all of these native to Titan?" I asked.
"Yes," said Gianorman. "You'd be surprised what you can find inside an ice moon. Where there's water there's life." We arrived at the alien base. It was a big laboratory where people were doing experiments on little blue animals in cages. One of the scientists took a black plastic chip the size and shape of a 6" nail and implanted it into the neck of a small blue cat.
"This is our Engineering Department," said Gianorman. "This is where we genetically engineer animals that look like pets. We already have a pet animal we leave outside animal charity centres that looks like a dog. We're developing one that looks like a cat. This is where we make the chips that we implant in people who have been abducted by flying saucers."
"But why?" I asked.
"Why do the Americans send so many robots to Mars?" asked Gianorman.
"Scientific interest. Curiosity."
"That is why we have spent the last 70 years spying on Earthlings." 3 scientists from the laboratory joined us and came into the ship.

Now we went deep out into the solar system, well past Uranus and Neptune, past Pluto and Charon, which I could see on the screen very close together because they are like 2 moons that orbit each other. We went many times further out into interstellar space.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Nibiru," said Crystal.
"How far is Nibiru?"
"About 4 light days from Earth."
"Crystal, can you give me a simple illustration. How far is that compared to Pluto?"
"It takes light 5 hours to reach Pluto and 4 days to reach Nibiru. 20 times further."
"80 billion miles?" I asked.
"Yes, if you can imagine 80 billion miles."
"900 Astronomical Units," said Gianorman.
"No one knows what they are," said Crystal. We approached a dim purple planet which had a large number of moons going around it.
"Why can this not be seen by telescope from Earth?" I asked.
"Too dim," said Crystal.
"What about the new infra red telescopes like the James Webb telescope?"
"Very little infra red light," said Crystal. "It's not very hot. Nibiru is not a planet. It's a failed star the size of Jupiter. The alien base is on one of the moons that goes around Nibiru." The spacecraft door slid open. We were on Nibiru. The sun sat like a giant red cabbage in the pink sky behind a  multi storey building that seemed tiny by comparison.
"Neville, we're going to leave you here," said Crystal. "You're going to have to catch a bus back home."
"How do I pay the fare?"
"They don't have money here," said Gianorman. An alien came up to the spacecraft and smiled at me. "This a friend of ours. Fuzzlebopilbipz."
"Hello Neville."
"Hello Fuzzlebopilbipz."
"Oh Neville, you can pronounce my name."
"I'm more impressed that you can remember that l'm called Neville."
"Let's find a cafe bar and have tea together."

We stood behind a machine in a cafeteria.
"Two yellow cucumbers. Two melon apples," said Fuzzlebipolbipz. The food appeared on 2 plates that were on top of the machine. I mean it really just appeared out of nowhere.
"Where did that come from?" I asked.
"Teleported here." We sat down at a table and began to eat. I bit into the yellow cucumber. It tasted like a banana. It was soft.
"Delicious," I said.
"On our planet we genetically engineer fruit and vegetables to taste good and to contain more protein. I can't understand why humans are so afraid of genetic engineering."
"Hi fuzzy," said a long haired female alien who had just come into the cafeteria.
"Hi Mezza," replied Fuzzy. "Just call me Fuzzy, Neville, no one uses my full name. Even we can't pronounce it properly."
"Can I join you and your friend?"
"Yeah, sure," said Fuzzy. I bit into the apple. It was soft and tasted like a melon but it didn't squirt water all over you like a melon would if you just bit into it. After I'd finished the cucumber and the apple I felt full and couldn't eat anything else.
"What do you want to ask me about Earth?"
"Oh?" asked Mezza, surprised by my question.
"Aren't you going to ask me what Earth is like?"
"Well," said Mezza. "It would be difficult to know where to begin. Do you want to discuss the effect that the development of computers has had on industry? Do you want to discuss the results of the Tony Blair government telling the Bank of England to set it's own interest rates and set them by a cpi target of 2 per cent and ignore house prices?"
"What is the weather like?" asked Fuzzy. "Is it different to when you were children? Is it global warming or is it climate change?"
"You seem to know more about it than me."
"We might," asked Mezza.
"Why are aliens always spying on us?"
"Let me explain," said Fuzzy. "The machines do all the work here."
"All of it? Somebody must grow all the vegetables and fruit."
"Robotised plantations," said Mezza.
"We have nothing to do. Everything is provided," said Fuzzy. "But remember Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs. Living things don't just need to be fed and watered, they need to work. Aliens are intelligent and hard working. So in the absence of real employment they develop a thirst for knowledge. We explore the cosmos looking for other cultures to study."
"There are other alien cultures? Earth isn't the only one?"
"As some of your scientists have said, there are 36 intelligent civilisations in the Milky Way alone," said Meza. "In fact, there's probably more like 60, especially if we include the ones that we haven't found yet, and there's also hundreds of alien bases keeping an eye on them."
"But that thirst for knowledge doesn't justify spying on what people do in their own homes and in their everyday lives."
"People on Earth spy on each other," said Meza. "It's like salesmen putting cookies on your computer, it's like reality TV, it's like some famous sportsman typing something into his mobile phone and next day it's a news headline on the other side of the world."
"We are a technologically advanced society," said Fuzzy. "More information about everything is always available. What would you do if you had to watch television all day? If you really had to? You'd want something to make it more challenging, more interesting."

Fuzzy and Mezza led me to the hotel where they were staying. We passed a robot helicopter that was cutting apples from a tree with a pair of scissors while another hovered underneath with a huge plastic crate, catching the apples as they fell. The sun was purple and huge, towering above the 50 storey hotel, filling a quarter of the sky. A few small orange clouds were passing in front of it, against a background of pink sky. Instead of an elevator the hotel had a teleport. It wasn't like the teleports in most science fiction movies. We stood in front of a voice activated intercom that was on the wall.
"Alpha Delta Bravo Ticho 591," said Fuzzy.
"Hello Fuzzlebopilbipz," said the intercom.
"Floor 31," he said. Then we just appeared in the corridor, looked through a pair of glazed doors and saw a sign on the wall that said Floor 31. On the other side of the door we entered a hotel room where we all sat down. Fuzzy spoke into a box on the wall. "Blue wine, hot," he said. 3 glasses of blue wine appeared on the table. I sipped my wine. It was warm and tasted like bubble gum pop. When we had all finished our drinks, Fuzzy looked at me and said, "I'll show you around." He led me into the bathroom and took the showerhead in his hand. "This is the ultrasonic shower," he said. I started to take my clothes off. "What are you doing?"
"I need a shower."
"It's ultrasonic. Leave your clothes on. It'll wash your clothes and you." Fuzzy handed me the shower head. It made a feint whistling noise like a dentist's drill. It felt really good as it cleaned my underarms and my shirt at the same time. I washed my hair with it. My hair had never felt better. Fuzzy led me into another room. "Your bedroom." There was no bed visible.
"What do you do here?" I asked. "Pull down bed? Soft carpet and sleep on the floor?"
"It's an air bed," said Fuzzy. "Walk into the middle of the room." Fuzzy pressed what looked like a light switch on the wall. There was a gentle hissing sound. I was lifted several feet in the air. I lay down on my back.
"Oh I see," I said, laughing. "An air bed."
"That intercom on the wall is your teleport."
"Do I need to push any buttons on it?"
"No. It'll hear your voice."
"Do I need a password?"
"No, you only need a password if you're entering your own hotel room. When you get up tomorrow, just tell it that you want to go to the station. It'll know what you mean."