In the science room of the mining ship Red Dwarf, the crew waited for Holly, the ship's onboard computer, to make an announcement. Red Dwarf is a city-sized spacecraft designed for mining precious minerals from the moons of the outer planets, but a tragic radioactive explosion in the late 21st century killed off most of the crew and forced Holly to steer the ship into deep space to avoid contaminating anyone outside the ship. Now, three million years later, the ship had now wandered (sorry, will wander) so far from Earth that the trip back was slow and tedious.
The crew consisted (or will consist) of Dave Lister and Kristine Kochanski, the only two humans who survived the accident because they were in "stasis" (a sort of suspended animation) at the time; Arnie Rimmer, a computer-generated hologram of a man whose flesh-and-blood body was long-since dead; Kryten, an android; and the "Cat", who looks human, but had in fact evolved over the three million years from an ordinary house cat.
They all were anxious to get back to Earth as soon as possible, and even though Red Dwarf could travel at high speeds, they seemed to make little progress. But now Holly said he had invented a means by which to get them all back to Earth in a flash, and he was about to reveal his plan.
"Ladies and gentlemen (and Cat and android) I hereby announce the unveiling of the Holly-Hop Drive, Mark II!" Holly proclaimed.
"Oh smeg!" growled Rimmer despondently.
"What is the Holly-Hop drive, Arnie?" Kris said, gently squeezing Rimmer's hand.
"You hadn't come to Red Dwarf when he did it," Rimmer replied, "But Holly invented this Holly-Hop drive to get us home, and it only succeeded in moving us into a parallel universe!"
The balding male head on the monitor screen (this was how Holly manifested himself) raised an annoyed eyebrow at Rimmer.
"Yes, but I have ironed out all the problems, and this time, it will work!" he assured him, "It will get us home in two shakes of a toad's tail!"
"Er--Toads don't have tails, Holly," Kryten reminded him.
"Oh no, of course they don't--I was thinking of sponges," said Holly, "You see, what I've done is hook up the Holly-Hop drive to the Artificial Reality machine, so that if we load an artificial world into the AR machine, we will be able to enter the real universe of that world! So what I've done is put several AR disks in that barrel and if someone would pick one out at random..."
Kris closed her eyes and picked a disk from the barrel. She then read the label on the disk she picked: "Wizard of Oz World"
"Then I guess we're going to the Land of Oz!" said Holly, "Load in the disk."
Kris slipped the CD-like disk into the slot in the side of the AR machine's CPU box.
"And now dudes, we will Holly-Hop! Press the 'start' button, Dave!" Holly proclaimed.
Lister reached over to the little, unpretentious plastic box marked "Holly-Hop Drive" and pressed the button. Suddenly, a blue globe with white clouds appeared in the view monitors.
"There it is! That's Earth!" Holly proclaimed triumphantly as he maneuvered the ship into orbit around the planet.
"Are you sure that's Earth?" Rimmer said skeptically.
"All the data checks out," Kris said, looking at a computer read-out of the planet's statistics, "'Diameter: 12,756 kilometers; Semi-Major Axis: 149 million kilometers; Surface Gravity: 1g; Length of Solar Day: 24 hours; Albedo 0.39; Number of moons: 3...'"
"Er, um, hang on one second! Last time I checked, Earth had only one moon!" said Rimmer.
"Well, remember this is a parallel Earth, and will be very different from ours, sir," observed Kryten.
"Is the Yellow Brick Road and the Emerald City really down there?" the Cat asked.
"The only way we're going to know for sure is to go down there and explore," said Kryten.
So it was decided, and everyone boarded the "Starbug" (a much smaller craft aboard Red Dwarf that was equipped with landing gear) and descended toward the planet's surface.
"Very curious!" observed Holly as they dropped below the cloud deck, "There seems to be a very large desert with a nearly perfectly rectangular oasis the size of Wyoming at its heart!"
"It's Oz all right!" said Kris.
"And the countryside appears to have color biases!" Holly continued.
"What?" asked Rimmer.
"Color biases? You mean that certain colors predominate over others?" said Kryten.
"Yeah--Right on!" confirmed Holly, "My spectroscopic analysis indicates a bias towards blue in the eastern region of Oz, yellow in the west, purple in the north, red in the south, and green at the very center!"
"Hm! You couldn't catch me dead wearing a freaked-out color scheme like that!" said the Cat disdainfully.
"Well, my favorite color is blue--I say that's where we should land," said Kris.
"Anything Kris is for, I'm for!" asserted Rimmer lovingly.
"Well, I vote for the red region!" said Lister.
"I'm with you, bud" said the Cat to Lister, "Red goes much better with the suit I'm wearing."
"Care to cast the deciding vote, Holly?" Rimmer inquired.
"No way!" replied Red Dwarf's supercomputer, wishing to stay out of this petty argument.
"Then it's up to you, Kryten," said Rimmer.
"I'm sorry Mr. Rimmer, but my programming mandates that I abstain and let majority rule...And my programming also mandates that the vote of a hologram doesn't count."
"Red it is!" cried Lister, triumphant.
Rimmer and Kris accepted the ruling, and Holly steered
Starbug down into the red country.
"Strike a light!" exclaimed Holly presently.
"Wha' now?" cried Lister anxiously.
"Is that a fabulous looking palace or what?" Holly said.
Out Starbug's window they saw a red field with red trees, dominated by a grand, sparkling palace of rubies.
"Land there!" cried Lister.
"Where, on the roof?" Kris said sarcastically.
"I will land the Bug at the foot of those steps," Holly announced, and a minute later they touched down in front of the great building. They stepped out of Starbug, and two young girls, who were apparently palace guardians, stepped forward to meet them.
"Greetings, galactic travelers," one of the guards said to them, "If you will follow us, her highness is expecting you."
"Who is 'her highness'?" Kryten asked.
"We are employed by her highness to guard the palace, not to answer questions!" the girl-guard snapped.
"This is Glinda's palace, or at least it should be," Kris whispered.
"Now follow us!" the girl-guard commanded, and the Dwarfers obeyed, as they were led down a long corridor and into a large room studded with rubies and lined with red satin. Sitting in a throne at the end of the room was a lovely young woman with short dark hair, a flowing red gown, and a golden crown.
Upon seeing the them, she stood, and said in a syrupy voice, "Are you good witches or bad witches?"
"We're not witches at all -- We're 'The Boyz From the
Dwarf'!" Lister proclaimed.
"And girls!" Rimmer added hastily, on behalf of Kris, who gratefully squeezed his waist.
"Oh...," said the woman in an even more syrupy voice, and pointed to Holly, whose disembodied head appeared on the display screen on Kryten's abdomen, "Well, is that the witch?"
"No," Holly replied, "I am a Tenth-Generation AI Hologrammatic computer with an IQ of 6000 -- The same IQ as 6000 Radio Talk Show hosts."
"Excuse me," said Kryten to the woman, "But my sincerity detection chip indicates that you are not speaking in your natural tone. We Dwarfers much prefer people we meet acting like themselves."
"Oh good!" said the woman with a sigh of relief and a switch in her tone to much more pleasant and intelligent-sounding voice, "Most people when they come here expect the 'Are you a good witch or a bad witch' routine, and it drives me nuts! But I'm glad to find you much more reasonable! I am Glinda, the Good Sorceress of Oz, and in fact I already know all about you from my Great Book of Records."
"'Great Book of Records'?" echoed Rimmer.
"It records within its pages all important events in the universe at the very instant that they occur! I read in it all about you and Red Dwarf and how you've been lost three million years from Earth, and how your 'Holly-Hop Drive' brought you here to Oz!"
"Then this is the Land of Oz, as in The Wizard of Oz?" Lister asked in amazement.
"Yes, indeed! And I'm sure that the Queen will want to meet you," said Glinda.
"Queen?? I thought the Scarecrow ruled Oz!" said Lister.
"Oh no, not for years!" Glinda replied, "Princess Ozma is our queen now -- The sweetest, kindest, wisest ruler a country ever had!"
"So we're not talking Margaret Thatcher here, are we?" Lister remarked.
"How do we get to the Queen?" Kryten asked.
"I will fly there in my pterodactyl-drawn chariot, and you can follow behind me in Starbug," Glinda replied.
"Pterodactyl drawn?" Lister asked.
"Oh yes -- Dinosaurs are alive and well here in Oz and the rest of Baumgea," said Glinda.
"What is 'Baumgea'?" asked Rimmer.
"This whole fairy continent," Glinda explained, "Oz lies at the center of the continent, and is surrounded by the 'Deadly Desert' that no mortal being can traverse. Various other lands lie outside the Desert, such as Ix, Ev, and Boboland. They are magical too, but not so much so as Oz, and Oz is the only place where everyone is immortal and leads a totally peaceful and contented existence."
"Except that there's no love and romance, right?" said Holly, whose computer text file archive included the text of Heinlein's The Number of the Beast.
"Of course there is! What made you think there wasn't?" said Glinda.
"WHEW!" Lister breathed a loud sigh of relief.
"I think we'd better get the to the Emerald City," Kris said, and they headed for Starbug and Glinda's guards prepared her chariot. At first, Glinda's graceful, shy, snow-white pterosaurs were terrified by the sight of Starbug, but after they were reassured that it wasn't some kind of green tyrannosaur, they willingly allowed Starbug to follow a safe distance behind as they pulled Glinda's chariot through the sky over the reddish landscape of the Ozian province of the Quadling people. The pterodactyls were swift, and very soon the sparkling green of the Emerald City was visible on the horizon.
* * * * * * * * * * On the opposite side of Oz, in the northern "purple" region known as Gillikin Country, stands a majestic, plateau-like mountain called Mount Flathead. On Mount Flathead lives three beautiful and clever sorceresses known as the "Three Adepts at Sorcery". The first Adept, Zsuzsa, has jet-black hair and brown eyes. She is very regal and dignified, and her specialty is artistic and musical magic. The second Adept is Sofia, with golden hair and blue eyes. She is free- spirited and sprightly, and her forte is sorcery garnered from nature. And last but light years from least is Judit, whose flowing reddish- brown hair and sparkling green eyes are bewitching to all. She speaks with a gentle, soft-spoken voice and moves with demure grace, and she is a skillful and brilliant specialist in mechanical magic, as well as the great and mysterious magic forces of the space-time continuum itself.
On the day that the Dwarfers arrived at Glinda's palace, the Adepts were also paid a visit.
"There's a lady to see you," the Butler told them in their magical experimentation laboratory, "A Miss Camille."
"What does she want?" Zsuzsa asked, looking up from a heavy old book of spells.
"She did not say, Madam."
"What's this Miss Camille like?" Judit asked, pausing from her attempt to harness a swarm of neutrinos.
"Oh, she's just lovely!" The Butler remarked in a dreamy voice, "She loves housework, drudgery and mindless tedium, and she believes as I do that servants and domestics should know their place. She even favors the abolition of voting rights for butlers, maids and housekeepers!" And he sighed like a schoolboy admiring the prom queen.
"She sounds like a deranged masochist to me!" Zsuzsa remarked, "And if she's looking for a job, I think we can do without her!"
"Well, we should go see what she wants and not sit and speculate," Judit said decisively and she rose, "Shall we sisters?"
"Miss Camille insisted that she speak to you one at a time," said the Butler hastily.
"One at a time? Why?!" Zsuzsa inquired with narrowed eyes.
"I did not inquire, ma'am," the butler replied with a snort, "My job is to do as I'm told and not ask questions!"
"Is that what they taught you at Gillikin School for Domestics?" Zsuzsa remarked, "Very well, lead me to this mysterious Miss Camille. I'll be back soon, sisters."
The Butler led Zsuzsa to the baize door leading into the reception room. Zsuzsa could hear Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, third movement emanating from within. She opened the door and entered.
Zsuzsa's eyes widened. Sitting on the coach, very erect and proud, was a handsome young man in a spiffy navy blue three-piece business suit. He had perfectly combed short dark hair, beautifully manicured nails, and newly shined black shoes.
"Ah, hello!" he said rising and courteously taking her delicate white hand, "You must be Zsuzsa. I am Camille."
Zsuzsa turned to the butler. "I thought you said this was a Miss Camille."
The Butler eyed his mistress as though she were ready for the booby hatch. "She is, ma'am."
"He looks an awful lot like a Mr. Camille to me!" she said to her servant, thinking him ready for the booby hatch.
"I hope you don't mind my playing some music while I waited...Off!" Camille said, his last word issuing the command to power down the magic jukebox, an invention of Judit's that can play any piece of music ever invented just by asking it to.
"Not at all," Zsuzsa said with a smile as the music obediently faded away, "I love classical music, especially Beethoven's Seventh. I once used it in a spell to launch Oznik I, so that Oz could enter the Space Race. That was before modern interstellar Ozoplanes and so on, of course."
"Yes, I love musical magic too," said the distinguished gentleman.
"You do?" she cried, then said to the Butler, "Did you hear what he said?"
"Yes, madam -- She said, 'I'm very sorry to have operated the jukebox without leave and pollute the air with Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, and other vulgar trash music of the former Axis Powers, and I promise that it will not happen again, madam!'"
Zsuzsa narrowed her eyes. "Is your hearing aid on the blink again? And why the hippikaloric do you keep calling him 'she'?"
"I have impeccable hearing and 20-20 vision, Madam; and a think I know a lower-class subservient maidservant when I see one."
Zsuzsa looked at the supposed "lower-class subservient maidservant" and saw only a high-class gentleman who likes Beethoven.
"Don't worry, Zsuzsa -- He'll never understand." Camille smiled, as he brushed a dust speck from his suit.
"Yes, I agree Miss Camille -- Sorceresses are blithely unaware of the bonding between fellow happily repressed servants." the Butler replied.
Zsuzsa glared at the Butler and said, doing her best Greta Garbo impression, "'Go to bed, Little Father -- We want to be alone!'"
"Very good, madam." And the Butler withdrew.
"So, what can I do for you?" Zsuzsa asked the handsome stranger.
"Let's dance first," he asserted, "On! Blue Danube Waltz by Strauss!"
"What conductor?" the jukebox inquired in a tinny voice.
"Er--Sir Alexander Gibson, Scottish Philharmonic." And the high-tech jukebox obeyed.
As they waltzed, Zsuzsa said, "This is wonderful! I've never danced in such ideal conditions before! Usually, it's to the heavy beat of music louder than a landing 747, under flashing colored lights like an explosion in a laser factory!"
"Guys who take you to places like that are clearly not good enough for you, my dear Zsuzsa."
She smiled, then after a few more bars of Strauss she asked soberly, "Can you tell me now what you've come here for?"
"Only you, my sweet!"
"No, seriously."
"Er--well, I think I'd better have a word with your sisters, first," Camille faltered.
* * * * * * * * * * Zsuzsa came out of the reception room and found her sisters waiting for her.
"Well? What's she like?" Judit asked.
"He is fantastic! A real man if there ever was one!"
"'He'?? But I thought--" Sofia began.
"Go in and see for yourself! He's fabulous!" Zsuzsa pressed. So Sofia went into the reception room...And saw sitting on the couch a man with long, wavy hair and a short, stubbly beard. He wore torn blue jeans, a tie-dye shirt and a "peace" pendant, and as Sofia entered he was playing the guitar and singing:
"If you want to sing out sing, sing out;
If you want to be free, be free;
'Cause a there's a million things to be;
You know that there are, you know that there are!"
Sofia was dumbstruck. "Er--you are--" she asked finally.
"I'm Camille, baby! Peace, sister!"
"But--but--I was expecting--"
"Expect! Hey, that ain't cool, sister! Expect the unexpected! And always do your own thing!"
"That's what I say!" cried Sofia, delighted, "No conventionalities, no stuffy
decorum -- Be yourself, and fight for freedom of expression and the liberation of nature!"
"Right on, baby!" Camille replied.
* * * * * * * * * * Sofia emerged, dreamy-eyed from the room.
"Well, isn't he great?!" said Zsuzsa.
"Oh yes!" sighed Sofia, "He loves rock music and ecology and abolishing war and holding demos on school campuses! He suggested we go over to Wogglebug College and picket the fine arts department for their crypto-fascist leanings."
"Crypto-fascist leanings?" said Zsuzsa incredulously.
"Yeah, like how they teach all about the succession of Ozian monarchs, but ignore the history of Tottenhots and other repressed Ozian racial minorities," Sofia explained.
"Balderdash!" scoffed Zsuzsa, "He's a level-headed nobleman with stature and dignity, not a some kind of anarchical hippie!"
Judit frowned. She knew there was something fishy going on. What would she see when she opened the door, she wondered.
So she opened it -- And beheld what appeared to be a gestalt composite of Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, and Clifford Stoll.
"Ah--Judit, my dear! I am Camille."
"You're Camille," Judit muttered.
"Tell me Judit, since we are of course dealing with the 11- dimensional non-Euclidean geometry of concave Hilbert spaces, does this mean that the field of Ozian sorcerial matrices is closed under addition and non-commutative multiplication; and should this have any bearing on the hyperbolic nature of space-time in proximity of Oz and other quantum-unstable Nonestican subsets in the presidigitational continuum?"
* * * * * * * * * * "Well?" Zsuzsa asked when Judit was back outside the room.
"He's an ultra-genius!" Judit replied, "An expert on quantum mechanics, relativistic astrophysics, higher linear algebra, analytical solid geometry, and computer programming in FORTRAN, COBOL, C++, and Oz-embly language! The kind of guy that makes my little heart go 'thump-thump, thump-thump'!"
"Okay, what's going on?" said Zsuzsa.
"There is no doubt in my mind," Judit stated with a discernible trace of disappointment in her voice, "This Camille is an 'AB'!"
"An 'AB'?" Sofia asked.
"An Aberrational Being," Judit explained, "ABs always appear to each individual as their own personal ideal companion. I've heard of such things before."
"So what do we do?" inquired Sofia.
"We ask him...her...it up front why he's here and what he...she...it ....wants!" Judit said firmly.
* * * * * * * * * * Pete Tranter's Sister sat forlornly in the dark, dingy pub in London's East End. She figured that there were a lot of horrible things in the known universe, but surely there couldn't be anything worse than being Pete Tranter's Sister!
All her life she had stood in the shadow of her rich and successful brother. He had an I.Q. of 176, owned three mansions and a yacht from million-dollar sales of the album "Om" he made with his Secondary School band "Smeg and the Heads" and belonged to the highly successful law firm of Tranter, Tranter, and Tranter. (It was only him at the firm, but he was such a fantastic lawyer that everyone knew it was worth writing his name three times.)
Even in their childhood her parents had shown excess favoritism to him, to the point that they didn't even bother to give her a name. They just said to people, "This is our wonderful son Pete, and this is his sister."
It was horrible -- Pete had money, fame, wealth, everything. And what did she have? She had a famous brother named Pete. Even guys would only go out with her to get to him, and it wasn't as if Pete Tranter's Sister was unattractive -- on the contrary, she could have been a model if she weren't a half-inch too short to ride Space Mountain and the other fun rides at Disney World.
No, being the shy, petite sibling of a tall, charismatic overachiever was not easy. That was probably why she had decided to let her hair grow long and bleached it blonde, starved herself to lose weight, and took to wearing skimpy leather that fitted her like a straight-jacket. At least then guys noticed her good looks first, and only later tried use her to get to her famous brother.
But what really burned her up inside was the fact that Pete was making all that money from the "Om" album, and she knew smegging well he was not the sole writer. He had cowritten it with Dave Lister, another member of the group. But Dave was dead, or at least presumed dead -- He had vanished one night during a particularly wild party with his mates, and the only trace they had ever found of him was his clothes and ID cards on a strange, cheruby young girl with amnesia and a gold bracelet engraved "E.B." So Pete knew he could get away with not so much as verbally crediting Dave, because you cannot libel the dead.
But what if it turned out that he was alive and well? Pete Tranter's Sister had asked herself. What if he was living in the jungle somewhere living off berries? Pete Tranter's Sister had resolved to set out to find him, not only to pay him the millions that was due to him (she had "borrowed" five million pounds sterling from Pete for that purpose), but also to see him. She had always liked Dave...He had always looked at her in a wide-eyed way that said better than words that he considered her the most beautiful creature since Aphrodite. Yet, he had never had the nerve to talk to her...He was obviously just as shy and quiet as she was, which made her think they had a lot in common.
But where to start? How do you go about searching for a young man who vanished during a wild party circa three AM two years ago in that region she had always referred to with a shudder as "Darkest Liverpool"? And in this modern "Age of Exploration" one wasn't just limited to Earth -- He could be practically anywhere in the entire Solar System!
"Looking for someone?"
The voice startled Tranter (as she now resolved to call herself, since she had no given name) out of her reverie.
She looked up -- And then had to look down, as the little man who had spoken to her was even shorter standing that she was sitting. He was little all right -- About two feet tall, fat, elderly, with a funny red beard and dressed all in green.
"Are you Pete Tranter's Sister?" inquired the little man.
"Yes," Tranter admitted grudgingly.
"I sympathize with you -- I am Horace's Brother," he said, as though that name would have any meaning to her.
"I never heard of him," said Tranter.
"That's all right," he replied brightly, "We in Tir Na n'Og have never heard of Pete Tranter either."
"Where did you say??"
"Tir Na n'Og. My homeland. But that don't matter, at all, at all. I have been sent by Zim the Flying Sorcerer of Oz to lead you to Dave Lister."
"What kind of fairy tale are you giving me?" Tranter said, annoyed.
"I'm quite serious," he said firmly, "Look behind you."
Tranter looked, and saw to her amazement that a misty, spherical cloud was swirling behind her.
"Step through that!" the little man commanded.
Tranter, who was now afraid that this little weirdo was in fact an undercover constable administering a test for drunkenness, timidly obeyed. She stepped into the mist, and suddenly found herself in a beautiful, sunny countryside, surrounded by the loveliest flowers and trees she ever beheld. To her astonishment, all sign of the pub, the little man, and London itself had vanished, and the only bit of civilization she could see in this paradisical wilderness was a road of yellow bricks extending seemingly forever in both directions, and a sign on the road with an arrow which read, "Emerald City, 3 km."
And best of all, she realized as she glanced into the clear, pristine water of a nearby pond, she had somehow reverted to the natural appearance she really preferred: Short, dark hair, not so skinny, and clothes like a Liverpudlian highschooler.
"Hi, beautiful!" a passing Munchkin called to her.
"I don't know what all this is about," Tranter said to anyone in the universe who cared to listen, "But at least I think I'm out of Pete's shadow at last!"
* * * * * * * * * * "I'm glad were going to the Emerald City to the see Queen Ozma," Camille observed as she and the Adepts hiked with her through the Purple countryside of Gillikin Country.
"So am I," Judit concurred, "This is undoubtedly a monumental crisis involving Oz's worst enemies!"
"Well, they won't get away with it!" Zsuzsa promised, as they quickened their pace, "They will be brought to justice and no harm will come to Oz, believe you me!"
As they headed down the Red Brick Road towards the Emerald City, they encountered the Tin Man, on his way back to his tin castle in Western Oz.
The Tin Man stopped in his tracks as he beheld Camille, for to him she appeared as the beautiful young girl that he was seriously involved with as a flesh-and-blood human until the Wicked Witch of the East busted up their relationship by chopping up his body with an enchanted ax, forcing him to get a tin body as a replacement. His old love looked much the same as always, except that she was now made of tin as well!
"Nimee Amee!" the Tin Man gasped in astonishment.
"It's Nimee Camille now," Camille replied, "I'm glad to see you, Nick!"
"I'm so glad to see you! But what's happened to your flesh? How did you ever become tin?!" Nick Chopper the Tin Man cried.
"Let's just say that enemies of Oz have been giving me trouble -- It really pains my heart, which is as large as yours!"
"Oh, how terrible!" said the Tin Man sympathetically, "Is there anything I can do?"
"You'd better get back to your palace and protect your people," Camille replied, "Oz is in danger, I am sorry to say, and the Adepts and I are going to the Emerald City for help."
"If we need you," Zsuzsa added, glancing remonstratively at Camille, "We'll let you know."
"Very well, but be careful my dear!" And the Tin Man hugged his metallic love and placed a kiss on Nimee Camille's sweet red tin- copper alloy lips, which from the Adepts' now unillusory point of view, was a kiss on the left side of Camille's true form -- a pulsating, wrinkled, slimy blue-green blob with a single eye on a long stalk. Sofia giggled, Zsuzsa reached for a nausea tablet, and Judit discreetly averted her eyes from the pastoral love embrace.
* * * * * * * * * *
Kris Kochanski and her fellow crewmembers from Red Dwarf arrived with Glinda at Ozma's palace in the Emerald City. The citizens of the city were astonished by Starbug, and thought it was some giant insect, something not unusual in Oz. (Well, at least less unusual than tourists from deep space and three million years in the future.)