Free The Fandom of the Operator by Robert Rankin

truth in that, I suppose,” said Dave. “And I get well peeved because there are so many things that I don’t understand yet. But I would be able to understand them if adults answered my questions. But they don’t. The reason children don’t understand as much as adults is because adults don’t tell them everything they know. They keep secrets from children. Adults complicate the world to death, but children see the world as it really is. They see it as simple. For some reason, adults don’t like ‘simple’, they like ‘complicated’. So adults screw up the world and children suffer for it.”
    “You really
are
wise beyond your years,” said I.
    “How dare you,” said Dave. “I’m wise because I’m wise. Right now, as I am. And you’re wise too. You know how to raise the dead. How many adults know that?”
    “It was an adult who thought up the formula and the rituals and everything.”
    “Only because stuff like that takes years to work out. If you started from scratch now, it might take you twenty years before you got it right. But once you had got it right, you could pass the information straight to your ten-year-old son and he’d know it too. Or you could keep it a secret to yourself. Which is what adults do about practically everything. They’re all a lot of homos, adults.”
    All? I puzzled over this. I felt that one day I was bound to find out what a homo was, but it probably wouldn’t be before I was an adult. And then it might be too late: I might actually
be
a homo myself. The thought didn’t bear thinking about, so I didn’t think any more about it.
    “I have this theory,” said Dave. “About Life, the Universe and Everything.”
    “Sounds like a good title for a book,” I said.
    “Don’t talk silly,” said Dave. “But I’ve thought hard about this theory. It’s in the form of a parable. Do you know what a parable is?”
    “Of course I do,” I said. “It’s a bird that a pirate has on his shoulder.”
    Dave shook his head.
    “I was only joking,” I said.
    “Oh,” said Dave. “I still haven’t worked out the one about the man with the huge green head. But a parable is a moral story, like in the Bible. Would you like to hear mine?”
    “Are there any spaceships in it?” I asked, for I greatly loved spaceships. Although not all spaceships. I didn’t, for instance, like the spaceships in P.P. Penrose’s Adam Earth books. They were rubbish, those spaceships.
    “Of course there are spaceships in it. I only know parables that have spaceships in them.”
    “Go on, then,” I said.
    “All right,” said Dave. “This parable is called ‘The Parable of the Spaceships.’”
    “Good title,” I said. “I—”
    “Shut up,” said Dave. And I shut up.
    And this is how it went.
     
    THE PARABLE OF THE SPACESHIPS
    Once upon a time there was a planet called Earth. And it was the future and people had cars that flew in the air and telephones that didn’t need wires and wore televisions on their wrists and had futuristic haircuts and big wing shoulders on their plastic jackets and lived in huge tower blocks that reached up into the clouds.
    And they had spaceships. But the spaceships could only go fast enough for people to commute between the planets in this solar system, which they did all the time, for going to work and stuff like that. Mostly mining emeralds on Saturn.
    Everybody was not doing OK in the future. Because there were so many people and all the planets in the solar system were getting completely overcrowded. So the scientists worked really hard on developing this spaceship that could travel at the speed of light and they built a special chamber in it where the pilot could be frozen up and stay in suspended animation until he got to his final destination, which would be the nearest planet capable of sustaining human life. They programmed the computer in the spaceship to search out the nearest planet that would comfortably support human life and then they looked