by Guy Haley
Then, a breakthrough. She found Plock sat by the outer gate in Anderson’s ditch, drinking water and telling ghastly stories to a dozen or so people. One day they would lament the extirpation of the aliens, for now there was only relief at an enemy vanquished.
“I did see him,” he told her when she had wrested his attention away from his audience. “He said he was going to the council. There’s a meeting, I heard.” He looked at her as if to ask her why she wasn’t there.
She unconsciously rubbed at her stomach. She was already showing; soon it would be obvious, even through the looser clothes she’d taken to wearing.
“He’s not there,” she said. “Where could he have gone?”
“I don’t know.” Plock shrugged. “He was odd after the fight...”
“Odd how?”
“I don’t know, odd-odd, he didn’t say much. But he never does, eh?”
Sand strode away without saying goodbye.
“Hey! If you see him, tell him he owes me a drink.”
Sand did not respond.
She rechecked all the places she’d checked before. She went back to the hospital and infirmaries, and went over the lines of the dead, all thirty of them, although she had been told he was alive and walking. He was not there.
It was the boy Roman who found him; knowing Sand was searching for him, he went to find her. He came running after her. “Pilot, Pilot!” he shouted. She turned. “Dariusz... I see him. You search, yes?”
“Where?” demanded Sand.
He held his hands up. “There, back there!” He gabbled Polish at her in frustration. He had still not learned much of the Lingua Anglica.
She grabbed a man she knew, pointed at the boy.
“The laboratory,” translated the man. He was tired, dead-eyed. Soot streaked his arms. He carried a toolbox that had seen much use.
“Which one?”
The man shrugged. “He does not know, he is six.”
“Show me,” she said.
Roman looked at the man, confused.
“Pokaż,” the man told him.
He nodded, beckoned, and turned tail. Sand hurried after him.
AN ATV WAS parked outside the genetics lab. Dariusz was inside. The lights were off, but she could hear him moving around. She stepped in without turning the light on. He heard her come in, he must have, but he did not look up from the fridge.
“Dariusz? I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” she said. “What are you doing?”
“I am about to administer Moore’s experimental retrovirus to myself,” he said calmly, as if that explained it all. “He’d finished it. Clever man, Moore.”
“Why? Come away from there. I was worried about you.”
Bio-killing blue light made him seem alien. He reached in to the fridge and pulled out a black carbon tube.
“I am going away, Sand.”
“Dariusz, what are you talking about, I –”
“It’s not us, in case you might have thought so, although I do not think we would have worked well in the long run, you and I. We are too different. Water and fire.”
“What are you talking about?” She took a step toward him, but went no further. Something awful hung between them.
He set the hypospray down and looked at her intently, like he was seeing her properly for the first time. “We found a functioning mini genelab in the creatures’ nest,” he said. “Moore was right, our EM signals were driving them crazy. They’d collected all sort of things together, Sand; all sorts of things. We killed them all. We had no right.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, although with a sudden rush of clarity, she thought she did. “What has that got to do with you going away? I have something that –”
He interrupted her again, which he never did. He had become ruthless in his conversation. “With the genelab, they’ll be able to type the saboteur’s residual DNA. Leonid kept a shard of the glass the saboteur used to cut himself, do you know that? He wore it around his neck. Posth gave it to him.”
“He?”
He looked at her expectantly, sorrowfully.
“You? You did it?”
Her gun was in her hand without her thinking about it. She aimed it squarely at him with a shaking hand. Sand stared at him; fury, sorrow and disbelief warred in her.
He loaded the tube into a hypospray. It slid home with a tiny click. He was so methodical, so slow and careful. Sand could not picture him making a rash decision. How could she have got it so wrong?
All the noises in the room were unnaturally loud – the hum of the fridge, the buzz of the UV light, the whirr of a pump somewhere – and laden with consequence. She felt the need to whisper.
“Why did you do it, why did you?” she said
“I was going to tell you, I needed to confess, but I couldn’t, I –”
“Why?” she shouted. She twisted the safety off on her gun, and racked a round into the chamber.
Dariusz looked at the floor. In the blue sterilising light of the fridge he looked very old and tired. “Sand, please, let me explain.”
“What, explain why you rammed us into this world, killed so many of us? I’ve watched so many people die, Dariusz, so many. Can you explain that to me? And your son... Could you explain it to him?” She was crying now, tears hot on her cheeks. His distant manner, his introversion. Not sorrow; he had been hiding his role in the disaster. No wonder he had been so guarded! She felt ashamed at being dragged into his orbit. “I’ve been such a fool. You have made me a fool.”
His face tightened. “I didn’t intend for it to happen.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I wanted a better world for... for Danieł.” Sand had not heard him say his son’s name for a long time. “I was at the end. I had lost my job, I had lost all chances at a job. A man, this man Browning, the virus was in my blood...” He stumbled over his words, unable to frame his confession. He began again. “I was promised a better world. The virus was supposed to break down the security systems surrounding the Syscore and release it from the direct control of the Pointers, that is what I was told. I realise that I was a fool to trust Browning. I knew nothing about the group that approached me. I was blinded by fear, I saw the end coming. I wanted my son to survive. I did not know it would have this effect. I wanted the colonies to be free of the Pointers, that is all. Trust me, it is the truth.”
Her head spun. “How can I trust you?” She held the gun higher, wavering in her hand. She grabbed her wrist to steady it. “How can I know anything you have said to me has been the truth?”
“Because it has been. Only this, my part in the crash... That was all I hid. I was going to tell you.” He hadn’t moved. He stood there with the hypospray in one hand, his finger still on the rear of the capsule. He did not raise his hands, did not approach. He awaited his fate. He had given up.
“When?”
He gave a sad smile. “When? That is a good question. Would there have been a good time?”
She released her wrist and wiped her forearm across her face. The gun stayed where it was.
“What do you plan to do?”
“I’m going to find the Syscore. Without it, the colony is finished. We need the database it carries. The machines we have will not last forever, and we cannot make replacements without the information in the Syscore, assuming its own databases are not also corrupt. A fool’s errand, I know, but I have to try. Our knowledge will fade, everything we have striven for since we walked out of the jungle. We will revert to savagery, and then we will die out. I owe it to everyone who lived to bring the Syscore back. I won’t have two disasters on my hands. When I bring it back, I will stand trial. Let them kill me. I do not care, just let me do what I can.”
“You can’t make it better.”
“I know.”
“You’ll never find it. You will die. The nightside will kill you.”
“That is probably what will happen. But I can at least try. I would have gone earlier, but I had to wai
t for the retrovirus to be finished.”
“It’s not been tested. What if it doesn’t work?”
“Then I will starve.”
Sand stared at him, finger tightening on the trigger. She bared her teeth. She wanted to shoot him. All the pain, the death, the loss. Friends, colleagues, killed by this man; the man who had clipped her wings and condemned her to a grounded life. “I hate you.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t want your understanding!” She squeezed harder, but her arm moved. The shot went wild, skimming past Dariusz’s ear. The gun clattered from her hand. All the life went from her; she half-collapsed. Something in her belly twinged. She grabbed at the countertop for support.
“Get out,” she said. “Get out now. They’ll be coming for you. Never come back.” She sat on the floor with a groan and put her face in her hands. “What a fucking mess.”
“They know we are lovers. They will think you were involved.”
“They won’t. I wasn’t. Any idiot can see that.”
He pressed the hypo to his arm and discharged the load of engineered virus into his bloodstream. With that action he stated his intent to leave. She stood.
“Kiss me one last time,” she said. He did. He gripped her head hard as he did. They had all grown stronger under the influence of Nychthemeron’s gravity.
She did not hear him drive away.
She stayed there for a long time, until Kasia found her. “What happened?”
“Dariusz,” she said. “He has gone. He wouldn’t say why.” She cried out and clutched her stomach.
“Did he hit you? Did you tell him?”
Sand sobbed.
“Did you tell him you were pregnant?”
Sand shook her head, she clutched at her stomach. “The baby. Kasia,” she said. “I think there’s something wrong.”
PART V
Nychthemeron
4 AC
Into the long night the First Born looked often, and were as often afraid of what they imagined therein. There dwelt monsters, they said, there was death. And they did not go into the dark, for there was fear in the dark above all things, and fear is the greatest enemy of all thinking beings.
The First Pilot mocked them for their timidity. “You cower under the sand as frightened tiger grubs. Do not be afraid. Do not be timid. In the darkness dwells the light of knowledge. Come, let us gather together the Wise, and by their art shall we fashion a craft of the air, called a plane of the air, that shapes the air unto its purpose as the plane of the shell worker cuts the shell unto his, and we shall go into the night, and take back the light of knowledge into the Evening Country, and let it light our way to the future, and we shall fear no more, neither of the night nor the day, and all will be as it was, when men were giants in heaven, for our children and thereafter their children’s children.”
There was much talk at this, and disagreement, for those were hungry times, and times moreover where every man had his say, before there were kings and the ways of kings. And the Lords of the Council remembered the ways of the Wolf, and how his evil threatened all. “Let not one way be put before all the other ways,” they said. “Only in balance will we survive.”
There were others of differing mind, and many among these Lords coveted the knowledge of the ancients, for they yearned for the times before the fall from heaven when men were giants in the land, and they were of greater persuasion than the other Lords, if not so many in number.
And so the Lords decreed that the machines be built, using the most sacred arts of the forefathers and of the giants, and of the times-before. So it came to pass that the First Born took to the sky for the first time since the Fall, and they saw it was good, and so it has remained ever since.
– Extract from the Nychthemeron Codex, translated from the Aggregate Slavic into neo-Anglic, 3328 AC
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Freedom of the Skies
THE TRICK WAS to get the rhythm right.
Yuri squatted on the sand, drumming with the severed rakes of a tiger beetle. He would have been the first to admit that he had changed. He was still slender, taking after his mother. He would never be as big as his father, not even if the colony had a surfeit of food, and it did not; but there was a corded strength beneath his skin from years of hard living that had not been there before. His muscles were clearly visible, moving over each other as he shifted position, tapping upon the sand to mimic the sounding pattern of a tiger beetle. His skin had darkened, from the sun of the desert out beyond Evening Country where he often went to hunt. All save the scar of the bullet wound inflicted upon him by Anderson, a white star emblazoned on his shoulder. No medtech or nano to wipe that away, nor the wrinkles round his eyes and mouth the sun had etched; not any more. Not on Nychthemeron.
Yuri had aged a great deal in the four years since the crash, but it was good aging, the kind that fruited wisdom. He had lived thirty-five years, and was – thanks to the treatments he’d benefited from in his youth – biologically twenty-five, but was over five centuries old in another sense. By the standards of his previous life, his body was worn. But his spirit was calm, and he was complete in himself. He accounted himself a man at last. He doubted he would ever have thought himself so if he had stayed on Earth. Age was a price he gladly paid for peace.
Yuri absorbed himself in his task. Drugs and drink and fleeting encounters he had abandoned – well, mostly, excepting drink at feast times, and the occasional fleeting encounter. In work and application he found his joys. He wore a light robe woven from pounded ferrobrush fibres, and a carbon-fibre shell brace was folded across his back. Here, at the edge of True Day, it was pleasantly hot. The cinnamon breeze blew weakly; the rainy season had passed a month before. They had yet to find a better alternative to the old calendar. As Nychthemeron did not rotate and had little axial tilt, there were no seasons beyond the inconstant ones provided by the heating of the sunward equatorial desert, and a subtle darkening that lasted for half of the planet’s fourteen-month orbital period. Efforts had been made to adapt their old calendar to the new, but Nychthemeron was a planet of constancy, not cycles, and Terran time did not fit. Nor did anything they had thought of. Every attempt to conceive of a new way of measuring time was inappropriate. They should adapt their minds to the planet, and not vice versa, Yuri said. He laughed after he said this. He never saw himself as a swami, and yet people came to him for his insight. He was turning into a bona fide mystic. It amused him to be seen so.
There was nothing forced about the rhythm, or his enjoyment of it. It was of the planet, and in performing it, Yuri felt at one with it. When hunting for sandclams, Yuri had the glimmer of a hope that mankind might survive upon Nychthemeron.
Piotr danced nearby, shuffling around the way the tigers did. On his feet were strapped platforms into which stiff twigs of ferrobrush were neatly drilled. He scuffed at the sand as he danced, moving in tight circles, first one way, then the next. Together, the two parts of the ersatz beetle moved across the sand, mimicking the predator and the prey of the sandclam. Yuri was sure there was a sandclam beneath, the texture of the ground was right – a flat expanse with a depression in the middle. Judging exactly where the animal was called for expertise.
The sand shifted. He put the rakes down gently and unslung the brace. He unfolded it, once, twice, and locked it in place. Three metres long, woven in the last of the fabricators. Piotr stopped shuffling; he moved to the left, then the right, the pattern of a tiger beetle on edge.
The sand mounded as the sandclam broke the surface at speed. Piotr leapt backwards, lost his footing, and scrambled for the safety of a nearby rock. “A big one!” laughed Yuri. He still laughed often, but his laughter was of triumph more often than despair these days, and had lost its shrill, maniacal edge.
The sandclam’s lips emerged from the ground, its shell gaped wide. Yuri held his arms high, allowing himself to be taken down into the creature’s maw.
This was the most difficult part,
and the most dangerous. It was the part he enjoyed best.
The sand protected his feet from the grinding teeth of the creature, but ran freely as the clam expelled it from its shell. He had to be quick.
With practised calm, he fitted the clawed ends of the brace against the shell’s fluted lips, first on one side, and then the other. He tested it was secure, then swung up onto it, wrapping his arms and legs about it. The sand disappeared from the centre of the shell, revealing the deep muscles and lines of hooked teeth that formed its rasp. Its meal unexpectedly gone, the mollusc tried to pull its shell closed and retreat; the brace prevented it from shutting, and so wedged it firmly into the sand at the surface.
“Piotrek! Piotrek! Get over here! I’ve got it! It’s stuck! Get the harpoon!”
The sandclam’s feet, two long, slippery tentacles, batted at Yuri, trying to knock him into the shell. He held on more tightly.
Piotr’s face appeared over the edge. In his hand was a long shaft with a slender iron point, a metre and half long. He drew back his arm, waited for the creature’s feet to move out of the way, and thrust the weapon deep into a patch of quivering flesh behind which lay the sandclam’s simple brain.
It took a minute for the sandclam to die. Reflex actions took a while longer to cease. Yuri waited until he was sure it was over before he climbed out.
He and Piotr smiled at each other, and laughed. Yuri clapped the younger man on the shoulder.
“Get the ATV,” he said. “It’s going to take a while to drag this out of the ground.”
While Piotr fetched their vehicle, Yuri pulled out a simple tablet computer, one of the first they’d made on-world. There were hunting quotas that could not be exceeded, population estimates that needed updating. He preferred to leave the messy business of butchery until he’d logged all he could about the clam, or he’d just forget. It was important he did not. After the destruction of the natives’ nest, the colonists were determined not to make the mistakes of Earth again. They all needed to eat, but that did not mean that they should not be careful.