Slower they went, picking their way. Though still remote, there were points ahead in the darkness, one bright and colossal, the rest circling in its tow. The shoal could have taken any course, could have avoided that faraway sun with ease. He knew that they too had wearied of the void, as occasionally must happen. Yet the distance remained great, even for them. His mind wandered, or sometimes idled.
They slowed further. They were near now, and there was plenty to observe, to be wary of: these tremendous spheres of rock and gas and fluid placed in eternal cycle by the star at their heart, some of them ringed as the system itself was by the waste of their creation. There were consciousnesses as well, tiny, barely cognizant organisms slaving at their hazardous existence upon inapt worlds.
Then he noticed, at the edge of his awareness, one planet unlike the others: suited as so few were to be a crucible for the engines of biology, extruding a richness of signals into the vacuum. He exerted his will, shifting his shoal’s course somewhat, so that they would pass closer. The life-mass intrigued him. It was an age since he’d beheld anything of such complexity.
His shoal didn’t pause as he had. They were already nearing the edge of his sense-sphere.
He almost followed.
But he was curious. He was younger than they, and though he had their experience as they had his, of himself he’d experienced less. He was hardly moving now; at his current speed he’d have required a lifetime to pass between stars. He dove steeply downward: with this mass to orientate against, there was a direction to be called down. He slipped through the planet’s outermost membrane.
There was atmosphere here, and it troubled him. He was unused to its heaviness. But he pushed on, confident that he would only need a moment. Forgetting nothing, he would have eternities to digest what he learned. He pressed lower, adjusting as he went, thrilled by the rush of knowing and the promise of more.
Then—threat . Such an enormity of it, beyond his ability to process. There were living beings on this world, as he’d predicted, and in vast multitudes. One species in particular drew his notice, for they had shaped their environment with a determination that none of their cohabitants had. They’d made themselves dangerous—and as he encountered them anew, part of him found them familiar.
The piece of his mind not his own, that was other than memory reproduced, was dizzied by a shock of recognition. That’s us , it thought, from so high above.
The land there was barren, deformed. Where elsewhere life swarmed in multiplicity, here there was wrack and rot, the stench of decay lying like a pall.
Could we really have done that , the Forrester part asked, scarred the very earth?
He readied to leave. There was too much to assimilate; he would need the peace of travel to begin to comprehend it. Yet he struggled. He’d drifted too close to the planet’s innermost casing, and to the frenzied brutality playing out there. Its influence was a shrill mental alarm sounding from everywhere at once. He doubted his course. Was he truly rising, or falling farther? Around him, the air churned with projectiles. They arced from the surface, each one flinging searing fragments in its wake. So much to avoid, so much to interpret, so much to—
He could have diverted the meteor-thing. He could have evaded it easily, had he not been afraid. The proximity of so many hazards on different trajectories, the barrage of undirected rage, had disorientated him.
Even then, the damage wasn’t severe. His substance was able to let such projectiles pass through with negligible harm. The explosion, however, he hadn’t anticipated, though there were detonations all about. The impact, the incursion, the scorching pressure, all of them together, they were enough to stun him and to erase any remaining sense of direction.
He couldn’t feel his shoal. They’d passed too far. He cried out regardless, not caring who or what should hear, expecting no answer. There were minds in his vicinity, possessed of an intelligence he could approximately understand, but they were filled with such fury, and a terror that outweighed his own.
Nevertheless, and he could scarcely believe it, there was an answering consciousness out there. Impossible as it seemed, one mind, though almost unfathomably disparate, had responded slightly and unknowingly to his touch. But it was a response, and he clutched it, preserved it, even as his senses screamed of catastrophe.
Only when he struck the planet’s crust did the true pain come. His substance was conditioned to the most delicate contact, the brush of microscopic debris in the near-nothing of deep space. He had never in the course of his existence been surrounded as he was now: matter before him, beneath him, over him. And there was no way to move, no way to judge his orientation or to commune with the myriad forces by which he navigated.
He’d always accepted that his existence would end, that an end was the very condition of existence. But he’d never imagined it would come like this. He lay still: frightened, submerged, paralysed. He clung to the one consciousness that had responded to his call, concentrating all his energies into reinforcing that tenuous connection.
If he must end, at least he might not be utterly alone.
Forrester opened his eyes with a jolt.
He didn’t know how much time had passed. It might have been minutes or days.
His body felt like an unfamiliar garment, stiff and ill-fitting. He was sprawled on the cold stone, his cheek to the ground. A trickle of spit ran from his lips, and he was incapable of moving to brush the saliva away. His hand was a dead weight .
He had seen nothing, heard nothing, and couldn’t have done so. His own senses were returning slowly and in pieces, so that for a moment he couldn’t say why he didn’t feel the stagnant air or smell the stone above or taste the radiating light.
Certainly he hadn’t heard the march of approaching feet.
There were six of them. They didn’t carry guns. Surely they knew as well as Forrester himself how ineffectual such weapons would be down here, near to that thing. But they were in uniform, and even that display of martial conformity sent judders of wrongness through his aching brain.
Their leader, by contrast, wore a plain black suit, and was looking at Forrester with what might have been satisfaction, or vague amusement, or just conceivably pity.
“Good evening, Lieutenant Forrester,” Forbes said. “I’d tell you to stay calm, but I doubt that will be a problem.”
Chapter Sixteen
“ L et me help you up,” Forbes said.
He seemed unconcerned by the alien entity’s presence. He offered a hand, and though Forrester would have liked not to, he took it and allowed himself to be hauled up. He almost tumbled over again; his injured leg and foot were practically useless. All that kept him standing was a stubborn determination that, if only in this one small matter, Forbes mustn’t win.
“My stick,” he muttered, and pointed to where it lay discarded. At a gesture from Forbes, one of the soldiers brought the branch over, eyeing the length of wood as if it might turn into a viper and bite him. They were nervous, Forrester realised, as much as it was possible to be this close to the entity. All of them were nervous except for Forbes, or perhaps he merely hid his reactions better. Forrester struggled to imagine how anyone could look upon the inconceivable being before them and feel anything but awe. Yet there was no sign of awe in their faces.
“You’ve made quite a mess of yourself,” Forbes observed conversationally .
“You left me little choice.”
“Maybe we could have played things better,” Forbes acknowledged. “Still, it’s all worked out in the end.”
He signalled the nearest soldier to lend Forrester a shoulder as they retreated up the passage. The man seemed embarrassed by the situation, as Forrester himself was. Whoever Forbes might be working for, these others appeared to be common soldiery, no doubt sworn to secrecy. What must they make of it all?
As Forrester and the assigned soldier stumbled along together, Forbes fell in beside them. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” he said, with a nod toward the ston
e walls. “There have been humans down here since prehistoric times. There are traces of paintings in some of the deepest caves. Since then, they’ve been used by smugglers—we’re not so far from the coast as you might think—and for a long while they were a silver mine. That’s why the original house was built.”
“You seem to know the place well,” Forrester responded, not feigning interest. Even had he cared what Forbes had to say, his mind remained with the entity. To leave it felt like relinquishing one of his own limbs.
“Oh, I did my research. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to find somewhere suited to our needs? And in the time available? This location was nothing short of a godsend. We couldn’t be anywhere near the civilian population, for obvious reasons. I suppose we could have done without a cover story, but it seemed wisest to introduce you to the truth piece by piece, and the house gave us an opportunity to do that.”
They’d reached to where the tunnel levelled out, and daylight was dimly visible as a narrow stripe ahead. Forbes, bored with his own monologue or by Forrester’s undisguised indifference, abandoned his lecturing. When they came finally to the entrance, the air was cooler than Forrester remembered, and the shadows had grown long. It must be early evening, and he wondered again how much time he’d spent in the cave. Outside, the two lorries he’d last seen parked in the garage at Sherston were pulled up. The soldier assisted Forrester into the rear of one, and then he and the others took up the remaining spaces. Moments later, they were off.
The road was in an atrocious condition. No surprise there, it had surely been in disuse for years or even decades. It occurred to Forrester that they were travelling away from Sherston, but likely that was just the way the ancient highway ran, and they would ultimately loop around.
In the musty, petrol-smelling interior of the lorry, as they bounced from dip to rut, he had nothing to do except think, the one thing he least desired to do. He couldn’t begin to process his experience with the entity. Already the recollection had the semblance of a dream. Easier to grasp was the fact that he was being taken back to captivity, and to whatever tribulations Forbes and his mysterious director chose to devise.
At least now Forrester understood what the whole business was about. For them to keep more secrets from him would be futile, and perhaps he had a card or two of his own to play, where before he’d had none. Yet taking comfort from such speculation was hard, for it seemed to him that even his traumatic flight across the moors had been better than unending imprisonment. Maybe he’d have been best off to die out there, if that had meant he died free.
After a point, he could feel that they’d left the old moorland road for one more recently surfaced. They were heading uphill too, rather than descending as they had been. Forrester studied the faces around him and found them all closed. If he weren’t here, would they be discussing what they’d just seen? Or would they be every bit as stupefied as they were now?
Eventually, the lorry stopped. But it was only a pause, during which he heard a metallic creaking that must be the gates being opened. When they drew to a fresh halt a minute later, the engine rattled into silence. The soldiers disembarked, all but the one assigned to aiding Forrester, who sullenly helped him debus. They were in the garage adjoining Sherston. A wheelchair was waiting for Forrester, and there with it, of course, was Sergeant Campion.
“Good to see you again, lieutenant sir,” he said, with a teasing grin that in no way suited his demeanour.
Ignoring him, Forrester let himself be lowered into the chair. Then, with the soldier’s assistance, Campion manoeuvred him back to his room. There they deposited him on his bed, and without a word, the soldier began to work at removing Forrester’s boots.
“I can manage,” Forrester said softly—then, more forcefully, “I can manage .”
The soldier scowled and stood up.
“He can manage,” Campion parroted, as though the soldier might not have heard. “Well, if you say so, sir.”
And they left, Campion dragging the wheelchair behind him. The door slammed. Forrester caught the rattle of the key.
He considered his own booted feet. Could he really manage? He was tired unto death. He glanced, bleary-eyed, around the room. Everything was as he remembered. It was as if the preceding twenty-four hours had never happened.
Forbes and Campion had won, and they’d done so conclusively. It would be easy to give in.
Yet he hadn’t lost entirely. His victory was small, almost invisibly so, but he knew deep down that it was real. He’d found the strength to oppose them, and that strength remained, waiting to be drawn upon. All he had to do was not let go.
Forrester finished removing his boots, though every twist made him shudder. Then he took off his uniform and changed into his nightclothes. He got up, balancing against the wall, went through to the bathroom, and washed. Lastly, he brushed away the dirt his trousers had left on the sheets, as well as he could. Only once that was done did he let himself crawl under the bedclothes and surrender to the tidal wave of sleep descending over him.
Three days passed before he encountered Forbes again.
On the first day, food was brought at his usual mealtimes by a nurse, though not by Abhaya as he’d hoped it would be. Forrester had wanted to thank her, but in her absence, he realised he was also apprehensive for her.
Soon after breakfast, the doctor who’d inspected him before the ice experiment came. He removed Forrester’s filthy bandages, tutting at the mess. “You’re lucky you didn’t cripple yourself.”
It struck Forrester that, aside from orders such as Unbutton your shirt and Tilt your head , these were the first words the man had spoken to him. He felt a stirring of anger, and then frustration as it subsided, washed away beneath a rising tide of serenity. He knew now what he’d suspected for a long time: that the emotion was not his own. It was imposed somehow by the entity in the cave, and he yearned to resist. More than ever, he had a right to be angry.
Yet anger was denied him. All right, but he could still protest without it. Perhaps being forced to defend himself calmly was even to his advantage. “I’m lucky I wasn’t crippled in Forbes’s experiment, the one you gave me the all-clear for. I wonder, doctor, what does the Hippocratic Oath have to say about torture?”
The doctor regarded him sourly. “I didn’t torture you,” he noted.
“And I didn’t cripple myself,” Forrester replied, and was satisfied when the doctor had no answer .
Instead, he spent a good quarter of an hour checking the gash in Forrester’s leg and then cleaning, treating, and rebandaging his foot, all of which he did with surprising gentleness. Once he’d finished, he said, “Where you haven’t torn your blisters, you’re actually healing well. You’ve a strong constitution, Lieutenant Forrester. Try and exercise a little, if doing so is bearable. I’ll have them send you up a stick.”
He sounded unexpectedly human, or at least like any busy country doctor, harried but basically sympathetic.
“Thank you,” Forrester said, and meant it.
The walking stick materialised along with his breakfast the next morning, brought by the same nurse. It was an appealingly sturdy-looking rod of some hard wood, without a handle and polished to a shine. He could envisage it as having belonged to Sherston’s owner, an accessory for when he rambled upon the barren moorlands.
As soon as the nurse left, Forrester had his first practice, pacing in a circle until he got dizzy. His right foot was in a sorry state; as the doctor had intimated, he’d torn open every blister, leaving the sole a mess of pocked flesh. Nonetheless, the doctor had salved and bandaged the damage thoroughly, and Forrester found that, with the aid of the stick, he could hobble quite capably.
If they want me a cripple, he thought, then they’ll have to break my legs.
His conviction, previously half-formed, had come to resolution in the night: having begun to resist, he could not stop. The response to this setback was to dissent more thoroughly. The only responsibility of the
wrongly imprisoned man was escape.
When walking became too painful, he invented other ways to exercise. He devoted his ingenuity to the task for most of the morning, and when he got tired, read in snatches, briefly returning to the Marcus Aurelius and then abandoning philosophy in favour of Shakespeare’s Tempest . The revelations of the day before last were already growing faint, and he knew he mustn’t let them fade altogether, lest he convince himself he had imagined the wonders he’d witnessed.
Now I will believe that there are unicorns , he read. But there were beasts in Africa very like unicorns, and nothing else anywhere on Earth that resembled the creature he’d seen.
After lunch, he returned to his exercise, and kept up the new regimen for the remainder of the day, working brain and body in turn. When he could bear no more of either, he ran a hot bath, washed thoroughly, and then sat massaging his tired muscles.
Later, the nurse came with his dinner, and Forrester greeted her pleasantly, which earned him a distrustful, “Good evening.”
He slept deeply, his mind hushed with a pleasant sort of tiredness, and woke refreshed. When the nurse arrived with breakfast, he decided to make a stab at conversation. “Do you think I might go down to the common room today?” he asked, more for something to say than from any real hopefulness.
The nurse looked uneasy. “Perhaps you could. But there’s no one there.”
That took him by surprise. “Have they been confined as well?”
“Sent away,” she said, and then, as if afraid she might have imparted too much, clammed up hurriedly.
After she’d left, Forrester set to interpreting what she’d let slip. But he quickly concluded that there was nothing overly strange about it. Giving the impression that the place was a hospital for shell-shocked officers had suited Forbes’s needs. However, Forrester was the only one he’d desired to fool, and now the deception was futile .
To End All Wars Page 19