Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  “Yeah,” he said eventually, pointing. “That’s north.”

  “Which means that’s south. The way to the village,” she said.

  The bar hadn’t softened at all, but she broke it and handed half to Daniel. It stuck to her teeth, but still scratched her throat as it went down. Apart from a faint sweetness, it was perfectly tasteless.

  “I never understand why people eat these things,” she said mildly. Daniel nibbled the corner of his piece, then threw the rest to Dog. The animal caught it, then stood looking puzzled for several seconds before dropping the glistening brown nugget into the leaf litter and walking away. Daniel shrugged, picked it up, and popped it into his own mouth.

  “Does it taste better like that? Covered in dog spit?”

  He shrugged. “Give me dried bat any day.”

  He’d been rehearsing in his mind all the reasons it was obviously better to get to the coast. But he wasn’t sure. The forest was dangerous, the village somehow more so. But if Jimmy and Lorna were really there, or if they could at last find out who their attackers were, then—

  He checked that the beacon was still working and got up. “OK. We’ll go to the village first. We’ll have to stay under the trees, and move slowly, and be super-careful when we get there.”

  “Slow won’t be a problem,” she said, easing herself to her feet. “Come on, Dog. Show us the way home. Home, yes? Oma and Isbet: Where are they?”

  Dog wagged its tail, then hurried ahead of them. It followed a line in the vegetation that looked like an animal track, a mark so faint it was as if a pencil line had been drawn and then erased. But Dog never wavered from it, and never paused except to wait for them to catch up. It moved silently too, unlike them; they tried to keep in shade, under the trees, but every leaf and stick seemed to cry out from underfoot, announcing their presence. The day’s rising heat was visible in little curls of steam coming off the leaves. When they looked back, it was hard to say which direction they’d come from, because the dying plume from the “volcano” was lost amid strands of afternoon cloud.

  MetOp-SG-Z3e was operated by the European Space Agency. It had been launched only months earlier from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, not far east of the old Aral Sea. It moved with ease from darkness to sunlight and back again, looping endlessly from pole to pole as its designers intended. As it did so, its extra-large, gold-tinted solar panels glinted prettily. But MetOp-SG-Z3e never did retransmit the signal from Daniel’s locator beacon; never even received it; might as well have been an expensive four-ton Christmas tree ornament. Like all its Leosat-Geosat brethren—and, indeed, like almost the entire heavenly host of the world’s winged, electromagnetic angeli—it had been stone-dead for weeks.

  But the beacon’s initial signal, and its hourly repetitions, were not completely wasted. On a hill a few miles away, well hidden in the forest, twenty yards of wire had been hung low between two big evergreen Araucaria trees. The signals were caught there, one by one, like buzzing flies on a fat, sticky thread of spider’s silk.

  CHAPTER 3

  AND HITLER MAKES THREE

  The village was even closer than they’d estimated. Dog led them straight to it. The valley looked hazy in the sunlight, as if filled with the remaining smoke from the I’iwa’s sacrificial fire. But the trees were thick around the clearing, and they couldn’t see anything until they stepped into the open. Dog’s almost-human groan was the first indication that something was wrong.

  When they came out from under the cover of the trees, what they saw looked like a field of wheat after harvest, with the stubble burned off incompetently in patches. A dozen separate fires at least, but long since extinguished. All but a few of the little shacks had been razed. Where were the Tainu? Herded somewhere like cattle? Dead? Fled deeper into the forest?

  Not far into the clearing, they came across a hundred square feet of blackened timbers, sticks, and ash. Morag was able to identify it only from its position. “This was the chapel the missionary built,” she whispered. “Where we slept that night. D’you remember that?”

  He didn’t remember any of it, not really. The whole place was familiar, the way a smell was familiar, but that was all.

  “This is a bad place to be,” he said. Not wanting to look at her, he glanced up, bringing her attention to Dog, who was continuing to make its pained, mournful sound as it stood over something in the grass to their left. As soon as she moved, he had a premonition about what would happen next, but it was already too late.

  She walked a few steps, stopped, and then sprinted. “No. No. No. No. No!” Each refusal of the truth was clearer and louder than the one before it, except the last, which dissolved into a high, thinning wail. She fell to her knees just as he reached the spot. Her fingers were curled, rigid, like a bird’s claws, raking uselessly at the air in front of her. When he’d seen what she had seen, he knelt beside her and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Isbet and I played together for hours and hours and hours,” she said. “It was Isbet who taught me their songs. Their bedtime stories. Their jokes. When we first arrived, she was the only kid in the village who wasn’t afraid of me.” And she convulsed into loud, inconsolable sobbing.

  The bodies had been there for a long time, and they were already skeletal: eaten by insects, dried by the sun, but apparently not visited by larger animals. The clothes were still in place, and there was no mistaking them. Isbet was wearing exactly the same set of thin, filthy missionary hand-me-downs—a red soccer shirt over blue shorts. She was lying face up across the body of her father, with her arms out wide, as if she’d been killed trying to protect him. Oma’s head was turned toward them. With the lipless mouth open, and the cheek resting on a patch of grass, he could have been napping. Isbet’s thin, dark single braid lay sideways across her father’s rib cage. The feathers woven into it would have looked like mere decoration to an outsider, but Morag knew Tainu customs well enough to read, in the order and color of the decorations, a brief life story: chief’s first daughter; first night spent in the forest alone; first period; first pig killed with a bow and arrow; marriage; the birth of a son; the death of a husband. They both looked unharmed, and strangely peaceful, except for the subtle stain, rust against red, on one side of Isbet’s shirt.

  It seemed to Daniel that Morag’s sobbing went on for a long time. Not that it seemed any longer than it should have been, but he sensed danger, wanted to get them out of the clearing and back into the relative safety of the forest. His neck was crawling, as if someone unseen was looking at him, and his own eyes twitched, hunting from place to place along the margin of trees.

  Trying his best to comfort Morag and scan for danger at the same time, he was taken by surprise when she stopped abruptly. The tears had left two wide, perfectly straight tracks down her cheeks. Her voice was hoarse, but even:

  “Give me the knife.”

  “What?”

  “The knife. It’s in the pack.”

  When he handed it to her, she checked the edge with her thumb, then picked up Isbet’s braid and cut through it, near the base at the nape of her neck. “They always do this,” she said. “It’s so that the dead can travel with the living.” She handed the knife back to him and ran the braid through the palm of her hand, smoothing down the feathers. Clumsily, through blurred eyes, she put it in her pocket, then changed her mind and tied it to the outside of the backpack.

  That was when she noticed the ring.

  Pitted. Silver. It had been incorporated into the braid with a small knot of vine, just next to the lowest feather. Her pulse thudded and skittered, stopped and started again, and for a moment she wondered—abstractly, almost idly, as if it was a question on a pop quiz—whether the phrase died of a broken heart meant literally that despair could make your heart stop.

  She showed it to Daniel. “This is Kit’s.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m bloody sure. It means she’s dead too. Isbet must have recovered, after the fight with Mayo, and f
ound her. My parents were already on their way back here with Oma. Injured, traveling slowly. She’d have caught up with them—”

  “So where are they? Jimmy and Lorna?”

  She forced herself to get up, put on the backpack, and wipe her eyes. “If they’re alive, and they’re not here, they’ve probably been captured. Telefomin, maybe. But like you said, if we go back there—” She looked at the mountains, and down at the bodies again. “Damn damn damn. We need to get out of here quickly. But you’re right. We’ll have to go to the coast. It’ll take days. A week. Maybe more.”

  “Should we bury them?” he said, scanning the edge of the clearing again. The last thing they needed was to use up a lot of precious time and energy performing a ritual for the sake of the dead, when the living had their own, more urgent needs. But he had to ask. He was relieved when she shook her head.

  “I told Oma what we do with our dead. He was horrified—like: ‘You imprison them under the ground?’ They prefer exposure. And this clearing is Oma and Isbet’s home, or what’s left of it, so the best we can do is leave them. They don’t like the idea of saying good-bye to the dead either, so let’s just get out of here.”

  “I’m sorry about Kit,” he said. Again he found himself struggling to say the right thing, because his own memory of Kit—of his own fierce attraction to her, once—was like something from a dream. A series of vivid but splintered images that didn’t fit together. His experience on Ararat had been like a big step away from the raw edge of ordinary human emotion.

  “She tried to protect me,” Morag said. “Like you. She was physically brave, like you.”

  “That was what you liked best about her, wasn’t it?”

  “No. What I liked best about her was everything. That she was funny. That she didn’t take anything too seriously. That she managed to be sarcastic and kind at the same time. That her English was bad, and that she didn’t really give a toss that it was bad, and that she invented the word crapshit. Maybe most of all I liked the fact that the little toe on her left foot was crooked.”

  “Huh?”

  “A tiny, hidden defect. It meant she wasn’t perfect. Which made her even more perfect.”

  He thought she was going to cry. But when he moved to put his arm around her, she gave him her steeliest, most defiant stare, and he knew exactly what it meant: If I think about Isbet now, if I think any more about Kit now, I’m going to fall apart. And I don’t have the time. Falling apart is for later, so just help me to be strong.

  They left the clearing the same way they’d come. Daniel went first, then Morag. Dog followed, slowly and reluctantly. Daniel was thinking about the fact that Morag had always been the icy, rational, unemotional one, when they were growing up, someone who latched on like a hitchhiker to his wild and many enthusiasms. Now the roles were reversed: he could see clearly, and think clearly, and put himself ruthlessly to one side in pursuit of a goal. He would be protecting her physically, but more than that, he would be the leader, the decisive one, the one untouched by personal emotion, keeping her together until she could fulfill the special destiny that the I’iwa’s mythos had outlined for her.

  He knew it would be a tough time, getting to the coast, but he was completely confident that he could handle whatever difficulties the forest threw at them. A hundred yards into the trees, he looked up from avoiding a tree root to see that he was staring down the barrel of a gun.

  Three people in khaki had materialized from the cover of the vegetation. The man directly ahead of Daniel was short and broad, with a pink baby face; his gun was a Sig Sauer carbine just like the one Mayo had been carrying. The woman, to the left, was carrying the same gun; she had a darker, more Mediterranean look, which made the peroxide-white hair curling out from under her black watch cap look especially phony. A second man stood behind them, with a handgun held casually at his hip. He was pale, with a greasy hank of hair across his forehead and a narrow, military mustache.

  Pinkie, and Blondie, and Hitler makes three, Daniel thought. He studied them for signs that they did, or didn’t, know how to fight. But their body language wasn’t giving much away, and it was a hopeless situation anyway: two people and Dog, armed with a small knife that he’d already returned to the pack, against three people waving guns. There was another factor too. Several steps behind them, hands tied and partly hidden by a tree, was a prisoner under a hood.

  “Thanks fer the signal,” Pinkie said, addressing Morag. “Four ’undred an’ sixty hertz, the very frequency we was led to expect. Marvelous little gizmos, those beacons. Well, well. Nice to meet you, and I’m delighted no ’arm came to you in the caves.”

  The accent was English, but completely different from Derek Partridge’s—flatter, less educated, more surly. “You got the calculations, then, or whatever they are? From the I’iwa?”

  Aye-aye-wer, it sounded like.

  “If you’re going to commit genocide,” Morag said, “you might at least pronounce it right. It’s Ih-IY-i-wa. Yes, we have some clever things they came up with. Too clever—we don’t know what they mean. I was planning to study them, but they’re probably meaningless.”

  The figure under the hood moved its tied hands, as if trying to signal to them.

  “We’ll see about that. As I understand it, you’re our best chance for ’igh-end puzzle-solving, and that’s why we need you. As for genocide, luvvy, no need to get sentimental. Your cave-monkey friends are goners anyway, just like most of the ’uman race.”

  “Maynard Jones,” Daniel said. “Did you work for him? Or were you all sent here by Balakrishnan?”

  Pinkie grinned, but didn’t answer. “All in good time, son. First, ’and over the bag. Slowly.”

  “If I don’t?”

  “If you don’t, we shoots our unfortunate prisoner.”

  “Mmmmr-g,” said a voice, from behind the hood.

  That was when Morag got it. “Mumma!” she shrieked, and she rushed forward. But it was Daniel who put his arms out and stopped her.

  “Mumma! It’s me and Daniel,” she shouted, struggling.

  “Calm down, M,” Daniel said in a low voice. “Take it easy. Let’s move slowly, and be nice to the gentleman with the gun. We don’t want any accidents. Give me the bag, and I’ll pass it to him.”

  He took the pack from her and moved as if to hand it over, then stopped while it was still out of the man’s reach and looked hard into his eyes. “You might at least allow Dr. Chen and her daughter to see each other.”

  Pinkie could easily have refused, but Daniel’s tone of voice, soft and even and reasonable, had exercised a peculiar authority over him. He didn’t lower his gun so much as an inch, but he nodded to Hitler, who went over to Lorna and began to take off the hood.

  Lorna, red hair wild and face blotchy, emerged blinking into the sunlight. “Thank you,” Daniel said. “And the gag.”

  Morag ran over and hugged her.

  “Oh gurrl gurrl gurrl!”

  “Are you OK? What happened? Where’s Jimmy? And did you—?”

  “So much to talk about, Morag my love. So much. Thank God you’re OK.”

  “Not now!” the man bellowed. He used the barrel of the gun to herd them toward Daniel, so that the three of them were standing shoulder to shoulder. There was an ugly green-and-purple bruise on Lorna’s neck. Daniel was still holding the backpack; he stepped in front of the others and dropped it at his own feet, as if challenging Pinkie to pick it up without lowering the gun.

  Pinkie hesitated, then ignored the pack. “I’ll make this simple,” he said. “You lot do exactly as I say, else this gets ugly. My orders are, we need the girl only. We’re going to Telefomin. From there, we get out of this bug-infested hole. You two want to stay alive? Remember you’re nothin’ but bargaining chips. To spend as necessary. Get it?”

  Daniel sensed that they weren’t total professionals. They were nervous, a little frightened even, and they were having a bit of a struggle managing the situation. But that could be good or bad, a
nd running over his old karate sensei’s advice in his mind wasn’t helping. Most of her scenarios involved the lone mugger, armed with fists or a knife, who accosts you when you’ve taken a shortcut across the park after dusk. “Nine times out of ten,” she said, “the cleverest and most effective defense is also the one your whole culture has trained you not to consider: swallow your pride, forget all the nonsense you’ve seen on screen, and get out of there. Heroes stay to be beaten up or killed for the sake of their pride. Smart people throw something on the ground and run.” Fat lot of use that bit of wisdom was, right now. Ditto what he remembered her saying about the martial arts movies she so despised: “How do you fight off multiple armed opponents? Ask the director to use careful editing and a lot of slow motion. It doesn’t work in real life.”

  Pinkie glanced over to Blondie. “Let base camp know we got ’em. We’ll be there in three hours.” Blondie produced a hand-held VHF and turned away from them. All they could hear of the exchange was crackling and a few random words—a conversation in the bottom of a Doritos bag. But Daniel caught the phrase “acquired the asset” and allowed himself a small inner smile. They weren’t professional soldiers; they were trying too hard to impress.

  “This way,” Pinkie said when she was done. “Move.”

  There was no time to argue, or think. Morag turned around and reluctantly let go of Lorna’s hands. “What can we do?” she muttered to Daniel as she brushed past him.

  “No talking,” the man said. “One more word, I’ll gag the lot of you. Come on.” Then he looked down, and said casually to the second man: “Shoot the dog. It’ll just get in our way.”

  The random, pointless cruelty was intolerable—Dog had saved their lives. “No,” she said, and she willed the animal to run. Instead, it responded by sitting, its eyes fixed on Hitler’s, looking attentive and puzzled. She knelt down and threw her arms around its neck.