by Eric Brown
“What was it?”
She shook her head, frustrated. “That’s the problem. I don’t know. Look, get back to your room. Climb the trellis as I did. They’ll be coming for you any time now.”
“And you?”
She climbed to her feet and leaned back against the weatherboard villa, smiling shakily and taking deep breaths. “I need to read the alien, Matt. But I promise I’ll take care, okay?”
“Hell, Mercury—”
She pressed a finger to her lips. “I said I’ll be fine. Go!”
Before he could protest, she turned and hurried along the side of the villa. He watched as she paused before the window, bent her head to read the alien, then moved off and disappeared around the corner of the building.
He watched her go, then turned and climbed the trellis. He crossed the flat roof, came to the open window and slipped inside, grateful for the cool of the interior after the full glare of the sun.
His pulse pounding, he crossed to the bed and lay down, going through what Mercury had said and wondering what the next few hours might hold.
NINE
THIRTY MINUTES LATER A KNOCK SOUNDED AT THE DOOR. He rolled off the bed and crossed the room.
“Matt,” Hovarth said, “if you’d care to make your way to the auditorium . . .”
He splashed his face with water in the bathroom and then, feeling tense with apprehension, followed Hovarth down the stairs and along the corridor. Maatje was waiting outside the double door. She looked away as he arrived, ignoring his conciliatory smile.
Hovarth swung the doors open and they stepped into the chamber. Hendrick expected the ee-tee to still be there, but the room was empty but for the suspension pod and three chairs placed before the table.
Hovarth took the middle seat, with Maatje and Hendrick on either side.
He was reminded of the day, back on the colony world of Landsdowne five years ago, when he and Maatje had first had Samantha suspended. They had sat side by side in a bare hospital room, staring in silent grief at the jade-green pod.
How different the situation was now, he thought. Could it be possible that the alien might be able to achieve the long-awaited cure?
He could not allow himself to hope.
He turned to Hovarth. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do after . . . ?” He gestured to the pod.
Beyond Hovarth, Maatje leaned forward and stared at him. “You mean, after Samantha is cured, Matt? Have we thought what we’re doing then?”
He returned her stare. “Well?”
She twisted her lips into a sardonic smile. “You’ve changed your tune.”
“I just want to know what your intentions might be if this turns out as you hope.”
Hovarth murmured, “We will take Sam far away from here.”
Before he could begin to protest, Maatje cut in. “And legally, you won’t have a leg to stand on. Earth laws are not recognised where we’re going.”
She glared at him, stony faced. He considered arguing, but knew it would be a waste of time.
The door opened behind them. He heard a susurrus of footsteps as the alien entered the room.
He watched the Zuterainian take its position at the head of the suspension pod, its arms clasped behind its back and its great insect-head bowed. It was the human-style suit, Hendrick realised, that pointed up the creature’s alienness. He stared at the jutting mandible, the huge compound eyes, and felt a shiver of revulsion.
The ee-tee’s head swung to take in the three humans. Hendrick felt a trickle of sweat work its way down his temple and under the collar of his shirt. He wanted to move his hand to scratch the irritation, but the alien’s gaze intimidated him.
Then the Zuterainian spoke. Its prognathous jaw worked, issuing a series of quiet clicks, and a transistorised voice sounded from a tiny speaker clipped to the lapel of its jacket.
“The process of hratha is complex, and will take time. Perhaps one hour will elapse, from the commencement of the procedure to its completion. I ask you to maintain complete silence for the duration.”
Hendrick glanced at Maatje. She was staring at the alien, transfixed.
The Zuterainian reached out, touched the controls, and the pod became translucent. Hendrick stared at his daughter. He was reminded, as on that first time way back on Landsdowne, of an infant Sleeping Beauty. He felt his throat constrict and swallowed with difficulty.
The alien touched another control and the sides of the pod folded down to reveal a complex array of fine wires and capillaries connecting the computerised underside of the pod to Samantha’s skin; a thousand strands like spider’s silk entered her flesh, maintaining her suspended condition. He recalled a technician explaining the finer points of the process five years ago, but he had understood only one word in ten back then, and now had forgotten even those.
Maatje had called it magic, but he had refuted that and told her that they had only science to thank.
And now he was placing his hope in the legerdemain of an alien magician.
The Zuterainian clicked again. “For the benefit of Mr Hendrick,” the translator went on, “I will briefly explain what hratha entails, and how I achieve what is beyond the capabilities of modern human medicine.” It turned its domed head to face Hendrick. “Hratha is an ancient Zuterainian tradition of healing; my ancestors have been practising it for some ten thousand Terran years. The word ‘hra’ in my language means what you would terms as ‘soul’; ‘tha’ loosely means healer or doctor. My kind have the ability to merge with the subject on the cellular level, and effect minute but substantial changes, and then revivify the soul, breathe life back into the subject’s quiescent sensorium. My preliminary probes on your daughter lead me to believe that the probability of a successful outcome to the procedure is extremely favourable.”
The alien reached out its right hand and placed it on Samantha’s forehead. With its free hand it touched another control and said, “For hratha to succeed, it is necessary that we terminate the suspension process.”
Hendrick stepped forward. “No!” He turned to Hovarth. “I thought you said . . .”
He heard a sound behind him, and the hushed, reverential quiet of the room was shattered as Mercury Velasquez appeared in the doorway and called out, “Move your hand from the controls, Vereen, or I’ll shoot!”
Mercury leaned against the doorframe, her breath coming in spasms. She looked dead on her feet, and when she raised the stunner in her right hand she was shaking uncontrollably.
The Zuterainian stepped back, alarmed, and swung to face the intruder. “But this is unprecedented . . . !” it began.
Maatje stared at Hendrick. “You! What have you done?” she hissed.
He shook his head, torn with fear and a crushing despair that he could not begin to explain.
Mercury pushed herself from the doorframe and staggered into the room, her stunner gripped at arm’s length. She said to Maatje and Hovarth, “Stay . . . Stay where you are and don’t move—or I’ll kill the alien.”
Hovarth said, his voice tremulous with anger, “What the hell are you doing? Have you any idea what—?”
“What my intervention has prevented?” Mercury interrupted, her breathing ragged. “I know very well, Hovarth. I’m here to prevent Samantha’s irrevocable death.” She looked at the Zuterain. “Tell them!” she said. “Tell them the truth, this time.”
The alien clicked its chitinous mandibles, but the only sounds that issued from the speaker were, “But . . . I . . . You cannot . . .”
Mercury turned and stared at Hovarth, her expression twisting in sudden enlightenment. “You knew . . .” she said incredulously.
Hendrick looked at Hovarth, whose expression was one of a culprit caught in flagrante.
“My God,” Mercury said, reading Hovarth’s mind. “You knew all along, but conspired with Vereen to keep it from her . . .”
Maatje pulled herself from Hovarth’s embrace and stared at him. “Emanuel? What is she talking about
? You knew what? Tell me!”
Mercury raised her stunner and aimed it at the alien’s domed head. “Tell her!” she cried.
The mandibles chattered like castanets. “I . . . I want only the successful completion of . . . of hratha . . . I—”
“Tell the truth, damn you!” Mercury yelled. “Tell Maatje and Matt what the chances are of your damned process not working! Tell them that the odds are less than fifty-fifty! Go on, tell them what happened to your last victim!”
The alien remained silent, its great chitinous jaws working but no words issuing from the translator at its lapel.
Mercury nodded to Hovarth. “Tell them!” she said.
Hovarth swallowed, then stared from Hendrick to Maatje and across to the recumbent form of the little girl in the suspension pod. At last he found his voice. “I was doing it for you, Maatje. I . . . You don’t know how it’s pained me to see you like this . . . obsessed with nothing else but Samantha and finding a cure. I . . . I heard about the Zuterainian process of hratha, and last year on Mendallay I contacted the Krinthian and arranged a preliminary meeting with Vereen. He explained the process, explained the risks.”
Maatje stared at him, shaking her head from side to side in disbelief. “The risks? But you said the risks were minimal! You promised me that the Zuterainian would bring my daughter back to me!”
Hovarth shook his head. “I never promised,” he began.
“But you knew the risk. Less than fifty-fifty?”
Hovarth reached out to her. “Maatje, you need . . . you need resolution. This . . . This is an obsession.”
“But I want . . . I want my daughter to live!” she sobbed.
“And I want you to live, to have a future other than this . . . this continual searching for something that might never happen. Face it, Maatje, the chances of finding a cure for Samantha—”
“No!” Maatje said, shaking her head and staring at her dead daughter. “I refuse to believe . . .”
Hovarth, his expression torn between compassion for Maatje and fear of rejection, reached out and pleaded, “Please, Maatje . . .”
Sobbing, shaking her head in confusion, she stumbled into his arms.
Mercury said, softly, “Hratha is less successful with human subjects, isn’t that right, Vereen? You had second thoughts about taking on the commission, but Hovarth convinced you, along with the promise of three million units. If Samantha was unsuspended, and the hratha failed . . . then Samantha would have been dead, forever.” She stared at Maatje, compassion in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Maatje. I’m truly sorry. I hope you see why I had to . . .”
Vereen moved suddenly. Hendrick saw the saw the weapon in its left hand—an old-fashioned ballistic pistol—saw the alien train it on Mercury. He cried out a warning and dived at the alien, but not before the creature fired and the blast deafened him. He hit Vereen and rolled, and was peripherally aware that Mercury had slammed against the wall in a spray of blood.
Then Hovarth was standing over him, a weapon in his hand. He stared down at Hendrick and said something which might have been an apology. Then he pressed the firing stud.
Hendrick felt an electric blast strike his torso and pain like a coronary lanced through his chest. His last thought before unconsciousness claimed him, as he stared up at his dead daughter in the suspension pod, was how beautiful and peaceful she appeared.
He came awake and found himself lying on his bed. He recalled Mercury hitting the wall in a spray of blood and called her name, despairing.
Someone stepped from the adjoining bathroom, and he said her name again, more in disbelief this time.
“It’s okay, Matt,” Mercury said. “You’ll be okay.”
He stared at her left shoulder, encased in a synthi-flesh cast. “I saw the alien shoot you,” he managed, choking with relief.
She came to the bed, sat down and held him.
He tried to sit up, but she placed a restraining hand on his chest.
He said, “Maatje and Hovarth! I’ve got to . . .”
“They got away, Matt.”
“What happened?”
Mercury touched her shoulder. “Vereen fled. Then Hovarth fixed me up. He removed the bullet, closed the wound, then put this on.” She tapped the cast with a fingernail, smiling.
“What?”
“Then the good doctor stunned me, Matt. When I came to my senses they were gone. The house was empty.”
“The pod–?” he began.
She shook her head. “They’ve taken it, Hovarth and Maatje.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Almost a day.”
“Then they might still be on Tourmaline!”
“I doubt it,” she said softly. “There was a transmission to Earth about an hour ago.”
Despair engulfed him. He thought of all the planets in the Expansion; they might be anywhere by now.
She gripped his hand. “It’s okay, it’s fine. We’ll find them, okay? They’ll have spoken to Telemass officials in Paris, left a mind-trail I’ll be able to pick up.” She tapped her head. “I’ll trace it, and we’ll follow them to wherever they took Samantha, and we’ll get her back. I promise.”
“And I suspected you of . . .” he began, close to tears.
She squeezed his hand.
He said, considering his ex-wife and her lover, “Maatje and Ho-varth? They left together?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“I wonder . . .”
“If Maatje will ever forgive Hovarth for his lie?” She shook her head. “I read a storm of conflicting emotions in her head, Matt. Love for Hovarth, bitterness at his treachery. And Hovarth . . .”
“Yes?”
“Hovarth truly loves her, Matt. What he did was reprehensible, but he was, is, concerned for Maatje’s . . . emotional stability, let’s say.”
“He thinks . . .” Hendrick began, the words catching in his throat. “He thinks there’s no hope for Samantha?”
Silently, she nodded.
He sat up, and this time she didn’t restrain him. “When’s the next transmission to Earth?”
“The day after tomorrow. But there’s something I need to do first, here on Tourmaline. It won’t take long, I promise. Then, just as soon as I’ve finished here, we’ll head for Earth, okay?”
A little later they left the house and made their way down the track to where Mercury had concealed the land-car.
TEN
THE BECALMED STARSHIP, ITS CARAPACE EXCORIATED FROM ITS centuries-long voyage through space, hung silently above the island of Nea Cyclades. Directly below the ship was an amphitheatre, fashioned after the arena at Delphi. A thousand people filled its tiers, staring up at the ship in wonder.
The Phoenix had phased into space-norm yesterday, its crew resuscitated at the end of their five-hundred-year voyage. Hendrick wondered how they had taken the news that space had been occupied by the human race for three hundred years now, and that they, the scientists and technicians aboard the starship, were no longer pioneers at the cutting edge of human progress. Now the spacers were curiosities, anachronisms belonging to a time long gone.
The amphitheatre stood beside the small town of Atheni, where Mercury had booked a room in an old guesthouse overlooking the square.
Hendrick sat on the balcony and looked across at the amphitheatre and the looming starship. Down in the square, tourists sat outside cafés, drinking and dining in the eternal sunlight.
At a café in the square, thirty minutes from now, Mercury was due to meet a woman from the starship, an engineer who had just stepped into a future which would be new and bewildering to her.
Smiling, Mercury moved from the bedroom, adjusting her tricorne, and joined him on the balcony.
“I told you earlier about the woman from the twenty-second century, who said goodbye to her daughter five hundred years ago, said goodbye forever to the one person who meant everything to her in the world?”
“So this woman hired you to meet her daught
er,” he said, “and bring about the long awaited reunion?”
Mercury went on, “She was the woman’s only child. She’d raised her daughter to be independent, and watched her grow into a talented scientist and engineer. They were close—probably because the girl’s father had walked out on them in her infancy, throwing her and her mother into an even closer bond. Anyway, the woman watched her daughter sail through university, then join the European Space Agency, little realising that . . . that one day . . . Then a team of scientists developed suspension technology, effectively opening the stars to humanity, and the daughter applied to be an engineer aboard the first ship to leave the solar system bound for the stars. She faced the prospect of leaving Earth, and everyone she loved, forever. It was the hardest decision anyone could be asked to make, and it broke her heart. And her mother’s.”
Hendrick shook his head. “You’ve read her mind. You’ve shared her pain . . . And her joy that soon they’ll be reunited?”
He, too, could share that joy.
Mercury smiled. “The woman was not without means. She bought a suspension pod and paid for its maintenance down the centuries. She wasn’t the only one. Many other wealthy people took the opportunity of suspension technology to experience this version of time travel. But she did it because she wanted to be reunited with a loved one. She emerged from suspension every fifty years, to check on her investments, to take a look at the place the world had become. And at one awakening, two hundred and fifty years ago, she knew that her dream might one day be realised: humanity had developed Telemass technology and opened the stars to mass migration. On awakening fifty years ago, she found that the Phoenix had been discovered, sailing through the void towards Tourmaline, and that it would emerge into space-norm on what would become known as Starship Day. And mother and daughter would at last be re-united.”
Mercury reached out and gripped his hand. “Can you imagine what it was like for the mother to lose her daughter, for her to be without hope of ever holding her again, of ever loving her, laughing with her, sharing life with her . . . ?”