by Eric Brown
An announcement sounded over the tannoy. “The shuttle will leave the station in ten minutes, ladies and gentlemen. If you would like make your way to the exit . . .”
They rose, crossed the lounge, and took an umbilical through to the shuttle. Hendrick offered Mercury the window seat, then sealed himself into a gel-papoose for the descent to the surface of the planet.
• • •
The landing area was a vast expanse of decking, more like the surface of an oil-rig than a spaceport, cradled between four small mountain peaks, with a tortuous switchback road leading down to the surrounding jungle. As the shuttle came in to land, Hendrick peered past Mercury at the lake-speckled terrain—areas of brilliant blue water occupying a hundred declivities. It was odd to see such a stretch of unspoilt country without a single sign of habitation.
The shuttle touched down and rumbled to a halt. In due course the hatch opened and a stairway was lowered.
“Hey!” Hendrick exclaimed as he stood up. Gravity was lighter here on Beltran, and he felt as if he were about to float.
He followed Mercury down the stairway into the brilliant sunlight, expecting to see a terminal building of some kind.
Mercury said, “No Vhey welcoming committee, or vetting party?”
Ralph laughed. “On Beltran? They do things differently here. It might even be a while before you see your first Vhey.” He pointed across the deck to an old-fashioned flier. “Hey, there’s Akio with the transport.”
Sylvie invited them to visit their commune and transferred her code to Mercury’s wrist-com. Then the artists picked up their cases and crossed the deck to the waiting flier.
A small, plump European in a white suit hurried across the deck, waving. “Mme. Velasquez and M. Hendrick? I’m Roger Pascal, chargé d’affaires on this sequestered cul-de-sac. You’ll be my guests at the villa for the duration of your stay. I have a flier at your disposal; I’ll fill you in on anything you need to know, and then you’ll be your own agents.”
They shook hands, and Hendrick glanced at Mercury as they crossed the desk to an open-topped ground-effect vehicle. Had Pascal put a certain inflection on the last word, or was he imagining things?
Mercury quirked her lips non-committally and slipped into the back seat beside Hendrick.
Pascal drove at frightening speed down the switchback mountain road. After the full glare of the huge sun, the dappled shade of the jungle was a relief. Pascal was silent for most of the thirty-minute descent, other than to proffer the usual pleasantries concerning their journey.
They emerged from the jungle and were presented with the breathtaking sight of a blue expanse of water stretching for as far as the eye could see to the east and west, but terminating in a line of foothills and then mountains, perhaps a kilometre ahead. They came to a sprawling timber villa and the chargé d’affaires declared, “Chez Pascal. I’ll show you to your room. You can clean up, then we’ll have drinks on the verandah, yes?”
Thirty minutes later, showered and refreshed, Hendrick accompanied Mercury through the open-plan villa to a long verandah, where Pascal was waiting beside an extensive bar.
They sat in comfortable rattan chairs, with ice-cold beers, and stared in stunned silence at the magnificence of the view.
Mercury said, “You must wake up in the morning, M. Pascal, and think yourself the luckiest diplomat in the Expansion.”
Pascal almost snorted. He lifted a silver pendant on a chain about his neck, then pointed to her connected-minds symbol. “If I wasn’t wearing this,” he said, “you’d be able to read the truth.”
Hendrick stared at him. “Which is?”
“I came to detest the place,” Pascal said, “after the first three months.”
“And how long have you been here?” Mercury asked.
“Five years. You see, I have very little company. There are only a hundred or so humans on the entire planet, spread out across the face of the world. And we have few visitors.”
“But surely,” Hendrick began, “in your role as chargé d’affaires . . .”
Pascal laughed. “My title is something of a misnomer.”
Mercury said, “You must liaise with the Vhey . . .”
Pascal regarded her quizzically. “Must I? I’m sorry to disabuse your preconceived notions, but the usual interplay of cultural relations that might maintain on other planets, between races, does not occur here. We have no relations, as such, with the Vhey. They’re so utterly alien as to be . . .” He paused, staring off across the lake.
“Yes?” Mercury prompted.
“To be perfectly honest, the Vhey frighten me to death.”
Hendrick stared at the diplomat. Mercury raised an eyebrow. “And why is that?”
Pascal took a while before replying. “As you’ll no doubt find out, the Vhey are utterly different to anything you’ll have experienced before. They’re difficult to interact with, as you would with other sentient races.”
He leaned forward and went on, “The Vhey are intently interested in us, in we humans, and study us with an intensity that is disconcerting—and they give absolutely nothing in return. This place”—he gestured around the verandah—”might seem like paradise, but it’s like living in a . . . a terrarium, with curious onlookers examining your every move. They’re all around, you know, creeping through the jungle like ghosts. And when you do come face to face with them . . .” He shook his head. “They act and move in such an odd manner that they make you ill at ease.” He looked from Hendrick to Mercury. “I can see that you don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, but all I can say is that you’ll see what I mean if you meet the Vhey.”
Pascal saw that their drinks were almost empty and suggested another round. While he was at the bar, Hendrick glanced at the jungle beyond the verandah, a tangle of deep green, serrated leaves, and huge tropical blooms. All was still in the heat, and silent. It was odd to think that curious aliens were observing them.
Pascal returned from the bar with their refilled glasses.
Mercury said, “So if you don’t have to discharge the normal duties of a planetary diplomat, just what do you do with your time?”
“I write holo-dramas for a distribution company on the colony world of Addenbrooke.” He shrugged. “It keeps me occupied.”
“You said there are about a hundred humans on Beltran at present,” Mercury said. “How many do you get passing through?”
Pascal took a long drink. “I’m lucky if I see a friendly face twice a year, Terran.”
“Do you see every visitor who comes in on the shuttle?” Hendrick asked.
“Not every one.”
“Yesterday,” Mercury said, “two people—a Dutch national Maatje van der Muellen, and a Hungarian surgeon, Dr Emanuel Hovarth—Telemassed here from Berlin. Did you . . . ?”
“Ola Nordqvist mentioned your interest in the couple,” Pascal said. “Unfortunately they met a contact at the port before I could introduce myself.”
“A contact?” Mercury said.
“Edward Lincoln, a crystal artist who lives on a commune a few hundred kilometres north of here.”
Hendrick exchanged a glance with Mercury, who said, “It must be the same commune that Sylvie and Ralph Cartwright belong to.”
“That’s right,” Pascal said. “I’ve met the Cartwrights.” He hesitated. “Might I ask why you’re interested in van der Muellen and Hovarth?”
“We’ve been hired by Ola Nordqvist and her department to keep an eye on them while they’re on Beltran,” Mercury said.
Hendrick asked, “What do you know about the artists’ commune, and Edward Lincoln?”
Pascal puckered his lips in a typically Gallic gesture. “I’ve met him once or twice, but I can’t claim to know him. He came over as . . . odd, slightly manic. Apparently he’s a highly talented and respected crystal artist. His work’s been exhibited to acclaim all around the Expansion.”
“Does Lincoln have especial contact with the Vhey?” Mercury a
sked.
Pascal hesitated, regarding his beer. At last he said, “I don’t know whether Edward himself has . . . what you call especial contact . . . but there’s something about that commune . . .”
Hendrick exchanged a glance with Mercury. She said, “Something about?”
Pascal looked uneasy. “I went up there, once. Only once. Never again.”
After a silence, Mercury prompted, “Why not?”
“You know what I said earlier about being observed by the Vhey? Well, the artists at the commune . . . they openly invite the Vhey to . . . to study them, almost. They told me that they have a contract with the aliens: they’re allowed to remain in the mountains, in their commune, so long as they open themselves to inspection.”
Hendrick nodded. “The Cartwrights mentioned the agreement.”
Mercury said, “It’s perfectly understandable, isn’t it? Opening up their commune in order to be given leave to remain?”
The silence stretched. Pascal regarded his glass, swirling the dregs uneasily. He looked up. What he said next surprised Hendrick. “Did you know that the Vhey have what they call, in their own language, sacred zones?”
Mercury repeated the words, shaking her head. “No. I read nothing about such zones, and Nordqvist and Caruthers mentioned nothing.”
“Sacred zones are . . . well, I don’t really know what they are, which is the point. They’re secret areas high in the mountains, out of bounds to humans. The Vhey . . . they do things there.”
Mercury opened her eyes wide in surprise. “Do things?”
“I got lost once, flying to a human outpost two thousand miles north of here. It’s easy to do, as there’s no facility for satellite navigation, there being no satellites. You fly the old-fashioned way—by compass. Well, the fliers are programmed with coordinates, but it’s still easy to lose one’s way.”
“What happened?” Hendrick asked.
“I was coming in high over a mountain when I saw lights in the jungle below, a series of almost phosphorescent emanations, almost like smoke, but—and I know this sounds crazy—but shaped, sculpted.”
“Representing what?” Mercury asked.
Pascal shook his head. “They represented nothing. At least, nothing that made sense to me. They were abstract shapes, and I don’t know whether it was this that I found so terrifying, or a sense of something . . . something malign . . . rising from the jungle far below. I got the hell out and eventually returned here, accessed the com cache and found that the area I’d overflown was a Vhey sacred zone.” He looked from Hendrick to Mercury. “And believe me, I don’t ever want to do that again.”
Mercury sat back in her seat and stretched out her long legs. “But to get back to the commune . . . What do the sacred zones have to do with the artists, M. Pascal?”
He nodded and finished his drink. “About a year ago a young woman contacted me, asked if she could stay here the night before taking the shuttle up to the Telemass Station. She was from the commune. Over dinner that evening she told me she was leaving the commune, as she’d experienced something that had . . . that had disturbed her. And I can tell you that she was upset, even frightened.”
“Did she tell you what she’d experienced?” Hendrick asked.
“She said that a group of Vhey had entered the compound of the commune and spoken with Edward Lincoln.”
“Just a minute,” Mercury interrupted. “He spoke their language, or did the Vhey . . . ?”
Pascal said, “Some of the Vhey have mastered a rudimentary form of English. Anyway, they can communicate if they choose to.”
“What happened?”
“The girl told me that the Vhey left with a woman—of the woman’s own free will, she said—and that that night the commune celebrated. When the girl asked Edward where the alien had taken the woman, he said that she’d gone to the sacred zone. The thing is, the girl remained at the commune for another four months, and the woman never returned—and when she asked Edward if the woman would come back, he told her that she’d elected to remain with the Vhey: she was, Edward Lincoln told her, now Exalted.”
Mercury whispered, “Exalted? What the hell does that mean?”
Pascal shook his head. “Edward didn’t say. But it spooked the kid, and that’s why she decided to get out.”
Trust Maatje, Hendrick thought, to get herself entangled with these people.
“So you see why the commune makes me . . . uneasy, to say the least?” Pascal finished.
Mercury sipped her drink. “I think it’d be wise, Matt, to drop in on the commune and see what’s going on.” To Pascal she said, “I have Sylvie Cartwright’s com-code. I’ll contact her and arrange to stay.”
Hendrick said, “We could leave this evening.”
“I wouldn’t advise that,” Pascal said. “It’s sunset in just over an hour, and it would take you at least six hours to reach the commune. Please, stay the night, have dinner with me, and take a flier in the morning.”
Hendrick wanted nothing more than to follow this latest lead, but he didn’t like the idea of flying blind through the alien night. He exchanged a glance with Mercury, and agreed.
Pascal stood up. “Excellent. I’ll go and sort out a meal. I have pre-prepared cuisine ’massed in from the finest Paris kitchens,” he said. “One of the only perks of the post.”
He refilled their drinks and left them to enjoy the view.
“Why am I not the slightest bit surprised,” Hendrick said when they were alone, “that Maatje sought out the commune?”
They dined on the verandah, and the food was as good as Pascal had suggested. He even broke out a bottle of rosé from a vineyard near his birthplace of St. Tropez.
He told them about the planet, and it wasn’t long before he returned to the subject of the Vhey. As the huge sun sank behind the mountains on the far side of the lake, filling the air with a pastel light not unlike the wine they were enjoying, Pascal announced that one of the Vhey’s oddities was their belief system. Every individual alien, Pascal said, believed that they were possessed by the spirits of their ancestors.
“So speaking to a Vhey—which I’ve done only once in all my five years here—is made all the more problematic because you’re addressing not only the alien in the here and now, but the spirits of the long dead.”
They watched the last of the sun’s light dwindle over the mountains; two small moons, pale blue against the darkening sky, rose slowly one after the other. The night remained warm. A while later they finished their wine and Hendrick and Mercury said goodnight, left the diplomat on the verandah, and made their way inside.
Hendrick paused on the threshold and looked back. Pascal was opening another bottle of rosé, a lonely figure sequestered far from home on a strange, alien world.
FOUR
HENDRICK WAS DRIFTING INTO SLEEP WHEN SOMETHING jerked him back to full consciousness.
He sat up, blinking. Moonlight cascaded through the floor-to-ceiling window to the right of the bed. He blinked out at the shimmering lake and the dark jungle. Before going to bed, Mercury had opened the window to admit a cooling breeze. He was sure he’d heard a sound from outside.
“Matt? What is it?”
“I heard . . .” he began.
“It’s only Pascal, stumbling to bed after too much wine.” She touched the bedside light and smiled up at him.
“Oh.” He collapsed back to the pillow.
Mercury sat up suddenly, her head cocked. “Mercury?”
She indicated the wall. “Pascal’s bedroom is next to ours.”
“So?”
“I thought I’d better check. I activated my tele-ability, and I was right.”
“About?”
“You know he wore his shield on a chain around his neck? Well, I wondered if he’d take it off when he went to bed. He did, and dropped it on the floor with the rest of his clothes.”
“And you’re reading him?”
She nodded, a frown of concentration drawing her dark eyeb
rows together.
He was conscious of his own thoughts being open to her. They had an agreement, arrived at early in their relationship, that she wouldn’t access her tele-ability in his presence without getting his permission first.
“Right,” she said two minutes later. “I’m no longer reading.”
“Learn anything?”
“He fears the Vhey more than he was letting on. He sees them as a malign presence.”
“For any particular reason?”
Mercury frowned. “Something he didn’t tell us. Shortly after his posting here he had a run in with a native. He was taking a walk along a pathway through the jungle near the villa, and . . . and one of the Vhey climbed onto his back.”
“Climbed? No wonder he was spooked. Why the hell . . . ?”
She shook her head. “That’s what freaked him out so much, Matt—the sheer arbitrariness of it. The creature simply emerged silently from the jungle, scooted up his legs and onto his back, then a few seconds later leapt off. But it left him with a strange feeling . . . a sensation . . . in his head—and the odd thing is that I’m getting an after-echo of that feeling now, and I don’t like it.”
“Can you describe it?”
“About as well as I can describe a colour you’ve never seen.”
“Touché.”
“It’s . . . deeply unsettling, like . . . you know when you awake after a nightmare, and you can’t quite recall what the nightmare was about but it leaves you with an inexplicable, indescribable sense of dread? Well, it’s like that. It haunts him.”
“No wonder he doesn’t love the place.”
“And now it haunts me.” She smiled at him. “But don’t worry, I’m used to being burdened with other people’s demons.”
He lay back down and she hugged him. “And don’t worry about Sam. Chances are that the reason Maatje and Hovarth came here has nothing to do with her, okay?”
He smiled, and she reached out and turned off the light. Hendrick lay in the moonlight, far from convinced.
He was awoken again, what seemed like minutes later, by the touch of Mercury’s hand on the small of his back. She was sitting up in the moonlight, her head cocked. Something in her alert posture told him she was reading.