by A. A. Ripley
She looked at her companions and realised that all three of them had slowed down considerably. Alan’s arms slumped, his head resting between his shoulders, and Hijinks’ step became shorter and more deliberate. Would none of them call an end to this drawn-out day?
‘How about a rest?’ she said, stopping in mid-stride.
‘We need to keep going, or we’ll never get out of here,’ mumbled Alan, just before stumbling.
‘Inan’s right,’ said Hijinks, a bit short of breath. Inan knew that Hijinks would never let them know, but as the eldest she must have felt the strain the most.
They had chosen a strong, gnarly tree with balls of fruit clustered around the young off-shoots. They stretched the hydrophobic material in the fork of a branch, creating a small “nest” suspended above the ground. Inan was reluctant to sit in it, doubting that the branch would hold them, but it didn’t bend even a little, its limbs stout as steel beams. Alan took a place beside her, but Hijinks just stretched herself on the branch, letting her hands and legs hang freely on both sides.
‘Sleep well,’ said Hijinks, seconds before dozing off.
Inan was so tired that she expected to fall asleep instantly. But instead she lay on her back, unsleeping and unmoving. Sleep seemed to have forgotten her, leaving to wander the alien forest instead. Above her, the tangled headdresses of the treetops swayed gently, letting the shiny pinpricks of the stars reach her swollen eyes. The air smelled of still-drying soil, a scent tinged with a spicy undertone like an exotic balsam. Underneath their hammock, the night life was hooting and chirping and calling in the wild voices of an alien forest, oblivious to the three of them hiding in the gnarly tree.
‘Inan.’ She heard her name spoken, barely audible above the sounds of the night. ‘Inan, are you awake?’
Next to her, Alan was glowing softly. She could see the warmth of his body in the darkness lingering under the jungle’s canopy. She thought briefly about not answering, about pretending she was sleeping deeply.
‘I’m awake,’ she said finally. She heard Alan take a deep breath, as though he was about to dive into deep water.
‘I… shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have blamed you for… all this.’
‘But you were right, you know. It is my fault we are here,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have… I should have listened to you, to both of you.’
Alan was silent for a moment.
‘Nobody made me come with you,’ he said. ‘And I could have walked out at any moment. Gone back to Middlelink. Taken the first ship that would take me off Amalonde. I didn’t.’
‘But Ure now has the disc and the coordinates. And is going to sell them to Cochrane and then… who knows what he is going to do with it?’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t matter if I was right or not. I still shouldn’t have said that.’
Inan thought of a response, but kept silent. She had the feeling that Alan had not finished yet.
‘I think I panicked. It is just that feeling. To be stuck. I have felt that way for as long as I can remember, stuck between the pirates, stuck with Maud.’
He fell silent just for a brief moment.
‘Until I met you. Meeting you and Hijinks gave me this idea that maybe… maybe I didn’t have to be stuck anymore.’
Inan thought back to the warship and its unending corridors, to the tight faces of humans living aboard it and to the bare quarters that were their entire world for so many days. She thought about how it would be to spend years on Napoleon, with an insane computer for a friend and a sadistic caretaker for a family.
‘That is how you came up with the escape plan from the Napoleon,’ she said finally.
‘Yes. I had to do a lot of thinking after you came aboard. And when I finally understood that you were not a monster, I was jealous.’
‘Jealous?’
‘Of places and people you spoke of. But going is easy; being in strange places is not. In Middlelink—’
Something rustled underneath them; some unseen creature moved the leaves of the undergrowth. A throaty grunt came from below like the sound from a creature that tries to chew a piece of food too big for its mouth.
‘Do you think it can climb?’ whispered Inan. Alan said nothing. Inan heard a scraping sound, like a beast clawing its way up the trunk; its rough and scaly stomach grating on the bark. Inan could almost feel it now, the presence of this creature under their resting place.
‘Don’t move,’ Alan breathed into her ear.
The grating got even louder and it was joined by a gurgle-panting, as though the creature was salivating at the thought of eating the strange pouch hanging from the branch. At any moment Inan expected the sharp fangs of the unseen monster to tear at the cloth, ripping it to shreds, biting into her skin and tearing into her flesh in a feeding frenzy.
Inan couldn’t sit still anymore. Suddenly all her fear slipped away from her like water from well-groomed scales. Instead, she felt a bright pulse of anger. She would absolutely not let herself be eaten by some tree-climbing creature.
‘What are you doing?’ hissed Alan. She reached out to the closest fruit cluster and tore off a few round pieces. She started pelting the ground below them as hard as she could. The fruit rained down on the ground and bounced like small rubber balls, scattering among the plants below them. Alan joined her and soon they were both hurling down fruit like fragrant, sap-dripping hail.
The grating on the tree bark stopped. For a couple of heartbeats there was a deafening silence below their nesting place. Then came a crash as the creature jumped off the trunk in pursuit of the bouncing fruit, trampling the plants. Then it was gone.
‘How did you know what it wanted?’ asked Alan.
Inan tried to say something smart. Something that would prove that she knew what she was doing, such as the creature would be highly unlikely to be after them as they wouldn’t resemble anything native to the planetoid. Or maybe that she wanted to make enough noise to convince the creature that something much larger was coming.
‘I didn’t,’ she said instead. ‘I just got angry.’
She realised just how silly that sounded, but Alan didn’t seem to care.
‘Well, it worked,’ he said, peering down from their nest. ‘I hope it will be satisfied with what we gave it.’
‘I just hope it won’t be back for more,’ said Inan, releasing the breath she didn’t know she was holding.
‘Quiet,’ murmured Hijinks, who hadn’t even stirred through it all and slept soundly on her branch.
*
They continued their march the next day, when the sun was already well on its way along the sky.
Finally, to Inan’s delight, the coarse face of the rock started to peek from among the trees. The path took them right up to the mesa and they started to climb it. After a few metres they realised that they needed to find another way up. The path was no more. Between the smooth rock of the mesa and the sharp drop on the other side there was jumbled rubble; a mess of tree branches, strangely twisted roots mixed with mud and rocks, threatening to cause a mudslide and bury anyone who was foolish enough to try and climb it.
‘We are not going to try it, are we?’ said Inan. Instead of replying, Alan stabbed the rubble with a fallen branch. In response, some mud slid off the top and engulfed the branch and Alan’s hand with it. He pulled it out with some effort and wiped it on his clothes. Hijinks wasn’t listening. Instead of searching for an alternative path or a passage between the heaps of soil, the marsupial had her head thrown back, seemingly scouting the trees that had their branches reaching beyond the rubble and the stone face of the rock.
‘This one is sufficient,’ she said, pointing to a tall tree rising above their heads and spreading its limbs over the ledge of the path leading to the top of the mesa.
‘You want us to climb it?’ said Inan.
‘I don’t really like the idea either, but that looks like our only option,’ said Alan, tracing the tree with his eyes, higher and higher, until he couldn’t lift his head any higher. Inan followed Alan’s gaze. The tree was barely able to earn that name. It looked more like a fleshy stalk, so thick that the three of them weren’t able to encircle it with their hands. Its dark plum-coloured limbs were a cross between a branch and a leaf; dense, heavy and veiny. Their rigid structure curved towards the sky and ended with a fruit, round and hard. The places where the branches or leaves connected to the trunk created small hollows where water from the recent rain glistened in the sun.
‘Observe,’ said Hijinks, grabbing the first leaf-bough and pulling herself up. Inan watched Hijinks the way one might watch a particularly adventurous insect climbing a sharp straw – with a mixture of wonderment and nervousness. A tailless and clawless creature, encumbered by a coil of cable around her waist, should always be a step away from slipping and plunging down to the ground. Yet Hijinks climbed steadily and expertly, undeterred by the smoothness of the trunk or the swaying of the leafy branches.
‘Grandma has some moves,’ said Alan, unconcealed admiration in his voice.
The marsupial was high above their heads now, a brighter purple spot among the darker canopies. Finally, Inan lost sight of her as Hijinks’ furry shape disappeared among the leaf-branches.
‘Hijinks?’ called Inan, unsettled by the silence and the stillness of the tree.
Something slid down from among the leaves, dark and long like a snake. For a second Inan thought that it was another alien creature come out to see if they qualified as a snack. Then she realised that was just the cable Hijinks had been hauling up the tree.
‘Climb!’ called the marsupial from above.
Inan climbed, avoiding the moist and slippery hollows and helping herself with her claws to gain stability on the way up. She knew better than to look down, having climbed enough trees since her hatchlinghood. Finally, she reached the bough where the cable was attached, the one reaching the path above the rubble.
She took a cautious step along the spine of the bough and then another one, before she realised that she would be more stable and less prone to loss of balance if she went down on her knees. She lowered herself carefully, trying not to rock the leaf, and grabbed the sides, sinking her talons into the fleshy plant. Stretching her tail to add balance, she moved carefully, sliding her knees forward one at a time, using her hands and talons to steady her progress. Bit by bit, she followed the darker curvature of the leaf’s spine until it reached the face of the rock. Then she lifted herself just a little bit, so that she could grab the ledge and pull herself up onto the path above.
She found herself standing on the path leading to the top of the mesa, the gravel under her feet feeling crisp and crunchy after the spongy texture of the leaf-boughs.
Inan looked back, trying to see how far Alan had progressed along the leaf. But he hadn’t. He was still standing in the hollow of the branch, his back glued to the trunk.
‘Come on over,’ called Inan to him.
‘You know, Inan,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I like heights very much.’
‘What?’ said Inan. ‘You were raised on a spaceship. Have you never been out on a hull?’
‘Yes,’ he said, looking paler and paler with every second. ‘But you can’t actually fall from it, you know?’
‘How did you get so high then?’
‘I looked up and pretended there was no down,’ he said.
Inan thought that might have been a good strategy going up, but it was a completely useless one to employ while going across. She sighed. So much for being a primate.
Inan thought to look for Hijinks, who should be somewhere around here, but then thought that she might not even understand what the problem was. Ki-jirai were arboreal species; branches were to them equal to the ground beneath their feet. Inan recalled that there was one thing that would help a hatchling stuck on the end of a bonsa tree, when the sticky-sweet treat at the end of the fruiting cluster was already eaten and the only way back was to brave the narrow branch again.
She took a few steps, back onto the leaf-branch. It was easier going this way from the thinner to thicker part. Soon she was next to Alan, who was still standing with his back to the trunk.
Inan looked into his eyes and spoke with as much conviction as possible.
‘You are a little garri-shuffler.’
‘A what?’
‘Garri-shuffler is a bird that lives high in the branches, but doesn’t fly,’ said Inan. ‘I will show you how it teaches little garri-shufflers to walk.’
She coaxed him to stand sideways on the branch. She stretched her tail and kept it rigid, to gain counterbalance. One arm she put around Alan’s shoulder, like the flightless bird taking its chick under the wing. Alan’s lack of tail, and the additional balance it granted, worried her but she could see no other way.
‘Look ahead,’ she said. ‘And take a step with me.’
Inch by inch they shuffled along the branch, like the galaxy’s worst caterpillar. Each time Inan thought Alan’s balance was wavering, she steadied him and urged him forward, knowing that each second spent suspended above the ground was one more second spent fighting for equilibrium.
Their aerial walk seemed to take forever, but finally they arrived onto the gravelled path on the side of the rock. They reached the top of the mesa without further incident.
*
The space-lift was sitting in the middle of the mesa, surrounded by a couple of shipping containers. It was a very simple one. The main cabin was just a torus, nestled within the arms of the power batteries that would provide the initial lift-off, before the auxiliary thrusters could take over. The stem of the construction rose from the epicentre of the torus, a thick multi-steel spire that went upwards for a hundred metres before tapering slowly into a thread so thin one would need a powerful microscope to see it. The thread was only a few atoms wide and weighed next to nothing. This thread was what would guide the cumbersome cabin up into orbit, towards a docking station. Inan hoped that the expedition’s spaceship was still there, waiting for its crew that would not come back.
Inside the cabin was mostly cargo area as the lift served primarily to bring the equipment down to the surface of the planetoid. Tucked away under thick, horizontal slit-windows there was a small area created especially to keep sentient beings comfortable during transit. Inan hoped that the journey up would be short. The seats were all worn and dilapidated and she spotted a pool of a sticky substance under one of them that she suspected of being leaked hydraulic fluid.
Hijinks powered up the controls. They started up slowly, as though waking up from a heavy slumber. Inan realised that she was holding her breath, only half-expecting the machine to come to life.
‘Let’s get out of this planetoid,’ said Alan.
‘Sealing the hatch,’ responded Hijinks.
The loading bay door lifted, pulled up by the hydraulic struts, and closed with a satisfying thump.
The console gave a tortured screech. The screen filled with a status report, all in red script. A grudging beep came from a damaged speaker.
“Pressurisation System Test: failed,” it said.
‘What just happened?’ said Inan, clinging to the hope that it was something minor. ‘What does it mean?’
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ said Alan.
‘Can’t pressurise the cabin – no oxygen up there,’ added Hijinks.
Inan felt like a starving person who discovers that the invitation for a meal was a joke.
‘You can fix it Hijinks, right? You can fix anything!’
Hijinks looked at her but said nothing. Instead, she started to look over the hatch, feeling the edge with probing fingers.
‘We should probably leave her with that,’ said Inan, expecting the expletives to
start pouring out of Hijinks’ mouth any time now.
They went outside, not knowing exactly what to do. Inan spotted a shape peering from behind the cargo containers. It was the missing all-terrain vehicle that belonged to the expedition. The vehicle was lying on its side next to the power battery, like a dead creature shot down by unknown hunters.
Inan climbed to the door and lowered herself inside and reached around. The interior was murky, the windows already covered by a film of reddish dust.Something fell down and rolled between the seats. Inan bent over and reached around in the crevices of the vehicle, trying to reach the object. She pulled out something glossy and flat. She turned it around in her fingers, unsure of what it was. The object came to life, silently filling the interior of the vehicle with pale light. Something shimmered on the surface and the light congealed into a picture. The picture gained focus and Inan could see now that it was a La-Abian female, both of her heads turned to look at something out of the frame.
‘Is that Linai-Linai?’ asked Alan.
‘I don’t know,’ said Inan.
The picture changed. Now it showed a human male, with the same La-Abian, measuring a long artefact. A female vamess was in the background, working on her comm-pad.
‘Members of the expedition, I think,’ said Inan.
Inan kept looking at the cycling images. The pictures of the expedition were of different species, different genders, different shapes, but all of them were busy working, or resting, or socialising. The people nullified by the Hidden Dwellers had gained faces. They were no longer just part of an expedition, they were persons. Persons that were no longer part of reality.
Inan watched the pictures, trying to commit to memory each one, until the charge in the picture frame ran out and the light disappeared from the interior of the vehicle.
‘We should take it with us,’ said Alan, and Inan agreed silently. She pocketed the frame and the last memory of the people who had come here before them.
It took some time for Hijinks to patch up the seal, but after a barrage of curses was silenced, and bits and scraps of materials were swept away, they were ready to leave.