A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  Michal waited a cautious minute, looking this way and that, before returning on board. He found Shah on her knees on the deck, carefully smoothing out the screw of paper with its innocuous information that had laid all she cared about in ruins, while large slow tears slid down her cheeks.

  At his footfall she lifted her face and smiled at him, tragedy bright in her eyes. “You see? Nostalgia can make fools of us all.”

  Michal’s experience of women may have been limited, but his instincts were good. He said, “I slipped in the oil and hurt my ankle. You would not have a bandage?”

  She found one in a plastic box with a red cross on it. By the time she had applied it to her complete satisfaction she had regained mastery of herself. She patted his strapped ankle as she might have patted a dog and rolled his trouser-leg down over it; and Michal, leaning forward with sudden, impetuous urgency, caught her wrists in his hands and her eyes in his solemn, intense gaze. “Lady –”

  “Shah,” she said, not for the first time.

  “Shah. Please, do not let us come between you.”

  She shook her head very slightly. “I don’t understand.”

  “I am not a spy,” hissed Michal, gripping her still. “I do not know what is between you and Paul. But I do know my world and my people, and all of Mithras would not weigh as a falling leaf beside the things you share. There is nothing and no-one here worth risking your happiness for.”

  He finally released her hands, but neither of them moved. Touched, Shah murmured, “Michal, what can you possibly know of my happiness?”

  He almost laughed. “Sweet heaven, lady, I have read less in long books than in your face when Paul is near you. When he enters a room you glow sun-bright, and when he leaves that glow fades. I believe this is – love?”

  It was a moment before Shah answered, and then her voice was low. “It is. But still it has little to do with happiness.”

  “I would not know. Here there is neither. Shah, do not stay. Make him take you away, before –” He stopped abruptly.

  “Before?”

  Michal’s face wrung. “My life, if a word of this should reach the lady Amalthea –”

  “It won’t. Michal, are we in danger here?”

  He shook his head. His eyes were fraught. “I do not know. Truly, Shah, I would tell you if I did. I know of no plot against you – but –”

  Shah tried his mind and found it ingenuous. He had a child’s conscience. There was no deceit in him. She liked him. Whatever Paul said, she trusted him. “But?”

  “Try to understand. The Hive is not a real community, growing and developing as real communities do through the making of families and the rearing of children. In its present form our culture has no future. We have wealth and comfort and art, and the leisure to enjoy these things, but if we stay on Mithras the people of the Hive will be extinct in fifty years, leaving the place to the Drones who were here before we came. That is a bitter truth to contemplate, and it makes my people bitter too: angry and bitter and uncaring. We behave as people with a future do not. I do not know what will become of us, but I fear that if you stay you will become cruel and uncaring too. I do not know if my people would hurt you. I believe Amalthea will use you, if she can. But more than that, I fear that Mithras will make you as it made us. Here even hard metal is corrupted.”

  “It has to be admitted,” Amalthea told Paul, her tone humorous, her eyes calculating, “that greed was the main reason for our predicament. We came to Mithras because there were materials we needed to repair our star-drive system. When we found there were other materials that we wanted –” she flashed her jewelled fingers under his nose – “avarice persuaded us to stay and garner them, and by the time we were satisfied with our crop it was no longer possible for us to leave.”

  The first explosive malfunction aboard the frigate “Galactic Dragon” had plunged her into uncharted regions far beyond Amalthea’s archipelago empire. Like a wandering asteroid she drifted down the dark tunnel of superspace until, velocity slowly leeching away to entropy, she was finally spewed out into a new galaxy with alien suns and, at length, a small green planet whose spectograph promised rare minerals to heal the damaged systems.

  “Galactic Dragon” took up a parking orbit around the world they called Mithras while surface parties went down in landers. They found wonderful things. Their reports brought the Empress herself and almost everyone else down to Mithras in every serviceable tender.

  They found gems as big as eggs nestling in the roots of trees or peeping strabismically out of the rocks. They found nuggets of gold and nodules of silver strewn casually along the banks and beds of streams. They found diamond-pipes prolific as conveyor-belts, spilling out rivers of blue clay and white fire. They found they had only to take an afternoon’s stroll with a few hand-tools in a sack to return rich beyond the wildest of their very wild dreams.

  They found that by the time they thought of going back to “Galactic Dragon” with the minerals needed to repair her, the small craft which were their only link with her had incubated a strange leprosy in the damp sweet air. Their outer skins had rotted into holes, and in their delicate inner workings cogs tooled to within a thousandth of an inch were dissolving into a thick metallic soup. Amalthea remembered, still vivid after fifteen years, standing with her chief engineer in the bowels of her personal barge and listening to the slow drip of corruption all around her. None of the many craft that had put down on Mithras ever left it.

  For some years, as trapped in their orbiting prison as were the landing parties below, the skeleton crew left aboard “Galactic Dragon” circled aimlessly in their crippled ark. Then the pull of a stray comet so elongated the ellipse of her track that she broke away from Mithras and went once more wandering in the void and was not seen again.

  For most of the Mithraians the loss of the “Dragon” signalled the end of their hope. While their mother-ship had held station with the planet, capable of sending radio messages to any other nomads who might chance along, they enshrined the expectation of ultimate rescue. They yoked the Drones and built the Hive, and went on collecting jewels and precious metals until the treasure occupied all available space, in the firm belief that this year or next, or the one after that, they would be discovered and conveyed back to some civilisation which would put a proper value on the fruits of their labours.

  The loss of their radio beacon destroyed that hope. Just as surely as they had once believed rescue inevitable, now they believed it impossible. In deepest despair, they would have lain down and died, or killed one another for the distraction, had not the Empress Amalthea taken the situation in hand. It was her iron will that kept them building and working long after a Hive capable of meeting their requirements was complete, and it was her intuition that drove the engineers and science officers from the “Galactic Dragon” in pursuit of a radio system employing hard gems and soft metals.

  Their success after more than a decade of endeavour enabled Amalthea to send the message that would end the isolation of the Hive people. But almost none of them understood why she had summoned not a passenger ship but a battle-cruiser.

  “Pirates,” said Amalthea. “It was entirely in keeping with our luck so far that the first distress signal broadcast by our new transmitter should be intercepted by someone whose preferred solution to our problem was to put us out of our misery. They first came a year ago. We beat them off. Four months later they were back; more of them. This time we bought them off – the alternative was having the Hive destroyed about our ears. I paid them tribute: I, an empress.

  “They said they would return for the next instalment when we had had time to collect it. I knew they would return; but I will not be humbled before them a second time. I kept signalling. Finally my message reached you. I will gladly pay what they would take, because when you blast their ship all over this spiral arm the shock-waves will keep anyone else from ever trying the same thing. I want an explosion that will be heard clear across the galaxy, Paul. Then we
will think of leaving here, with our belongings, in our own good time.”

  “You want me to blow them out of the sky? I can do it, but that way you won’t get your tribute back.”

  Amalthea eyed him sharply. “What are you saying – that you can capture their ship?”

  “Unless they prefer to die.”

  The Empress bristled. “They will die anyway.”

  “So long as you don’t tell them that while they still have the choice.”

  Her pale brow, smooth and soft as vellum, wrinkled quizzically. “Does it not bother you that I am proposing to massacre men from whom you have wrung a submission?”

  “Not enormously. I don’t care that much what happens to people who prey on defenceless settlers.” He grinned suddenly. “To be entirely frank, I don’t care all that much more what happens to the defenceless settlers.”

  Amalthea laughed richly. “As long as it does not happen while they owe you money. I admire ruthlessness, Paul. I just hope you fight as hard as you talk.”

  Paul shrugged. “If I don’t win, you don’t have to pay me.”

  “If you do not win, I expect there to be nothing left to pay.”

  Shah and Michal were still in the shuttle. Neither was anxious to return to the Hive, of for different reasons. Shah was turning the communication from “Gyr” in her hands. To say it had caused such trouble, it was a non-committal sort of thing.

  Michal nodded at it. “Can you tell me what it says?”

  Shah looked up, a little vaguely. “Mm? Oh – yes, of course, there’s nothing in the least bit sensitive about it. It says there is no evidence of settlements anywhere on the planet except here, but that small groups – Drone families? – are scattered fairly evenly across the surface with a slight increase in density in the neighbourhood of the Hive. It found no indications of building except here and no sign of technology except here. In short, it agrees with Amalthea: the only Mithraians worth talking about are the Hive people.”

  “I could have told you that,” said Michal.

  “Yes, but you could have been mistaken.”

  “Is it important?”

  For a moment she considered telling him about herself and the image she had received; but Paul’s wishes weighed more heavily with her than a mere whim or inclination of her own. She was also conscious that what Michal did not know he could not be pressed for: she was less afraid of his betraying her to Amalthea than that he might suffer at the Empress’s hands rather than do so.

  “Not important. But I’m curious. We aren’t all space travellers from earliest childhood. My experience of worlds is very limited – I want to see something of this one. The Hive’s impressive, but it’s not all Mithras. I want to know what else there is here. I want to see how the Drones live, and what kind of trees they sit under. I want to see what colour the sunsets are, and whether there is a Milky Way when the moons go down. I want to see if maybe your rainbows are straight. Come on.” She jumped up, grabbing his hand. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Michal stared at her, appalled. “A walk? Out there? By the trees?”

  “Into the trees,” Shah said firmly. “But only if you want to.”

  He exhaled, relieved. “Good. I do not.”

  “Then I’ll see you back at the Hive, later.”

  “No!” Michal shouldered his trepidation like a physical burden. “No. I will come.”

  Chapter Four

  Michal did not know why he was so afraid. He was too young to remember with any clarity the settlers’early ventures into the forest, and tales of them were not spoken. All he knew was that once the great clearing had been made and the Hive begun no-one from the “Galactic Dragon” essayed the woods again. The trees were not forbidden them: there was no need, people were only too happy to stay within the fastness of their own compound. Everything they needed was there: mines and brickfields and hydroponic farms that grew all their food. The clearing was all their world. If a particularly shiftless Drone decided he had had enough of servitude and slunk back into the trees, no-one followed: there was no shortage of Drones ready to trade labour of a kind for easy meals. In the forest they lived as gatherers, working harder for less food than they did as serfs of the Hive. There were no Hive children to stray into the crowding thicket. Amalthea’s empire now was a cleared circle that a man could cross in an hour and walk round in half a day, with the high broad dome of the Hive looming, vastly out of proportion to its surroundings, at the centre.

  Fields and tanks fringed the great structure, where worked most of those Mithraians whose duties took them outside, supervising small armies of toiling field-Drones. The fields extended almost to the naked no-man’s-land where Paul had landed the shuttle. Also clustered towards the perimeter were the mine-workings – after fifteen years the Mithraians had been reduced to digging for their treasures – a number of small oil-wells, brick kilns and hamlets of long low shelters where the Drones lived. None of these structures encroached upon the earth break: the Hive people did not expect invasion from the forest but nor did they propose to provide cover for anything coming that way. The break was continually scoured of all vegetation, and supervising the work was the most unpopular task in the Hive, for it took the overseers into closer proximity with the forest than any of their colleagues. There was no perimeter fence as such, but the sunlight reaching under the edgemost trees grew a dense thicket of mixed greenery like an unbroken circular hedge.

  Pushing through that hedge in the wake of an alien girl whose curiosity amounted in the circumstances almost to insanity, who had neither a notion what they might encounter beyond it nor any obvious means of dealing with danger, was the bravest thing Michal had ever done. But his whirling emotions would have been in yet greater turmoil if he had known how Shah’s nerves were leaping beneath her guise of self-confidence. Paul would have seen the too-bright eyes, the too-quick smile, the excessive resolution in the set of her wide shoulders, the subtle over-animation of her long body, and would have known; but Paul was not there.

  Shah knew the fringing thicket was not an impenetrable barrier because she knew from Michal that the Drones passed through it between their long houses in the compound and their spiritual home among the trees. But she could find no actual opening, and when she pitted herself against it bodily the dense weave of its twigs and tendrils held her like a net. She fought its resistance with bare hands and a kind of loathing, already regretting deeply the impulse that had brought her here. She did not fear the forest as Michal did, but her thoughts dwelt on Paul, angry and upset back at the Hive, and her scratched hands and torn clothes and the whip-weals across her cheeks seemed a high price to pay for indulging her spite against him. She wished she had not lost her temper. She wished she could abandon her exploration, at least for the moment, and go and straighten things out between them.

  Had she been alone she would undoubtedly have done so. Having Michal in tow made it harder. If she turned back now he would never believe that the evil ambience of the forest had not finally got to her too, and rather than ridding him of his dread she would confirm it eternally. She would never get him this far again if they turned back now. She had promised him a walk in the woods, and whatever his inclinations and her own she felt obliged to deliver. Paul’s hurts and hers would have to wait. They both had enough old scars to know how to bear new ones. She plugged on.

  All at once, with the sound in her ears of Michal struggling through the tangle behind her like something ferocious on her trail, Shah was conscious of the thicket yielding to her, surrendering its tenacious grasp on her and letting her pass. She staggered through its last defences almost without hindrance and emerged, sweaty and scraped and breathless with effort, into a wider place. She bent hands on knees over her heaving chest to give her labouring lungs a chance to recover.

  Not until a minute later did she realise that Michal, who had been panting on her heels like a spent hound all through the clawing hedge, had not emerged from it in her wake. She straightened up and
looked round for him. She called his name. There was no reply. She sent her perception in search of him.

  She found his faithful, uncomplicated mind in a state of numb terror and thought for a moment he had succumbed to claustrophobia amid the crowding scrub. She called, “Come on – the last bit’s the easiest.” Then as his mind started to slip out of focus she understood what was happening to him. She plunged back into the tangle and found him halfway to his knees, his eyes closing, hands pawing slackly at the green noose choking him.

  Strong with desperation, Shah’s hands fought the clinging tendrils away from Michal’s throat, and as, released, he dropped she grabbed his wrist and dragged him clear of the thicket and out onto the forest floor.

  Feeling the mumbling of his brain as he lay grey-faced at her feet, Shah was not afraid that she had been too late, but she was aware that she could have been. She knelt down and rolled him over on his side, and listened to his starved lungs whoop in the damp air, and watched him claw half-sensibly at his raw bruised throat, and wondered what had actually happened.

  The hedgerow was high and thick and densely tangled with groping, trailing branches and tendrils, and it was possible that in trying to force a way through it Michal had managed to enmesh himself and, panicking, had succeeded in drawing the living ropes tighter as he strove to get free. Given his acute nervousness about the whole green world beyond the scorched earth perimeter, it was perfectly possible. But she did not believe it. It had happened too quickly, for one thing, and for another it was a little too convenient that just as her problems had ended Michal’s had taken so dramatic a turn for the worse. Yet if ill chance were not responsible, she could not imagine what was.

  “That thing attacked me,” Michal whispered hoarsely. He was shaking visibly as he knelt facing her, propped up on his fists. His eyes were shocked and accusing, bright coals in black pits in the ashy frame of his face.