Brown, Eric

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]

  “And? I didn’t keep up with world events back then.”

  Kaluchek stared up at him. “The Moroccan government held out, and Olembe was as good as his word. He ordered the murder of the hostages. All five hundred were killed and buried in a mass grave in the Sahara.”

  Hendry shook his head. “Christ. Sissy... you sure about this?”

  “Unlike you, Joe, I did nothing but keep up with world news five years ago, wondering where the hell we were going. I took a big interest in what that bastard did. He was never arrested, never tried. The five hundred were just another set of casualties in wars and famines and other disasters that’d claimed the lives of millions. When I got to Berne, I thought I recognised Olembe. I did some checking on what’s left of the web. When I knew for definite, I got hold of Bruckner, asked him if he knew he was employing a mass murderer.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He prevaricated, but I pressed him and he admitted that ESO was aware of Olembe’s past.”

  “And they were turning a blind eye because they were desperate for competent engineers so close to launch?”

  Kaluchek was nodding, her face hard. “You got it, Joe.” She looked across at the cab. “Now you know why I don’t like the bastard.”

  Hendry nodded, lost for words. Kaluchek went on, “I don’t like the idea of someone like Olembe benefiting from ESO’s largesse. More than that, I don’t like the idea of starting anew with a mass murderer in our midst.

  “Sissy, don’t do anything foolish like confronting him.”

  “Don’t take me for a mug, Joe. I’ll wait till things have sorted themselves out, till we’ve found a world we can settle and got the colonists up there... then I’ll tell the authorities what I know and they can take it from there.”

  Hendry nodded. “Fine. That sounds like the best thing.”

  “So anyway, as I was saying, be aware of what he is when he’s issuing all those commands, okay? Don’t trust the bastard an inch.”

  Back at the crash-landing site, out on the ice when the alien had attacked, what Olembe had done had effectively saved his life... Of course, Olembe had done it to save his own life, too, but nevertheless Hendry had felt then some debt of gratitude for his actions.

  He wondered what had driven Olembe to order the murder of five hundred innocent men, women and children.

  He looked at Kaluchek. “And while you were checking up on your travelling companions, what did you get on me?”

  She shook her head. “Not much. I know about what happened to your wife. I couldn’t help noting the irony.”

  He nodded. “You mean, the Fujiyama Green Brigade’s responsibility for killing the five members of the original maintenance team? Had that not happened, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be a thousand years dead.”

  “Life’s strange, Joe. And if it was the Brigade who managed to sabotage the Lovelock...”

  He closed his eyes. What might his wife have said about the Brigade’s actions bringing about the death of her only daughter? How might she have justified that act of terrorism? The frightening thing was the thought that she would do just that, claim that personal sacrifice, no matter how bitter, was of little consequence beside the accomplishment of the Brigade’s objectives.

  Kaluchek was saying, “I also tried to find something on Carrelli, but you know what? I couldn’t find a thing. Not one thing. It was as if everything about the woman had been wiped from the files, or as if she’d never existed.”

  Hendry said, “If you’re right about her being a shrink, then maybe she’s an ESO plant. They recruited her, gave her a new identity...”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, Joe. But why?”

  They were interrupted by a shout from the cab. Olembe was leaning out, grinning. “Hey, you two lovebirds paired off already? Breeding starts only when the colony is set up.”

  “Jesus!” Kaluchek said, quickly withdrawing her hand from Hendry’s. ,

  They moved around the chamber, Hendry staring up at the arch high above.

  Five minutes later, just as he was beginning to wonder if they would ever come to the end of the ride, the pitch of the vibration change subtly. “Feel that?”

  Kaluchek nodded. “Christ, this is it. I don’t know whether to feel elated or shit scared.”

  Olembe called out from the truck again, “Okay, I suggest we put the masks back on. We don’t know what the atmosphere will be like outside.”

  Kaluchek pulled a face at Hendry. “Talk about stating the fucking obvious!”

  Kaluchek made her way to the truck, but Hendry remained where he was, staring at the oval portal as the vibration conducted through the decking diminished. He pulled on his faceplate and felt the sudden tightness of apprehension in his chest.

  Minutes later the sense of being afloat ceased; then the chamber jolted, ever so slightly. Slowly, the portal slid open, revealing a chamber identical to the one they had left behind. Hendry stepped from the elevator, then paused and stared down the length of the aisle.

  The design on the sloping panels to either side was so similar to the ziggurat below that it might have been the very same building. The only difference was that the sliding door at the far end of the aisle was open to reveal darkness beyond.

  He looked back into the chamber. Olembe turned the truck, spinning it on one track so that it faced the exit. The others peered through the windscreen, watching Hendry.

  He pointed to himself, then signalled towards the exit. Olembe gave him the thumbs up.

  He moved along the aisle, at once curious and apprehensive as to what he might find. He came to the great doorway and peered out into a blizzard of swirling snow. A fierce wind raged, and he was suddenly thankful for the protective warmth of his atmosphere suit. He raised his laser, stepped cautiously across the threshold and peered around him.

  The ziggurat stood on a great snow-covered plain. A grey cloudrace surged overhead. He looked up at the shadowy shape of the transport filament rising into the darkness. He turned and raised a beckoning arm.

  The truck grumbled to life and accelerated down the aisle and out of the ziggurat. It braked beside him and Kaluchek jumped down, followed by the others.

  “Just like the tier we left.” Kaluchek’s voice sounded tinny over the radio link.

  Olembe consulted his softscreen. “It’s twenty degrees warmer. Positively tropical.”

  Kaluchek stepped forward, then halted. She pointed, indicating something in the snow before them. Hendry made out an area that had been disturbed, a patch of scuffed snow and the unmistakable shape of footprints.

  They approached as one, knelt and examined the prints.

  “My guess is that whoever made these are bipedal and walk upright,” Olembe said. “But they’re much smaller than us.”

  They were pondering his words when they heard a sound in the air. Hendry tried to identify it. A deep, throaty, thrumming sound... like some kind of primitive engine.

  He looked up, and the noise was explained.

  Riding high in the air, perhaps a kilometre to the east and just beneath the level of the cloudrace, he made out the shapes of two dirigibles heading away from the ziggurat.

  * * * *

  SIX /// THE ZORL

  1

  The snowstorm cleared towards midday and the wind abated, and the dirigible enjoyed a calm passage high above the rilled snowdrifts of the western plain. Ehrin was at the controls, with Sereth seated on the divan, making notes of her dialogue with the tribesman.

  At one stage she looked up and said, “Wait until I return to college with this, Ehrin. There are things here that will turn accepted thinking on its head. For instance, the old school assume that the tribes of the plain speak a different language completely. But what I heard out there proves that both come from a common root, suggesting that at one point in the past the ancestors of the modern-day tribes left the city for the plains—or even the reverse, that they left the plains for the city.” She lookedup, across to where Elder Ca
nnak was sitting with his sharp nose in the Book of Books.

  “That would accord with Church thinking, wouldn’t it, Elder?” she asked. “The tribes and the city dwellers are all one people, created by God and placed upon the platform to do his will.”

  Cannak looked up, a spatulate fingertip marking his place in the text. “It is reassuring that one of you at least subscribes to the word of God. You would do well to pay heed to your fiancée, Mr Telsa.”

  Ehrin chose not to reply, but said instead, “That we are all one people seems patently obvious to me, Sereth. What is more mysterious is the provenance of the ziggurat, and who might have built it? What purpose did it serve, and when? There are a thousand questions I want answering!”

  Sereth said, “What does the Church say on such matters, Elder?”

  Cannak looked up from his book. “Logic dictates, since we are the only sentient race on the platform, that therefore we, long ago in the distant past, must have ventured out upon the plain for whatever reasons and constructed the edifice. Perhaps it was erected to the glory of God?”

  Ehrin glanced at the Elder. “And the silver column Kahran witnessed, and of which the tribesman spoke?”

  Cannak gave a disarming smile. “Perhaps it was conceived as some form of corridor to heaven,” he said half-facetiously.

  “It seemed to be coming the other way, Elder,” Ehrin pointed out. “From heaven to the land. Perhaps God wishes to come down from time to time and walk amongst us?”

  “And woe betide the heathen sinner if He does,” the holy man said.

  Sereth said, “But seriously, what can the ziggurat be? And why is it so large? It’s as if it were constructed not by men, but by giants.”

  Ehrin said, “No doubt the Church will have it that we were taller in the days of old, eh, Elder?”

  “Your atheistic jibes fall not on deaf ears, Mr Telsa, and are duly noted.” He hesitated, then went on, “And anyway, we have only the word of Shollay that the column existed. He might have hallucinated it in his delirium.”

  “We’ll have proof enough when he develops his photographs,” Ehrin said.

  Cannak elected to maintain a dignified silence. Sereth pulled a face at Ehrin, at once anxious and irritated at his childish jibes. Ehrin winked at her and turned his attention to the snow-covered plains below.

  He had kept a sharp eye out during the past four hours for any sign of habitation or life down below. Other than the occasional wild zeer, and smaller beasts he was unable to identify from this altitude, the plain was bereft of a living thing. This fact, he reasoned, was not all that surprising, given the inhospitable nature of the land. He saw no trees in the wilderness, not the slightest hint of grass or shrub, and nothing in the way of cover from the relentless wind. How the tribesmen survived, let alone flourished, in such hostile climes was beyond him. And yet by the appearance of the lead tribesman and his cohorts, they seemed as strong and healthy as any pampered city dweller.

  Just then his attention was drawn to a curious feature on the ice. He peered, and made out a series of trenches or ditches that appeared as short, dark strips cut into the permafrost far below. There were perhaps a dozen of them, each one approximately three hundred feet long and fifteen wide, arranged in a stepped line across the landscape. Ehrin wondered if they were a natural feature—surely not?—or something created by tribesmen, for whatever reason.

  Fifteen minutes later the freighter signalled to suggest landfall. Ehrin replied in the affirmative and throttled back the engines. Their dinning tone dropped and the gondola rocked as they descended to the plain.

  Cannak looked up. “We are landing?”

  “The geologists want to set up another test bore. We’ll be here for another day, at least.”

  “Then let us hope that this stop is less eventful than the last,” the Elder said.

  Five minutes later the Expeditor came to rest, with the freighter close behind. Kahran still had not emerged from his cabin, which was temporarily doubling as a dark room while he developed his photographic plates. Rather than disturb him, Ehrin dug out a new set of spikes from the storeroom and ventured outside. For the next fifteen minutes he made the dirigible secure, thankful that the snow had not returned and that the wind was manageable.

  A hundred yards away the engineers were hauling the drilling rig from the hold of the freighter and beginning the laborious process of setting up the bore.

  When he returned to the gondola, Sereth had prepared a tureen of stew, and he joined Cannak and his fiancée for lunch in the lounge. The conversation was stilted—Ehrin made awkward small-talk about what the geologists hoped to find this far west. He was grateful when a cabin door opened in the corridor and Kahran hurried out, flapping a series of prints.

  He spread them on the table, almost knocking over pots and bowls in his enthusiasm. He sat down and pointed. “The quality isn’t up to what I’d hoped, but look, here and here, see—the column.”

  The prints showed the dull shape of the upper reaches of the ziggurat, blurred by the snowstorm, against the grey backdrop of the sky. In two of the prints, a bizarre tentacular shape could be seen, hanging in the air above the summit, but short of the complex array of girders by about ten yards.

  “It hung in place for perhaps fifteen minutes,” Kahran explained, “before rising and sweeping off through the air. I received the impression that the thing was fabricated from some metallic substance, and worked somehow on the principle of a telescope, with jointed segments retracting into its length... But I allow that the visibility was poor, and as to the actual mechanics of the device...” he spread his hands, “well, I’m only guessing.”

  Cannak hardly spared the prints a glance before returning to his stew. Sereth was frowning at the blurred images, a worried expression on her pretty face.

  Ehrin stared at the prints in wonder. Had he been told a couple of days ago that the voyage would prove so eventful, so soon, he would have scoffed. He was in danger, now, of becoming inured to the wonders discovered on the plain. Kahran’s photographs restored that sense of awe.

  To his old friend he said, “As a boy, I dreamed of exploring the world with my father, or discovering all the answers to the big questions: how and why we are here, where exactly here is...” He traced the outline of the column with a fingertip. “This... I don’t know, but this seems to make all those unanswerable questions valid again. Nature isn’t as we perceived it once upon a time.” He looked at Kahran. “Everything is changing, and we are here to witness it.”

  Kahran stared at him, shaking his head.

  Elder Cannak laid his Book of Books upon the tabletop and tapped it with a thin forefinger. “Gentlemen, all the answers you will ever require are to be found in here, and one day you will be granted the wisdom to acknowledge the truth of my words.”

  Kahran merely smiled, gathered the prints and moved to the other side of the room, where he sat in silent contemplation of his handiwork.

  Sereth pulled Ehrin to his feet, “Come on, before you two get into another futile argument. Excuse us, Elder. I will educate my erring fiancée by reciting poetry.”

  “Poetry?” Ehrin goggled as Sereth pulled him from the lounge.

  “Shh!” She dug him in the ribs with an elbow and laughed as she kicked open their cabin door and turned to embrace him. “Ehrin, forget all about the uncertainties for a while, please, and make love to me, hm?”

  He carried her to the bed where, mindful of the berth’s thin partitions, he did his best to obey her.

  An hour later, as he lay on his back and held Sereth to him, he heard the drill start up and the shouted commands of the engineers.

  Sereth said, “Have you thought about what might happen when we return home?”

  “Yes,” he lied. “We arrive in Agstarn triumphant, having struck oil and gold; we’ll have made our fortune and discovered wonders little dreamed of by the hidebound philosophers back home. Then we’ll marry and build a vast dirigible to take us as far as the circum
ferential sea.”

  Propped on one elbow, she stared at him. “We will? You never told me that?”

  “Well, it’s only just occurred to me that it would be a wonderful thing to do.”

  “What, to marry—or to sail the circumferential sea?”

  He grinned and kissed her. “Both,” he said.

  She sighed. “Do you want to know what will really happen?”

  “I have a depressing feeling that you’re going to tell me.”

  “We’ll return to Agstarn and you’ll be arrested by the militia for unholy conduct. You might escape a jail sentence, but you’ll have your company assets confiscated. And, worse, I’ll be forced to renounce you and marry some clerk of the Church.”