Brown, Eric

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]

  “I have sufficient supplies to last me months,” the Zorl said.

  “We will meet again in two days from now. And then...” Ehrin grinned. “And then you can tell me more about the universe.”

  The Zorl reached out and took Ehrin’s hand in an unusual gesture. “The pleasure will be mine.”

  They hurried from the hold, secured its double doors, then returned to the control cabin and hauled the freighter into the air, its engines whining at the increased load.

  Ten minutes later Ehrin set the freighter down beside theExpeditor and took a deep breath. “I only hope Cannak doesn’t see through our lies, Kahran.”

  “Allow me to do the talking, Ehrin.”

  “I’ll find Kyrik and tell him about this ship,” Ehrin said.

  They left the freighter. The geologists and engineers gathered about the rig, talking animatedly among themselves. Kyrik saw them coming and waved. “Great news—the bore’s yield exceeds anything we might have reasonably expected. We could head back home in the morning, if that suits you?”

  Ehrin nodded. “We’ve had good luck too.” He told the geologist they had found something on the plains. Inspired, he said that he thought it was a gondola from one of his father’s old test dirigibles. Kyrik was too full of his own success to consider the likelihood of this.

  Leaving the workers to their celebrations, Ehrin and Kahran crossed to the Expeditorand stepped into the warmth of the lounge. Sereth stood up when they entered. “Ehrin! You were an age! I thought you’d crashed, or lost your way.”

  He held her. “We’re fine, Ser.”

  Cannak looked up from the Book of Books. “You were gone long enough.”

  Kahran grunted, “I wanted to find a crashed alien starship on the plains,” he said, silencing a startled Cannak. “But all we did find was a mangy herd of wild zeer.”

  Ehrin suppressed a laugh and sat with Sereth, taking the pot of tisane she offered and warming his hands. He wanted to tell Sereth everything, but that would have to wait until their return to Agstarn.

  And then, how to explain that he was harbouring an alien being bent on destroying Church property, albeit property stolen from its inventors?

  In the morning, the engineers dismantled the test rig and stowed the equipment in the freighter’s hold. An hour later they were in the air, Kahran at the controls and Ehrin staring out through the forward window at the driving snow as they headed east.

  Elder Cannak was in his own room. Sereth was still sleeping.

  Ehrin glanced across at Kahran, formulating the words to express what he had been thinking. “Kahran, did my father talk to you about the deathship after he’d returned to Agstarn?”

  Kahran looked up. “We met only once, and we discussed it briefly.”

  “Did my father guess what a powerful weapon it was?”

  Silently, Kahran nodded. “He knew, by the time he had worked on it and flown it back to Agstarn.”

  “But he still did the bidding of the Church?”

  “Ehrin, you can’t blame him. They threatened him with death. How was he to know that—” He stopped suddenly, and stared through the window.

  Ehrin looked up. “Know what?”

  Kahran turned tragic eyes on Ehrin. “How was your father to know that they intended to kill him anyway?”

  Ehrin’s stomach seemed to lurch, as if the dirigible had dropped ten metres. “My father’s accident...?”

  Kahran nodded. “Church militia planted a crude explosive within the ship’s engine.”

  Ehrin felt tears sting his eyes. He looked at his old friend. “And yet they allowed you to live?”

  Kahran stared down at his mangled fingers. “They tortured me to learn what I knew,” he said. “I managed to deny that your father told me anything about the deathship...”

  Ehrin stared ahead, seeing nothing.

  Kahran placed a hand on his shoulder. “We will prevail, Ehrin. Be assured of that.”

  * * * *

  SEVEN /// APPROACHING CIVILISATION

  1

  Hendry dreamed he was back on Earth.

  He was in the starship graveyard and, with the surreal displacement common to dreams, the five year-old Chrissie was living with him. In the dream he experienced an overwhelming love for this beautiful child, a love that was almost a melancholy ache, as if informed by her death a thousand years later.

  He awoke suddenly and sat up, struggling in the confines of the inflatable sleeping bag. He shuffled back and leaned against the sloping wall of the chamber, staring across the floor to the squat shape of the ground-effect truck. Carrelli was sitting in the passenger seat, reading a softscreen. There was no sign of Olembe. Kaluchek, he noted with surprise, lay cocooned in her sleeping bag beside him. He stared at her face, innocent in sleep of all expression, and marvelled at her similarity to his daughter. A sudden wave of grief broke over him, reducing him to silent sobs.

  He worked to control himself. He lifted a hand and stared at it, then beyond the splayed fingers at the vast echoing emptiness of the chamber.

  He experienced a sense of unreality, a sensation of mental remoteness from the physical fact of his presence here. He was on a distant world—no, an artificial construct built by an alien race—a thousand years after he had left everything he had known on Earth. He felt an uneasy dissonance with the reality around him; everything was strange, threatening, other than the three human beings who accompanied him. He felt a sudden surge of affection for his companions then, even Olembe, the prickly, aggressive mass murderer, if Kaluchek was to be believed; even Carrelli, the cool Italian whom it seemed impossible to get to know. And as for Kaluchek... He stared at her, and realised that he felt something for her beyond the obvious fact that she reminded him of Chrissie.

  They were human beings. They were all he had in this inimical, alien landscape; the only points of emotional familiarity with which to orient himself. These three disparate humans, and the three thousand sleeping colonists back on the first tier, constituted a measure of hope in an otherwise hopeless situation.

  Beside him, Kaluchek had turned in her bag. She laced her hands behind her head and smiled up at him. She had removed the hood of her atmosphere suit so that her jet hair fell round her face.

  “Olembe ran a check,” she explained. “The air in here’s breathable. I double-checked, just to make sure. Even odder, the air outside is almost Earth-norm, too.”

  Hendry lowered his faceplate and unfastened the hood. “Where’s Olembe?”

  She pointed to the great bronze door. “He went for a walk a couple of hours ago.”

  He recalled the airships they’d seen last night. “He ought to be careful. After our first encounter with aliens down there...”

  “Don’t worry. He took a laser. He’ll no doubt kill first and ask questions later.”

  He eased himself from the sleeping bag and stood, stretching. “Hungry?”

  “Could eat a horse, or even an alien equivalent.”

  They crossed to the chamber and Hendry took a couple of self-heating food-packs from a stack in the back of the truck. Carrelli looked up from her softscreen, smiled and nodded to them, then resumed whatever she was doing.

  They ate, sitting on the floor beside the truck. Kaluchek looked up from her food at one point and smiled. “I’ll tell you something, Joe. I’ve been trying to come to terms with what’s happening to us.”

  “Join the club.”

  “I remember when I was eighteen. I left home for the first time. All I knew was the town I’d grown up in. University was frightening. I was a loner, found it hard to make friends. After Alaska, LA was...” she laughed, “alien. I longed for flat, empty landscapes, people who didn’t say much instead of talking all the time. Everything was different. I withdrew into myself. It was a kind of psychological malaise. I’m not explaining it very well.”

  “It’s okay. I know what you mean. It’s the same thing here, right? I crave... I don’t know... a world of sun and sand and blue sea
, where we can create Utopia.”

  She gave him a wonderful warm smile. “That’ll do me, Joe. I want to be surrounded by familiar things, even people.”

  He laughed. “And you, the loner.”

  She gripped his hand, raised it to her lips and kissed it, and Hendry felt the sudden urge to hold her in his arms.

  Across the chamber, the sliding door ground open, startling them. Kaluchek dropped his hand quickly, looking guilty, and stared at the gap in the entrance. A swirl of snow cascaded in on a gust of icy wind, followed by the bulky figure of Olembe in his orange atmosphere suit.

  He closed the door behind him, pulled off his hood and crossed to the truck. He joined Hendry and Kaluchek, hunkering down beside them, and unfastened a softscreen from where he’d rolled it for convenience around his left forearm. Hendry watched the African, wondering at the pressures that had made the man give the orders all those years ago.

  Carrelli climbed from the cab and joined them, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  Olembe powered up his softscreen and pointed to the image of an eight-tier spiral coiled about a central sun. Two flashing asterisks marked positions on the lowest tier and on the one above it.

  “That’s where we came down,” Olembe said. “This here, on the second tier, is where we are now. I reckon, going by the temperature increase from that tier to this, that the fourth tier will be habitable. Mediterranean, even.”

  “And we reach the tier above us by this,” Carrelli gestured vaguely at the surrounding ziggurat, “umbilical elevator.”

  Olembe nodded. “Good name for it, Gina. I don’t see why not. It’s got us so far, why not all the way up?”

  Hendry looked at the softscreen and said, “I’ve been wondering... We’ve happened across two alien races so far, and presumably there are even more on the thousands of other worlds. My question is, why? Why was it built, where did these races come from, and for what reasons?”

  Carrelli frowned. “My theory, for what it is worth, is that the races we’ve so far discovered, and no doubt many others, were brought here by whoever built the helix, for whatever reasons.”

  A silence settled over the group, as each of the four digested the import of Carrelli’s words.

  Then she said, “I’ve been looking into how the umbilicals might work.” She placed her own softscreen beside Olembe’s. The screen showed a schematic of the first three tiers, and a representation of the ziggurats on each.

  “The first ziggurat on the lower tier was equipped with an umbilical, giving access from one to two. I think it would be mechanical redundancy to have this ziggurat,” she gestured around them, “equipped with an umbilical. My theory is that the next umbilical is on the third tier’s ziggurat, and swings down to connect to the second tier at every rotation—that is, every planetary day.”

  Hendry was shaking his head. “The feat of engineering to produce those things...”

  Olembe grinned. “We’re dealing with some advanced critters here, Joe.”

  Carrelli continued, “So if the last connection was between tier one and two, then it follows that the next will be between three and two. All we have to do is sit tight and wait.”

  Olembe pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “I went out there earlier and planted a surveillance cam on the plain, focused on the top of the ziggurat.” He tapped the sidebar of his softscreen and a grainy image appeared on the screen, showing the upper block of the edifice, lashed by snow. “We’ll get everything stowed in the truck and prepared, and when the link is made we’ll head for the elevator.”

  He stood and stretched. “I could kill a coffee. Anybody for the reconstituted swill ESO gave us?”

  For the next couple of hours they sat around the softscreen and chattered desultorily, getting up from time to time to stretch their legs with a walk around the chamber. At one point Hendry moved to the viewscreen in the door, staring out at the grey overcast that seemed to be this planet’s default meteorological condition.

  Kaluchek joined him. “Thought you might want this.” She held out another mug of the ersatz coffee, reminding him of how much Chrissie had loved the real thing.

  He took the mug and gestured with it to the world beyond the viewscreen. Daylight had arrived while they’d been talking, a minimal lighting of the grey. “I wonder if this is it, perpetual grey with no sight of the sun?”

  Kaluchek frowned. “That’s possible... I was trying to work it out. If the planets on the helix turn on a central axis, like beads on a string, then there’d be no inclination that produces the seasons on Earth. There’d be only a progression of day and night, with no seasons and therefore no years.”

  “So the weather conditions out there would be constant; snow and blizzards and continual grey cloud cover.”

  She shook her head, sipping at her coffee. “I wonder what the natives are like? What kind of life might have evolved on such a hostile world?”

  “It only seems hostile to us. To the creatures of this world it’d seem normal.” When speaking to Kaluchek like this, gently correcting her ideas with his own, it was as if he were with Chrissie again.

  She said, “One consequence of living on this world, if the cloud cover is constant, would be that they might not know anything about the helix.”

  He considered a race of beings ignorant of the wonder of the universe about them. What kind of society might that produce?

  They stared through the viewscreen at the pointillistic flurry of snow reducing visibility to a few metres, each lost in their own thoughts.

  Kaluchek said, “I was going through the data Olembe collected about this place on his screen.”

  “And?” He sipped his coffee and grimaced. It was hot, which was about all that could be said in its favour.

  “The temperature varies between five below zero at night, and two or three above during the day. It’s habitable out there, unlike the first world.”

  “We’d need an extensive system of hydroponics to grow enough food to feed three thousand colonists,” he said. “Things will be better on the next tier.”

  Kaluchek nodded. “I was just thinking worst-case scenarios—what if the worlds of the next tier prove uninhabitable?”

  “Then we’d move on to the next.”

  “And if that were uninhabitable?”

  He looked at her; she was grinning at him over the horizon of her mug. He said, “You’re playing the devil’s advocate.”

  “I was just thinking about how lucky we’ve been so far, in that the atmospheres on the two worlds we’ve happened across have been breathable. I mean, fortunate or what? That might not hold for the next tier.”

  He nodded, considering her words. “It is a stroke of luck,” he said. “And it can’t have been accidental.”

  She frowned at him. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, these worlds were constructed, designed. The atmosphere was put here, as it were. My guess is that the tiers were developed expressly for air-breathers, who were then brought here, if they were brought here, perhaps as some kind of experiment.”

  She considered this, sipping her coffee, then said, “But it doesn’t mean to say that all the levels are alike, which was my original point. The next one might have been designed for methane breathers, for all we know.”

  He smiled at her. “We’ll find out in time.”

  She was quiet for a while, watching him. “I was thinking...” she said, then stopped.

  “Go on.”

  “Carrelli. She knows a lot for a medic. Her backup specialism is smartware systems—but she knows a hell of a lot about everything.”

  “Well, she was part of the original maintenance team. They had a year or more in training.”

  “Do you know what I think?”

  He laughed. “You already have her down as a psychologist—” he began.

  “I think she was selected by the ESO as the embedded team leader. Listen, it makes sense. Lisa Xiang was the nominated leader, and she was strong, opinionated, but she
was only a pilot and a secondary nuclear engineer. She didn’t have Carrelli’s breadth of knowledge, her intuition.”

  Hendry closed one eye and looked at the tiny Inuit. “So... are you complaining?”

  “Far from it! If I’m right, and Carrelli is the boss, then that’s one in the eye for Mr Olembe.”

  He laughed. “But only if Olembe was aware of Carrelli’s position. She’s so embedded it’s not noticeable.” He reached out, suddenly, and touched her cheek.