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Brown, Eric

Page 22

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]


  A weapon of some kind—an old rifle of polished wood and brass—was strapped to its back. At least, Hendry thought, it showed no inclination to use it.

  The creature leaned forward and spoke in a series of high, protracted yips; rows of tiny sharp teeth showed, and Hendry could not stop himself from imagining the creature ripping into raw meat like some primitive animal.

  Hendry looked across at Carrelli, who raised a hand and smiled. Olembe said, “And peace be to you, friend.”

  The creature yipped again, the words ending in a cachinnation, which shot a hail of spittle towards Hendry; it froze on the way and tinkled against his faceplate.

  The creature reached down for something on the other side of the beast, and hauled up what looked like an animal skin wobbling with a full load of fluid. Without ceremony it hurled the skin into the sledge, then urged its mount forward until they were lost in the mist.

  Hendry stared at the animal skin sloshing at their feet.

  Carrelli said, looking across at Olembe, “More evidence that they don’t mean us harm. Why give us fluid if they were going to kill us, Friday?”

  He grunted. “They’re keeping us alive until they can butcher and eat us, for all we know.”

  Hendry smiled. “Need you be so optimistic?”

  Olembe shrugged. “I think a healthy degree of scepticism about these bastards’ motives might be in order.”

  Hendry reached out and lifted the animal skin. It was heavy and rolled awkwardly in his grip. He deposited it in his lap and examined a small nozzle, manufactured from metal and worked by a tiny tap.

  He looked up at Carrelli. “Would it be safe...?”

  “If we had a softscreen, then we could analyse its content.” She shook her head. “The fact is that sooner or later we must eat and drink, if we are to survive.”

  “I think I’ll hold off until we reach civilisation,” Olembe said, “if we ever do.”

  “Pass it to me, Joe,” Carrelli said. “I’ll play guinea pig.”

  He passed the skin to the medic and watched as she unsealed her faceplate. She lifted the skin to her mouth and worked the tap. Clear liquid trickled out, spilling over her chin. She closed the tap and made a thoughtful face as she swallowed, then nodded and deposited the skin on the boards of the sledge.

  “Water. Just like anything you’d find on Earth, with a slight taste of some mineral.”

  “Let’s see how long you keep it down,” Olembe said, dubiously eyeing the skin as it shivered at their feet.

  Hendry was aware of how thirsty he was, and then how hungry. It seemed a long time since he’d breakfasted on rations back at the ziggurat. He glanced at the chronometer set into the sleeve of his suit: they had left the ziggurat almost ten hours ago.

  He stared ahead, through the mist darkening with the approach of night. The mountains were much closer now, a looming bastion that filled the horizon. They had left the ice plain and were climbing into the foothills along a well-worn track cut through rock. Their escorts paraded before and after the sledge. Ahead, he made out perhaps twenty riders, before they were lost in the twilight, and the same number to the rear.

  Kaluchek stirred. She gripped Hendry’s hand. “Joe?”

  He smiled down at her. Her face, behind the visor, looked so young. “You’re going to be fine. Relax.”

  “What happened? I was in the truck, going for the laser...” She frowned, recollecting. “Something dragged me out. That was the last thing...”

  “We’re okay, Sissy. We’ll be fine.”

  Olembe grunted. “We’ve been captured by a troupe of fucking monkeys, Kaluchek.”

  Carrelli said, “They have given us water.”

  Kaluchek tried to sit up, but the pain in her head stopped her. She winced, collapsed back into Carrelli’s lap. “Where are they taking us?”

  Olembe said, “To their leader girl. Where else?”

  Kaluchek laughed. “I’m dreaming, right?” She smiled up at Hendry. “What are they like?”

  It was Olembe who replied, before Hendry could think of a suitable description. “Imagine monkeys, with big eyes, rat-like snouts and lots of little pointy teeth. Your average nightmare aliens, Kaluchek, even though Carrelli here thinks they’re born altruists.”

  “Not altruists, Friday,” Carrelli answered evenly, “just not the primitives you take them to be.”

  “Carrelli, they attacked us and beat our brains out. I don’t call that friendly.”

  Kaluchek rolled her eyes to look at the medic above her. “If they wanted us dead, they would have killed us back there, right?”

  “That was my reasoning, Sissy,” Carrelli said.

  Hendry shifted his position, the hard timber beneath his buttocks at last becoming unendurable. He dragged a noxious pelt towards him, arranging it behind his back. Kaluchek smiled up at him.

  Thirty minutes later he noticed lights in the darkness. They were approaching a settlement of squat, stone-built dwellings that climbed the hill to their left, one above the other like stacked beehives. The points of light were lanterns, held aloft by individuals who had braved the freezing night to greet their fellows.

  “What’s happening?” Kaluchek asked as the sledge ground to a halt. She struggled upright, this time determined to make it, and sat beside Hendry.

  More locals emerged from the cone-like dwellings and approached the sledge. They were too short to see over the side, but stood on the incline at a distance of some metres and stared at the heads and shoulders of the strange captives.

  Hendry noted a difference between the aliens who had captured them and the mountain-dwellers, and he wondered if the former were native to the ice plains. The mountain-dwellers appeared a head shorter than their cousins, and wore considerably more clothing: padded suits and caps that covered their heads and necks like balaclavas.

  The two camps met and appeared to be in discussion, the aliens from the ice plains explaining their find to three mountain-dwellers, who at one point approached the sledge and inspected its content.

  Olembe said, “So this is civilisation, folks. Look, I think we need a plan of action if things start getting violent.”

  Kaluchek looked across at him. “We’re shackled, Olembe. We have no weapons. I’m feeling like shit. I couldn’t fight off a kitten.”

  “We’ll be unshackled at some point. Then, if things start looking bad, I say we attack and grab their weapons. They’re puny bastards—they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  Carrelli was shaking her head. “Violence only as a last resort, okay? Until then we sit tight and see what happens.”

  Olembe opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it and merely shook his head in disgust.

  It appeared that some decision had been made. From further up the track, a team of six draft animals appeared hauling a sledge.

  “We’re being transferred, Carrelli,” Olembe said. “This might be the only opportunity.”

  The team of animals was led down to the track by a mountain-dweller, where it was halted alongside their own sledge, facing downhill.

  Hendry said, “I don’t think they’re transferring us. It wouldn’t make sense to take the risk.”

  “Then what—?” Olembe began.

  From a nearby building, half a dozen mountain-dwellers, working in pairs, carried what looked like heavy sacks and perhaps a dozen skins of liquid. They deposited them in the second sledge and returned for more, halting only when the sledge was laden.

  Carrelli laughed. “We’re being traded. Apparently we’re worth twenty sacks of grain and a dozen skins of wine... or whatever the local equivalent might be.”

  Kaluchek said, “And if these folk think we’re worth that much, then I don’t think they mean to kill us straight away.” She looked across at Olembe, challenging.

  The animals hauling the second sledge were prodded into action. The plain dwellers moved off down the hillside on their stolid mounts, but not before one of their number paused his mount beside Hendry and the
others.

  He wondered if it was the creature that had given them the water-skin earlier; it was impossible to tell. It merely stared at them, one after the other, its snout moving as it talked to itself. How alien we must appear to this creature, Hendry thought. The being made a quick movement with its snout, flicking it in the air—a valedictory gesture?—then rode off into the night.

  Seconds later the sledge started up and they continued on their way, this time escorted by a team of mountain-dwellers, a dozen smaller aliens—six fore and six aft—riding their own shaggy mounts.

  “My guess is that their capital city lies somewhere beyond the mountains,” Carrelli said, “which is where the dirigibles were heading.”

  “And that’s where we’ll be imprisoned and tortured as the invaders we’re assumed to be,” Olembe said.

  “Or where,” Kaluchek returned, “we might be treated as honoured guests.” She nudged Hendry. “What do you think, Joe?”

  He smiled. “Despite the evidence of the pain in my head, I think we’ll be accorded some degree of civility—though I don’t doubt they’ll be naturally suspicious of us. It can’t be every day they’re visited by ugly, furless giants.”

  “I’ll remind you optimists of this when the bastards bring out their thumbscrews, or whatever else they use to extract confessions.”

  Carrelli said, not without humour, “Go to sleep, Olembe.”

  The African laughed and pulled a pelt towards himself.

  An alien detached itself from the rearward group and rode alongside, staring at the strange cargo its people had purchased. Other than its smaller stature, and the fact that it was padded like a lagged boiler, it resembled the plain dwellers with its hostile snout and large, inscrutable eyes. Hendry shifted uncomfortably under its penetrating gaze.

  They climbed, the track becoming narrower as it passed between sheer walls of ice towards a distant pass in the mountains. At last the passage became so constricted that the alien rider was forced to abandon its inspection and ride on ahead, to Hendry’s relief.

  He rearranged the pelt so that he could lie down, and Kaluchek joined him, resting an arm across his chest.

  Like this, jolted to and fro as the sledge climbed through the alien night, Hendry and his fellow travellers slept.

  * * * *

  5

  He was awoken, hours later, by the light.

  He opened his eyes and stared up at the featureless grey, wondering how the lemur-creatures of this world survived the endless, drear days without a hint of sunlight. The answer was obvious: they had no conception of the existence of anything like the sun. The sight of the fiery primary, if and when that happened, would be a revelation.

  The others were talking. Kaluchek noticed his movement and shuffled towards him, helping him to sit up. “You’ve been out for hours, Joe.”

  He reached out and took her hand. “Are you okay?”

  “Apart from a sore head,” she smiled, “I’m fine.”

  Hendry looked around at the passing landscape. They had left the mountains behind them and were coming down the other side. Behind the sledge, the dark peaks reared, cold and hostile, while ahead...

  It was the sight ahead of the sledge that occupied Carrelli and Olembe. They were pointing out various features and discussing them in lowered tones.

  With Kaluchek’s help, Hendry managed to shuffle to his knees and peer over the front edge of the sledge.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  He had expected, going by what he had seen so far of the aliens’ civilisation, something rudimentary by way of a township, a primitive collection of stone-built dwellings similar to the village they had seen on the other side of the mountains, though perhaps on a grander scale. Even the fact that the aliens obviously had a manufacturing capability had not prepared him for the sight of the city that sprawled before them in the bowl of the mountains.

  It was vast, and consisted of great blocks of buildings that reminded him of the architecture of Earth’s nineteenth century. It had evidently been constructed from the centre outwards, built along great boulevards radiating from a hub of grand buildings, which dominated all the others. Between the buildings, the wide streets were silver with ice, along which citizens skated in ones and twos, and draft animals hauled carts not dissimilar to the one in which they were travelling.

  The sight of the city was impressive enough, but what made it truly a thing of wonder were the airships that sailed above it. Hendry counted fifty of them, all sporting brightly coloured balloons— globular, oblate and cigar-shaped—before giving up. They criss-crossed the grey skies without colliding, a veritable feat considering their number. Some made short hops across the city, putting down on rigs erected on top of buildings, while others ventured out to the foothills. They flew at various levels, at differing speeds, creating a dramatic kaleidoscopic effect when seen from the elevated vantage point of the mountainside, the polychromatic aerial display contrasting with the monochrome drabness of the city beneath.

  “What’s amazing,” Olembe was saying, “is that we travel five hundred light years through space to find a race which functions on principles similar to those of Earth a couple of hundred years ago. They have wheels, carts, sledges, skates, airships...”

  Carrelli considered his words, then said, “Perhaps it’s not so unusual. They’re a bilateral, carbon-based, upright species, after all. It would be surprising if during their evolution they had not discovered the things you mentioned.”

  “You mean,” Kaluchek said, “that things like sledges and skates and everything else, they’re the most efficient devices for the particular environment, so it’s inevitable that they would have been developed?”

  Carrelli nodded. “No doubt we’ll find many things peculiar to this race, adapted for the type of beings they are, but it isn’t surprising that we have so much in common.”

  Hendry said, “Is it surprising that the two species we’ve discovered have both been upright and bipedal?”

  Carrelli shrugged. “That’s hard to say, Joe. The sample is too small to make a judgement. Perhaps we’re an anomaly, and life in the universe will prove to be very different. Or the reverse: perhaps all life in the universe is similar to ourselves.” She paused, then went on, “There is always the possibility that whoever built the helix populated it solely with air-breathing bipeds.”

  They were silent for a time, considering this possibility.

  “The more pressing question,” Olembe said, “is what these bastards intend to do with us.”

  Kaluchek looked across at him. “You sound frightened, Olembe.”

  “Not frightened, sweetheart, just let’s say concerned. It’s best to consider all possibilities. You pacifists might be right, and the monkeys might turn out to be angels in disguise, but we need a plan of action if they decide to turn nasty.”

  Carrelli looked at the African for a second or two, before nodding reasonably. “I don’t disagree, in principle. What do you suggest?”

  Olembe looked surprised. “Well... the advantage we have over them is that we’re bigger. We could take them by surprise and overpower them easily, grab their weapons and take it from there.”

  “If we do need to act,” Carrelli said, “then we must do so after having agreed the action amongst us, is that agreed? There should be no action without consultation, no lone heroics. If we can do so, we avoid taking life—is that agreed? We haven’t travelled five hundred light years to kill members of only the second race we’ve discovered.” She looked round the group, receiving affirmative nods from everyone including, somewhat reluctantly, Olembe.

  “Okay,” he said, “but I know in my bones, that these guys have it in for us.”

  He had the last word, and in the following silence they all gazed ahead at the city.

  They were approaching the sprawling outskirts now, meaner dwellings and larger buildings that overflowed from the valley bowl and crept up the hillside. The road between the low, granite-grey
buildings consisted of churned slush for the last sloping kilometre into the city, but it became a mirror-smooth canal of ice when they reached the valley bottom. The draft animals hauling the sledge seemed at home on the ice and proceeded at a brisk trot.

  Their passage had attracted the attention of locals: at first one or two passers-by had dawdled to take a look at the curious cargo, but now the word had spread and a posse of thirty or forty padded citizens trailed the sledge, kept back by the dozen mounted mountain-dwellers. Hendry felt uneasy beneath the scrutiny of these strange beings, and wondered if alien crowds had the same propensity for unheeding reaction as had their counterparts on Earth. All it would take was one hothead to incite the crowd to violence against the bizarre off-worlders...

 

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