Brown, Eric

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]

  He arrived at the door behind which the Venerable had his rooms. He would be sleeping now, sleeping the innocent sleep of the holiest Caliquan on the mountain. Pharan hesitated before he knocked, but the miracle of his discovery gave him strength.

  The door was opened by an acolyte, and Pharan rushed past him to the door which gave on to the bedchamber. He said, “Rouse the Venerable. Great things are astir. I must have an immediate audience.”

  He had dreamed of this day for most of his life, and now he was giving orders as if he were some uncouth ignoble. “My apologies, but it is of the gravest matter of importance that I speak with Venerable Kham.”

  The acolyte bowed, slipped into the bedchamber, and seconds later emerged. “Please, enter.”

  Pharan did so, attempting to control the shaking of his limbs.

  Venerable Kham was sitting up in his bed-chair, blinking himself awake. “Pharan? What brings you flapping in like a nightbird?”

  Pharan fell to his knees. “Venerable Kham, it has happened. They are here. I witnessed their fall but minutes ago.”

  Venerable Kham merely stared at Pharan. “And you are not mistaken? A dream, maybe?”

  “I was awake with herbs, and alert. I saw the fall.”

  “Within close reach?”

  “A day away, by my estimation. To the north, beside the fourth loop of the Phar.” Pharan cleared his throat. “I hereby request to mount a caravan, to meet the Fallen and take them to the Sleeper.”

  These were the words that every watcher down the cycles had dreamed of pronouncing before their Venerable Master, and it had fallen to Pharan to speak them.

  The Venerable inclined his head. “Your request is granted. I will call the acolytes to order. You will leave with the dawn.”

  Euphoric, Pharan returned to his garden and assembled his scant belongings for the journey to meet the Fallen.

  * * * *

  TEN /// CALIQUE AND THE SLEEPER

  1

  Hendry awoke andopened his eyes. Sunlight, striking through the ship’s forward viewscreen, warmed his face. He was overcome with a sudden and overwhelming sense of well-being. The events on the ice-bound planet seemed a long way off. The attack of the alien militia, even though he could still feel the pain, was an event that seemed to belong to a much earlier chapter of his life. Perhaps it was the sunlight, he thought, betokening an end to their troubles—an end to their search for a habitable world.

  He was aware of someone beside him, curled sleeping with a hand across his chest. Then again, he thought, perhaps he felt so good because he had found Sissy Kaluchek.

  He sat up, careful not to disturb her. Carrelli was lying on the control couch, arms enwrapped about the curious frame, which more resembled a beetle’s chitinous outgrowth than anything mechanical.

  On the opposite couch, the giant lay dead and rigid, like the bas-relief of a knight on an ancient sarcophagus.

  Between the couches, the two lemur creatures were asleep, hugging each other.

  Through the viewscreen Hendry made out the serried, vertical boles of what looked like immensely tall palm trees, with the dense cover of their foliage high overhead. Carrelli was easing the ship through the forest, the snout of the vessel nosing aside tree trunks as if they were stalks of grass.

  Olembe was sitting against the far bulkhead, watching her. “What gives, Carrelli?” Evidently he too had just woken up.

  She glanced across at him. “I’ve cut the main drives. We’re hovering on auxiliaries. Havor was afraid that the Church might follow us in their own ship—well, the ship they appropriated from his people.”

  “Havor being the alien?” Hendry asked, indicating the dead giant.

  Carrelli nodded. “His people are the Zorl. They inhabited the world neighbouring the lemur’s world. The Church rule the latter.”

  “And our guests oppose the rule of the Church?” Hendry asked, glancing at the sleeping lemur and its mate.

  “So I understand,” Carrelli said.

  Hendry imagined life on a world where the truth, quite literally, was hidden; how might the race of a world shrouded in perpetual cloud come to any true understanding of its place in the universe?

  Olembe said, “What now?”

  “We land,” Carrelli said, “somewhere hidden from the Church ship, if they have indeed followed us. And then we explore this place.”

  “Perhaps,” Hendry ventured, expecting Carrelli to dash his hopes, “this might be the Earth-like world we’ve been looking for?”

  She smiled. “Perhaps you’re right, Joe. My telemetry says that the atmosphere’s breathable, and the temperature’s thirty Celsius. It’s too early to tell yet, but it looks good.”

  Olembe said, “Of course, it might be inhabited already.”

  “That’s always a possibility,” Carrelli conceded.

  “In which case we simply move along to the next one,” Hendry said, countering the African’s pessimism.

  “Okay,” Olembe said, “so we find a habitable world. What then? How do we work out how to get the colonists up here?”

  Carrelli eased the ship through the forest, staring through the screen. She said, “Our first priority should be finding somewhere suitable to settle. After that we can debate our next move.”

  Olembe pressed, not to be sidetracked. “It’s always best to plan ahead, Carrelli. If we only have this ship, which according to you isn’t functioning at full capacity, then it’s going to be a long hard job ferrying three thousand colonists up two tiers.”

  Hendry said, “You’ve forgotten the umbilicals. There might be more.”

  “I’m working on the assumption that we can’t rely on them,” Olembe said. “I’m looking at a worst-case scenario.”

  Carrelli smiled to herself. “Let’s just land and see what kind of place this is, and then consider the future, okay?”

  The lemurs were waking. Jacob blinked, looking around at the flight-deck, its large eyes lingering on the humans. Its gaze settled on the corpse of the alien, and it opened its mouth in a silent gesture. Hendry could only guess at what thought processes were going on behind those discus-like eyes, but he chose to interpret the alien’s reaction as grief. Beside Jacob, its friend came to its senses and sat up suddenly, clutching Jacob in evident alarm.

  Hendry raised a hand and smiled. “Tell them we’re friends, Gina.”

  Carrelli spoke to the lemurs, who replied. They conversed for a few minutes, the flight-deck filled with their high-pitched dialogue. At last the lemurs turned to stare up and out of the viewscreen.

  Carrelli said, “I’ve told him what we’re doing, where we are from. I don’t think he fully understands the concepts of individual planets.” She shook her head. “Which is understandable. Until a few days ago, apparently he had no idea that his world was just one of many on the helix. Their Church taught that their world was a flat platform floating in a grey void.”

  “Its friend seems to be finding the experience harder to accept than Jacob.”

  Carrelli said, “His name is Ehrin, at least that’s the phonetic equivalent. His... I suppose we’d call her his fiancée, is Sereth. Ehrin opposed the Church. As for Sereth, I get the impression that she was a believer.”

  Hendry regarded the two alien creatures. They were perhaps a metre tall, and were standing now, small claws touching the frame of the viewscreen as they stared out in wonder. It was difficult to conceive that they had lives as rich and complex as his own; perhaps, he thought, that was because they so resembled animals, and animals with some resemblance to terrestrial fauna. He wondered what they made of the humans, pink furless giants who until now they had never even dreamed might exist.

  Beside Hendry, Sissy Kaluchek yawned, murmuring to herself. She blinked up at him, smiled. “Hey, you,” she said. “Where are we?”

  Hendry gestured through the viewscreen. “Looks like paradise to me, Sis. And according to Gina, the air’s breathable.”

  “Let’s not get too carried away,” Olem
be said. “For all we know this place is inhabited by man-eating sentients.”

  “Lighten up, for Chrissake,” Kaluchek said.

  He shrugged. “Look at the track record. Two races discovered, and have either held out the olive branch? One set of bastards set about killing us, the other would have done—”

  “So,” Kaluchek said brightly, glaring at the African, “third time lucky, yeah?”

  “In your dreams, girl,” Olembe murmured.

  They were interrupted by movement across the flight-deck. The lemur called Ehrin left the side of his partner and moved to the control couch bearing the giant’s body. He leapt up onto the couch—his movements, though he was bipedal and walked upright, as agile as those of a chimpanzee—and squatted beside the alien, gazing down at the hairless, wrinkled face.

  Hendry watched, confident in his correct interpretation of the creature’s reactions as those of sadness. The lemur-analogue might have been alien, his race evolved in circumstances wholly different to those that had prevailed on Earth, but there seemed to be a commonality of emotion between the two. He wondered then if this was a universal constant, and, if so, whether it might indicate the possibility that extraterrestrial races, no matter how seemingly different, might have points of contact which would augur well for the future relations between the various species that dwelt upon the helix.

  No doubt Olembe would call him an unrealistic romantic.

  Ehrin was silent, staring at the dead alien. His mouth moved silently, before he looked up and spoke to Carrelli.

  She nodded and replied.

  Ehrin lifted its paw in an indecipherable gesture and yelped.

  Carrelli returned the sounds, then said in English to the others, “Ehrin has asked that when we land, the first thing we do is dispose of the remains of the alien, Havor.”

  Hendry said, “We owe our lives to the alien’s arrival.” He recalled what had happened back in the cell when Ehrin had appeared to suggest that the humans should be freed. “Tell Ehrin that we are grateful for what he and Havor did for us.”

  Carrelli spoke to Ehrin, then said, “I asked what the Church would have done to us. Ehrin said that they would have certainly put us to death.”

  “Some Church,” Olembe grunted. “Let’s just hope we’ve left our old superstitions back on Earth to rot along with everything else.”

  Carrelli smiled. “The selection process for the mission hopefully reduced the chances of fanaticism, Friday.” She shook her head. “We have enough to divide us and cause potential conflict, being human.”

  Olembe smiled. “Amen to that.”

  Ehrin’s mate, Sereth, snapped something across the flight-deck, and Ehrin leapt from the couch and joined her. They yipped at each other in lowered tones.

  For the last few minutes the ship had travelled through shadow, the forest canopy high above occluding all trace of sunlight. Now Carrelli eased the ship down, bringing it in to land with a diminishing whine of auxiliary motors.

  As the ship settled, Hendry stood and moved to a sidescreen. There was little undergrowth surrounding the landing site, just the surrounding boles of the towering trees and the occasional, spectacular shrubs bearing blooms of vivid scarlet and yellow stripes.

  Kaluchek asked Carrelli, “And you say the air’s breathable? We can go out without the hoods?”

  “The air’s fine, but I’m not as sure about the local fauna. Let’s be careful out there.”

  Olembe found the blaster the alien had used to such effect, as sleek and black as the rest of the ship. He checked its controls, hefted it and said, “Open the hatch. I’ll cover you.”

  Hendry was first out, with Kaluchek at his side. They walked down the ramp and set foot on the sandy soil. He took her hand and smiled, then cracked his faceplate and pulled down his suit’s hood. He breathed, laughing at the incredible perfume that filled his head: flowers, honey, and something so alien and spicy it defied description.

  Ehrin and Sereth came next, holding hands like the two humans, Sereth cautious as if expecting an attack at any second. Carrelli followed them and Olembe came last, holding the rifle on his hip and scanning the limited horizon of the clearing.

  Hendry heard distant birdsong, a high mellifluous carolling. He saw something flit through the air on multicoloured wings: an insect the size of a bird. The sunlight was largely shut out here, but the odd rapier streak did penetrate the canopy, slicing the aqueous half-light into sections full of floating pollen and spores.

  Ehrin released his mate’s paw, hurried forward to the edge of the clearing and squatted on the ground. He reached out and touched the ground, then began scooping the sandy soil into a mound. Only then did Hendry understand what it was doing. He joined the alien, along with Kaluchek. They fell to their knees and began digging, their much larger human hands far more successfully displacing the loosely packed earth. At one point Ehrin looked up at Hendry, and pulled its lips back in a rictus more like a snarl than a smile, and Hendry smiled in return. Carrelli joined them, calmly sweeping handfuls of the golden demerara soil to expand the long pit. Only Olembe remained standing, covering their grave-digging duties, while across the clearing Sereth squatted on the ship’s ramp, gazing about her with big eyes.

  They returned to the ship, and between Hendry, Carrelli and Kaluchek, they managed to ease the giant’s considerable bulk from the flight-deck, along the narrow corridor and down the ramp. Ehrin scrambled alongside, a skinny arm reaching up to clutch Havor’s radiation silvers.

  They laid the alien’s body in the shallow grave, and then stared down at it, at a loss what to do next. Kaluchek plucked a flower from a nearby shrub, placed it in the giant’s great fist and said to Ehrin, “It’s what some of us do on our planet.”

  Carrelli translated. Ehrin flicked his head, then stared at Havor and spoke, the litany going on for a minute before he paused, then knelt and began shoving the displaced soil back over his friend’s recumbent form. The others helped, and minutes later the makeshift funeral was over.

  Olembe called out, “If you’re quite through over there, I suggest we get on with what we’re here to do.”

  Kaluchek moved away from the grave. “Which is?”

  They gathered at the foot of the ramp. Olembe said, “The first job is to work out what’s wrong with this crate—you said it was dysfunctional, Carrelli?”

  She nodded. “Havor told me what was wrong, but the mechanical terms he used didn’t translate. He also told me that Ehrin helped fix the ship. Ehrin was some kind of engineer, back on his own world.”

  “So if we want to get back to the colonists on the first tier, we have to do something about the ship,” Olembe said. “Which, with no materials and Christ knows what tools, will be a miracle.”

  Carrelli spoke to Ehrin, then turned back to Olembe. “He replaced a component in the main drive.” She indicated a hatch on the ship’s flank. “We’ll have to take a look and see if we can do anything.”

  Kaluchek said, “We need food, right? I don’t know about you lot, but I’m starving. I mean, we can’t stay in paradise if we can’t eat. Me and Joe’ll look for food while you repair the ship, okay?”

  Carrelli smiled. “Take the blaster. Don’t go far. Bring back anything you think might look edible.”

  “Who’s going to play guinea pig?” Olembe said.

  Carrelli said, “Who else? Don’t worry, my augments wouldn’t let anything poison me.”

  Olembe, with grudging reluctance, gave up the weapon to Hendry. As the others moved along the flank of the ship, Carrelli quizzing Ehrin, Hendry and Kaluchek looked around the clearing. She pointed. “How about this way? I saw a hill through the trees, bathed in sunlight. We might be able to take in the lie of the land from there, okay?”

  “Lead the way.”

  She strode across the clearing and Hendry followed, cradling the rifle and gazing ahead of Kaluchek at the gap in the trees. They left the landing site and made their way through the forest, and Hendry thought back t
o a time, years ago, when he’d taken Chrissie to Australia to show her the place of his birth. They had spent a week in the Dandenong forest east of Melbourne—this was before the forest succumbed to blight—and its vast towering trees, its air of serenity, the golden sunlight filtering through the treetops, all put him in mind now of this alien forest. Sylvan and tranquil, he thought, pushing away the sudden vision of Chrissie lying dead in the cryo-unit and concentrating on the slim form of Sissy striding through the forest before him.

  At one point she knelt and played the palm of her hand across the ground in a wide sweeping arc. “Look at this stuff, Joe. It isn’t grass. It’s like velvet, golden-green velvet.”