Brown, Eric

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]

  Ehrin merely blinked at him.

  “I reckon the only hope is to cannibalise the ship. I’ll check later. Meantime, how about a fruit break?” He crossed the clearing to the pile of fruit and came back with a selection. They sat against the flank of the ship and ate. Ehrin chattered, ran off up the ramp and disappeared inside.

  Olembe looked at Hendry and said, “So you and Kaluchek are getting it on, right?”

  Hendry glanced at him. “What? You don’t approve? Think I’m too old?”

  “Hey, I’m no moralist, pal. Good luck to you, while it lasts. It’s just that... I’d like to know something, is all.”

  “What’s that?”

  Olembe paused, spitting out a mouthful of black seeds. “Why does your squeeze treat me like shit, Joe? And don’t say you haven’t noticed.”

  Hendry nodded. “Of course I’ve noticed.”

  “She’s racist, right? She can’t get her head round why an African, from the continent that’s given nothing to the world—cos that’s a perception that a lot of people held back around the end of the twenty-first century—gets to be aboard a life-saving mission to the stars, yeah?”

  “It’s not that, Friday.”

  Olembe spat. “And don’t say, how can she be racist when she’s half-coloured herself? It’s a typical ignorant white man’s remark I’ve heard a hundred times before!”

  “Screw you, Friday. I know what racism is. I was married to a Japanese woman, okay, and she hated every colour but yellow.”

  Olembe looked at him. “So... what’s the Eskimo’s problem? She acts like she’s got an icicle stuck up her arse every time she talks to me.”

  Hendry looked away, determined not to be provoked by Olembe.

  Olembe went on, “Look, you’re fucking the bitch, Hendry. What the hell gives?”

  Hendry turned, angered now. “She told me, Friday. Okay?”

  Olembe stopped chewing, glanced sidewise at Hendry. “Enlightening. Very fucking enlightening. She told you... so what the fuck did she tell you?”

  Hendry stared at the African and said, “She ran a check on everyone on the maintenance team when she was in Berne.” He paused, surprised to find that he was enjoying getting back at Olembe like this. “She came up with something about you, about what you did back in West Africa.”

  “Christ... Jesus Christ, man.”

  Hendry turned and looked at Olembe. He was staring off into the distance, biting his bottom lip. At last he said, “How the hell did she find that out?”

  Hendry shrugged. “Hacked into some UN smartware files. I don’t know the exact details.”

  “UN files? How the hell did the UN know about that?”

  Hendry looked at Olembe, puzzled. “That’s their business, Friday. They monitor wars, war crimes. They probably had observers at the trial.”

  Now it was the African’s turn to look puzzled. “Hendry, what the hell are you on about?”

  “The order you gave, sanctioning the execution of the prisoners, the five hundred Moroccans.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Olembe pushed himself to his feet, striding into the centre of the clearing and turning. He hurled a fruit at the ship, where it hit the golden carapace with a ripe splat and slid to the ground.

  He approached Hendry and pointed. “I don’t know what the hell she’s been telling you, Joe. But that’s a lie, you got me? A fucking goddamned lie!”

  “Sissy seemed pretty convinced.”

  Olembe was shaking his head, vehement. “I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t... Christ, what kind of monster do you think I am?”

  Hendry opened his mouth, thought through Olembe’s reaction, and said, “So you didn’t give the order—”

  “I was never in the fucking army, Hendry!”

  “But you’re hiding something.”

  Olembe just stood there, staring at him. He looked, Hendry thought, tough and aggressive, and yet at the same time vulnerable. At last he said, “Joe... I trust you, okay? You just sit around, taking it all in. You’ve lost your daughter, and do you moan about it?” He shook his head. “You’re cool, Joe.”

  Hendry wanted to protest that though he might not bewail his loss, he still felt it deeply; Olembe’s assessment of his reaction to Chrissie’s death demeaned his grief. He said nothing, but waited for the African to go on.

  “You’re right,” Olembe said, “I did something back then, but I didn’t massacre five hundred fucking civilians.”

  Olembe began striding, back and forth across the clearing, nodding to himself as if rehearsing the lines he would say to convince Hendry.

  “Okay, Joe... this is what happened. This is the truth. I’m not proud of what happened, but it isn’t as bad as massacring civilians...” He stopped and dropped into a crouch before Hendry. “This was ‘94, right? Last year—I mean, what would have been last year... Anyway, the war in Africa was over. What was left of the Republic of West Africa was trying to recover, pull itself from the shit. Everything was chaotic. It was every man for himself, okay? Bear that in mind. I was working in Lagos, on the coast. A shit job in an oil-fuelled power station. It was a hand-to-mouth existence. The government hadn’t paid us for three months. I went shooting game for food—I had a wife and two kids to feed.” He stopped there, hung his head, and Hendry wondered if he was thinking about the wife and children he had left behind on Earth. “Anyway, I had this brother working in the north, at the fusion plant in Abuja. We were close, we’d studied at Lagos together—nuclear mechanics—before he got a grant to study in the US ten, twelve years ago. When he got back, he landed himself a top post at a nuclear station in Abuja.”

  He paused, stopped his striding and looked at Hendry. “Then last year, a few weeks before the ESO call up, my brother came down to Lagos to see me. He knew how hard things were down south. He gave me money, enough to keep me and the family alive for a few months.”

  Hendry said, “What happened?”

  “He was staying with us, on leave from Abuja. We went out shooting one day, me and my brother and a couple of friends. Bag a bit of game to supplement the rations, right?”

  Olembe fell silent. He dropped into a squat on the golden moss, staring at his big fingers interlaced to form one great knot. He looked up, into Hendry’s eyes. “I didn’t shoot him, Joe. It was a friend. An accident. My brother got between the gun and an antelope... He died instantly.”

  “And...”

  Olembe was shaking his head, smiling. “And we covered it up, buried my brother and didn’t tell the police.”

  Into the following silence, Hendry said, “What was your brother’s name?”

  Olembe smiled. “You’re no fool, Joe. What do you think? Friday Olembe.”

  “You took his identity?”

  “I didn’t plan to, not until the ESO call up came along, forwarded to my place via Abuja. I opened the file and read the offer and... it came to me in a rush. I could do the job. I was a qualified nuclear engineer. What could be simpler? I was to report to a government department in Lagos, where I’d be security checked, my ID verified—”

  “So how did you get through that?”

  Olembe smiled, held two fingers up before his face and rubbed them together. “How do you think? I gave a couple of officials the equivalent of a year’s wages—paid from my brother’s account— and they passed me as Friday Olembe.”

  Hendry nodded, then said, “You left your wife and children?”

  “Don’t sound so fucking censorious, Joe. Do you have any idea what life was like in Lagos back then? You would have done the same—and yes, it tore me up, it was the hardest decision in my life, even harder than taking my brother’s identity. But desperation breeds even greater desperation, Joe. I left my wife and kids—with enough money to see them okay—but don’t think for a second that that doesn’t eat me up in here, Joe, because it never stops hurting like hell.”

  Hendry nodded. “I believe you,” he said, and wondered at what Olembe had done. Perhaps he was influenced by his new-fo
und feelings for Sissy—but how could anyone leave a wife and kids just like that?

  Olembe stood, moved back to the ship and slumped down beside Hendry. “So that’s how I’m here, while every last fucker we knew—my wife and kids and their descendants, if they ever had any— are long dead and gone.”

  Hendry heard sweet birdsong echoing through the forest. It worked like a balm, comforting.

  He said, “So why would Sissy fabricate that evidence against you? Make out you were a war criminal?”

  Olembe sighed. “Search me, man. Maybe it’s simply this, she doesn’t like the colour of my skin.”

  Hendry thought about it. He said suddenly, “Where did your brother study? You said he went to the US?”

  “Yeah, LA.”

  Hendry said, “So did Sissy. She graduated from LA in ‘83.”

  Olembe was nodding. “My brother... yeah, it’d be around then.”

  “It might be a coincidence... but you never know, they might have met—”

  “And something happened, and Kaluchek held a grudge ever since?”

  Hendry shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  “So how come she can’t tell I’m not really Friday. Joe?”

  Hendry shrugged. “People change a lot in twelve years. She remembered the name, not the face... I don’t know.”

  “Crazy. I thought the bitch had it in for me.”

  Hendry said, “Don’t say anything. About your brother, LA, or what Sissy told me about the war crimes. I’ll ask her what happened. Maybe we can straighten things out between you two. We need to pull together if we’re to get back to the colonists.”

  “Okay, okay, Joe,” Olembe said. “Do your stuff and we’ll all be happy families again.”

  “Just keep off her back and I’ll do my best to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Fine.” Olembe stood and indicated the entrance to the ship. “I’m going through the ship from top to bottom, see if I can come up with something I can hammer into shape.”

  Hendry watched him go. “Friday—one thing. Who were you before you were Friday?”

  Olembe grinned. “You really want to know? I never liked the name. It was my father’s. He called his first-born after him. Cyril, man. Can you believe that?”

  Hendry smiled. “I won’t tell anyone, Friday.”

  He settled back against the warm metal of the spaceship, considering Sissy Kaluchek and what might have happened in LA all those years ago, twelve subjective, a thousand real-time.

  He closed his eyes and anticipated her return. Birds called, soothingly, from the surrounding forest.

  * * * *

  4

  Ehrin crouched inside the hatch of the spaceship, hugging his shins and watching the two aliens—humans, they called themselves—as they talked for a long time in the clearing.

  One sat against the ship, while the other, a giant black creature, strode back and forth, gesturing animatedly. Ehrin watched with wonder, amazed at the fact that the words these beings spoke—slow, slurred sounds—could mean anything at all.

  Everything about the humans filled him with awe: their appearance, their size, their level of technological accomplishment, the fact that they had arrived here—according to their leader, Carrelli—from a planet way beyond the helical system of worlds.

  And to think that mere days ago he had been mired in the ignorance that affected all the citizens of Agstarn. To them, Agstarnwas the world, with even the plains beyond the mountains a distant, shadowy realm; to them, the word of the Church, of the Book of Books, was the ultimate arbiter of the reality of existence.

  He had never believed the version of reality promulgated by the Church, but he had to admit that in lieu of belief there had been a vast absence—how could he possibly have known what might have existed beyond Agstarn?

  The reality had rocked him to his core. Staring through the spaceship’s viewscreen at the vastness of the helix—his brain processing the view little by little, first the sun, then the tier immediately above them, and then all the other tiers and the miniature worlds like beads upon them—he had been overcome with a strange emotion that made him first weep and then laugh aloud.

  He had tasted victory then, a euphoric sense of righteousness that his opposition to the Church and its draconian ways was justified. He wanted to show Velkor Cannak the helix, laugh in his face as he viewed the Elder’s horror. That was impossible, of course, but he couldimagine Cannak’s disbelief, his refusal to accept the visual evidence of the helix. He wondered if Cannak were aboard the deathship, or if fear of what he might discover beyond the cloud cover of Agstarn had tempered his need for revenge. Ehrin liked to imagine that the Elder had boarded the deathship, and that his faith was now being undermined by the sight of the helix dominating the heavens.

  He wished Kahran had lived to share his sense of victory, and Havor had survived so that he might have achieved his goal of destroying the deathship.

  Perhaps that should be his goal now, he thought. Somehow, despite the seeming impossibility, he should help to bring about the destruction of the feared deathship. Perhaps that might be the first step in a much larger, more ambitious goal: to bring the truth to the people of Agstarn, to open their eyes after blinkered centuries of ignorance to the fact of the helix and their place upon it.

  It would be a fitting tribute to his good friend Kahran Shollay.

  His throat constricted as he thought about the death of the old man.

  Kahran would have revelled in the series of conceptual thresholds Ehrin had crossed, and been amazed by the latest revelation: that there existed somewhere in this forest, asleep for centuries or even longer by some process he couldn’t even guess at, a being who was linked in some way to the creators of the helix.

  He looked up. The two humans had finished their conversation. One of them, the tall darker being, moved up the ramp into the ship, his big fingers touching Ehrin on the head as he passed. He wondered what it might mean—perhaps an instruction to follow.

  Dutifully he climbed to his feet and entered the ship. The human moved around the flight-deck, clearly looking for something.

  He glanced at Ehrin and spoke, the sounds impossibly slow. The being held something up, before his face. It was the fractured cylinder he had lovingly fashioned in the foundry, a seeming age ago.

  The human pointed to it, then gestured around the ship.

  Could he be asking if there were another component like it somewhere in the ship, Ehrin wondered.

  Ehrin gestured no, and said that he had made the device back on his homeworld, but the human just stretched his lips and shook his head, continuing his search.

  He passed down the corridor and Ehrin followed, intrigued by the being’s search.

  They came to the rear lounge, and there Ehrin found Sereth. She was curled on the floor, staring through the viewscreen with a blank expression. The human moved around the lounge with his usual slow precision, then said something to Ehrin, stretched his lips again and moved back down the corridor.

  Ehrin remained in the lounge, watching Sereth. He felt a stab of guilt, and at the same time frustration. He had tried to comfort her on the flight from Agstarn, but fear had made her unreasonable and argumentative.

  At last she turned her head and looked at him. “I didn’t want to come here,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Sereth.”

  She gestured with her muzzle. He could see the fear in the dilation of her pupils. “You are enjoying all this, aren’t you? The company of these monsters, the illusion of... of wherever we are. You think this proves that you were right, don’t you?”

  He moved his head in a pained negative. “They aren’t monsters, Sereth. They’re very different to us, and we might never understand them, but they aren’t monsters. They have... compassion. They helped me bury Havor.”

  “He was another monster!”

  “He helped to save my life, Sereth.”

  “For his own godless ends! Perhaps it would have been best if
you had died with Kahran.”

  He stared at her, anger a naked flame in his chest. “Do you really mean that? You’d rather have had me tortured to death by the Church’s Inquisitors?”

  She stared at him. “It would have saved all this, Ehrin.”

  “All this? You mean the truth?”