They descended the stairs, Carrelli leading their way, and when she reached the forest floor she held out the pendant at arm’s length and spoke to Watcher Pharan in his fluting tongue.
Instantly, the acolytes behind Pharan fell to their knees and pressed their faces to the golden moss, while Pharan himself set up an exultant ululation. He reached out and took the pendant, staring at the magical fiery sun at its centre, then placed it reverently over his head and settled it on his chest.
He called to his acolytes and they rose and hurried to their mounts, so many quicksilver blurs. Watcher Pharan spoke to Carrelli again, and she replied. He mounted his sharl, and Kaluchek and Carrelli climbed aboard theirs. Slowly, the sharl turned and plodded from the clearing and entered the twilight word of the forest.
Carrelli said, “I told Pharan that the Sleeper awoke and addressed us, said that he wished them to treasure the pendant as a token of his gratitude.”
Kaluchek smiled. “The story will become myth, in time; your lie a source of wonder.”
Carrelli stared ahead. “As I said earlier, Sissy, what matters is faith.”
Kaluchek smiled to herself and they fell silent. As they passed a tall shrub a little later, Carrelli reached out and grasped a handful of berries, and seeing that they were the soporific fruit, Kaluchek did the same. Tired anyway, she found that with the sedative of the berries she was soon on the edge of sleep. She lay back, lulled by the rocking motion of the sharl, and was soon asleep and dreaming.
Carrelli woke her a short time later—at least, it felt like a short time. She opened her eyes and blinked, dazzled by bright sunlight penetrating the canopy of foliage high overhead.
“Sissy. Time you woke up.”
Kaluchek struggled into a sitting position, rubbing her eyes. She seemed to have been asleep for a matter of minutes, and yet she felt fully refreshed, even invigorated. She wondered if it was something to do with the drug,
“It’s morning, Sissy. You’ve been asleep for hours.”
“Morning?” she repeated idiotically.
“Here,” Carrelli said, passing her a fruit. “It’s almost all water. You need to drink in this heat or you’ll dehydrate.”
Kaluchek took the fruit and began peeling it, and instantly a cascade of cool water splashed across her hand. She lifted the fruit to her lips and took a mouthful of cool, scented fluid.
“How far are we from the ship?” she asked. She had wanted to say ‘from Joe’, but Carrelli would only have smiled her motherly smile at her.
“I estimate six hours,” Carrelli said. “Maybe less.”
“Do you think they’ll have fixed it?”
Carrelli glanced at her over her shoulder. “Let’s hope so. I have faith in Friday. I know you don’t like him, but he’s determined.”
Kaluchek bit her lip, deciding not to tell Carrelli what else he was. “Even if the ship’s up and running,” she said, “do you think we can make it to the next tier?”
“I don’t see why not. We made it so far. Of course, it’s not settled yet that we’re definitely going. The others might veto the idea. Rather than risk the flight, they might rather remain here and find a habitable world.”
Kaluchek shook her head. “Not Joe. I know him. He’ll want to find the Builders. I can’t speak for Olembe. But even if he’s against the idea, that’s three against one. The majority wins.”
Carrelli smiled to herself. “Let’s just see what they say, okay?”
Kaluchek fell silent, watching the tall trees of the forest pass slowly, the lumbering sharl ahead with the tiny figure of Watcher Pharan perched upon its back. She grabbed a bunch of fruit that Carrelli had passed safe earlier, handed one to the Italian and ate as she thought of Joe, waiting for her.
Carrelli’s estimate of six hours was conservative. Less than three hours had elapsed when Watcher Pharan turned upon his mount and chirruped to Carrelli.
“We’re almost back at the ship,” she said. “Five minutes.”
Kaluchek looked ahead, through the tall trees at the vista of golden sand. Minutes later she made out, a deeper shade of gold against the sand, the crouching shape of the alien ship, with Joe and Olembe seated beside it.
As the procession of sharls and their riders entered the clearing, Joe stood quickly, waved and hurried across to meet them.
Kaluchek couldn’t help herself. She slid from the back of the sharl and dropped into his arms. It felt so good, so natural, that she resented the time she’d spent away from him—even if she had beheld wonders.
“It’s so good to have you again, Joe.” She looked up, into his eyes, wanting him to respond with similar sentiments. He looked at her, something questioning in his eyes, his expression almost curious.
“What?” she said, her stomach tight.
What if he’d had second thoughts about her during her time away? What if that bastard Olembe had turned him against her? But she was being paranoid. She should credit Joe with more humanity than that.
He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s great to have you back.” He pulled away and regarding her at arm’s length. “Well, tell me all about it.”
She stared into his smiling face. “It was amazing, Joe. I mean...” She looked across at Carrelli. “Are you going to tell them?”
Olembe had stirred now and joined them, unable to keep himself away from the excitement.
Watcher Pharan darted from his mount and approached Carrelli. They spoke for a while, before touching hands. The Watcher then turned towards Kaluchek and the others, lifting both arms briefly in what might have been a farewell gesture.
In an instant it was upon its mount, and then the procession started up once again. Kaluchek watched the sharls carrying the tiny aliens back into the forest.
“Well?” Joe said.
Carrelli said, “First, what’s the status of the ship?”
“We repaired the mechanical fault,” Olembe said. “We powered up the ship’s smartware, as well as we could, and it seems to be running at around eighty per cent efficiency.”
Joe said, “As far as we could tell, that is. It’s an alien system. Much of it was familiar, but I might have missed signals for systems failure.”
Carrelli nodded. “That’s fine. Well, we have a decision to make...”
Olembe said, “What the hell did you find out there?”
Carrelli gestured to the ship, and led the way across the clearing to the ramp. She sat down, massaging her calves.
There was movement from the entrance to the ship, and Kaluchek saw Ehrin and Sereth peering out. Carrelli beckoned them, and Ehrin came and sat beside Carrelli. Sereth, cautious, remained where she was and squatted on the ship’s threshold.
Carrelli said, “What would you say if I told you we found out where the Builders are hiding themselves?”
Joe smiled. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
Kaluchek felt something melt in her chest as she looked upon his wonder. She shook her head. “It was incredible, Joe. We entered the ship and found the Sleeper. It was dead, but then Gina—”
“I interfaced with some highly advanced smartware system,” Carrelli said. “It was... I guess it was a simple directory. The ship was a maintenance vessel, operated by a race that worked for the Builders. I found that the Builders themselves have a planet almost directly above this one on the next tier.”
She turned and spoke to Ehrin in his own language, and the effect was marked. He sat up, his muzzle open, eyes wide, then spoke rapidly to Carrelli. She smiled and replied, then turned to Joe and Olembe.
“So, gentlemen, what do we do? We’ve found a temperate tier. We could explore the next worlds along on either side, think about settling here and fetching the colonists—”
Joe cut in, “Or we could take a trip to the next tier and seek out the Builders.”
Carrelli nodded and looked around the group. “Those are the options. What do you think?”
Olembe said, “If we could make it to the next tier without the
Church’s ship intercepting us...” He shrugged. “Then I’m all for pushing on.”
Oddly, Kaluchek found herself feeling annoyed that Olembe had fallen in with her own opinion. She looked at Joe, praying that it wouldn’t be him who raised objections. She was relieved when he said, “I agree. If the Builders are up there, then I want to meet them. Sissy?”
She smiled. “I’m with you. I mean, how can we look for a colonisable world when the people who built this place are so close to us? I’d always be wondering what we might have missed.”
Carrelli turned and spoke to Ehrin and Sereth.
Ehrin stood quickly, leaning forward. He fired off a question at Carrelli, and listened to her reply wide-eyed. He turned to Sereth and spoke. She replied, barking at him, then turned quickly at slipped into the ship.
Ehrin followed her.
Kaluchek said, “What was that about?”
Carrelli shook her head. “Ehrin is with us. He wants to meet the Builders. He told Sereth and she... She’s finding all this hard to take, to say the least.” She looked around the clearing. “So we’ll go, but we’ll be very careful about it. My guess is that the Church ship is miles away by now, but even so we’ll set off through the jungle on auxiliaries, okay?”
She led the way to the ship, followed by Olembe. Joe was about to step onto the ramp, but Kaluchek stopped him. She pulled him to her. “One last kiss on the planet where it first happened,” she said, exhilaration flowing through her.
He kissed her, then looked around at the forest and pulled her up the ramp.
Carrelli and Olembe were strapped into the pilots’ couches, going through pre-flight checks. There was no sign of Ehrin or Sereth. They strapped themselves into seats set into the bulkhead, close enough together to allow contact. She reached out and touched his fingers, feeling apprehension despite herself at the thought of ascending to the next tier in a patched together alien ship.
Thirty minutes later, Carrelli said, “Well, everything seems to be functioning pretty well. Let’s hope your repair holds.”
“Amen to that,” Olembe said.
Behind them in the corridor, Kaluchek heard a commotion, the high chatter of Ehrin and Sereth. She turned, expecting to see them enter the flight-deck.
Joe touched her hand and pointed through a sidescreen. The aliens had left the ship and were standing in the clearing, facing each other, evidently arguing. At one point Ehrin reached out, grabbed Sereth by the arm and tried to drag her back to the ramp.
Sereth exploded, lashing out at Ehrin and screeching so that she could be heard inside the ship. Then she turned and sprinted off into the forest.
Kaluchek was aware that they were watching an alien drama, and though she was unable to understand the nuances of the discord, the salient facts were obvious. She looked across at Joe, and wondered if he too was feeling a vicarious melancholy as he apprehended Ehrin’s dilemma.
Ehrin started after his mate, then stopped. He reached out a hand, called out and waited.
Then he dropped his hand and looked back at the ship. He hesitated, torn between two desires, and at last made his decision. He hurried back to the ship and scampered up the ramp.
Carrelli said, “Sealing the hatches. Okay, let’s power up. Auxiliaries activate. Standby, Friday.”
“A-OK.”
The ship vibrated, shaking as the engines came to life.
Ehrin joined them on the flight-deck, found a seat and strapped himself in. Joe smiled across at him, and the alien open its muzzle in what might have been a reciprocal expression.
“This is it,” Carrelli said. “Okay, hold on. Here we go...”
The ship rose unsteadily, rocking like a boat in a storm. Carrelli managed to equalise the lift, gripping the frame and scowling with the effort. Seconds later, the ship rose higher with a lurch. Carrelli eased the ship forward, through the trees. Like this, cautiously, they proceeded for perhaps an hour.
“Okay,” Carrelli said. “Hold on back there.”
Seconds later they crashed through the treetops, moving from shade to dazzling sunlight. All around was a sea of green, and to their right a wide river looped towards the horizon.
Then the ship tipped, flipping Kaluchek’s stomach, and accelerated at an incredible speed. Calique vanished beneath them, and immediately ahead, through the forward viewscreen, appeared the great arching parabola of the fourth tier, its length marked with alternating sections of ocean and thicker bands of land.
Joe gripped her hand as they accelerated way from Calique.
* * * *
4
Sereth fled intothe rainforest, her only thought to escape Ehrin and the aliens.
He had changed. He had become someone else, a being Sereth no longer knew, as different to her as were the aliens. He had always been a little different, she knew, which perhaps was what had attracted her to him in the first place—but she wished she could have told the impressionable girl she had been back then, on first meeting the illustrious Ehrin Telsa, where her infatuation with him might lead.
The aliens, the minions of the anti-god, had turned his head with this illusory quest for the truth, and were leading him ever further astray. Now they were ascending to the fourth tier of this hell, to rendezvous with the evil creatures responsible for the creation of this illusion. That had been enough for Sereth, that and the fact that Ehrin had said that he hadloved her. She felt the same for him—she had loved him, once, but no longer.
It would be better to be alone and lost in this forest than to be imprisoned with the aliens aboard their cursed spaceship bound for perdition.
She halted in her flight and looked about her.
Then she heard it, a roar she at first ascribed to a wild animal. Her heart skipped, before she realised the truth. The sound was the engine of the alien spaceship, a crescendo of noise that soon became deafening even at this distance. The ground seemed to shake beneath her feet, and the cacophony of the engines became the only reality. She fell to her knees and covered her ears, and dropped her hands only when the roar diminished. She listened until the sound died in the distance, and thought of Ehrin aboard the ship with the aliens and their doomed mission to meet the Builders. When she climbed to her feet, she realised that she was crying.
Through a gap in the foliage overhead she glimpsed a section of the helix. She was a long way from Agstarn, wherever that might be now. She felt a keen sense of loss, a longing to be in her father’s apartment, to be surrounded by all that was familiar—the ice of the city, the reassuring grey skies—rather than this sultry forest and the dazzling sunlight that penetrated the foliage and irritated her eyes.
But this was all an illusion, she told herself, a mirage conjured to lead her from the truth.
But if that were so... If this were an illusion, if she were living a dream, then where in reality was she? In some limbo world of hallucination, instilled in her mind by the anti-god? Might she in fact still be in Agstarn, but tricked into believing she was elsewhere?
She touched the bark of a tree. It felt solid enough. The golden moss beneath her feet felt real. Perhaps she really was here, but thathere was what was not really real. Perhapshere was what the anti-god had created to lure the unsuspecting away from God’s one truth.
She didn’t know which was the more frightening, that the illusion was in her head, or that this place was a creation of the anti-god.
But the creatures that inhabited this world? They had seemed, from what she could make of them from their actions, and from Carrelli’s reports of what they had said, to be peaceable creatures, if deluded. If she could find them, then perhaps she might learn from them whether this world had substance in fact.
She set off in the direction she had seen them take.
Even as she went, scampering through the golden forest, a part of her was aware of the flaw in her reasoning. How might she petition the truth from a race of beings who might themselves, unknowingly, be part of the illusion created to snare the pious? She presse
d on regardless, wondering if it were only the desire for the company of others, whoever they might be, that made her seek the insect creatures.
After a short while, she realised that she was hungry and thirsty. She had not shared the fruit gathered by the aliens, although Ehrin had eaten without ill effect. Perhaps, if she found the silver insect beings, they might be able to provide her with something more substantial than fruit.
She stopped, listening. In the distance she thought she heard a snort, one of the grey creatures clearing its great proboscis. She set off in the direction of the sound, then stopped again to listen. This time she made out the laborious shuffle of the animals as they made their slow way through the forest, and seconds later she glimpsed the grey hide of a beast between the trees.
Brown, Eric Page 37