Brown, Eric

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]

  Kaluchek prayed quietly under her breath. They turned to face the corridor.

  Seconds later Carrelli entered, smiling. “It’s on,” she said. “The Ho-lah-lee will summon a sail for us. We set off at sunrise.”

  * * * *

  3

  The sea wasblood red. The sun, rising at a right angle to the ocean, filled the dawn sky with coppery light.

  Hendry stepped from the ship and paused in wonder at the view. The light was incredible, illuminating the scene before the ship. More than a hundred Ho-lah-lee had assembled on the foreshore. They stood upright on the littoral loam and in the shallows, gazing out to sea in a silence he guessed must be part of some ritual obeisance. One or two raised their arms, and after a minute a concerted sound issued from the creatures, a bass note that for some odd reason struck him as profoundly moving.

  He walked with Kaluchek to the edge of the sea, Carrelli and Ehrin close behind. Olembe stood on the ramp of the ship, watching them.

  A Ho-lah-lee moved from the mass of creatures at the water’s edge and spoke to Carrelli. She replied, then turned to Hendry and Kaluchek. “They will now perform the ritual of the summoning. Many of them are embarking on the pilgrimage today. We must wait our turn.”

  As if at a silent signal, the assembled Ho-lah-lee raised their arms as one, and another silence descended upon the gathering. Hendry looked into the sky. Directly above, the tendrils waved in the wind, great lazy sweeps that seemed, because of their great height, retarded like the ebb and flow of marine flora.

  “Look,” Kaluchek whispered, pointing.

  High above the tendrils, Hendry saw the first sail. It drifted in over the vegetation, then descended suddenly and with slow majesty. It was, he saw, vast—perhaps a hundred metres high and almost as wide. On closer inspection it appeared silver, though the tendrils could be seen through its membrane as if through an opaque lens. It was, he thought, the strangest animal he had ever witnessed.

  The sail came in low over the shallows, then slowed itself by some unknown feat of aerodynamics and paused long enough for a dozen Ho-lah-lee to scramble aboard. They climbed up the concave inner curve of the sail, and seemed to hang suspended as the sail took off again, allowing the wind to waft it out to sea and higher into the air. Soon it was a rapidly dwindling speck against the brightening sky.

  “And there’s another, and another...”

  They were coming in threes and fours now, a slow procession of the incredible extraterrestrial beings, dipping over the tendrils and slowing above the shallows. Little by little the crowd of Ho-lah-lee diminished as they climbed aboard and took off on their once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage.

  A Ho-lah-lee approached Carrelli and spoke to her. She translated. “The next sail is for us. According to the Ho-lah-lee, it is an ancient sail, which has made the journey a thousand times before. It will be honoured to convey us to the hallowed land.”

  Hendry turned and watched a great sail dip over the tendrils, its bellying curve catching the sunlight in a rouge filament like a sickle. It swept in low, slowing and coming to a halt a few metres from them. The Ho-lah-lee spoke again and Carrelli said, “We simply climb aboard and the sail will do the rest. Don’t climb too high, though, or we’ll be in danger of tipping the creature.”

  As the closest to the sail, Hendry waded into the shallows and climbed aboard, turning to help Kaluchek after him. The membrane gave beneath his feet, like the surface of a slack trampoline, and he wallowed for a few paces before coming to the concave inner sweep of the curious creature. He reached out, and was amazed to find that his palms adhered to the diaphanous surface as if glued—and yet he was able to pull his hands away with ease. He climbed, then turned and found himself supported by the membrane. He lay back as if in a hammock and watched Kaluchek ascending until she was beside him. Carrelli came next, followed by Ehrin, and they settled further down the curve. Last of all came two Ho-lah-lee, who laid their heads against the membrane and closed their eyes as the sail rose and moved away from the shore.

  The sail climbed, and the land sank away beneath them. The ship became ever smaller—Olembe on the ramp a tiny stick figure, waving a hand in the air—until it was a golden sliver almost lost amid the tendrils that crowded the foreshore.

  They rose rapidly, their ascent dizzying, in total silence. Hendry recalled a balloon ride in his youth, and his amazement at the lack of noise. As was the case then, now they were moving with the wave-front of the wind: the only sound was Kaluchek beside him, laughing to herself in exhilaration.

  He scanned the skies for any sign of the Church ship. The heavens above the tendril forest were a cloudless bright blue, a shade deeper than any sky on Earth. All that could be seen in the depthless blue were a hundred elliptical specks as the sails headed out to sea.

  He examined the surface of the sail. It appeared to be a jelly-like substance, shot through with tiny silver filaments like veins. He craned his neck, straining to see to the top edge of the creature, but he could detect no evidence of sensory organs, or a knot in the flesh that might denote the locus of a cortex. He reminded himself that his was an alien creature, a very alien creature, and he would be foolish to expect its physiology to conform to terrestrial norms.

  They were rising all the time. The ocean glittered below, and the land they had left was on the horizon now, a fringe of waving tendrils that seemed kilometres distant. Hendry looked left and right, and made out a flotilla of a dozen nearby sails, all bearing their cargo of tiny frog-like Ho-lah-lee. He wondered how many years this had been going on, and what form their pilgrimage took when they reached journey’s end.

  Journey’s end... He doubted it would be his journey’s end, but merely a stage upon the way. The thought of returning to the first tier for the colonists, having to avoid the lemur militia and any other dangers that might be lurking, filled him with apprehension. There was a long way to go before that, though: the finding of a suitable, empty world, the planning of how best to go about ferrying the colonists up the tiers...

  Kaluchek reached out and touched his arm. “What are you thinking, Joe?”

  He smiled. “Journey’s end,” he said. “But we’ve really only just begun.”

  “It’s as if we’ve been travelling for ages,” she said. “I’m tired. I want to settle down, start the colony.”

  He looked at her, at the beautiful woman he was coming to love, and wondered at the secrets hidden behind her open, smiling face. He wondered how someone so loving could harbour so much hate. What had happened all those years ago in LA, between the man who had been Friday Olembe and herself?

  “Sissy...”

  She looked up at him, smiling radiantly. “Mmm?”

  He reached out and knuckled her cheek. “What happened?” he asked.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t...”

  “At university in LA. You met... Friday Olembe, right? What happened?”

  She stared at him, her expression mystified, and he wondered suddenly if he’d got it horribly wrong. Then she said, “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. That is, I know something happened— to make you feel the way you do towards Friday. But I don’t know exactly what.”

  She looked away, shaking her head, pain in her eyes.

  “You don’t have to tell me, Sissy. If it’s too... if it’s something you don’t want to share. But,” he paused, wondering how to phrase what he had to tell her, “but I think there’s something you should know about Friday.”

  She stared at him. “I know all I need to know!” she said with a flare of anger. “I know what he did to me, how he, how...”

  Her face collapsed, her mouth pulled into a pained rictus, and she was crying, sobbing silently. He reached out and cradled her in his arms, rocking her. “Sissy, listen to me, I need to tell you... You’ve got to know.”

  She looked up, shaking her head. “What?”

  “It wasn’t Friday,” he said, then corrected himself, “That is, it wasn’t the man we know as
Friday Olembe.”

  She pulled away, eyes wide, as if accusing him of some terrible complicity with the man who had destroyed her life all those years ago. “Sissy, he took the identity of Friday Olembe a year ago. Friday was his brother, a nuclear engineer like himself, but who studied at LA in the eighties, while you were there.”

  “Olembe told you this?”

  He nodded. “I asked him about his past. I wanted to know if he really was responsible for the war crimes, as you claimed. I questioned him. He took it the wrong way, told me about the crime he had committed, in taking his brother’s identity.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  So he told her about the shooting accident, and Friday Olembe’s call up from the ESO, and how his brother had seen the opportunity to steal his identity.

  “And you believe him?” Kaluchek asked.

  Hendry nodded. “He was telling the truth, Sissy.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I put two and two together, realised something must have happened between you and Friday’s brother back in LA.”

  “Something happened? Christ, do you want to know what happened? The bastard raped me. I was eighteen. A virgin. Heraped me!”

  “It’s okay. It’s over. That was a long time ago.” He held her.

  “And you try to tell me that it wasn’t Olembe! The man I’ve been hating all these years, been planning to destroy... Christ, it kept me going, Joe. I dreamed of the day I’d finally get even with the bastard! And now you’re trying to tell me...”

  “Sissy, Sissy... It’s no good hating. It doesn’t help you! It destroys—”

  She spat at him, “What do you know about hatred, Joe!”

  He stroked her cheek. “I hated, Sissy. I hated Su for leaving me, leaving me and Chrissie. And leaving us for some crackpot terrorist organisation. I hated her with all my strength. And do you know something? It didn’t make me a very nice person. Hate corrodes. It corrupts the good person you could become if you release the hatred, let go, look ahead and learn to live again.”

  She was sobbing on his shoulder now. “But he hurt me so much, Joe. The bastard took so much away from me and almost killed me inhere!”

  “I know, I know. But you’ve got to let go.”

  “I dreamed of the day I’d take revenge on him. Nothing else mattered.”

  “You were imprisoned in the past, fantasising about a future act that could never be as satisfying as the dream.”

  She stared at him. “I never got that revenge, Joe. It... it feels like something’s missing.”

  “Sissy, Friday Olembe died a thousand years ago, in the shooting accident in Nigeria. He got what he deserved.”

  “But he never knew the pain he caused me!”

  He stroked her cheek. “Who knows? Perhaps he did. He had plenty of time to look back and regret.” He shook his head. “But that doesn’t matter now. All that’s in the past. Put it behind you. Look ahead.” He smiled. “You have me, if that’s any compensation.”

  She smiled through her tears. “You’re a good man. Joe, I love you so much.”

  He held her.

  She looked up at him. “And Friday. I’ve spent so much time hating him... I don’t think I could stop, just like that. And he is the brother of the man who—”

  “You can’t hold him responsible for his brother’s crimes, Sissy.”

  She murmured, “I know that, Joe.”

  “You have to try to stop feeling the hate, okay? Later, when all this is over, tell him what happened. Apologise.” He smiled, to forestall her protests. “You’ll feel better if you do, okay?”

  She shook her head, her gaze distant. “I don’t know, Joe. I need to think about it,” she said in a small voice.

  He hugged her to him and kissed the top of her head.

  A little later she said, “Tell me what happened in Africa, Joe, when Friday’s brother was shot...”

  They rode on, and he told her Olembe’s story from the beginning. She listened in silence, reliving the death of the man she had hated for so long.

  Hendry held her and watched an armada of sails waft through the clear blue sky.

  Later, she rooted about in the pouch of her atmosphere suit and pulled out a handful of squashed berries. “I saved these for a rainy day,” she said quietly. “They’re... well, I don’t really know what they are, but they knock you out, put you under.” She smiled at him. “I could do with that right now.”

  Hendry looked back in the direction they had come. The coastline had vanished. He twisted around and stared through the blurred lens of the membrane. The sea stretched ahead for as far as the eye could see. He wondered how much longer the journey might last.

  “Try some?” Kaluchek asked, proffering the berries.

  He smiled and nodded, and allowed her to feed him the sweet mush. She ate the rest, and leaned against his chest, and minutes later Hendry felt himself drifting off, his thoughts becoming fuzzy, his body relaxing.

  In his dreams he was with Chrissie, except that she was not Chrissie but Sissy... At least, some of the time she was Chrissie, at others she was his small Inuit lover. Their identities morphed, segueing from one to the other. Then, as he dreamed that he was making love to the strange hybrid, he was pierced by a shaft of guilt that brought him awake, crying out loud.

  He sat up, trying to pull himself away from the membrane, then recalled where he was and slumped back. Sissy was curled beside him, sleeping. He felt the residuum of the guilt sluice from his consciousness, and wondered why he was torturing himself like this. He smiled; the answer was obvious, really. He had never really got over the guilt at Su’s leaving him. He’d told himself that it had been his fault she had left, depriving Chrissie of a mother. Now Chrissie was dead and he was in love with someone very much like her, and by extension someone very much like her mother.

  He shut off that line of reasoning and watched Carrelli climb carefully up the concave inner surface of the membrane to join them. Ehrin came too, nestling beside the Italian and watching her with its large eyes.

  “You’ve been asleep for hours, Joe.”

  He indicated the berry juice staining his fingers. “Thanks to Sissy.”

  “We’ve almost crossed the ocean.”

  He turned and peered through the membrane. Far below he made out the long gentle curve of a shoreline, surprisingly normal after the tendrilled coast they had left. This one was a stretch of what might have been golden sand, backed by undulating green plains and, further inland, foothills rising gradually to a distant mountain range.

  “Look,” Carrelli said, indicating the sky all around them.

  Where before there had been perhaps twenty sails floating across the ocean, now the air was filled with them. Hendry counted fifty before giving up. The closest was perhaps a dozen metres from their own sail, a vast lens carrying its cargo of tiny Ho-lah-lee; others sailed high on either hand, hundreds of them diminishing in perspective to tiny silver parings.

  “Convergence,” Carrelli said. “We can’t be far from the place of pilgrimage, wherever the Builders—or the Guardians—make their base.”

  Beside him, Kaluchek stirred to wakefulness. Hendry relayed what Carrelli had said. She stretched and yawned. “I hope we won’t be disappointed,” she said. “I mean, what if the Builders aren’t at home, or don’t want to see us?”

  Carrelli smiled. “I think the very sight of where they dwell will be amazing enough, even if we don’t find out anything about them.” She gestured at the converging sails. “It’s enough of an attraction to bring the Ho-lah-lee in their thousands, at any rate.”

  They were passing over the coastline now. Far below he could see the gentle lap of the ocean on the golden sands, for all the world like something from a terrestrial holovision programme.

  Not so familiar, though, were the herds of animals grazing on the foreshore. They were long-legged and spindly, with tiny heads bearing a disproportionate array of ramified antlers.

  Hendry looked ahead, through t
he membrane, for any sight of where the Builders might reside. The hills rolled on for what seemed like hundreds of kilometres, with not an artificial construction in sight.

  Ehrin touched Carrelli’s sleeve and spoke. She replied. For ten minutes they exchanged mysterious words in the abrupt, barking language. Hendry watched their faces for any sign of a familiar expression, but even Carrelli betrayed no emotion as she spoke, and Ehrin’s furred snout and massive eyes conveyed nothing.

  At last Carrelli turned to Hendry and Kaluchek and said, “Ehrin wants to bring the truth of the helix to his people. He says the Church has ruled with lies and cruelty for too long. He would like our help in bringing change to his world.”

  Kaluchek smiled. “How would we do that?”