No Man's World: Omnibus

by Pat Kelleher

  The padre and Nurse Bell exchanged anxious glances. This was becoming more dangerous than either of them had realised.

  “You can’t leave Nurse Bell here while I undergo the rite,” said the padre. “Not now Sirigar knows where she is. Not when you know what she carries.”

  “This One agrees,” said Chandar. “This One will make sure that your djamirrii is kept out of the way and hidden from Sirigar’s spies.”

  Chandar addressed Nurse Bell. “Rhengar will escort you.”

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “The safest place in Khungarr.”

  CHANDAR ESCORTED PADRE Rand through the high, domed cathedral-like Chamber of the Anointed Ones. Set in the walls of the great circular hall were large alcoves, decorated with hieroglyphs impregnated with sacred scents. Chatt dhuyumirrii occupied many of the alcoves, facing the walls, their antennae waving over the glyphs. The susurration of Chatts at prayer filled the space, their clicking mandibles sounding, to the padre’s mind, like a women’s knitting circle making socks for soldiers.

  They continued down a passage, past the alchemical chambers where the Chatt apothecaries distilled and stored the sacred scents. Here had been the Scentorum, the repository of all their knowledge. Jeffries had destroyed it; thousands of years of accumulated scent scriptures and commentaries boiled, burned and vaporised in the conflagration, generations of knowledge gone. It had been an act of desecration akin to the burning of the library at Alexandria. The chambers had since been rebuilt, but many ancient scent texts had been lost forever.

  The padre was here to rectify that, if his mind survived the rite. They left the Scentorum behind and proceeded to a string of small chambers barely big enough to stand erect in. They reminded him of confessionals.

  Two acolyte dhuyumirrii nymphs approached, guiding them towards the ritual chamber. The padre paused for a second. If he was going to back out, now was the time. God knows he wanted to. But this wasn’t just about him anymore.

  “You will be safe in here. No One will harm you while you are undergoing the rite,” Chandar told him. “Not even Sirigar.”

  With a deep breath, he ducked his head and entered the small chamber. A large clay oil burner moulded up from the floor dominated it. The padre sat as the acolyte poured viscous oil into the burner, then lit it with a taper before retiring from the chamber.

  “GarSuleth guide you,” said Chandar as the plant door expanded to close off the chamber.

  As he breathed in the fumes, the padre began to pray. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name—”

  Under the influence of the alien fumes, the prayer became a mantra, the words warping, shifting, slurring, as the alien vapour enfolded his mind.

  “Our Father, give us this day our hallowed Earth which art our English heaven, forgive us our daily trespass and deliver us from this evil kingdom. Forgive us our sins and lead us not into the earth. Lead us not into temptation, but into glory. Thine is the power to grant this. Amen.”

  He began to feel hot and faint. His fingers reached for the dog collar around his neck and pulled it free. “No, let this cup pass from me,” he gasped. He struggled to get up, but his limbs wouldn’t obey. He slid to the floor, staring into the guttering flame of the oil burner.

  The vision came and he was powerless to stop it...

  CHATTS MADE EDITH’S skin crawl. It was a base, primal revulsion, something she had no control over, no matter how much she tried to rationalise it. She wished that Chandar had blessed her again; frankly, the Chatts’ ability to affect your mind like that revolted her, too, but the mild euphoria had helped last time. However, both she and the padre needed their wits about them here. So why, she wondered, did the padre feel the need to undergo that rite again? What was it he was trying to prove?

  She didn’t know, but she couldn’t wait to be out of here. She’d thought she could face it and conquer her fear of Chatts, but it was proving harder than she’d expected. When she first signed up to be a VAD she had little knowledge of what it might entail. Oh, she had some romantic girlish notions about mopping the brows of wounded heroes. Experience disabused her of that: maggots in wounds, the telltale smell of gas gangrene, suppurating sores; all these she had faced and conquered, until now she was able to deal with them as a matter of routine. But the Chatts still made her squirm.

  Rhengar led her down through narrower utilitarian tunnels. Here, the lichen light became less frequent. Despite promises of safety, Edith began to feel uneasy.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “You are a nurse,” it replied.

  “Yes,” she said cautiously.

  They arrived at a small, unremarkable plant door at the end of a passage.

  “Do you have a patient you want me to see? Are they in here?” she asked.

  “Here, yes,” said Rhengar.

  Edith suddenly became afraid. She wanted to turn and flee, but where was there to flee to in this nest of insects, when every denizen could be turned upon her in an instant with an insubstantial chemical alarm?

  She gripped her haversack tighter and tensed as Rhengar breathed on the door. It opened, and Edith found herself pushed through. “No, wait,” she pleaded, but Rhengar was already striding back up the passage and the plant door was blooming shut.

  Oh, how she wished Nellie were here.

  Edith found herself confronted by a small Chatt, its carapace a smooth pale white. It wore no silk garment like Chandar and its caste, or like the scentirrii. It stepped forward as its antennae investigated her. It seemed satisfied that all the required scents and aromas were in order and scuttled off down a ramp, stopping only to see if she was following.

  Very well, she thought. She straightened her back, lifted her chin and turned to face her fate with a very English decorum.

  As she descended, the passage opened out. The gloom beyond was filled with the scuttling and clicks of hundreds of Chatts. As her eyes grew used to the low light, she was able to make sense of the space. She realised with a shiver of revulsion that she had been here before. It was the Khungarrii nursery.

  No wonder Rhengar thought she would be safe here. It would be the last place Sirigar would think to look. It was also the last place she wanted to be.

  She looked around and saw no signs of the battle that had raged there months before as a platoon of Pennine Fusiliers fought their way out of the edifice. The great hole in the wall, where the Ivanhoe had smashed through, had long since been repaired, as if they had never been there.

  Around the walls of the chamber were recesses where the grubs pupated into nymphs. Only a quarter of the cells were sealed and occupied. The rest lay open and empty. Running across the floor of the chamber were long sinuous channels where Urmen women and nursery Chatts fed blind, wriggling grubs.

  She noticed precious few eggs about the nursery. Surely, these things should be like factories. But there was no time to contemplate the problem, as her guide walked on down a large side passage. It curved and Edith could make out something huge and worm-like at the end, to which Chatts were attending.

  As she came closer, she realised that it was only part of some larger creature; the rest lay in a chamber beyond. Edging alongside the wormlike protuberance, she entered the chamber. Her mouth went dry and she could feel her heart pound in her chest. Occupying almost the entire space, as though they had built the chamber around it, was what she guessed to be the Khungarrii Queen. Its abdomen was a pulsating sac, twenty or thirty feet high, and grossly distended, to the point where the taut, glistening pale skin verged on translucency. Whatever limbs the Queen once possessed had withered or been swallowed by its vast bulk. Atop of that, dwarfed by its body, its head and thorax were of normal Chatt size, making it all the more grotesque. It was incapable of moving, grooming or feeding itself.

  To that end, the chamber wall ran with a spiralling gallery, and slung across the huge corpulent form were bridges and gantries, so that its attendants could groom every inch of its b
ody. Even now, Chatts scurried across it, licking up sweat. While others laboured in trenches dug beneath the vast bulk, removing excreta, a continual procession wound up the spiral gallery to a gantry level with the Queen’s thorax and head. There, attendants supplied the Queen with an endless supply of bowls of some sort of substance which they first masticated and then fed to it, like some sort of royal jelly.

  However, this obese creature was more than just an egg-laying machine. It controlled the state of the colony through unspoken chemical decrees. Above the Queen, in the roof of the royal chamber, were a cluster of vents that drew the royal scent commands up into the edifice, where they were circulated on the air.

  Edith stared up in horror at the creature.

  The whole machinery of attendance ground on around her, with Chatts ignoring her, until one touched her on the shoulder, making her yelp in alarm. It directed her back to the tunnel where the appendage from the distended belly ran.

  She realised what was wrong. There should have been a steady stream of nursery attendants carrying eggs from the ovipositor, the egglaying tube, to the nursery chamber, but there were none to be seen.

  Was that what Sirigar had been referring to when it was talking about the future of Khungarr?

  A Chatt spoke, struggling with the language, its exalted position not needing much interaction with Urmen.

  “Queen. Ill. Sickness. No eggs.”

  Whatever was wrong, it was beyond their abilities to heal, and they were desperate. That was why she was here.

  That changed things. With a patient, Edith was able to focus. Slowly, the terror she felt being surrounded by these creatures receded. She had a job to do. This was why Chandar hadn’t blessed her. In a euphoric state, she would have been in no position to help.

  “Light. I need light,” said Edith, sharply.

  The Chatt chittered a command, and within moments, a blue-white light bobbed toward them. It made Edith think briefly of Tinkerbell.

  Her aunt had taken her to see a performance of Peter Pan and Wendy many years earlier with her young cousins. And she’d clapped; how she’d clapped to save poor Tink. If only saving the Queen were as easy, she thought.

  Edith rolled up her sleeves as a dozen or so more Chatt attendants arrived clutching bunches of luminous lichen, their light bathing the tunnel.

  She set about examining the appendage. The tube was inflamed and swollen, with several large sores, two of which were open and suppurating. The translucence she’d found so awful also proved to be a great aid, almost like an x-ray. She could see that the tube was swollen and not allowing the eggs to pass. They were backing up, impacting on the side of the canal. Somehow, they would have to be released. She knelt before the opening of the ovipositor and gently inserted her hand, feeling her way up the inside of the lubricated tube. Her shoulder was almost touching the ovipositor sheath by the time she felt the constriction. The swelling had all but closed off the canal. Slowly, she withdrew her arm to find it coated with mucus. She tried to hide her disgust as she flicked creamy opaque strings of it at the tunnel wall before hurriedly wiping her arm down with a length of silken cloth provided by the Chatts.

  After her internal exam, she returned her attention to the infected wounds. If the infection had got into the bloodstream, then there was no hope of saving the creature.

  “Water!” she demanded. “And bandages.” They brought water and more fresh silk almost immediately. She sluiced out the sores as best she could.

  The open wounds needed debriding, the dead infected matter cutting away, but she had no knife, no scalpel, no way to do it. She looked around and met the inquiring eyes of the Chatt. She looked at its mandibles. They would have to do.

  “Here!” she said pointing at a wound. “Here!” she mimed snipping mandibles. The Chatt understood, and under her direction, it chewed away at the dead matter.

  When she was satisfied that the wounds were clean, Edith opened her haversack, sorted guiltily past the sacred scent and petrol fruit juice, to retrieve two precious ampoules of iodine. She broke one into each wound.

  Next, she pulled out sealed bags of dried moss. It had been a method she had learned in London, before she came out to France, where they used sphagnum moss as an absorbent surgical dressing for wounds in war hospitals. Here on this world, it proved a Godsend, once they had located a suitable source.

  She packed the wounds with the moss and bandaged them using lengths of silk that the Chatts provided. She hoped that it would bring the ovipositor swelling down enough to allow the passing of eggs. The dressings would have to be changed every couple of hours. That, for now, was all she could do.

  Tired, she found a nook out of the way of the constant scuttling, crawled into it and hugged her bag to her. The ability to sleep anywhere, at any time, was a skill the Fusiliers had long since mastered, and one she had soon acquired. Despite her unfamiliar surrounding and the constant, unsettling chittering, she fell quickly and deeply asleep.

  SHE WOKE SEVERAL times throughout the night; or at least, she assumed it was still night. Down here, in the bowels of the edifice, it was hard to tell. She changed the dressings on the wounds and found that, whatever the hour of day or night, the level of attendance to the Queen did not drop.

  The Chatt who had conducted her attended her closely. It watched her, intently, so she taught it as she went along, seeing it not as a repulsive Chatt, but another creature wanting to care for others. On the other hand, it would probably kill her if it looked as if she was harming the Queen in any way. They probably all would. She tried to push that thought to the back of her mind.

  The dressings seem to have done their work. The wounds were less inflamed and the tube was looking less swollen. As to what had caused the wounds, she couldn’t say, but she did wonder how such injuries were possible in a place where the Queen was cosseted and cared for every hour of the day. If Sirigar did not cause this, it had certainly gained great capital from it, seeking to blame the illness and possible reproductive crisis on the ‘Great Corruption.’ If the Queen had not responded to Edith’s treatment, the chances of the Pennines’ survival would be very bleak indeed.

  She turned her attention back to the task in hand. Had she done enough to ease the egg blockage?

  Parting the fleshy sheath, once again Edith eased her hand into the ovipositor canal. Gently but firmly, she pushed her arm up inside. There had been some improvement. She could pass her hand beyond the swelling now. At full stretch, she could feel an egg with the tips of her fingers, pressing against the wall of the canal. She struggled and flexed, trying to get another inch or so of reach. After a minute or two of frustration, her fingers finally curled round the far edge of the egg and she managed to retrieve it, scooping it slowly down the canal. Almost immediately, another slid down. Matters would improve as the swelling reduced.

  When she delivered the pearlescent egg to the waiting Chatt, a wave of excited chittering passed round the chamber. It almost sounded like soft, polite applause.

  Edith glanced up along the ovipositor, over the vast, throbbing, translucent abdomen to the small thorax and head high above her, and saw the Queen staring back down at her over its vast bulk.

  As soon as Edith delivered them, the Chatts took the eggs to the nursery chamber, each one carried away with awe and reverence.

  It might be days before the infection was gone, but she showed the Chatt what to do. Its slender arm and longer fingers might be better suited to retrieving the eggs than hers.

  In response to some unspoken command, Edith found herself manhandled, despite her mild protestations, from one Chatt to another and guided swiftly up the incline of the spiral gallery until she reached the audience gantry. There, ushered by the arthropod attendants, she stepped out to come face to face with the Queen itself; with the greater part of its obscene bulk hidden below like an iceberg, the portion Edith faced looked natural, or as natural as these creatures ever could.

  With feeble arms, it beckoned Edith closer. Sh
e took a faltering step toward it. The Queen leaned forward, waving its long antennae at her as an attendant tried to feed it from a bowl. The Queen chittered at it. It froze, not comprehending its instructions. The Queen spoke again, more forcefully this time. With reluctance, the attendant turned and proffered the bowl to Edith. Unsure as to the etiquette of the situation, Edith pointed to herself.

  “Me? You want me to eat?”

  The Chatt offered the bowl again. There was no mistaking the gesture. Those Chatts nearby halted briefly in their tasks to watch.

  “It is an honour no Urman has ever been given,” said the Chatt, watching her.

  Edith looked at the grey, glutinous and masticated jelly in the bowl. It didn’t look at all appetising. She could feel her stomach rebelling just looking at it. Seeing no way to decline politely, she smiled weakly at the Queen, cupped her hand and slipped her fingers into the warm gelatinous mess.

  The Queen watched expectantly.

  Edith took a deep breath and spooned her fingers into her mouth. She gagged a little at the thick and slimy texture, and had to force herself to swallow it. It was curiously filling, and it was a struggle to finish the bowl. She could feel it rising back up her throat and she swallowed hard, determined to keep it down.

  The Queen watched in approval, unblinking.

  Unsure what to do next, Edith gave a little curtsy. Another attendant ushered her away along the gantry as others resumed the chores of feeding and cleaning their Queen. Her royal audience was over.

  Edith reached the other side of the royal chamber and looked back. They had forgotten her presence already. Down below, Chatts once more resumed the collection of eggs.

  A Chatt led her down another passage to another circular plant door. The Chatt breathed on it and the circular plant portal shrivelled open to reveal Rhengar.