As I looked back towards the waterfall a movement caught my eye.
It was the Aliens. As I watched they moved to the right and dropped out of sight. At last they were going down, following the water to their own Levels. I grabbed my pack, checked the loads in my gun and set off into the Sun.
It took me the rest of the day to reach the far side of the water. It was rough going. There was a sort of path some of the way, but there were long stretches over great tumbled slabs of floor and roof. There were plants too, growing wild, with thorns. There was water everywhere. I fell in twice and had to stop to reload my gun. The Sun was very hot. While it was high I stopped and tried to sleep in a fairly good fragment of Corridor I found. My legs were scratched and my feet bleeding, there was no soft dust here.
When the Night came I was on the very edge of the path down. Mostly it was a chain of steep mossy slopes, but there were some stretches of stair. It plunged down and down, a great vee cut in the side of the City, right to the Forest of the floor below. The thunder of the falling water was terrible.
A mile or so down I could see the red glow of the Aliens’ fire. A day’s march and they would reach the floor. I decided to catch a few hours’ sleep and get on down after them. The Moon had just come up and I could see there would be plenty of light.
I woke an hour later in agony. My whole skin was on fire. It was so stiff I could hardly move. It felt swollen—it was as if it was going to lift off. Later when the light came I found that instead of the natural white I was bright red. The straps over my shoulders had left white painless paths on my skin. I had the Sun Burn. My father had warned me about that, but I hadn’t thought it could be as bad. Later blisters came up. I rubbed in all I had left of the rat fat and that seemed to ease it a bit. My skin never got to be its right colour again—it’s still a bit off-white. I started off at once, to take my mind off the pain. In a way I was glad the Bum had woken me—I would get to the Aliens all the quicker.
As I went down it got wetter and wetter. The roar of the waterfall filled my head now, everything was soaked from the drifting spray. There were many more plants now, the whole ground surface was covered with the moss.
My ankle turned, I fell. A stone lifted out of the moss bed and rolled, bounding down the steep slope. I watched it with horror. That was all I needed. A warning to tell the Aliens I was coming. The stone gave a final leap in the air and disappeared over the lip into the depths. I crawled down to the edge and peered over.
It was terrible. Straight down for thousands of feet to the Green top below. Clouds of vapour from the fall, layer upon layer, moved slowly across the space below. My mind reeled. All that infinity of space above was nothing to the drop in front of me. I rolled back from the edge. I lay on my back and watched the Sky. I tried to shut my eyes but couldn’t. I didn’t dare move for an hour after that.
In the end I pulled myself together and went on down. I wondered if the Aliens could have noticed the falling rock, I didn’t think they would have heard it in the water noise, but you never know with an Alien.
* * * *
When the Sun came up I was quite well on. The Sun didn’t seem so strong down here. Perhaps because it had to come through the banks of spray. The dark mass of the Green gained texture and colour. The mist down there cleared, the air warmed.
About half way through the afternoon I came to a flatter area—mossy and almost level. As I stepped out on to the springy surface a movement behind and to my right caught the tail of my eye.
It was one of the Aliens. I tore the wrapping from the breech of my gun, set the wheels and swung the weapon to my shoulder. There was another entrance to the glade and that was where the Alien was waiting. It had guessed wrong. As I completed my aim it charged.
The wheel spun, rasping on the flint. The primer charge took in a splash of sparks and smoke. The Alien was flying at me. It seemed to run a few inches off the ground.
At last the gun fired. The thud of the recoil was a message from Heaven.
The slug tore into the Alien. Its run broke. It all seemed to happen very slowly. The Alien swung to the side. It tottered on the edge of the water chasm. A stone shifted and it disappeared over the lip.
I dropped on one knee and reloaded the fired barrel. That other Alien was about somewhere. When I had the gun ready I moved across the glade and made sure the first Alien was gone.
It was.
As I turned from the fall I saw the second Alien standing in the bushes down the slope. The range was long but I fired anyway.
I hit it—I saw a spurt of flesh. The brute went down, but it didn’t do a lot of damage. It was one of the times I wished I still had a long barrel on my gun.
I ran down to the edge of the bushes. The plants were thrashing about down there. I waited, when I caught a glimpse of the Alien I fired again. The thrashing stopped.
I carefully reloaded my gun. It took a bit of time. My fingers were nervous and I dropped one of the flints. It took me a time to find it again and then I had to fit it. Altogether it was about ten minutes before I was ready.
I went down very cautiously but I might as well have saved my time. The Alien was gone. Later I caught a glimpse of it far ahead going swiftly down to the Green. I knew I had hit it once. I thought I had hit it twice, but it didn’t seem to have slowed up at all. They just don’t feel pain ... they’re different.
And that’s how it went. I followed the thing down in the thunder of the falling water, through the drifting spray. At length I was on the last approach to the Green.
The last three hundred feet of the path was a great channelled path of rubble jutting out of the City into the Green. To the right was the huge round pool of the waterfall.
The water came cascading down in steps from the Lake on top. The last bit fell a straight thousand feet, touching nothing. The water fell down into this great pool, it was very deep. A stream ran away to the east, along the City wall.
From the top of the rubble I could see the fins of the Aliens’ Ships sticking up out of the Green. The plants in the Green were much bigger than they looked from the Top, two or three hundred feet high, some of them. I looked back up at the great safe bulk of the City. The great vee gouge ran back into it. The Top was lost in clouds.
The Alien’s trail was easy to follow now. It ran east along the sandy shore of the waterfall Lake and then north, towards the first of the wrecked Ships. I cut straight through the Green, direct to the Ship.
That Green is a funny place. The plants, “Trees”, I suppose they are, come straight up out of the ground, like the columns in one of the Great Chambers. Round the bottoms the ground is broken up in great slabs, like it was floor once. The slabs have a sort of thick, moist brown dust over them, made up of the rotten leaves off the tree things. In this there are smaller plants, they aren’t white like the City ones either, none of them are Outside, it’s very strange till you get used to it. There’s no Order either, the trees are sort of random, not like the City at all. There are animals too. A bit like the dogs, except they’re bigger and some have horns. They’re not mangy either. They run in packs though, like the dogs.
When I started to get near the Ship the Place seemed to change. The Ship lay on its side in the centre of a rough circle. The floor was better here. There weren’t so many of the trees and where it was broken the floor was much thicker. It was all covered with grass. The Ship lay on its side about a mile from me, it was a very big Place.
The Ship was big too. I doubt it would have fitted into one of the small Great Chambers. In the Green around the circle were one or two Machines. I couldn’t see what they were for, they were very old and falling to bits with rust. The plants were growing right through them. In one of them were some man-bones. Rotten they were, the plants were growing right through them too.
I started out towards the Ship. It was shining silver in the Sun Light. -From the City it looked pretty perfect, new, but as I got near I could see the metal was buckled and torn. In places wh
ole plates were torn off. Towards the far end was a particularly big hole, the Ship was especially buckled there. The edges were soft and gobbed, like they had been melted. Bits of bright metal were scattered all about the ship. It wasn’t quite straight either, its back was broken. I kept low, below the level of the plants as far as I could. They got fewer and fewer as I moved towards the centre.
I was right about the Alien going for the Ship. When I was about a hundred yards off the centre the Alien broke cover on my right. As it saw me it began to move real fast. I broke into a run and we raced for the blasted port.
The Alien was going to get there first. I was about thirty yards away, well within range. I fired both barrels from the hip, one after the other. The Alien went over like a nine pin. It flung against the side of the Ship and rolled, falling into the Ship. It ended half in and half out of the entrance. You don’t go far with two .75 slugs in you.
I stepped in through the coils of powder smoke and looked down at the Alien. It wasn’t quite dead.
It’s funny how they bleed red like us. It spoke to me. Very calm it was, but very weak too. It had a soft, gentle sort of voice. It’s funny how like us they are. Apart from being black that is.
“Wait! You don’t have to kill me ... I’ll soon be dead. This is the truth. I’ve no reason to lie.”
The Alien lay sprawled. The first shot had broken one arm, the second had gone in just below the breasts, it was a young female. I didn’t have a load left in my gun so I let it talk. You don’t touch Aliens or I would have finished it with my knife. It would soon be dead. Meantime it went on talking.
“Look in the Ship ... On the second bulkhead ... look ... and tell me what you find.”
I went into the Ship, I didn’t turn my back on the Alien, you don’t do that, ever.
The floor of the Ship was gently curved and deeply ribbed. There was some sort of second skin but most of that was gone. The deep spaces between the floor ribs were filled with fine sand. There were hardly any plants here. I stubbed my foot on something in the sand. I dug it out, it was a half skull. There were other bones too, most of them were broken or charred. The part of the Ship I was in was open to the weather. The distorted metal was washed clean, eroded. I searched and found the bulkhead the Alien had told me about.
It was sheltered so there was still some paint on it. After a bit I made out some letters on it. My father had taught me how to cypher, it’s handy if you’re going to be a smith. I traced it out. It said “EXPLORATION CORPS” then underneath and bigger “MAIN LOCK”. Farther down a rusty lever was labelled “EXHAUST”.
I turned away and began reloading my gun. I was just spitting in the last slug when it dawned on me. If I could read a cypher on the Ship, there as it was when the Ship came, then it couldn’t be Alien. The Ship was ours ... of the City ... Human.
If the Ship wasn’t Alien then who had I just shot? If there were no Alien Ships then there were no Aliens. And the bones too—they were Human enough.
My mind was in an uproar. I thought and thought. The cabin swam. In the end I thought of the Alien. She would know something.
She was still lying where I’d left her. She had a sort of white cloth thing and was holding it against her body wound. There was a piece of dark blue paper with a white and red cross on it near by on the ground. She didn’t seem a lot weaker, but she was pretty badly hit.
“Pull my boots off,” she said. After a bit I found out how they worked. I undid the lace things and pulled them off. She had me tie the white cloth thing behind her back. It took me a while to understand her clothes but I managed it in the end. Then she made me get a tube thing from her haversack and press the contents into her arm. She seemed a lot easier after that. I moistened her lips from my water bottle and she started to talk.
“You’ve worked out there are no Aliens?” I nodded. After a bit she gathered her strength and went on. “The Ships are Human—yours and mine. They are the Star Ships ... Exploration Corps.... Do you know how far the Stars are? ... Millions upon millions of miles. The Sun is a Star ... ninety-four million away ... near. The others are much, much farther. It took the Ships a hundred years to get to the nearest—and another hundred to get back ... When they did, conditions had changed. The City cultures began centuries ago ... by the time the Ships got back they had reached their full development and begun to decline—break down. Did you know a billion people lived in that one—in yours ? They never went out, no one ever left the City. Self contained. The machines and power lasted quite well for a century or two ... some still work. Then the breakdown started ... the disease ... the riots ... the end of order. There aren’t more than ten thousand people in the whole City now and less and less every year ... a lot you’d hardly call human. It hadn’t gone as far when the Ships came back, but Exploration Corps was long forgotten ... your ancesters blasted them when they came to land ... they thought it was an invasion ... or missiles from another City. They didn’t bother to find out—and they didn’t care. The Mayorality may have known ... or guessed ... but they were only politicians. One of the Ships crashed into the City ... the power unit exploded ... it did that....” She meant the great rift in the blank side of the City, the way we had come down.
There was a long pause then. She was a lot weaker—I think she slept for a bit. When she woke I said: “Why are your people different?”
“Segregation. We always had the worst of it. The machines and power went first where we were. We were on the lowest Levels ... we went outside when the power went. We have a good community now.”
“Why do you bother? Why invade us?”
“To look for the machines ... we want to study them ... and to find books. We try to contact your people ... we would treat you with our medicines ... educate ... we are missionaries. We want you to come outside ... it’s better out here ... if you will let us bring you out.”
“Where’s this community?”
“North of here. By the river. We have a university there ... it’s not like the old ones ... not yet... but we work.”
I checked up as well as I could, of course. You don’t believe an Alien, not as easy as all that. I wondered how many I could get if I went to the Community. But even then I more than half believed her.
She died a little after that. I was away at the time, poking about in the other Ships. They were all the same. In them all I found the forms and order of the City. I had seen it all before, it was familiar, the proportions of the stairs, the writing on the walls, the rooms were all of the City. I found one door that was unbroken, the cabin behind hadn’t been opened since the Ships came. I blew it open with the spare gun-powder from my pack. The corroded metal gave a lot easier than I thought it would. I had to wait for the smoke to clear. It was a small room, more of a cupboard really. There were a lot of papers there. Among them I found a diary and some old pictures. I could read and understand most of what was written in the little book. It was full of references to “the City”, “Earth” and “Home”. It had belonged to a man called James Cameron, I wondered if it was the same Cameron. I knew then that all the Alien had told me was true for sure. One of the pictures was of a woman in clothes like the Alien’s, nearly. She was white, but not as white as we are. I wonder if we can ever be like the Aliens.
I went back and stood near her corpse. The tall grass moved gently in a warm breeze; the air was dusty with pollen in the Sun Light; the trees were green-blue over on the edge of the forest, butterflies made staggering patterns of brilliant colour against them. I could hear the bees humming and some birds were singing. My feet were crushing small bright flowers in the short mossy grass. I brushed the insects from the cuts on her legs and from her eyes.
It was then I found out why the Aliens smell so. In her pack was a packet of something labelled “Lilac Soap”. It smelled like her. They wash in it. She didn’t have any of the ring-worm and I never saw an Alien with the itch. I think the soap did that.
I buried the body in one of the gaps between the cr
acked floor slabs. I raised a pile of stones and yellow sand to mark the place. I turned my back on the City and headed north into the Green.
On the edge of the Green I turned and looked back. Dust and floating seeds followed my path, where it was flattened the grass shone back at me. Some were slowly springing back into place. The City Top was mostly hidden in clouds. Through a gap I could see the water catchments my father had shown me. Then they had been to the west, now they were far to the east. I had come a long way.
New Writings in SF 9 - [Anthology] Page 18