Escaping the Sun

by Rhett Goreman

  Suran happened to notice that inquisitive little girl, Quiana, was amongst the group holding on tightly to her mother’s hand.

  She also noticed the man send the hysterical families running off towards the far end of the corridor, only to shut the door behind them, looking rather pleased with himself.

  Her eyes continued to follow him as he ran over to a glass fronted customer service booth.

  The booth reminded me of a 20th Century telephone box. Inside was a holographic video screen, largely for human use, and a food and drink fabrication station.

  At that moment, Suran held her hand out to stop us talking.

  ‘That man,’ she said, pointing a finger. ‘The one in the booth. I’m sure I’ve seen him before. I think he may be a murderer.’

  ‘He’s High Elite isn’t he?’ said Tukarra trying to establish the colour of his suit in the dim light.

  Suran shouted, ‘Lets keep him in there whilst we question him.’

  Khonen ran over to the booth, pretended he wanted to use it himself, and then he leant back onto its full height glass door.

  The man was having a heated discussion inside, something about his task was done now, he wanted his reward and he wanted out.

  Suran, Tukarra and myself quickly came over to help Khonen keep the door shut, and Suran screamed through the glass at the man, ‘What were you doing in that cable chamber in my Arboretum? Did you kill that girl?’

  The man turned around from the controls of the customer service station, and gave Suran a filthy look that slowly transformed into a sickly smile.

  ‘My time has come. My master needs me. I shall be immortal,’ he spat, pressing his face hard against the glass, contorting his features, twisting his nose. His words made me shudder and I involuntarily jerked my head away from the door.

  Suran, Tukarra, Khonen and I, all looked at each other. We had no doubt in our minds the man was insane, but we also had not the slightest idea what to do next. There was no notion of a police force on Cerrina, nor any type of Security personnel, and we could not call for help anyway because the Ether was down.

  However, we need not have concerned ourselves with that problem because this ugly situation suddenly, and unexpectedly, resolved itself.

  A thick yellow liquid oozed through a grating in the floor of the booth and in seconds the cubical was half full, the level rapidly rising above the man’s waist. Suran started to tug at the door to let him out, but it was locked from the inside. We were horrified, but we also felt compelled to watch. There had to be some useful information to be gained from the spectacle.

  Suran screamed. There was something eel like, wriggling around in the liquid, making waves on the surface and strange patterns against the glass. A pale yellow tentacle wrapped itself around the man’s throat.

  He continued to smile, as the level of the liquid pushed on to climb over his head and fill the entire booth.

  There were still half a dozen members of the public in the room with us. They had witnessed everything that had happened, and they were all just as shocked as we were.

  I called out to them, ‘We need to push this cabinet over. Can any of you give us a hand?’

  Three blue clad humans came to help. I suggested that if we all pushed at the centre of one side of the booth we might be able to shift it.

  Sure enough it worked, to some extent. A corner of the cubicle lifted away from the floor, just enough to break the seal, allowing the yellow slime to gush between our feet.

  As a pool of liquid spread out across the room, our eyes were transfixed on the glass through which we expected to see a half drowned body emerge.

  There was no body. There were no tentacles. When the whole cubical had drained empty, I could see the grating was not seated properly amongst the floor tiles, but apart from that there was no physical evidence the man had ever been in there.

  Khonen blurted out, ‘What on Cerrina do you make of that?’

  I explained that Tukarra and I had seen something like it back on Earth, in the recycling room at Vidora, but that was in a horizontal tank.

  ‘This cubical must be a space saving idea,’ I said, cringing at the thought.

  Tukarra then added, ‘All my life, I have believed in the principles of recycling, but we now know this may also be a form of transportation! The man certainly believed he was going to a better place. To be with his master.’

  Suran then revealed a horrible thought to us, one she had been trying to put to the back of her mind..

  ‘I have seen moving tentacles like that before, only what I saw I thought looked more like plant roots, or tendrils, and they were brownish, not yellow.’

  ‘Where did you see them?’ I asked.

  ‘In the Arboretum,’ she replied.

  ‘And where does that corridor lead, you know the one our disappearing man sent those people into?’ I wondered.

  Khonen spoke up. ‘The Arboretum,’ he said.

  We ran over to the door but it had been solidly locked. There was a small, round, glass portal in the door. Looking through it and down the corridor, there was no sign of any people in there. I could see the entire length of the floor was built from metal gratings, like the ones under the customer service booth, and several of them were lying askew.

  ‘Is there another way round?’ I asked.

  Khonen, who had helped to build most of the city, said, ‘Sure there is. Because of the importance of this site, this building has been kept separate from the others. There’s another corridor that will take us to the next nearest dome. Follow me.’

  Khonen ran over to another exit door, closely followed by Suran, Tukarra and myself. The door opened into a different corridor. This one was still in darkness, but we followed Khonen on into it.

  As we bounded along in the low gravity, Khonen explained, ‘Because, all the domes in the main complex are hexagonal, we can easily get from one dome to another, in a number of ways.’

  Before we reached the far end of the corridor, power was restored, and the lights came back on. The Ether must have been restored as well.

  According to Khonen, Bazun Kertoli, the news reader for Skan Today, was reporting a tragic accident in which a sightseeing tour bus had been struck by a large chunk of debris, that was still falling back onto Cerrina after Endimian 389 had crashed. Apparently, at least twenty people had been killed. Khonen also said that Suniva Atrox had confirmed the same thing on Cerrina Live. We all knew this was nonsense. The news channels must have been fed a story made up by the Ether itself.

  We made our way through a dome dedicated to indoor sporting activities, and into another crowded with people who were both listening to calming music and also helping to create the rhythms - by moving their bodies together as a group. As we pushed through the swaying dancers our quick movements added a sharp discord to the melody.

  At last we arrived at an entrance to the Arboretum. Suran opened the airlock doors for us and we stepped inside. She was taken aback. The orange groves, apple trees and other crops had parasitic vines growing up their trunks, literally sapping the life out of them.

  Suran went weak at the knees.

  ‘How can this be? Those vines weren’t there when I had my accident, just a few shifts ago,’ she exclaimed, her face becoming ashen-white at seeing her life’s work struggling to survive.

  ‘It’s got to be Eric. These vines and roots have to be coming from Eric,’ she said and started running towards the centre of the dome.

  As we ran after her, she shouted, ‘Eric is a unique plant, I never did find out where he came from.’

  We arrived at Eric’s enclosure to find he was not alone. Lines of men, women, and children had formed along each point of the compass, facing towards the centre. Superficially, it looked like they were queuing for a chance to see Eric. In fact, they were all tightly held in the paralysing grip of those vines and roots. Nearer to the enclosure, the creepers and roots thickened, until it became harder to make out individuals, although surprisingly
their heads remained uncovered.

  As we arrived at the rear of one of the queues, I could see the four missing families, contained in a mesh of fine tendrils. The adults must have been stunned into a terrified silence. I could hear their children sobbing. Suran was sure she could hear Quiana in amongst them.

  *

  As if the current state of affairs was not enough to worry about, Tukarra suddenly started choking. Seconds later, I was gasping for breath myself. Our faces were awash with concern for each other.

  Suran and Khonen were open mouthed and speechless, wondering what was happening. They put their arms around us but had to keep their eyes fixed on the plant-life - trying to anticipate some form of attack.

  Just a moment more, and the awful sensation had passed.

  ‘You felt it too,’ I croaked to Tukarra.

  ‘Yes. It was like I was in my own nightmare, drowning. But I’m not sleeping. Am I?’ she whimpered.

  I said, ‘I am beginning to wish we were asleep.’

  Then Tukarra asked me to pinch her.

  She flinched.

  ‘Ouch,’ she yelped, whilst throwing a scowl my way.

  ‘You don’t seem to be asleep to me,’ I confirmed.

  *

  We quickly put that weird choking sensation behind us and tried to think of a plan to free as many people as we could.

  Suran soon realised what had to be done. In each area of the Arboretum there were one or two large cabinets containing tools used by the gardeners. She asked Tukarra to follow her into what used to be a thriving orchard for a moment, and when they reappeared they were each cradling four sharp machete knives and two axes in their arms.

  Taking one machete each, we started to hack away at the crippling vines on the line nearest to us. For a while, almost every cut resulted in the release of an individual.

  With great relief, Suran managed to free Quiana and her mother, and we had soon liberated all those who had children with them, sending them running off in the direction of the nearest exit.

  As we worked our way down the remaining lines of adults towards Eric, the vines and roots became thicker, until the machetes made little impression, and we had to start wielding the much heavier axes.

  Unfortunately, our handiwork had not gone unnoticed. Longer, stronger, more prehensile roots had stealthily worked their way out from Eric’s enclosure, between each of the queues, to position themselves behind us. Before we knew what was happening, they had pounced on all four of us simultaneously, wrapping around our legs and arms, and coiling around our throats - making it painful to speak.

  Once we had been completely disabled, the roots stood us upright, and reeled us in past the waiting lines of people, to bring us right up to the curved hand rail, alongside the other hostages at the head of each queue, and turned us to face Eric.

  We were all being forced to look on, as though being made to warm ourselves around a hideous camp fire, and it soon became apparent a few of the other ensnared hostages, encircling the enclosure, had literally lost their heads. Blood had run like fountains down their lifeless bodies, and was still congealing over the roots that continued to grip tightly onto them.

  One of Eric’s massive, toothed, hinged leaves rose into the air, clamped down on a man’s head, and pulled it off his blue suited body, blood gushing up onto those locked tight jaws. At the same time another leaf opened up and spat out the head of an Elite woman, to join the pile of heads now building on the floor.

  Tukarra screamed.

  ‘Is it eating them?’ she shrieked.

  Suran thought for a moment and calmly said, ‘No. I don’t think so. It’s as though Eric is looking for something or someone.’

  Alerted by Tukarra’s scream, yet another leaf rose high into the air, and then started to swoop in the direction of Suran and Tukarra.

  As the leaf began to fall, its barbed teeth glistening, Khonen let out a primaeval roar. Summoning every last ounce of his considerable strength, he had managed to release an arm from the plant’s grasp.

  Khonen was still holding onto a gardener’s axe and was able to throw it between the rapidly descending jaws. The axe lodged itself firmly in the soft, pink, tongue-like flesh in the interior of the leaf and I felt sure I heard the plant yelp with pain. Certainly, every leaf trembled for a moment.

  Still stained with fresh blood, the other leaf - the one that only a few seconds earlier had rejected the Elite woman’s head - then rose to the challenge. At the same time, I could feel those roots contract even more around me, doubling their efforts to hold onto their prey.

  Suran, Tukarra, and I could only watch, open mouthed, horrified, as the newly animated leaf savagely snapped down on Khonen’s head.

  Chapter 28 – Duality

  I know what I am about to say may be difficult to understand. Both Tukarra and I found what happened next really hard to come to terms with ourselves. It was as though both of us were in two places at once.

  As well as being gripped in the clutches of Eric, we seemed to be reliving the whole matter-transport sensation.

  Even more distressing, we suddenly became aware that each of us now owned, and existed in, two streams of consciousness; and when one of my incarnations was necessarily gasping for breath, my other body was needlessly hyperventilating.

  Overwhelmed with sensory information, I felt extremely nauseous. At the same time, I was experiencing the gut wrenching feeling of Deja Vu.

  Once more, I choked on acrid purple mist whilst it was being extracted from the glass cylinder that I found myself stood in. As before, I had to ignore the avalanche of pain that scoured my skin.

  The air soon cleared but I still couldn’t breath. Though I desperately needed to inflate my lungs, I found myself involuntarily holding onto my breath as I peered through the glass.

  I was reassured to see three other cylinders nearby. This time the first cylinder seemed to be empty. The second was unused, still filled with Astracite. At last I was able take in a deep breath, when the outline of Tukarra emerged from the mist in the third tube, with her bright eyes wide open and looking all around the room.

  Exactly as I remembered, our tubes rotated to create openings in the glass. As before, we wanted to run together and fling our arms around each other, but that was not going to happen this time. There appeared to be no floor below us.

  As we emerged from the tubes, we found that we had to jump onto some large leather clad objects, suspended in the ink black void below us, then climb down around them before we could find any suitable surface to stand upon. As we clambered over the objects, it soon became clear they were, in fact, the backs of sturdy chairs.

  However, it wasn’t just these strange surroundings that were causing us some concern.

  ‘You feel it too?’ I asked.

  ‘Like we are still on Cerrina?’ Tukarra confirmed with a another question.

  ‘Yes, but on Cerrina we can’t move a muscle and the plant is staying still for the moment. So we must try to focus on our new predicament. But where are we?’

  *

  The room was somewhat smaller than the one we had materialised in on Cerrina, and the pull of gravity was even weaker. As previously, there were thousands of tiny coloured lights, red, amber, and green, flashing randomly around us in the dark.

  I felt sure I could hear the sound of a distant heartbeat but soon dismissed the idea, assuming it to be my own.

  Without any warning a slow, deliberating, deep, voice filled the darkened room. It was a booming, gravelly, voice that pounded our chests and made the sickening sensation in the pits of our stomachs seem ten times worse.

  ‘I have been waiting for this moment, Rhett Goreman, for a very, very, long time,’ the voice said, making the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and sending a chill down my spine.

  Tukarra held onto me even more tightly, she must have been as surprised and shocked by this personal message as I was.

  ‘That’s the voice of Vitcha Kesinko,’ I whispered in h
er ear. ‘The man whom my father decapitated in the name of science!’

  We broke off our embrace, and looked around for the source of the voice, without any success.

  ‘Welcome to the Starship Kesinko,’ it continued, ‘and congratulations on surviving my many attempts to prevent you from getting here. I can’t tell you how difficult it is to find good minions nowadays. With that in mind, let me introduce you to Kleb.’

  The staring but otherwise expressionless face of a grey robot, like the ones I had seen on Earth, loomed at the small round window in the middle of a circular bulkhead door - a door that appeared to be the only way out from the room.

  ‘Kleb has just joined us from Cerrina with his job only half done! Fortunately, I can trust the plants, I control, to finish my work there.’

  My two streams of consciousness were suddenly at one with each other when I asked, ‘Are you controlling the carnivorous plant that Suran called, Eric?’

  Vitcha was too full of himself to wonder how I might have known about Eric.

  ‘I control everything,’ he replied. ‘I control the entire Ether and every rocket, every weather satellite, robot or artificial organism that uses it. I created the Elite. I can read their minds and control most of them.’

  ‘Some of the High Elite started to question my authority, but I encouraged them to live together in a single community on Cerrina, and then I eliminated them all, by crashing the very last shuttle craft from Earth into their city. It was a brilliant and efficient plan. There was a possibility you two might have stowed away on that shuttle, and I was hoping to kill two love birds and a whole dissident species with one stone, so to speak.’

  Sounding pleased with himself, Vitcha went on to say, ‘Ah well, if at first you don’t succeed.’

  Suddenly, a whirring noise filled the room. This was soon accompanied by a scraping sound that set my teeth on edge. The scraping was caused by a hefty steel cover sliding sideways, beneath our feet. We did not slide with it, and I soon realised we were actually stood on a glass window.

  As the steel cover reached its fully open position, the room was slowly illuminated by a dull blood red glow. In the dim light, I could then make out that the two pairs of seats, we had climbed over, actually faced the window. We had to be in the passenger compartment of some sort of up-ended vehicle. Then I noticed a plaque, on the wall, reading ‘Liberty #1’. We weren’t on-board the Starship Kesinko after all. This was a ship-to-shore landing-craft, a liberty boat, perhaps one of many.