by Eric Brown
“What the hell do they want with us?” She stared up at the roof of arching green fungus high above.
He touched his jacket; he was still armed with his laser. Das saw him checking, and did the same. She pulled out a small laser. “Me too. They didn’t disarm us. More fool them.”
“My guess is that they didn’t bother to take our weapons on purpose.”
“What are you driving at?”
“I think they don’t mean us harm. They’re friendly.” He paused, then said, “I think they took the two of us for a reason.”
“What if you’re wrong? What if they simply didn’t know about our weapons? What if they’re not friendly, but mean us harm?”
“I don’t now why, but I don’t get that impression.”
“Well, I hope to hell you’re right.” She stared down at the crimson shell covering her handset. “Wish they’d left this operable. I feel like half a person without it.” She paused, then said, “I wonder how they knew that these control our tele-ability?”
He shook his head and said, “Another mystery to add to all the others.” He smiled to himself.
She looked at him. “What?” she snapped.
“It has its advantages,” he said. “My thoughts are my own, for once.”
She looked away, examining the walls of their prison, searching in vain for hand- and foot-holds.
For however long the handsets were disabled, he thought, he was on an equal footing with her. The knowledge was reassuring. More troubling was the fact that with his handset disabled he would be unable to contact Sukara.
She hunkered down across the well from him. “I wonder what happened to Rab and the others?”
“Probably still chasing shadows.”
“I wish I knew where they were.”
He nodded. He could imagine her frustration, and her fear. Their imprisonment would allow Chandrasakar a chance to discover whatever secret the colonists had found down here. Her pay-masters wouldn’t be best pleased if his mission succeeded while Das languished in alien custody.
He said, “Don’t worry, whatever the colonists came across, it more than likely had something to do with the aliens.”
“Meaning?”‘
“Meaning, we’re probably closer to the secret than Chandrasakar and company.”
She considered this, then said, “Did you see the aliens?”
“A brief glimpse.”
“More than I saw. What were they like?”
“Small, very small. Three feet high, at a guess. Slight and green... I don’t know whether they were furred, scaled, or skinned.” He recalled his fleeting impression of the two abductors. “And they had domed heads.”
She said, “The creatures in the frescoes.”
She pushed herself to her feet impatiently and paced the cell. She examined the shell encompassing her handset and tried to prise off the material with her fingers. Failing, she moved to the wall and struck her arm against the rock once, twice, and a futile third time.
Vaughan watched with mounting amusement - then discovered that he was not the only spectator to her frustration.
He looked up and saw, peering down at him over the rim of the rock, the domed head of a native.
Its eyes were bulbous and compound, dark purple against the slime-green of its skin. It was not alone; other creatures had joined it, perhaps ten or a dozen, looking down at the captive pair in silence.
“I think they’re finding your antics very entertaining,” he said, gesturing up at the alien audience.
Das looked up quickly, and was about to call out something when she was interrupted by a noise from the hole at her feet. Vaughan heard a gurgle, then a rush of something fluid.
The crimson liquid came up in a spurting rush, rising warm and cloying around his legs. In seconds it had reached his shoulders and lifted him off his feet. He spread his arms across its surface and was carried up towards the lip of the rocky well.
He scrambled to the edge and held on, then hauled himself out and lay gasping on the rock. When he looked up he saw that the aliens had retreated and were squatting on thin legs, for all the world like terrestrial frogs, and watching with dark, unblinking eyes. There were perhaps fifty of the creatures, occupying a great, green-illuminated cavern.
Vaughan stood slowly and raised his hands into the air. He stared at the aliens, disconcerted by their massed regard.
An alien rose, left the squatting assembly, and approached them.
It stopped before Vaughan and Das, and he was suddenly aware of his heartbeat. The creature stared up at him. It had no facial features other than those outsized eyes - or so he thought until it opened its mouth. Its lips unsealed in a long, thin hyphen, and it spoke.
“Come,” said the alien.
* * * *
TWENTY
THE TREK
Vaughan managed a smile, realising how meaningless the expression might be. The alien stood before him, frog-like but longer in the body, and stared at him with massive, compound eyes like sieves.
He said, “What do you want with us?”
Behind the lead alien, the others remained squatting, watching him with a disconcerting fixity of attention.
The alien made no reply, but its fellows moved as one. They seemed to vanish into fissures and cracks in the rock of the chamber, to drain away like the fleshy equivalent of the crimson fluid. Seconds later only their leader remained.
Beside Vaughan, Das stepped forward. “Why have you taken us?”
In lieu of a reply, the creature turned and moved rapidly towards the chamber’s far wall. It walked with an oddly elastic, cushioned motion, giving at the knees so that its torso bobbed as if suspended on springs.
It slipped through a narrow fissure in the rock. Vaughan expected it to return, beckon them after it. When it failed to do so, he turned to Das and said, “What now?”
“Let’s go after it.”
They hurried towards the fissure and peered within. The alien was bobbing along a narrow corridor, giving no indication of being interested in its human charges.
Vaughan followed.
“Did you hear it back there?” he asked Das. “Or am I going mad?”
“Well... I did think it said ‘come’, but it might have been coincidence. It wasn’t that distinct. Perhaps it said something in its own language.”
He increased his pace to keep up with the elastic strides of the alien. “If it does speak English, then that means it’s had contact with the colonists.”
“Which might explain why they disabled these.” She held up her arm, cocooned in its crimson shell. “They knew about them from the colonists, right?”
“And they don’t want us to contact Chandrasakar and the others.”
“Which begs the question, what do they want with us?”
He peered ahead as the alien disappeared around a corner. He hurried after it and found it bobbing along another natural tunnel, this one sloping downwards at a thirty-degree angle.
I’m following an unknown alien, he said to himself, and I feel not the slightest threat...
They caught up with the alien as it negotiated a flight of steps chiselled into the sloping path; something about the way it took the steps, with caution, as if it were dipping its toes into icy water, suggested unfamiliarity. Vaughan wondered if the steps were man-made.
In the green light of the walls, he examined the alien more closely. It was naked, and its skin ran with a sebaceous film, catching the fungal glow in swirling highlights. It gave off a pungent reek, too, not unlike smelling salts.
Vaughan breathed shallowly.
Behind him, Das said, “Perhaps the aliens are what the colonists tried to contact their government about? These are their discovery.”
Vaughan thought about it. “Something about them must be pretty damned special to have Chandrasakar make the journey out here...”
She nodded. “You’re right.”
They looked primitive, with no apparent evidence of techn
ology; but he knew that first impressions, especially when dealing with Ee-tees, were often deceiving. He’d reserve judgement until they came to journey’s end.
“Wonder where Rab and his men are?” Das said.
“Did you get the impression that the others were led away from us? That the aliens deliberately separated us and pounced?” He half-turned to look at her; she nodded.
He gave his attention to the descent, and almost fetched up against the alien’s slim back; it had paused before another constructed feature in the rock, this time an archway. It raised a long-fingered hand to its forehead - almost in a gesture of obeisance, Vaughan thought - then stepped into a small, square chamber.
He followed it. A smaller archway mirrored the first on the opposite wall, and through it shone dazzling light.
The alien stopped, turned, and stared at the humans.
Seconds elapsed. Its great eyes watched them.
The most alien thing about this, Vaughan thought, is the total absence of social protocol between our races; it was like looking into the eyes of a lizard and hoping for some kind of communication.
And then the creature confounded his assumptions by opening its slit mouth again.
“Fear, no...” it said, the words barely a whisper. “Trust... yes.”
And without a further word of explanation, it turned and stepped through the second archway into the blinding golden light.
Vaughan followed the alien through the arch, then stopped and stared in wonder.
* * * *
At first he thought that they had somehow come through the mountain and emerged into the open air again, though the landscape was unlike the fungal terrain they had left far behind them. They were standing on the threshold of a vast plain, which extended ahead and to either side for perhaps fifty kilometres and was encircled by a range of jagged mountains. The plain was flat and uniform, consisting of what appeared to be a savannah of golden grass laden with a heady, herbal scent.
He turned to Das. She was staring up, her neck craned at an awkward angle. “Shiva,” she said under her breath.
He looked up, and knew that he was wrong about the geographical nature of where they were.
They had not emerged into daylight through the mountain. They were still deep, deep underground. They were in a cavern the like of which he would have thought impossible, until he saw it with his own eyes.
The cliff-face at their backs rose vertically for kilometres, and then arched overhead to form a gargantuan canopy, which covered the entirety of the plain before them. Embedded in the roof of this monstrous cavern were what appeared to be miniature suns, great nuggets of crystal which scintillated with ersatz daylight and filled the plain with a golden illumination.
Vaughan thought of the alien’s words. It was almost fear he felt now, a heady feeling combining agoraphobia with a mistrust of the unknown.
But the alien had counselled them to trust in it, also...
He thought about the colonists. He had pitied them earlier, thinking of them leading a meagre troglodyte existence far underground in the green light. But if they had found this cavern - and he could think of no reason why they might not have - then they had discovered a paradise.
Das said, “I wish I had the use of my handset, Jeff.”
He looked at her. “To scan for the colonists?”
She shook her head. “To do a few calculations.” She smiled at him and explained. “I suspect this isn’t a unique feature. It’s either natural, or made; either way, imagine if the vast planet is pocked with them like... like a pomegranate. Imagine how much living space there’d be. Perhaps this was what the colonists discovered? A planet packed with sufficient living space for thousands of cities?”
“And Chandrasakar wants a part of the real estate down here,” Vaughan said. “A ready-made, habitable, safe, and enclosed environment.”
Das smiled. “Which comes, unfortunately for him, with its very own sentient natives.”
The alien paused before them; it was moving rapidly down the incline towards the golden savannah. It looked up at them, and though it said nothing Vaughan knew that it wanted them to follow.
They hurried after the alien, which had come to a halt before the grassland. Vaughan and Das paused beside it, staring out across the expanse. It was not, he saw, grass of any kind, but thin wisps of yet another fungal variety, strands as thin as fibre-optic cable reaching to his hips.
The alien stared at them, the look in its dark eyes indecipherable, then lifted a long, thin hand and gestured out across the plain.
“Is it saying that we should cross it?” Das asked.
Vaughan squinted at the distant mountains. “Hell of a trek,” he said.
He looked at the alien, and gestured. “To the far mountains?”
The alien said nothing, merely turned and stepped into the fungal grass, which reached up to its chest.
Seconds later an odd thing happened. As they watched the creature wade through the savannah, the fungal stalks around the creature changed from their default golden hue to a shade of deep orange. No sooner had the alien passed on, than the stalks resumed their original gold. Like this, the creature moved in an accompanying nimbus of colour, perhaps two metres across, as if continually tracked by a diligent searchlight.
“Well, we’ll never lose him... or her,” Das said, stepping in after the alien.
Vaughan followed and looked around him as the whipping cords instantly transformed themselves from gold to pulsing tangerine.
He walked alongside Das, the bobbing alien leading the way. From time to time he called to it, “My name’s Jeff. Jeff Vaughan...” or, “Are you taking us to the other humans? Do you understand me?” But as expected the alien gave not the slightest acknowledgement that it was being addressed.
“You’re wasting your time, Jeff,” Das whispered.
“Do you think it understands us?”
She frowned. “It’s a possibility, but perhaps it deems the questions irrelevant. How to work out the mindset of an alien? You know what alien minds are like from attempting to scan them, no?”
He nodded.
She laughed without humour. “Human beings are enough of a riddle, much of the time.”
He glanced across at her. “How long have you been a telepath?”
“Just under five years.”
“And you did it for the cause? You tested psi-positive and had the cut for the good of the party?”
“I believe what I’m doing is for the good of humanity, Jeff. It was a small sacrifice to make.”
“So you do consider it a sacrifice?”
She gave him an appraising look. “Yes, I do. I’ve... I’ve read things in some minds that I’d rather not have read. I’ve been tainted by thoughts I’d never have myself. But I’m telling you nothing you don’t already know. And you do it day in, day out, for a living - and readcriminal minds.”
“Well...” He shrugged. “I suppose it makes me appreciate good people. And it does pay the bills.”
He turned as he walked, looking back the way they had come. They had already covered perhaps half a kilometre, and the cliff-face they had left behind loomed above them, riven with cracks and fissures. It was impossible to see the opening through which they had emerged. He realised that they would be terribly exposed, out here in the open, if Chandrasakar and his party were to stumble across the cavern.
He looked ahead to the distant mountain range - if mountains they were. It was impossible to see if their peaks joined the overarching ceiling kilometres above, as a fine mist cloaked the upper reaches of the range.
The alien was perhaps five metres ahead of them, out of earshot. Vaughan said, “So where would the Indian government stand on what we’ve found down here?”
She glanced at him. “What do you mean?”
“If this was what the colonists wanted to tell the FNSA about, this ‘revelation’ as Chandrasakar called it - the ultimate real estate bonanza - would India be in on the land-grab?
”
“You judge my government by your knowledge of Western powers, Jeff.”
“Come on! It isn’t as if your people are whiter than white! What you did in Bangladesh wasn’t exactly an act of altruism.”
She stared at the alien. “We invaded to protect our border cities from insurgents,” she whispered.