Cosmopath - [Bengal Station 03]

by Eric Brown

  Vaughan looked about him at the uniform façades. “Maybe that’s because it’s empty. Full of people and life... it might be different.”

  She remained to be convinced. “I think the colonists had more sense,” she said, “and moved on to a better place. After all, who’d want to live in a city deserted by its alien builders?”

  “I wish our guide would talk,” he said. “I’d ask him why it was deserted, what happened to bring about the exodus.”

  They turned a corner, then headed towards the centre of the city on a long, radial avenue. At Das’s suggestion they hugged the shadows, lest Chandrasakar send in his remaining drones.

  They reached the city’s hub, a raised circular plinth on which stood the carved stone figures of perhaps a hundred statues of beings identical to their guide. They described a great circle, their arms outstretched and fingertips touching, in a tableau Vaughan found oddly moving.

  They walked slowly around the great circle of aliens, staring up at the carved figures, until they reached the other side and their guide hurried them onwards.

  They passed through the city, reaching the outer perimeter of older buildings, and climbed the sloping ramparts of the cavern wall. This was not part of a mountain range, but an enclosing bulwark of rock, which curved high overhead to form the cavern’s ceiling.

  Vaughan paused and looked back. They had already climbed higher than the city’s tallest building, and their elevation gave them a clear view across the rooftops to the pass through which they had entered the cavern. There was no sign of Chandrasakar, his men, or the drones.

  The alien slipped into a cave-mouth, which proved to be the entrance of a wide, sloping tunnel, and Vaughan and Das hurried after it.

  They descended for what might have been a couple of hours. At last, the tunnel levelled out and ahead Vaughan saw a slash of artificial sunlight cutting through the green gloaming. They approached a jagged opening in the rock and followed their guide through into another cavern.

  This one was more like the savannah cavern, though even vaster. A myriad crystal suns created a good imitation of daylight, and what they shone upon had Vaughan and Das staring in amazement.

  The great valley, perhaps fifty kilometres by fifty, was divided into a series of arable patchwork squares, each given over to a different crop. A thousand farmhouses constructed from timber - or this world’s equivalent - dotted the plain, and long, winding lanes connected the farms to hamlets and villages.

  And here, in stark contract to the deserted city, there was life in abundance.

  Vaughan saw figures working in the fields, and steering carts along the lanes - carts piled with produce and hauled by close relations of the tapir-pig analogues, though much larger. There was an air of bucolic industry about the scene that Vaughan, never having lived anywhere other than a city, found almost alien.

  Which was strange, he reflected, because the figures at work in the valley were human.

  He heard a sudden whistle off to his right. He saw a crude shack, lashed together from boles of fungus, and standing beside it a cart drawn by one of the tapir-pigs. Only then did he see the man, or rather boy, standing beside the animal and staring across at them. He was dressed in shorts fashioned from some crudely stitched un-dyed material, and a sleeveless shirt of the same fabric.

  Their guide hurried across to the human, and Vaughan and Das followed.

  The alien and the boy spoke in a high, fluid tongue; the alien turned and gestured to Vaughan and Das.

  All the time the boy had been talking to the alien in its own language, his eyes had darted from Vaughan to the Indian woman and back again. He was perhaps sixteen - and therefore was born here, never having known Earth - with a shock of blond hair and a pale, open face. His skin, unlike the first colonists Vaughan had seen, bore no trace of green colouration.

  The alien stepped nimbly onto the cart’s front wheel and slipped over its side. It sat in the cart, peering ahead.

  The boy said, “You should join him, quickly. He says others are following you. I’m Tom, by the way. I’ll be taking you to Connor.” He had a curiously flat accent, not at all the American twang Vaughan had been expecting.

  Das stepped onto the wheel and hauled herself onto the cart’s flatbed, bouncing on stacks of some yellow, flaxen stalks. Vaughan joined her and they sat side by side as Tom mounted a forward seat, snapped the reigns and steered the cart slowly down the hillside.

  “I’m Jeff, and this is Parveen,” Vaughan said. The boy just grinned and shouted at the draft animal to watch its step as the cart jolted over a pot-hole.

  Beside them, their guide curled into a ball and slept.

  Tom glanced over his shoulder, grinning. “It’s true, then? You came all the way from Earth, aboard a starship?”

  Das said, “Did the alien tell you this?”

  The boy laughed. “No. He just told me about the others, those chasing you, and said we need to move fast.”

  “Then how do you know?” Vaughan asked.

  Tom looked over his shoulder. “The Taoth told Connor to expect you. Connor told my father, who told me to be ready today with my cart.”

  “The Taoth?”

  Tom jabbed his thumb towards the alien.

  “And who’s Connor?”

  “Captain Connor. He’s old, but he’s still in command. I’m taking you there now, a little under a day’s ride away, across the valley.”

  “And Captain Connor,” Das said, “wants to see us?”

  Tom repeated, “The Taoth told Connor to expect you.”

  “Specifically the two of us?” Vaughan asked

  The boy smiled. “That’s right. Two humans, a man and a woman.”

  Vaughan looked at Das, then said to Tom, “Do you know when the Taoth told Connor about us?”

  Tom nodded. “That’d be a couple of days ago, when they reported you’d seen off the Greens.”

  Das turned to Vaughan and said in a whisper, “They knew, even then?”

  Vaughan said to the boy, “How did the Taoth know that we - Parveen and me - would be coming here? I mean, we didn’t even know ourselves.”

  Tom shrugged. “The Taoth... they’re a strange and wonderful race.” He tapped his head. “Some people think they can read our minds.”

  Das stared at Vaughan. “But aliens can’t read human minds, and vice versa.”

  “Until we came across the Taoth, maybe,” he said.

  They had left the hillside behind them and were pulling along a narrow lane between fields high with what looked like corn.

  “Okay,” Das said, “just supposing they can read our minds. Why did they take us, and not Rab or his security team?”

  Vaughan shrugged. “They read his intentions. They knew what he wanted, and they didn’t like that.”

  “And what about me? I want the same thing as Chandrasakar, after all.”

  He smiled. “But you don’t know what that thing is...” he said. “So maybe you’re no threat. Maybe the Taoth like your commie leanings, and want to show you their secret.”

  Das turned to the boy. “Tom, when your people landed here, what was it you found?”

  Tom smiled. “These,” he said, “the Underlands.”

  “And anything else?”

  The boy frowned, doing his best to accommodate the stranger’s odd question. “Well, we found the Taoth, of course.”

  Vaughan tried another tack. “What was it the Greens - the rebel colonists - wanted to tell Earth? We understand they sent a message about something they discovered here.”

  Comprehension flooded the boy’s open features. “Ah... you mean Vluta?”

  “Vluta?” Das echoed. “What’s Vluta?”

  The boy frowned again. “It’s... it’s where the Taoth live,” he said.

  Vaughan and Das exchanged a glance. “Where they live?”

  Tom nodded. “It’s where they went when they left their cities here.”

  “And when was that?”

  “I think
many cycles ago, perhaps as many as a hundred.”

  “A cycle being the duration the planet takes to orbit Delta Cephei, right?” Vaughan guessed.

  The boy nodded. “My father told me that that’s around twenty-five Earth years.”

  So the aliens had left the cities more than two thousand five hundred years ago, Vaughan estimated.

  Das shook her head, exasperated. “But where did they go, Tom?”

  He smiled, unsurely. “They went to Vluta,” he explained, as if speaking to an idiot.

  Das nodded, and raised her eyebrows at Vaughan.

  Tom shouted as the tapir-pig decided to root for food in the lane. He prodded the animal with a stick and seconds later the cart was jolting on its way.

  Vaughan stared out at a farmhouse, a rickety construction of fungal boles, something almost fairy-tale in its rude construction. A family sat on the porch, a man and a woman watching two little girls, absorbed in a game with their dolls. Vaughan smiled to himself.

  Das went on, “But the aliens come back from Vluta from time to time?”

  “There are always a few Taoth round about,” Tom said. “I don’t know if the same ones stay a while, then go, or if different ones come and go. They’re a mystery, but we get on well.” He frowned. “It’s hard to put into words. The Taoth are just there, and we’re here, and that’s how it’s been, long as I recall.”

  “Do you know how many of them are here?” Vaughan asked.

  The boy shrugged easily and laughed, “Well, that could be around ten or so, or a hundred... It’s really hard to say.”

  They passed another farmhouse, and fields worked by human farmers. Some of the workers hailed Tom, and he waved in greeting.

  Vaughan lay back, lulled by the motion of the cart. He felt tired. He was aware of Das and Tom talking, but their words flowed over him, became a background noise, as he stared up at the spread of sparkling crystals and slowly slipped into sleep.

  * * * *

  TWENTY-THREE

  QUESTIONS

  Parveen lay back on the tubers, watching the farmland pass by. Vaughan was asleep, and at the rear of the flatbed the alien was curled as if dozing too. She gazed back at the mountain range they had left behind, looking for the first sign of their pursuers.

  She could be under no illusions, now, about just what Rab’s sentiments were towards her. He had her down as the traitor she had been all along, and wanted her dead - and Vaughan along with her. She had tried to kid herself, when the firing began, that the spider drone had been under Singh’s command - but the fact was that Rab was right there alongside the security chief and the drones. She had no doubt that he had given the command to fire.

  She supposed it made her dilemma easier, now. She knew where she stood as regards her feelings towards the tycoon, though when she considered the weeks when she thought she’d loved him... the pain still bit deep.

  She looked ahead. She had a goal, no longer clouded by the stirrings of her heart. She would find out what the colonists had found, this Vluta place, if Tom’s word was to be taken at face value, and then try to get through to her country’s starship.

  And Vaughan? He was a bit part player in the scenario now; she’d do her best to make sure he wasn’t harmed, and try to get him off the planet with her. But only if he was willing to play the game according to her rules.

  Tom glanced at her, shyly. He seemed intrigued by the colour of her skin. She smiled and held up her right hand. “You’ve never seen anyone from India before, Tom?”

  He shook his head. “No, M’am. I heard about Indians, but...” he shrugged and smiled, “it was hard to picture what you looked like.”

  She laughed. “And yet there you are, living alongside green aliens?”

  “Kinda strange, huh?”

  She smiled and said, “Tell me about the rebel colonists, Tom.”

  “They’re hard-liners, M’am. Connor calls them the Right Wing. Back on Earth, he said, they wanted supremacy for the FNSA.”

  “And Connor... he sounds an enlightened leader.”

  The boy shrugged. “He doesn’t like the rebels. He said if they got what they want, they’ll bring ruin to the world. Things are just fine here as they are here in Landfall. Or Kalluta, as the Taoth call this world.” He smiled. “We don’t want outsiders here, even the FNSA, messing things up.”

  “And then we arrive...”

  He smiled self-consciously. “Connor told my father... he said, the Taoth would help us when you came.”

  She sat up. “Help you? What did he mean by that?”

  Tom gave his characteristic shrug again. “I don’t fully know, M’am. My father didn’t say, just told me not to worry about the future.”

  Parveen stared out at the passing land, the arable idyll that the colonists had eked out of this alien landscape.

  She asked, “Did the rebels agree with the way of life you’re living now?”

  His reply didn’t surprise her in the least. “They wanted to get away from living off the land. They said they wanted to build cities, manufacture machines, mine the planet. They said that was the only way to progress...” He shrugged. “But we seem to be doing pretty well, all things considered.”

  She smiled. That really depended, she thought, on the political system they’d adopted here. She had no great hopes that it was an egalitarian Utopia where land was divided equally among the citizens, and wealth distributed to those who worked the land and supplied the meagre goods they must produce.

  “Tom, who runs Landfall?”

  He squinted at her. “Well, Connor runs the Assembly.”

  “You mean, he has total control?”

  He shook his head. “Well, not really. There are regional councils, made up of elected members. They meet at Assembly every thirty days, and Connor runs the meetings.”

  “So he’s more of a chairman?”

  He nodded. “Something like that.”

  “But he doesn’t tell the councils what to do?”

  He frowned. “I don’t think so. He advises them, and they make the laws. But if we have any problems, we just take them to Connor and he gives us good advice.”

  Parveen smiled to herself. And to think that a colony of the good old FNSA had come to this...

  She asked, “And everyone has enough to eat on Landfall? No one starves?”

  Tom laughed. “Starves? M’am, you throw seed into the ground and ten days later you’re eating produce.”

  She wondered what the party would make of this. If there were indeed many thousands of caverns like this one... But there had to be a catch, she thought. They worship a god that demands ritual human sacrifice, or the Taoth take every fifth child...

  She settled back into the tubers, rocked by the motion of the cart.

  They chatted a little more; Tom asked her about Earth, and if it were true that people lived in cities ten times larger than the Taoth’s old cities, and flew around the globe in air-carts, and didn’t farm the land but had robots to do all the work for them on farms as vast as ten caverns?

  She smiled and nodded and told him that, yes, it was all true.

  He fell silent after that, lost in contemplation of the incomprehensible world that was Earth.

  A while later she lifted her left arm and showed Tom the crimson encrustation that covered her handset. “Tom, do you know bow to get rid of this stuff?”

  He shook his head. “That’s Taoth doing, right? You had a device on your arm? I know that because some of the old colonists had them too. But the Taoth, they told Connor they were bad.”

  She looked at him. “The Taoth said this?”

  “Yes, M’am. They put the scabs on some of the old colonists - that was another thing the rebels didn’t like.”

  “Tom, what else won’t the Taoth let you do?”

  He pushed out his lips. “Nothing else, as far as I know. Just that.”

  “What about other machinery? Do you have holo-screens, audio-pins, scanners?”

  He look
ed at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. “Don’t know anything about any of those things, M’am.”

  She nodded and settled back, thinking through what she’d learned.

  Minutes later she glanced at the alien, and realised that it was watching her with its bulging insect eyes.

  She moved to the back of the cart so that she was sitting before the creature. “What are you doing to these people?” she hissed.