by Eric Brown
The pilot hardly glanced at her. She climbed into the back seat, sinking into the plush upholstery. She had to sit up to peer out through the window as the flier climbed. Inside, the noise of the jet engine was muffled. She watched the street, the flashing lights, and the crowds of people fall and tilt away beneath her as the cab banked. And then, so suddenly that Sukara was forced back into her seat, breathless, the flier accelerated. Buildings flickered by, then disappeared as the flier gained cruising altitude. Below, Bangkok was spread out for her inspection, a stretch of individual lights fusing into a continuous, hazy glow on the horizon. The Chao Phraya lay to her left, a dark swathe winding its way through the illumination. She sat back in the seat, bouncing once or twice and caressing the soft leather, her worries forgotten for now.
She wondered who had summoned her. She could think of two or three regular customers she thought it might be. Always, though, they had come to the bar. She wondered why tonight was different. Could it be that it was an Ee-tee, which had only a short time in Bangkok before taking off again for the stars?
A towering, light-spangled building came into view and the flier slowed. They landed in the forecourt and a footman in an ancient Thai costume ran up and opened the rear door. “Chintara Sukarapatam?”
She could only stare out at him, nod wordlessly.
“Room twenty-five, tenth floor.” He assisted Sukara from the flier, then leaned inside to pay the driver.
Sukara crossed the forecourt and entered through sliding glass doors that ran with liquid like a waterfall made rigid. In the foyer, rich citizens stood about in groups of two or three, chatting casually. Conscious of her inappropriate dress, her sweat-soaked T-shirt, shorts and scuffed sandals, she hurried across to the elevator, staring straight down at the crimson carpet. A young uniformed boy opened the door for her and operated the controls once they were inside. “Floor ten!” he repeated, glancing from her scarred face to her bare legs, seemingly fascinated by both.
The elevator rose quickly, stopped with a sedate bounce that made her stomach flip. The doors swished open. Sukara stepped out, surprised to find the long, thickly carpeted corridor eerily empty. The doors of the elevator closed and she was suddenly alone.
She walked down the corridor, reading off the room numbers, then realised she was moving in the wrong direction. She turned and hurried the other way, blushing even though there was no one around to see her mistake. She passed room thirty, increased her pace, then slowed as she passed room twenty-eight. She stopped and stared at the door bearing the number twenty-five, as if it might give some clue as to the identity of its occupant.
Her legs wobbly with apprehension, her mouth dry, she reached up and knocked on the door. She realised what a feeble tap she’d given, then knocked with more force. The door opened before she had finished, leaving her with her fist in the air. Her arm fell to her side as she stared.
“Mister Osborne?”
He smiled. “Su, it’s nice to see you again. Come inside. Would you care for a drink?”
He was gallant enough to pretend not to notice her nervousness as he ushered Sukara into the spacious lounge. He was dressed in a slick black suit, high-collared, cut away at the front to reveal a brilliant white shirt. His smile, even more devastating than she recalled, was enough to melt her insides.
“Can I get you a drink, Su?”
“Ah... beer? You got beer?”
He opened a wooden cabinet, which turned out to be a cooler, pulled out a Singha and unscrewed the lid. He poured the beer into a glass, passed it to Sukara.
She stood in the middle of the room, sipping quickly and nervously, while Osborne poured himself a brown drink in a big, round glass. She hugged herself, shivering despite the warmth of the room. She asked herself, over and over, what he might want with her.
He turned and raised his glass. “It really is nice to see you again, Su. I enjoyed our conversation the other night.”
She smiled and wiped her sweat-soaked palms down the front of her T-shirt. She recalled that, on their first meeting, Osborne had said that he did not want to go with her. She wondered if he’d changed his mind.
“Nice see you, Mister Osborne,” Sukara blurted. “Big surprise. Never thought I see you again. I put the two hundred baht in savings account, for rainy day.” She kicked off her sandals, sat on the arm of a big sofa, and scrunched her toes into the lush crimson velvet.
“That’s a good girl. I’m glad you’re careful with your money.”
“Working girl, Mr. Osborne. Must be careful.”
He crossed the room, glass in hand, and sat on the sofa. He turned sideways, staring at her. His eyes seemed to lose themselves in her face.
She wondered if she should reach out, touch his dark, strong jaw, or leave him to make the first move. She wanted to touch him, but could not bring herself to move. She wondered why she trusted this man, this stranger.
“I confused,” she found herself saying. “Why me? I not beautiful, not like—”
“You’re beautiful to me. Su. No, you’re not like the other girls.”
“Other girls, they beautiful. They have light skin, long legs, perfect faces. Just what men want.”
“In here,” Osborne said, reaching out and cupping her head in his big hand, his thumb caressing her temple. “In here, you’re what I’ve been looking for, for a long, long time.”
That smile again, that lopsided, easy grin which reassured her despite the obsessive quality of his words.
She avoided his eyes. “You like me, Mr. Osborne?”
He took her hand, drew her gently towards him. She arranged herself on his lap and pressed her head to his chest as he held her. She closed her eyes and wished the moment would go on forever, the pure physical pleasure without thought of motives or consequences. She realised that this was what she had been missing for so many years, for as long as she could recall, an embrace that wanted nothing other than to communicate affection without demanding sexual gratification. She would not let herself look further than this moment, to the time when he would leave her, the moment over, and she would be alone again.
She said, in a whisper, “Okay like this? We not go to bed?”
“No,” he whispered in return. “No, Sukara. It’s fine like this.”
She felt the moist heat of his lips on the top of her head. She closed her eyes, and the movement of her lids squeezed hot tears down her cheeks.
They remained like this for an hour, though it seemed to her a matter of minutes. She wondered if this was what love felt like. She had never allowed herself to believe in love before, never expected anyone to show her love or to feel it herself.
She told herself not to be so ridiculous. She hardly knew the man called Osborne, and how could he really know her? But whatever it was, she told herself, she would enjoy it while it lasted.
At last he positioned her on his lap so that he could look into her face. He thumbed the tears from her cheeks, caressed the line of her jaw with his knuckles. Sukara responded by pushing against his hand like a cat, laughing tearfully at his affection. The golden pendant he wore around his neck nestled against her cheek, warm on her skin.
He pulled her to him, running his hands through her hair, kissing the top of her head. “Oh, sweet Jesus Christ,” she heard him whisper.
She reached out, linked her arms around his neck. She stopped when she felt something cold, metallic, at the base of his skull.
He looked into her eyes. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I had an operation a long time ago. It’s nothing, Sukara.”
He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, burying his face in her hair. She caught brief glimpses of his face, as he pulled away, a swimmer coming up for air, and she realised that he too was in tears.
He held her face in his hands, his fingers spanning her temples. “Tomorrow I leave Bangkok,” he told her.
A wild, pounding panic seized her heart. She wanted to scream that it wasn’t true, that the pleasure she had experience
d with him so briefly could not be over so soon.
He said, “I can’t let you go to the Paradise Bar, get beaten up by drunken Indians.”
She stared at him. “How you know?”
He ignored her, went on, “I couldn’t let you work there—”
“But where...” she began desperately.
Osborne said, “I want you to come with me.”
Her heart missed a beat. “You do? I go with you?”
“You will come, won’t you?”
“I will,” she stammered. “I come. Of course I come.” She shook her head, the movement restricted by the vice of his fingers. “How long? How long you want me stay with you?”
He smiled. She reached out, touched the silver rears on his cheeks with her fingertips.
“I want you to stay with me forever, Su.”
They held each for a long time. It seemed so right, she told herself. It seemed that she had waited all her life for just this moment. She looked into the future—and told herself that the events of the past, the beatings and the taunts, she could finally put behind her.
He perched her on the summit of his knees. “Tomorrow, we leave Bangkok,” he told her. “We’ll live together. During the day I’ll do the work I must do, and at night we will be together.”
“What work, Osborne?”
He hesitated, then said, “I’m looking for someone. A man I worked with a long time ago.”
She nodded. “We go tomorrow,” she whispered, “but where we go?”
He looked into her eyes, into her head.
“Bengal Station,” he said.
* * * *
NINETEEN
IN THE PIT
They set off for the mountains just after sunset. Vaughan drove throughout the seven hours of darkness, Chandra sleeping beside him in the passenger seat.
It was a novel experience to be heading into such a vast and depopulated wilderness. Gradually the low mind-hum from Vanderlaan, the only concentrated noise for kilometres, receded into the distance. Vaughan had purposefully held off the chora so as to be fully alert during what lay ahead, and he had expected the noise to follow him for a long time. After two hundred kilometres, however, he experienced the blessed balm of total mind-silence. He leaned back in the seat and drove with his arms outstretched, gripping the apex of the wheel, staring straight ahead at the unwinding road, silver with frost, in the glare of the headlights
He turned off the coast road and headed inland, through farmland at first, and then through undulating, uncultivated plains. The silence persisted. The nearest centres of population, villages located in the foothills of the central range, were three hundred kilometres distant. At one point the silence became so strange an experience that he slipped the case from his jacket and inserted the pin into his skull console, wanting to relish the silence all the more by contrasting it to any noise he might pick up.
In scan-mode, he read occasional signals in the vast and empty distance—the low hum of sleeping minds, the occupants of sequestered farmhouses. They were so distant that he perceived no mental images, just faint signatures. He drove through the cold, dark night, warmed by the heating in the roadster, half-listening to these slumbering minds as a driver half-listens to the radio, played low. He wondered if he found the evidence of these minds reassuring, in contrast to the emptiness of the northern mountains and what they might contain.
He looked ahead, considered the events that might occur in the hours to come.
He told himself that it was wrong to classify as evil the deeds done by the creatures in the Geiger Caves—they, after all, were merely fulfilling the demands of the biological imperative to survive. Even the humans in proximity to the troglodyte creatures, slaves to the promise of eternal euphoria, no doubt had little control over their actions. It was the Church hierarchy, expediting the transfer of the aliens to Earth, whose actions were reprehensible. And even then he warned himself against finding easy solutions to something he did not yet fully understand. Perhaps even people like Weiss, Dolores Yandoah, and Jenson believed that they were delivering the victims of the creatures to so me ultimate oneness with the Godhead.
He thought back to the euphoria he’d experienced at the Holosseum, and compared it to the experience he had had with the rhapsody he had taken in his apartment after the service. Then, he had achieved a dulled, torpid state, without any of the euphoria. He considered what Essex had said about the drug being effective only in a twenty-Kilometre radius of the mountains—in proximity, in other words, to the creatures that issued the summons. Did that mean that, in the Holosseum, he had been close to one of the aliens transported to Earth? But why, then, had he not experienced the calling, the second stage of the effect described by Essex, that followed on from the euphoria?
He wondered if it was something to do with the strength of the drug administered at the service. Perhaps the drug given out then had been a sampler, designed to hook the congregation into coming back for more, and passing on the word of the thrill of communion to others. Later, when the ranks of believers had swelled, the dose would be increased, the congregation would experience the calling, and the alien would feed upon the faithful.
The creatures had fed on Verkerk’s World, and now they were about to feed on Earth. Vaughan wondered how many of the things had been smuggled off-planet.
Essex said that the calling had about a week to run. The next ship left in two days, with another two days of flight time before they reached Earth. That would leave approximately three days in which to locate the aliens on the Station, and wherever else they might be, and eradicate the danger they posed.
* * * *
He had discussed tactics with Chandra for the first hour of the journey. They would approach the Geiger Caves and attempt to film, at a distance, any activity that might be taking place. They had decided to err on the side of caution. Better to come away with nothing than suffer Kuivert’s probable fate. They had come prepared. They had a vid-camera in the back of the car, and weapons, thermal clothing, and tents should they be caught out in the open come nightfall.
Vaughan drove on, his mind active with speculation, and before he knew it the short, dark night was at an end.
Dawn arrived with the rapidity of an activated holo-set. The period of half-light seemed to last only seconds, and then the rising sun beamed up from behind the mountain range like the rays of a searchlight. The land was revealed as an idyllic panorama etched in every shade of silver, from the dull pewter of the metalled road to blinding white magnesium of the snow-capped mountains.
He pulled off the road. Chandra, still sleeping, shifted and muttered at the discontinued lullaby thrumming of tyres on tarmac. Vaughan eased himself from the driver’s seat and closed the door quietly behind him. The cold clamped itself around him, bracing and bone-gripping. He took a deep, invigorating breath, dispelling the tiredness that had built up over the hours and leaving him clearheaded and alert. He walked away from the car along the side of the narrow road. There was not the slightest sign of human presence. He was surprised to discover, when he raised a hand to his console, that his augmentation-pin was still jacked in. He stood in the middle of the road and turned in a full circle, taking in the undulating hills, sparkling in the frost; the distant, flat line of the coastal plain; and, in the opposite direction, the rearing ramparts of the northern mountains. He turned and scanned, concentrating on picking up the slightest human signal out there, however weak. He had never in his life had to scan with such diligence; usually, in scan-mode, he could do nothing to keep the minds from encroaching. Now there was nothing out there, no mind-hum or individual signatures, nothing but absolute silence.
He stood in the middle of the road with his arms raised to heaven as if in supplication. The silence of the night, his first experience of this kind of mind-silence, had hardly prepared him: not for years had he experienced such peace, such a profound and ringing silence. It was amazing to be alone with one’s own thoughts, to have the fragmented ide
ntities, the angst-ridden detritus from the minds of a million souls, the scraps of psychoses, paranoia, and neuroses, banished from his sensorium. Once tasted, the silence would haunt him forever with its promise of peace. Now he knew that such cerebral relief was possible, he told himself that he could go on, could endure the agony of being a telepath, just so long as he could return from time to time to the silence.
The cold drove him back to the car. He slipped into the driver’s seat and pulled the map from inside his jacket, opening it out across the steering wheel. He judged that they were less than a hundred kilometres from where the road passed closest to the Geiger Caves. From that point, it was a hike of another twenty kilometres through the foothills to reach the source of the call.
He returned the map to his pocket. Beside him, Chandra stirred again. It was strange to have experienced such profound mind-silence and yet be in the presence of another human being. He thanked himself for insisting that Chandra should take Weiss’s mind-shield back at police headquarters.