by Eric Brown
Then a greater wave of tiredness overcame him, and he told himself that it would be okay if he slept for just a few minutes—he would be woken by the cold, anyway, just as all the other times. But even as he thought this, he told himself that he could not submit. He admitted that he did not want to die, even though to fight against it was an exercise in futility: he did not want to experience the terrible oblivion he had so often shared vicariously in the past.
Despite himself, against his will, he felt himself slipping into unconsciousness.
* * * *
Much later, something made him open his eyes.
He blinked, stared in disbelief.
The night had come to an end; a new day had arrived on the mountain. It was light in the pit. He held Jimmy Chandra to him, almost laughing tears of delight at their survival.
For the first time he could look about him and see his prison. He scanned the rock walls that contained them. He made out possible foot- and hand holds in the sheer face. The sun struck a beam down into the pit, as warm and welcome as a flame.
Perhaps, after all, they would be able to escape.
A few minutes later Vaughan heard the faraway sound of a helicopter’s rotor blades, and hope turned to despair. The rhythmic blatt-blatt of rotors grew louder, nearer, and Vaughan almost laughed at the irony of surviving the night only to fall victim to the Disciples’ bullets this morning.
He held the sleeping Chandra to him, steeling himself for the end.
The sound of the chopper became deafening, then cut out on landing. The only sound then was the pounding of his heart, as he waited. Brief seconds later he heard footfalls on the rock above, muffled shouts. He held on to Chandra, willing the Indian to remain sleeping rather than wake and be aware of his end.
He scanned, and at first he did not believe what he was reading.
He heard something being thrown into the pit. A length of black fibre hung from the opening. Instantly it changed shape, became a ladder: memory carbon.
Someone was climbing into the pit. Dark shapes appeared in the patch of sky above, peering down.
“In here! We’ve found them!”
A young man in the uniform of the Vanderlaan police jumped from the ladder and hurried across to him. The officer stared, then turned and yelled for medical assistance.
Vaughan began laughing, a mad sound that echoed eerily in the confines of the pit. He shook Chandra, trying to wake him. “Jimmy! Jimmy, we’re safe!”
Someone was climbing into the pit, someone familiar. She turned and hurried across to where Vaughan huddled with Chandra in his arms.
He stared up at Lieutenant Laerhaven. “How...?”
Her mind exploded with delight at finding them alive, and he read how she’d found them even before she spoke.
“The watches I gave you are tracking devices, Vaughan. I wasn’t altogether sure we needed to keep tabs on you, but as things worked out...”
The pit was full of people now, kneeling beside him, examining him. Their mind-noise was becoming painful. Quickly he withdrew his pin.
“Vaughan,” Laerhaven squatted before him, her expression solicitous. “Vaughan, you can let go of Chandra, now. There’s nothing you can do, I’m sorry.”
He stared at the cold bundle in his arms. With his eyes closed, his face set in a peaceful expression, Jimmy Chandra might have been sleeping.
“Jimmy...”
“Vaughan, there’s nothing you can do.”
“No!” he yelled. He had the absurd idea that if he were to hold Chandra all the tighter, never let him go, then he might imbue the Indian with some of his own vitality.
The officers were all around him, pulling at Chandra, trying to part Vaughan from the frozen corpse. For the first time, Vaughan realised that he was shivering, though whether with cold or shock he was unable to tell.
“Let him be!” he screamed at the officers. “Please...”
Then he felt the blast of a hypo-ject in his neck, and no more.
* * * *
He came to his senses in a hospital room. He felt weak, feverish. Lieutenant Laerhaven sat on a chair beside the bed. She spoke to him—at least, he saw her lips move, but heard no words. He lapsed into unconsciousness.
When he next awoke he was in a different room, this one flooded with bright morning sunlight, and he no longer felt ill. He pushed himself into a sitting position and called out.
Laerhaven hurried into the room.
“Jeff... You’ve been through a hell of an ordeal. Lie down. You need to rest.”
He recalled what he had scanned in the minds of the Disciples. The Vaith were on Bengal Station, elsewhere in the Expansion. He needed get out of here, back to Earth to warn the authorities.
“When’s the next ship to Earth?”
“Tonight. But you’re in no fit state to be on it. You had a close escape. We’re not going to endanger you further by releasing you ahead of time.”
“Jimmy...?”
“His body will be travelling back on the same ship as yourself.”
“I need... Do you have a screader? I need to make a report for the Enforcement Agency on the Station. It must go on tonight’s flight, okay?”
Laerhaven looked at him dubiously. “If you’re sure you’re up to the mental strain of reliving what—”
“Just get me a damned screader!” he yelled, and fell back on the bed.
Later, alone in the room, Vaughan stared at the blank screen of the screader and wondered where to begin.
* * * *
TWENTY-ONE
A VERY CRUEL PLACE
Sukara decided to take each day as it came.
She sat in the back of the taxi-flier as it cruised high above the ocean, Osborne dozing beside her. She had never seen the sea before, never really understood how vast it was. The blue and white expanse stretched away in every direction, its size made apparent when a tiny ship came into sight below, marking the perfection of the surface with its feathery wake. She had expected Bengal Station to be just off the coast of Burma, observable from the land. When they had flown out over the long line of the coast, she had leaned forward between the front seats and stared ahead in search of the artificial construct where her sister now made her home.
“I no see it,” she had complained.
Osborne had opened one eye. “See what?”
“Bengal Station.”
He smiled. “You won’t. It’s still five hundred kilometres north-west of here.”
“Five hundred kilometres!” She shook her head. “And we go all way in taxi-flier?”
Osborne had just smiled again and settled himself further into the seat, trying to sleep.
She had been amazed that morning when Osborne had told her they were going to the Station by flier—and at that time she had thought it was only a matter of fifty or so kilometres from Bangkok. She tried to imagine how much the fare might be for a journey of this distance.
It made her wonder again who Osborne was. He had told her very little about himself—that he worked for the government of Federated America, and that he was trying to locate an old work-colleague on Bengal Station. She had worked out for herself that he was rich, most likely unmarried, and lonely. What concerned her most of all, though, was why he found her so attractive.
Last night at the hotel they had slept together in the king-sized bed, but they had not made love. Sukara had been willing, but when she had reached out for him in bed he had shook his head and stroked her hair. They had spent the night separated by an expanse of cool linen, holding hands. Sukara could not understand him: he professed affection for her, and yet seemed afraid or unwilling to be drawn into sexual intimacy. She had always understood that the first step on the way to keeping a man was to sleep with him. Osborne’s refusal worried her on more than one count: she feared that without sex he might tire of her, and worried that the reason he didn’t want to sleep with her was because he found her ugly. Last night he had said that he never wanted her to leave him, had he
ld her and caressed her like a lover. She told herself that she should be thankful that he wasn’t like her customers who had wanted from her only one thing.
In the early hours of the morning, staring at his profile in the light of the moon that slanted in through the window, she had sensed that he was awake.
“Osborne?”
“Mmm?”
She found his hand, held it tight. “Why me? Why I special?”
He was a long time before replying. “When I walked into that bar and saw you... Do you believe in love at first sight, Su?”
She frowned. “Don’t know.”
“There was something about you... who can say why they are attracted to people? Some chemical thing. Does it matter?”
“Suppose not.”
“Good. What matters is that we have each other, okay?”
“Mmm.” And she had fallen asleep to pleasant dreams, and on waking that morning had wondered, for a quick second, if the events of the night before had been nothing more than part of the dream. And then she had seen Osborne sleeping quietly beside her, and everything had come back to her: that her worries were over now, that she was going to Bengal Station, and that the man called Osborne loved her.
She told herself that she would try not to love him, as a safeguard against being hurt later, and take each day as it came.
In the morning he had taken her by flier to pick up her belongings, and then they had left Bangkok aboard a taxi-flier without even saying farewell to Fat Cheng.
As the flier carried her away, she told herself that whatever happened she would not come back, she would never again be a working girl. She would find Pakara on Bengal Station and start a new and happier life.
* * * *
She was dozing, the muffled roar of the jet engines lulling her on the edge of sleep, when she felt Osborne’s touch. “We’re almost there, Su.”
She woke with a start of excitement and peered through the side-window. Ahead and to the left, Sukara made out a massive shape on the face of the ocean. It was a monumental square structure, a jet-black block that rose sheer from the foaming waves around its base. It seemed out of place, an obviously artificial object contrasting with the natural element of the ocean. As they approached, it increased amazingly in size, as if magnified, and Sukara made out a hundred details that turned the Station from a lifeless architectural block to what it was: a great, hive-like city teeming with life. The upper three levels on the eastern flank were open, a deep shelf of towerpiles and hanging gardens, with the tiny shapes of pedestrians occupying plazas and escalators. Lower down, the flank was sealed, one long black wall interrupted by the silver rectangles of windows and viewscreens.
Hundreds of boats and ships converged on the Station, from dhows to ocean liners, and overhead a constant stream of airborne traffic came and went like so many bees around a hive. To the south-west, Sukara made out the ponderous bulk of a voidship moving slowly towards the spaceport. Even as she watched, another materialised on the horizon, blinking on and off before finally solidifying into reality.
Their flier banked, coming in over the upper-deck, and Sukara gasped at the sight of the crowds below. She had thought Bangkok crowded, but down there each street seemed packed with people, a solid flow of humanity like many millions of iron filings following the tug of some invisible magnet. How did individuals fight their way through such a crush? It was a thrilling and frightening prospect to realise that soon she would be down there. She wondered how she might find Pakara among so many people.
She pointed. “Look! Millions of people!”
Osborne smiled. “We’ll be staying in the north, Su. It’ll be a bit less crowded there.”
The flier dropped, came in low between ranked towerpiles and the occasional green area of a park. Five minutes later they banked, slowing, and landed gently in the forecourt of a golden, pyramidal building bearing the title: Hotel Ashoka.
They booked into a suite of rooms, showered and dressed, then took the elevator to the restaurant. After a light lunch—Chinese noodles and fried fish, better than anything she had ever tasted—Osborne took her shopping in the hotel mall.
He bought her two pairs of shoes, three dresses, skirts and blouses and T-shirts, a watch and jewellery—a necklace, a ring, and a ruby brooch—and gave her dollars to buy underwear and anything else she might want. He helped her back to the room with all her purchases, smiling at her like a father as she tried on first one dress and then another.
He kissed the crown of her head. “I’m going out for a few hours. I’ll be back around six. Then we’ll go for something to eat, okay?”
She lowered the dress she was holding up against the one she had just tried on. “I go out, too. Things I need to do, people to see.”
Osborne looked at her with that intense, penetrating gaze. He nodded. “But take care. Buy a map and travel by flier.” He gave her a stack of dollars, kissed her head again, and left the room.
* * * *
She sat on the bed surrounded by her new clothes and thought ahead to the meeting with her sister. For so long it had been an impossibility, a dream she had never really imagined would come true, and now the inevitability of their reunion, in just a few hours, was a fact she could allow herself the luxury of savouring. She decided to take her time, rehearse what she would say to Pakara, go over and over what it might be like, together again after five years. It was still only midday. She had plenty of time. She lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to imagine her little sister’s reaction to seeing her after so long.
What should she wear? She jumped up and held the dresses to her body. There was a mirror on the wardrobe door, but she avoided that. Somehow, her new clothes did not seem quite right for the occasion. From her backpack she pulled the clothes she had brought along: a few pairs of shorts and T-shirts, two short skirts. She picked the shorts and a red T-shirt. It was what she would have worn back in Bangkok, when Pakara had known her.
From the pocket of her shorts Sukara withdrew a pix of Pakara and herself, taken in a pix-booth six years ago. It showed two cheeky-faced girls, heads squashed together and poking their tongues at the camera. She smoothed the pix out over her knee, stared closely at the face of her little sister. She would no longer be so little. She would be sixteen now, a young woman, and beautiful. Sukara wondered if Pakara would recognise her with the scar disfiguring her face, how she might react. Then she wondered what her sister was doing now. In the stitched message on the silk scarf, she had said that she was working—but working at what? Perhaps she had got a good job, was not working in a bar or club. She pulled out the scarf, read Pakara’s message for perhaps the thousandth time.
Dear Sister, I am on Bengal Station, keeping well and working. I think of you every day. When you have money, come to the Station. I will be outside Nazruddin’s Restaurant, Chandi Road, Himachal sector. I am well and hope you are. Love, Pakara.
P.S. My friends now call me Tiger.
Sukara walked to the window and looked out. Somewhere out there, among the many millions of people, was her sister. She wondered if it was time now to go and find her. The longer she delayed, the more excited she became, and the excitement she felt burning in her chest was like a powerful drug to which she could become addicted.
She decided to leave now, but to take her time. She would go down to the hotel mall, where she had seen a shop selling plastic maps of the Station. She locked the door behind her and carried the key-card down in the elevator. The act of stepping from the elevator and crossing the glittering foyer filled her with pride and importance: she was doing things now which she had only seen actors performing in films. She walked to the mall, among strolling crowds of Indians and Thais, found the shop and asked the assistant for two maps printed in Thai: one of the whole upper-deck, and another of just the Himachal sector.
She wondered whether to take the maps and study them in a caf é over a coffee, or to go outside and sit on the grass. She decided to go outside, and then saw a
n open-air café in the grounds of the hotel, with people sitting around tables beneath colourful parasols. She found an empty table and ordered a café au lait.
When it came, and while she waited for it to cool, she unfolded the maps and pored over the intricate design of highways, streets, and alleyways; train-routes and flier lanes marked in broad sweeps of different pastel colours.
She studied the Himachal map and eventually found Chandi Road. She found Chandi Road and a small letter R indicating a restaurant. She stared at it for a long time, sipping her coffee and enjoying the odd feeling of knowing that her sister would have no idea that she, Sukara, was on her way.