At Martha’s suggestion, we opened the roof of the Observation Bubble and flew upwards on our body-armour jets. Professor Helms and six other colleagues joined us there, in mid-air, hovering above the swamp with blue skies above us where the canopy was broken, with birds flying all around. Professor Helms, as is his wont, retracted his helmet in order to feel the wind on his face, a perfectly safe manoeuvre of course since our oxygen implants can keep us alive for a considerable period of time, and the atmosphere is not actively poisonous.2 I joined the Professor in his impetuosity, and I too felt the wind on my cheeks.3
There were nine of us flying that day, and we soared high up into the air to be amidst the flock of Bell-Birds.4They were playing and scampering through the sky like dogs in a park. The Bell-Birds are vast creatures, the size of Earth whales, and they each have four sets of wings, creating a multiple hydrofoil of uncanny strength. They use jet propulsion from their anus to steer themselves, but they can also fart air from one of sixteen other rectums, which are dorsally located, and these jets of air are directed over the wings at differing speeds to create low pressure on the top of the wing, generating lift.
The Bell-Birds are squatly shaped, like bells, but there is considerable grace in the way they kink and dart around the sky. And so we flew through their flock and chased them and played with them. They are happy creatures and they seemed to relish our company as we flew with them, up high and down low. We brushed the canopy of trees and flew up through a gap and high up into the clouds, led by Bell-Birds which formed a perfect V shape in the skies with their vast bodies.
We saw a Roc,5 hovering high above us, dancing on a thermal current. We saw a flock of Sunlights,6 yellow darting creatures that flock in a cloud-shaped formation to create, in certain lights, a yellow shimmering second sun in the sky. We saw a speckled Amazonian Kite,7 which unlike its earthly counterpart is not bird-shaped, but is in fact flat and vast, like a manta ray, or indeed a toy kite.
It was pure joy, to be alive, to be flying, to be part of the world of birds on this glistening, beautiful, unpredictable planet.
Then we flew back down and rejoined our party, just as they reached the end of the Swamp, and were within sight of the Mountains of the Moon mountain range at the foot of which nestled the Depot which was our blessed bourne.8
Ben Kirkham was feeling woozy. The journey was exhausting him. And he couldn’t cope with the monotony, the endless chatter from that clown Baal, and the certainty that he was travelling with enemies who were assuming the form of human beings in order to deceive him.
There was a mood of exhilaration in the AmRover after the flying in the sky incident, but Ben felt detached from it, and scornful of it. Nothing made sense any more, and all was folly.
Hugo was uncomfortable with the way Ben kept staring at him. What was wrong with him these days? He hadn’t been behaving normally since they’d been bombed and fired at by the rogue Doppelganger Robots and then, after barely surviving a ghastly massacre, forced to take refuge in the perilous jungle.
What the devil was his problem?
Martha Le Clerk loved the twinkle in Hugo’s eyes when he talked about his beloved New Amazonian birds. He had a childlike passion for everything he did, and she admired his rigour and his publication record. Dr Hugo Baal was one of the giants in the xenobiological world, and Martha couldn’t believe how lucky she was to be sharing an AmRover with him.
Ben Kirkham, however, scared the shit out of her.
The surviving four AmRovers chuntered through the jungle, with Ashley on point duty on the armoured Scooter, which was in effect a one-person Flyer.
Professor Helms was desperate to reach the Depot. The journey had been demoralising, and he was starting to feel claustrophobic, despite the spacious quarters in the vast AmRovers.
But Helms didn’t want to spend the rest of his days living in an armoured car, however large it might be. He wanted a home, a place where he could breathe freshly recycled air and see artificially painted stars on a hardglass dome. The Depot would give them that. He’d built it big, the size of a town or even a small city, and it was equipped with everything they would need to make this planet truly habitable. It had self-contained living units, an artificial river, Earth vegetation, and a communal mingling area with benches and coffee-points.
It was a grandiose construction, but Helms had always known he would have to prepare for this eventuality. So he’d programmed robot-mode DRs and nanobots to fabricate his bolthole; and within a few hours he would be safe inside it.
There was only one outstanding problem: the Depot needed a name. For it was no longer a munitions and supplies store; it was going to be their capital city.
“Melbourne.”
“Arcadia.”
“Capital City.”
“Amazon City.”
“New London.”
“Fresh Start.”
“Depot. Let’s just call it Depot. It’s kind of cool, yeah?”
“No.”
“No.”
“Not cool.”
“Mozart.”
“Ah, good idea, musical theme; Samuelson.”
“Brahlish.”
“Leeminson.”
“Beethoven.”
“Flanagan.”
“Who the hell is Flanagan?”
“He’s kind of a blues singer with cross-over potential. I like him.”
“Nah.”
“Inca.”
“Orinoco.”
“Arse End of Nowhere.”
“We Couldn’t Think of a Fucking Name for It City.”
“Lubricious.”
“Plumbeous.”
“Linnaeus.”
“Nice one. Linnaeus, I like that.”
“Who’s Linnaeus?”
“Oh for pity’s sake!”
“Cousteau.”
“Falcon.”
“Falcon City.”
“Falcon City is good.”
“Eagle.”
“Eagle City is also good.”
“Sparrow.”
“Sparrow City, not so good.”
“Vulture.”
“Condor.”
“Heebie-Jeebie.”
“You can’t name a human city after an alien species.”
“Bandersnatch.”
“Same problem.”
“It’s a reference to a poem.”
“It’s also the name of thirty-four species of large land animal.”
“Some scientists have no imagination, huh?”
“Hel-lo! Roc, anyone? How many Rocs are there in the human universe? And Basilisk? The Basilisks on Apocrypha are actually sentient, how do you think they’ll like us recycling their name?”
“They don’t call themselves Basilisks.”
“That’s because they communicate via the smell of their belches. But their human scientific name is still Basilicus sapiens.”
“Yes, but our Basilisks are Basiliskus with a ‘k’.”
“Oh, and belching aliens are going to detect that subtle difference, are they?”
“Can we focus please?”
“Focus! I like that. Focus City.”
“Chaos.”
“Hades.”
“Olympus.”
“Arcadia.”
“Someone said that already.”
“Asimov.”
“Who’s he?”
“Gaiman.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Helms,” said Professor Helms, and the decision was made.
It was nearly midnight by the time they pulled up in Helms City. The Professor keyed in his remote code to open up the hardglass front door. The AmRovers were parked inside, and Sorcha led her soldiers into the Weapons Room, where they primed the force field and ran systems checks on the defensive cannons. There was an electrified perimeter area with virtual tripwires activating laser-beam blasts to destroy any unauthorised presences, an impermeable hardglass dome, the force field, hidden mines. This was a fortres
s that could withstand assault by an entire battle force.
When the security systems were in place Professor Helms, finally, breathed a sigh of relief.
“This is my room?” said Sorcha, awed.
It was palatial. A double bed. Bay windows with false views. A holographic ceiling. Mock-antique furniture.
“I was hoping, perhaps, if it isn’t too presumptuous, this might be our room?” said Helms, with the hesitant, shy smile that had always worked so well for him.
“But this is meant to be a depot!” protested Sorcha. “I was expecting, I don’t know, a warehouse maybe.”
“It was always going to be our second city,” Helms explained. “And why not? With cheap energy and robots, why create a utilitarian habitat when you can live in style?”
“Is that vintage wine?”
“It’s several hours old.”
“That’ll do me.”
Sorcha poured the drinks. Helms savoured the taste of the wine. He’d once drunk a bottle of fifty-year-old Château Lafite, but this was just as good. That was the joy of progress: epiphany was so easily reproducible.
Sorcha’s skin glowed with youth. Her body was muscular, but she still had some puppy fat. When he made jokes, she laughed, often amazed at the freshness of his wit. When he was sour and cynical about life, she often looked at him blankly.
For Sorcha loved her world, she loved herself, she loved everything about being alive, she loved killing aliens and enemy humans, she loved sunshine and sex and shitting, she saw nothing much wrong with anything, really.
And for Helms this, the experience of being with a young woman who sees things freshly, with enthusiasm and relish, without any trace of despair or dread or ennui, this was a rare delight.
“Shall we make, dare I suggest it, love?” he suggested shyly, and she beamed at the brilliance of that suggestion and took her clothes off and began touching him in wonderful ways.
“You have a lovely bony body,” she told him, and kissed his bones, and licked his flesh.
“Thank you,” he told her, very formally.
“You’re welcome!” she said, amused by his formality, and then she was wriggling, and fumbling him into position with a skilful hand, and he was inside her, and passion consumed them as they fucked, and fucked, and savoured each other’s flesh and smell and passion.
Ben took his meds and felt a familiar calmness descend. He realised, with some horror, that he’d been clinically psychotic for most of their journey through the jungle. Paranoid, suspicious, delusional, obsessional — in a word, crazy.
He was lucky they’d reached the Depot when they did, so that he could restore his biology to normal.
Ben marvelled at how close he had come to a total breakdown. And he loaded up his backpack with as many meds as he could find, in case they had to leave this place suddenly.
Because after a hundred years of sanity, he knew very well the dangers of trying to survive without his regimen of medication. It was essential that he should stay sedated, and hence focused, and calm, and rational.
And he knew too that he had to continue to be the emotionally dead, sardonic, rude, hypercritical Ben Kirkham that everyone knew and, well, loathed.
Because he didn’t dare to, once again, become that other person, the cheerful, life-embracing Ben Kirkham, the fun-loving Ben, the Ben who everyone laughed at and wanted to be with, the Ben as he really was without his daily dose of emotion-depressing medication. Because that would turn him back into the Ben he had been as a young man — exuberant, witty, brilliant, delightful.
And murderously insane.
Hugo inspected his lab and was thrilled. Imaging machines, micro-scalpels, a cell analyser, and a virtual reality booth that would allow him to travel through the body of a dissected alien as if he were on a spaceship.
It hadn’t occurred to Hugo that the Depot would be so well equipped. He was expecting a shed with some basic living facilities. But Helms had managed to construct a whole second city here.
Hugo was delighted, yet also highly suspicious; but his suspicions were swiftly swallowed up by his gleeful delight.
It occurred to Tonii that he was finally free. No Quantum Beacon, no DRs apart from the rogue one who was stalking them, no Commander in Chief, no CSO, no Earth. No oppression, no cultural prejudice, no emails from his scornful family mocking his choices in life. No birthday vids from his ex-husband Charlie berating Tonii for being such a useless freak.
And, perhaps most important of all, no trauma and pain and guilt as all the species of animal and plant on the planet apart from the zoo specimens were brutally slaughtered and exterminated, as had happened on his last six planets. No bleak transfer to another world rich in promise and full of rich and diverse life-forms that, in turn, would be callously genocided.
This, Tonii realised, was the start of a whole new life.
Mia wandered through the Depot, awestruck.
She’d expected some utilitarian habitat with a dome. Instead it was a magnificent piece of architecture. The walls all curved and swooped at angles, and were richly coloured with shimmering mosaics. The floors were angled too and it was possible to walk from the bottom to the top floor without ever using stairs. The curves formed patterns all around her, and richly carved floating pillars that served no structural function created an eerie temple-like effect.
Mia took a camera and explored. She wondered who had designed this — was it Helms? Was he an architect as well as a scientist?
The depot had a campanile, a tower that soared high through the hardglass dome and up into the sky, almost touching the canopy. Mia walked to the top and looked down at the jungle and captured the panorama with a series of slow tracking shots, then with a series of static pans. Then she leaped off the campanile and flew with her body-armour jets down to the ground, capturing the great expanse of the jungle ahead of her.
And as she flew, her camera flew beside her, capturing every moment of her epic leap.
“Hmm,” said William Beebe.
His and Mary’s room was surprisingly spacious. A trompe l’oeil window offered a view of the jungle — thanks to an ingenious mirror-tube that carried images from the exterior of the dome to the room. Juggernauts appeared to amble up to the window and peered through at them. Birds flew past, leaving a glorious orange train of excrement, as was the wont of these New Amazonian creatures. It was like having a luxury suite in the midst of a wilderness.
“Rather pleasant,” Mary agreed.
“Better than the room we had at Xabar,” William concurred.
“Hence . . .”
“So . . .”
“Indeed.”
“But . . .”
“But what?”
“I rather think you know ‘But what?’ ”
“But — perhaps Helms is a revolutionary?”
“That is the thought that crossed my mind.”
“He was planning a coup?”
“Perhaps. That would explain . . .”
“I’m with you.”
“Although —”
“Although?”
“He’s a strange man, in many ways.”
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“He’s good company. Rather clever.”
“But cold.”
“Yes, cold. Or rather — not cold. Reserved. Not the least bit WYSIWYG.”
“Hmm. Good point. I find him rather arrogant, also.”
“We all are.”
“True.”
“He’s amazingly knowledgeable though. For a geologist.”
“Rather too knowledgeable.”
“He has a mastery of cladistics that daunts even me.”
“Brain implant, that’s the explanation.”
“No, it’s too fast, the way he recollects data. If you ask him about the phylogenetic history of any alien species in Known Space, he knows. He doesn’t pause to ask the computer chip. He knows.”
“Clearly, he’s had memory modifications.”
<
br /> “And a face transplant.”
“You noticed that too?”
“Freckles on the arm, not on the nose. A dead giveaway.”
“I’d never buy a new face,” said William. “I like the one I have.”
“Your nose is too large.”
“True.”
“Out of proportion.”
“I’m aware of what ‘too large’ means.”
“It wasn’t intended as an insult.”
“And this? Is this in proportion?”
William was by now stark naked.
Mary looked at him, and smiled.
Then Mary also undressed. Her breasts were tiny and pert, her nipples were huge, her bum was large, her belly button turned outwards, and she was a good foot shorter than she needed to be. But William adored her for her quirky physique.
“I love you,” he told her.
“Hmm,” she replied, with a mock-frown. Then she added: “William, I think I’d like sexual intercourse now, if you don’t mind.” And he grinned, and then he entered her, and they made love, with staggering passion, for an hour or more.
Later, they lay naked in each other’s arms, listening to nothing, trembling and weak after their multiple, soul-shaking tantric orgasms.
“Are you hungry?” he asked at one point.
“Not a bit of it,” she told him, and fell asleep, and he slept too.
And when he woke, she was still asleep, and dreaming, and he kissed her as she dreamed, and touched her body gently, and she whispered to him from her sleep, and he whispered back, hoping that she would dream of him.
Helms showed Sorcha his dreams for the planet, in a complex holographic display that unfurled impressively from his virtual computer screen until it filled the entirety of their large living space.
Helms’s vision of their future involved floating cities and space elevators that allowed travellers to hop over the Jungle-Walls with ease. He also proposed to build vast skyscrapers that offered vistas across the canopy, opening up that whole area of the planet to human tourists.
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