by Bob Shaw
An unusually loud burst of laughter from within the aircraft caused him to jump to his feet and he made the humiliating discovery that he was jealous. On the strength of a few minutes of spurious intimacy and one speculative glance he had built up a fantasy in which he had a special claim on Colleen Bourgou. The logic was that of a fairytale in which a princess, having subliminally recognized a prince behind the outward shape of a frog, is automatically linked to him for life. He snorted in self-disgust. You really enjoy playing a part, Athene had told him, but there’s more to it than you walking about in bristles and codpiece …. But that had been before she had thrown everything in her sermon about one-to-one marriages to the winds. Athene had forfeited the right to pass judgment on his foibles. He neared the forward hatch of the aircraft and looked in. Colleen was laughing easily and uninhibitedly at something, and her eyes meeting his were more than ever like discs of newly-minted gold. He smiled back, with calculated wistfulness, and returned to his seat on the truck.
In spite of her free-and-easy attitude, Colleen appeared very meticulous about checking the items of incoming and outgoing payload on her clipboard. The activity around the aircraft gradually diminished until
Parma’s truck was the only one left. While Colleen was
checking the cargo hatch fastenings Carewe said his goodbyes to Parma.
“Thanks for everything,” he said. “As soon as I find out what in hell’s going on in my life I’ll get in touch and explain it to you.”
“I’d be interested to hear that, Willy. Look after yourself.”
Carewe shook hands, climbed on board and strapped himself into one of the forward passenger seats, just behind and to one side of the pilot’s station. He was disproportionately pleased to have it confirmed that there would be no other passengers on the flight.
“Here we go,” Colleen said, sealing the forward door and buckling herself in. She activated the control systems with a flashy expertise, fired the turbine starter cartridges and eased the aircraft upwards. When they had cleared tree level she put the nose down slightly and took off in an ascending swoop which did peculiar things to the emptiness inside Carewe’s ribs. He clutched his chest and held on.
“Sorry,” she said, glancing back. “Did that hurt?”
“Not really—but I’ve got a collapsed lung that’s so sensitive to acceleration it could stand in as an inertial guidance system.”
“How did you get that?”
“It wasn’t easy.” He described the stabbing incident without consciously slanting it to make himself appear heroic.
“Too bad,” she said sympathetically, “but I still don’t see why you were so eager to get away from the base.”
Carewe hesitated. “Somebody else tried to kill me, somebody in the base.” He waited—but the expected laughter did not come. Colleen was frowning and he wondered how he could ever have considered her only fairly attractive.
“Have you any idea who or why?”
“Ah …no.” Something far back in his mind associated the menace to his life with the fact that he had taken a shot of E.80, but the only person to whom he could confide his worries on that score was Barenboim.
She shivered deliciously. “It all sounds very mysterious and exciting.”
“Mysterious it is,” Carewe replied, “but I can’t see what porpoise, I mean purpose … porpoise … spoke to me on the dolphin …”
“Are you feeling all right?” Colleen turned in her seat. “Your straightness has gone … redly.”
He stared at her in horror. There was something terribly wrong about the gold coins of her eyes. … No, not the eyes themselves—the spacing of them. There had been a ghastly reversal, and now her eyes were separated by the circumference of the universe minus the width of the bridge of her nose, which left them still on her face but billions of lightyears apart….
“Not slowly,” she cried. “Unbreathe!”
“Your eyes—the non-Einsteinian simultaneity of blinking.”
Colleen’s hands were startled birds. “We don’t disrequire negative upness.”
White winds howling, gravity pushing … pushing? Carewe blinked and focused his eyes on the other passenger seats. They were changing position relative to each other, but this time it was real and metal arms were clamped around his body. His single lung pumped like a heart. He looked downwards at the dance of distant treetops, then up again. The shuttle aircraft was flying steadily onwards, a gaping rectangular hole in its belly, far above him now and growing smaller. Around him the other seats rose and sank in response to air currents, or twisted in slow turns, dangling unused straps. Cold clean air seared his nostrils.
“Don’t be afraid,” Colleen called and he saw her larger pilot’s seat drifting close by, fringed with hoses, wires and levers. “The world is pear-shaped and the tip will meet us rotationally “
“What … what happened?” he shouted numbly, clinging to the arms of his seat. A river glinted flatly in the west, and he thought he could see a haze of smoke on the nearer bank. The treetops were close now and rearing up to meet him with daunting speed. “What hit us?”
“Calculation equals chaos,” Colleen replied, her voice almost lost in the uprush of air.
“Look out,” he warned, “we’re almost down.” He examined the armrests of his seat and found a small vertically mounted thumb-joystick set in a recess. Memories of a thousand carefully-scanned flight safety booklets returned to him. Pushing the stick downwards would increase the porosity of the invisible forcefield canopy supporting the seat, and increase the rate of descent. Allowing it to spring upwards would intensify the field, and moving the stick laterally would distort the canopy in such a way that the seat would follow the direction indicated.
Carewe flinched as he fell below tree level and an irregular leafy valley surged up around him. He dimly heard other seats crashing through foliage but all his attention was concentrated on the tiny and seemingly irrelevant thumb movements which were supposed to steer him to safety. A smaller tree speared up at him. He pushed the joystick to the right, aiming for a patch of dimness, but the response was sluggish and the seat slanted down through the tree’s branches. It bounced and shuddered and slowed, while twigs lashed at his face—then he was on the ground, miraculously seated upright. The sound of other seats tumbling through foliage was loud. He hit the release button, the seat’s metal claws curled back into their sockets and he stepped clear.
“Hello there!”
He looked upwards and saw that Colleen’s seat was perched at an angle in the lower branches of a broad tree. She was about eight meters up, but appeared to be smiling.
“Hold on,” he called. “I’ll climb up to you.”
“It’s all right. No calculating, no chaos.” Colleen released herself from the seat and stepped off into thin air. She hurtled downwards, legs rotating lazily and tawny hair streaming, and smashed into a slump of shrubbery.
Carewe ran across the uneven ground and parted the shrub with shaking hands. She was unconscious and a single rivulet of blood, gleaming like lacquer, crossed her forehead. He raised one of her eyelids and touched the eyeball with a fingertip. The eye remained passive, indicating to Carewe’s limited medical understanding that she was deeply unconscious, perhaps concussed. He explored her limp body with his hands and, finding no broken bones, lifted Colleen out of the shrub and put her down on mossy ground.
Sinking to his knees beside her, he surveyed the scratches on his own body and tried to come to terms with reality again. The only explanation he could conceive was that a fast-acting hallucinogen had been released into the shuttle’s air system by a timing device. It had not been Illusogen or any of the other approved commercial drugs, but one specifically designed to interfere with a person’s spatial awareness and orientation—a lethal property in the context of an aircraft in flight. It appeared to have hit Carewe first, perhaps because his single lung was working at close to maximum capacity, and to have left his system earlier for the same r
eason. Colleen had been given sufficient advance warning to ler her blast them out of the aircraft, but the efts had still been with her when they landed, hence her attempt to walk on air.
Murder bid number four, he thought. And the person responsible had been ruthless enough to try sending an innocent woman to her death as part of the same package. His helpless, smoldering anger returned in full force. A combination of circumstances had saved his life again—but his luck could not hold out forever ….
A new thought obtruded. He was assuming the latest attempt had failed, but was it possible that he was as good as dead already? The shuttle had flown steadily southwest with mechanical insoucience. Perhaps its engines—drawing moisture from the air and converting it to fuel—would carry it far out across the Atlantic. In that case there was nothing that Carewe knew of to guide a rescue party to the spot where he and Colleen had come down. He was stranded possibly a hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement, in the sort of terrain in which a man would be lucky if he covered ten kilometers a day. With an injured woman to care for his progress could be cut to a fraction of that.
The throb of winged insects in the heavy air took on a malicious note and grew louder in Carewe’s ears, making constructive thought difficult. He pressed his hands to his temples. The river he had glimpsed during the paradrop, presumably the Congo, lay to the west—and there had been a faint smudge of smoke which might indicate a village. He looked down at Colleen and patted her face hopefully, but it remained inert as wax, almost a stranger’s now that her personality was no longer on the features. A feeling of having just arrived in Africa, of having been plucked out of Three Springs only a few seconds earlier came back to him. The continent’s shocking strangeness began in the unfamiliar mosses beneath his knees and radiated for thousands of kilometers in every direction, compounding mystery with hostility. And he, Will Carewe, was not equipped to cope. He had no rights in Africa, not even the right to live, therefore he had no obligations. The mood of resignation lasted for some seconds, then was replaced by the abiding anger which was becoming a permanent feature of his mental makeup.
He slid his hands under Colleen’s body, lifted her carefully, and began walking west towards the river. There was perhaps an hour until sunset—no possibility of reaching the river before dark—but he had a compulsion to be on the move. Within a matter of minutes he was drenched with sweat and his working lung felt as though on the point of bursting. Progress was even slower than he had imagined. The forest floor had variations in height of many meters, and where undergrowth and vines failed to block the way the sheer impossibility of climbing steep slopes forced him to make a detour. He kept going doggedly, learning not to set Colleen down during rest periods but to support her against tree trunks and thus avoid the punishing task of having to lift her all over again. The continuous background sounds of monkeys and birds sometimes faded to an echo of happenings in another universe.
By the time darkness was assembling its watchful forces among the tree lanes his legs were becoming incapable of supporting any weight. With his breath coming in roaring gasps, he looked round for an approximation of shelter. Colleen stirred sleepily in his arms and moaned. He set her down, almost collapsing in the process, and watched for further signs of returning consciousness. She moaned again, shivered and moved her arms aimlessly. Her eyes, pary open, were crescents of white and the shivering grew more violent.
“Colleen,” he said urgently, “can you hear me?”
“I … I’m cold.” Her voice was that of a small child.
“Don’t worry. I’ll …” He took off his tunic, draped it over her and surveyed the darkening diorama of the forest. The air was cooling rapidly and the only available materials were grass and leaves. He gathered armfuls of long grass, mixed with the broadest leaves, and piled them on her legs and up over the tunic. By the time he had finished the darkness was virtually complete and it was his turn to shiver. He slid himself under the tunic, disturbing the covering of vegetation as little as possible, and took Colleen in his arms. She moved against him with an easy, natural movement, one of her legs creeping over his, and the warmth returned to his body. He lay perfectly still, closed his eyes and tried to relax. Minutes, perhaps hours, slipped by as he sailed the shallows of the ocean sleep. During his periods of consciousness the brilliant lanterns of the stars were not above, but ahead—he was pinned to the foremost point on a runaway world, plunging dangerously through a crowded galaxy. Eventually he became aware that Colleen was awake.
“Will Carewe?” she said.
“Yes.” He made his voice calm. “You’re going to be all right.”
“What happened? I’ve got the craziest memories.”
“I’m afraid I involved you in my own particular mess.” He told her his theory of how the incident had begun and added a summary of the subsequent events.
“And now you’re trying to carry me all the way to the Congo River?”
“Well, you aren’t all that heavy—we probably covered two kilometers.” He realized she had not withdrawn the leg which was lapped over his, and that her breasts were firm in their pressure against his side.
She chuckled warmly in the darkness. “You’re hopeless, Will Carewe. Didn’t you …?”
“Didn’t I what?”
“Oh, nothing. Do you think we have much hope of reaching civilization on foot?”
“I don’t know,” he said ruefully. “I was hoping you could tell me that.”
Colleen waited a full minute before she replied. “I can tell you one thing.”
“What is it?”
“That you aren’t a cool.”
“Oh!considered arguing, but his body was offering her the most basic evidence of all. “Are you angry?” “Should I be?”
“Well, I watched you sunbathing when we arrived.”
“I don’t think that’s the reason you drag about—besides, I had an idea even then. Have you fooled many women?”
“Lots,” he assured her.
“They can’t have been real women, Will.” The words were accompanied by a gentle persuasive thrust of her loins which nothing in the world could have prevented him returning. Her mouth met his eagerly, and from her lips he drank a heady brew of warmth and reassurance. Reassurance, mind asked body, was that a good enough reason? He tried to stem the tide long enough to consider the reasons against the giving acceptance of the moment. Athene? She had changed the rules of the game. Colleen herself? He touched the dried blood on her forehead.
“You’ve been hurt,” he whispered. “Is this fair?”
“I’m an immortal, and immortals heal fast.” Her breath was hot on the roof of his mouth. “Besides, we may never get out of here.”
“All right,” he said, rolling over her, transferring his weight to the pliant platform of her hips. “We both win.”
In the dawn, when they had helped each other to dress, Carewe took Colleen’s arm and began moving towards the west, but she pulled back.
“Not that way,” she said, “we’ve got to get back to where we landed.”
“What good will that do?”
“The aircraft seats are standard Unations models for bush operations—there’s a radio beacon in each one, and it starts broadcasting as soon as a seat is ejected.”
Carewe caught her by the shoulders. “You mean we aren’t lost?”
“Did I say we were?”
“Last night you said we might never get out of here,” he accused.
Colleen gave an elaborate shrug. “We might have been bitten by poisonous snakes.”
“You little …” He shook her, trying not to grin. “Why didn’t you tell me that last night?”
“Well …”
“Was I being a bit steely and noble?”
She laughed and threw her arms around his waist. “Don’t be ashamed of it, Will—you play the part too well. You can tell your wife you were tricked by an unscrupulous bush pilot.”
“What makes you think I have a wife?”
“You have, haven’t you?”
“I am married. One-to-one. Does it matter?”
Colleen hesitated, and before she could answer there was a sound of aircraft in the east. “We’d better hurry—they’ll be looking for us, and there’ll be questions.”
“I guess so.” Carewe frowned. The prospect of rescue meant an immediate return to problems which had grown even more complex. His plan for a speedy and inconspicuous return to Three Springs could hardly have gone further wrong. The loss of an aircraft was going to focus a lot of attention on Carewe, advertising his whereabouts to the occult hunters and perhaps imperiling the secrecy of E.80.
“What’s wrong, Will?” Colleen’s eyes sought his. “Was it so terrible for you?”
“It was wonderful,” he said earnestly, “but this mysterious and exciting life of mine gets more complicated by the minute. The reason I jumped the shuttle in the first place was that I wanted to get home quickly.”
“You mean, if you have to hang around in Kinshasa you might get killed?”
“There’s even more to it than that, but I can’t explain.”
“Let’s go then.” Colleen unwrapped her arms and began to walk. “I’ve got friends in Kinshasa—they’ll get the formalities out of the way in a hurry and let you keep moving.”
“Formalities!” Carewe started after her. “How often do you lose an aircraft anyway?”
“The aircraft isn’t lost,” she said scornfully. “What do you think autoland systems are for? The shuttle would have landed at Kinshasa yesterday. Not as neatly as I would have done it, but still in one piece.”
“And full of hallucinogenic gas?”
“I doubt it. The environment control system completely renews the air in the cabin every four minutes.”
“Does it?” He helped Colleen over a break in the ground. “The people who are gunning for me haven’t left much solid evidence so far. If the gas container was made of a self-consuming plastic there’d be nothing…. But why did we abandon ship?”