Terra

by Mitch Benn

  - I don’t know why I’m here, said Terra bravely, but I do know that I’ve learned a lot from being here. And I think those who’ve known me have learned a lot, too.

  She looked into K’zsht’s eyes, searching for a connection.

  - I’ve learned what it is to be looked down on, to be thought of as savage and primitive. And my friends and I, we’ve learned what it is to surprise each other, to be better than we’re expected to be . . .

  K’zsht seemed to understand.

  - Most of all, said Terra, I’ve learned that the things that make us the same matter more than the things that make us different . . . That the things that bind us together . . .

  - . . . are stronger than the things which set us apart . . .? said K’zsht.

  - Exactly, smiled Terra.

  A smile began to form on K’zsht’s face. It looked like it might have been his first.

  - Perhaps we have much to learn from each other . . .

  - We do, said Terra. We all do.

  Terra looked round and saw Lbbp, his face beaming with pride. She beckoned to him and he stood beside her, placing his hand on her shoulder and squeezing it.

  K’zsht rose to his full height, and made as if to address the crowd. But another voice rang out first.

  - NO!

  Sk’shk stood in front of the dais. He shook with rage as he spoke.

  - How many? How many of my brothers have fought and died at your word? How much G’grk blood has been spilled for you? We have followed you across the face of this world, killing and dying at your command and now you betray your birth right, your heritage, your PEOPLE for the mewlings of a frightened animal? Weakling! Traitor! Coward! HERETIC!

  Too late, everyone noticed what Sk’shk had in his hand. He had picked up K’zsht’s lance, and now drew it back, aiming it at the Grand Marshal himself.

  Terra saw Sk’shk’s arm flash forwards, loosing the lance. Lbbp saw it too, and without a moment’s thought he pushed Terra aside and threw himself in front of K’zsht.

  The lance struck Lbbp in the upper torso with such force that it lifted him off his feet and propelled him backwards into K’zsht. K’zsht’s bodyguards, bewildered by the rapidity of events (and perhaps, until now, a little conflicted as to where their loyalties should lie) snapped back to attention and fell upon Sk’shk, beating him to the floor. One of them drew his sword and swung it high into the air, meaning to cleave Sk’shk’s head off, but paused at the sound of the Grand Marshal’s voice.

  - No! No one else dies today!

  Everyone turned to see K’zsht cradling Lbbp. The lance had buried itself in Lbbp’s shoulder and protruded from his upper back. Thick blue blood soaked Lbbp’s garment and a thin trickle ran from his mouth. Terra rushed to him.

  - I’m so proud of you . . . said Lbbp faintly. So proud . . .

  - Please, wept Terra. Don’t leave me now!

  She felt K’zsht’s hand on her arm. - I said no one else would die today, and I meant it, said the Grand Marshal. Bear him to my ship! Alert my personal physicians! And bind that one!

  As K’zsht’s bodyguards gelled Sk’shk’s wrists and dragged him away, both G’grk and Mlmlns rushed to Lbbp’s aid. Preceptor Shm, still bleeding himself but no longer bowed, was the first to reach him. The Drone Captain, the one who had captured Lbbp and Terra, was the second.

  - We can’t move him with this, said Shm, indicating the lance.

  - Don’t pull it out! He’ll bleed to death where he lies! said the Drone Captain, who knew about such things.

  - Wait, said K’zsht. He grasped the lance just above the point where it entered Lbbp’s body, and grunting with effort, snapped off the shaft. Everyone gasped; the G’grk at K’zsht’s destruction of his own sacred emblem, and the Mlmlns at how much stronger the old warrior was than he looked.

  - Go! Quickly! said K’zsht.

  The last thing Lbbp knew before unconsciousness washed over him was that he was being borne aloft by both robed Mlmlns and armoured G’grk.

  3.26

  The next thing Lbbp saw was orange sunlight streaming through the window of his own room, and Terra’s face smiling at him.

  - You’re awake!

  - It would seem so. How long have I . . .?

  - Don’t move. The physicians said it’d hurt for a while. The G’grk physicians didn’t have any pain-relieving medicine, of course. They think it’s for the weak. We had to send to the Nosocomium for some.

  - Are the G’grk still here?

  - Some of them. K’zsht has gone on permanent retreat to the desert moon of Jsk Four to spend the rest of his days in contemplation or something.

  - And Sk’shk?

  - Banished.

  - Where to?

  - No one knows, which I think was the idea.

  Lbbp looked around him. He and Terra were alone in his room.

  - How many did we lose?

  - We don’t know yet. They’re still counting. Many are still missing but more turn up alive every day. Fthfth and Pktk are okay; they were setting up a camp in the hills above the city. My whole class were hiding out there. They were the only ones to get away! All the other pupils got rounded up, but thankfully peace broke out before the G’grk could . . . do anything to them. Terra shuddered.

  - The whole novice class hiding out in the hills . . . pondered Lbbp. I imagine Fthfth was in charge. He smiled.

  - Actually Pktk was, said Terra. I know! she responded to Lbbp’s incredulous expression. I think he was a bit disappointed when they were rescued; he was looking forward to being a plucky resistance fighter. Oh, but Lbbp . . . There’s no sign of Bsht. Anywhere. I’m sorry.

  Lbbp let this sink in for a moment. Then he said, - She’ll turn up. You wait and see. I know Bsht.

  - Of course, you’re right, said Terra, not believing this. But there’s one bit of good news . . .

  - Yes?

  Terra held up a glittering gold star in one hand and a jewelled dagger in the other. - You’re the first Fnrrn in history to be honoured for bravery by both the Mlml government and the G’grk High Command. Thought you’d like to know.

  Lbbp smiled ruefully. Bravery. Bravery? Him? Bravery, really?

  He sighed.

  - Listen, Terra . . .

  Terra sat up, listening keenly.

  - I have to tell you something. Something I figured out before the war started. Something I couldn’t tell anyone, not even you. But now I can, in fact I think I have to.

  Terra’s nose wrinkled.

  - It’s about the night I found you, began Lbbp.

  3.27

  A few days later, Lbbp stood alone in the council chamber. The blue G’grk banners had been taken down and most of the debris of the brief war had been cleared away, but the council had not been reconvened. Some councillors had died in the initial assault and successors had yet to be found.

  An uneasy truce persisted; no one was sure what the long-term resolution would be. There was talk of the G’grk being placed in charge of planetary defences in return for withdrawing their troops back to the Central Plains, and even of assigning G’grk officers to train the armed forces of Mlml and Dskt. Lbbp had no doubt the politicians would figure something out. And when that didn’t work they’d figure something else out.

  In the silence of the chamber, Lbbp could almost hear Terra’s voice, still echoing around the quartz dome. Music, that was what it was called. He’d looked up the word while recovering from his injury. The Source contained quite a lot of information on the use and meaning of Ymn words, gathered from the broadcasts received from Rrth over the last era. Lbbp now realised he’d heard such ‘songs’ before, while studying these broadcasts himself . . . Ymns had such a strange up-and-downy way of talking that he’d never really noticed the difference. It was only when he’d heard Terra’s sweet little voice ringing out in this room that he’d understood what music was. A form of communication, one that bypassed the intellect and spoke straight to the core of one’s consciousness. Remarkab
le.

  Lbbp rubbed his sore shoulder and looked around the high white walls. He spoke.

  - So how much of this did you see coming?

  There was no reply. He’d expected none. He continued.

  - The war? The invasion? The song? All of it?

  No response but the echo of his own voice.

  - Is that why you let me keep her?

  He paused before going on,

  - So is that it now? Prophecy fulfilled? Do we get to live the rest of our lives as we please or is there more?

  Echoes, then silence.

  - Well, it doesn’t matter now anyway.

  The silence was broken by a scraping, rattling sound. Lbbp turned to see a young Fnrrn, clad in a white garment, pulling a metal trolley full of cleaning tools and products. The trolley scraped along the floor; it was designed to hover just above it but Lbbp could see that its power cell had gone flat. Power had not yet been restored to the whole city, people were having to make do.

  - Here, let me help you with that, said Lbbp. He proffered his good arm and helped the grateful young Fnrrn pull his cleaning trolley into the chamber.

  The cleaner took a long-handled brush from his trolley; he was about to set to work when he paused. He turned to Lbbp.

  - I’m sorry, he said, but are you Postulator Lbbp?

  Lbbp sighed. Since he’d been strong enough to leave home he’d spent much of his time being thanked and congratulated by strangers for his heroic actions. It was all very well meant, he knew, and he supposed he should be pleased, but he was growing very weary of having the same conversation over and over again . . . Yes, he had been scared, yes, the Ymn girl was fine, yes, it had hurt a lot . . .

  Lbbp took a deep breath and was preparing to run through the story one more time, when he had an idea.

  - No, said Lbbp. A lot of people have asked me that. I think I must look like him.

  - Oh, said the young cleaner, disappointed. Odd, this tall Fnrrn did look a lot like Postulator Lbbp, he was standing in the very place where Lbbp had performed his now famous feat of bravery, he even (the cleaner now noticed) seemed to have a sore shoulder much as Lbbp would certainly have, but he’d said he wasn’t Lbbp, so he obviously wasn’t. He wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true, would he? Why would anyone do something like that?

  That was easy, thought Lbbp. He turned to go. He had a lot to do; in the immediate aftermath of the extraordinary events in the council chamber, Terra had been promised a reward. She’d made a request, the request had been granted and tomorrow it would be honoured.

  Lbbp wasn’t looking forward to it.

  PART FOUR

  Forbidden Planet

  4.1

  The SETI laboratory at Hat Creek, California, was a quiet place. SETI stood for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and so far nobody, either here at Hat Creek or at any of the other SETI observatories around the world, had ever found any. Many people thought that the whole thing was a giant waste of time and money. Most scientists and astronomers insisted that, on the contrary, intelligent life was certain to exist somewhere out in space, and that it was only a matter of time before they found it. The cleverest of the scientists and astronomers admitted – privately at least – that any really intelligent life would be smart enough never to allow its presence to be detected by the human race. It wouldn’t have cheered these scientists and astronomers up one bit to know that they were right.

  This particular morning at 5.21 a.m., the extremely bored and poorly paid scientist, whose job it was to stay awake as hours of unremarkable data poured in from the huge radio telescopes towering over the building, was suddenly awoken by the sound of a dozen computers clicking into furious activity, the hum of printers switching themselves on and the glare of many screens banishing their swirly screensavers and flashing up instead rows and rows of numbers.

  Rubbing his eyes, the scientist looked at the computer screens. Not just numbers; the same numbers. The same four numbers, over and over again. He phoned the SETI labs at Ohio State University, the Parkes Observatory in Australia and Jodrell Bank in England and was told that they were all indeed receiving the same signal. Then he made himself some coffee and phoned some rather more important scientists than himself to come in and help him, since he wasn’t being paid nearly enough to handle this sort of thing on his own.

  At 5.45 a.m. the important scientists finished their coffee and played rock paper scissors to see who had to phone the government. The losing scientist drained his cup, took a deep breath and picked up the phone.

  At 6.01 a.m. the first phone calls came from the TV news people. The signal was now so strong that anyone with a radio could pick it up, and people were wondering where it was coming from and what the four numbers meant. The government released a statement saying it was a routine communications test. Nobody believed this for a second.

  At 6.44 a.m. the Air Force officers who, much to the scientists’ annoyance, seemed to have pretty much taken over the running of the Hat Creek laboratory realised that the four numbers were probably latitude and longitude readings. The numbers were giving a location, a special place on Earth where . . . nobody knew what would happen there, but it seemed obvious that something would, and soon. One of the Air Force officers hurried off to get a map while the scientists made more coffee.

  At 6.52 a.m. the map location given by the mysterious signal was identified as an unremarkable stretch of road, passing through an uninteresting bit of countryside. The Air Force officers hurried back to the helicopter they’d arrived in, while the scientists played rock paper scissors to see which one would get to go with them.

  At 7.25 a.m., somebody – nobody knew who, but they would be SO fired when they were found out – told the TV news people what was going on. The stretch of road was already crawling with news vans, cameras and expectant onlookers by the time the soldiers arrived to clear the area.

  At 7.45 a.m. the signal changed suddenly. Instead of the four numbers there was now just one: nine. Over and over again, the number nine. Everybody now knew that whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen at nine o’ clock. Pessimists all over the world decided they had an hour and fifteen minutes left to live. A radio breakfast show D J played a record with a chorus that went ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it’ several times in succession until he was forcibly ejected from the building. He didn’t seem to care.

  At 8.51 a.m., as more or less the entire population of Earth sat watching their TVs in varying states of fear and excitement, a missile early warning station reported that something had entered the upper atmosphere directly above the suddenly very special location. The military jet planes which had been circling the area for nearly two hours reported that they couldn’t see anything.

  By 8.58 a.m. the soldiers had managed to clear a space about thirty metres wide at the location. While the TV news reporters babbled into their cameras, many of the onlookers started singing. Some sang solemn hymns, some – the ones who’d brought beer – sang rude songs. It sounded terrible.

  At 8.59 and 50 seconds someone in the crowd started counting down from ten like it was New Year’s Eve. Nobody joined in, so after ‘Seven!’ he stopped.

  At 9.00:00 . . . nothing happened.

  At 9.00:02 Lbbp remembered to switch the invisibility shield off.

  At 9.06 a.m. people were still screaming.

  By 9.07 a.m. they’d started to calm down a bit.

  At 9.08 a.m. the soldiers holding back the crowd began to notice that their mood had changed; no longer were they surging forwards and backwards, their singing and shouting had faded away and the air of fear and excitement had dwindled down into a sort of numb acceptance that whatever was going to happen, was going to happen.

  So when at 9.09 a.m. a beam of white light burst from the underside of the strange hovering lemon-shaped object, there were no screams of alarm, just the sort of ‘ooh’ a crowd watching fireworks might make. Even the soldiers stood in silent anticipation, their weap
ons lowered.

  The light faded.

  The crowd – and via the TV, the human race – stared at the ground beneath the hovering object. Something was there. No, not something, someone . . . small, dressed in a curious shimmering blue garment, but definitely a person rather than a thing. What at first looked like a halo of light around its head proved to be honey-blonde hair, and the face beneath was pink, heart-shaped and . . . human?

  ‘Hello,’ said Terra brightly. ‘Perhaps you can help me. I’m looking for my mummy and daddy.’

  4.2

  There were two things Mrs Bradbury hadn’t done for a long time. One was argue with Mr Bradbury. The other was laugh.

  The initial searing pain of their tiny daughter’s disappearance had long since faded to a dull ache of loss which they knew would never go away. They’d had no more children; neither of them had ever even suggested it. It wasn’t so much that the Bradburys didn’t want to be parents again; it was more that they didn’t feel that they deserved to be.

  The small upstairs room which had been set aside to be the nursery still looked exactly as it had twelve years previously. The nameless baby had never slept there; she was still sleeping in a basket beside Mrs Bradbury’s bed at the time of her disappearance. The cot still bore its first clean sheet, the little dangly musical mobile had never turned, the cupboards still contained the few toys that her parents had bought for her, alongside the empty spaces meant for the toys that they’d intended to buy.

  Mr and Mrs Bradbury would occasionally admit to each other that keeping the nursery like this was foolish; to be reminded of their lost baby every day only made it harder on them and it really was time to convert the little room into an office, or spare bedroom, or something. That would be the right and sensible thing to do, they would agree. Yet it never happened; neither of them could bear to change a single thing in that room. So there it stayed, as perfect and as empty as it had ever been.