“Well, Hal, if the camp had gone entirely to hell, I don’t think they’d have taken the time to bury their dead. I’m pressing on. They had a distress beacon on, after all, and were guiding us in with the navigation light. Let’s assume that they’re alive and want us here.”
Paul continued his steady shamble, alternating his focus between careful footsteps and the rotating navigation light ahead. The sky was pitch black, with the enigmatic and beautiful crescent of Neptune suspended in mid-sky. Its terminator, the area where the 8-hour daytime was giving way to night, saw the aqua cloud deck becoming gradually darker, fading into a black which seemed to consume the bright white clouds of the stratosphere.
He kicked something hard and a shower of crystals scattered in every direction. There was a tone in his helmet which he’d never heard before, a klaxon like a high school fire alarm. “Shit. Ah, Hal? What have I got here?”
“Get moving,” was all he said.
The nearest rectangular module was only forty meters away, but it lacked portholes;, its light emanated through the fabric of the tenting, which looked very hi-tech. “Hal, I can’t see an airlock.”
“Look around the other side. Don’t stop.”
“What’s with the alarm?” he asked, and then began to feel that unnerving pressure change in his ear, like he had suddenly ascended fifty floors in an elevator. “Hal, did I get a fucking puncture out here?”
“I think one of the ice shards pierced your boot liner. Get inside as fast as you can.”
“Damn.” The pressure change continued as he skipped toward the airlock as quickly as the maddening terrain would allow. Pain built up quickly in his ears, which felt as though they were filled with hot, angry liquid. Then each breath seemed to become less useful, just as Paul needed extra energy to reach the airlock. “Hal, I’m in fucking trouble here.”
“Keep moving. Get to the airlock and punch the green panel.”
His ears were ready to explode outward. It was like a sudden, massive sinus headache which spread to his eyes and his upper jaw, threatening to force them all forward. His voice sounded strange and panicked inside the sphere of his helmet. “Hurts….”
Blinking and wincing at the pain as it mounted, he could just make out a green, illuminated panel with a push-button
Hal watched through Paul’s suit cameras. “Push it. The interior chamber is depressurized.” Paul jammed a gloved hand into the panel and saw the airlock rotate clockwise and pop forward, allowing him to haul it open enough to pull himself through. Paul immediately reached up to bring off his helmet. “Wait!” Hal shouted. “There’s nothing to breathe here yet!”
“Nothing to breathe here either!” Paul managed, his teeth clenched.
“You must keep your helmet on for now, pressure failure or none,” Hal insisted.
The outer airlock door slid shut behind him and pressurization began. Within moments, Paul’s suit console read an atmosphere of just under one bar, at 28% oxygen. His ears felt ready to bleed in a raging torrent.
“Go slowly,” Hal reminded him. “Vent the suit to the environment in small increments. Yawn and wiggle your jaw.”
The pain began to ease and moments later, with an enormous, full-body relief, Paul slid his suit helmet out of its locked position and set it on the airlock floor.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “Nasty.” He stuck fingers in both ears, though it didn’t help, and waited for his pulse to return to normal.”
“Are you OK? Can you see anyone?”
“Well,” Paul answered, “it no longer feels like my brain it trying to get out.” The inner door was still closed, but Paul peered through its porthole. There was a mesh-metal floor, apparently part of a donut-shaped hallway surrounding the main craft. Steps led from the floor up into an illuminated space – the inside of the main craft – which was lined with equipment racks; there was a pilot’s console beyond them, and a conventional-looking cockpit seat.
“Paul, my scans are becoming clearer as I learn to pick out plant life from the rest. I think there are at least three humanoids inside. Two of them appear to be heading your way. The third is not moving.”
“Should I open the inner hatch?”
“No, wait for them.” They quickly found that Paul wouldn’t have long to wait.
Haley Amber Scott peered through the porthole at Paul’s suited figure with a look of the sheerest apprehension. Her mouth slightly agape, and a strand of red curls dangling past her nose, she struggled to speak for a moment and then yelled something. Within seconds, another girl arrived, darker and more petite, dressed also in patched-up, blue coveralls.
Paul’s throat went dry. “Hal... there are two women staring at me.”
The great machine went silent for a moment. “I think you should smile, wave and motion for them to open the hatch.”
“They both look shit scared. I think they’re discussing me. The darker girl is rattling off an opinion.” As she did so, he followed Hal’s advice, giving the stunned pair a big, broad smile and raising a gloved hand in greeting. Two pairs of eyebrows shot up in alarm.
“I don’t know, Hal. They look pretty freaked out.”
“Well, you did arrive virtually unannounced from God-knows-where and stride into their airlock. For all we know, they might think you’re a reanimated corpse from those graves.”
“Christ, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“We know nothing about their belief systems, or where in the universe they were from.”
“That’s true, Hal, but I can’t exactly stand here all day.” Paul pointed down to the airlock door, hoping they’d catch his drift and operate the airlock using the outer control panel. After a long moment’s hesitation, the redhead made reached for the panel but the other woman stopper her. She said something else, and then dashed away, only to return seconds later with a pair of large kitchen knives.
“They’re getting tooled up, Hal. If I end up getting hacked to bits on this shitty moon, and my planet goes to hell as a result, I will not thank you for setting us down here. Any ideas?”
“Move very slowly and calmly. Continue smiling. Your physiologies are nearly identical. They must have evolved on a planet similar to Earth,” Hal observed. “They should recognize what a smile means, at least.”
“That’s great, Hal. But our similarities won’t help if they decide to stab me to death.”
Paul saw the redhead reach forward once more and quickly pushed a button, then back away to rejoin her friend, raising her knife tentatively. The airlock hatch fizzed open and then swung outward.
The dark-haired girl spoke. It sounded, more than anything, like Finnish. Maybe Estonian. There was a kind of West African English inflection to it, somehow. Paul understood absolutely nothing.
“This is a new one,” he heard the voice of Hal admit in his earpiece. “Wait until she finishes and just try a greeting or two.”
She seemed to be asking something, as she made the same gesture and vocal sounds repeatedly. Then she pressed her chest and said “Kiri.” The redhead did the same and seemed to say, “Haley.” Remembering the Tarzan movies of his youth, Paul held a gloved palm to his sternum and said, “Paul’.
The two women looked at each other, then at Paul, and the nervously beckoned him into their camp.
****
Chapter 10: Morning on Qelandi
The boy placed his hands flat on cool, dusty ground and lowered his forehead to his knees. The words came just as they had every second-sunrise, all of his life. The same as they would always be. A prayer for deliverance, for understanding, for the intercession of their friend, this rising orange star which added an amber glow to the horizon before quickly bathing the desert in welcome light and warmth.
His ritual complete, he pressed on towards the lip of the escarpment. Huddled against the side of the broad valley were the three hundred circular huts of their village. Eons ago – they knew this much, at least – their valley had hosted a mighty river which had carved giant ravi
nes, The escarpment was the last prominent ridge before the undulating hills gave way to the flatness of the Bright Plains. None would have lived here, save for the subsurface water which irrigated this arid place, welling up through ancient channels to create the only oasis for a hundred miles.
Amid the yellows and browns of the desert, this place was startlingly green. There were hydrotubes, bundles of robust, green bamboo which waved and rustled audibly in the wind. They were packed with water and, in the right season, tipped with delicate yellow flowers which would ooze nectar. Beneath these swaying trunks were other thick-leaved ferns with dense, deep-green foliage. Their elegant curves grew until they arched back to touch the surface once more. There were carpets of green, blue and purple mosses, strewn seemingly at random across the flat hilltop. They soaked up the new rays of light from the second sun, struggling slowly through their own growth cycle. And, almost everywhere, sand eels wriggled wetly in the undergrowth. Their overnight abodes were now suddenly too hot, and the little creatures took to bathing in pools of surface water.
The boy stepped lightly and carefully around a bank of brilliant blue moss and spied a group of eels shading under a fern. There wasn’t much time, he knew. Before the third star – the one nicknamed ‘The Snorer’ by children because it rose so late in the morning - had reached the crest of the Far Hills, he would be expected home with a bag of eels, some vegetables and, if fortunate, phials of the precious hydrotube nectar for his father’s distillery.
“Come, brothers in our sand, brothers of our moon,” he whispered as the eels settled under their chosen fern. “Come, brothers...” A broad, quick swipe of his net, and the boy expertly scooped up a dozen eels. He pulled the drawstring closed and counted his catch, his heart settling after the thrill of success. Ignoring the eels’ plaintive wriggling, he gathered the remainder of the day’s catch: a bunch of thick fern leaves for soup, three of the shorter, more tender hydrotubes, useful both for their water and as a stewing vegetable and, reaching high on tip-toe, a single flower from a mature hydrotube which boasted a swollen pouch of nectar in its sticky interior.
He turned to see their third star lazily peeking above the horizon to begin its slow, low-angled passage across a brightening sky. Soon, the heat would drive the eels back below ground, and the prolific flowers of the hydrotube would have to close, lest their precious moisture evaporate. At its very peak, the roaring noontime would overcome a human in minutes. The boy offered another quick prayer, this to the third star of their five, and leapt down the narrow, twisted escarpment path like a mountain goat, back towards the valley floor and the cluster of huts they called home.
The hamlet was stirring, following a social pattern so incredibly old, and so dependent on the five stars of their system, that they often compared themselves to the sun-worshipping plants and animals on which they so heavily depended. The boy’s sister was already up, milking their four goats, while the parents raised themselves from their comfortable patches of fur and leaves, arranged in a small bed chamber above the other rooms. Having worked until sundown, they had always risen slightly later than the young ones. Besides, these unsupervised, early morning moments were considered healthy for a child’s upbringing.
Village life depended absolutely on a clockwork routine, a schedule which was as unforgiving as it was strict. To depart from these ancient systems would be to waste water, the most criminal of acts in this barren wilderness. Replenishment from outside depended on a tenuous and frequently interrupted supply chain, and when the tremendously ancient aquifer beneath the escarpment eventually dried up for good, they would be finished. Water conservation was a moral code, and a ritual which dominated their lives.
“Many eels this morning, Julius?” His father’s tone was merry, the better to start another tough day with them all in a good mood.
“A dozen or so, Father,” he replied cheerily. “And a phial of nectar. Is breakfast ready?”
He knew the answer. His mother was making dense pancakes, mixing coarse-ground flour with precious water and a little butter from their faithful goats. It was a breakfast full of vitamins and roughage, if not an overabundance of flavor. “It’ll be along,” was his father’s daily refrain. “Did you say your prayers to the Great Stars?”
Julius nodded sincerely. His father had taught both of his children from their earliest years to obey the sacred vows which, they believed, kept them alive and safe in this desolate place. Why would anyone risk angering the Great Stars who provided everything? Their light warmed the soil just enough to bring shoots into maturity, and heated the underground complex of channels and ponds which fed the escarpment’s natural irrigation system. It was a precarious balance, and none would dare invoke Divine judgment, or needlessly court uncertainty.
The family ate together as they always did, in the shade of the main floor of their house. Under its awnings were their father’s workshop and a small alcove which the children used for study – the endless memorization of their school books, a ritual as old and as valued as their prayers to the stars. Once breakfast had been cleared away, and the children sent off to school, their father would settle down to another laborious day. He worked as an illuminator of texts, though this was just one of several sources of income. Their mother would run errands in the village before spending the latter part of the day at her clinic. Her specialisms were the concoction of healing potions for sleeplessness, disorders of the eye and ear, and matters of women’s health. By the setting of the second star, they would all return under these same awnings to eat together once again, telling the stories of their day. Such rituals gave structure and order. They knew no other way.
“Time for school,” his sister Nammett reminded him as they quickly brought a game of dice to a finish. The seven-sided red and eleven-sided blue gave them useful math practice before school started. Nammett called it ‘morning brain nectar’.
Julius packed his schoolbag with two heavy texts and a writing pad, and made his way arm-in-arm with his sister to their schoolhouse. The third star was a rich orange ball in mid-sky; before entering, they offered a final prayer, as they would not see it again today. As they stood, dusting off their knees, a bright dot in the heavens caught their eye, moving steadily against the backdrop of the three suns. They glanced at each other but, afraid of being late, headed straight into their small classroom where the professor was already scribbling on a chalk board.
“May the stars be with you today, professor,” they said together.
“And with you, today and forever,” the old man said kindly. It was another ritual, performed by every student who entered. There were nine in total; the older classes were smaller still.
“There was a cruiser in the sky, professor,” Nammett reported brightly. “It went from East to West.”
“Very good, Nammett. And do you know where it was going?”
The nine children thought for a moment, and then the youngest boy, dressed in a red wool shirt and well-worn shorts said, with a certain awe in his voice, “to visit the Great Stars.”
To all young children on Qelandi, the universe beyond their moon home was simply ‘the Great Stars’ and it consisted of the Five Stars of their system. Beyond that was an unknowable carpet of other bodies, dim and bright, so distant that they could probably be safely disregarded. For each of them, the Five Stars had been so thoroughly anthropomorphized, and connected to their lives in such distinct ways, that they formed a quintet of lifelong friends who, they were taught, would always regard them with compassion.
“Well, to our West at present...” the professor began, and then paused to wait for the answer.
Herik, the oldest, knew this one. “Callob, professor. The planet will be in transit in four days, but we’ll have to get up very early to see it.”
“And if you do?”
The nine yelled together, “Always wear your sun goggles!” It was a routine so engrained that, despite their habit of gazing frequently at their stars, Qelandi eyes were seldom inju
red. Made from a volcanic glass brought in on their transport ship, and crafted in the village by artisans, sun goggles were remarkably protective against even the harshest sunlight. It was often said that life here would be impossible without them.
“I wonder...,” the professor began, stroking his beard, “if any of you would, one day, like to journey on a Cruiser, just like that one?”
The nine were silent again. Sudden answers were frowned upon, and almost unheard of. Qelandi children were taught the mental disciplines of interrogating the data before offering a conclusion. Mind before Mouth, went the saying. The Qelandi had developed a whole range of body language and semantics to indicate that they were not yet prepared to answer. Such delays were accepted as good practice, even when the matter was pressing. On this occasion, Julius was the first to reply.
“I think...” he began tentatively. “I think I should like to see the greater worlds which lie beyond our Five Stars, professor. It would give us,” he reached for the expression, “a greater context to our little moon.” He continued, despite the professor’s sudden frown. “And it would show us our membership in the larger family of systems.” Nammett found it a beautiful sentiment and beamed at her brother.
The professor eyed Julius for a long moment and then slowly stood. “And... what lies among those ‘greater worlds’, do you think?”
The classroom’s atmosphere chilled as though caught by a stiff draft of night air. Nammett felt her heart palpitate slightly. What line could Julius have crossed? It was mere speculation. After all, the professor himself posed the question!
“Death.” It was the professor’s answer. “Death, for you and your family.” A small commotion began once the class realized the red-shirted boy had wet himself, yet again. Ignoring them, the professor continued. “I have been among the more distant worlds, Julius. Your father has too. And are we not the only Qelandi ever to have returned?” Julius nodded, his face darkened. “One of us tortured nearly out of his mind, and the other pulled into a pit of despair, of addictions and treachery?”
Clarion: The Sequel to Voyage (Paul's Travels) Page 12