by Sam Kates
In the ensuing silence, a mix of expressions passed over the faces of her audience: puzzlement, disbelief, dismay. Some exchanged glances as if wondering whether their Keeper was losing her mind. Fair enough thought Milandra. I’d probably wonder the same thing in their shoes.
She held up her hands to stem the inevitable questions. “Let me explain. You can throw all the questions you want at me later.
“I have spent the last couple of months shut away in a cottage in a small village north of here. I have been searching the archives of our communal memory for answers.
“Answers to what? you want to ask. Good question. A vague sense of unease has been growing in me over the last century. Nothing concrete, nothing serious, more a sense of something being amiss. Since the end of the last world war, during the slack periods while putting the plans for the Cleansing in place, my thoughts turned to questioning all I had once accepted.
“Why, for instance, did our collective memory only commence a century or two—we’re not even certain when—after arriving at Earth Home? Where did we live before Earth Home? Before our collective memory began, did we record our history in some other way? And the real puzzle: why could we find no trace at all of the ancients’ enemy?
“Those were the directions in which my musings strayed. And that might have been as far as they took me if it wasn’t for something Jason said.”
“I did?” said Grant.
Milandra smiled at his expression of bemusement. “It was as we were walking to meet Rod at the parking lot where the red buses were parked. You said you were concerned that our people arriving from Earth Home may not consider us to be part of the whole since we had been away from them for so long. It sparked a notion, a nagging one that grew stronger the more I tried to forget it. I felt that I had to delve into the collective memory banks and that within I would find the answers to the questions I had asked myself, and more.” Her smile faded. “So it proved.”
“What did you find?” asked Wallace.
“I’m coming to it.” Milandra glanced out at the ocean. The sun was out, making the tips of the waves glint. She could feel her cells tingling with anticipation to be outside, soaking up Sol’s life-giving rays. “What I sought was well hidden. Deliberately concealed. Sifting through the mass of memories was energy consuming, as Jason can confirm.”
Grant nodded. “Must have eaten your way through an entire Walmart’s worth of food.”
“Yep. Used damn near as much energy as reaching or sending or even conducting a Commune. But it was worth it to find the truth, hard though that truth might seem to some of you.” She sighed. “So what of that truth…
“The first memory I found was of a vast, black ship speeding through the outer reaches of a solar system. It was the interstellar ship of the ancients, fleeing Earth Home. Eight smaller craft appeared from the edge of the system, an advance scouting party of a larger space fleet.
“The scouts opened fire upon the black ship, but it was travelling at close to light speed, too fast for their missiles. Except for one. The missile intercepted the ship’s path and pierced its outer hull, sheering off part of the propulsion mechanism designed to provide upthrust within a planet’s gravity. That same mechanism whose absence may have caused the ship to crash into the surface of the planet to which it was headed.”
A gasp came from Peter Ronstadt. “Earth Haven. That’s why the ancients’ ship fell and caused the tidal wave that wiped out the dominant indigenous life forms.”
“You begin to understand,” said Milandra softly. “Indeed, I am once more indebted to Jason for helping me to understand.”
Again Grant’s face crinkled in puzzlement.
“You asked from whose viewpoint I was watching the ship being attacked,” explained Milandra. “This memory was of an incident taking place on the edge of deep space. There is only one place the viewer could have been. There weren’t eight scout craft attacking the ancients’ ship; there were nine. I—rather, the person to whom the memory belonged—was on board the ninth ship.”
She paused to allow this information to sink in, although she didn’t anticipate that the full import would hit home yet.
“I found other memories,” she continued. “I learned through whose eyes I was seeing. Someone you’ve all heard of, though she died many, many millennia before the oldest of us was born. Her name was Sivatra.”
Only Jason Grant, who already knew the identity of Milandra’s memory companion, did not make an expression of surprise or shock or disbelief.
Without pause to allow room for questions—the day was wearing on and she yearned to be in sunlight—Milandra went on to relate the memories she had experienced: the jungle landscape, the failed negotiations, the fierce fighting and the vanquished leader’s self-destruction.
“Civil war?” said Grant. “What does it mean?”
“Well, for one thing,” said Milandra, “it was our forefathers who damaged Earth Home’s surface. I saw waves of concussion knock flat jungles, raze mountains, create scorched wastelands. Sure, solar flares and winds probably came along later and completed the job, but it was our people who were responsible for setting the planet along the road to becoming the barren wilderness we knew.”
“But what were they fighting over?”
Milandra gave the slightest shrug. “I could only understand the occasional word I heard, but can extrapolate meaning from context and body language. My guess, but an educated one, would be that the two sides disagreed over something that went to the very being of our species.”
“It was us.” Peter sat forward in his chair and stared at Milandra with shocked understanding. “Wasn’t it? It was us.”
Milandra slowly nodded.
“What does he mean?” asked Simone, no trace now of little girl shrillness. “What was us?”
“The ancients fled Earth Home,” said Milandra, “in fear of being attacked by a deadly enemy. An enemy that we have found no trace of. There’s a very good reason for that.
“There was a warlike, violent species that hunted the ancients. In fact, it found its quarry just as the ancients were trying to make good their escape.”
Milandra nodded again as comprehension began to dawn in the faces of every member of her audience.
“Yes,” she said. “The nine scout ships which attacked the ancients’ craft were ours. The warlike, violent species was us.”
* * * * * * *
The tension inside the transit van increased the further south they advanced. Aletta and Levente sat opposite each other on bench seats in the back of the van. To the side of them, the benches were fully occupied, stretching into darkness towards the windowless rear doors. A musky, sour odour pervaded the air: the scent of fear.
Aletta peered forward, over the driver’s shoulder. Brake lights were showing on the vehicles ahead. The convoy had passed an industrial park and joined a main road leading due south. They had not been troubled by attacks from dogs since at least a mile back, and ‘troubled’ was probably too strong a word for what had been more a minor irritation.
Although many years had gone by since she had been accustomed to handling firearms while hunting with her father in the forested hills near their home, Aletta had volunteered to fight without hesitation. Levente hadn’t been so keen on returning to London. When she asked him whether he would go back with her, a look of such anguish filled his face that she did not ask again. It was only as the convoy was preparing to leave South Wales that the rear door to the minibus in which Aletta sat was thrown open and the heavily laden Levente clambered in.
“Not go without me,” he said, squashing into the seat next to her.
He leaned an assault rifle against the back of the seat, laid a submachine gun across his lap and lowered to the floor a canvas bag that clanked with the dull sound of magazines and grenades knocking together. He half-turned to face her and banged his clenched fist to his chest.
“Me from Hungary,” he proclaimed. “Me man, you woman. Man look
after woman.”
He looked so serious that Aletta was afraid of hurting his feelings if she allowed the giggle to escape. After a brief internal struggle, she managed to suppress it. She inclined her head.
“Not necessary,” she said, “but thank you.” She glanced at the hardware surrounding him and smiled. “Do you have enough weapons?”
Levente shook his head and his expression, if anything, grew more serious. Darker. “Not enough to fight bad people.”
Now the Hungarian sat straighter as he, too, peered through the windscreen of the transit van. The driver had reduced speed to a crawl and was pulling to a halt behind the vehicle immediately ahead, a twenty-six seater coach. Aletta could not see anything to suggest a reason for stopping.
The musky odour inside the van grew stronger as the nervous tension cranked up a notch, in contrast to the atmosphere of the previous day when people had strolled from Hillingdon Hospital. She and Levente had been lucky, coming through the attack unscathed. They had been passing a detached house with ivy climbing the front wall when they became aware of a commotion ahead. Without waiting to identify the cause, Levente tugged at Aletta’s sleeve, motioning towards the house. The front door opened at their touch and they entered, closing the door behind them. Levente headed upstairs, Aletta close behind. They had watched open-mouthed from a first floor window as a torrent of frenzied brown creatures swept down the street like a flash flood.
The transit van stopped. Over the rumble of idling engine, Aletta heard voices. The driver turned round in his seat.
“Everyone out,” he said loudly. “Arms at the ready.”
The darkness resounded with the clinking and clacking of magazines being checked, rounds chambered and grenades stowed in jacket pockets. The rear doors were thrown open and grey daylight illuminated scared faces.
Aletta’s stomach churned; she lowered her head and belched quietly into her hand. She followed the people to her left, shuffling along the bench seat and climbing out of the van into late morning drizzle.
The drivers remained aboard the three vehicles that had been in front of their transit van, engines still running. Passengers from these and Aletta’s van had disembarked and stood around in the rain, stamping their feet nervously, clutching weapons to chests like shields. The vehicles behind pulled up in a long line, but nobody got out. People peered through windows curiously, some pointing, making Aletta feel like a zoo exhibit.
She looked ahead, beyond the lead vehicle, scrunching her eyes against the steady drizzle that acted like a mist. A couple of hundred yards away stood the reason for them stopping.
The road climbed a gentle gradient to a point where the trees either side fell away; it must, Aletta thought, be bridging a river or railway line. A row of people stood shoulder to shoulder across the road at the bridge’s apex. Behind them, four black vehicles sat side by side, blocking the road.
She nudged Levente and nodded towards the row of people. He looked where she had indicated, squinting. When he looked back at her, the colour had drained from his face.
“Bad people?”
Aletta shrugged. “Too far to see in this rain. I think that maybe we will find out.”
“If bad people, we cannot go near.” Levente took a hand off his rifle—the submachine gun was dangling by his hip; the bag of grenades and magazines dangled by the other hip—to tap his forehead. “Not in here. Not again.”
Aletta didn’t respond. A man was working his way towards them, bringing the people from the front vehicles with him. As he drew closer, Aletta could see that it was the man who had made such a dramatic entrance during the meeting back in Wales; the man who had brought all the weaponry. Except, she corrected herself, he wasn’t a man at all, but a boy, not much older than her son Alger, taken from her by the virus in his seventeenth year. She pushed the thought to one side; now was not a time for grief.
The boy reached them and the people from the front vehicles gathered around so that he formed the centre of a rough circle.
“Is everyone armed and ready?” he said. Not waiting for an answer, he gestured roughly to the hill. “I count twenty-five people lined up across the road. I don’t think they are them; as far as I can tell at this distance, they are human. But they aren’t like us any more. Their brains have been damaged until they’re more like vegetables than people. If they have put them here to block our progress, we must make them move. Even if it means harming them. We must be ruthless.”
“Are they armed?” asked a man.
“I cannot see any weapons,” answered the boy, “and we outnumber them at least two to one, but we must proceed cautiously.” He motioned towards the many waiting vehicles. “We shouldn’t need to risk anyone else for such a pathetic welcoming committee.”
“What about those SUVs?” asked someone else.
The boy opened his mouth to reply, but Levente was quicker.
“Them,” he said. “In the black cars.”
“Maybe,” said the boy.
“Not maybe,” said Levente. “We saw. Before. It is them.”
“Good,” said the boy. “Let’s kill them.”
“No,” insisted Levente. “Not good.”
But the boy—wasn’t his name Joe?—had already turned away. The crowd parted to let him pass and closed up behind, following him tightly.
“Wait…” said Levente.
Nobody was listening.
Aletta placed a hand on his arm. “Stay here,” she said. “It is okay.”
The Hungarian turned haunted eyes towards her. “You go, I go. Igen.” He shook his head. “Not good.”
Side by side, they fell into line and walked up the gentle slope. Their company spread out, occupying the entire width of the road.
Aletta could now see more clearly the people who awaited them. Men and women, young and old, standing with hands behind backs, heads bowed, rain dripping from sodden hair. The clothes they wore were filthy, little more than rags. Not one person raised his or her head to watch their approach.
She looked beyond them to the black SUVs. The glass in the windows was tinted, allowing nothing to be glimpsed of the interiors. The engines were turned on, thrumming quietly in the way of well-tuned, powerful cars. A sense of the dread that Levente was clearly experiencing made itself felt inside Aletta at the sight of the vehicles. Her stomach bubbled, threatening to erupt at any moment.
Their pace slowed as they drew nearer. When within ten yards of the waiting people, the company came to a stop.
Still there was no movement, no raised heads, no signs of awareness from the people in front of them.
Aletta glanced at her fellows. Some held their guns to their shoulders, fingers on triggers, ready to begin firing in an instant. One or two looked terrified. Most appeared unnerved by this display of indifference.
Levente glanced at her and grimaced.
“Not good,” he whispered.
“No,” agreed Aletta. “Not good.”
She meant it, too. Something here was bad. Out of true, like bruises on a baby.
The boy, Joe, strode forward. He stood in the no man’s land between the two lines and raised the submachine gun he carried to his shoulder. Aletta was directly in line with him and could see at what he was aiming: not the people, but the black vehicles beyond them.
“Come on, then!” Joe yelled.
A few things happened at once.
The people standing in line before them, as one, raised their heads. The black vehicles began to reverse; since they had been parked just beyond the apex of the hill, they needed to drive back mere yards for only their roofs to remain visible. Levente uttered an exclamation and strode forward to stand beside Joe. He glanced back at Aletta, his eyes shining.
“Look,” he called to her, raising an arm to point at a man in the line, a grin lighting his face. “Jerzy!”
Aletta looked at the man to whom he was pointing and gave a start of recognition. It was the Pole who had travelled from Ostend with them. So Jerzy
was his name. And next to him, if Aletta wasn’t mistaken, stood the young, dark-haired Croatian. But something was still very wrong.
Their faces. Both men, and those standing next to them, wore expressions of such vapidity that they might be tailors’ mannequins. Strings of spittle drooled from limp lips and vacant eyes stared ahead, unseeing.
“No, Levente,” called Aletta, but the Hungarian was already striding towards their former companions, rifle clutched uselessly in his left hand, his right arm held out to greet the Pole…
… whose hands came out from behind his back. Not empty.
She darted forward, the warning forming on her lips, but Jerzy—or whatever he had become—raised the pistol and pointed it at Levente’s head. The vacuous expression did not falter as he pulled the trigger.
The rain had made the skin of Aletta’s face icy cold, almost to the point of numbness. As a consequence, the spray of blood and brain matter that engulfed her felt as warm as mulled wine. She didn’t even notice the tiny cuts to her cheeks caused by fragments of Levente’s skull.
The Hungarian slumped to the road. There was no time for Aletta to rush to his side, feel in vain for a pulse, cover his cooling face with a jacket.
For the young Croatian, and each of his slack-jawed companions, had brought pistols from behind their backs. And Jerzy’s pistol was now pointed at her.
Part 3:
Calon Lan
(Pure Heart)
Chapter Fifteen
The craft passed the moons and rings of Jupiter, resisting the effects of the gas giant’s gravity and magnetic fields with ease. Having travelled across more than four hundred and seventy light years of the galaxy, negotiating perils in deep space that humanity has not even imagined, nothing within Sol’s system would hinder the craft’s voyage to Earth Haven.
Its coating gave the craft the appearance of being sleek and black. The distilled essence of nothingness, condensed to a veneer not much thicker than a fingernail.