Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

“Was there evidence left?”

  “Just three holes in the ground forming a triangle. Like in your case. The ground was hard-packed in the yard so there was very little possibility of the struggle leaving signs.”

  He sighed.

  “The trouble is that Nick is a Native, from a nearby Reserve. The farmer likes him just fine; he has been hiring Natives to work on the farm in the summertime, all along. He says he likes their attitude to Nature, and he probably would not even have objected that much to his granddaughter’s dalliance; Nick is rather handsome so it was understandable. But the farmer’s an exception, not the rule, when it comes to people’s attitudes to Natives.”

  “Shit,” Lanie said. “Some people make their minds up before they even consider the facts. Our waitress here; I talked to her about what I was doing because this restaurant is where Katie was working when she met her husband, Donny. She basically told me that she was sure that Donny had killed his ex-wife, regardless of where he had been when she disappeared.”

  She gulped down the last of her coffee which was cold by now. Haddok laughed mirthlessly, watching her.

  “The trouble with people,” he said, “is that they don’t like mysteries. Some of them will sooner believe an impossibility than face the prospect that reality may not be as simple as we like to think it is.”

  “True.” Lanie stared at Haddok, her eyes open wide. “Yet I can’t stop wondering. What did happen to Katie Maki? Where did she go? Where in this universe is she now?

  Global Map of the Drowned Planet

  CHAPTER ONE

  She fought her way up through a thick darkness, a blackness that seemed to have glued itself to her being, resisting her desire to pull herself up to light and clarity. How long had she been in the grip of this odd, sticky darkness; had she been caught in it for minutes, hours, days, maybe weeks or months? There was no way to know; she could only continue to fight to clear her mind and her sense organs. At least she knew that much, that she had a mind and sense organs to clear. Until now she had been unaware of possessing any such; she had just been floating in the dark, letting the blackness stick to her as much as it would.

  “Do you think she’s starting to come out of it, at last?”

  She heard the voice ask the question as if from a great distance, but she did hear it, and that gave her a thrill. She was coming out of it! Whatever it was that she had been caught in, it was loosening its hold on her; bit by bit she was coming out of it! She was leaving the sticky dark!

  She thought that she’d try to swim her way across the dark that separated her form the voice she had heard. Surely she could get closer to it! Mentally she made swimming motions, willing at the same time for the black around her to clear up into clean, see-through water. And hear-through; wasn’t water supposed to have better sound transferring properties than air? If so, perhaps the trick would enable her to hear the voice again, more clearly.

  “Heck, she’s getting twitchy all over!” The voice was young and female; Katie could make out that much now. It sounded somewhat frightened. Who was getting twitchy all over?

  “Look, I’ll keep an eye on her if you’ll go and fetch some water.” This was a different voice but just as girlish. “I’m bigger so I can restrain her better if she starts flailing or something. God, I wish I knew how much of that mind-tangler they shot into her!”

  Mind-tangler. That was an appropriate term, Katie thought. But it was relaxing its grip, definitely. She now knew who she was and what she was and little by little the stickies were falling off her. She had eyes to see with, and very soon now, she was going to be able to open them. She would look around and see her surroundings.

  “If you can hear me at all,” the second voice was saying, “try to relax and lie as still as possible. Right now your muscle-control is poor, and I don’t particularly want to be whacked or kicked. And be prepared for a furball in your throat as you come to. There will be water to get rid of that.”

  She thought it best to try to follow the directions. She gave up the pretend swimming; it had served its purpose, anyway. Instead, she tried to regain her awareness of body, the way someone somewhere, somewhen—she did not at the moment know any of those things—had taught her. First, her toes; she knew that she had toes, she just needed to be aware of them, feel their presence. It took some doing, she had to strip off quite a bit of the black glue, but there they were finally, at the lowest part of her body, her toes. And after the toes, the balls of her feet, her heels and ankles: this was getting easier all the time.

  She opened her eyes—and began to gasp and cough, closing the eyes again. She tried to cry out but no sound came from her throat but a croak, weak enough to embarrass a dying frog.

  Hands pulled her up into a sitting position; someone was cradling her upper body, pounding her back to try to get her airways to function.

  “Roxanna! The water! We need the water!”

  Then someone was beside her, forcing a mouthpiece of a sort between her dry lips.

  “Suck on it!”

  She did. And water, glorious, wet water ran into her mouth, down her throat, dissolving away the dry fibres that seemed to have taken root there while she was in the grip of the dark.

  She opened her eyes again, and this time she kept them open even though doing so was not easy. Her body was shaking with weakness and her head felt stuffed, and light at the same time, as if somehow it had become a receptacle of dandelion fuzz. Lots of dandelion fuzz.

  “Don’t try to get a fix on your surroundings quite yet,” one of the voices advised her. This person was the one that was holding her in a sitting position, supporting her from behind. “When I woke up from the mind-tangler it took a while before everything around me quit spinning. And you’ve been out for hours; they must have given you a giant dose of the stuff.”

  Obediently Katie closed her eyes. Things about her had not been spinning exactly, but her eyesight had to be seriously compromised, surely. It had looked to her as if she was in a large room full of children, some of them very odd-looking and the closest ones gazing on her curiously. She must be hallucinating!

  She had drunk enough water and with a weak hand pushed away the bottle—or whatever—that had been proffered her.

  “Where am I?” she managed to croak. “What happened to me?”

  “Where are we?” repeated the voice that had been doing most of the talking. “On a space craft of some kind, I think. I can’t be more specific because I don’t know any more. And as to what happened to you, well, I can only guess from what happened to the rest of us. The cats kidnapped you and shot you full of mind-tangler to keep you quiet until they could transfer you from their little ship to this big one.”

  “The cats?” She opened her eyes again and discovered that the scene around her was exactly as she had seen it moments ago. She was, indeed, surrounded by children, although on second look there weren’t nearly as many of them as she had first thought. Nevertheless, there were easily at least two dozen.

  “So those cat-men were real,” she whispered.

  She had managed to get Jake away from them! He must be safe with her in-laws, back home by now, if she had been unconscious for hours.

  “Oh, they’re real all right,” the first voice said, and now, with her sight workable, Katie was able to connect it to a very pretty, petite, dark-skinned girl of about—at a guess—seventeen. “Dangerous-looking creatures, although I guess they have their orders not to harm us. And I don’t think they like you much. They came in carrying you, and dropped you on the floor like a sack of potatoes, and then it turned out that they had dosed you with so much tangle-juice that we worried that you wouldn’t come out of it at all.”

  “Shit.” It was hard to express frustration and anger when your voice barely worked. “It wasn’t me they wanted. They tried to take my son. I didn’t let them.”

  The final words gave her a grim satisfaction. It didn’t matter how the beasts treated her as long as Jake was safe.

 
“Oh, it was your son who they wanted, no doubt about that.” The owner of the second voice let go of Katie’s shoulders a little tentatively, then when it was clear that Katie could sit up without help, she stood up, coming into view. She was quite different in appearance from the other teenager. A tall, slim blonde with blue eyes and masses of pale hair, she was a fantasist’s Nordic dream come true. Where had the cats’ picked her up? Her English was perfect; with a perfectly Canadian accent!

  “Well, be as things may, at the moment,” the blonde continued, “let us all introduce ourselves to our newest member—at least those of us who can speak to one another.

  “My name is Ingrid and this,” she gestured gracefully towards the dark girl, “is Roxanna. We’ve been the oldest people here until you came, so we sort of took charge. Well, we’ve only been here a short time so we haven’t been doing it for long, but I think the littlest ones are a tiny bit less confused and scared, now.”

  “It’ll probably be good for them to have an actual grown-up with us,” added Roxanna.

  “My name is Katie,” Katie introduced herself in a voice that still was not steady, but she looked about her, at all the little people, curiously. “What’s going on? Did someone create a child collection, or something?”

  About a six-year-old girl in jeans and a striped sweater was on her knees in front of her. She giggled.

  “This is Ally,” Ingrid introduced her. “She’s one of few that speak English. The others; well, there’s some Spanish speakers and maybe one or two only speak French. Then there are the ones that we think must be from somewhere other than the Earth, they look so different. We haven’t managed to communicate with them much except to try to let them know that we like them just fine.”

  Katie gave Ally’s shoulder a little pat and then began the struggle to haul herself into a standing position.

  “Well, I’d love to meet as many of you as possible if you would be kind enough to introduce yourselves to me,” she said. “After that, if someone can show me to what serves as a washroom in this place I would be grateful.”

  Wryly Katie realized that she was taking on the cheery persona which she had used when she ran the children’s programs at her in-laws’ Resort. Well, it was a coping mechanism that came easily to her, and it did seem apt for the situation. Better to ignore other concerns, and just deal with the here and now.

  First the English-speaking children came up to her one by one, telling her their names shyly. Ingrid and Roxanna did not have to prod them much; they seemed quite keen to meet an adult. Then the non-English speakers followed their example, and Katie tried to attach the names she was hearing to faces, knowing full well as she did so, that she would forget most of them before the line-up was finished. Oh, well, likely she would have the opportunity to learn them through repetition.

  Then, when the last one of the human children had gone by her, one of the non-humans approached her, before she had time to begin her search for the toilet facilities. This was a boy, about twelve years old, she guessed, and clearly the next oldest of the children after the two teenage girls. He was a sturdy lad, wearing what looked like a monk’s robe, made of some roughly woven, brown cloth. His face was rather odd: his eyes were long slits, his nose very narrow and pointed, and he had a large, wide mouth in a generous chin. The proportions of his facial features were definitely not those of the human norm. His hair, however, was a pleasure to look upon; it was thick, black and wavy. Behind him followed several smaller boys who looked very like him, at least at first glance.

  When he had come to within a couple of feet of Katie, he stopped and used his whole hand to indicate his chest and said just one word: “Murra.” Or that is what the word sounded like to her.

  She took it that he was telling her his name. She smiled and returned the courtesy.

  “Katie,” she said, biting hard on the impulse to add something to that.

  The face in front of her lit up. “Kah-ti,” the boy said. And “Kah-ti,” he repeated.

  Katie laughed, taking pleasure in his pleasure.

  “Yes,” she assented. “Kati.”

  There was something edging at her mind, once again; this time neither black nor sticky. It was a feather-light feeling, clean and, oddly, friendly. It was not pushing at her mind, but, almost, as if asking for admittance.

  She had a sudden memory of her parents talking once, when she was quite small, wondering whether or not see had inherited any psychic gifts. Her mother had been partly of Canadian Native ancestry and her father had had Irish Gaelic blood. There had been more to it than this small amount of bare bones information but for some reason she had never thought to ferret it out while her parents had still been alive, and then it had been too late. It was a fact that she had often—not always, she reminded herself grimly, thinking of how she had fallen for her ex-husband Donny’s charms—been good at reading people and had always got along well with children and animals. Perhaps some latent psychic powers were now awakening within her, whether due to the scouring her mind had taken from the drug that the cats had used on her, or because this alien boy in front of her was teasing it out of her.

  However, she was not quite ready to deal with any possible mind-to-mind communication. First she needed to use the washroom. With an apologetic smile towards Murra, she turned to follow Ingrid who had started moving towards another part of the room, gesturing for Katie to follow her.

  *****

  Ingrid did a creditable job of--nicely-- kicking out the children who would have crowded into the facilities with them.

  “No, guys,” she said to the ones who could understand her. “Any of you need to use the john, use the other one until we’re done here. I’ll show Katie how things work, just like you guys showed me when I first came. Off you go now; grown-up women need some privacy when it comes to these things.”

  Then Ingrid explained the way the unfamiliar plumbing fixtures worked, in a thorough and detailed fashion.

  “See, on a space ship,” she began, “everything gets reused, recycled or composted. The kids told me that there’s a little greenhouse aboard. Some of them got to see it when the facilities were shown to them. I guess it was to impress into their minds that they were not to waste anything.”

  She showed Katie the shower and the clothes washer, the toilet facilities and the hygienic aids, all of which were clearly designed to keep the residents clean and cared for, with the least amount of trouble and waste.

  “You’ll have to try the shower yourself, soon enough,” Ingrid said, at the end of the demonstration. “The mist really is refreshing. But for now, maybe you just want to use a toilet cubicle and then we can go back to the other room, and Roxanna, you and I can have council of some kind. See if we can’t pool our knowledge and come up with some sort of an explanation as to what the heck we’ve landed in.”

  *****

  “There are thirty-one of us captives here, in this room, including you, Katie,” Ingrid said after she, Roxanna and Katie had settled into one of the round, cupped seating areas that lined the walls of the odd-shaped room they now inhabited.

  The two teenagers had explained to Katie that there really was nowhere else to go. Doors did sometimes open, but only to let people in. That had happened when the cat-men had dumped her in, leaving again immediately. When the doors closed again, they did so seamlessly, to all intents and purposes, disappearing.

  “Outside of you, Roxanna and I were the last ones picked up, Roxanna somewhat later than me.” The blond girl looked around her at the children, some of them amusing themselves and each other as best they could, while others followed the three-some’s doings avidly. “I really do think that whoever has us was after children.”

  Roxanna shuddered beside her. “That’s creepy, if you ask me,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” Katie objected. “If we are in the hands of aliens, to use a handy term, we don’t have any idea what they want. What they want with the kids may not be creepy at all in the terms that we unde
rstand.”

  “But I bet it’s creepy in their terms,” Roxanna protested. “They’ve come a long way to do their kiddie-stealing. No-one would bother with that if their intentions were pure.”

  Katie sighed.

  “I’m afraid that you have a completely valid point,” she conceded. “And it’s a point we would be smart to keep in mind.

  “However, we don’t have to remind the little ones of that--at least not until it seems to become a necessity. No point in sucking the life out of them.”

  “Well, whoever has got us has given us what we need to stay healthy, at least in the short term,” pointed out Ingrid. “Which means that they want us alive and kicking. How long we’re going to have to stay in this cage is anybody’s guess. It seems to me that all we really can do for ourselves is to try to survive, and keep our spirits up.”

  “It sounds simple,” threw in Roxanna, “but it isn’t. After all, we have all these kids here and nothing for them to do. We have no toys, no games, nothing. You’d think that if whoever we’re dealing with had done this sort of snatching before, they would be prepared with something for the kids to do during the trip.”

  “Maybe it’s not going to be a very long trip,” Ingrid said, hopefully.

  Roxanna shook her head. “Don’t count on that.”

  “Well,“ Katie said, “I can help to entertain the kids. I was in charge of the children’s programs at our Resort, which meant that I baby-sat and entertained, all day long, the kids whose parents didn’t want to be bothered with them that day. I had more resources than we have here, of course. However, we can do sing-alongs and story-telling here, certainly, and the singing should draw in everybody, whether or not there’s a language barrier.”

  Ingrid was just about to add something to this when a piercing whistle sounded from the other side of the room. A door had opened in the wall, and a burly man pushed in a cart filled with packages. He gave it a shove to move it closer to the middle of the room and then left, the door closing behind him.