Parallax View
Keith Brooke and Eric Brown
With a foreword by Stephen Baxter
Stafford, England
Parallax View
Keith Brooke and Eric Brown
© 2007
Smashwords Edition 2010
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people, or events, is purely coincidental.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
The right of Simon Keith Brooke and Eric to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Cover Art by Vincent Chong
Layout by Andy Lowe
A Smashwords edition, originally published in paperback by Immanion Press, 8 Rowley Grove, Stafford ST17 9BJ, UK
http://www.immanion-press.com
info(at)immanion-press.com
Foreword
Stephen Baxter
Science fiction is the literature of our age.
At the dawn of a new millennium our view of ourselves, our world, and our place in it is shaped by science — whether we like it or not.
The geologists have shown us that the rocks under our feet are not stable, but have been shaped by gigantic forces and events deep in the past — and that many more such events lie in wait for us in the future. Copernicus, Newton and the astronomers have taught us that our Earth, seemingly so immense and solid, is a mote suspended in space, orbiting one star out of a hundred billion, in a galaxy which swims through a universe huge beyond our imagination. The cosmologists have proved that our Earth, even the sun, is doomed to extinction — and that the future which lies in wait for us may be literally infinite.
Is it possible something of us will survive the turmoil of the present, to reach a future so distant that the brightly lit universe of our day, time’s bright morning, will seem no more than a post-Big Bang detail? Perhaps — but our children of that remote time may not resemble us. Darwin’s synthesis, perhaps the most shocking of all science, told us that even we are subject to change. According to the fossil record no mammalian species has persisted for more than a million years. Today, Homo sapiens is perhaps a hundred thousand years old ... But perhaps our children will remember us, and forgive us.
Western civilisation has been suffering future shock since the Renaissance. Science fiction is one way of dealing with that shock.
Science fiction is unique: it is the only modern literature which deals seriously with the universe — not as a static stage for our petty human dramas — but as a protagonist: as a force which can shape us even as we try to shape it, as a world beyond our grasp. Science fiction is the first literature since the classical age to take reality seriously.
But science fiction is not about cosmic doom or glossy technology, and it certainly transcends the costume dramas and action stories that clutter our movie theatres and TV screens. The best science fiction is, was and always will be about the impact of the universe on the human soul.
And the stories in this collection are among the best science fiction.
For the last ten years and more I have watched in envy as Eric Brown and Keith Brooke — separately, and more recently in collaboration — have assembled a dauntingly impressive body of mature, richly imagined, satisfying science fiction.
In their novels and short stories Brown and Brooke have prowled the boundaries of science fiction, exploring the impact of possible futures on art and music, on the texture of our relationships, on the feeling of our lives. The tools of science fiction have allowed Brown and Brooke, in the tradition of classics of the genre, to pose dilemmas beyond our current imagining, and so to shed new light on the human condition.
These are stories in the spirit of science fiction giants such as Robert Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, Michael Coney and others. These are stories imbued with a rich intelligence and a deep sense of humanity. These are stories given to us by writers who are immersed in humanity, and yet have the strength and the clarity of vision to see beyond our current horizon. These are mature stories, tales of love and loss, of pleasure and pain.
Cherish them.
Stephen Baxter
The Denebian Cycle
It started with the firestorm.
A few seconds was all it took for the sky to slide from a deep tropical azure to a solid sheet of charcoal, the contours of individual clouds limned by repeated lightning flickers.
Corrie Asanovic pulled her cape tight across her shoulders. Deep rumbles of thunder, tuned to almost subliminal pitch, reached deep inside her. Static buzzed in the dry air, blue-white sparks jumping between the trees, echoing the lightning high above. Another dry storm, she decided, of the kind that usually drew in towards dusk. This one was earlier than usual, and far more intense.
She pulled the pack onto her back and turned to look for Sam Reubens. There was no sign of him, but that was not unusual. Rube often wandered off on his own, following some new spoor, or the cry of one of the local animal forms. Rube didn’t care about the guidelines for appropriate fieldwork, no matter how often Skip Jennings critted him. Rube was, to be blunt, one self-centred son of a bitch.
Corrie glanced at the comms decal tattooed onto the back of her left wrist. Rube, she thought, and the decal told her: 36°, 12.4m.
She spoke into the decal: “Rube, are you done yet? I think we should be getting back.”
Silence. Corrie scratched at her cheek where, despite her best efforts at hygiene, a new growth of plaque was taking hold. The plaques were a kind of colonial animal, growing like corals wherever they could take hold. She didn’t know quite where they fitted in the taxonomic schema Rube had worked out, but there was some kind of complex symbiosis going on there: a kind of animate lichen, was the best terrestrial analogy she could come up with.
They were a nuisance, whatever. It was ironic, in a way: here they were in a rich, alien environment, where there was next to nothing a human could eat, yet still the local semi-animate life-forms persisted in trying to colonise any exposed surface. Something to do with the natural oils excreted by human skin, Rube had said. He just let the plaques grow, claiming it did no harm, although Corrie was sure he did it simply to be different.
“It’s just ... storm,” he commed now, his soft voice lisping in Corrie’s ear, the sound breaking up with the storm’s interference. “Go back if you ... I’m staying out in the field.”
Bastard. He knew Corrie wouldn’t return without him: that way she’d be the one the skipper critted.
Corrie and Rube were about a kay and a half out from the camp. Cataloguing, sampling, recording: building up an ecofile of the 100 by 100 metre quadrant Skip had allocated them the day before. There were 48 of them in the survey team, deposited on Deneb 5 for 120 days. A low profile survey, to provide the basis for any decision on whether to make contact with the local sub-industrial sentients.
In and out: a scientific snatch squad.
The blast threw Corrie face-down on the ground.
She groaned, rolled over onto her back.
Slowly her flash-blinded vision started to return. She rubbed her eyes, and her hand brushed against her hair: normally collar-length and lifeless, now it was standing on end.
She clawed at it irrationally, feeling that somehow she had been invaded.
“Well, look at you,” said Rube, emerging from the trees. He was stripped to the waist, vivid weals of red, gold and green plaques encrusting his chest and arms — growing so thickly, he had earlier boasted, that his horn of plenty necklace had become effectively grafted into the scaled-over flesh of his neck.
She could imagine herself: sitting on her fat ass in the mud, clawing at her hair, panicking. “The lightning,” she said, feebly. “I... I think I was hit by the lightning.”
Rube laughed at her. “You’d sure know about it if you were,” he said. “Near miss, is all. You planning on sitting there all day?”
The bastard was enjoying it. According to the expedition’s constitution Corrie and Rube were equals: even Skip only governed by consensus, after all. But Rube had been working in the field for thirty or more years and this was Corrie’s first assignment. And, as Corrie kept finding herself thinking, Rube was a grade A bastard.
Would it have been any different if she’d let him fuck her, she wondered? Committed scientist that she was, that was one experiment she never wanted to try.
She scrambled to her feet. Ten kay map, she thought, and her comms decal showed her a low-res map of the region, the image snowstormed with static interference. Picked out in gold were 24 dots, marking the locations of the survey teams. Six of the teams were already back at base. Corrie suspected most of the others were on their way.
“We’d better get back,” she said. The air was still thick with static, the darkened sky alive with lightning: strange, spreading sheets and glows, sudden forks, a continual background flicker. This was no ordinary storm.
Rube just looked at her, then turned his back and headed into the fleshy jungle. Corrie followed him, trying hard not to stare at his scaly back, failing. The man was obscene.
She tried comming base, but all she got was a hiss of static and a patronising glance from Rube.
The trees here were all young growth: what appeared to be a mature tropical jungle was really the product of a single growing season, albeit a season that lasted a little over 35 standard years. The trunks were fleshy, packed with the kind of oils that attracted the colonies of plaques. Any journey through the jungle was an unpleasant experience: suspended from the trees were long, trailing lianas that clung like cobwebs, a cloying curtain that hosted enormous colonies of mites and bugs and god knows what else.
Corrie walked with both arms in front of her and a gauze mask over her face, but that didn’t make her passage much easier.
Rube just walked on, regardless.
Here, deeper in the jungle, the storm was diminished, but Corrie knew that it persisted from the constantly flickering light and the nasty metal taste to the air.
Some time later, she paused to brush the crap from her hair. Most of the other teams were within a kay or two of the base now, drawn as if by a magnet. She looked around, but she didn’t recognise this part of the jungle, even though they must have passed this way about ten hours before. Although she hated to admit it, this godforsaken jungle all looked pretty much the same to her.
They were only about half a kay from camp now.
Rube was out of sight. Thirty metres up ahead, her decal told her. She set out again, walking faster to catch up. She hated to admit that she depended on him, but the sense of isolation from being alone for more than a few minutes was horribly oppressive.
“Hey, Corrie,” he commed. “Better get up here quick, you hear?”
There was something different about his voice, something urgent.
She broke into a jog. “What is it?” she spoke into her wrist.
Silence.
Then, Rube’s voice, lisping softly in her ear again: “Trouble, Corrie. Big trouble.”
Seconds later she broke out of a screen of undergrowth and almost crashed into Rube’s crusty back. He was hunched to one side, talking into his wrist on a different channel. He barely glanced at her, just gestured ahead.
They had emerged on a small shelf in the face of the hill, where the jungle descended towards the sludgy creek of a river they called the Brown Amazon. From this viewpoint they should be able to see the clearing where the Survey had set up base, but not now.
Dark clouds clung to the incline, billowing and twisting, plummeting down the slope towards the flood basin. At first, Corrie thought it was some strange atmospheric effect: a ground-hugging, sooty fog.
But then she caught the acrid taste of smoke on the air, and she saw that the flickering she had taken for yet another lightning effect was actually caused by flames.
The forest was on fire.
Corrie barged past Rube, intent on the path that led down the escarpment towards the base camp.
After a couple of seconds she paused, turned.
Rube was still standing on the shelf, just staring at her. “What you planning?” he asked. “Going to beat out the flames with your bare hands?”
She hadn’t been planning anything. Hadn’t been thinking. She just knew she should be doing something.
The bastard was right, much as she hated to admit it.
Below her, the forest plunged down the escarpment, thinning in places where the bedrock broke through the thin jungle soil. About 300 metres down the slope, she could see the first flames leaping across the treetops, spreading at a frightening rate from tree to tree.
“It’s the oils,” said Rube. “Everything’s full of it: trees, lianas, even the bugs.”
Just then another tree flared up like a molotov cocktail.
“Like dropping a match on gasoline,” Rube went on.
She should be able to see the base camp from here, Corrie realised. Should be able to see the off-white shell of their Vulcan lander. But all she could see was flames and smoke.
She turned away, peered at the decal on the back of her wrist. Her eyes were too fogged with tears to focus, but she was sure there were less than 24 gold dots on the map now.
* * *
The survivors assembled in a clearing, about a kay from the burned out ruins of base camp. Corrie looked around the gathering: what a sad and sorry sight, she thought. Her colleagues lay on the ground or sat against the trees, utterly bewildered and defeated by the tragic turn of events.
They were lucky, she supposed. Lucky not to have burned, like Skip and Jenny and Walter and...
Thirty-five dead, in all.
They’d had no chance, Imran had said. The walls of flame had just wrapped round the base camp like a military pincer movement. Twelve dead and the Vulcan a burned out husk, along with all the food and water supplies for the next hundred-plus days. The others had been picked off by the fire in ones and twos as they attempted to return to camp.
Earlier that day they had searched the jungle for survivors, finding none. It had been a grisly process. They had buried the bodies in makeshift graves beside the clearing, marked so that they could be exhumed when the Darwinian returned. More disturbing, to Corrie, than the sight of the burned and twisted corpses had been the smell of the over-cooked meat. Despite herself, it had cruelly reminded her that she hadn’t eaten for hours.
Across the clearing, Sue and Tanya hugged each other. Corrie smiled to herself, envying what they were sharing. Christ, it was going to be hard for the next few months: we need to take whatever comfort we can find.
Beside her, Rachel lay in a foetal ball. Corrie reached out and touched the back of her hand. The Somalian had lost her lover in the burned-out Vulcan, had slipped into hysteria on discovering that Ahmed had perished. Fortunately, one of the survivors had been equipped with a medical kit containing sedatives.
Now Rachel shifted a little, until Corrie found herself stroking the girl’s head in her lap.
Rube was holding forth in the centre of the clearing. “It’s simple,” he was arguing. “Survival. That’s what it’s all about now. We have 108 days until the Darwinian jumps back within range. When the Darwinian returns, we ping her with our distress beacons and they send another Vulcan down to lift us out. It’s as simple as that.”
“Rube’s right,” said Jake, the native-American zoologist. “It’s a matter of redistributing our priorities. We still have to avoid any contact with the native sentients, but we have to forget any idea of completing the survey work. We—”
“Fuck the sentients,” Rube said. “If my survival means making contact, then that’s what I do, regardless of any questionable effects on cultural evolution.”
Corrie was horrified. “How can you say that?” she demanded, surprising herself with her vehemence. “How can you say that any individual’s life is more important than the damage contact might do to an emergent culture?”
“This isn’t some college role-playing scenario now,” Rube said. “You live or you die. It’s that simple.”
“Hey, hey,” Imran said. The Australian xenthropologist looked around the group. “We’re getting hypothetical, okay? Rube’s right: we got to survive. Corrie’s right: we got to minimise our impact on the native situation. We got a little over a hundred days and we got to survive. We’re scientists, right? We’ve been studying the native lifeforms, right?” He paused, looked around the group. “Who could be in a better position to live off the land than a group of highly trained ecologists?”
Hunger.
Not the missed-a-couple-of-meals kind of hunger Corrie knew from deadline time at college. Not even the hunger she’d experienced on a survival training course, part of the prep for this expedition.
Real hunger.
Gnawing away at her gut. Every movement an enormous effort, every breath laboured. Her body running out of fuel. Head aching, brain thumping inside her skull, her vision swimming, spinning whenever she moved.
Thirst, too. So little to drink...
Stripped to the waist in the oppressive dry heat of the jungle, Corrie leaned against a grotesquely bulging tree trunk. She hugged Rachel to her. The girl, in her grief, had wordlessly sought consolation, glad to accept whatever comfort Corrie could provide.
Earlier that day, Rube had made some crass comment about another couple of dykes in our midst, and only intervention from Imran had prevented Corrie from attacking the bastard.
“I’m talking irony, right?” Imran said. The thin Australian was sitting cross-legged in the forest litter. He waved a hand, indicating the lush vegetation. “We got our own Amazonia here, I’ve never been anywhere so full of life as this. And—”
“Water, water everywhere, but fuck all to drink,” croaked Corrie.
Imran looked puzzled, didn’t get the reference. “Nothing to eat,” he went on. “All this, and nothing to eat.”
Corrie nodded. Imran was okay, if a little too earnest and literal-minded at times. What he said was true.
Corrie could just about manage to keep down a few nibbled fragments from some of the plants and coralline plaques, but any more and she’d vomit until she felt as if she was turning herself inside out. Something to do with the complex oils packed into the cells of just about every living thing in the jungle. Some of the others had even worse reactions if they tried to eat. Rachel, as if her grief was not burden enough, had found it impossible to keep down so much as a mouthful.
Corrie didn’t think it could be long before they suffered their first casualty since the firestorm.
“We have to move,” she said to Imran now. “Migrate.”
Imran looked puzzled. “The Vulcan’s burned out,” he said. “No transport.”
From across the clearing, Rube snorted. “Guess lover-girl didn’t think of that one, hey?”
Corrie ignored him. “Then we walk. Before we’re too wasted to move.”
Sue and Tanya glanced at each other. “It makes sense,” Tanya said, casting a shy, heartening glance towards Corrie. “There’s nothing to keep us here.”
“But it’ll all be like this,” Imran said.
“Think about it,” Corrie said. “Think of the climatic cycle. Thirty-five years ago this jungle was a tundra, emerging from the five year winter. The cold season’s closing in again in a few months. If we head north the cold season will be more advanced.”
There would be rain, or snow even. Drinkable water. And maybe there would be food: if, as Rube argued, the oily, fleshy nature of jungle lifeforms was an adaptation to the dry season, maybe things would be different in the more temperate regions.
Maybe. It was a chance, at least.
Imran looked up, his gaze taking in the gathered survivors. “Okay,” he said. “What do you think? Let’s put it to the vote. Who says we leave here, move north?”
Heart hammering, Corrie raised her hand.
Deneb was setting, its deep ruddy light filtering through the high foliage, reducing the bloated shapes of the trees to eerie shadows. Corrie walked on, supporting Rachel. They had set off at dawn, and for the first five hours Corrie had been fuelled by hope. At least, now, they were doing something other than sitting around the clearing and bemoaning their fate. Last night they had voted to move north with a majority of twelve to two: it had cheered Corrie that Rube had been one of the two dissenting voices.
At noon, Imran had called a rest break. Jake had spent a poor night, and that morning Rube had cited his colleague’s condition as a reason not to move. But Jake had argued that their only hope lay in finding food and water, and again Rube had been defeated.
For an hour they had rested in the jungle, while the three fittest of the team scavenged for water and some of the more edible fruits. They had returned with the single water canister, salvaged from the wreck of the Vulcan, half full of vapid, oily water, and half a dozen pineapple-like growths.
They had divided the spoils, pathetically inadequate as they were, and Corrie had helped Rachel force down a few mouthfuls of water and a sliver of fruit. Ten minutes later Rachel vomited it all back in putrid-smelling green bile. Corrie had managed to keep her own paltry meal down, but the fruit had done nothing to assuage her hunger. The oily flesh sat heavily in her belly, deeply unsatisfying.
An hour after the meal they had set off again, and Corrie had experienced none of her earlier optimism. She began to wonder, as the heat increased and her stomach spasmed with hunger pains, if perhaps Rube had been right. Perhaps they should have stayed put...
Now the sun was going down and the heat was diminishing. From somewhere behind them, Imran called that they should walk for another thirty minutes, and then think about making camp for the night.
During the day, Corrie had watched an enfeebled power-struggle take place among the men. Almost as if by consensus, it had been Imran who had taken tacit charge of the survivors. It was Imran who asked for suggestions, put ideas to the vote; he had settled the occasional disagreement, collated what was known about the planet and catalogued options.
Once or twice, Rube had made his objections known, suggested options opposite to those proposed by Imran. Always, Imran had thrown the debate open, asked for a democratic vote — and always Rube had been defeated. Corrie was pleased to note that she was not alone in her dislike of the querulous, annoying loud-mouth.
She had noticed another division among their ranks, too. Ever since last night, the women had gathered apart from the men. Tanya and Sue, Rachel and herself formed a group away from the other nine survivors. It had not been until they had set off again after the rest break that Corrie had become aware of the division: the women led the way, Tanya and Sue in the lead, followed by Rachel and herself. Then had come the men, led by Imran, with Rube bringing up the rear like some dissatisfied, skulking dog.
“I’m tired, Corrie...” Rachel whispered.
Corrie halted. Rachel was leaning against her, and she realised that she had been virtually carrying the woman for the last hundred metres.
“Okay, not far to go now. We’ll find a clearing. Stop for the night.”
“Thirsty. Don’t know how thirsty I am, Corrie...”
Corrie smiled to herself. Like to bet, she thought. “We’ll make camp for the night and collect water,” she said, realising as she spoke how terribly inadequate were her words.
Tanya had returned to see why they had stopped. She looked from Rachel to Corrie, shook her head. “I’ll take her,” she said quietly.
“Would you?” Surprisingly, Corrie experienced such a surge of gratitude that she felt like weeping.
Tanya shucked Rachel onto her broad back and strode off, soon catching up with Sue. Lightened of her burden, Corrie walked on.
Not long after setting off that morning, they had happened upon a trail through the undergrowth, long and straight and heading due north. Imran had speculated that it was more than a mere animal track; he suggested that the Denebians followed the trail on their long, migratory treks to the cooler climes of the north. From what little information they had been able to gather, Corrie knew that the Denebians were a tribal hunter-gatherer species, migrating with the planet’s 39-year seasonal cycle: in the winter they gathered in the south, then as the warm season set in, they split into tribal groups and headed north to stake out summer territories. The survey had set down at the southern fringe of the Denebians’ summer range: close enough, they hoped, to observe without their activities being detected.
Corrie wasn’t convinced that the trail was anything other than an animal track, but it was a blessing to be free of the undergrowth and the bug-filled curtain of lianas.
What seemed like hours later, Corrie heard a shout from way back in the jungle. She came to a halt and sank onto her haunches. Weakly, she called ahead, and a minute later Sue and Tanya appeared, stripped to the waist and slick with sweat.
Tanya knelt carefully and eased Rachel, unconscious now, to the ground. Sue sat cross-legged beside the Somalian, wiping sweat from the girl’s feverish brow. Minutes later the men arrived. They collapsed to the ground, eyes closed as they lay on their backs, breathing hard.
Rube seated himself against the bole of a tree, taking in an eyeful of Tanya’s generous breasts.
“Okay,” Imran said. He paused between words, as if the effort of speaking was becoming too much. “Okay... we’ve no water, and precious little pineapple...” He smiled to himself, no doubt noting the irony of naming something so inedible after a fruit most of them would willingly murder for.
“Any volunteers to go and look for fruit and water?”
Corrie raised a hand. Anything would be better than sticking around and suffering Rube’s lascivious stares. One of the men, an engineer called Pablo, volunteered too. He took the water canister. Corrie was on fruit duty.
She followed the path ahead, while Pablo back-tracked and scouted the trail they had come along. Soon she left behind the sound of the team’s desultory conversation. A strange silence sealed around her; after the cacophony of animal noises during the daylight hours, twilight spelled a period of quiescence. Even though she knew the jungle contained no predators that might endanger her safety, she nevertheless felt a quick and irrational fear. She recalled the last time she had been alone in the jungle, just before the discovery of the fire, and how she had hated herself for wanting Rube’s company, then. She glanced at the decal on the back of her hand: 12 golden dots, 70 metres due south.
She stepped from the trail, hands raised to fend off the lianas. There were some spiky bushes here, the kind that sometimes harboured the pineapple-form plaque colonies that were vaguely edible.
But no, this time they were bare. She straightened, scratching at an encrusted graze on her arm. And then she saw the standing stones.
They were in a clearing about five metres from the path. Corrie stared in disbelief. The light was dimming fast, but even so her eyes were not mistaken. She counted perhaps a dozen tall, pale green stones, roughly hewn, arranged in an oval approximately ten metres by five.
Wondering, she spoke Imran’s name into her wrist-decal. “I’ve come across something that might be of interest. Not exactly what we were looking for—”
“What?” Imran’s question sounded urgent in her ear.
“I don’t know. Stone artefacts. Standing stones of some type.”
“I’m on my way.”
Corrie stepped into the clearing. She passed the first menhir, a little taller than herself, and for the first time it came to her that she was looking upon the work of sentient beings that were not human. So far, she had been limited to pix of the Denebians taken before landing — and the first alleged evidence of the natives had been the north-south forest trail that may have been a migratory pathway. The standing stones were an order of magnitude more advanced than the trail.
Corrie moved past the first stone, and then the ground shifted, creaked, and she was falling.
She screamed, and her fall was broken by something yielding, cushioning her. She controlled her breathing, aware of her crazed heartbeat. She was fine, she was still alive; she had not been speared in some primitive animal trap. I’m okay, she told herself, her laughter spiced with tears of relief.
She was lying perhaps two metres below ground level. The last of the sunlight that reached this far revealed a pit, the walls of which glistened with some dark and viscous substance.
She heard a voice in her ear. Imran. “Corrie. Are you okay? I heard you scream—”
“I’m okay. I’m in the clearing. I fell into a... well, God knows what it is. Some kind of pit. Watch your step, there might be more of them.”
Only when she tried to stand did she realise that she was ensconced in the same soft, yielding substance that comprised the walls of the pit. She sank back into its sticky embrace, laughing to herself.
She had no idea what made her reach out, scoop a handful of slime from the wall next to her head and raise it to her nose. It smelled... well, there was no other word for it, appetising. She stuck out her tongue and touched the gobbet of goo. It tasted slightly sweet, a little meaty, satisfying. She bit into the stuff, its juices cascading over her tongue and down her throat. Unlike the other native food she’d tasted, this stuff — whatever it was — not only tasted good but felt as if, already, it was working to banish her hunger.
She was aware of movement above her and looked up. Imran was peering down at her over the rim of the pit.
“What the hell...?” he began.
Corrie, laughing, raised the manna into the air. “You won’t believe it,” she called up, “but I think we’re saved.”
Rachel walked across the clearing, avoiding the holes in the ground, and crouched before Corrie.
In just three days Rachel had regained her health. She had recovered her strength, put on weight, started to recover some of her former confident swagger. Jake, too, had been miraculously revived from the brink of an ugly death. They had excavated over a dozen pits in the clearing, each one packed with a store of semi-liquefied meat.
They had taken turns to trek into the surrounding jungle on water-collecting duty, though they discovered that water was no longer a prerequisite for survival. As well as providing solid food, the meat also contained sufficient liquid to more than meet their needs.
Now Rachel passed Corrie the canister. Corrie drank, more out of gratitude to Rachel than to quench her thirst.
The black woman smiled shyly. “I just wanted to say thank you — for helping me back there. I wouldn’t have made it without you.”
Corrie reached out and took the woman’s hand. “You’d have done the same for me, Rache. We’re all in this together.”
The others sat around the clearing, sated and relaxed. All except Rube, that is. He went to stand over Imran in the confrontational manner they had all come to recognise.
Imran looked up. “What is it, Rube?”
A silence came down over the gathering. Corrie glanced at the other women, then looked across at Rube.
“I’ve been thinking...” Rube paused, looked around the staring faces. Corrie stopped herself from making a caustic comment.
“I know we’ve speculated what these things might be,” he went on, gesturing towards the open pits. “But we haven’t considered the consequences.”
He let a silence develop. He looked around the team, taking everyone in. At last Imran said, “What consequences?”
“So we think we stumbled across meat stored by the aliens,” Rube said. “Some kind of big animal slaughtered, prepared and buried ritually by the Denebians for retrieval during the migration season...”
Imran was nodding. “It’s as good a hypothesis as any,” he said. They had already considered, and rejected, the possibility that it was a burial ground: the stores of meat were simply too large and well-preserved to match what they knew about the Denebian physique.
Rube waved. “I’m not arguing with the theory,” he said. “But I’ve been considering the results of what we’ve done here—”
Corrie cut in. “What? Are you suggesting that we should have left the meat well alone, Rube? Just continued north and starved to death?” She realised that she was hardly being fair — at least she should hear what Rube had to say — but at the same time she experienced a malicious satisfaction at baiting him.
He shook his head. “I’m saying nothing of the kind. I just want us to consider what we’ve done. Listen, a few days ago it was you who was going on about how we shouldn’t interfere with the natives...”
His gaze raked the dozen watching faces. “So we’ve dug up and consumed what I suggest was a valuable, and clearly specially prepared, food resource. I don’t think the Denebians will be best pleased when they return to find their larder raided.”
Jake spoke up, “By that time we’ll be long gone, Rube. I mean, how long till the winter season kicks in? A month? Two? We’ll have moved on by then...”
“Which brings us to the main question,” Imran began. He stood up, staring absently into the excavated pits. “We’ve almost finished this store,” he said. “So what do we do next?”
“I think we should keep to the original plan—” this was Rachel, shyly glancing towards Corrie as if seeking agreement, “and head north. You never know, we might find more of these stores: if there’s one, there’s bound to be more. Next time we’ll ration ourselves instead of gorging on the stuff. That way, we’ll easily make it until the Darwinian arrives.”
Corrie nodded. “That makes sense. We’ve got over our initial illnesses. We can move north at our leisure, looking for more of the standing stones—” She stopped there and looked at Rube. “Or would you rather we left the meat for the Denebians?”
His gaze was pure dislike. “Hark at the hypocrite who six days ago was worried about the damage contact might do to emergent cultures—”
“That was before we were starving to death!” Corrie began.
He shook his head and turned to Imran. “I suggest that we keep watch at night,” he said. “And keep our weapons at the ready. I wouldn’t want to be sleeping when the Denebians arrive.”
In the event, they were all wide awake when the aliens discovered their presence.
It was five days since Corrie had stumbled upon the subterranean cache, and they had finished the last of the meat the day before. Already, just hours without a meal, Corrie was hungry. She headed into the jungle, searching for any fruit they might have missed, something to fill her stomach before they headed north in search of another underground meat store.
She spent an hour foraging, and to her surprise she found a small clump of green fruits shaped like hand-grenades that had been overlooked by the others. Or maybe someone had tried one and found it to be inedible. She was debating whether to call it a day and return to the clearing when she thought she saw something move in the distance to her left.
She turned and peered. In the aqueous light of the jungle she made out a series of dancing shadows that might have been the play of palm-like leaves in the light of the sun. She told herself she was seeing things and turned towards the clearing.
And screamed.
The thing was running ahead of her, tall and lithe and quick, through the undergrowth towards the clearing. One second it was there, and the next it had vanished, and Corrie was left doubting the very evidence of her eyes.
It had been perilously tall and thin, jet black and hunched, and had moved with frightening alacrity.
She got through to Imran. “I’ve just seen—”
“Corrie. Get back here.”
“I’m on my way. I think I saw—”
“I know. We’ve met them too.”
Corrie rushed back to the clearing, heart pounding at the thought of what she might find. She pushed through the last buggy drape of lianas, stepped into the circle of standing stones, and stopped.
Her colleagues were on their feet, huddled together in the middle of the clearing. They were staring around them at the host of flitting, silent, shadowy figures identical to the one Corrie had seen in the jungle.
She recognised the attenuated soma-types of the native Denebians from her pre-drop studies aboard the Darwinian. But the available stock of images, indistinct and pixelated, were a poor representation of these aliens, failing to capture the essence of the creatures. It was their movements that made them so very alien.
They darted around the clearing with rapid, spry articulations of their long, double-jointed limbs, often coming to a sudden stop and scrutinising the ground with eerie, immobile intensity.
A combination of the failing light and the speed at which they moved left Corrie with only a fleeting impression of their facial appearance. Wide cheeks, long snouts, a cross between reptile and insect. And their eyes... The one thing she could be sure of in the twilight was the fact that they possessed huge, crimson eyes.
Quickly, she moved towards Rachel and the others.
Rube was standing apart from the team, watching the antics of the nearest alien. He glanced at Corrie as she reached out and hugged Rachel.
“Welcome to the party,” he said with cavalier bravado. “Allow me to introduce the Gargoyles. They seem to be just a little puzzled as to what we’ve done with their food supplies.”
Gargoyles, Corrie thought. Despite herself, she thought the name apt.
Perhaps a dozen aliens were cavorting around the clearing, darting down into the open pits with the speed of scurrying insects. They paid no attention to the humans — indeed, Corrie thought, they’re acting as if we don’t exist.
Occasionally the aliens ceased their dervish waltz around the pits, paused long enough to reach out and touch each other with horribly long fingers like waving twigs.
They had checked every pit by now, finding them empty, and it seemed inevitable that they should at last turn their attention to the humans.
Corrie had no way of anticipating her reaction when the Gargoyles, as one unit, turned and rushed towards the humans. They stopped perhaps a metre short, as if their advance had been calculated to startle. Corrie stifled a scream, took a deep, juddering breath as the Gargoyles — there was no other way she could think of them, now — took it in turns to inspect the humans. They darted back and forth, peering with huge red eyes, from time to time reaching out to touch and prod with stiff, cold fingers.
Corrie felt a hand palpitate her right thigh, and her heart almost ceased beating.
At last, after what seemed an age, the Gargoyles retreated and conferred, touching each other in a brief and frantic semaphore. Even then they were never still; always at least half of their group were darting this way and that in a fidgety, ceaseless pavane.
As Corrie watched, one Gargoyle ran nimbly from the clearing and climbed the nearest tree. It did so without apparent effort, and with no reduction of speed. Its rapid ascent of the vertical bole was like an optical illusion.
“What do you think they’ll do to us?” someone asked.
Imran shook his head. “They’ve shown no signs of hostility. I don’t know... Let’s just keep together and do nothing stupid, okay?”
The alien descended from the tree and stilted across the clearing. It was carrying something now, a bunch of what might have been some kind of small, purple fruit, like wrinkled aubergines. It passed the bunch to another alien, who advanced upon the humans.
It towered over Rube, perhaps a head taller, then broke a fruit from the bunch and passed it to him. Hesitantly, he accepted. The Gargoyle broke off another fruit and passed it to the next human. Like this it proceeded until every one of the team was holding one of the small, furry-skinned fruits.