Pallahaxi

by Michael Coney

  “You’re the group from Yam, you people?”

  A big human greeted us, and when I say big I mean even by human standards. A face like a lox and fine clothing molded onto his body.

  “We are the Yam negotiating committee,” said Stance. “This is Yam Wand, our womanchief, and Yam Bruno, my older brother.” Stancelike, he made it clear that he was the younger and therefore chief, rather than unlucky old Dad. Also Stancelike, he failed to introduce the younger members of the party.

  “Yes, well, I’m just a lackey around this place,” said the human disappointingly. “This way, please.” And he strode off so we had to run to keep up; all except Uncle Stance that is, who dropped behind as he maintained his usual measured tread, thumping the ground with his chief’s hunting spear at each step.

  Trigger, Faun and I were excluded from the high-level meeting. Possibly to atone for the blow to our pride, the loxlike human was detailed to show us around.

  “Call me John,” he said, “and stick close. Don’t go wandering off anywhere, you understand?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to wander off to,” replied Trigger with his usual odd logic. “I’ve never been here before.”

  Faun, too, had taken exception to John’s tone, which would have been more suited to addressing six-year-olds. “Just show us around like they told you,” she said sharply. There’s more than a touch of Wand in Faun.

  John looked at me, but I had nothing to add. “Right,” he said, “We’re going to take a look at the mine.” He led us into a tiny room and pushed a selection of buttons. The floor dropped away beneath us. Trigger uttered a yell of alarm and Faun clutched my hand. Her hand-clutching was getting to be a habit and it could be a pleasant one, but I had other things on my mind at that moment. We soon caught up with the floor, which suddenly pressed against our feet. Trigger fell in a sprawling heap. The wall pushed me in the back. By now Faun and I had accepted that we were in some kind of human conveyance, but Trigger had gone to pieces and was vomiting noisily, completely disoriented.

  “For Pete’s sake,” said John, pressing another button.

  A flap opened and a small machine trundled out and confronted Trigger face to face as he lay on the floor. He yelled in fright and jumped to his feet. Making greedy sucking noises, the machine gobbled up his mess, spun around looking hungrily for more, and then hurried away through its flap, replete. There’s no accounting for tastes.

  “Ugh,” said Faun. “Pull yourself together, Trigger.”

  Then suddenly we all took a forced run across the room, bringing up against the far wall. The conveyance had stopped. The door opened. John led us out into a vast, glassy cavern. Trigger and Faun stared up at the roof arching far above, open-mouthed. I wished they’d stop being amazed; it gave John all kinds of advantages over us.

  “Wow,” said Trigger. “Look at that long sun.” He meant the strip of overhead lighting, snaking off into the distance.

  “This is Adit One,” John was saying. He pointed off down the cavern. “The machine we call Starnose is away down the tunnel, digging. See that conveyer belt along the far wall? Starnose is a nuclear-powered total miner. It follows the richest veins automatically, mines the ore, smelts it, melts and compresses the spoil back into the tunnel wall, and sends the ingots back down that belt. We don’t have to do a thing. Not a thing.”

  This was apparent by the casual attitudes of various humans, males and females intermixed in that odd human way, wandering about, chatting, occasionally scanning instrument panels but without any real interest. It would have been a relaxing scene, were it not for that mighty roof poised to fall in on us.

  “What’s going to happen to all the tunnels when you people have gone?” asked Faun.

  John appeared baffled by the question. “Happen to them? Well, I guess they just stay here. You can have them.”

  “We don’t want them. They’re no use to us.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be long dead by the time we leave this planet, girl.”

  “My descendants won’t be.” Faun turned to me. “I think that when they go, the humans should leave everything exactly as it was, Hardy. Maybe our descendants won’t want big holes underground.”

  “They won’t see them,” said John. “We’ll bulldoze the domes flat and replant over the top. In a few generations you people will have forgotten the tunnels are here.”

  “Forgotten? How can we forget? My descendants will remember every word of this conversation.”

  John stared at her. “Of course they will. Sorry, girl, it was me forgetting. Well, if it means so much to you, I’ll talk to Missus Froggatt about it. That satisfy you?”

  “Who’s Missus Froggatt?”

  “She’s in charge of that kind of thing,” he said vaguely. “Now, hop on this belt and we’ll go take a look at Starnose.”

  It took a moment to persuade Trigger, who was still demoralized by the previous method of transportation. In the end, mortified by the poor impression we were giving the humans, I grabbed him and threw him onto the belt.Faun sat on him and we were off, the glassy wall sliding by.

  “The belt goes empty down this wall,” John explained, “and comes back full of ingots up the other. Impressive, huh?”

  It was, but the tide of human efficiency was doomed to evaporate very soon. A man came hurrying along the belt behind us. He was short, about my height, but fat and very breathless. He wouldn’t have lasted half a day on the hunt. “Problems, John,” he panted. “I may need your help.”

  “The usual?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  Soon the belt began to jerk ominously and I noticed, far away on the other side of the tunnel, the returning belt was empty of ingots. Both belts stopped with a jolt. We climbed off and began to follow the two hurrying humans. “Remember what I said!” John shouted over his shoulder. “Don’t wander off!”

  We caught up with them standing with a group beside a huge jumble of gleaming rectangular ingots, each one about the size of a human. The fat man was angry.

  “Okay!” he was shouting. “What in hell happened this time?”

  The others, six of them, seemed unconcerned. “Oh, well, you know how it is, Cal,” said one woman lazily. “A couple ingots slip off, I guess, and nobody notices the monitor. Next thing, they’re fouling the belt and piling up.” She paused to scratch her ear thoughtfully. “If it goes on long enough, well, you can see what happens. Hell of a big pile-up.”

  If I’d been Cal, I’d probably have reacted violently. However, he seemed almost to calm down. “And a hell of a long time not to look at the monitor.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “All right. Where are they?”

  “Where are what?”

  “You know damn well what.” Cal regarded them searchingly. They gazed back blandly. He shrugged and turned to John. “We’ll get no sense out of these goons. They’re besotted. You come with me.” To the others he said. “There’s a fork lift a half kilometer back. Start loading these ingots on the belt, huh?”

  He and John skirted the pile and continued down the tunnel. Trigger, Faun and I trotted behind. The tour was turning out to be more interesting than we’d expected. Soon we came to a rough-hewn opening in the wall of vitrified rock, forming a tunnel high enough for me to have walked along.

  “There you are,” said Cal. “That’s our problem.” We hurried past the dark hole and soon reached a flat metallic wall almost completely blocking the tunnel. The lower part was covered with buttons, levers and bright square screens.

  Lolling against this wall were three lorin.

  They watched us approach without expression — but can anyone really read the expressions on their furry faces? Some say they can, but I doubt it. One carried a small fishing net containing ripe yellowballs. They’d all been eating the fruit; the juice had dribbled from their mouths and stained their receding chins.

  “One day,” said Cal, “I’ll get to the
bottom of this.”

  “Have our guys been eating that fruit?” suggested John. “Maybe that’s what did it.”

  “The fruit’s harmless,” said Cal. “It’s the goddamned lorin themselves that’s the problem. Just being there. It seems to screw up our guys. And not just those guys back there. All of us. When the lorin are around, time just seems to slip by. We only notice things are going badly when we get a printout of production figures. The figures have been god-awful recently. Scary. We’re not earning our keep, John.”

  John took hold of a lorin’s arm, quite gently. “Come on, you guys,” he said. “Out of here.”

  The lorin subsided gently to the floor, sighing in lorin fashion.

  “I’ll do it,” I volunteered. “I’m used to them.”

  “Be my guest.”

  I composed my thoughts, approached the creatures and said quietly, “They don’t want you here. Please go.”

  I sensed resistance. Round gray eyes regarded me seriously.

  “No,” I said. “You really must go.”

  The one on the floor got up, the other two began to shuffle about, then the three of them shambled off toward the hole in the wall in single file, heads low.

  “You telepathic or something?” asked John.

  “No. I just understand them. It’s a knack.” I’d discovered my affinity with the lorin at the age of nine. “We don’t all have it, but I think all my male line does.”

  “I have it,” lied Trigger proudly.

  “How in hell do they burrow through rock like that?” asked Cal.

  “I don’t know. We don’t know much about the lorin at all. They go about their business, whatever it is, and we go about ours. Our paths don’t seem to cross.”

  “Don’t you have any curiosity?”

  It was difficult to explain. The lorin are so much part of the natural scene that it seems pointless to question their existence. They just are, like Phu and Rax. “There could be an answer somewhere back in our memories, but it would take too long to dig it out. Why bother?”

  He looked at me oddly. “You guys are easy meat,” he said.

  It was an ill-tempered negotiating team that reassembled beside the motorcart later that day.

  “Selfish freezers,” snarled Uncle Stance.

  “Mister McNeil did warn us,” Dad pointed out.

  “Does that make it any better? The point is, here are these freezers living in the lap of luxury, and meanwhile the rest of the world starves!”

  “Well, actually we weren’t overly concerned about the rest of the world ourselves,” said Dad mildly. “We were only negotiating on behalf of Yam.”

  “‘Policy of non-interference,’” shrieked Uncle Stance falsetto, apparently mimicking some human at the meeting. “Murder, I call it. Genocide, plain and simple. And when we’re all dead, they get the whole world free!”

  “It didn’t help when you threw that in their faces at the meeting, Stance. They’re sensitive about genocide, hadn’t you noticed?”

  “As well they might be. Well,” he swung himself onto the footplate. “Freeze them, that’s what I say. We don’t need their hand-outs. Inlanders will go it alone.”

  “And coasters,” I said unwisely.

  “Coasters!” He chose this occasion to acknowledge me, for once. “Coasters can go to Rax for all I care!” He hung out of the cab, glaring down at Dad. “And another thing, Bruno. I was seriously displeased when I heard you’d used the motorcart to visit Noss.”

  “You authorized it, remember?”

  “Begging the flounders for handouts as though we’re too stupid to feed ourselves. I won’t have it, I tell you!”

  “Shut up, Stance,” said Dad sharply, in a rare show of anger. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”

  Uncle Stance stared at him for a long moment, eyes narrowed. Then he pulled himself together and dropped the subject. “If you don’t want to be left behind you’d better climb aboard,” he snapped.

  Wand spoke for the first time. “You’re not seriously considering leaving at this hour?”

  “And why not?”

  “It’ll be dark soon.”

  “I’m not begging these freezers for hospitality after the way they’ve treated us. Absolutely not!”

  We climbed aboard obediently. You probably find this difficult to understand, but the view was: Uncle Stance was manchief and he outmemoried everyone there. If he cared to stand on his authority there was not a thing any of us could do, not even Wand. Silently he took his position at the tiller, and silently Dad swung the regulator. We chaff-chaffed out of the dome into the brittle winter air, our breath like steam.

  We’d scarcely left the moor before we had to stop and light the lamps. Darkness swept down on us as we started off again, huddled together on the footplate while the motorcart plunged on down the rutted track, rattling and clanking, the tiller bucking in Uncle Stance’s hands. We kept the firebox door partly open for warmth, which meant we used fuel fast, but I’d already calculated that we should have plenty for the journey. The rear of the cab was stacked with cordwood and there was a can of distil there too. The safety parott clucked contentedly in its wicker cage; those birds seem to be able to take any kind of conditions. The danger came more from Uncle Stance himself, and his incompetent driving. As we swept through the ancient stone pillars at the fringe of the moor there was a hellish screech of metal against granite and the motorcart lurched wildly. We barreled on through a forest of anemone trees, pale branches drawing back from the dim light from our lamps.

  “Steady there, Stance,” shouted Dad.

  Uncle Stance’s lips were moving. He was praying. “May the Great Lox guide our way, small frail creatures against the vastness of this cold world… .” I heard his faint muttering against the background clanking and hissing of the motorcart.

  Wand said acidly, “We’re relying on you to guide our way, Stance. Save your prayers for the temple, please.”

  “Would you rather I took over for a while?” Dad said diffidently. “You’ve been at the tiller a long time.”

  There was no reply. Uncle Stance was in the midst of some complex exhortation and was doubtless scared to break off in case the Great Lox should be insulted. His face was white, probably from fear; but he maintained his foursquare attitude, legs firmly astride, chin up, eyes gazing steadfastly ahead, every inch the manchief. It was a pose, but he’d have fooled anyone who didn’t know him well.

  Suddenly he burst out, the prayer apparently finished, “We wouldn’t have had to make this freezing journey if you’d looked after your crops properly, Wand!”

  It was uncalled-for. We regarded him in astonishment. I heard Dad say again, “Steady there, Stance, old fellow.”

  “And you can keep your freezing mouth shut too, Bruno!”

  Dad got up, hanging onto a handrail as the motorcart rocked and swayed, picked up a heavy fur and threw it around Uncle Stance’s shoulders, then jerked it into place around his body. The tiller is situated at the back of the cab, so Uncle Stance was further away from the firebox than the rest of us. Cold brings fear, fear brings irrationality.

  We trundled on in the feeble glimmer the lamps and the faint cold light of Rax.

  “I can’t see the road with that firebox door open!” yelled Uncle Stance in a fit of self-justification. “Shut it, for Phu’s sake!”

  I kicked the door shut and latched it. The footplate was instantly frigid. We huddled closer. Faun’s body was soft against mine. They say people get a strong sexual urge shortly before freezing to death; probably something to do with needing to perpetuate the species before it’s too late. I felt an urge for Faun’s body. I hoped I was not dying.

  There came an almighty lurch, throwing me to the footplate. Simultaneously there was a sharp metallic crack! and a yell of alarm from Uncle Stance. Faun was on top of me, her fur wrap enveloping me, her neat little breasts pressed into my face. Too frightened to savor the moment, I t
hrew her off and scrambled to my feet.

  “Rax!” exclaimed Dad. “I didn’t like the sound of that.”

  I heard Wand uttering shocked whimpers. Trigger was squealing. Uncle Stance was ominously silent.

  The motorcart sagged at a crippled angle. The cold closed around us. Rax watched us with a greedy eye.

  A fierce argument broke out among the elders. It seemed important to them that blame was assigned correctly. Our predicament was insignificant when compared to the quest for truth.

  To me, the possibility of damage to the motorcart ranked higher. That snapping noise had sounded ominously structural, like an axle. I told Faun, “I’m going to take a look.”

  “No! You’ll freeze out there!” She grabbed my arm, drawing me toward the firebox.

  “It’s got to be done quickly before the trees get interested.” I detached myself, took a hot brick from the slanting footplate, wrapped my cloak tightly around me and climbed to the ground. Frozen vegetation crunched under my feet and the branches of anemone trees waved near, glittering ghostly in the raxlight, attracted by the warmth. A rain of sparks drifted from the firebars, waking up the bindweed underneath the motorcart. I made my way to the front of the machine, each step an effort as the cold bit into my body and the fear began to build.

  Only Phu knows how much I wanted to run back to the warmth of the cab. I forced myself to lift a lamp from its bracket and, stooping and hugging the brick to my chest, peered under the front beam. Surprise — the axle was in one piece and the heavy steering chain was intact, thanks be to Phu. So why was the motorcart listing at such an angle? I shone the light on the bearings, brushing off an anemone tendril that insinuated itself around my neck, trying to ignore the cold striking up through my feet. Then I spotted the cause of our problem.

  The heavy spring above the right-hand bearing was fractured. Shards of metal littered the ground. The frame was resting directly on the axle.