Across The Universe

by Jack Klein

Part Two: Terra Incognita

  18

  The old man stirred in his bed. His eyelids creaked open like the thin wrinkled membranes of an ancient reptile waking from winter slumber. It was quiet and a fresh breeze tickled his nose. External information sank slowly into his brain – silence, breeze, fresh air. He raised himself on an elbow and stared at the open door where the breeze was coming from. He listened narrowing his eyes in concentration. No sound, nothing at all. Distrusting his ears he banged them with the palm of his hand and clicked his fingers at close range. He felt the pressure of the pop stun his eardrums and ring in his brain.

  "All in order," he concluded. If his ears were working then something else must be out of order. Vibration was gone; the mechanical heart of KOTUKU II was not beating. And where could this fresh air be coming from? Either they had landed somewhere or he was dead and mercifully released.

  He struggled upright and gingerly swung his feeble legs over the edge of the hammock. He slid forward onto the floor and tried weight on his legs. They still worked at least for standing on. One after the other he began to move them. His bladder was bursting so he proceeded carefully in short steps like an ancient robot on rusty castors. He paused in the doorway and listened for evidence of pedestrian traffic, cautious to avoid collision or offers of assistance. Hugo Manfred von Wittering didn't like people watching him walk. Being a former competitive ballroom dancer he felt sensitive about his current shortfall in mobility.

  "Too much whisky not enough walks." He turned into the air current and set off due south feeling his way along the wall for stability.

  Ahead of him soft warm light glowed through an open hatch and from outside von Wittering fancied he could hear birdsong. Once again he suffered a moment of confusion. How could the ship's door be open? Vague memories of a recent state of emergency strove to infiltrate but he banished them and staggered on towards the light. Closing his eyes against the glare he clutched the frame of the open hatch. Fresh warm air scented with rank dry earth and something sweet bathed his leached face. Slowly he opened his eyes expecting his first view of the afterlife.

  "Oh boy," he whispered. The sight that met his eyes was breath taking beyond belief. He was at the edge of a plateau above a vast grey plain. Rising up on all sides of him were high majestic mountains licked on their tips by deep red evening light. The mountains shimmered and seemed to press in on him and yet he could see they were a long way off at the distant margins of the desert plain. At their centre one mountain loomed taller than the others, the dark and towering cone of a huge volcano. From inside its crater clouds of smoke and steam billowed high in the sky in dark thunderous clouds. Out on the plain a cluster of fat swirling dust devils sucked together into a single towering column of airborne dirt and swept away towards the far horizon. The fragrance exciting his nostrils seemed to be coming from masses of red blossom clinging to a forest of stunted cacti surrounding the ship. It was like a fantastic prehistoric cyclorama. The only missing elements were a herd of dinosaurs grazing amongst the cactus and pterodactyls skimming aloft. Von Wittering was bereft of words. He couldn't remember ever seeing anything half so extraordinary.

  "Terra firma incognita," he muttered in disbelief. "Bella terra firma." He blew a kiss at the beautiful vision and stepped out through the hatch. Immediately he received a second surprise.

  The luminous blood red sky rising behind the mountains and above the clouds was not what it at first appeared to be. He could now make out hazy, curving edges of a gigantic red orb so large it almost obliterated the darkening sky beyond it. Planets and stars were his stock in trade but he'd never seen anything to equal this huge softly glowing sun. It seemed so close and so preposterously large that it defied the known laws of gravitation. But since none of it could be real he resolved not to let it worry him or spoil his enjoyment, temporary as that might yet prove to be.

  "So where's the bar?" he chuckled, lapsing back into character. "If this is heaven there’s got to be a bar." He gripped the thin metal rail and inched his way down the steep folding steps to the ground below. At the bottom he moved his feet cautiously onto dry land in case the whole thing proved to be an illusion. His boots sank almost ankle deep in dust, soft and thick like fresh snow.

  Apart from the scent of cactus flower the air rising from the plain felt warm, light and clean. But there was something else on the wind, something familiar. Von Wittering craned his neck and pointed his nose like a Spaniel. He swept the grey desert with his buzzard gaze, narrowing his eyes in thought. "Brewery?" he murmured. "Do I smell a brewery?" Below, on the edge of the plain something glinted. Immediately the old man's legs found new strength. Led blindly by his nose he moved without thinking for the first time in months.

  Below, where voluptuous dunes gave way to the flatness of the plain a group of triangular constructions emerged from the sand like the roofs of a buried village. These pyramid shapes were constructed of carefully placed stone blocks. There were no windows that he could see and no doors. At the apex of a larger structure at the centre of the group was the object that had attracted von Wittering’s attention from so far away.

  It was a mechanical, mainly wooden device of sturdy rods and wheels driving an assemblage of strange seemingly symbolic shapes, spinning and flashing in the sunset like a giant mobile. The more von Wittering watched it the more the mobile seemed to represent the movement of liquids. A heavy sensuous perfume of alcohol surrounded him. His nose twitched and his throat ran dry in anticipation.

  "Bar must have a door." He began to move around the central pyramid, making fresh footsteps in the virgin sand. "Hello," he called. "Anyone there!" His voice bounced back from the stone structures like a chorus of receding parrots. "There-there-there-there!" The echo mimicked him and faded away. There was silence again except for the distant wail of birds. He was about to move off again when his progress was blocked by an abrupt eruption of earth.

  As the dust settled a human figure appeared at the base of the sloping stone roof where the explosion had occurred. He seemed to be male and robustly built although not particularly large. He was dressed in a kind of rough baggy robe like the djalabah worn in North Africa and on his head he wore a loose black turban of finer weave. On either side of him he gripped the tops of a pair of double trap doors. When he saw von Wittering he released the doors and they folded back onto the ground sending up fresh clouds of dust. The little man stared at the navigator for a moment then turned and yelled something down into the ground.

  Immediately half a dozen other trapdoors burst up out of the ground and a crowd of dusty shapes appeared. Hugo found himself surrounded by a mob of curious little men moving slowly towards him. Their faces were shadowed inside the cowls of their robes but what he could see of them their features were taut and tanned, sharply lined and weather beaten. They formed a circle round him and became absolutely still. Von Wittering put out his hand to the nearest but the man didn't reciprocate. His weathered old eyes scanned von Wittering with blank suspicion.

  "Hello," von Wittering said forcing a smile. "My name is Hugo. How do you do?" He felt like a missionary attempting to make contact with a heathen congregation. They didn't look dangerous, but their stillness was disconcerting. Not one of them moved or seemed to breath. It felt like a dream of death, surrounded by motionless statuary.

  "Does anyone here speak English? Speak English anyone?" He repeated the words slowly as if spelling but there was no response. "Speak English," he repeated plaintively. This time he received an answer.

  "I speak English," said a voice at the rear of the mob back near the stone roof. Von Wittering strained onto tiptoes but all he could see was a disturbance in the sea of heads as something moved towards him. Eventually the front row parted to reveal a familiar face. Whetu smiled jovially. "Hugo, good lord, how come you're out of bed?"

  "I…" the navigator began and stopped. "Are we dead, lad? What's going on here?"

  "We landed," replied Whetu lightly. "Steve br
ought us down. François went mad but the rest of us are alive."

  "So this is all as we see it?" He swept his hand over their immediate surroundings.

  "Absolutely real, apparently." Whetu stamped his foot on the packed sand. "Good to be back on solid ground don't you think?"

  "Well yes but where are we?"

  Whetu grinned. "No idea. But it's definitely somewhere no question about that."

  "We're not back home by any chance?"

  "No chance."

  "So these people are sentient humanoid aliens"

  Whetu laughed. "I think we're the aliens here, Hugo." He took the old man by the arm and turned him through the crowd towards the pyramid. "Come on down." Below their feet a wide flight of stone steps led into a murky chamber. Von Wittering relaxed a little. Once again there were options, possibilities on offer.

  As they descended, a vast underground space opened out around them, dark and thick with smoke. Overhead in every direction, stout wooden beams ran between stone pillars supporting a heavy dark timbered ceiling. Von Wittering stopped and stared in wonder at the extent of it, a vast labyrinth of apparently infinite size its boundaries obscured in distant darkness. Avenues of winking lights extended in all directions and everywhere crowds of rough-robed and turbaned figures thronged in pools of light cast by oil lamps and tallow candles. Von Wittering remained rooted to the spot until Whetu led him onwards.

  They passed on through places where craftsmen and traders conducted their various business oblivious of the silent fuss caused by the foreigners' arrival. There were weavers and tanners, herbalists, fortune tellers, grocers and carpenters. At the far end of an alley flame raged in an open fire and a pair of sweating blacksmiths laboured over ringing anvils. Although there was no immediate sign of animals the heavy odour of beasts filled the air mixing with the spicy fragrance of exotic cookery. The place looked for all the world like a medieval village on market day.

  Von Wittering was too amazed to speak. "Who?" he began but his question seemed inadequate.

  "Who are these people?" Whetu finished it for him. "Verbal communication has not yet been established but they seem friendly. We think it might be a gathering place for herdsmen. We haven't seen their livestock but they've got them parked around here somewhere. They grunt and howl occasionally."

  Followed by a mob of silent herdsmen Whetu steered Hugo through a low arch into a smaller chamber. The ceiling was lower here and its walls were covered with woven rugs earth coloured and patterned in images of birds and animals. Long wooden benches ran around the walls and knots of hooded men lounged at low tables on rugs and cushions eating from platters and quaffing from clay mugs. The air was thick with perfumed smoke issuing from an alcove of old men with glazed eyes puffing on clay hookahs. Von Wittering's eyes came to rest on a rough planked trestle. Along the counter top ranged an assortment of earthen crocks with simple wooden taps.

  "I knew it," he chuckled. "A bar."

  A group of musicians was making music in a far corner. Several played fat flutes and thin reed instruments while others played drums. A tall ferocious woman clad in beads danced wildly to their rhythms. Most of the bar's population however, between forty to fifty herders were pressed together in another corner.

  "Over here." Whetu took the old man by the arm and guided him towards the mass of cowled backs. The crowd parted and for the second time in rapid succession von Wittering was surprised.

  "Look what I found wandering round outside," said Whetu.

  "Happy landings old man." Kurt raised a mug. Liam was there too and Mohammed, Steve and Celine, all sitting on cushions around a low metal topped table. Steve's mug looked to be the least sampled so von Wittering helped himself to a tentative swallow. He paused, licked his lips and nodded.

  "Mmmm," he murmured. "What do you think it is?"

  "Tastes like porter," replied Liam.

  "Yes, I believe it does. And not too bad at all." He drained the mug in one swallow and breathed a deep sigh of content. "Makes a change from whisky," he said. "I like this place. So if we’re not dead where do you think we are?"

  "You're the navigator," suggested Steve. "If you don't know, how would we?"

  "Very interesting."

  "Yeah, genuine life forms on another planet." Kurt seemed most excited of all of them. "Mammals like us, not a bunch of fossilised bugs like everyone thought."

  "We need to be careful." Steve as always seemed edgy. “Maybe we should get back to the ship.”

  “Relax Stephen. Have another drink.”

  Whetu looked around the weather beaten faces surrounding them. "They definitely do seem human and friendly enough."

  "Judging by their behaviour," observed Mohammed. "They realise we are different but not so different to cause alarm."

  “At this stage.” Steve added a note of caution.

  Beyond the crowd a young man had entered the room. He was about the same height as the herdsmen but slimmer. Although his features were similar to theirs there was a smoothness about him that suggested he lived a different life from them. His hair was clipped short and well groomed and his skin was fairer than the herdsmen. His clothes were finer and more complex in the form of breeches and a buttoned sleeveless jerkin with a long white shirt underneath. He wore blue slippers finely cut and sewn from soft animal skin. He was staring at them but unlike the herdsmen his expression was curious rather than blank. He seemed to be thinking, trying to place them in some known scheme of things.

  "Hi!" Whetu waved to him.

  “Jesus, don’t look at him.” Steve hid his face in his hands.

  The youth didn't respond. When the herdsmen became aware of his presence a murmur ran through the crowd. One of their number, an older man spoke to the youth in a loud guttural dialect. The boy nodded and raised a quizzical eyebrow. Emboldened, the old man spat on the floor in front of the strangers and a buzz of excitement animated the crowd. The young man moved forward. The crowd parted. The old man stamped, raised a fist and deposited another dark gob of tobacco stained phlegm on the flagstones. Assured of superior numbers he seemed to be working himself up to a gesture of defiance towards the intruders.

  “We better go.” Steve got up. The others followed, discretely gathering their weapons and moving out of range of the old man's projectiles. Kurt found himself at the front, an involuntary barrier to attack. The old man ranted and postured but the attack never came. Instead the mysterious young man stepped up beside the challenger and laid a calming hand on his filthy sleeve. Immediately the man stood back content to be relieved of initiative. There was absolute silence. The musicians stopped playing.

  Taking the young man's intervention as a gesture of friendship Whetu stepped forward with his hand outstretched. "Hi," he said. "My name's Whetu."

  The youth stared at Whetu's hand apparently counting his fingers and studying the general shape of his palm.

  "Whetu?" repeated Whetu. "What is your name?"

  The boy frowned inclining his ear towards Whetu's mouth. Whetu obliged him with more dialogue, slower and with maximum clarity. "What is the name of this place? What do you call it, please?" Still the youth said nothing although his lips moved silently as if miming words. Whetu persisted courteously.

  "What is this place?”

  The youth smiled, seemed to understand and replied - "Deep down in Louisiana" – in heavily accented tones.

  Whetu turned to his companions. "Did you hear what I just heard?"

  "Maybe," replied Kurt, equally bemused. "Get him to say it again."

  Whetu turned back to the boy. "Louisiana?" he asked. "Did you say Louisiana?" The kid nodded and began to shuffle his feet. His arms started to move and then his entire body dancing to some inaudible rhythm. Then he began to sing.

  "Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans, back up in the woods among the evergreens." His voice was a pleasant untrained tenor with a strong accent, possibly French. Nonetheless his words were clearly
understandable. "In a little log cabin made of earth and wood, lived a country boy name of Johnny B. Goode."

  The musicians took up the rhythm and the herdsmen began to clap in time. Whetu gaped in disbelief.

  “He never learned to read or write so well, but he could play the guitar like the ring of a bell.”

  Then, to everyone's surprise Whetu joined in the chorus. "Go, go Johnny, go-go-go!" The youth laughed slapping him on the back like a brother. The ice was broken, the formerly impassive crowd erupted in a spontaneous cheer.

  "Chuck Berry," yelled the youth above the noise. "Tu lui connais?"

  "Go, go, go Johnny go-go-go!" Whetu sang with redoubled gusto and the herders all joined in. Everyone it seemed knew the song.

  "What in god's name is going on here?" Steve finally found words to shout. "Are they singing in English?”

  They looked at each other in utter incomprehension. Only von Wittering remained unaffected by the turn of events. He wandered off to the bar with a gaggle of curious followers to replenish his empty mug.

  "Go, go, Johnny B. Goode!" The song ended in an uproar of rowdy camaraderie.

  "My dad used to sing that song," Whetu explained glowing with breathless triumph.

  "Your father used to sing it?" Steve looked doubtful. “What is it? How come they know it?”

  "Johnny B. Goode. It's as old as the hills."

  "But how can these people, supposedly on another planet know a song your father knew?" Celine's question echoed the thoughts of all of them.

  "Chuck Berry," continued the youth enthusiastically. "C'est génial. Tu connais la chanson entière? Les autres lyriques?"

  "Jesus he's talkin' frog," said Liam with disbelief. "Vous parlez français?"

  "Oui bien sur, et toi?" replied the youth enthusiastically. "Tu parles français?"

  "Bah oui," Liam replied with a Gallic shrug. "Un peu."

  Now they all stared at Liam who seemed as confused as the rest of them. Steve began to hyperventilate. The situation was expanding too quickly to follow. Instinctively he turned to Celine. "What are they doing now?" he whispered.

  "They're speaking in French," she replied casually.

  "French?"

  "I reckon." Kurt was looking at Liam through fresh eyes. "Who knew Liam could speak French?"

  "French." Steve's head began to swim. He struggled to suppress a panic attack. “But how?”

  "Ah, mais je parle pas bien,” Liam continued. “Parce que c'est… ah… depuis beaucoup années que j'ai appris le français." He spoke slowly and with a great deal of thought before each word. The youth nodded encouragement. "Mais j'ai oublié comment parler, désolé."

  "Pas de toute, pas de toute!" The young man protested volubly with hands and physiognomy. Liam felt encouraged to continue.

  "Ah… quand je suis à l'école, il y a trente années au moins." He was exhausted and couldn't think of another word to say but he'd surprised himself as well as his colleagues. They gaped at him in astonishment, except for Mohammed. It was impossible to astonish Mohammed.

  "Mais tu parles très bien," continued the youth. "Bien que avec un accent étrange. Qu'est que c'est ton pays?"

  "Eire," replied Liam without thinking.

  "Eire? Je ne connais pas l’Eire. Où est l'Eire?"

  The knot of herdsmen around them had silenced now. They were following the exchange between Liam and the youth with great interest their eyes moving from one to the other like a crowd watching a tennis match.

  "What’s he saying?" Steve whispered.

  "He's asking where I'm from."

  "How come he speaks French?" Celine chipped in.

  "Ask him where he learned Johnny B. Goode," Whetu asked.

  "Ask him where we are for Christ's sake?" Steve had put aside panic for the time being. "Where the fuck are we?"

  Steve had been in a state of nervous excitement ever since the ship had failed to burn up in the planet's atmosphere. The existence of gravity and breathable air had baffled him at first but he was beginning to connect the dots. Gravity-air-mammal-humanoid-English-French, it was all making sense. “Wait a minute,” he began. Liam interrupted.

  "Wait!" Liam leaned towards them drawing them into a huddle. "I think he thinks we're from here,” he said confidentially.

  “That’s what I’m trying to say,” Steve continued.

  "Not from round here precisely.” Liam waved his hands generally. “But from the same bloody planet, somewhere."

  “And he’s right. We must have landed back on Earth, look at the evidence.” Steve was suddenly animated. “We just have to find out where on Earth we are?”

  "Think about it.” Liam paused. “When we landed there was a bloody great dust storm going on, right?” General agreement. “So if all these people were all inside here sheltering from the storm then maybe no-one saw the ship come down."

  "And the noise of the storm would have wiped out the sound of us coming in."

  "And since we look sort of like them" Whetu was catching on.

  "I see your point," concluded Mohammed. "He has no reason to think we are not the same as him therefore he assumes we are."

  “But we are like him because he is human for god’s sake,” Steve persisted but no-one was listening. “Because we are back on Earth!”

  "So if I ask him where we are, what planet, it kind of gives the show away."

  "I see your point."

  “Jesus Christ.” Steve gripped his head as if it would explode. He slumped onto a bench.

  "Keep a low profile," suggested Kurt.

  "They will find out sooner or later." Mohammed was thinking ahead. "And we will probably need their help if we are to get away from here."

  "He seems sympathetic so maybe we should tell him, get him on side." There was logic to Celine's suggestion.

  "But slowly," Kurt advised. "Keep cool, don't give him a fright."

  The youth had waited patiently throughout the muted discussion observing them closely and listening intently. "Excusez-moi," he said at last. "Les autres parlent l'anglais je pense, oui?"

  "Oui," Liam confirmed his companions were speaking English.

  "Mais pourquoi?"

  "Do you speak English too?" asked Liam cautiously but the youth shook his head.

  "Un peu. Juss a leetle beet, mais pas bien. Mon père parle anglais très bien. My faader, il est savant."

  "Your father?"

  "Oui. Et vos amis, you frenz? Pourquoi parlent-ils anglais eux-memes, ensemble?"

  Liam realised he was moving towards a point of no return, a point of not being able to retrieve the situation should it turn sour. He was also moving beyond the limits of his knowledge of French. How could he be careful of what he said when he didn't really know what he was saying.

  "C'est difficile d'expliquer," he continued vaguely, waving his hands in a murky gesture of Gallic confusion. "Nous sommes perdus," he said. We are lost and have no idea where we are. What do you call this place, he asked, this region?

  The boy replied in a rapid stream of long flat vowels and shadowy consonants, a complex combination of hard sounds through soft guttural hisses through phlegm in the depths of his throat. Liam attempted to repeat it and failed.

  The boy laughed. "Bara ad Faad E'kandah," he repeated slowly.

  "Bien, c'est pas Louisiana, comme la chanson?" asked Liam and the boy broke into gales of laughter.

  No, it was not Louisiana, he replied slapping Liam on the back as if he'd made the most outrageous joke. So what was the place called in French? The boy thought for a moment and shook his head. There were no French words for the name of this place. It would be difficult to approximate it even in a sentence or entire paragraph. Loosely it meant "oasis," he said, but it also described something specific to this place and no other.

  Liam nodded and cautiously continued. What about the whole place, he asked moving his hands in an expansive gesture of curvature. The whole place, h
e repeated.

  "La planète?" the boy asked with surprise.

  "Oui. Qu'est ce que c'est vôtre nom pour la planète entière?"

  The boy frowned and let go another sustained barrage of unpronounceable sounds. Liam shook his head and the boy explained that the sense of this word was easier to translate. It meant the place we are all part of. We come from it and will return to it. Liam waited for the word.

  "Ca veut dire en français, la terre," concluded the boy.

  "La terre?"

  "Oui, quelque chose comme ça."

  Liam turned to the others. "What do you know? They call it the same as us, Earth." The boy was thinking and seemed on the point of asking something tricky. Liam quickly steered the inquiry to more stable ground.

  "Et votre nom?" he asked.

  "J'hassaan Poindl ad Fhaad E'kandah," replied the boy quickly, adding that he'd prefer to be called Jean-Pierre. Liam put out his hand.

  "Eh bien, Jean-Pierre."

  "Merci."

  "Liam."

  It was obvious the boy would not be put off for long. He asked Liam what his name for the planet was. Liam replied that it was the same thing, Earth. The boy nodded slowly and asked him where then was this place he called Eire? Was it to the West or East of here? Liam shook his head and said he didn't know. They were lost. But he noticed an astuteness in Jean-Pierre's questioning, the beginnings of a suspicion that the cat might shortly be out of the bag. Liam shuffled, looked at the floor and shrugged in an attempt to appear nonchalant.

  "Does he know?" asked Mohammed.

  "I think he begins to suspect something.”

  "Break it to him gently."

  Jean-Pierre's eyes narrowed and he asked if this Eire would be in the North or South of the planet. Liam tried to be vague but his words emerged sounding like evasion. How can you be so lost, Jean-Pierre continued, when you seem so sophisticated. Liam smiled and explained that their navigator got drunk and lost his way. He pointed to von Wittering who now had five mugs of different ales lined up on the bar. Every time he time he downed one the unruly crowd of herdsmen around him cheered and bought him another.

  Jean-Pierre looked straight into Liam's lying eyes and asked him how his party was travelling, by what means of conveyance? Liam shrugged and replied that they had arrived here on foot. But before that, quizzed the youth, how had they come?

  Liam sighed, glanced at the others. Then he bit the bullet and said quietly. "Dans une espèce d'avion."

  Jean-Pierre smiled. In a kind of aeroplane he repeated? Liam nodded. From where?

  "Lointain.” Liam took a deep breath. “En effet, une autre planète."

  "Tu est fou," the boy laughed out loud. The herdsmen laughed with him although none of them had showed any sign of understanding a word of the exchange.

  "He doesn't believe me," Liam said to his colleagues with obvious relief. "He thinks I'm crazy."

  "Well, how would you react if someone in a bar told you they were from another planet?"

  "Absolument fou!" chuckled the boy. The crowd of herdsmen agreed, applauding in gales of hilarious laughter.

  19

  As they walked away from the desert crossroads a silent crowd watched the strangers depart. Night was falling and a soft breeze drifted in from the plain heavy with the odour of dry, musky vegetation. Then the herdsmen themselves slowly and silently dispersed, each family going their separate ways out into the vast parched wilderness along familiar well-worn trails. Old women and young children rode on tall ill-tempered camel-like beasts called droons, their possessions tied up in brightly patterned cloth bundles piled high around them. Men proceeded on foot driving tiny herds of hairy goat-like creatures in front of them. Clusters of children moved at the sides, poking at the hindquarters of errant animals with pointed sticks.

  The ragged crew of KOTUKU II paused on the lip of the basin above the oasis of E'kandah, and watched the pageant, awed by its abstract majesty. Columns of figures moved away across the desert in all directions like a rising sun pattern on a pale quilt. Above and beyond spread the ring of dark mountains with the massive smoking volcano at its centre.

  Steve was quietly racking his brains for some long buried geographical memory, proof. Somewhere he must have read about or seen pictures of this place. A volcano of this size must have appeared on National Geographic or some other natural history channel. But he’d given up trying to argue his theory with the others. Against the evidence they were determined not to believe they had landed back on Earth.

  "Where are they all going?" Liam translated Whetu's question and Jean-Pierre explained that these people were dwellers of the Five Deserts. Many lived around the bara or waterholes dotted across the arid plains. Others lived in the mountains and still more lived in the Mahaadii, a wild desert land beyond the mountains. This was a extremely barren region which supported only the hardiest of creatures. The herdsmen and their families would travel through the night and find shelter by first light, when the plains would be made perilous by savage winds and vicious twisters that wracked the land at this time of year. In the final month of the retreating summer, movement on the plains during daylight hours was considered foolhardy and potentially fatal.

  "It sounds unbearable," Celine observed. "Why do they do it?"

  "It is where they live," replied Jean-Pierre through Liam. "They have always lived here."

  "Yes, but why do they bother if it's so awful?"

  "It is their place. They have found sustenance there, prosperity?"

  "Doesn’t look prosperous."

  "Centuries of life. They would defend their lands to the last man, woman and child."

  Celine shook her head. "That's sad." Liam didn't bother to translate.

  Jean-Pierre went on to explain about the oasis. He told them that the establishment at Bara E'kandah was an ancient place. Its origins went back beyond recorded memory. They said it had always been there in some shape or form, a sheltered water hole built underground to provide refuge from the winds. Over time it had evolved into a kind of crossroads marketplace where nomads and desert dwellers came to barter and trade. Ownership of E'kandah had been in Jean-Pierre's family for centuries. It was currently managed by his uncle. His immediate family, his father and brothers lived in a town in the foothills called Khadees but Jean-Pierre spent as much time as he could at the oasis. He loved the place and although the question of succession was yet to be resolved, it was his ambition to take it over when his uncle retired. In the meantime he studied physiology according to his father's wish. His father wanted him to become a surgeon.

  "Tell him to forget it," Celine advised. "Medicine's a crap job, a thankless task."

  Jean-Pierre had accepted the invitation to return with them to see their avion at first hand. He didn't believe they had arrived in a vehicle capable of flight since such devices were totally unknown in his culture. He had encountered mention of the avion in his French studies but believed the device to be merely a writer's fiction. Metallic objects were too heavy to fly. He knew that, everyone knew that.

  He didn't doubt they'd arrived in something, he'd met their kind before, exotic travellers from distant places rolling across the plains in sail powered wagons or drawn by teams of droon. He'd seen men of many different races - traders and entertainers, acrobats, illusionists and conjurors. They dressed eccentrically like these people and made outlandish claims. Foreigners always caused great excitement but they were never tolerated for long. In the end they were encouraged often forcibly to move on. Since very young Jean-Pierre had always been drawn to strangers, eager to learn about their cultures and custom. But he’d never had the opportunity to talk to them closely or visit their encampments. The prevailing opinion suggested they were dishonest and dangerous but he found them to be usually lively and amusing compared to his own people whom he found very conservative. He wanted to know more about them and where they'd come from so readily agreed to return with them to their camp.
r />   They had agreed to differ on the subject of aeroplanes and flight. By request Liam turned debate to the subject of language. Where had Jean-Pierre learned to speak French? The youth replied simply that he'd probably learned it the same place Liam had, in school. Where the language had originated he didn't know, no-one knew except it was believed to have been discovered on a mountain in the Mahaadii Desert.

  "Where is this place?"

  "Some call it Nasa. In Français we know it as Voyageur."

  Fifty years ago an assortment of ancient manuscripts had turned up at the oasis E'jibba. The papers were in an unknown language. Their source was eventually traced back to the mountain of Mahaadii and when deciphered it was discovered they were not one but three separate and distinct ancient dialects. Subsequently the knowledge gained from the study of these languages, known as Deutsch, Français and English had become the basis of a number of sciences and philosophies each with its own dedicated following. Several of these cults had elevated almost to the status of religion before being sternly suppressed by the indigenous orthodoxy. One song had risen from the archaeology to achieve mythic status. The parable of Johnny B. Goode recounted by his disciple Chuck Berry had achieved popular anthem status. Everyone knew it, the chorus at least. It had become so universally popular that the holy men were unable to suppress it. After considerable revision the devout scholars had found a place for it in the creed.

  “The song came from there too?” Jean-Pierre nodded.

  “It’s an ancient song kind of like a hymn he reckons,” Liam reported. Whetu didn’t feel like putting him straight, not yet at least.

  "Ask him about all the shit on the roof of his uncle's oasis," Kurt wanted to know. "Those big mobile doof-a-lackeys."

  Jean-Pierre wasn't sure what the mobiles were exactly. He believed they were part of an experiment his uncle was making with wind, something to do with an ancient science called Physics. His uncle was a recluse and felt no need to explain his researches. Consistent with local tradition he was devoting his time entirely to scholarship now that the years were gaining on him. He described his field as the Physical Sciences, studied in the German language.

  "He should get on fine with von Wittering then," mused Kurt. "If the old bugger gets drunk enough that's all he can talk, bloody German. Can't remember a word of it unless he's three parts pissed."

  They had left von Wittering behind at the oasis in the care of Jean-Pierre's uncle. By the time they left he was in no condition to make the trip back on foot. Von Wittering's Teutonic name alone had been sufficient encouragement for the physicist to take charge of him.

  They turned away from the ridge and continued retracing their steps to the ship. As they cleared the last ridge Jean-Pierre had his first sight of KOTUKU II. It was still a long way off but already the boy could see that this was not what he'd expected. This was an illusion of unbelievable proportions. It dwarfed the crowd of herders who stood quietly watching all around the ship. Higher by far than the tallest building he'd ever seen it towered above them like a small mountain. The impassive crowd parted to let them through and Jean-Pierre found himself at the foot of a set of stairs leading up into the belly of the ship. He was bereft of words. His thoughts were confused, unable to cross the chasm between what he knew and what he now saw. That such a vast construction could exist in any material other than stone was simply inconceivable. But metal, he'd never seen so much metal in one place. He'd used metallic tools, handled metallic weapons but this was so vast it blotted out the sky. How did they get it here? It could never have flown. He'd read descriptions of dirigibles, aeroplanes and spaceships and discounted them as fanciful. But this was a physical and philosophical contradiction. His first instinct was fear. The very mention of its existence would be considered blasphemous amongst the orthodox elders.

  "Veut-tu entrer?" suggested Liam. Jean-Pierre looked around at the silent multitude. Clearly the herdsmen shared his confusion. As one of them they seemed to be silently delegating him to be their representative, their elucidator. They were waiting for him to explain what kind of magic this was because magic was all it could be.

  "Viens," repeated Liam. "Entres avec nous."

  The others began to move up the narrow clanking stairway but Jean-Pierre hesitated. As Steve, Celine, Mohammed and Kurt disappeared inside one by one, the crowd murmured and shrank back. How could real people disappear within an illusion? Were they ghosts?

  "Viens," said Liam smiling. "It's OK."

  A primitive instinct was telling him he would be destroyed if he ventured inside, reduced to dust never to return. But he crowd of blank faces waited in expectation. He took a deep breath and fully expecting the mirage to evaporate he poked at the first rung in the ladder with his toe. To his surprise it was solid. Gingerly he eased his weight onto it and began to follow Whetu and Liam up the swaying gantry. The herdsmen who had stood so impassively watching, spontaneously erupted in an ocean of applause.

  20

  Whetu pushed open hatch DRL/42 and pulled himself up onto the companionway. "Mariana," he called. But the only reply was the receding echo of his own voice. "Mariana-Mariana-iana-na-na-na!"

  There was no sign of her. He felt a strange tightness in his chest a kind of burn. How had she survived touchdown? Where was she, was she hurt, was she alive? He felt angry with himself and he wondered why he would be concerned about the welfare of someone who clearly couldn't care less about him, someone he'd known for little more than an hour, someone who’d tied him up and held a knife to his throat. Maybe now they had landed and there was movement inside the ship she had moved deeper inside. But if she had moved camp why were her belongings still here, papers, clothing, equipment, provisions all intact.

  He leaned over the handrail and scanned the depths below and the galleries above. He moved further in and called out again and again until his voice was raw. There was no reply other than the doleful derision of his own echo. "Mariana-iana-na-na!"

  He was shocked to realise he might be missing her. He had been thinking about her since they landed. He'd wanted to go look for but was duty bound to join the others on the initial foray abroad.

  "Mariana, why didn’t you stay with the rest of us?” His voice echoed in assent and he realised he'd known her for longer than just that single desperate hour. All through their year of aimless drifting Whetu had kept his spirits alive largely because of his brief glimpse of the electronic princess. He had held a picture of her in his mind, a tiny beacon of hope illuminating the darkness of despair. He had searched for her, fought the Black Knight for her and had finally found her only to lose her. She had become a mirage once again. But what if she was lying somewhere injured, unconscious, needing help? He leapt to the narrow stairs his feet barely touching the steps as he plunged down through the oily murk towards the bottom.

  Before he finally gave up he had traversed five kilometres of identical interlocked companionway, combed every corner on every level of the sector. Exhausted he found his way back to where he started and closed the hatch.

  "If he doesn't eat, he'll die. If he doesn't drink he'll dehydrate and die even sooner," Celine flatly declared.

  "Maybe that's not such a bad thing," suggested Kurt. "Son of a bitch tried to kill us after all. If he's so keen on killing himself why not let the prick do it."

  "Right now he doesn't know what he wants." Celine waved her open fingers in front of François' vacant eyes but the Security Officer offered no reaction. He remained sitting on the edge of the metal bunk, bound hand and foot inside a heavy-duty white canvas straight jacket. He appeared calm, blank as a boiled egg.

  "We have a sworn duty to keep a fellow officer alive." Steve didn't sound particularly happy about his obligation. There was barely room for Kurt and Celine as well as François and his bunk in the tiny brig. It was a padded cell not much larger than a toilet cubicle so Steve was happy to remain outside in the protective custody of the corridor. He didn’t like being this close to someo
ne who had recently tried to kill him, repeatedly. He could still feel the man’s demented energy.

  "Not if the bastard's trying to kill us." Kurt the pragmatic. "I reckon that absolves us of any custodial responsibility. He nearly snuffed you too Steve."

  “And he’ll try again if he gets loose.”

  “Excellent.” Steve tried a chuckle but it came out more like a groan.

  "I've stuck a nutrient drip in his neck until you make up your mind." Celine stood up to leave. "I don't care either way. This pig doesn't even rate as human in my books let alone a fellow officer." Steve stepped back as she pushed by. "Unfortunately he's in good nick so he won't die any time soon."

  She disappeared down the corridor. Kurt came out and Steve quickly slammed the cell door and locked it. If François noticed they'd gone or had even been there he didn't let on. Like a tick waiting in a tree for his next feed to pass by he had retreated deep inside his shell to conserve energy for when he needed it. When the time came he would be ready to drop.

  At a table in the canteen Jean-Pierre chewed tentatively at a hamburger dressed with chilli sauce, reconstituted tomato, onion, garlic and a leaf of Mohammed's home-grown lettuce. Liam watched on with interest. Jean-Pierre had been desperate to eat genuine French food but a hamburger and french fries was the best the ship's cook could manage. He had served it with bright yellow mustard and lurid green relish on the side.

  "Mmmm." Jean-Pierre nodded politely. "C'est pas mal, mais qu'est ce que c'est?"

  "He wants to know what’s in it?" said Liam.

  “Le viande.”

  "How does he like it?" Mohammed stood in the galley doorway, arms folded waiting patiently for the verdict. He was dressed in a clean uniform with a fresh tea towel draped over his shoulder.

  Steve arrived and was trying to attract Liam’s attention with tentative hand signals. "Have you asked him yet?" he finally whispered. "What did he say?"

  Whetu had set up an SOS auto-scan and Steve had watched it repeatedly cycling through all known emergency frequencies for an hour without success. The SOS would have landed somewhere if they had been within a million miles of a terrestrial receiver so Steve had at last been forced to admit they had probably not landed back on Earth.

  “He still doesn’t know,” Liam hissed. “Maybe we should let him find his own way there.”

  “What about the engineers he was talking about, or an electrician?”

  “Baby steps mate.” Liam winked at Jean-Pierre. “Let’s not go startling the natives more than we got to.”

  Steve calculated they had less than six months left to get the expedition back on course if they were to reach their target before it was too late. When they left Turangi Base they had eighteen months to comfortably reach Millie-5B and redirect it. Before departure everyone was aware the mission would be lost in a communications black spot for the bulk of the voyage there and back. It would be another twelve months before KOTUKU II was expected to re-emerge, assignment accomplished. Staff at Turangi would not yet even be thinking of looking for them. By then it would be too late for UNR&D to send another expedition. Now there was hope again of completing the mission. But time was running out fast.

  "No way," he snapped. "We need to know. We need to know now. We have to get the mission back on track.” But urgency had departed, discipline had evaporated. The crew seemed impervious to orders, apparently more interested in being tourists than doing their jobs. Von Wittering had not returned from their first visit to the oasis. There was also the unresolved question of the Captain's living brain. There was no way of knowing how much longer it could survive in the cooler and Celine refused to take him seriously as a donor. But if he could get the brain home alive there might be a chance his friend would live again and his own negligence would be mitigated.

  Jean-Pierre struck a piece of gristle and spat it out. He tried to mask his revulsion with a tactful shrug. He struggled for words as he relayed his assessment to Liam.

  "I think he’s saying it does not lack flavour," Liam translated. "But he finds the texture a little coarse and somewhat firm, tough in other words. He says it's too greasy for his taste. I'm with him on that. But he thinks the concept is sound. And he's pleased to finally know what a hamburger looks like. He's read about them but never knew what they were."

  Mohammed wasn't offended. By now he was beyond insult. Throughout the year of drifting confinement he had been the constant butt of the crew's frustrations. Always blame the cook. He shrugged and slid a steaming cup of black coffee towards the youth. "Coffee," he said. "Café."

  "Café, vraiment?" Jean-Pierre had also read a great deal about coffee. He had tried to imagine what coffee could taste like and how it would affect him if he drank it. Now that he was confronted with it he hesitated. So much had happened to him in the short time he’d known these strangers. His beliefs had been rearranged and the laws of probability upended and redefined. He was becoming aware of a connection between these people and the ancient writings of Mahaadii and the dawning realisation scared him. History was in the making. He felt sure there was more to come and that he would be a central part in whatever it was.

  He tentatively sipped at the black oily liquid and grimaced. Mohammed couldn’t hide his disappointment. He waited while the youth tried a second tentative sip. Slowly the boy nodded and a broad smile spread across his face. “Yeah,” he said.

  “I think he likes it,” observed Liam.

  "Have you all taken leave of your senses?” Steve had waited patiently during the gastronomic experiments but he’d had enough. “Have you forgotten why we're here? We have a mission to complete. We have to get away from this place and get on with it!"

  "So you said. But where are we going to go, Steve?" asked Liam. "We don't know where we are and the ship's broke."

  "Ask him dammit! I order you to ask him? We have a moral duty." His face flushed with passion. "A duty to carry out the task with which we have been entrusted. We have undertaken to prevent a global tragedy. We cannot simply abandon our responsibilities just because we don't feel like it anymore! Ask him!"

  There was a convoluted exchange between Liam and Jean-Pierre. Steve waited patiently while the two nodded and gestured with their hands.

  "Well?" asked Steve when they finally stopped.

  "He says he likes it."

  "Oui, c'est très bon," the boy continued. "Délicieux." He finished the cup in one gulp. Mohammed went back into the galley. Steve slumped into a chair. What was the point? These people were out of control.

  "What about this place in the desert?" Mohammed returned with the coffee pot. "Where these languages are supposed to come from.”

  “Sounds a bit like Moses and the Ten Commandments.” Liam translated Mohammed's query. Jean-Pierre replied and Liam explained. "He says the language books were transcribed by the original scholars more than a century ago.”

  "But where did they come from, tablets of stone? And the song that Whetu knows? What about that?”

  “Johnny B. Goode. He says it’s always been around as long as he can remember. Everyone knows the song."

  The song came from the Soonii, an ancient vessel with a voice. It sang when it was discovered on the mountain. It no longer sings but before it became silent the words and music were written down by scribes.”

  "What's it matter where the stupid song came from?" Steve scoffed. "If we make no attempt to complete our mission we will be in breach of contract. If the mission cannot be continued we are obligated to inform base of our failure. The future of our civilisation is at stake.” Steve appeared to have given up. He was talking to himself. “We have to do something!"

  "I believe that's what we're trying to do, sir,” Mohammed said calmly. “None of us wants to stay here. We all want to go home.”

  "Right, OK." Steve seemed surprised. “Good, so lets…”

  "If the kid knows French then it must have got here from Earth somehow.” Liam interrupted. “We fi
nd out how that got here, we might find the way back. Yes?"

  Steve thought for a moment. "I understand, of course."

  "And we’ll probably need help with repairs. Kurt says we have only one thrust unit operational and even with jet propulsion that won't get us off the ground. If we get one more unit operational and lighten the payload Whetu believes we might have a chance."

  “Fine.”

  "And he says.” Liam indicated Jean-Pierre sipping coffee. “That his father knows an astronomer.”

  "Astronomer?" Steve straightened in his chair.

  "Stars Steve. We navigate by them."

  "Et mon père parle anglais." Jean-Pierre appeared to be following them. "Eee spik angleesh."

  "Well fine,” Steve conceded. “Let’s go see him then." As if this the answer he'd been waiting for. "What are we waiting for?"

  21

  "How do you do," said the old scholar in perfectly enunciated English. He spoke the words phonetically without trace of accent or expression. "It is a pleasure to meet you. My son has already told me so much about you."

  An unlikely delegation from the ship of Steve and Mohammed stood in the centre of what appeared to be a three-walled library, a large galleried room lined entirely with shelves of books. Maps hung from stands and there were rows of glass cases crammed with minute exhibits. In the centre of the triangular room a dry wizened old man sat perched on a tall bench leaning close to the surface of a narrow wooden desk. The desk was piled high with leather bound books and loose parchment manuscripts. In his bony fingers he held a quill made from a long white feather.

  Jean-Pierre had already explained that his father should be addressed as Chairman. He was apparently Chairman of a prestigious men's club in the town.

  "If you will please excuse me while I conclude this notion I am currently engaged in. I find that if I stop my thoughts it is often difficult to regain a continuity." The old fellow peered at them genially from behind a mountain of paper. More paper was strewn around him on the floor as if he had been interrupted in a fury of creation.

  "Please, we don't want to disrupt your work," smarmed Steve. Mohammed shuffled uncomfortably. He wasn’t sure why, as ship’s cook he was there. Since everyone else claimed to be busy with other duties he had been enticed to come along to lend physical substance to the delegation.

  "No-no I look forward to your interruption. The claims my son has made on your behalf are fascinating, but in the fullness of time. First I must finish a piece I am writing, a critical interpretation on the application of square leg."

  "Yes of course," Steve replied and the old man returned to his scribbling.

  "We have long pondered its significance at the club. There are many ways to interpret."

  "The club?" Mohammed murmured in a tone of recognition.

  "My son will provide you with refreshment." He indicated Jean-Pierre who waited deferentially by the open door. "I will be with you presently."

  Mohammed cleared his throat. "By square leg, sir," he began quietly. "Do you mean the area of the field at right angles to the batting crease behind the batsman?" He spoke quietly but with clarity and authority. The old man stopped his work.

  "Do I?" He looked up at Mohammed with furrowed brow.

  "Yes sir. It runs from short square leg to deep square leg, from the batsman's leg stump out to the boundary. In the case of a right-handed batsman square leg will be to the right of the approaching bowler. For a left-handed batsman leg-side would be to the left of the bowler."

  There was a long silence in the room. All three of them, the old man, Steve and Jean-Pierre stared at Mohammed in blank amazement.

  "What are you going on about?" Steve glared, Mohammed remained composed, the old man’s frown deepened. He fixed Mohammed with a suspicious scowl.

  "But how would you have come to this conclusion? Are you a scholar of the game?"

  Mohammed looked at the floor humbly. "Not a scholar, sir. But I have played the game," he said simply.

  "Played it, played the game?" The old man seemed offended by Mohammed's claim. "In what way could you have played it?"

  "On a pitch, sir."

  "What is this pitch?"

  "A large field of green grass with two teams of eleven men and umpires, sir."

  The old man thought for a moment. "Impossible," he concluded.

  "Mohammed,” Steve warned. “What are you doing?" They had come to respectfully ask Jean-Pierre’s father to put them in touch with an astronomer not to argue with and offend him.

  "Cricket," he explained. "He appears to know about cricket."

  "Let’s just stick to the plan." Steve smiled weakly at the Chairman who was becoming agitated. Mohammed respectfully proceeded.

  "When I was a young man I played cricket at my school in Mumbai, sir. I was a leg spinner."

  "Mumbai?” The Chairman slumped on his stool, all but disappearing behind the mound of paper on his desk. "Leg spinner?" he muttered quietly to himself. "What are you suggesting?" he demanded.

  Mohammed smiled as if understanding the old man's perplexity. He continued slowly and carefully. "It's a way of bowling the ball in cricket, sir, slowly and making the ball turn to trick the batsman."

  "Hypothetically speaking," suggested the old man attempting to recover his composure.

  "It is one of many ways to bowl a cricket ball to a batsman."

  “This is untrue!” The Chairman leapt to his feet.

  “No sir.” Mohammed’s face glowed with recollection. “Cricket is the most beautiful game ever conceived. Twenty-two men all dressed in white and a hard red ball.”

  “Outrageous lies!”

  “I speak the truth, sir. I was a leg spinner. I took many wickets”

  “Shut it, for Christ’s sake man.” Steve sensed dangerously shifting ground. Even Jean-Pierre was showing concern. “Maybe we should.”

  "You are trying to tell me," the Chairman barked. "That all my years of scholarship I have been proceeding up a garden path."

  “No sir. What I am saying is…” But he got no further. The Chairman drew himself to his full limited height.

  “I would like you to leave immediately.”

  No-one saw the stranger arrive. Kurt had been outside for an hour working on a damage assessment of the ship’s fuselage. As Ship's Carpenter in the absence of an engineer it became his responsibility to oversee the repair programme. Initial inspection of the bow undercarriage revealed the assembly had survived their emergency landing. It was one of six extruded alloy posts supporting KOTUKU II in its grounded state. He was moving aft to check the second row of undercarriage when he heard singing.

  "He carried his guitar in a gunny sack." A high pitched tenor voice warbled unsteadily from somewhere nearby. "Played b'neath the trees by the railroad track." Kurt saw the tent first. It was a brightly coloured bedouin style shelter made of tightly woven striped material. Parked beside it was a curious device like a large bamboo tricycle equipped with pedals, a mast and a furled sail. A pair of large hide saddle bags was slung over the rear axle. Apart from this the environs were empty. The novelty of KOTUKU II had eventually worn off and the crowds of curious herders had departed to get on with their lives.

  "Engineer would blow his whistle every day. He'd listen to the rhythm that the driver played."

  Kurt approached the strange tent. "Hello, anybody there!" There was no answer from within. The direction of the voice was hard to pinpoint. The dry clarity of the desert air made the voice appear from everywhere, all around him at once. Kurt turned full circle but still there was no sign of the singer.

  "People passing by used to stop and say. My-my that little country boy can play."

  Kurt approached the corroded column of the aft/starboard undercarriage and peering around it came upon an unusual sight.

  "Go, go Johnny go-go-go." The man was hunched in a collapsible canvas chair. He was birdlike in appearance, a combination of the long skinny lim
bs of a wader and thin bony neck and shiny dome of a large bald eagle. He continued to sing, oblivious of Kurt watching.

  "Oh go, go Johnny go-go-go." A long arm unfolded and slowly held aloft a soft globular thumb. Then he bent once more to his invisible task. After a momentary pause for concentration he began to sing again ending the verse with considerable flourish. "Go-go-go-go Johnny Be Goode!"

  Kurt peered over the man's shoulder to discover he was making a charcoal sketch of the battered underbelly of the Troika V. On the sand beside him lay a pile of already completed sketches of the ship from a variety of perspectives, all perfectly proportioned and detailed.

  "Good morning," Kurt interrupted as the man began a new verse. He stopped and looked back over his shoulder. A sharp hooked nose separated piercing blue eyes. It was impossible to guess his age.

  "Good morning, yes!" The man smiled broadly and put down his drawing. "And welcome traveller from far away." He stood up, absent-mindedly upsetting his chair and kept on standing, unfolding into the tallest thinnest person Kurt had ever seen. He thrust out a bony hand and beamed in warm salutation. "Am I right, am I correct?" He seemed to be bursting with excitement as he vigorously shook Kurt's massive paw. "Very pleased to make your acquaintance. I am so overcome with wonder at your machine I do not know where to begin."

  Letting go of Kurt's hand he filled his lungs with air and took in the entire craft with a single sweep of his expansive arms.

  "I came as soon as I heard and luckily I was nearby." At last he paused. "I'm sorry. Hello my name is Buzz." Once again he shook Kurt's hand. "I'm from L'Institut Voyageur."

  "Kurt," said Kurt. "Pleased to meet you."

  Buzz beamed at him. "Kurt, I wonder if I might be permitted to enter your machine, sir?"

  "I should ask the Captain but I see no reason why not."

  "Splendid." Buzz began collecting his drawing paraphernalia. "I have so many questions to ask you, you cannot imagine."

  "Right."

  "For example, English is your mother tongue I would say?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes and your place of birth would definitely not be anywhere near here am I right?" He was edging rapidly towards the point. Kurt had instantly warmed to him.

  "Definitely not near here.”

  "Would it be called Earth? Right or wrong?"

  Kurt thought for a moment. A direct question required a direct answer. "You would not be wrong."

  Buzz dropped his utensils and threw his arms in the air. "I knew it, I knew it, good grief I just knew it as soon as I heard!" he shouted. "This is a moment I have been waiting for all my life, the moment. Oh I feel poised on the edge of the most momentous discovery of modern science. I feel that everything at last is about to fall into place."

  "Fall into place?"

  "Indeed. The last details into place."

  Kurt had been instructed to be cautious in any communication with local people. Steve was clear in his directive – “We don’t know these people.” He’d gleaned it from the crash manual, how to deal with aliens - “We don’t know how they think.” Kurt didn’t know how Steve thought but this guy Buzz seemed much more straight-forward and there was no point in lying. He appeared to know exactly where they’d come from and didn’t seem to mind. In fact he was over the moon about it, as if he’d been expecting them.

  "Do you know anything about astronomy?" Kurt took a punt. "The stars."

  Buzz shook his head. "Not much, but I know someone who does."

  22

  "Don't want to go academy no more." Jean-Pierre was adamant. Over the past three days he'd spent almost all his time with them and his English had improved. He would still resort to French for more complex discussion and rely on translation. But Liam wasn't always around.

  "Why not?" asked Mohammed

  "I don't want chop up dead peoples toute ma vie."

  "So why don't you leave?"

  "Parce que father want me train to surgeon. This is learning parts of corpse but don't want to surgeon. Want live at bara, at oasis."

  They were driving in a jeep towards the Bara E'kandah with a load of apricot shortcake mix and Jack Daniels.

  After the disastrous visit to Jean-Pierre's father, Steve had called the crew together in the canteen. He was imposing a strict security regime and had put together a schedule for work required to get KOTUKU II in the air again. He presented his decree as a passionate appeal on behalf of future generations of human civilisation. No-one disagreed with his argument. Their reluctance to get with the programme was mainly because they were content just to be alive and after a year of confinement this place was very agreeable. They agreed they should proceed with preparations to leave but all in good time. Steve was passionate. They nodded and moved off. Celine told him she was proud of him. He looked like a leader, commander of his ship. He felt pleased, vindicated.

  Kurt and Liam were charged with reducing the ship’s payload. They were supervising a chain gang of meatheads to evacuate the holds of all but essential cargo. François was considered too unstable to be returned to duties. Mohammed and von Wittering with the assistance of Jean-Pierre were engaged in trading KOTUKU's superfluous stores for fresh provisions. Cases of beer, cans of taco sauce, quantities of cake mix and similar items originally intended for a planetary mining camp were finding their way piecemeal to the oasis and changing hands for fresh flour, meat, vegetables and fruit.

  Business had been slow until Mohammed put on demonstrations of cake and biscuit baking. Chocolate gateau with goat cream topping had become an instant smash hit with the herdsmen. Under von Wittering's tutelage a taste for canned lager was developing. They were having trouble keeping up with demand.

  Jean-Pierre was moody today. The elation of the last few days had worn off. Tomorrow evening he was expected back at the medical academy in Khadees, a town in the foothills where his father and brothers lived. He didn't want to go back and Mohammed suspected there was more to it than a general disinclination towards medicine. A malaise had been steadily overtaking the youth during the past few days.

  "Is there another reason you don't want to return?" Mohammed asked. "Something you do not wish to discuss?" The youth nodded. "Love can make a man sad the way you are," Mohammed continued and Jean-Pierre glared at him as if found out. Mohammed smiled and looked back at the track. "Love which cannot be attained."

  "Never," Jean-Pierre muttered sadly. "Is impossible."

  "Why impossible?" Mohammed felt himself an unlikely person to be advising a young man in affairs of the heart. He had never had much opportunity to explore the realms of love. However, lack of experience always seemed a poor reason for not tendering advice when required. "Why do you feel your position is hopeless?"

  "Because she is dead," replied the youth.

  They drove in silence. Mohammed had nothing to add. Death was, he had to agree, the ultimate barrier to the requital of love.

  "Is difficile to explique. She dead and not dead."

  "I see," said Mohammed although he didn't. "In what way?"

  "Explain, yes. I try."

  It appeared that the object of Jean-Pierre's affection was dead even before he met her. He had fallen in love with a cadaver the body of a beautiful young woman who had been admitted to the academy mortuary three months previously. She was from his town and although he had never once spoken to her while she was alive, he’d been aware of her presence since they were children. He had always admired her but since she was three years older than him she had remained inaccessible. It was a tragic tale that he could barely bring himself to tell.

  When the girl was aged seventeen she fell in with a decadent crew, wealthy young layabouts who mixed with criminals to spice the boredom of their listless lives. One of these criminals was a bad boy called Abou'ed. The girl, whose name was Layla found Ed interesting and exotic and for a time at least she never saw the real man. By the time she realised her mistake it was too late. She was enmeshed in his web, u
nable to break free.

  The Shadow, as he was known to the militia was wanted for a string of crimes including rape, murder, and blasphemy. His love for Layla was obsessive and savage. She was his Venus, radiant and pure. From the moment he saw her he had to possess her and once he did he vowed never to let her go.

  Finally Layla rejected him. She tried to flee but he followed and cornered her in a tiny village in the mountains of Ka'baaka. He was inflamed with jealous rage. If he could not possess her then no man would. He slaughtered her protectors and carried her off into the wilderness of Ab'sala where he poisoned her for five days and left her to die.

  "Why did he poison her? Why did he not kill her in a more conventional passionate way?"

  "Is favourite way they kill in this place. The poison we call it khendi. Make from trees growing all around in our hills. He make mad slowly so she know what is happen. Then brain is dead but body still live."

  "So where is she now?"

  "At academy. I look after her every day. I feed her and bath her. She breathe but her brain, il est mort. There is many like this."

  Mohammed thought about it. "So they are really only half dead?"

  "Is what we call them, demi-mort. The law say we keep them living. Is horrible. They should be dead not live like vegetable in crazy garden." Tears streamed down Jean-Pierre's stricken face.

  "And what happened to Abou'ed?"

  "Prisoner at Bara E'diddi in desert near Mahaadii."

  Mohammed passed Jean-Pierre his handkerchief and the boy dabbed at his eyes.

  "Are there many of these demi-mort people?"

  "At academy mortuary is just about hundred. Other places are many more. I don't go back there. Don't want to see her like this."

  The jeep bumped down off the track and sped across the plain towards the flashing mobiles on the roof of E'kandah. When they arrived von Wittering was outside waiting for them surrounded by herdsmen.

  "They're going mad for cake," he said. "Look at the blighters, mad." The herdsmen stood immobile, faces hidden deep within their cowls silent and patient as time itself.

  "Some fella calling himself the Chairman was here looking for you Moe." Von Wittering handed Mohammed a large envelope sealed with a blob of blue wax. "Asked me to give you this."

  Mohammed broke the seal on the envelope and drew out the single sheet within. The paper was headed with an embossed crest depicting a lion with its foot on the chest of a slumped eagle. Behind the lion stood a symbolic fence of three wickets. Above this on a flowing scroll were the letters - K.C.C.

  "Khadees Cricket Club," said Jean-Pierre. "My father is Chairman."

  The letter formally requested Mohammed's presence at the monthly meeting at the clubrooms in Khadees, next Thursday evening.

  23

  They travelled three nights in the jeep with Buzz guiding and Whetu and Kurt sharing the driving. All around them the dormant featureless desert stretched to infinity, a deep purple flatness with a luminous line of red horizon drawn between earth and sky. They drove following the tip of Buzz's finger, aware that he could be leading them anywhere. During daylight hours thunderous sand storms tore up the desert. They took shelter in a series of pungent subterranean oases smaller than E'Kandah and more rudimentary. These baras were called E'ssi, E'haadi and E'jibba. They slept huddled with herdsmen and their beasts, eating food with them and listening to their songs. The herdsmen seemed never to sleep. They drank and played dice and told stories.

  It was hot underground. During the long torpid afternoons dialogue between the travellers was incessant. Buzz wanted to know everything about space travel and the purpose of their voyage. Neither Whetu nor Kurt could think of any reason why he shouldn't know about their mission but the scholar's reaction surprised them.

  "Don't you think it immoral to tamper with fate?"

  Kurt immediately recognised a kindred spirit and rose to the bait. "In what way man?" he asked.

  "To redirect this asteroid away from its natural and inevitable collision is surely seeking to alter the course of evolution."

  "You think the asteroid is part of our evolutionary curve? It's meant to happen, right?"

  "Exactly."

  "Well maybe our evolution has led us to find out about it and use what we’ve learned and developed to ensure our own survival. What about that?"

  "You have a point there, undeniably," Buzz conceded and shifted ground. "But have you considered the ramifications?"

  "Which would be?"

  "By rendering the asteroid harmless to your Earth you are possibly passing the problem on to some other planet which originally did not have the problem."

  Kurt nodded. "You mean it might wipe out someone else?"

  "Precisely. Is that conclusion ethical?

  "Survival is never ethical," observed Whetu.

  "Unfortunate but true," concluded the scholar with a wry smile.

  "Anyway, the issue is purely theoretical at the moment," suggested Kurt. "Since the Captain's defunct, the navigator's drunk and the ship's broken. We have no practical way to continue the mission so it may never happen."

  "Of course it will happen." Neither of them shared his confidence but they didn’t say anything.

  Finally at dawn on the fourth day the three travellers achieved their objective. VOYAGER, the ancient source of language and learning lay high above them on a craggy ridge beneath the summit of the vast mountain of Mahaadii. It was still just a distant cluster of structures barely distinguishable from its surroundings in the grey light of dawn. From where they stood it was difficult to judge the scale of the three interlocked pyramids of stone against the vastness of the landscape. Second by second the sun's glow rose behind the distant horizon and the whole place was revealed. It was savage and breath-taking. Kurt wanted to stay and take pictures of the sunrise but Buzz was adamant they move on. Already the sun's rays had heat and the first breaths of breeze could be felt.

  "We must hurry," he said as a warm gust disturbed his matted hair. "We still have an hour to travel."

  An hour later the wind had risen to gale force and they were happy to get out of it. Buzz pushed open a stout wooden door and led them down a flight of narrow stone steps into a small anti-chamber. In the lintel above the door the letters NASA were carved in stone along with some obscure numerals that might have depicted a date.

  “Never saw a museum before that wasn't locked,” observed Kurt. “That's new."

  "It has never been locked. The exhibits would be valueless to anyone but the scholars of the institute. Nobody who could get here would have any use for them." He lit a candle and departed.

  On one side of the entrance, obscured in the shadows stood a small dusty display case containing the worm eaten remains of three very old books. Kurt bent close to the case and peered through the filthy glass. Two of the volumes were larger than the third. They were both hardbound in dark lacquered cloth. One was called Vol.I and the other Vol.II. On the spine in faded gold leaf they were both labelled - The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

  The other book was smaller. It still had a paper dust cover raggedly intact. Decorating the jacket was a coloured illustration of a curly red haired boy holding a small clay pipe. His eyes were lifted watching a cloud of bubbles floating in the air above his head. Above the picture in faded red and black lettering was the title - Pears Cyclopaedia, special edition.

  "This way please." Buzz reappeared, anxious for them to follow. Kurt wanted to ask him about the books but Whetu was already on the move. Buzz didn't think to explain the exhibit. He wasn't interested in books. He dealt in large physical entities made of metal and he was anxious to show them the main exhibit. They followed him through a low doorway and waited while he moved about in the darkness lighting lamps and tallow candles. Slowly, lamp-by-lamp the full extent of the vast stone chamber was revealed.

  It had three faces, three triangular sections rising up from the packed earth floor to a common apex. Th
e inside appeared to be a perfect mirror image of the outside, a hollow stone pyramid the size of a small stadium. The entire structure looked to be self-supporting with no evidence of beams or columns on the inside to hold it up. A mass of finely fitted but quite irregular blocks of stone it defied engineering and even more alarming, gravity.

  The flicker of the flames cast eerie shadows all around them. The stone walls seemed to bulge and ripple and crowd in on them with hallucinatory closeness, the rocks appearing to hang inches away from their faces. Blink and the ceiling would retreat only to close in again as soon as they moved. It felt as if the whole thing might collapse at any moment.

  Buzz noted their hesitation and assured them the building was quite safe. He explained that the pyramids had been built by masons from the south. The buildings began construction on the site of the discovery about fifty years ago and had remained solid since then weathering many storms and earthquakes. The structures were checked regularly and showed no sign of weakness. How did they stand up? Buzz shrugged. He didn't know. Pyramids weren't made anymore. The art of construction had been lost generations ago. These were some of the last ever built.

  Dismissing their fears he moved on and they followed him into a maze of curious constructions. On either side huge wooden cages and tripods hung with ropes and pulleys and surrounded by ladders rose up towards the roof. Contained within these wooden scaffolds was a collection of large metal objects made mostly of riveted alloy sheet. The metal was bent and torn like exhibits from a plane crash.

  "The fragments have been partially reconstructed," said Buzz. "As far as they could be without plans of course. Some of the fragments are unfortunately beyond salvage."

  "You’ve created all this?" asked Kurt in wonder.

  "Only some of it. A lot of the early work was already done before I came here. The reconstruction began about fifty years ago. Before that it was more like archaeology digging up pieces and cataloguing. Much of it was buried far underground, some pieces scattered across the plain."

  Nearest to them stood a tall square column of latticed alloy extrusion like the boom of a construction crane. Beyond it a large jagged edged fragment of what appeared to be the wreckage of a radar dish lying on its side. Elsewhere there were reconstructed sections of aero fuselage, huge lens assemblies, fragments of integrated electronics boards and a pressurised hatch.

  "Wow," said Kurt, at last able to speak. "This stuff looks familiar don't you think?"

  Whetu nodded. He felt the same way. He didn't know why but somehow he felt an affinity with these lovingly reconstituted piles of junk as if he'd seen it somewhere before.

  "There have been many attempts to create an overall picture of the whole thing, from the reconstructed fragments. There are many theories about what they might have been," said Buzz. "Many of our scholars believe they are the remains of a temple from an earlier very sophisticated civilisation who knew how to use of metal. Orthodox astronomers scorn this notion. Others claim it was some kind of prehistoric observatory for tracing the progress of the planets."

  "Perfect place for an observatory or a temple," said Kurt. "On top of a mountain in the middle of a desert. That's where they often are."

  "Can you put a date on it?" asked Whetu.

  "We are fairly sure the disintegration occurred a little more than a century ago. But when it would have been built and how long it stood here is unknown."

  "Unbelievable," said Kurt.

  "A few of us in the institute, a minority have a different theory. But mostly we are laughed at. Orthodox belief insists that only feathers may fly."

  "So what do you think it was?" asked Whetu.

  Buzz seemed hesitant, embarrassed to articulate the word. "Aliens," he said at last.

  Kurt laughed out loud. "I can understand your caution," he said. "That theory never goes down well anywhere."

  "Why do you call it the Voyager Institute?" asked Whetu.

  "Because they found that name printed on some of the fragments. Also the word Nasa was found but no meaning could be attributed to it. Voyager we discovered means - ‘One who journeys. A traveller by land. One who goes upon or takes part in a voyage or voyages. A navigator.’"

  "Hmmmn." Whetu thought for a moment. "I suppose it's possible. If we got here why couldn’t it?"

  Buzz waited patiently. He knew something was coming. Ever since he'd first seen KOTUKU II he had felt it. The elucidation they'd been seeking for half a century.

  "Are you thinking what I’m thinking?"

  Whetu nodded. “That this here might be the remains of an early space craft from Earth."

  “Could be the explanation for the languages, the knowledge these guys have.”

  "But nobody's been out this far before."

  "Not as far as we know."

  Buzz felt a strange elation spread through his being. Instinct had told him there was a connection between his life's work and these foreigners. It was like standing at the edge of a precipice watching a new world revealed below. Prehistoric temples and observatories melted into shadow. The mystery was about to be revealed. He felt a profound envy of these foreigners, these travellers from a far planet which he had obsessed over for as long as he could remember. He wanted to do what they had done, to take to the air and fly, to travel across the sky to the source of his dreams, Planet Earth.

  "What else have you got here?" asked Whetu. Buzz shook himself from his reverie and pointed to a door on the far wall.

  The second chamber was similar to the first, but smaller. In its centre in pride of place on a carved black stone plinth stood a simple glass case, pyramid shaped in echo of the space surrounding it.

  "The vessel," said Buzz with quiet reverence. "The source of language."

  They approached the case and peered inside. The vessel was small and oblong, a grey plastic thing with metallic buttons. In front of it were two stacks of half-a-dozen or so black plastic cases, smaller than the device, each one about ten centimetres long by seven wide. On the top case some faded gold lettering was just visible in the gloom. Whetu leaned closer clicking on a pencil flashlight.

  "TDK IEC 1/TYPE 1 NORMAL POSITION D-90," he read aloud.

  "Normal Position?" breathed Kurt. "What does that mean?"

  Whetu moved around to the rear of the exhibit and peered closely at a grimy label peeling off the long edge of the top case. The first word began with L but the rest was illegible. The next words were still there.

  "Tuition Series - Part One," read Whetu in a whisper.

  "Never seen anything like it," said Kurt bobbing down close to the glass. “What do you reckon it is?”

  "I'm sure I've seen something like it somewhere," said Whetu. "A picture in a book maybe. I don't know."

  From where he was standing Whetu had a clear view of the back of the plastic thing. At the base of the device was a small round hole with a silver metal pin inside its tip flush with the opening. Above the hole there was writing.

  "DC in 3V," said Whetu. "Three volts, must be electric powered. Can we open the case, take a closer look?"

  Buzz shook his head firmly. "I'm afraid the rule is exhibits may not be disturbed unless a minimum of five full members of the Institute are present."

  "But there's no-one else here?" said Whetu.

  "And we've come all this way," added Kurt.

  "Rules are rules."

  "Three hard nights across the desert."

  "Waste of our time, if we can't."

  "But these exhibits are priceless."

  "We're not just anyone, mate. You know that."

  "You want to know about this as much as we do, don't you?"

  Buzz looked at the floor. His voice was a mumble. "All of my life."

  "We can't leave here without knowing," said Kurt.

  "Open the case," said Whetu. “Please.”

  Buzz shrugged and drew a bunch of small iron keys from his tunic. He sorted through them and inserted one in a tiny
fissure below the top edge of the rock plinth. He glanced around the room to check nobody was watching then removed the glass cover. He looked away as Whetu reached in to pick up the ancient device.

  It was very light for such a solid looking block. He turned it over to examine more closely the information etched on its base.

  "Sony Stereo Walkman Two." He turned to Kurt who furrowed his brow and shook his head.

  "Sounds like English but it doesn’t mean anything to me."

  Whetu tried the various buttons and controls but the machine did nothing. "Might just be out of juice," he concluded. "We can generate three volts on the ship."

  Buzz grew nervous again. "Removal of exhibits from the institute is expressly forbidden," he began and stopped himself.

  "We'll give you a chit," said Kurt, and they laughed. Eventually Buzz laughed too.

  "If I come with you?" he said. “As custodian.”

  24

  The party of three picked their way through a scrubby mountain wasteland strewn with boulders some as large as small houses. The road was rough and at times ill-defined. Frequently they had to stop and take shelter from the wind and blazing sun. As soon as there was a lull in conditions their guide would motion them to mount their beasts and continue.

  “We’re going round in bloody circles.” Von Wittering had been complaining constantly about the animals’ odour and the lack of saddle comfort. Steve was trying to ignore the complaints and at the same time reassure the old navigator that the journey would not be much longer.

  "You said that before several times in fact and still we're no bloody closer."

  Their guide spoke only a smattering of English so they couldn't converse with any degree of accuracy. Maybe it was as well he couldn't follow VW's constant grizzling. He thought the old man was saying his prayers. The guide had been briefed thoroughly by Jean-Pierre according to instructions and maps drawn by Buzz before his departure to the Voyageur. Much drawing with sticks in the sand was done and there was long discussion in dialect between Jean-Pierre and the gnarled countryman.

  "I know him since I am little boy," said Jean-Pierre. "He know the hills like backs of your hand. You can trust him."

  They were hoisted onto a pair of grumpy droons and set off following their guide out of the back end of Khadees. They were travelling nor-East upwards into the Ab'sala high country in search of a man called Caleen whom Buzz said might be able help them with the stars. Buzz claimed to have known the star-gazer since he too was a little boy. He was an orthodox astronomer so Buzz suggested they remain vague about themselves and their purpose.

  By late morning their guide called a halt and tethered the animals at the edge of a copse of dense wind-stunted scrub. Under the branches of the copse the canopy was low and cool and entirely free of the dry wind that had dogged their progress since dawn. The leaves of the trees grew so densely together on the outside that there was no growth underneath. It was like being under a dense canopy of umbrellas. The leaves themselves were bright green thick and shiny with a grey furry underside. They were small and oval shaped and they grew in clusters of three hardening into sharp thorny tips, as Steve quickly discovered.

  "Na-na-na-na-na!" Their guide leaped towards Steve like a tiny wide-eyed demon and plucked his hands away from the trees. "Bad-bad-baaad," he yelled dancing about like a madman miming epilepsy. He spun round and around in a dazzling display of feigned vomit and convulsion eventually collapsing on the ground at Steve's feet in an orgy of quivering. Steve stepped back, vaguely offended by the display until von Wittering pointed out its probable meaning.

  "I think he's trying to tell you the leaves are poisonous."

  "But the camels are eating them. He's not trying to stop them." He pointed at their three mounts, grazing steadily at the edges of the copse. Their guide shook his craggy head.

  "O'kee fa aaan-ee-maaal," he said. "Baad faa maaan. Ded-ded-ded!" he said and began the show again. "Khendi-khendi-khendi-khendi," he yelled as he whirled and choked. "Khendi baaad!"

  "How can he do that in all this heat?" muttered von Wittering with painful envy. "Man of his age."

  "OK fine," yelled Steve. "We get the picture, thank you. You can stop now!"

  The little man stopped and mimed drink.

  "Yes please," said von Wittering, understanding the gesture immediately. "What you got?"

  The guide led them through the trees to a depression in the dusty earth, a small hole in the ground edged with damp rocks. On the rocks stood a collection of chipped clay mugs.

  "Water," von Wittering observed with disgust. "Haven't we got anything else?"

  When the sun reached its zenith twenty minutes later the wind suddenly departed as if it had never been there. Their guide had been waiting for this moment and when it came he herded them onto their droons and pushed on as if time were in preciously short supply. And it was. In less than an hour the sky to the South began to darken, lending an ominous edge to the quickening wind.

  Their guide glanced back over his shoulder with a look of grim desperation and urged them on with a burst of invective which in spite of the language barrier seemed quite clear. If they didn't move their arses they were going to die.

  As if to add substance to his claims the sky suddenly gathered into a dark swirling mass of blood red cloud which seemed to spread out and surround them. Then from the distant plain came a low elemental rumble and a cluster of thin twisting columns elongated downwards in sinuous claws from the cloud raising billows of dust where they touched the distant plain.

  "I heard it was worse up here," said von Wittering.

  "Ded-ded-ded!" screamed their guide as he whipped his beast into a gallop. Their own animals responded instinctively to the call. All they could do was hold onto their saddles and try not to fall off.

  Before long the first edges of the storm began to reach them, a fine cutting haze driving like needles at their rear. The wind drove with such horizontal force it seemed to pick them up and double their speed. The guide turned back only once to wave his arm towards the top of the mountain. Through the swirling mist of dust they could just make out a foreign shape rising up from the rocky summit now less than two hundred yards distant. Closer it looked like an eccentric roller coaster ride a collection of huge triangular constructions interlocked through hollow centres. It was towards this curiosity that their frantic guide aimed his striding beast.

  25

  A fountain was playing in the centre of the courtyard filling the place with a delicate liquid murmur as it trickled water into a pond overflowing with lush green lily pads and the red wrapped flutes of their blooms. Beyond the edges of the pond stretched a piazza of terra cotta tiles, triangular shapes of increasing size radiating outwards in a series of geometric patterns like an extravagantly patterned rug. Around the margins of the quadrangle ran a spacious portico supported on vine clad stone columns. Striped awnings hung down on the two sides of the structure facing the sun for additional shade at the bright time of day.

  A smell of sweet incense spread through the cool airy gloom under the portico wafting over a long row of wooden cots filling one entire side of the courtyard. The beds were all occupied with quietly breathing sleepers about a hundred in all. This was the demi-mort ward of the Khadees Academy of Medicine.

  Jean-Pierre lurked in shadows of a doorway dressed in the baggy white pyjamas of a medical student. The neck and cuffs of his uniform were trimmed with a narrow blue stripe labelling him a second year apprentice. His eyes were downcast and brimming with tears. From where he stood he could see Layla lying in her bed, her face exquisite in repose. It was a torment day after day to see her like this locked in her shroud of silence and to know she could never be whole again.

  This afternoon he was alone on the shift and the absence of distraction made his misery all the greater. His active work was done. Now he had nothing to do but watch over his charges until nightfall when the shift changed and visitors would come to sit s
ilently with their loved ones. Except for Layla. She never received visitors because she had been disowned by her family. Even before her death her liaison with Abou'ed had caused them to cut her off in shame. The only person who still loved her except for Jean-Pierre was the man who had destroyed her mind and he was imprisoned for life in maximum security under ground at Bara E'diddi.

  Usually Jean-Pierre would talk to her, tell her stories. Sometimes he would read poetry or play his flute to wile away the hours. But this afternoon he couldn't concentrate. The arrival of the strangers had made him restless. He tried to drift but whichever way his thoughts turned, inevitably they found their way back to Layla.

  Through a haze of confusion he began to see his position with new clarity. He loved Layla and would do anything for her. Her current state was an outrage, an affront to the sanctity of life. And worst of all he'd heard rumours of abuse during the long hours of the night shift. Non-conjugal congress was illegal and therefore difficult to access in a society so strictly structured as their own. Necrofornica even with a demi-mort was considered a defilement under orthodoxy and punishable by castration. But Jean-Pierre knew there were some at the academy who were desperate enough to risk it or enterprising enough to facilitate it for a paying client. Layla's beauty would be an obvious target for such unnatural enterprise and the thought of it consumed him with impotent anguish.

  She should be allowed to die with dignity. If nourishment were withheld she would slip away peacefully within the week. But orthodoxy expressly prohibited the extinction of human life under any circumstance. According to the holy men who kept the laws there could be no exceptions. So Jean-Pierre remained cursed by inaction and taunted by his own weakness. How much longer could he bear it? Another week, a month, the rest of the year? He had decided. Whatever the repercussions he could not wait even another day.

  And yet every fibre of his body baulked at the notion of harming even one cell of her precious mindless body, although the more he thought about it the clearer it seemed that he had to do it. He moved slowly towards her bed his eyes averted so as not to encounter her angelic face. His hand groped and found a pillow. His eyes streamed with tears. Moving like a robot he felt his legs touch the wooden side of her cot. The pillow in his shaking hands moved slowly down until it met resistance. He felt something firm and small beneath his hands through the feather pillow and pressed harder and harder and harder until his whole body began to shake.

  "What in the name of God are you doing!" screamed a shrill voice and Jean-Pierre was suddenly awake. His eyes opened and his head spun round to see his supervisor, a short red-faced man, striding towards him from the far side of the courtyard. He heard giggling and in panic remembered what he'd done. He looked down at his hands and discovered he was at the wrong end of the bed. He was attempting to murder Layla's feet and it must have tickled her because she was giggling.

  "Ah," he replied in spluttering dialect. "Um, I was just adjusting the pillows sir." But the supervisor remained unconvinced.

  "You were interfering with the patient's feet."

  "No sir."

  "Don't answer me back, boy! I've had my eye on you. I know what you've been up to and now I've caught you."

  Jean-Pierre felt the man's chubby hand close around his testicles. "You think you can get away with it but if I catch you again I'll…" His eyes bulged and flecks of saliva sprayed from his tight white lips into Jean-Pierre's face. He began to squeeze. "I'll cut them out myself."

  "Sir I…"

  "Quiet! Get back to your work, fornicator, sodomite!" The supervisor was a devout man, a fanatical bigot like many of the teaching staff at the academy. They were hypocrites and this man was the worst. Jean-Pierre leaned very close and gripped the tip of the man's cherry red nose between his teeth.

  "Take your filthy paw away or I'll bite off your sniffer," he hissed through clenched teeth. The supervisor released him and sprang back gripping his nose.

  "Your father will hear of this!" he barked. "Go home. Tell him you are expelled, banished, shamed!"

  "Tell him yourself!" Jean-Pierre moved closer, menacing. The supervisor backed away colliding with a stone pillar. He turned and ran off muttering outrage.

  Jean-Pierre didn't move. All he could hear was the music of Layla's giggles. He had made her happy and now he was wondering how he could have been so blind. How could he presume the right to kill her? Was it to release her from the curse of living death or was it to put him out of his misery? He was as bad as Abou’ed.

  26

  It was cool windless evening when they arrived by jeep at the rooms of the Khadees Cricket Club. Mohammed was driving with the Chairman sitting beside him. They left the vehicle guarded by local children and climbed the stairs to the first floor of the clubrooms. Mohammed entered the supper room behind the Chairman and immediately the burble of voices hushed to silence. Without prompting the sixty mainly elderly men rose to their feet and began to clap. Mohammed followed the Chairman onto a low podium where they halted behind an ornately carved wooden lectern. The Chairman raised his hand for silence and the crowd obliged.

  "Gentlemen, please be seated." The crowd sat but they didn't settle. Clearly there was dissension as well as expectation amongst them. The Chairman's mouth opened, he drew breath but no sound came out. Either he'd forgotten what he was about to say or was hesitant to say it. His audience grew restless. Eventually he began to speak slowly and tentatively.

  "Opinions within our club may differ as to the origins and indeed very nature of our Philosophy of Cricket. In the past there has been debate as to the precise meaning of the definition provided in The Shorter Oxford Dictionary and I quote - 'Cricket, a well-known open air game played with ball, bat and wickets by two sides of eleven players each.'" He paused and looked around the faces of his audience. "We know that a ball is defined as a 'globular body, any planetary body, esp the earth' and there are many references in Pears to games involving balls, cricket being one of them."

  He seemed to be warming up, gaining in momentum although there appeared to be a corresponding rise in tension in the crowd. Mohammed noticed that several factions were becoming apparent.

  "We know of the bat as a stick or club, although some interpret it as a small nocturnal flying mammal with a thin membranous wing stretching from the neck to the toes." This promoted a wave of contentious discussion amongst his peers and he had to wait until the room settled again before he could continue.

  "The wicket, we know it is and I quote - 'a set of three sticks called stumps, fixed upright in the ground and surmounted by two small pieces of wood called bails, forming the structure at which the bowler aims the ball.' But it is also the name given to a small door or gate for foot-passengers to gain ingress and egress when a larger door is closed."

  An argument broke out near the rear of the room and several men got to their feet in order to make their points more strongly. The Chairman was abusing his privilege, shamelessly preaching his controversial speculations.

  "We have long-on, we have square-leg and of course we have the googly. Again there has been debate and disagreement on the meaning of these terms."

  "Hear-hear!" shouted a red-faced old man in the second row. "You tell them!"

  "A great deal of emphasis has been placed on the symbolic level by which this so called game parallels the complex structure of a civilisation which we assume predates our own. Perhaps too much credence has been put on the symbolism."

  Uproar! "Nonsense, what are you driving at, outrageous, etc!" An angry hubbub of discontent filled the room. The Chairman pounded the lectern for order.

  "Maybe we have all been wrong." He paused to let his suggestion sink in. "Which brings me to our distinguished guest, Mohammed Saeed. Many questions are raised merely by his presence here amongst us this evening. These questions relate not only to our game of cricket but to the very basis of our civilisation and the historic interpretations of the Voyager discoveries."

 
There were cries of – “Rubbish!” and “Blasphemy!” Mohammed began to shuffle nervously. This was not what he'd expected. Being a shy man who had never risen above the third eleven at school he'd felt nervous about tonight but Jean-Pierre's father had reassured him that no matter what happened decorum could be guaranteed. Mohammed hadn't opened his mouth and already there were signs of riot.

  "But I would ask you put all that aside tonight and clear your minds of what we have so far believed to be Cricket. Leave reconciliation of the anomalies of philosophy and history to our leaders of conscience."

  By now a slow handclap had began in the back rows, jeers were being openly traded around the room, there was shoving and the beginnings of scuffles. The Chairman continued undeterred.

  "Mohammed Saeed makes a claim which none of us could make. He claims to have engaged in a physical manifestation of what we have pondered as the philosophical tournament of Cricket.” There was silence in the room. “He claims to have played this game in the open air on a field of grass with two teams of eleven players each, two sets of wickets, a bat and a ball."

  There was uproar in the room. As a man the members rose to their feet. "Impossible! Rubbish! Unthinkable! Nonsense!" they shouted. The Chairman pounded the lectern with his gavel and shouted for order but his pleas only fuelled the general state of outrage.

  Mohammed stepped forward and raised his right arm in the air like an umpire signalling dismissal. Slowly the noise subsided. The rowdy gathering settled and stared with rapt curiosity at the strange object he held in his hand. It was long and flat on the face, broad at the top with narrow shoulders at the base above a slim round handle which he gripped. It was made of wood and as he turned it they could see the reverse side had two sloping faces like the shape of a roof.

  "This is a cricket bat." In the silence Mohammed's voice was soft but steady with the strength of authority. "And these are wickets." In his other hand he held up three thin round poles about as long as the bat. He passed them to the Chairman and reached into his pocket.

  "This is what a cricket ball looks like." He held the small red globular body aloft. "They are made of leather and should weigh three ounces." It wasn't a perfect cricket ball but it was as good as he could manage at short notice. The bat and wickets were nearly perfect. They had been fabricated by Kurt in his workshop to Mohammed's specifications. Kurt had arrived back that morning from the Mahaadii with Whetu and Buzz.

  Mohammed threw the ball to the Chairman. He retrieved the wickets and inserted them pointed end first into a line of pre-drilled holes in the floor beside the podium. He placed bails on top of the wickets and took guard side-on in front of his castle. He nodded to the Chairman who took three steps back, gripped the ball firmly in the fingers of his right hand and sighted his objective. He stepped forward and straightening his arm, swung it in a rapid arc over his head. He released the ball at the top of his down-swing and sent it flying towards Mohammed. Mohammed moved his weight onto his back foot and swung the bat sharply forward at the approaching ball. Bat connected with ball on the rise as it bounced just short of his feet. The ball took off rapidly flying high over the heads of the standing members and smashed through a window in the rear wall of the hall. It disappeared outside amidst the sound of falling glass.

  A stunned silence settled over the supper room. Mohammed bowed slightly and stifled a smile. "That, gentlemen," he said. "Is what we would call a six."

  The only movement in the room was that of lips, all of them silently, privately mouthing the same word. "Six."

  27

  Calm descended over the mountain as the sun set. The gentle breeze had a refreshing chill to it and small birds sang in the Khendi trees. Von Wittering and Steve ascended a flight of stone steps from below ground and found themselves in the hub of a structure shaped like a huge stone wagon wheel lying on its side. Above them, from the centre of the hub towered a tall Corinthian column. Around the rim of the wheel at the end of each of the nine spokes a square stone column rose up to a similar height.

  "Sun dial," von Wittering guessed.

  "Time piece." It was a pedantic tone of voice that corrected them. "This is standard time for all people everywhere." Caleen was an oldish man tall and thin with piercing eyes. His taut, tanned face was partially obscured by an extensive white beard.

  Initially he'd been suspicious of them although not for the desperate style of their arrival. Most travellers arrived here the same way, hammering on his door for admittance while the wind and dust raged around them. It was almost half an hour before he'd heard them and unwillingly slid back the bar to let them in. Caleen was a hermit by nature but once they'd established their credentials he warmed a little and claimed to be Buzz's godfather. He asked how the boy was but didn't wait for an answer. This was a pattern with Caleen. He talked but seldom listened, asked a question and answered himself. Maybe it was because he's alone so much, thought von Wittering. He’s used to talking to himself. Now he has someone real to talk to he’s got a lot to say but no patience for answers. He asked where they had come from and how they knew Buzz. Fortunately he didn't wait for an answer. Buzz had warned them the astronomer might appear eccentric but underneath he was an erudite old school orthodox scholar. If they tried to explain to him who they really were and how they'd got here he would either dismiss them as insane or initiate a formal accusation of blasphemy. What they would be suggesting was contrary to orthodox cosmology so best avoided.

  "I imagine it was at the Institute." He muttered the word with disdain.

  "Ask him, go on." Steve whispered to von Wittering.

  "We've barely said hello.”

  Beyond the outer rim of the wheel lay the assemblage of large triangular structures they'd glimpsed on their approach. Like the timepiece they were built from white sandstone cut in perfectly proportioned blocks.

  "What are these for?" asked VW as they moved towards the first edifice towering metres high into the darkening sky.

  "As darkness falls and the stars are revealed the purpose will become clear."

  "So it's an observatory." Von Wittering was already impatient with the astronomer's obfuscations. Caleen seemed surprised at his astuteness.

  From ground level the apex of the triangle trained on the sky like a gun sight. "Here we observe the transition of Eleyas," Caleen intoned like a priest at a sign of the cross. "From each village a man entrusted with crops will come here at the beginning of the first month of Springtide. He will see Eleyas arrive and gain knowledge of the growing season to come, how long it will subsist and how abundant it will be."

  "Hmmn," Steve observed with polite interest. Caleen indicated another stairway to the stars, smaller than the first. "And here we observe the Cluster of Bernees in the autumn to inform us about animal procreation."

  "What about charts?" asked von Wittering. "Do you have charts of these stars, where they all are in relation to each other?"

  The Astronomer glared at von Wittering. Clearly he regarded the question as a professional slur. "Of course I have charts."

  "May I see them?"

  "But why, for what purpose? Are you a biologist or a husbander of animals?"

  "As I said before, I am a navigator."

  "Oh a navigator. I thought you were connected with the agricultural industry."

  "No, I'm not concerned with seasons so much as the general layout of your sky."

  Caleen looked at him in a very odd way. “But if you navigate surely you must already know the sky.”

  Von Wittering hesitated, unsure of how to proceed. Miraculously Steve had the answer. "We are from another region?"

  "Another region?"

  "Yes and we are lost. My colleague will use the stars to guide us back."

  "Back to where?"

  "Back home."

  "Where is that?"

  "That's what we wish to find out.” Von Wittering had found his voice. “With the assistance of your charts."

  The ast
ronomer seemed puzzled. For a moment there was a dangerous look in his eye as if he had maybe smelt a rat but couldn't put his finger on it. They saw it and realised something had to be done quickly or the game would be up. Steve's mouth went dry. He turned to von Wittering. It might have been instinct or maybe the fine network of broken veins blooming like tiny lightning bolts across the old astronomer's cheeks. Or it might just have been the way von Wittering was feeling at the time. Whatever it was, it turned out to be the right answer.

  "By god," von Wittering exclaimed with conviction. "I could use a drink after all that travel, a good strong drink."

  The astronomer's eyes lit up and whatever he'd been thinking was gone in a flash. "A drink? You'd like a drink would you?" he asked seriously.

  "Right now I'd kill for one."

  "Me too," said Steve less convincingly. "Dry as a wooden god!"

  "Then follow me." Caleen set off at speed towards his bunker.

  28

  A group of young women were walking to school in the dawn. Their heads were wrapped in black scarves and they wore long flowing robes of pale green fabric. Each carried a pile of books. As they were about to cross the lane one of them stopped. While the others carried on she raised the hem of her kaftan and dropped down on one knee. Lying on the cobblestones was something the likes of which she'd never seen before. Her friends became impatient.

  "Viens Saalo," they called to her.

  It was a round object the size of a piece of fruit. Her dark eyes burned with curiosity. She leaned over and without touching it examined it more closely. It was red and made of two pieces of thick animal hide stitched roughly together.

  "Depêches-toi Saalo."

  Her fingers reached out and cautiously touched the ball. It was glazed smooth and hard.

  "Que fais-tu Saalo? Allons-y."

  "Mes lacets de souliers," she called. She quickly picked up the ball, stuffed it in her pocket and ran to join them. In her hand it felt heavy for such a small object.

  "Bonjour. Bienvenue à Linguaphone," croaked a female voice through a maelstrom of ragged static. The assembled crew members looked a little disappointed. They had expected something more dramatic, a flash of clarity as mystery rolled back and the little machine gave up its secret. They were all there, even the cynical Celine. Von Wittering was the only absentee. He was drinking at E'kandah, making up for lost time.

  "Ouvrez le livre à page numero une," said the woman's voice.

  "Turn it up!" shouted Liam pushing through to jam his ear against the speaker console.

  "Ecoutez, puis repètez," continued the voice. "La plume de ma tante est dans le jardin."

  "Où est la plume de ma tante?" demanded Liam, and seconds later the voice asked the same question.

  "C'est dans le jardin," added Liam.

  "Bon, très bon," replied the woman with over emphasised encouragement. Liam grinned and started laughing.

  "What's so bloody funny?" asked Steve.

  "My father used to have one of these when I was a kid. It's Linguaphone, a French language Linguaphone. Doesn't look like the one he had but it sounds just the same."

  "Must be magnetic tape," said Whetu. "I read about that stuff somewhere."

  "I used to listen with him when he was trying to learn French."

  "But how would it get on top of that mountain?" Steve appeared mystified.

  "That's because," said Buzz. "It came from Earth on a craft like your own. That's what the ruins are, the wreckage of a space craft from your planet.”

  Steve looked to Whetu and Kurt who had been there and seen for themselves. "Is it possible?"

  "Hard to be sure," replied Whetu. "I'm not big on history but it could be. We know they had the technology back then."

  "And if we have managed to come here," suggested Mohammed. "Then something else could have."

  It was almost possible to hear Steve thinking. "Kurt," he said at last. "Go and get Wittering. He's most likely to know about this."

  "He won't come, sir."

  "Just bring him."

  Von Wittering arrived piggyback, grasping Kurt by the throat. He was well in his cups, mouth slurring but brain still rational. No matter how much the old fellow drank, no matter how hard he tried to obliterate it, his brain refused to submit.

  "What do you know about space travel last century?" asked Steve.

  "Very little," replied the old man.

  "You don't know?" Steve seemed disappointed.

  "I mean there was very little," continued the old man choosing his words with a drunkard's careful step. "They were still working out how to do it."

  "Does the name Voyager ring any bells?" Buzz asked. “Or Nasa for that matter?”

  “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” The old man stared at them. “What about it?”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It was the government space program of the former United States of America, last century and the one before. What was the other thing?”

  "Voyager."

  Von Wittering’s brows furrowed. "Why d'you want to know about Voyager?"

  "You know about it?" Steve asked eagerly. "What is it?"

  "Which one? Voyager One or Two?"

  "Either, both?"

  The old man sighed and shook his head. "There were two of them," he began. "Possibly more. Remote controlled research probes launched into space from Cape Canaveral Florida in nineteen hundred and seventy-seven I think it was. The purpose of the second one Voyager Two, was to relay pictures back to Earth of Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and the outer planets of Earth’s solar system."

  The old man paused, downcast. "The last planet on its list was Neptune. But once its mission was done there was no way of recalling Voyager Two, they couldn't bring her back. I always thought it was a sad story even though she was just a machine.

  "She just sailed on out through the heliopause, casting free of the last shreds of the sun's gravitation. Ultimately she would have pierced the Oort Cloud and voyaged silently out into infinite interstellar space on and on for ever."

  There was silence in the room. The old man had infused his tale with a sense of tragedy.

  "Shortly after the turn of the century the craft's plutonium batteries ran out and her last dwindling contact with Earth was lost."

  "Plutonium batteries," asked Whetu.

  "Nuclear fission," replied von Wittering. "Old style energy source before solar caught on. Very popular for years but unstable. Dirty stuff, dangerous. Voyager Two, the thought of her still haunts me, primitive little craft built by our forebears to lead us into the new age still voyaging blindly onwards even though she was long ago lost and superseded."

  "Until she was washed up on our shores," Buzz continued in the same vein. "And enriched our lives with her mysteries. A happy ending perhaps?"

  "Happy ending?" Von Wittering was still in the dark although it was dawning on the rest of them.

  "We think Voyager Two has crashed on a mountain top in our Mahaadi Desert," explained Buzz. "Our scholars have been puzzling over it’s remains for more than a fifty years now. The source of our ancient languages so-called and codes of knowledge."

  "Here we go," said Whetu. All the while he'd been working on The Beast, running a cross-reference through the data log under – HAZARDS : SPACE JUNK : VOYAGER 2.

  "Voyager Two was actually launched first, at Cape Canaveral Florida August twenty, nineteen seventy-seven. Voyager One was launched from Canaveral on September five the same year." There was a picture of it on screen, an odd looking unbalanced thing with components sticking out in all directions. One of these bits was a criss-cross section like a crane boom.

  Buzz recognised it immediately and felt foolish. "Damn it, of course," he said hitting himself on the forehead. "That’s how it goes together. Why didn't I see it?"

  Whetu continued reading off the scanner. "It says here that Voyager Two contained a selection of basic informatio
n and objects from the twentieth century to provide an impression of Earth civilisation for any intelligent life forms it might encounter. There were items of food, books, photographs, moving pictures, music. A recording of Johnny B. Goode by someone called Chuck Berry."

  "Johnny B. Goode," smiled Buzz. "Who was this Chuk Berri?"

  "I have no idea," said Whetu. "My father knew the song but he never said anything about any Chuck Berry."

  "So where does this leave us?" asked Steve.

  "Beyond Neptune in a barbed wire canoe without a paddle," said von Wittering opening his jacket and withdrawing a sheaf of folded papers. "Can't be more specific than that even with these."

  He spread out four hand-drawn charts of blobs and circles interconnected by arrows and dotted lines and annotated with notes in fine flowing script. Buzz's mouth dropped open in astonishment.

  "Caleen gave you these?" He couldn't believe it.

  "Well I, borrowed them. He'll get them back before he knows they're gone." Von Wittering made a gesture of tippling and raised his eyebrows. Buzz understood.

  "Now all we've got to do is fill the gap between here and Neptune and we're back on the map." Von Wittering turned and tottered towards the door. "I'll be at the bar thinking about it if you need me," he said and disappeared.

  "Where did you find it?"

  "In a gutter in the Diddi Lane."

  "What were you doing there?"

  "I was on my way to school. The lane is at the back of your club house."

  The Chairman smiled wearily. He had already interviewed almost thirty people that day with a similar story and now all he wanted was to go home.

  Saalo had been on her way home from school when she spotted a flier flapping on the wall outside a tailor's shop. Reward, it said, and beneath was a crude drawing of the small round red object she had found lying in the lane the day before. Please return to the Chairman of the Khadees Cricket Club and a reward will be paid.

  There was no mention of the amount of reward. Saalo didn't know what a cricket club was but nonetheless she wrote down the address. Since she had found the ball she had wondered what it could be and where it had come from. Caution had stopped her from asking her mother or her father about it. Small and unassuming as it was, the object felt so exotic and unknown that she knew it must be forbidden.

  When the Chairman finally received her he was polite but sceptical. "You are the thirtieth person I have received today," he said. "All of whom claimed to have found our ball." He paused and sighed wearily. "Yesterday there were equal numbers of tricksters seeking the reward."

  "I have it with me."

  "Show me."

  "What is the reward?" persisted Saalo

  "Show me the ball and I will tell you."

  Saalo withdrew the ball from inside her robe and held it out. For a moment the Chairman didn't move. His eyes were glued to the object in her hand. He reached for it suddenly but Saalo was quicker. She snatched it away.

  "The reward," she said. "I want to talk about the reward."

  "We will pay you."

  "I don't want money."

  "Then what?"

  "I want to join your club."

  The Chairman laughed. Could she be serious? "But no girl, no woman has ever belonged to our club."

  "Why not?" Saalo seemed perplexed. "Is it illegal?"

  "Well no, strictly speaking but it has never occurred before."

  "But there is no impediment?"

  The Chairman frowned. "I would have to consult the Board of Governors. They would all have to approve." He emphasised all.

  "How long will that take?"

  "We will meet again next month."

  "Fine." Saalo stood and turned towards the door replacing the ball in her pocket. "I will return then."

  "Wait!" The Chairman was on his feet and following her. "What about our ball?"

  "Until then the ball will be safe with me." And she left.

  The Chairman caught up with her in the street. "Wait," he cried. Saalo stopped and waited for his answer. "Perhaps a special meeting could be called."

  29

  "It's beautiful outside, the evening light," said Celine. "You should get out for a change, get some air."

  "Has the wind dropped?"

  "Not a breath."

  Tonight was a night off and like most other nights off Steve and Celine found themselves alone together eating in the deserted canteen. Whetu was cloistered in the radio shack and although Liam was often around he was gone tonight to spend the evening drinking with von Wittering at E'kandah. VW had become a fixture in the tavern with Caleen's star charts spread on the bar before him, pondering their meaning, looking for a breakthrough.

  The damage report on KOTUKU II had revealed their situation was not as grave as first thought. There were serious breaches in the bow and starboard side of the ship and one of their engines was beyond repair. Buzz had located quantities of bamboo in Khadees. He had constructed scaffolding and tripod hoists to raise the sections of metal sheet required to patch the open wounds in the ship's skin. The metal had been scavenged from inside the craft and although it wasn't the required thermal grade for external covering it would later be heat shielded with ceramic tiles. The tiles were being cast at a local pottery. When ready they would be re-fired at an iron foundry in Khadees at maximum heat for extra hardness. Steve believed that so long as their re-entry into Earth's atmosphere was relatively slow and shallow they could survive touchdown. The prognosis for getting the mission back on track was improving. Steve was feeling cautiously confident. Yet something Buzz had said a few days before still rang a warning bell in his ear.

  "I think it's fortunate that most of these people still don't believe you are aliens from another planet," he had told Steve. "At the moment their mood is tolerant but it will not last forever."

  "Are we in danger?"

  "Not yet. But I believe you should not waste time. One day a fanatic will come who will find an advantage in denouncing you. Many have confronted the rock of orthodoxy before but none has triumphed."

  The light in the sky was dimming as they emerged from the ship and in the windless conditions a fine haze had spread from the volcano, staining the colours of the plain purple and deep pink. As they walked across the cooling sand Celine felt pleased to have encouraged Steve out of the ship. Since landing the tension between them had reduced and past conflicts appeared to be behind them. Steve seemed to have forgotten everything, including the tumultuous events leading up to their emergency landing. Celine was trying to find a discreet way of reminding him of the better bits. She couldn't tell if his memory lapse was genuine or a convenient excuse to avoid further intimacy.

  "You've been terrific, Steve, the way you’ve got us all organised, noses to the grindstone."

  Steve shrugged. "I still feel we should be doing something about George.”

  "Like what?" Celine was working hard to keep irony from her voice. She wanted to avoid antagonism, preserve the moment. "Please let's not talk any more about donating your head."

  "But there must be something we could do to make him comfortable at least."

  "He's dead Steve, you can't get more comfortable than that. Why don't you let him go and get on with your own life?"

  "He's not dead. We know that now."

  "He may as well be. He can't walk or talk or even breathe for Christ's sake." Sarcasm had arrived unbidden. She had to bite her tongue back. "What I mean is," she continued mildly. "We can't help him. No-one can."

  Steve walked on in silence. He seemed to have levelled out of late, taking a more sensible less hysterical approach to the enduring question of his dead friend.

  "Maybe something can be done when we get back," she suggested by way of truce. "There's nothing we can do here, now."

  "Yeah," agreed Steve. "You could be right." They walked in silence for a while.

  "How long before we're ready to leave here?" She began steering
him back to neutral ground. Steve shook his head.

  "If we keep motivated we could be ready in a month, maybe. But I have to keep reminding them. They're like a bunch of bloody tourists, visiting ruins, lectures on cricket. Hugo's working part time as a barman, it's unbelievable. These are commissioned officers on a mission."

  "Only to be expected after being locked in a tin can for a year."

  "There's someone coming." Steve was squinting at a tiny figure ambling towards them from the direction of Khadees. The figure waved to them.

  "It's the boy, Jean-Pierre," said Celine.

  Jean-Pierre desperately needed someone to talk to. He would have preferred his oracle Mohammed but as fate would have it the nervous Captain and strange woman doctor were the first crew members he saw.

  "I quit!" he yelled with a bray of elation. "No more academy, no more dead peoples!" And he poured out the whole sorry saga of his torment, his impossible love for Layla and his bungled attempt to euthanize her. He was in trouble but at least he was free from the humiliation and mental anguish of bearing witness to the daily horror. Steve made no comment but Celine was interested.

  "Tell me about this brain poison, what's it called?"

  "Khendi from tree leafs."

  "And it deals to the brain and leaves the body alive?"

  "It kill only brain."

  They had turned and were moving back towards the ship Celine and Jean-Pierre leading. Steve followed behind, listening.

  "And what do you call these victims?"

  "Demi-mort, half dead."

  "So why don't you just pull the plug, let them die?"

  "I want but law not allow. This is my agony. Keep her live for nightshift hooker." He quickly explained the celibacy situation.

  "Weird," concluded Celine. “Horrible.”

  "How many of these patients do you have at your academy?" At last Steve spoke, a casual inquiry.

  "Maybe hundred at academy. In other place many more."

  "And you have men there as well as women?"

  "Yes. Man, womans, all sex, all age."

  "Interesting," Steve mused and fell silent.

  When they returned to the ship Steve excused himself and made his way to the cooler. He found the freezer R/L29K and switched on the inside light. He stood gazing at the pale ice-bound form of his dead friend and mentor.

  "Would you pardon me George if I shared a thought with you?" he whispered. "It may seem distasteful, it may be impossible,” he began cautiously. “It's just a thought so please forgive me if you find it abhorrent."

  Jean-Pierre was in the canteen drinking a bottomless cup of Mohammed's coffee and smoking a French cigarette when Steve caught up with him. He had a request to make and for once he didn’t beat about the bush.

  "How about it?" he finally asked.

  "No I don't go back there." Jean-Pierre replied with startling passion. "I swear I don't do it, jamais!"

  "All I want is pictures, that’s all. Here." Steve thrust a tiny camera into the youth's hand. The device was no bigger than a matchbox. "You can keep it when you're finished."

  "You want me make pictures?"

  "With this." He held it up to his eye. "Just the men."

  "But why?"

  "I can't tell you that yet." Steve had abandoned caution. Could he trust the kid? There seemed no alternative. "Come with me," he said and headed for the stairs. The boy lingered, unsure whether to follow.

  30

  The stone roofs of the ancient stronghold of Bara E'diddi lay like the bottoms of a flotilla of overturned boats amongst waves of shifting sands deep in the desert of E'haadi. Above ground at this time of year all that could be seen were the roofs of the city. Until the winds subsided and the sands stabilised E'diddi was an underground compound on seven levels, a massive rabbit warren of stone pillars in-filled with walls of wood and clay. On its upper levels it was an oasis and market town, but in its deepest depths it was a maximum security prison where the most dangerous transgressors against orthodoxy were kept hidden from righteous citizens. Towards the end of every winter prisoners were brought to the surface in work gangs to dig out the sand-bound southern zone of the city and for a few months E'diddi would enjoy a more pleasant open-air aspect. But as soon as summer began to fade the winds would return and with them the choking sands.

  At the nethermost point of E'diddi prison lay the pit, a dank flame lit quarry where the very hard men served their time. It was here that Abou'ed alias The Shadow toiled breaking rocks, sentenced to a lifetime's hard labour. It was here that he heard a rumour that a kid, a boy doctor at the Medical Academy at Khadees was hot for his girl. His revenge had bitten back at him. Even locked in her living hell it seemed Layla was not safe from the impure attentions of some pervert boy. Ed turned towards Khadees, raised his manacled arms and let out a howl both mournful and ferocious. The tattoos on his forearms seethed like coiled snakes and tears rolled down his rugged face.

  "He will die!" he screamed. The bearer of the news was already dead, a pile of bloody rags lying in the dust. The others in the compound, those who had shared in the scandal remained mute, counting themselves lucky to be still alive. Ed was not the biggest man in the pit but he was crazy with a kind of madness that knows no limit, no pain. There was nobody in E’diddi who would dare oppose him.

  "I will hunt the defiler down." His eyes burned blind to the pack of cowering sycophants surrounding him. “I will dismember his carcass and swill his blood.” He spoke quietly but with conviction and no thought of who might overhear him. He knew no-one would dare repeat his threats. His cronies bowed their heads in silent dread knowing full well that they would be the building blocks upon which he would mass his escape. They would be the ladder he would climb to scale the walls of E'diddi. It only remained to discover which part they would play in his bloody assault.

  31

  Every spare moment outside of his authorised tasks Whetu spent in the radio shack inside the VRT or staring at his scanners painstakingly scouring the old ship sector by sector, creeping down ducts and companionways into every recess and compartment. His voice was hoarse from repetition - "Mariana, can you hear me? Mariana where are you?" It was an entreaty without end. "Mariana answer me please. Are you alive? Mariana, are you hurt? Mariana, Mariana." The only consolation was in speaking her name but there was no answer today as every other day.

  He closed down the system and prepared to leave. Liam would be back from the oasis by now and soon they would start the night shift, supervising the removal of Electro-magnetic Thrust Unit/3, which had failed diagnostic scrutiny on all counts. If they couldn’t repair it, it was out. Load factor was critical to getting the old girl off the ground.

  He entered a new sequence of commands on his console and switched his scanner to the engine room. The external hatch inched open and outside he could see a perfect starlit night and Buzz waiting with his team of helpers, labourers from Khadees. As soon as the defunct EMTU was removed Buzz would load the dismantled sections onto the string of patiently waiting droons and they would depart. Every evening for the past week pack trains had set off for the Mahaadii with crates of booty - fused circuit boards, faulty instruments and boxes of randomly assorted componentry. Buzz wanted all of it for the museum, even the dead engine. Whetu left the radio shack and began to make his way down to B/deck where Liam would be waiting for him to break out a fresh work detail of meatheads. In the morning when the shift was done he would continue his search for Mariana.

  Moving down the corridor he heard voices as he neared the sick bay. One in particular was raised in anger. It was the ship's doctor. He edged closer to the open doorway. At the far end of the surgery beside the doctor's desk Steve and Celine stood nose-to-nose.

  "You're nuts." Celine was shouting and waving her arms. "I thought you were coming right but you're not. You're off your bloody rocker!"

  "I don't want a lecture. Just tell me if you think it's feasible."

  "Y
ou've got to be out of your mind."

  "Is it possible? Just tell me."

  Celine looked away and thought for a moment. "Anything's possible but forget it Steve, I'm not going to do it and that's that!"

  "What can happen? They’re both dead anyway, in a manner of speaking."

  "What about the donor?"

  "Jean-Pierre can find someone suitable."

  "No Steve." She was adamant. "Absolutely no! It's fucked up, twisted."

  Whetu moved back from the door so as not to be seen. When he looked back Steve was staring at the floor, an odd expression on his face. He looked back at Celine. "There must be something I can give you in return?"

  Celine's face coloured. She unleashed a vicious open handed slap, snapping Steve's head back. "That's low, Steve. That's dirty," she snarled. "I never thought you of all people would stoop to that."

  "Think about it. You don't have to answer now," he said. "Sleep on it."

  She wound up to slap him again but he caught her arm and held it firmly in his grasp. She swung at him with her other hand but he caught that too and forced her back against the wall. They struggled for a moment, Celine's green eyes glittering with disgust and humiliation. Slowly Steve moved against her. His mouth closed over hers’. She froze and for a moment remained rigid, not resisting. Then she heaved against him with sudden explosive force, kneeing him hard in the groin. Steve gasped and staggered backwards clutching himself, gagging for breath. She followed flailing at him with bunched fists until his knees buckled and he collapsed on the floor.

  "You're a sick, sick bastard!" she yelled as she ran towards the door. Whetu pulled back against the wall. Celine, blinded by tears did not see him.

  "Think about it!" Steve called after her breathlessly, still clutching his injured parts. "You might want to change your mind!"

  Whetu resisted a natural urge to go to Steve’s assistance. Something about what he’d witnessed made him uncomfortable. He turned the other way and proceeded to the dungeons by an alternative route.

  Five old men sat in wicker armchairs in front of the KCC clubhouse watching the activity of a group of young men on the far side of the compound where an enclosure of nets had been erected. The gardens of the club had recently been uprooted, the ground inside the walled perimeter flattened and planted with grass. Already it was turning green under the constant attention of numerous ground staff. The old men muttered and complained the way old men often do while watching cricket, yet although their discussion referred to the game their words were of blasphemy and heresy. They were displeased. Mutiny was in the air.

  “Our game was never intended to be flaunted in this manner. It contravenes all the laws of orthodoxy. The correct place for cricket is in the mind where it can do no harm."

  It was true, plainly stated in the Common Book of Prayer and Guidance that games of conflict were permitted only a theoretical level. Some were encouraged as a purgative of violent thought. The game of cricket had been practised for more than a century as the superlative mind game, the ultimate cerebral competition reserved for the brightest minds. And yet here before their very eyes the game had been reduced to an illegal contest of brute strength pitting corporeal bowler against physical batsman, of solid ball hurled against timber wickets and defended by a lump of wood. Base blasphemy! And who was playing the game now? Rough youths no better than animals. Ritual violence had become formalised reality. It was flagrant heresy and the punishment for heresy, as they all knew was death.

  "To stand by and do nothing is to connive at apostasy."

  “It would be a crime.”

  “God will punish us.”

  "Something must be done. This outrage must be reported.”

  “We need to seek guidance.”

  Not only had these men been excluded from the training squad currently undergoing coaching for the inaugural KCC club match, they had also been omitted from the panel of umpires. These five men were amongst the oldest members of the KCC which was in turn the oldest cricket club in the land. By their own reckoning they were the most experienced exponents of the custom and history of the game. They had been excluded because of their opposition to the proposed match citing inconsistencies with divine doctrine. In the past none of them had been particularly devout but now that they had been excluded they were righteously offended.

  “Who will stand up for the truth? Who will challenge the heretic?” The ringleader, a retired grain merchant called Garaam was directing his ill will at Mohammed who seemed the easiest target since he was a foreigner.

  Meanwhile players and coach were too absorbed in their endeavours to notice the murmurings at long leg. The five diehards were considered harmless. No-one imagined that any of them might rise up from his wicker chair and hoist a banner of rebellion. The powers of resentment and conservatism had been underestimated.

  "The conspiracy might run deeper than we suspect.” One of Garaam’s cronies advised in a tone of caution. “Enemies of the state could be at work here."

  "Use your feet and keep the bat straight!” Mohammed's voice rang out in encouragement. “That’s right, just block the ball until you get the right one." His words were absorbed at close range by a very different audience. Inside a three-sided enclosure of nets a young man gripped a cricket bat in front of a row of wickets. Outside the nets a crowd of young men wearing baggy white trousers took turns hurling a small red ball at him. Others stood waiting for the chance to catch the ball when hit back in their direction. Mohammed stood in the middle of proceedings conducting a simultaneous batting, bowling and catching master class. Adjacent to the practice strip a team of groundsmen were working with rakes and a large iron roller preparing a playing pitch of compacted clay in the centre of the oval shaped park.

  The batsman in the nets took guard, shuffling in his crease for a comfortable stance. Mohammed called to the bowler who had walked back and was turning to run up. "Pitch it up wide of leg stump." And then back to the sweating batsman. "Now hook it behind you! There's no-one there."

  The bowler, a tall slim youth loped in, swung his arm over and hurled the ball towards the batsman. The batter followed the ball with his bat and connected as it passed by. The ball flew high in the air over the nets and off towards the gallery of unsuspecting side-line humbugs. It plummeted downwards to collide with the table containing their lunch. There was an explosion of food and ale as the table disintegrated. The young men around the nets burst into spontaneous applause.

  The old men leaped to their feet, dripping with food and beverage. Aghast, they gaped at the red leather ball as if it were a fireball from heaven.

  "It is a sign!" cried Garaam. "An omen!"

  "What's he talking about?" asked another man who had been asleep.

  "He says it's an omen."

  Garaam seized the moment. He lowered his voice to a vindictive hiss. "He is a heretic.” Pointing at Mohammed. “An emissary of the devil.”

  "He's right," chimed another cynic. "Physical enactment of warfare is expressly forbidden."

  "Atheism, seditious heresy!"

  "Blasphemy! This must be stopped before it gets out of hand."

  "Someone should do something about it."

  "Very good," enthused Mohammed. "Take a rest now and let someone else bat. Tomorrow when the other strips are ready we will set up more nets and you can all bat for longer."

  He moved towards the bowler nodding with approval. "Good bowling, good control." The youth listened carefully. He was tall, slim and finely featured and wore a multi-coloured peaked cap. "Now try the out-swinger. Grip the ball across the seam angled away from the bowler and pass your arm across the body in follow through."

  "What will it do?" asked bowler in a soft voice that took Mohammed's breath away. The youth removed his cap and out tumbled skeins of glossy dark hair revealing him to be a young woman, taller than the diminutive Indian by at least a head.

  "It will move in the air like a swallow," said
Mohammed quietly. "And it will not land where the batsman expects it to be. Instead of hitting the middle of his bat the ball will fly from the edge into the hands of your slip catcher."

  "And he will be out?"

  "Walking back to the pavilion."

  Saalo tried the action a few times just as Mohammed suggested but without releasing the ball.

  "Ready," cried the new batsman impatiently, and Saalo turned into her run up. As her foot reached the crease line her right arm whipped over sending the ball through the air in a rapid curving arc. The batsman moved forward but the ball landed just as Mohammed said it would. It bounced up and caught the outside edge of the bat. To the batsman's and everyone else's astonishment it flew behind him, low and level past the stumps. A young man standing outside the net mimed the catch behind. The batsman cursed as a burst of respectful applause swelled from the catchers.

  The other players were still wary of this young woman competing freely in their midst. It was unusual for a girl other than a sister to be allowed amongst them without chaperone. Her mother had maintained a constant vigil at the side of the field every day since coaching began with a couple of aunts in attendance. Saalo took no notice of their presence. Nor did she show any interest in any of the young men in the squad. She seemed interested only in learning to play cricket and that confused them. She had reflex and accuracy and better concentration than any of them. But most disconcerting of all, she was beautiful.

  "First slip," said Mohammed with a chuckle. "Very good. Now do it again."

  "Thank you," Saalo replied with a modest smile.

  Mohammed blushed. He was feeling a rare discomfort he had never felt before. The advice he had generously offered Jean-Pierre a short time before had taken on new meaning. For the first time in his life Mohammed was smitten.

  Jean-Pierre returned from the academy late in the afternoon. Steve was waiting for him in his cabin trying hard to conceal his excitement. He took the camera from the boy and downloaded the images to a viewer. Immediately the face of a man appeared on-screen. His eyes were closed, his face immaculately groomed, plump and waxy. Steve shrugged and shook his head. "No that's not him." He pressed the forward arrow.

  The next face was leaner but the nose was too broad and the lips a little full. He moved on to the next and the next and was beginning to show signs of impatience when Jean-Pierre interrupted. "Best is last, four more."

  Steve skipped to the end to reveal a pleasant, angular well-proportioned intelligent face. The man had a fair complexion and might have been aged thirty-four or thirty-five. Like the others he was well-groomed and healthy looking and like the others he appeared to be happily asleep. Steve stared at the picture a long time before he spoke.

  "I like this one," he said finally. "What colour eyes?"

  "Brown. Everyone had brown eyes. I think this is best for you."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Because he has no visitor. No body know where he from."

  "So no-one would miss him if he went away?"

  "No body."

  "How tall?"

  "Just like Captain?"

  "Get me some close shots of his head, both sides and the top," Steve said. "Then we'll know." He gave the camera back to Jean-Pierre.

  "Mais, I cannot go back to there."

  "Come on, it's just a few pictures and a couple of head measurements – circumference, forehead, and front to back. Won't take long."

  Steve showed him how to use the tape measure and record the measurements. Jean-Pierre abandoned protest. He promised to have the pictures and dimensions by next evening. Now all Steve needed was to get Celine on side. That would be the hard part.

  32

  Dawn broke heralding the end of the night shift. Whetu and Liam watched Buzz lead the last droon train out across the plateau and descend over the lip towards E'kandah and beyond. The archaeologist stopped, waiting for the train to pass him by. When it was gone he turned back to them, saluted and departed. In eight days he would be back at the institute to begin the massive task of organising space for his new exhibits. He had promised to return before their departure.

  "Crazy man," observed Liam as he turned wearily towards the mob of hungry surly meatheads milling about by the engine room hatch. "But an amusing fellow."

  "Never met anyone like him,” said Whetu. "I'm going to miss him being around."

  They began herding the exhausted labourers back towards their quarters on B-Deck. Ratko aka The Chief had organised a docile gang for the outside work. None of them had so far caused any trouble. As always they seemed more anxious to get back inside at the end of a shift rather than attempt escape. Rumours had spread of vicious flesh eating beasts stalking the surrounding hills, rumours overheard from conversations between their gaolers and taken seriously to heart. It wasn't until they'd all passed through the dungeon doors and Liam had turned the key that they realised they were three men short.

  "Count 'em again," said Liam. But it was too late. The labourers had dispersed inside their stinking compound. Most of them were likely already asleep.

  "I counted eleven," said Whetu.

  "So did I."

  "We couldn't both be wrong, could we?"

  "Might still be outside or asleep in the engine room."

  They searched but the three truants weren't in the engine room or any of its neighbouring compartments. Nor were they visible outside the ship. They were gone.

  "Steve's going to have kittens," said Liam, stifling a grin.

  "He should warn the militia in Khadees asap."

  "Or reanimate François. They'd be back like a shot if they knew he was after them."

  In the absence of François who knew the prisoners, Liam and Whetu had misjudged and gone for an easy option. They were relieved to find a volunteer willing to organise the work gangs for them. Ratko appeared to be a plausible leader. Naively they never suspected his co-operation concealed an ulterior motive.

  “So what’s the plan, boss?” Neil asked when they were far enough away from the ship to feel safe from immediate pursuit.They had stopped running and had found a trail leading towards the winking lights of Khadees nestled in the distant foothills.

  "First thing I'm gonna do is get laid," Ratko gasped, still trying to get his breath back. "I want a decent fuck. No disrespect mate."

  “None taken.” Neil, the boy Ratko and Bo had previously fought over seemed relieved at the news.

  "No more skinny bumboy. Gimme some nice juicy snatch, blonde or maybe redhead I don't care so long as she’s fat."

  “I just want to get loaded,” Neil replied. “They must have weed round here somewhere.”

  "I'm gonna get a feed first.” Big Bo’s priorities were also quite clear. After thirteen months incarceration in the dungeon fresh air and open space meant nothing to them. All they could think of was sex drugs and food. The only way their tastes differed was in the order of preference. “A big feed, then a fight and a fuck.”

  "I need get out of my mind, forget the shit for a while."

  "Burger or a pizza, big fucker all dressed with sardines and sausage, the works man. Then a fight."

  “Whatever happens.” Ratko wanted to make his intentions clear. “Even if the pricks manage to get the ship going again I’m not dying in some miserable work camp on Mars.”

  “Me neither.” Neil was deep in thought, already making plans for the future, extending the excursion to on-going liberty. “No-one’s bitch no more.”

  “Good luck with that. Bo’s still gonna need somewhere to park up.”

  “Huh?” Bo grunted.

  “I want to go back to school.” Neil ignored the gibe.

  “School, you?” Ratko laughed. The idea seemed ridiculous but Neil just nodded. “Moron.”

  "Hey, we should hijack the ship, take it back home." Bo stopped and looked back the way they came. “Mutiny.”

  “Way ahead of you, man.” Ratko smirked. “That’s the pla
n, always has been.” He had been in no immediate hurry when he’d seen the window of opportunity opening. He had restrained the other two from jumping until the time was right. “When we’ve had some fun and they’ve done the work, we come back and take over.”

  "We kill the pricks," said Bo. “Kill the lot of them.” Bo didn't care for anybody, not even himself.

  "No way. We're gonna need them to drive the bus. I don't wanna get stuck in this dump for the rest of my life."

  "We haven't seen it yet," Neil suggested. "It might be alright."

  "It stinks." Ratko didn’t like contradiction. "Can smell it from here." Bo didn’t say anything. He was thinking about food and fighting.

  They were about to move off when Ratko stopped them. "What's that noise."

  They stood in silence and there it was, a distant rattling sound coming closer. Whatever it was it was heading straight for them.

  There was nowhere to hide. The plateau stretched flat in all directions not a bump or a boulder in sight, just a single bush scrubby and low to the ground. Neil reached it first. He dived under without pausing to consider the vicious thorns protruding at all angles. The bush was even smaller than first appeared and incapable of disguising one man let alone three. Ratko followed then Bo lumbered in and pushed them out of the way. They were still tussling for coverage pressed hard to the ground when the vehicle arrived. It was upon them and gone, a whirr of electric motors rattling body panels and a cloud of dust. They didn't see what it was until it turned at right angles to them half a mile away. It appeared to be a jeep with two occupants heading towards the ship.

  Steve and Jean-Pierre didn't see the fugitives. They were deep in conversation.

  It was mid morning before a couple of boys playing in a creek at the edge of town saw them stumbling across the desert, three red and green striped figures moving surreptitiously from bush to bush. By the time they broke cover and dashed across open ground to the cover of the packed mud perimeter wall of the town the boys were gone and half the population of the back end of Khadees knew the fugitives had arrived.

  "Now what do we do?" Neil turned to Ratko.

  "We do what we came to do." Ratko seemed less certain now that he was there. “Get down man!” Bo was urinating in a ditch.

  "So how do we do that?"

  "One of us goes in to look around?" Ratko was showing signs of irritation. “Comes back and reports.” He didn’t like being challenged by his former bitch. “Then we move.”

  “So we’ll wait here then.”

  “Eh?”

  “You’re the leader, boss.”

  “Bo can go.”

  Bo nodded. “Sure, I don’t mind.”

  “What if he doesn’t come back? I’m not sitting here like one of them ducks. What if he starts a fight and gets arrested?”

  “Let the fuckers try.”

  “We should stick together, boss. Safety in numbers.”

  They paused at the arch of a gateway through the town’s outer wall. Ratko gave the signal and they darted across a rutted laneway into the cover of a dark alley. The alley reeked of urine and animal dung and twisted uphill out of sight between rows of white painted mud houses. Nearby there were sounds of activity a rumble of voices and the bray of animals. Ratko pointed and pushed Bo up the alley. He shoved Neil ahead and followed several cautious paces behind. Ahead the alley opened out into a wider space. Bo stopped. He turned back to them wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

  “You gotta see this, man.” Neil then Ratko sidled up behind their human barrier. None of them had ever seen anything like it. "Bloody priests, hundreds of them."

  “Jesus.” It was all Ratko could think to say.

  Their vantage point overlooked a small square surrounded by tall stone and adobe buildings. It was packed with cowled plainsmen all arguing over a terrified goat trembling in the centre of their midst. Men outnumbered the sad beast by a hundred-to-one. It appeared they all had the same thing in mind, to possess the goat.

  "We're gonna stand out like dogs' balls around here." Neil was right. Their bright striped prison pyjamas glowed like beacons in the earth-toned environment.

  "Unless we get ourself some've them priest coats."

  "We could roll a couple of them," suggested Ratko. "They're not too big."

  "Yeah but there’s more of them than us.” Neil was emerging as the voice of caution. “Maybe we should try a less hostile approach.” Bo didn’t know what he meant. Ratko shook his head.

  “What have you got in mind, professor?”

  “I don’t know but I don’t think we should piss them off.”

  As if to illustrate his point one the cowled figures produced a broad blade and with a single swift blow beheaded the goat. That seemed to settle the argument.

  “They don’t worry me.” Bo was amping for action but Ratko put a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Yeah mate, but let’s wait till one of them comes over here. Then we’ll jump him.”

  An hour later they were no further ahead. Although the townsfolk came and went from the square none of them were considerate enough to pass their way. Their grand plan to get lost and laid had foundered for the most traditional of reasons. They lacked the right clothes. As noon approached, the sun began to beat down with merciless vigour and they might well have given up if the help had not found them.

  "Hey boys, you wanna meet someones?" He didn't look like the other townsfolk. He was small and smooth skinned and dressed differently. His robe was black and tight fitting and his neck and fingers glittered with bright metal jewellery. On his head he wore a scull cap of luminous beads.

  "Very clean ladies. She likes to meet you boys for sure." He chuckled lasciviously and backed away indicating they should follow. “For sure she do good times.”

  Ratko and Bo looked at each other with sly dumbfounded smiles. They couldn’t believe their luck. In terms of what they were after this appeared to be the answer. Neither of them was an astute judge of character. Their lives to date had been one continuous bad move so anything that wasn’t prison looked good to them. Neil felt otherwise.

  “Fellas,” he began but neither of his companions was listening.

  "What I tell you." Ratko grinned. "Stick with me boys you gonna have a good time." He stepped forward thrusting out his hand towards the slippery little man. There was instant rapport between them.

  "Gidday there. The name's Ratko, this is Bo and Neil." The little man limply gripped his hand and smiled. "We'd love to meet your friend. And maybe a couple more of her friends."

  The little man bowed deeply and gestured to an open doorway a short distance back down the lane. He set off towards it. Ratko and Bo followed without hesitation. Neil had no choice.

  Liam slapped the inanimate security officer hard in the face but the man didn't flinch. He took a step back and drove his fist like a piston into the man's stomach but still François made no reaction. Liam's knuckles just bounced off, painfully. It was like punching a brick wall.

  "We're trying to rouse him not kill him," Celine observed sardonically. "Aren't we?"

  "Bastard." Liam whacked François on the jaw but the big man's head barely moved. Liam rubbed his painful hand. "I don't get it, how can he be so asleep?"

  "Cataleptic somnipathy is a kind of cognitive hibernation," explained Celine. "Can be caused by concussion, aneurism, tumour or trauma like a blow to the head."

  "He hasn't moved since we put him here. How can he just sit there motionless week after week?" Whetu stood in the doorway wielding a hard rubber truncheon just in case the s/o tried to surprise them. “He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t shit. Is he still alive?”

  Nothing had changed in the brig since they'd last looked several weeks before. François was sitting on the edge of his bunk in a strait jacket, the tray of food at mouth height on a stand in front of him untouched as always. Mohammed replaced it every morning but it was always intact next day. The dormant s/o appeared to have
withdrawn into suspended animation.

  Whetu and Liam loosened the bonds of the straight jacket and held François' arms while Celine rolled up his sleeve. With obvious relish she jammed a needle in the s/o's massive biceps.

  "If this doesn't wake him up nothing will." But minutes later the amphetamine had done nothing, not even a flicker of an eyelid. François continued to gaze blankly into space. They removed the jacket and laid him back on the bunk.

  "Where the hell is Steve when we need him?" Liam sounded panicky.

  "He left for Khadees. Must have been about midnight." said Whetu. "I saw him leave with Jean-Pierre."

  "Really?" Celine found the news interesting. "An unusual combination wouldn’t you say?"

  They left the room locking the door behind them. As their footsteps receded away down the metal corridor François' lips began to soundlessly move.

  "Waiting-waiting-waiting." The words ran together inside his head in a monotonous mantra. "Waiting-waiting-waiting." The harsh whisper of a hundred voices echoed inside the otherwise soundless void of his mind.

  33

  Just after midnight Steve and Jean-Pierre stashed the jeep in an alley off a stinking yard inhabited by a guild of dyers at the back of the droon market and travelled the last five blocks to the Medical Academy on foot. The impecunious dyers readily agreed to hide the vehicle in return for a pair of polyester blankets.

  Security on the rear entrance of the Academy was fast asleep so they had no trouble gaining access. Jean-Pierre guided Steve to an anteroom where they donned the white pyjama uniforms of second year medical apprentices. Then they made their way outside onto a first floor gallery and descended a narrow plastered staircase towards the courtyard with the whispering fountain. Below them in the pink moonlight lay three rows of beds draped in luminous white cloth. Steve couldn't control his excitement. He tripped over Jean-Pierre's heels trying to keep up with him.

  At the bottom of the stairs Jean-Pierre stopped him, pushed him back into the shadows. There were sounds of activity in the yard, whispers and grunts. The youth became immediately tense. He pounded the wall with his fist and muttered a string of vehement imprecations Steve could not follow.

  "What?"

  In the darkness silhouetted against a lamp lit doorway Steve made out a group of half a dozen or so shadowy figures gathered together around a row of beds. The men were moving, swaying together in silent excitement their heads bent intently watching something in their midst. Jean-Pierre shook with rage, his face beaded with sweat.

  "I kill the bastards!" he hissed and seemed ready to lurch at them until Steve restrained him.

  "Calm down," Steve whispered. "What are they doing?"

  Jean-Pierre was unable to answer. Tears streamed down his face and his entire body trembled with silent sobs. Eventually Steve realised what he was watching. Two bodies were locked together on one of the beds. The man on top moved to a familiar rhythm while the body underneath remained limp and lifeless. The others were eagerly waiting for their turn with the occupant of the bed an unconscious female demi-mort.

  "That's outrageous,” Steve gasped. “She doesn't even know what's happening to her." Jean-Pierre tugged at Steve's arm and dragged him back towards the stairs.

  "No good now," he whispered unsteadily. "We come back later time."

  In the jeep as they sped across the desert towards the rising sun Steve was still disbelieving. "Sick buggers. Why don't they go out and hire a prostitute if they're that desperate?"

  "No prostitute. Is against divine law."

  "What about girlfriends? Why don't they?"

  "Never. Sex is not permit until marriage. And marriage is not permit before study finish. Old men say woman disturb thinking."

  Steve thought for a moment. "They could be right about that."

  "We try again other time." Jean-Pierre said resolutely. "Don't care what happen, I help you."

  The sun broke through the shutters high above von Wittering's head bouncing rays back and forth down the light well until a pinprick of light fell upon one of the astronomer's borrowed star charts. The old navigator stared at the map dumbly as he had for more than a week now, struggling with a sense of familiarity and trying fruitlessly to unravel a pattern from the mass of dots and lines. His weary eye fell upon the bright spot at the top of the page and the blurry patch of dots pulsed and seemed to detach from the paper to hang spinning in mid-air.

  "What was that?" he whispered pulling himself upright. "What did I just see?"

  Now that his eyes had refocused the mirage was gone. All that remained was a stained sheet of paper blotched with whisky and the grime of years. Then his eye was drawn back to the patch of light. He leaned closer until his nose touched the paper. Was there something there he couldn't quite make out, something important lurking in the tiny hexagon of light?

  With shaking fingers he gripped the chart and turned it slowly clockwise. He let his eyes defocus and once again the tiny constellation lifted from the page. Light and shade reversed, the black dots became bright pinpoints of light against a void of black. The stars throbbed and spun soaring in past his eyes to the remote reaches of his dim memory. He clamped his eyes shut to preserve the image and strained his brain to remember why this collection of dots felt so tantalisingly familiar.

  "My god don't you see it laddie?" he chided himself waving arms in the air. "It's been staring at you all this time, staring you in the face but upside down and back to bloody front." He turned the chart over and held it up against the light. The stars appeared in reverse order on the translucent paper.

  "Yes-yes-yes," he bellowed like an exultant Archimedes rising from his bath. "Backwards which means we must be on exactly the other side of where we would be on Earth."

  Von Wittering's finger stabbed at an uneven triangle of stars. "The Southern Cross back-to-bloody-front!" he shouted. "Which would put us." His finger moved down and to the left and stopped on a tiny cluster of pinpricks. “Somewhere in here.”

  He looked around for someone to tell and because there was no-one to share the news his elation plummeted into dejection. Immediately he began to think about the ramifications of what he'd just discovered, what it meant for him. What it meant was if the ship was patched up and recommissioned they would be continuing their ridiculous mission and after that heading home. Going home was a waste of time considering they probably would not make it. He wondered too if he still really wanted to go home. Most of his friends there were dead or lost to him. Here the booze was good the food was edible and the climate soft. Besides that he was respected here. He was exotic a celebrity and it had been a long time if ever since he'd been that back home. There he was nobody just another old man leaning on a bar.

  He rolled the charts together and tied them with string. He tucked them under his arm and leaving the bar climbed wide stone stairs to the outside world. The desert was just awakening. Birdsong and the buzz of insects filled the air and long bright shafts of purple gold light licked the tops of the dunes rejuvenating the blankness with magnificent vibrant life. Von Wittering breathed the crisp dawn air and smiled. Why go back? If he kept his discovery to himself the issue might never arrive. He would keep it to himself for the moment, at least until he'd thought it through.

  The fire burned bright as a beacon in the vast emptiness of the still desert night. Five hundred men sat cross-legged in a circle around a bonfire their faces lit red by its fierce glow. They all looked alike in purple robes except for four elderly men barefoot and dressed in white pyjamas standing before the flames. Three holy men sat on rugs on the opposite side of the fire. One of them read aloud from scriptures and five hundred voices chanted in affirmation at the completion of each stanza. Their bodies rocked in waves as they chanted, waves moving outwards from the centre like ripples on a lake. If the faces of the acolytes were blank, the faces of the holy men were cast in stone. Suddenly the Shaman ceased his reading and the incantations stopped.

  "Sp
eak!" His hairless head glowed bright in the light of the fire as he called across the flame. "Speak now!"

  The four petitioners shuffled nervously forward. It was Garaam from the Khadees Cricket Club and his cohort of disgruntled cricketers. They dropped to their knees in front of the flames.

  "Holiness," Garaam began head bowed. His wheedling tone cut through the crisp night air like a circular saw. "A great blasphemy has dishonoured our town and nobody there has the courage to oppose it not even the militia."

  "This is a serious charge."

  "Regrettably, Holiness."

  "What is this town?"

  "Khadees, Holiness. In the lowlands of Ab'sala."

  "And what is this blasphemy?"

  Garaam hesitated. He lowered his eyes and his voice for emphasis. "Conflict," he whispered. "They break the holy laws and advocate physical conflict."

  "Is this true?"

  “Aye, Holiness.” The three men supporting Garaam replied in unison.

  "Already they have many followers, Holiness and numbers are steadily growing."

  "What is the nature of this conflict?"

  "They have subverted the ancient philosophy of cricket, Holiness. They have converted it into a physical contest with gladiators."

  "How can this be possible? Turn philosophy into physical conflict?"

  "It is unbelievable, Holiness. I dare not speak of it."

  "Speak citizen! Tell me!"

  Garaam turned nervously to his companions. One of them grabbed him by the ear and whispered. Garaam nodded and pushed him away.

  "Speak citizen! Give me proof of your claims!"

  "Well, Holiness they use a wooden bat and a small hard object the size of an apple.”

  “They strike each other with these objects?”

  “There are two gangs of combatants, Holiness. A representative of one gang hurls this hard round ball at a representative of the other gang and this man retaliates by striking the ball with the wooden bat."

  The Shaman was long in deliberation. "Impossible!" he finally concluded.

  "I am sorry, Holiness. It is distasteful but you insisted."

  "No-no! I mean it is impossible that they would be able strike such a small object while in motion."

  "I have seen it, Holiness and these men with me are my witnesses."

  "Is this true?"

  "Yes." The trio of supporters nodded. "It is true, Holiness."

  The Shaman thought for a moment then turned in quiet consultation with his brothers. Eventually he turned back to the delegation.

  "Where do they engage in this conflict citizen?"

  "At the Cricket Club in Khadees, Holiness. They are planning a tournament for tomorrow. They claim the outrage will continue a full day before one team has vanquished the other."

  34

  "You are a trained surgeon. You have years of experience."

  "Not in neurosurgery for Christ’s sake."

  "Haven’t you got some kind of manual?"

  Celine couldn't deny that The Cranium Handbook was in her kit. She had caught Steve at her desk reading the chapter on brain surgery. He'd let himself in with a skeleton key while she was out.

  "It’s a major operation, Steve."

  "I read about some Chinese doctor who did the procedure in a tent."

  “Yeah but did the patient survive?”

  Steve didn’t know. He'd read it in a magazine in a barber's shop waiting for a haircut. The photographs had been incomprehensible but memorably graphic. "It was on TV as well."

  "Marjorie Chan is a freak. She shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine if you could call what she does medicine. More like voodoo."

  "She transferred the brain of a live antelope into the skull of a hippopotamus," Steve persisted. "It was live on Channel XL, I saw it."

  "Surgically it was a success.” Celine conceded. “The brain survived but the animal failed to adjust. It became neurotic. It didn’t know whether to jump or swim and after killing two minders it had to be put down.”

  "She's done cows and monkey's and people too." Steve was determined, desperate. "We have to try Celine. Whetu scanned George's brain again this morning and the signal was ten per cent weaker than before. If we delay he'll die. This is our last chance." Tears welled in Steve’s eyes, his chin puckered, his lip quivered. "It's all my fault and we've got a chance to put it right," he said unsteadily. "We've got to try. Please help me." And then he could speak no more.

  "Steve, we don't know the condition of his brain. It might be damaged. After all the risk and effort he might end up a vegetable."

  "Please." Steve slumped stifling a sob. “You said you loved me, why won’t you help?”

  "I never said I wouldn't help you. I never said that." She reached out and tentatively touched him. He buried his face in her breasts and murmured something inaudible. The ice in Celine's heart melted. Steve nuzzled her neck, nibbled her ear. His mouth found hers and slowly they sank to the floor. Clothes were loosened and very soon their movement became focussed, urgent. Any misgivings Celine might previously have had were soon submerged.

  The room was cramped and windowless and full of smoke. The ceiling seemed to be moving, hanging low over their heads, threatening to crush them.

  "It's just the drugs," Ratko told himself. "It'll be alright when we get outside.” Then the thought occurred to him - if we ever get outside. He didn’t know how much time had passed, whether it was day or night. It didn’t seem to make any difference since nothing changed minute by minute, hour by hour. They had drunk many flagons of sweet murky alcohol, eaten a huge meal of tough stringy meat and greasy vegetables and smoked a several hookah’s packed with rank weed. A hubbub of whispering voices blurred inside his head making it hard to think. "So where’s the lady?" he asked impatiently. "Where's this famous clean lady you promised me?"

  "Soon." The tricky little man had introduced himself as Raffeel and sometime between the second and third pipe the tiny room had filled with a gang of noisy young men whom he claimed were his brothers. Bo was asleep in a corner snoring drunk and Neil had disappeared somewhere. Ratko couldn’t remember when he’d last seen him.

  "What you got for trades, you got jewel or clock?" Raffeel returned to his original line of conversation.

  "I keep telling you I have nothing on me. It's all back at the ship."

  "Every one got somting for trades." He grabbed at Ratko's boot. "I give you foods, I geev you drinks and smoke and what you geev me?"

  "I will give you, man."

  "Yeeeeeeees!" Raffeel laughed. "You unnerstan. So geev me boot." His brothers grinned in unison and repeated. "Boooot."

  “What about the lady?” Ratko had begun to see something menacing about his hosts. Many of Raffeel's brothers were missing teeth and their eyes were wild and bloodshot. They’d seemed quite friendly until the third or fourth smoke. Since then no-one was laughing and room had become ominously quiet.

  “Forget clean lady, man. We make trades.”

  “The deal was a lady, that’s what you said, clean lady!” He was shouting, his fists were clenched and although he knew he should remain calm he couldn’t control a sudden flash of anger.

  "We don wanna fight with yous, man.” Raffeel grinned as if the very opposite might be the case. "So geev me boot." And once again his brothers crooned in a chorus.

  "Hey Bo, wake up bro!" Ratko shouted and the brothers laughed as if he'd just made an outrageous joke. One of them poked Bo with a stick and another one slapped him but the big man made no movement. Ratko noticed his feet were bare so they already had his boots. He had to think fast. He began to unfasten his laces.

  "Where's Neil, where's my mate?"

  Raffeel grinned. He winked and as he chuckled Ratko noticed for the first time that his teeth were brown and wasted with decay. "He goes weeth me brodda."

  In the hour before sunrise while the Bara E'diddi slept a fire broke out in the prison kitchens. The f
ire was no accident. It was deliberately set by a trustee whose task was to ignite the ovens for the day's cooking. The blaze spread rapidly because the man had liberally doused the floor with lamp oil. It spread so fast and with such intensity that the incendiary himself was caught before he could escape.

  It was some time before anyone noticed the smoke and by that time the conflagration was well under way. It was the firelighter's screams that eventually drew the guards' attention to the emergency. The first man on the spot felt the heat on his face and kicked open the door. The sudden inrush of oxygen caused something like an explosion. The room became an instant inferno. The trapped prisoner uttered a final strangled scream of agony as his lungs vaporised. Moments later the ceiling collapsed sending up a shower of sparks. Within minutes the fire had spread to the floors above. With the end of night a breeze had begun to sweep across the desert and soon the whole town was ablaze. A general alarm was sounded and mayhem ensued.

  Everywhere the air was thick with smoke and panicked screaming. The narrow stairs and alleys of the prison were jammed with one-way traffic. Low security prisoners were quickly released from their cells to help curb the rampaging fire and all guards, even from the high security cell blocks were called to assist. As the last footsteps faded and the lowest recesses of the prison fell silent there came a call long and insistent like a priest calling the devout to prayer. It echoed down through the narrow tunnels to the deepest subterranean level where the most desperate criminals were immured.

  "Igneeeee-eeeeez," the harsh voice called, and immediately all around there began a murmur like a swarm of wasps.

  In a slimy four-by-two cell at the end of the block farthest from daylight Abou'ed heard the all clear. He lay spread-eagled naked on a pile of straw his hands and feet secured in manacles chained to iron rings cemented into the damp flagstone floor. He strained hard until the veins on his face and tattooed neck stood out and it seemed his eyes would pop. Eventually there was a dull tinkle as a rusty two-inch nail he had concealed in his rectum the previous evening hit the floor. Slowly inch-by-inch he moved the nail with his buttocks across the floor towards his hand. The ancient manacle locks offered little resistance. First his hands then his feet were free and within minutes he was at the door deftly picking the lock of his cell.

  "Release me brother," implored the man in the cell next to him and the man next to him and so on all the way along the dank alley.

  "Mules!" Abou’ed replied. "What have you done for me?" He pushed open the iron gate and began his climb to freedom turning his back on the terror building behind him.

  The prison yard was ablaze and the air thick with wind driven smoke so nobody noticed another man with a blanket over his head running through the chaos of burning crashing debris, not even a naked man running against the flow of traffic towards the stables.

  There the man mingled with other men who were preparing the prison’s droons for removal to safety. He followed a stable hand to the rear of the barn and into a stall where a crazed wide-eyed beast strained desperately to rip its nose rope from the wall. Abou'ed clasped his hands together into one mighty fist and struck the man on the back of his head. The man's neck broke. Ed caught him as he fell and stripped off his djalabah. He dumped the lifeless body on the floor where it rolled under the hooves of the terrified droon.

  Hidden in the cowl of the dead man's robe Ed joined the procession of men and beasts across the burning market square towards the town gates. The gates were flung open and they passed from the maelstrom of smoke and fire into the freedom of an autumn dust storm. Abou'ed sprang upon his mount and was away like a shot, invisible within seconds lost in the haze of blowing sand.

  "OK Fet, hit it."

  "Contact," came Whetu's tannoy reply but nothing happened.

  "Contact?" repeated Kurt despondently. "Mate, are you sure it’s not something your end?"

  Kurt had struggled with the second thrust unit for three weeks laboriously checking circuits and replacing suspect componentry under Whetu’s remote direction but still the engine would not start. They had emptied the ship of virtually everything that wasn't structural or essential for a voyage home but still KOTUKU II was too heavy to lift with only one unit. The third had been scrapped but they wouldn't get off the ground without Number Two.

  "Try emergency bypass again." Whetu’s voice remained calm. "Isolate Sector Three."

  "Come on mate, not again."

  "We haven't done Sector Three."

  Kurt stared at the vast cigar shaped tube enmeshed in a cloud of coloured wires, so many wires. Any one of them could be faulty but which one? The Russian repair manual refused to give up its secrets even with von Wittering's grudging language assistance. Repairs to the outside of the ship were nearly complete. The newly fabricated ceramic tiles on the heat shields were in place and all external fissures had been sealed and reinforced. None of the repairs were perfect but they were as good as could be managed under the circumstances.

  While he waited for Kurt to open Sector Three Whetu returned to the sat/nav. Months of meticulous patience had paid dividends. Seventy-five per cent of the system was now operational and he was finally able to access KOTUKU's navigational memory store. In his search for information and images of the outer reaches Earth's solar system he always came back to the same place, VOYAGER 2. All the information he could find was based on pictures of star patterns the little explorer had sent back to Earth more than a century before right up until the time it finally passed out of range. Sporadic detail had been updated here and there over the intervening years but since commercial exploitation had concentrated on the closer planets like Luna, Mars and Venus the outer regions had remained largely uncharted. Last contact between Earth and VOYAGER had been in August 1989 a year after it had it passed by Neptune heading for interstellar space. The final images the craft transmitted were pictures of a vast dark void and a scattering of tiny unnamed dots of light. Whetu had entered the Ab'sala star charts into the sat/nav and compared them with the VOYAGER 2 data. He had transposed and overlaid the astronomer's charts a dozen different ways but nowhere was there any sign of correlation with their own maps.

  "If we both ended up in the same place then Voyager probably came the same way we did."

  "Not necessarily." Von Wittering sounded a note of scepticism. He had felt obliged to accompany Whetu on his celestial endeavours to show an interest to allay suspicion. But he found the process painful like watching an infant aimlessly playing with a chess board and missing the point of the game. He longed to set the boy right to explain the simplicity of it and show off his astronomical expertise but the risk was too great. If they got the ship working again they would be duty bound to complete their mission and return home. Von Wittering had resolved never to go back.

  "Voyager's pictures are accurate for May nineteen hundred and eighty-nine. But stars are constantly moving. We might have arrived here on a different orbit."

  "It was June when we lost control. That's not so different."

  "A micron of divergence from the map might translate into millions upon millions of miles of deviation. We could be anywhere."

  It's as plain as the nose on your face, he thought to himself. You are looking back at Earth's solar system from the other side of the coin. All you've got to do is turn the bloody map inside out, look at it from the other side and you'll have it. Young idiot, it's staring you in the face.

  In von Wittering's mind's eye the little diamond shaped quadrangle of stars lifted off the screen and flew a circuit around the electro/officer's head. But he'd never see it in a month of Sundays.

  "You don't need me any more do you?" he asked.

  "Thanks for your help Hugo. Where'll you be if I need you?"

  "E'kandah at the bar. I’m thinking of buying it."

  “Seriously?”

  “If I can get around the residency edict.”

  Whetu wondered for a moment. It seemed odd that the old man was putting d
own roots. "I'll call you if I crack it," he said instead of asking why.

  "Good luck."

  Von Wittering walked away with an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. Could it be guilt at withholding the truth? No, he said to himself, they're better off staying here. What would they have to go back to even if they made it? Earth was a horrible bloody mess going nowhere but down a drain. But on the other hand, should he be making this decision on their behalf? If only he hadn’t solved the mystery then he wouldn’t be in this onerous position.

  "Fet, you there?" Kurt's voice rumbled over the tannoy from the engine room. "Try again, Sector Three."

  In the evening Buzz paid off the drooners and sent them on their way. He stood watching the hoard racing in a cloud of dust down the mountain road towards the flat desert. Tonight they would eat and drink at E'jibba and then return to Ka'baaka to enrich their families with the wages they'd earned.

  Buzz was alone at the Institute but he knew it wouldn't be for long. With the cessation of the autumn winds a calm period would begin on the mountain and the scholars would return for the winter semester. He would have to work fast.

  Inventory in hand he began counting off the crates of discarded technology from KOTUKU II. Most of it he had taken simply because it was there rather than for any specific purpose. Several of the crates however were different and he couldn't believe his good fortune, couldn't believe they had thrown the contents away.

  Crate one of ten, MMC Micro-platform Shuttle kitset, complete with thrust units, control and comms module. When constructed he would have a pressurised cargo transport with the capacity of a small transit van. The MMC Micro had been developed to ferry limited loads of equipment and personnel between planet and workstations moored in zero gravity. The device was part of KOTUKU's cargo to a mining camp on Mars. What interested Buzz most was that the vehicle was capable of work in Martian standard gravity. The assembly manual claimed it was a tough little workhorse quite capable of comfortably withstanding the turbulence and heat associated with atmospheric re-entry. If he put it together correctly he could fly.

  The desert night was filled with a thousand fires. Not for many decades had such a thing been seen. They lit his way from E'haadi to E'ssi and beyond like lights on a highway a long staggering line stretching in the distance to the horizon and beyond. Abou'ed knew that by the time he got there the road would stretch all the way to Khadees.

  In the camps only one thing was spoken of around the fires. "The foreigners must be driven away," intoned the moderates.

  "They must perish!" screamed the devout.

  There were scientists and men of law in the procession and more joining by the day. Religious teachers and local politicians shared food with tanners and butchers all united in a common fervour. Never before had this been seen, this frenzy of religious zeal. But never before had the foreign threat been so grave. At the head of the ground swell rode the Shaman closely followed by Garaam and the disenchanted conservatives of the Khadees Cricket Club.

  "Has anyone actually seen their machine fly?”

  “No, Holiness.”

  “How can such a thing fly?"

  "Man cannot fly. It is against God's law."

  "It is unnatural."

  "It is blasphemy."

  "He is a false prophet this Mohammed, a charlatan and blasphemer," concluded Garaam at regular intervals. "The Chairman and his gang are in league with him." All around them acolytes swayed and chanted in mesmeric unison oblivious of the grave proceedings at their centre. Finally the Shaman spoke.

  "We will make our judgement when we reach Khadees."

  "This is an order,” Steve barked. “As acting commander it is my sworn duty to restore our captain to full health so he can regain command of his vessel. As his crew you are duty bound to co-operate."

  "But would the Captain want to be this guy?" Kurt was troubled. "Have you seen him?"

  “Trust me, George would rather be alive than dead.”

  "He might be a criminal or a child molester." Liam was also unconvinced.

  "I've seen his picture. He looks fine, a pleasant looking individual and not unlike Captain Thacker himself."

  "But someone murdered him," Liam went on. “Must have had a reason.”

  “Whatever he was before if he has the Captain’s brain he will assume the Captain’s essential characteristics, his personality, his sensibilities, his moral strength.”

  “That’s a big call bro.” Kurt was warming to the debate. “How do you know that the brain of a man is the sole arbiter of what defines him?”

  "It’s a well known scientific fact. The body is just a vessel, a container, a life support system for the brain. It is the brain that tells us what to do how to be, not our body.”

  Celine stifled a smile at that. So far she had remained out of the argument. Having eventually given Steve her tentative support she was hesitant to make it public.

  "It’s got nothing to do with science, man. It’s not ethical, it’s not natural."

  “It’s not Christian.” Liam sought vague footing on the moral high ground. “The sanctity of the human soul and all that.”

  “That’s rich coming from you.” Celine scoffed. “Devout wanker.”

  “Screw you.”

  “In your dreams.”

  "Only the owner of a body should give permission for its re-use." Unlike the others there was no hint of distaste or emotion in Mohammed's voice only ethical consideration. "And since the owner is unable to communicate how can we ask him for consent?"

  "Like he says, the inviolable gift of life is all we possess as individuals." Kurt continued. "It's our own to have or to give, not to be stolen."

  "But the man is dead. He has no further use for his body."

  "True," Liam was vacillating. "When the brain dies the soul departs."

  "The soul inhabits every part of the body." Again Mohammed's reply was calmly persuasive. "It cannot be divided. While any part of the body lives so lives the soul."

  "Jesus," Steve cried in anguish. "The man has no relatives. No-one will even know he's gone. And we are running out of time."

  "He's right," Celine added pragmatically. She was standing behind Steve, but not too close. "If we don’t do it soon there’ll be no time to begin surgery before Thacker's brain dies. The signal’s getting weaker."

  "Well I can't help you," said Mohammed finally. "I will be playing cricket on that day."

  35

  In the grey first light of day people were moving in the streets. From out of the narrow alleys and lanes they assembled, their numbers swelling as they moved on through the maze of pathways towards the town square which lay at the geographic centre of Khadees. This was the place of law, the temple of enlightenment and the market place, a cobble stone quadrangle the size of a football pitch surrounded on four sides by the walled residences of the leading citizens of Khadees. In the centre of the square stood a pyramid of stone with steps rising on four sides to a flat top just large enough for one person to stand. At this apex stood an old man with a shaven head draped in purple robes. Around all four sides at the base of the pyramid stood rows of acolytes twenty deep chanting loudly calling the faithful to battle. Their voices could be heard all through the town and out into the surrounding desert. It was a command not to be ignored.

  "What do you think they're singing about?" Five blocks away two men sat in a jeep parked in a narrow alley bordered by high stone walls.

  "Hard to tell,” Liam replied. “Some kind of choral festival maybe."

  There was no movement in the alley itself but they could sense commotion all around them, urgent voices and the padding of many feet like the sound of a great river relentlessly growing in strength. In the distance they could hear the echoing chant of massed voices.

  "Damn it where is he?" Steve was showing signs of strain.

  "Keep calm sir," advised Liam. "We give him another five minutes then we're off."
>
  The iron growl of dry hinges nearby then a shaft of light cut across the pavement behind them. First there were feet then a cane wheelchair appeared through the doorway with Jean-Pierre at the helm. He was dressed in his apprentice uniform. In the chair slumped a human form swathed from head to toe in bandages and wrapped in blankets. Jean-Pierre looked both ways then turned the chair and sped towards them.

  The Chairman and his deputy as umpires were first onto the field. There was a discreet round of applause from the moderate crowd as they moved slowly and with dignity towards the packed clay pitch in the centre of the manicured green oval. Wickets were already standing but the Chairman carried the bails in the pocket of his white linen jacket. When the bails were in place first at one end then the other, the clubhouse doors swung open and eleven men filed out all dressed identically in immaculate white flannels and red and blue striped caps. The visual impact of the scene was not lost on the crowd who were for the most part seated in chairs ranged along the side lines. The crowd fell silent.

  As the players reached the centre of the oval they huddled into a group at the edge of the pitch to confer. Then under the direction of their captain the team moved briskly to predetermined positions around the field. Mohammed, looking very much the military commander was preparing his field of battle. He pointed to one of his team and the Chairman's deputy threw her the ball. It was Saalo Mohammed's young protégé. She began a routine of stretching and limbering exercises with her arms.

  When they were all ready and settled two men from the opposing team emerged from the pavilion and strolled towards the pitch. They were dressed similarly to the fielders except for the green and yellow colours of their caps. They both had cricket bats tucked nonchalantly under their arms. The batsmen separated and moved to either end of the pitch. The Chairman took up a position behind one set of wickets and the batsman at the other end took guard.

  Saalo stripped off her cap and jersey and handed them to the Chairman to hold. Then she jogged away from the wicket counting her paces. When everyone was ready she rolled up her sleeves and began to run in measured strides towards the wicket. The batsman fixed his eye upon her and all across the field Mohammed's team locked together in concerted concentration.

  As she sped past the Chairman Saalo swung her arm over her head and released the ball. It flew through the air, hit the pitch just short of the batsman and rose sharply towards his bat. The man lunged forward with a straight bat and drove the ball into the ground. As it sped away across the turf Mohammed dived sideways in mid-air and cut it off. The two batsmen were already running, changing ends. Mohammed's throw was hard and level and at the striker's end it found the gloves of the keeper. The man whipped the bails off the wickets but the runner had safely made his crease.

  A thrill ran through the crowd like an electric current. Spontaneously they rose to their feet with a roar of appreciation. The first ball of the first match of the Khadees Cricket Club had only just been played and already the crowd was enthralled. They had never before seen anything like it.

  By the mid-morning drinks break Saalo had just taken her fifth wicket and once again an impassioned crowd had leapt to its feet in jubilation. As the clapping and cheering subsided and calm settled again over the park some of the spectators around the fence line became aware of a noise previously unnoticed. It was a sound like a gust of wind from a distant sea. Play resumed and for some time both players and audience were too absorbed with the drama on the field to take note of anything outside.

  The batting team was dismissed just before midday so the Chairman lifted the bails and called an early lunch. All through the break the noise outside grew until shortly before the resumption of play it had become deafening. Observers reported that a vast crowd had gathered on all sides of the park, several thousand fanatics chanting in unison. At one p.m. precisely the chanting stopped. The silence was so complete that the people inside the park became fearful. There was no way to escape and the park walls although high were not sufficiently robust to repel such a multitude for long. Then came a thunderous banging on the main gates. The chanting began again in earnest. No-one in the park moved. They sat meekly waiting like lambs for the slaughter.

  Eventually it was the Chairman himself who went to investigate alone. He pushed open the gate and found four hooded men shaping to run at him with a battering ram. The men stopped unsure of whether to continue. In all directions the streets were clogged with chanting acolytes. At the head of the throng stood a calm and very dignified old man dressed in the purple robes of a holy man. Behind the Shaman in the safety of the second row Garaam and his fellow accusers stood gloating. The Shaman raised his hand and there was silence.

  "This is their leader!" shrieked Garaam. "He is the Chairman of the club."

  The Chairman ignored Garaam. Instead he addressed his inquiry to the Shaman himself. "Can I help you, Holiness?" he asked.

  "There is accusation of unholy activity within your precinct."

  "Blasphemy, atheism!" screamed a red faced Garaam.

  "None that I know of," replied the Chairman with utmost calm. "We are a cricket club. We play by the book according to the rules."

  "Liar, blasphemer!" yelled the third row in ragged unison.

  "There are witnesses,” The Shaman continued. “These accusations must be attended."

  The Chairman bowed courteously and stepped aside indicating the entrance with a sweep of his hand. "Please enter as our guest, Holiness and make your own judgement." The Shaman hesitated. "Please Holiness you are welcome. Do come in."

  The old Shaman smiled. "Must I come alone?"

  "We do not have room for all your number."

  "Just my closest advisers."

  "Of course, Holiness. We will make a place for you." The Shaman and his five closest stepped eagerly forward.

  "It's a trick," screamed Garaam. "Don't go."

  "Silence him," commanded the Shaman and a rough hand went across Garaam's mouth. The holy men moved inside the park and the gate closed behind them. The multitude outside stood passively waiting in subservient silence.

 

  “Where is that little shithead?" Ratko asked.

  “Where’s ma boots?" Bo was staring at his toes as if he’d never seen them before. He had finally awakened and Neil had returned without his clothes. He was confused and appeared to be in pain but refused to talk about where he had been.

  "Psssst!" Raffeel's head zipped through the doorway and grinned. He threw a bundle of rough robes at them. “Put it on for disguising.”

  “Finally.” Ratko got up and pulled the djalabah over his head. Moments later Raffeel returned and gestured for them to follow him. Ratko moved towards the door.

  “Come on boys, time to move.”

  Bo pulled on a robe and stumbled to his feet. He was having trouble walking his toes tangling in the heavy robe. Neil didn’t move.

  “We should stay here until it’s dark. It’s not safe out there.” Clearly something had happened during his absence that made him wary of leaving the room. He claimed he couldn't remember what it was but it scared him.

  “No way man.” Ratko barked. “This is what we came for bro, pussy!”

  "We muzz hurry.” Raffeel was getting impatient. Ratko dragged Neil upright and slapped him.

  “Put the fuckin thing on!”

  Outside, Raffeel set a rapid pace. He was an agile little man and they had trouble keeping up with him darting through a maze of narrow alleys. Eventually for no apparent reason they stopped.

  "Wet air, I fine heem."

  "Who?"

  "My brodda. He wark air. He geet yous een."

  "I thought it was your sister?"

  "She too."

  Before they could protest he was gone. Neil didn't wait long to make his feelings known. "Fuck this," he said but neither of his companions replied. Ratko began to pace and Bo sat down against a wall and went to sleep.

  It was a narrow lane
with high stone walls either side. There was only one door to be seen, the one through which Raffeel had just disappeared. Above it in the sandstone lintel was carved a line of words in flowing scroll - Académie de Médicine de Khadees. Half an hour after he’d departed Raffeel had still not returned. Bo was snoring and Neil was beside himself with panic. Ratko’s pacing had increased in tempo.

  "Fuck it man something's wrong something's wrong," Neil said over and over until finally Ratko smacked him in the mouth.

  "Shut it pervert," he snapped. "I'm not leaving here till I get laid, understand me? I've waited a year for this and I'm not leaving till I got it?"

  In the silence that followed a bell began to ring on the other side of the wall a long mournful tolling sound like a funeral knell. Then voices could be heard calling and marshalling as if a squad of some sort were being formed.

  Ratko stopped pacing to listen. "Maybe we should come back later," he finally concluded. Neil was back on his feet shaking Bo trying to wake him. The big man swiped at him like a fly.

  "Fuck off,” he murmured sleepily. Ratko kicked him, dragged him to his feet. All around them a commotion was gathering a hushed gigantic clamour like a heard of animals on the move. Ratko slapped Bo across the face harder and harder until he blinked and began to take notice. His eyes were open but he couldn't see who was hitting him. He swung wildly a couple of times but made no contact. Ratko punched him hard in the stomach and as he doubled over he turned him and pushed him stumbling off down the lane back the way they'd come. Neil sprinted in front.

  It had seemed the obvious way to get out, the same way they'd come in but now Ratko was doubtful. The noise seemed close and getting louder. Before they could change course it was too late. A phalanx of zealots a mob of forty shouting men came around a corner and met them face to face. There was a moment of stunned stand-off then they turned and ran. Ratko and Neil ran. Bo just stood where he'd stopped and stared blankly at the figures running towards him waving sticks. He offered no resistance. Felled by a rain of blows he was trampled underfoot and swallowed in the furious flood.

  Around the next bend Ratko and Neil fared no better. They were confronted by a squad of fifty young men from the Academy dressed in white pyjamas. At the head of the phalanx marched the feisty supervisor whom Jean-Pierre had fallen foul of. The man gaped and pointed a finger, screaming maliciously.

  "Foreigners!" he screamed in spluttering dialect. "Capture the heretics!"

  There was nowhere to go except over the wall beside them. With surprising agility Ratko scrambled on top of it. He reached over and grabbing Neil's outstretched hand pulled him up.

  "We gotta stay together," he croaked. They had landed on a low roof with a steep stairway leading down into another narrow lane. The clamour of the two mobs coming together sounded close behind them. They took off again, running blind taking any and every turn offered in a desperate attempt to confuse their pursuers. Within minutes they had separated lost to each other in the maze narrow streets.

 

  When Mohammed came to bat his team was in dire straits. The crowd was buzzing with excitement, most favouring the fielding team. The blackboard beside the pavilion showed Mohammed's eleven to be five batsmen down for only forty-seven runs, chasing a total of one hundred and ninety-nine. There were still fifteen overs to be bowled before the close of play. His batting partner was nervous and demoralised. His ribs were bruised from bouncers and in the previous over he had been hit on the side of the face barely an inch below his temple. The man had not managed contact with the ball in his last four shots offered. The bowler looked confident sensing victory within his grasp. But as he turned to start his run up he was forced to stop.

  Mohammed had stepped out onto the pitch at the non-striker's end and was walking with his arm raised towards his team mate. The two men met in the middle and engaged in quiet conversation. After a brief exchange Mohammed said something funny because the other man laughed. Then they returned to their respective ends. The batsman had a smile on his face as he took guard. The bowler frowned as he stepped back to begin his run up.

  He delivered the ball wide and a little short. The batsman flashed at it timing his stroke well and sent it rapidly through the air square of the wicket and between the diving grasp of two fielders. Mohammed called and the batsmen changed ends with ease before the return was made.

  The crowd went quiet when Mohammed called for centre stump. The bowler glanced back over his shoulder then turned and hurled himself forward, his face contorted in a grimace of effort. The ball had perfect line and good length but Mohammed had no trouble with it. He merely leaned back and helped into the air over his left shoulder. One bounce and the ball was over the boundary. The umpire signalled four runs and the crowd went wild.

  "Well played," commented the Shaman with a thrilled smile. He had remained seated although all around him including his advisers had risen to their feet to cheer the diminutive foreigner.

  Saalo came to the crease at number eleven when the score was nine wickets down for one hundred and seventy-nine chasing one hundred and ninety-nine with one ball remaining in the third last over. Mohammed was still at the other end but he was running out of batting partners. Once again there was a conference in mid pitch and Saalo seemed concerned. The occasion had grown beyond anyone's expectations and she felt unequal to the task. Mohammed smiled and gripped her arm reassuringly.

  "Keep your eye on the ball and only play it if it's outside off stump. Otherwise block it with a straight bat. You know what to do."

  She still seemed doubtful as she moved to the striker's end to take guard. The first ball faced was quick and of good length but she kept her head down and got onto it blocking it into the ground for no run. Being the last ball of the over this would return strike to Mohammed for the start of the second last over.

  The crowd murmured realising that the game was poised with twenty-one runs required for victory from the twelve remaining balls. Mohammed played carefully, his first four shots netting two fours and a single. They changed ends and Saalo picked up five easy runs off the next two balls keeping the strike for the start of the final over. The star pace bowler of the fielding team a big left-hander took the ball.

  Six balls remained, seven runs required to win. The first delivery was fast but wide of leg stump. Saalo judged it well and pulled it for a sharp single to square leg. The batters crossed giving Mohammed the strike. Six runs were now required for victory and five for a draw with five balls remaining.

  The big bowler turned and paused for a moment to adjust his footing before bounding into his run up. He thundered in leaping high in the air as he drew level with the umpire. He grunted as he swung his arm over and released the ball. Mohammed moved towards the missile but as it made contact with the pitch it turned sharply away from him catching the edge of his bat. The fielder at first slip dived sideways reaching for the flying ball but it barely eluded his out-stretched fingers. The crowd groaned and Mohammed breathed a sigh of relief. The bowler cursed and walked back to restart his run up, his shoulders sloped in dejection.

  Mohammed waited seemingly for an eternity. He tapped in front of the crease with his bat, smoothing the dent made by the last ball. Eventually the bowler turned and launched himself forward. The crowd in the park grew quiet as the bowler gained momentum. Mohammed dipped his head his eyes fixed on the bowler's hand. Reaching the wicket the big man leapt in the air and hurled the ball at Mohammed screaming like a banshee. The ball struck the pitch short of the batsman rebounding sharply upwards straight at his face. Mohammed jerked his head back and the ball fizzed past his chin into the reaching hands of the wicket keeper.

  The crowd sighed and settled back onto the edges of their seats. Their voices murmuring like a swarm of bees as the bowler moved back to his mark. With three balls remaining all he needed was one final wicket for victory. The batting side now required two runs per ball for victory.

  The big bowler dipped his h
ead and bounded into his stride. Mohammed shuffled in his crease, tapped his bat on the pitch. The bowler seemed to grow in size as he approached breathing hard. His arm whipped over. He released the ball like a catapult and stumbled down the pitch in his follow through. Mohammed waited. He saw the ball floating towards him like a balloon. It dug in short and rose from the pitch in slow motion. He moved calmly onto his back foot and hooked the bouncer high over the fence and out of the park while the bowler watched in amazement from his hands and knees halfway down the pitch. Six runs. The crowd went wild. The game was over. Victory with two balls to spare. A legend had been born.

  All through the tumultuous conclusion of the game the multitudes outside the park had been growing restless. Garaam had seized his opportunity and resumed his denunciations of Mohammed, the Chairman, the KCC and the new ungodly interpretation of the mysteries of cricket. He intoned for insurrection. The Shaman their revered mentor and leader was unsafe in the midst of such a depraved rabble.

  "Listen to them shouting. They are mad! We must rescue him!"

  "Down with the walls," yelled the crowd.

  When the ball appeared high in the air over the park wall and began falling from the sky they watched it mesmerised unable to move. It fell from a great height and landed in the middle of Garaam's forehead striking him instantly unconscious. The mouth was silenced.

  Reaction to the event spread through the crowd like wildfire. Divine intervention! The cry went up and the crowd melted away in terror as if from a plague. The safety of their revered Shaman was temporarily forgotten in the panic of self-preservation. Unnatural things were occurring at the cricket ground. It was not a safe place for the circumspect to remain.

  Inside the stadium the crowd continued wild with jubilation. Everyone was on their feet cheering and clapping as the opposing team bowed in respect before the modest figure of Mohammed. Saalo dropped her bat and ran towards him. They came together in mid-wicket with arms outstretched. She hugged him tight and kissed him on both cheeks.

  "Don't go," she said. "Don't leave me."

  The crowd parted to let his team onto the field to give their accolade. When they rose again from their knees it was to hoist him aloft their shoulders and run him around the ground before a cheering crowd.

  Ratko ran like the wind, adrenalin pumping. He felt oddly light on his feet and agile. Already he had out-distanced the mob, left them far behind. They wouldn't catch him now, bloody savages he was smarter than them. The road widened and he thought for a moment that he smelled something familiar. Was it the goat market where they had arrived in this beastly town little more than twenty-four hours before? If it was, he was home free. Once he made the desert they'd never catch him. Then he saw the girl.

  She was drawing water from a well, a slim graceful figure draped in clinging muslin. She looked up and caught his eye and he was transfixed. She was young and beautiful with skin the colour of wild honey, warm red hair moving gently in the breeze. Something slipped inside Ratko's head and all at once time stood still. His animal heart melted and he felt an alien sensation stir within him. It was his first encounter with perfection, a vision he could never have imagined possible. The instinct that moved him was not of lust and conquest but subservience. He found himself instantly enslaved. Without realising he had stopped running. He was drawn towards her reverentially straining to absorb every detail of her face, her eyes, the curve of her lips, the shape of her hands. But he didn't get even halfway there.

  The mob was upon him so fast and from every direction he never had time to awake from his daze. Still staring at her he was engulfed in a grabbing, biting, punching chaos dragged and pummelled in a surge of overwhelming rage. It was like being swept up in an ocean, tumbled in heavy surf and held down in an undertow with no chance of drawing breath. But still that perfect face remained an image seared in his mind. Ratko offered no resistance, felt no fear because unexpectedly he knew he had experienced ultimate perfection.

  Twenty minutes later when Neil arrived in the square running at the head of his own surging mob the first thing he saw were two lumps atop glistening red poles planted in the ground at the base of the pyramid. His streaming eyes at last cleared sufficiently for him to see that the poles were glistening with blood and the lumps atop were heads that once belonged to Bo and Ratko. Between them was third pole he understood must be reserved for himself.

  There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Neil sank to the ground cowering before the wall of advancing men and wept bitter tears of regret. What had become of the fine life he'd been promised as a child? Was this where his future became the present?

  “Mother,” he cried. Where was she now that he needed her? The mob closed in on him. In a language he could not understand he was denounced, reviled and stoned to death.

  At the edge of the square one figure stood apart from the mob, different not because of its appearance because it was dressed in the same grey robes as the herd. But unlike the heaving mob this person stood motionless, observing, face hidden within the shadows of the hooded robe. The figure watched the dismemberment of the third heretic then turned and slipped away.

  36

  The entire nation seemed to have descended upon Khadees. Roads and lanes in every direction were clogged with fierce men brandishing sticks and chanting. It was like negotiating tributaries of a river in spate. Liam kept the jeep moving slowly, cautiously edging along side streets and obscure alleys just managing to avoid the mob.

  “We must find somewhere to hide yourself.” Jean-Pierre could hear cries for foreign blood but refrained from interpreting for the others. "It is not safe for them to see you.” He glanced nervously at the back seat where Steve seemed oblivious to any danger. He was fixed on their still fully bandaged cargo concealed in blankets and strapped semi-upright in the seat beside him.

  “Any thoughts on where we might secrete ourselves?” Liam didn’t need translation. The general uproar bore adequate witness to Jean-Pierre’s concern.

  “We turn around. Should go backwards. Too many peoples that way.”

  Liam made the turn and they began retracing their steps. Almost immediately the inevitable occurred. They came face to face with a phalanx of the mob, a pack of spirited young men in white pyjamas. It was a squad assembled by the Supervisor from the medical academy. There was a frozen moment of calm as they faced each other. Jean-Pierre couldn’t help himself. He laughed out loud.

  “Get them!” the Supervisor yelled and the students reluctantly obeyed.

  Liam slammed the jeep into reverse, sending it flying backwards down the alley away from the running students. Some of them hurled rocks, others shouted half-heartedly. From the other direction a far more challenging mob appeared with sticks and axes.

  "Keep down!" Liam screamed as he spun the jeep and accelerated through the middle of them. The wall of angry humanity peeled open as the jeep drove a tunnel down the street. Two more turns and they were alone again although they knew it wouldn't be for long.

  For another nervous hour they circled the town through back streets and laneways searching for an unguarded portal into the shelter of the desert. But there was no way through and increasingly nowhere to hide. Eventually Jean-Pierre smuggled them into the comparative sanctuary of a tanner's yard. Here they would be safe until the crowds abated or their bribery ran out.

  Just on nightfall Kurt called Whetu on the intercom. "Fet, I think we could be in a bit of strife mate," he said calmly.

  Celine joined them and all three stood in the aft hatch on the starboard side. As far as they could see in every direction there were people gathering. All around the ship fires were flaring and scattered groups of shadowy figures chanted waving their arms skywards. Soon they would be completely enclosed as more and more zealots arrived converging from the surrounding hills and desert.

  The air was thick with smoke. About fifty yards away from the ship in the direction of Khadees a huge fire had was burning. Flames sw
elled and sparks flew upwards swirling around three poles firmly planted in the sand around the fire. Even at a distance it wasn't difficult to recognise human heads on the poles.

  “Could be our missing helpers.” Kurt focussed binoculars on a wooden platform atop the blaze. Three headless bodies lay there, mutilated and caked in blood.

  "Do you recognise any of them?" Kurt passed the binoculars to Celine.

  "Meatheads." Many times since the start of the voyage she had individually and collectively wished them dead but now she felt a chill of recognition. "Poor bastards." They looked pathetic in death, harmless even Ratko.

  Whetu looked his watch. "The others should've been back by now."

  They all knew that if the jeep didn't come soon it would never get through. The remaining gaps in the crowd were beginning to close in. In the distance something flickered bright cutting through the pall of smoke spreading low around the fire. Then one light became two, headlights maybe of a vehicle still some distance away. The crowd seemed not to notice so intent were they in venting their wrath at the alien edifice in front them.

  Liam circled the margins of the horde and at last took the only gap he could find. He kept his foot to the floor and his hand on the horn. The crowd parted and miraculously the jeep passed through without mishap. Kurt, Whetu and Celine were waiting at ground level by the time they pulled up. The cargo bay was open and the hoist ready to go.

  "Cutting it fine," said Kurt as they unloaded the bandaged body.

  "Are you ready to operate?" Steve asked. "Is George ready?"

  "I didn't want to thaw him out until you got here."

  "Jesus Celine."

  Clearly Steve hadn't grasped the import of what was going on around them. He'd just passed through a riot and apparently hadn't noticed. Kurt pointed at the heads on top of the poles.

  "Time to fly Captain," he said. "They don't seem to like us any more."

  "But the ship's not ready?"

  "It'll have to do."

  "We don't know where we are, which way to go."

  "We can work it out later once we get away from here. Let’s put this guy inside and get the others." Kurt began hoisting the mummy wrapped figure into the open cargo bay.

  The jeep was about to depart when Celine nudged Steve. “Haven’t you forgotten someone?”

  "Who are we missing?"

  "Wittering's at the oasis and Mohammed's playing cricket." Whetu was climbing into the vehicle beside Liam. Celine shook her head pointing to the back seat where Jean-Pierre sat modestly waiting for whatever came next.

  “Perhaps a thank you to someone might be appropriate, don’t you think?”

  Steve’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “Oh yes. Cheers mate,” he said with a wave at Jean-Pierre. “Much appreciated. Um, is there anything we can do for you in return?”

  Jean-Pierre shook his head. “No thank you.”

  They set Jean-Pierre down at the back end of Khadees near the droon market. He would make his way to the cricket ground to find Mohammed. The other two went on to E'kandah to locate their navigator, hoping the unrest had not spread that far. They arranged with Jean-Pierre to rendezvous back at the same place to collect their errant cook.

  It was a cloudless night. The desert was a mass of shadow pools cast by the bright blue light of a full moon rising behind the Mahaadii Mountains. Jean-Pierre watched the jeep speed away across the sand with a sense of sadness. Whatever happened next he knew it would be the close of the most important chapter of his entire life. Nothing would ever compare with what he had been part of during the past months.

  The market place was crowded with chanting zealots and as more arrived others set off in ragged bands across the desert to join the throng surrounding the ship. In the dark streets packs of vigilantes lurked on street corners grabbing hapless passers-by from the streaming crowds to accuse them as collaborator or heretic. Summary justice was instantly administered to anyone unable to deny the allegations. The bodies of their victims hung on public display as a warning to others.

  Outside the cricket ground the streets were in chaos although the walls of the K.C.C. were still intact, stolidly guarded by holy men in purple robes. Their Shaman was still inside the park where debate was heated and by no means one-way. Some preached obedience to the old values, the origin of the first and only truth. Others expounded revolution claiming the old beliefs were outmoded and must give way to the new truth now revealed. The crowd appeared to be split between those who had been inside the ground and those who hadn't. The squad of silent priests guarding the gates managed to preserve equilibrium until news of an outrage at the Medical Academy filtered through. A demi-mort was reported to have been kidnapped, carried off by the foreigners. A fresh wave of fanatic fundamentalism whipped the mob into parochial frenzy. The foreigners had been discovered in the act. They must be hunted down and purged from the native soil.

  "Who has been taken, man or a woman?"

  "It would be a woman of course. Sacred chalice of procreation."

  "But no, they say it was a man!"

  "A progenitor, sower of seed, sacrosanct!”

  "And not yet dead. A demi-mort."

  “Retribution is our moral obligation!"

  The orators became inflamed. So long as the foreigners drew breath no-one would be safe from their depravity. They were blasphemers, libertines, necromantic sodomites, cannibals! They must be run down and put to death, reduced to ash before they further polluted the sacred land.

  Those more resistant to the old dogma wavered in their opposition as they grew fearful for their own lives. In the end fundamentalism predominated, the minority voice was shouted down and implicated in the outrage. To doubt was to be guilty of acquiescence. The crowd bristled with spears and agricultural tools. The remaining cricket supporters gathered together, grouping themselves at vantage points around the perimeter of the park but it was becoming increasingly difficult to repulse the mob. It was only a matter of time before a serious assault was mounted and the walls breached.

  With great difficulty Jean-Pierre eased his way to the front and presented himself to the embattled cordon protecting the main gates. He was careful not to reveal his relationship to the Chairman so it was fortunate he was recognised not by the mob but by a member of the club, a colleague of his father. Rather than risk opening the gate he was bodily hoisted over the fence into the park.

  Inside the pavilion a feast was in progress. The boardroom was filled with men wearing white flannels and blazers striped in the colours of the K.C.C. Being the only woman present Saalo alone was dressed differently. She wore a long white kaftan with her cricket cap. She seemed detached from the general hilarity of the event. She was not drinking, hadn't touched her food and took little part in conversation. She sat apparently forgotten at the far end of the table gazing at Mohammed seated painfully out of reach in pride of place at the head of the main table.

  On either side of him sat the Chairman and the Shaman. Below them in descending order ranged the club committee and lesser officials. Amongst the players of both teams conversation was retrospective and passionate. All anyone could talk about was the glory of the day's play. They remained blissfully unaware of the religious storm building outside.

  Speeches were made. The Chairman led with an impassioned eulogy to his friend and mentor Mohammed, the man who had brought them enlightenment in more ways than one. Even if they never took part in or saw another game of cricket played, concluded the Chairman, they would never forget the experience he had brought them. They would give up their lives if need be to take the knowledge he had given them on into the future, underground if necessary. The game would not die. It had been an apocalypse for them. Mohammed had broadened and enriched their lives beyond measure. In the eyes and minds of all of them he had defeated mortality. They would speak of him forever.

  Mohammed was overwhelmed by his accolade. Yet the source of his greatest joy and perplexity came from the
adoration of just one person. He could still feel the heat of her embrace on the pitch but couldn't understand why this modest wonderful girl should feel so warmly towards him. Her words echoed in his head displacing everything else.

  "Don't go," she had said to him. "Don't leave me." He had begun to wonder if in fact he should do just that, not leave. He was a god in their eyes a prophet. Why should he return to a place where he was a mere grain of sand reviled rather than respected? And this amazing girl, how could he think of leaving her when she was all he had ever wanted and never dared dream of - why?

  Jean-Pierre interrupted his reverie with news that KOTUKU II was preparing to depart. Escaped prisoners had been publically executed and a vigilante horde was massing to attack the ship. Unless they went now it would be too late. The ship would be destroyed and Mohammed and his colleagues would certainly perish.

  Mohammed realised he had no choice. Even if he survived the persecution he knew he would have no future here. He had a duty to his crew, to his employers who had entrusted him with a task he must fulfil. But most of all he had a duty to his family to return. His brothers were waiting for him in Bombay. Together they would rebuild their family’s fortunes and sail once again as masters of their own vessel. Mohammed looked at Saalo and with the deepest regret. Then he stood and followed Jean-Pierre towards the door.

  The room went quiet as everyone rose to the feet to honour him with respectful applause one last time. He was leaving the room when he stopped and looked back. Saalo his beloved girl was pushing her way across the room in quiet commotion. Her face was streaked with tears and her arms were stretched towards him. Something snapped inside Mohammed. Reason departed and he found himself unable to walk, unable to leave the room.

  "There is nothing you can say to make me change my mind. I am not leaving."

  "These people are hostile Hugo." Whetu had never called von Wittering by his Christian name before. "It is dangerous to even be here."

  "There's always somewhere to hide. Besides it can't be any worse than a return journey in a leaky tin can."

  Whetu looked to Liam for support but Liam couldn’t think of any reason why the old man should come with them except to navigate. If Von Wittering was afraid of not making it back to Earth alive, what could he say? He was probably right. None of them felt confident. The old man concluded by asking why he should endure the discomfort and danger of a return voyage just to end up another threadbare bum on skid row. He knew his days were numbered so why waste them in misery? Liam could not disagree.

  "He's right. If he wants to stay it's his choice."

  "I have told you all I know. I am no further use to you."

  "You told me a riddle. Look from the inside out. I don't know what that means."

  "You will understand so long as you do exactly as I say." He raised two fingers level with his grizzled temple. "Scout's honour. Now bugger off before it is too late."

  There was no sign of Jean-Pierre or Mohammed at the meeting place when they returned to Khadees. They had taken too long finding von Wittering so perhaps the others had been and gone. They waited a further half hour then regretfully departed for the ship.

  A mile wide ring of fire surrounded the beleaguered vessel lighting up the night through clouds of smoke and dust rising from a multitude of stamping feet. Legions of fanatic chanting zealots advanced waving sticks and clubs, seemingly priming themselves for a full frontal assault on the shrine of heresy. Still KOTUKU made no sign of flight. The aft starboard hatch was closing but emergency stairs still connected the ship with terra firma. Kurt stood anxiously in the doorway scanning the crowd. Then at the outer edge of the mob he saw what appeared to be a minor disturbance.

  Five holy men were driving a wedge through the seething crowd which folded back to respectfully give them way. At their head strode the old Shaman, parting the crowd with his stick as if it were a sea under command of miracle. In the centre of the phalanx moved a smaller figure also dressed in the holy purple, his face hidden within the cowls of his robe.

  Jean-Pierre and his father watched the spectacle from a low hilltop half a mile distant, following the progress of the holy men towards the ship through identical pairs of binoculars courtesy of KOTUKU II. The priests eventually broke through the inner circle and advanced through a gap in the flames towards the ship. The procession stopped and the tiny priest in the middle moved onto the steps. The tempo of the mob quickened as he climbed towards the belly of the monster. The mob held its breath. Surely the moment was imminent, God in the person of this tiny holy man would destroy the giant. At the top of the stairs he turned to look back at the priests now kneeling in a row at the base of the stairs. He waved to arms in salute. The Chairman smiled to see that the man in purple was indeed his friend and mentor safely aboard. “Six,” he said and raised his own arms skyward.

  As Mohammed turned away the footbridge steps began to fold themselves up inside the ship. Jean-Pierre held his breath as he saw a hooded figure detach from the rabble and rush towards the rising stairway. The figure pulled itself onto the bottom step and was lifted bodily inside the ship. The hatch closed and the crowd roared.

  There was a gigantic rumble and the ground beneath their feet began to shake. Below them the plateau became engulfed in a choking storm of flying dust and smoke from the fires surrounding the ship. Jean-Pierre and his father turned away looking for shelter.

  It was a scene of utter mayhem, fire and brimstone. A blasting wind filled with flaming debris tore at the acolytes as they fell to their knees in blinded ecstasy. A miracle was in motion. The heretics were being consumed in a divine conflagration. Smoking sand cut through the believers like buckshot, sending them tumbling back piling on top of each other. The crowd drew back but against the stream of retreating pilgrims one lonely figure was moving forward, a madman riding a ragged droon. He thrashed the wretched beast, urging it on over the trampled bodies of fallen disciples. Clear of the rabble they galloped through smoke and dust towards the ring of fire surrounding the ship.

  Abou'ed roared like a bull but his voice was drowned by the rumble of turbines and the roar of flame. Spurring his beast against the murderous wind he would have charged all the way to the ship to hack his way inside had not his mount tripped and collapsed on top of him pinning him to the sand.

  Inside, the entire ship was shuddering like a washing machine on final spin. The last stragglers stumbled to their places and strapped themselves in for take off. Over the tannoy came an impassioned announcement.

  "Mariana, where are you?" screamed a frantic voice on all channels through all the passages and cabins, the flight deck, the cooler and sick bay, booming through the ship's myriad nooks and crannies private and public.

  "Damn it where are you!" Even the meatheads heard Whetu's agonised call. "Please answer me, Mariana. Mariana!"

  He slumped disconsolate over his console, released the comms switch and turned away from the microphone. His face was streaked with tears as he extinguished his scanners and strapped in.

  Dawn was breaking as von Wittering climbed onto the roof of E'kandah to stand amongst the creaking mobiles and bid his friends farewell. He felt all connection to his former life receding like last year. The ship lifted and disappeared in the glare of the rising sun. Von Wittering felt as if he'd passed on released of his burden.

  “Welcome to the afterlife old boy.” He chuckled at the thought. "What'll it be then, beer or whisky?" He shook his head. "No, it must be champagne. This is a celebration not a bloody wake."

  Hundreds of miles away, across the Mahaadii Desert on the remote mountaintop of Voyageur, Buzz heard the distant roar and stopped work. He knew what the sound meant and looked to the sky for confirmation. At first he saw nothing in the direction of E'kandah but then there was a momentary flash in the sky and a faint white trail leading up towards the stars.

  "Must have left early," he muttered in a tone of disappointment. Then he smiled and raised his hand in salut
e. "Maybe I'll see you sometime," he said and returned to his task.