by Ian Watson
The clerk at the information desk was short and muscle-bound and tightly packed into his black suit; he looked as though he doubled as a security guard or even worked for the Police.
“Yes, Sir?”
“I, ah, need to get in touch with a Professor at al-Azhar. Ali Ibrahim Muradi. Sheikh Muradi. He’s head of a Sufi Order here in Cairo. It’s called the Fihi’iya… I’m afraid I’ve lost his home address and I don’t know how to read the phone book—”
“You cannot telephone al-Azhar today, Sir. Don’t you know this is a holiday?”
So it was still Easter, Yesterday had been Easter Sunday… But Easter wasn’t a Moslem festival…
“Because it’s Easter Monday?”
“That is a Coptic affair, Sir. Today is Sham-el-Nessim—‘the smelling of the breeze’. The first day of Spring.”
Hence the picnickers.
“If there’s nobody at al-Azhar today, can you phone the Fihi’iya Order for me? Please. It’s very important.”
A notepad whisked on to the counter.
“If you’ll say what your business is with them, Sir? I will have to explain it on the telephone. What name and room number?”
“John Deacon. I’m not actually staying here.” He placed one of the three pound notes on the counter. “Can I pay for the call with this?”
“Oh, I can’t change foreign currency. Impossible. You must ask the cashier. Over there, do you see? The sign?”
“Will you at least look the number up?”
“While you are changing your money.”
The cashier’s eyes were dark with kohl. She wore a mass of black hair bunched in a fat bun. A stout girl, in a blue twin-set.
“Is this all you want to change, Sir?”
“I’m leaving soon. I only need enough for a taxi,” he said, wondering how near the airport was.
“We do run our own minibus service from outside the door.”
“Ah, I mightn’t leave from the hotel—”
“As you please. Have you your passport?”
“Not with me… no. Why?”
“Because you are changing currency.”
“Heavens, hardly any! They’re only banknotes, not cheques.”
The stout girl sighed. “A rule, Sir. Exchange Control Regulations. I have to put the number of your passport on the form.”
“Even for three pounds?”
“Even for three pounds.”
“It’s a nuisance—”
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head.
“I’ll have to fetch my passport—” Maybe a taxi driver could find the headquarters of the Order. A taxi driver surely wouldn’t refuse hard currency! But he mightn’t understand, he might just drive round, ending Deacon up at some small district police station unable to pay the fare…
A coffee bar led off the vestibule; he walked in there instead—into a huge, high room supported by massive papyrus columns with swollen bell capitals. It was a room heavy with the silence of an MGM gongbeat just before the boom, full of polished brass, stamped with bas reliefs of sun motifs and wings and eyes of Homs. A thick brass footrail ran round the bar. He sat at a table, and ordered black coffee. When the waiter returned, he thrust the three pound notes on to the tray.
“You don’t mind changing this, do you? I left all my Egyptian money back at my hotel.”
The waiter hesitated, then the banknotes disappeared into his hand. A quarter of an hour later he finally brought back a pile of tiny frayed brown notes. Deacon removed them all and walked out quickly, back to the information desk.
The clerk looked annoyed.
“I did find your number for you. You wanted it in a hurry.”
“I had to take a pill—an aspirin for my headache.”
The excuse unaccountably mellowed the clerk. He clucked sympathetically and whisked his pad into sight again. Deacon placed two raggy notes on the counter.
“Please say that I need to see the Sheikh urgently. I’m very sorry for the lack of warning, but can I come and visit him right away? And the address—I need that.”
The clerk dialled, talked for half a minute in Arabic, then dialled another number; at last he cradled the phone.
“I have spoken to Sheikh Muradi’s assistant. The Sheikh expected you. A car will be sent as soon as possible. If you will wait—?”
“Did you say he expected me? Or expects me now?”
Tire clerk looked angry, as if his knowledge of English was in dispute.
“A car is coming here, Sir. Just wait.”
Seventeen
“However can we land at this speed?”
Michael panicked as the car flung itself at the rushing Moon horizon.
Garibaldi swung the steering wheel, foot lapping on the brake pedal. “You will learn. In one lesson—with hypno.”
“No hypnosis, thank you!”
“Instead of many lessons?” the pilot wheedled. “You will fly back on your own. I will not fly you. It is the only way to return. So! Talk it over with the other humans. Be helpful.”
More slowly now—though still seemingly far too fast—the car tilted round the Moon, travelling low over a massive double ring of mountains enclosing a circular pockmarked grey stone sea. Michael stared back towards Earth, too late. The home planet had already slipped behind the horizon of the Moon.
Garibaldi twisted the car upright again. “Our base is in Tsiolkovsky. 20 degrees south, 130 degrees east. It is quite distinctive. It cannot be missed.” Two minutes passed, during which a rumpled, cratered desolation flew beneath them. “Ahead—there, now. Do you see?”
Tsiolkovsky Crater printed a deep, spade-shaped splotch of darkness into the brightly lit, smallpox-blemished plains. The crater appeared dark in its own right, rather than dark with shadow. Puckered, cicatriced walls surrounded it. From its heart rose a white pyramid peak. As they swooped in over the crater rim, travelling slowly at last, Michael spotted a tall black fungoid tower rising to the south of the central peak. It was agaric metal mushroom, a tall stem rooted to the crater floor by three great outspread landing jacks, with a swollen dome-like cap. The space between each of the support legs harboured a long oval dome, three in all, stretching out across the crater floor. The starship rose to perhaps ten times the height of these domes, towering above them.
The car grounded gently, amid a surprising flurry of moondust. Garibaldi punched at the controls and snapped the steering wheel forward into “ground mode” once more. Dust fell back quickly, then, upon the car; Garibaldi cleared it from the windscreen with a sweep of the wipers, then switched the headlamps on.
“The external gravity point-sources are switched off now. We must drive normally into the dome.” The car’s pseudoengine whined faintly. The Thunderbird bumped forward towards the nearest of the domes. Pressing his face against the window, Michael stared up the long column of the starship. The underside of the dome-like cap high overhead was vaned, mushroom-like, with metal gills.
“Do you see those vanes underneath the hood up there?” asked Garibaldi. “Those are to radiate waste heat. The ship has to be cold while we sleep between the stars.”
“Oh—”
A triangular mouth opened up at the end of the dome they were approaching. They drove into this dark mouth, illuminating a short tubular tunnel with their headlamps, and halted. Behind them, the mouth closed. Garibaldi waited a while then switched off the “heater”—a heater no longer, in this reconstructed car. The “door-ajar” warning light blinked green. Immediately Michael lost nearly all his weight.
“The internal gravity is off now, and this airlock is pressurized with Earth atmosphere. So our car doors will open again. But wait.”
Ahead, a second triangular mouth opened up, revealing a small car park. Three cars stood by a transparent wall that rose to the upcurving roof of the dome. They were a Pontiac, a Mercedes and a Volvo, bearing American, German and Swedish plates. A second transparent wail divided the entire dome down its long axis, into two separate halls
. The left hand hall was narrower than the other, subdivided by screens and partitions, and brightly lit in yellow. In the larger, right hand hall, illuminated a sickly green shading into blue, a gutted Peugeot hung on chains among much heavy machinery. The engine of the French car lay discarded beside it. Several aliens, wearing no suits, were working on the Peugeot For the first time, as Garibaldi pulled up beside the other cars, Michael saw the aliens in the raw.
Their legs were of wrinkled grey hide, their feet stout and stumpy with thickly horned toes. Their plated backs sloped steeply, and umbrellas of bone roofed the brain, from under which the snout-faces poked out. The single, tough, flexible tentacle sprouted from the chest wall as though an elephant’s trunk had slipped down into the wrong location…
Each alien wore a tool belt around its right leg. Strapped to the other leg was a pouch-like holster holding a glassy green block identical to the one slotted in the car stereo.
Such preposterous creatures to have built a starship! Yet they moved so gently, as they nuzzled in the guts of the Peugeot, deftly remaking the car to fly through space… Two of the working aliens glanced up. Their small faces seemed pathetic and tender.
A woman stood at this end of the yellow-lit hall, by an airlock, in conversation with a suited alien.
Garibaldi tapped Michael on the knee. “I have been in this suit too long. Will you go over there, please? Your people and mine will explain.”
The pilot flipped Michael’s door open and prodded him in the ribs, as if playfully. Michael climbed out. How light he felt upon his feet, how bouncy and elastic!
Seeing him, the woman waved. She left the alien’s side and skipped into the translucent, circular air-lock. There must be human air on both sides of it, but obviously the larger hall held alien air.
She seemed in her late twenties. She was rather plain, with an odd disproportion about her body: a skinny upper half, then kangaroo hips and big legs. She wore slacks, an old suede jacket. Her hair was brown, and bobbed. Her jaw jutted.
The air-lock cycled; she hopped out.
“Hi there, I’m Helen Caprowicz.” Her accent was American. She stuck out a hand. “Welcome to the gang. Isn’t this really something? It’s quite a responsibility.”
“Hello, Helen. I’m Michael Peacocke. How many people are there, in the, er, gang?”
“Six. You’re British, I guess? I’m from upstate New York myself. You’re the last in, Mike. That makes six of us, counting you. Think of it! Just us six guys to distribute all those biosensors.”
“All those what?”
“Oh, they haven’t told you yet? Come on through—”
As the air-lock cycled, he whispered, “I thought it wasn’t real I thought it was a hallucination.”
“Mike, if this isn’t real, neither am I! And I feel real enough to me! Do I need to kick you to prove it?”
“Oh now, that wouldn’t prove—”
But she did turn and kick him, playfully if sharply, on the shin. Recoiling, he actually left the floor for a moment.
“Or do I get a Gebraudi to kick you in the butt?”
“No… You’re real!”
She led him to the waiting alien.
“Meet Boon-ap-aat-oo, Mike. I guess that’s how you say it! He’s our instructor.” Garibaldi—and… and?… and Bonaparte! Its bones were certainly “apart”, so far as its exterior cranium went.
The alien stretched out its arm. It took Michael’s fingers in its glove and wagged them limply up and down, as if inspecting for breakages.
“Welcome,” it hooted. “We appreciate you. Please follow me.”
• • •
Bonaparte led them to a temporary room run up from a few free-standing partitions. A milky glass panel, the size of a very large television screen, stood on the floor. Its base was an opaque prism, fitted with a keyboard printed with alien symbols. Helen Caprowicz promptly sat down on the floor, sprawling out her large legs.
“You do the same, Mike. They’ve got no use for seats.” So Michael squatted.
Bonaparte grounded itself in a heap of tyres beside the glass panel. It removed the green cartridge from its leg pouch and slotted this into a gap in the prism base. Then it tapped the keyboard; the panel lit. A picture appeared—an animated cartoon—of two stars revolving round a common centre of gravity, but quite far apart in space. One star was larger than the other.
“First I must explain about our home, and origin,” said Bonaparte methodically.
“I just love this film show,” whispered Helen. “I’ve seen it twice already. You spot something new each time.”
“Our home sun is part of a binary system. These two stars average six billion kilometers from each other—three times the distance from your own sun to the planet Saturn, which is enough room for both suns to have planets of their own. A great incentive to develop star flight! Imagine if you had another sun with a family of worlds where the planet Pluto is. Consequently our Unidentifieds thrilled with the hope that there might be Whole Planet Life around the other sun, and spurred us into space. In the event, alas, that second sun was barren.” The alien paused, “How would you explain the term ‘Unidentifieds’, Helen?”
She whistled. “I guess they’re like symbolic entities. Bits of the symbol language of the cosmic programme being glimpsed by us, the programmed. Though the programme isn’t written by some Big Programmer in the sky. It’s within the nature of reality. So we can glimpse a bit of it.”
“Or you can fail to,” grunted Bonaparte, “Which warps it into evil.”
The picture zoomed in upon the larger of the two stars. A family of planets orbited this. Here there were three small moonless worlds, a larger planet in fourth position possessing twin moons, a fifth small world, followed by a gas giant with many big moons.
“Gebraud is number four—”
They watched the weather patterns of that fourth world as it turned in space. Thick clouds cycloned and anticycloned, boiling and streaming apart, constantly disappearing around the world’s camber in accelerated time.
Abolishing the clouds, now, the picture laid the planet bare; and one world-continent appeared. The seas were all contained by land chains, quite the opposite of Earth. The camera eye drifted down across this world-continent—and the picture switched from cartoon format to actual scenes. Mountains were quite few, quite low. The light was faint and sickly green. The air was adrift with spores and mists and scudding showers.
A swampy plain extended to the horizon, studded by low knolls. Fungus trees sprouted on these outcrops: cups, bells, parasols, twisted turbans, coral branches, puffballs, morels, chanterelles. Great segmented worms hatched in these fungi, munching through them and burrowing into the soil as the fungus trees rotted down to jelly. The worms ate out waterlogged tunnels, spraying dirt and eggs behind them, drowning themselves in their own tunnels, rotting.
Beasts grazed the swamps. They watched a stump-legged, scaly platypus with a shovel-beak scoop up and sieve water monotonously for weed. Fungus sprouted in a rubbery mat upon its back. Worms hatched in the fungus. Dissolving, the vegetable jelly rotted the seams of its scales, and worms dug into its body. The platypus thrashed about; it rotted. More platypuses mated cumbersomely on the edge of a knoll. The male’s semen dribbled over the stream of eggs tumbling from the female. These eggs crystallized, glazing as soon as the liquid semen washed them. They rolled into worm holes, to lie there ripening. Hatching, soft-bodied platypus babies waddled underwater quickly (those that got that far) and in the water grew their scales that would ward off spores and worms and other parasites…
They watched a four-legged, thick-hided beast with a flat, bone-plated skull. A flexible leathery face thrust in and out beneath the skull. A single arm snaked among puffballs, breaking off chunks of fungus, pushing them into its mouth. In between bites, it tucked its arm back between its legs in safety among the folds of hide, and withdrew its face to chew, presenting only hard leather to the world. Fungus sprouted omits back and fel
l off and sprouted again. Storms drenched the land. Rain cascaded down the slope of the beast’s back, washing it clean. Mud fell from the sky. A giant chanterelle sprang up upon its broad neck. Straining the single arm over its shoulder, it pushed against the fungus till this snapped and fell away. It broke it up and ate it.
When the beast met a female, the pair coiled their single arms together and hooted in each other’s faces. Thus, face to face, they mated. The male stroked the female’s orifice till it opened and the female squeezed the male’s leathery pouch till it spilled its seed. She transferred the seed manually, smearing it into the passage he pressed open. Which then shut fast.
“That’s how octopuses do it,” whispered Michael to Helen. “I think it is. It’s all done by hand.” She hushed him.
The two beasts grazed together now, thrusting food at one another. The female began to swell, in calf. Eventually, straddle-legged over water, she gave birth, the male hauling the baby in its thick birth caul clear and tearing up the afterbirth, then pressing it into the female’s lips. Wearily she chewed this down, reincorporating her spent self.
“However did they get these films?”
“You’ll find out. Just watch.”
The female sickened and died. Her womb was rotten with worms and fungus. The male reared the baby instead—its sucking lips triggered milk from the male nipples.
The picture reverted, now, to a simulated landscape. As the imaginary viewpoint receded, the binary system of Eta Cassiopeia fused into a single blob of light, swimming through space among other slower and faster stars. One of these other stars suddenly bloomed blindingly. Circles of light radiated from it. They washed out across its neighbours. In their wake, rather more slowly, a halo of ionized gases expanded.
“There was a supernova, very near to us in cosmic terms. We believe that it affected your world too; but more distantly. The stars were in quite different relative positions seventy million years ago.”
Once more they watched the swampy plains. But now the dumb predator worms and other soft parasites were withering in the flux of cosmic radiation. The armoured, thick-hided platypus and the proto-Gebraudi sickened. Some died; but many recovered.
