“Fish,” Miz said, as he and Dloan tore into the last of their foodslabs and Sharrow looked sleepily at them, frowning and rubbing her left glove. “We’ll do some fishing.” He grinned at the others. “Fish; we’ll eat fish tonight.” He patted the pocket of his fancy hunting jacket that held the fishing gear.
They heard what sounded like gunfire just as they were setting off again; a distance-dulled crackle that seemed to come from further down the fjord in the direction they were heading.
They ran to the shore and stood there, gazing down the fjord.
“Shit,” Miz said. “Wonder what that means.”
Nobody suggested anything.
They had been walking for about an hour when they saw Feril jogging toward them through the trees.
“Welcome back,” Zefla said. Sharrow just stood there, smiling at the android.
“Thank you,” Feril said. It still had the dials and the laser they had given it; it presented both to Zefla.
“So?” Miz asked it.
“I have been to the end of the fjord,” the android began.
“Let’s walk and listen at the same time, eh?” Zefla said.
They hiked on; Feril walked backward in front of them without once putting a foot wrong, which was an unsettling but also rather impressive sight.
“The ground between here and the end of the fjord,” it told them, “is similar to that you have already traversed. There are two sizeable streams to be crossed, one of which has a fallen tree across it and so is quite easy, the second of which is more difficult and has to be waded. There is a place where one must either cross a very exposed beach only a kilometer or so from a point on the far side, or make a four or five kilometer detour round some cliffs.”
“What did you do?” Zefla asked.
“On my outward journey,” Feril told her, “I crossed the beach without incident; on my return I again started to cross the beach. But then I was fired upon.” Its upper body did a quarter turn to show a bullet graze on one shoulder. It kept on walking. “I returned fire with the laser pistol but then decided that my position was too exposed, and entered the water. I completed that part of the journey crawling along just under the fjord’s surface.”
Zefla smiled. Miz shook his head. Dloan looked vaguely impressed. Sharrow just blinked and said, “Hmm.”
“Where is this beach?” Dloan asked.
“About ten kilometers from here.”
Dloan nodded. “We heard the gunfire.”
“So they’re that much further ahead?” Zefla said.
“I believe only a sniper has been left on the point opposite the beach,” Feril said. “I think I saw the main body of the Solipsists earlier, about another three kilometers further down the fjord, ferrying themselves across the mouth of a side-fjord in an inflatable boat. I attempted to fire on the boat, but the range was approximately four kilometers and I was not able to observe any effect.”
Dloan shook his head understandingly.
“So,” Miz said, “what have we got to look forward to apart from finding the Solipsists there first?”
“There are no more major obstacles after the beach I mentioned, though there is a small hill to be climbed, avoiding a cliff which is sheer to the water. The end of the fjord has many small islands and rocks, starting from about ten kilometers or so from its head; I believe these are why the flying boat did not simply land immediately. The end of the fjord is quite sudden; there is no significant narrowing, just the islands and then an almost straight length of shore in front of a marshy plain, which looks as though it is the result of land reclamation.
“The Gun is, I believe, in a stone tower. The tower is approximately fifteen meters high and seven meters in diameter and topped with a hemispherical black dome of indeterminate substance. It stands in the center of a stone square about fifty meters to a side; the square has a circular wall half a meter high built upon it which just touches the mid-point of each edge of the square, and a meter-high stone post at each corner. A small river delta forms the far boundary of the square; on this side there is a field of tall rushes.
“The stone tower is surrounded by numerous human bodies, pieces of equipment and debris; these are mostly within the circular stone wall. From the state of decay involved, I would estimate that some of the bodies and pieces of debris have been there for many decades. The most recent bodies in the vicinity appear to be those of two young men I took to be Solipsists by their uniforms. Both bodies were attached to parachutes; one lay against the inside of the circular wall, his parachute snagged on a small tree just outside the square; the other parachutist appeared to have been dragged for some distance through the rushes before being stopped by rocks, and I was able to determine that he had been killed by some form of laser device which had removed his head. It had also left a hole in his chest and another in his groin, consistent with a sixty-millimeter beam. I deduced that the dome on top of the tower housed such a device, perhaps along with the concomitant detection and tracking equipment it would require.”
“Amazing deduction,” muttered Miz. He glanced at Sharrow but she didn’t seem to have heard.
“I noticed,” Feril continued, “that the few birds which overflew the area kept well away from the tower, though there were avian bodies of various species distributed around it, along with those of numerous small animals. Insects appeared to be tolerated. I conducted a brief experiment with pieces of wood, and found that anything moving within twenty-five meters of the center of the tower with a frontal area greater than approximately two square centimeters will be attacked by the tower’s defenses. I believe this to be a powerful X-ray laser, though the beam used on the pieces of wood I threw into this zone was considerably smaller than those which had killed the two Solipsist parachutists. I also noticed that when the dead parachutist resting against the inside of the wall moved—when his parachute was caught by a gust of wind—the beam that hit him was narrow and attenuated, and one of several dozen or so which had seemingly hit him after his death while he was presumably in the same state of morbid mobility.”
“Well,” Sharrow said. “Sounds good news and bad.” She looked distracted, grimacing as she rubbed at her left glove. “Let’s assume whatever’s in the tower is…intact, but—”
“But how the hell do we get in when nobody else has?” Miz said, kicking at a rotten branch in his way.
“Ah,” the android said. It held up one finger. “I mentioned the stone posts at each corner of the square.”
“Yes?” Zefla said.
“Beneath a cover on the top of each post,” Feril said, “there is a hand-lock plate; a security device in the shape of a double-thumbed hand. From their construction I would say that they are designed to react to some chemical or genetic trigger rather than the more usual handprint-pattern. At least two of these posts appear to be operational, the other two having been partially dismantled. All four bear the legend, ‘Female Line.’ ”
Sharrow stopped; they all did.
Zefla looked at her. “Sounds like Gorko again,” she said. “Might just switch the thing off for you, eh, kid?”
Sharrow was staring at her feet. Then she looked up at Zefla and seemed to shake, and then smiled and nodded. “Yes,” she said. She gazed at her left hand, holding it awkwardly. “Yes, it might.”
“So even if the Solipsists do get there first,” Miz said, “they won’t be able to do anything.”
“Yeah,” Zefla said. “But if they do get there before we do, they can make it impossible for us to do anything either.”
Sharrow swayed, blinking, trying to think. There was something else, too. So hard to think.
Zefla looked at Feril. “When will you have to set off if you’re to rendezvous with the sub?”
(Yes, that’s it, Sharrow thought.)
“In about thirty hours,” Feril said.
Zefla nodded, looking at Sharrow. “Onward?” she asked.
Sharrow swallowed. “Onward,” she said.
H
er hand hurt. She felt hungry and nauseous at the same time. She recalled Miz talking about eating fish and suddenly her mouth filled with saliva as she remembered the taste of spiced, blackened fish. That had been in Shouxaine, in Tile, many years ago. She had sat at the rough wooden tables with the others, beneath the lanterns and the firecracker strings and the glow-ropes. They had eaten fish caught in the lake that afternoon and drunk a lot of wine; then she and Miz had gone to bed, and then while they were making love the firecrackers had gone off, and she was there again, in the hotel in Malishu, on the bed under the membrane roof in front of the tall mirrors, but even as she thought about that something dragged her further onward, transported her forward and back at the same time, to that quiet hotel in the mountains, with the view over the hills and the windows opened to the cool breeze which blew the gauzy white curtains softly in and made her skin tingle and dried her sweat and gave Miz cold bumps, and her hands stroked him, fingers stroked him, smoothing the skin on his back and his flanks and shoulders and behind and chest, urging him, controlling him, moving him, and he was a beautiful gray shape above her in the first hint of dawn, and a slowly pulsing presence inside her, a soft-hard rocking nudging her closer and closer to an edge like the edge of the balcony, gray-pink stone through the haze of curtains, shoving and nuzzling and pressing her closer and closer, his breath and her breath like the noise of surf, so that she remembered building sand-castles on the shore once when she was young.
Breyguhn and she; they had each built a castle and made it as high and as strong as they could, right alongside each other; they had each put a paper flag on top of the tallest tower of their castles, and waited to see whose castle would collapse first; the two-moon tide had come in strong and fast and the waves beat at the walls they had each built, and she had seen her own castle start to crumble at the edges, but knew she had built better and had really been watching Breyguhn’s, willing the waves to hit the base of that sea-facing wall, and watched wave after wave after wave hit the sand, bringing the wall to the point of crumbling but not quite undermining it sufficiently, and slowly an incredible sensation of expectation and frustration had built up in her chest and belly, along with a fury that the sea could so nearly hand her victory but then hold back—as the power and strength of the waves seemed to ebb briefly, and no more damage was done—and started to believe that it was never going to happen, that neither castle was ever going to fall, but then seen the waves come strongly in again, breaking and surging and sucking at the castles’ walls, and then finally, finally, finally, with a sudden last pulsed rush of waves—waves that went on and on, piling into the sand when the thing was done and the contest decided—the whole wall of Breyguhn’s castle collapsed and fell, tipping out and breaking in the air and disintegrating into the waves, turning them golden brown as the surf fell tumbling over the wreckage and burst against the rough vulnerability of the sand revealed inside, and smoothed that and slipped back and surged forward again and smoothed and slipped and smoothed and slipped and smoothed, tumbling Breyguhn’s tower and flag into the water.
But then the light had flared, beautiful and terrifying, sublime and sickening, erupting over the beach and the mountains as the burst, glittering ship spun end over end toward the cold planet where she fell forever to the snow; a snowflake amidst the fall.
There had been another night when she slept badly, trying to curl up round her injured hand, holding the thing to her like a treasure and trying to will the pain to stop and let her sleep until eventually she fell into a kind of coma from sheer exhaustion, a semi-sleep in which she dreamed of the distant sparks of the two fires on the other side of the fjord, so far in front of them now that they could only just be glimpsed with the naked eye, flickering through the trees. She had thought she’d heard Cenuij calling to them from the trees ahead, but at least he hadn’t actually appeared in her dream.
Then she was woken with the others to the freezing cold of another day when the floor of gray flat water and the ceiling of gray flat clouds were shackled together by chains of sleet, and in the clear spells between the hail and the sleet showers they could see that the mountain tops were covered in white.
She marched on, talking with the others and to herself and getting hungrier and thinking about food and wishing her hand would stop hurting, and telling the others she was fine even though she wasn’t. They took the detour the android had suggested, around the beach in front of the cliff, near the point on the other side of the fjord, then crossed the first of the two large streams the android had warned them about by going across a fallen tree. Miz cut some branches off it with a laser to make the traverse easier but still she almost fell.
The forest was a cold, dark, damp place and she hated it. She hated her hand for hurting and her belly for being empty and her head for being dizzy and sore and her anus and vagina for itching and her eyes for not focusing and her brain for not working properly.
The android carried her across the second stream, the cold water washing round its chest.
They walked on as the weather cleared a little then got even colder while dark, tall clouds built up to windward and started toward them. Sometime about then she began to forget which day this was and where exactly they were and what they were looking for and why they were looking for it.
Plodding on became everything; her being became centered on the in-out ebb and flow of breath, the thud-thudding of her feet hitting the ground one after another and the lifting, dropping, lifting, dropping motion of her legs, sending vibrations up through her that she received as though from far away and in slow motion. Even her voice sounded distant and not really hers. She listened to herself answer the things the others asked her, but she didn’t know what it was she was saying and she didn’t really care; only the onwardness of walking mattered, only that slow thud-thudding that was her feet and her heart and the wounding pulse of her poisoning pain.
She was alone. She was quite alone. She walked a frozen shore in the middle of nothing, with only the solitude to stalk her either side, and she began to wonder whether she really was a Solipsist, the traitor amongst them.
A brain in a body; a collection of cells in a collection of cells, making its way in a menagerie of other cell-collections, animal and vegetable, wandering the same rough globe with their own share of its dumb cargo of minerals and chemicals and fluids carried strapped and trapped in and by that cage of cells—temporarily—always part of it but always utterly alone.
Like Golter; like poor, poor Golter.
It had found itself alone and it had spread itself as far as it could and produced so much, but it was still next to nothing.
They had grown up—had they only known it—in one room of an empty house. When they began to understand it was a house, they had thought there must be others nearby; they had thought perhaps they were in the suburbs, or even a well-hidden part of the city, but though they had colonized those other rooms, they had looked out from their furthest windows and tallest skylights and found—to their horror, and a horror only their own increased understanding made them fully able to appreciate—that they were truly alone.
They could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckoning, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and even guess that some of those suns too might have planets round them…but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their own.
The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and emblems of a thousand different languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their isolated and freakish star.
For a distance that was never less than a million light-years in any direction around it, Thrial—for all its flamboyant dispersion of
vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets—was an orphan.
There was this wall. She was coming slowly up to this flat wall. The wall was white and gray and studded with little round stones; to one side there was a larger boulder shaped like a giant door handle. She wondered if the wall was really a door. Somehow, she was sure that Cenuij was on the other side. She could see ice and frost on it. The wall was coming closer all the time and seemed to be very tall; she didn’t think she’d be able to see the top. It kept advancing toward her even though she was sure she had stopped walking. Walking had been everything for longer than she could remember; it had been her universe, her existence, her whole reason for being, but then she had stopped and yet here was this wall coming toward her. Very close now; she could see frozen trickles of water between the small stones, and what might have been small, frosted plants. She looked for Cenuij’s eye, peeking through at her from the other side. Somebody else must have noticed the wall because she thought she heard a shout from somewhere far away.
The wall slammed into her. There seemed to be a safety rail. Her head hit the wall anyway, and everything went dark.
The android saw her falling and rushed forward as Miz shouted out. It couldn’t hope to save her properly, but it was just close enough to stretch out a leg and get a foot under her upper chest, slowing her descent just a little before her falling weight took her down and she fell to the stony beach and lay there, face down and still.
Feril hopped once, unbalanced, then knelt with the others as they gathered quickly around her.
“Is she hurt?” Miz said, as Zefla and Dloan gently rolled her over. There was a small graze on her cheek and another on her forehead. Her face looked old and puffed. Her mouth opened slackly. Miz took her right glove off and rubbed her hand. Feril touched her left glove.
Against a Dark Background Page 47
