View from Ararat

by Caswell, Brian

  12

  Into the Maelstrom

  Carmody Island

  Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

  20/1/203 Standard

  KAZ’S STORY

  When the pager went off, we’d just got to sleep. Jules had his arm around me, and there was no way I could get up without waking him. So I didn’t try.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said, sliding out onto the cold floor. ‘Emergency.’

  ‘Want me to come?’ he asked, but I shook my head.

  ‘Nothing you can do. Go back to sleep.’

  But he didn’t roll over. He lay there staring at me as I got dressed. Then he spoke.

  ‘This is never going to happen again, is it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. For a moment I didn’t understand the question.

  My mind was on the pager message. Inge Hyams was slipping away from us, and that wasn’t something I could allow to happen without a fight.

  ‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘tonight. What happened. It’s never going to happen again.’

  I stopped dressing and looked at him. He seemed . . . I don’t know, resigned.

  And I realised he was right.

  A rainy night, the horror of what was about to overtake us, a moment of self-doubt.

  And Jules. Safe, warm and willing to help me block out the fear.

  I remembered his touch, his gentle caress, the care he took. I remembered crying afterwards, and holding him, and how he whispered me gently into sleep.

  He loved me. I knew that. I’d known it for a long time. And I suppose that’s why he saw through me, even before I saw through myself.

  He deserved more than I could offer him. He deserved to be loved back.

  ‘No,’ I said finally. ‘It’ll never happen again.’

  He looked at me for a moment longer, then smiled sadly and shrugged, a small movement of his shoulders.

  ‘They need you,’ he said. ‘You’d better go.’

  For a moment I held his gaze, then I reached down for my shoes.

  When I looked back, he was lying with his face towards the wall.

  The pager sounded again as I was headed for the door.

  Carmody Island

  Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

  20/1/203 Standard

  KAEBA

  01:29:15. She wakes with a start and looks across to where Loef is already sitting up on his bed-platform. He returns her look, and his thought-tone grows in her mind.

  – You felt it?

  – Loef, he is dying. Can we not . . .? But her question remains unfinished, as she sees suddenly into his intentions.

  Before the discussion can continue, the wave of fear swells again inside her mind, as powerful as anything she has ever experienced. Unfiltered emotion. Human pain. Alien thoughts.

  But pure. Uncontaminated by the alien speechwords. For this mind has never known the sound of speech. Nor anything but the rhythmical swell of heart and blood. And the unknown world as a distant rumble. Never until this moment, when that life-rhythm suddenly slows, and the pain grows unbearable.

  – Come . . .

  Already Loef is sliding from the platform, heading for the door.

  She rushes to join him, and together they make their way out into the pre-dawn dark.

  – This way . . .

  Her instruction is unnecessary. The pain, the fear, is like a beacon in the darkness.

  As they approach the island’s small medical centre, the baby’s wordless terror floods over them a third time, drawing them on, desperately. Insistently . . .

  Med-centre

  Carmody Island

  Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

  20/1/203 Standard

  KAZ’S STORY

  On the bed Inge Hyams was lying motionless, the way she had for over a month, her bandaged head held rigid by the metal frame encasing it.

  Her breathing was the steady, mechanical hiss of the respirator, her heartbeat was a small, efficient, negative-pressure reflex-pump. Machines filtered her blood and monitored her life-signs. Tubes delivered sustenance and removed waste. But for all its advances, there was nothing medical science could do to reverse the kind of injuries she had sustained, and the machines round the bed achieved squat, except to stave off the inevitable.

  The fall had done too much damage. Unlike the cells of the limbs or the other organs, the delicate complexity of brain tissue or spinal cord can’t be regenerated in cloning tanks. In every real sense, Inge Hyams was dead. She had been dead from the moment she was brought in from where they’d found her, bleeding and broken, at the base of that sickening drop.

  Under the circumstances, even the faint life-signs discovered in ER were amazing. But then came the discovery of the child growing inside her. A child who still lived and moved . . .

  That the tiny child had survived for so long was a miracle – if you believed in such things, which I didn’t. But the miracle was rapidly going sour.

  I studied the read-out on the body scan and shook my head. I was just twenty-one. I was out of my depth, and sinking.

  And I was desperate.

  Wendy, the nurse, must have read my feelings. She put an experienced hand on my shoulder.

  ‘You can’t do it, Kaz. It’s barely eighteen weeks, and it has too much going against it. It’ll never survive the shock of a caesarean. Look, it’s not your fault. You’ve done everything humanly possible.’

  For a few seconds we looked at each other. Then I broke.

  I’d had enough – Charlie, the outbreak, the thing with Jules . . . and now this. It wasn’t Wendy’s fault. She just happened to be in the firing line.

  ‘He’s a child, for Christ’s sake, not an “it”! And I haven’t worked this hard for this long to let him die now.’

  She didn’t blink. ‘Okay, “he”. But you can’t change the facts. He’s too young, and he’s too weak and unstable. Kaz, I know they’ve saved them younger, but not under these conditions. Look at the foetal distress levels. Take him now and the shock will kill him before we can even get him on life support. This isn’t Edison Central Paediatrics. We don’t have the back-up. Without the mother to incubate him, we’re screwed. Maybe if we tried—’

  ‘We’ve tried everything already. Look at the read-out. Her vital functions are failing. And the placental blood-flow is forty points below critical. He’s borderline oxygen-deficient already. If we don’t do it now, he’ll die anyway. And I’m not going to let it happen without a fight.’

  The anger dissipated as fast as it had arrived, but now it was replaced by a stubborn determination. She nodded reluctantly, and I looked back towards the figure on the bed, steeling myself for what was to come.

  It was hopeless and we both knew it, but there wasn’t a choice. A caesarean was a one-in-a-million shot. Waiting around for the child to die was no shot at all.

  I sensed the door sliding open behind me and I turned. Loef and Kaeba were standing maybe three or four metres away looking up at me.

  ‘What . . .?’ I began, but the presence that grew in my mind drove away all thought of speech.

  Loef. And he was as desperate as me.

  – The child is afraid. We must take away the fear or he will die. His pain is great . . .

  He moved towards the bed, his eyes still focused on mine.

  – I can help . . .

  For a moment I hesitated, but only for a moment. Somehow I trusted him. I nodded and Loef approached the motionless body where it lay on the bed. It was high off the floor, and he climbed up onto a chair to gain the height he needed.

  Then he reached out both hands and placed them on the comatose woman’s distended abdomen.

  I moved up behind him and whispered, ‘I have to take him immediately. In a few minutes he will be dead if I don’t.’

  With
out looking towards me, the young Elokoi nodded, in human fashion.

  – I know this. So I must prepare him. He is scared. But he must not fear. And he must not feel the pain, or he . . . he cannot survive. I must . . . find . . . I . . . must . . . I . . .

  Suddenly he was falling from the chair, rolling limply in the air, and landing hard on his back, his eyes staring, his long fingers clenching and unclenching in a spasm of pain and fear.

  I froze momentarily at the suddenness of it, but before I could bend to assist him Kaeba moved between us.

  – Quickly. He has taken the child’s pain. And his fear. You must do it now. With speed. Please. He cannot bear it long . . .

  She placed her hands on her kinbrother’s head, closing her eyes. She sent nothing more.

  For a few seconds I stared at the pair. Then the years of discipline took over and I turned to Wendy. ‘Let’s do it.’

  As I spoke, I moved towards the bed and began the preparations. My left foot depressed a pedal and the bed was suddenly isolated behind creolite screens which glided up out of the floor all around.

  The subdued overhead glow-lights were enhanced by a bank of blinding incandescents focused on the bed, and the whole area was bathed in the slightly orange aura of a sterilisation field, to ensure it was free of all potential infectious threats.

  A robot assistant tracked in through a panel in one of the screens, on its tray an ordered selection of shining instruments. I looked across at Wendy. ‘Ready?’

  She nodded slightly but said nothing. She had already pulled away the thin gown which covered the woman on the bed.

  ‘Laser.’ I spoke the order to the robot, and held out my hand, palm up, feeling the slight slap as the instrument was placed firmly in my grasp. Thumbing the control, I watched the thin, red line of light as I directed it in a careful arc across the tight skin. There was a wisp of smoke and the slightest smell of burning, and then the skin began to open . . .

  LOEF

  . . . down inside there is nothing but fear. And the pain.

  Physical, all-consuming. Searing his nerve-endings and burning across his very sense of being like a flame. Suddenly the wordless, uncomprehending terror, so seemingly powerful outside, is amplified a thousand times. It digs dark claws into his soul, tearing at his core of self, and he is trapped within the storm of raging, unformed thoughts. A chaos of timeless, alien instincts that surge wordlessly, insistently, and tell of flowing blood-rivers and warm salt-ocean swells and huge-leafed ancient trees. And of the deep, primeval hunger to survive.

  He is buffeted. Floating, falling, sinking through a universe of time and memory. Of race. Of species. Of a world far-gone. Forgone.

  Sinking. Spiralling downwards.

  Down towards the distant centre. Falling.

  Falling

  Spiralling and falling.

  A lifetime/A moment . . .

  And then the sudden emptiness, the soul-deep visceral silence. The eye of the maelstrom.

  In that measureless instant, floating without motion, disembodied, beyond reason and time, with the terrors and the drives and the rivers of instinct flowing, revolving around him, he is opened.

  Finally he understands.

  With invisible arms he reaches out from that single point of soul to embrace the unembraceable and draw it to himself.

  – I know you . . . he whispers/he shouts. And he waits . . .

  A moment/An eternity.

  – I know you . . . the reply comes back.

  Not shouted. Not whispered. Not an empty echo of his call, but an answer. It swells from beyond him and within him. It courses through him like blood.

  – I know you.

  – I know you.

  – I know . . .

  JULES’S STORY

  And that was it.

  I like to think that all those days spent burrowing through my intimate secrets had somehow helped prepare him for what happened in that operating room, but in the end I think it was just Loef. It was what made him special – that quality I’d sensed back in Al-Tiina all those months earlier.

  I guess what surprised me was that it happened so quickly. But isn’t that what they say? All the truly great events are accidents – a unique, unpredictable series of coincidences that change forever the way things will be.

  Kaz took the baby just in time. Within an hour Inge Hyams was gone. But the baby was safe in the tech-womb, connected to the life support, monitored, and calm. At some point during the operation the foetal distress reading had suddenly levelled off, and according to Kaz that was the deciding factor.

  We buried Inge in the island graveyard. There were no relatives. Her mother and father were dead and she had no brothers or sisters. We didn’t even know who the baby’s father was, and no one came forward to claim him.

  So Kaz named him Julius.

  It was a popular choice for a name, but I don’t think many people understood the significance of it. That’s what comes from losing your sense of history.

  I didn’t see much of Loef for the next couple of months. While the rest of the world was falling down around our ears, he spent just about every waking moment – and most of the sleeping ones – in the I-C ward, just sitting beside the child. I visited him at times, but there wasn’t a whole lot of point. He hardly knew I was there. It was like his whole concentration was focused, absorbed, by his communion with the child.

  Kaeba too. When she wasn’t with Cael, studying the Thoughtsongs, she was seated beside Loef. Sharing.

  I felt almost cheated that I couldn’t be part of what was happening in that hospital room. I’d been left behind as they began their journey along a road I wasn’t equipped to travel.

  First Kaz, then Loef.

  It’s funny. You go through your whole life, independent, fulfilled, completely satisfied with your lot, with who you are and the direction you have chosen, then suddenly it isn’t enough. For a brief moment you taste something different, you allow it inside your defences, and suddenly you want more. But though it floats there, tantalisingly close, it might as well be a universe away. And part of you knows it.

  I stood there in the doorway and watched them. And I knew that I was witnessing Deucalion’s future. The future of my race.

  If only we could find a way of protecting that future from the spectre of the past. A past whose fatal legacy was threatening to consume all that two billion years of evolution and two centuries of struggle had built.

  Later I stood on the clifftop, facing east towards the mainland. The wind was cold. I slid my hands inside my jacket and jammed them under my armpits, seeking warmth.

  Somewhere out there a war was in progress. Silent and invisible, the enemy was massing for an all-out attack. And we were manning the barricades, without a battle-plan and without a single weapon . . .

  13

  By the Numbers

  Roosevelt Ranges

  Eastern Foothills

  20/1/303

  CINDY’S STORY

  If some guy ever offers you a walking tour of the Roosevelt Ranges and the Fringes to their west, threaten him with permanent disfigurement, and look really mean until he goes away.

  It’s not quite as inhospitable as the equator of Ganymede, but it’s not that far off either. I guess the only thing it has going for it is that the air is at least breathable – except at midday, when it gets so hot that it burns your throat when you inhale.

  For the first few days after we escaped from the camp we spent every minute looking over our shoulders for signs of pursuit, or watching the skies for the flyers we were sure they’d send after us. But after a while it was clear we were safe.

  When you think about it, there was really no way they could have known that we were gone. How could they? No one was about to go into the camp and count heads, and with people dying at the rate of hundred
s a day, even infra-red scanners flown over the camp couldn’t keep track of the numbers.

  Pursuit wasn’t a problem for us. Food was. And water. Not shelter, so much. The flatlands are well vegetated, and moving at night and sleeping through the worst of the day’s heat in shady stands of Ocra or Capyjou, we managed to make it to the eastern foothills. It took us about four days to get there, and even by that stage Cox’s twins, Lexie and Jenna, were showing signs of wilting.

  And why not? They were ten years old (twelve in Earth numbers), and for as long as they could remember they’d lived with Cox’s mother in a temperature-controlled environment on the southern coast of the Florida republic.

  Then their father struck it rich in the garbage belt of Jupiter and the roller-coaster started rolling. One day they go into stasis on the Pandora, the next (for them) they wake up in orbit thirty-four light-years away from home.

  They hardly have time to blink, when suddenly they’re down on the surface of a strange planet, locked away from the rest of humanity like cattle in a stockyard, and suffering in heat that could boil blood. Then, before they can really get used to that, they find themselves on the run, with their father, their big brother and sister, and some people they don’t really know, walking at night, sheltering by day, permanently hungry and thirsty, and not really sure why they’re there, or why everyone in the group is frightened of shadows and angry most of the time.

  I think they’d both have been basket cases after our first day on the run if it hadn’t been for Tim and Krysten, their older brother and sister. They kept up conversations, invented stupid games, and at times even took turns in carrying the girls.

  But more importantly, they were a comforting physical presence when the men were just too concerned with getting on with the journey to spare even a brief touch for the two smallest journeyers.

  I never had any brothers or sisters, and being earmarked for Research as soon as the testing identified my potential at age four, I never really had any friends. At least, not the kind you share your ‘inner-mosts’ with.

  Research is too competitive to open yourself to anyone, and they train you in total independence – academic and personal – from the moment you’re chosen.