by Eric Brown
I had purposefully not looked Leah’s way until now: I could no more acknowledge her liaison with Hulse than I could have faced the possibility that she might snub me. She was the youngest among our group, at least in terms of years, though she had about her the natural sophistication of a woman twice her age. I had worshipped her from afar since I was ten, and just a year ago a miracle occurred when she became Gabby’s best friend and, in consequence, a member of our group.
Not long after that she took up with Hulse, perhaps impressed by his bravado, his leadership skills; I should have hated her for it, but I could only feel sorry for her and wait until the day when she saw through his swaggering act.
She was as slim as a moonfern, brown as a coffee bean. When alone in her company I was almost always speechless. On one embarrassing occasion, which she either did not notice, or deigned to overlook, she had playfully grabbed my arm and asked me a question, and in a paroxysm of fright and delight I had lost control of my bladder.
I recalled what I had rushed here to tell them.
‘Have you heard about the supernova?’ I asked. ‘It’s due to blow in fifty years.’
Hulse turned to me, something like heroic forbearance in his attitude. ‘When did you find that out, kid?’
‘Just now. This morning. My father told me.’
Hulse flicked a fashionable lock of hair from his eyes. ‘Just what do they teach you at your school?’ he sneered at me. How I hated his heavy-featured face, with its expert appropriation, freakish in someone so young, of adult disdain.
I glanced around. Bobby and Rona and Gabby were silent, gazing down at the lake. Leah was concealed behind my tormentor; I could only see her bare legs, embraced by her equally bare, brown arms.
‘Supernova in fifty,’ Hulse reeled off, ‘evacuation plans begin in thirty, actual evacuation in forty. Citizens to be evacuated by provinces, to designated planets in the Thousand Worlds. Communities to be kept intact, unless individuals wish otherwise, in which case they pay their own way.’
I tried to hide my unease, but that was impossible. I had a face that flared as red as a beacon at the slightest perceived affront.
‘I had no idea ...’ I stammered. ‘Nobody told me.’
Hulse rolled his wrist in a haughty gesture. ‘Consider yourself told.’
‘Are ... are any of you leaving before . . .’ I stuttered. ‘That is, before the actual evacuation?’
Gabby glanced at her brother. ‘Daddy said he’s thinking about taking us back to Earth. But I hope he doesn’t.’
‘I’m leaving anyway when I graduate,’ Hulse said, ‘but I expect I’ll come back from time to time, for old time’s sake.’
I cleared my throat. ‘Leah?’
She leaned forward again, and her smile banished all my self-doubt. ‘I’m staying here until the evacuation,’ she said, and I was cheered by the thought that her declaration intimated her independence from Hulse. ‘What about you?’
Timorously, I returned her smile. ‘I’m staying too,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.’ Perhaps boldened by her attention, I went on. ‘It’s hard to believe that in fifty years this ... all this . . .’ I gestured in lieu of words.
Rona said in a whisper, ‘All destroyed in the ultimate firestorm.’
‘God,’ Bobby said, as if the thought had just struck him, ‘Mallarme, the mountains and the lake . . . even Baudelaire!’
I glanced across at Leah. Tears filmed her vast, brown eyes.
Hulse said, ‘Yeah, just think of it. Every last bird and beast burned to a cinder.’
I expected Leah to protest, to cry at least. Instead she laughed and hit out at Hulse with a tiny, ineffectual fist. ‘Oh, you . . . you typical man, Hulse!’ and there was something close to admiration in her tone.
I stared down past my feet at the wind-rilled water far below. A silence settled as we each considered our thoughts, or in Hulse’s case whatever passed for thoughts.
I wondered if the holiday would continue in this vein, or if Hulse would let up and treat me as a human being. He’d been affable enough in the past, to the point where I almost considered him a friend, but he had always spoiled himself with some barbed cruelty or malicious act - not always directed at myself. Bobby had been the butt of his arrogance in the past. Perhaps this was one of the reasons Bobby and I were close.
‘Talking about birds and beasts,’ Hulse said, ‘shall we tell him about the Zillion?’
I glanced around at my friends, but they looked uneasy and would not meet my gaze.
‘What about it?’ I asked Hulse.
‘While you were resitting your exams,’ he said, ‘we began a dare.’
I guessed what the dare was, and I understood then the unease of my friends. I felt my palms begin to sweat where I gripped the lip of the fungus.
‘What kind of dare?’
‘On the first day of the holiday, I swam over to the island at sunset, sat and waited until the Zillion came out, then stared him down.’
I looked across the lake to the green knoll of the island. In years gone by we had often dared each other to swim across to Zillion’s island and confront the creature. At nights, as we huddled around the fire that Hulse had expertly built on bricks carried up from the lane, we had tried to frighten each other with ever more terrible stories about the strange creature that made its home on the tiny island. We knew it for a rogue Arcturian gladiator, or a man-eater, or a telepath who could kill with a single thought. My parents laughed when I told them this, and said that he was an harmless alien hermit who had come to Verlaine to see out the rest of his days in peace. But then they would say that, I reasoned, to keep the dreadful truth from me.
So Hulse had finally summoned the courage to face the alien ... I would have been impressed if I had not disliked him so much.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
Hulse shrugged nonchalantly. ‘He just stared at me. I thought I felt a prickling in my head, as if he were trying to read my thoughts. Then he returned to his lair and I swam back.’
I stared at the island. It was perhaps a kilometre away. The swim alone would have been enough to tax my strength, but then to confront the alien . . .
Hulse went on, ‘Next day, Leah did the same. Then Bobby and Gabby and Rona. Even Satch stirred himself from his sac yesterday and paid the creature a visit.’
Hulse was looking at me, sidewise, assessing my reaction to the news. I glanced at my friends. They knew I was a poor swimmer, knew I would have difficulty reaching the island.
Like a torturer relishing the agony of his victim, Hulse let the silence stretch.
‘So . . .’ he said at last, ‘how about this evening at sunset?’
‘I . . .’ I cast about feebly for an excuse. ‘I can’t. Not tonight. I said I’d help my mother in the garden.’
Hulse’s stare combined disbelief with supreme disdain.
‘But,’ I went on, surprising myself, ‘I’m doing nothing tomorrow night. I’ll swim over to the island then.’ And I stared at him until he looked away.
‘You all heard that,’ he said to the others. ‘Joe’ll risk his life tomorrow.’
‘Don’t joke about it, Hulse.’ This was Leah. She leaned around Hulse and smiled at me. ‘Don’t worry ‘bout it, Joe. You know,’ she continued lazily, ‘nothing is ever as bad as you expect it to be.’
Shortly after this, the meeting broke up. Gabby stretched and yawned, staring up at Satch in his sac. ‘You’ve slept enough, boy. I think I’ll go and wake him up.’
Quietly, whispering to each other, Hulse and Leah slipped from the platform. I heard them climbing high up inside the trunk, caught a glimpse of Leah’s legs as she stepped out onto a more private platform high overhead.
Bobby and Rona were arguing beside the slit in the bole. Finally Rona flounced from view, and Bobby joined me on the edge. ‘Women!’ he complained, shrugging his shoulders. ‘How about a game of Out?’
He pulled a miniature set from the
pocket of his jacket and we sprawled in the dappled sunlight and played the best of three. My mind was not on the game - a combination of trepidation at what I’d got myself into in agreeing to the swim, and some subtle realisation that Bobby would rather be with Rona, distracted me. I played badly and lost the first and third games.
I rolled onto my back and stared up through the dancing foliage. Above me, the canoe-shape of the dream-sac swayed and bulged as Gabby and Satch made love.
‘What was it like, when you swam across to the island?’ I asked Bobby.
I could not see him from where I lay looking up through the foliage, but I sensed his hesitation. I could imagine his reluctant shrug, his slow grimace. ‘Oh . . . you know. It’s easy, once you’re there. Don’t worry about it, Joe, okay?’
‘It’s easy, once you’re there,’ I repeated. ‘But it’s getting there that’s giving me the shits. And then there’s the bloody Zillion.’
He was silent. I closed my eyes. So much childhood experience is needlessly traumatic: I had often wished I could reassure the naive boy I was then that, as Leah had so wisely quoted, nothing was ever as bad as you expected it to be.
Perhaps an hour later, having got over her sulk, Rona appeared from the hollow-tree and smiled across at Bobby.
‘See you tomorrow, Joe,’ he murmured, and slipped away hand in hand with the short, ugly, red-headed girl. I lay there a while longer, contemplating how awful life could be, and then climbed down and made my way back home.
* * * *
So fresh were the memories that it was hard to credit that fifty years had elapsed since we had played in the tree beside the lake. For almost that long I had lived on Earth and Cymbaline, having followed my parents into the profession of xeno-botany. I had always intended to return to Tartarus some day, but the time had never been quite right - I was always busy or otherwise occupied. Then I heard on a newscast that the evacuation of the planet had begun. I took the fastest sailship to Tartarus and arrived at Verlaine on the day before Mallarme province was due to be evacuated. I had thought that perhaps I would need more time to reacquaint myself with the haunts of my youth, but in the event I found that my memories were too poignant and that one day was quite enough.
With two hours to go before the Thousand World Confederation carrier transported the remaining citizens to Baudelaire, I left the house for the very last time and walked down the hill to the lake.
Little had changed across the intervening years. The rolling green countryside was as I remembered it, fragrant and bedecked with flowers. So completely did the track to the lake - more a tunnel through thick, over-arching hedges - match my memory of it that I might have been transported back in time. Only the increased heat gave away the lie, and the dazzling, depthless white-hot sky. I passed familiar houses on my way, the open timber villas where Leah and the others had lived, empty and overgrown now like my own.
I arrived at the shore of the lake and noticed that a couple of the nearby hollow-trees had been felled - but not, I saw with a sudden start of relief, our own. I almost ran across to it. The ferns no longer concealed the entrance, and as I knelt and caressed the smooth, worn wood I marvelled that I had once been small enough to slip through the narrow gap. Now I could barely force my shoulder through the crevice. More than anything I wished I were able to climb up inside the tree, to renew my intimacy with the locale that had meant so much to me.
I stood and walked around the tree, to where its gnarled roots knuckled down towards the water’s edge. I shaded my eyes and gazed up the length of the trunk, at the branches that began ten metres above. With a thrill of recollection I made out the dark, triangular wedge of our fungal platform, and above it the small white shapes of the dream-sacs.
I sat down with my back against the bole and stared out across the lake. The water level had dropped with the increased temperature over the years, and the island seemed correspondingly larger. I stared at the dry, grassy hump and for a second imagined that I could make out the Zillion.
* * * *
On the eve of my encounter with the alien, I mooched around the house and garden, avoiding my parents and the inevitable questions they would ask. Why was I not outside, playing with my friends? The lie I had told Hulse earlier - that I had to help my mother in the garden - prevented my joining the others, but of course I realised that my friends would be occupied with other, more important things that evening, and would not welcome my presence.
I slept badly that night, dreaming of drowning in fathoms of water, of falling victim to the Zillion. I slept in till almost noon, then ate and read by turn until the sun lowered itself behind the distant hills and a beautiful, peach-wine light flooded the countryside. The Zillion would be climbing from its underground lair about this time, to sit in the twilight and contemplate who knew what.
I left the house and made my way down the track. I was so absorbed with my fear that I was only half-aware of Bobby as he stepped from the concealment of the hedge and barred my way. He looked as terrified as I felt.
‘Bobby? What’s wrong?’
He took me by the shoulder and pushed me into the hedge, as if he feared we might be seen. ‘I’ve been waiting here for hours,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d never come out.’
I shrugged, puzzled by his attitude. ‘I said I’d meet you at sunset . . . What’s the matter, Bobby?’
‘Look . . .’ He couldn’t bring himself to meet my gaze. ‘I wanted to tell you yesterday, but I couldn’t.’
‘Tell me what?’
He hesitated. ‘What Hulse told you then, that he swam across to the island...’
My heart banged in joyous reprieve. ‘What?’
‘He didn’t. He didn’t do it. He was lying.’
I stared at him.
‘And the other things he said, about me and the others swimming across . . . we didn’t do it, either.’
I was speechless for long seconds. Then I said, ‘You could have said something yesterday.’
‘You don’t understand. He said if we said anything, he’d tell my father about Rona and me, and Gabby and Satch. You know what my father would do if he found out.’ He reddened, then went on, ‘Last night Leah came and told me that we had to do something. I said I’d see you today.’
‘Leah?’ I asked, like an idiot. ‘Leah said you had to tell me?’
‘What’s so unusual about that?’ He regarded me. ‘Look, why do you think Hulse treats you like he does? It’s because Leah looks out for you, and Hulse doesn’t like that.’
I shook my head. The realisation that Leah thought about me - albeit in the same way a sister might think about her kid brother - was a strange and marvellous revelation.
‘So . . .’ Bobby went on, ‘all you have to say is that your father was out on his boat all last week, and didn’t see us swimming to the island. Tell Hulse he’s lying and that you’re not going to do the dare, okay?’
We continued down the track, through the dusk air filled with floating seed heads, and came to the lake that rippled at this time of day like molten gold. The others were beneath the tree, seated among the roots to gain a grandstand view of my swim. Even Satch was there, having vacated his sac especially for the event. He looked bleary-eyed and absent.
I noticed Leah and Rona glance edgily at Bobby, who nodded to them that everything was okay. Hulse had prepared a barbecue, a small fire roasting spitted spearback fish. Last year he’d found a valuable silver lighter in the main street, dubbed himself the Keeper of the Flame, and initiated a series of barbecues that he liked to think were the height of sophistication.
I stood hesitantly by the lake, watching them. Leah gave me a dazzling smile. I could only blush and look away. I told myself that it was better to be regarded by her as a little kid who needed her protection, than not to be regarded at all.
Hulse turned to me, waving a spitted spearback in the air. ‘Care for a last meal, kid?’
I was aware of all the eyes on me. ‘You don’t eat before swimming,�
�� I heard myself say. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
Hulse merely shrugged and turned away, while the others stared at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses. Perhaps I had. I had not planned to continue with the dare, but at Hulse’s ‘last meal’ jibe it had seemed the only thing to do. To confront Hulse with his lie and refuse the dare would be to admit my fear. To swim to the island, say good day to the alien, swim back and then confront Hulse - now that would be a supreme victory.
Hulse passed the cooked fish around. The others sat with the plates on their laps, reluctant to feast while I drowned. Hulse had stolen a bottle of wine from his father’s cellar. He poured himself a generous measure, enthroned himself among the roots, and gestured with his glass.
