A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  He expected to have trouble finding the Drones and more making them understand what had happened. In fact they found him.

  Once through the hedge he pushed on, as fast as he could go with Shah now unconscious in his grasp, into the grey wood. He did not expect Balrig, or any Mithraian, to follow, but then he had not expected to find Balrig so close to the hedge or to see him shoot the mercenary’s woman. When he could go no further for the pounding of his heart and the rasping of his breath and the muscle-cramps and the blinding sweat, he dragged to a halt in the gathering gloom and, with a familiarity he would have dismissed as outrageous only hours before, leaned back against a tree-trunk, taking Shah’s inert weight on his spread knees.

  His head bent over her, despair and salt sweat bringing tears to his eyes. It was over, ruined: his dream of escape, his hope of a future, all his optimism founded on the quick grin of a young woman he hardly knew. Now he belonged nowhere – not in the Hive, not in the forest, and the woman he would have made his country was dying in his arms. Her right breast, shoulder and hanging arm were drenched with the blood still leaking from her wound, from which the short fletched prod protruded like a wicked growth. He could have pulled the prod out, though not as easily as he thought he could, but it would have left its leaden gift deep in her body to fester and poison. He did not know what to do. He thought there was nothing he could do to save her, and probably he was right.

  He looked up suddenly, blinking his eyes clear, conscious of scrutiny. Like spectres of the deepening twilight, Drones surrounded him: a ring of the sturdy brown creatures hung with grey rags, binding him to the tree. They had gathered in silence, and in solemn silence they watched him. They made no move. He was afraid of them. He tightened his grip on Shah and, weary as he was, would have tried to shoulder through them, but one of the Drones stepped silently forward and put out his big hand that could hardly master a paint-brush and gently stroked Shah’s hair. Shah spoke.

  Michal almost dropped her with shock. Her voice was not her voice. The sound and the pitch were hers, and the breathiness of effort, but the accent and the emphasis and the words themselves belonged to another. Michal’s skin crawled with invisible ants. Shah’s shut eyes did not flicker. All her face was white and still except for her lips.

  “Give her to us. We will tend her.”

  It was the eeriest thing Michal could remember, listening to a woman talking about herself as if she was not there. He did not hand her over but was in no state to prevent them taking her. The Drone who had touched her now put his strong brown arms under Shah’s shoulders and thighs and walked away with her, her long limbs dangling, the burden making no visible difference to his stride.

  Michal, his reason for staying on his feet removed, sank slowly down the tree onto one knee. The Drones were filing away. The last of them looked back and stopped, and came back for him. Michal accepted the brown hand gratefully, let the Drone help him up and went with the small grey men. Dark fell entirely.

  The Drones took them to a place deep in the wood, where the trees were great-boled and ancient and no pollution of the Mithraians’colony had penetrated. Struggling along in the tail of the procession, exhausted and enervated from effort and reaction, mind and body numb, Michal would have been grieved to know that they considered him a pollution, though strictly speaking they were right. Several times in the weary march Michal strove to impress on the silent company the urgency of the situation, that while the woman lived the time separating her from skilled attention was of critical importance. The Drones simply waved soothing hands at him and neither hastened nor broke their pace; and since the Mithraian’s ten per cent longer legs were hard pressed to match the ground-covering capacity of the short bent brown ones of the forest dwellers in their own environment, it was perhaps as well that his pleas for haste were disregarded.

  They came at last to the Mecca of the Drones’pilgrimage. At first Michal, raising his drooping head to see why they had stopped, thought it was a building. But like everything else in the forest, the great structure was living wood, strong with the sap of centuries, venerable in antiquity. Over generations a crown of trees had grown together, their broad trunks shoulder to bulwark shoulder, their high branches plaiting a lofty roof over the chamber thus enclosed. A narrow lancet doorway twice the height of a man gave sole access. No light pierced the green ceiling. One of the Drones struck a tinder. They carried Shah inside. Michal followed.

  The Drone laid Shah gently on the humus-rich ground. It did not seem to occur to him that any softer bed could be provided or desired. He stroked broad fingers delicately across her brow, damp and hot with fever. Her lips moved. She whispered, “Rest. Do not fear. We shall bring help.”

  “Help?” asked Shah in her own voice, hours later.

  “The Drones,” Michal explained lamely. “They brought us here. They said they would bring help.” He glanced around, huntedly. “I do not know where they have got to.”

  Shah’s breathing, deliberately shallow, whispered in her throat. “They spoke to you?”

  Michal winced, remembering. “In a way.”

  “My head hurts,” whined Shah. She moved it fretfully from side to side and woke the slumbering dragon crouched on her shoulder. She whimpered. When the clutching talons relaxed a little she said, “Who shot me?”

  “Balrig.”

  “Who?”

  “The captain of Hornet Patrol. The man you humiliated.”

  Shah remembered. “He’s a rotten loser,” she observed waspishly, closing her eyes.

  Michal had almost reached the point of trying to do something for Shah himself, though the only implement he had was his elegant letter-opener of a knife, when the Drones returned. They brought oil-lamps that Michal recognised as having been purloined from the Hive, and one of them opened a lamp and fed small silver instruments into the flame. Shah had roused at their coming, and Michal helped her to sit. The Drone squatted before her.

  “We went seeking your companion at the settlement but he has gone. They spoke of a battle in the sky. We brought things. The projectile must be removed before you weaken.”

  “I understand.”

  “Will you trust us?”

  A ghost of a grin flickered across her face. “With my life.” To Michal she said, “They’re going to get it out. I expect it’ll be messy and I expect I shall make a great fuss. Please hold me.”

  The Drone carefully picked the bloody fabric of her shirt away from the shaft of the missile. The blood was old and caking. He slit the shirt and drew it off her breast. He laved the skin. The prod, projected by the small powerful crossbow carried by all the Hive’s fighting men, had struck in the triangle formed by her collar-bone, breast and armpit and had penetrated until its lead cap found bone, spreading on impact. The slug was thus now larger than its entry-wound. The purpled flesh had swollen closed on the shaft so that there was no more bleeding, and no room for manoeuvre either.

  The Drone’s blunt fingers explored. Watching with dread and the vicarious guilt felt by the innocent at others’sufferings, Michal saw Shah flinch from his touch. Then something happened between them. He saw the fear go out of her eyes, felt the tension leach from her body and was aware of a creeping calm that began with the Drones, invaded Shah in a happy conquest, then flowed out and up the ribs of the living chamber like a rising tide. Only Michal was excluded.

  What was happening was communion. The Drones had no anaesthetics, nor had they need of them. One person’s pain does not stretch far when shared with a planet.

  The Drone said, “Admit us.” For a moment she hesitated, afraid. But the pain and the weakness and the nausea that came of having a foreign body implanted in her own were enough to persuade her that things could not get worse. She slipped inside herself and opened wide the portals of her mind.

  They came as softly as rolling smoke, as multitudinous as the grains of sand fleeing before a desert storm, as comfortable and familiar inside her head as her own thoughts. They came from
the far regions of the forest, and beyond the forest, and from beyond the salt sea beyond the forest. They came in friendship and compassion, a healing horde. They took her pain and her fear and divided them among themselves. They were legion; and some of them were Drones and some of them were trees, and whatever the shapes of the bodies they inhabited the shape of their souls was uniquely one. But none was the soul of an individual. The personality of each was wholly subsidiary to its role within the gestalt, the conscious entity born of the life-forces of all Mithras. They were cells in an organism, atoms in an element, and though Shah believed she had understood what the Drone told her under the grey trees, not until now was the full import and all its implications clear to her, the beauty of its simple perfection revealed. As the Drone cut into her she smiled.

  Michal stayed with her in the wooden O. The bark gave off a soothing vapour. Most of the time Shah slept, wrapped in a blanket the Drones had brought. They also brought food, and once one of them changed her bandages almost without waking her. Her fever abated. Michal tried to thank the Drone, who only stared at him impassively. He ate desultorily and without enjoyment the hedge fruits the Drones brought, and spent longer carefully feeding Shah slow sips of water. Occasionally he too dozed. So passed all that night and the next day.

  On the second evening he heard her stirring and, turning up the lamp, found her looking at him with full awareness and a clear animation in her dark lustrous eyes that he had not seen there for some time. She smiled. “Hello.”

  He smiled too. “Welcome back.”

  He helped her sit up. She winced with the lingering pain in her shoulder. She looked around the ribbed chamber. “I vaguely remember asking before but I can’t remember what the answer was. Where are we?” Michal told her again. “That’s right, I remember now. The Drones said something about it too. It’s a special place for them, about the only one they have. The trees focus the power of living things into the earth and the power of the earth into living things. They bring their sick here, and their dead to be returned to the soil.”

  “Ugh,” said Michal, sniffing round him in alarm. “Recently?”

  Shah giggled painfully. “Perhaps not too recently. They live a long time. Anyway, the trees and the earth ingest them totally: there’s nothing left, not even a nasty smell in a Mithraian’s nostrils.”

  “So long as they do not try to ingest us.”

  For some reason that bothered her. She was not afraid of the trees, she was aware that they had breathed life into her when her own resources were at a low ebb, but the image Michal’s words conjured in her mind was disturbing and she could not yet remember why.

  The Drones returned. Shah was learning to recognise them visually as well as by the shapes of their minds. The one who had operated on her, who though none of them had names she thought of as Surgeon, came and squatted before her.

  “We have been to the Hive. Your companion has not returned. The Chancellor, the lord Chaucer, is with him. There is much anger in the Hive. They think of treachery. They think of blood. They believe that your vessel will not return.”

  Shah’s newly recovered strength deserted her all in a moment. If she had been standing she would have fallen. As it was she felt strange vacant sensations behind her knees and inside her elbows. She found her voice with difficulty, and it was hoarse and hollow and shot through with fear. “Destroyed?”

  “There was no battle. The observers in the Hive saw your craft intercept another. It opened fire, the other did not respond. They flew together for some time. Then they separated, the other craft proceeding on its route, yours arching away into deep space until it eventually disappeared from sight. There was no radio communication. What is radio communication?”

  “Something like we’re doing now, between mouth speakers.” Shah spoke absently, her brain in a whirl. “They use machines to speak over great distances.” She stared, frowning, into the yellow heart of the lamp; then she laid her head back against the fragrant bark and stared at the high dark roof. Michal, taking her good hand, felt her begin to tremble.

  Concern danced like an angel in his honest, innocent face. “Shah, what is it – what has happened?”

  In the pale light her upturned face was without expression, the almond eyes dry and empty, only she clung to Michal’s hand as one drowning. His comforting hand was of more immediate solace to her than all the comforting minds in the world. Her voice when it came was thick with gravel and grief. “He’s gone. He’s left me, the bastard. Paul! You bastard! You dog.”

  “Yes,” agreed the Drones silently.

  “Pull yourself together,” Michal said sharply. “Use your head. Paul would not leave you, you are his –”

  “I’m not his anything,” cried Shah. “I’m not his wife, or his woman; I’m not even his bit on the side. He described me to Amalthea as his associate, which just about says it all. I’m there when he wants to talk, there to shake him out of his bad dreams, handy when he wants to use me, and easy enough to cast off if it suits him. And why not? Credit where credit’s due, he never called it love.”

  Michal smiled. “I am sure he did not. You would hardly expect him to. Shah, I have seen you two together. If what he feels for you is not love, it is the nearest thing he is capable of.”

  Squirming on the talons of uncertainty, she rounded nastily on him. “And what do you suppose you know about it?” His eyes fell. His hurt hurt her. Her tone softened. “Oh Michal, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – You don’t understand.”

  There was both hunger and anger in the look he shot her. She was startled by the violence in his eyes. “I understand perfectly. Do not patronise me, Shah. My experience may seem narrow compared with yours, but my life has been neither sheltered nor easy, and there are times when it seems to me I know more of human nature than you and Paul put together. Indeed, for two such clever people you are remarkably dense. You love him and he does not know it, and he loves you and neither of you knows it. All the same, he would leave his money and his ship and his soul behind before he would leave you. If ‘Gyr’really has gone, either it is part of his plan to take the freighter or he has somehow lost control.”

  The unexpected censure had got Shah thinking again. “He’s not dead; I’d know if he were dead. And even if he’d walk out on me he wouldn’t betray a client – unless she’d already tried to cheat him. Would she do that?”

  “Who do you suppose had you shot?”

  Shah stared at him. “That was –”

  “I know who was pointing the crossbow. But I also know how things work on Mithras. Nobody – not Balrig, not the lord Chaucer, nobody – interferes in Amalthea’s schemes, not without an invitation. Balrig might have nursed a deep hatred for you after what you did to him, he might have taken every opportunity to show it, he might even in the heat of the moment have struck you. But he would never have dreamt of coming after you with a weapon. He came from her.”

  Shah nodded thoughtfully. It made sense, so far as it went, but it did not explain why Amalthea wanted her dead. Only because she disliked her? Perhaps it was enough, if she could be sure there would be no repercussions. Despatching her as she left the forest might have seen to that: had she not disappeared back into the trees the Captain of Hornet Patrol would doubtless have summoned up the courage to kick her out of sight among the brambles, and after that she would have been but another foolish unfortunate who strayed into the forest and never returned. Paul could not blame Amalthea for that.

  But she had left Michal out of the equation: either she did not know Shah had an escort, or she supposed the Mithraian could not survive the forest even if the alien could. There was some justification for thinking so but, though both Shah and Michal would now be dead had they separated, the partnership was proving surprisingly durable. With a little help from the Drones. Shah smiled at Surgeon and his mind smiled back. His berry-brown face remained impassive, and he faded silently from the chamber, leaving them alone once more.

  Something Michal had
said, that Shah had hardly registered, came drifting back. “Freighter, Michal? Do you mean the pirate ship?”

  Michal bit his lip. He was not surprised, with all that had happened, that somewhere along the line he had forgotten to tell her something important. “Well, actually,” he murmured, “no.”

  Chapter Five

  Paul woke with his ears still ringing after hours in an angry, raucous limbo that was neither sleep nor awareness but combined the worst of both worlds. His senses felt battered, like a man spat out after falling through a kaleidoscope. Curiously, although he had lost consciousness before he could identify the weapon, he woke knowing what it was and how it worked, as if his mind had been idly toying with the problem all the time it had been playing hide-and-seek with his body. It was a compressed air gun, and the charge exploding in his face had thrown him halfway across the flight-deck.

  Meanwhile “Gyr”, without guidance but unconcerned, knowing by his pulse sensor that he lived and unable to discriminate between a sleeping commander and one out for the count, swung on into deep space along the same graceful curve by which she disengaged the “Quasar Griffin”. The gun was quite clever, because it would put people out of action without damaging delicate instruments nearby.

  Finally, after he had thought about the gun and his ship and his head, Paul remembered Chaucer.

  He found him, after an inordinately long search in view of the size of the flight-deck, seated at the console, slewed round and regarding him acrimoniously over the flared muzzle of the little gun. From the angle of the console Paul deduced that he was against the starboard bulwark, from its elevation that he was on the floor, from the way his right arm was eclipsing half the view that his hands were tied up higher than his head, possibly to the mounting strake to which the various instrument panels were bolted, and from the fact that it had taken him five clear minutes to work out a small parcel of truths that should have been self-evident at first glance that his head was not yet operating at optimum efficiency. Also his shoulders ached from being strung up like a pig for ritual slaughter, and there was a deep cramping hurt in his side that suggested the recent application of a boot.