by Chris Walley
“Yes,” Merral answered slowly, feeling a prickling of unease.
“It’s dark and cold. Anyway, Trest cuts away one branch. Splash. Then suddenly he yells out, ‘Cap’n, there’s an animal in the branches!’ ”
Merral felt himself go rigid.
“I point the light at the tree and—” Daniel swallowed and closed his eyes, as if in pain. “In it . . . is a thing. Moving. At first I think it’s a bear. Then I realize it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Perhaps half my size, brown, and shiny.”
“Shiny?” Merral heard himself say, his own voice sounding strange.
Daniel opened his eyes wide in a look of acknowledgement. “Ah,” he said in a long, ragged whisper as their eyes met, “so you have seen it too?”
He stared at his glass, seemed to realize that it was empty, and put it on the floor with an exaggerated carefulness. “It was hard to see, really. Ten meters or so away. But it was shiny; glistening in the spotlight. The weirdest, most horrible thing. You could make out plates on it. Brown, gleaming—some sort of strange limbs. An odd brown head. Moving very slowly. Toward us . . .”
“Go on,” Merral said as gently as he could.
“Like a big insect. A fifty-kilo cockroach. You could hear the thing hissing. None of us liked what we were seeing.
“Lawrence steps back and starts praying. Weird thing was, I could see its breath. Weird—for an insect, that is.”
Suddenly the captain exhaled noisily and the words began running out. “Then, all of a sudden, this thing leaps at the boat. Just like that. Weird arms up in the air, clattering. As if they were mechanical. Billy screams. The thing lands in the prow, rocks the boat, and lashes out at Lawrence. An attack. Lawrence runs back, nearly overturns the boat. Drops the cutting tool. Now this thing, brown plates, scales—whatever—is in the boat. Like a lobster the devil’s made. Then it’s coming at me. So, I do the only thing I can think of and I pick up the cutting tool. And as the thing moves toward me, I flick the beam on.”
Merral shuddered, imagining all too clearly the cockroach-beast in the boat held at bay by a meter-long, pencil-thin beam of glowing, high-temperature gas.
“For a moment I thought it was going to back off. Then it jumps. Waves its arms at me and then moves at me. With these weird hands that look like they are crossed with an electrician’s wire cutters. And—”
He stopped and stretched out his arms on either side of him as if to brace himself against the cabin walls. Then, with his voice slower, the captain spoke again. “And I hit it with the beam. There’s an awful scream and a smell of burning. The flames are all round its face and it leaps in the air, screaming. I keep the beam on it because I’m terrified, and it lands on the edge of the boat. Thrashes around there in flames. Then it crawls over the edge and drops into the water.”
His jaw trembled. “And Billy is yowling and Lawrence is yelling at me and I realize I’ve still got the cutting tool blade on. So I turn it off and I see that we’re all shaking like leaves in a gale, and I focus the light into the water where this thing is thrashing about with steam coming off it. And there’s blood all over the side of the boat. And then this thing stops moving and just lies there, bobbing up and down. Facedown, with this strange corrugated brown back. And there’s blood in the water.”
Far away a ship’s siren sounded. When it had died away, the captain began again. “So we stare at the body. Lawrence is just saying ‘mutant insect, mutant insect’ over and over again. Billy is gibbering, and I’m wondering what to do.”
He sighed. “But I figure now we did the wrong thing. We should have hauled it back onboard, piled it in a big sealable bag, thrown out half our food, and put it in the freezer. Let Biology look at it. Well, you can guess what we did, can’t you?”
“Yes. Easily.” Merral realized his mouth was dry. “Just let it float away and washed off the blood?”
Daniel nodded, and Merral could see his pink tongue wrap round his lips. “Yes.” His voice was thickened and slow now. “We said we were physical oceanography, see, not biological. And we just decided that it’s some insect thing, right? Some mutant, Made World arthropod, some crustacean monstrosity. That’s why I don’t eat the things now. Only, as I stare at it, it begins to roll over. ‘It’s sinking,’ says Lawrence, and his teeth are chattering. And as it does I see the head properly.”
He rubbed his cheeks with his hands as if rubbing soap into his beard. “This is the worst bit. You see, it’s the head—the face—that’s burned the most. And as it sinks, slowly, I can see that it has a skull. White bone, braincase, jaws. A skull. Like you and me.”
“Ah.”
“Yes.” A muscle twitched in the side of Daniel’s face. “It wasn’t an insect. So that’s why we decided to keep quiet. We figured—well, I figured—that I’d killed some poor mutated human. We swilled out the boat, got the tree trunk free of the cable in double-quick time. Promised secrecy to each other. By dawn, we were kilometers away. So there you are. I killed it.”
Merral stood up and stretched himself, more to give himself a chance to think than because he needed to. He walked to the window and then back to his seat.
“Let me try and put your mind at rest,” he said after a moment. He took out his diary, found on it an image of two cockroach-beasts, and showed it to Daniel. “Is this it?”
The seaman gasped. “Two more?”
“Yes. I think there are still others left.” He switched the image off and sat down. “I have also met these creatures, and under circumstances like the one you described, I too killed one. It was either him or me.”
The eyes widened. “You’re serious? You are not just saying that?”
“Can you imagine what a nip from those hands would look like on an ankle?” Merral lifted his right trouser leg and rolled down his sock, exposing the red line of the still-healing wound. “My boot protected me a bit, but it still cut in.”
He covered his ankle again and looked at Daniel, who was shaking his head in disbelief. “No, Captain, whatever you killed was not human. It had human elements, but it was, in a way that we do not understand, a fabricated creature. And evil. I think it would have killed you and all your crew if it had had the chance. I think you can rest in peace about your action.”
“Thank you. Thank you!” The captain seemed close to tears. “Thank you very much indeed. You have no idea—” He shook his head.
“I do,” answered Merral, feeling an intense pity for this man. “Oh, I do. Actually I can guess your feelings better than most people. After all, I did the same as you. But in my case it was very obvious that these were hostile, evil things.”
“So . . . what are they?”
Merral hesitated, then decided that this man had earned the right to know far more than he knew already. So, omitting the details of the spiritual malaise that seemed to have affected Barrand and the Herrandown community, he described as much as he knew of the two types of intruders seen near the Lannar Crater. At the end, they agreed that it was perfectly likely that a creature, unfamiliar with the way Farholme’s rivers could suddenly rise, might all too easily have been caught in a flash flood and washed out to sea.
Daniel shook his head in disbelief. “I was horrified about what I had done. Now I am less so. Instead, I am appalled at what has been done in the making of these things.”
“Yes,” answered Merral, “and there many questions lie.”
“But are they a danger? with the Gate gone?”
“We do not know. Their losses have been heavy. They have not been reported much beyond the area of the Lannar Crater. We are working on the problem. That is why I came here.”
“Altered humans,” Daniel muttered in disgust. “And the Gate gone. These are strange days.”
“Indeed,” answered Merral. “But it’s as well that as few as possible know how strange they are. And if I may ask you more questions—what happened on the rest of the trip?”
“Ah,” Daniel sighed and shook his head. “Yes, well, fr
om then on it seemed like things went wrong. Only the three of us knew, and we said nothing, which was hard. We cleared the delta and then the wind got up. Even with stabilizers running at full compensation it was rough. The wind was from the north and it was bitter out; there was spray lashing over the prow, night and day. The ice covered the deck and the equipment; the antislip surface was useless. Then we got the main submersible sampler snagged on a recovery and had to send a diver down. He got his suit cut and nearly froze from exposure. Then we had a storm and a big wave that almost swamped the ship. And somehow a ventilation hatch was open and we got water all through the ship. And the electrics started playing up. Oh, and everybody started going down with colds. It was a dreadful trip. Worst I’ve known. And the thing was, they all started blaming me or each other.”
“I see.” Merral looked around, imagining ten people in this room with the floor tossing and heaving and all arguing with each other. “And that’s when the allowance idea came up?”
“Yes.”
“Who thought it up?”
“No one will admit it. Each side blames the other.”
An insight flickered in Merral’s brain and he tried to grasp it, but the captain continued speaking and he lost it. “Anyway, when we got back, someone asked me to raise it as a suggestion and—like a fool—I did. I can’t think what came over me.”
He gave another deep sigh. “So the rest of the voyage felt like a curse. There is an old sailor’s poem, from before the Intervention. I only know it in the Communal translation as ‘The Venerable Sailor.’ The original is Alt-Dutch or Ancient English.”
“English. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ ”
“That’s it. Anyway, you remember how in the days of sail, the sailor shoots an albatross with an arrow and the ship gets cursed as a result. Strange poem. You never know with the ancients whether they really believed these things. It kept coming back to me.” He gave a tired smile. “But tonight I think I can sleep as a more relieved man. I will tell Lawrence and Billy when I see them. Privately, of course.”
“So,” Merral asked, as gently as he could, “you think it’s all over now?”
“Yes,” came the answer. “It was a temporary aberration. A bad voyage. It’s over.”
I hope so, thought Merral but stayed silent.
The silence that followed was broken by Daniel stifling a yawn. “Excuse me!” he said. “I was up early. But come, let me show you your cabin.”
He led Merral beyond the mess room to a cabin so wide that it seemed to extend across the width of the ship. There was a big wallscreen on one side and a variety of sporting and exercise gear.
“The recreation room,” Daniel commented. “You can hardly run around the deck in bad weather. Your room is through here.”
“Very nice,” observed Merral. Then his eye was suddenly caught by a notice board. On it was a large white sheet divided in two, with columns of marks underneath. A score sheet, he thought idly, then stopped, his eyes riveted by the twin words at the top: Sunrise and Sunset.
Trying to make his voice sound unconcerned, Merral turned to the captain. “You divided the crew into two teams?”
“Have done for years.”
“And it’s easy enough to divide the crew up? I mean on the basis of where they come from?”
“Yes, we’ve been split neatly into Rise Siders and Sunsetters for some years.”
“So ‘you’re one or the other in Larrenport’?”
The captain smiled back in a tired manner. “That’s what they say. I gather you’ve heard the phrase?”
“Yes.”
Daniel shrugged, walked over, and opened a door, revealing a small cabin with a single bed. “I hope it’s all right?” he asked.
“Fine,” Merral answered, glimpsing the town’s lights visible through the porthole. “Can I ask you another question, Captain?”
“Why not?”
“Yes, you see, I couldn’t help wondering—really it’s none of my business—why you sleep on the boat when you have a home not far away?”
A soft “hmm” was all the answer that Merral received.
“Is it,” he suggested as sensitively as he could, “that you feel safer with the gangway up and the hatches closed than in a house with open doors?”
“Yes,” came back the tentative answer. “That’s it.”
Merral, staring at him, discerned a look of embarrassment in his eyes.
“But I think I’ll go back tomorrow. My wife will be back then anyway.” Then, with a wish that Merral would enjoy a good night’s sleep, he left.
By the time that Merral awoke, showered, and dressed the next morning, Daniel was already up and working in one of the cabins beyond the mess room. The captain joined him for coffee and breakfast and then led Merral up into the deck. Above the town the sun was shining between gaps in patchy gray clouds. The captain lowered the gangway and stood by it.
“Thanks, Merral,” he said, giving him a firm handshake. “Thanks so much. I guess I can now try to forget what happened on that voyage. I can put it behind me.”
Merral stared beyond him at the twin halves of the divided town before them, the left-hand side gleaming in the morning light. Sunrise and Sunset, he thought, remembering that he had one more question.
“Yes, Daniel, try to do that. Put it behind you. But something comes back to me. Yesterday you said about the crew problems on the voyage—what was it? ‘Each side blames the other.’ Did you mean that this sports division, well, sort of spread into everyday matters?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Daniel answered, his voice charged with reluctance.
“But only really during the trip we’ve been talking about? Never before?”
“No—I guess not. All the bad weather seemed to make things worse. We were more cramped. And the colds—but it’s over.” He hesitated. “Isn’t it?”
Merral glanced at the captain and saw he was gazing with a troubled expression at the split town. In a flash of intuition, he realized that Daniel was worried that it wasn’t over. Had he, perhaps, sensed something of the atmosphere of the Miriama’s voyage in his own town?
“I don’t know, Captain,” Merral said. “Let’s pray that it’s so.”
As he had expected, Merral found a bus stop at the gate of the harbor. A number of people who looked as if they had come off an overnight shift greeted Merral in an affable fashion and, when they learned he was a visitor from Ynysmant, offered him advice on how to get to the High Cliff Intensive Nursing Center where Great-Aunt Namia was.
“Easy enough to find,” said one woman. “Straight off the bridge. Turn right and it’s at the top of Rise Side at the cliff edge. Looks down on us. Typical.” The tone of disapproval in her voice caught Merral’s attention.
“Why, er, typical?”
She waved a hand dismissively to the west. “They don’t have the docks and harbor, see. Risers pride themselves on being better because of it.”
Merral tried, with difficulty, to bury his alarm. “This feeling they have—or you think they have—of being superior. Has it always been like this?”
She looked at him warily. “Oh no. Only the last two months. Suddenly.”
“I see,” he said, and he was going to ask whether there was any reason, when a bus turned the corner.
“Here’s your bus,” the woman said sharply. “Yes. Ever since Easter they have been getting so above themselves. Well, I really don’t know where it will end.”
As the bus went up over the last of the hairpin bends, Merral looked back down to the ships, trying to see the orange dot of the Miriama.
“It’s over,” the captain had said. But Merral knew he hadn’t believed it.
Now he didn’t either.
26
High on the western side of Larrenport, Merral bought some lilies from a flower shop and then, his mind preoccupied by events, strolled over to the High Cliff Intensive Nursing Center. The center and its grounds, embraced in a protective semicircle of bee
ch trees and evergreens, lay tucked just below the plateau edge. Looking at it, Merral felt that this elevated setting on the edge of the cliff was almost symbolic, as if it were easier to pass from earth to heaven from up here.
Halfway along the gravel driveway he stopped, gazing beyond the rosebushes and down to the town and the bay far beyond. Far out to sea, beyond multitudes of turning gulls, a belt of cloud was broken at the horizon so that a line of brilliant silver etched out the boundary of the sea and the sky. With an effort, Merral pushed his concerns out of his mind; in this twilight of her long and profitable earthly life, his great-aunt deserved his full attention.
He walked on to the reception office.
“Good morning; I’ve come to see Mrs. Namia Mena D’Avanos,” he said to the fresh-complexioned nurse with a blonde ponytail who sat behind the desk.
She smiled up at him welcomingly with round, nut brown eyes. “Oh yes. Are you a near relative?” she asked, in the sort of smooth and soothing voice that Merral felt was entirely appropriate for dealing with the elderly.
“Fairly,” he answered, wondering how near you were when a hundred years separated you. “She’s a great-aunt. I bring her family greetings. You know her?”
“Of course. We know them all.” She smiled again, but something at the edges of her mouth hinted at some difficulty. “But let me call the doctor to take you over to her,” she said and pressed a button.
“Do I need to talk to the doctor?”
Her smile was disarming. “I’ll think she’ll want to talk to you.” She nodded at the flowers Merral was carrying. “Nice bouquet. But you aren’t local, are you?”
“No, visiting from Ynysmant. Came in yesterday.”
“Ah, up on the lake, eh? Stay anywhere nice last night?”
