We drove for about twenty minutes in a straight easterly direction, then crossed Estuary Bridge and turned left on to the narrow concrete road which ran through the impoverished south-eastern suburbs and out on to Needle Point. We passed the desalination plant to the right, an array of towers, tanks, gantries and walkways, gleaming brightly in the harsh zenith light. The road wound on to the head of the Point where it terminated in front of a compound which surrounded the squat stone tower of the old lighthouse. The lighthouse had been built during the early days of the colony to guide the trawler-foils home, but it was long defunct. A small outbuilding of recent construction stood opposite it.
The guard on duty at the gate took the authorization papers from the driver, flicked through them, and said: “You’re expected.”
She opened the gate and we drove through and pulled up outside the outbuilding. An officer emerged and nodded to the driver.
“You get out here,” the driver said.
The officer took me over to the tower and unlocked the arched metal door in its base. The door opened without the expected creak and we climbed a zig-zag flight of stairs until finally (I counted seventy-two steps) we reached the top. A short corridor led to a door secured with three bolts and a guard sat on a stool beside the door, listening to a music-tape. He switched the machine off when he saw us, rose and saluted the officer. Unbidden, he began to unbolt the door.
“We will be waiting here,” the officer said, “and checking in on you from time to time.” He indicated a spy-hole in the door.
I wondered whether he had told me this to reassure me or to warn me.
The guard drew back the last bolt and opened the door sufficiently for me to squeeze through. The door closed behind me and a single bolt thunked into place.
The room was small and windowless. The little light which penetrated it came from a grille-covered hole at the centre of the ceiling. I guessed that a flight of stairs had once led up through the hole to the beacon itself. This had once been a maintenance room; now it was a cell.
As my eyes adjusted to the dimness I was able to make put three bunks against the far wall and a small table and three chairs to the right of the cross-hatched circle of light at the centre of the floor. The air was sultry, smelling strongly of sweat and urine.
I activated the recorder. “Jax?”
For a moment, nothing. Then: “Who is it?” There was no hint of real interest in the question.
“It’s David.”
A shadow moved on the middle bunk, became a body as it stepped into the skylight’s cone of illumination.
His hair was longer than I remembered, a luxuriant bush about his head, and a thin moustache lined his upper lip. He was taller and even sturdier than he had been as a youth, and the adolescent softness of his features had given way to a lean intensity of expression which I found a little disconcerting. He looked dishevelled and grimy, but otherwise fit.
“Hello, Jax,” I said as he moved towards the table.
He leaned on the back of a chair and squinted at me.
I took the chair opposite and sat down.
“This is a surprise,” he said.
“A not unpleasant one, I hope.”
He said nothing.
“Where are the other two?”
“Moved out a while ago. I thought perhaps they’d been taken for interrogation, but that didn’t really figure, leaving me here. I wasn’t expecting a visitor.”
“I asked to come when I saw your name in the Chronicle. You never did get your surname, eh?”
“There are more important things.”
“You never went back to Silver Spring? They told me you’d run away.”
“I never intend to go back.”
“But you made it to the trawlers, though,” I was straining to keep my voice friendly and informal. Jax looked extremely wary, even hostile.
“Yes, I made it.” He swung the chair around and sat down, resting his arms on the back. “What’s up, David?”
“What’s up? I wanted to see you, that’s all. Have you forgotten that we were once friends?”
“How did you get permission? No one outside the militia knows we’re here.”
“I work for the government. It was a favour.”
He gazed at me with open disdain, obviously seeing me as an enemy.
I took the recorder from my pocket, switched it off and laid it on the table. I had my back to the door so that the guards could not see it.
“They want me to find out where Eilan is hiding,” I whispered. “I’m supposed to record our entire conversation. Our glorious leader Helmine’s plan.”
There was a silence.
“There could be another inside your tunic,” he said.
“No, Jax. I wouldn’t do it. I went along with everything because I wanted to see you and because they’re going to torture you if you don’t tell them where she is.”
He gnawed his thumbnail. “So now you’re using gentle persuasion instead of deceit. No chance, David. I’m not going to tell Helmine and her storm-troopers anything.”
“I’m not asking you to tell me anything. Make up a story. For the benefit of—” I tapped the recorder “—this. Say you don’t know where she is or give some false location. Anything.”
He stared at me for a moment. “Why did you come, David?”
“I’ve told you. I wanted to see you. We used to be the closest of friends, remember?”
Again he was silent, but I sensed a softening in his attitude.
“When did you join the League?”
“A cycle back.”
“Why?”
For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said: “I joined the League because they’re committed to ridding Gaia of the M’threnni. It’s as simple as that.”
“But why?” As a youth, Jax had had no interest whatsoever in the aliens.
“Because of Annia.”
“ Annia? You mean the aliens killed her?”
He shook his head. “Annia isn’t dead, David.”
“Not dead? But I saw her urn.”
“You may have seen an urn, but it wasn’t hers. The M’threnni have taken her as a Voice.”
The story was brief but no less shocking for that. Two days after Annia’s last visit to Helixport, she and Jax had been out at our old hideout on the rocks just after dusk. From out of the darkening skies had come a small, pebble-shaped craft which had descended soundlessly and landed beside them. A circular portal had opened in the snout of the craft and a M’threnni male had emerged. Without warning, Annia had begun to walk towards the craft and before Jax was able to react, the alien had taken her on board. The portal had closed and the craft had taken off abruptly, vanishing into the night.
“She went as if she was hypnotized,” Jax told me. T was too dazed to stop her. It was as if something was holding me back. I rushed down the mountainside, found Caril and told her what had happened. Caril hurried me off to the elder Robert and I repeated the story.
“Do you know what he said? He told me that I had to swear to tell no one else about it. I was practically in tears. I asked him if they’d get Annia back and he said, no, no, she’s gone, there’s nothing we can do. You must forget it; we’ll tell everyone she died of a fever and you must say that too. I didn’t understand any of this and eventually I exploded with rage. I tried to attack him, but he and Caril held me down and they must have got someone to sedate me because I blacked out.
“The next thing I remember is waking up in the isolation room at the surgery. The door was locked. Caril came to see me over zenith but I wouldn’t talk to her. Robert came that evening and went over the same thing again. He said that he didn’t expect me to understand, I was young, but it was important, extremely important, that I said nothing to anyone about the M’threnni taking Annia away. It had to be a secret between me, him and Caril. I promised solemnly. That evening they let me go back to dorm and in the middle of the night I got up and sneaked down to the l
oading bay. I hid myself in a crate of butterfruit and climbed out through a window in a warehouse just off Capitol Square the following day. They took her, David, and no one did a thing about it.”
I sat back and began thinking. Everything fitted. The alien Annia and I had encountered outside the Institute had doubtless known that his Voice was dying and had gone abroad in the city to seek a replacement. He had chosen Annia. Perhaps he had probed her mind while we had been watching him; this would explain her subsequent stupor. Jax’s disappearance and the elders’ failure to inform me of Annia’s “death” both hinted, in the clear light of retrospect, that something unusual had happened. And the exaggerated courtesy which I had been shown on my return to the commune was clear evidence of Robert’s guilt. He had lied to me, and, more importantly, Caril had lied too. The gift of Annia’s gasglobe had been a propitiatory gesture, an attempt to absolve herself of the deceit.
Jax had never risked contacting me after his flight to the city for fear of being tracked down. He had gone instead to the harbour and had eventually been taken on as an apprentice on the trawlerfoils. There had been a modicum of consolation for him in that, I guessed.
Annia, less scrupulously dutiful than I, had told Jax about our encounter with the M’threnni at the Institute and I now told him of my visit to the tower and of my speculations regarding the M’threnni-Voice relationship.
“Perhaps they can sense sympathetic minds,” I suggested. “Perhaps there’s a certain empathy which makes one eligible to be a Voice.”
“Eligible? Cursed. Annia would never have gone with the alien of her own volition. She was interested in the M’threnni but not to that extent. She’s a prisoner in that tower, just like all the other Voices.”
A silence fell. I heard the spyhole flap being drawn back, then closing again.
“Jax,” I said quietly, “you must tell me where Eilan is hiding. If I can contact her, let her know where you are, then maybe the League will be able to do something.” I deliberately left the sentence vague.
He considered, watching me in the silence, still unsure of whether he could trust me, And why should he? I thought. I had come as Helmine’s emissary. I was a servant of the government. My clothes attested a comfortable affluence which I’m sure was an anathema to him. How much did we have left in common?
“Alien Star in the harbour. Ask for Roger.” He said the words so quickly, in a mumble, that I only just caught them.
Briefly, we discussed our strategy. I started the tape again and we resumed our conversation at the point where I had switched off the machine. We engaged in minor pleasantries, reflected on times past, talked of what we had been doing since we had last seen one another. Jax gave me a vague and doubtless grossly inaccurate account of his association with the League, mentioning no names. I asked him where Eilan was hiding. He pretended to prevaricate, but I insisted that I had been impressed by Eilan and her philosophy and that I wanted to join the League. He then “confessed” that he didn’t know where she was, that those involved in the bomb attack had not been made privy to the details of the raid on the penitentiary in case of their capture. The irony was, he said, that Eilan was unlikely to have approved of their actions, despite her release; she had always been opposed to violence. That was the problem with the League; for all their good intentions, most of the members were mealy-mouthed and afraid to take direct action against the M’threnni or the government. I told him that I was inclined to agree with Eilan; violence was never really justifiable. He inferred cowardice. I countered by saying that his aggressive tactics were immoral and immature. He told me that I was still the spineless child he had once known. I replied that he was as reckless and stupid as ever. He repeated that I was a child.
“Then a child has fooled you,” I said triumphantly. “Everything you have just told me will be reported to the authorities.” I tapped the pocket in which the recorder lay. “It has all been recorded.”
With an extremely authentic roar of rage, Jax leapt over the table and began, gently, to throttle me, I cried out, and within seconds the door burst open and the two militia men were upon Jax, dragging him off me. I picked myself up and hurried out of the room.
I was returned to the Complex where I handed over the recorder to Helmine. I sat in an adjoining room while she played it through and then I was admitted to her office.
She sat upright in her chair, her hands folded on the edge of the desk, the recorder lying in front of them.
“Interesting,” she said, peering somewhere over my head. “I was surprised to hear that the three saboteurs were not aware of the plans of the others, but this would seem to fit in with the fact that our investigations have failed to uncover any of their accomplices on the South Bank.” She looked at me as if inviting some comment. I said nothing.
“It would appear that your friendship has not stood the test of time,” she said, rolling the recorder to and fro across the desk-top with her index finger.
“He annoyed me,” I said. “He used to call me a child when we lived at Silver Spring. I always hated it.”
“It is regrettable that you saw fit to reveal your deception, however. It has destroyed any hopes we might have had of obtaining further information from him.”
“I think he was suspicious of me from the outset. He radiated caution and a subtle hostility. It was a painful meeting.”
“What did you talk about?”
I indicated my puzzlement, “It’s all on the tape.”
She shook her head. “I think not. The conversation recorded here lasts just over fourteen minutes, whereas the guards estimate that you were inside the cell for close on twenty-five.”
I thought furiously. “We talked about an old friend of ours. Annia. She’s dead now, but we remembered her in somewhat, er, sensual terms. I thought it would seem disrespectful to an outsider—embarrassing, too—so I excised it on the way here. It had no relevance to the main thread of our conversation.”
Her steely eyes fixed upon me in silent indictment. Clearly, she did not believe me.
“I think your usefulness to us is at an end,” she said, “You may leave.”
There was an undertone not just of coldness, but enmity in her words.
I went home, feeling a mixture of exhilaration, foreboding, doubt, confusion. I sat in the garden for an hour or so, turning over recent events, I was agitated. I felt I had to do something, but I didn’t know what. Jax, a rebel; Annia, a Voice. It was incredible, and somehow exciting. I was, above all, elated that Annia was alive, despite her imprisonment in the tower—if imprisonment it was. I also envied Jax, despite his imprisonment aid the possible threat to his life. I envied his strength and his commitment. Would Helmine attempt to force the information she required out of him and his comrades? Yes, he was in danger, and I knew I should act. Yet still I vacillated, afraid to make any move that would irrevocably commit me against the authorities. Jax had called me a spineless child only in subterfuge, but the description galled, for it contained an element of truth.
I went into the villa and came across Mark’s letter. Rather than waste the evening in futile brooding, I decided that I would deliver it.
Mark’s friend was a man called Rex, the proprietor of the Chimera Dream Parlour, a luxurious and respected establishment on Sussex Street, He greeted me warmly, read through the letter, smiling, then thanked me for delivering it. We sat down over a glass of wine and he offered me the use of the parlour as a gesture of thanks. I immediately accepted.
He took me to a small room towards the rear of the establishment. It was delicately furnished with cream and brown tiles and buff-coloured walls along which hung numerous watercolours showing aspects of city-life. I lay down on the sumptuous leather couch and Rex fitted the chrome headpiece over my head. I stared at the nearest painting, a rendition of Round Island from the northern bank; it was a delicately accomplished mood-piece.
“They’re all originals,” Rex said proudly, doubtless assuming that I recognized the ar
tist, although the scrawled signature was meaningless to me.
“Do you want programmed or free association?” he asked.
“Free association.”
He left, and the lights began to dim. I closed my eyes and let my thoughts wander where they may.
I drifted again through the pearly mist, as I had done on my only other visit to a parlour, a bodiless, questing mentality. Then the mist began, subtly, to change hue, a gentle blushing which soon became roseate, then rubicund, then thinning slowly until it was simply a dim red light. Pale walls surrounded me and I recognized the place: I was inside the M’threnni tower, in the warped cubicle where I had talked with the Voice. There was a dark portal in one of the “walls” and as I looked at it, Annia stepped through.
She was dressed in the white shorts and vest of a fruit-picker and her hair was tied back in a familiar pony-tail. But her eyes were black and circular, the eyes of a M’threnni.
She stepped forward and stood there with her hands folded across her stomach, an alien impassivity on her features, I tried to speak, but for a moment no words came. I had to drag them from deep within my throat.
“Annia,” I said finally. “They told me you were dead.”
She made no response.
“Do you remember me? It’s David. David from the High Valleys.”
Silence.
“They told me you were dead,” I repeated, “At the commune. They lied.”
The black eyes bored into me. She did not move.
“I saw Jax. Remember Jax? He’s a prisoner now. Captured by the authorities after the bomb attack on Round Island. He told me you lived.”
Still there was no flicker of reaction.
“The alien we met outside the Institute the day the old woman died. He came for you afterwards? You serve the M’threnni now?”
I waited, but she would not speak.
“Annia, please say something.”
She stood as still as a statue.
“Speak, damn you!” I shouted.
And speak she did. She opened her mouth, stuck out her purple tongue and began to assail me with a torrent of M’threnni clicks, hisses and squeals, each one sounding like an obscenity, each one a grotesque betrayal of her humanity. It was hideous, and I couldn’t bear it. I backed away, moving towards the portal, averting my eyes from her. I flung myself through it, disappearing into the darkness…
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