Capella's Golden Eyes

by Christopher Evans

  We reached the island soon after dawn the following day. We moored the foil about sixty metres from the shore and launched a rowing boat.

  No humans inhabited the Antipodean Isles, although they had been well-mapped and photographed from the Auriga soon after it arrived in orbit over Gaia. The islands bore more varied and abundant plant and animal life than the mainland but were rejected as the initial site for habitation because it was felt that none were large enough to allow for a controlled expansion of the colony; and spreading the population over several islands would have destroyed the cohesiveness essential if the colony was to prosper. Sporadic visits had been made in the past with a view to exploiting the islands’ natural resources—particularly the wood obtainable from the forests—but their remoteness from the mainland had prevented any of these plans, from reaching fruition.

  The boat ground on to a shingled beach and we clambered out. Immediately beyond the beach the forest began, a dense olive curtain of squat trees and vines. Junith scooped a handful of pebbles from the beach and tossed them casually at a queer-looking bird which was strutting along the high-water line. The bird, of tawny plumage, had a squat rotund body, a long, slender neck and two large, mournful white eyes which sat atop its pointed head. It waddled forward to inspect us, its head dipping up and down, and it emitted a throaty warble which sounded uncannily like someone gargling water.

  Junith took a stick of bread from her pouch, broke off a piece and offered it to the bird. Its eyes wobbled like eggs in a saucer, its mouth opened as if in a yawn, and suddenly its whole body jerked forward, snapping the bread from Junith’s hand so swiftly that she jumped back in surprise. The bird hurried off down the beach, burbling loudly. It dunked the bread into the water, then swallowed it whole.

  We moved inland. The vegetation was thick and in places impenetrable so that we had to use our gutting knives to cut our way through. The canopy overhead was provided by broad, palm-like fronds while the vegetation of the forest floor comprised pendulous bushes, giant ferns, liana and innumerable species of exotic flowers, all vying for the mottled greenish light which filtered through the trees. The air was hot, humid and fragrant. Tiny brown creatures scuttled across our path and we heard the strange cries of unknown animals: chirrups and screeches, squawks and hisses. We stayed close to one another as we moved through the undergrowth, I noticed that the bird we had encountered on the beach was trailing after us.

  The vegetation thinned abruptly and we emerged in a clearing at the base of the escarpment of dark rock which formed the backbone of the island. The hillside was pockmarked with caves, like some great geological sponge, and white bird-droppings stained its upper reaches, Near the mouth of one cave was a small pool fed by a stream which burrowed out of a cleft in the rockface.

  Alma, Junith and I were discussing who should sample the water when Tomas said: “I’ll do the sampling. I’m the most expendable person here.”

  There was a trace of self-pity in his voice; but resolution, too. He had been silent since our landing, letting Eilan lead him by the hand through the forest; but he had obviously been feeling that he was a burden to us. Here was his chance to do something useful.

  None of us made any objections so Eilan led him over to the pool. He knelt, scooped out a handful of water and splashed it against his lips. He repeated the motion, almost like a child at play, then rose.

  “No taste,” he said. “So far, so good.”

  We spent the remainder of the morning exploring the immediate area before finally deciding that the place beside the pool would make the best site for settlement. The cave behind the pool was deep enough to provide temporary shelter from the elements and unknown predators until we could construct some sort of cabin. Alma climbed to the top of the escarpment and called to us that she could see the far shore a few kilometres away. Later we were able to verify that we had come upon one of the smaller islands of the cluster.

  Over zenith we sat in the mouth of the cave and discussed our plans. We all agreed that our first priority was a cabin; it was odd, in retrospect, that no one suggested that we continue to live on the foil—though perhaps not so odd considering that we were all heartily weary of ship-life. We had sufficient supplies of food to last at least another month but Tomas was eager to sample the vegetable life of the island. We agreed, but stipulated that he should try only one new item each day so that if he fell ill the culprit would be more easily identifiable.

  Junith and I went down to the forest’s edge and collected a handful of the large purplish fruit which grew on one of the bushy plants. While the rest of us feasted on ship’s rations, Tomas ate the fruit. He was lavish in his praise of their flavour and succulence—so lavish that I was almost tempted to try one myself. The mottled bird wandered fussily about us as we ate, snapping at the crumbs which escaped our mouths and burbling incessantly. Junith fed it generous scraps of her rations and eventually, surfeited with food, it fell asleep at her side.

  We decided that we would start work on the cabin immediately, After zenith Alma, Junith and I returned to the trawler to fetch tools. We had only two axes, a few knives and a handful of fish-hooks and it was eight days before the frame of the cabin was complete. First we cut a swathe through the forest from the beach to the escarpment, uprooting plants and shrubs, and chopping down the slender-boled trees which formed the forest’s canopy. Then we laboriously carved out four deep holes in the bedrock beside the pool and set a stout trunk in each. We cut the remaining trunks into sections about eight metres long and bound them together with dried vines and liana, then bound these sections in turn to our four corner-posts. Finally we strung the dried, waxen leaf-fronds across a skein of branches to form a rough but watertight roof. We worked from dawn to dusk every day, only stopping when it grew too hot or when our blistered hands needed attention or when we were simply too tired to carry on. Eilan prepared our meals and attended to our wounds, while Tomas sat cross-legged at the mouth of the cave and called to us occasionally, asking us how it went.

  On the evening of the eighth day we moved in. The interior of the cabin was still rough—just four windowless walls—but at least we now had a roof over our heads; it was a haven, however crude, from the wildness of the Island. In the deepening gloom we sat down on a carpet of dried leaves to a meal of salted pork, mashed beans and rice. Tomas had a supplementary vegetable on his plate; a white-fleshed tuber which Eilan had discovered in the forest. Physically he appeared none the worse for wear from his diet of island food but the pall of his blindness was evident on bis face, Eilan had also prepared a liquor from some berries which Tomas had earlier verified as edible. It was tart on the palate, but full-blooded, reminding me strongly of unripened roseplum juice.

  Eilan and Alma were discussing how best the interior of the cabin should be structured to suit our needs: a kitchen in that corner, a fireplace beside that wall, sleeping quarters over there.

  “How long will we have to stay here?” I asked. It was a question which had been bothering me ever since I had been told our destination, and now that our most urgent needs were met I felt that it was time to broach the matter.

  “Until we can safely return to the mainland,” Eilan said.

  “That could be never.”

  “No, a season at most.”

  In the darkness I could not see her face. “How can you be sure? Helmine will not forget that quickly.”

  “Helmine will have other matters on her mind. A ship from Earth is on its way to Gaia.”

  Eilan said this so casually that it was a moment before the words registered on me. “A ship from Earth? When?”

  “We’re not exactly sure. In ten or eleven months’ time, we think.”

  “They’ve already made contact with Gaia?”

  “No. We located them first. Or rather, Junith did.”

  “But how? If they’re that far away I can’t see how the ship could have been detected in the first place.”

  “Junith?” Eilan said.

&nb
sp; Junith’s shadow spoke. “For the past two and a half cycles I’ve been monitoring the M’threnni freighter arrivals and departures from Round Island and I’ve discovered…” She paused. “Let me start from the beginning.”

  I heard the rustling of leaves and someone stood up. It was Tomas. He excused himself and went outside. He was slowly gaining in confidence in moving around on his own. It occurred to me that in the darkness of the cabin we were all as blind as he. But no, for we could dimly make out shapes and sense movements. The difference was small but inestimable.

  “According to our understanding of the universe,” Junith began, “no physical object should be able to travel faster than the speed of light since the mass of an object, and hence its inertia, increases exponentially towards infinity as it approaches the speed of light. And yet we are faced with the fact that the M’threnni freighters, which evidently originate outside our solar system, must possess plus-light capabilities. I was intrigued, so I did a little research and came across some work done by the late twentieth-century Earth mathematician William Smith. Smith calculated that an object possessing mass and travelling at plus-light speeds should be emitting vast amounts of energy in the form of pulsed gravitational waves. It’s possible—the mathematics is complicated but not insurmountable—to relate the frequency of the pulses to the speed of the craft: the higher the frequency, the faster it’s travelling, I built a receiver capable of picking up these gravitational pulses and began monitoring the M’threnni freighters—” “You built it yourself?”

  “It’s not a new technology. Similar equipment was developed on Earth in the light of Smith’s calculations to search for the hypothetical faster-than-light particles known as tachyons. None were found, which isn’t very surprising, for when I checked Smith’s calculations I discovered that his mathematics, while basically sound, embodied a factorial error…”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Here was Junith, whom I had always regarded as a pale, sickly ghost of a human being, expounding with great enthusiasm and obvious expertise on the work of one of the foremost theoretical physicists of Earth. She had found a mistake in his arithmetic…

  “… The strength of the emitted radiation,” Junith was saying, “is, in fact, ten million times weaker than Smith had anticipated—which explains why the researchers missed it: their receivers just weren’t sensitive enough.

  “I modified my equipment accordingly and when I came to monitor a departing M’threnni freighter, there they were: faint but detectable pulsations emanating from the craft soon after take-off when it became invisible—that is, when it breached the light-barrier. I monitored the decaying signals for over two hours, until they became too faint to register on the receiver. I was able to calculate from this that the M’threnni homeworld lies at a distance greater than two hundred light-years from Gaia, somewhere in the constellation we know as The Shield. If we could build more sensitive equipment it might just be possible to monitor the ship all the way back to its home-star, but at present that’s beyond us.”

  She paused, and I heard someone snoring softly. Alma had fallen asleep.

  Undaunted, Junith continued: “Calculations based on the frequency of the pulses show that the M’threnni freighters are capable of travelling at a velocity greater than fifty times light-speed. Again, with our present equipment we can’t put an upper limit on it—we simply don’t have the resolution.”

  “Does Helmine know anything of this?” I asked.

  “Not unless she had a spy planted in the middle of the League,” Junith said. “I did most of this work under Eilan’s auspices.”

  “I’m a patron of the sciences,” Eilan said wryly.

  “After this, discovery,” Junith went on, “I took to scanning the skies for incoming M’threnni ships; the principle is the same, only the reverse of what I’ve already described. Naturally most of the time the receiver was aimed in that area of the sky where we believe the M’threnni homeworld to be located. However, about a month ago on a whim I aligned the receiver in the direction of Sol. To my surprise I discovered that I was picking up similar signals to those from approaching M’threnni craft, but of much lower frequency. The obvious conclusion is that there is a ship on its way from Earth, travelling at a speed about five times that of light.”

  Alma was snoring more loudly now. Eilan reached out and evidently pinched her nose, for she snorted and fell silent.

  “We can deduce the time of arrival from the intensity of the pulses,” Junith said. “The figure we arrive at is ten or eleven months hence.”

  It was a startling revelation.

  “How many people know about this?” I asked.

  “At first I told only Tomas. Naturally Eilan was also informed as soon as we had freed her from prison.”

  Of course; the League’s sudden boldness in moving against the authorities made more sense in the light of this disclosure. Tomas must have organized the raid on the penitentiary because he knew that there was no longer anything to be gained from playing a waiting game.

  “We told no one else,” Eilan said. “Not even our fellow League members. We could not risk the news leaking out. It would simply have given Helmine more time to consolidate her position.”

  “What about the M’threnni?”

  “Well, we must assume that they are aware of the incoming ship. Who can say how they will react?”

  Who, indeed. The arrival of people from Earth would no doubt signal the beginning of a new era for the colony. With starships of plus-light capability, Earth would be able to maintain continuous contact with Gaia. What place for the M’threnni then?

  I was intrigued by the revelation of Junith’s genius. When I was next alone with Eilan I asked her about Junith’s background. At first, with her usual prudence, she refused to tell me anything, but I persisted and finally the story emerged.

  Junith had been an exceptionally gifted child. It was clear from an early age that her intellectual abilities far outstripped those of her crèche companions. Indeed, Eilan told me, there was a suspicion, never verified, that someone had tampered with the fertilization programme, artificially enhancing her intelligence quotient. This was illegal; only the sexual characteristics and the physical health of a newborn baby could be determined beforehand. At the age of three she had been taken from her nursery and raised by a team of educational psychologists under conditions designed to maximize her intellectual development. But her emotional needs were neglected; she had no friends her own age and her tutors lacked warmth. She grew into a remote, diffident adolescent. At fifteen, she ran away and lived for a cycle in poverty and squalor on the South Bank. Then, one day, she was discovered on Round Island Bridge. Apparently she had climbed the parapet and unsuccessfuily attempted to gain access to the tower. She had never spoken of the incident but Eilan theorized that she had been attracted to the aliens because she knew their mental abilities must far outstrip her own.

  “All her life she had been performing in an intellectual circus,” Eilan said, “and perhaps she felt her only recourse was to be taken under the wing of a being who would demand nothing,of her beyond servitude. In any event the aliens rejected her and she loathed them for it. Soon after her abortive assault on the tower she contacted the League. Joining us fulfilled two of her basic needs: the first, to revenge herself on the M’threnni; the second, to oppose a government she blamed for her unhappy childhood. She has a hatred of authority inculcated from those early days. Should the League ever win power, I think she would leave us, too.”

  We explored the rest of the island. It was predominantly forested with some swampland and areas of savannah. Shingled beaches hemmed the entire coastline. The animal life mostly avoided us but we glimpsed variants of the springers who populated the lower slopes of the mainland, in addition to leathery, tree-crawling primates and shy, mottled quadrupeds who peered at us through the foliage but fled if we approached them. The most ubiquitous creatures were the burblers, those inquisitive, flightless birds
whose ambassador had already been adopted by Junith. They were utterly fearless and utterly trusting and soon our cabin was besieged by them. In desperation we Toasted a few and chased the rest off with torches lest we lose our sanity under their incessant warbling. During this purge Junith locked her pet away in the cabin.

  Tomas suffered a minor stomach upset from some fungi he ate but apart from that, everything else he tried appeared edible. There were numerous varieties of fruit and vegetables in the forest and Eilan began to add them to our diet. We made spears and bows and arrows, and hunted the animal life. The springer meat was strong and salty, the tree-crawlers tough and unpalatable, the quadrupeds rich but somewhat greasy. The burblers provided most of our meat, the taste of their flesh similar to that of chicken. Only Junith refused to partake of it.

  Gradually we improved the cabin, carving out windows, building interior walls and lining the floor with strips of wood. We removed the bunks from the trawler and set them up in our separate bedrooms. We added an annex to the existing structure to be used as a bathroom and toilet. The roof fell in and we repaired it with a sturdier frame of branches. We carved stones into blocks and constructed a chimney which exhibited an efficiency far beyond our expectations. We built stools and tables which frequently collapsed at first but grew stronger as we improved our woodwork. We could have commandeered all our furniture from the foil but we wanted to maintain the craft in as pristine a condition as possible so that we could make our eventual departure from the island with a minimum of fuss—and besides, it was fun to experiment with joints and angles; we had plenty of time on our hands.