by Ian Whates
MY MOTHER WAS the keeper of the fortress, and so was her mother before that, and now so am I. My mother gave birth to me in the deepest part of the fortress, the part that lies far underground, the place that is lined with metal and filled with sparkling lights. I remember my birth very well: it was not an easy one, and I tried to help my mother by making myself as small as possible. Finally she pushed me through, into light and air, and the first things that I saw after that were her golden eyes.
She raised me in the maze of rooms that lay beneath the fortress and I came to know them all: the metal room itself, the low dark passages and, higher up at ground level, the series of sealed airlocks that shut the base of the fortress off from outside. I was not allowed to go there, of course, but my mother did so every month, to gather the black weed that covered the rocks, and the small scuttling things. Until I was grown, and started studying the fortress records, I thought there were only three things to eat: two kinds of weed, and shellfish.
Gradually, my mother started to teach me how to keep the fortress going. It was explained to me why the fortress had been placed here, on this remote fragment of rock orbiting the great suns of Ternair, of Sulane, of Morre, the last outpost of our people before the Sea of Sulane itself. She told me about the war, about the ships that had set out across the Sea, seeking a new world that the Kharain could never find, could never touch. I asked her, when I was old enough to understand what this was really about, whether any of our people were left in the suns’ systems, or whether everyone had died. My mother’s face crumpled, the loose skin puckering into tight folds and ridges, and she said that she did not know for certain, but she had been told by her own mother that no one was left, that all had fled before the Kharain. But she could not be sure and this was why the fortress must be kept going, sending out its beacon both fore and aft, back towards Ternair and out towards Sulane. Because if the beacon was allowed to fail and the signal died, and if someone came home, then they would not know what had happened, or whether it was safe to proceed. The fortress was a safe place, where a ship could be moored.
“But don’t the Kharain know that we’re here?” I asked. The thought of the Kharain terrified me: my mother had told me about their warships, their planet-rammers, their spawn-squads which bred on the battlefield, creating new warriors before the very eyes of their enemies.
“I think they must know,” my mother said.
“Then why haven’t they attacked us?”
A long pause.
“I don’t know.”
For a long time after that, I had dreams about the Kharain, great armoured figures charging through my sleep, making me wake with a cry. But the years passed and the Kharain did not come, and eventually my mother told me that it was time for her to die.
“I don’t want you to go!” I said.
“And I don’t want to leave you. But it’s time, I can feel it. And we have to go outside.”
“But there’s only one suit.”
“The only reason for the suit is to keep me alive. Since I’m going to die anyway, that’s not a problem any more. You can survive for a couple of hours out there, Beshmennah, it’s just that it will kill you eventually. The air is very thin. But both of us must go. You’ll see why when we’re out there.”
It was the first time that I had worn the suit and I found it clumsy and stifling, with its round helmet and huge gloves. It was very old, my mother said, made in a different age, but it was the only one that was left. It seemed very strange to be standing in the airlock, with me in the big suit and my mother in nothing but her shift.
“Won’t it be cold?” I asked. I felt cold myself, closed and tight, like a knot.
“Yes. I’ll manage. I’m going out to die, remember?” She was very calm and I wondered whether she’d been looking forward to it. She had spent her whole life here, as I would, with the added burden of a child, and I knew from the records that once our people had known something different, parklands with burrows and caverns and towers, before the coming of the Kharain.
“Are you ready?” she added, configuring the coding of the airlock mechanism, which she had made me memorise, over and over again.
“I suppose so.” To my shame, because I felt I had to be as strong as she had been, I blurted, “I don’t want to be on my own.”
“Ah,” she said. “But you won’t be, not for long.”
Then the airlock hissed open and we were outside.
I know it was just the suit filter kicking in, but the air smelled fresher the moment we were through the hatch. My mother did not look back, but set off immediately across the rocks, striding surefooted down a ridge of land. I knew we had no more than a couple of hours together, that I would have the rest of my life to stand out here and gape, but I still lingered. The star field was immense, much brighter than it seemed from the monitor windows of the fortress. Over the shoulder of the tower I saw the three blazes of the sun system; ahead were coiling meadows of coloured gas, the spirals of the Sea of Sulane. It looked close enough to touch. The fortress itself rose up from a basalt crag, all fused black glass and vitrified rock, sheened with an eerie blue. Pools of water lay at the foot of the crag, with the weed growing thick and slippery around them. My mother was walking quickly over a wilderness of stones. I hastened to catch up, moving awkwardly because of the suit.
She did not look to see if I was following her. She walked in a straight line, without faltering, not swerving around the rocks but walking up and over. I had to scramble to catch up; not easy in the ill-fitting, bulky suit. After a while, it became clear where she was heading: a cave, high in a basalt cliff. She climbed, and I was not sure at first if I would be able to follow her but then it struck me that she must have done this same thing, wearing the ancient suit, following in the steps of her own mother when the time had come.
When we reached the cave, she stopped, and motioned that I should take off the helmet. I did so.
“Take off the suit,” she told me. Her voice sounded different in the thin air, frail but not hesitant. She clearly knew exactly what she was doing. So I removed the bulky old suit and stood half naked in the searing cold. The cave exuded chill: it was like breathing in darkness.
“Leave the suit and come with me,” my mother said. I did as I was told. She led me further into the cave and touched the wall. The cave was suddenly lit, and I saw that we were not alone. Two figures sat against the opposite wall.
“This is your grandmother,” my mother said. The corpse was wizened, desiccated by the dry air. “And this, her mother.” They both looked exactly the same, the folds of facial skin slack, like the parchment leaves I had seen in the old records, their eye hollows staring at nothing, their hands nothing more than fragile bones. “Come here,” my mother said.
She sat down beside the corpse of her mother and motioned for me to sit opposite her. I did so, shivering, and she took my hands. “Wait.” All I could think of was the cold; it drove out even my despair.
“Is there anything I must,” I stopped, “that I must do for you, when you are dead? Any rite or ceremony?”
“Nothing. Just leave.”
“But –”
“Just leave. You will not have long.”
She sat, clasping my hands. The cold must have put me in a kind of trance. I sank into it, feeling the skin of our joined hands growing clammy – some exudation from the slits in her skin, or those in mine. I sensed her triumph, that she had succeeded in what she had set out to do, that her life had had meaning and purpose. I remember her life as she herself remembered it, a life very like that of her own mother, and I knew that my life would be the same. But there was a piece missing: the question of whether I, too, would breed. The cold seemed to grow more intense, biting through to my bones, and I came out of the trance with a start.
My mother’s golden eyes were open, but there was no one behind them. My hands were clammy and wet. For the first time in my life I was alone and I think I would have been sitting there yet, as
cold and still as she, if her last words had not struck me with renewed impact: you will not have long.
I was so cold that I could barely drag myself upright. At the entrance of the cave I glanced back and saw the three of them sitting in a row. I said, aloud, shakily, “I will see you again.” Then I passed my hand down the wall as I had seen my mother do, and the light faded and died.
I might have hated the suit before, but that was gone: I tugged and pulled until it was once more covering me and even then I was still cold by the time I reached the fortress. I threw myself in through the airlock, shut all the seals behind me, stripped off the suit and ran up the stairs.
I had been to all the levels before, but to the uppermost ones only in the company of my mother. I knew how to keep the beacon codes in sequence, how to send out the pulses of light that – so my mother said – only our people’s ships would understand. Now, because the uppermost level of the fortress had been so much my mother’s place, it was the place where I felt most safe. Ironic, since it was the highest place on all our little world, and thus the place that was closest to the Kharain. But I wrapped myself in my mother’s weed-silk blanket, that now was mine, activated the ceiling monitor of the dome, and stared up at the gleaming, distant stars.
I can’t remember how long I stayed there. Long enough for the cold to go away, though when I got up again my limbs were stiff and some of that cold seemed to have settled in my bones, nestling there. Life without my mother was lonely, yet not so very different: all her stories came from the records, as did mine. Her life had been one long seamless lack of change, except for the death of her own mother, and my birth. And that raised questions.
I pored over the records and discovered that for birth, one needed a male. Clearly, I did not have one, and my mother had never mentioned such a disturbing thing, so how had she managed to breed? I searched the fortress from beacon to maze, to see if my mother had kept any personal records, but it did not seem that she had. Perhaps she had not felt the need, but why had she never explained about birth and breeding? Come to that, why had I never asked any questions about it myself? I suppose that, remembering my birth as I did (though not my conception) I had simply taken the process for granted.
But soon something happened that drove all thoughts of males and breeding from my mind.
The Kharain came back.
At first, I didn’t understand what was going on. I had gone up to the data room as usual, but when I looked at the readouts, none of them made sense. The cycle of information that had been coming in ever since I could remember had changed, become new. I had to ask the data-source what was wrong and it told me, in my mother’s calm voice that sounded so much like my own, that the new data represented a ship, on its way to the fortress.
I felt my skin become suddenly dry, all over. The data room was filled with little lights and when they went away I found that I was sitting down.
“What kind of ship? Is it one of ours?”
“It is a ship of the enemy, the people known as the Kharain.”
“Can we –” It was strange that my first thought was not for my own safety nor for the sanctity of the information that the fortress guarded, but for the cold dry bodies of my mother and my grandmother and her mother, alone in the dark. “Can we put up a screen of some kind?” Can we hide?
“It is too late,” the data-source informed me with infuriating serenity. “The ship is coming here.”
And then it showed me a picture, gliding through the air: a huge thing, green, bristling with weapons. I looked out of the viewport of the fortress and saw a bright light that was not a star.
I asked the data-source to download everything recent. I knew that my grandmother had asked for the crucial information, the data pertaining to our world and culture, to be downloaded into a secret location – secret, that is, from any but her own family. I knew, now, that it was hidden in the same cave as the bodies. So even if the fortress was to fall, and I died, the information would still be there, safe for someone to find it.
If anyone could.
If anyone ever came back.
If the asteroid was not blown to fragments by one of the Kharain’s planet-slammers.
Having set the download in motion, I ran down to the cellar room and pulled on the suit, fumbling so that it took twice as long. Then I shoved myself as quickly as I could through the airlocks and out onto the surface.
The ship was much closer. I did not know how fast it must be travelling, but it was growing more visible every moment, so that I could see not only its lights but the long hulk of it, the glint of weapons in Sulane’s distant glow. I could only trudge across the rocks, and watch as it came. It seemed to take years to reach the cave, and then I did not go far inside, but crouched just beyond the entrance. I did not know if the Kharain ship had any form of life-scanners, but if they did, and if they found me, dreadful thought, I did not want them to look any further within the cave system. I did not want them to find the data. Or the bodies, as though my mother’s corpse was one of the shrines of which I had read, needing protection.
But all our real shrines were gone into fire and the ship was directly overhead now, slipping above the rock-strewn plain. There was a flare from its side and something was hurtling downwards, striking the surface below the cave with a great puff of dust. I shut my eyes and turned my head away, to avoid what I thought would be an explosion. But the ship glided on. As the dust settled I could see the thing that had fallen – no, landed. It was a pod, with a curved hull, surrounded by a network of webbed spines. A small black hole appeared in its surface, like a mouth opening. Two figures came out and began to move around.
They were the first Kharain I had ever seen, but they did not look like the images on the monitors. They were not the big, spiral-bodied things, with armour plate, with needle claws. These figures were spindly and small. But they were moving quickly towards the fortress, away from the cave. At least I had the suit, at least I did not have to face the freeze without it. I began to talk to the suit, speaking to it as if it was my mother. I can’t remember what I told it. Stories of our people, perhaps, or stories that I made up. I spoke and I waited for the Kharain to come back. I think I might have slept, because when I next looked out over the plain, the spindly figures were nowhere to be seen and the pod was lifting up in a roil of dust. I watched it sail upwards to the ship as though it was pulled on a wire, and once it had disappeared, the great ship moved away.
I watched it disappear and did not believe. This was a trick. The ship would come back, or would turn and the last thing I’d see would be the flare of its guns, bright as Sulane. I waited and waited and sipped some of the emergency fluid from the inside of the suit, thankful that my mother had instilled in me the importance of keeping it topped up. But the filtering system would not last forever and eventually I knew that I would have to go back to the fortress.
I did not want to go back. The fortress was no longer my home; the Kharain had made it part of themselves, stealing it from me as they had stolen everything else. But, apart from an unfamiliar coding of the airlocks, imposed to over-ride the locking mechanism, there was initially no sign that they had been there. They had closed the airlocks behind them, with no damage. When I checked, still wearing the suit, that they had not done anything to the internal air supply of the fortress and found it intact, I stripped off the suit and went through the tower room by room. I moved stealthily, for I’d only seen the pod lifting off, not the two figures. For all I knew, they had left someone behind.
But there was no sign of anything or anyone, until I reached the data room. There was something on the monitor, unscrolling into air. It was a battle scene.
“I have been left an instruction by the visitors,” the data-source said in my mother’s calm voice. “I am to play these images.”
So I watched. I saw a legion of beings that looked like my mother, like my grandmother, like me. They were advancing through the streets of an unfamiliar city, somewhere with
tall clay towers, from which a small, spindly people swarmed. The beings that were ourselves were tearing through them, tearing them apart, until the spaces between the clay mounds ran with ichor. Occasionally, one of our people would squat, her abdomen would pulse, and she would drop a squirming ball of a child, which swiftly uncoiled and grew. The ranks parted around each ball, until the back of the line was formed of new beings, growing quickly.
They were a spawn-squad, and they were me. Then the end of the city was reached and the image rewound itself from the beginning.
I watched it over and over again. I could not understand it, because it meant that everything I had been told was untrue. The Kharain were not the overrunning warriors. We were. I was.
“They have left a message,” the data-source said. “Shall I relay it?”
“Yes.” My voice sounded numb.
“It is this: the visit has been conducted. The treaty remains because the terms of the treaty have been adhered to. Your numbers have remained constant. The risk of your return is still judged to be too great and you must remain here, but you will not be harmed. You are the last of all your kind and we will not be responsible for extinction in spite of past actions. Message ends.”
It took me a long time to work it out. We had been the aggressors, but they had found a weapon against us: some chemical that limited the number of young we were able to reproduce. Reluctant to commit complete genocide, they had marooned one of our kind here, in what had once been an outpost of ours. And with difficulty, she had bred, the birth triggered by an adrenalin surge, not from combat this time, but from fear. So it had been all the way down the line, with the stories of how we had come here mutating and changing, until we were in the right, and they were in the wrong.
