The Twisted Vine

by Alyce Caswell

  ‘Inesh, why do you worship Bagara?’ Kuja asked. He could already see Inesh’s thoughts on the matter, but he wanted to hear them out loud. ‘You didn’t witness his arrival like the older generations did.’

  Inesh stretched his arms out behind him, grunting in satisfaction when something cracked in his shoulders. ‘Bagara’s only been here for a few decades. Seems to me that if a god gets old enough, they get caught up in the machinations of the universe and stop listening to the little people. Bagara still wants to please us. We should take advantage of this while we can.’

  ‘I don’t think you want Bagara overhearing you just now,’ Kuja remarked.

  ‘Hah!’ Inesh smirked. ‘He could learn a thing or two from listening to me.’

  Kuja bit down hard on his tongue to keep from snickering. ‘Oh? Like what?’

  ‘I’ll let you know when I think of something.’

  ‘Cool, so I’ll be waiting a while then.’ Kuja’s felt his good humour bleed away. ‘But, Inesh, if Bagara really wanted the laboratory gone, don’t you think he would have used his powers to throw vines into that hoverpad instead of expecting you to go blow it up?’

  Inesh’s voice took on a gentle, patronising tone. ‘Even he must respect the free will given to us by the Creator God. Bagara has got to let us do things for ourselves. And how are we supposed to know what he wants? He only speaks to us once a year at the festival and it’s always something so starking vague that it might as well not apply to us at all.’

  ‘So you think he should speak to each individual follower?’ Kuja asked, his forehead creasing.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Inesh answered, smacking a bug that came too close to his arm. ‘He could’ve told me to take a shower while Dr Hackett was in there. Wasted opportunity, I tell you.’

  Inesh was still chortling as he scurried down the wooden steps, lured away from their conversation by the promise of food.

  Kuja rested his chin on his knees, soothed by the distant croaks of the five-legged shingbats. He had spent so long letting his followers do as they pleased when perhaps what they had really needed was guidance. It was true that he only spoke to them during the festival, but he had intervened in extreme circumstances to save their lives and the lives of those visiting his domain.

  But what if his people wanted more from him? What if they wanted someone more hands on, like Sandsa, who actually spoke to his desert-based followers when they asked for his help? Talking to Inesh as a god might have accomplished more; Kuja, as a man, could hardly convince his friend to do anything.

  Kuja rolled his lips into his mouth.

  It bore thinking about.

  But not now. Not when he had so much to do.

  Kuja attended the midday meal for as little time as could be deemed polite, then headed for the gate, making sure he threw Inesh a look of warning. The man held up his hands and shook his head, as though promising he wasn’t going to bother the scientists in Kuja’s absence.

  No one in Bagath seemed fazed by Kuja disappearing so often and nor did they ask what he did while he was gone, for which he was grateful. He loved their company, enjoyed maintaining the village with his bare hands alongside them, and tried very hard to attend most of the meetings held by the village headman. But he wasn’t one of of the Bagathians, not really. And he never would be. He’d have to leave them in a handful of years, before they started to notice that he didn’t age. Before they realised what he was.

  Kuja walked down the path outside, twisting his hands in front of him, though he did manage to pry them apart so that he could wave at Gerns as he passed. He then had to quickly duck behind a tree when Lorena exited her living quarters — he didn’t want to see her, let alone speak to her, right now.

  Once he was safely out of sight, Kuja collapsed to the ground in a heap of leaf litter. If he’d had a mortal body during this process, he would have laughed and danced and sung until his lungs ran out of air. He loved becoming one with his domain.

  In this form, Kuja could touch every plant and creature on every world that bowed to the whim of the rainforest god. If there were humans or other sentient species living among the trees, he was drawn to their energy, their hopes, their needs —

  Someone was in danger. They were calling for Bagara.

  Kuja raced to their side to save them from falling off a cliff, then immediately hurtled into another situation requiring his presence. Then another. And another.

  But no matter how far across the galaxy he went, no matter how long he spent in his insubstantial form, his unwanted thoughts and desires chased him. He needed to quell the ache inside him somehow. But he had no idea how to achieve this, especially since his visit to the Enocian Harem had shown him that his fear of Fayay was not the only obstacle preventing him from finding release.

  Kuja’s mortal body, the thing that made him want such a thing in the first place, seemed set on tormenting him for eternity.

  • • •

  It was still dark when Fei opened her eyes. She swung her legs to the side of the bed and leaned her elbows on her knees, swallowing her yawn as she sifted through the images from her confusing tangle of dreams. There had been a dark, faceless figure searching the shadows for her and, instead of being afraid, she had called out to him, revealing herself. Within moments his lips had claimed hers, his arm winding around her waist like a vine —

  ‘I don’t need another man in my life,’ Fei told herself sternly, curving her hands over her thighs. ‘Not even for sex. I can handle that just fine.’

  She frowned when she remembered the last dream, the one that had actually woken her. Purple jumpsuits, empty of the agents who wore them, had been piling up beside her desk at work. She had kept tripping over them every time she’d tried to leave.

  Fei gnawed on her bottom lip for a moment. ‘Vidscreen activate.’

  The vidscreen glowed into life on the wall, casting sickly shadows over the room. A line of text appeared, asking her if she wanted to watch some light entertainment or send a message to her mother. Fei grimaced. She really needed to do more with her vidscreen if those were the only two options it assumed she’d pick.

  ‘Open Web,’ Fei told the device. She briefly considered seeing if BozzMed was online, but she had already asked too many suspicious questions of him lately. ‘I need information. Are there any GLEA agents on Yalsa 5?’

  The vidscreen displayed a single word: Negative.

  ‘So they’ve never been there.’

  A GLEA outpost was established in Atsa City on Yalsa 5 three Old Earth centuries ago in an attempt to curtail gang-related activity. The outpost was decommissioned five Old Earth years ago.

  Fei drew a silksein sheet around her shoulders, covering her goosebumps. ‘Why would the Agency leave? The gangs are still in charge of Yalsa 5. Did GLEA just give up?’

  She winced when she realised a response was already filling the vidscreen.

  There are two popular theories. One states that the city is now safe to live in, rendering GLEA’s presence unnecessary. The other theory states that GLEA agents became involved with the gangs and the Agency withdrew to avoid further corruption occurring within its ranks.

  ‘Seems a bit strange that they tried to interfere with the gangs anyway, because GLEA isn’t supposed to mess with a planet’s system of governance, no matter how unorthodox,’ Fei mused. ‘I guess they could be right about the deserts making it easier to stage criminal activities…but if Governor Bock Atsason is doing something in those deserts, then he’s probably written a law to make it legal. So it’s none of GLEA’s business. Unless BozzMed is right and GLEA really is worried about the Desine worshippers making them look bad…’

  The screen was bare of words this time.

  Fei sighed. ‘My fault for treating you like a sentient being.’

  Would you like to call your mother? it asked. Please insert your communicator chip.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  Fei rose and began to pace, the soft silksein sheet twisting arou
nd her ankles and nearly tripping her. No Web search would find what she was looking for. Since TerraCorp no longer allowed larger tech devices to access the Web inside their headquarters (Fei was keenly aware that this was her fault), any secret files that might explain the situation were offline.

  She’d just have to go in and find them herself.

  The sheet billowed as it fell to the ground, carried several paces away by the gust of wind she caused as she streaked towards her clothes. She threw them back on and hurried over to the door, slapping the keypass against her thigh five times in quick succession. If she neglected to perform this part of her ritual on the way out, she was guaranteed to lose the keypass somewhere on the way to TerraCorp.

  The journey usually took twenty Old Earth minutes. Tonight it took ten.

  Fei burst into the gloomy foyer of TerraCorp’s headquarters, panting. The light strips overhead only roused themselves into a welcoming blast once she’d stepped inside the hoverlift and selected the basement as her destination. She thought she had grown used to the bang as the lift hit the bottom of the shaft, but this time it shot through her like a lasbolt.

  Fei dropped into her hoverchair and opened an innocuous-looking program that was supposed to be debugging software. It took up relatively little space and on the surface seemed to do what it was meant to, not that Moz had ever bothered to test it. Shaking her head, Fei watched as the program sliced its way through security protocols, ignoring any prompts for passwords or retina scans.

  There wasn’t a folder titled ‘why GLEA is messing with TerraCorp’. But there were plenty of financial documents that bore the acronym of the religious organisation.

  Fei pushed herself away from the desk, her hoverchair all but shrieking as it carried her backwards across the floor, allowing her to take in the spread of files filling four entire vidscreens.

  GLEA never charged for their services and most people were willing to accept their protection without asking too many questions. Some worshippers of the Creator God donated what they could, out of the belief that it would please their god, but Fei had always wondered if those contributions were enough to cover the costs of running GLEA, not to mention the agents’ salaries.

  ‘We’re bankrolling them,’ she whispered.

  The files went back a full century. But that didn’t mean they stopped there. Older data was kept on different servers, only to be accessed if necessary.

  Fei brought up a list of the past few planets that TerraCorp had transformed. On each world the number of agents stationed there had multiplied by up to five times in the weeks following the final phases of the terraforming process. Any existing outposts had benefited from extensive upgrades and if the planet had lacked a temple dedicated to the Creator God, then it had been lavishly provided for.

  ‘But what are we getting out of it?’ she muttered, frowning so hard that she ended up squinting, the room around her fading to muted greys. ‘They get their operational costs covered. They get refurbished outposts and shiny new temples, potentially attracting more followers. They get to mess with our work. So what do we get?’

  The vidscreens abruptly darkened. Fei blinked at them, confused.

  Then a high-pitched alarm began wailing overhead.

  She shot to her feet and ran for the hoverlift. It failed to slam its way down to her when she called it.

  ‘Oh stark,’ she said.

  Fei clasped her hands together as she backed away from the hoverlift doors, murmuring, ‘Creator God, I know I haven’t been very faithful lately, but I could really use some help. Please. Please tell me what I should do.’

  Of course he didn’t answer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘This isn’t like you at all, Feiscina.’

  It seemed that Mozel Zan, like many others in Terra Corp’s middle management, preferred to use wooden furniture imported from a world that was specially designed to provide timber. Though she would have liked to touch Moz’s desk, Fei kept her hands linked behind her back. No one had threatened to arrest or cuff her yet, but her shoulders, elbows and arms ached from the position.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Moz watched her closely, his eyebrows merging into a thick, disapproving line. ‘You’re always so quiet, you don’t bother anyone — I never expected any problems from you.’

  He was draped comfortably in a padded hoverchair covered with silksein and decorated with wooden panels that matched the desk. Of course, his chair was whisper silent, even when he changed position. Moz had been sitting there from the moment he’d been called into TerraCorp an hour ago and had made sure that the agents GLEA had dispatched to deal with the security breach had been sent away.

  ‘But I never really know what you’re doing down there,’ Moz went on, scratching behind one of his ears. ‘I just let it lie, because your output always meets our expectations. You really should tell me more about what you’re doing, you know, or suggest any ideas you might have for improving our systems. I’d be more inclined to promote you if you spoke up for yourself.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Fei repeated. She wasn’t going to mention the idea he’d stolen from her, the one about cutting TerraCorp’s servers and consoles off from the Web. Right now she was wishing she’d never mentioned it in the first place, because being forced to come in to look for the files had led to her current predicament.

  ‘Feiscina, just tell me what the problem is,’ Moz entreated. His hoverchair jumped up as he rose to his feet. ‘Is it because of your family history? You know it is considered an honour to be called by the Creator God to join GLEA.’

  Fei sucked her lips into her mouth to stop herself from saying something that would get her fired.

  ‘TerraCorp was never separate from GLEA, you understand,’ Moz continued, moving closer to her, a hand outstretched. When his fingers came too close to her shoulder, Fei flinched and took a giant step away from him. Frowning, Moz pinned his arm back to his side. ‘We were created to fund them so that they can provide their services free of charge. People could not afford their protection otherwise. And if we happen to help GLEA set up a new outpost or temple, that’s not a bad thing. People need to be aware that the Creator God is looking after them.’

  Fei kept her voice to a murmur. ‘I know how important GLEA is. I do.’

  ‘Then why this poking around?’ Moz asked. He looked almost fatherly with his hair so uniformly silver, but it was the fashion on Enoc and not an actual sign of his age.

  ‘Moz…’ Fei swallowed, trying to find the words. ‘This was my sanctuary. All that religion stuff — I didn’t have to think about it. Not here.’

  Moz nodded slowly. ‘So you are having a crisis of faith and you’re worried it will affect your job performance now that you know we are part of GLEA.’

  ‘I just don’t want anything to do with them,’ Fei muttered.

  ‘Maybe all you need is some time to think about it,’ Moz said soothingly, backing her towards a hoverchair that matched his one behind the desk.

  Fei reluctantly sank into the cushioned seat. Her jaw ached from holding in a bitter retort.

  ‘A holiday,’ Moz continued, still standing far too close for her liking. ‘It will allow you to get your thoughts in order. You see, your father’s calling may have been to join GLEA, but your calling is to work here, at TerraCorp.’

  ‘That sounds…’ Like bullshit. ‘…I don’t know, Moz. It might take me years to come to terms with things.’

  But Moz was smiling and shaking his head, as though she was a child who had asked him a stupid question about how the galaxy worked. She wanted to punch him but instead dug her fingernails into the arms of her chair. The fragile material gave and tore beneath her grip.

  ‘This is what you need, Feiscina,’ he cajoled. ‘A holiday. A respite. A bit of time off. I know just the place.’

  Fei gave a non-committal shrug. She had no real preferences for a holiday destination; her mother lived on Gerasnin, the GLEA homeworld, and she had no desire to
go there.

  Moz raised his hands in a triumphant flourish. ‘Bagaran!’

  ‘The planet we’re currently sourcing data and material from?’ Fei clarified.

  The last few samples that had come through from Bagaran had been especially interesting because the topsoil on that planet was unusually deep. It was actually causing problems in her simulations since most plants in a typical rainforest had very shallow roots, owing to a lack of fertile depths. Millennia ago, some humans had made the mistake of assuming they could knock down rainforests and seed crops that needed much deeper topsoil. It had been a painful lesson, one of many that had destroyed Old Earth.

  ‘Yes, yes, they’ve had recent setbacks because of vandals but it is a very pleasant place by all accounts,’ Moz said, nodding repeatedly.

  Fei performed the appropriate grimace when he brought up the laboratory’s destruction. It had been recommended that GLEA not be called in because TerraCorp did not want to anger the Bagara worshippers in the area and the company still had important work to do on on the rainforest god’s primary world. A new lab was being constructed on a nearby planet and would be shipped over in the next month or so.

  Moz bounced back into his hoverchair and began sliding his fingers over his desk, its keyboard lighting up beneath his touch. ‘Apparently the locals will be holding some sort of annual festival for their sub-level god soon.’

  Fei sat up straight. ‘I’ve heard about that one. Bagara speaks directly to them during the festival.’

  ‘They claim he does, yes,’ Moz said. ‘It’s probably nothing but propaganda. Now. About that holiday…’

  He narrowed his eyes at Fei, clearly expecting a response.

  She sighed. ‘Alright. I’ll go. If that’s what you think I should do.’

  Evidently it was, because Moz took her keypass and ran it through the reader on his desk, rendering her access to the building null and void for two months. The amount of time seemed excessive, but Fei said nothing and allowed Moz to escort her out into the violet night and onto the footpath that led to their apartment building.