Against A Dark Background (60 page)

They walked on as the weather cleared a little then got even colder while dark, tall clouds built up to windward and started towards them. Sometime about then she began to forget which day this was and where exactly they were and what they were looking for and why they were looking for it.

Plodding on became everything; her being became centred on the in-out ebb and flow of breath, the thud-thudding of her feet hitting the ground one after another and the lifting, dropping, lifting, dropping motion of her legs, sending vibrations up through her that she received as though from far away and in slow motion. Even her voice sounded distant and not really hers. She listened to herself answer the things the others asked her, but she didn’t know what it was she was saying and she didn’t really care; only the onwardness of walking mattered, only that slow thud-thudding that was her feet and her heart and the wounding pulse of her poisoning pain.

She was alone. She was quite alone. She walked a frozen shore in the middle of nothing, with only the solitude to stalk her either side, and she began to wonder whether she really was a Solipsist, the traitor amongst them.

A brain in a body; a collection of cells in a collection of cells, making its way in a menagerie of other cell-collections, animal and vegetable, wandering the same rough globe with their own share of its dumb cargo of minerals and chemicals and fluids carried strapped and trapped in and by that cage of cells - temporarily - always part of it but always utterly alone.

Like Golter; like poor, poor Golter.

It had found itself alone and it had spread itself as far as it could and produced so much, but it was still next to nothing.

They had grown up - had they only known it - in one room of an empty house. When they began to understand it was a house, they had thought there must be others nearby; they had thought perhaps they were in the suburbs, or even a well-hidden part of the city, but though they had colonised those other rooms, they had looked out from their furthest windows and tallest skylights and found - to their horror, and a horror only their own increased understanding made them fully able to appreciate-that they were truly alone.

They could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckoning, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and even guess that some of those suns too might have planets round them . . . but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their own.

The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and emblems of a thousand different languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their isolated and freakish star.

For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial - for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets -was an orphan.

There was this wall. She was coming slowly up to this flat wall. The wall was white and grey and studded with little round stones; to one side there was a larger boulder shaped like a giant door handle. She wondered if the wall was really a door. Somehow, she was sure that Cenuij was on the other side. She could see ice and frost on it. The wall was coming closer all the time and seemed to be very tall; she didn’t think she’d be able to see the top. It kept advancing towards her even though she was sure she had stopped walking. Walking had been everything for longer than she could remember; it had been her universe, her existence, her whole reason for being, but then she had stopped and yet here was this wall coming towards her. Very close now; she could see frozen trickles of water between the small stones, and what might have been small, frosted plants. She looked for Cenuij’s eye, peeking through at her from the other side. Somebody else must have noticed the wall because she thought she heard a shout from somewhere far away.

The wall slammed into her. There seemed to be a safety rail. Her head hit the wall anyway, and everything went dark.

The android saw her falling and rushed forward as Miz shouted out. It couldn’t hope to save her properly, but it was just close enough to stretch out a leg and get a foot under her upper chest, slowing her descent just a little before her falling weight took her down and she fell to the stony beach and lay there, face down and still.

Feril hopped once, unbalanced, then knelt with the others as they gathered quickly around her.

`Is she hurt?’ Miz said, as Zefla and Dloan gently rolled her over. There was a small graze on her cheek and another on her forehead. Her face looked old and puffed. Her mouth opened slackly. Miz took her right glove off and rubbed her hand. Feril touched her left glove.

She’s lying in this water,’ Zefla said.
Let’s get her to the trees.’

They took her into the forest and laid her down. Feril ran its fingers over the taut left glove again. `There appears to be something wrong with her hand,’ it said.

The others looked at the glove. `She did cut her hand a couple of days ago,’ Zefla said. Dloan tried to undo the glove.

They had to cut it eventually. Her hand was bloated and discoloured; the original wound oozed from beneath a small, sopping plaster. Miz made a face.

Zefla drew her breath in.
Oh, oh,’ she said.
Oh, you silly thing. . .’She touched the swollen skin. Sharrow moaned.

Dloan drew his laser, opened the grip and adjusted the controls.

`What’s that for?’ Miz asked, staring at the weapon.

Dloan closed the grip again, turned and fired the gun into the needle litter at his feet; a tiny, continuous red ember burned. Dloan seemed satisfied and clicked the beam off.

Poison,’ Dloan said, gently taking Sharrow’s wounded hand and laying it as flat as possible on the ground.
Antiseptic? Dressing?’ he said.

Zefla was rummaging in Sharrow’s satchel. `Here,’ she said.

Might wake her up,’ Dloan said, kneeling so that he could hold Sharrow’s hand securely.
Want to hold her down?’

`Shit,’ Miz said, and took her feet. Feril held her other hand and pinned her shoulders; Zefla smoothed her hand over Sharrow’s forehead.

Dloan pointed the laser pistol at Sharrow’s wounded hand and pressed the trigger. The flesh spotted, blackened and split, parting like the skin of rotten fruit. Sharrow moaned and stirred as the liquid inside spilled out, sputtering and steaming under the laser’s power. Miz looked away.

Zefla rocked back and forth, stroking Sharrow’s forehead and cheeks; Dloan grimaced and screwed his eyes up as the fumes bubbling from the wound reached him; but kept the laser pointed at her hand, lengthening the incision. The android looked on, fascinated, while the moaning woman moved weakly beneath him.

They built a fire. Zefla had a last lump of foodslab left she’d been saving; they warmed it with the laser and tried to get Sharrow to eat it. They used a laser to heat some water in the hollow of a stone, soaked a bandana in it and got her to suck at it. Her face seemed to grow less puffy, and her breathing became slower and deeper. She passed from unconsciousness to something more like sleep. The smell of antiseptic spread around the hollow.

They had travelled only ten kilometres from their last camp; they still had thirty left to travel to the tower at the head of the fjord. Feril thought that given the state of the ground on the far side of the fjord the Solipsists might be significantly delayed; but it would be close-run thing, and while it could carry Sharrow until the next camp it would have to leave soon after darkness if it was to get back to the mouth of the fjord in time to attempt to make contact with the submarine.

`We don’t really have much choice, I guess,’ Miz said. He still felt ill after watching what they’d done to Sharrow’s infected hand. His feet ached and his stomach felt like it was eating itself; he was light-headed and shivery with hunger. He couldn’t stop thinking about food. But at least the pain of walking helped take his mind off his empty belly.

`You’re sure you can carry her safely?’ Zefla asked Feril.

`Yes.’

`I could spell you,’ Dloan said.

The android paused. `Thank you,’ it said.

Okay,’ Zefla said. She lifted the satchel.
Let’s go.’

The small group of people walked along the cold, grey shore under a dark, lowering sky. The tall leading figure walked lightly, even gracefully, but the one following looked too slight to carry the burden in its arms as easily as it appeared to, and the last two in the group were limping.

Above them, a sky the colour of gun-metal shook free the first few tiny flakes of snow.

Elson Roa watched from the top of a bluff through a pair of high-power binoculars. He saw the leading figure of the group on the far side of the fjord take an object from a satchel and stop briefly while they examined it. Then they replaced the object in the bag.

Roa switched the field-glasses’ stabilisers off and listened to their slowly dying whine as the air above the waters of the fjord began to fill with snow, wiping the view out in a swirling grey turmoil of silence. The sniper at his side checked the range read-out on her rifle again and shook her head, tutting.

Roa looked behind him to where his comrades stood, healthy and alert and waiting. A little snow drifted out of the dull expanse of cloud hanging between the mountains and settled gently on their dirtied but still gaudy uniforms.

They moved through a limited world; the falling snow obliterated everything save for a circle perhaps ten metres in diameter consisting of forest-edge, rocky shore and flat water. The patch of the fjord’s black surface they could see specked continually with white flakes that vanished the instant they touched that darkness. No waves beat. Where the snow-flakes touched the ground, they sat amongst the rocks and pebbles for a brief moment, then melted. The sky was gone, brought down to an indeterminate low ceiling where the mass of grey-white flakes became a single cloud of chaotic, cluttering movement.

Feril followed Zefla Franck, putting its feet where hers had gone. Sharrow was a slight burden in its arms; her extra weight meant that it had to lean back a little as it walked to keep its centre of balance vertical, but it could continue like this indefinitely if it had to. It kept looking around even though there was little enough to see. It maintained its audio sweep, listening for anything unusual.

They had pulled the hood of Sharrow’s jacket up over her face when they’d set off; when Feril looked down at one point it saw that the hood had fallen back, and flakes of snow were falling onto her sleeping face. The soft white scraps touched her cheeks and became tiny patches of moistness. Where they fell on her eyelashes, they lasted long enough for the android to be able to see the shape of the individual crystals, before each unique shape was dissolved by the heat of her body and flowed into the skin around her eyes like tears.

Feril watched for a moment and then pulled the hood back up, sheltering her.

Zefla Franck was leaving footprints now; the snow swarming from the closed and heavy sky was beginning to lie, collecting flake by tiny flake on the rocks and pebbles and the rough-surfaced trunks of the trees at the forest’s hem and building small bridges of softness over crevices and rivulets, which had begun to freeze.

The shore became too steep and the snow too heavy; they returned to the forest, walking among the trees in a scarcened filter of flakes, enlivened every now and again as a clump of snow fell suddenly from the canopy above through the branches to the forest floor.

Zefla cut through the tangles and fallen branches they encountered with her laser, leaving the charred smell of burned wood curling behind on a cloud of smoke and steam.

Sharrow made occasional small, whimpering noises and moved in Feril’s arms.

They walked on until it became too dark to see, then stopped to rest. Sharrow slept on, Zefla sat still, Miz complained about his feet and Dloan offered to take Sharrow. Feril said there was no need. Then they walked on, all but Dloan equipped with nightsights. He followed just behind Miz. The falling snow thinned, then thickened again.

Feril could see Zefla Franck’s previously well-balanced gait becoming ragged and clumsy, and hear Miz Gattse Kuma’s wheezing, laboured breathing behind. Dloan slipped and fell twice. They were only about nine kilometres from the head of the fjord, but the ground ahead was rough and much of it was uphill. It suggested they stopped and made camp.

They sat, exhausted, on a fallen trunk. Sharrow lay across their laps, her head cradled in Zefla’s arms. Feril found wood and used a laser to light the fire. It erected the tent for them, too. They put Sharrow inside; Zefla wrapped her in the blanket. Miz and Dloan sat at the fire.

I could go on the last nine thousand metres with Lady Sharrow,’ it told them, once they had gathered round the fire.
Even if she does not wake up, her palm, applied to one of the tower’s stone square’s posts, might well open the tower up.’

None of them seemed to have the strength to reply; they just stared at the flames of the fire. Snow-flakes fell towards it, then were caught in the updraft and whirled away. The snow seemed to be thinning again.

Alternatively,’ Feril told them,
I could return to the coast and signal the submarine. Though I’d have to leave now.’

`Or you could stay here on guard,’ Zefla said from the tent, putting Sharrow’s satchel under her head as a pillow.

Or he could head for the tower again,’ Dloan said.
With a gun, he might be able to hold off the Solipsists for a while.’

I still think we should get word to outside,’ Miz said.
Get the sub to call up some air support. Hell, the Security Franchise people didn’t bother about Roa’s fucking great flying boat, and one lousy fighter-bomber would be all we’d need.’