Grazing The Long Acre (3 page)

“Are you kidding? Because they’re not stupid, you idiot. Not stupid at all.”

Sugi took fright and retired into the sleeping pod. Sasha felt a desire to eat (for reassurance), but no appetite—the phantom itch of an amputated limb. That was a danger sign. She thought about the five of them, lying back on
Earth
like so many Walt Disneys in their glass coffins, and with just about as much chance (let’s face it) of successful resurrection. She could imagine the
Cheops
team agreeing among themselves. We’ll find ways round the problem eventually. But so it goes. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. She had sometimes thought the ‘special brain chemistry’ was a myth, invented as compensation. But she still wanted to go home. And the Ma’atians didn’t understand. Where is Bob? she wondered in sudden panic. Where is Nanazetta, where is Merle? They don’t want us to leave, to go back and report on this choice bit of real estate. They’re trying to split us up, they’re picking at the weak links.

Merle was alone, most alone. She could have been in Eden before the Fall. She had walked into the hills above the settlement. They had closed behind her: now there was nothing, not even a whisper of birdsong or the sound of water. She followed a ridge-path, deeper and deeper into a world of green crags and plunging chasms. This is Treasure Island, she said to herself derisively. Presently I will shoot a goat, and dress myself in skins.

Her Kirlian eyes were wide open and very still. An enormous presence watched at her back and looked down at her from the heights. She was afraid, though there was nothing to fear; and finally so afraid that she could go no further. She sat down on a rocky promontory beside her path. This is how it must have been, she thought, to wake up in the world. The first thinking thing, looking at the not-thinking. So much greater than I. The huge crags looked down at her tiny figure, impassively. She was aware that to endow that green immensity with persona was a reflex of fear, fear of what it really was. Slowly, slowly, she let the fallacy slip away. And fell into unknowing….

After a while, she got up and stripped off the suit. She was naked under it. She stood examining her body, wondering if she would know it among a hundred other bodies of tallish, dark haired white women, apart from the all-too-familiar face. She thought not. The small white sun was warm. She could feel it, she could see the shadow it gave her.

A Ma’atian child appeared, coming down the path. On seeing her naked it beamed all over its face and sat down on the edge of the promontory.

“Hello,” said Merle, cautiously.

She knew this was an adolescent female, from the patterns on the tiny kilt slung around its slender hips. If you didn’t look too closely it made a pretty young woman, in spite of the fish-like, needle teeth.

You have taken your clothes off, remarked the girl, in gesture and whistle-clicking. We didn’t think you could do that. We thought you were maybe ghosts.

She touched the shed carapace curiously.

Merle laughed lightly.

“What a silly idea.”

Perhaps the laugh seemed like an invitation. The child settled more closely on the rocky perch, and took Merle’s thick, white hand. I like you very much, she pantomimed. Why don’t you stay with us, don’t go away in that little box. I wish you would stay.

The pretty girl seemed sweetly sincere; however, Merle understood at once that she was being tempted, and why. She started to giggle. It was so ludicrous. Make love not war: Sugi had said that. Which was typical of Sugi, the good-hearted simpleton. Sugi was probably the only one of them all, villagers and invaders, who didn’t know this paradise was doomed. The natives had no way of guessing their world had five hundred years grace, at a conservative estimate. But Merle was not about to try and explain that. Let them sweat. After all, technology does make giant strides sometimes. They could be right to be scared for their own skins.

“Why should I want to stay with you,” she snarled, abruptly losing her temper. “You made me suffer. Just when I thought it was all over damn you. You made me feel things I thought I was safe from forever. You want to know the truth? We’re not explorers, we’re a bunch of escaped maniacs. And the rest of the asylum’s coming right after us.”

The child was not affected by human rage. Emboldened by the lengthy speech she moved even closer, grinning. We call you, the people who wrap up their farts, she confided. It must get very smelly inside your boxes. The mime was clever and ridiculous. Merle snorted. They laughed together, uproariously.

Merle wiped her eyes, looked down at herself, looked at the alien girl, in sudden, belated, heart-catching wonder….

 Sasha was still in the crew environment, panicking and wishing she could make herself feel hungry, when Merle joined her. She began checking over
Cheops
’ present status on the information screens. She was obviously in a foul mood.

She glared at Sasha and asked abruptly, “Have you been having hallucinations?”

Sasha was alarmed.

“Have you?”

Merle just scowled.

“Where’s Sugi?”

“She’s sleeping.”

Merle groped around in the wall niches. She located the worn piece of scrap paper, and after some rummaging, the safety pin. She pinned the booking notice on the sleeping pod diaphragm. She seemed to be daring Sasha to comment. As she was about to disappear, she looked around briefly.

“Cowardice and stupidity,” she said in a bored tone. “Are the mainsprings of your existence. And mine. Do you know why they picked us for
Cheops
? Because we’re too stupid to kill ourselves, and too scared to do anything else.”

 Sasha went up to the lake, feeling safer now that both of her weak links were accounted for. She was thinking wistfully that
Cheops
was bound to call an end to shore leave soon. A shiny doll came running up. She was afraid it was Sugi or Merle, turned violent. But it was Bob Irwin.

“Where’s the captain?” he yelled

“She’s in the sleeping pod with Sugi.”

“Oh, shit. We’ve go to do something. Nanazetta’s jumped ship.”

“What?”

“He has! He has! I found his suit. He dumped his suit…”

Sasha jumped to her feet. “They’ve got the Do Not Disturb sign up,” she wailed.

The token was so sacred that even in this crisis they didn’t know what to do.

“Fuck it,” decided Bob. “We’ll go after him ourselves.”

“Go after him?” Sasha was bewildered. “But he’s, I mean, if he’s not in the suit?”

“Sash, either I’m going crazy or….Come and see.”

The suit was where Bob had found it, stowed in some composting vegetation at the bottom of a Ma’atian garden. The footprints lead away: distinctly human, nothing at all like the slender tracks of the natives. The Ma’atians agreed that the fifth stranger had gone away. They even agreed, reluctantly, to show his friends where he was.

Nanazetta had covered a surprising amount of ground. When Bob and Sasha discussed it they couldn’t remember when they had last seen him. He could have been gone for days, and their ‘reality’ might have just closed over the gap. They lay in their shiny suits under unknown stars beside the two adult Ma’atians who were leading them. Neither of them managed to sleep.

In the morning they found him. They had been following a rocky valley which dwarfed the tiny stream buried in its midst. Ahead, the country was beginning to open out. They could see that this was no island. The green crags were the foothills of a great mountain chain, which loomed up against the lemon-coloured dawn sky.

“Awesome,” breathed Irwin.

And there was Nanazetta. The Ma’atians gestured upwards, and Sasha saw the physiologist’s big, burly, pink body. He was watching from a grassy cove, a natural step cut half way up the valley wall. The figure bobbed out of sight.

“He’s up there!” cried Bob. “Let’s get the bugger!”

The Ma’atians stayed below. Bob and Sasha climbed. In the cove, an extraordinary sight met their eyes. Somebody had started building a hut. There were Ma’atian artifacts strewn around, and on a flat rock someone had been mixing brown clay with water to plaster the stake and creeper walls. A Ma’atian boy squatted beside this rock, his arms wrapped around his knees. To Sasha he looked proud and frightened, and a little guilty. She guessed at the desperate plotting, the urgent deliberations of a society, not given to violence, trying to invent strategies for survival against the odds. It was a world of affection and comfort. They had no other weapons.

While Sasha saw this, Bob Irwin was catapulted back to
Earth
by bewilderment. He saw the boy as a youngster of his own race, and was appalled.

“You can’t mean to live with him!” he cried. “You’re ruining your life, kid. The man’s a horror story. He eats red meat!”

He remembered the glossary, and tried whistling and clicking, and hoped he was saying something. “Don’t stay with bad stranger. Your people better. Go home!”

The boy whistled and clicked, too: it sounded almost the same.

“Hey! Leave the kid alone!”

Nanazetta came running out from behind the half—built hut, brandishing a knobbled tree root.

Bob and Sasha grabbed at each other clumsily.

“Okay, Nanzetta,” quavered Bob. “Party’s over.”

“Don’t waste your breath. I like it here. I’ve got myself a girl, the food’s good. When you get back, you can report me missing.”

“That’s a boy, Nanazetta,” Irwin told him, exasperated. “We can tell by the kilt.”

The physiologist flushed darkly, colour spreading down his chest through the thick mat of hair. He was wearing a Ma’atian kilt too.

“What the fuck business is it of yours? Get off my patch!”

“For God’s sake, Nanazetta. You aren’t really here. None of us are really here. You don’t exist at the moment, except as an array of, of psychic dots and dashes, or whatever it is, in
Cheops
’ memory. You can’t have forgotten that.”

He had never accepted it, not deep down. That was his secret. He could not take seriously any theory of the human entity as something that could exist separated from the body. Nanazetta believed in flesh and blood. He hefted his twisted root, smiling contemptuously. He knew who was crazy.

“Nanazetta!” cried Sasha. “You’re betraying your planet. I don’t know what you’ve done, but you mustn’t do it. We are all of us part of the
Cheops
. You’re going to wreck the whole project.”

“So why should I care? Did anyone care what would happen to me, stuck in a cryogenic vault while my ‘Kirlian structure’ was off shooting round the galaxy? Piss on them. Piss on the Sahel, piss on the Boers, piss on the teeming masses everywhere. This is my promised land. I’m staying.”

“Oh Bob, this is crazy. This is just another shared hallucination. He can’t have escaped. He’s still part of the
Cheops
, and he’ll be back in the crew environment at take off with the rest of us. He can’t help it.”

Nanazetta’s fury boiled over. He charged across the cove. Sasha and the boy clung to each other this time. Bob tried to run.”Get the fuck off! Get the fuck off!” gasped the big man hoarsely, flailing with his root. Bob scuttled, dodged. Nanazetta went flying past him, still yelling furiously, over the edge of the shelf.

He landed with a crunch, out of their sight below.

“Oh, God.”

Down by the side of the stream, the two adult Ma’atians were bending over something fleshly, solid, and still. Nanazetta had broken his neck. He was dead.

The boy brought a kind of digging stick down from above and all five of them took turns at the work. They buried him where he lay. The Ma’atians seemed to think this was the right thing to do, and Bob and Sasha were in no state to argue.

On the journey back they camped when darkness fell, as before. In the middle of the night, Sasha jerked awake. She shook Irwin violently.

“Bob! We shouldn’t have buried him! The contamination! All kinds of bacteria, viruses. We’ll have to go back and dig him up and burn him….”

Bob waited until her babbling ended in silence. Each of them, in Ma’at’s radiant starlight, bright as a full moon on
Earth
, stared at a metallic doll.

“Was there a body?” asked Sasha at last. “Do you think we’re imagining all this?”

“I don’t know. But no body left
Earth
, Sasha.”

“Oh, good. So no
Earth
bacteria can be contaminating Ma’at.” Slowly, Bob removed his suit. Sasha did the same. Bob dug his bare hands into the dark soil and looked at them. There was dirt under his fingernails. He could feel the grit on his palms.

“This is impossible,” whispered Sasha.

They put the suits back on.

Sugi was waiting for them at the settlement. She didn’t seem to take in the news of Nanazetta’s death. She had worries of her own.

“I don’t know what it is, Bob, but I can’t seem to get into the lander. I must have locked myself out.”

She was confused, showing the pathetic wariness which they remembered from the first days of
Cheops
, before she got to trust them.

The
Cheops
lander looked the same as always, a glassy tetrahedron that turned from black to silver as the light struck it. It stood in the centre of the glade, under the clear blue sky, a large packing case that would open when triggered by
Cheops
, just big enough to fold in all the AI’s mobile exploratory hardware. Including five servo-units converted from human pressure suits.

“It’s bigger inside, isn’t it,” suggested Sugi uneasily.

“Only, I can’t get in anymore.”

It was cooler that night. Sasha and Bob sat on the porch of the house that had been lent to them and watched fireflies. They had taken off their suits again and were wearing borrowed Ma’atian garments, the light swathing folds making a comfortable cloud of Sasha’s gentle bulk. Sugi, surprisingly, had made a swift and complete recovery. She was down in the settlement somewhere with her holiday friends. Faintly, the marooned explorers caught strains of the
Earthling
dance track which had been top of the charts when
Cheops
departed.