In Solitary (2 page)

We were in the Hall of Weyym, a religious sect of the Soal. The Klees was sitting crosslegged and I, standing beneath his high stool, was looking up at him. It was daylight outside the Hall, and the sun angled through the mosaic of the chipped-crystal walls. However, the thermostats kept the room temperature constant. On a smaller stool some two metres high, beside his father, sat my friend Lintar. He was regarding me with hurt and puzzled eyes.

The diamond mouth of the Klees opened and he grunted in the thick accents of a Soal speaking Terran, punctuating each word with a breath.

‘You have betrayed us. After all our kindness you have finally shown us your true side, Terran animal. You have also betrayed your own father, who was a good and obedient servant, now in the arms of the Universal Weyym. I must contemplate your punishment.’ His head went down between his prominent clavicles: the classical Soal pose of concentration I called
stool,
owing to the piece of furniture upon which they usually did their thinking.

I thought about my father, a poor weak man; eager to please and happy to remain alive. If serving the Soal meant freedom from the fear of death or banishment, then my father would be the first to proclaim his submission. They
killed him when I reached 170 months of age. I did not despise him: he had been my father, and in that role had been a kind and good man. But I could no more be like him than a fish can be a bird – not for an hour, not for a second. Consequently I grew to manhood sullen and obstinate, with only one friend in the world, the Klees’s own son. Had we not been close, I should have died much sooner, by Endrod’s hand.

‘You must go,’ cried the Klees finally.

‘Father …’ began Lintar. But the Klees silenced his intervention with a quick wave of his arm.

‘Not this time my son. We have been lenient too often and for too long. Any mercy shown might jeopardize my own political career – Endrod would have the human dead. As it is I must face him with a considerably lighter award of punishment than he expects.’ Endrod was the Chief Librarian and my greatest tormentor.

The Klees turned to glare at me.

‘You have three hours,’ he stated, ‘you understand?’

I nodded. All the conversation between father and son had taken place in Soal, a language spoken at a frequency high above the audio range of the human ear, but I was adept at mouth reading and knew what had passed between them.

Then he stretched out his arms and legs and glided over my head towards the entrance, not looking down. I was banished from Brytan – a light sentence when you consider that I had been discovered investigating the tapes contained in the Soal history archives.

His father having now left us, Lintar began to question me in that sorrowful voice of his. He was a spoilt and rather selfish young Soal, but I was his property and when a youth’s favourite companion is taken from him he feels it is the most tragic moment of his life.

‘Why did you do it, Cave? What were you looking for that was so important to you?’

I hung my head as if in shame. From the suppressed frustration in his tone I knew he was only a whisper away from striking me and I had no wish to leave this land with more enemies than I had already. Endrod alone was enough for any man.

‘Shall we walk the vats?’ I said. This was an attempt at placating him.

Lintar’s feathers rose, and then slowly fell,
and I knew he had taken command of himself once more. He was nearing adulthood and his petulant outbursts of temper were becoming less frequent. It was a pity I had now disgraced myself, for it was reasonably certain that Lintar would attain the position his father held – he was competent in the affairs of state and his education had been channelled to that end. As his companion I would have been in an enviable position – for a human. There were few of us enough as it was, on dry land. Soon I was to join the unlucky ones – out on the mud.

On the vat walks the air was pleasant enough. It was, as always, full of the aerobic bacteria on which the Soal fed. I am told humans do not benefit from the odours that are exuded from the breeding sludge in the oblong vats, as the Soal do, but it was difficult to believe because the stench was so enjoyable. As a human I ate solid foods, though I drank liquids like the Soal. There again was another difference in our biological makeup. The Soal waited until their liquids turned sour before drinking them – I had tried that as a boy, and had made myself extremely ill. Lintar used to enjoy watching my efforts at mimicking his natural habits, until his father warned him that copying the Soal might end in my death by poisoning.

‘Is there anything you want me to do for you before you go?’ questioned Lintar.

We were walking on one of the broad rectangular paths that formed the walls to the vats. The smell was delicious and I breathed deeply. Then I answered.

‘I wondered,’ I said, stepping aside for two Soal that walked directly towards me, ‘whether I might be allowed to take a crossbow with me? I have heard that the mud flats can be dangerous – the humans that live out there are untrained and vicious.’ I looked down on Lintar’s face. It was a large request. The responsibility would be his, should any Soal be attacked with the weapon. His lidless eyes looked upwards and studied my own features.

‘But the humans must obey the laws of the Soal. Why should they want to kill one another?’

‘I have heard there are many, and that territories
are jealously guarded. If I should happen to stray accidentally into another man’s or woman’s area, or find it necessary to do so because of lack of food, then I would need a weapon.’

This was a lie and Lintar probably knew it, but he realized that I should have a hard time taking care of myself. I had never been alone before.

Lintar struggled with himself inwardly. There was a sensible course to take, and then there was the indulgence of a childhood companion whose need was desperate. Finally, and predictably for Lintar, he chose the latter.

‘You shall have your crossbow,’ he grunted, aware that he was being foolish. ‘Just take care you only use it in an emergency.’

I snorted. ‘What do you care for other humans?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied quickly. ‘Let no more be said. I shall obtain the crossbow for you, but if you are caught with it I trust you to keep my name inside you to the death.’

I nodded, and then changed the subject, leaning over the rails to a vat and pointing into the sludge. I thought about death, a subject which I find infinitely interesting and contemplate for long hours. It is the last great mystery. Soal speak of death as a fact but rarely wonder on the after effects of the termination of their own lives. The Universal Weyym is a god of life, not death. Death is a vacuum and is the same word in the Soal language as ‘Zero’. ‘When I reach zero,’ they say. They count the months of their lives backwards, beginning at one thousand and fifty. They never count below one. Some elderly Soal have been
one
for as long as I can remember. Each extra month they stay alive is a renewed ‘one’.

‘This is the vat which claimed the life of Askreenata – do you remember? She tried to glide the length of it and the breeze dropped? What a way to die – to drown in …’

‘That’s enough,’ snapped Lintar sharply. ‘Enough talk of death. You are a morbid human. Why death fascinates you so much I cannot imagine. It is dwelling on nothing, for that is death, nothingness.’

We finished our walk back at the church and the Klees was waiting for me with a knapsack of food. Lintar slipped away, I hoped to fetch the promised crossbow. Then
I was led through the accommodation area to the sea wall.

Beyond the sea wall, between the continent of Hess and Brytan stretched kilometres of tideland which was covered, in some places by only a few centimetres of water, at high tide. Once upon a time there had been a permanent channel of water between Brytan and Hess which made Brytan a full-time island. The earthquake of 2083 Old Time had changed the physical relationships between Brytan and Yurop, as Hess was called in those times. As well as the structural changes in the substrata of the western shores of Hess, the Soal had constructed great tidal gates, which also served them as a bridge, between the south-east tip of Brytan and the Hessian peninsula. Thus they were able to control the depth of the tideway to a certain degree and prevent flooding during the spring tides.

I had now to go out and live on the mud wastes, never again to set foot on the dry land of my home country. I was the last human to leave Brytan and I went regretfully. The Soal had all the main land over the whole Earth. Some of them, the central continentals, had never seen a human in their whole lives, yet once upon a time we crawled over the surface of the world in our millions. Now we lived on the islands and areas of waste ground which the Soal did not want. A race of hermits that prayed to the Weyym of Boundless Space for the simultaneous death of every living Soal in the universe.

Mudflats must be the most depressing of all the
landscape scenes to fall on the human eye. The only marks a person can leave on that desert of sludge are footprints, and even those are transient – they remain for the length of time between two high tides. Then the world is wiped smooth and clean of a mud dweller’s only solid proof that he is not a ghost. Nothing is made, nothing is created on the mud. People are there to exist only – not to build histories for the conjecture of others. When the last body, be it a thousand years hence, has rotted away, the mud will hold no secrets. All artifacts owned by mud dwellers bear the marks of Soal manufacture, and the human bones will be taken away with the tide.

Mud dwellers live only for a few hours at a time. They disappear with each oncoming tide, into one of the transparent needle towers, thinner and taller than minarets, that spike the mud, while the sea washes away the patterns of their existence.

I was prodded from behind and realized I had been standing for a few minutes regarding the grey wastes. I was beginning to wonder what in Weyym’s mind had induced me to go foraging through the Tape Library. Curiosity? Rebellion? Stupidity? The Klees would say the latter. Now I was doomed to spend the rest of my life, probably a very short one, up to my eyebrows in filth.

The Klees pushed some mudshoes into my hands just as Lintar came running towards us with a blanket, which he quickly bundled into my arms. I took it gratefully, feeling the hardness of the weapon within its folds.

‘Thank you Lintar,’ I said quietly.

He nodded. ‘In case you get wet,’ he said in that peculiar
shrill accent. For all the hours in the day the mushroom towers kept the temperature of the atmosphere fairly constant, at a comfortable heat. Lintar had once told me that if the mushroom towers ever cease to function the Earth would become uninhabitable for the Soal. He did not say for how long they could live in varying temperatures, but I understood it to be a very short time.

The two Soal, the old one and his young son, stood watching my naked form as I walked through the gates. It seemed to me that they were the sad ones, these two pigmy-sized aliens, and I the lucky one, setting forth on a fantastic adventure. I waved, but they had never understood the significance of that particular gesture – my father had used it just before the executioner twisted the switch that reduced him to dust – and they had merely stood, as now, with folded arms, looking vaguely helpless. How had creatures like these conquered the world?

Once outside the great sea wall I began walking, and after a few metres of hard soil I was on the mud. I pulled on the tearshaped mudshoes and plodded forward, with no other plan in mind than to make for a needle tower, for the high tide was only three hours away. Perhaps in a few months I could return and find Endrod’s wrath abated? If I lived that long.

Endrod was the one Soal that had pressed for my father’s execution. The Librarian had had an enmity towards my father. The other seven Soal on the Circle would have turned a blind eye to the Soal Law concerning Humans, but Endrod forced them into opening both eyes. The bat-like flapping of his arms during oratory had impressed even me – and I had not been able to hear the words he was speaking.

During the months my father had worked for the Klees he had stumbled innocently on a secret and, somehow, it had involved Endrod. It had been Endrod that had received the punishment from the Soal Circle and he was demoted to the position of Librarian. What post he held before that I did not know – but I had the feeling that therein lay the key to the whole affair.

Since that time (I was then only twelve months old), Endrod had extended himself in destroying humans, especially trained ones, and his principal targets had been my father and
myself. Now he had beaten both of us and as far as I knew there was only one other human on dry land – the elderly companion of the Klees of Far Enlich, west of Brytan. It was certain that I had never seen one.

I pulled the lightweight crossbow from the blanket and inspected it. It was an exquisitely made object, wrought from a black metal new to Earth and brought by the Soal. However, the design of the instrument was indigenous and merely one of those things the aliens had inexplicably latched on to when they looted our old cities. They had scorned ninety-eight per cent of our innovations and technology, and had thrown all their enthusiasm into the other two per cent, which consisted of articles that followed no logical pattern in themselves and were separated by dates of discovery or invention over thousands of months. The loom, the glass bottle, the crossbow and the smell of lemons were but four that I knew of – there were others, but as for their connections there seemed to be none. They were objects picked by a blind finger running down an inventory and even I, who had lived two hundred and forty months amongst the Soal, had no sensible explanation to offer.

There were four bolts clipped to the stock of the bow – two to each side. I unclipped one and fitted it to the discharge channel, but resisted the urge to wind the mechanism: I did not want a bolt accidentally loosing itself into my foot.