Solaris Rising (43 page)

Could he, for that matter? At a hundred and seventy he felt old, weary, dragged down by the anomie of virtual immortality.

She swung to face him, bearing down with her invisible retinal-cams. “Edward Loftus, what’s it like to be back on Karenia after so long?”

He raised a forbearing hand. “Please, Elana. Not now, okay?”

She touched her temple, stilled the cams, murmured, “Sorry, Ed.”

He pulled her to him and they kissed, and again he felt a pang of guilt that he should so easily dismiss her and find comfort in her within a single breath. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m tired. It was a long trip.”

They stood side by side at the balcony rail and gazed out over the hazed land. Crops of kreen swept away across the rolling terrain. The two great suns hung in the sky, grossly swollen in comparison to Sol; the first, burnt orange, was going down over a range of mountains to the east. The second, smaller and redder, sat at its zenith. Midday at this latitude was hot on Karenia, eased only by the stiff southerly breeze.

In the distance, smudged, were the kiln houses where the crops were dried and the drug extracted. From there it would begin the long journey back to Earth, starting on a dray cart and finishing on a faster-than-light ship.

“Edward!” Loftus turned. “Edward, it’s great to see you again!” The voice was strong, in contrast to the shrunken man who sat, wedged by cushions, in the wheelchair pushed by Christopher.

Alain Dupré smiled out of a sunken, lined face.

Loftus felt something constrict in his throat.

“Alain,” he said, advancing and taking the man’s frail hand. “It’s good to be back. This is Elana. Elana Kryadies.”

Elana was visibly shocked by the manifest ill-health of the man before her. Such physical infirmities were beyond her experience.

She rallied, smiled, and took his thin hand in a brief shake. “May I film?” she asked.

Alain gestured with a frail hand and nodded. “Come. Lunch is prepared. We’ll eat downstairs on the veranda.”

The patriarch descended the timber staircase on a stairlift, the others following slowly. Dupré grinned up at them. “Bet you thought you’d never see me again, eh, Edward?”

“Well, to be honest...”

Dupré laughed. “I’m surprised I’m here myself. I’m a hundred in just over four weeks. The medics give me another month, so I might just hit the century if I’m lucky.”

Beside him, Loftus heard Elana draw a sharp breath.

Dupré went on, “Cancer. Brought on by the genetic engineering. How ironic! A two edged sword, eh, Edward?”

“Can’t anything be done...?” Loftus began lamely, then cursed himself.

“What? Here on Karenia, at my age? Now maybe on Earth...” Dupré said, and winked.

Loftus felt a well of despair open within him.

“But I’ve had a hell of a long life, I’ll take my destiny,” the patriarch was saying as he rolled his chair from the stairlift and trundled across the polished timber floor to a sun-flooded veranda overlooking the fields.

A table was loaded with fresh food.

“Please, be seated.” Dupré gestured to a cluster of chairs.

A woman came onto the veranda, bearing a jug of juice. Christopher Dupré made the introductions. “This is Catherine, my daughter-in-law. My son Jack – Catherine’s husband – is busy with the kilns.”

Catherine was tiny and dark, and could scarcely bring herself to meet the eyes of these long-lived strangers from Earth. When she did look at Loftus, he experienced a sudden shock and the memories flooded back, bitter-sweet.

Only when she bent, carefully, to place the jug on the table, did Loftus notice the bulge of her belly. He couldn’t help but stare.

Elana touched her temple and looked at Loftus, recording his reaction.

Dupré pulled himself up to the table. “My great granddaughter is due in six weeks, Edward. It’s my ambition to see her before I go.”

Steeling himself, Loftus smiled and said, “And I’m sure you will, Alain. I’m sure you will.”

They took their seats and ate a simple meal of bread, cheese and salad, and Loftus tried to banish all thoughts of Catherine and her child.

Loftus wondered if Alain Dupré had picked up, from his manner, that all was not right on this visit. The old man possessed an intelligence that Loftus found daunting, as well as a keen insight into the workings of the human heart.

“Life here is simple,” he had told Loftus sixty years ago. “The rest of the Expansion might think us backward peasants, Edward, but the slow, rural way of life gives us time to dwell, to consider the way of things... We prefer to turn inwards. We are at one with our world in ways that more...
modern
societies have lost.”

Elana spoke up, “Mr Dupré, I wonder if I might ask you a few questions? I would be interested in knowing more about your life.”

The old man smiled. “A museum piece, eh? And don’t call me Mr Dupré, okay? I’m Alain.”

“I’m sorry. Alain. I was wondering...”

Loftus busied himself spreading soft cheese on a piece of coarsely grained bread, mentally wincing at the thought of what crass inanity Elana might consider a legitimate question.

“I must admit, Alain, that I was expecting... I don’t know – not so much hostility, but perhaps suspicion from the people of Karenia, despite the assurances Edward gave me. Could you say something about how you regard us... the people of the Expansion?”

“Other than that you have lost touch with the universe, you mean?” Dupré laughed and waved a chunk of bread. “You know, we don’t have long-lifers along that often–” He winked at Loftus. “So it’s good to have the opportunity to talk.”

“You don’t resent us?”

Beside Dupré, his son smiled and shook his head. The patriarch matched the gesture. “Of course not, Elana,” the old man said. “So we live eighty, ninety, a hundred years if we’re lucky. While the rest of you out there – if you can afford the treatment! – live a thousand years and more... but you’ve got to understand that this is our choice. We live peaceful, quiet lives. We expect no more. In fact, I’m filled with horror at the thought of possibly living a thousand years.”

“But you’re not angered by the irony that it is the drug that you harvest which grants the rest of us...?”

“Angered? But our forefathers knew the deal when they chose to stay on here. And we’re paid well in return for the drug – how would we be able to afford the genetic treatment for our children which makes them immune to the effects of the spores–?”

“Some critics of Omega-Gen accuse them of having it both ways,” Elana went on. “They say that Omega-Gen is getting the anti-ageing drug, and you’re paying for the genetic treatment that allows you to harvest it for them.”

Dupré shook his head, almost sadly. “They pay us well, and that allows us to live here, in paradise. We are a part of this world, Ms Kryadies, just as it is a part of us.”

Jesus Christ, Loftus thought, hanging his head. What will they think of Omega-Gen after what I have to say at the board meeting tomorrow? He glanced across at Catherine, the curve of her belly just visible over the table. What will they think?

“Edward?” It was Dupré, his tone solicitous.

Loftus quickly lifted his head. “I’m sorry. I’m fine. A little tired, that’s all.”

“Well, don’t stand on ceremony, Edward. Why not go take a siesta?” The patriarch smiled. “We have plenty of time to do the tour this afternoon.”

“That’s kind of you.” Loftus rose from the table and left the veranda. At the foot of the stairs, Elana caught up with him. “Ed?”

“I really am tired, Elana. Give me an hour alone and I’ll be fine, okay?”

Smiling uncertainly, she nodded and returned to the veranda – no doubt, Loftus thought, to continue her damned interrogation.

He found the bedroom, lay down and attempted unsuccessfully to sleep.

“We’ll go through the fields to the location of puffball prime, as I call it,” Dupré said, and then for the benefit of Elana, “It’s the nearest puffball to the manse. They go off twice a day, and it’s quite spectacular. We should just be in time to catch the second eruption.”

They rode on the flat-bed of a rickety tractor, bales of kreen doubling as stolid cushions. Christopher steered the tractor along the narrow lanes between the purple fields, Alain Dupré riding beside him in a jerry-rigged frame containing his wheelchair.

“I still like to get out and about,” he explained. “And an eruption is one of the highlights of the day.”

Cygni B had set, while Cygni A still rode high in the sky. Karenia was commencing its long, slow swing around its primary sun: the period of total daylight was coming to an end. Soon, in a matter of days, Karenia would move away from between the suns and around the back of Cygni A, and the planet would face the immense darkness of space every night. Then the people of the colony world would experience a period, lasting some ten days, of total darkness, sixteen hours out of thirty two. The colonists called this period True Night.

“It’s a special time,” the old man called over his shoulder to Elana, prompted by her question about True Night. “I suppose it’s natural that we should come to see True Night as special, occurring as it does only every eighteen Terran months, but we take our lead from the Yanth. It’s a kind of festival for us, and for them too: we share the same space along the river, mix freely... It’s quite something.”

Once, sixty years ago, Loftus had caught a fleeting glimpse of the planet’s native, semi-sentient species immediately following a period of True Night. They were small, blue, upright lizards – or that was the approximation he made at the time – perhaps a metre tall and, like their Terran analogue, fleet of movement. They possessed a rudimentary language and for much of the time dwelled in great catacombs underground, emerging only during True Night and the periods of twilight on either side.

Dupré said, “They might look like lizards, but really they’re much more like mammals. They have warm blood, they give birth to live young, not eggs, and have a kind of fur growing from the base of their body scales. They have a complex social structure, too. The most comprehensive xenological study done, way back, drew parallels with our australopithecines. Anyway, they celebrate True Night by flooding from their dwellings and consuming the fruit buds of the kreen crops.”

Elana said, “And it’s this consumption, when evacuated, which seeds the land for the next crop?”

Dupré smiled. “That’s right. You’ve done your homework. So the cycle continues, and however unlikely it is, the people of the Expansion are in debt to these tiny, rarely seen troglodyte creatures. Or rather, indebted to the seeds they shit out.” Dupré winked as he said this, and Loftus suppressed a smile.

They bumped along in silence for another fifteen minutes, before Dupré pointed and said, “Ah... there it is.”

Loftus followed the direction of the patriarch’s wavering finger. They had come over the crest of a small rise and before them spread a great purple plain dotted with kiln houses, all distorted and part-obscured by a diaphanous lavender haze. Half a kilometre ahead Loftus made out the hemispherical dome of a puffball, perhaps ten metres across, swelling from the surrounding fields like an ugly grey goitre.

“The eruption will be triggered by the rising heat of the afternoon,” the old man said. “Once a certain internal temperature is reached, it’s explosion time.”

Dupré himself had taken Loftus to witness the eruption of a puffball sixty years ago, the day before he was due back aboard the mothership. He’d marvelled at the spectacular explosion, but had regretted missing True Night a few days later and the consequent alien ceremony.

This time he would witness everything, the eruption and the festivities at True Night – and the guilt that he would be bringing the colonists’ way of life to an end would be compounded.

Dupré was saying, “The puffballs and the kreen exist in a symbiotic relationship. The spores of the puffball give nourishment to the kreen plants, and the kreen, in turn, rot back into the earth and compost the puffballs. Of course, we’re careful to ensure that when we harvest the kreen, we return a percentage of it to the fields.”

Christopher brought the tractor to a halt on the lane fifty metres from the domed puffball. No kreen grew in the vicinity, and they had a grandstand view of the swollen growth.

Loftus watched Elana. She was staring eagerly at the puffball, like a child anticipating fireworks.

They had discussed his mission to Karenia before light-out aboard the mothership, and Loftus had been angered by her simple acceptance of the inevitable. He wondered if it were her youth, her belief in the manifest destiny of the human race, which sanctioned her pragmatism: so a way of life on a colony world would come to an end, and families would be torn apart, but the colony had served its purpose in the scheme of things…

Paradoxically it was he, Loftus, the Omega-Gen company man, whose conscience was riddled with doubt and pre-emptive remorse.

The patriarch’s excited commentary brought him back to the present.

“Listen. Hear that? It’s the rind, splitting in the heat. Just seconds away from blowing.”

Loftus turned his attention to the puffball. Under immense internal pressure, the grey skin of the dome was swelling, splitting. As they watched, a loud crack like the report of a rifle split the air and the apex of the puffball detonated, the flesh lacerating as a vast cloud of purple spores shot into the sky in a plume hundreds of metres high.