Solaris Rising (45 page)

He approached them slowly, marvelling at everything about the creatures: the soft, almost pastel, blue of their features, their half-scaled half-furred body-coverings, the midnight blue of their eyes.

Finally, within a few metres of them, he dropped into a crouch so that he was at their level. “Friend,” he said again, feeling as if this was some kind of first contact while knowing that people had lived on Karenia for hundreds of years and this scene must have played itself out around True Night countless times before.

One of the aliens opened its thin lips and emitted a string of sound, individual words indistinguishable in the stream of bird-like chatter.

Loftus raised his hands helplessly, hoping to convey by sign his lack of comprehension.

This time, the alien dropped its head a little and spoke to him in a fractured bureaucrat’s English.

Loftus rocked back on his heels, shocked. He had been unaware that the Yanth could speak anything but their own language.

But the alien had said, “Our destiny is yours.”

Loftus shook his head. He felt tears on his cheeks, a strange rushing sensation in his ears, and briefly he wondered if his protective membranes had failed and this was the first onset of some kind of spore-induced psychosis.

The alien said, “No guilt, no pain, no fear.”

And then all four turned and disappeared into the cave mouth.

Loftus, delirious, fell forward on his hands and knees and pressed himself into the opening, calling after the aliens, wanting to know more, begging the Yanth to return and bless him with their knowledge.

He fell to the earth, sobbing, and passed out.

He had no notion of how long he lay there. He came awake suddenly, recalling his confrontation with the Yanth. He pushed himself onto hands and knees and looked at the cave, and then back at the jungle.

He stood, uncertainly. He spotted the gap where he had emerged from the jungle. He knew he should not have followed the Yanth, that he should be back in his room with Elana. He must return and compose himself. The day ahead would be long and traumatic.

He found his way back to the manse’s grounds and then up to the balcony, where he sat with his feet up, watching the patterns of the light on the jungle vegetation. He went over and over what the Yanth had said and wondered again if he had been affected by the spores, or if he were losing his mind.

Later, much later, Elana joined him without a word. She did not say anything about his absence, and he did not ask if she had noticed him gone. She knew what the coming day meant to him and now, in her silent companionship, he was selfishly grateful that she was with him and he was not alone.

The board met in Turballe’s town hall, a timber-panelled building almost as big as the Dupré manse. Loftus allowed Christopher Dupré to escort him through the building to a large second-floor meeting room, one entire wall of which was made of glass, looking out over the rooftops of the town clinging to the gentle incline down to the river. Beyond the settlement stretched fields of kreen, the neatly aligned rows broken occasionally by the bulge of a puffball. Loftus imagined the leathery surfaces of the puffballs tightening under the suns’ growing warmth, ready to burst again later in the day and release their bounty of spores.

He turned away and took his seat at the long meeting table, his back to the view. Ranked along the table were about two dozen divisional directors of Omega-Gen’s Karenian presence, Alain Dupré in his wheelchair towards the far end, smiling reassuringly at Loftus whenever he caught his eye.

Off to one side, not formally part of the meeting but here by consent of the board, Elana sat with her back to a wall, recording, always recording.

“Directors,” Christopher Dupré said, as the last to arrive took her seat to the right of Loftus. “Welcome to this specially convened meeting of the OGK directorate, the fourth in the presence of Consul Edward Loftus.” With that, he bowed his head in the direction of Loftus, who had at that moment, for some reason, a vivid flashback to the chubby boy who had once been so delighted to receive the gift of a small plastic horse. Loftus had needed to explain what a horse was.

Loftus nodded in greeting, and spoke a few words, conveying his gratitude for their hospitality and his great pleasure to be here again, among friends. As he spoke, he choked back on the guilt of his duplicity.

“Our production figures hold steady,” said Alain, then. “We have a record of several decades of balance between productivity while maintaining the intricate feedback cycles between kreen, sporeballs and Yanth.” He smiled at Loftus again, and added, “We have served Omega-Gen well, no?”

Loftus would not meet his old friend’s look. He cleared his throat. “You have,” he said. “You do. The corporation has no complaint.” He paused, then raised his gaze to look around the gathered board. “I have not come here to review the figures,” he continued. “I come as the messenger, one with news that will forever change the status of the colony world of Karenia.”

He had their full attention now. Finally, he met Alain’s look. “Eight months ago, the final trials were completed of a new, synthetic equivalent of kreenol. Omega-Gen can now manufacture in the laboratory that which could only previously be extracted from kreen grown on Karenia, in that delicate ecological balance that you describe.”

He hesitated. He noticed Dupré and other members of the board exchanging looks.

Dupré said, quietly, “Which means?”

“Which means,” Loftus said, “that over the next forty months kreen extraction on Karenia will be phased out.” Now he looked down again, and, more softly, said, “I’m sorry.”

In one short speech he had removed the single raison d’être for this colony world, with its elaborate mechanisms to protect its people. Their off-world income stream would vanish, and they would no longer be able to afford the gene-splicing that allowed them to live beyond forty or so years. And yet... those who had already been treated could never leave, because of their in-built bond with the spores.

“As part of the transition plan,” he went on, “Omega-Gen offers to remove all new-born children from Karenia and fund their relocation on other colony worlds. Your children, at least, will be offered a fresh start before the spores can do them any harm. There will also be on-going support for those left on Karenia...”

When he looked up he expected to witness resentment, grief, hostility; in planning this presentation he had been advised to anticipate physical violence as a distinct possibility.

Instead... the last thing he had expected was sympathy.

Christopher Dupré was on his feet, approaching. He placed a hand gently on Loftus’s arm.

“Come outside,” he said. “Leave the board to their deliberations. Come along, Edward, my people need to talk.”

Elena was already out in the ante-room, recording his emergence from the meeting.

He raised a hand to cut her filming.

“What’s going on, Ed?” she asked, when Christopher Dupré had returned to the hall.

He shook his head, pouring himself a glass of water from an iced jug. “It’s as if... they already knew.”

“Word from Omega-Gen?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.”

They took about ten minutes to reach a conclusion, and soon Loftus was back at his position at the head of the long meeting table, the purple-swathed panorama of Karenia at his shoulder.

“Directors,” he said, “I have full details of the transitional support package here. I represent you before the Omega-Gen board and I have fought hard to secure as favourable a package as was possible. I –”

“Ed.” Alain Dupré’s voice cut through his floundering words. “Ed, we know that you have fought for our interests and we thank you for that. We accept the support of our parent company, but we will not be giving our babies away.”

Loftus stared at his old friend. “But...” he said, “without the splice, your children will only have forty or fifty years at best!”

Dupré nodded. “A life lived on Karenia is a rich and wonderful thing,” he said. “This is our world. We choose to stay.”

Loftus thought then of the last deal the colonists of Karenia had accepted: be tied to the planet for a normal human lifetime, while the rest of humankind is granted near immortality. What was it about this world that made its people choose Karenia at almost any cost?

Loftus stood on the sloping lawn of the Dupré manse, Alain Dupré slightly above him in his wheelchair so that they were almost on eye-level.

“You knew, didn’t you?” he said. “You knew what I had come here to say.”

It was Dupré’s turn to avert his gaze. Loftus thought back to his earlier feelings of guilt and wondered just who was deceiving whom.

“It could never last,” Dupré said. “The kreen extraction operates according to a delicate ecological balance on one rather dangerous and remote colony world. It could only ever be a matter of time before OG developed a more reliable alternative.”

“But you knew...”

Alain nodded. He raised a hand and pointed towards the entangled wall of jungle. “Our friends the Yanth told us, Edward. They saw it in your... presence... last night.”

“They read my mind?”

“They read who you are, what you are. Edward, they see the world in a different way to you or me. Where we see boundaries between self and other, they see continuity. Last night you were them and they were you, but you just didn’t see it. You’re not equipped to see it.”

“And you are?”

“I’m trying.”

“And this is why your people are staying here, why they’ll accept that their children will only live forty years instead of forever?”

Dupré nodded again. “You really want to live forever, my friend?”

Loftus felt suddenly vertiginous, standing over the abyss of years. A hundred... a thousand...
ten
thousand?

“Stay here with us, Edward. Our destiny is yours, my friend. Stay with us.”

The details took some sorting out, but it was only a matter of days, time for the regional directors to report back to their people and confirm that there was no dissent from the terms accepted. Nobody would be giving up their babies to Omega-Gen.

“You’re really thinking of staying,” said Elana.

She sat on the leaning bough of a fallen tree, picking at the flaky whorls of bark with long painted fingernails. They were in the Dupré garden, almost out of sight of the manse at the foot of a slope where water gathered in a run of dusty pools. This exchange was off-camera, just them.

“I don’t know,” said Loftus. “I really don’t know.” He couldn’t work out how to put into words the thoughts and feelings that had occupied him for the last few days, while his brain had concentrated on the detail of the transitional planning.

“You should come with me,” she said. “You have a whole life to look forward to.”

If he stayed, he would have fifty years more, at best. If he went... forever.

“You have a whole future to look forward to, too,” he said. He stepped towards her, held her head against his chest. “What you have seen and recorded here will open so many doors for you. You really can go on and do whatever you want.”

Now, in this moment of separation – whether he left with her or not – he felt closer to Elana than he had ever felt before.

He stepped back, and saw her as if for the first time. Elana Kryadies was no naive young irritant only fit to comfort a self-obsessed old misanthrope like Loftus. She was strong, she had a whole life ahead of her; many lives.

She reached up and touched his cheek. “What we had… what we have – it means a lot to me, you know? I didn’t come with you just because–”

He touched her lips, silencing her. “Elana, I know.”

Elana would stay for nine more days on the planet of Karenia, but this was their real parting, their last true embrace, here in the garden of the Dupré manse, with half night dwindling and the chorusing of the jungle all around.

True Night descended, a darkness that was surprisingly swift to take hold.

The people of Turballe were out in force, elaborate picnics spread out along the parkland that fringed the river. The whole thing was lit by paper lanterns suspended from the trees.

Within minutes of darkness, the trees started to dust everything with spores that puffed out of the veins of what passed for leathery leaves. People sneezed and coughed; others caught the spores in jugs of drinks which they then mixed and poured into tall glasses loaded with split berries.

Loftus took a glass from Christopher’s youngest daughter Mabelle. He sipped, and felt his protective membranes working overtime to filter out the poisonous spores. To one side, Elana looked on, recording everything.

Earlier, she had asked again what he was planning to do, and still he had been genuinely unable to answer.

Now, he pushed away through the crowds. He had seen Catherine heading off determinedly, and he had a feeling he knew where to find her.

As he walked up the main street of Turballe, he did the sums again in his head. Sixty years...

She was kneeling over Helen Carson’s grave, rubbing at the stone with a piece of cloth. She looked up at his approach, as if she had known he would follow.