The Devil's Nebula (20 page)

Her thoughts were interrupted by her mother’s voice. “There you are, Maatja. Would you please come into the hut?”

Obediently, Maatja stood and followed her mother inside. Hahta was already there, sitting in front of her father. He smiled at Maatja as she sat down next to her sister.

Her mother joined them and they sat in a circle and after a long pause, her father spoke.

“A wonderful event occurred three days ago,” he said. “Leah and Rahn were informed that the Weird had selected someone from our people to join them in their lair.”

Hahta interrupted excitedly, “You, Daddy! You were Chosen!”

Maatja saw her sister’s unbridled enthusiasm and felt sick.

He smiled. “I was chosen, and today I will leave for the lair of the Weird. It is an honour I can still hardly bring myself to believe, and I hope you will share with my and your mother’s joy.”

“Daddy is a Chosen One!” Hahta chanted.

Her parents looked at Maatja. “Maatja?” her mother said.

She forced a smile. “I don’t know what to say...”

“Say nothing,” her father said, “but rejoice.”

“Let us eat a celebratory meal of phar,” her mother said, moving off to prepare their very last meal together.

Maatja ate without tasting a thing, her senses numbed. Hahta chattered excitedly and her parents answered their younger daughter’s questions as best they could. A small part of her wished, then, that she had eaten phar for years so that she too could feel happiness now, not this intense, gut-aching sadness.

After the meal, her mother took Hahta from the hut, leaving Maatja alone with her father.

He smiled at her and took her hand. “I know this is especially painful for you, Maatja.”

She gripped his hand. “I don’t want you to go!” The idea was so vast and painful she could hardly comprehend what life might be like without her father’s presence.

“You must understand that this is what I want.”

“What? To leave us?” she cried.

He said, “Both Hahta and yourself have reached the age of independence. I could never have been a Chosen one before now. You are both almost women, able to look after yourselves. Maatja...” He paused. “When I am gone, I want you to be careful. Do you understand? Do not venture into the jungle alone, and especially do not meet with the Outcasts. Nothing but tragedy for all concerned will come of these meetings.”

She found herself staring at her father and nodding.

He reached, cupped her cheek and thumbed a tear from her eye.

That afternoon, Maatja, Hahta, her mother and all the fissure people attended the Ceremony of Leaving, and gathered in the clearing as Leah and Rahn announced that her father had been chosen.

Maatja felt the phar sitting heavily in her stomach and she wondered if it was this that was numbing her to the awful idea of her father’s going. She felt as if her emotions had been ripped from her, as if her ability to cry was gone for ever.

At sunset, as the last of the bloody light bled from the sun and filled the clearing, her father, accompanied by Leah and Rahn on either side and followed by Maatja and Hahta and their mother, strode to the edge of the fissure, then paused.

Her father stepped forward and embraced first her mother, then Hahta and then Maatja. She held on tight, feeling his solidity, breathing in his odour. She did not want to let go, but he eased himself from her gently and kissed her forehead.

She watched him walk down the steps cut into the bank of the fissure and pass from sight, wanting to scream at him to come back. She looked at the people around her, her mother and sister, and felt disbelief at the sight of their joyous smiles.

As the sun sank fully and darkness enveloped the clearing, she returned to the family hut with her mother and Hahta. She curled in her bed in the darkness, her father’s absence almost palpable, and considered what to do.

She spent a disturbed night, woken by nightmares of pursuing Sleer and dead Outcasts and her father smiling at her.

In the morning, as the first light of the sun speared through the weave of the wall, she knew what she was going to do.

Before her mother and sister stirred, she gathered her fruit basket, slipped from the hut and crossed the clearing. She slipped over the edge, found a freer fruit bush and gorged herself, then began collecting fruit and berries for the journey. She would be gone for days, she thought, and did not know if there would be food bushes downriver.

“Maatja!”

The sound of her name startled her. She looked up. Hahta was peering over the edge of the fissure. “Maatja, what are you doing?”

Maatja scrambled up the incline to her sister and pulled her into the cover of a bush. Hahta stared at the laden basket, her eyes wide.

Maatja thought about what to tell Hahta, then said, “I am going away for a short while, but I’ll be back.”

“But where are you going?”

She hesitated, then said, “To the lair of the Weird.”

Hahta stared at her with massive eyes. “Why?”

Why indeed? To try and find her father, to find out exactly what to be a Chosen One meant. And then to return here and join the Outcasts with her knowledge...

That was her plan, at any rate.

She said, “I want to see where father has gone, Hahta.”

“But he’s gone to serve the Weird, Maatja! He is Chosen.”

Maatja embraced her sister. “I’ll be back in a few days, okay? Don’t worry about me.”

Hahta began to cry. “Don’t go, Maatja. Don’t leave me!”

She wiped away her sister’s tears. “Don’t cry. I will be back and everything will be... alright again. Please, trust me.”

Hahta nodded bravely and Maatja said, “Now go back to the hut and tell mother. Just tell her that I have gone away, but not into the jungle with the Outcasts, okay?”

Hahta nodded and they embraced again and Maatja watched her little sister stand and cross the clearing to the family hut. When she was safely inside, Maatja turned and hurried down the precipitous incline.

As she went, she told herself that her lies to Hahta had been necessary. Perhaps it would be better, for all concerned, if she did not return to the clearing, but joined the Outcasts immediately upon her return. She thought of Hahta, waiting for her, and tears prickled her eyes.

She reached the river an hour later. The sun was fully up by now, but this far down the fissure was still in dark shadow. The river was a placid black ribbon, murmuring at her feet.

She found a fehl tree, reached up and embraced one of its massive seed pods. With all her strength she wrested it from the branch, almost tipping backwards into the water as it came away with a snap. The pod was open at the top, ready to shed its load. She reached in with both hands and scooped out the dry, thumb-sized seeds.

She had heard the adults talking, and knew that the lair was situated in the mountains a little more than a day downriver. She would keep an eye out for the jetty built below the entrance to the lair, where the returning Harvesters were unloaded from the ferry.

She wondered what she might find at the lair of the Weird, and tried to suppress her fear.

She was about to lower the seed-boat into the water when she was startled by a great explosion overhead.

She looked up as the thunder rolled, but knew that it was not yet the rainy season.

The sleek shape of a starship, golden in the light of the sun, swept along the narrow gap of the chasm high above. Maatja gasped in wonder as it banked and disappeared from sight.

The humans, she thought, come to do the bidding of the Weird.

She lowered the seed-boat into the water, stepped wobblingly into it and pushed herself from the bank.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
HEY MADE A
dozen orbits of the blue planet, each pass varying by a few degrees, so that by the end of the twenty-four hour period they had scanned the entire world from pole to pole.

Carew returned to the flight-deck after a short sleep to find Jed in his sling. The militia-man, Thomas, was poring over a console, flanked by Choudri and Gorley.

“Lania?” he asked Jed as he took his seat.

“She’s sleeping, boss. We’re on automatic.”

The scene on the viewscreen was one of limitless jungle, split by black fissures, like negative images of forked lightning.

Carew said, “We should call this the green world, Jed.”

He thought of Lania and the conversation they’d had in the lounge back on the moon. It was strange, but in the ten years he’d known the woman, he’d never felt closer to her than he did now. He wondered if that was because they were far from home, in an unfamiliar situation: he was seeking comfort from what was familiar, in this instance the friendship of the person he’d known the longest. Which was strange, because he didn’t usually allow himself to get close to others. He must be weakening.

He looked through the viewscreen. There was no sign of the vast floating creatures they’d seen earlier from the moon.

“Have you located the colonists?” he asked Choudri, who had risen from his swivel chair to massage the small of his back.

“We’re pretty sure we have. There’s a concentration of life-forms situated in a big settlement just north of the equator, with others scattered in much smaller groups further north. Unless they’re native to the planet, then we think they might be the colonists.”

“Have you calculated how many there are down there?”

“Approximately a thousand in the main group, and hundreds scattered.”

“From an original crew of five thousand?”

Choudri frowned. “Life down there might have proved inimical,” he said. “Anyway, we’re going in for a closer look. We should be overhead in ten minutes.”

“So the atmosphere’s breathable.”

Choudri nodded. “Very much Terran-norm, with a trace more nitrogen. The gravity is slightly higher, but not much more given that it’s such a big world. We suspect it’s light in metals.”

“What about those floating things we saw earlier?”

“They came down in one of the fissures about fifty kilometres from the settlement – actually descended into the fissure and vanished.”

Carew peered at the screen. “How deep are the fissures?”

“According to telemetry, they range from a kilometre to three kilometres deep.”

Carew whistled. “Amazing features.”

“We surmise that they’re relics of seismic activity, long in the planet’s past. The world is riddled with them, and the rest is jungle in a band covering everything but the polar regions, with a few vast lakes.”

Carew thought through what Choudri had told him. “If they are indeed the colonists,” he said, “then I’d like to know how they got down there, who brought them here and why.”

Choudri nodded. “That’s what disturbs me. The motives of whoever brought them here.”

Jed said, “Maybe they were just being helpful? The ship came down on the moon and the natives of the blue world saw it and gave a helping hand?”

Carew smiled. “I wonder why I think that wasn’t the case, Jed?”

The door slid open and Lania stepped onto the flight-deck. She gave Carew a smile and sat next to him on his couch. “What’s happening, Ed?”

He gave her a condensed version of what Choudri had told him, then gestured towards the viewscreen. “The settlement should be coming into view any second now.”

“How high are we?” she asked.

Jed glanced at his console. “A kilometre. The viewscreen’s on plus three magnification.”

As they watched, the dense jungle down below was interrupted by a sandy clearing perhaps a kilometre long by half a kay wide, lying to the north of an ink-black fissure. Carew made out a row of perhaps a hundred small timber huts on stilts, and two longer constructions, one situated halfway along the row and the other at its western end. In the clearing between the huts and the fissure, he saw what looked like regular, upright, bi-pedal life-forms: human beings, going about their everyday business.

“Up the magnification,” Gorley ordered.

Seconds later the scene jumped and Carew saw that the figures in the clearing were indeed human.

“They look primitive,” Lania said. “I was expecting... I don’t know, a technological civilisation, perhaps. At least something a little more developed that this.”

The humans appeared Caucasian, though deeply tanned by the supergiant sun, and simply dressed in loin cloths. One group appeared to be working with rudimentary tools, knives and axes, with which they were shaping timber.

“And to think that a couple of generations ago,” Gorley said, “their ancestors were navigating starships through the void.”

“I wonder how much knowledge they retain of their history?” Carew said.

He peered at the long-house at the western end of the clearing. It had a thatched straw roof and what appeared to be open sides. There was something within it, but the angle prevented him from seeing what it was with any certainty.

He indicated the long-house. “Any chance of homing in on that?” he asked.

Lania peered. “What is it?”

“A hut, obviously. It’s larger than the others, presumably important. What I’m interested in,” he said, “is what it contains.”

The scene jumped, and when it resolved the long-house practically filled the screen. Thomas adjusted the image, pulling it out a little, and Carew saw that his earlier assumption had been correct.

“Good God,” Gorley said. “What is it?”

“One of the floating creatures,” Carew said, “or something closely related to it.”

The long-house enclosed a vast, grey, bloated creature, its sides bulging obscenely, spilling out between the upright supports.

Carew looked across at Choudri. “Should we land?”

“I see no reason why not,” the Indian said. “But perhaps if we came down some distance from the clearing and made our way there on foot, our arrival might not prove so traumatic for them.”

Gorley said to Thomas, “Prepare the militia. Four of you will accompany the landing party, while two will remain with the
Hawk
.”

Carew said to Gorley, “I’d like to take my team along.”

Gorley conferred with Choudri, and the Indian said, “Very well, but ensure that all three of you are armoured.”