The Devil's Nebula (22 page)

He was exhausted by the time he came to the edge of the escarpment and looked down. He’d thought the drop would be sheer, a vertical fall to whatever lay a kilometre or two below, but the fissure fell away at an angle of perhaps seventy degrees, cloaked in shadowy jungle.

Even in the roseate moonlight he could see no more than a few metres into the chasm. He wondered what the settlers did for water in the jungle, and if a river lay at the bottom of the fissure.

He stared along the length of the clearing, wondering if he might be breaking some form of etiquette if he were to make his way to the second long-house and investigate the penned creature.

He was about to set off when he noticed, with a start, a shadowy figure to his right. He thought at first that it was Lania, sans smartsuit, for the figure was small, feminine and semi-naked.

Then he saw that it was a settler, a young girl of perhaps ten. She stepped towards him and in the moonlight he saw her face for the first time and gasped.

“Maria?” he said.

He was mistaken, of course, but she bore an uncanny resemblance to Maria, and the sudden sight of her had fazed him. He peered at the girl, who stood before him unsurely, a frightened expression on her tanned, triangular face.

He smiled. The resemblance to his dead sister was remarkable. Or was his mind playing tricks? Was it just that she was tiny, bird-boned and very blonde – and his guilt was doing its best to make him see Maria in the settler?

She said in a tiny voice, “I am Hahta. You are a stranger from the stars.”

His racing pulse slowed gradually. “I am Ed Carew. And yes, I am indeed from the stars.”

“In a golden ship, yes? It said you would be coming.”

He looked at her. “It?”

She looked bemused. “The Weird in the Flyer.”

He repeated her words to himself. He looked around. They were quite alone in the clearing, next to the fissure.

He eased himself to the ground and sat cross-legged, gesturing for Hahta to do the same.

“The creature that lives in the...” – he pointed down the clearing, to the long-house – “is the creature in there a Flyer?”

She trilled a laugh and said, “No, that creature is a Harvester!”

Carew thought about it and said, “So it was a Weird
inside
a Flyer which knew we were coming?”

“It told us that you would soon be here, in your golden ship.”

“How did it know, Hahta?”

She shook her head. “The Weird just know. They know everything. They give us all we need to live, and sometimes we are Chosen.” She looked at him and beamed. “My father was a Chosen One.”

Carew repeated the word. “What does it mean?”

“It means that the Weird said my father was special and he has gone to their lair.”

She fell silent, then whispered, “Only, yesterday Maatja left the clearing and went down the river to find him, and I’m frightened for her safety and want her to come back.”

“Hahta, slow down.” He reached out, took her small hand in his. The feel of it was painful, as was the sudden look of trust in her blue eyes.

“Now, first of all, who is Maatja?”

“Maatja is my older sister. She is seven.”

He was thrown, momentarily, until it dawned on him that their years were based, of course, on the passage of their own planet around its primary.

“And you say that she has gone downriver?”

She held out a thin, tanned arm and pointed into the fissure. “Down there. She wanted to follow our father to the lair of the Weird. He was a Chosen One, and those that make the journey to the home of the Weird, they never return.”

Carew nodded, trying to make sense of her words. What he did know, now, was that the simple world of the settlers, portrayed by Leah and Rahn earlier, was nothing of the kind.

“And what will your father do when he reaches the lair of the Weird?”

“He will help them,” Hahta said.

“Help them in what way?”

She shook her head, frowning. “He will do what they want him to do, but I don’t really know what that is. But, I want my sister back, Edcarew. I begged her and begged her not to go, but she would not listen. And now I beg you, will you try to find my sister and bring her back to me?”

He took a deep breath, then said, “I don’t know whether I’ll be able to do that, Hahta. Your people might not want me to do that. Do you understand? They might try to stop me.”

She nodded and said in a small voice, “I know. They did not want Maatja to go. When they found out she had left, they sent a Sleer after her.”

“A Sleer?”

“Oh, a kind of Weird. They are used to track down and capture the Outcasts.”

“And who are the Outcasts?” he asked.

“The Outcasts are bad people who once lived with us but then left and now they live to the north and try to kill the Weird.”

He nodded. “I see.”

She looked up, shyly, through her long lashes and said, “Do you think you might be able to find my sister, Edcarew?”

It had occurred to him that this might be a trap, a ruse set up by the Elders to test him and his team. And yet, he thought not. She seemed genuine in her distress.

He said, “And you say that down there is the home of the Weird?”

“Straight down is the River of Life,” she said. “A long, long way down. The Chosen Ones are led down the five thousand steps by the Elders, and then they are taken in boats along the River of Life, and then they go deep underground to the lair of the Weird. My father will be there by now, but perhaps Maatja has not reached the lair, yet. Perhaps there is time to save her still.”

“Hahta,” he said with a sigh, “believe me, more than anything I would like to help you, and I promise you that I will try. But you must realise that I am only one person and against me is the will of your people and the will of the Weird. Do you understand?”

“I understand that you are strangers from the stars, who the Weird said will come to World and bring a time of change.”

He stared at her. “It said that? A time of change?”

“It said that you will help the Weird, that you will help the Weird spread all across the stars. They will not just be here, on World, but on every planet of every star.”

He was aware of the thudding of his heart as he stared at the young girl, who had told him so much. “What else did the Weird tell you about us, Hahta?”

“They said that though you come as one people, in one golden ship, really you are two people, some good and some bad. Some will help my people and some will not.” She smiled up at him with childish simplicity. “So you are good and will help me, Edcarew?”

He smiled and squeezed her hand. “I will do my very best, Hahta,” he said, with a heavy feeling in his heart.

She looked away from him, to the east. “The sun is coming up. A new day. Soon you and the Elders will talk and they will tell you all about the Weird and how they help us. Please do not tell anyone that I asked you to find Maatja. My mother says she is lost to us now, for disobeying the Elders.” He saw sudden tears glisten like crystals on her cheeks. “But I don’t believe that!”

She jumped to her feet suddenly, slim and lithe, and dashed back across the clearing to one of the huts.

Carew watched her go, and wearily climbed to his feet as the first filament of the new sun rose above the jungle canopy. He stopped and stared at its fiery magnificence, at the dance of crimson magma cast lazily from its circumference as if in slow motion.

He made his way back to his hut.

Lania was up and stretching outside the hut. She watched his approach, smiling. “I saw you chatting to the...” She stopped, staring at him and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Where to start?” he said wearily.

“Ed, what is it?”

“There’s more to the settlers than seems apparent, Lania. Fetch me a flask of water and I’ll tell you what the kid said.”

She brought two flasks from his tent and they sat in the entrance of the hut as the sun rose, and he recounted everything Hahta had told him about the settlers, the Weird and the Outcasts.

“And they knew we were coming, Lania. They said that though we came in one ship, we were two people, one set good and the other bad.”

She stared at him. “Well, that pretty much describes us and the Expansion people, Ed, depending on which side you’re on. But how the hell did the Weird know that?”

“I don’t know. But don’t let on to the Elders that we know, okay?”

She nodded. “Are you going to tell Gorley and Choudri?”

“I don’t see why not. We seem to be all in this together.”

“And the kid? Her sister? You can’t do anything about that.”

He looked at her. “Can’t I?”

“Ed, it’d be madness.”

He almost told her, then, about how his inaction, forty years ago, had cost the life of his sister, but then Choudri and Gorley emerged from the neighbouring hut and joined them. Carew decided to tell them what he had learned from Hahta, now before the Elders arrived.

A silence greeted his words when he finished speaking some ten minutes later, and before the debate could begin, he made out Leah and Rahn walking towards them down the length of the clearing.

A posse of settlers followed in their wake.

A
S THEY HAD
the day before, the nine guests from across space sat in the open long-house and Leah and Rahn sat cross-legged before them, the other settlers massed behind them in the clearing. The sun rose above the jungle canopy and a bloody flush fell across the sand.

Carew searched the faces of the massed settlers, but could not see Hahta.

“You said you came from the Expansion on a mission of exploration,” Leah said in her soft, deep voice. “Did you come specifically in search of my people?”

Gorley replied. “We received the distress signal from the
Procyon
and mounted a mission both to investigate what became of the ship and the colonists and to explore this as-yet uncharted region.” He hesitated. “We found the
Procyon
on the moon, its suspension pods mysteriously empty, a hole in the flank of the ship.”

“I can see that it must have puzzled you.”

Choudri said, “We couldn’t work out what had happened.”

“The explanation is simple,” Leah said. “We came down on the moon when our ship suffered a mechanical dysfunction. I do not know the details, as this of course happened before any of us were born. My father told of great desperation among the maintenance crew of the
Procyon
, as repairs were considered impossible.”

“What happened?”

Leah smiled. “My people were rescued. A Flyer arrived on the moon, and then more and more. They communicated with the maintenance crew and said that they could save the five thousand colonists and take them to a place of safety.”

Carew said, “The creatures, the Flyers, spoke your language?”

Leah smiled. “They did not need to. They read our minds and placed their thoughts in our heads.” She gestured. “Of course, we could only accede to their offer, the alternative being death on the arid moon. In relays, the Flyers brought us to World.”

“We saw a dead colonist aboard the
Procyon
,” Carew said. “What happened to him?”

“He was the first human to apprehend the Flyer when it sent a... a Sleer into the ship.”

“A Sleer?”

“Another of the Weird, the aliens of World,” she said. “According to the story, before the Sleer could establish mind contact, the colonist fired upon it, and the Sleer responded in self-defence.”

“The colonist’s bones were fused to the metal of the ship,” Carew said.

Leah gestured sadly. “The Sleer are hunters,” she said, “and they sometimes use acid weapons. The Weird much regretted the death, but the fact was that they saved my people from extinction.”

“So they call themselves the Weird,” Carew asked, “or is that your name for them?”

Leah smiled. “A little of both. Their name for themselves sounds a little like ‘weird,’ and our ancestors adapted the sound.”

Gorley said, “And they brought you here, but for what purpose?”

At this, Rahn smiled ingenuously and said, “For what purpose? You judge others by your own values, sir. The Weird had no ulterior motive in saving our souls than simply that – an act of altruism that needed no explanation, as far as they were concerned.”

Carew looked beyond the pair to the crowd. The colonists watched the proceedings in attentive silence, their faces expressionless.

Lania said, “So they brought you here approximately seventy standard years ago.”

“Or almost forty years ago, as we calculate the passage of time.”

Lania nodded. “There were around five thousand of you then, but...” – she hesitated, glancing at Carew – “from orbit we calculated there were approximately a thousand settlers here, around the clearing, and a few hundred more scattered in the jungle north of here.”

The Outcasts
, Carew thought.

Lania went on, “Over a period of seventy years, we would expect your numbers to have grown, not fallen.”

Rahn nodded. “The early years here were not easy,” he said, “despite the ministrations of the Weird. We took time to adapt to this world, and we suffered many casualties to disease. Also, there was conflict between our people. There were those who adhered to the old ways, the belief in the way of the Kurishen, and others who disavowed the old beliefs and instituted new ones more in keeping with World, and our life here with the Weird.”

Lania said bluntly, “You fought?”

“Sadly, yes. This was before my time,” Leah said. “Before any of us here were born. Over a period of years, the adherents of the new way prevailed and pushed their opponents out into the jungle. Their descendents still dwell out there, but we have little communication with them.”

Carew heard a racket of animal calls from the jungle at his back, a low, regular whooping bellow and a painfully high sound chipping away like the blade of a chisel striking an anvil.

Gorley said, “And those beliefs, the new beliefs and your relationship with the Weird?”

Leah smiled, as did Rahn beside her. It was as if the mere name of the aliens brought cheer to their hearts.