The Devil's Nebula (26 page)

The creature placed her in a sitting position against the wall, and she leaned back against the pulpy interior, and before she knew it her captor had forced something into her mouth. It was bitter and jelly-like and before she could spit it out, it dissolved on her tongue. She heard a sound outside and the creature bearing Ed ducked in through the tiny opening and set him with surprising gentleness, given its size and strength, against the wall opposite her. Then the creatures made for the exit and paused to look back – a pair of bloody embryonic monstrosities with featureless faces and great domed insect eyes – before slipping from the globe and disappearing.

She felt a great drowsiness sweeping through her body and knew that the lozenge forced into her mouth had been a sedative.

She looked across at Ed, her heart leaping with joy at the sight of him. His head was bloody from a gash that split his brow, and he was unconscious. Her last thought was that perhaps he was not unconscious, but dead. She felt a moment of futile panic, and then slipped into oblivion.

“L
ANIA
?”

She opened her eyes.

Ed was kneeling beside her, stroking her cheek. She smiled up at him, lifted her hand and touched the dressing at his forehead. It was not the synthi-flesh patch she might have expected, but a wad of leaf held in place by a loop of twine. But the fact that it was there at all suggested the possibility of kindness on the part of their captors.

She saw a gourd of liquid in the centre of the floor and next to it a palm leaf bearing two yellow fruits split into segments. Breakfast.

“What happened?” Ed said. “Something grabbed me. The next thing I knew...” – he reached up and touched his head – “I head-butted a tree or something. The odd thing is, I don’t feel a thing now.”

She smiled. “These jungle remedies.” She sat up and moved to the opening. A grey, fungal walkway connected the dwelling to the crown of a tree, perhaps thirty metres away. All around hung similar globes. There was no one in sight, neither humans nor monsters. She looked down, made out a sea of leaves broken here and there by a vertiginous view of the jungle floor.

She said, “Why did they give Rahn and Hahta to the Harvester, Ed?”

He looked at her. “I wondered if they gave Hahta... because she talked to me. I wondered if it were my fault –”

“But they gave Rahn, too.” She recalled what Rahn had told them. “He said that it was time to make way for younger, fresher minds.”

“Perhaps that answers the anomaly you noticed, Lania. Now we know how the Harvesters get so fat. They feed on people: those who have reached a certain age and... and undesirables.”

“That’s sick,” she murmured. She sank back against the soft pith of the wall, reached for the jug and drank. Some kind of fruit juice, indeed the finest drink she’d ever tasted. She passed the jug to Ed and he drank.

She inspected the fruit, sniffed it, then ate; it tasted sour at first, then sweet, and filled her mouth with an effervescent juice.

“We’re in some kind of giant fruit,” she said. “The good news is that there are humans about. I saw them last night.”

“What took us, Lania? Did you see them?”

She nodded. “Humanoids. Bipedal. Imagine skinned, bloody apes, but with big black eyes like locusts. The way they moved through the jungle, their speed and power...” She shook her head at the recollection of their headlong flight.

She wondered at the humans she had seen tracking their progress through the jungle canopy. Last night she had assumed they were settlers from the clearing, but now realised that she might have been wrong. Had they been the tree-dwellers, complicit in their abduction?

“These people must be the Outcasts, Ed.”

He nodded. “The girl, Hahta, she told me the Outcasts were ‘bad people’ – that they tried to kill the Weird.”

“Bad people who tended to your wound and left food and drink for us.”

“Bad is relative. I wonder what the Outcasts think of the settlers?”

Lania reached up and touched her ear, and found that her earpiece was missing.

Ed raised his hand to where his own should have been. “Mine too.”

“You think they were dislodged in transit?”

He shook his head. “More likely removed. The Outcasts don’t want us communicating with the others, obviously.”

They were silent for a time. Ed moved to the opening, sat and stared out. Lania asked, “What do you think they want with us?”

He shook his head. “They might just be curious. We’re the first visitors to their planet for seventy years. These are people opposed to the ways of the settlers. They might see us as allies.”

She smiled at him. “Are you just saying that to try to make me feel better?”

“No – I’m trying to make myself feel better.” He picked up a segment of fruit and began eating.

She stared out at the dome of the rising supergiant. It must have been an optical illusion, but from this vantage point, a mere fifty metres closer to the sun than at ground level, she seemed to be able to make out more detail on its fiery orange surface: the great sunspots, the rising spirals of fire, the geysering molten outbursts. It was colossal and majestic and strangely moving.

She found herself reaching out for Ed’s hand and holding on tight.

She said in little more than a murmur, “Have I ever told you about my father, Ed?”

He looked at her and shook his head. “No. No, you haven’t.”

“Haven’t told anyone about him. Never wanted to; or rather, I’ve wanted to, but never felt close enough to anyone to tell them, to trust them enough.” She thought she saw him wince at that, but she might have been mistaken. “I was close to him.”

“What happened?”

She sat in the opening and stared out at the fulminating supergiant. “My mother died when I was two. My father told me it was a heart attack.” She shrugged. “So he brought me up, spent all his free time with me when he wasn’t at work.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a cop.” She laughed. “Really. He was an Expansion cop working on Xaria. Working for the enemy, Ed. Anyway... one day when I was fourteen, we went swimming in the sea, well away from anywhere. We went there every holiday, just the two of us, and swam and dived and played with the narns – these things like dolphins – and just had a great time.”

She stopped. “I’d like to go back to Xaria, buy a villa on the coast where we spent the holidays, and lay the ghosts to rest.” She realised she was crying. When she glanced at Ed, he was looking away, pretending he hadn’t seen the tears streaming down her cheeks.

She said, “Then one morning we were out swimming, diving off a rocky ledge into the sea. Daddy wanted to impress me, so he climbed higher and moved a little further along the ledge, to where we hadn’t jumped from before. And when he dived for the last time he hit something under water and I was watching, and when I got to him, swimming through the blood... I think he was already dead. I dragged him to the beach, managed to haul him ashore. Found his com and called emergency, but by the time they got to us it was too late.”

Ed put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

“And things just got worse from then on. I had no relatives, so I was taken to an orphanage in the capital, only the orphanage was militia run, right? So a year later they came recruiting, dangling all these pretty holos and virts in front of our young impressionable eyes. Join the militia and see the universe – that kind of thing.”

“And you joined up?”

“And I joined up, and a few months later, realised I’d made a terrible mistake. And for the next couple of years I played the hard-working rookie in the boot-camp on Macarthur’s Landfall, and all the time I was planning how to get the hell out of there.” She paused, thinking back to the innocent kid she’d been, and the image of herself back then brought on another flood of tears.

“Then I had the opportunity. I’d saved a lot of money and I was trusted. I was on port patrol, and a tanker crewed by a bunch of freeloaders from Mars had landed a week before, and I’d made myself known to the captain. He was the sort who’d take on a stowaway for a couple of thousand, no questions asked. The night I skedaddled, I stole my commanding officer’s smartsuit, told a couple of friends I was going to go back to the south where my father died... and took off aboard the tanker.”

The silence stretched and she felt good in Ed’s embrace.

He said, “And a few months later, I found you in that bar on Rocannon’s End.”

She smiled. “Best thing that ever happened to me,” she murmured.

He squeezed her shoulders. “Hey, dry those tears, Lania. I think we have company.”

She swatted her cheeks with the cuff of her smartsuit. Outside the opening, she saw the walkway swaying. Two men were moving nimbly towards the dwelling fruit, one young and the other old, followed by one of the skinned monsters from the night before.

She and Ed retreated to the far end of the globe and sat back against the pithy wall.

The men paused outside the entrance, and as she watched, a curious thing happened. She thought it must be some form of ritual, a rite they enacted before entering these strange fruit dwellings. The men stood before the threshold and looked at each other, and then the old man closed his eyes. He seemed to be concentrating. Perhaps fifteen seconds later he opened his eyes and they spoke together in low tones.

Lania exchanged a look with Ed, who just shook his head in mystification.

The two men ducked through the entrance, nodded to Lania and Ed, and sat between the curved ribs of the wall. The monster, she saw, took up a position outside, sitting cross-legged on the walkway; it was fully twice the size of a man and filled the entrance with its slick, blue-veined bulk.

The young man looked across at Ed. “How is your head this morning?”

Ed raised a hand to the makeshift dressing. “Fine. I can’t feel a thing.”

“It was an unfortunate accident. We’re sorry it happened.”

The young man appeared to be in his twenties and wore nothing but a loin-cloth, his torso a perfect example of muscular definition. The old man, she saw on closer inspection, looked ancient. His long grey hair was tied back, emphasising his lined face. Oddly, he was not dressed like the rest of the human settlers on World, but wore an ancient pair of spacer’s radiation silvers, cut off at shoulder and thigh.

He was staring with disconcerting intensity at her.

Lania looked at the monster sitting outside the door, its head bowed. Its surface rippled with petroleum highlights; it looked, she thought, like the anatomical diagram of a flayed corpse.

“What,” she asked, “is that?”

The young man replied, “A Sleer. They’re incredibly strong and fast. They brought you here.”

Ed said, mystified, “A Sleer? But they’re Weird...”

The young man inclined his head. “Early stage Weird. They assist the Fissure People.”

“Then how...?” Lania began.

“They send them after us, to capture us and kill us. But now and again we manage to capture them, tame them and train them to do our bidding.”

“They’re monstrous,” she said.

“Not as monstrous as what they become, later.”

Ed said, “The Harvesters?”

“But before that, the Shufflers, ambulatory Harvesters, if you like.”

“And Harvesters are the ultimate form?” Ed asked. “We were told that each Harvester returns to the Weird home and makes the transition from this universe to the next one, whatever that means.”

The young man nodded. “And in making that transition they become Servers, so that, as their title suggests, they can serve the Weird Mother.”

Ed repeated the name.

“We have never witnessed the creature, just heard tell of it. A vast, static mind which controls every one of its many... parts.”

Ed looked from the oldster – who had yet to open his mouth – to the young man and asked, “That’s all very well, but what do you want with us?”

“I am Langley, and my friend here is Villic.” At this the old man nodded minimally, his face expressionless, as if set in stone.

“Carew and Takiomar,” Ed said. “But you haven’t answered my question. What do you want with us? Why did you bring us here?”

Langley and Villic exchanged a glance, and the latter nodded minimally. “We want to know why you came to World,” Langley said. “We want to know who you brought with you.”

He was interrupted by a sudden movement outside the globe. The Sleer stirred, restless, and made a sound like the low bellow of a tethered bull.

Villic, closest to the door, turned and stared at the creature, and instantly it ceased its moaning and settled down.

“It’s hungry,” Villic spoke for the first time, his voice gravely.

“It can eat,” Langley said. “I’m sure our guests will not attempt to escape.”

Villic turned again and stared at the Sleer, and a second later it rose to its full height and sloped off along the walkway.

Lania stared at the old man, suddenly uneasy.

Ed said, “Why should we tell you that? You abduct us, have your monsters drag us through the jungle...”

Langley raised a hand. “By abducting you, as you say, we very likely saved your lives. Please listen to me: you can trust us. We know what the Fissure People said to you, the lies they told about the Great Circularity, about the idyllic lives they lead, their supposedly mutually-beneficial relationship with the Weird. But it’s all lies.”

Lania said, “We saw the... before the Sleer took us, we saw what the Harvester did.”

Langley looked at her, sympathy in his eyes. “That’s only one aspect of the evil of the Weird,” he said. “Did you not wonder at the scant population of the Fissure People? Did you not question why there were not ten, twenty times their number?”

“They told us that disease took their people, before they discovered the Weird,” Ed said, “and that they fought battles with you, the Outcasts, which further reduced their numbers.”

The old man smiled and shook his head.

Langley said, “The truth is that they feed their old, their hopelessly injured, and their dissidents, to the Harvester. It is what the Weird demand.”

“And they do this willingly?” Lania said.