The Devil's Nebula (7 page)

Behind them, across the clearing, hut doors were opening and her people were stirring, leaving their huts and stretching in the red light of the sun.

Their mother called across the clearing, “Maatja! Hahta! Here at once!”

They rose and hurried across to their hut. Outside every other hut, families were gathering. A murmur of expectation filled the clearing.

Leah and Rahn, the Elders – even though they were only a little older than Maatja’s parents – stepped from their hut and smiled around the gathering. This was the signal. A cheer went up from the people. Leah and Rahn moved to the head of the crowd and strode down the clearing towards where the Harvester was penned. The people fell into step behind the Elders and followed them, silent now.

Hahta found Maatja’s hand and squeezed excitedly.

All Maatja’s friends, and the adults she had heard talking about the Harvester, thought that the creature was beautiful – as were all the Weird. But Maatja didn’t agree. She thought it was a monster.

They came to the long-house where the creature lived.

The long-house was just a thatched roof, perhaps twenty metres long, supported by a dozen pillars. The Harvester occupied the space under the roof, a vast bloated grey mound of fat, so big that its body bulged between the timber pillars. At one end were a dozen tentacles, and at the other end a single, thicker trunk from which the beast excreted phar.

Now the people lined up and walked past the Harvester, brushing its bulging flank with fingers and murmuring their gratitude. Maatja heard her mother say, “We give thanks for your munificence...”

Maatja followed, her fingers touching the hard grey hide. She muttered under her breath, “You’re a fat ugly thing and phar tastes like poo.”

It was the only verbal form of dissent she allowed herself.

Her father carried a small pail he’d fashioned painstakingly from woven branches and dried mud. They stood in line while the other families received their ration of phar. When her family arrived at the back end of the Harvester, her father knelt before the dangling trunk. He placed the pail beneath the rheumy sphincter and Maatja watched with revulsion as the pink orifice opened and a litre of pale fluid spurted from the beast and filled the receptacle.

Her mother and father murmured their thanks, rose from their kneeling positions and led the way from the long-house. The next family moved forward, knelt and placed their bucket beneath the trunk.

She sat outside their hut and her father passed her and Hahta a small ladle. First Hahta dipped it into the thick fluid, lifted it to her lips and drank. She swallowed, then sighed and smiled, and a look of relief crossed her face.

And now it was Maatja’s turn to simulate delight without spewing up the noxious liquid.

With rising nausea, she dipped her ladle into the pail, feeling the initial resistance of the fluid and then the give as the ladle broke the surface and filled up quickly. She lifted the ladle, heavy now, and brought it slowly to her mouth. She closed her eyes, felt the rubbery moisture touch her lips, and opened her mouth and drank. The phar seemed to expand in her mouth, filling it completely with its oddly chalky, sour mass, and it was all she could do not to gag and spit out the food.

She forced herself to swallow, tip the ladle again and take a second gulp.

Then it was down and it was her father’s turn to drink.

Maatja smiled in feigned happiness and looked at the fiery circumference of the sun, a great dome now over the jungle canopy.

Phar day was over for another week. Now the stuff would dry and in its dried form was much easier to eat.

After the phar meal, Maatja joined her foraging group and moved off into the jungle. If she hated phar day with a vengeance, she loved the foraging that followed.

She slung her gathering basket over her shoulder and followed Jaar, a boy a little older than herself, and a couple of adults, along the jungle path. Perhaps five hundred paces from the clearing, she looked around. The other foragers, men, women and children, had spread into the jungle in threes and fours, and were hidden from sight. The rule was that you must always remain within sight of your group, for deeper in the jungle rogue Sleer and Outcasts roamed.

Maatja had taken great delight in disobeying this edict from an early age.

Now, when she was sure that the adults had gone on well ahead and Jaar’s attention was fixed on the path, Maatja slipped from the worn track and ducked into the surrounding undergrowth.

She ran, exhilarated by the sudden sense of freedom.

She moved ever deeper into the jungle, away from where the foragers worked, towards the territory of the Outcasts.

She came to the clearing and the lakka bush. She sat beneath it, in the dappled sunlight that fell through the canopy a kilometre above her head, and plucked the small red berries from the bush. She ate them one by one and when she had swallowed a dozen she felt her stomach heave.

She squatted, leaned forward and retched.

A great torrent of pink-white fluid sprayed from her mouth, the phar and the berries, and she felt suddenly shaky with relief at expelling the alien mass. It lay on the jungle floor, already attracting insects and bugs.

This done, she proceeded to gorge herself on the fruit and berries that grew prodigiously around the clearing. The phar filled her people’s stomachs, and they consequently required far less sustenance than did Maatja. For every fruit she threw over her shoulder into her basket, she popped two into her mouth. In this way, she would not draw attention to herself by gorging at the evening meal, though it did mean she had to work with speed.

When she reckoned she had her daily quota, she moved from the clearing, deeper into the jungle, and sought out the meeting place. This was a smaller clearing, marked by a ghala tree, where sometimes Maatja met the Outcast boy, Kavan.

It was Kavan who, years ago, had told her what the phar was doing to her people and what she could do about it. Maatja had never liked phar – unlike most other people she knew – and to sick it up every day was a welcome relief.

And, after a week of doing this, she came to think more about the Weird and what they were doing to her people.

And came to realise – thanks in large part to Kavan’s words – that her people were enslaved to the alien race.

At first she had thought the wild jungle boy one of her own people. She was young then and had not met everyone in her tribe. But after a few meetings Kavan told her the truth: that he was an Outcast, a member of the tribe who lived in the treetops far away from the clearing, who were not addicted to phar and were not the slaves of the Weird.

Kavan had often exhorted her to come to live with his people, but always she had resisted. She loved her mother and father and her sister, and she could not envisage life without them. Her repudiation of the phar was the extent of her rebellion.

She came to the clearing and searched for Kavan’s sign: a complex pattern of woven leaves, skewered by a twig, which told her, depending on its position in the clearing, when Kavan would meet her.

Today, however, there was no symbol awaiting her. This happened from time to time, when Kavan was unable to get away from his work duties, or when the Weird had instigated another purge to rid the jungle of the Outcasts and he had to be especially careful in his movements.

Now she made her way back through the dense undergrowth, at once dejected that she would not be meeting Kavan and worried for his safety.

Fifteen minutes later she saw one of her people through the trees and casually moved to join them as if she had never been away. She noted, with satisfaction, that she had collected more berries than anyone else: her father would be proud.

When they returned to the clearing later that afternoon, a great excitement gripped her people.

Jaar came running from his family hut and told a group of children that the Weird had communicated with the Elders while they had been foraging. In two days, he said, a Weird Flyer would arrive at the clearing, with ‘great news.’

All that afternoon, the children speculated what the great news might be.

“Perhaps we’ll
all
be Chosen!” a girl shouted, “and we’ll all go to the lair of the Weird!”

“Or the Weird have found more humans on other planets and they’re bringing them to live with us!”

Maatja drifted away from her friends. She had no idea what the Weird wanted with her people – not even Kavan could tell her that – so she thought that her playmates’ wild guesses were a waste of time.

That night she slipped into the fissure and climbed her tree. As the bloated sun sank over the horizon, the sky slowly darkened and the stars came out. To the north, over the jungle, the night sky was resplendent with the gaseous pale red cloud that her father had told her was the Devil’s Nebula. To the south was a mass of brilliant stars: the swathe of Vetch space, and, beyond, the hazy sweep of stars that was the human Expansion, from where her people had originally ventured.

She stared for a while at the distinctive horned shape of the nebula, then transferred her attention to the stars of the Expansion. She wondered how many populated planets existed out there, and not for the first time found herself wishing that one day she might be able to leave World and explore them all.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HE REGIME THAT
governed the human Expansion represented everything that was anathema to Ed Carew’s philosophy of life. They were draconian where he was liberal; authoritarian where he was anarchic; and conservative where he was bohemian. He had spent his life in open – and not so open – defiance of their ideals. As a child, raised on the planet of Temeredes on the edge of Vetch space, he had dreamed of free travel among the stars, adventuring with a ship of his own. When the Vetch had declared their ultimatum and the Expansion had stood by, too weak to intervene, while his planet was evacuated, Ed Carew’s hatred of the Expansion government had been born.

Later, as a young man travelling the length and breadth of the Expansion, teaching and learning and soaking up as many of the diverse philosophies – human and alien – as it was possible for his intellect to comprehend, his disgust at the ruling regime was compounded: again and again he came up against repressive laws and codes, illiberal and totalitarian regimes that held entire planets in thrall. Somewhere along the way, his defiance of the rules crossed the line into lawlessness – though where the authorities might have called him a criminal, Carew preferred to think of himself as a free-thinker bound not by the laws of planetary governments but by his own morality. It had begun, he supposed, when he purloined a small starship from someone he considered a true criminal, and for almost thirty years he had managed to keep one step ahead of the law, mixing legitimate salvaging operations with shadier deals. Now, it would appear, his run of good fortune and freedom had come to an abrupt end.

His one regret was that Lania and Jed had been brought down with him. They were good people, despite what the authorities might claim about their respective misdemeanours, and over the years they had been with him he had come to see himself as their protector.

Well, no longer.

They had left the
Poet
as instructed, unarmed and arms aloft, attended by an overkill of armed guards, and had been rapidly and silently processed into the custody of a convict shuttle. Here four guards had inserted him into a narrow metal tube like a coffin. As cold as a corpse, garbed only in a prison shift, he’d experienced the subtle nausea of void transition and wondered where in the galaxy they were sending him.

Now he rolled and rattled inside the torpedo. No matter how hard he braced his arms against the curving walls of the tube, he could not prevent his head and shoulders connecting painfully with the cold, hard steel. The journey seemed to last an age.

It was yet another example of the regime’s inhumanity, meant to cow a criminal, physically as well as mentally, before he or she came to trial.

Then the rattling stopped, and a period of blessed calm followed; blessed to begin with, that was, after the discomfort of transit. As time passed, and the temperature within the tube grew even colder, he realised it was yet another ploy of the authorities: give the criminal time in which to dwell on what travails might be awaiting him.

He wondered where Lania and Jed might be, and if he would ever see them again. He thought not, as the judiciary was not a service designed to keep old friends connected: they would no doubt serve their time separated by light years, linked only by common memories.

The prolonged darkness within the tube fostered images he would rather not have experienced. He tried to dwell on happier times, on the wrecks he had salvaged and the people he had helped to throw off the shackles of oppression, but always images of his childhood came swimming into his mind’s eye. He was twelve again and the Vetch – making an example of Temeredes, lest any other human colony exhibit such tardiness in evacuating their citizens – were landing on the planet in wave after wave of assault ships. Then their shock troops were razing his hometown and killing his parents.

The tube rattled jarringly, but he found the physical pain of being shaken like a rat in a pipe a welcome respite from the nightmare images.

Abruptly, the tube was tipped vertically and he slid until his feet made contact with the flat base of his prison. Faint light illuminated the tube. He looked down to see a circle of white light encompass his bare legs like a fallen halo as the shell of the tube lifted and released him.

He was in a small white room which boasted, surprisingly, a screen through which he could see limitless deep space, specked with stars. He stepped from the base of the container, his legs cramped after so long a confinement, and hobbled over to the viewscreen.

He peered down, then up. He was in a holding cell in the face of a colossal star station, the like of which the Expansion maintained all along the length of the disputed territory with the Vetch. The stations were vast floating cities inhabited by soldiers and spacers, who flew face-saving missions along the disputed territory, a futile rattling of sabres, more a sop to human public opinion than any real threat to the truculent Vetch.