alt.human (23 page)

Divine cried out, turned on the aliens and then ducked down as more blue beams swept the rocks.

Skids was there, and over, and hunkering down, dodging the beams. Jemerie too, and Pi.

I looked, but it was too far for Hope and me, and I had spotted what was happening under cover of Saneth’s diversion too late. We wouldn’t have a chance.

Then, with a cry of rage, Sol advanced on the watcher. “!¡
outrage
¡! What are you doing, killing my people?” she cried.

Hope and I edged through the trees as, ahead of us, Marek hurdled the wall and landed among the rocks.

Sol got close enough to strike the startled watcher in its blank face. Her big fist sank into the thing’s head and then pulled free with a sucking sound audible even from where Hope and I hid in the trees.

The watcher pulled back with a fluid movement, like a ripple of its entire body. Then the snout of a weapon emerged from the watcher’s wrist and fired into Sol’s face.

Sol staggered back and half-turned. There was a hole right through from her face to the back of her head, wide enough that I could see daylight through it.

And then she turned back to face the watcher.

“!¡
authority
¡! Enough!” she cried, and I didn’t know how she could when she must surely be dead already. “These are my people!”

She struck the watcher again, and her hand passed through the thing’s head as if through water.

The watcher fired again. A hole opened up in Sol’s chest. The next shot sliced her arm so that the flesh hung off it, black skin flayed away from bunched off-white fibres. Like those Callo had revealed when she had wanted to show me that she was not one of us, but rather there for us, for our kind... a
guardian
, she had called herself.

Sol looked down at her arm and tried to swing it, but it was useless to her now.

She threw herself at the watcher, and I managed to tear my gaze away for long enough to see that some of the grunts had closed in, so that even with the distraction Sol offered we would have no chance of reaching the river and the safety of the tunnels.

“Here,” hissed Hope. “Now. Duck down.”

Saneth’s commensal, the sidedog, had crept towards us through the trees, and now Hope gestured at it, using the command she had seen Saneth use back in Angiere.

The commensal folded back on itself and Hope pulled me into its embrace as it plunged down on top of us, around us, engulfing us in that wet, fleshy interior. Instantly, my chest was squeezed so hard I couldn’t breathe and then I realised I didn’t have to breathe, didn’t want to breathe, surrounded as I was by the sidedog’s bulk. I could feel Hope against me, tangled with me, I could sense her, feel the shape of her presence.

For a moment I was lost, as the oneness with Hope and with the commensal swept over me, and then I realised that I could see and I could hear and I could smell. All my senses were sharper, more specific, than my dulled human senses had ever been.

And there before me, I watched and heard and smelled my clan-mother, who was not a human at all, but rather a guardian like Callo, being burned and sliced and dismantled by the watcher commander.

I wanted to go to her. I wanted to run from her, from the she that was not a she but an
it
. I wanted to throw myself at the watcher, stop it from slicing, slicing, slicing and revealing my clan-mother to be not what I had believed, turning her to slabs of meat and skin and mechanical components.

I could not do any of that. I was absorbed, contained within the commensal sidedog. Its body – our body – turned away from the destruction. In that single movement, our pin-sharp vision took in the grunts: watching their commander, checking the trees, watching us as we turned away...

I felt an urge to relax, and realised that the urge had been pushed towards me by Hope.

The body we were in was struggling to move, and I understood that this was because I was resisting, focused on what was happening to Sol.

I relaxed and the body moved more freely, swung away from the carnage, started to run in a shambling four-legged movement that felt natural, right.

I heard movements behind, the sound of a grunt raising its beam-gun. The brief pause that followed as it took aim, and then we dropped and rolled, and I saw a needle-beam burn blue through the air above.

It was as if the world had slowed down, our enhanced perception giving us just that little bit more time to react.

Something burned into our back and we gave a high-pitched yelp of pain, smelling the burning of our own flesh.

We paused to look back and saw Saneth speeding away in her-his buggy while the grunts and their watcher commander all turned their attention on our escape.

We reached the wall and simply lifted our legs and flowed over it with no break in our stride.

Another beam stung our hind quarters and now Hope was sending calming waves both to me and to our host.

The rocks slowed us, but soon we had dropped to water level.

We paused. Divine was waiting in the opening of the drainage duct, but we realised now that we would never squeeze through that gap in our current form.

I remembered the sidedog spewing out Marek and how it had taken him long moments to gather himself, orient himself, find his senses.

We did not have that much time.

Already, grunts were advancing across the road, and out on the river two skimmers were swooping in towards us.

Divine raised a fist in defiance and mouthed, “Martyrs,” and then she was gone and the drainage duct was only a dark slit between piled boulders.

We turned, stepped into the river’s dark waters and instantly plunged down. The water was dark and piercingly cold.

It tasted of mud, and its chill spread rapidly through our shared body.

Submerged, we flailed, lost all orientation.

We pulled our legs up, tucked our head in and only then did a sense of direction return as we dropped to the river bed.

The current took us and rolled us along. Occasionally we got lodged in rocks or mud or weed, and we would push with a leg to break free.

We rolled and tumbled and bounced along the river bed, going with the current, a ball of icy flesh, the three of us.

And then I started to sense Hope. It was more than just the awareness I had initially felt. She was a shape, a form whose boundaries met my own, overlapped my own, merged.

She was a presence, and within that presence I heard voices.

A constant babble of voices. Distant, subdued, their words impossible to distinguish. It was like Pennysway being unsung: just as the Ipp’s lines had blurred and lost detail, so these voices were blurred, indistinct.

They came from Hope, that much was clear. She had mentioned her voices before, and now I knew what she meant. This would drive anyone mad.

E
VENTUALLY, WE STARTED
to fight the current, clinging to the rocks of the river bed and hauling ourselves up onto dry land.

We emerged from the river among the abandoned market stalls of Riverside. Normally a place full of bustle and cries, colour and movement, now the area was deserted. All around us, my home city really was dying.

The sidedog stood on a small grassy area and tipped back, and Hope and I unfolded from its interior. The thing stood there for a moment longer, and then turned and trotted away and was soon gone.

Hope and I lay on the grass, slick with the alien’s juices. I rubbed at my face and Hope at hers. Her dressing had come away, and the left side of her face was healed now, smooth scar tissue covering the area where the wound had been. It was almost as if the sidedog had tried to fix her when it returned her to the world.

I looked down at my damaged hand and it too was smooth, the scars blending in with the surrounding skin.

I took my shirt off to dry in the sun and Hope did the same. Her body was skinny, her ribs clearly delineated, her breasts small, dark-nippled.

I dragged my eyes away, closed them.

And saw Sol being sliced apart by the faceless watcher.

A soft touch, fingertips, on my cheek. Smoothing away tears.

I opened my eyes and Hope was withdrawing her hand, studying me closely.

“!¡
confused | anguished
¡! Sol,” I said. “Did you see what happened to Sol? Did you see... what was inside?”

Hope gave a simple nod.

“!¡
confused
¡! What
was
that? What was she?”

“That’s not what a person looks like inside,” said Hope. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Not even at the infirmary.”

“!¡
hesitant
¡! I have,” I told her. “Callo. One of the four from Angiere – she came with Marek and Saneth.” And she was dead now, too.
Unsung
, as Saneth had put it.

Hope stared. “I didn’t know,” she said. “And the others? Is Marek... not one of us?”

“!¡
uncertain | confused
¡! I don’t know,” I said. “Callo: she told me that everything is not as it seems. I think she was telling me that she knew about Sol. She said she was a guardian, here to protect us. That’s what Sol did, too. Even at the end.”

I was crying again, even as I worked things through in my mind. Sol: she, or it, or whatever she was, had protected us to the last, but now she was gone.

Hope reached for me, pulled me close, let me sob. Skin against skin, we were one again, as we had been in the commensal sidedog, boundaries dissolving.

Eventually, my sobbing subsided and we just held each other.

“Did they get out?”

Slowly, I eased my embrace. I could smell burning now, a chemical burning. It was faint, distant, carried on the soft breeze that followed the river. Another part of the city, dying.

“!¡
hesitant
¡! I don’t know,” I said. “!¡
optimistic | untrue
¡! Probably. !¡
factual reporting
¡! I saw Skids, Jemerie, Pi and Marek all cross the road safely and reach the rocks. When we reached the river they had gone.” No bodies, is what I meant but couldn’t quite say. “I saw Divine in one of the tunnels.”

“And they would be safe in the tunnels?”

I dipped my head, pressing my forehead hard against my knees. “!¡
anguished
¡! The tunnels drain the city,” I said. “!¡
doubting
¡! If they can just find their way through the network, they’ll be okay.”

She nodded.

“!¡
reassuring | positive
¡! We’ll find them,” I said. “And then we’ll work out how to get out of this city. There’s nothing left for us here.”

Chapter Twenty

F
OR
H
OPE, OUR
escape from the Hangings in the sidedog commensal had offered strange respite. She had gone from cowering in the trees as we witnessed the carnage, with no way out and the voices in her head clamouring and wailing, to... release, quiet.

Just as last time, when the sidedog enfolded her, the voices in her head softened to a murmur and then stilled. All she was aware of was me, and the commensal, the three of us sharing a single body, our beings blending, mixing and remixing, just as I had felt the blending and mixing. And as she pushed her voices out, I had sensed them, shared them. For that short time, as we bounced along the bottom of the great river, we were one, different elements of a single being.

And when we emerged, I was a little bit Hope, and Hope was a little bit me.

Lying on the grass in the sun, she had wanted to hold me long before we fell into each other’s embrace. She knew the comfort it offered, the touch of another body.

We talked of Sol, and Hope was not shocked by the clan-mother’s nature. She had not known Sol well enough to see her as a person. To her, Sol was an intimidating figure, fierce protector of the clan; she was little more than another part of the backdrop of a strange new city.

But Callo... Callo had helped her escape from Angiere. Callo had shown her human kindness. In their few brief encounters, Callo had given Hope a model for what it was to be human.

And yet she was not.

“And the others? Is Marek... not one of us?” She remembered his taste and smell. She remembered the touch of his wiry body; he had so much hardness about him, in his body and in the way he was with people.

Was he man, or was he other?

“I
HEAR VOICES
,” Hope told me, after a silence in which we lay side by side, our arms touching. “In my head, voices.”

She turned her head towards me and I nodded.

“!¡
reassuring
¡! I know. You’ve said. And... I heard them.”

She knew what I meant immediately, had suspected it, had wondered where the voices went when she had pushed them away. “They scare me. I hate them. I don’t want them.”

I turned to her, put an arm across her, aware again of her semi-nakedness against me. She sensed this and gently pushed my arm away. We sat again, hugging our knees. I reached for our shirts, dry now, and handed Hope hers.

I pulled mine over my head, and as Hope covered herself, I said, “!¡
earnest
¡! Maybe you should try listening to them, rather than shutting them out. Maybe they have something to tell you.”

“H
OW WILL WE
find them?” Hope asked later. “Where will they go? Where will they be?”

She hadn’t believed my assurances that we would find the others again. To her, there was just the two of us now, but she knew I had to convince myself of that too before we could move on. She remembered exploring in the night we had spent underground, venturing away from the fire and following the drainage ducts deeper into the city, away from the river. The ducts had grown narrower the deeper she went. It was possible she had chosen a bad route, and that the main ducts would remain high and broad, but her experience didn’t encourage her to believe that.

“!¡
positive
¡! We’ll find them at the Monument to the Martyrs,” I told her. “It’s tucked away to the west of Central, by a bridge over a storm channel. That’s where we need to go.”