Deucalion (7 page)

Among the Elokoi, an individual is judged by his family and their actions. No one owns anything. Not even a dwelling. Leani's family group lived in one of the largest dwellings, but not because they were more important or richer than any other family. There were just more of them than there were in most families, so they needed the room. No individual Elokoi on the Reserve was more important than any other. They don't even have speechwords for ‘important' or ‘leader'.

In all their history and legend there has only been one individual with any special authority. Her name was Gaita, and she led the Forty Clans in their legendary Great Trek. But even Gaita had no power in herself. It was her Dream they followed, the Thoughtsong she was given one night, that led them to risk the journey across the uncharted Central Desert in search of the promise of what lay beyond the distant mountains. And when the Trek was over, nothing more of importance was heard from her. When she grew old, her advice might have been valued as the advice of the Elders always was, but no more than that of any of the others. It wasn't that they were ungrateful. It was just the Elokoi way. She had served her people well, and everyone knew it. What more
was
there to say?

That night, back in Edison, I watched Karl Johannsen on the tube. He was giving one of his famous ‘unscripted' speeches, outside one of the wealthier hotels in the Martinez Oasis Resort. I watched him preening in front of the cameras, flashing his diamond ring and mouthing all the right words. The minority leader on the Council, our soon-to-be first President. I wondered what the Elokoi would make of our system of politics. If they were interested.

The report said that the man himself was taking a flyer across to Edison the next day, and I remember thinking, big thrill! But in the end, it was the news story of the year. Because the flyer never made it into Edison, and it was days before they finally located Johannsen's body.

6

SURVIVORS

Air Traffic Coordination-Centre

New Geneva (City South)

15/7/101 Standard

‘What do you mean, “They aren't where they were supposed to be”?' The Controller growled the words, and the young operative took an involuntary step backwards.

The Controller was not a patient man. Stupid queries from his overpaid staff were rarely well received. Especially today.

They were ferrying over a new batch of inbounds from the latest Colony ship. Thirty thousand people, processed and shuttled down in the space of a few days. It was a huge operation, for which the Controller was ultimately responsible. And the responsibility did nothing to improve the state of his infamous temper. Especially when a junior staff-member wanted to bother him with the relatively minor problem of some private flyer being reported overdue on a routine hop.

‘The vehicle's flight computer was in contact with the control mainframe at Edison flyer-base up until about four, then the link was suddenly broken. No emergency signal or location beacon. Nothing. And the odd thing is . . .' She paused, and moved across to the monitor on the desk in front of him. Pressing a few keys, and selecting the menu she was after, she touched the screen.

‘Well?' He watched the monitor as the survey map of Edison and its surrounds appeared.

‘They were heading for Edison from Martinez, which is about 2,000 clicks almost due west.' The young woman indicated a point somewhere off the screen.

‘And?' Some of the impatience had drained from his voice as he sensed that she was about to make her point.

‘And the logical route would be to approach the coast, flying directly east, across the Fringes and crossing the mountains about here' – she touched the screen and the map refocused, enlarging a small area of desert where it bordered the Roosevelt Ranges, about 150 kilometres west of Edison.

‘I gather that didn't happen.'

‘No, it didn't. When contact was lost, the computer at Edison relayed the last known position of the flyer. Which put it—' Another short delay as the map changed again. She pointed to the screen. ‘Approximately here.'

For a moment the Controller stared at the screen, checking the coordinates. ‘But that's almost 400 clicks too far south. What would they be doing down there? There's nothing south of Edison but rocks and wild animals. And a few feral Elokoi.'

As he added the last phrase, the young operative flashed a look of distaste at the back of the man's head, but said nothing. He continued: ‘Maybe they decided to go sightseeing. It's been known. Especially if the flyer was chartered by new arrivals.'

‘It
wasn't a charter, sir. As I told you, it was a private flight. And it's unlikely they were sightseeing. You see—'

This time, something in the young woman's tone made the Controller look up.

‘You see, this flyer was carrying Councillor Johannsen.'

Suddenly, the movements of thirty thousand new arrivals were forgotten, as the Controller stared at the map on the screen, then at the chrono on the wall above the control desk.

‘What time did you say they lost contact?'

‘A couple of minutes before four. They've been searching for over two hours.'

‘And?'

‘Nothing. There's no sign of them anywhere.'

Roosevelt Ranges

Edison Sector (West)

15/7/101 Standard

CAEL

Stumbling up the last few metres of the rise, Cael stopped to look down at the crash site. Saebi was already making her way down the steep incline towards the black crater the explosion had gouged from the flesh of the parched land. Debris littered the path the stricken flyer had followed after it struck the boulder, about a hundred metres before the crater. A deathly silence hung over the scene.

Slowly, Cael followed his mate down towards the worst of the horror. Nothing could have survived. The flyer had disintegrated on impact, and the explosions had torn apart whatever might have remained. Yet they moved from place to place across the whole area, examining bodies and the larger pieces of wreckage for any sign of life.

Cael looked up as Saebi's Thoughtsong filtered into his consciousness. She was singing the victims Beyond. For a moment, it crossed his mind to ask her if she thought that aliens such as the offworlders could pass Beyond like Elokoi, but the haunting power of the Thoughtsong drove the question from his mind. Such wisdom was the province of the Tellers. Who was he to question the gift that she offered freely to the spirits of the dead?

The sudden cry hit them like a desert storm-front, tearing through their thoughts with a power that drove them to their knees. A cry of confusion and terrible pain. Wordless, it spoke of a horror too deep for words. Soundless, it leapt direct from mind to mind. In the silence that had closed in around them, in the centre of all that devastation, it was a cry for help.

Against the odds, someone had survived. An offworlder with the power to cast its thoughts. A child.

They stood up, and moved slowly in the direction of one of the huge boulders. And as they stepped into its shadow, a tiny voice wordspoke them in Standard. ‘Is somebody there? Please, is somebody still alive?'

Cael looked back at the horror of the crash scene, then at Saebi. And he moved around the curve of the rock to face the child.

DARYL

For the hundredth time, I thought I heard someone moving. And for the hundredth time, I told myself it was impossible. If anyone had survived, they would have found me long before this. Or at least called out.

My muscles were cramping from lack of movement but I was helpless to do anything about it. The cage that had saved my life had become my prison. It would probably end up serving as my coffin.

I had given up on the rescue teams an hour ago. I'd just about given up on me. In fact, I was almost beyond thinking. By that time – what was it, three hours after the crash? – I was four parts delirious. I'd stopped sweating; there was no more water left in my body. My lips were cracked and my tongue had begun to swell. It stuck to the top of my mouth, until I felt I was about to suffocate. I told myself to stay calm, breathe through my nose. Someone would come soon.

Who was I
kidding
?

No one was coming. Whoever had planned the crash – and all my training convinced me that it had to have been planned – was too smart to allow the chance of anyone arriving in time.

Then I heard it. A tiny voice. ‘Is somebody there?' it said. ‘Is somebody still alive?'

I wanted to shout out, to scream for help, but I could make no sound. My tongue refused to move, the sound locked in my throat. I tried to shake my head, but the crash-bars held it rigidly in place. I made one last, pointless effort to free my hand enough to push the cage-release. I scraped at the sandy soil with the toe of my boot, trying to make a sound that might attract the voice's attention.

Nothing.

In panic, I took a giant breath and forced it out through my parched throat. For a moment nothing happened, but then it came. A faint, rasping groan. Not a cry. Not loud enough to reach the ear of anyone more than a couple of metres away. Anyone human, that is.

One thing not many people know about the Elokoi is just how acute their hearing is. I found out later that they must have been the best part of 30 or 40 metres away when I called for help. But it didn't matter. They heard, and in a couple of minutes I was free, sitting in the shade of one of the boulders, drinking a can of something warm and wet they'd managed to salvage from the wreckage.

And sitting next to me was Elena. She was in shock – even I could see that. But she was alive, and so was I. And that was more than could be said for anyone else.

I've never believed in destiny. Fate. Karma. It was only coincidence. Pure and simple.

Simple? Deucalion is a big place, and this particular piece of mountain was at least 1,000 clicks from my rescuers' home Reserve. But here they were. And here
I
was. We'd had the whole of the Roosevelt Ranges to crash into, and they'd had the whole of the east coast to run away to. Yet we'd all ended up here.

Maybe fate isn't such a bizarre idea. Who knows?

It had been the best part of a year and a half, but there was no doubting who the two of them were.

Cael, the young male (we managed the introductions this time around), was almost entirely silver-grey by now. He'd lost nearly all his adolescent mottling, grown a few centimetres, and was just about fully mature. But there was no mistaking him. The white ‘headband' I'd noticed that time in Neuenstadt still stood out clearly. And besides, there was paint on his hands.

Saebi had taken control. Once you get used to Elokoi ways, that's a perfectly natural situation, of course. She made sure that the whole area was searched thoroughly. Just in case.

I could have told her it was a waste of time. You could see that there was no chance that there was anyone left alive. And yet . . . there were two of us sitting with our backs to the boulder who should have shared their fate.
We
were still alive.

I tried to get up and help them search, but my legs wouldn't take my weight. I think it was the shock setting in, on top of a dose of heat exhaustion. So I settled for trying to comfort Elena.

She was very young. I guessed about eight Standard. Since I'd sat down, she had said nothing. She just sat staring into the distance, rubbing the corner of her collar between her finger and thumb, and rocking slightly.

I spoke her name, but she gave no response. I guess it was her way of shutting out the horror she had lived through. I remembered her boarding the flyer a few hours earlier. She'd been smiling then, and talking twenty to the dozen with a young woman who'd looked enough like her to be her mother. Vaguely, I wondered how the two of them had ended up on the J-man's private flyer, but this wasn't the time to bring up the subject. Instead, I just slid my arm around her shoulder, and let her lean against me. I didn't know if she would take any comfort from the gesture, but she didn't pull away, so I figured at least I wasn't doing any harm. After a few minutes, she reached out and placed her hand on my wrist. I looked down at the tiny hand; at the total contrast of her white skin against my black. Her hair was golden blonde, and hung down in ringlets just past her shoulders.

I was about to speak again, to try to break through, when I realised her breathing had slowed to the deep, regular rhythm of sleep. Worn out by the terror of the last few hours, she had taken refuge in the oldest form of escape. Her hand went limp and slipped from my wrist, and I laid her gently down in the shade of the rock. I didn't know how long we could let her sleep there, but I hoped it could be a few minutes, at least. I didn't want her to have to wake and relive the horror all over again.

I watched her lying there. And suddenly it was like looking back in time at my little sister, Kirby.

Kirby was five years younger than me, and of course she wasn't really my sister.

When I was three, my parents' house caught fire. Someone pulled me out of the blaze. Smoke inhalation and a few third-degree burns, but I made it. Both my parents and my three sisters died, and I was left alone. Until the adoption. I don't remember anything about my birth parents. I have pictures, and some legal papers, but they don't count as memories. No one's quite as alone as a three-year-old orphan.

But by the time I was four, I had a new family. The doctors had told my new mother she would never be able to have children, so she and her husband had started looking for a child to adopt. And I was it. I didn't realise until years later just how lucky that made me. For every set of parents looking for a child, there were at least four or five kids – abandoned, orphaned, whatever – looking for parents. With unemployment running at thirty-five per cent and social services cut to the bone, there were too many people with no way to look after their kids. I'd been in foster care for almost a year when my new parents found me. Four years old, black, not particularly bright, but for some reason they wanted me.

My new parents were never well-off, but my father always had a job, even in the worst times.

Then, when I was five, Kirby arrived. She wasn't supposed to. There wasn't supposed to be any way she could . . . happen. She was just the sort of ‘miracle baby' the magazine programs on the tube love to use as ‘fillers' between the traffic smashes and the political scandals.

Kirby was everything I wasn't. Cute. Beautiful. She had long golden hair, huge blue eyes, and a smile that lit up a room. And she was as sharp as a laser. I never knew anyone who didn't love her at first sight. We had her for five years. There wasn't a thing I wouldn't do for her.

I was just ten and a half when she got sick and died. The doctors couldn't really say what it was; they called it ‘environmental'. Which on Old Earth could have meant anything.

Three months later, we were in stasis on the freeze-liner, heading for Deucalion. It wasn't so much that they were running away. There was just nothing left to stay around for.

It's been over fifty years since she died, even though I only remember the twelve that have passed since we got here. Sometimes, I wonder what she would have been like as a teenager, or even as an old woman. I'll never know. For me, Kirby will always stay five years old.

The two Elokoi returned, and I could tell without a word being spoken that there were no other survivors.

Saebi handed me another warm beer, which I drank without taking breath. The sun was past its peak, but it was still stinking hot and I'd lost a lot of water.

Cael spoke. ‘We . . . cannot stay. Here is . . . die. We walk Edison. Five . . . six days.'

I nodded. There was nothing else we could do other than try to find our way there. If my fears were right, there would be no one coming anywhere near. At least, not searching for us. Nobody knew we were here.