Helix (25 page)

Hendry dreamed he
was
back on Earth.

He
was in the starship graveyard and, with the surreal displacement common to
dreams, the five year-old Chrissie was living with him. In the dream he
experienced an overwhelming love for this beautiful child, a love that was
almost a melancholy ache, as if informed by her death a thousand years later.

He
awoke suddenly and sat up, struggling in the confines of the inflatable
sleeping bag. He shuffled back and leaned against the sloping wall of the
chamber, staring across the floor to the squat shape of the ground-effect
truck. Carrelli was sitting in the passenger seat, reading a softscreen. There
was no sign of Olembe. Kaluchek, he noted with surprise, lay cocooned in her
sleeping bag beside him. He stared at her face, innocent in sleep of all
expression, and marvelled at her similarity to his daughter. A sudden wave of
grief broke over him, reducing him to silent sobs.

He
worked to control himself. He lifted a hand and stared at it, then beyond the
splayed fingers at the vast echoing emptiness of the chamber.

He
experienced a sense of unreality, a sensation of mental remoteness from the
physical fact of his presence here. He was on a distant world—no, an artificial
construct built by an alien race—a thousand years after he had left everything
he had known on Earth. He felt an uneasy dissonance with the reality around
him; everything was strange, threatening, other than the three human beings who
accompanied him. He felt a sudden surge of affection for his companions then,
even Olembe, the prickly, aggressive mass murderer, if Kaluchek was to be
believed; even Carrelli, the cool Italian whom it seemed impossible to get to
know. And as for Kaluchek... He stared at her, and realised that he felt
something for her beyond the obvious fact that she reminded him of Chrissie.

They
were human beings. They were all he had in this inimical, alien landscape; the
only points of emotional familiarity with which to orient himself. These three
disparate humans, and the three thousand sleeping colonists back on the first
tier, constituted a measure of hope in an otherwise hopeless situation.

Beside
him, Kaluchek had turned in her bag. She laced her hands behind her head and
smiled up at him. She had removed the hood of her atmosphere suit so that her
jet hair fell round her face.

“Olembe
ran a check,” she explained. “The air in here’s breathable. I double-checked,
just to make sure. Even odder, the air outside is almost Earth-norm, too.”

Hendry
lowered his faceplate and unfastened the hood. “Where’s Olembe?”

She
pointed to the great bronze door. “He went for a walk a couple of hours ago.”

He
recalled the airships they’d seen last night. “He ought to be careful. After
our first encounter with aliens down there...”

“Don’t
worry. He took a laser. He’ll no doubt kill first and ask questions later.”

He
eased himself from the sleeping bag and stood, stretching. “Hungry?”

“Could
eat a horse, or even an alien equivalent.”

They
crossed to the chamber and Hendry took a couple of self-heating food-packs from
a stack in the back of the truck. Carrelli looked up from her softscreen,
smiled and nodded to them, then resumed whatever she was doing.

They
ate, sitting on the floor beside the truck. Kaluchek looked up from her food at
one point and smiled. “I’ll tell you something, Joe. I’ve been trying to come
to terms with what’s happening to us.”

“Join
the club.”

“I
remember when I was eighteen. I left home for the first time. All I knew was
the town I’d grown up in. University was frightening. I was a loner, found it
hard to make friends. After Alaska, LA was...” she laughed, “alien. I longed
for flat, empty landscapes, people who didn’t say much instead of talking all
the time. Everything was different. I withdrew into myself. It was a kind of
psychological malaise. I’m not explaining it very well.”

“It’s
okay. I know what you mean. It’s the same thing here, right? I crave... I don’t
know... a world of sun and sand and blue sea, where we can create Utopia.”

She
gave him a wonderful warm smile. “That’ll do me, Joe. I want to be surrounded
by familiar things, even people.”

He
laughed. “And you, the loner.”

She
gripped his hand, raised it to her lips and kissed it, and Hendry felt the
sudden urge to hold her in his arms.

Across
the chamber, the sliding door ground open, startling them. Kaluchek dropped his
hand quickly, looking guilty, and stared at the gap in the entrance. A swirl of
snow cascaded in on a gust of icy wind, followed by the bulky figure of Olembe
in his orange atmosphere suit.

He
closed the door behind him, pulled off his hood and crossed to the truck. He
joined Hendry and Kaluchek, hunkering down beside them, and unfastened a
softscreen from where he’d rolled it for convenience around his left forearm.
Hendry watched the African, wondering at the pressures that had made the man
give the orders all those years ago.

Carrelli
climbed from the cab and joined them, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Olembe
powered up his softscreen and pointed to the image of an eight-tier spiral
coiled about a central sun. Two flashing asterisks marked positions on the
lowest tier and on the one above it.

“That’s
where we came down,” Olembe said. “This here, on the second tier, is where we
are now. I reckon, going by the temperature increase from that tier to this,
that the fourth tier will be habitable. Mediterranean, even.”

“And
we reach the tier above us by this,” Carrelli gestured vaguely at the
surrounding ziggurat, “umbilical elevator.”

Olembe
nodded. “Good name for it, Gina. I don’t see why not. It’s got us so far, why
not all the way up?”

Hendry
looked at the softscreen and said, “I’ve been wondering... We’ve happened
across two alien races so far, and presumably there are even more on the
thousands of other worlds. My question is, why? Why was it built, where did
these races come from, and for what reasons?”

Carrelli
frowned. “My theory, for what it is worth, is that the races we’ve so far
discovered, and no doubt many others, were brought here by whoever built the
helix, for whatever reasons.”

A
silence settled over the group, as each of the four digested the import of
Carrelli’s words.

Then
she said, “I’ve been looking into how the umbilicals might work.” She placed
her own softscreen beside Olembe’s. The screen showed a schematic of the first
three tiers, and a representation of the ziggurats on each.

“The
first ziggurat on the lower tier was equipped with an umbilical, giving access
from one to two. I think it would be mechanical redundancy to have this
ziggurat,” she gestured around them, “equipped with an umbilical. My theory is
that the next umbilical is on the third tier’s ziggurat, and swings down to
connect to the second tier at every rotation—that is, every planetary day.”

Hendry
was shaking his head. “The feat of engineering to produce those things...”

Olembe
grinned. “We’re dealing with some advanced critters here, Joe.”

Carrelli
continued, “So if the last connection was between tier one and two, then it
follows that the next will be between three and two. All we have to do is sit
tight and wait.”

Olembe
pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “I went out there earlier and planted a
surveillance cam on the plain, focused on the top of the ziggurat.” He tapped
the sidebar of his softscreen and a grainy image appeared on the screen,
showing the upper block of the edifice, lashed by snow. “We’ll get everything
stowed in the truck and prepared, and when the link is made we’ll head for the
elevator.”

He
stood and stretched. “I could kill a coffee. Anybody for the reconstituted
swill ESO gave us?”

For
the next couple of hours they sat around the softscreen and chattered
desultorily, getting up from time to time to stretch their legs with a walk
around the chamber. At one point Hendry moved to the viewscreen in the door,
staring out at the grey overcast that seemed to be this planet’s default
meteorological condition.

Kaluchek
joined him. “Thought you might want this.” She held out another mug of the
ersatz coffee, reminding him of how much Chrissie had loved the real thing.

He
took the mug and gestured with it to the world beyond the viewscreen. Daylight
had arrived while they’d been talking, a minimal lighting of the grey. “I
wonder if this is it, perpetual grey with no sight of the sun?”

Kaluchek
frowned. “That’s possible... I was trying to work it out. If the planets on the
helix turn on a central axis, like beads on a string, then there’d be no
inclination that produces the seasons on Earth. There’d be only a progression
of day and night, with no seasons and therefore no years.”

“So
the weather conditions out there would be constant; snow and blizzards and
continual grey cloud cover.”

She
shook her head, sipping at her coffee. “I wonder what the natives are like?
What kind of life might have evolved on such a hostile world?”

“It
only seems hostile to us. To the creatures of this world it’d seem normal.”
When speaking to Kaluchek like this, gently correcting her ideas with his own,
it was as if he were with Chrissie again.

She
said, “One consequence of living on this world, if the cloud cover is constant,
would be that they might not know anything about the helix.”

He
considered a race of beings ignorant of the wonder of the universe about them.
What kind of society might
that
produce?

They
stared through the viewscreen at the pointillistic flurry of snow reducing
visibility to a few metres, each lost in their own thoughts.

Kaluchek
said, “I was going through the data Olembe collected about this place on his
screen.”

“And?”
He sipped his coffee and grimaced. It was hot, which was about all that could
be said in its favour.

“The
temperature varies between five below zero at night, and two or three above
during the day. It’s habitable out there, unlike the first world.”

“We’d
need an extensive system of hydroponics to grow enough food to feed three
thousand colonists,” he said. “Things will be better on the next tier.”

Kaluchek
nodded. “I was just thinking worst-case scenarios—what if the worlds of the
next tier prove uninhabitable?”

“Then
we’d move on to the next.”

“And
if that were uninhabitable?”

He
looked at her; she was grinning at him over the horizon of her mug. He said,
“You’re playing the devil’s advocate.”

“I
was just thinking about how lucky we’ve been so far, in that the atmospheres on
the two worlds we’ve happened across have been breathable. I mean, fortunate or
what? That might not hold for the next tier.”

He
nodded, considering her words. “It is a stroke of luck,” he said. “And it can’t
have been accidental.”

She
frowned at him. “How do you mean?”

“Well,
these worlds were constructed, designed. The atmosphere was put here, as it
were. My guess is that the tiers were developed expressly for air-breathers,
who were then brought here, if they were brought here, perhaps as some kind of
experiment.”

She
considered this, sipping her coffee, then said, “But it doesn’t mean to say
that all the levels are alike, which was my original point. The next one might
have been designed for methane breathers, for all we know.”

He
smiled at her. “We’ll find out in time.”

She
was quiet for a while, watching him. “I was thinking...” she said, then
stopped.

“Go
on.”

“Carrelli.
She knows a lot for a medic. Her backup specialism is smartware systems—but she
knows a hell of a lot about everything.”

“Well,
she was part of the original maintenance team. They had a year or more in
training.”

“Do
you know what I think?”

He
laughed. “You already have her down as a psychologist—” he began.

“I
think she was selected by the ESO as the embedded team leader. Listen, it makes
sense. Lisa Xiang was the nominated leader, and she was strong, opinionated,
but she was only a pilot and a secondary nuclear engineer. She didn’t have
Carrelli’s breadth of knowledge, her intuition.”

Hendry
closed one eye and looked at the tiny Inuit. “So... are you complaining?”

“Far
from it! If I’m right, and Carrelli is the boss, then that’s one in the eye for
Mr Olembe.”

He
laughed. “But only if Olembe was aware of Carrelli’s position. She’s so
embedded it’s not noticeable.” He reached out, suddenly, and touched her cheek.

She
smiled at him. “You think I’m dreaming all this?”

“I
don’t know. Let’s give it time, okay, and see what happens? I might be eating
humble pie before long.”