Helix (29 page)

Hendry
shifted his position, the hard timber beneath his buttocks at last becoming
unendurable. He dragged a noxious pelt towards him, arranging it behind his
back. Kaluchek smiled up at him.

Thirty
minutes later he noticed lights in the darkness. They were approaching a
settlement of squat, stone-built dwellings that climbed the hill to their left,
one above the other like stacked beehives. The points of light were lanterns,
held aloft by individuals who had braved the freezing night to greet their
fellows.

“What’s
happening?” Kaluchek asked as the sledge ground to a halt. She struggled
upright, this time determined to make it, and sat beside Hendry.

More
locals emerged from the cone-like dwellings and approached the sledge. They
were too short to see over the side, but stood on the incline at a distance of
some metres and stared at the heads and shoulders of the strange captives.

Hendry
noted a difference between the aliens who had captured them and the
mountain-dwellers, and he wondered if the former were native to the ice plains.
The mountain-dwellers appeared a head shorter than their cousins, and wore
considerably more clothing: padded suits and caps that covered their heads and
necks like balaclavas.

The
two camps met and appeared to be in discussion, the aliens from the ice plains
explaining their find to three mountain-dwellers, who at one point approached
the sledge and inspected its content.

Olembe
said, “So this is civilisation, folks. Look, I think we need a plan of action
if things start getting violent.”

Kaluchek
looked across at him. “We’re shackled, Olembe. We have no weapons. I’m feeling
like shit. I couldn’t fight off a kitten.”

“We’ll
be unshackled at some point. Then, if things start looking bad, I say we attack
and grab their weapons. They’re puny bastards—they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Carrelli
was shaking her head. “Violence only as a last resort, okay? Until then we sit
tight and see what happens.”

Olembe
opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it and merely shook his head in
disgust.

It
appeared that some decision had been made. From further up the track, a team of
six draft animals appeared hauling a sledge.

“We’re
being transferred, Carrelli,” Olembe said. “This might be the only
opportunity.”

The
team of animals was led down to the track by a mountain-dweller, where it was
halted alongside their own sledge, facing downhill.

Hendry
said, “I don’t think they’re transferring us. It wouldn’t make sense to take
the risk.”

“Then
what—?” Olembe began.

From
a nearby building, half a dozen mountain-dwellers, working in pairs, carried
what looked like heavy sacks and perhaps a dozen skins of liquid. They
deposited them in the second sledge and returned for more, halting only when
the sledge was laden.

Carrelli
laughed. “We’re being traded. Apparently we’re worth twenty sacks of grain and
a dozen skins of wine... or whatever the local equivalent might be.”

Kaluchek
said, “And if these folk think we’re worth that much, then I don’t think they
mean to kill us straight away.” She looked across at Olembe, challenging.

The
animals hauling the second sledge were prodded into action. The plain dwellers
moved off down the hillside on their stolid mounts, but not before one of their
number paused his mount beside Hendry and the others.

He
wondered if it was the creature that had given them the water-skin earlier; it
was impossible to tell. It merely stared at them, one after the other, its
snout moving as it talked to itself. How alien we must appear to this creature,
Hendry thought. The being made a quick movement with its snout, flicking it in
the air—a valedictory gesture?—then rode off into the night.

Seconds
later the sledge started up and they continued on their way, this time escorted
by a team of mountain-dwellers, a dozen smaller aliens—six fore and six
aft—riding their own shaggy mounts.

“My
guess is that their capital city lies somewhere beyond the mountains,” Carrelli
said, “which is where the dirigibles were heading.”

“And
that’s where we’ll be imprisoned and tortured as the invaders we’re assumed to
be,” Olembe said.

“Or
where,” Kaluchek returned, “we might be treated as honoured guests.” She nudged
Hendry. “What do you think, Joe?”

He
smiled. “Despite the evidence of the pain in my head, I think we’ll be accorded
some degree of civility—though I don’t doubt they’ll be naturally suspicious of
us. It can’t be every day they’re visited by ugly, furless giants.”

“I’ll
remind you optimists of this when the bastards bring out their thumbscrews, or
whatever else they use to extract confessions.”

Carrelli
said, not without humour, “Go to sleep, Olembe.”

The
African laughed and pulled a pelt towards himself.

An
alien detached itself from the rearward group and rode alongside, staring at
the strange cargo its people had purchased. Other than its smaller stature, and
the fact that it was padded like a lagged boiler, it resembled the plain
dwellers with its hostile snout and large, inscrutable eyes. Hendry shifted
uncomfortably under its penetrating gaze.

They
climbed, the track becoming narrower as it passed between sheer walls of ice
towards a distant pass in the mountains. At last the passage became so
constricted that the alien rider was forced to abandon its inspection and ride
on ahead, to Hendry’s relief.

He
rearranged the pelt so that he could lie down, and Kaluchek joined him, resting
an arm across his chest.

Like
this, jolted to and fro as the sledge climbed through the alien night, Hendry
and his fellow travellers slept.

He was awoken
, hours
later, by the light.

He
opened his eyes and stared up at the featureless grey, wondering how the
lemur-creatures of this world survived the endless, drear days without a hint
of sunlight. The answer was obvious: they had no conception of the existence of
anything like the sun. The sight of the fiery primary, if and when that
happened, would be a revelation.

The
others were talking. Kaluchek noticed his movement and shuffled towards him,
helping him to sit up. “You’ve been out for hours, Joe.”

He
reached out and took her hand. “Are you okay?”

“Apart
from a sore head,” she smiled, “I’m fine.”

Hendry
looked around at the passing landscape. They had left the mountains behind them
and were coming down the other side. Behind the sledge, the dark peaks reared,
cold and hostile, while ahead...

It
was the sight ahead of the sledge that occupied Carrelli and Olembe. They were
pointing out various features and discussing them in lowered tones.

With
Kaluchek’s help, Hendry managed to shuffle to his knees and peer over the front
edge of the sledge.

“What
do you think?” she asked.

He
had expected, going by what he had seen so far of the aliens’ civilisation,
something rudimentary by way of a township, a primitive collection of
stone-built dwellings similar to the village they had seen on the other side of
the mountains, though perhaps on a grander scale. Even the fact that the aliens
obviously had a manufacturing capability had not prepared him for the sight of
the city that sprawled before them in the bowl of the mountains.

It
was vast, and consisted of great blocks of buildings that reminded him of the
architecture of Earth’s nineteenth century. It had evidently been constructed
from the centre outwards, built along great boulevards radiating from a hub of
grand buildings, which dominated all the others. Between the buildings, the
wide streets were silver with ice, along which citizens skated in ones and
twos, and draft animals hauled carts not dissimilar to the one in which they
were travelling.

The
sight of the city was impressive enough, but what made it truly a thing of
wonder were the airships that sailed above it. Hendry counted fifty of them,
all sporting brightly coloured balloons— globular, oblate and
cigar-shaped—before giving up. They criss-crossed the grey skies without colliding,
a veritable feat considering their number. Some made short hops across the
city, putting down on rigs erected on top of buildings, while others ventured
out to the foothills. They flew at various levels, at differing speeds,
creating a dramatic kaleidoscopic effect when seen from the elevated vantage
point of the mountainside, the polychromatic aerial display contrasting with
the monochrome drabness of the city beneath.

“What’s
amazing,” Olembe was saying, “is that we travel five hundred light years through
space to find a race which functions on principles similar to those of Earth a
couple of hundred years ago. They have wheels, carts, sledges, skates,
airships...”

Carrelli
considered his words, then said, “Perhaps it’s not so unusual. They’re a bilateral,
carbon-based, upright species, after all. It would be surprising if during
their evolution they had not discovered the things you mentioned.”

“You
mean,” Kaluchek said, “that things like sledges and skates and everything else,
they’re the most efficient devices for the particular environment, so it’s
inevitable that they would have been developed?”

Carrelli
nodded. “No doubt we’ll find many things peculiar to this race, adapted for the
type of beings they are, but it isn’t surprising that we have so much in
common.”

Hendry
said, “Is it surprising that the two species we’ve discovered have both been
upright and bipedal?”

Carrelli
shrugged. “That’s hard to say, Joe. The sample is too small to make a
judgement. Perhaps we’re an anomaly, and life in the universe will prove to be
very different. Or the reverse: perhaps all life in the universe is similar to
ourselves.” She paused, then went on, “There is always the possibility that
whoever built the helix populated it solely with air-breathing bipeds.”

They
were silent for a time, considering this possibility.

“The
more pressing question,” Olembe said, “is what these bastards intend to do with
us.”

Kaluchek
looked across at him. “You sound frightened, Olembe.”

“Not
frightened, sweetheart, just let’s say concerned. It’s best to consider all
possibilities. You pacifists might be right, and the monkeys might turn out to
be angels in disguise, but we need a plan of action if they decide to turn
nasty.”

Carrelli
looked at the African for a second or two, before nodding reasonably. “I don’t
disagree, in principle. What do you suggest?”

Olembe
looked surprised. “Well... the advantage we have over them is that we’re
bigger. We could take them by surprise and overpower them easily, grab their
weapons and take it from there.”

“If
we do need to act,” Carrelli said, “then we must do so after having agreed the
action amongst us, is that agreed? There should be no action without
consultation, no lone heroics. If we can do so, we avoid taking life—is that
agreed? We haven’t travelled five hundred light years to kill members of only
the second race we’ve discovered.” She looked round the group, receiving
affirmative nods from everyone including, somewhat reluctantly, Olembe.

“Okay,”
he said, “but I know in my bones, that these guys have it in for us.”

He
had the last word, and in the following silence they all gazed ahead at the
city.

They
were approaching the sprawling outskirts now, meaner dwellings and larger
buildings that overflowed from the valley bowl and crept up the hillside. The
road between the low, granite-grey buildings consisted of churned slush for the
last sloping kilometre into the city, but it became a mirror-smooth canal of
ice when they reached the valley bottom. The draft animals hauling the sledge
seemed at home on the ice and proceeded at a brisk trot.

Their
passage had attracted the attention of locals: at first one or two passers-by
had dawdled to take a look at the curious cargo, but now the word had spread
and a posse of thirty or forty padded citizens trailed the sledge, kept back by
the dozen mounted mountain-dwellers. Hendry felt uneasy beneath the scrutiny of
these strange beings, and wondered if alien crowds had the same propensity for
unheeding reaction as had their counterparts on Earth. All it would take was
one hothead to incite the crowd to violence against the bizarre off-worlders...

They
came at last to the sanctuary of a foursquare building within a walled
compound, situated on the edge of the city. The sledge passed through great
iron gates, which were hauled shut behind them, effectively barring the curious
crowd. Hendry’s relief was tempered by the thought of what might lie ahead.

The
entourage of mountain-dwellers remained guarding the sledge. One of their
number dismounted and hurried across a cobbled courtyard to the door of the
building. He passed inside, watched by everyone including Hendry and the
others, and emerged a minute later trailing perhaps a dozen beings in black
uniforms.