Helix (41 page)

“Its
friend seems to be finding the experience harder to accept than Jacob.”

Carrelli
said, “His name is Ehrin, at least that’s the phonetic equivalent. His... I
suppose we’d call her his fiancée, is Sereth. Ehrin opposed the Church. As for
Sereth, I get the impression that she was a believer.”

Hendry
regarded the two alien creatures. They were perhaps a metre tall, and were
standing now, small claws touching the frame of the viewscreen as they stared
out in wonder. It was difficult to conceive that they had lives as rich and
complex as his own; perhaps, he thought, that was because they so resembled
animals, and animals with some resemblance to terrestrial fauna. He wondered
what they made of the humans, pink furless giants who until now they had never
even dreamed might exist.

Beside
Hendry, Sissy Kaluchek yawned, murmuring to herself. She blinked up at him,
smiled. “Hey, you,” she said. “Where are we?”

Hendry
gestured through the viewscreen. “Looks like paradise to me, Sis. And according
to Gina, the air’s breathable.”

“Let’s
not get too carried away,” Olembe said. “For all we know this place is
inhabited by man-eating sentients.”

“Lighten
up, for Chrissake,” Kaluchek said.

He
shrugged. “Look at the track record. Two races discovered, and have either held
out the olive branch? One set of bastards set about killing us, the other would
have done—”

“So,”
Kaluchek said brightly, glaring at the African, “third time lucky, yeah?”

“In
your dreams, girl,” Olembe murmured.

They
were interrupted by movement across the flight-deck. The lemur called Ehrin
left the side of his partner and moved to the control couch bearing the giant’s
body. He leapt up onto the couch—his movements, though he was bipedal and
walked upright, as agile as those of a chimpanzee—and squatted beside the
alien, gazing down at the hairless, wrinkled face.

Hendry
watched, confident in his correct interpretation of the creature’s reactions as
those of sadness. The lemur-analogue might have been alien, his race evolved in
circumstances wholly different to those that had prevailed on Earth, but there
seemed to be a commonality of emotion between the two. He wondered then if this
was a universal constant, and, if so, whether it might indicate the possibility
that extraterrestrial races, no matter how seemingly different, might have
points of contact which would augur well for the future relations between the
various species that dwelt upon the helix.

No
doubt Olembe would call him an unrealistic romantic.

Ehrin
was silent, staring at the dead alien. His mouth moved silently, before he
looked up and spoke to Carrelli.

She
nodded and replied.

Ehrin
lifted its paw in an indecipherable gesture and yelped.

Carrelli
returned the sounds, then said in English to the others, “Ehrin has asked that
when we land, the first thing we do is dispose of the remains of the alien,
Havor.”

Hendry
said, “We owe our lives to the alien’s arrival.” He recalled what had happened
back in the cell when Ehrin had appeared to suggest that the humans should be
freed. “Tell Ehrin that we are grateful for what he and Havor did for us.”

Carrelli
spoke to Ehrin, then said, “I asked what the Church would have done to us.
Ehrin said that they would have certainly put us to death.”

“Some
Church,” Olembe grunted. “Let’s just hope we’ve left our old superstitions back
on Earth to rot along with everything else.”

Carrelli
smiled. “The selection process for the mission hopefully reduced the chances of
fanaticism, Friday.” She shook her head. “We have enough to divide us and cause
potential conflict, being human.”

Olembe
smiled. “Amen to that.”

Ehrin’s
mate, Sereth, snapped something across the flight-deck, and Ehrin leapt from
the couch and joined her. They yipped at each other in lowered tones.

For
the last few minutes the ship had travelled through shadow, the forest canopy
high above occluding all trace of sunlight. Now Carrelli eased the ship down,
bringing it in to land with a diminishing whine of auxiliary motors.

As
the ship settled, Hendry stood and moved to a sidescreen. There was little
undergrowth surrounding the landing site, just the surrounding boles of the
towering trees and the occasional, spectacular shrubs bearing blooms of vivid
scarlet and yellow stripes.

Kaluchek
asked Carrelli, “And you say the air’s breathable? We can go out without the
hoods?”

“The
air’s fine, but I’m not as sure about the local fauna. Let’s be careful out
there.”

Olembe
found the blaster the alien had used to such effect, as sleek and black as the
rest of the ship. He checked its controls, hefted it and said, “Open the hatch.
I’ll cover you.”

Hendry
was first out, with Kaluchek at his side. They walked down the ramp and set
foot on the sandy soil. He took her hand and smiled, then cracked his faceplate
and pulled down his suit’s hood. He breathed, laughing at the incredible
perfume that filled his head: flowers, honey, and something so alien and spicy
it defied description.

Ehrin
and Sereth came next, holding hands like the two humans, Sereth cautious as if
expecting an attack at any second. Carrelli followed them and Olembe came last,
holding the rifle on his hip and scanning the limited horizon of the clearing.

Hendry
heard distant birdsong, a high mellifluous carolling. He saw something flit
through the air on multicoloured wings: an insect the size of a bird. The
sunlight was largely shut out here, but the odd rapier streak did penetrate the
canopy, slicing the aqueous half-light into sections full of floating pollen
and spores.

Ehrin
released his mate’s paw, hurried forward to the edge of the clearing and
squatted on the ground. He reached out and touched the ground, then began
scooping the sandy soil into a mound. Only then did Hendry understand what it
was doing. He joined the alien, along with Kaluchek. They fell to their knees
and began digging, their much larger human hands far more successfully displacing
the loosely packed earth. At one point Ehrin looked up at Hendry, and pulled
its lips back in a rictus more like a snarl than a smile, and Hendry smiled in
return. Carrelli joined them, calmly sweeping handfuls of the golden demerara
soil to expand the long pit. Only Olembe remained standing, covering their
grave-digging duties, while across the clearing Sereth squatted on the ship’s
ramp, gazing about her with big eyes.

They
returned to the ship, and between Hendry, Carrelli and Kaluchek, they managed
to ease the giant’s considerable bulk from the flight-deck, along the narrow
corridor and down the ramp. Ehrin scrambled alongside, a skinny arm reaching up
to clutch Havor’s radiation silvers.

They
laid the alien’s body in the shallow grave, and then stared down at it, at a
loss what to do next. Kaluchek plucked a flower from a nearby shrub, placed it
in the giant’s great fist and said to Ehrin, “It’s what some of us do on our
planet.”

Carrelli
translated. Ehrin flicked his head, then stared at Havor and spoke, the litany
going on for a minute before he paused, then knelt and began shoving the
displaced soil back over his friend’s recumbent form. The others helped, and
minutes later the makeshift funeral was over.

Olembe
called out, “If you’re quite through over there, I suggest we get on with what
we’re here to do.”

Kaluchek
moved away from the grave. “Which is?”

They
gathered at the foot of the ramp. Olembe said, “The first job is to work out
what’s wrong with this crate—you said it was dysfunctional, Carrelli?”

She
nodded. “Havor told me what was wrong, but the mechanical terms he used didn’t
translate. He also told me that Ehrin helped fix the ship. Ehrin was some kind
of engineer, back on his own world.”

“So
if we want to get back to the colonists on the first tier, we have to do
something about the ship,” Olembe said. “Which, with no materials and Christ
knows what tools, will be a miracle.”

Carrelli
spoke to Ehrin, then turned back to Olembe. “He replaced a component in the
main drive.” She indicated a hatch on the ship’s flank. “We’ll have to take a
look and see if we can do anything.”

Kaluchek
said, “We need food, right? I don’t know about you lot, but I’m starving. I
mean, we can’t stay in paradise if we can’t eat. Me and Joe’ll look for food while
you repair the ship, okay?”

Carrelli
smiled. “Take the blaster. Don’t go far. Bring back anything you think might
look edible.”

“Who’s
going to play guinea pig?” Olembe said.

Carrelli
said, “Who else? Don’t worry, my augments wouldn’t let anything poison me.”

Olembe,
with grudging reluctance, gave up the weapon to Hendry. As the others moved
along the flank of the ship, Carrelli quizzing Ehrin, Hendry and Kaluchek
looked around the clearing. She pointed. “How about this way? I saw a hill
through the trees, bathed in sunlight. We might be able to take in the lie of
the land from there, okay?”

“Lead
the way.”

She
strode across the clearing and Hendry followed, cradling the rifle and gazing
ahead of Kaluchek at the gap in the trees. They left the landing site and made
their way through the forest, and Hendry thought back to a time, years ago,
when he’d taken Chrissie to Australia to show her the place of his birth. They
had spent a week in the Dandenong forest east of Melbourne—this was before the
forest succumbed to blight—and its vast towering trees, its air of serenity,
the golden sunlight filtering through the treetops, all put him in mind now of
this alien forest. Sylvan and tranquil, he thought, pushing away the sudden
vision of Chrissie lying dead in the cryo-unit and concentrating on the slim
form of Sissy striding through the forest before him.

At
one point she knelt and played the palm of her hand across the ground in a wide
sweeping arc. “Look at this stuff, Joe. It isn’t grass. It’s like velvet,
golden-green velvet.”

He
squatted beside her, watching her as she stared in fascination at the moss-like
growth. There was something refreshingly childlike in her expression; he felt
his stomach lurch when she looked up and smiled at him.

She
took his hand, almost pulling him to his feet. They hurried through the trees,
apprehended by wonder on all sides, from strange colourful flowers that floated
through the air below diaphanous bubbles, to a variety of insect that cycled
past them with an arrangement of wings like a paddle-steamer’s wheel. They saw
tiny, darting silver creatures like lizards, which left shimmering images of
themselves in their wake, evidently a survival mechanism, and animals like
frogs, which inflated themselves to the size of footballs and retched noisome
venom at their prey.

“Look,
Joe,” she said, indicating a low-lying bush replete with small round fruit like
melons. She picked one, holding it on her palm between them.

“Well,
it certainly looks delicious.”

“Gina
will soon tell us,” Hendry said.

“Perhaps
I could try just a little?”

“Best
not to. It might look great, but at the same time it might be poisonous.” He
went on, “And even if it wasn’t harmful, it might not be any use as a
foodstuff.”

At
her frown, he said, “Not all proteins are like those on Earth. If the molecules
are reversed in relation to our own...” He shrugged, “then the edible food of
this world would pass through our system and we wouldn’t be able to metabolise
it.”

“But
if we could...”

He
smiled. “Then I’ll name it Kaluchek fruit, after its discoverer.”

She
smiled, looking around her at the shimmering golden forest. “I hope this place
isn’t already inhabited. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to start a colony here?”

He
pointed to a patch of sunlight, and standing in it the moss-covered outcropping
of rock Kaluchek had seen earlier. They approached it, leaving the shade of the
forest and stepping into warm sunlight.

She
leaned against the rock, turned to him and smiled. She said nothing, just
smiled, and then reached out a hand to him.

She
was small, and seemed very young and beautiful, and sudden desire flipped in
his belly like a live thing. He took her hand and she pulled herself to him,
her lips so urgent that the contact was clumsy, bruising. He laughed, slowed
her, took her face in both hands and kissed her lips, her cheeks and eyes.

Then
she pulled away quickly and, before he could fear that he’d offended her in
some way, she was twisting and struggling from the confines of her atmosphere
suit and finally standing before him, at once small and vulnerable and yet
elementally powerful in her nakedness.

Something
caught in his throat, a sound like a moan. He dropped the blaster then pulled
off his atmosphere suit, suddenly urgent, and when he fell into her embrace the
touch of her flesh was electric.

She
pulled him down on top of her onto the soft carpet of moss, then rolled so that
she was straddling him, then took him and eased herself down around him. He
slipped into her, amazed by her warmth and wetness, and she let out a loud cry
of laughing joy and arched her back, riding him for minutes until he emptied
himself and cried with the exquisite release.