Helix (53 page)

“And
you try to tell me that it wasn’t Olembe! The man I’ve been hating all these years,
been planning to destroy... Christ, it kept me going, Joe. I dreamed of the day
I’d finally get even with the bastard! And now you’re trying to tell me...”

“Sissy,
Sissy... It’s no good hating. It doesn’t help you! It destroys—”

She
spat at him, “What do you know about hatred, Joe!”

He
stroked her cheek. “I hated, Sissy. I hated Su for leaving me, leaving me and
Chrissie. And leaving us for some crackpot terrorist organisation. I hated her
with all my strength. And do you know something? It didn’t make me a very nice
person. Hate corrodes. It corrupts the good person you could become if you
release the hatred, let go, look ahead and learn to live again.”

She
was sobbing on his shoulder now. “But he hurt me so much, Joe. The bastard took
so much away from me and almost killed me in
here!”

“I
know, I know. But you’ve got to let go.”

“I
dreamed of the day I’d take revenge on him. Nothing else mattered.”

“You
were imprisoned in the past, fantasising about a future act that could never be
as satisfying as the dream.”

She
stared at him. “I never got that revenge, Joe. It... it feels like something’s
missing.”

“Sissy,
Friday Olembe died a thousand years ago, in the shooting accident in Nigeria.
He got what he deserved.”

“But
he never knew the pain he caused me!”

He
stroked her cheek. “Who knows? Perhaps he did. He had plenty of time to look
back and regret.” He shook his head. “But that doesn’t matter now. All that’s
in the past. Put it behind you. Look ahead.” He smiled. “You have me, if that’s
any compensation.”

She
smiled through her tears. “You’re a good man. Joe, I love you so much.”

He
held her.

She
looked up at him. “And Friday. I’ve spent so much time hating him... I don’t
think I could stop, just like that. And he is the brother of the man who—”

“You
can’t hold him responsible for his brother’s crimes, Sissy.”

She
murmured, “I know that, Joe.”

“You
have to try to stop feeling the hate, okay? Later, when all this is over, tell
him what happened. Apologise.” He smiled, to forestall her protests. “You’ll feel
better if you do, okay?”

She
shook her head, her gaze distant. “I don’t know, Joe. I need to think about
it,” she said in a small voice.

He
hugged her to him and kissed the top of her head.

A
little later she said, “Tell me what happened in Africa, Joe, when Friday’s
brother was shot...”

They
rode on, and he told her Olembe’s story from the beginning. She listened in
silence, reliving the death of the man she had hated for so long.

Hendry
held her and watched an armada of sails waft through the clear blue sky.

Later,
she rooted about in the pouch of her atmosphere suit and pulled out a handful
of squashed berries. “I saved these for a rainy day,” she said quietly.
“They’re... well, I don’t really know what they are, but they knock you out,
put you under.” She smiled at him. “I could do with that right now.”

Hendry
looked back in the direction they had come. The coastline had vanished. He
twisted around and stared through the blurred lens of the membrane. The sea
stretched ahead for as far as the eye could see. He wondered how much longer
the journey might last.

“Try
some?” Kaluchek asked, proffering the berries.

He
smiled and nodded, and allowed her to feed him the sweet mush. She ate the
rest, and leaned against his chest, and minutes later Hendry felt himself
drifting off, his thoughts becoming fuzzy, his body relaxing.

In
his dreams he was with Chrissie, except that she was not Chrissie but Sissy...
At least, some of the time she was Chrissie, at others she was his small Inuit
lover. Their identities morphed, segueing from one to the other. Then, as he
dreamed that he was making love to the strange hybrid, he was pierced by a
shaft of guilt that brought him awake, crying out loud.

He
sat up, trying to pull himself away from the membrane, then recalled where he
was and slumped back. Sissy was curled beside him, sleeping. He felt the
residuum of the guilt sluice from his consciousness, and wondered why he was
torturing himself like this. He smiled; the answer was obvious, really. He had
never really got over the guilt at Su’s leaving him. He’d told himself that it
had been his fault she had left, depriving Chrissie of a mother. Now Chrissie
was dead and he was in love with someone very much like her, and by extension
someone very much like her mother.

He
shut off that line of reasoning and watched Carrelli climb carefully up the
concave inner surface of the membrane to join them. Ehrin came too, nestling
beside the Italian and watching her with its large eyes.

“You’ve
been asleep for hours, Joe.”

He
indicated the berry juice staining his fingers. “Thanks to Sissy.”

“We’ve
almost crossed the ocean.”

He
turned and peered through the membrane. Far below he made out the long gentle
curve of a shoreline, surprisingly normal after the tendrilled coast they had
left. This one was a stretch of what might have been golden sand, backed by
undulating green plains and, further inland, foothills rising gradually to a
distant mountain range.

“Look,”
Carrelli said, indicating the sky all around them.

Where
before there had been perhaps twenty sails floating across the ocean, now the
air was filled with them. Hendry counted fifty before giving up. The closest
was perhaps a dozen metres from their own sail, a vast lens carrying its cargo
of tiny Ho-lah-lee; others sailed high on either hand, hundreds of them
diminishing in perspective to tiny silver parings.

“Convergence,”
Carrelli said. “We can’t be far from the place of pilgrimage, wherever the
Builders—or the Guardians—make their base.”

Beside
him, Kaluchek stirred to wakefulness. Hendry relayed what Carrelli had said.
She stretched and yawned. “I hope we won’t be disappointed,” she said. “I mean,
what if the Builders aren’t at home, or don’t want to see us?”

Carrelli
smiled. “I think the very sight of where they dwell will be amazing enough,
even if we don’t find out anything about them.” She gestured at the converging
sails. “It’s enough of an attraction to bring the Ho-lah-lee in their
thousands, at any rate.”

They
were passing over the coastline now. Far below he could see the gentle lap of
the ocean on the golden sands, for all the world like something from a
terrestrial holovision programme.

Not
so familiar, though, were the herds of animals grazing on the foreshore. They
were long-legged and spindly, with tiny heads bearing a disproportionate array
of ramified antlers.

Hendry
looked ahead, through the membrane, for any sight of where the Builders might
reside. The hills rolled on for what seemed like hundreds of kilometres, with
not an artificial construction in sight.

Ehrin
touched Carrelli’s sleeve and spoke. She replied. For ten minutes they
exchanged mysterious words in the abrupt, barking language. Hendry watched
their faces for any sign of a familiar expression, but even Carrelli betrayed
no emotion as she spoke, and Ehrin’s furred snout and massive eyes conveyed
nothing.

At
last Carrelli turned to Hendry and Kaluchek and said, “Ehrin wants to bring the
truth of the helix to his people. He says the Church has ruled with lies and
cruelty for too long. He would like our help in bringing change to his world.”

Kaluchek
smiled. “How would we do that?”

Carrelli
shrugged. “Perhaps it’s not our place to get involved in the political struggle
of other races. I don’t know. We’d have to discuss that when the colony is set
up, the legislature functioning.”

“Perhaps
tell him that we are all for the dissemination of the truth, and against the
rule of tyranny,” Hendry said, “and leave it at that.”

Carrelli
nodded. “I’ll give him hope,” she said, “without definite promises.”

Hendry
watched her relay the words to Ehrin, and wondered if the politicking had begun
already, the mealy-mouthed compromises and half-truths that had been part of
human interaction since time immemorial.

“Am
I imagining it,” Kaluchek said a short time later, “or are we losing height?”

Hendry
gazed down. The land was closer now. The grazing animals, spooked by the
arrival of the sails, started nervously and set off across the plain, the herd
moving as one with the gestalt empathy of a shoal of fish.

Hendry
turned and stared into the distance, and then saw it.

It
stood in the distance on a plateau of land in the shadow of the mountain range,
a towering ziggurat of perhaps fifty levels, its baroque bronze surface
refulgent in the morning sun.

The
sight of it filled his throat with an odd, choking emotion.

There
could be no mistaking that this was their destination: all around the massed
sails were converging, the leading sails settling to earth before the edifice,
the Ho-lah-lee dismounting and prostrating themselves in euphoria at the climax
of their pilgrimage.

Kaluchek
gripped his arm. “Joe, Joe... isn’t it beautiful?”

Hendry
wondered why it was so affecting; it was simple, and vast, its rounded
architecture was pleasing to the eye—and all this taken together, along with
the knowledge of what it represented, made it a thing of wonder.

Kaluchek
whispered, “What kind of beings would have made the helix, Joe?”

He
shook his head. He could not imagine them physically—it was almost as if he
dared not imagine the Builders incarnate for fear of being disappointed with
the reality, if or when they revealed themselves. No creatures of flesh and
blood, however impressive, could do justice to the immense achievement of the
helix.

Their
sail swept low over the plain, slowing as it went. To either side, sails came
down and their Ho-lah-lee passengers alighted on the grass, gazing in awe—at
least, that was how Hendry interpreted their goggle-eyed stares—at the towering
immensity of the ziggurat before them.

Their
sail slowed and came to a sedate halt. Hendry eased himself from the membrane’s
embrace and shuffled down the curve, jumping the last two metres to the grass
and turning to assist Kaluchek, Carrelli and Ehrin. Then the sail rose like a
curtain to reveal the bronze magnificence of the ziggurat.

For
long minutes, all they could do was stand and stare in silence.

The
Ho-lah-lee, thousands of them, were filing towards the ziggurat in a slow
procession, heading for an arched entrance in the base block of the edifice and
then passing silently inside.

Kaluchek
took his hand and they began walking.

They
were a hundred metres from the great entrance when Carrelli said, “Do you feel
it, or is it only me?”

Kaluchek
nodded. She put her fist to her lower chest. “Here.”

Hendry
felt it too. It was hard to describe—a kind of euphoria that filled his chest,
a physical sensation like a wall of sound drumming against his diaphragm, only
in silence. Power, he thought; some resonating power that communicated itself
in some way from the Builders of the helix to its lowly inhabitants.

He
wondered if this was how believers might feel in the presence of their god.

He
was eager to see inside, over the heads of the massed Ho-lah-lee. The archway
loomed, the interior shadowy. They came to the threshold, slowing as the press
of aliens created a brief bottleneck, and then they were inside.

Hendry
opened his mouth as he stared. He had had no idea what to expect, and might
have been disappointed if merely told what he would behold when inside the
ziggurat. But the reality was different, and staggering.

They
were in a vast chamber, the greatest space he had ever experienced bounded by
walls, and when he looked up, following the lead of the thousands of Ho-lah-lee
before him, he saw that the rising levels of the ziggurat were hollow, creating
a dizzying, diminishing perspective that seemed to rise to the stratosphere and
beyond, to penetrate the very core of the universe.

But
perhaps more moving still was the great bronze oval that stood in the centre of
the chamber. It was perhaps fifty metres high, a perfect ovoid that throbbed
with silent power; it seemed to thrum and throw at him an ineffable force,
almost forcing him backwards, and yet at the same time drawing him forward in
awe.

Before
them, the Ho-lah-lee parted as if by some silent command, and the humans,
accompanied by Ehrin, stepped towards the effulgent oval of bronze.

Hendry
glanced at Kaluchek, surprised by her expression of mixed wonder and fear,
though realising that these emotions were what he felt, too.

They
came to the foot of the ovoid and paused, and in his heart Hendry knew that
whatever happened now could only be an anticlimax.