Helix Wars (11 page)

A chorus of piping greeted his words, and the oldster gained his attention again. “Zzprell!” he said. “Sharray! Kay!”

And the alien raised a hand to its chest and thumped, then mimed falling backwards and lying still.

Ellis looked around the group and nodded. “Yes, I understand. The Sporelli, they invaded Phandra, killing many of your people.” He made what he hoped was a sympathetic face. “I’m sorry. Of course you can’t understand.” He shook his head. “There’s nothing much I can say, other than once the Peacekeepers find out...” He stopped there and looked around at their staring, childlike faces, and had an idea.

He pointed to the lower curved line. “Fahn’ra,” he said. He reached out and drew more barrel-shaped worlds on the lower curve, and indicated the sixth one along from Phandra. “New Earth.”

Now for the tricky bit. With his finger he traced the descent of an object, and said, “Olembe.”

He recalled the other alien’s hand gesture to imitate a shuttle. He flattened his hand and planed it from New Earth to Phandra. He crashed his hand upon Phandra and said, “Olembe.”

He pointed to himself. “Ellis. Olembe.” He pointed to world six along from Phandra. “New Earth.”

He looked around the group. To his dismay, they looked uncomprehending.

“Ellis,” he said, putting his hand to his chest. “Olembe. New Earth. We are human.”

To his surprise, this had a galvanising effect on the group. They sat up, staring at each other, and a rapid chatter broke out.

“Whoma, whoma!” said the oldster.

Another said, “Olmb!” And planed his hand through the air, crashing it into the sea next to Phandra.

They turned to him and said, in concert, “Whoma! Olmb!”

“Olmb, yes.
Olembe
. He was one of the First Four. The first humans to set foot on the Helix. That was two hundred years ago. They went through much hardship, much suffering. They were six to begin with, but two of their number died when their ship crash-landed. They were on the lowest, ice-bound circuit, and had to make their way up to a more temperate circuit.”

He fell silent, not because he realised the futility of trying to convey these concepts to aliens who didn’t have his language, but because for some reason he found himself choking up, his eyes filling, as he spoke of the exploits of his forbears.

He smiled at the Phandrans. “Anyway, yes. I am human. Olembe was human. And when my people get to know what the Sporell are doing here, we’ll take measures.”

Only when he said this did he wonder what the Peacekeepers might do to halt the advance of the Sporelli. In the one hundred and ninety years that the Peacekeepers had been in existence, never had they had to intervene in a military conflict. They were militarily equipped, had a small army, but it was only ever employed in a monitoring capacity. The humans, along with most every other race on the Helix, lived by pacific ideals. How to confront an army bent on a flagrant invasion of a peaceful neighbouring world, bent on death and destruction?

The aliens were packing up their bowls preparatory to resuming the journey. The oldster pointed to the cart and Ellis climbed to his feet.

He had – notwithstanding his injuries – been well until that point. But as soon as he stood, his head swirled, his vision blurred, and he felt a sickening nausea rise in his chest. It was like, he thought later, having consumed too much alcohol and realising the fact only when attempting to stand.

His stomach clenched in pain. He fell to his knees and vomited, regurgitating first all the bread and paste the Phandrans had served him, and then chunks of the golden fruit he’d eaten much earlier.

He braced himself on all fours, head hanging, drenched in sweat, as a glorious relief passed through him. He laughed and tried to say that he rather thought the bread and paste hadn’t agreed... Then he was retching again, and brought up more golden-apple pulp.

He spat, feeling better, and crawled away from the spreading pool of vomit. He sat up, taking deep breaths and hoping the sickness was over.

He smiled an apology to the alien, but the Phandra was paying him no heed.

Instead, he was crouching over the slick of vomit, staring at it with an odd intensity. He looked up, at another Phandran, and barked urgently, “Gan – yer-ahn! Gan!”

As Ellis stared, baffled, the scar-faced alien took off and raced into the forest. The others conferred in hurried lowered tones, occasionally looking back at Ellis.

A minute later the Phandran returned, holding something, and passed it to the oldster.

Ellis stared at the golden fruit as the oldster held it out to him. The alien pointed to his own mouth in obvious enquiry.
“Did you eat a fruit like this?”

Ellis nodded.

A cry went up from one of the aliens, and another gripped the arm of its mate.

Oh, hell,
Ellis thought,
what have I done?

The oldster snapped something at the scarred alien, who raced back into the forest. The oldster took Ellis’s arm and escorted him to the cart. He gestured for Ellis to lie down, and Ellis climbed back onto the flat-bed. Feeling more than anxious, he lay back. He wanted to tell the Phandrans that he was feeling fine now... but his little knowledge of poisonous plants was enough to tell him that there was often a period of wellbeing following the initial sickness.

The scar-faced alien hurried back clutching, Ellis saw with wry amusement, a handful of the bitter pink berries he’d first discarded as possibly harmful.

The oldster passed them to Ellis and gestured that he should eat them.

Obviously an antidote, he thought as he crammed the berries into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. The taste was truly terrible, bitter and dry, and it was all he could do to swallow them quickly and stop himself from throwing them up immediately.

The oldster leaned over him, a hand on his shoulder, and mouthed a string of sibilant, reassuring words. The Phandran pulled an empty pod skin over Ellis, leaving only his face uncovered.

Seconds later the cart juddered, lurched, and they were under way again.

Ellis lay on his back, staring at the succession of high wispy clouds interspersed with the foliage of the gossamer trees with their pendent pods bearing who knew what gruesome cargo. He smiled as he realised how lucky he had been that the aliens had happened along when they did.

They had, he realised, saved his life twice over now.

If, of course, the pink berries had done their job of counteracting the poison of the golden-apples.

As the cart juddered along, he turned his thoughts to wondering how he might escape from Phandra.

Even assuming the shuttle’s emergency beacon was working and had managed to relay the fact of the crash-landing to the authorities back on New Earth, they would have to mount an expedition in order to locate him. Which, given the Sporelli invasion, might be no easy task.

In effect, he was stranded on the world for the indefinite future.

Treading, he thought, in the steps of my illustrious forbear.

It had ended happily for Olembe, he recalled. On his return to New Earth he had written about his adventures and lived to a ripe old age in a villa beside the eastern sea.

Which, Ellis thought as the cart swayed from side to side and a clenching pain gripped his stomach again, would suit me just fine.

He shot up into a sitting position and vomited over the side of the flat-bed, a mess of golden apple and pink berries. He was surprised that he had any more of the poisonous apples inside him. How many had he eaten? Three, four? Had they expanded in his gut?

This time, following the sickness, there was no accompanying relief from the nausea. Worse, his head thumped with a sharp, insistent migraine.

He lay back, groaning.

The oldster was at his side, staring down at him. He spoke, a string of soft, feathery words, but Ellis could only smile and shake his head and clutch the alien’s tiny, bird-boned hand.

Seconds later pain lanced through his gut and throbbed within his skull. He wanted to void the toxins from his system, but it appeared that he had ejected as much of the golden apple as was coming out. He dry-retched, weeping at the pain and gripping the oldster’s hand.

Some time later the old Phandran, accompanied by another, dragged Ellis into a sitting position and made him eat more of the bitter pink berries, helped down this time with a draft of ice-cold water which made him feel slightly better.

He slept, and when he came to his senses, much later, he saw that the sun was sinking behind the distant mountains.

He was experiencing another period of remission, as he felt not quite as bad as earlier. Still at death’s door – he managed to smile at the thought – but not quite over the threshold.

Two Phandrans squatted beside him, pointing at something. He followed the direction of their gestures and wondered if what he saw, high up on the mountain-side, was a hallucination.

Fairy towers, belvederes with slit windows, a zigzag approach road up the precipitous incline. It looked like something from a fantasy holo-drama, its make-believe splendour enhanced by the tangerine and silver lamination of the setting sun.

He smiled. “Journey’s end?” he asked.

The oldster spoke, softly.

“Don’t understand a word,” he said feebly, “but thank you anyway. Without you... without...”

He passed out again.

3

H
E HAD ONLY
a partial memory of what happened over the course of the next few hours.

He recalled fragments of the climb to the castle, the zigzag track with one particular steep drop that fell for five hundred metres as the cart turned a sharp corner. He recalled the Phandrans shouting to each other and pointing. He had roused himself from his stupor long enough to look at what had excited them: far away, kilometres across a flat valley bottom, he made out the tiny vehicles of the invading army; he heard the retort of their weapons and, seconds later, saw small puffs of smoke as villages or towns were destroyed.

He’d passed out again, and some time later awoke to see the façade of the castle rearing up before the minuscule cart. As he lay on his back, staring into the air, his view of the wall was almost vertiginous. The edifice had been chiselled from the very face of the cliff itself, and seemed to rise forever, ending in a succession of towers with, high above in the twilight, the loop of the Helix’s third or fifth circuit – he was unable to tell which – catching the last light of the sun.

Then they were rattling over a stone road and entering a vast airy space the size of a cathedral which was merely the entrance hall to this magnificent edifice.

After that his memory misfired. He had sequential recollections of being lifted gently from the cart, of his saviours coming to him one after the other and mouthing soft words of farewell before he was carried rapidly off. He recalled glimpses of pink marbled corridors, helical stairways, and long cloisters. But interspersed with these images of the castle’s interior, he recalled scattered glimpses of paradisiacal gardens and flamboyant flowers, of darting birds and droning insects, and periods where he was left by himself in these strange places before being borne away again. At one point he was in a narrow chamber, on a hard stone bench, surrounded by a dozen Phandrans in red and green robes who stared down at him while murmuring amongst themselves.

He passed out, and when he came to his senses he was once again outside.

The nausea had passed, thankfully. He no longer felt the urge to vomit, and the headaches had passed too. As if to compensate for his partial recovery, he could feel an increased pain in his ribs and right leg.

He was propped up in a bed, and he was indeed in a garden. He was alone in a clearing of short crimson grass fringed by tall, slender trees with drooping frond-like branches. Flowers of every shape and colour grew amid the trees, and the air was filled with birdsong. He stared up into the air, looking for the next circuit of the Helix. He was on the roof of the castle.

A silver bird darted towards him and inserted its long curved beak into a tangerine trumpet bloom growing nearby. It hovered with the aid of two pairs of wings, and Ellis could only stare at it in amazement.

He looked down at his body for the first time since waking. He was naked; his flightsuit had been removed, and something placed over his ribs – not so much a bandage as an amber substance which felt wet on his chest and yet glistened like shell, which nevertheless allowed his chest to rise and fall with every breath. His right leg was similarly encased. The flesh of his arms and legs was patched with ugly red sores, and he wondered if these were the result of the pod’s acidic digestive juices.

Across his loins – suggesting that modesty was not solely a human affectation – a length of white material had been placed.

He considered the blue aliens, wondering why they had invaded this peaceful world, and if the authorities back on New Earth were aware of the violation.

He returned his attention to the bird. It had supped its fill of the bloom, and he expected it to fly off to the next one. Instead, and before he could react, it darted towards him, slipped its beak between his lips, and squirted honeyed fluid into his mouth. He had no choice but to swallow, shocked, and watched as the bird darted off and vanished into the trees.