Helix Wars (12 page)

He wondered if the fluid was a sedative, for minutes later he began to feel lethargic. He smiled to himself at the strangeness of this world, then closed his heavy eyes and slept.

A sound awoke him. He sat up. The sun was high above. Birds called in the clearing, and the air pulsed with the drone of insects. The sound that had drawn him from sleep, however, was neither that of birds nor of insects.

He looked to his left, and through a stand of frond trees saw the distant wall of a building, and an archway set into it. Great double doors were in the process of being hauled open, and through the entrance stepped a procession of Phandrans.

Perhaps two dozen slight, robed aliens passed from the castle and crossed the garden. As he watched, they parted, a dozen to each side, and formed what he took to be a guard of honour.

He looked through the arch, and watched as two figures appeared and walked sedately through the honour guard. One was an old man, garbed in a long green robe, hunched over and walking with the aid of a staff, his silver hair threadbare. Beside him was a young girl, perhaps twelve years old, in a red robe. She was slight and elfin-pretty, her face fine-boned as if crafted from delicate china. What struck him most, though, were her cobalt blue eyes, bright and piercing.

Only then did he become aware of other Phandrans on the periphery of the clearing. There were around twenty of these shy, elusive creatures, hiding behind the trees and peeking out at... not him, he realised... but at the advancing duo, the ancient man and the girl-child. It was as if the watchers were awed, entranced.

He recalled, with a stab of sadness, what Abi had told him before the crash-landing: that Phandrans lived on average for only twenty New Earth years, and he realised with incredulity that, for all the disparity of their apparent ages, the girl could not be that much younger than the old man.

The pair stopped at the foot of the bed and stared at him without expression. He recalled something else that Abi had told him – that the Phandrans were empathetic. He wondered if they were able to read his alien thoughts.

At length the pair turned their gaze from him and spoke together in hushed tones, their breath-like words hardly reaching him.

Minutes elapsed before they moved again. The old man turned and hobbled slowly from the garden, taking the honour guard with him. At the door he turned and called out, and as if by magic the circumspect watchers slipped from their hiding places behind the trees and drained in silence from the garden.

Within a minute, when the timber door had closed finally, Ellis and the girl were quite alone.

She approached the side of the bed, drew up a high stool fashioned from polished wood, and seated herself with grace, carefully drawing the folds of her robe around her.

She looked upon him in silence, and Ellis was struck by her ethereal, other-worldly air. More than any of the others, she made him think of an angel.

She sat with her slim hands enfolded together in her lap, the slightest smile on her alien lips.

He said, “I would like to thank you, your people, for what you have done for me. I know you can’t understand my words, but perhaps you can... can somehow
sense
my gratitude.”

The girl appeared deep in thought, staring down at her folded hands. Then she looked up at him.

“We helped you because we are a civilised race, and...” She relapsed into thought again. “...and we could do nothing but help a fellow sentient.”

He smiled, then laughed aloud in amazement. Her words were the softest, slightest emanations of sound imaginable.

“You speak my language!”

Her facial expression did not react as a human’s would; she seemed impassive, dwelling in some inner, cerebral realm. In his current frame of mind, it gave her the calm piety of a saint.

She digested his words, considered them, and at length made her response.

“Some of my people, numbering only in our hundreds, were schooled by the Elders who were schooled by the Elders who tended Olembe. From him we learned your language, and much more. We learned of humans, of the Peacekeepers. We have much for which to be grateful to Olembe.”

He wanted to reach out and take her hand. “The story is still told, on our world, New Earth, of the kindness the Phandrans showed Olembe. Now, we have reason to give thanks again.”

She turned her right hand in a modest gesture. “Thanks are not necessary for actions which, in the circumstances, are the only ones possible.”

“Even so...”

She was silent for a while, regarding him. In normal circumstances, if the person watching him had been human, he might have felt uncomfortable. The odd thing was that, in this girl-child’s watchful presence, he felt entirely at ease.

“You were near death when the yahn-fahrs brought you in. You had eaten gan-fruit, which are poisonous. They saved your life in giving you ker-berries. Without them, you would have died within hours.”

“They also saved my life when they cut me from the pod-tree.”

“They are yahn-fahrs. They harvest the yahn-pods every twelve-day. The meat within is considered a delicacy among some of my kind.” She turned her hand again. “Also, the yahn-pod had burned you. But your skin is healing now.”

He smiled. “Thank you.”

“You arrived here five days ago –”

“Five days?” he said. “Five? I thought I’d been here a day, two at the most.”

“Five days, and our world turns more slowly than your own. So perhaps ten of your days elapsed while you have been in our care. You were unconscious for much of the time, and you were beset by nightmares and hallucinations.”

“I can’t remember anything,” he admitted.

“You are mending well, now. You will live.”

He said, “I am Ellis. Jeff Ellis.”

She inclined her head. “And I am Calla-vahn-villa,” she said. “You may call me Calla. I am a Healer.”

“We call people of your profession doctors,” he said.

Again the calm turn of the right hand. “Healing,” she breathed, “is not my profession. I was born to heal, like my mother and her mother before her. It is a... a calling. It is what I was destined to do. Just as I was destined to minister to your needs.”

He stared at her. “Destined?”

“I was told by Diviner Tomar that I was to help you, and by helping you as my people helped Olembe, many generations ago, my actions will bring peace to Phandra and to the Helix.”

He laughed to himself, then fell silent. Who was he, having benefited from the succour of her people, to call her beliefs superstitious nonsense? He had the urge to question, to gently chide her beliefs. But all he said was, “And how might your helping me bring about that peace, Calla?”

No facial reaction at all, just the turn of her palm. “
That
I am not wise enough, nor privileged enough, to know.”

She slipped from the stool in one fluid, graceful movement, and drew her robes about her.

He reached out, his hand falling short. “One minute. Please, don’t go. Can you stay and talk? There is much I would like to know about you and your people, about what is happening to your world.”

She stared at him; long seconds elapsed. At length she resumed her seat. “You are still ill, and must rest, but I can talk for a little while longer, yes.”

He nodded, smiled, and considered his words. “My people believe that you, the Phandrans, are able to read the minds of others. This is an ability humans do not posses, and find hard to understand.”

She considered his words, staring down at her alabaster hands. She looked up, into his eyes. “We cannot read minds, so much as feel emotions, intentions. This I do not think is the same as reading thoughts, exactly. Certain amongst us are able to sense the moods of others, the dominant emotions. From these we can extrapolate intent.”

He paused, then asked, “And are you able to do this with members of an alien species?”

Her cobalt eyes fixed him with an unreadable expression. “Your emotions, moods, are there, like fish in a river... observable. However, you are alien, you are formed by influences I have no hope of understanding. So many of your moods and emotions are... are fish unidentifiable to me.” Her lips twitched in what might have been a smile.

“Many of my emotions? But not all?”

She considered his words. “I can understand your pain, your grief. But your other emotions – these will take more time for me to understand, Jeff Ellis.”

He was cheered, then, by something inherent in her words: that they would have more time together.

She made to leave again. She slipped from the stool and gathered her robes. “Now sleep. You are tired, and you grieve for your colleague, the woman named Abi.”

“Abi...” he said, wondering how she had learned her name. “And her remains?”

“My people have taken the bodies of your colleagues and interred them with respect.”

He stared at her as she turned and sedately walked away.

“One more thing,” he called after her.

She stopped and turned to face him.

“How old are you?” he asked.

She considered her reply, and, when it came, he was shocked. “I am almost twenty of your years,” she said, and swept from the clearing.

Twenty, he thought when she had gone.
Twenty
...

But how could that be? If her kind lived only to be twenty, and the old man who had accompanied her was approaching the end of his life... then Calla, at twenty, must be at the end of her allotted span, too?

But how could that be, when she had the appearance of a girl barely out of childhood?

4

H
E HEALED QUICKLY
over the course of the next few days.

Phandra turned slowly on its lateral axis, so that a day lasted for approximately two New Earth days. It was a regime to which his body clock could not adjust, and he soon found himself out of synch with the phases of night and day, sleeping during the daylight hours and often awake through the long hours of darkness – though the night was never fully dark in the Healing Garden. Many of the trees bore fruit that glowed, and floating insects carried their own luminescent night-lamps.

Calla attended to him three or four times a day, and often during the night. She changed the strange amber dressing on his chest and leg twice a day, simply laying a hand on the shell-like carapace. At her touch it flowed from his body, and from an amphora she poured on more of the caramel-like liquid. It flowed over his chest and leg and solidified rapidly as Calla shaped it with her tiny hands.

He asked her what it was called one morning, and she said a word in her own language which he did not catch, and went on to say that in its own way it was sentient, and that she could communicate with it. Shortly after, Ellis slept, smiling in wonderment at his situation.

The next time he awoke, Calla informed him that he should leave the bed and walk with her.

She helped him upright, and he swung from the bed and took a tentative step, expecting to feel pain in his leg and chest. To his surprise he experienced neither. He felt fully healed, renewed, and laughed aloud at the transformation.

“For one day and one night, Jeff,” Calla informed him as they strolled around the garden, “you will eat well and exercise, in preparation for the journey ahead.”

He stopped walking and looked at her. “The journey?”

She looked up at him. “Come,” she said, and led him from the garden, through the arched doorway and into the castle.

They passed down a long corridor furnished with rugs and carvings of Phandran animals, to a room positioned in the façade of the castle. “This is my chamber, Jeff.”

The room was long and low, and he had to stoop to avoid the thick timber beams that supported the ceiling. Sunlight flooded in through an arched window at the far end of the room, its dusty light illuminating a cosy area of tapestries and rugs and old sofas.

He moved to the window and stared out, drawing a breath in wonder. They were so high up that a cart, making its way around the switchback path he’d come up days ago, looked like a tiny beetle. Beyond, a vast plain of crimson grassland stretched for as far as the eye could see, with mountains on either side diminishing in perspective. The plain was dotted with gossamer-tree forests, giving the scene an ethereal quality, and quicksilver rivers threaded the wide valley beneath the setting sun.

“Jeff, here,” she called from behind him.

She was sitting at a small table, poring over what looked like a barrel mounted on gimbals. He joined her, sitting on the floor beside the table, and saw that the barrel was the representation of her world.

She turned it, and mountains and valleys, great plateaus and lakes, passed beneath her childlike fingers.

She stopped the barrel and pointed. “This, here, is the western range, or the Mountains of Haedra as we know them.” She pointed to the western extremity of the mountain range, where it petered out into a vast plain, or rather a plateau, still high above the level of the sea. “We are here, at the Retreat of Verlaine, perhaps a thousand...” She paused to translate the distance into a measurement he would comprehend. “Perhaps six hundred of your kilometres from the sea.”