Helix Wars (13 page)

“How do you know...?” he began.

She smiled, and said simply, “I calculated from your knowledge of distances. Of course, my estimation is only an approximation.”

He paused, then said, “And what else are you able to read of my thoughts?”

“Your thoughts? Very little. They are still alien to me. But I can discern images, moods.” She turned her hand. “It is inexact, and hard to explain in your language.”

He smiled. “You do very well.”

She returned her attention to the barrel-world. “We are here,” she said, her finger-tips resting on a bluff overlooking a vast plain. “Here, ten kilometres across the plain, is the town of Trahng. In the early hours of the morning, we will leave here and make our way to Trahng.”

“Together? You are coming with me?”

She looked up at him, piercing him with her cobalt eyes. “Of course. This is a journey we must make together.”

He smiled, warmed by the thought.

She continued, “We are going to the coast, to the western sea. There you will take passage on a boat destined for the world of D’rayni. From there, you will be able to contact your people on New Earth, and inform them of what is happening here on Phandra.”

“You have contact with the D’rayni?”

“We have limited trade links. They are more technologically advanced than ourselves, but we trade foodstuffs and woven materials and such like.”

She turned the barrel absently, the world of Phandra spinning beneath her fingers.

After a period of reflection, he said, “Why have the Sporelli invaded Phandra?”

She rose and paced across the room, to a cabinet where she poured a thick brown liquid into two tiny goblets. She returned and passed him one, saying, “Drink this. It will give you strength.”

He raised the glass to his lips and sipped. The liquid was sweet, fruity, and it tingled on his palate.

Calla said, “We are merely an obstacle to be overcome. The Sporelli have no need or desire to quell the Phandran race or occupy our world.”

“In that case?”

She sipped her drink, her tongue-tip showing as she dabbed a bead of liquid from her lower lip. She said softly, “The Sporelli are crossing Phandra in order to reach D’rayni. That world is rich in metals, in other things they can mine from the ground. Their world, Sporell, does not have an abundance of these materials. For their advancement, they must have these things.”

“How do you know this?”

“My people have had contact with them, with their minds.”

“And on their way, the Sporelli raze your villages, kill your people.”

“They are a cruel people, Jeff, or they have cruel leaders; perhaps the latter. Perhaps the average Sporelli is as... humane... as you or I.”

“Maybe. But the ones I saw seemed... vicious.”

Calla went on, “I thought, when the invasion continued, that the Builders might do something to halt the Sporelli. However, minds wiser than mine informed me otherwise: they said that for whatever reasons the Builders would not intervene.”

“When I return,” he said, “I will tell my people what is happening here. Our peacekeeping forces will do all within their powers to halt the Sporelli. The Builders are no longer corporeal, Calla. They live now in a virtual realm.” Her face showed no comprehension, so he rephrased: “They live lives of the spirit, as it were, no longer physical. Also, they no longer communicate with us as they once did, two hundred years ago when we first arrived here. It’s as if we have been left to our own devices to do the best we can.”

He paused, then said, “You knew I was coming, Calla. You said, earlier, that by helping me you would bring peace to your world.”

“The Diviners tell of this. I knew little of my destiny until Diviner Tomar told me that through my actions the times of trouble on Phandra would be ended and the halcyon days would be resumed.”

He smiled, then laughed. “I hope you’re right, Calla.” He considered the thought which had vexed him the night before.

“Tomar is old,” he said. “But I understood that your people live to the age of twenty New Earth years, and you told me that you are twenty years old.”

“And you wonder why I am not as... as manifestly aged as Tomar? Why...” – she traced the fine line of her cheek – “why I do not have fissured skin and sunken eyes?”

He smiled. “You are twenty, old for a Phandran, and yet you appear so young.”

“The male and female of our kind age at different rates,” she said. “That is, the female of the species is... how to explain? ...more physically able until the age of around twenty years... Or ten of our own years. We can conceive, bear children, until we are almost as old as I am. But after that, the decline is rapid.”

He felt something constrict his throat, and he nodded. He stared at her beauty, and wondered how little time the woman before him might have to live.

She said, as if divining the drift of his thoughts, “In one Phandran year, I will move from this phase of existence.”

Her words rocked him, and the sweet liquid that coated his palate tasted suddenly cloying. At last he said, “And you will move on to...?”

She smiled, and he wondered at her sudden utilisation of this very human expression. Days ago, at their first meeting, her face had been a blank slate, as it were, her expressions neutral, indecipherable; now, as if learning from him, she employed smiles and frowns, shrugs and gestures that made communication between much easier.

“I will move on to a realm very much like that one you describe the Builders as inhabiting,” she said.

He was about to say that the Builders now dwelled in a virtual realm of their own technological making, but stopped himself. Who was he to gainsay her beliefs? And, for that matter, how did he know that the Builders’ virtuality was materially based?

Calla drained her goblet, and Ellis found himself hoping that this did not denote an end to their meeting. He said, “You have been a Healer all your adult life?”

She inclined her head. “Since I was three of our years,” she said. “A Healer, a... you would call them counsellors. I have helped others of my kind, both physically and psychologically.”

“And do Healers... mate, Calla? Do you have children?”

She trilled a laugh at this. “Of course not. I chose, at an early age, to devote myself solely to Healing.”

He looked down, at the intricate inlay of the polished table. “And you have never regretted your decision, never felt
alone
?”

She smiled again. “But I am never alone, Jeff! My life is rich beyond your imagining. My contact with my kind surpasses any intimacy you and your kind would understand.”

He felt humbled, then, before the wisdom of this apparent girl-child, who was nothing of the sort, but an elderly, wise member of a race he would be mistaken to assume was anything at all like his own.

She looked up at him. “In the journey ahead, Jeff, you can tell me of your own relationships, yes? You will find that talking will help considerably.”

He nodded, staring into the eyes of this strange alien woman, and he could not help but feel that he was a child in the company of someone incomparably wiser than himself.

“It is late, and you must rest. I will wake you before sunrise, and we will set off for Trahng.” She rose to her feet, and paused before saying, “It will be a journey beset by danger, Jeff Ellis, but I know we will be enriched by the experience.”

She reached out and squeezed his giant’s hand. Dismissed, he left the chamber and made his way back to the Healing Garden.

S
IX
/// T
HE
Y
AHN-
G
ATHERERS

1

F
ROM HIGH ORBIT
, with her magnified viewscreen, Kranda watched the progress of the Sporelli army. They were traversing the world of Phandra from coast to coast, having crossed the intervening ocean from their own world aboard a combination of battleships and fliers. Now, convoys of tanks, troop-carriers and rocket-launchers flying the red and white striped Sporelli flag were perhaps halfway across the world,
en route
to their destination of D’rayni. A vanguard of fliers led the way, while the following military wrought havoc on the innocent population of Phandra, indiscriminately torching towns and villages. From her orbital vantage point, Kranda saw no reason for the Sporelli to be inflicting such punishment: the Phandrans put up no resistance to the invasion. They were a peaceable people with neither the wherewithal nor the inclination to commit violence. They were merely supremely unlucky to occupy the world they did, coming between the Sporelli and their goal, the metal-rich world of D’rayni.

She was tempted, with the weapons she possessed, to mete out a little justice on the invading army, but resisted the urge. There was always the danger that hubris would get the better of her and she’d fall victim to a lucky shot from Sporelli artillery. She could not endanger her duty to Jeff Ellis: saving him was the priority now.

If, that was, Jeff Ellis were still alive.

She instructed her flier to shield itself, then slipped into a lower orbit and overflew the mountains that reminded her so much of her homeworld. In minutes, the serried, iron-grey mountain range was in her wake and she was decelerating over high crimson meadow-land and the curious cloud-headed trees. She allowed the flier to follow the pre-set co-ordinates and came at last to the valley where Jeff Ellis’s shuttle had been brought down.

She hovered over the area, ensuring that it was free of both Phandrans and the invading Sporelli.

The ugly burned-out wreckage of the shuttle still occupied the great furrow it had ploughed through the meadow. Kranda eased her flier down between two cloud trees and cut the engines. She sat for a time, staring out at the mangled wreckage of the human shuttle.

Such ugliness amid such beauty...

She stood and drew her varnika from its peg on the bulkhead. The exo-skeleton hung in her grip like the bones of a filleted primate, a collection of matt black spars and struts which belied its incredible power. She laid it on the deck and stepped into the foot-shaped pads. The effect was instantaneous: it flowed up the back of her legs, up her back and over her head, enclosing her rib-cage and arms in its shackle of spars. She braced herself for the pain of the occipital cut, as the varnika accessed her sensorium. She had only ever worn a varnika once before, in routine training, and this was the bit she least liked: the needle-sharp incision at the base of her skull. It came, taking her breath, and she felt its insidious tendrils crawl through her neural pathways like some alien form of migraine. Then the pain was over and the varnika was part of her – or, perhaps, she was part of the varnika.

She was forever in awe of Builder technology – from the macro, the incredible construct of the Helix itself, to the micro, the various devices the Builders had bequeathed the Engineers and the exo-skeletons that augmented both strength and perceptions to supra-normal degrees.

Mahkans of her acquaintance believed that some essence of the Builders still dwelled in the smartcores of the varnikas, but Kranda didn’t hold with such irrational nonsense. The exo-skeletons were simply a form of technology so far ahead of what her people could conceive that it seemed like magic.

With a simple thought she commanded the varnika to shield itself, then strode to the reflective surface of the bulkhead and stared at where she should have been. All she saw, if she stared hard, was the very vague, fuzzy outline of herself. To the casual observer, not looking for her, she was invisible.

She broke out a pair of weapons from stores, clipped them to the spars of her forearms, and left the flier. She strode towards the wreckage of the shuttle, then stopped and looked back. She saw a grove of cloud-trees, an expanse of red grass... and only if she increased her visual magnification and squinted at where her flier was could she make out its squat shape. She was satisfied that it would be safe from casual observation.

She hurried towards the river where the satellite image had last shown the figure of Jeff Ellis. She exerted little effort – no more than she might if she were strolling – yet the effect was exponential: it was as if she had given her body the command to run. She covered the fifty metres between the cloud-tree and the stream in less than three seconds.

She knelt and examined the silver water of the river, and then the grass on its bank. She made out shallow impressions in the turf, marking – she surmised – where Ellis had dragged himself along. Did this indicate, then, that he had been injured and unable to walk?

She followed the trail. The indentations left the stream and approached a small bush bearing red berries, then moved from there to a shrub of golden fruit. Then the indents became deeper scuff marks, as if for some reason Ellis had propelled himself with more urgency away from the bushes and back towards the stream.

But what had become of the human? Had he pitched himself in the river, hoping to swim downstream away from the wreckage, assuming that sooner or later Sporelli troops would investigate the shuttle they had brought down?

It made sense. It was what she would have done, in his situation.