Helix Wars (40 page)

She would soon – hard though this was to believe – be in the presence of this ruler, this President Horrescu. He would be relying on her to ease his illness, though it was clear from what the officer had said that Sporelli physicians had done all they could.

She was curious as to what kind of man had ordered the invasion of innocent worlds, and the deaths of innocent people, and why he sought to extend his already considerable power. These were concepts alien to her way of thinking. Her people ruled by committee, with every villager having a voice as loud as an Elder; and her people eschewed violence, knowing that it brought about suffering both to the victim and to the perpetrator.

Perhaps she would have the opportunity to tell President Horrescu this simple fact?

The flier tipped. Through the window she saw a grey town come into view – but a town the like of which she had never seen before. It was vast, and consisted of a hundred mountains that had had their summits planed off and their sides made vertical so that they resembled so many rectangular blocks marching off into the distance. It was not, she thought, natural, and in all her life she had never set eyes on anything as ugly.

The flier came down in a yard surrounded by a high wall. The flier’s door was dragged open by a soldier and her guards gestured for her to climb out. The drop was too far for her to negotiate, so the soldier took her arm in a painful grip and pulled her down.

She was marched quickly across the yard, through freezing air, towards a door in a nondescript building like all the others she had seen.

She was hurried along a corridor, which did have the advantage of being slightly warmer than outside, and into a cell.

A table stood in the middle of the room, with a chair on one side of it and two on the other. The guard pushed her towards the big chair. When she sat, her feet dangled a hand’s span above the floor.

Two officers entered the room and sat down opposite her. The door closed with a reverberating clang.

She wondered what was happening now; why she was here, and not ministering to the needs of the president.

The officer to her right spoke in halting Phandran, “You were approached by a Mahkan on D’rayni as you were about to leave Erkeles base. What did the Mahkan want with you?”

She stared at the blue-faced Sporelli. “A Mahkan?”

“A Mahkan! An engineer.”

She gestured that she did not know what he was talking about. “A Mahkan. I know of no Mahkan. I have never seen a Mahkan in my life.”

The Sporelli consulted a screen. “And on Phandra you were in the company of the renegade human.” He stared at her, awaiting her reaction.

She said, “And before that I encountered the Sporelli, and saw their handiwork in the dead and injured you left behind you all across my world.”

The Sporelli’s gaze was like ice. “What did the Mahkan want with you, Phandran? Was he, too, seeking the human?”

Calla gestured again. “I cannot guess the motivations of those who seek me,” she said. “Perhaps, like you, they have a sick leader they would like me to assist?”

She considered the line rather humorous, but the Sporelli did not smile.

The translator turned to the second officer and spoke at length – recounting the outcome of their abortive dialogue?

At last the translator turned to her and said, “Have you heard of a device called a guran?”

“A musical instrument?” she ventured.

“A guran reads a subject’s mind,” he went on. “It elicits the truth, eventually. Sadly, it also leaves the subject dead.”

She considered his words, then said evenly, “In that case, I would be of little use to your president, sir.”

The two Sporelli conferred again, and she hoped that they considered the president’s health more important than learning why she had been approached by the ‘Mahkan’ on D’rayni.

The Sporelli soldiers stood abruptly and left the cell, snapping orders to the guards outside. They entered, took her arms and escorted her from the cell, back down the corridor and outside. This time, a bulbous black ground vehicle awaited her, and she was bundled into the rear seat. The guards joined her, one on each side, and the car started up and drove at speed from the compound.

They passed through streets devoid of natural life: no trees, no birds, no people – or very few of the latter. Once or twice she saw scurrying figures, dressed in colourless garb, bent against the intense cold.

She peered ahead and saw, rearing into the cold grey sky, a great black spike pierced with lighted windows.

The car passed through a high gate in the wall surrounding the vast tower, approached the building and then, miraculously, dipped underground without losing speed. The car braked and the guards bundled her out, hurrying her through a pair of sliding doors and into a tiny room. They stood still for a minute, their inactivity bewildering Calla, and then the door slid open again. They stepped out and, amazingly, they were no longer in the darkened underground chamber.

The guards tightened their grip on her upper arm and whisked her along a corridor and into a room bustling with men and women in black, blue and grey uniforms.

A silence descended as everyone turned to look at her. Someone spoke, and another laughed in response. A woman approached her with a circle of silver metal and passed it up and down in front of Calla’s torso, and another woman moved her hands over her body, patting briskly as if in search of something. This woman spoke to a man, who turned and nodded towards another man who opened the door at the far end of the room.

Through it, Calla made out a large chamber whose far wall was one tall window which looked out over the grey city. The little room, then, must have somehow carried her
up
inside the tower.

Seated on a wheeled chair in the middle of the room, facing the open door, was a man so ancient that Calla doubted he could still be alive.

The guards gripped her arms and propelled her through the door and into the presence of President Horrescu.

3

S
O THIS WAS
the man, the great leader, who had sent his troops into Phandra and D’rayni, troops who had gone willingly with the belief that they were liberating an oppressed people and bringing them a better life.

This was the man responsible for the deaths of thousands.

Calla stared at him, and all she could feel in her heart was pity.

She felt pity because he was so deluded that he thought the attainment of power was an achievement in itself; and she felt pity because he was in pain and on the verge of death.

Calla looked at President Horrescu, her instinctive probe sliding off his alien mind. She was glad that his mind was shut to her, that she was not privy to his innermost thoughts and emotions.

He reached out, and his thin lips twitched in a feeble smile.

He was thin, but his was not the healthy slightness that comes from exercise and a good diet: his was the emaciation of disease, of some illness that had whittled the flesh from his bones and left him resembling an animated skeleton. He sat stiffly upright, fighting pain; only his bright blue eyes seemed truly alive.

He surprised her by saying in halting Phandran, “Come, child...”

She bridled, remained where she was, and said, “I am not a child. Among my people, I am considered old. In less than one Phandran year, I will be dead.”

His eyes widened in surprise. He gestured with a shaking hand to a semi-circle of couches arranged before the floor-to-ceiling window. “If you would kindly propel me...” She approached his mobile seat and gripped the handles, turning the chair and pushing it towards the window. The president was no weight at all, a bag of feathers.

He gestured for Calla to take a seat, and she perched herself on one of the couches.

“Was I mistaken, or did I hear you say that in one year...?”

She said, “In less than one Phandran year... and I do not know how long that is in Sporell years, I will pass from this life, yes.”

“One Phandran year,” the president informed her, “is a little under two years here on Sporell.”

She inclined her head in understanding.

The president asked, “Do you know how old I am, in Phandran years?”

“I could not guess,” she said. He seemed ancient. Thirty? More?

“I am almost forty Phandran years old,” he said. “Or in our own reckoning, a little under eighty years old.” He gestured, his hand trembling. “Which is old, for my people. But then I have had access to the best Sporelli medicines available.”

Forty years old
, she thought in amazement. He
was
ancient.

“And yet... even the best medicine is sometimes not enough,” he said.

He stared at her, at her unlined face, at her still hands folded together on her lap. “But – Calla, isn’t it? – Calla, tell me: do you not fear death?”

She stared at him. It was clear, from his question, that
he
did.

She said, “What is to fear? I have led a full life, healing others. I have almost come to the end of my allotted time.”

He leaned forward in his carriage, the movement evidently causing him pain; he winced. “Allotted? You
knew
...?”

“Every Phandran lives to the age of approximately ten years,” she said, “unless an accident shortens their span.”

He shook his head. “To know when one will die... Perhaps, so knowing, you come to fear less the end?”

She made a negative gesture with her right hand. “No. We do not fear death at all, for after this life comes Fahlaine. The realm that follows this life, which every Phandran, and for all I know every other being on the Helix, will attain.”

“Even me?”

She stared at him. “Even you. Moral rectitude and goodness are no criteria for admittance into Fahlaine.”

“Then what is?”

“Merely that one has lived. In Fahlaine, so our Elders say, one learns of one’s mistakes in one’s earlier life, and then one repents.”

He said, “That is your belief.”

She inclined her head. “Of course.”

He stared at her. She detected bitterness in his eyes. “I hold no such superstitious belief. There is no glorious afterlife, no Fahlaine. There is only this life.”

Into the silence which developed then, Calla said hesitantly, “Is this, then, why you fear your approaching death so much, President Horrescu?”

He smiled at her presumption, and nodded. “Yes, Calla. That is probably why I fear the thought of my death. My extinction. The termination of everything I have ever known, and an end to all my hopes and dreams and ambitions.”

“For a man who held... holds... ultimate power, that thought must be very hard.” Which is proof, she thought, of the corrupting affect of that power.

He smiled, the gesture appalling on so ravaged a face. “But power brings that which lesser citizens could not dream of,” he said. “I might fear death, and stare it in the eye, but I am in no position, even now, to back down and admit defeat.”

She nodded her understanding. “Which is why you had me brought from D’rayni, so that I might heal you?”

How to begin to tell him that he was beyond even her considerable powers of Healing? She could ease his pain, prolong his life for a little while, but nothing could undo the disease raging within his wasted frame.

“I had you brought here, Calla, to
extend
my life for a little while, not grant me immortality.”

She thought she understood, then, his motivations. “You wish to see the successful end to your campaign on D’rayni? To live long enough to enjoy your great victory?”

He laughed at that. He flung back his head and brayed a hoarse, painful laugh. The effort was punished: he bent double, gasping for breath.

She stood and moved to the president. “Let me...”

She reached out and laid a hand on his chest, easing him back into the carriage. She closed her eyes and concentrated, felt his weak life-force like that of a small animal beneath her palm. She soothed, instilling energy, and worked to ease his pain.

Minutes later his breathing came more easily. He sat up, staring at Calla, then nodded. “Thank you,” he whispered.

She resumed her seat and folded her hands on her lap.

The president leaned forward and fixed her with an intense, unsettling stare. “You think I wish to live to savour the puny victory of my army over the feeble D’rayni? We have almost vanquished the lumpen oafs, taken over their world. I will gain little satisfaction from a campaign won so easily.”

He had changed in an instant, she thought. From a feeble old man on the cusp of death, he had become the person he might have been years ago, a dictator who showed no mercy, whose every command was obeyed by fearful underlings, who would brook no opposition to his grand schemes.

“You will go on,” she said, “to the next world, and the one after that, killing innocents, destroying cities and towns. You will go on and on, from one world to the next. But President Horrescu, even if you had the wherewithal to conquer the likes of the humans and the Mahkan, you will be dead long before that.”