Parallax View (20 page)

Abbott slipped once more into unconsciousness.

He came awake a while later, to horror.

He was no longer riding on the alien’s back. He was propped against the bole of a tree. The Kryte was squatting a couple of metres away, eating. Abbott stared with revulsion. The alien raised a ration canister to its face, opened its mouth. What looked like two tongues emerged, elongated and tentacular, and snatched a nutrient bar.

All the while, the alien’s massive eyes watched Abbott.

He moaned and looked down, and saw the stump of his leg. A colony of scarlet fungi had grown over the n-gel seal.

He looked up and said, “How long?”

The Kryte lowered the ration canister. “One day, human reckoning.”

“One day? We’ve been in this hell-hole one day?” Which meant, what? That he had another four, five days before the planet’s poisons killed him?

Then he looked down and saw his right hand. The palm was scaled with scarlet mould. He tried to wipe it off down the front of his tunic. It stung, and he received the impression that he’d only succeeded in embedding whatever it was further into his flesh.

Still squatting, the alien moved eye-blink fast and was before him, proffering a flask of water and a nutrient bar. “Eat. Drink.”

Abbott grabbed the flask. “Compassion?” he said, sarcastic.

The alien blinked at him. “Compassion?”

“A human concept. You wouldn’t have the ability to understand. The concern for others based on the understanding of the other’s humanity. A love for one’s fellow human beings.”

“Compassion,” the alien repeated, as if checking the word for taste. “I understand. A love for one’s fellow human beings, excluding all others. A limited, conditional empathy.”

“For God’s creatures–” Abbott began.

The alien stood quickly, exclaiming, “God!” and walked on quick legs to the edge of the clearing, staring out through serried boles into the jungle gloaming.

Abbott ate and drank, and felt the planet’s inimical spores slide down with the food, infecting him.

A mat of fibrous vegetation covered the ground. As Abbott stared at it, he noticed movement, a squirming mass of tendrils that comprised the vegetation. The surrounding trees were things from nightmare, conforming to the basic structure of Terran trees only in so much as they had boles and branches. They were the colour of old blood, and teemed with parasites that gave their surface a chaotic, unsettling appearance.

Things moved through the air, insects skulling with huge diaphanous wings like oars; bubbles drifted, blood-red and dripping something rank.

Abbott stared at the Kryte. “For God’s creatures,” he went on to himself. “Not for the Kryte, the agents of the Devil.” He closed his eyes, his thoughts confused. But all things were God’s creations, set down in the universe as part of some vast enigmatic scheme...

He should try to understand the Kryte; that, after all, was what he had told Travers. Try not to stereotype them as devils...

His thoughts were chaotic. He opened his eyes. His vision swam. The colours of the jungle cycled like the tesserae of a kaleidoscope. The alien was... doing something across the clearing.

He stared. It was standing. It swept its long hands down its limbs, its arms and legs, as if brushing off water... As he watched, he saw a cascade of coloured liquid fall from the creature’s silver-grey skin as if in slow motion, a beautiful torrent of dripping jewels.

He looked at his own bare arms. His flesh was crawling with a million polychromatic diadems. He screamed and tried to stand, brushing frantically at his arm.

He fell onto his side, his faced pressed into the writhing jungle floor.

The Kryte was beside him in an instant. It righted him, propped him back against the bole. It appeared to see the reason for his panic and reached out. With a cold hand coated with some kind of sebaceous fluid, it gently stroked his flesh, and as it did so the tiny coloured pointillistic bacteria – or such he supposed they were – fell from him to the ground.

The alien blinked at him. “Eat.”

He stared into its beautiful eyes, close to his face. “You need me alive, don’t you?” he laughed. “You have no word for compassion in your language. You need me alive! If I die, then so do you-!” He was ranting.

The Kryte interrupted, “We have words for concepts that you would not understand. Ch’tek, kreer, haar... We do not judge you by your inability to comprehend these terms, or to enact their meaning.”

He felt dizzy. He shouted, “You need me alive!”

The alien stared at him for what seemed like an age. “And you,” it said, “need me alive.”

And so saying it reached out and grabbed him.

Abbott yelled, felt himself swinging through the air. As if he were no weight at all, the alien lodged him on its back and set off immediately into the jungle.

The Kryte seemed indefatigable.

Abbott lost track of the hours. He dozed fitfully, awaking with a start to realise where he was, what had happened. Each time, it was with a shock – as if his memory had been momentarily wiped of preceding events. Then his situation, his predicament, came back in a terrible rush.

The alien was intent on finding Fort Campbell, on destroying it. That could be its only motive. It must have some device concealed about its person, or surgically inserted within it. When they reached Fort Campbell, it would detonate, killing itself and Abbott and God alone knew how many innocent humans...

Abbott clung onto the alien, gripping the material of its body suit and feeling the gelatinous play of strange muscle beneath its flesh. The Kryte took long, stilt-like strides and Abbott jogged along, the motion almost soporific. He watched the jungle pass in a blur, looked up through the canopy a kilometre above and made out the fire that was the sky: the blazing sun, the fiery, hellish ellipses of the Jehovah wormholes.

The Kryte had to rest, he reasoned. It was as vulnerable to St Jerome’s hostile lifeforms as he was. At some point it must slow, sleep, succumb however temporarily to the pollutants in the air.

Then he would take the opportunity to drag himself away. Five, perhaps ten metres was all it would take. All he required was ten, fifteen seconds to propel himself, pull himself on his arms, through the jungle, until he heard behind him the alien’s tortured screams as it deliquesced and died...

And then... How long had they been trekking through the jungle now? Two days?

Despair sluiced through him. Even if he were able to walk, it would take him two days to return to the shuttle... even supposing, he realised, he could find his way back to it through the jungle. One legged, ravaged by hostile spoors, he would have no chance.

The Kryte was correct. He needed the alien alive, just as much as it needed him.

But how could he prevent its attack on Fort Campbell?

He came awake as the creature dropped him.

He hit the floor with a grunt. He was sitting on a raft of writhing tendrils, the sensation beneath him disturbingly sensual. The sky high above, the tatterdemalion patches of it visible between the foliage, was incandescent with fire. The planet had swung in its orbit and turned so that it faced one of the mammoth wormholes. As he stared up at the furnace, he told himself that he could hear its roar.

The Kryte was squatting beside him, drinking. It was breathing hard between swallows of water, as if exhausted. Was it slowly succumbing to the ravages of this hellish world, as well as to the added burden of having to transport Abbott?

They were, he saw now, on the bank of a river – except that it was not water that flowed between the blood-red banks but strands of phosphorescent colour. He stared in wonder at the dancing cables of silver and green and blue as they flowed at speed past where he sat, each strand curling and twisting and enmeshing itself in others to create a vast living, writhing tapestry that beguiled the eye even as it confused the brain.

He looked away, dizzied.

The alien was staring at the river as if mesmerised. It turned to him suddenly. “The river of life. Metaphor. All things different, yet the same. Strands, intertwined, dependant, together. Ah! The poverty of your language...” And it continued to itself in a tongue Abbott found at once utterly alien and yet hauntingly beautiful, as if singing an ode to the mysterious spate before them.

Later, as the alien turned from the river and searched through the ration canister for a nutrient bar, Abbott said, “How far... how far are we from the...” He was exhausted, and yet he had expelled no energy. His system was being invaded, his physical self corrupted by alien spores.

The Kryte said, “One hundred and twenty kilometres, human reckoning. Three days away, human reckoning.”

“And you wish to destroy Fort Campbell? That’s why you...?” He could not continue, drew a deep breath to fill his gasping lungs.

The Kryte blinked at him. It passed him the nutrient bar. Without thinking, Abbott took it and ate.

“Destroy Fort Campbell? The human base will learn the truth, soon.”

Abbott mustered a laugh, much as it pained him to do so. “The truth? And what might that be?”

The alien regarded him. “You will find out in time, Abbott.”

In an instant the Kryte stood, reached out, and swung him onto its back. It waded into the polychromatic river, and Abbott felt something effervesce around his right ankle, a sensation that burned his flesh one second and then numbed it the next.

Only later, close to sleep, did Abbott realise that the Kryte had spoken his name... and he wondered how it had known who he was.

The truth?

He lay his cheek against the alien’s back. The truth. The Kryte could only be alluding to the eventual overthrow of Fort Campbell. So what was its mission here, its duty? Was it some kind of guide, to signal in others of its kind for the killing strike?

He looked about him from his elevated perch. He was taken by a great enervating lassitude. His skin crawled with multi-coloured diadems, which from time to time the Kryte reached up and swept away. His throat, sore a day ago with God knew what pathogens, was numb now – as was the rest of his body. The sensation was not unpleasant. He seemed cocooned in something that retarded his tactile sensations... and his senses... they too were affected. His hearing seemed slowed, so that sounds came to him slurred, late, seconds after he should by rights have heard them. A flying beast, like some kind of angry bonsai dragon, swung by, followed three seconds later by the sound of its multiple wings.

And his sight... Oh, by all that was wondrous in Creation! The world sparkled. The colour in everything was enhanced. Trees dazzled him with the dried blood tegument; insects blinded him like sunlit jewels, while overhead the wormholes fulminated like the very portals of hell.

He wondered if he were going mad, and if his brain would ever recover from the psychotropic storm it was undergoing.

The Kryte said, “I too...” It gasped for breath. “The wonder. Colours. Jubilation made physical. We are not going mad, Abbott.”

Abbott laughed, though he did not know why. There was something about the alien’s statement... something strange, not quite right. Then he had it.

How had the Kryte known what he had been thinking?

They had stopped to eat on a spur of rock jutting out over a great step in the land. Down below the plain continued, shrouded in jungle. Abbott had never seen a scene more beautiful in all his life. The expanse of the jungle far below writhed with colour. Above all of it, arching over the horizon, was a wormhole, pulsing light.

He drank, ate ration bars. The alien sat beside him, panting. His own breath came in ragged spasms. He was going to die. He knew that much. He gave thanks that whatever was attacking his body, his mind, was at the same time sparing him the pain.

He said, the words coming only with great effort, “How... how did you know my name, what I was thinking?”

The Kryte turned its liquid blue eyes on him. “Your thoughts,” it said, “sit upon the surface of your being like... like colour upon the surface of... of whatever.”

Abbott laughed. “You mean to say... you’re telepathic, in other words? You can read my thoughts?”

“Some of them. Others... They mystify me.”

Abbott was about to question the Kryte, but it replied before he could marshal the words, “I read your desires, immediate thoughts. Others, more abstract, philosophical, bewilder me. God, for instance.”

“God,” Abbott breathed, staring at the silent vast majesty of the wormhole. The beast was damned by its own words! “You are a Godless race!”

Squatting, its knees about its face, the alien turned to him and said, “There is... there is no God, Abbott. No saviour, no creator, no supreme arbiter.”

“The sinner knows not whereof he speaks,” Abbott began. Did the Kryte deserve God’s mercy, he wondered? Did they warrant salvation? He realised that he was crying, sobbing.

He said, “You killed my family, my wife, my son, five thousand innocent human beings on New Hampton...as well as hundreds of thousands of others across the Expansion.”

The Kryte turned to Abbott and staggered him by saying, “And for that we are truly sorry.”

And before Abbott had time to register shock, or to frame an apposite question, the alien surged to its feet and swept him onto its back.

Then it stepped over the side of the escarpment, and Abbott screamed as he anticipated the hundred foot drop.

There was no drop.

The alien seemed to be walking down the face of the escarpment, as if by magic. Only when Abbott looked behind him did he see the steps cut into the rock. The significance of the steps in this riotous landscape at first escaped him. His mind was fuddled, his perceptions delayed and with them his cognition. If there were steps... then that must mean that they had been made... and if they had been made... then that meant humans had made them... for humans had a base on St Jerome... So were the steps leading to Fort Campbell?

He laughed, but was unable to say why he was laughing. It seemed ridiculous, he knew, to be riding piggy-back down steps on some hostile planet with a Kryte...

The alien was running now, as if attempting to flee a pursuer. Had the humans at Fort Campbell seen them, and initiated a chase?