Parallax View (4 page)

And yet, while the Gargoyles danced attendance to the human’s need for sustenance, in all other respects they seemed to ignore the team.

It was this disparity that was so eerie.

Corrie smiled to herself, pleased that she had managed to work out something so complex. She knew why, though. It was sunset, hours since they had last been fed, and the mind-crippling effects of the fruit were wearing off.

She reached out, touched the cold, hard skin of the closest alien. It turned, suddenly, and stared at her with its ember-like eyes.

She controlled her breathing. Her heart gave a panicky little flutter. “Thank you,” she said. Until this moment, she hadn’t understood that the complex array of emotions she felt towards the Gargoyles included gratitude, but she realised that if not for their succour she could well be dead by now.

The thing stared at her, or past her, unmoving. She raised a hand to her mouth, mimicked eating. “For the food. Thank you.”

Without warning, the Gargoyle twisted, from the head down, in a single, flowing movement, until it stood with its back to her, its head angled downwards. Corrie had tried to communicate with the Gargoyles before, but had never got through. The beings didn’t seem to recognise that her sounds and gestures were an attempt to convey information. She wondered, as she had before, if an individual Gargoyle had the capacity to reason through such ideas. So much of their behaviour appeared ritualised, instinctive even. They clearly communicated with each other, but then so too do honey bees and chimps. The aliens showed no sign of curiosity about the humans in their charge, made no effort to communicate other than to ensure that the humans ate. They were highly organised, but in the week or so since first contact Corrie had seen little in the life of the settlement that evidenced culture or society. Were the Gargoyles even sentient at all, she wondered?

She turned at a sound behind her. A dozen Gargoyles were emerging from the caves in the face of the limestone bluff. They almost ran, leaning forwards, on their double-kneed legs, carrying fruit towards the humans’ cave.

Corrie felt a finger in her back, prodding her towards the cave. She obeyed, followed the other Gargoyles inside, and returned to her cell.

This time, though, when a Gargoyle approached and handed her one of the small purple dopefruit, she raised it to her mouth and mimed the act of eating. Satisfied, the alien departed. She looked around the cave. Her colleagues were devouring the fruit, rapt expressions on their bloated faces.

Corrie lay back, already the act of thinking no longer an impossible labour. She considered the events of the last few days, then remembered her decal and raised her hand. In the failing light of the cave, she made out the illuminated numerals. They still had another 94 days to wait until the arrival of the
Darwinian
.

The next day, Corrie discovered that she was bleeding.

She awoke suddenly from vivid dreams of the firestorm and its aftermath. She sat up and stared around the cave. She no longer felt groggy and distanced, at one remove from the reality around her. She could see clearly and her mind was sharp and alert.

The sound of the Gargoyles, entering the cave on their morning rounds, had awoken her. She watched the aliens as they filed through the farthest entrance and approached Rachel, Imran and the others. She counted twelve Gargoyles, and this time as she watched them she noted the stylised, ritualistic basis of the feeding ceremony. Before, no doubt, she had been too out of it to notice.

Now each alien approached its designated human, made a quick, complicated gesture in the air, and proffered the fruit. Corrie watched Rachel reach out and grab the small, green orb, and stuff it into her mouth.

One by one the humans were fed, and before the Gargoyle bearing her own fruit approached, Corrie knew that again she would simulate the act of eating.

But this time the Gargoyle turned away, before proffering her fruit, and handed it instead to Jake in the neighbouring cell. While the others ate, Corrie sat upright and experienced the irrational feeling of being excluded. Within minutes, the rest of her team had eaten their fill and were sleeping again.

She wondered if the Gargoyles were aware that she had feigned eating her dopefruit last night. Was this why they had declined to feed her this morning? She felt a stab of fear that the aliens were one step ahead of her, knew what she was doing. Also, it occurred to her that she would starve without the sustenance of the fruit.

She stood up and moved towards the cave mouth, and it was only then that she became aware of the dried blood caking her inner thighs and staining the crotch of her leggings. At the same time she felt the pain in her belly. For the past few days, she realised, she’d been so drugged up that she had failed to notice the usual pre-menstrual cramps. There was nothing she could do about it now, short of washing in the river and making herself some kind of makeshift breech cloth.

She left the cave and stepped out into the bright orange morning sunlight. The three Gargoyles were stationed between the caves and the bank of the river, maintaining odd, contorted postures and staring into space.

Corrie hurried down to the river, stripped off her leggings and dunked them in the river. She washed them in the thick, oily water as best she could, then laid them on the sand and waded back into the warm water, aware that she had been wallowing in her own excrement for days in that cave. The water of this infernal planet might not have been all the appetising, but it served well enough to cleanse the accumulated filth from her body. She submerged herself, luxuriating in the sensation.

Later, she tore a strip of fabric from her shirt, folded it and stuffed it into the gusset of her dried leggings.

No sooner had she returned to the cave than one of the three Gargoyles followed her in and grasped her arm in a sharp, pincer grip. It pulled her from the cave and pushed her away down the shelving incline. The other two aliens joined it before the cave and the three then adopted the statue-still, twisted postures of old.

Corrie watched them, shivering at the touch of the alien’s fingers on her upper arm. Clearly, then, she was
persona non grata
in the cave. From now on she would be forced to look after herself, while keeping a close eye on the welfare of the rest of her team. Perhaps it would be for the best. If she could survive until the
Darwinian
returned, she could tell the rescue team where to find the others.

She waded across the river and for the next couple of hours searched the margin of the jungle for edible fruits. She found a couple of the crusty pineapple growths, and a few berries she knew to be just about edible.

By the time she returned to the river and squatted on the bank opposite the limestone caves, another eviction had taken place. She was in time to see one of the Gargoyles escort Rachel from the cave and push her roughly towards the river. The African stumbled, fell. Corrie could hear her cries of anguish, and at the same time as experiencing compassion for the woman, she felt also the pleasure of knowing that she was no longer the only outcast.

She waded into the river and up the other side. Rachel was lying in the sand, semi-conscious and whimpering. She wore only leggings, having discarded her tunic to combat the increased heat of this latitude. Corrie helped her to her feet and half-carried her into the water. They crossed the river and Corrie laid Rachel in the shade of a spreading bush with broad, palmate leaves. She felt safer here, with the river separating them from the Gargoyles.

She lay down beside Rachel and slept.

When she awoke, the sun was setting and the eviction of undesirables from the cave was complete.

She came awake suddenly, wondering where she was. She blinked up at the broad palm leaf above her head, and the events of that morning came back to her. She sat up quickly. Rachel was lying beside her, smiling in greeting.

Corrie reached out and touched her hand. “How’re you feeling?”

Rachel sat up, stretching. “Fine, now. I no longer feel...” She shrugged. “Drugged, I suppose.”

“Any idea why the Gargoyles evicted you?”

Corrie had assumed that they had thrown
her
from the cave because she had refused to eat the fruit – but Rachel had been compliant, and still she had been evicted.

She shrugged again. “I don’t know. One minute I was half-asleep – or rather half-drugged – and then one of the aliens was dragging me from the cave.”

Corrie looked up, across the river, and saw two figures – human figures – lying side by side in the sand outside the cave.

Tanya and Sue.

Corrie and Rachel exchanged a glance. “Let’s go and get them.”

They crossed the river and climbed the incline. The triptych of Gargoyles paid them no heed. Corrie hurried over to the women and knelt beside them. They were half awake, still clearly labouring under the influence of the toxic fruit.

“Wait here,” Corrie said. She hurried towards the cave. At any moment she expected the Gargoyles to block her way but it was as if she no longer registered in their perception. She walked into the cave, paused and stared around her. She had not noticed it before, but the place stank of sweat and faeces. The remaining humans – all male, significantly – occupied the cells, semi-comatose and inert.

Quickly Corrie located the water canister attached to Imran’s belt, took it and rejoined the others. With Rachel’s help she managed to assist Tanya and Sue across the river and into the shade of the palm-analogue.

While Tanya and Sue slept off the effects of the drug, Corrie and Rachel searched the jungle for food and drinkable water. They found a couple of pineapples, and a spring of almost-clear water. Corrie filled the canister and returned to the palm tree.

An hour later, first Tanya and then Sue stirred. Corrie helped Tanya into a sitting position, gave her a drink of spring water. When Sue resurfaced, they sat and ate a meagre meal of oily forest fruit.

Corrie told the others why she had thought, mistakenly, that she had been evicted.

Tanya shook her head. “It had nothing to do with the fact that you refused the fruit,” she said. “What do we have in common?”

“Huh?” Corrie shrugged. “What, that we’re women?”

Tanya smiled. “Even more basic than that. I mean, how the hell do the Gargoyles know we’re women?” She laughed at Corrie’s mystified expression. “Look,” she went on, pointing to her own crotch. Her leggings were adorned with a bright Rorschach blotch of blood.

Rachel and Sue glanced down, nodded. Living and working so closely together, their periods had fallen pretty much into step with each other.

Corrie said, “Me, too. I washed my leggings in the river. But why...?”

Tanya shrugged. “Would you credit it, we come light years through space and discover the same old prejudices. The Gargoyles evicted us because they thought us unclean, or contaminated, or whatever. Faulty goods.”

After a long silence, Corrie said, “So... any ideas about what the hell’s happening over there?”

“Perhaps the Gargoyles are simply altruistic,” Rachel said. “They saw that we were starving...”

Tanya looked sceptical. “One thing we can be sure of, girl, is that we can’t ascribe human motivations to the actions of aliens.”

Sue said, “More important than the psychology of the Gargoyles, to be perfectly honest, is how are we going to feed ourselves?”

Corrie stared across the river to the cave-mouths and the trio of immobile aliens. “The simple fact is that we can’t survive off what we can get from the jungle – the pineapple things and berries. We’ve tried that and failed miserably. But we can eat the fruit the Gargoyles provided us with. If we combine the two, ration ourselves to only one fruit a day, then maybe we can make it until the
Darwinian
arrives.”

“That’s fine in theory,” Tanya said, “but how do we get hold of the aliens’ precious fruit?”

Corrie shrugged. “We follow the Gargoyles to where they harvest the stuff, wait till they leave, and then help ourselves.”

Tanya grunted. “Sounds easy enough...”

Corrie looked up at the sun, calculated. “An hour till sunset,” she said. “The Gargoyles fed us at nightfall. Why don’t we cross the river and wait until they make a move?”

They waited for thirty minutes, until the sun sank huge and ruddy behind the darkening jungle, and the lightning flicker of the evening’s static storm started to dance across the treetops. They waded through the thick, warm waters of the river and climbed the incline of the far bank. Outside the cave they sat, watching the trio of Gargoyles.

Minutes later, from the dark openings of the other caves dotting the limestone bluff, the quick, spry shapes of a dozen Gargoyles emerged and moved off along the bank of the river, heading west.

Corrie nodded to Rachel and the others, and they set off in pursuit.

The Gargoyles moved into the jungle, following a well-worn path. The women followed at a distance, Corrie leading. A little way into the jungle, they came to a clearing. The aliens were gathering fruit from low, ground-hugging bushes and plants. Corrie gestured to the others and they concealed themselves behind a stand of ferns next to the path. As she waited, she imagined following the same routine for the next ninety-odd days until the
Darwinian
arrived, sneaking around like the outcasts they were, stealing food from behind the backs of the Gargoyles...

Five minutes later the aliens left the clearing and passed the concealing stand of ferns one by one. Corrie held her breath, her heart hammering loud in her ears, and willed the Gargoyles to pass without seeing them.

As their footfalls diminished, she looked around at the others. Tanya nodded. “We’re clear. Let’s go.”

They stood and hurried along the path to the clearing. There were the bushes bearing the forbidden fruit. Corrie, impatient, hurried across the clearing.

The sudden appearance of the alien beside her almost stopped her heart. It stepped from the trees, looming over her, and darted forward. It thrust its great, prognathous mandibles towards her, hissing something loud and admonitory.