Helix (45 page)

Hendry
nodded. “I believe you,” he said, and wondered at what Olembe had done. Perhaps
he was influenced by his new-found feelings for Sissy—but how could anyone
leave a wife and kids just like that?

Olembe
stood, moved back to the ship and slumped down beside Hendry. “So that’s how
I’m here, while every last fucker we knew—my wife and kids and their
descendants, if they ever had any— are long dead and gone.”

Hendry
heard sweet birdsong echoing through the forest. It worked like a balm,
comforting.

He
said, “So why would Sissy fabricate that evidence against you? Make out you
were a war criminal?”

Olembe
sighed. “Search me, man. Maybe it’s simply this, she doesn’t like the colour of
my skin.”

Hendry
thought about it. He said suddenly, “Where did your brother study? You said he
went to the US?”

“Yeah,
LA.”

Hendry
said, “So did Sissy. She graduated from LA in ‘83.”

Olembe
was nodding. “My brother... yeah, it’d be around then.”

“It
might be a coincidence... but you never know, they might have met—”

“And
something happened, and Kaluchek held a grudge ever since?”

Hendry
shrugged. “It’s possible.”

“So
how come she can’t tell I’m not really Friday. Joe?”

Hendry
shrugged. “People change a lot in twelve years. She remembered the name, not
the face... I don’t know.”

“Crazy.
I thought the bitch had it in for me.”

Hendry
said, “Don’t say anything. About your brother, LA, or what Sissy told me about
the war crimes. I’ll ask her what happened. Maybe we can straighten things out
between you two. We need to pull together if we’re to get back to the
colonists.”

“Okay,
okay, Joe,” Olembe said. “Do your stuff and we’ll all be happy families again.”

“Just
keep off her back and I’ll do my best to get to the bottom of this.”

“Fine.”
Olembe stood and indicated the entrance to the ship. “I’m going through the
ship from top to bottom, see if I can come up with something I can hammer into
shape.”

Hendry
watched him go. “Friday—one thing. Who were you before you were Friday?”

Olembe
grinned. “You really want to know? I never liked the name. It was my father’s.
He called his first-born after him. Cyril, man. Can you believe that?”

Hendry
smiled. “I won’t tell anyone, Friday.”

He
settled back against the warm metal of the spaceship, considering Sissy
Kaluchek and what might have happened in LA all those years ago, twelve
subjective, a thousand real-time.

He
closed his eyes and anticipated her return. Birds called, soothingly, from the
surrounding forest.

Ehrin crouched inside
the hatch of the spaceship, hugging his shins and watching the two
aliens—humans, they called themselves—as they talked for a long time in the
clearing.

One
sat against the ship, while the other, a giant black creature, strode back and
forth, gesturing animatedly. Ehrin watched with wonder, amazed at the fact that
the words these beings spoke—slow, slurred sounds—could mean anything at all.

Everything
about the humans filled him with awe: their appearance, their size, their level
of technological accomplishment, the fact that they had arrived here—according
to their leader, Carrelli—from a planet way beyond the helical system of
worlds.

And
to think that mere days ago he had been mired in the ignorance that affected
all the citizens of Agstarn. To them, Agstarn
was
the world, with even
the plains beyond the mountains a distant, shadowy realm; to them, the word of
the Church, of the Book of Books, was the ultimate arbiter of the reality of
existence.

He
had never believed the version of reality promulgated by the Church, but he had
to admit that in lieu of belief there had been a vast absence—how could he
possibly have known what might have existed beyond Agstarn?

The
reality had rocked him to his core. Staring through the spaceship’s viewscreen
at the vastness of the helix—his brain processing the view little by little,
first the sun, then the tier immediately above them, and then all the other
tiers and the miniature worlds like beads upon them—he had been overcome with a
strange emotion that made him first weep and then laugh aloud.

He
had tasted victory then, a euphoric sense of righteousness that his opposition
to the Church and its draconian ways was justified. He wanted to show Velkor
Cannak the helix, laugh in his face as he viewed the Elder’s horror. That was
impossible, of course, but he could
imagine
Cannak’s disbelief, his
refusal to accept the visual evidence of the helix. He wondered if Cannak were
aboard the deathship, or if fear of what he might discover beyond the cloud
cover of Agstarn had tempered his need for revenge. Ehrin liked to imagine that
the Elder had boarded the deathship, and that his faith was now being
undermined by the sight of the helix dominating the heavens.

He
wished Kahran had lived to share his sense of victory, and Havor had survived
so that he might have achieved his goal of destroying the deathship.

Perhaps
that should be his goal now, he thought. Somehow, despite the seeming
impossibility, he should help to bring about the destruction of the feared
deathship. Perhaps that might be the first step in a much larger, more
ambitious goal: to bring the truth to the people of Agstarn, to open their eyes
after blinkered centuries of ignorance to the fact of the helix and their place
upon it.

It
would be a fitting tribute to his good friend Kahran Shollay.

His
throat constricted as he thought about the death of the old man.

Kahran
would have revelled in the series of conceptual thresholds Ehrin had crossed,
and been amazed by the latest revelation: that there existed somewhere in this
forest, asleep for centuries or even longer by some process he couldn’t even
guess at, a being who was linked in some way to the creators of the helix.

He
looked up. The two humans had finished their conversation. One of them, the
tall darker being, moved up the ramp into the ship, his big fingers touching
Ehrin on the head as he passed. He wondered what it might mean—perhaps an
instruction to follow.

Dutifully
he climbed to his feet and entered the ship. The human moved around the
flight-deck, clearly looking for something.

He
glanced at Ehrin and spoke, the sounds impossibly slow. The being held
something up, before his face. It was the fractured cylinder he had lovingly
fashioned in the foundry, a seeming age ago.

The
human pointed to it, then gestured around the ship.

Could
he be asking if there were another component like it somewhere in the ship,
Ehrin wondered.

Ehrin
gestured no, and said that he had made the device back on his homeworld, but
the human just stretched his lips and shook his head, continuing his search.

He
passed down the corridor and Ehrin followed, intrigued by the being’s search.

They
came to the rear lounge, and there Ehrin found Sereth. She was curled on the
floor, staring through the viewscreen with a blank expression. The human moved
around the lounge with his usual slow precision, then said something to Ehrin,
stretched his lips again and moved back down the corridor.

Ehrin
remained in the lounge, watching Sereth. He felt a stab of guilt, and at the
same time frustration. He had tried to comfort her on the flight from Agstarn,
but fear had made her unreasonable and argumentative.

At
last she turned her head and looked at him. “I didn’t want to come here,” she
said.

“I’m
sorry, Sereth.”

She
gestured with her muzzle. He could see the fear in the dilation of her pupils.
“You are enjoying all this, aren’t you? The company of these monsters, the
illusion of... of wherever we are. You think this proves that you were right,
don’t you?”

He
moved his head in a pained negative. “They aren’t monsters, Sereth. They’re
very different to us, and we might never understand them, but they aren’t
monsters. They have... compassion. They helped me bury Havor.”

“He
was another monster!”

“He
helped to save my life, Sereth.”

“For
his own godless ends! Perhaps it would have been best if you had died with
Kahran.”

He
stared at her, anger a naked flame in his chest. “Do you really mean that?
You’d rather have had me tortured to death by the Church’s Inquisitors?”

She
stared at him. “It would have saved all this, Ehrin.”

“All
this? You mean the truth?”

She
barked contemptuously. “The truth? This is a lie, Ehrin, a godless illusion. It
says in the Book of Books, chapter three, that the anti-god will confront the
strayed with illusion, that the one true world is Agstarn, the one true faith
the Church—”

“Superstition
used by a corrupt and powerful Church to keep itself in power, Sereth. All
lies. We’re like minuscule insects at the bottom of an ice pond, who by some
miracle climb out and behold another order of reality. Some can’t take it and
scamper back into the darkness. Others blink at the light and try to make sense
of it.”

She
cried out. “But God did not intend this! It’s an evil illusion.” She stood and
approached him. “Can’t you see, Ehrin, you’re being lured into something
against your will, by beings we don’t understand, for their own ends. I loved
you, Ehrin. I don’t want to see you harmed...” She reached out, touched his
coat with her claws.

It
was a difficult thing to do, but he did it. He pushed her paw away and said,
“There is no God. I am here because I want to be here. I am not being used. I
want to know the truth. That and only that is what is important to me.”

She
looked at him, and said at last, “More important to you than me, Ehrin?”

“Sereth,
Sereth...” He looked into his heart, then, and knew the truth, that he no
longer loved the woman who stood imploringly before him. His infatuation with
her had been a manifestation of his other, younger self, a self blinded by the
clouds of Agstarn, the blinkered social mores of a society ruled by deceit and
lies.

He
said, “I want to share the truth with you, Sereth. I want you to stop fearing,
to open your eyes and apprehend the truth. The Church lied to us. Cannak and
Hykell and all the others are evil.”

Sereth
spat, “No! My father is a good man, a great—”

“Your
father is a deluded fool blinded by ignorance.”

She
attacked him then. She leapt at him and tried to scratch his face. He grasped
her wrists, flung her back into a sunken sofa, where she sprawled sobbing and
stared up at him.

“Your
Church is evil and murderous and deserves to perish,” he said.

She
cried, “I loved you, Ehrin!”

He
moved to the exit. “And I loved you, Sereth.” He turned and hurried from the
lounge, pulling the hatch shut behind him. Her sobs followed him all the way
down the corridor.

He
stopped at the top of the ramp, a sickness in his stomach. Much as he disliked
the idea of hurting Sereth, he knew the pain he felt was provoked by his
memories of the good times they had shared, the love. All that was over now,
part of another life. It was odd, but beyond the pain he experienced a sense of
achievement, a sense of freedom at being able at last to state his views. He
felt suddenly liberated from everything that had held him back, as if Sereth
had been the last connection to the lie that was Agstarn.

He
looked around the clearing. The humans were kneeling on the ground beside the
engine nacelle again, working with the tools they had found aboard the ship.

The
big being saw him and gestured with something, and Ehrin saw that it was a
square of metal that the humans were attempting to fashion into a cylinder.
Ehrin joined them, fell into a squat and watched.

At
one point he gestured to the tool container beside the humans, and lifted out a
shaped wrench, which he thought more suited to the job.

The
humans looked at each other, commented in their odd retarded language and
stretched their lips. They took the wrench and continued their work.

Perhaps
an hour later they had shaped the metal to their satisfaction, and then began
the process of fixing it to the starboard manifold.

Ehrin
squatted on the fin and watched them, and from time to time the humans looked
up and stretched their lips and spoke to him. And Sereth had said these beings
were evil.

The
sun was setting by the time they finished the job and sealed the hatch. The
humans spoke to each other again, and both of them stared up at the gaps in the
canopy overhead.

They
sat beside the food they had gathered, gestured Ehrin to join them, and passed
him a large round fruit. He ate, watching these strange creatures as they
chewed slowly, and listened to their odd words. He wished the other human was
present, the being called Carrelli, so that he could take part in the
conversation and tell these people about his world, and ask about their own
home planet.