In Solitary (18 page)
The eyes went over my shoulder and I turned just in time to see a shape soaring down from the branches of a high tree. A second later it was on my back and claws impatiently searched my face for my eyes.
‘Endrod!’ I screeched. I put my hands over my head, grabbing loose material from the thermosuit and flung the Soal overhead. He landed, not heavily, in a shrub, was on his feet in a second, and scrambling back towards me. It was Endrod. His eyes, narrow with hatred and urgent with desire to kill me, transfixed me for a moment. The ‘stinger was in his hand and he levelled it with my head.
I flung myself sideways, at the same time grabbing a dead branch. The little Soal followed my movements, sweeping with the brainstinger. On my knees, I threw the wood, in desperation, like a spear.
It struck his face-plate, knocking him backwards off his feet. Jumping forward, I clutched at his legs and, holding his ankles, swung him bodily at a tree. The bones in his light frame splintered on impact, one of them coming through the thermosuit, and after two more swings I dropped him, partly in revulsion and partly in sheer exhaustion. Panting, I watched his body twitch once more, then it lay still on the ground.
As I began to regain my breath I turned to look at Endrod’s companion. He shook his head and waved a hand at me.
‘I have no quarrel,’ he stuttered. ‘We do not need to fight.’
I nodded, and leaned against a tree. Finally,
when I felt recovered I asked the Soal who he was.
‘I am called Kaltan,’ he replied.
I picked up Endrod’s brainstinger and pointed the weapon at Kaltan.
‘Well, Kaltan, you are going to take me to the Soal fleet.’
He hesitated. Then said without expression, ‘That’s up to you. I want to live, but if you come with me, you will die. They will never let you get to the new humans with the location of the fleet in your possession.’
‘Let’s go,’ I insisted.
We made one diversion. I had made my decision with regard to the women in my life and we called at Tiptihani’s home island in the hope that she would have returned there after the revolution had been broken: she was there and I told, not asked, her to accompany me. The rest of the journey in the craft Kaltan had uncovered, apart from a short hop over the sea wall, was by Schooter tube. As soon as I saw where we were headed I realized how slow my brain was. This was the secret of the high ranks, which Endrod had given to my father. This was what he had died for.
The needle towers were the ships.
The towers were metal plated now, and shone steely in the sun. I realized that as soon as the inhabitants got wind of the Martian arrival, the towers would be abandoned. The mud-walkers would be free to step on dry land once more. The fleeing Soal would make for them in the night, once they knew for certain their defences were breached, and on pressing the right switches, allowed a curtain of metal to slide up from beneath the mud where it had been poised for centuries.
The drive and control room would be below the mudline, under a movable flooring. Or perhaps in the nose? I had never been to the top of a needle tower – it had never been possible to go past the sixteenth segment. Yet I had known, somehow, at the time that I was not at the pinnacle of the tower.
‘Take me to the Klees of Brytan’s ship,’ I ordered the unresisting Kaltan.
‘He no longer lives. Killed on the night of the
invasion.’
‘Lintar, his son?’
Kaltan nodded. ‘He regained his former position when the Martians came.’ Then, ‘Your escape is blocked now,’ he said grimly. ‘We have been seen by the new humans. You became a Soal this day.’
‘Quickly then,’ I ordered.
We left the chiton and entered the open door of the needle tower.
Once through the locks I surveyed the hostile faces of about a dozen Soal.
‘Where is Lintar?’ I asked.
A voice spoke to my left and I turned to face my old companion. He was expressionless and waiting. Responsibility was now apparent in his stance and manner.
‘We wish to come with you Lintar,’ I requested. ‘I have no place amongst these aliens that crowd our old planet. This was our birthplace, not theirs, yet they stamp over it like ancient beasts – mindlessly. There are more of them coming – millions they say. This woman,’ I indicated my companion, ‘and I have no wish to share our world with dinosaurs. We would rather take our chances with the Soal. Kill us or take us! But do not leave us behind alive.’
‘Kill you?’ his beak opened and closed quickly. ‘How could I kill my lifelong companion. But we must go quickly. I will talk to you later. Do not mind the others. They will get used to you once I have spoken with them.’
So we left in a cloud of muck and ooze, spraying everything for hundreds of kilometres with the product of millions of months of elemental toil.
The star shone down on two figures standing by the shore. One cast a long, lean shadow. The other, not quite so long.
‘What were they? I was told they were dwellings – rest houses for mud men,’ said the Martian.
‘What in Weyym’s name are you running on about?’ said the Earthman. Already there was much animosity between the two races. The Martians had begun to talk of reservations on the continental steppes.
The ships or towers or whatever they
were you fool.’
The answer was delivered in a sullen tone.
‘Who’s the fool? You could have checked them.’
‘We took your word for it.’
‘Foolish thing to do. We’re ignorant savages.’
A short, red-haired Martian girl lay beside her latest lover and stared up at a star. It was not the same star as that which shone on the foolish Earthman and his arrogant quizzer, for she was in the southern hemisphere, but it was very similar in that it shone whitely and without flickering. She had heard about the starships and she knew what she had lost.
What the Martian hell, she thought. He was never a human anyway. He was a Soal inside a human’s skin. She thought this but quietly, without waking her lover, she cried the tears of a woman who was lost.
‘Look – beautiful stars,’ said the Polynesian girl, not looking up. She was talking to the infant cradled in her arms. It was too small even to focus its eyes on a finger centimetres from its face, let alone a star, light-years out in space, and the husband at the tiller smiled indulgently.
He then looked up himself, searching for the one star he needed to steer by. He was following a K
aveinga
, going south, to his wife’s former island. Now that her mother had gone with the man Cave she felt homesick on her husband’s island – and he had no real preference. As long as there were palms and pineapples, and fish to fish, he was as happy as a man can be. Oceania was his home. Several million square kilometres of blue water, studded with green stars.
Once we were on our way we were allowed to release ourselves from the couches. I went to Tiptihani and held her close, as she was afraid. We did not know where we were going, or what we would find once we arrived. It would not take long, for these ships of Lintar’s were the old ones, in which they had travelled to Earth, and I knew from Soal history that the last journey was a short one, which it needed to be because there was little edible food on board.
Lintar entered the segment and flicked a switch.
The segment lights dimmed and the ceiling darkened, then became freckled with lights. We were staring out into space, looking at its sparkling offerings.
‘Which place are we going to?’ asked Tiptihani.
Lintar lifted her hand.
‘Point to a star,’ he said.
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Novels
In Solitary
(1977)
The Night of Kadar
(1978)
Split Second
(1979)
Gemini God
(1981)
A Theatre of Timesmiths
(1984)
Abandonati
(1988)
Cloudrock
(1988)
The Voyage of the Vigilance
(1988)
The Street
(1988) (writing as Garry Douglas)
Hunter's Moon
(1989)
Midnight's Sun
(1990)
Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares
(1992)
House of Tribes
(1995)
A Midsummer's Nightmare
(1996)
Shadow Hawk
(1999)
Angel
1.
Angel
(1993)
2.
Archangel
(1994)
Navigator Kings
1.
The Roof of Voyaging
(1996)
2.
The Princely Flower
(1997)
3.
Land-of-Mists
(1998)
Collections
The Songbirds of Pain
(1984)
In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave
(1989)
In the Country of Tattooed Men
(1993)
Garry Kilworth (1941 –)
Garry Douglas Kilworth was born in York in 1941 and travelled widely as a child, his father being a serviceman. After seventeen years in the RAF and eight working for Cable and Wireless, he attended King’s College, London University, where he obtained an honours degree in English. Garry Kilworth has published novels under a number of pseudonyms in the fields of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction and Children’s Fiction, winning the British and World Fantasy Awards and being twice shortlisted for the prestigious Carnegie Award for Children’s Literature.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Garry Kilworth 1977
All rights reserved.
The right of Garry Kilworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11420 3
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.