In Solitary (3 page)

The mudflats were endless, and twice I caught sight of humans. Both times I stopped and waited until they were at a safe distance before continuing. I had a vague plan in mind to cross the flats to the land I knew lay on the other side. Yurop, which the Soal called Hess. It was much larger than Brytan, and in places the mountains reached high up into the clouds. It was big enough to enable a human to live without being disturbed by Soal or others of his own kind.

Suddenly I sank up to my knees in a particularly soft patch of the grey-black sludge. It had begun to drizzle with rain from above the temperature controlled zone. I wrenched a foot clear, but left a mudshoe beneath the mire and had to reach an arm’s length down into it to retrieve the shoe. The other foot came up more easily. As long as I took it slowly the sucking action
of the mud was not powerful enough to hinder my progress.

However, I was now covered in filth and the rain was becoming heavier by the minute. I began to feel very, very miserable. Suddenly there was a new danger. If the rain became too dense, I should not be able to see the needle towers and the first flood of water from the incoming tide would slow my progress.

I picked out a tower through the drizzle and began to quicken my steps towards it, but it was slow and difficult work across the sludge. I tried to remember certain points Lintar had mentioned on our walk; if you begin to sink in deep mud, do not struggle; lie flat and stretch out all four limbs. How he knew the correct procedure in deep mud was conjectural. I doubted he had ever been beyond the sea wall on foot, although I knew that he had been hunting sea birds with a crossbow from a mudskate vehicle. Perhaps the Soal learned a few safety rules before embarking on an expedition?

The black ooze crept up my body by degrees and the shoes flicked dollops of the stuff up my back and into my long hair. I trudged on for the next two hours while dusk came down, realizing, all too late, that I had left an easy, soft life behind me. My bungled attempt to find some incriminating evidence with which to enact revenge on Endrod had been a poor failure, and the reverse of what I hoped to achieve had come about: I was the one who had been banished.

Night was coming on and I had only a few minutes in which to find the tower. It had been directly ahead. Perhaps I had missed it? I turned and looked through the rain, which was running in rivulets down my face, neck and chest. It was silt-laden and uncomfortable. No tower. I stumbled on, and then, suddenly there it was, almost at my nose. I grabbed the inset rungs of the ladder and began to climb: I still had to get to a segment and the first was several metres above my head. I hoped I could find a segment with no other human inside.

I had gone barely a metre when the water began swilling around the base of the needle. It was now a race against the tide. With the blanket containing the crossbow tied sling-fashion over one shoulder I began to climb for my life – and the water rose with every scrambling step. It whirled with angry white-flecked mouths below me. I had visions of
disappearing down one of the throats of eddying foam.

With my arms aching and my chest heaving I made the first ledge and entered the segment gasping and pulling on the air with my lungs. It was dark in the segment and I lay on the cold floor and cherished my agony, listening to the waves throwing shoulders at the flexible, swaying tower.

Over the next few days I made my way from needle to needle, the soiling of my belaboured body becoming a continuing process, for although I could wash in the tower there was nothing to shift the obstinate patches.

I carefully avoided any humans I saw, of course. I had no desire to be caught breaking the one law for which there was no reprieve from death, no matter who or what one’s friends were. The far coast was reached but the sea wall was as high and as well guarded as the one I had left. There was to be no escape in that direction.

My rations had run out and I was now living on shellfish grubbed from the mud. Hair had grown over my face, I was constantly hungry and exhausted and I began to view the world with a hard and bitter eye. After my visit to the Hessian wall I was determined to obtain a full night’s rest and I climbed the nearest needle, curled up in a corner of a segment and fell instantly asleep.

It was still dark when I awoke and nagging pains in my stomach called for food. As I reached for my shoulder bag a soft moan came from the corner of the segment farthest from me. I froze, thinking I had misheard, and that the noise had its origins outside the tower. The wind, or the sea, if it was still high.

I convinced myself that this was the case, and once again reached out for the bag. A shrill scream tore through the stillness of the room and every nerve in my body sent needles of fear to my brain.

After the scream had subsided there was the sound
of heavy breathing from the far corner of the segment, punctuated by quick, sharp sobs. Grabbing my crossbow I wound the mechanism and pointed the instrument into the darkness.

‘Who’s that?’ I whispered gruffly. ‘I have a weapon.’

The moans and sobs continued but no answer was forthcoming.

‘Answer quickly or I may have to kill you,’ I said louder, not sure in myself whether I really would have the courage to release the bolt.

‘I’m … I’m Stella,’ came a laboured reply. Then a whimper and another long brain-screwing scream.

‘A human?’ I snapped, alert to danger.

‘Yes, like yourself. I saw you asleep and I hoped I would not have to disturb you, but I’m afraid …’

‘So am I, so am I, if we’re caught,’ I gabbled, ‘we’ll both be put to death. No mistake about that. You’ll have to leave – and quickly.’

‘Not me,’ she part-laughed and part-moaned, as if there was an enormous joke hovering in the air somewhere, if only one of us had the humour to catch it.

‘Are you wounded? Why are you crying?’

‘I’m in pain,’ said the small, feminine voice, which for some reason awakened solicitous feelings in my breast. I actually felt sympathy towards this human being that was threatening my existence with her presence.

‘Then I’ll have to go,’ I said at length. It seemed reasonable. If she were ill she had to have somewhere to
stay, away from the mud.

She screamed long and loud again and then her breath came out hissingly.

‘Please stay,’ she cried, ‘I’m having a baby. I’m afraid.’

‘You’re afraid, you’re afraid?’ I yelled again in a panic. ‘I don’t know anything about babies but I know we’ll both be executed …’

Suddenly her voice became hard.

‘Don’t be such a coward. Stay and keep a woman company while she gives birth to human life.’

This sentence hit me, full force, in a part of me I never knew existed.

I put down the crossbow feeling tremendously guilty – as though I had just broken a Soal Law, which of course was exactly what I was doing. I went across the floor and felt around, touching something soft, moist and warm.

‘Not there,’ she said sharply. ‘Here. Just hold my hand. It’ll all be over with soon.’

It was not ‘over with’ soon. It took four hours, and by that time the dawn had arrived and I found myself clutching the hand of a naked angular-faced human woman with bright blue eyes and long, exceptionally dirty red hair. Stella. My first real human contact apart from family. Both of us were covered in sweat and the new baby was laid in the blanket.

There was plenty of fresh water to be had in the needle and I washed the infant where it lay – beyond that I had no knowledge of what to do. A cord hung from inside of the mother and I wondered whether this ought to be severed.

‘Leave it,’ said Stella, when I asked. ‘I’ll deal with it.’

So I went out, and down the ladder to fetch food. I tried, unsuccessfully, to pin a seabird with the crossbow, but only managed to lose a valuable bolt in the deep mud. I made do with shellfish, and took several handfuls back to her. She seemed grateful. While we were eating, an appalling thought came to me.

‘How did you come to be having a baby?’ I uttered, rather ridiculously. ‘Now, I mean.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘You mean the mating period is not for a while yet? Don’t be a fool. Where have you
been living all your life?’

‘Among the Soal,’ I replied without a thought.

‘What?’ She sat up sharply from where she had been lying; her full breasts bounced heavily on her chest and I put out my hands instinctively to stop them quivering. She knocked my hands away roughly, glaring at my audacity.

‘You’re a spy,’ she snarled, the bottom lip curling.

‘No, no. Not at all. I’ve been banished. I did something wrong you see. They sent me away.’

‘Oh.’ She lay back. ‘I thought for a moment … but never mind.’

She smiled at me now and I felt warm all over my face.

‘You seem nice enough,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to cause you trouble. You’d better leave us now.’ She beamed at the infant beside her which had been trying to penetrate our eardrums for some considerable time.

‘Does a baby ever stop crying?’ I asked, to change the subject.

Stella laughed and the segment filled with our intimacy. It was a feeling I had never known before and at the time seemed quite worth dying for.

‘Not often,’ she choked. ‘Here give her to me.’

I gingerly picked up the ‘her’ – a fact I had not noticed before and watched Stella stifle the cries with one of her breasts. Soon the baby was happily feeding and we were able to continue our conversation.

I told Stella practically my life’s story in an hour. Hers took longer, and was one of such hardship and privation I wondered how she could still find it in herself to laugh. She was, she thought, somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty months old and had been born in a needle, of a mud-mother such as herself. However, her mother had been a virtuous woman and only copulated in the mating period. She looked after her daughter until the age of 120 months, when she was attacked by a band of human males during a night in a needle. When they had finished sating themselves they disposed of her. Thereafter Stella watched and fended for herself. Soal hunting parties, she said, could be extremely generous. And even the Soal Military had been known to hand out scraps of food. Mostly the military were dreaded, for contrary
to my understanding, clandestine meetings between humans were frequent out on the mud. It occurred to me that the Klees would be horrified if he ever learned of the lightness in which the laws were taken despite Soal. Their rule was not only divide and conquer, but keep divided and keep conquered. Humans were vicious animals that hunted in packs and the only way to keep them civilized was to keep them apart. Until the Soal had arrived we were on the road to self-destruction: the aliens were our salvation.

I intended to stay with Stella only until she was fit enough to travel but when it became time for me to leave I put it off – and kept putting it off, and eventually we both realized that we would rather be together and risk being caught, than part company. Stella was more reluctant than I was to remain as a unit. It was not out of regard or fear for the law that she was unenthusiastic about remaining together. She was not as afraid of discovery as I was. Perhaps she did not like me as much as I did her and the child? Whatever her reasons, she was certainly not unkind to me, and I was grateful for that. I was very inexperienced in the ways of my new world and she could have managed as well without me. You could say I was an encumbrance for the first few weeks but I learned many things. I learned that the Soal handed out traps for catching fish and the larger types of shellfish, like lobsters, from time to time. This generosity was irregular and very occasional, so those that did own traps were extremely possessive over them. I learned that much could be done with seaweed to make a change from fish, and that rock pools were a source of small delicacies such as shrimps.

I myself discovered certain pieces of conjectural information. For instance I strongly suspected that vitamins were added to our water supply.

‘If you don’t drink the tower water you become ill,’ Stella informed me. I was curious as to the symptoms.

‘What kind of ill?’ I asked.

‘Different kinds.’

That was all I could get out of her on this subject. I believe she was afraid to speak of
illnesses – they were nameless dreads that haunted her waking hours. She had no doubt seen many people die. There was other water to drink, that flowed onto the mud from rivers but I could not account for the Soal openhandedness. Why did they not let us all die?

We managed to avoid other humans on our travels. There were many of the crystal needle towers and few of us. The Soal Military were another matter. They would pick up a human on the slightest provocation – probably to keep our numbers low. In the first six weeks we had two brushes with them but since we were wise enough to sleep in separate segments in the needles, we were not caught together.

The Soal travelled over the mud in flying vehicles and could check segments of the transparent towers visibly, day or night. However, they rarely came at night. When they did, they would hover around outside the tower after lighting it internally with some form of remote switching, checking each segment carefully. Consequently those in the towers further abroad were forewarned of the Soal approach.

Stella was always brusque with the Soal – she had the facility of being able to bait them without going far enough for them to become angered. A lifetime’s learning put to practice.

She also had the uncanny knack, or skill, of knowing the approximate time – even at night and during a cloudy day. A necessary attribute where one’s life depended upon accuracy of the clock within an hour.

The mud wastes, smooth and ugly; the monotony broken only by wrinkles, ridges and rays left by the retreating tide. This was the stomach of the world, slit open and spread flat exposing a dull grey colour and veined texture: enzymes and juices left in the crevices and hollows of corrugated tissue.

Our life consisted of one trek after another over this boring landscape – why we did not stay in one spot was easily answerable: life then would become dull in the extreme – and it was during one of these wanderings that we encountered another nomad, one I hoped never to meet: the father of Stella’s baby.