In Solitary (7 page)

But the other two had no intention of setting him free, though I could tell that Stella was quite taken with him. When I questioned her about it she said that he was big and strong and would come in useful to us once we had convinced him that humans should begin banding together against the Soal. I had not, until that moment, realized that we were ‘banding together’ against anyone, but once I thought about it I agreed with her. The new man’s knowledge of the local geography would be invaluable to us.

However, we kept him tied and made him walk ahead of us. He led the way through what he called ‘my trees’ to a small escarpment some three hundred metres high. On the top of the westward spur was a crack approximately a metre in width and ten metres long. Subsequently this proved to be the entrance to an old volcanic fault which, after a gradual descent, angled sharply some thirty metres downwards. The wall of the hole had wooden stakes driven into it which were ranged in the form of a ladder to enable users to climb to the very bottom, where the shaft opened up into a cavern. Here, Tangiia, as we learned his name to be, told us we would be safe from Soal eyes. He had learned through experience that viewers could only penetrate to a certain depth. Flint-lit torches made the air somewhat unbreathable but in future it would be better for us to sit in the dark and talk, and climb out by using our sense of touch, feeling our way from rung to rung. We learned that Tangiia had hidden his mother there when she returned to visit him thirty or forty months after he had reached independence. He did not say what had happened to her.

‘Well done,’ said Stella to Tangiia, looking around the cavern with satisfaction. Her slim nude body with its
bell-shaped breasts was throwing a very inviting shadow upon the white wall of the hideout. I ran my tongue over my front teeth. It was quite an intimate little home we had been offered by our new man. Stella saw my eyes ranging over her glistening flesh and then glancing down at the hay-strewn floor.

‘We’ll rest for a while,’ she ordered. ‘Put out the torches. We needn’t worry about him,’ she pointed at Tangiia. ‘He can’t climb out with his hands tied behind his back.’

The torches were extinguished and I lay on the floor where I had stood, and waited. After a while I began to get a little anxious – she had not moved. Or perhaps, the ugly thought snapped out, she was lying with one of the other men? Just when I felt my anger was going to scream from my mouth, uncontrollably, in a torrent of abuse, I felt wet warm buttocks pressing against my abdomen.

‘Now!’ she hissed close to my ear as she arched her neck backwards.

‘This way round?’ I whispered, surprised.

‘This is the way animals do it,’ she replied, ‘and I feel like an animal.’

I think she was disappointed, at first, in my gentle performance, but I felt inhibited because I knew the others could hear our movements. However, I too was eager towards the end, and ceased to care whether the other men were there or not.

Some minutes later I heard Tangiia whispering in sepulchral tones to himself, ‘I found you my Peloa. I found you again – and again I left you on belly of sea.’

‘Keep quiet,’ grunted Fridjt impiously, ‘we’re all trying to sleep.’

The dauntlessness of man is not quenched
by five thousand months of alien rule: Tangiia was not in the cavern when we awoke. At first we thought he might be hiding in some dark corner but, joining hands and walking the whole floor space, which was only about twenty metres square, we realized he was missing.

We climbed the rude ladder, Fridjt first, fully expecting the exit to be blocked and a triumphant Tangiia to be jeering at us from the outside. As we neared the exit, no light greeted us and Fridjt said, ‘He’s done it. We’re locked in.’ Panic surged through my chest, but just as it was about to gain control of my limbs Fridjt shouted, ‘It’s all right. It’s night and the hole’s clear.’

We stumbled gratefully out onto the ridge. It occurred to me only later that Tangiia could have been waiting with a weapon, and have pounced then. It would only have been necessary to finish Fridjt. Stella and I were no match for him and could have been left for later.

The three of us made our way through the trees and finally came upon Tangiia. He was sitting with his back towards us, in front of a fire, and his hands were free. A closer inspection showed them to be bloody and scratched – no doubt the result of scraping the thongs against a piece of rough rock.

While Fridjt and I hesitated, hovering in the shadows, Stella stepped out boldly and sat beside the sullen figure with rounded brown shoulders. He said nothing to her, just sat staring into the flames. Stella began speaking to him in a low voice, inaudible to Fridjt and me, and after a while
we saw him look up but there was no change of expression on his face. Then he slowly shook his head and drew a finger across his eyes.

Stella stood up and came back to where we stood.

‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘I can’t get him to join us or sanction our staying here. He’s worried about the consequences.’

‘Then we’ll have to kill him,’ growled Fridjt roughly.

‘I told him that,’ Stella answered.

‘He just shrugged his shoulders. I also promised that if we stayed we would find him a woman – one for him and one for Fridjt.’

This statement lifted a certain amount of my doubts about our remaining as a group. I almost began feeling light-headed.

‘And he refused the offer?’

Stella replied, ‘He didn’t even answer.’

We stood staring at one another for a few minutes and I could see that a decision had formed itself in the minds of the other two. Then Fridjt nodded at Stella and with a grim expression on his round countenance he began walking towards Tangiia, taking care not to let his feet make any sound. Just then Stella raised a hand and seemed to concentrate on something. Then she hissed, ‘Soal.’

Fridjt froze and looked at her face. Then the three of us began running back towards the crack on the hill. It took a little time to find the hole in the dark, but we did, and managed to scramble down into the security of our hay-floored nest again. The belly of a rock-lined world is a comforting place when you are hunted by a ruthless predator.

We were prepared to wait in the hole as long as necessary – but how long is
necessary
? Would Tangiia come and tell us when the Soal had gone (if indeed they had ever arrived – we only had Stella’s intuition to guide us)? I doubted he would come.

Have you ever sat, in the darkness, and waited for something that you were sure was not going to happen? Time slows down, almost to a stop.

I waited, and waited, my hands tying knots with themselves and my mind counting my heartbeats. Finally I could not take any more.

‘I’m going up,’ I said, jumping to my feet.

‘No,’ cried Stella. ‘Stop him Fridjt!’

But it was pitch black and Fridjt was clumsy.
I was halfway up the ladder while he was still crashing about below thinking I was still there. At the entrance hole I paused, but having come so far I was not going to return without information.

My progress was slow but as I neared the clearing where we had left Tangiia I heard voices – one of which was in the halting, high-pitched accents of a Soal.

I went down on my chest and eased my way through the undergrowth, making sure not to make any noise – Soal hearing was not exceptional at low frequencies, but it was still able.

Once I could see some figures I paused. The fire had died considerably since the alarm had been given, and now just a red glow lit the figures that surrounded it. I counted – there were four Soal, all armed, and Tangiia. Probably there were another one or two Soal in the craft, which I could not see.

Suddenly I heard a voice which I recognized, and one which made my heart pound inside my chest. It was the second Soal to the left of Tangiia that had spoken. I stared hard at this alien but the light was too dim for me to be sure. Then Tangiia truculently kicked a log, making it flare and my eyes, not having moved, immediately recognized the features of my old enemy Endrod. The sight left me trembling and I cowered in the grass, burying my head deep into its roots.

I stayed in the same attitude for some time – until I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up in relief to see Fridjt kneeling by my side. The Soal had gone and Stella was standing beside Tangiia, who had a broad grin stretching his already wide mouth. I climbed to my feet and when he saw me he came lumbering over and hugged me with his huge sweaty arms.

‘My friend,’ he cried joyfully. ‘You killed Soal,’ the last word was uttered in admiration.

I pointed accusingly at Fridjt.

‘So did he,’ I answered excitedly.

‘But you,’ Tangiia laughed, now holding me at arm’s length, ‘you are brave one. He,’ a hand flicked in Fridjt’s direction, ‘is big and strong and does not think too well. With him it is almost mistake.’

Funnily enough Fridjt did not take exception
to this remark – in fact the fat fool grinned too. I had to suffer a vice-like but supposedly playful squeeze on my shoulder from that direction.

‘How you kill this Soal?’ asked Tangiia. ‘Tell me friend, how you kill this stink-sucking birdman? You rip his wings off, yes?’

‘Firstly,’ I replied, backing away out of reach of his loving arms, ‘I’m not your friend, though. I realize it is probably the only affectionate term you know, and secondly I am not used to story telling – however in this instance I’ll make an exception.’

‘You tell me, but not so long words,’ he smiled.

So I told him all the events that led up to the killing of the Soal officer and his companion and then proceeded to relate the way in which we escaped.

‘… the vehicle was hovering just outside our segment – perhaps some five metres from the ledge. This was too far to jump but Stella had an idea. We tore the blanket given me by Lintar into strips and tied them together, forming a rope. Then Fridjt here took this up to the ledge of the segment above, and lowered it. I wrapped it around my waist and Fridjt began swinging me like a pendulum…’

‘What is pendulum?’

I looked around me and saw a piece of vine a few metres away. Walking towards it I grasped it and used the end to demonstrate the principle – Tangiia understood and I continued.

‘As Fridjt built up the swinging motion I was reaching out for the side of the craft, but on each return the makeshift rope bent on the top of the segment’s entrance and crashed me against the ceiling. I have a thousand bruises to prove it. At last then, I went far enough out to get handholds on the craft but it was only after enormous effort – I am not a fit man – that I was able to pull myself up and into the craft. Once inside I had the job of controlling the vehicle – fortunately the controls are extremely simple and I’d seen them managed several times before, though I’d never actually piloted a craft myself. Freeing myself of the rope I then took the craft as close as I dared to the needle tower without mishap, allowing these two to jump inside. Then we set off, over the mud, admittedly a little erratically as I found the accelerator very finely tuned.

‘It was difficult to decide what to do from that point
onwards – all we had previously been concerned with was escaping from the immediate vicinity of the crime. We obviously wanted to go as far from the mud as possible but the Soal chiton was constructed only for local flight – not for long distance journeys. Then Stella remembered the Schooter tubes.’

I described the tubes to Tangiia, whose face immediately registered recognition of the structures that had patterned the world’s surface for several thousand months.

The Schooter tubes were of human, not Soal, construction and though the Soal still used them occasionally the aliens were not great wanderers and the tubes were idle most of the time. They consisted of starting cannons, which were self-activating, and repeaters. A vehicle that entered a horizontally-pointing starter cannon from the rear merely had to wait until the breach was closed by a pressure door before being fired onto a repeater tube at something like three thousand kilometres an hour. The repeater, or booster tubes, each around a quarter of a kilometre long, were lined across continents and oceans to form snakes of silver with parted, segmented bodies. The presence of a vehicle in a cannon was recognized by the mechanism and the firing procedure automatically took place. Stella had known about the tubes from her former continental boy friend – at least she had known about the starting procedure and that the tubes could be angled manually by entering the wheelhouses situated on the top of each section, but neither of us had known how to control the duration of the journey.

We had cruised over the sea wall in our vehicle, hoping that those who saw us would believe the craft to be piloted by Soal. We had then entered the first Schooter tube starter cannon we came across and had begun a very distressing journey that made Fridjt and me violently ill.

When it came to stopping the problem solved itself – we came out over a large group of islands. I had decided to head south for I had an idea that we were over the Maldeas in the Endean Ocean. We had flown low, skimming over the water, when I recognized an island at the top of a peninsula and we had turned south-east into the Pasific Ocean, which I knew to be peppered with small islands.

Once we had found a suitable spot
we landed and then covered the craft with branches and leaves. It was not a very thorough job but it was the best we could have done in the circumstances. Later, we decided, we could make better work of the camouflage.

All this I related to Tangiia, who stopped me several times, mainly because of my inability to simplify my explanations, or to clear up a word he did not understand. His vocabulary, like Fridjt’s, was very limited, due to the lack of contact with other humans. The reason our language had managed to survive at all was because childhood learning was refreshed at mating periods and also the Soal military liked to talk as much as any human.