Valhai (The Ammonite Galaxy) (2 page)

A metallic voice answered her. “What is the matter?” At first they couldn’t identify where the sound was emanating from, but then Six pointed to what was clearly a camera high above them. There were speakers on either side of it.

“You can’t expect me to have to share a cabin with this . . . this . . . untouchable!”

“No, I don’t.”

“Because you must see . . . I’m sorry?”

“I don’t expect you to share a cabin with the Kwaidian. You are both going into stasis as soon as I get this thing away from the system.”

“Stasis?” Diva was taken aback.

“It is going to take us three months to travel from Sacras to Almagest. The most efficient way to travel is by putting all non-essentials in suspended animation. It cuts back the supplies needed.”

“Non-essential?” Diva was affronted.

Six gave a smile. “Never been non-essential before, my lady?” he said. “Believe me, it’s good for the soul. I know.”

“You would!”

The boy sighed. “Why didn’t your father pick somebody else to come with the Sellite?” he asked. “He obviously could have done.”

“What do you mean? It is a great honour to be chosen!”

“Says who?”

She put her chin up. “My father!”

“Sure he didn’t just want to get rid of you?” asked Six. “Having met you I wouldn’t blame him— OUCH! I thought you said we would both stay on our own sides of the cabin?”

“You are a horrible boy! Stay away from me!”

“In all fairness, you are the one who just raged over to my side and kicked me in the shins!”

She looked unabashed. “It was your own fault,” she said.

“Yeah, like you believe that!”

“You provoked me,” she muttered.

“Without even trying.” He looked pleased with himself.

“You shouldn’t be talking to me! You are an untouchable. If we were on Coriolis you would be flogged simply for looking at me.”

“Sounds like a cosy place.”

“—And you can’t even speak Coriolan!”

“Well, why should I, if you can speak Kwaidian? Be reasonable, why in Sacras should I speak Coriolan?
I
never planned on interplanetary travel!”

She prickled up immediately. “I can’t think how they came to send you here. An untouchable! Tskk!”

“An untouchable! Tskk! Tskk!” he mimicked.

She threw a shoe at him.

“Not so very elegant, then?” he taunted.

“You are beneath my notice.” She turned away.

“If you keep throwing shoes at me, you will notice all right,” he said. “Your feet will freeze on Valhai. There is only a very slight atmosphere. I believe people can turn into blocks of ice in one minute.”

“We will be protected, won’t we Captain?”

But the captain didn’t appear to be listening.

Once he was away from the gravitational pull of Coriolis, the Sellite led the apprentices one by one along a curved corridor and into a circular chamber with stasis pods lining the bulkhead.

From cell two the captain took Diva first. He escorted her along the cold corridor without speaking and indicated the claustrophobic cylinder she had to get into. She forced herself to take a deep breath so that he wouldn’t see her fear. Thankful that she had snatched back her shoe from Six’s hand as she had marched out of the cell, she wedged herself into the cylinder with only a moment’s hesitation. She wondered how much the base boy from Kwaide would shout as he inched his way into the cylinder. He didn’t have the advantages she had, the training which enabled her to show no fear. He was bound to throw up, she thought with a certain satisfaction.

As he passed by, Six looked at the cylinder on the left curiously. Lady Divina’s face was blank and unworried, already fast asleep. He wondered if she had fought and shouted as the captain urged her to get inside. Perhaps not. She did have guts, whatever else she might be. He stepped inside his own capsule fearlessly. Sleep seemed like a pretty good alternative to him at that moment.

Xenon finished the task of loading all the twelve candidates, and then made his way back to the pilot’s console. He pushed the necessary buttons to shut down the expensive systems on the station, then those that would set his space trader on a trajectory for Valhai.

It was going to be a long three months. He had no-one to talk to, and only the daily checklist to run through. He himself would sleep at least twelve hours each day. It would be very boring, he thought.

Two months later a high pitched sound intruded into his thoughts, and he moved quickly into action. All twelve of the candidates were in suspended animation . . . but the sound warned him that one of the pods was not protecting its occupant from cryoprotectant toxicity. Although training exercises had taught him what to do in any and hopefully all situations out in space, he frowned. There was no discernable reason why the pod was malfunctioning. He ran three different status checks, with no result. The failure was in the automated valves which provided the chemical mix, and the only possible action would be to adjust to level five manually. He implemented the change. That should do it. He had followed Sell protocol to the letter. If not, that pod would be isolated from the rest automatically. At worst, he would lose only one of his cargo of apprentices. He went back to his musing.

GRACE WAS STANDING forlornly on the only outside terrace of the 48
^th
level of the 256
^th
skyrise on Valhai. She had put on a bodywrap to protect her from the very low pressure and pulled on one of the oxygen mask packs, which meant that she could stand for as long as she wanted gazing out over the landscape. It was the one place she knew that her mother would never come to find her. Her mother was terrified of open spaces, as most Sellites now were.

Her sister-in-law’s words rang in her ears. “You should have been genetically modified!” They had been bitter words, and now they wouldn’t go away.

She gave a deep sigh. It was true that she excelled at nothing. All the other Sellites her own age, fourteen, were already sure of their future. She didn’t want to do anything. And it wasn’t that she liked doing nothing; it was just that there wasn’t anything she was good at. All because she was the only unmodified child on Sell. Her mother had been caught on Xiantha when she was expecting, and it hadn’t been possible to apply the usual procedures.

“
I
wish I had, too!” Grace had replied. But it wasn’t true. Sometimes she couldn’t help thinking that everybody else was a little bit too sure of themselves. So good at whatever they had been genetically enhanced to do. Especially her sister-in-law, Amanita. The problem was that Grace herself didn’t fit into their system. They were all continually pushing and pulling, trying to make her into something she wasn’t. Except for her mother, perhaps.

“Your father would be ashamed of you!” Amanita had snapped. That too was probably true. But her father was dead. Xenon 48 had given way to Xenon 49; her brother had become insufferable and her sister-in-law triumphant. They had already moved up to the floor above, leaving only Grace and her mother on the 48
^th
level.

Grace let her eyes look towards the horizon. It was a bereft, abrupt landscape. What little atmosphere there was on Valhai was transparent and there was no cloud formation to hide the stars from the ground. Although there was either perpetual day or perpetual night on Valhai, all of the skyrises had been laid down in the twilight zone, that area where the sun was perpetually just under the horizon. A yellow-orange glow was all that could be seen of the red dwarf star, Almagest.

In front of her she could hardly miss seeing the sunward half of the planet Cian, a certain shade of violet-blue, which was hard to forget. Dotted all over the rest of the sky were milliards of visible stars, so bright that that it seemed almost as if they alone could account for the clarity on the surface of the planet. Like every other day, or night – for the two were indistinguishable at this point in the twilight zone – there was enough light to see the whole of the landscape. Grace could make out the features of the land perfectly, but it was an eerie, fey light which lacked tonality and left the planet a silvery grey colour.

The stars blazed unblinkingly at her, almost exactly as her ancestors had first found them. She could name all of the most visible, but they were not a step nearer to them. They seemed to be mocking her, mocking the Sellite race, who had dared to think they could reach out that far. But the Sell scientists had still not discovered how to travel at anything like the speed of light!

She would have to go in soon. She had only started coming outside since her father had died. The immensity of the sky calmed her. Her mother had become . . . well . . . a little odd since her father’s death, since her brother, Xenon, had moved up to the 49
^th
floor. That had left the whole of the 48
^th
floor of the skyrise, for just two people, a huge change. And nobody visited anymore. Oh, for a time after her father’s death there had been visitors. But they had slowly stopped coming, tired of being greeted by a distraught Cimma dressed in a soiled dressing gown and wielding the large Xianthan dagger she refused to be parted from. They had opted to leave her mother alone, leave her to tend to her husband’s magmite tomb in the tanato chamber. Grace blew a sigh. It was a continual battle to get Cimma to eat every day, one she felt she was losing.

Just sometimes she felt she had to escape from it all. A thought occurred to her, suddenly. Could she? It would be unheard of on Valhai. And her brother Xenon would be horrified if he ever found out! That decided her. She nodded suddenly to herself. She would do it. One day soon she would go bare planet. She would make her way past all the empty forty-seven floors to the ground floor, then out onto the terrace and down the metallic steps which led down to the planet. That would be really something. Now she had thought of it, it seemed somehow inevitable.

Diva came to her senses inside the same metallic casing she had been told to get into as they left Coriolis. Her head was aching, and she felt stiff; she was quick to take the bottle of water being held out to her by the captain. Once she had drunk she was able to climb out of the cylinder. Xenon made a sign to her to follow him, and she obeyed, coaxing her muscles back into motion.

Unwittingly, her eyes came to rest upon several other casings, in line with the one she was in. Her door was open on its hinges, but these remained closed. All except one had a green light over them. One had a red light. She frowned, and turned to the man who had brought them here.

“What . . .? Is that one broken? What about the person inside?” she asked.

He looked embarrassed but rather defiant. “It was not my fault. There was an irretrievable error in the software. Nothing to be done.” He gave a shrug.

“You mean they’re dead!” Diva stumbled on unresponsive legs over to the casket with the red light over it. Inside, through the transparent window, she could see the factions of a boy about her own age. He looked as if he were sleeping, except that the flesh around his eyes and cheekbones was sunken and taut – a yellow leather colour which precluded life. “You killed him!” She turned to the Sellite furiously.

The Sellite didn’t meet her eyes. “I already told you that it was a systems failure and that nothing could be done to rectify it. Now, you must come with me. I am sorry that one of you died. It will be a setback for the program,” he said flatly.

“What
is
the program? Why have we been brought here?”

“It will all be explained to you in the bubbles,” he said. “Now come on. I have to take each of you down individually, and we really haven’t got much time to waste.”

“But what about the dead boy? What will you do with his . . . his body?”

“Proper arrangements will be made.” The Sellite indicated she should strap herself into a bucket seat in the cabin they now found themselves in. “And it is none of your business.”

She looked around her. They were in another capsule, this time with no windows. “Where are we?”

“I am not here to answer your questions.”

With that, he leant forward to pick up some sort of a monitor from a pocket in front of him, switching it on and becoming engrossed in it, an indication that all conversation was over for the moment.

As soon as the cabin touched the surface of the planet, they transferred to another cabin, similar to the first, but horizontal now instead of vertical. This one was constructed out of the same black, pliable material and was equipped with windows, so that Diva was able to see the surface of the planet for the first time.

It was
so
different to Coriolis, her home planet. Just thinking about Coriolis brought a lump to her throat. Home had been blue, and green and white and absolutely full, she now realized, of vibrant colours. Valhai was ominous, grey and jagged. Sharp slate-coloured mountains spiked up to a black starry sky, yet there was enough light to see the terrain clearly. The only touch of colour which she could see was a half crescent of blue, hanging high up in the sky. She pressed her face closer to the transparent porthole, trying to see as much as possible. There were no plants or trees or animals. It was just one extensive grayish desert of rocky metallic hills stretching as far as she could see. Perhaps there was a touch of a coppery colour about the mountains. And she could detect a reddish haze towards the back of the cabin. The rest was all much of a muchness.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I am taking you to the bubbles, which is where you will live for the next two years, until you become a
Valhai
.”

“Are they houses, like those?” She pointed to the hundreds of high rise houses they were speeding past.

He shook his head. “No. Those are where we live. The Sellites. Every family has one of those blocks. We call them skyrises. But the first settlers to come here
did
live in the bubbles, and you will find them quite comfortable. The orthogel absorbs the incoming radiation, and keeps the bubbles at a constant temperature, which provides an almost perfect habitat for apprentices who we want to keep . . . err . . . safe.” The sentence tailed off rather inadequately to Diva’s ears but she was forced to bite back the further questions spilling out of her because the cabin was now slowing down.

It stopped, and the Sellite escorted her out of the cabin. They were standing at a sort of terminus, in the middle of a lake of black liquid. It stretched out in all directions, and Diva saw that the terminus was build out into the lake, for the shore was a relatively long way away in any direction.

She was led up a “jetty” which was suspended over the black liquid by big rexelene tanks. Set into the jetty at intervals were other, smaller boardwalks each of which terminated in a metallic ring sitting right on the surface of the liquid. The Sellite went over to a control panel and pulled a switch to start some sort of life-support mechanism. Then he ushered her down the fifth boardwalk to the left, indicated the ring, and said, “Jump!”

“Jump?” She shook her head. “Into that? I don’t think so.”

For as far as she could see there was only a murky liquid, which closer up appeared to be more a type of gel. Almost solid. It would have been an ocean if only it hadn’t been so thick. And he was telling her to sink into this stuff! He had to have been lying to her about keeping them all alive. This was some sort of macabre experiment. “I . . . I won’t!”

“Jump!” The earlier order was repeated, the man again indicating the loop of metal which lay on the surface of the substance. “Take a deep breath and jump!”

“Will not.” Diva sat down as firmly as she could on the jetty and grabbed one of the slats it was made of with all her might. “Will. Not.”

But he plucked her up off the jetty with no very great effort and suspended her over the loop of metal.

“Take a deep breath!” And when she didn’t, couldn’t, he gave her a little shake. “Do it, I tell you. Nothing bad is going to happen to you!”

She refused, kicking out with her legs and sobbing. “I won’t let you!”

It made no difference. He simply waited, holding the kicking and squirming girl coolly until she was forced to take in a gulp of air. Then, with one slick movement he dropped her into the asphyxiating goo.

She sank through it like a stone. To try and keep her panic at bay, she began to count the time as she fell. She had been able to hold her breath for fifty seconds at home, but here . . . she probably wouldn’t survive more than thirty. Already her lungs felt full to bursting.

She reached thirty-two and began to scream silently inside her head. She wouldn’t last much longer. Her body was desperate for air, her heart beating a frantic tom-tom of flutters. I can’t hold my breath any more, she thought sadly. Damn!
I should have done better.
Dizziness entered her head and left her light with acceptance. I mustn’t breathe, mustn’t breathe, mustn’t breathe, mus—

A sudden acceleration told her that she had exited the gel. She fell freely for a second and then hit a soft, rather rubbery floor that gave with her weight and then settled gently back into place. She lay panting, taking in air in huge rasping gasps. Her heart took its time in deciding it was still alive, finally settling down into some semblance of normality. All it cared about was if the air was breathable. It must be so, because her heart was calming down slowly.

Diva stared at her surroundings. She was in a room, enveloped in the dark substance. It looked a different colour now, more translucent. It was, just as the Sellite had said, a bubble. She felt behind her with her hands, pressing into the wall. It ceded slightly, and then seemed to press back. There were several tubes visible on one side, and a smaller bubble in an alcove off the main one. She made her way over to the doorway, which she noticed was not regular. Instead it was just like the joins of linked soap bubbles, an irregular and slightly curved quadrilateral. She peered inside. There was a bed, made of the same material. What had he called it? Orthogel? And there were toilet facilities to the right. The bigger bubble must have been about ten metres in diameter, the smaller one about five.