Rites of Passage (10 page)

I struggled to explain the presence of the pistol. “Ed... he said I might need it.”

“A wise move in these times.” She reached out and pulled me onto the bed.

We made love, Samara urging me to slow down, take my time, as she opened herself to me.

Time was obliterated. I had no idea how long might have passed. I lost, too, all sense of self. It was as if I were an animal, indulging in primal appetites, oblivious of anything else but the pleasures of the flesh. Samara was ferocious, biting me, scratching. I felt a heady sense of accomplishment, almost of power, that I could instil in her such a display of passion.

Later we lay in each other’s arms, slick with sweat and exhausted. She sat up, left the bed and padded to the shower. I watched her, overcome with the sight of her nakedness. She gestured for me to join her.

We stepped into the cubicle and stood together, belly to belly. She touched the controls and I gasped. Cool water cascaded over our heads, and I experienced both a sense of pleasure at the silken warmth of the water, and guilt at the profligate use of such a resource.

She passed me something, a small white block. “Soap,” she explained. “Rub me with it.”

I did so, surprised by the resulting foam, and we made love again.

We dried ourselves and lay on the bed, facing each other. I stroked her cheek. Even then I knew that this was a passing pleasure, unexpected and delightful but hedged with danger.

Then, as if reading my thoughts, Samara traced a finger across my ribs and said, “You can stay here, if you wish. Leave the others, travel with me. The life is hard, but I have my comforts.”

I stared at her, at her hard eyes, her cruel mouth. Even then I had wits enough to wonder if she harboured ulterior motives.

I said, “And leave my family?”

“You’d have me, Pierre,” she said. “We’d want for nothing. We’d eat well.”

I wondered if she had a hydroponics expert aboard. I’d seen no evidence of things growing in my brief passage through the hovercraft.

She leaned on one elbow, staring down at me. “And things will get better, believe me.”

I shook my head. “How?” I asked, wondering suddenly if she had information about a thriving colony somewhere.

“We’re heading to Tangiers,” she said.

“There’s a colony there?”

She smiled. “There was once a successful colony at Tangiers, Pierre. It died out, I’ve heard, a few years ago.”

“Then...” I shrugged. “Why go there?”

She paused, stroking my chest. “The colony was religious – one of those insane cults that flourished as civilisation died. They called themselves the Guardians of the Phoenix.”

I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of them.”

She looked at me. “But you’ve heard of Project Phoenix?”

“Edvard told me about it,” I said. “A ship was sent to the stars, hoping to find a new Earth.”

She was smiling. “That was the plan, anyway.”

“The plan? You mean...?”

“I mean the ship was almost built, in orbit, before the end – but the funding ran out, and governments lost control. The project became just another dead hope–”

“How do you know this?”

She rolled from the bed, crossed the room to a small wooden table and returned with a sheaf of papers.

“A read-out,” she said, curling next to me. “I obtained it years ago from a trader. It’s an official report about the winding up of the Project, and the resources that remained.”

I leafed through the papers. They were covered in a flowing script that made no sense to me.

Samara said, “It’s an Arabic translation.”

I laid the papers to one side. “And?”

“And it contains information about the spaceport at Tangiers. It’s a copy of the so-called sacred papers on which the Guardians founded their cult.”

“I don’t see...”

“Pierre, the Tangiers spaceport was where the supply ships would be launched from, before the departure from orbit of the
Phoenix
itself.”

“Supply ships,” I said, suddenly understanding. “You reckon they’re still there, the supply ships, full of everything the colonists would need for the journey – food, water.”

She laughed suddenly, disconcerting me. “Oh, I’m sorry, Pierre! You are so naïve. No, the colonists would not need such supplies as food and water.”

“They wouldn’t?” I said, puzzled.

“The supply ships at Tangiers, some dozen or so, were full of the colonists. But they were frozen in suspended animation, and would be for the duration of their trip to the stars. Five thousand of them.”

I stared at her. “Five thousand? That’s... that’s a city,” I said. “Christ, yes... With so many, we could start again, rebuild civilisation.”

Samara brought me up short. “Pierre, you’ve got it wrong. We couldn’t sustain a  colony of five thousand. How would we feed them? What about water? Pierre, face it – the Earth is almost dead. It’s every man for himself, now.”

“Then...?” I gestured at the print-out. “What do you mean? You said there were colonists?”

She stroked my jaw, almost pityingly. “Of course there are, but we couldn’t just revive them to... to
this
. That would be... cruel.”

“Then what?” I began.

She jumped from the bed and crossed the room, kneeling beside a curtained window and gesturing for me to join her.

Bewildered, I did.

She eased the curtain aside and inclined her head towards the revelry outside. A dozen men stood around a blazing fire, singing drunkenly. They were swigging from plastic bottles and eating something.

I turned to Samara. “What?”

Her hand, on my shoulder, was gentle. “The fire,” was all she said.

I looked again at the fire, at the spit that stretched across the leaping flames, and at what was skewered upon the spit.

I felt suddenly sick, and in terrible danger. My vision misted.

I said, “Skull?”

Samara murmured, “He was a traitor. He was against our plans. He stole supplies, water.”

“But...” I said, gesturing to what was going on out there.

“Pierre, Pierre. Life is hard. The Earth is dying. There is no hope. We must do what we must do to survive. If that means...”

I said, “The colonists.”

She did not say the world, but her smile was eloquent enough.

Meat
.

She led me back to the bed and pulled me down, facing me and gently stroking my face. “Pierre, come with me. Life will be good. We will rule the Mediterranean.”

Despite myself, I felt my body respond. She laughed, and we made love again – violently now, like animals attempting to prove superiority. This time, I did not lose my sense of self. I was all too conscious of Skull’s words, his warnings. I was in control enough to know that, however much I revelled in the pleasures of the flesh with Samara, this had to be the last time.

She gasped and closed her eyes. Fighting back my tears, I rolled over and reached down beside the bed.

“Pierre?” she said. She sat up, but she had no time to stop me. She merely registered sudden alarm with a widening of her eyes.

I shot her through the forehead, sobbing as I did so, and only in retrospect hoping that the sound of the gunshot would go unheard amid the noise of the party outside.

I stood and dressed quickly, then moved to the door. On the way I stopped, returned to the bed and picked up the print-out.

At the door I paused, and forced myself to take one last glance. Samara was sprawled across the bed, the most beautiful thing I had seen in my life.

I fled the room. I passed through the chamber housing the solar arrays. Despite the desire to get away, I knew what I must do. I spent a long minute looking over the couples and leads, then judiciously snapped a bunch of connections and removed a capacitor. The hovercraft would be going nowhere for a long, long time, if ever.

I hurried along the corridor until I came to the water canisters. I grabbed as many as I could carry, then made it to the hatch and stumbled into the night, gasping air and hauling the canisters towards the truck. I imagined some drunken reveller finding Samara and chasing me, catching me before I reached safety.

I barged into the lounge, startling Edvard, Danny and Kat. They stared wide-eyed as I staggered towards them.

“Pierre?” Kat said.

“Start up! We’ve got to get out of here!”

Kat, closest to the cab, needed no second telling. She scrambled through the hatch, slipped into the driving seat and kicked the engine into life. The truck surged, heading west.

Sobbing, I dropped the canisters and collapsed into a chair.

Danny and Edvard knelt before me. “Pierre...?” Danny reached out and touched my shoulder.

I passed the print-out to Edvard and told them about Samara and her men.

Kat took my hand.

~

F
or the next four hours, as the truck headed along the ridge of the crest, I was paranoid lest the cannibals repair their vehicle and follow us, crazed with the desire to avenge their dead queen. I sat at the rear of the truck, staring through the dust of our wake. I thought of Samara, and what she had given me, and I relived again and again raising the gun to her head and pulling the trigger, and through my tears I told myself that I had done the right thing.

An hour or two before dawn, Danny turned the truck and we headed nose-down into the trench. We bucked down the incline, then straightened out and accelerated. A little later he judged that we had put enough distance between ourselves and the hovercraft: he slowed the truck and stopped with the sloping wall of the trench to our left.

I joined Danny and Kat, and together we set up the rig and dropped the longest bore through the crazed surface of the old sea-bed.

“Where’s Edvard?” I asked as I locked the final length of drill column into place.

Kat nodded back to the truck. “In there, trying to translate the print-out.”

Danny stabbed the controls that dropped the drill-head, then stood back mopping the sweat from his brow. It was still dark, but the sky in the east was turning magnesium bright with the approach of dawn and already the temperature was in the high thirties.

Dog tired, I returned to the truck to catch some sleep.

An hour later I was awakened by a cry from outside. I surged upright, thinking we were under attack. I launched myself from the truck, into the heat of the day, and stared around in panic.

Kat and Danny were standing in the shadow of the rig, holding hands and staring at the bore.

As I watched, the trickle of water bubbling from around the drill column became a surge, then a fountain-head. I ran to join them and we embraced as the water showered down around us.

I opened my mouth and drank, expecting to taste salt. “It’s fresh!” I shouted. “My God, it’s fresh.” I held Kat’s thin body to me, looking into her eyes and crying with more than just the joy of finding water.

We dismantled the rig and stowed it aboard the truck. Danny marked the position of the bore on the map, and the three of us sat in the cab as we accelerated up the incline of the trench.

Later, Edvard joined us. I glanced at him as I drove.

Kat said, “What is it?”

Edvard seemed subdued. He sat between us, staring down at the print-out in his lap.

Danny said, “Ed? You okay?”

He lifted the sheaf of papers. “The colonists,” he said in barely a whisper, “number some five thousand five hundred, and they were selected to found a new world on some far star. Among them are...” his voice caught “... are doctors and scientists and engineers, specialists in every field you can imagine.”

He looked around at us.

“We could revive them in groups,” he said, with tears in his eyes, “start a colony, small at first, but in time, with the water we’ve found...”

We drove on in silence, into the blazing sun.

I
t began with a personal revelation for Yarrek, shortly after he graduated from college at the time of his twentieth cycle, and ended in an even greater revelation which was to affect every citizen of Sunworld.

On the 33rd brightening of St Sarrian’s quarter, Yarrek passed from the portals of Collium College for the very last time. He paused on the steps, ignoring the crowd of students surging around him, and peered up into the sky. Kite-fish were taking advantage of the approaching dimming, spreading their sails and floating high above the spires of the town as the heat of the sun diminished. He watched the multi-coloured, kilometre-wide wings glide before the face of the sun directly overhead as it changed from dazzling gold to the molten, burnt-umber of full-dimming, and he knew then what it must be like to be as free as a kite-fish.

No more college, ever. Adult life awaited him, with all its promised mystery and romance.

He elbowed his way past a gaggle of fellow graduates and boarded an open cart hauled by four lethargic lox. As the cart set off through the narrow streets of Helioville, heading for the open farmlands beyond, Yarrek watched the town pass by with the heightened clarity of someone witnessing the familiar for the very last time.

Who knew what the future might hold? One thing was for sure – in a brightening, maybe two, he would be away from the family farm, heading by sail-rail all the way to Hub City.

The knowledge was like a warming coal, like the sun which burned at the centre of the world. He watched the city folk go about their quotidian jobs, pitying them their lives of servitude, their changeless cycles of work and play, ignorant of what might lie beyond.

He sat back and let the somnolent lollop of the lox lull him into slumber, as the cart left the town and took the elevated lane through fields of golden yail.

~

“Y
arrek Merwell, your stop!”

The cry of the lox jockey yanked him from sleep. He hauled himself upright and jumped from the coach. As the lox were prodded into motion, farting and lowing in protest, Yarrek stood at the end of the path and stared out over the land that was his father’s, and which in time would be passed on to Yarrek’s elder brother, Jarrel, as was the tradition among the farmers of the central plains.

The Merwell estate stretched for as far as the eye could see, a vast golden patchwork of yail fields in various stages of ripeness. Ahead, like a galleon becalmed, stood his family’s ramshackle farmhouse. The timber had been parched by the sun for countless cycles, warped cruelly by the merciless heat that prevailed this close to the Hub. For all its ugliness, a part of him loved the place. He would find leaving it, and his family, more difficult than he cared to admit.