Earth and Air (25 page)

I belong on Earth, thought David. What am I doing here? Being part of a crew, that's what. But what is the crew doing here? Prospecting, with a bit of piracy when the chance offers, that's what. But why? Why any longer? He was rich—they all were, enormously rich in the currency of their home planets. Or were they? All those claims. Were they valid? Had anyone exploited them? That jade, hijacked in Altair—a share of that would have been enough to buy David twenty wives and islands for all of them, but without argument they had traded it for less than a thousandth of its value in fuel—to what end? More exploration, more claims . . .

David knew all this quite well. It was part of his memory—of all their memories—and there had seemed to be quite good reasons for it at the time. None of them had been the real reason, the need to stay together as a crew . . . And now the knowledge and the memory were strange, as strange as the ring of aliens who had fallen silent and were staring at him—those that had eyes to stare with.

“Man,” groaned Skunk. “Why. You. Kill. Cat?”

David barely understood the blurred syllables.

“Me?” he said. “Oh, rubbish. And my name's David.”

“Come off it,” clattered Bird. “It's got to be you. Doc was in his bucket, with no transport. Hippo was with the base-camp Bandy.”

“The base-camp Bandy was asleep,” said David. “Hippo could have done it.”

“Do you really think so?” said Hippo.

“No. Go on, Bird.”

“The rest of us were scouting, none alone. You were alone. You left the camp. Why?”

“I wanted to go over to the rocks. I can't remember why.”

“Not functioning again?”

“I suppose so.”

“Two possibilities suggest themselves. Either you are suffering brain damage, which would account for your failure to function, and your killing Cat, and your not remembering that you had done so or why you went to the rocks. Or you are functioning, killed Cat for your own reasons and are concealing this by pretending not to function.”

“That's easy to check,” said David. “Ask the Bandies. Am I functioning, Bandies?”

The eight eyes swivelled towards him on short stalks.

“Yesyesyesyes,” shrilled the Bandicoots. “Man's functioning fine.”

It was true. The hesitation, the slither, the blur of thought of the last two hours had been sucked away like mist sucked off autumn meadows by the sun, leaving the normal clarity of instant connections, of each detail of knowledge and experience available at the merest whisper of a wish. Except that in this shadowless illumination David could see for the first time that the state was not normal. It was what he was used to, yes; but for a member of the genus homo sapiens it was abnormal. The sapience had been distorted into grotesque growth, like the udder of a dairy cow.

“OK, I'm functioning now,” he said. “But was I functioning when you got back to camp, Bandies?”

“Don't remember,” they said. “Busybusybusy.”

“Are we sure it matters?” said Hippo. “We've only lost a Cat, and look, we've got another one,”

David saw their heads turn, but himself, caught in the rapture of returned illumination, barely glanced at the newcomer crouching at the fringe of the circle of firelight. A large Cat, almost twice the size of the old one, sidled towards Doc's bucket, trailing one hind leg. It had a fresh wound in its shoulder. As Doc's glimmering pseudopod rose and attached itself to the wound, David placed these new facts in their exact locations on the harsh-lit landscape of his knowledge.

“Yes, it matters,” he said. “Skunk was right. It matters immensely to all of us. Look at me. Did I kill Cat?”

He willed their attentions away from the wounded Cat and onto him.

“All right,” he said. “You be the jury. You decide, You aren't my peers, any of you, because we're all so different, but we've got one thing in common which is more important than any difference. Now, listen. Think. There isn't much time. What's happened since sunset? Up to then we were all functioning normally. The survey parties were out. The reports were coming in, everything as usual. Then, just as it began to get dark, Bird found a wreck, and her Bandy didn't report it. Instead all three Bandies told their parties to come home. About the same time I got an urge to visit the rocks, where I found Cat's body. 1 got back and found Hippo scratching herself on a support strut and saying that she was pregnant. If that was true, it meant that she had delayed implantation for an incredible length of time. Next, Doc started eating Cat, instead of trying to restore him to life; he also complained about his hypochondria. Hippo was shocked, though she normally manages not to worry about the carnivores in the crew. As soon as Mole got back he started saying he wanted to go home, and Bird and Doc said the same, and the Bandicoots went into their mating behaviour, which they've never done before when we've been landed—though it's only natural that they should—the presence of a four is immensely stimulating to Bandies—and Bird swore in front of the Whizzers and the Whizzers complained, and I realized I'd stopped functioning . . . How are you feeling, Hippo?”

“How kind of you to ask,” said Hippo, incapable of irony. “Yes, I'm afraid I may have been a wee bit careless and let myself get . . .
you know what. I think I'll probably pop later tonight, but if you all get aboard and close the ports and I go downwind you'll be quite safe. My poor darlings will just have to take their chance.”

“Remember what she was saying twenty minutes ago?” said David.

“The Lord has changed her heart,” said a Whizzer.

“Infinite is His mercy,” said the other one.

“Do you still want to go home, Bird?” said David.

“Come off it. I notice you don't ask old Mole. Just because I'm female you pick on me for a moment of nostalgia, as if I was a brainless ninny all the time.”

“But you're back to normal now? You too, Mole? And the Bandies? And me. But it isn't normal. We're all behaving in ways which are unnatural for our species. We're suppressing some parts of our behaviour and exaggerating other parts. It isn't normal for me to act like a fault-free computer. My brain has computer like abilities, but in order to function as a crew member I've had to adapt them. It isn't normal for Bandies not to mate whenever four of them meet, but they've suppressed that side of their behaviour. It's the same with all of us. Now think of the order of events: Cat dies; we stop being a crew and become individuals; a new Cat turns up and we start being something like a crew again; only this new Cat is badly wounded and not paying proper attention, which is why we have still got a little time left.”

David glanced towards the bucket. The water level, which had at first perceptibly sunk was steady now. As soon as it started to rise it would mean that Doc was beginning to withdraw his substance from the Cat's body.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you remember that load of jade we hijacked round Altair? We could all have retired on that, but we didn't. Instead we got rid of it at the first opportunity, for a ludicrous price. Why? Because it would have broken us up as a crew, and we've got to stay as a crew, not for our own sake but for Cat's. The Cat is a parasitic species. I don't know anything about natural Cat behaviour, which is interesting, considering that I've got all your details stored away, but my bet is that on their own planet Cats are parasitic on lower animals. When the first explorers reached their planet they simply adapted them into the system, and now the function of a space crew is to provide a safe environment for a Cat.”

“It wasn't safe for our Cat,” said Mole.

“It was almost safe. Between us we could control any normal dangers, except one. You missed a point in your analysis, you know. Doc said that if you're going to kill a Cat you have to know exactly where to hit. The only crew members who might have known were Doc and myself. Doc couldn't have got to the rocks, and I've already told you I don't know much about Cats, because our Cat never allowed me to. But there's one other creature who would have known, one creature whom neither Skunk nor the Bandies would have detected when they were feeling for traces of higher life on this planet. That's another Cat which survived the space wreck. A Cat large enough to ambush and kill our Cat despite a broken leg. Our Cat must have fought and wounded it, in the shoulder: our Cat must also somehow have mentally sent for me as the fight began, which was why I went out to the rocks, but I was too late.”

David glanced at the bucket again. The water level had risen halfway to its normal level and the strange Cat was stirring.

“We've got to be quick,” he said. “There's no time left. In a moment this new Cat will take us over. But we don't have to give in. Cats don't have total control. This one had to hang around and wait for the Bandies to finish their mating pattern, because that was an urge too powerful to be interrupted once it had begun. I don't think Cats are
very intelligent—they don't have to be, because we do their thinking for them. But now we are aware what they do to us, I believe that we've got the will power and intelligence to resist the control, long enough to get clear. We can go home, find out if any of our claims are valid, and if they are we can retire. Surely we can cooperate that long, without being forced to by a Cat? You've got to make up your minds. Now, at once. That is part of the analysis. What's your verdict?”

The new Cat quivered, shook itself, and stood up by the bucket. Fresh scar tissue showed on its shoulder—so Doc had done a rushed job. The Cat took a pace towards the fire. If only it had a sense of smell, Skunk could have controlled it, But it hadn't. That too was part of the analysis.

“Quick. What's your verdict?” hissed David.

He felt the pressure of their attentions focused on him.

“Guilty,” groaned Skunk. “Man. Guilty. Of. Mutiny.”

David was only for an instant conscious of the blast of odour that laid him out.

He woke some time after midnight. The embers were dim, but gave just enough light for him to see that the ship's port was closed. Hippo was crashing around in the remains of the ruined grove. David rose, intending to go and say good-bye, but his legs walked him away from her—just as, a few hours back, they had walked him for no good reason towards the rocks. He was ceasing to function, but his normal intelligence was sound enough to tell him that he could never rejoin the crew, any crew, because his knowledge of the behaviour of Cats would henceforth be part of his memory and thus part of his function. He would not be able to perform his tasks without being aware of why he was doing so.

As the harsh clarity of thought faded into softer textures, full of vaguenesses and shadows, David became conscious of the planet around him, of the sweetness of its air, of the rustle of primitive leathery leaves, of the ticking insect life that might one day evolve towards a creature like Bird. He had known all these things, of course, soon after the ship had landed, but known them merely as facts—the chemical composition of the air, the level of evolution of plant and insect—and not as sensations, accepted and relished through channels other than those of the intellect.

Behind him the sound of splintering timber ceased. From vast lungs came a strange whinnying noise, dying into a long sigh. David realized he had been walking downwind from Hippo. His legs continued to do so. Breeze at, say, six kph—at any rate a little faster than he had been walking. He had about a kilometer start, so the seed cloud should reach him in . . . His mind refused to tackle even that simple sum, because it kept slithering off into irrelevancies, such as the sudden thought that Cats had five senses after all; and that they were more intelligent that he had guessed; and, to judge by their revenges, more catlike.

About the Author

Peter Dickinson OBE is the author of more than fifty books, including many books for children and young adults such as
Emma Tupper's Diary, Kin, Eva, The Dancing Bear,
and
The Seventh Raven.
He is a two-time winner of both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award and winner of the Guardian Award. He spent seventeen years working at the magazine
Punch.
He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley. Find out more at peterdickinson.com.

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