Helix Wars (16 page)

The Healer inclined her head in assent. “Yes.”

“Then isn’t it rash of us to be heading towards the very same coast?”

She smiled at him, her serene head rocking this way and that with the motion of the cart. At last she said, “The Sporelli forces are massed two hundred kilometres north along the coast, near the town of Pahran. There is a harbour there, and from there they will mount their invasion of D’rayni.”

He thought about it. “And when we reach the coast?”

“There we will part company. But we will be reunited again, or so say the Diviners.”

They fell silent, and Ellis watched the countryside passing serenely by. He saw yahn-gatherers at work, climbing the gossamer-trees with coiled ropes over their shoulders; when they reached the pods, they attached ropes to them, hacked at the stalks, then lowered the pods to the ground.

“Calla?”

She turned her calm face to him. “Yes?”

“I’ve been thinking about our relative lifespans. Your people live for an average of twenty New Earth years, my own race for almost one hundred.” He shook his head. “I often feel cheated that our time is so short, when there is so much to experience, so many worlds to see. And I’m likely to live for a hundred years – five times as long as your people.” He stopped abruptly, silenced by her amused expression.

“Are you trying to say, Jeff, ‘are you not crushed by the knowledge of the short span that is your destiny’?”

He grunted. “Yes, if not quite so eloquently.”

She shrugged – another gesture she had picked up from him – and said, “I am aware only of the richness of my life. We live as long as we live. It seems sufficient to me. Think on this, that the race known as the Garl, who dwell five worlds along from D’rayni, live for almost
five hundred
of your years.”

“I’ve heard of the Garl,” he said.

“They are, like my people, pre-technological. They are nomads, and from time to time a lone wanderer has fetched up on our shore with many wondrous tales to tell of his exploits.”

Ellis smiled as he imagined the encounter between the fire-fly Phandrans and the aged Garl.

“Do they know of their history?” he asked. “Are they aware that millennia ago their ancestors dwelled on a world far away from the Helix?” It was a question which fascinated him – how the various races of the Helix viewed the past: whether they were aware of the immense translocation perpetrated by the Builders, or if in their ignorance they had dreamed up creation-myths to account for their presence here?

She smiled at him. “According to a Garl wanderer I met, the Helix is a limb of their god, on which we all dwell like parasites.”

Ellis laughed. “Did you tell him what you believed, Calla?”

She tipped her head to the side, regarding him. “And what might that have achieved? Originally, many millennia ago before the Builders brought us here, my people thought their planet a fruit on a jall-tree, the life-tree, planted by a... by the Universal Gardener. But, do you not see, that this explanation is just as valid as that which you know as the truth?”

He smiled and fell silent as the turtle-beast plodded somnolently along the track.

A while later, when the sun had climbed and was directly overhead, he stirred himself to ask, “Are you curious about the original world of the Phandrans? What kind of people you were that the Builders thought it necessary to bring you here?”

She considered his questions for a while, then said, “Personally, no. But I do know that certain thinkers among my kind have thought deeply on these matters.”

“And?”

She shrugged with grace. “And they have arrived at the conclusion that whatever reasons the Builders had for saving us from ourselves on our original world, they have no relevance to the beings we have become. This happened almost eight thousand of our years ago – fifteen thousand of your years. Whatever bellicose or self-annihilating race we might have been then, we are no longer. We have evolved, become better. We are now, I think, as the Builders desired us to be: one with our world, one with the life-force that governs the Helix.”

He absorbed that, and said, “And you, personally, have no curiosity as to the world your people left behind?”

She shook her head. “No, Jeff, I have not.” She was watching him. “And you? Are you curious about the world you call Earth, the home of the human race?”

“Not a day goes by when I don’t think about Old Earth,” he said. “We left there relatively recently, Calla. We settled here just two hundred years ago, though the ship that brought us here took a thousand years to do so.” He shrugged. “So, one thousand two hundred years ago the Builders brought us here, and my people were divided: the many millions who remained on Earth, a planet whose various nations were at war with each other, a planet rapidly running out of natural resources – and the three thousand colonists who settled New Earth. I often wonder what became of Old Earth – if humanity survived, and if so, how. Or if they perished, if indeed we were saved from the violent end the Builders foresaw.”

She shook her head. “But what can such curiosity achieve?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Perhaps that’s one thing that separates our races, Calla – curiosity. We’ve always been curious, inquisitive. It can be our undoing, and our making.”

She said, “Perhaps it is why the Builders made you Peacekeepers, Jeff? Because you are so close to the terrible past that resulted in your arrival here? You can still recall, as a race, what befalls a world when it is at war with itself. And you have no wish to see that happen again. The Builders, in their wisdom, divined this, and bequeathed you a singular destiny.”

“I’ve never really thought about it like that before,” he admitted. “But to be honest, your assessment smacks too much of a manifest spiritual destiny to my materialistic mind.”

She laughed. “You will learn the truth one day, perhaps, Jeff.”

He said, staring at a silver stream twinkling along parallel to the track, “One day, I would like to return to Old Earth, to see what became of the people left behind.”

She stared at him. “One day, Jeff, you might just do that.”

She glanced up suddenly. He looked along the track, following the direction of her intent gaze – and made out a shape in the distance.

An animal, he thought – a long-necked, long-legged creature that galloped with an oddly somnolent, almost negligent grace. It resolved, became more than just an indistinct blur: it was a golden-pelted creature not dissimilar to a terrestrial giraffe, not that Ellis had ever seen anything but archive film of such a strange animal.

And riding on the back of the giraffe-analogue was a tiny jockey.

Calla stood and stared ahead as the rider drew alongside the cart and shouted down to her.

She replied with urgency, and the rider heeled its mount and steered it off the track and through the gossamer trees. On the hump of the turtle, the yahn-gatherers were chattering amongst themselves with apparent agitation.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Up ahead, at Trahng,” Calla said. “A platoon of Sporelli infantry arrived this morning and set up a blockade around the sail-rail station.”

“The sail-rail...?”

“Where we were due to catch the coast-bound train,” she explained. “It is as if they knew about our imminent arrival.”

“Would that be possible?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d like to think not, but...”

“What do we do?”

She ignored the question, climbed over the skins and conferred with the yahn-gatherers.

Minutes later she returned and said, “There is a station ten kilometres west of Trahng, and the sail-rail train stops there. Of course, the Sporelli might have soldiers stationed there too, or aboard the train. We will find that out in due course. I have asked that we bypass Trahng. We will arrive at Karralan in approximately three hours.”

Thirty minutes later they came to a fork in the road. The driver urged the turtle-beast down the track to the left. Ellis asked, “And if the Sporelli do know of our rendezvous with the train?”

Calla’s expression was a study in concentration. “If that is so, and they have troops around the station or aboard the train, then we will proceed to the coast by some alternative manner.”

He lay back and stared at the looping wisp of the Helix high above.

He considered Maria, and how she might be reacting to the news of his non-arrival on D’rayni. He liked to think that, despite the state of their relationship, she would be more than a little concerned.

He recalled an incident over a year ago when Maria had been involved in a mono-rail accident on the coast. They’d been going through a particularly rough period, when their every attempt at conversation ended in a row. But when Ellis found out about the crash, his first reaction had been one of shock and concern. He’d rushed to the hospital to find that she’d suffered merely a broken arm, and it had been symptomatic of their relationship that within fifteen minutes, after a jibe from Maria about his thoughtlessness in not bringing her a change of clothing, they had found themselves locked in antagonistic silence.

He told himself that, despite her animosity towards him, Maria would be worried – and he felt a sudden rush of guilt that, all things considered, and despite the danger he was in, he was almost enjoying the role of being a fugitive on an alien world.

He sat up and looked at Calla; she was sitting cross-legged on a pile of furs at the front of the flat-bed, staring serenely ahead.

He said her name.

She turned her head and smiled at him. “Yes?”

“You said we were boarding a train at Karralan? But I thought you didn’t possess technology on Phandra?”

Her smile widened. “We don’t. Not mechanical technology as you know it, utilising metals and such. The train is a
sail-rail
train, constructed from timber. You will see soon enough.”

“I’m intrigued.”

“A network of tracks link all the populous areas of Phandra, and some under-populated areas, too. The tracks are over eight thousand years old, or rather the infrastructure dates back that far. The timber itself is being constantly renewed. It is a never-ending task.”

She fell silent, staring at the fields that had replaced the gossamer-trees. A patchwork of red and yellow stretched up a hillside to their right, and workers toiled at harvesting large black fruits from rows of low shrubs. He contrasted the agriculture here to that back on New Earth, where every process in the farming industry, from planting to harvesting, was conducted by mechanical drones.

He realised that this was how farmers must have worked in the fields of Old Earth, millennia ago.

A while later, Calla turned to him. “Jeff, look.”

She gestured ahead. A great timber construction crossed the fields before them, with regularly spaced v-shaped stanchions bearing three tracks, a central one in the valley of the v and two upper parallel tracks supported by each arm.

“The sail-rail track from Trahng to the sea,” Calla said.

Ellis laughed. “Why... it’s
vast
, Calla. What kinds of vessel runs along a track so big?”

She smiled. “A train more like a ship.” She frowned prettily. “I think you called them
galleons
.”

The cart approached the track and, instead of passing beneath it, turned left along a dirt-track running parallel with the giant timber construction. Ellis looked up. The two higher rails were thirty metres overhead, and spaced twenty metres apart.

“Not far now, Jeff,” Calla said. “In fact, look: the town of Karralan.”

He followed the gentle curve of the track as it diminished in perspective, and made out a blur of buildings in the mid-distance. Calla gestured him to ride lower in the flat-bed and to pull the furs around him, and minutes later he saw why. Peering from beneath the skins, he saw other carts join the track, along with a file of pedestrians, all heading for the distant town.

Fifteen minutes later he heard a faint susurrus, which grew as they approached, and peering out he saw a crowd of Phandrans in what looked like a market place. Ahead, a warped two-storey timber building stood at the far end of a cobbled square. Calla whispered to him, “The sail-rail station.”

As he watched, the oldster leapt down from the back of the rurl and disappeared into the crowd. He returned minutes later and spoke with Calla.

“Good news,” she told Ellis. “The Sporelli do not have the station under surveillance. The train is due in shortly. We have someone aboard who will apprise us of the situation, whether or not Sporelli troops are riding on the train. If so, then it would be impossible to take the train, and it will be a long, slow journey from here to the coast.” She gestured to the furs. “Now, cover yourself and be patient.”

She climbed down from the cart and approached the station, a tiny figure jostled by the crowd that surged before the timber building. Ellis pulled a silver fur over his head and closed his eyes.

The piping chatter of the crowd was muffled now, along with the bellows of animals being led towards the station. It was hot beneath the furs, and while he hadn’t much noticed their aroma while riding on top of the animal skins, buried beneath them he was soon aware of their musky stench. He breathed shallowly and willed the train to arrive soon.