Helix Wars (17 page)

What felt like a long time later, the chatter of the crowd increased as if in anticipation. Minutes later he heard a distant creak and grind, then a high-pitched squeal that lasted an age. At last the piercing note ceased, and with it the creak of timbers, and he guessed that the train had drawn into the station.

Curious, he peered out from beneath the furs. His view was limited, but he made out the station’s façade, and rising above it to a height of thirty metres the train’s crimson and silver sails, bellying like over-filled shirt-fronts. He smiled to himself. From interplanetary shuttle, he thought, to farm cart, to this, a timber sail-rail vessel like a galleon of Old Earth.

The cart shook, and he felt someone climbing aboard. He heard voices, and shortly afterwards Calla drew the fur aside and peered in at him.

She was smiling. “The Sporelli are not onboard the train. We are safe to board.” She shook her head. “But I don’t understand. Their soldiers surrounded the station at Trahng, as if they knew we were due to arrive, and before the train set off they searched it – but they did not bother to ride the train, nor to send troops here, to Karralan.”

He looked at her. “You don’t suspect a trick?”

She bit her bottom lip and shook her head. “I don’t know, Jeff. But we must be very careful. Now, cover yourself again while we board the train.”

He pulled the skins over him and heard Calla call an instruction to the oldster.

The cart juddered into motion and rolled forward slowly, edging through the crowd.

Five minutes later the flat-bed tipped. He rolled beneath the furs. The oldster called out, urging the turtle to greater effort, and slowly the cart moved forward and upwards. A ramp, Ellis thought. The flat-bed levelled out again, and he peered out.

They were on a broad timber deck, busy with the to and fro of passengers boarding the train. He felt pressure beside him, as Calla lay down and lifted a fur. “Be ready to climb down. Very soon I will escort you through the ship to a cabin I have booked.”

She lowered the fur, and he waited for the signal from Calla. A few minutes later, it came. The fur was yanked aside and Calla gestured Ellis to follow her.

The deck was quieter now, and keeping the bulk of the cart between himself and the passengers still boarding, he followed Calla through a tiny timber door and along a wonderfully warped and twisted corridor that ran the length of the ship.

In due course they arrived before another small door. Calla unlocked it with a great wooden key and Ellis had to duck to gain admittance.

Head bent to avoid dangerously low beams, he followed her across to a window-seat at the far end of the chamber. A small mullioned window overlooked the rails curving off into the distance.

“The largest room aboard the train,” Calla said. “I am afraid it is still rather cramped for someone of your size.”

The chamber was hung with tapestries and spread with woven rugs. Not one surface – wall, floor or ceiling – was set square with another, and the predominant odour was that of old wood and polish. He had the feeling of having been sent back in time, exiled from all the reassuring comforts of modernity he was accustomed to on New Earth. This was almost medieval.

He curled himself onto the window-seat before the thick glass window. Calla said. “You must be hungry. I will bring food for us. Bolt the door when I leave, and open it only when I knock like this.” And with her tiny knuckles she rapped five times on the window frame.

While she was gone the galleon creaked and strained, and he heard a distant cheer. Almost imperceptibly the train began to move. He pressed his face against the flawed glass and made out the gargantuan timber beams that crossed the width of the train above him, terminating in great greased wooden wheels which turned on the tracks to either side.

The train gained momentum and, with much creaking and groaning, pulled from the station. He watched the quaint timber buildings flash by, the crowds of locals waving off loved ones, and within minutes they were racing along the track through open fields. As their speed increased, the walls of the room flexed and buckled, setting up a rhythmic creak that counterpointed the constant thrum of the wheels on the tracks high above.

Calla returned five minutes later with a tray of food, and they sat side by side on the window-seat and ate.

E
IGHT
/// A
T
T
HE
B
UILDERS’
Z
IGGURAT

1

M
ARIA SAT AT
a table in the plaza of her hotel overlooking the tourist resort that had grown up around the Builders’ ziggurat.

She was due to meet Dan Stewart at noon, and, as ever, before they spent any time together, she experienced both excitement and guilt; excitement for obvious reasons... but guilt? It was, she told herself, ridiculous. Things had never been as bad between her and Jeff as they were now, not even during the bitter recriminations that followed Ben’s death three years ago. They lived, to all intents, separate lives. They rarely spoke, and then only to synchronise their busy time-tables. They shared the lakeside house, but were rarely in it together – Maria made sure of that. So why, then, the nagging guilt? Maria blamed her parents, and more specifically her father; the grandson of an Orthodox Greek whose morality he had tried to pass on, with limited success, to his daughter. If he could have seen her now, cheating on her husband, he would have reduced her to tears with just a few words.

She swore, cursing as much her weakness as her father’s posthumous influence over her, and tried to push the guilt aside and concentrate on the days ahead. She had more reason than ever today to anticipate their meeting. She had been seeing Dan Stewart, head of the Builder Liaison team, for over a year now, attracted to him initially because he was everything that Jeff was not. Tall and blond where Jeff was stocky and dark; talkative and emotionally forthcoming where Jeff was taciturn and inhibited. And, importantly, highly intelligent while Jeff was, to put it kindly, intellectually dull. At first Maria had wondered if she was attracted to Dan only because he was so different from Jeff; then she came to appreciate the differences as important attributes in themselves, and by that time, even though she did wonder occasionally if she were no more than an adventurous fling for the high-flying Director, she was in love with him.

Over the past few months she had come to believe that her sentiments were reciprocated. Dan told her that he loved her, and at their last meeting she had steeled herself and issued an ultimatum. If he really did love her, she said, would he leave his wife for her?

He had greeted her words with silence, stroking her hair as they lay in bed in the aftermath of love-making. “I’ve never claimed,” he’d said, “not to love my wife.”

“But you say you love me. If you really did, you’d leave her.”

“That would... destroy her.”

She told herself that he was being melodramatic, or was she trying to convince herself of this in order to minimise her guilt?

“So you’re happy to go on like this, sneaking off for clandestine weekends, when we could have a fulfilling life together?”

He looked away, his blue eyes unreadable. “No, I’m not happy doing it like this. I’d like to spend more time with you... but at the same time I don’t want to hurt Sabine.”

She didn’t know whether to be cheered at this example of his humanity, or enraged. And then the niggling doubt began: did he really love her as he claimed, or was she merely the source of physical relief which his marriage failed to provide?

He’d moved his hand from her cheek and slipped two fingers between her legs. Despite herself, she opened up to him.

Afterwards, he had stroked her hair and murmured, “I love you, Maria. I’ll... I’ll tell Sabine. I have a week off in a little over a month. Let’s go away somewhere together to celebrate, okay?”

He had suggested the resort complex near the Builders’ ziggurat because it was a tacky tourist site which members of their team would be unlikely to frequent; and while it was not the most romantic of destinations, Maria would have been happy to take a week alone with Dan Stewart
anywhere
, even on the ice-fields of the first circuit.

2

S
HE LOOKED AT
her wrist-com. It was not yet eleven: she had another hour before Dan was due in. She’d arrived late last night and had not had time to do the tourist trek.

She left the hotel plaza and crossed one of the many walkways that meandered over the greensward connecting the complex of hotels to the ziggurat and adjacent visitors’ centre. Beyond, partially embedded in grassy mounds, was the wreck of the Agstarnian ship which had followed the First Four from the eighth circuit. As a child she had read about the First Four, and seen holo-films of their exploits, and she recalled her first sight of the wreckage, and the ziggurat, at the age of nine. She had been almost breathless with the wonder of it, the stuff of myth made physical. She had come to the coast with her parents, and had gratified their expectations with unbidden tears when she stepped towards the ziggurat where Hendry, Kaluchek, and the Agstarnian Ehrin had first encountered the Builders, channelled through their team-mate Carrelli.

Even now she felt a constriction in her throat as she stepped into the shadow of the rearing bronze ziggurat. She wondered how much this emotion was a genuine response to what the building represented, or a reaction to the memory of the innocent girl she had been all those years ago.

She took her place in the line of tourists snaking towards the arched entrance of the ziggurat. She made out a couple of tall, reptilian Mahkan, the Helix’s engineers, their bearing severe and military, almost hostile. Next to them were three Jantisars, the thick-set, porcine creatures from a frozen world on the seventh circuit. There was even a gaggle of tiny Agstarnians which Hendry, in his famous account of his arrival here, had referred to as lemur-like, whereas Friday Olembe had called them rats. They were, she thought, a little like both.

They passed through the entrance and into a vast chamber, which she recalled from Hendry’s account as the largest walled space he had ever experienced. She looked up, as he had done two hundred years ago, and experienced an odd, vertiginous dizziness as she took in the myriad galleries rising inside the soaring tower.

But most remarkable of all, she thought, was the great bronze oval that occupied the centre of the chamber. As if drawn like pilgrims, the tourists – and Maria with them – moved
en masse
towards the oval.

She paused before it, staring at its lambent perfection.

She heard a gasp from someone to her right, and turned as a human tourist pointed in awed silence.

Maria didn’t know whether to be horrified at the tackiness of what was taking place, as four ghostly blue-uniformed figures and an Agstarnian stepped from around the side of the oval and stood before the tourists, or swept up in the sense of wonder at what the scene represented.

She recognised the figures as Joe Hendry – her husband’s childhood hero – Sissy Kaluchek, Friday Olembe the truculent Nigerian engineer, and Gina Carrelli, the puppet and mouthpiece of the Builders, the woman who had vanished mysteriously, shortly after the founding of the city that was to be named after her. Alongside them was the Agstarnian, Ehrin.

Maria forgot her adult cynicism, and just stared.

The ghostly holographic figure of Gina Carrelli stepped forward and spoke in barely-accented English. “After weeks of travelling, from the inhospitable ice-bound eighth circuit – or, as we called it then, the first circuit – enduring many travails and hardship along the way, we arrived at last at the ziggurat of the Builders. And this is what they, the Builders, had to say...”

Maria was nine again, and gripping the hand of her father, as she listened to the pronouncement of the Builders speaking through the medium of Gina Carrelli, the Italian psychologist the Builders had been ‘employing’ over the years to facilitate humankind’s passage to the Helix.

“Over thousands of millennia,” she said, “the ancient race known as the Builders have been working to save the many otherwise doomed races that occupy the galaxy...”

Maria hung on every word, as the Builders – through Carrelli – explained to Hendry and the others just why they had been brought here, to the Helix. It was as if Maria was hearing this for the first time and experiencing vicariously Hendry, Kaluchek and Olembe’s wonder as they took in her words.

The speech lasted perhaps fifteen minutes, after which the figures faded and the watching tourists came back to their senses; they smiled and laughed, and exclaimed amongst themselves. It was, Maria thought, like they’d just witnessed a particularly wondrous magician’s act.

As Maria moved away from the group and strolled around the bronze oval, then took her leave of the ziggurat and crossed the greensward towards the crash-landed starship, she considered the irony of what she had just heard.

For a decade after humankind settled on New Earth, the Builders had kept up constant communications with the humans’ appointed leaders. Together they had set up the Peacekeepers and established the complex ground-rules and protocols governing the politically delicate matter of maintaining harmony between so many alien races. Then, almost ten years to the day after humanity’s first encounter with the enigmatic Builders, the aliens had announced that they had told humanity all they needed to know, and were retreating into the virtual quiescence they had maintained for millennia. Despite protests, led by Hendry himself, the Builders had been incommunicado from that day forward, leaving humankind to the task of peacekeeping as best they were able.