Parallax View (2 page)

Corrie didn’t think it could be long before they suffered their first casualty since the firestorm.

“We have to move,” she said to Imran now. “Migrate.”

Imran looked puzzled. “The Vulcan’s burned out,” he said. “No transport.”

From across the clearing, Rube snorted. “Guess lover-girl didn’t think of that one, hey?”

Corrie ignored him. “Then we walk. Before we’re too wasted to move.”

Sue and Tanya glanced at each other. “It makes sense,” Tanya said, casting a shy, heartening glance towards Corrie. “There’s nothing to keep us here.”

“But it’ll all be like this,” Imran said.

“Think about it,” Corrie said. “Think of the climatic cycle. Thirty-five years ago this jungle was a tundra, emerging from the five year winter. The cold season’s closing in again in a few months. If we head north the cold season will be more advanced.”

There would be rain, or snow even. Drinkable water. And maybe there would be food: if, as Rube argued, the oily, fleshy nature of jungle lifeforms was an adaptation to the dry season, maybe things would be different in the more temperate regions.

Maybe. It was a chance, at least.

Imran looked up, his gaze taking in the gathered survivors. “Okay,” he said. “What do you think? Let’s put it to the vote. Who says we leave here, move north?”

Heart hammering, Corrie raised her hand.

Deneb was setting, its deep ruddy light filtering through the high foliage, reducing the bloated shapes of the trees to eerie shadows. Corrie walked on, supporting Rachel. They had set off at dawn, and for the first five hours Corrie had been fuelled by hope. At least, now, they were doing something other than sitting around the clearing and bemoaning their fate. Last night they had voted to move north with a majority of twelve to two: it had cheered Corrie that Rube had been one of the two dissenting voices.

At noon, Imran had called a rest break. Jake had spent a poor night, and that morning Rube had cited his colleague’s condition as a reason not to move. But Jake had argued that their only hope lay in finding food and water, and again Rube had been defeated.

For an hour they had rested in the jungle, while the three fittest of the team scavenged for water and some of the more edible fruits. They had returned with the single water canister, salvaged from the wreck of the Vulcan, half full of vapid, oily water, and half a dozen pineapple-like growths.

They had divided the spoils, pathetically inadequate as they were, and Corrie had helped Rachel force down a few mouthfuls of water and a sliver of fruit. Ten minutes later Rachel vomited it all back in putrid-smelling green bile. Corrie had managed to keep her own paltry meal down, but the fruit had done nothing to assuage her hunger. The oily flesh sat heavily in her belly, deeply unsatisfying.

An hour after the meal they had set off again, and Corrie had experienced none of her earlier optimism. She began to wonder, as the heat increased and her stomach spasmed with hunger pains, if perhaps Rube had been right. Perhaps they should have stayed put...

Now the sun was going down and the heat was diminishing. From somewhere behind them, Imran called that they should walk for another thirty minutes, and then think about making camp for the night.

During the day, Corrie had watched an enfeebled power-struggle take place among the men. Almost as if by consensus, it had been Imran who had taken tacit charge of the survivors. It was Imran who asked for suggestions, put ideas to the vote; he had settled the occasional disagreement, collated what was known about the planet and catalogued options.

Once or twice Rube had made his objections known, suggested options opposite those proposed by Imran. Always, Imran had thrown the debate open, asked for a democratic vote – and always Rube had been defeated. Corrie was pleased to note that she was not alone in her dislike of the querulous, annoying loud-mouth.

She had noticed another division among their ranks, too. Ever since last night, the women had gathered apart from the men. Tanya and Sue, Rachel and herself formed a group away from the other nine survivors. It had not been until they had set off again after the rest break that Corrie had become aware of the division: the women led the way, Tanya and Sue in the lead, followed by Rachel and herself. Then had come the men, led by Imran, with Rube bringing up the rear like some dissatisfied, skulking dog.

“I’m tired, Corrie...” Rachel whispered.

Corrie halted. Rachel was leaning against her, and she realised that she had been virtually carrying the woman for the last hundred metres.

“Okay, not far to go now. We’ll find a clearing. Stop for the night.”

“Thirsty. Don’t know how thirsty I am, Corrie...”

Corrie smiled to herself. Like to bet, she thought. “We’ll make camp for the night and collect water,” she said, realising as she spoke how terribly inadequate were her words.

Tanya had returned to see why they had stopped. She looked from Rachel to Corrie, shook her head. “I’ll take her,” she said quietly.

“Would you?” Surprisingly, Corrie experienced such a surge of gratitude that she felt like weeping.

Tanya shucked Rachel onto her broad back and strode off, soon catching up with Sue. Lightened of her burden, Corrie walked on.

Not long after setting off that morning, they had happened upon a trail through the undergrowth, long and straight and heading due north. Imran had speculated that it was more than a mere animal track; he suggested that the Denebians followed the trail on their long, migratory treks to the cooler climes of the north. From what little information they had been able to gather, Corrie knew that the Denebians were a tribal hunter-gatherer species, migrating with the planet’s 39-year seasonal cycle: in the winter they gathered in the south, then as the warm season set in they split into tribal groups and headed north to stake out summer territories. The survey had set down at the southern fringe of the Denebians’ summer range: close enough, they hoped, to observe without their activities being detected.

Corrie wasn’t convinced that the trail was anything other than an animal track, but it was a blessing to be free of the undergrowth and the bug-filled curtain of lianas.

What seemed like hours later, Corrie heard a shout from way back in the jungle. She came to a halt and sank onto her haunches. Weakly she called ahead, and a minute later Sue and Tanya appeared, stripped to the waist and slick with sweat.

Tanya knelt carefully and eased Rachel, unconscious now, to the ground. Sue sat cross-legged beside the Somalian, wiping sweat from the girl’s feverish brow. Minutes later the men arrived. They collapsed to the ground, eyes closed as they lay on their backs, breathing hard.

Rube seated himself against the bole of a tree, taking in an eyeful of Tanya’s generous breasts.

“Okay,” Imran said. He paused between words, as if the effort of speaking was becoming too much. “Okay... we’ve no water, and precious little pineapple...” He smiled to himself, no doubt noting the irony of naming something so inedible after a fruit most of them would willingly murder for.

“Any volunteers to go and look for fruit and water?”

Corrie raised a hand. Anything would be better than sticking around and suffering Rube’s lascivious stares. One of the men, an engineer called Pablo, volunteered too. He took the water canister. Corrie was on fruit duty.

She followed the path ahead, while Pablo back-tracked and scouted the trail they had come along. Soon she left behind the sound of the team’s desultory conversation. A strange silence sealed around her; after the cacophony of animal noises during the daylight hours, twilight spelled a period of quiescence. Even though she knew the jungle contained no predators that might endanger her safety, she nevertheless felt a quick and irrational fear. She recalled the last time she had been alone in the jungle, just before the discovery of the fire, and how she had hated herself for wanting Rube’s company, then. She glanced at the decal on the back of her hand: 12 golden dots, 70 metres due south.

She stepped from the trail, hands raised to fend off the lianas. There were some spiky bushes here, the kind that sometimes harboured the pineapple-form plaque colonies that were vaguely edible.

But no, this time they were bare. She straightened, scratching at an encrusted graze on her arm. And then she saw the standing stones.

They were in a clearing about five metres from the path. Corrie stared in disbelief. The light was dimming fast, but even so her eyes were not mistaken. She counted perhaps a dozen tall, pale green stones, roughly hewn, arranged in an oval approximately ten metres by five.

Wondering, she spoke Imran’s name into her wrist-decal. “I’ve come across something that might be of interest. Not exactly what we were looking for–”

“What?” Imran’s question sounded urgent in her ear.

“I don’t know. Stone artefacts. Standing stones of some type.”

“I’m on my way.”

Corrie stepped into the clearing. She passed the first menhir, a little taller than herself, and for the first time it came to her that she was looking upon the work of sentient beings that were not human. So far, she had been limited to pix of the Denebians taken before landing – and the first alleged evidence of the natives had been the north-south forest trail that may have been a migratory pathway. The standing stones were an order of magnitude more advanced than the trail.

Corrie moved past the first stone, and then the ground shifted, creaked, and she was falling.

She screamed, and her fall was broken by something yielding, cushioning her. She controlled her breathing, aware of her crazed heartbeat. She was fine, she was still alive; she had not been speared in some primitive animal trap. I’m okay, she told herself, her laughter spiced with tears of relief.

She was lying perhaps two metres below ground level. The last of the sunlight that reached this far revealed a pit, the walls of which glistened with some dark and viscous substance.

She heard a voice in her ear. Imran. “Corrie. Are you okay? I heard you scream–”

“I’m okay. I’m in the clearing. I fell into a... well, God knows what it is. Some kind of pit. Watch your step, there might be more of them.”

Only when she tried to stand did she realise that she was ensconced in the same soft, yielding substance that comprised the walls of the pit. She sank back into its sticky embrace, laughing to herself.

She had no idea what made her reach out, scoop a handful of slime from the wall next to her head and raise it to her nose. It smelled... well, there was no other word for it,
appetising
. She stuck out her tongue and touched the gobbet of goo. It tasted slightly sweet, a little meaty, satisfying. She bit into the stuff, its juices cascading over her tongue and down her throat. Unlike the other native food she’d tasted, this stuff – whatever it was – not only tasted good but felt as if, already, it was working to banish her hunger.

She was aware of movement above her and looked up. Imran was peering down at her over the rim of the pit.

“What the hell...?” he began.

Corrie, laughing, raised the manna into the air. “You won’t believe it,” she called up, “but I think we’re saved.”

Rachel walked across the clearing, avoiding the holes in the ground, and crouched before Corrie.

In just three days Rachel had regained her health. She had recovered her strength, put on weight, started to recover some of her former confident swagger. Jake, too, had been miraculously revived from the brink of an ugly death. They had excavated over a dozen pits in the clearing, each one packed with a store of semi-liquefied meat.

They had taken turns to trek into the surrounding jungle on water-collecting duty, though they discovered that water was no longer a prerequisite for survival. As well as providing solid food, the meat also contained sufficient liquid to more than meet their needs.

Now Rachel passed Corrie the canister. Corrie drank, more out of gratitude to Rachel than to quench her thirst.

The black woman smiled shyly. “I just wanted to say thank you – for helping me back there. I wouldn’t have made it without you.”

Corrie reached out and took the woman’s hand. “You’d have done the same for me, Rache. We’re all in this together.”

The others sat around the clearing, sated and relaxed. All except Rube, that is. He went to stand over Imran in the confrontational manner they had all come to recognise.

Imran looked up. “What is it, Rube?”

A silence came down over the gathering. Corrie glanced at the other women, then looked across at Rube.

“I’ve been thinking...” Rube paused, looked around the staring faces. Corrie stopped herself from making a caustic comment.

“I know we’ve speculated what these things might be,” he went on, gesturing towards the open pits. “But we haven’t considered the consequences.”

He let a silence develop. He looked around the team, taking everyone in. At last Imran said, “What consequences?”

“So we think we stumbled across meat stored by the aliens,” Rube said. “Some kind of big animal slaughtered, prepared and buried ritually by the Denebians for retrieval during the migration season...”

Imran was nodding. “It’s as good a hypothesis as any,” he said. They had already considered, and rejected, the possibility that it was a burial ground: the stores of meat were simply too large and well-preserved to match what they knew about the Denebian physique.

Rube waved. “I’m not arguing with the theory,” he said. “But I’ve been considering the results of what we’ve done here–”

Corrie cut in. “What? Are you suggesting that we should have left the meat well alone, Rube? Just continued north and starved to death? “ She realised that she was hardly being fair – at least she should hear what Rube had to say – but at the same time she experienced a malicious satisfaction at baiting him.

He shook his head. “I’m saying nothing of the kind. I just want us to consider what we’ve done. Listen, a few days ago it was you who was going on about how we shouldn’t interfere with the natives...”

His gaze raked the dozen watching faces. “So we’ve dug up and consumed what I suggest was a valuable, and clearly specially prepared, food resource. I don’t think the Denebians will be best pleased when they return to find their larder raided.”