Parallax View (6 page)

“They guarded the orchard area where they harvested the stuff,” Corrie said. “But it was easy enough to get in and out of the caves once we’d been outcast, wasn’t it? It was as if we no longer existed. Maybe they’ll have some supplies in these caves.”

“So we just walk right in...?”

“Not quite,” Corrie said, grinning. “Not quite.”

Just as Corrie had suspected when she first saw the settlement, the sequence of artificial caverns all faced out across the river’s flood basin. There were signs here of violent water-flow – the outpourings of melting glaciers, Corrie supposed. It had carved the rills through the sandstone embankment which the Gargoyles had roofed over, and it had scooped out the great river basin that, at present, was only graced with the slightest of turbid trickles at its core.

Rachel and Sue had needed little persuasion to wait in the jungle while Tanya and Corrie reconnoitred. About fifty metres from where the sandstone embankment tumbled down towards the river basin, the jungle proper opened out and thinned. A few meagre tongues of scrubby growth lapped the open ground and the two women worked their way along one of these.

About ten metres from the edge of the embankment, they reached bare ground. Side by side, they crawled across on hands and knees until they could lie belly down and stare out across the settlement.

It was a scene quite unlike the previous settlement. Small groups of Gargoyles were frozen in their now-familiar half-observant, half-stupefied postures, but elsewhere some of the beings lay basking in the afternoon sun with almost cat-like ease. And there were what appeared to be young Gargoyles, too: smaller aliens, flitting about the open space like gnats over a stagnant pool. In short, there was a domestic atmosphere to this settlement that had been altogether absent from the first settlement.

“It’s the season,” Tanya said, answering Corrie’s unspoken question. “This colony is further through the cycle, just as you said they would be as we move north. They’ve bred, it’s a more mature settlement, getting through the seasonal cycle before the winter zone moves south again.”

“Come on,” Corrie said. “We’re not field scientists now: we’re looking for food.” She backed away from the embankment.

Back in the undergrowth, they worked their way along to the first roofed over section of gully, as far back from the river basin as possible. They weren’t, as Tanya had suggested, just going to walk into the caverns: they were going in through the roof.

The roof material had been sliced from the fleshy limbs of some kind of tree. The stuff was tough and rubbery and, Corrie suspected, would put up pretty good resistance to even a laser cutter if they’d had one to hand. But it was flexible and elastic, and she found it quite easy to twist away a flap of the material and peer down into the gloomy interior of the cavern. The musty faecal smell was quite overpowering and, hanging with her head suspended into the opening, she had to fight not to gag.

It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, and in that time she expected at any moment to feel cold, twiggy fingers closing around her head, hauling her down into the cave. But it didn’t happen. Instead, she found that she could make out bulky shapes in the gloom.

She was looking into a cavity, hollowed out from a natural cleft in the rock. There was a bulbous shape at the far end and, for a chilling instant, she thought that somehow they had completed a full circle and come back to the original settlement and this was Rube or Jake or Imran wallowing in their own self-centred filth.

But no. She knew that wasn’t true. And, in any case, the smell was not a human one. It was animal, something like the fetid mustiness of a fruit bat colony she had once studied in Irian Jaya.

“Keep your eyes peeled for me: I’m going to take a look.”

Corrie twisted so that her legs dangled through the opening, and then she wriggled her torso through the gap and dropped into the gloom.

The thing in the far end of the cell made a slight peeping sound, but otherwise showed no reaction to Corrie’s intrusion. She approached it, hesitantly. The thing was just a mound of flesh, fully two metres round, almost a perfect sphere. Somewhere, near the summit, there was a protrusion that may have been a head, and to either side were folds of blubber that may have served as some kind of limbs.

She touched it.

Its flesh quivered, was cold, its surface slick with exuded oil. What it reminded her of most was some kind of bizarre cross between a seal and the oily, fleshy trees of the dry jungle.

And also, it reminded her of the men they had left behind, although clearly this thing had not the slightest trace of humanity about it.

She snapped herself out of her reverie. It was as if the musty scent in the air was doping her. In the gloom, she searched about the cell, found a few meagre scraps of food: discarded, shrivelled rinds, a few rubbery, dried up gobbets of fruit-flesh, dropped out of reach of the cell’s occupant.

She stepped from the cell, into another similar one. Its occupant, too, wallowed at one end of its filthy domicile, and here she found more scraps of food, even a small number of untouched dopefruit littering the floor.

She swallowed the juices welling up in her dried out mouth. She knew she must fight the desperate urge to bite into one of these discarded fruit. She had to keep her wits about her, had to get back to the others.

Gathering her booty into a fold in the shirt knotted at her waist, Corrie passed through the cell’s narrow opening.

There was a sudden, high-pitched shriek and cool fingers closed around her arms. Chitinous mandibles flashed before her face, and the red ember glow of Gargoyle eyes.

Then she was on her rear, feet kicking feebly, as the Denebian dragged her through the cavern, one long-fingered hand wrapped around her arm, another tangled in her hair.

A sudden glare of sunlight, and then her feet lifted clear from the ground and she was, briefly, flying through the hot, dry air.

Then she struck the dirt in a crumpled, bone-shocked heap.

She drew breath, nearly choking on the dust kicked up in the air around her. She peered through slitted eyes, and through the settling dust clouds she could see a Gargoyle, poised statue-like a few metres away. She couldn’t be sure if it was the one that had ejected her from the cavern. She looked around, and worked out that she was in the clearing she and Tanya had observed from the top of the embankment. There were other Gargoyles nearby, some in frozen repose, others flitting about, yet others lying spread-eagled, basking in the sun.

And then she realised that some of the figures they had taken for sun-bathers were, in fact, withered, almost mummified corpses. These figures were smaller than the Gargoyles with which she had become familiar, their bodies stocky and short-limbed. There was something about them that recalled the grossly bloated figures occupying the cells.

She rolled onto her side and slowly rose to a squatting position.

None of the Gargoyles appeared to be paying her any attention. She jogged across the clearing to where a trail climbed the edge of the embankment and soon she was back in the jungle fringe, working her way across to where the others would be waiting.

“Don’t you see?” she said to Tanya, Rachel and Sue, when they had retreated into the jungle and she had described what had happened. “This is the Gargoyles in their natural state. This is how they would have been if we hadn’t somehow interrupted their natural cycle.”

“But what
are
they – these creatures in the caves?”

“Their society has two castes,” Corrie said. “They lay out the foodstores in the jungle for this elite caste and then, when the stores are exhausted, they round the elite up and take them back to the caverns to look after them. We stumbled upon that foodstore and the Gargoyles somehow took us for members of their elite caste and took us back to their settlement.”

“What about the corpses?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they weed out the ones with diseases or some kind of flaw. They took our menstrual bleeding as a sign of disease and cast us out, just as they cast out any of their own with comparable signs of weakness.”

~

They headed north again, sticking to their reasoning that survival would be more feasible in the temperate zone. Corrie waited until that night before telling the others that she was carrying a few scraps of dopefruit.

Gathered in the root-hollow at the base of a large, broken-limbed tree, they shared out the pieces of fruit she had managed to scavenge. The first bite sent digestive juices scorching painfully up her gullet in anticipation. The second sent a sense of mellow well-being seeping through her body.

Soon the food was gone and for the first time in days Corrie felt sated. Tanya and Sue were curled up in each other’s arms, asleep already. Corrie turned to Rachel, brushed her lips across her friend’s cheek and slumped against her, asleep before either of them hit the ground.

Nine days later, they found the third set of standing stones.

There were fewer this time, nineteen of them, and they were smaller. Corrie wondered if the Denebian tribes had some kind of class structure, with the tribes ranked according to the size and number of their standing stones. Perhaps, but xenthropology wasn’t her field. That made her think of Imran, and for the first time in days she wondered what was happening to the men they had left behind.

The pits here were empty, as they had anticipated. In unspoken consensus, the four women followed the trail that led roughly northwards away from the standing stones. Corrie consulted her map and saw that a small river crossed their path about seven kays due north. If this followed the pattern of the first two finds, that would mark the location of a Gargoyle settlement.

They camped out in the jungle about a kilometre short of the river.

Corrie took first watch, as the other three slept. In the dark confines of the jungle, ‘watch’ was really an inappropriate term: she listened instead. By now she was familiar with the night-time sounds of the jungle, the occasional rustles and calls of nocturnal creatures, the usually distant whoops and hollers of the agile lizard-like creatures that inhabited the high canopy of the forest.

She drank from the flask, filled from a nearby dew-pond formed in the hollowed-out horizontal limb of a tree. It was cooler at night now, and the air moister, which meant that thirst, at least, was not the problem it had been further south.

And then she heard the scream.

It sounded like a baby... a baby in intense pain. The kind of agonised wail that cuts right through to any human with the merest scrap of empathy.

She shook herself. The sound had only lasted for an instant, and now she wondered if she had somehow imagined it, some kind of aural hallucination. Something in the water, perhaps.

She was just beginning to relax when she heard it again, lasting a full two seconds.

“What is it?” Tanya was at her side.

“I don’t know,” said Corrie. “But it’s coming from where I think the settlement will be. And it’s bad – I know that much, for sure.”

They approached the settlement in the grey twilight hours before dawn. The screams had lasted well into the previous night and, even when they had subsided, none of the women could settle again.

They knew they were nearing the settlement when they heard the steady sobbing drifting towards them from up ahead.

The women exchanged glances as they edged cautiously through the undergrowth towards the growing lightness of the forest fringe.

They came to the river first, a muddy, slow-moving ribbon of slime about ten metres wide. Across the water was a wide, gravelly shelf, a riverine beach enfolded by a great, lazy loop of river. And beyond this area, the land rose in a low cliff-face dotted with the openings of caves, much as Corrie had expected to see.

But she had not anticipated the tableau laid out on the gravel clearing. Strewn like beached jellyfish across the stones were the hulking, bloated bodies of the Denebians Corrie had previously thought of as an ‘elite caste’. But what culture would treat its elite in such a manner?

The beasts had been hauled from their caverns, and that alone must have been responsible for some of the damage Corrie saw before her.

The bodies had been skinned alive. The great hulks lay quivering, sobbing and groaning in the heat of the rising sun. Vivid red trails led from each massed body back to the cave-mouths, scraps of what must have been skin flapping in the breeze, stripped from the bodies as they were dragged out into the open.

Had all of these creatures been cast out for some reason, had they all been rejected as, first Corrie, and then the other three women had been? Did some remain in the caverns?

But no. As Corrie stared, unbelieving, she recognised the flitting movements of the Gargoyles, up by the caves. Clearly, they had not yet finished with their tortured captives.

They moved so fast!

An instant after she had seen them emerging from the caves, some of the Gargoyles were down by their mounded charges in the open. Even as she watched, one of them skipped up onto a flayed torso and was down on the ground again, holding another scrap of skin aloft. A piercing, baby-cry tore through the morning air a split-second later.

Corrie turned away.

“What are they
doing
?” she gasped.

Tanya shook her head, still watching. “Some kind of ritualised torture and massacre. Maybe we were wrong all along: it’s not a caste system, but some kind of intensive farming. Maybe they’ve been fattening these creatures up for harvest.”

Corrie remembered the pathetic corpses she had seen at the previous colony. “No,” she said. Although they had physical differences, there was a definite continuity of features between the Gargoyles, the rejected creatures cast out from the caves to die, and the bloated forms being tortured here today. “They’re the same species.”

“Cannibalism, then,” Sue said. “They eat some of their own in order to survive the coming winter season.”

Corrie steeled herself for another look.

Out across the river, the settlement had come alive with the early morning sun. The beach was swarming with Gargoyles.