Paw-Prints Of The Gods (14 page)

Notwithstanding their
predicament, it was another piece of seemingly innocuous
information that settled uneasily upon her mind. The satellite had
reset the console’s time and date display to Universal Standard
Time. Without her wristpad, which Ravana assumed had been
confiscated by the nurses, she had long ago lost track of the
passing days. The display revealed she had been away from the dig
longer than she thought. Two weeks had passed since her fateful
visit to meet the supply ship at Arallu Depot. The archaeology team
would now be on their way back from meeting the returned
Sir
Bedivere
and with a sinking heart she realised her father would
have waited in vain for her promised follow-up call.

“Rats,” she
muttered.

“Thraak thraak?”

“No, it’s not looking
good at all.”

A noise behind drew
their attention to Artorius and Stripy, who were both now awake and
staggering bleary-eyed around the dimly-lit cabin. The young grey
also wore cut-off overalls, but for some reason had them on
back-to-front. Ravana watched as Artorius helped himself to another
packet of rations without offering one to anyone else.

“Fwack!” exclaimed
Stripy, holding out a hand and looking indignant.

“Yes, I know.” Ravana
sighed. “No manners at all.”

“Do you understand
them?” Artorius asked, spitting food as he spoke.

“Not a screech,” she
admitted, then remembered something the boy had said back at the
clinic. “Can you? You told me the nurses made you ask them
questions.”

“I can give you the
translation program,” offered Artorius. “We can link implants.”

Ravana opened her
mouth to object, ever cautious whenever the subject of implants
arose, then realised he had gone ahead anyway. A new image popped
into her mind, one that for a moment looked like a chess piece for
a knight but instead quickly transformed into an hour glass. She
wondered what her own implant icon looked like inside Artorius’
head.

“All I see is a
timer,” Ravana told him. “Filled with yet more sand,” she added in
a mutter, gazing at the endless dark desert outside the window.
Just for a moment she thought she saw a distant silver shape and
two tiny yellow eyes glowing in the darkness of the dunes. She
shook her head and dismissed it as a figment of her stressed
imagination.

“It’s coming!”
Artorius said grumpily.

Ravana waited,
somewhat hypnotised by the animated hour glass. Artorius looked
cross and screwed up his eyes in fierce concentration.

“Still waiting,” she
told him.

“Why isn’t it
working?” complained Artorius.

“Have you tried
switching it off and on again?”

“My implant?”

“No, your brain,”
snapped Ravana, feeling a headache coming on. “Artorius, we need to
talk. Last night I was angry, tired and desperate to get out of
that creepy place and I’m not sure I did the right thing bringing
you with me. What did the clones want with you?”

“Clones?” Artorius
looked puzzled.

“The monks. Brother
Simha and Dhanus.”

“I saw two men in
cloaks but the nurses kept me away from them.”

“Why were you locked
up like that?” she asked. Her irritation was not helped by the
hour-glass symbol still hovering in her mind. “Where are your
parents?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Eaten by a
dinosaur.”

“Don’t joke about
something like that!” scolded Ravana. She gave him a reproving
look, but his expression was both sad and serious.

“It’s the truth!” he
protested. “A robot Tyrannosaurus Rex.”

“What?” she asked,
then bit her lip. “Oh, I see. Was that on Avalon?”

Artorius nodded glumly
and went back to shovelling food into his mouth. Avalon was a
terraformed moon of the gas giant Thule in the Alpha Centauri
system. It was home to a variety of hit holovid shows, first and
foremost being the long-running
Gods of Avalon
, in which
third-rate celebrities took part in bizarre challenges in a land
populated by cybernetic gods and monsters controlled by the votes
of a vengeful audience. Ravana recalled that a spin-off show
Quest for Fire
had a prehistoric theme and stories often hit
the news of ground crews being attacked by malfunctioning robots.
The Alpha Centauri system had no government as such and the Avalon
Broadcasting Corporation was a prime example of what happened when
a big media company was given a free rein to chase ratings as it
pleased.

“You should have the
translator now,” said Artorius, interrupting her thoughts.

The animated hour
glass in her thoughts had gone. Ravana brought up the implant
control menu in her mind’s eye and saw a new icon in the shape of a
pair of grey lips outlined in red. She gave the image a mental prod
and the outline became green.

“Hey, Stripy,” Ravana
said. She gave the young grey a friendly tap. “Say something.”

“Fwack?”

She had expected a
literal audio translation, but instead her implant reacted to the
grey’s utterance by flashing a series of vague images through her
thoughts that suggested less poking and more food was the order of
the day. Ravana looked at Artorius in awe.

“Wow,” she murmured.
“That’s incredible!”

“Fwack fwack!”

“How did anyone manage
to come up with something like this?”

Artorius shrugged, not
seeming to care.

“But I could
understand them! Stripy wants something to eat!”

“Thraak thraak,” added
Nana.

“And Nana hates
mushrooms!”

“Thraak thraak!” Nana
repeated firmly.

“Well, if you don’t
like them, it’ll have to be the nut roast again.”

The images created by
the implant translator left Ravana feeling dizzy. The greys were
more human-like by the minute and she was having to constantly
revise her preconceptions of the mysterious creatures. Still
somewhat dazed following the translator revelation, she turned up
the interior lights and left her seat to fetch a selection of
rations from the overhead locker. Artorius finished eating and
hopped into the vacated driver’s chair to examine for himself the
navigation computer display. It was not lost on Ravana that he
still had not told her why he had been at the dome, locked in a
cell.

“Breakfast,” she said,
handing a couple of ration packs to Nana and Stripy.

She still had a
million questions to put to Artorius, not to mention the greys, but
had awoken from her slumber feeling distinctly grubby. She could
not remember the last time she had a bath, her hair felt disgusting
and she was very conscious of how bad she smelt. During her earlier
trip to the toilet she discovered the transport had a shower
cubicle and she was looking forward to a long soak.

“Where are you going?”
asked Artorius, as she retreated to the end of the cabin.

“I need to wash that
place out of my hair,” she replied. “Then we talk.”

* * *

An hour later, Ravana
felt refreshed and ready to face the world once more. She took
great pleasure in discarding the clinic’s green smock into the
waste disposal unit and now wore a pair of the tatty but clean
overalls and a pair of boots she had found in the locker, her damp
hair wrapped in a towel from the shower room. She persuaded
Artorius to use the shower in turn, during which she took the
opportunity to study the navigation charts further over a bite to
eat as she tried to come up with a plan of action.

The scanner had once
again picked up a signal on the edge of its range. The satellite
identified it as belonging to some sort of vehicle, though whoever
rode inside appeared to be in no hurry to come closer. Switching on
the transport’s short-range communicator gave only the hiss of
static, adding to the overall sense of isolation.

Once Artorius finished
in the shower, Ravana gathered them together in the rear of the
transport, herself on the opposite bench seat to the others.
Artorius looked quite comical in a pair of adult-sized overalls
with the sleeves and legs rolled up.

“We have enough fuel
to take us a good way round the planet,” she began. “There’s also
sufficient oxygen aboard to maintain life support for at least two
weeks. However, the food situation is not good. We have plenty of
water, but only enough ration packs for two, maybe four days if
we’re careful. That’s Earth days,” she clarified.

“Fwack fwack!”

“Where are we going?”
Artorius asked. “Are you taking me home?”

“I will do my best to
get you somewhere safe,” she reassured him. “But the only place I
know is the excavation. Even if we ran non-stop, it would take five
or six days to get there. The satellite chart shows another outpost
two days north-west of here, but I have no idea if it is still in
use, or if we can expect to find supplies there. Assuming we agree
we don’t want to risk starving to death in the desert, we seem to
have just one option.”

“Thraak?”

“We go back to the
dome. We break in, grab supplies and then head for the dig.”

“No way!” cried
Artorius. “I am not going back there!”

“We don’t have a lot
of choice! Besides, you still haven’t told me why you were kept
locked up like that. For all I know I might be harbouring a
ten-year-old criminal mastermind!”

“I’m eight,” the boy
retorted.

“So what’s your
story?”

“The nurses said I was
evil,” Artorius said sullenly. “They tried to teach me about the
greys and their church but I kept getting it wrong. They said I was
supposed to be king of a game but I was not behaving like one.”

“What?” Ravana stared
at him. “That’s no way to talk to a little boy!”

“Thraak,” agreed
Nana.

“I played with Nana
and Stripy and talked to them so the translator could be made
better,” Artorius said stubbornly. “The nurses said I was special
because Nana and Stripy liked me but I was also very bad because I
asked too many questions. They said the greys would one day save
everyone and the people of their church were the chosen ones.”

“Fwack?” asked
Stripy.

The boy scratched his
head. “I don’t know,” he replied. He looked confused, as if the
question had never occurred to him before. “I think they chose
themselves.”

“But it’s good to ask
questions,” Ravana protested. “That’s how you learn things.”

“They said everything
I need to know is in their book.”

Ravana sighed. Her
previous dealings with the Dhusarian Church had not left a good
impression. Artorius’ curious remark about being a king also rested
uneasily upon her mind. The priest Taranis had once said something
very similar to herself.

“Why did they think
you were a king?” she asked.

“There’s a rhyme they
made me learn,” Artorius replied, then unexpectedly began to recite
a verse in a high-pitched halting monotone:

“
Reborn beneath twin
suns,

orphaned child of
Sol,

pawn to watchers and
weavers,

king by the great
game.”

“I think you need to
look up the definition of ‘rhyme’,” mused Ravana, though her mind
was elsewhere. “Those lines are from the Dhusarian
Isa-Sastra
. I wonder...”

Artorius looked at her
oddly. “Why were you there?”

“At the dome?” she
asked and sighed. “I was at Arallu Depot with the others, getting
ready to travel back to the dig. I’d just spoken to my father, then
went to fetch a drink and was surprised to find someone else at the
depot with us. Everything after that is pretty much a blank. The
medication the nurses gave me did strange things to my memory.”

“Did they also give
you that yucky scar?”

“No!” Ravana retorted,
defensively touching her cheek.

“Thraak,” Nana said
sadly. “Thraak thraak.”

Ravana shuddered. Her
implant had brought up a fleeting vision of the twelve clones
standing around the fallen Fenris. Artorius looked at her with a
most curious and almost awe-struck expression. She wondered what
his own translator had shown when there were no relevant memories
for it to draw upon inside the boy’s head.

“Lizard men!” he
murmured.

“Half-human,
half-alien cyberclones,” she corrected. “I saw them being born.
Maybe that’s what they wanted me to forget.”

“Fwack fwack?”

“I don’t know why.
Everyone in Newbrum must know the story by now so it can’t be to
keep their existence a secret. Besides, I’d never have known they
were here if they hadn’t whisked me away to their lair. None of it
makes any sense.”

“They looked
horrible,” Artorius muttered.

“Fwack,” agreed
Stripy. “Fwack fwack fwack!”

“You’re getting very
chatty,” remarked Ravana. “Anyway, we’re getting off the point. We
need to make a move. I don’t really want to return to that place,
but can’t think of any realistic alternative. We’ll sneak in, steal
loads of food and then head for Arallu. With any luck we’ll be on
our way again before they realise we’re back. What do you
think?”

Artorius fell silent,
his face creased in annoyance.

“Artorius?”

“I’m not going!” he
retorted.

Ravana gave him a
stern look. “It’s the only sensible thing to do,” she said.

“No!” he cried.
“Please don’t take me there. I hate them!”

She was quite taken
aback at how upset he looked. Whatever it was the nurses had put
him through at the dome had obviously left its mark. The greys
shifted uneasily upon the bench, sensing the tension.

“There is another
option,” she suggested hesitantly. “As I said, there’s a base a
couple of days drive from here. We may find supplies, but it could
just as well be an abandoned settlement or an unmanned research
station.”

“I want to go there,”
declared Artorius, his face brightening.