The Departure (62 page)

Sakhrans knew what She was; the Commonwealth didn’t. The Commonwealth knew She visited civilisations and left them ruined and declining, but not why; and Why was the product of
what She was.
Sarabt knew this even better than most Sakhrans, for two reasons: he had read the Book himself, and now he had actually seen Her. He needed to survive, to help stop Her doing to the Commonwealth what She did to Sakhra three hundred years ago.

It was a limited ambition. He didn’t expect he alone could stop Her or save the Commonwealth. He didn’t even (he told himself) have any particular feelings for the Commonwealth. It had features he didn’t like, but it wasn’t a ravening Evil Empire; it worked tolerably well, gave him a good career, and only occasionally showed him unpleasantness or bigotry. So we should
stop Her
this time, he thought; stop Her doing to the Commonwealth what She did to us. It was an unusual thought for a Sakhran, at least for one born after Srahr. There was no telling where it might lead.

And that gave him another reason to survive. He wanted to contact Thahl. He wanted to know if Thahl had ever had thoughts like this.

There were four of them, each one about his own size and weight. They were reptilian: low-slung, six-legged and very muscular. Their mottled skin, like the desert, was the colour of unwashed underwear. They trotted alongside him desultorily. Their faces were expressionless. So was his.

Every time he felt a pregnancy convulsion, and they were now coming more frequently, he masked it with a sudden unsheathing of his claws which caused the four predators to break formation, but every time he did this they took fractions of a second longer to break and regrouped fractions of an inch closer. As the sun rose higher in the pewter sky, and the day grew as hot as the night had been cold, he became more and more conscious that they belonged in this place, and were adapted to it; and that he didn’t, and wasn’t.

He had been travelling for part of yesterday, all of last night, and part of today. The pain in his left side, the dull pain which was quite separate from the convulsions, would not go away; it dogged him like the predators. He diagnosed it, as far as diagnosis was possible while half-running and half-walking, as a puncture in his minor heart. That meant that without surgery he would be dead in another twenty-four hours, but he was able to assign it a lower priority because he knew he would die of premature childbirth within twelve, or perhaps be killed by the predators within six. If he hadn’t been pregnant he could probably have outrun them, but if he hadn’t been pregnant he would not have needed to.

He might not even have been here: in accordance with regulations, he had reported his pregnancy to Captain Matoub of the
Pallas
. Matoub should have required him to stand down, but, aware of his abilities, had asked him to embark on what became the ship’s last journey.

He shrugged. Sakhrans did not waste time wishing for the non-existence of facts. Actually, as he continued with the predators loping alongside him, he became aware of one fact which might operate in his favour. Back on Sakhra he had always lived in the Irsirrha Hills; he had never lived in Blentport or any of the other Commonwealth lowland cities, so the poison glands in his hands and feet had not been removed. This would be significant. The ability to augment his claws with poison might give him another full hour.

His claws. Again he unsheathed them, and again the predators hissed and moved away. He hissed back. The inside of their mouths was bright pink; the inside of his was dark red. They returned to their normal formation, alongside him. They seemed to have less trouble in keeping the pace than he did in setting it. Two hours passed.

The sun rose higher, sweating reflections out of quartz veins in the boulders and rock outcrops which were occurring more frequently, and still they stayed loping unhurriedly alongside him. In this fashion another two hours passed. The scene was totally devoid of any element of drama, and it was this, rather than his own deteriorating condition, which made him sense that his calculations were slightly off and their attack was imminent.

He slowed down, sauntered carefully over to the largest boulder within reach, turned with his back against it and waited for them. Amazingly they squatted before him in a semicircle, watching him earnestly. For at least half a minute the tableau remained stable, and he found himself fighting an impulse to start addressing them as though they were a gathering; then the one on his left attacked. He almost felt sympathy for it as his foot whipped out and raked parallel poison trails across its muzzle, for he realised as he watched it shrink back vomiting that these predators had the same inner contradiction as Sakhrans: their social organisation was weak. There wasn’t enough keeping them together.

Just like us
, he thought idly, as he jabbed a hand into the eyes of the one which he’d pretended not to notice climbing the boulder behind him and crouching to spring,
when they come together they’re always less than the sum total of the individual parts.
He reached back, grabbed the poisoned and blinded predator, and tossed it screaming on top of what was now the corpse of the first. It was a foolish act, a gesture which took no account of his physical condition, and it brought on a new and deeper series of pregnancy convulsions which bent him almost double. The two remaining predators, who had started to back away, now looked at him with renewed interest as he staggered and fell forward on his knees, hands clutching his abdomen; and now, of all times, he started to feel the first mixed sense of wonder and outrage at something
separate from himself
causing movement inside his own body.

All his calculations were wrong, he thought irritably, all of them; the attack was earlier than he expected and the advanced convulsions were worse than he had imagined and
if you don’t get up and get back to the boulder and find time to rest you’ll lose this child, it’ll die, you’ll carry a dead thing in your belly
.

His vision blurred, but he saw the remaining two moving towards him. Their mouths were very pink, opening and closing in unison: absolutely perfect unison. He shook his head and the double vision cleared, leaving one in front and one, he realised just before he felt the first tearing and clawing at his back, behind. He fell face down, almost welcoming the shift in the focus of pain away from his abdomen. The second one joined the first. His face was pressed into the dust with their weight and he felt their tearing at him shift, subtly, from random to rhythmic; he was no longer being attacked but being eaten.

He had often watched something similar, back on Sakhra: one of the huge herbivores, run to exhaustion by a hunting party, giving up and allowing itself to be eaten, still standing. He made a decision. There were two alternatives, both involving his death, but only one involving his death now. He would not die in that way; it was obscene.

He bunched his arms and legs underneath him, then screamed and rolled onto his back. The two predators either jumped away from him or were sent flying, he was not sure which. He stood up, feeling dust and gravel where he bled, and with his forearms covered in vomit which he knew somehow was his own; its colour was like the dust, and as he spread his clawed fingers it formed a shaking web between them. When had he vomited? How did he recognise it as his? He put the questions aside for now, though the second one particularly interested him.

The two predators crouched where they landed, staring up at him wide-eyed. He sheathed and unsheathed his claws. His tongue licked across his teeth. He shut down the poison glands in his hands and feet. He would not need them now.

Only when he finished did he stop to analyse his motives. It was not that without poison the act of killing them was slower, or more vengeful; it was simply fitting, because it introduced a proper element of balance. Without poison it was more risky for him, though only marginally so. But anything less would have been a discourtesy to the child he had let die inside him.

He lay down on his back, spread his legs, looked up at the pewter sky and pushed. It was not an act of birth but an act of defecation. He buried it in a shallow grave and turned quickly away before the soil started crawling.

Ten hours later he stood unsteadily on a low ridge overlooking a shallow dust bowl—stood, because he could walk no further, but knew that if he were to lay down, or fall down, he would never get up again—and considered what he saw with a mixture of astonishment and amusement.

He had been taught that life, while it happened, had no real meaning. Meaning could be assigned later by others, but life, while it happened, was only the total of a series of random accidents, each one operating
on-off
like a binary gateway, either
this
or
that
, to give it its particular direction; but not its meaning. And now
this.

He revised his ambitions. They were limited already, and he made them more so. Never mind living long enough to see Her again and help others stop Her. He wanted only to know if Thahl had similar ambitions. If he could live long enough to get spotted by an aerial patrol drone, perhaps he’d have time to communicate with Thahl.

The wounds on his back and the septic trickle from the birth rupture in his lower abdomen attracted clouds of flies which he was no longer strong enough to keep brushing away; he endured them with a herbivore’s patience, his secondary eyelids flicking horizontally every now and then. Something small and multi-legged erupted from underneath a rock by his feet and made for the cover of another rock, froze as his claws whipped out in reflex, and sank into the sand like a brick into mud. The rocks around him seemed to sing with the refraction of sunlight. The air quivered. A few minutes passed. He counted them, and with them the ironies of pure, binary accident which were the only life-shaping force he understood or recognised. Sakhrans called them Binary Gates, and liked reciting them. It appealed to their sense of irony.

One, that She had moved on Bast rather than Horus or the other former Sakhran systems. Two, that the only ship in Bast able to engage Her was the
Pallas
, on which he was an officer—one of only two Sakhran officers in the Commonwealth. Three, that when his ship died around him—that was not an accident, but a certainty—his particular abilities meant he was the only one among several qualified pilots to get a lifeboat away with some survivors. Four, that the lifeboat crashlanded and the others aboard all died. But five, that it landed and he survived. Yet, six, that he had no communications equipment and could only try to walk out of the desert and find a command post or be spotted by a patrol before the predators, premature childbirth, or a ruptured minor heart killed him. But, seven, he had lived through the first two of those. But, eight, the third one—his heart—was still counting away, unevenly but inexorably, the time he had left.

He lost count. No, he concluded, there could be no overall meaning. There usually wasn’t, when you reduced events to their building-blocks. Accidents occurred, chances fell; gates opened here and closed there; but there was no hidden force insisting on an overall direction. Nothing
made
him survive the crashlanding or predators. No sinuous enigmatic force had willed it, any more than if he dropped dead now it would have been willed. If he dropped dead now, it would mean only that his abilities weren’t enough.

And yet, he stood swaying on the ridge, a slight dark figure, and wondered if all his teaching was wrong. For below him in the dust bowl lay the ninth and final irony. He had no idea it would be there when he laboured up the shallow incline; he had thought to skirt the slope but his innate tidymindedness, or maybe it was obsessiveness, made him keep to his straight path, even if straight meant up.

And now, below him in the shallow dust bowl and almost but not quite within hailing distance, sat a small Commonwealth command post. He continued to stand on the ridge, unable to walk forwards. A few more minutes passed.

***

“Fucker,” said Sergeant Madsen, mechanically and without malice. The way he said it, without emphasis on either syllable, gave it an everyday cadence. If he had spoken it as part of a longer sentence, it would have been hidden in the other words.

He was talking to a dismantled drone lying on the bench in front of him. He’d been working on it for four hours, and couldn’t get its optical circuits to function. Unknown to Sarabt, this was the tenth and possibly final irony. If it had been working properly four hours ago, it would have been quartering the area of desert where the lifeboat crashlanded, and would almost certainly have seen him.

Madsen was just about to give up on it. The optical circuitry wasn’t responding to any of his efforts. He leaned back and listened to the door of one of the outbuildings banging in the wind.

Only a Sakhran would be polite enough to describe it as a Command Post. It was a collection of three sheds (two plus an outside toilet) to which Madsen and two others had travelled by tracked groundcar. It was the only collection of buildings anywhere near the area where they had calculated, from the lifeboat’s last known trajectory, that the crashlanding might have occurred. Their orders were to set up at the command post and quarter the desert with the remotely-piloted drone to spot any survivors. It hadn’t worked. The drone was a low-budget, short-range model, and its optical circuits were trashed. Ironically (would Sarabt have seen this as the eleventh irony?) it had been assembled by Sakhrans, as part of a failing Commonwealth re-employment project.

In fact, the whole thing was rather half-assed. Yes, they’d told him, it would be easier just to quarter the desert with a flier, but all piloted fliers (Bast 3 didn’t have that many) were commandeered. In case, they told him, She came back.

Hynd looked round the door.

“Luck, Sergeant?”

Madsen shook his head. “S’not gonna work. Give up, is best. Where’s Stockton?”

“Toilet,” Hynd said, and added, “Wanking himself silly.”

Madsen snorted, not in disgust but because he always snorted rather than blow his nose, and returned to the drone. It was spread out on the workbench like a dissected bat. He folded up the pinions and fabric of its wings, folded back its jointed body, went to return it to its carrycase, and found it wouldn’t fit.