The Devil's Nebula (31 page)

They came to the water’s edge ten minutes later and stopped beside a tree overhanging the river. Villic slipped from the back of his Sleer and moved into the undergrowth along the riverbank.

Lania asked, “Where’s he going?”

“We have a boat moored nearby,” Langley said.

Carew looked down the river, taking in the steep bank. “Won’t we be a sitting target, floating down the middle of the river?”

“We’ll have two things going for us,” Langley said. “First, the boat doesn’t look like your conventional boat. Look.” He pointed out across the water. Carew saw something floating swiftly in the current, turning as it went. It looked like some kind of giant seed pod; there were dozens of them, he saw now.

Langley went on, “The shyla trees drop their pods every late summer, and many fall into the river. Our vessel will be just one pod among many.” He smiled from Carew to Lania. “And second, our Sleer won’t be coming with us in the boat. They’ll be tracking us along the riverbank. If they come across anything untoward, they know what to do.”

Carew looked at the Outcast. “They don’t mind attacking their own kind?”

“They’re primitive beasts, Ed. Little more than wild animals at this stage. Villic has them safely in mind-thrall. They’ll do his bidding and hopefully keep us safe while we journey downriver.”

Lania was checking her pulse-beam rifle, stripping down its energy pack and cleaning the connections with the cuff of her smartsuit. “It’s not the river part of the voyage that I’m worried about,” she said, “but what might happen when we reach the caves.”

Langley nodded. “That will be the hard part, yes,” was all he said.

There was a commotion in the undergrowth and Carew raised his laser. He lowered it with relief when Villic stumbled into sight, pulling something attached to a length of rope. A hollowed-out seed pod, torpedo-shaped, with a slit opening in its top, bobbing at the water’s edge.

Villic drew it closer to the bank and tethered the rope to an overhanging branch. Langley climbed in, followed by Lania. Carew went next, surprised at the room in the vessel. It was not unlike the scooped-out fruit the Outcasts used as dwellings in the treetops, the interior ribbed and padded with pith. Large stones were spaced evenly along its bottom. Langley said, “To make it ride a little lower in the water, so it doesn’t capsize.”

Villic was the last aboard. One of the Sleer set off along the riverbank at a loping run, while the second splashed into the water and swam across the river. Carew saw it emerge on the far bank, pull itself into the undergrowth and disappear from view.

Villic settled himself in the back of the seed-boat next to Carew and passed him what looked like a giant sycamore seed. Villic himself had a second. “Paddles?” Carew asked.

“Rudders. Slip them through here and hold them like this.” Villic indicated slits cut through the flesh of the seed-pod, and Carew inserted his rudder through and into the water.

“It’ll stop us swirling about,” Villic said, “and make scanning the banks for our enemies a little easier. I’m still mind-linked to the Sleer. If we see anything untoward, I’ll just steer the Sleer in the right direction. All set?”

He untied the rope from the overhanging branch they were immediately borne away on the current. Carew felt the pressure of the river on his makeshift rudder, pressing it into his ribs. He followed Villic’s lead and leaned against the haft of the rudder, forcing it against the gunwale. The vessel straightened and careered downstream.

He looked up. The narrow strip of daylight far above seemed kilometres away. At one end, the ruddy disc of the supergiant took up the eastern portion of the sky. It was possible to stare at the surface of the sun with the naked eye, watching the pattern of sunspots and belching magma like something in a kaleidoscope.

He turned his attention to the steep banks of the river, his laser at the ready. The others were alert too. Langley and Lania sat facing him, watching the banks to either side. He looked at Lania, her long black hair tied back, her beautiful face smudged with jungle dirt and criss-crossed with small cuts and scratches. She saw him looking and smiled.

Langley broke out fruit from his pack and passed it round.

Carew thought about what Villic and Langley had told them about the Weird, and the threat they posed to humankind.

He said, “So the Weird want to break out from their realm, invade our space, enslave humans and Vetch alike. But why? Merely so that they can feed on us?”

“That’s the obvious reason,” Langley said. “The Harvester stage of their development requires... sustenance.”

Carew shrugged. “So why don’t they simply get it from animals? Why enslave sentient species and feed off these?”

Beside him, Villic grunted. “For the very reason that we
are
sentient, Ed. They crave our meat, yes – but they also want what’s in here.” He tapped the side of his head. “Our knowledge, our history, our culture. They’re – or rather
it’s
– a gestalt mind, remember, and it doesn’t work like us individuals. The mind craves knowledge.” He paused, then went on, “In a way, though we see the Weird as evil and cruel, it’s merely following the rules of its evolution: it cannot see that what it’s doing – enslaving and feeding off thousands of individuals – is wrong, for the simple reason that it cannot encompass the idea of sentient life as comprising so many individuals.”

Lania said, “But can’t it see that every human being is sentient and therefore like itself, an individual?”

Villic smiled sadly. “That’s what I thought, once. I assumed that it must know that what it was doing was wrong, because as you say, it was aware of every human as an individual life like itself.”

Carew looked at him. “You thought this once? But no longer?”

“I’d read the minds of the Sleer, but they were basic, embryonic. I wanted to know more. So I decided to approach a Harvester and make contact.”

Lania looked at him wide-eyed. “And?”

“How to describe an alien mind?” Villic smiled and shook his head. “It was almost impossible. I went back again and again, attempting to come to some understanding, and I think in time I did.” He paused, considering his words, then went on, “It was like looking into the mind of a megalomaniac, a monomaniac... someone who wanted only one thing and would stop at nothing to get it. It wanted knowledge; it wanted to know this new universe which it had discovered. It did not see us as sentient because our minds were so different from its own, and though our minds teemed with knowledge and experience, it could not conceive that this knowledge and experience was especial to the individual, because it was impossible for it to believe that the limited amount of knowledge and experience in each of us, in each unit, amounted to anything more than a part of some gestalt mind it could not locate. It was mystified by humans, these individuals that had no centre, and in lieu of finding our physical core or self, it assumed therefore that our
culture
was the central binding essence of humankind.”

Carew smiled. “Which I suppose, in a way, it is.”

Villic waved. “I’m simplifying, of course, and anthropomorphising. It took me a long time to come to some small understanding of the Weird, to come to see it not as evil, just
other
. And the horror – that’s what I received from the contact. The sheer horror of its view of the universe, that does not admit things like love or hate, or anger or compassion, or the thousand other emotions in between. It was experiencing this horror that made me realise that the Weird, though not evil in the sense we understand the meaning of the word, is necessarily our enemy and needs eradicating.” He stared at Carew and Lania in turn. “Because, please believe me, there is no enemy more inexorable, ruthless and fearsome than an enemy which cannot understand or feel compassion for its opponents.”

Carew allowed his words to sink in. “And with knowledge gained from Gorley and the others, they’ll be able to match us on our own terms?”

Villic nodded. “There’s no knowing how many hundreds, possibly thousands, of humans are infected with the mind-parasite. For all I know the Expansion is teeming with them, each manipulating its host in order to bring the Weird to the Expansion.”

Lania said, “But surely the military might of the Expansion, our weaponry... You said the Weird employ acid weapons, so how can they be any match for our pulse-beams and nucleonic charges?”

Villic held a hand up to stop her. “Lania, the Weird intend to defeat humanity in the very same way that it brought the Kurishen to its knees – by infecting, infiltrating. When it does this, it will in effect control the people who control our superior weaponry.”

Lania closed her eyes at the thought, and Carew began to see the enormity of the fight that lay ahead. Nothing less than the future of humankind was at stake.

“So that’s why we need to stop Gorley and his cohorts,” Villic said, “and that’s why you must return to the Expansion with word of what you’ve found here.”

Carew saw a flash of something on the right-hand bank and sat up in alarm. Villic said, “Only a bek. Something like an antelope.”

Carew smiled. “I’m seeing danger in every shadow.”

“Can you imagine now our lives as Outcasts?” Langley said.

Lania was about to say something, but Villic forestalled her with, “The scene you saw in the treetops earlier, Lania, might have appeared at first sight idyllic, but it was not typical. We are forever on the move, alert for danger. The Weird send Sleer to hunt us down, and even humans posing as potential Outcasts. We find the treetops safer than the jungle floor, but even so we’re vulnerable to the Flyers.”

Carew said, “We saw them from orbit.”

“They encircle the planet, searching for us and other renegades.”

“There are others like you?”

“Scattered bands far to the south,” Villic said, “though we haven’t had contact with them for years. For all we know, the Weird might have succeeded in eradicating them entirely.”

Lania looked across at Carew. “Ed, we could take the Outcasts back with us, or at least some of them. And then send back ships for more.”

Villic said, “I know my people, Lania, and they would refuse your offer. We only know one way of life, that of the jungle; and one struggle, that against the Weird. It might be hopeless, futile, but this struggle is all we have.” He smiled. “And anyway, I’m not sure that my people would find it easy to settle into the modern ways of the Expansion.”

“But if you stay here...” Lania began.

“We have lost only a dozen souls in as many years to the Weird,” Langley said. “Life might be hard, and we might have to be constantly on the move, but it has its own, small rewards. Sometimes we do make true converts of the Fissure People and sometimes we do manage to kill a Weird.” He shrugged. “I know – an individual Flyer, Shuffler or Sleer is only a single unit of gestalt entity, so what can the merit be in killing one? But this is how we tell ourselves that the battle is not yet lost.”

“To leave World,” Villic said quietly, “would be to run away from danger.”

Carew unstoppered his water-gourd and took a long drink. Langley squinted up at the sun. He said, “We have perhaps six hours before we reach the point where we must leave the boat and climb. If you would care to rest, we’ll keep watch.”

“I’m fine,” Lania said.

Carew smiled. “The heat’s getting to me,” he said. “Or is it my age?”

He exchanged places with Langley, who took the rudder. Carew sat next to Lania and leaned back into the ribbed seat, cushioned by pith.

As the seed-boat drifted downriver, he dozed.

S
OMEONE WAS SHAKING
him awake.

“Stay down!” Lania hissed.

He blinked up at her. She fell on top of him, pressing him to the bottom of the boat. “One of the Sleer has seen a Shuffler.”

He eased Lania from him and, still lying flat, peered towards the end of the boat. Langley and Villic were kneeling, using the erstwhile rudders as paddles.

“How long was I asleep?”

“A few hours.” She smiled. “You were snoring like a pig.”

The sun had advanced a little way along the length of the narrow strip high above. With an expanse of white daylight to either side of the orb, it resembled a bloodshot eye staring down at them.

The low branches of a riverside tree came into sight above the boat and Langley and Villic slowed their paddling. The boat bumped against the bank, gently, and Langley reached out to steady it.

“We’re almost there,” he said. “We’ll make the rest of the journey by foot.”

Lania helped him to his feet, and he stepped out of the boat. Villic tied it to a tree trunk and scanned the incline.

“The Shuffler?” Carew whispered.

Silently, Villic pointed uphill, slightly to their left. “About a hundred metres above us.”

“It knows we’re here?”

“I’m not sure, but I suspect so.”

“And these critters spit acid?”

He nodded. “But the Sleer has it in its sights, which means I do too. So it can’t move without me knowing exactly where it’s going.”

Lania said, “They shuffle, right? So they don’t move that fast?”

Beside her, Langley laughed quietly. “They shuffle, but fast. And they can jump.”

“Great,” Lania said.

Carew heard a splash in the water at his back. He turned in time to see a Sleer rise from the river beside the boat. He raised his laser. Villic batted it back down.

“One of ours,” he said.

The Sleer rose from the river, a cascade of water streaming from its great empurpled torso. “I’m getting jumpy,” Carew admitted.

“That’s okay,” Langley said. “We all are.”

Villic stared at the Sleer. The creature held the telepath’s gaze for a second, then passed them silently and climbed the incline at speed, soon vanishing into the undergrowth.

“What now?” Lania asked.

“We follow,” Langley said, “giving the Shuffler a wide berth.”

Langley led the way along the riverbank, parallel with the river for perhaps a hundred metres, then heading up the incline. He stepped with pantomime care as he climbed through the undergrowth, stopping from time to time to assess the best course.