Engineman (22 page)

Chapter Twelve

Ella leaned expertly into the bend. The snow-capped peaks of the Torreón mountains stood high and distant to her right, and to her left was the ever-present sunset. She came into the straight and accelerated, luxuriating in the feel of the headwind, the illusion of liberty gained through speed and an open road.

She might have been physically free, but mentally she was the prisoner of her thoughts. She could not shake from her head the images of Eddie and Max, Jerassi and Rodriguez. They had given their lives willingly; Eddie through despair, and the others for a cause far greater than their lives, and maybe through despair, too. They were all in a far better place now, but that didn't make the pain of her bereavement any easier to bear. Ella had faith, she believed in the joyous afterlife that awaited everyone, but all she asked was for a little joy in this life, too.

She had been on the road an hour, stopping and pulling into the cover at the side of the road only when she spotted vehicles up ahead. She had no doubt that, after the destruction of the interface, the militia would be all the more vigilant in their search for possible accomplices. So far she had seen only civilian vehicles, farm trucks and the occasional private car, and fortunately not many of either.

Now she slowed as she came to the last bend before her destination, rounded it and brought the bike to a halt.

Ahead, the central plateau lowered itself in ever-widening steps down to the coast. Each semi-circular terrace was bountiful with wild jungle and carefully cultivated tropical gardens, ablaze with bougainvillea and a dozen varieties of alien flowers. Dwellings of different designs occupied the levels, from traditional villas to A-frames, ziggurats in white ceramics to cluster-domes like so many over-blown soap bubbles. But more spectacular than the gardens and mansions was the feature that gave the Falls its name. Perhaps a hundred waterfalls poured cleanly from level to level, perfectly geometrical like arcs of blue glass, each maintaining the water-level of as many dazzling lagoons. The sight always struck Ella as breathtakingly beautiful.

She kick-started the bike and set off, but not in the direction of the residences. Perhaps because she feared the impending meeting with her father, or because his villa held fewer happier memories than where she was heading, she turned right along the track which switch-backed up the steep face of the hillside.

She braked at a bend in the track before she reached the top. In the sudden silence she heard the musical cascade of splashing water. She concealed the bike beside the track, ducked under the branches of a palm tree and found herself suddenly on the very edge of the lagoon.

The sight of the oval sink brimming with bright blue water released a flood of happy memories. The sanguine light of the sunset, filtering through the surrounding foliage, gave the scene a tint of rose which corresponded with her recollections. The unbroken arc of water which tipped from the rockface high above might have been the very same that had surged down ten years ago. There was the flat rock she had used as a diving platform, and there, in the very centre of the lagoon, was the camel's hump.

Between the age of twelve and fifteen she had spent at least one day of every weekend here. During her holidays, summer and winter, she had often defied her father's wishes and camped overnight. What had made the place such an attraction, apart from its obvious beauty, was the fact that it was
secret
- a place she could call her own, a paradise from which her father and her minders were excluded.

Then, in the summer holidays of her fourteenth year, she'd discovered that someone else used her lagoon. What could have been a crushing blow turned out to be a miracle that made her secret extra-special.

She recalled the evening as if it were yesterday.

Her father was having guests for dinner, and he wanted Ella present to serve the food and pour the drinks and talk about how well she was doing at school, but the draw of the lagoon was too much. She had slipped from the house and ran up the zig-zag track to the final bend before the summit.

She had pushed her way through the fringe of shrubs and...

At first she thought the figure standing on the camel's hump of rock in the centre of the lagoon was a naked boy of around her own age. Suffused with rage and indignation, she stepped forward to shout or remonstrate.

Then she stopped. Her rage evaporated, replaced by fear - fear at having her expectations so thoroughly subverted - for the boy was not a boy at all. Ella experienced a sudden, chill dread of the unfamiliar, the unknown.

The boy was not a boy, but an alien; a member of the Lho-Dharvo people. It was tall and spectacularly elongated, and Ella's first reaction was revulsion, even though there was something beautiful about the tone of its copper-bronze skin.

Its stance on the rock was not a human stance. It stood with its arms outstretched slightly behind it, its head tilted back, eyes closed.

A shiver coursed down her spine.

This was the first Lho-Dharvon Ella had ever seen, though she had watched anthropological films about them on vid-screen, and read articles in magazines and on discs. They were a tribal people, nomadic for part of the year, who herded animals similar to goats and lived off the land. They were at the stage of their evolution that corresponded to
Homo sapien's
stone-age, and a xeno-anthropologist working with them over thirty years ago had recorded their religious beliefs in a work known as the Book of the Lho. They lived on all four continents of the Reach, in conditions ranging from polar to desert. Ella had never heard mention of the fact that a tribe was living so close to the Falls.

She watched the alien for the next ten minutes. It maintained its odd pose, unmoving. Wanting to get closer, Ella edged around the lagoon, always ensuring that she was concealed by shrubbery. At last she was as close as she could get to the creature, on an overhang of rock above the water, concealed by scant, sprouting grass. She knelt and stared down.

She could not tell to which sex it belonged. Where its reproductive organ should have been was nothing more than a slight protuberance. It was so thin and long that it seemed that its torso and limbs had been stretched. She stared and stared, and could not decide whether she saw more of its alienness or its humanity: one moment she was taken in by its familiar features and thought it human, and the next it appeared horribly alien in its crude mimicry of the human form. Watching the alien was like looking at an optical illusion that the brain had worked out at one second, and lost the next.

Its eyes were massive, bulging and lidded like those of a toad. Its nose was almost non-existent, two tiny slits, and its mouth was similarly atrophied. Thin lips curved around the hull of its jaw in a thin, stoic, reptilian line.

Ella was wondering whether she had seen enough when the alien opened its eyes - its lids dropping from underneath, she saw - and stared directly at her. In panic she tried to scramble away, but lost her footing and slipped from the overhang. She struck her head as she fell, and in a second of panic she was aware of the warm, cloying water enveloping her as she slipped into oblivion.

She had no idea how long she was unconscious. When she came to her senses she was lying on her side on the flat rock she used as a diving platform. She tried to sit up, and cried out in pain. The back of her head throbbed as if someone was hitting it from the inside with a hammer. She touched her hair, and her fingers came away smeared with blood. She peered at the collar of her blouse and saw that that too was blood-soaked. At the thought of how her father might react, she quickly removed her blouse, crouched at the water's edge and scrubbed it thoroughly.

Only then did she recall the alien. She looked across to the camel's hump on which it had stood, but it was no longer there. Then she looked up at the overhang from which she'd fallen, a good ten metres above her. There was no tide in the pool, of course. There was no way she could have fetched up here without...

Hard on the realisation that the alien had saved her life, she experienced first revulsion that the creature had actually touched her, and then a profound amazement that something so... so
alien
had bothered to save her life - the kind of amazement she might have felt had she been saved by a monkey or a bear.

Then she saw the alien. It was crouching three metres from her, its long shins drawn up before its chest, its elongated head peering at her from above the peaks of its bony knees.

Ella jumped up in fright - at the same time trying to drag on her blouse to cover her nakedness - but the pain in her head forced her down again. Sobbing, she fumbled with the wet, clinging material, finally getting it on and fastening the studs.

All the time she watched the alien, as if it might spring up and attack her at any second.

When it did move, she was ready. The alien unfolded itself to its full height and took a step towards her. She scrambled to her feet, trying to ignore the insistent throbbing in her head. She backed off, sobbing in fear and confusion.

"Don't come near me!" she screamed. "Why did you have to come here anyway?" And she knelt and found a rock and hurled it at the frozen alien. It missed by a long way, sailing over its head, but the creature never flinched. It regarded Ella without expression as she ran off through the bushes to the track.

By the time she reached her father's villa she was sick with exhaustion and shame. The party had broken up - she must have been unconscious for longer than she'd thought. Her minder was swimming in the artificial lagoon behind the house, and her father was in the lounge, staring through the picture window at the sunset. He didn't even look around as Ella hurried to her room. She showered and washed her bloody clothes, hanging them on her balcony rail to dry, then lay on her bed and thought through the events of that evening, the alien and her reaction to it. The contusion at the base of her skull was the size of a racquet-ball, but that had nothing to do with the fact that she slept little that night.

For disobeying her father's orders and not attending the party, she was not allowed out of the villa for a week. In the circumstances she could think of no worse punishment. She wanted nothing more than to find the alien, to make amends for her ungrateful behaviour.

She used the week to good effect; she remained in her room and made a gift for the Lho-Dharvon. On the first day of her freedom, she rushed up to the lagoon. She waited for hours but there was no sign of the alien. The following day she returned, and her heart jumped as she pushed through the bushes and saw, on the rock in the centre of the lagoon, the slim golden Lho, arms outstretched behind it, head in the air. She moved around the water's edge, her resolve to confront the being and apologise diminishing with a renewal of her uneasiness at the creature's very
alienness
.

She crouched on the flat rock and watched for perhaps thirty minutes. At the end of that time, it opened its eyes and gracefully lowered its arms. It did not seem surprised to see her.

Startling her, it dived into the water without the slightest splash, emerged just as cleanly and leapt onto the rock before her. It paused, crouching, and regarded her with massive eyes which nictitated every ten seconds from the bottom up.

She gripped the gift in her hand, but it was as if she were paralysed and could not hold it out for the alien to take. Her mouth was dry; words would not come.

The alien reached out an arm which ended in a long hand with three long, slim fingers and a stubby thumb. Ella marshalled her panic, fought her very real revulsion.

She closed her eyes and swallowed.

She felt gentle fingers probing the bump at the back of her head. When the fingers withdrew, Ella opened her eyes. The alien was staring into her face, its expression unreadable. Perhaps it found the arrangement of her eyelids as strange as she found its?

Then it dabbed the centre of Ella's forehead with its middle finger in a gesture that obviously meant something, turned and walked towards the jungle. Even the spry articulation of its gait was entirely dissimilar to that of a human.

"Wait!" Ella found herself calling.

More, she thought, in surprise at her shout than with any understanding of her command, the alien paused and turned to her. Ella approached, held the painted rock out at arm's length.

The alien accepted it, turned it over and regarded the painting.

"It's you," Ella said. "I did it myself. I thought it appropriate, a rock for the one I threw at you. I know you don't understand, but..." And she shrugged, realising the futility of her words.

The alien looked from Ella to the gift. It was on a long thong, but rather than hang it around its neck, it wound it around its thin wrist, grasping the rock in its hand.

"Before you go," Ella said, and shrugged. "I don't know... Will you be here again tomorrow?"

She took off her watch and stepped a little closer to the alien. She displayed her watch and tried to indicate the passage of thirty-six hours.

"Here, same time, tomorrow?"

But what hope, she told herself, had she of making the alien understand something as abstract as the passage of time divided into human hours?

It regarded her without any sign of comprehension, then disappeared quickly into the jungle.

The following day, when she pushed through the bushes with no real hope, but expectation bubbling within her, the alien was waiting for her on the flat rock.