Green Grow the Rashes and Other Stories (2 page)

"Probably the gardener," I thought. As
I got within five yards I spoke again.

"Hello?"

But there was still no
reply. I went to the figure’s side and touched his shoulder, then
stood back as he turned round. He just didn’t
look
green. He
was
green, his skin more like the
bark of a tree than flesh, his beard bristling and firm like new
pine needles. Two deep black eyes were sunk into hollows but they
sparkled with life.

The worst thing was the mouth - I
couldn’t take my eyes off it. The lips were thin, almost
non-existent and they were pulled back over red, feverish gums in
which three brown teeth sat, spaced at intervals in the rotting
tissue. The tongue that popped out when he looked up at me was also
green and somehow slimy.

I looked down at the rest of him.
Suddenly I found it hard to breathe and the world swam mistily
around me. I had to shake my head, hard, and look again, just to
make sure.

In his left hand the man had a pointed
stick of black, moss encrusted wood. He pointed at a leaf, a brown
leaf from last year’s fall. As I watched it started to go green,
from the edges first, a yellowing then a darkening spreading
inwards along the veins, crackling and rustling as the leaf
unfurled and stretched, before falling to the ground. I looked down
to see roots running in frenzy at my feet like a slithering nest of
snakes. All around us new growth rose up from the dead brown
soil.

The stick pointed again, this time at
a rose bush. Leaves sprouted and opened. I didn’t know why, but I
found that I was crying. When I looked up again the squat figure
had wandered off, over into the center of the cemetery.

I followed. As I got closer I saw that
the figure had bent over a pool. I heard cooing noises coming from
the festering hole which passed as a mouth. I saw a fish glide in
the water and the man point the stick.

"No" I shouted, just before my world
changed.

He looked round at me, and pointed at
my chest. I felt emotion well up inside me, and unbidden, the song
came. I stood there in the middle of the cemetery and sang until my
heart seemed to bleed.

There's
nought but care on every hand,

In every hour
that passes.

The green man waved the
stick in time, as if conducting me in the song, and smiled a huge
grin that showed his teeth as I finished. Then he did something
even more remarkable than anything I had already seen. He pointed
the stick at himself, then at me, and repeated the action. Every
time he did so, I felt emotion rise and fall inside me, like the
swell of the ocean.

He pointed at the green
shoots on the ground, then at me, backward and forward, and he
raised a bushy eyebrow in a question.

I was not exactly sure
what was being asked of me, but I knew one thing and knew it well;
I wanted to feel that swelling, that life…I wanted it more than
anything.

I nodded.

~-o0O0o-~

Several things happened
at once. He passed me the stick. At the same moment I looked to the
ground to see that both his legs seemed to have sunk deep into the
soil. White roots slithered across his whole lower torso. The stick
writhed in my hand and I felt a slight pain as it too took root,
nestling in my palm as if it had been grown there. Green veins
spread up my arm and I smiled as a new beard sprouted on my
chin.

The green man smiled in
return, even as the roots tugged violently at him and his body fell
apart into a moist brown loam that quickly turned green.

The song rose up in me
and could not be contained. I walked through the cemetery, singing
and waving the stick in time.

But give me a
cannie hour at even,

My arms
around my dearie, O,

An' worldly
cares and worldly men,

May all go
tapsalteerie, O!

Spring followed behind
me.

Ten short
years.

That’s how long we have.
The ore that gives us light, keeps us warm, and runs the food
plants has finally come to an end. Three hundred and fifty years
after the dimming. A good run.

But not long enough. Not
by my reckoning. I’m only twelve points short of my breeding merit.
There’s no way I’m checking out of here before then.

So I volunteered.
"Exploration duty", that’s what they call it. "Suicide", Tom Draper
said. "Escape", Linda whispered in my ear the night before I
left.

As it turns out, all
three were right in their own way.

~-o0O0o-~

It started well enough,
despite my apprehension at heading out. The flyer they gave me
hadn’t been upside for thirty years; nobody had. Too cold, too
dark, no point. Until now. I had to wait for two days while the
bots fitted an ore probe and a drill and that just gave me more
time to fret. I was actually happy when I strapped in and took the
flyer into the tube.

The five-minute ascent to
Hell soon put paid to that.

I felt cold
before we got halfway up. Of course I knew about Hell. No light for
three hundred years, thirty foot thick ice shelves and no life
bigger than a patch of lichen. I
knew
that. I just
didn’t realise what it meant in real terms.

At least the
flyer had a heater. I pushed it up to
Full
and it still
wasn’t going to be enough. We punched through to the surface a
minute later and I immediately forgot about the cold.

They’d taught me about
Hell. But they hadn’t mentioned the sky. A carpet of stars hung
from horizon to horizon - a glittering jewel that had remained
unseen for decades. I felt humbled in the face of such immensity.
More than that, the open space filled me with such dread that I had
to lower my eyes, unused as they are to looking at anything more
than ten feet away.

I switched on the ore
probe and let it run. I had nothing to do for hours now except hang
there in the sky and try to ignore the stars that now seemed to be
falling ever closer, threatening to wrap themselves around me,
engulf me and drag me off to the black beyond.

I say this to give you
some idea of my thought processes in those early hours. I know I am
speaking of things you have been taught, things you have seen on
the holovids for most of your lives. But nothing has prepared you
for what is out there, what must be faced if we are to survive the
time that is left to us. It is vast, it is empty, and it does not
care.

It just does not
care.

~-o0O0o-~

I had music
turned up loud for most of the next few hours. It seemed to help,
to stop the oppressive sky from beating me down into the ice that
lay everywhere below me. I almost didn’t hear the
beep
as the probe announced a finding.

I checked the
co-ordinates and my heart sank. It was a four-hour flight away. I
wasn’t sure my mind could take so much open space, so much
desolation. Then I remembered.

Ten short
years
.
And twelve points short of my breeding
merit.

I set my eyes on the
brightest star, and told the probe to go.

I tried to let my mind
wander, to think of happier times in the warren, of solid walls and
enough light to keep the dark at bay permanently. But my eye kept
drawing me back to that star, a bright pinpoint. At first I thought
it might be one of the planets, before I remembered that, without a
star to light them, they too had gone mostly dark. I realised that
I was looking at Sol itself… or what was left of her after the
dimming.

You’ve all seen the
history vids, you all know of the great golden ball that some days
seemed to fill the sky. And I know that some of you harbour
thoughts that it’s still up there, hanging above, and that we will
walk underneath its heat again.

I wish I could show you
that sad little point of light that is all that remains; I wish I
could make you see just how far the dark has encroached since we
went under. I flew over the desolation for hours. We know from our
lessons that we went to ground where we hoped to be hottest.
Iceland they used to call it, a place of hot springs and abundant
thermal energy. Or so we thought. The dimming changed all of that;
not quickly, but three hundred years without heat is a long time.
And Iceland now lives up to its name.

There is no
sea.

I’ll repeat that, for it
is something we have forgotten. We see the pictures, of waves
crashing on sandy shores, and smiling people walking hand in hand
under open sky. Never again. There is ice, pack ice, and rock.
Nothing else.

I headed south and west.
Again the history tells of cities, tall mighty monuments to our
past. They are all gone. The ice has eaten everything. The history
of mankind has gone cold. More than halfway into my journey I
crossed what had been the Equator, what had been lush greenery. All
gone. The whole planet has gone cold.

That was my thought and I
saw nothing to make me change my mind.

Until I reached my
destination.

~-o0O0o-~

And here I must take more
care over my words. There are no histories that mention what I must
tell, no pictures I can show you. Only what I have seen with my own
eyes, and if I am to impress you with urgency, I must be clear in
my intent.

The flyer told me I was
somewhere in the South Pacific. It looked little different to the
spot where I had come upside, but as we descended I saw that the
ice here was less compacted. Several darker patches showed. As I
got closer, I could see there were stretches of broken ice and
slush. I started to think there might even be open water available.
The probe beeped a proximity alert warning as the flyer hovered ten
feet above an island of rock, black against the ice all
around.

There was ore here, and a
lot of it. The scan showed a seam, some one hundred feet deep in
the rock. I quickly spotted that I would have to land and drill to
get proof, for if the deposit was as large as it seemed to be, then
more flyers would be needed to carry it back below to where it was
needed.

I put the flyer down on
the flattest spot I could find. I did not need to get out to
supervise the drilling; the on-board bot handled that. But I could
not come all this way to merely sit in a bubble. Even despite the
glowering stars overhead, my curiosity won over my fear. I put on a
helmet and ventured outside, aware even as I did so that I was
probably the first human to walk above ground for three
centuries.

I had to turn up the suit
heater after just two steps. The helmet told me I had two hours
power left, but I wasn’t worried. I just wanted a short walk, just
enough to be able to brag about it back in the warren.

The only sound was the
steady grinding of drill on rock. My heads-up told me that the
strata being drilled was sedimentary on top of schist, the drill
currently penetrating rock that was over two hundred million years
old, and going through a million years of sediment a
second.

All of which was
secondary to the fact that I had just found a cave.

~-o0O0o-~

The heads up told me that
drilling would take another thirty minutes. And with the heater
turned up full, I was cosy enough, despite the outside temperature
of minus 65, a figure which meant nothing to me. Besides, I could
always rationalise my decision to enter the cave mouth by telling
myself I needed some respite from the lowering stars in the sky
above.

I stepped into the
darkness, and got a sudden fright when my helmet switched on a
bright light to show me the way. I felt my heart pound in my ears
and had to steady myself to quell the impulse to flee. But two more
steps took me in to the cave proper, and I almost felt at home. The
walls were smooth, some weathering process over the millennia was
my assumption, and the light from the helmet was bright enough to
light my way for twenty yards ahead. The cave floor sloped
downwards, and as I proceeded the temperature rose. It was when it
reached minus four that I was given pause for thought.

I might have discovered
much more than just a source of ore. There was obviously heat here.
And plenty of it.

I went in
further.

Fifty yards in I had to
turn off the suit heater. I also got the first indication that this
was more than a simple cave. I found a number imprinted on the
wall. It read:

SUB LEVEL 25.

The passageway was man
made.

As you can imagine, my
heart rate was elevated as I went in further. We know from our
history that we were not the only ones to go under; indeed we were
communicating with some of the others for the best part of a
century. But there has been no contact for more than two hundred
years. The thought I might be close to meeting another human being
made me descend even faster.