The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction Page 4

  Enright downed the last of his whiskey, felt it burning his throat.

  Connaught stood. “Shall we go?”

  Enright stood also, unsteadily. “Please, after you.” Swaying, he followed Connaught from the room.

  He expected to be taken outside, but instead Connaught led him through a narrow door and down a flight of even narrower steps. A succession of bare, low-watt bulbs illuminated a series of vaulted cellars, the first chambers stocked with wine, the later ones empty and musty.

  They walked along a narrow red brick corridor.

  “We’re now passing from the Manor and walking beneath the kitchen garden towards the spinney,” Connaught reported over his shoulder.

  Enright nodded, aware that he was sobering rapidly with the effects of the cold and the notion of what might imminently be revealed.

  The corridor extended for five hundred yards, and terminated abruptly at a small wooden door.

  Connaught drew a key from the pocket of his waistcoat and opened the door. He stood aside, gesturing for Enright to enter.

  Cautiously, he stepped over the threshold.

  He faced an abyss of darkness, until Connaught reached past him and threw a switch.

  A dozen bare bulbs illuminated a vast rectangular redbrick room. The walls were concave, bowed like the hull of a galleon. A series of rough wooden steps led down to the floor, again of red brick.

  The cylinder lay in the centre of the room, a long, gun-metal grey column identical to those he had seen in the chamber on Mars. At the facing end of the cylinder was a circular opening. Beside the cylinder, laid out lengthways, was one of the Fighting Machines.

  Enright climbed down the steps, aware that his mouth was hanging open. He walked around the cylinder, its dimensions dwarfing him and Connaught. He reached out and touched the icy cold surface of the cylinder, something he had been unable to do on Mars. He inspected the tripod, marvelling at the intricacy of the metalwork – crafted far away on Mars by a race of beings long dead and gone.

  “According to the story,” Connaught said, “that night James crouched on the edge of the pit and watched fearfully as the great threaded stopper slowly unscrewed and fell out. He waited, but hours elapsed and nothing emerged other than a strange, other-worldly cry, ‘Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla.’ It was daybreak before he plucked up the courage to scramble down into the pit and approach the cylinder. There were three beings in the craft, he could see by the light of dawn, but they were dead. Fortunately, the spinney was on his land, and anyway the trees concealed the pit from view. Over the course of the following year, working alone, he built this construction around the craft, and then devoted the rest of his life to the study of its contents. He and his son, my grandfather, reconstructed the tripod you see there. They even attempted to preserve the dead aliens, but they rotted almost to nothing with the passage of years.”

  Enright looked up. “Almost nothing?”

  Connaught walked over to a raised wooden platform. Upon this was a big desk, and piles of papers and manuals, illuminated by a reading lamp. He gestured to a bulbous preserving jar, floating in which was a grey-brown scrap of what looked like hide.

  “This is all that remains of the first alien beings to arrive on planet Earth,” Connaught said.

  “Did James show Wells all this?” Enright asked.

  Connaught shook his head. “It was a strict secret, at the time known only to James and his son. As I said, he gave Wells the idea as a fiction, but supplied him with detailed drawings of the cylinder and the other machinery, and even of the aliens themselves, and their death cry.”

  “And you’ve never shown anyone outside the family, until now?”

  Connaught smiled. “By the time my father found out, the truth of what had happened was lost in time. My grandfather was old when he showed my father the cylinder – his memory was not what it was. My father took the story with a pinch of salt. He rationalized that James had manufactured the cylinder himself, and the tripod. My father sealed the chamber, and only showed it to me when I was down here exploring, and asked about the mysterious bricked-up door.”

  “And yet you believed James’s story?” Enright said.

  Connaught hesitated. “I was at Oxford in the seventies,” he said, “studying ancient literature. Later I found myself working for the government, decrypting codes . . . When I inherited the Manor, I inspected this chamber and everything it contained.”

  He moved to the desk and unlocked a drawer. From it he produced a thick, silver object that looked something like a book.

  He laid it upon the desk and opened the cover. The pages were also silver, manufactured of some thin metal-like material, and upon each leaf of the book Enright made out, in vertical columns, what might have been lines of script. But it was a script unlike any he had ever seen before.

  “James discovered this in the cylinder. For years and years he worked at decoding the book from the stars, as he called it. He failed. When I came across it, I began where my great-grandfather had left off.”

  Enright stared at him. “And you succeeded?”

  Connaught bent and unlocked another drawer. From this he lifted a more conventional manuscript, a ream of A4 paper in a clip folder.

  “I succeeded. Last year I finished translating the book. Much of it is an encyclopaedia of their world, a history of their race. Mars was dying, Ed. Millennia ago, the beings that had dwelled on the surface of the planet were forced to move underground, out of the inhospitable cold. Their numbers dwindled, until only tens of thousands survived. They realised that they had to leave their planet.”

  “And invade Earth,” Enright finished.

  But Connaught was smiling and shaking his head. “They were a peaceful people. Only in Wells’ fiction were they belligerent.”

  He reached out and opened the cover of his translation. “Please,” he said.

  Enright stepped forward, his pulse pounding, and read the first paragraph.

  We of the fourth planet of the solar system, the planet we call Vularia, come to the third planet on a mission of peace. Although our kind has known enmity, and fought debilitating wars, we have outgrown this stage of our evolution. We come with the hope that our two races might join as one and explore the universe together . . .

  Enright stopped reading, aware of the constriction in his throat. He leafed through over five hundred pages of closely printed text.

  He thought of McCarthy, and Jeffries, and the military operation underway right at this minute. He smiled to himself.

  “Over half a million words,” Connaught said. “You can hardly begin to conceive what a treasure it is.”

  Enright turned and walked away from the desk. He stared at the cylinder, and the so-called Fighting Machine.

  Behind him, Connaught was saying, “My great-grandfather guessed that they were dying before they arrived on Earth – that it was not an earthly virus that ended their existence, but one of their own. How wonderful it might have been, had they survived.”

  Enright turned. “Why, Joshua? Why have you shown me all this? Your translation?”

  “Why else? This has been a secret long enough. Now, my life’s work is finished, the translation done – I would like to receive acknowledgement, in due course. I summoned you here so that you might take this copy of the translation back to America, to answer the mystery of what you discovered beneath the sands of Mars.”

  He gestured towards the door. “Come, it’s cold in here. Shall we retire to the library for a nightcap?”

  With one last glance at the Martian machines, he turned and followed Connaught from the chamber.

  On the flight back to America, Enright dreamed. He was in London, but a London laid waste by some apocalyptic war. He strode through the ruins, listening. He was not alone. Beside him was a child, a small girl, and when he looked upon her he was filled with a strange sense of hope for the future, a hope like elation. The girl slipped a hand in to his, and at that moment Enright heard it. Faint at first,
and then stronger. It was the saddest, most haunting sound he had ever heard in his life.

  “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla . . .”

  He awoke with a start. The sensation of the small, warm hand in his was so real that he glanced at the seat beside him, but it was empty.

  The plane was banking. They were coming in to land at Orlando.

  Enright checked beneath his seat to ensure that he still had the briefcase containing the Martian translation.

  We of the fourth planet of the solar system, the planet we call Vularia, come to the third planet on a mission of peace . . .

  He smiled to himself, closed his eyes, and thought of Delia, and home, and the future.

  Deathday

  Peter F. Hamilton

  Peter Hamilton started writing at about the same time as Eric Brown, though his emphasis was less on short fiction than on increasingly breeze-block size novels which pumped life back into the grand space opera of old. His Night’s Dawn trilogy – The Reality Dysfunction (1996), The Neutronium Alchemist (1997) and The Naked God (1999) took the struggle of life and death to the ultimate. The following story, one of his earliest, is another struggle for life or death, but on a rather smaller scale.

  Today Miran would kill the xenoc. His confidence had soared to a dizzying height, driven by some subconscious premonition. He knew it was today.

  Even though he was awake he could hear the ethereal wind-howl of the ghosts, spewing out their lament, their hatred of him. It seemed the whole world shared in the knowledge of impending death.

  He had been hunting the xenoc for two months now. An intricate, deadly game of pursuit, flight, and camouflage, played out all over the valley. He had come to learn the xenoc’s movements, how it reacted to situations, the paths it would take, its various hiding places in rocky crevices, its aversion to the steep shingle falls. He was its soul-twin now. It belonged to him.

  What Miran would have liked to do was get close enough so he might embrace its neck with his own hands; to feel the life slipping from his tormentor’s grotesque body. But above all he was a practical man, he told himself he wasn’t going to be asinine-sentimental about it, if he could pick it off with the laser rifle he would do so. No hesitation, no remorse.

  He checked the laser rifle’s power charge and stepped out of the homestead. Home – the word mocked him. It wasn’t a home, not any more. A simple three-room prefab shipped in by the Jubarra Development Corporation, designed for two-person assembly. Candice and himself. Her laugh, her smile, the rooms had echoed with them; filling even the glummest day with life and joy. Now it was a convenient shelter, a dry place from which to plot his campaign and strategies.

  Physically, the day was no different to any other on Jubarra. Gloomy leaden-grey clouds hung low in the sky, marching east to west. Cold mist swirled about his ankles, coating grass and rocks alike in glistening dewdrops. There would be rain later, there always was.

  He stood before her grave, a shallow pit piled high with big crumbling lumps of local sandstone. Her name was carved in crude letters on the largest. There was no cross. No true God would have let her die, not like that.

  “This time,” he whispered. “I promise. Then it will be over.”

  He saw her again. Her pale sweat-soaked face propped up on the pillow. The sad pain in her eyes from the knowledge there was little time left. “Leave this world,” she’d said, and her burning fingers closed around his hand for emphasis. “Please, for me. We have made this world a lifeless place; it belongs to the dead now. There is nothing here for the living any more, no hope, no purpose. Don’t waste yourself, don’t mourn for the past. Promise me that.”

  So he had held back the tears and sworn he would leave to find another life on another world; because it was what she wanted to hear, and he had never denied her anything. But they were empty words; there was nowhere for him to go, not without her.

  After that he had sat helplessly as the fever consumed her, watching her breathing slow and the harsh stress lines on her face smooth out. Death made her beauty fragile. Smothering her in wet earth was an unholy sacrilege.

  After he finished her grave he lay on the bed, thinking only of joining her. It was deepest night when he heard the noise. A muffled knock of rock against rock. With a great effort he got to his feet. The cabin walls spun alarmingly. He had no idea how long he had lain there – maybe hours, maybe days. Looking out of the door he could see nothing at first. Then his eyes acclimatized to the pale streaks of phosphorescence shivering across the flaccid underbelly of the clouds. A dark concentration of shadows hovered over the grave, scrabbling softly at the stones.

  “Candice?” he shouted, drunk with horror. Dark suppressed imaginings swelled out of his subconscious – demons, zombies, ghouls, and trolls, chilling his bones to brittle sticks of ice.

  The shadow twisted at his cry, edges blurring, becoming eerily insubstantial.

  Miran screamed wordlessly, charging out of the homestead, his muscles powered by outrage and vengeance-lust. When he reached the grave the xenoc had gone, leaving no trace. For a moment Miran thought he might have hallucinated the whole event, but then he saw how the limestone had been moved, the rucked mud where non-human feet had stood. He fell to his knees, panting, stroking the limestone. Nauseating fantasy images of what the xenoc would have done with Candice had it uncovered her threatened to extinguish the little flicker of sanity he had remaining. His future ceased to be a nebulous uncertainty. He had a purpose now: he would remain in this valley until he had ensured Candice was granted the dignity of eternal rest. And there was also the question of vengeance against the monster desecrator.

  Miran left the grave and walked past the neglected vegetable garden, down towards the valley floor. The hills of the valley were high prison walls, steep slopes and cliffs smeared with loose stone and tough reedy grass. They reared up to create a claustrophobic universe, for ever preventing him from seeing out. Not that he had any desire to, the memory of all things good dwelt between the hills.

  The river ran a crooked course ahead of him, wandering back and forth across the valley floor in great loops, fed by countless silver trickles which seeped out of secret fissures high in the forbidding massifs. Long stretches of the low meadowland below the homestead were flooded again. Skeletal branches and dead rodent-analogue creatures bobbed lazily on the slow flow of muddy water. Further down the valley, where the river’s banks were more pronounced, straggly trees had established a hold, trailing weeping boughs into the turbulent water.

  This was his land, the vista he and Candice had been greeted with when they struggled through the saddle in the hills at the head of the valley. They had stood together lost in delight, knowing this was right, that their gamble had paid off. They would make their life here, and grow crops for the ecological assessment team’s outpost in return for a land grant of twenty thousand acres. Then when the colonists started to arrive their vast holding would make them rich, their children would be Jubarra’s first merchant princes.

  Miran surveyed the valley and all its wrecked phantoms of ambition, planning carefully. He had abandoned yesterday’s chase at the foot of a sheer gorge on the other side of the river. Experience and instinct merged in his mind. The xenoc had been skulking along the base of the valley’s northern wall for the last two days. There were caves riddling the rock of the foothills in that area, and a scattering of aboriginal fruit bushes. Shelter and food; it was a good location. Even the xenoc occasionally sought refuge from Jubarra’s miserable weather.

  He stared ahead. Seeing nothing. Feeling around the recesses of his mind for their perverse bond.

  How it had come about he never knew. Perhaps they had shared so much suffering they had developed a mental kinship, something related to Edenist affinity. Or perhaps the xenoc possessed some strange telepathy of its own, which would account for why the ecological investigators had never caught one. Whatever the reason, Miran could sense it. Ever since that night at the grave he had known of the other’s
presence; moving around the valley, sneaking close, stopping to rest. Weird thoughts and confused images oozed constantly into his mind.

  Sure enough, the xenoc was out there to the north, on the hummocks above the flood water, picking its way slowly down the valley.

  Miran struck out across the old fields. The first crops he’d planted were potatoes and maize, both geneered to withstand Jubarra’s shabby temperate climate. The night they had finished planting he carried Candice out to the fields and laid her lean body down on the new furrows of rich dark humus. She laughed delightedly at the foolishness that had come over him. But the ancient pagan fertility rite was theirs to celebrate that night, as the spring winds blew and the warm drizzle sprinkled their skin. He entered her with a fierce triumph, a primeval man appeasing the gods for the bounty of life they had granted, and she cried out in wonder.

  The crops had indeed flourished. But now they were choked with aboriginal weeds. He had dug up a few of the potatoes since, eating them with fish or one of the chickens that had run wild. A monotonous diet; but food wasn’t an interest, just an energy source.

  The first of the morning drizzles arrived before he was halfway to his goal. Cold and insistent, it penetrated his jacket collar and crept down his spine. The stones and mud underfoot became treacherously slippery.

  Cursing under his breath, he slowed his pace. Presumably the xenoc was equally aware of him. It would soon be moving on, building valuable distance between them. Miran could move faster, but unless he got within a kilometre he could never hope to catch it in a day. Yet he didn’t dare take any risks, a fall and a broken bone would be the end of it.

  The xenoc was moving again. Throughout the intermittent lulls in the drizzle Miran tried to match what he was sensing in his mind with what he could see.

  One of the buttress-like foothills radiating out from the base of the mountain ahead of him had created a large promontory, extending for over half a kilometre out into the flood water. It was a grassy slope studded with cracked boulders, the detritus of past avalanches. The oldest stones were coated with the emerald fur of a spongy aboriginal lichen.