Parallax View (21 page)

Abbott tried to twist and look behind him, but only made out the overgrown steps and the encroaching jungle that covered the face of the escarpment like a mantle.

They came to the level of the tree-tops and then descended even further, soon arriving at the bottom of the cleft in the land. The foliage closed about them again, dimming the fire in the sky.

Without pausing, the Kryte hurried through the aqueous twilight.

Minutes later – though Abbott’s time sense was skewed, along with his other perceptions – he thought he heard a half-familiar sound.

It was the dolorous tolling of a bell, sounding regularly. It was an anthem of devotion, and the sound called to something in Abbott. The Kryte paused, poised like some animal ready to flee, and Abbott took the opportunity to turn upon the creature’s back and stare in the direction of the pealing call to prayer. He looked up, through the tree-tops.

He gasped at what he saw.

He made out the jagged flight of steps they had taken down the face of the escarpment, and then, to either side of the switch-back stairs, the façade of what looked like a vast and ancient building. Set into the frontage of this edifice – in reality the face of the escarpment – were a thousand slim, arched windows, many filled with stained glass which reflected the Jehovah wormhole in brilliant bursts of colour as if in visual celebration of the glory of God.

This could only be the Cistercian monastery, the redoubt of the pious who sought sequestration on this far-flung and hostile world.

Somewhere within an arch, a niched entranceway sheltered by the outstretched limb of a buttress, Abbott spied movement, a figure, cloaked in dark grey, hooded. His heart leapt to see another human being. He opened his mouth to cry out, but only a feeble croak emerged.

They had reached the monastery... They were surely saved!

But the Kryte kept going, heading now away from the baroque facade.

“Stop,” Abbott hissed. “They will help us.”

The hooded figure turned away, as if it had not even seen them.

“Have mercy,” Abbott said.

At this, the Kryte paused, mid-stride, and turned its head to Abbott. Its globe-like eyes were speckled gold and red, embedded with alien spores, and Abbott saw his own reflection, dim within their stardust mirrored surface.

In answer to the Kryte’s unvoiced question, Abbott explained, “Mercy. Kindness towards one who is in one’s power.”

The Kryte looked forward again, and resumed its stride, as if no longer interested. “I am your captive,” it said. “I have seen your mercy.”

The Kryte increased its pace, just as a melancholy chorus of plainsong filled the monastery at their shoulder. Abbott clung to its back and sobbed.

“I might die,” he murmured to the Kryte, “but I am going to a better place.” Even as he spoke the words, he wondered at their truth.

He recalled the empty months after his wife and son’s deaths; the period of doubt. He had been so certain in his faith when he had everything; then, when he had nothing, came the undermining of his faith, the months of anguish and anger at God. As the years passed and the pain of his loss lessened, he thought he had regained his faith, but had he merely deluded himself into some semblance of piety, paying lip-service to a God he had known all his life, but whom he now doubted existed at all?

Did he believe? It was a frightening thought.

“A better place. Heaven.”

He heard the Kryte, as if from a great distance. The words startled him, until he realised that the alien had access to his mind. He replied, “Heaven.”

“Afterlife, the reward for pious living. So, then, why do you humans fear death?”

“Look into my mind for that answer,” he said.

The Kryte responded, “Death and damnation, salvation. You are all sinners. You seek piety, and fear temptation.”

“We strive, and yet...”

“And yet you yourself...” The alien paused, as if shocked itself by the degree of Abbott’s uncertainty.

“We strive for faith. I had faith, once.”

“And now?”

Abbott said, “Look into my mind, you bastard,” and he wept.

The alien said, what seemed to Abbott like hours later, “I pity you, but fear not.”

Abbott sobbed, then slipped into unconsciousness.

A cessation of the regular jogging motion woke him.

He looked up. The alien had stopped and was poised with its head cocked, as if listening for something.

“What?”

“Silence!”

Abbott listened, but could hear nothing above the regular jungle noises, the ululation of what might have been birds, the chitter of smaller creatures, and the anomalous crackle of the trees.

The alien muttered something in its own sibilant tongue, then moved off, veering to the right. Its progress was slower now, its attitude decidedly wary. It seemed to creep forward, peering ahead as if expecting at any second to come upon what it sought, or what it feared.

They came to a clearing. The Kryte halted and stared ahead.

“Oh, sweet Jesus Christ,” Abbott said as he beheld what the clearing contained.

The Kryte crept forward, entering the clearing, as if it could not believe what it was seeing, could not believe this example of human saintliness or folly.

Even Abbott, perched upon the alien’s back like a parasite, could not decide either way, though he believed full well what he was seeing.

Who knew how long the monk had been in the jungle? He seemed still to be living, if his condition could be said to be alive; Abbott was in some doubt.

The Kryte approached ever closer, as if drawn.

The monk, garbed in rotting habit, seemed to be enthroned upon some fleshly mound, a pile of what at first glance appeared to be writhing maggots. Only when Abbott looked more closely did he see that the rolls of etiolated flesh were no more than sections of the monk’s body which had burst through the threadbare weave of his raiment. The flesh was scabbed with fungus, and crawled with parasites – and something even pullulated beneath the surface of the skin, a subcutaneous peristalsis that rippled the flesh and made Abbott want to vomit.

But the horror to end all horror was the monk’s face, because though patched with mycelium and suppurating in places, the old man’s dignified face displayed eyes which were open and exhibiting awareness of what was taking place.

Abbott saw the canister beside the monk, standing upon the jungle floor but embedded in the outgrowth of flesh. Transparent pipes connected the canister to the holy man’s body, supplying the living corpse with nutrients and what looked like transfusions of blood and plasma.

“Oh, sinners,” the monk intoned in barely a croak, “look upon the pious and rejoice. For there is but one path and that path leadeth to the Lord, and I am upon that path...” Delirium showed in the eyes, the ecstasy of the righteous.

Abbott, staring at the monk, was torn between revulsion and fear, and he knew what it was to be humbled.

The Kryte breathed, “Insanity!”

Abbott said to the monk, “How long... how long have you been out here?”

The holy man fixed bright blue eyes on Abbott. “How long? Time is not to be trusted. An eternity, at least.”

To the Kryte, Abbott said, “Take me away from here.”

The alien remained in place, staring.

“You ride upon the devil’s back like a willing passenger, you sinner,” intoned the monk. “Repent, and know the reward of God.”

“Take me away!”

Instead, the alien dropped into a crouch and inspected the life-support mechanism beside the holy man. He reached out, made an adjustment, cleared a lever of spore and unkinked a twisted pipe.

The monk gasped as if with exquisite relief.

Abbott thought, at first, that the alien intended to bring the holy fool’s suffering to a merciful end, but the Kryte said, “No – he does not suffer. He rejoices. Insane, but... but to evince such commitment to an ideal! You are an insane race.”

“We should kill the poor bastard, put him out of his misery.”

The Kryte stood and regarded the monk. “But he knows no misery, only ecstasy. He is approaching your elusive God, Abbott. Have compassion.”

And then the alien turned and bore Abbott away from the clearing, away from the ecstatic cries of mortification from the deluded holy man, and Abbott looked into his soul and found only emptiness.

The monk followed them.

When they paused some minutes later, Abbott saw the holy man’s face in the trailing foliage of a tangled climbing plant. Its leaves swirled and writhed, dissolving and reforming, their surfaces made up of tiny, iridescent lifeforms, and as they shifted and settled, shifted and settled, Abbott saw the monk’s eyes staring out at him, eyes set in a writhing, deformed mass.

“Oh sinner,” the monk intoned. “Repent now of your sins, for the Lord watches over us all.”

“Tha...” Abbott pointed briefly, before his arm dropped.

The Kryte angled its head so that it appeared to be looking straight at the monk, and then it turned its tainted stardust eyes on Abbott. “Only vegetation,” it said.

Abbott shook his head, suddenly angered, and abruptly, the Kryte jerked its head back, as if he had struck it between the eyes.

It looked again at the climber, as if trying to see what Abbott had seen. Finally, it said, “The madman is not there. He cannot move.”

Abbott looked.

The monk was not there. They had left him behind in his clearing.

~

“And your mercy is not kindness.”

“Hnh?” Abbott had been dozing, and he was not certain whether the words had been a dream or if they were what had stirred him.

The Kryte’s trot had slowed to a rolling walking pace, the first indication that this journey was taking its toll on the alien. It said nothing more, and Abbott almost convinced himself that he had dreamed the words. Then he realised that the Kryte had resumed an exchange from some hours before: at the monastery, Abbott had asked for mercy and the Kryte had shown none because its kind had no concept of what mercy might be.

Gossamer curtains of some kind of delicate foliage hung all about them, catching the light and distorting it. The Kryte brushed them aside, while Abbott marvelled at the ever-changing shimmering patterns they cast.

“God shows mercy to the sinner,” Abbott croaked, still haunted by the vision of the mad, enrooted monk.

“Mercy is a gift from your god? A flow of ... kreer ... from ruler to ruled, from abuser to abused.”

Abbott wasn’t sure if he had failed to catch the word, or if it was genuinely an alien word. He sensed that it was right, though, and nodded.

“Then it is not Kryte,” said his carrier. That sentence seemed to be enough for the beast, but then, as it sensed his confusion, it added, “Kreer is from one to another. It flows in all directions. Kreer
is
.”

Abbott shook his head, and he felt his head carry on turning, spinning.

And then he heard the whine of a flier’s engine, somewhere high up above the canopy.

The Kryte had heard it too. They stood motionless, Abbott aperch the alien’s back, both with heads tipped to the heavens. They could see no further than a hundred metres or so above them. The trunks of the tree-like plants were pale and etiolated, leaning and twisting as they strove heavenwards, each supporting the other, so that there were vast caverns and chasms of space between them, but above, the foliage was thick. Light cracked through, sending powerful shafts in scattered directions, but only a few fragments of sky were visible.

“How far?” Abbott asked.

“Ninety kilometres.”

Above, the whine thinned, tailed away.

They rested. The Kryte was tired. And the Kryte was hungry: it ate the last two nutrient bars, a single swallow for each, wrapper and all.

Abbott wasn’t hungry, not that he had been given any choice. It was a simple judgement, he understood: the Kryte was doing all the work, the Kryte needed sustenance, the Kryte ate the last two bars.

Abbott stared at his stump.

The n-gel had crusted over, its surface marbled with the fibres of some kind of spongy infestation. The n-gel was moving, and at first he thought it had been infiltrated by maggots, but then he realised it was the fibres, squirming, driving deeper, probing his flesh, becoming one with him...

He grabbed the giant scab of n-gel and ripped it from his stump, and as he did so he cried out, and then he opened his eyes, for as he screamed he must have closed them, and there, before his face, he held a slab of n-gel, fibres trailing like hair, the hair matted with his own blood. The marbled knots of alien infestation clustered like the features on a face, and he saw that it was the monk, and the monk was telling him, “God absolves you, child. Bask in his bounteous love.”

He felt panic rising, but then alien hands held his, calmed him. A presence in his mind smothered like cobwebs, like snow, like dust.

He opened his eyes, but the Kryte was settled on its haunches across the clearing from him, not holding his hands at all. It stared at him with bauble eyes, and he felt calm. And that was when he realised he could sense the Kryte within, probing him, calming him, penetrating his body. He looked down at his stump and saw that it was not raw and seeping as it had been when he ripped the n-gel away; it was dry, not quite skinned-over, but certainly healing.

He peered at the alien, and he knew what it was to be tempted. “Be gone,” he hissed, and as he spoke he realised that he sounded like the mad monk, that he was becoming the mad monk. “Be gone from my body, demon!”

He felt a lifting, a departure, as if his whole body was breathing out, from every pore, every cavity, every surface.

He gasped.

He looked down at his stump and then the pain hit him. Pain from his stump, from the ghost of the limb that should have been there, from the scabs and lesions that covered his skin, from the pinprick spores lodged across his face and deep in his throat, and – oh! – the deep burning agony that filled his lungs with every breath!

Blackness took him in an instant, and he only screamed in the few seconds between waking and being taken by blackness once again.

“Damnation.”