Solaris Rising (44 page)

Laughing, they watched the spores spread and drift and rain down around them, like lilac confetti, glittering and flickering in the sunlight.

Dupré breathed deeply, and as Loftus watched him he thought he saw a revitalising glow bringing colour to the old man’s cheeks.

Loftus pulled a wipe from his pocket and passed it to Elana. Already he could feel the membrane at work in his throat and nasal passages, expelling the powdery spores.

A thick, mauve gunk was running from Elana’s nose, spreading along her top lip. She mopped up the mess, pulling a face. Feeling a tickle below his nose, Loftus put a finger to one nostril and blew hard, spraying the ground with purple snot, then repeated the process with the other side. He nodded to Elana, who was filming him, and said, “They call it the bushman’s handkerchief.”

Nearby, Dupré giggled at them. “It does have the effect of making one rather... light-headed,” the patriarch said. “Even, I venture, euphoric.”

Elana turned to him. “What did the first settlers here make of the puffballs?” she asked.

Dupré was watching the slowly falling spore mist with rheumy eyes. Loftus wondered whether that was an effect of the spores themselves or pity for those first settlers. He turned and smiled at Elana, at the millions of viewers who would watch her documentary in the years to come.

“The first colonists worked for an exploration company out of Mars,” the old man said. “It was a second-rate, cost-cutting venture that sent out ill-equipped colony teams on the cheap.” He shrugged. “They found Karenia and studied the biology. The chemists gave the place the all clear. The spores didn’t seem anything other than a cause of the sniffles and a pretty optical effect. It was only forty, fifty years later that the effects of the spores began to manifest. Just as they eat away at the lining of the gut of the Yanth, they attack the moist membranes of our lungs and throat, leaching virus-like particles into our bloodstream.”

“Colonists began dying,” Elana supplied.

“They succumbed to a spectrum of gradual wasting diseases and neurological dysfunctions and died within six months of first presenting symptoms. Few lived beyond about forty years. The colony faced evacuation, but then some of the biochemical studies showed interesting results. Omega-Gen bought out the original exploration company and followed up the early, somewhat crude studies. They found that the kreen, or rather extracts from it, helped in the treatment of certain cancers. At the same time they found a gene tweak that allowed people to live here without full biohazard suits, so that each generation, when receiving the splice, had immunity from the deadly effects of the spores. What they couldn’t do, of course, was prevent the colonists developing a biological dependency, one similar to the Yanth’s; that dependency is genetic: just as the gene-splice protected us from the spores, it bound us to them.”

And therein lay the irony of the situation, Loftus thought. The colonists were dependent on the spores, but the spores could not be synthesised, and they broke down within a day or two of release, so the colonists could never travel off-world. They were tied to Karenia.

Dupré was saying, for the benefit of the viewers who would one day watch Elana’s documentary, “Not long after Omega-Gen began taking the kreen, one of their chemists chanced on a miraculous discovery: a variant of the chemical that stopped cancer cells multiplying and allowed normal body cells to divide beyond the telomere-shortening limit, so that subject primates tended to stay young and live beyond their normal span. It wasn’t long before the drug was tested on humans, and so extended longevity was achieved.”

A silence fell then, and Loftus considered what Dupré had left unspoken…

A short time later they arrived at the kiln house. Christopher lifted his father from the tractor and propelled the wheelchair into the cavernous shadow of the building.

Loftus followed, taking in the heady aroma of dried kreen.

The kiln house was like a vast timber barn, packed with lines of funnel-shaped vats underneath each of which was an oil-fuelled heater. The heat was intense, and workers, naked to the waist, transferred tangled bundles of kreen from the back of tractors and pitch-forked them into the vats.

Dupré led Loftus and Elana through the open-ended barn and indicated a conveyor belt onto which the funnels discharged the desiccated remains of the kreen plant, a mounded mix of blue-green fibres and grey ash. He talked them through every stage of the plant’s harvest and treatment, Elana switching between paying close attention and wandering off for establishing shots and different perspectives for the final edit.

Loftus moved away, heading for the sunlight. He emerged from the furnace heat of the kiln house, into the relative cool of the day, and leaned against the timber frame.

He wondered if it had been the sight of the kiln house workers and the knowledge that this scene would be multiplied a million-fold across the face of the planet that brought the reality of the situation into stark relief.

In a matter of months all this would cease to be; an entire way of life, a culture with its traditions and rituals built up over two centuries, would be no more.

And here he was, their Judas, welcomed into the home of an old friend only to tell them that all this was over.

He sensed movement beside him, and turned. Elana was watching him, with her documentary eyes: he wondered how long she had been filming him.

She walked away and swept her head in an arc, taking in the lie of the land, the turquoise crops of kreen overlaid with the gauzy mist of the puffball spores, and commenced a portentous voice-over.

“Tragedy compounds tragedy, here on Karenia. The colonists are tied to their planet by their dependency on the spores that cannot be synthesised. Also, they are doomed to live lives as did our forbears: four score and ten, on average. The tragic fact is this: the terrible price the colonists must pay for their dependency is that their metabolism is rendered immune to the effects of the anti-ageing drug, itself a derivative of the spore-kreen symbiosis.”

Elana turned, suddenly, to face Loftus. She was perhaps five metres away, staring at him intently. “And as if that were not tragedy enough, this man must tell them that their way of life here on Karenia is coming to an end.”

Despite a sudden flare of anger, Loftus played his part, an actor in a docu-drama that would enthral millions. Pained, he turned and walked slowly into the kiln house.

Dupré lifted his hand in a genial wave. “Ah, there you are, Edward. How about we get back and rest up before dinner this evening?”

Loftus smiled and agreed, unable to bring himself to look his host in the eye.

He excused himself early from the table again that night and walked alone through the grounds of the Dupré manse. He stopped frequently to look at the patterns of whorls on the bark of a native tree, the fruiting bodies bulging sticky and pearl-white on a network of roots spread across the ground, the dusting of spores on the surface of a small pool... The buzzing and whistling of native wildlife filled his ears, swelling and cutting off to a pattern that wasn’t quite a pattern.

He emerged on a trail that took him down towards the settlement of Turballe. The first building he encountered was a chapel, its wooden board-walls painted white, its tin roof patched orange with rust.

In the chapel grounds, each grave was marked with a small engraved slab set into the crusty turf.

He had passed this way before on previous visits, a landmark that indicated the edge of town.

The Dupré family had one corner of the cemetery to themselves. The slabs here were well-tended, the vegetation trimmed back, the surfaces scraped and swept clean. At first, Loftus did not find what he sought, but of course... she had married, changed her name to Carson.

Helen Carson.

He knelt, reached out, ran a finger along the grooves of her name on the stone’s surface.

Three days. That was all it had been. All the Omega-Gen schedule had permitted before he was shuttled away from the planet. Three days.

So many what ifs, so many what might have beens.

He straightened, turned, and saw movement in the chapel doorway, a shadow, a shape.

Catherine, the wife of Christopher Dupré’s son.

Loftus stared at her, and inevitably his eyes were drawn to the bulge of her belly.

He turned, took a stumbling step, and then was out of the graveyard, back on the trail past sticky fruiting bodies and purple-skinned pools, breathing heavily the air that was thick with heady scents and spores, gasping.

He turned and stared, but the chapel was lost to jungle, the trail behind him empty.

More slowly, he headed back up to the manse.

Elana must have been watching out for his return, for she soon joined him in their room. They closed the shutters on the semi-light of the false night and held each other.

Very soon Elana was breathing evenly, sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Loftus lay awake, unable to settle, beset by fear and dogged by thoughts of tomorrow’s meeting with the colony’s ruling elite.

His vision adjusted to the darkness, and he turned onto his side and regarded his lover, wondering why he had invited her along. He wondered at the motive of his old self, his self of six months ago. Had he really loved this woman enough to want to help her career by giving her the opportunity to accompany him?

Or did he have an ulterior motive, hidden even to himself at the time?

He wondered now if he wanted Elana to document not only the beginning of the end on Karenia, but also his part in it, so that the world would understand how he had suffered as the harbinger of dire tidings. Was the entire exercise nothing more than a consequence of his need for absolution, the desire to have his suffering witnessed by the watching millions?

He ran a finger along the declivity of her naked back, and felt a renewal of guilt at using her like this.

Some time later, a sound came from outside, a high-pitched chittering like that of a bird. He sat up, careful not to disturb Elana.

He swung himself out of bed, slipped into a pair of jeans, and crossed the room. Carefully he eased the shutters open slightly and peered out; the twilight was too bright for him to see anything at first. When his vision adjusted he saw the balcony rail, a twisted array of flowers growing up one pillar. He almost turned away, but then movement caught his eye, something beyond the rail, something out in the manse’s grounds.

He edged the shutters open and stepped out onto the wooden decking of the balcony. Down where manicured garden segued into jungle there were three – now four – squat blue figures, pushing and skipping like children in a school playground. Every so often, a chittering cry came from one of the creatures.

They were Yanth, the native semi-sentient species.

Loftus had seen them on previous visits, but only ever fleetingly, distantly. As he watched, they froze, as if one. For a second or two they were as statues, and then they melted into the undergrowth and were gone.

Loftus was aware of his increased heartbeat. His throat was dry.

What were they doing here, so close to human habitation?

He hesitated for only an instant, and then was heading down the steps, his bare feet crunching through spore-crusted grass.

The ground where the Yanth had been playing bore the impressions of their feet, dark imprints where the dusting of spores had been dislodged. Loftus stared at the edge of the jungle and saw a thinning, what might have been a way through.

He straightened, took a step, then another. With his third step, the jungle wrapped itself around him and the manse might have been nothing more than a distant memory.

The mauve twilight of half night, which had seemed so bright when he first opened the shutters, was but a murky gloom in the depths of the jungle. Frequently, Loftus headed for a thinning between the trees only to be pulled up by a web of crystalline fibres snagged across his face and body. He almost turned back after a few minutes of this, but then he heard the chittering again.

Soon he was unable to determine how far he may have come, his progress so full of false starts and doubling back. Eventually, the twilight grew brighter ahead and he knew he must be approaching some kind of clearing.

Aware of the noise of his progress, he slowed, easing his way towards the thinning, his heart pounding again.

A brow of rock cut through the jungle here, covered only by a thin layer of undergrowth. The mauve sky hung seamless overhead.

Loftus’ eyes took a few seconds to adjust, and then he saw the Yanth, four of them, sitting cross-legged by a dark opening in the rock, their faces turned back towards him, apparently unperturbed by his clumsy pursuit.

All pretence of stealth abandoned, he stepped out into the open and brushed himself down, aware of the many scratches from the jungle fibres across his arms and torso.

Unsure what to do, or even what kind of danger he could face, he raised his hands palms outward, shrugged, and for want of anything better said, “My name is Ed Loftus. I’m a friend of the Duprés. A friend of the Yanth.”

When Loftus took a step forward, the aliens remained where they were, watching him with no visible reaction.