The Abyss Beyond Dreams (52 page)

‘Nearly eighteen hours. It’s the day after we got married.’

‘Uracus! We have to leave. Now!’

‘Would you like to tell me why?’

‘Something . . . A Faller egg, but bigger, a new type, big enough to carry a whole nest of them. It came down in the woods on the other side of the river three nights ago. They’ll
eat us, Nigel! I didn’t tell anyone. I know I should have done, I’m sorry, but I didn’t. I was so angry about the wedding, about everything.’

He sat at the table opposite her, hands wrapped round a mug of tea. His smile was reassuring. ‘Ah. Yes. Don’t worry. Actually, that wasn’t from the Forest. It’s not a
Faller invasion. You’re safe.’

Her skin chilled as she looked at him. Slowly, slowly, she tensed her leg muscles, ready to make a dash for the door.
Is the shotgun back in its cabinet? Has he found it?

‘Now try and keep calm,’ Nigel said. ‘This is the biggie coming up: that thing you saw land was my spaceship.’

‘Riiiight—’ Kysandra sprinted as fast as she could in those stupid bloomers. Straight through the hall and out into the compound. The ground with its small sharp stones stung
and cut her bare feet, but she didn’t stop. Refused to let the pain distract her. Ahead was the gate in the sagging fence round the overgrown garden. Except the vegetable garden was now in
good order, with the soil beds freshly dug. Someone was kneeling to sort out the tangle of runner beans on their bamboo canes. Someone dressed in simple dungarees and a rust-red T-shirt. Someone
who was standing up and turning to face her. And his face was—

Kysandra screamed and lost her footing, tumbling over in a flurry of flailing arms. Pain shot up both knees.

‘Are you okay?’

She looked round fearfully. Nigel was coming out of the house, his expression full of concern. She looked from him to the
thing
by the vegetables. It was human shaped, but its face
– it was completely devoid of any characteristics.
Like an adult-size doll
, she thought. Waiting to take someone’s identity. ‘Fallers,’ she cried.
‘You’re Fallers!’

‘Kysandra, please,’ Nigel said. And his shell softened to let her perceive his thoughts; the genuine compassion, and more, a trace of amusement at her reaction.

A spark of anger fired into her brain. ‘You think I’m a crudding joke?’ she shouted.

‘No. I think you’re holding up well . . . given the circumstances. How do you think Akstan would react? I met him, remember. I think he’d have fainted clean away by
now.’

‘You’re going to eat me!’

Nigel sighed, and knelt down beside her. ‘No, Kysandra. I’m not going to eat you. I’m human, just like you.’

She twisted her head round to look fearfully at the doll-man. ‘That’s not.’

‘No. It’s not. It’s what we call an ANAdroid. It’s a machine. Biological, but manufactured. Think of it as a giant mod-dwarf, just a little smarter.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ the doll-man said. Its pale lips curved up, approximating a smile. ‘I apologize if my appearance startled you. I assure you I am not hostile. Nigel is correct,
I am a biological machine.’

Kysandra started crying.

‘Come on,’ Nigel said kindly. ‘Let’s get you back inside. Those cuts need cleaning.’

Kysandra stared up helplessly at him as he stood above her. She was all out of fight.
I can’t stop them. I’m already dead
. So she didn’t resist when he picked her up
and carried her back inside.

As he walked back to the house she saw another of the doll-men up on the roof, fixing the shingle.
There is no escape.

Nigel put her down on the settee in what had originally been the dining room until her father had covered the walls with shelves which he filled with his treasured books. The room hadn’t
been refurbished yet. Somehow that made the worn cushions she lay on quite comforting. She’d often sat on this same settee with her father when he read to her.

A mod-dwarf brought in a small green bag with a white cross on the top. Nigel knelt beside her and put an old towel underneath her heels. Kysandra watched dully. Blood was staining the bottom of
the bloomers, and her feet were a mess, too.

Nigel took a slim tube from the bag. ‘This may sting for a moment,’ he warned. Kysandra shrugged. The tube hissed as he brought it close to the torn skin on her soles. He moved it in
a strange motion as if he was painting her feet.

He was right: it did sting. She sucked down some air sharply at the biting sensation. Then her feet became numb.

‘Antiseptic and a mild anaesthetic,’ Nigel said quietly. ‘Let’s see, the dermsynth should work here.’ He took out another tube.

Kysandra peered down curiously now, just in time to see a faint blue mist spray out of the second cylinder. The substance stuck to her skin, flowing over it and foaming to form a thin, even
layer.

‘Good. I was worried the Void wouldn’t permit that.’

‘What?’

‘The Void inhibits a whole range of electrical functions. I didn’t know if it would affect the dermsynth. But that’s mostly a biochemical reaction.’

‘Oh.’ She didn’t really understand.

‘I need to get the fabric clear from your knees.’

Kysandra realized he was asking permission. ‘Whatever.’

His teekay ripped through the bloomers’ cotton as if it was air.

Faller teekay is stronger than ours.

Then he was spraying the stuff from the first tube on her gashes. Her knees stung, then there was nothing again. She let out a sigh of relief. The blue substance was applied. It was like a layer
of skin, but tougher.

‘There we go,’ he said happily. ‘All finished now. The dermsynth will help regenerate your own skin. It’ll peel off when it’s done. Couple of days,
maybe.’

‘Right.’

‘Kysandra.’

‘Yes?’

‘Have you ever seen anything like that before?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

He gestured round at the books which surrounded them. ‘I’ve had a bit of a crash course in your history the last two days. Mainly I’ve been learning about the Fallers. But,
tell me, do you know that humans came to Bienvenido from another place?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Kysandra nodded at the five thick Landing Chronicles – she’d read every one. ‘Captain Cornelius brought us here in his ship.’

‘Good. Okay. Then is it too much to ask you to believe I came from the same place as that first ship?’

In her mind, the image of the boat-bird falling through the night sky was very clear. She stubbornly refused to admit anything, but her racing thoughts were chaotic, surging with so many
conflicting emotions. She could not let hope dominate. Hope betrayed her every time. That he’d flown to Bienvenido was too much to believe.
It would be wonderful, though.

‘Is it at least possible?’ Nigel persisted.

‘I suppose so.’
Flying through space is in the books, it’s real history, so we used to be able to do it.
‘But—’

‘Incredible, I know. This must be very shocking. So take a quiet moment and try to relax a little. Why don’t you get dressed? And when you’re ready, I’ll take you over to
see my spaceship. That should finally convince you. If it doesn’t, I don’t know what will.’

‘Then what?’ she asked.

‘Then we’ll talk. Once I know you believe, I’ll answer all your questions. And, trust me, you’ll have a lot of questions.’

She looked down at the patches of blue . . .
stuff
on her knees. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Instinct told her it really was something from beyond this world. And
a Faller wouldn’t treat her like this. ‘All right,’ she said cautiously. Because if there truly was such a thing as a spaceship, she simply had to see it.

*

The blue dress did fit perfectly. It felt wonderful, too – clean and fresh. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever worn anything new. Sarara had
always collected her clothes from a charity house in town, sewing patches onto worn cloth, darning sweaters. Badges of how poor they were. But this dress . . . Kysandra stood in front of the mirror
and simply couldn’t stop the smile lifting her lips as she admired herself. Her red-gold hair fell over her shoulders in long waves, without any of the normal tangles that were so devilish to
tug out. It was as if she’d spent a week in a salon. She hated Madeline with all her might, but had to admit the woman knew a lot about taking care of hair.
I must make an effort to keep
it like this
, she thought. Then she instantly hardened her shell so
he
didn’t pick that up. When she looked a little closer into the mirror, she saw the zits on her nose, with
more on her chin, one on her cheek. She sighed; would they ever stop?

Nigel was waiting in the hall when she came down the stairs. They’d been fixed, too; not one of them creaked when she put her weight on them.

‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘Ready to visit your first real live spaceship?’

‘I want it to be real,’ she said. ‘I do.’

‘I know. Come on.’

They walked down to the river, through the old pattern of fields that were now just squares of tangled weeds and vines separated by hedges that had grown wild. A small boat was tied up on the
shore. Not a kind of boat she recognized. This one was circular and seemed to be made of orange fabric. It was
alien
– no other word for it.

There was a rope running across the river, tied to trees on either side. Nigel knelt in the bottom of the boat and used the rope to pull them across.

Kysandra had only crossed the river a handful of times. The wood that occupied the other side of the valley was gloomy and unwelcoming. Its great dark trunks had grown packed close, and they
leaned against each other, seemingly merging together several metres off the ground to give an unbroken canopy of aquamarine fronds and verdant fan-leaves. Those trees that died stayed upright,
buttressed by their neighbours, so they simply became pillars of vibrant orange and grey fungi. The narrow crooked gaps were filled with vines, as if some giant arachnid had turned the wood into an
oversized feeding trap.

A passage had been cleared through the dense web of creepers, the cut ends still bleeding gooey sap. The ground underfoot was a springy loam that smelt vinegary. Tatus flies and larger stikmoths
fluttered about in the shade. She could hear bigger creatures rustling through the creepers, though her ex-sight only ever perceived bussalores slithering down into their dank underground
burrows.

Then her ex-sight perceived the
thing
up ahead. It must have come down almost vertically at the end, for there was no long trail of smashed trees. Instead it was in a small clearing of
broken trunks.

She’d been right about the shape: a large bulbous oval with triangular wings on both sides; she thought the wings had been a lot bigger when it flew over the farmhouse. As she stood at the
edge of the clearing looking at it, the surface was an intensely dark green where the sun struck; otherwise it appeared to be coal black. Surprisingly, her gaze was drawn to the twenty or so neuts
that were milling about passively.

‘Why are they here?’ she asked.

‘I need manual help to restart the farm,’ Nigel replied. ‘They’re having their eggs shaped into useful genistars.’

‘Into geniwhats?’

‘You call them mods.’

‘Oh. Do you know how to adapt neut eggs?’

‘I know the theory, but the ship’s smartcore – its brain – is doing the actual shaping.’

‘The ship?’ She looked at the smooth foreign artefact that had ended its flight in such an ungraceful fashion by thumping to the ground here, and realized she wasn’t afraid any
more. No, that had been replaced by very strong curiosity. And wonder.

‘Come on.’ He held out his hand.

She held it tight as a hatch opened in the side of the ship, a circular area which seemed to contract somehow, revealing a short white corridor that was lit as brightly as if the sun was inside.
‘It
is
real!’

*

Nigel was from the Commonwealth. The union of human worlds that existed outside the Void. A universe that was very different. He had come to find out what had happened to the
ships that Captain Cornelius had flown into the Void.

‘Why?’ Kysandra asked. She was sitting on a round chair that had grown out of the floor in the blank circular chamber he called the main cabin. And Nigel had been right; there were
so many questions her head was in danger of bursting open from the pressure of them.

‘We don’t know how they came through the barrier that guards the Void from the rest of the universe.’

‘But you came through.’

‘That was different. Some alien allies tore the boundary open temporarily, just long enough for me to slip inside. I’ve spent seven years in suspension – that’s a long
sleep – while a Skylord led me to this world.’

‘You flew through space.’ It was just the most wonderful thing ever to think that humans could still do such a thing – that it wasn’t only Captain Cornelius who travelled
between planets. Out there in the Commonwealth, where there were hundreds of worlds, all filled with marvels, people flew between them all the time. ‘Please take me out there, back to the
Commonwealth you came from. Please, Nigel. I’ll help you however you want while you’re here, but afterwards . . .’ She gave him the most entreating plea she could, letting her
yearning thoughts free so he could taste them.

‘Getting out is difficult,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t expect I’d be doing that.’

‘But you can do it,’ she insisted. Her hands gestured round the magnificent spaceship with its clean air and bright lighting. A machine that could fly! ‘You’re so clever.
You know everything there is to know.’

‘Ha!’

His bitter laugh shocked her.

‘I’m the stupidest person in the galaxy, actually.’ He glanced meaningfully up at the blank ceiling. ‘Though I’m not alone.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘We thought there was only one planet in the Void where humans lived – Querencia. How wrong we were. We should have known, should have worked it out, but we didn’t; we assumed
– which is always a foolish thing to do. We did it because all our power and knowledge brings a huge dose of arrogance with it. Well, thank you, universe: lesson in humility well and truly
learned.’