Chapter 09

 

The hot rain falling on Durringham had started shortly after daybreak on Wednesday; it was now noon on Thursday and there had been no let-up. The satellite pictures showed there was at least another five hours’ worth of cloud waiting over the ocean. Even the inhabitants, normally unperturbed by mere thunderstorms, had deserted the streets. Scummy water swirled round the stone supports of raised wooden buildings, seeping up through the floorboards. More worryingly, there had been several mudslides on the north-east side of the city. Durringham’s civic engineers (all eight of them) were alarmed that an avalanche effect would sweep whole districts into the Juliffe.

Lalonde’s Governor, Colin Rexrew, received their datavised report phlegmatically. He couldn’t honestly say the prospect of losing half of the capital was an idea which roused any great regret. Pity it wasn’t more.

At sixty years old he had reached the penultimate position in his chosen profession. Born in Earth’s O’Neill Halo, he had started working for the astroengineering giant Miconia Industrial straight after university, qualifying with a degree in business finance, then diversified into subsidiary management, a highly specialized profession, making sure semi-independent divisions retained their corporate identity even though they were hundreds of light-years from Earth. The company’s widespread offices meant he was shunted around the Confederation’s inhabited systems in three-year shifts, slowly building an impressive portfolio of experience and qualifications, always putting his personal life second to the company.

Miconia Industrial had taken a ten per cent stake in the Lalonde Development Company, the third largest single investor. And Colin Rexrew had been appointed Governor two years ago. He had another eight years of office to run, after which he’d be in line for a seat on Miconia’s board. He would be sixty-eight by then, but some geneering in his heritage gave him a life expectancy of around a hundred and twenty. At sixty-eight he would be just hitting his peak. With a successful governorship under his belt, his chances of nabbing the board seat were good verging on excellent.

Although, as he now knew to his cost, success on Lalonde was a slippery concept to define. After twenty-five years of investment by the LDC, Lalonde wasn’t even twenty per cent self-financing. He was beginning to think that if the planet was still here in eight years’ time he would have accomplished the impossible.

His office took up the entire third storey of a dumper on the eastern edge of the city. The furniture itself was all made by local carpenters from mayope wood, Lalonde’s one really useful resource. He had inherited it from his predecessor, and it was a trifle sturdy for his taste. The thick bright jade carpet of kilian hair had come from Mulbekh, and the computer systems were from Kulu. A glass-fronted drinks cabinet was well stocked, with a good third of the bottles in the chiller containing local wines, which he was acquiring a palate for. Curving windows gave him a view out over the cultivated rural areas beyond the suburb, a sight far more pleasing than the backward mundane city itself. But today even the neat white clapboard houses were afflicted by the downpour, appearing dowdy and beleaguered, the usually green fields covered by vast pools of water. Distressed animals crowded onto the island mounds, bleating pathetically.

Colin sat behind his desk, ignoring the datawork flashing urgently on his screens to watch the deluge through the window. Like everyone on Lalonde he wore shorts, although his were tailored in the London arcology; his pale blue jacket was slung over one of the conference chairs, and the conditioner failed to stop sweat stains from appearing under the arms of his pale lemon silk shirt.

There was no such thing as a gym on the whole planet, and he could never bring himself to jog from his official residence to the office in the morning, so he was starting to put on weight at a disappointing rate. His already round face now had accentuated jowls, and a third chin was developing; a smattering of freckles had expanded under Lalonde’s sunlight to cover both cheeks and his forehead. Once hale ginger hair was thinning and fading towards silver. Whatever ancestor had paid for the geneered metabolic improvements which increased his life expectancy had obviously stinted on the cosmetic side.

More lightning bolts stabbed down out of the smothering cloud blanket. He counted to four before he heard the thunder. If this goes on much longer even the puddles will develop puddles, he thought bleakly.

There was a bleep from the door, and it slid open. His neural nanonics told him it was his executive aide, Terrance Smith.

Colin swivelled his chair back round to the desk. Terrance Smith was thirty-five, a tall, elegant man with thick black hair and a firm jaw; today he was dressed in knee-length grey shorts and a green short-sleeved shirt. His weight was never anything less than optimum. The rumour around Colin’s staff said Smith had bedded half of the women in the administration office.

“Meteorology say we’re due for a dry week after this passes over,” Terrance said as he sat in the chair in front of Colin’s desk.

Colin grunted. “Meteorology didn’t say this lot was expected.”

“True.” Terrance consulted a file in his neural nanonics. “The geological engineers up at Kenyon have finished their preliminary survey. They are ready to move on to more extensive drilling for the biosphere cavern.” He datavised the report over to Colin.

Kenyon was the twelve-kilometre-diameter stony iron asteroid that had been knocked into orbit a hundred and twelve thousand kilometres above Lalonde by a series of nuclear explosions. When Lalonde’s first stage of development was complete, and the planetary economy was up and functioning without requiring any additional investment, the LDC wanted to progress to developing a space industry station cluster. That was where the real money lay, fully industrial worlds. And the first essential for any zero-gee industrial stations was an abundant supply of cheap raw material, which the asteroid would provide. The mining crews would tunnel out the ores, literally carving themselves a habitable biosphere in the process.

Unfortunately, now Kenyon was finally in place after its fifteen-year journey from the system’s asteroid belt, Colin doubted he had the budget even to maintain the geological engineering team, let alone pay for exploratory drilling. Transporting new colonists into the continental interior was absorbing funds at a frightening rate, and the first thing an asteroid settlement needed was a reliable home market as a financial foundation before it could start competing on the interstellar market.

“I’ll look into it later,” he told Terrance. “But I’m not making any promises. Somebody jumped the gun on that one by about twenty years. The asteroid industry project looks good on our yearly reports. Moving it into orbit is something you can point to and show the board how progressive you’re being. They know it doesn’t make a dollar while it’s underway. But as soon as it’s here in orbit they expect it to be instantly profitable. So I’m lumbered with the bloody thing while my cretinous predecessor is drawing his standard pension plus a nice fat bonus for being so dynamic while he was in office. The auditors should have caught this, you know. It’s going to be another fifty years before these mud farmers can scrape together enough capital to support high-technology industries. There’s no demand here.”

Terrance nodded, handsome features composed into a grave expression. “We’ve authorized start-up loans for another eight engineering companies in the last two months. Power bike sales are healthy in the city, and we should have an indigenous four-wheel-drive jeep within another five years. But I agree, large-scale consumer manufacturing is still a long way off.”

“Ah, never mind,” Colin sighed. “You weren’t the one who authorized Kenyon. If they’d just stop sending us colonists for six months, allow us to catch our breath. A ship every twenty days is too much, and the passage fees the colonists pay don’t cover half of the cost of sending them upriver. Once the starship’s been paid for the board doesn’t care. But what I wouldn’t give for some extra funds to spend on basic infrastructure, instead of subsidizing the river-boats. It’s not as if the captains don’t make enough.”

“That was something else I wanted to bring up. I’ve just finished accessing the latest schedules flek from the board; they’re going to send us five colonist-carrier starships over the next seventy days.”

“Typical.” Colin couldn’t even be bothered with a token protest.

“I was thinking we might ask the river-boat captains to take more passengers each trip. They could easily cram another fifty on board if they rigged up some awnings over the open decks. It wouldn’t be any different from the transients’ dormitories, really.”

“You think they’d go for that?”

“Why not? We pay their livelihood, after all. And it’s only temporary. If they don’t want to take them, then they can sit in harbour and lose money. The paddle-boats can hardly be used for bulk cargo. Once we’ve repossessed the boats, we’ll give them to captains who are more flexible.”

“Unless they all band together; those captains are a clannish lot. Remember that fuss over Crompton’s accident? He rams a log, and blames us for sending him off into an uncharted tributary. We had to pay for the repairs. The last thing we need right now is an outbreak of trade unionism.”

“What shall I do, then? The transients’ dormitories can’t hold more than seven thousand at once.”

“Ah, to hell with it. Tell the captains they’re taking more heads per trip and that’s final. I don’t want the transients in Durringham a moment longer than necessary.” He tried not to think what would ever happen if one of the paddle-boats capsized in the Juliffe. Lalonde had no organized emergency services; there were five or six ambulances working out of the church hospital for casualties in the city, but a disaster a thousand kilometres upriver . . . And the colonists were nearly all arcology dwellers, half of them couldn’t swim. “But after this we’ll have to see about increasing the number of boats. Because as sure as pigs shit, we won’t ever get a reduction in the number of colonists they send us. I heard on the grapevine Earth’s population is creeping up again, the number of illegal births rose three per cent last year. And that’s just the official illegals.”

“If you want more boats, that will mean more mortgage loans,” Terrance observed.

“I can do basic arithmetic, thank you. Tell the comptroller to shrink some other budgets to compensate.”

Terrance wanted to ask which divisions, every administration department was chronically underfunded. The look on Colin Rexrew’s face stopped him. “Right, I’ll get onto it.” He loaded a note in his neural nanonics general business file.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to look into safety on those paddle-boats some time. Make them carry lifebelts.”

“Nobody in Durringham makes lifebelts.”

“So that’s a fresh business opportunity for some smart entrepreneur. And yes I know it would need another loan to establish. Hell, do we have a cork-analogue tree here? They could carve them, everything else on this bloody planet is made out of wood.”

“Or mud.”

“God, don’t remind me.” Colin glanced out of the window again. The clouds had descended until they were only about four hundred metres above the ground. Dante got it all wrong, he thought, hell isn’t about searing heat, it’s about being permanently wet. “Anything else?”

“Yes. The marshal you sent up to Schuster County has filed his report. I didn’t want to load it into the office datanet.”

“Good thinking.” Colin knew the CNIS team monitored their satellite communications. There was also Ralph Hiltch sitting snugly over in the Kulu Embassy, like a landbound octopus with its tentacles plugged into damn near every administration office, siphoning out information. Although God alone knew why Kulu bothered, maybe paranoia was a trait the Saldanas had geneered into their super genes. He had also heard a strictly unofficial whisper that the Edenists had an active intelligence team on the planet, which was pushing credulity beyond any sane limits.

“What was the summary?” he asked Terrance.

“He drew a complete blank.”

“Nothing?”

“Four families have definitely gone missing, just like the sheriff said. All of them lived out on the savannah a fair distance away from Schuster town itself. He visited their homesteads, and said it was like they walked out one morning and never came back. All their gear had been looted by the time he arrived, of course, but he asked around, apparently there was even food laid out ready for a meal in one home. No sign of a struggle, no sayce or kroclion attack. Nothing. It really spooked the other colonists.”

“Strange. Have we had any reports of bandit gangs operating up there?”

“No. In any case, bandits wouldn’t stop after just a few families. They’d keep going until they were caught. Those families disappeared nine weeks ago now, and there have been no reports of any repetition. Whatever did happen, it looks like a one off.”

“And bandits would have stripped the homesteads of every remotely useful piece of gear, anyway,” Colin mused out loud. “What about the Tyrathca farmers? Do they know anything?”

“The marshal rode out to their territory. They claim they’ve had no contact with humans since they left Durringham. He’s pretty sure they’re telling the truth. There was certainly no sign of any humans ever being in their houses. His affinity-bonded dog had a good scout round.”

Colin stopped himself from making the sign of the cross; his Halo asteroid upbringing had been pretty formal. Supervisors and sheriffs using affinity was something he could never get used to.

“The families all had daughters; some teenagers, a couple in their early twenties,” Terrance said. “I checked their registration files.”

“So?”

“Several of the girls were quite pretty. They could have moved downriver to one of the larger towns, set up a brothel. It wouldn’t be the first time. And from what we know, conditions in Schuster are fairly dire.”

“Then why not take their gear with them?”

“I don’t know. That was the only explanation I could think of.”

“Ah, forget it. If there aren’t any more disappearances, and the situation isn’t developing into an insurrection, I’m not interested. Write it down to an animal carrying them off for nest food, and call the marshal back. Those colonists know the risks of alien frontiers before they start out. If they’re mad enough to go and live out in the jungle and play at being cavemen, let them. I’ve got enough real problems to deal with at this end of the river.”

 

Quinn Dexter had heard of the disappearances, it was all round the Aberdale village camp the day a party from Schuster made their official welcome visit to Group Seven. Four complete families, seventeen people flying off into thin air. It interested him, especially the rumours. Bandits, xenocs (especially the Tyrathca farmers over in the foothills), secret metamorph aborigines, they had all been advanced as theories, and all found wanting. But the metamorph stories fascinated Quinn. One of Schuster’s Ivets told him there had been several sightings when they had first arrived a year ago.

“I saw one myself,” Sean Pallas told him. Sean was a couple of years older than Quinn, and could have passed for thirty. His face was gaunt, his ribs were starkly outlined. Fingers and arms were covered in red weals, and pocked sores where insects had bitten him. “Out in the jungle. It was just like a man, only completely black. It was horrible.”

“Hey,” Scott Williams complained. He was the only Afro-Caribbean among Aberdale’s eighteen Ivets. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that.”

“No, man, you don’t understand. It didn’t have any face, just black skin, there was no mouth or eyes; nothing like that.”

“You sure?” Jackson Gael asked.

“Yeah. I was twenty metres from it. I know what I saw. I shouted out and pointed, and it just vanished, ducked down behind a bush or something. And when we got there—”

“The cupboard was bare,” Quinn said.

The others laughed.

“It’s not funny, man,” Sean said hotly. “It was there, I swear. There was no way it could have got away without us seeing. It changed shape, turned into a tree or something. And there’s more just like it. They are out there in the jungle, man, and they’re angry with us for stealing their planet.”

“If they’re that primitive, how do they know we’ve stolen their planet?” Scott Williams asked. “How do they know we’re not the true aboriginals?”

“It’s no joke, man. You won’t be laughing when one of them morphs out of the trees and grabs you. They’ll drag you underground where they live in big cave cities. Then you’ll be sorry.”

Quinn and the others had talked about Sean and what he said that night. They agreed that he was badly undernourished, probably hysterical, certainly suffering from sun dreams. The visitors from Schuster had cast a tangible gloom on the mood of all Aberdale’s residents, an all too physical reminder of how close failure lurked. There hadn’t been much contact between the two groups since the Swithland departed.

But Quinn had thought a lot about what Sean said, and the talk he picked up around the village. A black humanoid, without a face, who could disappear into the jungle without a trace (more than one, judging by the number of sightings). Quinn was pretty sure he knew what that was: someone wearing a chameleon camouflage suit. Nobody else in Aberdale had guessed, their minds just weren’t thinking along those lines, because it would be totally ridiculous to expect someone to be hiding out in the hinterlands of the greatest shit-hole planet in the Confederation. Which, when Quinn considered it, was the really interesting part. To hide away on Lalonde, where nobody would ever look, you must be the most desperate wanted criminal in the universe. Group of criminals, he corrected himself; well organized, well equipped. Conceivably, with their own spacecraft.

Later he discovered all the families who had disappeared had been living in savannah homesteads to the south-east of Schuster. Aberdale was east of Schuster.

Could a retinal implant operating in the infrared spectrum spot a chameleon suit?

The options opening up were amazing.

 

A fortnight after the Swithland left Group Seven at their new home on the Quallheim, the voidhawk Niobe emerged above Lalonde. With the Edenists having a five per cent stake in the LDC a visit from Jovian Bank officials was a regular occurrence. The visiting voidhawks also brought supplies and fresh personnel to the station in orbit around Murora, the largest of the system’s five gas giants. They were there to supervise Aethra, a bitek habitat that had been germinated in 2602 as part of the Edenist contribution to developing the Lalonde system.

Darcy requested the Niobe’s captain perform a detailed scan of Schuster County as soon as the voidhawk slipped into equatorial orbit. Niobe altered its orbital track to take it over Schuster at an altitude of two hundred kilometres. The verdant, undulating quilt of jungle rolled past below the voidhawk’s sensor blisters, and it concentrated every spare neural cell on analysing the images. Resolution was ten centimetres, enough to distinguish individual humans.

After five daylight passes Niobe reported that there were no unauthorized human buildings within a one-hundred-kilometre radius of Schuster town, and all humans observed within that area were listed in the immigrant file Lori and Darcy had built up. Aboriginal-animal density was within expected parameters, which suggested than even if a group had concealed themselves in caves or stealth-cloaked structures, they weren’t hunting for food. It found no trace of the missing seventeen people.

 

After six months Aberdale was looking more like a village and less like a lumberyard with each passing day. Group Seven had waded ashore that first day, armed with fission saws from their gear, and single-minded resolution. They had felled the mayope trees nearest the water, trimmed the trunks to form sturdy pillars which they had driven deep into the shingly riverbed, then sliced out thick planks from the boughs to make a solid walkway. Fission blades made easy work of the timber, ripping through the compacted cellulose like a laser through ice. They sawed like mechanoids, and sweated the cuts into place, and hammered away until an hour before the sun set. By then they had a jetty three metres wide that extended twenty-five metres out into the river, with piles that could moor a half-dozen paddle-craft securely against the current.

The next day they had formed a human chain to unload their cargo-pods and cases as the paddle-boats docked one by one. Will-power and camaraderie made light of the task. And when the paddle-boats had set off back down the river the next day, they stood on the sloping bank and sang their hymn: “Onward, Christian Soldiers”. Loud, proud voices carrying a long way down the twisting Quallheim.

The clearing which formed over the next fortnight was a broad semicircle, stretching a kilometre along the waterfront with the jetty at its centre. But unlike Schuster, Aberdale trimmed each tree as it came down, carrying the trunks and usable boughs to a neat stack, and flinging the smaller leftover branches into a firewood pile.

They built a community hall first, a smaller wooden version of the transients’ dormitory with a wooden slat roof and woven palm walls a metre high. Everyone helped, and everyone learnt the more practical aspects of gussets and joists and tenons and rabbet grooves that a didactic carpentry course could never impart. Food came from frequent hunting trips into the jungle where lasers and electromagnetic rifles would bring down a variety of game. Then there were wild cherry-oak trees with their edible nutty-tasting fruit and acillus vines with small clusters of apple-analogue fruit. The children would be sent on foraging expeditions each day, scouring the fringes of the clearing for the succulent globes. And there was also the river with its shoals of brownspines that tasted similar to trout, and bottom-clinging mousecrabs. It was a bland diet to start with, often supplemented with chocolate and freeze-dried stocks taken from the cargo-pods, but they never fell anywhere near Schuster’s iron regimen.

They had to learn how to cook for batches of a hundred on open fires, mastering the technique of building clay ovens which didn’t collapse, and binding up carcasses of sayce and danderil (a gazelle-analogue) to be spit-roasted. How to boil water in twenty-five-litre containers.

There were stinging insects to recognize, and thorny plants, and poisonous berries, nearly all of which somehow managed to look different from their didactic memory images. There were ways of lashing wood together; and firing clay so that it didn’t crack. Some fronds were good for weaving and some shredded immediately; vines could be dried and used for string and nets. How to dig latrines that nobody fell into (the Ivets were given that task). A long, long list of practicalities which had to be grasped, the essential and the merely convenient. And, by and large, they managed.

After the hall came the houses, springing up in a crescent just inside the perimeter of the clearing. Two-room shacks with overhanging veranda roofs, standing half a metre off the ground thanks to astute management of the tree stumps. They were designed to be added to, a room at a time extending out of the gable walls.

Out of the two hundred and eighteen family groups, forty-two elected to live away from the village, out on the savannah which began south of the river where the jungle eventually faded away to scrub then finally grassland, a sea of rippling green stalks stretching away to the foothills of the distant mountain range, its uniformity broken only by occasional lonely trees and the far-off silver glimmer of narrow watercourses. They were the families who had brought calves and lambs and goat kids and foals, geneered to withstand months of hibernation; pumped full of drugs, and transported in marsupium shells. All the animals were female, so that they could be inseminated from the stock of frozen sperm that had accompanied them across three hundred light-years from Earth.

The Skibbows and the Kavas were among the families who had visions of filling the vast, empty savannah with huge herds of meat-laden beasts. They slept in a tent on the edge of the jungle for five weeks while Gerald and Frank assembled their new home, a four-room log cabin with a stone fireplace, and solar panels nailed on the roof to power lights and a fridge. Outside, they built a small lean-to barn and a stockade; then dammed the little nearby stream with grey stones to form a pool they could wash and bathe in.

Four months and three days after the Swithland departed, they split open their seventeen marsupium shells (three had been stolen at the spaceport). The animals were curled up in a form-fitting sponge, almost as though they were in wombs, with tubes and cables inserted in every orifice. Fifteen made it through the revival process: three shire-horse foals, three calves, one bison, three goats, four lambs, and an Alsatian pup. It was a healthy percentage, but Gerald found himself wishing he could have afforded zero-tau pods for them.

All five family members spent the day helping the groggy animals stand and walk, feeding them a special vitamin-rich milk to speed recovery. Marie, who had never even patted a living animal before let alone nursed one, was bitten, peed on, butted, and had the yellowy milk spewed up over her dungarees. At nightfall she rolled into bed and cried herself to sleep; it was her eighteenth birthday, and no one had remembered.

 

Rai Molvi made his way across the clearing towards the jetty where the tramp trader boat was waiting, exchanging greetings with several adults. He felt a surge of pride at what he saw, the sturdy buildings, neat stacks of timber, fish smoking over open fires, danderil hides pegged out on frames to dry in the sun. A well-ordered community chasing a common goal. The LDC could use Aberdale in its promotional campaign without any falsehood, it was exemplary.

A second wave of tree felling had been underway for a month now, cutting rectangular gashes deep into the jungle around the perimeter of the clearing. From the air the village resembled a gear cog with exceptionally long teeth. The colonists were starting to cultivate the new fields, digging out the tree stumps, ploughing the soil with rotovators that charged from solar cells, planting their vegetable plots and fruit groves. Lines of small green shoots were already visible, pushing up through the rich black soil, and the farmers had to organize a bird patrol to scare off the hungry flocks perched waiting in the surrounding trees.

Not all of the Earth seeds had germinated successfully, which was surprising because they were geneered for Lalonde’s environment. But Rai had every confidence the village would triumph. Today’s fields would become tomorrow’s estates. In six months they had accomplished more than Schuster had in eighteen. It was down to effective organization, he felt. His council was acknowledged as a stroke of salutary foresight, organizing them into an effective interactive work unit even back in the transients’ dormitory.

He passed the community hall and stood to one side to let a group of children march by, carrying braces of fat polot birds they had caught in their traps. Their skin was scratched from thorns, and their legs were coated in mud, but they were smiling and laughing. Yes, Rai Molvi felt very good indeed.

He reached the jetty and walked its length. A couple of Ivets were in the river, Irley and Scott, hauling up their creels full of mousecrabs. The creels were adaptations of lobster-pots, one of Quinn’s ideas.

Rai waved at the two lads, receiving a grinning thumbs-up. The Ivets were undoubtedly his greatest success. A month after they had arrived, Quinn Dexter had asked to talk to him. “Anything we say to Powel Manani just gets automatically ignored, but we know you’ll give us a fair hearing, Mr Molvi.”

Which was so true. It was his job to arbitrate, and like it or not, the Ivets were part of Aberdale. He must appear strictly impartial.

“We want to organize ourselves,” Quinn had said earnestly. “Right now you have all eighteen of us working for you each day, but you have to feed us and let us live in the hall. It’s not the best arrangement, because we just sweat our arses off for you and don’t get anything out of it for ourselves, so we don’t give a hundred per cent, that’s only human nature. None of us asked to come to Aberdale, but we’re here now, and we want to make the most of it. We thought that if we had a rota so that thirteen of us are available as a general work team each day, then the remaining five could use the time to build something for ourselves, something to give us a bit of pride. We want to have our own cabin; and we could trap and grow our own food. That way you don’t have to support us, and you get a far more enthusiastic work team to help put up your cabins and fell the trees.”

“I don’t know,” Rai had said, although he could see the logic behind the idea. It was just Quinn he was unsettled over; he had encountered waster kids back in the arcology often enough, and Quinn’s sinewy frame and assertive mannerisms brought the memories back. But he didn’t want to appear prejudicial, and the lad was making an honest appeal which might well be beneficial to the whole community.

“We could try it for three weeks,” Quinn suggested. “What have you got to lose? It’s only Powel Manani who could say no to you.”

“Mr Manani is here to help us,” Rai answered stiffly. “If this arrangement is what the town council wants, then he must see that it is implemented.”

Powel Manani had indeed objected, which Rai thought was a challenge to his authority and that of the council. In a session to which Powel Manani was not invited, the council decided that they would give the Ivets a trial period to see if they could become self-sufficient.

Now the Ivets had built themselves a long (and very well constructed, Rai grudgingly conceded) A-frame building on the eastern side of the clearing where they all lived. They caught a huge number of mousecrabs in their creels, which they traded for other types of food among the other villagers. They had their own chicken run and vegetable allotments (villagers had chipped in with three chicks and a few seeds from their own stocks). They joined the hunting parties, even being trusted to carry power weapons, although those did have to be handed back at the end of the day. And the daily work team were enthusiastic in the tasks they were given. There was also some kind of still producing a rough drink, which Rai didn’t strictly approve of, but could hardly object to now.

It all added up to a lot of credit in Rai Molvi’s favour for pushing the idea so hard. And it wouldn’t be long before the time was right for Aberdale to think about formally electing a mayor. After that, there was the county itself to consider. Schuster town was hardly flourishing; several of its inhabitants had already asked if they could move to Aberdale. Who knew what a positive, forthright man could aspire to out here where this world’s history was being carved?

Rai Molvi came to the end of the jetty flushed with a strong sense of contentment. Which was why he was only slightly put out by a close-up view of the Coogan. The boat was twenty metres long, a bizarre combination of raft and catamaran. Flotation came from a pair of big hollowed-out trunks of some fibrous red wood, and a deck of badly planed planks had been laid out above them, supporting a palm-thatched cabin which ran virtually the whole length. The aft section was an engine house, with a small ancient thermal-exchange furnace, and a couple of time-expired electric motors used by the McBoeings in their flap actuators which the captain had salvaged from the spaceport. Forward of that was a raised wheel-house, with a roof made entirely of solar panels, then came the galley and bunk cabin. The rest of the cabin was given over to cargo.

The Coogan’s captain was Len Buchannan, a wire-thin man in his mid-fifties, dressed in a pair of worn, faded shorts and a tight-fitting blue cap. Rai suspected he had little geneering; the hair peeking out from his cap was tightly curled and pale grey, dark brown skin showed stringy muscles stretched taut and slightly swollen joints, several teeth had rotted away.

He stood in front of the wheel-house and welcomed Rai on board.

“I need a few supplies,” Rai said.

“I ain’t interested in barter,” he said straight away, cheeks puffing out for emphasis. “Not unless it’s powered equipment you’re offering. I’ve had my fill of pickled vegetables and fruit preserves and cured hides. And don’t even think about saying fish. They’re coming out my ears. I can’t sell anything like that downriver. Nobody’s interested.”

Rai fished a roll of plastic Lalonde francs out of his pocket. Buchannan was the third trader captain to appear at Aberdale recently. All of them wanted cash for their goods, and none had bought much of Aberdale’s produce in return. “I understand. I’m looking for cloth. Cotton mainly, but I’ll take denim or canvas.”

“Cost you a lot of francs. You got anything harder?”

“I might have,” Rai said, with a grey inevitability. Didn’t anybody use Lalonde francs? “Let’s see what you’ve got first.”

Gail Buchannan was sitting in the wheel-house, wearing a coolie hat and a shapeless khaki dress. An obese fifty-year-old with long, straggly dark hair, her legs were like water-filled sacks of skin; when she walked it was with a painful waddle. Most of her life was spent sitting on the Coogan’s deck watching the world go by. She looked up from the clothes she was sewing to give Rai a friendly nod. “Cloth you wanted, is it, lovie?”

“That’s right.”

“Plenty of cloth, we’ve got. All woven in Durringham. Dyed, too. Won’t find better anywhere.”

“I’m sure.”

“No patterns yet. But that’ll come.”

“Yes.”

“Does your wife know how to sew, then?”

“I . . . Yes, I suppose so.” Rai hadn’t thought about it. Arcology synthetics came perfectly tailored; load your size into the commercial circuit and they arrived within six hours. If they started to wear, throw them into the recycler. Waster kids dressed in patched and frayed garments, but not decent people.

“If she doesn’t, you send her to me.”

“Thank you.”

“Knitting too. None of the women that come here know how to knit. I give lessons. Best lessons east of Durringham. Know why, lovie?”

“No,” Rai said helplessly.

“Because they’re the only ones.” Gail Buchannan slapped her leg and laughed, rolls of flesh quivering.

Rai gave her a sickly smile and fled into the cargo hold, wondering how many times that joke had been cracked over the years.

Len Buchannan had everything a farmstead could ever possibly want stacked up on his long shelves. Rai Molvi shuffled down the tiny aisle, staring round in awe and envy. There were power tools still in their boxes, solar cells (half of Rai’s had been stolen back in Durringham), fridges, microwaves, cryostats full of frozen animal sperm, MF album flek-players, laser rifles, nanonic medical packages, drugs, and bottle after bottle of liquor. The Lalonde-made products were equally impressive: nails, pots, pans, glass (Rai saw the panes and groaned, what he wouldn’t give for a window of glass), drinking glasses, boots, nets, seeds, cakes of dried meat, flour, rice, saws, hammers, and bale after bale of cloth.

“What kind of things would you take downriver?” Rai asked as Len unrolled some of the cotton for him.

Len pulled his cap off, and scratched his largely bald head. “Truth to tell, not much. What you produce up here, food and the like. People need it. But it’s the transport costs, see? I couldn’t take fruit more than a hundred kilometres and make a profit.”

“Small and valuable then?”

“Yes, that’s your best bet.”

“Meat?”

“Could do. There’s some villages not doing as well as you. They want the food, but how are they going to pay for it? If they spend all their money buying food, it’s going to run out fast, then they won’t be able to buy in new stocks of what they really need like seed and animals. I seen that happen before. Bad business.”

“Oh?”

“The Arklow Counties, a tributary over in the northern territory. All the villages failed about six or seven years back. No food, no money left to buy any in. They started marching downriver towards villages that did have food.”

“What happened?”

“Governor sent in the marshals, plus a few boosted mercenaries from offplanet if you believe what people say. Them starving villagers took a right pounding. Some escaped into the jungle, still there by all accounts, lot of bandit reports in the north. Most got themselves killed. The rest got a twenty-year work-time sentence; the Governor parcelled them out to other villages to work, just like Ivets. Families broken up, children never see their parents.” He sucked his cheeks in, scowling. “Yes, bad business.” Rai sorted out the cloth he wanted, and on impulse bought a packet of sweetcorn seed for Skyba, his wife. He offered the Lalonde notes again.

“Cost you double, that way,” Len Buchannan said. “The LDC people at the spaceport, they don’t give you anything like the proper exchange rate.”

Rai made one last attempt. “How about chickens?”

Len pointed to a shelf given over to cryostats, their tiny green LEDs twinkling brightly in the gloomy cabin. “See that? Two of those chambers are crammed full of eggs. There’s chickens, ducks, geese, pheasants, emus, and turkeys stored in there; I’ve even got three swans. I don’t need live chickens crapping on my deck.”

“OK.” Rai gave up; he dug into his inside pocket and offered his Jovian Bank disk, feeling a little bit shabby. People should believe in their own planet’s currency. If—when—Schuster County became an important commercial region, he would make damn sure every transaction was made in Lalonde francs. Patriotism like that would be very popular with the voters.

Len stood beside his wife as Rai walked back down the jetty. “Ten thousand born every second,” he murmured.

Gail chuckled. “Aye, and all of them come to live here.”

From their vantage point in the river shallows, Irley and Scott gave Rai a cheery wave as he carried his cloth ashore. Another who had a Jovian Bank credit disk, that made seventy-eight known residents now. Quinn would be pleased with them.

Rai reached the end of the jetty just as Marie Skibbow arrived carrying a bulky shoulder-bag. She gave him an uninterested glance and hurried on towards the Coogan.

What’s she come to pick up? Rai wondered. Gerald’s place was one of the prime savannah homesteads. Although the man himself was a complete self-righteous pain in the arse.

 

Horst Elwes stood at the base of the church’s wooden corner stanchion, holding the cloth bag full of nails, and still managing to feel completely useless. Leslie didn’t need anyone to hold the nails ready. But Horst could hardly let the Ivet work team assemble the church without being there, without at least the pretence of being involved.

The church was one of the last of Aberdale’s buildings to be put up. He didn’t mind that at all. These people had toiled hard to build their village and clear their fields. They couldn’t spare the time on a structure that would only be used once or twice a week (though he liked to think there would be more services eventually). Nor was it right they should do so. Horst could never forget how the cathedrals of medieval Europe had risen like stone palaces out of the mouldering, stinking wooden slums. How the Church demanded the people of that time give and give and give. How fear was rooted in every soul and carefully nurtured. And because we were so arrogant, as aloof as God Himself, we suffered a terrible price in later centuries. Which again was right. Such a crime deserved a penance that lasted for so long.

So he held his services in the hall, and never complained when only thirty or forty people turned up. The church must be a focal point for unity, a place where people could come together and share their faith, not a baron demanding tribute.

And now the fields had been rotovated, the first batch of crops planted, and the animals brought out of hibernation, Aberdale had a moment of time to spare. Three Ivets had been assigned to him for a fortnight. They had built a long raftlike floor supported half a metre off the ground by old tree stumps, then put up four-metre-high stanchions to hold up the sloping roof.

At the moment it looked like a skeleton of some boxy dinosaur. Leslie Atcliffe was busy hammering the trusses into place, while Daniel held them steady. Ann was busy cutting slates from the sheets of qualtook bark they had stripped off the felled trunks. The church itself would occupy a third of the structure, with a small infirmary at the rear, and Horst’s room sandwiched between the two.

It was all going very well, and would probably go better if Horst wasn’t there asking what he could do to help the whole time.

The church was going to be a fine building, second only to the Ivets’ own A-frame. And how that structure had shown up the hall and the other houses. Horst had joined Rai Molvi in urging the council to allow the Ivets some independence and dignity. Now Quinn was the one who had really worked miracles in Aberdale. Since the long barkslate covered A-frame had gone up the other residents had taken to quietly improving the structure of their own homes, adding corner braces, putting up shutters. And none of us will use an A-frame design, Horst thought. Oh, foolish pride! Everyone was captured by the quaint white-painted cottages we saw on the first days of the voyage upriver, we thought if we could emulate the look we would have the life that went with it. Now the most practical method of construction is a monopoly. Because using it would mean the Ivets knew best. And I can’t even build the church that way, the sensible way, because people would be offended. Not out loud, but they would see and in their hearts they would object. But at least I can use the bark slates rather than slats that will warp and let in the rain like the houses which were built first.

Leslie climbed down the ladder, a rangy twenty-two-year-old wearing shorts sewn together from an old jump suit. A specially made belt had loops to hold all his carpentry tools. To start with Powel Manani had issued the tools on a daily basis, and demanded their return at night; now the Ivets kept them permanently. Several of them had developed into highly skilled carpenters; Leslie was one of them.

“We’ll fetch the last two transverse frames now, Father,” Leslie said. “They’ll be up by lunch, then we can start with the lathing and the slates. You know, I think we will be finished by the end of the fortnight after all. It’s just those pew benches I’m worried about, cutting that many dovetail joints in time is going to be tricky, even with fission blades.”

“Don’t pay it a second thought,” Horst said. “I don’t get enough of a congregation to fill every pew. A roof over our heads is more than enough. The rest can wait. The Lord understands that the farms must come first.” He smiled, keenly aware of how shabby he was in his stained ochre shirt and oversize knee-length shorts. So much at variance from these uniformly trim young men.

“Yes, Father.”

Horst felt a pang of regret. The Ivets were so insular, yet they did more work than most. Aberdale’s success was in no small part due to their efforts. And Powel Manani still grumbled about the liberties they were shown. It didn’t happen in other settlements, he complained. But then other settlements didn’t have Quinn Dexter. It was a thought Horst couldn’t be quite as grateful for as he should be. Quinn was a very cold fish. Horst knew waster kids, their motivations, their shallow wishes. But what went on behind those chilling bright eyes was an utter mystery, one he was afraid to probe.

“I shall be holding a consecration service once the roof’s on,” he said to the two Ivets. “I hope you’ll all come to it.”

“We’ll think about it,” Leslie said with smooth politeness. “Thank you for asking, Father.”

“I notice that not many of you come to my services. Everybody is welcome. Even Mr Manani, although I don’t think he’s particularly impressed with me.” He tried to make it sound jovial, but their expressions never flickered.

“We’re not very religious,” Leslie said.

“I’d be happy to explain the broader ramifications of Christianity to anybody. Ignorance isn’t a crime, only a misfortune. If nothing else we could have a good argument about it, you needn’t worry about shocking me there. Why, I remember some debates from my novice years, we really gave the bishop a roasting.” Now he knew he’d lost them. Their earlier magnanimity had turned to stiff-backed formality, faces hard, sparks of resentment agleam in their eyes. And once more he was aware of how ominous these young men could appear.

“We have the Light Brother—” Daniel began. He broke off at a furious look from Leslie.

“Light Brother?” Horst asked mildly. He was sure he’d heard that phrase before.

“Was there anything else, Father?” Leslie said. “We’d like to collect the transverse frames now.”

Horst knew when to push, and this wasn’t the time. “Yes, of course. What would you like me to do? Help you fetch them?”

Leslie looked around the church impatiently. “We could do with the slates stacking round the floor ready for when we get the lathing up,” he said grudgingly. “Piles of twenty by each stanchion.”

“Jolly good, I’ll start doing that then.”

He walked over to where Ann was standing beside a workbench, slicing up the bark with a fission jigsaw. She was wearing a pair of hand-stitched shorts and a halter top, both made from grey jump suit fabric. There was a huge pile of the slates on the ground around her. Her long face was crunched up in an expression of furious concentration, dark auburn hair hanging in damp tassels.

“We don’t need the slates that urgently,” Horst said lightly. “And I’m certainly not going to complain to Mr Manani if you slacken off a bit.”

Ann’s hand moved with mechanical precision, guiding the slender blade in a rectangular pattern through the big sheet of glossy ginger-coloured qualtook bark. She never bothered to mark out the shape, but each one came out more or less identical.

“Stops me thinking,” she said.

Horst started to pick up some of the slates. “I was sent here to encourage people to think. It’s good for you.”

“Not me. I’ve got Irley tonight. I don’t want to think about it.”

Irley was one of the Ivets; Horst knew him as a thin-faced lad, who was quiet even by their standards.

“What do you mean, you’ve got him?”

“It’s his turn.”

“Turn?”

Ann suddenly looked up, her face a mask of cold rage, most of it directed at Horst. “He’s going to fuck me. It’s his turn tonight. Do you want it in writing, Father?”

“I . . .” Horst knew his face was reddening. “I didn’t know.”

“What the hell do you think we do in that big hut at night? Basket weaving? There are three girls, and fifteen boys. And the boys all need it pretty bad, banging their fists each night isn’t enough, so they take it in turns with us, those that aren’t AC/DC. Quinn draws up a nice little impartial list, and we stick to it. He makes sure it’s dished out fairly, and he makes sure nobody spoils the merchandise. But Irley knows how to make it hurt without making it painful, without it showing. Do you want to know how, Father? You want the details? The tricks he’s got.”

“Oh, my child. This must stop, at once. I’ll speak to Powel and the council.”

Ann surprised him. She burst into shrill contemptuous laughter. “God’s Brother. I can see why they dumped you out here, Father. You’d be bloody useless back on Earth. You’re going to stop the boys from screwing me and Jemima and Kay, are you? Then where are they going to go for it? Huh? Lotsa your good parishioners got daughters. You think they want Ivets prowling round at night? And how about you, Father, do you want Leslie and Douglas giving your sweet little friend Jay the eye? Do you? Because they will if they can’t get it from me. Get real, Father.” She turned back to the sheet of bark. A dismissal that was frightening in its finality. Nothing Horst could offer was of the remotest use. Nothing.

 

It was there, right at the bottom of his pack where it had lain for six and a half months. Untouched, unneeded, because the world was full of worthy challenges, and the sun shone, and the village grew, and the plants blossomed, and the children danced and laughed.

Horst took out the bottle, and poured a long measure. Scotch, though this thick amber liquid had never rested in oak barrels in the Highlands. It had come straight out of a molecular filter programmed with the taste of a long-lost ideal. But it burnt as it went down, and slowly lit up his belly and his skull, which was all he wanted from it.

How stupid. How blind to think the serpent hadn’t come with them to this fresh world. How obtuse that he, a priest, hadn’t thought to look below the shining surface of achievement, to see the sewer beneath.

He poured another measure of Scotch. Breath coming in hot bursts between gulps. God, but it felt good, to abandon mortal failings for a few brief hours. To hide in this warm, silent, forgiving place of sanctuary.

God’s Brother, she had said. And she was right. Satan is here amongst us, piercing our very heart.

Horst filled his glass to the very top, staring at it in abject dread. Satan: Lucifer, the light bringer. The Light Brother.

“Oh no,” he whispered. Tears filled his eyes. “Not that, not that here. Not the sects spreading over this world’s purity. I can’t, dear Lord. I can’t fight that. Look at me. I’m here because I can’t.” He trailed off into sobs.

Now as always, the Lord answered only with silence. Faith alone wasn’t enough for Horst Elwes. But then he’d always known that.

 

The bird was back again, thirty centimetres long, its plumage a tawny brown flecked with gold. It hovered twenty metres above Quinn, half hidden by the jungle’s curving branches, its wings blurring in an intricate pattern as it maintained position.

He watched it out of the corner of his eye. It wasn’t like any other bird he’d seen on Lalonde; their feathers were almost like membrane scales. When he scanned it with his retinal implant on high magnification he could see it had real feathers, Earth genealogy feathers.

He gave the hand signal, and they advanced steadily through the bush, Jackson Gael on one side of him, Lawrence Dillon on the other. Lawrence was the youngest Ivet, seventeen, with a slim figure, skinny limbs, and sandy blond hair. Lawrence was a gift from God’s Brother. It had taken Quinn a month to break him. There had been the favouritism, the extra food, the smiles and making sure he wasn’t bullied by the others. Then there had been the drugs Quinn had bought from Baxter, the gentle lifts which removed Aberdale and all its squalor and endless toil, blurring away the edges until life was easier again. The midnight rape performed in the middle of the A-frame with everybody watching; Lawrence tied to the floor with a pentagon drawn around him in danderil blood, his mind blown out of his skull by the drugs. Now Lawrence belonged to him, his sweet arse, the golden length of his dick, and his mind. Lawrence’s devotion to Quinn had evolved to a form of worship.

Sex showed the others the power Quinn had. It showed them how in touch with God’s Brother he was. It showed them the glory of freeing the serpent beast that was trapped in every man’s heart. It showed them what would happen if they failed him.

He had given them hope and power. All he demanded in return was obedience.

Demanded and received.

The big spongy leaves of the vines which shrouded the trees brushed lightly against Quinn’s damp skin as he advanced on his prey. After months of working under the brilliant sun he was a rich all-over brown, wearing just a pair of shorts cut from his jump suit, and the boots he’d stolen in Durringham. He’d eaten well since the Ivets started fending for themselves, and put on muscle weight from the work he’d done around the homesteads.

Creepers were hung between the trunks like a net the jungle had woven to catch its smaller denizens. They crackled annoyingly as he waded through them, booted feet crunching on the spindly mosslike grass that grew deep in the jungle. Birds clucked and squawked as they arrowed through the latticework of branches. He could see the distant movement of vennals high overhead, spiralling round trunks and branches like three-dimensional shadows.

The light filtering down through the leaf canopy was growing darker. He spotted an increasing number of young giganteas interspaced with the usual trees. They resembled elongated cones, with an outer coating of mauve-brown fibrous hair rather than a true bark. Their boughs emerged in rings from the trunk, spaced regularly up the entire length; they all sloped downwards at a fifty-degree angle, supporting fanlike arrangements of twigs, densely packed as birds’ nests. Leaves grew on the upper surface like a dark green fur.

The first time Quinn had seen a mature gigantea he thought he must have been tripping. It stood two hundred and thirty metres high, with a base forty-five metres in diameter, rearing out of the jungle like a misplaced mountain. Creepers and vines had wrapped themselves around its lower branches, adding a colourful speckle of multi-coloured flowers to its uninspiring leaden-green leaves. But even the vigorous vines couldn’t hope to challenge a gigantea.

Jackson clicked his fingers, and pointed ahead. Quinn risked raising his head above the shoulder-high rall bushes and spindly light-starved saplings.

The sayce they had been tracking was padding through the skimpy undergrowth ten metres away. It was a big specimen, a buck, its black hide scarred and flecked with blue spots, ears chewed down to stubs. It had been in a lot of fights, and won them.

Quinn smiled happily, and signalled Lawrence forwards. Jackson stayed where he was, sighting the laser rifle on the sayce’s head. Back-up, in case their attack went wrong.

The hunt had taken a while to set up. There were thirty of Aberdale’s residents spread out through the jungle today, but they were all nearer to the river. Quinn, Jackson, and Lawrence had made off south-west into the deeper jungle as soon as they could, away from the river and its humidity, into the country where the sayce lurked. Powel Manani had ridden off at dawn to help one of the savannah homesteads track down the sheep that had wandered off after their stockade had failed. Most importantly, he’d taken Vorix with him to find the scent. Irley had arranged for the stockade fence to fail last night.

Quinn put down the pump-action shotgun he’d bought from Baxter, and took the bolas from his belt. He started spinning it above his head, letting out a fearsome yell. To his right Lawrence was running towards the sayce, his bolas whirling frantically. Nobody knew the Ivets used bolas. The weapon was simple enough to build, all they needed was the dried vine to link the three stones with. They could carry the vine lengths about quite openly, using them as belts.

The sayce turned, its jaws hinging wide to let out its peculiar keening cry. It charged straight at Lawrence. The boy let the bolas fly, yelling with adrenalin intoxication, and it caught the sayce on its forelegs, stones twisting in ever-shorter arcs with incredible speed. Quinn’s whirled around the animal’s right flank a second later, tangling one of the hind legs. The sayce fell, skidding through the grass and loam, its body bucking in epileptic frenzy.

Quinn ran forward, tugging the lasso off his shoulder. The sayce was thrashing about, howling, trying to get its razor-sharp teeth into the infuriating vine strands binding its legs. He twisted the lasso, working up a good speed, studying the sayce’s movements, then threw.

The sayce’s jaws shut between cries, and the lasso’s loop slipped over the muzzle. He jerked back with all his strength. The jaws strained to open, but the loop held; it was silicon fibre, stolen from one of the homesteads. All three Ivets could hear the furious and increasingly frantic cries, muted to a harsh sneezing sound.

Lawrence landed heavily on the writhing sayce, struggling to shove its kicking hind legs into his own loop of rope. Quinn joined him, hugging the sayce’s thick gnarled hide as he fought to coil another length of rope round the forelegs.

It took another three minutes to subdue and bind the sayce completely. Quinn and Lawrence wrestled with it on the ground, getting covered in scratches and mud. But eventually they stood, bruised and shaking from the effort, looking down at their trussed victim lying helplessly on its side. Its green-tinted eye glared back up at them.

“Stage two,” said Quinn.

 

It was Jay who found Horst late in the afternoon. He was sitting slumped against a qualtook tree in the light drizzle, virtually comatose. She giggled at how silly he was being and shook him by the shoulder. Horst mumbled incoherently then told her to piss off.

Jay stared at him for a mortified second, her lower lip trembling, then rushed to get her mother.

“Ho boy, look at you,” Ruth said when she arrived.

Horst burped.

“Come on, get up. I’ll help you get home.”

The weight of him nearly cracked her spine as he leant against her. With a solemn-faced Jay following a couple of paces behind they staggered across the clearing to the little cabin Horst used.

Ruth let him fall onto his cot, and watched impassively as he tried to vomit onto the duckboard floor. All that came out of his mouth was a few beads of sour yellow stomach juices.

Jay stood in a corner and clutched at Drusilla, her white rabbit. The doe squirmed around in agitation. “Is he going to be all right?”

“Yes,” Ruth said.

“I thought it was a heart attack.”

“No. He’s been drinking.”

“But he’s a priest,” the girl insisted.

Ruth stroked her daughter’s hair. “I know, darling. But that doesn’t mean they’re saints.”

Jay nodded wisely. “I see. I won’t tell anyone.”

Ruth turned and stared at Horst. “Why did you do it, Horst? Why now? You’d been doing so well.”

Bloodshot eyes blinked at her. “Evil,” he groaned. “They’re evil.”

“Who are?”

“Ivets. All of them. Devil’s children. Burn down the church. Can’t consecrate it now. They built it. Evil built it. Herit— here— heretical. Burn it to cinders.”

“Horst, you’re not setting fire to anything.”

“Evil!” he slurred.

“See if there’s enough charge in his electron matrix cells to power the microwave,” Ruth told Jay. “We’ll boil some water.” She started to rummage through Horst’s gear looking for his silver-foil sachets of coffee.

 

Right up until the moment the electric motors began to thrum, Marie Skibbow hadn’t believed it was actually happening. But here it was, bubbles rising from the Coogan’s propeller, the gap between the boat and the jetty growing.

“I’ve done it,” she said under her breath.

The ramshackle boat began to chug its way out into the middle of the Quallheim, the prow pointing downriver, gradually picking up speed. She stopped dropping logs into the thermal-exchange furnace’s square hopper-funnel and started to laugh. “Screw you,” she told the village as it began to slide astern. “Screw all of you. And good fucking riddance. You won’t ever see me again.” She shook her fist at them. Nobody was looking, not even the Ivet lads in the water. “Never ever.”

Aberdale disappeared from sight as they steered round a curve. Her laughter became suspiciously similar to weeping. She heard someone making their way aft from the wheel-house, and started lobbing logs into the hopper again.

It was Gail Buchannan, who barely fitted on the narrow strip of decking between the cabin and the half-metre-high gunwale. She wheezed heavily for a moment, leaning against the cabin wall, her face red and sweating below her coolie hat. “Happier now, lovie?”

“Much!” Marie beamed a sunlight smile.

“It’s not the kind of place a girlie like you should be living in. You’ll be much better off downriver.”

“You don’t have to tell me. God, it was awful. I hated it. I hate animals, I hate vegetables, I hate fruit trees, I hate the jungle. I hate wood!”

“You’re not going to be trouble for us are you, lovie?”

“Oh no, I promise. I never signed a settlement contract with the LDC, I was still legally a minor when we left Earth. But I’m over eighteen now, so I can leave home any time I want to.”

A nonplussed frown creased the folds of spare flesh on Gail’s gibbous face for a second. “Aye, well you can stop loading the hopper now, there’s enough logs in there to last the rest of today. We’re only sailing for a couple of hours. Lennie’ll moor somewhere below Schuster for the night.”

“Right.” Marie stood up straight, hands pressed against her side. Her heart was racing, pounding away against her ribs. I did it!

“You can start preparing supper in a while,” Gail said.

“Yes, of course.”

“I expect you’d like a shower first, lovie. Get cleaned up a bit.”

“A shower?” Marie thought she’d misheard.

She hadn’t. It was in the cabin between the galley and the bunks, an alcove with a curtain across the front, broad enough to fit Gail. When she looked down, Marie could see the river through the gaps between the deck boards. The pump and the heater ran off electricity from the thermal-exchange furnace, producing a weak warm spray from the copper nozzle. To Marie it was more luxurious than a sybarite’s jacuzzi. She hadn’t had a shower since her last day on Earth. Dirt was something you lived with in Aberdale and the savannah homesteads. It got into the pores, under nails, scaled your hair. And it never came out, not completely. Not in cold stream water, not without decent soap and gels.

The first sluice of water from the nozzle disgusted her as it drained away. It was filthy. But Gail had given her a bar of unperfumed green soap, and a bottle of liquid soap for her hair. Marie started scrubbing with a vengeance, singing at the top of her voice.

 

Gwyn Lawes never even knew the Ivets were there until the club smashed into the small of his back. He blacked out for a while from the pain. Certainly he didn’t remember falling. One minute he was lining up his electromagnetic rifle on a danderil, anticipating the praise he would earn from the rest of the hunting party. And the next thing he knew was that there was loam in his mouth, he could barely breathe, and his spine was sheer agony. All he could do was retch weakly.

Hands grabbed his shoulders, and he was turned over. Another blast of fire shot up his spine. The world shuddered nauseously.

Quinn, Lawrence, and Jackson were standing above him, grinning broadly. They were smothered in mud, hair hanging in soiled dreadlocks, spittle saturating their tufty beards, scratches bleeding, dribbles of red blood curdling with the mud. They were savages reincarnated out of Earth’s dawn times. He whimpered in fright.

Jackson bent down, teeth bared with venomous joy. A ball of cloth was thrust into Gwyn’s mouth, tied into place with a gag. Breathing became even harder, his nose flaring, sucking down precious oxygen. Then he was turned again, face pressed into the wet ground. All he could see was muddy grass. He could feel thin, hard cord binding his wrists and ankles. Hands began to search him, sliding into every pocket, patting the fabric. There was a hesitant fumble when fingers found the inside leg pouch on his dungarees trousers, tracing the shape of his precious Jovian Bank credit disk.

“Got it, Quinn,” Lawrence’s voice called triumphantly.

Fingers gripped Gwyn’s right thumb, bending it back.

“Pattern copied,” Quinn said. “Let’s see what he’s got.” There was a short pause, then a whistle. “Four thousand three hundred fuseodollars. Hey, Gwyn, where’s your faith in your new planet?”

Cruel laughter followed.

“OK, it’s transferred. Lawrence, put it back where you found it. They can’t activate it once he’s dead, they’ll never know it’s been emptied.”

Dead. The word cut through Gwyn’s sluggish thoughts. He groaned, trying to lift himself. A boot slammed into his ribs. He screamed, or tried to. The gag was virtually suffocating him.

“He’s got some handy gear here, Quinn,” Lawrence said. “Fission knife, firelighter, and that’s a personal guido block. Spare power mags for the rifle, too.”

“Leave it,” Quinn ordered. “If anything’s missing when they find him, they might get suspicious. We can’t afford that, not yet. It will all belong to us in the end.”

They lifted Gwyn, carrying him on their shoulders like some kind of trophy. He kept drifting in and out of consciousness as he jounced about, twigs and vines slapping against him.

The light was darker when they finally slung him down. Gwyn looked about, and saw the smooth ebony trunk of an old deirar tree twenty metres away, its single giant umbrella-leaf casting a wide circular shadow. A sayce had been tethered to it, straining at the unbreakable silicon-fibre rope, forelegs scrabbling at the loam as it tried to reach its captors, its snapping jaws dripping long chains of saliva. Gwyn suddenly knew what was going to happen next. His bladder gave out.

“Get it riled good and proper,” Quinn ordered.

Jackson and Lawrence started throwing stones at the sayce. It keened in torment, its body jacking about as though an electric current was being run through it.

Gwyn saw a pair of boots appear twenty centimetres from his nose. Quinn squatted down. “Know what’s going to happen afterwards, Gwyn? We’re going to be assigned to help out your widow. Everyone else is busy with their own little plots of heaven. So it’ll be the Ivets who get dumped on. Once again. I’m going to be one of them, Gwyn. I’m going to be a regular visitor to poor, grieving Rachel. She’ll like me, I’ll make sure of that. Just like you and all the others, you want to believe that everything’s so perfect on this planet. You convinced yourselves we’re just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser’s way out. Your way. You and all the others grubbing round in the dirt and the rain. In a couple of months I’ll be in the bed you made, under the roof you sweated over, and I’ll have my dick rammed up inside Rachel making her squeal like a pig in heat. I hope you hate that idea, Gwyn. I hope it makes you sick inside. Because that’s not the worst. Oh, no. Once I’m through with her, I’ll have Jason. Your shiny-eyed beautiful son. I’ll be his new father. I’ll be his lover. I’ll be his owner. He’ll be joining us, Gwyn, me and the Ivets. I’ll bind him to the Night, I’ll show him where his serpent beast is hidden within. He’s not going to be a dickhead loser like his old man. You’re only the first, Gwyn. One by one I will come to you all, and very few will be given the chance to follow me into darkness. Inside of six months this whole village, the only hope for a future you ever had, will belong to God’s Brother.

“Do you despise me, Gwyn? I want you to. I want you to hate me as much as I hate you and all you stand for. Then you will understand that I’m speaking the truth. You will go to your pitiful Lord Jesus weeping in terror. And you will find no comfort there, because the Light Bringer will be the ultimate victor. You will lose in death, as you have lost in life. You made the wrong choice in life, Gwyn. My path is the one you should have walked. And now it’s too late.”

Gwyn strained and wheezed against the gag until he thought his lungs would burst from the effort. It made no difference, the shriek of hatred and all the threats, the curses condemning Quinn to an eternity of damnation, were left jailed inside his skull.

Quinn’s hands curled round the lapels of Gwyn’s shirt, hauling him upright. Jackson took his feet, and the two of them swung him back and forth, building momentum. They let go, and Gwyn’s tumbling body flew in a shallow trajectory right over the top of the berserk sayce. He hit the loam with a dull thud, face contorted with insane dread. The sayce leapt.

Quinn put his arms round the shoulders of Lawrence and Jackson as the three of them watched the sayce mauling the man, its teeth tearing out great strips of flesh. The power to bring death was equal to that of bringing about life. He felt enraptured as the hot scarlet blood flowed into the soil.

“After life, death,” he chanted. “After darkness, light.”

He looked up, and stared round until he found the brown bird. It was perched up in a cherry oak’s branches, head cocked on one side, observing the carnage.

“You’ve seen what we are,” Quinn called out. “You’ve seen us naked. You’ve seen we’re not afraid. We should talk. I think we have a lot to offer each other. What have you got to lose?”

The bird blinked as if in surprise, and launched itself into the air.

 

Laton let the kestrel’s wonderfully clear sensorium fade from his mind. The sensation of air flowing over wings remained for several minutes. Flying the predator via affinity was always an experience he enjoyed, the freedom granted to creatures of the air was unsurpassed.

The ordinary world rushed back in on him.

He was in his study, sitting in the lotus position on a black velvet cushion. It was an unusual room, an ovoid, five metres high, its curving walls a smooth polished wood. A cluster of electrophorescent cells were fitted flush with the apex, supplying a glimmer of jade light. The single cushion on the cup of the floor was the only thing to break the symmetry; even the door was hard to see, its lines blending with the grain.

The study possessed a unifying simplicity, freeing his mind of distractions. In here, his body motionless, his affinity expanding his consciousness through bitek processors and incorporated brains, his mentality was raised by an order of magnitude. It was a hint of what could be. A pale shadow of the goal he chased before his exile.

Laton remained sitting, thinking about Quinn Dexter and the atrocity he had perpetrated. There had been a lurid flash of gratification in Dexter’s eyes as that helpless colonist had been thrown to the sayce. Yet he must be more than a brainless sadistic brute. The fact that he had recognized the kestrel for what it was, and worked out what it represented, was proof of that.

Who is God’s Brother? Laton asked the house’s subsentient bitek processor network.

Satan. The Christian devil.

Is this a term in wide use?

The term is common among Earth’s waster population. Most arcologies have sects built up around the worship of this deity. Their priest/acolyte hierarchy is a simple variant on that of the more standard officer/soldier criminal organization. Those at the top control those at the bottom through a quasi-religious doctrine, and status is enforced by initiation rituals. Their theology states that after Armageddon has been fought, and the universe abandoned to lost souls, Satan will return bringing light. The sects are unusual only in the degree of violence involved to maintain discipline among the ranks. Because of the level of devotion involved, the authorities have been generally unsuccessful in eradicating the sects.

That explains Quinn, then, Laton thought to himself. But why did he want the money in the colonist’s Jovian Bank credit disk? If he was successful in taking over Aberdale no trading boat would ever stop there; he couldn’t buy anything. In fact, the Governor would be more than likely to send in a posse of sheriffs and deputies to stamp out any Ivet rebellion as soon as word leaked out. Quinn must know that, he wasn’t stupid.

The last thing Laton wanted was for the outside world to show an interest in Schuster County. One marshal digging around was an acceptable risk, he’d known that when he took the colonists from their homesteads. But a whole team of them scouting through the jungle in search of renegade Devil worshippers was totally out of the question.

He had to know more of Quinn Dexter’s plans. They would have to meet, just like Quinn had suggested. Somehow the idea of agreeing to his proposition was vaguely disturbing.

 

The Coogan was moored against a small sandy spit an hour’s sailing downriver from Schuster town. Two silicon-fibre ropes had been fastened to trees on the shore, holding the tramp trader secure against the current.

Marie Skibbow sat on the prow, letting the warm evening air dry the last traces of water from her hair. Even the humidity had fallen off. Rennison, Lalonde’s largest moon, was rising slowly above the dusky-grey treetops, adding a glimmering oyster light to the gloaming. She sat back against the flimsy cabin wall and watched it contentedly.

Water lapped gently against the Coogan’s twin hulls. Fish made occasional ripples on the glass-smooth surface.

They’ve probably realized I’ve gone by now. Mother will cry, and Father will explode; Frank won’t care, and Paula will be sad. They’ll all worry about how it will affect them and the animals not having an extra hand at their beck and call all day long. Not one of them will think about what I want, what’s good for me.

She heard Gail Buchannan calling, and made her way back to the wheel-house.

“We thought you’d fallen overboard, lovie,” Gail said. A splash of light from the galley shone out, showing the sweat beading on her blubbery arms. At supper she had eaten more than half of all the food Marie prepared for the three of them.

“No. I was watching the moon come up.”

Gail gave her a lopsided wink. “Very romantic. Get you in the mood.”

Marie felt the hairs on the nape of her neck rising. She was cold despite the jungle’s breath.

“I’ve got your night clothes ready,” Gail said.

“Night clothes?”

“Very pretty. I did the lacework myself. Len likes his brides to have frills. You won’t find better this side of Durringham,” she said generously. “That T-shirt’s nice and tight. But it hardly flatters your figure, now does it?”

“I paid you,” Marie said in a frail voice. “All the way to Durringham.”

“That won’t cover our costs, lovie. We told you, it’s expensive travelling this river. You have to work your passage.”

“No.”

There was nothing of the bumptious nature left in the huge woman. “We can put you off. Right here.”

Marie shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Course you can. Pretty girl like you.” Gail wrapped a weighty hand around Marie’s forearm. “Come on, lovie,” she coaxed. “Old Lennie, he knows how to treat his brides right.”

Marie put one foot forward.

“That’s it, lovie. Down you come. It’s all laid out here, look.”

There was a white cotton negligee on the galley table. Gail led her over to it. “You just slip this on. And don’t let’s hear any more silly talk about can’t.” She held it up against Marie. “Oh, you’re going to look a picture in this, aren’t you?”

She glanced down numbly at it.

“Aren’t you?” Gail Buchannan repeated.

“Yes.”

“Good girl. Now put it on.”

“Where?”

“Here, lovie. Right here.”

Marie turned her back to the gross woman, and began to pull her T-shirt off over her head.

Gail chortled thickly. “Oh, you’re a one, lovie, you really are. This is going to be a chuckle.”

The negligée’s hem barely came below Marie’s buttocks, but if she tried to pull it down any further her breasts would fall out of the top. She had felt cleaner when she was covered in dirt from the jungle.

Still chortling, and giving her little nudges in her back, Gail followed her into the cabin where Len was waiting dressed in an amber towelling robe. A single electric lamp hanging on the ceiling cast a halo of yellow light. Len’s mouth split in a jagged smile as he took in the sight of her.

Gail sank down onto a sturdy stool by the door, puffing in relief. “There now, don’t you worry about me, lovie, I only ever watch.”

Marie thought that perhaps with the sound of the lapping water and the close wooden walls she could pretend it was Karl and the Swithland again.

She couldn’t.

 

The Ly-cilph had been travelling for over five billion years when it arrived at the galaxy which was home to the Confederation, although at that time it was the dinosaurs which were Earth’s premier life-form. Half of its existence had been spent traversing intergalactic space. It knew how to slip through the wormhole interstices; a creature of energy, the physical structure of the cosmos was no mystery to it. But its nature was to observe and record, so it sped along at a velocity just short of lightspeed, extending its perceptive field around the outcast hydrogen atoms on their aeons-long fall towards the bright, distant star whorls. Each one was unique, an existence to be treasured, extending the knowledge base, its history placed in the transdimensional storage lattice which provided the Ly-cilph with its identity focus. The Ly-cilph was the section of space through which it passed with less disturbance than a neutrino. Like a quantum black hole, it had almost no physical size, yet within was an entire universe. A carefully patterned universe of pure data.

After it arrived at the rim stars it spent millions of years drifting among them, categorizing the life-forms which rose and fell on their planets, indexing the physical parameters of the multitudinous solar systems. It witnessed interstellar empires that bloomed and failed, and planet-bound civilizations that were lost to the final night as their stars cooled to frozen iron. Saint-like cultures and the most bestial savagery; all clicking neatly into place within its infinite interior.

It progressed inwards on a loose line towards the scintillating glow of the galactic core. And in doing so, arrived at the volume of space populated by the Confederation. Lalonde, freshly discovered, and on the edge of the territory, was the first human world it encountered.

The Ly-cilph arrived at the star’s Oort cloud in 2610. After it passed through the band of circling, sleeping comets, occasional laser and microwave emissions impinged on its perception field boundary. They were weak, random fragments of overspill from the communication beams of starships entering orbit above Lalonde.

A preliminary survey showed the Ly-cilph two centres of sentient life in the solar system: Lalonde itself with the human and Tyrathca settlers, and Aethra, the young Edenist habitat in its solitary orbit above Murora.

As always in cases of life discovery, it first performed analytical sweeps of the barren planets. The four inner worlds: sunblasted Calcott and the colossal Gatley with its immense lethal atmosphere, then skipping past Lalonde to review airless Plewis and the icy Mars-like Coum. The five gas giants followed, Murora, Bullus, Achillea, Tol, and distant Puschk with its strange cryochemistry. All of them had their own moon systems and individual milieux requiring examination. The Ly-cilph took fifteen months to classify their composition and environment, then swooped in towards Lalonde.

 

The search through the jungle took eight hours. Three-quarters of Aberdale’s adult population turned out to help. They found Gwyn Lawes fifteen minutes after Rennison had set below the horizon. Most of him.

Because it was a sayce which had killed him; because the ropes had been taken off his wrists and ankles, and the gag removed from his mouth; because his electromagnetic rifle and all his other possessions were accounted for, everyone accepted it was a natural, if horrible, death.

It was the Ivets who were assigned to dig the grave.