Parallax View (5 page)

Immediately, other Gargoyles appeared from the jungle, moving around the four cowering women in choreographed sequence all the more discomforting for being not in the least threatening.

Then Corrie felt hard, cold fingers pincer her upper arm, and she was forcibly ejected, along with the others, from the clearing. The Gargoyles escorted the women along the bank of the river and left them on the shelving slope before the caves.

For the first time that day, Corrie felt a pang of hunger. As she watched the aliens file into the humans’ cave, a part of her experienced the irrational sensation of envy.

“So what now?” Rachel said. She, too, was staring at the cave.

“We wait till the Gargoyles leave, then go see what we can scrounge.”

“From Rube?” Tanya laughed. “The bastard wouldn’t let you eat his shit.”

“I wasn’t thinking about begging from Rube,” Corrie said. “Maybe Imran or Jake...”

Tanya said nothing, but tacit in her gaze was the doubt that the men would give them the slightest succour.

Ten minutes later the Gargoyles filed from the cave. If they saw the four women, skulking by the river, they paid them no heed. The aliens repaired to their own caves, dark apertures in the limestone face of the bluff, washed pink now in the light of the setting sun.

Corrie led the way up the incline to the cave. She stepped inside, gagging on the stench. It was a good thirty seconds before her eyes adjusted to the half-light. She made out the men, flat on their backs in their individual cells.

She found Imran and approached.

Tanya was beside her. “Good God,” she whispered.

Imran and the others had been stripped naked. It seemed that, in just a day since Corrie had been ejected, the men had gained weight. Their bellies seemed bloated, as well as their limbs. Their bodies glistened with what might have been oil or grease – perhaps some exudation from their diet of fruit? Tanya gagged at the sight and moved to the mouth of the cave.

Corrie knelt beside Imran, found his hand and squeezed. She saw that his eyes were open, watching her.

“Imran, we’ve been thrown out. Me and Rachel, Tanya and Sue. We need food, Imran.”

She glanced around the cell for any sign of discarded or overlooked fruit, found none. “Imran...”

“Corrie...” She had to strain to make out the sound of her name. “Corrie, it’s okay. We’ll survive. They’re taking care of
us–”

“Didn’t you hear a damned thing I said?” Corrie was close to tears. “They’ve thrown us out. We have nothing to eat!”

“Corrie, lie down. Take it easy. The aliens will provide...”

“Jesus Christ!” Corrie spat. She moved to where Sue and Rachel were trying to make contact with Jake.

Sue shook her head. “It’s no good. They’re all the same. They’re too far gone.”

They scoured the cave for fruit, managed to gather together a few scraps of rind, a discarded kernel. They hurried from the stench of the cave and sat beside the river.

Despite herself, Corrie started to absent-mindedly chew on the soiled rind. She told herself that she could feel it working on her senses, dulling not only the pain of her hunger, but her fear at what lay ahead. She passed what remained to Rachel, whose expression mixed disgust with the need to eat. She bit tentatively at the hard skin.

“What now?” Tanya said at last.

Corrie let the silence develop. She looked at the decal on the back of her hand. She called up the flight plan of the
Darwinian
, as if it would be any different to the last time she’d checked. They had 93 days to survive before the ship returned.

“We could always leave here,” she said. “Trek north, just as we’d planned before. We could look for another clearing marked with standing stones. You never know... Chances are that the Gargoyles excavated more than one foodstore. If we follow the migratory trail, checking for clearings...”

She paused there, looked from Rachel to Tanya and Sue. “Put it this way,” she went on. “What do we gain if we stay here? The Gargoyles certainly won’t feed us. There isn’t much food in the nearby jungle, and this damned heat...”

Rachel shrugged, uncomfortable. “But... I mean, what about the men?”

“The men?” Tanya said, and laughed. She spoke for Corrie when she said: “Fuck the men, Rachel.”

They set out in the peachy light of dawn, heading almost due north.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” said Corrie, as they walked. “Look out for anything that might be edible, any source of water. We need to take it wherever we find it.” None of the artificial distinctions between marching time and foraging time that the men had adopted, she thought to herself. “And if there’s any sign of Gargoyles I suggest we get out of sight as fast as possible,” she added. “We don’t understand them, so we can’t go taking unnecessary risks.”

The others nodded and Corrie wondered briefly when it was that the consensus had tacitly accepted her leadership. Rachel, Tanya and Sue were each more experienced than Corrie, yet all now turned to her for guidance.

For the first time, she felt her presence on Deneb 5 justified, that she was, as their constitution said, a full and equal member of the expedition and not just Rube’s field assistant.

They marched through the heat of the Denebian day.

The going was uneven and slow. After a few kilometres, the trail had petered out into nothing and they were traversing rough jungle terrain. The undergrowth was rarely impenetrable, but Corrie found that she had to use a stick to bat the great cobweb-lianas out of her way, and still she found the stuff clinging to her like a musty body-stocking.

Only three months ago she had been in college, celebrating the end of her training. And now...

“Let’s make camp,” said Tanya, breaking into Corrie’s reverie. As the evening static storm settled around them, they found shelter at the foot of a wide-boled tree with a yielding, fleshy trunk. Corrie found it hard to recall how blasé they had been about these storms until the one that had sparked the forest fire and destroyed their Vulcan lander.

Now, the dusk storm was a time for shared memories of those they had lost. Corrie reached out a hand to comfort Rachel, but the Somalian turned away, her own grief back to the fore now that her mind was clear of the sedation and dopefruits.

Hundred kay map
, she thought. The comms decal on the back of her wrist showed a low-res map of the region, the image sparking static with the evening storm. There were few features that were of any use to them: the Brown Amazon cutting off one corner of the map, another winding creek to the north. They were still at least a couple of hundred kilometres from their target: the narrow temperate zone, edging steadily south with the advancing cold season. And if Rube’s ecofile had been right, there would be more water there, and more chance of edible lifeforms.

At their present rate, it would take them at least twenty days to get there. But Corrie knew it wasn’t as clear-cut as that: every kilometre further north was a step in the right direction, increasing their chances of survival.

When the storm had passed, they set out again in silence, preferring to keep moving, trying to keep their minds off the growing hunger and thirst.

It was shortly after dawn, two days into their post-captivity journey, that they came upon the clearing.

“Hey,” Tanya said, her voice little more than a parched croak. “Looky here, will you?”

Corrie had been off to one side of the track, scouring a thorn bush for what passed for fruit. Now, she stood at Tanya’s broad shoulder and looked out from the trees, dazzled by the sudden ruddy sunlight.

For a distance of maybe a hundred metres, the forest parted. In places, trees had been unable to grow where the bedrock rose to the surface, but in others Corrie suspected the bulbous saplings had been cleared.

And there, as her vision returned, Corrie began to determine a form to the outcrops of rock that dotted the clearing. Not outcrops, but free-standing, carved blocks of granite: standing stones!

Heart thumping, Corrie tried to stop herself from running into the clearing. They had to be cautious. What if there were Gargoyles in the vicinity, guarding their migratory food supplies? – even more likely if they had learnt that another such foodstore had been plundered a few tens of kilometres south.

But suddenly Rachel was out there, staggering across the open ground, whimpering like a beaten dog in her desperation for sustenance. Sue and Tanya were not far behind.

Corrie lingered for a few seconds more, squinting in the harsh light for any sign of the sudden, flitting movements of the Gargoyles. There were none.

She stepped out into the open and jogged to catch up with her three companions.

Now that her eyes were accustomed to the light, she saw that this storage place was much larger than the one they had found before. It should easily sustain them for the remaining 90 days until the return of the
Darwinian
.

But... there was something wrong.

Up ahead, Tanya and Sue were on their knees by one of the pits at the foot of a towering granite menhir.

As she approached, Corrie heard a plaintive sobbing, but it did not come from either of the women she could see. She stopped by the pit and looked down. Rachel was in there, two metres down, her body wracked with grief.

Corrie opened her mouth to speak, but there were no words to counter her friend’s distress. The stone pit had been emptied.

She turned away. Ten metres on, she came to a second standing stone and, at its foot, a second denuded pit.

She spent the next thirty minutes going from stone to stone, but every pit had been emptied of its contents.

Later, the sun towering in the morning sky, they sat by the first pit.

“You’re the ecologist,” Tanya said to Corrie. “What do you reckon?”

Corrie shook her head. “If these pits were foodstores set aside for the migratory period, as we thought,” she said, “then why are they empty? We’ve come further north. The cold season should be more advanced–”

“Not that you’d notice,” Sue interrupted, indicating the glowering alien sun.

“But if the season’s more advanced here,” Corrie continued, “then they should be
better
prepared for the migration, not totally unprepared.”

“Perhaps they use it earlier,” said Rachel, tentatively. “Perhaps they need longer to prepare.”

“But the cold season won’t hit here for a while yet,” said Corrie. “Surely this is too early.”

“Who knows?” said Tanya. “Like we said before, though: they’re aliens – how can we possibly hope to understand them on the basis of so little information and analysis?”

“Survival,” said Rachel, softly. “That’s what it’s all about now. Surviving ’til the
Darwinian
comes back for us.”

They found the trail that led them to a second Gargoyle settlement heading away from the north-west corner of the clearing.

“What do you reckon?” said Tanya.

Corrie looked at the trail, and then at the encroaching jungle to either side: its gloomy interior tangled with scrubby undergrowth and heavy with dusty, cobwebbed lianas.

Corrie shrugged. “Keep your eyes peeled,” she said, gesturing towards the trail. “We’ll get more distance under our belt in the open.”

Ten kay map
, she thought, and her decal showed her a map of the area. A small river sliced through the centre of the map. If the trail held its north by north-west course, they would have to ford the waterway in about five kilometres. She hoped it would be a shallow, slow-moving river, like the one by the first settlement.

That first settlement had been a similar distance from the foodstore they had plundered. A pattern, perhaps...

Moving at the pace of their slowest member – Rachel, limping as the result of jumping into that first empty foodpit – the party approached the river two and a half hours later.

Corrie had time for a little personal hygiene as she walked, picking at the plaques on her exposed shoulders and back, using clawed fingers to rake sticky liana-debris from her hair. She was looking forward to getting into the river to clean the last caked blood from her body and clothing.

A steady, trudging rhythm descended on the four women as they headed north, intent on survival. There was a deep ache in the pit of Corrie’s stomach, something that had gone way beyond hunger and become almost a part of her psyche.

A movement cut through her numbed state of consciousness and instantly Corrie signalled to the others and side-stepped into the undergrowth. It had been a movement that somehow combined suddenness with an agile, alien fluidity.

They hid for several minutes until a dark, improbably thin, tall figure darted across Corrie’s field of view, followed by another seconds later.

A few minutes after that, she stepped from the undergrowth and peered along the trail. Two Gargoyles stood stock still about a hundred and fifty metres away. The women lingered in the shadows until, finally, with perfect co-ordination, the Gargoyles twisted through 180 degrees, from the head down, and darted away along the trail.

After a further half-kay, the trail opened out as the ground fell away towards the river, the exposed golden sandstone cut through by a sequence of meandering rills and gullies.

At first, Corrie didn’t see the settlement, but then she realised that some of the gullies had been roofed over with felled trees to form artificial caverns that faced out across the river.

“It’s a settlement,” she hissed to the others, leading them aside into the undergrowth. “Just like the first one.”

“What do we do?” asked Tanya. “How do we get round it?”

Corrie looked at her three companions. Each had deteriorated rapidly over the course of their latest trek. Rachel and Sue were struggling simply to keep moving, and even Tanya – broad-shouldered, buxom Tanya Chernekova – seemed like a ghosted image of the woman Rube had mentally undressed at every opportunity.

“We don’t,” Corrie said, slowly, trying to figure out the idea that was taking form in her mind. “Think of the first settlement: they had a supply of the dopefruit, didn’t they? They didn’t have it just for us.”

“But they guarded it,” Tanya said.