Tabitha (59 page)

‘I’m glad I’m
not human then,’ she replied, settling down into the saddle. Tabitha took a
swig of whiskey while the harness fitted around her. With a thought she sent
Seven leaping up over the garden with a jet blast. The crowd screamed as the
creature bounded off the mansion roof, and they watched it tear off into the
night.

Survival of the
fittest.
The
woman’s words echoed in Tabitha’s head as she soared into the starry sky. She
looked down from Seven’s back at the dark world laid out far below, and took
another tipsy swig of the whisky bottle and threw it into the night. Those
people back there weren’t the fittest; not any more. They were just hiding away
from extinction, gorging themselves on the last scraps of success while the new
fittest took over the world. And trying to quote Darwin to justify themselves
wasn’t going to make a blind bit of difference.
Selfish and contentious
people will not cohere, and without coherence, nothing can be effected.
They
were fucked.

Tabitha sank down into
the cockpit and watched the world roll away beneath them; a gleaming
mould-white carpet in Seven’s spectral night vision. Spirit-white beaches and
lead-grey rainforest rolled on forever as they reached Panama. At least,
Tabitha thought it was Panama. She didn’t know. It was the narrowest stretch of
land on the hologram map anyway. She saw farms and cities in ruins, looking all
the more haunting in her ship’s nocturnal sight. She took Seven higher so that
the dead towns and villages were just vague patchworks far below. She couldn’t
stand to see any more death and destruction.

The
peaceful cockpit kept the temperature steady as Tabitha dozed, and the alien
flight suit let her skin breathe freely. She still couldn’t feel Seven’s mind
though, despite her attempts to reach out to him. Fishbowl was bobbing around
placidly in the cockpit as they flew, until Tabitha felt a gentle tapping on
her arm while she was trying to connect her thoughts to Seven’s.

‘What’s
up?’ she asked Fishbowl brightly, coming out of the ship’s mind and back into
the cockpit. She was just glad to have some interaction at last. Fishbowl
simply floated there next to her, and held out a tentacle.

‘Water?’
Tabitha guessed. She plucked the strange bottle from her belt and looked around
the cockpit for a container to pour it in, but came up short. She glugged a bit
into her cupped palm, and Fishbowl was straight in with a slurping tentacle.
Tabitha gave it a few more glugs and drank a bit herself to take the edge off
her whiskey headache. She was going to have to drink much more water than this
to stay hydrated, she told herself. She refilled the bottle from the water
dispenser behind the seat; it had a cold smooth taste. It was a novelty just to
have water on tap again, there whenever she wanted it, easy as that. Where did
Seven get it from though? Was it filtered seawater? She laid a palm on the
dispenser and got a feeling from it; there was gallons of it held in a sac
beyond the ribbed back wall. At least she wasn’t going to go thirsty, then.
Tabitha yawned, stood up, stretched her legs. She’d have to decide where to go
next, she supposed. Right now they were just flying without any particular
place in mind. They should go somewhere uninhabited; that was all she could
think of. Maybe another castle somewhere. It wasn’t like they needed food or
supplies; they could live anywhere.

‘Where
should we go?’ she asked Fishbowl, pulling up the hologram globe on the
console. Its blue light lit her face with a calm glow.

‘Amazon?
You’d like the Amazon,’ she told her companion. ‘You could grow flowers bigger
than a house there. Hey, I could build a treehouse. Or what about Peru? It
looks beautiful there, from the pictures. What do you think?’ she turned to
look at Fishbowl, just glad to have something different to talk about. The
creature just floated peacefully beside her and did nothing. ‘Never mind,’ said
Tabitha, watching Fishbowl’s tentacles tap along her hand when she held it out.
‘I’m not very good with decisions either. Let’s do that then. Let’s go to
Peru.’ Tabitha zoomed in on the hologram globe, held up her finger to the
western coast, and hesitated. There weren’t any countries marked out on the
globe, of course. Just land and sea.

‘
Er
,’ she mumbled, waving her finger around the general
area. Ok, so she really was rubbish at geography. No point pretending. ‘Ah,
we’ll know it when we see it.’ She took a guess and tapped her finger into the
deepest part of the curving west coast, in the middle of the continent. Seven
banked gently to the right, and Tabitha left him to it while she lay back in
the seat to get some sleep. She just couldn’t face any more of that hard metal
coldness that she felt in his mind.

‘Come
back to me,’ she told Seven quietly, reaching out to press her palm to the
wall. ‘I’m sorry.’

By sunrise they were
landing down quietly on a cloud-cloaked mountaintop, crowded with stone walls
as old as myth. Machu Picchu; she couldn’t believe she was really here. Tabitha
sat in the saddle for a while just to take it all in, and watched Fishbowl
float off to explore the grass. She’d always wanted to come here. She was
slap-bang in the heart of living history, surrounded by a solid earthy slab of
legend. With her short attention span nagging at the reverent pause, Tabitha
yawned away her sleep and jumped down from the saddle onto Seven’s wing. His
scales were so dark now; nothing like when she’d first met him. Coal black. She
made a point of stroking his neck, but he didn’t respond. Tabitha sighed sadly
and turned away, walking down his wing like a ramp. She turned her attentions
back to her destination and drank in the feel of the place, old and sacred. She
smiled at the mountain view.

‘Well,
this is Machu Picchu,’ she told Fishbowl, who was already bobbing around
brightly above the grass in the city square. As soon as the creature had caught
the scent of plants and earth on the fresh air it had pushed past her to get
out of Seven’s hatch and explore.

‘At
least someone’s happy,’ she said with a smile, watching Fishbowl tapping its
tentacles on the grass around them. ‘You could have a word with him if you
like,’ she said quietly, nodding at Seven. ‘He’s not the same
any more
.’ Tabitha wandered off towards the steep edge of
the mountain, and looked around at the misty peaks that surrounded them.
‘Unless I’m just going insane, of course,’ she mumbled to herself. She was
worrying over the emotional health of a dragon and an octopus. Still, who else
did she have left to think about? Seven and Fishbowl were her friends, in some
weird way. Her monsters.

The
clouds were lit gold in the rising sun. The only smell was grass in the fresh breeze.
Tabitha saw light pouring over a different world around her, high and remote,
hidden away in miles of forest as far as the eye could see. It wasn’t quite a
tropical beach… but at least they were far from any battleships here. Her and
Seven could take care of any stray spiders if they came creeping up to find
them, and it was a long way up. It felt safe here; hidden. It was a good place
to set up their home. She just hoped it would last.

Tabitha
placed her metal hands on rough ancient stone, carved into steps leading up to
a rock platform. The stone walls of houses lined the mountaintop, from hovels
to palaces. She had a whole town to herself, and Fishbowl could fill up the
empty squares and foundations with new alien gardens. Tabitha smiled at the thought.
All she wanted was a chance to live in peace.

Seven
had taken to the high peak that jutted over the town, and perched there on the
highest rock with his wings spread to the sunlight. Fishbowl was floating
around the stone terraces on the edge of the mountaintop, taking a great deal
of interest in the grass and weeds and waving a tentacle through them. Tabitha
looked around, nodded contentedly, and didn’t know what she could do. She
always seemed to get teary in her quiet moments these days.

‘What
am I supposed to do now, Mum?’ Tabitha asked the sky and the steep outlook in
front of her. Her hand went straight for the ribbon on her wrist. ‘I wouldn’t
mind so much if I had something to concentrate on, but there’s nothing left.’
She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her catsuit. She sniffled snot, laughed a
little, and looked up at the sky. ‘Look, I’m still a big
crybaby
,’
she told her mum, smiling through her tears. ‘I don’t know where I’m supposed
to go, or what I’m supposed to do. I mean, is it safe here? Or should I be on
the other side of the world, looking for survivors?’ she sat down and hugged
her knees close, staring over the steep drop at the hills and forest below. ‘I
can’t even be around other people any more though,’ she told her mum. ‘I’m not
the same person.’ Tabitha searched the heavens; watched the horizon under the
golden sun, thinking all the while. And none of it helped her. Maybe she didn’t
have to
do
anything. Maybe surviving for herself was enough. Perhaps
this was her life now; blissful stretches of silver peace, shot through with
sharp red chaos whenever they found her again. Just like being in the food
chain, she supposed. Everything else had been living like that for millions of
years.

‘I’ll
survive all of this,’ she told the grass at her black feet. ‘That’s what I’ll
do with my life. I’ll just be a survivor. A damn good one.’

Tabitha
strode back across the grassy square with a new sense of purpose.
Survival
,
she said to herself. Like a mantra. It was a loose, misty kind of idea she had
in her head, but at least it was something to set her mind to. She felt better
having a plan, however basic it might be.

‘Water,’
she said to herself. ‘Water’s the most important thing.’ She walked off towards
Seven on the peak, and was about to whistle him down into the city when she
heard running water off to her left. It was coming from the sprawl of roofless
stone houses, deep in the heart of the town. Tabitha followed the faint sound
down dirt-path streets until it became a clear sloshing gush, and she rounded
the corner of a stone alleyway to find the source. It was a square hole cut
into the rock face, slapping water down into a stone basin in the ground.
Tabitha sipped at a little to taste it, and filled her water bottle with a
high-pitched rumble. She noticed a sunken button in the base of the bottle once
she’d filled it, and pressed it in. The bottom split open like a flower, and a
little filter inside dripped a dab of brown gunge on the ground. The base
closed back up again, and that was that.

‘Well
that was weird,’ she muttered, crouching down to dab her finger in the brown
drip. It just seemed to be dirt. The bottle must have purified her water.

‘Mm,’
she concurred with herself, taking a sip. The water had a pure smoothness to
it, fresh and mountain-cold. She turned around and jumped as she bumped into
Fishbowl.

‘Oh
hi you,’ she said brightly, sipping from her bottle. ‘Have some. It’s really
good.’ She left Fishbowl to drink from the stone basin, and navigated back
through ancient streets until she was back out on the green courtyard.

‘Ok,
so water,’ she said, counting the essential with her thumb. ‘Then food,’ she
added, popping up a finger and nodding at the sun. ‘Shelter… I’ve got a dragon
for that… warmth, see above… and, what else?’ she looked around at a loss,
staring at the mountain city. Searching for answers. There had to be more to
survival than that. ‘Protection from predators, I suppose,’ she said. She
touched the handle of the knife on her belt, and counted it off on her mental
list by raising her little finger. She had her claws too, strong enough to tear
holes in monsters; a small pack of spiders was nothing to her any more. ‘So now
what?’ she said, a tiny figure standing alone on the mountaintop. The only
thing she really had left to do was turn the ruins into a home. She smiled at
the prospect, and looked around for the best house in town.

‘So
this is an orchid, I think,’ Tabitha told Fishbowl, who was bobbing next to her
on the terraces. It reached out a tentacle and tapped at the flower then
wrapped it around the stem, about to pull it from the ground.

‘No,’
said Tabitha, pulling the tentacle gently away. ‘It’s not a weed. It’s a
flower. Flowers are good. Bees need them.’ She watched Fishbowl floating there,
puffing air from its gills and hesitating. It reached back to the orchid and
stroked it gently, and patted down the ground around it.

‘Very
good,’ Tabitha said happily, watching Fishbowl move closer to water the flower
from a tentacle tip. ‘Good job.’ She led Fishbowl’s tentacle gently over
towards a second flower, and patted around the ground there as well. Fishbowl
got the message, and watered that flower too. Tabitha smiled, and felt a
contented feeling rising inside her. She’d never thought that gardening could
do that to her. ‘Well, there’s a million more flowers around here,’ she told
Fishbowl, looking around the terraces. ‘Should keep you busy enough, if you
fancy the job.’ Tabitha watched her monster move on to a third flower further
along, patting down the grass around it and giving it some water. Suddenly it
was hard at work with a gardening project, back to its usual Fishbowl self. If
only her ship was so easy to handle, Tabitha said to herself. She looked up at
her dragon perched high on the peak. The sky all around them had grown thick
with low cloud, and her dragon stood out black as death against the drifting
white fog and the mountains beyond. The real Seven was still in there
somewhere; she was sure of it. Hidden away behind those big white eyes that
stared at her from the peak. She left Fishbowl to it on the terraces, and
wandered off back to Seven across the grassy square. The sunlight spilled down
through the mist in heavenly rays, pouring drama into a living landscape
painting all around her. Tabitha could only sigh and look around at the view,
drinking in the sight of vivid green grass and dark jutting mountains that
surrounded them. She’d take some alien seeds out from the cockpit, she decided,
and let Fishbowl try to grow another alien garden here. It was the perfect
place for it, and she’d never seen the creature look so content as when it had
its garden. She peered up to the mountain peak above to call Seven down, and
looked around at the clouds at the sound of sudden rumbling thunder. Except it
wasn’t thunder. It was Seven, she realised. He was staring down at her,
growling.