ONE///BRIGHTSIDE
I survive.
I live from day to day — a Meridian day which humanity has created from one eternal stretch of daylight.
At night, as the floating mylar shield occludes the sun and casts its comprehensive penumbra across the archipelago, I sit on the patio and watch the pterosaurs make their way towards the beckoning aurora of Brightside. The migration of birds has always filled me with sadness and regret, a sense of being left behind. After the heat, the wind from Darkside blows, chilling me. In the early hours of darkness I often contemplate the past even though the past is no refuge — and the series of events which brought me here.
~
Looking back on it, my meeting with Fire Trevellion came about quite by accident, which is how those events which change your life tend to happen. I still cannot decide whether I regret accepting Abe Cunningham's invitation to accompany him to the party thrown by the Altered artist Tamara Trevellion. The repercussions were both tragic and, for me at least, life-saving — but something visceral urged me to go, perhaps the instinct for self-preservation. I'd become something of a recluse of late, and that morning Abe must have realised that I was slipping again and in need of help. He invited me to the event to take my mind off whatever was eating me up, guilt and regret, as ever — though all Abe could see was the distance in my eyes and the leached pallor of my skin.
I'd slept badly that night, plagued by dreams of the accident. For what seemed like hours — longer, in fact, than the actual incident — I was locked in the command web of the smallship. The auxiliaries were dead and I was piloting the 'ship through the storm on manual, with the aid of a malfunctioning computer. I relived the horror of the flight in slow-motion. As each problem arrived hard upon the last, I watched myself make the wrong decision time after time, a snowball effect of errors leading inexorably to the final catastrophe. In the nightmare I experienced again the terror I had felt at the time; not the fear of my responsibility for the one hundred passengers, but the sickening dread of losing my own life. It was ironical that when I awoke screaming from the dream an instant before the impact, the terror I experienced was the remorse I carried for the dead passengers. I had emerged alive from the wreckage — if not in one piece, then with relatively minor injuries. I could be put back together, cured in body if not in mind. For the passengers, though, there was no cure.
I lay awake for a long time, staring up at the apex of the dome. I tried to get back to sleep, but images crowded in, ready to coalesce into nightmare.
I took refuge on the patio, purposefully ignoring the half-shell on the coffee table as I passed through the lounge. The warmth of the old day was tempered by a chill breeze blowing in from the tundra and ice of Darkside. In the direction of Brightside, the leading edge of the shield had slipped over the horizon, shutting out the glare of Beta Hydri. The only light came from the diamond-hard points of stars in the void above Darkside. To east and west, the strip of sea that encircled the planet from pole to pole coruscated like a band of silver lamé. The islands of the archipelago showed as dark knobs, stretching away around the curve of the planet like the individual vertebra of a giant, basking leviathan. During daylight hours, the view from the dome was one of incomparable beauty, with the aurora of Brightside competing for attention with the snow-capped mountains of the sun-deprived hemisphere. At night, when the darkness was complete but for the meagre illumination of the stars, the effect was sinister. That night, the void of deep space reminded me too much of my final run.
I could not sleep, and I could not stay awake without hearing again the abbreviated screams of the passengers, so as ever there was only one thing I could do.
I returned to the lounge and emptied the contents of the half-shell into the burner. Then I carried the apparatus back to the patio and sat with it on my lap. There was a certain pre-administrative ritual to be followed, and this always had the effect of heightening the anticipation. I thought back twenty years to the summer of my sixteenth birthday, and the holiday I had taken on an island in Greece. I concentrated on the event that had made that holiday so special. Holding the image of the girl in my mind's eye, I lit the burner and inhaled the pungent fumes. What I was doing was dangerous, of course; with the visions of the accident so clear in my mind, there was always the possibility that I might pitch myself into a fugue more vivid and terrible than anything I had experienced in my nightmares. But in the event I need not have worried... The fumes infused my senses and reality went into a slow dissolve. Over the period of a few seconds I became oblivious of my identity, of my adult cares and worries. When I opened my eyes I was a naive youth of sixteen again, standing on the white sands of a Mediterranean beach with all my life ahead of me. For the next eight hours I relived the bliss of that holiday; for that long I was spared the agony of guilt.
It was daylight by the time I came to my senses. The sun burned fifteen degrees above the fiery horizon of Brightside. The emptiness of the coming day was accentuated by the memories of my holiday. From time to time, as I sat on the patio and stared out across the glittering ocean to the rearing, green islands, my pulse quickened at the recollection of shared intimacies, as fresh in my mind as if I'd experienced them just yesterday: then I would realise, with a sudden sense of loss, that the love I had known was twenty years gone and as many light years away.
I climbed unsteadily from the foam-form, staggered into the lounge and inspected the half-shell. It was empty, coated with a light dusting of powder which would have no effect at all. I checked the small wooden box I kept concealed behind the tape-case — but this, too, was empty. Part of me, the fifty percent of Bob Benedict which knew that refuge in the drug was no salvation at all, saw this as the perfect opportunity to break my dependency. The other part, weak and irresponsible, managed to convince myself that I needed a supply of the powder on hand in case the nightmares became just too much; and anyway, how much stronger would be my resolve to kick the habit if I could do so while I had a supply in the dome. Happy with this skewed logic, I replaced the box and decided to make the trip to Brightside in the next day or two. Then the screen chimed and my heart skipped, as if the communication were a summons from my conscience.
The lean, leonine face of my neighbour, Abe Cunningham, stared out at me. Behind him, his pterosaur hooked its scythe-like beak over his shoulder and regarded me with beady eyes.
"Bob, are you doing anything today?" The calls from a hundred exotic birds and beasts made his words indistinct.
"Actually... I have a couple of dozen people coming round for a party this afternoon—" I stopped myself before I began to sound too self-piteous.
Abe opened his mouth. "Ah... That's a real pity. I wanted to share this twenty-five year old single malt I've just had Telemassed in from Earth." He held up a chunky, old-fashioned bottle. "You sure you can't make it?"
"Well, as a matter of fact... I possibly could put them off."
Abe smiled. "Good man. See you in an hour?"
I showered and changed, welcoming the sudden and unexpected diversion. On the way down the steps to the tiny beach and the jetty where I moored my launch, I tried to shake the lingering visions of last night's hallucination. As I cast off and steered the launch out across the open sea, the image of the girl's face receded, became indistinct, so that her features might have belonged to any one of the actresses I saw on vid-shows every day. But still, on some subconscious level, I was filled with a residual sadness, a sense of loss that even the prospect of whiling away the day at Abe's could not banish.
Reality was all very well, but it had nothing on the induced euphoria of an artificially recollected past.
I opened the throttle and accelerated across the calm, flat ocean, pointing the launch in the direction of the next island in the chain. Seaspray drenched me in a cool, jewelled shower. The narrow strip of sea which circumnavigated the planet was the only habitable region on the globe, and the long archipelago which straddled a quarter of the hemisphere from the north pole to the equator was where ninety-nine percent of citizens on Meridian made their home. In the social hierarchy of the planet, Abe and myself came somewhere near the bottom; we owned small islands at the end of the chain, near the pole. The larger islands towards the equator were the exclusive province of the Altered and the Augmented, a select clique of self-styled cultural aristocrats who over the years had turned Meridian into something of a noted artists' colony.
Abe's island, despite its presumed lowly social status, was unique and, so far as I was concerned, of far more interest than the pretentiously landscaped islands owned by the wealthier citizens. Abe and his wife had arrived on Meridian ten years ago and set up a sanctuary and breeding centre for the planet's endangered species, which due to the precarious ecology of the stationary world were many. The green hump of the island was dotted with dozens of sparkling domes, like silver dewdrops in the sunlight. These were the reconstructed habitats of the planet's fauna.
Abe stood on the landing stage, hands on hips. His commanding presence was a reassuring feature of my visits to his island. He watched my approach with the pterosaur, as gaunt and beaked as Abe himself, beside him.
I tossed him the rope and he made it fast around a post, then gave me a hand from the launch. "Bob, it's been weeks. You ought to come over more. Don't wait to be asked."
I promised I would visit more often in future — a promise I must have made every month since my arrival on Meridian a year earlier. We strolled along the jetty and up the path towards Abe's villa on the highest point of the island. We passed domes and cages holding all manner of exotic birds and animals, the air shrill with their cries. Abe's pterosaur waddled in our wake like an obedient child.
He showed me through the dome to the verandah overlooking the stepped terracing of the island, the blue sea and the other islands stretching away into the distance. We sat in the shade on a long foam-form, and Abe made a ceremony of opening the whisky and pouring two generous measures into iced tumblers. Abe was a man of few pretensions and even fewer pleasures: scotch — and not the drink itself so much as the occasion of its sampling — was one of his rare indulgences.
We chatted of nothing in particular for a while, the latest news from Earth, gossip from around the archipelago. Our silences were easy, periods of reflection rather than anticipation of what we might say next. Abe mentioned what he was working on now — a breeding programme involving the last surviving rabbit-analogues on the planet — and I sat back and listened, admiring the view. Flights of pterosaurs formed vortices in the distance, like computer-generated pixels illustrating thermal dynamics. On one of the larger islands, far to the south, artists competed in a smoke-sculpting contest. Towering columns, depicting mythic figures from the history of Earth, billowed in the brilliant blue sky.
I drained my first glass and Abe took great pleasure in pouring a second. Already the liquid was having an effect, making my thoughts lazy and diffuse.
In the early days of our friendship, I often wondered why Abe bothered with me. He was thirty years my senior, moderately successful at what he did, and in control of his life. As I got to know him better, I came to see that we had certain things in common. Perhaps because we were both reserved and rather introspective, we shared a suspicion of the Altereds and the Augmenteds on the higher islands. We were the only non-artists to own islands in the chain, and neither of us had capitulated to vanity and had our forms altered, either to enhance our human appearance or, as was becoming increasingly popular with a certain clique of frivolous artisans, to imitate species as varied as mythical animals and alien lifeforms. In fact, Abe wore his grey hair long and had cultivated a paunch over the past few months, as if in defiance of prevailing somatic aesthetics. Nor were we Augmented — the small occipital computer I had at the base of my skull, which I had used to interface with the controls of my smallship, was sealed now and redundant. We had only our own intellect to fall back on, unlike the Augmenteds who wore computers like yokes and spent much of their time wired into some abstract metaphysical realm at many removes from everyday reality.
Perhaps another reason for his friendliness was the fact that just over a year ago he had lost his wife in an accident on Brightside. It had happened a month before my arrival; Abe, understandably, had never mentioned the incident. All I knew was what I had heard second-hand from mutual acquaintances, and all they knew was that, in the aftermath of the accident, Abe had rushed his wife to a hospital on Main island, but by the time he arrived she was beyond help.
There were a number of pictures of Patricia Cunningham in the villa: a smiling, fair-haired woman in her early fifties. Others showed Abe and Patricia together: they had seemed a happy couple, and I'd often caught myself wondering if having someone and losing them was more terrible than never having had anyone at all.
Occasionally, while wasting time in the isolation of my own dome, I thought of the widower in his hilltop eyrie. He was just as isolated as I was, with his scotch and his memories, and I frequently felt bad about not taking up his offer of open house. But the guilt never lasted all that long: I had my own memories, and my own means of dealing with them.
"You really should stop me going on like this," Abe said, at the end of a rambling monologue on the subject of his latest project. "No wonder you don't come up here so often. I'm sorry — I'm a fauna bore."
Beside him, the pterosaur stropped its bill on an extended wing. I gestured and said something to the effect that I enjoyed hearing about his work; which was true. Listening to the details of other people's lives, I temporarily forget those of my own.
"What have you been doing with yourself recently?" Abe asked. "How's work?"
I shrugged, suddenly defensive. When asked to account for my own activities, I found myself for once viewing my life with some degree of objectivity, and I was never enamoured with what I saw.
"Nothing much. Business is bad — I haven't had any work in months."
Before becoming a pilot in my early twenties, I had overhauled fliers and shuttles for the Javelin Line. When I arrived on Meridian, I fell back on this skill and set myself up in business as a mechanic. For a few months I'd been patronised by rich artists and their friends — the one-time smallship pilot, down on his luck — but the sympathy had soon dried up and with it the supply of fliers in need of repair.
Abe listened, hands clasped behind his head. "If there's anything I can do, Bob..." He trailed off, then peered at me. "If you don't mind me saying so, you look terrible. You sure you're okay?"
I laughed, but it rang hollow in my ears. "I'm okay, Abe. I'm just run down, that's all. I haven't been sleeping."
Abe knew about the accident. Months ago I'd given him the story — the sanitised, emotion-free version, that is. As far as he was aware, I was just a blameless pawn in a smallship blow-out. He knew nothing about my guilt and the need to suppress it, and what I did to do so. He knew nothing about my dependency.
There were times when I wanted to tell him everything, as if to absolve myself from blame, but I feared his censure and valued his occasional company too much to risk losing it.
The pterosaur regarded me accusingly. The staple diet of these birds was the flower of the thorned cacti which grew on Brightside and which they consumed without any side-effects.
"Bob, how would you like to go to a party tonight?"
"Well, to be honest..."
"I've been invited to an 'event' down the archipelago. I wasn't going to go, but it might be interesting... You do need to get out, you know."
I tried to think of an excuse, but came up with nothing. I temporised. "What is this 'event', exactly?" I disliked the way every novice artisan and ambitious technician graced their shows and exhibitions with the soubriquet of event.
Abe tried not to smile. "It's a combined poetry recital and film show. It might be good. And anyway, even if it isn't, the fact remains that you need a change of scenery. The guests won't all be Altereds and Augmenteds. There'll be a whole crowd of techs from the Telemass station, along for the free drinks."
I was still casting about for an excuse not to attend. "Who's the artist?" I asked.
"Have you heard of the sculptress and poet Tamara Trevellion?"
"Wasn't she...?"
Abe nodded. "You probably saw her on the news last year, when she lost her husband. She's an Altered fish-woman."
I watched little news — most of it was from Earth, and that planet held bad memories for me — but I had caught the news-flash reporting the Telemass accident. Three citizens had been mistranslated and lost somewhere along the Earth-Meridian vector, with little hope of recovery.
The tragedy became even more sensational when it was announced that Maximilian Trevellion, the famous crystal artist, was one of the missing persons. Tamara Trevellion was interviewed, and she turned the performance into an 'event' worthy of her finest creative endeavour. Few who watched her could fail to be moved by the poise and valour of the mer-woman as she told the world that now, after three days, she acknowledged that her husband was lost but that his spirit and his work would live on, both in her heart and in the minds of those who appreciated true art.
Later, the tragedy was compounded when it was disclosed that the trip to Earth taken by her husband, to represent Tamara Trevellion at a reading of one of her prose-poems, was to have been made by her daughter, Fire. At the last moment, Fire Trevellion had fallen ill, and Maximilian had taken the fateful trip instead.
"Well?" Abe asked now. "I was told to bring someone. You're more than welcome to come along."
"Do you know Tamara Trevellion?" I tried to conceal my surprise that the artist should wish to socialise with a lowly conservationist.
"I've supplied her with a number of exotic pets over the years," Abe said. "Well?"
I recalled again the tragic mask of beauty and her brave soliloquy at the loss of a loved one, and I wondered how the passage of time had treated Tamara Trevellion. This, and the fact that I knew Abe was right when he said that I needed to get out more, overcame my resistance.
I nodded. "Why not?"
Abe smiled, poured more whisky and began a speech to the effect that the best scotch was still made on Earth. We chatted about our homeplanet for a time. "By the way," Abe said, "the last time we met you were talking of going back."
I shrugged. "The thought does cross my mind from time to time, I must admit. I like it here, but—"
"But Earth is home, right? So what's stopping you? The fact that Earth still has smallships?"
I looked up. Abe was casually stroking the bill of his pterosaur. He knew he'd scored a hit.
"Okay, maybe that does have something to do with it."
Earth still used smallships on all the in-system runs, and I knew that the sight of one would release a whole slew of unwelcome memories and associations. At the same time, the reason I told people that I intended to return to Earth one day was so that I might build a psychological momentum and eventually match my words with the deed, escape from what was keeping me on Meridian.
Still regarding the bird, Abe said, "Bob, you remind me a lot of Terror, here. I saw him being driven from his flock one day and found him down on the beach, injured and forlorn. I've no idea what he did to get himself ostracized like that. He's fit now and perfectly able to leave here — but, as you see, he won't... Perhaps he's too scared to return and face his past."
"So you think my talk of going back is no more than just that — talk?"
Abe shrugged. "I think you'd be a damned sight better off if you returned to where you really belonged."
I was saved from having to reply — if I could have found a suitable response — by the sound of Abe's vid-screen chiming in the lounge. He excused himself, entered the dome and activated the wall-screen. The picture showed an expanse of sand, clearly Brightside, shimmering in a vaporous heat haze. I made out a cage in the foreground, containing an animal.
I turned my attention to the view of the island chain and contemplated Abe's words. I had assumed until now that I had kept my feelings concerning the accident pretty well concealed — but Abe was more astute a judge of human nature than I had given him credit for. Perhaps I should have felt gladdened at his concern, but instead I felt almost threatened.
Abe returned a minute later. "That was a remote sensor I have monitoring a cage. I've just trapped the female of a species I hope to breed in captivity." He glanced at his watch. "I really must go and collect it. There'll be time to get there and back before the party starts."
"Is the cage on Brightside?"
"Fifty kilometres in. It'll be a hot trip."
I tried to sound casual. "Any chance of a ride?"
He looked surprised, then pleased. I was not known to exhibit such camaraderie. "I don't see why not. I could use a hand with the cage. Ever been Brightside before?"
"No," I lied. "I'd like the experience."
He nodded. "I've a spare silversuit somewhere."
~
As we kitted-up in the solar-reflective silversuits, water-cooled but light and flexible, I felt a twinge of guilt at deceiving him like this. I salved my conscience with the resolve that this would be the start of a closer friendship with Abe Cunningham.
Abe's flier was a sleek, silver tear-drop, at rest on the harbour wall but pointing as if in readiness towards Brightside. He opened the wing hatches and we dropped inside. The padded, insulated interior, darkened by the tinted viewscreen and fitted out with hi-tec instruments, brought to mind the pilot's nacelle of a smallship.
Abe gunned the engine; the jets caught and we streaked away from the island, a metre above the calm surface of the sea.
A computer screen embedded in the dashboard showed a circular view of the Brightside hemisphere. It was divided into three zones, like a target. Abe explained, "The outer margin is zone blue, the coolest area, suitable for human habitation. The second ring, extending for a couple of hundred kilometres, is zone orange, where you go only if you have good reason. The inner core, zone red, is strictly a no-go area. We're here—" He indicated a small, flashing light moving towards the outer circle. "And the cage is here—" A second point of light well within zone orange.
We would be venturing further into the zone of fire than ever I had before.
Ahead, on the horizon, Brightside appeared as a low line just above sea level, shimmering in the convection currents. The sky above the distant landmass was white hot, leached of colour by the incessant and merciless radiation of the sun. Few people, other than the occasional research team, ventured far into this sunward facing hemisphere; no-one had yet made a Brightside crossing. On the equator, the mantle of rock over an area of a thousand square kilometres had formed a hellish lagoon of molten lava. Even the most hardy of the planet's fauna dwelled within the safety margin of zone blue, beside the meridional ocean.
One hour later we were still kilometres from the ochreous foreshore of the Brightside, and the thermometer on the dash indicated that the temperature outside was one hundred and ten fahrenheit. Every breath of air, seemingly devoid of oxygen, parched my throat. I took frequent drinks from Abe's canteen.
He leaned forward and peered through the viewscreen, then pointed. "Look..."
I followed his gesture. To our left, high in the blue sky above the ocean, a falling bolt of white light appeared suddenly as if by magic. The first bolt, to which Abe had alerted me, had already found its target, the great arched column reducing in length as it hit the Telemass reception pad. The second bolt followed instantly, then a third, all landing on the largest island of the chain some two hundred kilometres south of our present position. Each pulse, from its first appearance in the stratosphere to the time it hit destination, lasted for barely a second, and as ever I found it hard to believe that I had witnessed the medium which transported the constituent molecules of human beings and supplies more than twenty light years through space from Earth to Meridian. I found it even more difficult to accept that I too had undergone the same process of reduction, transmission and reconstitution.
"The sight always gives me one hell of a thrill."
Abe smiled. "You're not alone. I think everyone feels the same. I know I do. And it's not just our intellect trying to come to terms with the technological wonder of it."
I was staring to my left, imagining the sensation of dislocation and relief that the travellers would be experiencing as they were reformed on the deck of the station.
"We always feel awe at that which we don't understand," Abe was saying. "But it's more than that. When we see the bolts, we're reminded of the connection to Earth. It's the life-line to the one place we all have in common. The sight of the bolts reassures us that mother Earth still cares, that we're still connected by the techno-umbilical that gave us our new life here."
"Hence the massive news coverage when something goes wrong, like the mistranslation last year?"
He nodded. A thousand droplets of sweat stood out on his face. "And hence the concern over recent rumours concerning the station."
There were times when my isolation and indifference to what was happening outside the confines of my head put me at a serious disadvantage. "What rumours?"
"You haven't heard?" Abe glanced quickly from the viewscreen to me. "There's been a reduction of staffing levels at the station over the past couple of months. The Director's leaving soon for a more prestigious posting. Rumour is that both incoming and outgoing shots will be cut to one a month."
"But it's just that, I take it? A rumour?" At present, there were three shots to and from Earth every month.
"It's a rumour Director Steiner hasn't bothered to deny, Bob. On a broadcast last week he was non-committal. If it is true, it'll probably mean a waiting list and one hell of a price increase. I'm glad I don't send that much to Earth, but some of the artists will not be pleased." I thought I detected a slight note of irony in his tone.
"Meridian isn't that popular anymore," I commented.
"Tourism's down fifty percent since last year, after the quake scare. A dozen big hotels on Main have shut up shop over the past six months. Also, Consolidated Mining has got what it can from the margins of Brightside and Darkside — they reckon increased investment to go further in wouldn't be a sound proposition. Earth is looking to other, bigger colonies for investment, hence the rumours of scale-down." Abe laughed. "We'll soon be a backwater, Bob. Here we go."
We had reached the parched plains of Brightside. Abe accelerated and we rocketed at great speed across the wastes of the comparatively safe zone blue. In three directions, for as far as the eye could see, the land ran flat and featureless, but for the occasional rock the size of a fist and even smaller ground-hugging plants. The seared air above the distant horizon wavered like a film projected onto a corrugated screen.
We followed a rough track inland, a slight linear depression made by the vehicles which had passed this way before us. I was thankful for the flier's sun-roof and our silversuits. On my previous trips to Brightside, quick sorties to get what I wanted with not a second wasted, my launch had been uncovered and I had foregone the luxury of a cooled suit — and I had returned every time exhausted and dehydrated.
As we advanced across zone blue, an area about as hospitable as the Sahara in mid-summer, the temperature hit 130°. Even in the shade of the cab the heat parched my skin, and each breath seared my throat.
We raced over extensive rafts of cacti-like flora; I recognised the bright pink blooms, and wished we could stop so I could gather the flowers and return. Then we travelled for kilometres without seeing any sign of vegetation, and I began to despair that we had passed the last of the growth, that the trip would be wasted. We bore remorselessly on, speeding towards the great, incandescent orb of the sun burning relentlessly fifteen degrees above the horizon, as if intent on immolating ourselves.
A while later, I thought I detected something in the distance. It was a slight irregularity, growing line by line from the shimmering horizon like the build up of lateral graphics on a computer screen. As we approached, the image resolved itself: a building, a white-panelled, monolithic ziggurat out of place here in the middle of nowhere.
Abe slowed the flier and we idled alongside. Behind a high wire-mesh fence, the giant lettering on the facade of the building proclaimed: SOLAR RE... while the remainder of the sign: SEARCH STATION, hung at an angle across the entrance. Radio dishes and antennae on the building's roof were pointing at the sun like so many heliotropic blooms. The station had about it an air of terminal desolation; the very fact that the roof-top instruments were still directed at the subject of the research made the abandonment all the more forlorn.
"Shut down three months ago," Abe said, "when Earth turned off the funding."
We accelerated and the dead station receded in our wake, the flashing point on the screen before us indicating that we were leaving zone blue behind us.
~
Brightside, zone orange...
Abe cut the engine. The flier settled. For a second, the sand displaced by our landing masked the merciless glare of Beta Hydri. Then the cloud settled, and the white hot disc of the sun reappeared. A wall of fire reared on the horizon, a dancing curtain of golden light which errupted frequently in great incandecent gouts of flame. As we stared through the viewscreen, the silver paint on the hood of the flier began to flake. The thermometer read 180°.
We had come to rest on a baked plain of sand beside an outcropping of rocks and boulders — the habitat of the rabbit-analogue that Abe had ensnared. Ten metres in front of the flier was the cage, a small, furless shape within it.
Then, beyond it, I saw the cacti.
They spread for as far as the eye could see, a dense matt of green, spatulate vegetation dotted here and there with pink flowers. The sight filled me with joy.
All I had to do now was snatch them without Abe noticing...
I had no doubt that he knew the blooms were the source of the powerful mnemonic-hallucinogenic drug so popular with the colonists in the early days, before the expensive designer-pharmaceuticals hit the market. Abe had been too long on Meridian to be in ignorance of the fact. But there was no way he might know of my dependency, and I had no intention of letting him find out. He was solicitous enough about my welfare as it was, without attempting to save me from the one thing that made my life bearable.
"Gloves and hood," he was saying. "Don't forget the face mask, and don't look directly at the sun. We're going to spend as little time out there as possible. We'll stow the cage away, then it's back in here, okay?"
"Fine by me," I lied, my heart sinking. I pulled on the gloves, arranged the hood and the face mask.
"Okay," Abe said. "Let's go..."
He opened the hatches and we climbed out.
The heat of the sun hit me with the force of a physical blow. I felt myself bowing beneath it. The miniature refrigeration unit on my back began a laboured whirring as it fought to keep the circulating water cool.
We walked towards the cage, two silversuited figures in an alien, hostile land. To all sides, the ground only as far as the mid-distance was visible; further afield was the shimmering optical illusion of convection currents, giving the paradoxical impression that we were surrounded by large areas of water. My mind switched to thoughts of swimming pools and long, iced drinks.
The nearest cacti plant was some metres beyond the cage, and I was wondering how I might reach it unseen when Abe stopped me with an arm across my chest. "Bob! Back in the cab — there's a laser. Quick!"
I ran, ignorance of Abe's alarm lending panic to my flight. I reached the cab, exhausted, unclipped the laser from the door-rack.
Abe was running back to meet me.
"What the hell—?" I began.
He grabbed the rifle. "Look..."
Perhaps a hundred metres beyond the cage was the hulking, armoured shape of a sand lion, the size and weight of a dump truck. I had only ever seen them on vid-documentaries, great quadrupeds resembling a cross between a prehistoric triceratops and a rhino. Even at this distance the clashing of its mandibles rang loud in my ears.
"Christ, Bob..."
He passed a pair of binoculars to me, and only when I raised them and sighted the lion did I understand the reason for his distress.
The animal was devouring what once might have been a human being. Now the figure was stiff and lifeless, an oversized rag-doll in the fanged jaws of the lion. The carcass was parcelled in the remains of a familiar, light blue uniform.
I lowered the binoculars, and the intervening distance made the sight of the carnage almost bearable. The sound remained though, the clash of fangs and the eager, liquid sucking as it feasted. Within seconds, there was very little left of the corpse.
Abe and I were still staring like prize fools when the lion looked up and saw us. There was a second's hesitation before the animal decided that it was not yet sated. Then it charged.
Sand lions, I recalled from the vid-programme, were notoriously difficult to kill. High velocity bullets could penetrate the inch thick armour, but bullets were an antique ammunition no longer available on Meridian. Laser bolts could at best only stun the beasts. I recalled the deaths of three scientists on Brightside just six months ago, attacked and devoured by a pair of the man-eaters. I had thought, then, that it was a particularly horrible way to go.
The lion trundled towards us, gaining momentum as it came. It had lowered its great, hanging head, presenting a crest of horns and spikes. Its stench reached us in advance, the heady stink of putrescent carrion and an acid odour peculiar to the beast. I yelled out in fear.
Deliberately, Abe raised his rifle and fired. The electric blue bolt sizzled across the gap, actually connecting the hunter to the hunted for a fraction of a second. The bolt slammed into the ridge of osseous armour plating above the animal's brow. It dropped a matter of metres from us with a great grunt of expelled air.
"Bob!" Abe cried.
But I had seen my opportunity and was was taking it.
I ran past the felled beast; a swarm of flies rose from it, and minute parasites swam in the film of oil that covered its chitinous exo-skeleton. I had no idea how long the lion might remain unconscious, and in retrospect I realised what a fool I was. But at the time I had thoughts for only one thing. When I reached the remains, a scattered collection of rags and bones, I knelt and snatched a fragment of blue uniform, along with as many small, pink flower-heads as I could manage without Abe's getting wise.
Then I sprinted back past the lion; it was still unconscious, but twitching spasmodically and growling as if gradually coming to its senses.
"Bob — that was a bloody fool trick!"
I thrust the scrap of blue uniform at him. He took it, looked up at me. "A Telemass tech..." Then he remembered himself. "Quick, let's get the cage aboard."
Between us, keeping one eye on the concussed lion, we lifted the cage and carried it back to the flier. The darkened, cooled interior of the cab was like an ice-box in comparison to the hell we had just escaped. Abe dogged the hatches and sat back in relief. I peeled off my gloves and removed my mask.
"That was a foolish thing to do, Bob."
"I had to get it..."
Abe unfolded the blood-stained material on his lap, revealing the Telemass logo — three scimitars, points touching.
"But what the hell was he doing out this far, Bob? He didn't stand a chance..."
He looked up, through the viewscreen, out to the scatter of bones in the desert. "If he came out here alone," he went on, "then where's his vehicle? And if he didn't, then someone knows something about this."
He drew a deep breath, folded the rag with reverence and tucked it into his pouch.
The sand lion was stirring, attempting to gain its feet. Abe fired the jets, swung the flier around on its axis and headed towards home.
We made the return trip without a word, our long shadow streaking ahead of us. Beside me, Abe seemed lost in thought; it came to me that what we had witnessed today served only to remind Abe of another death, this one much closer to him, that had occurred on Brightside over a year ago. I could think of nothing to say, so I kept quiet. It was a relief to come upon the cool blue ocean of the meridian again, and leave the nightmare of Brightside behind us.
Only when we reached Abe's island did he speak. "I'll get onto Steiner, tell him about it." He smiled wearily. "See you tonight, Bob."
I collected my launch and steered it back to my island. I climbed the path to the dome, entered the lounge and stood in silence for a long time, contemplating the empty half-shell. Normally, I would have set to work immediately and prepared the drug, but the thought of doing that now, while Abe remained alone with his memories, deterred me. I threw the desiccated flower-heads into a corner, showered and changed for the party.