1

A walk in the desert
She looked back over the route she‘d taken, and could still see the rocky outcrop that she’d started from. Parked beside it was the rather forlorn-looking vehicle she’d now abandoned…
The girl was just cresting a ridge, in a few moments the view back would be hidden,
‘No going back now…’
It had been childishly simple to get away in the end…
Marta had been due to go out with Han, to repair the ground station that she and Priya had installed all that time ago…which had suddenly and unaccountably stopped working…
She had been thinking that she could use this as an opportunity to abscond. She would wait until they were both up on the rock, and make an excuse to return to the rova…drive it far enough away from the rock, and then get out and continue on foot… There were obvious flaws in this plan. She didn’t want to strand the boy, so she would have to leave the vehicle somewhere that he could both see and reach on foot; and what then would stop him from following her once he had? And, in any case, the vehicle would be tracked from space, giving them a good idea of where she was going…no, that simply wouldn’t work…!
But in the end, fate took a hand…! While unloading the ’plane after his previous day’s mission, Han had let a heavy crate slip from his hands…and onto his foot. The result was a broken toe, and Han could no longer go on their mission. Everyone else was committed to more important work, with the exception of Raj (who wasn’t considered competent), so the mission was cancelled…
Marta then went to Nurse Gee, and offered to go alone… She still couldn’t believe that the nursemaid agreed, it was breaking the cardinal rule they’d established…but Gee, who had appeared distracted, almost absentmindedly gave the OK… Marta initially put this down at least partially to the lack of regard that Six Gee now showed towards her…but later conceded that she and by extension Mission AI may have had other things on their collective mind…
This then was an opportunity not to be missed. Her principal experimental subject, Oswald, was less than ten kilometres away, within hiking distance… The pseudo-crustacean was in the vicinity of ‘its’ pod grove, which fitted in nicely with her plans… She reckoned that she would have at least two hours, possibly more, from when she reached the ground station before Mission AI would expect her to report in…and the new shortwave communication was notoriously unreliable, so there was no guarantee that she would be able to get through anyway… She would switch off her interface once she set off, meaning that there would be no tracking signal for any searching aircraft to pick up…
In the event, it proved impossible to reach the Dome by radio once out of range of the last ground station, reception was just too bad, meaning she probably had hours before the alarm would be raised…
So here she was, now out of sight of her last connexion with home…truly on her own…!
The girl could feel the straps of her pack cutting into her shoulders as she scrambled down the rocky trail…she had the tent, sleeping bag, survival kit and emergency rations all taken from the rova. She’d also managed to sneak a change of clothes and extra rations onto her vehicle, concealed among the tools and kit needed for the maintenance job; these were now in her pack… She hesitated over whether to take the rifle or not, but in the end decided against… She regarded this as a necessary leap of faith, a test of her commitment to her cause… If she believed that Oswald was not in fact dangerous or hostile, then not taking a rifle was a testament to that belief…she would meet with the pseudo-crustacean unarmed, without Earth technology, as one intelligent creature to another…
It felt like an outing on the trail and this feeling persisted…Marta had used her interface to point her in the direction of the pod grove before switching it off, and she was now navigating by Alph alone…
The primary was approaching its zenith, and in its orange light the exercise was making her sweat… She suddenly felt immensely alive and tuned in to the world around her…she could feel the slight variations in the terrain beneath her feet, now rocky and boulder-strewn, now soft and sandy…the ever-present cinnamon smell filled her nostrils…the sun’s rays warmed her face…every sense seemed extraordinarily heightened…the smallest gust of wind impacted her face…the slightest sound, whether it be a pebble dislodged by her feet…or the noise made as she brushed past the maroon pseudo-shrubs resounded like a pistol shot in her ears…the slightest movement caught her eye, a tiny arthropod, no bigger than one of the bees that pollinated the Garden, scuttled under a rock…she felt like she was the centre of some vast interconnected system, bounded only by the lilac bowl of the the sky…she imagined that her body reached out, in every direction, and encircled the globe,
‘…this is my home…’ she declared portentously , ‘…the creatures here are my kin…I reject Earth…I reject our technology…I embrace the planet…’
The vision that had seized her bore her onwards, and the kilometres between her and her goal melted away…In no apparent time the dusky purple mass of the pod grove filled the horizon, she hadn’t realised it was so big,
‘Now where was the creature she had come to see…?’
Annoyingly, Oswald was not here to greet her, clearly not realising that a pivotal moment in interspecies relations was about to take place… Marta felt almost offended and sat down on a rock to wait…
She must have nodded off in the afternoon warmth, when she was awakened by the familiar hiss…
The hulking shape had emerged from the grove and was moving toward her…

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2

Oswald
Marta got cautiously to her feet and prepared to face the monster… She had no real plan. She hoped the creature would remember her as one who had approached it before and attempted to communicate via visual images, but in her haste she’d not been able to bring the technology needed to repeat the show… The girl was clinging to her belief that the pseudo-crustacean would know her as another intelligent being, and that somehow would be enough for communication to begin,
‘…of course, it could just decide to kill and eat me…’ she thought ruefully…she could feel herself trembling as the thing neared…she took a breath,
‘I must appear calm and in control…’ she decided, taking two steps towards it… The creature had halted a couple of metres in front of her…it seemed to fill the sky,
‘Does it know that I’m the human that killed its comrades…?’ she thought suddenly. She assumed ‘Oswald’ had been there in the crater, but had no means of knowing this,
‘Did pseudo-crustaceans visit the remains of those she had killed…?’ she asked herself. They’d sent the drone over the site of the landslip several times in the days that followed, establishing that two of the beasts had indeed died…but subsequent visits had merely confirmed that the remains were still there,
‘No matter, I’m here now…I can’t do anything about the past…!’
Steeling herself, she took another step forward. She was now between the creature’s huge claws, and tilted her face up towards it… The creature looked back, the large pupils of its golden eyes regarded her… Apart from the gentle hiss of its lungs, there was no sound… Apart from the never-ceasing movements of its complicated mouthparts, everything was still…
To the casual, hypothetical observer, the scene would have assumed an almost fairytale, dreamlike quality… Like something from Alice in Wonderland, the slim girl standing gravely in front of the vast armoured black monster…beauty confronting her beast…
Marta now remembered that when they’d met before, the crusty had touched the screen with its palps…she stretched out her hand towards it…
Slowly, the creature extended its palps and enfolded her hand…
Its touch was light, but she could feel it exploring her skin… Suppressing a shudder, she opened her senses to the experience… It felt dry, and smooth, almost feathery…she also noticed its warmth, the animal’s body was warm, higher than ambient temperature… This was a discovery, all of Priya’s arths were cold blooded,
‘…this explains how they could survive at the Pole…’ she thought excitedly…
But there was something else, a slight but perceptible…pressure on her mind… This was the only way she could describe it, it was almost subliminal, but she was aware of it… Whether this was subsonic sound, or radio waves (could humans detect radio waves…?)…or freekin’ ESP, for God’s sake, she couldn’t tell…! But it was real, it was actual, Oswald was reaching out to her, in some way that her mind was aware of but couldn’t process,
‘Maybe, I should try and think back…’ she eventually decided…
The girl tried to fill her mind with the only thing she think of that would make sense to another intelligence…the Garden with its flowers, its fruit and its flying insects… Suddenly, without being conscious of any change…she was there, in the Garden, smelling the blossom, feeling the leaves brush past her face, seeing the butterflies flutter past her head… The sudden snap back to the reality of the desert was almost painful… Time to try again, now she decided to think about the twins… This time she was again in the Garden, but now carrying Maddy and Milla in each arm… The girls were smiling and laughing, reaching out to touch the brightly coloured flowers and the ripe hanging fruit…staring in wonder at the bees and butterflies as they flew by…
After an interval that could have been a few seconds…or an eternity, she was back… The crusty had released her hand…
Slowly, ponderously it was backing away from her…Marta felt a keen sense of rejection, but creature still regarded her with its eyes… Oswald executed a half-turn and moved towards the grove, it then stopped and faced her again,
‘It clearly wants me to follow….’ thought the girl…
So she trailed after it, and thus began the strangest of processions. Every few steps Oswald would pause, half-turn and swivel one of ‘his’ eyestalks to check she was still following… Marta was sure the creature was male now, but she couldn’t have said why!
They were now moving parallel to the edge of the grove about ten metres away from it. Here it looked impenetrable, but after a few minutes they’d reached a place where two large purple boles stood apart from each other, forming a natural arch… The pseudo-crustacean paused and stood slightly to one side of this ‘entrance’, looking at her once more,
‘It wants me to go in….’ she marvelled…
She stepped forward into the purple shade, noticing idly what looked white buds poking out of the smooth flesh of the pseudo-trees… She turned, expecting Oswald to follow, the arch was plenty big enough, but the creature had turned and was already returning to whatever enigmatic pursuit had occupied it before her arrival… She hesitated. Alph already dropping towards the horizon, and the gloom before her was intensifying,
“I’ve come this far…” she told herself aloud, “…seems pointless to stop now…”
She had a torch in her pack, she now switched it on and shone it before her… A forest of dully gleaming columns was revealed in the torchlight… A broad corridor through the columns was also revealed… She pressed on…

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3

In the Grove
Now that she was alone Marta was starting to have doubts…about the nature of the exchange between her and the crusty for one thing… Had she really communicated with it…? It had seemed so real at the time…but now, in that hall of columns, in the fading light, suddenly it didn’t…! It occurred to her that everything that she had ‘seen’ in her vision had come from within her own mind…nothing apparently was passed to her from the mind of the beast… Maybe she’d just been hallucinating, a continuation of the state of heightened awareness she’d been experiencing since she had deserted her Mission and struck out on her own… Marta remembered reading or hearing somewhere that real communication was only possible between equals…she couldn’t remember who had said that, but could the crusty really be regarded as her equal…?
She shook her head, as if to clear it of such doubts… No, she had felt a connexion with the pseudo-crustacean, she knew this…! And in any case the animal had led her here, so it must have gained something from the exchange… It must have learned enough for it to make the decision to guide her to this place, presumably so she could commune in some way with the pod grove itself,
‘….a classic case of take me to your leader…..’ she told herself…
In that she had a plan at all, communication with the intelligent life forms that they shared the planet with was definitely the goal… Having achieved a measure of communication with Oswald, that left the pods…but that was as far as Marta had thought, she really had no idea what came next…
She also had no idea where to go next…! What had started out as a clearly defined avenue through the grove had dissipated into an area where the pod boles were equally spaced… Very quickly she’d lost all notion of where she should be going, and wasn’t even sure if she could retrace her steps… She had started out using the direction of the sunlight in the leafy crowns of the pseudo-trees as a navigational bearing, but Alph had now dropped too low for this to be of any use… After another ten minutes she came to the conclusion that she was thoroughly lost, and probably walking ’round in circles… The grove was completely silent, although some light still filtered down through the ‘foliage’… In places she could even see the sky, now darkening towards indigo…
Surprising, she didn’t feel cold. Normally, the temperature dropped very quickly once Alph had set, and she’d brought thermal survival clothing with her to cope with this…but the temperature within the grove had not changed, presumably the pseudo-plants themselves regulated this…
She could, of course, switch her ’face back on and use it to help her navigate…she would then have a compass and a chronometer, but then Mission AI would be able to track her again… The canopy looked dense, but it was only ten or so metres above her head, and she didn’t think that would be enough to mask her signal,
‘No…!’ she told herself, ‘…you do that when you decide to give up…’
She was idly considering trying to climb up one of the larger ‘trunks’ to get a bearing, she could use her knife to cut hand and footholds, when it occurred to her,
“How can you be so dense….?”
She chastised herself aloud, glad to hear something apart from the sound of her own breathing in that silent purple twilight,
“How did Rai find the heart of the grove in the hidden valley…..? By drinking sap, of course…!”
This was clearly the secret of communing with the pods, or at least it had worked for Rai… Quickly she set about cutting a notch in the nearest pod…after a few seconds the liquid began to drip out of the wound she had inflicted. She cupped her hands and gathered some of the sticky white stuff… For a second or two the girl hesitated, she didn’t even like taking analgesics, so the thought of taking a substance with mind-altering properties filled her with trepidation,
‘Look…!’ she told herself, ‘…you either do this, or you go back and face the music…! Which is it to be…?’
The thought of the humiliation involved in creeping back to the Dome overcame her fear of the unknown and she swallowed a mouthful of the substance,
‘Peppermint…just like Jorja said…’ she decided to drink some more, ‘No time for half measures…’
For the next few minutes, she sat cross-legged in the gathering gloom and waited… There was no longer any discernable daylight filtering down through the canopy; the pool of light from her torch became her whole world…
And then she saw it…a strange almost phosphorescent glow had started to emanate from the surrounding pseudo-plants…she could see patterns…almost like veins, where there had been only smooth purple flesh… Suddenly, she didn’t need the torch to see…its light was now a distraction, so she switched it off…and let it slip from her fingers…
She could now hear it, although she didn’t think ‘hear’ was the right word, she didn’t think she was registering it with her ears…
A warmth enfolded her, and she felt a pulse, a steady almost subliminal beat that seemed to call her on… She now knew precisely which way to go…

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Her quest had now taken on the aspects of a dream. The pulse grew in her mind, accompanied by ‘murmurings’ that remained frustratingly just out of reach…strange imaginings that her mind couldn’t process… The glow of the pseudo-plants around her dazzled her… The forest of columns suddenly gave way to what could only be described as a chamber… In front of a particularly large pseudo-trunk at the far edge of this space lay a sleeping pseudo-crustacean… Marta approached, this was exactly as Jorja and Sal had described it, the creature was motionless, and connected to the pod by a thin tube…
This then was the culmination of her brief odyssey…she had as gone as far as she could…headed down a one-way street until she could go no further…pulled up the drawbridge and bolted the doors of her former life behind her,
‘Would anyone dare to follow…would they care enough…?’
This was her last coherent thought… She lay down beside her motionless companion and prepared to sleep…

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Chapter 18. Sleeping Beauty >>