Secret Harmonies Read online

  “Men have asked you too?” It was out before he knew it.

  “Sometimes girls are guides, I didn’t properly explain. I suppose it’s worse for them because women prefer to make their own choice.” After a while, he added, “It’s almost worth it, to be in-country again.”

  “I wish I knew it better.”

  “You’ll learn, if you want. My father was from Earth, he knew it best of anyone in Broken Hill. He used to spend weeks out here, you know? When I was old enough, sometimes I’d go with him. But he really liked to be alone.”

  “I’d like to talk with him, if I could.”

  “He died,” the boy said simply. “Happened two years ago. He loved this world, see, but things in it kept making him ill. Sam’s all the family I’ve left.”

  There was a silence, broken only by twigs popping in the fire, in which de Ramaira thought of and rejected various formulations of polite apology. The larger of Elysium’s two moons hung low above the mountain peaks. The first stars were out, tremblingly enlarged in the soft night air.

  At last Jonthan stood. His dog looked up at once and said, “’On’t, Jonthan.”

  “Stay there, Sam, look after Dr de Ramaira. My rifle’s just there, Doctor, by my saddle, but you shouldn’t need it.” Jonthan wouldn’t meet de Ramaira’s eyes. “Well, good night.”

  “Good night,” de Ramaira echoed as the boy crossed to the tent and lifted its flap. A ray of light shot across trampled grass as he stooped inside. The flap fell. The light went out.

  The dog, Sam, said, “No goo’, yah?”

  De Ramaira reached over and picked up Jonthan’s hunting rifle. “Know how this works?”

  “Manthing. I juss a ’og, ry?”

  “Well, keep a good lookout, then.”

  “Ry. ’ucking well ry.” The dog bared his teeth. De Ramaira couldn’t tell if it was meant as a smile or a display of strength.

  That night, de Ramaira dreamed that he was back on the colony boat, that his coldcoffin had somehow failed and he had woken in transit. Naked, he arose and walked the aisles between the other coldcoffins, row upon row. Inside each was the masked, skeletal figure of an aborigine, but somehow this didn’t seem strange. A tremor went through the pod, the fusion motor cutting in. It was the midpoint of the voyage.

  He awoke with a start to the neon orange of Tau Ceti’s dawn. Jonthan Say looked up from tending the ashy campfire and said, “There’s coffee.”

  “Made from some native crap.” The lieutenant was buckling her pistol belt around her wide hips.

  “Well, I’d like to try it,” de Ramaira said, and rolled out of his thermoblanket. The air was the exact temperature of his skin. It was going to be another hot day.

  The drink was tan and tart, not much like coffee. “If that stuff poisons you, don’t look to me to carry you back to Broken Hill.” The lieutenant stalked off to saddle her horse.

  “She wants to go hunting,” Jonthan said. “If you need help I will be here, Doctor.”

  “You could come and watch the aborigines with me.”

  The boy knuckled the springy helmet of his hair. “I’ve seen them,” he said, after a moment.

  “Even the goddamn settlers know the abos aren’t worth the trouble,” the lieutenant said, and grunted as she pulled the cinch of the saddle’s bellyband tight around her horse.

  “Why must you always denigrate the aborigines, Lieutenant?” de Ramaira asked. “After all, your job is to represent their interests.”

  The lieutenant spat out the dead butt of her cheroot. “I’ll do just that when they tell me what their interests are, instead of freezing as soon as they set eyes on me or anyone else. Listen, the only reason I got this job was because my father had it before me. My younger brother started at the bottom, and already he’s aide to Senator O’Hara—who may well make governor eventually—while I sit in my crummy office or make trips into the stinking wilderness.” Her small eyes fixed de Ramaira as if calculating a trajectory. “You look all you want, Earthman. I’ve got better things to do.” She swung up into the saddle, then added gratuitously, “You watch your ass, Jonthan, while I’m away.”

  De Ramaira spent the whole day at the village, lying in long grass with his eyes closed, watching pictures relayed via the compsim interfaced to his nervous system from the remotes which stitched their trajectories among the mud and grass huts like so many inquisitive mosquitoes. As near as he could judge (apart from the mutilated shaman, sitting in the centre of the village, the aborigines were almost impossible to tell apart—even their black and tan markings were almost identical) there were about three dozen immature adults in the village, about half that number of children. According to Webster there would be at least as many roaming the land, following paths that webbed a territory up to a hundred kilometres in diameter, overlapping with those of half a dozen other villages. They might leave their home village as soon as they were large enough to be independent, six or seven years old, might not return until they had gone through their two or three years as a sexually active male and matured into a female. But always they would return, and in the fall mate with as many males who would accept them before going to what Webster called the Source Cave (another romantic anthropomorphism) to lay their fertilised eggs and die, and be consumed by the hatchlings.

  All of the quasimammalian species on Elysium had some sort of variant on that life cycle. Mire boars did not lay their eggs but went into a kind of hibernation and were consumed from within by their children; sabretooths, the biggest predators on the continent, laid their eggs in the flesh of paralysed prey, and soon. Webster theorised that the necrogenetic life cycles were adaptations to the dryer, colder contemporary climate by animals which had evolved in the swampy, tropical world which Elysium had once been and would be again in some distant era, when inconstant Tau Ceti burned hotter once more. It was a theory de Ramaira intended to test more rigorously, in time. He had plenty of that, at least, the rest of his life. In the meantime, there were the aborigines, and although he was loathe to admit it, he was beginning to tire of simply watching them. He lacked the patience of an ethnologist. Already he’d identified more than a dozen activities, and all corresponded closely to the descriptions given by Webster. As if the aborigines were no more than programmed robots, or like ants and bees, their seemingly purposeful activity merely blind instinct butting at a task until it was done. Only the young showed any semblance of free will. De Ramaira had fantasies of stealing a hatchling, raising it to intelligence. Perhaps it would imprint on him, like Lorenz’s goslings. Well, he’d satisfied himself about the veracity of Webster’s painstakingly detailed observations, but he’d discovered nothing new.

  At last he recalled his remotes and returned to the camp. The boy was sprawled in the shade of the tent; Sam roused himself to say, “McAn’ers no’ ba’, so we slee’.”

  “She’s been gone a long time, hasn’t she?”

  “Yeah. Goo’ an’ long.” Sam growled, and settled back to sleep.

  The sun had bled into the western horizon, Jonthan had relit the campfire and he and de Ramaira had eaten, but still the lieutenant had not returned. Jonthan squatted by the fire and watched the darkness. The firelight playing over his bare, lean torso made him look like something by Michelangelo, de Ramaira thought, glancing up now and then as he read in his book, rummaging through terse descriptions: Twenty days beyond the first foothills we reach a high plain. Lame horse slaughtered for meat. Cold driving rain.

  De Ramaira did not ask what the boy was thinking. He had hardened his heart, the only defence against the affair. He was an observer, nothing more. But at last Jonthan stood and picked up his rifle and said, “I’m going to look for her. You better come too, Doctor.”

  Although the big moon had risen above the Trackless Mountains, its cold radiance laid such a tangle of deceptive shadows over the grassland that darkness would have been preferable. De Ramaira’s horse, stolid enough by day, kept shying at nothing its rider could see, or stumbling heavil
y on the uneven ground. Ahead, Jonthan’s torch threw a nervous oval of yellow light which only occasionally revealed the rustling track Sam pushed through tall grass as he searched out the lieutenant’s faint trail. Once, he lost it for more than ten minutes, and in the hiatus Jonthan, his patience worn out by concern, lost his temper. “Wanna ’racker, ge’ a ’ucking blu’houn’,” the dog grumbled as he cast about. But at last he rediscovered the trail and they set off again.

  And ten minutes later found the lieutenant’s horse standing patiently in the moonlight, reins flipped over its head. Finding the lieutenant took longer, even with Sam’s help. De Ramaira was about to suggest that the horse could have run off after she had fallen somewhere else, when Sam barked. A moment later Jonthan gave an inarticulate cry.

  The lieutenant lay in a kind of nest of dry grass, her face and arms marred by dead white swellings, her eyelids so puffy that she could scarcely open them. As the boy and de Ramaira tended her, she roused enough to mumble fragments of her story. She had disturbed a mire boar in the bottom of a dry ravine and chased it through dense banks of thornbush until her horse would go no further, getting her legs badly scratched up in the process. Then, on the way back to the camp, some kind of fever had taken hold in her, weakening her muscles until she could ride no further.

  Jonthan helped her drink a little water, and then he and de Ramaira lifted her over the saddle of her horse. As they slowly rode back, de Ramaira asked about the cause of the lieutenant’s fall. “Are the thornbushes poisonous, then?”

  The boy, leading the lieutenant’s horse with one hand and guiding his own with the other, said, “Almost all wild plants are poisonous if you eat a piece of them, but I never did hear of anyone being poisoned by a thornbush scratch. I guess she could be more sensitive than most. Like my father.”

  “Allergic, then, not poisoned. We’ll give her some antihistamines, back at the camp.”

  But the camp was a long way off, the going slow. The lieutenant, by now delirious, kept slipping off her saddle. Every ten minutes or so they would have to stop and heave her up again. The third time it happened Jonthan cried out, “She could fucking well die out here!”

  It was the woman’s own damn silly fault, but de Ramaira could hardly tell the boy that. He was about to suggest that they tie her across the saddle when the dog said, “Something ow there. Liss’n.”

  But the humans saw it before they heard anything. No more than a fitful spark at first, far out beneath the huge starry sky, suddenly resolving into twin headlight beams. And then the sound of a cushiontruck came to them, small and clear. The boy grabbed his rifle, pointed it straight up and fired, swore as he fumbled to eject the spent cartridge and insert a new one. But there was no need. His signal had been heard. The truck was turning toward them.

  Kneeling in the flat glare of the cushiontruck’s headlights, de Ramaira inexpertly swabbed the lieutenant’s swollen forearm and jabbed home the ampoule of antihistamine.

  Jonthan, watching him closely, asked, “Will that do any good?”

  “I’m not that sort of doctor. We’ll have to see.”

  The leader of the three cops who had come to their rescue, a rangy young man called Sinclair, scratched at his sun-bleached mop of hair and said disdainfully, “In-country’s no place for keyboarders. You don’t know it, you can get hurt bad.” One of his companions, a woman, said, “No lie,” and laughed. Sinclair added, “You finished now, get her in back. Your camp close by? Lucky for you we were heading for it.”

  The loadbed of the cushiontruck was pitch black beneath its canvas roof. Something shifted in the darkness as de Ramaira and Jonthan lifted the lieutenant into it, and Sinclair shone his torch briefly, showing half a dozen people huddled on a bench. “Can’t let you ride with these, you sit up front with me. Mueller will bring your horses along with the ones we took off of these shiteaters.” Behind them, the woman cop laughed again. It was not a friendly sound.

  When de Ramaira quit the tent at the lakeside camp, he found Sinclair overseeing the unloading of the prisoners. He had eased an antipyretic pill down the lieutenant’s throat and left Jonthan dabbing water on her dry lips, an intimacy that made him uneasy. Now, watching the prisoners as they clumsily clambered down, hobbled by short ankle chains, he asked Sinclair, “Is that really necessary?”

  “Weren’t for the chains they’d be over the Trackless Mountains soon as we turned our backs. They know they’re for the mines.” The blond cop was amused. “Listen, how did you all get in such a mess?”

  Wearily, de Ramaira told Sinclair what he knew about the lieutenant’s accident. The woman cop, Mueller, went from prisoner to prisoner, linking their ankle chains to a staked line. The third member of the patrol, a taciturn man named Kelly, brewed coffee.

  When de Ramaira had finished, Sinclair grinned, showing yellow teeth crowded in a narrow jaw. “She wanted hunting she shoulda come with us,” he said, and eagerly related how he and his companions had tracked down the illegal homestead in a valley high in the mountains, of the ambush which had trapped the runaway settlers. The cops were due to share out the prisoners’ possessions in addition to a credit bonus, and the lieutenant’s misadventure only added to their schadenfreude. They stayed up late, drinking coffee and passing around fat reefers which de Ramaira politely refused, joking in loud voices about their little clean-up action.

  Jonthan stayed in the tent with the lieutenant, Sam sprawled watchfully outside. That night, de Ramaira slept fitfully, waking often on the hard ground beside the ashy fire to see the lamp still burning in the tent, outlining the boy’s figure as he bent in an attitude of devotion.

  Toward dawn, de Ramaira untangled himself from his silvery cocoon and went over to the tent. Jonthan was asleep at last, face smooth and untroubled, fists doubled in his groin. The lieutenant breathed raggedly beside him, still unconscious, the reaction blisters on her arms inflamed. De Ramaira gave her another shot of antihistamine and patched a glucose drip into a vein inside her elbow. The boy awoke and instantly asked, “Is she any better?”

  “She’s fighting it. How are you?”

  The boy shrugged, then touched the lieutenant’s brow. “She’s so hot.”

  “You can leave her long enough to get some breakfast,” de Ramaira said. “If you’re going to look after her, you must look after yourself.”

  “I shouldn’t have let her go off alone,” the boy said.

  “Eat. Then you can wallow in guilt all you want.”

  Their water sack was empty, so they set off for the lake together. One of the prisoners was awake, a burly man with a bald pate and the longest white beard de Ramaira had ever seen, a gaze as fierce as a hawk’s. All around, the sea of red grass stretched silent and still. When they had pushed through the reeds which fringed the lakeshore, Jonthan pointed to ominous black clouds towering over the mountains and said that there was a storm coming down.

  “Well, I suppose we’ll be back in Broken Hill soon enough.”

  “I guess,” Jonthan said, and bent to fill the sack.

  The three cops were up and about by the time de Ramaira and Jonthan returned to the camp. “We’ve plenty of clean water in the truck,” Sinclair called out, but the boy ignored him and went on toward the prisoners. Sinclair said sharply, “They drink when we’ve done. Go look to your keyboarder, kid.”

  De Ramaira said, “There’s no need—”

  Sinclair pushed hair from his eyes. His stare was hard and mean. “They’re my prisoners, friend. Go on, boy.”

  All the prisoners were awake now, the old man with the patriarchal white beard, another man about de Ramaira’s age, and two women and three children, the oldest a girl of twelve or so with a dirty bandage around her head. The patriarch caught de Ramaira’s eye, then deliberately spat on the ground between his boots, looked up again. De Ramaira tried and failed to match his fierce proud gaze and turned away, ashamed.

  It took the cops more than an hour to feed the prisoners and load them onto the truck, and by the
time they set off a fine rain had begun to fall. De Ramaira sat in the cab of the cushiontruck, turning to watch the aborigine village dwindle into the landscape. Kelly whistled tunelessly as he steered the vehicle along the narrow track. Sinclair and Mueller were following on horseback, leading the string of spare mounts, and Jonthan Say rode with them; Sinclair hadn’t allowed him to ride in the back of the truck with the prisoners and lieutenant McAnders. The rain fell harder, sweeping across empty red grassland. Lightning flickered like whips at the level horizon.

  After a while, de Ramaira ventured, “Will this get worse?”

  “Maybe so.”

  And a little later: “This reminds me of Kansas, you know. On Earth.”

  “Yeah? Fancy.”

  After that riposte, de Ramaira abandoned any attempt at conversation and simply watched rain and grass trawl past, thinking of the aborigines and his failure to understand them. Perhaps they are only animals after all, he thought, but it gave him no comfort. He was beginning to understand the frustration which had driven Webster to his extravagant fantasies of Shamans and Source Caves and secret underground rituals.

  The convoy began to descend into the first of the forested valleys, following a narrow trail made treacherous by the rain that poured straight down between the towering trees. At last Sinclair rode up to the cab and yelled through the side window, “Go on before it gets worse, Kelly. Mueller and the kid and me, we’ll catch up.”

  Kelly instantly gunned the cushiontruck and it leaped forward. De Ramaira watched with helpless fascination as large bare trunks whipped past scant centimetres from the sides of the truck. The windscreen was blinded by rain. The truck scythed over a swollen stream at the bottom of the valley, crested the ridge beyond. And then the trail vanished in a tangle of boulders and mud and uprooted trees. Kelly blew air from the truck’s skirt but there was no way to stop in time. Sliding sideways, the truck slammed into a fallen tree, spun nose-first into another. De Ramaira pitched forward, banged his head on the windscreen. Then there was only the sound of rain and running water.