Jay let out a squeal of excitement and kicked her legs in the air. “Yes! Thank you, Father.”
He finished tying his laces and stood up. “Don’t mention the starship, Jay. When the navy comes it will be in a mighty flotilla, with their exhaust plumes so strong and bright they will turn night into day. Nobody will mistake it. But in the meantime we must not pour cold water on the others’ hopes.”
“I understand, Father. I’m not as dumb as them.”
He ruffled her hair, which she pretended not to like, wriggling away.
“Come along now,” he said. “Breakfast first. Then we’ll get our expedition sorted out.”
“I suppose Russ will come with us?” she asked in a martyred voice.
“Yes, he will. And stop thinking uncharitable thoughts.”
The children already had most of the bedding off the floor. Two boys were sweeping up the dried grass from the sack mattresses (Must find a better replacement, Horst thought). Eustice’s voice could be heard through the open door, yelling instructions to the children airing the linen outside.
Horst helped to pull the big table into the middle of the room. Andria’s team were scurrying round the kitchen corner, tending the equipment and the meal. The big urn was just starting to boil, and the three IR plates were heating up the boiling pans ready for the eggs.
Once again Horst gave a fast prayer of thanks that the solar-powered equipment functioned so well. It was easy enough for the children to use without hurting themselves, and most of them had helped their mothers with the cooking before. All they needed was some direction, as they did in every task he set them. He didn’t like to think how he would have coped if the homestead hadn’t been empty.
It took another fifteen minutes before Andria’s cooking party were ready to serve breakfast. Several of the eggs Shona brought back were broken, so Horst himself scrambled them up in a pan on a spare IR plate. It was easier to feed Jill, the toddler, that way.
The tea was finally ready, and the eggs boiled. Everyone lined up with their mug and cutlery and eggcup, and filed past the kitchen bar which doubled as a serving counter. For a few wonderful minutes the room was actually quiet as the children drank, and cracked their eggs open, and pulled faces as they munched the dry oatmeal biscuits, dunking them in the tea to try and soften them up first. Horst looked round his extended family and tried not to feel frightened at the responsibility. He adored them in a way he had never done with his parishioners.
After breakfast it was wash time, with the extra two tanks he had installed in the rafter space struggling to provide enough hot water.
Horst inspected them all to make sure they were clean and that they had jell-rinsed their teeth. That way he could have a few words with each of them, make them feel special, and wanted, and loved. It also gave him the chance to watch for any sign of illness. So far there had been remarkably little, a few colds, and one nasty outbreak of diarrhoea a fortnight ago, which he suspected was from a batch of jam that had come from another homestead.
The morning would follow its standard pattern while he and Jay were away.
Clothes to be washed in the stream and hung out to dry. Hay to be taken into the cows, corn to be measured out into the chicken-run dispensers (they never did that very well), lunch to be prepared. When he went away it was always the packets of protein-balanced meals from Earth—all they had to do was put them in the microwave for ninety seconds, and nothing could go wrong. Sometimes he allowed a group to pick elwisie fruit from the trees on the edge of the jungle. But not today; he gave Danny a stern lecture that no one was to wander more than fifty metres from the cabin, and someone must be on watch the whole time in case a kroclion turned up.
The plains carnivores hadn’t often plagued the homesteads, but his didactic memory showed what a menace the lumbering animals could be. The boy nodded earnestly, eager to prove his worth.
Horst was still suffering from stings of doubt when he led the group’s one horse from its stable. He trusted Jay to be left in charge, she acted far older than her years. But he had to hunt for meat, there were hardly any fish in the nearby stream. If they stuck to the cache of food in his bedroom it would be gone within ten days; it existed to supplement what he killed and stored in the freezer, and acted as an emergency reserve just in case he ever did get ill. And Jay deserved a break from the homestead, she hadn’t been away since they arrived.
He took two other children with him as well as Jay. Mills, an energetic eight-year-old from Schuster village, and Russ, a seven-year-old who simply refused to ever leave Horst’s side. The one and only time he had gone hunting without him the boy had run off into the savannah and it had taken the whole afternoon to find him.
Jay was grinning and waving and playing up to her jealous friends when they set off. The savannah grass quickly rose up around their legs; Horst had made Jay wear a pair of trousers instead of her usual shorts. A thick layer of mist started to lift from the waving stalks and blades now the sun was rising higher into the sky. Haze broke the visibility down to less than a kilometre.
“This humidity is worse than the Juliffe back in Durringham,” Jay exclaimed, waving her hand frantically in front of her face.
“Cheer up,” Horst said. “It might rain later.”
“No, it won’t.”
He glanced round to where she was walking in the track he was making through the stiff grass. Bright eyes gleamed mischievously at him from below the brim of her tatty felt sun-hat.
“How do you know?” he asked. “It always rains on Lalonde.”
“No, it doesn’t. Not any more, not during the day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you noticed? It only ever rains at night now.”
Horst gave her a perplexed stare. He was about to tell her not to be silly. But then he couldn’t remember the last time he’d rushed indoors to shelter from one of Lalonde’s ferocious downpours—a week, ten days? He had an uncomfortable feeling it might even have been longer. “No, I hadn’t noticed,” he said temperately.
“That’s all right, you’ve had a lot on your mind lately.”
“I certainly have.” But the chirpy mood was broken now.
I should have noticed, he told himself. But then who regards the weather as something suspicious? He was sure it was important though, he just couldn’t think how, or why. Surely they couldn’t change the weather.
Horst made it a rule that he was never away for more than four hours.
That put seven other homestead cabins within reach (eight counting the ruins of the Skibbow building) as well as allowing enough time to shoot a danderil or some vennals. Once he had shot a pig that had run wild, and they’d eaten ham and bacon for the rest of the week. It was the most delicious meat he’d ever tasted, terrestrial beasts were pure ambrosia compared to the coarse and bland aboriginal animals.
There was hardly anything of any value left in the cabins now, he had stripped them pretty thoroughly. After another couple of visits there would be little point in returning. He caught himself before brooding turned to melancholia; he wouldn’t need to go back, the navy would come.
And don’t ever think anything different.
Jay bounded up to walk beside him, adjusting her stride to match his. She gave him a sideways smile, then returned her gaze to the front, perfectly content.
Horst felt his own tensions seeping away. Having her so close was like the time right after that dreadful night. She had screamed and fought him as he pulled her away from Ruth and Jackson Gael. He had forced her through the village towards the jungle, only once looking back. He saw it all then, in the light of the fire which pillaged their sturdy tranquil village, snuffing out their ambitions of a fair future as swiftly as rain dissolved the mud castles the children built on the riverbank. Satan’s army was upon them. More figures were marching out of the dark shadows into the orange light of the flames, creatures that even Dante in his most lucid fever-dreams had never conceived, and the screams o
f the ensnared villagers rose in a crescendo.
Horst had never let Jay look back, not even after they reached the trees.
He knew then that waiting for the hunting party to return was utter folly. Laser rifles could not harm the demon legions Lucifer in his wrath had loosed upon the land.
They had carried on far into the jungle, until a numbed, petrified Jay had finally collapsed. Dawn found them huddled together in the roots of a qualtook tree, soaked and shivering from a downpour in the night. When they eased their way cautiously back towards Aberdale and hid themselves in the vines ringing the clearing they saw a village living a dream.
Several buildings were razed to the ground. People walked by without paying them a glance. People Horst knew, his flock, who should have been overwrought by the damage. That was when he knew Satan had won, his demons had possessed the villagers. What he had seen at the Ivet ceremony had been repeated here, again and again.
“Where’s Mummy?” Jay asked miserably.
“I have no idea,” he said truthfully. There were fewer people than there should have been, maybe seventy or eighty out of the population of five hundred. They acted as though devoid of purpose, walking slowly, looking round in befogged surprise, saying nothing.
The children were the exception. They ran around between the somnolent, shuffling adults, crying and shouting. But they were ignored, or sometimes cuffed for their trouble. Horst could hear their distraught voices from his sanctuary, deepening his own torment. He watched as a girl, Shona, trailed after her mother pleading for her to say something.
She tugged insistently at the trousers, trying to get her to stop. For a moment it looked like she had succeeded. Her mother turned round.
“Mummy,” Shona squealed. But the woman raised a hand, and a blast of white fire streamed from her fingers to smite the girl full in the face.
Horst cringed, crossing himself instinctively as she dropped like a stone, not even uttering a cry. Then anger poured through him at his own cravenness. He stood up and strode purposefully out of the trees.
“Father,” Jay squeaked behind him. “Father, don’t.”
He paid her no heed. In a world gone mad, one more insanity would make no difference. He had sworn himself to follow Christ, a long time ago, but it meant more to him now than it ever had. And a child lay suffering before him. Father Horst Elwes was through with evasions and hiding.
Several of the adults stopped to watch as he marched into the village, Jay scuttling along behind him. Horst pitied them for the husks they were. The human state of grace had been drained from their bodies. He could tell, accepting the gift of knowledge as his right. Six or seven villagers formed a loose group standing between him and Shona, their faces known but not their souls.
One of the women, Brigitte Hearn, never a regular churchgoer, laughed at him, her arm rising. A ball of white fire emerged from her open fingers and raced towards him. Jay screamed, but Horst stood perfectly still, face resolute. The fireball started to break apart a couple of metres away from him, dimming and expanding. It burst with a wet crackle as it touched him, tiny strands of static burrowing through his filthy sweatshirt. They stung like hornets across his belly, but he refused to reveal his pain to the semicircle of watchers.
“Do you know what this is?” Horst thundered. He lifted the stained and muddied silver crucifix that hung round his neck, brandishing it at Brigitte Hearn as though it was a weapon. “I am the Lord’s servant, as you are the Devil’s. And I have His work to do. Now stand aside.”
A spasm of fright crossed Brigitte Hearn’s face as the silver cross was shaken in front of her. “I’m not,” she said faintly. “I’m not the Devil’s servant. None of us are.”
“Then stand aside. That girl is badly hurt.”
Brigitte Hearn glanced behind her, and took a couple of steps to one side. The other people in the group hurriedly parted, their faces apprehensive, one or two walked away. Horst gestured briefly at Jay to follow him, and went over to the fallen girl. He grimaced at the singed and blackened skin of her face. Her pulse was beating wildly. She had probably gone into shock, he decided. He scooped her up in his arms, and started for the church.
“I had to come back,” Brigitte Hearn said as Horst walked away. Her body was all hunched up, eyes brimming with tears. “You don’t know what it’s like. I had to.”
“It?” Horst asked impatiently. “What is it?”
“Death.”
Horst shuddered, almost breaking his stride. Jay looked round fearfully at the woman.
“Four hundred years,” Brigitte Hearn called out falteringly. “I died four hundred years ago. Four hundred years of nothing.”
Horst barged into the small infirmary at the back of the church, and laid Shona down on the wooden table which doubled as an examination bed. He snatched the medical processor block from its shelf and applied a sensor pad to the nape of her neck. The metabolic display appeared as he described her injuries to the processor. Horst read the results and gave the girl a sedative, then started spraying a combination analgesic and cleansing fluid over the burns.
“Jay,” he said quietly. “I want you to go into my room and fetch my rucksack from the cupboard. Put in all the packets of preprocessed food you can find, then the tent I used when we first arrived, and anything else you think will be useful to camp out in the jungle—the little fission blade, my portable heater, that kind of stuff. But leave some space for my medical supplies. Oh, and I’ll need my spare boots too.”
“Are we leaving?”
“Yes.”
“Are we going to Durringham?”
“I don’t know. Not straight away.”
“Can I go and fetch Drusilla?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea. She’ll be better off here than tramping through the jungle with us.”
“All right. I understand.”
He heard her moving about in his room as he worked on Shona. The younger girl’s nose was burnt almost down to the bone, and the metabolic display said only one retina was functional. Not for the first time he despaired the lack of nanonic medical packages; a decent supply would hardly have bankrupted the Church.
He had flushed the dead skin from Shona’s burns as best he could, coating them in a thin layer of corticosteroid foam to ease the inflammation, and was binding her head with a quantity of his dwindling stock of epithelium membrane when Jay came back in carrying his rucksack, It was packed professionally, and she had even rolled up his sleeping-bag.
“I got some stuff for myself,” she said, and held up a bulging shoulder-bag.
“Good girl. You didn’t make the bag too heavy, did you? You might have to carry it a long way.”
“No, Father.”
Someone knocked timidly on the door post. Jay shrank into the corner of the infirmary.
“Father Horst?” Brigitte Hearn poked her head in. “Father, they don’t want you here. They say they’ll kill you, that you can’t defend yourself against all of them.”
“I know. We’re leaving.”
“Oh.”
“Will they let us leave?”
She swallowed and looked over her shoulder. “Yes. I think so. They don’t want a fight. Not with you, not with a priest.”
Horst opened drawers in the wooden cabinet at the back of the infirmary, and started shoving his medical equipment into the rucksack. “What are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said woefully.
“You said you had died?”
“Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Ingrid Veenkamp, I lived on Bielefeld when it was a stage one colony world, not much different to this planet.” She twitched a smile at Jay.
“I had two girls. Pretty, like you.”
“And where is Brigitte Hearn now?”
“Here, in me. I feel her. She is like a dream.”
“Possession,” Horst said.
“No.”
“Yes! I saw the red demon sprite.
I witnessed the rite, the obscenity Quinn Dexter committed to summon you here.”
“I’m no demon,” the woman insisted. “I lived. I am human.”
“No more. Leave this body you have stolen. Brigitte Hearn has a right to her own life.”
“I can’t! I’m not going back there. Not to that.”
Horst took a grip on his trembling hands. Thomas had known this moment, he thought, when the disciple doubted his Lord’s return, when in prideful arrogance he refused to believe until he had seen the print of nails in His hand. “Believe,” he whispered. “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through His name.”
The Brigitte/Ingrid woman bowed her head.
Horst asked the question that should never be asked: “Where? Where, damn you!”
“Nowhere. There is nothing for us. Do you hear? Nothing!”
“You lie.”
“There is nothing, just emptiness. I’m sorry.” She took an unsteady breath, seemingly gathering up a remnant of dignity. “You must leave now. They are coming back.”
Horst shut the flap on his rucksack and sealed it. “Where are the rest of the villagers?”
“Gone. They hunt fresh bodies for other souls trapped in the beyond, it has become their quest. I haven’t the stomach for it, nor have the others who remained in Aberdale. But you take care, Father. Your spirit is hale, but you could never withstand one of us for long.”
“They want more people to possess?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“Together we are strong. Together we can change what is. We can destroy death, Father. We shall bring eternity into existence here on this planet, perhaps even across the entire Confederation. I shall stay as I am for all time now; ageless, changeless. I am alive again, I won’t give that up.”
“This is lunacy,” he said.
“No. This is wonder, it is our miracle.”
Horst pulled his rucksack onto his back, and picked Shona up. Several adults had started to gather around the church. He walked down the steps pointedly disregarding them, Jay pressing into his side. They stared at him, but no one made a move. He turned and headed for the jungle, mildly surprised to see Ingrid Veenkamp walking with him.