‘Are you tired? Do you people sleep?’ Claude asked.
‘Yes. Doesn’t everything?’ The waft jumped up and down in front of him, spinning, chittering, its skin an astounding shade of daffodil yellow.
Claude turned his back. ‘Let’s get one thing straight, Vava. You can’t make me glow, whatever that is. My skin’s not darker than Guldron’s because I’m unhappier than she is. Humans are all different colours, but we can’t change the one we’re born with, at least not naturally. Understand?’
Vava stopped jumping. ‘No. Neither do you. Can I have some of that?’ It pointed to his drink.
‘I don’t think so. I’m going to sleep now. What do you want to do?’
‘Sit and listen for a while. I’ll sleep here later. Goodnight.’ It skipped to the sofa and sat with its forearms on the plump backrest, staring out of the window at the moonlight.
Claude sighed and went into his bedroom.
In the morning, Claude tried to persuade the waft to stay in his living quarters. Vava didn’t seem to understand what he was saying, which Claude found suspicious in view of the little creature’s astounding grasp of human speech the previous night. He wondered if the Leelees were as honest as Guldron thought.
‘Stay here!’ Claude commanded as he backed towards the door that led to his offices.
Vava sped past him emitting a series of squeaks, which to Claude’s ears sounded ominously jubilant.
By mid-morning, the vivacity of the Leelee had caused his head to spin. Unable to concentrate on his work because of the antics of his guest, he stabbed a few pause buttons and sat back to have a hot drink. The waft was at his side in an instant, the writhings of its features resembling the palsy of some terrible disease. Claude grimaced and turned away.
‘Why?’ the waft asked.
Claude looked back and found his expression parodied repeatedly. ‘Stop it!’
The waft looked perplexed. ‘But why?’ it said and tentatively mimicked the expression one more time.
Claude caught on. ‘Your conversation makes me dizzy,’ he said.
Before the Leelee could make a response the comm buzzer sounded on Claude’s desk. He tapped out the reply code. ‘Yes?’
‘Iveley Guldron wonders if you have a few minutes to spare,’ the tinny voice of his secretary replied; a creature possibly even less entertaining than Guldron.
Claude silently groaned and rubbed his face. ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to tell her I’m up to my neck in it until this afternoon,’ he said, averting his gaze from the silent screen in front of him, the empty correspondence racks. ‘After lunch, OK?’
‘Very well, suzerain Enquito.’ The connection was broken.
Claude shook his head.
‘You have gone darker!’ the waft accused.
Before he could stop himself, Claude’s glance flicked down to his hands, where, naturally, he could see no difference at all. ‘No, Vava, I haven’t. Be useful and get me a top-up from that machine over there. Have one yourself if you like.’
The waft took his cup, but its gaze never left his face. ‘You spoke mistakenly,’ it said. ‘You deliberately spoke mistakenly.’ There was a kind of wonder in its voice and its features writhed in slow, folding gestures.
Claude realised it was referring to how he had put Guldron off seeing him that morning. ‘Clearly, you haven’t spent much time with humans,’ he said with a smile, a smile that, undeniably, covered an insidious twinge of shame caused by the open expression of innocent shock on the waft’s face.
‘Why didn’t you say what she couldn’t see? That she damps your glow and makes your head sleepy?’
Claude had to laugh. ‘I don’t think Guldron would appreciate that, Vava.’
‘What do you mean?’
Claude sighed. He remembered what Guldron had told him about the Leelee inability to dissemble. He was too weary to try and explain. ‘It’s just something we do. Now forget it,’ he said.
The Leelee’s attention had now been taken by the ornament beside Claude’s console. It picked the thing up and again exhibited signs of shock and dismay.
‘What is it this time?’ Claude asked, trying to take the glass away from it.
The Leelee stepped backwards, clutching the ornament firmly. It had gone very pale. ‘No glow, no glow at all!’ it said and held the glass up to the light, shaking its head in disbelief. ‘You haven’t used it!’ it cried accusingly. ‘No wonder you don’t glow!’
‘Used it? Give it to me, Vava. What do you mean?’
The waft put the ornament into Claude’s hand and leaned close to him, staring into it. The smell and aura of the creature in such close proximity caused Claude to break out into a sweat. He lifted the ornament up and gazed through it; an amorphous lump of cloudy glass.
‘We give them to all new humans,’ Vava said. ‘We thought they helped you. Hasn’t anyone taught you how to use it?’
‘No. I don’t think anyone here knows how, Vava. Perhaps you people didn’t explain properly how we should. What is it? I thought it was just an ornament.’
Vava twittered in what Claude took to be amusement. ‘Not very ornamental at the moment is it? It’s an eeookha, suzerain.’
‘Eeookha?’ Claude repeated slowly. ‘And what’s that?’
‘It stores your glow so you can use it in darker times. We all have one. Eeookhas are things that go back a long long way.’
‘And how does it store one’s glow exactly?’ There was no evidence of even slight luminosity in the glass at present.
‘I could show you,’ Vava said, hesitating, ‘But, because it’s your eeookha, I really shouldn’t. It would be... intrusive, like... like....’ It held up the empty cup. ‘...like spitting in your drink. See?’
Claude laughed. ‘I don’t mind. Here, show me.’
‘Very well, then. I’ll fill it for you and then you try to take it, but you might not be able to use my glow... you’re so different.’
Watching with perplexed interest, Claude handed the waft his ornament. It screwed up its eyes, grimaced, leered, twitched and then calmed. There was a new smell in the room, that Claude could never have described, and a weird feeling as of electricity brushing the skin. Then the waft smiled and Claude looked away from its face to the ornament sitting in its hands.
‘Satan’s teeth!’ he said, almost in a whisper. The glass was glowing with a thousand turning motes of brightness and colour. ‘How did you do that?’
‘Simple. Try taking some. I don’t think it will harm you.’
‘How?’
The waft twitched. ‘Think it in. I’ve made it loose. It shouldn’t be hard.’
‘OK.’ Claude laughed nervously and took the glass in his hands. It felt neither warm nor cold. After staring at it for a moment, he looked up and shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he said, sneakily relieved.
The waft grimaced and shook its head. ‘Not trying,’ it said. ‘Make your head empty. Think it in.’
‘Like a kind of meditation?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I think I get it.’ He cleared his throat, settled himself and stared once more into the sparkling glass. Attempting to dismiss any misgivings, he calmed his mind. For a while, nothing happened, other than the feel of the glass weight in his hands; the shifting glow, became soothing, almost hypnotic. Then, as true relaxation spread through Claude’s body, an alarming heat suffused his face, which he realised was coming from the glass. Suddenly the whole room was blotted from his sight by a flash of brightness as if he’d been smacked sharply in both eyes. He cried out and dropped the ornament, flopping back in his chair, then forwards, clutching his face. Gripped by confusion but not pain, he did not think about how it had been rather stupid to do what Vava had asked.
‘You alright?’ the waft said, pawing his shoulder in quick, birdlike gestures.
Claude shook his head. His vision was clearing. Alright? Am I? What happened? Suddenly, he began to laugh. ‘Alright? I feel wonderful!’ he cried.
> The waft clapped its hands and skipped on the spot. ‘Yes you do. You’re glowing, glowing. You’re not dark anymore.’
Again Claude looked briefly at his hands. No change. He laughed once more. ‘Vava, I don’t think you meant the colour of my skin when you said I was dark, did you?’
The waft shook its head, uncomprehending. ‘You’re glowing now anyway,’ it said.
‘And glowing is... is happiness, right? And contentment and well-being and all that?’
The waft wrinkled its nose. ‘If that’s how you feel it, then it is,’ it said.
‘That’s how I feel!’ Claude said.
‘You’re not so sorry you came here now,’ Vava told him. ‘You’re saying it. With your glow. I’m glad, and Zozozo will be pleased with me. We didn’t realise you weren’t using your eeookhas. No wonder your faces are so quiet.’
Claude, who currently felt like skipping, dancing and being utterly childlike for a while, realised that Guldron probably wouldn’t want to encourage the use of eeookhas within the complex, even if she knew what they could do. Exuberance might interfere with the work schedules and that would never do for Ms. Guldron. He was pleased he’d proved her wrong about never being able to communicate properly with the Leelees. Pure joy for living was a sentiment that must be the same the universe over.
Vava leaned over Claude’s shoulder and deftly turned off his console. Clearly, it had been watching him work far more closely than he’d thought. ‘Time for that later,’ it said. ‘Let’s celebrate for a while’ It held out its hands. Before taking hold of them, Claude dimmed the windows and locked the doors. Somehow he thought it more prudent not to share his new-found source of enjoyment with Guldron and her like just yet. It would not be approved of, and certainly not understood. Therefore, subtle handling of the subject was called for.
Such matters were indeed for later perusal, however. For now, bathing in a delightful intoxication, Claude allowed the Leelee to lead him in a wild, crazy dance. It seemed, if he listened hard enough, there was music to dance to, music from outside; the call of birds, the pulse of wind, even the mechanical thump of the complex’s machinery. Spinning in circles around the spacious office, they shared the warmth of Vava’s glow which seemed to hang between them like a luminous ball. Claude was conscious of the vastness of Sheller’s Brake beyond the complex walls; a place he wanted to explore and be part of. Almost drunk with the explosion of joy inside him, he saw himself as a benevolent mind from beyond the dancing moons with whom the Leelees could share new sensations, experiencing through him the variety of other worlds. From them, he could learn to understand the world that had become his home. The strange calls of the flyers would speak to him too and the wriggling of waftish features would become a language he could speak. The humans of Leeleefam had ignored the richness of the planet they were occupying for too long, so obsessed were they with their desire for commercial success. It occurred to Claude that maybe, just maybe, someone high-up on Abbey Five had thought about this. Could it be possible that it was why the gregarious Claude Enquito had been offered the position in the first place? Guldron could get on with juggling her precious figures and sending out the shipments on time; Claude felt there was far more important work on Sheller’s Brake for him to do.
Eventually, he and Vava exhausted themselves and sat on the floor together in the underwater gloom of the shuttered office.
‘Tomorrow, I shall begin showing you how to fill the eeookha yourself,’ Vava said. ‘Then you need never be dark again. And you will stay here, won’t you?’ Its voice was eager and its slim hands reached for his. ‘Zozozo saw the glow inside you all trodden on and spoken sharply to and not allowed out. She saw this and knew you’d be the best person who’d ever come here from the other places in the sky. We want to be friends, Claude, but nobody will speak to us. Not until you, and we all know you will.’
Claude picked up the ornament from where it had rolled under a chair. It still emitted a soft radiance and he could see within it the vague form of a tall man in ceremonial robes. A flaw in the glass? Imagination? Perhaps. He reached out and patted Vava’s face, who chittered and rubbed against his hand, kitten-like.
The point of contact is joy, he thought, not smug tolerance, or even a patronising attempt at understanding, just utter, child-like joy.
‘We’ll learn to talk,’ he said and, for a moment, the eeookha glowed brighter with the faintest shade of purest blue.
The Rust Islands
I found it on my second dig, in the catacombs near Samedi Lake. It was the colour that caught my eye: a small green thing.
I lifted it from the rubble; a cylinder that left a verdigris powder on my gloves. For just a moment, I experienced a sense of déjà vu that vanished even before I could attempt to fix a memory on it. At first, I thought the little artefact was just another holovid chip: more dim, fragmented nostalgia that would depress rather than entertain; wrinkled memories of the past, when this world had been more than just a graveyard rubbish heap.
I tucked the cylinder into my belt-pouch and then forgot about it.
I was delving around on my own, beneath the harsh glare of porta-lites. There were no skull faces watching me, no bones in the darkness. We called that place the catacombs, but it had once been a city, now buried under mountains of refuse and hastily constructed buildings that had fallen during the last Great Ecological War. Abos scuttled on its surface like cock-roaches. Anything of interest and value had been plundered centuries ago.
Recently, public interest had been rekindled in old Earth, and a team from the Historical Facility on the Organic had, after a struggle, secured funding to make a journey through space to come and sift over the remains. I was a member of that team. But what we’d found was just like the great pyramids of legend; empty plundered tombs. We could learn only from the shadows that civilisation had left behind in the sand.
Around our camp, from horizon to horizon, stretched the rusting hulks of the long-dead city. We found the climate far too hot. Little grew on the rubble, although it was teeming with hundreds of tiny grey cats. The abos worshipped them and, for food, hunted goliath spiders, mice and rats. The natives looked like zombies - ash-covered and dead-eyed - and they had little interest in us. We had not been greeted as gods, which I think disappointed Elenov, our team leader, a little. When we told them we’d come from a country, far up in the sky, they simply shrugged and said they thought many people lived that way. They could not understand our eagerness about the past and gave crazy answers to our questions. There was no curiosity in them, whatsoever. They seemed dull creatures - not at all how we’d expected - and it was hard for some of us to accept we shared a common heritage with these people.
Avoiding everyone, I went back to the compound at sunset and sneaked into my cabin. Our camp consisted of a row of rover trucks, which doubled as caravans - the living space was incredibly cramped. We had a power generator and a canteen hut. The showers didn’t always work and there were insects and monstrous arachnids forever scuttling round them.
We’d been working on the site for months and I’d started to get home-sick for the Organic; it seemed so far away, it might not exist. I wanted to walk beneath the stars amid the lush fern-trees. I wanted to feel the universe spin around me. I didn’t need dirty heat and the threat of disease. I’m an archaeologist, used to working on many different colonised worlds. Some I’d seen had been more hostile than old Earth, yet here, the weight of history pressed down upon me. Would all our worlds eventually come to this? My only comfort was the knowledge that the retrieval bus was already on its way through sub-space to pick us up. Our sojourn was nearly over.
I needed a shower, and as I tossed my trousers onto the fold-out chair beneath the tiny window, the little cylinder fell out and rolled across the floor. I looked at it lying there in the red rays of the sinking sun. It seemed somehow significant. The moment was silence itself, but for the hum of the cooling unit, and the faint call of one of my team-workers through
the thick lens of my window.
I left the cylinder on the floor, while I indulged myself with a welcome cooling shower. Then, naked and wet, I sidled to my desk where my jacket was lying, and took my AI, Lucrezia, out of the deepest pocket. Once I’d set her on the table, she took form by steadying herself on limbs that spidered out from her belly, then flipping out her monitor and shaking it until it became firm.
I showed her the cylinder. ‘Can you read this?’
Delicately, she extended two arms that were feathered with dainty, clawed clamps, and took the cylinder from my hand. Inquisitive antennae snaked out and quivered over the object’s surface. She pulled it towards her mandibles to taste its atomic structure.
‘What is it?’ I asked her, walking to the cooling unit behind the door, to find myself a carton of guava juice.
Lucrezia hummed a little. It’s a quirk she has, evidence of her personality. ‘It’s a recording built into a playback system. Special recording, for direct neural experience. There are minute sockets set into either end.’
‘More yesteryears pleasureware,’ I said, slamming the cool-unit’s door. It had a tendency to swing open again.
‘I don’t believe so.’ Lucrezia gently turned the cylinder in her mandibles.
‘Then what?’
Lucrezia extended an arm towards me. ‘That is for us to find out.’
I sat on the chair by the desk, plonked the carton of juice down next to Lucrezia, and took the cylinder from her. I turned it in my fingers. It looked corroded, dead. ‘Could it be an historical archive?’ The possibility was exciting. So far, we’d found nothing that had really told us anything about the civilisation that had once thrived in this place. The abos had scavenged everything, twisted it into something new, or else destroyed it.
Lucrezia hummed. ‘I estimate that is very likely.’
‘Then can we jack into it? It looks damaged.’
‘The outer casing is marred, but I estimate the chip itself is mostly intact.’
I shrugged. ‘OK, let’s see, shall we?’ My heart had increased its pace. I don’t know what I was expecting.