Vulpheous

By Eric Brown

T

he landscape that enclosed Connery and his campsite was stark and inhospitable - the crater of a long-extinct volcano a kilometre wide, its inner walls encircling a perfect disc of still, green water. A fitting venue, Connery thought, for the final act of a drama that had lasted five years. For that long he had tracked the last existing Vulpheous on Tartarus, at first following no more than folk tales and rumours, later picking up the trail of the creature sighted by mariners and islanders across the southern sea from the continent of Iriarte to the archipelago of Demargé. Now he had traced it to its lair, its final resting place before the sun went supernova.

Three days ago he had pitched his dome and set up his equipment, and it was while he was working in the intense heat of the early morning that his hopes were confirmed. According to the fisher-folk now evacuated from the islands of the chain, the last remaining Vulpheous on the planet had emerged from the sea a year ago, scaled the incline of the volcano, and disappeared over the side in search of its aeons-old spawning lake. Connery had taken their stories lightly - he’d been disappointed too many times in the past - but, while installing his monitors beside the water, he was alerted by a bubbling disturbance on the surface of the lake. He turned in time to see the grey bulk of the creature’s huge head break the surface, water cascading from its hide in scintillating cataracts. He stared in awe and exquisite relief for a minute while the Vulpheous took in air to sustain it in its submarine lair for four to five days. Then the creature ejected a spume of water like a cockade from its cranial blow-hole, and submerged, leaving the lake serene and undisturbed. For the next three nights Connery worked hard erecting his equipment in preparation for the creature’s next appearance.

Now he stepped from the air-conditioned coolness of his dome and was enveloped by the cloying evening heat. He wore only shorts and boots, and within seconds his exposed skin was covered with an irritating film of sweat. He walked down the incline, through a rattling scree of pumice, towards the water’s edge.

These days the sun was so huge and emitted so much light that it was no longer discernible as a sphere: it filled the sky during the day with a pure white glow, blinding to look upon. During the pulsing hours of night, the heavens were a gaudy, beribboned display of magenta and tangerine strata, and this was when Connery preferred to work. It was hot, even then, but not as hot as the flesh-burning, furnace heat of day.

He stepped beneath the sun-reflective canopy where he stored his equipment, found the air-tanks and strapped them to his back. He exchanged his boots for flippers and picked up the underwater flashlight, then fitted his mask and stepped from the canopy into the water.

It was a thick, warm soup that offered no relief from the twilight humidity. As he waded further into the lake, the gradient of the slope quickly taking the water level past his knees and groin, the algae seemed to suck at his flesh. Suppressing a shiver of disgust, he switched on the flashlight and kicked out from the shore. Within seconds he had penetrated the mat of algae and was swimming through an aqueous, jade-green realm, the water becoming cooler as he descended.

For ten years after Madelaine’s death he had lived alone, the first five spent exploring many of the Thousand Worlds - less, he realised later, through a genuine curiosity than a desire to fill his time and thoughts with anything other than his grief. Then, after something told to him by a physician on Solomon’s Reach, he had come to Tartarus in search of the Vulpheous. Once more his life had a reason, a goal.

When he reached the area where he judged the creature had risen three days ago, he turned his flashlight into the depths and swam after its widening beam. It had occurred to him that the Vulpheous might not surface for a second time in exactly the same position. If it re-emerged at another part of the lake, then all his preparations would be in vain. It would be a tragedy if he wasted valuable time chasing the creature around the lake after assuming it to be so captive a target. The last TWC evacuation ship left Tartarus in three months, and Connery planned to be on it.

In the illumination of his flashlight, tiny silver fish turned as one like a million scintillating components of some larger, gestalt creature. The Vulpheous was not occupying the lake bed directly beneath the place where it had surfaced.

Connery manoeuvred himself into a standing position, moved his right flipper and turned the flashlight in a great probing circle. He was almost back where he’d started when the cone of light picked out what appeared to be a colossal boulder. He started, shocked, despite himself. He’d seen pix of the creature, even seen its great head in the flesh the other day, but nothing had prepared him for the fact of its size. Physically it resembled a sea elephant, though Connery estimated the Vulpheous to be fully twenty times bigger. It reposed on the lake bed in dolorous obesity, something tragic in its isolation. According to the islanders it was a female which, unable to be impregnated, had returned anyway to the place of its birth, not to spawn young but to die in the imminent supernova. Amid the piled flesh that was the creature’s head, Connery could see two tiny, bright yellow eyes, staring out at him. He felt a great sadness then, almost a regret at what he was doing.

He switched off his flashlight and rose quickly to the surface of the lake. The water warmed as he swam, and when he broke through the raft of algae he felt the heat of the night hot on his skin. From the pouch in his shorts he pulled an inflatable buoy, activated it and left the bulbous red and yellow marker on the algae above the creature’s position. When he returned to camp, he would recalibrate his equipment to the position of the buoy.

As he swam towards the shore and his camp, he thought of Madelaine. Upon his arrival on Tartarus, he had made a promise to her memory - a ridiculous and romantic thing to do, which his younger self would never have understood, but which somehow seemed right in the circumstances. That promise was close to being fulfilled.

He was wading from the lake, his limbs suddenly heavy, when he caught a glimpse of movement perhaps half a kilometre away to his right. At the narrow defile in the encircling crater, though which he himself had entered, he made out a small, human figure. It was moving slowly down the incline towards the lake. After assuming he was the only person on the island - perhaps even on the entire archipelago - it came as a shock to find that his triumphal arena had been invaded.

He shrugged off his air-tank and set to work on the equipment beneath the canopy.

After her arduous, zigzag climb up the side of the volcano, Leona arrived exhausted at the gap in the rock overlooking the lake. She sat and stared down at the perfect circle, sudden tears blurring her vision. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, telling herself that she was no longer a child: she was a woman, now, and women didn’t - not even after spending three days canoeing from her island and climbing the volcano to the lake considered holy by her people.

She could have rested for longer, but decided to press on. Once she had pitched her tent beside the lake, and said her prayers to the healer, then she could rest for as long as she liked. It would be a reward for the hardship of getting this far. She had never really believed that she would succeed in crossing the straits, still less be able to scale the volcano. She had expected her boat to sink, or that she would collapse exhausted halfway up the mountainside. That she had made it this far was an omen: her pilgrimage would be a success.

She climbed to her feet and adjusted her pack, its leather thongs biting painfully into her shoulders. The ground on this inner rim of the crater had absorbed the heat of the setting sun, and the rock was griddle-hot beneath her bare feet. She picked her way carefully down the incline, trying to step in the shadows cast by the rocks that littered the slope. She wondered if her tribe would be thinking of her now, if her mother was wondering whether she had reached the holy lake. She glanced into the sky, at the colourful display that reminded her of the feathers of a belcher-bird, and tried to imagine the stars her mother had told her were once visible at night. It was hard to believe that her people were being carried to a new star aboard the great TWC ship - even though three weeks ago she had concealed herself behind a bush on her island and watched fearfully as it ate up her tribe and left Tartarus forever.

Now she was here, and perhaps if all went well she would one day be joining her people in their new home among the stars.

She was standing at the water’s edge, on a flat shelf of rock she thought would be a good place to erect her tent, when she saw that she was not alone. Three stone throws around the lake was a man. More than just his impressive height told her that he must be an off-worlder. There was a lot of machinery beneath a silver canopy, strange devices that Leona had never seen before, and farther up the slope was a silver living dome. The man was crouching beneath the canopy, working on his machinery.

She wondered if he was here for the same reason that she was - she could think of no other - and the thought worried her. She occupied herself by building her tent. She tied together the canes that had doubled as the frame of her pack, forming the outline of a pyramid. Then she unfolded the animal skin cover of the pack and draped it over the pyramid. She ducked inside, unrolled her sleeping blanket across the rock, and set out her scant possessions beside it: her comb, her eating bowl and cup, and her five important powders. It was dark inside the tent; she hoped that it would be as dark when the sun came up in the morning, affording her cool shade.

She left the tent and walked to the water’s edge. She sat cross-legged and said a prayer, paying her respects to the healer, telling it that at last she had arrived. Later, she would chant the mantra that her people’s holy-man had taught her, the ritual of the Summoning.

After prayers, she stripped off her dress and washed it in the lake, having to wade in to her neck to get past the plant-life. The water was like a balm on her hot and tired skin. She felt soothed by its warm envelopment, and at the same time blessed that she was sharing the lake with ultarrak. She fetched her cup from the tent and strained a quantity of water through the material of her dress. This she drank, slaking her thirst. She strained another cupful and carried it carefully to the tent for later. She laid her dress out on the hot rock, and then scraped the water droplets from her body. Within minutes she was dry, and not long after that so was her dress. She stepped into the garment, tied the laces up the front, and then stared along the shore of the lake to where the off-worlder was still busy beneath the canopy.

What was he doing? Why would a man from the stars camp beside the lake and set up his complicated machinery?

Once, when she was a girl, a small tribe of off-worlders wearing blue uniforms had come to her island in flying machines. The elders greeted them, and shared food and drink with the strange men and women, and then told the rest of the tribe that the off-worlders were people of honour and could be trusted. For days Leona had watched the strangers move around the island - counting people for the eventual evacuation, according to the elders. She had come to trust the tall men and women of the TWC, had even accepted fruit from a woman with hair the colour of blood-grass. Now she felt no fear of the off-worlder who had arrived at the lake before her, just a slight apprehension as to what he was doing here.

Refreshed after her ablutions, and comfortable in her clean dress, she walked along the shore towards the off-worlder’s camp.

He was still busy working with the machinery, his back to Leona, when she arrived at the canopy. She hitched up her dress around her knees, squatted, and hugged her shins. In silence she watched as he worked. He was doing something to two long, pointed mechanisms that were directed at the centre of the lake. As he worked, he talked to himself in a language unfamiliar to Leona.

He was even bigger than she had originally thought. His skin was a lighter shade of brown than hers, a copper tone that glistened with sweat. She watched his muscles as they slipped and tightened beneath his skin. The sight of his naked flesh reminded her of Yarta, a boy who had gone with the rest of them into the TWC ship, and how she had felt for him in those hopeless days before the evacuation.

She blushed when she realised that the man was watching her. She felt embarrassed, as if he had been able to read the run of her thoughts.

In her own language, more to divert his attention from her blushes than to elicit any reply, she asked him what he was doing here.

The man smiled gently, and shrugged his shoulders. He said something in his strange, soft language, and then returned to his machinery. From time to time he glanced from his work, his eyes lingering on her in a way Leona found at first invasive and then complimentary. She knew she was blushing again, in confusion: she had never before had the attentions of a grown man, and she was unsure how to respond.

She decided that his presence beside the lake had nothing to do with the healer. Off-worlders were ignorant of important things of the spirit - her people had laughed when the TWC off-worlders claimed they knew nothing of the sun god whose anger was causing the sun to explode - and clearly this man was more bothered about his machinery than about ultarrak.

She stood quickly and retraced her steps around the lake, increasing her pace when he called something after her. When she looked over her shoulder, he was standing beneath the canopy, wiping his hands on a rag and watching her.

Back at her tent, she mixed her powders in the bowl of water. She was careful with the white powder, the fehna - the right amount would bring relief, but too much could kill her. When the mixture had turned the water blood-red, she raised the bowl to her lips and drank the concoction in one long draft. She felt its heat coursing through her, and told herself that she could feel its restorative powers working already.

Later, when she felt the time was right, she left her tent. Her stomach fluttery with apprehension, she sat cross-legged before the lake, bowed her head and began the mantra of the Summoning.

Connery saw the girl as she approached hesitantly around the curve of the lake. He watched her covertly until she was within a few metres of the canopy, then bent to his work. So is not to scare her off, he would let her initiate conversation. He’d had contact with the tribal people of the southern seas: they were an insular, shy people who were easily frightened by the brusque and confident ways of outsiders.

After perhaps an hour of silence, he glanced across at the girl. She was squatting on her heels, her brown arms hugging her shins. She seemed miles away, lost in her own thoughts. When she noticed him looking at her, she blushed and spoke so hurriedly that he was unable to catch the meaning of her corrupted French dialect.

He smiled and shrugged and returned to his work. From time to time he stole glances at her. She was tiny and dark skinned, with long black hair and a thin, high-cheekboned face.

She wore a short dress made from animal skins, sleeveless and laced up the front. He guessed her to be on the cusp of womanhood, perhaps sixteen or seventeen Earth years old.

He wondered what she was doing here, why she had not left the planet with the rest of her people. He wanted to ask her, but she seemed as shy as a bird - as if any sudden word or movement from him might frighten her away.

When she did finally leave, jumping up quickly and hurrying around the shore, he called to her to come back soon, then stood and watched her go. Something turned in his stomach, not a physical pang at the sight of her slim back and quick brown legs, but a more fundamental sense of longing and loss represented by her hurried retreat.

He did another hour’s work on the machinery, then retired to his dome. He showered in the recycled lake water, then sat in the air-conditioned luxury of the dome’s main section. He heated one of the pre-packed trays he’d bought from the TWC surplus stores at Baudelaire, and slowly ate the tasteless meal.

Beyond the transparent wall of the dome, he could see the sky losing its colour as the merciless sun rose on another day. In an hour or two the temperature would increase by forty degrees, by which time he would be asleep and oblivious to the hellish conditions outside. And when he woke, in approximately ten hours, he would be ready for when the Vulpheous next chose to surface.

He darkened the wall of his dome to shut out the heat and light of the day, then stepped outside and peered along the shore to the small, triangular irregularity of the girl’s tent. Already the heat was sapping, and the sun had not yet fully risen. He returned inside, filled a container with two litres of cool, sparkling water, picked up a food tray and left the dome.

The girl sat by the water’s edge, her back straight, her head bowed. As he walked along the shore, she uncrossed her legs, stood and ducked into her tent. He wondered how she hoped to exist here with no source of renewable foodstuffs and only the brackish water of the lake to drink.

He knelt outside the tent. ‘Hello,’ he called.

Almost immediately she drew aside a flap and peered out, her expression neutral. She ducked from the tent and sat cross-legged before him. He matched her posture, then held out the food and water.

She looked at him, her face radiant. She spoke in her singsong French patois. ‘For me?’

‘For you,’ he replied.

She stared at him. She spoke quickly, and though he caught only every other word, he was able to make out what might have been: ‘You can speak my language?’

‘A little - if you speak very slowly. Do you understand?’

She nodded, her eyes on the tray of food and container of water.

‘I thought you might like these. A present. Do you have rood of your own?’

Her eyes were big and brown, the whites very white. They widened as she said, ‘None, only water.’

He tried not to smile. ‘Then how do you hope to survive?’

She stared at him, her head on one side. Finally she shrugged, then cast her eyes down to where her fingers worried the imperfect hem of her animal-skin dress.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

She did not look up. ‘I am here to pay respects,’ she whispered. ‘With luck, I will be helped by ultarrak.’

Connery did not know the word. He shook his head. ‘There are no more people here, just you and me.’

She shrugged again, either unwilling or unable to enlighten him.

‘How did you get here?’ he asked. ‘From which island do you come?’

At this, she was more willing to speak. ‘By canoe,’ she said, glancing up at him, then shyly back down again at her fingers. ‘Three days from Sauvé.’

He had seen the island on his map, part of a small archipelago that ran parallel with the main Demargé chain.

‘But what of your people?’

‘My people have left for the stars in great ships.’

Connery shook his head, feeling a sudden stab of pity for the girl.

‘Why were you left behind? Why didn’t you go with them?’

She shook her head in a show of frustration. ‘No … I could not go with them. I had to come to the holy lake. Later, I will join my people.’

‘Later? How much later? How long will you stay here?’

She had plucked the hem of her dress to a frayed tassel. ‘Perhaps a year, maybe more. It is not up to me.’

‘A year?’ he echoed. ‘A year without food?’

She looked up at him, her wide eyes critical of his ignorance. ‘I do not need food!’ she said.

‘But in a year … Don’t you realise that in a year the sun might have blown?’

‘A year, or two,’ she corrected him. ‘Who knows?’

A silence came between them as the heat of dawn increased. He could not keep his eyes from the swelling of her small breasts he glimpsed through the zigzag lacing of her dress.

At last the girl asked in a small voice, ‘Why are you here? What are your devices?’ She pointed towards the canopy.

Connery thought about his reply. If she considered the lake holy, would she think what he was doing a desecration?

‘I am a scientist,’ he said at last. ‘I am studying the lake.’

She nodded, glanced from him to the burning sky. She touched the food tray and container. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, and made to move to her tent.

He reached out a hand, forestalling her. ‘I’m Connery,’ he said. ‘And you are?’

‘Leona,’ she said, and unsure how to respond to his gesture, touched the tips of his fingers with hers. He took her hand, and she stared at him in surprise.

‘I … There is plenty of spare room in my dome,’ he said. ‘And food. You can’t live in that thing - you wouldn’t last a day. Please, you can join me if you wish.’

Her watchful expression gave no indication that she had understood him. She pulled her fingers free of his and crawled into the tent, taking the food and water with her.

Connery made his way back to his dome, took another shower and lay on his bunk. He could not banish the thought of Leona from his mind. He considered the heat, unbearable even at this early hour. How might she exist with nothing but the flimsy skin tent to shade her as the day progressed?

Leona sat cross-legged, clutching the cool container of water. Already the heat inside the tent was unbearable - a lank humidity that made a full breath impossible. Still, this was preferable to the direct light of the sun, which would have burned her skin in minutes.

She closed her eyes and considered the events of the past few hours. Her summons had failed to attract ultarrak. She had said the mantra just as the holy-man had told her, and emptied her mind of everything but her principal wish - but nothing had happened.

And then the off-worlder had arrived, bearing gifts.

She had assumed the correct posture to accept the gifts, and looked into his eyes only occasionally, as custom dictated in these matters. He should have said straight away, if he wanted her, that she was welcome to share his dwelling, but instead he had asked many questions, and only later asked her to join him in her dome. Well, perhaps customs were different on his home world.

One hour passed, then two, and the temperature inside the tent rose steadily. The sun was so bright that its invading light pierced the threadbare patches of her tent and smote her with a heat like burning coals. She took a long drink of cold water from Connery’s container, but seconds later she was thirsty again.

When she judged that a suitable duration had elapsed, she slipped from the tent and dismantled it, transforming it quickly back into a pack. She stowed away her cup and bowl, and made sure her six leather pouches of powders were secure. By the time she was ready, the sunlight was burning her skin, the heat searing her throat. Then, her heart beating wildly in her chest, she walked around the lake towards Connery’s dome.

Before she reached the off-worlder’s dwelling, she knelt and cast about for a sharp sliver of pumice. She found a suitable length, tested its point for sharpness, and slipped it into her belt.

She passed into the dome through two doors which opened like the petals of a flower, first the outer door and then the inner. It was cold inside, and Leona wondered how this was achieved. It was as if the inside of the dome was another world entirely.

Connery was not in the main chamber, but an opening gave access to a second, smaller room. Leona stepped silently across the threshold. The off-worlder lay on his bunk, staring at her.

At the sight of his gaze, Leona almost stopped dead in her tracks. A part of her wanted to turn and flee. Another part, which knew that this was what should happen, made her continue towards the bed.

She perched herself on the side of his bunk, very aware of his bulk beside her, though her eyes were staring at the floor. From her belt she pulled her pumice dagger, and reached out for his bare chest. Only then could she bring herself to look into his eyes. He was staring at her with a startled, shocked expression, his head raised from the bed. She smiled to indicate that she would be gentle. She held the point of the dagger above his sternum. He moved his hand, as if to stop her, but did not. Perhaps this was another of her people’s customs that differed slightly on the off-worlder’s homeplanet.

She lowered the dagger until its point touched the tanned flesh of his chest. Then she applied pressure. He let out a breath. A droplet of blood welled. She drew the dagger lightly down his torso, from sternum to abdomen, alternately scoring a bloody line and a thin white scratch across his skin. He gripped the side of the bunk, breathing hard, staring at her.

When she reached the muscles of his stomach, she raised the dagger and stood. With trembling fingers she unlaced her dress, let it drop and stepped from it. She stood before him naked, but his eyes never left her face. She raised the dagger for a second time, pressed it to the skin between her breasts, and winced as she dug the point home and scored it down her body. Then she threw aside the dagger and joined Connery, wound to wound, on the bed.

For a few seconds as he came awake, Connery felt the weight of the girl in his arms and his thoughts were filled with the notion of Madelaine. He convinced himself that he could smell the natural scent of her small body, hear the familiar sound of her breathing.

Then he regained his senses and his awareness was flooded with the memories of Leona and her strange courtship rite. An immediate, stabbing sense of regret was soon sluiced away by the memory of what had passed between them. It was more than five years since he had last made love to a woman, during which time he told himself that he missed neither the intimacy nor the affection: the truth was that he had missed both, but as the years passed by he found it ever more difficult to initiate a relationship. Whether this inability was caused by the fear of losing a loved one for a second time, or the thought that he was being unfaithful to the memory of Madelaine, he did not know.

He carefully disengaged himself from her limbs and left her sleeping on the bunk. He dressed quickly, hardly taking his eyes from the girl. She rolled onto her back, into the space he had vacated, and twitched slightly in her sleep.

He was about to leave the dome to check his equipment before the surfacing of the Vulpheous when Leona spasmed, her whole body convulsing for an instant as if electrocuted. This brought her awake; she sat up, shivering and staring across at him. Her mouth moved, but no words came. She lay back, staring up at the apex of the dome and crying. She was hugging her shoulders and pulling her knees up to her chest, as if in an effort to warm herself. Connery rushed across to her, tried to hold her. She pushed his arms away, pointed across the chamber to her pack on the floor. ‘In there’ she gasped. ‘Powder.’

He almost tore the pack apart in a bid to get at its contents. He pulled out half a dozen pouches heavy with crystallised substances and stared across at Leona.

‘Water!’ she cried.

He fetched a water container and a cup. ‘Now what? For chrissake what do I do?’

‘A little … a little of each powder in the cup.’

His fingers huge and useless, he pulled the drawstring on the first pouch and nipped out an amount of yellow powder. He held it up to Leona, who nodded, watching him with eyes wide in desperation as he transferred the powder to the cup. He did the same with the second and third pouch, but when he came to the fourth, Leona screamed aloud. ‘No! Less … That much can kill!’

He dropped a few grains into the cup, then continued with the two remaining powders. He stirred the concoction with a finger, surprised to see it turn blood-red and viscous, then carried it over to the girl. He put an arm around her shoulders and lifted the cup to her lips. Steadying it with both hands, she drank the fluid in grateful gulps. She seemed immediately to relax. He lay her back on the bunk, stroking a sweat-soaked strand of hair from her forehead.

‘You are ill,’ he whispered.

She shook her head. ‘No … I will be fine.’ She smiled at him, a dreamy half-smile, as her eyes closed in sleep.

He remained with her for a while, watching her even breathing and working to calm himself. Through the wall of the dome he could see the fiery night sky slowly replacing the magnesium glare of daytime, the streaked scarlets and tangerines gaining in strength. He stroked Leona’s hair one last time and left the dome, the heat and humidity breaking over him in an almost palpable wave.

There was something unnatural about the scene as he stood beneath the canopy and stared out across the lake, the green circle of water beneath the two-tone sky suggesting the garish nightmare of a crazed expressionist. Connery had never felt at home on Tartarus, among its many strange peoples and even stranger places. He would breathe easier when finally he took his leave of the dying planet. His yacht was anchored in a sheltered cove on the other side of the island, and sailing time to Baudelaire was a matter of three or four weeks. He thought of Leona, the fact that she had told him she would remain here ‘to pay her respects’, as she had said, for a year or more …

He checked and rechecked the settings and calibrations of his equipment. All was as it should be. The lasers, grapples and hawsers were primed to activate when he keyed in the single command on the terminal beside him. All that remained was for the Vulpheous to show itself.

He heard the outer door of the dome open and watched Leona pick her way across to him. She was shy in the aftermath of their lovemaking, her eyes downcast. They sat on the shore of the lake and Connery put an arm around her shoulders.

At last he asked, ‘Do you have to stay here for a year? Couldn’t you leave in a few days?’

Her shoulders moved in a shrug beneath his forearm. ‘I must…at least a year. I wish I could leave soon, but that is impossible.’

‘Why, Leona? What are you doing here?’

She shook her head, as if she found it impossible to explain. She glanced at him, and he saw tears in her eyes. ‘And you?’ she asked. ‘When do you leave?’

He hesitated. Soon, in a year or so, the sun would blow. He would be long gone by then. The gift he would give to the Thousand Worlds could not be jeopardised by needless delay.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of leaving soon.’

She glanced at him, then past him at his arrayed machinery. ‘Your work will be finished then?’

He nodded. ‘With luck, yes, it will.’

She looked from his equipment and out across the lake, then returned her gaze to him. ‘What are they for, Connery?’

He sighed. He had prevaricated earlier when she had asked him the same question. Now he felt compelled to tell her what he was doing, to try to explain himself.

‘A great creature lives out there in the lake,’ he told her. ‘The Vulpheous. For five years I’ve tracked it across the southern seas. It’s the last of its kind and it has returned here to die.’ He shrugged. ‘Soon, when it surfaces, I will kill it humanely and drag its carcass to the shore—’

He stopped when he felt her stiffen beneath his arm. She pulled away and stared at him. ‘Kill it? You want to kill it?’

‘Leona, I know it seems barbaric—’

He stopped. At that second, a slow series of air-bubbles broke the surface of the lake.

Connery slipped into the seat behind the laser cannon, sighting down the ‘scope at the ripples radiating from close to the marker buoy. Now that the time had come, the culminating event of five years’ hard work, his awareness of the world was reduced to the surfacing creature, the laser and himself. He stared down the ‘scope, the blood pounding in his temples, and cried out as the domed head of the Vulpheous butted ponderously through the mat of algae, emerging with the slow grace of all colossal creatures. Connery reached out to the terminal keyboard.

He heard a scream, and saw a flash of movement from the corner of his eye. Leona dived at the laser cannon as his finger struck the command key. The piercing blue needle shot high and wide of its target as the cannon toppled with the girl clinging to its barrel. Timed to activate seconds after the laser, the harpoon and grapples exploded out from beneath the canopy, missing Leona by centimetres. Connery watched as the harpoon struck the water before the Vulpheous. Then the hawser sprang into programmed action, hauling in the grapples empty but for gouts of algae and weed.

The Vulpheous, either alarmed by the unaccustomed activity or sated with air, began its leisurely descent. The bulk of its body disappeared slowly, followed by its ugly, domed head. Its tiny yellow eyes seemed to bore across the lake at Connery, at once mocking and accusing.

Leona scrambled from the tangle of machinery, righted herself and ran up the slope. She disappeared behind the dome and seconds later Connery heard her muffled sobs.

He picked up the laser, checking it for damage, and did the same with the hawser and grapples. He recalibrated the weapon and recovery equipment, the weight of aborted expectation settling over him like a depression. He told himself that nothing was lost, that he would try again when the Vulpheous next emerged, and this time succeed.

He spent an hour needlessly going over the programme, waiting until Leona’s sobs abated. When there was silence he left the canopy and walked around the dome. He found her seated on a low boulder, her face lowered to her palms. She looked up as his footsteps scattered pumice, wincing as if she thought he might strike her.

He sat down on the rock next to the girl and was silent for long minutes. At last he reached out and gripped the back of her neck, her skin hot to his touch. He pulled her towards him so that her head pressed against his chest.

In a whisper, he asked, ‘Is the Vulpheous special to your people?’

She drew a breath, hiccupped on a last sob, nodded. ‘We call it ultarrak,’ she murmured. ‘It is as you say – special.’

Connery nodded, silently massaging her neck. ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘I don’t know if you’ll understand, but I’ll tell you anyway.’

He was silent for a while, marshalling his thoughts, going over the events of the past and sorting them into some kind of consecutive order.

‘Twelve years ago my wife was told that she was suffering from an illness known as Hartmann’s disease. It was very rare and very deadly. Only a hundred or so cases had been diagnosed since records were kept on all the planets of the Thousand Worlds, and most of the sufferers had succumbed to the disease. It was a viral infection that invaded the lymphatic system, causing paralysis and death within six months. My wife’s specialist held out no hope. I took her home and hired a nurse to help me look after her. I resigned from my job as a physicist with the TWC and spent all my time investigating the disease. The last ten victims, spread far and wide across the Worlds, had all died within the allotted six months, but I discovered that two sufferers had survived. However, these people had lived fifty years ago - their medical records were scant and both men were no longer alive. You can’t imagine, though, how the knowledge that Hartmann’s could be beaten filled me with a hope that in retrospect seemed futile, but at the time kept me alive … I spent a fortune travelling around the Worlds, interviewing people, talking to doctors and scientists, quacks and charlatans … I got nowhere. Back on Earth, my wife was slowly deteriorating. I reached the point where I recognised that I had to give up, return to Madelaine and nurse her through her last months.’

He paused, suddenly pitched into the present with the tribal girl in the crater of an extinct volcano, on a dying world a long, long way from Earth. Leona was silent but for an occasional sniff, her cheek against his chest.

‘After her death I left Earth and the memories and travelled to some of the Thousand Worlds I’d never seen before …’

He was running away, and he knew it, but it seemed the right thing to do at the time. He could not face Earth and the painful associations it provoked, and he told himself that a few years away from the place would work wonders. In time, when the thought of Madelaine’s passing no longer tore at his insides, he would return.

He was in a bar in an exotic port city on a world called Solomon’s Reach when he fell into conversation with a fellow drunk, who introduced himself and added that he was a doctor of medicine. Connery was inebriated and maudlin and it was perhaps natural that the topic of conversation should turn to his late wife and the disease that had taken her life. The information that Madelaine had succumbed to Hartmann’s had an odd effect on the doctor. He hiccupped and straightened on his bar-stool, with that comical attempt at sobriety that sometimes affects those drunks who wish to make a point.

The doctor told Connery that he had heard of Hartmann’s disease. Not only that, but had actually studied the virus at medical school, paying particular attention to the case histories of the two victims who had survived the disease.

‘They were saved by … by some substance derived from the liver of a beast that lived on the world of Tartarus, a backwoods planet along the arm.’

Connery could never recall his precise reaction to this news, but he suspected that it might have been lachrymose.

‘But … but if there’s a cure,’ he began, thinking of all the other Madelaines out there.

The doctor held up a tipsy forefinger. ‘That was fifty years ago,’ he went on, ‘The creature is reported to be extinct. I’m sorry.’

Connery sobered up and left Solomon’s Reach and investigated how many people across the Thousand Worlds were currently suffering from Hartmann’s disease. The answer was a dozen, eight women and four men. He discovered that the sun of Tartarus was due to blow in just seven years, but booked passage anyway.

‘I arrived and made enquiries, followed leads and red herrings and finally found people who had actually seen the last remaining Vulpheous.’ He paused, then went on, ‘So for the sakes of the people now suffering from Hartmann’s disease, I must return to Earth with the liver of the Vulpheous. From it, we might be able to synthesise a drug to combat the disease. It’s the least I can do. It’s too late to save Madelaine… but at least I can stop the suffering of others like her.’

They remained sitting on the rock for an hour or more, holding each other like the survivors of a shipwreck. At last Leona pulled away, squeezing his fingers, and walked slowly down to the lake. Connery watched her, his heart heavy, as she sat cross-legged and bowed her head.

As the night came to an end and the horizon brightened with the blinding white dazzle of the new day, Connery returned to the dome. He opaqued the wall, lay on his bed and traced the wound that ran from his chest to his belly. He heard the inner door open, and Leona as she moved through the dome to his room. He saw her back-pack on the floor, and beside it her pouches of powders, and he assumed she was returning for these, before leaving.

She paused briefly in the entrance, staring through the half-light at him, then crossed the chamber and lay beside him on the bed. Connery took her in his arms in silence, afraid that a word from him might break their uneasy truce.

Leona took to spending the hours of sunset on the slab of rock overlooking the lake where she had originally pitched her tent, cross-legged and head bowed, but not repeating the mantra of the Summoning. Connery tended his machinery every day, and every morning swam out to check the position of ultarrak. She was afraid that if she summoned the healer, and it came, then he might kill it with his weapon of light.

Today she bowed her head and wept at her dilemma.

She loved Connery. They were One, after all. She had sealed their bond with the joining of the wounds, and since then life with him was better than anything she had ever experienced. They made love at every sleep period, and as night fell and her fever took command, Connery mixed the powders and held her as she drank and felt relief. But there was a distance between them, a divide that separated them as well as any sea. She understood why Connery wanted to kill ultarrak, to save the victims of a disease among the stars, because he had been unable to save his wife. But he did not understand why she could not allow him to kill ultarrak, why the creature was important to her - and that was her fault. She had to tell him … He had asked, questioned her is to what she was doing here, why she had to remain for months, but Leona had been unable to tell him the truth: would he still want her, if he knew?

But she had to tell him. There was no other way. He could spurn her if he so wished, and she would learn of the man he really was, or he could accede to her needs and agree not to kill ultarrak.

In a burst of resolve she jumped up from the rock and set off around the lake to where Connery was working among his awkward, angular devices. By the time she reached the canopy, though, her resolve had almost dissipated. She stood in the shadow, hugging her shoulders, as he knelt with his broad back to her, oblivious of her presence. At last she cleared her throat, and he turned and smiled at her.

He made to return to his work, but Leona said, ‘We must talk.’

He laid down a metal tool, wiped his hands on his shorts and nodded. They sat facing each other beneath the canopy, his gaze making her blush.

Unable to look him in the eye, she said, ‘You must not kill ultarrak.’

‘Leona?’ He reached out and took her chin in his hand, lifted her head so that she had to look at him. ‘What are you doing here? What does the Vulpheous mean to you?’

She pulled back her head, freed herself of his fingers, but held his gaze. ‘Do you love me, Connery?’

‘I … you know I do.’ He looked steadily at her, and she could discern no hint of a lie in his expression.

‘Then if you love me, you cannot kill ultarrak.’

‘Leona … ?’

‘If ultarrak dies, I die—’

‘You’re not making sense. What do you mean?’ His face was full of anger and confusion, but fear also.

She stared at her fingers, busy with the hem of her dress, and tried to think of the words to tell this off-worlder, this man she loved, so that he would not think any less of her.

‘Many years ago,’ she said, raising her eyes, ‘there was not one ultarrak, but hundreds. They lived among the islands of the south seas. Each tribe kept an ultarrak, except they did not keep one, exactly, but rather it was there when it was needed. It came when summoned, and it healed.’

At this, Connery’s eyes widened. ‘Healed?’

‘When people were so sick that normal herbs and prayers could not heal them, when they were possessed by death-demons, the ultarrak was summoned and the sick person would be taken.’

He was shaking his head. She went on, ‘The sick person enters the ultarrak through its vathar - ‘ She indicated the top of her head, ’—where it blows water. There is a chamber in there and the sick person sleeps for a year and is healed by the ultarrak. I have never met anyone healed this way, but my mother, and her mother, knew people who were.’

‘You enter its blow-hole?’ he said, staring at her. ‘And you stay in there for a year? But what about food, air … ?’

‘My mother said that you sleep so deeply that you do not breathe, and ultarrak shares its blood with you through tentacles that heal. And after a year or more, you return to the tribe in full health.’

Connery said a word she did understand in his own language, then reached out and took her hand. ‘And you are sick?’ he asked her, ‘and need the ultarrak to heal you?’

She nodded and lowered her eyes. ‘I am possessed by a powerful spirit in here.’ She touched her temple.

‘But your powders—’ he began.

‘They will work only for so long … Soon I will die, if I cannot summon ultarrak. My people could do nothing to save me. They even took me to the off-worlders who were arranging our evacuation, but they too could do nothing, only ultarrak can save me, Connery, and it cannot save me if you kill it.’

His reaction was surprising. He stood and pulled her to her feet, and with his arms around her shoulders hurried her up the slope towards the dome. Once inside he sat her on the bed and rushed about the room in search of something. He found it - a flat board from which hung lengths of material like leather thongs. He knelt before her, fumbling in his haste, and tied the thongs around her right arm. She started and gasped - it was as if a thousand ants were nibbling her skin, but he told her not to worry.

He poked the board with his fingers, and strange shapes glowed on its surface. He peered at these with fevered eyes, muttering to himself in his own language. She wanted to tell him not to worry, that ultarrak would heal her - that if the other off-worlders could not save her, then neither could he.

Then suddenly his activity ceased. Slowly, he unwound the stinging thongs from her arm, leaving stripes of blood on her brown skin. When he looked at her, she saw tears in his eyes.

She stroked his hair. ‘Connery, do not worry what your board says. Ultarrak will take me and make me well.’

He lay with her on the bed, stroking her hair and saying her name, and then many other words she could not understand. She could tell by the tone of his voice that he was trying not to cry. How like a man!

For the first time in days, Leona felt at peace. Connery loved her, and would not kill ultarrak, and in time she would be healed.

He could not let Leona see his consternation. He kissed her and left her on the bed, then hurried from the dome and stormed down the slope to the water’s edge. He wanted to scream, to yell to the non-existent gods that it was so unfair. Madelaine had been taken from him, and now Leona … He cursed and tried not to weep, but the effort made his throat burn with contained emotion, and eventually he sat down by the lake and wept.

The diagnosis was that Leona was dying from a neurological disorder known by a dozen different names throughout the Thousand Worlds. There was no cure. Victims rarely lasted for more than three months. The diagnosis gave Leona no more than a few weeks. He cast his mind back to Madelaine’s death, and wondered how he had managed to overcome so numbing a tragedy, and how he might triumph over this one.

What compounded his pain was Leona’s own reaction - her childish faith in an ancient folk tale. She really believed that she could be cured by the Vulpheous. But how might such a cure be possible? How might she survive for a year within the blow-hole of the creature? It was, surely, no more than primitive superstition … And yet, he said to himself, what if her naive faith proved justified, and the Vulpheous could indeed effect her recovery?

Connery sat beside the lake for what seemed like hours, going over his options. He told himself again and again that it could not be true, that someone as vital and alive as Leona could not be dying … He stared into the sky, at the clouds corrupted by the supernova. In time the sun would blow, destroying everything: the planet, the island, the Vulpheous … Could he risk not getting the cure out to the Thousand Worlds, for the hopeless belief in a primitive folk tale?

At last he left the lake and retraced his steps back to the dome. Leona was still on the bed, and she turned and smiled it him as he entered the chamber. He sat down beside her and stroked the hair from her forehead. He stared at her in silence, touching the line of her jaw. Her brown eyes watched him, so bright and alive.

Later, her convulsions began. As she lay on the bed with her eyes closed, shivering, Connery mixed the powders into the blood-red syrup that would make her still. He sat with her in his arms and raised the cup to her lips, and he rejoiced in her relief as her body relaxed and her breathing became even. He lowered her head to the pillow, kissed her on the lips, and then left the dome.

He stood beneath the fiery sky and stared out across the jade green lake, asking himself over and over if he had made the right decision.

*

Connery was standing beneath the canopy when the Vulpheous made its next appearance. The sun had set on another searing day, and the sombre tone of the night sky turned the surface of the lake a dark, brooding shade of emerald.

He was barely aware of the first lethargic ripple that disturbed the surface of the lake, so lost was he in his thoughts. Then a series of slow bubbles exploded through the layer of algae.

The Vulpheous rose to the surface with a slow, wallowing buoyancy. Its massive head turned slowly towards Connery, its tiny eyes seeking him out. It remained staring at him for what seemed like a long time.

Connery slipped into the seat behind the cannon, reached out and struck the command. The laser flashed out, striking the creature through the forehead, and the natural amphitheatre rang to the piercing shriek of the dying animal. Already the harpoons and grapple had found their fleshy target and were hauling the dead Vulpheous across the lake to the shore. It beached with a lifeless shudder, its inert mass of blubber already discharging reeking fluids across the volcanic rock.

Connery set to work, lasering the carcass into sections and slicing free its massive liver. He transferred the organ to his waiting carricase, then made his way back to the dome. He showered to rid himself of its blood and stench, and was leaving the dome for the last time when he paused. On the floor was Leona’s pack, and beside it her pouches of medicine powders, among them the pouch that had contained the white powder, the fehna, empty now.

He left the dome with the carricase. Soon, he told himself, thanks to what he had achieved here in the volcano, many people around the Thousand Worlds would give thanks to him, would be able to look into the future with hope renewed.

For every advance there was a sacrifice.

On his way up the slope he paused by the cairn of stones beneath which Leona lay.

Before he began the long trek from the volcano to the cove where his yacht was anchored, Connery knelt beside the cairn, closed his eyes and asked for her forgiveness.

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