‘So far, naebody’s encountered anything they couldnae handle in a space suit,’ Carlyle said. ‘I’ll take my chances, and if there’s nae inhabitants and nae connection tae an inhabited place I can always just hop straight back.’
The column laboured up the slope, the top now just a few hundred metres away. The Knights’ nearest skimmer was overtaking the first of the stragglers at the tail end.
‘Something has been puzzling me,’ Armand said, in a tone that suggested he was trying to keep her mind off any nervousness. ‘Does the gate that you came through lead to a terraformed world?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Carlyle. ‘I’ve already told you all that, on television.’
‘Ah, so you have,’ said Armand. ‘Why do organisms from that world not pass through to this, and vice versa? The biota of Eurydice is, as your team quickly found, distinctive. Yet it was new to you. And there are no plagues or pests, which one would expect.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Carlyle. ‘We’ve wondered that too. It just disnae happen, or no very much. There are aye anomalous animals, of course.’
Armand laughed. ‘Strange big cats?’
At that she laughed too. ‘You have them an aw?’
Two hundred metres. She glanced back. The Knights’ skimmer was accelerating, catching up fast.
‘Faster,’ she said. ‘We can dae just like I tried the first time. Remember?’ Armand leaned forward and said something to the pilot. The unwieldy raft shot forward, cresting the hill, and then its aircars’ fans were thrown into reverse and its flaps dug in. Armand, already braced, stayed put. Carlyle tumbled forward and hurtled past him, bounced off the leading edge and rolled in heather. The suit and its reflexes, so much sharper than her own, protected her. She stood shakily just at the side of the henge. The Knights’ skimmer slewed to a halt, metres away. Two black-clad stocky men vaulted out and lunged towards her. They weren’t in space suits. She grinned ferally at them, skipped back, turned around and stepped between the rough stone pillars. The moment of transition, when what she saw and the gravity she felt and the readings in her head-up all changed at once, was as disconcerting and disorienting as ever. All the more so as she was stepping on empty space and falling forward.
She fell half a metre on to sand, and found herself kneeling on a sundrenched beach, and looking upon the stony face of Marx.
CHAPTER 8
Self-Reliant People
Blue sky, blue sea. Yellow sun, low in the sky. Ambient temperature thirty Celsius. There was no sign of human habitation to left or right. Behind her was dense forest in a long crescent curve to headlands that marked the limits of the beach, and beyond which she could not see. Gulls and cormorants patrolled the sea and the air above it. On the horizon, long low sea-ships, probably bulk carriers or tankers, moved with distant deliberation. Two hundred metres out to sea, like a gigantic stone shipwreck survivor wading ashore, a statue of Marx rose about twenty metres above water that reached its elbows. Behind it, Lenin stood in water up to the knot of his tie, and beyond him Mao, head just above the waves as if swimming the Yangtse.
Farther out than Mao a pair of bespectacled eyes and a quiff were all that betrayed the location of Kim Jong-I1.
From this Carlyle deduced that the planet had a moon, that the sea was tidal, and that the tide was high. The origin of the statues wasn’t so much a deduction as a no-brainer.
‘Fucking DK,’ she said to herself. She’d instantly recognised the commie statuary style, in all its ludicrous grandiosity. What the fuck the statues were doing in the water, and what the commies were doing on a terraformed world in the first place, she had no idea. Terraforming was definitely an America Offline thing. As far as DK were concerned, terraforming was a waste of a perfectly good tip, not to mention a contamination of a perfectly good strip-mine site.
As she pondered this it occurred to her that the planet might well be Earth itself. That would certainly account for the immediate appearances, but it raised other problems. She’d never heard of a gate on Earth. The nearest, in fact the first one the Carlyles had stumbled upon, was on Mars.
And speaking of stumbling upon gates, how come no one had stumbled upon this one? Like, say, while they were erecting the statues? Surely people had come ashore to the beach. Yet the gate was quite unmarked.
Carlyle walked down to the strandline and picked up a piece of drift-wood. She retraced her footprints to where she fallen from the gate, and swung the stick slowly forward, keeping the tip of it close to the ground.
To her surprise and relief, it vanished into the barely visible shimmer of the gate without being cut off at knee-height. Instead it thumped against something firm but not hard: soil, she guessed. She slid it upward until it cleared the obstacle and jerked forward. Then the stick was wrenched from her hands and tugged away through the gate. She jumped back smartly.
It wouldn’t take the Knights long to bring up space suits, though she rather doubted they would follow her into the unknown—they had enough on their plates already without potentially tangling with the Carlyles, whom they would presume to be the likeliest guardians of this side of the gate. Worse luck we aren’t, she thought. Still, it would be a good idea to get well away from the gate. She marked its location as clearly as she could with more bits of wood and a couple of small boulders, then walked off along the beach, thinking to check what lay beyond the headland. It would be rash to plunge into the jungle without making sure civilisation wasn’t just around the corner.
Before she’d gone a hundred metres she’d come to feel quite irrationally suffocated in the suit. It kept her cooler than she’d be with the helmet off, she’d no doubt about that, but it seemed wrong to be breathing closed- system air instead of fresh. Unfortunately the Eurydicean suit didn’t have the multiple immunity-adapters that her own had. It didn’t even have analysers. It did have a radio, though. She stopped and winked through menus and began to pick up radio broadcasts, in a language she didn’t know, and an odd mixture of sentimental and martial music. DK, almost certainly. Poking around, she found the translator and selected Korean.
Her ears filled with a babelfish babble of fractured English, all of which seemed to have something to do with shipping. Bingo. She was on a human world all right—not that she’d expected aliens, but there was an outside chance the place was all poisonous and inhabited by machines. Some planets had been known to go toxic in the terraforming.
Cautiously, she unlocked the helmet and lifted it off, gasped in the hot air heavy with the smells of sea and jungle.
Somebody shouted at her. She almost jumped out of the suit, and actually did drop the helmet. The shouting, amplified and angry-sounding, went on. As she looked frantically from side to side she realised it was coming from the statue of Marx. She picked up the helmet and put it back on.
At once the translation software took over, and the tone of the shouting changed.
‘—good, you keep on helmet, please seal helmet, not to contaminate nature region preserve. Please to stay where you stand are.’
The guano-spattered top of the statue’s head flipped back like a lid and something black came out and flew above the sea towards her, descending.
As it approached she recognised the angular, awkward, unaerodynamic-looking shape. It was an electrostatic lifter, a weird product of DK
She put her gloved hands on the tingly and somehow sticky surface and hauled herself aboard, sitting down beside the man. The queer little craft flew back to the top of the statue, and descended into a parking slot. The lifter’s engine heterodyned down and went off. A peculiar sense of relief ensued. The man stepped out on to a spiral staircase—the head was about the size of a lighthouse beacon—and Carlyle followed him down into a compact cabin in the larger cavity of the chest. The head’s lid closed above them and lights came on. From inside it was evident that the statue was made not of stone but of something like fibreglass, and that the interior was some kind of scientific observatory or laboratory.
The man raised his visor to reveal a swarthy, high-cheekboned face that didn’t actually look very Korean.
