Righteous felt a soft presence pulling at the mixed up maelstrom
of his thoughts. He tried to clear a path for it but the presence kept slipping
into the darkness again. He was beyond all human intervention. He didn’t even
feel it when the woman guided him to a shady knoll. He felt nothing of the kind
hands and cool cloths that soothed his black and thundering brow, the soft
sweet fingers that held his hands tenderly, the stream of loving words that
caressed his ears, but went no further. For him, time stood on the edge of a
precipice, pushing forwards as well as pulling him back. He was in limbo, hell’s fires licking at his broad black feet, sweet angels pulling at his soul
as if to tear his body in half. He knew not which way to go. He was afraid of
his fears; afraid of the monstrous potential deeds in his mind. He didn’t trust
himself without the voices to guide him.
And then there was that pretty presence again and he felt
a brief respite from the battle, a momentary pause in the onslaught. It was
almost like a little melody threading through the carnage of his mental
maunderings. The song seemed, for a brief moment, to anchor his wandering mind
to his body in blissful conjunction, and he almost came to himself. Then all
was dark and deadly once more and the furies resumed their attack.
Sweet Mary’s loving ministrations would have wrenched the
devil himself from hell and made him foreswear his old ways forever. But
Righteous Alchemy was in a state of cataclysmic change. The very atoms of his
being were undergoing such a profound metamorphosis that it was uncertain
whether his physical being would be recognizable as human in the end. This
place, this Neverland, had got a hold of his soul and was ripping him apart.
“Come and get it,” called Rose cheerfully to the group.
“Picnic!” cried Sweet Mary with forced enthusiasm, as if
the lovely word would rouse him from his torpor. “I love a picnic. Don’t you?”
she said stroking Righteous’ hand and continuing to babble inanely at him as
they settled down for lunch. It seemed that her well-being hung on his. That
her soul and sanity depended on his because they both had a mental disability
of sorts made a bond between them. Somewhere inside himself, Righteous could
feel this.
“I know you can’t talk, but you must try and eat something.”
Everyone watched her futile attempts to get through to him and felt sorry for
both of them: babes in a very dark wood. Eventually Dutch couldn’t bear it any
longer and sidled over to her and gave her a hug.
“Don’t worry. He’s going to be alright. He just needs time
to adjust.”
“But what’s wrong with him?” she cried and then her
emotions came apart at the seams. All that she had been holding in: the
tension, the danger, and the scariness of the last few months all came out in a
rush and she cried like a baby on Dutch’s broad shoulder.
“He…he…” she sobbed but couldn’t get any further words
out. Dutch just held her and let her cry. Her body jerked and convulsed and
hiccoughed as the past overwhelmed her and all the bad things that had ever
happened to her flamed up in Technicolor before her eyes….sounds, smells and
all.
From the moment of her arrest it had been a nightmare,
with Dutch as the only life raft to cling to. Actually her life had been a
nightmare long before that. As her mind ranged back over all the sad events of
the past she stumbled across some long suppressed memories. Righteous’
predicament seemed to have unlocked a door in her mind that until now she had
kept firmly shut. When she looked back to that dire doorway she saw her father
speaking to some men; men that had come to take her and her mother away.
Suddenly she remembered it as clear as daylight.
The raid had come just a little after midnight. The men,
slavers from Haedron Chalmer, were busy rounding up all the women and children
in the village and herding them into the floating hog-ships nearby. There were
screams and shots and sobbing and mayhem all around; people darting everywhere
through the darkness, trying to escape.
One of the problems of living on an off-world settlement
was the lack of security. Apart from a few private laser rifles no one had
anywhere near the firepower needed to repel these boarders. The raiders could
be heard laughing and joking as houses were torn apart and torched in their
search for hidden chambers and hidey-holes.
When they knocked at Sweet Mary’s door, her father had
answered and turned his wife and child over to the raiders without a murmur of
protest. She didn’t blame him for what he did because they would have found
them eventually anyway. But he thought it would buy him his life if he
co-operated. He was wrong. They shot him as they were leaving. All the men were
shot, and they left the village in flames.
Sweet Mary, only thirteen years old, found herself at the
bottom of a pile of wriggling, screaming bodies. Mother’s were desperately
trying to calm down their hysterical children; other families had become
separated and were searching for each other. Though their cries clawed at the
heart, Sweet Mary, keeping a tight grip on her mother’s hand, seemed to view
all this from a distance; as if it wasn’t really happening to her. The shock
was what kept her calm. The shock was probably what saved her life. Panic was
the big killer in these situations. At the end of a two week journey, only half
of them were left alive when the doors opened and they were herded into Sani-cubicles
for sterilization and implants. That was the last Sweet Mary saw of her mother.
The rest was a jumble of men and faces and places and pain and smells that made
her sick to her stomach. But she rode the storm, and after a few weeks the
hiatus in her head calmed down.
Now docile with her null-wave transmitter welded to her
frontal lobe, she was taken for placement-assessment and assigned to
casino-escort duties on Mayle Mera, a small asteroid close to the main shipping
zone between Earth and the Belt. Being a naturally amenable, decorous and
likable young lady, it wasn’t long before she was chosen for the more classy
private diplomatic duties and in no time she was sipping champagne and having
caviar licked from her belly button.
Her luck finally ran out when a high court judge, who
liked to hear his girls scream, became suspicious when she didn’t, and had her
arrested for having an illegal implant. A lot of call girls had this done so
they could access the more expensive clients. The ones who needed to do things
that a normal body couldn’t stand. That someone else had done this to Sweet
Mary was of no consequence to the law. She was arraigned and shipped off to the
nearest penal colony some thirty light-years away.
“Don’t worry too much sweetie. There’s nothing anyone can
do for him at this moment. He’ll come out of it when he’s ready. I’ve seen this
kind of thing before,” Dutch lied. Sweet Mary had to pull her mind back from
where it had been roaming in the dark recesses of her life to the present
situation. She realized she had been crying and feeling sorry for herself and
not for Righteous at all, and this made her feel a bit embarrassed. Quickly she
turned her attention back to the situation in hand in case someone discovered
she had been being so self-piteous.
“Is he going to be alright?” she sniffed, turning a pair
of big, sheepish, wet eyes on Dutch.
“He’s going to be fine,” she answered. “It’s probably a
temporary G-force trauma. Some people can’t handle the high G’s and suffer from
time-lag afterwards. He’ll be catatonic for a while until his system catches
up. So you relax and enjoy the day. He’ll be fine.”
Sweet Mary sniffed a few times more and pulled herself
together.
“I can still talk to him though?” she asked.
“I’m sure you can,” said Dutch giving her a squeeze. “But
I think you should eat something
too.”
The soporific perfume of the flowers, the heat and the
bubbling water from the pool spread a comforting balm over the little band of exhausted
travellers. Even Sweet Mary had calmed down and was sitting, if not happily,
then peacefully next to Righteous, eating and drinking. The drowsy buzzing of a
strange bird-like creature with bat wings took their attention for a while as
it flipped from one flower to the next, looking for nectar.
They all stretched out in the sun and welcomed in its
healing rays. Rose rolled up the legs of the bio-suit to just above her knees
and felt quite naughty baring so much skin in front of Angelo. She blushed a
little as she caught herself using his name instead of the official ‘Officer’. She
looked down at her legs. Not bad for a middle-aged lady, she thought: no bulges
or cellulite, shapely and firm. As luck would have it, she looked up and caught
Officer Angelo staring at her. He quickly turned his eyes away, but she saw a
red flush spread across the back of his neck and she smiled to herself.
Dutch was chewing on a grass stalk and watching a strange
reptile, shaped a bit like a miniature ostrich with scaly skin and long bird
like legs, pecking at a fruit pod. “I wonder if that’s edible?” she said.
“The creature or the fruit?” asked Officer Angelo.
Dutch laughed.
“Well, I suppose we don’t have to find out just yet. But I
think we should be giving some thought to finding this beacon quite soon?”
“Hmmm. Shouldn’t think there’s any hurry. If he’s not dead
already, I don’t think another day is going to matter much.”
One by one they all fell asleep, satiated and content. All
except for Righteous.
HAVE THEY REALLY STUMBLED UPON A GARDEN OF EDEN? WHAT STRANGE SURPRISES DOES THIS PLANET HOLD IN STORE FOR THEM?
