Brown, Eric Read online

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  Helix

  By Eric Brown

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  ONE /// GRAVEYARD EARTH

  1

  The year was2095 and planet Earth was dying.

  That morning Hendry was working in the garden of the starship graveyard when his communications rig chimed. He moved back into the Mars shuttle and slumped down before the receiver. It was Old Smith, as usual, calling from across the straits in Tasmania to chat for a while. Smith said he’d lucked in on a radio station beaming out of Jakarta. The big news in Europe was a terrorist strike in Berne, at the headquarters of the European Space Organisation, with a dozen dead and hundreds injured.

  “I thought I’d better get in touch, Joe,” Smith said. “Doesn’t your daughter—?”

  Sweating, fear lodged like an embolism in his chest, Hendry cut the call short and tried to get through to Berne.

  There was no reply from Chrissie. He waited five minutes then tried again. Okay, so she was out, working at the ESO headquarters. What time was it in Europe? He tried to work it out, but fear scrambled his thoughts. Australia was eight hours ahead of Berne, so it’d be around two in the morning in Europe.

  Chrissie wouldn’t be at work, then. She’d be sleeping, he told himself, and he didn’t know whether to feel relief at the fact or renewed fear at the thought that his call should have awoken her.

  He called her code again, and five minutes later gave up and left the shuttle.

  He walked through the starship graveyard to the edge of the sea. Light-headed, trying not to dwell on Chrissie’s lack of response, he looked over his garden, row upon row of peas and beans and potato plants, their lush foliage incongruous amid the rearing shapes of a dozen derelict shuttles and decommissioned tugs. Despite their dilapidated and broken-backed condition, there was something almost proud and defiant about these ships. They spoke of a time when humankind had not been afraid to explore, when the planet could sustain the luxury of space flight, before the cutbacks and the withdrawal of the moon and Mars colonies.

  He passed between the two towering solid fuel boosters that formed the entrance to the graveyard, paused and took in the scene before him. The sea lapped listlessly at the scorching sands of the beach, but he saw only Chrissie’s face in his mind’s eye.

  Thirty years ago Hendry had lived with his parents in the Melbourne suburb of Edithvale, now submerged twenty miles out to sea. This was as close to the stamping ground of his youth as he had been able to get, and the fact had disturbed him on his return in ‘90. He had known, intellectually, that Australia like every other landmass had been pared down little by little and reshaped by the creeping tides, but that the ocean had swallowed his childhood home he found inconceivable and shocking.

  So he’d set up a base in the old starship graveyard, and started a garden, along with a dozen other like-minded, lost souls who over the following years had either died or moved away, driven by the encroaching sea or the increasing heat. Hendry had stayed on, despite the pleas from Chrissie to join her in Europe where civilisation was making a last stand against the worsening elements.

  He had always resisted her offers of an apartment in Berne. He had his own life here, such as it was, and he could not face the prospect of living an artificial existence of pampered excess in some Swiss fortress enclave.

  Now he wanted nothing more than to be with her.

  He walked along the shoreline to the jetty, a tumbledown extension of rank lumber, which he had helped erect five years ago. He negotiated the treacherous, sun-warped boards, stepping over gaping holes, and came to the system of pulleys he’d rigged up last year. He hauled, and far below a ripped square of netting emerged from the sea bearing its usual meagre haul of small fish. He transferred the catch to a bucket and carefully retreated to the shore.

  He moved along to the desalination plant, which was a grand name for the pile of shuddering junk that O’Grady had patched together two years ago, a parting gift before he bailed out and escaped north.

  The plant was powered by a shield array of solar panels, coruscating blindingly in the morning sun. Beneath them the rusting pipes and engines throbbed, taking salt from the seawater and pumping the resulting clear, but foul-tasting, water back up the beach to the irrigation system that helped keep Hendry’s vegetable garden alive. There were a couple of litres left over every day for Hendry’s consumption, which he drank in the form of dandelion tea.

  He checked the plant half-heartedly, going over the list of details O’Grady had warned him about before his departure. O’Grady had been the community’s engineer, and his loss had been a grave blow—one from which they had never recovered. Stella had died not long after and her husband, Greg, had reluctantly left Hendry and sailed east in a home-made ketch. Hendry often wondered what had become of the meteorologist. Had he ever made it to New Zealand, and the mountainous land of promise they had heard myths about on infrequent radio broadcasts from Dunedin?

  The desalination plant was doing fine, a testament to O’Grady’s engineering skills. Hendry turned and walked back up the beach. He’d try getting through to Chrissie again now, and if he did so he’d celebrate with grilled fish and salad for lunch.

  He hurried through the booster gateposts and was approaching the shuttle when he heard the chime of the incoming call. He arrived breathless and dived at the rig. “Hendry here. Do you read?”

  It took a second for the picture on the screen to clear, and even then it was furred with atmospheric interference.

  A smiling face looked out at him, and Hendry shot forward on the couch, relief flooding through him like a drug. “Chrissie! For Chrissake, I thought... The bomb—”

  “I know. That’s why I called. I’ve just heard about it.”

  “You okay?” he asked, inanely. He realised that his eyes were filling with tears.

  She smiled out at him. “I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’m not in Europe.”

  “You’re not?”

  Her smile widened, mischievous. “I’m in Oz, Dad. Sydney.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Why on earth...?” If she were in Sydney, then the chances were that she’d be down to see him soon.

  “I heard about the bomb,” he said, “tried to get through to you. You can’t imagine how worried I was when you didn’t answer.”

  “It’s okay, Dad. I’m fine,” she said.

  He sat back in the chair and laughed.

  She said, “It was the Fujiyama Green Brigade. They claimed responsibility for the bombing.” She looked away uneasily, perhaps wondering if she should have mentioned the Brigade for fear of opening old wounds.

  He stared at her. “It was? My God...”

  Chrissie smiled and changed the subject. “You look a sight, Dad!”

  “I do?” He looked down at himself. He was wearing sawn-off denims, and an old shirt, through which his pot belly protruded. On his head an ancient straw hat protected him from the sun. “Well, not many people around here now, so I don’t dress for dinner.”

  “How many, Dad?”

  He thought about lying, but decided against it. “Exactly one.”

  Her round face, slanted eyes, registered shock. “You’re all alone?”

  “And doing okay, Chrissie.”

  He thought she was about to suggest, again, that he join her in Berne. Her calculating look was that obvious. To her credit she didn’t even try, this time.

  She leaned forward. The picture broke up briefly, then re-formed. “You remember how we used to talk about the future of humankind?”

  He smiled. He had brought her up alone, after her mother had walked out. Chrissie had gone through a phase in her teens when the state of the world, and the future of h
umanity, became her overriding concern. She’d corner him and talk for hours on end about where the planet was going.

  “I remember.”

  “And you were always the optimist, Dad.”

  “And you the teenage pessimist.”

  She laughed. “And now? You still optimistic?”

  Hendry smiled. “Well... it’s hard to be optimistic these days, you know?” He stopped there. He didn’t want to sound like the Jeremiahs of his youth: Chrissie was still young; the future was hers, what little there was left of it.

  “Dad,” she said, changing tack, “do you think humanity carries within it the seed of its own destruction? I mean, was it destined to end like this? Are we so corrupt on the personal level that that is inevitably mirrored in society at large?”

  “What have you been reading, Chrissie?”

  His daughter worked as a botanist, battling to save flora endangered by the harsh climatic conditions. As she’d emerged from her teenage angst, she’d turned into a happy young woman who, despite all the evidence around her, always argued that there was hope.

  “Answer the question, Dad.”

  “Okay, okay,” he smiled and thought about it, then shrugged. “That’s a hard one, Chrissie. But in general I’d say no, nothing is inevitable. Many people are corrupt, but many are not. Some societies down the ages have prospered, and would have continued to do so without despoiling the Earth, if not for other societies who gained pre-eminence.” He shrugged. “Does that make disaster inevitable? It depends a lot on luck, the right breaks.” He decided he was waffling, and shut up.

  “What you’re saying is that if we had it all over again, Dad, then with luck it might work out differently?”

  He nodded, wondering where this was leading. “Yes, I guess so.”

  She smiled, and the smile sent a terrible pain through him, for there was only one world, and it was dying, along with everyone upon it, even his beautiful twenty-five year-old daughter.

  “Thanks, Dad. That’s what I think, too.” She leaned forward, so that her face almost filled the screen. “Something’s come up at this end. It’s all top secret, hush-hush. I can’t breathe a word of it over the link. But we’re flying down to Victoria for more training, and I’ve wangled an hour off to see you. I’ll be there around noon, okay?”

  He was stunned. “Can’t wait, Chrissie.”

  “Love you,” she said, and her image vanished as she reached out and cut the connection.

  Hendry went about in a daze for the rest of the day. He’d last seen Chrissie two years ago, when she’d managed the arduous trip and stayed with him for a fortnight. Back then the community had numbered ten, and had a vitality about it, though he’d seen how shocked she was at his living conditions.

  Since then they’d communicated every month or so, she trying to get him to relocate to Berne, he resisting, but later wondering why.

  Maybe it was because he didn’t want to become emotionally reliant on Chrissie. He’d been down that road fifteen years ago with Chrissie’s mother, Su, and then she’d walked out, left him to join a commune of neo-fascist Greens bent on the systematic assassination of industrialists.

  It had taken a long time to get over that, and a long time to come to terms with being alone again when, five years ago, Chrissie left their home in Paris to attend university in Berne. Hendry had thought of going with her then, but something had drawn him south, to the land of his birth.

  Later he went out into the garden, watched the sun go down and then began hoeing between the peas. He normally slipped into a mindless fugue while working in the garden, but this time his head was full of Chrissie’s optimism. Something had come up, she’d said, something hush-hush. She’d wanted to know if humanity carried the seeds of their destruction within them... And her mention of a new beginning?

  He wondered if, like her mother, she’d been lured into some fanatical cult promising redemption.

  But she would tell him all about it tomorrow. That was more than Su had ever done. She’d walked out after dropping Chrissie off at school one morning, left him a note saying that she’d had enough of being married to a spacer and was leaving.

  Slowly, he’d worked to overcome his rage, his hatred. He’d hired the services of a private detective, who’d traced her to the headquarters of a back-to-the-soil cult in Tokyo, the Fujiyama Green Brigade. Hendry had tried to contact her, but his calls and emails had gone unanswered. He’d even visited Tokyo in an attempt to track her down, but the cult was expert at covering the traces of its converts.

  A couple of years later the detective had called Hendry and told him that his ex-wife had been killed in a terrorist raid on the headquarters of the American Space Administration.

  Hendry had tried to find within himself some iota of grief, without success. In his mind, Su had become a different person when she’d left him, an inexplicable cipher brainwashed by monomaniacs, and not the woman he’d loved and married in his early twenties.

  As the evening cooled, he stopped weeding and looked up at the looming shape of the shuttle, dark against the sunset. The sight brought back a slew of memories.

  Hendry had spent fifteen years working for Space Oceana, a smartware engineer on the ships that made the short-hop Earth-L5-Mars runs. Then the collapse of ‘88 had bankrupted Space Oceana and every other private enterprise in space, and the colonies had been recalled, the L5s emptied, and a flood of refugees had returned to an impoverished Earth, their expertise of little use in a world rapidly reverting to pre-technological barbarity... or so it had seemed to Hendry.

  Over the past seven years, the majority of the world’s population had succumbed to drought, rising sea levels and resource wars. Many of those who had survived had fallen, eventually, to plagues both man-made and natural. Terrorist groups, working on the assumption that it was better for no one to have anything than for a few to have a little, had released deadly pathogens into the water supplies of the mega-cities in America and China, killing millions, while seeding the air with lab-developed viruses. No one knew the present population of planet Earth. Some said it might even be as low as a dozen or so millions.

  Added to which, the ozone layer was in tatters, and the sea was poisoned, and plant-life was withering in the rising heat...

  He got down on his hands and knees to remove the weeds the hoe had missed. Minutes later he found that he was weeping, large tears falling straight onto the soil and rapidly soaking in.

  It often hit him like this, inexplicably and for no apparent reason. He supposed, this time, it had something to do with Chrissie’s futile optimism. His own end, his own death somewhere down the line, he could deal with. But he found unbearable the thought of his daughter’s inevitable death, in a terrible future much worse than the present, without him around to hold her and tell her that everything would be okay.

  He stood up, clapped his hands together to get rid of the soil, and berated himself for being so negative. For how long had he expressed the philosophy that he should live for the day, without thought for tomorrow? He had brought Chrissie up with this ideal. Live for the present, gain the maximum enjoyment from now, and the future would cease to exist; it would become but an unfolding series of moments to be savoured.

  He moved back into the shuttle, fixed himself some fish and roast potatoes.

  That night, sleeping fitfully, he dreamed for the first time in years of his wife. In the nightmare, Su flew to Berne and attacked the Space Agency’s headquarters, blowing herself up and taking Chrissie with her.

  He woke in the early hours, sweating in fear, and then remembered that his daughter would be with him at noon.

  * * * *

  2

  He awoke late. It was almost ten by the time he rolled from his bunk and showered in the makeshift cubicle he’d erected under the nose of the shuttle. He breakfasted on the salad left over from yesterday, then rooted through the storage units for the last of the coffee. Chrissie loved freshly ground coffee, one of the many rare co
mmodities in Europe these days.

  He left the shuttle and made his way through the garden, seeing the regimented rows of produce through Chrissie’s eyes and feeling proud of his achievement.

  The sea was as sluggish as ever, scummed with a meniscus of something oil-based. Recently his catch of fish and the occasional crab had diminished. There had been a time when the daily haul had easily fed the community of ten; now there was barely sufficient for himself. He dragged up the net and inspected the catch. Two catfish, and a baby snapper, which he threw back. It was better than nothing, he supposed, and would provide the makings of a decent lunch.

  He checked the desalination plant—it throbbed away contentedly—then made his slow way back to the starship graveyard.

  He grilled the fish, then fixed a fresh salad. When he looked up it was almost midday. He went out and sat in his chair beneath the awning, staring out across the flat, parched landscape and wondering from which direction Chrissie might come.