‘Where you might leave me anyway, even if I tell you everything.’
‘It’s up to you. But, one police officer to another, I think you know that telling me everything is the right thing to do.’
41. Through The Mirror
Mangala | 25 July
The three travellers dossed down in cheap sleeping bags in the squalid living room of Hanna Babbel’s trailer: the kind of worn grey carpet found in rented offices, a greasy couch and a coffee table piled with used trays of microwaved meals, papers and books, blades of sunlight slicing through cheap plastic blinds and falling on a photograph of a scowling man with a bushy moustache. The former Mr Babbel, according to Hanna. ‘To remind me why I never go back to Earth.’
Chloe had a hard time getting to sleep, woke to find Henry snoring and Fahad’s sleeping bag unzipped and empty. He was outside, standing in front of the cage of the mantis-like biochine. The thing was pressed against the bars, its small triangular head angled towards him. It was making a low buzzing sound, like a fridge motor ticking over.
Fahad smiled at Chloe and said, ‘Ugly Chicken has made a friend.’
His right hand was gripping his left wrist and Rana’s bracelet.
Chloe said, ‘Is that what he’s telling you?’
‘He isn’t talking to me. Not yet. But I can feel him, in my head. He’s awake, Chloe. Ready to go.’
‘That’s beyond cool, Fahad. Seriously.’
‘Because it means you have not come all this way for nothing.’
‘Because the risk we all took is paying off.’
‘Yes. It will all work out. You’ll see.’
Hanna Babbel scowled when Fahad explained about befriending the biochine and what it meant, told him to keep away from her valuable specimens and find something else to play games with.
Henry pretended to be sanguine, saying that it was nice that Fahad and Ugly Chicken were getting along so well, but wasn’t it time that the thing explained what it wanted them to find?
‘Even if it did, we’d still have to go and look for it,’ Chloe said. ‘But at least we should know what it is when we see it.’
‘I feel good about it,’ Fahad said, looking around at the others, his smile like sunshine breaking through clouds. ‘I feel this is right.’
They spent most of the day driving around the city and picking up supplies. Stopping first at a dealership, where Henry bought an aluminium-hulled skiff and a ridiculously oversized outboard motor, and a trailer that they hitched to Hanna’s Subaru.
‘You pay far too much,’ she said.
‘So what? It isn’t my money,’ Henry said. He had a credit card that drew on an account in a local bank, pumped up with funds transferred via the shuttle. Just for today, he said, he was Santa Claus.
They towed the boat to the compound and went out again. The ordinary streets and buildings, the ordinary cars and buzzing swarms of scooters deepened Chloe’s dreamlike feeling that she hadn’t travelled across twenty thousand light years at all, but instead had fallen through a mirror into an alternate Earth, or the kind of fictional country where action films and shoot-’em-up video games were staged. Only the low, soft orange sun and the pinkish sky suggested otherwise.
They staged a swift raid for basic clothing on a Gap in a shopping centre, but finding essentials for their expedition took most of the rest of the day because outdoor sports shops and hardware shops had been stripped by people anxious about the oncoming storm. There was a drought of bottled water, hardly any food left on the shelves. Most of their supplies consisted of cereals, dried pasta, power bars, odd combinations of fruit juices — strawberry and orange, mango and ginger — and a kilo of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee beans that cost more than everything else put together.
‘If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll have to live off the land,’ Henry said. ‘Some of these alien critters must be edible. I mean, if we can suck down a McFlurry we can eat pretty much anything.’
They had stopped in the drive-through McDonald’s they’d seen yesterday, to regroup and work out if they’d forgotten anything, for a last taste of the Earth before they headed off into the great unknown. In the restaurant, Chloe felt a fresh wave of the odd feeling that she hadn’t really left Earth: the familiar pod-like furniture and playschool colours, the familiar odours and perky staff in familiar uniforms, the familiar menu. She was picking at a clammy salad served in a plastic shell. Henry was washing down his double cheeseburger with a big glass of red wine. They served wine and beer here, and there was a café section for coffee and pastries. It was a Continental version of McDonald’s.
Hanna explained that few of the plants and animals on Petra could be eaten by human beings or the animals they had brought with them.
‘The musculature of biochines is based on various polymers. Plastics. As for other animals, and plants too, they are mostly inedible or poisonous. You would not expect otherwise. They were brought here by Elder Cultures from their homeworlds. It is not a true integrated ecology, but patchworks of competing clades. In the early days, people had to sterilise the soil with chemical treatments or by steam injection before any crops would grow.’
‘Maybe we should order a couple of dozen cheeseburgers to go,’ Henry said. ‘They never go off. Leave one on a shelf for a year, it’s still edible.’
Fahad was quiet, hunched in his brand-new blue Helly Hansen parka. He hadn’t once complained during the long march of their supply run, but he’d lost the shine of his enthusiasm, and had given up on his Chicken McNuggets and strawberry milkshake. Now he pushed back from the table and excused himself.
‘Kid is getting nervous,’ Henry said, watching Fahad thread his way past tables and booths to the toilets.
‘So am I,’ Chloe said. ‘This is a giant step into the unknown.’
‘It’s mostly desert,’ Henry said. ‘I know deserts.’
‘Do not make the mistake of thinking this is like Earth,’ Hanna said.
‘Yet here we are in a McDonald’s.’
Henry was definitely happier than Chloe had ever seen him. Henry Harris, man of action.
He said, ‘This isn’t a full-blown expedition. It’s a quick raid, in and out before the storm hits. So we don’t need to take much in the way of supplies. And this place is on a river, so we won’t lack for water. If the worst comes to the worst, aren’t there farms out there? Farms, orchards…We can buy food, scrump apples.’
‘We will be a long way from any farm,’ Hanna said.
They pulled up the maps again, reviewed the route they would take to Idunn’s Valley and the settlement closest to the site, the winding path of the river. After a few minutes, Chloe said, ‘Where’s Fahad?’
He wasn’t in the toilets. He wasn’t anywhere in the busy restaurant. He wasn’t in Hanna’s Outback, wasn’t anywhere in the car park.
‘Split up,’ Henry said, all business. ‘You go left, Chloe, I’ll go right. You,’ he told Hanna, ‘stay by your vehicle. Don’t fucking move.’
‘This is my fault? You blame me, who helps you without thanks? Who works hard out here, on her own, for so many years?’
But Henry was already jogging away.
Chloe went in the opposite direction, walking along the road in the traffic’s buffeting slipstream. There was no pavement, so she kept to the shoulder, treading amongst patches of grey furze, black spikes like spearheads pushing up from red dirt. Passing the edge of the car park of a giant Ikea shed.
She felt an airy apprehension, felt as if this strange world had revealed itself to be tissue-thin. She was pretty sure that she knew where Fahad was headed, what he’d been planning all along, and hoped she was wrong.