Tanith Lee by The Sky-Green Blues

Author:The Sky-Green Blues [Blues, The Sky-Green]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-12T02:16:55+00:00

When I woke again, it was late in the morning; instinctively I knew. And once I had crawled forward, I saw. One of those breaks had come, this time a vast clearing. The machine was stopped on its edge, screened off only by clumps of bamboo, a flimsy curtain of vines. I hadn’t noticed, somehow, the previous evening, in the failing dusk.

Here, the perimeter of the clearing was richly green, but running to tobacco-brown farther off. The jungle only came in again, I thought, over a kilometre away. Some little deer were feeding in the middle distance, and there was a ripple of heat haze. The sky was very bright, cat’s-eye colour. Almost midday then. I could no longer hear the fall.

Neither of us had left the machine before now. There was no need to. Every psychological need to. But without discussion, both of us had seemed to decide to go outside was foolish. The jungle-forest, in Laitel’s language the lunga-rook, is treacherous. Quicksands, poisoned plants and snakes, gurricula, boar … an endless list of don’ts.

But now, Laitel had gone out. He must have done, because the machine, including the toilet and the storage space, was empty. I opened the front compartment. It was filled by batteries and tools for the upkeep of the machine. Lohno Tezmaine’s gun lay slimly alongside.

I sat in the front seat, turning slowly, looking through the dome into the clearing, and the forest behind us, what I could make out over the machine’s streamlined back.

Laitel had left the vehicle, and was not to be seen. Had vanished.

A story I hadn’t bothered to tell him: when I was a child, in my own city, unthinkable wastes of time from here, I’d been left with some relative for an afternoon. I was about five. As it turned out, the relative, an aunt, either real or titular, hadn’t been reliable. Rather like wicked female kin in fairy tales, she had taken me to the park, gone off to buy something, cigarettes I seem to recall, and not remembered to come back. Unnecessary to itemize the stages of my bewildered and tearful panic, the gibbering little near-foetus I eventually became, under those pruned cedars of Hurlingham. Near closing time, a park warden found me. He took me with some trouble —I’d been told never to go with strangers —to the park admin. Here I was rescued presently by a parent.

It shook me, sitting in the machine, sitting there with the blistering near-noon sunlight coming through the dome, shook me. Laitel gone, and I was that child again. The park, the jungle, the lunga-rook. Don’t go with strangers.

For God’s sake, I couldn’t drive this thing. I didn’t even know, and couldn’t work out, which button would polarize the dome and stop the glare.

But come on, I’d been in worse situations. Hadn’t I? Seldom quite alone though. My own kind had been with me. Or another sort of stranger, the sort one believes, for that short period, is an ally, a companion.

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