Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“Can I?”

“It won’t bite you.”

He looked closely at the fist-sized ball of amber at its head, and the skeleton outline of a sphere embedded in it.

“It’s a buckyball,” I said. “The symbol of our power.”

He passed it to me without comment. We unwrapped our guns, cleaned them, checked them, and set off. We walked east that day along the ridges of the Nandi Hills, through ruined fields and abandoned villages. Helicopter engines were our constant companions. Sometimes we glimpsed them through the leaf cover, tiny in the sky like black mosquitoes. The old people and the mothers looked afraid. I did not want them to see how nervous they were making me. I called my colleagues apart.

“They’re getting closer.”

Hamid nodded. He was a quiet, thin twenty-two year old… Ethiopian skin, goatee, a political science graduate from the university of Nairobi.

“We choose a different path every time,” he said. “They can’t know this.”

“Someone’s selling us,” Meji said.

“Wouldn’t matter. We pick one at random.”

“Unless they’re covering them all.”

In the afternoon we began to dip down toward the Rift Valley and terminum. As we wound our way down the old hunters’ paths, muddy and slippery from recent rain, the helicopter came swooping in across the hillside. We scrambled for cover. It turned and made another pass, so low I could see the light glint from the pilot’s heads-up visor.

“They’re playing with us,” Hamid said. “They can blow us right off this hill any time they want.”

“How?” Naomi asked. She said only what was necessary, and when.

“I think I know,” Sean said. He had been listening a little away. He slithered down to join us as the helicopter beat over the hillside again, flailing the leaves, showering us with dirt and twigs. “This.” He tapped my forearm. “If I could find you, they can find you.”

I pulled up my sleeve. The Judas chip seemed to throb under my skin, like poison.

“Hold my wrist,” I said to Sean. “Whatever happens, don’t let it slip.”

Before he could say a word, I pulled my knife. These things must be done fast. If you once stop to think, you will never do it. Make sure you have it straight. You won’t get another go. A stab down with the tip, a short pull, a twist, and the traitor thing was on the ground, greasy with my blood. It hurt. It hurt very much, but the blood had staunched, the wound was already closing.

“I’ll just have to make sure not to lose you again,” Sean said.

Very quietly, very silently, we formed up the team and one by one slipped down the hillside, out from under the eyes of the helicopter. For all I know, the stupid thing is up there still, keeping vigil over a dead chip. We slept under the sky that night, close together for warmth, and on the third day we came to Tinderet and the edge of the Chaga.

Ten had been leading us a cracking pace, as if she were impatient to put Kenya behind us. Since mid-morning, we had been making our way up a long, slow hill. I’d done some hill-walking, I was fit for it, but the young ones and the women with babies found it tough going. When I called for a halt, I saw a moment of anger cross Ten’s face. As soon as she could, we upped packs and moved on. I tried to catch up with her, but Ten moved steadily ahead of me until, just below the summit, she was almost running.

“Shone!” she shouted back. “Come with me!”

She ran up through the thinning trees to the summit. I followed, went bounding down a slight dip, and suddenly, the trees opened and I was on the edge.

The ground fell away at my feet into the Rift Valley, green on green on green, sweeping to the valley floor where the patterns of the abandoned fields could still be made out in the patchwork of yellows and buffs and earth tones. Perspective blurred the colors—I could see at least fifty miles—until, suddenly, breathtakingly, they changed. Browns and dry-land beiges blended into burgundies and rust reds, were shot through with veins of purple and white, then exploded into chaos, like a bed of flowers of every conceivable color, a jumble of shapes and colors like a mad coral reef, like a box of kiddie’s plastic toys spilled out on a Chinese rug. It strained the eyes, it hurt the brain. I followed it back, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. A sheer wall, deep red, rose abruptly out of the chaotic landscape, straight up, almost as high as the escarpment I was standing on. It was not a solid wall; it looked to me to be made up of pillars or, I thought, tree trunks. They must have been of titanic size to be visible from this distance. They opened into an unbroken, flat, crimson canopy. In the further distance, the flat roof became a jumble of dark greens, broken by what I can only describe as small mesas, like the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming or the old volcanoes in Puy de Dome. But these glittered in the sun like glass. Beyond them, the landscape was striped like a tiger, yellow and dark brown, and formations like capsizing icebergs, pure white, lifted out of it. And beyond that, I lost the detail, but the colors went on and on, all the way to the horizon.

I don’t know how long I stood, looking at the Chaga. I lost all sense of time. I became aware at some point that Ten was standing beside me. She did not try to move me on, or speak. She knew that the Chaga was one of these things that must just be experienced before it can be interpreted. One by one the others joined us. We stood in a row along the bluffs, looking at our new home.

Then we started down the path to the valley below.

Half an hour down the escarpment, Meji up front called a halt.

“What is it?” I asked Ten. She touched her fingers to her communicator; a half-eggshell of living plastic unfolded from the headset and pressed itself to her right eye.

“This is not good,” she said. “Smoke, from Menengai.”

“Menengai?”

“Where we’re going. Meji is trying to raise them on the radio.”

I looked over Ten’s head to Meji, one hand held to his ear, looking around him. He looked worried.

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“And what do we do?”

“We go on.”

We descended through microclimates. The valley floor was fifteen degrees hotter than the cool, damp Nandi Hills. We toiled across brush and overgrown scrub, along abandoned roads, through deserted villages. The warriors held their weapons at the slope. Ten regularly scanned the sky with her all-seeing eye. Now even I could see the smoke, blowing toward us on a wind from the east, and smell it. It smelled like burned spices. I could make out Meji trying to call up Menengai. Radio silence.

In the early afternoon, we crossed terminum. You can see these things clearly from a distance. At ground level, they creep up on you. I was walking through tough valley grasses and thorn scrub when I noticed lines of blue moss between the roots. Oddly regular lines of moss, that bent and forked at exactly one hundred and twenty degrees, and joined up into hexagons. I froze. Twenty meters ahead of me, Ten stood in one world… I stood in another.

“Even if you do nothing, it will still come to you,” she said. I looked down. The blue lines were inching toward my toes. “Come on.” Ten reached out her hand. I took it, and she led me across. Within two minutes’ walk, the scrub and grass had given way entirely to Chaga vegetation. For the rest of the afternoon we moved through the destroying zone. Trees crashed around us, shrubs were devoured from the roots down, grasses fell apart and dissolved; fungus fingers and coral fans pushed up on either side, bubbles blew around my head. I walked through it untouched like a man in a furnace.