Under the Burning Clouds Read online

  “How will you even get there?”

  “He’ll invite me in.”

  “And you will think of something when you are there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Impulsive. Unthinking. Barely a hint of a plan.”

  Maliha knew that Françoise was goading her. She knew she should just walk away. But she could not. Was Françoise right? Was she really impulsive? Did she create plans that had no ending? Did she really just make it up as she went along?

  “Always...” she started and then hesitated. “It is the truth that matters.” She stopped again. “Only the truth. Don’t you see? I am not important, it does not matter whether I live or die, as long as I know the truth.”

  “But, ma cherie, you are important.”

  Maliha shook her head.

  “Bien sûr. There are people who love you.”

  “Valentine is dead.”

  Françoise made a noise of derision. “You think he was the only one who loved you? Am I no-one? What of your Amita? Madame Makepeace-Flynn?”

  “Me,” added Constance then nodded at the children. “And those rascals.”

  Maliha wanted to deny it, but she could not. Barbara had said she loved her like a daughter. Amita was so devoted it could barely be anything else but love.

  “You love me?” she said finally.

  “Much as I am forced to regret it every day, since I know you will not share my bed,”— Maliha noticed a frown flicker across Constance’s brow; it was not going to be a happy parting when Françoise moved on—“yes, Maliha Anderson, I love you.”

  “Are you sure that’s not just lust?”

  Françoise smiled. “Oh yes, there is the lust, of course,”—Constance was becoming a storm cloud—“but I know what that is and I can separate the lust, so the thing that remains must be love.”

  “What about me?” said Constance.

  Maliha marvelled at the way Françoise refocused her attention on her lover, drew her into a delicate kiss and washed away all the doubt. “You, Constance, are my special and most beautiful love.”

  “Aaaaaaiiiiieeeeeeeeee!”

  Lilith’s scream pierced the dome like a knife driven into the heart. It was loud enough to make thought impossible and told of a pain so acute it transmitted the agony to any who could hear.

  “Goddess!” It was Izak. Maliha was already moving; she had launched herself in the direction of the children the moment the scream touched her ears. It was almost as if she had been waiting for it.

  She focused first on Izak. He was pulling back from the twisting form of Lilith. She was arching her back and flopping forward, her arms and legs jamming out at odd angles then pulling in. It was if she was possessed by a demon trying to claw its way from her body.

  The description was not entirely inaccurate.

  Lilith drifted towards the deck. Maliha used the dome to push off and intersect the girl’s path. Lilith screamed again, but it was choked off halfway through, as if the muscles of her throat refused to obey her.

  Maliha grabbed her as she passed and wrapped her arms about her tightly, preventing her from lashing out. Her legs were still free and the child repeatedly kicked, driving her heels into Maliha’s thighs and knees. The lack of gravity did not reduce the pain.

  Maliha made shushing sounds, but even if the child could hear her it made no difference to her behaviour. Maliha’s shoulder crashed into the deck. She cushioned Lilith from the impact, crushing her own chest and stomach.

  She continued to cling to the little girl.

  “I’ll fetch the doctor,” said Constance.

  “No, he can’t do anything,” said Maliha. Lilith’s struggling seemed to have lost some of its strength; her muscles were probably tiring. “Help me get her back to my cabin.”

  ii

  “Is she going to die?” said Izak.

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re the goddess.”

  “I’m not.”

  Maliha had managed to make Lilith drink a sleeping draught concocted from the pills and powders the doctor had supplied. She had been holding them in anticipation of this day.

  She had sent Constance and Françoise away after they got the child restrained. They had even had to gag her at first. It was just as well the default British approach was to ignore badly behaved children, as they had passed several people.

  But now Lilith was lying quietly. Her breathing was hoarse, but her muscles only spasmed occasionally.

  Maliha sat on one side of the bed while Izak stood on the other.

  “You said you were the goddess.”

  “I never did, Izak,” she said, treating him as an adult. He may be young but he had already seen horrors in his life she would never witness. She had never starved on the streets the way he had. The pain she had ever suffered was nothing compared to his.

  Well, no, she corrected herself, but what she had suffered could not compare to Izak or Lilith’s suffering. The girl’s anguished cry was a pain that could not be truly expressed.

  She did not imagine the creatures of Venus reacted this way. Were these fungal creatures parasites or symbiotes? It probably varied. But Lilith’s reaction to this one, whichever it was, did not seem to be in the best interests of the fungus either way. It was uncontrolled.

  Probably because our bodies did not react the way a victim should.

  “It was other people who said I was a goddess,” Maliha continued, as if she had not left minutes between her sentences. “It was a man in India. A man with his own agenda, who wanted to create a goddess to oppose the French and the British. To throw them all out of India. It was not my idea.”

  “You said we could call you Goddess.”

  “Because you would not stop.” She wanted to shout at him, but it was not his fault. “I even thought it might be a good idea.” Foolishness. What could she possibly have hoped to achieve?

  The enemy was not Terence Timmons, his industrial empire or his fleet of slavers. The enemy lay before her, squirming and growing within the body of her child. Monstrous.

  What kind of enemy was it that made you kill the ones you loved in order to destroy it?

  “What will happen to her, Goddess?”

  Maliha looked up and stared at him. He held her eye, steady, serious.

  Despite being unconscious from the drug, Lilith convulsed and cried out in pain.

  “The pain will get worse. The thing within her will escape and fill the air with its spores. It will infect you, me and everybody on this vessel. Then we will also die.”

  “Can you stop it?”

  She hesitated and then nodded. I can take away the pain; in fact, I have no choice. I cannot allow the fungus to run the full course of its infection. I must prevent it.

  “You will end her life?”

  Maliha felt her face muscles tighten in prelude to the tears that came. She hated low gravity for forcing her to wipe away her tears. She wanted to demonstrate her grief, she wanted the tears to streak her cheeks, but in this place they would not.

  “I have a knife,” said Izak and pulled out a small pointed blade he must have stolen from someone.

  She shook her head. “We cannot do that. If we do, the monster inside of her will still infect us all.”

  “Then what will you do, Goddess?”

  “Make her sleep so deep she cannot wake up.”

  Maliha took a deep breath. She felt numb. No part of her body wanted to move—it was so unfair. Why was life like this? Why did an innocent child have to die? Why must she be the agency of that death?

  Because she had the power of life and death over not only Lilith but everyone else. She was the only one who understood that all life on Earth now hung in the balance. She was the only one who had the power to warn them, who would be able to save them.

  But only if she killed this one child.

  Like an automaton she went to the cupboard and fetched the pills. Moving carefully in the low gravity, she ground the pills into powder and mixed them wi
th water, churning every grain into the liquid until no more could be absorbed.

  Lilith’s cries were becoming more frequent. This was not entirely a bad thing as she would need to be at least partially awake to drink.

  When Maliha turned back, Lilith’s eyes were open and showed the glassy black with tiny white pinpricks where the pupils should have been. She struggled against the restraints but she was no longer complaining of the pain.

  Maliha felt the tears again. She forced them back. She could not allow them now. She would weep later.

  “Are you thirsty, Lilith?” she said, forcing her voice into calm. She glanced across at Izak; he still held the knife. His face was hard as stone and she saw a touch of red where he was pushing the end of the blade into his thumb. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and opened them again. Now she wore a smile.

  “I expect you’re thirsty. I’ve made you a drink.”

  Maliha sat on the edge of the bed. She adjusted the straw. Lilith moved stiffly, as if her muscles no longer worked properly. Perhaps they didn’t.

  “Here, let me hold the straw to your mouth.” She moved the cup and straw towards the girl, but the mouth remained shut.

  “Open your mouth, Lilith.” At the command, she did so, and closed it again when the straw touched her tongue. For the brief time her mouth was open Maliha had seen that the pink skin inside was now a dark grey. She could not even be certain the sleeping draught would work.

  If it did not there was only one other solution.

  “Drink.”

  There was a moment’s pause then Lilith sucked at the straw and the liquid poured into her mouth. Maliha watched the muscles in her throat contract and swallow. Again and again. Lilith kept drinking and swallowing until there was nothing left and Maliha pulled the straw from her mouth. Lilith’s mouth and throat continued to act as if the straw was still there.

  Maliha put the cup to one side and took Lilith’s hand in hers. It was slick and cold with sweat. Lilith tensed and convulsed; Maliha held her hand tight. “Lie back, Lilith.”

  The girl did so. Her eyes were closed. Maliha could almost imagine she was the same girl from Johannesburg. Without thinking, Maliha made a sound in her throat and coughed. For a moment she did not realise what she was doing. Then it came to her.

  Maliha remembered her mother holding her hand the night before she was to leave for boarding school in England. Young Maliha had been so scared and her mother had not known how to comfort her. So she sang a lullaby, a song she had sung to Maliha to help her to sleep on the nights when her nightmares created monsters in the dark.

  So Maliha sang her mother’s lullaby for Lilith as she slipped away.

  iii

  “The body will be consigned to the Void at eleven-hundred, Miss Ganapathy.”

  She nodded. The captain sat across his desk from her, smoking his overly ornate pipe carved from some black wood. Its double curve was highlighted by thick grain-lines, unlike anything you would see from an Earth tree.

  “I am, however, somewhat at a loss as to explain how she could have died from black-eye.”

  Maliha had discovered there was a major hole in her knowledge. So much was happening on Venus and yet it went unremarked in Earth literature. There had been nothing in any medical literature about Venusian diseases.

  Black-eye. Not common but not unknown. A danger in the torrid zones and fatal if not caught early.

  “She contracted it on Earth,” said Maliha.

  “How?”

  Because a shadowy division of the company for whom you work is experimenting with Venusian fungi on Earth. Some of it has escaped to infect animals and people alike.

  “I couldn’t say,” she said. Because that would mean explaining more to you than I am willing to do at this time.

  “And you did not report her illness.”

  “I didn’t know how ill she was until last night,” she said. “I knew she was under the weather, having bad dreams, but it could have been the unfamiliar surroundings.”

  He sighed. “You haven’t been to Venus previously?”

  She shook her head.

  “You weren’t in contact with someone who had recently been to Venus?”

  “No, Captain, I told you.”

  He sighed and made some notes on the form he was filling in. “What shall I put as the girl’s surname?”

  “Anderson.”

  He looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “Not Ganapathy?”

  “I adopted them under my real name,” Maliha said. Unofficially, perhaps, but what did that matter? What is in the heart is more important than what is on a piece of paper. Now he would put it in writing and it would become the truth.

  I was a terrible mother.

  The captain finished writing in the boxes provided. “Are you planning to continue to the surface? You could simply wait in the station for the next flight back to Earth.” He paused. “Many people do.”

  “No,” she said. “I have business that will not wait.”

  “If I might make so bold, Miss Ganapathy?”

  “Captain?”

  “I would appreciate it if you chose a different vessel for the return journey.” The smile he forced onto his face was more like a grimace. “Deaths on board a ship are counted against the captain. It’s not an official policy, but sailors are superstitious. If there were to be more deaths on a vessel I commanded, it would become harder to find a crew that would serve under me.”

  Maliha stood up and offered her white-gloved hand for him to shake. He took it.

  “I understand, Captain,” she said. “I hope not to trouble you further.”

  She paused at the door. “How long until we reach the station dock?”

  He glanced at the chronometer on the wall. “A little over six hours.”

  She closed the door gently behind her.

  * * *

  The ship’s chaplain read a short service in the Anglican seafarer tradition. Maliha did not mind; she had put up with seven years of church on Sunday on the British coast, where there were often references to the local fishermen, their trade and their losses. In some ways it was familiar and comforting.

  They were in one of the airlock antechambers. Lilith had already been placed in the airlock itself, completely wrapped and bound in a white sheet that revealed her outline.

  There was only a small window through which she could be seen and, after the main part of the service had been delivered, each of the mourners—Izak, Constance, Françoise and the doctor, as the representative of the ship’s crew—took a moment to look in on her.

  The window was at a good height for a man and the doctor went first. He muttered God be with you, child, but for the three women and Izak it was out of reach. The chaplain had thoughtfully provided a box for them to stand on. They could have jumped, but that would have been undignified.

  Maliha wondered what Constance and Françoise might be thinking as they took their turns. She let Izak go before her. He climbed onto the box and looked through the thick quartz glass. He brushed the back of his hand across his eyes then turned to Maliha; standing on the box, his eyes were on a level with hers.

  “It is a lesson, Goddess,” he said. There was a cough from the chaplain at the word.

  Maliha looked at him without understanding.

  “It is a lesson to you that you cannot save everyone, even the ones you love.” He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. “And it is a lesson to us that we must protect you and help you so you can save the rest of us.”

  She wanted to argue with him, to explain that his lessons were nothing more than a rationalisation of a bad thing that had happened by chance, but this was not the time.

  He jumped lightly from the box and Maliha took his place. Her breath misted on the glass, but it evaporated almost as it formed.

  There was no cure for black-eye once it had taken hold. Quinine held it at bay. If she had known this, Lilith would be alive. Quinine was easily available in the tropics; she
could have given it to Lilith and she would be alive now. True, she would be leading a precarious existence in a constant battle to prevent the fungus from spreading, and it was not a perfect treatment—quinine could have terrible side effects and some people could not take it at all—but there would have been a chance.

  “Give her your blessing, Goddess,” said Izak.

  The chaplain coughed again; apparently the reference to a goddess was annoying him.

  Maliha placed her palm flat on the glass. She closed her eyes. “Namaste, Lilith. May you fare better in your next incarnation.”

  There was an ensign in the antechamber as well, responsible for the mundane and practical matters of the Void burial. He too was dressed in his best uniform and he was Indian.

  “Do you wish to operate the door, Goddess?” he said.

  Maliha jerked her head round to him. He had a gentle smile on his young, kind face. She nodded. He held out his hand to help her from the box, though it was hardly necessary.

  He guided her to a set of controls at the side of the door. “You put your feet in the floor stirrups,” he pointed to two leather loops attached to the deck, “turn this to release the air pressure and, when the red light is on, press this button.” The rotating handle was marked ‘Air valve’ and the button was the door release.

  Maliha slipped her shoes into the loops—they were very loose, being designed for men’s boots—then turned the handle. Without the foot loops she would have turned herself while the handle remained motionless. There was a hiss that quickly faded and she could feel the metal of the wall between her and the airlock radiating cold.

  The light came on. Maliha hit the release button with the heel of her hand. There was the whine of an electric motor and a metallic thump.

  Maliha did not need to look to know that the residue of atmosphere had carried Lilith’s body out into the Void, most likely, given their trajectory, to burn up like a shooting star in the atmosphere of Venus. A shooting star that no one would see.

  She heard the door open and turned to see the chaplain leaving. The doctor came over and shook her hand. He mumbled his condolences, gave a casual salute to the other women and departed.

  With the other crew members gone, the ensign moved round in front of her, removed his cap and knelt. He touched her feet. Maliha placed her hand on his head as her blessing, in return for his respect. Rising again, he pressed his palms together above his head and bowed, then scurried from the room almost as if he was embarrassed with himself.