Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking Book 3), page 44
Exhausting work. Non-stop. But worth doing.
Still, when some of the newly-woken settlers suggested an exploration trip, I was up for it. So was Wilf, even if his wife wasn’t happy to see him go for the four weeks we’d be away.
There were ten of us. Me. Wilf. Collier, who was a caretaker on one of the settler ships and our main pilot. Mikkelsen, an anthropologist, who wanted to study and learn from the different Spackle enclaves we expected to meet. Dawson, Stubbs, Zhiang and Jefferson were agriculturalists and ecologists, hoping to find things that might help us out in terms of native food. And Foster and Fukunaga were, I think, like me and Wilf: hard workers who needed a break and who just wanted to see what was out there. We were the lucky ones chosen by the new Council to go exploring, though I admit, Wilf and I had some pull.
Before we left, one of my friends who stopped the war talked to the leader of the Spackle – they call him the Sky – and he cleared a way for us, sending messages that we were to be helped wherever we landed in the scout ship.
If you ask me, it was the least he could do.
So we set off exploring, up north, as far as we could go. Over mountains and plains, across a set of connected lakes no human eyes had ever seen, across forests so vast even flying above them you couldn’t see their end. Stopping at all kinds of places, meeting all kinds of Spackle, seeing all kinds of new animals, as we kept going north.
“When should we stop?” we asked each other.
“When we get to the end,” we always answered.
You are safe, the lead Spackle showed us in its Noise. The Snowscape is gone.
“The what?” Mikkelsen said.
There was a crowd of Spackle before us, several dozen at least, Dawson and Fukunaga safely with them.
We had no idea where they could possibly have come from.
“Y’all right, Connie?” Wilf asked Fukunaga. She had a hand up to her mouth, fighting back tears, but she nodded. Wilf put an arm around her shoulders. Dawson came up and embraced them both.
People tend to gather like that around Wilf.
“Four dead,” Collier said to the lead Spackle, looking for someone to blame. “What the hell happened? We were told–”
We are sorry for your loss, the lead Spackle showed, and the weird thing was, you could feel he was telling the truth. Feel their grief with a keenness that silenced all of us. They seemed to be handing their loss to one another, each to each.
And then a strange thing happened. My Noise was filled with a chorusing of Spackle Noise, but unlike any I’d ever felt before. It had colours beyond colours, sounds and shapes that seemed to be pure feeling, and I was swimming in it, spinning in it–
Then it was gone.
There was silence all around. Collier, Fukunaga and Dawson, the three human women left out of the six who came on this trip, looked at us stunned.
“What was that?” Fukunaga asked. “Everyone just froze.”
“I feel…” Mikkelsen said, looking at his hands as if they were brand new, “I feel different.”
“Less sad,” Wilf said, though he didn’t sound particularly happy about it.
He was right, though. I felt the same way, like a little bit of the burden had been lifted from me, taken by the Spackle.
Please come, the lead Spackle said. Night is falling. The weather is turning. You will need shelter.
“I’d rather wait it out in the ship, if I’m honest,” Collier said.
“We should go with them,” Wilf said, and there was an odd note to his Noise, a note that wanted to find something out. “Yes, we should.”
And, as was usually the case when Wilf spoke, that was that.
They led us under the snow.
We assumed they’d be taking us back into the trees, to Spackle huts we must have somehow missed on the scans, because there was nothing north of the forest. It really was the final line of anything before an endless horizon of snow that stretched for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres over the very tip-top of the planet before heading back down the other side. We knew so little about it we weren’t even sure if it covered an ocean or a continent or both.
But that’s the way the Spackle headed.
“You won’t believe it,” Dawson said, shock still spangling her voice. “You just won’t believe it.”
That was all we could get out of her as the Spackle beckoned us on, unhurried, as if there was nothing to fear from whatever giant thing that had emerged from the forest, killing nearly half our crew.
“What was it?” I asked a Spackle near me, but all her Noise showed was the shadow disappearing into the forest. She was telling me there was nothing to be afraid of.
And again I felt that lack of fear, felt it draining away in my own Noise–
Wilf hmmphed in an unconvinced way but said nothing more.
They led us into the emptiness, seemingly oblivious to the snow that still fell. The lichen they grew over their skin was the heaviest I’d ever seen on a Spackle, but still much thinner than our snow gear, which even now wasn’t keeping me nearly warm enough.
“Humans can’t survive in this,” Collier tried to explain to them. “We’re not as acclimatized as you–”
But the lead Spackle simply showed, We are here.
In the side of a snowbank, one that looked just as temporary and windblown as all the others, a small, door-shaped hollow was sunk. The Spackle started down through it immediately, disappearing under the snow. Dawson followed them without a word.
The five of us remaining humans looked at each other.
The war was over. We had made peace with the Spackle. Other Spackle had been enormously helpful to us on our journey northwards.
But still we hesitated.
Because something here felt different.
“May as well find out,” Wilf said, then he turned to Collier, “but always know where the exit is.”
We followed the last of the Spackle through the door. It led down a corridor of ice that glowed, as if lit from within. Down we went, the walls remaining ice even past the point where it seemed like we should be hitting earth or rock underneath the snow.
“Must be a frozen sea,” Mikkelsen said behind us.
“So close to a forest?” Fukunaga asked, just in front of Wilf, who was leading me.
“Much we don’ know about this planet,” Wilf said, almost to himself.
“And the people on it,” Collier said, at the front, and I could see through Wilf’s eyes how closely she was watching the Spackle leading us.
“We’d see it if they meant us harm,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“I know,” she said. But once again, I could hear the uneasiness. I knew the Spackle could hear it, too, but they didn’t seem to mind. Oddly enough, I minded less than I thought I should, though that was a feeling hard to make sense of.
“Here’s somethin’,” Wilf said as we reached a flat part of the corridor. It opened out into a large room, almost a cavern, its walls lit with that unknown light, the floor covered in what looked like a mixture of furs and thick lichen. A huge table ran down the middle, seemingly a place to meet and eat and barter, wares and furs draped along it as well as food. Corridors led from points along every wall to caverns of ice and others beyond that.
You could tell because here and in the vast rooms beyond were hundreds and hundreds of Spackle, connected by Noise, giving us a welcome of complete and utter serenity.
It was the most peaceful-feeling place I’d ever seen.
The Spackle coated the walls with a secretion that lowered the temperature of the ice even further, hardening it and ensuring it wouldn’t melt. From the pictures I could see in their Noise, the caverns sprawled a mile or more out under the frozen wasteland. They hunted in the forest outside, but also deeper down, where the ice grew thinner, there were great holes for fishing. Their secretions provided the luminescence we were seeing, too, which was enough light to grow different kinds of ice-based crops in even further caverns, as well as allowing them to tend to a rabbit-like creature they grew in herds and which was their favourite diet.
They fed it to us. I can’t lie, it was good.
Everything was good. Their Noise was some kind of miracle of calm. I could feel the grief in our group, for the friends we’d lost, but at least in me, Wilf and Mikkelsen, it was pushed away, like it could never really hurt us.
I also felt too calm to really mind that it felt that way.
“We didn’t even know you were here,” Collier said to the lead Spackle, trying to ignore the usual pity our female members encountered from Spackle who didn’t understand why they didn’t have Noise. “You didn’t show up on our scanners and none of the other enclaves said anything about–”
Not all the Land speak with the same voice, the lead Spackle showed. Most, but not all.
Collier frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’ reckon I do neither,” Wilf said, taking another bite of snow rabbit-thing.
The lead Spackle took a moment to gather his words – it was clear he didn’t speak our language and was having to learn it from our Noises almost as he spoke it – and showed, We are… he paused, finding the right phrase. Self-sufficient?
“I can see that,” Mikkelsen said, looking around the cavern again, at the number of Spackle going about their daily lives, some watching us with a mild curiosity, most just calmly moving from room to room, a sense of serene purpose to every one of their actions.
“Everyone seems very…” Fukunaga said, also looking around.
“Relaxed?” Collier said.
“At peace,” Fukunaga said.
This is a problem? the Spackle asked us. Because I can see … turmoil in your own voices. He glanced at Collier. Those of you who have them.
“Our friends died,” Collier said, showing a flash of anger. “I mean, I’m glad you all chased whatever that thing was away, but I’d like some answers.”
“Me, too,” Wilf said. “I thank you for the feed, but I wan’ hear about that what came outta the forest. Now, please.”
For the first time, the lead Spackle looked uncomfortable. The Snowscape, he showed.
“If you say so,” Wilf said, taking a drink.
The Spackle looked at all of us, and I saw through his Noise how we looked back. Fukunaga bereft and cold, Dawson shocked to the point of humming a tune while she picked at the food in front of her, Collier angry and getting angrier, demanding to know.
But also how peaceful Mikkelsen looked as he ate, as if he hadn’t just seen four people die. I’m ashamed to say that I looked nearly as comfortable. Wilf’s face was unreadable, but Wilf’s face is always unreadable.
Still, we seemed as calm as the Spackle around us.
Then the lead Spackle opened his Noise and started to show us about the Snowscape.
“Do you believe all that?” I whispered to Wilf from the beds the Spackle had made for us.
The storm had got worse outside, and the Spackle had offered us a place to sleep until it passed. We had a small cavern to ourselves, warmed by whatever mysterious system the Spackle had mastered, though not quite warm enough for a human to take off their gloves.
“Not sure,” Wilf said, though I could see how awake his Noise was and how much he was thinking it over.
“Is it possible, do you think?” Collier asked, from the other side of me.
“This world,” Wilf said. “It’s big.”
“It surely is that,” Collier answered.
Mikkelsen was snoring away, peaceful as anything in a far corner. Fukunaga sat slightly apart from us, her back turned, praying. Dawson hummed to herself on the bedding in the other corner. We’d been unable to get much out of her since the whole thing had happened. It was entirely understandable. Zhiang was her husband, and he was lying in a snowy grave a few hundred feet away.
“But you think there’s something they’re not telling us?” I asked Collier.
In Wilf’s Noise I could see her frown. “You can’t see it, I don’t think,” she said, “because your Noise kind of prevents you. It can’t see itself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t really describe it, but there’s a kind of … absence.”
“Absence?” Wilf grunted.
“A void. A missing part. Something that was there before but isn’t now.” She rolled back on her bedding, face up to the ceiling. “I can’t explain it. These Spackle aren’t like any other Spackle we’ve met, and now your Noise is looking a bit like theirs.”
“Hmm,” Wilf said, pondering.
“Maybe it’s something to do with the Snowscape,” I said.
Collier sighed. “I’m not sure that’s something I find comforting.”
The Snowscape, the Spackle had told us, was a bogeyman they’d never been able to fully get rid of. A species of ravenous, snow-dwelling creature that had somehow evolved to sniff out its prey by following their darkest Noise, the bits that were frightened, the bits that were angry and panicked. The bits, in short, that would spark the loudest when the creature was chasing them. The more afraid its prey got, the more they shone like a beacon to the Snowscape.
Over the generations, the Spackle in these parts had learned both how to hide from it physically, underneath the snow, but also in their Noise. That was the weird thing that had happened when me and Wilf and Mikkelsen were suddenly feeling a whole lot better about things. The Spackle here had found a way to remove anger and fear from their own Noise, making them less visible to the Snowscape. With the added benefit that, hey, it was getting rid of anger and fear, making their home one of the most peaceful places I’d been to on this Noisy, Noisy planet.
“But three of the four people it killed out there were women,” Collier had said to the lead Spackle. “They didn’t have Noise at all.” And again, there was a rush of pity around her for her own lack of Noise. “And you all can just shut the hell up about that right now,” she’d snapped, her temper rising.
I am afraid that probably only confused the Snowscape more, the lead Spackle showed. It is still an animal, after all, and your bodies are clearly much warmer than ours, easier to smell. It almost certainly did not know what sort of creature you were and if it heard you screaming and running but not speaking with a voice…
“Why don’ you kill it?” Wilf asked.
We do try, the Spackle showed, but showed nothing more.
Still, I felt my fear lessen again, so much so that when Collier said, “You sure as hell aren’t doing a very good job of it,” I was embarrassed at her rudeness.
“They’ve got used to it,” she said now. “That’s what’s happened. They’ve so neutered themselves with this removal of any fear or anger that they can’t be bothered to kill it.”
“Or maybe it’s symbiotic,” Fukunaga said, turning to us.
“Sorry, Connie,” Wilf said, thinking we’d interrupted her prayers.
She waved him off. “I was finished anyway. But Collier’s right. There’s something they aren’t telling us, and I think it might be symbiosis.” She looked at us in the low luminescence, her eyes sad. “They have a reason to practise a peaceful life, and the creature out there gives them more than one way to keep it peaceful.”
We were silent at that, before Collier finally said, “You mean…”
But she didn’t finish.
“What?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“Surely they can’t all be this serene,” Fukunaga said. “And that thing out there needs to eat.”
“You don’ mean they sacrifice,” Wilf said, “do you?”
I tried to think about this, but my Noise felt muddled every time I approached it, some feeling telling me, no, it was all right, everything was all right. It was weird, contradictory. I felt good, but annoyed at how it got in the way.
“We haven’t seen any threat in their Noise,” I said. “Nothing. You can’t just accuse them–”
“I’m not accusing,” Fukunaga said. “And there wouldn’t be threat, would there? They’d feel sad about it, but then they’d remove that sadness.”
“But Spackle aren’t like that,” I insisted. “They’ve been helpful to us all along the way. The Sky told them–”
“These Spackle aren’t connected to the Sky,” Collier said. “They’re self-sufficient, remember?”
“And if that’s true,” Fukunaga said, “maybe there’s a reason. Maybe no other Spackle want them.”
“Maybe they’ve been cut off,” Collier said.
“You’re making this up from nothing,” I said. “Something terrible has happened, but you can’t let it–”
“They’re lying to us,” Dawson said, from the corner. “They don’t think I can see it. But I can.” She turned back around and faced the wall, resuming her humming.
“I think she might be right,” Collier said. “The gaps in your Noise, the way they constantly block it by removing anything bad. At the very least, there’s something they don’t want us to know.”
“But it’s not sacrifice,” I said. “They saved us, remember?”
“Yeah,” Wilf said, slowly, and then again, “yeah, thass true.” He pulled his arms around himself. “But I don’ like my Noise being taken without me offering it.” He looked from Collier to Fukunaga. “Leave first thing?”
“As soon as we can,” Collier said, and Fukunaga nodded.
“I have to say,” Mikkelsen said the next morning, “that was the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had.” He grinned. “And I once slept for sixty-seven years.”
He was the only one who’d got any sleep at all. The rest of us – save Dawson, who still hummed distractedly in the corner – had talked all night, coming to no real conclusion. There was an irony in that I, who had least cause to trust any Spackle after they’d taken my eyes from me, was the one who was defending them the most. I could see that something was a bit weird here, but surely there must be other reasons why an enclave would be separate from the connected voice of the Spackle. Maybe it was sheer distance, maybe it was weather, maybe it was how they’d had to live.
