Filaria - Brent Hayward [93]
“We have two days to kill, Deidre. All I ask in the interim is that you stay calm and hear me out. Will you do that? Please?”
“You really expect me to stay here for two days? With you? You’re crazy.” But the warmth of the odd red sun — if that single orb overhead could be considered a sun — made Deidre feel drowsy. And her feet throbbed. So she set off, hobbling down the path towards the fountain. A bench was shadowed there, under overhanging leaves. “All right, voice,” she said, “here’s your chance. Tell me why I’m here.”
“You were hurt, Deidre.”
“I know that! But why?” She took a deep breath to calm herself. “Anyhow, it was you that hurt me!”
“Not me, Deidre. Them. The locals. The monsters, as you called them.”
“They work for you. You said that. Therefore you’re responsible.”
“We had to get you out. The operation was a success.”
“What’s become of Elegia? My family?”
“Everything you refer to still exists. There is trouble there, I’ll grant you that. Trouble we didn’t count on, but for now everything exists.”
Deidre had reached the bench. Exhausted, she sat down carefully, feeling immediate relief. She closed her eyes briefly, then stood again to plunge both hands into the cold water, letting it run through her fingers and splash deliciously up her arms for a moment before bringing her hands to her face and wetting her skin. She drank deeply from her cupped palms and sat back down, dripping from her chin and hair and cheeks and feeling another fraction of a degree better.
“I’m still leaving,” she said. “I’ll sit for a while, get a little stronger, but I am getting out of this cage. Have you found anything for me to wear yet?”
“I’m working on it.”
There were no birds to be seen or heard. No animals, no insects, no small mammals. Just like home. She would like to see a moth, or even a beetle, scurrying along the ground. If this place were truly just for her, as the voice had said, insects should have been added.
Maybe the larvae had been a concession in that direction? Had they only appeared to her as she’d seen them, because she was familiar with caterpillars?
Now that she thought about it, the layout of this place, down to the fountain and the bench she sat on, could have been lifted straight out of childhood memories.
What would Mingh straw’s cage have looked like, had the girl lived, and been the one brought here? What did this place really look like under the veil of illusion she was sure the voice cast over it?
“Talk to me, voice.” She tried to stave off the recalled image of Mingh straw’s terrible fall. Light played through her lashes. “Explain everything to me.”
“Okay. For the first part, you’ll have to look. I’m going to show you something, if you can stay awake.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.” She opened her eyes; before her was a crude gram. Through it, the fountain sparkled. Drops set the image quivering. Whatever the source might be of this illusion it was very high, somewhere above the treetops or even above the barrier itself. From the infinite blue? Deidre moved from side to side to focus better on the projection, but what the blurred gram depicted, or even what scale it might be, she could not tell. Some large lumpy growth? A convoluted mound? The reception was atrocious. A living thing? Yet there were hard edges, hints of construction. A tumourous machine, resting on a fairly smooth surface.
Was it a skin lesion, magnified by a million? The only visible result of a parasite, buried subcutaneously?
It bristled with numerous whiskers — some thin as threads, others fatter, hollow, emitting something that looked like smoke or steam or other gas — jutting up at various angles. Around the base, apertures slowly vomited forth slag or maybe pus that rolled glutinously and appeared to gradually harden. The configurations altered, adjusted, settled.
If this thing was a machine, it had a form of autonomy and had mutated in ways surely unfathomable to its inventor. Expanding in different,