Paw-Prints Of The Gods Read online

  “Show me the way, lord alien grey,

  To the skies I look for a sign!

  And wait to be taught, the one last true thought,

  Your wisdom like starlight shall shine!

  Show me the way, lord alien grey,

  Light-years of rapture divine!

  To you we all bind, to wipe clear the mind,

  In your head be it and mine!”

  “In your head be it,” murmured Ravana. She had heard the hymn before.

  “We are a little early,” Lilith told her, seeing her raise a quizzical eyebrow. “The monks wanted to see you straight after the service broadcast.”

  “Service?” asked Ravana. After what the nurses had told her, it should not have been a surprise to learn that hospice life included religious services, but this was the first real confirmation that the medical centre was a church-run affair. “Can anyone join in?”

  “Only the devout,” Jizo replied. Her triumphant sideways glance at her colleague suggested that while she herself qualified for such worthy status, Lilith did not.

  The singing continued unabated. They arrived at the interview room, to find the two chairs on the far side of the desk unexpectedly vacant. Lilith invited Ravana to take her usual seat and then waited with Jizo at the door, presumably for the arrival of one or both of the monks. For a while Ravana was content to sit gazing longingly through the window at the distant sandy beach. After several minutes passed and neither nurse spoke, she could take the silence no more and decided to pose the question that had been on her mind since yesterday.

  “Why does Brother Simha have twelve fingers?”

  Jizo looked up from pulling the legs off a spider, scooped from its web near the door. Her leer had become an apprehensive stare. Ravana shivered at the sight of something alive squirming in the pocket of the nurse’s grey habit.

  “Does he?” remarked Jizo, looking uncomfortable. “Can’t say I noticed.”

  “Polydactyly,” Lilith replied smugly.

  “Yes!” Jizo cried. “Poly-what-she-said. Some sort of dinosaur.”

  “A rare congenital medical condition,” Lilith corrected, regarding Jizo with disdain. “Some people are born with extra fingers or toes.”

  “Like the dinosaur,” her colleague persisted, unwilling to let go of an idea. “With big claws dripping blood and guts from all the tiny animals they’ve ripped apart and...”

  “You’re thinking of a Pterodactyl,” Ravana hastily interrupted. Jizo’s wild macabre imagination made her feel sick. “I think they had wings.”

  “Exactly! The extra fingers and floppy skin enabled them to fly.”

  Lilith gave the weary sigh of someone who wished they were anywhere else but here. Ravana opened her mouth to ask something else, then realised the singing had stopped. A tramp of footsteps in the corridor outside sent the nervous nurses back to their positions by the door. Moments later, the monks arrived.

  The two grey figures swept into the room in a blur of cloaks and scarlet sashes. They slipped silently into the waiting chairs, leaving Lilith and Jizo to disappear through the door and close it behind them. Ravana’s headache flared as the usual wave of panic crashed over her, a fear which like yesterday remained as she stared into the dark recesses of their hoods. This time she faced them with a clear mind. It dawned on her that the random emotional shapes their presence brought to mind were being generated by her implant, yet the images were quite unlike the shadowy pictures glimpsed whilst in her room. Her mind went back to the nightmare vision of twelve grey figures reaching towards her with their outstretched hands. Ravana turned her gaze from the seated figures and shuddered.

  Brother Simha, the monk with lions upon his sash, nodded to his companion sat at his side, then leaned forward to level the blank stare of his hood at Ravana.

  “zz-raavaanaa-zz,” he hissed, his voice cold and unwelcoming. “zz-wee-aaree-moost-coonceerneed-aaboouut-yyoouur-meemooryy-zz.”

  “zz-yyoouu-aaree-noot-weell-zz,” rasped Brother Dhanus, who wore the customary archers on his sash. “zz-teell-uus-aaboouut-thee-booook-theen-yyoouu-caan-reest-zz.”

  Ravana stared back, her fear growing by the minute. “What book?”

  The formless shapes in her mind reverberated with angry spikes as each monk spoke. The thought of what she may have done to generate such dreadful passions terrified her. Their hatred bore down on her, threatening to swamp her with fear and drive her into insanity. She was on the verge of tipping past the point she could take no more, when a tremor passed through their linked minds, a flicker of apprehension. A sudden realisation hit her with all the force of poorly-maintained rocket booster.

  “Those tablets,” she gasped. “You’re using selective mind wipes! There’s something you want me to remember. But there’s more you want me to forget!”

  “zz-yyoouur-miind-muust-bee-freeeed-zz,” said Brother Simha, his voice grating painfully upon Ravana’s ears. “zz-yoouu-muust-beeliieevee-zz.”

  “zz-aall-thaat-iis-paart-dooees-beeloong-zz!” cried Dhanus.

  Ravana stared at the monks in disbelief, wide-eyed with terror as she finally remembered the dreadful encounter with the mad priest Taranis in the Dandridge Cole. She and her friends had witnessed the dreadful unveiling of the half-human, half-alien cyberclones the priest called his disciples, created to spread the word of the Dhusarian Church throughout the five systems. The twelve clones had turned upon Fenris, Taranis’ accomplice, reaching out with their hands to destroy his mind in a moment of pure rapture. Brother Dhanus’ words were exactly what the twelve had chanted as their victim fell lifeless to the floor. Now she saw both the monks sported the spindly six-fingered hands of the alien clones.

  “Oh my word,” she murmured. “You killed Fenris!”

  She did not know how it could be, but seated before her were two of Taranis’ creations. As if to confirm the terrible truth, both monks raised their hands to their heads and carefully pulled back their hoods. Now they revealed the merciless mask-like grimaces etched upon their faces and the grey, lizard-like skin stretched tight across their skulls. Ravana did what anyone else would have done in the circumstances and shrieked.

  “zz-uunbeeliieeveer-zz!” screeched Dhanus. “zz-buut-yyoouu-wiill-beeliieevee-zz!”

  “zz-iin-yyoouur-heeaad-bee-iit-zz!” declared Simha.

  Ravana screamed again and fell backwards off her chair, landing sprawled upon her hands and knees. She scrambled across the floor towards the door and was brought up short by two pairs of legs blocking her path. Lilith stood in the open doorway, wearing an expression that captured her bewilderment at the revelation of what lay beneath the monks’ hoods. Jizo, stood beside her, looked oddly unfazed.

  “We, err... heard a scream,” stammered Lilith. “Is this a bad moment?”

  “Yes!” cried Ravana. “Very bad! Get me out of here!”

  “What scared you, little runt?” Jizo sneered.

  “zz-thee-paatiieent-iis-noot-weell-zz,” rasped Simha, making Lilith jump. “zz-shee-haas-miisleed-yyoouu-aand-reefuuseed-treeaatmeent-zz.”

  Jizo gave Ravana a disapproving stare. “Is that so?”

  “They’re alien cyberclones!” cried Ravana. “Created by Taranis!”

  “Taranis is dead,” Lilith declared. “You killed him.”

  “What?!”

  “zz-taakee-heer-aawaayy-zz!” Dhanus ordered. “zz-doo-noot-faaiill-uus-zz!”

  Lilith nervously bobbed her head in reply. Her face betrayed her shock at seeing the monks unveiled. Jizo stood defiant, radiating a smug superior air. Lilith quickly recovered and with Jizo, grabbed Ravana’s arms and dragged her backwards through the door.

  They did not stop until they reached her room at the end of the corridor. Lilith went to fetch the usual medication and the look in the nurse’s eye upon her return was enough to tell Ravana that this time there would be no pretending. Lilith pressed the tablets directly into the girl’s mouth and stood glaring until she was sure the medication had been swallowe
d.

  Jizo grinned and pulled a wriggling rat from her pocket. Ravana yelped and retreated in horror as the nurse did a grotesque mime of a pterosaur attacking its victim.

  “Lizard men,” Jizo declared, staring thoughtfully into the rat’s face. She pulled her flask from a pocket and took a swig. “I told you it was something to do with dinosaurs.”

  * * *

  As soon as the nurses had gone, Ravana rolled out of bed and rammed her finger down her throat, already feeling a lightness in her head as the tablets got to work. Moments later she was on her hands and knees, trying to vomit as quietly as possible and glaring at the metal box under her mattress with justified paranoia. When she felt she had thrown up what she could of the undigested tablets, she reached beneath the bed and yanked the electrical cables from the box in a shower of sparks. The flickering shapes in her mind abruptly resolved into clearly-defined symbols, created by her cranium implant as it reached out and connected with whatever remote circuits it could find. Her mind had been messed with in more ways than one. Exhausted, she slumped against the wall, sobbing quietly.

  “Why me?” she moaned. Her headache was worse than ever. “What have I done?”

  Lilith’s accusation reawakened the guilt Ravana had bottled up over the fate of Priest Taranis, the father of the Dhusarian Church. The shock of seeing two of Taranis’ creations sent her mind into turmoil and her memories flooded back. The priest and his alien-human cyberclones had been blasted into space, cast adrift when her friend Zotz tricked the Dandridge Cole’s safety systems into jettisoning the engine room and the priest’s secret laboratory into the void, deep in the Barnard’s Star system. Ravana and her friends abandoned the hollow moon shortly afterwards, for Taranis’ meddling and the crash of the Platypus had left the tiny world with badly compromised life-support systems.

  Taranis’ clones had threatened their lives and left Fenris dead. After the euphoria of their escape, Ravana had nevertheless been haunted by the thought that she had been wrong to encourage Zotz to do what he did. Prior to the incident, the priest had been presumed dead for years. An inquest into what happened that fateful day was shelved and quietly forgotten. If Lilith’s revelation was true, Ravana and her friends had got away with murder.

  Ravana found a new home on Ascension, gained a place at Newbrum University and tried to get on with her life. Yet she was also a thief; she had taken Taranis’ Isa-Sastra, a book that ultimately led her to join a student archaeology expedition in the Tau Ceti system during the summer break. What was missing from her memory was how she had apparently ended back on Daode, a virtual prisoner of the Dhusarian Church, in the company of two of Taranis’ surviving disciples. It was a mystery she was more than willing to leave behind.

  “It’s time this patient was discharged,” she murmured.

  Her cranium implant had already identified the remote control for the lock on the door to her room. All children born in the Epsilon Eridani system were implanted at a young age by order of the governing Que Qiao Corporation; Taranis and his attempts to meddle with her destiny many years ago had left Ravana with an unregistered special-services device with far greater capabilities than was usual. As she listened for any sound of movement in the corridor beyond, she heard a murmur from the room next door and felt guilty for not remembering Artorius. Moving to the wall, she put an ear to the flaking paint and listened.

  “Artorius?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  There was a rustle of sheets, a soft patter of feet and a faint thud as someone dropped to the floor on the other side of the wall.

  “Ravana?”

  “Yes, it’s me. Are you okay?”

  “I want to go home,” the voice declared.

  “Me too,” admitted Ravana. “I’m leaving tonight.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Can I bring Nana and Stripy?”

  “Who?” Ravana rolled her eyes in despair. “This is an escape, not a group outing!”

  She heard a shuffling noise and guessed the boy had moved from the wall. She crept to the door and pressed the control, but as expected the mechanism remained locked. She considered the implant image that represented the lock, a plain red square centred upon a stylised key, then carefully gave it a mental prod. With a soft clunk, the symbol changed from red to green. Ravana tentatively reached for the control again. This time, the door opened.

  “Piece of cake,” she murmured.

  The darkened corridor beyond was empty. Ravana pressed the wall-mounted release button to unlock the room next to hers and pushed open the door. Artorius sat on the floor next to his bed, looking downcast. Seeing her enter, he smiled and gave a little wave.

  Ravana offered the boy her hand. “Coming?”

  Artorius nodded and took her hand without a word. Ravana quickly led him into the corridor and down towards the interview room, which now she thought about it was the limit of her geographic knowledge of the hospice. Her implant detected security cameras, but no alarms sounded and any red symbols quickly became green, just as when she broke into Que Qiao’s headquarters on Yuanshi to rescue her father. Upon reaching the door she sought, she was annoyed to find Artorius trying to pull her further along the corridor.

  “This is the way out!” she whispered urgently. “There’s a window leading outside.”

  “We need to go down here!” the boy protested stubbornly.

  “But...” Ravana began, then saw Artorius’ expression. “Okay, have it your way. Don’t blame me if we run into angry lizard monks!”

  Artorius led her to a set of double doors at the end of the corridor. These too were locked and this time the wall panel demanded a security code, but Ravana was able to override the control with her implant as easily as before. The door unlocked with a clunk.

  “How did you do that?” asked an awestruck Artorius.

  “Magic,” she said.

  He wriggled past and pushed open the doors. Lights flickered on in the room ahead. Ravana’s nose wrinkled in disgust as she caught the musty metallic odour of raw meat.

  “Oh my word,” she murmured.

  The space before her was crammed with racks of cages, medical apparatus, work benches and all sort of paraphernalia ideally suited to a mad scientist’s laboratory. The windowless chamber was not large and the chaotic jumble of equipment left little room for manoeuvre. When Ravana saw the empty cages and flecks of blood upon the floor, a tremor ran down her spine. It reminded her of the secret animal-testing laboratory she and her friends had stumbled upon on Yuanshi some months before.

  “What is this place?” she asked.

  “This way!” cried Artorius, pulling her forward.

  Not all the cages were empty. When Ravana saw the final large enclosure, her heart leapt and her head filled with so many different emotions. The caged creatures were the size of small apes, humanoid yet lizard-like with grey hairless skin and mournful almond-shaped eyes peering from an inverted triangular face. Spindly fingers clung despondently to the bars of the cage as they lifted their gazes towards their visitors.

  Ravana was one of the few people ever to get close to the greys, the near-mythical aliens of Epsilon Eridani. Incredibly, she recognised one of the creatures now before her. The older-looking grey had distinctive blue markings on its skin that had stayed in her mind ever since a strange encounter in her childhood. Taranis later captured the same creature and awarded it the dubious honour of being the mother to his hybrid cyberclones. The grey was present at the birth of the priest’s disciples on the Dandridge Cole, but despite Ravana’s efforts had been condemned to the same fate as Taranis and his creations. Yet at least two of the clones had survived. So it seemed had their unwilling mother.

  “Pretty cool aliens, eh?” remarked Artorius. The younger of the two greys, which wore faint zebra-like red stripes upon its back, was reaching through the bars towards the young boy, its lips twitching in what looked like a smile.

  “Greys,” she
corrected, cautiously approaching the cage. “We’re the aliens here.”

  The elder grey recognised her. The creature reached through the bars and placed a six-fingered hand upon her arm, just like at their last fateful encounter. Ravana began to suspect they were far more intelligent than she had previously given them credit for.

  “Thraak thraak!” the grey yelped gently, momentarily startling her. The noise that erupted from the creature’s mouth was like two bursts of static.

  “Nana knows you,” said Artorius, impressed.

  “It’s a long story,” she admitted. “You can understand them?”

  “The angry nurses make me ask them things.”

  His reply opened up far too many questions but Ravana knew this was not the time for a discussion on clandestine scientific research. She had tried and failed to save the older grey from Taranis once before. She would not fail again.

  “They’re coming with us,” she reassured Artorius. “Is it just these two?”

  The boy nodded. “Nana and Stripy.”

  “Nana?”

  “She’s very old.”

  “And Stripy is striped,” Ravana murmured. “How original.”

  “Their real names are very long!” Artorius replied haughtily.

  The younger grey pointed to a bunch of old-fashioned mechanical keys hanging on a wall hook. Ravana found the one to open the cage and moments later Stripy and Nana were clambering cautiously down to the floor, unsure of their new-found freedom. Neither stood more than chest high to her, though could look Artorius in the eye.

  They seemed unwilling to move until they were taken by the hand. While their stubby legs did not look as if they had evolved for speed, Ravana soon had them all out of the strange laboratory and at the door to the interview room. Upon hearing the sound of distant footsteps they hurried into the room, where Ravana used her implant to lock the door behind them.

  The room was in near-darkness, with the window in the opposite wall just visible in the gloom. She found the darkness outside puzzling, for a day on Daode was ten times longer than on Earth and the sun had showed no signs of setting when she had been there earlier.