'Thank you,' Axel said, shivering. 'I thought I was going to be neutered in there for sure.'
'Don't mention it,' Alvar said. 'That barman seemed to have quite a grudge against you, I noticed.'
'Aliens don't like my kind,' Axel said. 'We humans in general - those of us left - get quite a hard time from the other races around here. Call it the Maker's gift to us.'
'Hm,' was the guardian's only reply. It may have been Axel's paranoia at work, but the creature had a gift for saying a lot with very little, and the tone of that single syllable suggested that Alvar wasn't buying Axel's cry of 'speciesism'. In fact, the human felt like Alvar was somehow aware of the truth of Aenon's accusation despite their having only just met.
'I'd suggest we go somewhere else,' Alvar added, interrupting the human's unhappy train of thought. 'Somewhere a bit more sheltered perhaps?'
'You're right,' Axel answered. 'Plus, it won't take Aenon long to clear up that Virnoid's mess and remember how much he hates me, and I don't want to be here for him and his goons to catch and string up.'
They made their way with difficulty across the vehicle park out the front of the tavern. There was a wonderful cross-section of the transports used by the Cluster's citizens blocking their path, as varied and bizarre as their owners - wheeled, winged, insect-legged (Axel could never see the point of a walking car), some designed for just the one passenger, some big enough for a family to stretch out in. There were tunnels and walkways connecting all the platforms of the stilted metropolis where the sentients on Atruenus lived, which had grown too big and complicated and dangerous to travel around on foot. It was the same story with all the stiltcities on the planet.
'Where are we going, by the way?' Alvar asked, skipping lightly across the bonnet of a sleek landcruiser. 'I hope you're not following me; I only arrived here this afternoon, I've got no credits to my name and nowhere to stay.'
'I know somewhere we can crash for the night,' Axel answered, struggling to squeeze through the gap between the cruiser and a chunky freighter parked next to it. 'It's a short journey away from this stiltcity, not the most comfortable of places, but it will do for one night. Once we're rested we can make plans to get offworld and find that missing child of yours.'
'I thought the stiltcities were the only places offworlders were allowed to live,' Alvar said. He had done his research; everywhere else on Atruenus was off-limits to visitors, reserved for the planet's natives. Those Syreenii like Aenon and his sister who chose to live in the stiltcities were allowed to do so, but it was a one-way deal; any visitor dipping so much as a toe into Atruenus' oceans was in danger of execution.
'We're not allowed in the waters,' Axel explained. 'But anything above them is fair game, and there is land on this planet, believe it or not. Very muddy land, and not much of it, but it's there.'
'You're not selling this to me very well,' said Alvar. 'I don't like mud.'
'It's just one night, and the building we're going to visit is dry,' Axel said. 'Trust me.'
Once they were across the vehicle park, the two companions stopped beneath a flickering, free-standing lamp which served to illuminate their exit to the next level down. Unfortunately that route didn't look or sound at all inviting; it was a hole, and the sound of waves crashing could be heard far beneath it.
'My transport is parked on Level Zero,' Axel said. 'We're not supposed to leave vehicles down there, but parking on the main platform is expensive and there are too many transjackers lurking around up here.’
The human led Alvar down the rain-slicked stairs and into the underside of the city. As they went the waves grew louder around them.
'Thank you for the save by the way,' the human added. 'For a moment back there I thought Aenon was going to feed me to the fishes.'
'You're welcome,' Alvar replied, negotiating the stairs on all fours. 'Like I said, cross-species relationships, bad idea.'
'There wasn't a relationship!' Axel protested. 'Jhana's not even my type; all slick-skinned and big-eyed, and don't get me started on the size of her tongue. That brother of hers thinks everyone's out to bed her - her and his five hundred other sisters. I'll be surprised if any of those girls get to experience intimacy with a male in their lifetimes.’
'No relationship, got it,' said Alvar, not sounding convinced. 'So what were you doing in that tavern anyway? It didn't seem like the most savory of establishments. Especially for a monk.'
'I'm... not exactly a monk,' Axel said. 'I was raised in a monastery after my parents left, but it didn't take. I kept this robe as a souvenir; it's quite handy when I need to keep a low profile.'
'Well, you might want to work on covering that human smell as well,' Alvar said. 'I could pick up your scent from across the room.'
'Not everyone has such a clever nose,' Axel said, scowling. 'Damn!'
He skidded on a step and only just managed to stop himself falling over by grabbing the handrail.
'Be careful,' Alvar cautioned. 'These stairs are slippery.'
Mind of the Maker, Axel thought. He never switches off his inner guardian, does he?
It occurred to the human that there might be a limit to how long he could put up with this undergrown grown-up fussing over him.
‘So tell me about this human family of yours,’ he said.
‘Well, they were tall and pink…’ Alvar began.
‘I meant their history,’ Axel interrupted. ‘I’d like to know how they escaped from the Tellistraxian massacre, for a start.’
The Tellistraxian massacre had become a cautionary tale throughout the Cluster and something for parents to frighten their children with before bedtime. The humans had arrived in Clusterspace cycles earlier in three gigantic vessels, thrown across incalculable distances by their jumpgates. They were driven so far by one mission: to convert every sentient that they encountered to their One True Faith.
As it turned out, the sentients inhabiting the Cluster already had plenty of religions of their own, thank you very much, and weren’t desperate to receive yet more. Once the novelty of accommodating these strange visitors had worn off, the humans had found themselves being treated with polite tolerance and amusement by every race that received them.
It was then that the missionaries made their first big mistake; finding the spreading of their word hard going among the Clusterworlds, they chose to widen their nets and extend their mission to the Darkness Beyond, otherwise known as the Not-Clusterworlds. In defiance of the warnings given to them by everyone who cared enough to warn them, the humans set off into uncharted territory in search of more malleable converts. Unfortunately for them, the first species they came across were the Tellistraxians.
Very few of the missionaries had survived that first encounter.
‘I’ve never met a Tellistraxian,’ Alvar said. ‘But they don’t sound like very nice people.’
‘They’re not,’ Axel said. ‘Fourteen feet tall, red skin, horns, very bad tempered, breathe fire and fart sulphur. Rumour is that they eat their own children and sacrifice their old and sick to their gods. And they’re persistent; once you've annoyed them, they chase you to the ends of the universe until you're begging to be caught just so you don't have to keep fleeing in terror any more.
In short,’ he concluded. ‘Not creatures that you’d want to get into a religious squabble with.’
‘Well, I don’t know how my humans got away from them,’ Alvar said. ‘When my agency set me up with my job on their ship, they’d been drifting around in space for cycles and still hadn’t found any other survivors, and not for want of trying.'
'It doesn't sound to me like they were doing a very good job of looking,’ Axel said.
'They were doing their best!' Alvar snapped. 'Considering that the monsters that you’ve just described were prowling around listening out for them, they didn't do very badly, I'd say.'
'Let's agree to differ,' Axel said. ‘Here’s my bike.’
They had arrived on the lowest level of the stiltcity, as close to water level as it was possible to get and keep breathing. Normally only maintenance-bots and fishing enthusiasts descended so far.
‘Bike?’ Alvar asked. What he was looking at resembled a heap of scrap that had been thrown in a corner with only the saddle and handlebars suggesting any kinship to real vehicles. In that respect it was utterly theft-proof. To the Gelithran’s horror, the human straddled the pile and brought it snarling to life with a flick of his wrist.
‘Hop on,’ Axel said. ‘She won’t bite.’
‘That’s not what I’m afraid of,’ Alvar answered. He clambered nervously onto the machine and took a seat behind Axel’s, expecting the thing to collapse under their combined weight at any second.
‘I built this myself you know,’ Axel called as they shot out across the waves. He had to raise his voice to carry over the sound of the engine which was competing with the sea for loudest noise on the planet.
‘You don’t say,’ Alvar called back, hanging on for dear life. He was reconsidering letting the human anywhere near his pod.
‘I’m taking you to the monastery,’ Axel continued.
‘The monastery you don't live in anymore?’
‘I’m still friends with some of the monks there and they’ll give us a bed for the night. You do sleep in beds, don’t you?’
‘The floor will do,’ Alvar replied. He had never been able to relax on elevated cushions; they always made him feel less secure than the good, reassuring density of the ground under him.
‘Let me know if you see anything you don’t recognise,’ Axel said.
Alvar looked around and recognised a lot of water. The only thing to break up the monotony was the city they had just left; it was dwindling off into the distance, a great, sixteen-legged beetle standing paralysed in a lake.
‘So what’s your full name?’ Alvar asked. He was aware of the humans' efforts to assert their cubs' individuality by combining three or more of a finite repository of names, one after another, which spoke volumes about their lack of imagination.
‘Axel Theodore Munt,’ replied Axel. ‘Son of Geoffrey, son of Noah, son of Reginald, yadda yadda yadda.’
‘What does “Axel” mean?’ Alvar asked.
'Oh, most human names don't mean anything,' Axel said. 'But my father chose mine. It was the name of a great hero from Lost Earth who spent his life questing for the Paradise City.'
'What's that?' Alvar asked, brightening up.
'It's a place where the grass is green, and the girls are pretty. I guess on some level that's what we're all looking for, right?'
'I suppose so,' Alvar sniffed. ‘Well, I'm not all that bothered about the colour of the grass really.'
‘What about your name?’ Axel asked. 'Mean anything?'
‘My human family gifted it to me,’ Alvar answered. ‘It means “guardian”.’
Axel thought that was a little like calling a pilot ‘Pilot’, but kept the thought to himself.
‘That was nice of them,’ Axel said. ‘Why didn’t they use your birthname? Assuming that they have birthnames on your home planet.’
‘My people go in for descriptive names,’ Alvar replied. ‘Bloodsplasher, Stonecutter and so on. Mine is…’
He mumbled something.
‘What?’ Axel asked.
Alvar repeated the mumble.
‘Angle Grinder?’ Axel said.
‘Anklebiter,’ Alvar said. ‘On account of my size. I hate it. My human employers were the only people kind enough to let me change it.’
‘I like it,’ the human said. ‘Some people just ask to have their ankles bitten and somebody ought to do it.'
‘Hm,’ Alvar said.
-
After that the conversation fizzled out. The bike’s engine was too loud and the effort of talking over it was too tiring, and both of them were worn out.
After half an hour of riding in silence, Axel turned to his companion and announced:
‘We’re here!’
A light mist had sprung up while they had been flying, replacing the monotonous vision of grey water in all directions with an eerie white wall. Now, looming out of that wall in the near distance was an island. It was one of the few patches of (relatively) dry ground to be found on Atruenus, and it was home to a few sorry-looking trees and a single building. That building occupied the highest point of the island and was comprised of five towers connected by a single outer wall. At the centre was the main building, which housed most of the younger monks. They had discovered decades earlier that life on Atruenus provided the much-needed character-building that their kind relished.
‘There's been quite a big turnover of monks since I was living there,’ Axel explained. ‘The only one I'm really on friendly terms with now is Brother Finn. He's one of the elder monks, and he's solid - he always gives me a bed when I need one.’
Axel switched the engine on his cycle to low power as they neared the beach. The machine slowed, and the roar of the engine gave way to a quiet hum.
‘Don't want to wake them up,’ the human said as the cycle came to rest on the beach.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a square inch of ground within view that qualified as ‘dry land’. Axel briefly flirted with the idea of offering to carry the Gelithran across the beach but decided that both his and his new friend's dignity would suffer irreparable damage if he did. Oblivious to the human’s inner turmoil, Alvar stepped off the transport and made for the nearest rock on tip-toe.
‘It's going to take you a long time to get off the beach like that,’ Axel called as he watched Alvar making zig-zag progress, leaping from one mud-slicked stone to another. The human was trudging through the mud ankle-deep in a straight line towards the monastery, dragging deep grooves as he went and not minding a jot. It was one of those occasions when the human practice of wearing clothes, sneered at by some of the Cluster’s less modest races, made a lot more sense.
‘Some of us... aren't... wearing... boots,’ Alvar retorted.
Axel shrugged. ‘I'll meet you there then,’ he said, pointing at the nearest tower.
The journey to the tower took them out of the mud and into grass, which was almost waist-high to the human and which he waded through without difficulty. It was only when he was nearly at the tower that Axel suffered a sudden pang of conscience; there was no path through the grass, and he could hear his companion sneezing behind him. He turned to see Alvar make a few desperate leaps before disappearing altogether.
‘Do you want some help?’ Axel called.
‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ the Gelithran called despondently. ‘There’s no way I can get any wetter now.’
It was a sorry-looking pair who finally arrived at the monastery's nearest tower. Axel was soaked from the waist down and badly wanted to get inside a warm room, while Alvar's entire coat was plastered to his skin and he looked skinny and miserable. Fortunately, the monastery stood on an outcrop of rock - a sort of island-within-the-island - so there was at least a solid surface to walk on.
‘Please tell me this building's heated,’ the Gelithran coughed. ‘Or at the very least, furnished with towels.’
'It's drier than out here,' Axel confirmed. 'Now, if I could just remember the way in...'
Unfortunately, Axel had forgotten which of the many entrances gave him access to Finn's quarters, and the pair were forced to circle the building three times before he remembered how to get inside. Built into one of the towers was a door made of greenish wood, undecorated save for a handle carved of some opaque, milky stone. There appeared to be no locks and nothing blocking their entry, although as the door opened, it emitted a whining creak, which, in the silence, was unbearably loud.
‘See, no need for sentries,’ Axel said through gritted teeth. ‘They'll all know we're here now.’
Inside the tower was a spiralling staircase which took them up and around, past five closed doors. Although the outside walls had been rain-slicked and decorated with moss and lichen, inside, they were warm and dry.
Over the sounds of their own painfully loud treading upon the stairs, Alvar could hear hushed voices and, occasionally, what sounded like chanting in some obscure alien tongue. The noise only increased his sense of trespassing into somewhere he didn't belong. Although the Gelithran had always entertained a vague notion of some higher power at work in the universe, he was quite happy to let that mystery party get on with whatever he, she or it was doing and mind his own business, and he fully expected that individual to extend him the same courtesy. He recalled looking up at the night sky on his home planet and feeling like he ought to congratulate someone on a job well done, but the idea of being urged to do so by his fellow creatures had never sat well with him. As such, he usually avoided religious establishments like mange.
At the top of the stairs, they arrived at a final door. There was a soft, warm glow coming from under the ancient wood and through the cracks between its weathered planks. Axel knocked softly.
‘Come in,’ called a muffled voice.
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