I stopped and talked with some of them — it was vital to cement alliances, for troubled times lay ahead — but all the while my mind was on the recorded message, wondering what it could mean.
I soon found out.
‘I assume by now you’ve killed me,’ Constanza said. ‘Or at the very least made me disappear for good. No; don’t say a word — this isn’t an interactive recording, and I won’t take very much of your precious time.’ I was looking at her face on the screen in my quarters: a face that looked fractionally younger than the last time I had seen her. She continued, ‘I recorded this some time ago, as you’ve probably gathered. I downloaded it into the Santiago’s data network and had to intervene once every six months to prevent it being delivered to you. I knew that I was an increasingly sharp thorn in your side, and thought the chances were good that you would find a way of getting rid of me before too long.’
I smiled despite myself, remembering how she had demanded to know how long I had held her prisoner.
‘Well done, Constanza.’
‘I’ve ensured that a copy will reach a number of senior officers and crew, Sky. Of course, I don’t really expect that I will be taken seriously. You’ll have certainly doctored the facts surrounding my disappearance. That doesn’t matter; it’s enough that I’ve sown a seed of doubt. You’ll still have your allies and admirers, Sky, but don’t be surprised if not everyone is prepared to follow your leadership with blind obedience.’
‘Is that all?’ I said.
‘There’s one final thing,’ she said, almost as if she had expected me to speak at that point. ‘Over the years, I’ve amassed a great deal of evidence against you, Sky. Much of it is circumstantial; much of it open to different shades of interpretation, but it’s a life’s work and I’d hate to see it go to waste. So — before I recorded this message — I took what I had and concealed it in a small, hard-to-find place.’ She paused.
‘Have we reached orbit around Journey’s End yet, Sky? If so, there’s little point trying to find the materials. By now they’re almost certainly on the surface.’
‘No.’
Constanza smiled. ‘You can hide, Sky, but I’ll always be there, haunting you. No matter how much you try and bury the past; no matter how effectively you remake yourself as a hero… that package will always be there, waiting to be found.’
Later, much later, I stumbled through the jungle. Running was difficult for me, but that had very little do with my age. The hard part was keeping my balance with only one arm, my body always forgetting that necessary asymmetry. I had lost the arm in the very earliest days of the settlement. It had been a dreadful accident, even though the pain of it was only an abstract memory now. My arm had been incinerated; burned to a crisp black stump when I held it in front of the wide muzzle of a fusion torch.
Of course, it hadn’t been an accident at all.
I had known for years that I might have to do it, but had kept delaying it until we were down on the planet. I had to lose the arm in such a way that no medical intervention could save it, which ruled out a neat, painless severing operation. Equally, I had to be able to survive the loss of it.
I had been hospitalised for three months after the accident, but I had pulled through. And then I had began to resume my duties, word escaping around the planet — and out to my enemies — of what had happened. Gradually it had settled into the mass consciousness that I only had one arm. Years had passed and the fact had become so obvious that it was barely mentioned any more. And no one had ever suspected that losing the arm was just a tiny detail in a greater plan; a precaution set in place years or decades before it might become useful. Well, now the time had come when I could be thankful for that forethought. I was a fugitive now, even as I approached my eightieth birthday.
Things had gone well enough in the early years of the colony. Constanza’s message from the grave had taken the shine off for a while, but before very long the people’s need for a hero had overridden any nagging doubts they might have had about my suitability for the role. I had lost some sympathisers, but gained the general goodwill of the mob, a trade-off I considered acceptable. Constanza’s hidden package had never come to light, and as time passed I began to suspect that it had never existed; that the whole thing had been a psychological weapon designed to unnerve me.
Those early days were heady times. The three months’ good grace which I had given the Santiago had been enough time for us to establish a network of small surface camps. We had three well-fortified main settlements by the time the other starships braked into orbit above them. Nueva Valparaiso, near the equator (it would make a fine site for a space elevator one day, I thought) was the latest. Others would follow. It had been a good start, and it had seemed unthinkable then that the people — with a few loyal exceptions — would turn so viciously against me.
Yet they had.
I could see something ahead, through the dense-packed rain-forest foliage. A light. Definitely artificial, I thought — perhaps the allies I was supposed to be meeting. I hoped that was the case anyway. I did not have many allies now. The few left in the orthodox power structure had managed to break me out of custody before the trial, but they had not been able to assist me in reaching sanctuary. Very probably those friends would be shot for their treason. So be it. They had made the necessary sacrifice. I had expected nothing less.
At first it had not even been a war.
The Brazilia and the Baghdad had arrived in orbit, confronted by the skeletal hulk of the old Santiago. For long months nothing had happened, the two allied ships maintaining a chill observational silence. Then they had launched a pair of shuttles on trajectories which would bring them down in the Peninsula’s northern latitudes. I had wished I could have saved a speck of antimatter in the old ship, just to fire up its engine for a moment, and to douse the shuttles with that killing lance. But I had never learned the trick of shutting down an antimatter reservoir.
The shuttles had come down, then made further flights back up to orbit, ferrying down sleepers.
More long months of waiting.
And then the attacks had begun: skirmish squads moving down from the north, striking against the Santiago’s nascent settlements. So what that there were barely three thousand people on the whole planet. It was enough for a small war… and it had been quiet at first, giving both sides time to dig in, consolidate… breed.
Not really a war at all.
But my own side were still trying to have me executed for war crimes. It was not that they were interested in peace with the enemy — too much had happened for that — but they certainly blamed me for bringing about the whole situation. They would kill me and then return to the fray.
Ungrateful sons of bitches. They had twisted everything now. They had even changed the name of the planet, as a kind of joke. Not Journey’s End any more.
Sky’s Edge.
Because of the edge I had given them to be the first to arrive.
I hated it. I knew what they meant by it: a sick acknowledgement of the necessary crime; a reminder of what had brought them here.
But the name was sticking.
Now I paused; not merely to catch my breath. I had never really liked the jungle. There were rumours of things in it — large things which slithered. But no one I trusted had ever seen one. Just stories then — that was all.
Just stories.
But I was still lost. The light I had seen earlier was gone now. It might have been obstructed by a thick patch of trees… or perhaps I’d imagined it all along. I looked around me. It was very dark, and everything looked the same. The sky was blackening overhead — 61 Cygni-B, normally the brightest star in the sky apart from Swan, was below the horizon — and the jungle would soon just be a darkening extension of that blackness.