Freedom has Many Faces

Chapter 3

The sun was high up in the sky by the time Norm arrived back at Hell's Gate. In the trees overhead a small cluster of prolemuris swung between branches with their long angular arms and chattered excitedly to one another. One reached out with a fruit in its hand to a member of its group huddled on a thicker limb. From under the broad skin flaps of the second animal's upper arms, a tiny blue and green face peeked out and looked anxiously but eagerly at the offering.

Norm walked round to a side-entrance and swiped his key-card through the slot on the external gate. His fingers moved automatically over the keypad below, entering the pass-code. The gate slung open with a loud metallic buzz, allowing him access beyond the electrical fence that had been put up when the colony centre was first built in order to deter the local wildlife. The side-entrance to the building itself consisted of a sequence of sealed chambers designed to function as an airlock and cleanse staff coming in from the outside of any potential pathogenic matter that might have collected on their clothing and skin.

Norm moved systematically through the first few cells until he was permitted to remove his exopack. As he worked it off his head he realised as he always did at this point how stale the air had become behind the mask. The newly filtered air that circulated around the base ran over his face and down his throat like a jet of cool water. He pulled off his jacket and vest and tossed them through a laundry chute in the side of the fourth chamber. He was about to remove his boots when a low purring voice cut in over the tannoy.

'Where'd your shirt go, tiger?'

It was Helen Ranger, one of the other humans involved in the avatar programme who had been permitted to stay on Pandora. She and one of the other researchers whose avatar body was also still in tact had gone on an excursion overnight; Norm assumed that they must have returned a few hours before him.

'My shirt? I lost it,' he replied.

'I can see that,' said Helen. 'What were you doing out there?'

Norm unlaced his boots and kicked them off. 'Maintenance. We lost water for a few hours whilst you were out. Should be back now, though. It was a hole in one of the pipes.' He peeled the damp socks from his feet. 'Any idea where Max is?'

'Mess hall, I think.' Helen's voice softened. 'He's not talking much today. He seems a bit low. I don't know what's wrong exactly, though.'

They both knew it was the isolation getting to him, like it got to all of them. They didn't tend to discuss it openly with one another, but everyone who manned the base felt lonely from time to time. Hell's Gate maintained more or less the same level of contact with other colonies both on- and off-Earth – other remnants of humanity – as it had when it was fully staffed. Live video and audio feed, though, were still impossible. Norm remembered what a shock it had been at first to travel from a planet where cross-global communications appeared instantaneous to a situation where recorded messages could sometimes take several weeks to arrive at the other end. It didn't help that conditions were as volatile on Earth as they were on Pandora. At the start of one month you could be receiving a message from a sibling or parent where they'd be reassuring you through a fixed smile that they were doing fine and everything was reasonably calm on Earth and that they'd be in touch again soon. By month's end, the next you might hear of them was just one more copy-and-paste reproduction of the same old official notice informing you that they had passed away. Just the name changed, with no mention of the exact circumstances. It could be one of the increasingly frequent natural disasters that rocked the planet, maybe a water-borne illness they had suddenly contracted within a few weeks for which the necessary medical treatment was temporarily unavailable, perhaps one of the raids the Pandora colony sometimes heard about: the random desperate pillaging of someone else's rations that ended too regularly in murder. The worst part was waiting. You could go on for years expecting that notice at any time, whilst the two of you carried on chatting and updating one another, always saying 'hope to hear from you again soon, take care' with quietly intense conviction, in case it was the last time.

Norm raised the shower head slightly on its metal frame. 'Uh, Helen, any chance you could turn off the surveillance cam in here for a bit?'

'And here I was thinking I'd get away with it this time,' Helen laughed. 'Kay, Norm. See you up top.'

The voice cut off. Norm removed the last of his clothing and turned the shower on. The sudden spray felt gloriously warm and soothing against his skin. He breathed in the rising vapour, clearing his lungs fully of the air that had been circulating around his exo-pack for the previous few hours. Muddy water swirled down into the large drain embedded at the centre of the floor. As he relaxed the thought washed over him: I spent my night in banshee ER, and lived to tell the tale. No longer terrified, he grinned and wondered how Max would respond to this news.

And then he thought back to Matuei. When she had insisted that he helped her heal the banshee's wounds, his first thought had been that she was simply naïve. Too old to be naïve, but naïve nonetheless. Against his better nature, his mind had fallen back into the divisive condescension of the scholar. He had suspected that all her idea of 'flying again' or 'going to a better place' were part-euphemism, part-honest belief, part-ignorance. Inferring ignorance on others was still a hard tendency to fight off, even though he had studied the Na'vi and their customs for years. Spend a long enough time confined in a small space like Hell's Gate, and you felt that attitude closing in from almost every side, easy to spot when it came across as open aggression, but just as unsettling when it assumed a benign appearance. It was difficult, too, to reach a compromise between educating someone about a different culture and objectifying it, imposing rules and patterns on it that reduced it to something basic and regular, something that was only learned and not in fact lived. He had felt the same way when working with Jake to help induct him into the Omaticaya. It didn't matter how intelligent you were; the more alien another species and culture was, the more tempting it could be to treat it like Latin. It's a dead language, you don't speak it as such, the typeface used in these books doesn't show how the letters were really written and the photographs are poor quality. In the early days, learning about the Na'vi on Earth, Norm had sometimes felt a little guilty about his enthusiasm, as he often wondered whether this passion came from the enjoyment academics can feel when admiring an amusingly quaint old curiosity or from a genuine love for something that was breathing and coherent and developing so quickly that when he actually got to Pandora he would barely recognise it.

To his dismay, his regard for Na'vi culture became even more impure as he clocked in more and more simulation hours with his avatar body. Those experiences became something precious that was his alone. He felt as if he had some private, superior understanding of what it felt to be in a Na'vi body, but however much he stood staring into the mirror, catching the occasional glimpse of a familiar face imprinted in human flesh, going years and years without actually coming face-to-face with a true Na'vi had quietly taken its toll on his powers of judgment.

He turned off the shower and reached for a towel. All that life he had never fully been able to appreciate seemed to flow from Matuei's body like a stream of blood. The stump of her queue had reminded him of how far her experiences must lie beyond his knowledge. The sight of it had both terrified and humbled him, and he did not pity her. He just felt extremely sad.

After drying off, he changed into a fresh set of clothes and headed up to the mess hall to see if Max Patel was still there. He found the doctor sitting at a table next to the window, staring out over the jungle and warming his hands around a cup of coffee. When Max saw Norm enter, he looked over and smiled.

'Thanks for fixing the water,' he said. He gestured to a cafetière and an empty mug beside it. 'Sit yourself down. You look like you need this even more than I do.'

Norm thanked him and sat down on the bench opposite. He poured some coffee out, mixed in some milk and raised the cup to Max.

'Best coffee in the world,' he said. He drained half the mug in one go, not caring that the water stung the tip of his tongue.

'Glad you think so. It took my whole PhD to discover the perfect method. Just as well, really: all I ever seem to do these days is press a couple of buttons and drink coffee.' Max lowered his cup. 'I trust you didn't face too many problems sorting out the water supply?'

'Hole in a pipe. It was getting rusty anyway so I changed it for a spare.' Norm leaned forward. 'Guess what.'

'Agh, I've already done too much guesswork this morning just trying to work out the fastest way I can get a message to my niece. It's her birthday next month. Seventeen years old. I can't believe it – last time I saw her she had pigtails! She was barely waist-high to me.' Max sighed. 'But this is the way things are, I suppose. What did you have to tell me?'

'I helped a banshee to fly again,' said Norm with a wide grin across his face.

'You what?'

'I know! Christ, it sounds insane just saying that.'

In Max's face Norm saw the same succession of conflicting emotions he had felt when he agreed to help Matuei.

'You could have been killed, what in hell did you think you were- what, single-handedly?'

'No, of course not!' Norm laughed. 'I helped a Na'vi fix him up.'

'Forget the banshee, the Na'vi could have killed you!' exclaimed Max. He was now on his feet, reaching over the table with his hands laid down flat on either side of Norm's mug. 'How are you still alive?'

'A little luck, a little bit of negotiation.'

Not to mention a fresh perspective on things.

After speaking with Max and dropping in to say hello to Helen properly, Norm climbed into his bunk. He hadn't slept properly in days. It was becoming a real habit now. With the loss of senior staff on the avatar programme like Grace, work and research had become less structured and regulated, and he hated hanging around in Hell's Gate all day. The whole base felt haunted by the people who had once worked there. Every time he turned round, he glimpsed lines of marines and officers rushing down the corridor from the corner of his eye, none of whom were there any more. The silence was boring, but worse than that, it was stifling. Like most human beings, he only noticed the warm reassurance of knowing that you were only ever several feet from another person, whether a friend or not, when he had lost it altogether.

Sighing, he wrapped the sheets around him. He was asleep almost instantly.

The old sensations returned, vague but somehow too bright. He shielded his eyes with long blue fingers. He went through the familiar motions, first laying his palms on his face and slowly splaying the fingers apart to allow his sensitive golden eyes to become accustomed to the strong daylight. The black pupils constricted and began to take in his surroundings as he flexed and tightened each muscle in his long body. He was lying on the forest floor, gazing up into the canopy. Far off, an annoying barrage of popping and cracking noises shuddered through the air. His ears lowered, the tips brushing the light carpet of leaves beneath him as they arced downwards.

Suddenly he stiffened. He reached down to his chest. A warm viscous wetness soaked his fingertips. He whisked them away instantly as if he had just touched a hot pipe. Their dark redness laced down towards and around his knuckles. The spot on his chest that he had touched began to sting, then burned until it became agonising.

His mind exploded into action. A bullet wound. He tried to raise himself up onto his elbows but the pain brought him back down. He thumped the ground hard with his fists in an attempt to take his mind off it just long enough that he could move and look around to check whether his assailant was gone. Internal organs he had barely been consciously aware of before began to make their presence known just as they were starting to fail, each boiling with pain as if they were drilling into the original hole the bullet had made, widening it to fill his entire body. It felt like they were turning against him. In a final ditch, he bit down hard on his bottom lip and clenched his fists even more, then thrust himself up and forward with a loud grunt.

He flopped down to the ground again, face-first. The warmth of his blood welled under him. In desperation he looked up: lying inches from his nose was a rifle, apparently dropped by a human soldier. He reached forward to drag it towards him with trembling hands. The butt and trigger were too small for him to use, but he still clung to that end of the gun uselessly.

It was then that he noticed the cloying acrid stink that rose into the air around him. He looked down and saw that fluid was now spilling out from his chest in a growing black puddle. Dazed from haemorrhaging, he pressed two fingers into the pool and rubbed at them with his thumb. There wasn't a trace of red left in the liquid; it didn't even smell like blood anymore. Not human blood, not Na'vi blood, not even like a mixture of the two. Instinctively he gripped the rifle more firmly. The black pool had reached the outstretched hand now. He could hardly believe that he was still conscious given the sheer quantity of it. The wetness wrapped around his fingers. It was even thicker than before. When he looked closely at it, whirls of pink and blue swam around before his eyes, only to disappear when he looked away. The liquid covered his hand now. He flexed the fingers, and the space around them that was once too small for him to grasp properly was now pliant to his grip. He raised his gun arm up. He tried to toss the rifle away.

The flesh was fused to the plastic and metal.

Oh god I have to go there's a way out of this I have to leave but I don't know how how did I do it before god concentrate concentrate somewhere there's a button but I can't get it to that it's no good there's some other way I know there is come on you know this just try to remember-

From behind him there was a fierce growl. Clawing around with the aid of the rifle, which more and more felt like an extension of his index finger till the very end of the barrel seemed to curl into a jointed digit, he spotted an animal with leathery grey skin. It was crouched low to the ground, the flesh pulled back from a long set of crocodile-like jaws. When its flashing yellow eyes met his, the lips wrapped back even further until the entire face of the creature seemed to be turning itself inside out to reveal one enormous glistening mouth.

He tried to retreat. The moment he moved the animal leapt into the air, its growl opening up into a bellowing cry. It had initially looked more like something that would waddle or slither along the ground like a lizard, but it moved like a dog, and he saw now that the legs were actually quite long. All six were flung forward, targeting his stomach. He couldn't move fast enough. In the next second it had seized the flesh of his narrow waist in its teeth and was worrying at it madly, rolling its head this way and that with incredible force. As it flipped him over onto his back with a hard push, black fluid sprayed onto its face. The animal screamed and jumped back. It thrashed its head from side to side even more furiously than when it had attacked him and scraped at its spattered red gums with a front foot. The scrabbling of its claws against its face slowed until each talon seemed to drag through the flesh. Still horribly conscious and aware of what was going on, he could see that the dark blood that poured from his chest had bored through the creature's gums like strong acid and that the animal's attempt to clear its face of the substance had only succeeded in making each wound larger.

It gave up and burst forward with fresh rage. Its teeth fastened onto his waist again and pressed into him harder and harder. As it clamped down on his flesh it didn't seem to care that it was destroying itself at the same time. It just burrowed in further and further, widened its jaws one last time and closed them on his organs with a cold sharp metallic clank.

Norm screwed up his face irritably and turned over onto his other side. The wire rungs of the bunk squeaked below him. His hand clutched at the pillow briefly and his legs kicked out uncomfortably, and then he was still again.

Author's note: Yeah, so, I wasn't trying to make that dream sequence all Aliens-y, but it just turned out that way. This is fanfiction – what're you expecting, originality! I'll raise the rating if necessary, but really that's as graphic as I'm prepared to get here. I was going to make it a bit nastier, but meh, the weird dream logic is there, and that's what matters as far as my intentions for this fic are concerned. Next chapter will be more cheerful and should shed a bit more light on the situation … it's just that writer's block is harder to get rid of when you don't permit yourself a little gratuity!

Thought I'd keep this one short since the last chapter ran quite long. I'll get back to the flashbacks in the next chapter. I whizzed this out in about a day so there's a bit of lumbering fat in here that I'd normally trim away. As before, thank you so much for your story alert adds, faves, reviews. And a special thanks to Vskrainaek for answering my question about sturmbeests in the last chapter.