Chaos Walking 3.5 - Snowscape (Patrick Ness) PDF

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Summary

1. Acción de describir.
2.
Discurso oral o escrito en el que se explica cómo es una cosa, una persona o un lugar para ofrecer una imagen o una idea completa de ellos.
"en la primera versión de la novela aparecen dilatadas descripciones acerca de la mala vida de la ciudad...

Description

A CHAOS WALKING SHORT STORY

CHAOS WALKING SHORT STORY

SNOWSCAPE

PATRICK NESS

I wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for Wilf. “Back!” he yelled. “Back to the ship!” All I could see in his Noise was the white surrounding us, the thick, piling snow that had rushed in with the nightmare and filled both ground and sky. I’m ashamed to say I panicked, because honestly, it felt like nothing so much as going blind all over again. And then through Wilf’s eyes, I saw the long smear of red across the snow, far too thick and deep for the person who left it to still be alive. “I got you,” he said, grabbing my arm and pulling me along. He dragged me fast, but his Noise was too jumbled, too hurtling for me to be able to follow it properly, and I fell, the snow half-burying me. Wilf was already hoisting me up again. “Must run, Lee. Outta here.” “Leave me,” I said. “Help the others. I’m a hindrance in this weather–”

“Ain’t happ’nin, Lee–” And then the roar came again. The monster, whatever the hell it was, had circled back. Wilf didn’t say another word, just reached under my armpits and dragged me to my feet again, keeping me on track with sheer muscle power. I could see almost nothing, just what Wilf saw, the white of the snow, the more white and the more snow– The roar cut through it all once more, almost directly beside us, at that terrible, impossible height, its Noise saying nothing except how much it wanted to kill us. Wilf pulled me down into a drift, the closest thing we had to a place to hide. We listened to the thumps of the monstrous footfalls striding towards us with terrifying speed– But it kept on past, and in the distance we heard a scream, a human scream– Cut off violently in mid-flow. “We have to help them,” I said. “Yes,” was all Wilf answered, and I could see his Noise whirring. It had been a clear day when we set out from the scout ship, and there wasn’t supposed to be anything out here that was anything like a threat. We’d seen the storm coming and decided to return, but the clouds had rolled in faster than we could gather our things, whipping in with hurricane-like strength out of the bare trees. And the storm had brought something with it. Foster had been carrying a rifle, but she’d been the first taken. Screaming, too, then suddenly not. The rest of us had run, trying to make it back to the ship, but in the increasing blizzard they were all as blind as me.

In Wilf’s Noise now, I saw him think of the weapons that every scout ship came equipped with. “We have to try,” I said. “Yup.” He grabbed my arm, and we ran once more, dodging trees and stones, the roar seeming to surround us. We could hear the shouts of the others, too, panicked in the whiteout. I had completely lost track of where the ship might be, but Wilf must have known because the dark shadow of it lurched into his Noise ahead of us. There was someone standing by the launch door, Mikkelsen, waving us frantically in. “Hurry!” he shouted. “Weapons?” Wilf asked, as we rushed up the small ramp to get inside. “Already on it,” Collier called from the cockpit, her hands flying over the screens, which were tracking the rest of us on infrared outside. Wilf read them and I read them through him. “Only two?” he asked. “Foster, Zhiang and Stubbs are dead,” Collier said, her voice flat, her fingers pointing to the motionless bodies across the screens, the dissipating heat of them already turning from red to blue in the infrared glow. On different screens across the main display, two other figures were running in opposite directions. The computer identified them as Fukunaga on the left, and Jefferson on the right. We all watched as an enormous blue shadow, easily three times Jefferson’s height, emerged behind her out of the snow, lifted her orange infrared form off her feet, and tore her into two pieces– “Jesus Christ,” Mikkelsen said.

“Missiles arming,” Collier said, working the weapon controls. “What is that thing?” I asked. “Where’s Dawson?” Wilf said, and I could feel his Noise intently scanning every screen. There was no sign of her, dead or alive. “It’s going after Fukunaga!” Mikkelsen shouted. We could see the dark blue shadow, indistinct in the infrared glow, as if it was nearly as cold as its surroundings. It had turned from where Jefferson now lay dead, and was heading across first one screen, then another. Fukunaga was strong and healthy, but she was also in her late sixties. There was no way she was going to be able to outrun it– “Missiles prepped,” Collier said, lifting the hatch that contained the firing button. “Locking target–” “Wait!” Wilf said. “There’s people!” All across the screens, smaller figures – orange on the infrared, but less vivid than the running Fukunaga – were emerging out of the snow. Five, ten, twenty. Rows of them, showing up from seeming nowhere. There was one bright red individual among them. The computer identified it as Dawson. “Spackle?” Mikkelsen asked. “Impossible,” Collier said. “We were told–” “Monster’s going,” Wilf said. “Monster’s leaving.” We watched the huge blue shadow turn from chasing Fukunaga and disappear back into the forests, the roars from outside growing fainter in the distance. We all just panted for a moment, staring in shock. “What the hell just happened?” I finally said.

“Don’t know,” Wilf said, turning back to the ramp that led outside, and in Mikkelsen’s Noise, I could see him frown. “But if there’s answers, I’ll be wantin’ ‘em.”

This snow was meant to be an empty place, according to what we’d been told by the different Spackle enclaves we’d met along the way, the land just beyond the last trees of the arctic forest. It was the upper limit of nature before the icefields that capped the vast northern pole of the planet. Inhospitable, unlivable, the final frontier. Why did we go there? Why not? The very first group of settlers on New World had never been able to do much exploring, having had to keep themselves – through war, deprivation, their own cussed stupidity – to one long river that ran from abandoned Prentisstown in the west all the way through Haven and out to the equally abandoned settlement of Horizon on the ocean in the east. But there had always been a whole world out there, hadn’t there? One populated by a species we found ourselves at war with not once, but twice (see the “cussed stupidity” I mentioned above). I’m not old enough to have seen much of the first war. I saw more of the second than I ever wanted to. I learned, though. We all did. Learned to live again. Learned to accept help when we needed it, which since the end of the second war has been pretty much all the time. We also maybe learned to live with an entire planet of Spackle,

and with each other, too, as the new wave of settlers woke up out of their travel-sleep and discovered Noise, discovered the mostly destroyed civilization of the people who’d preceded them, discovered a world that needed a hell of a lot of rebuilding. But some of us who were already here also woke up to ourselves. I was blinded by a Spackle weapon, after seeing people I cared about die from those same weapons. If war is hard – and it is, forever and always – then after war is just as hard, in a different way. But we’re doing our best. I’m doing my best. I use the Noise of others to see, though mostly it’s Wilf, and sometimes that includes the Spackle who are helping us, and when I’m seeing through their eyes, sometimes I think maybe we have more in common than we both thought, and that maybe things aren’t so bad, maybe there’s hope. Sometimes. But the rebuilding is carrying on. New homes for the new people, the rebuilding of destroyed ones for the old, and it’s being done in a better way this time. Though again I have to say “sometimes”. There’ve been problems, but people are working on them, people are trying. And that’s all down to some friends of mine. Friends who haven’t been able to see the good things they brought about just yet because– Well, anyway. The new ships landed, the new settlers woke up, and suddenly, there were five times as many people around as anyone had ever seen. Noise like you wouldn’t believe. Wilf and I worked hard to help out, sealing up most of our war artillery in a sunken mine (no matter how much

I argued it should be destroyed altogether), clearing rubble, planting winter crops, telling newly-woken men and boys how to make Noise easier to live with. Exhausting work. Non-stop. But worth doing. Still, when some of the newly-woken settlers suggested an exploration trip, I was up for it. So was Wilf, even if his wife wasn’t happy to see him go for the four weeks we’d be away. There were ten of us. Me. Wilf. Collier, who was a caretaker on one of the settler ships and our main pilot. Mikkelsen, an anthropologist, who wanted to study and learn from the different Spackle enclaves we expected to meet. Dawson, Stubbs, Zhiang and Jefferson were agriculturalists and ecologists, hoping to find things that might help us out in terms of native food. And Foster and Fukunaga were, I think, like me and Wilf: hard workers who needed a break and who just wanted to see what was out there. We were the lucky ones chosen by the new Council to go exploring, though I admit, Wilf and I had some pull. Before we left, one of my friends who stopped the war talked to the leader of the Spackle – they call him the Sky – and he cleared a way for us, sending messages that we were to be helped wherever we landed in the scout ship. If you ask me, it was the least he could do. So we set off exploring, up north, as far as we could go. Over mountains and plains, across a set of connected lakes no human eyes had ever seen, across forests so vast even flying above them you couldn’t see their end. Stopping at all kinds of places, meeting all kinds of Spackle, seeing all kinds of new animals, as we kept going north.

“When should we stop?” we asked each other. “When we get to the end,” we always answered.

You are safe, the lead Snowscape is gone.

Spackle showed us in its Noise.

The

“The what?” Mikkelsen said. There was a crowd of Spackle before us, several dozen at least, Dawson and Fukunaga safely with them. We had no idea where they could possibly have come from. “Y’all right, Connie?” Wilf asked Fukunaga. She had a hand up to her mouth, fighting back tears, but she nodded. Wilf put an arm around her shoulders. Dawson came up and embraced them both. People tend to gather like that around Wilf. “Four dead,” Collier said to the lead Spackle, looking for someone to blame. “What the hell happened? We were told–”

We are sorry for your loss, the lead Spackle showed, and the weird thing was, you could feel he was telling the truth. Feel their grief with a keenness that silenced all of us. They seemed to be handing their loss to one another, each to each. And then a strange thing happened. My Noise was filled with a chorusing of Spackle Noise, but unlike any I’d ever felt before. It had colours beyond colours, sounds and shapes that seemed to be pure feeling, and I was swimming in it, spinning in it– Then it was gone. There was silence all around. Collier, Fukunaga and Dawson, the three human women left out of the six who came on this trip, looked at us stunned.

“What was that?” Fukunaga asked. “Everyone just froze.” “I feel...” Mikkelsen said, looking at his hands as if they were brand new, “I feel different.” “Less sad,” Wilf said, though he didn’t sound particularly happy about it. He was right, though. I felt the same way, like a little bit of the burden had been lifted from me, taken by the Spackle.

Please come, the lead Spackle said. Night is falling. The weather is turning. You will need shelter. “I’d rather wait it out in the ship, if I’m honest,” Collier said. “We should go with them,” Wilf said, and there was an odd note to his Noise, a note that wanted to find something out. “Yes, we should.” And, as was usually the case when Wilf spoke, that was that.

They led us under the snow. We assumed they’d be taking us back into the trees, to Spackle huts we must have somehow missed on the scans, because there was nothing north of the forest. It really was the final line of anything before an endless horizon of snow that stretched for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres over the very tip-top of the planet before heading back down the other side. We knew so little about it we weren’t even sure if it covered an ocean or a continent or both. But that’s the way the Spackle headed. “You won’t believe it,” Dawson said, shock still spangling her voice. “You just won’t believe it.”

That was all we could get out of her as the Spackle beckoned us on, unhurried, as if there was nothing to fear from whatever giant thing that had emerged from the forest, killing nearly half our crew. “What was it?” I asked a Spackle near me, but all her Noise showed was the shadow disappearing into the forest. She was telling me there was nothing to be afraid of. And again I felt that lack of fear, felt it draining away in my own Noise– Wilf hmmphed in an unconvinced way but said nothing more. They led us into the emptiness, seemingly oblivious to the snow that still fell. The lichen they grew over their skin was the heaviest I’d ever seen on a Spackle, but still much thinner than our snow gear, which even now wasn’t keeping me nearly warm enough. “Humans can’t survive in this,” Collier tried to explain to them. “We’re not as acclimatized as you–” But the lead Spackle simply showed, We

are here.

In the side of a snowbank, one that looked just as temporary and windblown as all the others, a small, door-shaped hollow was sunk. The Spackle started down through it immediately, disappearing under the snow. Dawson followed them without a word. The five of us remaining humans looked at each other. The war was over. We had made peace with the Spackle. Other Spackle had been enormously helpful to us on our journey northwards. But still we hesitated. Because something here felt different.

“May as well find out,” Wilf said, then he turned to Collier, “but always know where the exit is.” We followed the last of the Spackle through the door. It led down a corridor of ice that glowed, as if lit from within. Down we went, the walls remaining ice even past the point where it seemed like we should be hitting earth or rock underneath the snow. “Must be a frozen sea,” Mikkelsen said behind us. “So close to a forest?” Fukunaga asked, just in front of Wilf, who was leading me. “Much we don’ know about this planet,” Wilf said, almost to himself. “And the people on it,” Collier said, at the front, and I could see through Wilf’s eyes how closely she was watching the Spackle leading us. “We’d see it if they meant us harm,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I know,” she said. But once again, I could hear the uneasiness. I knew the Spackle could hear it, too, but they didn’t seem to mind. Oddly enough, I minded less than I thought I should, though that was a feeling hard to make sense of. “Here’s somethin’,” Wilf said as we reached a flat part of the corridor. It opened out into a large room, almost a cavern, its walls lit with that unknown light, the floor covered in what looked like a mixture of furs and thick lichen. A huge table ran down the middle, seemingly a place to meet and eat and barter, wares and furs draped along it as well as food. Corridors led from points along every wall to caverns of ice and others beyond that.

You could tell because here and in the vast rooms beyond were hundreds and hundreds of Spackle, connected by Noise, giving us a welcome of complete and utter serenity. It was the most peaceful-feeling place I’d ever seen.

The Spackle coated the walls with a secretion that lowered the temperature of the ice even further, hardening it and ensuring it wouldn’t melt. From the pictures I could see in their Noise, the caverns sprawled a mile or more out under the frozen wasteland. They hunted in the forest outside, but also deeper down, where the ice grew thinner, there were great holes for fishing. Their secretions provided the luminescence we were seeing, too, which was enough light to grow different kinds of ice-based crops in even further caverns, as well as allowing them to tend to a rabbit-like creature they grew in herds and which was their favourite diet. They fed it to us. I can’t lie, it was good. Everything was good. Their Noise was some kind of miracle of calm. I could feel the grief in our group, for the friends we’d lost, but at least in me, Wilf and Mikkelsen, it was pushed away, like it could never really hurt us. I also felt too calm to really mind that it felt that way. “We didn’t even know you were here,” Collier said to the lead Spackle, trying to ignore the usual pity our female members encountered from Spackle who didn’t understand why they didn’t have Noise. “You didn’t show up on our scanners and none of the other enclaves said anything about–”

Not all the Land speak with the same voice, Spackle showed. Most, but not all.

the lead

Collier frowned. “I don’t understand.” “Don’ reckon I do neither,” Wilf said, taking another bite of snow rabbit-thing. The lead Spackle took a moment to gather his words – it was clear he didn’t speak our language and was having to learn it from our Noises almost as he spoke it – and

We are... Self-sufficient? showed,

he paused, finding the right phrase.

“I can see that,” Mikkelsen said, looking around the cavern again, at the number of Spackle going about their daily lives, some watching us with a mild curiosity, most just calmly moving from room to room, a sense of serene purpose to every one of their actions. “Everyone seems very...” Fukunaga said, also looking around. “Relaxed?” Collier said. “At peace,” Fukunaga said.

This is a problem? the Spackle asked us. Because I can see ... turmoil in your own voices. He glanced at Collier. Those of you who have them. “Our friends died,” Collier said, showing a flash of anger. “I mean, I’m glad you all chased whatever that thing was away, but I’d like some answers.” “Me, too,” Wilf said. “I thank you for the feed, but I wan’ hear about that what came outta the forest. Now, please.” For the first time, the lead Spackle looked uncomfortable.

The Snowscape, he showed. “If you say so,” Wilf said, taking a drink. The Spackle looked at all of us, and I saw through his Noise how we looked back. Fukunaga bereft and cold,

Dawson shocked to the point of humming a tune while she picked at the food in front of her, Collier angry and getting angrier, demanding to know. But also how peaceful Mikkelsen looked as he ate, as if he hadn’t just seen four people die. I’m ashamed to say that I looked nearly as comfortable. Wilf’s face was unreadable, but Wilf’s face is always unreadable. Still, we seemed as calm as the Spackle around us. Then the lead Spackle opened his Noise and started to show us about the Snowscape.

“Do you believe all that?” I whispered to Wilf from the beds the Spackle had made for us. The storm had got worse outside, and the Spackle had offered us a place to sleep until it passed. We had a small cavern to ourselves, warmed by whatever mysterious system the Spackle had mastered, though not quite warm enough for a human to take off their gloves. “Not sure,” Wilf said, though I could see how awake his Noise was and how much he was thinking it over. “Is it possible, do you think?” Collier asked, from the other side of me. “This world,” Wilf said. “It’s big.” “It surely is that,” Collier answered. Mikkelsen was snoring away, peaceful as anything in a far corner. Fukunaga sat slightly apart from us, her back turned, praying. Dawson hummed to herself on the bedding in the other corner. We’d been unable to get much out of her since the whole thing had happened. It was entirely

understandable. Zhiang was her husband, and he was lying in a snowy grave a few hundred feet away. “But you think there’s something they’re not telling us?” I asked Collier. In Wilf’s Noise I could see her frown. “You can’t see it,...