The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown Page B

track and ducked into the surrounding undergrowth.
    She ran, exhilarated by the sudden sense of freedom.
    She moved ever deeper into the jungle, away from where the foragers worked, towards the territory of the Outcasts.
    She came to the clearing and the lakka bush. She sat beneath it, in the dappled sunlight that fell through the canopy a kilometre above her head, and plucked the small red berries from the bush. She ate them one by one and when she had swallowed a dozen she felt her stomach heave.
    She squatted, leaned forward and retched.
    A great torrent of pink-white fluid sprayed from her mouth, the phar and the berries, and she felt suddenly shaky with relief at expelling the alien mass. It lay on the jungle floor, already attracting insects and bugs.
    This done, she proceeded to gorge herself on the fruit and berries that grew prodigiously around the clearing. The phar filled her people’s stomachs, and they consequently required far less sustenance than did Maatja. For every fruit she threw over her shoulder into her basket, she popped two into her mouth. In this way, she would not draw attention to herself by gorging at the evening meal, though it did mean she had to work with speed.
    When she reckoned she had her daily quota, she moved from the clearing, deeper into the jungle, and sought out the meeting place. This was a smaller clearing, marked by a ghala tree, where sometimes Maatja met the Outcast boy, Kavan.
    It was Kavan who, years ago, had told her what the phar was doing to her people and what she could do about it. Maatja had never liked phar – unlike most other people she knew – and to sick it up every day was a welcome relief.
    And, after a week of doing this, she came to think more about the Weird and what they were doing to her people.
    And came to realise – thanks in large part to Kavan’s words – that her people were enslaved to the alien race.
    At first she had thought the wild jungle boy one of her own people. She was young then and had not met everyone in her tribe. But after a few meetings Kavan told her the truth: that he was an Outcast, a member of the tribe who lived in the treetops far away from the clearing, who were not addicted to phar and were not the slaves of the Weird.
    Kavan had often exhorted her to come to live with his people, but always she had resisted. She loved her mother and father and her sister, and she could not envisage life without them. Her repudiation of the phar was the extent of her rebellion.
    She came to the clearing and searched for Kavan’s sign: a complex pattern of woven leaves, skewered by a twig, which told her, depending on its position in the clearing, when Kavan would meet her.
    Today, however, there was no symbol awaiting her. This happened from time to time, when Kavan was unable to get away from his work duties, or when the Weird had instigated another purge to rid the jungle of the Outcasts and he had to be especially careful in his movements.
    Now she made her way back through the dense undergrowth, at once dejected that she would not be meeting Kavan and worried for his safety.
    Fifteen minutes later she saw one of her people through the trees and casually moved to join them as if she had never been away. She noted, with satisfaction, that she had collected more berries than anyone else: her father would be proud.
    When they returned to the clearing later that afternoon, a great excitement gripped her people.
    Jaar came running from his family hut and told a group of children that the Weird had communicated with the Elders while they had been foraging. In two days, he said, a Weird Flyer would arrive at the clearing, with ‘great news.’
    All that afternoon, the children speculated what the great news might be.
    “Perhaps we’ll all be Chosen!” a girl shouted, “and we’ll all go to the lair of the Weird!”
    “Or the Weird have found more humans on other planets and they’re bringing them to live with us!”
    Maatja drifted away