He did. Her estimate was accurate, as it was just about four minutes later that dark dots began rising out of some of the towns… a few at first, just here and there, but rapidly increasing to a swarm. It was like watching the emergence of flying ants from nests across the countryside, but all of them emerging to head off in the same direction.
They were all, along routes radiating in from every town, heading in to the city. Within a few more minutes there were so many bikes in the air that Alex could only hazard the wildest guess at how many – hundreds of thousands, for sure, maybe even as many as a million. They were streaming to the city and vanishing into it.
‘The morning commute,’ Migan told him, surveying it with a connoisseur’s eye. ‘Lovely, isn’t it? Like flocks of birds heading to roost. And in five hours…’ she gestured to indicate a great launching outwards, ‘They’ll all come bursting out again.’
Alex would not have said that it was lovely, but it was interesting. He knew from destination-briefing that work on Camae was unusually structured. Almost all work, unless it required round-the-clock shifts, was carried out in the five hour slot the Camag regarded as a normal working day. What might be ‘0900 to 1700’ on another world was ‘seven till twelve’ here.
‘Anyway,’ said Migan, ‘I thought you might like to visit a town…’ she gave him a grin. ‘I’d like to say,’ she gestured broadly, ‘take your pick! But your people like to know where you’re going to be, so…’ she pointed, and looked at him for confirmation that he was happy to go along with these plans.
‘This is Turu,’ she told him, as they approached on slow descent. ‘Population, twenty three thousand. Of which about eight thousand just went off to work.’
There were more houses there than he’d realised – groups of them almost hidden under the trees, the town considerably bigger than its visible centre. It was far more varied than he’d expected, too. On Novaterre, there were estates of virtually identical housing which went on and on, seemingly forever. Here, though, was an eclectic mix of domestic architecture, old and new, big and small.
There were bike-parks throughout the town, and they parked in one close to the temple, leaving their safety harnesses there to go about unencumbered. The air was milder here than it had been in the mountains, damper, with a pervading mossy scent from the woodland which didn’t so much surround the town as infuse it. There were trees throughout, even shading the streets and squares which rambled through the town. No grid layout here. And no towers, either. There were no apartment blocks on Camae.
Migan, with her town planner’s eye, pointed out the different types of housing. The cheaper ones, he discovered, were the bigger, newer kind – with some few exceptions, the smaller and older a house was, the more expensive it was likely to be.
‘Cheaper housing has more people living in it,’ Migan explained. ‘Several generations, probably, sharing costs and childcare. You only get the smaller houses if you can afford for your family to spread across a lot more properties.’
‘Ah,’ Alex said, understanding then that the ten bedroomed properties were a lot cheaper to buy or rent, per occupant, than the kind of middle class three-bedroomed home Migan herself lived in. And with only six of them sharing it, too, rather than the forty or so of a labour-class family home.
‘And anything over two hundred years old,’ Migan added, ‘prices triple, at least. And for a manse, well … sky’s the limit.’
She pointed out a manse, identifying it as ‘The Old House’ and mentioning that some of Prince Ottavawr’s family lived there.
Alex had already met Leganwn Ottavawr, hereditary prince of Findur. She was a charming – of course, charming – middle aged lady who’d talked to him intelligently about the linguistic similarities between Camag and quarian.
‘We can go in for a look round, if you like,’ Migan said, and he understood just from the slight reserve in her tone that this was not something she would normally even think of, but that it had been suggested by the Diplomatic Corps.
Alex looked at the manse, a lovely old house built in pink-tinged stone, with the high windows and gable roof Migan had told him were characteristics of a Mellic era house – around six hundred years old, though it had of course been frequently modernised within. It was surrounded by gardens, Alex noted, but not fences. There were no fences here, or at least, none that were visible.
‘No – that’s all right,’ he said, feeling that for one thing he was going to see enough of the insides of royal places, and for another, that Migan herself was not keen.
So they just went for a walk around the town, instead, Migan pointing out the community centre where the town council held their meetings, the clinic, and the children’s hub. Kids here did most of their education through datanet, but there were times when they needed the use of music and art studios, science labs and the like, and a play-centre, too, for social interaction with kids from outside their own family.
‘We could go in there,’ Migan grinned, ‘But kids have no control, they’d be all over you!’
What the town did not have, Alex realised, was any kind of shops, cafés, bars or other places of public entertainment.
‘Everywhere,’ Migan said, when he asked her where people on Camae went out to eat. ‘We eat out all the time – family, friends, neighbours, we eat out more often than not. And picnics, of course. Hardly a weekend without a picnic somewhere.’
‘But no restaurants?’ Alex realised as he spoke that there was no word for that in Camag, any more than there was in quarian.
‘Rest rooms?’ Migan was puzzled, then worked it out from context, ‘Oh! I know! Like hotels – they have them at the spaceports.’
Alex grinned. Camae would have been ludicrously over-endowed with spaceports even if they had liners arriving here every day.
They had nine, in fact. National rivalries were such that they could not agree to any one nation having the spaceport, so they had all built their own. Complete with, as Migan observed, the only hotels and restaurants on the planet. But these were hardly used, even by the tiny trickle of visitors. Those who did make it to Camae as tourists would barely have time to check into a hotel before they’d find local people befriending them and taking them home as their guests.
‘So,’ he wondered, ‘what do you do, then, if you’re in a town like this, and don’t know anybody, and want, say, a cup of tea?’
She looked at him, saw that this was not an academic question, and chuckled. Then, taking him by the hand, she turned and walked through gardens to the nearest house. It was a bungalow, with open windows indicating that people were home. The sound of a very small child having an unintelligible conversation floated through a window as they approached, and as they walked towards the door some alarm must have sounded inside, as a slightly older child’s voice hollered, ‘Muuuum! Doooor!’
‘I heard it!’ a woman’s voice said, and as the door opened, a tousle-haired young woman came out to meet them. Her eyes widened a bit at the sight of Alex, but she kept her composure admirably.
‘Hello,’ Migan held out her hand, introducing herself cheerfully. ‘Migan Glynbas. And this is my friend Alex.’
‘Pleasure.’ She shook hands with them both, briefly but warmly. ‘I’m Legan Otta – are you visiting?’ It was a rhetorical question, as she was already beaming a welcome. ‘Do, come in!’
‘We’d just like to sit in your garden, thanks,’ Migan said, and this was clearly a perfectly normal request, as Legan acknowledged it happily.
‘There’s an arbour round the side,’ she said, directing them. ‘What can I get you to drink? Would you like something to eat?’
They went and sat in the arbour, a vine-covered arch over a slightly mossy wooden seat, and Legan brought them some tea. She was followed by a little boy who looked about four, staring at Alex with his finger in his mouth – just old enough to realise that this funny looking man was somebody strange and important, but not to understand who he was.
‘Tsss, t
sss!’ Legan smiled apologetically at them and ushered the child away, leaving them to have their tea in peace.
Alex sipped the tea, which was good, and looked at Migan’s mischievous does that answer your question?
‘This,’ he realised, indicating the tea, ‘isn’t because she recognised me, is it? Or set up by the Embassy?’
‘Nope.’ Migan confirmed. ‘That is what you do if you’re in a strange town on Camae and you don’t know anybody and you want a cup of tea. Or a meal, come to that, or a bed for the night. Or for a week, if you’re needing to stay for some reason.’
‘And… I take it we don’t offer to pay…?’
‘Only if you want her to think you’re insane,’ said Migan, and both of them laughed.
It was lovely sitting there in the arbour, and they stayed for quite a while – so long, indeed, that Legan popped out again to offer more tea and ask if they would like to stay for lunch. Declining, they thanked her and moved on, strolling to the temple which Migan said she’d like to call into before they left.
‘Not that I’m specially religious,’ she confided, as they walked along unhurriedly. They were holding hands, which felt skin-tingling intimate. ‘But Granma Miggy always asks if I’ve made an offering when I go somewhere, and if I say I didn’t have time or I forgot, I get called a godless heathen and prayed for, so it’s easier just to do it – if you don’t mind?’
‘Not at all,’ he said. He’d studied up on Camag religious belief and was perfectly happy to participate in temple observance, should the need arise.
So, they went into the temple. There were no priests in Camag’s religion. Temples were built and managed by town councils, with the congregation conducting rituals themselves. Of these, the most common was the making of an offering, which was mostly just as casual as Migan was doing right then. They walked into the temple, pausing inside the door to wash their hands and pass their feet through shoe-cleaning brushes. There was nobody else there at that hour, and the temple was utterly silent.
Alex walked a little way in, and stopped, gazing upward with a look which started out as interest and froze into shock.
For a moment, one stunning moment, he knew this place.
The temple appeared to be translucent – an illusion, he knew, created by the solar absorption coating on its outside providing power to the luminar surface within. The illusion, though, was very convincing, as if the temple was eggshell thin and surrounded by light. It was completely plain, with none of the angelic imagery or symbolism he had seen in holos of other temples. There was just a pearlescent surface, softly aglow, covering every part of the temple from the floor underfoot to the spire which rose above them with a star-bright light at its very top.
He had been in a place like this before. Or at least, he had been in a place which this temple reminded him of so vividly that for a moment he felt déjà vu. That place, though, had been immeasurably bigger, on a scale which made this temple, spacious as it was, seem minute in comparison. But the shape was the same, the ovoid space, the dome and spire above, a pearly, translucent surface.
In an instant, he was back there again, standing in the airlock of an upside-down shuttle, looking out at it, trying to orient himself when there was no frame of reference. He had jumped out, more than a metre down to the smooth surface, surprised to find that it wasn’t as slippery as glass, and he had looked up.
He had had only a moment to stand there, gazing up at the immensity above him, before the Gider had appeared.
Because that was their ship – or at least, the encounter bubble they had generated from their ship as a safe space for the humans to visit while they projected in holographically, maintaining quarantine.
It had not, in fact, turned out to be as safe as the Gider intended, as they’d popped it into decontamination disposal while the Heron’s shuttle was still far too close. The resulting implosion had come close to killing them, for which the Gider had apologised, after their own fashion, with a merry little ‘Whoops!’
But this was an echo – tiny, imperfect, but so similar.
Ideas tore through Alex’s mind. Had the Camae seen something like this aeons ago? And remembered it as a holy thing, to be preserved in worship of the beings who had brought them to this world? Could that still be, after ten thousand…
‘Are you all right?’ Migan was surprised and concerned, seeing him stop dead and gape up at the spire as if he’d never seen anything so amazing before in his life. ‘You look,’ she joked, ‘like you’re seeing angels!’
As Alex looked at her, her own eyes widened.
‘You’re not…?’ she asked.
Alex pulled himself together. ‘No – just having a moment,’ he said, as if that meant anything.
‘I thought you were having a rapture,’ she said, and laughed, turning to walk on.
Alex followed slowly, looking around. He was beginning to understand. The pictures he’d seen of the interior of Camag temples had been nothing like this. They had seats all around, sometimes tiered like the seats in an in-the-round theatre. And they were decorated to within an inch of sanity, their walls covered with artwork and gilding, the interior of the dome covered in religious symbolism and great angel statues with huge golden wings.
‘Findur temples aren’t much to look at,’ Migan said, almost as if following his thoughts, and with a note of apology. ‘I can take you to much nicer ones if you’re interested – but they don’t believe in images in temples, in Findur. Or chairs.’
They had come up to the central point, directly beneath the tip of the spire, and the only object in the temple. It was an offering-altar, Alex supposed, although it was nothing like the hugely ornate structures he’d seen pictures of. This was nothing more than a broad, shallow steel bowl on a steel post, completely unadorned. There were a couple of centimetres of water in the bottom of it.
Migan reached under the bowl and unhooked a small steel cup, eyeing it with a glance which said that she wasn’t impressed. And with that, still completely casual, she pushed the cup against the supporting post – some flap which had not been apparent to Alex moved open and water flowed out into the cup.
‘Dio, Dio Vir.’ Migan circled the hand holding the cup over her heart and touched her forehead with it, then poured it into the altar bowl with no more ceremony than she might have poured a cup of tea – careful, but not at all reverent. She had put the cup back in its place and was turning back to Alex within seconds, her attitude clearly that of satisfaction that a necessary chore had been accomplished.
Water, thought Alex, yes of course, water. Always water, in religious observances. Water and light, always sacred.
‘You’ve gone very quiet,’ Migan observed, and with concern, ‘I haven’t embarrassed you, have I? Only I know offworlders don’t… well, who knows what you believe in. But I’m sorry if…’
‘No, no,’ Alex assured her. ‘It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s just… the atmosphere here is amazing. I didn’t expect that. Would it be all right, do you think, if I…?’
He indicated the altar, and felt as he did so that it would be good, and right, to do this. He had organised a memorial service on Korvold once, for the ancient Alar who’d been so long forgotten. This felt the same, the paying of respects to a people lost to history… the people he was now prepared to believe the Camag remembered as angels. His doubts on that had been resolved, right here. Of course it could be a coincidence that the temple design they’d been using for ten thousand years was so very similar to the interior of a Gider ship, but Alex didn’t think so.
‘If you want, sure!’ Migan said, and turned back, getting a cup for him and showing him what to do. ‘The theory is,’ she said, ‘that the water evaporates and carries thanks to heaven. In Parva we say the evaporating vapour is the breath of angels.’ She glanced around at the deserted temple, lowering her voice momentarily as she said that, as if not wanting to be overheard. ‘But they won’t have that here. For them it’s all about the purity, pure water,
pure thought.’ Her manner was back to normal. ‘Anyway it doesn’t matter if you pour water in without pure intention – it might not get to heaven, but it goes to make clouds.’
‘Well, my intention is not one of belief,’ Alex said, ‘but it is one of respect, and I hope that may be pure enough.’
He filled the cup, copied the gesture and the words of blessing, and poured the water carefully into the bowl.
Thank you. Whoever they were, whoever they had been, someone had created the survival genome and brought those first colonists to Camae. And that generosity, that gift, ought to be acknowledged.
‘I wouldn’t have thought you were religious,’ Migan said, taking his hand again as they were leaving the temple.
‘I’m not,’ Alex said. ‘Not really. No formed beliefs. But…’ he looked at her, and wished that he could tell her. I’ve seen an angel.
Well, a Chethari. Who looked like an angel, and whose people might, even, have been those who’d created Migan’s people. There was no way to know, only the possibility that if the Senate did agree to sending them out to the coordinates Trilopharus had given, they might be able to find out.
‘Oh, the things you’ve seen,’ Migan said, looking into his eyes with longing for a moment, and then with rueful amusement. ‘And if you could tell me the half of it,’ she said, ‘I still wouldn’t see. But you must have seen so many things, Alex, that I can’t even imagine.’
One of the things Alex had learned about Migan in their talk the previous evening was that, in common with 99.94% of the population, she had never been off Camae. Never. Not even to go for a visit to a space station or a bus tour of the system.
‘A couple of weeks ago,’ Alex said, as they walked on together, ‘I stood on a planet no other human being has ever set foot on. I picked up a pebble from its surface and stood there watching the sun rise. Just me, Migan. The only person who had ever been there in the four billion years that planet was orbiting that star, and the only person who would ever see the sun rise on it. It was a huge, violet desert under a deep purple sky, with stars like a rainbow…’ he waved a hand to indicate a great arc. ‘And as the sun came up, amethysts the size of tower blocks flashed out rays of light and indigo shadows flowed across the land like wine.’ He glanced sideways at her awed expression. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘I blew it up.’
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