His eyes narrowed. ‘I’d rather be second, after I see it work, and I hear you call back through that Mole box.’ He moved closer, and she could feel the gravitational tug of his body, still massive and powerful despite the rationing they had all endured during the whale’s strange odyssey. ‘Or, I’ll tell you a little idea I dreamed up. Suppose I knocked you up, and then sent you through? If you made it, and even if nobody else got through, at least a little piece of me would survive in universe Alpha.’
Lura faced him. ‘You try it and I’ll rip your seed out of my body with my bare hands – in this universe or any other.’
He grinned. ‘Just a thought, tree lady. Just don’t make me regret letting you go.’
‘It’s time, it’s time,’ wheezed the Mole. ‘Lura? This is Coton. Can you hear me? It’s time . . .’
Regretfully she handed the Mole to Pesten. ‘You’d better take this.’
Pesten cradled it. ‘This little box has worked hard.’
‘Yes. Massive sensor dysfunction. Do you think it’s been suffering – cut up, and unable to do its job – for all this time, since the Ship crashed?’
‘Maybe when you’re gone, it can rest at last. I’ll take care of it.’
‘Oh, Pesten—’ Something broke, and she threw herself at him, and they embraced. ‘I’ll see you in Alpha,’ she said.
He pulled back. ‘But will I still be me, after such a strange passage? Will you be you?’ He drew back and eyed the Supply Machine, and Lura saw how terrified he was of it, for all sorts of deep reasons other than the obvious danger.
The Mole murmured, ‘Lura, please . . .’
No more time. She jumped, lifted her legs, and let herself drift down into the body-shaped cavity, where she lay with arms at her side and legs out straight. Immediately, machine components bristled over her bare flesh.
Pesten loomed over her. ‘How does it feel?’
‘Like I’m lying on rough bark. Not so bad.’
‘Lura, I—’
‘Close the lid, Brother. It’s all right.’
The lid descended. Pesten’s face and Otho’s, illuminated by the pinkish light of the Core of Cores, were the last she saw of universe Beta.
She was alone in the dark and silence.
Now the machine’s components closed in on her from above and below and to either side, rough, scratching, some jabbing hard enough to hurt. She was uncomfortably reminded of Otho’s jibe about knives. But she sensed a gathering energy, and she could smell a sharp electric scent, and the hairs on her skin stood on end.
Coton had tried to describe the process to her. This Supply Machine, designed to manufacture food and drink, was scanning her body, quantum function by quantum function. She understood little beyond the Alpha-language phrases, but she knew that before she saw the light again, the numbers that defined her would be stripped out and read off and sent through the space between the universes – and, in the end, lodged safely in the head of her friend. When she thought of that, and conjured up Coton’s face as she imagined it, she relaxed and smiled . . .
Her awareness sparkled and subsided.
And she was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions that encompassed all the universes slid past her like stars streaming from the edge of an unseen nebula, and her eyes were filled with the grey light that shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows.
Time wore away, unmarked.
And then—
15
Marshal Sand stood before the coffin-box, set on end in the flitter cabin, which would serve as the terminal of the transfer. An armed guard stood by.
And Coton writhed on his couch, trying to scream around the gag in his mouth. His head was swathed in a silvery helmet, and the air sparkled with Virtual read-outs. Two crew members hovered over him, evidently anxious, and they tucked a med blanket over his slight body.
Vala stood back, helpless, trying not to tremble. ‘How much longer, Croq?’
But Croq, studying Virtuals that scrolled and danced in the air before his face, had no answer.
‘I wouldn’t worry, Academician,’ Sand said calmly. ‘The alien thing in his head can be used for more transfers, even if this first experiment kills him.’
‘Have some pity, Marshal—’
Now Croq gasped. ‘It’s working! But it shouldn’t be. In the end the graviton flux just isn’t sufficient. Or it wasn’t. Something is boosting it, like an amplification. Otherwise we’d be losing the data, too much of it . . .’
‘Something,’ Sand said. ‘What something?’
‘I think I can guess,’ Vala said. ‘The gravitic creatures in the Core. What else could do this? They saw what we were trying to do. They helped! They amplified the flow—’
‘Why should they?’
‘As you may open a window to release a butterfly, Marshal. A trivial kindness.’
The door of the coffin-box creaked open, just a crack in the seal. There was a smell of smoke, Vala thought – of meat, of sweat. Croq gasped and stepped back.
But Sand held her ground. ‘Well, let us see what it is they have been kind to.’ She stepped forward, and her guard followed, weapon ready. Sand faced the coffin-box, dug the fingers of one gloved hand into the seal of the opened door, and pulled it back.
A girl fell out.
The Marshal caught her in her uniformed arms. Limp, the girl wore a dirty tunic of what looked like plaited tree bark, and her grimy hair was tied back. She was too tall, too spindly, her stick-thin legs didn’t look as if they would support her, Vala thought, and her head lolled on a skinny neck. It was a paradox that the creatures of a high-gravity universe spent most of their lives in effective freefall. And she had distinct webbing on her toes – an adaptation for swimming in the air?
Sand lowered her to the deck. But the girl struggled, and tried to raise her head, and spoke in a scratchy voice. ‘Ma-seef senss-or dees-funx-eon . . .’
Sand stared at her. ‘By Bolder’s ghost. I think she made a joke!’
The girl tried to speak again, and the flitter’s Virtual suite translated for her. ‘Coton? Where is he?’
Vala had not thought of her grandson since the coffin-box had cracked open. She whirled.
Coton lay immobile on his couch. The crew members worked on him frantically. But, one by one, the Virtual lights hovering around his head were turning red.
One by one, the human worlds fell dark before the Xeelee Scourge. At last, a million years after Poole’s time, the streams of refugees became visible in the skies of Earth itself.
Since the time of Michael Poole there had been immortals among the ranks of mankind. The descendants of Jasoft Parz were among them. They emerged, lived, and sometimes died through accident or malice, in their own slow generations, hidden within humanity. They had been called many names. ‘Ascendant’ was one of the more acceptable. Yet they endured.
The Ascendants had come to believe that as long as Earth survived, mankind would survive.
And so they took steps to make that happen.
PERIANDRY’S QUEST
AD c.3.8 BILLION YEARS
The funerary procession drew up in the courtyard of the great House. Through a screen of bubbling clouds the blueshifted light of Old Earth’s sky washed coldly down over the shuffling people, and the stars spun through their crisp two-minute cycles.
Peri took his place at the side of his older brother MacoFeri. His mother CuluAndry, supported by her two daughters, stood behind him. ButaFeri’s hearse would be drawn by two tamed spindlings. Peri’s father had been a big man in every sense, a fleshy, loud, corpulent man, and now his coffin was a great box whose weight made the axles of his hearse creak.
Despite his bulk, or perhaps because of it, Buta had always been an efficient man, and he had trained his wife, sons and daughters in similar habits of mi
nd. So it was that the family was ready at the head of the cortege long before the procession’s untidy body, assembled from other leading citizens of Foro, had gathered in place. Their coughs and grumbles in the chill semi-dark were a counterpoint to the steady wash of the river Foo, from which the town had taken its name, as it passed through its channelled banks across the Shelf.
‘It’s that buffoon of a mayor who’s holding everybody up,’ MacoFeri complained.
Culu’s face closed up in distress. BoFeri, Peri’s eldest sister, snapped, ‘Hold your tongue, Maco. It’s not the time.’
Maco snorted. ‘I have better things to do than stand around waiting for a fat oaf like that – even today.’ But he subsided.
As the family continued to wait in the cold, servants from the Attic moved silently among them, bearing trays of hot drinks and pastries. The servants were dressed in drab garments that seemed to blend into the muddy light, and they kept their faces averted; the servants tried to be invisible, as if their trays floated through the air by themselves.
The delay gave PeriAndry, seventeen years old, an unwelcome opportunity to sort through his confused emotions. This broad circular plaza was the courtyard of ButaFeri’s grand town House. The lesser lights of the town were scattered before the cliff face beneath which Foro nestled, dissipating in the enigmatic ruins at the town’s edge. In this setting the House glowed like a jewel – but ButaFeri had always counselled humility. Foro had been a much prouder place before the last Formidable Caress, he said. The ‘town’ as it was presently constituted seemed to have been carved out of the remains of a palace, a single mighty building within a greater city. And once, ButaFeri would say, even this wide courtyard had been enclosed by a vast, vanished dome, and over this ancient floor, now crossed by the hooves of spindlings, the richer citizens of a more fortunate time had strolled in heated comfort. Buta had been a wise man, but he had shared such perspectives all too infrequently with his younger son.
Just at that moment, as PeriAndry’s sense of loss was deepest, he first saw the girl.
Suddenly she was standing before him, offering him pastries baked in the shape of birds. This Attic girl was taller than most of her kind; that was the first thing that struck him. Though she wore as shapeless a garment as the others, where the cloth draped conveniently he made out the curve of her hips. She was slim; she must be no more than sixteen. Her face, turned respectfully away, was an oval, with prominent cheekbones under flawless skin. Her mouth was small, her lips full. Her colouring was dark, rather like his own family’s – but this was a girl from the Attic, a place where time ran rapidly, and he wondered if her heart beat faster than his.
As his inspection continued she looked up, uncertain. Her eyes were a complex grey-blue. When she met his gaze she seemed startled, and looked away quickly.
BoFeri, his elder sister, hissed at him, ‘Lethe, Peri, take a pastry or let her go. You’re making an exhibition of us all.’
He came back to himself. Bo was right, of course; a funeral was no place to be ogling serving girls. Clumsily he grabbed at a pastry. The girl, released, hurried away, back to the Elevator that would return her to her Attic above the House.
MacoFeri had seen all this, of course. Buta’s eldest son sneered, ‘You really are a spindling’s arse, Peri. She’s an Attic girl. She’ll burn out ten times as fast as you. She’ll be an old woman before you’ve started shaving . . .’
Maco’s taunting was particularly hard for Peri to take today. After the ceremony MacoFeri and BoFeri, as eldest son and daughter the co-heirs of ButaFeri’s estate and the only recipients of his lineage name, would sit down and work out the disposition of Buta’s wealth. While Bo had shown no great interest in this responsibility, Maco had made the most of his position. ‘You love to lord it over me, don’t you?’ Peri said bitterly. ‘Well, it won’t last for ever, Maco, and then we’ll see.’
Maco blew air through finely chiselled nostrils. ‘Your pastry’s going cold.’ He turned away.
Peri broke open the little confection. A living bird, encased in the pastry, was released. As it fluttered up into faster time the beating of its wings became a blur, and it shot out of sight. Peri tried to eat a little of the pastry, but he wasn’t hungry, and he was forced to cram the remnants of it into his pocket, to more glares from his siblings.
At last the cortege was ready. Even the Mayor of Foro, a wheezing man as large as ButaFeri, was in his place. Maco and Bo shouted out their father’s name and began to pace out of the courtyard. The procession followed in rough order. The spindlings, goaded by their drivers, dipped their long necks and submitted to the labour of hauling the hearse; each animal’s six iron-shod hooves clattered on the worn tiles.
The road they took traced the managed banks of the river Foo. Rutted and worn, it ran for no more than a kilometre from the little township at the base of the cliff and across the Shelf, and even at a respectfully funereal pace the walk would take less than half an hour. As they proceeded, the roar of falling water slowly gathered.
The Shelf was a plateau, narrow here but in places kilometres wide, that stretched into the mist to left and right as far as Peri could see. Behind the Shelf the land rose in cliffs and banks, up towards mistier heights lost in a blueshifted glare; and before it the ground fell away towards the Lowland. Foro was just one of a number of towns scattered along the Shelf, whose rich soil, irrigated by ancient canals, was dense with farms. Peri knew that representatives of towns several days’ ride away had come to see off Buta today.
At last the hearse was drawn up to the very edge of the Shelf. The family took their places beside the carriage. Peri’s mother had always had a fear of falling, and her daughters clustered around her to reassure her. There was another delay as the priest tried to light her ceremonial torch in the damp air.
The edge was a sheer drop where, with a shuddering roar, the river erupted into a waterfall. Reddening as it fell, the water spread out into a great fan that dissipated into crimson mist long before it reached the remote plain far below. The Lowland itself, stretching to a redshifted horizon, was a mass of deep red, deeper than blood, the light of slow time. But here and there Peri saw flashes of a greater brilliance, a pooling of daylight. There was no sun in the sky of Old Earth; it was the glow of these evanescent ponds of pink-white light, each kilometres wide, reflecting from high, fast-moving clouds, which gave people day and night, and inspired their crops to grow.
Standing here amid this tremendous spectacle of water and light, Peri was suddenly exhilarated. He felt as if he was cupped in the palm of mighty but benevolent forces – forces that made his life and concerns seem trivial, and yet which cherished him even so. This perspective eased the pain of his father’s loss.
At last the priest had her torch alight. With a murmuring of respectful words, she touched her fire to the faggots piled in the carriage around the coffin. Soon flame nuzzled at the box that confined ButaFeri.
Among the faggots were samples of Buta’s papers – diaries, correspondence, other records – the bulk of which was being torched simultaneously at Buta’s home. This erasure was the custom, and a comfort. In four thousand years, according to tradition, when the next Formidable Caress came and civilisation fell once more, everything would be lost anyhow – all painfully accumulated learning dissipated, all buildings reduced to ruin – and it was thought better to destroy these hard-won monuments now rather than leave them to the relentless workings of fate.
For long minutes family, priest and crowd watched the fire hopefully. They were waiting for an Effigy to appear, a glimpse of a miracle. The spindlings grazed, indifferent to human sentiment.
And in that difficult moment Peri saw the Attic girl again. Once more she moved through the crowd bearing a tray of steaming drinks, restoratives after the march from Foro. Now she was wearing a dress of some black material that clung languidly to her curves, and her dark hair was tied up so that the sw
eep of her neck was revealed. Peri couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Maco nudged him. ‘She’s changed, hasn’t she? It’s – what, an hour? – since you last saw her. But in that time she’s been to the Attic and back; perhaps half a day has passed for her. And perhaps it’s not just her clothes she’s changed.’ He grinned and licked his lips. ‘At that age these colts can grow rapidly, their little bodies flowing like hot metal. I should know. There was a girl I had, oh, three years ago – an old crone by now, no doubt – but—’
‘Leave me alone, Maco.’
‘I happen to know her name,’ Maco whispered. ‘Not that it’s any concern of yours – not while our father burns in his box.’
Peri couldn’t help but give him his petty victory. ‘Tell me.’
‘Lora. Much good it will do you.’ Maco laughed and turned away.
There was a gasp from the crowd. A cloud of pale mist burst soundlessly from the burning coffin. It hovered, tendrils and billows pulsing – and then, just for a heartbeat, it gathered itself into a form that was recognisably human, a misty shell with arms and legs, torso and head. It was ButaFeri, no doubt about that; his bulk, reproduced faithfully, was enough to confirm it.
Buta’s widow was crying. ‘He’s smiling. Can you see? Oh, how wonderful . . .’ It was a marvellous moment. Only perhaps one in ten were granted the visitation of an Effigy at death, and nobody doubted that ButaFeri was worthy of such an envoi.
The sketch of Buta lengthened, his neck stretching like a spindling’s, becoming impossibly long. Then the distorted Effigy shot up into the blueshifted sky and arced down over the edge of the cliff, hurling itself after the misty water into the flickering crimson of the plain below. It was seeking its final lodging deep in the slow-beating heart of Old Earth, where, so it was believed, something of Buta would survive even the Formidable Caresses.
Xeelee: Endurance Page 37