“A doctor? For a no-name? Do you think we are made of money?”
Cimma shook her again. “You hell-hag!” she snapped. “I shall lock you up in the same place and throw away the key!”
“The Elders heard she was ill,” muttered the matron, “and they sent one of their ‘sick wagons’ to take her to Benefice.”
Six closed his eyes. “Then I am too late,” he said numbly. “Too late.” He gave a sigh. “I let her down. Again.”
“At least she is still alive,” Diva said.
“We don’t know that.”
“Not knowing if she is alive is much better than knowing she is dead.”
“It doesn’t feel like much to me.”
Diva walked up to him but he shook her off again. “Let me be!” he said. “I wanted to do something, get her out of here. Now there is nothing I can do.”
Diva followed him, and walked around him so that he was forced to look into her face.
“Of course there is something you can do!” she said. “You can make sure nobody else is starved close to death in this … this misnamed ‘shelter’. We should raise it to the ground!”
The matron went white, and Cimma laughed. “Ah, that got to you, didn’t it? Don’t worry, we won’t kill you. But there is a nice dark room waiting to play host to you, madam!”
There was a long silence, while Six looked through Diva, his eyes unseeing. Then gradually refocused on his surroundings. Diva felt his gaze on her, sensed his return to the here and now, and felt the slow anger replacing his guilt. Heat began to sweep through the rest of his body, until it reached his face, which darkened with rage. A red haze took over his mind, boiling over into his thoughts and preventing any sort of rational planning.
Then he leapt for the gate and began to tear at it with his bare hands. Diva threw herself after him, and between them they half-pulled, half-lifted it off its hinges, and dragged it over to the nearby ditch.
As the rusted metal barrier fell end over end down the embankment Six turned, and caught Diva’s eye. “You’re right,” he cried, drawing his blade, “nobody else should have to exist in the misery of this cesspit. Let’s make sure they don’t!”
“Let’s!”
And the two of them entered the birth shelter at a run, brandishing their weapons above their heads. Cimma was left, still holding her own knife at the matron’s neck.
“I think you were about to show me this dark room of yours?” she said politely. “After you!”
IT WAS ALL over within an hour. They met little opposition from the shelter staff, all of whom were ex-orphans who had been allowed to stay on in exchange for their work. They had suffered more than even the young children.
Six asked them to line up outside the walls of the hated shelter.
“You are free, now,” he announced.
They looked around, disconcerted and still afraid by the sight of weapons and the upheaval in their mundane lives.
“But where will we go?” One of them wailed. “We have nowhere to go, no-one to help us.”
Six glared at the speaker, but noticed Diva’s eyes resting on him with a quizzical expression. At first, he felt exasperated with the inability of these people to take their lives into their own hands, and then, as the anger which had consumed him for all those minutes wore off, he realized that it would be unfair to demand independence from people who had been institutionalized since birth. He drew a deep breath, and found that he knew the answer, had known it all the time.
“All those of you who want to can come with us,” he said. “We are going to set up a camp in the uninhabitable zone, and all no-names are welcome.”
“But what shall we eat?” The same boy demanded.
“What – the food was so good here that you are going to miss it?” Six’s voice was sharp. “I don’t think it will be hard to better the meals you were given here!”
His listeners looked at the ground.
Six regarded them sadly. They were a sorry bunch. They certainly didn’t look like the start of a revolution. It seemed almost ludicrous to think he could change Kwaide with beaten inmates like this. “We will forage for food,” he told them, “but that will be supplemented by supplies from Coriolis, together with anything else we need.”
They looked up pretty quickly at that. “Coriolis,” they breathed, making an audible collective hum. “The planet Coriolis?”
Six nodded. “We have connections and transport from there.” He looked around the ragged band of children and adults. “Well? Are you coming or staying?”
It was their turn to look around at each other. Eventually one of the boys moved forward, came up to Six, and then walked to stand behind him.
“Nothing could be worse than that place,” he said. “I would rather die than go back.”
“So would I!” called a voice, its owner moving forward.
“And I!” One by one, the refugees began to take the first, great step towards a new life. The trickle became a chorus, and then a rush, until there were only five people still standing on the opposite side. One of them was the girl they had talked to the previous year, Fifteen.
“Will you not come with us?” Six asked, with a gentler tone.
Fifteen shook her head. “Stay with Matron,” she got out.
“But she’s a sycophant. She mistreats you.” Six couldn’t believe she would want to stay.
Fifteen shook her head stubbornly. “Stay with Matron.”
“Very well. I think you are making a mistake, but you can stay if you want to.”
Diva held up one hand in warning. “If they are going to stay then they should be locked up with her. Otherwise they will let her out as soon as we have gone and she will raise the alarm. These refugees can’t travel fast and it will take us at least four days to get to the uninhabitable zone.”
Six frowned. “Lock them up! But they have done nothing wrong. They are the victims here. It is one thing to lock Matron up – she’s a despicable sadist, and she deserves far worse than that – but these are no-names.”
“They choose to stay. They will let her out as soon as she asks them to. They are only used to following orders. You can’t expect them to do anything else.”
That was true. Six gave a heavy sigh. “Very well,” he said. “Put them in the dark room with Matron, then. But let’s leave them plenty of water and what food we can find. It may be a week before somebody comes to let them out.”
When Six signed for the five to lead the way to the dark room they fell meekly into step. “Tell anyone who wants to know,” he said, “that all untouchables are welcome to join us. Any no-name who wants to change his life should come to find us. We’ll be in the lower ranges of the mountains, up in the uninhabitable zone. Tell them to search just below the black peak, to the west of the scarred crag. There will be enough food for everyone.”
The five nodded their assent, and followed the cement-lined corridors of the shelter until they came to a heavy metal door set into one of the corridors. Six forced the rusty lock open with difficulty and signaled them to go in. The matron was already sitting on the one iron bedstead, looking thundery.
Six walked into the cell and looked around at the grimy walls. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. He moved over to one particular wall and with one finger traced out the contour of a thin and shaky figure eight scratched faintly into the stone. Six bowed his head, speechless. She had nearly died here in this foul place!
The matron had been taking advantage of his momentary distraction by edging closer to the door when Cimma appeared from a mission to find and bring food and water to the voluntary captives and put an abrupt stop to any thoughts the manager of the birth shelter might have had of escape. Cimma gave a pleased nod. “Glad to see we understand each other, Matron.”
The matron gave her a look of acute dislike, but sat down again.
Cimma saw Six standing with his head bowed, and noticed the scratches on the wall. “Come away, Six, there is n
othing for you here. I have checked the records, and asked the inmates, and they all confirm the matron’s story. Eight is long gone. Come away. Come on!”
He gave a faint nod, and allowed himself to be led away, waiting as she locked the door to the dark room carefully. The sunlight was a warm welcome after the chilly bleakness of the shelter. Diva was waiting for them outside with those refugees who had agreed to travel into the uninhabitable zone.
Diva and Six looked at each other, and Diva indicated the various hundreds of waiting Kwaidians.
“No going back now, Six,” said Diva solemnly.
“No,” he said slowly. “No going back now.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” she went on, “we seem to have started a revolution.”
He gave a small shrug. He didn’t care. “All I wanted to do was to rescue Eight,” he said. “I was too late.”
“I know.” The Coriolan girl touched his arm. “But at least nobody else will suffer here.”
Six looked at the place he had hated in his mind for so many years. “We should set fire to it,” he said savagely.
“We can’t. We have left people inside.”
“Then the Elders will be able to start it up again.”
“They might,” agreed Diva. “But they might just find that things are changing around here too. Let’s wait and see.”
They signed to the waiting refugees, and began the slow march towards the mountains. Progress was slow, but freedom was something to be savoured by all the inmates they had liberated. They breathed in the cold Kwaide air with excitement. It seemed to fizz through their veins, and make their blood dance. They walked lightly.
Except Six, whose footsteps were heavy. He trudged on through the miles, foot after foot. He had failed again. He hated the Elders. He hated Kwaide. Mostly, he hated himself. This didn’t feel like a revolution to him. It felt like a wake. He ploughed on through thick depression. The way seemed endless.
Chapter 4
THE SKYRISE WAS absolutely deserted after the departure of the other three. Grace found herself wandering around the huge area like one of the famous lost animas of Xiantha. After two days of pointless perambulation she decided to go bare planet again, to see Arcan in person. She was longing to get out of the skyrise, to set foot on the planet’s surface again.
She found her excitement growing as she made her way down to the first level in the ortholift. It grew more once she had donned her bodywrap and clipped the first mask pack into place over her face. She navigated the metallic steps which led her down the enormous rexelene blocks which protected the skyrise from seismic activity.
Already the traces of their last visits to the surface of the planet had been wiped away, obliterated by the soft winds and the particulate sand they carried with them. She bent down to pick up some few grains of the silvery sand. It was beautiful, she thought.
She turned her attention to the sky above her. Inky black, with a touch of slate, it hung massively overhead, both oppressive and liberating at the same time. The brilliant violet planet of Cian was high in the sky today. More than half of its orb was illuminated by Almagest, giving a vibrant lune of colour in the darkness.
Grace felt she had come home. Her presence in the skyrise was that of a stranger, but here … here she felt alive. Here she felt as if she belonged. Slowly she began to walk towards the ortholake, reveling in every moment away from the skyrise, enjoying her natural lack of exophobia.
The mountainous region lay in front of her, way beyond the lake, and it was a grey jagged line cutting across the dark horizon. To her left a faint glow showed her the break-off where the dark side of the planet met the permanently illuminated light side, where the food for the Sellite community was grown.
At last she was half side-walking and half slipping down the sandy shore to the ortholake. After everything that had happened recently it was almost a surprise to see the lake lying there so peacefully. The silvery black surface showed her that Arcan was totally recovered from the illness he had contracted when he escaped the Sellite bombing, taking them all to what they had thought was the safely of Coriolis. It had turned out to be almost fatal for the orthogel entity.
The lake must have been aware of her proximity, for, starting just in front of her, a ripple of sheer electric blue travelled out along its surface into the distance. This was followed by another ripple of magenta and then one of a vivid emerald green. Finally a huge fountain of all those colours sprang into place in front of her, towering up to a height of at least three stories.
Grace clapped her bodywrapped hands together. “Thank you, Arcan,” she said.
“I am happy to see you here.” The fountain dissolved again into the surface, which shimmered, both in her eyes and somehow in her head.
“Yes. It is very different. One thing is to see you as an individual bubble which can talk, and another is to come out here and see you as you really are – you are overwhelming!”
“Naturally you would think so.”
“Can you take on any form you want?”
“Like this?” And the surface of the lake in front of her began to bulge upwards. The dark colour became speckled with iridescent light and the lake grew and grew until an enormous globe hung above it, then began to spin on its axis faster and faster until the specks of light all merged together into lines of solid colour flashing on her retina.
Grace clapped again, transformed by the show. “Amazing!”
The globe subsided. “Not really,” it said. “This sort of thing is trivial for a hyperfluid.”
“What is trivial to you is a big deal for me!”
“Yes, I know.”
“It is nice to be able to talk to you directly too, instead of having to sign with fingers.”
“Quicker, certainly.”
“Are you happy, Arcan?”
“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be?”
“No-o. Just wondered, that’s all.”
“I am awake now. Before I was … unaware. Now I am aware, I am progressing. That is the definition of happiness, is it not?”
“Is it?” Grace gave a shrug. “I don’t know.”
“I am continually amazed at the enormous amount you transients don’t know, and yet you are still able to survive.”
“We are a superior species.”
“To what? A vaniven? A Xianthan peacock? Only barely.”
Grace prickled up. “Only barely?” she echoed.
The lake glittered. “You have many genes in common with both those species,” he pointed out.
“Is that how you think of us, Arcan? As vaniven?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh, good!”
“The relative sizes would be all wrong. No … you are much smaller than a vaniven would be. Are there no really small animals in the system?”
Grace thought. “The ants – small insects – on Kwaide?” she hazarded. “They are about,” she indicated a tiny length with thumb and forefinger, “this long.”
“That is more like it.” Arcan appeared pleased. “Then I think of you as ants. Yes. The ratio between our brains would be similar to that of your brain and about a thousand ants.”
“You mean you see me as a thousandth the size of an ant?”
“That would be about the right proportion, certainly.”
“You make me feel so important.”
“Good. Even though you are small, you are quite useful, I find.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence.”
“My pleasure, Grace.” Sarcasm was totally lost on the orthogel entity.
Grace said goodbye and began her solitary trek back to the skyrise. A thousandth of an ant, she thought to herself. Are ants happy? No wonder he doesn’t understand my questions. I’m surprised I can communicate with him at all.
The dark shadows of Valhai soothed her on her way back to the skyrise. She lingered as long as she dared before going back inside, and used up all the mask packs before reluctantly leavi
ng the planet’s surface.
GRACE HADN’T RECEIVED any non-virtual visitors since the expulsion of the rest of her family to Cesis, so the sound of the main ortholift was a surprise. She hurried to the reception area, to find Vion waiting for her.
She felt a sudden flip of her heart, which appeared to be trying to reposition itself in her throat, and she could feel heat in her face, which could only mean that she was going red.
“Y-you! … I wasn’t expecting anybody.” Her hand had gone to her throat automatically.
“I am sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” said Vion. He walked up to her slowly, hesitated, and then held out his hands upright towards hers, in the traditional Almagest way of greeting. She stepped across the remaining magmite between them and let her fingers touch his.
For a brief moment nothing happened, and then something akin to an electric shock travelled right through Grace and welded her to the floor. Her heart gave another leap inside its ribbed cage, and she felt her face flush even more.
Vion was looking at her peculiarly, but had made no move to withdraw his hands. His eyes seemed darker than usual.
She came to her senses, and snatched her hands back. “H-hello,” she breathed, still unsure of just what had happened.
“Grace,” Vion replied, realizing suddenly just how quickly she had grown up. His hands were burning as if they had been scalded. This was not good. Definitely not good. He sighed. “I just wanted to see how you were getting on. I know you are on your own now.”
“Oh, fine,” she said mendaciously, “absolutely fine.”
“Good. I heard Cimma had gone too – to Kwaide, I mean. Are you sure you are not finding all this very solitary? I wouldn’t like you to get too isolated. That would not be good for you.”
“Do you care?” she asked him.
“My job is to care.”
Grace was still feeling confused by the effect of their hands touching. “Don’t worry about me, Vion, I will be fine. I am working hard to help Arcan, remember.”
Ammonite Planets (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #1-3 Page 30