The silence, broken by the wheezing of the pigs, seemed to stretch; Dura, staring at the ugly flaps of flesh which covered the woman-thing’s ear-cavities, wondered if it could hear Hork, still less answer him.
Then the woman-thing opened its mouth. Light poured out of its straining lips, and a sound emerged - deeper than any voice originating in a human chest - and, at first, formless.
But, Dura realized, wondering, words were beginning to emerge.
I . . . We’ve been expecting you. You took your own sweet time. And we had a devil of a job to find you. It looked around at the ‘Pig’, its neck swivelling like a ball joint, unnaturally. Is this the best you could do? We need you to come a lot deeper than this; transmission conditions are awful . . .
Hork exchanged an astounded glance with Dura.
‘Can you understand me?’ he asked the thing. ‘Are you a Colonist?’
‘Of course it can understand you, Hork,’ Dura hissed, exasperated in her turn. She felt fascinated beyond her horror of this bag of skin. ‘How is it you can speak our language?’
The thing’s mouth worked, obscenely reminiscent of an Air-pig’s, and the flesh-balls in the eyecups rolled; as she watched, it seemed to Dura that the woman-thing appeared less and less human. It was merely a puppet of some unfathomable hyperonic creature beyond the hull, she realized; she found herself glancing through the window, wondering what immense, dark eyecups might be fixed on her even now.
The woman-thing smiled. It was a ghastly parody.
Of course I can understand you. I’m a Colonist, as you call us . . . but I’m also your grandmother. Once or twice removed, anyway . . .
A week before Games Day, Muub, the Physician, sent Adda an invitation to join him to view the Games from the Committee Box, high over the Stadium. Adda felt patronized: he had no doubt that in Muub’s eyes he remained an unreconstructed savage from the upflux, and to Muub, Adda’s reactions to the City’s great events would be amusements - entertainments in themselves.
But he didn’t refuse immediately. Perhaps Farr would enjoy seeing the Games from such a privileged vantage point. Farr’s mood remained complex, difficult for Adda to break into. In fact he saw little of Farr these days; the boy seemed determined to spend as much time as possible with the rebellious, remote community of Surfers who lived half their lives clinging to the City’s Skin.
In the end, Farr wouldn’t come to the Games.
The City wasn’t what it was. Even in Adda’s short time of acquaintance with it, Parz, battered by the consequences of the Glitches, had lost some of its heart. In the great avenues half the shops and cafés were closed up now, and the ostentatiously rich with their trains of perfumed Air-piglets were conspicuous by their absence. There was a sense - not exactly of crisis - but of austerity. Times were difficult; there was much to be done and endured before things improved and the City could enjoy itself again.
But the Games were going to be different, it seemed. As the Day approached he sensed a quickening of the City’s pulse. There seemed to be more people on the streets, arguing and gambling over the outcome of the various strangely named events. The Luge. The Slalom. The Pole-Divers . . . The Games would be like a holiday for the City, a relief from drudgery.
Adda was curious.
So, in the end, he decided to accept Muub’s invitation.
The Stadium was a huge, clearwood-walled box fixed to one of the City’s upper edges. The Committee Box was a balcony which hung over the Stadium itself from the City’s upper surface, and to reach it Adda had to travel to the uppermost Upside, to the Garden surrounding the Palace itself. Feeling more out of place than ever in the opulent surroundings, he Waved past the miniature, sculpted Crust-trees, brandishing his begrimed bandaging like a weapon. He was subjected to scrutiny by three layers of contemptuous Guards before he reached the Box itself; he enjoyed insulting them as they searched his person.
At last he was ushered into the Box, a square platform twenty mansheights on a side, domed over by clearwood. Neat rows of cocoons filled the platform, bound loosely to the structure by soft threads. About half the cocoons were already full, Adda saw; courtiers and other grandees nestled in the soft leather of the cocoons like huge, glittering insect larvae.
Their talk was bright and loud, their laughter braying; there was a heavy, cloying scent of perfume.
Adda was escorted to the front row of the Box by a small, humble-looking woman in a drab tunic. Muub was already there. He rested in his cocoon with his long, thin arms folded calmly against his chest, and his bare scalp shone softly as he surveyed the Stadium below. He turned to greet Adda with a nod. With ill grace Adda let the woman servant help him into a spare cocoon; his legs remained stiff and his right shoulder barely mobile, so that, embarrassingly, he had to be levered into the cocoon as if he were a statue of wood. Another woman, smiling, approached him with a box of sweetmeats; Adda chased her away with a snarl.
Muub smiled at him indulgently. ‘I’m glad you decided to come, Adda. I believe you will find the Day interesting.’
Adda nodded, trying to be gracious. After all, he had accepted Muub’s invitation. But what was it about this man’s manner that irritated him so? He nodded over his shoulder at the sparkling ranks of courtiers. ‘That lot seem to agree with you.’
Muub regarded the courtiers with aloof disdain. ‘Games Day is a spectacle which does not fail to excite the unsophisticated,’ he said softly. ‘No matter how many times it is viewed. And besides, Hork is absent. As you know very well. And there is something of a vacuum of authority, among my more shallow colleagues, until the Chair’s return.’ He listened to the jabber of the courtiers for a moment, his large, fragile head cocked to one side. ‘You can hear it in their tone. They are like children in the absence of a parent.’ He sighed.
Adda grinned. ‘Well, he said, ‘it’s nice to know that your superciliousness isn’t restricted to upfluxers.’ He deliberately ignored Muub’s reaction; he leaned forward in his cocoon and stared through the clearwood wall below him.
He was perched at the upper rim of the City. Its wooden Skin swept away below him, huge, uneven, battered; the great Corestuff anchor-bands were arcs of silver-grey cutting across the sky. Far below the City the Pole was a mass of bruised purple. Vortex lines shimmered across the sky around the City, on their way to their own rotation pole around the curve of the Star ...
Adda stared at the vortex lines for a moment. Were they more tightly packed than usual? He tried to detect a drift through the Air, a presage of another Glitch. But he wasn’t in the open Air - he wasn’t able to smell the changes in the photons, to taste the Air’s disturbance - and he couldn’t be sure there was any change.
The Stadium was thronged with people who swarmed through the Air, hauling themselves over each other and along the ropes and rails strung across the great volume. Even through layers of clearwood, Adda could hear the excited buzz of the crowd; the sound seemed to come in waves of intensity, sparkling with fragments of individual voices - the cry of a baby, the hawking yells of vendors working the crowd. Sewage outlets sprayed streams of clear waste from the shell of the Stadium into the patient Air.
Away from the bulk of the City, aerobats Waved silkily through the Air in a prelude to the Games proper. They were young, lithe, nude, their skins dyed with strong primary colours; with ripples of their legs and arms they spiralled around the vortex lines and dived at each other, grabbing each other’s hands and whirling away on new paths. There must have been a hundred of them, Adda estimated; their dance, chaotic yet obviously carefully choreographed, was like an explosion of young flesh in the Air.
He became aware that Muub was watching him; there was curiosity in the Physician’s shallow eyecups. Adda let his jaw hang open, playing the goggling tourist. ‘My word,’ he said. ‘What a lot of people.’
Muub threw his head back and laughed. ‘All right, Adda. Perhaps I deserved that. But you can scarcely blame me for my fascination at your reaction to all this. S
uch scenes can scarcely have been imaginable to you, in your former life in the upflux.’
Adda gazed around, trying to take in the whole scene as a gestalt - the immense, human construct of the City itself, a thousand people gathered below for a single purpose, the scarcely believable opulence of the courtiers in the Box with their fine clothes and sweetmeats and servants, the aerobats flourishing their limbs through the Air in their huge dance. ‘Yes, it’s impressive, ’ he said. He tried to find ways of expressing what he was feeling. ‘More than impressive. Uplifting, in a way. When humans work together, we can challenge the Star itself. I suppose it’s good to know that not everyone has to scratch a living out of the Air, barely subsisting as the Human Beings do. And yet ...’
And yet, why should there be wealth and poverty? The City was a marvellous construct, but it was dwarfed on the scale of the Star - and it was no bigger than an Ur-human’s thumb, probably. But even within its tiny walls there were endless, rigid layers: the courtiers in their Box, walled off from the masses below; the Upside and Downside; and the invisible - yet very real - barriers between the two. Why should it be so? It was as if humans built such places as this with the sole purpose of finding ways to dominate each other.
Muub listened to Adda’s clumsy expression of this. ‘But it’s inevitable,’ he said, his face neutral. ‘You have to have organization - hierarchy - if you are to run the complex, interlinking systems which sustain a society like the City with its hinterland. And only within such a society can man afford art, science, wisdom - even leisure of the most brutish sort, like these Games. And with hierarchies comes power.’ He smiled at Adda, condescending once more. ‘People aren’t very noble, upfluxer. Look around you. Their darker side will find expression in any situation where they can best each other.’
Adda remembered times in the upflux, when he was young, and the world was less treacherous than it had become of late. He recalled hunting-parties of five or six men and women, utterly immersed in the silence of the Air, their senses open, thrilling to the environment around them. Completely aware and alive, as they worked together.
Muub was an observer, he realized. Believing he was above the rest of mankind, but in fact merely detached. Cold. The only way to live was to be yourself, in the world and in the company of others. The City was like a huge machine designed to stop its citizens doing just that - to alienate. No wonder the young people clambered out of the cargo ports and lived on the Skin, riding on the Air by wit and skill. Seeking life.
The light had changed. The rich yellow of the Air over the Pole seemed brighter. Puzzled, he turned his head towards the upflux.
There was a buzz of anticipation from the Box, answered by a buzz from the Stadium. Muub touched Adda’s arm and pointed upwards. ‘Look. The Surfers. Do you see them?’
The Surfers were a hexagonal array, shining motes scattered across the Air. Even Muub, despite his detachment, seemed thrilled as he stared up, evidently wondering how it would be to ride the flux so high, so far from the City.
But Adda was still troubled by the light change. He scoured the horizon, cursing the distortion of the clearwood wall before him.
Then he saw it.
Far upflux, far to the north, the vortex lines had disappeared.
Its - her - name was Karen Macrae. She had been born in a place called Mars, a thousand years ago.
That’s Earth-standard years, she said. Which are about half of Mars’ years, of course. But they’re the same as your years . . . We designed your body-clocks to match the standard human metabolic rate, you see, and we got you to count the rhythms of the neutron star so that we have a common language of days, weeks, years . . . We wanted you to live at the same rate as us, to be able to communicate with us. Karen Macrae hesitated. With them, I mean. With standard humans.
Dura and Hork looked at each other. He hissed, ‘How much of this do you understand?’
Dura stared at Karen Macrae. The floating image had drifted away from the centre of the cabin, now, and seemed to be growing coarser; it was not a single image, in fact, but a kind of mosaic formed by small, jostling cubes of coloured light. Dura asked, ‘Are you an Ur-human?’
Karen Macrae fizzed. A what? Oh, you mean a standard human. No, I’m not. I was, though . . .
Karen Macrae and five hundred others had come to the Star from - somewhere else. Mars, perhaps, Dura thought. They had established a camp outside the Star. When they’d arrived the Star had been empty of people; there were only the native lifeforms - the pigs, the rays, the spin-spiders and their webs, the Crust-trees.
Karen Macrae had come to populate the Star with people.
The structure of a neutron star is astonishingly rich, whispered Karen Macrae. Do you realize that? I mean, the Core is like a huge, single nucleus - a hypernucleus, laced with twenty-four per cent hyperonic matter. And it’s fractal. Do you know what that means? It has structure on all scales, right down to the . . .
‘Please.’ Hork held up his hands. ‘This is a storm of words, conveying - nothing.’
The blocks of Karen’s face jostled like small insects. I am a first-generation Colonist, she said. We established a Virtual environment in the hypernucleus - in the Core. I was downloaded via a tap out of my corpus callosum - downloaded into the environment here, in the Core. Karen Macrae brought veils of skin down over the pulpy, obscene things nestling in her eyecups. Do you understand me?
Hork said slowly, ‘You are - a copy. Of an Ur-human. Living in the Core.’
Dura said, ‘Where is the Ur-human Karen Macrae? Is she dead?’
She’s gone. The ship left, once we were established here. I don’t know where she is now
... Dura tried to detect emotion in the woman-thing’s voice - was she resentful of the original who had made her, who had thrust her into the Core of the Star? Was she envious? - but the quality of the voice was coarse, too harsh to tell; Dura was reminded of the Speaker system on Toba Mixxax’s Air-car.
The colony of human copies, downloaded into the Core, had devices which interfaced with the physical environment of the Star, the woman-thing told them. They had a system to produce something called exotic matter; they laced the Mantle with wormholes, linking Pole to Pole, and they built a string of beautiful cities.
When they’d finished, the Mantle was like a garden. Clean, empty. Waiting.
Dura sighed. ‘Then you built us.’
‘Yes,’ Hork said. ‘Just as our fractured history tells us. We are made things. Like toys.’ He sounded angry, demeaned.
The world had been at peace. There had been no need to struggle to live. There were no Glitches (few, anyway). The downloaded Colonists, still residing in the Core, had been there for the Human Beings like immortal, omniscient parents.
One could Wave from upflux to Pole, through the wormhole transit ways, in a heartbeat.
Hork pushed forward, confronting the woman-thing. ‘You expected us to come here, to seek you.’
We hoped you would come. We could not come to you.
‘Why?’ He seemed to be snarling now, Dura thought, unreasonably angry at this ancient, fascinating woman-shell. ‘Why do you need us now?’
Karen Macrae turned her head. The light-boxes drifted, colliding noiselessly - no, Dura saw, they drifted through each other, as smoothly as if they were made of coloured Air.
The Glitches, she said slowly. They are damaging the Core . . . they are damaging us.
Dura frowned. ‘Why don’t you stop them?’
We haven’t a physical interface any more. We withdrew it. Karen’s voice was growing more indistinct, her component blocks larger; the form of a human was gradually being submerged in loss of detail.
Hork pushed himself forward from the cabin wall, his heavy hands outspread against the wood. ‘Why? Why did you withdraw? You built us, and took away our tools, and abandoned us. You waged war against us; you took our treasures, our heritage. Why? Why?’
Karen turned to him, her mouth open, purple boxes streamin
g from her coarsely defined lips. She expanded and blurred, the boxes comprising her image swelling.
Hork threw himself at the image. He entered it as if it were no more than Air. He batted at the drifting, crumbling light-boxes with his open palms. ‘Why did you make us? What purpose did we serve for you here? Why did you abandon us?’
The boxes exploded; Dura quailed from a monstrous, ballooning image of Karen Macrae’s face, of the pale forms infesting her eyecups. There was a soundless concussion, a flood of purple light which filled the cabin before fleeing through the walls of the ship and into the ocean beyond. The human-thing, the simulacrum of Karen Macrae, was gone. Hork twisted in the Air, punching at emptiness in his frustration.
But there were new shadows in the cabin now, blue-green shadows cast by something behind Dura. Something outside the ship. She turned.
The object was a tetrahedron, she recognized immediately; a four-faced framework of glowing blue lines, like fragments of vortex lines. Sheets of gold, rippling, glistened over the faces. The construct was perhaps ten mansheights to a side, and its faces were easily wide enough to permit a ship the size of the ‘Pig’ to pass.
It was a gate. A four-sided gate ...
Dura felt like a child again; she found a smile, slow and heavy with wonder, spreading across her face. This was a wormhole Interface, the most precious of all the treasures lost in the Core.
It could be a gateway out of the Star.
She grabbed at Hork’s tunic, wonder flooding out her fear. ‘Don’t you understand what it means? We’ll be able to travel, to cross the Star in a moment, as we could before the Wars . . .’
He pushed her away roughly. ‘Sure. I understand what this means. Karen Macrae can’t stop the Glitches. And so - for the first time since dumping us in the Mantle all those years ago, since leaving us to our fate - she and her Core-infesting friends need us. We - you and I - are going to have to travel through that thing, to wherever it takes us, and stop the Glitches ourselves.’
Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring Page 78