by Nagle, Pati
Here, now, he’d met her, who was the opposite of that.
∞
The suit she flew in stretched into webbing between arms and legs when she spread-eagled, which gave her not quite enough lift to glide in this thin air; even the teasing tug of gravity here would be enough to haul her down to ruin from a height. Extra lift came from the impellers at wrist and ankle. Eventually, with practice, she’d get fine control the same way.
Eventually; not yet. That day she came down fast and awkward, even when she wasn’t trying to scare him into a cardiac arrest. Diving she was good at, that sudden plummet where her body was cooperative with all the other forces acting upon it; she was made to fall, as they all were. A steady descent was something else, unfamiliar, unnatural. Unappealing, perhaps.
He watched her come down, said,
“I don’t suppose even you can miss the planet, but you’re sure as hell going to miss me. You’ll miss the whole tower, if I don’t jump to catch you.”
“So jump,” she said. “Take a chance.”
She swooped in, tumbling as she tried to brake and stall and so drop neatly to his side, to prove him wrong. Tried and failed, tumbled catastrophically and would have overshot and fallen thirty metres to the ground, out of any hope of control or recovery. It wouldn’t have killed her—probably—and the Upshot always have the option to move on from a broken body in extremis, though the move might be unwelcome at the time. Still, he leapt—too high for his own comfort—to catch her ankle, and his weight was enough to pull her down, while her momentum rolled them over and over on that broad platform and they had cause again to be grateful how many of their kind had been this way before them.
When they stopped, where they stopped, she pulled her helmet off and shook her hair loose and grinned at him, sweating and exhilarated. He could only hold to the lean solidity of her and marvel at his privilege, at her trust, at how close they were to the edge.
“You see?” she said. “My chevalier. Always ready to catch me, should I fall.”
“Always bruised,” he said, “from needing to.”
“Yes. Ouchie. Worth it, though. Worth every bruise and every bleeding scrape.”
And she was, of course, worth all of that and more. Much more. The Upshot could be as heedless with their hearts as with their bones and bodies, in a life where staying put was stagnation, another life entirely; where moving on—even if they moved together—still meant other bodies on other worlds. It was hard to commit to someone who might be another gender next time round, was sure to be another type and so would you be too. Physical attraction faltered in those shifts, and they were too abrupt to mend in other ways.
He’d never learned to be so casual in possession, of himself or of his lovers. They had been few, then, necessarily; there had been more pain than plenty. Upshot or downside, people mishandled his heart as they did him, mistaking his intensity for passion, his failures for greed. He hurt, and moved on, and took his hurting with him.
It had been a burden, but she freed him. Not of his nature, none the less she delighted in it; and yes, she would come on with him, the two of them together and let the ’Chute fling them where it would, into anything, they could survive it. If she fell, he would be there to catch her; when she flew, he would be there to watch her. One day, perhaps, he could learn to fly himself . . .
∞
They lay sprawled and sore together on the Tower of Souls, and here came a dirigible, flying above them. Or floating, perhaps, if one could float with purpose. At least some of the time they did that, they had purpose. They couldn’t have built this tower else, nor their own.
They built nothing else, that he knew about. Until the first tower was discovered, people thought they only drifted on the wind. Some refused to call them sentient, arguing that they had no more need of intelligence than they did of buildings, engines, any product of mind and work together. Great bags of gas, feeding from the medium they floated in: why would evolution burden them with brains or self-awareness?
Then someone spotted the first of the towers—its shadow, rather, seen from orbit like a needle laid dark and unnatural across the land—and that wasn’t a question any longer.
That they had language took longer to discover, and still needed machinery to decode it. They spoke metabolically, drifts of shadow and substance beneath a semi-translucent skin; they needed a day to share a greeting, a month to have a proper conversation. They’d intertwine dangling filaments to stay together, to keep a stray gust from interrupting. Not often, though. He supposed, if you had to reorder your digestion—the closest way he could imagine it—to communicate by gastric rumbles, nothing so simple and convenient as farting, you’d be frugal. You’d save it up. And want to be damn sure the other party was paying attention; repeating yourself would mean going back to the beginning, filling your stomach, starting the whole process again.
So no, this dirigible wasn’t going to talk to them, nor they to it. By chance or by intent—he couldn’t guess which—it was going to pass directly overhead, and all he could do was watch. Observation of course was interaction, but it did feel a little one-sided. He had no idea whether the dirigible reciprocated, whether it saw him too, how else it might be sensing where he was, what he was, what he did. Somehow, surely; but it had no discoverable eyes, nor any other organ that the xenobiologists could identify as sensory. Precious few organs of any kind, the way he’d heard it. Dirigibles were seemingly careless of the bodies of their dead; after the first few curious post mortems, so were the scientists who studied them. Inside the collapse of the ripped glassine tegument, they could trace a few membranes and a primitive digestion, some hint of a nervous system trailing through the fronds, tendrils, call them what you would that hung below. That was all. What fluids, what gases, what more solid masses might hold the mind of a dirigible could still be only guessed at.
A century of study? What was that? It had taken long enough to understand how much the piercing mattered, that they never found a body not torn open.
∞
This one—and if he’d seen it before, he couldn’t tell; they really did look all the same to him—seemed to hover a while above them where they lay, though the things moved so damn slowly it was hard to be sure. Maybe it was only caught in an eddy of air, some freak of turbulence caused by the tower or the great spike of the ’Chute behind it. At any rate, he had plenty of time to gaze up at it. The sun on its flank drove light and colour through its skin and deep into the gaseous swirls within, he’d seldom seen so much of mystery; and there was the great dark shadow of a soulstone in its belly, unmissable, enough to make anyone wonder how for so long they had not been missed from the corpses.
On earth, some birds swallowed gravel and stored it in their gizzards to substitute for teeth. On this world, a mature dirigible untethered from its parent needed some substitute for absent mass, something to keep it upright and manoeuvrable against the wind; and so it would ingest what the first people here had termed keelstones, or simply ballast.
It had needed time, linguists, computers to come close to understanding what the dirigibles called them, which was—or might be—soulstones.
∞
She was quicker to recover from her plummet, his grab, their mutual tumble. Also, she was possibly—no, certainly—less curious about the alien that hung over them, its wafting filaments not so far at all above his face. He had jumped for her; he could jump for this too. He wasn’t going to say so, for fear she might try it. She wouldn’t think of it on her own account; her attention was otherwise, on him. Her hand was on his clothes, in his clothes, unzipping as it went.
He said, “Don’t, not here . . . !”
“Exactly here,” she giggled, “and—oh, here, too. Why not here?”
“Look up.”
“I’ve seen. So what? If it’s watching, who cares? Who knows? It can’t tell anyone; what would it say? Take half a year, just to misunderstand us. . . “
That might be true. Perhaps t
hought was as slow as conversation, where it depended on the leak of gases through semi-permeable membranes. Or whatever they did, however they did it. It didn’t matter. He felt observed, considered, weighed in judgement; never mind that he couldn’t understand the judgement, there were other things he equally couldn’t do under others’ eyes. Tendrils. Scrutiny.
He pulled away from her questing fingers, hasty to fasten his clothes again. She pulled faces at his back; he knew it, he could feel them. Sometimes he couldn’t believe how young she acted. She might still have been in her earliest sequence of discards, barely left home, despite what the record said. It was rare to have come so far and give no signs of being older than your body, not to have picked up even a cynical veneer; he joyed in her enthusiasm, and mocked it, and felt as baffled by her as a dirigible must be.
∞
The way down the tower was a perfect spiral ramp, built into the solid structure as soon as the dirigibles understood that if they raised this thing, people would insist on climbing it. It had taken them a while, three metres or so of accumulated height, to come to that understanding, so the ramp only started that distance above the ground; below was smooth solid wall of stacked discards. In this gravity, three metres could be jumped either way, up or down, but the need to do it amused him every time.
Just as well, when little else in the climb or at the top amused him. She delighted him constantly and disturbed him constantly, kept him on the razor edge of anxiety; sometimes he felt like a parent, having to watch his child fly. Which was absurd, she was older than he was, with a trail of discards twice the length. She didn’t like to talk about the past, though, so he never pressed her to it; which made it hard to remember that distance travelled, when all he saw was the bright youth of her body and all he heard was the dizzy enchantment of her voice.
Today he heard that voice laughing back at him, he saw that body a turn below, disappearing a turn and a half ahead; she took the steep smooth ramp at a bounding run, while he walked it like a model of good sense and cursed her in a steady monotone. Even now she couldn’t let him be easy, no, never that. . .
At the foot of the ramp, the flat platform; the jump. And her waiting below, making as though to catch him; and tangling her arms around him, stretching for a kiss and getting it here in the tower’s shadow, regardless of whether the dirigible still hung overhead; and walking that long shadow as though it really were a road, for that way lay home, more or less; and walking it hand in hand then arm in arm then closer yet, her arm around his waist and his slung over her shoulders as she tucked herself beneath it: she as shifting, as restless, as physically demanding as he was patient and willing to take whatever came. Willing and wondering and never demanding anything, for fear of losing whatever it was that he had already, her whimsical devotion or her trust.
Home for now, for here was a canister habitat, dropped in from orbit to accommodate the first arrivals, those who built the terminal long ago. It had been his, till she arrived; now they shared it. There was more comfort in the newer dormitories, but he’d preferred the option of sleeping single, a cabin to himself and nearest neighbours a walk away. Now he had her, constantly in his sight, and isolation was another kind of blessing. The Upshot were not body-shy, they couldn’t be; when every relocation meant another body and the old one left empty for disposal, shed like a dead skin, what was there to protect? And yet, he wanted privacy from his own kind as much as he did from alien observers; he could never be comfortable sharing a bed in a shared room, in earshot of others.
It was also true that he could never be comfortable with her, in company or alone, but that was another matter. Nothing that she said or did worked to his comfort or content. She kept him nervous, alert, constantly watchful; other people had to tell him he was happy.
She said, “How will we choose, where to go next? When we move on?”
He never had chosen, not like that. He stayed where he was until the work was done that he’d signed up for, or until he’d done something so stupid or so graceless that staying no longer seemed to be an option. Repercussions made an effective motive force. Then he’d contact the Bureau and ask about jobs elsewhere, take the first that came available, take the fling.
Now, with two of them, he supposed it would be different. He couldn’t even imagine now, what it would be that would make them move. Both at once and both together—how could that work?
He said, “You choose. I’ll follow you.” There was always work for a roustabout, out on the edge; empires overreach themselves, always, and their peoples scrabble to keep up. But—it struck him, suddenly—what if she chose to go inwards, towards the centre of things, the ancient settled heart worlds?
She was here, though, now, not doing that; her record showed a face turned always to the ever-expanding frontier, as his own did.
She smiled, and said, “Yes. I’ll do that. You tell me when.”
Which should have answered his own unspoken question, but this was what she did, she taught him anxiety: it might be his to say, but he wanted to please her, he wanted to pick just the right time. How would he know, how could he tell when she was ready . . . ?
He guessed she’d make it clear, when the time came. She seldom did ask a question without having the answer right there in her grasp, held up for him to see it.
∞
The dirigible shadowed them, all the way back. Actually, with the sun so low, its shadow never touched ground where he could see it, but it lingered in the air above and behind them as they walked, in the corner of his sight if he only turned his head a fraction. He wondered if they had curiosity, these creatures: for sure they had some sense of life beyond themselves, that first gift of sentience, or else they would never rip open each other’s corpses and salvage the soulstones, to build towers like fingers breaking up out of the soil.
That was all they did build, all the mark they made on their world; grazers and drifters, they needed nothing more. Sometimes he thought he was much the same: he grazed on a world’s interest, and then moved on. He left more solid monuments behind him, but that was camouflage, meaningless, the excuse and not the purpose. They intrigued him, with their towers of the dead; something they memorialised, though whether it was the dead or the death or the survivability of stone, he couldn’t tell. “Soulstone” was the best label anyone could offer, it was hard to call it a translation and even that hint of religious significance made him suspicious, but the facts were undeniable. They did salvage the keelstones of their dead, and build them into towers, and revere those towers; they did do the same with the Upshot’s discards, to the point where it had needed slow discussion and eventual consent—grace, she called it—to allow people the climb up their own Tower of Souls, to give them a vantage-point and a view across this dreary landscape.
To give her a launching-point, to fly from.
∞
Alone for sure, canister’d, contained, with the door dogged shut behind them: here he could shuck his clothes off, peel hers away from sticky skin and make her sweat again before they washed, before they sprawled again in the ruin of their bed and she said, “Low-g, I do love it. When we fuck, we fly. It’s so new—”
And then she was abruptly silent, until she said, “New to this body, I mean—”
Which was just as stupid, because they’d been doing it for months now, since she’d first occupied that body.
He said nothing, and she heard that; and turned her back, drew her legs up, huddled herself against him and shivered in their shared heat.
“Who was she?” he asked—which was stupid in itself, because if there was one question he knew the answer to, it was that one. The record said, exactly who she was and who she had been.
“You mean, who am I?”
“Yes.”
Her voice had shrunk within her, as she was trying to shrink within herself, to be unnoticeable. His arms were around her, but that was a helpless gesture, a mockery of protection. She said, “I was downside, of course, just a girl,
but I ran errands to the terminal. For my father, or for anyone who’d send me, I loved it there. I met her, and we were friends. My first adult friend, my first alien friend. She’d been so far, seen so much; I couldn’t get enough of her.
“And she stayed, longer than. . . longer than most of you do. Long enough for me to grow to adulthood, way longer than anyone stayed there, on my homeworld. It wasn’t a welcome place to be. They allowed the terminal, they used it for trade, but the Upshot were confined to the compound and none of us were let leave. They said it was our religious duty, to keep within the bounds our god had set us; I think it was political, they thought too many of us would leave if any went. But I wanted, I wanted to go. So much, I wanted it. . .
“And then she said she wanted to stay. She was tired, she said, and she wanted to grow old in a body she was comfortable with; and she’d met a man she’d like to make a family with. It was illegal, of course, but she worked in records and her friend drove trucks in and out of the compound all day long. Between them, they could make it work. Except that the Upshot keep such careful track of their people, not like mine; she needed someone willing to be sent on in her name. . .
“She said she’d change the record, so the machines couldn’t see I wasn’t her. And of course, once I was here, whole new body, official body, then no one need ever know. She gave me all her codes, her passwords, everything. I only had to be careful not to talk too much, about that life I haven’t had.
“And I’ve messed it up already, first world I came to. You won’t, you won’t tell them, will you? You won’t tell anyone . . . ?”
He wouldn’t need to. The woman had lied to her. A terminal’s local records could be overwritten, perhaps, by a skilled hand, to fool the ’Chute’s internal logs into believing that this body being presented for discard was the one supplied however many years ago to such-and-such an Upshot personality. Internal logs and local records were audited, though. Necessarily, of course they were; and no hand was skilled enough to hide the marks of its meddling from audit. Besides, there was the physical record, tissues taken from the body at time of discard to be matched against those taken at time of issue. Those matches were always made.