Ancient Light

by Mary Gentle

She paused, then: ‘Yes, you go down ahead of me. We’ve had two chances of viable Witchbreed science, we can’t afford now to miss the third. Lynne, I’ll be relying on you.’

  9

  Canals

  When I was in the Service, it used to strike me how closely our missions approximate the shapes of our lives: born out of the ship-womb into a world full of incomprehensible experience, no sooner gaining a kind of competence than called out of that world again. Flying down to the Coast held something of that feeling – cold ice-thin air outside the ports, the blue-purple of the stratosphere, and Orthe an ochre shadow thirty thousand feet below.

  I flicked the holotank-image from exterior-view to Records, and then had to lean forward while Pramila Ishida went past to take the pilot’s console with David Osaka.

  And I could do without having Pramila along, she’s a direct conduit of information back to the team –

  How can I hope to cushion culture shock, faced with something like this?

  The departed archeological team left a message-capsule in orbit, and it was only after landfall that the team had got round to deciphering its last image. I leaned on the rim of the holotank, studying it – a close shot of an inland Coast city. It was ill-resolved, taken from a shuttle overflight. Satellite surveys are no better, the area being comparatively close (in continental terms) to the southern continent’s war devastation. I wondered briefly how the research team were doing with their plans to override the atmospheric interference.

  And if Molly hadn’t been determined on the canals already, this would have brought her running! Jesus, I thought. If I do my job, I’m helping the Company to move in on Orthe. If I don’t do it, I’ll be out myself. And if this fulfils its implications …

  Three-dimensional and miniature, the holotank held a barren landscape. Five canals cut straight lines through the desert. The shot had been taken towards dusk: Carrick’s Star reflected back amber from the water surfaces. And where the canals would have intersected, a great cylindrical pit gaped in the desert, a pit big enough to land a starcruiser in; and in its terraced walls, tiny humanoid figures moved … the city, Maherwa, according to the archeologists’ report. To whet the Company’s appetite still further, it lies thirty miles inland from the Inner Sea, and only sixty miles to the west of Kel Harantish.

  Doug Clifford, emerging from the shuttle’s rear compartments, came and sat in the holotank’s other viewseat. He smiled.

  ‘Out of communication range with young Molly? She’ll miss hearing how obstructive a government envoy I am.’

  ‘I’d like to have read your last FTL transmission to Earth,’ I retorted. ‘Especially what went in under “Christie, L. D.”.’

  ‘Ah, well – one has to say certain things.’

  ‘Doesn’t one …’

  He leaned back, looking at me over steepled fingers. There was a certain affectionate mockery there that I would have missed, badly, had it been absent.

  ‘I find it interesting that a government representative is permitted to come on this mission …’

  He left that invitingly open, but I declined to comment. ‘Special advisor’ is a flexible designation; the duties of “liaison” are not always specified; and if I choose to let Douggie Clifford take a close look at the Company’s modus operandi – that’s my responsibility. The multicorporate’s presence has to be counter-balanced somehow.

  A little sourly, he said, ‘Why should a multicorporate Company worry about a national government, after all? Britain’s nothing more than a client state to PanOceania.’

  ‘That’s an exaggeration.’

  ‘I believe you’ve been out of the Service too long. If I were to call you a groundsider –’

  ‘You could end up walking back to Morvren Freeport.’ I gave due consideration to the Inner Sea. ‘Or swimming.’

  He chuckled at that one, eyes bright. ‘I must say, I do prefer offworld service to my groundside days.’ His gaze flickered, going round the small cabin, passing over David and Pramila at the pilot’s console. ‘Lynne, just what is it you do with the Company, now?’

  ‘You mean when I’m not being hauled out of my Company department and booted off to the further reaches of the galaxy as a special advisor?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I’m a groundsider. No – quite genuinely, Douggie. On Earth, I run the department that liaises between PanOceania and the British government. After all, if you want to regulate the relations between a multicorporate and its “client state”, that’s best done from the inside, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Which side of the inside?’ He grimaced, primly displeased by his own phraseology.

  ‘Sometimes even I’m not sure.’

  He twinkled. The irony doesn’t escape me – I balance affairs between PanOceania and the government much as I once did between Earth and Carrick V. It’s the same job.

  The shuttle thrummed, wallowing in the thin air. Clifford leaned back. ‘I thought you seemed a little confused. Now let’s see – PanOceania won’t entirely trust you because you’re British-born, and we won’t entirely trust you because you’re contracted to PanOceania. I don’t envy you your position, Lynne.’

  ‘I’m a professional outsider. I’m used to it.’

  I keyed the holotank to images of the Desert Coast. Lines, contours, symbols. But I watched that bland, round face.

  ‘Of course, Orthe won’t ever have major trade status, even with the Company’s presence here.’ His tone was deliberately dismissive. ‘We’ve run several Health and Agriculture Aid programmes here, but for no return. The place is unco-operative as well as uneconomic.’

  ‘True enough.’ I noted he couched it in terms that would appeal to the Pacifican woman. Aiming to have it get back to her. ‘It’s not me you have to persuade, Douggie. By the way – Molly Rachel is of the opinion you spend too much time with the Freeport Ortheans. She thinks you’re unreliable.’

  ‘I do hope so.’ He was almost demure. Then: ‘“Unreliable”?’

  ‘They used always to say Service people were prone to going native,’ I said. ‘Which, being empaths by profession, isn’t too surprising.’

  ‘You know as well as I do, we’re trained to put Earth’s interests first.’

  ‘Which I suppose accounts for Service tendencies to emotional confusion. And our – your – reputation for instability, unreliability, and hypocrisy –’

  He straightened, met my gaze. ‘I don’t know that you’re entitled to say those things now.’

  ‘Since I left the Service? Possibly not.’ Still testing the water, I said, ‘You don’t think I mean you? Two months out of twelve on-world, that isn’t long enough to go native.’

  ‘Nor is eighteen months, ten years ago?’

  ‘Thank you, Douglas.’

  Neither of us was entirely unserious. That’s a kind of barbed joking that the Pacificans wouldn’t understand. I thought I’d better pay some attention to the record-abstracts on the holo, and so watched the tank for some minutes. Clifford went back to making notes on his personal memlink.

  The holotank showed networks of canals, some mine-workings, and seaports; all in that narrow ribbon of land between the Inner Sea and the first mountain range of the Elansiir. There was no data for the Elansiir wasteland itself, under permanent cloud-cover; and precious little detail for anything else. I went back to the archeology team’s report, running the image-loop of Maherwa over and over, concentrating on the “floor” of the pit. Small, badly-resolved, there was none the less a structure of some sort there – it stood out by its size and isolation.

  And it might be purely ornamental, and it might be anything, but it might be what the archeologists suggested: an entrance to the canals’ maintenance system … I went back to the government archives. And came up with nothing.

  ‘You haven’t been exactly extensive in these reports.’ I glanced up at Clifford. ‘Most of them are second-hand sources. As far as the south-east Coast’s concerned, you might just as well
have said “Here Be Tygers” and “Terra Incognita”.’

  He protested, ‘There’s a lot on the languages.’

  ‘That’s no help, without knowing the context they’re used in.’

  Doug Clifford frowned. ‘You seem to have forgotten a great deal. The social context is well sketched-in, at least in these areas here –’

  Pramila Ishida leaned back and interrupted: ‘We’re coming up on the selected landing site. Can I put us down close to the settlement?’

  Tactile memory washes over me: the hammerblows of heat on the roofs of Kel Harantish, only ten days ago. Spring season here, but so great a change from spring in the Freeport. Climate anomalies …

  ‘Yes, take us in,’ I directed. ‘Coast Ortheans don’t have the taboo on land. Put us down a tactful distance from the settlement itself.’

  She nodded, almost absently, and I saw her lean over to speak to David. He frowned, and they remained with their heads together for some moments.

  The vibration of the flight changed subtly.

  ‘Nobody’s paid that much attention to the Coast until now,’ I said.

  ‘The Coast Ortheans didn’t have anything that anyone wanted.’ Doug raised his eyebrows: a self-mocking play to the gallery. It occurs to me that, without the nihilistic sense of humour that he often displays, D. Clifford might not be on what is, after all, considered a fifth-rate Diplomatic posting.

  He said, ‘I did go to the northern areas of the Coast a few years back. Round Kasabaarde and the islands. Lynne, you may contemplate, at your leisure, what it’s like trying to cover something the size of the Hundred Thousand when there’s no central authority. I’ve had to spend a considerable amount of my time there.’

  ‘Mmmm; sorry –’

  The typical fate of backwater worlds: under-staffing, lack of interest, neglect.

  ‘– but I still wish there was more in records.’

  He scratched at his grizzled hair, that was turning quite grey over the ears, and looked at me quizzically. Douggie’s always been prone to capitalizing on that fifteen years’ difference in our ages.

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Lynne. You want to treat this trip as a First Contact. A fact-finding mission. Things aren’t like that any more. There aren’t any purely academic questions, or answers of purely hypothetical interest. Where you go, the Company follows.’

  The shuttle thrummed throughout its length, and for a split second lights and holo-images dimmed.

  ‘Go for the crash-straps,’ Ishida said, ‘we’re coming in.’ She hooked a viewscreen down to helmet her eyes; flicking switches, bringing David in as pilot-standby.

  Exterior-view in the holotank: the horizon a haze, where an immense plain of land at last loses itself; the sky luminous, pale blue; Carrick’s Star diamond-brilliant. Fifteen hundred feet, rapidly descending, and everything unreal: perfect scale miniatures – ridged brown land; that multitude of browns, oranges, ochre, white. Hummocks of wrinkled earth beginning to rise: the foothills of the Elansiir mountains. Beyond them, splintered silver in the cloud haze. And the shuttle a tin box. How does it shut out the world so well? The world so real … Aware of being held, suspended, from some mythical skyhook-point …

  Thirty miles distant, the glimmer of the sea. A wonder: this country, that was irrevocably “inland”, is from this height coastal. Canals are thin ribbons, every curve distinct as map contours. No sight of any city, but I know how easy it is to lose that on aerial-view.

  I fastened the crash-straps across me, turned to speak to Doug. The shuttle swung down into a landing-pattern, curving off to the left. A long and gradual curve, a tightening curve –

  I didn’t shout. Conventions hold, even on such occasions, perhaps because such occasions aren’t easy to recognize as they happen. I glanced at the land below, at Ishida, at the girl again; and the shuttle wasn’t slowing, was speeding up.

  Her fingers moved rapidly over the controls. ‘We’re coming in too fast,’ I warned, levelly as possible; she shouldn’t have her attention distracted now, and I wanted to scream, Pull out! Get us out of here!

  A slow turn, pushing me hard into the seat, insistent pressure throwing me away from the direction of the curve. Why did I think, before I ever flew, that I wouldn’t feel that downward pull? Nothing between me and the earth. Empty air. Most of the human body is water: as the shuttle banked, I felt it answering gravity, surging like the tide.

  Made speechless; thinking, Stop this fucking thing –

  The shuttle plunged down, still on the curving trajectory, and the image in the holotank abruptly cut out. Fast; faster. Acceleration pushing me back into the seat; a hot fear swelling in my head, feeling as if my skin enclosed an infinite pressure. At one and the same time thinking we’re crashing this is it and I always knew this would happen and but I’m not really afraid – why aren’t I? Gravity pressed me back, pinned me down. The shuttle bucked and rumbled underfoot; a terrible grinding sound; I couldn’t breathe.

  The slide, that uncontrolled plunge –

  Something hit the underside of the floor. The cabin jolted violently. I heard a crash, only felt the skidding sideways – both hands gripping the seat – and violent braking threw me forward, back. And then a juddering halt.

  ‘Christ!’ Douglas Clifford said.

  As if that were a signal, everybody began to move and speak. I wrenched at the straps, forced co-ordination, and stood up. The exit irised open. I stumbled out, on the heels of David Osaka.

  ‘– what –’

  ‘– we’re down, we’re –’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  Silence, then realization, then speech.

  A hot wind hit my face, and I stumbled over shale underfoot; slippery, dry, and treacherous. Open air; sky above. My hands were shaking, but only slightly. The white dolphin-shape of the craft …

  ‘You wouldn’t know we’d hit a thing!’ David: amazed, exultant. ‘You wouldn’t know –’

  ‘What –’

  Standing safe, I can look, can ask: where did we cross that momentous barrier between safety and danger? When did a normal day become abnormal?

  There’s where we hit, jolting over a shale slope, rutted and grooved with crevasses (if we’d hit there) and a stone tor (did we come that close to –?) and the shuttle, there, drunkenly slewed at the foot of the shallow rise.

  David and Pramila clung together, each pounding the other’s back, panic and rapture indistinguishable on their faces. Doug said again, ‘What –?’

  An expected sharp panic wasn’t there. I shook a little, soon stopped; felt a kind of floaty sensation, and then an acute nausea.

  They fell in love with that bright shadow, Death –

  Cassirur, we can understand them better than you ever will.

  Only for an instant, then natural human fear reasserted itself. And shock: I shouldn’t be able to feel such alien emotion.

  Empathy is no prized gift.

  ‘Lynne!’

  ‘Uh –’

  ‘All navigation systems cut out!’ Pramila Ishida said, at last moving from David’s embrace. ‘Total freak conditions – we were flying blind the last few seconds.’

  She grinned, all deference and all quietness gone. Her sallow face was shining with sweat. She made no attempt at self-justification, very sure of herself. In these situations, even the guiltless protest their innocence.

  A hot silence, nothing but sun blazing on the earth. My eyes stung, the alien light too harsh for unprotected human vision. Through tears I saw our four black shadows on the shale. Brown shale, speckled with orange; prism-shaped pebbles, flat leaves of rock … sharp focus. Pinned sweating under the incandescent dome of the sky, dry-mouthed, hollow, I felt a change: Orthe for a moment becomes only Carrick V. A separation, a betrayal.

  ‘Christ!’ Doug repeated, his face grey.

  That second when the shuttle sank away from under me, that long dive, like a hawk’s stoop, is sensation imprinted into cells, not conscious memory. I remembered, as
it happened, a feeling almost of satisfaction: “This is the worst that can ever happen, and it’s happening; nothing in the future can be as bad as this.” And, paradoxically, knowing I wouldn’t die.

  Static electricity sparked from clothing, from hair. Round the rim of the horizon, heat-lightning flickered continuously. I turned to speak to Doug and I couldn’t; throat muscles paralysed, tongue thick in the mouth. That knowing is only the refusal of something living to believe that it can die.

  And we get from here to Maherwa – to anywhere – how? This shuttle’s grounded.

  Between fear and self-pity I thought, It was going to be so simple. Fly a shuttle down to the canal junction nearest Kel Harantish, visit the settlement, ask questions –

  Now we’re stopped before we’ve begun.

  Impossible to stay outside, unprotected, in the heat; but the shuttle’s cabin was claustrophobic. I sipped flat liquid from a water-bulb, and leaned up against the frame of the open exit-port. Hours had passed. It felt as though it should be midnight, but Carrick’s Star was only declining into late afternoon, light still harsh. I ran a finger under eye-shields to clear dust, and looked out at a sepia landscape.

  The earth was golden. Not a thing moved on the wide plain, no animal, no insect. There was no cultivated land. Nothing but dry earth. Only in the north-west, round Kasabaarde, are there ridge-backed lizards, and the packbeasts called brennior, and fields of arniac and del’ri.

  ‘Here,’ Doug said, passing a belt-holster across. I fastened it round my waist, and drew the CAS-IV sonic stunner – it’s one of the few handguns that look impressive on pre-tech worlds. And, being keyed to human biopatterns for use, is not often a two-edged sword.

  ‘The orbiter got us located yet?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not yet. Pramila says she can get through to them about thirty per cent of the time.’

  I rested a hand on the butt of the CAS-IV – Coherent Amplified Sound was originally developed to be a communications device, not a weapon. Technology is mutable.

  When I glanced behind me, I saw Pramila Ishida still leaning over the comlink; David with both hands on the back of her chair, talking loudly. Such self-possession.