Dura tried to envisage the distance from the upflux to Parz. “But at this speed it must take months to reach the City.”
“A full year, generally.”
“A year?” Dura frowned. “But how can the City wait that long for lumber?”
“It can’t. But it doesn’t have to.” Kae was smiling, but there didn’t seem to be any impatience in her tone at Dura’s slowness. “At any time, there’s a whole stream of caravans like this, heading for the City from all around the circumference of the hinterland. From the point of view of Parz there’s a steady flow of the wood it needs.”
“Rauc knew on exactly which day to come down to the caravan. In fact, you and Brow were waiting to greet us.”
“Yes. We were on time. We always are, Dura; all the caravans are, right across the hinterland. It’s all carefully planned.”
Dura thought of dozens, hundreds perhaps, of caravans like this, endlessly converging on Parz with their precious lumber… and all on time. She felt awed at the idea of humans being able to plan and act systematically on such a scale, and with such precision.
They moved on along the length of the caravan. In some places the trunks had been opened up to expose the green glow of the wood’s nuclear-burning core. Humans moved around the glowing spots and circles, purposeful and busy. There were nets and lengths of rope trailing from the trunks, and Dura saw sleep cocoons, tools, clothes, food bales tucked into the nets. In one place there was a little clutch of infants and small children, safely confined inside a fine-meshed net.
“Why,” she said, “the caravan’s like a little City in itself. A City on the move. There are whole families here.”
“That’s right.” Kae smiled, a little sadly. “But the difference is, it’s a City that will be broken up in another few months, when we get to Parz. And we’ll be shipped back to the hinterland in cars, to start work on another.”
They passed another netful of sleeping children.
Dura asked gently, “Why doesn’t Rauc travel with the caravan? With Brow?”
Kae stiffened slightly. “Because she gets better pay where she is, doing coolie-work for Qos Frenk. They have a kid. Did she tell you? She and Brow are having her put through school in Parz itself. They have to work like this, to afford the fees.”
Dura let herself drift to a stop in the Air. “So Rauc is on a ceiling-farm in the hinterland, her child is in that wooden box at the Pole, and Brow is lost somewhere in the upflux with the lumber caravans. And if they’re lucky they meet — what? once a year?” She thought of the Mixxaxes, also constrained to spend so much of their time apart, and for much the same motives. “What kind of life is that, Kae?”
Kae drew away. “You sound as if you disapprove, Dura.” She waved a hand. “Of all of this. The way we live our lives. Well, we can’t all live as toy savages in the upflux, you know.” She bit her lip, but pressed on. “This is the way things are. Rauc and Brow are doing the best they can, for their daughter. And if you want to know how they feel about so much separation, you should ask them.”
Dura said nothing.
“Life is complex for us — more than you can imagine, perhaps. We all have to make compromises.”
“Really? And what’s your compromise, Kae?”
Kae’s eyes narrowed. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s find the others. It must be time to eat.”
They worked their way back along the complicated linear community in stiff silence.
* * *
A dozen people had gathered, close to the trunk of one of the great severed trees at the heart of the caravan. A Wheel design had been cut into the trunk: neat, five-spoked, large enough to curve around the trunk’s cylindrical form. Small bowls of food had been jammed into the glowing trenches of the design.
The people anchored themselves to the trunk itself, or to ropes and sections of net dangling from the trunk, arranging themselves around the glow of the nuclear fire. Occasionally one of them reached into the fire and drew out a bowl.
Dura joined the group a little nervously. But she was greeted by neutral, even friendly nods. With their nomadic lives, crisscrossing the hinterland, these caravanners must be as used to accepting strangers as anyone in the huge, sprawling hinterland around Parz.
She found a short length of rope and wrapped it around her arm. The rope, leading to the tree trunk, hauled at her with a steady pressure. So, she realized, she had become part of the caravan, bound to it and swept along by its immense momentum. She glanced around at the group. Their faces, their relaxed bodies in their practical vests, formed a rough hemispherical shell over the exposed wood core. The green glow underlit their faces and limbs and cast soft light into their eyecups. Dura felt comfortable — accepted here — and she drifted closer to the warmth of the nuclear fire.
She spotted Rauc and Brow, huddled together on the far side of the little group. Rauc waved briefly to her, but quickly returned her attention to her husband. Glancing around discreetly, Dura saw that most of the party had separated out into couples, bonded loosely by conversation. Alone, she turned to stare into the steady glow of the fire.
There was a tap on her arm. She turned. Kae had settled into place next to her. She was smiling. “Will you eat?”
Dura couldn’t help but glance around surreptitiously. There seemed to be no one with Kae, no partner. There was no sign of Kae’s earlier flash of hostility — she had the impression that there was a core of deep unhappiness in Kae, hidden not far beneath the surface. She smiled back, eager to show good grace. “Thanks. I will.”
Kae reached toward the fire-trenches cut into the wood. She drew out one of the bowls embedded there, taking care to keep her fingers away from the hot wood itself. The bowl was a small globe carved of wood, and it held food, a dark brown, irregular mass. She held the bowl out to Dura.
Dura reached into the bowl and poked at the food tentatively. It was hot to the touch. She took hold of it and drew it out. The surface was furry, but the furs were singed to a crisp, and they crackled as she squeezed.
She looked at Kae doubtfully. “What is it?”
“Try it first.” Kae looked sly in the green underglow.
Dura picked at the fur. “The whole thing?”
“Just bite into it.”
Dura shrugged, raised the lump briskly, opened her mouth wide and bit into the fur. The surface was elastic, difficult to pierce with her teeth, and the furs tickled the roof of her mouth. Then the skin broke, and bits of hot, sticky meat spurted over her mouth and chin. She spluttered, but she wiped her face and swallowed. The stuff was rich, warm, meaty. She took a bite from the skin and chewed it slowly. It was tough and without much flavor. Then she sucked at the remaining meat inside the shell. There was a hard inner core which she discarded.
“It’s good,” she said at last. “What is it?”
Kae let the empty bowl hang in the Air; she poked at it with her forefinger and watched it roll in the Air. “Spin-spider egg,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t recognize it. But it’s the only way to eat it. It’s actually a delicacy, in some parts of the hinterland. There’s even a community on the edge of the wild forest who cultivate spiders, to get the eggs. Very dangerous, but very profitable. But you have to know how to treat the eggs, to bring out the flavor.”
“I don’t think I would have recognized this as a spider egg at all.”
“It has to be collected when freshly laid — when the young spider hasn’t yet formed, and there’s just a sort of mush inside the egg. The hard part in the center is the basis of the creature’s exoskeleton; the young spider grows into its skeleton, consuming the nutrient.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Dura said drily.
Kae laughed, and opened up a sack at her waist. She drew out a slice of beercake. “Here; have some of this. In Parz, there’s a good market for exotic deep-hinterland produce like that. We make a good side-profit from it. Now. How about some Air-pig meat?”
“All right. Please. And then you can tell
me how you came to join these lumber caravans.”
“Only if you tell me how you ended up here, so far from the upflux…”
With food warm inside her, and with the exhilarating buzz of beercake filling her head, Dura told Kae her tangled story; and a little later, in the steady glow of the nuclear-fire Wheel, she repeated her tale for the rest of the lumberjacks, who listened intently.
* * *
The food globes, nestling in the fire trenches, were finished. The conversation gradually subsided, and Dura sensed that the gathering was coming to an end.
Rauc drew her hand from her husband’s, and pulled forward, alone, into the center of the little group. She faced the Wheel cut into the tree trunk in silence.
The last trickles of conversation died. Dura watched, puzzled. The atmosphere was changing — becoming more solemn, sadder. The lumberjacks drew away from each other, their postures stiffening in the Air. Dura glanced at Kae’s face. The lumberjack’s eyecups were wide, illuminated by the fire-glow, fixed on Rauc.
Slowly Rauc began to speak. Her words consisted of names — all of them unknown to Dura — recited in a steady monotone. Rauc’s voice was tired, quiet, but it seemed to enfold the intent gathering. Dura listened to the lulling, rhythmic chant of names as it went on, for heartbeat after heartbeat, read evenly by Rauc to the great Wheel carved into the wood.
These were the names of victims, Dura realized slowly. Victims of what? Of cruelty, of disease, of starvation, of accident; they were the names of the dead, remembered now in this simple ceremonial.
Some of the names must go back generations, she thought, their deaths so ancient that all details had been forgotten. But the names remained, preserved by this gentle, graceful Wheel cult.
And people who lived in the sky could have no other memorial than words.
At last the list came to a close. Rauc hung in the Air before the fading glow of the Wheel trenches, her face empty. Then she stirred and looked around at the faces watching her, as if waking up. She Waved back to her husband.
The group broke up. Brow enfolded his wife in his arms and led her away. All around the group, couples bid farewells and drifted off.
Dura observed Kae surreptitiously. The woman was watching Brow and Rauc, her expression blank. She became aware of Dura. She smiled, but her voice sounded strained. “I’ve the feeling you’re judging me again.”
“No. But I think I understand your compromises now.”
Kae shrugged. “We’re together, Brow and I, for most of the time. Rauc knows it, and has to live with that. But Brow — loves — Rauc. This day with her is worth a hundred with me. And I have to live with that. We all have to compromise, Dura. Even you.”
Dura thought of Esk, long dead now, and a similar painful triangle. “Yes,” she said. “We all have to compromise.”
Kae offered her a place to sleep, somewhere in the tangle of nets and ropes that comprised this strange, linear City. Dura refused, smiling.
She said farewell to Kae. The lumberjack nodded, and they regarded each other with a strange, calm understanding.
Dura pushed away from the trunk and kicked at the Air, Waving for the ceiling-farm and her secure, private little nest.
The caravan spread out beneath her, Wheel-shaped fires burning in a dozen places.
13
Accompanied by a nervous-looking nurse from the Hospital of the Common Good, the injured old upfluxer diffidently entered the Palace Garden. When Muub spotted him he beckoned to the nurse — over the heads of curious courtiers — that she should bring the upfluxer to join him at the Fount. Then he turned back to the slow ballet of the superfluid fountain.
The Garden was a crown perched atop Parz City, an expensive setting for the Palace of the City Committee. The Garden had been established generations before by one of the predecessors of Hork IV. But it had been the particular genius of the current Chair, and his fascination for the natural world around him, that had made this place into the wonder it was. Now it was a lavish park, with exotic plants and animals from all around the Mantle brought together in an orderly, tasteful display. The low — but extravagant — buildings which made up the Palace itself were studded around the Park, gleaming like Corestuff jewels set in rich cloth. Courtiers drifted through the Garden in little knots, huddling like groups of brightly colored animals.
Muub was no lover of the great outdoors, but he relished the Garden. He tilted back his stiff neck, looking up into the yellow-gold Air. To be here beneath the arching, sparkling vortex lines of the Pole — and yet securely surrounded by the works of man — was a fulfilling, refreshing experience. It seemed to strengthen his orderly heart that the Garden was an artifact, a museum of tamed nature — but an artifact which stretched for no less than a square centimeter around him… The Garden was enough to make one believe that man was capable of any achievement.
He ran a discreet doctor’s eye over the approaching upfluxer. Adda was recovering well but he could still barely move without assistance. Both his lower legs were encased in splints, and his chest was swathed in bandages; a cast of carved wood enclosed his right shoulder. His head, too, was a mass of strapped-up cloth, and an eye-leech patiently fed in the corner of the old fellow’s only working eye.
“I’m glad you could join me,” Muub greeted him with a professional smile. “I wanted to talk to you.”
Adda glowered past his leech at Muub’s shaved head, his finery. “Why? Who or what are you?”
Muub allowed himself a heartbeat’s cold silence. “My name is Muub. I am Physician to the Committee… and Administrator of the Hospital of the Common Good, where your injuries have been treated.” He decided to go on the offensive. “Sir, we met before, when you were first carried into the Hospital by one of our citizens. On that occasion — though I don’t expect you to remember — you told me to ‘bugger off.’ Well, I failed to accept that invitation, choosing instead to have you treated. I have asked you to view the Garden today as my guest, as a friendly gesture to one who is new to Parz and who is alone here. But frankly, if you’re not prepared to be courteous then you are free to depart.”
“Oh, I’ll behave,” Adda grumbled. “Though I’ll not swallow the pretense that you’ve done me any sort of favor by treating my injuries. I know very well that you’re exacting a handsome price from the labor of Dura and Farr.”
Muub frowned. “Ah, your companions from upflux. Yes, I understand they have found indentures.”
“Slave labor,” Adda hissed.
Muub made himself relax. Anyone who could survive at the court of Hork IV could put up with a little goading from an eyeless old fool from the upflux. “I’ll not let you needle me, Adda. I’ve invited you here to enjoy the Garden — the spectacle — and I fully intend that that is how we will spend the day.”
Adda held his stare for a few moments; but he did not pursue the discussion, and turned his head to view the Fount.
The superfluid fountain was the centerpiece of the Garden. It was based on a clearwood cylinder twenty microns across, fixed to a tall, thin pedestal. Inside the cylinder hovered a rough ball of gas, stained purple-blue, quivering slowly. The cylinder — fabulously expensive in itself, of course — was girdled by five hoops of polished Corestuff, and it bristled with poles which protruded from its surface. Barrels — boxes of wood embossed with stylized carvings of the heads of Hork IV and his predecessors — were fixed to the ends of the poles inside the cylinder.
Beautiful young acrobats — male and female, all naked — Waved spectacularly through the Air around the cylinder, working its elaborate mechanisms. The electric blue of the vortex lines cast shimmering highlights from the clearwood, and the soft, perfect skin of the acrobats glowed with golden Air-light.
The upfluxer, Adda, made a disgusting noise through his nose. “You brought me here to see this?”
Muub smiled. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand what you’re seeing.”
Adda scowled, his hostility evident. “Then tell me.
”
“Superfluidity.” Muub pointed. “The cylinder contains a low-pressure region. There’s hardly any Air in there, I mean… except for the sphere in the center. That’s just Air, but stained blue so you can see it. The hoops around the cylinder, there, are generating a localized magnetic field. Do you understand me? Like the Magfield, but artificial. Controllable. The magnetic field keeps the cylinder from being crushed by the pressure of the Air outside. And it’s designed to keep the little Air inside the cylinder in that ball at the center.”
“So what?”
“So we can view the Air — within which we are ordinarily immersed — from the outside, as it were.
“Adda, Air is a neutron superfluid — a quite extraordinary substance which, were inhabitants of some other world to discover it, would seem miraculous. Quantized circulation — the phenomena which causes all the spin in the Air to collect into vortex lines — is only one aspect. Watch, now, as the vessels are lowered and raised from the sphere of Air.”
A handsome young acrobat — a girl with blue-dyed hair — grasped one of the poles protruding from the cylinder and pushed it through the clearwood wall. The base of the ornate barrel at its far end dipped into the sphere of blue Air. The barrel wasn’t completely immersed; the girl held the barrel still so that its rim protruded from the surface of the Air by a good two or three microns.
Blue-stained Air visibly crawled up the sides of the box and over the lip, pooling inside. It was like watching a living creature, Muub thought, fascinated and charmed as always by the spectacle.
When the box had filled itself to the level of the rest of the sphere, the acrobat drew it slowly out of the sphere and brought it to rest again, so that its base was placed perhaps five microns above the surface. Now the blue Air slid over the sides and, in a thin stream which poured from the base of the vessel, returned eagerly to the central sphere.
The acrobat troupe maintained this display at all hours of the day, at quite remarkable expense. Adda watched the cycle through a couple of times, his good eye empty of expression.
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