A Night Without Stars

by Peter F. Hamilton

  That the cottage had an electrical supply had come as a surprise to Florian back when he arrived, but the full electrification of Bienvenido had been one of Slvasta’s prestige projects, giving everybody the same benefit of the new and modern post-Transition civilization, no matter where they lived. Dams were built across hundreds of valleys, bringing employment to tens of thousands in every county, while newly nationalized factories re-tooled and re-educated their workforce to build the hydro-turbines Mother Laura had designed before she sacrificed herself to exterminate the Prime.

  Not that there were many uses for electricity in the warden’s lonely lodge. Each of his four rooms had an electric light bulb. There was a radio. A pump shunted water from the rainwater tank through to the back boiler on the wood-fired cooking range, allowing him to have hot water in the sink and shower. He also had some woodworking tools in the lean-to.

  That was all Florian needed. Ever since Lurji, his brother, had fled the PSR – supposedly to Port Chana, where the Eliter radical movement was strongest – Florian had wanted to be by himself. He never had got on very well with people – a situation exacerbated by his Eliter status, condemning him to constant taunts and bullying at school, and even worse victimization during his time as a conscript for the county regiment.

  It was maths which interested him, and he was good at it – an ability magnified thanks to his macrocellular clusters. He even made a few modifications to the binary codes of the operating system they all used, improving the file search function. The Eliter community, of course, was eager to have him work on refining and expanding their routines, which was an ongoing project. But for all their solidarity, they endured relentless persecution, driving angry people like his brother into more open acts of defiance. That was a life he knew would bring him nothing but misery. And outside the Eliter community, there were no intellectually challenging jobs available, not for the likes of him. He could never escape his heritage. Eliter status was on your birth certificate and identity papers, condemning your life. It didn’t even matter if an Eliter’s children didn’t have functioning macrocellular clusters, they were still deemed Elite – just another injustice perpetrated by the government, of which there were many. Some Eliters had managed to hide their family’s abilities from the PSR, but not many in this day and age. If he joined the civil service, he would never rise above grade five – junior management level. The university wouldn’t allow him to study. And he would certainly never be allowed to join the Astronaut Regiment, whose Liberty missions he’d worshiped from an early age.

  Most would consider the forest warden job, with its isolation, to be a curse, but to Florian it was a blessing. He joined the warden service the same week he was discharged from his national service. They accepted him without question; these days, few people were interested in such a career. He’d heard nearly a third of the valleys under their stewardship lacked a warden.

  Out here in the seclusion of Albina valley, he could spend a few hours each day doing the actual job, while the rest of the time he could sit and think. His macrocellular clusters allowed him to become an even greater recluse, giving him the ability to live quite literally inside his own head to the exclusion of everything else.

  In the afternoon, when the cloud had lifted to form a dank roof over the valley and the drizzle had abated, he drove the Openland truck up the eastern slope with Teal sitting in the passenger seat. The Openland’s fat tyres had deep treads, giving it plenty of traction on the spindly lingrass which covered the ground between the trees. Albina valley was covered in a mix of terrestrial pine and native browfrey, a deciduous tree sprouting long trains of grey-blue leaves that dangled like a spindly moss from its whip-thin branches.

  The main tracks were cut vertically up the slope, with firebreak paths extending outwards at ninety degrees every hundred and fifty metres, dividing the entire valley wall into a grid. Some tracks were quite overgrown, which he dutifully logged in his memory files. He would come back with a chainsaw on a dry day and trim down the worst of the overhanging branches. Then there were the other paths through the trees, produced by wild goats and shal-sheiks meandering along gradients. Even his memory log didn’t have all of them mapped out yet.

  Twenty minutes after leaving the lodge, he turned off the main track and rumbled along firebreak AJ54 (in his private designation). The firebreak was narrow, and the lingrass thick and cloying. There was a small circular clearing five hundred metres in, which the Openland could just turn round in – if you knew how and took it slowly. He kept a hard lock on the steering wheel as the fronds of browfrey slapped against the windscreen.

  When he killed the motor, silence engulfed him like a benign presence. He sat still for a moment, relishing the seclusion. It simply wasn’t possible to get further away from people than here, which made these times away from the lodge quite precious.

  ‘Go on, boy,’ he told Teal. ‘Find me some rabbits.’ Teal obediently jumped out of the Openland and started pushing through the tangled undergrowth. The forest’s rabbit population had been increasing a lot lately, despite the native bussalores preying on them. Knapsvine and jibracken, which grew in abundance between the tree trunks, were excellent foods for them. Unfortunately it meant the newly planted saplings on the western slopes were getting badly chewed. Again, the county’s warden service office had known about it for the last two years. Nothing had been done.

  Waxed leather trousers tucked into knee-high boots kept the water from the lingrass off his legs as he gathered up bundles of dalfrond from the trailer and carried them down to the trench. There were eighteen identical trenches scattered at random around the valley. He’d methodically dug them out during the first eighteen months, his spade making light work of the soft peaty soil – a metre and a half deep, two wide, and twenty long. The bottom was covered in lengths of wood that proved too spindly for logs that he could use in the lodge’s range stove. Nothing odd or suspicious about that, if anyone stumbled across them. Nor the layer of smelly dalfrond scattered on top; that was applied to accelerate the wood’s decay.

  Florian scanned the trench and smiled as he counted eleven waltan fungi that had fallen in. The waltan was a strange thing – a fan-shaped nodule of fungus that was mobile. It didn’t move fast, but it could sense the rotting wood it fed on, and moved inexorably towards it. And the trenches, with their decomposing branches and bark, were a rich source. Unfortunately, once the fungus fell in and began to leach the nutrients it thrived on, it then had no way of climbing up the trench’s vertical walls afterwards. The trenches were the most basic trap it was possible to create.

  When he’d finished scattering the fresh dalfrond weeds over the wood, Florian picked up the tough fibrous waltans, the smallest of which was the size of his head, and dumped them in the trailer.

  Teal reappeared, his head hanging low, and his muddy coat snagged with tiny twigs and knapsvine burrs.

  ‘Nothing, huh?’ Florian said. ‘Don’t know why I bother with you.’

  Teal clambered back into the passenger seat and gave him a forlorn look.

  Florian drove to the drying shed, hidden in a dense clump of pines along firebreak FB39, and hung the waltans up in net bags. It took at least three months to dry one out properly in Albina valley’s humid atmosphere. There were a couple of batches that had withered to the point they were starting to crumble through the netting, so he carried those back to the trailer before heading home.

  *

  Evening was Florian’s favourite time, and he had a very specific routine. As the sun began to sink below the horizon he loaded several logs into the range cooker, and put the big pot of rabbit stew back onto the hotplate. His kitchen took up half of the living room. Over the years he’d added several pots and pans, along with a drawer full of new utensils. Crockery pots with rubber-seal lids held his flour and sugar. Herbs from the garden hung on a rack above the range cooker, drying out. One day, when savings from his minuscule wages had grown enough, he planned on buying an electri
cal refrigerator, which would probably double his electricity bill.

  First there was the chicken coop to check. Three new eggs there.

  ‘They’ll do for breakfast, boy,’ he told Teal happily. Teal wagged his tail on the other side of the wire mesh. Teal was no longer allowed inside the pen after getting a little bit carried away two years ago. It was for his own good; a chicken claw had left quite a graze on his nose.

  Goat pen next. Florian sat on the stool and milked Embella. He got just over half a litre from her, which was one reason he wasn’t hurrying for the refrigerator.

  Inside again, and he began to mix a new batch of bread dough for tomorrow, scattering in a few rosemary leaves then kneading it for a good ten minutes before shaping it into a hemisphere. The proved dough from yesterday was taken out of the bowl, and the fresh one put in. He draped the bowl with a damp cloth, and checked the temperature of the oven, which was up to two hundred degrees Celsius.

  The bread was put in the oven, and the stew stirred. There wasn’t much left.

  ‘Be taking a trip tonight, boy,’ he told Teal. ‘Fancy myself some lamb for next week.’

  A subroutine in his macrocellular clusters began counting down. The timer was one he’d written extra code for, so it could count down as well as up. He settled into the comfy chair, switched off the electric bulb, and closed his eyes.

  The routines squirted coloured sparks into the darkness which rapidly coalesced into the image of the Warrior Angel – the Eliter’s standard activation symbol. Icographics, the Eliters called them – strips of translucent colour, like malleable glass, that could be bent and twisted and stretched to provide illustration, mainly for graphs. He’d welcomed them when he was younger, using them to help structure equations. You could create three-dimensional fields of them, and punch them with dark alphanumerics, creating matrices of numbers governed by equations, transforming the physical into mathematics, explaining so much of the world. He’d achieved a lot with them back then, before growing frustrated with their limitations. So he’d dug back through the icographic formatting routine and begun to add code of his own, enhancing functionality.

  Florian’s mindscape unfolded. He was no longer in a dark lodge in Albina valley. Now he was sitting on a beach of some tropical island. His skin felt the warmth of the sun, he smelt the sea air – or what he determined sea air would smell like from the descriptions he’d read: sort of like sweet rose perfume. Waves lapped against the snow-white sand. It was the world of Danivan’s Voyage, the book he’d read when he was eleven, captivating him because it described Bienvenido after the Fallers had been purged – a glimpse of the future he had clung to throughout all the bad days, then years.

  It wasn’t perfect. There were areas which lacked colour. Some sections weren’t three-dimensional, or flickered between the two. But he was making progress, exploring the abilities of his macrocellular clusters, the effects that could be generated within his mind. And the code that made it possible. Code was king. Code was his true life now.

  He settled back and summoned up the audio routines. They opened round him, column after column written by his own designator subroutines. He could play music from a file now. It wasn’t particularly clear, and there were lulls. A lot of that was to do with his radio; reception in Albina valley wasn’t good. Atmospherics affected the short-wave signals, and the new medium-wave services broadcast out of Opole were blocked by the valley walls.

  He had plans for all that. Plans for a routine that could take the meagre music files and use them as a basis to compose new music, with him as a conductor. Plans to build a medium-wave radio with an aerial on the peak of the valley. Plans to build a converter that would change analogue signals to digital, so that his macrocellular clusters could receive them directly; that way, he wouldn’t have to rely on inefficient old ears. So many ideas. Terannia sent him books about mathematics and electrical circuits when she could, but they were all mimeographed copies of originals and didn’t tell him what he really needed to know. But they gave him the fundamentals, so code could be written to solve the problems. Code could do anything. Code could save the world.

  *

  It had been dark for three hours when Florian drove the Openland down to the lake at the base of the valley. His eyes provided him with a grainy green-tinged vision of the landscape, allowing him to keep the headlights off. The only people likely to see the four-by-four would be people doing the same thing as him, but avoiding attention was second nature for Eliters.

  The lake was seven kilometres long and three at the widest. Nine streams fed into it, with the river Kellehar running out the far end. It was one of the hundreds of tributary rivers that merged into the river Crisp that drained the lands to the north of the Sansone mountains all the way up to the Pritwolds, and from the coast to the west of Opole.

  Florian drew up on the edge of the Vatni village and switched the engine off. The aliens had been here for over sixty years, swimming upstream from the coast to spread down several tributaries. They tended to settle on lakes like this one, which weren’t close to any main human towns. Their huts were long cylindrical affairs woven out of pine and browfrey branches that seemed to be connected into a single chaotic maze.

  Infra-red vision showed him the bright scarlet blobs of fires burning on hearths in the centre of the larger huts, the cooler amber haze of smoke rising up through long clay flues. The Vatni didn’t have much to trade with humans; the cultures were too different. Back on Aqueous they didn’t even have fire. The tiny islands on that world of water had never evolved any kind of woody vegetation; the best their biosphere had come up with was a kind of spiky coral lichen. Yet once those initial Vatni families arrived on Bienvenido, they’d readily taken to the innovation, and now cooked a lot of food. They said their ancestral memories showed them they’d once had fire back on whatever world they’d originated from prior to the Void. Knives were also a popular item to be traded, along with basic tools. Some of the larger coastal settlements even had electricity, supplied from Bienvenido’s grid.

  Most Vatni settlements exchanged fish for human goods. The village in Albina valley supplied Florian with fish from the lake, but mainly he paid them cash for the dalfrond. Cash which he then used to buy them what they wanted from the general store in Wymondon on his fortnightly trips for his own supplies.

  It was Mooray that came out to greet him. Like all his kind, the Vatni was nearly three and a half metres long from his nose to the tip of his dorsal tail. His body was a fat cylinder weighing in at nearly a thousand kilograms. Yet despite their bulk, the Vatni were surprisingly lithe, even out of the water. Mooray’s hide was a dense grey-brown fur, like bristles that had fused together, which shone with a waxy oil that made it look like he was permanently damp. That colour showed he was in his early middle age. As a Vatni got older, the hide would tinge into blotchy rust-red.

  He waddled towards Florian on his three flattened tentacle-like tails that wriggled across the compacted ground like synchronized snakes. The thick dorsal tail was the shortest, used for balance alone when Mooray was out of the water, with the lower two providing traction. The trisymmetrical limb configuration was repeated for the mid-body flippers. His dorsal flipper was purely a fin for when he was in the water, while the remaining pair of serpentine flippers were longer and had pincer tips. There were also three tusks protruding from Mooray’s triangular mouth, with the longest one at the top, curving down.

  Three large gold-hued multi-segment eyes peered down at Florian, and Mooray emitted a lengthy liquid squealing sound, as if he was gurgling a thick syrup, interspaced with fast clicking as his tusks drummed together.

  Florian brought up his translation routine.

  ‘Greetings, my friend Florian of the land,’ Mooray was saying. ‘Are you meat hunting again this night?’

  Florian took the modified flute out of his pocket and positioned the castanets carefully in his right hand. Using Vatni speech was a prolonged operation, even for an Eliter, bu
t the routines governed his lips and tongue movements, allowing him a decent stab at speaking Vatni directly. ‘My gratitude to you for seeing me, friend Mooray of the water. You are correct in thinking I would hunt this night. Will you honour me with your presence?’

  ‘I will be delighted to go with you. Have you made progress with the killing apparatus?’

  ‘Progress is slow, for which I apologize. I think you would require a pump handle to pull the string back.’ Modifying a crossbow for Mooray had been an ongoing project for over a year now. Shaping it to be held by Vatni flippers had been relatively easy, but those pincers didn’t really have the strength to crank the string back. An additional mechanism was needed for that. Routines could create basic three-dimensional designs, but Florian’s carpentry skills didn’t quite match his ambitions.

  ‘No apology is required,’ Mooray chirruped and thrummed. ‘Your attempts are a demonstration of friendship which I find most honourable.’

  ‘I will succeed eventually,’ Florian warbled back.

  ‘All things will be in the end.’

  They walked around the huts to the stubby wharf the Vatni had built into the lake. Very occasionally anglers and other countryfolk would visit to trade. The Vatni were anxious to make them feel welcome.

  The boat waiting at the end had been built for Florian by the Vatni, more rounded than a human rowing boat, but very stable. Florian climbed in and sat on the bench. Teal curled up behind him, while Mooray made the whole thing rock about as he lumbered in and lay at the prow, with his head over the gunwales.