Creation Machine
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Andrew Bannister 2017
Cover photographs: Alamy and Shutterstock
Cover design by Stephen Mulcahey/TW
Andrew Bannister has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473527195
ISBN 9780593076507 (hb)
9780593076514 (tpb)
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Dedicated to Thomas and Felix, whose uncritical faith was leavened with the occasional timely deflating comment
EIGHTY-EIGHT PLANETS AND twenty-one suns; all artificial down to the last particle.
More than ten thousand years before, there had been a pact. It had begun what people then called the Stable Age and it was still holding, even though everyone had forgotten about it.
Almost everyone. A few people still remembered – but they had forgotten what it was they were remembering.
But we remembered.
WHEN BELBIS HAD first made the Long Walk he had been eleven years old. It had taken him almost three greater moons, and for the first twenty days his legs had trembled and ached from rise to set. Seven years later he was far stronger. It should take him little more than a greater moon – but he would still be tired when he got there.
He walked steadily, using the terse economical stride that all his people were taught from their very first steps. Walking was important and it had to be done properly. When Belbis was younger he had taken this so seriously that he had driven his teachers to the edge of madness.
But then Belbis took everything very seriously. Otherwise, what was the point? Things were there to be taken seriously. How else should he take them? Most people seemed not to understand that, but Belbis didn’t mind because he knew very well that he didn’t understand most people. On that at least, he and his teachers had agreed. He had therefore taken the only obvious route in life, and everyone including him had been relieved. Besides, the Circle’s last Painter had died the winter before, and the Predigers were sternly certain that there was only a limited period of grace allowed to find another, so Belbis the Odd had become Belbis the Painter quickly and smoothly. He took on the grey robe of the Novice – the lowest rank of the Order, but the highest a Painter was allowed – almost with relief. Simple certainties suited Belbis.
The route of the Long Walk was not complex. By tradition it began at the furthest point out to sea of the longest dock at Circle Harbour. From there it plodded on to dry land, past the slipways with their vivid smells of tar and human waste, past the rope walks and oil stores, and past the flensing yards where the great, prized bull-fins were sliced apart with razor-edged spades, leaving the remains to flow back down the glistening gut-ramps and into the back harbour where lesser creatures waited, their mouths open. The lesser creatures were themselves the prey of creatures in some ways even lower, as far as society was concerned: the starving, the ill and the old, who waited above them with clubs and sticks, watching for a chance. When you were too old or too ill to fish, Circle Harbour had no use for you, and no food either.
Belbis didn’t like strong smells. He hastened through the first part of the Walk with his eyes fixed on the ground and his throat tensed, in case he should commit the blasphemy of retching.
After the flensing yards the route jinked round the Quay Sergeant’s hut, with its own particular smells of fried food and tube smoke and stump brew, and became more agreeable. Or mostly more agreeable; Belbis didn’t like the part when he passed the big dwellings at the upper end of Founders’ Green. This was where the wealthy had their town-houses, great halls built with massive timbers resting on low walls of mortared schist. The wealthiest had roofs of schist, too, instead of thatch or turf, and the smoke from their chimneys smelled not of dried seaweed but of scented wood. Sweet-smelling or not, Belbis had observed the unsayable fact that the wealthier the family, the more agnostic they became. Never overtly atheist, of course, that would have been suicidal, but even so Belbis never lost his astonishment at how much doubt one could entertain without actually being a formal unbeliever. Especially if one was rich.
His astonishment didn’t protect him from the taunts and the occasional flung stone. He could ignore them. Such things had always been part of his life. He supposed they always would be. The Order was unpopular – he had been told that one of the main functions of a priesthood was to be resented, especially in times when the fishing was poor. Not that any of the Predigers ever went fishing.
After Founders’ Green the Long Walk passed the great public park of Founders’ Fields, kinking inwards as the park narrowed at the upper end to skirt the Ending Place, where a few people every week met their end on the edge of the Dispatcher’s axe: criminals, certainly, and traitors, and also those who were possibly less doubting than the residents of the big houses of Founders’ Green but also less rich.
The Dispatcher wore the darkest black robes, indicating seniority over all but the ten highest Klerikers. Belbis had heard townspeople whisper that black didn’t show bloodstains, but that wasn’t the real reason. The Dispatcher had people to deal with blood, on robes or elsewhere.
The channel from the Ending Place wound its way down the town, avoiding the wealthiest neighbourhoods, until it joined the gut-ramps near the harbour. Belbis had heard that things were added to the blood to keep it fluid. He didn’t know for sure, but it seemed reasonable. These things could be done, as he knew very well from his own profession, and after all you wouldn’t want the channels to block.
The Ending Place marked the outskirts of the town. After that the Walk wandered out through private estates and farmland until it had climbed off the coastal platforms that nurtured the town and the harbour and was heading for the mountains. Day by day the landscape drew in around him as broad valleys became narrow rocky slots, often with cold rivers hissing down them. Night by night he slept as he had been taught, sprawled under his cloak with his cheek resting on his arm and his eyes turned away from the stars. He would not see the stars until his journey was over. No Painter ever did.
Towards the end of the Walk he always became very hungry. Down on the plains there had been berries and a few larger fruits. By tradition the Painter could forage only within ten paces to either side of the Walk, and some of the older farming folk planted bushes within reach, and watched and nodded as the Painter took the food. But as he climbed away from the fertile lands the food thinned out and he had to rely on the baked ration from his little pack. It was not enough, but then it wasn’t meant to be. The Painter should arrive at the Watch House with his eyes large and his blood thin, people said.
Belbis reached the Watch House on the evening of the third day before the full dark of the last greater moon of the year. It was an auspicious time. The skies were clear and black with frost and bright with stars.
The Watch House perched on the top of a narrow peak at the highest point in the Spine Range, so called because it crossed the continent in a shallow S-curve that looked like deformity. The House was wooden, a battered castle of a place wedged and propped off the top of the mountain on great rough trunks socketed into the grey rock. There was only one entrance, a swaying unguarded timber walkway that sprang off the end of a shelf of rock just big enough for a man to stand on, if he pressed himself back against the rock wall behind him.
The walkway – a spiritual challenge in itself – was twenty paces long. At its other end the three Housekeepers stood waiting, faint and grey in the starlight. They carried no lanterns; in deference to the needs of the Painter, the Watch House at night was kept in complete darkness, and so were its keepers. As Belbis came nearer he could see their empty eye sockets, blacker shadows in the grey. He had shuddered when he first saw them.
Painters were chosen young, but Keepers were selected at birth.
He bowed to the Housekeepers as he had done for the last seven years. With the enhanced senses of the lifelong sightless they somehow registered his bow – he always wondered how; air currents? The rustle of his robe? – and bowed in return. Then they stood aside and gestured him into the Watch House.
His feet knew the way. He walked up steps, and then up narrower steps, to the Painters’ loft. The bench was empty except for the two shallow antimony bowls, as wide as the palm of his hand. The rest of the tools were his. He opened his pack, took out the leather roll and unrolled it on the bench between the bowls. The tools came into view one by one: the pens with their different-sized nibs, from thin to bulky. The brushes, and then the other tools. And the dressings.
He thought for a moment before selecting one of the glass shards. He took it between finger and thumb, lifted aside his robe to expose the top of his thigh, and made a quick slicing movement.
Blood welled in dark berry drops. He put the shard back on the leather, picked up a bowl and pressed its edge into his thigh just below the cut. A slow trickle collected in the bottom of the bowl.
Belbis waited until he had a pool two fingers across. Then he put the bowl on the table and pressed a dressing against his cut, shutting his eyes against the sting and counting to ten to give the astringent time to seal his flesh. Then he picked up a fine outline pen, dipped it in the bowl and poised it above the sheet of paper. Only then did he reach up with his other hand to pull the cord which opened the moon shutters.
For a moment he stared, wide eyed. Then he screamed.
For the first time in his life, for the first time in five hundred lives, the sky held the wrong number of Gods.
His scream brought the Housekeepers. At first he babbled and pointed at the patch of sky between the moon shutters but they shook their heads and gestured at their empty sockets. So then he told them.
The old men conferred. Then, looking grim, they waved Belbis to follow them. They led him down flights and flights of stairs he had barely noticed to a part of the Watch House he had never visited before: a chamber that must have been carved out of the peak of the mountain itself because unlike everything else in the Watch House it was made not of wood but of stone, as dry and dusty as ancient death. In the middle of the chamber there was a single black waist-high pillar that looked like a cannon, mounted vertically with its blank mouth gaping upwards.
The oldest of the Housekeepers passed his hand over the mouth of the thing just once. Then he stood back.
For a moment nothing happened. Then Belbis jumped. A quiet voice had spoken out of nowhere. The accent was outlandish but the words were clear. ‘Ignition active,’ it said. ‘Please vacate the area.’
Belbis looked at the Housekeepers. They had linked hands to form a circle round the pillar. ‘The thing said to go,’ he said. ‘Where should we go?’
The oldest spoke, without turning his face towards Belbis. ‘Go as far as you can.’ Then he clamped his lips firmly closed.
Belbis turned and ran. He had reached the outer walkway when the light exploded soundlessly behind him.
Down on the plains, people looked up and wondered at the fierce green beam that pierced the sky.
IT WAS LATE and Seldyan’s nose and mouth were dry with the abrasive dust which was everywhere in here. She huffed down her nose, feeling the warm breath escaping across her face through the perished seals of the filter mask.
Most nights that would have bothered her very much, but tonight she didn’t care. She squinted through the haze; Hufsza was in front of her, his shoulders squirming in the confined space as he moved a vac nozzle over the surface of the duct. They were paired off. Of the others, Kot and Lyste were out of sight, working in their own duct. She could hear occasional scrapes and clangs as they cleaned. There was no sign of Merish, but that was a good thing. There wasn’t supposed to be, yet.
They were inching their way through the sinistral whorl of the rear branch of the main carbon dioxide manifold. If it had been running, they would have been blown backwards out of it and into the billion cubic metres of the biggest single biomass plant in the Spin – a huge, enclosed forest in its own space-going cube. But not before they had been asphyxiated by all the growth-encouraging carbon dioxide.
Unfortunately the carbon dioxide didn’t just encourage the biomass. It also nurtured a whole ecosystem of moulds and fungi, some of them unique to the micro environment. At least one of the moulds was actually parasitic on a combination of two others, and most of them seemed to give off spores that accumulated in sooty, gritty black clumps. They piled up in corners, built up into filter-clogging cakes, and broke apart into drifting clouds of unbelievably pervasive dust.
Cleaning was a horrible, regular, manual job, done by people with vacs and wire brushes and no rights and no choices.
It probably said ‘Hive Technicians’ on the order. They were duct monkeys to everyone else. Two teams of two people crawling along in the heat and the dust with their cramped limbs aching, and one banksman watching their backs from the entrance. Two people manually scratching the black stuff away with wire brushes and sucking it up with moaning vac nozzles, until their backs ached and their knees ached and the palms of their hands were raw – and who would be punished if they didn’t meet a daily target.
She shook herself. Today was not about death, and she needed to concentrate. She resettled the mask on her face and peered through the dust past Hufsza. In the sameness of the ducts it was hard to gauge distance, but surely they were almost there? If they had missed the place there would be no more chances. Or if there had been a refit. Or if …
She reached out and tapped Hufsza’s foot. He glanced over his shoulder, eyebrows raised. She nodded and gestured ahead.
A few metres in front of them, there was an extra seam in the metal surface. A metre further on was another.
Seldyan felt a grin scratching against the mask. It was still there.
A movement in front of her made her realize Hufsza had seen it too; he sat back on his heels, his head brushing the top of the duct, and switched off the vac.
It fell silent. Seldyan slapped the metal in front of her sharply, twice. The echoes clanged and fell away. She listened intently. On the edge of hearing came the sound of vacs winding down, and then, much louder, two slaps.
Everyone was in place. Or, rather, both teams of two were in place. She just had to hope Merish was too. She slapped the metal just once more, then shut her eyes and began counting silently. She got to five.
Boom.
It was a deep, soft sound that she felt through the metal of the duct almost before she heard it. As it faded, a perfect rectangular smoke-ring of dust rolled along the duct towards them. She nodded to herself. Merish was on the case.
There was an electrical-sounding buzz and a sharp smell of burning. The two seams glowed dull red, then quickly climbed the spectrum to a fierce yellow-white. Then the metre-long section of metalwork between the seams dropped out.
The unofficial, unnoticed exit was open.
Seldyan took a deep breath. ‘Go,’ she said. It was unnecessary; Hufsza had already shunted himself forward. He dropped through the gap and disappeared.
Seldyan shuffled to the edge of the gap. She had wondered if she would hesitate when she got to this part. She didn’t; the worst she could expect by following Huf was a quick death. The best she could earn herself by staying put was a very slow one.
She shut her eyes and launched herself.
She dropped like a stone.
No one in the Hive ever talked openly about escape. But then, no one talked about survival either, and yet they all thought about that all the time, too.
‘Hive’ stood for ‘high value’. Hivers took that as a bitter joke.
The Hive was the biggest forced-labour colony in the Spin. It was the economic well-spring of the Inside, a space-borne city state within a state. Its million or so inhabitants were hired out to do anything at all, for anyone at all. It was slavery, on a more-than-industrial scale, and Seldyan had never known anything else.
Her stomach yawned with the acceleration and her body yelled at her to open her eyes, to flail, to save herself. She managed to ignore it, curling instead into the tightest ball she could and keeping her eyes screwed shut. Right now the best and simplest thing she could do for herself was just to fall in a straight line.
The cube’s internal monitoring, if any of it had survived Merish’s attention, would now be showing four desperate escapees falling to certain death. A straight line was the only sure way to prove it wrong. If she glided off track by more than a hundred metres or so, she was jelly.
Well, fairly sure. Her terminal speed in the thick humid atmosphere of the cube shouldn’t be too high, Merish had said, but it seemed high enough. She could feel herself tumbling, and a wind that behaved like a solid battered at her. The temptation to open her eyes was almost unbearable, but she had schooled herself to resist it.
Then something else struck at her, something that felt like being whipped with fog.
She shouted with relief. The line had been straight enough – she had hit the Feather Palms.
From their oily sap the Feather Palms provided almost half of the basic vegetable fat consumed by the Inside. Each tree was over a hundred metres tall. Their roots were shallow, and to compensate for this and to resist the high winds on their native planet they clumped together so tightly that their trunks came close to touching. Even here in this regimented environment they were planted in a hexagonal close-packed array just a metre apart. Thankfully no one had yet managed to engineer out their soft, dense, wastefully deep canopies.
At her speed soft was a matter of opinion, but deep was undeniable. Even curled up, Seldyan slowed in a series of wrenching jolts that felt as if every joint had been dislocated. Any extended limbs would certainly have been torn off. But she slowed, and eventually she felt she had lost speed enough to open her eyes and take control.
Branches were thrashing past her; she grabbed at one and lost her grip and some skin, but it had trimmed her speed to stoppable. The next one she held on to, breathing hard. Her hand hurt and her nose was full of the sickly oily smell of the palm, and she could feel her grin trying to split her face.
She waited until her breathing had got halfway back to normal. Then she hand-over-handed her way down through the remainder of the canopy until she could angle down a single branch to the main trunk. The trunk was smooth, and slender enough at this height for her to close her arms around it. She slid down for thirty metres or so until it became too thick for her to span, then took stock. The palms really were close together; if she stretched out a leg like this she could get a foothold on a neighbouring trunk. She turned her back to her own tree, braced herself against it and shunted herself down, ignoring the pain in her back.
She almost made it to ground level before her foot slipped on an oily patch.
‘Shit!’ The yelp was out before she could stop it. She hit a lot of roots with the small of her back. It knocked the breath out of her, and she lay there panting for a moment. Then, as the spasms in her diaphragm quieted, she rolled over into a crouch, looked around through the dim light – and saw nothing at all except trees, and heard nothing except a thick woody silence.
She didn’t dare try to stand. The forest floor wasn’t really a floor. The palms relied on sprawling above-ground root spreads for what little stability they had, and their vast thirst shrank the soil so that ground level became a knotted rooty obstacle course littered with loose fallen branches that were even more treacherous than the roots. The next part of the plan really had to work. Otherwise, a few years hence, she was going to be found on this exact spot, stone dead and smelling of tree oil.
She cast about carefully in the branch brash and selected a strong-looking limb about half her own height, picked it up, hefted it and then took the hardest swing she could manage at the trunk of the tree she had shinned down.
Electronic communication was out down here, for the same reason it was out up in duct-world, but hitting things was fine.
The tree rang like a musical instrument.
She listened as the sound faded away. She didn’t have to wait long; almost immediately there were three answering sounds. She nodded. All safe.
The next part was down to Merish. As had been the last, but Seldyan didn’t feel guilty about that; she and the other three had a major job to do later. If they got as far as later.
Besides, she knew herself well enough, feeling guilty wasn’t her strong suit.
She did her best to sit down on a root. It wasn’t easy, but in the end she managed a kind of perch, if she braced one foot against another root. It was miserably uncomfortable, but she didn’t care. Even uncomfortable could feel good, if it was a step away from the Hive.
I’m never going back, she thought. The word felt like a chant. Ne-ver, ne-ver, ne-ver.
A few minutes later she looked up. The woody silence had stopped being a silence – she could hear a regular knocking, about twice the speed of a heartbeat. She looked around quickly, and then nodded to herself. A few trunks away two big parallel roots formed a bridge she could just about stand on.
Beneath them was a void big enough to curl up in. That would do. She hoped the noise was Merish, but it might not be. Hiding could be good, if it was someone else.
She teetered on to the bridge, leaned against a trunk and peered cautiously round it towards where she thought the sound was coming from. When she saw it she wanted to laugh, partly out of relief that it was Merish rather than someone else, but mainly because it just looked – funny.
He was standing up, but she wasn’t sure how. He was on a platform which looked as if it was using the tree trunks like vertical monkey bars. It was grasping its way from one trunk to the next, about a metre above the rootscape, using things that looked like tree-sized lock-grip pliers. Somehow it managed to stay more or less horizontal, but some side-to-side wobble was inevitable. There was a T-shaped handle at waist height, and Merish looked as if he was having to hang on to it quite hard.
She leaned out and waved. He nodded and did something to a control on the handle. The platform slowed, coming to a stop a couple of trunks away.
She grinned at him, and then saw his expression and stopped grinning. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Tell me. No clear run, right?’
He nodded. ‘Definitely no clear run. There’s an extra shift on, fuck knows why.’
She felt herself tensing. ‘A whole extra shift? Ten bodies?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry, Sel.’
‘Why? You didn’t invite them. I’d like to know who did.’ She stared into the distance for a moment, calculating. ‘Are the main shift sorted?’
He nodded. ‘Sure. Confined in a half-exploded control room by an inexplicable series of systems failures. That bit worked okay. But there’s enough of the extra shift to cover the ways out.’
‘Are there any inside the Planter?’
‘I don’t know. There could be.’
‘We’d better assume there are then. Let’s get the others. We might need to think of another definition of exit.’ She gave the platform a jaundiced look. ‘You’re fine on that thing, for a given value of fine, but it’s only big enough to torture one at a time. What about the rest of us?’
His eyes flickered and he pointed over his shoulder.
She followed the gesture. ‘Oh …’
There was a line of four platforms behind him.
He looked embarrassed. ‘They were all I could manage. They’re slaved to this one. When they’re not hugging trees they just float. It’s pretty comfortable.’
She nodded. ‘You know, Merish, comfortable doesn’t really bother me? Freedom, now that I care about, and you’ve done your job.’ She squared her shoulders. ‘Let’s go and find the team. It’s our turn now.’
He looked away for a moment, and she saw his lips twitching.
Ten minutes later they had picked up the others and formed a wobbly line of five with Merish in the lead. Seldyan was feeling sick, partly from the uneasy jolting of the platform and partly from the pervasive smell of oil from the Feather Palms, but she still didn’t care. They were closing on the edge of the plantation and another step towards freedom, even if there were extra obstacles; reaching the edge also meant that they would soon be floating, not gripping. That was good under any circumstances, even these.
They had talked quickly about those circumstances once the five of them were together. They had a plan. It would have to do, because none of them could think of anything cleverer.
As they reached the edge of the stand of Feather Palms they split up. No one said anything.
The Planter was divided into strips a hundred metres wide. Every second one was palms; the others were mainly low-growing succulents that acted as combined moisture moderators and firebreaks. Seldyan turned her platform down the strip and gunned it so that it tilted forward and built up speed until the wind rush scoured her eyes and tried to tear her hands from the T-bar. She hugged the margin of the palms just in case it might shelter her from anyone who might be looking, but someone was bound to see her soon. Speed was the thing.
The end of the strip was rushing towards her. She held her speed as long as she dared, then reared the platform steeply backwards at the last second, threw it round a right angle that made her inner ears dance and into the narrow space between the end of the strips and the inner curtain wall of the Planter. She held on to the turn by a miracle, then leaned forward and twisted the grip to full power. There wasn’t much room; her speed built up an air dam in front of her which racketed into the end of the palm stand and bounced off the trunks with a staccato whistle that hammered at her eardrums. Then she was past the palms and hissing through the open air at the end of another low strip.
She covered the kilometre to the far corner of the Planter in just over twenty seconds, and hauled the platform to a halt. Her face felt abraded, her arms ached and her ears were ringing, and it wasn’t over yet.
She had had the furthest to go. Everyone else should be in place, but she didn’t have any way of checking because they were too far apart to communicate by hitting trees, so she would just have to assume.
That meant the time was now. She powered down the platform and it sank to the ground. Inert, it was surprisingly light. She flipped it over without much effort, examined it for a second and then ran a finger over a rectangular seam on the smooth base. The seam popped open, revealing two greyish squares covered with ominous-looking symbols in a language she couldn’t read. No user-serviceable parts inside, she thought.
‘Platforms have two cell packs,’ Merish had said, ‘but they can get by for a while on one.’
She had looked at him for a moment, and then asked, ‘Long enough?’
There had been the slightest pause before he nodded. She didn’t think anyone else had noticed.
Now she reached into the space and pulled at one of the squares. It turned out to be the square end of a cube about two hands across. As it came free there was a faint crackle. She turned it over; there was a recessed contact array hedged about with even more ominous symbols.
The wire brush she had used to scrub the surface of the duct was still hanging at her belt. She unhooked it. Then she replaced the cover and righted the platform, took the cell pack and walked towards the edge of the palm stand. Ten paces into the trees she stopped and put the cell pack down, contacts upwards. She took the wire brush and held it out, bristles downwards. She gulped, dropped it straight down towards the contacts, and was running by the time it landed.
Even with her back turned the arc was bright. There was an angry buzz, and then a wet-sounding explosion. By that point she was at the platform. She jumped on, gripped the bar and leaned the thing as far forward as she dared.
The acceleration almost tore her arms off. She allowed herself just one glance to the side – the first few palms in the stand were already on fire, set off by the electro-chemical inferno at their bases.
The whole stand of oily trees would burn. She just had to hope that the fire-front would be fast enough.
But not too fast. She tried to force the grip further, but it was at maximum. She didn’t know what the top speed of the platform was, or how long it could keep it up on only one cell pack, or if the whole mad scheme would work, or anything.
She still felt like whooping.
Then something screeched and slammed behind her, and a wall of sub-sonic noise shook the platform.
She risked a glance over her shoulder. The first firebreak had dropped. Now the first hundred flaming metres of the Planter were isolated by a thousand tonnes of mineral-fibre curtain wall. It was the next-to-last defence of the Planter, designed to isolate just about any problem.
Except for five improvised incendiary bombs all at once. She glanced again – the trees in front of the firebreak were smouldering. As she looked, flames leapt. She faced forward and gritted her teeth. Even this far ahead of the fire the air smelled of burning oil.
Slam. That was the second wall. Eight to go. She didn’t look this time; she had felt herself slowing the last time she had turned. Speed was everything. The burning smell was getting stronger.
Slam. The concussion seemed stronger too. She was losing ground. Seven to go. She could feel radiated heat on the back of her head.
Slam. It was getting harder to breathe. By now there should have been an air-wash blowing back across the Planter, driving the fire into itself, but instead the air was full of billowing oily smoke.
She remembered. They had broken the ducts. The air-wash couldn’t help, either by clearing the smoke or slowing the fire-front. She wanted to thump the controls, but she didn’t dare.
Slam. She blinked. That one had seemed quieter. For a moment she thought she must be gaining, but that couldn’t be right; the heat and the smoke were even stronger. Then she realized. It wasn’t that the firebreak had been quieter – everything else was louder. There was a thrumming roar. Now she risked another look over her shoulder, and immediately wished she hadn’t.
Where there should have been trees, there was boiling black smoke shot through with expanding bubbles of fire. It was far too close, and it was getting closer.
It wasn’t going to work after all. Then she corrected herself: it wasn’t going to work for her. She hoped the others were ahead of her. It was supposed to be impossible for Hivers to break out; four impossibles out of a possible five would be pretty good going.
Besides, she wasn’t done yet. She leaned forward as far as possible, drew her elbows into her body to streamline herself and twisted the control so hard she thought it would break, thinking that if this was what freedom felt like – then it felt good.
Better than good. Better than anything she had ever experienced.
And then she felt the platform slowing down.
She actually laughed. When she saw Merish she would tell him that ‘long enough’ was not long enough, after all. Except that now it looked like she wouldn’t be seeing Merish again.
The platform dropped to the ground and she threw herself off it and into a dead run. She had no idea how far she was ahead of the fire-front, or how far behind the last firebreak and when it would drop. All she knew was running, and trying to breathe air that was no longer proper air but smoke and soot and heat that rasped her throat and fouled her lungs. Her heart hammered and her vision began to fade.
The screech and slam of the last firebreak were dead overhead. Her legs gave way; she dropped and rolled awkwardly, hoping it was still forward.
She came to a stop and for a second there was nothing. Then she heard the fire and knew that it was all over.
Then she felt arms on her, uncurling her.
‘Seldyan! You okay?’
She opened her eyes. It was Merish. At first she wanted to throw her arms round him and she tried to raise herself. Then she realized, and fell back. If he was here they must both have failed. She corrected herself – she had failed both of them.
‘Seldyan! Shit, will you snap out of it? You need to be ready.’
She shook her head. ‘Ready for what?’
‘What do you think? You still got your vac tab?’
It was hard to think, and besides, he was talking nonsense. She humoured him, patting the upper pocket of her coverall. ‘Yep, still there. So what?’
‘Then fucking take it!’
She opened her eyes properly and stared at him. ‘Seriously?’
‘Of course seriously! Take it now!’
Still staring at him, she fumbled the little pill out of her pocket. It was standard issue for anyone who went space-side, even Hivers. Boiling away into a vacuum, if you were exposed to it, wasn’t good. The vac tab bought you minutes.
Her brain came back to life. If she was taking a tab then that must mean …
She took it, and looked at Merish. ‘How long?’
He shrugged. ‘Should be ten seconds.’
‘Right. We’d better hold on, then.’ She rolled over, extended her hands and drove her stiffened fingers into the soil between the succulents. For a frantic moment she found nothing. Then her fingers met something and curled around it. It was the geotextile mesh that held the soil together. It should be strong enough.
She saw Merish lying down next to her, his hands pushing down as hers had. Then she heard it – louder than the crash of the firewalls, louder than the roar of the burning trees, it was a sound that had meant frozen boiling death to ten thousand generations of space-faring animals.
It was the howl of air racing out of something very fast.
Seldyan looked up and felt her eyes widen. The vaulted roof was splitting into segments like the skin of a fruit. If she had needed confirmation, here it was; they had made it to the last cell after all, and now the Planter had activated its ultimate defence. When the fire can’t be contained, sod the biomass – save the structure. The whole thing was opening itself to vacuum.
She held on.
A hurricane gripped her. Shrieking winds hauled her body off the ground. A vortex of plants, burning tree fragments and even the soil itself was flicking up towards the void. The force on her arms was massive – but manageable.
Then she saw one of Merish’s hands grasp at the soil, and flail, and fly loose. The other, still buried, was shaking. As she watched, the hooked fingers began to uncurl.
Her muscles made the decision before her brain could intervene. She undid the fingers of her right hand, yanked it out of the soil and flung it out and back just as Merish yelped and lost his grip completely.
She caught his shoulder then lost it, his upper arm then lost it, and finally felt his hand close on hers. She gripped back as hard as she could, and gritted her teeth as his mass tried to tear her in half. Her shoulders were close to dislocating and her fingers screamed at her.
She ignored them. It’s just pain, she told herself. This time it’s pain you’re choosing. Take it.
She took it.
They were buffeted by a storm of shattered timber and smouldering leaves, and she shut her eyes and got ready to be battered to death. Then, at last, the pull lessened and she opened her eyes.
A cloud of ice crystals fogged the view, forming a swirling vortex that followed the clashing debris out through the open roof. When it had gone, so had the last of the air. Without the vac tab she would have had about twenty seconds; with it, maybe three minutes. It was enough, if the hurried plan they had made in the plantation worked out.
As the wind had died the Planter’s grav had reasserted itself. They dropped to the ground fairly gently with Merish on top in the total silence of a vacuum. He let go of her hand and rolled off, and she gingerly uncurled her buried fingers from the mesh.
Letting go managed to hurt even more than holding on. She squeezed her hand shut, and fascinatedly watched a drop of blood boil away into the vacuum.
She shook herself. Merish was gesturing towards the end wall and she saw his platform, somehow still sitting obediently on the ground. There were several questions she had no time to ask him, and no breath either; they ran. Merish hauled the platform upright, jumped on and gestured to Seldyan. She climbed on behind and locked her arms round his waist.
Even with two aboard the platform was very, very fast in a vacuum. They were at the end wall in twenty seconds – Merish’s remaining power cell had obviously taken far less of a hammering than hers – and standing in front of an oddly old-fashioned-looking gas-tight door with a control wheel in its middle. She looked at it and mouthed, ‘Fully manual?’
He nodded. They gripped the rim of the wheel and turned. It resisted, gave and rotated through a whole turn before taking up the load. Another full turn and it stopped with a sound that Seldyan felt as clang even if she couldn’t hear it, and the door swung open.
They bundled past it into the airlock. The door shut behind them, and there was the ice-crystal kiss of air freezing as it expanded into a vacuum.
There was an indicator patch on the wall. Seldyan watched it, feeling her heart beginning to pump against her ribs. She was fighting the urge to try to breathe, as while the patch was red breathing would be a bad idea: even the vac tab couldn’t stave off the effects of thin cold air on starved lung tissue. She had to wait until the lock thought its own atmosphere was warm enough and thick enough.
Green. There. It was okay to breathe.
It still hurt though. The chill rasped at nerves she had never noticed before. She rode it out and then looked at Merish.
‘Thanks.’
He nodded, reaching out to take her hand. She winced, but let him turn it over and gently uncurl her fist. It was filthy with soil, but the deep cuts at the bases of her fingers had stained it a glistening purple.
He looked sharply at her. ‘Oh, shit …’
She shrugged. ‘It was that or let go. There’ll be meds in the shuttle. I assume the shuttle is our next stop?’
‘Yes. The other three should be in the next lock along. Sorry, Seldyan.’
‘Don’t be.’ She grinned, and it felt good. ‘Because you know what we’re going to do next? With your help, technical maestro, we’re going to borrow a shitload of money.’
He smiled slowly. ‘I can do that,’ he said.
SELDYAN’S CHILDHOOD HAD seemed normal as far as she could remember. The Hive had been – everything. She remembered food and sleep, and adults that were tall and remote and occasionally forbidding and mostly irrelevant.
But then, she supposed, most childhoods probably did seem normal until something arose to challenge the seeming. Her challenge had come late. It hadn’t been when she was four, when she had been taken out of class one day and hurried to a room she had never seen before, and she had been told to take off her shift and curl over, and something sharp had pressed against her back near the top of her bottom and then it had hurt so horribly, and she had howled until her throat hurt as much as her back but she couldn’t move because they were holding her.
They had let her rest for the afternoon, and with the evening bowl they had given her something that made her sleep. When she woke the next day she felt almost all right, just a bit sore. When she got to class she heard someone say she had been chipped. It was a new word, and she remembered it.
It hadn’t been when she was just beginning to bud and the Supervisor had wangled her a single room instead of a dormitory space, and had visited her on the very first night just when she was feeling so lucky. She had known men were different, obviously, but she hadn’t known it could be that sore. She had tolerated his fumbling and grunting and his mess for two weeks. Then one day while they were all chanting a lesson, there was a sharp pop overhead and one of the light globes became a spray of glassy shards. A big one landed on the surface in front of her; she managed to snatch it and conceal it up the sleeve of her shift. It cut her a little but she didn’t care.
Later, it cut the Supervisor much better.
She expected to be punished but for once nothing happened. She never saw the Supervisor again. She supposed he couldn’t be a supervisor without what she had cut from him.
She had never seen so much blood.
No. The challenge to her seeming had come later, when she was fifteen. Someone had smuggled in a book, an actual old-fashioned book such as she had heard of but never seen. It had a screen, and buttons to advance the pages, and it used two words that she had never heard, but whose meaning became clear very quickly as she read on, oblivious to risk.
The risk became reality. They found her and took her away, and this time she was truly punished, oh yes, punished until she wished her body didn’t belong to her. Until she knew in intimate close focus, one at a time and several times over, what that chip could do. But she remembered the words, and what they meant.
Mother, and father.
A little while afterwards they moved her out of the dormitory and into one of the Villages and she learned another word she wasn’t supposed to know.
It was slave.
HIS FEET KNEW the way and his nose knew the air, but it still took him a long time to retrace his steps. He could feel the changing ground, the way that the jagged rocks of the peak became the smooth worn surface of the lower path. He could feel the change from rock to moss, and from moss to grass if he strayed from the path. The sound of falling water guided him down the sharp-edged little river valleys, and he learned with wonder how dense and detailed the soundscape could be. Even the slightest turn of his head changed it, telling him that here the water poured over a boulder and there the bed broadened and slowed. The air, too. Not only did it become thicker as he descended – how much thicker he could hardly believe – but the scent! Rock had a smell. Wet rock smelled different to dry rock, and one rock smelled different to another. Not knowing the real names of any of the rocks, he gave them his own names according to their smell. Saltstone, Bitterstone and Sulphur Rock.
Smell guided him to food, too. At first he dared not leave the path but as his hunger and his confidence grew he began to make short side-trips to follow the scents of berries and toadstools.
Somehow, despite his blindness, Belbis didn’t quite starve.
Even the times of day changed. Day and night had no meaning for him, except that night was a bad time to sleep because he would wake up cold and damp. Instead he marked his own daily cycle, and again gave it his own names. Mouse Quiet, for example, that was the time at the end of the night when the night-seeing hunters had finished but the day dwellers were still sleepy or asleep. If he stood very still and listened very hard he could hear the diffident little rustles of the smallest creatures taking advantage of the lull to – well, what? Scavenge, he supposed, or dig a burrow. Perhaps just to breathe without having their tiny breath triangulated by death in the air.
Mouse Quiet was followed by Dew Time, and he usually walked as briskly as he could through that to fight off the cold and to keep dry until the time he named Sun Greet.
His feet were telling him he was near the outskirts of Three Quarter Circle town when his ears and nose alerted him to something. At first he wasn’t sure what it was. He stopped and thought.
The sun felt directly above him and an onshore wind was in his face. At this hour the harbour should have been busy no matter the state of the tide. He should have been able to smell the oily reek of the rendering vats with its undertone of burning peat. There should have been the click of ropes against masts and the distant grinding breath of the old steam engines that ran the hauling winches. Especially there should have been the cries of the merchants.
Instead there was quiet. No, that wasn’t right; instead, there was the absence of familiar noises. They had been replaced by an odd undertow, almost at the limit of his hearing. And the air did smell, but that was wrong too.
Without thinking about it he found he had broken into a run. Senses he had developed on the downward journey mined the unconscious knowledge of half his lifetime – there were familiar cobbles beneath his feet. From here, downhill two hundred paces, until the cross-shore wind struck his right cheek, and then to the right, and he would be at the Prater House. They would look after him there, and when he had told the Klerikers what had happened they would be able to explain it to him. They would know what to do.
Meanwhile his nose sought the smells that should have been there, and his ears the cries, and then he felt his pace faltering. And now there were cries and there was smoke, yes. But the cries were angry and the smoke smelled of wood and tar and something worse, something that made his gorge rise, and as he came to a halt in front of what should be the Prater House he felt a hot wind on his cheeks. Suddenly his mind supplied an image of burning buildings.
Now the cries were coming quickly closer, and had become focused as if the men had something to shout about.
‘Another blood-sucking priest!’
‘Didn’t we get them all then?’
‘Guess this one’s been a-wandering …’
He turned in panic, but hands seized him.
‘Drag him in front of the Merchants.’
‘To hell with that. Who put them over us? They’re as bad as the fucking priests. Hang him up with the rest of the black bastards!’
‘No! Wait …’
Someone pushed him to the ground, and there was the warm damp breath of stump spirits in his face. One breath, two breaths, three, and he knew he was being inspected.
‘Young. Grey robes. Oh sweet shit, let it be him …’
‘If it’s him he’ll be scarred.’ Another voice.
‘They have potions to stop that.’
‘Or witchery …’
‘Just bloody look, will you?’
Hands took his robes and dragged them upwards, and he felt the hot wind on his thighs.
‘Well now …’
‘What?’
‘It’s him. It’s the Idiot.’
Voices roared around him. Through the roar he sensed the warmth of a face close to his, and more stump brew. The voice was harsh and hoarse.
‘What did you do?’ Hands took his robe and he felt himself lifted and thrust back so that the back of his head struck the cobbles. Red-green stars fizzed across his darkness and he felt the breath whistling out of him as if it would never return. ‘What – did – you – DO?’
It was so hard to make words. For the whole of his life Belbis had treasured the thought that if he could only find the right words, someone would understand him, just for once. He made a supreme effort, expelling each word on a gust of breath. ‘Counted Gods. Wrong number.’
There was a pause, while the roaring voices went on roaring. Then came a sound like a grunt of disgust and the hands let go of his robe.
Then the first blows landed. The blows became kicks from men who grunted with effort, loud enough to be heard over the crowd noise. He covered his head and began to cry. It hurt to breathe, and through his tears he realized that the clicks he heard within himself were his own ribs breaking.