‘Yep. Scared shitless. Scared like prey.’ It wagged its head. ‘Know what I’m talking about!’
Skarbo stared at it, and shuddered. For a moment he had imagined the creature with a beak full of wriggling insects.
Then the light blinked twice. He looked at The Bird. ‘Time to shut our eyes?’
‘Pah. Stare down anything.’
‘Your choice.’ Skarbo shut his eyes.
There was a busy hissing, just above the limit of his hearing, and air currents wafted over him. It went on for about a minute.
Then it fell silent. There was a second’s quiet before The Bird said, ‘Oh very funny.’
Skarbo opened his eyes.
The plain walls had gone. They were now covered with something like a very fine dense moss that changed colour depending on how you looked at it. It extended up and across the ceiling in a gently iridescent curve that looked blue near the floor, and merged into a dull sandy orange above his head.
There was a couch covered in the same stuff. The design was unfamiliar but it looked usable. Even comfortable. Something in front of the couch looked like an entertainment unit.
Skarbo glanced towards the smaller room. The same moss, and species-appropriate sanitation. He looked back at The Bird. ‘What’s funny?’
It flapped up from the floor and circled a tall pole with a bar across the top of it. ‘See that? Bloody perch? Oh yes. Thank you very much. Speciesism, that is. Perch. Huh.’
Skarbo blinked. It had never occurred to him to wonder where and how, or even if, The Bird slept. ‘What would you prefer?’ he asked.
‘Doesn’t matter! Rest anywhere. Sleep flying. Don’t care. Just not a bloody perch.’ It hovered next to the perch and pecked it sharply twice, making a quick high click each time, then flew off across the room and disappeared into the smaller chamber. The door snapped shut, but Skarbo could still hear angry muttering.
He shrugged and settled down on the couch. Then something occurred to him. He stood up and wandered over to the perch. The surface of the bar was smooth, dull metal and it only took a few seconds to locate two fresh pock-marks where The Bird had pecked it. He extended a claw and dragged it across the surface. It left no mark at all. He tried harder with the same result.
Interesting.
But he was tired, in a way that his younger self could never have imagined. He settled back down, arranging his damaged leg carefully in an attempt – vain, he knew – to keep it as long as possible and, for the second time in only a day, tried to compose himself for sleep.
And failed, utterly.
He wished his leg would heal as quickly as The Bird’s wing. Because it hadn’t seemed troubled at all by flying, and that was interesting too.
He stared at nothing for a while.
Almost eight hundred years. He had rejected the world – all the worlds except one – for that long sweep of time, his focus far away on a distant object he would never visit. An object that he had thought, and feared, was proving him wrong over and over. He felt almost cheated that it had after all been proving him right.
And for all that time, while his back had been turned, the real universe had been full of events he had never seen.
And there stood the entertainment unit, if that was what it was.
He pushed himself forwards and reached for some controls. A few nervous minutes later, he had news channels.
War had indeed broken out – but that seemed too rapid a description. Fostees, who had been studying politics, and more specifically had been drinking at the time, had once said to him there was a threshold of conflict above which wars became general.
Skarbo had sighed, and asked him to elaborate because he knew he was going to anyway.
‘Simple.’ Fostees put the wide, shallow cup of hot spirit down on the low table. ‘Lots of people fight for some of the time, agreed?’
‘Yes. I can’t see the point of it, but yes.’
‘Of course you can’t. You’re splendid, you know that? But they do. And some people fight for lots of the time. But if you have lots of people fighting for lots of the time, then war becomes the paradigm, you see?’
Skarbo thought about that. ‘How do you define lots?’
Fostees picked up the cup. ‘Depends. In a single country, it’s very variable. With the right background you can have half the population bashing each other but the wheels stay on, the economy functions, everyone happy. Except for the half that are bashing. Although they might be happy too.’
He drank, noisily, and then dropped the cup. ‘Fuck …’
Skarbo sighed and gathered the shards of ceramic. ‘Go on.’
‘Thanks. So, the bigger the setting the better the maths work. Anything bigger than a decent planetary system is homo-thingy enough. Ten per cent.’
‘Homogeneous? Yes. I see.’
‘Very well done you. So if ten per cent of everyone is at war, then sooner or later everyone is at war. My head hurts.’
‘You deserve it.’
But Fostees had been dead for hundreds of years, and the war was now. It had been brewing for centuries – longer indeed than Hemfrets had suggested – and the ten per cent had been passed, and was growing to encompass almost everything.
And was called the Warfront.
The Warfront was a permanent war economy. It assimilated, it coerced, it ate, and it grew. And it was indeed coming.
Wall Energy Collective
ZEB OPENED HIS eyes, looked around to confirm that he was where he had expected to be, and then closed them again, his chest falling in a deep sigh. To tell the truth he hadn’t really needed to open his eyes to know he was back in the real; other senses could do the job for him just as well.
Waking from the vreality tasted of regret. Every time, no matter how hard he tried to persuade himself.
More specifically, on this occasion it tasted of frost and wood-smoke. He didn’t really understand how frost could have a smell or a taste, but it did – a distinct, unique clarity on the palate that was quite separate from the collateral sharpness of burning fuel.
Once, when he awakened, there would have been other smells. Food, certainly; the sweetly starchy smell of grain broths, with acerbic overtones from mugs of hot infusions. Even longer ago, there might have been other things to notice. Sometimes even the softly musky scent of Aish’s body, and a warmth next to him. She had disliked being with him when he was virtual, but she had stayed even so.
But that had been many, many awakenings ago. These days, Aish had pretty much given up on him. He had tried to explain a couple of times, but he must not have done it justice, and besides, her own responsibilities had grown so much since those early days.
But to be fair, he had trouble explaining it to himself sometimes. It was always easier when he was in the vreality, but then everything was easier in the vreality. Aish had called it addiction.
He reached up to his head and peeled off the close-fitting wire mesh skull-cap that was his connection into the vrealities. It snagged in his hair and he swore quietly and fiddled it loose.
It had been a while since he had cut his hair.
He opened his eyes and pushed back against the cot to shove himself upright. The thick cover fell away, and he grabbed at a robe. The temperature in the room was just on the wrong side of freezing; he guessed it was still well before noon.
His room was four metres square. One wall was transparent, a single sheet which had once included sophisticated insulation – but ‘once’ was hundreds of years ago. Now it was just basic glass, slightly dimmed by the huge lead content needed to stop it shattering on really cold nights. It leaked heat.
The view was almost worth it.
The room was two hundred metres up the Wall, part of a narrow inhabited band that separated the machine deck below from the solar wall above. The Wall was really the northern edge of an ancient quarry, about half a kilometre deep. The floor stretched away southwards for several kilometres, ending in a shallower cliff which you co
uld see, on clear days, as a sharp line because of the pool of shadow at its base. He could see it now – the sun was still at a low angle, glancing across the plain and glittering off the hundred thousand or so solar panels they had mortgaged themselves to install at Aish’s encouragement.
They would glitter, and the sun would trickle into his room, for another two hours. Then the sun would climb above the Skylid and that would be that until early evening. Their panels, and the strip of cold-hardened crops at the base of the Wall, would have to do without.
He sighed and turned away from the view. And then jumped. His door was open, and someone was propped in the opening. A young woman, frowning.
‘Back with us?’
Zeb spread his arms. ‘Hi, Shol. As you see.’
‘Aish wants everyone. She’s been waiting for you.’
‘That’s good of her. And thanks for coming to glower at me. I guess she’s too busy to do it herself.’
Shol kept up the frown for a second longer. Then she looked down and shook her head, and Zeb guessed she was hiding a smile. ‘C’mon, Zeb. You know how she is. Especially these days. She wants a meeting.’
‘Well, she’d better have one. What about?’
Shol looked up. ‘What do you think? Get dressed, mate.’
There were forty of them. There had been more at the start, when everything had seemed like a good idea. There had been more last time they had gathered.
Zeb shook himself. That was not a helpful state of mind. On the plus side, it meant there was more food to go round, when there was food. On the other hand, downward trajectories only end in one place. He shook himself again. Then a knot of people at the front of the group parted and a woman held up her hands for quiet. She got it, after a moment, and nodded.
‘Meeting of the Wall Energy Collective, called to order.’
Aish looked tired. He wasn’t surprised. But she still looked good, and she could still command a room.
‘Okay. The general reports are uploaded. Did everyone go through them?’
Most people nodded.
‘Any comments?’
A thin grey-haired male near the front raised a hand. ‘To state the blindingly obvious, the power output’s dropped.’
Aish sighed. ‘Yes, Harmity, that was blindingly obvious. Thanks.’
‘But why?’ Harmity’s voice was as thin as he was, with a whining overtone. ‘In my view—’
But Aish cut him off. ‘We’ll come to the output in a moment. And, if we live to be very old, we might have time to come to your view.’ Some people laughed, but the laughter was nervous and at least as many again didn’t share it. Zeb raised his eyebrows.
Aish waved the laughter away. ‘Look, I won’t keep you waiting. The power is down because Orbital Joule has extended the Skylid. Not very much: about one per cent. Wait; hold on!’
The last word was barely audible; everyone was shouting. Zeb looked round the room, and then met Aish’s eye. For a moment she held the look. Then her lips tightened, and she looked up and filled her lungs. ‘Hey! Everyone! Quiet down.’
The noise subsided to a mutter. Aish nodded and opened her mouth, but Harmity beat her to it. He was shaking with anger.
‘By what right?’ He jabbed a finger in the air. ‘By what right do they do this? Taking away our light?’
‘We don’t have rights!’
Zeb rocked back on his heels; Aish had shouted, not merely raised her voice but shouted. He couldn’t remember her doing that before.
She stood still for a moment. Then she went on. ‘Sorry. But you know it! We’re just a bunch of Suncroppers grubbing away. They don’t care what we do down here. Orbital got the rights to Lid all the planets in the Cluster and the only condition is they have to let enough light fall on the surface to maintain what life is there. And guys? We’re down to forty. In their book that doesn’t need too much light.’
A hand went up at the back. ‘Aish?’
She looked, and smiled a little. ‘Yes, Iverrs?’
The thin young man gulped. ‘If, if there’s not enough sun we can’t be Suncroppers.’
She nodded. ‘Good, Iverrs,’ she said gently.
He gulped again, actually audible across the room. ‘But, but, what else will we do?’
Aish glanced at the people standing next to the young man. One of them reached out a hand to him. ‘Don’t worry, Iverrs. It won’t come to that. Look, come with me.’ And the two of them left, with Iverrs’s body language radiating anxiety.
Harmity watched them go. When the door had closed he turned round. ‘Iverrs may be simple but he has a point!’
Aish sighed. ‘Orbital doesn’t care about Suncropping. Neither does the Cluster. We’re not efficient; we just mop up what’s left.’
‘Which we then plug straight into the servers! No transmission losses! That makes us efficient.’ Harmity glanced round the room, eyebrows raised. No one spoke. The silence seemed to embolden him, and he turned back to Aish, jabbing a finger. ‘The bigger Skylid shades us more. Our own solar output goes down. Our crops grow less! What do we do? What are you going to do?’
Several people stood up, but Aish held up her hands. ‘Before you all start? Last time I checked we were a “we”, not a “you”. Let’s hold on to that.’
People nodded, and most sat down again. Only Harmity was left standing, with his arm still extended like an angry signpost. ‘Very well. But we still need to decide what we are going to do about this.’
Aish nodded. ‘We do. And we will.’
The room was silent for a moment.
Zeb raised a hand. ‘Have Orbital said anything about this? Or the Cluster?’
‘If you mean, have I asked them, then yes. They haven’t answered yet.’ Aish sighed. ‘Look, I’d be lying if I told you everything was decided, but I figure there are still some efficiencies we can go after. Look, you’ve all got stuff to do. I want a meeting of the Engineering group in three hours, guys. Can you make that?’
Half a dozen people nodded.
‘Good. I’ll keep on to Orbital, and meanwhile we’ll get something sorted out. Thanks, everyone.’
It was dismissal and they knew it. Zeb watched for signs of resistance, but after a few seconds people began to stand and move away.
He nodded. Aish still had her authority. For the moment.
He waited until the room had emptied. Then he walked over to where Aish was still standing. ‘Nothing personal, but you look knackered. You still trying to do this on your own?’
She gave him an impatient look. ‘You had your chance to join in.’
‘Had? Past tense?’
‘It looks that way, unless you’ve changed. How many hours did you spend in vreality this last week?’
‘Like you don’t know the answer.’ He looked away. ‘Look, it’s all on my free time.’
‘It’s all of your free time. You barely eat.’
They stared at each other for a moment. Then Zeb felt himself grinning. ‘I used to enjoy these arguments when we were together, too.’
‘You know, I sometimes think you truly did. I didn’t. It’s not good, Zeb.’
‘Me or the solar?’
‘The solar. I’ve given up worrying about you.’ Aish shook her head, turned and walked off. He watched her cross the room, her back straight. Then he let his own back slump, wincing a little – maybe the immobile hours in vreality were catching up with him after all. He rolled his shoulders, causing a few clicks. Then he sighed. Aish was right. There was stuff to do.
At sundown, and even more tired than before, Zeb headed for the roof.
If the view from his room was good, the view from the roof was – astonishing. For a start, you could see the whole of the Skylid from here. At this time of day, with the sun below the horizon, you could see it even better. Given everything the thing meant to their lives it felt wrong to think it was beautiful, but, well …
It just was. Maybe that was why people mostly didn’t come up here at night.
<
br /> He had heard plenty of comparisons. Rainbows, flames, sunsets watched through a distorting chemical kaleidoscope. For his money they all fell short.
A Skylid was a layer, a film, a sheet, halfway between a vapour and a solid, one complicated molecule thick and as long and wide as you cared to make it. This one was quite small, as suited the planet beneath it: a disc a mere five thousand kilometres across. It probably weighed a couple of kilos.
Skylids were ancient technology. Zeb had heard that they had originally been made as an answer to the planetary overheating that had once been a widespread problem because of atmospheric pollution or just too much heat-generating stuff.
Richly ironic, these days.
Every molecule in the hazily diaphanous extent of a Skylid was a solar generator. Sunlight struck a Skylid, had the life sucked from it, and emerged as a pale ghost. The already cool planet beneath it got cooler. The waste heat from the huge server farms where most of humanity now lived in the vrealities was not enough to make up the difference.
But still – beautiful. Its orbit intersected the planet’s ionosphere, so that winds of charged particles played across its semi-conducting surface, giving up their energy to the power-hungry molecules with tiny bursts of coloured light.
Zeb had watched solar auroras on three real planets and a dozen virtual ones. There were no colours, no patterns, like it.
At the moment it looked like a code – vivid blobs stuttered across the sky so quickly that his eye could barely register them. The night before it had been as if the sky was a fractured mirror reflecting the birth – or death – of a star.
You could lose yourself in the sight. When the touch came on his shoulder he didn’t know how long he had been there.
He tore himself away from the view, turned towards the direction of the touch, and sighed.
‘Hi, Shol.’
She looked insulted. ‘Hi yourself. Is that the best you can do? Sigh, and hi?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t apologize. You don’t mean it.’
They watched the display in the sky in silence for a while. Then Zeb looked away from the shifting colours. ‘Did Aish send you?’
‘Did she fuck. I sent me. Zeb? Sometimes you can be a massive idiot.’
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