Enna made the best of it. She put on the finest dress in her luggage, and decorated her hair with her best jewellery, including the pretty piece her mother had given her when they bade their tearful goodbyes. But as she brushed her hair by the light of her spindling-fat lamp, the blank walls of the city building she was using seemed to close in around her.
She met Tomm outside the building. He was still in his travelling clothes; he had not been invited to the dinner.
‘You look wonderful,’ he said.
She knew he meant it, and her heart softened. ‘Thank you.’ She let him kiss her.
‘Do you suppose I’m allowed to walk you over?’
‘I’d like that. But, Tomm—’ She glanced back at the building, the gaping unglazed windows like eye sockets. ‘Put my luggage back in one of our wagons. I don’t care which one. I’m not spending another night in one of these boxes.’
‘Ah. Not even with me?’
‘Not even with you. I’m sorry, Tomm.’
‘Don’t be. As long as you let me share your wagon.’
When they got to her father’s building she was stunned by the sight. Inside, three long trestle-tables had been set up and laid with cloths and the best cutlery and china. Candles glowed on the tables, and finely dressed guests had already taken their seats. At the head table sat Bayle himself, with his closest confidantes – and his guest of honour, Sila, dressed now in a fine flowing black robe, sat beside him. From a smaller building co-opted as a kitchen, a steamy smell of vegetables emanated, while five fat runner-chicks slowly roasted on spits. Enna had grown up in a world shaped by her father’s organisational skills, of which the Expedition was perhaps the crowning glory. But even she was impressed by the speed and skill with which this event had been assembled. After all, the party had only reached this mysterious Lowland city a day before.
When he saw Enna, Bayle stood up and waved her forward. Led by Nool, Bayle’s sleek manservant, Enna took her place at her father’s right-hand side. Sila sat on his left.
Enna leaned close to her father. ‘I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve been trying all day.’
‘I know you have. Priorities, my dear.’
That was a word she had heard all her life. But she insisted, ‘Something isn’t right here. People are missing. The geography—’
He cut her off with a wave of his hand. ‘I know you’re no fool, my daughter, and I will hear you out. But not now. We’ll make time at the end of the dinner.’
She wasn’t going to get any more from him. But as her father sat back, she caught the eye of the city woman, Sila. She imagined there was a calculation in Sila’s deep gaze as it met her own. She wondered what Sila truly wanted – and what it would cost them all if she achieved it.
The food was good, of course; her father would have allowed nothing less, and the wine flowed voluminously, though Enna refused to touch a drop. She longed for the meal to be over, so she could talk to Bayle before another night fell. At last the final dish was cleared away, the glasses refilled for the final time.
And, to Enna’s intense frustration, Bayle got to his feet and began to make a speech.
He had spent the night and much of the day in conversation with Sila, he said, and a remarkable experience it had been.
Everybody had expected to find people down here on the Lowland. For generations the judges of Foro had used ‘time pits’ as a punishment measure. The logic was simple. The deeper you fell, the slower time passed for you, so by being hurled into the time pits you were banished to the future. Only a handful had ever climbed back up, bewilderingly displaced in time. But as time had gone by, rumours wafted up to the Shelf that some, at least, of the criminals of the past had survived, down there in their redshifted prison.
‘The time pits have long been stopped up,’ Bayle said now, ‘and we look back on such methods with shame. Now we long to discover what had become of our exiled citizens, and their offspring – and we long to reach out to them a hand of reason and hope. Our consciences would permit nothing less.
‘And now we have found those lost souls, in the person of Sila. She is the daughter of an exile, whose crime was political. Sila grew up almost in isolation with her mother, her only society a drifting, transient collection of refugees from many ages. And yet she is educated and articulate, with a sound moral compass; it would take very little grooming indeed for her to pass as a citizen of Foro.
‘There may be no society as we know it here, no government, no community. But the inhabitants of the Lowland are not animals but people, as we are. In her person Sila demonstrates the fundamental goodness of human nature, whatever its environment – and I for one applaud her for that.’
This was greeted by murmured appreciation and bangs of the tables. Sila looked out at the Philosophers, a small smile barely dissipating the coldness of her expression.
Now Bayle came to the emotional climax of his speech. ‘We all knew when we embarked from Foro that this would not just be an Expedition to the Lowland, but into time. We are all of us lost in the future, and with every day that passes here, the further that awful distance from home grows.’ He glanced at Enna, and she knew he was thinking of her mother, his wife, who had been too ill to travel with them on this journey – and who, as a consequence, Enna would never see again. ‘All of you made a sacrifice for knowledge, a sacrifice without precedent in the history of our civilisation.
‘But,’ Bayle said, ‘if this is a journey of no return, it need not be a journey without an end.
‘Look around you! We do not yet know who built this place, and why – I have no doubt we will discover all this in the future. But we do know that it is empty. The sparse population of the Lowland has never found the collective will to inhabit this place. But we can turn this shell into a true city – and with our industry and communal spirit, we will serve as a beacon for those who wander across the Lowland’s plains. All this I have discussed at length with Sila.
‘Our long journey ends here. Oh, we will send emissaries back to our home on the Shelf – or the daughter civilisations of those we remember. But this city, bequeathed to us by an unimaginable past, will host our future.’ He raised his hands; Enna had never seen him look more evangelical. ‘We have come home!’
He won a storm of applause. Sila surveyed the crowded room, that cold assessment dominating her expression – and again Enna was sure she could smell the cold iron stench of raw meat.
At the end of the dinner, despite her anxiety and determination, Enna still couldn’t get to talk to her father. Bayle apologised, but with silent admonishments, warned her about spoiling the mood he had so carefully built; she knew that as Expedition leader he believed that morale, ever fragile, was the most precious resource of all. It will keep until the morning, his expression told her.
Frustrated, deeply uneasy, she left the building, walked out of the city to her wagon, and threw herself into Tomm’s arms. He seemed surprised by her passion.
Wait until the morning, Bayle had said.
But when the morning came the city was in chaos.
They were woken by babbling voices. They hastily pulled on their clothes, and hurried out of the wagon.
Servants and Philosophers alike milled about, some only half-dressed. Enna found Nool, her father’s manservant; dishevelled, unshaven, he was nothing like the sleek major-domo of the dinner last night. ‘I’m not going back in there again,’ he said. ‘You can pay me what you like.’
Enna grabbed his shoulders. ‘Nool! Calm down, man. Is it my father? Is something wrong?’
‘The sooner we get loaded up and out of here the better, I say . . .’
Enna abandoned him and turned to Tomm. ‘We’ll have to find him, Tomm! My father—’
But Tomm was staring up at the sky. ‘By all that’s created,’ he said. ‘Look at that.’
At first she thought the shape drifting
in the sky was the Expedition’s balloon. But this angular, sharp-edged, white-walled object was no balloon. It was a building, a parallelepiped, like a slanted cube. With no sign of doors or windows, it had come loose from the ground, and drifted away on the wind like a soap bubble.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Tomm murmured.
Enna said grimly, ‘Believe it or not, we have to find my father even so. Come on.’ She grabbed his hand and dragged him into the city.
The unmade streets were crowded today, and people swarmed; it was difficult to find a way through. Again she had that strange, dreamlike feeling that the layout of the city was different. ‘Tell me you see it too, cartographer,’ she demanded of Tomm. ‘It has changed, again.’
‘Yes, it has changed.’
She was relieved to see her father’s building was still where it had been. But Philosophers were wandering outside, helpless, wringing their hands.
The doors and windows, all of them, had sealed up. There was no way into the building, or out.
She shoved her way through the crowd, grabbing Philosophers. ‘Where is he? Is he in there?’ But none of them had an answer. She reached the building itself. She ran her hands over the wall where the doorway had been last night, but it was seamless, as if the doorway had never existed. She slammed on the wall. ‘Father? Bayle! Can you hear me? It’s Enna!’ But there was no reply.
And then the wall lurched before her. Tomm snatched her back. The whole building was shifting, she saw, as if restless to leave the ground. Still she called, ‘Father! Father!’
‘He can’t hear you.’ The woman, Sila, stood in the fine robes Bayle had given her. She seemed aloof, untouched.
Enna grabbed Sila by the shoulders and pushed her against the wall of the building. ‘What have you done?’
‘Me? I haven’t done anything.’ Sila was unperturbed by Enna’s violence, though she was breathing hard. ‘But you know that, don’t you?’ Her voice was deep, exotic – ancient as Lowland dust.
Desperate as Enna was to find her father, the pieces of the puzzle were sliding around in her head. ‘This is all about the buildings, isn’t it?’
‘You’re a clever girl. Your father will be proud – or would have been. He’s probably already dead. Don’t fret; he won’t have suffered, much.’
Tomm stood before them, uncertain. ‘I don’t understand any of this. Has this woman harmed Bayle?’
‘No,’ Enna hissed. ‘You just lured him here – didn’t you, you witch? It’s the building, Tomm. That’s what’s important here, not this woman.’
‘The building?’
‘The buildings take meat,’ Sila said.
Tomm looked bewildered. ‘Meat?’
‘Somehow they use it to maintain their fabric. Don’t ask me how.’
‘And light,’ Enna said. ‘That’s why they stack up into this strange reef, isn’t it? It isn’t a human architecture at all, is it? They are more like a forest. The buildings are competing for the light.’
Sila smiled. ‘You see, I said you were clever.’
‘Light?’
‘Oh, Tomm, don’t just repeat everything we say! He’s in there. My father. And we’ve got to get him out.’
Tomm was obviously bewildered. ‘If you say so. How?’
She thought fast. Buildings that take meat. Buildings that need light . . . ‘The balloon,’ she said. ‘Get some servants.’
‘It will take an age for the heaters—’
‘Just bring the envelope. Hurry, Tomm!’
Tomm rushed off.
Enna went back to the building and continued to slam her hand against the wall. ‘I’ll get you out of there, Father. Hold on!’ But there was no reply. And again the building shifted ominously, its base scraping over the ground. She glanced into the sky, where that flying building had already become a speck against the blueshifted stars. If they fed, if they had the light they needed, did the buildings simply float away in search of new prey? Was that what had become of poor Momo?
Tomm returned with the balloon envelope, manhandled by a dozen bearers.
‘Get it over the building,’ Enna ordered. ‘Block out the light. Hurry. Oh, please . . .’
All of them hauled at the balloon envelope, dragging it over the building. The envelope ripped on the sharp corners of the structure, but Enna ignored wails of protest from the watching Philosophers. At last the thick hide envelope covered the building from top to bottom; it was like a wrapped-up present. She stood back, breathing hard, her hands stinking of leather. She had no idea what to do next if this didn’t work.
And a door dilated open in the side of the building.
Fumes billowed out, hot and yellow, and people recoiled, coughing and pressing their eyes. Then Bayle came staggering out, and collapsed to the ground.
‘Father!’ Enna knelt, and took his head on her lap.
His clothes were shredded, his hands were folded up like claws, and the skin of his face was crimson. But he was alive. ‘It was an acid bath in there,’ he wheezed. ‘Another few moments and I would have succumbed. It was like being swallowed. Digested.’
‘I know,’ she said.
He looked up; his eyes had been spared the acid. ‘You understand?’
‘I think so. Father, we have to let the doctors see to you.’
‘Yes, yes . . . But first, get everybody out of this cursed place.’
Enna glanced up at Tomm, who turned away and began to shout commands.
‘And,’ wheezed Bayle, ‘where is that woman, Sila?’
There was a waft of acid-laden air, a ripping noise. Philosophers scrambled back out of the way. Cradling her father, Enna saw that the building had shaken off the balloon envelope and was lifting grandly into the air. And Sila sat in an open doorway, looking down impassively, as the building lifted her into the time-accelerated sky.
Bayle was taken to his wagon, where his wounds were treated. He allowed in nobody but his daughter, the doctors, Nool – and Tomm, who, Bayle admitted grudgingly, had acquitted himself well.
Even in this straitened circumstance Bayle held forth, his voice reduced to a whisper, his face swathed in unguent cream. ‘I blame myself,’ he said. ‘I let myself see what I wanted to see about this city – just as I pompously warned you, Tomm, against the self-same flaw. And I refused to listen to you, Enna. I wanted to see a haven for the people I have led out into the wilderness. I saw what did not exist.’
‘You saw what Sila wanted you to see,’ Enna said.
‘Ah, Sila . . . What an enigma! But the fault is mine, Enna; you won’t talk me out of that.’
‘And the buildings—’
‘I should have seen the pattern before you did! After all, we have a precedent. The Weapons are technology gone wild, made things modified by time, grown into a kind of ecology – and so are the buildings of this “city”.’
Once, surely, the buildings had been intended to house people. But they were advanced technology: mobile, self-maintaining habitats. They fuelled themselves with light, and with organic traces – perhaps they had been designed to process their occupants’ waste.
Things changed. People abandoned the buildings, and forgot about them. But the buildings, self-maintaining, perhaps even self-aware in some rudimentary sense, sought a new way to live – and that new way diverged ever more greatly from the purposes their human inventors had imagined.
‘They came together for protection,’ Bayle whispered. ‘They huddled together in reefs that looked like towns, cities, jostling for light. And then they discovered a new strategy, when the first ragged human beings innocently entered their doorways.
‘The buildings apparently offered shelter. And whenever a human was foolish enough to accept that mute offer—’
‘They feed,’ said Tomm with horror.
Bayle said, ‘It is just as the Weapons of
the plain once learned to farm humans for meat. We share a world with technology that has gone wild and undergone its own evolution. I should have known!’
Enna said, ‘And Sila?’
‘Now she is more interesting,’ Bayle whispered. ‘She told me exactly what I wanted to hear – fool as I was to listen! She cooperates with the city, you see; in return for shelter – perhaps even for some grisly form of food – she helps it lure in unwitting travellers, like us. Her presence makes it seem safer than a city empty altogether.’
‘A symbiosis,’ Tomm said, wondering. ‘Of humans with wild technology.’
Enna shuddered. ‘We have had a narrow escape.’
Bayle covered her hand with his own bandaged fingers. ‘But others, like poor Momo, have died for my foolishness.’
‘We must go on,’ Tomm said. ‘There is nothing for us here.’
‘Nothing but a warning. Yes, we will go on. The Expedition continues! But not for ever. Someday we will find a home—’
‘Or we will build one,’ Tomm said firmly.
Bayle nodded stiffly. ‘Yes. But that’s for you youngsters, not for the likes of me.’
Enna was moved to take Tomm’s hand in hers.
Bayle watched them. ‘He may not have a first-class mind,’ he said to Enna. ‘But he has an air of command, and that’s worth cultivating.’
‘Oh, father—’
Outside the wagon there came shouting, and a rushing sound, like great breaths being drawn.
‘Go and see,’ Bayle whispered.
Enna and Tomm hurried out of the wagon.
Displacing air that washed over the people, the sentient buildings of the city were lifting off the ground, all of them now, massive, mobile. Already the first was high in the blueshifted sky, and the others followed in a stream of silent geometry, a city blowing away like a handful of seeds on the breeze.
FORMIDABLE CARESS
AD c.5 BILLION YEARS
As the women tried to pull her away, Ama hammered with her fist on the blank wall of the Building. ‘Let me inside! Oh, let me inside!’
Xeelee: Endurance Page 44
