But the Building had sealed itself against her. If the Weapon that ruled the people decreed that you were to bear your child in the open air, that was how it was going to be, and no mere human being could do anything about it.
And she could not fight the logic of her body. The contractions came in pulses now, in waves of pain that washed through the core of her being. In the end it was her father, Telni, who put his bony arm around her shoulders, murmuring small endearments. Exhausted, she allowed herself to be led away.
Telni’s sister Jurg and the other women had set up a pallet for her not far from the rim of the Platform. They laid her down there and fussed with their blankets and buckets of warmed water, and prepared ancient knives for the cutting. Her aunt massaged her swollen belly with oils brought up from the Lowland. Telni propped Ama’s head on his arm, and held her hand tightly, but she could feel the weariness in her father’s grip.
So it began. She breathed and screamed and pushed.
And through it all, here at the lip of the Platform, this floating island in the sky, she was surrounded by the apparatus of her world, the Buildings clustered around her – floating buildings that supported the Platform itself – the red mist of the Lowland far below, above her the gaunt cliff on which glittered the blue-tinged lights of the Shelf cities, the sky over her head where chains of stars curled like windblown hair . . . When she looked up she was peering into accelerated time, into places where a human heart fluttered like a songbird’s. But there was a personal dimension to time too, so her father had always taught her, and these hours of her labour were the longest of her life, as if her body had been dragged all the way down into the glutinous, redshifted slowness of the Lowland.
When it was done Jurg handed her the baby. It was a boy, a scrap of flesh born a little early, his weight negligible inside the spindling-skin blankets. She immediately loved him unconditionally, whatever alien thing lay within. ‘I call him Telni like his grandfather,’ she managed to whisper.
Old Telni, exhausted himself, wiped tears from his crumpled cheeks.
She slept for a while, out in the open.
When she opened her eyes, the Weapon was floating above her. As always, a small boy stood at its side.
The Weapon was a box as wide as a human was tall, reflective as a mirror, hovering at waist height above the smooth surface of the Platform. Ama could see herself in the thing’s silver panels, on her back on the heap of blankets, her baby asleep in the cot beside her. Her aunt, her father, the other women hung back, nervous of this massive presence that dominated all their lives.
Then a small hatch opened in the Weapon’s flank, an opening with lobed lips, like a mouth. From this hatch a silvery tongue, metres long, reached out and snaked into the back of the neck of the small boy who stood alongside it. Now the boy took a step towards Ama’s cot, trailing his tongue-umbilical.
Telni blocked his way. ‘Stay back, Powpy, you little monster. You were once a boy as I was. Now I am old and you are still young. Stay away from my grandson.’
Powpy halted. Ama saw that his eyes flickered nervously, glancing at Telni, the cot, the Weapon. This showed the extent of the Weapon’s control of its human creature; somewhere in there was a frightened child.
Ama struggled to sit up. ‘What do you want?’
The boy Powpy turned to her. ‘We wish to know why you wanted to give birth within a Building.’
‘You know why,’ she snapped back. ‘No child born inside a Building has ever harboured an Effigy.’
The child’s voice was flat, neutral – his accent was like her father’s, she thought, a little boy with the intonation of an older generation. ‘A child without an Effigy is less than a child with an Effigy. Human tradition concurs with that, even without understanding—’
‘I didn’t want you to be interested in him.’ The words came in a rush. ‘You control us. You keep us here, floating on this island in the sky. All for the Effigies we harbour, or not. That’s what you’re interested in, isn’t it?’ Her father laid a trembling hand on her arm, but she shook it away. ‘My husband believed his life was pointless, that his only purpose was to nurture the Effigy inside him, and grow old and die for you. In the end he destroyed himself—’
‘Addled by the drink,’ murmured Telni.
‘He didn’t want you to benefit from his death. He never even saw this baby, his son. He wanted more than this!’
The Weapon seemed to consider this. ‘We intend no harm. On the contrary, a proper study of the symbiotic relationship between humans and Effigies—’
‘Go away,’ she said. She found she was choking back tears. ‘Go away!’ And she flung a blanket at its impassive hide, for that was all she had to throw.
The Weapon returned to visit Telni when he was six years old. Ama chased it away again.
The machine next came to see Telni after the death of Ama and her father. Telni was ten years old. There was no one to chase it away.
The double funeral was almost done, at last.
Telni had had to endure a long vigil beside the bodies, where they had been laid out close to the rim of the Platform. He slept a lot, huddled against his kind but severe great-aunt Jurg, his last surviving relative.
At the dawn of the third day, as the light storms down on the Lowland glimmered and shifted and filled the air with their pearly glow, Jurg prodded him awake.
And, he saw, his mother’s Effigy was ascending. A cloud of pale mist burst soundlessly from the body on its pallet. It hovered, tendrils and billows pulsing – and then, just for a heartbeat, it gathered itself into a form that was recognisably human, a misty shell with arms and legs, torso and head.
Jurg, Ama’s aunt, was crying. ‘She’s smiling. Can you see? Oh, how wonderful . . .’
The sketch of Ama lengthened, her neck stretching like a spindling’s, becoming impossibly long. Then the distorted Effigy shot up into the blueshifted sky and arced down over the lip of the Platform, hurling itself into the flickering crimson of the plain below. Jurg told Telni that Ama’s Effigy was seeking its final lodging deep in the slow-beating heart of Old Earth, where, so it was believed, something of Ama would survive even the Formidable Caresses. But Telni knew that Ama had despised the Effigies, even the one that turned out to have resided in her.
They waited another day, but no Effigy emerged from old Telni.
The bodies were taken across the Platform, to the centre of the cluster of box-shaped, blank-walled Buildings that supported this aerial colony, and placed reverently inside one of the smaller structures. A week later, when Jurg took Telni to see, the bodies were entirely vanished, their substance subsumed by the Building, which might have become a fraction larger after its ingestion.
So Telni, orphaned, was left in the care of his great-aunt.
Jurg tried to get him to return to his schooling. A thousand people lived on the Platform, of which a few hundred were children; the schools were efficient and well organised.
But Telni, driven by feelings too complicated to face, was restless. He roamed alone through the forest of Buildings. Or he would stand at the edge of the Platform, before the gulf that surrounded his floating home, and look up to watch the Shelf war unfold, accelerated by its altitude, the pale-blue explosions and whizzing aircraft making an endless spectacle. He was aware that his great-aunt and teachers and the other adults were watching him, concerned, but for now they gave him his head.
On the third day, he made for one of his favourite places, which was the big wheel at the very centre of the Platform, turned endlessly by harnessed spindlings. Here you could look down through a hatch in the Platform, a hole in the floor of the world, and follow the tethers that attached the Platform like a huge kite to the Lowland ground half a kilometre below, and watch the bucket chains rising and falling. The Loading Hub was down on the ground directly beneath the Platform, the convergence of a dozen roads th
at were crowded with supply carts day and night. Standing here it was as if you could see the machinery of the world working. Telni liked to think about such things, to work them out, as a distraction from thinking about other things. And it pleased him in other ways he didn’t really understand, as if he had a deep, sunken memory of much bigger, more complicated machinery than this.
Best of all you could visit the spindling pens and help the cargo jockeys muck out one of the tall beasts, and brush the fur on its six powerful legs, and feed it the strange purple-coloured straw it preferred. The spindlings saw him cry a few times, but nobody else, not even his great-aunt.
And so the Weapon came to see him.
Telni was alone in one of the smaller Buildings, near the centre of the cluster on the Platform. He was watching the slow crawl of lightmoss across the wall, the glow it cast subtly shifting. It was as if the Weapon just appeared at the door. Its little boy stood at its side, Powpy, with the cable dangling from the back of his neck.
Telni stared at the boy. ‘He used to be bigger than me. The boy. Now he’s smaller.’
‘We believe you understand why,’ said Powpy.
‘The last time I saw you was four years ago. I was six. I’ve grown since then. But you live down on the Lowland, mostly. Did you come up in one of the freight buckets?’
‘No.’
‘You live slower down there.’
‘Do you know how much slower?’
‘No,’ Telni said.
The boy nodded stiffly, as if somebody was pushing the back of his head. ‘A straightforward, honest answer. The Lowland here is deep, about half a kilometre below the Platform, which is itself over three hundred metres below the Shelf. Locally the stratification of time has a gradient of, approximately, five parts in one hundred per metre. So a year on the Platform is—’
‘Only a couple of weeks on the Lowland. But, umm, three hundred times five, a year here is fifteen years on the Shelf.’
‘Actually closer to seventeen. Do you know why time is stratified?’
‘I don’t know that word.’
Powpy’s little mouth had stumbled on it too, and other hard words. ‘Layered.’
‘No.’
‘Good. Nor do we. Do you know why your mother died?’
That blunt question made him gasp. Since Ama had gone, nobody had even mentioned her name. ‘It was the refugees’ plague. She died of that. And my grandfather died soon after. My great-aunt Jurg says it was of a broken heart.’
‘Why did the plague come here?’
‘The refugees brought it. Refugees from the war on the Shelf. The war’s gone on for years, Shelf years. My grandfather says – said – it is as if they are trying to bring down a Formidable Caress of their own, on their families. The refugees came in a balloon. Families with kids. Grandfather says it happens every so often. They don’t know what the Platform is but they see it hanging in the air below them, at peace. So they try to escape from the war.’
‘Were they sick when they arrived?’
‘No. But they carried the plague bugs. People started dying. They weren’t im—’
‘Immune.’
‘Immune like the refugees were.’
‘Why not?’
‘Time goes faster up on the Shelf. Bugs change quickly. You get used to one, but then another comes along.’
‘Your understanding is clear.’
‘My mother hated you. She was unhappy when you visited me that time, when I was six. She says you meddle in our lives.’
‘“Meddle.” We created the Platform, gathered the sentient Buildings to support it in the air. We designed this community. Your life, and the lives of many generations of your ancestors, have been shaped by what we built. We “meddled” in many ways long before you were born.’
‘Why?’
Silence again. ‘That’s too big a question. Ask smaller questions.’
‘Why are there so many roads coming in across the Lowland to the Loading Hub?’
‘I think you know the answer to that.’
‘Time goes twenty-five times slower down there. It’s as if they’re trying to feed a city twenty-five times the size of the Platform. As if we eat twenty-five times as fast as they do!’
‘That’s right. Now ask about something you don’t know.’
He pointed to the lightmoss. ‘You put this stuff in the Buildings to give us light. Like living, glowing paint.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Is this the same stuff that makes the light storms, down on the Lowland?’
‘Yes, it is. Later you may learn that lightmoss is gathered on the Lowland and shipped up to the Platform in the supply lifts. That’s a good observation. To connect two such apparently disparate phenomena—’
‘I tried to eat the lightmoss. I threw it up. You can’t eat the spindlings’ straw either. Why?’
‘Because they come from other places. Other worlds than this. Whole other systems of life.’
Telni understood some of this. ‘People brought them here, and mixed everything up.’ A thought struck him. ‘Can spindlings eat lightmoss?’
‘Why is that relevant?’
‘Because if they can it must mean they both came from the same other place.’
‘You can find that out for yourself.’
He itched to try the experiment, right now. But he sought another question to ask, while he had the chance. ‘Did people make you?’
‘They made our grandfathers, if you like.’
‘Were you really Weapons?’
‘Not all of us. Such labels are irrelevant now. When human civilisations fell, sentient machines were left to roam, to interact. There was selection, of a brutal sort, as we competed for resources and spare parts. Thus we enjoyed our own long evolution. A man called Bayle mounted an expedition to the Lowland, and found us.’
‘You were farming humans. That’s what my mother said.’
‘It wasn’t as simple as that. The interaction with Bayle’s scholars led to a new generation of machines with enhanced faculties.’
‘What kind of faculties?’
‘Curiosity.’
Telni considered that. ‘What’s special about me? That I might have an Effigy inside me?’
‘Not just that. Your mother rebelled when you were born. That’s very rare. The human community here was founded from a pool of scholars, but that was many generations ago. We fear that by caring for you we may have bred out a certain initiative. That was how you came to our attention, Telni. Your mother rebelled, and you seek to answer questions. There may be questions you can answer that we can’t. There may be questions you can ask that we can’t.’
‘Like what?’
‘You have to ask. That’s the point.’
He thought. ‘What are the Formidable Caresses?’
‘The ends of the world. Or at least, of civilisation. In the past, and in the future.’
‘How does time work?’
‘That’s another question you can answer yourself.’
He was mystified. ‘How?’
A seam opened up on the Weapon’s sleek side, like a wound, revealing a dark interior. Powpy had to push his little hand inside and grope around for something. Despite the Weapon’s control, Telni could see the boy’s revulsion. He drew out something that gleamed, complex, a mechanism. He handed it to Telni.
Telni turned it over in his hands, fascinated. It was warm. ‘What is it?’
‘A clock. A precise one. You’ll work out what to do with it.’ The Weapon moved, gliding up another metre into the air. ‘One more question.’
‘Why do I feel . . . sometimes . . .’ It was hard to put into words. ‘Like I should be somewhere else? My mother said everybody feels like that, when they’re young. But . . . Is it a stupid question?’
‘
No. It is a very important question. But it is one you will have to answer for yourself. We will see you again.’ It drifted away, two metres up in the air, with the little boy running beneath, like a dog on a long lead. But it paused once more, and the boy turned and spoke again. ‘What will you do now?’
Telni grinned. ‘Go feed moss to a spindling.’
That was the start of Telni’s scholarship, in retrospect, much of it self-discovered, self-taught. And as his understanding increased, he grew in wisdom, strength, and stature in his community.
In Telni’s twenty-fifth year, a group of Natural Philosophers from the Shelf visited the Platform. Telni was the youngest of the party selected to greet the Shelf scholars.
And MinaAndry, a year or two younger, was the most junior of the visitors from Foro. It was natural they would end up together.
The formal welcomes were made at the lip of the Platform, under the vast, astonishing bulk of a tethered airship. The Shelf folk, used to solid ground under their feet, looked as if they longed to be far away from the Platform’s edge, and the long drop to the Lowland below.
Then the parties broke up for informal discussions and demonstrations. The two groups, of fifty or so on each side, were to reassemble for a formal dinner that night in the Hall, the largest and grandest of the Platform’s sentient Buildings. Thus the month-long expedition by the Shelf Philosophers would begin to address its goals, the start of a cultural and philosophical exchange between Shelf and Platform. It was a fitting project. The inhabitants of the Platform, their ancestors drawn long ago from Foro, were after all distant cousins of the Shelf folk.
And Telni found himself partnered in his work with MinaAndry.
There was much good-natured ribbing at this, and not a little jealousy in the glances of the older men. All the folk from the Shelf were handsome in their way, tall and elegant – not quite of the same stock as the Platform folk, who, shorter and heavier-built, were themselves different from the darker folk of the Lowland. They were three human groups swimming through time at different rates; of course they would diverge. But whatever the strange physics, MinaAndry was striking, tall yet athletic-looking with a loose physical grace, and blonde hair tied tightly back from a spindling-slim neck.
Xeelee: Endurance Page 45
