by James Bow
The setting sun was projected on a gigantic screen. It showed the fused silica cap atop the cliffs, the diamond lands stretching as far as the eye could see. The setting sun was a curved sliver of brilliance on the horizon.
“It’s not a fake: it’s a film of last Nocturne’s sunset,” I said.
“I’m just saying, Simon: it’s not live. They’ve had that film for fourteen months. They could edit anything into it. It could be the view from Daedalon, or — anywhere.”
This was pure Aaron, a guy who wanted to be an astronomer on a planet where the stars never shone, and who was forever questioning the status quo.
I was about to chide Aaron for his conspiracy theories, but just then the lights dimmed. The battery boys were on ladders, unscrewing the bulbs in the Great Hall to show the projection better. A roar went up from the crowd. Night was almost here. Nocturne, the end of white, the end of restraint. Nocturne: darkness and colour. There would be dancing. I had passed my exams and would be flying away to join the flight academy on Daedalon. But first, there was a ceremony to go through.
Mayor Matthew Tal strode onto the stage, and the crowd cheered. He gripped the podium and beamed at us. Then his face grew solemn. I clasped my hands. As one, we lowered our heads.
“We give thanks to Old Mother Earth,” he called.
We answered in a unified chant. “The blue marble in space. Our birthplace. The cradle of our civilization.”
The mayor continued. “We are sorry for what we have done.”
“For the wars,” we replied. “The pollution. The mistakes that drove us away.”
“We give thanks to the ship,” the mayor intoned.
“The Icarus,” we replied. “Bearing thirteen cities to our second chance. Leaving the mistakes of our ancestors behind.”
“We give thanks to those who went before us,” called the mayor.
“Who prepared the way for us to land.”
“We remember the accident,” said the mayor.
As one, we lowered our heads. “We appeared too close to the sun.”
“We remember the monsters,” the mayor called out.
“Who ticked in the fog. Who made us raise our cities halfway up the cliffs.”
“And so we live,” the mayor prompted.
“Between fog and fire. Between darkness and light. In our webs, tethered to our cliffs. For tomorrow.”
The mayor raised his arms in benediction. “Let us say the oath!”
Our chants echoed across the hall. “We pledge ourselves to the future of Icarus Down. Together we shall build the future, for ourselves and for the generations that follow. We shall leave the mistakes of Old Mother Earth behind.”
Mayor Tal bowed his head. “In the name of the Creator of the Stars and the Captains of the Icarus …”
“We say it is so,” we intoned.
The mayor turned to the projection, his arms outstretched.
The sun was almost gone. The sliver of brilliance shrank to a dot and vanished. The blazing sky turned dark blue. A roar rose up from the Great Hall and from all Iapyx. It swayed the lights. It buzzed in the soles of my shoes. Everybody was cheering.
At the podium in front of the screen, Mayor Tal brought his arms down and turned to us. “Let Nocturne begin!”
There was a crash of drums. There was the blare of pipes and fiddles. I was laughing. I followed the crowd. I tried to steer Aaron to the party, but I lost him. I didn’t really care. It was here! Nocturne! Nobody would be sleeping tonight!
The Great Hall rumbled with practically the entire population of Iapyx. People filled all available space among the trees and the plant beds, and more and more streamed in from every door. Stages had been set up for the musicians. The rafters had been strung with flakes of mylar, winking as they reflected the lights below, giving us stars even if we couldn’t see the real ones. There were tables laden with fruits and rare meats from the forest floor. Most people milled about. Others played impromptu games of kickball. Many danced.
All wore the boldest colours they could find: scarves of red, blue and yellow, capes of black. The sun couldn’t find us now, and turn that colour into flame. People ran through the crowds shaking hand-powered flashlights, turning them on and training them on their faces. The coloured cellophane over the bulbs gave brilliant red, blue and green tones to their laughing, joyous expressions.
“Simon! Isn’t it fantastic?”
Suddenly, I had a purple scarf draped over my neck and someone pulling on both ends. I and the someone stumbled, and I instinctively grabbed on for support. When we caught our balance, I found myself staring at Rachel, her cheeks rosy and her eyes alive with laughter.
She’d changed out of her vocational school uniform and was wearing trousers and a loose-fitting, long-sleeved blouse. She had on a blue scarf and had also tied colourful ribbons — some fabric, some cellophane — around her waist.
“Do you like it?” She twirled. Her ribbons billowed up. She grinned at me, since I couldn’t help but stare. “Happy Nocturne!”
I smiled, and hoped I wasn’t blushing. I opened my mouth, but suddenly I had no idea what to say.
“But look at you.” She came forward. “Still all in white! Let’s do something about that.” She tied a ribbon of red cellophane through my hair, tugged it into a bow and stepped back to admire her handiwork. I knew I looked ridiculous, but I could only look at her.
Then it hit me. She was beautiful. That was the word I’d been struggling to find in the months leading up to now, as our conversations got more awkward. She was my friend, and she was beautiful. And she and Isaac were … It made things feel complicated, but really, it was that simple. I just had to tell her.
“Isn’t it perfect?” she said. “I love the colours and the music. And the food! Come, see!” She took my arm and led me toward the food table, which was busier than the daily marketplace.
But I couldn’t think of anything to say. To fill the silence between us, I decided to supply her with news.
“Isaac was here,” I yelled. “Nocturne break. He asked after you.”
“Oh.” Her smile faded. “Thanks for telling me.” And the silence got a lot more uncomfortable. She looked down at the end of the food table we’d just reached and didn’t pick up a plate. My mouth watered as I glanced over the selection. But as I reached out for a toffee, Rachel grabbed my hand. “Come on! Let’s dance!”
“Dance?” It was a different place and time, remember. Dancing meant something. I wasn’t supposed to dance with my brother’s — whatever she was. I sputtered: “But — what about Isaac?”
“Oh, pfft—” She waved her hand airily. “He’s not here. You are, and I want to dance! Will you?” Suddenly her eyes were on me, earnest and deep. “Please?”
I took her hand, and she led me onto the dance floor among the couples and groups. We skipped to the frenzied beat, sometimes close together, sometimes an arm’s length apart. I forgot about trying to tell her what I was thinking. I was happy enough with the dance.
But then Rachel led me off the floor.
“Have you thought about the future, Simon?” she asked abruptly. She gave me a strange look, like there was a particular answer she wanted.
“Well … yeah,” I managed. “I just heard — I got into the flight academy.”
“Oh.” Her mouth curved down.
“What about you?” I was suddenly nervous. “I suppose you’ll go study at the infirmary?”
“I suppose …”
“Rachel, what’s wrong?”
She stared into the distance. The music hammered around us. Finally she said, “I want to be somewhere else.”
I blinked at her.
“I’ve heard stories,” she said, “about Old Mother Earth. If I were there, I’d still have three years of education ahead of me. More, if I went to one of those universities, before I had to choose what to do with my life.”
I nodded. I’d heard the same stories, though I hardly believed them. How could p
eople wait all the way to eighteen for their adult lives to begin?
Rachel went on. “Not here, though. I have to make my choice now. The headmaster wants me to hand in my apprenticeship application. Isaac wants—” She drew her arms around herself. “I have to decide, and I’m not ready.”
“You’ll be ready.” Awkwardly, I patted her shoulder. “You love nursing. You’ll fly through the apprenticeship.”
“I know.” I hardly heard her over the crowd. “But maybe there are other things I could love.” She looked me in the eye again, with an intensity that took my breath away.
I wanted to reassure her, but I didn’t know how without repeating what I’d already said.
I squeezed her shoulder. “You’ll be a great nurse. I know it. Just make your choice and stick to it. Whatever doubts you have, put them away.” I quoted something the headmaster had said in his pre-graduation address. “The future’s in front of you. It will work out if you just work toward it.”
Rachel looked up at me. I thought she looked disappointed, but she gave me a small smile. I took that as encouragement. “Look, you don’t have to worry about this tonight,” I said. “How about I brave the food line and get us something to eat? We’ll need to build up our strength before we go back to the dance floor, right?”
She looked away. “Yes, Simon. I’d like that very much.”
“Good. Wait here!” I got in line for the food. Of course, the line had got a lot longer while we’d talked, but I was patient and made it in time for the cooks to bring a fresh selection up. I had two plates almost full when someone bumped into me, causing me to spill those plates back on the table. “Hey!” I turned. Then I gaped. “Aaron? What’s wrong?”
He blinked, as though struggling to recognize me. “Simon? I was in the observation room with my telescope! You won’t believe what I saw! Right on the horizon! A star!”
I couldn’t help but grin. A star? Impossible. “You sure that ‘star’ wasn’t in a bottle?”
“I’m not drunk, Simon! I saw what I saw!”
“Well, what do you want me to do? There’s nobody you can report this to; everybody’s here. The headmaster—”
He looked at me sharply. “You’re right! I should tell the headmaster. Thanks, Simon! He’s got to hear about this!” And he ducked into the crowd.
“Aaron, I didn’t say you should talk to him! Aaron!” But I’d lost him already, and I decided that Rachel and I needed to eat. I picked up my plates, looked back to where I’d left her — and the plates slipped from my hand again.
Isaac stood in front of Rachel. He was talking to her, gesturing, and Rachel was looking nervous. Then he clasped her hand, pulled her closer, and whispered something in her ear. She jerked back, wide-eyed. Then he nodded over his shoulder at one of the exits and gave her a tentative smile. She stayed still a moment. Then she nodded. They turned and walked off the dance floor, hand in hand.
Isaac. He always led the way.
But now, all these months later, he was gone. And I had no idea what to do next.
CHAPTER FIVE
SABOTAGE
After Rachel kissed me, she pulled back, and I stared at her. The moment lengthened, and the silence began to roar in my ears. I had to say something witty that would seal this moment.
“Um …”
Then I saw Rachel’s cheeks flushing. She was smiling. “I have to go,” she whispered. “And right now, you have rehab to do if you want to do a good job for the CommController.”
“Um …” I said again.
She walked away, but she looked back as she left the Great Hall, and that look gave me all the hope I needed.
* * *
Michael’s orders were to concentrate on “activities of daily living.” I had to practise carrying a cafeteria tray while using a cane. I had to master navigating a flight of stairs. I had to learn how to cope with people staring at my scars.
I do what I’m told, so, over the next couple of days, I went to the quartermaster to get re-measured for a uniform my hardened, shrunken body wouldn’t be lost in — one that had a zipper instead of buttons to struggle over. I went to the Housing Commission and gave them my discharge date. My dorm room at the flight academy was long gone and the infirmary bed wouldn’t be mine much longer. I went to the galley and had my ration card changed to reflect my less active profession.
I also kept my ears open.
Officially, Iapyx’s mass communication system consisted of town criers, newsletters and official handbills in the Great Hall and the galleys. Unofficially, we lived and died by rumours. I’d missed nine months’ worth of rumours, and there were some big ones.
The Captain of Icarus Down — our third since our flight from Old Mother Earth — was dying, again. At eighty-nine, he had been dying on and off for a while, but it might be real this time: I could tell by the way people inclined their heads and respectfully refused to speculate before tearing into the political gossip.
The current Captain was from Daedalon; the mayor of Daedalon was a lock to succeed him. No — Daedalon had held the Captaincy since planetfall and it was time for another city to have the chance. Round and round it went. Our own mayor’s name, Matthew Tal, came up a lot. Was he putting together a campaign? Might he be the next Captain?
Then there were the “failures.” That’s what people were calling them. I walked in the Great Hall, resting on the benches and watching the children play ticktock monsters. People turned their eyes away from my burnscars, and then acted as if I were deaf. I heard tale after tale of pneumatic canisters gone astray. People laughed about lovers’ messages humorously misdelivered, or someone ordering a shipment of stem bolts, not getting them, and ordering them again and again, until all the orders suddenly arrived at once.
But there was one man in the galley who was ranting about the CommController. An order to shut a steam valve had been sent, and didn’t arrive at the other end. So the pressure built up and up in one of the inspection shafts. No one would have realized if the supervisor who’d sent the first order hadn’t had some premonition, and sent the order a second time. This one arrived, and a maintenance crew evacuated in time to avoid getting scalded to death.
Nobody laughed at that story.
But everyone had a theory about what was going on. The CommController was getting old, many said. Perhaps he was going senile. He was hardly ever seen outside his offices.
The mayor’s teams were scrambling, others noted, inspecting everywhere.
Looking for sabotage.
That word, too, was whispered through the city. Over and over, I heard it: mothers watching children, steam workers, a pair of battery boys chattering. Sabotage.
And they started to talk about the Grounders.
* * *
Since we’d raised our cities out of the fog forest, there had been those who argued that we should lower them again. The Grounders, we called them. We thought they were lunatics.
It must be hard for you, knowing what you know about the monsters in our forest, to understand this. Please try. My people weren’t murderers, and we weren’t fools. We were — we had been — colonists, civilians, idealists on the run from the Extinction Wars that swept Old Mother Earth after the Great Warming. We set out from Earth with the dream of building a better world, a just world, a balanced world, leaving the mistakes of the old one behind. We went 25,000 light years into the darkness. We spent three generations in space. The only people with military training among us had been the officers of the Icarus, killed in the crash, and the advance colonization team, whom we never heard from again.
We had been promised a blue world, an ocean world dotted with islands and broad salt flats, a long lazy year in distant orbit around a brilliant sun. We didn’t know what had gone wrong, and when the Icarus appeared too close to that brilliance, we didn’t have a chance to find out. All the city pods crashed — a controlled crash, because of the sacrifice of our mother ship, but still a crash. No advance team came to meet us. There wer
e no oceans, no salt flats; only a forest so dense that you could hardly walk through it, and a fog that swallowed everything more than three metres away.
Our too-bright sun didn’t just leave us cowering from visible light in shadowy canyons. It blasted us with a heavy sleet of electromagnetic radiation. A wire more than a metre long would build a charge and spark unpredictably. Electromagnetic broadcasts were swamped within metres of their source. When our city pods landed, we’d lost our radio instantly, our central power systems within a day, and all but the best-shielded of our computers within weeks.
We did our best. We had limitless solar power, but had to figure out how to move it around without wires. We used steam to send messages by pneumatic tube. We transformed our colony pods into cities, turning the blood-red soil, and prepared our hydroponic seedlings for planting.
Then, one day, a bloodstained and battered man came tottering out of the fog. A man in military uniform. An officer of the Icarus! They’d survived!
No. The man told the tale: they had survived, barely, but after the crash they had been attacked. The fog around us had teeth. There were monsters. Subtle, careful, ruthless monsters. They ticked and clicked: directionless sounds that carried like the snapping of bones. They had slaughtered the crew of the Icarus.
I think we only half believed him, this dishevelled, weeping, traumatized man who wouldn’t give his name. But then we heard it: the ticking and clicking in the fog. It grew louder, closer. It was all around us, it was everywhere.
And people started dying. Farmers in fields, cartographers on survey — we’d just find their bodies, sliced up, bled out into the blood-red soil. And then, even inside the shelters, at random: there would be one death a night, there would be two. Remember, we couldn’t even keep the lights on at that stage. The monsters were glimpsed, here and there: bigger than human; reptilian but moving like apes; talons and teeth. And fast, so fast. Sometimes someone would get a lucky shot and kill one, but it didn’t seem to matter. The ticking was constant.
In a long, slow season of terror, one at a time, and at random, hundreds of people died.
