by Tom Holt
You’re welcome. Now, let’s get in out of the wind, shall we? It’s a bit nippy out here.
She turned and walked, and he followed, keeping his eyes glued to a small area of duffel coat covering the place between her shoulder blades. Occasionally, roughly every thirty steps, he felt his foot skid a little on the glass. Ignoring it was possibly the hardest thing he’d ever done.
Just when he’d resigned himself to spending the rest of his life staring at six square inches of coat, she stopped. He adjusted his focus, and saw that she was standing in front of a door. It was just eight planks nailed to a couple of crossbars, but when she pushed it, it opened. He followed her through it, and suddenly there was a visible floor instead of blue water. His head swam and he staggered, and fell back into, of all things, a chair.
“Here we are” said a female voice. “Sit down and make yourself at home. I’ll get you a nice hot cup of tea.”
“You’re talking.”
“Of course I am.” She’d gone into another room. “It’s much easier talking than thinking. But you’ve got to think outside because the wind’s so noisy.”
The voice he was hearing wasn’t anything like the voice he’d imagined to go with the words condensing inside his head. It was younger, higher, more ordinary – someone you’ve just met in the street, as it were, rather than a goddess or a guardian angel. He considered the room he was in. Bare wooden walls. Some kind of fibre matting on the floor. A low wooden table, with a wooden bowl of apples and slightly brown pears. The chair he was sitting in and two others. No electric light, just a sort of Venetian blind arrangement set in the ceiling like a skylight. No metal of any kind to be seen anywhere.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said.
“What?”
“Nice…” She was looking at him with her head on one side, like a bewildered dog. “Doesn’t matter. Where is this?”
“You don’t—?”
“No.”
“I see. What’s the matter with you?”
Where to start; oh, where to start? Fortunately, a stray seed of inspiration floated in through his ear, took root and blossomed. “Amnesia,” he replied. “Guess I must’ve hit my head or something.” He dabbed behind his ear. “Ouch,” he added, by way of corroboration. “I can’t seem to remember anything.”
She nodded. “Right,” she said.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“Well, we had that other case this time last year.”
“That other case.”
“Yes. Over on the East Float. They found this man clinging to the rail, and he couldn’t remember anything at all; not his name, or which Float he was from, or which sect he belonged to. They had to tell him everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“I’d like that,” Theo said passionately. “Do you think you could see your way to…?”
She pursed her lips. “Everything?”
“Oh, yes please.”
She thought for a moment, then sighed. “Oh, all right, then.” She took off the hat and the scarf, revealing a small, pretty face and an absurd amount of wavy red hair. “Drink your tea,” she said, “and I’ll tell you everything.”
It all started (she said) about a thousand years ago. A thousand, or two hundred, something like that. We don’t actually know, and who gives a damn?
Anyway, something really bad happened down on the surface. Some people think it was a war, others say it was chemicals or something, or it could have been scientists doing an experiment that went badly wrong. Anyhow, there was this very, very, very large explosion, and nobody could live on the surface any more. If we stayed on the land or the sea, we’d all die. So that just left the sky.
You’re not drinking your tea. Yes, it’s supposed to taste like that. We like it.
Luckily, there was like a thirty-year window where we could make all the necessary preparations. So, they had a big meeting, all the survivors from all the old countries, and they figured out what to do. The idea was, Venice-in-the-sky. We don’t actually know what that means, but it must’ve meant something, or they wouldn’t have called it that, would they?
It works sort of like this. There are four Floats, OK? Each Float hangs from something like a million fifty-thousand-litre helium-filled balloons. We call them the Bubbles. Now, it was clear from the start that we’d never be able to go back down to the surface again, so either we had to take stuff with us, or else it had to be sustainable; that was the key word, sustainable. It meant, we had to be able to make it or grow it twenty thousand feet up in the air.
The big breakthrough, which made it all possible, was aeroponic cultivation. Basically, that’s where you grow stuff in air rather than dirt. The idea had been around for a long time but nobody bothered with it much, because dirt was easier, apparently. Anyhow, we grow all our food that way. And, of course, the rubber trees.
Oh yes. Vital.
Well, everything, really. We use the wood for repairing the Floats, building houses, making all the stuff we use. The rubber is what we use for the Bubbles, and for cars and lorries and all that, and waterproof roofs. We twist the bark into ropes, and we rot down the leaves and everything that’s left over to make methane to power the generators. Nearly the whole of the South Float is covered with rubber plantations, and there’s about two thousand hectares on the East Float as well.
And that’s about it, really. You’re born into a sect: gardeners, rubbersmiths, carpenters and sunlighters. I’m a gardener, I work on the smaller cabbage farm on North 36C. It’s a bit of a hike, this being East 607J, but I’ve got my own car, so it’s no bother, really. Of course, when I was little I wanted to be a sunlighter, everybody does when they’re little. Very glad that particular dream never came true, thank you very much.
What? Oh, right, you don’t know. The sunlighters are the poor devils who look after the Bubbles. Very glamorous, of course, and everybody thinks you’re wonderful, but you’d have to be nuts to actually do all that stuff. Well, I’ll give you an example. If you’re a sunlighter, after five years in the job they give you a medal – real metal – and a big house and a pension for life. Or that’s the theory, anyway. Nobody’s ever survived long enough.
Anyhow, that’s really all there is to it. Nothing much ever happens, you see. Everybody’s too busy doing their work to make things happen. Once a year we all get together on South Float and drink a cup of tea, eat a rice bun and sing the national anthem, but otherwise one day’s pretty much like all the others. And of course, everybody knows everybody, and there’s just the Floats, unless you get really bored, in which case you can take your car and drive to Mount Everest; that’s the only point on the surface anyone ever goes to. They reckon you can stay there for fifteen minutes and it won’t do you any harm. But it’s a three-month drive, so you’ve got to be really desperate. I’ve been twice. Actually, there’s not much there, just the pointy top of the mountain and a little platform you can stand on. But it makes a change.
Say what? Legal system? Oh, you mean laws, yes, that’s right, we were told about all that stuff in school. Fancy you remembering about laws, when you’ve forgotten absolutely everything else. Well, we don’t have them any more, of course. Don’t need them. Basically, everybody gets on really well with everybody else, so… All right, yes, if six people sign a declaration saying you’re horrible, then they push you over the edge. But nobody’s been horrible for, what, two hundred years or something. We’re all really nice to each other. Why wouldn’t we be?
Theo swallowed carefully; his mouth had gone dry. “No idea,” he said. “I try to be nice to everybody all the time. At least,” he added quickly, “I’m sure I do, though of course I can’t remember. But if I wasn’t nice to people, they’d have chucked me off the edge years ago, so it stands to reason I’m nice, doesn’t it?”
She gave him an odd look. “Well,” she said, “that’s all I can think of to tell you. How was the tea?”
“Del
icious.”
“We make it out of rubber-tree bark chippings mixed with finely ground maize husks. Just as well you like it, because that’s all there is, besides water.”
“I like water. I expect.”
She looked at him some more. “You know,” she said, “it was really weird, about the other guy.”
“Oh yes?”
“Mphm. I mean, like I said, everybody knows everybody, so you’d think, if someone showed up who’d lost his memory, it wouldn’t be long before he got recognised by someone who knew him. Or at the very least, the other people in his sect would wonder where he’d got to, or his family, come to that. But the other guy, he’s been here a year and nobody knows who in sky he is. To begin with we all thought he must be a sunlighter who’d fallen off a Bubble and bumped his head. But nobody in Sunlighter Guild’s ever seen him before.”
“Maybe he’s from—” Theo paused. “Somewhere else?”
She laughed. “There isn’t anywhere else, silly,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, we’d know about it by now if there was. Unless you believe in little green men from Mars, of course. But he’s not green. Nor,” she added with a tiny frown, “are you.”
“Um. I mean no, definitely not. I’m sure I’m really quite ordinary and nice, if only I could remember.”
“I’m sure too,” she replied, with a slightly forced smile. “Anyhow, I think the best thing we can do is take you down-float so you can meet the Duty Officer. He’ll know what to do.”
“Duty…?”
“Oh, it’s just a name left over from the old days,” she said casually. “It means whoever’s in charge. We all take turns, you see. Each one of us, just for one day. There’s never anything to do, of course, you just sit in a big chair and look important. I’m due for my turn in twenty-six years, four months and three weeks come Thursday.”
“I see,” Theo said. “And whoever’s turn it is today will know what to do with me?”
“Of course,” she said, “he’s the Duty Officer. Come on, we can go in the car.”
Theo suddenly felt a tremendous reluctance to get out of his chair. “Go out there, you mean.”
“Well of course out there, silly. He’s not going to come to us, is he? It’s only a four-hour drive. I can drop you off on my way in to work.”
Drop me off, Theo thought. “I really don’t want to be any bother to anyone,” he said. “Why don’t I just stay here and try very hard to remember what I’ve forgotten?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you want to meet the Duty Officer? Most people do. He’s the most important person on the Four Floats.”
Theo grinned feebly. “Well, in that case,” he said.
You can’t help feeling just a tad pathetic and sad when it takes you every last scrap of your courage and moral fibre to face something that’s just another stage in someone else’s daily commute. Hop in, she thought into his brain, as he teetered on the edge of the invisible platform, looking down in terror at what appeared to be four planks of wood hanging from two pink balloons. All around him, the wind screamed and howled, tugging at his shirt like a bored child. It was a yard from the edge of the glass (he could just see it, a slight refraction of sunlight against the blue backdrop of the far-too-distant sea) to the nearest plank. She skipped the distance lightly, then turned and scowled at him. Come on, I’ll be late for work.
One small step for a man. One giant leap of faith for a man on the verge of falling a very long way and then going splat. He closed his eyes and hopped, making the little raft shake horribly. She grabbed his hand and pulled him off the edge into the middle. Scaredy-cat. Well, yes.
He opened his eyes. She was standing behind him, engaged with a device that looked a bit like an old-fashioned mangle; she was turning a big wheel with a handle, and a couple of large wooden cogwheels were slowly going round and round. It occurred to him that he ought to offer to help, but that would involve standing up and moving, and besides, it might come across as chauvinistic. He stayed where he was.
She gave the wheel one last turn, then pressed a little wooden lever at the side. At once, a broad wooden propeller he hadn’t previously noticed began to spin at the back of the mangle, and the raft shot forward. She pounced like a cat and landed next to him, kneeling on the planks.
Off we go.
Mostly to keep from looking down, or sideways, which was almost as bad, he studied the mechanism she’d been messing about with. After a moment or so, he figured it out. The gear-train and the flywheel turned the propeller, which made the raft go. What drove them, and what she’d been winding, was a foot-wide, anaconda-thick rubber band.
Well, yes. Of course it works. Yes, you’ve got to wind it up again when it runs down, but so what? Well, you think of something better, then, if you’re so clever.
Desperately, Theo tried not to think of an internal combustion engine.
Oh, that’s just silly. That’d never work in a million years. For one thing, it’d blow up.
Well of course it would. Silly me. What on earth could I have been thinking of? (Well, this –)
Oh. Oh, that’s clever. So that’d stop the gas coming through all at once. And that bit there goes round and round, and the burnt gas gets pushed out through that tube there. Gosh.
Theo groaned. He didn’t have a rule book in front of him, but his instincts told him that utterly changing a society, almost certainly for the worse, was not the sort of behaviour to be expected from a well-mannered guest. He tried to think of –
Yes, but what would you run it on?
Good point. Excellent point. Yes, you’ve got me nailed to the floor on that one. So, let’s forget all about it, shall we? (Actually, methane, or alcohol distilled from rubber leaves, or – No! Stop it!)
That’s brilliant. They’re going to be so excited when I tell them about it. Just think. No more stopping every five minutes to wind up the stupid rubber band.
Theo started to hum. He made no audible sound, of course, but he’d heard once that it was what the Maharishi used to do, to blot out all conscious thought. It worked up to a point. He could still hear her in his head, jabbering on about how wonderful his invention was and how it’d revolutionise travel between the Floats, maybe make it possible for them to build new ones; but at least he couldn’t make out all of the words.
Eventually, after a dozen rubber-band-winding stops, they pulled up next to a long, low wooden hut, floating serenely under three enormous purple balloons. Getting off the raft proved easier than getting on, mostly because he wasn’t quite so sure he cared whether he fell off or not. Inside, it looked pretty much the same as the girl’s house had done, except that there were five chairs, and a pampered-looking rubber plant in a brass pot.
“That’s the sacred rubber plant,” she whispered. “That’s why it’s got a real metal pot.”
“Ah.”
A door opened, and a man came out. He smiled at the girl, then frowned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think I know—”
“It’s another one,” the girl said excitedly. “He showed up on South 388H, and he’s completely lost his memory, I’ve told him a bit about everything, and he’s got this utterly amazing idea—”
“Um,” Theo said loudly. “Are you the Duty Officer?”
The man looked shocked. “What, me? Do I look like the—?”
“He doesn’t remember,” the girl interrupted. “Anything. Except, he knew about laws. And he’s thought of an incredibly clever way of making cars go without—”
“I’d like to see the Duty Officer, please,” Theo said firmly.
“What, now?”
“If that’s possible.”
The man frowned. “I don’t know about that. I’ll have to ask him. Excuse me just a moment.”
He withdrew, closing the door firmly behind him. The girl was looking at a piece of paper pinned up on the wall.
“The Duty Roster,” she said. “It tells you who the Duty Officer is. Gosh.”
“What?”<
br />
“Fancy that,” she said.
“I can try, but you’ll have to meet me halfway. What’s so—?”
“You’ll never guess who’s on Duty today.”
“No, almost certainly not. You could try telling me, though, if that wouldn’t be seen as cheating.”
She turned and beamed at him. “Him,” she said. “The other one.”
“Excuse me?”
“The other one like you,” she said. “You know. The man who turned up and couldn’t remember anything. Apparently, today’s his turn.”
Theo was just about to say something when the door opened again, and a different man came out. He froze in the doorway, stared for a moment, then clicked his tongue as loud as a pistol shot.
Theo, for crying out loud.
Theo couldn’t do telepathy. Presumably it took time, and he’d only been there an hour or so. So he had to make do with words. “Hello, Max,” he said.
Shut your face and get in here now.
The girl was gawping at the pair of them. “You know him?” she said.
“No,” Max and Theo said simultaneously. “Go away,” Max added. “Please. And you,” he added, as the man came out to see what all the fuss was in aid of. “Vital affairs of state,” he explained. “Essential meeting, total secrecy. Nobody must know. Got that?”
The man shrugged. The girl nodded eagerly. “Is this something to do with the exploding-gas car-propelling machine? Because I think it’s really great.”
Max grabbed him by the shoulder, shoved him through the door and slammed it shut behind them. “Theo,” he said. “You total bastard.”
Theo held up his hand. “Max.”
“Yes?”
“Do I take it that you can do this telepathy thing they’ve got around here?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Fine. Read my mind.”
Didn’t take long. Max’s eyebrows shot up; then he said, “I see. I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I’m not.”
“You’d really like to do that to me?”
