Flux xs-3

by Stephen Baxter

  She held Farr’s arm tight and pulled herself closer to him, determined that Farr should never make the journey he was dreaming of.

  18

  Wakefulness intruded slowly on Mur.

  Slowly, in shreds and shards, he became aware of the rustle of the Crust-trees, the tired stink of his own body, the endless yellow glow of the Air pushing into his closed eyecups. He’d used a few loops of frayed rope to bind himself loosely to a branch of an outlying tree, and now he could feel the undeniable reality of the ropes as they dug into the thin flesh of his chest and thighs.

  Then the pain started.

  His stomach, empty for so long, seemed to be slowly imploding, filling the center of his body with a dull, dragging ache. His joints protested when he began to stir — stiff joints were a wholly unexpected side-effect of hunger, reducing his movements on bad days to those of an old man — and there was a sharp sheet of pain stretched around the inside of his skull, as if his brain were pulling away from the bone.

  He jammed his eyes closed and wrapped his arms around himself, feeling his own bony elbows digging into his ribs. How strange it was that he had never slept more deeply in his life than in these impossibly difficult times. While waking life had become steadily more unbearable, sleep was ever more comfortable, seductive, a different realm in which his physical pain and mental distress dissolved.

  If only I could stay there, he thought. How easy it would be never to wake up again…

  But already the pain had dug too far into his awareness for that option to be available today.

  With a sigh he opened his eyes and probed at the cups with one finger, working at rims sharp with crusty sleep deposits. Then he clambered slowly out of his loose sling of ropes. The rest of the Human Beings — the other fourteen — were scattered across the lower rim of the forest, bound by similar loops of rope. Dangling there half-asleep they looked like the pupae of insects, deformed spin-spiders perhaps.

  Mur dropped out of the forest, avoiding the eyes of those others who were awake.

  He stretched, his muscles still aching from yesterday’s Waving. He pulled a handful of leaf-matter from the tree, and then flexed his legs and Waved stiffly down into the Mantle. Perhaps twenty mansheights below the fringe of the forest ceiling he lifted his tunic and raised his legs to his chest. His hips and knees protested, but he grabbed his lower legs and pulled his thighs close to his stomach. At first his bowels failed to respond to this prompting — like the rest of his system his digestive and elimination processes seemed to be failing, slowly — but he persisted, keeping his arms wrapped around his legs.

  At last his lower bowel convulsed, and — with a stab of pain which lanced through the core of his body — a hard packet of waste was expelled into the Air. He glanced down. The waste, floating down into the Mantle, was compact, too dark.

  He cleaned himself with his handful of leaves.

  Dia, his wife, came drifting down from the impromptu camp in the forest. As she descended, he saw how she was blinking away the remnants of sleep and compressing her eyecups against the brightness of the Air; but she was already — just moments after waking — squinting along the vortex lines into the South, toward the distant Pole, trying to assess how far they had come, how much further was left of this huge odyssey.

  When she reached Mur she looked into his face, kissed him on the lips, and wrapped her arms around his chest. He folded his arms around her and rubbed her back. Through her shabby poncho he could feel the bones of her spine. They had nothing to say to each other, so they clung to each other, hanging in the silent Air, with the Quantum Sea spread below them.

  Since Dura and the City woman had left in their Air-car — taking away the children, including their own Jai — the fifteen abandoned Human Beings had trekked across the Mantle toward the Pole. The slow pulsations of the vortex lines marked out the endless days of the journey. With no stores of food, the Human Beings were forced to follow the fringe of the Crust-forest; the leaves of the trees were scarcely nutritious, but they did serve to fool the body into forgetting its hunger for a while. Every few days their food ran out and they were forced to interrupt the march. There was some game to be had but the forest was unfamiliar, and the animals, still scared and scattered after the most recent Glitch, were wary and difficult to trap.

  Without their own herd, the Human Beings were slowly starving to death. And on this hopeless trek, with its endless days of slow, painful Waving, the Human Beings were probably burning off their energy faster than they could replace it. Mur couldn’t forget the richness of the “bread” Dura had brought to them, when she had come Waving out of the sky so unexpectedly with her startling stories of Cities in the Air.

  Their progress around the Mantle’s curve was imperceptible, a crushingly discouraging crawl. Every time he woke to another changeless Mantlescape Mur felt discouraged. And, even when the Pole was neared, the Human Beings would still have to cross the hinterland, the cultivated belt around the Pole. How would the inhabitants of those regions — themselves suffering after the Glitches — welcome this band of starving refugees as they came drifting beneath their ceiling-farms?

  The logical thing for the Human Beings to do would be to give up this trek. Their best chance of survival would be to stay here, or even retreat a little further into the upflux, and try to establish a new home on the edge of the Crust-forest. Stop wasting their energies on this trek. They could build a new Net, establish a new herd of Air-pigs. They could even, he’d thought dizzily as he Waved across the silent Air, experiment with maintaining flocks of rays. The flesh of the ray was tough and not as palatable as Air-pig, but it softened when broiled using nuclear-burning heat; and the eggs were fine to eat and easy to store.

  …But, of course, that wasn’t possible; for their children had been taken from them, by well-meaning Dura, and transported to the South Pole. When he stared into the dull crimson glow of the Pole, in the far downflux, Mur felt as if a chain as long as a vortex line connected him directly to his child, a chain which dragged inexorably at his heart. Dura’s action had surely been in the best interests of the children. But it left Mur knowing that his only chance of meeting his son again was to stay alive and to complete this trek, all the way to the City at the Pole.

  He squeezed Dia once, and then they broke and prepared to return to the Crust-forest, to face the others and begin the day’s work.

  “Dia! Mur!” The voice, drifting down from the Crust-forest, radiated excitement.

  Dia and Mur slowed their ascent, confused, and looked up. Philas was dropping toward them, her skinny legs pumping at the Air. When she reached the couple, she grabbed at their arms to stop herself.

  Dia held Philas’s shoulders. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Philas, panting, the bones of her face prominent under her tied-back hair, shook her head. “Nothing’s wrong. But… look. Look down there.” She pointed, down past their feet into the Mantle.

  The three of them separated and tipped forward in the Air. Mur peered down, trying to follow the direction of Philas’s gesture. He saw the orderly array of vortex lines, the dull purple bruise of the Quantum Sea beyond the crystalline Air. There seemed nothing unusual, except…

  There. A small, dark knot in the Air, a hint of motion.

  He turned to Dia. “Your eyes are sharper than mine. What is it?”

  “People,” she said, squinting down. “A group of them. Twenty or thirty, maybe. It looks like an encampment. But there’s something at the center…”

  “What?”

  Philas thrust her face forward at Dia. “Do you see it?”

  “I think so,” Dia said slowly. Her eyes narrowed. “But it might not mean anything. Philas…”

  Mur was baffled. “What is it? What do you see?”

  Uncertainty and fear creased Dia’s small, pretty face. “It’s a tetrahedron,” she said.

  * * *

  The fifteen Human Beings gathered on the lower edge of the forest and debated
what to do. Dia, fearful, uncertain, thought they shouldn’t waste time on this chance encounter; she wanted simply to continue with the slog to the Pole. Mur sympathized. The Human Beings were already divided, listless, growing steadily more apathetic. It was becoming ever harder to maintain the momentum of this trek across the Mantle; and once that momentum was gone, it might be impossible to regain.

  They would be stranded, wherever they stopped. And that, of course, would be unbearable for those with children at the Pole.

  Philas and others argued strongly for doing something. “Think about it,” she said vehemently, her thin arms raised over her head as she spoke, her fingers spread wide. “What if that really is a wormhole Interface, left over from the past? What if it’s still working?”

  “That’s impossible,” Dia said. “The Interfaces were taken down into the Core, by the Colonists after the Core Wars.”

  “The Mantle is a big place,” someone said. “Maybe some of the Interfaces were left functioning. Maybe…”

  “Yes,” Philas said eagerly, “just think of that. We know that in the days before the Wars Human Beings could cross the Mantle in huge bounds, using the wormholes. If that is a working Interface down there we might complete this impossible journey in a heartbeat!”

  Mur looked around at faces rendered sharp by hunger and exhaustion. Philas was weaving a dream of abandoning this ghastly journey, to reach their goal in moments with the aid of magical ancient technology. It was seductive, compelling, all but irresistible.

  Despite his loyalty to Dia, he felt himself falling under the spell of that dream.

  “There are already people there,” he said slowly. “Around the Interface. If it is an Interface. Who’s to say how they will react to us? Will they simply let us walk up and wander through?”

  “Maybe they’re Colonists,” Philas said.

  “Anyway,” said someone, “we won’t know unless we go to find out…”

  There was a murmur of agreement. Dia dropped her head.

  Philas and Mur were named as scouts, to go ahead to the artifact and investigate, leaving the rest of the Human Beings in the forest until their return.

  Mur tried to comfort Dia. “It won’t take us long. And perhaps…”

  “Perhaps what?” She stared at him bitterly. “Perhaps there are wizards there who can restore little Jai to us. Is that what you expect?”

  “Dia…”

  She seemed to slump, as if the Air was collapsing out of her. “We’re going to spend the rest of our lives here. Right here. Dying off one by one. Aren’t we, Mur?”

  * * *

  Philas and Mur dived away from the forest and into the Mantle. The tetrahedral artifact might be as much as a half-day away, so they each carried a bag containing a little of the tribe’s precious, and dwindling, supply of pig-meat.

  At first Mur looked back frequently into the Crust-forest. Dia’s face, turned down like a small, round leaf, followed them as they descended, her expression soon too distant to read. Then she ducked back into the forest. For a while Mur was able to follow the movements of the other Human Beings as they worked through the forest, using the time to hunt and to repair damaged tools, ropes and clothes. But at last the site of the Human Beings’ temporary camp was lost in the swirling, complex tapestry of trunks and branches that made up the Crust-forest.

  Mur spent some time staring up at the forest, carefully committing the pattern of trunks to memory so they could find the Human Beings again.

  Philas descended toward the artifact without speaking. Her thin face was intent on the goal, empty of expression; Mur hadn’t seen her so focused since the death of Esk. She dug into her pouch and, with efficient regularity, bit into a piece of meat.

  Mur, alone with his thoughts, fell through the vortex lines. The artifact, and the little colony around it, grew in his vision tantalizingly slowly. But it wasn’t long before he could see without ambiguity that the artifact was indeed a tetrahedron, around ten mansheights to a side.

  The story of the Colonists, and their Core Wars, was part of the lore of the Human Beings. When the Ur-humans first reached the Star, having traveled from their own unimaginable worlds, the Star was empty of human life. The Colonists had been the first generation to be established within the Star, by the Ur-humans. It had been their task to spawn the first of the Star’s true inhabitants: all of them, the mortal, frail ancestors of the Human Beings, the people of Parz and the hinterland, all the inhabitants of the Mantle.

  Compared to Human Beings the Colonists had been like gods. They had more in common with the Ur-humans, perhaps, Mur speculated. With Ur-human technology they had pierced the Mantle with wormhole links and established huge Cities which had sailed through the Mantle in vast, orderly arrays. The first generations of Human Beings had worked with their progenitors, traveling the wormhole links and building a Mantle-wide society.

  Then the Core Wars had come.

  As they neared the artifact, and the irregular little settlement around it, excitement gathered in Mur. Fatigue and hunger worked on him as he Waved, and he became aware that his thinking was becoming looser, more fragmented. His head seemed filled with visions, with new hopes; and the aches of his tired, protesting body seemed to fade. Could these really be Colonists, this artifact a fragment from the magical past?

  He wanted to believe. He was tired — so tired — of pain, of death, of scraping his marginal existence from the unforgiving Air. To discover a Colonist artifact would be like returning to the arms of long-dead parents.

  Glancing across at Philas, he recognized the same hunger to believe — to find a home — in her expression, the set of her body as she Waved.

  With perhaps five hundred mansheights separating them from the artifact, two people broke from the grouping around the tetrahedron. The two came Waving cautiously up to meet Philas and Mur.

  Mur slowed, and moved closer to Philas.

  The pair from the tetrahedron halted a dozen mansheights below the Human Beings. They were a man and a woman, and they carried spears of wood. The woman came up a little further, and pointed her spear at Mur’s belly. “What do you want?”

  Mur inspected the woman. She must have been aged around forty. The spear was well crafted, but it was just a spear — nothing more sophisticated than a sharpened stick of wood, nothing the Human Beings couldn’t have manufactured for themselves. The woman wore a crude, pocketed poncho of what looked like pig-leather, and a wide-brimmed hat. Folds of cloth were tied up around the rim of the hat. The woman was well muscled but scrawny; her face was wide and flat, disfigured by a scowl. “Well?” she demanded. “Deaf, are you?”

  Mur sighed, disappointment gathering in him. He turned to Philas. “Obviously, these aren’t Colonists.”

  “Who are they, then?”

  “How should I know?” he snapped back, irritated.

  He moved forward a little, with arms spread wide, hands empty. “My name is Mur. This is Philas. We’re — refugees.” He decided not to mention the rest of the Human Beings. “We lost all we possessed in the Glitch. We’re trying to get to Parz City. Do you know it?”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed; she didn’t reply. She raised the spear uncertainly and poked it toward Mur’s stomach again, substituting aggressiveness for an answer.

  “We’re wasting our time,” Mur whispered to Philas. But Philas had broken away from him and was Waving down with irregular, trembling strokes of her thin legs toward the strangers.

  “You have an Interface,” she said.

  The man, similarly grimy and scowling, a little younger than the woman, joined his companion. He too was wearing a battered, wide-brimmed hat. They stared at the Human Beings as suspiciously, thought Mur, as a pair of tethered Air-pigs.

  “Please,” Philas said. “We’ve come a long way. We’re trying to reach the Pole. Can we…” She stumbled over her words, as if she’d become suddenly aware of how foolish they sounded. “Will your Interface help us?” She looked from one to the other. �
�Do you understand what I’m asking?”

  The man opened a mouth devoid of teeth and laughed, but the woman laid a restraining hand on his arm. Her voice remained stern, but it softened a little. “Yes, I understand. And you’re right; it is an Interface — from the olden days, from before the Core Wars. But you can’t use it.”

  Philas was trembling. “We’ll pay,” she said wildly. “You must…”

  Mur grabbed her shoulders and tried to still her shivering with his own inertia. “Stop it, Philas. Don’t you understand? Even if we could pay, the Interface doesn’t work any more. These people are as helpless as we are.”

  Philas stared into his face resentfully, then turned away; her body was wracked by shuddering.

  The man and woman watched them curiously.

  Mur turned to them wearily. “Why don’t you put away your weapons? You can see we’re no threat to you.”

  They lowered their spears carefully, but kept them aimed roughly in the direction of the Human Beings. The man said, “You really are refugees from further upflux?”

  “Yes. And we really are trying to reach a place called Parz City, which we’ve never seen. But it’s at the Pole.”

  “Which Pole?” the woman asked. “The South Pole?”

  The man cackled. “If you’re starting from here it hardly matters, does it?”

  “Oh, shut up, Borz,” the woman said.

  Mur put his arm around Philas. “Will you let us see your Interface?”

  To his shame, he read amused pity in the woman’s expression. “If you want,” she said. “But stay close to the two of us. Do you understand? We see enough thieves and beggars…”

  “We’re no beggars,” Philas said with a spark of spirit. She drew away from Mur and pulled her shoulders straight.

  “Come, then.”

  Borz and the woman turned away from them and separated by a couple of mansheights. Hand in hand, Mur and Philas Waved cautiously forward.