They are curious and rather scary places, the cable cities. It is a matter of pride for the typical Narcissian that their cable webs be not too closely woven, so there are always gaping holes and wide unstrung spaces through which it is easy to fall. Habituated cable dwellers move about their cities with a breathtaking facility, but of course people do fall; it is a long way down from most of these precarious web-like eyries to the bottom, and the water at the base is very cold, very black, existing in permanent shadow. More than this, the walls down there are worn smooth by the millennial action of the water slopping up and down, so it can be extremely difficult to climb out. Creatures live in the dark waters, vegetative worms that grow to great lengths. Rumour says they are happy to devour anything that splashes down.
Some fallers return, via one route or another, rescued by friends or under their own power. Some don't, and that only adds to the glamour and excitement of living in the web-communities. I should add, dear stone, that the larger proportion of the population live in more conventional cavern-wall dwellings, or on the tops of the cliffs. A life of constant danger becomes tedious after a while, and it becomes easier to retreat to the many hollowed-out homes with their interconnecting passages and complex inner spaces.
There are some who live a more solitary life, carving out a high home inside one of the tall pinnacles of stone that stab up at the sky. I visited one of these during my stay on the world, and it had the whiff of an aeons-old hermetic establishment. Thousands of steps were carved up the spine of a sharply slanting, sharp-featured rock-spire, up to where the air was so thin that a dotTech-less person such as myself found it hard to breathe. And there, carved out of the rock was a single-room dwelling with a doorway and wide plasglass windows. The view was eyecatching and beautiful.
4th
Dear Stone,
So, at Narcissus I descended from orbit and spent several days in one of the plateau towns, before taking a bird-car to Ru-denetter, one of the larger crevasse-towns.[11] Stay there for a few days, my AI instructed me. Then you'll need to find one of the granite spires. There's something we need from there.
'I find myself thinking,' I said aloud, 'that you may be nothing more than a figment of my imagination.'
Pssht! said the AI. Or it made a noise rather like that in my head.
Ru-denetter was a young person's town. A famous first-stop for visiting tourists, it was filled with the sorts of buzzes and sights most likely to interest a traveller. It had no bother with 'money' or any such idiocy, but thronged with newly-adult people, all of whom relished the freedom of finally abandoning the long years of childhood.
The crevasse of Ru-denetter itself was about three hundred metres wide, and the cats cradle of cables and ropes that bridged this gap provided a tangled marvel of lines, clotted with people scrambling to and fro, makeshift buildings, sports, theatre-spaces. Set into either side of the crevasse wall were large communal spaces, caves borrowed out of the canyon walls where all manner of drugs and intoxicants could be obtained. For some visitors it was enough to lounge in the couches by the windows, or on the balconies, and look out at the goings-on in the webbing. For others the excitement of the web, with its flavouring of danger, was too much of a draw.
The webbing was thickest at the top of the canyon, where there was most light. The lower into the crevasse you went, the less daylight reached, until you came to a level where only a few minutes of noon daylight would penetrate in each twenty-one hour day. Few people lurked in these depths.
Still wobbly from my spaceflight, and taking longer to recover without the dotTech inside me, Ispent my first few days in Ru-denetter eating and drinking in a bar called Alles. Outside the window dozens of slender individuals were leaping and hopping from left to right; some kind of race. Just a few days, alright? chided my AI. You can rest for a while, but we must retrieve this information. Then you can get on with your job.
Is there a hurry in destroying all these lives? Must it be done by a certain date? I asked drowsily, my sensations pleasantly sticky and numb with goldwash.[12]
Well, it's not that exactly, said the AI.
Then maybe I'll just wait a little while.
Wait too long and your employers will hand you back to the police.
This threat almost reached past the buzzing numbness of being drunk on goldwash, and I shifted uneasily on my couch. Outside the window, a young woman was flying from cord to cord of the webbing, aided in longer jumps by a flat board like a wing that she held over her head. I was trying to see whether there were handles, or if she were simply (and dangerously) holding the board unassisted with bare hands.
'What is this information I need so desperately to collect?' Iasked, my eyelids dropping now.
My AI may have answered me; but I slid into a sleep.
5th
Dear Stone,
I think by this stage that my body was getting more used to existing without the dotTech. Certainly it was a little stronger than it had been. My nose ran constantly, and my breathing bubbled and snorted accordingly, but my skin had mostly healed. The keloid scribbling of my scar tissue gave me a striking and even exotic appearance. Given that I had reverted to default humanity when the dotTech left my body, I looked unexceptional, unlikely to stand out in a crowd. But this in turn served only as a more effective means of offsetting my peculiar scars, like a plain metal setting for a rare jewel. I had a small beard, mostly directly underneath my chin, a dozen or so flittery hairs. I had lost weight through illness, and then put it back on in peculiar places. My trip through space from Rain to Narcissus had rested me; most of my infection had been purged by my metabolism by the time I arrived.
In other words, I didn't truly need to rest in the bar called Alles. But to begin with I was too sluggish mentally to do anything else, and by the time my mind had fully recovered from the disorientation of travelling faster than light, I had discovered a pleasant miniature community in the bar.
'Most travellers,' said a pale man, approaching me, 'stay here for a day or two and then move on. Either they move on to other towns, or else they get hypnotised by the web-city and clamber out on to it.'
'Sometimes,' said somebody else, a very short individual, 'they fall off. That's worth watching.'
'But you've been here for over a week now,' said the pale man. 'You planning on staying?'
'For now,' I said, nodding to him.
'Then I guess,' he replied, 'I should say wellhello to you properly.' He nodded to me. His name, he said, was Ditle. He had adapted his body in a variety of subtle ways, mostly to do with his digestive organs. The thing I noticed about him to begin with was that his teeth had been regrown by the dotTech as a comb of fine needles. When he came closer and sat on the couch next to me I could see that his nostrils, wider and flatter than normal, were also toothed on the inside with twin rows of small canines. These nostrils were capable of opening and shutting like two tiny mouths, and sometimes he ate through them in preference to his actual mouth – taking miniature bites out of yams and baps by stuffing his nose into the food. His eyelids were also furnished with delicate teeth that curved out to avoid scratching the cornea, and meshed together when he blinked. I never got to know him well enough to determine whether all his orifices were toothed in this same way.
'Wellhello, Ditle,' I said. 'My name is Jasba.' I elected not to re-use the alias I had used on Rain, just in case details of Enkida's murder surfaced.
'Jasba,' he repeated. 'Odd name. This is Klabier.' He waved in the direction of the other individual, a petite woman with shining blue-brown skin.
'You're regulars here?' I asked.
'Years now. There are more of us. We came to Narcissus as travellers, like you, from all over.'
'I'm from Jerusalem,' said Klabier. Her voice, notwithstanding her tiny body, was surprisingly deep and resonant.
'For a while we did the tourist things here – climbed the peaks, dashed about on the cables of the web-communities, all that.'
'Oh yes
,' nodded Klabier.
'Then we got bored with that. But instead of moving on, we holed up here with a dozen or so like-mindeds. Politics is our thing now.'
'Politics,' said Klabier.
'Where's everybody else?' I asked. The truth was that I had been so drowned in goldwash for my first week that I had barely possessed the wherewithal to eat, let alone notice my surroundings.
'They still like to climb,' said Ditle. 'Every now and again they go and scuttle up some needle-peak or other. But they'll be back in a week or two. Politics! That's the latest craze, not just here but all the way up this border between t'T and the Tongue. Up at Nu Hirsch, in the Aksleroth, it's what everybody is talking about.'
There was a pause, which carried with it the aura of significance. Finally Ditle spoke: 'You want in?'
'OK,' I said as my AI said No, no, what are you doing? You Have to get out of this place – we must retrieve what we have come here to retrieve! But I ignored its voice.
'OK,' confirmed Ditle.
'Love your scars,' said Klabier as they moved away. 'Very chic.'
Dusk came. Sunset over the top of the canyon wall above us stained the far cliff with the colours of freckles, of cut timber, of embre[13] and crocus-yellows. I watched a mass of people rush from the ledges and run along the nearest cables. They dashed at one another, feinting and leaping, grabbing nearby cables with their hands and hauling themselves up. Everybody was hurrying about holus-bolus. I watched, absorbed, assuming it to be some kind of tag-game.
The dark thickened and deepened in texture. Bit-lights, some in the canyon walls, some fixed to or hanging from the cables, blipped into visibility, light appearing like fists springing open to become starfish-palms. Soon the whole canyon was littered with sparkling lights. The cable material gleamed and crossed the space from cliff to cliff with a tangle of glowing lines.
In the days that followed I became friendly with a dozen or so of the 'political' group; but it was Klabier and Ditle that I was closest to. I discovered that they were one of hundreds of 'political' groups scattered around the southern hemisphere of the planet, groups with whom we (as I came to think of it) were in frequent communication. There were, the others assured me, many thousands springing up all the time all the way along the rimwards stretch of t'T space.
Politics is the new fashion, they said.
Discussion would usually begin towards the end of the day. I would spend mornings stoned on alcohol or gold-wash. Then I would sleep in the afternoon, and drink a stimulant with some sugar-food upon waking. This would leave me alert enough to attend the discussions, if not quite to take part.
Politics, dear stone, is an antique art, like certain sports or garden cultivation. Before the Utopian days of t'T, human interaction was a power-over or submission-under game. Individuals unable to exist alone would sacrifice aspects of their lives in order to join the larger group. The precise, complex dynamics of these sacrifices, and the system-control strategies, were called 'polities'. They are more or less an irrelevance to the worlds of t'T nowadays, except in those worlds that maintain archaic 'political' structures for their own reasons. For the habi-tuants of the bar Alles, politics meant a detailed process of discussion and interaction, modelled in part on books and novels from the distant past.
Ditle would start things going with a snicker-snick of his artificial teeth. Then somebody would assert something they'd learnt from info-searching earlier in the day. Then the discussion would flicker back and forth, person to person. This is the true state of affairs. We should do this. They should do that. It's clear that this is what's going to happen.
Nonsense! What nonsense! groaned the AI in my head. They're all so ignorant. They all know nothing at all.
I contributed little; but every now and again I would drop in some most-obvious statement of truth. For instance, the more people spouted confident predictions about the future mass behaviour of people in the t'T, the more I would want to interject that 'Of course chaos philosophy demonstrates how none of your predictions are worth anything at all.' Perhaps I would interject with that statement, or something like it. Then I would be frozen out with silence, or subjected to a withering comment. Or again; perhaps somebody would say something in reply.
But there was a single feature about their discussions that caught and held my attention. They talked about the coming war.
For the first time, aspects of my own particular commission found a context in which they made sense.
'Seems to me,' Ditle said on one occasion, 'that the coming war is closer than ever. A traveller from Nu Hirsch says that up that way there are rumours that the Palmetto tribes have already launched fireships through the sublight space towards t'T.' He said these last words as if each one were a precious thing that had to be savoured alone; speaking slowly, with pauses between each sound. It had the desired effect.
It took me several days to discover what the 'fireships' were. Nobody in the spaces of the t'T had ever seen one; but the rumours were that the Palmetto tribes had constructed large unmanned spacecraft. These ships were accelerated to near the speed of light, which made them grow relatively bigger, and were sent off hurtling towards the rimwards systems of the t'T. They were reputed to be nothing but bombs, that targeted systems and flew up to – well, opinion varied: explode the system's star, was one theory, pollute the atmosphere of the inhabited planet was another; rapidly oxidise the surface (hence fireships) said a third. There was no direct evidence for these great weapons, but that did not shake the 'politics' of believing in them.
'Why would the Palmetto do this?' Iasked, incredulous, although the whole scenario gave me twinges of recognition.
'War,' said one voice.
'War,' agreed another.
'The Palmetto are following in their own crafts,' explained Ditle, patiently, as if to a child. 'They will occupy the systems nearest to their space. This will give them a beachhead.'[14]
The Palmetto, I should add dear stone, are almost entirely unknown in t'T. In this respect they are unlike the Wheah. It is rare to come across a barbarian from the Wheah, but they do sometimes travel across the long reaches of the Tongue in order to experience life in the t'T. Agifo3acca was one example, and there were others. But the Palmetto were a different matter. Their realms were all sublight; it took hundreds or sometimes thousands of years for them to pass from system to system in their various sublight spaceships. They did not visit the fastspace of t'T, and what little was known was mostly gleamed from thousands-of-years-outdated radio transmissions. They appeared to be a clan-based culture of twelve or thirteen enormous families, each of whose genetic distinctiveness was jealously preserved. They used dotTech, but with amore focused application to enhance longevity; and they spent much of their lives in coma-like sleeps. Individuals could live several thousand years, passing much of the time asleep; and family-based grudges animated their interactions with blood-feuds. It was assumed that members of a Palmetto tribe could hold grudges for centuries; they were proverbial figures in that regard.
'They will be here in ten years!' affirmed Ditle, with emphasis. 'Perhaps less! The worlds of the t'T must prepare!'
That the Palmetto would wish to 'invade' the space of t'T seemed bizarre and implausible to me; I was dismissive. 'What would they profit by making this sort of "war"?' I insisted.
Ditle swished and clicked his exaggerated teeth. 'History teaches us,' he said, meaning ancient history, 'that war might be prosecuted for any number of reasons: wealth; living space.'
'Perhaps,' interjected somebody, 'they are tired of crawling about space at sublight speeds. Perhaps they wish to move to a space such as ours, where faster-than-light travel is possible?'
'I disagree,' said Klabier. 'War is coming, that is true. It is difficult to deny this. But not from the direction of the Palmetto. They are too set in their peculiar rhythms of life, and those rhythms are adapted to the traffic of sublight travel.'
She has no evidence at all! said the AI inside my head
. She's extrapolating and plain inventing! And yet she sounds so confident, as if she has access to some truth!
'No,' Klabier went on. 'The problem is not Palmetto, but the Wheah. They have been sending individuals among us for many years, we all know this. None of us have asked why. Well, I know why. The Wheah do travel faster than light, but because they live in a realm of slow-space theycannot exceed three times light-speed, or thereabouts. It is natural for them to want to possess the space of the t'T. They can translate their cultures straightforwardly into our space; worship their gods and increase their wealth and possessions. Invade us! They plan it!'
I was, in the first instance, baffled by this speech, partly because it utilised various archaic terms, such as 'possession' and 'invade'. In fact, I was about to interject dismissively, when the thought struck me. What if this talk of war had some basis in truth?
Would killing the entire population of a world count as an act of war? Was that its justification? Perhaps that was why I had been employed to do this crime. But by the Wheah? Or the Palmetto?
'Everybody knows,' somebody else was saying (and this despite the fact that nobody knew very much about the Wheah at all, for certain) 'that their barbarian culture is based on religion and possession. On God and trade. Doesn't it make sense that their fraction-God might instruct them to invade our space? That they might look on our space – superior to theirs in its very nature – as a possession for them to possess?
Everybody hummed and grumbled agreement.
Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 13
