“Come forward,” this one told Bianca in fractured Arabic, its voice like a Peruvian pipe ensemble. She thought it was the one that called itself Ismaíl. “Make see archipelago.”
She followed it forward to the anemopter’s rounded prow. The naturalist, Erasmus Fry, was already there, resting his elbows on the rail, looking down.
“Pictures don’t do them justice, do they?” he said.
Bianca went to the rail and followed the naturalist’s gaze. She did her best to maintain a certain stiff formality around Fry; from their first meeting aboard Transient Meridian she’d had the idea that it might not be good to let him get too familiar. But when she saw what Fry was looking at, the mask slipped for a moment, and she couldn’t help a sharp, quick intake of breath.
Fry chuckled. “To stand on the back of one,” he said, “to stand in a valley and look up at the hills and know that the ground under your feet is supported by the bones of a living creature—there’s nothing else like it.” He shook his head.
At this altitude they were above all but the highest-flying of the thousands of beasts that made up Septentrionalis Archipelago. Bianca’s eyes tried to make the herd (or flock, or school) of zaratanes into other things: a chain of islands, yes, if she concentrated on the colors, the greens and browns of forests and plains, the grays and whites of the snowy highlands; a fleet of ships, perhaps, if she instead focused on the individual shapes, the keel ridges, the long, translucent fins, ribbed like Chinese sails.
The zaratanes of the archipelago were more different from one another than the members of a flock of birds or a pod of whales, but still there was a symmetry, a regularity of form, the basic anatomical plan—equal parts fish and mountain—repeated throughout, in fractal detail from the great old shape of Zaratán Finisterra, a hundred kilometers along the dorsal ridge, down to the merely hill-sized bodies of the nameless younger beasts. When she took in the archipelago as a whole, it was impossible for Bianca not to see the zaratanes as living things.
“Nothing else like it,” Fry repeated.
Bianca turned reluctantly from the view, and looked at Fry. The naturalist spoke Spanish with a flawless Miami accent, courtesy, he’d said, of a Consilium language module. Bianca was finding it hard to judge the ages of extrañados, particularly the men, but in Fry’s case she thought he might be ten years older than Bianca’s own forty, and unwilling to admit it—or ten years younger, and in the habit of treating himself very badly. On her journey here she’d met cyborgs and foreigners and artificial intelligences and several sorts of alien—some familiar, at least from media coverage of the hajj, and some strange—but it was the extrañados that bothered her the most. It was hard to come to terms with the idea of humans born off Earth, humans who had never been to Earth or even seen it; humans who, many of them, had no interest in it.
“Why did you leave here, Mr. Fry?” she asked.
Fry laughed. “Because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life out here.” With a hand, he swept the horizon. “Stuck on some godforsaken floating island for years on end, with no one but researchers and feral refugees to talk to, nowhere to go for fun but some slum of a balloon station, nothing but a thousand kilometers of air between you and Hell?” He laughed again. “You’d leave, too, Nazario, believe me.”
“Maybe I would,” Bianca said. “But you’re back.”
“I’m here for the money,” Fry said. “Just like you.”
Bianca smiled, and said nothing.
“You know,” Fry said after a little while, “they have to kill the zaratanes to take them out of here.” He looked at Bianca and smiled, in a way that was probably meant to be ghoulish. “There’s no atmosphere ship big enough to lift a zaratán in one piece—even a small one. The poachers deflate them—gut them—flatten them out and roll them up. And even then, they throw out almost everything but the skin and bones.”
“Strange,” Bianca mused. Her mask was back in place. “There was a packet of material on the zaratanes with my contract; I watched most of it on the voyage. According to the packet, the Consilium considers the zaratanes a protected species.”
Fry looked uneasy, and now it was Bianca’s turn to chuckle.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Fry,” she said. “I may not know exactly what it is Mr. Valadez is paying me to do, but I’ve never had any illusion that it was legal.”
Behind her, the firija made a fluting noise that might have been laughter.
3. THE STEEL BIRD
When Bianca was a girl, the mosque of Punta Aguila was the most prominent feature in the view from her fourth-floor window, a sixteenth-century structure of tensegrity cables and soaring catenary curves, its spreading white wings vaguely—but only vaguely—recalling the bird that gave the city its name. The automation that controlled the tension of the cables and adjusted the mosque’s wings to match the shifting winds was hidden within the cables themselves, and was very old. Once, after the hurricane in the time of Bianca’s grandfather, it had needed adjusting, and the old men of the ayuntamiento had been forced to send for extrañado technicians, at an expense so great that the jizyah of Bianca’s time was still paying for it.
But Bianca rarely thought of that. Instead she would spend long hours surreptitiously sketching those white wings, calculating the weight of the structure and the tension of the cables, wondering what it would take to make the steel bird fly.
Bianca’s father could probably have told her, but she never dared to ask. Raúl Nazario de Arenas was an aeronautical engineer, like the seven generations before him, and flight was the Nazarios’ fortune; fully a third of the aircraft that plied the skies over the Rio Pícaro were types designed by Raúl or his father or his wife’s father, on contract to the great moro trading and manufacturing families that were Punta Aguila’s truly wealthy.
Because he worked for other men, and because he was a Christian, Raúl Nazario would never be as wealthy as the men who employed him, but his profession was an ancient and honorable one, providing his family with a more than comfortable living. If Raúl Nazario de Arenas thought of the mosque at all, it was only to mutter about the jizyah from time to time—but never loudly, because the Nazarios, like the other Christians of Punta Aguila, however valued, however ancient their roots, knew that they lived there only on sufferance.
But Bianca would sketch the aircraft, too, the swift gliders and lumbering flying boats and stately dirigibles, and these drawings she did not have to hide; in fact for many years her father would encourage her, explaining this and that aspect of their construction, gently correcting errors of proportion and balance in Bianca’s drawings; would let her listen in while he taught the family profession to her brothers, Jesús the older, Pablo the younger.
This lasted until shortly before Bianca’s quinceañera, when Jesús changed his name to Walíd and married a moro’s daughter, and Bianca’s mother delivered a lecture concerning the difference between what was proper for a child and what was proper for a young Christian woman with hopes of one day making a good marriage.
It was only a handful of years later that Bianca’s father died, leaving a teenaged Pablo at the helm of his engineering business; and only Bianca’s invisible assistance and the pity of a few old clients had kept contracts and money coming into the Nazario household.
By the time Pablo was old enough to think he could run the business himself, old enough to marry the daughter of a musical instrument maker from Tierra Ceniza, their mother was dead, Bianca was thirty, and even if her dowry had been half her father’s business, there was not a Christian man in Rio Pícaro who wanted it, or her.
And then one day Pablo told her about the extrañado contract that had been brought to the ayuntamiento, a contract that the ayuntamiento and the Guild had together forbidden the Christian engineers of Punta Aguila to bid on—a contract for a Spanish-speaking aeronautical engineer to travel a very long way from Rio Pícaro and be paid a very large sum of money indeed.
Three months later Bianca was in Quito
, boarding an elevator car. In her valise was a bootleg copy of her father’s engineering system, and a contract with the factor of a starship called the Caliph of Baghdad, for passage to Sky.
4. THE KILLING GROUND
The anemopter’s destination was a zaratán called Encantada, smaller than the giant Finisterra but still nearly forty kilometers from nose to tail, and eight thousand meters from gray-white keel to forested crest. From a distance of a hundred kilometers, Encantada was like a forested mountain rising from a desert plain, the clear air under its keel as dreamlike as a mirage. On her pocket system, Bianca called up pictures from Sky’s network of the alpine ecology that covered the hills and valleys of Encantada’s flanks: hardy grasses and small warm-blooded creatures and tall evergreens with spreading branches, reminding her of the pines and redwoods in the mountains west of Rio Pícaro.
For the last century or so Encantada had been keeping company with Zaratán Finisterra, holding its position above the larger beast’s eastern flank. No one, apparently, knew the reason, and Fry—who, he being the expert, Bianca had expected to at least have a theory—didn’t even seem to be interested in the question.
“They’re beasts, Nazario,” he said. “They don’t do things for reasons. We only call them animals and not plants because they bleed when we cut them.”
They were passing over Finisterra’s southern slopes. Looking down, Bianca saw brighter, warmer greens, more shades than she could count, more than she had known existed, the green threaded through with bright ribbons of silver water. She saw the anemopter’s shadow, a dark oblong that rode the slopes and ridges, ringed by brightness—the faint reflection of Sky’s sun behind them.
And just before the shadow entered the larger darkness that was the shadow of Encantada, Bianca watched it ride over something else: a flat green space carved out of the jungle, a suspiciously geometric collection of shapes that could only be buildings, the smudge of chimney smoke.
“Fry—” she started to say.
Then the village, if that’s what it was, was gone, hidden behind the next ridge.
“What?” said Fry.
“I saw—I thought I saw—”
“People?” asked Fry. “You probably did.”
“But I thought Sky didn’t have any native sentients. Who are they?”
“Humans, mostly,” Fry said. “Savages. Refugees. Drug farmers. Five generations of escaped criminals, and their kids, and their kids.” The naturalist shrugged. “Once in a while, if the Consilium’s looking for somebody in particular, the wardens might stage a raid, just for show. The rest of the time, the wardens fly their dope, screw their women … and otherwise leave them alone.”
“But where do they come from?” Bianca asked.
“Everywhere,” Fry said with another shrug. “Humans have been in this part of space for a long, long time. This is one of those places people end up, you know? People with nowhere else to go. People who can’t fall any farther.”
Bianca shook her head, and said nothing.
* * *
The poachers’ camp, on Encantada’s eastern slope, was invisible until they were almost upon it, hidden from the wardens’ satellite eyes by layers of projected camouflage. Close up, the illusion seemed flat, its artificiality obvious, but it was still not until the anemopter passed through the projection that the camp itself could be seen: a clear-cut swath a kilometer wide and three times as long, stretching from the lower slopes of Encantada’s dorsal ridge down to the edge of the zaratán’s cliff-like flank. Near the edge, at one corner, there was a small cluster of prefabricated bungalows; but at first it seemed to Bianca that most of the space was wasted.
Then she saw the red churned into the brown mud of the cleared strip, saw the way the shape of the terrain suggested the imprint of a gigantic, elongated body.
The open space was for killing.
* * *
“Sky is very poor, Miss Nazario,” said Valadez, over his shoulder.
The poacher boss looked to be about fifty, stocky, his hair still black and his olive skin well-tanned but pocked with tiny scars. His Spanish was a dialect Bianca had never heard before, strange and lush, its vowels rich, its hs breathy as Bianca’s js, its js warm and liquid as the ys of an Argentine. When he said fuck your mother—and already, in the hour or so Bianca had been in the camp, she had heard him say it several times, though never yet to her—the madre came out madri.
About half of the poachers were human, but Valadez seemed to be the only one who spoke Spanish natively; the rest used Sky’s dialect of bazaar Arabic. Valadez spoke that as well, better than Bianca did, but she had the sense that he learned it late in life. If he had a first name, he was keeping it to himself.
“There are things on Sky that people want,” Valadez went on. “But the people of Sky have nothing of interest to anybody. The companies that mine the deep air pay some royalties. But mostly what people live on here is Consilium handouts.”
The four of them—Bianca, Fry, and the firija, Ismaíl, who as well as being an anemopter pilot seemed to be Valadez’ servant or business partner or bodyguard, or perhaps all three—were climbing the ridge above the poachers’ camp. Below them workers, some human, some firija, a handful of other species, were setting up equipment: mobile machines that looked like they belonged on a construction site, pipes and cylindrical tanks reminiscent of a brewery or a refinery.
“I’m changing that, Miss Nazario.” Valadez glanced over his shoulder at Bianca. “Off-world, there are people—like Ismaíl’s people here”—he waved at the firija—”who like the idea of living on a floating island, and have the money to pay for one.” He swept an arm, taking in the camp, the busy teams of workers. “With that money, I take boys out of the shantytowns of Sky’s balloon stations and elevator gondolas. I give them tools, and teach them to kill beasts.
“To stop me—since they can’t be bothered to do it themselves—the Consilium takes the same boys, gives them guns, and teaches them to kill men.”
The poacher stopped and turned to face Bianca, jamming his hands into the pockets of his coat.
“Tell me, Miss Nazario—is one worse than the other?”
“I’m not here to judge you, Mr. Valadez,” said Bianca. “I’m here to do a job.”
Valadez smiled. “So you are.”
He turned and continued up the slope. Bianca and the firija followed, Fry trailing behind. The path switchbacked through unfamiliar trees, dark, stunted, waxy-needled; these gave way to taller varieties, including some that Bianca would have sworn were ordinary pines and firs. She breathed deeply, enjoying the alpine breeze after the crowds-and-machines reek of Transient Meridian’s teeming slums, the canned air of ships and anemopters.
“It smells just like home,” she remarked. “Why is that?”
No once answered.
The ridge leveled off, and they came out into a cleared space, overlooking the camp. Spread out below them Bianca could see the airfield, the globular tanks and pipes of the poachers’ little industrial plant, the bungalows in the distance—and, in between, the red-brown earth of the killing ground, stretching out to the cliff-edge and the bases of the nearest translucent fins.
“This is a good spot,” Valadez declared. “Should be a good view from up here.”
“A view of what?” said Fry.
The poacher didn’t answer. He waved to Ismaíl, and the firija took a small folding stool out of a pocket, snapping it into shape with a flick of sinuous arms and setting it down behind him. Valadez sat.
And after a moment, the answer to Fry’s question came up over the edge.
* * *
Bianca had not thought hardly at all about the killing of a zaratán, and when she had thought of it she had imagined something like the harpooning of a whale in ancient times, the great beast fleeing, pursued by the tiny harassing shapes of boats, gored by harpoons, sounding again and again, all the strength bleeding out of the beast until there was nothing left for it to do but wallow gasp
ing on the surface and expire, noble and tragic. Now Bianca realized that for all their great size, the zaratanes were far weaker than any whale, far less able to fight or to escape or even—she sincerely hoped—to understand what was happening to them.
There was nothing noble about the way the nameless zaratán died. Anemopters landed men and aliens with drilling tools at the base of each hundred-meter fin, to bore through soil and scale and living flesh and cut the connecting nerves that controlled them. This took about fifteen minutes, and to Bianca there seemed to be something obscene in the way the paralyzed fins hung there afterwards, lifeless and limp. Thus crippled, the beast was pushed and pulled by aerial tugs—awkward machines, stubby and cylindrical, converted from the stationkeeping engines of vacuum balloons like Transient Meridian—into position over Encantada’s killing ground. Then the drilling teams moved in again, to the places marked for them ahead of time by seismic sensors and ultrasound, cutting this time through bone as well as flesh, to find the zaratán’s brain.
When the charges the drilling teams had planted went off, a ripple went through the zaratán’s body, a slow-motion convulsion that took nearly a minute to travel down the body’s long axis, as the news of death passed from synapse to synapse; and Bianca saw flocks of birds started from the trees along the zaratán’s back as if by an earthquake, which in a way she supposed this was. The carcass immediately began to pitch downward, the nose dropping—the result, Bianca realized, of sphincters relaxing one by one, all along the zaratán’s length, venting hydrogen from the ballonets.
The Very Best of the Best Page 40
