"I was born in the district of Drifting Knives on the banks of the river Sanquon where it flows out of the White Mountains on the planet of Cold Comfort in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Four Hundred and Seventy-Six."
"It's going to be a long story, is it?" Dovrich puts in.
"Longer if you keep interrupting," the priest replies mildly and seemingly unperturbed. I’m doing a quick mental calculation from the old Christian Era Calendar favoured by the Void Priests into the one I’m accustomed to work with. The answer comes out as something around 1912 A.H.
"Drifting Knives is a small town of low grey stone igloos separated by wide marshy avenues,” he continues. “Summer is short and cool and winter is long and bitter and characterised by frequent heavy snow falls, often cut by the wind into deep serrated dunes of tortured ice. The locals work in the timber mill at the downriver end of town or else they hunt chitterings and zanhrass in the mountains. It's a basic kind of a place with no pretensions or aspirations. The only building which isn't strictly functional is the church of St. Banatapon of the Order of The Holy Void. It stands on a high promontory upriver from the centre of town with a tall conical tower and bat winged black buttresses. It captured my imagination as a child, and it led me into the faith as it was meant to do.
"I was a solitary child. My father died in a boating accident when I was three years old, and my mother brought me up single-handed in a battered three-room igloo at the edge of town. She scraped a living in half a dozen part time jobs. She worked as a clerk in the auction ring in the summer when the lowland farmers brought their herds of lean sheep and gangly goats to market. She did custom piecework for the textile mill. She served in a grocery shop, and she catalogued prayer mail at St. Banatapon’s. We were poor but proud as an old cliché has it. I don’t know much about my mother’s past before she came to Drifting Knives, but she’d been well educated. She taught me to read long before I went to school, and she inculcated a love of learning which separated me out from my more practical contemporaries. It didn’t help me to make friends.
"The church took hold of me early. I loved the evening services in summer when the sun set in a cloud of wispy insects over the still reed pools and the pale light of a hundred candles lay lightly over the rough grey stones. We’d sing the atonal disciplines, sharp, nasal and long. And the priest of the Holy Void must have seen my hunger to read when I accompanied my mother as she sorted the prayer mail. He gave me access to the church library and I devoured it all. It was so different from the utilitarian material we were obliged to learn in school. Of course, I knew my maths, my geography, my politics and my history but no one was really interested in these things. And given the pedestrian way they were presented and the parochial nature of the history it was little wonder. The other children just wanted to hunt as soon as they were old enough. I didn’t. But even so, I guess I might never have gone further if it hadn’t been for the fever that took my mother when I was only ten years of age. I can remember sitting in the tower after the funeral and making a promise to myself – a promise to leave Drifting Knives and to leave Cold Comfort and to take the Holy Void to be my only true comfort.
"It wasn’t as simple as that - naturally. Ten-year-old orphans with no money in a backwater like Drifting Knives don’t suddenly go gallivanting off all over the galaxy. I had to serve my time. But my vow was also my way out. I was keener than the knife-edge snow drifts. Keen to learn everything about everything and keen to escape. When I was thirteen, I secured a scholarship at Quaralon College. It’s a Void Church establishment on the outskirts of the bright lights of Greater Ged. They teach over a thousand pupils until the age of sixteen and then there’s a seminary for the more gifted where priests train for another five years.
"Greater Ged was a fascinating city and although it might seem like a backwater to you, compared with Drifting Knives it was cosmopolitan and sophisticated. Had I been a little bit older I might have been tempted away from the faith by the varied attractions and secular employments of the city. Others fell by the wayside, but God must have wanted me for a priest. I was too young and insecure to move away from the College when I first took classes and by the time I was of an age where I might have been tempted, I already had my eyes on a higher prize. Perhaps it was because I had no parents and no brothers or sisters, or perhaps it was some other reason, but I put all my energies into learning, and I am not being proud when I say that I excelled in class, and I was always hungry for more. The seminary was inevitable, but it was only the beginning. I was ordained in 2497. My destiny was to leave Cold Comfort and to become first a postgraduate scholar at the Agarite Theological Centre on Green Home, later a researcher and ultimately a teacher there myself.
“So, you’re a career priest, through and through then,” Galda says.
“I saw my vocation early and I stuck to it,” he replies.
“It is a rule in the Order to retreat to a chapel of the Void every ten years,” I say. “You must have attended three mandatory retreats since your ordination. How did you find them? They have always struck me as rather perverse rituals at best.”
He looks at me curiously.
“You’re well informed. Have you had contact with our Order before?”
“I’ve endured many sermons from your priests,” I say. “But we are listening to your story now. I will tell you mine in due course.
“Fair enough. And to answer your question, I found the retreats of immense value. They are at the heart of the Order of the Holy Void.”
“What happens?” Galda asks.
“They run away to a Void Chapel,” I answer. “The Void Chapels are small space stations drifting in the gaps between the stars. And they live in isolation and contemplate the Void like technological hermits, until they get fed up and send a message drone out to summon up a ship to take them back. There’s a sort of a macho thing about how long you can go without human contact."
I’m slightly surprised to find myself needling the priest, which isn’t a good sign. I was hoping to have my emotions under control. I have fallen out with the Order of the Holy Void. Aspects of their social policy annoy me. They bicker and squabble with colonists, government agencies and the rest of the church. They spend too much time and effort propping up the Emigrant’s Charter and looking after the rights of C cases. But at least I’m in broad agreement with their xenopolitical stance. I shouldn’t react so strongly. The Order of The Holy Void isn’t to blame for my problems, still less this priest.
Ramon Avva raises an eyebrow detecting a raw nerve. “We do not ‘run away’ as you put it. We use the time to pray and to restore a proper spiritual sense of the place of mankind within the cosmos. You heard how Willow put it at the start of the black meditation. ‘Many things are recognised most clearly in their absence’. We Void priests believe that too.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I hold up my hands in a gesture of reconciliation. “Please continue.
“The Agarite Theological Centre on Green Home is an important intellectual base for the Order. The Holy Father has visited from Rome on more than one occasion in the past thirty years. We exchange regular visits with the Reformed Jesuits and the Community of All Believers, and we advise the Green Home government on social policy.
“Yes. Quite a cosy little set up from what I’ve heard,” Galda says but the priest chooses to ignore this barbed remark. I’m beginning to respect the way he’s standing up to his somewhat hostile audience. Despite the fact that only a moment before, I was the one goading Avva, I give Galda a stern glance. She smiles.
“I’m not an important member of the Order. I wouldn’t want you to think that. At the Centre I came to realise my limitations in fairly short order. It was a humbling experience. I’d been used to being the brightest student in my class but now I had to recognise that there were others just as smart and plenty even more intelligent and with a deeper order of spirituality. But by the grace of God, I learned that my foolish pride could be subsumed into other tasks for His service, and I have been happy to teach and to learn for more than thirty years.
"Tutoring can be a rewarding vocation if sometimes frustrating. At the Agarite Centre I had the benefit of apt students who were willing and eager to learn. It was a pleasure to introduce them to new ideas in history, philosophy and theology. In several I recognised myself, and I knew too when a student had the potential to rise further in the Order than I had. But only one of my pupils was a genius. His name was Thomas Wordsmore, a graduate from the Tremulak Planet School on Unity.
"Even partial responsibility for educating a genius is challenging and exhausting – or at least it was in this particular case! Thomas was tall and lean with a wispy red beard. He had sharp features with a crooked nose that must have been badly broken in some childhood accident. He was full of ideas and full of energy – endless ideas which he needed to test against the metal of his fellow students and his teachers. He had no admiration for authority, and I don’t mean that in any critical sense. It was just that he was ruthless in logic and had no time for convention unless it was backed up by solid argument. Debating with him was exhilarating and mentally draining but never dull and often fruitful. There would be times when it felt as if I were the student and he the teacher and yet he respected my knowledge and depth of learning, and I could best him more times than not. I was never under any illusions about that. Once Thomas had trained for longer in the libraries and debating halls of the Order he would soon surpass me. But I felt proud of his enthusiasm and pleased that I had played some small part in his education. I fully expected him to go on to great things in the Order. He was surely destined to be a cardinal and maybe one day to be Pope.
"That didn’t come to pass and now I know it never will. When he graduated in 2520, Thomas Wordsmore dropped out of sight, and I heard nothing from him for ten years. Four years ago in 2530, I returned from a yearlong retreat to be summoned to the office of the Dean of Outer Studies. He sent me on a quest to find out what had become of my former pupil and to return him to the fold. It seems that Thomas had led a mission from the Order of the Holy Void to the archaeologists at Hequidar and something had gone wrong – possibly badly wrong. The Dean told me that I was one of the few people with an insight into Thomas’ mind. The Order and the Church needed to know exactly what had happened.
"So, with a heart full of trepidation and uncertainty I followed my former pupil’s footsteps to the very edge of the Bubble.”
“Hequidar is fifteen light years from the waypoint white dwarf Alanon II on ByRoute 18. It’s an unremarkable system - an orange K class star, all sunspots and scruffy flares with a ragbag of rubble worlds and comets, plus a couple of medium sized gas giants which are the only primary bodies big enough to have been allocated sequence numbers.
"If you’ve heard of Hequidar at all it will be for one thing and one thing only - the Cathedral Moons. The twin Cathedral Moons orbit Hequidar I at a distance of roughly one AU from the sun. They are substantial little worlds in the size range of your typical Ganymede class moon. But the Cathedral Moons are unique in almost every other respect. On an astronomical scale the most obvious anomaly is their mass. Both worlds have abnormal density profiles; the one being much more massive than expected and the other much less so. The inner moon has a significant gravitational field capable of retaining a thin nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere at temperatures that sometimes attain 300 degrees Kelvin. It is believed to have a small metallic Osmium core, which could not have been produced by any known astrophysical process. The outer moon, by contrast, is almost light enough to lead some to suspect it might be hollow. In fact, both moons are quite artificial, and this is self-evident even from space.
"The outer moon is called Issulon on the charts of the Counter Xarctic traders and is also known as the Dark Cathedral. The inner moon is called Eduoma - the Light Cathedral. The Counter Xarctic traders tell us that the Cathedral Moons were built by the Cata-Zin, which makes them twice the age of this Temple, well before the Amnyine Passage and approaching the borderlands where history gives way to the wilderness of mythology. I don’t know how much even the Counter Xarctic traders really know about the Cata-Zin. They sometimes boast that their records go back fifteen million years but although they have a wealth of documentation dating from the time of the Querequian Cultures up to the present day, their information is increasingly sparse for periods prior to the seven-million-year mark. The Grumm Movement is poorly understood and the Cata-Zin less so. Or maybe (as some scholars speculate) the Traders know more than they wish to share with us.
"Some things I do know. The Dark Cathedral is a terrible place. In the harsh vacuum of space towers of artfully sculptured rock cast sinister shadows across brooding canyons of igneous origin. Whole mountain ranges have been carved into disconcerting abstract and semi-abstract forms. Under the weak gravity, brittle microcrystalline minerals can soar in twisted arches and vast bridges over ranks of patient statues and shiny sheets of mirror cold ice. There are many who say that Issulon is haunted by twin spirits of Extinction and Fear. And I am one of them…
"The Light Cathedral has an altogether different mood
"The skies on Eduoma are lilac under the cool orange light of Hequidar and the palest indigo as the sun sets. Its towers are white and rose pink and its citadels are ringed by icy narrow canals and buttressed by diamond filigree webs. Expansive empty plazas are open to the sun but give back only the faintest of echoes from lonely patrolling footsteps. Time has not been as kind to the Light Cathedral as to the Dark. Over the ages, the thin atmosphere has worked away at the stone and even at the more durable artificial materials to reduce many subtle carvings to a smooth and faceless blank. In the mornings, when Hequidar rises over a grid of terraced roofs, you can often see the slim ghost of hoar frost melting back into the night. Pale white umbrella spores float through the cold streets from the once rigidly defined planting beds where uncountable generations of spindly opinia have been confined by the original design of the builders. Remarkably, the plants have only succeeded in colonising a few sites amidst the decaying splendours of the Cathedral ruins and for the most part the planet retains the purity of untouched stone. The biologists tell me that opinia was bio engineered into its restricted growth patterns. But ten million years or so is a long time to leave a crop untended and evolution has begun to wriggle a way out of the straight jacket the Cata-Zin created.
“I travelled to Hequidar in three stages over two months. A human ship flickered me as far as Mainstream – a bulk cargo carrier with a hold full of assorted organics. From there I joined a Network Commune of the Counter Xarctic traders on a Long Ship they called ‘Skretch’ which had been running ByRoute 18 for God alone knows how long. The ‘Skretch’ was a draughty warren with dark cavernous spaces and shiny smooth tunnels lit by thin red and blue running lights. The Counter Xarctic traders scuttled through the fine mesh web work of its interior with the easy skill of a race which might have been born to zero gravity. Their deep blue chitin shells glowed pale and glossy in the blackness. I was invited to speak at one of their Oblique Meditations, but I declined. I was a little afraid of them although I had no reason save my own primal imagination.
"The Counter Xarctic traders agreed to take me as far as Alanon II where I was promised passage on a thinderin craft travelling to Hequidar. They didn’t make the stop for me alone of course. The rendezvous had been arranged a long time ago to effect a transfer of goods from hold to hold. I just took the opportunity to transfer with them. The church paid for all this. I didn’t ask questions about the price.
"The thinderin ship was a Canopy class vessel hailing from one of their Wet Forest worlds, which they call Ysalaka. It’s outside the Bubble. No human has ever been there, and the crew had only seen a few human beings before and all of those on the Cathedral Moons. Like the Counter Xarctic traders they were eager to talk and this time I was ready to make more of an effort to integrate and to learn. I’d studied some thinderin languages at the Theological Centre and although I wasn’t an expert, I was interested to see how far I could communicate. I knew that the thinderin maintained a small outpost on Eduoma not far from the human archaeological settlement and not far, in theory, from the location where Thomas had established his missionary church. Although this was the shortest part of the journey it took the longest part of the time. Canopy class vessels are not built for speed and the flicker drive was only capable of short hops, so we had a full five weeks after leaving the pasty white light of Alanon II before the orange warmth of Hequidar was bright enough to illuminate our destination.
"I learned as much as I could from my travelling partners although they knew only a little about the Cathedral Moons. But it was here that I first heard about the Temple of Chromatic Enlightenment and the Light Guards of Silusia-Alpha. That was a subject that interested my hosts more than the lost history of the Cata-Zin, and here I was introduced to an ancient book of which I was later to think often and deeply.
"Have you read ‘Legends of the Chromatic Temple’ properly?”
“Haven’t we all?” Galda says, “I should think it was required reading for any pilgrim who chose to come here.”
“Yes, yes,” Avva cuts back impatiently. “But I don’t mean the pathetic Pan Arabic or English translations. I mean has anyone read it in the original Early Light Guard dialect of the Thinderin Quaternary language?”
“I have,” I say simply, gratified for the moment by the simple pleasure of taking the wind out of the priest’s sails although in truth his story is beginning to interest me.
By human standards, the ‘Legends of the Chromatic Temple’ was written a very long time ago indeed, but of course in terms of Galactic history this is all relative. The Light Guards were first exiled to Silusia-Alpha twenty-five thousand years ago and although this fact is often forgotten now, they spent the first five thousand years of their encampment here as barely tolerated aliens with considerably less status than the present human colonists. At that time the bilachai had a powerful civilisation, one of a few which have risen and fallen on Silusia Alpha without ever managing to produce an emergent culture capable of taking its place amongst the great Galactic powers of the Contemporary races. It is something of a mystery why the bilachai have never attained the status of a true interstellar power. There must be some inherent weakness in their genetic makeup or just a cumulative run of bad luck. In any case, the locally important civilisation found by the thinderin exiles had a history of looking after the Temple. But when that civilisation crumbled it was thinderin Light Guards who assumed the responsibility of Temple custodians. And this has been their constant trust even when the long bilachai dark ages ended and the current civilization arose. It is still a constant after we humans have so relatively recently added our own small contribution to the mix of richness and diversity in this planetary culture.
To set the ‘Legends of the Chromatic Temple’ in context you must know that the book dates from that earliest period of thinderin occupation before they became the Temple guardians. It was written by a thinderin scholar grove in conjunction with sympathetic bilachai priests. For the most part, it consists of a series of moral fables going back into antiquity. The Legends relate how the Temple was handed down to the bilachai forefathers from the gods and contain intriguing hints of earlier cycles of bilachai civilisation predating the one found by the thinderin. There are stories about ancient kings and priests, significant conversions and profound cultural changes brought about by deviation from (or adherence to) the holy writ of the Temple. About half of the book has been translated into English. I’d had the benefit of studying the other half with viwodian scholars on Earth.
Ramon Avva looks at me sharply, obviously curious to know how I have come by this obscure source. I smile enigmatically as though to say, ‘all in good time’.
“Carry on,” I say instead, and he does.
“When I spiralled down to Eduoma in the thinderin thistledown lander I had only a few disturbing facts to ponder. It was known that Thomas Wordsmore had established a Void Church in the small human archaeological town of TwoWells in accordance with the instructions of his superiors. This was the place where I would start my investigations. Biannual reports had been sent back directly to the Agarite college and the Dean of Outer Studies for every year from 2523 when the Church was consecrated until 2529, at the end of the previous year. I’d read and reread them all, searching for a clue but there was nothing out of the ordinary in these routine forms. The abrupt cessation of formal communications would have been reason enough for an investigation, but we had a little more to worry us. You see, it wasn’t just the official lines of contact, which had dried up. Four of the missionaries had family ties with Green Home and had been in the habit of writing regularly to their relatives until June 2529; after that, nothing. What had happened? We had some independent evidence. There were communications from the archaeologists at TwoWells that said that the Void Church had been moved. They hinted at some weird explanation that didn’t seem at all coherent or convincing. It was up to me to verify this story and to explain the missing pieces.
"It was an hour’s walk to TwoWells from the thinderin grove where the thistledown lander set root. I said farewell to my thinderin travelling companions and set out alone with a backpack containing all my possessions. The air was thin, and I needed breathing apparatus but nothing more bulky than a grade two ratio compression filter. I had a good map, and it was easy country, but I’d never been anywhere that was quite like Eduoma. Half the time the scenery seemed natural enough. The path led through rose tinted rolling hills in a thin mist, which soaked slowly into my shirt. From a distance these hills might have been the uncomplicated geological products of a lifeless world. But closer up… Closer up I knew better, and the signs of ancient intelligence weren’t hard to discern. Escarpments were revealed as the walls of gargantuan broken buildings. Weathered ‘boulders’ turned out to be exposed machines of unknown purpose and strange design, long past any hope of functioning and frankly far closer to an element of landscape than the relic of an ancient civilization but betraying just a subtle hint of artificiality. Milestones by the side of the road were more obviously manufactured but were almost certainly not milestones in the sense I thought of it. It was rather like walking through an enormous theme park at the scale of a whole planet. Here the usual order of events had been reversed. The ‘natural’ was a modern product of the last ten million years and the ancient was synthetic. And often it was hard to tell the difference or to tell whether it mattered.”
“Archaeological remnants after ten million years. That’s incredible!” Galda interjected.
The priest purses his lips and nods. “The old races could build to last when they wanted to. The Temple of Chromatic Enlightenment is possibly almost six million years old after all and the Cata-Zin were likely as competent as the Amnyine. Perhaps they had their own form of transdimensional blueprints too? And what’s four million years extra between friends, eh? Not that the Cata-Zin and the Amnyine were friends, mind. Or even contemporaries come to that.”
“Yes, but the Temple’s been looked after,” Galda persisted. “At least some of the time.”
“Eduoma is a very stable world,” Avva said. “There’s a hint of libration but it’s almost tidally locked to its gas giant parent. There’s more weathering than you’d get in a vacuum, it’s true, but nothing extreme. The wind never rises above a mild breeze and a heavy dew is about as exciting as you get in the way of precipitation. No storms – no gales and virtually no running water. There’s no real animal life either and what vegetation there is, is mostly constrained to garden forms by Cata-Zin genetic programming. And in any case, I’m not saying it hasn’t gone to ruin. It has. A lot of the moon would be quite unrecognisable to its builders, I suspect. In another ten million years the surface evidence will all be worn away, but in the meantime there it is, in a fascinating limbo between artificial and ‘natural’ forms.
"The thinderin set up their first grove outpost on the Light Cathedral roughly eight thousand years before they came to Silusia Alpha. The township of TwoWells was established in 2425 by the 3rd Dynasty of the Resource Management World government to study Eduoma and Issulon. Thomas Wordsmore arrived a hundred years later.”
“So let me get this straight,” I say, doing some quick calculations. “By my reckoning, when it comes to excavating this ten-million-year-old civilization the thinderin have a more than thirty thousand year head start on human archaeologists. In fact, they’ve been analysing Cata-Zin relics and culture at the Light Cathedral for approximately eight times as long as human beings have even had any sort of culture worth analysing. What’s the point of human beings bothering to look? Why not just ask the thinderin?”
Naturally I know the answer to this one. Who better? I’m just checking up to see what sort of answer the priest will give. He sighs. I think he detects my political bias.
“Because the thinderin only tell us what they want to tell us. Because the thinderin don’t look for the same sorts of things we look for. They have their interests, and we have ours and they aren’t necessarily the same. Humans can offer original insights although obviously our archaeologists have benefited enormously from the body of thinderin work where they are prepared to share it. I’d studied as much of this as I could in the time available to me and even had the benefit of some discussion with the more knowledgeable seedlings on the Ysalaka. But the mismatch isn’t as bad as it looks. The thinderin haven’t actually spent all that time in active study. You have to remember that although they are an old and stable race compared with our own, they’ve still had their share of cultural upheavals. I believe that Eduoma was abandoned for six thousand years and there was a long period before that which they refer to as ‘stagnant’ when they were effectively doing no research.”
“Fine,” I say, satisfied. They’re valid points as long as you don’t read the wrong things into them. My political opponents have read the wrong things into them. I let the priest continue.
“According to my briefing TwoWells was home to eight thousand men, women and children. The maps showed a radial pattern of streets fanning out from a low promontory that curved like a hook into a small lake. Farmland spread over the low downs that lay between the lake and the thinderin grove, irrigated with dew collectors to extract every drop of moisture they could from the thin mists. Beyond the lake was an important Cata-Zin structure called the Wheel.
"I planned to meet with a lay member of our Order by the name of Ian Hastings who had sent an alarming if rather garbled message to Green Home. Hastings claimed that Wordsmore had ‘gone mad’ - that he’d abandoned the principles of the Order and formed a cult based on something he’d discovered at the Wheel. As I got closer to the town, I started to wonder why I hadn’t seen any of the residents. A curious foreboding came over me. The low whisper of the thin wind sounded suddenly sinister, and the desolation of the Light Cathedral began to seem less fascinating and more oppressive. I regretted the fact that I’d been sent on this mission alone.
"I crested the ridge that had hidden TwoWells from my sight. The town was laid out below me – clean single storey white stone buildings, their flat roofs hosting solar panels, iron railings, miniature gardens and black and yellow flags. Wide streets were paved in the same white flagstones and adorned by an occasional tall elm tree. The shallow lake lapped timidly against the shore where a few yellow fibreglass boats were drawn up on the stones. I couldn’t see a soul. Where was everyone? It seemed improbable that they would all be in the buildings. Somewhat perturbed I let my eyes wander more widely. To my left a long gentle slope curved round the northern shore of the lake. I could just make out a series of black dots in the field. Rather a lot of black dots. I had a pair of binoculars in my backpack and I sat down by the side of the path and took them out. The black dots resolved themselves into tiny crosses. Just short of eight thousand black crosses as I later found out: crosses in the style of our Order – or almost in the style of our Order. Just short of eight thousand grave markers in fact. TwoWells was deserted and its inhabitants were dead and neatly buried.”
The priest takes a drink of fruit juice. I look out of the window. The morning has advanced whilst we have been listening to his story. Silusia is bright and high behind a grey blanket of stodgy clouds. It isn’t raining but it looks as if it might.
“The weather’s holding up”, Galda says after a long silence. “Why don’t we go and see the others again before this afternoon’s meditation?”
I hesitate.
“No,” I say at last. “Not today. Tomorrow.”
The truth is that I’m not ready to see Tamsin again.
Galda shrugs. She doesn’t seem to want to argue the point. Ramon Avva is lost in his own thoughts.
“Look!” Galda cries and points out of the window. There’s a black spot high in the sky above Rillyon in the direction of the spaceport. It grows visibly larger as we watch. The thinderin have seen it too and they raise their weapons smartly.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go outside.”
We leave the refractory and make our way to the cliff top for an uninterrupted view of the approaching sky ship which swoops in on a high velocity trajectory taking it in a broad arc out to sea before turning back towards the Temple. It’s a thinderin ship. That much is obvious from the tips of the two pairs of wide shining white wings to the delicate traceries of the fluted tail. It hovers high over the waves, riding the air like a gull in a gale. The wings are arched and angled dynamically into the airflow. Thinderin atmospheric vessels are so much more graceful than human aeroplanes and G-riders. Then again, they have been working on their designs for a lot longer than we have. The ship folds its wings and dives into the water at the base of the cliff raising an enormous fountain of salty water. We pilgrims have front row seats and get a little wet despite the fact that the wind is at our backs. When the craft bobs to the surface again, I notice the motif of a storm cloud scarred by a complex fractal lightning bolt burnt over the surface of the hull. It’s the badge of the Rain Cities League. The wings spread out over the water, flexing, flattening and twisting in a pseudo-organic manner. Four doors slide up, one above each wing. A party of bilachai troops emerge and take up their stations along the length of the wings. They are followed by a squad of thinderin seed warriors sporting prominent personal weapons who fly up to the top of the cliff on military jet packs and stream over our heads on a direct course for the Temple. Spectral flashes across their uniform mark them out as Light Guards.
“The changing of the guard, eh?” Avva says. “They like to make a show of it, don’t they?”
But Galda isn’t so sure, and neither am I.
“I think they’re reinforcements,” Galda says.
“Why?” Avva asks.
“I don’t know.”
I do. Or at least I think I do. I fear that the Zed men have arrived and that in reaching Silusia Alpha they might have come too far. In the old parlance, I fear a ‘diplomatic incident’. I say nothing. Things could get interesting very soon – quicker than I’d hoped for. I need some more time. Time to complete the white meditation.
We sit on the edge of the cliff in the humid warmth of a light drizzle which has just opened up. It’s not raining hard enough to make us want to go indoors again. We watch the bilachai re-enter their craft and prepare to fly back to Rillyon.
“So what happened in TwoWells?” Galda asks Avva. “Did they die of natural causes or was there any violence? Did your little heretic genius get himself killed along with the archaeologists in his flock?
“O no,” Avva says. “Thomas Wordsmore wasn’t dead. I’ll explain in due course. It took me a week to piece together all the facts I could lay my hands on. I contemplated returning to the thinderin groove and asking for help but before it came to that I felt that I owed it to my church, my religion and my species to struggle with the forensics myself. Intuition told me that I’d arrived at the scene of a crime – a crime of a very unusual kind but a crime, nevertheless. I hadn’t travelled all those light years expecting to find a mausoleum for a town, but I had come to deal with the consequences of Wordsmore’s apostasy. If these were the consequences, then so be it. This was my job in the first instance.
"I set up my headquarters in the civic centre on the waterfront. It didn’t feel right to invade any of the private dwellings although they might have been more comfortable. At first, I kept expecting to find another living inhabitant. It was lonely and I don’t mind admitting that I was scared. There was a strange intermittent coughing sound just below the thin moan of the wind around the empty streets. I imagined footsteps and voices, but I saw no one. There was no evidence of any sort of disturbance. Doors and windows were closed or locked; there was food on some of the tables – abandoned but with knives and forks cleaned and put away. As the indigo evening darkened, a few lights were still glowing in the houses but there was no one at home. Over the far side of the lake the labyrinthine bulk of the Wheel, loomed dark and menacing. I slept badly and dreamt that the oxygen mask was smothering me in the night instead of sustaining me.
"In the morning I made an early trip to the broken land north of town to confirm that it really was what I feared it to be. The ground was freshly dug and coming closer I could see something disconcerting that I hadn’t noticed from the distance of the trail. All the crosses were upside down.
"I exhumed one of the bodies. It was a bearded man in his late forties, lank and lean and only recently dead. I’m not a doctor but I have received a little medical training over the years. There were no obvious signs of disease or violence. I didn’t have the resources or the skill for a full autopsy. I turned his cross around, conducted a brief burial service, and returned to the civic centre via the lakeshore. I wished I could do more, but it was beyond my power even to consecrate the entire cemetery with the limited time and energy I had available.
"I wasn’t even sure that the other graves were occupied – that was just an assumption. But I’d seen enough. If the missing citizens of TwoWells weren’t under the ground, I’d no idea where else they might have gone. Not then I hadn’t. But it turned out that they weren’t all dead and buried. Some of them had gone with Wordsmore to Issulon - the Dark Cathedral - and that was worse.”
“How did they get there?” I ask him. He doesn’t answer directly.
“Have either of you ever seen this symbol?” he says. He reaches into a fold in his jacket and takes out a thin silver coloured token about the size of a Transit Card. It is in the shape of an isosceles triangle with the ratio of the height to the width looking roughly two to one. An asymmetric series of broad ridges make a complex chevron relief, broken by two hollow circles. We shake our heads.
“It’s a common Cata-Zin motif,” he says. “I’m not surprised you haven’t come across it before, but it’s well known to archaeologists that specialise in the Cata-Zin. They call it the Syradell, but no one knows what the Cata-Zin called it or what it means. Perhaps it was the symbol for a political party or perhaps it was the symbol for a religion. Most likely it was neither. But although none of the contemporary races can interpret it, it was widespread across this part of the galaxy for upwards of two million years during the last two thirds of the era we currently think was dominated by Cata-Zin culture – from roughly eleven to nine million years ago.”
I pick the piece up and rub it between my fingers and thumb. It’s hard and cold.
“You can see the Syradell everywhere in Cata-Zin relics,” the priest tells us. “It’s on tokens like this one, it’s carved into the stone, and it’s etched on the walls of what ancient Cata-Zin buildings still stand.”
I pass the token to Galda.
“Perhaps if just meant something like ‘Men’ or ‘Women’,” she suggests, somewhat irreverently. “Perhaps those buildings were nothing more than public lavatories.”
“Maybe,” Ramon concedes.
“How about an advertising slogan,” I offer. “It could be the Cata-Zin version of coca cola. Some ubiquitous product they all craved.”
“About time they got a new brand then,” Galda snorts.
“Ah but they did. They did!” Avva says, excited now.
“You see the thing is that no one had ever found any variation in the constant relationship between the sides of the triangle and the shape of the chevron. Not in two million years of design and across the entire width of the Bubble. According to the Counter Xarctic traders the Cata-Zin occupied a much larger volume of space than we’ve been able to explore. They sometimes sell Cata-Zin relics from outside the Bubble and the Syradell looks virtually identical. Everywhere and always the same design. Until last year in TwoWells when this was unearthed from a new shaft deep under the Wheel."
He takes out another silver triangle, very like the first and hands it to me. To begin with, I don’t notice the difference. Then I realise that the left and righthand sides are transposed, and the hollow circles are shifted towards the apex of the triangle. It’s almost a mirror image of a universal icon, but corrupted like, well, like an upside down cross…
Ramon nods as he sees me making the connection. I’m impressed with my own mental powers, but did I follow his logic all by myself? Just for a second, I feel like I’ve had direct access to his thoughts – as though I were achieving some of the powers of the meditations outside the Temple - weird but encouraging.
“It’s the Anti Syradell,” Ramon says.
We pass the token round and speculate some more. “So, they got Pepsi cola,” Galda says. “So what?”
“Or they got a new sex,” I say, reminding her of her own speculation. “That would be a bit more radical, wouldn’t it?"
“I think they got something radical alright”, Avva says. “I can’t prove it, but I know I’m right. I think they got something radical enough to build the Dark Cathedral in mockery of the Light. I think they got something evil."
There’s a dramatic pause as this sinks in. Then Galda breaks the mood.
“That’s the trouble with you priests,” she says contemptuously. “You always have to think of everything in terms of good and evil. How can you possibly know what happened to a species that was extinct across the Bubble before we humans had even left the African savannah?”
“And the trouble with you atheists is that you don’t know evil when it’s staring you in the face,” Avva counters. It’s the first time I’ve seen the priest lose his temper. The crack in his hitherto calm and phlegmatic attitude shakes Galda.
“I learnt about this little symbol from Ian Hastings journal,” he continues. “Ian was going to be my contact, remember? After my visit to the graveyard the Void Church had to be next. With the missionary expedition coming so late in the life of the town I’d expected it to be on the outskirts of TwoWells. However, it turned out that the missionaries were blessed with good fortune. One of the founding buildings had been condemned and scheduled for demolition just before they arrived. The church occupied the newly cleared plot of land, right in the centre of town overlooking the North Well. It was a credit to Wordsmore’s persuasive skills that he’d been able to secure permission to build on such a prime site.
"Considering the size of the town and the modest number of missionaries the church was a respectably large building in the local white stone and plastic, complete with a fluted spire and two rows of five pentagonal aquamarine glass windows flanking the nave. The building was reflected in a large still pool, bounded by a low white circular wall. This was the North Well although it was more of a pond than a well. Large ornamental double doors were carved under the gable end, but they had never been designed to open. A pair of much smaller real doors flanked the main entrance, keyed by standard fail safe access handles. The pressure seals were intact, and I entered through a triple atmospheric lock. Inside, slow white dust filtered lazily through the thick shadow-stained air. I walked past rows of empty pews wondering what sermons Wordsmore had been preaching from the high silver pulpit. Behind the sanctuary another air lock led to a low bunkhouse and a lodge built into an L shape where the missionaries had lived.
"Above all I wanted to speak to someone. I’d no idea how long it’d been since this odd tragedy had overtaken TwoWells. So, there was food on tables, and not badly decayed, but that didn’t mean much to me. Most buildings were now depressurised. In the thin atmosphere it was hard to tell how long it would have taken the natural agents of decay to work. For the same reason, I could tell nothing much from the body I’d exhumed. I’m not a biologist. I didn’t understand how quickly the biosphere of this relatively sterile little world would act on human remains. I’m not an archaeologist either but I almost felt like one. The mystery of TwoWells seemed as impenetrable to me as the ancient lifestyle of the Cata-Zin and yet the one might have happened yesterday whilst the other was ten million years up the stream of time. But both were devoid of actors – living beings with whom I could converse. I’m a priest. I’m trained to pray, to meditate and to talk. I’d come here expecting an argument – expecting to debate with my old pupil. I was wary of Wordsmore’s skills, but I had confidence I could win him back to the true ways of the Void Church. I’d never expected this desolation. Now I couldn’t fight the battle for which I’d been trained.
"I found no one living in TwoWells but I found the next best thing. In Ian Hasting’s quarters I found his journal, and with the journal the two tokens I have just shown you. Hasting’s account was fragmentary, and it ended before matters reached their climax, but it told me enough. It seemed that the unearthing of the Anti Syradell had provoked a ferment of excitement and theorising amongst the citizens of TwoWells. The Scientific Council made an interesting decision immediately after the news was released, forbidding open discussion with the thinderin grove, ‘pending primary evaluation studies’. My guess is that they were jealous of their discovery and wanted to keep it secret from their alien colleagues and rivals for a while. I suppose you can’t blame them. It must have been galling to have to work behind a thirty-thousand-year head start all the time. It turned out that Anti-Syradell tokens were common in this new sector of the Wheel – common enough for Ian Hastings to acquire one. Theories ran like wildfire round the town and that was when Wordsmore first broke away from the traditions of the Void Church and in a spectacular way. He made a visit on his own to a part of the Wheel deep in the new territory and never before explored. He came back with a revelation, acting like some sort of latter-day Moses. Wordsmore claimed to have been told what the Syradell and the Anti-Syradell were for. He started a schism with his orthodox brethren, but such was the force of his personality that his cult soon dominated the church. That’s when Hastings sent out his warning to Green Home. There were only a few later entries in the journal. He recorded, somewhat bitterly, that congregations rose to new heights. He neglected to record what Wordsmore was saying to them, whether out of disgust or plain ignorance I do not know. But he did mention that Wordsmore had become obsessed with Issulon and with one particular structure on the Dark Cathedral which was called ‘The Congress Of Shadows’.
"At length, I decided to return to the thinderin grove and ask for help. I walked back sombre and thoughtful. The observation station was a large copse of more than two hundred adult sessile thinderin. There were only a few seedlings kept on site to tend to the nutritional and safety needs of the grove and look after rare ‘fast time’ events such as maintaining relations with the human settlement.
"I was made welcome and housed in the guest annex where they kept supplies of human food and mist concentrated water. It was a pleasant enough building made of local stone and the sacred wood of the thinderin dead, not unlike the centre where our fellow pilgrims are now undergoing spiritual guidance. A seedling I learned to call WindThinker was appointed to look after me and to translate to the grove.
"WindThinker explained that contact with human archaeologists was sporadic and usually initiated from TwoWells. You may already appreciate that for adult thinderin, awareness moves at a very slow rate. The adult thinderin of Eduoma slept or debated the findings of their ancestors in chemical philosophy between their roots and branches over decades. They seldom bothered to excavate for new material though the seedlings could do that for them when they felt the need. It’s a much less sensitive state than the human mind – akin to dreaming perhaps – the thinderin I’ve conversed with claim it is more in tune with the longer time perspectives of the universe. Anyway, the consequence of this state of consciousness is that the adults simply hadn’t noticed the demise of TwoWells. It had been too recent to filter into their awareness and the few seedlings on the planet had recently been occupied with other private projects.
"The debate was slow and ponderous, even to my mind trained to the value of the prolonged theological conclaves in Green Home. Long rose dawns and indigo evenings passed under the silent thought of the trees. WindThinker used his root system to tap into the great network of minds, moving from place to place, keeping me informed of the progress of the discussions and injecting my own contribution into the slowly rising sap and cortical hard wood. The thinderin were shocked. Nothing of such significance had happened on Eduoma for ten thousand years. They analysed their recent system sense data for some sign of what had happened to TwoWells. They found a record of a G-Lifter launch, heading for Issulon – heading in fact for the location on the moon which was translated by thinderin and human alike as ‘The Congress of Shadows’. And after much argument it was agreed that WindThinker and I would take a thistledown lander and follow.
"We took precautions. I carried no weapons and the Eduoma grove wasn’t a military base, but WindThinker had access to some equipment which I doubt if the thinderin have ever shown to humans elsewhere; sensitive communication machines and some light weight ‘defensive’ armaments. The lander was fitted with five drone transfer projectiles, and these were manually set to an autonomous rescue protocol designed to ensure that the grove received a report of our demise should anything untoward happen. Not particularly comforting but better than nothing.
"WindThinker brought the lander to ground near the edge of a vast circular plain of polished blue ice. Traces of ion engine vapour had confirmed our decision to land here and although we saw no sign of the community shuttlecraft, an infrared signal stood out above the background noise seven hundred meters north of our position.
"Six silvery needle spires, each twice as tall as this Temple marked the arc of the perimeter of the plain. The ambient temperature was a chilly 230 degrees Kelvin. We donned bulky atmospheric protection suits and stepped out into the near vacuum of the Dark Cathedral.
"‘It is ten thousand years since we sent an expedition to Issulon’, WindThinker said.
"‘Why so long?’
"‘We have limited resources. There is still much to learn on Eduoma, and we are profiting from it. Issulon changes more slowly in the emptiness of its atmosphere. We have surveyed the major features. Its secrets will keep. There is plenty of time for later study.’"
"'Obviously not what Wordsmore thought,' I muttered.
"‘Obviously not,’ WindThinker agreed.
"Below the needle spires there was a low sprawl of silvery grey cubical buildings, interpenetrating like rapidly grown salt crystals under high magnification. We made our way to a narrow alley way between two squat blocks that seemed to lead in the direction of the heat source. Our footsteps were silent in the vacuum but there was a faint vibration transmitted through the soles of our boots. WindThinker was behind me, spinning lightly round the axis of each triple leg, or stuttering forward with more awkward linear motions where the passageway narrowed. We turned three corners where the angles of the buildings seemed to have melted into soft curves like theatre curtains and descended a gently sloping pavement to reach a wide set of steps leading down into the darkness. An archway over the steps was decorated with the gunmetal grey shape of the Anti Syradell. And at the bottom of those steps, we found the missing disciples of TwoWells. And we found Thomas Wordsmore. They’re still there as far as I know.
"Twenty metres down into the stairwell the darkness gave way to a pale distorted blue light, which flickered against the silvery plastic tunnel walls. The steps opened out into a circular hall in which a scattering of quasi-organic shapes, and more geometrically simple tubes spanned the space between floor and ceiling. The floor itself was transparent – alarmingly so at first impression, so that WindThinker and I both hesitated before stepping out onto the clear surface. The light was coming from the level below, casting disturbing shadows on the structures of the room. We looked down onto a pathological scene, one that I came to think of as a living hell.
"The floor and surrounding structures must have sealed the lower level away from the vacuum. There was some sort of air pressure in there, although I couldn’t tell what kind of air and how much of it there was. Wordsmore and his disciples weren’t wearing atmospheric protection suits. Wordsmore had a long dark bottle green cloak, like a perversion of his priestly robes. The others were naked.
"Once I got over my initial shock I counted twenty-eight humans in that chamber, the last survivors of TwoWells. At first, I had no idea what they were doing but Wordsmore was directing it, I could see that much. A hard glassy screen projected at an angle of ninety odd degrees from the back of the room where its surface was clearly visible to them all and only slightly more awkward for Wind Thinker and I to study. Wordsmore was wielding a thin silver instrument like a conductor’s baton and where he touched the screen he left behind a pattern of glowing amber and blue light, which persisted for an indeterminate amount of time. My immediate thought was of an alien chalk and blackboard, but a complex one of whatever sort. The patterns marked by Wordsmore’s wand were more intricate than his simple tracing action implied. I guessed that some subtlety in the way he was wielding the tool was responsible for the diversity of responses on the screen.
"‘I do not recognise the script,’ WindThinker said.
"Neither did I. I wasn’t even sure that it was a script in the conventional sense. Perhaps it was more like a diagram. In any case, it was soon impossible to concentrate on that screen in the face of the horrors that were going on in the centre of the chamber.
"The disciples were dissecting one of their number – an old man with long grey hair bound at the back in a ponytail. He was stretched on a machine extruded from the chamber floor, his stomach open to scalpels and tweezers wielded by five or six individuals. He was looking straight up at me, and it was plain to see that he was fully conscious and in agony.
"I don’t know how long we watched this horrific operation. Not long probably, though it seemed an age. My mind found it hard to process what my eyes were seeing, and it was WindThinker who pointed out another feature of the room below us. Several warped plastic sculptures protruded from the floor, ceiling, and walls. They were translucent and revealed thin traceries of opaque veins within. And other things. Things that looked suspiciously like human internal organs. I identified what appeared to be a pair of lungs, a pair of kidneys and several sets of eyes.
"Our suspicions were shortly reinforced by what we witnessed next on the operating table. One of the makeshift surgeons was removing the patient’s heart. Yet despite this violation the man appeared still to be breathing and twitching on the alien machine. Thin transparent cilia had writhed round him, whipping out of the artefact and inserting themselves into arteries and veins.
"‘They’re maintaining the systolic pressure’, I guessed aloud, fascinated at the same time that I was repulsed. But the heart itself, still beating, was borne away to a tooth shaped protrusion which proceeded to absorb it into the structure of the wall even as we watched. And then I perceived the nature of the matrix below me. Somehow, ancient Cata-Zin machinery from this long dead site in the ‘Congress of Shadows’ on the planet of Issulon had locked on to the organic functions of human organs and was keeping them alive – alive and connected through surrogate nervous tissue in the structure of the very building. And not just any organs – as I looked around, I saw the sensory organs, eyes and ears and eventually I saw the brains. It was only then that I suddenly wanted to vomit and just as suddenly I was very afraid.
"I’m not sure what I’d have done if WindThinker had not been there. At that moment of crisis my thinderin ally felt less alien than the carnival of lost souls from TwoWells cavorting below me. They seemed beyond my help. And yet I hadn’t come all this way to do nothing.
"‘Are you trying to speak to me?’, WindThinker asked. “I do not understand you.”
"It took a moment for me to recover.
"‘No,’ I said. 'I wasn’t speaking. I was being sick. The retching reaction in humans empties the undigested contents of the stomach through the mouth. It is an unpleasant experience for us – it’s my involuntary response to this situation.’
"‘Are you alright?’
"‘I’ll live’
"‘This is a most disturbing situation. We must decide what to do.’
"And so Wind Thinker and I discussed it, as calmly and rationally as could be expected under the circumstances. We quickly decided we had no hope of rescuing anyone. We didn’t understand the Cata-Zin machinery and frankly I was too scared by the prospect of a physical confrontation with Wordsmore and his followers. I wasn’t going to go without some answers though, and I resolved to return with medical and armed support as soon as I could get it.
"‘I must try to talk with them,’ I said. ‘That at least.’
"‘They have no radios’, WindThinker said, ‘but if we strike the floor hard enough, we might attract their attention with a sound transmitted through their air pocket. Then they will look up and see us.’
"That is what we did. And for a few moments Thomas Wordsmore turned his head up to us and locked eyes with me. I don’t know if he recognised me behind the vacuum suit, but he waved in the direction of the screen and two symbols appeared side by side. The first was the Anti-Syradell and the second was an inverted Christian cross – just like all those crosses I’d left behind in TwoWells.
"So, after two months and one hundred and fifty-three light-years I was finally face to face with my apostate former pupil, and there was nothing I could say. Not nothing I wanted to say. I had so many questions for which I must have answers and the need to open a dialog consumed me from within as a hot fire of anger, curiosity, righteousness and fear. But there was nothing I could say because I had no adequate way to communicate. Wordsmore might have helped if he’d been willing. He had the screen, and he had his Cata-Zin pointing stick. We could have written sentences across the gap between the chambers. But after those first chilling symbols I got no more from him.
"Wordsmore and his disciples returned to their dismemberment and there was nothing we could do to stop them. Nothing.
"So, we had to leave. I was duty bound to report all this to my Order. Naturally I’ve sent messages to the nearest colonies and ahead to Green Home but the Dean of Outer Studies is awaiting my account in person. However, I’ve done a lot of listening to the thinderin on Eduoma. Their text was the ‘Legends of the Chromatic Temple’.”
He smiles, a watery token of ambiguous apology. “A small detour seemed in order. And that is how I came to this place in search of enlightenment.”
Ramon Avva doesn’t need to tell us exactly why it is this Temple on this planet. We all know what he’s looking for and now we know why. He’s looking for a method of direct mental access to the minds of Thomas Wordsmore and his lost flock. And because we three pilgrims all know what the white meditation promises, we all smile together. Just for an instant, simple human deductive reasoning gives us the same thing. We share the same thought, know that we do and are amused by the manner of it.
Then Dovrich Galda breaks the sympathetic spell.
“A straightforward military mission would sort that creep Wordsmore out. He doesn’t need understanding; he just needs eliminating. You can’t face the fact because he’s your precious pupil and you think there has to be some subtle reason for his spiritual corruption, some great missing truth. And you want to save him, don’t you? Not possible in my book. All you’re telling us is that you’re a redemption junky. Yes? I suppose we should expect as much from a Void priest.”
After Ramon Avva’s long story, her prickly little response sounds harsh and crass. Nevertheless, I find myself agreeing with her.
The priest sighs. Either he hasn’t the energy to defend himself against the tough old woman or he simply doesn’t care.
“Isn’t that why we all came? Or perhaps you’ll tell me something different.”
Dovrich Galda keeps an uneasy silence. I think of an old saying I suspect might apply. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
But I have no problems. I’m here for an eminently practical purpose as I was from the beginning. And at this moment I perceive that my earlier indulgence in spiritual contemplation was no more than timidity, tinged perhaps with a justifiable fear of the unknown. I’ve grown out of that now. Bring on the meditations. I can handle them.
Dovrich is right. When it comes right down to it, I’m not really a very nice person.
“Time for your story now,” the old woman says looking at me with a menacing smile.
“Ladies first,” I reply with fake gallantry which doesn’t convince her for a moment. Her smile cracks.
“Why don’t we toss a coin for it?” I suggest.
“How curiously archaic. You have such a thing as a coin with you?”
“Oh yes. I’ve got several coins, including my lucky one."
They are the same coins that I’ve been using as Cribbage pegs. I reach in my pocket and hand one to her for inspection – an arbitrary coin – I’m bluffing about having a lucky one. She turns it over suspiciously, as though I might have carried a fake double headed coin nearly thirty light years specially to fool her. But no. It’s standard issue Resource Management World Government coinage for the low development provinces – double headed, yes, but not the same two heads. It’s Their Majesties picked out in gold and green, Imran on one side and Katarina on the other.
“You call and Ramon can toss. Can’t say fairer than that can you?”
“OK,” she says. “We’ll do it your way."
The coin spins in the air over the wooden table in a long lazy arc.
“Katarina,” Dovrich calls. Before I can see the outcome, I marshal my thoughts…
Shall I tell them about Fitararye Wilson and my adventures on Inuwarmah? Maybe…
ByRoute 74 winds its way across the Bubble, emerging from the Forbidden Regions to spinward and vanishing into them at the trailing rim. The long ships of the Counter Xarctic traders have been plying this route for three million years, as the slow movement of the stars in their ancient orbits round the galactic centre gradually distorts the geometry of its original course. On my first trip off world as a BXR trainee I travelled on a pallet craft to Tuesday’s Drift then on to ByRoute 74 with a party of four Void priests. Our destination was the planet of Inuwarmah, classified in Society records as Fallow with a Quarantine review to take place within two hundred years. That made it the most interesting system in the Bubble to the student of alien politics. Inuwarmah was now in the same state which Earth had been in roughly forty thousand years ago and Werm a few thousand years earlier. The laws of the Society of Contemporary races already restricted contact with the indigenous sophonts and under the current policy it was a matter of time before a general withdrawal order would be issued to avoid contamination of the emerging culture. According to the current Society policy, full Quarantine would be initiated on the crux of the passage from prehistory into history, ensuring that there would be no local incontrovertible records of alien visitors or their technologies to pollute the developmental stream of the seedling civilization. The odd slippage wasn’t too serious, as later scholars of a young and isolated species would usually attribute early records to myth and legend, but the Society was very strict about removing all physical evidence of alien visits after Quarantine was imposed.
Inuwarmah is a massive low-density world orbiting an F type sun in an eccentric orbit which takes it to within approximately one and a half AU of its parent star at perihelion and out to a little over two AU at aphelion. It is a great dirty snowball of a planet with a thick atmosphere, which attenuates only slowly into a vast sky. The lowlands lie under nearly three times standard Earth atmospheric pressure, but high table lands and long mountain chains take much of the surface up to regions where the pressure is only half as much. There are five great icy oceans which never quite freeze over, even in the depths of winter. Strong winds stir a vigorous pattern of constantly changing clouds round the temperate belts. The mix of oxygen in the air is something close to twenty five percent and the gravitational forces too high to be comfortable for most humans.
We came to Inuwarmah at the start of the long northern hemisphere summer which would last for nearly a whole Earth year. I was tense and excited as the shuttle went through a seemingly endless series of buffeting lurches, screaming into the thick air. The long journey had been an intriguing prelude, although the smooth predictability of the flicker drive was less thrilling in practice than in concept, and now I was eager to be free from the confines of interstellar travel. I was about to set foot on my first alien world. At the same time, I was also conscious of my distance from the four priests who were my companions, as though I had no real business here. I certainly did though, both as an official BXR employee and then, depending on the things I found out, perhaps in a secret capacity for the BEA. It was complicated.
The shuttle landed vertically, descending the final few meters on its tail in a snowstorm of giant swirling flakes as soft as thistledown and as large as my head, crystallising in intricate fractal hexagons writ bold but translucent across the bleak blue sky. We’d arrived at the research centre of St. Lucien, high in the Patriqua mountain range on the continent of Eil.
It was cold in the hard winds outside. We clamped light but strong plastic breathing masks over our mouths and noses. The masks needed no air tanks, drawing their gases from the atmosphere but rebalancing the mix and reducing the pressure on our lungs. Even so, we all breathed in shallow gulps, eyes smarting from excess oxygen, skin tingling, ears adjusting to the buffeting volume of the blustery air. Three men were waiting for us in a squat circular reception building at the edge of the small grey square of the landing field. The first was deacon Ochre Jones, the head of the Void priest mission, a gaunt Caucasian with thick grey hair rushing back from a deeply tanned and lined face, creased now into a smile of welcome. My contact from BXR Louis Chen, was hunched in a grey overcoat with a wiry black moustache nearly covering his mongoloid face. Two steps behind Chen was Fitararye Wilson, a lean, but muscular man with red skin which I later learned came from Sioux ancestors. He wore a dark suit and sported a shocking crimson ridge of hair. Wilson was a representative of the Great Commercial League and as I would soon find out, a consummate professional, an idealist, a pragmatist and an arch fixer.
Above the landing field a wide road led upwards in a series of gentle curves through a forest of spiky Ixarick trees. The trunks were mossy brown and bronze and coated with frost and ice. Our vehicle lumbered through them on great grey balloon tyres taller than we were, making wide chevron patterned tracks through the thin snow and sometimes cutting down to the layer of the wooden sleepers beneath. We watched the darkening forest from a warm cab pressurised to human standards high above the gentle rocking of the chassis and when we crested a ridge the weather changed abruptly, with the last of the clouds blowing away behind us. The flat back wind cut into the stars over a sunset like rusty iron.
“We are close to the edge of the Triambic Escarpment," Chen said, "and that's where most of the action is."
“It’s along most of the escarpment edges,” Jones said, “but the Triambic Escarpment is the place where the off-world observatories are and where we have our mission house.”
Chen gave the deacon a complicated look which I tried to interpret, my best guess being that as far as he was concerned the off-world observatories were the action. There was no time for further elaboration. The horizon was close, rising to a little lip that screened the land below. With a hiss of decompressing gas, we stopped at the end of the road then waited for an automatic docking sequence whilst a tubular extension at the bottom of the vehicle bonded to a matching circular portal in the ground.
“This is where we get off,” Chen said. That turned out to mean all the secular passengers. The priests, it transpired, were riding a little further.
Once the connection was secure with the interior at cabin pressure, Chen, Wilson and I were free to descend via a short ladder into a wide sterile corridor lit by white neon. The air lock closed behind us and there was only a faint engine noise to tell us that the bus had gone.
“Welcome to the embassy. Come through to the office and let me pour you both a drink…”
I must have looked a little disappointed at the antiseptic windowless surrounds of the subterranean complex.
“Don’t worry,” Chen said. “You’ll get to see plenty of the world in the next few days. And you can start with a visit to the Void priests.”
“They have a much more interesting space. A real room with a view you could say,” Wilson added.
“The thing is,” my BXR boss resumed, “it’s the Void Priests that have the money. I know back on Earth we’d be the ones in charge, but we aren’t the government here. We’re just observers. The priests have a lot of powerful backing. They are the main representatives of humanity out here and not us, though we may well wish otherwise. Our job is to keep an eye on them and to keep an eye on the other observers too – the thinderin just over the edge and the werm further north when we can.”
“And the natives too, I expect,” I said. “What about them?”
Chen shrugged. “The natives don’t usually cause us as much concern, although at the moment we do have a little situation I’ll explain later. We have to be careful.”
“We’re not just observers, are we?” Wilson said, his voice dripping with something that sounded like amusement and cynicism combined.
“Our business representative reminds me of a deal we have with the Commercial League. I’ll explain all that in a couple of days. I want you to see the Void priests first and tell me what you think. I’d welcome your unbiased opinion before we start on the fine details of how we handle alien relations with all our neighbours and before we talk about our other work.”
The Void priests had a large centre built into the escarpment cliff side. Their chapel and their study mission joined together were the biggest buildings in St. Lucien, though artificial caverns rather than buildings might have been a more accurate description. All human dwellings on Inuwarmah were underground to protect us from over exposure to the fierce native sun and air. There was a tunnel connecting the embassy to the mission, broken into three separate pressure sealed zones and I did not have to wait for the bus to make my visit. Ochre Jones was expecting me, and the chief priest led me through to the chapel.
We entered the room at its highest point ten meters to the left of the main altar. Ahead of me the floor dropped away in a series of long shallow steps, some of the closer ones hosting heavy black pews whilst the further steps growing gradually wider and flatter were more open, occupied by occasional groupings of tables and chairs some of which faced the opposite way where great swathes of natural light burst into the chapel from an irregularly shaped archway twenty metres tall or more and fifty wide.
The view was breath-taking. The natural opening in the cliff face has been sealed with some kind of hard glass like resin, creating a massive window which held fast against the high pressure of the outside atmosphere and revealed a wonderful panorama where the land fell away. Even though this window had been coated with a polarising photosensitive filter the brightness of the scene made me blink rapidly for a few moments until my eyes accustomed themselves. Great dark grey clouds were rolling in fast, thick swells across the sky granting occasional glimpses of the fierce white sun behind them. Thinner and paler veils of mist drifted beneath, revealing depth and form at the base of the Triambic Escarpment. These were the Table Lands, I later learned, a verdant cascade of lime and sea green tree canopy which spread over the middle distance before dropping down in a second dramatic acceleration towards a red and beige carpet of increasingly distant vegetation. Far below, these Low Lands rose and fell in a dappled hilly landscape of dark green stone and water which faded into haze and obscurity but up here, amongst the fleets of clouds swift black shapes soared, swooped and dived in a complex dance. At first, I thought they were birds but I had to revise my initial assessment of the scale of the scene and the participants in it, when two of them flew close to the window. I could now see that the flyers were almost twice as tall as a human being with a roughly anthropoid form, yet skeletal with great ribbed barrel chests and wide, multiply jointed wings. Their bodies were lined with black fluffy feathers which I learned later functioned more as a protection against cold than a flight aid. Their heads were angular, eyes wide and recessed into sockets on either side of a roughly cubical skull. A substantial fluted flexible proboscis occupied roughly the position where a nose would sit on a human face, and I was told it served the combined anatomical functions of nose and mouth. I had only a glimpse and then they were gone, gliding past and dropping to the left.
“The native sophonts,” the priest said in answer to my unspoken question. “They call themselves the Inuwar. These are the people we are here to study and to teach.”
Inevitably we moved down the gentle slope of the chapel to the base of the window where it melded in a thick bonding flow directly into the floor. The four new priests who had travelled with me to this world were gathered there watching an unfolding panorama where the cliff bent round to the left and a flock of Inuwar circled at the entrance to a honeycomb of caves.
“There are roosts at intervals all along the Triambic Escarpment for more than two thousand kilometres. We know that there are other colonies on the Petric and Zynal Escarpments too; maybe even more there. So what we see here is only a very small sample of Inuwar life. But we visit the roost here on a regular basis and we have established a line of communication with their leaders.”
“They have a culture then?” I queried.
“Oh, yes. They have language and a strong oral tradition. They have certain basic native technologies too, such as some rudimentary clothing which they wear round the neck and the feet, though not when they are flying. It’s only writing that they lack and they aren’t far from reaching that stage.”
“I can see there is a lot to learn,” I remarked absently, “but you also mentioned teaching. What are you teaching them? Isn’t that some kind of interference with local culture? How does that fit in with the policy of the Contemporary Races to leave the world fallow?”
Jones took some time to think about his reply. “I’m not sure I entirely understand everything about this policy of Fallow worlds myself,” he said. “I don’t claim to speak for the Contemporary Races. I have thought about it a lot though. There is plenty of latitude in the policy. It isn’t as prescriptive as it seems; much more pragmatic in application than it may appear in theory. The thinderin are doing much the same as we are from what I can understand of their intentions. They have groves here and they are spreading their knowledge too; some kinds of knowledge anyway. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t serious about the Fallow policy though. I have no doubt that all contact will be cut once a persistent knowledge transfer mechanism such as writing is established in the local culture. And once we are out, we’ll be out until they reach star flight - if they ever do.”
“What’s the point of teaching anything then?”
"It's a duty," the tall priest answered. "A Holy Duty we would say, though you might not understand what that means. We are here at the start of something that might last for thousands of generations - the birth of a whole new civilization. We wish to bless it with our presence and to consecrate it for good. There is nothing specific we are trying to impart - all that will be lost in the distance of time and space. What we are trying to communicate is a veneration for the spirit which we hope will infuse the Inuwar and which will turn them from barbarisms and evils. We will never see the fruit of this work. We cannot. And we cannot know whether we will succeed or fail because that measure lies only in the eyes of the far future and of God. Yet we may pray and we may hope. And the little we can do we offer gladly.
“Not exactly instant gratification is it?” I remarked rather flippantly but he answered me in all seriousness.
“We’ve got to learn to think like the thinderin and the viwodian if we’re going to get along in this galaxy. That means thinking long term – really long term. I believe their motives are like ours.”
"Then you take a lot on yourself," I said, for I was still young and inclined to be judgemental. "The history of missionaries is not a happy one and the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children even unto the last generation." I paraphrased the Bible inaccurately. "Beware lest it is sin you teach!"
"Only prayer and the will of God can guide us there," he answered mildly. "But the actions of your Bureau are rather more open to question do you not think? Tell me how you justify your work here?"
I acted confused although I was pretty sure I knew what he was taking about, but I needed to have it confirmed. "Louis Chen hasn't briefed you yet has he? He's a sly one! He thinks your innocence will find me kinder towards you and I suppose he's right but I'm not going to do his work for him. You'll find out what the BXR is doing here soon enough, I'm sure, and it's more than just keeping an eye on us and on the thinderin embassy. Come back and visit me when you know more! I'd be interested to continue our little theological debate then."
The next day, after he'd debriefed me about my visit to the priests, Chen sent me on a trip with Fitararye Wilson. I was a little disappointed that I'd had no opportunity to see the caves of the Inuwar and said as much to my boss.
"There's plenty of time," Chen said. "The priests like to guard their access. I'm sure Jones will arrange an accompanied visit for you in a few days. I have something else I want you to see first."
The merchant and I were accompanied by a couple of security men from the embassy and we travelled by bus again, the wide tyres of the lumbering vehicle taking us this time onto a road running along the lip of the escarpment. We drove north of St. Lucien for almost half an hour before a rigging of stark open iron work came into view. This turned out to be the head station of a funicular railway. A great pill shaped capsule rested on a cradle. It was docked into a small circular waiting room crouching under the iron work. We transferred into this carriage and after a short while it began to descend down the near vertical track which clung to the cliff face.
Wilson was mercurial of mood, by turns ebullient and expansive then suddenly pensive and silent. As I hardly knew him I took this for part of his normal character, though it made him an awkward companion, but later I realised that he must have known something of the way events were to move on Inuwarmah and the knowledge had made him nervous. He was assessing me and my prospects as a possible friend or foe in the coming drama.
"The light gas masks we all wear around St. Lucien aren't adequate for survival outside the pod at the bottom of this ride," he said. "The pressure of the atmosphere is too great down on the table lands even though we will still be two kilometres or more above sea level. It gets very thick down there and very strange. There are many ecosystems in this world and we only have good access to the top slices. The high table lands are as far down as we ever get. We have suits that will allow some independent movement there. They are stowed in the lockers behind you. It's normal practice to spend some of the journey time suiting up and for new travellers to familiarise themselves with the suit mechanisms, so why don't we do that now?"
Through the thick windows I could see a sparse scattering of scrubby bushes which clung to the grey cliff side. A wispy kind of mist kissed the glass and left diamond beads of water behind. If I leant over I could peer down the line of the rails where they seemed to converge, far, far below in a tempest of thicker vegetation and a patchwork of lakes. It gave me vertigo.
The suit design was a modification of standard modern diving attire which I'd later encounter in Antarctica. It did not sit flush with the skin but wrapped round existing clothing, separated by a micro thin inner layer of compressed air. Once tuned it was capable of maintaining a dynamic balance of flexibility and rigidity in the outer skin under a considerable degree of external pressure and all controlled by the volition of the wearer. Configuration and adjustment, however, though largely automatic was always time consuming and especially so for a new wearer. We concentrated on suiting up, let the systems do their job of measuring and tailoring and didn't speak again until a loud metallic clang and a ratcheted deceleration ended with the pod door opening at the bottom of the cliff.
Ahead of us a slick black road twisted away between irregularly spaced columns of tall purplish and royal blue tree trunks. We had broken through the canopy of a deep forest, yet the leafy roof was open in places to allow the sunlight through, revealing a complex living panorama. Scrub and clearings were interrupted by pools of water and the occasional flying shape which flashed across them.
“I like this place,” Wilson said as we set off to walk down the road. “It feels like the Earth’s older and more muscular brother. It’s an austere, hard world and it’s tough but it’s rich too. Everything that lives here has a strong appetite for life. You can feel it in the air. There’s more of everything – more weight, more oxygen, more vigour all round. It’s not somewhere for delicate little species clinging to ecosystem niches. It’s a land for giants; a land for the robust.”
I sensed that he might have said more were it not for the presence of the two silent BXR security guards. In any case, we reached the cultivated area in less than ten minutes. A low metal bridge over a dark canal broke the regularity of the road and then we passed through a gateway in a metal fence and entered a region where the trees had obviously been planted, a single species standing in tall epic rows their smooth grey trunks spare and very straight and their crowns far above our heads. Elegant palmate leaves twisted in the wind the front and back sides two complementary shades of pale yellow and green. The geometry of the forest and the flow of air created waves of synchronised motion in the leaves so that seen from the ground, patterns of green and yellow swept across the sky in great gusting arcs of transformation. It was such a compelling sight that it took me a while to spot the much smaller clusters of heavy dark red seeds peeking between the high branches and alternately hidden and revealed by the play of the wind. When I next glanced down at the ground, I saw that one had fallen near to where we were standing, and I bent to pick it up. The seed was roughly the size and shape of a coconut, but smooth of skin, mottled and faintly scented with a bitter aroma. There was something vaguely familiar about the smell, but I couldn’t work out what it was at first.
A sudden movement in the corner of my eye made me twist my head to see a crab like shape with an iridescent metallic lustre scuttling up the trunk of the nearest tree. My first assumption was that I was watching some new example of the fauna of Eil, but the truth was rather more strange. As my eyes and mind adjusted to the details of the scene I began to notice many more of these things and even to catch glimpses of them jumping in the canopy from tree to tree with prodigious leaps and aided by small stubby wings.
“They are our harvesters,” Wilson said in answer to my unspoken question. “And this is our crop. We couldn’t work here without them.”
“Nothing I’ve ever seen the like of before,” I admitted. “Are they...”
“They’re robots. It’s quite an efficient technique, though they don’t always do exactly what we’d like, because we don’t understand all their control functions. Enough to get by though. It’s Tetratic Empire technology. The Counter Xarctic traders conserved some limited stocks and sold them to the Werm and to us.”
The Tetratic Empire was the last of a short series of political organisations which controlled our spiral arm of the galaxy in the period after the end of the Amnyine passage and before the foundation of the Society of Contemporary Races. It collapsed in the face of the Asamack Response eight hundred thousand years ago. The Tetratic Empire is reasonably well documented, unlike the increasingly mysterious civilizations before the Amnyine passage, such as the Grumm movement and the Cata-Zin. When compared with these older cultures, it was neither remarkably extensive, long lived nor technologically advanced but by virtue of the fact that it held sway in relatively recent times it had played an important role in modern history. There are many Tetratic Empire stations scattered throughout the Bubble and beyond and some, in vacuum conditions, are almost perfectly preserved. Recovered Tetratic Empire technology helped more than one species rise out of the Age of Convalescence (particularly the Paladen) and was of great significance to the embryonic organisations that joined together to form the Society of Contemporary Races. We rely on the records of the Counter Xarctic traders for first-hand accounts of the nature of the Empire and its peoples. It was, we are told, heterogeneous, ambitious, benevolent for the most part and ultimately badly flawed. It produced some technologies which none of the Society members have yet been able or willing to recreate.
We walked down an avenue of trees which cut a straight path away from the escarpment, rising and falling over a series of gentle slopes dictated by the soft curves of the land. To left and right the monoculture of the forest continued without a break. At length we crested a low rise and looked down into a clearing where a small complex of squat buildings broke the pattern of the woods. Two tall and fat silvery storage cylinders dominated the scene each topped by a wide-open funnel. They sat inside a fenced compound where a low rattle and rhythmic hiss emanated from some unknown machinery in a long white shed. A narrow-gauge railway emerged from the right-hand end of the shed and took a course following the flattest route, the track vanishing quickly out of sight behind rows of grey trunks.
This was a collection point for the harvesters. As we watched they emerged from the canopy, gliding on their short wings. Now that I observed more closely, I could see that occasional bursts from micro air jets were helping them to cross these wider open spaces with their burden. In the space of five minutes, we must have seen fifteen or twenty. Each one cradled a single red seed between the claws beneath its belly. Each one, flew over the funnel of one of the hoppers before releasing the seed to tumble into the station stores.
“It’s the tail end of the season,” Wilson told me. “We’re just cleaning up the late fruiting trees. Ten days ago you’d have seen whole flocks of harvesters coming out of the forest here and at the south point and low point stations. The whole operation is almost fully automated; just myself and a couple of trained techs from the Commercial League to keep an eye on things; and your bosses to keep an eye on me.
"The stations crush the seeds, winnow out the shells and distil the marrows then strain the pulp through a methanol compressor and redistill. The dried product is packed onto the light railway system and transported back up the cliff. It’ll be cut with a substrate to bulk it out before it’s sold but that happens off world.”
He looked at me slyly.
“You do know what we produce here, don’t you?”
The mild, pervasive scent of the crushed seeds rising from the station brought back sharply the memories of my time in London and the spaced out revellers; the purple flush on their skin and the undercurrent of violence and despair.
“Fly,” I said.
It wasn't the surprise he might have imagined. The BEA had gone to a lot of trouble, using sleeper agents in the BXR to ensure this was my first mission. They'd placed me here as their spy because they already had strong evidence Inuwarmah was the source of Fly, and I had my orders for what to do if that was true.
In the cities and town of Europe and America, Fly was a curse; a scourge which kept them chained, leaving thousands addicted and hundreds crippled and dying from withdrawal symptoms every year. How perverse that it was produced from something so beautiful, and that all that misery originated from such a tiny area!
On the morning after my trip to the forest I attended a formal briefing in Louis Chen’s office. He introduced me to two other members of his team, the first a sharp faced man with slick gelled hair and a dangerously blank look in his eyes; hard to read and inclined to long silences but not without his diplomatic skills as I was to find out.
“This is Prajeet Birl,” Chen told me. “He has just come back from a mission to the far north.
I nodded, equitably. The second was a woman in late middle age of Sino-Asian origin, with a wide pleasant face and a disarming smile.
“Lia Tan Yew Leong is my senior xenlologist and thinderin expert,” Chen said. “She handles our negotiations with the local grove”.
One wall of the office was projecting a map of this region of the Patriqua mountain range. The Triambic Escarpment showed as a thick black jagged line running from top to bottom down the left hand side. St Lucien appeared as a yellow dot roughly half way along the line with the routes to the space port behind it. Over the lands to the west, the tapestry of lakes and vegetation were depicted in more muted pastel tones. A green dot on the escarpment and a splash of mauve to its left marked the funicular railway and the extent of the cultivated woodland where Fly was harvested and extracted.
“This is a profitable operation for the Great Commercial League and for the BXR,” Chen explained. “It’s more profitable for us now than for them. There have been some recent renegotiations in the terms of the contract and going forward the profits will be divided seventy to thirty in our favour. Wilson wasn’t happy but he had no choice.”
Prajeet grinned silently and Chen allowed himself a satisfied smirk. It didn’t take a genius to understand that there had been some strong-arm tactics employed.
“We mustn’t get complacent though,” Chen continued. “Profits could be much higher. There is only a limited season when the crop trees fruit and the area we have under cultivation is small. Fly could be pushed throughout the Bubble if we could make more of it. But we have a problem with that. The land to the south, here is the site of the thinderin grove.”
He pointed out a small roughly circular patch of lime green just a little way away from the escarpment line and slightly south of St. Lucien.
“We can’t expand our operations in that direction. We have to be careful not to offend the thinderin. To the west of our forests, the land drops down further to the level of these lakes”. A mosaic of blue splotches stretched out from the site he indicated all the way to the edge of the map.
“There’s something about the chemistry or moisture level of the soil in that region which doesn’t suit the Great Flag trees. In any case, the slopes and the stretches of open water cut down on the area that could be easily covered by the harvesters. It would be difficult to cultivate even if the trees grew well.
Obviously, we can’t go east because that brings us right up against the base of the escarpment. And by the way, we know the Great Flag trees won’t grow up here on the extreme heights – they need a heavier warmer atmosphere to thrive. So that leaves the north as the only viable direction for expansion. But there’s a problem with that, too....”
Chen lapsed into a meditative silence and it was Lia who continued the briefing. “These yellow hatched zones with the solid regions inside are the air corridors and cave systems of the local Inuwar roosts. Grandarick Roost is our neighbour to the immediate north and you can see that their area of influence extends right over the obvious land we’d like to use for expansion. We need to find a way to persuade them to let us cultivate it. Unfortunately, they have other uses for the trees there, although they sometimes take crop seeds from our plantations too...”
“And reduce our yield at the same time,” Chen interjected with a frown,
“And reduce our yield somewhat,” Lia allowed. “In the main they prefer other fruits which come from the species growing around them. The Inuwar are semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, following their food sources. They come back to the same locations after traditional intervals (which are sometimes longer than annual) and they develop them when they are there. Grandarick Roost is a town built to be regularly abandoned and then inhabited again by the same tribe when the forest here is in season. But despite the fact it is not continually occupied it has a significant level of sophistication. You’ll see that for yourself when you visit. The point is that the Inuwar would prefer to keep the balance of species in the forest the way it is at the moment. We would like to persuade them otherwise.”
“And how do you plan to persuade them?” I asked.
“There are various ways,” Chen answered vaguely. “I have a number of options under consideration. And one option is that we may not need to persuade them at all. We could keep things more or less as they are here without cultivating more of the forest. But that depends on Lia. I want you to go with her tomorrow when she visits the thinderin grove. Watch and learn.”
My second trip out of doors on Inuwarmah led me south of St. Lucien in the company of Chen’s xenologist. The travel arrangements were much like my first trip – the surface bus with its giant balloon tyres driving ponderously through the spare upland forests of these highlands - then another docking station and another rail lift fastened to the side of the great escarpment taking us down into the depths of the atmosphere where a different kind of world awaited.
“Are there many more of these?” I asked waving my hand vaguely at the metal constructs anchored to the cliff face and the sturdy pressurised carriage. It was an impressive piece of engineering.
“Only the two,” Lia replied shortly. “The north lift and the south lift. St. Lucien doesn’t need any others.”
I’d asked the question mainly to interrupt the continuous briefing which she was delivering concerning the thinderin grove and how I was to behave there. This was the first time I had encountered thinderin and although I knew of them through my BXR studies, theory and practice are not the same thing, as Lia continually reminded me. She radiated anxiety and my presence as a novice diplomat obviously somewhat disconcerted her.
“Follow my lead and don’t speak unless you are asked a direct question,” she advised.
I shrugged, a little annoyed that my colleagues seemed so reluctant to let me in on their plans but I guessed I’d find out what was really going on in due course and resigned myself to the role of junior observer.
To begin with the countryside at the bottom of the south lift seemed little different from the northerly forest I’d seen the day before. A similar smoothly surfaced road cut through the vaulting pillars of the giant trees, and we set out along its course to the south. In places there were bridges crossing deep ravines where waterfalls and steep streams cut the land and the way sometimes looped deeper into the forest to avoid unstable sections of cliff face but for the most part it seemed to follow an approximate contour line hugging the sharp rise to the ridge of the Triambic Escarpment. It took us almost an hour to reach the thinderin grove and gradually I began to notice a change in the nature of the vegetation. The height of the canopy was dropping, and new kinds of trees characterised by a froth of mauve and red feathery leaves in their lower branches began to supplant the titans with their monolithic and relatively smooth trunks.
I didn’t realise it immediately, but even before we crossed the official border into the grove, I’d already seen a few adult thinderin outliers, growing peaceably amongst the native species; their bark dark grey and deeply folded, their branches intricately structured and their complex geometric leaves burnt umber, ochre and orange. Then suddenly, after the road had passed between two black fluted stone columns all the trees were of this same kind and I recognised them for what they were.
Within a minute or two we were joined by a seedling, my first sight of the motile form of the thinderin race, then a second and a third and soon a small party. They were expecting us and after conventional and brief greetings we followed their lead along a pathway that took us off the road and into a deep conical dell with a blue pool at its centre. Here was the heart of thinderin power on Inuwarmah and here we had come to listen to the verdict of the elders.
I hadn’t appreciated the nature of the dialog the BXR was engaged in and how far advanced it was. Perhaps I should have thought it through sooner, but in my defence the whole experience of this alien world was an overwhelming one and was giving me more than enough to think about already. But I did know that thinderin politics was a very slow business and that questions and requests must be put very carefully to the grove and answers ought not to be expected at the same meeting. It turned out that there was no real risk I could adversely affect any decision here. This wasn’t going to be one of the question setting symposia but more like the posting of the results of an exam. It was too late to affect the outcome but we were about to find out how Lia’s requests and carefully worded stratagems had been received. Such declarations tended to be final on the time scale of human interests. The thinderin do not much believe in appeals or second judgements and it is notoriously hard to change their collective mind when they have finally made it up. So we were supplicants here and the motile forms, after observing some brief courtesies set out the official position of the grove.
The answer was a firm “no”.
I understood that even before I understood exactly was the question had been. Lia looked stunned. She replied in polite platitudes, keeping the force of her anger for our return trip. That was when she explained to me how the BXR had been negotiating for permission to establish a second station on the Zynal Escarpment.
“Which is obviously so Chen can build a second base of operations for harvesting Fly,” I said. “And I gathered that the thinderin don’t approve of what’s been done here with the woodland on the Triambic Escarpment, so it’s not too surprising they aren’t going to look favourably on this request.”
“It would have been for the best, whether they appreciate or not,” Lia said. She sounded very tired suddenly. “I’d put such a lot of work into making our case but there were certain truths I was not permitted to share. Chen won’t be denied. He always told me I wouldn’t get thinderin approval, but he let me try so long as there was a chance. Now that’s all over. Chen has a second plan and it’s not such a polite one.”
“Surely he’s not going to risk angering the thinderin is he?” I was genuinely shocked as Lia let the question hang with a revealing silence. That would be a very dangerous policy and I couldn’t believe the BXR would sanction it. What I didn’t understand was how important Fly had become in Queen Katarina’s policies and the gambles a bold and maverick lone operator might be prepared to take to gain her favour. Chen was just such an operator, as I was shortly to find out.
“Perhaps you’ve been wondering about Chen’s favourite henchman, Prajeet Birl and his mission to the north?” Lia said. “It won’t be secret soon. Let me enlighten you.”
Half an hour after I’d received Lia’s disturbing briefing, I took up an invitation for a drink with Fitararye Wilson. We met at the entrance to the “Rose in the Wind”, a combination of a restaurant, bar, cinema and a venue for occasional live music. It was managed by Madame Jasmine, an elegant, diminutive woman of indeterminate age and Franco-Japanese descent, given to wearing dark coloured kimonos, silver jewellery and an artfully piled coiffure. Ultimately it was owned by the Caumarine Consortium, a part of the Great Commercial League mandated to provide hostelries and centres of accommodation on all the worlds where the League operated. On a planet with a bigger human presence, it was the kind of place that would also have offered a variety of other types of less salubrious and more discrete entertainment, but with a permanent population consisting mostly of Void Priests it was hard to make much profit out of vice, or even anything worthwhile from its other lines of business. It ran at a loss to fulfil the Consortium’s contract, but it was popular with its few regular customers.
“Welcome to the only fleshpot of St Lucien,” Fitararye Wilson said with an ironic bow as he ushered me through the artfully painted pressure doors of the only significant sector of the settlement that wasn’t either run by the BXR or part of the Void Priests’ establishments.
We took a seat behind a long heavy table cut from some dark purple wood, thick with knots and holes and with artfully carved legs that looked like trunks and roots. A few low, fat candles in shallow glass stands cast a warm yellow glow over this surface and a handful of other similar ones. The bar was lit with soft red lamps but otherwise it was quite dark and utterly unlike the ambient intensity of the planet’s sun; deliberately and restfully so, I had no doubt. Wilson ordered a couple of whiskeys; single speyside malts that claimed to come from Earth. I had my doubts, but they were pleasant enough.
“What have you made of your two trips into the woods so far?” he asked me.
“Interesting. I can’t form a proper view until I’ve seen the Inuwar roosts,” I said. “I’m getting a tour tomorrow with the new intake of the Void Priests. I’m really looking forward to that.”
“Hmmpf!” Wilson said, non-committal and unhelpful. “But what do you think about the Fly?”
“It’s corrosive. It’s eating away at heart of society like a parasite in the bloodstream. If the Zed men were any good at the job they profess to do they’d be spending their energy on stopping Fly, not fighting the Pasteracht. But they don’t because the BXR is profiting and the BXR has the ear of their Majesties, and their Majesties control the Zed men."
“Well, that’s frank enough,” he answered with a tight smile. “Have you shared these thoughts with Chen? You might need to be a little careful since he’s running this operation and I represent the shipping interests.”
I shrugged. It had been my intention to be deliberately provocative; to push and see what gives.
“I’m not saying anything that isn’t obvious to every inhabitant of St Lucien.”
Wilson reached over the table and picked up one of the candles. He turned it upside down and showed me the base. A tiny transceiver of some sort was embedded in a slot in the wax at the centre and connected to a ring of silvery metal running around the base of the candle. It looked like mere ornamentation to protect the tables from the candle wax, but I also realised it could just as well conceal electronic equipment.
“It’s a listening device. Your friends in the BXR like to know what’s going on here. The Rose in The Wind disturbs them. Perhaps its somewhere plots could be hatched. People could make a mistake when they’ve had too much to drink, eh? Not that there’s much to monitor. Most of the time.”
I must have looked a little surprised. He laughed.
“Don’t worry. You’ve not said anything incriminating. As you say, nothing that isn’t obvious to every inhabitant of St Lucien. But in any case, you needn’t worry. We run this bar; the Caumarine Consortium and the Great Commercial League. And we make these things.”
He tapped what appeared to be the control circuit in the centre.
“And since we don’t like the BXR, or anyone else, to know ALL our business, we have ways of disabling them. Subtly of course. This one is sending a little harmless fairy tale conversation back to the automated listeners. No offensive keywords and all above board. It won’t even wake up a human monitor. So, you see, if you ever were to say something that wasn’t obvious to everyone in St Lucien, you’d be sure your bosses wouldn’t find out."
He looked at me expectantly as I attempted my best poker face and kept silent, though I was thinking furiously. In the flickering candlelight his outrageous pink Mohican hair cut made spikes of shadow play like dark flames over the folds of the black and crimson silk tapestries that decorated the walls of the Rose in the Wind. There was a disconcerting intensity in his fish-eyed unblinking gaze.
“Look,” he said at last. “It would be to our mutual benefit to be honest with one another. You’re no ordinary BXR staffer, are you? I think you have another agenda. Chen probably does as well. The Fly operation runs on paranoia, and we suspect everyone. Council of Zed Men? Or BEA perhaps?”
“BEA”
He sighed. “I thought as much.”
“Now it’s my turn to play guessing games. It’s not all fun and games in the Fly business, is it? I’ve heard the BXR are squeezing your cut. Chen tells me you have no choice but to accept the new terms.”
“Fly is a mess!” Wilson said with surprising vehemence. “Let’s say I don’t even care what happens to the Fly users. Let’s say my company is just in it for the money. Then even so it is business we can do without. The margins were terrible even before this cut. We take a lot of risks to get through BEA checks. We lose ships and couriers. We lose good will with the BEA who know damn well we’re behind the thinly veiled disguise of independent drug runners. The good will is potential business lost in other areas. We’d like to be neutral in the squabbles between the BXR and the BEA. We just want to run a business and make a profit. Only now we’re in too deep with the BXR. They are blackmailing us – threatening to expose our operation (which they are bankrolling) and blame us for the trade whilst they wash their hands of it. Once the dust has settled, they’ll resume with a new operator. They play very dirty."
“I’m authorised to tell you that my bosses want a safe exit strategy from the Fly trade,” he concluded at last. “Are you offering one?”
I chose not to answer him directly. “You know Chen is planning to increase production,” I said. “He’s tried to persuade the thinderin to let him open up another harvesting site? Not going to happen. I was with Lia when she petitioned the grove. It didn’t go well. But he has a second plan which she told me about just before I came here. Simply turn the existing harvesting area into a full-scale planation, by ripping out anything that isn’t productive and replacing it with cropping trees. It could triple production with minimal inconvenience to the harvesting operation.
"The problem is that the Grandarick Roost doesn’t like it. The local Inuwar prefer to have mixed woodland here since they have other uses for other trees. They’re happy for us to have the Fly but not on the scale Chen wants. I knew that much from official briefings but what I’ve learned from Lia is that not all Inuwar feel the same way. There are rival Roosts. Roots which are jealous of the privileged status the Grandarick Roost has with off-worlders. Roots which, given the right encouragement would be happy to muscle in and take over the local operation. They’d let Chen do what he liked, and they’d get to settle some old tribal scores at the same time. Prajeet Birl has been to see the Hloven Roost. He’s stirring up trouble by promising them weapons and Lia reckons it can all be brought to a head within a few more days.”
Wilson seemed stunned. “That makes sense,” he said at last.
“Tell me something,” I continued. “Let’s say I am a BEA agent. Let’s say I am sympathetic to your goals. Before I share what I might be willing to contribute, how would you break the Fly trade on your own? You must have thought about it.”
He took a long drink then eyed me warily. But we were both too deep into this discussion to have reservations now. If our mutual trust was misplaced it was too late to take it back.
“Sure, I’ve thought about options for disrupting the supply. Everything has to come to St. Lucien and on to the spaceport via the north lift. It could probably be rerouted through the south lift but if something were to happen to both lifts, the plateau would be isolated from the cropping lands. Maybe some form of sabotage for the escarpment lifts? Trouble is, it’s not a long-term solution. The lifts can be repaired. Also, it would be obvious that sabotage had been carried out from St Lucien and it wouldn’t take long to find out who had done it. Can’t risk it. Not worth it.”
Not a good plan then, but it was worth asking if only to gauge Wilson’s reaction. That was promising even if his ideas weren’t. I took the Werm memgems from my pocket and placed them on the table. When I ran my fingers over the crystal beads, they sensed my identity and one of the glowed with a slightly different shade of blue to the others. I popped it off the band, with a twist that was an instruction.
“I have a different way,” I said. “This is something my agency cooked up from samples of Fly and samples of the tree that makes it. I don’t know how they got those samples. This bead contains a hundred doses of a very carefully engineered biohazard. Not to us but to the tree. It needs to be administered to the flowers, spread onto the stamen before pollination. Done right and done thoroughly enough over enough specimens and it will serve many purposes. It kills the tree, but it also poisons the genetic legacy. It will result in a rapid drop in the supply of Fly, and it will be the start of a self-sustaining plague which will bring about the extinction of the species.”
Wilson was hypnotised by the bead. “And how would you administer it?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Your harvesters. That Tetratic technology that strips the berries. It takes and takes but it could give as well. It could administer the poison if you were to reprogram it don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” he said at last. “Maybe if we experimented a bit. The harvesters are difficult to work with when you want something unusual done but I dare say it’s possible.” He looked troubled. “I don’t like it. These trees are an important local species. If we interfered like this, the Inuwar culture would be damaged – perhaps fatally. Fly is a human problem but the trees that make it are a vital part of the local ecosystem.”
In truth, I wasn’t happy myself. I said nothing for a few seconds as I strung the bead back on the string with the memgems. “But if it came down to it, you’d help,” I insisted, and his reluctant nod was all I needed to know at that moment. I took a long final drink and left.
The next day I made my promised visit to the Grandarick Roost. I met with the deacon in the Void Chapel. Ochre Jones shook my hand again, a curiously archaic gesture, and introduced me to the three companions who would be accompanying us on this visit. I can’t remember their names now, but they all looked young, enthusiastic and full of the lean intensity the Void church attracts and fosters.
It was impossible not to be struck once again by the splendour of the scene from the vast curving window overlooking the lands to the west and easy to imagine how you could be hypnotised by the view; the moving cloud shadows, the glinting light on rock and water, the wind stirring the treetops in the Table Lands and the churning sky punctuated with the occasional majestic flight of an Inuwar flock soaring in the boisterous air. I could have watched for hours.
At the north end of the chapel there was a pressure door into a tunnel lit by dim purple strip lighting and wide enough for two to walk abreast. I expected it to lead up to the surface and a port where we would board one of the balloon wheeled shuttle buses I’d already journeyed in twice. I was wrong. After no more than twenty paces the corridor started to slope downwards and turning to the left came to the lip of a circular drop, surrounded by a safety wall at hip height. An opening at the far side gave access to a ladder allowing us to descend into the well and we climbed down for no more than a minute to reach a wide darkened antechamber in which three tall candles burned in an alcove.
“These are the saints of the Grandarick Way,” Ochre Jones said. “Three of our priests lost their lives in the making of this route and we pay tribute to them here and ask them to watch over our passage.”
On the opposite wall were two rows of pegs with breathing masks of the same type I had been introduced to on my first day on the planet. Ochre Jones took them and passed them round.
“Put these on. We’re going outside,” he grinned.
I wasn’t particularly liking the sound of this if I’m honest. There was an airlock big enough for two at a time. Unlike the usual vacuum environment designs common on spaceships everywhere the default locking mechanism was reversed because the pressure was higher outside than in, so the doors opened outwards with a firm push allowing default physics to force them closed against the outer frame. There was no pumping mechanism to equalise the pressure, since some small leakage into St Lucien’s atmosphere was acceptable, another sign that the gas mixtures in the planet’s air were within a range that provided a viable balance for human breathing and could relatively easily be scrubbed of those elements that might have harmed us in the long term. A safety lock prevented inner and outer doors from being opened at the same time to avoid the danger of an uninterrupted gale of inrushing air that would overwhelm the colony atmosphere. Even if that did happen, I knew there were also emergency door seals throughout the town, always facing outwards to limit the damage from any accident with pressure containment systems.
Beyond the outer lock we emerged onto a wide shelf set in the cliff side of the Triambic Escarpment. I blinked in the bright light, taking shallow breaths through the mask and turned my face quickly away from the aching open spaces to fight back a sudden wave of vertigo. The naked geology where my eyes found an anchor was shockingly white and profoundly eroded; an up-tilted fault that exposed sheer planes of limestone lifted high into the mountains. Whilst there were many subtle stripes marking the ages of its construction, we were clearly standing on a particularly important boundary layer between some older and decidedly yellowish strata below our feet and a pale creamy band rising up above our heads. Long ages of weathering had found the gaps between the rock planes and erosion had cut back and downwards into the cliff face at a roughly twenty-degree angle to make a natural but narrow pathway out of the sloping ledge and its overhang. The Void priests had worked with this existing feature to turn it into the route to the roost they called the Grandarick Way. Where the ledge narrowed it had been widened and deepened. Where the rock face had crumbled away, pitons, ropes and wooden planks made a bridge across the gaps. Where a hard intrusion broke through both strata, a tunnel had been carved to keep the line of the Way true. Posts, spikes, cords, wires and cables provided some measure of safety to the travellers on this spectacular trail, but there was no hiding the fact that the Grandarick Way was dangerous and as we set out to traverse the cliff face, we did so with utmost caution.
I had thought I was getting used to the strong pull of Inuwarmah’s gravity but on this walk I felt the grip of its mass more acutely than ever, aware of the swift fall of stones to the treetops far below as they were kicked from the path. We were probably on the Way for less than an hour, but it felt much longer. The wind pushed, tugged, and beat against our ears in dangerous gusts under the light of the over bright sun as we picked our way across the rock face. Eventually, however, a new sensation drew my attention, a rushing noise of a different frequency to the turbulent air and more constant; the sound of falling water. Looking below I saw that the tree canopy of the table lands was broken by the blue glint of a large lake under the foot of the escarpment and that it was being filled by a sizeable waterfall which emerged from the cliff face at roughly the same height as the Grandarick Way.
We all stopped for a moment on an unusually broad section of ledge to take a short rest and admire the view.
“Impressive, eh?” Jones said. “The hydrology in this part of the Patriqua mountains is a little unusual. The Triambic Escarpment is tilted up to the line of these cliffs from the higher mountains in the east behind it, which means that streams escaping the peaks would normally only flow north or south in the groove where the escarpment emerges from their bedrock. However, the limestone and chalk beds are easily percolated and weathered, and the water finds its way underground. There are no open watercourses on the top of the escarpment, but there are numerous subterranean streams which have cut against the grain to flow west and emerge at the cliff edge, watering the table lands. There’s a small one just below St. Lucien where we obtain our supply, but this is far and away the biggest. The Upper Grandarick river feeds the lake through the waterfall. It flows directly out of the cavern we’re about to see that has been made into the Roost. Beyond the lake it emerges again as the Middle Granderick, running through the forests of the table lands until it overspills into the Low Lands, becoming the Lower Granderick in the zones of high pressure where humans cannot follow without must more cumbersome protective suits. We know so little about the Low Lands but at some point the Lower Granderick unites with a similar river flowing from the south and they reach the Trathin ocean on the west coast of Eil”
Less than ten minutes after this little lecture we arrived, entering the Roost through a narrow archway carved with an elegant surrounding quite at odds with the scary simplicity of the Grandarick Way. Inside, a breath-taking space came into view. The first sensation was one of increased noise. The rushing sound of water was intensified as it echoed off the walls of an edifice built on the structure and raw materials provided by a collapsed cave system. At some distant time in the past a large section of roof must have fallen to the floor leaving a wide skylight, big enough for many Inuwar to fly through at once. The river emerged from the escarpment through a slot in the back wall, descending in a cascade of five meters to carve a churning plunge pool then flowing through a channel to reach an archway at the front of the cave where it could fall much further to the Grandarick Lake on the table lands below. The archway was at least as broad as the window in the Void Chapel at St Lucien and gave the Inuwar a second route into the roost.
As my eyes adapted to the dimmer light, I began to pick out more details. On either side of the river channel at the place where the cave roof was open, two fires burned brightly, their smoke escaping in thin grey columns above them. Alcoves, archways and horizontal perches showed evidence of simple but robust building work. Then on the far wall was a giant mural painted in purple, yellow, green and red.
Inuwar were everywhere, hanging from pegs in the ceiling and the recessed archways above the waterfall, swooping in and out of the main cave entrance and the open roof and gathered in groups on the ground, their wings folded to their bodies but projecting above their heads to the first joint.
Jones drew our attention to three individuals walking towards the fire. “Furnace, Farmer and Fleet,” he said. “Not their own names which can’t easily be conveyed in human speech, but convenient labels. They happen to be our most important contacts. Let’s join them and I’ll show you how we communicate.”
Up close the Inuwar seemed at first a little intimidating, being almost twice our height, yet their bones were hollow and light to adapt them for flight and even out of their element they walked with a certain grace, allowing one another and ourselves the courtesy of plenty of personal space.
They whistled softly to one another, interrupted by gurgling guttural clicks, and I quickly recognised the sophistication of the sounds as language. One of the Void priests reached into his robes and withdrew a handheld device where some preloaded program showed a coloured keypad and a text window above it. He handed it to a second acolyte who touched an icon, resulting in a melodic phrase which I gathered returned the Inuwar greeting.
“We had some help with the language from the thinderin and werm agents,” Jones observed quietly to me, careful not to interrupt the flow of the conversation by respecting its primacy and its important silences. “They’ve been here longer than us, but we’ve made our own contribution to refining the translation. These are the courtesies – the polite social exchanges that keep everyone happy. It’s not easy to establish a meaningful cross species connection and the preludes must be taken seriously and allowed their proper time to work. We’ll get to the interesting stuff eventually. When we reach the fire.”
But even before we reached the fire on our side of the river my attention was drawn to activity above the other one. A small Inuwar had flown in through the roof with something gripped in its lower limbs which I recognised as one of the seeds of Fly. Remarkably it seemed to be able to hover over the fire in a way that seemed like an Earthly kestrel, although not I think quite so skilful as the ones I’d seen in Africa in my childhood. There was more apparent error correction and less stealth, and it occasionally dropped to wobble in a tight orbit rather than maintaining a locked position, like a juggler momentarily missing a beat, but it was still a lot more controlled than I had imagined the Inuwar to be capable of. It seemed to use the updrafts from the heat of the flames, positioning itself carefully until it suddenly released the giant seed like a bomb into the centre of the blaze.
“A bit showy and not strictly required since the fire does most of the work,” Jones commented. “The young males have fun on these bombing runs though, and it’s a traditional way to help fracture the shells, just as they would if dropped naturally from the trees. It’s part of the mating game too. They compete to impress the females with their flying skills.
"They’re cooking the pulp. There’s a clay cauldron with a drain hole and a plug in the centre of the flames. We think the Inuwar first learned to harness fire a long time ago to improve their access to this juice. The technique of fire cracking helps release more of it than they would have been able to consume in the wild, and heating it also increases its potency. Turns out the juice is an important supplement for the females in the breeding season. Presentation of a single fruit is a long-standing courtship custom, but this cooking ceremony has come to play an important role in their culture and must be at least partly responsible for increased fertility and an increased population.
"The Grandarick Roost have been interested and impressed by what your friends in the BXR have done on the table lands, but worried too. There’s plenty of the seed for everyone (the Inuwar don’t need anything like the quantity available now) but they can see the obvious merits of agriculture. We are hoping they will try it themselves and we’re encouraging them with other potential crops. Fly isn’t everything to them in the way it is to the BXR. They are concerned about the extent of an expanded monoculture and what it means for their other food sources. Rightly so, I’d say.”
“Do the Inuwar ever fight?” I asked, seemingly off topic.
“Individually you mean or collectively? Individually, sometimes. Collectively, very rarely. Why do you ask?” He looked at me sharply. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
I smiled evasively and Jones looked troubled. I’d already said more than I wanted to and by now we’d reached the nearer of the two fires. This close to the plunge pool, the sound of the river churning the cold water beat back off the walls of the cave making conversation difficult. A long technical discussion began between our hosts and a second priest who had previously said nothing but now took over the translator when the expert in socialising had finished. The Void Priests were teaching the Inuwar the basics of smelting, using adaptations to increase the flow of oxygen to the fire. The simple furnace could already refine small quantities of tin and lead; experimental at this stage but the first step in a technological line that should eventually progress to the production of copper and bronze.
I wasn’t concentrating. My attention had been drawn to the enormous mural on the cave wall. It was an amazing piece of art, covering every available surface on both sides of the river. There were clear representational elements, including paintings of Inuwar with wings spread wide gliding over a forest of green treetops, mysterious climbing animals in the trees, leaves, seeds, fruit and nuts highlighted and outlined in black. Abstract patterns flowed between the figurative elements, chequered grids of purple and yellow with swirling spiral fronds in a darker red. Natural features of the rock face had been incorporated into the design here and there, so that a protruding lump of stone over the river had been painted to resemble a single large eye and stalagmites by the plunge pool had been daubed with brown and green pigment and augmented with natural foliage to make a fake forest. The whole, illuminated by the bright natural light coming through the opening in the roof and augmented by the red and orange glow from the fires made a striking impression of vigorous artistry, more energetic than subtle but bold and ambitious. It was breath-taking.
Our stay at Grandarick Roost lasted for almost three hours. After the long technical review of the furnace, we were invited to a ceremonial meal in which we were treated as honoured guests but were unable to partake due to the need to keep our breathing masks in place. Later we made a tour of two other innovative projects which the Void priests had an interest in; a side channel near the edge of the cave where a small watermill was powering a grindstone and a kind of weaving scheme using the thin flexible stalks of a species of web like vine that could be stripped, teased apart, treated and knotted into an open work fabric. The Inuwar were wide spectrum omnivores and would occasionally take fish if the opportunity arose, but they were not specialists. The ability to create nets opened fishing opportunities for them.
It was all fascinating work, and I couldn’t help but admire the efforts of the Void priests and the innovative creativity of the Inuwar. It felt like the beginning of something important. However, I sensed a cooling in Ochre Jones attitude towards me. He’d always been friendly and open and keen to take me on this expedition but as the afternoon wore on, his answers to my questions became shorter and more distracted. I knew that my question about conflict amongst the Inuwar had troubled him. Did he already suspect what Louis Chen was planning? Was he now wondering about my own role? After all, I was a BXR agent. Why wouldn’t I support my boss? There was no reason for him to know of my secret work for the BEA but even if he had known what I was carrying in my Werm memgem and what my BEA handlers wanted me to do with it, well that was, if anything, even more devastating. I realised now that destroying the Fly, endangered the culture and possibly even the very existence of the Inuwar themselves. I wanted to say, “I understand. I’m on your side”. But was I?
Eventually we made our polite goodbyes and started back along the Grandarick way whilst there were still two full hours of daylight left. “We must always allow plenty of time to get back to St. Lucien before nightfall,” a priest observed to me as we took our first steps on the dizzying trail. “Wouldn’t want to be caught out here in the dark.” I could only agree. Somehow the vertiginous expanses of the narrow cliff walk seemed even more daunting the second time around.
Then the storm came. I must confess that the return journey to St Lucien remains one of the most frightening experiences it has been my misfortune to endure. On the high trail, the wind seemed like some conscious vengeful spirit determined to pluck us from the cliff and send us tumbling into the treetops which thrashed below us. Visibility dropped and soon the rain was beating into our faces, clouding the masks and soaking through our clothing. It was cold too, and the light grew dim under the thick grey clouds. We had to proceed with extreme caution as the rocks became slippery. At each step, it was important to keep three points of contact with hands and feet on the ground, gripping the rough natural buttresses and overhangs or on the metal pegs with occasional loops of rope that had been hammered into the cliff face where the way was particularly difficult. Only one free limb at a time could shuffle forward to seek the next anchor point.
Conversation was impossible. I let my body do the planning at a subconscious level and tried not to think over much about the imminent dangers of the trail. That wasn’t going to help. Instead I let my mind circle round the questions of what to do next for the best. Wind and rain churned the problems endlessly round in my head in a hypnotic wash cycle, but I didn’t make much progress.
If I released the virus I would put an end to the supply of Fly. The income and power of the BXR would be weakened and my shadow handlers in the BEA well satisfied. It would not be easy and much would depend on Wilson and his ability to reprogram the harvesters and to conceal his actions from the BXR minders. Having seen how they operated, I doubted that the BXR team here would be competent enough to analyse the source of the infection or to guess that we had deliberately introduced it. I had no doubts that Wilson would co-operate. In many ways this was the most effective solution, but now I’d seen the Inuwar, it wasn’t an acceptable one. How could I endanger this ecosystem and chance inflicting genocide on a helpless people with such obvious potential for the development of intelligent civilisation?
Yet if I did nothing and let the plans of the BXR come to their conclusion I’d be collaborating with a murderous slaughter at the Grandarick Roost for a profit that would heap more of the misery of Fly addiction on Earth; equally unacceptable and the very thing my BEA bosses had set me to stop. They would certainly consider my mission a failure in that event.
I don’t like binary dilemmas and I particularly didn’t like this one. There had to be some alternative. I had three passive friends who had each revealed their own different kinds of unhappiness with the way matters were coming to a head on this planet: Chen’s xenologist Lia Tan Yew Leong, the Great Commercial League’s representative Fitararye Wilson and Ochre Jones the Void Priest. What if there was a way to turn them from passive friends into active allies? What if there was a plan that would bring them all together? What if there was something quite different from my binary choice which neither the BEA nor the BXR had foreseen?
I remember the solution came to me in the interval between a flash of bright blue lightning and a deafening clap of thunder that followed no more than two seconds later. There was such a plan. If we could all agree to it, if we worked very fast and very hard together to implement it, and if we had some luck on our side, it might even work…
When at long last we hauled our tired bodies into the air lock at St. Lucien, enormously relieved that we had all completed the journey without mishap, the priests made a short prayer of thanks at the candlelit shrine. I’m not a believer in Void Priest doctrine but that brief ceremony affected me even so.
“There’s something I need to explain,” I said to Ochre Jones as we returned, sodden, dripping and cold to the Void Chapel, eager for a warm shower and to get changed. “Not just to you. To Lia Leong and to Fitararye Wilson as well. I think it will help if I can get you all together. Can you join us at the Rose in the Wind in an hour?”
I made that meeting happen and I carried the day. We followed up on my idea and together we did something quite different from the plans of the BXR or the BEA. And it worked...
