Flux - Xeelee Sequence Part 16

There was a tap on her arm. She turned. Kae had settled into place next to her. She was smiling. "Will you eat?"

Dura couldn't help but glance around surrept.i.tiously. There seemed to be no one with Kae, no partner. There was no sign of Kae's earlier flash of hostility - she had the impression that there was a core of deep unhappiness in Kae, hidden not far beneath the surface. She smiled back, eager to show good grace. "Thanks. I will."

Kae reached toward the fire-trenches cut into the wood. She drew out one of the bowls embedded there, taking care to keep her fingers away from the hot wood itself. The bowl was a small globe carved of wood, and it held food, a dark brown, irregular ma.s.s. She held the bowl out to Dura.

Dura reached into the bowl and poked at the food tentatively. It was hot to the touch. She took hold of it and drew it out. The surface was furry, but the furs were singed to a crisp, and they crackled as she squeezed.

She looked at Kae doubtfully. "What is it?"

"Try it first." Kae looked sly in the green underglow.

Dura picked at the fur. "The whole thing?"

"Just bite into it."

Dura shrugged, raised the lump briskly, opened her mouth wide and bit into the fur. The surface was elastic, difficult to pierce with her teeth, and the furs tickled the roof of her mouth. Then the skin broke, and bits of hot, sticky meat spurted over her mouth and chin. She spluttered, but she wiped her face and swallowed. The stuff was rich, warm, meaty. She took a bite from the skin and chewed it slowly. It was tough and without much flavor. Then she sucked at the remaining meat inside the sh.e.l.l. There was a hard inner core which she discarded.

"It's good," she said at last. "What is it?"

Kae let the empty bowl hang in the Air; she poked at it with her forefinger and watched it roll in the Air. "Spin-spider egg," she said. "I knew you wouldn't recognize it. But it's the only way to eat it. It's actually a delicacy, in some parts of the hinterland. There's even a community on the edge of the wild forest who cultivate spiders, to get the eggs. Very dangerous, but very profitable. But you have to know how to treat the eggs, to bring out the flavor."

"I don't think I would have recognized this as a spider egg at all."

"It has to be collected when freshly laid - when the young spider hasn't yet formed, and there's just a sort of mush inside the egg. The hard part in the center is the basis of the creature's exoskeleton; the young spider grows into its skeleton, consuming the nutrient."

"Thanks for telling me," Dura said drily.

Kae laughed, and opened up a sack at her waist. She drew out a slice of beercake. "Here; have some of this. In Parz, there's a good market for exotic deep-hinterland produce like that. We make a good side-profit from it. Now. How about some Air-pig meat?"

"All right. Please. And then you can tell me how you came to join these lumber caravans."

"Only if you tell me how you ended up here, so far from the upflux..."

With food warm inside her, and with the exhilarating buzz of beercake filling her head, Dura told Kae her tangled story; and a little later, in the steady glow of the nuclear-fire Wheel, she repeated her tale for the rest of the lumberjacks, who listened intently.

The food globes, nestling in the fire trenches, were finished. The conversation gradually subsided, and Dura sensed that the gathering was coming to an end.

Rauc drew her hand from her husband's, and pulled forward, alone, into the center of the little group. She faced the Wheel cut into the tree trunk in silence.

The last trickles of conversation died. Dura watched, puzzled. The atmosphere was changing - becoming more solemn, sadder. The lumberjacks drew away from each other, their postures stiffening in the Air. Dura glanced at Kae's face. The lumberjack's eyecups were wide, illuminated by the fire-glow, fixed on Rauc.

Slowly Rauc began to speak. Her words consisted of names - all of them unknown to Dura - recited in a steady monotone. Rauc's voice was tired, quiet, but it seemed to enfold the intent gathering. Dura listened to the lulling, rhythmic chant of names as it went on, for heartbeat after heartbeat, read evenly by Rauc to the great Wheel carved into the wood.

These were the names of victims, Dura realized slowly. Victims of what? Of cruelty, of disease, of starvation, of accident; they were the names of the dead, remembered now in this simple ceremonial.

Some of the names must go back generations, she thought, their deaths so ancient that all details had been forgotten. But the names remained, preserved by this gentle, graceful Wheel cult.

And people who lived in the sky could have no other memorial than words.

At last the list came to a close. Rauc hung in the Air before the fading glow of the Wheel trenches, her face empty. Then she stirred and looked around at the faces watching her, as if waking up. She Waved back to her husband.

The group broke up. Brow enfolded his wife in his arms and led her away. All around the group, couples bid farewells and drifted off.

Dura observed Kae surrept.i.tiously. The woman was watching Brow and Rauc, her expression blank. She became aware of Dura. She smiled, but her voice sounded strained. "I've the feeling you're judging me again."

"No. But I think I understand your compromises now."

Kae shrugged. "We're together, Brow and I, for most of the time. Rauc knows it, and has to live with that. But Brow - loves loves - Rauc. This day with her is worth a hundred with me. And I have to live with - Rauc. This day with her is worth a hundred with me. And I have to live with that. that. We all have to compromise, Dura. Even you." We all have to compromise, Dura. Even you."

Dura thought of Esk, long dead now, and a similar painful triangle. "Yes," she said. "We all have to compromise."

Kae offered her a place to sleep, somewhere in the tangle of nets and ropes that comprised this strange, linear City. Dura refused, smiling.

She said farewell to Kae. The lumberjack nodded, and they regarded each other with a strange, calm understanding.

Dura pushed away from the trunk and kicked at the Air, Waving for the ceiling-farm and her secure, private little nest.

The caravan spread out beneath her, Wheel-shaped fires burning in a dozen places.

13.

ACCOMPANIED BY A NERVOUS-LOOKING nurse from the Hospital of the Common Good, the injured old upfluxer diffidently entered the Palace Garden. When Muub spotted him he beckoned to the nurse - over the heads of curious courtiers - that she should bring the upfluxer to join him at the Fount. Then he turned back to the slow ballet of the superfluid fountain.

The Garden was a crown perched atop Parz City, an expensive setting for the Palace of the City Committee. The Garden had been established generations before by one of the predecessors of Hork IV. But it had been the particular genius of the current Chair, and his fascination for the natural world around him, that had made this place into the wonder it was. Now it was a lavish park, with exotic plants and animals from all around the Mantle brought together in an orderly, tasteful display. The low - but extravagant - buildings which made up the Palace itself were studded around the Park, gleaming like Corestuff jewels set in rich cloth. Courtiers drifted through the Garden in little knots, huddling like groups of brightly colored animals.

Muub was no lover of the great outdoors, but he relished the Garden. He tilted back his stiff neck, looking up into the yellow-gold Air. To be here beneath the arching, sparkling vortex lines of the Pole - and yet securely surrounded by the works of man - was a fulfilling, refres.h.i.+ng experience. It seemed to strengthen his orderly heart that the Garden was an artifact, a museum of tamed nature - but an artifact which stretched for no less than a square centimeter around him... The Garden was enough to make one believe that man was capable of any achievement.

He ran a discreet doctor's eye over the approaching upfluxer. Adda was recovering well but he could still barely move without a.s.sistance. Both his lower legs were encased in splints, and his chest was swathed in bandages; a cast of carved wood enclosed his right shoulder. His head, too, was a ma.s.s of strapped-up cloth, and an eye-leech patiently fed in the corner of the old fellow's only working eye.

"I'm glad you could join me," Muub greeted him with a professional smile. "I wanted to talk to you."

Adda glowered past his leech at Muub's shaved head, his finery. "Why? Who or what are you?"

Muub allowed himself a heartbeat's cold silence. "My name is Muub. I am Physician to the Committee... and Administrator of the Hospital of the Common Good, where your injuries have been treated." He decided to go on the offensive. "Sir, we met before, when you were first carried into the Hospital by one of our citizens. On that occasion - though I don't expect you to remember - you told me to 'b.u.g.g.e.r off.' Well, I failed to accept that invitation, choosing instead to have you treated. I have asked you to view the Garden today as my guest, as a friendly gesture to one who is new to Parz and who is alone here. But frankly, if you're not prepared to be courteous then you are free to depart."

"Oh, I'll behave," Adda grumbled. "Though I'll not swallow the pretense that you've done me any sort of favor by treating my injuries. I know very well that you're exacting a handsome price from the labor of Dura and Farr."

Muub frowned. "Ah, your companions from upflux. Yes, I understand they have found indentures."

"Slave labor," Adda hissed.

Muub made himself relax. Anyone who could survive at the court of Hork IV could put up with a little goading from an eyeless old fool from the upflux. "I'll not let you needle me, Adda. I've invited you here to enjoy the Garden - the spectacle - and I fully intend that that is how we will spend the day."

Adda held his stare for a few moments; but he did not pursue the discussion, and turned his head to view the Fount.

The superfluid fountain was the centerpiece of the Garden. It was based on a clearwood cylinder twenty microns across, fixed to a tall, thin pedestal. Inside the cylinder hovered a rough ball of gas, stained purple-blue, quivering slowly. The cylinder - fabulously expensive in itself, of course - was girdled by five hoops of polished Corestuff, and it bristled with poles which protruded from its surface. Barrels - boxes of wood embossed with stylized carvings of the heads of Hork IV and his predecessors - were fixed to the ends of the poles inside the cylinder.

Beautiful young acrobats - male and female, all naked - Waved spectacularly through the Air around the cylinder, working its elaborate mechanisms. The electric blue of the vortex lines cast s.h.i.+mmering highlights from the clearwood, and the soft, perfect skin of the acrobats glowed with golden Air-light.

The upfluxer, Adda, made a disgusting noise through his nose. "You brought me here to see this?"

Muub smiled. "I wouldn't expect you to understand what you're seeing."

Adda scowled, his hostility evident. "Then tell me."

"Superfluidity." Muub pointed. "The cylinder contains a low-pressure region. There's hardly any Air in there, I mean... except for the sphere in the center. That's just Air, but stained blue so you can see it. The hoops around the cylinder, there, are generating a localized magnetic field. Do you understand me? Like the Magfield, but artificial. Controllable. The magnetic field keeps the cylinder from being crushed by the pressure of the Air outside. And it's designed to keep the little Air inside the cylinder in that ball at the center."

"So what?"

"So we can view the Air - within which we are ordinarily immersed - from the outside, as it were.

"Adda, Air is a neutron superfluid - a quite extraordinary substance which, were inhabitants of some other world to discover it, would seem miraculous. Quantized circulation - the phenomena which causes all the spin in the Air to collect into vortex lines - is only one aspect. Watch, now, as the vessels are lowered and raised from the sphere of Air."

A handsome young acrobat - a girl with blue-dyed hair - grasped one of the poles protruding from the cylinder and pushed it through the clearwood wall. The base of the ornate barrel at its far end dipped into the sphere of blue Air. The barrel wasn't completely immersed; the girl held the barrel still so that its rim protruded from the surface of the Air by a good two or three microns.

Blue-stained Air visibly crawled up the sides of the box and over the lip, pooling inside. It was like watching a living creature, Muub thought, fascinated and charmed as always by the spectacle.

When the box had filled itself to the level of the rest of the sphere, the acrobat drew it slowly out of the sphere and brought it to rest again, so that its base was placed perhaps five microns above the surface. Now the blue Air slid over the sides and, in a thin stream which poured from the base of the vessel, returned eagerly to the central sphere.

The acrobat troupe maintained this display at all hours of the day, at quite remarkable expense. Adda watched the cycle through a couple of times, his good eye empty of expression.

Muub watched him surrept.i.tiously, then shook his head. "Don't you have any interest in this? Even your eye-leech is showing more awareness, man!" He felt driven, absurdly, to justify the display. "The Fount is demonstrating superfluidity. When the vessel is lowered into the pool, a thin layer of the fluid is adsorbed onto the vessel's surface. And the Air uses that fine layer - just a few neutrons thick - to gain access to the interior of the vessel. When the vessel's withdrawn the Air uses the same channel to return to the main bulk, the sphere. Quite remarkable.

"The hoops maintain a slight magnetic gradient from the geometric center of the cylinder. That gradient restricts the residual Air to that sphere at the center... and it is the resulting difference in electromagnetic potential energy which drives the cycle of the fountain. And..."

"Riveting," Adda said drily.

Muub bit back a sharp comment. "Well, I know you people have different priorities in life. Let's view the rest of the Garden... perhaps some of it will remind you of the world you have left behind. I'm curious as to how you lived, actually."

"We upfluxers?" upfluxers?" Adda asked acidly. Adda asked acidly.

Muub replied smoothly, "You Human Beings. For example, superfluidity... Have you retained much knowledge of such matters?"

Adda said, "Much of the lore absorbed by our children is practical and everyday... how to repair a net; how to keep yourself clean; how to turn the battered corpse of an Air-pig into a meal, a garment, a source of weapons, a length of rope."

Muub felt himself shudder delicately.

"But knowledge is our common heritage, City man," Adda murmured. "We would scarcely allow you to rob us of that, as you robbed us of our place here ten generations ago."

Turning, Muub led Adda slowly away from the Fount. Beside the youthful grace of the acrobats, Adda's ungainly stiffness was laughable - and yet heartbreaking, Muub thought. They pa.s.sed through one of Hork's experimental ceiling-farm areas. Here a new strain of wheat - tall and fat-stemmed - thrust from a simulated section of Crust-forest root-ceiling.

"Tell me, Adda. What are your plans now?"

"Why should you care?"

"I'm curious."

Adda was silent for a while; then, grudgingly, he replied: "I'm going to go back. Back to the upflux. What else?"

"And how do you propose to achieve that?"

"I'll d.a.m.n well Wave there if I have to," Adda growled. "If I can't get one of your citizens citizens to take me home in one of those pig-drawn cars you have." to take me home in one of those pig-drawn cars you have."

Muub was tempted to mock. He tried to summon up sympathy, to put himself in Adda's situation - alone and far from home in a place he must find frighteningly strange, despite his bravado. "My friend," he said evenly, "with all respect to the skills of my staff in the Common Good, and to the remarkable progress you are making... I have to say it will be a long time before you are fit for such a journey. Even by car, the trek would kill you."

Adda snarled. "I'll take my chances."

"And if you made it home you'd never be as strong as you were, frankly. Your pneumatic system has been weakened to well below its nominal level."

Adda's response, when it came, seemed doubtful. "I couldn't hunt?"

"No." Muub shook his head firmly. "Even if you were able to Wave fast enough to creep up on, let us say, an aged and unfit Air-pig..." - that won a slight smile from the upfluxer - "even so, you could never survive the low pressures, the thin Air of the upperMantle. You see, you would be a burden on your people if you returned. I'm sorry."

Adda's anger was apparently directed inward now. "I will not be a burden. I wanted to die, after my injury. You did not allow me to die."

"It was the choice of your companions. They They did not allow you to die; they sold their labor to pay for your continued health. Adda, you owe it to them to maximize the usefulness of your new life." did not allow you to die; they sold their labor to pay for your continued health. Adda, you owe it to them to maximize the usefulness of your new life."

Adda shook his head stiffly, the bandaging rustling at his neck. "I cannot return home. But I have nothing here."

"Perhaps you could find work. Anything you could earn would reduce the burden on your friends." ...And help besides, Muub forbore to add, to pay for Adda's own food and shelter once his medical treatment was concluded.

"What could I do? Do you hunt here? I can't see myself being much use stalking blades of mutated gra.s.s."

They had come now to a simulation of the wild Crust-forest. Dwarf Crust-trees - slender whips no taller than a mansheight - thrust out of the roof of Parz. A clutch of young ray, shackled to the roof surface by short lengths of rope, snapped at them as they pa.s.sed. Muub glanced at Adda, curious about the old man's reaction to this toy forest. But Adda had turned his face up to the vortex lines swooping over the City; his good eye was half-closed, as if he were peering at something, and the leech crawled, ignored, over his face.

Muub hesitated. "When I first encountered you, you were swaddled in makes.h.i.+ft bandages. And you had splints... Do you remember? The splints seemed actually to be spears, of varying lengths and thicknesses. All decorated with fine engravings."

"What of it? Are you suggesting I could get a price for them here? I thought your people, your Guards, Guards, were well enough equipped with their bows and whips." were well enough equipped with their bows and whips."

"Indeed. No, we do not need your weapons... as weapons. weapons. But as artifacts the spears have a certain - novelty." Muub sought the right words. "A kind of primitive artistry that is really rather appealing. Adda, I suspect you could get a decent price for your artifacts, especially from collectors of primitive materiel. And if, by chance, you were capable of producing more..." But as artifacts the spears have a certain - novelty." Muub sought the right words. "A kind of primitive artistry that is really rather appealing. Adda, I suspect you could get a decent price for your artifacts, especially from collectors of primitive materiel. And if, by chance, you were capable of producing more..."

There was an odd change in the quality of light around them. Muub glanced around, half-expecting to find that they had fallen into the shadow of an Air-car; but the sky was empty, save for the vortex lines. Still the feeling of change persisted, though, unsettling Muub; he pulled his robe closer around him.

Adda laughed. "I'd rather die than wh.o.r.e myself."

Muub opened his mouth, shaping a reply. That may be the choice, old man... That may be the choice, old man... But now there was some sort of disturbance among the courtiers around them. No longer drifting in their intense little knots of intrigue, the courtiers were gathering together as if for comfort, pointing at the sky. "I wonder what's wrong. They seem scared." But now there was some sort of disturbance among the courtiers around them. No longer drifting in their intense little knots of intrigue, the courtiers were gathering together as if for comfort, pointing at the sky. "I wonder what's wrong. They seem scared."

"Look up," Adda said drily. "Perhaps that has something to do with it."

Muub looked into the old man's sour, battered face, and then lifted his head to the open Air.

The flux lines were moving. They were surging upward, away from the City, rising like huge knife-blades toward the Crust.