Flux - Xeelee Sequence Part 17

"Glitch, "Adda said, his voice tight. "Another one. And a bad one. Muub, you must do what you can to protect your people." "Adda said, his voice tight. "Another one. And a bad one. Muub, you must do what you can to protect your people."

"Is the City in danger?"

"I don't know. Perhaps not. But those in the ceiling-farms certainly are..."

Muub, in the last moment before rus.h.i.+ng to his duties, found time to remember that Adda's own people too were exposed to all of this, lost somewhere in the sky.

The Air above him seemed to s.h.i.+mmer; somewhere a courtier screamed.

It was Rauc who first noticed the change in the sky.

Dura and Rauc were working together in a corner of Qos Frenk's ceiling-farm. Dura was wearing the mandatory Air-tank, but she wore the veil pushed back from her face; and the heavy wooden tank thumped against her back as she worked. She had pushed her head and shoulders high into the stems of wheat, so that she was surrounded by a bottomless cage of the yellow-gold plants. She reached above her head with both hands, burrowing with her fingers among the roots of the wheat. Stems scratched her bare arms. Here was another sapling; it felt warm and soft, undeniably a living thing, a thin thread of heavy-nuclei material pulsing along its axis. Young Crust-trees were the most persistent danger to Frenk's crop, springing up endlessly despite continual weeding. The saplings - thinner than a finger's width - were difficult to see, but easy to pick out from among the wheat-stems by touch. She allowed her fingers to track along the sapling's length further up into the shadows of the wheat. She probed at its roots, which snaked up into the tangle of roots and plants which comprised the forest ceiling, and patiently prized them out.

It was dull, mindless work, but not without a certain satisfaction: she enjoyed the feel of the plants in her fingers, and relished deploying the simple skills she was learning. Maybe in some other life she might have been a good farmer, she thought. She liked the orderliness of the farm - although not the pressure of other people - and the work was simple enough to leave her mind free to wander, to think of Farr, of the upflux, and...

Rauc half-laughed. "Look at that. Dura, look... How strange."

Vaguely irritated at this irruption into her daydream, Dura dropped down from the inverted field. Emerging into the clear Air, she rubbed her hands free of dust. "What is it?"

Rauc hovered in the Air, Waving gently; she pointed downward. "Look at the vortex lines. Have you ever seen them behave like that before?"

Vortex lines, acting strangely?

Dura snapped her head downward and raked her gaze across the sky.

The vortex lines were s.h.i.+mmering s.h.i.+mmering - infested with so many small instabilities that it was difficult to see the lines themselves. At the limit of vision Dura could just make out individual ripples racing along the lines, like small, scurrying animals. And the lines were exploding upward, out of the Mantle and toward the Crust. Toward the farm. Toward her. - infested with so many small instabilities that it was difficult to see the lines themselves. At the limit of vision Dura could just make out individual ripples racing along the lines, like small, scurrying animals. And the lines were exploding upward, out of the Mantle and toward the Crust. Toward the farm. Toward her.

All of the lines were moving, as deep into the sky as she could see; the parallel ranks of them hurtled evenly out toward her.

There was something else, too: a dark shape far away, at the edge of her peripheral vision; it scored the yellow horizon with a pencil of blue-white light.

"Rauc," she said. "We have to move."

Rauc looked up at her, the thin, tired face beneath its veiled hat registering unconcern. "Why? What's wrong?"

Dura brushed the hat from her head, impatiently shrugging off the straps of her Air-tank. "Give me your hand."

"But why..."

"It's a Glitch. And if we don't move now we'll be killed. Give me your hand. Now!"

Rauc's mouth opened wide. Dura saw shock in her expression, but no fear yet. Well, there would be time enough for that. She grabbed Rauc's hand; the laborer's palm was toughened by her work but the hand was cool, free of the heat of terror. She kicked at the Magfield with both legs, Waving downward, away from the Crust and toward the approaching flux lines. At first Rauc was dead inertia behind her; but after a few strokes Rauc, too, began to Wave.

When the Star suffered a Glitch the Mantle could not sustain its even, gently slowing pattern of rotation. The superfluid Air tried to expel the excess rotation from its bulk by pus.h.i.+ng the arrays of vortex lines - lines of quantized vorticity - out toward the Crust. And the lines themselves suffered instabilities, and could break down...

The women dropped into the racing forest of vortex lines. The lines were usually about ten mansheights apart, so - in normal times - they were easy to avoid. But now, at the birth of this spin storm, they were already rising faster than a Human Being could Wave. The vortex lines fizzed past the women, sparkling electric blue. Instabilities the size of a fist raced along them, colliding, merging, collapsing.

Rauc whimpered. Unwelcome images of the last Glitch, of Esk imploding around the rogue vortex line, crowded Dura's head. She concentrated on the buffeting of the Air against her bare skin, the thin, unnatural taste of it on her lips, the deadly sparkle of the vortex lines. Now Now was all that mattered - now, and surviving into the future through this moment. was all that mattered - now, and surviving into the future through this moment.

The vortex lines were growing denser as they crowded toward the Crust, seeking an impossible escape from the Star. It was becoming harder to dodge the lines as they swept past her like infinite blades; she was forced to twist backward and forward, slithering between lines. The instabilities were becoming more prominent, too; now ripples almost a mansheight high were marching along the soaring lines, deepening and quickening as they pa.s.sed. There was a terrible beauty in the way the complex waveforms sucked energy from the vortex lines and surged forward. The Air was filled with the deafening, deadening heat-roar of the lines.

Soon Dura's arms and legs, already stiff from a long s.h.i.+ft, were aching, and the Air seemed to sc.r.a.pe through her lungs and capillaries. But now, as they penetrated the rus.h.i.+ng vortex forest and moved deeper into the Mantle, the lines were starting to thin out. Dura, gratefully, looked down and saw that they were approaching a volume where the lines - though still cutting the Air with preternatural speed - were s.p.a.ced at about their normal density. Further in still the Air seemed almost clear of lines, temporarily purged of its vorticity.

Dura released Rauc's hand and risked a look back.

The vortex lines soared upward into the Crust, slicing through nuclear matter and embedding themselves amid the complex nuclei of the Crust material. As they entered the forest ceiling the lines thrashed with instabilities, sending bits of broken matter flying into the Air. The lines were tearing apart Qos Frenk's ceiling-farm. The crops she had tended only heartbeats earlier were now uprooted, fat wheat-stems scattered in the Air. Ironically Dura could see Crust-tree saplings, anch.o.r.ed by their deeper roots to the forest ceiling, surviving the spin storm where the mutated gra.s.s could not.

Further away the buildings at the heart of Frenk's farm had been torn loose of their moorings to the Crust ceiling; one of them exploded into a shower of wood splinters. Coolies and supervisors were emerging from the fields and buildings, all over the farm. They looked like a cloud of ungainly insects, dropping from the fields toward the hurtling spin lines. Even through the storm Dura could hear their shouts and cries; she wondered if the voice of Qos Frenk himself were among them. Some people squirmed desperately into the lethal rain of vorticity, as Dura and Rauc had done; but most had left it too late. Unable to squeeze through the barrage of twisting lines they were forced to turn back, to climb up toward the Crust.

But there was no haven there.

Dura saw a woman, her Air-mask still in place over her face, pull herself up into the wheat, as if burrowing into the Crust. When the vortex lines struck, her body folded around the lines, backward, her arms and legs outstretched. The woman's cries rose, thin and clear, before cutting off sharply.

Dura concentrated on the light-smell of the disturbed Air, its sharp presence in her nostrils and on her palate and lips. She wasn't out of danger yet herself. She watched an instability emerge from a line close to her. The instability grew like a tumor and scythed through the Air, its motion along the line combining with the line's upward sweep to take it diagonally past her. As it exceeded a mansheight in depth the complex grace of its waveform became distorted; it seemed to be forming a neck at its base, and secondary instabilities rippled around its circ.u.mference like attendants.

The neck began to close. Dura stared, fascinated.

The sparkling vortex line crossed itself. The throat closed, and a ring of vorticity spun clear of the line, perhaps two mansheights in diameter. The line itself, freed of its irksome instability, recoiled from the ring in a smooth surge, and then soared on toward the Crust. The ring turned in the Air, quivering, cutting a diagonal path through the array of vortex lines.

A vortex ring.

Rings were believed to form perhaps once a generation, in extremes of spin weather. Dura had never seen one before, and as far as she knew neither had her father, in a long lifetime in the upflux.

She felt a p.r.i.c.kle of deep unease. A vortex ring. Something extraordinary is happening to the Star. A vortex ring. Something extraordinary is happening to the Star.

She remembered the odd, distant movement she had seen at the start of the storm, the needles of blue light on the concave horizon. Perhaps that blue light was the cause of all this. Making sure she wasn't in any immediate danger, she glanced around the sky, seeking out the strange vision...

A scream. Rauc. Rauc.

Dura spun in the Air, her legs thras.h.i.+ng at the Magfield. Rauc had gone from her side, unnoticed. She felt a surge of anger at herself, her own carelessness, her dreamy fascination with the vortex ring.

The scream had come from the path of the vortex ring, as it rose toward the Crust. There was Rauc, high up in the thinning, rus.h.i.+ng forest of vortex lines. She must have seen the damage being wrought at the farm, and had taken it into her head to return. To help. And now she was right in the path of the climbing vortex ring. Rauc's eyes and her round, gaping mouth were like three splashes of dark paint on her round face. The older woman was hanging in the Air, mesmerized by the ring's oscillations, making no effort to flee.

Dura wrenched her legs and arms through the Air, surging toward the remote tableau. "Get out of the way! Rauc, oh, get out of the way! It will kill you..."

But she could not overtake the ring. Rauc seemed to be waiting, almost patiently, for the ring to come to her. The Air sc.r.a.ped in Dura's mouth and throat. She clawed through the Air, her concern for patient, harmless Rauc merging with layers of savage memory: her desolation at the loss of Esk and her father, her continual, helpless ache at the thought of Farr, so remote from her.

A ring was a mechanism for a vortex line to shed instability, to lose excess energy in a bid to regain lost equilibrium. But the ring itself was unstable. It quivered in the Air as it climbed, seeming almost fragile, and it was visibly shrinking: already it had lost perhaps half its original diameter and was reduced to no more than a mansheight in width. And its path curved in the Air, as its spin wrenched at the gas it pa.s.sed through. For a moment Dura wondered wildly if the combined effects of the shrinkage and the deviation of its trajectory might take the ring away from Rauc. Perhaps if Rauc would just Wave a little way, away from the curve of the path...

No. It was too late. Rauc was still alive, fully breathing, aware; but it was as if she was already dead.

The ring struck Rauc in the midriff. She seemed to implode around the ribbon of vorticity. Her smock was torn open and dragged forward, exposing her back; Dura saw shards of bone protruding from broken flesh. One arm was twisted around and torn away, leaving a grisly, twisted stump of ligament and bone. Rauc's head remained intact, but it seemed to have been pulped; her face had been stretched, grotesquely, the mouth ripping at its corners.

The vortex ring pa.s.sed on through the wreckage of Rauc, shrinking rapidly.

Dura let herself drift to a stop in a clear volume of Air. She felt the tension leave her muscles; she curled slowly into a ball, as if she were seeking sleep. This shouldn't happen, This shouldn't happen, she thought. she thought. It's not right. We don't deserve such a fate. It's - unnatural. It's not right. We don't deserve such a fate. It's - unnatural.

And now there was another name to add to the litany of the caravans.

On the horizon, something moved. An object, slicing through the Air; it was like a ray, with s.h.i.+ning, golden wings which beat at the Air... but it was far larger than any ray, large enough to be seen even though it was almost lost in the mists of the horizon. Blue-white light stabbed from the belly of the great sky-ray into the bruised purple ma.s.s of the Quantum Sea below.

More memories, legends from the mouths and staring eyecups of intense, lean old men, returned to her. I know what that is. Could it he causing the Glitches, with those beams? I know what that is. Could it he causing the Glitches, with those beams?

I know what it is. It's a s.h.i.+p, from beyond the Star.

She let her head sink forward, against her knees.

Xeelee.

14.

"XEELEE.".

Amidst the wreckage of ceiling-farm buildings, Hork cradled the head of his father in his lap. He looked up at Muub, despair and rage s.h.i.+ning from his bearded face.

Muub studied the broken body of Hork, Chair of Parz Committee, determined to forget his own personal danger - exposed as he was to the mercurial anger of the younger Hork - and to view this shattered man as just another patient.

As soon as word of the latest Glitch reached Parz, Hork, fearing for his father's life, had summoned Muub. Now, less than a day later, here they were at the experimental Crust farm.

The small medical staff maintained here had clearly been overwhelmed by the disaster. They had greeted Muub on his arrival with a bizarre mixture of relief and fear - eager to hand over responsibility for the injured Chair, and yet fearful of the consequences if they were judged to be negligent. Well, the staff here had clearly done their best, and Muub doubted that the attention Hork had received could have been bettered even within his own Common Good Hospital. But the medics' work had been to no avail, Muub saw immediately. The large, delicate skull of the Committee Chair was clearly crushed.

A Guard, crossbow loaded, hovered over the body, watching Muub surrept.i.tiously.

Hork lifted his face to Muub; Muub read bitterness, apprehension and determination in Hork's round, tough features. He tried to put aside the interest shown by the Guard in his movements. Hork was a grieving son, he told himself. "Sir," he said slowly. "He's dead. I'm sorry. I..."

Hork's eyecups seemed to deepen. "I can see that, d.a.m.n you." He glanced over his father's crushed body, picking at the Chair's fine robes.

"The staff here were afraid to tell you," Muub said.

"Do they have reason to be?"

Muub tried to judge Hork's mood. He was honest enough to admit to himself that he would have no compunction in delivering the hapless attendants here up to Hork's wrath, if he thought it were necessary to save himself. But Hork, though clearly shocked, seemed rational. And in his heart he wasn't a vindictive man. "No. They did everything they could."

Hork ran a hand over his father's thin, yellow hair. "Make sure you tell them I appreciate their work. See they understand they're under no threat for their part in this... And see they get on with treating the rest of the injured here."

"Of course." There was plenty of work for the medics here. As the Air-chariot had hurtled beneath the devastated hinterland, Muub had caught shocking, vivid glimpses of smashed fields - of coolies and uprooted wheat-stems drifting alike in the placid Air - of shattered, exploded buildings. Air-pigs had nosed among drifting corpses, seeking food. He shuddered. "I may be forced to stay here myself, sir, after you've departed. There is urgent work to be done, all around this area, finding and treating the wounded before..."

"No." Hork still stroked his father's head, but his voice was brisk, businesslike. "I intend to stay here one day, to ensure my father's affairs are in order. During that time you may do as you please here. But then I will return to Parz, and you must return with me." He raised his face to the sky and stared around at the Crust, at the newly congealed vortex lines. "The devastation is not restricted just to this farm, or even this part of the Crust. Muub, damage was done in a broad annulus right around the Pole, in a great swathe cutting through much of Parz's best hinterland. It's all to do with the Star's modes of vibration, I'm told." He shook his head. "If it's any consolation there must have been similar bands of destruction encompa.s.sing the Star at every lat.i.tude, all the way to the North Pole. The Star rang like a Corestuff Bell, one cheerful idiot told me... Now I have to ensure that the work of relief is coordinated as well as it can be - and to start to consider the consequences of so much damage to Parz's bread-basket hinterland. And I need you with me, Muub; you have thousands of patients throughout the hinterland, not just the few dozen here. And I have another a.s.signment in mind for you..."

"As you say."

Still Hork's eyes probed at the sky. "Xeelee," "Xeelee," he said again. he said again.

His mind full of images of destruction, Muub tried to focus on what the Chair-elect was saying... It seemed very important to Hork. And therefore, he thought wearily, it was important to Muub.

"I'm sorry, sir. I don't understand."

"That's what they're saying."

"Who?"

"The commoners... the ordinary people, here in the ceiling-farm. The coolies and their supervisors. Even some of the medical staff, who should be educated enough to know better." Hork's face grimaced in a ghastly echo of a smile. "They all saw the beams in the sky, the s.h.i.+p from beyond the Crust. The reality of these visions seems unquestionable, Muub. And the commoners have only one explanation... that the Xeelee have returned to haunt us." He looked down at the devastated head of his father. "To destroy us, apparently."

Muub, disturbed, reached out and grasped Hork's fat-laden shoulder; he felt the tension in Hork's ma.s.sive muscles. "Sir, this is nonsense. The commoners know nothing. You must not..."

"Rubbish, Muub." Again that wild look; but Muub, daring, kept his hand in place. "Everyone knows all about the Xeelee, it seems, even after all this time. So much for generations of suppression since the Reformation, eh? These superst.i.tions are like weeds in my father's fields, I'm starting to think. It's the same with the d.a.m.n Wheel cult - no matter how many of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds you Break, they keep coming back for more. Quite ineradicable. Even within the Court itself, Muub! Can you believe that?"

Muub felt himself stiffen. "Sir, a great disaster has befallen us. We must deal with the consequences of the Glitch. We cannot pay attention to the gossiping of ignorant folk. And..."

"Don't tell me my duties, Muub," Hork said. "Of course I have to deal with the impact of this Glitch. But I cannot ignore what has been seen, I cannot ignore what has been seen, Physician." Hork's round face was stern, determined. "A huge s.h.i.+p, penetrating the Crust from the s.p.a.ces beyond the Star. And appearing to fire some kind of weapon, a spear made of light, into the Quantum Sea. Muub, what if the s.h.i.+p is Physician." Hork's round face was stern, determined. "A huge s.h.i.+p, penetrating the Crust from the s.p.a.ces beyond the Star. And appearing to fire some kind of weapon, a spear made of light, into the Quantum Sea. Muub, what if the s.h.i.+p is causing causing the Glitches? What then? Where would my duty lie?" the Glitches? What then? Where would my duty lie?"

Muub pulled away from Hork. Despite his exhaustion and shock, he felt a thrill of awe run through him, deep and primitive. Hork was planning to challenge the Xeelee themselves. Hork was planning to challenge the Xeelee themselves.

"Now that my father's gone the Court will be a nest of intrigues. In the chaos of this disaster, perhaps there'll even be an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt... and I don't have time to deal with any of it. We have to find a way to combat the threat of the Xeelee. We need knowledge, Muub; we need to understand the enemy before we can fight them."

Muub frowned. "But so many generations after the Reformation our knowledge of the Xeelee mythos has been relegated to fragments of legend. I could consult scholars in the University, perhaps..."

Hork shook his heavy head. "All the books were fed into Harbor hoppers generations ago... And the heads of those 'scholars' are as empty as they are shaved of hair."

Muub forced himself not to run a self-conscious hand over his own bare scalp.

"Muub, we have to think wider. Beyond the City, even. What about those weird upfluxers you told me about? The old man and his companions... curiosities from the wild. The upfluxers are Xeelee cultists, aren't they? Maybe they could tell us something; maybe they have preserved the knowledge we have foolishly destroyed."

"Perhaps," Muub said dutifully.

"Bring them to Parz, Muub." Hork glanced down at his father. "But first," he said quietly, "you must attend to your patients."

"Yes. I... excuse me, sir."

Gathering his strength, Muub Waved away from the grisly little tableau and returned to his work.

Dura glided to a halt against the soft resistance of the Magfield. She let her limbs rest, loose, against the field; they ached after so many days' Waving from the ruined ceiling-farm.

She stared around at the empty, yellow-gold sky. The Quantum Sea was a concave bruise far below her, and the new vortex lines arced around her, clean and undisturbed. It was as if the recent Glitch had never happened; the Star, having expelled its excess energy and angular momentum, had restored itself with astonis.h.i.+ng speed.

It was a shame, Dura thought, that humans couldn't do the same.