Kirinya, page 39
Being dressed in her sleep seemed more a violation than being undressed.
‘You need a hand?’ Cowboy asked. The one he offered her bore the symbol of three spirals. She took it and pulled herself into the light.
She lay, chin resting on folded elbows, in the mouth of a pocket on a cliff of Chaga-coral. A similar cliff faced her a kilometre away across a steep, narrow canyon. Hundreds of pockets covered the valley sides. Cascades of vegetation tumbled down the cliffs; figures moved over and through them, harvesting. Lines were slung between the canyon walls, a web hung with biolume clusters and spongy water traps. As she watched, a four-armed figure moved with dazzling speed up the net, leaping from node to node with thrilling confidence.
Ren looked up. The canyon walls met overhead. The point of the sky-arch was densely forested; tendrils, roots, strings of bladders, waving fans of porous moss hung many metres into the canyon, entangling with the rope web. The climber disappeared into the roof jungle of knotted tubes and orange flowers.
Ren looked down. A hundred metres below, the cliffs were cut off by a plane of light. The floor of the canyon was a concave hemisphere of translucent fabric, guyed to the mountain sides by thousands of adhesive threads. Looking up and down the canyon, Ren could see where the edges of the world-floor rose to meet the valley roof, on the world’s close horizon. A roof on the world, a carpet of light, that was the only safe way to see this place. To see it as it truly was was to invite vertigo: a bubble clinging with spider-silk to the outside of the Big Dumb Object, a dome of air pressurized by centripetal force.
Mandelatown, its seventy-three citizens called this tender balloon of gases. After the hard-shelled terror of Iles Glorieuses, it was home and safety to Ren.
Cowboy clung head-down to the wall above Ren’s nest.
‘How long was I out?’ she asked him.
‘A couple of hours.’
‘I’m sorry. I just couldn’t stay awake.’
‘Don’t be. You needed it. Tsirinana’s called a meeting.’ Cowboy scuttled around the spiracle mouth until he was underneath Ren. ‘Coetivy’s come in.’
‘It’s all right?’
‘It’s fine.’
Ren shivered in her nest. The flight was still written in the ache of her muscles and bones. The long loop around the dark side of the BDO, American radars like the fingers of unwelcome men on her skin, Marine tugs pulling away from the hub on intercept burns, fuel reserves dwindling by the second. Always running. Always the hunted. High Sumatra had been the first to go in. A terse crackle of communication, the stutter of attitude jets, then the heart-stopping dive to within fifty metres of the surface, the American tugs swooping down behind. Somewhere in the warren of canyons between the sprawling kilometre-high mesas of the Dirac Massif, there had been a fight: bloody, hand-to-hand at three kilometres per second. Against one Marine squad, Chaga-born adaptations might have prevailed. Not against two. High Sumatra was grappled, gutted with cutting lasers, snatched away like a broken songbird. Then it had been Ren’s turn. She took Iles Glorieuses out over the pole, spun her on her tail, and went in. Claws of ice reached for her; she danced clear of them, threw her ship between ten-kilometre icicles and bergs the size of cities. She twisted Iles Glorieuses through great CO2 Ginnungagaps, William scanning seconds ahead, the briefest thruster squirt between her and destruction. She plunged through sudden outgassings, rolled to narrowly avoid massive iceteroids melted loose by the heat of the sun and flung outwards by the BDO’s spin. Then she was over the rim, belly scraping the uppermost fronds of the vacuum-Chaga canopy. The strategy had been to confuse the defence by taking widely divergent approaches to the landing site. For once the strategy worked. Tugs looped wide from the north cap on surface grazing orbits. Too far, too slow. Ren had gone radar-dark among the fissures and the towering heat-exchange fans of South Fermi. With the last fuel in her tank and strength in her muscles, she had brought Iles Glorieuses in to the wide valley where four-armed figures in abseil harnesses moored it fast against the centripetal spin and shrouded it with thermal profile netting.
Gravity, Ren had thought, naming the new force pressing her spine into the soft placenta of the life pod. No. Gravity draws you in. This repels you, throws you away. Traitor gravity. Anti-gravity. Sleep, her body told her. You are thinking about gravity? You have fought a battle and survived, warrior. You have brought your ship and your people safely to the destination. You have lived where others have died. Sleep. Eat. Get strong again. She shivered in the blood-warm amniotic fluid. Darkness flooded in. At some point she felt shifts in this anti-gravity. The Big Sky people are ejecting my pod, she thought. Again, a sensation of gentle acceleration. They will be taking me to their nation, she thought.
Sleep is a great punctuation, Ren thought as she pulled herself up to sit in the mouth of her mountain nest. It makes a new day of everything. A spider-line was attached by a gobbet of adhesive to the cliff face just above her head. Cowboy watched as she reached for it and failed.
‘You are in no state to climb,’ he said. ‘Get on my back, I will take you.’
She glanced down at the strong curve of pressure-skin. Its strength was egg-shell thin: a body, a heavy tool, almost any object falling from half a kilometre would punch through into vacuum beyond. Mandelatown would pop like a bubble. Ren wrapped arms and legs tight around Cowboy. She closed her eyes and pressed her face against his back as he swung them out over the white drop.
‘Don’t you trust me, Three Stripes?’
‘What?’
He stroked her wrist.
‘It’s how people are named here. I think this will be my name for you.’
As Ren contemplated it, and found she rather liked it, night fell. There was no twilight on the Big Dumb Object, darkness was sudden and absolute. Ren battled primeval fear with briefings. There are two nights on the outside of Big Dumb Object, Little Night, which happens when it spins away from the sun, and lasts six minutes, and Phase Night, which is when the BDO passes into occultation behind earth, and is gradual over a period of seven days. As her eyes accustomed to the short dark she saw Mandelatown become a constellation of lights: biolanterns swaying in the air currents that stirred the web, bioluminescent fungi on the canyon walls, green glowings from the cave-mouths, the stripes on her wrists and ankles, Cowboy’s spirals. A sudden gust shook the web. Ren felt Cowboy’s lower shoulders tighten as he secured his grip on the bouncing rope.
‘You okay?’
‘I’m okay,’ she whispered in his ear. A sound; a rising stuttering shriek high above. Machine noise, engines. Ren looked up. Red and green navigation lights were moving up in the low-pressure zone close to the surface of the BDO. Warning beacons pulsed white, yellow, tiny jewel-points burned blue for an instant. Attitude thrusters: one of the Big Sky People’s two pirated tugs was returning. The ground crew had lifted the upper edge of the air canopy, spilling atmosphere into space, allowing the ship to slip through to dock. Ren saw suit patterns dancing around the tug, cocooning it in faintly glowing silk, like spiders that had ganged together to hunt a swallow.
Cowboy held the line until the pressure stabilized. In that time, night ended, a new little day began. The floor of the world was a curve of white.
This world is missing a second dimension, Ren thought. Everything is either one- or three-dimensional, the line or the volume. There are no planes, no flat surfaces in Mandelatown.
The meeting place clung to a crevice in the northern wall. Ren was reminded of worm casts in the soft lagoon mud at Turangalila, tangles of spit-glued sand, a soft, feather-gilled monstrosity lurking within. The trumpet mouths of these tubes were the height of two people. A warm gust of human-stink stroked Ren’s skull-stubble as Cowboy swung down the clamber-netting.
The meeting took place in a chamber shaped like a human ear, Ren and Cowboy descended a curving ramp between high ridges of crimson coral to a central whorl where William and Tsirinana waited with the leadership of the Big Sky People. Tsirinana’s pressure-skin, signed with a white triangle, seemed to emphasize her pregnancy. ‘It will be explained to you,’ Anitraséo had said as they met the crew from Mayotte off the tilt-rotor. It seemed seasons ago. It was only hours. She felt like she had known Tsirinana all her life. She was hardly less a stranger than these three Big Sky People. They perched on stools fitted to their complex anatomy. One, an African man with a skin so blue-black it seemed oiled, who wore two linked circles on his pressure skin, was staring at her. He jumped off his stool, bounced on his lower hands over to Ren, caught her shoulder and examined her scalp. Ren shied away.
‘I thought so,’ he said.
‘Thought what?’
‘It is red. I did know your mother.’
‘My mother?’
‘I was in Unit 12. I had another name then; I was called Juma.’
‘Gab got you out?’
‘You are not the only one,’ William said suddenly. The one who had been called Juma spun on his lower hands. He stared at William’s face. He frowned. Recognition dawned.
‘The precog. Yes!’
‘What’s going on here?’ Ren asked. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I also was held in Unit 12,’ William said. ‘Your mother got me out. She also got me in there in the first place.’
The Big Sky man said to William, ‘Red Three.’
‘Ah. I am sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I have a wife, many children now. And we are free. And you, the red woman’s daughter.’
‘Small world,’ Ren said lamely. Juma Two Circles laughed.
‘Yes, and I have been from one end of it to the other. Space is curved, you will always come back again.’
‘Two Circles,’ said the Elder who had South American features and carried the sign of two commas. ‘The kid’s tired. She’s come far and fought hard.’
‘And we do not have time to waste,’ said the third Elder, a woman with the fine, heart-shaped face of the Nilo-Hamitic race. She wore two blue rings around her wrists, ankles, neck and waist.
‘We will talk later,’ Juma Two Circles said to Ren. ‘I owe your mother.’
‘The tactical situation is evolving by the minute,’ Blue Two said. She was Big Sky Nation’s military leader. She came from Galla people, a warrior race. She had been part of the tug hijack that had sparked the Space Monkey rebellion; she had crawled across ten metres of hull, naked to vacuum, to blow the canopy latches and consign the white meat to space. ‘There has been a change of plan.’
Stools flowed out of the chamber floor. Cowboy showed Ren how to be almost comfortable on one.
‘As mission commander, I should have been consulted before any changes were made to operations,’ Tsirinana said.
‘No time,’ Blue Two said. ‘Our forward observation posts report increased traffic through the main lock. General McKittrick is about to move on us.’
‘In the past she’s been put off by fear of heavy losses,’ Commas said in heavily accented Swahili. He shifted his weight on the stool. ‘Her last major engagement, we took another one of her tugs; she lost three soldiers. Fear of a hull breach has prevented her from throwing the Gaia probe at Mandelatown.’
‘Your arrival tipped the balance in favour of action,’ Blue Two said.
‘How soon?’ Tsirinana asked.
‘Imminently. She will want to strike before you enter the fourth chamber.’
‘For us, it is imperative that we relocate Mandelatown,’ Two Circles said.
‘You’re going to move all of this?’ Ren heard herself ask. Two Circles smiled at her ingenuousness.
‘We have done it before. We have a suitable site already picked out in the Oppenheimer Escarpment. The pressure sheet is all that is essential.’
‘But the farms, the plants,’ Ren said.
‘We carry the seed with us wherever we go.’ Ren saw a secret smile on Tsirinana’s face; she brushed her long, elegant fingers against the swell of her suit. Two Circles continued: ‘It will be hard for a while, but we are Big Sky People, we can live anywhere. We adapt. But we will need all our people for the move. All our people, all our resources.’
‘We can take you to the second entry point,’ Blue Two said. ‘But once you are inside, you are on your own. We cannot guide you.’
Tsirinana was halfway out of her seat.
‘This is not what was agreed with the Coalition!’
William’s fingers restrained her. Ren thought she sensed something protective, proprietorial in the touch. Is that your child, swimming in there? But who would sanely send a pregnant woman into a war zone, through a space battle, on a rocket? Questions: no answers.
‘The safety of my people is not negotiable,’ Two Circles said. ‘In keeping with standard US military practice, Alice McKittrick will only engage if she is certain of absolute victory. She will annihilate the tribe to the last child.’
‘These Americans are not barbarians,’ Tsirinana’s eyes challenged him.
Two Circles held her look. ‘She sent us a message.’ A circle of floor in the centre of the ring of stools flowed into screen. ‘Our rim watch relayed these images to us twenty minutes ago.’
The observation post was concealed in a clutch of low egg-shaped hills a few kilometres from The Hub. It commanded a panorama of the south cap and all the traffic that moved between the main lock, a two-kilometre wide blister rising above the dense surface growth, and High Steel, the one-time front step to the BDO. Over the years it had expanded into the transfer point and re-fuelling depot for Unity tugs. It hung fifteen kilometres above the out-lock, a sprawl of modules, solar panels and booms on which tank farms clustered like a heavy harvest. Ren could just make out intra-orbit tugs nose-in to the fuelling points. Alice McKittrick’s space fleet jostled like piglets at the teat. The sleek white delta of a Merina orbiter was as inappropriate among them as a bride in a boneyard.
The camera zoomed in on the imprisoned ship, pod ports open, mirror nacelle empty, then refocused in a sudden swirl of ships and stars on The Hub. The lock was opening, petals sliding over each other. The interior had been rigged with floods; it blazed with light. Out of the light, into the dark, came four sudden bright specks. The camera tracked and zoomed. At its highest resolution, Ren could see that they looked like tiny five-pointed stars.
She closed her eyes. She heard William’s intake of breath, Cowboy swearing softly in his own language, nothing from Commander Tsirinana. When she looked again the screen had returned to the floor and Two Circles was staring at her as if her reaction were the one that truly mattered.
‘In space no one can hear you say “Geneva Convention”,’ Blue Two said.
‘We will take you and the team from Coetivy to the entry point immediately,’ Two Circles said. Tsirinana nodded. ‘We cannot afford to have one of our ships out of service any longer than necessary. Blue Two will brief you more fully on the tug, but I can assure you that you will not find yourself without, ah, allies inside the fourth chamber. You will also find yourself with enemies: the military have kept a base there since the Big Sky rebellion. Blue Two will take you to the ship now, this meeting has already eaten up too much of too little time. Good luck, you will need it.’
He called Ren back from the curving ramp. ‘Hey, red woman’s daughter!’ He pressed a thin, flat object into her hand. ‘You will need this, I think.’
It looked like an innocuous few centimetres of strip plastic, but Ren knew from experience that a twist would lock its molecules into a wicked little blade. She nodded her thanks, pressed it to her thigh tackpatch and went to where Cowboy was waiting to carry her on his back to the ship at the top of the world. The roof-crews were already unfastening the mooring cables as the crew of Iles Glorieuses strapped in.
‘You all right, Three Stripes?’ Cowboy asked, noticing that Ren in the next seat had closed her eyes.
‘Just trying to let my soul catch up with me,’ she said. She felt the warmth of his hand on her hip. It felt almost like a soul. A sudden lurch jolted her eyes open as the tug dropped from its cradle under centrifugal gravity. She clutched for Cowboy; then the engines took control. The Big Sky pilot steered his ship beneath a canopy of inverted jungle. Ren glimpsed dangling tendrils and flowers through the tiny ports. The sky forest was lashed by a sudden hurricane. Vines whipped, fungus caps swayed, flowers shed hand-sized petals. The Big Sky People had lifted the hem of the pressure curtain. The tug was blown free in a gust of wind, ice crystals and flash-frozen petals.
A flowery way, Ren thought. Maybe it is a good thing that I have moved too far and too fast for my soul to catch up with me. Maybe the real name of that soul is fear. She looked for clues of soul in the faces in the pod. Cowboy; yes: his touchings begged as much intimacy as they gave. His Coetivy counterpart, a fine-featured Malagasy boy, also sat with their isopath, an aristocratic Merina man. Ren judged him in his late twenties. They both had the fear-soul on their faces. They could not touch to take it away. William sat with his co-precog, a Mozambique mulatto woman with a beautiful pale skin and liquid brown eyes. She saw Ren looking at her. Fear there too. Is that because of the future you can see, or the future you cannot? At the front of the pod, Blue Two was in intense conference with Tsirinana and the engineer/commander of Coetivy. Also a woman, Ren noted. Also, Ren concluded from her unconscious self-touchings and the heavy, liquid-filled way she could not get comfortable in her seat, deeply pregnant.
The sudden brief night came again.
62
The clear-up teams moved through the reception hall. They were quiet and efficient. They unpinned the frontals and folded the cloths, they collapsed the spindle-legged tables. They dismantled the dais where the singers had performed and unhooked the white backcloth with the blue logo on it. Faraway watched men on ladders take down the tapestries of Suomenlinna’s proud legacy, shake out the dust and carefully roll them up. They could cancel the commission for the new tapestry, now that history was not going to be made on this island. Men with big black refuse sacks moved around Faraway, emptying ash trays, dropping in half-eaten morsels of food, picking up detritus from the floor with litter sticks. They worked with the single-minded purposefulness of drone insects, as heedless of Faraway as if he were a piece of furniture. Less so: furniture was to be stacked on trolleys and taken out to the waiting service vans. He was functionless, redundant.
