Where Time Winds Blow, page 3
Beginning the circuit for the second time, he soon discovered the place where Kris Dojaan’s shot had struck the hull. The metal was twisted inwards, the side of the machine opened in a long and narrow split. The shot seemed to have half-caught an entrance-way, because Faulcon could see the twisted remnants of some intra-wall mechanism; beyond the hole was a passageway, narrow and of pentagonal cross-section. He could see only a few inches into the interior, Kytara being bright but not sufficiently bright.
A wash of purple light made him stand, startled, and become aware that the wind had dropped. He looked up into the heavens and saw the tenuous flickering purple of some stratospheric activity. It was pretty, though not startling, and moved away to the south, discharging two magnificent strikes of forked lightning down onto the ocean.
Lena’s voice in his ears whispered, “Is he there? Has he got a shard?”
“I think he’s gone inside the machine,” said Faulcon stiffly. “He’s opened some sort of passageway. I’ve tried calling him but he doesn’t answer. Maybe he’s screened somehow.”
In the stillness, but still wary of a sudden squall, Faulcon backed away from the hulk and peered up at its tiny windows, hoping to see some movement. He saw nothing and felt a moment’s thrill at the thought of where inside that vast ruin his colleague might have been, and what sights he might have been seeing. I haven’t lost it all; not yet, not yet.
There was a sound down by the ocean and he glanced that way; it had sounded like an animal splashing in the water’s edge and his body chilled as he imagined something creeping up the shore towards him. As he saw movement in the darkness he felt a second shock, and backed away a little. The creature came between him and the bright reflection of Kytara on the ocean’s surface, and he saw that it was a man; after a moment he recognized Kris, walking steadily towards him.
“I thought you were inside the machine,” said Faulcon evenly.
“I got a six-skip,” said Kris, laughing stiffly. And he held up his hand. “I also got my lucky charm.” Light reflected weakly off a small fragment of opaque crystal, star-shaped and precise.
Faulcon said, “Then you didn’t go inside …?”
Kris hesitated just briefly before he said, “No. No, I didn’t go inside.” And he walked past Faulcon to the tent.
CHAPTER TWO
It was the end of spring, and time for the city to move. Spring on Kamelios, whether in the northern or southern hemisphere, was a season, no more, no less, dry and windy than any other time of year. But for the last three Kamelion months—longer than a Standard Earth month, but the year on Kamelios was divided up into the same twelve units—there had been a noticeable darkening of the native flora, and changes in the behaviour of many of the beasts that inhabited the lands about the valley. And for three months, too, the crop-fields of the various human settlements, from Valley Edge and Chalk Stack, to Touchdown and Hawkman’s Holding nearly two hundred miles away, had begun to show a rapid growth, and would soon be ready for harvesting.
For Steel City, the end of spring meant a change in position, a move of fifteen miles along the edge of the valley known as Kriakta Rift. It was mere ritual, and as such was never missed.
From a high ridge of ground, west of Steel City, where a tangled forest of the white and purple tree-form known as sun-weed made travel difficult and habitation all but impossible, Leo Faulcon watched the city rise on its engines, and hover almost silently above the blackened crater that had been its home for the last quarter year. Behind him, Lena Tanoway guided her byke through the snag-toothed trunks of the forest, and brushed blue and grey fragments of leaves and pollen from her black travelling suit as she stopped by Faulcon and watched the manoeuvres several miles distant. Kris Dojaan could be heard, distantly, cursing and shouting as he failed to ease his way through the forest. They should have come by the marked track-way, Faulcon knew, but they had been in a hurry to get home, and this short cut, close to the scientific station at Chalk Stack, had seemed like a good idea at the time. They had forgotten the date, and the ritual shift of base location; they would not be able to enter the city until dusk, and they could easily have taken the longer, more leisurely route along the edge of the valley.
To Faulcon’s surprise, when Kris finally emerged from the stand of sunweed, dishevelled and covered with the fine, powdery exudate from the plants, instead of complaining he gasped in wonder. Climbing down from his byke, still brushing at his arms with abstracted gestures of his hands, he walked to a chalky outcrop of rock, stood upon it and gazed across the land laid out before him.
Faulcon recognized instantly what Kris was feeling, and realized that he had been right to suggest the short cut. Was he getting so jaded that he could overlook the simple pleasures of tourism? He smiled as he walked to join the youngster, and as he looked at the distant city, and the land surrounding it, he felt, for a moment, the sense of awe he could remember having experienced a year before when Lena had taken him up into Hunderag Country, to the foothills of the Jaraquath Mountains. There, close to the many territories of the manchanged, the view to the south, across the rift, had been even more startling than from Chalk Stack.
“You think it’s so barren, round the city; when you’re inside, looking out, it seems so desolate and dry. But it isn’t, it’s beautiful, it’s rich, really rich. And that valley!”
Faulcon smiled, half watching Kris Dojaan’s dust-and mask-covered features as the boy enthused, aware of the expression in his eyes, even though the goggles effectively hid his features from view.
They were not high enough to get a clear view into the valley, and they could not get a real view of the spread of the land; but they had sufficient vantage to see how wide the valley was, nearly a mile across, with its wind-scoured bluffs and ridges covered with all manner of gleaming, indistinguishable junk. It looked vegetated in parts, and Faulcon, through binoculars, observed that a wide spread of now-dying forest covered several miles of the valley’s bottom, ripped there from a future time, no doubt, when the valley had been eroded away, and a stand of these high, tree-like plants had grown upon a marshier soil. Two spires rose from that green and brown foliage, and a movement upon one of them told Faulcon that a team was crawling about those ruins, logging everything. It did not make him want to be there, back in the valley; but it made him remember how thrilled he had been the first time his Section Commander, Gulio Ensavlion, had allowed him to join a Section 8 team shortly after a time wind had blown through the gorge.
The valley was two hundred miles long, in places so wide and low that it seemed like no more than open land between rolling hills; at the far end, the eastern limit, it was deep, narrow, dangerous; here, close to the western extreme, the “beach” was wide and shallow, marking the place where the east to west flow of the time winds blew themselves out. From their vantage point they could see some twenty miles of the valley’s snaking form, as far, in fact, as Riftwatch Station Eekhaut, the ruined observer post that sat on the sharpest of Kriakta Rift’s bends, at Rigellan Corner.
Along each side of the winding valley ran a ten-mile strip of essentially uninhabited land, varying from a tangle of jungle life along most of the southern perimeter, to the more barren reaches of Gaunt’s County, the western lands where Steel City spent most of its restless life, and across whose forested borders Faulcon and the others had just passed. Only installations from the military section of the Galactic Cooperative, or Federation as it was more familiarly known, were allowed access to this so-called Valley Zone, although there was a small and vital tourist trade, and for the purposes of more practical trade and communication there were trackways passing from the various counties beyond the Valley Zone up to the huge, brick-built Exchanges that were scattered along the border. Those counties were the neocolonial settlements. Gaunt’s County, Five Valleys, Seligman’s Drift and Tokranda County were the nearest to Steel City, and the only inhabited regions that Faulcon had visited.
Here lived the first and second generation colonists, human settlers not prepared to undergo the same drastic engineering as the manchanged (which would adapt them, ultimately, to Kamelios in all its poisonous, pollen-saturated glory), but rather hoped to evolve a natural tolerance. The nearest of the manchanged lived in the high lands, in Hunderag Country, the foot-hills of the Jaraquath Mountains, and were rarely seen in the counties. These low lands were mainly devoted to agriculture, and quite intensively farmed; the fields made an octagonal checkboard of colour, and the darker shapes of the towns and villages were scattered almost regularly between the small-holdings.
The area of habitation ended at Chalk Stack, close by, with a sprawling scientific installation, built below, up and across several weather-worn pinnacles of a white and flaky limestone-type rock. The place was well known to Faulcon from a few months ago when, his relationship with Lena broken for the while, he had known a girl called Immuk Lee. She lived at Chalk Stack, now, with the station controller, one Ben Leuwentok, who had often induced sleep in Faulcon with his interminable, and no longer fascinating, seminars on man, moons, madness and the native life-forms of Kamelios.
Six counties, Faulcon explained to Kris Dojaan, and six major towns; at their edge, moving between them, using them for food and supplying them with consumer goods of a more idle kind, was Steel City, an immense, domed monster, overshadowing the townships, shifting restlessly as it crossed the border between Gaunt’s County and Five Valleys, and onwards, along the rift, until it turned and came back again.
It began its fifteen-mile drift now, away from Faulcon and the others, towards a place in cleared land where already a site had been marked out for it. Through his glasses Faulcon could see the winking lights, the scurrying shapes of rift-suited men, and the bulkier, spidery gleam of digging machines. At this time of day the sun was high, more orange than red, and the land was bright and green; the rift valley appeared as a reddish and grey streaked channel, bordered by greywood forest and the more colourful jungle, a treacherous land that reached hundreds of miles into the hazy distance to the south.
“Time to go,” said Faulcon, and they returned to their bykes, and the patiently waiting leader. Kris acknowledged her with a slight movement of his hand. “Sightseeing completed?” she asked, and Kris nodded: “It’s a great view.”
“Wait until I get you hunting,” said Faulcon, “up in Hunderag … ” He stopped speaking as Lena punched her byke into noisy life.
They trailed the city for several hours, passing around the gigantic crater where it had recently nestled. The city floated ahead of them, the whining of its motors growing in volume as they closed the distance. Soon they had to turn their heads to see the full span of the floating hemisphere, with its bulbous traverse units—five of the six—clinging to its lower half; where was the sixth traverse unit, Faulcon wondered idly, and as if to answer his question his eyes caught the flash of light on the tiny mobile installation, miles away, and crawling home, still a week away after some expedition into the far lands of the east.
From satellites, from air cars, on bykes and from segments of Steel City itself, from all these things was VanderZande’s World studied and explored; an enormous team of men and women, dedicated to following the time winds, and picking up the traces of those who had gone before—and those who would yet arrive on the world, at a time when Steel City had long since corroded.
By mid-afternoon the city had reached its new location, and settled noisily and chokingly to the ground, promising an earlier entry than Faulcon had at first believed; the cloud of dust and smoke remained about the installation for several minutes, and by the time it had cleared the Riftwatch Tower had emerged, sliding upwards from the central core, its disc-shaped observation platform already turning.
Faulcon watched the city as it settled and was still again. He lounged back on his byke, scarcely aware of the muscular control he exercised over the intricate and complex mechanisms of the speeding machine. Moving at more than a mile a minute was not a particularly hazardous occupation, but on this terrain, with its hidden clefts, and sudden gusts of wind, it was far too fast for common sense. This was why Lena and Kris were now trailing him, concerned over his obvious relaxation. Faulcon was fascinated by Steel City, though. He thought it was incredibly ugly, and with the gaping gash in its side where the crawling traverse unit belonged, it was both ugly and lopsided. He could never understand why so many thousands of people opted to live within its glassy shell (calling it Steel City was just a way of describing its antiglare appearance) and had not set up townships within the Valley Zone.
Convenience, he supposed; and the sense of transience it brought to one’s stay on VanderZande’s World; that was why he himself had secured quarters in the city. Nobody with any sense ever came to this place intending to stay. Which was not to say that people who came to Kamelios ever left it.
The city, then, despite its hideous presentation, attracted Faulcon in an indefinable way. It also promised good food, proper rest, proper bodily hygiene, and a fat bonus, in old-fashioned credit chits, which he had every intention of spending with as much irresponsibility as possible. With Kris Dojaan on the team, he had managed to convince himself, they were the luckiest team on the world. When credit ran short they could always follow the youngster’s nose.
The three-day journey home had been a reasonable approximation of hell. Food had virtually run out, and the expected catch of edible life-forms in the Ilmoroq passes had not materialized; meat compress and nutrient paste can become a most nauseating prospect when it is all there is to look forward to. He preferred to eat sand; he bitterly regretted the loss of the real carrot. Lena had seemed less bothered by the discomfort, but then she was a real old hand—or so Faulcon thought of her. Surprisingly, too, Kris had seemed unconcerned by the agonies of the return trip, and for one whose stay on Kamelios was still measurable in days, that showed remarkable self control. What puzzled Faulcon was that, for virtually the whole of the trip, Kris had done little else but complain—at not being able to visit the valley straight away, at the primitiveness of the masks and bykes—or gasp in awe, as when they had come through the Ilmoroqs, for example, and later, when they had hit the Paluberion beach. But from the moment they had started coming home he had seemed a different man. Certainly he had inquired almost endlessly about the human habitation and setup on the world, and Faulcon had swiftly grown tired of exercising his own rather shabby understanding of how the world functioned commercially, and how it was governed. But there was nonetheless something curiously different about the boy, a sense of detachment.
In whispered tones Faulcon had confided his concern to Lena, who had agreed with him. There were two possibilities. That Kris had lied when he had denied entering the derelict, and that what he had seen inside it had upset him, or altered him in some way. Secondly, that a tentative, rather weak mood change had swept them during that last night by the ocean; whilst Lena, and Faulcon himself, had not sensed any subtle change in their psychological presentation, Kris Dojaan, raw and fresh, and un-tampered with by the world as yet, had been badly affected.
There was, in fact, a third possibility: that all this was pure imagination; that Kris’s early awe and the sense of his being overwhelmed by place and discovery, had worn off; that he was a controlled and inquisitive young man, with a great deal more sense than credulity, in contrast to the way he had earlier appeared.
As they circuited the perimeter of the installation, waiting for an access bay to lower from the core, Kris’s soft voice again crackled through Faulcon’s mask radio, expressing disbelief that anyone could be so obsessed with luck that they would move a whole city.
Faulcon had explained the reasoning behind the location shift a few hours earlier, and even then had found himself laughing in agreement with the boy. It did sound ludicrous, no matter how you expressed it, that every three months, by VanderZande’s time, the city should lift up its skirts and scurry to a different place on the cliff approaches. It did not in the least reduce the chances of being caught by a time squall. It did give observational access to a different section of the valley, and Faulcon supposed that there was something to be gained from watching the time ruins regularly from a different spot. But anyone—and he was thinking most emphatically of Mad Commander Ensavlion—anyone who wished to watch the valley with a curiosity bordering on the obsessional had only to climb into a rift suit and go down to the valley’s edge. If you’d paid your money to come here you could do what you liked—within reason, rules and your own scant spare time.
Steel City, Faulcon explained as they rested, close enough to the building to hear the low, grumbling sounds of its various systems, had a second escape-ploy, should a destructive wind rear up and out of the valley and swoop towards it. The traverse units, the six mobile domes that were effectively mini-cities on their own, could move considerably faster than the crawl with which they circuited the continent. They could, if required, lift vertically at only just less than bone-breaking velocity. If the klaxons went—signifying a time wind’s approach—the populace could drain into the six units in literally thirty seconds, through any one of hundreds of drop-chutes from the main city body. The longest drop was from the observation tower that was raised so high in the air. Thirty seconds down, and the traverse units would explode upwards and away to safety, though the main city would be lost.
“A time wind,” Kris repeated, the tone of awe back in his voice for the moment. He had seen a derelict, an ancient machine ripped from its own era and cast, lifeless, upon the shores of a red-lit ocean. But he had not seen the wind that had brought it, and he was impatient to witness such a phenomenon. Faulcon explained that in the year he had been on VanderZande’s World he had observed a time wind on only a half-dozen occasions, although he had once come close to being caught in an eddy, the sudden appearance of a tiny, transient focus of distortion. But the main winds blew in the deep valleys, and in the nearby valley most of all. If he was patient, he would see his wind; but there was no predicting them.
