Of course. The answer was obvious. It was—almost—staring him in the face. It was beautifully simple and it made elegant use of local resources. Why had he not thought of it sooner?
All he had to do was hide them behind Haldora.
He made the necessary arrangements, then opened the communications channel back to Morwenna.
Vasko observed the approach to the main island with great interest. They had been flying over black ocean for so long that it was a relief to see any evidence of human presence. Yet at the same time the lights of the outlying settlements, strung out in the filaments, arcs and loops that implied half-familiar bays, peninsulas and tiny islands, looked astonishingly fragile and evanescent. Even when the brighter outlying sprawls of First Camp came into view, they still looked as if they could be quenched at any moment, no more permanent or meaningful than a fading pattern of bonfire embers. Vasko had always known that the human presence on Ararat was insecure, something that could never be taken for granted. It had been drummed into him since he was tiny. But until now he had never felt it viscerally.
He had-created a window for himself in the hull of the shuttle, using his fingertip to sketch out the area he wanted to become transparent. Clavain had shown him how to do that, demonstrating the trick with something close to pride. Vasko suspected that the hull still looked perfectly black from the outside and that he was really looking at a form of screen which exactly mimicked the optical properties of glass. But where old technology was concerned—and the shuttle was very definitely old technology—it never paid to take anything for granted. All he knew for certain was that he was flying, and that he knew of none amongst his peers who had ever done that before.
The shuttle had homed in on the signal from Scorpio’s bracelet. Vasko had watched it descend out of the cloud layer attended by spirals and curlicues of disturbed air. Red and green lights had blinked on either side of a hull of polished obsidian that had the deltoid, concave look of a manta ray.
At least a third of the surface area of the underside had been painfully bright: grids of actinically bright, fractally folded thermal elements hazed in a cocoon of flickering purple-indigo plasma. Elaborate clawed undercarriage had emerged from the cool spots on the underside, unfolding and elongating in a hypnotic ballet of pistons and hinges. Neon patterns had flicked on in the upper hull, delineating access hatches, hotspots and exhaust apertures. The shuttle had picked its landing zone, rotating and touching down with dainty precision, the undercarriage contracting to absorb the weight of the craft. For a moment the roar of the plasma heaters had remained, before stopping with unnerving suddenness. The plasma had dissipated, leaving only a nasty charred smell.
Vasko had caught glimpses of the colony’s aircraft before, but only from a distance. This was the most impressive thing he had seen.
The three of them had walked towards the boarding ramp. They had almost reached it when Clavain misjudged his footfall and began to tumble towards the rocks. Vasko and the pig had both lurched forward at the same time, but it was Vasko who had taken the brunt of Clavain’s weight. There had been a moment of relief and shock—Clavain had felt terribly light, like a sack of straw. Vasko’s intake of breath had been loud, distinct even above the kettlelike hissing of the transport.
“Are you all right, sir?” he had asked.
Clavain had looked at him sharply. “I’m an old man,” he had replied. “You mustn’t expect the world of me.”
Reflecting now on his past few hours in Clavain’s presence, Vasko had no idea what to make of him. One minute the old man was showing him around the shuttle with a kind of avuncular hospitality, asking him about his family, complimenting him on the perspicacity of his questions, sharing jokes with him in the manner of a long-term confidant. The next minute he was as icy and distant as a comet.
Though the mood swings came without warning, they were always accompanied by a perceptible shift of focus in Clavain’s eyes, as if what was taking place around him had suddenly ceased to be of significant interest.
The first few times that this happened, Vasko had naturally assumed that he had done something to displease the old man. But it quickly became apparent that Scorpio was getting the same treatment, and that Clavain’s distant phases had less to do with anger than with the loss of a signal, like a radio losing its frequency lock. He was drifting, then snapping back to the present. Once that realisation had dawned, Vasko stopped worrying so much about what he said and did in Clavain’s presence. At the same time he found himself more and more concerned about the state of mind of the man they were bringing home. He wondered what kind of place Clavain was drifting to when he stopped being present. When the man was friendly and focused on the here and now, he was as sane as anyone Vasko had met. But sanity, Vasko decided, was like the pattern of lights he could see through his cabin window. In al-most any direction the only way to travel was into darkness, and there was a lot more darkness than light.
Now he noticed a strange absence of illumination cutting through the lights of one of the larger settlements. He frowned, trying to think of somewhere he knew where there was an unlit thoroughfare, or perhaps a wide canal cutting back into one of the islands.
The shuttle banked, changing his angle of view. The swathe of darkness tilted, swallowing more lights and revealing others. Vasko’s perceptions flipped and he realised that he was seeing an unlit structure interposed between the shuttle and the settlement. The structure’s immensely tall shape was only vaguely implied by the way it eclipsed and revealed the background lights, but once Vasko had identified it he had no trouble filling in the details for himself. It was the sea tower, of course. It rose from the sea several kilometres out from the oldest of the settlements, the place where he had been born.
The sea tower. The ship.
Nostalgia for Infinity.
He had only ever seen it from a distance, for routine sea traffic was forbidden close to the ship. He knew that the leaders sailed out to it, and it was no secret that shuttles occasionally entered or left the ship, tiny as gnats against the gnarled and weathered spire of the visible hull. He supposed Scorpio would know all about that, but the ship was one of the many topics Vasko had decided it would be best not to raise during his first outing with the pig.
From this vantage point, the Nostalgia for Infinity still looked large to Vasko, but no longer quite as distant and geologically huge as it had done for most of his life. He could see that the ship was at least a hundred times taller than the tallest conch structure anywhere in the archipelago, and it still gave him a bracing sense of vertigo. But the ship was much closer to the shore than he had realised, clearly an appendage of the colony rather than a distant looming guardian. If the ship did not exactly look fragile, he now understood that it was a human artefact all the same, as much at the mercy of the ocean as the settlements it overlooked.
The ship had brought them to Ararat, before submerging its lower extremities in a kilometre of sea. There were a handful of shuttles capable of carrying people to and from interplanetary space, but the ship was the only thing that could take them beyond Ararat’s system, into interstellar space.
Vasko had known this since he was small, but until this moment he had never quite grasped how terribly dependent they were on this one means of escape.
As the shuttle fell lower, the lights resolved into windows, street lamps and the open fires of bazaars. There was an un-planned, shanty-town aspect to most of the districts of First Camp. The largest structures were made from conch material that had washed up on the shore or been recovered from the sea by foraging expeditions. The resulting buildings had the curved and chambered look of vast seashells. But it was very rare to find conch material in such sizes, and so most of the structures were made of more traditional materials. There were a handful of inflatable domes, some of which were almost as large as the conch structures, but the plastics used to make and repair the domes had always been in short supply. It was much easier to scavenge metal from the heart of the ship; that was why almost everything else was lashed together from sheet metal and scaffolding, forming a low urban sprawl of sagging rectangular structures seldom reaching more than three storeys high. The domes and conch structures erupted through the metal slums like blisters. Streets were webs of ragged shadow, unlit save for the occasional torch-bearing pedestrian.