“That,” said Darvin, clapping the book shut, “is precisely why any idea that the stars could change colour in historical time is no longer believed. It’s regarded as a quaint superstition.”
“There are variable stars,” said Orro.
“Yes, but they’re cyclic. Well understood. Their fires flare and fade periodically.”
“Fires?” Orro looked sceptical, and rather as if he’d caught Darvin out.
“All right,” said Darvin. “The physics of stars is not well understood.”
“Nor is the physics of radioactivity,” said Orro, with apparent irrelevance. He fixed Darvin in a quizzical gaze for a moment, then sighed. “Oh well. I suppose we should next investigate some early modem observations — Dawn Age and onward.”
“I’ve done it,” said Darvin, tapping a finger-claw on a stack of open books on his desk. He stood up. “Predictably enough, it turns out that some of the Daughters were misidentified as other types of stars, back then. Inadequate telescopes, unskillful observations — you know how it is.”
He dragged one of the books across the desk, pointed at a reproduction of a crude woodcut illustration in which the stars were shown encircled by tiny flames, and marked by tinier letters. The key, written in Orkan but in Selohic script, classified forty-nine of the stars as green, and identified the nine others now included among the Daughters as yellow or red.
Orro laid the tracing of the recent photograph and Darvin’s sketch of the ancient map on opposite sides of the book. “It seems,” he said, “that we have identified a trend.”
“Is it possible,” Darvin asked, “that the modern classification is wrong?” He laughed. “I myself have never counted the Daughters. Actually, since I became an astronomer, I’ve hardly looked at the sky.”
“Let’s do that,” said Orro. “Let’s go out onto the high plain and count them for ourselves.”
“The high plain…” Darvin said. “Yes, let us do that tomorrow, and one thing else that we can only do in the day.”
“What’s that?”
Darvin grinned. “You’ll see.”
The main cable-car station was quiet the following morning, after the earlier incoming rush of travellers from the plains settlements had subsided. Darvin and Orro, carrying small packs of dried meat and dried fruit and with knives and electric torches clipped to their belts, climbed into a car and sat side by side. A trudge bolted the door and pushed the car around the curve of the terminus loop to face the exit, then tugged a lever to clamp the overhead to the active cable. The car lurched forward into the sunlight outside, rushed up above a steep slope to a stubby pylon at the top, jolted over it then settled into a more gradual ascent to the clifftop pylon that overlooked the town. Darvin poked his head through the open side window and gazed down at the crowded roosts and deep ravines, pondering how different they looked when one was borne aloft from how they looked when flying. The sensation was strange and dreamlike. After a few moments it made him feel queasy. He turned and faced ahead. The journey to the ochre cliffs of the high plains tableland took about an hour. Halfway up the long catenary that connected the final pylon on the grassland with that of the substation at the top of the cliff, Orro gave a grunt.
“What?” said Darvin.
“I calculate that if the cable were to snap now, we’d have time to take wing before the car hit the ground.”
“Thanks for that,” said Darvin.
The cliff-face loomed, closer and closer. It seemed incredible that they would not crash into it. The car’s ascent steepened. Darvin stared fixedly ahead. From this vantage, the ochre sandstone of the cliff was broken and blemished with scrubby bushes and clumps of plants in cracks and shelves, and by great shit-stains of flitter droppings.
Just before the car stopped at the substation Darvin stood up, swaying. “This is where we get out.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
The substation was there to provide auxiliary power, but the cliff was something of a visitor attraction in its own right, so the cars always stopped there for a few minutes before continuing across the tableland. Darvin and Orro stepped out on the platform and watched the car’s grip glide along a rail and connect to the new loop of the cable. It jolted away, swaying. There was an open stairway to the ground, for those too laden or infirm to fly, and a short flight of steps up to a railed viewing platform overhanging the clifftop. With wordless assent the two scientists climbed to it. From there they had a view, uncluttered by the station or the cables, in all directions: across the grassland to the glittering sea; along the great sweep of the cliff; and northward, over the high desert tableland, sandy and barren, breaking in the near distance into wind-sculpted mesas; and down the eight-eights-of-eight drop of the cliff.
“I take it you want to visit the famous caves,” said Orro.
“Correct,” said Darvin.
He hitched his pack of provisions to his belt and clambered onto the rail. It was too narrow to grasp with his toe- and heel-claws, but he balanced on it easily, rocking back and forth on the soles of his feet as he sniffed the wind, scried the shimmer of the heat haze, espied the floating spiral paths of flitters, and formed somewhere between his brain and his spine a sense of the shape of the air. He spread his wings, tipped forward, thrust with his feet, and dived.
The cliff’s updraught, on this hot morning, was immense. He could have hung there like a carrion-eating flitter, almost without a wingbeat. To fly at this height without the effort of having climbed to it was exhilarating, with a pleasant sense of the unearned. The thrum of the airstream on his wings tempted him to cavort. Instead he tilted and glided downward. The extra weight he carried sped his descent and he flapped a vigorous wingbeat or two to adjust. At a couple of eights-of-eight spans clear of the cliff-face and about an eight-of-eight down, he banked, beginning to describe a slow spiral. A glance up showed him Orro following. The physicist waved. Flitters screamed and flocked away. Others, perhaps a different species, fluttered in and out of caves. Darvin scanned the caves. The one he sought was well known and often visited, but quite unmarked, except for the flitter-wire mesh of a gate set a little way back from its entrance, to keep out the wild flying animals.
He spotted it, gestured to Orro, and stooped towards it. He landed with a running thud on the lip of its ledge, and came to a halt up against the mesh. Orro crashed to the same terminus a few seconds later.
“Ha-ha-ha!” he barked. “That was enjoyable!”
Darvin nodded, panting a little. “Yes. Well, let our briefly brisker blood-surges power our arms…”
The gate was a crude and heavy wooden affair, three heights of a man high; its frame and crossbeams must have been let down from the top on ropes, and likewise with the roll of sturdy-wired fine-holed mesh, much stronger than normal flitter-wire. But rather to Darvin’s surprise, the latch was a simple metal hook and loop, and the door swung back on squeaking wooden hinges. The two men stepped through and hauled it back into place behind them, then looked around.
“Stinks in here,” said Orro.
“Dried flitter shit,” said Darvin. His nose wrinkled. “Perhaps not all dry…”
Ignoring what was soft underfoot, he unclipped his electric torch and thumbed the switch. Its heavy click, or perhaps the yellow beam, disturbed some things small and dark and swift, which flew chittering farther into the cave’s depth.
“What do they live on?” Orro wondered aloud, shining his own torch around.