“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.
“Dead people,” said Darvin, in a hollow voice. “Come on.”
A path on the floor of the cave had been worn smooth by the tread of previous visitors. In the electric torchlight, it almost shone. Darvin and Orro paced along it. The occasional droppings of the small flitters apart, the cave was dry, with nothing of the dankness and weed that Darvin had half-expected, from some dim association with sea caves. The air too was fresh; some of the caves were said to connect to sinkholes well behind the cliff-top, and their occupants — human visitors or animal tenants — in danger of being flushed out in the flash floods of rare rainstorms. The risk seemed small.
“I’m told it’s about two eights-of-eights of steps,” said Darvin.
“When did you start counting?”
“Good point,” said Darvin, and began his mental count at a double-eight.
But the sight they had come to see was hard to miss.
The cave widened not quite enough for the space to be called a chamber. High on its walls, and arching over its roof, were eights-of-eights of coloured drawings. The sketched outlines of humans were so crude that they could as well have delineated moths. Animals, prey and grazer, flitter and cursor, were rendered with a colour and tone and line that made one hallucinate that they breathed. Oddly, they were untouched by droppings; only a soot-stain here and there sullied them, from the guttering wooden torches of the first discoverers, scientists — and later, gaping, adventurous travellers — of the Dawn Age.
It was not the only, or the best, example of the cliff-men’s art in Seloh: new caves were being discovered all the time, right along the whole edge of the tableland. But it was famous, and close to wing, and Darvin knew what picture to look for. He scanned the walls with his beam.
“There!” he said, lighting on a patch about two wingspans up the wall.
“That pattern of dots?”
“Yes. It’s generally supposed to represent the Queen and the Daughters — they’re picked out in a green stain made from, I believe, some kind of copper salt. And of course, being ignorant cliff-men, our clumsy ancestors only bothered to pick out a few.”
He turned to Orro. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to stand on your shoulders for a moment.”
Orro shrugged. “If you must.”
Darvin backed off, sprang into the air and flapped. He hovered for a few seconds, then lowered his feet on to Orro’s shoulders. He resisted the reflex to curl his toes. Keeping his wings outstretched for balance, clutching the heavy torch, he peered at the stone wall. The largest of the green markings was a precise circle about the size of the palm of a hand. He’d consulted the two most reputable books on cave paintings, and in the brief passages describing this cave the sharp outline was held as evidence that the patch represented the Queen (as well as, less reliably, that the cliff-men had had sharper eyesight than their modern descendants). Around Her was a seeming random speckle of green dots, each the size of a fingertip. They didn’t look like even the more prominent of the Daughters; it was indeed tempting to regard them as a crude indication.
He looked closer yet, leaning forward then almost toppling back, then forward again as he regained his balance. In among the green spots were others, fainter and smaller but definite. Some were made with ochre, some with what he guessed was sulphur, others perhaps with chalk; all of them ground into the sandstone with such force that the markings had left little pits. Red, yellow and white; there was no mistaking the intent.