It had been a long three months for the Red Sun Circle and its associates. For a time the entire scheme had hung in the balance, with the more energetic elements of the younger generation divided between those who most wanted to get on with constructive work, and those whose top priority was ending the emergency and voting out the Council. Synchronic wasn’t sure how much effect her caredaughter’s passionate appeals for the former option had had, but she couldn’t discount them.
Now the stream of young settlers to the hollow spaces of both cones was steady; the lifting of comms restrictions had allowed first an outpouring of discontent and then its gradual fading; and among the majority of the voting-age cohort who remained behind, a growing minority had begun to voice a grudging recognition of the wisdom of the founders in vetoing colonisation until future relations with the aliens could be sorted out.
Her one disappointment was that almost all the ship generation had lost all interest in the Destiny II virtualities now that they no longer had a live feed. The archives of the virtualities were vast, and in large part unexplored. An immense amount of information of undeniable future use lay untapped. She’d expected that this hoard of insight into the very first alien civilization — and indeed multicellular biosphere — to come within the ken of humanity would lure many bright young minds. But few indeed still entered it. It was as though it was old news, and that only the constant unfolding of the planet’s present moment could seize attention.
She’d have been tempted to write this off as the superficiality of the youth of today, but her own contemporaries in the founder generation were almost as remiss. They too were entranced by incoming live data, in their case from other planetary probes and system surveys. Speculation on resources remained brisk, though with long futures. There was even a market in shorter futures, betting on the possibility that the embargo would be reversed; Council discouragement and disapproval of this dubious activity had merely and predictably given rise to secondary and tertiary markets in moral hazard.
So she herself had taken to doing what she’d once hoped the ship generation would become absorbed in doing. In hours of relaxation and recreation she roamed the vault of uplinked and recorded and synthesised impressions, trying to make sense of the bat people’s world.
Today she haunted the simulacrum of an upland settlement, somewhere in the typical altiplano of the continental hinterlands. Scrub and brush on the hills, a richer and greener vegetation in the hollows that might have been the local analogue of grass, grazed by the big four-footed beasts. A narrow, rickety tower on a hilltop, surrounded by fenced and hedged orchards and a scatter of low sheds. You couldn’t call the place a farm: the bat people didn’t practice agriculture. They tended tiny plots of herbs and berries; they built fences and walls that kept the grazers out of patches of ground, wherein fruit trees sprang up, with parabolic inverted-umbrella layers of branches turned to the sky like some ancient SETI radio-telescope array; they herded and hunted, chivvied and chased the grazers, swooping and hallooing around them, driving them with slashing clawed kicks and occasional bites that looked like a vampiric refreshment. When a beast was selected for slaughter, and driven close to the settlement and set upon with tooth and claw and blade, the crowd of wings and the frenzy was such that it seemed a surprise how much meat remained to be cut up and carried off, to be hung and salted and smoked and sent on its way to the cities on the occasional passing cart hauled by machine or slave traction.
She rotated the POV and drifted it toward the shed that she guessed was the slave pen. As the door came closer — it was wooden, the lower half of solid planking, the top barred — the POV fell through a sudden and disconcerting rift.
Her viewpoint was now behind the bars, looking out. The time of day, perhaps the day itself or even the season, had changed. The shadows looked shorter, the hillside scrub thicker than they had a moment ago. The quality of the image had sharpened, had become more detailed, dense with verity. It was as if she looked directly upon a real scene, rather than a seamless but guessy, lossy construal stitched together from numerous flaky, tiny inputs. The sound quality had improved too: she heard a sound like breathing, louder and closer than the grassy arboral hiss of the upland wind that carried the lowing of far-off alien kine.
And, as if from around a corner, voices.
High-pitched and fast but with almost recognisable syllables, quite other than the bat people’s chirruping patter.
As she strained to hear, the view before her tipped forward and filled with a crossbar and a pair of four-digited hands. The hands, encumbered about the wrists with a sort of ragged fleshy sleeve, squeezed between the bars and twisted around with a disregard to their own damage that made her flinch. Blood slicked the boards. There was grunt, and then a rattle and squeal of metal, and a hard rap.
The hands were wrenched back through the slats. For a second or her gaze fixed upon raised wrists, scratched and scored, spiked with splinters, bleeding back to the elbow. Then the wrists reversed and the hands slammed forward, thrusting the door open with a thud. The POV rushed straight ahead, jolting as if from a camera on the forehead or shoulder of someone running. Trampled mud, grass, a ring of cyan fungi, a fence looming, a leap and a frantic scrabble—
A shout from behind.
“Hey — the trudge is out!”
“After him!”
Before Synchronic could assimilate her shock at understanding the words, her vision became a confused, blurred rolling as the viewpoint topped the fence and fell down the other side, then more running.
Then wings, a glint of teeth, a clawed foot jammed straight into the viewpoint. A flurry and a welter. Sky and a sunlight flash on a downward-stabbing blade. A long, deep, full-throated scream that ended on a rising, resonant pitch, as if a soul had streaked upward to the bright, blank blue that was the last image to fill its sight.
Darkness and silence.
16 — The Anomalies Room
Kraighor, the capital of Seloh’s Reach, lay a long way around the coast from Five Ravines. Darvin had been there once, when he’d been a little kit, and his memories of it were an unstable mix of the vivid and the vague. Loud streets, sharp tastes, a smell of burning coal, a high and roost-encrusted hill, trees with dark and twisted leaves. He and his parents had arrived by cable car from inland, and it was his memories of the station that he felt were reliable: if it hadn’t changed much he could still find his way around it. The city itself was a blur.
This time he travelled there alone, and by the coastal packet steamer. It made the trip every three days; the voyage took from the early morning of one day to noon of the next, with three or four stops at small ports along the way. Such halts gave the passengers — about an eight of eights — a welcome opportunity to stretch their wings; flying off the side of the boat was discouraged, because of the danger of falling behind. Tedium, motion sickness, yelling kits, sleeping racks in which everyone swayed and bumped into each other like ill-matched pendulums, salted meat and bruised fruit, travelling salesmen who liked to talk… Darvin took with him plenty of reading matter.