Clinging with both feet to a rattling cable bar that squealed for lack of oil, Darvin turned his head from the swaying bodies likewise suspended in front of him on this cheapest of transports and peered down at the market beneath his nose. A few stalls of cheap domestic stuff: mats, burners, brushes. Not worth a look, and in any case packing up. It was the end of the day’s third quarter, the hour halfway between noon and midnight, the time when people headed home. There was a peculiar division in the transport. Tired workers from the shops and factories clogged the cable bars and trolleys; civil servants from the Height darkened the sky, welcoming the chance to stretch their wings after a hard day behind the desk. Darvin had in just the past hour roamed the perimeter of the edifice, which he’d reached by cable car. He’d watched the regular wheelings of the sabreurs of Seloh’s Guard, and the comings and goings of airships at the skeletal copse of mooring-masts on the slope below. The Height was a busy place, but how much of its activity represented something real, and how much really symbolic, was another matter.
The cable bar swung over a square puddled with yellow lights around trees, tables and stalls. Smells of tea and stumblefruit wafted up. A few workers in the line ahead of him, who had dozed, feet reflex-locked to the bars, jolted awake and let go, gliding down. Darvin followed. The momentum of the cable’s rush carried him forward as his back flexed upward and his wings braced. Down he spiralled. Tiny green spearpoints of new growth bristled the dusty trees. He alighted on cobbles and strolled to a tea bar. There was room for his feet at the perch and for his elbows at the counter. The serving girl was bright and brisk. A trudge squatted just beyond the end of the counter, leashed to the leg of the stall and gnawing on a bone while its master drank with friends at an adjacent table. Some people at the counter talked and laughed; others, solitary like Darvin, sipped in silence.
From a nearby temple the sound of many voices singing echoed: there was a trick they had, of concentrating the sound by focusing the crowded singers’ wings. Darvin listened to the hymn with a mixture of enjoyment of its beauty and disdain of its content. He was no scoffer: at the sight of the galaxy, Deity seemed the most evident and insistent of deductions. Like most astronomers, he was devout. Like almost all, he had no truck with the cults. It was not only that they still held a grudge against astronomy, the science that had stolen heaven from their very hands, though the more enlightened were ever eager to honey-gum the antique myths in symbolism. For the priests, one god was never enough, nor a good life a sufficient offering. For them there had to be sacrifices, conducted with sickles and herbs at the new moons and knives and calves at the new year; and songs at evening and morning.
Varlun, a noted philosopher of the Dawn Age, who had lived three eights-of-eights of years ago in Gevork, had written of the passages from day to night, and night to day. At night, he wrote in his essay “What Is Dawn?,” the starry skies above told you all you needed to know about the might and mind of Deity. By day, the Sun’s kindly warmth told you all you needed to know of its creator’s goodness. And in the evening hours and in the dawn the promptings, indeed at times the pains, of conscience told you all you needed to know of right and wrong. For this the priests had had him locked up for seven years.
Darvin examined his conscience for stirrings and found nothing that pricked. His unease about the trudges had ceased to be a moral pang and become a practical concern. How different, he wondered, would life be if there had been no trudges? No tractable, versatile beast to do the heavy and dirty work? Some engineering tales had speculated on that. Sometimes they averred that the art of invention would have developed faster, culminating in a society little different from that of today, but with two-legged, two-armed machines in the place of trudges; for some tales of the future such machines had become a part of the furniture. Others, darker and more daring, had made the blunt point that if there had been no trudges to bear the load, some men would have been forced to bear it, slashed and lashed, leashed and chained, some gelded and spayed. And as that came to revolt the conscience, or became too clumsy a method to work in manufacture, why then they would have been turned loose, and hunger having taken the place of all other inducement, they would have done the same work for pay. The usual refinement of such tales was in finding ingenious ways to exclude the freed human trudges from nature’s bounty of fruit and prey. The crudest involved enormous fences and aerial barriers; the subtlest, debt.
None had given thought to what a future without trudges would be like; a future that did not begin with a convenient mechanical analogue to take the trudges’ place. Darvin stayed at that counter for three-quarters of an hour, drinking two glasses of tea, his ear cocked to conversations. He heard not a word about trudges or aliens, Gevorkians or Southerners. Gossip and shop talk, and the party politics of the Reach. He moved on when he became convinced that the trudge tethered to the stall was listening too.
“Bahron! Arrell!”
Bahron sprang toward him and clapped him on the shoulder.
“In the name of the Sun and the Queen,” the Eye hissed in his ear, “shut the fuck up. We aren’t called that around here.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Darvin heard his apology coming out slurred. He’d had one too many stumblefruits.
“What’ll you have?” asked Bahron, louder.
“A sharpfruit, thanks.”
“Coming down,” said Bahron. He shoved Darvin towards a table. “Talk to the lady.”
Darvin sat down so hard it hurt his buttocks. “Hello.”
“A whiff, I think,” said Arrell. She waved under his nose a smoking bowl of laughterburn. Darvin inhaled. On the instant the world became lucid and wondrous. Stars flickered in the gaps between tree branches. Rings of poisonous-looking fungi probed up from ground littered with leaves and rinds. He was in a stumblefruit orchard in the university area, to which his ramble had, quite without conscious intent, taken him.
“So much for avoiding scholars and students,” he said.
She didn’t get it, but Bahron, returning with three small ripe fruits, did. “Hah!” he said, sitting down. “Been trying to pick up clues to the popular mood, have we?”
“Yes.”
“Not your job,” Bahron said. “But I don’t doubt you’ve done it well. Let’s see now…” He bit into the fruit and let the juice dribble into his upturned mouth. “Ah, that’s better. You heard very little about the subjects on your mind, but what you did hear told you that people are pretty sceptical about this so-called alien craft, think the claim about it is some kind of manoeuvre by our friends in the South, and if they’re worried about anything beyond their own troubles, it’s Gevork. Trudges? Far from becoming smarter, all you’ve heard is the odd grumble about how some trudge or other is acting even more stupid and recalcitrant than usual.”
Darvin almost choked on his own first sip of the bitter juice. “Exactly!” he spluttered. “How did you know?” He had the sudden, embarrassing suspicion that the Sight had been tracking him ever since he’d left its secret offices.
“From the letters column of The Day,” said Bahron. He waved his hand over the smouldering bowl, inhaled, and regarded Darvin with narrowed eyes through the smoke he breathed out. “A lesson, eh, astronomer?”
Darvin laughed. “Lesson learned,” he said.
“Cabdrivers are another useful source,” said Arrell.
“I don’t suppose,” Darvin said, “you have any idea when we are going to get, you know, some definite view from the Height?”
Bahron ran a finger-claw up and down the side of his nose. “Watch the skies, astronomer,” he said. “Watch the skies.”