Into the corridors and rooms. Lights again. Find a corner, a cable, a cubbyhole, a creeper, anything. Cling and brace.
There’s a moment like when we entered this sun’s orbit, a moment when something that has always been there goes away. The engine that has powered the sun-line all our lives goes off. There’s nothing, not a flicker of the lights, not a vibration of the bulkheads, not a sensible clue. But we all feel that eerie absence. I have the passing fancy that the shutting down of a machine that makes universes should feel like this: like the sudden silence of a god.
The mystical moment passes in a blare: All hands! Stand by for separation!
There’s a shriek and a vibration that set your teeth on edge and rattle them at the same time. Then a faint backward pressure, a small sense of weight, increasing. We’re on our way now, running on auxiliary and attitude jets. With the cosmogonic drive’s jet no longer channelled to the sunline, we can’t use it until it’s pointing away from the habitat, which it could cut like a laser.
All hands! Brace for manoeuvres!
The floor lurches, the vertical tilts. Unsecured objects and people skid sideways. The whole cone is tipping over. I’m busy imagining this until I realise I can watch it if I want. I patch in the feed from the cameras on the base of the cone. The habitat cylinder is shockingly close, spinning lickety-split. I can just see along one side. Ruby lights flicker. We’re taking raking laser fire! It can’t hurt us, I think, it can’t burn through metres of plate and regolith. Then as the view degrades I realise: they’re burning out lenses, blinding our defences. Farther back, more lights and another kind of movement.
My surge of angry adrenaline comes at a lucky moment—
All hands! Stand by for acceleration!
The god’s presence comes back, and with it weight, weight like a sack of soil on your chest, weight like people piling on to you. I’m looking ahead, eyes closed, seeing in the direction that is now down. I see the white rapier of the jet stab to infinity. Far away, another jet crosses it, as if in parry. The habitat dwindles beneath our backs. I see the cylinder entire now, rolling on its axis like an abandoned fuel tank. There are other lights, red and white, but they’re hard to tell apart from the bright dots in front of my eyes. Except they’re moving faster.
The habitat shrinks to a white streak like a star on a long-exposure plate.
The weight becomes so much that I feel my ribs are about to break. I think I’m blacking out.
My sight fills with soundless vast spherical explosions of white light far below.
Something, somewhere, fizzes and cracks.
Then there’s a sense of absence and blessed relief as the weight goes away. The call still rings through my head:
All hands! Stand by! Free falling!
And the lights below us fade.
18 — Sabreur
The legend went that the Queen of Heaven had given Her children the green gift, the gift of life; but that it was the Sun Himself who had given the red gift, of fire and intellect. Darvin and Kwarive now sought hidden sparks of that gift in the streets and markets, with a radio receiver. The apparatus was one Orro had cobbled together during the great shittle hunt. It was less bulky than the ones most people had in their houses. It had earpieces instead of a loudspeaker. None of this made it inconspicuous, and as he lugged it around, Darvin found himself pestered by kits and glowered at by stallkeepers.
“What is their problem?” he muttered as a piece of rotten rind skittered past his foot.
Kwarive fiddled with the loop antenna. “They think it’s some new kind of health inspection.”
“Well, that makes sense.” Darvin aimed a halfhearted kick at his other tormentors. “Flap off, you little imps!”
“Great,” said Kwarive. “Now they’ll go screeching to their mothers.”
“Yes, it’s their mothers I’d like to speak to. These kits should be in school and not skulking around the — wait a minute.” Something had buzzed in his ears. “Back a step. Hold it there. Rotate.”
The buzz came back. One side of the antenna faced a blank wall, the other an alleyway.
“Down there.”
The buzz grew stronger as they hastened down the alley. Around the corner of the far end stood a small cart, laden with bricks. The trudge who stood between its handles looked at them with a brighter gaze than most of his kind. When his master returned from a nearby refreshment stall, the trudge bent his back to haul without demur. As the cart moved off, Kwarive turned the antenna. The trudge was the source all right.
“Follow it?” Kwarive asked.
“Not this one,” said Darvin.
“Why not?”
Darvin wasn’t sure why not. “Too risky. We’re not trying to intervene. Not until we know more.”
Kwarive shrugged. “You’re the one carrying the wireless.”
They walked on down the street. Lined on one side with stalls, it was a narrow shelf along the bank of a rivulet at the bottom of the Second Ravine. Lichens and fungal growths splashed garish scarlet and cyan circles on the cliffs and the wet ground. The stream, normally sluggish, was spring-spate swollen, sediment-brown, lapping the banks. As they followed it upstream the goods became ever shoddier: trappings in cracked leather, malformed pots with glazes in colours Darvin didn’t have names for, electrical implements with rusty components and dusty handles, cages of listless flitters. At least here the wireless apparatus drew no attention. It looked like something they might have come here to sell.
The earphones buzzed, but faintly. Darvin glanced at Kwarive and raised a finger. They stood facing the torrent for a moment, mud under their heels, vile suds hissing and popping around their toe-claws. Kwarive pointed a diagonal finger across her midriff.
“That way.”
They turned and walked a few eights of paces on, looking at every stall and trestle, until they came upon a table stacked with barred boxes. At first glance it looked like another stall of flitters, live prey for small children. Then Darvin noticed their thick fur, sturdy limbs and odd, baby-like faces.
“Trudge kits,” breathed Kwarive.
The old woman behind the stall rattled her bony wings. “That they are,” she said. “Healthy and uncut. Train them from small, it’s always the best. Nice young couple like you, any of these’ll be well tamed by the time your own kits come along, just don’t feed it live meat, that’s what I always say, you hear some terrible stories sometimes, that Queen forbid may happen to you, but don’t you worry, it won’t, because…”
Kwarive let her prattle on while moving the antenna about in front of the wooden cages. Darvin waited until he was sure from which the buzz originated, then nodded. Kwarive pointed. “I’ll have that one, please.”
As the old woman shifted boxes she noticed the looped wire and the radio.
“What’s that you’ve got there, dears?”
“The very latest thing,” said Kwarive. “An etheric dowsing box. To pick up good-luck vibrations.”
“Don’t hold with that there etheric dowsing, dear, that’s Southern superstition, that is. But if it works for you, who am I to say, young people these days…”
As she spoke the woman deftly knotted a string handle around the box. “Fifty selors,” she said.
Darvin fumbled out the money.
“Thanks,” said the vendor, counting the scrip and tucking it in her belt. “Well, best of luck with that one. I’ve found him a bit of a handful myself.”
They walked back down the path, each with their own load.
“Etheric dowsing?” Darvin asked, as soon as they were out of earshot.
“It was something I made up,” said Kwarive.
“It’ll be all the rage,” said Darvin.
The box stood on a shelf in Kwarive’s museum annexe room. Among all the bones and stones, skins and pickled scraps, it didn’t look out of place. The small black animal inside it clutched the bars with tiny fingers and peered out with big eyes. It stank somewhat. It didn’t scratch itself much, and it licked its fur a lot. This seemed reassuring about its health. Every so often Darvin waved the aerial in front of it, while holding one earpiece to his ear. It always buzzed. He still found it hard to believe. This belonged with the weird tales in the Anomalies Room.