“As well we made good distance yesterday,” Holse said, chewing on some air-dried meat.
They secured their few belongings, checked the map, took a few of the bald-head fruit with them — for the caude; the fruit was indigestible to humans — then took off into a freshening breeze. The wind added to the sensation of cold, even though they were flying much lower than earlier due to the great banks and drifts of dark grey cloud striating the sky. They skirted the bigger clouds and flew through only the smallest. Caude were reluctant to fly through thick cloud anyway, though they would do so if they were forced. Once inside cloud the animals were as bad as humans at gauging whether they were upright and flying straight and level, or describing a banked circle and about to crash into some nearby Tower. Caude were the rowels of the air, reliable work beasts rather than thoroughbred racing creatures like lyge, and so only flew at about fifty or sixty kilometres per hour. Even so, hitting a Tower at that speed was usually enough to kill both beast and rider, and if not, then the subsequent fall to the ground tended to do the trick.
Ferbin was still keeping an eye on the chronometer and marking the passage of the Towers to their right — they were flying closer to them now, only a few kilometres off each one, so they didn’t miss any, something Ferbin knew from experience it was all too easy to do — however, he found himself thinking back to a dream he’d had the night before and — via that — to his one journey to the Surface, back when he’d been a youth.
That, too, was like a dream to him now.
He had walked on strange ground beneath no lid or ceiling save that of the atmosphere itself, held contained by a far circle of walls and by nothing else but gravity; a place with no Towers, where the curve of the earth beneath one’s feet just went on, uninterrupted, unbroken, unsupported, unbelievable.
He had watched the stars wheel and, in each of the half-dozen days he had been there, had marvelled at the tiny, blinding dot that was Meseriphine, the Unseen Sun, the distant, connected yet unconnected pivot that great Sursamen itself spun slow about. There was a remorselessness about those Surface days; one sun, one source of light, one regular set of days and nights, always the same, seemingly unchanging, while everything he’d ever known was far below — entire levels that were themselves worlds beneath him, and only nothing above; a dark true-nothingness, sprinkled with a rash of faint points of light that he was told were other suns.
His father had been meant to be there but had had to call off at the last moment. Ferbin had gone with his older brother Elime, who had been there before but had wanted to go again. They were very privileged to be treated so. Their father could command the Oct to take people to other levels including the Surface, as could some other rulers and the Head Scholars of Scholasteries, but any other person travelled at the whim of the Oct, and they granted almost no such wishes.
They had taken a couple of friends and a few old servants. The great Crater they’d stayed within for most of their visit was green with vast meadows and tall trees. The air smelled of unidentifiable perfumes. It was thick and at once fresh and heady; they had felt energised, almost drugged.
They had lived within an underground complex in the face of a tall cliff looking out over a vast network of hexagonal lakes bounded by thin strips of land; this pattern stretched to the horizon. They had met some Nariscene and even one Morthanveld. Ferbin had already seen his first Oct, in the scendship that had taken them up the Tower to the Surface. This had been before the Oct embassy had been opened in the palace at Pourl and Ferbin had the same superstitious dread of the Oct as most people. There were legends, rumours and uncorroborated reports that the Oct issued from their Towers in the dead of night to steal people from their beds. Sometimes whole families or even villages disappeared. The Oct took the captured back to their Towers and experimented upon them, or ate them, or transported them to another level for sport and devilment.
The result was that the common mass of people dreaded both the Oct themselves and the very idea of being taken to and transported within a Tower. Ferbin had long been told these were nonsense tales, but he’d still been nervous. It had been a relief to discover the Oct were so small and delicate-looking.
The Oct in the scendship had been most insistent that they were the true Inheritors and direct descendants of the Involucra, the original builders of the Shellworlds. He had been highly impressed with this, and had felt a vicarious outrage that this fact was not more widely accepted.
He’d been in awe of the Oct’s casual familiarity with and easy control of this vessel that could rise within a Tower, past level after unglimpsed level, to the very outside of all things. It was control of the world, he realised. It seemed more real, more relevant and somehow even more important and impressive than control of the infinitude of ungraspable space beyond the world itself. This, he’d thought, was power.
Then he’d watched how the Oct and the Nariscene treated each other, and realised that the Nariscene were the masters here; they were the superiors, who merely indulged this strange species that to his people, to the Sarl, had near-magical powers. How lowly the Sarl must be, to be mere cargo, simple primitives to the Oct, who were themselves treated like little more than children by their Nariscene mentors!
Seeing, furthermore, how the Nariscene and the Morthanveld interacted was almost dismaying, because the Morthanveld in turn seemed to regard the Nariscene as something like children and treated them with amused indulgence. Another level, and another; all beyond his, above his people’s heads.
In some ways, they were the lowest of the low, he realised. Was this why so few of his people were ever invited here?
Perhaps if everybody saw what he, his brother and their friends were seeing, the Sarl might sink into a state of apathy and depression, for they would know how little their lives really counted within the ever-expanding hierarchies of alien powers beyond them. This had been Elime’s opinion. He also believed that it was a deliberate scheme of their mentors to encourage those who were in power, or who would one day assume power, to witness the wonders that they were now being shown, so that they would never be tempted to get above themselves, so that they would always know that no matter how magnificent they appeared to themselves or those around them and regardless of what they achieved, it was all within the context of this greater, more powerful, sophisticated and ultimately far superior reality.
“They try to break us!” Elime had told Ferbin. Elime was a big, burly, energetic young man, always full of enthusiasm and opinions and tirelessly keen to hunt or drink or fight or fuck. “They try to put a little voice in our heads that will always say, ‘You don’t matter. What you do means nothing!’”
Elime, like their father, was having none of this. So the aliens could sail within the Towers and cruise between the stars and construct whole worlds — so what? There were powers beyond them that they didn’t fully understand. Perhaps this nesting, this shell-after-shell-beyond-what-you-knew principle went on for ever! Did the aliens give up and do nothing? No! They had their disputes and contentions, their disagreements and alliances, their wins and losses, even if they were somehow more oblique and rarefied than the wars, victories and defeats that the Sarl both enjoyed and suffered. The stratagems and power-plays, the satisfactions and disillusions that the Sarl experienced mattered as much to them as those of the aliens did to their own over-weeningly cosmopolitan and civilised souls.
You lived within your level and accepted that you did; you played by the rules within that level, and therein lay the measure of your worth. All was relative, and by refusing to accept the lesson the aliens were implicitly trying to teach here — behave, accept, bow down, conform — a hairy-arsed bunch of primitives like the Sarl could score their own kind of victory against the most overarching sophisticates the galaxy had to offer.