Minla's Flowers

'Fourteen years ago.'

'Force and wisdom. It must be like ancient history to you.'

'Not to all of us,' the woman said sternly. 'I am Minla, Merlin. It may be fourteen years ago, but there isn't a day when I don't remember my father and wish he was still with us.'

As he was being propelled across the apron, Merlin looked up at the woman's face and compared it against his memories of the little girl he had known twenty years ago. At once he saw the similarity and knew that she was telling the truth. In that moment he felt the first visceral sense of the time that had passed.

'You can't imagine how odd this makes me feel, Minla. Do you remember me?'

'I remember a man I used to talk to in a room. It was a long time ago.'

'Not to me. Do you remember the stone?'

She looked at him oddly. 'The stone?'

'You asked your father to give it to me, when I was due to leave Lecythus.'

'Oh, that thing,' Minla said. 'Yes, I remember it now. It was the one that belonged to Dowitcher.'

'It's very pretty. You can have it back if you like.'

'Keep it, Merlin. It doesn't mean anything to me now, just as it shouldn't have meant anything to my father. I'm embarrassed to have given it to you.'

'I'm sorry about Malkoha.'

'He died well, Merlin. Flying another hazardous mission for us, in very bad weather. This time it was our turn to deliver medicine to our allies. We were now making antibiotics for all the land masses in the Skyland Alliance, thanks to the process you gave us. My father flew one of the last consignments. He made it to the other land mass, but his plane was lost on the return trip.'

'He was a good man. I only knew him a short while, but I think it was enough to tell.'

'He often spoke of you, Merlin. I think he hoped you might teach him more than you did.'

'I did what I could. Too much knowledge would have overwhelmed you: you wouldn't have known where to start, or how to put the pieces together.'

'Perhaps you should have trusted us more.'

'You said you had no cause to wake me. Does that mean you made progress?'

'Decide for yourself.'

He followed Minla's instruction. The area around Tyrant was still recognisable as the old military compound, with many of the original buildings still present, albeit enlarged and adapted. But most of the dirigible docking towers were gone, as had most of the dirigibles themselves. Ranks of new aircraft now occupied the area where the towers and airships had been, bigger and heavier than anything Merlin had seen before. The swept-back geometry of their wings, the angle of the leading edge, the rakish curve of their tailplanes all owed something to the shape of Tyrant in atmospheric-entry mode. Clearly the natives had been more observant than he'd given them credit for. Merlin knew he shouldn't have been surprised; he'd given them the blueprints for the jet turbine, after all. But it was still something of a shock to see his plans made concrete, so closely to the way he had imagined it.

'Fuel is always a problem,' Minla said. 'We have the advantage of height, but little else. We rely on our scattered allies on the ground, together with raiding expeditions to Shadowland fuel bunkers.' She pointed to one of the remaining airships. 'Our cargo dirigibles can lift fuel all the way back to the Skylands.'

'Are you still at war?' Merlin asked, though her statement rather confirmed it.

'There was a ceasefire shortly after my father's death. It didn't last long.'

'You people could achieve a lot more if you pooled your efforts,' Merlin said. 'In seventy - make that fifty - years, you'll be facing collective annihilation. It isn't going to make a damned bit of difference what flag you're saluting.'

'Thank you for the lecture. If it means so much to you, why don't you fly down to the other side and talk to them?'

'I'm an explorer, not a diplomat.'

'You could always try.'

Merlin sighed heavily. 'I did try once. Not long after I left the Cohort . . . there was a world named Exoletus, about the same size as Lecythus. I thought there might be something on Exoletus connected with my quest. I was wrong, but it was reason enough to land and try to talk to the locals.'

'Were they at war?'

'Just like you lot. Two massive power blocs, chemical weapons, the works. I hopped from hemisphere to hemisphere, trying to play the peacemaker, trying to knock their heads together to make them see sense. I laid the whole cosmic perspective angle on them: how there was a bigger universe out there, one they could be a part of if they only stopped squabbling. How they were going to have to be a part of it whether they liked it or not when the Huskers came calling, but if they could only be ready for that--'

'It didn't work.'

'I made things twenty times worse. I caught them at a time when they were inching towards some kind of ceasefire. By the time I left, they were going at it again hell for leather. Taught me a valuable lesson, Minla. It isn't my job to sprinkle fairy dust on a planet and get everyone to live happily ever after. No one gave me the toolkit for that. You have to work these things out for yourselves.'

She looked only slightly disappointed. 'So you'll never try again?'

'Burn your fingers once, you don't put them into the fire twice.'

'Well,' Minla said, 'before you think too harshly of us, it was the Skylands that took the peace initiative in the last ceasefire.'

'So what went wrong?'

'The Shadowlands invaded one of our allied surface territories. They were interested in mining a particular ore, known to be abundant in that area.'

Depressed as he was by news that the war was still rumbling on, Merlin forced his concentration back onto the larger matter of preparations for the catastrophe. 'You've done well with these aircraft. Doubtless you'll have gained expertise in high-altitude flight. Have you gone transonic yet?'

'In prototypes. We'll have an operational squadron of supersonic aircraft in the air within two years, subject to fuel supplies.'

'Rocketry?'

'That too. It's probably easier if I show you.'

Minla let the orderly wheel him into one of the compound buildings. A long window ran along one wall, overlooking a larger space. Though the interior had been enlarged and re-partitioned, Merlin still recognised the tactical room. The old wall-map, with its cumbersome push-around plaques, had been replaced by a clattering electromechanical display board. Operators wore headsets and sat at desks behind huge streamlined machines, their grey metal cases ribbed with cooling flanges. They were staring at small flickering slate-blue screens, whispering into microphones.

Minla removed a tranche of photographs from a desk and passed them to Merlin for his inspection. They were black and white images of the Skyland air mass, shot from increasing altitude, until the curve of Lecythus's horizon became pronounced.

'Our sounding rockets have penetrated to the very edge of the atmosphere, ' Minla said. 'Our three-stage units now have the potential to deliver a tactical payload to any unobstructed point on the surface.'

'What would count as a "tactical payload"?' Merlin asked warily.

'It's academic. I'm merely illustrating the progress we've made in your absence.'

'I'm cheered.'

'You encouraged us to make these improvements,' Minla said, chidingly. 'You can hardly blame us if we put them to military use in the meantime. The catastrophe - as you've so helpfully pointed out - is still fifty years in the future. We have our own affairs to deal with in the meantime.'

'I wasn't trying to create a war machine. I was just giving you the stepping stones you needed to get into space.'

'Well, as you can doubtless judge for yourself, we still have some distance to go. Our analysts say that we'll have a natural satellite in orbit within fifteen years, maybe ten. Definitely so by the time you wake from your next bout of sleep. But that's still not the same as moving fifty thousand people out of the system, or however many it needs to be. For that we're going to need more guidance from you, Merlin.'