· I am unaware of any phenomenon able to mimic one so convincingly.
· Fucking hell.
· I float corrected. Somebody would seem to be extremely ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak.
· The Dwellers are not going to be happy, he told Hatherence. — Only they’re allowed to let off nukes in the atmosphere, he explained. — And it isn’t even fireworks season.
They found the CloudTunnel about where Fassin had thought it ought to be, only a hundred kilometres out laterally and two kilometres further down: bang on by Nasqueron standards. The CloudTunnel was a bundle of a dozen or so carbon-carbon tubes like some vast, barely braided cable-cluster floating in the midst of an unending cloudscape of gently billowing yellow, orange and ochre. The CloudTunnel’s two main tubes were about sixty metres in diameter, the smallest — basically comms and telemetry wave guides — less than half a metre. The whole cluster had looked thread-thin when they’d first caught sight of it, tens of kilometres away, but up close it looked like a hawser fit to tether a moon. A great, deep rushing sound rumbled from inside the two main pipes.
· What now? the colonel sent.
· We see if my vicarious kudos credit is still good.
Fassin used one of the arrowcraft’s manipulators to prod one of the wave guides, working the filaments through the tube’s protective sheath without breaking it. A hair-thin wire extended into the matrix of light filling the narrow tube. Information streamed from the far end of the wire, into the gascraft’s biomind, its transitional systems and then into Fassin’s head, forming a coded chaos of babbling sound, wildly scintillating visuals and other confused sensory experiences. The interruption in the light streams had already been noticed and allowed for. A pulse of information aimed right at the filament sent an identity request and inquired whether assistance was required, otherwise stop interfering with a public information highway.
— A human, Fassin Taak, privileged to be Slow Seer at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, he sent. — I’d like some assis-tance in the shape of transport at the given location, bound for Hauskip City.
He was told to wait.
“Fassin Taak, Out-Bander, Stranger, Alien, Seer, Human! And… what’s this?”
“This is Colonel Hatherence of the Mercatorial Military-Religious Order the Shrievalty Ocula, an oerileithe.”
“Good day, Dweller Y’sul,” Hatherence said. They had switched to using ordinary sound-speech.
“A little dweller! How fascinating! Not a child, then?”
Y’sul, a sizeable mid-adult a good nine metres or so in diameter, rolled through the gas and, extending one long spindle-arm, clunked a fist-bunch (bink-bink-bink!) on the esuit of the Colonel.
“Hellooo in there!” Y’sul said.
Hatherence’s discus of esuit leaned to one side under the rain of not-so-gentle blows. “Pleased to meet you,” she replied tersely.
“Not a child,” Fassin confirmed.
They were in a giant bowl-like room, roofed with slate-diamond micrometres thin, in a Thickeneers’ Club in Hauskip City.
Hauskip lay within the equatorial zone of Nasqueron, one of the hundred thousand or so major conurbations in that particular atmospheric band. Seen from the right angle in a sympa-thetic light, it looked a lot like the internal workings of an ancient mechanical clock, multiplied and magnified several thousand times. From far enough away, or just seen in a schematic, it resembled millions of toothed-looking wheels caught up in amongst each other, with larger sets of wheels interconnecting with them through hubs and spines and spindles, themselves linking up with still greater sets of wheels. The whole mighty, slowly gyrating and spinning assemblage, easily a couple of hundred kilometres in diameter, floated within a thick soup of gas a hundred kilometres beneath the cloud tops.
The city was the hub for several CloudTunnel lines. Once an empty car had made its way to the access hatch nearest to where Fassin and Hatherence pitched up alongside the CloudTunnel, it had taken two changes of line, riding in the same car, for Fassin and the colonel to get there through the network of partially evacuated, high-speed transit tubes. The whole journey had taken one of Nasqueron’s short day-night cycles. They had each slept for most of the time, though just before Fassin had dozed off, the colonel had said, “We go on. You agree, major? We continue our mission. Until we are ordered to cease.”
“Iagree,” he said. “We go on.”
The TunnelCar had docked, sphinctered its way through a TunnelBud wall in Hauskip’s Central Station and sped through the gelatinous atmosphere straight to the equatorial Eighth Progression Thickeneers’ Club, where Y’sul, Fassin’s long-time guide-mentor-guard had been attending a party to celebrate the Completion and Expulsion Ceremony of one of the club’s members.
Dwellers started out looking like anorexic manta rays — this was in their brief, occasionally hunted childhood phase — then grew, fattened, split most of the way down the middle (adolescence, kind of), shifted from a horizontal to a vertical axis and ended up, as adults, basically, resembling something like a pair of large, webbed, fringed cartwheels connected by a short, thick axle with particularly bulbous outer hubs onto each of which had been fastened a giant spider crab.
Part of the transition from recent- to mid-adulthood involved a period called Thickening, when the slim and flimsy discs of youth became the stout and sturdy wheels of later life, and it was customary for Dwellers to join a club of their approximate contemporaries while this was taking place. There was no specific reason for Dwellers to band together at this point in their lives, they just in general enjoyed joining clubs, sodalities, orders, leagues, parties, societies, associations, fellowships, fraternities, groups, guilds, unions, fractionals, dispensationals and recreationalities, while always, of course, leaving open the possibility of taking part in ad hoc non-ceremonial serendipitous one-time gatherings as well. The social calendar was crowded.
Y’sul had invited them to this private book-crystal-lined library room in his Thickeneers’ Club rather than to his home so that, as he explained, if they were too boring or in too great a hurry, he could get back without an over-great delay to his chums taking part in the ceremonial dinner and spree in the banqueting hall below.
“So, Fassin, good to see you!” Y’sul said. “Why have you brought this little dweller with you? Is she food?”
“No, of course not. She is a colleague.”
“Of course! Though there are no oerileithe Seers.”
“She is not a Seer.”
“Then not a colleague?”
“She has been sent to escort me, by the Mercatorial Military-Religious Order the Shrievalty Ocula.”
“I see.” Y’sul, dressed in his best smart-but-casual finery, all brightly coloured fringes and lacily ornate ruffs, rocked back, rotating slightly, then came forward again. “No, I don’t! What am I saying? What is this ‘Ocula’?”
“Well…”
It took a while to tell. After about a quarter of an hour — this all, thankfully, in real-time, with no slow-down factor — Fassin thought he’d pretty much briefed Y’sul as well and as completely as he could without giving too much away. The colonel had contributed now and again, not that Y’sul seemed to have taken any notice of her.
Y’sul was about fifteen thousand years old, a full-adult who was perhaps another one or two millennia away from becoming a traav, the first stage of Prime-hood. At nine metres vertical diameter (not including his semi-formal dinner clothes, whose impressive body ruff added another metre), he was about as large as a Dweller ever got. His double disc was nearly five metres across, the modestly clothed central axle barely visible as a separate entity, more of an unexpected thinning between the two great wheels. Dwellers shrank very slightly as they aged after mid-adulthood and slowly lost both hub and fringe limbs until, by the time they were in their billions, they were often nearly limb-disabled.