The volumes he was checking were mostly composed of stories concerning the romantic adventures and philosophical musings of some group of Stellar Field Liners, though they were either much-translated or the work of not just another species but another species-type altogether. They seemed fanciful, anyway.
The tapping wasn’t going to go away.
He looked up from the screen to the round skylight set in the ceiling. Library Three, though now surrounded and surmounted by other spheres, had once been on the upper outskirts of the house and had a generous expanse of diamond leaf at its crown, though nowadays — even had the house been situated in less gloomy regions — it would let in little natural light.
There was something small and pale out there. When Fassin looked up the tapping stopped and the thing waved. It looked like a Dweller infant, a pet-child. Fassin watched it waving for a while, then went back to the screen and the not especially feasible exploits of the S’Liners. The tapping started again. He felt himself attempt to sigh inside his little gascraft. He stopped the screen scroll and lifted out of the dent-seat, rising to the centre of the ceiling.
It was indeed a Dweller child: a rather elongated, deformed-looking one, to human eyes more like a squid than a manta ray. It was dressed in rags and decorated with a few pathetic-looking life charms. Fassin had never seen an infant wearing clothes or decorations. It was oddly, maturely dark for one so young. It pointed in at what looked like some sort of catch or lock on the side of one of the skylight’s hexagonal panes.
Fassin looked at the curious infant for a while. It kept pointing at the catch. There had been no sign of pet-children round the house in all the time they’d been here. This one looked entirely like it might belong to Oazil, but he had not displayed any earlier, and hadn’t mentioned owning one. The child was still indicating the pane’s lock. It started to mime pressing and twisting and pulling motions.
Fassin opened the pane and let the creature in. It flipped inside, made a sign that was probably meant to be the Dweller equivalent of “Shh!” and floated towards him, curling and cupping its body so that it formed a sickle shape, just a metre away from the prow of the arrowhead craft. Then, on its signal skin, now shielded from sight in all directions save that Fassin was watching from, it spelled out,
OAZIL: MEET ME 2KM STRAIGHT DOWN, HOUR 5. RE. VALSEIR.
It waited till he light-signalled back OK, then it sped out the way it had come, one slim tentacle staying behind after the rest of it had exited just long enough to pull the ceiling pane shut after it. It disappeared into the night-time gloom between the dark library globes outside.
Fassin looked at the time. Just before hour Four. He went back to his studies, finding nothing, thinking about nothing, until just before five, when he went back to Library Twenty-One and slipped out through the secret doorway again. He dropped the two thousand metres down through the slowly increasing heat and pressure and met the old Dweller Oazil, complete with his float-trailer. Oazil signalled,
— Fassin Taak?
— Yes.
· What did Valseir once compare the Quick to? In some detail, if you please.
· Why?
The old Dweller sent nothing for some time, then, — You might guess, little one. Or do this just because I ask. To humour an old Dweller.
Fassin waited a while before answering. — Clouds, he sent, eventually. — Clouds above one of our worlds. We come and we go and we are as nothing compared to the landscape beneath, just vapour compared to implacable rock, which lasts seemingly beyond lasting and is always there long after the clouds of the day or the clouds of the season have long gone, and yet other clouds will always be there, the next day and the next and the next, and the next season and the next year and for as long as the mountains themselves last, and the wind and the rain wear away mountains in time.
· Hmm, Oazil sent, sounding distracted. — Mountains.
Curious idea. I have never seen a mountain.
· Nor ever will, I imagine. Do you want me to add any more?
I don’t think I recall much else.
· No, that will not be necessary.
· Then?
· Valseir is alive, the old Dweller said. — He sends his regards.
· Alive?
· There is a GasClipper regatta at the C-2 Storm Ultra-Violet 3667, beginning in seventeen days’ time.
· That’s in the war zone, isn’t it?
· The tournament was arranged long before the hostilities were first mooted and so has been cleared with the Formal War Marshals. A special dispensation. Be there, Fassin Taak. He will find you.
The old Dweller roted forward a metre, taking up the slack on the float-trailer’s traces. — Farewell, Seer Taak, he signalled. — Remember me to our mutual friend, if you’d be so kind.
He turned and floated away into the deep hot darkness. In a few moments he was lost to most passive senses. Fassin waited until there was no sign of him at all, then rose slowly back up to the house.
“Ah, Fassin, I understand commiserations are in order,” Y’sul said, floating up to the bubble house’s reception balcony from the Poaflias. Nuern, Fassin and Hatherence had watched the ship motor out of the dim haze, hearing its engines long before they’d seen it.
“Your sympathy is noted,” Fassin told Y’sul. He’d got Hatherence to call the Poaflias the day before and order it back from its hunting patrol. The little ship returned with a modest number of trophies strung from its rigging: various julmicker bladders, bobbing like grisly balloons on sticks, three gas-drying RootHugger hides, the heads of a brace of gracile Tumblerines and — patently the most prized, mounted above the craft’s nose — a Dweller Child carcass, already gutted and stretched wide on a frame so that it looked like some slightly grotesque figurehead, flying just ahead of the ship. Fassin had sensed the colonel’s esuit rolling fractionally back when she’d realised what the new addition to the Poaflias’s nose actually was.
“What is your state of mind, Fassin, now that you have lost so many of your family?” Y’sul asked, coming to a stop in front of the Seer. “Are you decided to return to your own people?”
“My state of mind is… calm. I may still be in shock, I suppose.”
“Shock?”
“Look it up. I have not decided to return to my own people yet. There are almost none to return to. We are, however, finished here. I wish to return to Munueyn.”
He’d told the colonel that morning that he’d discovered something and they needed to leave.
“What have you discovered, major? May I see it?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“I see. So where next are we bound?”
“Back to Munueyn,” he’d lied.
“Munueyn? Our captain will be pleased,” Y’sul said.
They left that evening. Nuern and Livilido seemed relaxed, positively cheered, that they were departing. Y’sul had returned with news of the war, in which two important Dreadnought actions had already taken place, resulting, in one engagement alone, in the loss of five Dreadnoughts and nearly a hundred deaths. The Zone forces were retreating in two volumes at least and the Belt certainly had the upper grasp at the moment.
Fassin and Hatherence recorded short messages of gratitude for Jundriance to read at his leisure.
Nuern asked them if they wanted to take any of the books or other works from the house.
“No, thank you,” Fassin said.
“I found this humorous thesaurus,” the colonel said, holding up a small diamond-leaf book. “I’d like this.”