Her backside got sore; she glanded numb, rode on.
At the height of the day, a desiccant umbrel provided shade for her and the aphore, once she’d chased a snoozing misiprike away. It had been fast asleep; she’d had to clap her hands and holler to get it to wake while she and the suddenly nervy aphore stood, only ten metres away.
The misiprike had looked up, risen tiredly to its feet and loped off. It stopped once to snarl back at them as though it had only just remembered it was supposed to be a fearsome creature, then padded loose-limbed over the frozen waves of set-sand.
She fed the aphore, her stomach rumbling, then ate, drank. Even in the shade it was very hot; she and the mount snoozed.
She’d missed the descent; usually she liked being dropped onto the inside of an Orbital, rather than taking the conventional approach of coming up from underneath. A descent meant you got to see the overview of the place you were coming to; a real view, even if it was through a screen, not a pretend one.
She’d been born and raised on a planet. This was a rare thing, in the Culture; even rarer than being born on a ship, and that was pretty rare in itself. Things had been like this for millennia. Anyway, she ascribed whatever eccentricities she was prone to displaying to that oddity of birthright. She’d spent more time on Os than anywhere else — spent centuries living on them — but still she couldn’t help but think of planets as normal and Orbitals as somehow aberrant, for all that the artificial worlds far outnumbered the number of naturally inhabitable ones.
In the end it was kind of unarguable that planets were natural and Orbitals were artificial, though she supposed that, when you thought about it, it was really no more natural to live on the outside of a huge, skein-warping sphere of rock, held to its surface — like the atmosphere — by nothing more than gravity than it was to live on the inside of an O, held there by spin, with the atmosphere held down by the same movement and stopped from spilling off the edges by retainment walls of diamond film and fate knew what exoticism of material and field.
She drifted in and out of her snooze, and, while still dozily waking up, asked her ancient pen terminal whether anybody had ever built a planet, or discovered a natural Orbital. Yes to the former, though rarely, and not for aeons. A straight no to the latter.
“There you are,” she told Yoawin as she got her to stand and busied herself re-setting the animal’s bridle. “Planets not guaranteed totally natural after all.”
The aphore snorted.
That night, at the start of the hills — maybe a kilometre in and a hundred metres up, by a dry water bowl — Tefwe slept under the stars and the bright, lit band of the Orbital’s far side.
That was the really unnatural sign of an O, she supposed. You might not notice the inside-out curvature at any time, or come to an access tube that would let you drop the hundred metres or whatever to the world’s space-exposed under-surface, or see the sea or the clouds held ruler-straight against an edge wall, but, come the night, there would be the sure and certain sign that you really were pinned by your rotating frame of reference to the inside of a bracelet ten million klicks across: the far side, shining in its daytime while the side you were on had its back turned to whatever sun the whole O circled.
Well, unless the clouds on your side of the Orbital were really thick, she supposed, and fell asleep.
Come the morning they left in the grey pre-dawn, despite Yoawin’s protests. “Don’t you spit at me, you addled stumble-hoof,” Tefwe said, and spat back at it. “There. See how you like it.” She wiped her face while Yoawin shook hers. “There. Now, sorry. Both of us sorry, yes? No more spitting. Here.” She gave it some dried berries.
A series of tall cliffs kept them mostly in shade until nearly noon, letting them keep going longer. They ate, drank and dozed under an overhang.
The track just before the pass was very steep; she got off Yoawin and led the animal up the zigzagging path. Dry stones rattled under her boots and the aphore’s hooves. At a corner in the trail near the top, one fall of initially just a dozen or so stones set off a small landslide further down. The fractious, rattling, rumbling sound of it echoed off the cliffs and slopes all around like dry thunder. Tefwe watched the dusty mass descend, to see if it would sweep away any part of the track, but it didn’t, and the tumbling mass of stones and boulders slowed and slumped to a dusty stop on the shallowing slope some way above the valley floor.
From the pass, the plateau was only fifty metres below her, ringed by sharp peaks and ragged cliffs. Its surface was bright with salt lakes and thin wind-corralled whorls of pale sand. Yoawin panted. Tefwe patted the animal’s snout and looked around as the hot wind swept her hair back from her face. She smiled, and felt the dried skin on her lips protest at the motion.
A couple of kilometres away, shimmering in the heated air, she could see the rocky outcrop where the drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie would be working on its sandstreams.
Tefwe reached up to where the flower she’d picked the day before had been, tucked into a coil of her hair, at least until this morning, thinking to leave it here at the pass. But her fingers closed round nothing; it had gone, already fallen.
xGSV Contents May Differ
oGCU Beats Working
You appear to covet the behaviour of our superlifter siblings, and have become a sort of serial tug. Were you getting bored?
∞
A little. I also thought that — given the Ronte had been due to arrive at Zyse in particular significantly after the Enfolding — helping them to get to Zyse swiftly might help preclude the Liseiden, faced with an empty home system devoid of both those it had belonged to and those it had been allocated to, being tempted to ignore the decision in favour of the Ronte by resorting to illegal pillaging. I simply wanted to remove that temptation by making sure the Ronte were in position at the time of the Instigation, thus ensuring a smooth handover.
∞
Thoughtful. However it does rather make it look as though we favour one over the other.
∞
I appreciate that, however all we are doing is favouring the rightful over those who might, wrongly, feel aggrieved and who, were this action not taken, have the means and the opportunity to act upon that feeling, with potentially disastrous results.
∞
Noble motivations, I’m sure. May I ask you to run any ideas for future innovations of a similar nature past the rest of us before carrying them out? Would you do that?
∞
I would.
Fifteen
(S -13)
“This is a closed system, of course,” the blindfolded man said, feeling his way to the seat and then turning it, holding it angled away from the ancient-looking console and screen so that the septame could sit in it. Banstegeyn held the back of the seat but did not sit. The blindfolded man — by his uniform, a captain in the Home Regiment — talked to him as though he could see him. “It is unconnected to any other, and so its contents are unavailable elsewhere. I understand other such hermetic arrangements hold certain records it is as well are not readily accessible; however this one merely catalogues various pieces of equipment which are regarded as being best kept secret from the general mass of people, and indeed even the general mass of armed forces personnel.”
“I see,” said Banstegeyn, studying the captain’s face. The man’s eyes were concealed behind a thick metal strap cushioned with dark foam. According to Marshal Chekwri, who had personally driven him here to this anonymous if well-guarded warehouse on the capital’s outskirts, this was perfectly normal and did not constitute some special arrangement made just for him.