That was the start of Telni’s scholarship, in retrospect, much of it self-discovered, self-taught. And as his understanding increased, he grew in wisdom, strength, and stature in his community.
In Telni’s twenty-fifth year, a group of Natural Philosophers from the Shelf visited the Platform. Telni was the youngest of the party selected to greet the Shelf scholars.
And MinaAndry, a year or two younger, was the most junior of the visitors from Foro. It was natural they would end up together.
The formal welcomes were made at the lip of the Platform, under the vast, astonishing bulk of a tethered airship. The Shelf folk, used to solid ground under their feet, looked as if they longed to be far away from the Platform’s edge, and the long drop to the Lowland below.
Then the parties broke up for informal discussions and demonstrations. The two groups, of fifty or so on each side, were to reassemble for a formal dinner that night in the Hall, the largest and grandest of the Platform’s sentient Buildings. Thus the month-long expedition by the Shelf Philosophers would begin to address its goals, the start of a cultural and philosophical exchange between Shelf and Platform. It was a fitting project. The inhabitants of the Platform, their ancestors drawn long ago from Foro, were after all distant cousins of the Shelf folk.
And Telni found himself partnered in his work with MinaAndry.
There was much good-natured ribbing at this, and not a little jealousy in the glances of the older men. All the folk from the Shelf were handsome in their way, tall and elegant – not quite of the same stock as the Platform folk, who, shorter and heavier-built, were themselves different from the darker folk of the Lowland. They were three human groups swimming through time at different rates; of course they would diverge. But whatever the strange physics, MinaAndry was striking, tall yet athletic-looking with a loose physical grace, and blonde hair tied tightly back from a spindling-slim neck.
They walked across the Platform, through the city of living Buildings. The walls were gleaming white surfaces, neither hot nor cold, and pierced by sharp-edged doorways and windows.
Mina ran her hand across one smooth wall. Through an open door, inside the building, could be glimpsed signs of humanity: a bunk bed made of wood hauled up from the plain, a hearth, a cooking pot, cupboards and heaps of blankets and clothes, and outside a bucket to catch the rain. ‘This place is so strange. We build things of stone, of concrete, or wood. But this—’
‘We didn’t build these structures at all. The Buildings grew here. We don’t even know what they are made of – we call it Construction Material. That may not even be a human invention. They bud from units we call Flowers, and soak up the light from the storms. Like the Weapons, the Buildings are technology gone wild, made things modified by time.’
‘It all feels new, although I suppose it’s actually very old. Whereas Foro feels old. All that lichen-encrusted stone! It’s like a vast tomb . . .’
But Telni knew that the town she called Foro was built on the ruins of a city itself called New Foro, devastated during the wars he remembered watching as a boy. He had naively expected the Shelf folk to be full of stories of that war when they came here. But the war was fifteen Platform years over, more than two hundred and fifty Shelf years, and what was a childhood memory to Telni was long-dead history to Mina.
‘Is it true you feed your dead to the Buildings?’ She asked this with a kind of frisson of horror.
‘We wouldn’t put it like that . . . They do need organic material. In the wild, you know, down on the Lowland, they preyed on humans. We do let them take our corpses. Why not?’ He stroked a wall himself. ‘It means the Buildings are made of us, our ancestors. Sometimes people have to die inside a Building. The Weapon that rules the Platform decrees it.’
‘Why?’
‘It seems to be studying Effigies. It thinks that the Construction Material of which Buildings are made excludes Effigies. Some of us are born inside Buildings, so no Effigy can enter us then. Others die within a Building, a special one we call the Morgue, in an attempt to trap the Effigies when they are driven out of their bodies. My own great-aunt died recently, and had to be taken inside the Morgue, but no Effigy was released.’
‘It seems very strange to us,’ Mina said cautiously. ‘To Shelf folk, I mean. That here you are living out your lives on a machine, made by another machine.’
‘It’s not as if we have a choice,’ Telni said, feeling defensive. ‘We aren’t allowed to leave.’
She looked down at her feet, which were clad in sensible leather shoes – not spindling hide like Telni’s. ‘I could tell that a machine built this place. It lacks a certain humanity.’ She glanced at him uncertainly. ‘Look, I’m speaking as a Philosopher. I myself am studying geology. The way time stratification affects erosion, with higher levels wearing away faster than the low, and the sluggish way rivers flow as they head down into the red . . . All this is a manifestation of depth, you see, depth that pivots into time. On the Shelf we all grew up on a cliff-top, over all that depth. But here we are suspended in the air on a paper-thin sheet! Whatever the intentions of the Weapon that governs you, it doesn’t feel safe. A human designer would never have done it like this.’
‘We live as best we can.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I’ll show you,’ he said with a dash of defiance.
He took her to the very centre of the Platform, and the wheel that turned as always, drawn by teams of patient spindlings as they laboured to draw up supplies from the plain below.
MinaAndry patted the necks of the plodding beasts. The cargo jockeys, unloading buckets and pallets of supplies drawn up from the Lowland, stared at her curiously.
She said, ‘How charming these beasts are! You know that on the Shelf they were driven to extinction during the Creationist-Mechanist Wars. We are slowly restocking with animals drawn up from the Lowland herds, but it’s ferociously expensive . . .’
Something about the way she patted and stroked the tall, elegant creatures moved Telni deep inside. But he had to pull her aside when he saw a spindling was ready to cough up its faeces. Mina was astonished at the sight.
He took Mina’s hand and led her to the centre of the Hub, close to the great hatch in the floor of the Platform, which revealed the goods-laden cables that dangled down to the Lowland far below.
Mina squealed and drew back. ‘Oh! I’m sorry. Vertigo – what a foolish reaction that is! Although it proves my point about the uncomfortable design.’
He pointed down through the hole. ‘I brought you here to see my own work. I earn my living through my studies with an apothecary. But this is my passion . . .’
Holding tight to the rail, pushing a stray strand of hair back from her face, she peered down through the floor. From here, Telni’s cradles of pendulums, of bobs and weights and simple control mechanisms, were clearly visible, attached in a train along one of the guide ropes that tethered the Platform to the Lowland plain.
‘Pendulums?’
‘Pendulums. I time their swing. From here I can vary the length and amplitude . . .’ He showed her a rigging-up of levers he had fixed above the tether’s anchor. ‘Sometimes there’s a snag, and I go down in a harness, or send one of the cargo jockeys.’
‘How do you time them?’
‘I have a clock the Weapon gave me. I don’t understand how it works,’ he said, and that admission embarrassed him. ‘But it’s clearly more accurate than any clock we can make. I have the pendulums spread out over more than a quarter of a kilometre. There’s no record of anybody attempting to make such measurements over such a height difference. And by seeing how the period of the pendulums vary with height, what I’m trying to measure is—’