She set down her rope and pack, anchored herself with her bare legs, dug her arms into the branches, and gingerly lifted out the Mole. It was a box about the size of her head, roughly square-edged. But it wasn’t made of wood or whale cartilage or any substance she recognised, but of something pale and shiny, and the hide was punctured by holes within which some other substance glimmered, hard and transparent. You could see that the Mole had once been part of something else, for stubs of cut-off panels and bits of pipe stuck out of its sides, and scorch marks showed that great heat had been used to cut this remnant out.
Cautiously she whispered, ‘Mole. Status.’
‘Massive sensor dysfunction. Massive sensor dysfunction—’
Its voice was blaring, grating, not like anything human at all. She always found it oddly upsetting. ‘Hush, Mole.’
‘Massive sensor dysfunction—’
‘Stop it! Stop talking!’ She found it hard to think, and to remember the phrases her mother had taught her. ‘Mole. End report.’
The voice cut off in mid-phrase. Lura heaved a sigh of relief, hugged the box to her chest, and settled back in the branches of Twenty-Four.
From up here, at the top of the Forest stack, her view of the sky she floated in was unimpeded. The air of the nebula was, as always, stained blood-red, and littered with clouds like handfuls of greyish cloth above and below her. Stars fell in a slow, endless rain that tumbled down to the nebula’s misty core. Their light cast shifting shadows from the clouds, and the wild trees, and huge misty blurs that might be whales. Beyond this nearby detail she could see the greater expanse of the spaces beyond the sky: the knotty patches of light that marked other nebulae, and the brilliant pink pinpricks of the big-stars, all of them orbiting the Core of Cores, a sullen, dark mass.
She was relieved nobody had found the Mole. Her mother had told her it must be kept hidden, especially from the Brothers, for it was her family’s oldest secret. For a time she had kept it tucked away inside the cabin she had shared with her parents. But when it had started squawking she could think of nowhere else to keep it but here, as far from the mass of people as she could find. Her mother’s sole legacy was nothing but a hassle.
She thought about the playing children. How she had loved being little, and carefree, and cherished! But one day her father had been killed when he had descended to the kernel to fix a loose cable; in the powerful gravity field of the burned-out star a simple fall had broken his back. Then her mother, always weak, had fallen to a condition of the lungs. And Lura, burdened with care, was a child no more.
Sometimes, in fact, she thought she had grown up too quickly. She always seemed to see dark shadows in the Forest’s daily bustle – the etiolated condition of some of the trees’ leaves, and the pale faces and straining chests of the weaker children, unable to keep up with the others. The nebula air wasn’t as rich as it used to be, the old folk said, it was smoky and made you gasp – and perhaps it had killed her mother. It was said that humans had come to this nebula from another that was dying. Well, it might be true, even if she had never heard anyone explain how people had hopped through the airless void from one nebula to another. But the trouble was, as she could see at a glance from here, even if that was possible, no nearby nebula was much healthier than this one – a healthy cloud being blue and full of bright yellow suns, and scattered with the greenery of trees. Every nebula she could see was a cramped red mass.
If all the nebulae were dying, then where were the people to go?
The Mole was certainly no help. She stared at its ugly hide, the stubby cut-offs. ‘Mole, you are strange and useless and nothing but trouble. And if you hadn’t meant so much to my mother I’d pitch you out of the tree—’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’
Startled, she scrambled in the foliage, and nearly lost her hold.
Brother Pesten hovered before her.
Pesten wore the simple dyed-black shift of the Brotherhood of the Infrastructure, and soft sandals on his feet. Tall and stick-thin, he was bald, with a fringe of unruly greying hair. He held himself oddly rigid as he hung in the air, with one steadying hand on the tree trunk. He had always seemed old to Lura, even when he had been her tutor, and now, of course, he was older still – perhaps as much as fifty thousand shifts. The tree pilots resented the Brothers. Nobody grew as old as a Brother, they muttered, because everybody else had to work too hard. But when Pesten smiled at Lura, a little bit of her softened, as it always had.
She clutched the Mole. ‘Who told on me?’
‘How do you know I didn’t just find the gadget for myself, shouting away in this treetop as it was?’
‘I remember you, Brother, and you were never one for climbing any further than you had to. Who told? Ord, I bet, that fat rat’s arse – no, if he’d found it he’d have blackmailed me for whatever he could get.’
‘Ord isn’t so bad. He’s never actually harmed you, has he? He just doesn’t know how to approach you.’
She couldn’t have cared less about that. ‘If not Ord then who?’
‘Old Jorg. Chief pilot of the Forest’s fulcrum tree.’
‘Jorg! I trusted him.’
‘You still can. He’s our most senior and experienced pilot, and he’s no fool. And when he saw you creeping around his tree with your gadget, he was concerned for you, for what you might be getting yourself into. So he came to me. Where did you get this thing?’
‘From my mother,’ she said ruefully. ‘We call it a Mole. I don’t know why. Handed down from her mother, and hers before her . . . I let them all down, didn’t I? The Mole was kept secret by my family for generations, and now I’ve had it for a few dozen shifts and the whole Forest knows about it.’
‘Don’t blame yourself. Something about the Mole may have changed. I can’t believe it can have been so noisy before and escaped detection. May I?’ He reached out. Reluctantly she handed him the Mole. He hefted it, feeling its mass, turned it over in his hands, and rapped its hull. ‘Do you know what it’s made of? No? It’s a kind of metal, I think. Like kernel iron, but processed . . . Do you know what it is?’
‘I know what my mother said it is.’
‘Tell me.’
She took a deep breath, for she was about to speak heresy to a Brother. ‘Part of the Ship. Maybe the last surviving part. My mother said there was a big argument long ago. Some people wanted to forget about the Ship. Others wanted to remember. Humans don’t belong here – that was their slogan. So when remembering the Ship was banned by the Brothers, and any remnants of it were destroyed, this Mole was saved, and hidden.’
‘If it came from the Ship, do you know what it’s for?’
She shrugged, reluctant to be drawn, unsure what kind of trouble she was in. She waited for the rebukes, the condemnation, the accusations of heresy.
But none of that came. Instead Pesten turned the Mole over in his hands. He said, ‘I can make an educated guess. It’s probably a transport machine – or the clever part. All the working parts were cut away long ago.’