Xeelee: Endurance (41 page)

At last the staircase gave onto a rocky ledge. He rested, bent forward, hands on his knees, panting hard. He had counted nine hundred steps; he had surely climbed more than two hundred metres up from the Shelf. He straightened up and inspected his surroundings.

There was a kind of village here, a jumble of crude buildings of piled stone and wood. So narrow was the available strip of land that some of these dwellings, or store-rooms or manufactories, had been built into crevices in the cliff itself, connected by ladders and short staircases. This was the Attic, then, the unregarded home and workplace of the generations of servants who served the House of Feri.

He walked along the Attic’s single muddy street. It was a grim, silent place. There were a few people about – some adults trudging wearily between the rough shanties, a couple of kids who watched him wide-eyed, fingers picking at noses or navels. Everybody else was at work, it seemed. If the children were at least curious, the adults were no friendlier than the Elevator workers. But there was something lacking in their stares, he thought: they were sullen rather than defiant.

At the head of the Elevator the pale necks of tethered spindlings rose like flowers above weeds. They were here to turn the wheel that hauled the Elevator cage up and down. One weary animal eyed him; none of its time-enhanced smartness was any use to it here.

Near some of the huts cooking smells assailed him. Though it was only morning, the servants must be working on courses for that evening’s dinner. The hour that separated two courses on the ground corresponded to no less than ten hours here, time enough to produce dishes of almost magical perfection, regardless of the unpromising conditions of these kitchens.

A woman emerged from a doorway, wiping a cauldron with a filthy rag. She glared at Peri. She was short, squat, with arms and hands made powerful by a lifetime’s labour, and her tunic was a colourless rag. He had no idea how old she was: at least fifty, judging from the leathery crumples of her face. But her eyes were a startling grey-blue – startling for they were beautiful despite their setting, and startling for their familiarity.

He stood before her, hands open. He said, ‘Please—’

‘You don’t belong in blueshift.’

‘I have to find somebody.’

‘Go back to the red, you fool.’

‘Lora,’ he said. He drew himself up and tried to inject some command into his voice. ‘A girl, about sixteen. Do you know her?’ He fumbled in his pocket for money. ‘Look, I’ll make it worth your while.’

The woman considered his handful of coins. She pinched one nostril and blew a gout of snot into the mud at his feet. But, ignoring the coins, wiping her hands on her filthy smock, she turned and led him further into the little settlement.

They came to the doorway of one more unremarkable shack. He heard singing, a high, soft lilt. The song seemed familiar. His breath caught in his throat at its beauty, and, unbidden, fragments of his elaborate fantasy came back to him.

He stepped to the doorway and paused, letting his eyes adapt to the gloom. The hut’s single room contained a couple of sleeping pallets, a hole in the ground for a privy, a surface for preparing food. The place was hot; a fire burned in a stone-lined grate.

A woman stood in one shadowed corner. She was ironing a shirt, he saw, shoving at tough creases with a flat-iron; more irons were suspended over the fire. The work was obviously hard, physical. The woman stopped singing when he came in, but she kept labouring at the iron. Her eyes, when they met his, were unmistakable, unforgettable: a subtle grey-blue.

For a moment, watching her, he couldn’t speak, so complex and intense were his emotions.

That could be my shirt she’s ironing
: that was his first thought. All his life he had been used to having his soiled clothes taken and returned as soon as he wanted, washed and folded, ironed and scented. But here was the cost, he saw now, a woman labouring for ten hours for every hour lived out by the slow-moving aristocrats below, burning up her life for his comfort. And if he lived as long as his father, he might see out
ten generations
of such ephemeral servants before he died, he realised with a shock: perhaps even more, for he could not believe that people lived terribly long here.

But she was still beautiful, he saw with relief. A year had passed for her in the month since he had seen her last, and that year showed in her; the clean profile of a woman was emerging from the softness of youth. But her face retained that quality of sculpted calm he had so prized on first glimpsing it. Now, though, there was none of the delicious startle he had seen when he had first caught her eye; in her expression he saw nothing but suspicion.

He stepped into the hut. ‘Lora – I know your name, but you don’t know mine . . . Do you remember me? I saw you at my father’s funeral – you served me pastries – I thought then, though we didn’t speak, that something deeper than words passed between us . . . Ah, I babble.’ So he did, all his carefully prepared speeches having flown from his head. He stammered, ‘Please – I’ve come to find you.’

Something stirred on one of the beds: a rustling of blankets, a sleepy gurgle. It was a baby, he realised dimly, as if his brain was working at the sluggish pace of the ground. Lora carefully set down her iron, walked to the bed and picked up the child. No wonder her song had seemed familiar: it was a lullaby.

She had a baby
. Already his dreams of her purity were shattered. The child was only a few months old. In the year of her life that he had already lost, she must have conceived, come to term, delivered her child. But the conception must have happened soon after the funeral . . .

Or at the funeral itself.

She held out the child to him. ‘Your brother’s,’ she said. They were the first words she had ever spoken to him.

He recoiled. Without thinking about it he stumbled out of the hut. For a moment he was disoriented, uncertain which way he had come. The dreadful facts slowly worked into his awareness.
Maco
: had he really wanted her – or had he taken her simply because he could, because he could steal her from his romantic fool of a younger brother?

The old woman was here, the woman with Lora’s eyes – her mother, he realised suddenly. ‘You mustn’t be here,’ she growled. ‘You’ll bring harm.’

In his befuddled state, this was difficult to decode. ‘Look, I’m a human being as you are. You’ve no reason to be frightened of me . . . This is just superstition.’ But perhaps that superstition was useful for the House folk to maintain, if it kept these labouring servants trapped in their Attic. And this mother’s anger was surely motivated by more than a mere taboo. He didn’t understand anything, he realised with dismay.

The woman grabbed his arm and began to drag him away. Still dazed, his emotions wracked, he allowed himself to be led through the mud. There seemed to be more people about now. They all glared at him. He had the odd idea that the only thing that kept them from harming him was that it hadn’t occurred to them.

He reached the Elevator. The boxy cage was laden with cereals, fruit, platters of cold meat, pressed tablecloths. It was the stuff of a breakfast, he thought dully; no matter how much time had elapsed up here, on the ground the House had yet to wake up. He took his place in the cage and waited for the descent to begin, with as much dignity as he could muster.

‘. . . And you can go too, you with your red-tinged bastard!’

He turned. The scowling woman had dragged Lora out of her hut and had hauled her by main force to the Elevator. For a second Lora resisted; holding her child, she met Peri’s eyes. Perhaps if he had acted then, perhaps if he had found the right words, he could have saved her from this dreadful rejection. But there was nothing inside him, nothing left of the foolish dream he had constructed around this stranger. Shamed, he looked away. With a final shove the hard-faced woman deposited Lora inside the cage.

As they waited for the captive spindlings to start marching in their pen, Peri and Lora avoided each other’s gaze, as if the other didn’t even exist.

The Elevator descended. Peri imagined slow time flowing through him once more, dulling his wits. His mood became sour, claustrophobic, resentful. But even as he cowered within himself, he reflected how wrong BoFeri had been. These Attic folk couldn’t be so different from the people of the Shelf after all, not if a son of the House could sire a baby by an Attic woman.

At last the Elevator cage thumped hard against the ground. The heaps of cold meat and tablecloths slumped and shifted.

Peri threw open the gate, but it was Lora who pushed out of the cage first. She ran from the Elevator, away from the House, and made for the cobbled road that led to Buta’s pyre by the edge of the Shelf. Peri, moved by shame, wanted nothing more to do with her. But he followed.

At the edge of the Shelf he came on his eldest sister BoFeri. She was feeding more papers into the pyre, kept smouldering a month after the funeral. This was a morning job; again he was reminded that for all the time he had spent in the Attic, here on the Shelf it was still early in the day.

The girl Lora was only a few metres away. Clutching her baby, she stood right on the edge of the Shelf and peered down at the waterfall as it poured into the red mist below. The wind pushed back her hair, and her beautiful face glistened with spray.

Bo eyed Peri. ‘So you went up into the Attic.’ She had to shout over the roar of the Foo. ‘And I suppose that’s the girl Maco tupped so brazenly at Buta’s funeral.’

Peri felt as if his world was spinning off its axis. ‘You knew about that? Was I the only one who didn’t see?’

Bo laughed, not unkindly. ‘Perhaps you were the one who least wanted to see. I said you would be hurt if you went up there.’

‘Do you think she’s going to jump?’

‘Of course.’ Bo seemed quite unconcerned.

‘It’s my fault she’s standing there. If I hadn’t gone up, they might have let her be. I have to stop her.’

‘No.’ Bo held his arm. ‘She has no place in the Attic now. And what will she do here, with her half-breed runt? No, it’s best for all of us that it ends here. And besides, she believes she has hope.’

It was a lot to take in. ‘Best for all of us? How? And hope? Hope of what?’

‘
Look down
, Peri. The Lowland is deep beneath us here, for the waterfall has worn a great pit. Lora believes that if she hurls herself down, she and her baby will sink deeper and deeper into slow time. She won’t even reach the bottom of the pit. Her heart will stop beating, and she and her baby will be preserved for ever, like flies in amber. There have been jumpers before, you know. No doubt they are there still, arms flung out, their last despairing thoughts frozen into their brains, trapped in space and time – as dead as if they had slit their throats. Let her join that absurd flock.’

Lora still hesitated at the edge, and Peri wondered if she was listening to this conversation. ‘And how is her death supposed to benefit us?’

BoFeri sighed. ‘You have to think in the long term, Peri. Maco and I enjoyed long conversations with Buta; our father was a deep thinker, you know . . . Have you never thought how vulnerable we are? The Attic folk live ten times as fast as we do. If they got it into their heads to defy us, they could surround us, manufacture weapons, bombard us with rocks – destroy us before we even knew what was happening. And yet that obvious revolution fails to occur. Why? Because, generation by generation, we siphon off the rebels: the defiant ones, the leaders. We allow them to destroy themselves on the points of our swords, on our guillotines or scaffolds – or simply by hurling themselves into oblivion.’

Again Peri had the sense that Lora was listening to all this. ‘So each generation we cull the smart ones. We are selectively breeding our servants.’

‘It’s simple husbandry,’ Bo said. ‘Remember, ten of their generations pass for each one of ours . . .’ She studied him, her face, a broader feminine version of his own, filled with an exasperated kindness. ‘You’re thinking this is inhuman. But it isn’t – not if you look at it from the correct point of view. While the Attic folk waste their fluttering lives above, they buy us the leisure we need to think, to develop, to invent – and to make the world a better place for those who will follow us, who will build a greater civilisation than we can imagine, before the next Caress comes to erase it all again.

‘My poor baby brother, you have too much romance in your soul for this world! You’ll learn, as I’ve had to. One day things will change for the better. But not yet, not yet.’

Lora was watching the two of them. Deliberately she stepped back from the edge of the Shelf and approached them. ‘You think blueshift folk are fools.’

Bo seemed shocked to silence by Lora’s boldness. Even now, Peri was entranced by the blaze of light in the girl’s face, the liquid quality of her voice.

‘Addled by taboo, that’s what you think. But
you
can’t see what’s in front of your nose. Look at me. Look at my colouring, my hair, my height.’ Her pale eyes blazed. ‘Three of your seasons ago my mother was as I am now. MacoFeri took what he wanted from her. He left her to grow old, while he stayed young – but he left her
me.
’

For Peri the world seemed to swivel about her suddenly familiar face. ‘You’re Maco’s daughter?
You’re my niece
?’

‘And,’ she went on doggedly, ‘despite our shared blood, now MacoFeri has taken what he wanted of me in turn.’

Peri clenched his fists. ‘His own daughter – I will kill him.’

Bo murmured, ‘It’s only the Attic. It doesn’t matter what we do up there. Perhaps it’s better Maco has such an outlet for his strange lusts . . .’

Lora clutched her baby. ‘You think we are too stupid to hate. But we do. We hate. Perhaps things will change sooner than you think.’ She wiped the mist from her baby’s face, and walked away from the cliff.

Around her, the flickering light of day strengthened.

CLIMBING THE BLUE

AD
c.
4 BILLION YEARS