Xeelee: Endurance (42 page)

‘Everything about our world is
made
,’ said the Natural Philosopher. ‘Made by intelligence, perhaps even built by human hands! Tonight I will prove it to you – prove it, at least, to those with minds flexible enough to understand . . .’

To Celi, to any Foron, such thoughts were radical, shocking. But Celi was electrified.

Celi had only taken Qaia to the lecture that night because he had heard rumours that the Philosopher was going to cut up a body. A
human
body, sliced apart in Foro’s own town hall! It was a sight no self-respecting sixteen-year-old could miss.

Celi’s father, Sool, had given his permission in his usual absent way. After all, he was going too. But his mother had seen right through him, as always. Pili was kneading bread, her powerful forearms coated in flour. ‘You’re going because you think it will be some kind of circus. Blood and bone and guts.’

Immersed in rich kitchen smells, Celi squirmed, ashamed. ‘Mother, it’s not like that—’

‘She’s a bad influence, you know.’

‘Who?’

‘Qaia. Her Effigy has yours by the throat, doesn’t it? And she has you climbing the blue at a snap of her fingers.’

Climbing the blue.
On Old Earth, time was layered: the higher you climbed, up towards the blueshifted sky, the faster time passed. So, said the more serious citizens of Foro, if you burned up your life on nonsense, you were climbing the blue.

Celi didn’t know what to say.

Pili sighed, and cuffed his head gently. ‘Go, go. But if you only have eyes for Qaia, at least keep your ears open. You might learn something, and then the evening won’t be a total waste. But get the flour out of your hair first.’

So off he had set, at a run, to Qaia’s house.

And as it happened, he did learn something that night: something about the world he lived in, and about himself.

HuroEldon, Natural Philosopher, stalked back and forth over the stage in his richly woven robe, casting flickering shadows by the light of the torches on the walls.

The setting was magnificent. The town hall was a domed chamber, big enough to hold all Foro’s adult citizens. It was actually a wing of a palace, ruined in the last Formidable Caress. Now it had been rebuilt, and not as the home of a ruler, but as a meeting place for all Forons, rich and poor.

But even here HuroEldon’s voice resounded like Lowland thunder, Celi thought, a voice too large to be contained by mere stone. The Philosopher had about him a rich whiff of antiquity: it was a strange thought that, though Huro looked no older than fifty, he might have been born centuries ago.

And as he made his prefatory remarks, on the stage beside Huro were two bodies, corpses strapped to tables, covered by dust sheets and attended by assistants. Celi felt deeply queasy.

‘The world is a made thing,’ Huro said again. ‘An extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence – and I have it!’ With a showman’s flourish he drew a long knife from his sleeve, and his assistants pulled the cover sheets from the tables.

The audience gasped. One revealed corpse was of a young spindling, its six legs splayed, its long neck limp as string. And the other corpse was of a little girl.

Celi felt Qaia’s hand creep into his own. He had actually known the child; she had been called Bera, and she had died of the Blight aged only eight. Celi could see the disfiguring burn-like stains on her skin. Celi was ashamed at his earlier grisly curiosity: it made a big difference when you knew
who
was to be cut up.

HuroEldon held up his knife, inspecting the blade. Then with a butcher’s casual expertise he slit the girl’s pale body from throat to pelvis and emptied the chest cavity of organs. There was a smell of sour chemistry; the body’s blood seemed to have been dried to a powder, and the organs were shrivelled, like blackened fruit. But still people groaned, and a few stumbled out of the hall, their hands pressed to their mouths.

Huro displayed the essentials of Bera’s bone structure, the long spine, the ribs, the limbs attached by ball-and-socket joints. ‘Thus the architecture of a human,’ he said. ‘And if you were to dissect a rat or a bird you would find much the same body plan – adjusted for the purpose of running or flying, of course, but with an essential unity of design.’ Despite his revulsion, Celi was fascinated by this brisk lesson in skeletal anatomy.

Huro turned his back on the girl and stalked to the other table. ‘A spindling, though, is quite different. Why, you can see it even before I open it up. Look at it!
Six legs.
Six limbs, not four! And if we look deeper, we will find more divergences . . .’

Efficiently he peeled back skin and prised out bones from the spindling’s once-elegant long neck – except that these greyish objects weren’t actually bones. ‘The spindling has an inner skeletal structure. That much we have in common with it. But look – can you see?’ He stalked around the front rows of the audience, who flinched back from his gory specimens. ‘This isn’t bone. It’s a kind of cartilage, quite unlike the human design.’

He tore apart the spindling, displaying more features of the animal. For instance, a human’s digestive system was essentially a duct that passed through the body: food in one end, waste out of the other. In contrast a spindling had a closed digestive loop, so that it used its mouth as its anus, for food and for waste. Celi was struck by this observation. Everybody knew to keep out of the way of a spindling when it prepared to vomit up its shit, but it had never occurred to him before how different it was to the human way of doing things. He felt curiosity stir; he wondered how many other strange features of the world were waiting for him to notice them, if only he could learn how to look.

‘What does all this mean?’ Huro demanded. ‘It means that the spindling does not come from the same tree of life as humans and rats and birds. The spindling has been
brought
here, to this world of ours, from somewhere else – or else we have been brought to
its
world, although that seems less likely as there are more creatures like us here than like it. And the spindling is not the only example of an alien among us, among the plants and the animals.

‘Like most primitive cultures on the Shelf, you Forons cling to a naive naturalism! You believe that the world as we experience it emerged from the blind operation of natural laws, that intelligence had no hand in it. But
that cannot be true
. The spindling is
proof
that the world could not have developed organically; one counter-example is enough to demonstrate that nature lacks the necessary unity for that to be so. The simplest hypothesis is in fact that it has
all
been made, all shaped by intelligence, from blueshifted sky to redshifted Lowland.’ He held up spindling cartilage, and a hip joint from poor Bera. ‘Here is the proof!’ And he threw the bones to the floor.

There was a long silence. Then one man rose to his feet. Celi was moved to see that it was his own father. Sool was a proud Foron who clearly bristled over Huro’s comments about primitivism and naivety. He demanded to know if this ‘radical creationism’ was the only philosophical choice. Must Forons now accept gods and devils? Must they cower from storms like their ancestors, and worship the light that flared across the Lowland? Was not Huro’s presumption of a higher intelligence actually the more intellectually primitive point of view? He spoke well, a dignified anger deepening his voice, and his neighbours applauded.

But Huro was able to counter him point by point. Despite himself, Celi found himself accepting the Philosopher’s arguments. But he felt deeply disturbed at the way this arrogant man dismissed his father, and had so easily upset his own world view.

On impulse Celi stood up himself.

His father, surprised, yielded the floor. As he became the focus of the packed hall – the Mayor herself was here – Celi quailed. But he held his nerve, and dramatically pointed at Bera’s corpse. ‘Philosopher, if you can tell us the design of the whole world, why could you not save
her
from the Blight?’

Huro smiled. ‘If you ask such a question, young man, perhaps you have it in you to become a doctor, so you can answer it yourself. Talk to me later.’ He turned away to take more questions.

As Celi sat down, stunned, Qaia tugged his sleeve. ‘You won’t go to that awful man, will you?’

‘No,’ said Celi immediately. ‘No, of course not.’ But as he stared into Qaia’s wide blue eyes, he knew he was lying.

Foro was situated on the side of a cliff, on the broad plain of the Shelf. The Forons were proud of their town, for they had built it with their own hands. But it was cupped in the mighty ruins of a much older city, devastated generations ago by the Formidable Caress.

And if you climbed the rocky walls above and below the Shelf, you climbed into stratified time. You could ascend into a rarefied air where time raced like a pumping heart, or go down into the grave torpor of redshift.

In practice nobody from Foro ever did climb the rocks. It just wasn’t practical to run your life with time’s cogwheels slipping constantly. And the Forons’ reluctance was cultural too. Celi’s people were proudly descended from a group who had once been kept in an up-cliff community called the Attic, where their lives had been burned up in the service of slower-living rich folk on the Shelf below. Celi was the great-grandson of rebels against that strange enslavement.

But if the folk of Foro ignored the stratification of time, the Philosophers, like HuroEldon, exploited it.

The Philosophers marketed knowledge. In their own community far down the slope, their lives, slowed by time, were stretched out. The Philosophers devoted their extended existences to recovering some of the wisdom that had been lost during the Caress, through study and patient archaeology. And they made their living by selling that learning back to those who had lost it. Thus HuroEldon had ascended grandly from his redshifted keep to instruct the people of Foro on how to turn their growing town from a heaped-up clutter into a functioning city with common services like water supplies and sewage, how to reclaim the ancient canal system to irrigate their fields, and so on; he could then step forward across time to advise on such projects as they were carried out.

Celi came to realise that this gift of knowledge was essential. It was only a few generations since the Forons had begun to grope their way out of the fog of fearful superstition that had been the enduring legacy of civilisation’s fall in the Formidable Caress. And it was even less time since the deeper psychological shock of that fall had begun to fade: the edge of the Shelf was still lined by the remains of funeral pyres, where the citizens of Foro, despairing of a future in which another Caress must inevitably shatter all they had built, had burned all their learning with them when they died.

But however useful his advice, for Forons, who prided themselves on their egalitarian instincts, it was hard to stomach Huro’s arrogance. That lecture on creationism had been a gift by Huro, rich with too much knowledge, a bauble tossed carelessly away by a man come to advise on sewage. His manner had been infuriating, let alone the content of his lecture.

And Huro had deflected Celi’s young life just as casually.

In the end, Celi did speak to the Natural Philosopher after the lecture. And within days he was assigned to Dela, the town’s physician, to begin his apprenticeship as a doctor. It all happened so quickly, his whole life upset. When he thought this over, Celi found he resented it, but he knew he would not step off the path he had chosen – or rather, that the Philosopher had chosen for him.

But when HuroEldon called on him again, long after that fateful night in the town hall, Celi found it hard to hide his nervousness.

HuroEldon walked grandly through Celi’s study. In his Philosopher’s cloak Huro was magnificent in this shabby background. He inspected Celi’s notes, carefully scraped onto spindling-skin parchment, and pored over an area he called Celi’s ‘laboratory’, an array of herbs, fluids and minerals labelled and annotated.

Five years had worn away. Celi, now twenty-one, was growing into his role in the town, as a practising physician – and as husband to Qaia, and expectant father of her first baby. But for HuroEldon, who had returned to his redshifted community of Philosophers, less than a year had passed.

‘I’m grateful that you called on me,’ Celi said stiffly.

‘I wanted to see how the town’s bright-eyed young doctor was progressing. It is always amusing to skip forward in time, so to speak, and see how such stories as yours have played out.’

‘I’m not a doctor yet,’ Celi said. ‘I’m still learning.’

‘That will never cease, I hope.’

‘And Dela is still working—’

‘That old witch! Oh, Dela has the charm, she knows the right words to murmur when Effigies go spiralling up from the dying. But
you
have something far more important than that.’ Huro tapped Celi’s temple. ‘A mind, my boy. That and your spirit, your doggedness. I saw it in you even during that night in the town hall.’

‘I’m surprised you remember it . . .’ But for Huro it wasn’t long ago at all. ‘Your lecture made a great impression on me.’

‘Obviously,’ Huro said dismissively.

‘It wasn’t you showing off your knowledge that intrigued me,’ Celi said, irritated. ‘It was Bera.’

‘Who? Oh, the little girl on the butcher’s slab. What use is all the knowledge in the world, you asked, if it can’t save a child from the Blight?’ He waved a hand at Celi’s home-made laboratory. ‘I can see you’ve devoted yourself to the cause. But the Blight won’t be wrestled into submission, will it?’

No, it wouldn’t. That was why Celi had asked to see HuroEldon.

Celi was already a competent physician. He could deliver babies, stitch up wounds, set broken limbs and comfort the dying, and he had acquired basic knowledge of the vectors of infection, of antisepsis and antibiotics. Much of this learning, preserved and sold by the Philosophers, was rumoured to be very old.

But Celi had also learned that there was nothing anybody could do about the Blight.