Xeelee: Endurance (45 page)

At last, border friction between the growing trading empires of Foro and Puul had provided the excuse everybody wanted for a cathartic war. It was a war that Belo had eagerly signed up for – a war that the Creationists of Puul had managed to carry all the way into the heart of Old Foro itself – but which, at the last, the Mechs had turned, thanks to their stunning bit of inventiveness with the balloons.

And now he and Tira had been ripped out of their time, out of the very context of their war.

As they discussed this, Tira said grimly, ‘We don’t even know how slowly time passes here, compared to home. We are surely already stranded far from our time. Everybody we knew must be dead. The war must be over, one way or another – perhaps even forgotten. And every day we are stuck here we are further removed from home.’

Belo took her hand. ‘As long as we are alive the war is not over, for the truth burns in our hearts.’

‘As long as we are alive,’ Tira echoed.

They held each other’s hands in a silent pact.

Some of Belo’s questions were answered perhaps a week after their stranding on this doleful plain, when Teeg’s group of captives, shepherded by the patrolling Weapon, encountered others.

It was a convocation of several groups, eight or ten of them, coming together across the emptiness of the plain. There were no more than a dozen people in each subdued little flock – and each was patrolled by a circling Weapon. These machines seemed more or less similar to the one associated with Teeg, but some showed wear, their carapaces patched with dull materials.

Belo was surprised to see a herd of spindlings, six-legged, nervous and skittish, briskly controlled by a Weapon. While most of the machines were content to patrol, this Weapon regularly spat fire into the dirt; perhaps the spindlings needed reminding how to behave.

And Belo spied another class of machines altogether: squat, ugly carts that ran along the ground. These devices gathered together heaps of dirt, which they circled jealously. Belo had no idea what their purpose could be.

As the groups converged, Belo expected Teeg to call out to the other slave-keepers and Weapon-masters, perhaps even to socialise with them. But he stayed as silent and sullen as the rest, following the machines as they swept busily over the dusty ground.

Their group was brought to a central place, marked out by the Weapons’ patrols. And here a very strange trade began to take place.

Under Teeg’s direction, Belo, Tira and the others began to hurl the rotting scraps of Dane’s corpse into the rough arena marked out by the toiling wheel-based machines. Belo saw that similar body parts, and even corpses, some heartbreakingly tiny, were thrown out by other groups.

Meanwhile one Weapon peremptorily isolated a spindling and sliced it up with brisk slashes of its sword of fire. The other animals bucked and mewled, their long necks twisting. The people took their chance to grab slices of meat, bloody, still warm.

But the other Weapons were circulating. Some of them settled on the mounds of rusty dirt that had been gathered by the wheeled machines. Others took chunks of meat, spindling or human, charred it black with their belly-fires, and absorbed it within their metal carapaces.

‘It is a kind of market,’ Belo whispered to Tira. ‘Meat is exchanged for meat, or for the heaped-up dirt.’

‘And this is how Teeg keeps his people alive,’ Tira said grimly, ‘by trading with other slave runners.’

But Belo, watching closely, suspected this strange process had little to do with Teeg. After all, it was the machines who took the dirt, and absorbed much of the meat into their bodies. ‘Perhaps these Weapons need meat as we do, for fuel,’ he mused.

Tira said, ‘But why the dirt?’

Belo had an idea about that too. He knew a little of the lore of iron-smelting; his mind was bright and acquisitive, and he knew a little about a great many things. Perhaps the Weapons needed this rusty dirt for its iron, or other minerals, to repair their gleaming bodies. And so these toiling wheeled carts gathered iron-rich dirt, or dug it out of the ground as ore, and exchanged it for the organic material, the meat delivered here by their hovering cousins.

There was a kind of economy operating here, Belo saw. But the trade wasn’t really about the people and their needs. It was about the Weapons.

When the strange trade was done, the various groups moved apart, shepherded by the Weapons. The toiling wheel-machines scurried away over the ground, no doubt in search of more iron-rich soil.

That night Teeg’s group ate comparatively well. Spindling flesh was tough and unsatisfying, but better than nothing. Belo believed that was because spindlings weren’t even native to the Old Earth, as humans were. Teeg muttered that sometimes the Weapons brought more palatable meat, rodents or birds.

As he ate, Belo looked out upon the dismal plain, which flickered with light storms, distant, irregular, silent. Day and night on Old Earth were controlled by the rhythmic cycling of these light storms across the face of this, the deepest Lowland. In the midst of a landscape of mysteries, even this simple pattern baffled Belo. For if time was stratified, how could the days and nights down here on the Lowland itself have the same duration as up on the Shelf? For so it felt to him, now that he was here.

But he had no answer to such questions. Belo was now a slave who ate roots and raw meat and slept in the dirt, a situation hardly conducive to theorising, and with time his thinking would surely grow stagnant. But for now he kept his wits.

And as he watched Teeg and his machine, he thought he began to see certain truths about their situation.

That night, in the dark, Tira came to Belo. ‘I think things are coming to a head,’ she whispered.

‘Teeg?’

‘He’s been looking at me . . . I think my grace period is up.’

‘And mine,’ said Belo.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He doesn’t need another male around. But as long as he had Dane’s flesh to trade, it was in his interests to keep me alive.’

Tira grimaced. ‘As a walking larder.’

‘Yes. Easier for me to walk than for my flesh to be carried. But now he needs my meat.’

Tira said, ‘As for me, I’ll fight to the last. But while he has that machine of his—’

‘Oh, I don’t think the Weapon is “his” at all.’

‘You don’t?’ She turned to him, her face grimy and drawn. ‘What’s going on here, Belo?’

‘I’ll explain it all,’ he whispered. ‘But first we need to deal with Teeg. This is what you must do . . .’

As the light of day began to gather, Belo sought out Teeg. The big man sat at the edge of the rough perimeter patrolled by the hovering Weapon, peering out at the other groups scattered over the plain. He watched Belo suspiciously.

Belo was careful to keep his hands in sight at all times. ‘I have something for you. Two things, actually. Gifts.’

Teeg pointed. ‘The Weapon is just over there.’

Belo held his hands up. ‘I won’t try anything; I know it’s pointless. And I know what you intend to do to me.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘I won’t fight. What’s the point? I’m sick of fighting. I’m sick of it all. I was sick of it before I fell down that chute to this hellhole. Just make it quick, all right?’

‘So what do you want?’

‘I told you. I have gifts for you. Can I reach inside my jacket?’

Teeg hesitated. ‘Slow as you like.’

Belo reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved his military-issue flask of gin. ‘It’s meant for the battlefield, to comfort the dying. An anaesthetic, you know?’ He unscrewed the cap and smelled the liquor. ‘Ah, the memories—’

‘Give me that.’ Teeg swiped the flask out of his hand and raised it to his lips. His small eyes closed; it was the nearest Belo had seen him come to showing pleasure.

‘When was the last time you had a real drink?’

Teeg grunted. ‘When my father’s blood was still wet under my fingernails.’

‘Lovely memory. Well, have it all. You’d have taken it anyhow once I was dead.’

‘That and your boots.’ Teeg laughed, an ugly noise, and he wiped his watering eyes with the back of a filthy hand.

The powerful drink was having the effect on a long-abstinent Teeg Belo had hoped for.

Teeg raised the bottle again. ‘So what’s your other gift?’

‘What? Oh – Tira. The woman. Take her.’

Teeg eyed him blearily. ‘You serious?’

‘She turned me down once too often.’

‘She turned
you
down?’

‘I mean, I got her out of the battle, and protected her from
you
, and she still won’t open her legs. I’ve had enough of her.’ Belo forced a smile. ‘Take her now, if you want. Have a party.’

‘Where is she?’

‘When I tried it on she got away.’

‘What?’ Teeg, hot with the drink, got to his feet, swaying.

Belo pointed into the dark. ‘Somewhere over there. I couldn’t see. You can get her back. You’re the boss here, aren’t you?’

‘Damn right.’ Teeg took a step forward, two.

And the Weapon came drifting up with an almost-silent whisper of displaced air.

‘Wait.’ Teeg tried to get back inside the perimeter of its patrol. Belo braced himself to push him back – but compact bundles of rags hurtled past him and slammed into Teeg, knocking him to the ground, right in the path of the Weapon. Cold eyes gleamed in small, begrimed faces; Teeg’s slaves had rebelled at last, shoving him out of the Weapon’s cordon.

And the Weapon spat fire.

The wounds didn’t kill Teeg, not straight away. But Belo saw from the way he tried to hold closed his belly that the end wouldn’t be far away. Teeg’s eyes were full of pain and hatred.

Tira stood over him. She had been hiding among Teeg’s women. ‘An appropriate way for you to die.’

‘She’s right,’ Belo said. ‘After all, you lied, didn’t you? That Weapon was never under your control.
You have been farmed by it
, farmed by a machine, just as much as these others, your hapless slaves. The only difference was that you had the cunning to turn the situation to your advantage. But now it’s over for you. Well, I’ll have my boots back. Don’t trouble to take them off. I can wait.’

And he sat on the dirt while the flickering light of day gathered in the sky, and Teeg’s life blood spilled on the ground.

For the first time the women talked, and even laughed. The children, hesitantly, began to play.

And still the Weapon continued its deadly circling.

‘It is all about the Weapons,’ Belo said to Tira. ‘It always was.’ He smiled. ‘I call myself a Creationist. I should be ashamed of myself for not seeing it sooner.’

The Creationists believed that everything about Old Earth had been made for a conscious purpose. But they also believed that the world was very ancient, and that time, too, had shaped the world and its contents – even here, where time ran like syrup.

‘The Weapons are made things,’ he said. ‘And made for one thing—’

‘To fight in battle.’

‘Yes. Imagine going to war with such gleaming beasts at your command! But when those who had made them had finished their war, they forgot the Weapons, discarded them. And the Weapons, intelligent, purposeful in their own way, sought a new reason to exist.’

The abandoned Weapons, programmed to survive, must have fought among themselves, cannibalising each other for raw materials. But with time a more stable ‘food chain’ emerged, with the toiling ore-extractors at the bottom, and the most aggressive battlefield machines at the top. The Weapons needed organic material too, which they took from animals like the spindlings – and, later, humans.

So a kind of ecology had emerged, involving humans and Weapons and spindlings: an ecology composed of people, and the technology they had made, and animals, which, Creationists believed, had been brought to this world from somewhere else entirely. It was an ecology that could not have existed without the actions of space-spanning humans, far in the past. But it was the Weapons that had emerged as top predator, machines that learned to farm the remote descendants of those who first made them.

‘It is a very fable of Creationism,’ Belo breathed, marvelling. ‘Wait until I tell them about this back at the seminary in Puul!’

‘Except,’ Tira said dolefully, ‘the seminary, and Puul itself, probably don’t even exist any more.’

‘True, true.’ For a brief moment, exhilarated by new understanding, he had forgotten where they were.

‘And anyhow,’ Tira said, ‘I don’t see how any of this helps
us.
We are just as much slaves of the Weapon as these women ever were.’

‘Ah, but we are not like Teeg,’ he said. ‘Whatever his crime, he was a survivor of an age deep in the past, a pretechnological age. We, though, come from an age used to machines, though not so advanced as these. I am confident we will find a way to convince our Weapon to serve
us
, rather than the other way around.’

One of Teeg’s women tapped his arm. ‘We help you. We watch machine. Long, long time. Know its ways.’ Her accent was stronger than Teeg’s; he wondered from what era she had come. She smiled at him. She looked very young.

‘There you are,’ Belo told Tira. ‘We can’t fail!’

‘And then what?’

‘And then we will go home, and finish the war.’

So they did.

By the time they stormed back up the time chute, so many years had passed on the Shelf that the war itself was a matter of history, the theological dispute over the nature of the world had been transformed by new evidence, and conquerors and conquered had interbred so much that nobody could untangle the whole mess anyhow. But none of that mattered as Belo and Tira, free and vengeful, with a Weapon of untold potential at their command, began to make their own history.

THE LOWLAND EXPEDITION

AD
c
.4.8 BILLION YEARS

Enna relished her flights in the spotting balloon.

She loved to see the Expedition train strung out across the Lowland’s arid plain, with its spindling-drawn wagons, the chains of servants and bearers, the gleaming coach that transported her father and his precious books, even the small flock of runner-birds. If the weather was fine the Philosophers themselves would walk alongside the wagons, marching into the Lowland’s mysteries, arguing endlessly. The Lowland Expedition was a grand gesture of the civilisation of the Shelf that had spawned it.

And it was brave too, for all the explorers knew that they could never go home again, whatever they discovered. Already the communities they had left had been whisked by stratified time into the deep past; the explorers would bring home their treasure of knowledge to their own remote descendants in an unknowable future.

Down there on the ground was Tomm, one of the junior cartographers. Whenever Enna flew, Tomm always wore a special red cap so she could pick him out, a bright-red dot in the dusty line of Philosophers. At twenty-one he was just a year older than Enna herself – and he was her lover, though that was a secret to all but her closest friends, and certainly to her father, or so she hoped. When he saw her, he waved.

But his waving was sluggish, like an old man’s. When she rode her balloon up into the air, Enna was ascending into quicker time. If Tomm’s ears had been sensitive enough he would have heard her heart fluttering like a bird’s, and conversely when she looked down at him she saw him slowed, trapped in glutinous, redshifted time.

The balloon flights were invaluable aids to navigation, but Bayle, Enna’s father, had strictly ordered that flights should be short, and that his party should take it in turns to man them, so that no one fell too far out of synchronisation with the rest. ‘This trip is challenging enough for us all,’ he insisted, ‘without the cogs of time slipping too.’ Enna accepted this wisdom. Even now, despite the joy of the flight, she longed to break through the barriers of streamed time that separated her from her love.

But when she spied the city on the horizon she forgot even Tomm.

The light of the Lowland was strange, shifting. Storms of light constantly swept across its surface, silent and flaring white. These founts of brightness were in fact the major source of daylight on Old Earth, but they made the seeing uncertain. Enna thought at first that the bright white line she spied on the horizon must be weather: a low cloud, a dust devil, even a minor light storm. But in a rare instant of clear seeing, the bright band resolved into a cluster of geometrical shapes, unmistakably artificial. It must be a city, stranded in the middle of the Lowland, where nobody had expected to find any signs of humanity but the meanest degradation. And Enna had discovered it.

She turned immediately to the pilot. ‘Do you see it? There, the city, can you see? Oh, take us down! Take us down!’

The expedition’s chief pilot was a bluff good-humoured fellow called Momo. A long-time military-service companion of her father, he was one of the few people to whom Bayle would entrust his daughter’s life. As he had lost one eye in the wars he ‘couldn’t see a blessed thing’, he told her. But he believed her, and began to tug on the ropes that controlled the hot-air balloon’s burner.

Enna leaned over the descending gondola, yelling out news of her discovery. As the time differentials melted away, faces turned slowly up towards her.

The Philosophers entered the city in wonder. Enna walked hand in hand with Tomm.

The city was a jumble of cubes and rhomboids, pyramids and tetrahedrons – even one handsome dodecahedron. The buildings towered over the explorers, immense blocks of a geometric perfection that would have shamed even the grand civic centre of New Foro, Enna thought.

There were no doors, though, and the windows weren’t glazed. And there were plenty of other peculiarities. Without inner partitions, each building was like ‘one big room’, as Tomm put it. Between the buildings the ground was just dirt, not paved or cobbled as were the streets of New Foro, back on the Shelf. It was more
abstract
than any city Enna had seen before, more like an art installation perhaps. And yet these great structures were clearly habitable.

‘And there’s nobody here,’ Enna whispered. ‘Not a soul! It’s so strange.’

‘But wonderful,’ Tomm said. He was tall, strong but sparsely built, with a languid grace that disturbed her dreams. ‘This must be a terribly ancient place. Look at the finish of these walls – what is this stuff, stone, ceramic, glass? Far beyond anything we are capable of. Perhaps the builders were Weapon-makers.’

‘Maybe, but don’t you think it’s all rather eerie? And the layout is such a jumble—’

‘A cartographer’s nightmare.’ Tomm laughed.

‘And why are there no windows or doors?’

‘We can make windows,’ he said. ‘We can hang doors.’ He took her hands. ‘Questions, questions, Enna! You’re worse than all these grumpy old Philosophers. This is your discovery. Relish the moment!’

There was a deep
harrumph
. Bayle, Enna’s father, came walking towards them, trailed by acolytes, lesser men but Philosophers themselves. Tomm hastily released Enna’s hands.

‘But Enna is right,’ Bayle said. ‘There is some familiarity about the place, and yet perhaps that merely blinds us to how much is strange . . .’

Bayle wore his dress uniform, topped off by his cap of spindling fur and feathers. Though he had devoted the last three decades of his life to science, Bayle had retained an honorary rank in the army of New Foro, and ‘for the sake of general morale’, as he put it, he donned his uniform to mark moments of particular significance during their long journey. But Enna knew that no matter how extravagant his appearance, her father’s mind was sharper than any of those around him.

He tapped the walls of the nearest building with his stick. ‘Certainly the layout follows no obvious rational design, as does the centre of New Foro, say. But there are patterns here.’ He walked them briskly through the narrow alleys between the buildings. ‘Can you see how the largest buildings are clustered on the outside, and the smaller huts are in their shade?’

‘It almost looks organic,’ Enna said impulsively. ‘Like a forest, dominated by its tallest trees.’

Bayle eyed her appreciatively. ‘
I
was going to compare it to a bank of salt crystals.’ Salt had become something of an obsession of Bayle’s during their journey. There was salt everywhere in the Lowlands; there were even plains covered with the stuff, the relics of dried-up lakes. Bayle was gathering evidence for his contention that the Lowland had once been the bed of a mighty body of water. ‘But I admit, daughter, that your analogy may be more apt. This city is not planned as we think of it. It is almost as if it has
grown
here.’

Tomm seemed confused. ‘But that’s just an analogy. I mean, this is a city, built by human hands – though maybe long ago. That much is obvious, isn’t it?’

Bayle snapped, ‘If everything were obvious we would not have needed to come out here to study it.’ He gave Enna a look that spoke volumes.
The boy has a pretty face but a shallow mind
, said that withering expression.
You can do better
.

But Tomm was Enna’s choice, and she returned his glare defiantly.

They were interrupted by a raucous hail. ‘Sir, sir! Look what I’ve found!’ It was Momo. The burly, one-eyed pilot came stumbling around the corner of a building.

And walking with him was a woman. Dressed in some kind of scraped animal skin, she was tall, aged perhaps fifty, in her way elegant despite her ragged costume. She eyed the Philosophers, detached. In that first moment Enna thought she seemed as cold, strange and hard-edged as her city.

Bayle stepped forward, his gloved hand extended. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘if you can understand me, we have a great deal to discuss.’ The woman took Bayle’s hand and shook it. The subordinate Philosophers applauded enthusiastically.

It was yet another remarkable moment in this unprecedented trek of discovery. This was Bayle’s first contact with any of the ‘lost souls’ believed to inhabit the Lowland, stranded here from ages past; to find such people and ‘rehabilitate’ them had been one of his stated goals from the beginning.

But Enna caught a strange whiff about the woman, an iron stink that at first she couldn’t place. It was only later that she realised it was the smell of raw meat – of blood.

As night fell, the explorers and their attendants and servants dispersed gladly into the city’s bare buildings. After the dirt of the plain, it was going to be a relief to spend a night within solid walls.

Bayle himself established his base in one of the grander buildings on the edge of the city, bathed in light even at the end of the day. It seemed he planned to spend most of the night in conversation with the woman who was, as far as anybody could tell, the city’s sole inhabitant; he said they had much to learn from each other. He kissed his daughter goodnight, trusting her safety to his companions, and to her own common sense.

So it was a betrayal of him, of a sort, when in the darkest night Enna sought out Tomm’s warm arms. It wasn’t hard for her to put her guilt aside; at twenty she had a healthy awareness of how far her father’s opinions should govern her life.

But she dreamed. She dreamed that the building itself gathered her up and lifted her into the sky, just as she was cradled by Tomm’s arms – and she thought she smelled that iron tang again, the scent of blood.

The dream became disturbing, a dream of confinement.

Bayle had formulated many objectives for his Expedition.

Always visible from Foro, Puul and the other towns of the Shelf, the Lowland, stretching away below in redshifted ambiguity, had been a mystery throughout history. Now that mystery would be dispelled. Cartographers would map the Lowland. Historians, anthropologists and moralists hoped to make contact with the lost people of the Lowland plains, if any survived. Clerics, mystics, doctors and other Philosophers hoped to learn something about Effigies, those spectral apparitions that rose from dying human bodies, or some of them, and fled to the redshifted mysteries of the Lowland. Perhaps some insight would be gained into the cause of the Formidable Caresses, the tremendous rattlings that regularly shook human civilisation to pieces. There were even a few soldiers and armourers, hoping to track down Weapons, ancient technology gone wild, too wily to have been captured so far.

There had already been many successes. Take the light storms, for instance.

Old Earth’s blueshifted sky was a dome of stars that spun around the world. Day and night, and the seasons of the year, were governed not by the sky but by the flickering uncertainties of the light that emanated from the Lowland. Now Bayle’s physicists had discovered that these waves of light pulsed at many frequencies, ‘like the harmonics of a plucked string,’ as one mathematician had described it. Not only that, because of the redshifting of the light that struggled up to higher altitudes, the harmonic peaks that governed the daily cycles here were different from those to be observed from Foro, up on the Shelf, where time ran faster.

Enna was walked through the logic by her father. The effects of time stratification, redshifting and light cycling subtly intermeshed, so that whether you were up on the Shelf or down in the Lowland the length of day and night you
perceived
was roughly similar. This surely couldn’t be a coincidence. As Bayle said, ‘It adds up to a remarkable mathematical argument for the whole world having been
designed
to be habitable by people and their creatures.’

That, of course, had provoked a lively debate.

Forons were traditionally Mechanists, adhering to a strand of natural philosophy that held that there was no governing mind behind the world, that everything about it had emerged from the blind working-out of natural laws – like the growth of a salt crystal, say, rather than the purposeful construction of a machine. However, there were hard-line Creationists who argued that
everything
on Old Earth required a purposeful explanation.

After centuries of debate a certain compromise view had emerged, it seemed to Enna, a melding of extreme viewpoints based on the evidence. Even the most ardent Mechanists had been forced to accept that the world contained overwhelming evidence that it had been manufactured, or at least heavily engineered. But if Old Earth was a machine, it was a very old machine, and in the ages since its formation, natural processes of the kind argued for by the Mechanists had surely operated to modify the world. Old Earth was a machine that had evolved.

At the heart of Bayle’s expedition was a deep ambition to reconcile the two great poles of human thought, the Mechanist versus the Creationist – and to end centuries of theological conflict over which too much blood had been spilled. He and his companions would see through this goal, even though they could only return to a distant future.

In the morning Enna and Tomm were among the first to stir. They emerged from their respective buildings, and greeted each other with a jolly innocence that probably fooled nobody.

Cartographer Tomm had been detailed to take up the balloon for a rapid aerial survey, to provide context for the more painstaking work on the ground. Enna, free of specific chores, decided to ride up with him.

But there was a problem. They couldn’t find Momo. The pilot was a habitual early riser, like Bayle himself – a relic from his military days, it seemed. He was
always
up for Enna.

Tomm was unconcerned. ‘So old One-eye treated himself to a party last night. He won’t be the only one—’

‘That isn’t like Momo!’ Enna snapped, growing impatient. When Tomm treated her like a foolish child, Enna had some sympathy for her father’s view of him. ‘Look, this is a strange city, which we barely explored before splitting up. You can help me find Momo, or use the hot air you’re spouting to go blow up the balloon yourself.’

He was crestfallen, but when she stalked off to search, Tomm, embarrassed, hurried after her.