Xeelee: Endurance (48 page)

‘Not just that. Your mother rebelled when you were born. That’s very rare. The human community here was founded from a pool of scholars, but that was many generations ago. We fear that by caring for you we may have bred out a certain initiative. That was how you came to our attention, Telni. Your mother rebelled, and
you
seek to answer questions. There may be questions you can answer that we can’t. There may be questions you can
ask
that we can’t.’

‘Like what?’

‘You have to ask. That’s the point.’

He thought. ‘What are the Formidable Caresses?’

‘The ends of the world. Or at least, of civilisation. In the past, and in the future.’

‘How does time work?’

‘That’s another question you can answer yourself.’

He was mystified. ‘How?’

A seam opened up on the Weapon’s sleek side, like a wound, revealing a dark interior. Powpy had to push his little hand inside and grope around for something. Despite the Weapon’s control, Telni could see the boy’s revulsion. He drew out something that gleamed, complex, a mechanism. He handed it to Telni.

Telni turned it over in his hands, fascinated. It was warm. ‘What is it?’

‘A clock. A precise one. You’ll work out what to do with it.’ The Weapon moved, gliding up another metre into the air. ‘One more question.’

‘Why do I feel . . . sometimes . . .’ It was hard to put into words. ‘Like I should be somewhere else? My mother said everybody feels like that, when they’re young. But . . . Is it a stupid question?’

‘No. It is a very important question. But it is one you will have to answer for yourself. We will see you again.’ It drifted away, two metres up in the air, with the little boy running beneath, like a dog on a long lead. But it paused once more, and the boy turned and spoke again. ‘What will you do now?’

Telni grinned. ‘Go feed moss to a spindling.’

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—’

‘The stratification of time. The higher up you raise your pendulums, the faster they will swing.’ She smiled. ‘Even a geologist understands that much. Isn’t it about five per cent per metre?’

‘Yes. But that’s only a linear approximation. With more accurate measurements I’ve detected an underlying curved function . . .’ The rate at which time flowed faster, Telni believed, was actually inversely proportional to the distance from the centre of Old Earth. ‘It only
looks
linear, simply proportional to height, if you pick points close enough together that you can’t detect the curve. And an inverse relationship makes sense, because that’s the same mathematical form as the planet’s gravitational potential, and time stratification is surely some kind of gravitational effect . . .’ He hoped this didn’t sound naive. His physics, based on philosophies imported from Foro centuries ago with the Platform’s first inhabitants, was no doubt primitive compared to the teachings Mina had been exposed to.

Mina peered up at a sky where a flock of stars, brightly blueshifted, wheeled continually around an empty pole. ‘I think I understand,’ she said. ‘My mathematics is rustier than it should be. That means that the time distortion doesn’t keep rising on and on. It comes to some limit.’

‘Yes! And that asymptotic limit is a distortion factor of around three hundred and twenty thousand – compared to the Shelf level, which we’ve always taken as our benchmark. So one year here corresponds to nearly a third of a million years, up there in the sky.’

She looked up in wonder. ‘It is said that nearly ten thousand years have elapsed since the last Formidable Caress. An interval that spans all the history we know. But ten thousand years
here
—’

‘Corresponds to about three billion years
there.
In the sky. We are falling into the future, Mina! And if you study the sky, as some do, you can see the working-out of time on a huge scale. A year up there passes in a mere hundred seconds down here, and we see the starscape march to that pace. And even as the sky turns, the stars in their flight spark and die, they swim towards and away from each other . . . We live in a great system of stars, which we see as a band across the sky. Some say there are other such systems, and that they too evolve and change.

‘And some believe that once Old Earth was a world
without
this layering of time, a world like many others, perhaps, hanging among the stars. Its people were more or less like us. But Old Earth came under some kind of threat. And so the elders pulled a blanket of time over their world and packed it off to the future: “Old Earth is a jar of time, stopped up to preserve its children” – that’s how it has been written.’

‘That’s all speculation.’

‘Yes. But it would explain such a high differential of perceived time. I’m always trying to improve my accuracy. The pendulums need to be long enough to give a decent period, but not too long or else the time stratification becomes significant
even over the length of the pendulum itself
, and the physics gets very complicated—’

She slipped her hand into his. ‘It’s a wonderful discovery. Nobody before, maybe not since the last Caress, has worked this out before.’

He flushed, pleased. But something made him confess, ‘I did need the Weapon’s clock to measure the effects sufficiently accurately. And the Weapon set me asking questions about time in the first place.’

‘It doesn’t matter what the Weapon did. This is your work. You should be happy.’

‘I don’t feel happy,’ he blurted.

She frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’

Suddenly he was opening up to her in ways he’d never spoken to anybody else. ‘Because I don’t always feel as if I
fit.
As if I’m not like other people.’ He looked at her doubtfully, wondering if she would conclude he was crazy. ‘Maybe that’s why the Machine has been drawn to me since the day I was born. And maybe that’s why I’m turning out to be a good Philosopher. I can look at the world from outside, and see patterns others can’t. Do you ever feel like that?’

Still holding his hand, she walked him back to the wheel and stroked a spindling’s stubby mane, evidently drawing comfort from the simple physical contact. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Maybe everybody does. But the world is as it is, and you just have to make the best of it. Do you get many birds on this island?’