It rained for most of the day in the Albina Valley, as it did for the majority of days on the northern fringes of the Sansone Mountains. Florian was used to the microclimate of the foothills. Seven years he’d spent as the valley’s forest warden, looking after the trees that grew up the broad slopes, maintaining the firebreak lanes, watching out for roxwolf packs. So he’d learned that for eight months each year, chaotic southern winds would push the clouds through the high snowcapped peaks before sending them slithering over the foothills, where they coated the forested slopes in a persistent drizzle. Then the summer months arrived, and the sea winds died down. That was when a more intermittent rain came in from the north, carried by the warm air from the heart of the continent.
He’d known the rain would end by midafternoon, recognizing the weather pattern as soon as he rose that morning. So after breakfast he stayed close to the little lodge with its shaggy thatch roof and shifted stodgy clumps of dalfrond from the big pile to the metal trailer ready to take to the trenches that afternoon. It was the Vatni who brought the stuff to him, dredging the dark-green water weed from the lake at the bottom of the valley where they had a village. Teal, his springer spaniel, trotted along behind him, curved bushy tail wagging about and soaking up its usual quantity of mud.
Once the trailer was full, he backed the four-wheel-drive SMI (Siegen Motor Industry) Openland truck up to it and hitched the two together. The trailer’s left tire looked slightly flat again. It’d been three weeks since he filed a report of the slow puncture with the county office of the forest warden service. Jackso, the warden two valleys to the west, had loaned him a compressor, which now sat in the lean-to shed on the side of the lodge. He unwound the air hose and screwed it onto the tire’s valve. The compressor’s electric motor started with a vigorous whirring sound, and the tire inflated.
That the cottage had an electrical supply had come as a surprise to Florian back when he arrived, but the full electrification of Bienvenido had been one of Slvasta’s prestige projects, giving everybody the same benefit of the new and modern post-Transition civilization, no matter where they lived. Dams were built across hundreds of valleys, bringing employment to tens of thousands in every county, while newly nationalized factories retooled and re-educated their workforce to build the hydro-turbines Mother Laura had designed before she sacrificed herself to exterminate the Prime.
Not that there were many uses for electricity in the warden’s lonely lodge. Each of his four rooms had an electric lightbulb. There was a radio. A pump shunted water from the rainwater tank through the back boiler on the wood-fired cooking range, allowing him to have hot water in the sink and shower. He also had some woodworking tools in the lean-to.
That was all Florian needed. Ever since Lurji, his brother, had fled the PSR—supposedly to Port Chana, where the Eliter radical movement was strongest—Florian had wanted to be by himself. He never had gotten on very well with people—a situation exacerbated by his Eliter status, condemning him to constant taunts and bullying at school, and even worse victimization during his time as a conscript for the county regiment.
It was math that interested him, and he was good at it—an ability magnified thanks to his macrocellular cluster. He even made a few modifications to the binary codes of the operating system they all used, improving the file search function. The Eliter community, of course, was eager to have him work on refining and expanding their routines, which was an ongoing project. But for all their solidarity, they endured relentless persecution, driving angry people like his brother into more open acts of defiance. That was a life he knew would bring him nothing but misery. And outside the Eliter community, there were no intellectually challenging jobs available, not for the likes of him. He could never escape his heritage. Eliter status was on your birth certificate and identity papers, condemning your life. It didn’t even matter if an Eliter’s children didn’t have functioning macrocellular clusters. They were still deemed Elite—just another injustice perpetrated by the government, of which there were many. Some Eliters had managed to hide their family’s abilities from the PSR, but not many in this day and age. If he joined the civil service he would never rise above grade five—junior management level. The university wouldn’t allow him to study. And he would certainly never be allowed to join the Astronaut Regiment, whose Liberty missions he’d worshiped from an early age.
Most would consider the forest warden job, with its isolation, to be a curse, but to Florian it was a blessing. He joined the warden service the same week he was discharged from his national service. They accepted him without question; these days, few people were interested in such a career. He’d heard nearly a third of the valleys under their stewardship lacked a warden.
Out here in the seclusion of Albina Valley, he could spend a few hours each day doing the actual job, while the rest of the time he could sit and think. His macrocellular cluster allowed him to become an even greater recluse, giving him the ability to live quite literally inside his own head to the exclusion of everything else.
In the afternoon when the cloud had lifted to form a dank roof over the valley and the drizzle abated, he drove the Openland truck up the eastern slope with Teal sitting in the passenger seat. The Openland’s fat tires had deep treads, giving it plenty of traction on the spindly lingrass that covered the ground between the trees. Albina Valley was covered in a mix of terrestrial pine and native browfrey, a deciduous tree sprouting long trains of gray-blue leaves that dangled like a spindly moss from its whip-thin branches.
The main tracks were cut vertically up the slope, with firebreak paths extending outward at ninety degrees every 150 meters, dividing the entire valley wall into a grid. Some tracks were quite overgrown, which he dutifully logged in his memory files. He would come back with a chain saw on a dry day and trim down the worst of the overhanging branches. Then there were the other paths through the trees, produced by wild goats and shalsheiks meandering along gradients. Even his memory log didn’t have all of them mapped out yet.
Twenty minutes after leaving the lodge, he turned off the main track and rumbled along firebreak AJ54 (in his private designation). The firebreak was narrow, and the lingrass thick and cloying. There was a small circular clearing five hundred meters in, which the Openland could just turn around in—if you knew how and took it slowly. He kept a hard lock on the steering wheel as the fronds of browfrey slapped against the windscreen.
When he killed the motor, silence engulfed him like a benign presence. He sat still for a moment, relishing the seclusion. It simply wasn’t possible to get farther away from people than here, which made these times away from the lodge quite precious.
“Go on, boy,” he told Teal. “Find me some rabbits.” Teal obediently jumped out of the Openland and started pushing through the tangled undergrowth. The forest’s rabbit population had been increasing a lot lately, despite the native bussalores preying on them. Knapsvine and jibracken, which grew in abundance between the tree trunks, were excellent foods for them. Unfortunately it meant the newly planted saplings on the western slopes were getting badly chewed. Again, the county’s warden service office had known about it for the last two years. Nothing had been done.
Waxed-leather trousers tucked into knee-high boots kept the water from the lingrass off his legs as he gathered up bundles of dalfrond from the trailer and carried them down to the trench. There were eighteen identical trenches scattered at random around the valley. He’d methodically dug them out during the first eighteen months, his spade making light work of the soft peaty soil. A meter and a half deep, two wide, and twenty long. The bottom was covered in lengths of wood that proved too spindly for use in the lodge’s range stove. Nothing odd or suspicious about that, if anyone stumbled across them. Nor the layer of smelly dalfrond scattered on top; that was applied to accelerate the wood’s decay.
Florian scanned the trench and smiled as he counted eleven waltan fungi that had fallen in. The waltan was a strange thing—a fan-shaped nodule of fungus that was mobile. It didn’t move fast, but it could sense the rotting wood it fed on, and moved inexorably toward it. And the trenches with their decomposing branches and bark were a rich source. Unfortunately, once the fungus fell in and began to leach the nutrients it thrived on, it then had no way of climbing up the trench’s vertical walls afterward. The trenches were the most basic trap it was possible to create.
When he’d finished scattering the fresh dalfrond weeds over the wood, Florian picked up the tough fibrous waltans, the smallest of which was the size of his head, and dumped them in the trailer.
Teal reappeared, his head hanging low and his muddy coat snagged with tiny twigs and knapsvine burrs.
“Nothing, huh?” Florian said. “Don’t know why I bother with you.”
Teal clambered back into the passenger seat and gave him a forlorn look.
Florian drove to the drying shed, hidden in a dense clump of pines along firebreak FB39, and hung the waltans up in net bags. It took at least three months to dry one out properly in Albina Valley’s humid atmosphere. There were a couple of batches that had withered to the point they were starting to crumble through the netting, so he carried those back to the trailer before heading home.
Evening was Florian’s favorite time, and he had a very specific routine. As the sun began to sink below the horizon he loaded several logs into the range cooker, and put the big pot of rabbit stew back onto the hotplate. His kitchen took up half of the living room. Over the years he’d added several pots and pans, along with a drawer full of new utensils. Crockery pots with rubber-seal lids held his flour and sugar. Herbs from the garden hung on a rack above the range cooker, drying out. One day, when savings from his minuscule wages had grown enough, he planned on buying an electrical refrigerator, which would probably double his electricity bill.
First there was the chicken coop to check. Three new eggs there.
“They’ll do for breakfast, boy,” he told Teal happily. Teal wagged his tail on the other side of the wire mesh. Teal was no longer allowed inside the pen after getting a little bit carried away two years ago. It was for his own good; a chicken claw had left quite a graze on his nose.
Goat pen next. Florian sat on the stool and milked Embella. He got just over half a liter from her, which was one reason he wasn’t hurrying for the refrigerator.
Inside again, and he began to mix a new batch of bread dough for tomorrow, scattering in a few rosemary leaves then kneading it for a good ten minutes before shaping it into a hemisphere. The proofed dough from yesterday was taken out of the bowl, and the fresh one put in. He draped the bowl with a damp cloth and checked the temperature of the oven, which was up to two hundred degrees Celsius.
The bread was put in the oven, and the stew stirred. There wasn’t much left.
“Be taking a trip tonight, boy,” he told Teal. “Fancy myself some lamb for next week.”
A subroutine in his macrocellular cluster began counting down. The timer was one he’d written extra code for, so it could count down as well as up. He settled into the comfy chair, switched off the electric bulb, and closed his eyes.
The routines squirted colored sparks into the darkness, which rapidly coalesced into the image of the Warrior Angel—the Eliter’s standard activation symbol. Icographics, the Eliters called them. Strips of translucent color, like malleable glass, that could be bent and twisted and stretched to provide illustration, mainly for graphs. He’d welcomed them when he was younger, using them to help structure equations. You could create three-dimensional fields of them, and punch them with dark alphanumerics, creating matrices of numbers governed by equations, transforming the physical into mathematics, explaining so much of the world. He’d achieved a lot with them back then, before growing frustrated with their limitations. So he dug back through the icographic formatting routine and began to add code of his own, enhancing functionality.
Florian’s mindscape unfolded. He was no longer in a dark lodge in Albina Valley. Now he was sitting on a beach on some tropical island. His skin felt the warmth of the sun, he smelled the sea air—or what he determined sea air would smell like from the descriptions he’d read, sort of like sweet rose perfume. Waves lapped against the snow-white sand. It was the world of Danivan’s Voyage, the book he’d read when he was eleven, captivating him because it described Bienvenido after the Fallers had been purged. A glimpse of the future he had clung to throughout all the bad days, then years.
It wasn’t perfect. There were areas that lacked color. Some sections weren’t three-dimensional, or flickered between the two. But he was making progress, exploring the abilities of his macrocellular clusters, the effects that could be generated within his mind. And the code that made it possible. Code was king. Code was his true life now.
He settled back and summoned up the audio routines. They opened around him, column after column written by his own designator subroutines. He could play music from a file now. It wasn’t particularly clear, and there were lulls. A lot of that was to do with his radio; reception in Albina Valley wasn’t good. Atmospherics affected the shortwave signals, and the new medium-wave services broadcast out of Opole were blocked by the valley walls.
He had plans for all that. Plans for a routine that could take the meager music files and use them as a basis to compose new music, with him as a conductor. Plans to build a medium-wave radio with an aerial on the peak of the valley. Plans to build a converter that would change analog signals to digital, so that his macrocellular clusters could receive them directly; that way, he wouldn’t have to rely on inefficient old ears. So many ideas. Aunt Terannia sent him books about mathamatica and electrical circuits when she could, but they were all mimeographed copies of originals and didn’t tell him what he really needed to know. Still, they gave him the fundamentals, so code could be written to solve the problems. Code could do anything. Code could save the world.
It had been dark for three hours when Florian drove the Openland down to the lake at the base of the valley. His eyes provided him with a grainy green-tinged vision of the landscape, allowing him to keep the headlights off. The only people likely to see the four-by-four would be people doing the same thing as him, but avoiding attention was second nature for Eliters.
The lake was seven kilometers long and three at the widest. Nine streams fed into it, with the river Kellehar running out the far end. It was one of the hundreds of tributary rivers that merged into the river Crisp, which drained the lands to the north of the Sansone Mountains all the way up to the Pritwolds, and from the coast to the west of Opole.
Florian drew up on the edge of the Vatni village and switched the engine off. The aliens had been here for more than sixty years, swimming upstream from the coast to spread down several tributaries. They tended to settle on lakes like this one, which weren’t close to any main human towns. Their huts were long cylindrical affairs woven out of pine and browfrey branches that seemed to be connected into a single chaotic maze.
Infrared vision showed him the bright scarlet blobs of fires burning on hearths in the center of the larger huts, the cooler amber haze of smoke rising up through long clay flues. The Vatni didn’t have much to trade with humans; the cultures were too different. Back on Aqueous they didn’t even have fire. The tiny islands on that world of water had never evolved any kind of woody vegetation; the best their biosphere had come up with was a kind of spiky coral lichen. Yet once those initial Vatni families arrived on Bienvenido, they’d readily taken to the innovation, and they now cooked a lot of food. They said their ancestral memories showed them they’d once had fire back on whatever world they’d originated from prior to the Void. Knives were also a popular item to be traded, along with basic tools. Some of the larger coastal settlements even had electricity, supplied from Bienvenido’s grid.
Most Vatni settlements exchanged fish for human goods. The village in Albina Valley supplied Florian with fish from the lake, but mainly he paid them cash for the dalfrond. Cash he used to buy what they wanted from the general store in Wymondon on his fortnightly trips for his own supplies.
It was Mooray that came out to greet him. Like all his kind, the Vatni was nearly three and a half meters long from his nose to the tip of his dorsal tail. His body was a fat cylinder weighing in at nearly a thousand kilograms. Yet despite their bulk, the Vatni were surprisingly lithe, even out of the water. Mooray’s hide was a dense gray-brown fur, like bristles that had fused together, which shone with a waxy oil that made it look like he was permanently damp. That color showed he was in his early middle age. As a Vatni got older, the hide would tinge into blotchy rust-red.
He waddled toward Florian on his three flattened tentacle-like tails that wriggled across the compacted ground like synchronized snakes. The thick dorsal tail was the shortest, used for balance alone when Mooray was out of the water, with the lower two providing traction. The trisymmetrical limb configuration was repeated for the mid-body flippers. His dorsal flipper was purely a fin for when he was in the water, while the remaining pair of serpentine flippers were longer and had pincer tips. There were also three tusks protruding from Mooray’s triangular mouth, with the longest one at the top, curving down.
Three large gold-hued multisegment eyes peered down at Florian, and Mooray emitted a lengthy liquid squealing sound, as if he were gurgling a thick syrup, interspaced with fast clicking as his tusks drummed together.
Florian brought up his translation routine.
“Greetings, my friend Florian of the land,” Mooray was saying. “Are you meat hunting again this night?”
Florian took the modified flute out of his pocket and positioned the castanets carefully in his right hand. Using Vatni speech was a prolonged operation, even for an Eliter, but the routines governed his lips and tongue movements, allowing him a decent stab at speaking Vatni directly. “My gratitude to you for seeing me, friend Mooray of the water. You are correct in thinking I would hunt this night. Will you honor me with your presence?”
“I will be delighted to go with you. Have you made progress with the killing apparatus?”
“Progress is slow, for which I apologize. I think you would require a pump handle to pull the string back.” Modifying a crossbow for Mooray had been an ongoing project for over a year now. Shaping it to be held by Vatni flippers had been relatively easy, but those pincers didn’t really have the strength to crank the string back. An additional mechanism was needed for that. Routines could create basic three-dimensional designs, but Florian’s carpentry skills didn’t quite match his ambitions.
“No apology is required,” Mooray chirruped and thrummed. “Your attempts are a demonstration of friendship, which I find most honorable.”
“I will succeed eventually,” Florian warbled back.
“All things will be in the end.”
They walked around the huts to the stubby wharf the Vatni had built into the lake. Very occasionally anglers and other country-folk would visit to trade. The Vatni were anxious to make them feel welcome.
The boat waiting at the end had been built for Florian by the Vatni, more rounded than a human rowing boat, but very stable. Florian climbed in and sat on the bench. Teal curled up behind him, while Mooray made the whole thing rock about as he lumbered in and lay at the prow, with his head over the gunnels.
“I’m going to go up to Naxian Valley,” Florian said.
“A good choice for the land meat creatures.”
Florian cast off and swung the long oars out over the side. The Naxian Valley stream that fed into the lake was a good eight hundred meters around the shore. He began rowing.
“It is a clear night,” Florian remarked. Above them, the northern sky revealed the Ring Trees glittering silver-white in a mighty curve around the planet. One less tonight. He’d seen the atomic flash through the drab clouds as Liberty 2,673 successfully destroyed another enemy.
“It is an empty night,” Mooray replied.
“Aqueous should be rising soon. And Trüb is coming back into view from behind the sun. Even Ursell will shine bright before morning, so we can enjoy Mother Laura’s triumph.”
“A full sky is a glorious sight.”
Florian smiled to himself. This was how he always got the Vatni talking about other worlds. There weren’t many humans who took the time to get to know the Vatni. Contact was mainly limited to official meetings about guarding the coastlines, and merchants looking to trade. But he couldn’t get enough of these stories, and their racial memory was extraordinary. Somehow the females passed knowledge on to their offspring while they were still in the second-womb (of three).
It was the Vatni’s knowledge that he used to embellish his most precious file, the astronomy one. A mindscape of the whole solar system, where he could tour around the planets at will—as he’d dreamed of doing as an astronaut. Images from telescopes had been incorporated to map out planetary surfaces with great accuracy. Aunt Terannia had even found him an old book that had photographs taken by Mother Laura’s team when she opened the wormhole to survey the strange star system the Void had banished them to.
But it was the stories of the Vatni that allowed him to animate them, to make them live. Ursell before the Fireyear, a world with dark seas and wasteland continents, speckled with lights coming from Prime fortress enclaves—then the glorious blue fire enveloping the entire planet, and the still-expanding atmosphere. Macule, with its vast ice caps and berg-cluttered equatorial ocean, the ominous craters pocking its bare sterile lands, carved by nuclear explosions millennia ago. Trüb, the strange uniform gray world, devoid of surface features, circled by its twelve tiny moons; but to the Vatni memory, a world of extraordinary color. Even the moons had been larger in the past, engulfed by mighty petals like a solid rainbow flower. Until the day over a thousand years ago when spaceships from the recently arrived Ursell landed on its smooth surface. The day Trüb’s colors died, never to blossom again.
The Vatni, with their remarkable eyes, had spotted Ursell as soon as it appeared in orbit around this star. A century later, the white sparks of the Prime ships had risen from its continents and flown across space. First they went to Trüb. Within days of their landing the surface had darkened, and the petals of the moons withered to nothing. The ships never came back, and the Prime sent no more to Trüb. Instead the next wave of Prime ships headed straight to Aqueous.
They had orbited the ocean globe for several days before departing.
“We know now we had a lucky escape,” Mooray said. “Your great and wise Mother Laura told us the Prime need land, not water, to dwell on.”
The Vatni had watched the ships depart and fly to Macule next—which was also unsuitable for the Prime. They visited Asdil after that, briefly, then went on to examine every world orbiting their new star, an epic two-year voyage that saw them returning to Ursell at the end.
Then four centuries after the ships went home, Ursell began to flash with very bright explosions. Its atmosphere turned sour, and the cloud cover swelled to envelop most of the surface.
“And what of Fjernt?” Florian asked. “What do you remember seeing there?” Fjernt was a planet in the same orbit as Bienvenido and Aqueous, but in conjunction behind the sun, which meant it could never be seen from Bienvenido. All Florian knew was that it had no oxygen in its atmosphere, and 80 percent of the surface was water. Laura Brandt’s brief survey had neither detected any radio emissions nor seen anything that could be a city.
“Clouds,” Mooray said. “White as ice. Towers of cloud taller than a dozen land mountains. They spin and they dance as the world turns.”
“All the lands?” he asked, captivated.
As Mooray gurgled his flowery descriptions of the hidden planet, Florian turned the boat up into the stream that ran along the floor of the Naxian Valley. It was wide for a stream, with plenty of water surging along its stony bed, but not quite big enough to qualify as a river in its own right. Rowing against the swift current was hard work. Florian was soon sweating.
A couple hundred meters from the water, the well-maintained track up into the valley curved in from the west and began to follow the stream. It was easy enough to see, even without his superior Eliter vision. Like all country roads on Bienvenido, it was lined with trees in accordance with Captain Iain’s law, passed seven hundred years after the Landing, so that travelers would always be able to see the way ahead.
The huge ancient larches marched away into the night, all the way up to the Ealton family’s farmhouse—a large stone mansion at the center of half a dozen barns, stables, and yards.
Florian kept rowing, methodically pushing the boat along parallel to the avenue. Naxian was a lot wider than the Albina Valley; its shallow slopes were predominantly pasture, with long swaths of jibracken clinging to the boggy folds. It was excellent terrain for raising herds of mountain sheep. The Ealton family had been doing just that for generations, dating back a thousand years before the Great Transition. Now they carried on under the People’s Congress as they had when the Captains ruled, only they did it under state license. A difference that made no difference.
The road slowly split away from the stream, angling westward. When they were a kilometer apart, Florian eventually turned the boat into the shallows and clambered out. Tall stiff volreeds lined the swift water, and he secured the painter to a big rock jutting out of the bank.
The Ealton family farmhouse was another four kilometers upstream. On full magnification, Florian’s eyes could just make out a small glimmer of red where the stone walls were a couple of degrees warmer than the night air.
“Can you see anything?” he asked Mooray.
“No people of the land are close.”
Florian reduced his zoom and started to scan the surrounding landscape. The centuries of work that generations of Ealtons had devoted to the valley had resulted in long drystone walls dividing the meadowland into regular pastures, extending across the valley floor and halfway up the slopes, almost reaching the high wild forests. A lot of the walls were in need of repair, with long sections crumbling away—just as they always had been. Strips of temporary wire fencing had been set up to block the bigger gaps.
Flocks of sheep showed up in his infrared vision, red lumps clustered together for security and warmth. He picked the crossbow out of the boat. “This way.”
They set off toward a walled-off pasture a couple of hundred meters away, which contained at least eighty sheep that he could see. The gate was held shut by a simple chain, which he removed quietly. None of the sheep moved when he pushed it open. Mooray and Teal slipped through the gap.
“Wait here,” he told them. Teal let out a tiny whine, but sat obediently next to the Vatni.
Florian loaded a quarrel into the crossbow as he walked toward a pack of seven sheep. They started to stir when he was about twenty meters away. He stood still and took careful aim.
The quarrel shot into the sheep’s skull, killing it instantly. The others scattered, bleating in panic as it collapsed onto the ground. Florian scanned around carefully. If any of the shepherds were close, that would attract them. Apart from the sheep, and some smaller creatures he guessed were bussalores, nothing was moving. He let out a low whistle.
Rustling wasn’t a huge problem for the valleys, and Florian didn’t sneak into the Naxian Valley often enough to draw attention. The Ealtons would likely write off the occasional missing sheep to roxwolves, not that he ever saw much of them; the lean predators tended to stay within the tree line.
Mooray lumbered up out of the darkness as Florian finished strapping a rope harness to the sheep. Between the two of them, the carcass was easy to drag.
They’d almost made it to the bank of the stream when Florian’s communications routine flashed a spectral green icon of a general ping request across his vision. He started at the unexpected connection.
“Is something wrong, friend?” Mooray asked.
Florian held up a hand for silence. The signal was gaining strength. His auditory nerves plagued him with a distorted whistle that quickly calmed and began to stutter before becoming coherent.
“Urgent request for assistance. Urgent request for assistance. If you are receiving this, please respond. Urgent request for assistance. Urgent—”
The message carried on with methodical insistence. An Eliter! Florian let out a small groan of dismay. Some hothead radical on the run had ended up in the valley, one step ahead of the sheriffs or PSR officers. But scanning the larch tree avenue in infrared he couldn’t see any kind of vehicle, not even a bicycle. I don’t need this.
“Is there a problem?” Mooray asked in a fast clatter of tusks.
“I hope not.” Slumping his shoulders, Florian ordered his communications routine to open a link. “Nobody here can help you. You need to keep moving.”
The signal strength multiplied by an order of magnitude. Florian hadn’t known anyone could transmit at such strength. “Not an option, I’m afraid. I’m locking on to your position. That’s good—nice and remote. I can make that easily. Hang on, I’m decelerating.”
“What?” Spoken aloud as well as transmitted along the link.
“Three minutes out. You’ll hear me real soon. Don’t be afraid.”
Which was completely the wrong thing to say. And still there was nothing visible between the larch trees.
Mooray’s tusks clattered wildly. Teal barked.
“Look, look,” Mooray was saying. His heavy body was rocking about in agitation, flippers extended rigidly. Pointing up into the air.
With blood thudding in his ears, Florian slowly looked up into the sky, dreading what he would see, telling himself there could be nothing. Please. “Oh, great crudding Giu!” he moaned.
Something blazing with heat was moving across the northern sky, curving around. Fast, so fast! Lining up on the Naxian Valley as if the wide-open slopes were some kind of welcome embrace.
“Go away!” Florian pleaded. He knew he was watching the end of his life zooming toward him. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. He whimpered in dismay. The urge to wrap himself in a pleasant faraway mindscape until the thing was gone was almost overwhelming.
“Way too late for that, pal. I’ve been waiting for a long time now. And anyway, my systems ain’t what they used to be.”
Then it was dipping down, and slowing. Getting bigger. But actually, it wasn’t that big. Florian had been expecting something the size of an IA-509. What he saw now was a cylinder with slightly bulbous ends, which his optical analysis routines were classifying at three meters long, and two wide. The incredibly hot air surrounding it was not moving, which was impossible. He could see the turbulence in the sky behind it, a long line of warm twisting air.
“What is that?” Mooray asked. “A new type of Faller?”
“No,” Florian told his friend. “I don’t know what it is. But it’s trouble.”
The cylinder passed fifty meters overhead, descending rapidly now. And somehow it wasn’t as hot. Its halo of fiery air was dissipating, a spherical ripple gushing away.
Florian felt it, a gust of heat as if someone had opened an oven right in front of him. Teal barked in dismay, jumping about. Then thunder rolled into the valley—a weird crackling boom from the north that went on and on. And Florian just knew that had to be the cylinder’s wake, ripping through the sky.
The whole county’s going to know it’s here!
Teal was howling with fright now as the thunder echoed off the valley walls. Sheep were charging across their pastures. Infrared vision showed him flocks of panicked birds rising from the trees they’d been sleeping in.
“Down and safe. Well, sort of. Get yourself over here, my new friend. I have something for you.”
“What?” Florian replied automatically as he tried to soothe Teal.
“As of now, the most precious thing on the planet. Come on, get your arse over here.”
Florian looked at Mooray and pulled out the flute. “The thing that Fell from the sky: It wants us.”
“How do you know this?”
“It’s speaking to me, the way my kind speak, over distances.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then we will adventure this night. Hunt more than stupid land meat. Hunt the knowing, friend Florian. This is good.”
The cylinder had landed about eight hundred meters away, at the edge of a spinney of silver birch that crowned a small rise. Florian hurried toward it, torn between wanting to know what the cylinder was and simple fear of the unknown. Teal bounded along beside him, while Mooray struggled to keep up.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Joey…Well, I used to be. I’m not anymore.”
“I don’t understand. What are you now?”
“Good question. Technically, this is an independent life support system.”
“Life support…? You mean you’re in a spaceship, like a Liberty capsule?”
“Not so much in it, as: it. I’m resident in the smartnet nowadays.”
“What?”
“I’m the electronics.”
“You’re the machine itself? I’m talking to an electrical machine?”
“Yeah, that’s it. You are.”
“Then what is your function?”
“Okay, that’s the complicated part. You’ll see in a minute when you get here.”
Florian saw the lights in the farmhouse come on. They would have been woken by the thunder of the cylinder’s flight. But the Ealton family weren’t Eliters; they wouldn’t be able to see the cylinder’s radiant heat and know something had come from the sky. He still had some safe time.
“You said you required assistance?” Florian inquired.
“Yeah. I was trying to reach a big concentration of Advancers. I scanned from orbit and picked up their link chatter; there’s an area near the coast with a lot of them there. I figured they’d be my best bet.”
“What are Advancers?”
“Crap. You have forgotten a lot. Advancers are people like you, with functioning macrocellular clusters.”
“We call ourselves Eliters. Bethaneve founded our movement during the revolution, but it became so much more. Now the label is used by the government to denigrate us. But we use it with pride.”
“Ah. I wondered about that. I’ve picked up some radio over the centuries, but it’s been intermittent. I’m not really configured for shortwave; I had to improvise. Eliters got mentioned, but never in a good way.”
“Centuries? You have been orbiting for centuries?”
“Not through choice. I got stuck. Long story, and irrelevant tonight.”
“Joey, where are you from?” Florian asked in trepidation. There was one answer he wanted to hear above everything.
“Again: complicated. But originally I’m from the Commonwealth.”
“You’ve found us!” he yelled joyfully.
“No. Sorry, pal, I’ve been here all along, and I’m completely alone. But that should end soon.”
“How?”
“Look, I’m not sure how long we’ve got, so let’s just cut short the—Holy shit! What is that with you?”
Florian glanced sideways at Mooray, uncertain how to respond. “This is Mooray, my friend of the water.”
“It’s an alien? A sentient one?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know there were more aliens on Bienvenido.”
“The Vatni come from Aqueous. They came across through the wormhole Mother Laura opened.”
“Sonofabitch! I’ve missed so fucking much. Bastard Tree. Nuking was too good for it. Is Laura Brandt still alive?”
“Mother Laura sacrificed herself to defeat the Prime.”
“Sweet Jesus! The Prime are here? The Prime? This is a fucking nightmare!”
“The Prime were exterminated. Mother Laura killed their world. She flooded it with the atmosphere from Valatare.”
“Valatare? That’s got to be the gas giant, right?”
“Yes.”
“Flooded…? So she left you working wormholes?”
“No. The wormhole closed behind her. We think she did it to protect us.”
“Oh, that stupid smart woman. I always thought she was the best.”
Florian had arrived at the bottom of the slope. He looked up at the pale slim trees on top; several of them had been knocked down when the cylinder landed. There was a short gash in the ground as it tore through the lingrass to end up with one blunt end embedded in the steaming mound of peaty soil it had plowed up. Once again, his enhanced vision revealed a strange layer of air cloaking the thing’s skin.
“Joey, do you know Mother Laura?” he asked in bewilderment.
“Yes, I knew her. Long time ago, now.”
“But—”
“Look, I know you’ve got a bazillion questions, but we’re kind of short on time. From what I did manage to catch from your radio, Bienvenido has some kind of totalitarian government, right?”
“Depends how you look at it.”
“Should have asked before. What’s your name?”
“Florian.”
“Okay, Florian. My sensors are showing you’re a young man. So you’re full of ideals, right?”
“Not really.”
“Dump the modesty; this is extremely important. Is your government totalitarian? Think carefully about your answer, please. I need you to be completely honest with me, okay? No pressure, but the fate of every human on Bienvenido may depend on it. There are some big decisions that have to be made in the next minute, and this net isn’t really wired for that. I need my choices to be as simple as possible.”
Florian stared at the cylindrical space machine that used to know Mother Laura. Dear Giu, how do I answer? I should just walk away, let someone else deal with this. But of course he couldn’t. A friend of Mother Laura! “The government can be quite oppressive, yes.”
“Shit! Okay. Right. Thanks, Florian. Do you live around here?”
“In the next valley.”
“So I’m not going to ask what you’re doing here at this time of night.”
Too late, Florian realized the crossbow was still hanging from its shoulder strap. He shifted in embarrassment. Was the space machine judging him? It felt like it.
“Now listen,” Joey said. “This is the way these things always play. The government is going to come looking for me. And looking hard. I managed to deflect their radars; that’s easy enough. But there was nothing I could do about the hypersonic boom. They’ll figure that out soon enough. I’m already picking up some pretty paranoid communications, and I’m guessing those are search planes they’re launching from that city to the north. Then there was that astronaut who saw me, clever bugger. They’ll know what they’re looking for.”
“What astronaut?” Florian was angry with himself for not understanding what was going on, but even more upset with the space machine for not explaining anything properly.
“The one in the Liberty spaceship—and how you wound up building Soyuz copies is a story I’m really going to enjoy hearing some day! Irrelevant; sorry. But this is how it is: I can’t fly again. My ingrav units took a pounding in the quantumbuster blast, and didn’t get any better while I was tussling with that motherfucking Tree.”
“You’ve been fighting the Trees?”
“Sort of. This life support system used to be part of Nigel’s ship—”
“Nigel!”
“Yes.”
“You knew Nigel as well?”
“Briefly. Focus, please. The life support package was damaged by the quantumbuster Nigel detonated. The Trees don’t have force fields, so chunks had snapped off, and the surface was heated to plasticity, jetting vapor like a comet.”
“A what?”
“Ah, yes, you don’t get them here, do you? Think: chunk of ice and rock that starts to boil when it gets near a star. They shoot out huge vapor tails—Never mind. Point is, the Tree surface was molten. When I hit, I was embedded deep. Ever since then the bastard Tree has been trying to engulf me. It was a slow process, and I fought back by manipulating my force field. Neither of us could ever get the upper hand. Then along came your Liberty mission.”
“Two hundred and fifty years fighting a Tree! That is a truly heroic battle, Joey.”
“Yeah, whatever. Let’s concentrate on the now, shall we? I have something for you, Florian. Something I need you to keep out of harm’s way for a month. There is nothing more vital in the universe right now. Capish?”
“What?” Florian hated the way he’d been reduced to repeating that one word over and over, like he was too dumb to say anything else.
“This gift has to be kept out of government hands. They’ll be…unpleasant. Can you do that? Or if not you, can you find someone who can?”
“I…I suppose. Yes.”
“Thank you. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”
“You have a heart?”
“Used to. Come up here now, please.”
Florian walked slowly up the incline toward the space machine. He urgently wanted to be holding the crossbow ready, but that was plain ridiculous. His enhanced vision showed him how smooth the space machine’s skin was. There was no way of knowing what it was made from, except he didn’t think it was metal.
“Do you know what it is yet?” Mooray asked from just behind him.
Florian raised the flute once more. “I think it came from the place where humans lived before the Void.”
“Is it a good thing?”
“Giu, I hope so.”
A circular hole appeared in the center of the space machine, expanding rapidly and silently until it was a meter wide. Florian watched it in fascination; it was as if that section of the shell had turned to liquid.
Not mechanical then.
Pale-blue light spilled out. He frowned and peered into the small chamber it exposed. “Crud! That’s a…”
The naked baby wiggled, her chubby face wrinkling up into a distressed frown as the cool night air washed over her.
“Take her,” Joey said.
“Oh, no. Joey, no. I can’t. Not that.”
Teal nuzzled forward to see the baby. He barked excitedly.
“You have to,” Joey said. “She’s alive now. I cannot care for her.”
“This is insane!”
“Wrong. This is the greatest dose of sanity to hit this world since we fell into the Void.”
“I don’t know anything about babies,” Florian protested frantically.
“They’re simple. Feed ’em, change ’em. Repeat. And she’s going to need a lot of specialist richmilk. I synthesized a few bladders for you to start with.”
“What?” Florian could feel his heart hammering that way it always did when things got bad. His skin was growing hot—then icy. Breathing difficult. He always had to sit down for a while when these attacks came on…
“Shit! Kid, are you okay? Florian!”
Florian gulped, his throat constricting.
“I don’t fucking believe this! Okay, this is from my medic kit. It’ll help. Florian!”
He whimpered.
“Beside the baby. Look! See it?”
Something had risen up out of the white cushion-stuff the baby was wiggling about on. A gloss-green hemisphere three centimeters across.
“Put it on your neck, Florian. Do it now. It’s medicine. Oh, crap, he’s going to pass out. Florian, put it on your neck. Now!”
Florian sank to his knees in front of the opening. Shaking hands scrabbling for the little hemisphere. Eyesight blurring. Fingers grasped the object.
“Go on. Up. That’s my boy! Flat side on, and press firm—”
It was like a mild pinch on his skin, barely noticeable among the horrible sensations shuddering through the rest of his beleaguered body.
Then—
Pure ice water blasted through every artery under immense pressure, streaking through capillaries, zapping every cell in his body to full power. He sprang to his feet. Wanting to run. Wanting to fight. Wanting to fuck. Tears flooded his eyes. “Crudding Uracus!”
“Good stuff, huh?”
His heart was still hammering, but for completely different reasons now. “What…”
“Okay. Take a breath. And again.”
Florian’s hand scrambled around wildly for the green hemisphere, peeling it off to stare at it. “What was that?”
“Just a little pick-me-up. Welcome to Commonwealth medical technology.”
“I can’t—That’s amazing!”
“Right. Now let’s focus on the problem at hand, shall we?”
Florian gave the infant girl a guilty glance; she was starting to snivel. “Oh, crud. Joey…”
“Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”
He blinked and looked properly. The girl had something attached to the side of her head behind her right ear, a glistening oval of dark-red tissue, as if some strange organ had formed outside her body. “Is she ill?”
“That is the healthiest person on the planet right now,” Joey replied. “And you have to keep her that way.”
“But—” He reached out to touch the glistening tumor-thing, then drew his fingers away. “That’s not right. I know it’s not.”
“That’s an organic secure store; it contains all her personality and memories. They flow into her as her neural structure grows.”
“What?”
“It’s her fairy godmother. Let me have an input access to your lacunae. I can send over some files that’ll make sense of all this for you.”
“My what?”
“Hell. What kind of semi-sentient are you guys running?”
“What?” Florian ground his teeth together. Stop saying What!
“You know what macrocellular clusters are, right? The thing in your head you’re using to talk to me with?”
“I know that,” he said defensively.
“Okay. So what runs them? Can you connect me to it, please?”
“Connect you to my routines? I don’t see how.”
There was a long pause. Florian kept staring at the baby, terrified she’d start crying. If that happened, he’d have no option but to lift her out and try to soothe her. That wouldn’t end well.
“Right,” Joey said. “Let’s start at the beginning. The routines you have, where did they come from?”
“We’ve written them. They are shared among all Eliters.”
“You write your own operating code?”
“Yes.”
“But how do you—No, scratch that; the Void must have stopped Advancers from linking. You lost the original Commonwealth u-shadow operating software. Then why didn’t Laura…Forget it! I have to work with what I’ve got now. Kid, I’m going to give you another gift. It’s going to come into your head and start helping you understand a lot more about who you are and what you can do, okay?”
“Are you talking about code?”
“Oh, yeah. This is the biggest upgrade you’re ever going to have.”
Florian gave the space machine a tentative smile. “I think I would like that.”
“Okay. Here we go. I’m going to keep the bandwidth down; I don’t know your limits. When the package is in, it will run parameter tests on your secondary neural system—the macrocellular structure—and modify itself accordingly. It might take a while.”
“How long?” Florian could hear some strange whistling in the background, like a chorus of very high-pitched musical instruments, but discordant. At the same time, something flickered in his vision—rainbow specters he knew were there but couldn’t quite focus on.
“Couple of hours, maybe,” the space machine told him. “Now let’s concentrate on the baby, shall we?”
“Oh.” Florian gave her a guilty glance again. In his joy at the gift of sophisticated new code, he’d managed to forget that part.
“I’ve microfactured a couple of nutrient processors for her. When the bladders have run out, just chuck food in one end and they’ll do the rest. There’s an instruction file in the data I’m sending you, tells you what kind of food to use—the processors will help a lot there. There’s another file tells you what to give her when she can take solids, but keep giving her the richmilk. Okay? That’s important.”
“Er…I guess?”
“I’m kind of limited in the things I can synthesize for you, but I’ll give you some protection. Nothing that’s going to blow cities to shit, mind. Just something you can use to avoid trouble if they’re closing in on you.”
“I really don’t want any trouble.”
“That’s good. Stay ahead of the hunters and you’ll be fine.”
“Hunters?”
“The secret police, or whatever they’re called here.”
“The People’s Security Regiment,” he said automatically.
“Yeah. Figures. That type are always real imaginative.”
“Joey, I don’t understand what you want. Why can’t the government look after the baby?”
“Because they’ll be scared of her. People are always scared of change. And nobody more so than undemocratic officials who can see their power and world being taken from them.”
“She’ll do that?”
“If anyone can get Bienvenido out of this mess, it’ll be her.”
The baby yawned, fat little fists clenched.
“But…how?” Florian asked in amazement.
“If I knew that, I’d do it myself. But this girl…Once you give her a problem, she will not stop until she’s solved it. Not ever. Now come on, it’s time for you to go. I’ve produced a backpack. Shove everything else in it, then take the baby and go.”
Quite how the padding in the chamber parted Florian never did catch. He just saw a simple dark-green canvas backpack slide up next to the baby. When he lifted it out, it didn’t seem anything different from one you could buy in Opole—except, perhaps lighter? Next, a brushed-metal cylinder half a meter long appeared. He’d started to put it in the bag, surprised by how heavy it was, when another identical cylinder emerged.
“This is the richmilk,” Joey said as the space machine conjured up five plastic bulbs twice the size of his fist. “It’ll last you until tomorrow morning. You’ll have to start the processors after that to replenish them.”
Florian gave the space machine a questioning glance. He didn’t know much about babies, but he was pretty sure one wouldn’t drink that much.
“I can give you a medical kit, too. Your new files will show you how to use it.”
Florian frowned at the neutral gray oblong box that didn’t appear to have any lid, but he stuffed it in the bag anyway.
“Wipes,” Joey went on. “Trust me, you’re going to need a lot of those. Diapers. Very absorbent. Enough to last until tomorrow, then you’ll have to improvise. Same with clothes. Use this shawl to swaddle her in. After that, you’ll have to find some bigger bits of cloth.”
It seemed to Florian that Joey knew as much about looking after a baby as he did—and possibly even less. But he pushed everything down into the backpack without mentioning that.
“Now put this around your wrist.”
This was a wide featureless bracelet made from some pearl-white substance that resembled wax. Florian picked it up, surprised to find it was quite flexible. He slipped it over his hand, then gave a start as it tightened around his arm above the wrist. It gripped tight but not painfully so—as if it had become part of his flesh. “What is it?”
“That’s the protection I told you about. The new routines will give you full access when they’re integrated.”
Florian held the bracelet up and gave it a suspicious examination. He’d been expecting some kind of gun.
“Now pick up the baby, wrap her in the cloth. And go.”
“That’s it?” Florian asked. The rush from the drug had worn off. He was getting a headache now—an odd one, like a dull itch behind his temple. That had to be whatever code the space machine had given him. “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”
“You know this land. I don’t. Look, I get that this is a huge ask, and I’m sorry. But fate brought you here—if you believe in such a thing. Just keep her safe. Keep moving, keep ahead of them. You can do this. It’s only for a month.”
“What’s going to happen in a month?”
“You’ll see. Trust me. Now pick her up. She’s going to need feeding soon.”
“Is someone else going to come and collect her?”
“Go, Florian. My sensors are showing me some kind of vehicles leaving that big house.”
“Crud!” Florian had forgotten the Ealtons. Very very carefully, he picked up the baby, terrified he was going to drop her. Then there was the delicate operation of putting on the diaper—which had sticky tabs on each side, so it wasn’t too difficult. After that he had to wrap her in the square of soft cloth. She started to cry.
“Nooo!” he told her. “No, don’t do that. It’s all right.” He tried rocking her, like he’d seen mothers do.
“Whoa. Gently, kid!” Joey said. “She’s not made of metal.”
“Sorry,” he blurted above the baby’s cries, and slowed the motion down. He was sure the farm trucks pulling out of the yard must have heard the wailing, it was so loud! “Easy there; easy.” He held her a little closer, and carried on rocking her in a gentle swaying motion. By some miracle, the crying subsided.
“Thank you, Florian,” Joey said. “Remember, keep ahead of them. Keep her safe. Just for a month.” The hole in the side of the space machine closed up as silently and quickly as it opened, leaving them in the dark.
“What happens in a month?” Florian asked again, but there was no answer; the link was dead. The baby wriggled around. She was fully awake. He looked down at her, still not understanding how he had wound up holding her, how he’d agreed to any of this. It was madness. I should wait until the sheriffs get here, give her to the authorities. But he knew he’d never actually do that.
“What now, friend Florian?” Mooray asked.
Florian took a look at the headlights from the farm trucks. One set was heading down the long larch tree avenue. The other was driving along a track that would bring them close to the little hillock where he was standing.
“Now we leave. I’ll think what I’m going to do with her later.” Aunt Terannia will know what to do. And if she doesn’t, she knows people who will.
They set off back down the small slope, heading to the boat. After a minute the baby started crying again, and no amount of soothing and rocking would stop her.
“Is it in pain?” Mooray asked.
“I don’t think so. She might be hungry.” The high-pitched wailing wasn’t helping his headache. “I’ll feed her as soon as we get to the boat.”
“Should we not use the boat to speed from this place?”
“Yes, but I don’t think she really wants to wait.”
“Throw away your fear. I will propel us.”
“Thank you.” Florian had never asked Mooray to give the boat a push; the whole idea was too much like hitching a horse to a cart. Mooray wasn’t a farm animal. It would be demeaning. But the baby was getting even louder.
Florian settled himself in the boat and scrabbled hurriedly around in the backpack for one of the richmilk bladders. The teat had a twist cap protecting it, which took a moment for him to work out. Then he was proffering it to the baby. She seemed reluctant at first, too busy crying to start sucking. He remembered something he’d seen one of his cousin’s friends do and squeezed out a few drops of the richmilk, rubbing the liquid on the rubbery teat, then put that in the baby’s mouth. There was a surprised gurgle, and she started sucking fast. The sudden absence of crying was a blessed relief.
Mooray, meanwhile, had slipped into the water. His tails were flicking about with deceptive force, pushing them along with the current, traveling a lot faster than Florian had ever managed to row.
The lights from the farmhouse and the trucks quickly fell behind. The empty night sky and dark land merged into one, leaving him alone. And for the first time he could actually stop to consider what had happened, the crazy thing he’d agreed to do. Hide a Commonwealth baby for a month by avoiding the PSR, the most ruthless, most efficient force on the planet?
“Oh, crud, what have I done?” It had all happened so fast.
Of course, the whole encounter was madly exciting, and he was defying the PSR bastards. But that burst of exhilaration, the yearning for defiance, might well be a side effect of the Commonwealth drug.
I’ll never know now.
The baby finished guzzling the bladder and let the teat drop from her slack mouth with a contented smile. Florian held the flaccid bladder up in puzzlement. It was practically empty. The baby couldn’t possibly have drunk that much. Has the bladder got a leak?
“What are you going to do?” Mooray asked.
Holding the child very carefully under one arm, Florian put the flute between his lips and blew a quiet answer. “I’m not sure. Keep her safe like I told the Commonwealth machine I would. I really don’t want the government to get her.”
“Why not?”
“I suppose because she’s from the Commonwealth. Government people don’t like that. They’re always saying how bad it is.”
“How do they know?”
“They don’t. The last person from the Commonwealth was Nigel and he triggered the Great Transition, which Slvasta hated. But then Eliters always claim we should make contact with the Commonwealth because it will save us. Only they don’t know that for sure, either, if I’m being honest.”
“What do you think?”
“I guess I just want things to change.” He looked down at the baby in the crook of his arm. “And it sounds like she might do that for us.”
They were halfway across the lake to the Vatni village when the baby woke and started crying—really bawling. The noise was incredible. Florian was convinced she’d wake the whole county. Any Air Force planes searching would hear her above their propeller roar.
“Is she ill? Have you damaged her?” Mooray asked.
“I don’t know,” Florian replied. He held the baby up, looking beseechingly into her scrunched-up, distraught face, hoping beyond reason she’d give him some kind of clue what was wrong. That weird thing stuck to her head?
He bounced her softly on his knee. “What is it? What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
The wailing continued. He began to move her a little more. “Please, please. It’s all right. Just…What is it?”
She came down on his knee—and let out the biggest burp he’d ever heard. A mouthful of richmilk splattered on his hand. It was disgustingly warm and tacky. He couldn’t move his hand to wipe it off, or she might topple over.
“Oh.” Now he understood. You have to burp babies after they’ve had milk, he remembered.
She still didn’t look happy, so he tentatively bounced her about again. Two burps later, she seemed calmer. So he supposed he ought to check the diaper—
“Oh, great crudding Giu!” Florian thought he might throw up. The smell. And surely it shouldn’t be so liquid? He winced, and looked away, trying to inhale some clean lake air.
“Friend—”
“Don’t ask! Just…get us to the village. Fast, please!”
But it had to be dealt with. So balancing the baby on one knee, which was now suspiciously damp, he felt around in the bag for the wipes and a fresh diaper.
It took forever, and the unsteady boat didn’t help. But just before they reached the little jetty she was clean and dry and wrapped in a new diaper. He actually felt rather pleased with himself for coping. And he’d know how to do it better next time.
The boat knocked into the jetty and Mooray heaved himself out of the water. “What now?” the Vatni asked. “Do you wish to stay here with us?”
“No. You have been more than kind, my friend. But I cannot stay here, for to do so would be to put you in danger. My government would not take kindly to you aiding me.”
“Please be careful.”
“Don’t worry, I will be the most careful person on the planet.” He lifted his head, looking to the north. The breeze was growing stronger. Thin scattered clouds were starting to build across the horizon. The weather would slow any search. He would have time to prepare, to work out what he was going to do, and where to go. Aunt Terannia first. She’ll know what to do.
He drove the Openland back up to his lodge, again not switching on the headlights. By the time he got back, he was exhausted and the headache was getting even worse. All he wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep.
The baby was fitful when he took her from the passenger seat. When he bent over her, he caught a whiff of—“Not again? I just changed you.”
But when he got her inside and unwrapped the cloth on the kitchen table, sure enough the diaper was full. He changed her, more quickly and efficiently this time.
The baby lay on her back, wide awake. Her little arms were raised, hands clawing at the air, as if she was searching for something. The beginnings of a frown crinkled up her face.
“Now what?”
Her mouth was opening and closing like a fish.
“What? More milk?’ It didn’t seem possible. But when he produced the second bladder she started guzzling immediately. Teal curled up on his blanket beside the range cooker and watched quietly.
And of course, after the feed, she needed to be burped. It wasn’t anything like as easy as last time. Then, just as she seemed to settle, she had to be changed.
“Great Giu.” Florian could barely keep his eyes open; he’d never been so tired before. Dawn was only a couple of hours away now. His headache had evolved to a hot burn that thumped away behind his eyes with every heartbeat.
He put the baby down in the middle of his bed. Then, worried she’d wiggle her way off, he put the pillow on one side and lay down on the other. Sleep came fast.
Equally fast, he was awake as soon as she started crying. Another change!
Sleep.
Dawn and more crying combined. The headache had mercifully abated, but his neck was stiff from not having a pillow. And he couldn’t have had more than an hour’s sleep in total.
“All right, all right,” he groaned, close to weeping himself now. The third bladder of richmilk. Crud, I’ve only got two left. How can she drink so much?
When he held her in the crook of his arm to feed, he saw that the cloth she was wrapped in was uncomfortably tight around her skin. Must be from squirming around in her sleep.
Change her. Wrap her up again, but there wasn’t as much cloth. “Huh?” Looking at her, he could have sworn she’d grown several centimeters overnight, which was weird. But…Kids have growth spurts…I think? Nothing else could explain it, and Joey said he would need more cloth soon, so nothing was wrong. She’d survived the night. “I did it right,” he told the dozing infant with a proud smile. “I actually did it.” Then he thought about having an entire month of nights identical to the one he’d just survived, and his skin turned cold.
It was raining. A low cloud roofed the valley, reducing the morning sunlight to a dour gray glimmer as if twilight had already arrived. Florian switched on the light in the living room. The range cooker was cooling, but the embers were still glowing, so he put some fresh logs in. Before long they’d caught, and he left the air vent fully open so they would burn fast and hot.
The baby was asleep on the ancient sofa, safe surrounded by cushions to make a kind of nest. He knew he’d only have an hour at most before she’d need changing again. Probably a feed, too.
There was still some of yesterday’s bread left, so he cut some slices and spread raspberry jam over them. Only then did he realize how hungry he was. The kettle took a long time to boil. He put some more logs on, knowing the oven temperature would be all wrong—and just not caring.
He sat on the rocking chair and stared at the baby. The enormity of what he’d done was starting to register. He’d be lucky if he could manage to look after her, never mind keep her away from the PSR.
That drug. It must have been the drug. I’d never agree—
There was a mild flash. Florian looked up at the window, thinking lightning was plaguing the valley, but it was a very weak flash and there was no thunder.
“What?”
More flashes—but they were coming from behind his eyes. Like a broken icographic, except this was brighter. The flashes quickly stabilized into five stars in a pentagon formation.
“Huh?”
Shapes began to emerge from each of the stars, so much sharper and clearer than the icographics he was used to. A green pyramid, turning slowly in midair. Spheres made up of smaller spheres, multiplying from the center. A sinkhole of concentric lavender circles that led back to infinity. A sphere of rippling yellow sine waves. Rainbow star cluster.
The space machine’s code.
Florian smiled, entranced. Then someone spoke fractured juddering words that made no sense, fading in and out like shortwave radio in a storm. He twisted around in shock, but there was nobody in the room. It was inside his head, part of the new code.
The voice spoke again, and this time the fragments came together in a mellow tone. “Can you understand this? If you can, please say yes out loud.”
“Yes!”
“I am the basic operational memory package for macrocellular cluster operation. I have run tests on your neural functionality, and configured myself accordingly. There is a red diamond icon positioned at the top of the display in your exovision. Please locate it.”
“Sure. I got it.”
“In order for this package to download from your lacuna and into your main cluster, you must visualize the diamond expanding. When it has done this, please rotate it one hundred and eighty degrees clockwise. To cancel the download, please rotate it the other way. Please confirm you understand.”
“Yeah. Uh, right.” He needed to take a breath. This commitment was as big as picking up the baby. Commonwealth knowledge! The one thing the Eliters have wanted for centuries. “I understand.”
“Please make your choice.”
Florian concentrated on the diamond, wanting it to be bigger. When it expanded, he thought of it turning rapidly clockwise.
The sensation that followed was akin to the drug he’d taken last night, but confined to his skull. Information like silver light was glowing inside him, shining through his gray matter to nestle snugly inside a billion neurons, elevating them. It was as if his brain had never been truly alive before, and now it sang with knowledge.
The operating system downloaded and installed, bringing a revelation of understanding. Instinctively, he grasped the functions behind the exovision icons; he knew what exovision was, too, and its parameters. There were formatting tools for sight, sound, and sensation. There were files decompressing into his storage lacuna. Encyclopedia files. Specialist files. Even entertainment files. Medical routines started monitoring his physiology, showing him body temperature, heart rate, blood-oxygen levels, toxin levels, hormone secretion, muscle performance, nerve paths, neural activity.
“Oh, crudding Uracus,” he breathed in glorious amazement.
The baby started crying.
“Seriously?” he growled at her. “Now?”
But she needed feeding, and was as insistent about it as only she could be. With a small martyred sigh, he postponed exploring his newfound wealth and reached for the next bladder. Crud, only one left after this. So while she sucked down the entire contents, he sat on the settee and accessed the file on richmilk. It was like ordinary milk, but with a massively high protein and vitamin content, along with concentrated specialist fats and hormones. He started to cross-index their functions with encyclopedia files, and quickly got lost in terms he didn’t understand. For all the information now filling his storage lacuna, comprehension was lacking. The space machine hadn’t given him any education packages.
“Uracus!” It was like being able to see an orchestra playing, but not hearing it.
So the Commonwealth baby needed richmilk. He didn’t know why she was different from Bienvenido babies, but that explanation was probably somewhere in the files, too. He could work on refining the search function later. He called up operational files on the nutrient processors, and shot an activation code at one of them. The top opened, its malmetal expanding, allowing the plyplastic hopper to swell up and form a big cone. Florian laughed in delight and made the cylinder repeat that several times before he sheepishly admitted to himself it was a bit childish.
He burped the baby while looking up what kind of food to put in the hopper. Plenty of vegetation, the goat’s milk would also do, some protein (there was a little bit of rabbit stew left), water, jam for sugar.
While she was sleeping—it wouldn’t be long before another change was due—he ran around collecting the ingredients and dropping them in the smooth conical hopper. The nutrient processor’s micronet asked for a bladder to be attached. Florian had to use all the water he’d boiled to sterilize the used bladders, so he still hadn’t managed to make a cup of tea for himself. The kettle went on again. He sterilized the used bladders in a big copper pot, and connected one to the bottom of the nutrient processor. Then watched in satisfaction as the mush of food in the hopper was slowly ingested, and a trickle of richmilk filled the bladder.
I made it work!
Then the baby needed changing, and then the bladder on the nutrient processor was full, so he attached a second one. And he realized Teal hadn’t been fed, so he took care of that. And the kettle was whistling loudly, which woke the baby. So he soothed her back to sleep. Then the hopper needed cleaning, the undigested slop flushing out of the processor ready for the next batch.
It was midday already (how did that happen?), and Florian hadn’t eaten anything but three slices of bread. Three weeks ago, on his trip to the general store in Wymondon, he’d bought a cured ham. There was still some left, which was a relief. He had to eat something before he set off to visit Aunt Terannia. Exactly when he was going to pack for his forthcoming trip, he didn’t know—nor what to take. The baby would need feeding again soon. And—
Teal raised his head, ears twitching. Then the dog was on its feet, nose close to the door, barking. The baby started whimpering.
“Quiet, boy,” Florian told the dog; the last thing he wanted right now was the baby waking up again.
He looked out the window. Three black-painted regiment Terrain Trucks—bigger versions of his Openland—were driving up the track to his lodge.