Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (143 page)

The craft was more like some immense, black-winged insect, resting on a sheet of glass, Spinner thought. Its elegant curves were surrounded by the stumpy, glistening forms of the
Northern
’s pods, and by other pieces of equipment. Spinner could see a small drone ‘bot crawling across the surface of one nightdark wing, trailing twisted cable strands and scrutinizing the alien material with clusters of sensors. The Callisto ice around the craft was scarred and broken, pitted by the landing jets of the pods and criss-crossed by vehicle tracks.

The craft was
immense
. The activities of the humans and their machines looked utterly inadequate to contain the power of this artificial beast . . . if it were to awake from its centuries-long slumber.

Spinner’s fear seemed to rise in inverse proportion to her nearness to the craft. It was as if the sinister insectile form, pinned against the ice, radiated threat.

She shivered, pulling the fabric of her environment suit close around her.

The streets and houses around Morrow were empty. The endless, ululating cries of the klaxon echoed from the bare walls, of the ruined buildings and the steel underbelly of the sky.

A grappling hook - a crude thing of sharpened, twisted partition-metal - sailed past Morrow’s face, making him flinch. The hook caught in some irregularity in the floor of the Deck, and the rope it trailed stiffened, jerking. Within a few seconds Trapper-of-Frogs had come swarming along the rope, across the Deck floor; her brown limbs, glistening with sweat, were flashes of colour against the grey drabness of the Deck’s sourceless light, and her blowpipe and pouch of darts bounced against her back as she moved.

Morrow sighed and dropped his face. In zero-gee, they were abseiling across the floor of Deck Two. The metal surface before his face was bland, incongruously familiar, worn smooth by countless generations of feet, including his own. He twisted his neck and took a glance back. His other companions were strung out across the surface of the Deck behind him, their faces turned to him like so many flowers: there was Constancy-of-Purpose with her powerful arms working steadily, and her dangling, attenuated legs, the Virtual Mark Wu, a handful of forest folk. The Virtual was trying to protect their sensibilities, Morrow saw, by making a show of climbing along the ropes with the rest of them.

The Temple of the Planners was a brooding bulk, outlined in electric blue, still hundreds of yards ahead, across the Deck.

Many of the houses, factories and other buildings were damaged - several quite badly. In one corner of Deck Two there was evidence of a major fire, a scorching which had even licked at the grey metal ceiling above.

Morrow tried to imagine what it must have felt like to have been here, in the cramped, enclosed world of the Decks, when the GUTdrive had finally been turned off - when
gravity
had faded out. He imagined walking along, on his way to another routine day at work - and then that strange feeling of lightness,
his feet leaving the Deck . . .

The klaxon had called out ever since they’d climbed down here, into the Decks, through the Locks from the forest; perhaps it had been wailing like this ever since the zero-gee catastrophe itself. The noise made it difficult even to
think;
he tried to control his irritability and fear.

Trapper twisted and grinned at him. ‘Come on, Morrow, wake up. You climbed all the way down the elevator shaft with Spinner-of-Rope, once, didn’t you? And that was under gravity. Zero-gee is
easy
.’

‘Trapper,
nothing
is easy when you get to my age.’

Trapper laughed at him, with all the certainty of youth. And it was
genuine
youth, he reflected; Trapper was - what? Eighteen, nineteen? Children continued to be born, up in the forest, even all these decades after the opening-up of the Locks on Deck One, and the provision of AS treatment for the forest folk.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘you remind me of Spinner-of-Rope.’

Trapper twisted easily, as if her small, bare body had all the litheness of rope itself; her face was a round, eager button. ‘Really? Spinner-of-Rope’s something of a hero up there, you know. In the forest. It must have taken a lot of courage to follow Uvarov down through the Locks, and—’

‘Maybe,’ Morrow said testily. ‘What I meant was, you’re just as
annoying
as she was, at your age.’

Trapper frowned; there was a sprinkling of freckles across her small, flat nose, he saw, and a further smattering that reached back across her dark-fringed patch of shaven scalp. Then her grin broke out again, and he felt his heart melt; her face reminded him of the rising of a bright star over the ice fields of Callisto She craned her neck forward and kissed him lightly on the nose.

‘All part of the package,’ she said. ‘Now come
on
.’

She scrambled up her rope again; within seconds she had reached her grappling hook and was preparing to throw the next one across the Deck, in preparation for the next leg of the trek.

Wearily, feeling even older than his five centuries, Morrow made his way, hand over hand, along his rope.

He tried to keep his eyes focused on the scuffed floor surface before his face. Why was he finding this damn jaunt so
difficult
? He was, after all, Morrow, Hero of the Elevator Shaft, as Trapper had said. And since then he had been out, beyond the ribbed walls surrounding the Decks, out into space. He had walked the surface of Callisto, and watched the rise of the bloated corpse of legendary Sol over the moon’s ice plains; he had even supervised the excavation of that ancient alien spacecraft. He’d shown courage then, hadn’t he? He must have done - why, he hadn’t even
thought
about it. So why did he feel so different, now he was back here, inside the Decks once more - inside the metal-walled box which had been his only world for half a millennium?

He’d been apprehensive ever since Louise had asked him to lead this expedition in the first place.

‘I don’t
want
to go back in there,’ he’d told Louise bluntly.

Louise Ye Armonk had come down to Callisto to congratulate him on his archaeology and to give him this new assignment. She had looked tired, old; she’d run a hand through grizzled hair. ‘We all have to do things we don’t want to do,’ she said, as if speaking to a child, her patience barely controlled. When she’d looked at him, Morrow could detect the contempt in her eyes. ‘Believe me, if I had someone else to send, I’d send ’em.’

Morrow had felt a sense of panic - as if he were being asked to go back into a prison cell. ‘What’s the point?’ he asked, his desperation growing. ‘The Planners closed off the Decks centuries ago.
They
don’t want to know what’s happening outside. Why not leave them to it?’

Louise’s mouth was set firm, fine wrinkles lining it. ‘Morrow, we can’t afford to “leave them to it” any more. The Universe outside -
we -
are impinging on what’s happening in there. And we’ve evidence, from our monitors, that the Planners are not - ah, not reacting well to the changes.

‘Morrow, there are two thousand people in there, in the Decks. There are only a handful of us outside - only a few hundred, even including the forest on Deck Zero. We can’t afford to abandon those two thousand to the Planners’ deranged whims.’

Morrow heard his own teeth grind. ‘You’re talking about
duty
, then.’

Louise had studied him. ‘Yes, in a way. But the most fundamental duty of all: not to me, or to the Planners, or even to the ship’s mission. It’s a duty to the
species
. If the species is to survive we have to protect the people trapped in there, with the Planners - as many as possible, to maintain genetic diversity for the future.’

‘
Protect
,’ he said sourly. ‘Funny. That’s probably just what the Planners believe they are doing, too . . .’

Now he looked around at the abandoned houses in their surreal rows, suspended from what felt like a vertical wall to him now, not a floor; he listened to the silence broken only by the plaintive cries of the klaxon. All the people had gone - taken, presumably into the Temples, by the Planners - leaving only this shell of a world; and now the elements of this oppressive place seemed to move around him, pushing at him like elements of a nightmare . . .

Perhaps it was the very
familiarity
of the place that was so uncomfortable. Coming back here - even after all these decades - it was as if he had never been away; the metal-clad walls and ceiling, the rows of boxy houses, the looming tetrahedral bulks of the Planner Temples all loomed closely around him, oppressing his spirit once more. It was as if the huge, remarkable Universe beyond these walls - of collapsing stars, and ice moons, and magical alien spacecraft with wings a hundred yards wide - had never existed, as if it had all been some bizarre, fifty-year fantasy.

In the old days, before his first encounter with Arrow Maker and Spinner, he’d thought himself something of a rebel. An independent spirit; a renegade - not like the rest of the drones around him. But the truth was different, of course. For centuries, the culture of the Planners had trained him into submission. If it hadn’t been for the irruption of the forest folk - an event from outside his world - he’d never have had the courage, or the initiative, to break free of the Planners’ domination.

In fact, he realized now, no matter what he did or where he went in the future - and no matter how this conflict with the Planners turned out - he never
would
be free of that oppression.

Now he reached the end of his rope. He let himself drift away from the Deck a little, and launched himself through the air across the few feet to the next rope Trapper had fixed. He glanced back again; the little party was strung along the chain of ropes which led all the way back to the ramp from the upper levels.

There was a rush of air above his head, a sizzling, hissing noise.

Instinctively he ducked down, pressing his body flat against the Deck; infuriatingly he bounced away from the scarred surface, but he grasped the edges of Deck plates and clung on.

The noise had sounded like an insect’s buzz. But there were very few insects within the Decks . . .

Another hiss, a sigh of air above him. And it had come from the direction of the Temple which was - he sneaked a look up - still a hundred yards away. Another whisper above him - and another, and now a whole flock of them.

Someone behind him cried out, and he heard the clatter of metal against the Deck.

Trapper-of-Frogs came clambering back down the rope towards him; without inhibition she scrambled over his arms and snuggled against his side, a warm, firm bundle of muscle; her shaven patch of scalp was smooth against his cheek. She was no more than four feet tall, and he could feel her bony knees press into his thighs.

‘It’s the Planners,’ she whispered into his ear. Her breath was sweet, smelling of forest fruit. ‘They’re
shooting
at us from the Temple.’

He felt confused. ‘Shooting? But that’s impossible. Why should they?’

She growled, and again he was reminded of a young Spinner-of-Rope, decades ago, who also had spent a lot of time getting annoyed at him. ‘How should I know?’ she snapped. ‘And besides,
why
hardly makes a difference. What’s important is that we get
out
of here before we get hurt.’

He clung to his rope, disoriented. Maybe he should have been prepared for this. Maybe the Planners really
had
gone that crazy.

But if that was true, what was he supposed to
do
about it?

Now someone else came clambering up behind him. It was Constancy-of-Purpose, pawing her way across the Deck with her huge, powerful right hand; she clutched something shiny and hard in her left. Those AS-wasted legs, Morrow thought irrelevantly, looked even slimmer than Trapper’s; they clattered against the Deck, pale and useless.

‘Morrow.’ Constancy-of-Purpose opened her left hand. The object nestling within it was a piton: sharpened, the coarse, planed surfaces of its point glistening in the sourceless light. ‘This look familiar? The Planners are using their damn crossbows on us again.’

‘But why?’

Constancy-of-Purpose looked exasperated, even amused. ‘
Why
hardly matters, does it?’

Trapper punched Morrow in the ribs, lightly; he winced as her small, hard fist dug into the soft flesh. ‘That’s what I’ve been telling him, too,’ she told Constancy-of-Purpose.

‘At the moment they’re hitting the Deck behind us,’ Constancy-of-Purpose said urgently. ‘They are shooting over our heads. Maybe they’re trying to find their range. Or maybe they’re just trying to warn us; I don’t know. But as soon as they like, they’ll be able to pick us off . . . Come on. We have to retreat.’

Morrow, still confused, twisted his head to study the Temple ahead of him. The building’s tetrahedral form, with its outline of electric blue and triangular faces of golden-brown, was no longer a seamless whole. Windows had been knocked out of the nearest face, leaving black, gaping scars. He saw small figures in those windows: men and women, dressed in the drab, uniform coveralls he’d worn himself for so many centuries.

They were raising bows towards him.

‘All right,’ he said, wishing only that this were over. ‘Let’s move out of range. Come on; Constancy-of-Purpose, you lead the way . . .’

The pod landed close to the stern of the night-dark craft. Spinner climbed down onto the ice of Callisto.

Around her waist she’d tied a length of her own rope, and within her suit, suspended on a thread between her breasts, was one of her father’s arrow-heads. She raised her hand to her chest and pressed the glove against the fabric of her suit; the cool metal of the arrow-head dug into her flesh, a comforting and familiar shape. She tried to regulate her breathing, looking for bits of comfort, of stability. Even the gravity here was wrong, of course; and the presence of the heavy suit over her flesh, with Mark’s biostat probes inside, was a constant, scratching irritant.