Skyfall (12 page)

Outside the flyer, night rushed past, and in the darkness, with the only light the dim cast of the pilot's interface, Dernan Mann was remembering.

Below was a vault of empty darkness and somewhere below that, he knew, the ground was flashing beneath them – the hard, dead, inhospitable ground, the ground that had claimed his wife.

There was a time when Dernan Mann had been as fascinated by the field as Eyna, when the thought of standing out there, actually physically
standing
on the ground itself, was as exotic and as exciting to him as it had been to her.

The living Earth,
Eyna used to call it, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

In reality, the bare earth wasn't exciting. Seductive perhaps, and definitely dangerous, but exciting? No. Not that. Never that again.

And yet after all this time, here he was, strapped into a flyer, hurling himself through the night towards the very same patch of dirt that had consumed his love and been his obsession for as long as he could remember.

He'd forgotten the sensation of flying, the sickening, lurching feeling in the pit of his stomach that even a lifetime of magging across the city couldn't prepare you for. He'd forgotten the faint vibration that the resonators sent through the airframe, at the same time soothing and disturbing. He'd forgotten the muted whistle of air being torn apart by the screaming rush of a machine moving through it at almost twice the speed of sound.

Most of all, he'd forgotten the trepidation – how it felt to sit there, helpless and strapped in, and not knowing if you'd be returning again in a couple of hours or if this time you'd end up lying, exposed and burning, somewhere out there on the merciless dirt that they called the Darklands.

He remembered it now, though. All of it.

And this was where he was taking his sons.

From his position behind the two pilots' chairs, Dernan Mann studied them both. They'd never admit it, either of them, but the two were so similar. That was never more obvious than now, in the dim monochrome light. Both had their mother's cheeks, high and wide, the inheritance of some long-dead, long-forgotten northern ancestor. Their noses were the same, too. Both Janil and Larinan had managed to aquire his long, aquiline snout, the same as his own father's.

Genetics,
he mused.
There's no escaping them. No getting away from who – or what – we truly are. It doesn't matter how hard we try, how far or fast we run, how much we probe and manipulate ourselves, DNA will always come through in the end.

The thought gave him hope, somehow.

Because, Sky knew, at that moment Dernan Mann needed all the hope he could get his hands on.

The message had come up on his interface earlier that afternoon, soon after the meeting with the Prelate. Janil had no idea, of course, that his father had put a mole into the program that monitored conditions in the exposure chamber, and so the moment he accessed the environmental manager, Dernan Mann had been alerted.

Looking at his elder child now, Dernan Mann sighed. At least he hadn't gone through with it – hadn't given the command. But still, so much anger.

Dernan didn't know which was more dangerous, Janil's rage or Larinan's lack of it.

His younger son was staring out of the nosedome, peering into the blackness. The night Larinan had been born had been both the best and the worst night of Dernan Mann's life.

All things considered, Larinan's had been an easy birth, but that wasn't surprising in a society where difficult childbirth was the exception rather than the norm. Still, it hadn't been completely simple. Unlike most women, Eyna had insisted on having a ‘natural' for Larinan. She was strange, that way. Occasionally she got these oddly romantic notions, and when she did nothing Dernan said could persuade her out of them. Larinan's birth had been one such example.

‘Nobody uses natural,' he'd said. ‘There's pain, there's risk, there's—'

‘Dernan, stop trying to talk me out of it.' She'd rested a hand on her swollen belly. ‘Women have been doing it for thousands of years.'

‘The majority of those women didn't have a choice. You do. The reasons for not having natural are well documented. Sky above, Eyna! Even lower-level women use C-meth. The only ones who have natural nowadays are the ones who slink away to have them off the system – shifties and clanswomen and—'

‘You know that's not true as well as I do. Some women still choose natural.'

‘You didn't use it for Janil.'

‘All the more reason for me to do it with Larinan, then. This is my last chance to experience one of the last great rites of passage for women. Think of the subjects. Think of what that girl went through the night we pulled her in.'

‘That's exactly my point. She was half-dead by the time we got to her.'

‘She'd experienced something that used to be every woman's right, something which our precious society has more or less taken from us, whether we wanted it to or not.'

‘So you're doing this to make some kind of a point? A political statement? You do know this isn't the twentieth century any longer, don't you?'

Laughing, Eyna Mann had leaned over and planted a kiss on her husband's forehead.

‘You're a big softie, you know that, Dernan Mann. You can bluster and argue all you want, but I know the truth about you. I know that basically you're just scared.'

‘Even if that's true, it's not without reason.'

‘It'll be fine. Don't worry.'

And it had been fine – the birth, at least. Larinan Mann, born naturally after seven hours of labour, younger child of noted scientists Dernan and Eyna Mann, younger brother to Janil, city-sanctioned breach of reproductive protocol, copygen.

He still lay awake some nights wishing they'd done it differently, wishing his younger child had been born a girl as custom dictated, then feeling guilty for thinking that way.

But he'd acquiesced to Eyna. He always had. And now, for better or for worse, the three of them were flying out into the most dangerous place on the planet.

Formerly the most dangerous place on the planet,
he had to remind himself. Eyna's work, now so ably completed by Janil, with its not unexpected but nevertheless frightening conclusions, had inverted pretty much everything Dernan Mann had always taken for granted about Port, including its safety.

It was a little like the flyer but on a much grander scale. That was another thing he'd forgotten: the artificial, womb-like quality that these machines took on, with the reassuring pulse of the engines and the warm, filtered air recycling through the cabin. In here, the hostile world outside was held at bay by three centimetres of clearcrete, and it was easy to forget how vulnerable you really were – how your life depended on that single slender thread that held everything together.

It was easy to get complacent. Just like they had in the city.

‘Is it much further?'

Larinan's question broke into his thoughts and pulled Dernan Mann back into the present.

‘Not a lot. We should see the wall in the next few minutes,' Janil answered.

‘What's it like?'

‘You'll find out.'

Even though he'd never shown any interest in the program, Larinan couldn't hide the edge of excitement in his voice. It was the excitement of the unknown, of plunging into another world. Dernan Mann remembered it well. Eyna used to get the same way every single time they'd flown out. The closer they got to the fieldedge, the more excited she'd become.

‘Think about it, Dernan,' she'd said on one occasion as they slipped into the field. ‘Think about what it must be like to actually
expose
yourself to that. To stand bareheaded under the sky, barefoot on the dirt, to feel the air –
real
air – on your cheeks and arms and legs. Don't tell me there isn't even a tiny bit of you that wants to try it.'

‘No. Not a bit.'

He'd known it was a lie as he said it. She'd known, too.

‘You're lying.'

‘Even if I am, it would be such a complete breach of protocol—'

‘Oh, shush. We both know the field protocols are there to protect the stupid.'

He'd laughed at her. ‘And you think wanting to go out into the field unprotected doesn't put you into that category.'

‘It's night, Dernan. There's no radiation.'

‘No solar, perhaps. But there's still residual.'

‘Only in the towns and a few select sites between.'

They had flown on in silence, until his wife had given him a sideways look.

‘Let's do it.'

‘What? No.'

‘Yes. Let's land now. Go out—'

‘The monitors—'

‘Can be turned off.' She'd tapped a couple of commands into the interface panel. ‘Just like that. We're off the system, Dernan.'

He hadn't replied and Eyna Mann dropped the flyer, low and fast, pulling up just a few metres above the hard red dirt of the Darklands.

‘There's nothing and nobody for a thousand square kilometres, and rad levels are all well within the acceptable ranges. So, what do you say, husband. Feel up to an adventure?'

He'd looked out the window. The ground below was indeterminate in the faint starlight. It was like looking out into another world.

‘Okay.'

A few seconds later the flyer had settled onto the hard earth. Eyna was out of her chair almost before the resonators had finished spooling down.

‘Come on.'

‘Are you certain?'

‘Dernan. Come.'

He'd fumbled with the straps and when he finally clambered up out of his chair he had been startled to find his wife standing there naked.

‘Eyna, what in the Sky …'

‘Come on, silly.'

She toggled the hatch open and dropped through it, outside.

‘Eyna! Wait.' He almost threw himself after her. ‘This is insane. It's … Shi!' His shin collected the hatch coaming in his haste to catch up. Then he was down on the ground below the flyer. He ducked his head low, automatically, before remembering that he wasn't wearing a helmet.

‘Eyna …'He stopped.

His wife was standing a few metres away, her pale skin glowing silver in the moonlight, her arms outstretched, legs slightly akimbo, her face reflecting the glory of the sky.

‘Feel that, Dernan.
Feel
it!'

Cold tingled at Dernan Mann's nose and cheeks, and the unfamiliar sensation of air moving across his face made him want to scratch.

‘Eyna, you need to get your suit on, now.'

‘No, Dernan. Listen …' She waved her wristband at him.

‘I can't hear anything.'

‘Of course not. No warning. No exposure. It's safe.' Arms still outspread to the night, she turned a slow circle. ‘It's safe.'

Dernan looked around, taking in the vastness of the landscape. Seen without the filter of his helmet, everything seemed heightened, the contours of the land sharper. There were colours here, he realised. Even in the washed-out light of the moon, the landscape was dappled with hints of muted red and green and a thousand shades of earth-brown, colours foreign to his skycity-trained eyes.

‘It's …' he began, but his voice trailed into night silence.

‘It's beautiful, Dernan. It's the living Earth.'

Behind them, the flyer looked tiny and insignificant against such an awesomely distant horizon. It gleamed and reflected the stars, as though pushing back against this world in which it had landed.

‘Dernan.' Suddenly his wife's hands were around him, pulling at the neck fastening that held his field suit in place, her face, speckled with night, lifted to his. ‘You have to
feel
this.'

Numbly, unresisting, he let her pull apart the seam and his field suit peeled away. The bare flesh of his arms and legs rumpled into gooseflesh. As the silver material pooled around his ankles, he slipped his toes out of the attached boots and placed his bare feet on the red sand. It felt grainy and strange. The ground was cold, and yet there was some distant hint of heat in it.

‘Naked, Dernan.'

She pulled his underclothes from him and took his hand.

‘Let's walk.'

And Dernan Mann had walked, hand in hand, naked with his wife, across the Darklands.