Authors: Isobelle Carmody
Later, I thought, guiltily.
As the endless flight through darkness went on, unchanging, the others began to think of sleep. There were no beds but the seats themselves could be made to flatten out to form a sort of bed. Ana made several of the chairs up as beds, laying out pillows and light, fat, soft coverlets that she found in some recess. I did not know how such things had lasted, but it seemed that many Beforetime materials were all but immortal. Dragon eschewed the chairs altogether, going instead to lie on the ground close to Rasial and Gavyn, but unlike the boy, she had a pillow and blanket. Maruman left his chair to curl up against her belly, and I wondered if all of them would dream together and felt an equal measure of envy and apprehension for them.
I did not dare think of dreamtravelling myself, for all my longing to see if I could follow the golden cord binding my spirit to Rushton’s, for if, as I hoped, the H’rayka had come to believe me dead, better for him to go on thinking that.
I went down to see Gahltha and found Swallow grooming Sendari. I waited for the brush then did the same for Gahltha. He insisted I tend to Faraf first but she wanted Dameon so Swallow went to fetch him down. Dameon arrived and communed tenderly with the little mare as I finished with Gahltha.
‘Do not fear for Marumanyelloweyes on the dreamtrails, for in spirit he has teeth and claws far greater than in punyflesh,’ Gahltha told me, after I had handed the brush to the empath.
I had not voiced any fear, but like Maruman, Gahltha was accustomed to entering my mind at will. Somehow it had never troubled me to have them wander in and out of my thoughts, as it would have done had they been human.
Kissing the black horse on the nose, I went up after Dameon assured me he could make his way back to the main salon without help. I found the lights had been dimmed and several of the wolves were now prowling about, sniffing at the walls and seats. I had worried about them needing a place to relieve themselves but Ana had put them in a room where there was a bathing cube, and had filled it with some sort of material that absorbed the odour and prevented the whole glide reeking. Hendon had directed her to a store of it in the hold. I had no idea why it would be there but I had given up trying to find the answer to every puzzle.
It seemed that Hendon was alone, until I reached the front bench that enveloped him, and realised there were seats along the front of it, facing the front window. Ana was sitting there, staring out at the darkness, Darga at her feet. Perhaps he had been there since he had come aboard. But Gobor also sat looking out, and I realised several of the other wolves were lying there too.
Ana must have sensed me, for though I had not made a sound, she turned to look at me. I asked where Swallow was and she said he had retired to one of the beds Hendon had told her about, which could be pulled out from the walls of the short passage leading from the main chamber to the relieving rooms. I had been astounded when she had earlier told us about the relieving rooms, and had privately thought I would wait rather than attempting to use such a thing on a glide!
‘What about you?’ I asked.
She smiled. ‘Hendon does not need me, but I like to sit with him.’ She looked back at the window where the blackness billowed, endlessly churning. ‘Sometimes it seems to me that all of this must be a dream, and that I am still sleeping in Midland, or maybe in Habitat, and will soon wake to go and help weave or hoe or haul up buckets of water from a well.’
‘The time in Habitat seems like a dream to me,’ I said. I fell into a silence which Ana broke some time later, by asking what I was thinking of.
I sighed. ‘Mostly I am trying not to think about us flying or of all the terrible things that could happen if something goes wrong with the glide.’
‘I feel the strangeness of it,’ Ana said thoughtfully. ‘Yet somehow I do not feel afraid.’
‘It is because you have machine empathy. I think it makes it easier for you to trust yourself to machines.’ I had supposed the Teknoguildmaster must have spoken to her of his thoughts on this matter, but seeing the expression of astonishment spread over her face, I realised it was not so.
‘Garth mentioned it to me first, but having seen you with Hendon and God, I have no doubt of it,’ I said. ‘Most of the words it uses are still gibberish to me.’
‘He never said,’ she muttered, looking dazed. ‘The odd thing is that I don’t understand a lot of the words Hendon uses either, but somehow I mostly get a sense for what he is saying.’
I yawned and she said
I
ought to go and get some sleep.
‘I will if you promise faithfully to come and get me when you feel sleepy. I know it doesn’t need us, but I would feel safer if there was a human awake, too.’
Grinning a little, Ana swore a solemn oath to fetch me when she drooped and I went to lie down on one of the chair beds. I stared at the stepped roof, barely visible in the vague lume, and felt all at once nearly dazed with exhaustion, yet I was also wide awake. It was impossible to imagine sleeping, flying above the earth in a machine controlled by a machine, nevertheless it was not long before I dropped into a light doze, only to dream of Gobor lunging at Rheagor. I started awake, heart pounding, skin clammy with sweat, then closed my eyes and slept again at once.
This time I did not dream.
A hand shook me and I opened my eyes to find Dragon looking down at me. ‘Come and see,’ she whispered urgently.
I sat up, careful not to disturb Maruman, who had joined me while I slept, and glanced towards the front of the glide. There was no sign of any of the wolves or of Ana. Seeing my consternation, Dragon whispered that she had been sitting with Ana when she noticed her beginning to nod off. She had wanted to fetch me, but Dragon said she would keep watch then wake me to take her place, so Ana had staggered off to one of the bed niches.
‘She said to tell you that you must trust Hendon to get us safely to our destination,’ Dragon said, as we eased past Dameon who lay stretched out asleep on one of the chair beds, his long legs sticking out from the end of the blanket that had been spread over him. Surprisingly, Darga lay under his chair. I looked back to find Gavyn and Rasial lying deeply asleep in the same place on the floor, though the little owl was now perched on the sill above the boy’s head, its eyes wide open.
‘Come,’ Dragon urged, and only then did I remember she had woken me to show me something.
‘What is it?’ I asked, following her forward, then I lifted my eyes and drew in a breath, for the transparent front of the glide now showed a predawn sky of palest lavender, utterly clear save for one long strand of dark violet unravelling along the horizon. Strangely, all of the other glide windows showed black, though there was no sign of the smoke we had flown through for hours the previous night. Was the vision shown by the screen real then, I wondered, or some sort of illusion? Just as we were approaching the glide control bench, the sky blushed pink all along the horizon and the long strand of cloud turned dark crimson. Then the sun began to rise directly ahead of us, sending out golden beams of light. I realised with a shock, then, that the glide was flying directly east! I pictured the map, and had no idea at all what there was in that direction, beyond the edge of the land. I was fairly certain God’s map had shown a great swathe of sea and nothing more than a cluster of very small islands, very far away.
‘Why can’t we see out the other windows?’ I wondered aloud.
‘That is Ana’s doing,’ Dragon said. ‘She was saying she wished we could all just sleep until we woke, while we had the chance, and I said why shouldn’t we. She said we could if we could manage to sleep with the sun beating down on us. Then Hendon said he could make the windows stay dark if we liked so she bade him do it and he did.’ Dragon reached out to pat the androne’s metallic arm fondly, and then she went round to the front of the control bench, again beckoning me to follow. For the first time I came around the bench and was startled and unnerved to see that the transparent part of the hull actually curved down to become the floor, so that I could look directly down if I stood on it.
I shuddered. Then I saw what I had not seen before because I had been distracted by the sky.
Below that gorgeous pale sky, and lit by the rising sun, were Blacklands of the most dreadful kind. Scarred with gouges and holes, many of which held water that was crusted yellow, green and purple at the edges, the centres glimmered with an oily sheen. Other pools shimmered with the sickly green flames that Landfolk called witchfires and still others gave off the malevolent green glow that meant they were strongly tainted. Everywhere smoke or dribbles of some sulphurous discharge billowed out of fissures, but instead of rising, the smoke lay on the ground, as if it was too heavy to rise.
We flew over a vast expanse of earth that seemed to have fused to great dull gleaming pools of black glass, which reflected the sky. The glorious light of the rising sun revealed a poor dead land where all possibility of life had been extinguished.
‘It is worse than anything I ever imagined,’ Dragon murmured as the glide flew over a chasm filled with a roiling brownish mist. ‘And it has been going on ever since I woke. I kept thinking to endure it alone until it ended, but it does not end.’
‘Ana saw this?’ I asked.
Dragon nodded. ‘I think that is why she went to bed. She
was
tired, but seeing that, and I do not know how long she watched before I came, I think she started to see how it is out there now. It made her dreadfully sad because it looks like that terrible dream the Agyllians showed her of what would happen if you do not complete your quest – all the world destroyed. Truly I think she wanted Swallow more than she wanted sleep.’
Gazing out over the devastated land, I hoped Ana
had
gone to Swallow and that he had been able to comfort her. There was no comfort to be had from the destroyed land running under us, yet it
was
fascinating, in some dreadful way, and also bleakly beautiful. After watching with me for some time, Dragon said she would go and prepare us something to break our fast. I had no appetite but I thought she needed the normality of that task, so I thanked her and said I would be glad of a bite to eat.
When she had gone, I sank down onto the seat in front of the control bench, too sickened by the ugly vision unfolding to be afraid. Gradually, the glide turned until it was flying north again, and I wondered uneasily what sort of strange course God had given the androne to follow. A moment later my heart leapt in fright as a whole hillside exploded in dreadful molten splendour, magma and flame gouting high up into the air.
Later, when everyone was awake, and Hendon made the windows transparent, all of us spent the day intermittently gazing out at the devastated land. We were forever summoning one another to see this or that horror. There were wonders and mysteries, too. Swallow called me to the side window from the table where I had been poring over Hannah’s bits and pieces, which Ana had at last given me, to see a fantastically high remnant of what must once have been a Beforetimer bridge of astonishing dimensions. Both of us had wondered what it had spanned, since there was no sign of water or even a dry streambed under it. The bridge itself was broken in the middle but both ends stood intact upon giant pillars, and ran back to the cracked remnants of roads. The immense middle section lay in a twisted mess between them on the cracked black earth.
‘Imagine the force it would have taken,’ Swallow murmured soberly. ‘What a terrifying race they were – all greed and power.’
‘What is that?’ Ana asked late in the afternoon as all of us sat at the front of the glide. She was pointing to a long white pillar rising up at a slight angle from the black earth. As if the glide was curious too, it suddenly tilted and turned until it was flying west, and in moments we were passing over the pillar. I had been worried that the androne might have been misdirected, given its frequent inexplicable direction changes, until Ana explained that the devices in the glide hull told Hendon when the ground was very badly tainted or unstable in a way that would endanger us, whereupon God’s program had what Ana called a loophole that allowed the androne to redirect the glide. But she had confirmed that our direction was essentially due north.
Dragon asked the androne once more about the white pillar.
‘It is an unexploded missile with its warhead intact,’ Hendon answered. ‘It is emitting a faint sporadic signal but there is a high probability its firing mechanism has corroded.’
‘A weaponmachine,’ I said bleakly, remembering a vision I had seen of a flock of slender shining vessels flying up out of the opening that had become the Skylake. As the upended missile passed from sight, I shared the uneasy revulsion I saw on the faces of the others and wondered how many weaponmachines like this there were in the world still capable of hideous destruction; I wondered, too, where the Balance of Terror computermachine was, by which Sentinel could summon some, or maybe all of them, to deadly life, and why that had not been my target.
Ana heaved a sigh and asked, ‘What can it possibly have benefitted the Beforetimers to conquer a land by such means that it was rendered useless for aeons?’
‘Maybe this was revenge, pure and simple,’ Swallow said. ‘The Beforetimers were not above that, from what you have told me.’
She nodded. ‘The teknoguilders showed me enough that I know they were vengeful and also fearful.’
‘What could have frightened a people into unleashing this?’ Dragon asked.
‘I imagine they feared one another,’ Dameon said. He was sitting with us, and though he could not see what we saw, he had once told me the emotions we felt were a kind of landscape, too. Dragon asked what he meant, and the empath gave his slight, eloquent shrug. ‘They feared one another because they knew what
they
were capable of doing, and maybe in some cases, had done. The more weapons they created, the more frightened they would have been of the weapons they imagined their enemies had created, and so they strove to make worse weapons, to discourage any attack. I don’t think any of them imagined anyone would dare to use them and yet what other end could there be to it all?’