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“You were supposed to be here yesterday to brief us,” Rai Molvi said.
“Quite right,” Powel said without breaking stride. “I apologize. If you would like to make an official complaint about me, the Land Allocation Office which issues my contract is in a dumper down on the western edge of town. It’s only six kilometres.”
“No, we weren’t going to complain,” Rai Molvi said quickly. “But we do need to establish certain facts to prepare ourselves. It would have been helpful had you attended.”
“Attended what?”
“Last night’s council meeting.”
“What council?”
“Group Seven’s council.”
Powel took a breath. He never did understand why half of the colonists came to Lalonde in the first place. The LDC must employ some pretty amazing advertising techniques back on Earth, he thought. “What was it the council wanted to know?”
“Well . . . where are we going, for a start?”
“Upriver.” Powel stretched out the pause long enough to make the other man uncomfortable. “A place called Schuster County, on the Quallheim tributary. Although I’m sure that if you have somewhere else in mind the river-boat captain will be happy to take you there instead.”
Rai Molvi reddened.
Gerald pushed his way to the front as they all moved out from under the dormitory’s creaking roof. Powel had turned, making for the circular harbour two hundred metres away, Vorix padding along eagerly behind him. There were several paddle-boats pulled up at the wooden quays inside the artificial lagoon. The bright red specks of scavenging chikrows swirled overhead. The sight with its sense of purpose and adventure was unbeatable, quickening his blood.
“Is there anything we need to know about the paddleboats?” he asked.
“Not really,” Powel said. “They carry about a hundred and fifty people each, and it’ll take us about a fortnight to reach the Quallheim. Your meals are provided as part of your transit fee, and I’ll be giving talks on the more practical aspects of jungle lore and setting up your home. So just find yourself a bunk, and enjoy the trip, for you won’t ever have another like it. After we make landfall the real work begins.”
Gerald nodded his thanks and turned back to the dormitory. Let the others pester the man with irrelevant questions, he would get the family packed and onto the Swithland straight away. A long river trip would be just what Marie needed to calm her down.
The Swithland followed a standard design for the larger paddle-boats operating on the Juliffe. She had a broad, shallow hull made of mayope planks, measuring sixty metres from prow to stern and twenty metres broad. With the water flowing by a mere metre and a half below the deck she could almost have been mistaken for a well-crafted raft had it not been for her superstructure, which resembled a large rectangular barn. Her odd blend of ancient and modern technologies was yet another indicator of Lalonde’s development status. Two paddles midway down the hull because they were far simpler to manufacture and maintain than the more efficient screws. Electric motors because the industrial machinery to assemble them was cheaper than the equivalent necessary to produce a steam generator and turbine unit. But then electric motors required a power source, which was a solid-state thermal-exchange furnace imported from Oshanko. Such costly imports would only be tolerated while the number of paddle-boats made the generator and turbine factory uneconomical. When their numbers increased the governing economic equations would change in tandem, quite probably sweeping them away entirely to be replaced with another equally improbable mismatch craft. Such was the way of progress on Lalonde.
The Swithland herself was only seventeen years old, and good for another fifty or sixty at least. Her captain, Rosemary Lambourne, had taken out a mortgage with the LDC that her grandchildren would be paying off. As far as she was concerned, that was a bargain. Seventeen years of watching hapless colonists sailing upriver to their dream’s ruin convinced her she had done the right thing. Her colonist shipment contract with the Governor’s Transport Office was a solid income, guaranteed for the next twenty years, and everything she brought downriver for Durringham’s growing merchant community was pure profit, earning hard fuseodollars.
Life on the river was the best, she could hardly remember her existence back on Earth, working in a Govcentral design bureau to improve vac-train carriages. That was somebody else’s existence.
A quarter of an hour before they were due to cast off, Rosemary stood on the open bridge, which took up the forward quarter of the superstructure’s top deck. Powel Manani had joined her after he had led his horse up the gangplank, tethering it on the aft deck; now the two of them watched the colonists embarking. Children and adults alike shuffled round. The children were mostly gathered round the horse, patting and stroking it gently. Shoulder-bags and larger cases were strewn about over the dark planking. The sound of several heated arguments drifted up to the top deck. Nobody had thought to count how many people were coming on board. Now the boat was overladen, and latecomers were reluctant to find another berth on one of the other ships.
“You got your Ivets organized well,” she told the supervisor. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the gear stowed so professionally before. They finished over an hour ago. The harbour-master ought to nab them from you and put them to work as stevedores.”
“Humm,” Powel said. Vorix, who was lying on the deck behind them, gave an uneasy growl.
Rosemary grinned at that. Sometimes she wasn’t sure who was bonded to who.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“Someone, actually. They’ve got themselves a leader. He’s going to be trouble, Rosemary. I know he is.”
“You’ll keep them in line. Hell, you’ve supered five settlements, and all of them wound up viable. If you can’t do it nobody can.”
“Thanks. You run a pretty tight ship yourself.”
“Keep an eye out for yourself this time, Powel. There’s people gone missing up in Schuster County recently. Rumour has it the Governor’s none too happy.”
“Yeah?”
“The Hycel is carrying a marshal upriver. Going to have a scout round.”
“I wonder if there’s a bounty for finding them? The Governor doesn’t like homesteaders ducking out of their settlement contract, it sets a bad example. Everyone would come and live in Durringham otherwise.”
“From what I hear, they want to find out what happened to them, not where they are.”
“Oh?”
“They just vanished. No sign of a fight. Left all their gear and animals behind.”
“Fine, well, I’ll keep alert.” He took a broad-rimmed hat out of the pack at his feet. It was yellow-green in colour, much stained. “Are we sharing a bunk this trip, Roses?”
“No chance.” She leant further over the rail to scan the foredeck for her four children, who along with two stokers were her only other crew. “I’ve got me a brand-new Ivet as my second stoker. Barry MacArple, he’s nineteen, real talented mechanic on both sides of the sheets. I think it shocks my eldest boy. That is, when he actually stops boffing the colonists’ daughters himself.”
“Fine.”
Vorix let out a plaintive whine, and dropped his head onto his forepaws.
“When are you back in Schuster County next?” Powel asked.
“A couple of months, maybe three. I’m taking a group up to Colane County on the Dibowa tributary next time out. After that I’ll be up in your area. Want me to visit?”
He settled the hat on his head, working out agendas and timescales in his mind. “No, it’s too soon. This bunch won’t have exhausted their gear by then. Make it nine or ten months, let them feel a little deprivation, we’ll be able to flog them a bar of soap for fifty fuseodollars by then.”
“That’s a date.”
They shook on it, and turned back to watch the quarrelling colonists below.
Swithland cast off more or less on time. Rosemary’s eldest boy, Karl, a strapping fifteen-year-old, ran along the deck shouting orders to the colonists who were helping with the cables. A cheer went up from the passengers as the paddles started turning and they moved away from the quay.
Rosemary was in the bridge herself. The harbour didn’t have much spare water anyway, and Swithland was sluggish with a hold full of logs for the furnace, the colonists, their gear, and enough food to last them three weeks. She steered past the end of the quay and out into the centre of the artificial lagoon. The furnace was burning furiously, twin stacks sending out a high plume of grey-blue smoke. Standing on the prow, Karl gave her a smiling thumbs-up. He’s going to break a lot of female hearts, that one, she thought proudly.
For once there wasn’t a rain-cloud to be seen, and the forward-sweep mass-detector showed her a clean channel. Rosemary gave the horn a single toot, and pushed both paddle-control levers forward, moving out of the harbour and onto her beloved untamed river that stretched away into the unknown. How could life possibly be better than this?
For the first hundred kilometres the colonists of Group Seven could only agree with her. This was the oldest inhabited section of Amarisk outside Durringham, settled almost twenty-five years previously. The jungle had been cleared in great swaths, making way for fields, groves, and grazing land. As they stood on the side of the deck they could see herds of animals roaming free over the broad pastures, picking teams working the groves and plantations, their piles of wicker baskets full of fruit or nuts. Villages formed a continual chain along the southern bank, the rural idyll; sturdy, brightly painted wooden cottages set in the centre of large gardens that were alive with flowers, lines of tall, verdant trees providing a leafy shade. The lanes between the trunks were planted with thick grasses, shining a brilliant emerald in the intense sunlight. Out here, where people could spread without constraint, there wasn’t the foot and wheel traffic to pound the damp soil into the kind of permanent repellent mud which made up Durringham’s roads. Horses plodded along, pulling wains loaded with bounties of hay and barley. Windmills formed a row of regular pinnacles along the skyline, their sails turning lazily in the persistent wind. Long jetties struck out into the choppy ochre water of the Juliffe, two or three to each village. They had constant visitors in the form of small paddle-driven barges eager for the farms’ produce. Children sat on the end of the jetties dangling rods and lines into the water, waving at the eternal procession of boats speeding by. In the morning small sailing boats cast off to fish the river, and the Swithland would cruise sedately through the flotilla of canvas triangles thrumming in the fresh breeze.
In the evening, when the sky flared into deep orange around the western horizon, and the stars came out overhead, bonfires would be lit in the village greens. Leaning on the deck rail that first night as the fires appeared, Gerald Skibbow was reduced to an inarticulate longing. The black water reflected long tapers of orange light from the bonfires, and he could hear gusty snatches of songs as the villagers gathered round for their communal meal.
“I never thought it could be this perfect,” he told Loren.
She smiled as his arm circled her. “It does look pretty, doesn’t it. Something out of a fairy story.”
“It can be ours, this sort of life. It’s waiting up there at the end of the river. In ten years’ time we’ll be dancing round a bonfire while the boats go by.”
“And the new colonists will look at us and dream!”
“We’ll have our house built, like a palace made from wood. That’s what you’ll live in, Loren, a miniature palace that the King of Kulu himself will envy. And you’ll have a garden full of vegetables and flowers; and I’ll be out in the grove, or tending the herds. Paula and Marie will live nearby, and the grandchildren will run both of us off our feet.”
Loren hugged him tightly. He lifted his head and let out a bellow of joy. “God, how could we have wasted so many years on Earth? This is where we all belong, all of us Loren. We should throw away our arcologies and our starships, and live like the Lord intended. We really should.”
Ruth and Jay stood together beside the taffrail and watched the sun sink below the horizon, crowning the vast river with an aura of purple-gold light for one sublime magical minute.
“Listen, Mummy, they’re singing,” Jay said. Her face was a picture of serenity. The horrid corpse of yesterday was long forgotten; she had found utter contentment with the big beige-coloured horse hitched up to the port railing. Those huge black eyes were so soft and loving, and the feel of its wet nose on her palm when she fed it a sweet was ticklish and wonderful. She couldn’t believe something so huge was so gentle. Mr Manani had already said he would let her walk it round the deck each morning for exercise and teach her how to groom it. The Swithland was paradise come early. “What are they singing?”
“It sounds like a hymn,” Ruth said. For the first time since they had landed she was beginning to feel as though she’d made the right decision. The villages certainly looked attractive, and well organized. Knowing that it was possible to succeed was half the battle. It would be tougher further from the capital, but not impossible. “I can’t say I blame them.”
The wind had died down, sending flames from the bonfires shooting straight up into the starry night, but the aroma of cooking food stole over the water to the Swithland and her two sister craft. The scent of freshly baked bread and thick spicy stews played hell with Quinn’s stomach. The Ivets had been given cold meat and a fruit that looked like an orange, except it had a purple-bluish coloured skin and tasted salty. All the colonists had eaten a hot meal. Bastards. But the Ivets were starting to turn to him, that was something. He sat on the deck at the front of the superstructure, looking out to the north, away from all those fucking medieval hovels the colonists were wetting themselves over. The north was dark, he liked that. Darkness had many forms, physical and mental, and it conquered all in the end. The sect had taught him that, darkness was strength, and those that embrace the dark will always triumph.
Quinn’s lips moved soundlessly. “After darkness comes the Bringer of Light. And He shall reward those that followed His path into the void of Night. For they are true unto themselves and the nature of man, which is beast. They shall sit upon His hand, and cast down those who dress in the falsehood of Our Lord and His brother.”
A hand touched Quinn’s shoulder, and the fat priest smiled down at him. “I’m holding a service on the aft deck in a few minutes. We are going to bless our venture. You would be very welcome to attend.”
“No, thank you, Father,” Quinn said levelly.
Horst gave him a sad smile. “I understand. But the Lord’s door is always open for you.” He walked on towards the aft deck.
“Your Lord,” Quinn whispered to his departing back. “Not mine.”
Jackson Gael saw the girl from Donovan’s slouched against the port rail just aft of the paddle, head resting on her hands. She was wearing a crumpled Oxford-blue shirt tucked into black rugby shorts, white pumps on her feet, no socks. At first he thought she was gazing out over the river, then he caught sight of the personal MF block clipped to her belt, the silver lenses in her eyes. Her foot was tapping out a rhythm on the decking.
He shrugged out of the top of his grey jump suit, tying the arms round his waist so she wouldn’t see the damning scarlet letters. There was no appreciable drop in temperature as the humid air flowed over his skin. Had there ever been a single molecule of cool air on this planet?
He tapped her on the shoulder. “Hi.”
A spasm of annoyance crossed her face. Blind mirror irises turned in his direction as her hand fumbled with the little block’s controls. The silver vanished to show dark, expressive eyes. “Yeah?”
“Was that a local broadcast?”
“Here? You’ve got to be kidding. The reason we’re on a boat is because this planet hasn’t invented the wheel yet.”
Jackson laughed. “You’re right there. So what were you ’vising?”
“Life Kinetic . That’s Jezzibella’s latest album.”
“Hey, I rate Jezzibella.”
Her sulk lifted for a moment. “Course you do. She turns males to jelly. Shows us fems what we can all do if we want. She makes herself succeed.”
“I saw her live, once.”
“God. You did? When?”
“She played my arcology a year ago. Five nights in the stadium, sold out.”
“Any good?”
“Supreme.” He spread his arms exuberantly. “Nothing like an ordinary Mood Fantasy band, it’s almost straight sex, but she went on for hours. She just sets your whole body on fire, what she does with the dancers. They reckoned her AV broadcast pillars were using illegal sense-activant codes. Who gives a shit? You would have loved it.”
Marie Skibbow’s pout returned. “I’ll never know now, will I? Not on this bloody retarded planet.”
“Didn’t you want to come here?”
“No.”
The hot resentment in her voice surprised him. The colonists had seemed such a dopey bunch, every one of them wrapped up in the prospect of all that rustic charm crap spread out along the riverbank. It hadn’t occurred to him that they were anything other than unified in their goal. Marie might be a valuable ally.
He saw the captain’s son, Karl, making his way down the side of the superstructure. The boy was wearing a pair of white canvas shorts, and rubber-soled plimsolls. Swithland was riding some choppy water, but Karl’s balance was uncanny, he could anticipate the slightest degree of pitch.
“There you are,” he said to Marie. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, I thought you’d be at the service the priest’s giving.”
“I’m not helping to bless this trip,” she said smartly.
Karl grinned broadly, his teeth showing a gleam in the deepening twilight. He was a head shorter than Jackson, which put him a few centimetres below Marie’s height, and his torso was muscled like a medical text illustration. His family must have had plenty of geneering, he was too perfect. Jackson watched in growing bewilderment as he held his hand out expectantly to the girl.
“Are you ready to go?” Karl asked. “My cabin’s up forward, just below the bridge.”
Marie accepted the boy’s hand. “Sure.”
Jackson was given a lurid wink from Karl as he led Marie down the deck. They disappeared into the superstructure, and Jackson was sure he heard Marie giggle. He couldn’t believe it. She preferred Karl? The boy was five years younger than him! His fists clenched in anger. It was being an Ivet, he knew it was. The little bitch!
Karl’s cabin was a compact compartment overlooking the prow, definitely a teenager’s room. A couple of processor blocks lay on the desk, along with some micro-tool units and a half-dismantled electronics stack from one of the bridge systems. There were holograms on the wall showing starfields and planets; clothes, shoes, and towels were scattered about on the deck planks. It had about ten times as much space as the cabin the Skibbows and Kavas were forced to share.
The door shut behind Marie, muting the sound of the congregation gathered on the aft deck. Karl immediately kicked off his plimsolls, and unlatched a broad bunk which had been folded flat against the wall.
He’s only fifteen years old, Marie thought, but he has got a tremendous body, and that smile . . . God, I shouldn’t have allowed him to smooth talk me in here, never mind be thinking of bedding him. Which only made her feel even randier.
The congregation started to sing a hymn, their voices bringing a rich enthusiasm to the slow melody. She thought of her father out there, his eager-to-make-amends expression this morning, telling her how the river trip would show her the wholesome satisfaction to be earned from the quieter side of life and honest labours. So please, darling, try to understand Lalonde is our future now, and a fine future at that.
Marie unbuttoned her shirt under Karl’s triumphant gaze, then started on her shorts.
The settlements along the Juliffe changed subtly after the third day. The Swithland passed the end of the Hultain Marsh, and villages began to appear on the distant northern bank. They lacked the trimness of the earlier buildings, there were fewer animals and cultivated fields; less jungle had been cleared, and the trees standing so close to the cabins looked far more imposing.
The river branched, but the Swithland sailed on purposefully down the main channel. The water traffic began to fall off. These villages were still hard at work to tame the land, they couldn’t afford the time it took to make sailing boats. Big barges were chugging down the river, loaded mainly with mayope timber cut by new settlements to sell to the shipyards in the city. But by the end of the first week even the barges were left behind. It simply wasn’t economical to carry timber to the capital over such a distance.
There were tributary forks every hour now. The Juliffe was narrower, down to a couple of kilometres, its fast waters almost clear. Sometimes they would sail for five or six hours without seeing a village.
Horst felt the mood on board turning, and prayed that the despondency would end once they made landfall. The devil makes work for idle hands, and it had never been truer than out here. Once they were busy building their village and preparing the land Group Seven would have no time for brooding. But the second week seemed to last for ever, and the daily rains had returned with a vengeance. People were muttering about why they had to travel quite this far from the city for their allocated land.
The jungle had become an oppressive presence on either side, hemming them in, trees and undergrowth packed so tightly that the riverbanks created a solid barricade of leaves extending right down to the water. Foltwine, a tenacious freshwater aquatic plant, was a progressive nuisance. Its long, brown ribbonlike fronds grew just below the surface right across the width of the river. Rosemary avoided the larger clumps with ease, but strands would inevitably wrap themselves around the paddles. The Swithland made frequent stops while Karl and his younger sister clambered over them, cutting the tough slippery fronds free with the radiant yellow blades of fission knives.
Thirteen days after they departed from Durringham they had left the Juliffe itself behind and started to sail along the Quallheim tributary. It was three hundred metres wide, fast flowing, with vine-swamped trees thirty metres high forming a stockade on both banks. Away to the south, the colonists could just make out the purple and grey peaks of a distant mountain range. They stared in wonder at the snowcaps shining brightly in the sun; ice seemed to belong to an alien planet, not native to Lalonde.
In the early morning of the fourteenth day after leaving Durringham, a village crept into view as they edged their way up the river, the first they had seen for thirty-six hours. It was set in a semicircular clearing, a bite into the jungle nearly a kilometre deep. Felled trees lay everywhere. Thin towers of smoke rose from a few fire pits. The shacks were crude parodies of the cottages belonging to villages downriver; lashed-up frames with walls and roofs made from panels of woven palm fronds. There was a single jetty that looked terribly unsafe, with three hollowed-out log canoes tied up to it. A small stream trickling through the middle of the clearing into the river was an open sewer. Goats were tied to stakes, foraging in the short grass. Emaciated chickens scratched around in the mud and sawdust. The inhabitants stood about listlessly and watched the Swithland go past with numb, hooded eyes. Most of them were wearing shorts and boots, their skin a deep brown, whether from the sun or dirt it was hard to say. Even the apparently eternal chittering of the jungle creatures was hushed.
“Welcome to the town of Schuster,” Rosemary said with some irony. She was standing on the bridge, one eye permanently on the forward-sweep mass-detector, watching out for foltwine and submerged snags.
Group Seven’s council and Powel Manani were ranged around the bridge behind her, grateful to be in the shade.
“This is it?” Rai Molvi asked, aghast.
“The county capital, yeah,” Powel said. “They’ve been going for about a year now.”
“Don’t worry,” Rosemary said. “The land you’ve been allocated is another twelve kilometres upriver. You won’t have to have much contact with them. No bad thing, too, if you ask me. I’ve seen communities like this before, they infect their neighbours. Better you have a fresh start.”
Rai Molvi nodded briefly, not trusting himself to speak. The three rivercraft sailed on slowly, leaving behind the shanty town and its torpid inhabitants. The colonists gathered on Swithland ’s aft deck watched them disappear as the boat rounded a bend in the river, silent and contemplative.
Horst made the sign of the cross, muttering an invocation. Perhaps a requiem would be more appropriate, he thought.
Jay Hilton turned to her mother. “Will we have to live like that, Mummy?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Never.”
Two hours later, with the river down to a hundred and fifty metre width, Rosemary watched the digits on the inertial-guidance block flick round to match the coordinates the Land Allocation Office had given her. Karl stood on the prow as the Swithland crept along at a walking pace, his keen eyes searching the impenetrable green barrier of vegetation along the southern bank. The jungle was steaming softly from the rain of an hour earlier, white tendrils wafting out of the treetops, then spiralling away into the burning azure sky. Small, colourful birds darted about between the branches, shrieking brazenly.
Karl suddenly jumped up and waved to his mother, pointing at the bank. Rosemary saw the tarnished silver pillar with its hexagonal sign on top. It was stuck in the soil five metres above the water. Vines with big purple flowers had already climbed halfway up it.
She gave the horn a triumphant hoot. “End of the line,” she sang out. “This is Aberdale. Last stop.”
“All right,” Powel said, holding up his hands for silence. He was standing on a barrel to address the assembled colonists on the foredeck. “You’ve seen what can be done with a little bit of determination and hard work, and you’ve also seen how easy it is to fail. Which road you go down is entirely up to you. I’m here to help you for eighteen months, which is the period your future will be settled in. That’s the make or break time. Now, tell me, are you going to make a go of it?”
He received a throaty cheer, and smiled round. “Fine. Our first job is going to be building a jetty so that Captain Lambourne and the other two river-boats can dock. That way we can unload your gear properly, without getting it wet. Now a jetty is an important part of any village on this river. It tells a visitor straight away what sort of community you want to carve out for yourselves. You’ll notice our good captain wasn’t too eager to stop at Schuster. Not surprising, is it? A good jetty is one that the boats are always going to stop at, even out here. It’s a statement that you want to take part in what the planet has to offer. It says you want to trade and grow rich. It says that there are opportunities here for clever captains. It makes you a part of civilization. So I think it would be a good idea if we start off as we mean to go on, and build ourselves a solid decent jetty that’s going to last out your grandchildren. That’s what I think. Am I right?”
The chorus of “Yes!” was deafening.
He clapped his hands together, and hopped down off the barrel. “Quinn?” He beckoned to the lad, who was in the group of quiet Ivets standing in the shade of the superstructure.
Quinn trotted forward. “Yes, sir?”
The respectful tone didn’t fool Powel for a second. “The captain is holding station against the current for now. But it’s costing her power, so we have to secure the Swithland if we want her to stay for any length of time. I want you to ferry a cable out to the shore, and tie it onto a tree large enough to take the strain. Think you can manage that?”
Quinn looked from Powel to the mass of dark green vegetation on the bank then back to Powel. “How do I get over there?”
“Swim, boy! And don’t try telling me you can’t. It’s only thirty-five metres.”
Karl came over, uncoiling a rope. “Once you’ve secured it, we’ll haul the Swithland into the shallows, and rig a proper mooring,” the boy said. “Everyone else can wade ashore from there.”
“Great,” Quinn said sourly. He took his shoes off, then started to shrug out of his jump suit. Vorix nosed around the two shoes, sniffing eagerly.
Quinn left his shorts on, and sat on the decking to put his shoes back on. “Can Vorix come with me, please?” he asked.
The dog looked round, long tongue hanging out of the side of its big jaw.
“What the hell do you want him with you for?” Powel asked.
Quinn gestured to the jungle with its barrage of animal sounds. “To take care of any wild sayce.”
“Get in the water, Quinn, and stop whingeing. There aren’t any wild sayce around here.” Powel watched as the lad eased himself over the side of the deck and into the river. Jackson Gael lay flat on the deck, and handed the rope down.
Quinn started swimming for the shore with a powerful sidestroke, dragging the rope behind him.
“The kroclions ate all the sayce,” Powel yelled after him; then, laughing heartily, went aft to get the jetty-building team organized.
Chapter 08
“Quite right,” Powel said without breaking stride. “I apologize. If you would like to make an official complaint about me, the Land Allocation Office which issues my contract is in a dumper down on the western edge of town. It’s only six kilometres.”
“No, we weren’t going to complain,” Rai Molvi said quickly. “But we do need to establish certain facts to prepare ourselves. It would have been helpful had you attended.”
“Attended what?”
“Last night’s council meeting.”
“What council?”
“Group Seven’s council.”
Powel took a breath. He never did understand why half of the colonists came to Lalonde in the first place. The LDC must employ some pretty amazing advertising techniques back on Earth, he thought. “What was it the council wanted to know?”
“Well . . . where are we going, for a start?”
“Upriver.” Powel stretched out the pause long enough to make the other man uncomfortable. “A place called Schuster County, on the Quallheim tributary. Although I’m sure that if you have somewhere else in mind the river-boat captain will be happy to take you there instead.”
Rai Molvi reddened.
Gerald pushed his way to the front as they all moved out from under the dormitory’s creaking roof. Powel had turned, making for the circular harbour two hundred metres away, Vorix padding along eagerly behind him. There were several paddle-boats pulled up at the wooden quays inside the artificial lagoon. The bright red specks of scavenging chikrows swirled overhead. The sight with its sense of purpose and adventure was unbeatable, quickening his blood.
“Is there anything we need to know about the paddleboats?” he asked.
“Not really,” Powel said. “They carry about a hundred and fifty people each, and it’ll take us about a fortnight to reach the Quallheim. Your meals are provided as part of your transit fee, and I’ll be giving talks on the more practical aspects of jungle lore and setting up your home. So just find yourself a bunk, and enjoy the trip, for you won’t ever have another like it. After we make landfall the real work begins.”
Gerald nodded his thanks and turned back to the dormitory. Let the others pester the man with irrelevant questions, he would get the family packed and onto the Swithland straight away. A long river trip would be just what Marie needed to calm her down.
The Swithland followed a standard design for the larger paddle-boats operating on the Juliffe. She had a broad, shallow hull made of mayope planks, measuring sixty metres from prow to stern and twenty metres broad. With the water flowing by a mere metre and a half below the deck she could almost have been mistaken for a well-crafted raft had it not been for her superstructure, which resembled a large rectangular barn. Her odd blend of ancient and modern technologies was yet another indicator of Lalonde’s development status. Two paddles midway down the hull because they were far simpler to manufacture and maintain than the more efficient screws. Electric motors because the industrial machinery to assemble them was cheaper than the equivalent necessary to produce a steam generator and turbine unit. But then electric motors required a power source, which was a solid-state thermal-exchange furnace imported from Oshanko. Such costly imports would only be tolerated while the number of paddle-boats made the generator and turbine factory uneconomical. When their numbers increased the governing economic equations would change in tandem, quite probably sweeping them away entirely to be replaced with another equally improbable mismatch craft. Such was the way of progress on Lalonde.
The Swithland herself was only seventeen years old, and good for another fifty or sixty at least. Her captain, Rosemary Lambourne, had taken out a mortgage with the LDC that her grandchildren would be paying off. As far as she was concerned, that was a bargain. Seventeen years of watching hapless colonists sailing upriver to their dream’s ruin convinced her she had done the right thing. Her colonist shipment contract with the Governor’s Transport Office was a solid income, guaranteed for the next twenty years, and everything she brought downriver for Durringham’s growing merchant community was pure profit, earning hard fuseodollars.
Life on the river was the best, she could hardly remember her existence back on Earth, working in a Govcentral design bureau to improve vac-train carriages. That was somebody else’s existence.
A quarter of an hour before they were due to cast off, Rosemary stood on the open bridge, which took up the forward quarter of the superstructure’s top deck. Powel Manani had joined her after he had led his horse up the gangplank, tethering it on the aft deck; now the two of them watched the colonists embarking. Children and adults alike shuffled round. The children were mostly gathered round the horse, patting and stroking it gently. Shoulder-bags and larger cases were strewn about over the dark planking. The sound of several heated arguments drifted up to the top deck. Nobody had thought to count how many people were coming on board. Now the boat was overladen, and latecomers were reluctant to find another berth on one of the other ships.
“You got your Ivets organized well,” she told the supervisor. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the gear stowed so professionally before. They finished over an hour ago. The harbour-master ought to nab them from you and put them to work as stevedores.”
“Humm,” Powel said. Vorix, who was lying on the deck behind them, gave an uneasy growl.
Rosemary grinned at that. Sometimes she wasn’t sure who was bonded to who.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“Someone, actually. They’ve got themselves a leader. He’s going to be trouble, Rosemary. I know he is.”
“You’ll keep them in line. Hell, you’ve supered five settlements, and all of them wound up viable. If you can’t do it nobody can.”
“Thanks. You run a pretty tight ship yourself.”
“Keep an eye out for yourself this time, Powel. There’s people gone missing up in Schuster County recently. Rumour has it the Governor’s none too happy.”
“Yeah?”
“The Hycel is carrying a marshal upriver. Going to have a scout round.”
“I wonder if there’s a bounty for finding them? The Governor doesn’t like homesteaders ducking out of their settlement contract, it sets a bad example. Everyone would come and live in Durringham otherwise.”
“From what I hear, they want to find out what happened to them, not where they are.”
“Oh?”
“They just vanished. No sign of a fight. Left all their gear and animals behind.”
“Fine, well, I’ll keep alert.” He took a broad-rimmed hat out of the pack at his feet. It was yellow-green in colour, much stained. “Are we sharing a bunk this trip, Roses?”
“No chance.” She leant further over the rail to scan the foredeck for her four children, who along with two stokers were her only other crew. “I’ve got me a brand-new Ivet as my second stoker. Barry MacArple, he’s nineteen, real talented mechanic on both sides of the sheets. I think it shocks my eldest boy. That is, when he actually stops boffing the colonists’ daughters himself.”
“Fine.”
Vorix let out a plaintive whine, and dropped his head onto his forepaws.
“When are you back in Schuster County next?” Powel asked.
“A couple of months, maybe three. I’m taking a group up to Colane County on the Dibowa tributary next time out. After that I’ll be up in your area. Want me to visit?”
He settled the hat on his head, working out agendas and timescales in his mind. “No, it’s too soon. This bunch won’t have exhausted their gear by then. Make it nine or ten months, let them feel a little deprivation, we’ll be able to flog them a bar of soap for fifty fuseodollars by then.”
“That’s a date.”
They shook on it, and turned back to watch the quarrelling colonists below.
Swithland cast off more or less on time. Rosemary’s eldest boy, Karl, a strapping fifteen-year-old, ran along the deck shouting orders to the colonists who were helping with the cables. A cheer went up from the passengers as the paddles started turning and they moved away from the quay.
Rosemary was in the bridge herself. The harbour didn’t have much spare water anyway, and Swithland was sluggish with a hold full of logs for the furnace, the colonists, their gear, and enough food to last them three weeks. She steered past the end of the quay and out into the centre of the artificial lagoon. The furnace was burning furiously, twin stacks sending out a high plume of grey-blue smoke. Standing on the prow, Karl gave her a smiling thumbs-up. He’s going to break a lot of female hearts, that one, she thought proudly.
For once there wasn’t a rain-cloud to be seen, and the forward-sweep mass-detector showed her a clean channel. Rosemary gave the horn a single toot, and pushed both paddle-control levers forward, moving out of the harbour and onto her beloved untamed river that stretched away into the unknown. How could life possibly be better than this?
For the first hundred kilometres the colonists of Group Seven could only agree with her. This was the oldest inhabited section of Amarisk outside Durringham, settled almost twenty-five years previously. The jungle had been cleared in great swaths, making way for fields, groves, and grazing land. As they stood on the side of the deck they could see herds of animals roaming free over the broad pastures, picking teams working the groves and plantations, their piles of wicker baskets full of fruit or nuts. Villages formed a continual chain along the southern bank, the rural idyll; sturdy, brightly painted wooden cottages set in the centre of large gardens that were alive with flowers, lines of tall, verdant trees providing a leafy shade. The lanes between the trunks were planted with thick grasses, shining a brilliant emerald in the intense sunlight. Out here, where people could spread without constraint, there wasn’t the foot and wheel traffic to pound the damp soil into the kind of permanent repellent mud which made up Durringham’s roads. Horses plodded along, pulling wains loaded with bounties of hay and barley. Windmills formed a row of regular pinnacles along the skyline, their sails turning lazily in the persistent wind. Long jetties struck out into the choppy ochre water of the Juliffe, two or three to each village. They had constant visitors in the form of small paddle-driven barges eager for the farms’ produce. Children sat on the end of the jetties dangling rods and lines into the water, waving at the eternal procession of boats speeding by. In the morning small sailing boats cast off to fish the river, and the Swithland would cruise sedately through the flotilla of canvas triangles thrumming in the fresh breeze.
In the evening, when the sky flared into deep orange around the western horizon, and the stars came out overhead, bonfires would be lit in the village greens. Leaning on the deck rail that first night as the fires appeared, Gerald Skibbow was reduced to an inarticulate longing. The black water reflected long tapers of orange light from the bonfires, and he could hear gusty snatches of songs as the villagers gathered round for their communal meal.
“I never thought it could be this perfect,” he told Loren.
She smiled as his arm circled her. “It does look pretty, doesn’t it. Something out of a fairy story.”
“It can be ours, this sort of life. It’s waiting up there at the end of the river. In ten years’ time we’ll be dancing round a bonfire while the boats go by.”
“And the new colonists will look at us and dream!”
“We’ll have our house built, like a palace made from wood. That’s what you’ll live in, Loren, a miniature palace that the King of Kulu himself will envy. And you’ll have a garden full of vegetables and flowers; and I’ll be out in the grove, or tending the herds. Paula and Marie will live nearby, and the grandchildren will run both of us off our feet.”
Loren hugged him tightly. He lifted his head and let out a bellow of joy. “God, how could we have wasted so many years on Earth? This is where we all belong, all of us Loren. We should throw away our arcologies and our starships, and live like the Lord intended. We really should.”
Ruth and Jay stood together beside the taffrail and watched the sun sink below the horizon, crowning the vast river with an aura of purple-gold light for one sublime magical minute.
“Listen, Mummy, they’re singing,” Jay said. Her face was a picture of serenity. The horrid corpse of yesterday was long forgotten; she had found utter contentment with the big beige-coloured horse hitched up to the port railing. Those huge black eyes were so soft and loving, and the feel of its wet nose on her palm when she fed it a sweet was ticklish and wonderful. She couldn’t believe something so huge was so gentle. Mr Manani had already said he would let her walk it round the deck each morning for exercise and teach her how to groom it. The Swithland was paradise come early. “What are they singing?”
“It sounds like a hymn,” Ruth said. For the first time since they had landed she was beginning to feel as though she’d made the right decision. The villages certainly looked attractive, and well organized. Knowing that it was possible to succeed was half the battle. It would be tougher further from the capital, but not impossible. “I can’t say I blame them.”
The wind had died down, sending flames from the bonfires shooting straight up into the starry night, but the aroma of cooking food stole over the water to the Swithland and her two sister craft. The scent of freshly baked bread and thick spicy stews played hell with Quinn’s stomach. The Ivets had been given cold meat and a fruit that looked like an orange, except it had a purple-bluish coloured skin and tasted salty. All the colonists had eaten a hot meal. Bastards. But the Ivets were starting to turn to him, that was something. He sat on the deck at the front of the superstructure, looking out to the north, away from all those fucking medieval hovels the colonists were wetting themselves over. The north was dark, he liked that. Darkness had many forms, physical and mental, and it conquered all in the end. The sect had taught him that, darkness was strength, and those that embrace the dark will always triumph.
Quinn’s lips moved soundlessly. “After darkness comes the Bringer of Light. And He shall reward those that followed His path into the void of Night. For they are true unto themselves and the nature of man, which is beast. They shall sit upon His hand, and cast down those who dress in the falsehood of Our Lord and His brother.”
A hand touched Quinn’s shoulder, and the fat priest smiled down at him. “I’m holding a service on the aft deck in a few minutes. We are going to bless our venture. You would be very welcome to attend.”
“No, thank you, Father,” Quinn said levelly.
Horst gave him a sad smile. “I understand. But the Lord’s door is always open for you.” He walked on towards the aft deck.
“Your Lord,” Quinn whispered to his departing back. “Not mine.”
Jackson Gael saw the girl from Donovan’s slouched against the port rail just aft of the paddle, head resting on her hands. She was wearing a crumpled Oxford-blue shirt tucked into black rugby shorts, white pumps on her feet, no socks. At first he thought she was gazing out over the river, then he caught sight of the personal MF block clipped to her belt, the silver lenses in her eyes. Her foot was tapping out a rhythm on the decking.
He shrugged out of the top of his grey jump suit, tying the arms round his waist so she wouldn’t see the damning scarlet letters. There was no appreciable drop in temperature as the humid air flowed over his skin. Had there ever been a single molecule of cool air on this planet?
He tapped her on the shoulder. “Hi.”
A spasm of annoyance crossed her face. Blind mirror irises turned in his direction as her hand fumbled with the little block’s controls. The silver vanished to show dark, expressive eyes. “Yeah?”
“Was that a local broadcast?”
“Here? You’ve got to be kidding. The reason we’re on a boat is because this planet hasn’t invented the wheel yet.”
Jackson laughed. “You’re right there. So what were you ’vising?”
“Life Kinetic . That’s Jezzibella’s latest album.”
“Hey, I rate Jezzibella.”
Her sulk lifted for a moment. “Course you do. She turns males to jelly. Shows us fems what we can all do if we want. She makes herself succeed.”
“I saw her live, once.”
“God. You did? When?”
“She played my arcology a year ago. Five nights in the stadium, sold out.”
“Any good?”
“Supreme.” He spread his arms exuberantly. “Nothing like an ordinary Mood Fantasy band, it’s almost straight sex, but she went on for hours. She just sets your whole body on fire, what she does with the dancers. They reckoned her AV broadcast pillars were using illegal sense-activant codes. Who gives a shit? You would have loved it.”
Marie Skibbow’s pout returned. “I’ll never know now, will I? Not on this bloody retarded planet.”
“Didn’t you want to come here?”
“No.”
The hot resentment in her voice surprised him. The colonists had seemed such a dopey bunch, every one of them wrapped up in the prospect of all that rustic charm crap spread out along the riverbank. It hadn’t occurred to him that they were anything other than unified in their goal. Marie might be a valuable ally.
He saw the captain’s son, Karl, making his way down the side of the superstructure. The boy was wearing a pair of white canvas shorts, and rubber-soled plimsolls. Swithland was riding some choppy water, but Karl’s balance was uncanny, he could anticipate the slightest degree of pitch.
“There you are,” he said to Marie. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, I thought you’d be at the service the priest’s giving.”
“I’m not helping to bless this trip,” she said smartly.
Karl grinned broadly, his teeth showing a gleam in the deepening twilight. He was a head shorter than Jackson, which put him a few centimetres below Marie’s height, and his torso was muscled like a medical text illustration. His family must have had plenty of geneering, he was too perfect. Jackson watched in growing bewilderment as he held his hand out expectantly to the girl.
“Are you ready to go?” Karl asked. “My cabin’s up forward, just below the bridge.”
Marie accepted the boy’s hand. “Sure.”
Jackson was given a lurid wink from Karl as he led Marie down the deck. They disappeared into the superstructure, and Jackson was sure he heard Marie giggle. He couldn’t believe it. She preferred Karl? The boy was five years younger than him! His fists clenched in anger. It was being an Ivet, he knew it was. The little bitch!
Karl’s cabin was a compact compartment overlooking the prow, definitely a teenager’s room. A couple of processor blocks lay on the desk, along with some micro-tool units and a half-dismantled electronics stack from one of the bridge systems. There were holograms on the wall showing starfields and planets; clothes, shoes, and towels were scattered about on the deck planks. It had about ten times as much space as the cabin the Skibbows and Kavas were forced to share.
The door shut behind Marie, muting the sound of the congregation gathered on the aft deck. Karl immediately kicked off his plimsolls, and unlatched a broad bunk which had been folded flat against the wall.
He’s only fifteen years old, Marie thought, but he has got a tremendous body, and that smile . . . God, I shouldn’t have allowed him to smooth talk me in here, never mind be thinking of bedding him. Which only made her feel even randier.
The congregation started to sing a hymn, their voices bringing a rich enthusiasm to the slow melody. She thought of her father out there, his eager-to-make-amends expression this morning, telling her how the river trip would show her the wholesome satisfaction to be earned from the quieter side of life and honest labours. So please, darling, try to understand Lalonde is our future now, and a fine future at that.
Marie unbuttoned her shirt under Karl’s triumphant gaze, then started on her shorts.
The settlements along the Juliffe changed subtly after the third day. The Swithland passed the end of the Hultain Marsh, and villages began to appear on the distant northern bank. They lacked the trimness of the earlier buildings, there were fewer animals and cultivated fields; less jungle had been cleared, and the trees standing so close to the cabins looked far more imposing.
The river branched, but the Swithland sailed on purposefully down the main channel. The water traffic began to fall off. These villages were still hard at work to tame the land, they couldn’t afford the time it took to make sailing boats. Big barges were chugging down the river, loaded mainly with mayope timber cut by new settlements to sell to the shipyards in the city. But by the end of the first week even the barges were left behind. It simply wasn’t economical to carry timber to the capital over such a distance.
There were tributary forks every hour now. The Juliffe was narrower, down to a couple of kilometres, its fast waters almost clear. Sometimes they would sail for five or six hours without seeing a village.
Horst felt the mood on board turning, and prayed that the despondency would end once they made landfall. The devil makes work for idle hands, and it had never been truer than out here. Once they were busy building their village and preparing the land Group Seven would have no time for brooding. But the second week seemed to last for ever, and the daily rains had returned with a vengeance. People were muttering about why they had to travel quite this far from the city for their allocated land.
The jungle had become an oppressive presence on either side, hemming them in, trees and undergrowth packed so tightly that the riverbanks created a solid barricade of leaves extending right down to the water. Foltwine, a tenacious freshwater aquatic plant, was a progressive nuisance. Its long, brown ribbonlike fronds grew just below the surface right across the width of the river. Rosemary avoided the larger clumps with ease, but strands would inevitably wrap themselves around the paddles. The Swithland made frequent stops while Karl and his younger sister clambered over them, cutting the tough slippery fronds free with the radiant yellow blades of fission knives.
Thirteen days after they departed from Durringham they had left the Juliffe itself behind and started to sail along the Quallheim tributary. It was three hundred metres wide, fast flowing, with vine-swamped trees thirty metres high forming a stockade on both banks. Away to the south, the colonists could just make out the purple and grey peaks of a distant mountain range. They stared in wonder at the snowcaps shining brightly in the sun; ice seemed to belong to an alien planet, not native to Lalonde.
In the early morning of the fourteenth day after leaving Durringham, a village crept into view as they edged their way up the river, the first they had seen for thirty-six hours. It was set in a semicircular clearing, a bite into the jungle nearly a kilometre deep. Felled trees lay everywhere. Thin towers of smoke rose from a few fire pits. The shacks were crude parodies of the cottages belonging to villages downriver; lashed-up frames with walls and roofs made from panels of woven palm fronds. There was a single jetty that looked terribly unsafe, with three hollowed-out log canoes tied up to it. A small stream trickling through the middle of the clearing into the river was an open sewer. Goats were tied to stakes, foraging in the short grass. Emaciated chickens scratched around in the mud and sawdust. The inhabitants stood about listlessly and watched the Swithland go past with numb, hooded eyes. Most of them were wearing shorts and boots, their skin a deep brown, whether from the sun or dirt it was hard to say. Even the apparently eternal chittering of the jungle creatures was hushed.
“Welcome to the town of Schuster,” Rosemary said with some irony. She was standing on the bridge, one eye permanently on the forward-sweep mass-detector, watching out for foltwine and submerged snags.
Group Seven’s council and Powel Manani were ranged around the bridge behind her, grateful to be in the shade.
“This is it?” Rai Molvi asked, aghast.
“The county capital, yeah,” Powel said. “They’ve been going for about a year now.”
“Don’t worry,” Rosemary said. “The land you’ve been allocated is another twelve kilometres upriver. You won’t have to have much contact with them. No bad thing, too, if you ask me. I’ve seen communities like this before, they infect their neighbours. Better you have a fresh start.”
Rai Molvi nodded briefly, not trusting himself to speak. The three rivercraft sailed on slowly, leaving behind the shanty town and its torpid inhabitants. The colonists gathered on Swithland ’s aft deck watched them disappear as the boat rounded a bend in the river, silent and contemplative.
Horst made the sign of the cross, muttering an invocation. Perhaps a requiem would be more appropriate, he thought.
Jay Hilton turned to her mother. “Will we have to live like that, Mummy?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Never.”
Two hours later, with the river down to a hundred and fifty metre width, Rosemary watched the digits on the inertial-guidance block flick round to match the coordinates the Land Allocation Office had given her. Karl stood on the prow as the Swithland crept along at a walking pace, his keen eyes searching the impenetrable green barrier of vegetation along the southern bank. The jungle was steaming softly from the rain of an hour earlier, white tendrils wafting out of the treetops, then spiralling away into the burning azure sky. Small, colourful birds darted about between the branches, shrieking brazenly.
Karl suddenly jumped up and waved to his mother, pointing at the bank. Rosemary saw the tarnished silver pillar with its hexagonal sign on top. It was stuck in the soil five metres above the water. Vines with big purple flowers had already climbed halfway up it.
She gave the horn a triumphant hoot. “End of the line,” she sang out. “This is Aberdale. Last stop.”
“All right,” Powel said, holding up his hands for silence. He was standing on a barrel to address the assembled colonists on the foredeck. “You’ve seen what can be done with a little bit of determination and hard work, and you’ve also seen how easy it is to fail. Which road you go down is entirely up to you. I’m here to help you for eighteen months, which is the period your future will be settled in. That’s the make or break time. Now, tell me, are you going to make a go of it?”
He received a throaty cheer, and smiled round. “Fine. Our first job is going to be building a jetty so that Captain Lambourne and the other two river-boats can dock. That way we can unload your gear properly, without getting it wet. Now a jetty is an important part of any village on this river. It tells a visitor straight away what sort of community you want to carve out for yourselves. You’ll notice our good captain wasn’t too eager to stop at Schuster. Not surprising, is it? A good jetty is one that the boats are always going to stop at, even out here. It’s a statement that you want to take part in what the planet has to offer. It says you want to trade and grow rich. It says that there are opportunities here for clever captains. It makes you a part of civilization. So I think it would be a good idea if we start off as we mean to go on, and build ourselves a solid decent jetty that’s going to last out your grandchildren. That’s what I think. Am I right?”
The chorus of “Yes!” was deafening.
He clapped his hands together, and hopped down off the barrel. “Quinn?” He beckoned to the lad, who was in the group of quiet Ivets standing in the shade of the superstructure.
Quinn trotted forward. “Yes, sir?”
The respectful tone didn’t fool Powel for a second. “The captain is holding station against the current for now. But it’s costing her power, so we have to secure the Swithland if we want her to stay for any length of time. I want you to ferry a cable out to the shore, and tie it onto a tree large enough to take the strain. Think you can manage that?”
Quinn looked from Powel to the mass of dark green vegetation on the bank then back to Powel. “How do I get over there?”
“Swim, boy! And don’t try telling me you can’t. It’s only thirty-five metres.”
Karl came over, uncoiling a rope. “Once you’ve secured it, we’ll haul the Swithland into the shallows, and rig a proper mooring,” the boy said. “Everyone else can wade ashore from there.”
“Great,” Quinn said sourly. He took his shoes off, then started to shrug out of his jump suit. Vorix nosed around the two shoes, sniffing eagerly.
Quinn left his shorts on, and sat on the decking to put his shoes back on. “Can Vorix come with me, please?” he asked.
The dog looked round, long tongue hanging out of the side of its big jaw.
“What the hell do you want him with you for?” Powel asked.
Quinn gestured to the jungle with its barrage of animal sounds. “To take care of any wild sayce.”
“Get in the water, Quinn, and stop whingeing. There aren’t any wild sayce around here.” Powel watched as the lad eased himself over the side of the deck and into the river. Jackson Gael lay flat on the deck, and handed the rope down.
Quinn started swimming for the shore with a powerful sidestroke, dragging the rope behind him.
“The kroclions ate all the sayce,” Powel yelled after him; then, laughing heartily, went aft to get the jetty-building team organized.
Chapter 08
Tranquillity: a polyp cylinder with hemispherical endcaps, its shell the colour of fired unglazed clay, sixty-five kilometres long, seventeen kilometres in diameter, the largest of all bitek habitats ever to be germinated within the Confederation. It was drab and uninviting in appearance, and difficult to see from a distance; what little sunlight eventually reached it from the F3 primary one-point-seven billion kilometres away seemed to be repulsed, preferring to flow around the curving shell rather than strike the surface. It was the only human settlement in the star system, orbiting seven thousand kilometres above the Ruin Ring. The shattered remnants of those very remote xenoc cousins were its sole companions. A permanent reminder that for all its size and power, it was terribly mortal. Lonely, isolated, and politically impotent, there should be few people who would choose to live in such a place.
And yet . . .
Starships and scavenger vessels on an approach trajectory could discern a stippled haze of light hovering around the endcap orientated to galactic north. A cluster of industrial stations floated in attendance. Owned by some of the largest astroengineering companies in the Confederation, they were permanently busy serving the constant stream of starships arriving and departing. Cargo tugs, fuel tankers, personnel carriers, and multipurpose service vehicles shuttled around them, their reaction drives pulsing out a smog of hot blue ions.
A three-kilometre spindle connected Tranquillity’s northern endcap to a non-rotating spaceport: a disc of metal girders, four and a half kilometres in diameter, with a confusing jumble of support facilities, tanks, and docking bays arrayed across its surface, resembling a gigantic metal cobweb that had snagged a swarm of fantastic cybernetic insects. It was as busy as any Edenist habitat, with Adamist starships loading and unloading their cargoes, taking on fuel, embarking passengers.
Behind the tarnished silver-white disc, three circular ledges stood out proud from the endcap: havens for the bitek starships which came and went with quick, graceful agility. Their geometrical diversity fascinated the entire spaceport, and most of the habitat’s population; observation lounges overlooking the ledges were popular among the young and not-so-young. Mirchusko was where the blackhawks mated and died and gestated. Tranquillity offered itself as one of their few legitimate home bases. Their eggs could be bought here, changing hands for upwards of twenty million fuseodollars and absolutely no questions.
Around the rim of the endcap hundreds of organic conductor cables stretched out into space; subject to constant dust abrasion and particle impact, they were extruded on a permanent basis by specialist glands to compensate for the near-daily breakages. The habitat’s rotation kept the cables perfectly straight, radiating away from the shell like the leaden-grey spokes of some cosmic bicycle wheel. They sliced through the flux lines of Mirchusko’s prodigious magnetosphere, generating a gigantic electrical current which powered the biological processes of Tranquillity’s mitosis layer as well as the axial light-tube and the domestic demands of its inhabitants. Tranquillity ingested thousands of tonnes of asteroidal minerals each year to regenerate its own polyp structure and invigorate the biosphere, but chemical reactions alone could never produce a fraction of the energy it needed to nurture its human occupants.
Beyond the endcap and the induction cables, exactly halfway down the cylinder, there was a city, home to over three million people: a band of starscrapers wrapped around the median equator, five-hundred-metre-long towers projecting out of the shell, studded with long, curving transparencies that radiated warm yellow light out into space. The view from the luxurious apartments inside was breathtaking; stars alternated with the storm-wracked gas giant and its little empire of rings and moons, eternal yet ever-changing as the cylinder rotated to provide an Earth-standard gravity at the base of the towers. Here, Adamists were granted the sight which was every Edenist’s birthright.
Small wonder, then, that Tranquillity, with its liberal banking laws, low income tax, the availability of blackhawks to charter, and an impartial habitat-personality which policed the interior to ensure a crime-free environment (essential for the peace of mind of the millionaires and billionaires who resided within), had prospered, becoming one of the Confederation’s premier independent trading and finance centres.
But it hadn’t been designed as a tax haven, not at first; that came later, born out of desperate necessity. Tranquillity was germinated in 2428, on the order of the then Crown Prince of Kulu, Michael Saldana, as a modified version of an Edenist habitat, with a number of unique attributes the Prince himself requested. He intended it to act as a base from which the cream of Kulu’s xenoc specialists could study the Laymil, and determine what fate had befallen them. It was an action which brought down the considerable wrath of his entire family.
Kulu was a Christian-ethnic culture, and very devout. The King of Kulu was the principal guardian of that faith throughout the kingdom; and because of bitek’s synonymous association with Edenists, Adamists (especially good Christian ones) had virtually abandoned that particular branch of technology. Possibly Prince Michael could have got away with bringing Tranquillity into existence; a self-sustaining bitek habitat was a logical solution for an isolated academic research project, and astute propaganda could have smoothed over the scandal. Royalty is no stranger to controversy, if anything it adds to its mystique, especially when relatively harmless.
But the whitewash option never arose; having germinated the habitat, Prince Michael went and compounded his original “crime” (in the eyes of the Church, and more importantly the Privy Council) by having neuron symbionts implanted enabling him to establish an affinity bond with the young Tranquillity.
His final act of defiance, condemned as heretical by Kulu’s conclave of bishops, came in 2432, the year his father, King James, died. Michael had a modified affinity gene spliced into his first son, Maurice, so that he too might commune with the kingdom’s newest, and most unusual, subject.
Both were excommunicated (Maurice was a three-month-old embryo residing in an exowomb at the time). Michael abdicated before his coronation in favour of his brother, Prince Lukas. And father and son were unceremoniously exiled to Tranquillity, which was granted to them in perpetuity as a duchy.
One of the most ambitious xenoc research projects ever mounted, the unravelling of an entire species from its chromosomes to whatever pinnacles of culture it achieved, virtually collapsed overnight as its royal treasury funds were withdrawn and staff recalled.
And as for Michael: from being the rightful monarch of the seven wealthiest star systems in the Confederation, he became the de facto owner of a half-grown bitek habitat. From commanding a navy of seven hundred warships, the third most powerful military force in existence, he had at his disposal five ex-navy transports, all over twenty-five years old. From having the absolute power of life and death over a population of one and three-quarter billion loyal human subjects, he became an administrator of seventeen thousand abandoned, shit-listed technicians and their families, resentful at their circumstances. From being First Lord of the Treasury dealing in trillion-pound budgets, he was left to write a tax-haven constitution in the hope of attracting the idle rich so he could live off their surplus.
For time evermore, Michael Saldana was known as the Lord of Ruin.
“I am bid three hundred thousand fuseodollars for this excellent plant. Really, ladies and gentlemen, this is a remarkable specimen. There are over five intact leaves, and it is of a type never seen before, completely unclassified.” The plant sat in a glass vacuum bubble on the auctioneer’s table: a dusty grey stalk, sprouting five long drooping fern-like leaves with frayed edges. The audience gazed at it in unappreciative silence. “Come along now, that protuberance at the top may well be a flower bud. Its cloning will be such a simple matter, and the genome patent will remain exclusively in your hands, an incalculable font of wealth.”
Someone datavised another ten thousand fuseodollars.
Joshua Calvert didn’t try to see who. This crowd were experts, facial expressions like poker players running downer programs. And they were all here today, packing the room, there wasn’t a spare chair to be had. People stood four deep around the walls, spilling down the aisles; the casuals, billionaires looking for a spark of excitement, the serious collectors, consortium bidders, even some industrial company reps hoping for technological templates.
Here because of me.
Barrington Grier’s outfit wasn’t the largest auction house in Tranquillity, and it dealt in art as much as Laymil artefacts, but it was a tight, polished operation. And Barrington Grier had treated a nineteen-year-old Joshua Calvert who had just returned from his first scavenging flight as an equal, as a professional. With respect. He had used the house ever since.
The bidding room was on the fiftieth floor of the StMary’s starscraper, its polyp walls overlaid by dark oak panelling, with velvet burgundy curtains on either side of the entrance arches and thick royal-blue carpets. Elaborate crystal lights cast a bright glow on the proceedings. Joshua could almost imagine himself in some Victorian London establishment. Barrington Grier had told him once that was the effect he wanted, quiet and dignified, fostering an atmosphere of confidence. The broad window behind the auctioneer spoilt the period effect somewhat; stars spun lazily outside, while Falsia, Mirchusko’s sixth moon, slowly traversed the panorama, a sliver of aquamarine.
“Three hundred and fifty thousand, once.”
Falsia was eclipsed by the auctioneer’s chest.
“Three hundred and fifty thousand, twice.”
The antique wooden gavel was raised. Falsia reappeared, peeping out over the man’s shoulder.
“Final time.”
There was a smack as the gavel came down. “Sold to Ms Melissa Strandberg.”
The room buzzed with voices as the glass bubble was carried away, excitement and nervousness throttling the air. In his second-row seat, with his nerves alight, Joshua felt it build around him, and shifted round uncomfortably, careful not to knock his legs against those of his neighbours. His feet were still painful if he applied pressure too quickly. Medical nanonic packages had swallowed both legs up to his knees, looking like strange green-leather boots, five sizes too large. The packages had a spongy texture, and he felt as though he was bouncing as he walked.
Three auctioneer’s assistants carried a new bubble over to the table, it was a metre and a half high, with a dull gold crown of thermo-dump fins on top, keeping the internal temperature below freezing. A faint patina of condensation misted the glass. The voices in the room chopped off dead.
Joshua caught sight of Barrington Grier standing at the side of the stage, a middle-aged man with chubby red cheeks and a ginger moustache. He wore a sober navy-blue suit with baggy trousers and neck-sealed jacket with flared arms, the faintest of orange lines glowing on the satin material in a spiral pattern. He caught Joshua’s eye, and gave him a wink.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the final item of the day, lot 127. I think I can safely say that it is unique in my experience; a module stack of Laymil circuitry which has been preserved in ice since the cataclysm. We have identified both processor chips, and a considerable number of solid-state crystal memories inside. All of them in pristine condition. In this one cylinder there are more than five times the number of crystals we have recovered since the discovery of the Ruin Ring itself. I will leave it to you to imagine the sheer wealth of information stored within. This is undoubtedly the greatest find since the first intact Laymil body, over a century ago. And it is my great privilege to open the bidding at the reserve price of two million Edenist fuseodollars.”
Joshua had been bracing himself, but there wasn’t even a murmur of protest from the crowd.
The bids came in fast and furious, rising in units of fifty thousand fuseodollars. The background level of conversation crept up again. Heads were swivelling around, bidders trying to make eye contact with their opponents, gauge the level of determination.
Joshua gritted his teeth together as the bids rose through four million. Come on, keep going. Four million three hundred thousand. The answer could be stored in there, why the Laymil did it. Four and a half. You’ll solve the biggest problem facing science since we cracked the lightspeed barrier. Four million eight hundred thousand. You’ll be famous, they’ll name the discovery after you, not me. Come on, you bastards. Bid!
“Five million,” the auctioneer announced calmly.
Joshua sank back into the chair, a little whimper of relief leaking from his throat. Looking down he saw his fists were clenched, palms sweating.
I’ve done it. I can start repairing Lady Mac , get a crew together. The replacement patterning nodes will have to come from the Sol system. Say a month if I charter a blackhawk to collect them. She could be spaceworthy within ten weeks. Jesus!
And yet . . .
Starships and scavenger vessels on an approach trajectory could discern a stippled haze of light hovering around the endcap orientated to galactic north. A cluster of industrial stations floated in attendance. Owned by some of the largest astroengineering companies in the Confederation, they were permanently busy serving the constant stream of starships arriving and departing. Cargo tugs, fuel tankers, personnel carriers, and multipurpose service vehicles shuttled around them, their reaction drives pulsing out a smog of hot blue ions.
A three-kilometre spindle connected Tranquillity’s northern endcap to a non-rotating spaceport: a disc of metal girders, four and a half kilometres in diameter, with a confusing jumble of support facilities, tanks, and docking bays arrayed across its surface, resembling a gigantic metal cobweb that had snagged a swarm of fantastic cybernetic insects. It was as busy as any Edenist habitat, with Adamist starships loading and unloading their cargoes, taking on fuel, embarking passengers.
Behind the tarnished silver-white disc, three circular ledges stood out proud from the endcap: havens for the bitek starships which came and went with quick, graceful agility. Their geometrical diversity fascinated the entire spaceport, and most of the habitat’s population; observation lounges overlooking the ledges were popular among the young and not-so-young. Mirchusko was where the blackhawks mated and died and gestated. Tranquillity offered itself as one of their few legitimate home bases. Their eggs could be bought here, changing hands for upwards of twenty million fuseodollars and absolutely no questions.
Around the rim of the endcap hundreds of organic conductor cables stretched out into space; subject to constant dust abrasion and particle impact, they were extruded on a permanent basis by specialist glands to compensate for the near-daily breakages. The habitat’s rotation kept the cables perfectly straight, radiating away from the shell like the leaden-grey spokes of some cosmic bicycle wheel. They sliced through the flux lines of Mirchusko’s prodigious magnetosphere, generating a gigantic electrical current which powered the biological processes of Tranquillity’s mitosis layer as well as the axial light-tube and the domestic demands of its inhabitants. Tranquillity ingested thousands of tonnes of asteroidal minerals each year to regenerate its own polyp structure and invigorate the biosphere, but chemical reactions alone could never produce a fraction of the energy it needed to nurture its human occupants.
Beyond the endcap and the induction cables, exactly halfway down the cylinder, there was a city, home to over three million people: a band of starscrapers wrapped around the median equator, five-hundred-metre-long towers projecting out of the shell, studded with long, curving transparencies that radiated warm yellow light out into space. The view from the luxurious apartments inside was breathtaking; stars alternated with the storm-wracked gas giant and its little empire of rings and moons, eternal yet ever-changing as the cylinder rotated to provide an Earth-standard gravity at the base of the towers. Here, Adamists were granted the sight which was every Edenist’s birthright.
Small wonder, then, that Tranquillity, with its liberal banking laws, low income tax, the availability of blackhawks to charter, and an impartial habitat-personality which policed the interior to ensure a crime-free environment (essential for the peace of mind of the millionaires and billionaires who resided within), had prospered, becoming one of the Confederation’s premier independent trading and finance centres.
But it hadn’t been designed as a tax haven, not at first; that came later, born out of desperate necessity. Tranquillity was germinated in 2428, on the order of the then Crown Prince of Kulu, Michael Saldana, as a modified version of an Edenist habitat, with a number of unique attributes the Prince himself requested. He intended it to act as a base from which the cream of Kulu’s xenoc specialists could study the Laymil, and determine what fate had befallen them. It was an action which brought down the considerable wrath of his entire family.
Kulu was a Christian-ethnic culture, and very devout. The King of Kulu was the principal guardian of that faith throughout the kingdom; and because of bitek’s synonymous association with Edenists, Adamists (especially good Christian ones) had virtually abandoned that particular branch of technology. Possibly Prince Michael could have got away with bringing Tranquillity into existence; a self-sustaining bitek habitat was a logical solution for an isolated academic research project, and astute propaganda could have smoothed over the scandal. Royalty is no stranger to controversy, if anything it adds to its mystique, especially when relatively harmless.
But the whitewash option never arose; having germinated the habitat, Prince Michael went and compounded his original “crime” (in the eyes of the Church, and more importantly the Privy Council) by having neuron symbionts implanted enabling him to establish an affinity bond with the young Tranquillity.
His final act of defiance, condemned as heretical by Kulu’s conclave of bishops, came in 2432, the year his father, King James, died. Michael had a modified affinity gene spliced into his first son, Maurice, so that he too might commune with the kingdom’s newest, and most unusual, subject.
Both were excommunicated (Maurice was a three-month-old embryo residing in an exowomb at the time). Michael abdicated before his coronation in favour of his brother, Prince Lukas. And father and son were unceremoniously exiled to Tranquillity, which was granted to them in perpetuity as a duchy.
One of the most ambitious xenoc research projects ever mounted, the unravelling of an entire species from its chromosomes to whatever pinnacles of culture it achieved, virtually collapsed overnight as its royal treasury funds were withdrawn and staff recalled.
And as for Michael: from being the rightful monarch of the seven wealthiest star systems in the Confederation, he became the de facto owner of a half-grown bitek habitat. From commanding a navy of seven hundred warships, the third most powerful military force in existence, he had at his disposal five ex-navy transports, all over twenty-five years old. From having the absolute power of life and death over a population of one and three-quarter billion loyal human subjects, he became an administrator of seventeen thousand abandoned, shit-listed technicians and their families, resentful at their circumstances. From being First Lord of the Treasury dealing in trillion-pound budgets, he was left to write a tax-haven constitution in the hope of attracting the idle rich so he could live off their surplus.
For time evermore, Michael Saldana was known as the Lord of Ruin.
“I am bid three hundred thousand fuseodollars for this excellent plant. Really, ladies and gentlemen, this is a remarkable specimen. There are over five intact leaves, and it is of a type never seen before, completely unclassified.” The plant sat in a glass vacuum bubble on the auctioneer’s table: a dusty grey stalk, sprouting five long drooping fern-like leaves with frayed edges. The audience gazed at it in unappreciative silence. “Come along now, that protuberance at the top may well be a flower bud. Its cloning will be such a simple matter, and the genome patent will remain exclusively in your hands, an incalculable font of wealth.”
Someone datavised another ten thousand fuseodollars.
Joshua Calvert didn’t try to see who. This crowd were experts, facial expressions like poker players running downer programs. And they were all here today, packing the room, there wasn’t a spare chair to be had. People stood four deep around the walls, spilling down the aisles; the casuals, billionaires looking for a spark of excitement, the serious collectors, consortium bidders, even some industrial company reps hoping for technological templates.
Here because of me.
Barrington Grier’s outfit wasn’t the largest auction house in Tranquillity, and it dealt in art as much as Laymil artefacts, but it was a tight, polished operation. And Barrington Grier had treated a nineteen-year-old Joshua Calvert who had just returned from his first scavenging flight as an equal, as a professional. With respect. He had used the house ever since.
The bidding room was on the fiftieth floor of the StMary’s starscraper, its polyp walls overlaid by dark oak panelling, with velvet burgundy curtains on either side of the entrance arches and thick royal-blue carpets. Elaborate crystal lights cast a bright glow on the proceedings. Joshua could almost imagine himself in some Victorian London establishment. Barrington Grier had told him once that was the effect he wanted, quiet and dignified, fostering an atmosphere of confidence. The broad window behind the auctioneer spoilt the period effect somewhat; stars spun lazily outside, while Falsia, Mirchusko’s sixth moon, slowly traversed the panorama, a sliver of aquamarine.
“Three hundred and fifty thousand, once.”
Falsia was eclipsed by the auctioneer’s chest.
“Three hundred and fifty thousand, twice.”
The antique wooden gavel was raised. Falsia reappeared, peeping out over the man’s shoulder.
“Final time.”
There was a smack as the gavel came down. “Sold to Ms Melissa Strandberg.”
The room buzzed with voices as the glass bubble was carried away, excitement and nervousness throttling the air. In his second-row seat, with his nerves alight, Joshua felt it build around him, and shifted round uncomfortably, careful not to knock his legs against those of his neighbours. His feet were still painful if he applied pressure too quickly. Medical nanonic packages had swallowed both legs up to his knees, looking like strange green-leather boots, five sizes too large. The packages had a spongy texture, and he felt as though he was bouncing as he walked.
Three auctioneer’s assistants carried a new bubble over to the table, it was a metre and a half high, with a dull gold crown of thermo-dump fins on top, keeping the internal temperature below freezing. A faint patina of condensation misted the glass. The voices in the room chopped off dead.
Joshua caught sight of Barrington Grier standing at the side of the stage, a middle-aged man with chubby red cheeks and a ginger moustache. He wore a sober navy-blue suit with baggy trousers and neck-sealed jacket with flared arms, the faintest of orange lines glowing on the satin material in a spiral pattern. He caught Joshua’s eye, and gave him a wink.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the final item of the day, lot 127. I think I can safely say that it is unique in my experience; a module stack of Laymil circuitry which has been preserved in ice since the cataclysm. We have identified both processor chips, and a considerable number of solid-state crystal memories inside. All of them in pristine condition. In this one cylinder there are more than five times the number of crystals we have recovered since the discovery of the Ruin Ring itself. I will leave it to you to imagine the sheer wealth of information stored within. This is undoubtedly the greatest find since the first intact Laymil body, over a century ago. And it is my great privilege to open the bidding at the reserve price of two million Edenist fuseodollars.”
Joshua had been bracing himself, but there wasn’t even a murmur of protest from the crowd.
The bids came in fast and furious, rising in units of fifty thousand fuseodollars. The background level of conversation crept up again. Heads were swivelling around, bidders trying to make eye contact with their opponents, gauge the level of determination.
Joshua gritted his teeth together as the bids rose through four million. Come on, keep going. Four million three hundred thousand. The answer could be stored in there, why the Laymil did it. Four and a half. You’ll solve the biggest problem facing science since we cracked the lightspeed barrier. Four million eight hundred thousand. You’ll be famous, they’ll name the discovery after you, not me. Come on, you bastards. Bid!
“Five million,” the auctioneer announced calmly.
Joshua sank back into the chair, a little whimper of relief leaking from his throat. Looking down he saw his fists were clenched, palms sweating.
I’ve done it. I can start repairing Lady Mac , get a crew together. The replacement patterning nodes will have to come from the Sol system. Say a month if I charter a blackhawk to collect them. She could be spaceworthy within ten weeks. Jesus!