Across the Spectrum (41 page)

He climbed after the other boy, shadowing him closely,
feeling the strain in his chest and arms as he and Naramutro zigzagged across
the sky, Talajara wheeling around them. Taj could hear the other’s harsh
breathing and realized that he was panting just as hard.

Just then Naramutro twisted swiftly in a complex turn,
falling away and behind and tossing the ball toward one of his friends. But Taj
was ready. He slipped sideways, spilling air from his flight wings and twisting
violently in a move that made the quillions on his wings whistle. He caught the
ball just ahead of the girl’s scoop and fell away as she yelled in frustration.

He heard Elli laugh. “Air too thick for you, Nara?” she
crowed.

Naramutro didn’t reply, and instead stooped viciously on
Taj, coming far closer than he should have. But Taj didn’t flinch. Instead, he
spread his wings and turned to meet him. The maneuver created a whirl of wind
that spoiled the other boy’s lift and caused Naramutro to spiral away for a few
seconds in a clumsy flutter.

Naramutro flew back toward him and hovered. “Is that how you
want it, mudfoot?” Then, not waiting for an answer, he threw back his head and
shouted, “Suraki!”

The cry was taken up by some of the others. “Suraki,
suraki!”

“No!” shouted Elli. “You know it’s forbidden!” But her voice
was lost in the swelling chorus as a swirl of flyers descended around them. Taj
yielded the ball to one of them, who had motioned for it. Was this what Mari
had referred to in the simulator down on Sundara?

But then the girl he’d thrown the ball to tossed it down,
and someone else swooped under, caught it, and then launched it farther down,
toward the distant surface. Taj watched for a moment, then joined in: He caught
it, then tossed it down. A few more kids did the same, then Naramutro swooped,
caught, and tossed. It seemed too simple: everyone was taking turns; there was
no longer any apparent competition.

While he waited his next turn, he saw Ama circling above.
Her face was creased with worry—she shouted something to him, but he couldn’t
hear. He looked for Elli but didn’t see her.

Slowly he became aware that, one by one, the others were
dropping out of the game, pulling up to fly in lazy circles above the dwindling
number of players below, so his turn, and Naramutro’s, came closer and closer
together. Finally, only they were left. All the other flyers watched from
above, scattered across the sky below the increasingly distant diffusers.

Taj’s arms and chest were beginning to hurt, but he wouldn’t
give up. When the other boy swooped under him to catch the ball he saw that
Naramutro’s face was set in fierce concentration, mixed with what looked like
increasing desperation.

They spiraled lower and lower. Taj’s breath came raggedly
and his chest muscles felt like they were on fire. It was getting harder and
harder to move his flight wings.

Then, abruptly, it was over. Naramutro tossed the ball down
and then groaned in defeat as Taj swooped down and caught it. The other boy
turned and climbed slowly away.

Taj turned to follow, but his wings felt strangely heavy.
Naramutro seemed to be climbing faster now, and Taj couldn’t keep up—he wasn’t
even sure he was really climbing.

A few minutes later he was sure he wasn’t—no matter what he
did, he kept sinking. He could barely move his flight wings now; they felt like
lead.

Suddenly the ball still held in his scoop expanded with a
loud pop and escaped. Startled, Taj watched it dwindle swiftly upward, toward
the aerie now lost in the dazzle of the diffusers high above.

And then he remembered. . . The farther an object is from
the spin axis—the lower it is—the heavier it gets, and the change with altitude
is much greater than on a planet or in a gravitor-equipped habitat. Now he knew
why Gee-Em had been so insistent about the orientation vid.

With a muffled crack, his lift wings collapsed and the
rushing air forced his flight wings and arms up over his head. He was falling.
The surface of Talajara rushed up to meet him.

Suraki.

Icarus inverted.

He’d flown too low.

Then something slapped at him in a vicious double concussion
and he passed out.

∞

Taj opened his eyes and blinked in confusion. He was
floating in the center of the strangest room he’d ever seen, with furniture,
plants, tapestries, paintings and statues, and even bookcases on every surface.
He couldn’t figure out where the floor was, or the ceiling, or if those terms
even meant anything here.

Hearing a rustle of cloth, he turned. Beside him was Gee-Em,
but her bubble was nowhere to be seen, and Taj realized he was in her home at
the spin axis of Talajara. The double concussion that knocked him out must have
been her geebubble accelerating to transonic speed to rescue him.

She looked at him in silence for a long time.

“You didn’t watch the orientation, did you? You didn’t know
about the Suraki Effect.”

Taj felt his face flush. “Not the whole thing. When they
mentioned Icarus, I . . . uhh . . . They called
me Icky at school. I didn’t want to hear about it.” Taj felt his eyes burning;
he resolved fiercely that he wasn’t going to cry. Gee-Em would never sponsor
him to a commission now, not after such a stupid mistake.

“I’ve seen your simulator chips, both naval and flight,” she
said. “You are quite good, actually. There was really only one lesson
remaining, although I had not intended it to be quite so dramatic.”

Taj felt his throat closing up with the effort not to weep.
“Wha . . . what?” he choked out.

Her fierce blue eyes transfixed him. “You tell me.” Her
voice was flat.

Oh, Telos, he hated it when adults did this. He opened his
mouth to reply that he’d learned that gravity in a highdwelling changed far
faster with altitude than on a planet, but he stopped himself. Meeting her
merciless gaze, he knew that wasn’t the answer. He’d known that, but he’d still
almost killed himself.

But what did she want? If he didn’t answer correctly, he
knew she’d write him off without hesitation.

Unbidden, Mari’s voice came back to him.
But you’re a
downsider, and so is Flugel.

Flugel had thought the WingWorld sim would teach him what he
needed to know, but WingWorld was a hollowed-out asteroid with a gravity generator
at its center—fourspace-distortion gravity, like a planet, with the same almost
imperceptible gradient with altitude. There was no Suraki Effect.

But Flugel was a downsider and hadn’t thought of the Suraki
Effect. Or hadn’t known.

Suddenly it was clear.

“No matter how real it seems, a sim is just someone else’s
idea of reality,” said Taj. “If they don’t know something, or overlook it, it
won’t be there, and you can’t learn it.” He thought a moment longer, encouraged
by the first hint of a smile on the nuller’s deeply lined face.

“And what they don’t know can kill you.”

Gee-Em smiled broadly. “You’ll do, Tajarivani. I’ve known a
few naval officers who learned that lesson only too late, so you’ll be ahead of
the game at the Academy.” She reached over and tabbed a control on a legless
table floating nearby.

“Now greet your friends, who’ve been really worried about
you.”

Ama, Elli, and Tulli came in, followed, to Taj’s amazement,
by Naramutro. Taj laughed. Somehow, he was sure he wouldn’t be seeing the inside
of a simulator again until he got to the Academy.

And that was just fine with him.

It’s currently my favourite because it came out of nowhere,
let me combine two forms, steampunk and vampire story, that I thought were far
too hackneyed to bother with, produced some great characters, and included a
thoroughly spooky coincidence (when I thought I’d invented a steampunk gadget
out of whole cloth, only to find one of my most spookily coincidental fellow
readers had actually seen one). And finally, because “Ferrocarril” introduced
me, via the back-research, to the amazing railways of South America.

∞ ∞ ∞

As the
Internationale
pulled out of La Paz station,
the man at the window beside Concepçion Gonzaga leant over and made a
proposition that took her breath away.

“Beautiful señora, permit my little bat to share your room
tonight, and I will see you attain immortality.”

The locomotive blew pressure for the first zigzag up to El
Alto, a blast of steam that blotted the view and drowned human chatter; but not
his urgently muttering voice.

“A very little bat, señora, his wings cannot span my
forearm, very rare and very precious. He came to me on the Altiplano, alone,
solitary, unique. I must carry him safe to Arequipa. If you permit him in your
cabin, señora, only tonight . . .”

Concepçion got out the first word she found.

“What?”

“My bat, señora. My little, little, precious bat.” Anxious
eyes squinted down at her from a seamed, Indian-dark face. Full Aymara, or even
Uro, she classified automatically, from round Lake Titicaca. Guaqui, by the
colors in his serape. “Only the one night, I swear to you.” His hair trailed
lankly over a high forehead sheened with oil or sweat. “And I promise, I
promise, immortality—” The reek of coca leaves breathed through his yellowed
teeth.

Concepçion withdrew her head and said crisply, “My soul is
already immortal, if I heed the priest. But what is this of the bat?”

The locomotive braked to reverse for the switch-point to the
zigzag’s second leg. The man looming over her wrung his hands.

“They will not permit him in the carriages, señora, and I
cannot uncage him in the luggage van. He must stretch his wings, could you
travel five hundred miles with your arms bound down? You are a great lady, I
hear them speak of you. The Cuzco line-chief’s wife, good-hearted as her
husband, and he the best foreman on the Ferrocarril. The governor has a
stateroom. El Presidente del Ferrocarril has a stateroom, all the honorable
señores of La Paz have staterooms. And you, you have a stateroom. Of your
mercy, this one small favour. Only this one night.”

He was tall for an Indian, almost skeletal under the serape.
Concepçion stared up at him and saw instead Edouard’s narrow black eyes, his
sudden smile, the deceptively flamboyant sweep of his moustache. Yes, she
thought. After thirty years, Señor Meiggs’s Southern Peru Railway is finally
open, clear from La Paz to the sea. For this inaugural journey, I have first
class passage, in honor of Edouard. Who, on the face of those perfidious Andes
just below La Raya, was kind once too often. And some lazy, stupid ganger’s
mistake cost him his life.

But if Edouard had been kind, he was also nobody’s fool.

“Señor,” she said, “it is true, all the fine señores of La
Paz have staterooms. For such a recompense one will doubtless favour you. I am
a widow, of no great rank. But my honor demands that, even for immortality,
such an offer I must decline.”

She stepped back, past his shoulder, away from the window
where the hewn side of the second incline was sliding past, and without looking
the other way to the magnificent vista of green-patterned La Paz valley, with
the white city at its heart and Illimani’s sugar-crystal snows above, she went
into the stateroom Edouard had earned her, and closed the door.

∞

Four hours later she stopped staring at the bleak tan and
treeless vistas of the Altiplano, and began to doff her good navy suit. As the
first twilight dimmed Sorata and Illimani’s receding peaks, the major domo,
murmuring mechanically, “An honor,” ushered her into the dining car. Eyeing the
vista of glistening silver, crystal and white tablecloth beyond him, she braced
herself for the doubtless endless orations ahead.

Her three table-companions bowed her into a chair and forgot
about her. Upper-level office people, she judged, from Lima, perhaps. Criollos,
by their almost arrogant confidence, maybe with an actual Spanish Peninsular
ancestor only a generation back. But they mentioned Don Enrique Meiggs with
nostalgic approval too. They even drank an impromptu toast as Lake Titicaca
glinted briefly under a sunset-filled sky. “A man whose visions endure, five
years into this new century. And humane beyond parallel!”

Too humane,
Concepçion retorted silently, smoothing the high lace tucker of her best grey
silk.
If Don Enrique knew enough to hire
Edouard, he was far too gentle with those Chilean rotos, not to mention Chinese
coolies, that he used to build his tracks. Whose clumsy stupidity at a
landslide—

She stopped herself with the harshness of long experience.
Now the others were laughing about the “loco hombre Indios.”

“Special, precious, unique, forsooth! If ’tis so small, the
thing is only another vampire bat! Found it battening on his cattle, and
persuaded himself ‘tis a hudu—or a brujo itself!”

“Ha ha! And how does he think to feed it, on such a train as
this? A freight now, with a couple of cattle-cars—”

“Oh, have no concern, señores. He will call manna from
heaven—thus anyone kind enough to house his bat is sure of immortality!”

The locomotive whistled for a siding, a long, long wail that
rose to an ear-shrilling scream. As points clacked and whitewashed adobe houses
slid past, Concepçion said carefully, “So, señores. Did all decline his offer,
then?”

They met her eyes from sheer surprise. Then all three pomaded,
mustachioed, evening-dressed dandies seemed to lose their tongues. Not merely
embarrassed, or surprised, or even scandalized. Perhaps, she wondered, a touch
of fear?

So the Indian had disturbed them too.

Then the man opposite exclaimed, “Dios mios, did you hear
that whistle? One of the new Baldwin locomotives. Eight drivers, amazing
traction. And the whistle, it was never done before—the whistle climbs a
scale!”