Aurora (6 page)

‘The stories you told me about the Weave when I was little – that was all
real
?’ Lily is amazed.

‘When the great floods came,’ Mara explains, ‘life changed all across the Earth. People abandoned the old technology – they were fighting to survive. The Weave was left forgotten in the ether, but it’s still there. The ruins of a cyber-universe . . . wrecked boulevards and Weave towers, crammed full of – oh,
everything
that ever existed in the drowned world. All sparking and glittering. So beautiful. I wish you could see it, Lily.’

‘The Fox you met in the Weave,’ Lily remembers. ‘Was that . . .
him
?’

Mara’s eyes grow darker, softer.

‘See, I
did
tell you about him,’ she says, ‘in a way. The Weave was our special place. No one else went there any more,’ Mara’s face burns with the memory, ‘except Fox.’

Lily feels shot with envy as she looks out at the emptiness of Lake Longhope, at the vast enclosure of mountains, and thinks of her small, suffocating life in the summer tree huts and winter earth burrows of Candlewood. What incredible adventures her mother has had . . .

‘So much happened, so fast,’ says Mara, unconsciously echoing Lily’s thoughts. ‘Every day was a fight to survive. All Fox knows is that we reached the top of the world. He doesn’t know if we survived.’ Mara hesitates. ‘I don’t know if
he
did. I’m sorry, Lily.’

‘You’re
sorry
?’

Lily stands up. The whole world has turned on its head. Her father is not her real father. Ships are sailing across the sky.

Now, the sky ships seem like a signal from the world of her unknown father.

‘What does he look like?’ Lily asks, needing to know about him, hungry for more.

Mara meets her daughter’s untamed eyes, a fiery dreamer’s eyes, darkened now with hurt, in a soft, intense face amid a tousle of tawny hair.

‘You,’ says Mara simply.

Lily feels like one of the steaming hot geysers that burst up between the rocks by the lake. She can’t contain the emotions boiling inside. She abandons Mara by the lakeside and races like a fury through Candlewood’s trees. Everyone has lied to her about who she really is.

She will find her Fox father. Somehow she will.

And they’ll all be sorry they’ve lied to her – once she’s gone.

THE NETHERWORLD QUEEN

The lagoon shudders. The rumbling of engines fills the netherworld and shadows loom in the waters as huge vessels pass overhead.

For many days now, the tops of the sky towers have been busy with airships.

Fox and Pandora paddle their canoe from its anchorage in the flooded undercroft below the museum, through waterlogged archways, to the broken bridge. Wading though a seaweed swamp that throbs with saltwater salamanders, newts and frogs, they clamber over the rusted shell of an ancient land vessel called a bus and scramble up the steep limb that reaches up out of the netherworld sea.

At the top of the broken bridge Fox unhooks a telescope from his belt and focuses on the activity around an airship just landed on a tower above.

‘Building materials, equipment, crew,’ he murmurs.

‘All heading North,’ Pandora adds, squinting up as a slat of sun breaks through the sky tunnels and the tiara she wears on her tangled head bursts into diamond fire.

‘The Arctic pirates were right,’ says Fox.

Radio chatter on the soundwaves between the Arctic pirate ships say that the empire’s airships have begun to invade the Northlands.

‘My Surgents were right too,’ Pandora reminds him.

In virtual gatherings in the electronic wastes of the Weave, Pandora relays Fox’s plans and readies the troops of secret Surgents – rebels within the sky cities, drawn to the revolution by lures planted all across the cyber-universe that draw in daredevil, questing minds. The secret Surgents have backed the Arctic pirates’ radio reports. The sky empire plans to conquer the Northlands, say the rebel insiders, once the long darkness of winter is at an end. The fleets of airships now loading up and taking off from the sky towers are heading to the new continent to build empire settlements there.

Fox’s face darkened when Pandora told him what the empire means to call the land once known as Greenland, though it was, in past times, a vast whiteness of polar ice.

Caledon.

It’s the name of the grandfather who founded the world Fox has set his whole existence against.

The vast island that’s emerged from the ice
is
now greening, with rich sweeps and plateaux of summer pastures, the Arctic pirates say; most of it undiscovered still by the small populations living in the North.

Green, fertile farmland is what the sky empire seeks, as the numbers in the sky cities soar and the ocean food farms struggle to feed so many. The vast mountain ranges are rich in the metals, minerals and fuels the empire needs to launch its Stellarka project, a long-abandoned venture to the stars.

With airships full of young empire builders and their guards headed for the new continent of Caledon, the sky cities of the northern hemisphere are now vulnerable to attack.

It’s the moment of weakness the Surge has waited for.

So why, Pandora wonders, is Fox so grim? All day he’s been avoiding her. Now he can’t seem to look her in the eye. Something is wrong.

He glares up at the giant towers as if he’d like to tear them down with his bare hands. Yet he has always insisted that the cities will not be destroyed in the coming war. It’s the one part of his grandfather’s legacy that makes him proud. The empire must be broken but the towers will stand.

Miracles of natural engineering, each city is powered by sun, wind and waves. Over the years Fox has tracked the changes in his erstwhile home, as the sky imagineers seemed to bring their city to life. The once-gleaming towers are now crusted with bacteria that’s fed dead matter and breathes in carbon and plankton to make the city a living, growing power source of lumenenergy.

In the old books in the tower Fox found pictures of ancient standing stones, built by the earliest peoples of the Earth; uncanny images of the cities that now stud the world’s oceans. As daylight fades to night and the sky city glows with the same luminous phosphoresence as the underwater ruins, the great towers seem ever more like timeless monoliths of the Earth.

Pandora reaches up to touch Fox’s face. He has shaved off the tawny beard that keeps him warm in winter. His bare face is much younger, though tiredness shadows his eyes. He was up all night again, checking out the radio links. He smiles absently at her touch, still avoiding her gaze.

‘You need to rest. Look.’ Pandora points to the draped fishing nets that hang from the edge of the bridge, down into the lagoon. ‘The nets are
heaving
– I’ll dive down and get us a feast!’

Fox takes Pandora’s hand and strokes the membrane of webbing between her fingers with a look in his eyes so strange it sends a tremble through the girl.

‘I’m sorry, Pan,’ he murmurs.

‘Sorry? What for?’

Fox has always touched her webbed fingers and feet and the delicate gills in the back of her neck with a gentle reverence and wonder. He’s envious of her water skills and of her sleek, downy skin that keeps her warm in winter. Now, there is something quite different in his face. Pity? Shame?

Pandora draws her hand away.

‘There’s something I need to tell you. Something I’ve suspected for a while,’ says Fox. ‘Now I’ve found out for sure.’

‘What is it? What’s
wrong
?’

He scratches at an infected insect bite on his neck, nervy and grim.

‘The sky people made you,’ he says reluctantly. ‘The people of my grandfather’s time.’

‘
Made
me? What do you mean?’

‘The empire made you what you are.’

At last he faces her and Pandora tries to read the strange darkness in his eyes. She has never understood what she is. She has raked through the books in the tower, peered into all the aged biological freaks and experiments that float like ghouls in glass bottles in one of the museum halls, yet nowhere has she found a hint of another human like herself.

‘What am I?’ she asks blankly.

‘You’re beautiful,’ says Fox.

Pandora looks down at her hands and spans her fingers wide. The membrane of webbing is like the waxy wings of a moonmoth. Her skin is velvety in the netherlight, the gills on the back of her neck soft as feathers.

‘Am I the only one?’

But there
were
others; of course there were. The netherworld urchins who escaped North in the ships had the same seaworthy skin, the same webbed fingers and feet.

Fox turns away with a murmur she can’t catch but Pandora glimpsed his shamed expression, saw in it the awful truth he is trying to hide: what was once beautiful to him is now tainted, forever changed.

Pandora grabs Fox’s hand, feels it warm and clammy in her cool-blooded fingers. All of a sudden she is acutely aware of all the amphibian life at their feet; it makes a moving carpet of the seaweedy bridge.

‘Tell me what I am,’ she pleads.

Fox looks into her distraught green eyes. Deliberately, gently, as if to erase his shameful feelings, he raises her hand to his mouth and kisses it.

‘You are a wonder. A new kind of human made to survive in a flooded world. But the world didn’t like what the scientists created.’

The sun slips behind a sky tower and the netherworld plunges into gloom.

‘Go on,’ whispers Pandora.

‘So the empire decided to erase its Amphibian Experiment.’

Pandora absorbs the brutal meaning of it all.

‘I am an experiment they didn’t like. What do you mean,
erase
. . . ? Kill us all?’

Fox nods.

‘But there were renegade scientists,’ he continues, ‘who couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the life they’d made. Your parents must have been among the ones those rebel scientists set free. But the outside world drove them away too. They were hunted down, but they hid their children wherever they could. Under the bridges, in the netherworld . . .’

‘Then they
didn’t
abandon me?’

Fox squeezes her hand. ‘Somehow, they saved you. They did all they could to make sure you lived. There’s no greater love than that, Pan.’

Pandora’s world seems to turn inside out.

‘So the boat people,’ she sees, ‘are
not
my people? They – they
hunted
my parents? Killed them.’

‘Some of the older ones did. The world was full of fear, Pan. The great floods had struck and people were trying to survive. Desperate people can do terrible things.’

Devastated, Pandora clings to Fox’s hand. And yet, he has gifted her two things she has always longed for: to know who she is and to be truly beloved.

‘All this is true? How do you know?’

‘I trust the outlaw pockets of the Noos,’ says Fox. ‘The truth of things is hidden there, as it is in the Weave. And this truth came from the renegade scientists, that older generation who never forgot and joined our Surge.’

Pandora’s mind reels as she tries to take it all in. The Noos – the virtual universe of the empire – is the sizzling energy of millions of computers and human brains. As mysterious to Pandora as the inside of a sky city, the Noos is where the citizens of the empire work and play and dream. She can only try to imagine the wonders of the cities and then stunning cyber-universe from what Fox has told. The twenty-first-century cyber-Weave is hers to roam but he won’t let her near the Noos. Far too much is at stake, he insists, to risk her discovery there.

The trusty old computer godgem of his youth still connects Fox to his beloved Noos. He slips through its wild undergrowth, teeming virtual jungles of frenetic brilliance, sneaking into renegade pockets where rebels uncover the truths he has set free in the cyber-universe; shameful truths the empire has tried to erase.

But now she, Pandora, is one of those ugly truths.

‘The empire wants to experiment again.’ Fox’s voice is leaden. ‘It wants to engineer humans designed for life in the Far North, for colonizing space – humans who are better engineered for life in the sky cities too.’