Xeelee: Endurance (40 page)

He hadn’t forgotten the surge of helpless longing he had felt as he studied her demure face, her carelessly glimpsed figure. She hadn’t said a word to him, or he to her – and yet, though she was just a servant, he sensed there had been something between them, as elusive yet as real as an Effigy, there to be explored if only he had the chance. And how he longed for that chance!

In his obsessive imagining, Peri constructed a fantasy future in which he would seek out the girl. He would show her his life, perhaps fill the inevitable gaps in her learning – though not too quickly; he rather liked the idea of impressing her with his worldliness. They would grow together, but not through any seduction or displays of wealth: their Effigies would call to each other, as the saying had it. At last they would cement their love, and much of his detailed imagining centred on
that.

After all that, well, he would present their liaison to his family as an accomplished fact. He would ride out their predictable objections, claim his inheritance, and begin his life with Lora . . . At that point things got a bit vague.

It was all impossible, of course. There were few hard and fast laws in Foro; the community was too young for that, but it went against all custom for a Shelf man to consort with an Attic servant, save for pure pleasure. But for Peri, a romance with Lora would bring none of the complication of his liaisons with women from the town, none of the unwelcome overlay of inheritance and familial alliance – and none of his brother’s gleeful manipulation, for this would be Peri’s own choice.

Elaborating this comforting fantasy made the days and nights of the hunt easier to bear. Or at least that was so before Maco, with almost preternatural acuity, figured out what Peri was thinking.

It was a bright morning, a couple of weeks after the hunters had set off. They were running down a small herd of wild spindlings, perhaps a score of the animals including foals. Here the Shelf was heavily water-carved, riddled with gullies and banks, and the southern cliffs were broken into round-shouldered hills. The party was galloping at top speed, their spare mounts galumphing after them, and they raised a curtain of dust that stretched across the Shelf.

The spindlings’ six-legged running looked clumsy but was surprisingly effective, a mixture of a loping run with leaps forward powered by the back pair of legs. The spindlings’ six-limbed body plan was unlike those of most of Old Earth’s land animals, including humans. But then, so it was said, the spindlings’ ancestors had not come from Old Earth. Unladen, the wild spindlings were naturally faster than their hunters’ mounts, but, panicking, they would soon run themselves out.

Maco rode alongside Peri. He yelled across, ‘So how’s my little brother this morning?’

‘What do you want, Maco?’

Maco was very like his father when he had been young – dark, handsome, forceful – but already he showed traces of Buta’s corpulence in his fleshy jowls. ‘We’ve been talking about you. You’re keeping yourself to yourself, aren’t you? Head full of dreams as usual – not that there’s room in there for much else. The thing is, I think I know what you’ve been dreaming about. That serving girl:
Lora
. Your tongue has been hanging out ever since the funeral . . .’ He clenched his fist and made obscene pumping motions. ‘Is the thought of her keeping you warm in your sack?’

‘You’re disgusting,’ Peri said.

‘Oh, don’t be a hypocrite. You know, you’re a good hunter, PeriAndry, but you’ve a lot to learn. I think you will learn, though. You’re certainly going to have plenty of opportunity.’

Peri hauled on his reins to bring his spindling to a clattering halt. Maco, startled, rode on a few metres before pulling up and trotting back. Their two panting beasts dipped their long dusty heads and nuzzled each other.

Peri, furious now, said, ‘If you’re talking of my inheritance then tell me straight. I’m tired of your games.’

Maco laughed. ‘You’re not a very good sport, little brother.’

Peri clenched his fists. ‘I’ll drag you off that nag and show you what a good sport I am.’

Maco held up his hands. ‘All right, all right. Your inheritance, then: in fact it’s one reason I organised this hunt – to show you what I’m giving you.’

‘What do you mean?’

Maco swept his arm wide. ‘All the land you see here, across the width of the Shelf – all this belonged to Buta. Our father bought the land as a speculation from a landowner in Puul, the last town, half a day back. Right now it’s got nothing much to offer but wild spindlings and scrub grass . . .’

‘And this will be mine,’ Peri said slowly.

‘It’s a good opportunity,’ Maco said earnestly. ‘There’s plenty of water in the area. Some of these gullies may actually be irrigation channels, silted up and abandoned. Good farming land – perhaps not for our generation, but certainly our children. You could establish a House, set up an Attic in those hills. You could make your mark here, Peri.’

‘This is a dismal place. My life will be hauling rocks and breaking dirt. And we’re fourteen days’ ride from home.’

‘
This
will be your home,’ Maco said. As he spoke of Peri’s inheritance, Maco had seemed to grow into his role, sounding masterful, even wise. But now a brother’s taunting tone returned, sly, digging under Peri’s skin. ‘Perhaps you could bring your little serving girl. She can make you pastries all day and let you hump her all night . . .’

Peri blurted out, ‘It is only custom that keeps me from her.’

Maco let his jaw drop. ‘Hey – you aren’t serious about this foal, are you?’

‘Why should I not be?’

Maco said harshly, ‘Kid, she lives in the Attic. Up there, for every day that passes for you, ten or twelve pass for her. Already months have gone by for her . . . I know from experience: those Attic girls are sweet but they turn to dust in your hands, until you can’t bear to look at them. Already your Lora must be ageing, that firm body sagging . . .’

If it had gone on a minute longer Peri might have lost control, even struck his brother, and the consequences would have been grave. But there were cries from across the plain. Peri saw that the party had backed the family of spindlings into a dry gully. Grateful for an excuse to get away, Peri spurred his mount into motion.

The spindlings, cornered, clustered together. There were more than a dozen adults, perhaps half as many colts. They seemed helpless as the hunters closed their circle; old and young, in their panic, they puked lumps of faeces from their mouths in the spindlings’ unique manner.

But then four of the adults craned their necks high in the air, and their heads, three metres above their bodies, turned rapidly. With a whinny the four broke together, clattering up the gully’s dusty wall. The movement was so sudden and coordinated they cut through the hunters’ line and escaped.

The spindlings’ long necks were an evolutionary response. On Old Earth, time passed more rapidly the higher you went, a few hundredths for each metre. The spindlings were not native to Old Earth, but they had been here long enough for natural selection to work. That selection had favoured tall animals: with their heads held high, the longer-necked were able to think just a little faster and, over time, that margin of hundredths offered a survival advantage. Now these accelerated adults had abandoned the young, old and feeble, but they would live to breed again.

The young hunters didn’t care about evolutionary strategies. The aged adults made easy meat, and the captured youngsters could be broken and tamed. The hunters closed in, stabbing spears and ropes at the ready. Already they sang of the feast they would enjoy tonight.

But PeriAndry did not sing. He had made up his mind. Before the night came he would leave the party. Perhaps this desolate stretch of remote scrubland was his destiny, but he was determined to explore his dreams first – and to achieve that he had to return home.

It took Peri just ten days to ride back to Foro. Each day he drove on as long as he could, until exhaustion overtook him or his mounts.

When he got home he spoke to his mother briefly, only to reassure her of the safety of the rest of the hunting party, then retired to his room for the night.

His sister BoFeri insisted on seeing him, though, and she briskly extracted the truth of what he intended.

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘We’re different stock, we folk of the Shelf, from the brutes of the Attic, and similar lofty slums. Time moves at a stately pace here – and that means it has had less opportunity to work on us.’ She prodded his chest. ‘
We
are the ones who are truest to our past – we are the closest to the original stock of Old Earth. The Attic folk have been warped, mutated by too much time. Think about it – those rattling hearts, the flickering of their purposeless generations! The Attic folk aren’t human as we are. Not even the pretty ones like Lora. Good for tupping, yes, but nothing more . . .’

‘I don’t care what you say, Bo, or Maco.’

Her face was a mixture of his mother’s kindness and Maco’s hard mockery. ‘It is adolescent to have crushes on Attic serving girls. You are evading your responsibilities, Peri; you are escaping into fantasy. You are so immature!’

‘Then let me grow up in my own way.’

‘You don’t know what you will find up there,’ she said, more enigmatically. ‘I’m afraid you will be hurt.’

But he turned away, and would not respond further.

He longed to sleep, but could not. He didn’t know what the next day would bring. None of his family, to his knowledge, had ever climbed the cliff before, but that was what he must do. He spent the night in a fever of anticipation, clutching at shards of the elaborate fantasy he had inflated, which Maco had so easily seen and punctured.

In the morning, with the first light, he set out in search of Lora – if not yet his lover, then the recipient of his dreams.

There were two ways up the cliff: the Elevator, and the carved stairways. The Elevator was a wooden box suspended from a mighty arrangement of ropes and pulleys, hauled up a near-vertical groove in the cliff face by a wheel system at the top. This mechanism was used to bring down the servants and the food, clean clothes and everything else the Attic folk prepared for the people of the House; and it carried up the dole of bread and meat that kept the Attic folk alive.

The servants who handled the Elevator were stocky, powerful men, their faces greasy with the animal fat they applied to their wooden pulleys and their rope. When they realised what Peri intended they were startled and hostile. This dismayed Peri; he had anticipated resistance from his family, but somehow he hadn’t considered the reaction of the Attic dwellers, though he had heard that among them there was a taboo about folk from the House visiting their aerial village – not that anybody had wanted to for a long time, it seemed.

But anyhow, he had already decided to take the stairs. He imagined the simple exertion would calm him. Ignoring the handlers, without hesitation he placed his foot on the first step and began to climb, counting as he went. ‘One, two, three . . .’

These linked staircases, zigzagging off into the blue-tinged mist over his head, had been carved out of the face of the cliff itself; they were themselves a monumental piece of stonework. But the steps were very ancient and worn hollow by the passage of countless feet. The first change of direction came at fifty steps, as the staircase ducked beneath a protruding granite bluff. ‘Fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six . . .’

The staircase was not excessively steep, but each step was tall. By the time he had reached a hundred and fifty steps he was out of breath, and he paused. He had already climbed above Foro. The little town, unfamiliar from this angle, was tinged by a pinkish redshift mist. He could see people coming and going, a team of spindlings hauling a cart across the courtyard before his House. He imagined he could already see the world below moving subtly slower, as if people and animals swam through some heavy, gelatinous fluid. Perhaps it wasn’t the simple physical effort of these steps that tired him out, he mused, but the labour of hauling himself from slow time to fast, up into a new realm where his heart clattered like a bird’s.

But he could see much more than the town. The Shelf on which he had spent his whole life seemed thin and shallow, a mere ledge on a greater terraced wall that stretched up from the Lowland to far above his head. And on the Lowland plain those pools of daylight, kilometres wide, came and went. The light seemed to leap from one transient pool to another, so that clusters and strings of them would flare and glow together. It was like watching lightning spark between storm clouds. There were rhythms to the sparkings, though they were unfathomable to Peri’s casual glance, compound waves of bright and dark that chased like dreams across the cortex of a planetary mind. These waves gave Old Earth not just its sequence of day and night, but even a kind of seasonality.

He continued his climb. ‘One hundred and seventy-one, one hundred and seventy-two . . .’

He imagined what he would say to Lora. Gasping a little, he even rehearsed small snippets of speech. ‘Once – or so it is said – all of Old Earth enjoyed the same flow of time, no matter how high you climbed. Some disaster has disordered things. Or perhaps our stratified time was given to us long ago for a purpose. What do you think?’ Of course his quest was foolish. He didn’t even know this girl. Even if he found her, could he really love her? And would his family ever allow him to attain even a fragment of his dreams? But if he didn’t try he could only imagine her, up here in the Attic, ageing so terribly fast, until after just a few years he could be sure she would be dead, and lost for ever. ‘Ah, but the origin of things hardly matters. Isn’t it wonderful to know that the slow rivers of the Lowlands will still flow sluggishly long after we are dead, and that in the wheeling sky above worlds shiver and die with every breath you take?’ And so on.

At the Shelf’s lip, where his father’s pyre still smouldered, he saw the Foo waterfall tumble into space, spreading into a crimson fan as it fell. Buta had once tried to explain to him
why
the water should spread out instead of simply falling straight down. The water, trying to force its way into the plain’s glutinous deep time, was pushed out of the way by the continual tumble from behind, and so the fan formed. It was the way of things, Buta had said. The stratification of time was the key to everything on Old Earth, from the simple fall of water to the breaking of human hearts.