“Perhaps.” Muub smiled. “But perhaps not. Here’s a speculation for you. What if the Ur-humans didn’t intend us to be destroyed when the Star impacted the Ring? What if the Ur-humans left us some means of escaping from the Star?”
Dura said, “Like the wormhole to the planet — ”
“Or,” Muub said, “even a ship — an Air-car that could travel outside the Star itself.” He looked up at the Crust, a look of vague dissatisfaction on his face. “What lies beyond that constraining roof over our world? The glimpses you saw, Dura, of other stars — hundreds, millions of them — each one, perhaps, harboring life — not human as we are, and yet human, descended from the Ur-stock… And then, behind it all, the Ur-humans themselves, still pursuing their own aloof goals. To see it all — what a prize that would be! Yes, Adda; many of us are very curious indeed about what might lie at the far Pole…
“Yet even that will tell us so little of the true history of our universe. What is the true purpose of Bolder’s Ring? What are the Xeelee’s intentions — who, where is the enemy they seem to fear so much?” He smiled, looking wistful. “I will resent dying without the answers to such questions, as I surely will…”
In the distance, in the opened heart of the City hundreds of mansheights away, pipes began to bray: Hork calling his citizens to him. Muub bid a hasty farewell to his friends.
With Adda, Dura began to make her way toward the heart of the debris cloud. As they Waved, peacefully, she slipped her hand into his.
“We’ve come a long way, daughter of Logue,” Adda said.
Dura looked at him with a little suspicion, but there was no sign of irony in his expression; his good eye returned her gaze with a softness she hadn’t often seen there before.
She nodded. “We have…” And some of us a little further than others, she thought. “How’s Bzya?”
He sniffed. “Surviving. Accepting what he has. Which is a lot, I suppose; he has Jool and Shar both with him now…”
“And you,” she said.
He didn’t reply.
“Do you think you’ll stay with them?”
He shrugged, with an echo of his old cantankerousness, but his expression remained soft.
She squeezed his hand. “I’m glad you’ve found a home,” she said.
As they neared the Wheel at the heart of the debris cloud, they could hear once more the thin, clear voice of Physician Muub as he addressed the crowd gathering there.
“…The cult of the Xeelee, with its emphasis on higher goals than those of the here-and-now, was impossible for Parz’s closed, controlled society to accommodate. It was only by the suppression of these elements — the expulsion of the Xeelee cultists, the Reformation’s expunging of any genuine information about the past — that the authorities thought the City could survive.
“Well, they were wrong.
“Human nature will flourish, despite the strictest controls. The upfluxers kept their ancient knowledge almost intact — across generations, and with little recourse to records or writing materials. New faiths — like the cult of the Wheel — bloomed in the desert left by the destruction of beliefs and knowledge.” Muub hesitated, and — unable to see him — Dura remembered how his cup-retinas characteristically lost some of their focused shape, briefly, as he turned to his inner visions. “It’s interesting that both among the exiled Human Beings — and among the almost equally disadvantaged Downsiders, here in Parz — a detailed wisdom from the past survived, by oral tradition alone. If we are all descended from Stellar engineers — from a highly intelligent stock — perhaps we should not be surprised at such evidence of mentation, crossing generations. Indeed, the systematic waste of such talent seems a crime. How much more might man have achieved in this Star by now, if not for petty prejudice and superstition…”
Adda snorted. “Unctuous old fart.”
Dura laughed.
“And I wish I could see Hork’s face, as he Waves around having to listen to that.”
“Maybe you misjudge him, Adda.”
“Maybe. But then,” he said slowly — carefully, she thought — “I’ve never been as close to him as you have.”
Again she studied the old man sharply, wondering how much he knew — or what he could read, in her face. He was watching her, waiting for some reaction, his battered face empty of expression.
But what was her reaction? What did she want, now?
So much had happened since that first Glitch — the Glitch that had taken her father from her. Several times she had thought her life was finished — she’d never really believed she’d return to the Mantle, from the moment she boarded the “Flying Pig” in Parz’s Harbor. Now, she realized, she was simply grateful to be alive; and that simple fact would never leave her, would inform her enjoyment of the rest of her time.
And yet…
And yet her experiences had changed her. Having seen so much — to have traveled further, done so much more than any human since the days of the Colonists themselves — would make it impossible for her to settle back into the cramped lifestyle of a City dweller — and still less of a Human Being.
Absently she folded her arms across her stomach, remembering her single moment of passion with Hork — when she had allowed her intense need for privacy to be overcome, when she thought her life was almost lost, deep in the underMantle. She had found a brief spark of human warmth there; and Hork was surely wiser than she had first realized. But still, she had seen into Hork’s soul in the Ur-human chamber, and she had recoiled from what she had found — the anger, the desperation, the need to find something worth dying for.
Hork could not be a companion for her.
“I’ve changed, Adda,” she said. “I…”
“No.” He was shaking his head sadly, reading her face. “Not really. You were alone before all this — before we came here — and you’re still alone, now. Aren’t you?”
She sighed. A little harshly, she said, “If that’s how I’m meant to be, then maybe I should accept it.” She turned; beyond Parz’s cloud of rubble she could see the ceiling fields of the hinterland: bare, scrubbed clean of their cultivation — and yet, in a way, renewed. “Maybe that’s where I will go,” she said.
He turned to see. “What, and become a farmer? Making pap-wheat for the masses? You?”
She grinned. “No. No, making a place of my own… a little island of order, in all of this emptiness.”
Adda snorted with contempt, but the pressure of his fingers around hers increased, gently, warmly.
The pipers’ calls were bright and harsh. From all around the cloud-City people were Waving into the Air, converging toward the Wheel at the heart of the cloud. Peering that way now, Dura could see the massive form of Hork — a colorful speck in his robes, his massive arms resting on the huge Wheel. She imagined she could already hear his voice as he recited the litany — the first legal Wheel-litany, a list of all those known to have died in the final Glitch, whether they were from Parz, the hinterland, the upflux, the Skin.
It was a litany intended to conciliate and heal.
About the Author
Stephen Baxter was born in 1957. Raised in Liverpool, he has a mathematics degree from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Southampton. He now works in information technology. Baxter sold his first short stories to Interzone in 1986 and is a prizewinner in the Writers of the Future contest. His first novel, Raft, was published in 1991 to great acclaim, and was followed in 1992 by Timelike Infinity. He is married and lives in Buckinghamshire, England.