A burst of snow flew from somewhere, and the entire glider-cat shivered.
'There was once an ancient road, not along this ridge, though. They drove their petrolwagons up here during the summer. It was colder then.' Cerrelle did something to the controls, and the glider-cat slowed, dropping almost into the snow.
Colder? I glanced into the afternoon, onto the rocks and the powdered snow that was drifted everywhere. Colder? The wind moaned. The glider-cat shivered, and more snow sprayed across the canopy.
Ahead, along the ridgeline, was something that shimmered. Snow flew around it, enshrouding it, but even when the gusts died down, the shimmering persisted.
'We're almost there,' Cerrelle announced.
'Where?'
'The highest point east of Dezret. Sometimes, the winds here reach over two hundred kilometers per hour.'
'And we're up here in a glider-cat?'
'They're only running about forty.' Cerrelle slowed us more as we neared the top of the peak. 'The stabilizers can handle gusts of a hundred, easily.'
Were we on the top of the feared Demons' Peak, where the winds ripped men apart? Where people froze in instants?
'There.' My red-haired driver eased the glider-cat to a halt beside a shining golden haze, turning the vehicle slightly sideways on a flat expanse of snow thirty meters square -precisely thirty meters square.
Above us and behind the shimmering shield was a structure - an ancient structure. Huge chains, each link a half meter long - or more - rose out of the stone beneath the drifted snow. Each link was reddish, tinged with the rust of centuries, perhaps millennia, yet somehow still massive. There were four chains, one for each corner of the building, and all four passed through the shield - a nanite force-shield of some sort - and crossed the top of the building. The stone-and-timber building, its shape blurred by the shield, was chained to Demons' Peak. Those iron chains - adiaphorus, carious, colossal - were they like the ancients themselves, trying to defy the universe itself through brute force?
I kept looking, though there was little enough to see but an indistinct structure, a nanite shield, chains, rock, and snow.
'There's something about it, isn't there? Not something you can really describe.'
'Yes.' But, like Cerrelle, I couldn't exactly say what. My eyes went to the west, where clouds scudded toward us with cold celerity, where the tips of lower peaks barely pierced the gray of the oncoming storms.
'We'd better go.'
I nodded, and Cerrelle turned the glider-cat, leaving me alone with my thoughts for a time.
More gouts of snow plastered the canopy, and the craft shook more than a few times before we dropped back below the tree line. Once back among the trees and the gloom that would have been shadows had the clouds not blocked the late-afternoon sun, Cerrelle took a deep breath.
'A little close?'
A little,' she admitted. 'But I didn't know when you might have another chance.'
'I appreciated the scenic drive, all of it.'
'I thought you would. Sevenday is about the only time we could have gotten up there without a flock of people around.' She smiled without taking her eyes from the console. Another good part of this is that, since I never finished your indoctrination fams, I can charge the fuel for the glider to that account.'
That brought me up short. 'You would have paid for that?'
'If I'd had to. But I don't' That brought a grin. 'The Authority thinks you're worth it.' She flicked something on the arm of her seat, and lights flared out, illuminating the tracks we followed back down toward the tunnel to Lyncol, tracks that had already drifted over in places.
On the way down the road, even in the dimmer light, I could see how old the trees were, squat pines twisted and gnarled, and tall firs with trunks more than two meters across. Beyond the glider-cat, the wind began to howl, and white flakes skittered across the permaglass of the canopy.
At the end of the road trail, the red strobe lights flashed, but the tunnel doors opened, and Cerrelle eased the glider-cat inside. Her entire body relaxed once we were in the tunnel.
'Thank you,' I said again.
'I'm glad you liked it.'
'I'm not sure I liked it,' I had to confess, 'but I'm glad you showed it to me. What was it?'
'A meteorological outpost, from what we can tell.'
'But people drove petrolwagons up there?'
'There's a lot the ancients did we still don't understand. It could have been religious. Or some of them might have been ancestors of the rock-climbing self-suiciders.'
I chose not to mention Sanselle, but Sanselle was anything but suicidal. The ancients? Who could tell about them?
When we came out of the transport building, the snow had begun to fall in Lyncol as well, lazy fat flakes dropping out of dark gray clouds. In the time it took us to cross the four hundred meters between the transport door and the transient quarters, the wind picked up. Snow turned into a gusting sideways curtain of white, coating my hair, turning Cerrelle's red hair white.
We ducked inside the double doors leading down to the glider platforms and wiped off snow.
'Definitely cutting it close,' I said.
'You always have, Tyndel.'
'Me? You were driving.'
She raised her eyebrows again, and I had to grin. We walked slowly down the steps to the glider platforms. Then we stopped.
'I had a good day.' I found myself smiling at her. The departure bells rang twice.
Cerrelle squeezed my hands. 'I won't see you much before long.'
I frowned.
'You're going to be busy when you get to ship-handling. Very busy.'
'So Andra told me.'
She squeezed my hands again, and I had to scurry into the second seat in the glider. The doors slid shut, and I was swept eastward into the tunnel toward Runswi.
In the glow of the glider, with the darkness of the tunnel beyond, I sat back in the glider seat, closing my eyes and trying to make sense out of the day. Why had I blushed so much, felt so much like a schoolboy again? Because I didn't have to be so on guard, because I knew Cerrelle had seen me at my worst and would still see me and talk to me?
Abruptly, behind or before my closed eyes, arcs of fire exploded, so bright that it felt as though they seared my ears, yet those golden-red arcs of fire were brighter, closer, and the depth of space far deeper, yet nielle with a fulgence that beckoned, than I had ever sensed before.
I sat up in the dimness of the enclosed glider, eyes wide open, breathing hard. What was it about that niellen fulgurence? And why now?
63
The body senses reality; the mind interprets it; trust your body.
After all the days in the dark simulator with Alicia, suddenly, it seemed, I was standing, waiting for a shuttle to Orbit Two.
Alicia had been as brief as always the day before, telling me, 'Report for the zero seven hundred shuttle tomorrow. Be at the operations desk by zero six-thirty. All you'll need is two complete sets of candidate greens, toiletries, and underwear. Your instructor will have everything else waiting for you. The first fam runs three days, usually, but that depends on the instructor and you. Yours might be less, because you have null grav experience, but I wouldn't count on it.'
I wasn't. As I stood at the operations building waiting, all I could count on was that I'd learn something new and more difficult than I'd envisioned, or that some other piece of knowledge would rearrange once more my perceptions of the universe and my place in it.
The seven hundred shuttle was a busy one. A good dozen people stood in the area of the operations desk by zero six forty-five. A thin wispy fog hovered across the marsh beyond the permacrete strip, and through the open door that led to the gray shuttle came the sharp cry of a bird. It might have been a heron, but I'd never heard one make a sound, though I'd watched several from the lounge that overlooked the marsh lake.