some crawled close to the ground, and some almost walked upright, like their most distant ancestors, their hands barely brushing the ground. Manekato, who had spent her whole life on a Farm where everybody looked alike, tried to mask her shock and revulsion at so much difference.
She was met outside the station by a Worker, a runner from the Astrologers. She slid easily onto its broad back, wrapping her long arms around its chest, and allowed herself to be carried away.
Her first impression of the Market was of waste. The streets were broad, the buildings an inefficient variety of designs, and she could spot immediately places where heat would leak or dust gather, or where the layout must prevent optimally short journeys from being concluded.
All of this jarred with her instinct. The goal for every Farmer was to squeeze the maximum effectiveness and efficiency from every last atom — and beyond, to the infinitesimal. The mastery of matter at the subatomic level, resulting in such everyday wonders as Mapping and Workers, had brought that ultimate dream a little closer.
But, she reminded herself, this was the Market, not a Farm.
In the deepest past there had been a multitude of markets, where Farmers traded goods and information and wisdom. The transient population of the markets had always been predominantly male. Women were more tightly bound to the land, locked into the matriarchal Lineages that had owned the land since the times almost before history; men were itinerant, sent to other Farms for the purpose of trade, and marriage.
But as technology had advanced and the Farms had become increasingly self sufficient, the primary function of the markets had dwindled. One by one they had fallen into disuse. But the role of the markets as centres of innovation had been recognized — and, perhaps, their purpose in providing an alternate destiny for rootless men and boys. So some of the markets had been preserved.
At last only one Market remained: the grandest and most famous, perched here on the eroded peak of its equatorial mountain, supported now by tithes from Farms around the world. Here men, and a few women, dreamed their dreams of how differently things might be — and enough of those innovative dreams bore fruit that it was worth preserving.
It had been this way for two hundred thousand years.
The Worker carried her away from the Market’s crowded centre towards its fringe. The crowds thinned out, and Manekato felt a calming relief to be alone. Alongside an impossibly tall building the Worker paused and hunched down, letting her slip to the ground.
A door dilated in the side of the building. She glanced into the interior; it was filled with darkness.
Reluctant to enter immediately, she loped further along the gleaming, dust-free road. Not far beyond the building the ground fell away. She was approaching the rim of the summit plateau, worn smooth by the feet and hands of visitors. She leaned forward curiously. The mountain’s shallow flanks fell away into thicker, murky air; far below she glimpsed green growing things.
And she saw the Air Wall.
It was like a bank of windblown cloud, moving swiftly, grey and boiling. But this cloud bank hung vertically from the sky, and the clouds streamed horizontally past her. Now that it was not masked. by the buildings she could see how the great Wall curved around the mountain-top, enclosing it neatly. It stretched down like a curtain to the ground below, where dust storms perpetually beat against the struggling vegetation, and it stretched up towards the sky.
It was not easy for her to look up, for her back tilted forward, and her neck was thick, heavily muscled, adapted to fight the Wind. Besides, at home there was generally nothing to see but a lid of streaked, scudding cloud. But now she tipped back awkwardly, raising her chinless jaw.
It was like peering up into a tunnel, lined by scraps of hurrying cloud. And at the very end of the tunnel there was a patch of clear blue.
She had never before seen the sky beyond the clouds.
She shuddered. She hurried inside the building.
And there she met her brother.
Reid Malenfant:
While he waited for an opportunity to progress his mission, Malenfant ate and drank as much as he could, and after the first day put his body through some gentle exercise. He stretched and pushed up and pounded around the red dust of the neat little stockade in his vest and shorts, while Ham servants watched with a kind of absent curiosity, and Runners hooted and shook their shackling ropes. The low gravity made him feel stronger, but conversely the reduced oxygen content of the low-pressure air weakened him. If he over-exerted himself he would soon run out of air; his chest would ache, and, in the worst cases, black spots would gather around his vision.
But he would adapt. And for now, it did no harm to test his limits.
McCann took him for tourist-guide jaunts around the compound, and even beyond. He seemed childishly eager to show off what he and his companions had built here.
McCann said the English had tried to mine mudstone — a kind of natural brick so as to build better houses. “We have the raw muscle, among the Runners and the Hams,” McCann said. “That’s fine for hauling, lifting and dragging. But they can’t be set to fine work, Malenfant; not without a man’s constant supervision. You certainly can’t send off a party even of the Hams to a mudstone seam and expect them to return with anything but a jumble of gouged-out, misshapen rocks — nothing like bricks, you see — that’s if they bring back anything at all.”
There were a lot of pleasurable knick-knacks to inspect, constructed over long hours by the ingenious hands of these bored Englishmen. Malenfant, a gadget fan, pored over wooden locks, clocks and slide rules, all made entirely of wood.
McCann had even maintained a crude calendar system — though it was little more than marks on wood. “Like a rune staff,” McCann said, grimacing. “How far we have fallen. But we haven’t quite mastered the knack of paper-making, you see; needs must. And besides this wandering world has a damnably irregular sky. Even the stars swim about sometimes, you know. But we try to impose order. We do try.”
Everything was made of wood, or stone, or bone, or material manufactured from vegetable products. You could make rope, for instance, from birch bark, pine roots or willow. Ham women baked pine bread made from phloem, the soft white flesh just inside the tree’s bark. You could drink the sap of birch trees, if you had to. And there were medicinal products: spruce resin to ease gut ache. And so on.
McCann said, “This benighted world is bereft of metals, you see — of sizeable ore lodes, anyhow, so far as we could find. Of course the very dust is iron oxide — hematite, I think — but we have notably failed to establish a workable extraction regime… It was an early disappointment, and all the more severe for that. And we were reluctant to mine the only source of refined metals here — I mean our ship, of course. As long as we clung to hope that we might escape this jungle world, we were reluctant to turn our only vessel into pots and pans. All seems a little foolish now, doesn’t it? And so ours is an economy of stone and wood. We have become like our woad-wearing forebears. Amusing, isn’t it?”
They came to a hut where a Ham woman, somewhat bent, was ladling water from a wooden bucket at her feet. Malenfant, glimpsing machinery, poked his head inside the hut, and allowed his eyes to adjust to the shade.
A big wooden container sat on a stand above a smouldering fire. There was some kind of mash inside the container: the woman showed him, though she had to remove a lid sealed with some kind of wax to do it. Two narrow bamboo pipes led down from the container. Condenser pipes, Malenfant thought. The pipes finished in v-notches that tipped their contents neatly into gourds…
“It’s a still,” Malenfant breathed. “Holy shit. Hillbilly stuff. Just the way Jack Daniels started. God, I love this stuff.”