‘A few months.’ Her voice was very quiet now. We watched Yellowstone and the swarm of parked ships rotate into view again before she continued, ‘What he said — what he implied — never happened. All he’s ever done is just scare me. But every time he goes a bit further. He frightens me, Tanner. I’m glad you were with me.’
‘It was deliberate, wasn’t it? You were hoping he would try something today.’
‘Then I was afraid you might kill him. You could have, couldn’t you? If you had wanted to.’
Now that she formed the question I had to ask it of myself as well. And I saw that killing him would have been easy for me; simply a technical modification of the restraint I had imposed. It wouldn’t have demanded any more effort; would hardly have impinged on the calm I had felt during the whole incident.
‘He wouldn’t have been worth the effort,’ I said, reaching over to pick up the thing which had slipped from his pocket. No weapon, I saw now — or at least nothing with which I was familiar.
It was more like a syringe, containing some fluid which could have been black or dark red, but was most likely the latter.
‘What’s this?’
‘Something he shouldn’t have had in Idlewild. Give it to me, will you? I’ll have it destroyed.’
I passed the hypodermic device willingly; it was of no use to me. As she pocketed it with something close to revulsion, Amelia said, ‘Tanner, he’ll be back, when you’ve left us.’
‘We’ll worry about that later — and I’m not going anywhere in a hurry, am I? Not with my memory in the state it is.’ Trying to lighten the mood, I added, ‘You said something about showing me my face, earlier on.’
She answered hesitantly. ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’ Then she fished out the little penlight she had used in the tunnel and instructed me to kneel down again, looking into the glass. When Yellowstone and its moon had gone by and the cave had become dark again, she shone the torch on my face. I looked at my reflection in the glass.
There was no shocking sense of unfamiliarity. How could there have been, when I had already traced the outline of my face with my fingers a dozen times since waking? I already sensed that my face would be blandly handsome, and that was the case. It was the face of a moderately successful actor or a motivationally suspect politician. A dark-haired man in his early forties — and, without quite knowing from where I had dredged this fact, I knew that on Sky’s Edge, that more or less meant exactly what it said; that I could not be drastically older than I seemed, for our methods of longevity extension lagged centuries behind the rest of humanity.
Another shard of memory clicking into place.
‘Thank you,’ I said, when I had seen enough for now. ‘I think that helped. I don’t think my amnesia’s going to last forever.’
‘It almost never does.’
‘Actually, I was being flippant. Are you saying there are people who never get their memories back?’
‘Yes,’ she said, with unconcealed sadness. ‘Mostly, they never function well enough to immigrate.’
‘What happens to them, in that case?’
‘They stay here. They learn to help us; to cultivate the terraces. Sometimes they even join the Order.’
‘Poor souls.’
Amelia stood, beckoning me to follow her. ‘Oh, there are worse fates, Tanner. I should know.’
SIX
Ten years old, he moved with his father across the curved, polished floor of the freight bay, their booted feet squeaking on the high-gloss surface, the two of them suspended above their own dark reflections; a man and a boy forever walking up what looked to the eye like an ever-steepening hill, but which always felt perfectly level.
‘We’re going outside, aren’t we?’ Sky said.
Titus looked down at his son. ‘Why do you assume that?’
‘You wouldn’t have brought me here otherwise.’
Titus said nothing, but the point could not be denied. Sky had never been in the freight bay before; not even during one of Constanza’s illicit trips into the Santiago’s forbidden territory. Sky remembered the time she had taken him to see the dolphins, and the punishment that had ensued, and how that punishment had been eclipsed by the ordeal that had followed: the flash of light and the period he had spent trapped alone and cold in the utter darkness of the nursery. It seemed so long ago, but there were still things about that day that he did not fully understand now; things he had never persuaded his father to speak about. It was more than his father’s recalcitrance; more than simply Titus’s grief at the death of Sky’s mother. The censorship by omission — it was more subtle than a simple refusal to discuss the incident — extended to every adult Sky had spoken to. No one would speak of that day when the whole ship had turned dark and cold, yet to Sky the events were still clearly fixed in his memory.
After what felt like days — and now that he thought about it, it probably had been days — the adults had made the main lights come on again. He noticed when the air-circulators began to work — a faint background ambience which he had never really noticed until it had ceased. In all that time, his father told him later, they had been breathing unrecirculated air; slowly turning staler and staler as the hundred and fifty waking humans dumped more and more carbon dioxide back into their atmosphere. In a few more days it would have started causing serious problems, but now the air became fresher and the ship slowly warmed back up to the point where it was possible to move along the corridors without shivering. Various secondary systems that had been unavailable during the blackout were brought hesitantly back online. The trains which ferried equipment and technicians up and down the spine began to run again. The ship’s information nets, which had been silent, could now be queried. The food improved, but Sky had hardly noticed that they had been eating emergency rations during the blackout.
Yet still none of the adults would discuss exactly what had happened.
Eventually, when something like normal shipboard life had returned, Sky managed to sneak back into the nursery. The room was lit, but to his surprise everything looked more or less as he had left it: Clown frozen in that strange shape he had assumed after the flash. Sky had crept closer to examine the distorted form of his friend. He could see now that all Clown had ever been was a pattern in the tiny coloured squares that covered the nursery’s walls, floor and ceiling. Clown had been a kind of moving picture that only made sense — only looked right — when seen from precisely Sky’s point of view. Clown had appeared to be physically present in the room — not simply drawn on the wall — because his feet and legs had been drawn on the floor as well, but with a perspective distorted such that it looked perfectly real from where Sky happened to be. The room must have mapped Sky and his direction of gaze. Had he been able to shift his viewpoint fast enough, faster than the room could recompute Clown’s image, he would perhaps have seen through that trick of perspective. But Clown was always much faster than Sky. For three years, he had never doubted that Clown was real, even if Clown could never touch or be touched by anything.
His parents had abdicated responsibility to an illusion.
Now, however — in a mood of eager forgiveness — he pushed such thoughts from his mind, awed by the sheer size of the freight bay and the prospect of what lay ahead. What made the place all the larger was the fact that the two of them were quite alone, surrounded only by a puddle of moving light. The rest of the chamber was suggested rather than clearly seen; its dimensions hinted at by the dark, looming shapes of cargo containers and their associated handling machines receding along curved lines into blackness. Parked here and there were various spacecraft; some little more than single-person tugs or broomsticks designed for flying immediately outside the ship, while others were fully pressurised taxi craft, built for crossing to the other Flotilla craft. The taxis could enter an atmosphere in an emergency, but they were not designed to make the return trip to space. The delta-winged landers which would make multiple journeys down to the surface of Journey’s End were too large to store inside the Santiago; they were attached instead to the outside of the ship and there was almost no way to see them unless you worked on one of the external work crews, as his mother had done before her death.