By the time they had passed another two platforms, the three were alone on the stair leading up. Eventually they stepped out on the top of the Big Flint where Aesop studied his surroundings. Ten years ago Keech stood up here, but things had certainly changed since then.
Some sails were huddled in a mass: large pinkish baggy bodies, long necks hooking above them, terminating in crocodilian heads. Other sails were scattered separately about on the top of the Flint or out on the bubble-metal platform ringing it. Some operated cowled machines Aesop could not identify, until stepping close to one with its weather shield open to find the sail working, with its big spider hands, a touch console and screen inside. Satellite dishes were positioned further out on the platform; cables snaked across the stone. None of the sails paid the three much attention.
‘We are here to see Windcheater,’ Bloc announced.
Abruptly a number of heads swung towards them. Then the crowd of sails parted and a larger, more aggressive-looking creature mooched over towards them. This was definitely Windcheater—Aesop recognized him from the files he had been instructed to study.
‘Yes,’ said the sail.
‘You’re Windcheater?’
The sail did not reply.
‘Are you Windcheater?’ Bloc tried again.
‘Evidently.’
Bloc said, ‘You’ve relocated us. We had an agreement.’
‘Yes.’
‘This is unacceptable. You can’t go back on your word.’
The sail arched its neck to bring its head down level with Bloc. ‘You paid me so you could come here and build a ship to sail your pilgrims to the Little Flint. The plans you submitted were for you to launch it from the Chel Island, but I did not agree to them. I don’t want you people that close to me. Now bugger off.’ The sail began to turn away.
‘What about the sails for our ship?’ Bloc quickly asked. ‘You agreed to that. It’s part of your law that no ship can sail without at least one of your kind aboard.’
‘You’ll get your sails,’ Windcheater told him.
‘There’s an economic reason for you moving us, isn’t there?’ Bloc suggested.
Aesop was impressed: Taylor Bloc was not normally so restrained.
Showing more interest than heretofore, the sail swung back. ‘For example?’
‘Because no more are being produced, there’s only a limited number of reifications who can come here for either a cure or their physical destruction by the virus, so eventually pilgrimages by those you find distasteful will dwindle. So afterwards you’ll get yourself a piece of civilization established on another island.’
‘Smart dead man,’ said the sail.
Aesop felt like laughing, but had lost that ability long ago. Nothing about the additional costs and a probable takeover by Lineworld. Windcheater had clearly been paid to relocate them. However, Bloc was only going through the motions. He had obviously decided on his course now.
The sail Huff had been informed by humans, AIs and Windcheater that he remembered his name because he was brighter than the average sail, for a certain horrible reason. When the Batian mercenary Shib had stapled Huff’s neck to the mast of Captain Drum’s ship, the Ahab, and when Jay Hoop’s lunatic wife Rebecca Frisk had subsequently cooked Huff’s skull with a laser, his brain had then regrown without the usual hard wiring. Puff, it was supposed, remembered her name for similar reasons, telling Huff she only vaguely recollected the heirodont that had clamped its jaws on her skull when she had peered over the edge of the Little Flint to see about snapping up one of the hammer whelks nestling down there. Huff speculated that a similar happenstance had resulted in Windcheater’s enhanced intelligence, perhaps when the planet had been ruled by the Eight, who had taken as much pleasure in hunting indigenes as those humans who escaped from the coring facility. Windcheater was not telling. However, no such drastic damage had resulted in the cerebral rewiring of the third sail, nor was likely to. Huff now eyed their companion.
Zephyr was as big as Windcheater, and no heirodont’s jaws carried the muscle to crush his ceramal skull, and no one would be stapling him to a mast. His tough carbon polymer skin was the hue of blued steel. His teeth were chainglass and his bones were composite-reinforced bubble-metal. In his chest he carried two state-of-the-art fusion reactors, which drove his carbon-fibre muscles and powered his crystal brain and formidable sense array. His eyes were gleaming emeralds. Zephyr had very little to fear, being a Golem sail.
Huff and Puff’s partnership had lasted for ten years, from when they discovered much in common with each other and little with their fellows. Zephyr, when he arrived here less than a year ago, had been much less coherent than he was now. Windcheater had treated him with suspicion; the response of other sails had been confusion. Huff and Puff, however, adopted him as an outcast like themselves. They showed him their world, talked and flew with him. In a short time they became fascinated by the Golem sail’s strange combination of hard-headed wisdom and not quite sane pronouncements on life and death. They argued and flew, learnt, and thus became even more distant from their fellows. When he volunteered the three of them for a task other sails wanted no part of, he became the leader and they the followers.
‘I think I see it now,’ said Huff.
‘You do,’ Zephyr replied. ‘And now we need to go faster.’ The Golem sail accelerated.
Huff and Puff looked at each other questioningly, then grabbed air to catch up with their companion.
‘What’s the hurry?’ Puff complained. ‘The money’s the same either way and there’s no way they’ll be sailing without us.’
Zephyr glanced aside. ‘I will see the soulless sail.’
‘And…?’ said Huff.
Zephyr’s voice changed to more normal tones, as if the Golem sail now assumed a prosaic guise. ‘Beyond the reason that will soon become evident to you, we have reason to get this part over with as quickly as possible.’ Zephyr held up the harness he clasped in one claw. ‘We might not be within the Polity, but this Warden will take a dim view of what we’re about if he catches us. From what I’ve been told he doesn’t put much credence in the rules and regulations supposedly governing his status.’
‘What might he do?’ Puff asked.
Huff had a damned good idea; he had been in the middle of the events that resulted in the new Warden. He still remembered the taste of the human heads he had bitten off just before the Ahab sank and the device inside it detonated. And later he had been high in the sky watching when the war drone Sniper, who was now the Warden, had come down like a hammer on that Prador ship.
‘It is this way,’ said Zephyr. ‘The new Warden would try not to endanger any innocent Polity citizen, but it might be possible to identify us by a chemical analysis of the ash floating on the sea. I do not choose Death. I refuse it.’
‘But you are a Polity citizen,’ Huff pointed out.
Zephyr exposed his chainglass teeth so they glinted in the sunset light. ‘But not innocent; and that I’m not an ignorant native makes me doubly culpable.’
‘No forgiveness then,’ asked Puff.
‘Outmoded concept of human law. We are all responsible for our actions.’ Zephyr pointed ahead with one long metallic talon. ‘Do you see now?’
Huff and Puff peered ahead.
‘Oh, one of them,’ said Huff.
3
Putrephallus Weed:
phallic in shape and stinking like rotten corpses, this is not a plant xenobotanists much enjoy studying. They grow from a large seed, throwing up in only a few days a two-metre-tall green phallic stalk, and spreading catch leaves low to the ground. The tips turn red as they ripen, attracting the lung birds to eat them, gain some nutrition from the outer fruiting body, then vomit up the inner pollen sack. This usually happens in another stand of the same plants, perhaps caused by some kind of pheromonal trigger. The pollen sacks splash on the ground, spraying liquid pollen over the catch leaves and entering their central stigma. The seeds then developing are raised up in the tips of yet more phallic growth, are eaten by the lung birds, then vomited up at other locations. Lung birds, perhaps gratefully so, are also the main pollinators of the sea lily -