“Why are you doing this?” he said.
She gave him a wry smile. “Old Imps said I was neglecting my duty, but I believe that everybody on Overland has a higher duty. Each of us has to search for and develop his or her artistic gift. I don’t know if I can even be an artist, but I’m making the effort. If I fail I’ll go on to poetry, music, dance… I’ll keep searching until I find something I can do, then I’ll do it to the best of my ability.”
“Why is it a duty?”
“Because of the Migration! You can’t do what we did and get away without paying a penalty. We left our racial soul behind on the Old World. Do you know that in all the ships that took part in the Migration there was not one painting? No books, no sculptures, no music. We left it all behind us.”
“It was hardly a pleasure trip, you know,” Toller said. “We were refugees carrying the bare essentials of life.”
“We brought jewellery and useless money! Tons of weapons! A race needs an armature of culture to support every other aspect of its being, and we no longer have one. The King left it out of his great plan for a new Kolcorron. We left all that kind of thing behind, and that’s why Overland feels so empty. It isn’t because we are so few, spread out over a whole world—we suffer from spiritual emptiness.”
Berise’s ideas were strange to Toller, and yet her words seemed to find their mark somewhere far inside him, particularly the references to emptiness. As a young man in Ro-Atabri he had always enjoyed the setting of the sun and the gentle approach of darkness—but of late, even with Gesalla at his side, the once satisfying experience had become oddly flat and disappointing. No matter how beautiful the sunset, there was no longer any pleasure in reviewing the achievements of the day, no anticipation of the morrow. The associated emotion, had he ever acknowledged it, would have been a poignant sadness. Overland’s western sky, as it deepened through gold and red to peacock green and blue, had seemed to ring with… emptiness.
The word had been a curiously apt one to come from a comparative stranger. He had been attributing his feelings to some unrecognised inner malaise, but had he just been offered a better explanation? Could he be an aesthete at heart, troubled by a growing awareness that his people lacked a cultural identity? The answer came quickly as the pragmatic, practical side of his nature reasserted itself.
No, he thought. The worm which eats out the core of my life is not concerned with poetry and art—and neither am I.
He half-smiled as he realised how far he had strayed, in an unguarded moment, into realms of fanciful thought, then he saw that Berise was staring at him.
“I wasn’t smiling at your ideas,” he said.
“No,” she replied thoughtfully, her gaze still hunting over his face. “I didn’t think you were.”
And, of all the scenes which were played and replayed in Toller’s memory, the brightest and most clearly incised were those from the day which saw the war’s true beginning…
Seventy-three days had passed since the positioning of the first two fortresses. It was not a long period of time by the standards of men and women going about their routine affairs on the surface of Overland, but evolution was swift in the unnatural environment of the central blue.
Toller had completed his daily flying and archery practice, and had felt disinclined to return too quickly to the oppressive confines of the station. His fighter was floating about five hundred yards outside the datum plane, a vantage point from which he could observe the ebb and flow of activity in the Inner Defence Group and the surrounding space. To his left he could see a supply ship crawling up from Prad, its balloon a small brown disk sharply outlined against the convex patterns of Overland; to his right was Command Station One, flaring with sunlight against the indigo of the sky. Close to it were lesser three-section habitats which were used as workshops and stores, and in a loose swarm were the fighters of Red Squadron. Dozens of human figures, moving purposefully, could be seen in perfect detail in spite of being so tiny, mannikins from the hand of a master jeweller.
As always, Toller was impressed by the sheer amount of progress which had been made in the time available, since the first naive scheme to blanket the entire weightless zone with fortresses which would have relied on guns to repel an invasion.
The invention of the fighter craft had been the major step forward, their astonishing speed having rendered obsolete the idea of each fortress being an isolated and self-sufficient entity. They had ceased to be fortresses, and were now assigned specialised roles—dormitory, workshop, store, armoury—in support of the all-important jets.
No matter how clever was the theoretical planner working on the ground, Toller had realised, innovation and development were usually products of practical experience. Even Zavotle, his thinking conditioned by normal gravity, had not foreseen the problems which would be posed by weightless debris and waste matter. The death of young Argitane, the fighter pilot killed by a drifting cannonball, had been a dramatic example, but the pollution of the environment by human wastes had become a matter of increasing concern.
The psychological stress of life in the gateway was augmented by the indignity and sheer unpleasantness of attending to one’s bodily functions in zero gravity, and no commander could countenance the prospect of each station being surrounded by a thickening cloud of filth. Carthvodeer had been obliged to set up a collection team—quickly and mercilessly dubbed the Shit Patrol—whose unenviable task it was to trawl all offensive material into large bags. The bags were then towed a few miles down towards Land by a fighter and released to continue their journey under the influence of gravity—a practice which occasioned much ribaldry among the fortress crews.
Another problem, one yet to be resolved, had come with the attempts to establish an outer defensive ring. The original intention had been to place stations on a ring thirty miles across, greatly extending the area of interdiction, but with separations of more than about four miles they had become almost impossible to locate and keep supplied. A second fatality among fighter pilots had occurred when a flier, perhaps with substandard eyesight, had simply become lost while returning from an outer station, and had burned up all her power crystals in vain attempts to locate her base. Deprived of the heat generated by her engine, she had perished of hypothermia, and had been found purely by chance. Since that time the policy had been to concentrate all stations in the central group and rely on the fighters to extend their area of influence as required.
As was the case with all the other fliers, Toller had found that his lung capacity had increased to deal with the rarefied atmosphere, but it was impossible to adapt to the relentless cold of the weightless zone. By the time he had been drifting and meditating for twenty minutes all residual heat had leaked away through the wooden cowling of his engine, and he was beginning to shiver despite the protection of his skysuit. He was pumping up the fighter’s pneumatic reservoir, preparatory to returning to the command station, when his attention was drawn to a star which had suddenly increased in luminosity for a second and now was emitting regular pulses of brilliance. No sooner had he deduced that the star was actually a distant station, and that it was sending out a sunwriter message, when he heard the sound of a trumpet, its repeated blasts fast-fading in the thin air. His heart stopped, lay quiescent for a subjective eternity, then began a rhythmic jolting.