Tomm looked bewildered. ‘Meat?’
‘Somehow they use it to maintain their fabric. Don’t ask me how.’
‘And light,’ Enna said. ‘That’s why they stack up into this strange reef, isn’t it? It isn’t a human architecture at all, is it? They are more like a forest. The buildings are competing for the light.’
Sila smiled. ‘You see, I said you were clever.’
‘Light?’
‘Oh, Tomm, don’t just repeat everything we say! He’s in there. My father. And we’ve got to get him out.’
Tomm was obviously bewildered. ‘If you say so. How?’
She thought fast. Buildings that take meat. Buildings that need light . . . ‘The balloon,’ she said. ‘Get some servants.’
‘It will take an age for the heaters—’
‘Just bring the envelope. Hurry, Tomm!’
Tomm rushed off.
Enna went back to the building and continued to slam her hand against the wall. ‘I’ll get you out of there, Father. Hold on!’ But there was no reply. And again the building shifted ominously, its base scraping over the ground. She glanced into the sky, where that flying building had already become a speck against the blueshifted stars. If they fed, if they had the light they needed, did the buildings simply float away in search of new prey? Was that what had become of poor Momo?
Tomm returned with the balloon envelope, manhandled by a dozen bearers.
‘Get it over the building,’ Enna ordered. ‘Block out the light. Hurry. Oh, please . . .’
All of them hauled at the balloon envelope, dragging it over the building. The envelope ripped on the sharp corners of the structure, but Enna ignored wails of protest from the watching Philosophers. At last the thick hide envelope covered the building from top to bottom; it was like a wrapped-up present. She stood back, breathing hard, her hands stinking of leather. She had no idea what to do next if this didn’t work.
And a door dilated open in the side of the building.
Fumes billowed out, hot and yellow, and people recoiled, coughing and pressing their eyes. Then Bayle came staggering out, and collapsed to the ground.
‘Father!’ Enna knelt, and took his head on her lap.
His clothes were shredded, his hands were folded up like claws, and the skin of his face was crimson. But he was alive. ‘It was an acid bath in there,’ he wheezed. ‘Another few moments and I would have succumbed. It was like being swallowed. Digested.’
‘I know,’ she said.
He looked up; his eyes had been spared the acid. ‘You understand?’
‘I think so. Father, we have to let the doctors see to you.’
‘Yes, yes . . . But first, get everybody out of this cursed place.’
Enna glanced up at Tomm, who turned away and began to shout commands.
‘And,’ wheezed Bayle, ‘where is that woman, Sila?’
There was a waft of acid-laden air, a ripping noise. Philosophers scrambled back out of the way. Cradling her father, Enna saw that the building had shaken off the balloon envelope and was lifting grandly into the air. And Sila sat in an open doorway, looking down impassively, as the building lifted her into the time-accelerated sky.
Bayle was taken to his wagon, where his wounds were treated. He allowed in nobody but his daughter, the doctors, Nool – and Tomm, who, Bayle admitted grudgingly, had acquitted himself well.
Even in this straitened circumstance Bayle held forth, his voice reduced to a whisper, his face swathed in unguent cream. ‘I blame myself,’ he said. ‘I let myself see what I wanted to see about this city – just as I pompously warned you, Tomm, against the self-same flaw. And I refused to listen to you, Enna. I wanted to see a haven for the people I have led out into the wilderness. I saw what did not exist.’
‘You saw what Sila wanted you to see,’ Enna said.
‘Ah, Sila . . . What an enigma! But the fault is mine, Enna; you won’t talk me out of that.’
‘And the buildings—’
‘I should have seen the pattern before you did! After all, we have a precedent. The Weapons are technology gone wild, made things modified by time, grown into a kind of ecology – and so are the buildings of this “city”.’
Once, surely, the buildings had been intended to house people. But they were advanced technology: mobile, self-maintaining habitats. They fuelled themselves with light, and with organic traces – perhaps they had been designed to process their occupants’ waste.
Things changed. People abandoned the buildings, and forgot about them. But the buildings, self-maintaining, perhaps even self-aware in some rudimentary sense, sought a new way to live – and that new way diverged ever more greatly from the purposes their human inventors had imagined.
‘They came together for protection,’ Bayle whispered. ‘They huddled together in reefs that looked like towns, cities, jostling for light. And then they discovered a new strategy, when the first ragged human beings innocently entered their doorways.
‘The buildings apparently offered shelter. And whenever a human was foolish enough to accept that mute offer—’
‘They feed,’ said Tomm with horror.
Bayle said, ‘It is just as the Weapons of the plain once learned to farm humans for meat. We share a world with technology that has gone wild and undergone its own evolution. I should have known!’
Enna said, ‘And Sila?’
‘Now she is more interesting,’ Bayle whispered. ‘She told me exactly what I wanted to hear – fool as I was to listen! She cooperates with the city, you see; in return for shelter – perhaps even for some grisly form of food – she helps it lure in unwitting travellers, like us. Her presence makes it seem safer than a city empty altogether.’
‘A symbiosis,’ Tomm said, wondering. ‘Of humans with wild technology.’
Enna shuddered. ‘We have had a narrow escape.’
Bayle covered her hand with his own bandaged fingers. ‘But others, like poor Momo, have died for my foolishness.’
‘We must go on,’ Tomm said. ‘There is nothing for us here.’
‘Nothing but a warning. Yes, we will go on. The Expedition continues! But not for ever. Someday we will find a home—’
‘Or we will build one,’ Tomm said firmly.
Bayle nodded stiffly. ‘Yes. But that’s for you youngsters, not for the likes of me.’
Enna was moved to take Tomm’s hand in hers.
Bayle watched them. ‘He may not have a first-class mind,’ he said to Enna. ‘But he has an air of command, and that’s worth cultivating.’
‘Oh, father—’
Outside the wagon there came shouting, and a rushing sound, like great breaths being drawn.
‘Go and see,’ Bayle whispered.
Enna and Tomm hurried out of the wagon.
Displacing air that washed over the people, the sentient buildings of the city were lifting off the ground, all of them now, massive, mobile. Already the first was high in the blueshifted sky, and the others followed in a stream of silent geometry, a city blowing away like a handful of seeds on the breeze.
Formidable Caress
AD c.5 Billion Years
As the women tried to pull her away, Ama hammered with her fist on the blank wall of the Building. ‘Let me inside! Oh, let me inside!’
But the Building had sealed itself against her. If the Weapon that ruled the people decreed that you were to bear your child in the open air, that was how it was going to be, and no mere human being could do anything about it.
And she could not fight the logic of her body. The contractions came in pulses now, in waves of pain that washed through the core of her being. In the end it was her father, Telni, who put his bony arm around her shoulders, murmuring small endearments. Exhausted, she allowed herself to be led away.