Telni’s sister Jurg and the other women had set up a pallet for her not far from the rim of the Platform. They laid her down there and fussed with their blankets and buckets of warmed water, and prepared ancient knives for the cutting. Her aunt massaged her swollen belly with oils brought up from the Lowland. Telni propped Ama’s head on his arm, and held her hand tightly, but she could feel the weariness in her father’s grip.
So it began. She breathed and screamed and pushed.
And through it all, here at the lip of the Platform, this floating island in the sky, she was surrounded by the apparatus of her world, the Buildings clustered around her – floating buildings that supported the Platform itself – the red mist of the Lowland far below, above her the gaunt cliff on which glittered the blue-tinged lights of the Shelf cities, the sky over her head where chains of stars curled like windblown hair . . . When she looked up she was peering into accelerated time, into places where a human heart fluttered like a songbird’s. But there was a personal dimension to time too, so her father had always taught her, and these hours of her labour were the longest of her life, as if her body had been dragged all the way down into the glutinous, redshifted slowness of the Lowland.
When it was done Jurg handed her the baby. It was a boy, a scrap of flesh born a little early, his weight negligible inside the spindling-skin blankets. She immediately loved him unconditionally, whatever alien thing lay within. ‘I call him Telni like his grandfather,’ she managed to whisper.
Old Telni, exhausted himself, wiped tears from his crumpled cheeks.
She slept for a while, out in the open.
When she opened her eyes, the Weapon was floating above her. As always, a small boy stood at its side.
The Weapon was a box as wide as a human was tall, reflective as a mirror, hovering at waist height above the smooth surface of the Platform. Ama could see herself in the thing’s silver panels, on her back on the heap of blankets, her baby asleep in the cot beside her. Her aunt, her father, the other women hung back, nervous of this massive presence that dominated all their lives.
Then a small hatch opened in the Weapon’s flank, an opening with lobed lips, like a mouth. From this hatch a silvery tongue, metres long, reached out and snaked into the back of the neck of the small boy who stood alongside it. Now the boy took a step towards Ama’s cot, trailing his tongue-umbilical.
Telni blocked his way. ‘Stay back, Powpy, you little monster. You were once a boy as I was. Now I am old and you are still young. Stay away from my grandson.’
Powpy halted. Ama saw that his eyes flickered nervously, glancing at Telni, the cot, the Weapon. This showed the extent of the Weapon’s control of its human creature; somewhere in there was a frightened child.
Ama struggled to sit up. ‘What do you want?’
The boy Powpy turned to her. ‘We wish to know why you wanted to give birth within a Building.’
‘You know why,’ she snapped back. ‘No child born inside a Building has ever harboured an Effigy.’
The child’s voice was flat, neutral – his accent was like her father’s, she thought, a little boy with the intonation of an older generation. ‘A child without an Effigy is less than a child with an Effigy. Human tradition concurs with that, even without understanding—’
‘I didn’t want you to be interested in him.’ The words came in a rush. ‘You control us. You keep us here, floating on this island in the sky. All for the Effigies we harbour, or not. That’s what you’re interested in, isn’t it?’ Her father laid a trembling hand on her arm, but she shook it away. ‘My husband believed his life was pointless, that his only purpose was to nurture the Effigy inside him, and grow old and die for you. In the end he destroyed himself—’
‘Addled by the drink,’ murmured Telni.
‘He didn’t want you to benefit from his death. He never even saw this baby, his son. He wanted more than this!’
The Weapon seemed to consider this. ‘We intend no harm. On the contrary, a proper study of the symbiotic relationship between humans and Effigies—’
‘Go away,’ she said. She found she was choking back tears. ‘Go away!’ And she flung a blanket at its impassive hide, for that was all she had to throw.
The Weapon returned to visit Telni when he was six years old. Ama chased it away again.
The machine next came to see Telni after the death of Ama and her father. Telni was ten years old. There was no one to chase it away.
The double funeral was almost done, at last.
Telni had had to endure a long vigil beside the bodies, where they had been laid out close to the rim of the Platform. He slept a lot, huddled against his kind but severe great-aunt Jurg, his last surviving relative.
At the dawn of the third day, as the light storms down on the Lowland glimmered and shifted and filled the air with their pearly glow, Jurg prodded him awake.
And, he saw, his mother’s Effigy was ascending. A cloud of pale mist burst soundlessly from the body on its pallet. It hovered, tendrils and billows pulsing – and then, just for a heartbeat, it gathered itself into a form that was recognisably human, a misty shell with arms and legs, torso and head.
Jurg, Ama’s aunt, was crying. ‘She’s smiling. Can you see? Oh, how wonderful . . .’
The sketch of Ama lengthened, her neck stretching like a spindling’s, becoming impossibly long. Then the distorted Effigy shot up into the blueshifted sky and arced down over the lip of the Platform, hurling itself into the flickering crimson of the plain below. Jurg told Telni that Ama’s Effigy was seeking its final lodging deep in the slow-beating heart of Old Earth, where, so it was believed, something of Ama would survive even the Formidable Caresses. But Telni knew that Ama had despised the Effigies, even the one that turned out to have resided in her.
They waited another day, but no Effigy emerged from old Telni.
The bodies were taken across the Platform, to the centre of the cluster of box-shaped, blank-walled Buildings that supported this aerial colony, and placed reverently inside one of the smaller structures. A week later, when Jurg took Telni to see, the bodies were entirely vanished, their substance subsumed by the Building, which might have become a fraction larger after its ingestion.
So Telni, orphaned, was left in the care of his great-aunt.
Jurg tried to get him to return to his schooling. A thousand people lived on the Platform, of which a few hundred were children; the schools were efficient and well organised.
But Telni, driven by feelings too complicated to face, was restless. He roamed alone through the forest of Buildings. Or he would stand at the edge of the Platform, before the gulf that surrounded his floating home, and look up to watch the Shelf war unfold, accelerated by its altitude, the pale-blue explosions and whizzing aircraft making an endless spectacle. He was aware that his great-aunt and teachers and the other adults were watching him, concerned, but for now they gave him his head.
On the third day, he made for one of his favourite places, which was the big wheel at the very centre of the Platform, turned endlessly by harnessed spindlings. Here you could look down through a hatch in the Platform, a hole in the floor of the world, and follow the tethers that attached the Platform like a huge kite to the Lowland ground half a kilometre below, and watch the bucket chains rising and falling. The Loading Hub was down on the ground directly beneath the Platform, the convergence of a dozen roads that were crowded with supply carts day and night. Standing here it was as if you could see the machinery of the world working. Telni liked to think about such things, to work them out, as a distraction from thinking about other things. And it pleased him in other ways he didn’t really understand, as if he had a deep, sunken memory of much bigger, more complicated machinery than this.