She was bewildered. ‘The clever part?’
‘Like a brain. A brain without a body – but perhaps these little holes are its eyes and ears. After all, it responds when you speak to it, doesn’t it?’
‘Brother – what are you saying? That this is actually from the Ship?’
He sighed. ‘The Brotherhood doesn’t believe in the Ship. But the Ship, nevertheless, existed.’ He smiled. ‘And, yes, you have a piece of it here, preserved through the generations.’
She was astonished by these admissions. ‘You’ve been lying to us!’
‘“Lie” is a hard word,’ he said mildly. ‘The Brothers only want what’s best for everybody. I know we have our faults, Lura, but you have to believe that much.’ He gestured at the tree, and the panorama of the Forest below. ‘Look – you understand what we’re doing here, with all these trees?’
She felt faintly insulted he’d asked. ‘We pull at the star kernel. Eventually we’ll make it fall out of the nebula, and all the way down into the Core of Cores.’
‘And why would we want to do that?’
‘Because in response the Core of Cores produces gushes of fresh air. You Brothers say it harbours gods that do that.’
‘Yes. Air with oxygen, and other gases we need to breathe . . . Lura, a kernel is a massive object, and it takes a lot of pulling to deflect it from its trajectory, which, with the rest of the nebula, is a decaying orbit around the nearest big-star. And we only have the trees to pull it with. It takes whole generations to move a single kernel. But when this one falls we will cut the trees loose and move to another kernel, and we’ll start all over again.
‘This is what we do. This is all we can do, hauling kernels across the sky, trying to coax more air out of the Core of Cores. So what good is it for people to fill their heads with dreams of another world, and of a Ship that might have brought them here? Best for them to forget it all, and make do with what they have.’ He lifted the Mole before his face. ‘I’ll regret destroying this, for it is a rarity – I have seen other fragments – I never heard of one that spoke before. Remarkable. But it must go, of course.’
‘You have no right.’
‘Of course I do,’ he said gently.
‘Will I be punished?’
‘No. I think losing this will be punishment enough, won’t it? I’ll dispose of it, don’t worry any more. Let’s go down and have something to eat, and hope that the next shift turns out to be a bit more straightforward than this one.’
A shadow crossed the sky behind him.
She pointed. ‘I think they might have something to say about that.’
He turned to see.
Out of the sky’s crimson gloom a flock of whales came swimming, their massive tails beating at the air, human riders standing on their translucent backs. Humans with weapons.
Suddenly the Mole spoke again. ‘Massive sensor dysfunction! Massive sensor dysfunction!’
3
Vala received two contradictory summonses. They came two standard days after the arrival of the Second Coalition flotilla.
Grumbling, she showed the Virtual messages to Coton. One, heralded by a trumpet blast, was an order to attend a Marshal Sand, evidently the senior military figure on the planet and now the ‘interim governor’. The second was an order to go to a ‘processing’ centre, along with all the Weaponised on Delta Seven. Vala snorted. ‘Typical of this sort of strutting ninny – fanfares and petty cruelty, and sheer incompetence to boot. Which shall I attend, eh? Even if you try to do what these people want it’s impossible to get it right. Curse them!’
As she ranted Coton stood back, rubbing the black tattoo on his forehead.
At last she noticed. ‘Oh, child – I haven’t been thinking of you. Don’t be afraid.’
‘This is how it started on Centre.’
‘I know, I know.’ Gently she pulled his hands away from his forehead. ‘Look at this ludicrous mark – it’s all out of shape. They apply them to babies, you know, and then when you grow . . . Look, they haven’t even mentioned you in the summonses. They probably don’t even know you’re here.’
‘Are we going to have to run again, grandmother?’
‘We’re not running anywhere. The work we’re doing here is much too important.’
‘The Starfolk?’
She squeezed his hands. ‘Not just that. It’s this business of your dreams – if that’s what they are. I’ve been doing some research on those words you keep repeating . . . Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be mysterious. We’ll talk properly later. Well, we must obey one of our summonses, but which? We’ll go see this Marshal character, shall we? At least she’s the superior officer. Let’s both go, and you can demonstrate your existence.’
The city was in chaos. The streets were crowded with Coalition soldiers and functionaries and their transports, and with citizens, some trying to go about their business, some laden with luggage and wandering anxiously. Many buildings had been requisitioned by the new authorities and displacing their inhabitants, so that heaps of furniture and other detritus were piled in doorways amid crowds of the evicted. One sector, an avenue lined by huge college buildings, had long been given over to a market. This morning the vendors were short of supplies, and the lines of would-be buyers were long and fractious, shabby people with bags and packs, holding unhappy children by the hand.
Vala snorted her contempt as she pushed her way along with Coton. ‘The mighty hand of the Second Coalition at work! Refugees lining up to buy food that doesn’t exist. This is what happens when a new authority tries to take control. They’ll have carved up the region with new boundaries, cutting trading links, forcing people out of their homes to be relocated according to one grand scheme or another . . . Oh, I dare say it will sort itself out. But in the meantime we’ll all go short.’
Coton didn’t feel so judgemental. ‘It’s not just the Coalition’s fault, grandmother. The Scourge is advancing, a curtain of darkness. Whole worlds are thrown into chaos. People abandon their homes, their planets, and fall as refugees onto those further out. We have to expect this over and over in the coming years as the Scourge looms ever closer, driving people ahead of it.’
Vala grimaced. ‘A cold analysis, but probably an accurate one.’
They came to a pencil-slim building, its face adorned by light globes.
‘This is it. Once the Chancellor’s residence. Come on! If we follow the directions we’ve been given, we have to climb all the way to the roof.’
Much of the building was dark. The elevators were working, but patchily, and, comically, they had to break their journey around the middle of the ascent to cross corridors and climb three flights of stairs, transferring from one elevator shaft to another. At last they emerged through another dilating door, and Coton found himself on the roof of the building – and not a pace from the edge, which wasn’t in any way fenced off.
Vala laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that! Jump off and the inertial nets will trap you. It’s quite impossible to come to any harm . . . It’s rather obvious where we’re supposed to go, isn’t it?’ She pointed at a space-going military flitter that sat square in the centre of the roof, adorned with flags bearing a bright green tetrahedral logo. She marched forward. ‘Typical of such people to grasp at the symbols of a better past . . .’
Despite her sparky self-confidence, they were held up by armed guards before being allowed to enter the flitter. Vala had to give both their names, and the guards, in bright green uniforms, eyed their Weaponised identification tattoos suspiciously, and checked their identities against scrolling lists. It didn’t help that Coton wasn’t included in the summons, and they had to refer to an off-world database.