A girl fell out.
The Marshal caught her in her uniformed arms. Limp, the girl wore a dirty tunic of what looked like plaited tree bark, and her grimy hair was tied back. She was too tall, too spindly, her stick-thin legs didn’t look as if they would support her, Vala thought, and her head lolled on a skinny neck. It was a paradox that the creatures of a high-gravity universe spent most of their lives in effective freefall. And she had distinct webbing on her toes – an adaptation for swimming in the air?
Sand lowered her to the deck. But the girl struggled, and tried to raise her head, and spoke in a scratchy voice. ‘Ma-seef senss-or dees-funx-eon . . .’
Sand stared at her. ‘By Bolder’s ghost. I think she made a joke!’
The girl tried to speak again, and the flitter’s Virtual suite translated for her. ‘Coton? Where is he?’
Vala had not thought of her grandson since the coffin-box had cracked open. She whirled.
Coton lay immobile on his couch. The crew members worked on him frantically. But, one by one, the Virtual lights hovering around his head were turning red.
One by one, the human worlds fell dark before the Xeelee Scourge. At last, a million years after Poole’s time, the streams of refugees became visible in the skies of Earth itself.
Since the time of Michael Poole there had been immortals among the ranks of mankind. The descendants of Jasoft Parz were among them. They emerged, lived, and sometimes died through accident or malice, in their own slow generations, hidden within humanity. They had been called many names. ‘Ascendant’ was one of the more acceptable. Yet they endured.
The Ascendants had come to believe that as long as Earth survived, mankind would survive.
And so they took steps to make that happen.
Periandry’s Quest
AD c.3.8 Billion Years
The funerary procession drew up in the courtyard of the great House. Through a screen of bubbling clouds the blueshifted light of Old Earth’s sky washed coldly down over the shuffling people, and the stars spun through their crisp two-minute cycles.
Peri took his place at the side of his older brother MacoFeri. His mother CuluAndry, supported by her two daughters, stood behind him. ButaFeri’s hearse would be drawn by two tamed spindlings. Peri’s father had been a big man in every sense, a fleshy, loud, corpulent man, and now his coffin was a great box whose weight made the axles of his hearse creak.
Despite his bulk, or perhaps because of it, Buta had always been an efficient man, and he had trained his wife, sons and daughters in similar habits of mind. So it was that the family was ready at the head of the cortege long before the procession’s untidy body, assembled from other leading citizens of Foro, had gathered in place. Their coughs and grumbles in the chill semi-dark were a counterpoint to the steady wash of the river Foo, from which the town had taken its name, as it passed through its channelled banks across the Shelf.
‘It’s that buffoon of a mayor who’s holding everybody up,’ MacoFeri complained.
Culu’s face closed up in distress. BoFeri, Peri’s eldest sister, snapped, ‘Hold your tongue, Maco. It’s not the time.’
Maco snorted. ‘I have better things to do than stand around waiting for a fat oaf like that – even today.’ But he subsided.
As the family continued to wait in the cold, servants from the Attic moved silently among them, bearing trays of hot drinks and pastries. The servants were dressed in drab garments that seemed to blend into the muddy light, and they kept their faces averted; the servants tried to be invisible, as if their trays floated through the air by themselves.
The delay gave PeriAndry, seventeen years old, an unwelcome opportunity to sort through his confused emotions. This broad circular plaza was the courtyard of ButaFeri’s grand town House. The lesser lights of the town were scattered before the cliff face beneath which Foro nestled, dissipating in the enigmatic ruins at the town’s edge. In this setting the House glowed like a jewel – but ButaFeri had always counselled humility. Foro had been a much prouder place before the last Formidable Caress, he said. The ‘town’ as it was presently constituted seemed to have been carved out of the remains of a palace, a single mighty building within a greater city. And once, ButaFeri would say, even this wide courtyard had been enclosed by a vast, vanished dome, and over this ancient floor, now crossed by the hooves of spindlings, the richer citizens of a more fortunate time had strolled in heated comfort. Buta had been a wise man, but he had shared such perspectives all too infrequently with his younger son.
Just at that moment, as PeriAndry’s sense of loss was deepest, he first saw the girl.
Suddenly she was standing before him, offering him pastries baked in the shape of birds. This Attic girl was taller than most of her kind; that was the first thing that struck him. Though she wore as shapeless a garment as the others, where the cloth draped conveniently he made out the curve of her hips. She was slim; she must be no more than sixteen. Her face, turned respectfully away, was an oval, with prominent cheekbones under flawless skin. Her mouth was small, her lips full. Her colouring was dark, rather like his own family’s – but this was a girl from the Attic, a place where time ran rapidly, and he wondered if her heart beat faster than his.
As his inspection continued she looked up, uncertain. Her eyes were a complex grey-blue. When she met his gaze she seemed startled, and looked away quickly.
BoFeri, his elder sister, hissed at him, ‘Lethe, Peri, take a pastry or let her go. You’re making an exhibition of us all.’
He came back to himself. Bo was right, of course; a funeral was no place to be ogling serving girls. Clumsily he grabbed at a pastry. The girl, released, hurried away, back to the Elevator that would return her to her Attic above the House.
MacoFeri had seen all this, of course. Buta’s eldest son sneered, ‘You really are a spindling’s arse, Peri. She’s an Attic girl. She’ll burn out ten times as fast as you. She’ll be an old woman before you’ve started shaving . . .’
Maco’s taunting was particularly hard for Peri to take today. After the ceremony MacoFeri and BoFeri, as eldest son and daughter the co-heirs of ButaFeri’s estate and the only recipients of his lineage name, would sit down and work out the disposition of Buta’s wealth. While Bo had shown no great interest in this responsibility, Maco had made the most of his position. ‘You love to lord it over me, don’t you?’ Peri said bitterly. ‘Well, it won’t last for ever, Maco, and then we’ll see.’
Maco blew air through finely chiselled nostrils. ‘Your pastry’s going cold.’ He turned away.
Peri broke open the little confection. A living bird, encased in the pastry, was released. As it fluttered up into faster time the beating of its wings became a blur, and it shot out of sight. Peri tried to eat a little of the pastry, but he wasn’t hungry, and he was forced to cram the remnants of it into his pocket, to more glares from his siblings.
At last the cortege was ready. Even the Mayor of Foro, a wheezing man as large as ButaFeri, was in his place. Maco and Bo shouted out their father’s name and began to pace out of the courtyard. The procession followed in rough order. The spindlings, goaded by their drivers, dipped their long necks and submitted to the labour of hauling the hearse; each animal’s six iron-shod hooves clattered on the worn tiles.