The young hunters didn’t care about evolutionary strategies. The aged adults made easy meat, and the captured youngsters could be broken and tamed. The hunters closed in, stabbing spears and ropes at the ready. Already they sang of the feast they would enjoy tonight.
But PeriAndry did not sing. He had made up his mind. Before the night came he would leave the party. Perhaps this desolate stretch of remote scrubland was his destiny, but he was determined to explore his dreams first – and to achieve that he had to return home.
It took Peri just ten days to ride back to Foro. Each day he drove on as long as he could, until exhaustion overtook him or his mounts.
When he got home he spoke to his mother briefly, only to reassure her of the safety of the rest of the hunting party, then retired to his room for the night.
His sister BoFeri insisted on seeing him, though, and she briskly extracted the truth of what he intended.
‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘We’re different stock, we folk of the Shelf, from the brutes of the Attic, and similar lofty slums. Time moves at a stately pace here – and that means it has had less opportunity to work on us.’ She prodded his chest. ‘We are the ones who are truest to our past – we are the closest to the original stock of Old Earth. The Attic folk have been warped, mutated by too much time. Think about it – those rattling hearts, the flickering of their purposeless generations! The Attic folk aren’t human as we are. Not even the pretty ones like Lora. Good for tupping, yes, but nothing more . . .’
‘I don’t care what you say, Bo, or Maco.’
Her face was a mixture of his mother’s kindness and Maco’s hard mockery. ‘It is adolescent to have crushes on Attic serving girls. You are evading your responsibilities, Peri; you are escaping into fantasy. You are so immature!’
‘Then let me grow up in my own way.’
‘You don’t know what you will find up there,’ she said, more enigmatically. ‘I’m afraid you will be hurt.’
But he turned away, and would not respond further.
He longed to sleep, but could not. He didn’t know what the next day would bring. None of his family, to his knowledge, had ever climbed the cliff before, but that was what he must do. He spent the night in a fever of anticipation, clutching at shards of the elaborate fantasy he had inflated, which Maco had so easily seen and punctured.
In the morning, with the first light, he set out in search of Lora – if not yet his lover, then the recipient of his dreams.
There were two ways up the cliff: the Elevator, and the carved stairways. The Elevator was a wooden box suspended from a mighty arrangement of ropes and pulleys, hauled up a near-vertical groove in the cliff face by a wheel system at the top. This mechanism was used to bring down the servants and the food, clean clothes and everything else the Attic folk prepared for the people of the House; and it carried up the dole of bread and meat that kept the Attic folk alive.
The servants who handled the Elevator were stocky, powerful men, their faces greasy with the animal fat they applied to their wooden pulleys and their rope. When they realised what Peri intended they were startled and hostile. This dismayed Peri; he had anticipated resistance from his family, but somehow he hadn’t considered the reaction of the Attic dwellers, though he had heard that among them there was a taboo about folk from the House visiting their aerial village – not that anybody had wanted to for a long time, it seemed.
But anyhow, he had already decided to take the stairs. He imagined the simple exertion would calm him. Ignoring the handlers, without hesitation he placed his foot on the first step and began to climb, counting as he went. ‘One, two, three . . .’
These linked staircases, zigzagging off into the blue-tinged mist over his head, had been carved out of the face of the cliff itself; they were themselves a monumental piece of stonework. But the steps were very ancient and worn hollow by the passage of countless feet. The first change of direction came at fifty steps, as the staircase ducked beneath a protruding granite bluff. ‘Fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six . . .’
The staircase was not excessively steep, but each step was tall. By the time he had reached a hundred and fifty steps he was out of breath, and he paused. He had already climbed above Foro. The little town, unfamiliar from this angle, was tinged by a pinkish redshift mist. He could see people coming and going, a team of spindlings hauling a cart across the courtyard before his House. He imagined he could already see the world below moving subtly slower, as if people and animals swam through some heavy, gelatinous fluid. Perhaps it wasn’t the simple physical effort of these steps that tired him out, he mused, but the labour of hauling himself from slow time to fast, up into a new realm where his heart clattered like a bird’s.
But he could see much more than the town. The Shelf on which he had spent his whole life seemed thin and shallow, a mere ledge on a greater terraced wall that stretched up from the Lowland to far above his head. And on the Lowland plain those pools of daylight, kilometres wide, came and went. The light seemed to leap from one transient pool to another, so that clusters and strings of them would flare and glow together. It was like watching lightning spark between storm clouds. There were rhythms to the sparkings, though they were unfathomable to Peri’s casual glance, compound waves of bright and dark that chased like dreams across the cortex of a planetary mind. These waves gave Old Earth not just its sequence of day and night, but even a kind of seasonality.
He continued his climb. ‘One hundred and seventy-one, one hundred and seventy-two . . .’
He imagined what he would say to Lora. Gasping a little, he even rehearsed small snippets of speech. ‘Once – or so it is said – all of Old Earth enjoyed the same flow of time, no matter how high you climbed. Some disaster has disordered things. Or perhaps our stratified time was given to us long ago for a purpose. What do you think?’ Of course his quest was foolish. He didn’t even know this girl. Even if he found her, could he really love her? And would his family ever allow him to attain even a fragment of his dreams? But if he didn’t try he could only imagine her, up here in the Attic, ageing so terribly fast, until after just a few years he could be sure she would be dead, and lost for ever. ‘Ah, but the origin of things hardly matters. Isn’t it wonderful to know that the slow rivers of the Lowlands will still flow sluggishly long after we are dead, and that in the wheeling sky above worlds shiver and die with every breath you take?’ And so on.
At the Shelf’s lip, where his father’s pyre still smouldered, he saw the Foo waterfall tumble into space, spreading into a crimson fan as it fell. Buta had once tried to explain to him why the water should spread out instead of simply falling straight down. The water, trying to force its way into the plain’s glutinous deep time, was pushed out of the way by the continual tumble from behind, and so the fan formed. It was the way of things, Buta had said. The stratification of time was the key to everything on Old Earth, from the simple fall of water to the breaking of human hearts.
At last the staircase gave onto a rocky ledge. He rested, bent forward, hands on his knees, panting hard. He had counted nine hundred steps; he had surely climbed more than two hundred metres up from the Shelf. He straightened up and inspected his surroundings.