The Elevator descended. Peri imagined slow time flowing through him once more, dulling his wits. His mood became sour, claustrophobic, resentful. But even as he cowered within himself, he reflected how wrong BoFeri had been. These Attic folk couldn’t be so different from the people of the Shelf after all, not if a son of the House could sire a baby by an Attic woman.
At last the Elevator cage thumped hard against the ground. The heaps of cold meat and tablecloths slumped and shifted.
Peri threw open the gate, but it was Lora who pushed out of the cage first. She ran from the Elevator, away from the House, and made for the cobbled road that led to Buta’s pyre by the edge of the Shelf. Peri, moved by shame, wanted nothing more to do with her. But he followed.
At the edge of the Shelf he came on his eldest sister BoFeri. She was feeding more papers into the pyre, kept smouldering a month after the funeral. This was a morning job; again he was reminded that for all the time he had spent in the Attic, here on the Shelf it was still early in the day.
The girl Lora was only a few metres away. Clutching her baby, she stood right on the edge of the Shelf and peered down at the waterfall as it poured into the red mist below. The wind pushed back her hair, and her beautiful face glistened with spray.
Bo eyed Peri. ‘So you went up into the Attic.’ She had to shout over the roar of the Foo. ‘And I suppose that’s the girl Maco tupped so brazenly at Buta’s funeral.’
Peri felt as if his world was spinning off its axis. ‘You knew about that? Was I the only one who didn’t see?’
Bo laughed, not unkindly. ‘Perhaps you were the one who least wanted to see. I said you would be hurt if you went up there.’
‘Do you think she’s going to jump?’
‘Of course.’ Bo seemed quite unconcerned.
‘It’s my fault she’s standing there. If I hadn’t gone up, they might have let her be. I have to stop her.’
‘No.’ Bo held his arm. ‘She has no place in the Attic now. And what will she do here, with her half-breed runt? No, it’s best for all of us that it ends here. And besides, she believes she has hope.’
It was a lot to take in. ‘Best for all of us? How? And hope? Hope of what?’
‘Look down, Peri. The Lowland is deep beneath us here, for the waterfall has worn a great pit. Lora believes that if she hurls herself down, she and her baby will sink deeper and deeper into slow time. She won’t even reach the bottom of the pit. Her heart will stop beating, and she and her baby will be preserved for ever, like flies in amber. There have been jumpers before, you know. No doubt they are there still, arms flung out, their last despairing thoughts frozen into their brains, trapped in space and time – as dead as if they had slit their throats. Let her join that absurd flock.’
Lora still hesitated at the edge, and Peri wondered if she was listening to this conversation. ‘And how is her death supposed to benefit us?’
BoFeri sighed. ‘You have to think in the long term, Peri. Maco and I enjoyed long conversations with Buta; our father was a deep thinker, you know . . . Have you never thought how vulnerable we are? The Attic folk live ten times as fast as we do. If they got it into their heads to defy us, they could surround us, manufacture weapons, bombard us with rocks – destroy us before we even knew what was happening. And yet that obvious revolution fails to occur. Why? Because, generation by generation, we siphon off the rebels: the defiant ones, the leaders. We allow them to destroy themselves on the points of our swords, on our guillotines or scaffolds – or simply by hurling themselves into oblivion.’
Again Peri had the sense that Lora was listening to all this. ‘So each generation we cull the smart ones. We are selectively breeding our servants.’
‘It’s simple husbandry,’ Bo said. ‘Remember, ten of their generations pass for each one of ours . . .’ She studied him, her face, a broader feminine version of his own, filled with an exasperated kindness. ‘You’re thinking this is inhuman. But it isn’t – not if you look at it from the correct point of view. While the Attic folk waste their fluttering lives above, they buy us the leisure we need to think, to develop, to invent – and to make the world a better place for those who will follow us, who will build a greater civilisation than we can imagine, before the next Caress comes to erase it all again.
‘My poor baby brother, you have too much romance in your soul for this world! You’ll learn, as I’ve had to. One day things will change for the better. But not yet, not yet.’
Lora was watching the two of them. Deliberately she stepped back from the edge of the Shelf and approached them. ‘You think blueshift folk are fools.’
Bo seemed shocked to silence by Lora’s boldness. Even now, Peri was entranced by the blaze of light in the girl’s face, the liquid quality of her voice.
‘Addled by taboo, that’s what you think. But you can’t see what’s in front of your nose. Look at me. Look at my colouring, my hair, my height.’ Her pale eyes blazed. ‘Three of your seasons ago my mother was as I am now. MacoFeri took what he wanted from her. He left her to grow old, while he stayed young – but he left her me.’
For Peri the world seemed to swivel about her suddenly familiar face. ‘You’re Maco’s daughter? You’re my niece?’
‘And,’ she went on doggedly, ‘despite our shared blood, now MacoFeri has taken what he wanted of me in turn.’
Peri clenched his fists. ‘His own daughter – I will kill him.’
Bo murmured, ‘It’s only the Attic. It doesn’t matter what we do up there. Perhaps it’s better Maco has such an outlet for his strange lusts . . .’
Lora clutched her baby. ‘You think we are too stupid to hate. But we do. We hate. Perhaps things will change sooner than you think.’ She wiped the mist from her baby’s face, and walked away from the cliff.
Around her, the flickering light of day strengthened.
Climbing The Blue
AD c.4 Billion Years
‘Everything about our world is made,’ said the Natural Philosopher. ‘Made by intelligence, perhaps even built by human hands! Tonight I will prove it to you – prove it, at least, to those with minds flexible enough to understand . . .’
To Celi, to any Foron, such thoughts were radical, shocking. But Celi was electrified.
Celi had only taken Qaia to the lecture that night because he had heard rumours that the Philosopher was going to cut up a body. A human body, sliced apart in Foro’s own town hall! It was a sight no self-respecting sixteen-year-old could miss.
Celi’s father, Sool, had given his permission in his usual absent way. After all, he was going too. But his mother had seen right through him, as always. Pili was kneading bread, her powerful forearms coated in flour. ‘You’re going because you think it will be some kind of circus. Blood and bone and guts.’
Immersed in rich kitchen smells, Celi squirmed, ashamed. ‘Mother, it’s not like that—’
‘She’s a bad influence, you know.’
‘Who?’
‘Qaia. Her Effigy has yours by the throat, doesn’t it? And she has you climbing the blue at a snap of her fingers.’
Climbing the blue. On Old Earth, time was layered: the higher you climbed, up towards the blueshifted sky, the faster time passed. So, said the more serious citizens of Foro, if you burned up your life on nonsense, you were climbing the blue.
Celi didn’t know what to say.
Pili sighed, and cuffed his head gently. ‘Go, go. But if you only have eyes for Qaia, at least keep your ears open. You might learn something, and then the evening won’t be a total waste. But get the flour out of your hair first.’