Celi walked to the window and peered up at the sky. The light of Old Earth came from the shifting glow of the Lowland, reflected from the clouds. ‘Why would anybody make all this?’
‘Think it through,’ Huro said. ‘If you could climb down from the sky, down into this redshifted pit we call our world, you would be preserved, locked in time.’
‘Preserved?’
‘We believe that once Old Earth was a world without this layering of time, a world like many others, perhaps, hanging in the sky. And its people were more or less like us. But Old Earth came under some kind of threat. And so, to protect their children, the elders of Old Earth pulled a blanket of time over their world and packed it off to the future. You must understand this is a rather flimsy hypothesis, and as I always say myself, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and we don’t have it yet! But it’s the best justification we’ve come up with so far: Old Earth is a jar of time, stopped up to preserve its children.’
Celi frowned. ‘But then, what about the Effigies?’ The ghostly forms released by the dying represented the biggest single mystery he had encountered as a doctor. ‘Are they us – are they human souls, leaving a dying body? And if so, why do so few of us release them on death? And why should the world periodically shake itself to pieces in the Formidable Caresses?’
‘Good questions. I wish I had good answers! Perhaps you will find out for yourself – when you come down into the red and join us.’
So here was the invitation, bluntly stated. Celi said, ‘I am a doctor. I have patients here in Foro.’
‘They will die in the end, whatever you do. While you could live on.’
‘I have a wife. Qaia. She is carrying our first child—’
‘The blue-eyes who was with you the night of the lecture? How cute. Bring her with you. Or, better still, leave her behind.’ He leaned closer, and Celi smelled gin on his breath. ‘Stride into the future with me, five years, ten, twenty. There will always be more girls, not even conceived yet, fresh fruit waiting to be plucked. How do you think I keep myself entertained during these visits to your dismal little town? It isn’t all sewage systems and creationism, you know.’
The curiosity Huro had woken in Celi that night five years ago would never leave him. But everything else about Huro and his proposal repelled Celi, everything but the allure of knowledge. It was easy for him to turn down Huro’s invitation.
As it turned out, however, Celi’s future was after all decided that day. When he returned home, he found Qaia sitting alone, stroking her belly, her face streaked by desolate tears. A pale-pink stain, like a burn, was spreading across her neck: it was the Blight.
Her life and his had been destroyed, he thought, by a vector of infection he couldn’t even see, and which he would never have the time to defeat. He couldn’t bear it.
It took a sleepless night of calculation for Celi to decide what he must do. He would not follow HuroEldon, down into the red. He must climb up into the blue, alone.
In the morning he packed quickly: a few clothes, some dried food, bags of seeds and roots, a set of his medicinal samples. Then, with his pack on his back and a cage of mice dangling awkwardly from his belt, Celi walked out of Foro.
He made for the cliff face, and began to climb. Once there had been an elevator system here, worked by tethered spindlings. Now you had to walk. But a whole series of staircases had long ago been cut into the face of the rock, heavily eroded by usage and weathering, but still usable.
He was winded by the time he had climbed the nine hundred steps to what remained of the Attic, where once his ancestors had toiled.
He walked around curiously; he had never been up here before. There was nothing left of his people’s village but post-holes in the ground, the scorch-marks of abandoned hearths, and gaunt caves in the cliff walls that had once been used as kitchens and dormitories. It all looked much older than the two or three generations since its abandonment, but that was in Foro time; up here in the blue this place had grown much older than the Forons’ memories of it.
He dangled his legs over the edge of the cliff, sipped water from a spring, and looked down into the depths of the Lowland, an ocean of misty redshift. From here, Foro too was bathed in a crimson glow; he could see the people and their spindling-drawn vehicles crawling as if through syrup. Already he was cut off from his family, from his patients, from Qaia, by the streaming of time. He wondered how many of them he would see again.
Once he had made his decision to leave he had been determined to keep his plan secret from everybody – even from Qaia. Perhaps it had been the kindest thing to do; or perhaps he had feared his own determination might waver if he hesitated.
But Dela, the doctor who had tutored him, had seemed to have an idea what he was up to. ‘It’s the white mice,’ she told him. ‘You’re taking white mice.’
‘What about them?’
‘Mice can catch the Blight, like humans. Spindlings, for instance, can’t. And that’s important to you, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Unexpectedly she hugged him. Old enough to be his mother, she was a nurturing doctor, but not given to physical displays of affection. ‘I will miss you. You’re a good colleague.’
‘I’ll be back in a few days.’
‘Of course you will.’
His father had accepted his bland assurances that he would return. He had a more strained encounter with his mother, who, with her usual acuity, guessed he was up to something. ‘I always did say that girl would have you climbing the blue.’
‘Look after her, mother.’
‘I will.’ He embraced her; she smelled of warm bread.
And then had come his parting from Qaia. He had left her, and his unborn child, with lies. Now, as he looked down into the layers of time that trapped her, he couldn’t bear even to think about it. Wearily he collected his kit and continued the climb.
Above the Attic he plodded steadily along the trails of migrant animals, and when the trails petered out, scrambled over rocks. There were no more people or animals now, but he saw the flash of wings, and occasionally heard an echoing caw. He was not alone, not while the birds flew with him.
After a time he noticed a change in the rock. Shattered by frost or heat, its surfaces scarred by lichen, it seemed much more sharply eroded than the cliff faces down by Foro. The stratification of time must be having a profound effect on the very fabric of the world, with higher rock sections eroding away much more rapidly than lower. When he paused to sleep, wrapped in a skin blanket on a narrow ledge, he scratched a note about this in his spindling-skin journal, the first note he had made there.
On the third day he climbed a narrow pinnacle, heading up to a summit. By now it seemed that only he existed in a normal stream of time; he was alone in the clean, thin air, sandwiched between the stars over his head and the crimson glow beneath.
The slope levelled out, and he stood on a smooth, worn plateau. There was life here: tufts of grass, low trees that clung to the rock face, even a couple of abandoned birds’ nests. Food and water: he could live here, then. But Foro and the Shelf, far beneath him, were lost with the Lowland in a dank sea of redshift. Perhaps there were higher mountains to climb. But surely he had come high enough to achieve the temporal advantage he sought, high enough to defeat the evolutionary enthusiasm of the Blight vectors – high enough to give him the time he needed to save Qaia. This would do.
But now that he had stopped moving, doubt plagued him. Could he really bear to lose himself in time like this?
Better not to think about it. Better to begin work; once his patient methodology gathered momentum, his soul would be filled with the work and his purpose. Grimly he began to unload his kit.