Old Earth Stories Part 18

"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 antic.i.p.ation, 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 realized what Peri intended, they were startled and hostile. This dismayed Peri; though he had antic.i.p.ated resistance from his family, somehow he hadn't considered the reaction of the Attic folk, though he had heard that among them there was a taboo about folk from the House visiting their aerial village not that anybody had ever wanted to before.

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 pa.s.sage 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 climbed high above Foro. The little town, unfamiliar from this angle, was tinged by a pinkish reds.h.i.+ft 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 labor 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, miles wide, came and went. The light seemed to leap from one transient pool to another, so that cl.u.s.ters 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 a sequence of day and night, and even a kind of seasonality.

He continued his climb. "One hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two..."

He imagined what he would say to Lora. Gasping a little, he even rehea.r.s.ed little 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, aging so terribly fast, until after just a few years he could be sure she would be dead, and lost forever. "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 stars explode with every breath you take?" And so on.

At the Shelf's lip, where his father's pyre still smoldered, he saw the Foo waterfall tumble into s.p.a.ce, spreading into a crimson fan as it fell. Buta had once tried to explain to him why 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. 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 yards up from the Shelf. He straightened up and inspected his surroundings.

There was a kind of village here, a jumble of crude buildings of piled stone or wood. So narrow was the available strip of land that some of these dwellings or store-rooms or manufactories had been built in convenient crevices in the cliff itself, connected by ladders and short staircases. This was the Attic, then, the unregarded home and workplace of the generations of servants who served the House of Feri.

He walked along the Attic's single muddy street. It was a grim, silent place. There were a few people about some adults trudging wearily between the rough shanties, a couple of kids who watched him wide-eyed, fingers picking at noses or navels. Everybody else was at work, it seemed. If the children were at least curious, the adults were no friendlier than the Elevator workers. But there was something lacking in their stares, he thought: they were sullen rather than defiant. At the head of the Elevator the pale necks of tethered spindlings rose like flowers above weeds. They were here to turn the wheel that hauled the Elevator cage up and down. One weary animal eyed him; none of its time-enhanced smartness was any use to it here.

Near some of the huts, cooking smells a.s.sailed him. Though it was only morning yet, the servants must be working on courses for that evening's dinner. The hour that separated two courses on the ground corresponded to no less than ten hours here, time enough to produce dishes of almost magical perfection, regardless of the unpromising conditions of these kitchens.

A woman emerged from a doorway, wiping a cauldron with a filthy rag. She glared at Peri. She was short, squat, with arms and hands made powerful by a lifetime's labor, and her tunic was a colorless rag. He had no idea how old she was: at least fifty, judging from the leathery crumples of her face. But her eyes were a startling gray-blue startling for they were beautiful despite their setting, and startling for their familiarity.

He stood before her, hands open. He said, "Please "

"You don't belong in blues.h.i.+ft."

"I have to find somebody."

"Go back to the red, you fool."

"Lora," he said. He drew himself up and tried to inject some command into his voice. "A girl, about sixteen. Do you know her?" He fumbled in his pocket for money. "Look, I'll make it worth your while."

The woman considered his handful of coins. She pinched one nostril and blew a gout of snot into the mud at his feet. But, ignoring the coins, wiping her hands on her filthy smock, she turned and led him further into the little settlement.

They came to the doorway of one more unremarkable shack. He heard singing, a high, soft lilt. The song seemed familiar. His breath caught in his throat at its beauty, and, unbidden, fragments of his elaborate fantasy came back to him.

He stepped to the doorway and paused, letting his eyes adapt to the gloom. The hut's single room contained a couple of sleeping pallets, a hole in the ground for a privy, and a surface for preparing food. The place was hot; a fire burned in a stone-lined grate.

A woman stood in one shadowed corner. She was ironing a s.h.i.+rt, he saw, wrestling at tough creases with a flat-iron; more irons were suspended over the fire. The work was obviously hard, physical. The woman stopped singing when he came in, but she kept laboring at the iron. Her eyes, when they met his, were unmistakable, unforgettable: a subtle gray-blue.

For a moment, watching her, he couldn't speak, so complex and intense were his emotions.

That could be my s.h.i.+rt she's ironing: that was his first thought. All his life he had been used to having his soiled clothes taken and returned as soon as he wanted, washed and folded, ironed and scented. But here was the cost, he saw now, a woman laboring for ten hours for every hour lived out by the slow-moving aristocrats below, burning up her life for his comfort. And if he lived as long as his father, he might see out ten generations ten generations of such ephemeral servants before he died, he realized with a shock: perhaps even more, for he could not believe that people lived terribly long here. of such ephemeral servants before he died, he realized with a shock: perhaps even more, for he could not believe that people lived terribly long here.

But she was still beautiful, he saw with relief. A year had pa.s.sed for her in the month since he had seen her last, and that year showed in her; the clean profile of a woman was emerging from the softness of youth. But her face retained that quality of sculpted calm he had so prized on first glimpsing it. Now, though, there was none of the delicious startle he had seen when he had first caught her eye; in her expression he saw nothing but suspicion.

He stepped into the hut. "Lora I know your name, but you don't know mine ... Do you remember me? I saw you at my father's funeral you served me pastries I thought then, though we didn't speak, that something deeper than words pa.s.sed between us ... Ah, I babble." So he did, all his carefully prepared speeches having flown from his head. He stammered, "Please I've come to find you."

Something stirred on one of the beds: a rustling of blankets, a sleepy gurgle. It was a baby, he realized dimly, as if his brain was working at the sluggish pace of the ground. Lora carefully set down her iron, walked to the bed and picked up the child. No wonder her song had seemed familiar: it was a lullaby.

She had a baby. Already his dreams of her purity were shattered. The child was only a few months old. In the year of her life that he had already lost, she must have conceived, come to term, delivered her child. But the conception must have happened soon after the funeral...

Or at the funeral itself.

She held out the child to him. "Your brother's," she said. They were the first words she had spoken to him.

He recoiled. Without thinking about it, he stumbled out of the hut. For a moment he was disoriented, uncertain which way he had come. The dreadful facts slowly worked into his awareness. Maco Maco: had he really wanted her or had he taken her simply because he could, because he could steal her from his romantic fool of a younger brother?

The old woman was here, the woman with Lora's eyes her mother, he realized suddenly. "You mustn't be here," she growled. "You'll bring harm."

In his befuddled state, this was difficult to decode. "Look, I'm a human being as you are. You've no reason to be frightened of me ... This is just superst.i.tion." But perhaps that superst.i.tion was useful for the House folk to maintain, if it kept these laboring servants trapped in their Attic. And this mother's anger was surely motivated by more than a mere taboo. He didn't understand anything, he thought with dismay.

The woman grabbed his arm and began to drag him away. Still dazed, his emotions wracked, he allowed himself to be led through the mud. There seemed to be more people about now. They all glared at him. He had the odd idea that the only thing that kept them from harming him was that it hadn't occurred to them.

He reached the Elevator. The boxy cage was laden with cereals, fruit, platters of cold meat, pressed tablecloths. It was the stuff of a breakfast, he thought dully; no matter how much time had elapsed up here, on the ground the House had yet to wake up. He took his place in the cage and waited for the descent to begin, with as much dignity as he could muster.

"...And you can go too, you with your red-tinged b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

He turned. The scowling woman had dragged Lora out of her hut and had hauled her by main force to the Elevator. For a second Lora resisted; holding her child, she met Peri's eyes. Perhaps if he had acted then, perhaps if he had found the right words, he could have saved her from this dreadful rejection. But there was nothing inside him, nothing left of the foolish dream he had constructed around this stranger. Shamed, he looked away. With a final shove the hard-faced woman deposited Lora inside the cage.

As they waited for the captive spindlings to start marching in their pen, Peri and Lora avoided each other's gaze, as if the other didn't even exist.

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 s.h.i.+fted.

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 smoldering heap of the pyre. For all the time he had spent in the Attic, here on the Shelf it was still early morning.

The girl Lora was only a few yards 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. But 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 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.s 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 civilization 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 blues.h.i.+ft 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 coloring, 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 me."

For Peri the world seemed to swivel about her suddenly familiar face. "You're Maco's daughter? You're my niece 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 l.u.s.ts..."

Lora clutched her baby. "You think we are too stupid to hate. But we do. 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.

The same circ.u.mstances can produce overwhelming problems and exhilarating opportunities in bizarrely entangled combinations.

"Everything about our world is made 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 Vala to the lecture that night because he had heard rumors that the Philosopher was going to cut up a body. A human human body, sliced apart in Foro's own town hall! It was a sight no self-respecting sixteen-year-old could miss. 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 arms 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?"

"Vala. 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 blues.h.i.+fted sky, the faster time pa.s.sed. 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 Vala, 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."

So off he had set, at a run, to Vala's house.

And as it happened he did learn something that night: something about the world he lived in, and about himself.

HuroEldon, Natural Philosopher, stalked back and forth over the stage in his richly woven robe, casting flickering shadows by the light of the torches on the walls.

The setting was magnificent. The town hall was a domed chamber, big enough to hold all Foro's adult citizens. It was actually a wing of a palace, ruined in the Formidable Caress. Now it had been rebuilt, and not as the home of a ruler, but as a meeting place for all Forons, rich and poor.

But even here HuroEldon's voice resounded like Lowland thunder, Celi thought, a voice too large to be contained by mere stone. The Philosopher had about him a rich whiff of antiquity: it was a strange thought that though Huro looked no older than fifty, he might have been born centuries ago.

And as he made his prefatory remarks, on the stage beside Huro were two bodies, corpses strapped to tables, covered by dust sheets and attended by a.s.sistants. Celi felt deeply queasy.

"The world is a made thing," Huro said again. "An extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence and I have it!" With a showman's flourish he drew a long knife from his sleeve, and his a.s.sistants pulled the cover sheets from the tables.

The audience gasped. One revealed corpse was of a young spindling, its six legs splayed, its long neck limp as string. And the other corpse was of a little girl.