Across the Spectrum (37 page)

So he’d gone on, from that world to another, and another;
and like most of the Upshot, he’d got the taste first and then the habit of it.
And after a while, of course, he began to understand its deeper
meanings—functional immortality, to be brief, in a life constantly refreshed by
new horizons, new opportunities, new flesh—and he had yet to meet anyone with a
good reason to offer, why they should turn away from that.

Here, now, he’d met her, who was the opposite of that.

∞

The suit she flew in stretched into webbing between arms
and legs when she spread-eagled, which gave her not quite enough lift to glide
in this thin air; even the teasing tug of gravity here would be enough to haul
her down to ruin from a height. Extra lift came from the impellers at wrist and
ankle. Eventually, with practice, she’d get fine control the same way.

Eventually; not yet. That day she came down fast and
awkward, even when she wasn’t trying to scare him into a cardiac arrest. Diving
she was good at, that sudden plummet where her body was cooperative with all
the other forces acting upon it; she was made to fall, as they all were. A
steady descent was something else, unfamiliar, unnatural. Unappealing, perhaps.

He watched her come down, said,

“I don’t suppose even
you can miss the planet, but you’re sure as hell going to miss me. You’ll miss
the whole tower, if I don’t jump to catch you.”

“So jump,” she said.
“Take a chance.”

She swooped in, tumbling as she tried to brake and stall and
so drop neatly to his side, to prove him wrong. Tried and failed, tumbled
catastrophically and would have overshot and fallen thirty metres to the
ground, out of any hope of control or recovery. It wouldn’t have killed
her—probably—and the Upshot always have the option to move on from a broken
body
in extremis
, though the move might be unwelcome at the time. Still,
he leapt—too high for his own comfort—to catch her ankle, and his weight was
enough to pull her down, while her momentum rolled them over and over on that broad
platform and they had cause again to be grateful how many of their kind had
been this way before them.

When they stopped, where they stopped, she pulled her helmet
off and shook her hair loose and grinned at him, sweating and exhilarated. He
could only hold to the lean solidity of her and marvel at his privilege, at her
trust, at how close they were to the edge.

“You see?” she said. “My chevalier. Always ready to catch
me, should I fall.”

“Always bruised,” he said, “from needing to.”

“Yes. Ouchie. Worth it, though. Worth every bruise and every
bleeding scrape.”

And she was, of course, worth all of that and more. Much
more. The Upshot could be as heedless with their hearts as with their bones and
bodies, in a life where staying put was stagnation, another life entirely;
where moving on—even if they moved together—still meant other bodies on other
worlds. It was hard to commit to someone who might be another gender next time
round, was sure to be another type and so would you be too. Physical attraction
faltered in those shifts, and they were too abrupt to mend in other ways.

He’d never learned to be so casual in possession, of himself
or of his lovers. They had been few, then, necessarily; there had been more
pain than plenty. Upshot or downside, people mishandled his heart as they did
him, mistaking his intensity for passion, his failures for greed. He hurt, and
moved on, and took his hurting with him.

It had been a burden, but she freed him. Not of his nature,
none the less she delighted in it; and yes, she would come on with him, the two
of them together and let the ’Chute fling them where it would, into anything,
they could survive it. If she fell, he would be there to catch her; when she
flew, he would be there to watch her. One day, perhaps, he could learn to fly
himself . . .

∞

They lay sprawled and sore together on the Tower of Souls,
and here came a dirigible, flying above them. Or floating, perhaps, if one
could float with purpose. At least some of the time they did that, they had
purpose. They couldn’t have built this tower else, nor their own.

They built nothing else, that he knew about. Until the first
tower was discovered, people thought they only drifted on the wind. Some
refused to call them sentient, arguing that they had no more need of intelligence
than they did of buildings, engines, any product of mind and work together.
Great bags of gas, feeding from the medium they floated in: why would evolution
burden them with brains or self-awareness?

Then someone spotted the first of the towers—its shadow,
rather, seen from orbit like a needle laid dark and unnatural across the
land—and that wasn’t a question any longer.

That they had language took longer to discover, and still
needed machinery to decode it. They spoke metabolically, drifts of shadow and
substance beneath a semi-translucent skin; they needed a day to share a
greeting, a month to have a proper conversation. They’d intertwine dangling
filaments to stay together, to keep a stray gust from interrupting. Not often,
though. He supposed, if you had to reorder your digestion—the closest way he
could imagine it—to communicate by gastric rumbles, nothing so simple and
convenient as farting, you’d be frugal. You’d save it up. And want to be damn
sure the other party was paying attention; repeating yourself would mean going
back to the beginning, filling your stomach, starting the whole process again.

So no, this dirigible wasn’t going to talk to them, nor they
to it. By chance or by intent—he couldn’t guess which—it was going to pass
directly overhead, and all he could do was watch. Observation of course was
interaction, but it did feel a little one-sided. He had no idea whether the
dirigible reciprocated, whether it saw him too, how else it might be sensing
where he was, what he was, what he did. Somehow, surely; but it had no
discoverable eyes, nor any other organ that the xenobiologists could identify
as sensory. Precious few organs of any kind, the way he’d heard it. Dirigibles
were seemingly careless of the bodies of their dead; after the first few
curious post mortems, so were the scientists who studied them. Inside the
collapse of the ripped glassine tegument, they could trace a few membranes and
a primitive digestion, some hint of a nervous system trailing through the
fronds, tendrils, call them what you would that hung below. That was all. What
fluids, what gases, what more solid masses might hold the mind of a dirigible
could still be only guessed at.

A century of study? What was that? It had taken long enough
to understand how much the piercing mattered, that they never found a body not
torn open.

∞

This one—and if he’d seen it before, he couldn’t tell;
they really did look all the same to him—seemed to hover a while above them
where they lay, though the things moved so damn slowly it was hard to be sure.
Maybe it was only caught in an eddy of air, some freak of turbulence caused by
the tower or the great spike of the ’Chute behind it. At any rate, he had
plenty of time to gaze up at it. The sun on its flank drove light and colour
through its skin and deep into the gaseous swirls within, he’d seldom seen so
much of mystery; and there was the great dark shadow of a soulstone in its
belly, unmissable, enough to make anyone wonder how for so long they had not
been missed from the corpses.

On earth, some birds swallowed gravel and stored it in their
gizzards to substitute for teeth. On this world, a mature dirigible untethered
from its parent needed some substitute for absent mass, something to keep it
upright and manoeuvrable against the wind; and so it would ingest what the
first people here had termed keelstones, or simply ballast.

It had needed time, linguists, computers to come close to
understanding what the dirigibles called them, which was—or might
be—soulstones.

∞

She was quicker to recover from her plummet, his grab,
their mutual tumble. Also, she was possibly—no, certainly—less curious about
the alien that hung over them, its wafting filaments not so far at all above
his face. He had jumped for her; he could jump for this too. He wasn’t going to
say so, for fear she might try it. She wouldn’t think of it on her own account;
her attention was otherwise, on him. Her hand was on his clothes, in his
clothes, unzipping as it went.

He said, “Don’t, not here . . . !”

“Exactly here,” she giggled, “and—oh, here, too. Why not
here?”

“Look up.”

“I’ve seen. So what? If it’s watching, who cares? Who
knows
?
It can’t tell anyone; what would it say? Take half a year, just to
misunderstand us. . . “

That might be true. Perhaps thought was as slow as
conversation, where it depended on the leak of gases through semi-permeable
membranes. Or whatever they did, however they did it. It didn’t matter. He felt
observed, considered, weighed in judgement; never mind that he couldn’t understand
the judgement, there were other things he equally couldn’t do under others’
eyes. Tendrils. Scrutiny.

He pulled away from her questing fingers, hasty to fasten
his clothes again. She pulled faces at his back; he knew it, he could feel
them. Sometimes he couldn’t believe how young she acted. She might still have
been in her earliest sequence of discards, barely left home, despite what the
record said. It was rare to have come so far and give no signs of being older
than your body, not to have picked up even a cynical veneer; he joyed in her
enthusiasm, and mocked it, and felt as baffled by her as a dirigible must be.

∞

The way down the tower was a perfect spiral ramp, built
into the solid structure as soon as the dirigibles understood that if they
raised this thing, people would insist on climbing it. It had taken them a
while, three metres or so of accumulated height, to come to that understanding,
so the ramp only started that distance above the ground; below was smooth solid
wall of stacked discards. In this gravity, three metres could be jumped either
way, up or down, but the need to do it amused him every time.

Just as well, when little else in the climb or at the top
amused him. She delighted him constantly and disturbed him constantly, kept him
on the razor edge of anxiety; sometimes he felt like a parent, having to watch
his child fly. Which was absurd, she was older than he was, with a trail of
discards twice the length. She didn’t like to talk about the past, though, so
he never pressed her to it; which made it hard to remember that distance
travelled, when all he saw was the bright youth of her body and all he heard
was the dizzy enchantment of her voice.

Today he heard that voice laughing back at him, he saw that
body a turn below, disappearing a turn and a half ahead; she took the steep
smooth ramp at a bounding run, while he walked it like a model of good sense
and cursed her in a steady monotone. Even now she couldn’t let him be easy, no,
never that. . .

At the foot of the ramp, the flat platform; the jump. And
her waiting below, making as though to catch him; and tangling her arms around
him, stretching for a kiss and getting it here in the tower’s shadow,
regardless of whether the dirigible still hung overhead; and walking that long
shadow as though it really were a road, for that way lay home, more or less;
and walking it hand in hand then arm in arm then closer yet, her arm around his
waist and his slung over her shoulders as she tucked herself beneath it: she as
shifting, as restless, as physically demanding as he was patient and willing to
take whatever came. Willing and wondering and never demanding anything, for
fear of losing whatever it was that he had already, her whimsical devotion or
her trust.

Home for now, for here was a canister habitat, dropped in
from orbit to accommodate the first arrivals, those who built the terminal long
ago. It had been his, till she arrived; now they shared it. There was more
comfort in the newer dormitories, but he’d preferred the option of sleeping
single, a cabin to himself and nearest neighbours a walk away. Now he had her,
constantly in his sight, and isolation was another kind of blessing. The Upshot
were not body-shy, they couldn’t be; when every relocation meant another body
and the old one left empty for disposal, shed like a dead skin, what was there
to protect? And yet, he wanted privacy from his own kind as much as he did from
alien observers; he could never be comfortable sharing a bed in a shared room,
in earshot of others.

It was also true that he could never be comfortable with
her, in company or alone, but that was another matter. Nothing that she said or
did worked to his comfort or content. She kept him nervous, alert, constantly
watchful; other people had to tell him he was happy.

She said, “How will we choose, where to go next? When we
move on?”

He never had chosen, not like that. He stayed where he was until
the work was done that he’d signed up for, or until he’d done something so
stupid or so graceless that staying no longer seemed to be an option.
Repercussions made an effective motive force. Then he’d contact the Bureau and
ask about jobs elsewhere, take the first that came available, take the fling.

Now, with two of them, he supposed it would be different. He
couldn’t even imagine now, what it would be that would make them move. Both at
once and both together—how could that work?

He said, “You choose. I’ll follow you.” There was always
work for a roustabout, out on the edge; empires overreach themselves, always,
and their peoples scrabble to keep up. But—it struck him, suddenly—what if she
chose to go inwards, towards the centre of things, the ancient settled heart
worlds?

She was here, though, now, not doing that; her record showed
a face turned always to the ever-expanding frontier, as his own did.