Aestival Tide (47 page)

It must have been several hours since they first peered Outside. The tor that was their destination no longer seemed so far away. Overhead the gulls had grown all but silent, wheeling fretfully and occasionally diving into the waves. From the trees came a constant rush of wings. He looked up to see dark shapes arrowing against the sky, heading inland. Once or twice he halted and tried to make out some sound from the direction of Araboth, but there was nothing, only the pounding waves, and the wind stinging his ears.

When he looked up he saw that Nefertity had stopped to wait for him. The ground at her feet was brighter than it was elsewhere. As he approached he saw that water poured in a narrow stream from the woods down to the sea. He ran the last few yards, stumbling to his knees in the shallow water and drinking greedily. Then he lay on his back, letting the stream pour over him until his clothes were soaked and his sunburned face soothed. He stood, flinging back his long hair so that it hung heavy and wet on his neck.

“We can follow this,” Nefertity said. She pointed to where the woods opened up on either side of the stream, vine-hung trees and rosebushes giving way to cactus and small gnarled trees covered with papery, dull-orange flowers. “It might lead us up to that hill. At least we will be inland when the storm hits. If we hurry.”

He glanced back at the domes of Araboth. They reflected the darkening sky, the sun a white blister on the curved surface. He knew now that he would never go back. Something inside of him had broken, a connection that had once tethered him to his parents, his dead mother and mad father, but now was gone. He felt fairly certain that he would die out here, and sooner rather than later; but if what the nemosyne said was true, if the city really was crumbling, then he would have died anyway. At least now he had seen the city from Outside, a sight only the Aviators had ever glimpsed from their Gryphons; and he had walked with a nemosyne, a creation from the First Days, and heard her speak with the voice of a woman centuries dead. Not even Shiyung Orsina had ever done all these things; not even Nasrani. His exhaustion eased somewhat at the thought. He started walking up the middle of the streambed, the wind sending his damp clothes flapping against his feverish body.

The stream coursed through a ravine that grew deeper and narrower the farther up they climbed. Nefertity walked alongside it, picking her way faultlessly among rocks and shattered blocks of limestone that seemed to be the remains of some huge building. Eventually Hobi had to clamber from the stream and join her. While shallow, the water flowed faster here, and it grew more difficult to keep his footing on the moss-covered stones. The sun passed fitfully in and out of the clouds, clouds so dark that the light seemed more like that inside the domes. The spindly trees cast shadows of an inky blackness against the green sky. As he stumbled through prickly pear and thorny underbrush birds flew up in a flurry of squeaks and trills, and once he nearly stepped on a fistful of yellow bees clustered on a rotting log, too lethargic to fly or sting him.

Nefertity cautioned him against speaking—“You will grow too tired, we
must
reach higher ground before the winds strike.” His head and body had resolved into one great pulsing ache. Several times he paused to lean over the ravine and drink, and pull bright red fruit from the prickly pears—not as sweet as those grown inside the vivariums, but something at least to fill his stomach.

“Hobi—look—”

He turned from where he crouched beside a cactus knobbed with fruit. Nefertity had disappeared. The monotonous vista of twisted greenery and dun-colored thornbushes stopped abruptly a few hundred feet in front of him. He stood, catching his trousers on a cactus spike, and pulled away heedless of the tear on one leg. His ears hurt from the wind battering at them. When he looked behind him he could see nothing but a dense web of green and brown. Ahead of him the trees fell back, so that it was mostly cactus and spare brush that had been tortured into anguished shapes by the relentless wind.

“Hobi, here—it's the top of a hill, there's something here—”

He hurried after her, sliding through a loose scree of pale limestone. He fell once, cutting his hand on something. When he drew his bloody fingers back he found a wedge of metal buried in the dry soil, bright blue and yellow, with teeth painted on it. It glowed eerily in the aqueous light, and Hobi shivered as he tossed it away.

In a few minutes he reached the top of the promontory. The wind was so loud that he covered his ears. When he tried to stand he nearly fell over, buffeted by air blasting warm and strong as from a huge oven.

Nothing grew here. He stood at the edge of a flat plateau that stretched perhaps a mile across, rimmed with stunted cactus and a few sturdy mesquite. Odd shapes littered the barren landscape, some of them big as houses, others smaller, like toppled statuary. Through it all the stream ran, a dull thread nearly invisible beneath the lowering sky.

“What is it?” Hobi shouted, but the wind ripped his words into a whisper. He turned to look behind him.

Under a range of black and umber clouds roiled the sea, so distant that he gasped to think they had climbed this high. From here all of Araboth could be seen, rising straight above the sand on a peninsula barely large enough to contain it. The small lip of sand beneath the Lahatiel Gate glittered in the ominous light, and glints of blue and gold flickered from the spires of the Gate itself. But elsewhere there was scarcely enough sand to keep the water from lashing at the foot of the domes. Even knowing nothing of its history, Hobi realized that it could not always have been like this. Erosion, or some natural disaster unmarked inside the domes, must have gnawed away at the sands surrounding the city. Otherwise how could it have been built there, with the waves coursing so near its fundament? An awful vertigo seized him—to think he had lived there all these years with the ocean lapping
right there,
with nothing but that fragile shell to protect him, and the vigilance of the Architects. He swayed, and would have fallen but for a cold hand clenching about his elbow.

“Hobi, come with me. There is shelter here.”

Reluctantly he let her drag him away, his eyes fixed upon the vision of the domes like five clouded eyes set into the sand, the water churning around them and casting up long streamers of white and green beneath a somber sky.

The wind howled so loudly that they did not try to speak. An overpowering reek filled his nostrils, like water clogged with blossoms. Even with Nefertity gripping his arm he stumbled—the ground was uneven, covered with sharp stones that cut through the soft soles of his boots. But when he looked down he saw that they were not stones, but bits of metal and glass, some of them worn smooth but others sharp and rusted as though just torn from some huge machine. And they were all brilliantly colored, red and yellow and green and blue and orange, and striped or spotted or laced with intricate designs. He saw fragments of words spun across sheets of metal or plastic sticking up from the ground like severed limbs.
ILLER,
they read, or
DOL,
or
ING.
A scalloped yellow plate, a sort of canopy twice his height, rose from where it was half-buried in the ground, and flapped in the wind.

It shouted in bold red-and-yellow letters.

Other things lay sprawled on the stony ground. Hollow images of creatures many times the size of a man, their huge misshapen ears cracked and bent, bulbous noses knocked awry or sometimes buried next to their crushed heads. Centuries of neglect on the exposed tor had caused their paint to ripple and crack, flaking venomous chips of acid-green and candied blue onto the scarred earth. And everywhere were the remains of machines, huge blackened metal arms shooting up from beneath heaps of rubble, flattened engines and broken domes of glass, a gigantic skeletal wheel rising against the turbulent sky like a charred and deadly moon.

Hobi stopped. His voice croaked thin and shrill above the wind.

“Where are we?”

Nefertity shook her head. Her translucent body glowed dull cobalt, its shining spindles and circuits shuttling back and forth inside her chest. “I don't know,” she said after a moment. “The ruins of something—a funfair, I think.”

“A
what?”
Hobi yanked his arm from her and clasped himself. In a way this was worse than first seeing the world Outside alone: because that at least he had been prepared for, that was a nightmare he had fought and thrashed through all his life. But this? It was grotesque, all those inhuman faces with their lumpy grins, random letters like shrapnel flung against the desolate earth, immense scorpions of blackened steel crushing one another beneath the weight of a huge fallen tower. And through it all the stream coursing in its rust-colored bed. His stomach knotted to think he had drunk from it before.

“ ‘Fun,' ” Nefertity quoted softly. She pointed at the broken canopy. Her voice shifted into its crystalline recitative mode.

“Roundabout, coconut shies, big wheels, swingboats, rock stalls, all the fun of the fair. Midget pantechnicons bearing such legends as: ‘Loades of Fun, Fun on Tour,' etc. You press the time-switch; the lights go on; everything clicks into motion. Then stops. Until you press the switch again.”

She stopped. The wind rushing through the broken chambers of a small building made a howling sound.

“It's making me sick,” said Hobi, shouting to be heard above the wind. “Who would do this?”

Nefertity's eyes glittered, but her voice was calm. “People long ago,” she said. “After the Second Shining, perhaps even earlier than that. They liked to go to the seashore. Loretta used to like it, she told me. They built things there—pleasure cities. I think this was one of them.”

Pleasure cities. Hobi remembered what Nasrani had told him about the city that had stood here once. Wealthy people, slave traders, gamblers. They might have climbed here, where they could look down upon the sea, and thrown their hours and their money to the ravening winds.

But he couldn't imagine who would have derived pleasure from
this
—these broken statues, and machines whose use could never have been anything but obscure. It was worse even than the Orsinate's dream inquisitions. He shivered, his teeth chattering. A whistling sound echoed across the tor, once and again, and again, then small reports that grew louder. Hobi cried out. Something struck his neck, then his face, and he drew away his hand to find it wet.

“It's started.”

Nefertity turned back toward the ocean. A solid black line seemed to shimmer only inches above the edge of the promontory. Clouds of silver shook through the air—rain, Hobi realized, this was
rain!
—and a distant crashing echoed the wind screaming across the tor. In this sudden twilight Nefertity was a silvery blue beacon in the center of the world, calm and implacable as the rain lashed about her. As Hobi huddled beside her he thought he could see something out on the outermost edge of the horizon, a rent in the disturbed surface of the great ocean—something black and huge, as though the rim of the world had suddenly plunged into an abyss. He pointed at it. The rain struck him so hard that his face felt as though he had been slapped.

“I do not know,” said Nefertity. Rain streamed down her body in fiery runnels. “But we should find shelter.”

“
I
know what it is,” the boy said slowly. As they watched the black bulge on the horizon grew even huger, and moved across the lashing gray sea, heading toward the shore. Hobi felt dizzy, almost speechless as he realized what it was that ripped across the ocean toward Araboth.

He said, choking, “I saw it—in a, a 'file once, about the Third Ascension. A kind of wave—like what you said before, the kind of wave that came after the Second Shining.”

“Tsunami,” the nemosyne whispered. “A tidal wave.”

He nodded, staring numbly at the black ridge, the massive plateau of water rising to crush the sands below. “It's really come, Nefertity.” He knew she could not hear him above the wind, he could no longer hear himself, but he went on anyway. “Like they always said—”

“Ucalegon.”

Nasrani had turned and fled after the
rasa
left him, back up the tunnel until the sand slithered beneath his feet and shallow water lapped at his soles. His breathing roared in his ears, and another sound, faint but unceasing. The pale green light that had filled the passage near the tunnel's mouth had faded until it was nearly too dark for him to see. That was what finally stopped him.

He stood in the middle of the tunnel, swaying back and forth. He could once again hear the murmurous explosions that rocked the Undercity, and feel the ground tremble. For the hundredth time his hands patted futilely at his greatcoat, trouser pockets, boots, searching for something, anything—empty morpha tubes, paper wrappings, ashes, lint. Nothing. He had found it all hours before, chewed it or spun it to grit between his fingers and then flicked it into the darkness. There was nothing left now, not in his pockets, not anywhere. If he went any farther back into the Undercity he would find the tunnel blocked, or be crushed by the walls caving in. Slowly he turned, and began to walk back toward where the passage opened onto the shore.