Context (114 page)

They
sat with backs against the inner hull, his hand clasped in both of Elva’s, with
the heavy satchel tugged round so it lay in his lap. And, in a soft murmur with
lips held close to each other’s ears, they talked.

‘I know ... as Litha, I know a
thing ...from nine years ago.’

Nine SY? That had been an
eventful year.

‘What is it, my love?’

A long pause in the darkness.

Then, ‘They found a body on the
ground, on the surface. Shattered. When they were searching for the Oracle’s
killer.’

Poignard blade, hard into his
body. Scarlet blood, splashed bright across the blue-white floor.

‘Who did?’

‘Grey Shadows, undercover. We—they
hid the evidence.’

And the escape. In the floating
terraformer, high in Nulapeiron’s skies, and the brief vision of himself,
despair-filled with anger turning inwards, throwing himself suicidally from the
balcony at the great sphere’s apex.

But that was hallucination.

Except that more recent events
suggested otherwise.

‘They tested its DNA,’ whispered
Elva. ‘Reconstructed the features. Litha saw it.’

Her dead twin’s memories, not
fully displaced by Elva’s occupancy of what had been Litha’s body.

‘What did they find?’

Dreading the answer.

Don’t say it, my love.

Knowing the answer in advance.

‘It was you, Tom.’ Her voice was
eerie in the darkened container. ‘The dead body was you.’

Take-off.

They clutched each other in the
vibrating darkness, a tremendous roar pulsating through their bodies, hammering
the air so that they could not even shout to each other. Their cargo container
was in a flyer’s hold, rising fast through the vertical shaft, heading upwards,
bursting free into open air, shooting upwards into lemon skies whose nature
Elva could perhaps imagine, but which she had never seen. Her grip on Tom
tightened, hard.

Then freefall, arcing, and the
landing.

Cargocrabs—they could tell from
the scraping sounds, the sudden jolt of movement—carried their container
outside, and stacked it against the others.

Tom and Elva waited till all was
silent, then waited some more, until they could no longer stand it.

‘Me first,’ said Tom.

It
was night, and cloudy, but the black vault still showed distant stars and the
wind, though soft, was in continuous motion, bearing the sound of dark leaves
rustling and the grassy scents which no subterranean dweller would recognize.

Elva swallowed, stumbled, but did
not cower: it was the most impressive reaction of a non-acclimatized newcomer
Tom had seen.

But still she walked unsteadily,
in the wide open spaces beneath infinite night skies, and Tom would have to
lead for now.

They
were on level ground, a gentle portion of a long slope, and its grass-covered
surface looked silver by the light of triplet moons.

Tom led the way upwards, to a
knot of trees and undergrowth near the ridgetop, and used Elva’s small sharp
knife to cut away branches, pulling them down to form a shelter.

They had no food, no water.

But they were used to waiting.

As
false dawn lightened the night a little, Tom whispered, ‘Stay here,’ and
crawled out from the shelter.

Elva remained crouched inside.

The stacked cargo pods still
stood downslope. There was no sign of cargocrabs; the flyer itself had long
departed. The diminishing night was clear, and—had it not been for the
containers—he would have thought himself alone in a vast natural wilderness.
Beneath him, a long plain led onwards from the foot of the ridge, spanning many
klicks before reaching a range of low, dark distant hills, only just visible
against the purple-grey horizon.

Woody scents, a sharp hint of
some purple bush’s fragrance—he recognized the plant but could not name it—made
his nostrils flare. He took a long, deep breath, then slowly let the pure air
slide from his lungs, bringing a momentary peace.

Then Tom turned and crawled
upslope, to the ridge’s apex, and looked down over the side.

Chaos...

And knelt there, unmoving.

Below lay a huge structure, all
of crystal, like some titanic bloom which shimmered, ethereal in the fading
moonlight, and its heart seemed twisted through extra-dimensional folds which
Tom could not truly see.

There was a small clump of
undergrowth, surrounding a stunted tree, nearby. Tom crawled to it, lay down
beneath its meagre cover, and waited for the dawn.

And soon enough, the eastern sky
was painted pale, washed-out lemon, and the grey clouds were tinged with
yellow.

Then sunlight caught the vast
spreading crystalline building, if that was its function, and it burned with
the brightness of a thousand sparkling suns, a blazing glorious dawn-fire which
hurt the eyes with its brilliance and made Tom want to crawl away and hide.

He
waited, though, for the first of the big transport-flyers to glide overhead and
settle down to land. He counted four hundred passengers disembarking down
multiple ramps, and every person wore light grey edged with crimson.

More flyers touched down.

And then, from some
membrane-covered shaft opening in the ground beyond the great crystalline
construct, many more people began to climb into the open. And headed, like the
others, to the vast stadium-like crystal flower.

Thousands, maybe tens of
thousands, of Blight-subsumed individuals were converging upon the structure
when Tom finally dared to crawl back through the long grasses, back to the knot
of trees where Elva crouched alone, waiting.

Sunlight
dappled the interior of their branch-covered shelter, and Elva squinted against
it. She sat cross-legged, bulky black satchel in her lap, listening to Tom’s
description of what was occurring outside. For all her mental strength, there
was no way that she—without conditioning—could move around on the world’s
surface in daylight. Agoraphobia aside, it was now too dangerous to leave this
place.

‘We made a tactical mistake,
then.’