Land and Overland - Omnibus (112 page)

Cheered by having been presented with a homely objective, Steenameert, Mistekka and Arvand darted away towards a clump of wryberry bushes, the rounded outlines of which had gradually become visible in the starlight. Vantara gave Toller a prolonged stare, which he guessed to be one of disdain, then turned and slowly walked after the others, leaving him in the sole company of Jerene.

"Your leg needs many more stitches, but there is not enough light." She glanced at the impeller, which had now faded into a rectangular patch of grey. "I will bind the wound now and finish the job properly in the morning."

"Thank you," Toller said, suddenly realizing that he was quite incapable of walking unaided. The wound, while serious enough, seemed insignificant in comparison to his size, and he was chastened to find that he felt cold, ill and weak. He stood patiently while Jerene bound his calf tightly with a bandage from the field kit.

"This is where my farm upbringing comes in useful," she said, securing the dressing with an expert knot.

"Thank you again!" Toller spoke in mock indignation, grateful to be distracted from his haunting worry about the sun. "You may nail new shoes to my hooves in the morning, but in the meantime will you assist me to join the others by the fire?"

Jerene stood up, put an arm around his waist and helped him walk towards the flicker of orange light which was already beckoning through the darkness. He found it more difficult and painful than he had expected to make progress through the long grass, and he was relieved when Jerene stopped to rest.

"Now I
doubly
deserve promotion," she said breathlessly. "You weigh nearly as much as my pet greyhorn."

"I'll see to your promotion as soon as…" Toller paused, hesitating to make any promises for a future which might not exist. "You were very courageous when you ran to the machine. My blood froze for fear that you would not get clear of it in time."

"Why were you so concerned?" Jerene murmured. "After all, I had achieved what I set out to do."

"It may have been because…" Toller smiled, realizing that Jerene was playing an ancient game with him, and all at once as they stood together in the darkness that game became more important to him than all his fear for the future of the planet. He drew her closer to him and they kissed with a kind of gentle fervour.

"The countess can see what we are doing," Jerene said, still being provocative as the kiss ended, and her breath was warm in his mouth. "The countess will not be pleased."

"What countess?" Toller said, and he and Jerene began to laugh as they clung together in the dark, dark night.

Toller had not expected to sleep. His wounded leg had begun throbbing like a busy machine, and in any case it had been inconceivable to him that he could lay down the burden of consciousness while wondering if his world was lost in a starless void. But the warmth of the fire had been pleasant, and it had felt good to have Jerene lying at his side with one arm draped across his chest, and he had been more tired than he knew…

He opened his eyes with a start, trying to solve the urgent problem of deciding where he was. The fire had been reduced to white-coated embers, but it gave enough light for him to see the sleeping forms of his tiny band of warriors—and suddenly the great question was again hammering between his temples. He abruptly raised his head, causing Jerene to sigh in her sleep, and scanned the edges of the world.

There was a faint but unmistakable feathering of pearly light above one section of the horizon.

Toller's vision blurred with gratification as he took in the full, wondrous meaning of the tentative glow, then he sank back down to rest.

Queen Daseene had suffered a major stroke, one which was almost certain to prove fatal.

As news of the impending tragedy raced out from Prad to the towns and lesser communities of Overland, the common people—already chastened by inexplicable events in the sky—became even more morose and subdued. Those of a religious or superstitious turn of mind saw the Queen's illness as having been foretold by the spate of omens which had so radically transformed the appearance of the heavens. And even those who had no time for the supernatural were affected by their awareness that something
very
strange had happened at dawn three days previously.

The early risers who had been out of doors at the crucial time were extremely graphic in their reports. They had spoken of the initial awe-inspiring moment during which a fierce source of yellow light, like a miniature sun, had appeared at the zenith, centred on the great disk of Land. Hardly had the eye become accustomed to the cosmic intruder when multiple shells of luminance, concentric to different sources, had exploded into pulsing conflict across the dawn sky.

And then—a final incredible act in the cosmic drama—the sky had …
died.

The same word—died—had been employed over and over again. It sprang spontaneously to the lips of untutored observers who had spent their lives under heavens which were extravagantly patterned with light, spilling over with astronomical jewels of every kind.

The sky had appeared to die when Land simply blinked out of existence—along with the Great Wheel and a myriad of lesser silver spirals; countless thousands of stars, the most brilliant of which had formed the constellation of the Tree; the irregular streamers of misty radiance strewn like delicate tresses among the galaxies; the comets whose glowing and tapering fans partitioned the universe; the darting meteors which had enlivened the dome of night, briefly linking star to star.

All of these had disappeared in an instant, and now the sky seemed dead—all the more so because of the cold, aloof and infinitely remote points of light which, instead of illuminating the sky, served only to emphasize its lack of light.

Toller Maraquine, supported by his crutches, was watching the sunset from the south-facing balcony of his family's home. He had a hot drink positioned within reach on the wide stone balustrade, but it was forgotten for the time being as he saw the sky assume deeper and more sombre colours. He repressed a shiver as the alienness of the darkening celestial dome made itself more and more apparent, and it was not merely the aching absence of the sister world from its ordained station directly overhead which disturbed him. He had spent a fair amount of time on the "outside" of Overland—where most of the inhabitants could not even visualize having the detailed convexity of another planet suspended above them—and had quickly become accustomed to the changed environment.

His present sense of alienation, he had to admit to himself, was caused by the stark
emptiness
of the night sky. Doing his utmost to be pragmatic, calm and reasonable he had tried to shrug the whole thing off. What did it matter, he had asked himself, if the irrelevant and uncaring night sky contained a billion stars or only a scattered handful? Would either condition affect the yield of a harvest by so much as a single grain?

The trouble was that the reassuring negative answer failed to provide sufficient reassurance. He had no idea of what fate had overtaken Land or Dussarra—for all he knew those worlds no longer existed
anywhere
—but he understood with a bleak and sterile exactitude that Overland had been, to use Steenameert's phrase, cast out. This was an
alien
region of the space-time continuum. It had a heart-sinking quality to it. Somehow, within the blink of an eye, Overland had been flung into a decayed universe which had grown old and cold …
old and cold
… and the paramount question was posed: Could human life—individually and collectively—go on just as it had always done?

Physically, there appeared to be no obstacle to prevent the men and women of Kolcorron living out their lives in the same manner as their forebears had done since the beginnings of history. But was it possible that the drear sense of isolation, of inhabiting an outpost in the black wastes of infinity, could alter the racial outlook?

Land and Overland—sister worlds, so close that they were linked by a bridge of air—might have been designed by some cosmic Planner to coax and lure their inhabitants into becoming interplanetary travellers. And, once that critical first step had been taken, there had beckoned a universe laden with astronomical treasures—so obviously charged with the forces of life—that it would have been impossible for the adventurer to turn back. Toller's people had been predisposed by their spatial environment to look outwards, to believe that their future lay in
moving
outwards into a fertile and welcoming universe—but how would they feel now? Would there ever appear a hero with sufficient vision and courage, sufficient
stature,
to gaze at the remote and icy stars of Overland's bleak new sky and vow to make them his own?

Unwilling to confront abstracts any longer. Toller turned his back on the red-gold sunset and took a sip of his mulled brandy. As well as being heated, the liquor had been spiced and buttered to offset the coolness of the twilight air. He found its calorific familiarity deeply comforting as he watched his father and Bartan Drumme fuss over the telescopes which had been set up on the balcony. In his eyes the two older men had become granite pillars of intellectual fortitude and good sense in a quicksand universe, and his respect for them had been enhanced beyond measure. They were discussing a strange scientific anomaly, a quirky lesion in the fabric of the new reality, which thus far had been noticed by relatively few people.

"It is quite ironic," Cassyll Maraquine was saying. "It would be no exaggeration to say that, taking the state factories as a whole, there are at least a gross of highly qualified engineers and technicians who are directly answerable to me. They spend much of their time peering at the most accurate measuring instruments we can devise—but none of them saw
anything
!"

"Be fair," Bartan murmured. "There is no change in the way in which circles relate to circles, and most of your—"

Cassyll shook his greying head. "No excuse, old friend! It took a humble employee of the Cardapin brewery—a cooper!—to fight his way to me through all the cursed barriers that bureaucracies insist on erecting in spite of one's doughtiest efforts to prevent them. I have since plucked the man out of his lowly occupation and appointed him to my personal staff, where—"

"Tell me, father," Toller cut in, his curiosity aroused. "What
is
this to-do concerning rings and circles and wheels and the like which perplexes you so? What can be so strange and intriguing about an ordinary circle?"

"A circle has always had certain fixed properties, just like any other geometrical figure, and now those properties have suffered a sudden change," Cassyll said in solemn tones. "Until now, as you very well know, the circumference of a circle has been
exactly
equal to three times its diameter. Now, however—if you care to put the matter to the test—you will find that the ratio of circumference to diameter is slightly
more
than three."

"But…" Toller tried to assimilate the idea, but his mind baulked at the task. "What does it mean?"

"It means we are a long way from home," Drumme put in, with a twist of the lips which hinted that he had said something very profound.

"Yes, but will it make any difference to our lives?"

Cassyll snorted as he took the lens cap off a telescope. "There speaks a man who has never had to earn his crusts in commerce or industry! The re-design and re-calibration of certain classes of machinery is going to cost the state a veritable fortune. And then there will be clerical costs, and accountancy costs, and—"

"Clerical?"

"Just think of it, Toller. We have twelve fingers, so we naturally count to the base of twelve. That, coupled with the fact that the circumference of a circle used to be precisely three times the diameter, made whole areas of computation absurdly easy. From now on, however, everything in that line is going to be more difficult—and I am not talking about matters as rudimentary as a cooper having to learn to make longer straps for his barrels. Take, for example, the—"

"Tell me," Toller said quickly, anxious to forestall one of his father's rambling discourses, "what
is
the new ratio? I ought to know that much, at least."

Cassyll glanced significantly at Bartan. "There has been a certain amount of discussion on that point. I have been too busy—what with the distressing events at the palace and so forth—to take measurements in person. Some of my staff are claiming that the new ratio is three-and-a-seventh—which, of course, is nonsense."

"Why is it nonsense?" Bartan said with some heat.

"Because, my old friend, there has to be a natural harmony in the world of numbers. Three-and-a-seventh would work in with nothing. I have no doubt at all that when the measurements are made with proper accuracy we will find that the new ratio is amenable to…"

Toller allowed his attention to wander away from what promised to be a lengthy argument of the type from which his father and Bartan Drumme had always derived great satisfaction. He wished that Jerene was by his side, but she had gone to visit her family in the village of Divarl and was not expected back until the morrow. Tired of standing by the balustrade, he made his way to a couch, lowered himself on to it and set his crutches aside. His leg, now that the process of healing was well under way, had become stiff and capable of producing excruciating pain when subjected to any degree of stress. Simply living with such a leg, continually devising strategies to prevent it unleashing bolts of agony, was an experience which Toller found enervating and exhausting, and he was glad to lie down.

"Son, perhaps you should go off to your room and take your night's sleep," Cassyll Maraquine said gently, coming to stand by the couch. "The wound was more severe than you seem to think."

"Not yet—I'd rather stay here for a while." Toller smiled up at his father. "I seem to remember us exchanging similar words many times in the past, when I was a child. Are you about to pack me off to bed whether I like it or not?"

"You are too big for that kind of treatment. Besides, I am busy and I do not want to be plagued with calls for glasses of water."