Something Coming Through

34. The Cloud Tree

Mangala | 30 July

Fighting a headwind all the way, the little Cessna crawled low over the vast red playa and scrub-covered plains, flew out above the forested slopes at the edge of Idunn’s Valley. The sky was tinted a hard cold pink. The sun hung low above what looked like a hazy brown band stretched across half the horizon. The leading edge of the dust storm, according to the pilot.

‘Man, it’s big,’ Vic said. Dressed in a microlight down jacket, jeans and hiking boots, strapped in the seat next to the pilot, he was the only passenger on the plane.

‘More than two thousand kilometres across, and getting bigger all the time,’ the pilot, a laconic Finn with buzz-cut grey hair, said.

Idunn’s Valley was a crooked verdant scar that ran from the edge of the sprawling northern ice cap to the ring sea that girdled the equator. Glaciers fed a slow, wide river that meandered through it; little towns and farming settlements were spreading along a narrow belt pinched between the river and the alien veldt and forests, the latest in a long succession of civilisations that had risen and fallen along the river banks long before the first hominins had walked out across the plains of Africa, the ruins each left behind cannibalised by succeeding Elder Cultures or erased by changes in the river’s course or by dust and sand blown in from the deserts on either side of the valley. So far, prospectors had mapped the outlines of more than three hundred ancient sites along the river, excavating the fossilised remains of alien technology and architecture, uncovering a number of still-active artefacts, eidolons, and other revenants, and novel polymers and metamaterials. Room-temperature superconductors, quantum dust, solar paint, the proton-exchange membranes that were the basis for LEAF batteries and cheap desalination, and half a hundred other prizes.

It was good to get out of Petra, Vic thought, good to be reminded that there was so much more to Mangala than the housing developments and shopping malls, schools and hospitals, office blocks and industrial estates that were spreading from the city centre like the pulsing growth of a bacterial colony, to escape the deepening grip of multinational corporations and the Coca-colonisation of the weird. Out here, you could still have your mind eaten by an alien phantom, stumble upon a lost city, or discover a fraying thread of some kind of weird quantumised metamaterial that could kick-start a new industrial revolution and make you a billionaire. Out here were places not yet mapped. Old dreams and deep mysteries. A world wild and strange and still mostly unknown. And he was a lone avenger, arrowing through the raging weather of this strange planet, ready to speak for his dead.

Static lightning flickered in the air. Dust devils dipped and swayed across the yellow veldt like eccentric dancers. Once, the pilot tapped Vic’s shoulder and pointed off to the left. A cloud tree set alight by a lightning strike was burning in a shroud of blue hydrogen flame and shedding flurries of sparks: clouds of microscopic sporelings that would rise high on the fire’s updraught and seed new life across hundreds of square kilometres.

This vivid portent set an atavistic thrill fizzing in Vic’s blood, triggered memories of his first days on Mangala: the first days of human colonisation. He’d brought a motorcycle with him, and in his free time would choose a random direction and ride out into the playa until all traces of the hand of man were lost in a dry sea of red rock and red sand. Try that now, you’d have to travel a long fucking way to find a place where someone hadn’t set up a campfire, or scrawled graffiti on a rock, or shot up a needle tree, or left behind a litter of fast-food wrappers and soft-drink cans. But back then you didn’t have to go far to find places where no human being had ever before trod. Where you could lie down in the warm light of the fat sun or the steely glitter of the alien stars and lose yourself in the profound silence of the desert, where the only noise was the beating of your heart and the sigh of your lungs, where you could feel your mind unravel into the ancient unknown.

A bend of the broad river gleamed below and the plane turned sharply to follow it. On the far side, ranges of low hills clad in red and orange forest stretched into a dim haze and the turbulent base of the mountainous dust storm. The plane flew low over a patchwork of fields. Acres of fast-growing strains of alfalfa and mustard, gleaming seas of polytunnels, a cluster of grain-storage tanks, a scatter of buildings around a crossroads.

‘Winnetou,’ the pilot said.

The little town where Skip had been murdered.

And then the plane was descending in a sudden swoop towards a dirt runway, bumping down and taxiing towards the Portakabin that served as flight control, administrative offices and waiting room.

The pilot cut the engine and said, ‘This could be my last flight for a while. That monster is advancing faster than predicted. If I can’t return tomorrow, how will you get back?’

‘I haven’t thought that far ahead,’ Vic said.