The Fugitive Worlds

Chapter 1

The lone astronaut had fallen from the very edge of space, down through thousands of miles of gradually thickening atmosphere, a drop which had lasted more than a day. In the later stages of the descent his body had been acted on by wind forces which had carried him far to the west of the capital city. Perhaps through inexperience, perhaps from a desire to be free of the restraints of the fallbag, he had opened his parachute too soon. It had been deployed a good ten miles above the planetary surface, and as a result was being wafted even farther into the sparsely populated regions which lay beyond the White River.

Toller Maraquine II, who had been patrolling the area for eight days, examined the creamy fleck of the parachute through powerful binoculars. It was an inconspicuous object, hardly as bright as the daytime stars, seemingly fixed in position beneath the great curving rim of the sister world which filled the center of the sky. The movement of Toller’s airship made it difficult to keep the parachute centered in his field of view, but he was able to pick out the tiny figure slung beneath it and he felt a growing sense of anticipation.

What would the astronaut have to report?

The very fact that the expedition had lasted longer than expected was a good omen in Toller’s eyes, but in any case it would be a relief to pick the man up and transport him to Prad. Patrolling the near-featureless region, with nothing to do but return the companionable waves of farm workers, had been monotonous in the extreme, and Toller had a craving to get back to the city where he could at least find congenial company and a glass of decent wine. There was also some unfinished and highly pleasurable business with Hariana, a blonde beauty in the Weavers’ Guild. He had been in ardent pursuit of her for many days, and he sensed she had been on the verge of yielding when he had been sent away on the current irksome duty.

The airship was running easily before the easterly breeze, requiring only an occasional nudge from the jet engines to keep pace with the parachutist’s lateral motion. In spite of the shade provided by the elliptical gasbag overhead, the heat on the upper deck was becoming intense, and Toller knew that the twelve men comprising his crew were as eager as he to see the mission come to an end. Their saffron airmen’s blouses were dappled with sweat and their postures were as drooped as was compatible with observance of shipboard discipline.

Two hundred feet below the gondola the striated fields of the region slipped quietly by, forming patterns of stripes which flowed out to the horizon. It was now just over fifty years since the migration to Overland, and the Kolcorronian farmers had had time to impose their designs on the natural coloration of the landscape. On a planet without seasons the edible grasses and other vegetation tended to be heterogeneous, each plant following its own maturation cycle, but the farmers had painstakingly sorted them into synchronous groups to achieve the six harvests a year which had been traditional on the Old World since history began. Each field of grain displayed linear variations in color, from the delicate green of young shoots to harvest gold and the brown of shorn earth.

“There’s another ship to the south of us, sir,” shouted Niskodar, the helmsman. “Same altitude or a bit higher. About two miles away.”

Toller located the ship—a dark sliver low on the purple-hazed horizon—and turned his glasses on it. The magnified image showed that the craft had blue-and-yellow Sky Service markings, a fact which caused Toller some surprise. Several times in the previous eight days he had glimpsed the ship which was patrolling the sector adjoining his to the south, but that had been at the mutual limit of the sweeps and the visual contacts had been fleeting. The newcomer was well inside Toller’s assigned territory and, as far as he could determine, was closing with him as though also intending to intercept the returning parachutist.

“Get on the Sunwriter,” he said to Lieutenant Feer, who was at the rail beside him. “Give the commander of that ship my compliments and advise him to change course—I am on the Queen’s business and will brook no interference or obstruction.”

“Yes, sir,” Feer replied eagerly, obviously pleased that the incident had come along to add a hint of savor to the foreday. He opened a locker and took out a sunwriter which was of the new lightweight design employing silvered mirror slats in place of the conventional glass sandwich construction. Feer aimed the instrument and worked the trigger, producing a busy clacking sound. For about a minute after he had finished there was no visible response, then a tiny sun began to blink rapidly on the distant ship.

Good foreday, Captain Maraquine, came the pulsed message. The Countess Vantara returns your greeting. She has decided to take command of this operation in person. Your attendance is no longer required. You are hereby instructed to return to Prod immediately.

Toller choked back the angry swear words the message had inspired in him. He had never met Countess Vantara, but he knew that she, as well as holding the rank of sky-captain, was a granddaughter of the Queen and that she habitually used the royal connection to enhance her authority. Many other commanders faced with a similar situation would have backed down, perhaps after a token protest, for fear of prejudicing their careers, but Toller was constitutionally unable to accept what he saw as a slur. His hand dropped to the hilt of the sword which had once belonged to his grandfather, and he scowled fiercely in the direction of the intruding ship as he composed a reply to the countess’s imperious message.

“Sir, do you wish to acknowledge the signal?” Lieutenant Feer’s manner was absolutely correct, but a certain brightness in his eyes showed that he relished seeing Toller faced with a tricky decision. Although of subordinate rank he was somewhat the older of the two, and he almost certainly subscribed to the general view that Toller had achieved captaincy so early through family influence. It was apparent that the prospect of witnessing a duel between the privileged and the privileged had a strong appeal to the lieutenant.

“Of course I wish to acknowledge it,” Toller said, hiding his irritation. “What is that woman’s family name?”

“Dervonai, sir.”

“All right, forget all that countess frippery and address her as Captain Dervonai. Say: Your kind offer of assistance is noted, but in this instance the presence of another vessel is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help. Continue with your own business and do not impede me in the execution of the Queen’s direct orders.”

A look of gratification appeared on Feer’s narrow face as he beamed Toller’s words out to the other ship—he had not expected an outright confrontation to develop so quickly. There was only the briefest pause before a reply came. Your show of discourtesy, not to say insolence, has also been noted, but I will refrain from reporting it to my grandmother if you withdraw at once. I urge you to be prudent.

“The arrogant bitch!” Toller snatched the sunwriter out of Feer’s hands, aimed it and worked the trigger. I deem it more prudent to be reported to her Majesty for discourtesy than for treason, which would be the case were I to abandon my mission. I therefore urge you to return to your needlework.

“Needlework!” Lieutenant Feer, who had been able to read the message from the side, gave an appreciative chuckle as Toller handed the sunwriter back to him. “The lady aviator won’t appreciate that one, sir. I wonder what her reply will be.”

“There it is,” Toller said, having raised his binoculars just in time to discern smoke pluming out from the other ship’s main jets. “She’s either departing the scene in a huff or going all out to reach our objective first—and if what I’ve heard about the Countess Vantara is true… Yes! We have a race on our hands!”

“Do you want full speed?”

“What else?” Toller said. “And tell the men to put on parachutes.”

At the mention of parachutes Feer’s gleeful expression faded and was replaced by one of wariness. “Sir, you don’t think it’s going to come to—”

“Anything can happen when two ships dispute a single piece of sky.” Toller injected a note of joviality into his voice, subtly punishing the lieutenant for the improprieties in his attitude. “A collision could easily result in deaths, and I would prefer it that they were all on the opposition’s side.”

“Yes, sir.” Feer turned away, already signaling to the engineer, and a moment later the main jets began a steady roar as maximum continuous power was applied. The nose of the long gondola lifted as the jet thrust tried to rotate the entire ship about its center of gravity, but the helmsman quickly corrected its attitude by altering the angle of the engines. He was able to do so single-handed, by means of a lever and ratchets, because the engines were of the modern lightweight type consisting of riveted metal tubes.

Until quite recently each jet would have utilized the entire trunk of a young brakka tree, and consequently would have been heavy and unwieldy. The power source was still a mixture of pikon and halvell crystals, which throughout history had been extracted from the soil by the root systems of brakka trees. Now, however, the crystals were obtained directly from the earth by means of chemical refining methods developed by Toller’s father, Cassyll Maraquine.

Industrial chemistry and metallurgy were the cornerstones of the Maraquine family’s immense fortune and power—which in turn were the source of most of the personal difficulties Toller had with his parents. They had expected him to understudy his father in preparation for taking up the reins of the family’s industrial empire—a prospect he had viewed with dread—and his relationship with them had been occasionally strained ever since he had chosen to enter the Sky Service in pursuit of excitement and adventure. Those two qualities had been less plentiful than he had hoped for, which was one of the reasons for his determination not to be elbowed aside on this particular occasion…

He returned his attention to the astronaut, who was still a good mile above the surface of the undulating farmlands. There was no practical point in racing to the parachutist’s estimated touchdown point, but it might strengthen Vantara’s case if she could claim to have been at the site first. Toller guessed that she had by pure chance intercepted the sunwriter message he had relayed to the palace earlier in the day, and then had decided on a whim to take over at the interesting phase of what had been a tedious mission.

He was considering whether or not to send her a final warning message when he noticed that a line of dark blue had appeared on the western horizon. His binoculars confirmed that there was a substantial body of water ahead, and on consulting his charts he found that it was called Lake Amblaraate. It was more than five miles across, which meant that the astronaut had little chance of drifting himself clear of its edges, but it was traversed by a line of small, low-lying islands from which a skilful parachutist ought to be able to select a good landing site.

Toller beckoned Feer to him and showed him the chart. “I think we may be in for some sport,” he said. “Those islets look scarcely big enough to accommodate a parade ground. If yonder flyaway seed manages to plant himself on one of them the task of plucking him up again will call for some fancy airmanship. I wonder if the lady aviator, as you dubbed her, will remain so anxious to claim the honor.”

“The important thing is that the messenger and his dispatches are conveyed safely to the Queen,” Feer replied. “Does it really matter who picks him up?”

Toller gave him a broad smile. “Oh yes, lieutenant—it matters a great deal.”

He leaned on the gondola’s rail, enjoying the cooling effect of the gathering slipstream, and watched the other ship draw nearer on the converging course. The range was still too great for him to be able to see any of the crew clearly, even with binoculars, but he knew they were all female. It had been Queen Daseene herself who had insisted on women being allowed to enter the Sky Service. That had been during the emergency of twenty-six years earlier, at the time of the threatened invasion from the Old World, but the tradition persisted to the present day, though for mainly practical reasons it had been decided not to use mixed crews. Toller, who had spent most of his active service on the far side of Overland, had not previously encountered any of the very few airships crewed by women, and he was interested in finding out if gender had any noticeable effect on ship-handling techniques.

As he had expected, both ships reached Lake Amblaraate while the parachutist was still high above them. Toller judged which of the islands was most likely to provide the touchdown point, ordered his ship down to a hundred feet and began cruising in a circle around the triangular patch of green. To his annoyance, Vantara adopted a similar tactic, taking up a station at the opposite side of the circle. The two ships rotated as though attached to the ends of an invisible rod, the intermittent blasts of their jets disturbing colonies of birds which nested on the low ground.

“This is a waste of good crystals,” Toller grumbled.

“A criminal waste.” Feer nodded, permitting himself a hint of a smile over the fact that his commander was frequently reprimanded by the Service’s quartermaster general for using up his stores of pikon and halvell at a greater rate than any other captain because of his impatient flying style.

“That woman should be grounded and—” Toller broke off as the parachutist, apparently having agreed with his audience on a choice of landing site, abruptly furled part of his canopy, increasing his fall-speed and steepening his angle of descent.

“Get us down there with all possible speed!” Toller ordered. “Use all four anchor guns on first contact—we must land on the first pass.”

The smile returned to Toller’s face as he saw that the crucial moment had come while his ship was well to the west of the island, so that a single natural maneuver would bring it into position for an upwind landing. It very much looked as though the aerial wheel of chance had declared against Vantara. He glanced again at the Countess’s ship and was appalled to see that it was already breaking out of the flight pattern and beginning a steep descent to the island, obviously intent on making an illegal downwind landing.

“The bitch,” Toller whispered. “The stupid bitch!”

He watched helplessly as the other vessel, its speed enhanced by the following breeze, speared down through the lowest levels of the air and drove towards the center of the island. Too fast, he thought. The anchors will never take the strain! Puffs of smoke appeared on each side of the gondola as its keel touched the grass and the anchor cannon fired their barbs into the ground. The ship slowed abruptly, its gasbag distorting. For a moment it looked as though Toller’s prediction would be proved wrong, then both ropes on the left side of the gondola snapped. The ship rolled and turned, hauling its rear anchor out of the soil, and would have broken free had not the crew member on the solitary remaining anchor begun paying out line at maximum possible speed, thus easing the strain on the rope. Against the odds the single line took up the load without breaking, and all at once it was impossible for Toller to bring off his intended landing maneuver—Vantara’s ship, dipping and wallowing, lay across his line of descent.

“Abort the landing!” he shouted. “Up! Go up!”

The main jets sounded immediately and, following the emergency drill, the crewmen who were not otherwise engaged ran aft to transfer their weight and help tilt the nose of the vessel upwards. Prompt though the corrective actions had been, the inertia of the tons of gas in the envelope which strained overhead slowed down the ship’s response. For nightmarishly protracted seconds it continued on its course, with the obstructing vessel expanding to fill the view directly ahead, then the horizon began to sink with nerve-abrading slowness.

From his position at the side of the bridge Toller glimpsed the long-haired figure of Countess Vantara, a momentary vision which was replaced by the swift-sliding curvatures of the other gasbag, so close that he could make out the individual stitches of the panels and load tapes. He held his breath, willing himself and his ship to rise vertically, and was beginning to hope that a collision had been averted when there came a vast groaning sound from below. The sound—low-pitched, quavering, reproachful—told him that his keel was ploughing its way across the upper surface of the other ship’s gasbag.

He looked aft and saw Vantara’s ship emerging from beneath his own. At least two seams had given way in the varnished linen envelope, allowing the supportive gas to spew into the atmosphere. The rents, although serious, were not bad enough to cause a catastrophe—the elliptical gasbag was slowly becoming misshapen and wrinkled, allowing the gondola beneath it to sink to the ground.

Toller gave the orders for his ship to resume normal flying and to make another circuit in preparation for landing. The maneuver gave him and his crew an excellent opportunity to watch the countess’s ship sink down at the end of its tether, and—the final ignominy—be blotted out of sight by the collapsing gasbag. As soon as it had become apparent that nobody was going to be killed or even injured, the release of tension caused Toller to laugh. Taking their cue from him, Feer and the rest of the crew joined in and the merriment became almost hysterical when the parachutist—whose existence had virtually been forgotten—descended into the scene of action, made a comically awkward landing and ended up sitting on his backside in a patch of swamp.

“There’s no hurry now, so I want a flawless showpiece landing,” Toller said. “Take her in slowly.”

In accordance with his instructions the ship settled down against the breeze with a stately motion and grounded with a barely perceptible shudder. As soon as the anchor cannon had secured the craft, Toller swung himself over the rail and dropped to the grass. The first of Vantara’s crew were beginning to struggle out from beneath the folds of their gasbag, but Toller ignored them and walked towards the parachutist, who had risen to his feet and was gathering the sprawled canopy. He raised his head and saluted as he saw Toller approaching. He was a lean, fair-skinned youngster who looked barely old enough to have left his family home, but—and Toller was impressed by the realization—he had completed a double crossing of the void that lay between the sister worlds.

“Good foreday, sir,” he said. “Corporal Steenameert, sir. I bear urgent dispatches for her Majesty.”

“I thought as much,” Toller smiled. “I am under orders to transport you to Prad without delay, but I think we can take a moment to let you get out of that skysuit. It can’t be very comfortable walking around with a wet arse.”

Steenameert returned the smile, appreciating the way in which Toller had put the relationship on an informal footing. “It wasn’t one of my best landings.”

“Bad landings seem to be the order of the day,” Toller said, glancing past Steenameert. Countess Vantara was striding towards him, a tall black-haired woman whose high-breasted figure was made even more impressive by the fact that she was holding herself angrily erect. Close behind her was a smaller woman, much rounder in build, wearing a lieutenant’s uniform, who was laboring to keep pace with her superior. Toller returned his attention to Steenameert, his sense of wonder stirring as he thought of the magnitude of the journey the boy had completed. In spite of his youthfulness, Steenameert had seen sights and had been granted experiences Toller could scarcely imagine. Toller envied him and also was deeply curious about what had been discovered on the voyage to Land—the first since the colonization of Overland had begun fifty years earlier.

“Tell me, corporal,” he said. “What was it like on the Old World?”

Steenameert looked hesitant. “Sir, the dispatches are privy to her Majesty.”

“Never mind the dispatches. Man-to-man, what did you see? What was it like?

A gratified expression appeared on Steenameert’s face as he struggled out of his one-piece skysult, making it apparent that he had a compulsion to talk about his adventures. “Empty cities! Great cities, cities which make Prad look like a village—and all of them empty!”

“Empty? But what about the—?”

“Mister Maraquine!” The Countess Vantara was still a dozen paces away, but her voice was forceful enough to silence Toller in mid-sentence. “Pending your dismissal from the Service for willfully damaging one of her Majesty’s airships, I am taking command of your vessel. You will consider yourself under arrest!”

The arrogance and the sheer unreasonableness of Vantara’s words checked Toller’s breath, inspiring in him a pang of fury so intense that he knew it was vital for it to be subdued. He put on his most relaxed smile, turned slowly towards the countess, and immediately wished he had met her under different circumstances. She had one of those faces which have the effect of filling men with hopeless admiration and women with hopeless envy. It was oval, grey-eyed and perfect—flawless in a way which set its owner apart from all the other women Toller had ever seen.

“What are you grinning at?” Vantara demanded. “Did you not hear what I said?”

Putting his regrets aside, Toller said, “Don’t be silly. Do you need any help with repairs to your ship?”

Vantara glanced in outrage at the lieutenant who had just arrived at her side, then triangulated her gaze on Toller’s face. “Mister Maraquine, you don’t seem to realize the seriousness of your situation. You are under arrest.”

Toller sighed. “Listen to me, captain. You have behaved very stupidly, but fortunately no real damage has been done and there is no need for either of us to make an official report. Let us just go our separate ways and forget the whole sorry incident.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“It would be better than prolonging this lunacy of yours.”

Vantara’s hand moved to the butt of the pistol in her belt. “I repeat, Mister Maraquine, you are under arrest.”

Scarcely able to believe what was happening, Toller instinctively gripped the haft of his sword.

Vantara’s smile was icily perfect. “What do you think you could do with that ridiculous museum piece?”

“Since you ask, I’ll tell you,” Toller said, lightly and evenly. “Before you could even raise your pistol I could cleave your head from your body, and were your lieutenant foolhardy enough to try menacing me she would suffer the same fate. Furthermore, even if you had two others of your crew with you… and even if they managed to fire and put their bullets into me … I would nevertheless be able to run at them and cut them down.

“I hope I have made myself clear, Captain Dervonai. I am under direct orders from her Majesty, and if anybody attempts to prevent me executing those orders that attempt will end in terrible bloodshed. Those are the simple facts of the matter.” Keeping his expression bland, Toller waited to see what effect his words would have on Vantara. The physique he had inherited from his grandfather was a living reminder of the days when the military had comprised a separate caste in Kolcorron. He towered over the countess and had twice her weight, and yet he was not at all certain that things were going to go his way. She had the look of one who was not accustomed to being thwarted, whatever the circumstances.

There was a tense moment during which Toller was acutely aware that his entire future was trembling in the balance, and then—unexpectedly—Vantara gave a delighted laugh.

“Just look at him, Jerene!” she said, nudging her companion. “I do believe he’s taking all this seriously.” The lieutenant seemed startled for an instant, then she mustered a weak smile.

“It is a very serious—”

“Where’s your sense of humor, Toller Maraquine?” Vantara cut in. “Of course, now that I think of it, you always did take yourself too seriously.”

Toller was taken aback. “Are you claiming that we have met before?”

Vantara laughed again. “Don’t you remember your father taking you to the Migration Day reception at the palace when you were little? Even then you went around wearing a sword… trying to look like your famous grandfather…”

Toller was certain he was being mocked, but if this was the countess’s way of backing down without too much loss of face he was prepared to be compliant. Anything was better than continuing the needless confrontation.

“I confess to not remembering you,” he said, “but I suspect it is because your appearance has changed to a greater degree than mine.”

Vantara shook her head, rejecting the implied compliment. “No. It’s simply that you have a poor memory—what about this skyman for whose custody you were, only minutes ago, prepared to risk the safety of two ships?”

Toller turned to Steenameert, who had been listening to the exchange with interest. “Go aboard my ship and have the cook prepare you a meal. We will continue our conversation in comfort.” Steenameert saluted, took hold of his parachute and dragged it away.

“I presume you asked him why the expedition lasted so much longer than expected,” Vantara said casually, as though the clash of wills had never taken place.

“Yes.” Toller was unsure of how to deal with the countess, but he decided to try making their relationship as informal and friendly as possible. “He said that Land was empty. He spoke of empty cities.”

“Empty! But what has become of the so-called New Men?”

“The explanation, if there is one, should be in the dispatches.”

“In that case I must visit her Majesty, my grandmother, as soon as possible,” Vantara said. The reference to her royal family connection had been unnecessary, and Toller took it as an indication that he was expected to keep his distance.

“I, too, must return to Prad with all possible speed,” he said, making his tone brisk. “Are you sure you don’t want any help with repairs?”

“Positive! The seams will be sewn before littlenight, then I’ll be on my way.”

“There’s just one more thing,” Toller said as Vantara was turning away. “Strictly speaking, our ships were in collision and we are supposed to file incident reports. How do you feel about that?”

She met his gaze directly. “I find all that paperwork rather tiresome, don’t you?”

“Very tiresome.” Toller smiled and saluted. “Goodbye, captain.”

He watched the countess and her junior officer walk off in the direction of their ship, then he turned and retraced his steps to his own vessel. The great disk of the sister planet was filling the sky overhead, and the shrinkage of its sunlit crescent told him there was not much more than an hour until the daily eclipse which was known as littlenight. He was acutely aware, now that they had parted company, of the extent to which he had allowed himself to be manipulated by Vantara. Had a man been guilty of such appalling behavior in the air and arrogance on the ground, Toller would have given him a verbal blistering so fierce that it could easily have provoked a duel, and most certainly would have indicted him in an official report. As it was, he had been unmanned and bemused by the countess’s incredible physical perfection, and had conducted himself like an impressionable youth. It was true that he had conclusively defeated Vantara on the main issue, but in retrospect he could almost believe that he had been as much concerned with impressing her as with carrying out his duty.

By the time he reached his ship a crewman was standing beside each of the four anchors and making ready for departure. He went up the rungs on the side of the gondola and swung himself over the rail, then paused and stared at Vantara’s grounded craft. Its crew were busy detaching the gasbag and laying it out on the grass under Vantara’s supervision.

Lieutenant Feer came to his side. “Continuous thrust to Prad, sir?”

If I ever get married, Toller thought, it has to be to that woman.

“Sir, I asked you if—”

“Of course I want continuous thrust to Prad,” Toller said. “And bring Steenameert to my cabin—I want to talk to him in private.”

He went to his cabin at the rear of the main deck and waited for the skyman to be shown in. The ship felt alive again, its timbers and rigging emitting occasional creaks as the structure as a whole adjusted to the tensions of flying into the wind. Toller sat at his desk and toyed abstractedly with navigation instruments, unable to put the Countess Vantara out of his thoughts. How had he managed to forget meeting her as a child? He could recall being dragged against his will to the Migration Day ceremonies, at an age when he scorned the company of girls, but surely even then he would have noticed her among the giggling, gauzy creatures at play in the palace gardens…

His musings were interrupted when Steenameert tapped at the door and came into the small room, still brushing food particles from his chin. “You sent for me, sir?”

“Yes. We were interrupted at an interesting point in our conversation. Tell me more about these empty cities. Did you see no living people whatsoever?”

Steenameert shook his head. “Not one, sir! Lots of skeletons—thousands of them—but, as far as I could tell, the New Men no longer exist. Their own pestilence seems to have turned against them and wiped them out.”

“How far abroad did you travel?”

“Not far—two hundred miles at the most. As you know, we only had the three skyships… nothing with lateral thrusters… and had to rely on the winds to get us about. But that was enough for me, sir. After a while I had an uncanny feeling about the place—I knew there was nobody there.

“I mean, we first dropped down only a couple of miles out of Ro-Atabri, the old capital. We were in the heart of ancient Kolcorron itself. If there were any people living on Land, that’s where they would be found. It stands to reason that’s where they would be found.” Steenameert spoke fervently, as though he had a personal stake in convincing Toller that his ideas were valid.

“You’re probably correct,” Toller said. “Unless, of course, it is something to do with the ptertha. From what I’ve been taught, the worst of them infested Kolcorron, while the other side of the globe was comparatively free of them.”

Steenameert became even more intense. “The second great discovery we made is that the ptertha on Land are colorless—just like those on Overland. It appears that they have already reverted to their neutral state, sir. I suppose it was because the poison they developed for use against humans had done what was required of it; and now they are in a state of readiness to war against any other type of creature which threatens brakka trees.”

“That’s very interesting,” Toller said, but—belying his words—his attention wandered as the image of Countess Vantara’s face began to swim before his mind’s eye. I wonder how I can arrange to see her again. And how long will it take?

“It seems to me,” Steenameert was saying, “that the logical thing to do now is to mount a proper expedition. Lots of ships, well-equipped and carrying settlers, to reclaim the Old World—just as King Prad predicted we would.”

Toller had half-consciously noted earlier that Steenameert was unusually well-spoken for a ranker, and now it came to him that the man also seemed better educated than might have been expected. He examined Steenameert with new interest.

“You’ve been pondering this matter, have you?” he said. “Is it your wish to go back to Land?”

“Yes, sir!” The smooth skin of Steenameert’s face grew pinker. “If Queen Daseene decides to send a fleet to Land I’ll be among the first to volunteer for the journey. And if you were likewise inclined, sir, I’d consider it an honor to serve under you.”

Toller considered the notion and his mind conjured up a somber-hued picture of a handful of airships roaming over landscapes of weed-shrouded ruins wherein lay millions of human skeletons. The vision was made even more unappealing by there being no place in it for Vantara. If he went to Land, he and she would literally be worlds apart. It shocked him to find that he was already according her such a prominent place in his life scheme, and with so little justification, but it showed the extent to which she had breached his emotional defenses.

“I can’t help you get back to the Old World,” he said to Steenameert. “I believe I have enough to keep me fully occupied right here on Overland.”

Chapter 2

Lord Cassyll Maraquine breathed deeply and pleasurably as he came out to the front steps of his home on the north side of the city of Prad. There had been rain during the latter part of the night and as a result the air was sweet and invigorating, making him wish he did not have to spend the morning in the stuffy confines of the royal residence. The palace was little more than a mile away—visible as a gleam of rose-colored marble beyond serried trees. He would have enjoyed making the journey on foot, but he never seemed to have time for such simple pleasures these days. Queen Daseene had grown highly irritable in her old age, and he dared not risk annoying her by being late for his appointment.

He went to his waiting carriage, nodding to the driver as he climbed in. The vehicle moved off immediately, drawn by the four bluehorns which were a symbol of Cassyl’s elevated status in Kolcorron. Until less than five years ago it had been forbidden by law to have a carriage which required more than one bluehorn, because the animals were so necessary to the developing economy of the planet, and even now teams of four were something of a rarity.

The equipage had been a gift from the Queen and it was politic for him to use it when going to visit her, even though his wife and son sometimes bantered with him about growing soft. He always took their criticism in good part, even though he had begun to suspect that he was indeed becoming too fond of luxury and pampered ways of living. The restlessness and craving for adventure which had characterized his father seemed to have skipped a generation and manifested themselves in the young Toller. On a number of occasions he had come close to falling out with the boy over his recklessness and his outmoded habit of wearing a sword, but he had never pressed matters too far. In the back of his mind there had always lurked the idea that he was acting out of jealousy of the hero worship Toller accorded his long-dead grandfather.

The thought of his son reminded Cassyll that the boy had been commander of the airship which had arrived only the previous aftday with advance dispatches from the Land expedition. In theory the contents of the dispatches were secret, but Cassyl’s secretary had already been able to pass him the word that the Old World had been found to be uninhabited and free of the deadly strain of ptertha which had forced humanity to flee across the interplanetary void. Queen Daseene had been quick to call a meeting of selected advisers, and the fact that Cassyll was required to attend was an indication of the direction in which her thoughts were turning. Manufacture was his field of expertise, and in this context the concept of manufacturing led inexorably towards skyships—which implied that Daseene wanted to reclaim the Old World and thus become the first ruler in history to extend her sway to two planets.

Cassyll had an instinctive distaste for the notion of conquest, reinforced by the fact that his father had died in a monumentally futile attempt to claim the third planet of the local system, but in this case none of the usual philosophical or humanitarian restraints applied. Overland’s sister world belonged to his people by right of birth, and if there was no indigenous population to be subjugated or slaughtered he could see no moral objection to a second interplanetary migration. As far as he was concerned, the only questions would relate to scale. How many skyships would Queen Daseene want, and how soon would she need them?

Toller will want to take part in the expedition, Cassyll thought. The crossing is bound to have its dangers, but that will only serve to make him more determined to go.

The carriage soon reached the river and turned west in the direction of the Lord Glo Bridge, which was the principal crossing for the palace. In the few minutes that he was on the curving boulevard Cassyll saw two steam-driven carriages, neither of which had been produced by his own factory, and again he found himself wishing he had more time for practical experimentation with that form of transport. There were many improvements yet to be made, particularly with regard to power transmission, but all his time seemed to be taken up with the administration of the Maraquine industrial empire.

As the carriage was crossing the ornate bridge the palace came into view directly ahead, a rectangular block which was rendered asymmetrical by the east wing and tower which Daseene had recently built as a memorial to her husband. The guards at the main gate saluted as Cassyll passed through. Only a few vehicles were waiting in the main forecourt at this early hour, and at once he noticed the official Sky Service coach which was used by Bartan Drumme, senior technical adviser to the Chief of Aerial Defense. To his surprise, he saw that Bartan himself was loitering by the coach. At the age of fifty, Drumme still retained a lean and wiry figure, and only a slight stiffness in his left shoulder—the result of an old battle wound—prevented him from moving like a young man. A whisper of intuition told Cassyll that Bartan was waiting to see him in advance of the official meeting.

“Good foreday!” Cassyll called out as he stepped down from his carriage. “I wish I could afford the time to dawdle around and take the air.”

“Cassyll!” Bartan smiled as he came forward to shake hands. The years had scarcely altered the boyishness of his round face. Its permanent expression of humorous irreverence often deceived people who were meeting him for the first time into thinking he was an intellectual lightweight, but over the years Cassyll had learned to respect him for his mental agility and toughness.

“Are you waiting to see me?” Cassyll said.

“Very good!” Bartan replied, raising his eyebrows. “How did you know?”

“You were as furtive as an urchin dallying by the bakery window. What is it, Bartan?”

“Let’s walk for a minute—there is time before the meeting.” Bartan led the way into an empty quarter of the forecourt where they were partially screened from view by a bed of spearblooms.

Cassyll began to chuckle. “Are we going to conspire against the throne?”

“In a way it is almost as serious as that,” Bartan said, coming to a halt. “Cassyll, you know that my position is officially described as scientific adviser to the head of the Sky Service. But you also know that—simply because I survived the Farland expedition—I’m somehow expected to have a magical awareness of all that goes on in the heavens and to advise her Majesty of anything of import, anything which might constitute a threat to the realm.”

“Suddenly you make me uneasy,” Cassyll said. “Is this anything to do with Land?”

“No—another planet.”

“Farland! Say what you’ve got to say, man! Out with it!” Cassyll felt a coolness on his brow as the dread thought heaved in his mind. Farland was the third planet of the local system, orbiting at roughly twice the distance from the sun as the Land-Overland pair, and throughout most of Kolcorron’s history it had been nothing more than an insignificant green speck amid the splendors of the night sky. Then, twenty-six years ago, a bizarre set of circumstances had led to a single ship venturing out from Overland and crossing millions of miles of hostile vacuum to reach the outer world. The expedition had been ill-fated—Cassyll’s father had not been the only one to die on that dank, rainy planet—and three of its members had returned to the home world with disturbing news.

Farland was inhabited by a race of humanoids whose technology was so advanced that they had the capability of annihilating the Overlanders’ civilization at a stroke. It was fortunate indeed for the humans that the Farlanders were an insular, inward-looking race with no interest in anything beyond the perpetual cloud-cover of their own world. That attitude of mind had been difficult for the territorially acquisitive humans to comprehend. Even after years had merged into decades with no sign of aggression from the enigmatic third planet, the fear of a sudden devastating attack from the skies had continued to lurk in some Overlanders’ minds. It was, as Cassyll Maraquine had just discovered, never far beneath the surface of their thoughts…

“Farland?” Bartan gave him a strange smile. “No—I’m talking of yet another planet. A fourth planet.”

In the silence that followed, Cassyll studied his friend’s face as though it were a puzzle to be solved. “This isn’t some manner of jest, is it? Are you claiming to have discovered a new planet?”

Bartan nodded unhappily. “I didn’t discover it personally. It wasn’t even one of my technicians. It was a woman—a copyist in the records office at the Grain Quay—who pointed it out to me.”

“What does it matter who actually saw it first?” Cassyll said. “The point is that you have a really interesting scientific discovery to—” He broke off as he realized he had not yet been told the whole story. “Why do you look so glum, old friend?”

“When Divare told me about the planet she said it was blue in color, and that made me think she could have made a mistake. You know how many blue stars there are in the sky—hundreds of them. So I asked her what size of telescope was needed to see it properly, and she said a very small one would do. In fact, she said it could be seen well with the naked eye.

“And she was right, Cassyll. She pointed it out to me last night… a blue planet… quite easy to see without optical aid… low in the west soon after sunset…”

Cassyll frowned. “And you checked it with a telescope?”

“Yes. It showed an appreciable disk even with an ordinary nautical instrument. It’s a planet, all right.”

“But…” Cassyll’s bafflement increased. “Why has it not been noticed before now?”

Bartan’s strange smile returned. “The only answer I can think of is that it wasn’t there to be observed before now.”

“That goes against everything we know about astronomy, doesn’t it? I have heard that new stars appear now and then, even if they don’t last very long, but how can another world simply materialize in our skies?”

“Queen Daseene is bound to ask me that selfsame question,” Bartan said. “She will also ask me how long it has been there, and I’ll have to say I don’t know; and she will then ask me what should be done about it, and I’ll have to say I don’t know that either; and then she will start wondering about the value of a scientific adviser who doesn’t know anything…”

“I think you’re fretting too much on that score,” Cassyll said. “The Queen is quite likely to regard it as nothing more than a mildly interesting astronomical phenomenon. What makes you think the blue planet poses any threat to us?”

Bartan blinked several times. “It’s a feeling I have. An instinct. Don’t tell me you’re not disturbed by this thing.”

“I’m deeply interested in it—and I want you to show the planet to me tonight—but why should I feel any sense of alarm?”

“Because …” Bartan glanced at the sky as though seeking inspiration. “Cassyll, it isn’t right! It’s unnatural … an omen… There is something afoot.”

Cassyll began to laugh. “But you’re the least superstitious person I know! Now you are talking as though this errant world has appeared in the firmament for the sole purpose of persecuting you.”

“Well …” Bartan gave a reluctant smile, reclaiming his youthful appearance. “Perhaps you’re right. I suppose I should have gone to you immediately. It wasn’t until Berise died that I realized how much I depended on her to keep me on an even keel.”

Cassyll nodded sympathetically, as always finding it difficult to accept that Berise Drumme had been dead for four years. Black-haired, vivacious, indomitable, Berise had given the impression that she would live forever, but she had been swept away within hours by one of those mysterious, sourceless ailments which brought it home to medical practitioners just how little they knew.

“It was a big blow to all of us,” Cassyll said. “Are you drinking?”

“Yes.” Bartan detected the concern in Cassyll’s eyes and touched his arm. “But not the way I was doing when I first met your father. I wouldn’t betray Berise in that way. A glass or two of wryberry in the evening is enough for me these days.”

“Come to my house tonight and bring a good telescope with you. We’ll have a beaker of something warming and take a look at it… There’s another job for you—we’ll need a name for this mysterious world.” Cassyll slapped his friend on the back and nodded towards the arched entrance of the palace, signifying that it was time to go in for their meeting with the Queen.

Once inside the shady building they went straight to the audience chamber through corridors which were almost empty. In King Chakkell’s day the palace had been very much the seat of government, and it had usually been thronged with officials, but Daseene’s policy had been to disperse general administration into separate buildings and to treat the palace as her private residence. Only matters such as aerial defense, in which she took a special interest, were considered important enough to merit her personal attention.

At the door to the chamber two ostiaries, sweating under the weight of their traditional brakka armor, recognized both men and admitted them without delay. The air in the room was so hot that Cassyll had to snatch for breath. In her old age Queen Daseene continually complained of being cold, and the quarters she used were kept at a temperature which most others found unbearable.

The only person in the room was Lord Sectar, the fiscal chancellor, whose job it was to control state spending. His presence was another indication that the Queen had plans to reclaim the Old World. He was a large and top-heavy man in his sixties, with a jowled face which was florid in normal conditions and in the excessive heat of the room had turned bright crimson. He nodded at the newcomers, pointed mutely at the floor and its buried heating pipes, rolled his eyes to express consternation, dabbed perspiration from his brow and went to stand by a partially-open window.

Cassyll responded to the dumb-show with an exaggerated shrug which mimed helplessness, and sat down on one of the curved benches which faced the high-backed royal chair. At once his thoughts were drawn back to the mystery of Bartan’s blue planet. It occurred to him that he had been altogether too casual in his acceptance of the reported phenomenon. How could a world simply materialize in the nearby regions of space? New stars had been seen to appear in the sky, and that being the case one could assume that stars sometimes disappeared, perhaps through explosion, leaving their retinues of planets behind. Cassyll could imagine such worlds blundering through the darkness of the interstellar void, but the chances of one of them joining the local system seemed vanishingly small. Perhaps the reason he did not feel the proper degree of astonishment was that in his heart he simply did not believe in the blue planet. A cloud of gas could have the semblance of solid rock, after all…

Cassyll stood up as a tipstaff opened the door and pounded the floor with his metal-shod rod to announce the arrival of the Queen. Daseene came into the room, dismissed the two ladies-in-waiting who had accompanied her as far as the door, and went to her chair. She was thin and frail-looking, seemingly burdened by the weight of her green silk robes, but there was undiminished authority in the way in which she signaled for the others to be seated.

“Thank you for your attendance here this foreday,” she said in a reedy but firm voice. “I know you have many demands upon your time, so we will go straight to the business of the meeting. As you are already aware, I have received an advance dispatch from the Land expedition. Its contents may be summarized as follows.” Daseene went on to describe the expedition’s findings in detail, doing so without hesitation or reference to notes. When she had finished she surveyed the group, eyes intent beneath the pearl-beaded coif without which she never appeared in public. As had happened before, it occurred to Cassyll that Daseene could if required have taken over the rulership of Kolcorron at any stage in her husband’s career and coped well with the task. It was perhaps surprising that she had usually chosen to remain in the background, except in a few cases where women’s rights had been concerned.

“I think you have already divined my purpose in calling this meeting,” she went on, speaking in formal High Kolcorronian. “In view of the fact that I shall have a full report from the expedition commanders in only three days from now, you may consider my actions precipitate—but I have reached a stage in life at which I am loathe to waste so much as a single hour.

“I intend to send a fleet to Land without delay.

“It is my intention to establish Ro-Atabri as a living capital again before I die; therefore I require decisions from you this very foreday. I also expect the practical work of implementing those decisions to begin as soon as the coming littlenight has ended. So let us be about our work, gentlemen! My first question for you is: how large should the fleet be? You first, Lord Cassyll—what are your views?”

Cassyll blinked as he rose to his feet. This was the style of rulership developed by the late King Chakkeli to suit the needs of pioneers on a new world, and he was not at all sure that it was apposite in the present situation.

“Your Majesty, as loyal subjects we all share your views about reclaiming the Old World, but may I respectfully point out that we are not in a state of dire emergency such as prevailed at the time of the Migration? As yet, we have no proof that the whole of Land is available to us, so the prudent course would be to follow up the first expedition with a primarily military force equipped with airships which could be reassembled on Land and used to circumnavigate and survey the planet.”

Daseene shook her head. “That course is too prudent for me, and I have no time for it—your father would not have counseled me thus.”

“My father’s day has passed, Majesty,” Cassyll said.

“Perhaps it has, perhaps it hasn’t, but I take your point about the airships. I propose to send… four. How does that number sound to you?”

Cassyll gave a slight bow, expressing irony. “That number sounds very good to me, Majesty.”

Daseene gave him a faint twisted smile to show that she had not missed the nuance, then addressed herself to Bartan Drumme. “Do you foresee any great difficulty in transporting airships to Land aboard skyships?”

“No, Majesty,” Bartan said, standing up. “We could adapt small airship gondolas to serve as skyship gondolas for the single crossing. On arrival on Land it would simply be a matter of disconnecting the balloons and replacing them with airship gasbags.”

“Excellent! That is the sort of positive attitude I like in my advisers.” Daseene looked meaningfully at Cassyll. “Now, my lord, how many skyships can be made ready for the crossing within, say, fifty days?”

Before Cassyll could speak Bartan coughed and said, “Forgive me, Majesty, I have something to report… a new development… something I feel should be brought to your attention at this point.”

“Has it any bearing on the discussions in hand?”

Bartan shot Cassyll a worried glance. “It probably has, Majesty.”

“In that case,” Daseene said impatiently, “you had better speak, but do it quickly.”

“Majesty, I … A new world has been discovered in our own planetary system.”

“A new world?” Daseene frowned. “What are you prattling about, Mister Drumme? There can’t be a new world.”

“I have observed it with my own eyes, Majesty. A blue planet … a fourth world in our local system…” The normally fluent Bartan was floundering as Cassyll had never seen him do before.

“How big is it?”

“We cannot decide that until we are sure how far away it is.”

“Very well then.” Daseene sighed. “How far away is this infant world of yours?”

Bartan looked deeply unhappy. “We cannot calculate that until we—”

“Until you know its size,” the Queen cut in. “Mister Drumme! We are all indebted to you for that little excursion into the marvelously exact science of astronomy, but it is my earnest wish that you should confine your remarks to the subject already in hand. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Majesty,” Bartan mumbled, sinking down on to the bench.

“Now…” Daseene suddenly shivered, drew her robes closer together at her throat and looked about the room. “No wonder we freeze to death in here! Who opened that window? Close it immediately before we perish from the cold.”

Lord Sectar, lips moving silently, got up and closed the window. His embroidered jacket was heavily stained with sweat and he was ostentatiously mopping his brow as he returned to his place.

“You don’t look well,” Daseene told him tersely. “You should see a doctor.” She returned her attention to Cassyil and repeated her question about the number of skyships that could be available within fifty days.

“Twenty,” Cassyil said at once, deciding that an optimistic estimate was called for while the Queen was in her present mood. As head of the Sky Service Supplies Board he was in a good position to judge the quantity of ships and associated materiel which could be made ready for an interplanetary crossing as well as being spared from normal function. Ever since the discovery that Farland was inhabited a number of defensive stations had been maintained in the weightless zone midway between the two sister worlds. For some years the great wooden structures had been manned, but as public fears of an attack from Farland had gradually abated the crews had been withdrawn. Now the stations and their attendant groups of fighter jets were maintained by means of regular balloon ascents to the weightless zone. The schedule of flights was undemanding, and Cassyil estimated that about half the ships in the Sky Service fleet were available for extraordinary duties.

“Twenty ships,” Daseene said, looking slightly disappointed. “Still, I suppose that’s enough to be getting on with.”

“Yes, Majesty—especially as we are not obliged to think in terms of an invasion fleet. One can foresee continuous traffic between Overland and Land, sparse at first, but gradually building up until—”

“It’s no use, Lord Cassyil,” the Queen interrupted. “Again you are advocating a sedate approach to this enterprise, and again I say to you I have no time for that. The return to Land has to be decisive, forceful, triumphant … a clear-cut statement which posterity cannot misread…

“It may help you to gauge the strength of my feelings in the matter if I tell you that I have just given one of my granddaughters—the Countess Vantara—permission to take part in the reclamation. She is an experienced airship captain, and will be able to play a useful role in the initial survey of the planet.”

Cassyll bowed in acquiescence, and there followed an intensive planning session which—in the space of a single hour—was intended to shape the future of two worlds.

On quitting the overheated atmosphere of the palace Cassyll decided against returning home immediately. A glance at the sky showed him that he had some thirty minutes in hand before the sun would slide behind the eastern rim of Land. He had time for a quiet walk in the tree-lined avenues of the city’s administrative area. It would be good to get some fresh air into his system before he responded to the ever-present call of his business commitments.

Accordingly, he dismissed his coachman, strolled down to the Lord Glo Bridge and turned east along the bank of the river, a route which would take him past several governmental buildings. The streets were busy with the flurry of activity which usually preceded the littlenight meal and the daily change of tempo in human affairs. Now that the city was half-a-century old it appeared mature to Cassyll’s eyes, with a permanence which was part of his life, and he wondered if he would ever make the journey to Land to view the results of millennia of civilization. She had not said as much, but he suspected it was in Queen Daseene’s heart—age-weakened though she was—to return to the world of her birth and perhaps end her days there. Cassyll could empathize with such feelings, but Overland was the only home he had ever known and he had no desire to leave it, especially as so much work remained to be done in so many different spheres. Perhaps, also, he lacked the spirit or courage to face that awesome journey.

He was drawing close to the Neldeever Plaza, which housed the headquarters of the four branches of the armed services, when he espied a familiar blond head projecting above the stream of pedestrians coming towards him. Cassyll had not seen his son for perhaps a hundred days, and he felt a pang of affection and pride as—almost with the eyes of a stranger—he noted the clear-eyed good looks, splendid physique and the easy confidence with which the young man wore his skycaptain’s blue uniform.

“Toller!” he called out as their courses brought them together.

“Father!” Toller’s expression had been abstracted and stern, as though something weighed heavily on his mind, but his face lit up with recognition. He extended his arms and the two men embraced while the flow of pedestrians parted around them.

“This is a happy coincidence,” Cassyll said as they drew apart. “Were you on your way home?”

Toller nodded. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get home last night, but it was very late before I got my ship safely berthed, and there were certain problems…”

“What manner of problems?”

“Nothing to cloud a sunny day like this,” Toller said with a smile. “Let’s hasten homewards. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to one of mother’s littlenight spreads after an eternity of shipboard rations.”

“You appear to thrive on those selfsame rations.”

“Not as well as you on proper food,” Toller said, trying to pinch a roll of fat at Cassyll’s waist as they began to walk in the direction of the family home. The two men exchanged the kind of inconsequential family talk which, better than deliberated speeches, restores a relationship after a long separation. They were nearing the Square House, named after the Maraquine residence in old Ro-Atabri, before the conversation came round to weightier affairs.

“I’ve just been to the palace,” Cassyll said, “and have come away with news which should interest you—we are to send a twenty-strong fleet to Land.”

“Yes, we’re entering a truly wondrous era—two worlds, but one nation.”

Cassyll glanced at his son’s nearer shoulder flash, the saffron-and-blue emblem which showed that he was qualified to pilot both skyships and airships. “There’ll be a deal of work for you there.”

“For me?” Toller gave a humorless chuckle. “No thank you, father. I admit I’d like to see the Old World some day, but at present it is one great enamel house and I don’t relish the prospect of clearing away millions of skeletons.”

“But the journey! The adventure! I thought you’d jump at the chance.”

“I have quite enough to occupy me right here on Overland for the time being,” Toller said, and for a moment the somber expression Cassyll had noted earlier returned to his face.

“Something is troubling you,” he said. “Are you going to keep it to yourself?”

“Have I that option?”

“No.”

Toller shook his head in mock despair. “I thought not. You know, of course, that it was I who picked up the advance messenger from Land. Well, another ship appeared on the scene at the last moment—unwarranted—and tried to scoop up the prize from under my very nose. Naturally I refused to give way…”

“Naturally!”

“… and there was a minor collision. As there was no damage to my ship I forbore making an official entry in the log—even though the other commander was entirely to blame—but this morning I was informed that an incident report had been filed against me. I have to face Sky-commodore Tresse tomorrow.”

“There’s no cause for you to worry,” Cassyll said, relieved to hear that nothing more serious was afoot. “I will speak to Tresse this aftday and acquaint him with the real facts.”

“Thanks, but I think I am obliged to deal with this kind of thing by myself. I should have covered my flank by making an entry in the flight log, but I can call on enough witnesses to prove my case. The whole thing is really very trivial. A flea-bite…”

“But one you continue to scratch!”

“It’s the sheer deceitfulness involved,” Toller said angrily. “1 trusted that woman, father. I trusted her, and this is how she repays me.”

“Aha!” Cassyll almost smiled as he began to plumb beneath the surface of what he had heard. “You didn’t say that this unprincipled commander was a woman.”

“Didn’t I?” Toller replied, his voice now casual. “It has no relevance to anything, but it so happens that she was one of the Queen’s brood of granddaughters—the Countess Vantara.”

“Handsome woman, is she?”

“It is possible that some men might… What are you trying to say, father?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. Perhaps I’m a little curious about the lady because this is the second time within the span of a couple of hours that her name has been mentioned to me.” From the corner of his eye Cassyll saw Toller give him a surprised glance, but—unable to resist tantalizing his son—he volunteered no further information. He walked in silence, shading his eyes from the sun in order to get a better view of a large group of ptertha which were following the course of the river. The near-invisible spheres were swooping and bounding just above the surface of the water, buoyed up by a slight breeze.

“That’s quite a coincidence,” Toller finally said. “What was said to you?”

“About what?”

“About Vantara. Who spoke of her?”

“No less a person than the Queen,” Cassyll said, watching his son carefully. “It appears that Vantara has volunteered to serve with the fleet we are sending to Land, and it is an indication of the strength of the Queen’s feelings towards the enterprise that she is giving the young woman her blessing.”

There was another protracted silence from Toller before he said, “Vantara is an airship pilot—what work is there for her on the Old World?”

“Rather a lot, I’d say. We’re sending four airships whose task it will be to circle the entire globe and prove there are no disputants to Queen Daseene’s sovereignty. It sounds quite an adventure to me, but of course there will be all the privations of shipboard life—and you’ve had your fill of service rations.”

“I don’t care about that,” Toller exclaimed. “I want to go!”

“To Land! But only a moment ago…”

Toller halted Cassyll by catching his arm and turning to face him. “No more play-acting, father, please! I want to take a ship to Land. You will see to it that my application is successful, won’t you?”

“I’m not at all sure that I can,” Cassyll said, suddenly uneasy at the prospect of his only son—who was still a boy in spite of all his pretensions to manhood—setting off across the perilous bridge of thin air which linked the two worlds.

Toller produced a broad smile. “Don’t be so modest, father of mine. You’re on so many committees, boards, tribunals, councils and panels that—in your own quiet way, of course—you practically run Kolcorron. Now, tell me that I’m going to Land.”

“You’re going to Land,” Cassyll said compliantly.

That night, while he was waiting for Bartan Drumme to arrive with a telescope, Cassyll thought he could identify the true cause of his misgivings about Toller’s proposed flight to the Old World. Toller and he had a harmonious and satisfying relationship, but there was no denying the fact that the boy had always been unduly influenced by the stories and legends surrounding his paternal grandfather. Apart from the striking physical resemblance, the two had many mental attributes in common—impatience, courage, idealism and quickness of temper among them—but Cassyll suspected that the similarities were not as great as the younger Toller pretended. His grandfather had been much harder, capable of total ruthlessness when he deemed it necessary, possessed of an obduracy which would lead him to choose certain death rather than betray a principle.

Cassyll was glad that Kolcorronian society was gentler and safer than it had been even a few decades ago, that the world in general offered fewer chances for young Toller to get himself into the kind of situation where—simply through trying to live up to self-imposed standards—he might forfeit his life. But now that he was committing himself to fly to the Old World those chances were bound to increase, and it seemed to Cassyll that the ghost of the long-dead Toller was stirring into life, stimulated by the scent of dangerous adventure, preparing to exert its influence on a vulnerable young man. And even though he was thinking about his own father, Cassyll Maraquine devoutly wished that that restless spirit would confine itself to the grave, and to the past…

The welcome sounds of Bartan Drumme being admitted by a servant at the front entrance roused Cassyll from his chair. He went down the broad staircase and greeted his friend, who was carrying a wooden-tubed telescope and tripod. The servant offered to take the telescope, but Cassyll dismissed him, and he and Bartan carried the heavy instrument up to a balcony which afforded a good view to the west. The light reflected from Land was strong enough for reading, but nevertheless the dome of the sky was thronged with countless bright stars and hundreds of spirals of varying sizes and shapes, ranging from circular whirlpools to the narrowest of ellipses. No less than six major comets were visible that night, splaying fingers of radiance across the heavens, and meteors darted almost continuously, briefly linking one celestial feature to another.

“You surprised me this foreday, you know,” Cassyll said. “Nobody I know can talk like you, regardless of the audience and circumstances, but you seemed flummoxed for some reason. What was the matter with you?”

“Guilt,” Bartan said simply, raising his head from the task of setting up the tripod.

“Guilt!”

“Yes. It’s this damned fourth planet, Cassyll. Every instinct I have tells me that it does not bode well for us. It shouldn’t be there. Its presence is an affront to our understanding of nature, a sign that something is going terribly amiss, and yet I am unable to convince anyone—not even you—that we have cause for alarm. I feel that I have betrayed my Queen and country through my sheer ineptness with words, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

Cassyll gave a reassuring chuckle. “Let me see for myself this harbinger which troubles you so much—anything which stills the famous Drumme tongue must be worthy of careful perusal.”

He was still in a mood of comparative levity when, having prepared and aligned the telescope for him, Bartan stepped aside and invited him to look into the eyepiece. The first thing to meet Cassyll’s gaze was a fuzzy disk of bluish brilliance which resembled a soap bubble filled with sparkling gas, but one touch on the focusing lever achieved a remarkable result.

There before him, suddenly, swimming in the indigo depths of the universe, was a world—complete with polar snow caps, oceans, land masses and the white curlicues of weather systems.

It had no right to exist, but it did exist, and in that moment of visual and intellectual confrontation Cassyll’s first thought—with no justification he could understand—was for the future safety of his son.

Chapter 3

The height gauge consisted of a vertical scale from the top of which a small weight was suspended by a delicate coiled spring. Its operating principle was so simple and effective—as a ship rose higher and gravity lessened the weight moved upwards on the scale—that only one modification had been introduced in fifty years. The spring, which would once have been a hair-like shaving of brakka wood, was now made of fine-drawn steel. Metallurgy had made great strides in Kolcorron in recent decades, and the guaranteed consistency of steel springs made gauges easy to calibrate.

Toller studied the instrument carefully, making sure it indicated zero gravity, then floated himself out of the cabin and over to the ship’s rail. The fleet had reached the weightless zone in the middle of a daylight period, which meant that the sun’s rays were washing across him in a direction parallel with the deck. In one direction the universe appeared its normal dark blue, plentifully scattered with stars and silver spirals, but in the other there was a surfeit of light which made viewing difficult. Below his feet, Overland was a huge disk exactly bisected into night and day, the latter half making its own contribution to the general luminance; and over his head, although occulted by the ship’s balloon, the Old World was similarly adding to the confusion of radiance.

On a level with Toller, starkly floodlit by the sun, were the three other balloons which supported airship gondolas in place of the lightweight box structures normally used by skyships. The smooth outline of each gondola had been marred by the addition of a vertically mounted engine, the exhaust cone of which projected well below the keel. Further down the sky, ranged in groups of four against the glowing complexities of Overland, were the sixteen ships making up the main part of the fleet. Seen from above, their balloons looked perfectly spherical and had the apparent solidity of planets, with load tapes and lines of stitching to represent meridians. The roar of jet exhausts filled the sky, occasionally reaching an accidental climax as a number of ships fired their pulsed bursts in unison.

Toller was using binoculars to search for the circular group of permanent defense stations, and wishing for a speedy method of finding them regardless of the disposition of sun and planets. The nub of the problem was that he had no real idea which direction was most likely to yield results. His reading of the height gauge could be out by tens of miles, and the convection currents which helped make the air bridge between the world so cold often gave ascents lateral dispersions of the same order. Large though they were on the human scale, the stations were insignificant in the chill reaches of the central blue.

“Have you lost something, young Maraquine?” The voice was that of Commissioner Trye Kettoran, official leader of the expedition, who had chosen to fly in one of the modified ships. He was subject to low-gravity sickness and had hoped that the comfort of an enclosed cabin would lessen the severity of his attacks. His expectations had been in vain, but he was enduring his illness with great fortitude in spite of his age. At seventy-one, he was by far the oldest member of the expedition. He had been appointed by Queen Daseene precisely because he had clear recollections of the old capital of Ro-Atabri and therefore was well qualified to report on present conditions there.

“I have orders to inspect the Inner Defense Group,” Toller said. “The Service was hard pressed to loft twenty ships for this expedition, and as a result we are forced to omit a fifty-day inspection—but if I see anything going seriously wrong I am empowered to divert one of the expedition’s ships for as long as it takes to put things right.”

“Quite a burden of responsibility for a young captain,” Kettoran said, his long pale face showing faint signs of animation. “But—even with the aid of those splendid glasses—what kind of inspection can you carry out at a range of several miles?”

“A superficial one,” Toller admitted. “But in truth all we have to concern ourselves with at this early stage is the general alignment of the stations. If one is seen to have separated from the others, and to be drifting towards Overland or Land, it is simply a matter of nudging it back into the datum plane.”

“If one begins to fall, won’t they all follow suit?”

Toller shook his head. “We are not dealing with inert pieces of rock. The stations contain many kinds of chemicals—pikon, halvell, firesalt, and so on—and a slight change in conditions can lead to the production of gases which could leak through a hull if a seal weakens. The thrust produced may have no more force than a maiden’s sigh, but let it go on for a long time—then augment it with the growing attraction of gravity—and, all at once, one is confronted with an unruly leviathan which is determined to dash itself upon one world or the other. In the Sky Service we consider it prudent to take corrective action long before that stage is reached.”

“You have quite a way with words, young Maraquine,” Kettoran said, his breath pluming whitely through the scarf which was protecting his face from the intense cold of the weightless zone. “Have you ever considered diplomacy as a career?”

“No, but I may have to if I fail to locate these accursed wooden sausage skins before long.”

“I will help you—anything to take my mind off the fact that my stomach wants to rise into my mouth.” Kettoran knuckled his watery eyes with a gloved hand, began surveying the sky and within a few seconds—to Toller’s surprise—gave a satisfied exclamation.

“Is that what we’re in search of?” he said, pointing horizontally to the east, past the three modified skyships. “That line of purple lights…”

“Purple lights? Where?” Toller tried in vain to see something unusual in the indicated part of the sky.

“There! There! Why can’t you… ?” Kettoran’s words faded into a sigh of disappointment. “You’re too late—they have gone now.”

Toller gave a snort of combined amusement and exasperation. “Sir, there are no lights—purple or otherwise—on the stations. They have reflectors which shine with a steady white glow, if you happen to catch them at the right angle. Perhaps you saw a meteor.”

“I know what a meteor looks like, so don’t try to—” Kettoran broke off again and pointed at another part of the heavens. “There’s your precious Defense Group over there. Don’t try to tell me it isn’t, because I can see a line of white specks. Am I right? I am right!”

“You’re right,” Toller agreed, training his binoculars on the stations and marveling at the speed with which luck had directed the old man’s gaze to the correct portion of the sky. “Well done, sir!”

“Call yourself a pilot! Why, if it hadn’t been for this unruly stomach of mine I would have…” Kettoran gave a violent sneeze, retreated into the cabin and closed the door.

Toller smiled as he heard further sneezes punctuated by muffled swearing. In the five days of the ascent to the weightless zone he had grown to like the commissioner for his humorous grumpiness, and to respect him for his stoicism in the face of the severe discomforts of the flight. Most men of his age would have found some means of evading the responsibility thrust upon him by Queen Daseene, but Kettoran had accepted the charge with good grace and seemed determined to treat it as yet another in a lifetime of routine chores undertaken on behalf of the ruler.

Toller returned his attention to the defense stations and was relieved to see that they formed a perfectly straight line. When he had first qualified as a skyship pilot he had enjoyed the occasional maintenance ascents to the stations. Entering the dark and claustrophobic hulls had been a near-mystical experience which had seemed to conjure up the spirit of his grandfather and his heroic times, but the futility of the so-called Inner Defensive Group’s very existence had quickly dominated his thoughts. If there was no threat from Farland the stations were unnecessary; if the enigmatic Farlanders ever were to invade their technological superiority would render the stations irrelevant. The wooden shells were merely a token defense which had in some measure eased the late King Chakkell’s mind, and to Toller their principal value was that maintaining them was a way of preserving the nation’s interplanetary capabilities.

Having satisfied himself that there was no need to make a diversion from the vertical course, he lowered the binoculars and gazed thoughtfully at the furthermost of the other three ships making up his echelon. It was the one commanded by Vantara. Ever since the foreday he had learned that the Countess was taking part in the expedition he had been undecided about which approach to use in future dealings with her. Would an air of aloofness and dignified reproval wring an apology from her and thus bring them together? Or would it be better to appear cheerful and unaffected, treating the incident of her report as the sort of boisterous skirmish which is bound to occur when two free spirits collide?

The fact that he, the injured party, was the one who planned reconciliation had occasioned him some unease, but all his scheming had proved redundant. Throughout the preparations for the flight Vantara had managed to keep her distance from him, and had done so with an effortless grace which denied him the consolation of feeling that he was important enough to be evaded.

One hour after the fleet had passed through the datum plane the group of defense stations had shrunk to virtual invisibility, and the pull of Land’s gravity was imperceptibly adding to the ships’ speed. A sunwriter message from General Ode, the fleet commander, was flashed back from the flagship instructing all pilots to carry out the inversion maneuver.

Glad of the break in the shipboard routine, Toller drew himself along a safety line to the midsection, to where Lieutenant Correvalte was at the engine controls. Correvalte, who was newly qualified, looked relieved when he heard that he was not expected to handle the inversion. He relinquished the controls and positioned himself a short distance away as Toller began the delicate task. The ship had four slim acceleration struts which joined the gondola to the balloon’s equatorial load tape, and which gave the whole assemblage the modest degree of stiffness required for flying in the jet propulsion mode. Although the balloon itself was very light, a flimsy envelope of varnished linen, the gas within it had a mass of many tons, with inertia to match, and had to be coaxed with infinite care when any change of direction was called for. A pilot who was too enthusiastic in his use of the ship’s lateral jets would soon And that he had driven the top end of a strut through the envelope. While not necessarily serious in low-gravity conditions, that kind of damage was difficult and time-consuming to put right—and the offender was always given good cause to regret his error.

For what seemed a long time after Toller had begun firing one of the tiny cross-mounted jets it seemed that its thrust was having no effect, then with grudging slowness the great disk of Overland made its way up the sky. As it showed itself above the ship’s rail, hanging before the crew in all its painted vastness, the immense convexity that was the Old World emerged from behind the balloon and drifted downwards. There was a moment during which, simply by turning his head from side to side, Toller could see two worlds laid out in their entirety for his inspection—the twin arenas in which his kind had fought all the battles of evolution and history.

Superimposed on each planet, and similarly lit from the side, were the other ships of the fleet. They were in varying attitudes—each pilot inverting at his own pace—arcs of white condensation from their lateral jets complementing the global cloud patterns thousands of miles below. And embracing the spectacle was the frozen luminous panoply of the universe—the circles and spirals and streamers of silver radiance, the fields of brilliant stars with blue and white predominant, the silent-hovering comets and the darting meteors.

It was a sight which both thrilled and chilled Toller, making him proud of his people’s courage in daring to cross the interplanetary void in frail constructs of cloth and wood, and at the same time reminding him that—for all their ambitions and dreams—men were little more than microbes laboring from one grain of sand to another.

He would not have cared to admit as much to any of his peers, but it was a comfort to him when the inversion maneuver had been completed and the ship was sinking back into humanity’s natural domain. From now on the air would grow thicker and warmer, less inimical to life, and all his preoccupations would begin to resume their normal importance.

“That’s how it’s done,” he said, returning control of the vessel to Correvalte. “Get the mechanic to convert the engine back to burner mode, and tell him to make sure that the heaters are working properly.”

Toller emphasized the final point because, although the aerial environment would indeed grow less harsh as the ship lost height, the direction of the airflow over the ship would be reversed. The considerable amount of heat lost from the balloon’s surface would be borne upwards and away in the slipstream instead of bathing the gondola with an invisible balm which helped protect its occupants from the deadly coldness of the mid-passage.

The engine had to be shut down while being converted from a thrust creator to a producer of hot gas for conventional aerostatic flight, and Toller took advantage of the period of quietude to go into the forward cabin in search of nourishment. Nobody had ever explained the baffling sensation of falling which men experienced in and close to the weightless zone, but it had been spoiling his appetite for more than a day and as a result he was in the ambivalent position of needing food while not actually wanting it. The selection of fare he found in the provision nets—strips of dried meat and fish, cereals and puckered fruit and berries—was less than seductive. He rummaged through what was available and finally settled for a slab of grain cake which he chewed upon without enthusiasm.

“Don’t despair, young Maraquine!” Commissioner Kettoran, who had wedged himself into a seat at the captain’s table, was feigning cheerfulness. “We’ll soon be in Ro-Atabri, and once we’re there I’ll take you to some of the best eating places in the world. Mind you, they’ll be in ruins—but I’ll take you to them anyway.” Kettoran winked at his secretary, Parlo Wotoorb—who was across the table from him—and both old men hunched their thin shoulders in amusement, looking strangely alike.

Still chewing, Toller nodded gravely to acknowledge the witticism. Kettoran and Wotoorb had been contemporaries of his grandfather. They had actually known him—a privilege he envied—and both had survived to quite an advanced age with no apparent erosion of their faculties. Toller doubted that he would reach his seventies with the same degree of fortitude and resilience. It had always seemed to him that there was a special quality about the men and women who had lived through the great events of recent history—the ptertha plague, the Migration, the conquest of Overland, the war between the sister worlds. It was as though their characters and spirits had been tempered in the crucible of their times, whereas he was destined to live through a fallow period, never knowing for sure if he had it within him to respond to, and as a consequence be ennobled by, a great challenge. Try as he might, he could not imagine the tamed and stable circumstances of his day yielding up adventures which were in any way comparable with those which had earned Toller the Kingslayer his place in legend. Even the journey between the worlds, which had once been the dangerous limit of men’s experience, had become a routine matter…

A sudden brightness washed in through the portholes on the left side of the room—momentarily rivaling the prisms of sunlight which slanted across the table from the opposite wall—and somebody outside on the open deck gave a howl of fright.

“What was that?” Toller was starting for the door, hindered by the lack of gravity, when there came an appalling burst of sound, akin to the loudest thunderclap he had ever heard. The room tilted and small objects chattered noisily in their brackets.

Echoes of the thunder were still booming and surging when Toller got the door open and was able to propel himself out of the cabin. The ship was twisting in violent air currents which drew groans and creaks from the rigging. Lieutenant Correvalte and the mechanic were clinging to lines by the engine, their shocked faces turned towards the north-west. Toller looked in the same direction and saw a restless, swirling core of fiery brilliance which quickly dwindled into nothingness. All at once the sky was placid again, the silence complete except for faint cries coming from men on other ships.

“Was it a meteor?” Toller called out, aware of the question’s superfluity.

Correvalte nodded. “A big one, sir. It missed us by about a mile, perhaps more, but for a moment I thought our time had come. I never want to see anything like that again.”

“You probably never will,” Toller said reassuringly. “Get the rigger to check the envelope for damage, particularly around the strut attachments. What is the fellow’s name?”

“Getchert, sir.”

“Well, tell Getchert to look lively—it’s time he did something to earn his salt on this trip.”

As Correvalte moved away towards the aft superstructure, where the ordinary crew members were housed, Toller gripped a transverse line and drew himself to the rail. Now that the inversion had been carried out he could see only the ships of his own echelon and, below him, the balloons of the four leading vessels, but all seemed well with the fleet in general. He had made many ascents to the weightless zone and as a result had become inured to the thought of a meteor actually striking a ship. It was one of the rare cases in which he could draw comfort from thinking about man’s insignificance in the scale of cosmic events. His ships were so small and the universe so large that it would be quite unreasonable for one of the blazing cosmic bullets to find a human mark.

It was ironic that only minutes earlier he had been privately bemoaning the humdrum nature of interplanetary flight, but if there were to be dangers he wanted them to be of a type which could be challenged and overcome. There was precious little glory to be wrung from casual extermination by a blind instrument of nature, a commonplace fragment of rock speeding through the void from…

Toller raised his head, directing his gaze to the south-east, to the part of the sky where the meteor must have originated, and was intrigued when he picked out what looked like a tiny cloud of golden fireflies. The cloud was roughly circular and was expanding rapidly, its individual components brightening with each passing second. He stared at it, bemused, unable to recall having seen anything similar amid the sky’s sparkling treasures, and then—like the abrupt clarification of an image in an optical system—his sense of scale and perspective returned, and there came a terrible realization.

He was looking at a swarm of meteors which appeared to be heading directly towards the fleet!

His understanding of the spectacle transformed it, seeming to increase the tempo of events. The shower opened radially like a carnivorous blossom, silently encompassing his field of vision, and he knew then that it could be hundreds of miles across. Unable to move or even to cry out, he gripped the ship’s rail and watched the blazing entities fan ever outwards, racing towards the peripheries of his vision, still in utter silence despite the awesome energies being expended.

I’m safe, Toller told himself. I’m safe for the simple reason that I’m too small a prey for these fire-monsters. Even the ships are too small…

But something new was happening. A radical change was taking place. The obsidian horsemen from the far side of the cosmos, who had pursued their courses through total vacuum for millions of years, had at last encountered a denser medium, and they were destroying themselves against barriers of air, the gaseous fortifications which protected the twin planets from cosmic intruders.

Favorable though the encounter was for any creature living on the surface of Land or Overland, it boded ill for travelers taken by surprise at the narrowest point of the bridge of air between the two worlds. The meteors, racked by intolerable stresses, began to explode, and as they shattered into thousands of diverging splinters they were bound to become less discriminatory in their choice of targets.

Toller flinched as, with a wash of light and overlapping peals of thunder, the disintegrating meteors momentarily filled the whole sky. Suddenly they were behind him. He turned and saw the entire phenomenon in reverse, the great disk of radiance contracting as it raced into the remoteness of space. The main difference in its appearance was that there was less corpuscularity—the circle was a nearly uniform area of swirling flame. On leaving the last tenuous fringes of the twin worlds’ atmosphere, the fiery bullets were deprived of fuel and quickly faded from sight. A numb silence engulfed the tower of ships.

How did we survive? Toller thought. How in the name of…

He became aware of shouting from somewhere not far above him. There came a blurry explosion, typical of the pikon-halvell reaction, and he knew that at least one of the ships had been less fortunate than his own.

“Put us on our side,” he shouted to Lieutenant Correvalte, who was frozen at the control station. Toller clung to the rail, impatiently straining to see upwards past the curvatures of the balloon, while Correvalte began the regulated intermittent firing of one of the lateral jets.

A few seconds later Toller’s eyes were greeted by the bizarre spectacle of a bluehorn drifting downwards in the sunlit air, against the background of daytime stars. The explosion must have hurled it clear of the gondola in which it was being transported. It was barking in terror and lashing out with hoofed feet as it imperceptibly fell towards Land.

Toller turned his attention to the stricken ship, now coming into view. Its balloon had been reduced to a formless canopy of fabric panels. All four sides of the gondola had been blasted away from the base, and were still spinning slowly as part of an irregular ring which was made up of the figures of men, boxes of stores, coils of rope and general debris. Here and there among the floating confusion were flashes and fizzlings which emitted billows of white condensation as small quantities of pikon and halvell encountered each other and, not being confined, burned harmlessly against the pastel background of Overland.

Crew members from the other three ships of the same echelon were already launching themselves out from the sides of their vessels to begin rescue work. Toller scanned the struggling human figures which were part of the central chaos, and felt a pang of relief as he reached the unexpected conclusion that none of them was dead. He guessed that the gondola had received a glancing blow from a tiny meteor fragment and had turned on its side, thereby causing some of the green and purple power crystals to mingle and ignite, perhaps in the engine hoppers.

“Are we under attack? Are we to die?” The quavering words came from Commissioner Kettoran, his long pale face appearing at the door of the cabin.

Toller was about to explain what had happened when he noticed a movement at the rail of Vantara’s ship. She had come to the side, accompanied by the smaller and less impressive figure of the lieutenant who had been with her at the time of their inauspicious meeting. Even at a distance the sight of the princess was enough to disturb Toller’s composure. He saw that Vantara and her officer seemed to be concentrating their attention on the still-struggling bluehorn. The animal had lost all the momentum imparted to it by the explosion, and was apparently in a fixed position roughly midway between Vantara’s ship and Toller’s.

He knew, however, that the permanence of the spatial relationship was an illusion. The bluehorn and the ships were all in the grip of Land’s gravity, and all were falling towards the surface thousands of miles below. The all-important difference was that the ships were receiving some degree of support from their hot air balloons, whereas the bluehorn was falling freely. This close to the weightless zone the discrepancy in speeds was hard to detect, but it was there nevertheless, and in accordance with the laws of physics was steadily increasing. Unless corrective action was taken quite quickly the bluehorn—a valuable animal—would be condemned to that fatal plunge, lasting more than a day and a night, which every skyman had experienced in bad dreams.

Vantara and the lieutenant, whose name Toller had forgotten, were busy with their hands and within seconds he realized why. They propelled themselves over the rail with weightless ease, and he saw they had donned their personal flight packs. The units, powered by miglign gas, were a far cry from the old pneumatic systems hastily invented at the time of the interplanetary war, but in spite of their advanced design they were tricky enough for the unpracticed operator.

Evidence of that fact came almost immediately when Vantara, failing to keep the thrust in line with her center of gravity, went into a slow tumble and had to be righted and steadied by her companion. It occurred to Toller at once that the two women, obviously intent on retrieving the bluehorn, could be getting themselves into real danger. The terrified beast was still lashing out with its plate-sized hooves, one blow from which would be sufficient to pulp a human skull.

“We had a close call,” he shouted over his shoulder to Kettoran as he snatched a flight unit from a nearby rack. “Ask Correvalte about it!”

He went over the rail and sprang out into the sunlit air with the unit still in his hand. The twin worlds with all their intricate detail filled most of the sky on each side of him, and the space between was largely occupied by ranks of bulbous ships, plus wreaths of smoke and condensation through which miniature humanoid figures could be seen going about their enigmatic errands. Daytime stars and the brightest of the nebulae and comets effectively completed a full sphere of visual phenomena.

Toller, who had made a point of mastering the standard flight unit, used his drift time to strap the pack securely around his torso. He brought himself into a good alignment and fired a long burst which took him directly towards the bluehorn. The fierce chill of the mid world region, enhanced by slipstream, clawed at his eyes and mouth.

Vantara and her lieutenant were now close to the bluehorn, which was still barking and crowing in terror. They edged nearer to it and were beginning to uncoil the rope they had brought when Toller used his retro jet to bring himself to a halt close by. It was a long time since he had been within speaking distance of Vantara, and—in spite of the bizarre circumstances—he felt a tingling awareness of her physical presence. The very molecules of his body seemed to be reacting to an invisible aura which surrounded her. Her oval face, partially shaded by the cowl of her skysuit, was as lovely as he remembered it—enigmatic, utterly feminine, unnerving in its perfection.

“Why can’t we meet in ordinary places, the way other people do?” Toller said.

The countess eyed him briefly, turned away with no change of expression and spoke to her lieutenant. “We’ll bind the back legs first—it would be easier that way.”

“I would like to try calming the beast down first,” the lieutenant replied. “It’s too risky to go behind it while it’s so fretful.”

“Nonsense!” Vantara spoke with the brisk confidence of one who had had extensive stables at her disposal since childhood. Forming a wide noose with the rope, she sailed closer to the bluehorn on a plume of miglign condensation. Toller was about to call out a warning when the animal, which was continually twisting its head around and had a full view of its surroundings, struck out with both hind legs. One of its enormous hooves grazed Vantara’s hip, catching the material of her suit without impacting on her body. The imparted force put her into a spin which was checked almost at once by the cold-stiffened rope she was still holding. Had the bluehorn’s hoof connected with her pelvis she would have been seriously injured, and it was apparent that she understood the fact because her face was pale when she regained a stable attitude.

“Why did you pull on the line?” she demanded of her lieutenant, her voice stinging with anger. “You drew me in! I could have been killed!”

The lieutenant’s jaw sagged and she shot a scandalized glance at Toller, tacitly enlisting him as a witness. “My lady, I did no such—”

“Don’t argue, lieutenant.”

“I said we should calm the beast down before—”

“Let’s not set up a court of enquiry,” Vantara interrupted, her breath forming white wreaths of condensation in front of her face. “If you have suddenly become expert in animal husbandry you may retrieve this foul-tempered sack of bones. It’s of pretty poor stock, anyway.” She twisted in the air and propelled herself back towards her ship.

The lieutenant watched her depart, then looked at Toller, an unexpected smile plumping her already rounded cheeks. “The theory is that if this poor dumb creature had good breeding it would have known not to kick a member of the royal family.”

Toller felt that the levity was misplaced. “The countess had a narrow escape.”

“The countess brings these things down on herself,” the lieutenant said. “The reason she took it on herself to retrieve the bluehorn—rather than leave the job to common hands—was that she wanted to demonstrate her natural control over bloodstock. She firmly believes in all the aristocracy’s most cherished myths—that their males are born with an instinctive mastery of generalship; that the females are gifted in every branch of the arts and—”

“Lieutenant!” Toller’s annoyance had been growing throughout the discourse and suddenly could no longer be contained. “How dare you speak thuswise to me about a superior officer! Don’t you realize I could have you severely punished for that kind of talk?”

The lieutenant’s eyes widened in surprise, then her expression became one of disappointment and resignation. “Not you, too. Not another one!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Every man who meets her…” The lieutenant paused, shaking her head. “I would have thought that after that business of the collision report … Do you know that the beautiful Countess Vantara did her utmost to have you deprived of your command?”

“Do you know that you are supposed to use the proper form of address when speaking to a senior officer?” Toller was vaguely aware that there was something ludicrous about his manner—especially when the two of them were poised in blue emptiness between the swirled disks of planets—but he was unable to listen passively while Vantara was subjected to such acidulous criticism.

“I’m sorry, sir.” The lieutenant’s face had lost all expression and her voice was neutral. “Do you want me to see what I can do about the bluehorn?”

“What’s your name, anyway?”

“Jerene Pertree, sir.”

Toller now felt pompous, but could see no way out of the web he had woven around himself. “There’s no scarcity of experienced handlers on this flight—are you sure you won’t get yourself sent flying?”

“I grew up on a farm, sir.” Jerene opened the valve of her propulsion unit a short distance, producing just enough thrust to drift her towards the bluehorn’s head. The animal’s bulging eyes rolled as she drew near and shining strands of saliva gathered in the air around its mouth. Toller felt a stab of concern—those massive jaws could easily rend human flesh beneath the stoutest garment—but Jerene was making gentle, wordless sounds which seemed to have an immediate soothing effect on the bluehorn. She slipped one arm around its neck and began stroking the animal’s brow with her free hand. It submitted to her touch, visibly becoming docile, and in a few seconds she was able to slide its eyelids down over the staring amber eyes. Jerene nodded towards Toller, signaling for him to come in with the rope.

He jetted forward, bound the bluehorn’s back feet together, paid out a short length of line and repeated the process with the forelegs. He was not accustomed to that kind of work, and all the while was half-expecting a violent response from the captive animal, but it allowed him to complete the operation without mishap.

By that time the chaos above was being brought under control. The stricken ship was being abandoned. Overland’s surface was almost completely occulted by condensation trails as crewmen from other vessels began the work of salvaging supplies. They were shouting to each other, sounding almost cheerful as they realized how slight was the damage to the fleet as a whole, compared to what it could have been. It occurred to Toller that the expedition had been lucky in another respect—if the encounter with the meteor swarm had not happened so close to the weightless zone recovery from it would have been much more difficult, if not impossible. Every object he could see was falling towards Land, but the rate of descent was so leisurely that in practice it could be disregarded for the time being.

Men were also jetting upwards from the four ships of the first echelon, among them Sky-commodore Sholdde, chief executive officer for the expedition. Sholdde was a tough and laconic fifty-year-old, much favored by the Queen because of the relish with which he tackled difficult assignments. The fact that he had lost a ship, although no blame could be laid at his door, was going to make him edgy and difficult to deal with for the rest of the flight.

“Maraquine!” he shouted at Toller. “What do you think you’re doing there? Get back to your ship and see what extra stores you can take on board. You shouldn’t be concerning yourself with that miserable flea-bag.”

“How dare you call me a flea-bag!” Jerene murmured in Sholdde’s direction, feigning indignation. “Flea-bag, yourself!”

“Look, I’ve already warned you about…” Toller, who had been about to admonish the lieutenant on her disrespect for senior officers, met the humorous glint in her brown eyes and his resolve foundered. He liked people who could make jokes at times of stress, and he had to admit that he would have had trouble summoning up the nerve to go as close to the frightened bluehorn’s head as Jerene had done.

“You may rejoin your ship now,” he said stiffly. “The farmers can collect their bluehorn when they’re ready.”

“Yes, sir.” Jerene pushed herself clear of the quiescent animal and reached for the controls of her propulsion unit.

Toller now felt that he had been unfair. “By the way, lieutenant…”

“Sir?”

“You did well with the bluehorn.”

“Why thank you, sir,” Jerene said, smiling demurely in a way which left Toller almost certain that he was being mocked. He watched her jet away from him, trailing a cone of rolling white condensation, and his thoughts turned immediately to Vantara. She had narrowly escaped injury from the bluehorn’s hoof and had done the right thing in retiring to her ship at once. It was unfortunate, though, that her doing so had deprived him of the opportunity to establish a better relationship between them.

But I’ve got time in hand, he thought, deciding to be philosophical. There’ll be all the time in the world when we get to Land.

Chapter 4

Divivvidiv was awakened from mid-brain-sleep by a telepathic whisper from the Xa.

Look about you, Beloved Creator, the Xa said, using the mind-color green to show that it considered the matter to be of some urgency.

What is happening? Divivvidiv responded, still not fully restored to every level of consciousness. He had been dreaming of simpler and happier times, in particular about his early childhood on Dussarra, and his high-brain had just begun devising the scenario for a fulfilling day, one which would have been fed in every detail into slumbering mid-brain and which he would have lived in full while asleep. He would, of course, be able to recreate it during his next inert period, but inevitably there would be some minor differences, and he could not help but experience a slight sense of loss. The vanished dream-day had promised to be well-nigh perfect. Nostalgia compounded…

The Primitives ascending from the surface of their planet have passed through the datum plane, the Xa went on. They have inverted their vessels and—

Which shows they are on their way to the sister planet, Divivvidiv interrupted. Why did you disturb me?

I have been able to perceive them with greater clarity, Beloved Creator, and I must inform you that their organs of sight are much superior to yours. Also, they have developed instruments which efficiently magnify optical images.

Telescopes! The idea of a primitive species having been able to devise ways of manipulating a medium as intractable as light startled Divivvidiv into full wakefulness. He sat up on the smooth, spongy block which was his bed and switched off its artificial gravity field, without which he would have been unable to enter any but the most superficial level of sleep.

Tell me, he said to the Xa, will the Primitives be able to see us? He had to ask the question, to rely for the moment on the Xa’s senses, because his own radius of direct perception was severely curtailed by the metal walls of the habitat.

Yes, Beloved Creator. Two of them are already scanning the general area of the visual sphere in which we are located—one of them with the aid of a double telescope—and there is a strong possibility of our being detected. The heaters of the protein synthesizing station are the most likely to draw attention—they leak radiation which is well within that part of the spectrum spanned by the Primitives’ eyes. ‘Purple’ is the word they use for it.

I will shut down the heaters immediately. Divivvidiv floated himself out of the habitat’s living quarters and into the principal operations hall. His trajectory carried him through the air to the control matrix which governed nutrient production, and he used a pencil-slim grey finger to divert the flow of power away from the row of exterior heaters.

I have done it, he said to the Xa. Have the Primitives seen anything?

There was a brief pause before the Xa replied. Yes—one of them has commented on seeing ‘a line of purple lights’, but there is no associated emotional reaction. The event has been dismissed as insignificant, and is already being forgotten.

I am glad of that, Divivvidiv said, using the mind-color appropriate to relief.

Why do you experience relief, Beloved Creator? Surely a species at such an early stage of its development can pose no threat to you.

I was not concerned about my own safety, Divivvidiv said. If the Primitives had been curious about us, and had decided to investigate, I would have been forced to destroy them.

There was another pause before the Xa spoke. You are reluctant to kill any of the Primitives.

Naturally.

Because it is immoral to deprive any being of its life?

Yes.

In that case, Beloved Creator, the Xa said, why have you decided to kill me?

I have told you many times that nobody has decided to kill you—it is simply a matter of… The talk of killing reminded Divivvidiv of why he was there, of the awesome crime against nature being perpetrated by his own kind, and a pang of anguish and guilt stilled his thoughts.

Chapter 5

The ancient city of Ro-Atabri was immense.

Toller had been standing at the rail of his gondola for more than an hour, staring down at the slowly expanding patch of intricate line and color patterns which differentiated the city from the surrounding terrain. He had been conditioned to regard Prad, Overland’s capital, as an imposing metropolis, and had visualized Ro-Atabri as much larger but essentially the same. The reality of the historic seat of Kolcorronian power, however, was something for which he could not have prepared himself.

He sensed that such a huge difference in size somehow led to a difference in kind, but there was more to it than that. All the cities, towns and villages on Overland had been planned, and therefore their chief characteristics sprang from the will of their architects and builders, but from high in the air Ro-Atabri resembled a natural growth, a living organism.

It was all there, just as in the sketches his maternal grandmother—Gesalla Maraquine—used to make for him when he was a child. There was the Borann River winding into Arle Bay, which in turn opened out upon the Gulf of Tronom, and to the east was the snow-capped Mount Opelmer. Cupped in and shaped by those natural features, the city and its suburbs sprawled across the land, a vast lichen of masonry, concrete, brakka wood and clay which represented centuries of Endeavour by multitudes of human beings. The great fires which had raged on the day the Migration had begun had left a still-visible discoloration in some areas, but the durable stonework had survived intact and would serve humanity again in some future era. Flecks of orange-red and orange- brown showed where the ill-fated New Men had begun capping the shells of buildings with new tiled roofs.

“What do you think of it, young Maraquine?” Commissioner Kettoran said, appearing at Toller’s side. Now that gravity was back to normal he was feeling much better and was taking a lively interest in all aspects of the ship’s affairs.

“It’s big,” Toller said simply. “I can’t take it in. It makes history… real.”

Kettoran laughed. “Did you think we’d made it up?”

“You could have done, as far as most of the present generation are concerned, but this … It hurts my brain, if you know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean—think how I feel.” Kettoran leaned further across the rail and his long face became animated. “Do you see that square patch of green just to the west of the city? That’s the old Skyship Quarter—the exact spot we took off from fifty years ago! Will we be able to land there?”

“It seems as good a place as any,” Toller said. “The lateral dispersions on this flight have been remarkably slight, and those that did occur have cancelled each other out. The decision rests with the Sky-commodore, of course, but I’d say that’s where we’ll put down.”

“That would make it perfect. The perfect full circle.”

“Indeed yes,” Toller agreed, no longer really listening, his attention captured by the realization that the ten-day flight between the worlds was all but over, and that very soon he would have unlimited opportunities to court Vantara. He had not even glimpsed her since the incident with the blue-horn, and the lack of contact had fuelled his obsession to the point where the prospect of seeing another world for the first time seemed no more of an adventure than being able to speak to the countess face to face and perhaps win her over.

“I envy you, young Maraquine,” Kettoran said, gazing wistfully downwards at the natural stage upon which the half-remembered scenes of his youth had been enacted. “Everything lies before you.”

“Perhaps.” Toller smiled, savoring his own interpretation of the commissioner’s words. “Perhaps you’re right.”

The village of Styvee contained no more than a hundred or so buildings, and even in its heyday would have housed only a few hundred people. Toller was tempted to cross it off his list and proceed on his way without even landing, but it would then have become necessary to falsify an inspection report and he could not allow himself to sink to petty dishonesty. He studied the layout of the village for a moment, noting that its central square was very small, even for such an out-of-the-way place.

“What do you think, corporal?” he said, testing the younger man’s judgment. “Is it worth trying to put the ship down on those few yards of turf?”

Steenameert leaned over the rail to assess the prospects. “I wouldn’t take the risk, sir—there’s very little leeway and there’s no telling what the eddy currents are like around that group of tall warehouses.”

“That’s what I was thinking—we’ll make a pilot of you yet,” Toller said jovially. “Head for those pastures to the east, beside the river, and drop us there.”

Steenameert nodded, his naturally pink face growing even more roseate with gratification. Toller had taken a liking to Steenameert on the occasion of their first meeting, when he had parachuted down from the interplanetary void, and had put in a special request to have him in his crew for the flight to Land. Now he was personally grooming Steenameert for a field promotion, somewhat to the annoyance of Lieutenant Correvalte, who had spent the customary year in a training squadron.

Toller turned to Correvalte, who officially should have been conducting the landing maneuver and was showing his discomfiture by lounging in a seat in a posture of exaggerated boredom. “Lieutenant, detail one man to guard the ship and get the others ready to inspect the village—the walk will do them good.”

Correvalte saluted, very correctly, and left the bridge. Toller maintained a carefully neutral expression as he watched the lieutenant go down the short stair to the gondola’s main deck. He had already decided to recompense Correvalte by recommending him for a full captaincy earlier than usual, but had decided not to let him know until the current mission had been completed.

It was the middle of foreday, and already in the equatorial region of Land the sun’s heat was baking the ground. Most of the gondola was in the shadow of the ship’s gasbag, a fact which made the environment beyond seem preternaturally bright and vivid. As the vessel performed a slow half-circle to face the slight breeze, sinking all the while, Toller saw that the fields surrounding the village had almost returned to their natural uniform shade of green.

With no seasons to orchestrate the cycle of maturation, individual plants in the wild state tended to follow their own timetables, with a proportion in the earliest stages of growth while others were at their peak or in the process of withering and returning their constituents to the soil. From time immemorial, Kolcorronian farmers had sorted the seeds of useful vegetables into synchronous batches—typically creating six harvests a year—and as a result areas of cultivated land presented patterns of stripes of varying colors.

Here, after decades of neglect, those patterns had all but disappeared as the edible grasses and other crop vegetables had slowly returned to botanic anarchy. The advanced stage of the reversal led Toller to suspect that the village of Styvee was not one of those which the New Men had reclaimed after the ptertha plague had wiped out the normal human population. If that were the case, the inspection of the village promised to be yet another in a series of unpleasant and highly depressing experiences.

The final stages of racial extinction—half a century ago—had come so swiftly that there had been no time for the dying to bury the dead…

The thought cast a pall over Toller’s mood, reminding him of how wrong he had been in his supposition that the fleet’s arrival on Land would give him endless opportunity to keep company with the Countess Vantara. At the heart of his mistake had been a single historical fact.

The migration from Land to Overland had been a carefully planned affair, one which should have been carried out in orderly stages, but in the event it had been essayed in circumstances of panic and chaos. With the city of Ro-Atabri burning, with mobs on the rampage and the army’s discipline gone, the evacuation had been forced through with only minutes of notice for the refugees*—and in that extreme not one book had been taken on the journey between the worlds. Jeweler and useless bundles of currency notes had been carried in plenty, but not one painting, not one written poem, not one sheet of music.

While men and women of culture were later to complain that the race had left its soul behind, King Chakkell and his heirs were to fret about a more irksome oversight. In all the turmoil and confusion nobody had thought of bringing any maps of Kolcorron, of the empire, or of Land itself. From the time of the Migration until the present day—although the Kolcorronian royal family still claimed sovereignty over the Old World—the lack of charts had proved an annoyance more than anything else, but the situation had changed entirely.

Prince Oldo, Daseene’s sole remaining offspring, was now in his late fifties and had been thwarted all his life by the Queen’s refusal to step down from the throne. And, just as his mother’s frailty was promising to clear the way for him, he had been given an extra frustration to contend with in that he was about to become heir to a kingdom whose actual and potential wealth were almost a total mystery.

Unknown to Toller, he had prevailed on Daseene to put off the circumnavigation of Land until a detailed survey of Kolcorron itself had been carried out. Thus it was that, instead of pacing Vantara’s ship on a challenging round-the-world flight, Toller had found himself committed to a seemingly endless series of aerial hops from one deserted village or town to another. He had been on Land for almost twenty days and in all that time had not even seen Vantara, who was engaged on similar duties in a different quarter of the country.

Just as the city of Ro-Atabri had impressed him with its sheer size, Kolcorron was overwhelming him with the multiplicity of centers, large and medium and small, which had once been necessary to house its population. Having lived all his life on Overland, where it was possible to fly for hours without seeing a single habitation, Toller felt oppressed, suffocated, by the extent of men’s interference with the natural landscape. He had begun to visualize the old kingdom as one vast, seething hive in which any individual would have counted for very little. Even the knowledge that it was the birthplace of his grandfather did little to counteract his negative feelings about Kolcorron’s tamed and overworked countryside.

He gazed moodily at the cluster of dwellings and larger buildings, apparently tilting with the airship’s movements, which made up Styvee. The old maps and gazetteers which had been found in Ro-Atabri showed that its chief importance arose from the fact that the village contained a pumping station which had been vital to the irrigation of a considerable area of farming land north of the local river and canal system. It was required of Toller that he should inspect the station and report on its condition.

Still keeping a watchful eye on Steenameert and his handling of the airship, Toller consulted his list and confirmed that after Styvee had been crossed off there would be only three further locations to check. If there were no complications he could be on his way back to base camp in the capital before littlenight of the following day. Vantara might also have returned to Ro-Atabri by that time. The thought helped to dispel some of Toller’s forebodings about the task in hand, and he began to whistle as he took his sword from a locker. The steel weapon—which had once belonged to his grandfather—was too awkward to wear in the close confines of a ship, but he never ventured abroad without it strapped to his side. It enhanced his sense of kinship with that other Toller Maraquine, the one whose exploits he would never have the chance to emulate.

A minute later—to the accompaniment of short bursts from the secondary jets—the gondola’s keel made contact with the ground and the four anchor cannon fired their barbs into the grassy earth. Crewmen leapt over the side immediately with extra lines and began doubly securing the ship against the possibility of the heat vortices which commonly roamed the land close to the equator.

“Closing down the engines, sir,” Steenameert said, his eyes seeking Toller’s as he vented the pneumatic reservoir which fed power crystals to the jets. “How was the landing?”

“Passable, passable.” Toller used a tone of voice which showed that he was more pleased with the corporal’s performance than his choice of words implied. “But don’t stand there all day congratulating yourself—we have business in yonder metropolis. Over the side with you!”

As had happened before, during the short walk to the edge of the village Toller felt oddly self-conscious, as though hidden observers were watching every step he took. He knew how absurd the notion was, but yet he was unable to forget what easy targets he and his men would be if defenders with muskets were to appear at the blank upper windows of the nearest houses. His uneasiness, he decided, sprang from a feeling that he had no right to be doing what he was doing, that the last resting places of so many people should be left undisturbed…

An outburst of swearing from one of the crewmen a dozen paces to his left caused him to look in that direction. The man was gingerly skirting something which Toller could not see because of the long grass.

“What is it, Renko?” he said, knowing in his heart what the answer would be.

“A couple of skeletons, sir.” Renko’s saffron airman’s shirt was already darkened with sweat in several places and he was showily limping. “I nearly fell over them, sir. Nearly broke my ankle.”

“If it doesn’t mend soon I’ll have the incident noted in your service record,” Toller said drily. “Clashed with two skeletons—came off second best.” His comment brought a round of laughter from the other men and Renko’s limp rapidly disappeared.

On reaching the village the group fanned out in what had become a routine procedure, with the crewmen entering houses and reporting on their condition to Lieutenant Correvalte, who was making copious notes in a dispatch book. Toller took the opportunity to find some comparative solitude, wandering separately through narrow passageways and the remains of gardens. The derelict condition of the buildings convinced him that Styvee had not been occupied by the New Men, that half a century had passed since human families had enlivened the crumbling stonework with their presence.

There were no skeletons visible out of doors, but that was not unusual in Toller’s experience. In the final and most virulent phase of the ptertha plague victims had survived for only two hours after infection, but some instinct seemed to have prompted them to seek out places of seclusion in which to die. It was as if some lingering sense of propriety had been outraged at the thought of defiling their communities with decaying corpses. A few had made their way to favorite beauty spots or vantage points, but in general the citizens of old Kolcorron had chosen to die in the privacy of their homes, very often in bed.

Toller had lost count of the number of times he had seen pathetic family tableaux consisting of male and female skeletons still locked in a last embrace, sometimes with smaller bony frames lying between them. The sight of so many reminders of the ultimate futility of existence in such a short span had contaminated his spirit with a deep melancholia which at times overcame his natural ebullience, and now—unashamedly—he avoided entering the silent dwelling places whenever he could.

His meandering course through the village eventually brought him to a large windowless building which had been built on the bank of the river. Part of it extended down into the slow-moving water. Identifying the structure as the pumping station which was the chief item of interest in the area, he walked around it until he came to a large door in the north wall. The door had been constructed from close-grained wood well reinforced with brakka straps and appeared to have been quite unaffected by fifty years of neglect. It was locked and, as he expected, barely quivered when he threw his considerable weight against it.

Muttering with annoyance. Toller turned away, shaded his eyes from the sun and scanned the village. More than a minute went by before he spotted the burly figure of Gabbleronn, the sergeant-artificer, who was responsible for maintenance of the airship. Gabbleronn had just emerged from what had once been a store of some kind, and was cramming a small object into his pouch. He looked startled when Toller called him, and responded to the summons with an evident lack of enthusiasm.

“I wasn’t looting, sir,” he protested as he drew near. “I just picked up a little candle holder fashioned from that black wood. It’s of no value, sir … a souvenir to take home to Prad for my wife… I’ll put it back if you—”

“Never mind that,” Toller interrupted. “1 want this door opened. Fetch whatever tools you need from the ship. Blow it off its hinges if that’s what it takes.”

“Yes, sir!” Looking relieved, Gabbleronn studied the door for a moment, then saluted and hurried away.

Toller sat down on the stone doorsteps and made himself as comfortable as he could while he waited for the sergeant to return. The heat was increasing as the sun climbed higher, and the sky was so bright that only a few of the normal daytime stars were visible. Directly above him, the great disk of Overland occupied the center of the heavens, looking fresh and unsullied in his eyes, and he felt a sudden pang of homesickness for its dew-fresh open spaces. The entire planet of Land was one vast charnel house—exhausted, ghost-ridden, dusty and sad—and even the presence of Vantara somewhere over the horizon scarcely compensated for the gloominess which had begun to impose itself on his mind. It would be different if he could actually be in her company, but this business of being near to her and yet completely cut off from her was much worse than…

What am I doing to myself? he thought suddenly. What kind of man am I becoming? Would that other Toller Maraquine have mooned around in such a manner—lovesick and homesick—like a sallow-faced adolescent?

The questions propelled Toller to his feet and he was pacing in impatient circles, a hand on the hilt of his sword, when he saw Correvalte approaching with the rest of the crew in his wake. The lieutenant was checking his notes as he walked, looking businesslike, competent and very much at ease with himself and his surroundings. Toller felt a twinge of envy coupled with a momentary suspicion that Correvalte had the potential to be the better officer of the two.

“The report is almost complete, sir—except for an inspection of the pumping station,” Correvalte said. “Have you been inside the building?”

“How could I enter the building when the accursed door is barred?” Toller snapped. “Do I look like a wraith which can insinuate itself through cracks in the woodwork?”

The lieutenant’s eyes widened and then became opaquely impersonal. “I’m sorry, sir—I didn’t realize…”

“I have sent Gabbleronn for some tools,” Toller cut in, already ashamed of his display of peevishness. “See if he needs any help in carrying them—I have no wish to linger in this cemetery any longer than necessary.”

He turned away as Correvalte was performing one of his ultra-correct salutes and walked along the bank of the river until he came to a narrow wooden bridge. From a distance the bridge had appeared quite sound, but on close examination he saw that its structure had a grey-white spongy texture which signaled that it had been ravaged by wood-boring insects. He drew his sword and struck at one of the handrail stanchions. It severed with very little resistance to the blade and toppled into the river, taking a section of the rail with it. Half a dozen further blows were sufficient to cut through the two main beams of the bridge, sending the whole rotten edifice plunging down into the water amid puffs of powdered wood and a buzzing of minute winged creatures which had been disturbed in their appointed task.

“You have had a good meal,” Toller said, whimsically addressing the multitudes of insects and their grubs which must have been still inside the fallen timbers, “now you can enjoy a drink.”

The little flurry of physical activity, frivolous though it had been, helped ease the tensions in his mind and he was in a better mood as he retraced his steps to the village. He reached the pumping station just as Gabbleronn and two of his helpers had succeeded in prising the door open with the aid of large crowbars.

“Good work,” Toller said. “Now let us see what marvels of engineering lie within.”

Before arriving on Land he had known from his history tuition that the planet had no metals, and that brakka wood had always been employed for applications where, on Overland, the designer would have chosen iron, steel or some other suitable metal. Nevertheless, machinery whose gearwheels and other highly stressed components were carved from the black wood seemed cumbersome and quaint to his eye, relics of a primitive era.

He led the way along a short passage to a large, vaulted chamber which contained massive pumping machinery. The windows in the roof were heavily encrusted with grime, but there was enough light filtering down from them to show that the machinery, although coated with dust, was complete and in a good state of repair. Those parts not made of brakka—beams and struts—were of the same close-grained wood as the station’s door, a material which evidently resisted wood-boring insects or was not to their taste. Toller tested one of the beams with his thumbnail and was impressed by its hardness, even after fifty years without maintenance.

“I believe it’s called rafter wood, sir,” Steenameert said, coming to his side. “You can see why it was favored by builders.”

“How do you know what it’s called?”

Steenameert blushed. “I have read descriptions of it many times in the—”

“Oh, no!” The voice was that of Lieutenant Correvalte, who had been walking around the perimeter of the chamber, opening the doors into side rooms as he came to them. He was backing off from a doorway, shaking his head, and Toller knew at once that he had witnessed a great obscenity. This, Toller told himself, is what I have been expecting since we entered the village. I knew something bad was in store for us, and I have no wish to set eyes on it.

He knew, also, that he could not avoid personally inspecting the find lest the word get about among the crewmen that he had become soft. The most he could do was to delay the grim moment. He stooped over a control lever and ratchet and brushed the dust away from them, pretending to take a special interest in the precise carving, and while doing so watched his men. Their curiosity aroused by Correvalte’s reaction, they were taking turns at venturing into the room. None stayed longer than a few seconds, and—professionally callous though they were—each looked subdued and thoughtful as he returned to the main chamber.

I have an appointment in that room, Toller thought, and it would be unseemly to delay any longer.

He straightened up, hand unconsciously falling to the hilt of his sword, and walked to the waiting doorway. The room beyond resembled a prison cell. It was devoid of furniture, and was cheerlessly illuminated by a broken skylight in the sloping roof far above. Ranged around the walls, in the seated position, were perhaps twenty skeletons. The wispy remnants of dresses and skirts, plus the presence of necklaces and ceramic bangles, informed Toller that the skeletons were the remains of women.

It isn’t all that bad, he thought. It was a fact of life, a fact of death, that the plague was impartial. It struck down women just as readily as men, and since arriving on this unhappy world I have seen many, many…

His mind seized up, chilled, as he absorbed a fact which had not been readily apparent at first glance. Curled up in the pelvic basin of each of the skeletons was another skeleton—a tiny armature of fragile bones which was all that remained of a baby whose life had ended before it had properly begun.

Yes, the plague had been very impartial.

Toller longed to turn and flee from the room, but the deadly coldness in his mind had percolated down through his body, immobilizing his limbs. Time had become distorted, stretching seconds into eons, and he knew that he was destined to spend the rest of his life frozen to the same spot, on that threshold of pessimism and pure despair.

“The villagers must have put all their pregnant women in here, hoping these walls would protect them,” Lieutenant Correvalte said from close behind Toller. “Look! One of them was having twins.”

Toller chose not to seek out that refinement of horror.

Breaking free of his paralysis, he turned and walked away from the room, acutely aware of being closely scrutinized by every member of his crew.

“Make a note,” he said over his shoulder to Correvalte. “Say that we inspected the pumping machinery and found it to be in good condition and capable of being restored to working order in a short time.”

“Is that all, sir?”

“I haven’t noticed anything else that our sovereign would regard as important,” Toller said in casual tones, walking slowly towards the station’s entrance, disguising the anxiousness he felt, the pressing need to reassure himself that the sanity of sunshine could still be found in the outside world.

The Migration Day celebrations had taken Toller completely by surprise.

He had completed his survey mission and arrived back at the base camp in Ro-Atabri less than an hour before nightfall, having lost track of the date. Unusually for him, he felt deeply tired. The news that it was Day 226, the anniversary of the first touch-downs on Overland, had failed to strike any spark within him, and he had gone straight to bed after signing his ship over to Fleet Master Codell. Even the word that Vantara had returned to base earlier in the day had not roused him from the pervasive lethargy, the weariness of spirit which was taking the light out of everything.

Now he was lying in darkness in his room, which was part of the quarters which had once housed the guard of the Great Palace, and was quite unable to sleep. He had never been given over to introspection and soul-searching, but he understood very well that his tiredness was not physical in its origins. It was a mental tiredness, a psychic fatigue induced by a long period of doing that for which he had no taste, of going against his own nature.

Before leaving home he had visualized Land as one vast charnel house, and the reality of it had more than conformed to his expectations, culminating in the grisly find at the Styvee pumping station. Perhaps he was being self-indulgent. Perhaps—as one born into a privileged position in society—he was having his first taste of what life must be like for a common man who was forced to spend all his days in a kind of toil he detested and which had been forced on him from above. Toller tried reminding himself that his grandfather, that other Toller Maraquine, would not have allowed his composure to be so quickly disturbed. No matter what fearful sights and experiences the real Toller Maraquine had had to contend with he would have deflected the force of them with his shield of toughness and self-sufficiency. But… but…

How do I find room inside my head for twenty skeletons neatly ranged against a wall, with another twenty skeletons curled up inside them in the pelvic cradles? Another twenty-one skeletons, I should have said. Didn’t you notice that one of the women was having twins? What are you supposed to do about two little manikins, with whitened twigs in place of bones, who kept each other company in death instead of life?

An extra-loud burst of laughter from somewhere in the palace grounds brought Toller to his feet, swearing in exasperation. Men and women were getting drunk out there, getting themselves into a state in which they could exchange handshakes with skeletons, return the grins of skeletons, and pat unborn babies on their still-bifurcated craniums. It came to Toller that his only prospect of sleep that night lay in dosing himself with large quantities of alcohol.

Welcoming the positive decision, his inner tiredness abating slightly, Toller pulled on some clothes and left the room. Finding his way through unfamiliar corridors with some difficulty, he reached the garden on the north side of the grounds which was the center of the festivities. It had been chosen because it was mostly paved and therefore had stood up to decades of neglect better than the others. Even the parade ground at the rear of the palace was waist-high in grass and weeds. Several small fires had been lit in the garden, their orange-and-yellow rays partially obscured and softly reflected by ornamental fountains, statues and shrubs, making the place look much larger than it did in daylight.

Couples and small groups strolled through the spangled dimness, while others stood near the long table which had been set up for refreshments. Males outnumbered females by about three to one on the expedition, which meant that women who were in the opposite mood that night were enjoying a surfeit of romantic attention, while males who were redundant in such respects were concentrating on food, drink, song and the telling of bawdy stories.

Toller found Commissioner Kettoran and his secretary, Parlo Wotoorb, standing behind the table serving food and drink. The two old men were obviously enjoying the menial task, proving to all of the company that in spite of their exalted rank they still possessed the common touch.

“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” Kettoran called out when he espied Toller approaching. “Come and have a drink with us, young Maraquine.”

Toller thought that the commissioner was slightly overplaying his role—perhaps afraid of somebody missing the point—but it was a harmless enough foible, not one he found objectionable. “Thank you—I’ll have a very large beaker of Kailian black.”

Kettoran shook his head. “No wine. No ale either, for that matter. A question of useful payload on the ships, you see—you will have to settle for brandy.”

“Brandy it is then.”

“I’ll let you have some of the good stuff, in one of my best glasses.”

The commissioner sank down to his knees behind the table and a moment later stood up with a glittering crystal filled to the brim. He was handing the glass over when the jovial expression abruptly departed his face and was replaced by one of mingled surprise and pain. Toller took the glass quickly and watched with some concern as Kettoran pressed both forearms against his lower ribcage.

“Trye, are you unwell?” Wotoorb said anxiously. “I told you ‘you should take more rest.’ ”

Kettoran inclined his head briefly towards the secretary, then winked knowingly at Toller. “This old fool thinks he is going to live longer than I am.” He smiled, apparently no longer in distress, picked up his own glass and raised it to Toller. “1 bid you good health, young Maraquine.”

“Good health to you, sir,” Toller said, unable to muster a reciprocal smile.

Kettoran studied his face closely. “Son—I trust you will not think me impertinent—but you no longer seem the young game-cock who captained my ship on the voyage to Land. Something seems to have taken the starch out of you.”

“Out of me!” Toller laughed incredulously. “Put your mind at ease, sir—I don’t soften up so readily. And now, if you will excuse me…”

He turned and walked away from the table, privately disturbed by the commissioner’s comments. If the effects of his malaise could be discerned so quickly by one who scarcely knew him, what chance had he of keeping the respect of his own crewmen? Maintaining discipline was difficult enough at times without having the men begin to regard him as a hothouse plant who was likely to wilt at adversity’s first cold breath. He sipped some brandy and walked around the garden close to the perimeter, keeping away from noisier centers of activity, until he found an unoccupied marble bench. Grateful for the solitude, he sat down.

Above him the narrowing crescent of Overland was nested near the center of the Great Wheel, that enormous whirlpool of silver luminance which dominated the night sky in the latter part of the year. Several comets were splaying their tails across the heavens, and myriads of stars—some of them like colored coachlamps—added to the splendor, burning with an unwinking permanence which contrasted with the brief dartings of meteors.

Toller addressed himself to his outsized goblet, which must have contained close on a third of a bottle of brandy, downing the warming liquor in patient, regular sips. It was a night on which it would have been good to have female companionship, but even the thought that Vantara might be only a few dozen paces away in the scented gloaming failed to elicit any response from within him. It was also a night for facing up to truths, for discarding illusions, and the plain facts of the matter were that he had made an enemy of the countess on their first meeting as adults, that she despised him now and would go on doing so for as long as he stayed in her memory.

Besides, came the slithering thought, how can you even think of courting a woman when there are twenty-one miniature skeletons watching you?

Toller kept on with his methodical drinking until the goblet was empty, then assessed his condition. In spite of the tiredness he had not yet succeeded in stunning himself with alcohol. There was a perverse wakefulness at the core of his mind which told him that at least one more brimming crystal would be necessary if he were to escape the reproachful gaze of the twenty-one bone-babies and sink into unconsciousness before deepnight engulfed the world.

He stood up, as steady as a well-rooted tree, and was starting in the direction of the table to avail himself of Kettoran’s generosity when he saw a woman approaching him. She was slim and dark-haired, and he knew before being able to see her face properly that she was Vantara. She was wearing full uniform—no doubt her way of distancing herself from those officers who were prepared to forget about rank for the sake of the revel—and Toller braced himself for a verbal skirmish. He did not have long to wait.

“What’s this?” she said lightly. “No sword? Of course! How silly of me to forget—there aren’t any kings ripe for skewering at this little gathering.”

Toller nodded, acknowledging the reference to his grandfather, who had been dubbed Kingslayer by the populace of his day. “That’s very funny, captain.” He made to move past her, but she halted him by placing a hand on his arm.

“Is that all you have to say?”

“No.” Toller was disconcerted by the unexpected physical contact. “1 would add that I’m going to replenish my glass.”

Vantara looked up into his face, frowning slightly as she scanned his features. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I fail to understand the question.”

“Where is the great warrior, Toller Maraquine the Second, who is immune to bullets? Is he off duty tonight?”

“I was never one for riddles, captain,” Toller said stonily. “Now, if I may be excused—I’m ready for another of the commissioner’s sleeping potions.”

Vantara transferred her grip to the hand in which he held his glass—the warmth of her touch like ambersparks playing on his flesh—and briefly bowed her head over it. “Brandy? Bring one for me, please. But not on such a gigantic scale.”

“You want me to bring you a drink?” Toller said, aware of sounding slow-witted.

“Yes—if you don’t mind.” Vantara sat down and made herself comfortable on the bench. “I’ll wait here for you.”

Feeling slightly bemused, Toller made his way back to the refreshments table and obtained another huge bumper of brandy for himself and a normal-sized one for Vantara, to the accompaniment of much nodding and winking from Kettoran and Wotoorb. While he was on his way back to the bench a ptertha came drifting across the garden, its bubble-like structure glinting but scarcely visible in the uncertain light. It was ascending in the updraught from one of the fires when it was noticed by a group of the revelers. Whooping with glee, they began throwing large twigs and pebbles at it. One of the sticks flailed through the ptertha and it abruptly ceased to exist. A cheer went up from the onlookers.

“Did you see that?” Vantara said as Toller approached her. “Just listen to them! Overjoyed because they managed to kill something.”

“The ptertha killed many of us in their day,” Toller replied, unmoved. Including twenty-one unborn babies.

“So you approve of killing them for sport?”

“No, no,” Toller said, sensing a return of Vantara’s old antagonism and feeling unable to cope with it. “I don’t approve of killing anything, for sport or any other reason. I’ve seen enough of the butchers’ handiwork to last me a lifetime.” He sat down, handed Vantara her glass and took a sip from his own.

“Is that what’s wrong with you?”

“There is nothing wrong with me.”

“I know—that’s what is wrong with you. Having something wrong is a natural state with…” Vantara paused. “I’m sorry. As well as being too involuted, that was uncalled for.”

“Did you ask for that drink merely to occupy your hands?” Toller took a gulp of his brandy, suppressing a grimace as the excessive quantity of the fiery liquid washed into his throat.

“Why are you so determined to get drunk tonight?”

“In the name of… !” Toller gave an exasperated sigh. “Is this your normal mode of conversation? If it is I’d be grateful if you would go and sit elsewhere.”

“Again, I apologize.” Vantara gave him a placatory smile and sipped from her glass. “Why don’t you lead the conversation, Toller?”

The informal and quite intimate use of his given name surprised Toller, adding to the mystery of her change of attitude towards him. He gazed thoughtfully at Vantara and found that in the half-light her face was impossibly beautiful, a concordance of perfect features which might have existed only in the mind of an inspired artist. It occurred to him that one of his fantasies had suddenly and unexpectedly been translated into reality—she, with all of her incredible womanliness, was close beside him. And it was a night for romance. And there was a thrilling softness in her voice. And it was the duty of every human to seize what happiness he could whenever he could—no matter how many tiny skeletons he had looked upon—because nature produced millions of beings of every species for the precise reason that some of them were bound to be unfortunate, and if a member of the lucky majority failed to savor life to the full that would be a betrayal of the few who had been sacrificed on his behalf. It was now up to him to make the maximum effort to win the object of all his desires by attracting her to him with his qualities of strength, courage, consideration, fortitude, knowledge, humor, generosity. Perhaps a well-turned compliment would be the best way to begin.

“Vantara, you look so…” He paused, aware of the scrutiny of eyes that no longer existed in twenty-one fist-sized skulls, and listened like a bystander to the words which were issuing from his mouth. “What is happening here? Usually when we meet you behave like an arrogant bitch, and now—all of a sudden—we’re on first-name terms and the very air is suffused with warmth and friendliness. What private scheme are you about?”

Vantara laughed and gasped at the same time. “Arrogance! You talk to me about arrogance* You who always approach a woman with your male armor clanking and your phallic sword swinging through the air!”

“That is the most twisted and…”

Vantara silenced him by raising one hand, fingers spread out, as a barrier between their eyes and mouths. “Say no more. Toller, I beg you! Neither of us is wearing armor on this night and therefore either of us could easily be wounded. Let us accept things the way they are for this single hour; let us have this drink together; and let us talk to each other. Will you agree to that?”

Toller smiled. “How could any reasonable man refuse?”

“Very well! Now, tell me why you are no longer the Toller Maraquine I have always known.”

“We’ve returned to the same subject!”

“We never left it.”

“But…” Toller gazed at her in perplexity for a moment, and then the unthinkable happened—he began to speak freely about what was in his mind, to confess his newly discovered weaknesses, to admit his growing belief that he would never be able to live up to the example set for him by his grandfather. At one point, while he was describing the tragic find at the pumping station in Styvee, his voice faltered and he experienced a terrible fear that he would be unable to continue. When he had finished he took another drink of his brandy, but found it was no longer to his taste. He set the glass aside and sat staring down at his hands, wondering why he felt as shaky as a man who had just emerged from the most harrowing ordeal of his life.

“Poor Toller,” Vantara said gently. “What has life done to you that you should be ashamed of having finer feelings?”

“You mean, of being weak.”

“It isn’t weakness to feel compassion, or to experience doubt, or to need human contact.”

Toller thought he glimpsed a way of repairing some of the cracks in his personal facade. “I could do with lots of human contact,” he said wryly. “Provided it’s the right sort.”

“Don’t talk like that, Toller—there is no need for it.” Vantara set her own glass down and swung one leg over the bench so that she was sitting facing him. “Very well, you may touch me if you want to.”

“This is not the way I…” Toller fell silent as Vantara took his hands and guided them on to her breasts. They felt warm and firm, even through the thickly embroidered material of her captain’s jupon. He moved closer.

“Pray do not misunderstand,” Vantara whispered. “I am not going to share your bed—this degree of human contact is sufficient for the needs of the hour.” Her lips parted slightly, inviting him to kiss, and he accepted the invitation as in a dream, scarcely able to believe what was happening. The utter femininity of her swamped his senses, reducing the sounds in the garden to a remote murmur. Vantara and he held the same position for a long but indeterminate time, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps twenty, repeating the kiss over and over again, tirelessly, feeling no need to vary or advance the act of physical communion. And when finally they separated Toller felt replenished, restored to completeness. He smiled at Vantara and she responded, his smile grew wider and suddenly they were laughing. Toller was aware of a sense of relief and relaxation akin to that which followed sexual congress, but it was more pervasive and had a component which hinted at greater permanence.

“I don’t know what you did to me,” he said. “An apothecary could grow rich if he could put such a remedy in a jar.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“But you did! I had become so weary of this old planet that even the circumnavigation flight was beginning to pail on me. Now, all at once, I’m looking forward to it again. We will not actually be together when we take to the skies, but I’ll be continuously in sight of your ship, day after day, and at night there’ll be no landing in graveyard cities. I’ll see to that. We can…”

“Toller!” Vantara looked oddly wary. “I told you not to misinterpret what has taken place between us.”

“I am presuming nothing, I assure you,” Toller said quickly and easily, knowing he was lying, filled with an exulting new certainty that in this respect he knew Vantara better than she knew herself. “All I am saying is—”

“Forgive me for interrupting,” Vantara cut in, “but you are making one rather large presumption.”

“And that is… ?”

“That I will be taking part in the flight.”

Toller was jolted. “How can you not take part? You’re here because you’re an air captain, and the round-the-globe flight is the most important part of the entire mission. Sky-commodore Sholdde will not excuse you from it.”

Vantara smiled in a way that was almost shame-faced. “I confess that I was anticipating some difficulty in that direction, but it transpires that my beloved grandmother—the Queen—had foreseen this kind of thing happening, and had given the commodore instructions that my requests were not to be denied.” She smiled again. “I have a feeling he will shed very few tears when I leave.”

“Leave?” Toller understood exactly what Vantara was saying, but his lips framed the question nevertheless. “Where do you intend to go?”

“Home, of course. I despise this tired and gloomy world even more than you do, Toller—so tomorrow I will escape from it by flying to Overland, and I doubt if anything will ever persuade me to come back here.” Vantara stood up, symbolically breaking the bonds of Land’s gravity, putting the interplanetary chasm between herself and Toller, and when she spoke again her voice contained a note of casual insincerity which he felt like a blow to the face.

“Perhaps we will meet again in Prad—in some future year.”

Chapter 6

Divivvidiv floated near the viewing post of an electronic telescope and waited until the Xa had completed all adjustments in the aim-and-focus circuits. When the image on the screen had steadied a comparatively small area of the planet below remained as background, the rest having flowed outwards and vanished. He seemed to be looking vertically downwards through a window, the view from which was crossed by swirls of cloud superimposed on ochre us land patterns.

In the exact center of that view was a small silvery crescent, resembling a miniature moon which had somehow been frozen in place. Closer examination of the object revealed that it was a brownish sphere illuminated on one side by the sun. It appeared solid enough to be a rocky asteroid, but Divivvidiv knew he was looking at one of the fabric balloons used by the Primitives for travel between their worlds. As it was still ascending towards the weightless zone the ship’s gondola was optically invisible, but the Xa could “see” the crew very well by other means.

They are five in number, Beloved Creator, the Xa said. All are female, which is unusual if our limited experience of this race is anything to go by.

Are they aware of the station? Or of you?

There was a short pause. No, Beloved Creator. The ship, which is one of the group we saw previously, is returning to its home world for reasons which, although they are not clear to me, are obviously connected with the emotional well-being of its commander. There is no thought of observing or investigating our activities.

The communication from the Xa was correctly and courteously formed, but it contained shadings of mind-colors which seemed inappropriate. Divivvidiv associated them with malice and gloating, and he had little trouble in identifying the most likely source.

Do you predict that we will be observed?

It is almost inevitable, the Xa replied. In fact, it is almost inevitable that there will be a collision. The Primitive ship is experiencing virtually no lateral drift, and—as you know—my body is now expanding at its maximum rate.

Divivvidiv withdrew at once into the high-brain mode so that he could ponder the problem without being overheard by the Xa. The extermination of five uncultured bipeds would be an utterly trivial occurrence—especially when one considered the events which were soon to overtake this entire region of space—but he would have to take the decision in person. And the deaths would be close.

Those facts, coupled with his direct involvement, would forge a mental link between him and the five whose lives were to be brought to a close and, inescapably, he would be caught up in each reflux. The reflux was the brief, incredibly fierce and inexplicable burst of psychic activity which always occurred one or two seconds after the death of an intelligent being. Even when the physical form was instantaneously vaporized, and in theory no further mental interaction with the living could possibly take place, there always came that searing pang—excruciating, chastening, ineffable, poignant—that momentary spiritual refulgence which had a profoundly disturbing effect on those who felt it.

The fact that the reflux happened at all was taken by many as proof of the continuance of the personality after death. Some component of the mind-body complex was migrating to a new existence, it was claimed. Others of a more materialistic nature seized on the way in which the strength of the reflux faded with distance as an indication that there were realms of physics which Dussarran science had yet to explore.

Divivvidiv did not adhere to either school of thought, but he had been close to reflux epicenters twice in his life—when his parents had died—and he had no wish to repeat the experience if it could be avoided. Morality was powerfully reinforced by self-interest, leaving him in a dilemma which he would have to resolve quickly if he were to meet his obligations to the all-important Xa.

Part crystal, part computer, part sentient being—the Xa could only grow to the size necessary for its eventual purpose in a region where there was a complete absence of gravity, coupled with an abundance of oxygen. The Dussarrans had been fortunate in finding such an environment within reach of their original home, but the existence of a burgeoning technical society on the twin worlds was an unwelcome complication to their plans, mainly because the Xa’s structure—in spite of being so huge—was comparatively fragile. The Primitives were capable of damaging it, with or without malicious intent, and therefore had to be controlled like vermin if they came near.

Divivvidiv considered the problem for a short time, then arrived at a solution which satisfied his fondness for the creative compromise. It would involve his going outside the station’s pressurized living quarters so that he could communicate privately and efficiently with Director Zunnunun on the home world, Dussarra. Luckily, the series of relocations had been successfully completed and Dussarra was now part of the local system, visible as a bright blue mote against the rich stellar background. At a range of only a few million miles it would be easy to establish mind-to-mind contact with Zunnunun with no risk of others intercepting the communication. Divivvidiv reverted to mid-brain mode and, with his eyes fixed on the image of the ship which was laboring up from the alien planet, contacted the Xa.

You have already told me that the Primitives are unaware of our presence, he said. Does that mean they are totally without means of direct communication?

There was a brief hesitation while the Xa carried out the necessary investigation. Yes, Beloved Creator, the Primitives are completely passive in that respect.

Divivvidiv felt a surge of mingled revulsion and pity—how could any creature endure going through its entire existence in a condition of mind-blindness? The Primitives’ lack of higher sense organs made them easier to deal with in this instance, but the cautious and meticulous side of Divivvidiv’s nature prompted him to ask further questions.

Are they a belligerent race?

Yes, Beloved Creator.

Do they carry weapons?

Yes, Beloved Creator.

Extract a description of the weapons for me.

Another pause followed before the Xa spoke. Their weapons employ solid lead projectiles expelled through tubes by the force of gases compressed in metal containers. Simultaneously the Xa conveyed to Divivvidiv exact details of the dimensions and energy transference capabilities of the types of weapons the Primitives carried both on their persons and aboard their slow-moving craft.

Divivvidiv felt a growing sense of satisfaction as he became certain there was no obstacle to the plan he had conceived for dealing with the approaching ship and its crew.

You are well pleased, Beloved Creator, the Xa said.

Yes—I shall now return to my dream and await the arrival of the Primitives in comfort.

You are pleased because it will not be necessary for you to terminate the Primitives’ lives.

Yes.

In that case, Beloved Creator, why does it not trouble you that soon you will kill me?

You do not understand these things. Divivvidiv felt a sudden impatience with the Xa and its obsession with preserving its own pseudo-life. Each time it returned to the subject his own mind was clouded with dark thoughts of genocide, and—in spite of the mental disciplines at which he was adept—the echoes of those thoughts disturbed his dreams.

Chapter 7

Toller knew it was only his imagination, but an abnormal quietness seemed to have descended over the Five Palaces area of Ro-Atabri. It was not the sort of quietness which comes when human activity is in abeyance—it was more as if an invisible blanket of soundproof material had been pressed down over everything in his vicinity. When he looked about him he could see evidence that carpenters and stonemasons were busy with their restoration work; bluehorns and wagons were sending up clouds of dust which added scumbles of yellow to the blue of the foreday sky; ground crew and airmen were going about their business of getting the ships ready for the round-the-world flight. Everywhere he looked there was purposeful movement, but the noises of it seemed to be reaching him through the filters of distance, attenuated, lacking in relevance.

The flight was due to begin within the hour, and it was that fact—Toller knew—which was numbing his reactions, separating him from the perceived world of the senses. Nine days had passed since Vantara’s departure for Overland, and during that time he had sunk into a mood of depression and apathy which had defied all efforts to overcome it.

When he should have been preparing his men and his ship for the circumnavigation he had been lost in thought, living and reliving that strange hour with Vantara at the Migration Day festivity. What had prompted her to behave as she had? Knowing that she was on the eve of quitting the planet altogether, she had raised him to the heights—he could still feel her lips against his, her breasts cupped in his hands—only to dash him down again with her sudden callous aloofness. Had she been playing cat-and-mouse on a whim, passing a dull hour with a trivial game?

There were moments in which Toller believed that to be the case, and at those times he plumbed new depths of misery, hating the countess with a passion which could whiten his knuckles and rob him of speech in mid-sentence. At other times he saw clearly that she had exerted herself to break down barriers between them, that she considered him a person of value, and that she would indeed be waiting to receive him when next he set foot on Overland. In those periods of optimism Toller felt even worse, because he and his love—the finest and most desirable woman who had ever lived—were literally worlds apart, and he was unable to imagine how he could endure the coming years without seeing her.

He would stare up at the great disk of Overland, its convex vastness crossed again and again by streamers of cloud, and wish for some means of instantaneous communication between the sister planets. There had been fanciful talk of some day building huge sunwriters, with tilting mirrors as large as rooftops, which would have been capable of sending messages between Land and Overland. If such a device had existed Toller would have used it, not so much to talk to Vantara—bridging the interworld gulf in that unsatisfactory way might have made his yearnings even more insupportable—but to get in touch with his father.

Cassyll Maraquine had the power and influence to obtain his son a special release from the Land mission. In the past, before he had been touched by the madness of love, Toller had scorned such uses of privilege, but in his present state of mind he would have seized on the favor with unashamed greed. And now, to make matters worse, he was on the point of setting out on a voyage which would take him through the Land of the Long Days, that distant side of the planet where he would not even have the spare consolation of being able to see Overland and in his mind’s eye watch over Vantara while she went about her oh-so-special life…

“This will never do, young Maraquine,” said Commissioner Kettoran, who had approached Toller unnoticed, making his way among piles of lumber and other supplies. He was wearing the grey robe of his office, but without the official emblems of brakka and enamel. Another man of his rank might have sequestered himself in imposing quarters or only ventured abroad with an entourage, but Kettoran liked to wander unobtrusively and alone through the various sections of the base.

“Instead of mooning around here like a maiden with the colic,” he continued, “you should be checking the loading and balance of your ship.”

“Lieutenant Correvalte is dealing with all that,” Toller replied indifferently. “And probably making a better fist of it than I would.”

Kettoran pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes, creating a prism of shade from which he regarded Toller with concern. “Listen, my boy, I know it is none of my business, but this infatuation with the Countess Vantara bodes ill for your career.”

“Thank you for the advice.” Toller deeply resented the elderly man’s words, but he had too much respect for Kettoran to hint at his anger other than by mild sarcasm. “I’ll keep your good counsel in mind.”

Kettoran gave him a small, sad smile. “Believe me, son, before you know it, these days which seem so interminable and so full of pain will be nothing more than faint memories. Not only that—they will seem joyous in comparison to what is to come. You are foolish not to make the most of them.”

Something in Kettoran’s voice affected Toller, drawing his thoughts away from his own circumstances. “This hardly seems credible,” he said, claiming the right to intimacy he had earned on the interplanetary crossing. “I never expected to hear Trye Kettoran talk like an old man.”

“And I never expected to be an old man—that was a fate exclusively reserved for others. Ponder on what I am telling you, son. And don’t be a fool.” Commissioner Kettoran squeezed Toller’s shoulder with a thin hand, then turned and walked away towards the eastern flank of the Great Palace. His gait seemed to lack something of its usual jauntiness.

Toller stared after the commissioner for a moment, frowning. “Sir,” he called out, prompted by a sudden unease, “is all well with you?”

Appearing not to hear, Kettoran continued on his way and was soon lost to view. Toller, now troubled by premonitions about the commissioner’s well-being, somehow felt obliged to pay more heed to the advice he had just been given. He began making conscientious efforts to follow what was undoubtedly good philosophical counsel—after all, he was young and healthy and all his life lay before him—but each time he ordered himself to feel cheerful the only result was an obstinate upsurge of his misery. Something within him was antagonistic to reason.

He returned to his ship and went on board, supervising the departure arrangements with a gloomy inattentiveness which he knew was bound to communicate itself to the crew. Lieutenant Correvalte responded by becoming even more wooden and correct in his manner. The voyage was expected to take about sixty days, assuming no mishaps were to occur, and the gondola was a very small space for eight men to be cooped in for that length of time. The psychological strain would be considerable even under ideal conditions, and with a commander who was making it clear from the outset that he had no stomach for the mission there could be problems with morale and discipline.

Eventually all the formalities were completed, and the signal for departure came when a trumpet sounded on board the lead ship. The four vessels took off in unison, their jets sending flat billows of sound rolling out across the parks which surrounded the Five Palaces and into the sunlit environs of Ro-Atabri. Toller stood at the rail, hand on the hilt of his sword, leaving the control of the ship to Correvalte, and stared out at the sprawling expanse of the old city. The sun was high in the sky, nearing Overland, and the gondola was completely contained within the shadow of its elliptical gasbag, making the scenery beyond look exceptionally bright and sharply defined. Traditional Kolcorronian architectural styles made extensive use of orange and yellow bricks laid in complex diamond patterns, with dressings of red sandstone at corners and edges, and from a low altitude the city was a glittering mosaic which shimmered confusingly on the eye. Trees at different stages of their lives provided islands of extra color which ranged from pale green to copper and brown.

The ships made a partial circuit of the base and took a north-eastern course, seeking the trade winds which would help conserve power crystals during the voyage. Local surveys had indicated that there would be no shortage of mature brakka trees along the route, but broaching their combustion chambers to obtain the green and purple crystals would have been a time-consuming business, and it was intended that the little fleet should complete the circumnavigation using only its on-board supplies.

Toller gave an involuntary sigh as Ro-Atabri began to slide into the distance aft of his ship, its various features flattening into horizontal bands. The voyage, with all its promised tedium and privation, had begun in earnest, and it was time for him to face up to that fact. He became aware of Baten Steenameert, newly promoted to the rank of air-sergeant, eyeing him as he passed on his way to the lower deck. Steenameert’s pink face was carefully impassive, but Toller knew his recent moodiness had had its effect on the youngster, who had developed an intense loyalty to him since they had left their home world. Toller halted him by raising a hand.

“There is no need for you to fret,” he said. “I have no intention of hurling myself over the side.”

Steenameert looked puzzled. “Sir?”

“Don’t play the innocent with me, young fellow.” Toller was only two years older than the sergeant, but he spoke in the same kind of fatherly tones that Trye Kettoran often used to him, consciously trying to borrow some of the commissioner’s steadiness and stoicism. “I’ve become the butt of quite a few jests around the base, haven’t I? The word has gone about that I’m so besotted with a certain lady that I scarcely know night from day.”

The bloom on Steenameert’s smooth cheeks deepened and he lowered his voice so as not to be overheard by Correvalte who was nearby at the airship’s controls. “Sir, if anybody dared speak ill of you in my presence I would…”

“You will not be required to do battle on my behalf,” Toller said firmly, addressing his wayward inner self as much as anybody else, then saw that Steenameert’s attention had been drawn elsewhere.

The sergeant spoke quickly, before Toller could frame a question. “Sir, I think we are receiving a message.”

Toller looked aft in the direction of Ro-Atabri and saw that a point of intense brilliance was winking amid the complex layered bands of the city. He immediately began deciphering the sunwriter code and felt a peculiar thrill, an icy mingling of excitement and apprehension, as he realized that the beamed message concerned him.

By the time Toller got back to base the balloon of the skyship was fully inflated and the craft was straining at its anchor link, ready to depart for Overland. It was swaying a little within the three timber walls of the towering enclosure, like a vast sentient creature which was becoming impatient with its enforced inactivity. A further indication of the urgency of the situation was that Sky-commodore Sholdde was waiting for Toller by the enclosure instead of in his office.

He nodded ungraciously, obviously in a foul temper, as Toller—flanked by Correvalte and Steenameert—approached him at a quick march and saluted. He ran his fingers through his cropped iron-grey hair and scowled at Toller.

“Captain Maraquine,” he said, “this is a cursed inconvenience. I’ve already been deprived of one airship captain—and now I have to find another.”

“Lieutenant Correvalte is perfectly capable of taking my place on the round-the-world flight, sir,” Toller replied. “I have no hesitation in recommending him for an immediate field promotion.”

“Is that so?” Sholdde turned a hard-eyed, critical gaze on Correvalte and the look of gratification which had appeared on the lieutenant’s face quickly faded.

“Sir,” Toller said, “is Commissioner Kettoran very ill?”

“He looks to me like he’s already dead,” Sholdde said indifferently. “Why did he particularly ask for you to fly him home?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“I can’t understand it either. It seems a strange choice to me. You haven’t exactly distinguished yourself on this mission, Maraquine. I kept waiting for you to trip over that antiquated piece of iron you insist on wearing.”

Toller unconsciously touched the haft of his sword and he felt his face grow warm. The commodore was subjecting him to unnecessary ignominy by giving him a dressing down in the presence of lesser ranks. The most Toller could do to register a protest was to hint that he viewed Sholdde’s remarks as a waste of valuable time.

“Sir, if the commissioner looks as poorly as you say…”

“All right, all right, begone with you.” Sholdde glanced briefly at Steenameert. “Has this man become a Maraquine family retainer, part of your personal entourage?”

“Sir, Corporal Steenameert is a first-class skyman and his services would be invaluable to me on—”

“Take him!” Sholdde turned and strode away without any kind of salute, an action which could only be interpreted as another direct insult.

So that’s it, Toller thought, alerted by the commodore’s reference to the “Maraquine family”. My grandfather was the most famed warrior in Kolcorronian history; my father is one of the most brilliant and most powerful men alive—and even the likes of Sholdde resent me for it. Is that because they believe I secretly make use of family influence? Or is it because, by overtly not making use of it, I proclaim a special kind of egotism? Or can it be that I shame or annoy them by refusing to grasp opportunities for which they would give… ?

A prolonged blast on the skyship’s burner, echoing in the huge cavity of the balloon, interrupted Toller’s reverie. He touched Correvalte’s shoulder in farewell, ran with Steenameert to the gondola and climbed over the side. The ground crew sergeant who was at the burner controls, keeping the ship in readiness, saluted and nodded towards the passenger compartment.

Toller went to the chest-high cane partition and looked over it. Commissioner Kettoran was lying on a pallet and, in spite of the heat, was covered with a quilt. His long face was extremely pale, with lines of age and weariness graven into it, but his eyes were alert. He winked when he saw Toller and twitched a thin hand in an attempted greeting.

“Are you travelling alone, sir?” Toller said with concern. “No physician?”

A scornful expression briefly animated Kettoran’s features. “Those blood-letters will never get their hands on me.”

“But if you are ill…”

“The doctor who could cure my complaint has yet to be born,” Kettoran said, almost with satisfaction. “I suffer from nothing less than a dearth of time. Speaking of which, young Maraquine, I was under the impression you also were anxious to make a speedy return to Overland.”

Toller mumbled an apology and turned to the sergeant, who immediately moved away from the burner controls and clambered over the gondola’s side. Pausing for a few seconds on the outside ledge, he explained to Steenameert where all necessary provisions, including skysuits, had been stored. As soon as he had dropped out of sight Toller fed a plentiful charge of hot gas into the pliable dome of the balloon above him and pulled the anchor link.

The skyship surged upwards, its acceleration enhanced by the lift created as the curved upper surface of the balloon moved into the current of air flowing over the enclosure. Well aware that the extra buoyancy would be cancelled as soon as the balloon fully entered the westerly airstream and began to move with it, Toller kept the burner going. The skyship—in spite of being so much below its maximum operating weight—performed a queasy slow-motion shimmy as it adapted to the changing aerial environment, causing Steenameert to clutch theatrically at his stomach. From Commissioner Kettoran, hidden behind his wicker partition, came a moan of complaint.

For the second time in less than an hour the sprawling panorama of Ro-Atabri began to recede from Toller, but now it was retreating downwards. I can scarcely believe that all this is happening to me, he thought dreamily, almost stupefied by the flux of circumstance. Only minutes earlier he had been racked by fears that he would never see Vantara Dervonai again—now he was on his way to her, keeping an appointment which had been specially arranged for him by the forces of destiny.

Soon I will be able to see Vantara again, he told himself. For once, things are working out in my favor.

Toller had not eaten anything for a day, and had taken only a few sips of water, barely enough to replace the bodily moisture lost by exhaling into the arid air of the middle passage. Toilet facilities on a skyship were necessarily primitive and unpleasant to use at the best of times, but in weightless conditions the disadvantages—including the sheer indignity—were so great that most people chose to suspend their natural functions as completely as possible for a day on either side of turnover. The system worked reasonably well for a healthy adult, but Commissioner Kettoran had begun the voyage in a severely weakened state, and now—much to Toller’s concern—appeared to be using up the last dregs of his strength merely to stay alive.

“You can take those slops away from me,” Kettoran said in a grouchy whisper. “I refuse to be suckled like a babe at my time of life—especially from a revolting dug like that.”

Toller unhappily fingered the conical bag of luke-warm soup he had been proffering. “This will do you good.”

“You sound just like my mother.”

“Is that a reason for not taking sustenance?”

“Don’t try to be clever, young Maraquine.” Kettoran’s breath issued in white clouds from a small opening in the mound of quilts in which he had ensconced himself.

“I was only trying to—”

“My mother could make much better food than any of the cooks we ever employed,” Kettoran mused, paying no heed to Toller. “We had a house on the west side of Greenmount—not far from where your grandfather lived, incidentally—and I can still remember riding up the hill, going into our precinct and knowing immediately, just by the aromas, whether or not my mother had chosen to prepare the evening meal. I went back there a few days after we landed in Ro-Atabri, but the entire district had been burnt out a long time ago… during the riots… gutted… hardly a building left intact. It was a mistake for me to go there—I should have preserved my memories.”

At the mention of his namesake Toller’s interest picked up. “Did you ever see my grandfather in those days?”

“Occasionally. It would have been hard not to see him—a fine figure of a man, he was—but I more often saw his brother, Lain… going back and forth between his house and the Lord Philosopher’s official residence in Greenmount Peel.”

“What did my grand—?” Toller broke off, alarms clamoring silently in his mind, as there was a subtle but abrupt change in his environment. He rose to his feet, holding a transverse line to keep himself from drifting clear of the deck, and looked all about him. Steenameert, muffled in his skysuit, was strapped into his seat at the control station. He was firing the main jet in the steady rhythm needed to maintain the ship’s ascent, and he appeared completely unperturbed. Everything seemed absolutely as normal in the square microcosm of the gondola, and beyond its rim the familiar patterns of stars and luminous whirls shone steadily in the dark blue sky.

“Sir?” The swaddled, anonymous bulk of Steenameert moved slightly. “Is there something wrong?”

Toller had to survey his surroundings again before he was able to identify the source of his unease. “The light! There was a change in the light! Didn’t you notice?”

“I must have had my eyes closed. But I still don’t…”

“There was a drop in brightness—I’m sure of it—and yet we have more than an hour till nightfall.” Baffled and disturbed, wishing he could have a direct view of the sun, Toller drew himself closer to the control station and looked up through the mouth of the balloon. The varnished linen of the envelope was dyed dark brown so that it would absorb heat from the sun, but it was to some extent translucent and he could see a geometrical design of panel seams and load tapes radiating from the crown, emphasizing the vastness of the flimsy dome. It was a sight he had seen many times, and on this occasion it looked exactly as it had always done. Steenameert also looked into the balloon, then lowered his gaze without comment.

“I tell you something happened,” Toller said, trying to keep any hint of uncertainty out of his voice. “Something happened. There was a change in the light… a shadow… something.”

“According to the height gauge we are somewhere close to the datum plane, sir,” Steenameert said, obviously striving to be helpful. “Perhaps we have come up directly beneath the permanent stations and have touched their shadows.”

“That is virtually impossible—there is always a certain amount of drift.” Toller frowned for a moment, coming to a decision. “Rotate the ship.”

“I … I don’t think I’m ready to handle an inversion.”

“I don’t want it turned over yet. Just make a quarter-rotation so that we can see what’s above us.” Realizing he was still holding the food bag he tossed it towards the passenger compartment on a descending curve. It fouled a safety line, swung round it and floated out over the gondola’s side, slowly tumbling as it went.

Toller pulled himself to the rail, straining to see upwards, and waited impatiently while Steenameert fired one of the tiny lateral jets on the opposite side of the gondola. At first the jet appeared to be having no effect, except that the slim acceleration struts on each side of Toller emitted faint creaks; then, after what seemed an interminable wait, the whole universe began a ponderous downwards slide. The whorled disk of Land moved out of sight beneath Toller’s feet, and above him—stealthily uncovered by the ship’s balloon—there came into view a spectacle unlike anything he had ever seen.

Half the sky was occupied by a vast circular sheet of white fire.

The sun was slipping out of sight behind the eastern edge, and at that point the brilliance was intolerable, a locus of blinding radiance which sprayed billions of prismatic needles across the rest of the circle.

There was a slight falling off in the intensity of light across the disk, but even at the side farthest from the sun it was enough to sting the eyes. To Toller the effect was akin to looking upwards from the depths of a sunlit frozen lake. He had expected to see Overland filling a large area of the heavens, but the planet was hidden behind the beautiful, inexplicable, impossible sheet of diamond-white light, through which rainbow colors raced and danced in clashing zigzag lines.

As he stood at the rail, transfixed, he became aware that the incredible spectacle was drifting down the sky at undiminished speed. He turned and saw that Steenameert was staring out past him, jaw sagging, with eyes which had become reflective white disks—miniature versions of the phenomenon which was mesmerizing him.

“A quarter turn I told you,” Toller bellowed. “Check the rotation.”

“Sorry, sir.” Steenameert stirred into action and the lateral jet mounted low down on Toller’s side of the gondola began to spew miglign gas. Rings of condensation rolled away from it through the gelid air. The sound of the jet was puny, quickly absorbed by the surrounding void, but it gradually achieved the intended effect and the skyship came to rest with its vertical axis parallel to the sea of white fire.

“What’s going on out there?” The querulous voice of Trye Kettoran issuing from the passenger compartment helped bring Toller out of his own tranced condition.

“Have a look over the side,” he called out for the commissioner’s benefit, then turned to Steenameert. “What do you think yonder thing is? Ice?”

Steenameert nodded slowly. “Ice is the only explanation I can imagine, but…”

“But where did the water come from? There is the usual supply of drinking water in the defense stations, but that amounts to no more than a few barrels…” Toller paused as a new thought struck him. “Where are the stations, anyway? We must try to locate them. Are they embedded in the… ?” His voice failed altogether as related questions geysered through his mind. How thick was the ice? How far away from the ship was it? How wide was the enormous circular sheet?

How wide is the circle?

The last question suddenly reverberated in his consciousness, excluding all others. Until that instant Toller had been overawed by the brilliant spectacle confronting him, but it had inspired no sense of danger. There had been a feeling of wonder—but no threat. Now, however, certain facts of aerial physics were beginning to assume importance. A disturbing importance. A potentially lethal importance…

He knew that the atmosphere which enveloped the sister planets was shaped like an hourglass, the waist of which formed a narrow bridge of air through which skyships had to pass. Old experiments had established that ships had to keep near the center of the bridge—otherwise the air became so attenuated that the crews were bound to asphyxiate. Largely because of the difficulty of taking measurements in the region, there was some uncertainty about the thickness of that core of breathable air, but the best estimates were that it was no more than a hundred miles in diameter.

The enigmatic sea of sun-blazing ice was rendered featureless by its brilliance, and in the absence of spatial referents it could have been hovering “beside” the skyship at a distance of ten miles, or twenty, or forty, or… Toller could think of no way to ascertain its distance, but he could see that it spanned almost one third of the visual hemisphere, and that gave him enough information to perform an elementary calculation.

Lips moving silently, he stared at the radiant disk while he dealt with the relevant figures, and a coldness which had nothing to do with the harsh environment entered his system as he reached a conclusion. If the disk proved to be as much as sixty miles away—which it could quite easily be—then, by the immutable laws of mathematics, it was sufficiently wide to block the air bridge between Land and Overland…

“Sir?” Steenameert’s voice seemed to come from another universe. “How far would you say we are from the ice?”

“That is an excellent question,” Toller said grimly, taking the ship’s binoculars from the control station locker. He aimed them at the disk, striving to pick out detail, but could see only a shimmering field of brightness. The sun was now fully occulted, spreading its light more evenly over the vast circle, making an estimate of its distance more difficult than before. Toller turned away from the rail, knuckling round green after-images from his eyes, and examined the height gauge. Its pointer was perhaps a hair’s breadth below the zero-gravity mark.

“You can’t rely much on those devices, sir,” Steenameert commented, unable to resist showing off his knowledge. “They are calibrated in a workshop, with no allowance for the effect of low temperatures on the springs, and—”

“Spare me,” Toller cut in. “This is a serious matter—I need to know the size of that… thing out there.”

“Fly towards it and take note of how it expands.”

Toller shook his head. “I have a better idea. I have no intention of turning back unless all other options are denied me—therefore we will fly towards the edge of the circle. Its exact diameter in miles is not all that significant. The truly important thing is to ascertain whether or not we can fly our ship around the obstacle.

“Do you wish to remain at the controls?”

“I would value the experience, sir,” Steenameert replied. “What burner rhythm do you require?”

Toller hesitated, frowning, frustrated by the fact that no practicable air speed indicator had ever been developed for use on skyships. An experienced pilot could get some idea of his speed from the slackening of the rip line as the crown of the balloon was depressed by air resistance, but the abundance of variables made accuracy impossible. It would not have been beyond Kolcorronian ingenuity to devise a reliable instrument, but the motivation had never been present. A skyship’s job was to crawl up and down between the planetary surface and the weightless zone—a journey which always took roughly five days on each leg—and a difference of a few miles an hour was neither here nor there.

“Give it two and six,” Toller said. “We shall pretend to ourselves that we are making twenty miles in the hour and base all our estimates accordingly.”

“But what is the nature of the barrier?” Commissioner Kettoran said from close behind Toller. He was in an upright position, holding the edge of the cane partition with one hand and keeping a quilt around him with the other.

Toller’s first impulse was to request him to lie down again to achieve the complete rest which had been prescribed by the base physician, then it occurred to him that in the absence of weight it made no difference which attitude was adopted by a person with a heart condition. Allowing his thoughts to be diverted into irrelevancies, he visualized a new use for the pathetic little group of defense stations in the weightless zone. Properly heated and supplied with good air, they could best serve as rest centers for those with certain kinds of ailment. Even a cripple would be…

“I’m addressing you, young Maraquine,” Kettoran said peevishly. “What is your opinion of that curious object?”

“I think it might be made of ice.”

“But where would such a vast quantity of water come from?”

Toller shrugged. “We have had rocks and even pieces of metal descend on us from the stars—perhaps the void also contains water.”

“A likely story,” Kettoran grumbled. He gave a theatrical shrug and his long, solemn face—now purple with the cold—slowly sank from view as he returned to his cocoon of downy quilts.

“It’s an omen,” he added, his voice muffled and indistinct from behind the partition. “I know an omen when I see one.”

Toller nodded, smiling thinly in skepticism, and returned to his vigil at the gondola’s rail. By calling out-the firing times for the various lateral jets he helped Steenameert guide the ship into a course which closed with the fire-sheet at an unknown angle, aiming it for the westernmost edge. The main jet was roaring in a steady two-six rhythm and Toller knew that the ship’s speed could easily be as much as his putative twenty miles an hour—but the aspect of the sheet did not alter noticeably with the passing of the minutes.

“Our friend, the omen, appears to be a veritable giant,” he said to Steenameert. “We may have some trouble in getting around him.”

Wishing he had the simple navigational instruments available on the humblest airship, Toller kept his gaze on the eastern rim of the great circle, willing it to descend and thus prove that the ship was making significant progress. He was just beginning to convince himself that he could indeed see a change in the vital angle, when the glowing sheet was swept by waves of prismatic color. They moved at breathtaking orbital speed, crossing the entire disk in mere seconds and stilling Toller’s heart with their message that cosmic events were taking place, reminding him of how unimportant the affairs of mankind were when measured against the grandeur of the universe. The sun, already hidden from his view by the icy screen, was being further occulted by Overland. As soon as the bands of color—engendered by the refraction of the sun’s light in Overland’s atmosphere—had fled into infinity the disk’s overall luminosity began to decrease. Night was falling in the weightless zone.

Here, so close to the datum plane, the terms “night” and “littlenight” no longer had any relevance. Each diurnal cycle was punctuated by two periods of darkness approximately equal in length, and Toller knew it would be some four hours before the sun reappeared. The hiatus could hardly have come at a more inconvenient time.

“Sir?” Steenameert, a sentient pyramid of swaddling in the fading light, had no need to voice the full question.

“Keep going, but reduce thrust to one and six,” Toller ordered. “We can shut down the jet altogether if we find we can’t keep a check on our course. And be sure to keep the balloon well inflated.”

Grateful for Steenameert’s competence, Toller remained at the rail and studied the disk. Sunlight was still being reflected from Land—which was now directly behind him—so the icy wall remained visible, and with the change in illumination he began to see hints of an internal structure. There was a tracery of the palest violet, arranged like rivers which divided and kept on dividing until they faded from the sight, lost in distant shimmers.

They’re like veins, Toller thought. Veins in a giant eye…

As Land was gradually enveloped in Overland’s shadow the disk steadily darkened to near-blackness, but its edge was still clearly defined against the cosmic background. The rest of the sky was now ablaze with its customary extravagance of galaxies—glowing whirlpools ranging from circles to slim ellipses—plus formless ribbons of light, myriads of stars, comets and darting meteors. Against that luminous richness the disk was more mysterious than ever—a featureless well of night which had no right to exist in a rational universe.

By occasionally ordering a slight pendulum movement of the ship Toller was able to look ahead and satisfy himself that it was on course for the disk’s western edge. As the hours of darkness dragged by the air became progressively thinner and less satisfying to the lungs, evidence that the skyship was far from the center of the invisible bridge that linked the two worlds. Although Commissioner Kettoran did not voice any complaint, his breathing became clearly audible. He had mixed some firesalt with water in a vellum bag and could be heard sniffing from it at frequent intervals.

When at last daylight returned, heralded by a brightening of the disk’s western rim, Toller found he could see the rim without having to tilt the ship. Perspective returned; geometry again became a useful tool.

“We’re only a mile or so from the edge,” he announced for the benefit of Steenameert and Kettoran. “In a few minutes we should be able to work around it and head back into the good air.”

“It’s about time!” Kettoran scowled face appeared above the passenger compartment partition. “How far to the side have we travelled?”

“Perpendicular to the ideal course, we must have done in the region of thirty miles—” Toller glanced at Steenameert and received a nod of confirmation—“which means we are dealing with a lake, a sea, of ice some sixty miles across. I find it hard to credit what I’m saying, even though I am looking straight at the thing. Nobody in Prad is going to believe what we say.”

“We may have corroboration.”

“By telescope?”

“By your lady friend—Countess Vantara.” Kettoran dabbed a drop of moisture from the end of his nose. “Her ship departed not so many days before ours.”

“You’re right, of course.” Toller was dully surprised to realize he had forgotten about Vantara for several hours. “The ice… the barrier… whatever it is… may have been in place when she made the crossing. It is something we will have to confer over in detail.”

Having derived an unexpected grain of comfort from the discussion—a readymade reason to seek out Vantara, wherever she might be—Toller gave his attention to the task of steering his ship around the edge of the disk. The maneuver was not a difficult one in theory. AH he had to do was pass the western rim by a short distance, carry out a simple inversion and begin flying back into the thicker air at the core of the atmospheric bridge.

Leaving Steenameert at the controls, he remained by the rail in order to obtain the most advantageous viewpoint and started giving detailed handling instructions. The ship was moving very slowly as it drew level with the rim, probably at no more than walking pace, but after some minutes had passed it came to Toller that it was taking longer than he had expected to reach the limit of the ice wall. Suddenly suspicious, he trained his binoculars on the rim. The sun was close to his aiming point, hurling billions of needles of radiance into his eyes and making the viewing difficult, but he managed to get a clear look at the icy boundary. It was now less than a furlong away in reality, and the image in his glasses brought it much closer.

Toller grunted in surprise as he discovered that the rim of the ice sheet was alive.

In place of what he had expected—the inertness of frozen water—there was a kind of crystalline seething. Glassy prisms and spikes and branches, each as tall as a man, were sprouting outwards on the rim with unnatural rapidity. They were extending the boundary of the sheet with the speed of billowing smoke—each thrusting into the gelid air and glistening in the sunlight for a moment before being overtaken and assimilated by others in the racing, sparkling vitreous foment.

Toller stared at the phenomenon, tranced, his mind awash with the unexpected and incredible beauty of it, and it seemed a long time before the first coherent thought came to him: The rim of the barrier is moving outwards at almost the same speed as the ship!

“Increase speed,” he shouted to Steenameert, his voice strained by the bitter coldness and the inimical nature of the thinning air. “Otherwise you’ll never see home again!”

Commissioner Kettoran, who had seemed almost a well man during the passage through the weightless zone, had been struck by a fresh seizure when the ship was only a few thousand feet above the surface of Overland. In one second he had been standing with Toller at the gondola’s rail and pointing out familiar features in the landscape below; in the next he was lying on his back, unable to move, eyes alert and afraid, beaconing an intelligence trapped inside a machine which no longer responded to its master’s bidding. Toller had carried him to his nest of quilts, wiped the frothy saliva from the corners of his mouth, and had gone immediately for the sunwriter in its leather case.

The lateral drift had been greater than usual, bringing the ship down some twelve miles to the east of the city of Prad, but the sunwriter message had been picked up in good time. A sizeable group of coaches and mounted men—plus a sleek airboat in grey-and-blue royal livery—had been waiting in the touchdown area. Within five minutes of the landing the commissioner had been transferred to the airboat and sent on his way to an emergency audition with Queen Daseene, who was waiting in the overheated confines of her palace.

There had been no opportunity for Toller to pass on any words of reassurance or farewell to Kettoran, a man he had come to regard as a good friend in spite of the disparity in age and status. As he watched the airboat dwindle into the yellow western sky he became aware of a sense of guilt and it took him some time to identify its source. He was, of course, deeply concerned about the commissioner’s health, but at the same time—and there was no getting around the fact—one part of him was thankful that the older man’s misfortune had come along, like the answer to a prayer, exactly when he had needed it. No other circumstance that he could readily think of could have placed him back on Overland and within reach of Vantara in such a short time.

What sort of monster am I? he thought, shocked by his own selfishness. I must be the worst…

Toller’s bout of introspection was interrupted by the sight of his father and Bartan Drumme descending from a coach which had just arrived at the landing site. Both men were attired in grey trews and three-quarter-length tabards gored with blue silk, a formal style of dress which suggested they had come straight from an important meeting in the city. Toller strode eagerly to meet his father, embraced him and then shook hands with Bartan Drumme.

“This is truly an unexpected pleasure,” Cassyll Maraquine said, a smile rejuvenating his pale triangular face, “it is a great shame about the commissioner, of course, but we must assume that the royal physicians—a plentiful breed in these times—will quickly put him to rights. How have you been, son?”

“I am well.” Toller looked at his father for a moment in that unique gratification which springs from an harmonious relationship with a parent, and then—as extraneous matters crowded into his mind—he shifted his gaze to include Bartan Drumme in what had to follow. The latter was the only surviving member of a fabled voyage to Farland, the local system’s outermost planet, and was acknowledged as Kolcorron’s leading expert on astronomical matters.

“Father, Bartan,” Toller said, “have you been observing the skies within the last ten or twenty days? Have you noticed anything unusual?”

The older men exchanged cautiously surprised glances. “Are you speaking of the blue planet?” Bartan said.

Toller frowned. “Blue planet? No, I’m talking about a barrier … a wall … a lake of ice… call it what you will… which has appeared at the midpoint. It is at least sixty miles across and growing wider by the hour. Has it not been observed from the ground?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary has been observed, but I’m not even sure that the Glo telescope has been in use since—” Bartan broke off and gave Toller a quizzical stare. “Toller… Toller, you can’t nave an accretion of ice at the midpoint—there simply isn’t the water. The air is too dry.”

“Ice! Or crystal of some kind. I saw it!” The fact that he was being disbelieved did not surprise or unduly disturb Toller, but it caused an uneasy stirring in the lower levels of his consciousness. There was something wrong with the pattern of the conversation. It was not going as it should have gone, but some factor—perhaps a deep-seated unwillingness to face reality—was for the moment paralyzing vital mental processes.

Bartan gave him a patient smile. “Perhaps there has been a major failure in one of the permanent stations, perhaps an explosion which has scattered power crystals over a wide area. They might be drifting and combining and forming large clouds of condensation, and we both know that condensation can give the appearance of being very substantial… like banks of snow or—”

“The Countess Vantara,” Toller interrupted with a numb smile, keeping his voice steady to hide the fear that had been unleashed in him as certain doors swung open. “She made the crossing only nine days ago—had she nothing unusual to report?”

“I don’t know what you mean, son,” Cassyll Maraquine said, speaking the words which Toller had already prepared for him on a parchment of the mind. “Yours is the first and only ship to have returned from Land. Countess Vantara has not been seen since the expedition departed.”