Xeelee: Endurance

Formidable Caress

AD c.5 Billion Years

As the women tried to pull her away, Ama hammered with her fist on the blank wall of the Building. ‘Let me inside! Oh, let me inside!’

But the Building had sealed itself against her. If the Weapon that ruled the people decreed that you were to bear your child in the open air, that was how it was going to be, and no mere human being could do anything about it.

And she could not fight the logic of her body. The contractions came in pulses now, in waves of pain that washed through the core of her being. In the end it was her father, Telni, who put his bony arm around her shoulders, murmuring small endearments. Exhausted, she allowed herself to be led away.

Telni’s sister Jurg and the other women had set up a pallet for her not far from the rim of the Platform. They laid her down there and fussed with their blankets and buckets of warmed water, and prepared ancient knives for the cutting. Her aunt massaged her swollen belly with oils brought up from the Lowland. Telni propped Ama’s head on his arm, and held her hand tightly, but she could feel the weariness in her father’s grip.

So it began. She breathed and screamed and pushed.

And through it all, here at the lip of the Platform, this floating island in the sky, she was surrounded by the apparatus of her world, the Buildings clustered around her – floating buildings that supported the Platform itself – the red mist of the Lowland far below, above her the gaunt cliff on which glittered the blue-tinged lights of the Shelf cities, the sky over her head where chains of stars curled like windblown hair . . . When she looked up she was peering into accelerated time, into places where a human heart fluttered like a songbird’s. But there was a personal dimension to time too, so her father had always taught her, and these hours of her labour were the longest of her life, as if her body had been dragged all the way down into the glutinous, redshifted slowness of the Lowland.

When it was done Jurg handed her the baby. It was a boy, a scrap of flesh born a little early, his weight negligible inside the spindling-skin blankets. She immediately loved him unconditionally, whatever alien thing lay within. ‘I call him Telni like his grandfather,’ she managed to whisper.

Old Telni, exhausted himself, wiped tears from his crumpled cheeks.

She slept for a while, out in the open.

When she opened her eyes, the Weapon was floating above her. As always, a small boy stood at its side.

The Weapon was a box as wide as a human was tall, reflective as a mirror, hovering at waist height above the smooth surface of the Platform. Ama could see herself in the thing’s silver panels, on her back on the heap of blankets, her baby asleep in the cot beside her. Her aunt, her father, the other women hung back, nervous of this massive presence that dominated all their lives.

Then a small hatch opened in the Weapon’s flank, an opening with lobed lips, like a mouth. From this hatch a silvery tongue, metres long, reached out and snaked into the back of the neck of the small boy who stood alongside it. Now the boy took a step towards Ama’s cot, trailing his tongue-umbilical.

Telni blocked his way. ‘Stay back, Powpy, you little monster. You were once a boy as I was. Now I am old and you are still young. Stay away from my grandson.’

Powpy halted. Ama saw that his eyes flickered nervously, glancing at Telni, the cot, the Weapon. This showed the extent of the Weapon’s control of its human creature; somewhere in there was a frightened child.

Ama struggled to sit up. ‘What do you want?’

The boy Powpy turned to her. ‘We wish to know why you wanted to give birth within a Building.’

‘You know why,’ she snapped back. ‘No child born inside a Building has ever harboured an Effigy.’

The child’s voice was flat, neutral – his accent was like her father’s, she thought, a little boy with the intonation of an older generation. ‘A child without an Effigy is less than a child with an Effigy. Human tradition concurs with that, even without understanding—’

‘I didn’t want you to be interested in him.’ The words came in a rush. ‘You control us. You keep us here, floating on this island in the sky. All for the Effigies we harbour, or not. That’s what you’re interested in, isn’t it?’ Her father laid a trembling hand on her arm, but she shook it away. ‘My husband believed his life was pointless, that his only purpose was to nurture the Effigy inside him, and grow old and die for you. In the end he destroyed himself—’

‘Addled by the drink,’ murmured Telni.

‘He didn’t want you to benefit from his death. He never even saw this baby, his son. He wanted more than this!’

The Weapon seemed to consider this. ‘We intend no harm. On the contrary, a proper study of the symbiotic relationship between humans and Effigies—’

‘Go away,’ she said. She found she was choking back tears. ‘Go away!’ And she flung a blanket at its impassive hide, for that was all she had to throw.

The Weapon returned to visit Telni when he was six years old. Ama chased it away again.

The machine next came to see Telni after the death of Ama and her father. Telni was ten years old. There was no one to chase it away.

The double funeral was almost done, at last.

Telni had had to endure a long vigil beside the bodies, where they had been laid out close to the rim of the Platform. He slept a lot, huddled against his kind but severe great-aunt Jurg, his last surviving relative.

At the dawn of the third day, as the light storms down on the Lowland glimmered and shifted and filled the air with their pearly glow, Jurg prodded him awake.

And, he saw, his mother’s Effigy was ascending. A cloud of pale mist burst soundlessly from the body on its pallet. It hovered, tendrils and billows pulsing – and then, just for a heartbeat, it gathered itself into a form that was recognisably human, a misty shell with arms and legs, torso and head.

Jurg, Ama’s aunt, was crying. ‘She’s smiling. Can you see? Oh, how wonderful . . .’

The sketch of Ama lengthened, her neck stretching like a spindling’s, becoming impossibly long. Then the distorted Effigy shot up into the blueshifted sky and arced down over the lip of the Platform, hurling itself into the flickering crimson of the plain below. Jurg told Telni that Ama’s Effigy was seeking its final lodging deep in the slow-beating heart of Old Earth, where, so it was believed, something of Ama would survive even the Formidable Caresses. But Telni knew that Ama had despised the Effigies, even the one that turned out to have resided in her.

They waited another day, but no Effigy emerged from old Telni.

The bodies were taken across the Platform, to the centre of the cluster of box-shaped, blank-walled Buildings that supported this aerial colony, and placed reverently inside one of the smaller structures. A week later, when Jurg took Telni to see, the bodies were entirely vanished, their substance subsumed by the Building, which might have become a fraction larger after its ingestion.

So Telni, orphaned, was left in the care of his great-aunt.

Jurg tried to get him to return to his schooling. A thousand people lived on the Platform, of which a few hundred were children; the schools were efficient and well organised.

But Telni, driven by feelings too complicated to face, was restless. He roamed alone through the forest of Buildings. Or he would stand at the edge of the Platform, before the gulf that surrounded his floating home, and look up to watch the Shelf war unfold, accelerated by its altitude, the pale-blue explosions and whizzing aircraft making an endless spectacle. He was aware that his great-aunt and teachers and the other adults were watching him, concerned, but for now they gave him his head.

On the third day, he made for one of his favourite places, which was the big wheel at the very centre of the Platform, turned endlessly by harnessed spindlings. Here you could look down through a hatch in the Platform, a hole in the floor of the world, and follow the tethers that attached the Platform like a huge kite to the Lowland ground half a kilometre below, and watch the bucket chains rising and falling. The Loading Hub was down on the ground directly beneath the Platform, the convergence of a dozen roads that were crowded with supply carts day and night. Standing here it was as if you could see the machinery of the world working. Telni liked to think about such things, to work them out, as a distraction from thinking about other things. And it pleased him in other ways he didn’t really understand, as if he had a deep, sunken memory of much bigger, more complicated machinery than this.

Best of all you could visit the spindling pens and help the cargo jockeys muck out one of the tall beasts, and brush the fur on its six powerful legs, and feed it the strange purple-coloured straw it preferred. The spindlings saw him cry a few times, but nobody else, not even his great-aunt.

And so the Weapon came to see him.

Telni was alone in one of the smaller Buildings, near the centre of the cluster on the Platform. He was watching the slow crawl of lightmoss across the wall, the glow it cast subtly shifting. It was as if the Weapon just appeared at the door. Its little boy stood at its side, Powpy, with the cable dangling from the back of his neck.

Telni stared at the boy. ‘He used to be bigger than me. The boy. Now he’s smaller.’

‘We believe you understand why,’ said Powpy.

‘The last time I saw you was four years ago. I was six. I’ve grown since then. But you live down on the Lowland, mostly. Did you come up in one of the freight buckets?’

‘No.’

‘You live slower down there.’

‘Do you know how much slower?’

‘No,’ Telni said.

The boy nodded stiffly, as if somebody was pushing the back of his head. ‘A straightforward, honest answer. The Lowland here is deep, about half a kilometre below the Platform, which is itself over three hundred metres below the Shelf. Locally the stratification of time has a gradient of, approximately, five parts in one hundred per metre. So a year on the Platform is—’

‘Only a couple of weeks on the Lowland. But, umm, three hundred times five, a year here is fifteen years on the Shelf.’

‘Actually closer to seventeen. Do you know why time is stratified?’

‘I don’t know that word.’

Powpy’s little mouth had stumbled on it too, and other hard words. ‘Layered.’

‘No.’

‘Good. Nor do we. Do you know why your mother died?’

That blunt question made him gasp. Since Ama had gone, nobody had even mentioned her name. ‘It was the refugees’ plague. She died of that. And my grandfather died soon after. My great-aunt Jurg says it was of a broken heart.’

‘Why did the plague come here?’

‘The refugees brought it. Refugees from the war on the Shelf. The war’s gone on for years, Shelf years. My grandfather says – said – it is as if they are trying to bring down a Formidable Caress of their own, on their families. The refugees came in a balloon. Families with kids. Grandfather says it happens every so often. They don’t know what the Platform is but they see it hanging in the air below them, at peace. So they try to escape from the war.’

‘Were they sick when they arrived?’

‘No. But they carried the plague bugs. People started dying. They weren’t im—’

‘Immune.’

‘Immune like the refugees were.’

‘Why not?’

‘Time goes faster up on the Shelf. Bugs change quickly. You get used to one, but then another comes along.’

‘Your understanding is clear.’

‘My mother hated you. She was unhappy when you visited me that time, when I was six. She says you meddle in our lives.’

‘“Meddle.” We created the Platform, gathered the sentient Buildings to support it in the air. We designed this community. Your life, and the lives of many generations of your ancestors, have been shaped by what we built. We “meddled” in many ways long before you were born.’

‘Why?’

Silence again. ‘That’s too big a question. Ask smaller questions.’

‘Why are there so many roads coming in across the Lowland to the Loading Hub?’

‘I think you know the answer to that.’

‘Time goes twenty-five times slower down there. It’s as if they’re trying to feed a city twenty-five times the size of the Platform. As if we eat twenty-five times as fast as they do!’

‘That’s right. Now ask about something you don’t know.’

He pointed to the lightmoss. ‘You put this stuff in the Buildings to give us light. Like living, glowing paint.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Is this the same stuff that makes the light storms, down on the Lowland?’

‘Yes, it is. Later you may learn that lightmoss is gathered on the Lowland and shipped up to the Platform in the supply lifts. That’s a good observation. To connect two such apparently disparate phenomena—’

‘I tried to eat the lightmoss. I threw it up. You can’t eat the spindlings’ straw either. Why?’

‘Because they come from other places. Other worlds than this. Whole other systems of life.’

Telni understood some of this. ‘People brought them here, and mixed everything up.’ A thought struck him. ‘Can spindlings eat lightmoss?’

‘Why is that relevant?’

‘Because if they can it must mean they both came from the same other place.’

‘You can find that out for yourself.’

He itched to try the experiment, right now. But he sought another question to ask, while he had the chance. ‘Did people make you?’

‘They made our grandfathers, if you like.’

‘Were you really Weapons?’

‘Not all of us. Such labels are irrelevant now. When human civilisations fell, sentient machines were left to roam, to interact. There was selection, of a brutal sort, as we competed for resources and spare parts. Thus we enjoyed our own long evolution. A man called Bayle mounted an expedition to the Lowland, and found us.’

‘You were farming humans. That’s what my mother said.’

‘It wasn’t as simple as that. The interaction with Bayle’s scholars led to a new generation of machines with enhanced faculties.’

‘What kind of faculties?’

‘Curiosity.’

Telni considered that. ‘What’s special about me? That I might have an Effigy inside me?’

‘Not just that. Your mother rebelled when you were born. That’s very rare. The human community here was founded from a pool of scholars, but that was many generations ago. We fear that by caring for you we may have bred out a certain initiative. That was how you came to our attention, Telni. Your mother rebelled, and you seek to answer questions. There may be questions you can answer that we can’t. There may be questions you can ask that we can’t.’

‘Like what?’

‘You have to ask. That’s the point.’

He thought. ‘What are the Formidable Caresses?’

‘The ends of the world. Or at least, of civilisation. In the past, and in the future.’

‘How does time work?’

‘That’s another question you can answer yourself.’

He was mystified. ‘How?’

A seam opened up on the Weapon’s sleek side, like a wound, revealing a dark interior. Powpy had to push his little hand inside and grope around for something. Despite the Weapon’s control, Telni could see the boy’s revulsion. He drew out something that gleamed, complex, a mechanism. He handed it to Telni.

Telni turned it over in his hands, fascinated. It was warm. ‘What is it?’

‘A clock. A precise one. You’ll work out what to do with it.’ The Weapon moved, gliding up another metre into the air. ‘One more question.’

‘Why do I feel . . . sometimes . . .’ It was hard to put into words. ‘Like I should be somewhere else? My mother said everybody feels like that, when they’re young. But . . . Is it a stupid question?’

‘No. It is a very important question. But it is one you will have to answer for yourself. We will see you again.’ It drifted away, two metres up in the air, with the little boy running beneath, like a dog on a long lead. But it paused once more, and the boy turned and spoke again. ‘What will you do now?’

Telni grinned. ‘Go feed moss to a spindling.’

That was the start of Telni’s scholarship, in retrospect, much of it self-discovered, self-taught. And as his understanding increased, he grew in wisdom, strength, and stature in his community.

In Telni’s twenty-fifth year, a group of Natural Philosophers from the Shelf visited the Platform. Telni was the youngest of the party selected to greet the Shelf scholars.

And MinaAndry, a year or two younger, was the most junior of the visitors from Foro. It was natural they would end up together.

The formal welcomes were made at the lip of the Platform, under the vast, astonishing bulk of a tethered airship. The Shelf folk, used to solid ground under their feet, looked as if they longed to be far away from the Platform’s edge, and the long drop to the Lowland below.

Then the parties broke up for informal discussions and demonstrations. The two groups, of fifty or so on each side, were to reassemble for a formal dinner that night in the Hall, the largest and grandest of the Platform’s sentient Buildings. Thus the month-long expedition by the Shelf Philosophers would begin to address its goals, the start of a cultural and philosophical exchange between Shelf and Platform. It was a fitting project. The inhabitants of the Platform, their ancestors drawn long ago from Foro, were after all distant cousins of the Shelf folk.

And Telni found himself partnered in his work with MinaAndry.

There was much good-natured ribbing at this, and not a little jealousy in the glances of the older men. All the folk from the Shelf were handsome in their way, tall and elegant – not quite of the same stock as the Platform folk, who, shorter and heavier-built, were themselves different from the darker folk of the Lowland. They were three human groups swimming through time at different rates; of course they would diverge. But whatever the strange physics, MinaAndry was striking, tall yet athletic-looking with a loose physical grace, and blonde hair tied tightly back from a spindling-slim neck.

They walked across the Platform, through the city of living Buildings. The walls were gleaming white surfaces, neither hot nor cold, and pierced by sharp-edged doorways and windows.

Mina ran her hand across one smooth wall. Through an open door, inside the building, could be glimpsed signs of humanity: a bunk bed made of wood hauled up from the plain, a hearth, a cooking pot, cupboards and heaps of blankets and clothes, and outside a bucket to catch the rain. ‘This place is so strange. We build things of stone, of concrete, or wood. But this—’

‘We didn’t build these structures at all. The Buildings grew here. We don’t even know what they are made of – we call it Construction Material. That may not even be a human invention. They bud from units we call Flowers, and soak up the light from the storms. Like the Weapons, the Buildings are technology gone wild, made things modified by time.’

‘It all feels new, although I suppose it’s actually very old. Whereas Foro feels old. All that lichen-encrusted stone! It’s like a vast tomb . . .’

But Telni knew that the town she called Foro was built on the ruins of a city itself called New Foro, devastated during the wars he remembered watching as a boy. He had naively expected the Shelf folk to be full of stories of that war when they came here. But the war was fifteen Platform years over, more than two hundred and fifty Shelf years, and what was a childhood memory to Telni was long-dead history to Mina.

‘Is it true you feed your dead to the Buildings?’ She asked this with a kind of frisson of horror.

‘We wouldn’t put it like that . . . They do need organic material. In the wild, you know, down on the Lowland, they preyed on humans. We do let them take our corpses. Why not?’ He stroked a wall himself. ‘It means the Buildings are made of us, our ancestors. Sometimes people have to die inside a Building. The Weapon that rules the Platform decrees it.’

‘Why?’

‘It seems to be studying Effigies. It thinks that the Construction Material of which Buildings are made excludes Effigies. Some of us are born inside Buildings, so no Effigy can enter us then. Others die within a Building, a special one we call the Morgue, in an attempt to trap the Effigies when they are driven out of their bodies. My own great-aunt died recently, and had to be taken inside the Morgue, but no Effigy was released.’

‘It seems very strange to us,’ Mina said cautiously. ‘To Shelf folk, I mean. That here you are living out your lives on a machine, made by another machine.’

‘It’s not as if we have a choice,’ Telni said, feeling defensive. ‘We aren’t allowed to leave.’

She looked down at her feet, which were clad in sensible leather shoes – not spindling hide like Telni’s. ‘I could tell that a machine built this place. It lacks a certain humanity.’ She glanced at him uncertainly. ‘Look, I’m speaking as a Philosopher. I myself am studying geology. The way time stratification affects erosion, with higher levels wearing away faster than the low, and the sluggish way rivers flow as they head down into the red . . . All this is a manifestation of depth, you see, depth that pivots into time. On the Shelf we all grew up on a cliff-top, over all that depth. But here we are suspended in the air on a paper-thin sheet! Whatever the intentions of the Weapon that governs you, it doesn’t feel safe. A human designer would never have done it like this.’

‘We live as best we can.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I’ll show you,’ he said with a dash of defiance.

He took her to the very centre of the Platform, and the wheel that turned as always, drawn by teams of patient spindlings as they laboured to draw up supplies from the plain below.

MinaAndry patted the necks of the plodding beasts. The cargo jockeys, unloading buckets and pallets of supplies drawn up from the Lowland, stared at her curiously.

She said, ‘How charming these beasts are! You know that on the Shelf they were driven to extinction during the Creationist-Mechanist Wars. We are slowly restocking with animals drawn up from the Lowland herds, but it’s ferociously expensive . . .’

Something about the way she patted and stroked the tall, elegant creatures moved Telni deep inside. But he had to pull her aside when he saw a spindling was ready to cough up its faeces. Mina was astonished at the sight.

He took Mina’s hand and led her to the centre of the Hub, close to the great hatch in the floor of the Platform, which revealed the goods-laden cables that dangled down to the Lowland far below.

Mina squealed and drew back. ‘Oh! I’m sorry. Vertigo – what a foolish reaction that is! Although it proves my point about the uncomfortable design.’

He pointed down through the hole. ‘I brought you here to see my own work. I earn my living through my studies with an apothecary. But this is my passion . . .’

Holding tight to the rail, pushing a stray strand of hair back from her face, she peered down through the floor. From here, Telni’s cradles of pendulums, of bobs and weights and simple control mechanisms, were clearly visible, attached in a train along one of the guide ropes that tethered the Platform to the Lowland plain.

‘Pendulums?’

‘Pendulums. I time their swing. From here I can vary the length and amplitude . . .’ He showed her a rigging-up of levers he had fixed above the tether’s anchor. ‘Sometimes there’s a snag, and I go down in a harness, or send one of the cargo jockeys.’

‘How do you time them?’

‘I have a clock the Weapon gave me. I don’t understand how it works,’ he said, and that admission embarrassed him. ‘But it’s clearly more accurate than any clock we can make. I have the pendulums spread out over more than a quarter of a kilometre. There’s no record of anybody attempting to make such measurements over such a height difference. And by seeing how the period of the pendulums vary with height, what I’m trying to measure is—’

‘The stratification of time. The higher up you raise your pendulums, the faster they will swing.’ She smiled. ‘Even a geologist understands that much. Isn’t it about five per cent per metre?’

‘Yes. But that’s only a linear approximation. With more accurate measurements I’ve detected an underlying curved function . . .’ The rate at which time flowed faster, Telni believed, was actually inversely proportional to the distance from the centre of Old Earth. ‘It only looks linear, simply proportional to height, if you pick points close enough together that you can’t detect the curve. And an inverse relationship makes sense, because that’s the same mathematical form as the planet’s gravitational potential, and time stratification is surely some kind of gravitational effect . . .’ He hoped this didn’t sound naive. His physics, based on philosophies imported from Foro centuries ago with the Platform’s first inhabitants, was no doubt primitive compared to the teachings Mina had been exposed to.

Mina peered up at a sky where a flock of stars, brightly blueshifted, wheeled continually around an empty pole. ‘I think I understand,’ she said. ‘My mathematics is rustier than it should be. That means that the time distortion doesn’t keep rising on and on. It comes to some limit.’

‘Yes! And that asymptotic limit is a distortion factor of around three hundred and twenty thousand – compared to the Shelf level, which we’ve always taken as our benchmark. So one year here corresponds to nearly a third of a million years, up there in the sky.’

She looked up in wonder. ‘It is said that nearly ten thousand years have elapsed since the last Formidable Caress. An interval that spans all the history we know. But ten thousand years here—’

‘Corresponds to about three billion years there. In the sky. We are falling into the future, Mina! And if you study the sky, as some do, you can see the working-out of time on a huge scale. A year up there passes in a mere hundred seconds down here, and we see the starscape march to that pace. And even as the sky turns, the stars in their flight spark and die, they swim towards and away from each other . . . We live in a great system of stars, which we see as a band across the sky. Some say there are other such systems, and that they too evolve and change.

‘And some believe that once Old Earth was a world without this layering of time, a world like many others, perhaps, hanging among the stars. Its people were more or less like us. But Old Earth came under some kind of threat. And so the elders pulled a blanket of time over their world and packed it off to the future: “Old Earth is a jar of time, stopped up to preserve its children” – that’s how it has been written.’

‘That’s all speculation.’

‘Yes. But it would explain such a high differential of perceived time. I’m always trying to improve my accuracy. The pendulums need to be long enough to give a decent period, but not too long or else the time stratification becomes significant even over the length of the pendulum itself, and the physics gets very complicated—’

She slipped her hand into his. ‘It’s a wonderful discovery. Nobody before, maybe not since the last Caress, has worked this out before.’

He flushed, pleased. But something made him confess, ‘I did need the Weapon’s clock to measure the effects sufficiently accurately. And the Weapon set me asking questions about time in the first place.’

‘It doesn’t matter what the Weapon did. This is your work. You should be happy.’

‘I don’t feel happy,’ he blurted.

She frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’

Suddenly he was opening up to her in ways he’d never spoken to anybody else. ‘Because I don’t always feel as if I fit. As if I’m not like other people.’ He looked at her doubtfully, wondering if she would conclude he was crazy. ‘Maybe that’s why the Machine has been drawn to me since the day I was born. And maybe that’s why I’m turning out to be a good Philosopher. I can look at the world from outside, and see patterns others can’t. Do you ever feel like that?’

Still holding his hand, she walked him back to the wheel and stroked a spindling’s stubby mane, evidently drawing comfort from the simple physical contact. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Maybe everybody does. But the world is as it is, and you just have to make the best of it. Do you get many birds on this island?’

The question surprised him. ‘Not many. Just caged songbirds. Hard for them to find anywhere to nest.’

‘I ask because I used to watch birds as a child. I’d climb up to a place we call the Attic . . . The birds use the time layers. The parents will nest at some low level, then go gathering food higher up. They’ve worked out they can take as long as they like, while the babies, stuck in slow time, don’t get too hungry and are safe from the predators. Of course, the parents grow old faster, sacrificing their lives for their chicks.’

‘I never saw anything like that. I never got the chance.’ He shook his head, suddenly angry, resentful. ‘Not on this island in the sky, as a servant of some machine. Sometimes I hope the next Caress comes soon and smashes everything up.’

She took both his hands and smiled at him. ‘I have a feeling you’re going to be a challenge. But I like challenges.’

‘You do?’

‘Sure. Or I wouldn’t be here, spending a month with a bunch of old folk while seventeen months pass at home. Think of the parties I’m missing!’

His heart hammered, as if he had been lifted up into the blue. ‘I’ve only known you hours,’ he said. ‘Yet I feel—’

‘You should return to your work.’ The familiar child’s voice was strange, cold, jarring.

Telni turned. The Weapon was here, hovering effortlessly over the hole in the floor. His tethered boy stood some metres away, tense, obviously nervous of the long drop. The spindlings still turned their wheel, but the cargo jockeys stood back, staring at the sudden arrival of the Weapon, the maker and ruler of their world.

Telni’s anger flared. He stepped forward towards the child, fists clenched. ‘What do you want?’

‘We have come to observe the formal congress this evening. The Philosophers from Shelf and Platform. There are many questions humans can address that we—’

‘Then go scare all those old men and women. Leave me alone.’ Suddenly, with Mina at his side, he could not bear to have the Weapon in his life once more, with its strange ageless boy on his umbilical. ‘Leave me alone, I say!’

Powpy turned to look at Mina. ‘She will not stay here. This girl, MinaAndry. Her home is on the Shelf. Her family, the Andry-Feri, is an ancient dynasty, with a lineage reaching back almost to the last Caress. She has responsibilities, to bear sons and daughters. That is her destiny. Not here.’

‘I will stay if I wish,’ Mina said. She was trembling, Telni saw, evidently terrified of the Weapon, this strange, ancient, wild machine from the dark Lowland. Yet she was facing it, answering it back.

Telni found himself snarling, ‘Maybe she’ll bear my sons and daughters.’

‘No,’ said the boy.

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘She is not suitable for you.’

‘She’s a scholar from Foro! She’s from the stock you brought here to populate the Platform in the first place!’

‘It is highly unlikely that she has an Effigy. Few in her family do. Your partner should have an Effigy. That is why—’

‘Selective breeding,’ Mina gasped. ‘It’s true. This machine really is breeding humans like cattle . . .’

‘I don’t care about Effigies!’ Telni yelled. ‘I don’t care about you and your stupid projects.’ He stalked over to the boy, who stood trembling, clearly afraid, yet unable to move from the spot.

‘Telni, don’t,’ Mina called.

The boy said tremulously, ‘Already you have done good and insightful work, which—’

Telni struck, a hard clap with his open hand to the side of the boy’s head. Powpy went down squealing.

Mina rushed forward and pushed herself between Telni and the boy. ‘What have you done?’

‘He, it – all my life—’

‘Is that this boy’s fault? Oh, get away, you fool.’ She knelt down and cradled the child’s head on her lap. With the umbilical still dangling from the back of his neck, Powpy was crying, in a strange, contained way. ‘He’s going to bruise. I think you may have damaged his ear. And his jaw – no, child, don’t try to talk.’ She turned to the Weapon, which hovered impassively. ‘Don’t make him speak for you again. He’s hurt.’

Telni opened his hands. ‘Mina, please—’

‘Are you still here?’ she snarled. ‘Go get help. Or if you can’t do that, just go away. Go!’

And he knew he had lost her, in that one moment, with that one foolish blow. He turned away and headed towards the Platform’s hospital to find a nurse.

He would not see the Weapon again for two decades.

The little boy walked into Telni’s cell, trailing a silvery rope from the back of his neck.

Telni was huddled up in his bunk, a spindling-skin blanket over his body. Though feverish, Telni was shivering: drying out from the drink, and not for the first time. He scowled at the boy. ‘You again.’

‘Be fair,’ the boy said. ‘We have not troubled you for twenty years.’

‘Not twenty for you.’ His figuring was cloudy. ‘Down on Lowland, less than a year—’

‘This boy is not yet healed.’

Telni saw the boy’s face was distorted on the right-hand side. ‘I apologise.’ He sat up. ‘I apologise to you – what in the blue was your name?’

‘Powpy.’

‘I apologise to you, Powpy. Not to the thing that controls you. Where is it, by the way?’

‘It would not fit through the door.’

Telni lay back and laughed.

‘We did not expect to find you here.’

‘In the drunk tank? Well, I got fired by the apothecary for emptying her drugs cabinet once too often. So it was the drink for me.’ He patted his belly. ‘At least it’s putting fat on my bones.’

‘Why this slow self-destruction?’

‘Call it an experiment. I’m following in my father’s footsteps, aren’t I? After all, thanks to you, I have no more chance of happiness, of finding meaning in my life, than he did. And besides, it’s all going to finish in a big smash soon, isn’t it? As you smart machines no doubt know already.’

It didn’t respond to that immediately. ‘You never had a wife. Children.’

‘Sooner no kids at all than to breed at your behest.’

‘You have long lost contact with MinaAndry.’

‘You could say that.’ When the month-long tour of the Shelf Philosophers was concluded, she had gone home with them to continue her interrupted life on Foro. Since then, the accelerated time of the Shelf had whisked her away from him for ever. ‘After – what, three hundred years up there, more? – she’s dust, her descendants won’t remember her, even the language she spoke will be half-forgotten. The dead get deader, you know, as every trace of their existence is expunged. That’s one thing life on Old Earth has taught us. What do you want, anyway?’

‘Your research into the Formidable Caress.’

‘If you can call it research.’

‘Your work is good, from what we have seen of that portion you have shared with other scholars. You cannot help but do good work, Telni. The curiosity I saw burning in that ten-year-old boy, long ago, is still bright.’

‘Don’t try to analyse me, you – thing.’

‘Tell me what you have discovered . . .’

He could not hold back what he had learned, he found. At least the telling distracted him from his craving for drink.

After his discovery of the huge rate at which the inhabitants of Old Earth were plummeting into the future of the universe, Telni had become interested in spans of history. On the Shelf, written records went back some four thousand years of local time. These records had been compiled by a new civilisation rising from the rubble of an older culture, itself wrecked by a disaster known as the Formidable Caress, thought to have occurred some six thousand years before that.

‘But in the external universe,’ Telni said, ‘ten thousand Shelf years corresponds to over three billion years. So much I deduced from my pendulums, swinging away beneath the Platform amid streams of spindling shit and cargo jockey piss . . . Everybody has always thought that the Caresses come about from local events. Something to do with the planet itself. But three billion years is long enough for events to unfold on a wider scale, a universal one. Time enough, according to what Shelf scholars have reconstructed, for stars to be born and to die, for whole galaxies to swim and jostle . . . “Galaxy”, by the way, is a very old term for a system of stars. I found that out for myself. So, you see, I wondered if the Caresses could have some cosmic cause.’

‘You started to correspond with scholars on the Shelf.’

‘Yes. After that first visit by Mina’s party we kept up a regular link, with visits from them – once every couple of years for us, once a generation for them . . . I spoke to the astronomers over there, about what they saw in the sky. And their archaeologists, about what had been seen in the past. There was always snobbishness, you know. Those of us down in the red think we are better because we are closer to the original stock of Old Earth; those up in the blue, who have produced more generations, believe they are superior products of evolution. None of that bothered me. And as their decades ticked by, I think I helped shape whole agendas of research by my sheer persistence.’

‘It must have been rewarding for you.’

‘Academically, yes. I’ve never had any problem, academically. It’s the rest of my life that’s a piece of shit.’

‘Tell us what you discovered.’

‘I don’t have my notes, my books—’

‘Just tell us.’

He sat up and stared into the face of the eerily unchanged boy – who, to his credit, did not flinch. ‘The first Caress destroyed almost everything of what went before, on the Shelf and presumably elsewhere. Almost, but not all. Some trace inscriptions, particularly carvings on stone, have survived. Images, fragmentary, and bits of text. Records of something in the sky.’

‘What something?’

‘The Galaxy is a disc of stars, a spiral. We, on a planet embedded in the disc, see this in cross section, as a band of light in the sky. Much of it obscured by dust.’

‘And?’

‘The ancients’ last records show two bands, at an angle to each other. There is evidence that the second band grew brighter, more prominent. The chronological sequence is difficult to establish – the best of these pieces were robbed and used as hearths or altar stones by the fallen generations that followed . . .’

‘Nevertheless,’ the boy prompted.

‘Nevertheless, there is evidence that something came from out of the sky. Something huge. Another galaxy, so some believe – so I believe. And then there are crude, scrawled images – cartoons, really – of explosions. All over the sky. A million suns, suddenly appearing.’ He imagined survivors, huddled in the ruins of their cities, scratching what they saw into fallen stones. ‘After that – nothing, for generations. People were too busy reinventing agriculture to do much astronomy. That was ten thousand years ago.

‘The next bit of evidence comes from around three thousand years back, when a Natural Philosopher called HuroEldon established new centres of scholarship, at Foro and down on the Lowland . . . Once again we started keeping good astronomical records. And not long after Huro’s time, the astronomers observed in the sky—’

‘Another band of stars.’

‘No. A spiral – a spiral of stars, ragged, the stars burning and dying, a wheel turning around a point of intense brightness. This object swam towards us, so it seemed, and at its closest approach there was another flare of dazzling new stars, speckled over the sky – but there was no Caress, not this time. The spiral receded into the dark.’

‘Tell us what you believe this means.’

‘I think it’s clear. This other spiral is a galaxy like our own. The two orbit each other.’ He mimed this with his fists, but his hands were shaking; shamed before the boy’s steady gaze, he lowered his arms. ‘As twin stars may orbit one another. But unlike stars galaxies are big, diffuse structures. They must tear at each other, ripping open those lacy spirals. Perhaps when they brush, they create bursts of starbirth. A Formidable Caress indeed.

‘The last Caress was a first pass, when the second galaxy came close enough to our part of our spiral to cause a great flaring of stars – and that flaring, a rain of light falling from the blue, was what shattered our world. Then after HuroEldon’s time, two billion years later externally, there was another approach – this one not so close, not a true Caress; it was spectacular but did no damage, not to us. And then . . .’

‘Yes?’

He shrugged, peering up at the Construction-Material roof of the cell. ‘The sky is ragged, full of ripped-apart spiral arms. The two galaxies continue to circle each other, perhaps heading for a full merger, a final smash. And that, perhaps, will cause a new starburst flare, a new Caress.’

The boy stood silently, considering this, though one leg quivered, as if itchy. He asked: ‘When?’

‘That I couldn’t calculate. I tried to do some mathematics on the orbit. Long time since I stayed sober enough to see that through. But there’s one more scrap of information in the archaeology. There was always a tradition that the second Caress would follow ten thousand years after the first, Shelf time. Maybe that’s a memory of what the smart folk who lived before the first Caress were able to calculate. They knew, not only about the Caress that threatened them, but also what would follow. Remarkable, really.’

‘Ten thousand years,’ the boy said. ‘Which is—’

‘About now.’ Telni grinned. ‘If the world ends, do you think they will let me out of here to see the show?’

‘You have done remarkable work, Telni. This is a body of evidence extracted from human culture that we could not have assembled for ourselves.’ Even as he spoke these calm words, the boy trembled, and Telni saw piss drip down his bare leg.

Telni snorted. ‘You really aren’t too good at running the people you herd, are you, machine?’

Ignoring the dribble on his leg, Powpy spoke on. ‘Regarding the work, however. We are adept at calculation. Perhaps we can take these hints and reconstruct the ancients’ computations, or even improve on them.’

‘So you’ll know the precise date of the end of the world? That will help. Come back and tell me what you figure out.’

‘We will.’ The boy turned and walked away, leaving piss-footprints on the smooth floor.

Telni laughed at him, lay back on his bunk, and tried to sleep.

It was to be a very long time before Telni saw the Weapon and its human attendant again.

‘He refuses to die. It’s as simple as that. There’s nothing but his own stubbornness keeping him alive . . .’

His hearing was so bad now that it was as if his ears were stuffed full of wool. But, lying there on his pallet, he could hear every word they said.

And, though he needed a lot of sleep these days, he was aware when they moved him into the Morgue, ready for him to die, ready to capture his Effigy-spirit when it was released from his seventy-seven-year-old body.

‘Leave me in here if you like, you bastards.’ He tried to laugh, but it just made him cough. ‘I’m just going to lie here as long as necessary.’

‘As long as necessary for what?’

‘For it to come back again.’

But, more than thirty years since the last visitation, only a handful of the medical staff knew what he was talking about.

In the end, of course, it came.

He woke from another drugged sleep to find a little boy standing beside his bed.

He struggled to sit up. ‘Hey, Powpy. How’s it going with you? You’ve grown, a little. You’re not afraid of me, are you? Look, I’m old and disgusting, but at least I can’t slap you around the head any more, can I?’

He thought he saw a flicker of something in the boy’s eyes. Forgiveness? Pity? Fear? Contempt? Well, he deserved the latter. But then Powpy spoke in that odd monotone, so familiar even after all these years. ‘We were here at the beginning of your life. Now here we are at the end.’

‘Yes.’ He tried to snap his fingers, failed. ‘Just another spark in the flames for you, right? And now you’ve come to see me give up my Effigy so you can trap it in this box of yours.’

‘We would not describe it as—’

He grabbed the boy’s arm, trying to grip hard. ‘Listen, Weapon. You can have my Effigy. What do I care? But I’m not going to die like this. Not here, not now.’

‘Then where, and when?’

‘Fifty years,’ he whispered. He glanced at the medical staff, who hovered at the edges of the Building. ‘I did my own calculations. Took me ten years. Well, I had nothing better to do . . . Fifty years, right? That’s all the time we’ve got left, until the fireworks.’

The boy said gravely, ‘We imagine our model of the galaxies’ interaction is somewhat more sophisticated than yours. But your answer is substantially correct. You understand that this Caress will be different. Those on the Platform will survive. The Construction Material of the Buildings will shelter them. That was always one long-term purpose of the Platform project, to provide refuge. And from this seed, the recovery of civilisation after the Caress should be much more rapid.’

Telni cackled weakly. ‘You built us a shelter from a Formidable Caress? Well, well, you do care. But the cities of the Shelf – Foro, Puul—’

‘People will survive in caves, underground. But the vast loss of life, the destruction of the ecology, of their agriculture—’

‘Serves those bastards right. They lost interest in talking to me decades ago.’ Which was true. But since the Creationist-Mechanist Wars, there had been centuries of peace on the Shelf – and they had built something beautiful and splendid up there, a chain of cities like jewels in the night, cities that sparkled in the time-accelerated view of witnesses on the Platform. In his head Telni imagined a race of blueshifted Minas, beautiful, clear-eyed, laughing. ‘Well. There’s nothing I can do for them.’ He struggled to sit straighter. ‘But there’s something I want you to do for me. You owe me, artefact. Now you’re going to take away my soul. Well, you can have it. But you can give me something back in return. I want to see the Caress.’

‘You have only weeks to live. Days, perhaps.’

‘Then take me down into the red. No matter how little time I have left, you can find a pit deep enough on this time-shifted world to squeeze in fifty Platform years.’ Exhausted, he fell back coughing; a nurse hurried over to lower him gently to his blankets. ‘And one more thing.’

‘More demands?’

‘Let this boy go.’

When Telni woke again, he found himself staring up at a sky of swirling blue stars. ‘Made it, by my own redshifted arse.’

A face hovered over him, a woman’s. ‘Don’t try to move.’

‘You’re in the way.’ He tried to sit up, failed, but kept struggling until she helped him up and he could see.

He was on a plain – on the ground, his pallet set on red, rusty dirt, down on the true ground of Old Earth for the first time in his life. Something like a rail track curled across his view. Buildings of Construction Material were scattered around like a giant’s toys. He got the immediate sense this was a kind of camp, not permanent.

And figures moved in the distance. At first sight they looked human. But then something startled them, and they bucked and fled, on six legs.

‘What are those?’

‘They are called Centaurs.’ Powpy was standing beside him, his neck umbilical connecting him to the Weapon, which hovered as impassive as ever, though rusty dirt clung to its sleek hide. ‘Human-spindling hybrids.’

He stared, astonished. But he had no time left for wonder. ‘You were going to let this kid go.’

‘He will be released,’ said the woman sternly. ‘My name’s Ama, by the way.’

Which had been his mother’s name. He felt a stab of obscure guilt. ‘Glad to meet you.’

‘You should be. I’m a nurse. I volunteered to stay with you, to keep you alive when they brought you down here.’

‘No family, I take it.’

‘Not any more. And when this business is done, I’ll be taking Powpy here back up top, to the Platform. You did ask for him to be released, didn’t you?’

‘His mother and father—’

‘Long dead,’ she whispered.

‘We’re all orphans here, then.’

Powpy said solemnly, ‘We will have to shelter in a Construction-Material Building to ride out the Caress. We are deep enough that it should be brief—’

‘How deep?’

‘We are in the Abyss. Once the bed of a deep ocean, far below the offshore plains you call the Lowland . . . Deep enough.’

‘Nice sky.’

‘Most of the stars’ radiation is blueshifted far beyond your capacity to see it.’

‘And how long – ow!’ There was a sharp pain in his chest.

Ama grabbed him and lowered him back against a heap of pillows. ‘Just take it easy. That was another heart attack.’

‘Another . . .’

‘They’ve been coming thick and fast.’

‘That Weapon won’t want me dying out in the open. Not after all this.’

‘We have a Morgue designated just over there,’ Ama said. ‘Your bed’s on wheels.’

‘Good planning.’

‘Not long now,’ murmured Powpy.

But he, the boy, wasn’t looking at the sky. Telni touched Powpy’s chin, and lifted his face. ‘He should see this for himself.’

‘Very well,’ the Weapon said through the boy’s mouth.

‘Why, Weapon? Why the grand experiment? Why the Platform? Why are you so fascinated by the Effigies?’

‘We believe the Effigies are not native to the Old Earth, any more than the spindlings or the lightmoss or—’

‘But they’re pretty closely bound up to humans. They live and die with us.’

‘They do not die. So we believe. We have mapped disturbances, deep in the Old Earth . . . We believe there is a kind of nest of them, a colony of Effigies that dwells deep in the core of the planet. They emerge to combine with humans, with infants at birth. Some infants – we don’t know how they choose. And we don’t know how they bond either. But after the human carrier’s death, the Effigy symbiote is released, and returns to the core colony. Something of the human is taken with it. We believe.’

‘Memories.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And are these memories brought back up from this core pit the next time an Effigy surfaces?’

‘Perhaps. Everything about this world is designed, or modified. Perhaps the purpose is to preserve something of the memory of humanity across epochal intervals.’

‘Maybe this is why I always felt like something in me really doesn’t belong in this time or place.’

‘We Machines can study this only at second-hand. It is something about humanity that no Machine shares.’

‘I think you’re jealous. Aren’t you, Machine? You can farm us, keep us as lab animals. But you can’t have this.’

‘There is no reliable mapping between human emotions and the qualia of our own sensorium . . .’

But he didn’t hear the rest. Another stabbing in his chest, a pain that knifed down his left arm. The nurse leaned over him.

And the sky exploded.

These weren’t just new stars. They were stars that detonated, each flaring brighter than the rest of the sky put together, then vanishing as quickly, blown-out matches.

‘Supernovas,’ said the boy, Powpy. ‘That is the ancient word. A wave of supernovas, triggered by the galaxy collision, giant exploding stars flooding nearby space with lethal radiation, a particle sleet . . .’

But Telni couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe.

‘He’s going,’ the nurse said. ‘Get him to the Morgue.’

He glimpsed people running up – no, not people, they were six-legged, Centaurs – and his bed was shoved forward, across the rusty dirt towards the enclosure of a Building. He tried to protest, to cling to his view of that astounding sky as long as he could. But he couldn’t even breathe, and it felt as if a sword were being twisted in his chest.

They got him indoors. He lay back, rigid with pain, staring at a Construction-Material roof that seemed to recede from him.

And a glow, like the glow of the sky outside, suffused the inside of his head, his very eyes.

‘It’s happening,’ he heard the nurse say, wonder in her voice. ‘Look, it’s rising from his limbs . . . His heart has stopped.’ She straddled him and pounded at his chest, even as a glow lit up her face, the bare flesh of her arms – a glow coming from him.

He remembered – a glimmering tetrahedron, looming, an electric-blue framework swallowing him up – memories that had nothing to do with this world . . .

He heard Powpy call, ‘Do you know who you are? Or who you were?’

And suddenly he knew, as if his eyes had suddenly focused, after years of myopia. With the last of the air in his lungs he struggled to speak. ‘Not again. Not again!’

The nurse peered into his eyes. ‘Stay with me, Telni!’

‘Who are you? Who are you?’

The light detonated from deep inside him. Suddenly he filled this box of Construction-Material, he was contained within it, and he rattled, anguished. But there was the door, a way out. Somehow he fled that way, seeking the redshift . . .