Sleep and the Soul, page 25
The glider shuddered, then slid forward. Tirell had helped with the previous launch, running backward across the platform, amused at how light the strange arrangement of vines and capstans made the glider feel, while compensating for this generosity by making the platform runners move twice as far as the glider was advancing.
“Hold on!” Anna instructed him.
“To what?” But then he saw the two curved branches that Anna was holding, attached within the hollow, and he gripped them behind her.
Ahead, the mouth of the clearing grew nearer, exposing endless ranks of red cloud. Tirell weighed up the benefits of jumping out onto the platform while he still had a chance. If nature had wanted people to leave the forests, it would have let them retain the gas from the fruit they ate, instead of belching it out. But he was weighed down with pulp, and entirely free of the one ingredient from his diet that might have saved him.
The glider passed over the edge of the platform – and instead of soaring skyward it dipped alarmingly, heading for an elaborately twisted blue-and-white vortex far below. Tirell squeezed the handles so hard he could feel splinters digging into his skin, but then he saw Anna’s legs moving slightly, working the pedals that controlled the wing flaps, and the glider leveled out, leaving him staring over her shoulder at a sight less terrifying but still utterly wrong: red clouds spread out ahead forever, without a single branch or leaf in sight.
He glanced back toward Maldo, but it was already dwindling into insignificance, like a tangled ball of twigs someone had tossed into the sky. “How will we find our way home?” he asked.
“I know the winds,” Anna replied.
“What does that mean?” Tirell complained. When someone asked for directions to the market, you didn’t just smile and say: trust in the leaves.
“It’ll be easier to explain when we’re on our way back. For now, what we need is altitude.”
Tirell had many more questions, but he decided to shut up and stop distracting the pilot. While he was in no position to rank the dangers they faced, his presence was certainly the most novel factor in the current journey, so the less impact he had on the way it unfolded, the better.
Anna muttered to herself as she examined the clouds, then she seemed to make a choice, and sent the glider swerving gently to the right. The destination she’d selected was a disheveled red column, full of wind-streaked wisps that suggested some vertical motion of the air, though if Tirell was honest he could not have determined by eye if the current was ascending or descending.
When they reached the edge of the column the answer became palpable. As the glider rose, Anna kept its path curving slightly, so it circled the strange cloud formation like a vine wrapping around a tree trunk. Tirell tried to take comfort in his instinctive response to gaining height: inside the forest, it almost always meant that he was safer, with more obstacles to break his fall. And perhaps it wasn’t entirely foolish to feel the same way, even in the open air. If something went wrong, the higher they were, the more time Anna would have to correct the problem before they hit the depths.
When they broke free of the column, Tirell looked around, then upward. There were yet more clouds above, as red as those surrounding the forest, but he could already discern gaps between them, filled with pallid light in the direction of the Far Sun, but shading into darkness elsewhere.
Anna did not disguise her frustration as she searched for the next opportunity to ascend. Once she picked a target Tirell fixed his gaze on it, trying to commit to memory every feature that distinguished it. If he ever decided to become a pilot himself, he was going to need a very long list from Anna of all the signs he should heed, but for now he could just watch, and try to learn a little.
Close up, whatever order Anna had discerned in the second column was less apparent than ever; to Tirell they just seemed to have reached a scraggly mess of fragmented clouds. But while the currents buffeted them unevenly, as the glider looped around it was lifted more often than it dropped, and gradually they rose above the thicket of red.
The Far Sun had almost set, and the cloudless sky was darkening in the east. But at the zenith, there it was: a dull magenta disk a sixth as wide as the entire view.
Tirell felt a new kind of dizziness that had nothing to do with the motion of the glider. He had never doubted that the Near Sun was real; he had explained its cloud-hidden presence to children who’d fretted on the days when the Far Sun briefly vanished behind it at noon. But seeing it for himself made all the other claims in the Recitation, if not more convincing, certainly more urgent. The Near Sun wasn’t just an idea, it was a thing as solid as a tree. So either it had once blazed a thousand times brighter than it did now, or it hadn’t. That wasn’t a matter of opinion, or whether it sounded appealing, or exciting, or strange. Either the Changes really had come about because this disk had gone from outshining the Far Sun to its present, barely illuminated state, or the whole account of the past was nonsense.
“Why is one side brighter?” Tirell asked Anna.
She turned to face him. “One side of what?”
He nodded upward, wishing he hadn’t let his curiosity overpower his resolve not to divert her attention from the glider’s controls.
“That’s to do with the way we orbit each other.” When Tirell replied with uncomprehending silence, she added, “Some of our air is still falling onto it, even now. But it doesn’t fall in a straight line, so it hits one side more than the other. That’s the cause of the hot spot.”
“I see,” Tirell replied. Her explanation made a certain amount of sense, but it only increased his vertigo. If the air of the world was raining down gently on the Near Sun, right before his eyes, and doing even a little of the thing that made the Far Sun shine, then it no longer seemed such a stretch to imagine that the very same current had once been much stronger.
“We’re just waiting for sunset now,” Anna explained. Mercifully, she was no longer twisted around toward him. “If these things are still where I saw them last, it won’t be hard to spot them.”
“Circling around the ... equilibrium point?” Tirell didn’t feel that he’d earned the right to employ that term so casually, as if he truly understood how the tug of the world, the tug of the Near Sun, and the effect of being whirled around in a circle all added up to zero. He was prepared to believe, though, that such a balance might be precarious, and that anything that drifted by and lodged there by chance was unlikely to linger.
“That’s where I’ll be looking.”
“And if this is the cousins ... how are they doing it?”
Anna laughed. “If they could overcome the gravity of the Near Sun entirely, this would be nothing to them.”
Tirell was confused. “You mean the gravity of the world? It was the world they escaped from, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but that’s the easy part.” Anna raised one hand to point straight up. “The tiniest push will get you over the equilibrium point, but then you’d just crash into the thing that did most of the work for you. If you want to go and take your pick of the inner worlds, your real fight is with the Near Sun, not the world you were born on.”
Tirell was prepared to take her word for it, though the Near Sun was clearly much farther from the equilibrium point than the world was. He wriggled a little in the hollow to relieve the cramp that had been growing in his forearms, though it wasn’t easy to stretch his muscles without letting go of the handles.
“We could add vines here that we tie around our bodies, to keep us from falling out,” he suggested. But vines might dig into their skin. “Or strips of cloth?”
“Mmm.” Anna wasn’t really interested in such luxuries.
The Far Sun moved behind the bank of red clouds below them to the west, and though that wasn’t enough to extinguish its light, when Tirell looked to the east he saw a smattering of white dots emerging from the grayness: stars, the farthest of Far Suns. He really had no right to be surprised that so many things from the Recitation were turning out to be true – but Anna’s skills were rare enough that he could imagine whole forests where no one took up the same role, and the stories people told children about the void beyond the clouds were entirely unconstrained by the possibility of anyone checking them.
“Here they come now,” Anna said. Tirell took a moment to realize that she was speaking not of anything approaching, but the objects of her interest finally attaining visibility. Peering upward, all he could see at first were a few faint stars struggling to compete with the dull but undiminished light of the Near Sun. Then he realized that one of the “stars” was moving – slowly, but still too fast, and in the wrong direction, to be merely crossing the sky the way the Far Sun did.
“I can see one,” he confirmed.
“Cover up the Near Sun with your fist,” Anna suggested, demonstrating.
Tirell didn’t want to let go of either handle; the glider was still circling the air column, shuddering and bouncing in response to the vagaries of the currents. “I might give my eyes a chance to adjust first.”
He closed one eye and turned his head back and forth, trying to obscure the Near Sun while he scrutinized the region around it. “Oh, I can see two more!” he blurted out, before realizing that he’d confused himself and was double-counting the first one. But then a moment later there was no need to retract; he’d sighted three distinct specks, all circling the zenith.
“How do we know they’re going around the equilibrium point?” he asked Anna. “Couldn’t they be orbiting the Near Sun?”
“Be patient,” she said. “There’ll be evidence soon enough.”
Tirell raised his gaze again, waiting for the promised revelation. After a while, he was rewarded in a different way. “I think there are four now. Definitely four.”
“Aha.” Anna sounded underwhelmed, as if she’d been offered a low bid for something she was selling in the market.
Tirell tightened his grip with his left hand, then raised the right one to help him. With the Near Sun better masked, he could see at least one more point of light. Shifting his gaze and his hand and keeping careful track of everything was harder than he would have anticipated; he could appreciate Selik’s skepticism now, as less a slight against Anna than an honest assessment of the difficulties for any observer. But eventually he settled on a verdict.
“There are six,” he said.
“I think that’s right,” Anna replied.
As Tirell tried to make one more recount, he found himself coming up short. “Wait, no, there’s only ... ”
“Look again,” Anna suggested.
“Only two. No, not even ... ” They were gone, all six. “What happened?”
Anna said, “The Far Sun’s dropped too low now to illuminate them. And it didn’t take long; that’s how we know they’re at the equilibrium point, not farther away.”
Tirell pictured it: the shifting shadow of the world rising up to encompass the strange visitors. “If this is the cousins, what are they doing up there?”
“Watching us?” Anna suggested. “Waiting to see what we’re like now, after all this time apart, before they introduce themselves.”
“Watching us through the clouds?” Just how magical were the cousins meant to be? “And why would they need to watch us from six different places?”
“Maybe they came here from their new home in six vessels, and the stragglers have just caught up.”
“How big are those things?” Tirell wondered.
Anna hesitated. “From their brightness, I’d guess about a hundred times larger than Maldo.”
“That’s a lot to bring along for a casual visit.” Even if the cousins needed to pack enough food for a long journey, six hundred forests’ worth seemed excessive. “You’d think they’d start with a couple of emissaries, traveling light, just to make contact.”
“I don’t know what any of this means,” Anna confessed. “But at least you can tell the others I wasn’t imagining it.”
“Of course.”
Now that the task was completed, Tirell had nothing to distract him from the fact that he was sitting inside a tree trunk, swooping around above the clouds in darkness, with no idea which way was home.
Anna sensed his disquiet. “I know it’s hard, but the safest thing will be to wait for sunrise; if we tried to go back now, we could end up anywhere.”
“I understand.” Tirell had witnessed the timing of her returns often enough to have known what to expect.
He glanced up at the lopsided magenta glow; he could feel the warmth of it on his skin. Without that lingering heat, would the world be entirely dead now? The Far Sun was brighter in its own kind of light, but too distant to pierce the chill.
“Just tell me we won’t follow the air that’s falling on our neighbor,” he joked.
“We won’t,” Anna replied. “Not unless we really try.”
3
“How’d you go?” Selik asked, as he helped Tirell to his feet.
“Good.” Tirell realized he was shaking. He was ecstatic to be back in the safe boughs of the forest, but as the glider had turned toward Maldo for the final approach, it had taken all his strength not to leap into the depths just to avoid the impending collision.
Selik and Rada helped the returning travelers get the glider safely tied up, but then Tirell glanced at Anna and realized that she was leaving it to him to speak first.
“I saw them,” he said. “Just where Anna said they’d be. Except now there are six.”
“Six?” Selik regarded him dubiously, as if this new detail somehow made his testimony less reliable.
Tirell was annoyed. “Go up there yourself, if you don’t believe me.”
“Are you sure they weren’t just stars?” Selik pressed him. “Because—”
“I know how stars move,” Tirell replied. “These weren’t stars. They were six bright objects, circling the zenith, that lost their light not long after sunset.”
“That does sound like something solid, nearby,” Rada said, clearly aiming for a conciliatory tone. “Like asteroids, but ... ” She made a cupping gesture with her hands, as if to suggest a constraining force that was preventing the objects from slipping away.
“What are asteroids made of, anyway?” Tirell asked. People had used the word in front of him ever since he’d joined the group, but he still didn’t really understand it.
“Rock,” Rada offered, unhelpfully. “The same as the inner worlds.”
“But what exactly is ‘rock’?”
“It’s a bit like bone, but it’s not from anything living.”
Tirell grimaced “Have you ever touched rock?”
“Of course not.”
“Then how do you know what it’s like?”
Rada said, “It’s in the Full Recitation. Before the cousins left, people studied these things; they weren’t going to flee to the inner worlds without some idea of what they’d find there.”
Tirell felt very tired. What he’d seen with his own eyes was real, and he was persuaded that the general story of the Changes was probably correct, but he had less faith in the details that no one could confirm, and only a fraction of people seemed to bother retelling.
The four of them sat on the platform together, trying to make sense of the growing number of objects the latest expedition had revealed.
“Why would the cousins hang back for so long?” Selik mused. “Do they think they’d be unwelcome?”
“Maybe they can’t survive among us,” Rada suggested. “Even the ancestors would shiver at the temperatures and pressures we’re used to, and who knows what the cousins ended up having to adapt to. Whatever kind of life they have on the inner worlds, I doubt it’s much like ours.”
“But either they have a way to deal with that, or there was no point coming in the first place,” Selik protested.
“I think they’re being cautious,” Anna said. “It’s been ... well, longer than anyone knows for sure. They wouldn’t want to rush in unprepared.”
“Maybe we should give them a signal,” Tirell proposed. “Let them know that we’re still as friendly as ever, but we’re growing impatient to meet them.”
Selik was amused. “What kind of signal could we send, from this distance?”
Anna said, “It shouldn’t be necessary. If they’re looking for us at all, they’ll find us.”
“Then maybe they’re just not looking,” Selik replied. “They’ve returned to their old world, for some reason – but as far as they’re concerned, it’s obvious from the state of things that the people they left behind would have died out long ago.”
4
“Can we call it nineteen and be done with it?” Tirell pleaded. There’d been a time when he would never have believed that counting dots in the sky could be painful, but he was aching in places that no amount of fruit-picking had ever reached.
“Just check it once more,” Anna insisted, as if the exact number might carry some significance, beyond the fact that it was always increasing.
Tirell closed his eyes for a moment and tipped his head from side to side to stretch the muscles in his neck, acutely aware that if he waited too long the encroaching shadow would render his observations meaningless. He adjusted his restraint and positioned himself beneath the occultation disk again.
“One, two, three,” he muttered, tapping his thigh with his thumb to make the numbers more palpable as he counted. The objects weren’t even moving so rapidly that he had any real excuse to confuse one for another, but the way they traveled at slightly different speeds disrupted any temporary pattern they formed, undermined his confidence that he wasn’t missing any of them, or double counting.
“Nineteen,” he declared, as close to sure as he was ever going to be. He made a guess as to which of them would be the first to vanish, and followed it until he was proven right. “Nineteen,” he repeated. As he watched the lights wink out, he began to believe that he’d actually grasped the true geometry of the whole strange constellation.
