Binary system, p.13
Binary System, page 13
By the time they reached the mass of mud huts that climbed the tiered terraces, perhaps a hundred Fahran stood in the light of the dying sun, staring with their huge dark eyes in silence.
Var came to a wide terrace of packed earth, which clearly acted as a kind of village square; the crowd gathered there, blocking the way, and Var halted.
A Fahran emerged from one of the beehive dwellings, a tiny, white-furred figure clutching a staff and bent almost double. He looked up at Mahn with rheumy eyes and uttered a few words.
Imp translated, Ahntan an Mahn, mate of Mareen, son of Naran and Lheer, you have returned.
“I escaped the Skelt,” Mahn said, “fled their far northern city. I have returned, but cannot stay. I am on pilgrimage, and head south to the valley of Mahkanda. I can stay but a short time, to tend the tree of my Mareen.”
“And the fate of Gahan and Vaal, and Hovar and her sisters who were taken with you?”
“Gahan and Vaal are as well as can be expected. They toil for the Skelt. Hovar and her sisters died soon after arriving at Alkellion, Hovar at the hands of a Skelt, Ramar and Fawl succumbing to disease.”
“It grieves me to hear this news. I will communicate the tidings to their families.”
Mahn turned to Delia. “The grave garden occupies the uppermost terrace, where the line of pharl trees grow. You and Var may accompany me.”
“I will be honoured,” Delia said.
Var moved forward little by little, and the crowd parted to allow her through, past the mud dwellings and up another track to the grave garden. Delia looked behind her; the entire village followed in silence.
They came to the first of the trees and Mahn asked Var to halt and let him down.
An air of restfulness filled the grove; the pharl trees were short, thick-boled, with spreading canopies of purple leaves. Mahn climbed down from Var’s back, and passed along the avenue of trees. Delia climbed down also, but did not follow. Var folded her legs and settled herself on the ground, and Delia stood by her great head, happy to watch at a respectful distance.
Three Fahran hurried past them and approached Mahn, who turned at their greetings. They came together and Mahn touched his cheek to the forehead of each Fahran in turn, his hands on their shoulders. They spoke for a minute, and Delia wondered if they were old friends. Then the trio turned and hurried back along the grove, passed Var with a twittered aside, and rejoined the crowd.
Imp said, They uttered a short greeting, wishing a safe journey to Ahntan an Mahn’s travelling companions.
Delia watched as Mahn approached a small, sturdy tree. Each tree stood beside a carved post – presumably a grave marker beneath which the body of a Fahran lay. Mahn was very still for perhaps a minute, staring at the tree. Then he knelt, and prostrated himself before the gnarled root system, his arms outstretched before him.
Delia felt uneasy, and looked away. There was something humbling about Mahn’s obeisance, as if the ceremony should be undertaken away from prying eyes. Mahn was grieving, and vulnerable, and it seemed a sacrilege to look upon him.
Not that her uncertainty was shared by his fellow villagers. They massed behind Var and looked on in reverential silence, and Delia found something ineffably moving in their sharing of this moment with their grieving fellow.
She found herself weeping, her tears hot beneath the face-mask, and she could not say if she were weeping for Mahn and his old loss, or for herself. She lifted her mask and rubbed at her cheeks with the cuff of her sleeve.
Mahn stood and stepped towards the tree. For the next minute he picked dead leaves from the branches, then pulled weeds from around the base of the trunk; then he backed away from the tree, and turned and rejoined Delia and Var.
“I feel much better, my friends. I felt Mareen’s spirit, wishing us well on our journey south. Shall we continue?”
“You don’t wish to stay a while, meet with friends...?” Delia began.
“We must arrive in time to witness Chalto rise,” Mahn said, “and before then we must find your people at Alarah. There will be time enough in future to return and meet old friends.”
Delia was about to remount Var when a small Fahran, a child half Mahn’s height, darted from the watching crowed and passed Mahn a woven satchel. Mahn peered into the bag and spoke to the child.
He climbed up on to Var’s back, and Delia followed him.
As Var rose and proceeded along the track that climbed from the village to rejoin the plain above, Mahn said, “Food, donated by the village, so that we will not go hungry on the journey south.”
She turned and watched as they left the village, and the silent crowd of Fahran, in their wake. She found herself lifting a hand in a gesture the aliens would have no hope of comprehending.
They reached the plain, and proceeded along the lip of the escarpment, heading east to Million Falls. Ahead the sun sank, a huge bloated hemisphere straddling half the far horizon.
Mahn recounted the many wonders of the city of Million Falls, and dipped into the satchel and pulled out sweet cake and strange fruit. He passed fruit down to Var, who took it delicately in her great right claw and slipped it into her maw, masticating noisily.
Delia sat back and ate a sour-sweet fruit shaped like a pear as night time came.
Chapter Nineteen
MILLION FALLS WAS every bit as beautiful, and spectacular, as Mahn had promised.
The city was strung out along the lip of the escarpment. Low, curving domiciles like sand dunes, and rearing towers curved like scimitar blades, rose against the red sun, which had swollen to five times its former size since Delia’s arrival on Valinda. The hemisphere straddled the horizon, huge and crimson, spouting a constant fire-show of looping and spurting ejecta. In its dying light the town was busy with Fahran going about their business, most on foot but some riding ugly, skinny beasts like hairless alpacas.
But most beautiful and breathtaking of all, even more striking than the bloated sun, were the waterfalls that tipped like rainbows from the escarpment and dropped in perfect parabolas to the plains a kilometre below.
Var had come to a halt in a plaza beside a waterfall. The meltwater surged with the momentum of the river behind it, launching itself out over the edge of the cliff, the spume catching the sunlight and creating a million dancing, effervescent rainbows. Delia stared at the waterfall, and the others spaced along the drop, as they cut arcs through the air to the plain below, a vast green expanse shot through with a thousand silver rivers.
“Beautiful...” she breathed. She stared at the town. “And the Skelt never venture this far south?”
“The plain between where you were captured and the Falls is vast, with scant pickings for their raiding parties. Once they came this far south, many summers ago, but not in living memory.”
Mahn offered Delia fruit and water, and something that resembled bread. She ate as she took in the view, and luxuriated in the warmth of the sun.
Imp said, Delia, it is safe now to remove your face-mask. I have deactivated your thermal suit.
It’ll be strange to feel the sun on my face, she said.
Aware that Mahn was watching her, she reached up and peeled off the mask; the sensation was a welcome relief, akin to removing an old plaster. She blinked and rubbed her face, smiling at Mahn.
“The strange thing is,” he said, “I always thought you would have hair beneath the covering.”
“Well, I do.” She lowered her hood and shook out her long black hair. “But not on my face and body.”
The Fahran stared at her. “You are a curious colour, like sand in the sun. Your eyes are tiny, and your nose large. And your mouth...”
“Yes?”
“So thin, and yet so narrow.”
“You think me ugly?” she laughed.
“I... No, not ugly, exactly. Just strange.” He turned a hand. “You’re very different from we Fahran, and yet curiously similar.”
Var said, “Like the Vo and the Fahran, I think.”
“With the proviso, Var, that I do think you’re ugly,” Mahn said.
“And I must admit that I have always thought the Fahran peculiar,” Var said, “so thin and spindly, like a child’s doll.”
“So much for inter-species amity,” Delia said, “and I thought we were getting on so well.”
She recalled something Var had told her, days ago. “You said you were accompanying us only as far as the Falls, Var. I think I speak for Mahn when I say that I hope you’ll reconsider, and come with us to Alarah, and maybe even beyond.”
Var whistled in response. “I have given it much thought over the past two days,” she said. “So much has happened, so much might yet happen which I would be loath to miss. Your people have come from the skies, Delia, and it would be a blessing to witness the reunion with your kind. And the thought of accompanying you on a pilgrimage to your holy valley, Mahn, is attractive.”
Mahn said, “Then come with us. You said that your ambition is to travel, to see the world and gain experience.”
Delia knocked on Var’s hard shell. “It’s settled, Var. You’re coming with us.”
“I would be honoured,” Var said.
Delia regarded Mahn. “Now, I’m intrigued. How do you get from the escarpment to the plains below?” Here the drop was sheer, with no sloping roads leading to the plain below.
Mahn pointed, and Delia saw what looked like a great jellyfish floating up from the plain. Its domed skirt billowed and pulsed, propelling its ascent; below the dome, a gondola carried a dozen Fahran, waving to crowds lined up at a receiving station.
“But what is it?”
“A yarm,” Mahn told her. “It’s a very simple animal. They rise and fall up the wall of the escarpment at this time of year, and hibernate through the long cold winter. Many summers ago my people had the excellent idea of harnessing the creatures and attaching carriages to their skirts. We will descend to the plain by way of a yarm,” he finished.
Var rose and scuttled along a boulevard that ran parallel with the escarpment. Crowds of Fahran, until then intent on the view, turned to watch their passage.
“They have never before seen anything like you, Delia,” Mahn said, waving to the crowds like royalty.
The yarm Delia had seen was not the only one ferrying citizens up and down the Falls. She counted the pink, membranous skirts of a dozen more of the creatures, fading into the distance. The first station they approached had a long queue of waiting travellers; Mahn suggested they continue on to the next.
“Have you ever ridden a yarm?” Delia asked.
“Never,” Mahn said. “This will be the first time.”
The yarm seemed insubstantial, and the flat-bottomed gondolas attached by ropes to the cartilage below their skirts appeared almost as flimsy.
They lined up at the next station, climbed down from Var’s back, and presently stepped aboard the gondola. Delia felt it rock beneath her feet and hurried across to the rail; it was ridiculously low – made for the convenience of Fahran citizens – and she was compelled to sit down to forestall a queasy tide of vertigo.
Var settled in the centre of the gondola, and Mahn joined Delia. He stood beside the rail and pointed across to another Fahran. “The ferry-master,” he said. “Watch.”
The tiny Fahran approached a long rope depending from the skirt of the yarm high overhead and swarmed up it, coming to a halt five metres above the gondola. He twisted his right leg around the rope, cupped his hands around his long lips, and began whistling what sounded like a mournful, heartfelt lament.
“What is he doing?” she asked Mahn.
“The yarm are amenable to music,” he explained. “They are attracted to the love songs of the Fahran. This was discovered many summers ago, when Fahran choristers, practising one dawn, attracted an audience of a dozen floating yarm. The ferry-masters have perfected the art of calling, and controlling, the creatures.”
High above, the circumference of the yarm’s skirt pulsed and eddied, and the gondola floated dreamily down the sheer face of the escarpment. Delia peered over the rail and watched the land below resolve itself.
Verdant farmland stretched for as far as the eye could see, shot through with silver rivers. Farmers worked the plantations with their fleeceless-alpaca beasts, piling bales of produce onto wheeled carts.
Mahn explained that it was the first harvest of summer, and that from now until high summer the farmers would make three more harvests, all across Fahran territory, and the crops would last well into the next winter.
“And when fresh produce runs out?” she asked.
“Then we will eat fungus grown underground, and animals reared for winter slaughter. Some children, born in mid-winter, won’t enjoy the delicacy of fresh fruit and vegetables until they’re all but grown. They’re often the weakest, and hive mothers attempt to conceive so that their hatchlings will be born towards the end of winter.”
“And you?”
“I was spring born,” Mahn said, “and as such was destined to be a teacher.”
She stared at him. “The time of year you were born denotes your profession?”
He blinked at her. “Why, of course. Is it not the same on Earth?”
She explained that the time of one’s birth had nothing to do with the choice of one’s vocation, a concept both Mahn and Var found bizarre.
“On Valinda,” Var said, “we do not have a choice when it comes to our profession. It must be very confusing not to know one’s destiny as you grow to adulthood.”
Delia laughed and marvelled at the differences between their worlds.
In due course the yarm floated to the ground; the ferry-master wound a hawser around a tree and the passengers filed off one by one.
Delia and Mahn climbed on to Var’s back and she set off along the riverbank towards a moored ferry, again drawing stares and comments from the strolling crowds.
Delia looked along the length of the escarpment. Million Falls could be seen stretching east and west, the silver arcs of individual waterfalls connecting the highland to the plain like so many curving cantilevers of steel. Below, the spume of spray was spangled by a myriad dancing rainbows; and long-billed birds, with wingspans far greater than any Terran albatross, cut arabesques through the mist.
They boarded a riverboat and accommodated themselves on bales of cloth in the prow of the vessel. The captain cast off and the broad, shallow barge drifted along the sedately flowing river.
As the trip progressed, and the boat moved through farmland to a flat, grassy plain interspersed with tall, corkscrew trees, Delia moved to the rail and stared out across the twilight land.
Soon they would dock in Alarah, and in time Delia would learn if other survivors from the Amsterdam had made landfall on Valinda.
Imp?
Yes?
What if the con-trail we saw was not from a human life-raft? What if it was a Skelt vessel, returning to check on their old colony?
The coincidence of a Skelt vessel appearing so soon after your arrival here is vanishingly small.
She nodded. I know, but...
She felt silent, then asked, Still no contact with...?
Negative. I will keep trying.
I wonder why the silence, if it is a life-raft from the Amsterdam?
If it is a human vessel, then the survivors have either switched off their implants, or – more likely – evacuated the Amsterdam without their chargers.
Delia contemplated the years ahead. It was impossible to envisage how she might cope, alone, without human company – despite the companionship of Mahn and Var – but the thought of fellow human beings to share her grief, her nostalgia, when considering all she had lost... Well, it made the idea of life on Valinda almost bearable.
If the vessel was from the Amsterdam, then she would have people with whom to share memories, compare experiences, people whose frames of reference and cultural values were the same as hers; she would be able to tell them things that only another human being could comprehend, share intimacies and confidences...
She thought of Timothy, and then her parents who she would never see again, and fought back her tears.
Chapter Twenty
IT WAS LATE into the night when the riverboat approached the city of Alarah. Delia joined Mahn and Var at the rail.
The architecture was familiar from Million Falls, with flowing, sweeping dwellings that seemed almost to have been formed by the wind, but Alarah was far more sprawling than the Falls and built upon one bank of the river only. A glowing mass of stars rose behind the city, so that the buildings appeared silhouetted on the horizon like a line of alien script.
“Are all cities on Valinda so beautiful?” she asked Mahn as the boat approached a stone jetty.
“We Fahran pride ourselves on our architecture. The cities of the north, like Alkellion, are ancient and more severe in style; those of the equator were built to celebrate summer.”
“And the Vo?” she asked Var. “Do your people build cities?”
“Great underground lairs ten times the size of Alarah,” she said, “though I admit they are not as beautiful.”
The boat nudged the jetty and several gangways were lowered. Delia felt a pressure in her chest at the thought of what lay ahead.
Crowds of Fahran had gathered at the harbour, hawking food and drink and trinkets, or come to meet friends and family. Fat, glowing insects floating on long cords lit the streets, and above the hubbub of conversation Delia made out soft melodies played by musicians on stringed instruments like wheeled harps. Here and there, conspicuous above the crowd, stood half a dozen bulky Vo.
Mahn led the way from the boat, but as soon as her feet were on dry land, Delia was the centre of attention. A hushed crowd had gathered, staring at her and her companions; one or two children reached out, tentatively touching her crimson suit. A murmur passed through the ranks, a susurration of comment and curiosity.
