Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

The seabed’s ascent as it approached the land formed a gentle incline. Waves began to break two hundred meters offshore, and with a hundred meters still to go Bony and Liddy could touch bottom.

The shore itself was a bleak shingle of black and brown stones. Bony waded the final ten meters and sank to his knees.

Liddy moved anxiously to his side. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just looking for something. If you want to open your suit now it ought to be all right. I suggest you sit down before you do it — I felt dizzy for a few moments.”

She flopped down at his side. Bony heard the hiss of escaping air, followed by Liddy’s calm voice, “You said looking. Looking for what?”

Apparently his own discomfort had mostly been nervousness. He would never make a hero. Bony said, “Looking for signs of life. Little crabs, shrimp, sand fleas, barnacles, stuff like that.” He turned over handfuls of pebbles. “I don’t see anything alive. Not even plants. Do you?”

“Nothing. But you saw all sorts on the seabed, didn’t you? Plants and animals. What does it mean?”

Bony stood up and gazed farther inland, to where black rocks rose to a jagged skyline. “If it’s the same up there, and it’s my guess it is, then regardless of what we find in the sea we won’t have to worry about danger on land. Remember I was saying that you ought not to find life on a planet around a blue giant star, because it wouldn’t have had enough time to develop?”

“And I pointed out that the theory is obviously wrong. There is life on Limbo.”

“But I think the astronomers are half right. Back on Earth, there was life in the sea for billions of years before it emerged onto the land. That’s what we have here on Limbo. Lots of plants and animals in the sea, nothing above the surface.” Bony leaned his head back and squinted up into the dazzling sky. “I wonder if there’s a moon? We might find out if we could stay here until dark, but long before that we’d better be back on the ship.”

“A moon . I thought you said it was the type of sun that makes the difference?”

“A moon causes tides. Plants and animals that live in shallow water close to the shore get stranded by the tides, and over time they evolve so that they can live on land or in water. At least, that’s the theory.”

“Do you know every useless piece of information in the universe?”

She was teasing him. Bony didn’t mind at all. They were on an alien world, in the middle of some God-know’s-where mystery region known as the Geyser Swirl. They had no idea how, when, or if they would return home — or even if they would get back safely to the Mood Indigo before dark. It ought to be quite impossible to relax. Yet here he was, ridiculously cheerful and gratified by the sight of Liddy laughing at his side.

“Not every useless thing, no.” He stood up, turning to gaze out beyond the breakers. “But when you’re alone a lot, learning helps to take your mind off it.”

She stood up, too. “Were you alone?”

“All the time, when I was a kid.” Bony had been searching the horizon for any sign of the great clover-leaf shape that had swept overhead when he was down on the seabed. Suddenly he realized the total lack of logic in his action. If life had yet to move out of the sea on Limbo, no winged creature could have taken to the air. Whatever he had seen was a sea-creature. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a look farther inland.”

“Why were you alone?” Liddy fell into step beside him. “And where were you alone?”

“You don’t really want to know.”

“I’ll decide that — after you tell me. Come on, Bony. I’d tell you anything.”

“I warn you, it’s not very interesting.” How much was he going to tell her, after so many hidden years? Well, the first part was safe enough. “You seemed surprised because I’d heard of the Leah Rainbow Academy for the Daughters of Gentlefolk. You shouldn’t have been. I was born on Earth. I was a Gallimaufries kid like you.”

“You didn’t tell me that! You said you’d just read about Earth and the Leah Rainbow Academy.”

“I know. It was a reasonable statement; almost everything else I know came through reading. I wasn’t like you. To get picked out and taken into the Academy, even back then you must have already been absolutely gorgeous. You know, people say about the Academy — at the Academy, did you — I mean, did they teach you how to—”

“None of your business. You may find out one day, but it won’t be through asking about it.” Liddy hooked her arm through his. “So we have lots in common. Both from Earth, both born as Gallimaufry kids.”

“I didn’t say that.” Bony wished they weren’t wearing suits. He couldn’t even feel Liddy’s grip on his arm. “I wasn’t born in the Gallimaufries, the way you were. And you must have been slim and beautiful. I was already fat and clumsy.”

“Lots of kids are. No big problem.”

“It was for me. My last name is Rombelle now; but when I was born it was Mirambelle.”

She stopped dead, her boots grating loud on the barren basaltic rock of the slope. “You’re a Mirambelle?”

“I was. Though you would never have known it.” Bony knew the image that was in Liddy’s mind. The Miraculous Mirambelles, poised and confident, aerialist builders with a grace and sense of balance that would shame a cat or a squirrel, directing the robot spinners in their monofilament spans three thousand meters above the ground. In seven generations, no Mirambelle had ever suffered a fall.

Bony felt that he could not breathe, his lungs were as starved as if the air of Limbo had suddenly lost all oxygen. He went on, “Naturally, my parents didn’t want me anywhere near ultrahigh construction. Not on the ground, either. Too hard on me, they said. Also, of course, I would ruin the Mirambelle legend. Better to have me deep down below the surface, where no one would expect to find a Mirambelle. Better to have me hidden in the Gallimaufries.”

“But you didn’t stay there. You got out.”

“I did. No thanks to the Mirambelle clan, though.” This was the place to stop. This was where he ought to say no more. Bony went on. “I got out because of something else. When I was thirteen years old I became interested in remote viewing, and I heard about something that the Duke of Bosny had been doing. I wanted to take a look.”

“What was it?”

“I’d rather not say.” There was a long silence, then Bony continued, “He was, well, you know, fooling around in unusual ways. Doing things I wasn’t sure were even physically possible. So I figured out how to make the equipment, and I built it, and I did the remote viewing. I wanted to see. I mean, I was only thirteen.”

Now she was staring at him in a peculiar way. His instinct had been right, he should have stopped with the Mirambelles.

Liddy said, “Bony, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. And you probably don’t need to. Anything you’ve seen or heard about, I probably did . Oh dear. Now I’ve shocked you.”

“No, no. I’ve — been around.”

“I was at the Leah Rainbow Academy, you know.”

“Yes. Yes. The Leah Rainbow Academy. The Academy.”

“Bony, stop gibbering. Forget the Academy. I lived through it, so can you. You did the remote viewing. Tell me what happened next.”

“I got caught. I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, and I had no idea how many levels of security there were around the Duke of Bosny. A man called Chan Dalton came to see me.”

“Chan Dalton! He’s a big wheel. He’s the Duke’s chief enforcer.”

“He is now. But this was twenty years ago. He had some connection with the Duke that he didn’t specify, and he had all kinds of weapons in his belt. I felt sure he’d come to kill me. He told me he wanted to know how I’d broken in, because the Duke’s experts told him that remote viewing access to the inner court was impossible. He made me do it again, with him actually present, to prove that I could.”