Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

‘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.’