alt.human (31 page)

He nodded to her, but remained silent.

The trail climbed now into another bank of craggy hills. Scrubby heathland grew to either side, and the scent of wild thyme was heady in the early autumn sun.

“Tell me about the starsingers,” she said, after a time. “Tell me about the realities they sing.”

Skids still bore the scars and bald patches from where he had worn the caul, an alien symbiont that allowed those who became wraiths to commune with the starsingers. His brooding dark eyes fixed on her, as if measuring her, assessing her.

“!¡
struggling
¡! Remember looking back on Laverne from a distance?” he said.

She did. There was one point on their journey where they had stopped on a rise and looked back. She nodded.

“A hazy blur,” said Skids. “You could see a few buildings, but most ran together. A few towers in Central and the skystation gantries were all the detail you could really make out. Well... closer up, you’d see more: individual buildings, details on those buildings – windows, roofs, doors, spires, guttering, murals. Even closer up and you’d see bricks and building stones, woodwork. Closer up: the heads of nails, the joins where blocks have been glued, a black stain from leaking gutters, a line of house martin nests beneath the eaves.

“That’s what it’s like. We see starsingers as if we see them from a distance. We see a vague outline of what they are. Starsingers are ancient. We can’t even begin to conceive of what they are, or how they think or operate. Those words don’t even apply. They don’t
think
or
do
.”

She regretted asking. She almost left it alone, then. But she needed to know. Had a starsinger sung the voices in her head?

“Do they notice us?” she asked. “Are they aware of our existence? Do they... experiment with us?”

“!¡
struggling to articulate
¡! They can be very aware of us,” said Skids. “They grant us the caul. They seek to know us, from the inside. They are oblivious to most races, but there is something in us that they crave. !¡
frustration
¡! Ach, there aren’t the words. The ’singers don’t ‘seek’ or ‘crave’. Those words only describe what the starsingers do like a city seen from a distance. Wear the caul and you’d see how clumsy words are, how they limit our understanding to what we can describe, rather than what we can
perceive
. Words do not describe the All, they constrict it.”

“The starsingers sing realities?” Hope prompted.

Skids nodded. “!¡
factual reporting
¡! They recast reality around themselves,” he said. “That’s how they can travel across the All: they recast reality so they are
here
rather than
there
.”

She considered the chorus in her head. Saneth said it had been sung. What might the starsingers want with her? She put a hand to her temple and said, “I think... I think they’ve done something to me. In my head. Saneth said something had been sung in my head.”

Skids fixed her with those intense eyes again. “!¡
sincere
¡! The starsingers have touched us all,” he said. “But remember: a starsinger is a single entity, never a ‘they’. The ’singers stay apart from each other. They are solitary beings. It’s far too dangerous for them to come together, too much of a toll on the All, with all those pulls on reality in close proximity.”

“The voices,” she said. “The voices in my head. Can they be
un
sung?”

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! Anything can be,” said Skids. “You just have to learn how to make it so.”

T
WO NIGHTS LATER,
Hope settled to sleep alone as I took first watch again, this time with Frankhay.

We were camped out in the hollow where we would later discuss our options.

Now wary of sleeping alone, Hope settled close to where Saneth and the commensal sidedog stood. Before doing so, she checked where Marek was, and was relieved to see him lying with a small group of Hays.

She curled into a ball and lay for a time with her eyes open. Saneth was washing, or oiling, her-his body with fistfuls of some secretion from a belly-gland. The stuff smelled of something citrus. Sour lemons, she decided.

She closed her eyes and thought of drinks with chunks of lemon in them, back in Angiere. It seemed to calm the voices, which was a good thing.

She thought of roaming the streets in Angiere, exploring. She thought of the dockside bustle, the impatient screeching of the gulls. She thought of Emerald, who had got her jobs serving in bars and tried to persuade her to get parts of her body pierced that should never have sharp metal pushed through them.

She stirred to arms coiling around her, a body pressed gently against her, and the night was suddenly cold and the body warm, and she recognised the touch, knew it was me, shifted so that we fitted like twined honeysuckle.

She slumbered again, woke, and my arm was still around her, a hand on her ribs, half-cupping her right breast. She knew my hesitancy around her signified something, some kind of bond. She knew I wanted her, but sensed also that I wanted more than anyone else had ever had from her.

This made her feel something in return, but she didn’t know what it was. Something in her belly, which could easily have been a sex thing. Some kind of feeling of responsibility, too, an awareness that she could easily do harm.

She didn’t think that this was what I was feeling though, and because of this she felt inadequate, less than human, because she couldn’t reciprocate whatever it was that I felt.

She was confused, and her head, usually calmed by my presence, was loud, cacophonous. She knew she would not sleep again this night.

Carefully, she eased herself out of my embrace, sat with her knees pulled up, watched me sleeping for a while.

She peered around in the darkness, saw two Hays – Buller and May – standing guard a short distance downslope from the hollow. Marek lay motionless in the group he had joined for the night. Saneth stood nearby, still: maybe asleep, maybe not.

She went to sit on a flat rock that gave her a view out across the plain. Whenever the moon broke through the clouds, the land was lit with a thin wash of silver. Occasional lights pricked the view, some moving, all distant. Back to where Laverne lay in the west, a yellow glow spilled across the sky and occasional flashes and beams from the skystation jittered like a dry lightning storm.

The voices, the jam-packed essence of our kind... they were a murmur now, almost soothing, the distant, muffled breaking of waves on a beach. Which made her think of Anders Bars and her escape to the dunes by the sea just as the infirmary was burnt to glass, which made her think again of the hospital, the endless days in that room, the wires and lights and smells... Was that where they’d put the voices into her head, or had she arrived there already like this, captured for study by Saneth and her-his colleagues?

She breathed deep and held it, trying to smother the rising chorus.

She watched the sky lighten and detail begin to etch itself across the land, and as she did so she became aware of me behind her, pausing, and then coming to join her. We sat in silence for a time and then I spoke and she answered and she leaned towards me and kissed me softly on the jaw because in that moment she understood that maybe the gnawing uncertainty in her belly whenever she was with me was exactly what I was feeling, and so maybe she
could
reciprocate, maybe she
was
whole, maybe this was a normal thing to be feeling.

She watched me closely as I hesitated and allowed some indefinable moment to pass, she allowed herself a moment of frustrated anger with me when I did not turn and take her in my arms and then... people stirring, starting to gather their things, and the moment really had slipped away.

H
ERALD CALLED THEM
together to debate what to do next, and for most of it Hope sat on the fringe, letting the words wash over her, just another chorus of voices.

She was surprised when Marek spoke more passionately than most, but when he talked of justice and equality she remembered the rough touch of his hand and the way he had treated her back in Angiere.

But he did not know how to find Harmony. All he knew was that it was a city dominated by ten towers, set in the mountains. And Saneth did not know either, Saneth who suddenly seemed weak and frail and who said she-he was dying and had no way to help them.

“I know the way,” Hope said into the silence after Herald had finished his crowing. She had seen it in a dream, in dreams that were only now coming back to her, the returning memory keyed by Marek’s description. The towers: six of them square and blocky, the remaining four twisting helices. Much of the city abandoned, in ruins. The white mountains beyond; the river channelled through straight-edged cuts.

What she did not tell them, because she did not want to put them off from continuing the journey and because it made the voices shrill in her head, was what else she saw in her dreams, the dreams that had only just come back to her now and which she realised had been disturbing her sleep for nights on end.

What she did not tell them was that the giant starship that hung over the city, connected to the towers by a beam of harsh light, was another angel of destruction, needle beams stabbing down, burning, destroying, melting the city to glass as, one by one, the towers slumped, folded in on themselves, lost all form and collapsed.

Harmony would be no refuge.

Harmony was another stopping place on the way to somewhere better, and one they must be careful not to stay in for too long.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

W
ITH THE WEIGHT
ofnumbers behind Herald, and the fact that only one of us claimed to have any idea at all how to find Harmony – and that one was a girl who most regarded as flaky at best and who admitted she only knew from a dream – the outcome was inevitable.

But I was still surprised when it was Frankhay who finally swung the debate behind the settlers.

“!¡
menacing
¡! We have a simple choice,” he said, and instantly the gathering fell silent around him. “We stay here, learn how to survive a winter and then build a community, hoping all the time that the watchers don’t come after us an’ destroy it like as they did Angiere and Laverne.”

Herald opened his mouth to speak but Frankhay silenced him with a pointing finger and a glare. “Or we head east looking for a city we don’t know exists with directions from a stranger’s dreams.”

This time he silenced me, as I tried to butt in.

“!¡
authority
¡! It’s a choice ’tween the safe bet and, quite literally, hope,” he concluded.

I looked around the gathering, and I knew where the consensus lay.

“!¡
hierarchy
¡! The choice is simple,” said the clan-father. “If we carry on travelling into the winter, we have no guarantee of food. Every night we’ll be riskin’ everything on the chance of findin’ shelter. It’d be a fool of a clan-father to lead his people into that when they could be staying in one place, learning their surroundings good and proper instead of learning and re-learning everywhere they go.”

“!¡
dismay
¡! You’re saying we stay?” I asked, disappointed in him. I thought we’d bonded, I thought he believed in finding a better place.

“!¡
decisive
¡! No,” he said. He waved at the gathering. “I say
they
stay. This is a good spot, best we’ve found. The whole lot of us movin’ on don’t stand much chance, but if most stay here they do, an’ a smaller party carryin’ on to find Harmony stands a better chance of success too. An’ if we find it, we can easy send back for the rest.
That’s
what I’m saying.”

W
E STAYED ANOTHER
day, helping to build shelters, saying our one-sided farewells: those who were leaving convinced that this would be a temporary separation, those who remained convinced that the two groups would never see each other again.

Frankhay made a show of leaving Ashterhay in charge of his clan. “!¡
authority
¡! Them as say you’re too young, well, they’d best remember what it was like for me,” he said to a small gathering round a fire that evening. “I was much younger when I founded the clan an’ we took over the Loop. Age ain’t nobody’s business. It’s what’s in your head and in your heart that matters. Ash, you’re like blood to me, but that’s not anything to do with it. You’re the one that’s most like me in your head and your heart: that’s what’s made my mind up.”

Frankhay had been sure to include Herald in the gathering while he handed the clan to Ash, and Herald clearly didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, he was party to the handover of power, but on the other, well, the power wasn’t being handed to
him
.

There would be trouble there, I felt sure. Frankhay must know it, and so must Ash.

I tried to put it from my mind, though. I could do nothing other than forewarn the Cragsiders we left behind.

Herald would stay, of course, and Fray too – a woman of similar age who had grown closer to him on the journey here. Back in Laverne, she had looked after the smaller children at Villa Mart Three, and now she had adopted the role of carer for the two pups from our clan who had survived, Tuck and Immy.

Hope and I were clearly going to seek Harmony. Skids was coming. He had always supported seeing the journey through, and mention of a starsinger protecting Harmony only gave him extra reason. Saneth was coming along, and Marek, too, the most passionate advocate of continuing the journey. Divine was torn; she did not think it was a good idea, but her loyalties lay with me as nominal clan-father of what remained of our people.

That only left Jemerie and Pi from the surviving Cragsiders. I needed to talk to them to determine their thinking.

I had to wait until later in the evening to learn what they thought, when we were splitting into smaller groups, organising ourselves and settling for the night. That was when the two of them found me, unusually hesitant, Pi gesturing at Jemerie with her head as if to say,
Go on, do it
.