Firespark (32 page)

“I didn't know what to do with her. She crawled out of the water and sat at Mara's—I mean, the statue's—feet. I think she's all on her own.”

He finds he can't speak about the other child, the dead one.

“You found her at the Face in the Stone?” Candleriggs looks startled then rummages on the floor among a scatter of books. “Now, where is it? I was reading a Greek legend … it's such an old story it surely can't do me much harm,” Candleriggs mutters, fumbling in a book.

Fox has to smile. She's surrounded by hillocks of
books, sleeps upon them, the floor is carpeted with pages, and they burn them to keep warm, yet Candleriggs can't shake off her belief that books are dangerous things.

“Ah, here it is.” Candleriggs smoothes the page, so intent on the words of the story that she momentarily forgets her fears. “The legend of Pandora, a child made of water and earth. Made of clay, really … and you found this clay child at
that
statue. That's important. Must be.”

Fox yawns. The old woman is fixated with signs in stones, with coincidence and what's meant to be—as if the future is all laid out, already set. Fox is clinging to the hope that the future is still up for grabs. He has to believe that, or why else would he be cooped up here in a cold stone tower in a netherworld with an ancient, owl-eyed Treenester and a child made of clay?

The urchin is staring at the fire, hissing. Before either of them can stop her she reaches out and picks up a glowing ember. And drops it, screaming, her hand singed.

“Hey, hey, come here.” Fox grabs a can full of rainwater and plunges the burned hand into it. The child wails at the top of her voice, a sound that mimics the sea-police sirens. Fox points to the fire and copies the siren noise. “Don't touch.”

“You're a Pandora all right.” Candleriggs dips a corner of her mossy cloak in the rainwater and begins to clean the urchin's mucky face. “Too curious for your own good.”

Candleriggs scrubs the urchin's clay-caked face and body. A green-eyed, wild-ringleted cherub emerges from layers of netherworld muck. In the firelight, when Candleriggs shows how to warm hands and feet by the fire without getting burned, Fox stares at the urchin's leathery, thick-downed skin and the faintest of webbing between her fingers and toes.

Once she's eaten some scrambled egg and spat it out in disgust, Pandora prowls the tower room, curious and wary. Fox eats her leftover egg and watches her grab an uncooked one and munch it, shell and all. When Fox laughs she snatches his green headgem from the bookshelf behind him, hissing like a snake. Fox smacks her fingers but Pandora won't let go of the gem. He has to force her fingers open. She bites his hand.

“No!”

Pandora just looks at him with beautiful green eyes and laughs. She points to the headgem that's the same color as her eyes, with another hiss.

“What's the hissing for?”'

“I don't know. She's copying something, as children do. The waste air that's pumped out of New Mungo, maybe? There's a waste pipe near the Face in the Stone. No, listen—she's speaking,” says Candleriggs.

Fox can only hear a serpent hiss.

“Whississss,” Pandora hisses, still pointing at the green gem.

“What's this?” Candleriggs's face creases into a thousand wrinkles as she smiles at the child.

“Thiss,” says Fox, imitating the hiss, “iss mine. Iss not a toy.”

“Ah, but I've got a toy,” declares Candleriggs.

She digs into a pocket in her mossy cloak and brings out a little wooden snake, hardly bigger than her hand. The snake is made of a train of short stubs of wood, linked on a string, so that it wriggles whenever it's moved. The greenish tinge the wood has been stained with has almost all rubbed off.

“Whississss.”

“It's a toy snake. See? Sssss.” Candleriggs runs the
wooden snake up Pandora's arm. The little girl squeals with delight and grabs it. “It was my son's,” says Candleriggs, laughing. “I made it for him when he was a baby. You can play with it now,” she tells the child.

Candleriggs has a son? One of the Treenesters who has gone with Mara?

Candleriggs reads the surprise on Fox's face.

“He died when he was a baby.”

Fox takes this in. “You had a baby with my grandfather? Is that what you mean? And he still threw you out of the city? With his own baby? What kind of a man could do that?”

Anger flashes through him. The thought of Mara with his baby, an ocean away, haunts Fox night and day.

“Caledon never knew,” says Candleriggs. “It was my revenge. But revenge didn't do me any good when my baby died,” she pauses, her eyes bitter and dry, “of an infected mosquito bite.” Candleriggs gives Fox a look that makes him shiver. “Maybe he'd have looked something like you, if he'd lived.”

Everything might have been so different. What if Candleriggs hadn't rebelled against the New World, where people are safe in their sky-city havens and everyone else, like Mara, is abandoned in the drowned world? If Candleriggs had stayed with Caledon and her baby had lived, his grandfather would never have married his grandma. He, Fox, wouldn't have been born at all.

Fox has a glimmering of all the great and small flukes of fate, all the twists and turns in the lives of his ancestors, that must have happened to cause him to be born, to be alive, here, at this point in the world.

He's hungry, miserable, his life is a wreck, and the idea that he could change things seems like a mad fantasy. The
temptation to go back home is huge, to plead for forgiveness from his family and claim his disappearance was just a teenage prank that got out of hand. Night after night, too cold to sleep on his lumpy mattress of books, he's on the verge of giving in. But he always comes back to Mara. Mara and a ship of refugees at the top of the world. Wasn't it a mad fantasy to think she could do that? Wasn't it a mad fantasy of his grandfather's to imagine up a whole New World of skyscraping cities studded across the globe of a flooding world? Yet he made it real and became the Grand Father of All the New World. His grandfather and Mara both chased their dreams and made them real.

“Your parents”—Candleriggs interrupts his thoughts—“they must be missing you, worried sick.”

It's not the first time she's said it. She keeps urging him to post them a note in the Noos, at least.

“I hardly knew them,” says Fox, aware as he says it that he's put his parents behind him, in the past. “They were never there. Their work came first.”

The idea he's been crafting all this time feels like mad fantasy too. But maybe, just maybe, it'll work. The Noos is more ruthlessly guarded than ever before, but Fox knows that trying to police cyberspace is like trying to police the universe. You can't. And now he has created a new wonder for the stunning cyberuniverse of the Noos.

A galaxy of peekaboo moons.

He found the idea in old Weavesites: pesky advertisements that pop up in your face. Yet the occasional one would catch his eye and he'd be curious to see what it was about. So Fox has created another kind of pop-up: a peekaboo at a buried past and an unknown world of the present that exists just beyond the city walls. It's a pesky pop-up of brutal truth the people of the New World need.

Someone, surely, will take a look to see what his peekaboo moons are about. The bored and the too-curious, the brilliant and the lonely. Some daredevil Noosrunner like he once was, who still has a glimmer of wonder and might stop for an instant amid the frenzy of invention and cybertrading that engrosses the New World.

That's who Fox is seeking. People of a mind like him. In the unguarded moment they stop to take a look, their godgem is open to him. That's his chance to sneak a secret connection with the godgems of all the curious minds. All he can do is hope there are such people left in the cosseted cities of the New World.

If there are, he'll pop them a shock of truth.

I chased the clouds of my Thrawn Glory

Looking for my Kingdom Come

Slip the chains of Fate

Don't tell me it's too late

“My thrawn Glory,” James Grant

A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's heaven for
?

Robert Browning

The globe is a dead and useless thing. It has no power to get him out of here.

Tuck wriggles inside the tent he's made of his wind-wrap as something trickles down his neck. A fragment of the rockfall that traps him, or an insect, he can't tell.

An insect.

Tuck has been trapped long enough to latch on to the slightest slither of thought. He gave up counting heartbeats once he reached twelve thousand and after that there was nothing else to count. He doesn't know much about insects. There were few in Pomperoy. Lots of woodworms though.

Woodworms
. They live in the Earth as well as in wood. Maybe it's a worm that's gone down his neck.

He waits, feels nothing except the pain in his trapped foot, but a thought slides out of a corner of his mind.

Worms and insects. Dead insects. Dead, black insect words.

The book.

Tuck rummages in the pockets of his windwrap, willing the book not to be lost. In one of his pockets he finds a trickle of small, smooth stones. They run through his fingers and Tuck remembers with a shock what they are: the seven pearls that Pendicle gave him on the day Ma died. He'd forgotten all about them. Tuck's heart beats faster. It feels like a sign. But a sign of what?

Great Skua, this is not the day
he
's going to die.

What about Pendicle? Is he loose on the ocean or safe back at the rig? Or is he lost at sea just as Tuck is lost at Land? And the bridgers? What about the rusted barges and ferries and the leaky old
Waverley
? Did they all survive the harsh oceans of the Far North?

What folly to rush headlong after the
Arkiel
like that. Pomperoy acted on pirate impulse with no thought to what might happen or how to get back if it all went wrong. Just as he rushed headlong to Land.

Don't build a bridge into thin air, Tuck
.

An old bridger saying that Da used to quote. Before, it was just words but now Tuck understands.

He's found the book in a pocket and grips on to it, visualizing the tatty cover in his hands, its words like thick black oil. He fixed those words in his head:
Natural Engineering
by C. D. Stone.

There were worms and insects in the words and pictures of the book.

Tuck
is
trying to build a bridge out of thin air—to every dead insect word and every picture from the dark days and nights when Gorbals read to him by skull light. He knows there are three hundred and thirty-seven pages and forty-two pictures, but remembering what's in them is hard. Tuck tries to turn each page in his mind, pages upon
pages about the dam building of beavers, the web weaving of spiders, tower building of termites, nest knitting of birds, the industry of ants—and the tunneling of worms.

The tunneling of worms
.

The sun takes another golden footstep into the sky, climbing higher each day as they make their way through the vast glacier gorge. The wheel of the year is turning, winter slowly rolling toward spring. But the journey through the gorge is so grueling that Mara wonders why she brought everyone to such a place.

Why didn't she stay in the caves? Why didn't she stay with Fox? Why didn't she stay on the island and drown? Drowning in her own comfortable bed on Wing often seems preferable to this: a moment-by-moment struggle, fighting brutal winds along the perilous wrinkles of rock that the glacier has scraped into the mountain face. The baby grows heavier by the day, sapping her energy, making a back-aching agony of every blistered step.

Sometimes she wishes she was Tuck, crushed to death in an instant in the caves.