Xeelee: Endurance (43 page)

It showed up as a skin discolouration first, like a burn. This stage could last a year, even more. But eventually it got into your lungs, and within three days you were dead. None of Dela’s medicines could fight it; it was only rigid quarantine procedures that kept it from overwhelming the community altogether.

What frustrated Celi was that he was sure a cure for the Blight was achievable. As he had visited case after case, Celi had made notes of the folk medicines he encountered, concocted from animal blood, plant roots and seeds, mineral salts – potions and salves born out of desperation. The surprising thing was that some of these remedies showed signs of slowing the disease. Somewhere in all these ingredients was a cure, he became convinced.

But finding that cure was a tremendous challenge. There were no full-time scientists here; Foro wasn’t rich enough to afford them. And a little systematic thought demonstrated that there were simply too many combinations of ingredients and relative concentrations to be tested, even if Celi were to dedicate himself to the project full time – which, as one of Foro’s two doctors, was quite impossible.

And now HuroEldon, who he had hoped would be a source of old wisdom on the Blight, dismissively told him it was all futile anyhow. ‘We live in a world in which time is stratified, remember. Time flows faster the higher you go—’

‘I understand that,’ Celi said testily.

‘Do you? That’s impressive.
I
don’t. And you must also understand, my boy, that organisms change – especially the pesky little brutes that bring us diseases. The Blight can transmit itself through blood, or spittle, or through the air. Whatever we do, a subset of the Blight’s disease vectors can always waft up into the blue where, accelerated in time, they can mutate, faster than we can hope to match them with our remedies. You see? It’s thus a fundamental feature of our world that disease is always beyond our control.’ He shrugged massive shoulders. ‘One must simply accept the losses.’

Celi could not fault the Philosopher’s logic. But on some level, he saw, Huro simply did not
care
that it was impossible to defeat the Blight. Perhaps this was a legacy of the past. HuroEldon’s very name was a relic of the complicated compound nomenclature once adopted by the aristocracy of Foro, while Celi’s was a blunt Attic name. Even generations after the rebellion, in Huro’s heart he still thought he was better than Celi, better than the swarming townspeople Celi tended. Celi kept such thoughts to himself.

Huro seemed to be growing bored. ‘You’re wasting your time here, you know. There are much more intriguing questions for a mind like yours to address.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as the subject of that lecture of mine: the indisputable fact that the whole of our world is a made thing, or at least assembled from disparate components, from blue to red, top to bottom. We’ve plenty of evidence beyond spindling skeletons. Why, we believe that the very stratification of time is an artefact.’

Celi walked to the window and peered up at the sky. The light of Old Earth came from the shifting glow of the Lowland, reflected from the clouds. ‘Why would anybody
make
all this?’

‘Think it through,’ Huro said. ‘If you could climb down from the sky, down into this redshifted pit we call our world, you would be preserved, locked in time.’

‘Preserved?’

‘We believe that once Old Earth was a world
without
this layering of time, a world like many others, perhaps, hanging in the sky. And its people were more or less like us. But Old Earth came under some kind of threat. And so, to protect their children, the elders of Old Earth pulled a blanket of time over their world and packed it off to the future. You must understand this is a rather flimsy hypothesis, and as I always say myself, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and we don’t have it yet! But it’s the best justification we’ve come up with so far: Old Earth is a jar of time, stopped up to preserve its children.’

Celi frowned. ‘But then, what about the Effigies?’ The ghostly forms released by the dying represented the biggest single mystery he had encountered as a doctor. ‘Are they
us
– are they human souls, leaving a dying body? And if so, why do so few of us release them on death? And why should the world periodically shake itself to pieces in the Formidable Caresses?’

‘Good questions. I wish I had good answers! Perhaps you will find out for yourself – when you come down into the red and join us.’

So here was the invitation, bluntly stated. Celi said, ‘I am a doctor. I have patients here in Foro.’

‘They will die in the end, whatever you do.
While you could live on.
’

‘I have a wife. Qaia. She is carrying our first child—’

‘The blue-eyes who was with you the night of the lecture? How cute. Bring her with you. Or, better still, leave her behind.’ He leaned closer, and Celi smelled gin on his breath. ‘Stride into the future with me, five years, ten, twenty. There will always be more girls, not even conceived yet, fresh fruit waiting to be plucked. How do you think I keep myself entertained during these visits to your dismal little town? It isn’t all sewage systems and creationism, you know.’

The curiosity Huro had woken in Celi that night five years ago would never leave him. But everything else about Huro and his proposal repelled Celi, everything but the allure of knowledge. It was easy for him to turn down Huro’s invitation.

As it turned out, however, Celi’s future was after all decided that day. When he returned home, he found Qaia sitting alone, stroking her belly, her face streaked by desolate tears. A pale-pink stain, like a burn, was spreading across her neck: it was the Blight.

Her life and his had been destroyed, he thought, by a vector of infection he couldn’t even see, and which he would never have the time to defeat. He couldn’t bear it.

It took a sleepless night of calculation for Celi to decide what he must do. He would not follow HuroEldon, down into the red. He must climb up into the blue, alone.

In the morning he packed quickly: a few clothes, some dried food, bags of seeds and roots, a set of his medicinal samples. Then, with his pack on his back and a cage of mice dangling awkwardly from his belt, Celi walked out of Foro.

He made for the cliff face, and began to climb. Once there had been an elevator system here, worked by tethered spindlings. Now you had to walk. But a whole series of staircases had long ago been cut into the face of the rock, heavily eroded by usage and weathering, but still usable.

He was winded by the time he had climbed the nine hundred steps to what remained of the Attic, where once his ancestors had toiled.

He walked around curiously; he had never been up here before. There was nothing left of his people’s village but post-holes in the ground, the scorch-marks of abandoned hearths, and gaunt caves in the cliff walls that had once been used as kitchens and dormitories. It all looked much older than the two or three generations since its abandonment, but that was in Foro time; up here in the blue this place had grown much older than the Forons’ memories of it.

He dangled his legs over the edge of the cliff, sipped water from a spring, and looked down into the depths of the Lowland, an ocean of misty redshift. From here, Foro too was bathed in a crimson glow; he could see the people and their spindling-drawn vehicles crawling as if through syrup. Already he was cut off from his family, from his patients, from Qaia, by the streaming of time. He wondered how many of them he would see again.

Once he had made his decision to leave he had been determined to keep his plan secret from everybody – even from Qaia. Perhaps it had been the kindest thing to do; or perhaps he had feared his own determination might waver if he hesitated.

But Dela, the doctor who had tutored him, had seemed to have an idea what he was up to. ‘It’s the white mice,’ she told him. ‘You’re taking white mice.’

‘What about them?’

‘Mice can catch the Blight, like humans. Spindlings, for instance, can’t. And that’s important to you, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Unexpectedly she hugged him. Old enough to be his mother, she was a nurturing doctor, but not given to physical displays of affection. ‘I will miss you. You’re a good colleague.’

‘I’ll be back in a few days.’

‘Of course you will.’

His father had accepted his bland assurances that he would return. He had a more strained encounter with his mother, who, with her usual acuity, guessed he was up to something. ‘I always did say that girl would have you climbing the blue.’

‘Look after her, mother.’

‘I will.’ He embraced her; she smelled of warm bread.

And then had come his parting from Qaia. He had left her, and his unborn child, with lies. Now, as he looked down into the layers of time that trapped her, he couldn’t bear even to think about it. Wearily he collected his kit and continued the climb.

Above the Attic he plodded steadily along the trails of migrant animals, and when the trails petered out, scrambled over rocks. There were no more people or animals now, but he saw the flash of wings, and occasionally heard an echoing caw. He was not alone, not while the birds flew with him.

After a time he noticed a change in the rock. Shattered by frost or heat, its surfaces scarred by lichen, it seemed much more sharply eroded than the cliff faces down by Foro. The stratification of time must be having a profound effect on the very fabric of the world, with higher rock sections eroding away much more rapidly than lower. When he paused to sleep, wrapped in a skin blanket on a narrow ledge, he scratched a note about this in his spindling-skin journal, the first note he had made there.

On the third day he climbed a narrow pinnacle, heading up to a summit. By now it seemed that only he existed in a normal stream of time; he was alone in the clean, thin air, sandwiched between the stars over his head and the crimson glow beneath.

The slope levelled out, and he stood on a smooth, worn plateau. There was life here: tufts of grass, low trees that clung to the rock face, even a couple of abandoned birds’ nests. Food and water: he could live here, then. But Foro and the Shelf, far beneath him, were lost with the Lowland in a dank sea of redshift. Perhaps there were higher mountains to climb. But surely he had come high enough to achieve the temporal advantage he sought, high enough to defeat the evolutionary enthusiasm of the Blight vectors – high enough to give him the time he needed to save Qaia. This would do.

But now that he had stopped moving, doubt plagued him. Could he really bear to lose himself in time like this?

Better not to think about it. Better to begin work; once his patient methodology gathered momentum, his soul would be filled with the work and his purpose. Grimly he began to unload his kit.

Celi stood in the doorway of the home he had built with Qaia. He looked round at the walls of mud and plaster, the furniture they had made and bought, the carving with their names over the door. For him, all of it was a lifetime old, yet as fresh as a morning. And there was no place for him, he knew.

He felt an odd stab of nostalgia for his mountaintop refuge, the hut he had built, the cages for the mice. But even if he could climb back up there it would already all be gone, weathered away by accelerated time. The core of his life had been hollowed out; he felt as if he had been away only a moment, that he had been aged in a heartbeat.

Qaia walked into the room, humming, a towel around her hair. For a moment she did not see him, and he watched her, his breath catching in his throat. It hurt him to see what the Blight had done to her: the crimson stain had spread up from her neck across her once-pretty face. Yet he was relieved that he had, after all, returned in time to save her.

Then she saw him. She recognised him immediately, and her blue eyes widened. It was unbearable to have her look at what he had become, with his white hair, his stooped back.

He longed to hold her, but time stood between them like stone. Only a year had passed for her, while more than forty had worn away for him.

‘You said you would be gone a few days,’ she said. ‘Some “few days”.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Qaia, the baby—’

‘You have a son, Celi. A son. Four months old.’

He tried to take that in. His leathery old heart beat faster. He held up his precious vial. ‘Take this. It is—’

‘I know what it is. Your mother guessed what you must be doing. So did Dela. Oh, you fool! What use is saving me if I had to lose you in the process?’

He pressed the vial into her hand. ‘Take it to Dela,’ he whispered. ‘She will know what to do. Hurry now. It’s what all this has been about, after all.’

She bit her lip, and ran out of the door.

And HuroEldon walked in, his robe sweeping. ‘Well, well. Somebody told me they saw you come staggering back down out of the blue.’

Celi straightened. ‘Philosopher.’

Huro leaned closer. ‘You smell like a spindling’s breath. And what is this you’re wearing, mouse fur? I take it you found your cure. I knew you would do it,’ Huro said grudgingly. ‘But I never thought you would reduce yourself to this in the process. And you ran out on your patients, despite the vows you doctors take.’

‘I came back—’

‘But what use are you now, like this?’ He inspected Celi, as if he were a curious specimen. ‘Your wife can’t love you again, you know. We humans don’t seem to have evolved to handle such differential shifts in time. That’s another point that convinces me this is a made world, by the way, that we are designed for a different environment . . .’ He idly picked up Celi’s notebook, and paused at the very first observational note Celi had made so long ago, about the effects of differential weathering rates at altitude. ‘An acute bit of geology. I told you, you would have made a good Philosopher. But you’ve thrown your life away.’

Celi had no reply. Huro was articulating doubts that had plagued him during his vigil on the mountain – in all those years alone, how could he not have had doubts? As he had worked through his monumental combinatorial challenge with his vials of infected blood and trial remedies, slaughtering generation after generation of white mice, his intellectual curiosity, even his basic impulse to save his wife, had worn away, leaving nothing but a grim determination to keep on to the end. He had even stopped counting the years as they had piled up. Of course he had been lonely, up there on his plateau, looking out over uncounted layers of time! But what choice had there been?