A Night Without Stars (19 page)

It rained for most of the day in the Albina Valley, as it did for the majority of days on the northern fringes of the Sansone Mountains. Florian was used to the microclimate of the foothills. Seven years he'd spent as the valley's forest warden, looking after the trees that grew up the broad slopes, maintaining the firebreak lanes, watching out for roxwolf packs. So he'd learned that for eight months each year, chaotic southern winds would push the clouds through the high snowcapped peaks before sending them slithering over the foothills, where they coated the forested slopes in a persistent drizzle. Then the summer months arrived, and the sea winds died down. That was when a more intermittent rain came in from the north, carried by the warm air from the heart of the continent.

He'd known the rain would end by midafternoon, recognizing the weather pattern as soon as he rose that morning. So after breakfast he stayed close to the little lodge with its shaggy thatch roof and shifted stodgy clumps of dalfrond from the big pile to the metal trailer ready to take to the trenches that afternoon. It was the Vatni who brought the stuff to him, dredging the dark-green water weed from the lake at the bottom of the valley where they had a village. Teal, his springer spaniel, trotted along behind him, curved bushy tail wagging about and soaking up its usual quantity of mud.

Once the trailer was full, he backed the four-wheel-drive SMI (Siegen Motor Industry) Openland truck up to it and hitched the two together. The trailer's left tire looked slightly flat again. It'd been three weeks since he filed a report of the slow puncture with the county office of the forest warden service. Jackso, the warden two valleys to the west, had loaned him a compressor, which now sat in the lean-to shed on the side of the lodge. He unwound the air hose and screwed it onto the tire's valve. The compressor's electric motor started with a vigorous whirring sound, and the tire inflated.

That the cottage had an electrical supply had come as a surprise to Florian back when he arrived, but the full electrification of Bienvenido had been one of Slvasta's prestige projects, giving everybody the same benefit of the new and modern post-Transition civilization, no matter where they lived. Dams were built across hundreds of valleys, bringing employment to tens of thousands in every county, while newly nationalized factories retooled and re-educated their workforce to build the hydro-turbines Mother Laura had designed before she sacrificed herself to exterminate the Prime.

Not that there were many uses for electricity in the warden's lonely lodge. Each of his four rooms had an electric lightbulb. There was a radio. A pump shunted water from the rainwater tank through the back boiler on the wood-fired cooking range, allowing him to have hot water in the sink and shower. He also had some woodworking tools in the lean-to.

That was all Florian needed. Ever since Lurji, his brother, had fled the PSR—supposedly to Port Chana, where the Eliter radical movement was strongest—Florian had wanted to be by himself. He never had gotten on very well with people—a situation exacerbated by his Eliter status, condemning him to constant taunts and bullying at school, and even worse victimization during his time as a conscript for the county regiment.

It was math that interested him, and he was good at it—an ability magnified thanks to his macrocellular cluster. He even made a few modifications to the binary codes of the operating system they all used, improving the file search function. The Eliter community, of course, was eager to have him work on refining and expanding their routines, which was an ongoing project. But for all their solidarity, they endured relentless persecution, driving angry people like his brother into more open acts of defiance. That was a life he knew would bring him nothing but misery. And outside the Eliter community, there were no intellectually challenging jobs available, not for the likes of him. He could never escape his heritage. Eliter status was on your birth certificate and identity papers, condemning your life. It didn't even matter if an Eliter's children didn't have functioning macrocellular clusters. They were still deemed Elite—just another injustice perpetrated by the government, of which there were many. Some Eliters had managed to hide their family's abilities from the PSR, but not many in this day and age. If he joined the civil service he would never rise above grade five—junior management level. The university wouldn't allow him to study. And he would certainly never be allowed to join the Astronaut Regiment, whose Liberty missions he'd worshiped from an early age.

Most would consider the forest warden job, with its isolation, to be a curse, but to Florian it was a blessing. He joined the warden service the same week he was discharged from his national service. They accepted him without question; these days, few people were interested in such a career. He'd heard nearly a third of the valleys under their stewardship lacked a warden.

Out here in the seclusion of Albina Valley, he could spend a few hours each day doing the actual job, while the rest of the time he could sit and think. His macrocellular cluster allowed him to become an even greater recluse, giving him the ability to live quite literally inside his own head to the exclusion of everything else.

In the afternoon when the cloud had lifted to form a dank roof over the valley and the drizzle abated, he drove the Openland truck up the eastern slope with Teal sitting in the passenger seat. The Openland's fat tires had deep treads, giving it plenty of traction on the spindly lingrass that covered the ground between the trees. Albina Valley was covered in a mix of terrestrial pine and native browfrey, a deciduous tree sprouting long trains of gray-blue leaves that dangled like a spindly moss from its whip-thin branches.

The main tracks were cut vertically up the slope, with firebreak paths extending outward at ninety degrees every 150 meters, dividing the entire valley wall into a grid. Some tracks were quite overgrown, which he dutifully logged in his memory files. He would come back with a chain saw on a dry day and trim down the worst of the overhanging branches. Then there were the other paths through the trees, produced by wild goats and shalsheiks meandering along gradients. Even his memory log didn't have all of them mapped out yet.

Twenty minutes after leaving the lodge, he turned off the main track and rumbled along firebreak AJ54 (in his private designation). The firebreak was narrow, and the lingrass thick and cloying. There was a small circular clearing five hundred meters in, which the Openland could just turn around in—if you knew how and took it slowly. He kept a hard lock on the steering wheel as the fronds of browfrey slapped against the windscreen.

When he killed the motor, silence engulfed him like a benign presence. He sat still for a moment, relishing the seclusion. It simply wasn't possible to get farther away from people than here, which made these times away from the lodge quite precious.

“Go on, boy,” he told Teal. “Find me some rabbits.” Teal obediently jumped out of the Openland and started pushing through the tangled undergrowth. The forest's rabbit population had been increasing a lot lately, despite the native bussalores preying on them. Knapsvine and jibracken, which grew in abundance between the tree trunks, were excellent foods for them. Unfortunately it meant the newly planted saplings on the western slopes were getting badly chewed. Again, the county's warden service office had known about it for the last two years. Nothing had been done.

Waxed-leather trousers tucked into knee-high boots kept the water from the lingrass off his legs as he gathered up bundles of dalfrond from the trailer and carried them down to the trench. There were eighteen identical trenches scattered at random around the valley. He'd methodically dug them out during the first eighteen months, his spade making light work of the soft peaty soil. A meter and a half deep, two wide, and twenty long. The bottom was covered in lengths of wood that proved too spindly for use in the lodge's range stove. Nothing odd or suspicious about that, if anyone stumbled across them. Nor the layer of smelly dalfrond scattered on top; that was applied to accelerate the wood's decay.

Florian scanned the trench and smiled as he counted eleven waltan fungi that had fallen in. The waltan was a strange thing—a fan-shaped nodule of fungus that was mobile. It didn't move fast, but it could sense the rotting wood it fed on, and moved inexorably toward it. And the trenches with their decomposing branches and bark were a rich source. Unfortunately, once the fungus fell in and began to leach the nutrients it thrived on, it then had no way of climbing up the trench's vertical walls afterward. The trenches were the most basic trap it was possible to create.

When he'd finished scattering the fresh dalfrond weeds over the wood, Florian picked up the tough fibrous waltans, the smallest of which was the size of his head, and dumped them in the trailer.

Teal reappeared, his head hanging low and his muddy coat snagged with tiny twigs and knapsvine burrs.

“Nothing, huh?” Florian said. “Don't know why I bother with you.”

Teal clambered back into the passenger seat and gave him a forlorn look.

Florian drove to the drying shed, hidden in a dense clump of pines along firebreak FB39, and hung the waltans up in net bags. It took at least three months to dry one out properly in Albina Valley's humid atmosphere. There were a couple of batches that had withered to the point they were starting to crumble through the netting, so he carried those back to the trailer before heading home.

Evening was Florian's favorite time, and he had a very specific routine. As the sun began to sink below the horizon he loaded several logs into the range cooker, and put the big pot of rabbit stew back onto the hotplate. His kitchen took up half of the living room. Over the years he'd added several pots and pans, along with a drawer full of new utensils. Crockery pots with rubber-seal lids held his flour and sugar. Herbs from the garden hung on a rack above the range cooker, drying out. One day, when savings from his minuscule wages had grown enough, he planned on buying an electrical refrigerator, which would probably double his electricity bill.

First there was the chicken coop to check. Three new eggs there.

“They'll do for breakfast, boy,” he told Teal happily. Teal wagged his tail on the other side of the wire mesh. Teal was no longer allowed inside the pen after getting a little bit carried away two years ago. It was for his own good; a chicken claw had left quite a graze on his nose.

Goat pen next. Florian sat on the stool and milked Embella. He got just over half a liter from her, which was one reason he wasn't hurrying for the refrigerator.

Inside again, and he began to mix a new batch of bread dough for tomorrow, scattering in a few rosemary leaves then kneading it for a good ten minutes before shaping it into a hemisphere. The proofed dough from yesterday was taken out of the bowl, and the fresh one put in. He draped the bowl with a damp cloth and checked the temperature of the oven, which was up to two hundred degrees Celsius.

The bread was put in the oven, and the stew stirred. There wasn't much left.

“Be taking a trip tonight, boy,” he told Teal. “Fancy myself some lamb for next week.”

A subroutine in his macrocellular cluster began counting down. The timer was one he'd written extra code for, so it could count down as well as up. He settled into the comfy chair, switched off the electric bulb, and closed his eyes.

The routines squirted colored sparks into the darkness, which rapidly coalesced into the image of the Warrior Angel—the Eliter's standard activation symbol. Icographics, the Eliters called them. Strips of translucent color, like malleable glass, that could be bent and twisted and stretched to provide illustration, mainly for graphs. He'd welcomed them when he was younger, using them to help structure equations. You could create three-dimensional fields of them, and punch them with dark alphanumerics, creating matrices of numbers governed by equations, transforming the physical into mathematics, explaining so much of the world. He'd achieved a lot with them back then, before growing frustrated with their limitations. So he dug back through the icographic formatting routine and began to add code of his own, enhancing functionality.

Florian's mindscape unfolded. He was no longer in a dark lodge in Albina Valley. Now he was sitting on a beach on some tropical island. His skin felt the warmth of the sun, he smelled the sea air—or what he determined sea air would smell like from the descriptions he'd read, sort of like sweet rose perfume. Waves lapped against the snow-white sand. It was the world of
Danivan's Voyage,
the book he'd read when he was eleven, captivating him because it described Bienvenido after the Fallers had been purged. A glimpse of the future he had clung to throughout all the bad days, then years.

It wasn't perfect. There were areas that lacked color. Some sections weren't three-dimensional, or flickered between the two. But he was making progress, exploring the abilities of his macrocellular clusters, the effects that could be generated within his mind. And the code that made it possible. Code was king. Code was his true life now.

He settled back and summoned up the audio routines. They opened around him, column after column written by his own designator subroutines. He could play music from a file now. It wasn't particularly clear, and there were lulls. A lot of that was to do with his radio; reception in Albina Valley wasn't good. Atmospherics affected the shortwave signals, and the new medium-wave services broadcast out of Opole were blocked by the valley walls.

He had plans for all that. Plans for a routine that could take the meager music files and use them as a basis to compose new music, with him as a conductor. Plans to build a medium-wave radio with an aerial on the peak of the valley. Plans to build a converter that would change analog signals to digital, so that his macrocellular clusters could receive them directly; that way, he wouldn't have to rely on inefficient old ears. So many ideas. Aunt Terannia sent him books about mathamatica and electrical circuits when she could, but they were all mimeographed copies of originals and didn't tell him what he really needed to know. Still, they gave him the fundamentals, so code could be written to solve the problems. Code could do anything. Code could save the world.