Across the Spectrum (38 page)

She smiled, and said, “Yes. I’ll do that. You tell me when.”

Which should have answered his own unspoken question, but
this was what she did, she taught him anxiety: it might be his to say, but he
wanted to please her, he wanted to pick just the right time. How would he know,
how could he tell when she was ready . . . ?

He guessed she’d make it clear, when the time came. She
seldom did ask a question without having the answer right there in her grasp,
held up for him to see it.

∞

The dirigible shadowed them, all the way back. Actually,
with the sun so low, its shadow never touched ground where he could see it, but
it lingered in the air above and behind them as they walked, in the corner of
his sight if he only turned his head a fraction. He wondered if they had
curiosity, these creatures: for sure they had some sense of life beyond
themselves, that first gift of sentience, or else they would never rip open
each other’s corpses and salvage the soulstones, to build towers like fingers
breaking up out of the soil.

That was all they did build, all the mark they made on their
world; grazers and drifters, they needed nothing more. Sometimes he thought he
was much the same: he grazed on a world’s interest, and then moved on. He left
more solid monuments behind him, but that was camouflage, meaningless, the
excuse and not the purpose. They intrigued him, with their towers of the dead;
something they memorialised, though whether it was the dead or the death or the
survivability of stone, he couldn’t tell. “Soulstone” was the best label anyone
could offer, it was hard to call it a translation and even that hint of
religious significance made him suspicious, but the facts were undeniable. They
did salvage the keelstones of their dead, and build them into towers, and
revere those towers; they did do the same with the Upshot’s discards, to the
point where it had needed slow discussion and eventual consent—grace, she
called it—to allow people the climb up their own Tower of Souls, to give them a
vantage-point and a view across this dreary landscape.

To give her a launching-point, to fly from.

∞

Alone for sure, canister’d, contained, with the door
dogged shut behind them: here he could shuck his clothes off, peel hers away
from sticky skin and make her sweat again before they washed, before they
sprawled again in the ruin of their bed and she said, “Low-g, I do love it.
When we fuck, we fly. It’s so new—”

And then she was abruptly silent, until she said, “New to
this body, I mean—”

Which was just as stupid, because they’d been doing it for
months now, since she’d first occupied that body.

He said nothing, and she heard that; and turned her back,
drew her legs up, huddled herself against him and shivered in their shared
heat.

“Who was she?” he asked—which was stupid in itself, because
if there was one question he knew the answer to, it was that one. The record
said, exactly who she was and who she had been.

“You mean, who am I?”

“Yes.”

Her voice had shrunk within her, as she was trying to shrink
within herself, to be unnoticeable. His arms were around her, but that was a
helpless gesture, a mockery of protection. She said, “I was downside, of
course, just a girl, but I ran errands to the terminal. For my father, or for
anyone who’d send me, I loved it there. I met her, and we were friends. My
first adult friend, my first alien friend. She’d been so far, seen so much; I
couldn’t get enough of her.

“And she stayed, longer than. . . longer than most of you
do. Long enough for me to grow to adulthood, way longer than anyone stayed
there, on my homeworld. It wasn’t a welcome place to be. They allowed the terminal,
they used it for trade, but the Upshot were confined to the compound and none
of us were let leave. They said it was our religious duty, to keep within the
bounds our god had set us; I think it was political, they thought too many of
us would leave if any went. But I wanted, I wanted to go. So much, I wanted it.
. .

“And then she said she wanted to stay. She was tired, she
said, and she wanted to grow old in a body she was comfortable with; and she’d
met a man she’d like to make a family with. It was illegal, of course, but she
worked in records and her friend drove trucks in and out of the compound all
day long. Between them, they could make it work. Except that the Upshot keep
such careful track of their people, not like mine; she needed someone willing
to be sent on in her name. . .

“She said she’d change the record, so the machines couldn’t
see I wasn’t her. And of course, once I was here, whole new body,
official
body, then no one need ever know. She gave me all her codes, her passwords,
everything. I only had to be careful not to talk too much, about that life I
haven’t had.

“And I’ve messed it up already, first world I came to. You
won’t, you won’t tell them, will you? You won’t tell
anyone 
. . . ?”

He wouldn’t need to. The woman had lied to her. A terminal’s
local records could be overwritten, perhaps, by a skilled hand, to fool the
’Chute’s internal logs into believing that this body being presented for
discard was the one supplied however many years ago to such-and-such an Upshot
personality. Internal logs and local records were audited, though. Necessarily,
of course they were; and no hand was skilled enough to hide the marks of its
meddling from audit. Besides, there was the physical record, tissues taken from
the body at time of discard to be matched against those taken at time of issue.
Those matches were always made.

She had, how long, a few months more at most? He wasn’t in
records, he didn’t know the frequency of audit. Only the certainty. All the
Upshot knew. And that woman had sent a downside innocent into this all unaware,
purely for camouflage, a placeholder to distract attention for a while, until
authority caught up. She would have known when the next audit was due; likely
she timed all this to happen immediately after the last, to buy her the maximum
time to slip away with her lover. Planets are large; even a cooperative
government might struggle to locate two people who’ve had time and motivation
to bury themselves in new identities far from the Upshot compound.

Meanwhile, this girl, authority would know exactly where to
find her. And would come, detain and question. She would confess; she could do
nothing else, and it didn’t matter anyway. Her body would speak against her.

And then—after how long, how many days of terror and despair?—they
would put her in the ’Chute, and send her nowhere. The body would be a discard,
recorded, preserved, as they all are; her self would be lost information,
deleted, irrecoverable. She’d be dead.

People called them immortal, the downsiders did, but they
were very wrong. Everyone dies, in the end. Accident, negligence, deliberate
choice: their own, or someone else’s.

Everyone dies; everyone lies. He said, “Don’t worry, nothing
terrible will happen. Just be careful, and don’t let it slip to anyone else. You’re
with me now, I’ll look after you.” Ready to catch her, should she fall. “We’ll
move on soon; if we just keep moving for a while, we can leave trouble behind,
and give you enough real planets to talk about, you won’t even have to remember
you’ve got anything to hide. I promise. We’ll ask about work tomorrow, register
as willing to transit. Meantime—well, this is meant to be a rest day. Let’s do
something wildly unrestful. . . “

So they did that, though she was tearful and needy, so
little like the woman that he’d known these last months; and then he teased
her, tempted her into showering and eating before he took her quietly back to
bed and held her till she slept.

And lay awake all night, deliberately, standing vigil over
his beloved; and in the morning, early, when she roused, he brought her coffee
and bakies in bed.

When she rose, he had her flying-suit laid out and ready:

“Sun’s just coming up,” he said, “you could have an hour in
that dawn wind you love so much, before we have to get serious. Could be your
last chance; when a job comes up, they won’t hold it open if we don’t go stat.”

“Come with me?”

“Of course. When did I ever not?”

She purred at him, and wriggled into the suit’s cling.
“Promise not to shout, if I go high?”

“Promise to be sensible, and I won’t shout. Of course, if
the wind should happen suddenly to lift you higher than you were ready for, I’d
have nothing to shout about, would I . . . ?”

“I might have to dive quite suddenly too, to correct for
that.”

“So you might.”

∞

So they retraced their steps of last evening, through the
clear shimmer of the dawn. When they reached the Tower of Souls he boosted her
up to the ramp-platform, though she really didn’t need the help, and followed
with a barely-graceless scramble.

They climbed the truncated spiral to the broad top, and he
wondered aloud what the dirigibles would do when the logic of that spiralling
ramp had brought the whole edifice to a point, to match the ’Chute it shadowed.

“Start another tower, of course,” she said. “Why not?
They’ve made plenty for themselves.”

Which was true, of course, they had; dirigibles had few
offspring and long lives, and there were nevertheless many towers. But none of
those seemed to be finished, they were all works in progress, waiting on another
death. This that they built for human discards had a necessary terminus, and he
wasn’t sure how they would deal with that.

Still, at least he wouldn’t be here to learn.

He checked her impellers and webbing one last time, and
kissed her, and let her go.

She leapt from the tower, arms and legs astretch and
impellers hissing. She caught the air, or her suit did; seized it, climbed it,
conquered it.

Went high and higher, and he said not a word.

Surmounted the spire tip of the ’Chute, and higher yet.

Was a glory, a shimmering speck in sunlight, a mote of
something lovely.

Until the impellers failed, all four of them at once, all at
the utmost of her flying height.

He had no magnification, but he knew. Her voice would have
been in his ears, screaming the news of it, but he’d killed the sound long
since.

He knew the moment when it happened, and he knew what she
did to save herself; how she spread her arms and legs to use the webbing as
much as she could, to drag what little speed she could from her disaster. How
she tried to spiral down towards the tower, where he waited, ready to catch her
if she fell. He was her solution; surely he would save her now.

How the webbing ripped loose in a second and final calamity,
and then she had nothing that mattered: no hope, no steerage, nowhere to turn.

∞

He stood on the Tower of Souls, and watched her fall.

It’s my only published short story; my education in that form
was interrupted by the glamour of Silicon Valley.

∞ ∞ ∞

Taj was soaring. Free of the chains of gravity inside a
bubble of stone high above the planet Sundara, he had just reached the peak of
his climb when a small voice spoke in his ear.

“Time’s up.”

Taj groaned. He’d almost forgotten that the only real things
he was experiencing were his sport-flying wings and the effort of using them.
The rest was a cleverly programmed fiction in a firmly planet-bound simulator.

The color slowly began to fade out of the vine-tangled
cliffs around him as the shutdown sequence began. Taj wheeled about and began a
steep dive toward a grassy sphere far below, at the center of the orbital
flight resort being reproduced by the simulator. At the last possible moment he
opened his wings and, with a final burst of energy that he felt deep in his
chest, swooped upward and firmly planted his feet. Then he ran his thumbs
across his fingertips, flexing the control gloves in the shutdown sequence, and
relaxed as his wings began to pull away from his arms and legs and fold into a
compact bundle.

A mild dizziness washed through Taj as the gravity slowly
increased back to normal. Suddenly the scene around him wavered, as though seen
through running water, and dissolved into the gray dyplast interior of the
simulator, leaving him standing on a small platform a bare meter off the
scuffed deck of the sim. He could hear the dull whine of the wind generators
subsiding. Behind him, the door clanked open.

“So, Taj, you ready for WingWorld?”

Taj twisted around, his collapsing wings still an awkward
bundle on his back and legs, as Mari’s silvery voice echoed in the huge room.
She smiled at him, her dark eyes sparkling.

“Huh?” Taj felt his face burn; Mari had replaced the dour
old man who used to run the sim only a week ago, and he still felt
tongue-tangled at the sight of her. It didn’t help that she treated him like a
kid brother. “No, I’m going to Talajara. Didn’t Flugel tell you? Gee-Em invited
me.”

Mari’s eyes widened. “The Talajara nuller? You know her?”

“Gee-Em was my name-day sponsor.” He waved an arm around at
the sim. “And she’s the one who pays for this.” Emboldened by the sudden
respect in Mari’s face, he added, “My dad says she may even sponsor me to the
Academy on Minerva.”

“You’re very fortunate,” Mari said. Then she frowned. “But
Talajara’s a highdwelling.”

Struck by the sudden doubt in her voice, Taj suddenly
remembered that Mari herself was a highdweller, born in one of the huge
cylindrical constructs in orbit around Sundara.

He shrugged, trying to project a confidence he didn’t feel.
“So? It’s just bigger, and it rotates to make gees, instead of using a big
gravitor at the center. But up at the spin axis it’s low gees, just like
WingWorld. Besides, the sim doesn’t have any highdwelling chips; Flugel said
this would teach me what I needed to know.”