The Recollection (38 page)

Imagine that you’re standing naked in the snows on the surface of Tiers Cross, back where it all began.

You’re standing in the street, on the corner of one of those windy junctions near the port, and the wind’s coming in off the ice fields beyond the town. The cold prickles your skin. Your breath comes like steam.

Ships move to and fro on the landing field. Still more crowd the parking orbits above. More and more every day, each and every one packed to the gills with refugees from Strauli, Inakpa, Djatt. Other worlds, too. Now that it has access to jump capable ships, The Recollection’s moving fast, its spread contained only by the impossibility of travelling faster than light.

Thank heavens the arches have started to evaporate. By allowing humanity to spread out, they’ve served their purpose. Now the Dho have pulled the plug on the network, to stop The Recollection taking advantage of it, and the individual arches have started to fall like dominoes, bleeding into the wind like the purple ash of a madman’s dream.

Around you, here on Tiers Cross, the usual port trash ply their wares: pushers; scam artists; beggars; buskers. All of them doing the same old Downport hustle. Their numbers grow with every refugee ship that lands here, fleeing The Recollection. They own nothing, and they have nowhere to go. They can’t see you. They walk through you as if you were a ghost. And deep in your heart you love them all, unreservedly.

Overhead you see the sparks of tugs exploring the jewelled fringes of the Bubble Belt. You know the breaker teams are working flat-out, pulling double shifts, opening up habitable bubbles for these people to settle. Here in the Belt, with a billion individual habitats, there’s room for everyone.

And deeper into the Belt, where once you saw only a curtain of diamonds, a light glows. A miniature sun illuminates it all from within, like a crystal chandelier. The Gnarl at the centre of the cloud is now a rocket, pushing out light and energy in a thin jet, slowly building up the tremendous force it will need to move not only itself, but this small moon and the billion habitats of the Belt. Watching its radiance, you know it will take years for that movement to become evident, longer still for the background stars to start moving noticeably in the night sky.

The wind makes you shiver, but you don’t mind. This is your home, after all. You’re used to it. You’ve missed it, although it seems an eternity since you were last here.

Your childhood and the peculiar pains of adolescence: they all happened here, so long ago, their immediacy now lost in the days before the Ark, before the Gnarl. Even your name, Toby Drake, feels like an anachronism, part of a skin you once shed.

Once you had a life, now you have a purpose. There’s no time for regret or resentment; you have your part to play.

For a long moment, you look up at the sweeping grandeur of the Bubble Belt, and wish the person who named it had thought of something with a little more gravitas, something more suited to the majesty and inhuman immensity of the crowded habitats, each one as unique as a snowflake and each following its own carefully prescribed and choreographed orbit around the waxy, streaming Gnarl at the centre.

You look down at the dirty snow beneath your bare feet. The snow of home. But of course, you’re not really down here. You’re up there, in the heart of the Gnarl.

And you can see
everything.

You’re everywhere and nowhere, baby.

Your mind roams the sky. It’s
you
firing that colossal jet, and wherever you’re going, you’re taking this gaudy Christmas decoration of a cloud with you. You’re leading the salvaged remnants of humanity away from the advancing wave front of The Recollection. Ships like the
Ameline
will cover your retreat. And soon, the Dho Ark will join you, with its own cargo of fleeing refugees. All you have to do is steer them all to safety.

You turn your face to the sky.

That smudge out there, what is that? Is that
Andromeda?

Drowned in the greasy depths of the Gnarl, you smile to yourself.

Let’s go there,
you think.

And in a handful of decades, you’re gone.

THE END

Also by Gareth L. Powell

The Last Reef

Silversands

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Jonathan Oliver; Neil Roberts; Lee Harris; Colin Harvey; Richard Scott; Neil Beynon; my sister Rebecca; my wife Becky; and my brother Huw.

Several passages in this book were inspired by or adapted from pieces published in my collection
The Last Reef and Other Stories
(Elastic Press, 2008). A few sentences from Chapter Five appeared in a slightly different form in the story ‘The Winding Curve,’ which I co-wrote with Robert Starr and which appeared in Rob’s collection
Sophistry By Degrees
(Stonegarden, 2008).