Th” Ol” Ones. As” them wha” for.”
“The Old Ones? Where do they live?”
She shrugged, her shoulders moving volcanically. “In th” ol’est place.”
He frowned. “What about you, Julia?”
“Baas?”
“What do you want?”
“Home,” she said immediately.
“Home? Where is home?”
She pointed into the sky. “Grey Earth.”
“Does Mr McCann know you want to go home?”
She shrugged again. “Born here.”
“What?”
She pointed to herself. “Born here. Mother. Moth” born here.”
“Then this is your home, with Mr McCann.”
She shook her head, a very human gesture. She pointed again to the forest, and the sky.
Then she said, “You, Baas? What you wan’?”
He hesitated. “I came looking for my wife.”
Her face remained expressionless. But she said, “Fam’ly.”
“Yes. I guess so. Emma is my family. I came here looking for her.”
“Lon” way.”
“Yes. Yes, it was a long way. And I ain’t there yet.”
She walked towards him, rummaging in the pouch of her skirt. “Thomas,” she said.
“I know him. He found me.”
“Took off of Runner in fores’.” She held out something in the dark, something small and jewel-like that glittered in her palm.
He took it, held it up to the light of the window. It was a hand-lens, badly scuffed, snapped off at its mount. It was marked with the monogram of the South African air force.
“Emma,” he breathed. He was electrified. So there were indeed things McCann didn’t know, even about the Hams of his own household. “Julia, where—”
But she had gone.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
“I have three wives and six children. That is how it is done in my new home…” Babo was talking fast, nervously, and his knuckles rattled as he walked with her through the tall dark halls of the building. His body hair was plaited and coloured in a fashion that repelled Mane’s simple Poka tastes. “The Farm is fine, Mane, and bigger than that of the Poka Lineage, but its design is based on the triangle: plane-covering, of course, but cramped and cluttered compared to Poka’s clean-lined hexagons.”
“You always were an aesthete,” she said dryly.
This whole building, she realized slowly, was a store of records piled up high from the lowest room to the highest. Physically, some of the records were stored in twinkling cubes that held bits of the quantum foam, minuscule wormholes frozen into patterns of meaning; and some were scraped onto parchment and animal skin.
“Some of these pieces are very ancient indeed,” Babo said. “Dating back half a million years or more. And the Air Wall, you know, is a controlled storm. It is like a hurricane, but trapped in one place by subtle forces. It has raged here, impotent, for fifty thousand years — so that for all that time the Market has been in the eye of the storm — an eye that reveals the sky beyond the clouds, a sky opened for the study of the Astrologers…”
She stopped and glared at him. “Oh, Babo, I don’t want to know about Air Walls or records! I never thought I would see you again — I didn’t know you had become an Astrologer.”
He sighed, ruminatively picking his nose. “I am no Astrologer. But the Astrologers sent for me. When I was younger I did spend some time here, working informally, before I reached the home of my wives. Many boys do, Mane. You matriarchs run the world, but there is much you do not know, even about those who sire your children!”
“Why are you here, Babo?”
He wrapped his big hands over his head. “Because the Astrologers thought it would be kinder that way. Kinder if your brother told you the news, rather than a stranger…”
“What news?”
He grabbed her hand, pulling her. “Come see the sky with me. Then I’ll tell you everything.”
Reluctantly, she followed.
The building was tall, and they had a long way to ascend. At first they used simple short-range isomorphic Mappers, but soon they came to more primitive parts of the building, and they had to climb, using rungs stapled to walls of crude bricks.
Babo led the way. “A remarkable thing,” he called down to her. “We find climbing easy; our arms are strong, our feet well adapted to grasping. But it appears that our climbing ancestors evolved into creatures that, for a time, walked upright, on their hind feet. You can see certain features of the position of the pelvis — well. But we have given that up too; now, once more, we walk on all fours, using our knuckles, clinging to the ground.”
“If you tried to walk upright you would be knocked over by the Wind.”
“Of course, of course — but then why is it we carry traces of a bipedal ancestry? We are creatures of anomaly, Mane. We are not closely related to any of the animals on this Earth of ours — not one, not above a certain basic biochemical equivalence of course, without which we could not eat our food and would quickly starve to death. We can trace evolutionary relationships among all the world’s creatures, one related to the other in a hierarchy of families and phyla — except us. We seem to be unique, as if we fell out of the sky. We have no evolutionary forebears, no bones in the ground that might mark the passing of those who came before us.
“Is it possible we evolved somewhere else? — a place where the Wind did not blow so strongly, where it was possible to walk upright?”
“What sort of place? And how could we have got here from there?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. But the pattern of the bones, the biochemistry, is unmistakable.”
“Idle speculation, Babo, won’t germinate a single seed.”
“A Farmer’s practical reply,” he said sadly. “But we are surrounded by mystery, Manekato. The Astrologers hope that your mission will settle some of these fundamental quandaries. Oh, please keep climbing, dear Mane! We are soon there, and I will tell you everything.”
With bad grace, clinging to the rungs with feet and hands, she continued her ascent.
They reached a platform, open to the sky. But there was no breeze, and the air felt as warm as it had inside the tower.
Babo walked around nervously, peering into the sky. “It is darkling already. Our days are short, because the planet spins quickly — did you ever reflect on that. Mane? It didn’t have to be so. Earth could spin more slowly, and we would have leisurely days, and — oh, look!” He pointed with a long stabbing finger. “Look, a star!”
She peered up awkwardly. There was a single bright star, close to the zenith, set against the deepening blue of the sky.
“How strange,” Babo breathed, “that before the first tentative Mappings no human eye saw a star.”
Manekato grunted. “What of it? Stars are trivial. You don’t need to see them.”
That was true, of course. Every child was expected to figure out the stars.
When Manekato was two years old she had been shut in a room with a number of other children, and a handful of objects: a grain of sand, a rock crystal, a bowl of water, a bellows, a leaf, other things. And the children were told to deduce the nature of the universe from the contents of the room.
Of course the results of such trials varied — in fact the variations were often interesting, offering insights into scientific understanding, the nature of reality, the psychology of the developing mind. But most children, working by native logic, quickly converged on a universe of planets and stars and galaxies. Even though they had never seen a single star.
Stars were trivial mechanisms, after all, compared to the simplest bacterium.
“Ah, but the detail is everything,” Babo said, “and that you can never predict, of course. That and the beauty. That was quite unexpected, to me. Oh, and one other thing. The emptiness of the universe…”
Manekato’s childhood cohort, like most others, had concluded — groping with an intuition of uniformity — that if this world was inhabited, and the universe was large — well, then, there must be many inhabited planets. She recalled what a great and unwelcome surprise it had been to learn that that was not true: that, as far as could be discerned, the universe was empty of the organization that would have marked the work of intelligence.
“It is a deep, ancient mystery,” Babo said. “Why do we see no Farms in the sky? Of course we are a sedentary species, content to cultivate our Farms. But not every species need have the same imperatives as us. Imagine an acquisitive species, that covets the territory of others.”
She thought it through quickly. “That is outlandish and unlikely. Such a species would surely destroy itself in fratricidal battles, as the illogic of its nature worked itself out.”
“Perhaps. But wouldn’t we see the flaring of the wars, the mighty ruins they left behind? We should see them. Mane.”
She snapped, “Babo, get to the point.”
He sighed and came to squat before her. Gently he groomed her, picking imaginary insects from her coat, as he had when they were children. “Mane, dear Mane, the Astrologers have read the stars…”
The word “astrology’, in Manekato’s ancient, rich language, derived from older roots meaning “the word of the stars’. Here astrology had absorbed astronomy and physics and other disciplines; here astrology was no superstition, no foolishness, but one of the fundamental sciences. For if the universe was empty of mind save for humans, then the courses of the stars could have no meaning save for their role in the affairs of humanity.
And now, Babo said, the Astrologers, peering into the sky and poring over records dozens of millennia deep, had discerned a looming threat.
Joshua:
Mary was in oestrus. The scent of her seemed to fill the air of the hut, and the head of every man.
Joshua longed for the time of her blood to pass, and she and the other women could recede to the grey periphery of his awareness. For the deep ache aroused by Mary distracted him from the great conundrum which plagued him.
Over and over he thought of the great blue wings he had seen falling from the sky, bearing that fat black and white seed to its unknown fate in the forest at the top of the cliff. He had never seen such a thing before. What was it?
Joshua’s was a world that did not countenance change. And yet, a stubborn awareness told him, there was change. Once the people had lived on the Grey Earth. Now they lived here. So the
