outline of my face with my fingers a dozen times since waking? I already sensed that my face would be blandly handsome, and that was the case. It was the face of a moderately successful actor or a motivationally suspect politician. A dark-haired man in his early forties — and, without quite knowing from where I had dredged this fact, I knew that on Sky’s Edge, that more or less meant exactly what it said; that I could not be drastically older than I seemed, for our methods of longevity extension lagged centuries behind the rest of humanity.
Another shard of memory clicking into place.
‘Thank you,’ I said, when I had seen enough for now. ‘I think that helped. I don’t think my amnesia’s going to last forever.’
‘It almost never does.’
‘Actually, I was being flippant. Are you saying there are people who never get their memories back?’
‘Yes,’ she said, with unconcealed sadness. ‘Mostly, they never function well enough to immigrate.’
‘What happens to them, in that case?’
‘They stay here. They learn to help us; to cultivate the terraces. Sometimes they even join the Order.’
‘Poor souls.’
Amelia stood, beckoning me to follow her. ‘Oh, there are worse fates, Tanner. I should know.’
SIX
Ten years old, he moved with his father across the curved, polished floor of the freight bay, their booted feet squeaking on the high-gloss surface, the two of them suspended above their own dark reflections; a man and a boy forever walking up what looked to the eye like an ever-steepening hill, but which always felt perfectly level.
‘We’re going outside, aren’t we?’ Sky said.
Titus looked down at his son. ‘Why do you assume that?’
‘You wouldn’t have brought me here otherwise.’
Titus said nothing, but the point could not be denied. Sky had never been in the freight bay before; not even during one of Constanza’s illicit trips into the Santiago’s forbidden territory. Sky remembered the time she had taken him to see the dolphins, and the punishment that had ensued, and how that punishment had been eclipsed by the ordeal that had followed: the flash of light and the period he had spent trapped alone and cold in the utter darkness of the nursery. It seemed so long ago, but there were still things about that day that he did not fully understand now; things he had never persuaded his father to speak about. It was more than his father’s recalcitrance; more than simply Titus’s grief at the death of Sky’s mother. The censorship by omission — it was more subtle than a simple refusal to discuss the incident — extended to every adult Sky had spoken to. No one would speak of that day when the whole ship had turned dark and cold, yet to Sky the events were still clearly fixed in his memory.
After what felt like days — and now that he thought about it, it probably had been days — the adults had made the main lights come on again. He noticed when the air-circulators began to work — a faint background ambience which he had never really noticed until it had ceased. In all that time, his father told him later, they had been breathing unrecirculated air; slowly turning staler and staler as the hundred and fifty waking humans dumped more and more carbon dioxide back into their atmosphere. In a few more days it would have started causing serious problems, but now the air became fresher and the ship slowly warmed back up to the point where it was possible to move along the corridors without shivering. Various secondary systems that had been unavailable during the blackout were brought hesitantly back online. The trains which ferried equipment and technicians up and down the spine began to run again. The ship’s information nets, which had been silent, could now be queried. The food improved, but Sky had hardly noticed that they had been eating emergency rations during the blackout.
Yet still none of the adults would discuss exactly what had happened.
Eventually, when something like normal shipboard life had returned, Sky managed to sneak back into the nursery. The room was lit, but to his surprise everything looked more or less as he had left it: Clown frozen in that strange shape he had assumed after the flash. Sky had crept closer to examine the distorted form of his friend. He could see now that all Clown had ever been was a pattern in the tiny coloured squares that covered the nursery’s walls, floor and ceiling. Clown had been a kind of moving picture that only made sense — only looked right — when seen from precisely Sky’s point of view. Clown had appeared to be physically present in the room — not simply drawn on the wall — because his feet and legs had been drawn on the floor as well, but with a perspective distorted such that it looked perfectly real from where Sky happened to be. The room must have mapped Sky and his direction of gaze. Had he been able to shift his viewpoint fast enough, faster than the room could recompute Clown’s image, he would perhaps have seen through that trick of perspective. But Clown was always much faster than Sky. For three years, he had never doubted that Clown was real, even if Clown could never touch or be touched by anything.
His parents had abdicated responsibility to an illusion.
Now, however — in a mood of eager forgiveness — he pushed such thoughts from his mind, awed by the sheer size of the freight bay and the prospect of what lay ahead. What made the place all the larger was the fact that the two of them were quite alone, surrounded only by a puddle of moving light. The rest of the chamber was suggested rather than clearly seen; its dimensions hinted at by the dark, looming shapes of cargo containers and their associated handling machines receding along curved lines into blackness. Parked here and there were various spacecraft; some little more than single-person tugs or broomsticks designed for flying immediately outside the ship, while others were fully pressurised taxi craft, built for crossing to the other Flotilla craft. The taxis could enter an atmosphere in an emergency, but they were not designed to make the return trip to space. The delta-winged landers which would make multiple journeys down to the surface of Journey’s End were too large to store inside the Santiago; they were attached instead to the outside of the ship and there was almost no way to see them unless you worked on one of the external work crews, as his mother had done before her death.
Titus halted near one of the small shuttles. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we’re going outside. I think it’s time you saw things the way they really are.’
‘What things?’
But by way of answer Titus only elevated the cuff of his uniform and spoke quietly into his bracelet. ‘Enable excursion vehicle 15.’
There was no hesitation; no querying of his authority. The taxi answered him instantly, lights flicking on across its wedge-shaped hull, its cockpit door craning open on smooth pistons and the pallet on which it was mounted rotating to bring the door closer and align the vehicle with its departure track. Steam started to vent from ports spaced along the vehicle’s side and Sky could hear the growing whine of turbines somewhere inside the machine’s angular hull. A few seconds ago the thing had been a piece of sleek, dead metal, but now there were awesome energies at its disposal; barely contained.
He hesitated at the door, until his father beckoned that he lead.
‘After you, Sky. Go forward and take the seat on the left of the instrument column. Don’t touch anything while you’re about it.’
Sky hopped into the spacecraft, feeling the floor vibrating beneath his feet. The taxi was considerably more cramped inside than it had looked — the hull was thickly plated and armoured — and he had to duck and dive to reach the forward seats, brushing his head against a gristle-like tangle of internal pipework. He found his seat and fiddled with the blue-steel buckle until he had it tight across his chest. In front of him was a cool turquoise-green display — constantly changing numbers and intricate diagrams — beneath a curved, gold-tinted window. To his left was a control column inset with neat levers and switches and a single black joystick.
His father settled into the rightmost seat. The door had closed on them now and suddenly it was quieter, save for the continuous rasp of the taxi’s air-circulation. His father touched the green display with his finger, making it change, studying the results with narrow-eyed concentration.
‘Word of advice, Sky. Never trust these damned things to tell you that they’re safe. Make sure for yourself.’
‘You don’t trust machines to tell you for yourself?’
‘I used to, once.’ His father eased the joystick forward and the taxi commenced gliding along its departure track, sliding past the parked ranks of other vehicles. ‘But machines aren’t infallible. We used to kid ourselves that they were because it was the only way to stay sane in a place like this, where we depend on them for our every
