'My name,' she repeated. 'You are Gil Velteseri, this is Lucia Chimbers. I am who?'
They both stood looking at her for a moment. The woman looked down and tried to brush a smudge from her blouse. In a quiet, sing-song voice she said, 'Sim-ple-ton.'
The man laughed lightly. 'Ah-ha,' he said.
2
The wind was a never-ending edge within the air, a knife-wire sawing back and forth in Gadfium's throat and lungs with each laboured, wheezing breath. The plain was a dead flat, almost featureless expanse of dazzling, eye-watering whiteness four kilometres across, splayed beneath a darkened purple sky. A thin, desiccated wind cut out of the bruise-coloured vault and keened across the sterile salt-flats, picking up a thin dry spray of particles which turned the air into a chill shot-blast for exposed skin.
I am a fish, Gadfium thought, and might have laughed had she been able to breathe. A fish, dredged from the fluid-thick depths of warmth beneath us and dumped upon this high salt-crust of shore; landed here to suck in vain at the parched air and die drowning beneath a thin membrane of atmosphere where the stars shine clear and unwavering in daylight, in half the sky.
She motioned to the assistant observer, and the woman brought over the small oxygen cylinder. Gadfium gulped in the mask's cold cargo of gas, filling her lungs to their depths.
This morning at the oxygen works, this afternoon sampling their future product, she thought. She nodded gratefully to the assistant observer as she handed the cylinder back.
'Perhaps we ought to return inside now, Chief Scientist,' the woman said.
'In a moment.' Gadfium lifted the visor from her eyes and squinted through the binoculars again. Salt dust and sand swirled in twisted veils in front of her and the cold wind made her eyes water. The grey-black stones nearest the observatory looked like nothing more than giant pucks from some huge game of ice hockey. Each stone was about two metres in diameter, half a metre high and supposedly made of pure granite. They had been sliding about this plain for millennia, riding the sporadically slicked surface of the salt-bowl whenever snow had fallen and a wind subsequently blew. Any snow and ice the plain collected was turned to water by a combination of the pipework buried beneath the plain itself and by the reflected sunlight of mirrors shining from the twentieth level of the fast-tower, rearing bright and solid to the north, three kilometres away.
The Plain of Sliding Stones formed the flat roof of a complex of giant rooms on the eighth level of the fastness; these huge, almost empty, barely habitable spaces were arranged in a wheel-like formation, the exposed flank of which formed a great nave of kilometre-tall windows facing from south-south-east to west. It had always been assumed that the redundant systems of both buried pipework and tower-mirrors were there to ensure that no roof-destroying thickness of ice could ever accrue on the plain, though the reason the roof had been left flat in the first place had never been determined. Also unknown was exactly what the stones were there for, or how they contrived to move in ways that were subtly but undeniably at variance with the ways they should have moved according to both highly accurate computer models and carefully calibrated physical re-creations of their environment.
The mobile observatory — a three-storey sphere supported by eight long legs each tipped with a motor and tyre and resembling nothing more than an enormous spider — had been following the mysterious stones across the plain for hundreds of years, gathering vast amounts of data in the process but without really contributing anything of great note to the anyway rather exhausted debate concerning the origin and purpose of the stones. More had been learnt when one of the stones had been partially analysed centuries earlier, though as the crux of what had been learnt was that to start chipping bits off one of the stones was to draw down some highly focused and scientist-evaporating sunlight from the fast-tower's twentieth level (whether it was day or night), such a lesson was arguably something of a dead end.
Gadfium looked back out across the Plain of Sliding Stones, to the edge of the darkly livid sky. A chill gust of razor-wind stung her face and made her close her eyes, the salt like grit between orb and lid. She could taste the salt; her nose stung.
'Very well,' she said, dry-gasping in the meagre air. She turned from the balustrade and had to be half-led to the lock by the assistant observer.
'The circle began forming at six-thirteen this morning,' the chief observer told them. 'It was complete by six forty-two. All thirty-two stones are present. The distance between the stones is a uniform two metres — the same as their diameter. They have arranged themselves in a perfect circle with an accuracy of better than a tenth of a millimetre. The predicted-motion discrepancy factor for certain of the stones during the period they were forming the current pattern was as high as sixty per cent. It has never in the past exceeded twelve point three per cent and over the last decade has averaged below five per cent.'
Gadfium, her aide Rasfline and assistant Goscil, the mobile observatory's chief observer Clispeir and three out of the four junior observers — one was still on duty in the vehicle's control room — sat in the observatory mess.
'We are in the exact centre of the plain?' Gadfium asked.
'Yes, again to an accuracy of less than a tenth of a millimetre,' Clispeir replied. She was fragile-looking and prematurely aged, with wispily white hair. Gadfium had known her at university forty years earlier. Nevertheless, like the other observers she was able to operate without extra oxygen and pressurisation, which was much more than Gadfium felt able to do. That she, Rasfline and Goscil were able to breathe easily now was only because the observatory had been lightly pressurised for their comfort. Still, she told herself, they had travelled from barely a thousand metres above sea level to over eight kilometres higher in less than two hours, and a human-basic individual would already be suffering from altitude sickness to which she was genetically resistant, which was some consolation.
'However the circle did not actually form around the observatory.'
'No, ma'am. We were stationary a quarter kilometre from here, almost due north, waiting on the wind to rise following the precipitation and melt last night. The stones began to move at four forty-one, holding pattern T-8 with drift-factor one. They veered —'
'Perhaps a visual display would be more… graphic,' Goscil interrupted.
Embarrassed looks were exchanged around the mess-room table. 'Unfortunately,' Clispeir said, clearing her throat, 'the pattern formed during an observation-system down-time event.' She looked apologetically at Gadfium. 'We are, of course, only a very small and perhaps insignificant research station and I don't know if the chief scientist is aware of my reports detailing the increased incidence of maintenance-level-related breakdowns and our requests for increased funding over the last few years, but —'
'I see,' Rasfline said impatiently. 'Obviously you lack implants, ma'am, but I assume one or more of your juniors recorded the events in their habitua.'
'Well,' Clispeir said, looking uncomfortable. 'Actually, no; as it has turned out, the team here consists entirely of persons from Privileged backgrounds.'
Rasfline looked shocked. Goscil's mouth hung slightly open.
Clispeir smiled apologetically and spread her hands. 'It's just the way it's happened.'
'So you don't have anything on visual,' Rasfline said, contriving to sound at once bored and exasperated. Goscil blew some hair away from her face and looked crestfallen.
'Not of an acceptable standard,' Clispeir admitted. 'Observer Koir —' the elderly scientist nodded to one of the two young male observers, who smiled sheepishly '— took some footage on his own camera, but —'
'May we see it?' Rasfline asked, tapping his fingers on the table surface.
'Of course, though —'
'Ma'am, are you all right?' Goscil asked Gadfium.
'I'm — actually… no, not —' Gadfium slumped forward over the table, head on forearms, mumbling and then going quiet.
'Oh dear.'
'I think some oxygen —'
