Look to Windward

pylons—each between twenty and sixty metres high and shaped like an inverted L—everywhere. He could see why the Epsizyr Breaks were also known as Pylon Country.

“Why was the system built in the first place?” Kabe asked. He had been quizzing the avatar about the cable- car system when it had made its remark about almost forgetting the place existed.

“All down to a man called Bregan Latry,” the avatar said, stretching out across the couch and clasping its hands behind its head. “Eleven hundred years ago he got it into his head that what this place really needed was a system of sailing cable cars.”

“But why?” Kabe asked.

The avatar shrugged. “No idea. This was before my watch, don’t forget; back in the time of my predecessor, the one who Sublimed.”

“You mean you didn’t inherit any records from it?” Ziller asked incredulously.

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course I inherited a full suite of records and archives.” The avatar stared up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Looking back, it’s very much as though I was there.” It shrugged. “There just wasn’t any record of exactly why Bregan Latry decided to start covering the Breaks in pylons.”

“He just thought there should be… this… here?”

“Apparently.”

“Perfectly fine idea,” Ziller said. He pulled on a line, tightening one of the sails underneath the car with a squeak of wheels and pulleys.

“And so your predecessor built it for him?” Kabe asked.

The avatar snorted derisively. “Certainly not. This place was designed as wilderness. It couldn’t see any good reason to start running cables all over it. No, it told him to do it himself.”

Kabe looked round the haze horizon. He could see hundreds of pylons from here. “He built all this himself?”

“In a manner of speaking,” the avatar said, still staring up at the ceiling, which was painted with scenes of ancient rustic life. “He asked for manufacturing capacity and design time and he found a sentient airship which also thought it would be a hoot to dot pylons all over the Breaks. He designed the pylons and the cars, had them manufactured and then he and the airship and a few other people he’d talked into supporting the project started putting the pylons up and stringing the cables in between.”

“Didn’t anyone object?”

“He kept it quiet for a surprisingly long time, but yes, people did object.”

“There are always critics,” Ziller muttered. He was studying a huge paper chart through a magnifying glass.

“But they let him go ahead?”

“Grief, no,” the avatar said. “They started taking the pylons down. Some people like their wilderness just as it is.”

“But obviously Mr Latry prevailed,” Kabe said, looking round again. They were approaching the mast on the low hill. The ground was rising towards the car’s lower sails and their shadow was growing closer all the time.

“He just kept building the pylons and the airship and his pals kept planting them. And the Preservationeers—” the avatar turned and glanced at Kabe, “they had a name by this time; always a bad sign—kept taking them down. More and more people joined in on both sides until the place was swarming with people putting up pylons and hanging cable off them, rapidly followed by people tearing everything down and carting it away again.”

“Didn’t they vote on it?” Kabe knew this was how disputes tended to be settled in the Culture.

The avatar rolled its eyes. “Oh, they voted.”

“And Mr Latry won.”

“No, he lost.”

“So, how come-?”

“Actually they had lots of votes. It was one of those rolling campaigns where they had to vote on who would be allowed to vote; just people who’d been to the Breaks, people who lived on Canthropa, everybody on Masaq’, or what?”

“And Mr Latry lost.”

“He lost the first vote, with those eligible to vote restricted to those who’d been to the Breaks before—would you believe there was one proposal to weight everybody’s votes according to how many times they’d been here, and another to give them a vote for each day they’d been here?” The avatar shook its head. “Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight. So he lost that one and in theory my predecessor was then mandated to stop the manufacturing, but then the people who hadn’t been allowed to vote were complaining and so there was another ballot and this time it was the whole Plate population, plus people who’d been to the Breaks.”

“And he won that one.”

“No, he lost that one, too. The Preservationeers had some very good PR. Better than the Pylonists.”

“They had a name too by this time?” Kabe asked.

“Of course.”

“This isn’t going to be one of those idiotic local disputes that end up being put to a vote of the whole Culture, is it?” Ziller said, still poring over his chart. He looked up briefly at the avatar. “I mean, that doesn’t really happen, does it?” he asked.

“It really happens,” the avatar said. Its voice sounded particularly hollow. “More often than you’d think. But no, in this case the quarrel never went out of Masaq’s jurisdiction.” The avatar frowned, as though finding something objectionable in the painted scene overhead. “Oh, Ziller, by the way; mind that pylon.”

“What?” the Chelgrian said. He glanced up. The pylon on the hill was only five metres away. “Oh, shit.” He dropped the chart and the magnifying glass and moved quickly to adjust the levers controlling the car’s overhead steering wheels.

There was a clanking, grinding noise from overhead; the stubby pylon whooshed past to starboard, its foametal girders streaked with bird droppings and dotted with lichen. The cable car shook and rattled as it crunched over the first set of points while Ziller loosened his ropes, letting the sails flap free. The car was now on a sort of ring round the top of the pylon from which the other cable routes left; a set of vanes on the top of the pylon powered a chain drive set into the ring, pulling the car round.

Ziller watched a pair of hanging metal boards go past; they bore large numbers in fading, flaking paint. At the third board, he shoved one of the steering levers forward; the car’s overhead wheels reconnected and, with a screech of metal and a sudden jolt, it slipped onto the appropriate cable, sliding down by gravity alone at first until Ziller hauled on his ropes and reconfigured the sails to haul the swaying, gently bouncing car along a long bowed length of cable that led to another distant hillock.

“There,” Ziller said.

“But eventually Mr Latry got his way,” Kabe said. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” the avatar agreed. “In the end he just got enough people sufficiently enthused about the whole ridiculous scheme. The final vote was over the whole Orbital. The Preservationeers saved face by getting him to agree he wouldn’t clutter up any other wildernesses, even though there was no evidence to show he had any plans to do so in the first place.

“So he went ahead, planting pylons, spinning cables and producing cars to his heart’s content. Lots of people helped; he had to form separate teams with a couple of airships each, and some went their own way, though they mostly worked under a general plan drawn up by Latry.

“The only interruptions came during the Idiran War and—once I’d taken over—in the Shaladian Crisis, when I had to commandeer all the spare production capacity to be ready to build ships and military stuff. Even then he kept building pylons and spinning cables using home-made machinery some of his followers had built. By the time he’d finished, six hundred years after he’d started, he’d covered almost the whole of the Breaks in pylons. And that’s why it’s called Pylon Country.”

“That’s three million square kilometres,” Ziller said. He had retrieved the chart and the magnifying glass and gone back to studying one through the other.

“Near enough,” the avatar said, uncrossing then recrossing its legs. “I counted the number of pylons once and totted up the kilometrage of cable.”

“And?” Kabe asked.

The avatar shook its head. “They were both very big numbers, but otherwise uninteresting. I could search