Look to Windward

People ran, rolled, boarded, ski’d, skiffed or boated down the dunes all the time, but on a dark night there was something special to be seen. Tiny creatures lived in the sands, arid cousins of the plankton that created bioluminescence at sea, and when it was very dark you could see the tracks left by people as they tumbled, twisted or carved their way down the vast slope.

It had become a tradition that on such nights the freeform chaos of individuals pleasing only themselves and the occasional watching admirer was turned into something more organised, and so—once it was dark enough and sufficient numbers of spectators had turned up on the crawler-mounted viewing platforms, bars and restaurants— teams of boarders and skiers set off from the top of the dunes in choreographed waves, triggering sand-slip cascades in broad lines and vees of scintillating light descending like slow, ghostly surf and weaving gently sparkling trails of soft blue, green and crimson tracks across the sighing sands, myriad necklaces of enchanted dust glowing like linear galaxies in the night.

Ziller watched for a while. Then he sighed and said, “He’s here, isn’t he?”

“A kilometre away,” the avatar replied. “Higher up on the other side of the run. I’m monitoring the situation. Another one of me is with him. You are quite safe.”

“This is as close as I ever want to get to him, unless you can do something.”

“I understand.”

A Defeat of Echoes

~ So unterritorial.

~ I suppose when you have this much territory you can afford to be.

~ Do you think I’m old-fashioned to be disturbed by it?

~ No. I think it’s quite natural.

~ They have too much of everything.

~ With the possible exception of suspicion.

~ We can’t be sure of that.

~ I know. Still; so far, so good.

Quilan closed the lockless door to his apartment. He turned and looked out at the floor of the gallery, thirty metres below. Groups of humans strolled amongst the plants and pools, between the stalls and bars, the restaurants and—well; shops, exhibitions? It was hard to know what to call them.

The apartment they had given him was near the roof level of one of Aquime City’s central galleries. One set of rooms looked out across the city to the inland sea. The other side of the suite, like this glazed lobby outside, looked down into the gallery itself.

Aquime’s altitude and consequently cold winters meant that a lot of the life of the city took place indoors rather than out, and as a result what would have been ordinary streets in a more temperate city, open to the sky, here were galleries, roofed-over streets vaulted with anything from antique glass to force fields. It was possible to walk from one end of the city to the other under cover and wearing summer clothes, even when, as now, there was a blizzard blowing.

Free of the driving snow that was bringing visibility down to a few metres, the view from the apartment’s exterior was delicately impressive. The city had been built in a deliberately archaic style, mostly from stone. The buildings were red and blonde and grey and pink, and the slates covering the steeply pitched roofs were various shades of green and blue. Long tapering fingers of forest penetrated the city almost to its heart, bringing further greens and blues into play and—with the galleries—dicing the city into irregular blocks and shapes.

A few kilometres in the distance, the docks and canals would glitter under a morning sun. Spinward of those, on a gentle slope of ridge rising to the outskirts of the city, Quilan could, when it was clear, see the tall buttresses and towers of the ornately decorated apartment building which contained the home of Mahrai Ziller.

~ So could we just go and walk into his apartment?

~ No. He got somebody to make him locks when he heard I was coming. Apparently this was mildly scandalous.

~ Well, we could have locks, too.

~ I think it better not to.

~ Thought you might.

~ We wouldn’t want it to look like I have something to hide.

~ That would never do.

Quilan swung open a window, letting the sounds of the gallery into the apartment. He heard tinkling water, people talking and laughing, birdsong and music.

He watched drones and people in float harnesses waft by beneath him but above the other humans, saw people in an apartment on the other side of the gallery wave—he waved back almost without thinking—and smelled perfumes and the scent of cooking.

He looked up at the roof, which was not glass but some other more perfectly transparent material—he supposed he could have asked his little pen-terminal to find out exactly what it was, but he had not bothered—and he listened in vain for any sound of the storm swirling and blowing outside.

~ They do love their little insulated existence, don’t they?

~ Yes, they do.

He remembered a gallery not so dissimilar to this, in Shaunesta, on Chel. It was before they had married, about a year after they had met. They had been walking hand-in-hand, and had stopped to look in a jeweller’s window. He had gazed in casually enough at all the finery, and wondered if he might buy something for her. Then he’d heard her making this little noise, a sort of appreciative but barely audible, “Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm.”

At first he’d assumed she was making the noise for his amusement. It had taken him a few moments to realise that not only was she not doing that, but she was not aware that she was making the noise at all.

He realised this and suddenly felt as though his heart would burst with joy and love; he turned, swept her into his arms and hugged her, laughing at the surprised, confused, blinkingly happy look on her face.

~ Quil?

~ Sorry. Yes.

Somebody laughed on the gallery floor below; a high, throaty, female laugh, unrestrained and pure. He heard it echo round the hard surfaces of the closed-in street, remembering a place where there were no echoes at all.

They’d got drunk the night before they left; Estodien Visquile with his extended entourage including the bulky, white-furred Eweirl, and he. He had to be helped from his bed the next morning by a laughing Eweirl. A drenching under a cold shower just about brought him round, then he was taken straight to the VTOL, then to the field with the sub-orbital, then to Equator Launch City, where a commercial flight hoisted them to a small Orbiter. A demilled ex-Navy privateer was waiting. They’d left the system headed for deep space before his hangover started to abate, and he realised that he had been selected as the one to do whatever it was he had to do, and remembered what had happened the night before.

They were in an old mess hall, decorated in an antique style with the heads of various prey animals adorning three of the walls; the fourth wall of glass doors opened onto a narrow terrace which looked out to sea. There was a warm wind blowing and the doors were all opened, bringing the smell of the ocean into the bar. Two Blinded Invisible servants dressed in white trousers and jackets attended them, bringing the various strengths of fermented and distilled liquors a traditional drinking binge required.

The food was sparse and salty, again as dictated by tradition. Toasts were proposed, drinking games indulged in, and Eweirl and another of the party, who seemed nearly as well built as the white-furred male, balanced their way along the wall of the terrace from one end to the other, with the two-hundred-metre drop to one side. The other male went first; Eweirl went one better by stopping halfway along and downing a cup of spirit.

Quilan drank the minimum required, wondering quite what it was all in aid of and suspecting that even this apparent celebration was part of a test. He tried not to be too much of a wet blanket, and joined in several of the drinking games with a forced heartiness he thought must easily be seen through.