between the “Okay?” and the “Let’s go” bits of that last sentence for anybody to say very much at all.
Outside, it was dark until you looked down, then the landscape shone in great stripes separated by a central band of grey near-dark. No stars were visible, hidden by vanes and ceiling structures. Djan Seriy squatted on the sill, one hand holding on to the top edge of the inward-opening door. She turned to Ferbin and touched him with her other hand. “You come straight out after me, all right, brother? Don’t delay.”
“Yes, of course,” he said. His heart was hammering.
Djan Seriy looked at him for a moment longer. “Or you could just go limp and the suit will do it all for you; climbing up and out, I mean. With your eyes closed—”
“I shall do it myself, never fear,” Ferbin said, trying to sound braver and more certain than he felt.
She squeezed his shoulder. “See you down there.”
Then she threw herself out of the doorway.
Ferbin pulled himself up to squat where his sister had, feeling Holse’s hands helping to steady him, then he swallowed as he looked down at the impossible drop below him. He closed his eyes after all, but he flexed legs and arms and threw himself out, curling into a ball.
The view was tumbling about him when he opened his eyes again; light/dark, light/dark, light… then the flickering sequence started to slow as the suit whirred, gently teasing his limbs out. His breath sounded terribly loud in his head. After a few moments he was falling in an X shape, feeling almost relaxed as he lay looking back up at the shady mass of Filigree and vaning hanging from the ceiling above. He tried to see where he had thrown himself from, but couldn’t. He thought he caught a glimpse of another tiny dark dot far above, also falling, but could not be sure.
“Can I turn over and look down?” he asked the suit.
“Yes. It will be advisable to return to this orientation for entry into the atmosphere,” the suit told him in its crisp, asexual voice. “Or it is possible to transmit the view downward to your eyes in your present orientation.”
“Is that better?”
“Yes.”
“Do that, then.”
Suddenly it was as though he was dropping down into the distant landscape beneath rather than falling away from the view above. He felt disoriented and dizzy for a moment, but soon adapted. He looked in vain for Djan Seriy, falling somewhere below, but could see no sign of her. “Can
“She is probably within this area,” the suit said, creating a thin red circle over part of the view. “She is camouflaged,” it explained.
“How far have we fallen so far?”
“Six kilometres.”
“Oh. How long did that take?”
“Fifty seconds. Over the next fifty seconds we shall descend another twenty kilometres. We are still accelerating and will continue to do so until we encounter the atmosphere.”
“When does that happen?”
“In about ten minutes from now.”
Ferbin settled back and enjoyed the topsy-turvy view, trying to spot the Hyeng-zhar cataract, then attempting to trace the course of the Sulpitine river and finally settling for working out where the Upper and Lower Sulpine Seas might be. He wondered if it was all still frozen. They’d been told it would be, though he found that hard to believe.
The view expanded slowly in front of him. There; was that one of the seas? It looked too small. Was that the other? Too small and too close to the other one. It was so hard to tell. The gloom beneath was gradually filling more and more of his field of vision, leaving the bright, sunlit lands on the edges of the view.
By the time he was sure those had been the two Seas, he had begun to realise how high up they had been when they’d started falling, how small even two substantial seas and a mighty river could look from a great altitude and how enormous the world he had lived in all his life really was.
The landscape beneath was bulging up towards him. How were they to stop?
The suit started to grow around him, extending a mass of bubbles from every part save that he must be looking through. The bubbles enlarged; some slowly broke and kept on extending, becoming a delicate-looking tracery of what appeared like an insect’s near-transparent wings or the infinitely fragile-looking skeleton structure that was left when a tree-leaf had lost all trace of its light-gathering surface and only the sustaining filigree of its sap-transporting veins was left.
The top of the atmosphere imposed itself as a very slowly increasing sense of returning weight, pushing against his back, so that — as he continued to look downwards even though he was actually on his back — he experienced the vertiginous sensation of being propelled even faster towards the ground beneath. A faint whispering sound transmitted itself through the suit. The push grew harder and the whisper swelled to a roar.
He waited to see the red, yellow and white glow which he had heard things meeting atmospheres produced about them, but it never appeared.
The suit twisted, rotating so that he was actually facing downwards now. The tracery and the bubbles collapsed back in towards the suit and became crescent wings and thin fins protruding from his arms, sides and thighs; the suit had been gently reconfiguring his body so that his arms were stuck out ahead of him now, as though he was about to dive into a river. His legs were splayed behind him and felt as though they were connected by some sort of tether or membrane.
The landscape was much closer now — he could see tiny dark rivers and hints of other surface features picked out in blacks and pale greys in the gloom far beneath — however, the ground was no longer rushing up towards him but sliding past beneath. The feeling of weight had shifted too and the air was whispering about him.
He was flying.
Anaplian dropped back to touch with Hippinse as they flew. “Worked out what’s messing with the local systemry?” she asked. Hippinse was monitoring the disturbance in the surrounding level’s data complexes and analysing data they’d collected earlier while in the Aultridian scendship.
“Not really,” the avatoid confessed, sounding both embarrassed and concerned. “Whatever’s corrupting it is almost untouchably exotic. Genuinely alien; unknown. In fact, right now, unknowable. I’d need the ship’s whole Mind to start attacking this shit.”
Anaplian was silent for a moment. “What the fuck is going on here?” she asked quietly. Hippinse had no reply to that either. Anaplian let go and flew ahead.
Ferbin and the suit dipped, passing close enough to the ground to see individual boulders, bushes and small, scrubby trees, all tailed by narrow deltas of the same pale grey as though casting strange shadows. Gullies and ravines shone palely too, as if filled with softly shining mist.
“Is that
“Yes,” the suit said.
Something lightly grasped his ankle. “Are you all right, Ferbin?” Djan Seriy’s voice said.
“Yes,” he said, starting to twist round to look back but then stopping himself just as she said, “There is no point looking back, brother; you won’t be able to see me.”
“Oh,” he said, “so you are behind me?”
“I am now. I have been flying ahead of you for the last two minutes. We are in a diamond formation; you are in the right-hand position. Turminder Xuss flies a kilometre ahead of us.”
“Oh.”
“Listen, brother. While we were in the tube, just before we dropped, we picked up repeated signals from an Oct news service talking about the Falls and Oramen. They say that Oramen lives and is well but there was some
