“You are always glad to arrive, to see Sursamen, or any Shellworld, are you not?” Utli asked Shoum.
“Of course,” she said, turning to him a little.
“Whereas, personally,” the Grand Zamerin said, swivelling away from the view, “it’s only duty keeps me here; I’m always relieved to see the back of the place.” There was a tiny warble and one of his eye stalks flicked briefly over to look at what appeared to be a jewel embedded in his thorax. “Which we’re informed occurs very shortly; our ship is ready.”
Shoum’s comms torque woke to tell her the same thing, then went back to its privacy setting.
“Relieved? Really?” the director general asked as they floated back through the web towards their respective entourages and the docking chutes that gave access to the ships.
“We shall never understand why you are not, Shoum. These are still dangerous places.”
“It’s been a very long time since any Shellworld turned on its inhabitants, Utli.”
“Ah, but still; the intervals, dear DG.”
The Grand Zamerin was referring to the distribution of Shellworld-induced mass die-offs through time. Plotted out, they implied only a slow dying away of such titanic murderousness, not yet a final end. The graphed shape of attacks approached zero, but did so along a curve that implied there might be one or two more yet to come, probably some time in the next few thousand years. If, of course, that was really the way these things worked. The implied threat of future cataclysms might be the result of coincidence, nothing more.
“Well then,” Shoum said, “to be blunt, we would have to hope it does not happen during our tenure, or if does, it does not happen in Sursamen.”
“It’s just a matter of time,” the Grand Zamerin told her gloomily. “These things turn killer, or disappear. And nobody knows why.”
“Yet, Utli,” the director general said, signalling mischievousness, “do you not find it in any sense romantic somehow — even in a sense reassuring — that there are still such mysteries and imponderables in our polished, cultivated times?”
“No,” the Grand Zamerin said emphatically, expelling an emission named
“Not even in the abstract?”
“Not even in the abstract.”
“Oh, well. Still, I wouldn’t worry, if I were you,” Shoum told Utaltifuhl as they approached their attendants. “I suspect Sursamen will still be here when you get back.”
“You think its disappearance is unlikely?” Utli said, now expressing mock seriousness.
“Vanishingly,” Shoum said, but the joke didn’t translate.
“Indeed. And of course. However, it has struck us that so wonderful and enjoyable is the life we lead that a disaster of equal but opposite proportions must always be a threat. The higher you build your Tower, the more tempting a target for fate it becomes.”
“Well, at least you are vacating your Tower for the next year. I trust the trip home is rewarding and I shall look forward with pleasure to seeing you again, Grand Zamerin.”
“And I you, Director General,” Utaltifuhl told her, and performed the most respectful and delicate of formal mandible-nips on her outstretched maniple spine. Shoum blushed appropriately.
They had reached their respective entourages and a giant window that looked out the other side of the transit facility, to a small fleet of docked ships. Utaltifuhl looked out at the star craft and emoted dubiety. “Hmm,” he said. “And interstellar travel is also not without its risks.”
5. Platform
Djan Seriy Anaplian, who had been born a princess of the house of Hausk, a dynasty from a wide-spectrum pan-human species lately from a median level of the Shellworld Sursamen and whose middle name basically meant fit-to-be-married-to-a-prince, stood alone on a tall cliff looking out over a rust desert deep within the continent of Lalance on the planet Prasadal. A strong wind lashed at her long coat and tore at her clothes. She still wore her dark, wide-brimmed hat and its stiff material was caught and tugged at by the gusting wind as though it was trying to tear it off her head. The hat, secured by well-tied ribbons, was unlikely to come off, but it meant that the wind made her head shake and nod and jerk as though with palsy. The wind carried dust and sand in small dry flurries that came beating up from the desert floor beneath and curling over the serrated edge of the cliff, stinging her cheeks where they were exposed between the scarf that covered her mouth and nose and the goggles that protected her eyes.
She put one gloved hand to the goggles, pulling them away from her face a fraction to let a little moisture out from the base of the frames. The sparse liquid ran down her cheeks, leaving streaks, but soon dried in the dusty force of air. She took a deep breath through the protecting scarf as the clouds of dust parted like a dry mist, allowing her an uninterrupted view of the distant city and the forces that had been besieging it.
The city was burning. Siege engines taller than its own towers buttressed its walls like gigantic calipers. The desert around it, until recently dark with the besieging army, was clearing as they poured into the stricken city, exposing sand the colour of drying blood. Smoke tried to rise from the wreckage of the shattered buildings in great curling bundles of darkness but was struck down by the force of the gale, flattened and whirled away from the various conflagrations, dipping down and back towards the desert to come rearing up again as it met the cliff so that it went billowing over Anaplian’s head in a ragged, fast-moving overcast.
The wind increased in strength. Out over the plain, a wall of dust was forming between her and the city as half the desert seemed to lift into the air, gradually dimming and wiping away the view, silhouetting a series of rocky outcrops for a few moments until they too were swept under the hem of the advancing dust storm. She turned and walked a little way back to where a contraption like a cross between a skeleton and a sculpture sat poised on all fours on the exposed rock. She gathered the coat about her and stepped backwards on to the feet of the strange machine. The seatrider came alive instantly, swinging up fluidly and fitting itself about her, clasps closing round ankles, thighs, waist, neck and upper arms, nestling its thin form around her like a lover. She took the offered control grip as it swung out to her hand and pulled it upwards, sending the machine and her flying into the sky, then pushed forward so that she went racing through the storm of dust and smoke to the beleaguered city.
She rose through the haze into clearer air as she built up speed, leaving the fields down at first and letting the slipstream buffet her, the wind making her coat tails snap like whips and forcing the hat’s brim to fold itself away, then she clicked the streamline field on and rode in a delta-shaped bubble of quiet air towards the city.
She dropped and slowed as she crossed over the walls and turned the streamline field off again. She flew between wind-twisted columns of smoke, watching the besieging forces as they swept into the spaces of the city, saw defenders falling back and inhabitants fleeing, observed arrows fly and a last few rocks and fire barrels land in the city’s upper reaches. She smelled the smoke and heard the clash of blades and the crack and rattle of burning and the rumble of falling masonry and the ululating battle cries and war trumpets of the victorious invaders and the wails and screams of the defeated. She saw a few tiny figures pointing at her, and a couple of arrows arced towards her then fell away again. She was knocked to one side and almost thought herself hit with the violence of the action as the seatrider dodged a fire barrel; it went past with a great roar and a stench of burning oil, looping downwards to crash into the roof of a temple in the upper city, splashing flame.
She turned the full panoply of fields back on, hiding her and the machine and enclosing herself in the still bubble of protected air again. She had been heading for the centre of the city, for what she assumed would be the citadel and the palace, but then changed her mind and flew around one side of the city, level with its middle reaches, watching the general influx of invaders and the chaotic retreat of defenders and civilians while also trying to observe the slighter struggles of small groups and individuals.
Eventually she alighted on the flat, low-walled roof of a modest building where a rape was in progress and a small child cowered in a corner. The four soldiers waiting their turn gazed at her with annoyance when she appeared seemingly from thin air, stepping off the seatrider. Their frowns were beginning to turn into appreciative if unpleasant smiles when she drew a sleek chunk of a gun from a shoulder holster and, smiling thinly back, set about punching head-sized holes in each of their torsos. The first three men went flying backwards off the roof to the
