and then he was placed in a large tank.
One of the Oct had tried to explain what was going on, though Holse hadn’t understood much.
Holse had been told Ferbin would take time to repair. Still sitting on the platform that had borne them earlier, he’d been shown through the watery environment to a nearby room from which all the water drained away while fresh air took its place. The Oct he’d been talking to had stayed with him, its body covered in a sort of barely visible suit of moisture. Another set of dry rooms had opened up which seemed to have been designed for human habitation.
The Oct had said he could live here for the few days Ferbin would take to repair, then left him alone.
He’d walked over to the set of round, man-high windows and looked out over the land of the Sarl as he’d never seen it before, from nearly fourteen hundred kilometres above the surface, through the vacuum which existed above the atmosphere that covered the land like a warm blanket.
“What a sight, sir.” Holse appeared lost for a moment, then shook his head.
“And how came we to be here, on the Fourth?” Ferbin asked.
“The Oct only control the D’neng-oal Tower up to this level, as far as I can understand the matter, sir. They seemed reluctant to admit this, as though it was the cause for some embarrassment, which it may well indeed be.”
“Oh,” Ferbin said. He hadn’t known that the Conducer peoples ever controlled only part of a Tower; he’d just assumed it was all or nothing, from Core to Surface.
“And on account of the fact that beyond the Ninth one is in the realm of the Oversquare, transference from one Tower to another is not possible.”
“Over… what?”
“This has all been explained to me by the Oct I was talking to on the screen while being bled upon by your good self, and subsequently and at some length in my quarters near your place of treatment, sir.”
“Really. Then kindly explain it to me.”
“It’s all to do with the distances apart that the Towers are, sir. Below and up to the level of the Ninth, their Filigree connects, and the Filigree is of sufficient hollowness for scendships — which is the proper term for the spherical room which transported us—”
“I know what a scendship is, Holse.”
“Well, they can switch from one Tower to another through their connectings in amongst the Filigree. But above the Ninth the Filigree doesn’t connect, so to get from one Tower to another one has to travel between them, through whatever exists on the relevant level.”
Ferbin’s understanding of such matters was, like his understanding of most things, vague. Again, it would have been much less so if he’d ever paid any attention to the relevant lessons from his tutors. The Towers supported the ceiling over each level through a great fluted outbranching of this stuff called Filigree, whose greater members were as hollow as the Towers themselves. Given that the same number of Towers supported each level, whether it was the one closest to the Core or that supporting the Surface, the Towers would be at a greater distance from each other the closer they got to that last outward level and the Filigree would no longer need to join up to support the weight above.
“The whole of the Fourth,” Holse said, “is home to these Cumuloform, which are clouds, but clouds which are in some sense intelligent in that mysterious and not especially useful way so many alien peoples and things tend to be, sir. They float over oceans full of fishes and sea monsters and such. Or rather over one big ocean, which fills the whole of the bottom part of the level the way land does on our own dear Eighth. Anyway, they’re seemingly happy to transport folk between Towers when the Oct ask them to. Oh, and I should say, welcome to Expanded Version Five; Zourd,” Holse said, looking up and around at the nebulous mass of cloud extending around and far above them. “For that is what this one is called.”
“Indeed,” Ferbin said.
“Good-day.” The voice sounded like a whole chorus of whispered echoes and seemed to issue from every part of the bubble-wall around them.
“And, ah, and to you, good, ah, Cumuloform,” Ferbin said out loud, looking up at the cloud above. He continued to gaze expectantly upwards for a few more moments, then looked back at Holse, who shrugged.
“It is not what you’d call talkative, sir.”
“Hmm. Anyway,” Ferbin said, sitting up and staring at Holse, “why do the Oct only control the D’neng-oal up to the Fourth?”
“Because, sir, the Aultridia” — Holse averted his head to spit on the semi-transparent floor — “control the upper levels.”
“Oh my God!”
“WorldGod be preserved indeed, sir.”
“What? You mean they control the upper levels of all Towers?”
“No, sir.”
“But wasn’t the D’neng-oal always an Oct Tower?”
“It was, sir. Until recently. This seems to be the principal cause of the embarrassment felt by the Oct, sir. Part of their Tower has been taken over from them.”
“And by the Vileness!” Ferbin said, genuinely horrified. “The very filth of God!”
The Aultridia were an Upstart species; recent arrivals on the Involved scene who had wasted no time in establishing themselves, shouldering their way to as near the front of the galactic stage as possible. They were far from alone in that. What distinguished them was the manner and location of their coming to sentient fruition as a species.
The Aultridia had evolved from parasites which had lived under the carapaces and between the skin layers of the species called the Xinthia; Xinthian Tensile Aeronathaurs to give them their proper name. It was one of these that the Sarl called the WorldGod.
The Xinthia were regarded with something approaching affection by even the most ruthless and unsentimental of the galaxy’s Involved, partly because they had done much great work in the past — they had been particularly active in the Swarm Wars of great antiquity, battling runaway nanotech outbreaks, Swarmata in general and other Monopathic Hegemonising Events — but mostly because they were no threat to anybody any more and a system of the galactic community’s size and complexity just seemed to need one grouping that everybody was allowed to like. Utterly ancient, once near-invincibly powerful, now reduced to one paltry solar system and a few eccentric individuals hiding in the Cores of Shellworlds for no discernible reason, the Xinthia were seen as eccentric, bumbling, well-meaning, civilisationally exhausted — the joke was they hadn’t the energy to Sublime — and generally as the honoured good-as-dead deserving of a comfortable retirement.
The Aultridia were regarded as having spoiled that comfortable twilight. Over the space of several hundred thousand years, the great air-dwelling, spacefaring Aeronathaurs had been greatly troubled by the increasingly active creatures they were playing host to, the infestation of super-parasites running round the necklace of Aeronathaur habitats orbiting the star Chone like a disease.
It hadn’t lasted; the advantage of a truly intelligent parasite was that you could reason with it, and the Aultridia had long since abandoned their old ways, leaving their one-time hosts alone in return for material advancement and what seemed like alien super-science to them but was like a box of broken toys discovered in a dusty attic to the Xinthia.
They had constructed their own purpose-built habitats and taken up the task of opening up and maintaining Shellworlds; this swiftly turned into a real and useful speciality. It was conventionally assumed that burrowing into a Shellworld was somehow something they were suited for just by their history and nature.
The stigma of their birthright remained, however, and it didn’t help that the mat-like Aultridia stank like rotting meat to most oxygen-breathing species.
The only remaining suspicion regarding the Aultridia’s present existence was that they had established at least a token presence on all the Shellworlds which contained Xinthians, often at impractical cost and to the considerable annoyance of other Conducer species like the Oct. To date, as far as anyone knew, the Aultridia had never even tried to penetrate all the way down through the levels of a Shellworld to a Core-dwelling Xinthian — even the more established Conducer species tended to leave the ancient beings alone, out of respect and possibly an almost superstitious wariness — but that didn’t reassure many people, least of all those like the Sarl, who treated the Xinthian at the Core of the world as a God and were appalled at the idea of the ghastly Aultridia
