‘I need to get the fabric clear from your knees.’
Kysandra realized he was asking permission. ‘Whatever.’
His teekay ripped through the bloomers’ cotton as if it was air.
Faller teekay is stronger than ours.
Then he was spraying the stuff from the first tube on her gashes. Her knees stung, then there was nothing again. She let out a sigh of relief. The blue substance was applied. It was like a layer of skin, but tougher.
‘There we go,’ he said happily. ‘All finished now. The dermsynth will help regenerate your own skin. It’ll peel off when it’s done. Couple of days, maybe.’
‘Right.’
‘Kysandra.’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you ever seen anything like that before?’
‘No,’ she admitted.
He gestured round at the books which surrounded them. ‘I’ve had a bit of a crash course in your history the last two days. Mainly I’ve been learning about the Fallers. But, tell me, do you know that humans came to Bienvenido from another place?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Kysandra nodded at the five thick Landing Chronicles – she’d read every one. ‘Captain Cornelius brought us here in his ship.’
‘Good. Okay. Then is it too much to ask you to believe I came from the same place as that first ship?’
In her mind, the image of the boat-bird falling through the night sky was very clear. She stubbornly refused to admit anything, but her racing thoughts were chaotic, surging with so many conflicting emotions. She could not let hope dominate. Hope betrayed her every time. That he’d flown to Bienvenido was too much to believe. It would be wonderful, though.
‘Is it at least possible?’ Nigel persisted.
‘I suppose so.’ Flying through space is in the books, it’s real history, so we used to be able to do it. ‘But—’
‘Incredible, I know. This must be very shocking. So take a quiet moment and try to relax a little. Why don’t you get dressed? And when you’re ready, I’ll take you over to see my spaceship. That should finally convince you. If it doesn’t, I don’t know what will.’
‘Then what?’ she asked.
‘Then we’ll talk. Once I know you believe, I’ll answer all your questions. And, trust me, you’ll have a lot of questions.’
She looked down at the patches of blue . . . stuff on her knees. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Instinct told her it really was something from beyond this world. And a Faller wouldn’t treat her like this. ‘All right,’ she said cautiously. Because if there truly was such a thing as a spaceship, she simply had to see it.
*
The blue dress did fit perfectly. It felt wonderful, too – clean and fresh. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever worn anything new. Sarara had always collected her clothes from a charity house in town, sewing patches onto worn cloth, darning sweaters. Badges of how poor they were. But this dress . . . Kysandra stood in front of the mirror and simply couldn’t stop the smile lifting her lips as she admired herself. Her red-gold hair fell over her shoulders in long waves, without any of the normal tangles that were so devilish to tug out. It was as if she’d spent a week in a salon. She hated Madeline with all her might, but had to admit the woman knew a lot about taking care of hair. I must make an effort to keep it like this, she thought. Then she instantly hardened her shell so he didn’t pick that up. When she looked a little closer into the mirror, she saw the zits on her nose, with more on her chin, one on her cheek. She sighed; would they ever stop?
Nigel was waiting in the hall when she came down the stairs. They’d been fixed, too; not one of them creaked when she put her weight on them.
‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘Ready to visit your first real live spaceship?’
‘I want it to be real,’ she said. ‘I do.’
‘I know. Come on.’
They walked down to the river, through the old pattern of fields that were now just squares of tangled weeds and vines separated by hedges that had grown wild. A small boat was tied up on the shore. Not a kind of boat she recognized. This one was circular and seemed to be made of orange fabric. It was alien – no other word for it.
There was a rope running across the river, tied to trees on either side. Nigel knelt in the bottom of the boat and used the rope to pull them across.
Kysandra had only crossed the river a handful of times. The wood that occupied the other side of the valley was gloomy and unwelcoming. Its great dark trunks had grown packed close, and they leaned against each other, seemingly merging together several metres off the ground to give an unbroken canopy of aquamarine fronds and verdant fan-leaves. Those trees that died stayed upright, buttressed by their neighbours, so they simply became pillars of vibrant orange and grey fungi. The narrow crooked gaps were filled with vines, as if some giant arachnid had turned the wood into an oversized feeding trap.
A passage had been cleared through the dense web of creepers, the cut ends still bleeding gooey sap. The ground underfoot was a springy loam that smelt vinegary. Tatus flies and larger stikmoths fluttered about in the shade. She could hear bigger creatures rustling through the creepers, though her ex-sight only ever perceived bussalores slithering down into their dank underground burrows.
Then her ex-sight perceived the thing up ahead. It must have come down almost vertically at the end, for there was no long trail of smashed trees. Instead it was in a small clearing of broken trunks.
She’d been right about the shape: a large bulbous oval with triangular wings on both sides; she thought the wings had been a lot bigger when it flew over the farmhouse. As she stood at the edge of the clearing looking at it, the surface was an intensely dark green where the sun struck; otherwise it appeared to be coal black. Surprisingly, her gaze was drawn to the twenty or so neuts that were milling about passively.
‘Why are they here?’ she asked.
‘I need manual help to restart the farm,’ Nigel replied. ‘They’re having their eggs shaped into useful genistars.’
‘Into geniwhats?’
‘You call them mods.’
‘Oh. Do you know how to adapt neut eggs?’
‘I know the theory, but the ship’s smartcore – its brain – is doing the actual shaping.’
‘The ship?’ She looked at the smooth foreign artefact that had ended its flight in such an ungraceful fashion by thumping to the ground here, and realized she wasn’t afraid any more. No, that had been replaced by very strong curiosity. And wonder.
‘Come on.’ He held out his hand.
She held it tight as a hatch opened in the side of the ship, a circular area which seemed to contract somehow, revealing a short white corridor that was lit as brightly as if the sun was inside. ‘It is real!’
*
Nigel was from the Commonwealth. The union of human worlds that existed outside the Void. A universe that was very different. He had come to find out what had happened to the ships that Captain Cornelius had flown into the Void.
‘Why?’ Kysandra asked. She was sitting on a round chair that had grown out of the floor in the blank circular chamber he called the main cabin. And Nigel had been right; there were so many questions her head was in danger of bursting open from the pressure of them.
‘We don’t know how they came through the barrier that guards the Void from the rest of the universe.’
‘But you came through.’
‘That was different. Some alien allies tore the boundary open temporarily, just long enough for me to slip inside. I’ve spent seven years in suspension – that’s a long sleep – while a Skylord led me to this world.’
‘You flew through space.’ It was just the most wonderful thing ever to think that humans could still do such a thing – that it wasn’t only Captain Cornelius who travelled between planets. Out there in the Commonwealth, where there were hundreds of worlds, all filled with marvels, people flew between them all the time. ‘Please take me out there, back to the Commonwealth you came from. Please
, Nigel. I’ll help you however you want while you’re here, but afterwards . . .’ She gave him the most entreating plea she could, letting her yearning thoughts free so he could taste them.
‘Getting out is difficult,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t expect I’d be doing that.’
‘But you can do it,’ she insisted. Her hands gestured round the magnificent spaceship with its clean air and bright lighting. A machine that could fly! ‘You’re so clever. You know everything there is to know.’
‘Ha!’
His bitter laugh shocked her.
‘I’m the stupidest person in the galaxy, actually.’ He glanced meaningfully up at the blank ceiling. ‘Though I’m not alone.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We thought there was only one planet in the Void where humans lived – Querencia. How wrong we were. We should have known, should have worked it out, but we didn’t; we assumed – which is always a foolish thing to do. We did it because all our power and knowledge brings a huge dose of arrogance with it. Well, thank you, universe: lesson in humility well and truly learned.’
‘There’s more than one planet in the Void?’
‘Apparently.’
‘And do people live there, too?’
‘They used to, Kysandra. That’s all I can tell you. They managed to get a message out to us. But it was a very long time ago. And I’m here now, not on Querencia.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
Nigel massaged his temples. ‘My original goal was to get to Makkathran – which is a living alien spaceship that’s managed to survive on Querencia – and send all the information it gathered back to the Commonwealth and its own species. But that’s going to be quite tough now. My ship can’t fly any more. The Void has affected its engines – or part of them, anyway. The closer you are to a planet, the worse it gets.’
‘So you can’t fly me to the Commonwealth?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m going to research the Void from here for a while. Maybe if I can analyse its structure, I can learn to fly again. But right now I’m more interested in the Fallers. I don’t understand what they are at all. They don’t plague Querencia like they do Bienvenido.’
‘They’ve always been here,’ she told him. ‘Right from the start. It’s in the Chronicles. Captain Cornelius saw what they were as soon as the ship landed. He founded the first regiment, the Meor, to fight them; then he set up the Watcher Guild to warn everyone when the eggs fall. And the Research Institute so we could learn how to fight them. Without him we would never have survived.’
‘Did you learn that at school?’
‘Yes.’
‘Interesting. So the Fallers were here already when the colony ships were sucked in. They’re probably prisoners, just like us.’
‘Prisoners?’
‘Yes. Haven’t you worked that out yet? The Void is a prison; it consumes your soul for its own twisted purpose. People. Their thoughts. Their minds. They’re like a kind of food that gets sucked up into the Heart.’
‘They live for ever more in glory. Everybody knows that.’
‘Do they indeed? Have you ever seen this glory? Always demand proof of nirvana before you start following messiahs who’re selling it to you. Those guys don’t exactly have the greatest track record in the universe.’
‘You doubt the Skylords’ Guidance?’ she asked, shocked.
‘I doubt any system that won’t reveal its purpose, that only offers promises of a better tomorrow. But then I’m just a thousand-year-old cynic. You have to make up your own mind, Kysandra. And to do that, you need information. A lot of information.’
She looked round the cabin, surprised she could feel so deflated on the day she’d discovered the truth of the universe. ‘I want to learn,’ she told him, ‘it’s all I ever really wanted.’ Somewhere at the back of her mind a hope was burning that the ship would carry a library, maybe even bigger than the public one at Adeone.
‘I can help you do that,’ he said. ‘I might not be able to take you to the Commonwealth, but I can certainly bring the Commonwealth to you. Think of it as payment for you providing me with cover here. How does that sound?’
Kysandra smiled in a way she hadn’t for the last eight years.
*
‘Lie back, this won’t hurt,’ Nigel said.
Kysandra didn’t believe him. But she lay back anyway. The medical chamber – a cylinder like a silver coffin – had slipped out of the cabin’s wall. Its oval top had done that magical contraction thing, revealing a padded mattress inside.
‘I’ll keep it open,’ Nigel said. ‘It can be a bit claustrophobic in there if you’re not used to it.’
Kysandra didn’t trust herself to speak. All she concentrated on was the very firm belief that this was nothing to do with the Fallers. She wasn’t going to get eaten. Probably.
‘Here we go.’ Nigel’s grin was reassuring. The silver sides of the capsule sprouted slim tendrils that moved like serpents. They began to prod and poke at her body. She’d removed the dress for the chamber to do whatever it did, but Nigel assured her she could keep her underwear on. More of the tendril things were emerging round her head, a dense cluster of them wriggling through her hair. She swallowed hard, trying to be brave.
‘You’re doing fine. Keep still.’
‘This is your doctor?’ she asked.
‘Sort of, yes. Though it can do a lot more than just cure you.’ He closed his eyes, but his expression was one of concentration, as if he was reading something.
Can it get rid of zits?
‘Interesting.’
‘What is?’ she asked.
‘You said Captain Cornelius landed three thousand years ago?’
‘Yes.’
‘That gives us a conservative estimate of a hundred and twenty generations. There’s been some drift in your Advancer sequences; several of them have broken down. I can’t believe the Void’s been screwing with your DNA on top of everything else. Of course, we haven’t had a hundred-generation baseline in the Commonwealth to compare it with, and most of our generations are still factoring in improvements every twenty years. But that level of reversion will be something for the geneticists to watch out for.’
‘Oh.’ Whatever that meant.
He opened his eyes and grinned. ‘Commonwealth citizens have certain additional biological . . . er, abilities built in to their original bodies. They’re specialist cells which help you communicate over distance, like a ’path voice but a lot faster and more sophisticated. Memory can be organized, too, rather than nature’s rather random method.’
‘And I don’t have them any more?’
‘You do, but they’re slightly degraded. And disconnected from your brain.’
‘So I can’t learn Commonwealth stuff like you said?’
He grinned at her disappointed expression. ‘There are always alternatives. I’ll insert some replacement neural pathways into the macrocellular clusters to integrate your secondaries. That’s a standard med repair. Then there are new vectors for the other Advancer features. It will be a while before the reseqencing takes effect.’
Nope: still don’t have a crudding clue what you’re saying.
It had been a year since Kysandra had stopped going to Mrs Brewster’s school every other weekend. She really missed it; school had been the one part of her life that had carried on as normal. With the teacher’s clever gifts and tutelage she’d quickly mastered the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic. Mrs Brewster was the only person left she could talk to about the amazing things she read in her father’s books. And the teacher had told her all about the university in Varlan, where people did nothing but read and learn all day long. That sounded pretty much like a piece of Giu to Kysandra. ‘It’s worth applying,’ Mrs Brewster had suggested as her sixteenth birthday approached.
To which Sarara had retorted: ‘She’ll do just fine as a farmer’s wife, so don’t you go filling her head with dreamy nonsense. She needs to get ready for real
life.’ That was the last time she’d been allowed to go to the school.
Now Nigel promised her knowledge beyond anything she’d ever read on Bienvenido. The truth about the whole universe.
Something pinched the back of her skull.
‘Ouch.’
‘Sorry,’ Nigel said absently.
Obscurely, Kysandra felt better. I knew it would hurt.
Nothing much happened for a few minutes, then all the silver tendrils withdrew and flattened out against the sides of the capsule, blending into the metal casing.
‘You can get dressed now,’ Nigel said.
She turned her back to him to put her dress on. Ridiculous.
‘So this is going to be like ’path gifting?’ she asked.
‘Sort of, yes.’
When they left the spaceship, she was sure there were more neuts milling round outside than when she went in.
‘What sort of mods are you adapting?’ she asked as they took the fabric boat back across the river. And to think, an hour ago she’d been impressed by that.
‘Ge-monkeys and chimps, mainly. Like your dwarfs and apes. They’ll be the most useful to start with.’
‘So ge-forms come from the other planet the ships landed on?’
‘Yes.’
She looked up into the sky with its high drifting cloud ribbons. ‘Where is it?’
‘Querencia? I’m not sure. Some of the nebulas are the same. Your Giu is their Odin’s Sea, and Uracus is Honious to them. But nothing else is the same. The Void may have different internal pockets, like segments in an orange, if you like; or the quantum geometry spacetime equivalent here is folded more than we realized.’
‘I think I need to wait for the Commonwealth giftings. Tell me what life was like on the other Void world.’
‘They found Makkathran, which had a city section modified by a species that came to Querencia before humans. It was abandoned, so I guess they were all consumed by the Heat, whoever they were. Makkathran made life a little easier for the Querencia humans, so it shaped their society slightly differently to yours, from what I’ve seen so far.’
‘Was that earlier species the Fallers?’
‘No. Like I said, I don’t understand them at all. I wish I’d taken time to study the Forest during my approach. It had a very unusual quantum signature.’