As for her desire simply to sit and look at the plant, that was probably a function of her doubt that what they were doing here was going to make any difference to their plight even if it went exactly according to plan; she suspected that subconsciously she hoped the sheer presence and scale of this industrial enterprise – and the physical energy of its creation – would somehow convince her there was a point to it all.
If that had been her wish, it had not been granted, and no matter how much of the oxygen works filled her field of vision, always lurking at the edge of her sight she seemed to see that hazy spread of darkness, rising from the night’s horizon like an obscene inversion of dawn.
‘Chief Scientist?’
‘Hmm?’ Gadfium turned to find her aide, Rasfline, standing a couple of metres away. Rasfline – thin, ascetic, stiffly correct in his aide’s uniform – nodded to her.
‘Chief Scientist; a message from the Palace.’
‘Yes?’
‘There has been a development at the Plain of Sliding Stones.’
‘A development?’
‘An unusual one; I know no more. Your presence there has been requested and the relevant travel arrangements made.’
Gadfium sighed. ‘Very well. Let’s go.’
The piker swept out of the oxygen works and headed for East Cliff along a dusty, winding road filled with heavy traffic both machine and chimeric. The groomed, carefully landscaped parkland that had graced this part of the Great Hall for a thousand generations had been ripped up without a second thought when the Encroachment’s implications had – apparently – been driven home to the King and his more sceptical advisers; normally any such industry would have been banished to the inner depths of the fastness, where there was little natural light and objectionably ugly or effluent processes could safely be housed without disturbing either the view or the air, and where only the desperate or outlawed would ever choose to live.
Still – for all the outrage, and the suicides of a number of gardeners and foresters – when the King had decided such a plant must be built, and must be built quickly, and under the eye of the Palace, the earth-movers – themselves newly constructed for the purpose – had been sent in, and woods, lakes and glades which had delighted all castes and classes for millennia were levelled under their ploughs, scrapes and tracks.
The chief scientist watched the oxygen works disappear behind a wooded hill, until the construction site was marked only by a haze of smoke and dust hanging in the air above the trees. It would reappear as they headed out across the plain to East Cliff; the oxygen works was sited on a small plateau and so visible from almost everywhere throughout the ten-kilometre length of the Great Hall. Gadfium wondered again whether the real reason the King had had the works built here was to impress upon his subjects the full gravity of their situation, and give them a preparatory hint of the kind of sacrifices that would need to be made in the future. Gadfium shook her head, tapped her fingers on the seat’s wooden armrest and opened a vent by the side of the window to let the warm air in. She looked at the man and woman sitting opposite her.
Rasfline and Goscil had been with her since the start of the present emergency, ten years ago, when science had started to matter again. Rasfline epitomised the officer caste, and seemed to take pride in making himself as much like a machine as possible; in all those ten years he had never called Gadfium anything other than ‘Chief Scientist’ or ‘ma’am’.
Goscil – plump-faced, wild-haired, and whose tunic never seemed to quite fit properly or ever be entirely free from stains – had seemed to grow more dishevelled over the years, as though in response to Rasfline’s severe tidiness. She had uploaded some files from the oxygen works, and sat with her eyes closed now, reviewing this information and occasionally making small involuntary noises; tutting, hissing, snorting, humming. Rasfline set his jaw and looked away out the window.
‘Any more details from the Plain?’ Gadfium asked him.
‘None, ma’am.’ Rasfline paused, making it obvious he was communicating, then shook his head. ‘As before; the observatory there has reported something unusual and the Palace has granted their request that you attend.’
‘Plain of Sliding Stones?’ Goscil said, opening her eyes suddenly. She blew hair away from the side of her face, glancing at Rasfline. ‘I heard some gossip on the science channel about the stones doing something weird.’
‘Really,’ Rasfline said drily.
‘And how did this weirdness manifest itself?’ Gadfium asked.
Goscil shrugged. ‘Didn’t say; there’s just a filed report from some junior timed about dawn that the stones were moving and something strange was happening. Nothing since.’ She glanced at Rasfline again. ‘Probably been clamped down.’
Gadfium nodded. ‘Has there been much wind and precipitation up there lately?’
Both Rasfline and Goscil went still for a moment. Goscil answered first: ‘Yes. Enough melt for them to move, and some wind. But…’
‘Yes?’ Gadfium said.
Goscil shrugged. ‘The way that junior reported; said there was a… may I repeat it verbatim?’
Gadfium nodded. ‘Go on.’
Goscil closed her eyes. Rasfline looked away again. ‘Umm,’ Goscil said, ‘… Usual identifiers; Plain of Stones Observatory, etc., then, quote: ‘ – her voice changed here to something like a chant – ‘something odd going on. Something very odd. Oh shit. Let’s see, right, general data first: wind blowing; north-west, force four, precip; three mill yesterday, plain friction factor; six. Oh, look at them! Look at that. They can’t do that! They’ve never done that, have they? Wait till – (unintelligible) – I’m calling the chief observer… filing this as is. Signing off.’
Goscil opened her eyes. ‘Unquote. After that, nothing. People have been trying to get in touch with the observatory since, but there’s no reply.’
‘When was the report timed?’
‘Six-thirteen.’
Gadfium looked at Rasfline, who was smiling thinly. ‘Has the Palace been in touch with the observatory since?’
‘I cannot say, Chief Scientist,’ the aide replied, then, as though seeking to be helpful nevertheless, added: ‘The message I received requesting your presence was timed at ten forty-five.’
‘Hmm,’ Gadfium said. ‘Kindly request that the Palace furnish us with more details, and allow us to speak directly with the observatory.’
‘Ma’am,’ Rasfline said, and took on the glassy-eyed look of someone making it politely obvious they were communicating.
Gadfium’s status decreed that she was above the need for an implanted direct status link, being one of those valued souls whose mind must be left free from the distractions of constant inter-communication to concentrate on undiluted thought, unless they chose to access the data corpus by some external means. She knew she must accept this, but even so oscillated between a guilty pride in her privileged position and an intermittent frustration that she so often had to rely on others to furnish her with so many of the details her work required.
‘We’re to take a clifter up the East Face,’ Goscil announced after a moment’s pause. ‘The King’s own machine, just for us,’ she told the chief scientist. ‘They must want us there very quickly.’
* * *
3
The caisson-train lumbered across the broken landscape of the collapsed Southern Volcano Room; a line of huge, cylindrically rotund, multi-wheeled heavy carriers interspersed with smaller vehicles and chimerics. Some of the larger chimerics, all of them of the incarnosaur genus, carried troops; most of the other make-beasts were considered at least semi-sentient, and were themselves soldiers, variously armoured, impedimented and armed.
The other ground vehicles were all-drive holster-buggies, armoured scree-cars, one- or two-gun landromonds and the huge multi-turreted tanks known as bassinals. The struggling convoy accounted for a good sixth of the King’s military transport, and represented either a brilliant flanking manoeuvre to supply the beleaguered garrison of troops guarding the workings in the fifth-floor south-western solar, or a desperate and probably forlorn gamble to win a war that was not only unwinnable but anyway pointless; Sessine had still to decide which.
The Count Alandre Sessine VII, commander-in-chief of the second expeditionary force, looked up and away from the slow-moving convoy of beasts and machines in his charge to gaze at the gaping shell of ruined walls around them, and the revealed topography of mega-architecture and cloud beyond.
Standing waist-high in the turret of the command scree-car, shaken this way and that by the rough, trackless ground the convoy traversed, his body armour clunking dully against the inside rim of the hatch, it took an effort to focus on the vast and sullen grandeur of one’s surroundings, and a further effort to dismiss the apparent irrelevance of such scale to the more immediate task at hand (or rather at foot, and paw, and wheel and track).
All the same, it pleased him to do so every now and again when the steam and smoke-clouds cleared sufficiently, and he judged it no extravagance upon his supposedly valuable attention; keener eyes and more extrapolated senses than his would mind the progress of the convoy over such increments of time as he chose to allow the wider view, and – after all – what was his silent, self-solitary mind left so for (by the King’s good grace) if not to attend to the greater world beyond the vulgar intimacy of the immediate?