Chapter 4: Chapter 4

Arthur had not slept, and Pearl had.

She had gone under somewhere out over the dark water, in the middle of a sentence about nothing, and her head had come down on his shoulder, and he had not moved since. His arm was dead from the elbow down. He was not going to move.

The cabin lights were at night level. Four rows up the aisle, on the bulkhead beside the forward hatch, a stencilled placard gave a mass limit and a figure, and Arthur could read it from where he sat. The air handler had a bad bearing in it, and he could hear which of the two fans it was.

Either that was the thing behind his ear, or he had been awake for twenty hours at the end of a day that had taken his city, his house, and his mother out from under him, and a boy that wired can hear anything.

He would ask Pearl. Not now.

Somebody's QUIP was running two rows up, low, and his own had woken to match it and put a panel in the air over the seat back in front of him.

A woman in a blue jacket stood in front of a rendering of Saturn.

“Ground broke this week on the largest private habitation project in the history of the system,” she said, in the warm and unhurried voice of somebody who had never once been asked to leave a district. “Open Sky is a Caldris family undertaking, financed in full, with no public appropriation and no Commonwealth partnership.”

The rendering turned. Rings, and a bright ribbon of built things inside them, and Saturn behind it holding light the way nothing on Coravel had ever held light.

“Forty-one habitats across two hundred years of construction. Nine hundred thousand residents at first occupancy. Water rights, air rights, and open horizon at every elevation.”

Open horizon at every elevation. Arthur had heard that line so many times he could have said it half a beat ahead of her, and he did, under his breath, and the tortoiseshell girl across the aisle glanced at him.

“The project is funded entirely by licensing revenue from the Caldris discovery of 2219, the first intact gravity regulator recovered from the precursor complex beneath Mars.”

Twenty years ago. Two years after the ruins opened. One family, one room, one object the size of a bread box, and every ship in the system had been paying them for it every day since. Every drydock. Every hauler. Every yard. The floor under Arthur's boots had a plate in it that made his blood sit down where it belonged instead of pooling in his skull, and a fraction of what somebody paid for that plate had gone to Caldris, and would go to Caldris tomorrow, and would go to Caldris when Arthur was dead.

That was Discovery Participation. His contract had the same clause in it that theirs did. Theirs had been signed in 2219 by somebody standing in a room under Mars, and his had been signed last night in a district office that was closing.

The feed cut to a reception. Long room, high ceiling, felini in clothes Arthur had no name for.

“Founding commitments have been announced by the Asterin Dockyards consortium, by Panthera Frontier Solutions, and by eleven private households,” the anchor said, and the faces came in a row, and Arthur knew three of them from the feeds and one of them from a shampoo advertisement. “A spokesman confirmed that the first residential tranche is fully subscribed.”

Then footage from under Mars. It always came at the end, because it was the part people watched.

A crawler camera going down a shaft. A lamp finding a corridor five meters wide and six high, running out past where the lamp reached. A doorway four meters tall. A wall with no join in it anywhere, and a recess two and a half meters up that somebody, once, had put a hand on and turned.

Arthur sat forward without meaning to.

“Recovery from the vaults continues to outpace projection,” the anchor said, “with the Combine reporting a fourth consecutive year of record participation.”

Record participation. Forty to sixty percent of a survey team does not come back off a new branch, and that figure is published, and every recruit is read it at intake, and Arthur had read it himself at fourteen in a filing that nobody had written to be read. Record participation meant a lot of people had signed. It did not mean anything else.

He watched the corridor anyway. Everybody watched the corridor.

“In the Marrowen basin,” the anchor said, and the picture changed, “provisional counts from Tuesday's surge now stand at forty-five thousand.”

Water in a street. Water where a street had been. A gray line of people on a berm with plastic sheeting over their heads, and behind them a pump house with its roof gone, and Arthur knew exactly what that pump house had sounded like when it worked, because he had slept four blocks from one his whole life.

“Relocation officers are on site. The Commonwealth has designated the basin for orderly withdrawal.”

Nine seconds. He counted them, and then the anchor was back in front of Saturn with a smile on, because that was the last item and they always ended on the good one.

Arthur closed his hand and the panel went out.

He was not angry. That was the thing he noticed about himself, sitting there with the taste of sleep in his mouth. Forty-five thousand people on the other side of the world had drowned on a Tuesday and he had watched it between a shampoo face and a rendering of a ring, and what he mostly felt was a low level tiredness, the way you feel about weather. Somewhere down there a boy his age was standing on a berm under a plastic sheet, and the difference between that boy and Arthur was that Arthur's family had spent a house on his head.

Two hundred years of construction. Nine hundred thousand people who would be born under a sky nobody had to defend.

He wanted it so badly his jaw hurt.

Then the cabin lights came up half a notch, and out the port the black had gone gray, and there was a line in the sky.

It did not look like a structure. It looked like somebody had drawn on the window with a ruler and forgotten to stop. It came down out of the dark above them, thinner than a thread and perfectly straight, and it went down through the cloud deck and kept going, and it did not end anywhere Arthur could see. Lights ran up it in a slow chain. He followed it down until the curve of the world took it, and up until it went past anything the port would show him, and both directions kept going.

Pearl stirred against his shoulder.

“Is that it,” she whispered.

“That's it.”

She did not lift her head.

The shuttle came down through the cloud and the Prowl came up underneath them, and Arthur stopped breathing for a second.

It went to the horizon in every direction the port would give him, a floor of light with no dark in it anywhere. Towers stood in it in ranks, and between the ranks were more towers. Between those were lit canyons with traffic moving in layers, and all of it ran out to the curve and did not stop at the curve. He looked for the end of the city the way he had looked for the end of the tether, and got the same answer.

A billion people. He had known the figure since school and it had been a word.

At the center of it, coming up out of the light like something dropped through the roof of the world, the base of High Perch stood in a yard of its own, and the yard alone was the size of his district.

Then the shuttle put its nose over and turned away from it.

The line went out of the port and came back in the far window, on the wrong side, and stayed there while they lost altitude.

“We're not landing there,” Pearl said into his shoulder, with her eyes still shut. “Nothing flies inside sixty kilometers of a tether. The air's closed all the way around and all the way up.”

“Then where.”

“Talaris. Seventy-one out. They drive us the rest.”

She had never been to the Prowl in her life. She had read about it, same as he had. She always came back from a thing she had read with the distances in her mouth, and Arthur always came back with what a survey team gets paid.

So he watched the thing he had come for slide backward past his shoulder for eleven minutes.

The field took them in a stack of five. Below the wing, freight lay in blocks out to a fence he could not find. There were aircraft on the ground in numbers he could not hold, and somewhere behind the terminal a hauler lifted off a pad every twenty seconds.

“Cohort four,” a woman said at the hatch, over and over, in the voice of somebody who had said it eleven thousand times. “Cohort four, red line on the deck, follow it, don't stop on it.”

The heat came up through the deck plating and got him in the sinuses. It smelled like scorched grease and standing water. Pearl walked into his back, gripped his jacket at the shoulder blade, and did not let go of it. They went down the line in a file of thirty-eight, and every one of them was eighteen or nineteen and from somewhere else. A boy from the delta cities had his father's suitcase, hardshell, older than the boy. A girl three ahead was in boots so new they were still creaking. Two of them were crying and doing a bad job of hiding it, and nobody looked, because everyone was working on their own face.

The transport was waiting on the apron with its skirts down, riding two and a half feet off the surface and holding it. It was armored to the roofline, matte and unmarked except for the company shield on the flank. The windows were fifty millimeters of laminate with a green cast to them. Arthur got a window seat over the second skirt. Pearl took the aisle and put her arm through his. The doors sealed, and the transport came up level and started to move.

The Ronda began at the fence.

Towers went up out of it in rows that ran to the limit of the glass, sixty and seventy floors of them, gray and beige and gray, with the sides still open to the frame. On the nearest one a printer head hung off a rail at the fortieth floor, laying a wall in strips while laundry dried on lines nine meters under it. People stood on the balcony under the laundry watching the printer work, and a child on the balcony under that one waved at the transport with both arms. The towers carried serial numbers a meter high, stencilled at the base, and each number ended in a year. Arthur read four of them going past. The years were 2229, 2231, 2231, and 2226.

He said the word temporary in his head, looked at the 2226, and could not make the two things sit in the same skull.

Water came out of a standpipe at the corner in a line of yellow jugs sixty long. The woman at the head of the line held a numbered ticket up over her head so the people at the back could see it, and the number was 812. Rails crossed overhead in three layers on frames welded out of whatever. A foundry was running with its doors open, and the whole intersection went orange twice while they waited to cross. Under the second overpass the market was going in the dark with no lamps at all, four hundred stalls lit by nothing but QUIP panels, every one of them somebody's wrist. The light came off them in the same clean blue that came off Arthur's when he opened his hand. His and theirs and the anchor's and the Caldris family's, the same panel in every hand in the system, allotted at birth.

Then the transport turned onto a through-lane and the traffic opened and the towers began to change.

The sound was what went first. The rail frames stopped, and there was nothing overhead anymore, and the generators stopped, and after a while Arthur could hear the transport's own handlers whining under the floor, which he had not been able to hear since the fence. Then the printers stopped, because everything out this way was finished. Then the dust stopped. He put two fingers on the glass and there was nothing on it.

“It's quiet,” Pearl said.

“Yeah.”

“No. Arthur. Listen to it.”

He listened to it. Back at the crossing a foundry had been running with its doors open into a street where people lived. Out here the machinery that ran a city of a billion people had gone somewhere he could not see it and had taken its noise with it.

The cordon came up at a wall with 12 KM stencilled on the gate house in letters two meters high. Six lanes, a gate house on each, Unification troopers in field plate with their visors down and their weapons slung across the front where their hands were. The transport stopped. The driver dropped his window, a trooper put a reader in through it, and every QUIP on the bus lit at once without being asked, thirty-eight blue panels standing up out of thirty-eight wrists, name and issue and DNA lock. In the lane to their right a civil coach was standing with all its baggage out on the ground in rows and a family beside the rows, and a trooper had the father apart from them with a hand flat on his chest, holding him where he was.

Arthur counted forty seconds of it before the transport moved, and it was still going on when the wall took it out of the window.

Verdanza started with grass.

It came right up to the roadway on both sides and ran back from it in a green that had never been anything else, cut short and watered. Sprinklers were going at midday on a lawn four hectares deep, throwing water into the air where the sun could take it, and behind the water there was a house with nine windows across the front and a stand of trees older than the tether. Then a wall, and another one. Then a lawn with a private pad on it and a flier folded down on the pad. Then a lake with a dock and a boat with a roof.

There were no people in any of it. In twenty minutes of ground and houses and water he counted three gardeners and a woman on a horse. He had never in his life been anywhere he could not hear a neighbor through a wall.

Pearl's fingers tightened on his arm.

“That'll be us one day,” she whispered. She had her chin nearly on his shoulder and her breath went into the fur behind his jaw. “The Ashpelt place. Right there, the one with the lake. Ashpelt.”

Arthur grunted.

He kept looking out the window because it was the only thing to do with his face. She was joking. She was always joking. She had also said it out loud on a bus in front of thirty-six other people. There was a house behind that water with nine windows in it, and somebody in it had done exactly the thing Red Horizon was about to send Arthur down a shaft to do.

“Ashpelt,” he said. “Yeah. Sure.”

“I'd take the boat.”

“You'd sink the boat.”

“I'd take the boat and sink it and you'd buy me another one,” Pearl said. She put her head down on his shoulder for a second and lifted it again.

Then the light in the transport changed, and he looked up, and stopped hearing her.

The facility had been in the window for a while and he had taken it for weather. It stood across the whole forward glass and kept standing there as they came on, a shell of white ribbing and glass with the top of it lost in its own haze. The tether came down through a slot in the crown of it and went inside.

“Eleven kilometers a side,” Pearl said. “They moved a river for it.”

Freight lanes ran into the base in ranks, numbered on the arches. Arthur read the last arch as they turned for it. The number on it was 214, and he laughed out loud and startled the boy across the aisle.

Two hundred and fourteen freight lanes. Cargo trains in eleven of them that he could see, standing under gantries with climber cars off their cradles and open down one side.

Then the arch went over the transport and the sky went away.

Inside was a city with a roof on it, and Arthur's first thought was that somebody had left the sun on. The light lay over everything, even and white and coming from no direction he could find. There was no shadow anywhere. There was no shadow under his own hand on the glass, which he did not like.

Roadways ran in four levels, one above another, and along the second one trees had been planted in long beds. Birds went between them. Actual birds, in and out of the branches with a roof over them, and Arthur wondered whether they knew where they were and decided they probably did not. A train came across the ceiling on a rail, passed directly over the transport, and made no sound he could hear at all.

A cart stood at the foot of a tower with its prices in the air above it. Coffee was ninety. Arthur owed Sable forty for a ferry across a city that was being closed, and a cup of coffee in here was ninety, and he was carrying no money of any kind.

The middle of the enclosure had a cluster of skyscrapers in it, twenty or thirty of them standing close together, and he had been looking at them for a while without thinking about them. Then one of the skyscrapers moved.

It came up off the floor and rose through the middle of the cluster with lit windows all down its flank, and it kept rising, and Arthur understood what he had been looking at. The tower was a climber car. The cluster was High Perch.

The thread he had watched out the shuttle port for an hour came into this room as forty or fifty cables running side by side with room between them, and the buildings were on the cables. Floors and lit rooms were built around them and stacked up them until the haze took the top. All of it went down into a shaft at the center of the floor with lamps and railing around the mouth, and what Arthur could see of High Perch was the piece between the roof and the hole. The rest of it was over his head as far as the sky went and under his feet as far as they had needed to dig.

The transport came down its ramp, pulled onto a deck marked in company colors, and set its skirts on the floor. The doors opened. The air that came in was cool and clean and carried no smell at all.

The file went across the deck toward a hall with a ceiling forty meters up and a Red Horizon shield on the back wall six stories tall. Arthur got nine steps across the deck and stopped.

The cables stood over him. He counted them because it was the only thing he could think to do, and he got forty, and then fifty, and then he lost his place where they ran together in the middle of the bundle.

He had never once used the module on purpose. Pearl had seated it in the dark of the cabin and he had spent the flight wondering whether it was the reason he could hear which of two fans had the bad bearing, and he had not asked her. He thought at it now.

Every cable he had counted had cables behind it. He counted in tens because there was no way to hold them otherwise, and he went past a hundred, and he went past two hundred, and the bundle kept going back into itself.

Arthur breathed out.

Pearl had him by the arm with both hands. She was smiling with her whole face. “Come on.”

“QUIPs up, do not put your bags down,” a man was calling from a rostrum. He had a headset on and a Cohort staff band on his sleeve, and he called the numbers without reading them off anything. “Numbers only. I don't want names. Two-fourteen, two-nineteen, two-twenty-two, two-thirty, you are the yellow line, kit issue, medical, you ship tonight. Two-thirty-eight through two-forty-nine, blue line, hold hall, you're on tomorrow's climber.”

Arthur heard both numbers.

Pearl's hand was still through his arm. It stayed there for a second longer, and then he felt it happen: her fingers came off the inside of his elbow one at a time, and her arm came out of his and went down at her side.

“Blue line,” she said.