floated in through his ear, took root and blossomed. “Amnesia,” he replied. “Guess I must’ve hit my head or something.” He dabbed behind his ear. “Ouch,” he added, by way of corroboration. “I can’t seem to remember anything.”
She nodded. “Right,” she said.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“Well, we had that other case this time last year.”
“That other case.”
“Yes. Over on the East Float. They found this man clinging to the rail, and he couldn’t remember anything at all; not his name, or which Float he was from, or which sect he belonged to. They had to tell him everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“I’d like that,” Theo said passionately. “Do you think you could see your way to…?”
She pursed her lips. “Everything?”
“Oh, yes please.”
She thought for a moment, then sighed. “Oh, all right, then.” She took off the hat and the scarf, revealing a small, pretty face and an absurd amount of wavy red hair. “Drink your tea,” she said, “and I’ll tell you everything.”
It all started (she said) about a thousand years ago. A thousand, or two hundred, something like that. We don’t actually know, and who gives a damn?
Anyway, something really bad happened down on the surface. Some people think it was a war, others say it was chemicals or something, or it could have been scientists doing an experiment that went badly wrong. Anyhow, there was this very, very, very large explosion, and nobody could live on the surface any more. If we stayed on the land or the sea, we’d all die. So that just left the sky.
You’re not drinking your tea. Yes, it’s supposed to taste like that. We like it.
Luckily, there was like a thirty-year window where we could make all the necessary preparations. So, they had a big meeting, all the survivors from all the old countries, and they figured out what to do. The idea was, Venice-in-the-sky. We don’t actually know what that means, but it must’ve meant something, or they wouldn’t have called it that, would they?
It works sort of like this. There are four Floats, OK? Each Float hangs from something like a million fifty-thousand-litre helium-filled balloons. We call them the Bubbles. Now, it was clear from the start that we’d never be able to go back down to the surface again, so either we had to take stuff with us, or else it had to be sustainable; that was the key word, sustainable. It meant, we had to be able to make it or grow it twenty thousand feet up in the air.
The big breakthrough, which made it all possible, was aeroponic cultivation. Basically, that’s where you grow stuff in air rather than dirt. The idea had been around for a long time but nobody bothered with it much, because dirt was easier, apparently. Anyhow, we grow all our food that way. And, of course, the rubber trees.
Oh yes. Vital.
Well, everything, really. We use the wood for repairing the Floats, building houses, making all the stuff we use. The rubber is what we use for the Bubbles, and for cars and lorries and all that, and waterproof roofs. We twist the bark into ropes, and we rot down the leaves and everything that’s left over to make methane to power the generators. Nearly the whole of the South Float is covered with rubber plantations, and there’s about two thousand hectares on the East Float as well.
And that’s about it, really. You’re born into a sect: gardeners, rubbersmiths, carpenters and sunlighters. I’m a gardener, I work on the smaller cabbage farm on North 36C. It’s a bit of a hike, this being East 607J, but I’ve got my own car, so it’s no bother, really. Of course, when I was little I wanted to be a sunlighter, everybody does when they’re little. Very glad that particular dream never came true, thank you very much.
What? Oh, right, you don’t know. The sunlighters are the poor devils who look after the Bubbles. Very glamorous, of course, and everybody thinks you’re wonderful, but you’d have to be nuts to actually do all that stuff. Well, I’ll give you an example. If you’re a sunlighter, after five years in the job they give you a medal – real metal – and a big house and a pension for life. Or that’s the theory, anyway. Nobody’s ever survived long enough.
Anyhow, that’s really all there is to it. Nothing much ever happens, you see. Everybody’s too busy doing their work to make things happen. Once a year we all get together on South