enthusiasm and opinions and tirelessly keen to hunt or drink or fight or fuck. “They try to put a little voice in our heads that will always say, ‘You don’t matter. What you do means nothing!’”
Elime, like their father, was having none of this. So the aliens could sail within the Towers and cruise between the stars and construct whole worlds – so what? There were powers beyond them that they didn’t fully understand. Perhaps this nesting, this shell-after-shell-beyond-what-you-knew principle went on for ever! Did the aliens give up and do nothing? No! They had their disputes and contentions, their disagreements and alliances, their wins and losses, even if they were somehow more oblique and rarefied than the wars, victories and defeats that the Sarl both enjoyed and suffered. The stratagems and power-plays, the satisfactions and disillusions that the Sarl experienced mattered as much to them as those of the aliens did to their own overweeningly cosmopolitan and civilised souls.
You lived within your level and accepted that you did; you played by the rules within that level, and therein lay the measure of your worth. All was relative, and by refusing to accept the lesson the aliens were implicitly trying to teach here – behave, accept, bow down, conform – a hairy-arsed bunch of primitives like the Sarl could score their own kind of victory against the most overarching sophisticates the galaxy had to offer.
Elime had been wildly excited. This visit had reinforced what he’d seen during his first time at the Surface and had made sense of all the things their father had been telling them since they were old enough to understand. Ferbin had been amazed; Elime was positively glowing with joy at the prospect of returning to their own level with a kind of civilisational mandate to carry on his father’s work of unifying the Eighth – and who knew, perhaps beyond.
At the time, Ferbin, who was just starting to take an interest in such things, had been more concerned with the fact that his beautiful second cousin Truffe, who was a little older than he and with whom he’d started to think he might be falling in love, had succumbed – with frightening, indecent ease – to Elime’s bluff charms during the visit to the Surface. That was the sort of conquering Ferbin was starting to take an interest in, thank you, and Elime had already beaten him to it.
They had returned to the Eighth, Elime with a messianic gleam in his eye, Ferbin with a melancholic feeling that, now Truffe was forever denied him – he couldn’t imagine she’d settle for him after his brother, and besides, he wasn’t sure he wanted her any more anyway – his young life was already over. He also felt that – in some strange, roundabout way – the aliens had succeeded in lowering his expectations by the same degree they had inadvertently raised Elime’s.
He realised he had drifted off in this reverie when he heard Holse shouting at him. He looked about. Had he missed a Tower? He saw what looked like a new Tower some distance off to his right and forward. It looked oddly bright in its paleness. This was because of the great wall of darkness filling the sky ahead. He was damp all over; they must have flown through a cloud. The last he recalled they had been flying just under the surface of some long grey mass of vapour with hazy tendrils stretching down like forest creepers all around them.
“. . . grit-cloud!” he heard Holse yell.
He looked up at the cliff of darkness ahead and realised it was indeed a silse cloud; a mass of sticky rain it would be dangerous and possibly fatal to try and fly through. Even the caude he was riding seemed to have realised things weren’t quite right; it shivered beneath him and he could hear it making moaning, whining noises. Ferbin looked to either side. There was no way round the great dark cloud and it was far too tall for them to go over the top. The cloud was loosing its gritty cargo of rain, too; great dragged veils of darkness swept back along the ground beneath it.
They’d have to land and sit it out. He signalled to Holse and they wheeled right round, back the way they’d come, descending fast towards the nearest forest on the side of a tall hill bound on three sides by the loop of a broad river. Drops of