In the Un-Black by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter [Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-09T00:56:29+00:00

La-ba had been raised into strangeness.

The hollow cable had a floor that lifted you up, and windows so you could see out. Inside, she rode all the way out of the air, into a place of harsh flat light.

When she looked down she saw a floor of churning red gas. Auroras flapped in its textured layers, making it glow purple. When she looked up she saw only a burning, glaring light.

The Old Man tried to make her understand. “The light is the sun. The red is the world. The Post floats in the air of the world.”

She couldn’t stop staring at his face. It was a mass of wrinkles. He had one eye, one dark purple pit. His face was the strangest thing of all, much stranger than the sun and the churning world.

The cable ended in another giant ball, like the Post. But this ball was dimpled by big black pits, like the bruises left by the heels of her hands in the face of the We-ku. And it floated in space, not the air.

Inside the ball there was a cavity, but there were no people or Cadre Squares and no Birthing Vat: only vast mechanical limbs that glistened, sinister, sliding over each other.

“No people live here,” she said.

He smiled. “One person does.”

He showed her his home. It wasn’t a dorm. It was just a shack made of bits of shining plastic. There were blankets on the floor, and clothes, and empty food packets. It was dirty, and it smelled a little.

She looked around. “There is no supply dispenser.”

“People give me food. And water and clothes. From their rations.”

She tried to understand. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Because life is short. People want—”

“What?”

“Something more than the war.”

She thought about that. “There is the dance.”

He grinned, his empty eye socket crumpling. “I never could dance. Come.”

He led her to a huge window. Machines screened out the glare of the sun above and the glower of the overheated planet below.

Between sun and planet, there was only blackness.

“No,” the Old Man said gently. “Not blackness. Look.”

They waited there for long heartbeats.

At last she saw a faint glow, laced against the black. It had structure, fine filaments and threads. It was beautiful, eerie, remote.

“It is un-black.”

He pointed at the sun. “The sun is alone. If there were other suns near, we would see them, as points of light. The suns gather in pools. There are not even pools of suns nearby. The un-black is pools of suns, very far away.”

She understood that.

“Others lived here before me,” he said. “They learned how to see with the machines. They left records of what they saw.” He dug into a pocket and pulled out a handful of bones: human bones, the small bones of a hand or foot. They were scored by fine marks.

“They speak to you with bones?”

He shrugged. “If you smear blood or dirt on the walls it falls away. What else do we have to draw on, but our bones, and our hearts?” He fingered the bones carefully.

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