The Night's Dawn Trilogy (19 page)

After the evening meal Syrinx went back to her old room, asking to be left alone for a few hours. Ruben and Athene acceded,
retreating to the white iron chairs on the patio and conversing on the singular-engagement mode, sober faces betraying their
worry.

She lay back on the bed, staring through the transparent roof at the lazy winding valleys beyond the dimming axial light-tube.
In the seven years since
Oenone
reached maturity the trees had grown and bushes fattened, expanding the green-on-green patterns of her childhood.

She could feel
Oenone
out on the ledge, hull being cleaned of foam, mobile gantry arms in position, giving technicians full access to the battered
crew toroid. Now it had completed its nutrient digestion its mindtone was returning to normal. It was enjoying being the centre
of attention, busy conversing with the ledge crews over aspects of the repairs. Two biotechnicians were squatting over a ruined
sensor blister with portable probes, taking samples.

Daddy?

I’m here, Sly-minx. I told you I always would be.

Thank you. I never doubted. How is he?

Happy.

A little of the dread lifted from her heart. Is he ready?

Yes. But there was so much missing from recent years. We have integrated what we can. The core of identity is viable but it
lacks substance. He remains a child, perhaps the part of him you loved the most.

Can I talk to him yet?

You may.

She was standing barefoot on thick, cool grass beside a broad stream, the axial light-tube shining like a thread of captured
sunlight overhead. There were tall trees around her, bowing under the weight of vines hanging between their branches, and
long cascades of flowers fell to the floor, some of them trailing in the clear water. Butterflies flapped lazily through the
still air, contending with bees for perches on the flowers, birds cheeped all around.

It was the clearing where she had spent so many days as a girl, just past the bottom of the lawn. Looking down she saw she
was wearing a simple cotton summer dress with a tiny blue and white check. Long loose hair swirled around skinny hips. Her
body was thirteen years old; and she knew why even as she heard the children shouting and laughing. Young enough to be regarded
as part of childhood’s conspiracy, old enough to be revered, to hold herself aloof and not be resented for it.

They burst into the clearing, six ten-year-old boys, in shorts and T-shirts, bare chested and in swimming trunks, smiling
and laughing, strong limbs flashing in the warm light.

“Syrinx!” He was in their middle, sandy hair askew, grinning up at her.

“Hello, Thetis,” she said.

“Are you coming with us?” he asked breathlessly.

A raft of rough silicon sheets, foamed aluminium I-beams, and empty plastic drink tanks—familiar enough to bring tears to
her eyes—was lying on the bank, half in the water.

“I can’t, Thetis. I just came to make sure you’re all right.”

“Course I’m all right!” He tried to do a cartwheel on the grass, but toppled over and fell into a laughing heap. “We’re going
all the way down to the salt-water reservoir. It’ll befun, we’ve not told anyone, and the personality won’t see us. We could
meet anything down there, pirates or monsters. And we might find some treasure. I’ll bring it back, and I’ll be the most famous
captain in all of the habitat.” He scrambled to his feet again, eyes shining. “
Please
come, Syrinx. Please?”

“Another time, I promise.”

There were shouts from the other boys as the raft was pushed into the fast-flowing stream. It bobbed about at alarming angles
for a few seconds before gradually righting itself. The boys started to pile on.

Thetis’s head swivelled between Syrinx and the raft, desperately torn. “Promise? Really promise?”

“I do.” She reached out and held his head between her hands, and kissed him lightly on his brow.

“Syrinx!” He squirmed in agitation, colouring as the other boys launched into a flurry of catcalls.

“Here,” she said, and took off a slim silver necklace with an intricately carved pale jade stone the size of a grape. “Wear
this, it’ll be like I’m there with you. And next time I visit, you can tell me all about it.”

“Right!” And he ran for the raft, splashing through the shallows as he fumbled to fasten the chain round his neck. “Don’t
forget, come back. You promised.”

How far will he go?
she asked Sinon as a soaking Thetis was hauled over the edge of the raft by a couple of his friends.

As far as he wishes.

And how long will it last?

As long as he wants.

Daddy!

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be flippant. Probably about ten or fifteen years. You see, even childhood will ultimately pale.
Games that defy adults and friends that mean the whole world are all very well, but a major part of what a ten-year-old is,
is the wish to be old; his actions are a shadow of what he sees as adult behaviour. There is an old saying, that the boy is
the father of the man. So when he has had his fill of adventure and realizes he will never be that man, that he is a sterile
child,his identity will fade out of the multiplicity into the overall personality. Like all of us will eventually, Sly-minx,
even you.

You mean he will lose hope.

No. Death is the loss of hope, everything else is merely despair.

The children were paddling now, getting the hang of the raft. Thetis was sitting at the front shouting orders, in his element.
He looked round, smiled and waved. Syrinx raised a hand.

Adamists lose hope,
she said.
The
Dymasio
’s captain lost all hope. That’s why he did what he did.

Adamists are incomplete. We know we will continue after the body dies; in some way, some fraction of us will linger for hundreds
of millennia. For myself, I cannot even contemplate abandoning the multiplicity segment of the personality, not with you and
my other children and grandchildren to watch over. Perhaps in ten or fifteen generations, when I can conjure up no sense of
attachment, then I may seek full unity with the habitat personality, and transfer my allegiance to all Edenists. But it will
be a very long time.

Adamists have their religions. I thought their gods gave them hope.

They do, to the very devout. But consider the disadvantage under which the ordinary Adamist labours. The mythical kingdom,
that is all their heaven can ever be, beyond ever knowing. In the end, such belief is very hard for poor sinful mortals to
retain. Our afterlife, however, is tangible, real. For us it is not a question of faith, we have fact.

Unless you are Thetis.

Even he survives.

Some of him, a stunted existence. Floating down a river that will never end.

Loved, treasured, welcomed, eternal.

The raft disappeared round a bend, a clump of willows blocking it from sight. High-pitched voices drifted through the air.
Syrinx let her hand drop. “I will visit you again, big brother,” she told the empty gurgling stream. “Again and again, every
time I come back. I will make you look forward to my visits and the stories I bring, I will give you something to hope for.
Promise.”

In her room she looked up at the darkened indistinct landscape far above. The axial light-tube had been reduced to a lunar
presence masked by the evening’s first rain-clouds.

Syrinx closed her mind to the other Edenists, closed it to the voidhawks flying outside, closed it to the habitat personality.
Only
Oenone
remained. Beloved who would understand, because they were one.

Emerging from the jumble of doubt and misery was the tenuous wish that the Adamists were right after all, and there was such
a thing as God, and an afterlife, and souls. That way Thetis wouldn’t be lost. Not for ever.

It was such a tiny sliver of hope.

Oenone
’s thoughts rubbed against hers, soothing and sympathetic.

If there is a God, and if somewhere my brother’s soul is intact, please look after him. He will be so alone.

Over a thousand tributaries contributed towards the Juliffe's rapacious flow, a wrinkled network of rivers and streams gathering
in the rainfall over an area of one and a half million square kilometres. They emptied themselves into the main course at
full volume throughout the whole two hundred and ninety-five days of Lalonde's year, bringing with them immense amounts of
silt, rotting vegetation, and broken trees. The turbulence and power of the huge flow was such that the water along the last
five hundred kilometres turned the same colour and thickness as milky coffee. By the time it reached the coast the river's
width had swollen to over seventeen kilometres; and the sheer weight of water backed up for two thousand kilometres behind
it was awesome. At the mouth it looked as though one sea was bleeding into another.

For the final hundred-kilometre stretch, the banks on the northern side were non-existent; marshland extended up to a hundred
and fifty kilometres into the countryside. Named the Hultain Marsh after the first reckless ecological assessment team member
to venture a few brief kilometres inside its fringes, it proved an inhospitable zone of reeds and algae and sharp-toothed
lizard-analogue animals of varying sizes. No human explorer ever managed to traverse it; the ecological evaluators contented
themselves with Hultain's sketchy report and the satellite survey pictures. When the wind blew from the north, it carried
a powerful smell of corruption over the river into Durringham. To the city's residents the Hultain Marsh had virtually assumed
the quality of myth, a repository of bad luck and ghoulish creatures.

The land on the Juliffe's southern side, however, rose up to twelve metres above the surging brown waters. Sprawling aloof
along the bank, Durringham was relatively safe from the most potent of the Juliffe's spring floods. Poised between spaceport
and water, the city was the key to colonizing the entire river basin.

The Juliffe provided the Lalonde Development Company with the greatest conceivable natural roadway into Amarisk's interior.
With its tributaries extending into every valley in the centre of the landmass, there was no need to hack out and maintain
expensive tracks in the jungle. Abundant wood provided the raw material for boat hulls, the simplest and cheapest form of
travel possible. So shipbuilding swiftly became the capital's principal industry, with nearly a quarter of its population
dependent on the success of the shipyards.

Captains under contract to the LDC would take newly arrived colonist groups upriver, and bring down the surplus produce from
the established farms to be sold in the city. There were several hundred boats docking and sailing every day. The port with
its jetties and warehouses and fishmar-kets and shipyards grew until it stretched the entire length of the city. It was also
the logical place to site the transients' dormitories.

Jay Hilton thought the dormitory was tremendously exciting. It was so different from anything in her life to date. A simple
angled roof of ezystak panels eighty metres long, supported by a framework of metal girders. There were no walls, the LDC
officer said they would have made it too hot inside. There was a concrete floor, and row after row of hard wooden cots. She
had slept in a sleeping-bag the first night, right at the centre of the dormitory with the rest of Group Seven's kids. It
had taken her an age to fall asleep, people kept talking, and the river made great swooshing noises as it flowed past the
embankment. And she didn't think she would ever get used to the humidity, her clothes hadn't been completely dry since she
got off the spaceplane.

During the day the dormitory thronged with people, and the alleyways between the cots were great for chases and other games.
Life underneath its rattling roof was very easygoing; nothing was organized for the kids, so they were free to please themselves
how they chose. She had spent the second day getting to know the other kids in Group Seven. In the morning they ran riot among
the adults, then after lunch they had all made their way down to the riverside to watch the boats. Jay had loved it. The whole
port area looked like something out of a historical AV programme, a slice of the Earth's Middle Ages preserved on a far planet.
Everything was made of wood, and the boats were so beautiful, with their big paddles on each side, and tall iron stacks that
sent out long plumes of grey-white smoke.

Twice during the day the sky had clouded over, and rain had fallen like a solid sheet. The kids had all retreated under the
dormitory roof, watching spellbound as the grey veil obscured the Juliffe, and huge lightning bolts crashed overhead.

She had never imagined the wild was so wild. But her mother wasn't worried, so she wasn't. Sitting down and just watching
had never been such fun before. She couldn't think how wonderful it was going to be actually travelling on a river-boat. From
a starship one day to a paddle-steamer the next! Life was glorious.

The food they had been served was strange, the aboriginal fruit was all odd shapes with a mildly spicy flavouring, but at
least there wasn't any vat meat like they had at the arcology. After the high tea the staff served for the kids in the big
canteen at one end of the dormitory, she went back to the riverside to see if she could spot any aboriginal animals. She remembered
the vennal, something like a cross between a lizard and a monkey. It featured prominently in the didactic memory which the
LDC immigration advisory team at the orbital-tower base-station had imprinted before she left Earth. In the mirage floating
round inside her skull it looked kind of cute. She was secretly hoping she'd be able to have one as a pet once they reached
their allotted land upriver.