Flux

The photons emitted by the lines smelled thin, sharp. The spin storm was coming.

Dura had chosen a sleep place about fifty mansheights from the center of the Human Beings’ current encampment, in a place where the Magfield had felt particularly thick, comfortingly secure. Now she began to Wave toward the Net. Wriggling, rippling her limbs, she felt electricity course through her epidermis; and she pushed with arms and legs at the invisible, elastic resistance of the Magfield as if it were a ladder. Fully awake now, she found herself filled with a belated anxiety — an anxiety healthily laced with guilt at her tardiness — and as she slid across the Magfield she spread the webbed fingers of her hands and beat at the Air, trying to work up still more speed. Neutron superfluid made up most of the bulk of the Air, so there was barely any resistance to her hands; but still she clawed at the Air, her impatience mounting, seeking comfort in activity.

The vortex lines slid like dreams across her field of vision now. Ripples hurtled in great even chains, as if the vortex lines were ropes shaken by giants located in the mists of the Poles. As the waves beat past her they emitted a low, cool groan. The amplitude of the waves was already half a mansheight. By Bolder’s guts, she thought, maybe that old fool Adda is right for once; maybe this really is going to be the worst yet.

Slowly, painfully slowly, the encampment grew from a distant abstraction, a melange of movement and noise, to a community. The encampment was based around the crude cylindrical Net made of plaited tree-bark, slung out along the Magfield lines. Most people slept and ate bound up to the Net, and the length of the cylinder was a patchwork of tied-up belongings, privacy blankets, cleaning brushes, simple clothes — ponchos, tunics and belts — and a few pathetic bundles of food. Scraps of half-finished wooden artifacts and flags of untreated Air-pig leather dangled from the Net ropes.

The Net was five mansheights across and a dozen long. It was at least five generations old, according to the older folk like Adda. And it was the only home of about fifty humans — and their only treasure.

As she neared it, clawing her way through the clinging Magfield, Dura suddenly saw the flimsy construct with an objective eye — as if she had not been born in a blanket tied to its filthy knots, as if she would not die still clinging to its fibers. How fragile it was: how pathetic, how defenseless they truly were. Even as she approached to join her people in this moment of need, Dura felt depressed, weak, helpless.

The adults and older children were Waving all around the Net, working at knots which dwarfed their fingers. She saw Esk, picking patiently at a section of the Net. Dura thought he watched her approach, but it was hard to be sure. In any event Philas, his wife, was with him, and Dura kept her face averted. Here and there Dura could make out small children and infants still attached to the Net by tethers of varying lengths. Each child, left tethered up by laboring parents and siblings, was a small, wailing bundle of fear and loneliness, Waving futilely against its constraints, and Dura felt her heart go out to every one of them. Dura spotted the girl Dia, heavily pregnant with her first child. Working with her husband Mur, Dia was pulling tools and bits of clothing from the Net and stuffing them into a sack; Air-sweat glistened from her swollen, naked belly. Dia was a small-limbed, childlike woman whose pregnancy had served to make her only more vulnerable and young-looking; watching her work now, her every movement redolent of fear, made something move inside childless Dura, an urge to protect.

The animals — the tribe’s small herd of a dozen adult Air-pigs and about as many piglets — were restrained inside the Net, along its axis. They bleated, their din adding a mournful counterpoint to the shouts and cries of humans; they huddled together at the heart of the Net in a trembling mass of fins, jet orifices and stalks erect with huge, bowl-shaped eyes. A few people had gone inside the Net and were trying to calm the animals, to attach leaders to their pierced fins. But the dismantling of the Net was proceeding slowly and unevenly, Dura saw as she approached, and the herd was a mass of panicky noise, uncoordinated movement.

She heard voices raised in fear and impatience. What had seemed from a little further away to be a reasonably controlled operation was actually little more than a shambles, she realized.

There was something in her peripheral vision — a motion, blue-white and distant… More ripples in the vortex tubes, coming from the distant North: immense, jagged irregularities utterly dwarfing the small instabilities she’d observed so far.

There wasn’t much time.

Logue, her father, hung in the Magfield a little way from the Net. Adda, too old and slow for the urgent work of dismantling the encampment, hovered beside Logue, his thin face twisted, sour. Logue bellowed out orders in his huge baritone, but, Dura could already see, with very little effect on the Human Beings’ coordination. Still Dura had that odd feeling of timelessness, of detachment, and she studied her father as if meeting him for the first time in many weeks. Logue’s hair, plastered against his scalp, was crumpled and yellowed; his face was a mask through which the round, boyish features shared by Farr could still be discerned, obscured by a mat of scars and wrinkles.

As Dura approached, Logue turned to her, his brown eyecups wide, his cheek muscles working. “You took your time,” he growled at her. “Where have you been? You’re needed here. Can’t you see that?”

His words cut through her detachment, and despite herself, despite the urgency of the moment, she felt resentment building in her. “Where? I’ve been to the Core in a Xeelee nightfighter. Where do you think I’ve been?”

Logue turned from her in apparent disgust. “You shouldn’t blaspheme,” he muttered.

She wanted to laugh. Impatient with him, with herself, with the continual friction between them, she shook her head. “Oh, into the Ring with it. What do you want me to do?”

Now old Adda leaned forward, the open pores among his remaining hair sparkling Air-sweat. “Don’t know there’s much you can do,” he said sourly. “Look at them. What a shambles.”

“We’re not going to make it in time, are we?” Dura asked him. She pointed North. “Look at that ripple. We won’t get out of the way before it hits.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” The old man raised his empty eyes to the South Pole; its soft glow illuminated the backs of his eyes, the cup-retinas there; fragments of debris swirled around the rims and tiny cleansing symbiotes swam constantly in and out of the cups.

Logue bellowed suddenly, “Mur, you damn fool. If that knot is stuck then cut it. Rip it. Gnaw it through if you have to! — but don’t just leave it there, or half the Net is going to go flapping off into the Quantum Sea when the storm hits us…”

“Worst I’ve ever seen,” Adda muttered, sniffing. “Never known the photons to smell so sour. Like a frightened piglet… Of course,” he went on after a few moments, “I remember one spin storm when I was a kid…”

Dura couldn’t help but smile. Adda was the wisest among them, probably, about the ways of the Star. But he relished his role as doomsayer… he could never let go of the mysteries of his own past, of the wild, deadly days which only he could remember…

Logue turned on her with fury, his face as unstable as the quivering Magfield. “While you grin, we could die,” he hissed.

“I know.” She reached out and touched his arm, feeling the hot tide of Air which superleaked from his clenched muscles. “I know. I’m — sorry.”

He frowned, staring at her, and reached forward, as if to touch her. But he drew the hand back. “Perhaps you’re not as strong as I like to think you are.”