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Morrow tried to imagine what it must have felt like to have been here, in the cramped, enclosed world of the Decks, when the GUTdrive had finally been turned off — when gravity had faded out. He imagined walking along, on his way to another routine day at work — and then that strange feeling of lightness, his feet leaving the Deck…
The klaxon had called out ever since they’d climbed down here, into the Decks, through the Locks from the forest; perhaps it had been wailing like this ever since the zero-gee catastrophe itself. The noise made it difficult even to think; he tried to control his irritability and fear.
Trapper twisted and gri
“Trapper, nothing is easy when you get to my age.”
Trapper laughed at him, with all the certainty of youth. And it was genuine youth, he reflected; Trapper was — what? Eighteen, nineteen? Children continued to be born, up in the forest, even all these decades after the opening-up of the Locks on Deck One, and the provision of AS treatment for the forest folk.
“You know,” he said, “you remind me of Spi
Trapper twisted easily, as if her small, bare body had all the litheness of rope itself; her face was a round, eager button. “Really? Spi
“Maybe,” Morrow said testily. “What I meant was, you’re just as a
Trapper frowned; there was a sprinkling of freckles across her small, flat nose, he saw, and a further smattering that reached back across her dark-fringed patch of shaven scalp. Then her grin broke out again, and he felt his heart melt; her face reminded him of the rising of a bright star over the ice fields of Callisto. She craned her neck forward and kissed him lightly on the nose.
“All part of the package,” she said. “Now come on.”
She scrambled up her rope again; within seconds she had reached her grappling hook and was preparing to throw the next one across the Deck, in preparation for the next leg of the trek.
Wearily, feeling even older than his five centuries, Morrow made his way, hand over hand, along his rope.
He tried to keep his eyes focused on the scuffed floor surface before his face. Why was he finding this damn jaunt so difficult? He was, after all, Morrow, Hero of the Elevator Shaft, as Trapper had said. And since then he had been out, beyond the ribbed walls surrounding the Decks, out into space. He had walked the surface of Callisto, and watched the rise of the bloated corpse of legendary Sol over the moon’s ice plains; he had even supervised the excavation of that ancient alien spacecraft. He’d shown courage then, hadn’t he? He must have done — why, he hadn’t even thought about it. So why did he feel so different, now he was back here, inside the Decks once more — inside the metal-walled box which had been his only world for half a mille
He’d been apprehensive ever since Louise had asked him to lead this expedition in the first place.
“I don’t want to go back in there,” he’d told Louise bluntly.
Louise Ye Armonk had come down to Callisto to congratulate him on his archaeology and to give him this new assignment. She had looked tired, old; she’d run a hand through grizzled hair. “We all have to do things we don’t want to do,” she said, as if speaking to a child, her patience barely controlled. When she’d looked at him, Morrow could detect the contempt in her eyes. “Believe me, if I had someone else to send, I’d send ’em.”
Morrow had felt a sense of panic — as if he were being asked to go back into a prison cell. “What’s the point?” he asked, his desperation growing. “The Pla
Louise’s mouth was set firm, fine wrinkles lining it. “Morrow, we can’t afford to ‘leave them to it’ any more. The Universe outside — we — are impinging on what’s happening in there. And we’ve evidence, from our monitors, that the Pla
“Morrow, there are two thousand people in there, in the Decks. There are only a handful of us outside — only a few hundred, even including the forest on Deck Zero. We can’t afford to abandon those two thousand to the Pla
Morrow heard his own teeth grind. “You’re talking about duty, then.”
Louise had studied him. “Yes, in a way. But the most fundamental duty of all: not to me, or to the Pla
“Protect,” he said sourly. “Fu
Now he looked around at the abandoned houses in their surreal rows, suspended from what felt like a vertical wall to him now, not a floor; he listened to the silence broken only by the plaintive cries of the klaxon. All the people had gone — taken, presumably into the Temples, by the Pla
Perhaps it was the very familiarity of the place that was so uncomfortable. Coming back here — even after all these decades — it was as if he had never been away; the metal-clad walls and ceiling, the rows of boxy houses, the looming tetrahedral bulks of the Pla
In the old days, before his first encounter with Arrow Maker and Spi
In fact, he realized now, no matter what he did or where he went in the future and no matter how this conflict with the Pla
Now he reached the end of his rope. He let himself drift away from the Deck a little, and launched himself through the air across the few feet to the next rope Trapper had fixed. He glanced back again; the little party was strung along the chain of ropes which led all the way back to the ramp from the upper levels.
There was a rush of air above his head, a sizzling, hissing noise.
Instinctively he ducked down, pressing his body flat against the Deck; infuriatingly he bounced away from the scarred surface, but he grasped the edges of Deck plates and clung on.
The noise had sounded like an insect’s buzz. But there were very few insects within the Decks…
Another hiss, a sigh of air above him. And it had come from the direction of the Temple which was — he sneaked a look up — still a hundred yards away. Another whisper above him — and another, and now a whole flock of them.
Someone behind him cried out, and he heard the clatter of metal against the Deck.