Ken MacLeod - Engines of Light 2 - Darklight

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Dark Light

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

www.ebookyes.com

Tor Books by Ken MacLeod

THE FALL REVOLUTION

The Star FractionThe Stone CanalThe Cassini DivisionThe Sky Road

THE ENGINES OF LIGHT

Cosmonaut KeepDark Light

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

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Dark Light

DARK LIGHT

Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

A Tor BookPublished by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC175 Fifth AvenueNew York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 0-312-70388-0

www.ebookyes.com

First Edition: January 2002

To Andrew and Lesley

Thanks to Carol, Sharon, and Michael, for more than usual.

Thanks to Farah Mendlesohn for reading and commenting on the draft and for historical information

about Rawliston (any mistakes are mine); to Catherine Crockett for details about the sky people; to

Rachael Lininger for help with the folk song; and to Mic Cheetham and Tim Holman for holding out for

an ending.

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Dark Light

Don’t fear that philosophy’s an impious way—superstition’s more likely to lead folk astray.—Lucretius,

De rerum natura, Book One paraphrased by Joanna Taine

1 urbi et orbi

2 there dwelt a lass in rawley’s toun

3 customs

4 the first man on venus

5 the apothecary’s traffic

6 dawson’s night

7 ancient astronauts

8 a man you don’t meet every day

9 vaster than intellects and more cool

10 the gods ourselves

11 catastrophic loss of data

12 lights in the sky

13 st. teilhard’s day

Rawliston Sprawls; from space it’s a grubby smudge, staining the glassy clarity of the atmosphere along

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fifty kilometers of coastline. Biggest city on the planet, home to a million or so human and other beings.

Seven centuries old and ever renewed; two centuries on from the biggest jolt it ever got; hours away

from another. It’s coming like an earthquake, coming like a runaway train, coming like a lightspeed ship.

Stone froze in a cold sky. Around him, the glider’s struts creaked and its cables sang. Hundreds of

meters below his feet, the valley crawled. The Great Vale stretched fifty or so kilometers before him and

the same distance behind him, its fields and towns, rivers and screes filling his sight. Through the

imperfect glass disks of his goggles he couldn’t quite see the mighty rockfalls at either end that had,

thousands of years ago, isolated the valley, but he could just make out the distant gleam of the lake

formed by Big River against the natural dam at the eastern end. The midmorning sun glimmered on a

series of meanders in the river’s fat, lazy length along the valley’s broad floor. The word for world is

“valley,” he thought, and the word we use for ourselves is the “flying people,” and the word the savages

use for themselves is “people”. Oh, but aren’t we a sophisticated and self-conscious Stone Age

civilization!

He hung in a leather harness; the handles he gripped were made from the paired humeri of an eagle; the

fabric of the wing above him was of hand-woven silk doped with alcohol-thinned pine resin; the craft’s

singing structural members were tensed bamboo, its cables vine and its stitching gut. Flint blades and

bone needles and wooden shuttles had been worn smooth in its manufacture; no metal tool had touched

it. No man, either; the whole process, from harvesting the raw materials through building it to this, its

test flight, was women’s work. It would be bad luck for a man to touch it until it had been brought safely

back from its maiden flight and formally turned over. Stone wryly reflected on the canny custom that

assigned the rougher and riskier parts of glider production—finding the eagle’s carcass, tapping the

resin, testing the craft—to women like him. He enjoyed the excitement and the solitude of these tasks,

though they would not have been so welcome without the background of days he spent in the secure and

companionable society of other women, working in long, airy sheds with the needle or the loom, the

glass saw or the stone knife.

He banked into an updraught and followed its upward spiral, almost to a level with the mountain range

on the western side of the valley. Below him, a pair of wing-lizards skimmed the corries. Two black

flecks, their wingspans almost a third that of the glider. He kept a cautious eye on the upper slopes as he

drifted past them; sneaking across the skyline was the preferred approach route for savage scouts and

even raiding parties, and firearms were one product of the metalworking peoples whose use none of the

stoneworking peoples—including his own—dared to disdain.

From his high vantage he could see the other aerial traffic of the valley: a few hot-air balloon-trains

lofting to cross the eastern barrier on the way to Rawliston, dozens of other gliders patrolling the slopes

or carrying urgent messages and light freight from one town to another. A quick upward turn of his head

caught him a glimpse of a high, fast glint as one of the snake people’s gravity skiffs, on some

incomprehensibly urgent mission of its own, flashed across the sky like a shooting star. The skiffs were

a common sight, starships rarer. Every few weeks a ship would follow the line of the Great Vale in a

slow, sloping descent to Rawliston; it’d be at an altitude of two kilometers when it passed above the

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Dark Light

western end of the valley, down to a thousand meters by the time it reached the other.

Swinging out of the updraught, he set the machine on the long descending westward glide that would

take him back to the launching-and-landing slope of the airfield above his native town, Long Bridge. He

was following the course of Big River at a few hundred meters—an altitude quite low enough for him to

smell the smoke from the kilns and see and hear children pointing and yelling at him from each village

he passed over—when he heard a screaming from the sky to the north and west. Stone looked up.

Something huge and black hurtled in a second from the zenith to behind the hills, just ahead of him and

to the left. Reflexively he closed his eyes, flinching in expectation of a crash and an explosion.

None came.

He sent a quick and self-consciously futile prayer of thanks to the indifferent gods and opened his eyes.

What he saw made him almost shut them again. Behind the brow of the mountain range a vast,

ramshackle contraption was rising like a malignant moon. Evidently the object seen falling, it moved

forward, almost scraping the summit. Lurching and yawing, it careened to above the middle of the

valley. Then it stopped, hanging in the air half a kilometer away, right in front of him. It turned around.

The air crackled; Stone could feel every hair on his body prickle. He was still rushing forward, on a

collision course that in seconds would splatter him and the glider across the front of the thing like a fly

on goggles. He swung his upper body forward and his legs up, and tipped the the bone levers to tilt the

glider into a dive. Down and down, he aimed for Big River, in the slim hope that if he couldn’t pull out

in time he might just survive a crash into water.

The shadow of the unidentified flying object passed over him. Something, not the air and not his own

efforts, slowed his descent, at the same time buffetting him as though with invisible fists. He felt,

incredulously, that he was actually being lifted. Then the shadow and the strange lightness passed, and

he began to plummet again, but now he was able to pull back. At fifty meters above the river he was in

level flight, at a speed that a small and cautious upward flex on the controls turned into a shallow climb.

The long bridge that had given the town its name whipped beneath his feet like—so it seemed—a just-

missed trip wire. He banked leftward above the rooftops of tile and thatch, slowing and spilling air as the

field came into view, closer and closer, he could see the blades of grass, and then he was down with a

thump that jarred every cartilage from his ankle joints to the top of his spine and running, running faster

than he’d ever run before, sprinting up the slope as fast as a man running full pelt down it to take off, the

glider still flying at shoulder height and no weight at all, and then he could slow and finally stop.

He stood for a moment, unbuckling the harness and lifting the wing, then stepped out from under it and

let it sag to the grass behind him. His breath came in deep sighing gusts; he could not control it. His legs

shook; he could control them, and he walked stiffly away from the glider toward the sheds at the top of

the field. Later he would ache. For now, he just felt an immense surge of exhilaration carrying him along.

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DarkLightATOMDOHERTYASSOCIATESBOOKNEWYORKwww.ebookyes.comTorBooksbyKenMacLeodTHEFALLREVOLUTIONTheStarFractionTheStoneCanalTheCassiniDivisionTheSkyRoadTHEENGINESOFLIGHTCosmonautKeepDarkLightATOMDOHERTYASSOCIATESBOOKNEWYORKThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisnovelareeitherfic...

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