Losing the seed and his connection to the whole
node, when he’d gotten used to it, was like suddenly going blind. Terry found himself clutching the armrests, eyes wide and
blinking as if to clear a fog in front of them.
Oh,
sacred pages of wisdom, queries of my ancestors, search my soul...
All that he could see was a fading icon that grew
tiny in the lower left corner of his vision, but it didn’t go away. He struggled to calm himself, even as the
station spoke through the shuttle. “Terence, are you ill?” It's not entirely gone. It's just quiet.
“A touch of motion sickness, Station. I’ll have a
glass of water when I’m down and it will be fine.”
Why
did it shut down? Why did it go quiescent? Why... how? Did it hit some kind of
limit? Is it limited to working only off planet?
“Shuttle reporting to ground station. There is
anti-nausea medication in the armrest of your chair, Terence.”
“Oh, yes.
Thank you.”
“Requested news and music feed, audio only,” Station said
and its voice was replaced by the fruity tones of the announcer. “... the toxicity index for this afternoon is
seven, or high, and we suggest that anyone who is required to be outside wear
filter masks higher rated than three's. The high season news will
be on at the top of the hour and our next musical set will begin with the radical band, ‘Airborne Axhandles...”
Terry tuned out the audio, leaning his forehead
against the window. Xanadu spread out, a vague dumbbell shape under his eyes,
just as it had on the moon, but growing larger, rather than hover as an
anomalous green spot, in the middle of a sea of reddish, yellowish or, if
people were lucky, white or cream-coloured sand. The earthan green gradually spread in his
sight, becoming the whole world as the shuttle descended.
Perrin’s Landing lay in the centre of the larger of
the two landmasses, the circular spiderweb of its layout perfect, un-marred by
any kind of random messiness. Threads of orangey roads cut through the green,
radiating out, trailing off to the great estates all around. In the outlying
areas, downwind, plumes of smoke rose from various stacks, as those required to
maintain lower tech burned hard and soft coal for their power.
Swaths of orange dust blew up and across the human
friendly green, making it look frosted.
He gazed down toward the narrow waist of the continent while he was high
enough, toward his family’s out of town estate, but couldn’t pick it out of the
uniformly laid out fields that fed everyone.
On the smaller half of the continent, in the rain-shadow half the year,
the colours were more brown and green.
There were no plumes rising from there, since everyone’s power was
supplied by muscle, by the illiterates who grew the ras’r and the prolong and
all the other exotics that had come of attempted terraforming of the planet,
the hybrids and the galactically valuable pharmacopeia.
“Your anti-nausea medication is still in your
hand, Terence,” Station said.
“Oh, yes it is.” He’d just sat, holding it and popped it
into his mouth. The wafer melted on his tongue without flavour, not needing
water other than his own saliva. I’m not in a safe place yet, that’s obvious
as my own two butt-cheeks under me. The deceleration as the shuttle manoeuvred
to a neat landing pressed him back into his chair as if reminding him. Through the window he could see the shadow as
the hanger closed overhead, silently, cutting out the dust that blew in from
the planetary basin.
Ground crew, all Tech 4th class, were
already at the shuttle, even as he rose and picked his bags up from the
stick-tight spot on the floor. There
wouldn’t be anyone to meet him, he thought.
Perhaps the butler would have sent an undergroom? It depended on how much disgrace he was in,
in his brother’s eyes. Father would be
in the capitol, busy.
He found that he didn’t much care. If there was no one waiting for him, he’d just stay in town rather than go home.
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