Highlights from A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve Last read on January 3, 2024
Highlights from this book
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"More valooble'n Old Tech," muttered Grandma Gravy. "Mossie airship gone down, dinnit? My boys saw the fires in the sky. My town was first at the wreck. Not much left, no. Jus' a few struts and engine parts and this item, this valooble item."
She led him up a metal stairway and in through the door of one of the mud-brick towers that rose like termite hills out of the tangle of ducts at the townlet's stern. Inside were more stairs, and Grandma panted and rattled as she climbed them. The hems of her robes were bedecked with magic charms: a human jawbone, a monkey's hand, little greasy-looking leather pouches filled with gods-knew-what. Grandma Gravy had a reputation for witchcraft, and used it to keep her people in line...
The foreman of the furnaces, Daz Gravy, had come out of his shady lair to see what all the fuss was. Stalkers didn't frighten Daz; he was Grandma Gravy's favorite grandson, and around his fat neck hung dozens of charms she'd given him to ward off bullets and the evil eye. All he cared about was keeping Grandma's engines running smooth. He grabbed Theo by his iron slave collar and heaved him back toward his abandoned hopper. "He's ours. We found him, square and fair. Dragged him out of a wrecked Mossie airship. Grandma says we can do what we like with hi--" In a single motion Hester swept the gun off her shoulder, flipped up the safety catch, and shot him dead. He fell with a wet thud and a clattering of good-luck charms.
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The dust was clearing. The black ship ran on, slowing now, because its sails were full of holes. It began to pass through the shadows of tall towers of rock around whose summits hopeful vultures wheeled. Some of the towers looked like crude, wind-worn statues, and perhaps they were, for all sorts of civilizations had made their mark on the old earth, and some had left some very strange things behind. The towers filled the desert ahead, whittled by the wind into flutes through which the dry breeze moaned.
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Wolf looked thoughtfully at him as he slurped his coffee. Then, setting down his cup with a clatter, he said, "It may be noble, Herr Natsworthy, but it is not Municipal Darwinism."
"What do you mean?" asked Tom.
"I mean that I have lived aboard Murnau, and I have seen at first hand the way our great Traction Cities have tied themselves up in petty rules and taboos." He speared a kipper with his fork and used it to point at Tom. "The big cities are finished! Even if they win this war, do you think the Traktionstadts will ever hunt again as real cities should? Of course not! They will cry, 'Oh, we must not hunt Bremen; Bremen gave us covering fire when we bogged down on the Pripet salient,' or 'It would be wrong to chase little Wagenhafn, after all that Wagenhafn did for us in the war.' That is why they cannot defeat the Mossies, you see. They insist on helping each other, and as soon as you start helping others, or relying on others to help you, you give away your own freedom. They have forgotten the simple, beautiful act that should lie at the heart of our civilization: a great city chasing and eating a lesser one. That is Municipal Darwinism. A perfect expression of the true nature of the world: that the fittest survive."
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"There is a hermitage on Zhan Shan," she whispered. "We shall break the journey there."
Zhan Shan was a volcano so huge and high that Fishcake had been piloting the Spider Baby across its lower slopes for days without even noticing. The whole world seemed to form the roots of Zhan Shan, and its head was lost above the clouds. The narrow tracks that wound up and up across the lava fields were lined with shrines. Raggedy silk prayer flags clapped and fluttered and tore away in wisps of silk and cotton, carrying prayers to the realms of the Sky Gods.
"This is a holy mountain," said Fishcake's Stalker, turning into Anna again and picking him up, because the path was steep and the air thin and he was close to exhaustion. He wondered why she had come back now. Had it been the sound of those flags flapping that had woken her?
"No one knows how it came to be," she whispered. "Perhaps it was the Gods who put it here, perhaps the Ancients. Something ripped the land open, and the hot blood of the earth welled out and made Zhan Shan and all the young mountains north of here. Ash and smoke blocked out the sun. The winter lasted for decades. But look how beautiful this land is now!"
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Tonight, because the rest of the old building is so cold, Fishcake has made his way to her room again, hoping to curl up in the faint warmth of her machines. She is still at work, still typing her chains of numbers. The clatter of her steel fingers on the keys sounds like Lady Death playing dice with dead men's bones down in the Sunless Country. Hydraulics grizzle up above the ceiling somewhere, sending down a snow of crumbled plaster. Outside, where the real snow whirls around the roof and the Stalker-birds keep watch for snooping airships, a saucer-shaped aerial turns and tips to focus on a point high in the northwestern sky.
Far, far above, something large and old and cold rides the long dark, frosted with space dust, pocked by micrometeors. Solar panels give off a tired gleam, like dusty windows. Inside the armored hull a receiver listens patiently to the same wash of static that it has been hearing for millennia. But now something is changing: Inside the static, like flotsam washing ashore in the surf, comes a familiar message. The ancient computer brain detects it and responds. Many of its systems have been damaged over the long years, but it has others, fail-safes and backups. Power cells hum; glowing ribbons of light begin to weave through the coils of the weapon chamber; ice crystals tumble away in a bright, widening cloud as heavy shields slide open.
ODIN gazes down into the blue pool of the Earth and waits to be told what it must do.
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Just at that moment a shaft of light stabs in through the window, so bright that it looks solid, so hot that it sets Cynthia and everything else in the room instantly on fire. A roaring, shrieking noise drowns out her screams. In the shadows of the stairwell Naga feels the heat on his face like the breath from an open furnace.
Above him Cynthia Twite is a black branch, burning. There is a sound of crashing masonry. The Jade Pagoda heaves sideways, as if it's having second thoughts about perching here on the mountainside. Naga tries to stand, but his armor won't obey him. Cinders of Cynthia rattle down around him as the light fades. "Help!" he yells into the smoke. "Help!"
Behind him an ancient stone wall is tugged aside like a curtain. The main part of the Jade Pagoda is gone. He is looking down into the valley where Tienjing has stood, the capital of Anti-Tractionism, for a thousand years. There is nothing there but fire, and the million mournful voices of the wind.
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Grike had arrived too late. He ran like a ghost through the mountains, and came to Erdene Tezh just before dawn, when the sky above the lake was scratched with the trails of shooting stars.
The house was a ruin by then; gray ash; charred beams; a few trickles of white smoke still drifting across the garden. In a chamber full of carbonized machinery he found the remains of the Stalker Fang, and knelt beside her. The gimcrack Engineer-built part of her brain had stopped working, but he sensed faint electrical flutterings fading in the other, older part. He unplugged one of the cords from his skull and fitted it into a port on hers. Her memories whispered to him, and his mind drank them.
The sun rose. Grike went back out into the garden, and in the gathering light he saw Tom and Hester waiting for him by the fountain. He had not noticed them in the dark, for they were as cold as the stones they lay upon.
Grike went down on his knees beside them and gently drew out the knife that Hester had driven through her own heart. At first he thought that if he were quick, he could still carry her to Batmunkh Gompa and make Oenone Zero Resurrect her. But when he started to lift her, he found that she had clutched Tom's hand as she died, and she was still clinging tightly to it.
If Stalkers could cry, he would have cried then, for he knew all at once that this was the right end for her, and that she would not want him to take her from this quiet valley, or from the Once-Born she had loved.
So he lifted them together, and carried them away from the house. As he crossed the causeway, the slack weight of their bodies shook a faint memory loose in him. He checked to see if it was one of those he had just absorbed from Anna Fang, but it was his own. Long ago, before he was a Stalker, he had had children, and when they were sleepy and he had carried them to their beds, they had lain just as limp and heavy in his arms as Tom and Hester lay now.
The memory was a fragment, a gift, a down payment on that knowledge of his past that Oenone Zero had promised would come to him when he died. But that would not be for a long time. He had been made to last.
He found a place at the head of the valley where a river tumbled down in white cataracts past a rocky outcrop; where a stunted oak tree grew. It reminded him of things Hester had told him about the lost island of her childhood. There he laid her down with Tom, side by side, still holding hands, their faces almost touching. Unsheathing his claws for the last time, he cut away their soggy clothes, the belts and boots they would no longer need. There was a shallow cave at the foot of the rocks nearby, and he went and sat down in it, watching and waiting, wondering what he would find to do in a world that no longer held Hester.
That evening airships buzzed down to land at the ruin on the lake. After a while they went away again.
Days flew over the valley of Erdene Tezh. In the fitful sunlight Tom and Hester began to swell and darken beneath their shroud of flies. Worms and beetles fed on them, and birds flew down to take their eyes and tongues. Soon their smell attracted small mammals that had been going hungry in that cheerless summer.
Grike did not move. He shut down his systems one by one until only his eyes and his mind were awake. He watched the graceful architecture of Tom and Hester's skeletons emerge, their bare skulls leaning together like two eggs in a nest of wet hair. Winter heaped snow over them; the rains of spring washed them clean. Next summer's grass grew thick and green beneath them, and an oak sapling sprouted in the white basket of Hester's ribs.
Grike watched it all while the years fell past him, green and white, green and white. The small bones of their hands and feet scattered into the grass like dice; larger ones were tumbled and gnawed by foxes; they turned gray and crumbly, and it became hard to tell whose had been whose.
The oak sapling grew into a tree; spread out a canopy that blushed green in summer and threw dancing shadows over Grike; shed acorns that became new saplings; grew old, trailed beards of lichen; died and fell and rotted, giving up its goodness to the roots of younger trees that were spreading down the hillside to the lake.
Grike sank deeper into his fugue. Stars blurred over him; seasons blinked at him. The trees became a wood. Bare branches breathed in, exhaled green leaves, turned golden, bare, breathed in.
At last a human figure began to flash in front of him, stooping again and again to place something around his neck. With a deep effort he began to rouse himself; the flicker of day and night becoming less frantic as the whirl of seasons and centuries slowed.
A summer morning. Green light shining through the leaves of an ancient oak wood. Garlands of flowers decked Grike's torso, and the remnants of older garlands lay dried and crumbling in his mossy lap. His shoulders were shaggy with ferns. A bird had nested in the crook of his arm. Of Tom and Hester nothing remained but a little dust blowing between the gnarled roots of the trees.
Goats were moving through the wood. The bells on their necks chimed softly. A small Once-Born boy came and stood looking at Grike, and was joined by a girl, still smaller. They had ocher skin, brown eyes, dusty black hair.
"HELLO," said Grike. His voice was rustier and more screechy than ever. The boy fled, but the girl stayed, speaking to him in a language that he did not know. After a while she went and picked some small blue flowers among the oak trees and made a crown for him. Her brother came back, cautious, wide-eyed. The little girl brought some fat and rubbed it into Grike's joints. He moved. He stood up. Gravel and owl pellets cascaded off him; he shook himself free of cobwebs and birds' nests and moss.
The girl took his hand, and her brother led them down the valley amid a bleating, chiming crowd of goats. They stopped at a village, where adult Once-Born came to stare at Grike and poke him with sticks and the handles of simple farm tools. Listening to their excited chatter, he started to decipher their language. They'd thought him nothing but an old statue, sitting there in his cave. They had hung flowers about his neck for luck each summer when they brought their goats up to the high pastures. They had been doing it since their mothers' mothers' time.
Down a track to a paved road, riding on a cart now, the children beside him. The sun was redder than Grike recalled, the air clearer, the mountain climate kinder. A town lay cupped in a wooded vale. Grike wondered if his new friends realized that its ancient metal walls were made from the tracks of a mobile city, and that some of its round, rust-brown watchtowers had once been wheels. They seemed simple people, and he imagined that their society had no machines at all, but as they brought him through the town gates, he saw delicate airborne ships of wood and glass rising like dragonflies from tall stone mooring towers. Silvery disks, like misty mirrors, swiveled and pivoted on their undersides, and the air beneath them rippled like a heat haze.
They took him to a meeting place, a big hall in the city's heart. People crowded around him to ask questions. What kind of being was he? How long had he been asleep? Was he one of the machine men out of the old stories? Grike had no answers. He asked questions of his own. He asked if there were any places in the world where cities still moved and hunted and ate one another. The Once-Born laughed. Of course there weren't; cities only moved in fairy tales; who would want to live in a moving city? It was a mad ideal
"What are you for?" asked one boy at last, pushing to the front of the crowd. Grike looked down at him. He pondered awhile, thinking of something Dr. Popjoy had told Anna.
"I AM A REMEMBERING MACHINE," he said.
"What do you remember?"
"I REMEMBER THE AGE OF THE TRACTION CITIES. I REMEMBER LONDON AND ARKANGEL; THADDEUS VALENTINE AND ANNA FANG. I REMEMBER HESTER AND TOM."
His listeners looked blank. Someone said, "Who were they?"
"THEY LIVED LONG AGO. IT SEEMS ONLY YESTERDAY TO ME."
The little girl who'd found Grike looked up at him and said, "Tell us!"
Around her, people smiled and nodded, settling down cross-legged, waiting to see what stories he had brought for them out of the lost past. They liked stories. Grike felt, for a moment, almost afraid. He didn't know how to begin. He sat down on the chair they brought for him. He took the little girl on his lap. He watched dust motes dancing in the ancient sunlight that poured like honey through the hall's long windows. And then he turned his face toward the expectant faces of the Once-Borns, and began.