“It’s going to be like this once you’re in charge,” the old man told him numerous times. “You’re the best there’s been for decades. Almost as good as me. You’ll bring it all back to me, the power and the wealth.”
“This is the future?” Dariat asked. They were standing on a tall altar of polyp-rock, looking down on a circular starscraper entrance. People were rushing about with a vigour and purpose not usually found in Valisk. Every one of them was wearing a Magellanic Itg uniform. When he lifted his gaze it was as though the northern endcap was transparent; blackhawks flocked around their docking rings, loaded with expensive goods and rare artefacts from a hundred planets. Further out, so far away it was only a hazy ginger blob, Magellanic Itg’s failed Von Neumann machine spun slowly against the gas giant’s yellow-brown ring array.
“It could be the future,” the old man sighed regretfully. “If you will only listen how.”
“I will,” Dariat said. “I’ll listen.”
The old man’s schemes seemed to coincide with the pressure of conviction and certainty which was building in his own mind. Some days he seemed so full of ideas and goals he thought his skull must surely burst apart, whilst on other occasions the dream man’s long rambling speeches seemed to have developed a tangible echo, lasting all day long.
That was why he enjoyed the long bouts of solitude provided by the unadventurous interior. Walking and exploring obscure areas was the only time the raging thoughts in his brain slowed and calmed.
Five days after his fourteenth birthday he saw Anastasia Rigel. She was washing in a river that ran along the floor of a deep valley. Dariat heard her singing before he saw her. The voice led him round some genuine rock boulders onto a shelf of naked polyp which the water had scoured of soil. He squatted down in the lee of the boulders, and watched her kneeling at the side of the river.
The girl was tall and much much blacker than anyone he’d seen in Valisk before. She appeared to be in her late teens (seventeen, he learned later), with legs that seemed to be all bands of muscle, and long jet-black hair that was arranged in ringlets and woven with red and yellow beads. Her face was narrow and delicate with a petite nose. There were dozens of slim silver and bronze bracelets on each arm.
She was only wearing a blue skirt of some thin cotton. A brown top of some kind lay on the polyp beside her. Dariat caught some fleeting glimpses of high pointed breasts as she rubbed water across her chest and arms. It was even better than accessing bluesense AV fleks and tossing off. For once he felt beautifully calm.
I’m going to have her, he thought, I really am. The certainty burned him.
She stood up, and pulled her brown top on. It was a sleeveless waistcoat made from thin supple leather, laced up the front. “You can come out now,” she said in a clear voice.
Just for a moment he felt wholly inferior. Then he trotted towards her with a casualness that denied she had just caught him spying. “I was trying not to alarm you,” he said.
She was twenty centimetres taller than him; she looked down and grinned openly. “You couldn’t.”
“Did you hear me? I thought I was being quiet.”
“I could feel you.”
“Feel me?”
“Yes. You have a very anguished spirit. It cries out.”
“And you can hear that?”
“Lin Yi was a distant ancestress.”
“Oh.”
“You have not heard of her?”
“No, sorry.”
“She was a famous spiritualist. She predicted the Big One2 quake in California back on Earth in 2058 and led her followers to safety in Oregon. A perilous pilgrimage for those times.”
“I’d like to hear that story.”
“I will tell it if you like. But I don’t think you will listen. Your spirit is closed against the realm of Chi-ri.”
“You judge people very fast. We don’t stand much of a chance, do we?”
“Do you know what the realm of Chi-ri is?”
“No.”
“Shall I tell you?”
“If you like.”
“Come then.”
She led him up the river, bracelets tinkling musically at every motion. They followed the tight curve of the valley; after three hundred metres the floor broadened out, and a Starbridge village was camped along the side of the river.
Starbridge was the remnants of the cults and tribes and spiritualists who had moved into Valisk during its formative years. They had slowly amalgamated down the decades, bonding together against the scorn and hostility of the other inhabitants. Now they were one big community, united spiritually with an outré fusion of beliefs that was often incomprehensible to any outsider. They embraced the primitive existence, living as tribes of migrants, walking round and round the interior of the habitat, tending their cattle, practising their handicraft, cultivating their opium poppies, and waiting for their nirvana.
Dariat looked out on the collection of ramshackle tepees, stringy animals with noses foraging the grass, children in rags running barefoot. He experienced a contempt so strong it verged on physical sickness. He was curious at that, he had no reason to hate the Starbridge freakos, he’d never had anything to do with them before. Even as he thought that, the loathing increased. Of course he did, slimy parasites, vermin on two legs.
Anastasia Rigel stroked his forehead in concern. “You suffer yet you are strong,” she said. “You spend so much time in the realm of Anstid.”
She brought him into her tepee, a cone of heavy handwoven cloth. Wicker baskets ringed the walls. The light was dim, and the air dusty. The valley’s pinkish grass was matted, dry and dying underfoot. He saw her sleeping roll bundled up against one basket, a bright orange blanket with pillows that had some kind of green and white tree motif embroidered across them, haloed by a ring of stars. He wondered if that was what he’d do it on, where he’d finally become a real man.
They sat crosslegged on a threadbare rug and drank tea, which was like coloured water, and didn’t taste of much. Jasmine, she told him.
“What do you think of us?” she asked.
“Us?”
“The Starbridge tribes.”
“Never really thought about you much,” Dariat said. He was getting itchy sitting on the rug, and it was pretty obvious there weren’t going to be any biscuits with the tea.
“You should. Starbridge is both our name and our dream, that which we seek to build. A bridge between stars, between all peoples. We are the final religion. They will all come to us eventually; the Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists, even the Satanists and followers of Wicca; every sect, every cult. Each and every one of them.”
“That’s a pretty bold claim.”
“Not really. Just inevitable. There were so many of us, you see, when Rubra the Lost invited us here. So many beliefs, all different, yet really all the same. Then he turned on us, and confined us, and isolated us. He thought he would punish us, force us to conform to his materialistic atheism. But faith and dignity is always stronger than mortal oppression. We turned inwards for comfort, and found we had so much that we shared. We became one.”
“Starbridge being the one?”
“Yes. We burned the old scriptures and prayer books on a bonfire so high the flames reached right across the habitat. With them went all the ancient prejudices and the myths. It left us pure, in silence and darkness. Then we rebirthed ourselves, and renamed what we knew was real. There is so much that old Earth’s religions have in common; so many identical beliefs and tenets and wisdoms. But their followers are forced apart by names, by priests who have grown decadent and greedy for physical reward. Whole peoples, whole planets who denounce one another so that a few evil men can wear robes of golden cloth.”
“That seems fairly logical,” Dariat said enthusiastically. “Good idea.” He smiled. From where he was sitting he could see the whole side of her left breast through the waistcoat’s lace-up front.