Rauc and Brow broke their embrace, but they stayed close with their arms linked together. Rauc pulled Brow toward Dura. “Brow, here’s a friend from the farm. Dura. She’s an upfluxer…”
Brow turned to Dura with a look of surprised interest; his gaze flickered over her. He resembled Rauc quite closely. His body was lean, strong-looking under its vest, and his narrow face was kindly. “An upfluxer? How do you come to be working on a ceiling-farm?”
Dura forced herself to smile. “It’s a long story.”
Rauc squeezed Brow’s arm. “She can tell you later.”
Brow rubbed his nose, still staring at Dura. “We see upfluxers sometimes. In the distance. When we’re working in the far upflux, right at the edge of the hinterland. You see, the further upflux you go toward the wild forests, the better the trees grow. But…” He stopped, embarrassed.
“But the more dangerous it gets?” Dura maintained her smile, determined for once to be tolerant. “Well, don’t worry. I don’t bite.”
They laughed, but it was forced.
Rauc introduced the woman with Brow. She was called Kae, and she and Rauc embraced. Dura observed them curiously, trying to make sense of their relationship. There was a stiffness between Rauc and Kae, a wariness; and yet their embrace seemed genuine — as if on some level, beneath the surface strain, they shared a basic sympathy for each other.
Brow tugged at Rauc. “Come and see the others; they’ve missed you. We’re going to eat shortly.” He glanced at Dura. “Will you join us?”
The woman Kae approached Dura with brisk friendliness. “Dura, let’s leave these two alone for a while. I’ll show you around the caravan… I don’t suppose you’ve met people like us before…”
Dura and Kae Waved side by side along the length of the caravan. Kae pointed out features of the caravan and described how it worked in a brisk, matter-of-fact way, her talk laced with endless references to Dura’s assumed ignorance. Dura had long since grown tired of being treated as an amusing freak by these Parz folk, but — for today — she bit back the acid replies which seemed to come so easily to her. This woman, Kae, didn’t mean any harm; she was simply trying to be kind to a stranger.
Maybe I’m learning to look beneath the surface of people, Dura wondered. Not to react to trivia. She smiled at herself. Maybe she was growing up at last.
The chain of trunks slid through the Air at about half an easy Waving speed. There were teams of harnessed Air-pigs, their harness sets fixed — not to Air-cars — but to the rope links in the chain of trees. The pigs squealed and snorted as they hauled at their restraints of leather. Humans, some of them children, tended the animals. The pigs were fed bowls of mashed-up Crust-tree leaf, and their harnesses were endlessly adjusted to keep the teams hauling in the same direction, along the long line of trunks.
People hailed Kae as she passed, and they glanced curiously at Dura. Dura guessed there must be a hundred people traveling with this caravan.
The women paused to watch one team being broken up. The animals were released from their harnesses, but they were still restrained by ropes fixed to pierced fins. The animals were led away to be tied up in another part of the caravan to rest, while a fresh team was fixed into place.
Dura frowned at this. “Wouldn’t it be easier to stop the caravan, rather than try to change the pigs over in flight?”
Kae laughed. “Hardly. Dura, when the caravan is assembled, back on the edge of the upflux, it takes several days, usually, for the pig-teams to haul it up to speed. And once this mass of wood is moving, it’s much easier to maintain its motion than to keep stopping and starting it. Do you see?”
Dura sighed inwardly. “I know what momentum is. So you don’t even stop when you sleep?”
“We sleep in shifts. We sleep tied up to nets and cocoons fixed to the trunks themselves.” Kae pointed to the nearest pig-team. “We rotate the pigs in flight. It isn’t so difficult to steer a caravan; all you have to do is follow the vortex lines downflux until you get to the South Pole… Dura, a caravan like this never stops moving, once it sets off from the edge of the hinterland. Not until it’s within sight of Parz itself. Then the pig-teams are turned around, and the caravan’s broken up to be taken into the City.”
Dura tried to envisage the distance from the upflux to Parz. “But at this speed it must take months to reach the City.”
“A full year, generally.”
“A year?” Dura frowned. “But how can the City wait that long for lumber?”
“It can’t. But it doesn’t have to.” Kae was smiling, but there didn’t seem to be any impatience in her tone at Dura’s slowness. “At any time, there’s a whole stream of caravans like this, heading for the City from all around the circumference of the hinterland. From the point of view of Parz there’s a steady flow of the wood it needs.”
“Rauc knew on exactly which day to come down to the caravan. In fact, you and Brow were waiting to greet us.”
“Yes. We were on time. We always are, Dura; all the caravans are, right across the hinterland. It’s all carefully planned.”
Dura thought of dozens, hundreds perhaps, of caravans like this, endlessly converging on Parz with their precious lumber… and all on time. She felt awed at the idea of humans being able to plan and act systematically on such a scale, and with such precision.
They moved on along the length of the caravan. In some places the trunks had been opened up to expose the green glow of the wood’s nuclear-burning core. Humans moved around the glowing spots and circles, purposeful and busy. There were nets and lengths of rope trailing from the trunks, and Dura saw sleep cocoons, tools, clothes, food bales tucked into the nets. In one place there was a little clutch of infants and small children, safely confined inside a fine-meshed net.
“Why,” she said, “the caravan’s like a little City in itself. A City on the move. There are whole families here.”
“That’s right.” Kae smiled, a little sadly. “But the difference is, it’s a City that will be broken up in another few months, when we get to Parz. And we’ll be shipped back to the hinterland in cars, to start work on another.”
They passed another netful of sleeping children.
Dura asked gently, “Why doesn’t Rauc travel with the caravan? With Brow?”
Kae stiffened slightly. “Because she gets better pay where she is, doing coolie-work for Qos Frenk. They have a kid. Did she tell you? She and Brow are having her put through school in Parz itself. They have to work like this, to afford the fees.”
Dura let herself drift to a stop in the Air. “So Rauc is on a ceiling-farm in the hinterland, her child is in that wooden box at the Pole, and Brow is lost somewhere in the upflux with the lumber caravans. And if they’re lucky they meet — what? once a year?” She thought of the Mixxaxes, also constrained to spend so much of their time apart, and for much the same motives. “What kind of life is that, Kae?”
Kae drew away. “You sound as if you disapprove, Dura.” She waved a hand. “Of all of this. The way we live our lives. Well, we can’t all live as toy savages in the upflux, you know.” She bit her lip, but pressed on. “This is the way things are. Rauc and Brow are doing the best they can, for their daughter. And if you want to know how they feel about so much separation, you should ask them.”
Dura said nothing.
“Life is complex for us — more than you can imagine, perhaps. We all have to make compromises.”
“Really? And what’s your compromise, Kae?”
Kae’s eyes narrowed. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s find the others. It must be time to eat.”
They worked their way back along the complicated linear community in stiff silence.
A dozen people had gathered, close to the trunk of one of the great severed trees at the heart of the caravan. A Wheel design had been cut into the trunk: neat, five-spoked, large enough to curve around the trunk’s cylindrical form. Small bowls of food had been jammed into the glowing trenches of the design.