Reunion

by John Gribbin, Marcus Chown

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

It is over a thousand years since the events of Double Planet, when a group of cosmonauts crashed a comet into the Moon, thereby bringing a potential life-supporting atmosphere to that desolate planet. Tugela is a young girl who has grown up in the austere post-technological society that has settled there in that time, a society dominate by the all-powerful City and its insidious cult of the Eye. As the comets stopped coming, and the atmosphere became increasingly thin, the Priests' power grew with the claim that only their rituals could bring the comets back. But a revolution is brewing among the Moon colony that aims to smash both the City and the poisonous stranglehold of superstition that has been holding it back for so long. Within this violent struggle, Tugela has a vital role to play. When she stumbles into a secret vital to the cause, she soon realises her destiny lies far beyond her homeland, beyond the deadly Forbidden Zone, perhaps even beyond the Moon itself...

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 222

Sample

It was extremely dangerous for Tugela to linger in this place, high on the exposed plateau. It was true that the Eye had gone but at just about any moment it could return. Worse still, another Eye might fly over even lower and catch her. Who could tell what might or might not happen in this time of turbulence and change?

Safety lay far below her in the embrace of the forest (what was left of it), and that was where she must soon return. But she had made the tortuous climb to the plateau for a reason and she might never return here again. Against common sense, and with her heart pounding violently (more from the achingly thin air than from fear), Tugela hurried on towards God’s Window.

The place often figured as a backdrop in the Sagas, the tales told by old men round crackling fires during long dark nights in the Land. Because the Sagas were her father’s private obsession, she had heard them repeated more often than most. But never, even while listening intently to the soft drone of his voice, had she dreamt that she herself might one day journey to the fabled lookout point at the edge of the world.

At God’s Window, the Sagas told, the Land came to an abrupt end, like a conversation choked off in mid-sentence. Along a ragged boundary that was hundreds of klomters in length, firm ground simply ran out, and empty space took over. In the remote past, evidently, some monumental cataclysm had split the skin of the world, and raised up the ground on one side – or perhaps, depressed it on the other (depending on your point of view). As a result, the Land came to a sudden end in vertiginous cliffs, in places almost two klomters high.

Beyond God’s Window stretched the wilderness of the Forbidden Zone – a grey nightmare place, empty except for demons and other vile creatures too horrible to contemplate. Whenever ordinary folk talked of the place, they did so in hushed and respectful voices, as if merely uttering the name of the place might somehow conjure it to life in their midst. And such was the power of the name, that even when it was whispered, the cold emptiness of that place did seem to reach out across the Land, a tangible thing, clutching with icy fingers at their hearts, impelling them to crowd in closer to any source of light, any source of warmth.

To restless souls, however, the Forbidden Zone acted like a magnet. It drew them from far and wide – those individuals who had yearned all their lives for adventure and unlimited horizons, for whom the Land had never been enough, had always seemed claustrophobically small. From the towering cliffs of God’s Window, they could contemplate a land their imaginations had imbued with the colours of their hopes, and test the strength of their resolve to go on against the grey reality.

At this sight, most would wake suddenly, as if from a dream, and realise that what they really sought lay elsewhere. For not only did the nightmare land have the power to sober the most restless of men and women, it also had the power to hold a mirror to their lives, to show them what they had somehow missed in the confusion of their days: what was important and worthwhile.

For a short time, they would drink in the awful vista; then, resigned to the Land, they would turn their backs and begin the long journey home, to return only, perhaps, in their troubled dreams.

But not all.

Six men and women had reached God’s Window and, because they were insane or deranged in some other way, gone on. Each, in their turn, had found a way down the face of the precipitous cliffs to the plain below. And each had vanished for ever into the Forbidden Zone.

The names of the Lost Ones, Tugela, like every child in the Land, knew by heart. From Waymon Dart, the renegade priest from the City, to Aletta, the orphaned outlander, barely fifteen years old when she disappeared. Dart, the first of the six, had left the Land more than three centuries before; Aletta had disappeared at the beginning of the Third War of Independence, a conflict that was raging still across the Land.

In the Sagas, the names of the Lost Ones cropped up again and again. Their exploits were embroidered and embellished until it seemed they were more than mere mortals. Yet they had all been ordinary men and women. Tugela, perhaps better than anyone else, knew the truth of that.

For one of them had been her grandfather.

A bitter wind stung Tugela full in the face, tore at her loose hair. It sliced through the layers of her clothing as if they were made of the thinnest paper and struck deep into the very core of her body. But so far had she come and so close was she now to her goal that she could permit nothing to deflect her. With her head down, she pressed on into the hurricane.

The wind, for all its severity, was no more than the overspill from a much stronger draught of air. That air, Tugela knew, was rising up the wall of the world from the plain far below. Its roar, like the ominous rumble of deep thunder, had already drowned out every other sound.

Heedless of the danger, Tugela broke into a run. At first, it seemed a futile thing to do and she made next to no headway. The wind threatened to lift her off her feet and toss her back whence she had come. But, miraculously, and in the space of just a few strides, it slackened, and was suddenly gone.

It was as she had guessed it must be. The rising air, when it reached the level of the plateau, could not simply spill over the edge; its momentum would carry it on and upwards. In a great overhead arc, the air would descend on to the plateau, leaving the ground at the very edge of the cliffs calm, as at the eye of a storm.

Cold beyond caring now, Tugela covered the last stretch of ground to God’s Window, and looked out on …

An ocean of whiteness.

It opened up before her like a vision from a dream. She had expected to see grey monotony, the rise and fall then rise again of bare, lifeless hills, but instead she saw endless banks of puffy white clouds marching away to infinity like waves on a frozen sea. Below her feet, a klomter down the sheer cliff face, the waves rolled in to the shore, breaking and eddying against the hardness of the Land.

It was a sight of powerful beauty but it provoked in the girl only a feeling of bitter disappointment. It was so unfair! She had come so far, risked so much, only to be cheated out of a glimpse of the Forbidden Zone at the very last step. Though she stood now, a god at God’s Window, cold tears streamed down her face.

The Sagas lied!

It strained credibility to think that she was the first person to get to God’s Window only to find the Forbidden Zone hidden from view. Yet, at no time, did the Sagas admit such a possibility. It was a reminder, if a reminder were needed, that the Sagas were stories – stories built around a kernel of truth perhaps, but stories nonetheless. How had she forgotten? Her father had stressed the point to her often enough.

Wearily, Tugela sat down on the cliff edge, allowing her long legs to dangle into space. She wiped the mist from her eyes and peered downward. Just below her vantage point, a thin waterfall spurted from the rock face, draining the last reserves of moisture from the plateau into the cloud layer far below. Where the waterfall turned to vapour, she picked out the tiny black silhouette of a glideagle, wheeling slowly, gracefully, on invisible currents of air.

With one hand anchoring her to the rock behind her, Tugela craned further forward. But looking straight down the vertical wall made her dizzy; her stomach heaved. To steady herself, she had to lie flat on her back and gulp great lungfuls of the thin air. How, in the name of sanity, had her grandfather managed to climb down there?

And this thought led to a host of others concerning her grandfather, all of which she had pondered on countless occasions before. What kind of man could he have been to have come to this place at the edge of the world and then to have struck out into the unknown?

As a young child, her mind cringing from the horror of his deed yet at the same time fascinated by it, she had imagined her grandfather as a giant among other men, a man who did not know the meaning of the word fear. But as she had got older, her unconditional awe had become tempered by a pragmatic realism. He had left a wife back in the Land, and children, too. What kind of man would do that? And why?

Tugela turned her attention back to the clouds, the endless banks of clouds. For an age, she stared out across that unbelievable ocean of whiteness, unable to focus on any portion, drawn down deeper and deeper into its depths. She had the disconcerting feeling that she was falling and could not stop herself. So disorientated did it make her that when, after minutes, after hours perhaps – time didn’t seem to come into things now – the clouds began slowly to disperse, she did not notice. It was with a shock that she realised what was happening and sprung to her feet.

In a dozen separate places, the cloud layer was breaking up.

The Sun was burning it off. Here and there, the crests of hills, the tips of mountains, were beginning to show, islands breaking the surface of the white sea. Consumed by impatience, Tugela began to run along the cliff edge, as if this activity might, in some way, hasten the natural processes underway. As she stumbled on, a land was slowly unveiled before her. It was painted in greys and browns, and the blacks of deep, inpenetrable shadows. Nowhere were there trees or any other signs of vegetation. Strangest of all were the faint rings etched on the land. They were first to appear and seemed, to Tugela, like she imagined the great Circleberg, the mountain ring that enclosed the plain of the City.

And then no cloud at all remained. Tugela stopped running and stood, her lungs heaving, taking in the terrible vista of the Forbidden Zone. The Forbidden Zone, where nightmare creatures prowled the shadows. The Forbidden Zone, which had swallowed her grandfather, and five others. The Forbidden Zone, where at regular intervals the comets that brought air to the Land impacted. Only they weren’t impacting any more. The City had made sure of that.

Time passed …

Suddenly, Tugela realised just how cold she was so high up in the thin air. She was shaking uncontrollably. She was dehydrated, her lips and face dried out by the cruel wind. Why, she wondered, had she not noticed these things before? The excitement, perhaps, or the fear. And how long had she been up here? She realised with a shock that she really had no idea at all. In the thin air, her thoughts seemed to be oddly fuzzy and sluggish. She had heard that altitude could have such a effect.

Then Tugela remembered her uncle, Kasteel! She had left him down in the valley, asleep by the wagon where he had passed out drunk. She had to get down. In a stupor, she stumbled across the open plateau and began the descent through the ranks of yellowed and dying shatterpines. When, finally, they petered out, and she emerged into bright sunlight, she saw the figure coming towards her. Even at a distance, something in his posture told her he was mad at her.

Shaking with exhaustion, Tugela stood her ground and braced herself for the inevitable storm.

By the time of the second seventh, the Sun should have taken the worst of the night’s chill off the Land. But the thin air was still freezing and the ground was still hard with frost. As the wagon trundled across the valley floor, Tugela tried to shrink deeper into the cave of her cape and hood. But there was no place, it seemed, not even in the deepest folds and layers of her clothing, where the cruel wind could not reach.

Think warm, she told herself. But the sensation was now as alien to her as the colour of purple is to a man blind from birth. Try as she might, she could not breathe life into a single memory of balmier days. Warm was something she had simply never been.

In the Land, the nights were always cold, winter and summer. People expected that and got by the best they could. What helped them to survive the long night more than anything else was the promise of the long day which would follow. But now, in the middle of summer, when by rights the world should come to life at the first touch of the new Sun, the Sun was climbing the sky and it was still freezing. How long, the girl wondered, before the blanket of air that insulated the world was so depleted that night and day in the Land became indistinguishable?

Tugela glanced at the shape of her uncle beside her, hunched over the reins of the carriers. Only the fog of frozen breath, expelled from time to time in long measured exhalations, betrayed the existence of a human being beneath the amorphous mound of clothing. When he lifted the flask of liquor to his hood and gulped, she caught for a moment the wedge of his jaw, set hard in sullen fury.

When she had returned from God’s Window, Kasteel had been more than merely furious; he had been apoplectic. Her misjudgment of his mood cost her a fierce beating. Even now, the pain of that punishment lingered. Only with the greatest of care was she able to shift in her seat atop the wagon without wincing from the bruises and she cursed the misfortune that had forced her to travel with him.

Tugela realised, with the benefit of hindsight, that she had been a fool not to have guessed that Kasteel would see her ascent to God’s Window as the most heinous of crimes. Kasteel was the one whose life was most badly affected – shattered even – when her grandfather had vanished into the Forbidden Zone. Hadn’t her own father told her that, often enough? For Kasteel, the trade route to Ironvale, which passed so close to God’s Window, was a kind of living hell, re-opening an old and festering wound. That was why, immediately they made camp, he had begun drinking heavily. And that was why Tugela had been able to slip away, while he lay unconscious beside the campfire.

Kasteel’s terrible misfortune was that he had been born the eldest of four brothers (her father, Bandon, was the youngest). When their father disappeared, therefore, it was Kasteel, a boy barely fifteen years of age, who inherited the responsibility of supporting the family.

According to her own father, who at the time of her grandfather’s disappearance had been barely old enough to understand what was happening, his elder brother had been a quiet, studious boy who had shown academic promise early on and whom the family intended to send to the distant City to be educated into the ways of the priesthood. With the sudden departure of the family’s breadwinner, the boy was thrust into premature manhood, all those dreams cruelly swept away.

To his credit, Kasteel discharged all of his duties to the family. Then, as suddenly as his father before him, he left. Perhaps in an attempt to free himself for ever of what he had found to be the crushing weight of responsibility, he became a freelance trader, buying metal goods in the City and selling them among the more remote outlander settlements. It was a lonely occupation, which explained why Kasteel, at the best of times, was a man of few words, but it was an occupation that left him answerable to no one, and that suited him. Plying his trade at the wild periphery of the Land, her uncle had found a kind of peace.

At one time, the family had heard rumours of a woman he had loved who had died, but the rumours had not been confirmed and Kasteel himself, on his rare return visits, said nothing. Those visits became rarer and rarer and, perhaps, the girl would not have seen her uncle for many years had not the City soldiers burned the farm at Boschendale and taken away her parents. When Tugela had no one in the world, Kasteel was suddenly there, as if summoned from afar by the glideagles that rode the air currents above the Land. For that she was grateful and for that she tried – she tried so hard – to understand the man. To some extent, she had succeeded. But forgiveness was quite another thing. At present, the bruises on her back were too fresh, and she was certainly no saint.

The ground was smoother now, so she stood up a while to stretch her legs. Like most people in the Land, Tugela stood tall and slim with sun-darkened skin. When she walked she did so with long, loping, easy strides. When she ran, she flowed effortlessly across the ground. Her muscles, barely perceptible at rest, could propel her like the wind when taut. Only in height did she differ from the racial, having not quite reached that of an adult.

Mentally, the differences were rather more marked. She had a strong feeling of being unlike others of her age. Perhaps this came from being the grand-daughter of a man who had entered the Forbidden Zone. Or perhaps it was because, being a loner, she deluded herself that she was important, setting herself above others to provide a comforting explanation for why she did not fit in.

How much further to Ironvale, Tugela wondered? The wagon was climbing a steep rise now, the yellow, oxygen-starved trees of a dying forest to one side of them, and the carriers were finding it very hard going. Ahead, if she strained her eyes, she could just about make out a long line of hills, their summits dusted lightly with snow. Having never travelled at the Periphery before, she could only guess that those were the High Hills. If she were right, then they could not be far from their destination.

The journey to Ironvale had brought them out to the Periphery along a valley that ran along the back of God’s Window. Now, ironically, they were headed back into the interior of the Land as if they had somehow ricocheted off the barrier obstructing their path. It was a curiously convoluted route but they had no choice, constrained as they were by the lie of the land and by the need to avoid patrols of the City, a few of which penetrated even this far into the outlands.

As far as Tugela was concerned, of course, the route was fortuitous. It had, after all, given her the chance to climb to God’s Window. What she had glimpsed of the Forbidden Zone had been worth the beating, worth it a hundred times over. And the Eye … that had been an unexpected bonus. Descending through the shatterpine forest, she had toyed with the idea of telling Kasteel about it. But now she was determined it would remain her secret, at least for the time being.

The wagon came to the top of the rise and began descending a stony slope to a place where a stream, now dried up, had once run. Without warning, Kasteel drew up the carriers. Tugela looked ahead, puzzled, and then saw what her uncle had seen: below them, by the dark stain of the stream bed, was a small homestead. At such a distance, it was difficult to make out any detail, but the tiny wooden buildings had the feel of a place abandoned. As far as the girl could see, there was no smoke rising into the air. No dwelling was habitable in the present cold without a fire.

Driving on, they came to a portion of the hillside which was neatly terraced on either side of the track and planted with some kind of cereal crop, now dead. Evidently, when the stream had disappeared, the crops had gone with it. Or perhaps the severe frost had killed them before that. Tugela found such matters depressing to speculate on.

It was rare to find a homestead out here on the Periphery. Only those outlanders to whom the dominion of the City stuck in the throat trekked this far from its power. But whoever they were had gone now. As the wagon passed the shacks, three in all, it became clear that they had been abandoned recently. The door of the largest swung mournfully in the wind, while the deep ruts cut by the wagons, heavily laden, stretched away into the distance.

To Tugela’s surprise, Kasteel, instead of slowing to take a look, urged on the carriers. Had he known the people who had lived here? Had he stopped on his way to Ironvale to water the carriers and rest awhile? Yes, Tugela concluded, seeing the way he concentrated his attention on the horizon, he had known them. But what they had meant to him she could not guess.

It was a measure of how hard things had become recently that people who were so determined to live in freedom should feel no alternative but to trek back towards the enemy they hated so much, for that was where they must surely have gone. Already, on the journey to Ironvale, they had passed three or four abandoned farms. In all cases, the settlers, their crops ruined, had headed inward from the Periphery to the Great Depression. There, at the lowest point in the land, they must have reasoned, the air would be at its thickest and water might still be running free.

Kasteel never looked back at the farmstead, and neither did Tugela. Like her uncle, she kept her eyes fixed on the route ahead, willing Ironvale to come into view. And so, long before they ever reached the endpoint of their journey, Tugela spotted the tell-tale black smoke hanging like a shroud across the hills. Forgetting herself for a moment, she pointed and shouted excitedly, but her uncle was still in a black mood and continued to stare ahead doggedly, pausing only to take occasional swigs from his flask of liquor. She shut up abruptly and sat still. But, inside, she was jubilant.

Soon she would be among people again, in a place throbbing with life.

The road that formed the final approach to Ironvale wound down through hills entirely stripped of forest. For the most part, the slopes of the hills were littered with the severed stumps of trees but, in places, not even these sorry remnants poked from the barren ground. Ugly grey scars had opened up on several slopes, carved by avalanches of mud that had swept all before them. Against the devastated landscape nothing moved, not a single small creature on the ground nor a glideagle in the air, and it was eerily quiet apart from the constant crump, crump, crump of the wagon as it jounced and bounced on the rutted track.

Tugela had never seen such destruction before in the Land. Seeing it all about her, and the pall of smoke which hung above the hills ahead and which, so far, was the only visible sign of Ironvale, she trembled. Was it perhaps Hell that Kasteel was heading for and not the town that promised to deliver the outlanders at long last from the tyranny of the City?

Below them on the road, a giant wagon was ponderously negotiating a hairpin bend. It was loaded with the slender trunks of shatterpines and led by a great team of carriers, numbering perhaps a dozen in all. Kasteel, in no time at all, had caught it up and was cursing loudly because there was no room to pass. Tugela gazed upward with awe at the great logs piled high on the wagon and hoped fervently that they could not break loose from their thick chains. Telling her uncle that she would walk the remainder of the way to Ironvale and meet up with him there, Tugela jumped down on to the track. Kasteel grunted his assent and dug into the layers of his coat for his flask.

Quickly, Tugela skirted the giant wagon and came to a boy who was standing on the bend of the road, signalling to the three men atop the wagon. One of them, the youngest, saw her and waved. But before she could exchange a word with him, the urchin on the ground suddenly became animated and the older men yelled “Brake, brake!” Promptly, the young man complied, throwing his full weight on a stick of wood that protruded from the front of the wagon. The wheels screeched in mechanical pain and Tugela passed on by.

Further on, another giant wagon, this one empty, trundled past her, going up the track. She watched it go by and then her thoughts turned back to the pall of smoke ahead and to the town that lay beneath it. Soon, around the next bend or the one after that, Ironvale would be revealed in all its glory. Her heart beat faster in anticipation and she quickened her pace.

For a while, there was no other incident as Tugela walked. Then, as the road veered sharply yet again, a sudden commotion to one side caught her attention. Instinctively, she reached for the knife beneath her cloak. But before her hand could close around it, she recognised the shape of a small boy. He was standing on the steep hillside, about twenty metres above her, grinning. As she watched warily, he made his way, slipping and sliding, down the muddy bank. He ambled across the track and thrust out a grubby hand.

Tugela estimated he could be no more than eleven or twelve years old. He had long hair that was black as soot and unkempt; his clothes, a jerkin and gaiters, were the colour and texture of old sacking. The only thing out of keeping with his dishevelled appearance was a necklace of polished metal pieces, a product, Tugela guessed, of Ironvale. He was smiling, with a toothy grin as he held out his hand. “I’ve been following you,” he said. “Ever since way back up the road.” And, at this, he motioned, the links of his heavy necklace clattering.

She ignored the dirty hand. “Why?” she asked, suspiciously.

“Thought I might be of help to you,” he said. He peered at her quizzically, tipping his head to one side, then the other.

“No,” he said, apparently coming to a conclusion. “I can see you don’t trust me.” He withdrew his hand but not his toothy grin. “Look,” he said. “I mean you no harm. What I said’s the truth, swear to you it is. Thought you might need a guide who knows his way about Ironvale. Well, miss, do you?”

“I might,” she said, grudgingly.

“Right,” the boy said with a decisiveness that knocked her back. “Then, we’re in business.” He started off down the road.
. . .