The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [94]
Then he heard voices, male and female, and sounds of running feet, laughter. There, among the trees a young couple ran, one chasing to give a tap on the shoulder to the other, who then turned about to give chase, tripping, laughing, stumbling into each other’s arms, kissing …
The memory was suddenly whole and alive, keen with joy and the pain of a lost and innocent perfection. After long languorous moments, the kiss ended, they broke apart and carried on upslope, off into the trees, the youthful Robert Horst and his girlfriend, Giselle, later wife and mother of Rosa …
He sat back in the boat, his mind a whirl of emotions. The Tanenth machine had not hinted at what to expect but now he wondered what lay in store, and with a degree of apprehension.
The change that came over the landscape then was swift, smooth, as if he were passing through some surreal holoartwork. The steep wooded slopes to his right flattened and the shoreline moved off and off, finally receding into the horizon, while to his left … the trees shrank, hills and ridges diminished, and the slopes of looming mountains lost their immensity. The boat was now moving slowly past a series of small-scale rocky fjords and coves, most with clusters of houses, villages and towns as he went on, all in perfect miniature, their inhabitants tiny yet going about their routines. Threads of smoke rose from minuscule chimneys, trawlers put in to wharfs to offload catches, and little wagons and vehicles wound along cobbled roads or up winding trails into the woods.
And when he shifted his gaze further along the shore and saw a flatter region, a coastal plain bounded by ridges and steep hills inland and mountainous uplands to the north, and dominated by a towering promontory, he suddenly realised that he was floating past the entirety of the Darien colony in miniature. There were the streets and built-up areas of Hammergard, there beyond it lay Lake Morwen, there further north was Port Gagarin with its landing strips, and there was the island of New Kelso, while further west stretched rich farmlands, hamlets, villages and towns. But smoke rose in many places, and he saw great mobs laying siege to barricaded strongholds, or engaging in running battles through the streets of unfortunate towns. A few zeplins passed through the air above Hammergard and off to the south, while fighting seemed to be taking place up on Giant’s Shoulder. There were flashes of energy weapons, the yellow bursts of explosions, and out-of-control fires.
Robert watched the stricken land pass by and wondered how true a representation this was. This must be how the Godhead sees the activities of us lesser beings, scurrying around, pursuing antlike purposes. Or could this be just one way of looking at us, a kind of conceptual model, perhaps even a discarded one?
Past the northern shore, with the miniature city of Trond and its stone towers sliding out of view behind the upland slopes, cliffs began to rise again on both left and right. In front of him they joined overhead, forming the entrance to a gigantic, gloomy cavern into which the river swept. As the light from the entrance faded the murk deepened until he was engulfed in pitch blackness with only the sides of the boat to cling on to and the rocking motion to remind him that the river still carried him along.
A foggy glow appeared before him, gradually brightening to a wide stretch of blue-grey openness, dotted here and there with strange floating crags and boulders, some with trees growing on them. Some were like bizarre plateaus wrenched from absent landscapes, their rocky roots tapering beneath while odd creatures grazed amongst angular ruins. Further on a larger structure came into view, something that looked designed or at least assembled, a complex of low buildings in radial sectors rising