Moon & Earth

Chapter 2-2

Tali wanted to know what Javes was going to do with the maps of the location of the machine that Karlen had given him. So Javes explained about the doga and the systems of government and how he would probably apply to see the proctor and give him the maps and Karlen’s notes in person. Then she wanted to know what they would do with it, and he said that they’d likely send a team with balloons to destroy it.

“Do they know how to destroy this machine if no one can get close because of this thing called sonorics?”

Javes gave her a sideways look. He had assumed, at Karlen’s shelter, that Tali had gone to sleep and had no interest in the matters that Karlen shared with Javes. But she’d been listening all along.

“Some people can get close. They live in Peria, and they’re immune to sonorics because a machine like this used to sit under the City of Glass, and these people lived on top.”

And then Javes had to explain about the City of Glass and the huge explosion of the machine twenty years ago—in the year before he was born—that had brought a lot of Perian refugees to Tiverius and had led to a change in the weather in the entire world.

And then Tali said, “Like what happened in Ysherra in the last few years.”

Javes was embarrassed not to be aware of this, especially since he’d spent time with Pashtan and was supposed to know about the weather. But he didn’t, so she told him of how, when she was little, winter would bring rains in which farmers could grow grain; but, lately, the rain would fall in summer when it was not useful to farmers because the water dried up too quickly to be of use for crops. Dust devils were also a new addition to the climate. They used to occur just in the desert north of Red Hill, in places where no one except windwalkers ever went. She also said that big storms like the one they had come through were new, and that often the weather would get really cold during those storms and the old people would complain about it and would say that this never used to happen in the past.

“Like the storm we just came through?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Does it ever snow here?”

Javes had to admit that the Scriptorium’s weather recordings from the north and less-populated areas of the country were woefully inadequate. In the north, they only recorded data from around Ysherra and Watya. There used to be a meteorologist in Tamyra, too, but the doga had been unable to fill that position for a long time. Here on the highlands, there were few weather stations.

None that had ever recorded snow, as far as he knew, and he should know because he was studying to be a meteorologist, and being a meteorologist was an important task in the world. Because weather was influenced by sonorics, and it seemed that everyone in Tiverius had been ignoring the deep changes, of which he had witnessed enough to know that he shouldn’t ignore them any longer, never mind the presence of weather stations.

A chill went over his spine. “The weather stations in the north are reporting all these things, but no one in Tiverius is listening.”

“That’s because no one ever sends anything back from the big city,” Tali said. “So it seems like no one cares.”

Javes balled his fists. He would set about changing that. The data about the changing climate in Ysherra had probably been buried in the Scriptorium for many years, and no one had thought to notify anyone about it. They probably wouldn’t, unless the dust devils hit Tiverius.

That was a disturbing thought. Dust devils in Tiverius would definitely disturb the genteel, sophisticated lives of the citizens. He could imagine the death and devastation.

Tali then wanted to know what he was going to do when he got back to Tiverius.

Javes abandoned his horrifying thoughts of things that might come to pass, and returned to the safe nothing is going on bubble. “I need to finish my studies, and then I’ll get a job somewhere.”

“Taking measurements?”

“Probably not.” Most graduates ended up as number crunchers in the Scriptorium or in the meteorology department under his tutor Viki. And he would end up helping to bury data in big books that no one ever looked at.

That was another disturbing thought. He had wanted to work at the Meteorology Department, but if this trip had made him realise anything, it was that those pretty maps with pressure and temperature lines represented the lives of real people in many different ways.

It also made him realise that if anyone could alert the doga to the problems with the weather, it was him.

They finally went to bed when the fire started to die down, and long after the animals had gone to sleep.

Tali seemed no longer afraid of him, and slept next to him for warmth, and he no longer had embarrassing dreams about her. She was like a sister he never had.

Javes woke up when it was still dark. He had dust in his mouth. Dust was on his face, too, and on top of his blanket.

It was much later in the morning than he had first thought. The sky was covered in dark brown clouds, and most of the valley had disappeared in a brown haze.

Tali sat up, clutching her blanket around her. Her eyes were wide in panic. “They don’t have dust devils here, do they?”

Javes didn’t know. He didn’t think so. “Better get the animals, just in case.”

He crawled out from under the cover and—

“Oh, look at that!” The sky to the north was almost black with big, towering clouds. Yet another storm? How many of these storms could they cope with? What was going on with the weather?

The camel stood nearby, sniffing the wind and pulling funny faces. Javes knew that this was a sign of distress. He grabbed the headgear and led the animal to the shelter, rubbing the furry neck.

Tali tried to round up the goats, but they were nervous and kept jumping away.

Javes called, “Come on, come back here. Help me pack this up.”

Wind whipped his hair to one side.

“But the goats. . . .”

“We’ll make a dash for the town. The goats will come, if they want to.”

Javes had never packed up so quickly. The camel, too, was keen to go. It was pulling on the rope. Javes wished they could ride, but asking the animal to carry both of them and the packs was too much.

They sped down the road as fast as Tali could walk. As Javes had predicted, the goats came bounding after them soon enough. The wind was picking up again, bringing strangely warm air laced with brown dust. It would whip branches, leaves, grit, the occasional sheet of roofing across the road. The black clouds at the northern horizon grew and came closer. The wind came alternately from the north or south. Sometimes it was biting cold, sometimes it was warm.

The big storm in the desert had been relatively normal, but nothing was normal about this weather. All his knowledge about weather patterns and rain depressions was of no use.

While taking a short break in the shelter of the wall of a shed, Javes took out his sonorics meter. The reading on the dial was four motes per cube; then suddenly, it went up to twenty-five, and then it fell again.

The world was broken. The weather was broken. This happened because people had destroyed the machine in the City of Glass, but they hadn’t destroyed the one in the northern desert. That had to be done as soon as possible.

The town of Velora lay at the very foot of the central platform. The river that flowed through the town provided power for the many timber mills. In the old days, the sawmills used to fish the logs out of the river after they floated down from where they had been cut upstream, and then they would put the cut wood onto rafts that would float to Tiverius. But this made shipping on the river rather dangerous, so now the timber went by train.

For a logging town, Velora was surprisingly free of surrounding forest, because the land on the river plain was fertile for crops, which, thanks to the railway, they could sell in Tiverius.

Many years of logging and selling crops had made Velora one of the richest areas in Chevakia outside Tiverius.

Unlike the northern towns, Velora did not greet its visitors with the ugliest parts of town: the warehouses, the businesses, the scrap yards. Stately houses lined the road into town, all of them well-tended, neatly painted and cleaned.

But even here were signs of bad weather: a tree blown over, dust heaped onto a veranda, part of a roof lifted off. People in front yards were repairing the damage, and these houses of the well-off had weathered the storm quite well. The same could not be said for the much smaller houses of the workers further into town. Sometimes nothing was left of a house except a pile of mangled wood. Men and women sorted through the rubble.

Here, the industriousness of fixing the damage and been overtaken by the instinct to flee.

The road grew busy, crowded with families with donkey carts laden with all their belongings, and women with harried faces dragging children, looking around in the crowd, maybe for their husbands or their parents. As in Lekata, people stood by the side of the road, trying to sell belongings to fund their trip. The camel was nervous, and the goats wanted to bolt in all directions at once, which made Tali’s job—hanging onto the rope that held all of them—quite interesting.

A big mass of people waited in the square outside the train station, corralled into a semblance of a queue by a handful of harried guards, too few for the task.

Javes and Tali and their menagerie got some hostile looks.

One man said, “You don’t think you’re going to get on the train with all those beasts, do you?”

Javes didn’t say that yes, that was intention. It also didn’t take him very long to realise that there was not much chance to get a spot on the train. Animals travelled in special wagons, and those would certainly be used to transport people and their luggage.

A station employee was answering questions further down. How long would it take for everyone to find a spot on the train? He didn’t know. When would the next train come? There was one this afternoon. Beyond that, he didn’t know. Were there facilities set up for them when they got to Tiverius? He didn’t know.

And so on and so forth. Javes and Tali had arrived at the front of the queue.

“Yes?” the ticket seller said in a harassed voice.

“I’d like to go to Tiverius with my sister and the animals,” Javes said.

The man shook his head. “No animals on this train.”

“What about the next one?”

“No animals on that one either, or the next one or the one after that, if there are still trains after that.”

Javes dug in his pocket and found the piece of ancient metal he had taken from Arukat’s house. “I can give you this if you’ll let us on.”

The man squinted. “Whatever piece of rubbish is that?”

“It’s ancient. A collector’s item. It’s worth a lot.”

“If you say so. I have no time for that rubbish. Next!”

“But our camel—”

“No animals. The train is packed. We’re putting people in the freight carriages. We have no room for camels. No matter how much ancient rubbish you pay. No matter how many gold eagles you pay. There is no room. Either you go without the camel or you don’t go at all.”