The Pale

Chapter 1-2

Jaxon considered this an egotistical affectation. Had he been asked, he would have enumerated several shortcomings of this present Regent which, as the decades passed, had diminished his appreciation of her gleaming ebony skin, embedded with gold and gems, and her physical perfection. As a Regent—figurehead of the policosmos—she appeared immutable and flawless, quite beyond the knowledge of ordinary citizens. That was perfectly acceptable, as long as she interfered only marginally in the real workings of the city—as long as he could ensure that she interfered only marginally. Now, mindful as ever of every protocol, Jaxon bowed with the exact degree of deference required between the Regent and the foremost official of the policosmos. He folded his hands across the lightning symbol of his office, zigzagging down the front of his tunic. ‘My lady?’

‘Senior. I want you to look at this.’ Élin indicated the large screen along the western wall of the Throne Room. As she pointed at it, the screen flashed green-yellow-green and then settled into the live image of the night sky.

Jaxon blinked at the sudden intensity of colour. ‘Ah,’ he said, as his eyes went slightly out of focus. Some milliseconds passed while he consulted the appropriate data. ‘Autumn storm season, but with increased flamboyance.’

‘Yes,’ said the Regent crisply. ‘And the air, man, the air!’

The Senior Forecaster tilted his chin. Élin tapped one foot while he sought the correct dataset, visualising the current readings and comparing them against the norms.

‘Pressure is decreasing, and the wind is rising markedly. A mega-storm?’ he proposed with great calmness.

The Regent slapped her hands together. ‘I don’t call you here to tell me there’s a storm looming! Look at the data, Senior: are we building to another shock?’

Jaxon blinked again, his eyes flashing upon the Regent and then turning inwards again, the pupils hugely dilated. Élin rasped her ruby fingernails against the ingrained jewels of her forearm, a scowl of impatience marring the mask-like perfection of her face. The rising wind twisted, howling around the Acrocomplexa.

‘Well?’ demanded the Regent.

‘Of a different order, my lady,’ said Jaxon. ‘You are quite correct. Neither the atmospheric pressure nor the celestial manifestations match the records of the most recent nor of the original aftershock. Something quite, quite unusual is happening.’

‘So I perceive,’ said the Regent. She sighed, an infinitesimal susurration. ‘Much as I regret to say it, my intuition tells me there is another shock coming.’

‘My lady.’ Jaxon frowned. He knew, of course, of the famed Patraena instinct, just as he knew—or, in truth, remembered—all the history of the policosmos. His life and his study covered every topic from pre-Conflagration days till the present hour; his updates were live and he had only to look. Nothing in any of his datasets matched the current conditions, but still he doubted the credibility of a mere instinct.

All his information indicated that the Patraena intuition was an incompletely documented, unsounded, unreliable resource that had raised the Patraenas, ages past, to the peak of their society. Former Regents had preened themselves much on this inherited ability. That the current queen preferred not to rely on her inner perception as a guide to actions and decisions was a factor Jaxon had counted in her favour. Nothing bored him so much as story-tale mumbo jumbo. Tonight, however, as their gazes locked, both Jaxon and Élin assimilated the fact that the Regent’s intuition had indeed proven more alert than any of the data forecasts or sensors.

The realisation hit at the same moment as the Pale cracked apart, gaping from way beyond Alpha Gate right up to the steps of the Acrocomplexa. Both the Regent and the Senior Forecaster were flung to their knees, and neither noticed for long moments how they clung like frightened young.

Tad thought about asking his squad partner to come on to the observation step, but Jeris, her shoulder pressed against the edge of a silo, looked to be napping. How she could sleep with the wind booming around the fencelines, and the pathetic crying of the child Outside, was beyond Tad.

Huh. Maybe she couldn’t hear the commotion. Probably she needed an audio upgrade, one that she would never get now. Jeris was getting on, after all. He wondered briefly what it would be like to reach the end of your allotted upgrades, to know you were soon for the scrapheap—officially known as the Recycling Shed. It was meant to be a time of celebration, a time when you contributed great gifts to the whole community inside the Pale, but Tad wasn’t so sure. He had been in the service long enough to know that no one wanted their parts recycled into something less meaningful, like a victualler or cultivator or sanitariat. Everyone in the service was proud of the active, useful, busy life it offered. A forecaster would be fine, but forecasters were few and precious, even fewer than the recyclers themselves.

Tad shook his head; all that was nothing he need worry about for decades. He was a fully-grown serviceman now, having spent the first twenty years of his life being progressed, grown, fitted out, gauged, and trained. It was usual practice to match up a new serviceman with an experienced squad partner, and he really enjoyed Jeris’s company. She didn’t talk much, but what she did say was worth listening to. She had a glint of humour in her eyes, a quality that Tad had never previously encountered. Jeris could tell him more in one look than most of his comrades in a dozen words. The last couple of days, though, he had noticed a change. Jeris kept nodding off. That was strange. He supposed he should report it. Well, first investigate what that human immature was doing by the fence, and then wake Jeris.

He flicked his wheel switch on and zoomed west along the go-way towards Beta Gate. The sun had set hours ago, but the sky was lit red and orange by bursts of cloud and gas. Some of the flashes were brighter than daylight. In one surge of light more dazzling than any yet, Tad realised that the crying child was not alone. He slowed as he reached the barred gate, and looked through its cutthroat wire panels at the two humans outside.

The immature had gone silent, staring at him. The grown human sank down onto the ground, as if she—or he—Tad wasn’t all that good at lifeform identification, though he could tell a vulpine from a canine, a mastopod from an ursine, and so on. In the service, it wasn’t necessary to know everything. If he’d needed to differentiate human males from human females, then he would have been provided with that information. All that was necessary in this case was to recognise a living being at the fence, and to give the challenge. So he did.

‘Serviceman Tad speaking. You have approached Beta Gate, on the west side of the Pale. What do you seek?’

‘Please.’

‘I repeat, what do you seek?’

The grown human seemed to crumple into a closer bundle of flesh and clothing. The immature reached out a hand and placed it on the back or shoulder of the huddled form. They were both shaking, Tad could see. Neither looked ready to answer the challenge. Tad pursed his lips. Procedure was to issue the challenge three times, and then eliminate any life form that threatened the perimeter, especially if it was near any of the six gates. He cleared his throat, loosened his firearm from its holster, and spoke with deliberate distinctness.

‘I am Serviceman Tad. I ask again, what do you seek here at Beta Gate of the Pale?’

The folded adult hoisted itself into a semblance of posture—maybe it was kneeling. Tad took a hasty step backwards: when the human raised itself, he could see a massive rent in the front of its body. The human spoke again, and Tad dragged his eyes from the ragged, bloody wound to the ghastly face.

‘Ferals,’ gasped the human. ‘The boy. Please.’ With that, the human fell forward onto its dreadful face, and lay still. The immature pulled frantically at its shoulder, but the human had ceased living.

As Tad braced his weapon in both hands, uncertain what to do next, Jeris wheeled up behind him and took him by the elbow.

‘Put that away,’ she said.

Tad obeyed. ‘What now?’ he asked.

‘It is clear they sought shelter from ferals.’

‘The adult one is dead,’ said Tad.

‘Yes.’

‘The immature is not.’

‘So I hear,’ murmured Jeris. The child was wailing fit to wake the trainees tucked into their cocoons over by Epsilon Gate. She tilted her head on one side. ‘Do you think that boy is healthy, Tad?’

Tad grimaced. What sort of a question was that? He was no recycler, to gauge the value of bodies and parts. He shrugged again. ‘Maybe.’

‘Hmm. Bring it in.’

Tad started. ‘Inside the Pale? A human immature?’

‘Yes. It may be valuable to the recyclers. If not, it is easily disposed of.’

‘Yes’m.’

Tad slapped the screen embedded in his wrist, and waited the scant milliseconds while it flashed green-yellow-green and then glowed into fervent life. He tapped a few keystrokes, and then stood back while one of the cutthroat wire gates clicked open neatly, inwards. When the way was clear he wheeled over to where the humans were congealed like a single life form. He touched the immature’s shoulder. ‘Come.’

The child looked up at him, and then down at the figure bent almost to nothingness at his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said, and put his small hand into Tad’s.

Tad flinched, but kept hold. The boy’s fingers were chilly, and they clung to his like tendrils of bindvine.

By the gate, Jeris had struck her own wristscreen into life and was speaking into it. ‘Jeris here, Beta Gate. I request another squad. We have a dead supplicant and some tidying up to do.’

‘Request granted. Squad Levin will zoom to Beta Gate immediately.’

‘Noted, Supervisor,’ replied Jeris. She tapped the keystrokes to close the gate, keeping her eyes on Tad and the boy.

‘What now?’ asked Tad.

‘To the Aventine district, Tad: the isolation cocoons. We’ll ask the recyclers to look at this one when they have time. You go. Levin and I will tidy up here.’

‘Yes’m.’ With the immature clutching his hand, there was only one way to travel. Tad gathered the boy into his arms and zoomed southeast. The shattered lights in the sky flared brighter than he had ever seen them. He thought the air vibrated with the changing colours, but maybe that was just the sobbing of the child in his arms.

On the wider plains of the Outside, scores of creatures scattered at the first sign of strange intensity in the heavenly light shows. Skittering, darting, scampering or crawling across the ground, they sought cracks and crevices where they might hope to live through the coming turmoil.

Huge flying fowl heaved up from the tangled vegetation of the Ravine and flapped south through the tempest. Wild cats and ragged vulpini scurried across the twitching plain in every direction. Massive mastodons settled ponderously into the earth. They folded their vast flexible limbs under the skin-and-metal panoply that covered them from the tip of their intelligent nasal protrusion to the incongruent thatch of vestigial tail. When the convulsion of the earth arrived, they waited it out, closing every sense to the destruction and distress around.

The canini, too, recognised the signals in the air and in the night sky that heralded a shock. Each pack had long ago chosen a safe place to den, near the shared hunting grounds of Broad Plain. Although they provided pairing, birthing, training and community spaces, canini dens were fundamentally defensive in nature. The deepest recesses could only be reached through narrow openings that one canine could guard alone. As the air tightened with the shock’s approach, the aged leader Tinashe whistled the attention signal with her thumb between her formidable teeth.

‘Alert, pack! The dens are unsafe. The ground is hoven. Out, out, into the open! Mashtuk, quick!’

Her descendant Mashtuk never wasted breath on disputing anything his ancient relative told him. He threw back his head, his tremendous voice ensuring that the warning was passed on from canine to canine, from pack to pack, in a cacophony of urgent howls. Tinashe’s pack was the first to reach open ground, but they were not long alone there. When Mashtuk joined them, he saw canini emerging like a dark flood from burrows and caves, rock shelves and warrens, copses and ruins all around the fringes of Broad Plain. They spilled in numbers into the open, loping away from their dens. Some were burdened with youngling cubs who had to be carried, others limped or shuffled with age. None would be left behind. They gathered in a large, loose group, with all the scouts on the outer ring.

In his place on guard, with every sense stretching, Mashtuk observed the ripples that unfolded from one side of the land to the other. Sometimes the massed canini bolted in panic as the ground undulated beneath their paws, sometimes they simply trekked around the earth’s new, jagged features of uplift and crumple to a more even space. Mashtuk scanned the flaring lights in the sky, one hand extended flat upon the rock beneath him, his back bent almost double. He realised that the earth spoke in tremors.

‘Revered Tinashe, pack elders! The earth gives warning. Feel the ground with your hands: it tells the direction of the ripples.’

‘It is so,’ said Tinashe. ‘The cubling is right. This way, canini!’

Other creatures also scattered from the Shock. The reviled ferals steered a course through the rippling and broken land, once so familiar and now so strange. In the ages-long tradition of their kind, they joined or separated as each one read the threat; individual survival was their highest and most binding priority. Ferals had a mix of lifeforms and histories, with an increasing grotesquerie triggered by remnant gene modifications and unwise interbreeding. Ferals were always unpredictable and always dangerous, especially to each other. A comrade one moment might become a predator the next, depending on circumstances. They recognised no leader and despised any sign of weakness. In fact, showing any weakness among their fellows was an invitation to attack. Every other inhabitant of the plains feared and avoided the fleeing ferals as they feared and avoided the dangers of the writhing land.

The last group living on the plains, the roving tribesmen, were not as quick as the canini to read the signs of danger in the air and the sky. They were also much more unwilling to leave their campsites. Some of the elders retained close links to the land and the weather, and sent warnings: Feather of the Storm ran from camp to camp all night, carrying his grandmother’s messages.

Although many tribesfolk moved to open ground in response to Feather’s message, they were hampered by their wish to save the goods they worked so hard to gather. Their camps had grown almost as complex as cities, with elaborate portable structures and considerable quantities of gear. For generations, they had traded with the Settlement, spurning nothing except technology. Fully concerned with their own safety and with securing their belongings, however, they didn’t stop to wonder about how the humans of the Settlement were faring.

Of course, nobody Outside considered the citizens of the Pale, for they never thought of them as human.

Only Feather, whose lover was Jana Danesdottir, a Settlement woman, worried how the aftershock had affected them. Bound by his important role as herald, he fretted for a chance to head down the southern trail.