through damp veils, streaked pink and blotched brown, along the entrance, while my employer 1 , came apart and collected herself behind us.
As we came out under the loud, dark sky, she said: ‘He’s quite something, isn’t he?’ (The second ‘he’ made that imaginary lip bone of mine unflex.) ‘If you knew even a tenth of the work he’s been putting into our emergency situation here, you’d be awed. We’ve, had to go to the stars when we can’t even get help from geosectors five or five-hundred kilometres away!’
‘Oh, in just the day I’ve been here, I’ve been able to get a rough idea.’ I think she looked questioningly at me on the word ‘day’, but I’m not sure. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she’squite a woman. And you’ve got quite a situation to deal with here, all of you.’
The dark sky crackled with red lightning, and a moment later thunder, which had punctuated my stay almost every twenty minutes, trundled across the low, ragged peaks. ‘Is it always like this?’ I asked, loudly.
Trailing gauzes around her, she glanced at me, her face glimmering as through washes of (human) blood. ‘Oh, we have whole fifty- and sixty-hour periods when the lightning is blue.’
‘I mean over all of Nepiy.’
‘Oh, no,’ she answered. ‘You only get lightning here in the western equatorial band. A thousand kilometres towards the poles in either direction, and you don’t get any lightning at all. Just black.’
We climbed into the kar.
Strung into the pilot’s net, the woman pressed and pulled and pushed.
The kar broke through the power shield into the hot, dark, ululating silt.
‘Do you have anything like this at home?’ Now she wore lots of layers of lensing plastic over her face.
‘No,’ I said, thinking of our southern hotwind season, which comes close. ‘Not really.’
‘There –’ she said suddenly, pointing through the grill-work over the window plate. ‘Can you see it –?’
I couldn’t, which is pretty usual in such situations.
‘Over there …?’
After a few minutes I thought I could. Which is also usual. General Information got me through, though: apparently those dark, fuzzy slashes were where kilometre after kilometre was acrawl with a rugged, rotting vine that decayed into polluting vapour, whipping about the strong wind in yellow blades – like my home world’s -wrs gone wild. The vines had been intended as high-yieldbean bushes that would bear seven distinct types of bean, each with a distinct and different flavour. But as the genetic designs had been shipped from world to world, star to star, somewhere along the way a few triplets had fallen into the DNA specifications that, in conjunction with a high-sodium environment, upped the possibility of viable mutation: and this particular bit of Nepiy desert had been all salt marsh sometime before its very superficial planoforming. The triplets hadn’t been detected, or rather hadn’t been recognized for what they were. At about the fifth generation, the bushes had suddenly metamorphosed into this lethal and virulent sport.
‘Within thirty kilometres there are three urban complexes that are on the border of starvation, with a combined population of twelve million women – of both races,’ my driver said glumly.
‘I see.’ Outside the window, the fields were dark and dim. ‘Still, I find it a little hard to understand how three whole cities are dependent on a single product, to the point that its failure threatens them with starvation …?’
She glanced at me through many lenses. ‘It’s more complicated than that, of course. But you have to leave in a … day. Do you have time to hear the last fifty years’ history of this geosector, or the last eighty years’ history of the Quintian Geosector Grouping, of which our sector, here, is the smallest, or of the two hundred twelve years’ history of Nepiy’s whole colonization …?’
‘Given the time we have, I probably wouldn’t be able to follow it.’
As we came out under the loud, dark sky, she said: ‘He’s quite something, isn’t he?’ (The second ‘he’ made that imaginary lip bone of mine unflex.) ‘If you knew even a tenth of the work he’s been putting into our emergency situation here, you’d be awed. We’ve, had to go to the stars when we can’t even get help from geosectors five or five-hundred kilometres away!’
‘Oh, in just the day I’ve been here, I’ve been able to get a rough idea.’ I think she looked questioningly at me on the word ‘day’, but I’m not sure. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she’squite a woman. And you’ve got quite a situation to deal with here, all of you.’
The dark sky crackled with red lightning, and a moment later thunder, which had punctuated my stay almost every twenty minutes, trundled across the low, ragged peaks. ‘Is it always like this?’ I asked, loudly.
Trailing gauzes around her, she glanced at me, her face glimmering as through washes of (human) blood. ‘Oh, we have whole fifty- and sixty-hour periods when the lightning is blue.’
‘I mean over all of Nepiy.’
‘Oh, no,’ she answered. ‘You only get lightning here in the western equatorial band. A thousand kilometres towards the poles in either direction, and you don’t get any lightning at all. Just black.’
We climbed into the kar.
Strung into the pilot’s net, the woman pressed and pulled and pushed.
The kar broke through the power shield into the hot, dark, ululating silt.
‘Do you have anything like this at home?’ Now she wore lots of layers of lensing plastic over her face.
‘No,’ I said, thinking of our southern hotwind season, which comes close. ‘Not really.’
‘There –’ she said suddenly, pointing through the grill-work over the window plate. ‘Can you see it –?’
I couldn’t, which is pretty usual in such situations.
‘Over there …?’
After a few minutes I thought I could. Which is also usual. General Information got me through, though: apparently those dark, fuzzy slashes were where kilometre after kilometre was acrawl with a rugged, rotting vine that decayed into polluting vapour, whipping about the strong wind in yellow blades – like my home world’s -wrs gone wild. The vines had been intended as high-yieldbean bushes that would bear seven distinct types of bean, each with a distinct and different flavour. But as the genetic designs had been shipped from world to world, star to star, somewhere along the way a few triplets had fallen into the DNA specifications that, in conjunction with a high-sodium environment, upped the possibility of viable mutation: and this particular bit of Nepiy desert had been all salt marsh sometime before its very superficial planoforming. The triplets hadn’t been detected, or rather hadn’t been recognized for what they were. At about the fifth generation, the bushes had suddenly metamorphosed into this lethal and virulent sport.
‘Within thirty kilometres there are three urban complexes that are on the border of starvation, with a combined population of twelve million women – of both races,’ my driver said glumly.
‘I see.’ Outside the window, the fields were dark and dim. ‘Still, I find it a little hard to understand how three whole cities are dependent on a single product, to the point that its failure threatens them with starvation …?’
She glanced at me through many lenses. ‘It’s more complicated than that, of course. But you have to leave in a … day. Do you have time to hear the last fifty years’ history of this geosector, or the last eighty years’ history of the Quintian Geosector Grouping, of which our sector, here, is the smallest, or of the two hundred twelve years’ history of Nepiy’s whole colonization …?’
‘Given the time we have, I probably wouldn’t be able to follow it.’
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