Ken MacLeod - Dark Light

R awliston Sprawls; from space its a grubby smudge, staining the glassy clarity of the atmosphere along fifty kilometers of coastline. Biggest city on the planet, home to a million or so human and other beings. Seven centuries old and ever renewed; two centuries on from the biggest jolt it ever got; hours away from another. Its coming like an earthquake, coming like a runaway train, coming like a lightspeed ship.

Stone froze in a cold sky. Around him, the gliders struts creaked and its cables sang. Hundreds of meters below his feet, the valley crawled. The Great Vale stretched fifty or so kilometers before him and the same distance behind him, its fields and towns, rivers and screes filling his sight. Through the imperfect glass disks of his goggles he couldnt quite see the mighty rockfalls at either end that had, thousands of years ago, isolated the valley, but he could just make out the distant gleam of the lake formed by Big River against the natural dam at the eastern end. The midmorning sun glimmered on a series of meanders in the rivers fat, lazy length along the valleys broad floor. The word for world is valley, he thought, and the word we use for ourselves is the flying people, and the word the savages use for themselves is people. Oh, but arent we a sophisticated and self-conscious Stone Age civilization!

He hung in a leather harness; the handles he gripped were made from the paired humeri of an eagle; the fabric of the wing above him was of hand-woven silk doped with alcohol-thinned pine resin; the crafts singing structural members were tensed bamboo, its cables vine and its stitching gut. Flint blades and bone needles and wooden shuttles had been worn smooth in its manufacture; no metal tool had touched it. No man, either; the whole process, from harvesting the raw materials through building it to this, its test flight, was womens work. It would be bad luck for a man to touch it until it had been brought safely back from its maiden flight and formally turned over. Stone wryly reflected on the canny custom that assigned the rougher and riskier parts of glider productionfinding the eagles carcass, tapping the resin, testing the craftto women like him. He enjoyed the excitement and the solitude of these tasks, though they would not have been so welcome without the background of days he spent in the secure and companionable society of other women, working in long, airy sheds with the needle or the loom, the glass saw or the stone knife.

He banked into an updraught and followed its upward spiral, almost to a level with the mountain range on the western side of the valley. Below him, a pair of wing-lizards skimmed the corries. Two black flecks, their wingspans almost a third that of the glider. He kept a cautious eye on the upper slopes as he drifted past them; sneaking across the skyline was the preferred approach route for savage scouts and even raiding parties, and firearms were one product of the metalworking peoples whose use none of the stoneworking peoplesincluding his owndared to disdain.

From his high vantage he could see the other aerial traffic of the valley: a few hot-air balloon-trains lofting to cross the eastern barrier on the way to Rawliston, dozens of other gliders patrolling the slopes or carrying urgent messages and light freight from one town to another. A quick upward turn of his head caught him a glimpse of a high, fast glint as one of the snake peoples gravity skiffs, on some incomprehensibly urgent mission of its own, flashed across the sky like a shooting star. The skiffs were a common sight, starships rarer. Every few weeks a ship would follow the line of the Great Vale in a slow, sloping descent to Rawliston; itd be at an altitude of two kilometers when it passed above the western end of the valley, down to a thousand meters by the time it reached the other.

Swinging out of the updraught, he set the machine on the long descending westward glide that would take him back to the launching-and-landing slope of the airfield above his native town, Long Bridge. He was following the course of Big River at a few hundred metersan altitude quite low enough for him to smell the smoke from the kilns and see and hear children pointing and yelling at him from each village he passed overwhen he heard a screaming from the sky to the north and west. Stone looked up.

Something huge and black hurtled in a second from the zenith to behind the hills, just ahead of him and to the left. Reflexively he closed his eyes, flinching in expectation of a crash and an explosion.

None came.

He sent a quick and self-consciously futile prayer of thanks to the indifferent gods and opened his eyes. What he saw made him almost shut them again. Behind the brow of the mountain range a vast, ramshackle contraption was rising like a malignant moon. Evidently the object seen falling, it moved forward, almost scraping the summit. Lurching and yawing, it careened to above the middle of the valley. Then it stopped, hanging in the air half a kilometer away, right in front of him. It turned around.

The air crackled; Stone could feel every hair on his body prickle. He was still rushing forward, on a collision course that in seconds would splatter him and the glider across the front of the thing like a fly on goggles. He swung his upper body forward and his legs up, and tipped the the bone levers to tilt the glider into a dive. Down and down, he aimed for Big River, in the slim hope that if he couldnt pull out in time he might just survive a crash into water.

The shadow of the unidentified flying object passed over him. Something, not the air and not his own efforts, slowed his descent, at the same time buffetting him as though with invisible fists. He felt, incredulously, that he was actually being lifted. Then the shadow and the strange lightness passed, and he began to plummet again, but now he was able to pull back. At fifty meters above the river he was in level flight, at a speed that a small and cautious upward flex on the controls turned into a shallow climb.