Free Out on Blue Six by Ian McDonald Page B

the thought clearly entered Courtney Hall’s head (and remained there) that in all the adventures of Wee Wendy Waif she had helped to create, there had never been anything half so bizarre as being dragged down dark tunnels deep under Yu on a tube-steel travois by an army of talking raccoons.

Apostles I
    A S HE WAITED FOR the judgment, it came to him: a moment of clairaudience (some alchemic combination of time and place and atmosphere) when the ear abolished all distance between sources and all sounds arrived at it with equal weight and clarity. The iron grumble of tram wheels. The hiss of rain, ebbing. The calls, the splashing footfalls of the wingers abroad in the streets of Pendelburg. The ring of a solitary pedicab bell. High above, indeterminate, the purr of airship engines. He heard them all, clearly, distinctly, each voice a note in the night-song. And he heard the voices of his friends judging him.
    The little he understood about the universe forced him to conclude that he was a threat to these people. This society into which he had been thrust (how? from whence? why?) had an inside and an outside; his own experience taught him that much, and these people were firmly outside. He suspected that, unlike himself, they had chosen to be outside; unlike himself again, they had not been outside from the very beginning. But to such outsiders as they, others of their kind could be a threat, an insider in disguise.
    Marvelous, the amount he had learned of this fascinating universe already.
    He listened to the debating voices, the soliloquies, the valiant defenses from the dock, the accusations and the parries, and pondered anew the condition of the outsider in this rigidly enclosed society. They could claim nothing from their Compassionate Society (whole blocks of a priori knowledge that had hitherto floated solitary, isolated, in the spaces of his memories, were levered into place, monolith by monolith), and as he suspected that this institution controlled all resources political, economic, physical, and spiritual, these Raging Apostles had only such access to food, power, and shelter as their wits allowed them. A dangerous place to be outside. He recalled the hang gliders, the synthesizers, the fireworks, the glittering costumes that had bedazzled him in Neu Ulmsbad Square. Their wits must be sharp indeed to winkle such beads and baubles from the Seven Servants. (Another block of masonry fell with a crash into position.) Quickness of the hands deceives the eye. Empty bellies under robes of splendor. He reckoned the Raging Apostles sacrificed themselves for their art.
    “I’m not happy about this. I’m not happy at all; what proof have we that this Kilimanjaro West is not a Love Police agent?” That was Winston’s voice. He was learning to distinguish the individual performers by their voices. A deep “pneumatic rumble of a voice; the athleto, what was his name? Kilimanjaro West had only just begun to come to terms with a casted, stratified society.
    “Then why aren’t we in West One? Why didn’t they pick us up back there in Neu Ulmsbad?” A debate between the two. “Because we gave them the slip. But how do you know that we’re safe here, that the Love Police won’t come out of the sky at any moment?”
    Here, the safe here, was the Big Tree. Seeing it from a distance through rain-streaked glass and frantically pumping windshield wipers, Kilimanjaro West had had great difficulty in believing that such a place could exist. Incongruous in boulevard after boulevard after boulevard of fin de siècle brownstones as a fart in a cathedral, Big Tree was a solid block of green growingness, a vertical jungle, its canopy breaking in a steaming green wave twenty meters above the red pantiles of Pendelburg. A solitary trog enclave in a prefecture of wingers.
    “ SHELTER closed it down about twelve years back,” explained the girl he had learned to call Kansas Byrne. “Part of a planned population shift; the prollets over