Clouds of Phoenix

1- The Dreamer in the Ruins

1

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The Dreamer in the RuinsBLANCHE RAN AS FAST AS SHE COULD.

Which was: faster than anything on the planet.

Her slender arms waving like a bird’s wings, her legs pumping the ground eight times per second, she inhaled the saline air flowing from the distant sea.

The overhead sky was the color of tender grass, a reverse pasture grazed by a herd of fluffy sheep. In a strong contrast, the mineral land replied with tawny shades of honey, oranges, rusty reds, ash grey…

Jumping from a crumpled wall to another, the girl dashed across the ruins sitting downstream of the new town. Her city harbored the builders of the future Phœnix, as the mayor affirmed at every New Year banquet.

Phœnix, her home.

The planet was named after her unique continent, its shape suggesting a great bird raising his beak as to defy the water. The bird shook away some feathers, forming a string of archipelagos. Along is vertebral spine, a mountain range dominated the highlands. A tiny cut on the bird’s neck, the valley inhabited by the colonists enjoyed a temperate climate. The ocean thrived with indigenous life, which had yet to take over the firm ground.

Blanche soon found herself on the highest point of the dead city: the temple. At least, that had been how the archaeologists named this abstract-patterned floor, surrounding a high table carved into black polished stone, like the sacrificial altar of the ancient religions. In a single leap, the young pioneer reached the top of the massive block.

A quick look to her oxygen puffer light showed a dark green circle. She had more time left to trot outside the Bubble that enclosed the town. Phœnix might be classed as an open world, but the oxygen mass counted only for a hundredth of the atmosphere, not enough to breathe. The planet’s rating, O-, reflected the scope of the terraforming effort needed.

Phoenix had a lesser note than the “P” planets, soft-climate paradises where any patch of land was disputed for fortunes. However, living on Phœnix was more enjoyable than squeezing under the pressurized domes of the closed worlds or in the floating cities of the gaseous giants.

Calypso, a G4 rated star, solitary and inconspicuous, has just risen, her light veiled in a milky halo. This halo was due to a thick dust layer hovering in high atmosphere. Those particles, diffusing the green wavelength, generated the sky color.

Blanche crossed her long legs, a tricky task considering the intricate framework of metal, pumps and pistons around them. Straps rose to her shoulders and encircled her waist to keep her inside the apparatus.

She used her basin and torso to direct the crude roboservers inserted in the mechanical joints of the frame. Clumsy at first, when her father had fitted her with the contraption, her moves had become as natural to her as brushing her hair.

Those mechanical “overalls” enabled Blanche to run, fast. Only a full speed off-road vehicle could catch up with her… if she let it.

A playful wind lifted her long hair strands, trying in vain to steal them. Blanche took out a nutrient bar and nibbled at the sweet chocolate and wheat savor.

This was her own precious moment of solitude.

Her gazed traveled over the low walls, the remains of razed habitations. Here and there, spikes wearing red, orange and sky green ribbons warned the rare walkers of the presence of treacherous hidden wells and other dangers.

The dead city had no name. The crews that had mapped, analyzed, dissected, memorized it had long since departed towards more exciting challenges. No scripts graced the arches and the murals.

The best translators had tolled in vain on the abstract patterns covering the floors. No tool, no tombs helped reconstitute the life of its inhabitants. No clue hinted to the nature of the cataclysm that had annihilated the city.

Eons ago, three planets circled around Calypso. The two sisters of Phœnix remained as thin asteroid belts that the courier shuttles cautiously avoided. Which raging war had destroyed this city?

Because the adults considered her too young to understand, they never mention in front of Blanche the ongoing war that the Gayan Alliance was leading against a rival race, the mysterious Gardeners. But she had listened in to some conversations.

Blanche paused, imagining the strident rash across the sky, or explosions gouging the ground. But, outside the breeze gusting between two rocks, the only sounds she heard was the chattering of the Ubu River, flowing down below.

In front of her, the valley broadened as to offer the dead city to the plains. The river traced a series of meanders where sand and stones snatched from the landscape accumulated. Then, the Ubu split in a dozen streams brimming over the delta before escaping into the ocean.

Blanche ate the wrapping of her bar, enjoying the marshmallow taste, and chased it down with a few gulps of treated water.

She lay on her back to look at the clouds.

Three pale filaments drifted, strands of hair frayed by strong high-altitude air currents. She knew that over the sky, a more glacial void stretched, an infinite blackness where Phoenix and Calypso danced like tiny dust grains.

A dizziness fell over her. The young girl felt that, any time now, her body would loosen itself from the rock and fall in this endlessly green void, ripping the frail threads of cloud.

Then, the first dancers appeared.

They came from the eastern highland.

Their forms reminded her of spinning tops enclosed in a disk of ice crystals. Their rotation generated a long tail spiraling down, burdened by the weight of agglomerated crystals, as if the clouds tried to reach the land.

An impossible errand, since the dancers stayed high in the atmosphere, where atoms got scarce.

Now, they were eight, nine, ten, eleven… She smiled broadly at them.

*

A GRAVELLY VOICE called overhead.

“Speaking again to the clouds, Blanche?”

Blanche’s eyes blinked open. Six slender polymerized steel legs had made a cage around her, holding the squat body of a spider. She must have dozed off while watching the dancers. Not a serious problem: in case of prolonged sleep, her oxygen puffer would have warned her in time to return to the Bubble.

The metal spider stepped aside. The legs folded down in a hiss of hydraulic joints, lowering the abdominal seat to the ground.

His hand on the sole command, a man clad in a brown overall looked at her from mischievous eyes.

Blanche greeted him with a broad smile. Sabian was the only adult not all worked up and ranting all day about schedules and quotas. A rare thing on a burgeoning colony, he moved around on his own runner, a freedom that many other coveted.

“I saw you from afar,” he said, using the intrafamilial form of address that Blanche appreciated. “I thought that here would be a good place to work.”

He had come here to paint, of course.

A gush of wind pushed grey strands from his brow. Sabian was also the only man on Phœnix over fifty standard years old. Raising his hand as a shelter, he looked up, tiny wrinkles fanning from the corners of his eyes.

“The dancers are already here? Well, I’m late!”

He jumped from the seat and landed on his boots, a lithe move many younger men would envy.

Sabian cast a triangular cushion to the ground. Three legs popped up, inserting themselves between the tiles. The man sat on the mechanical stool, grateful for a little stability after being shaken by his spider’s gait. Following his habits, he would stay here without moving at least half an hour, before pacing the ruins for inspiration. Blanche left him to roam the ruins on her own.

There was a lot to discover, she was certain of it. She took precautions not to fall in the wells or trip over a raised angled stone. While descending the unequal slope from the temple, she could guess at the geometry of the houses foundations. Metal beams had held the stone houses together at a point, but whatever had killed the city had melted the supports, leaving the low foundations in place. Most bases had been covered by scattered bricks, but the teams of archeologists had cleaned out a few of the habitations in the hopes of finding some usable alien tech, or some jewels.

They hadn’t found anything besides mineral artifacts: the table, some marked slabs, signs on the walls. They never found any doors, nor windows. Blanche imagined the unknown beings hopping over the base of their wall to land on the roof and descend to the living area.

*

WHEN SHE RETURNED from her exploration, she found her friend installed before the graceful curve of a triple portal. His veined hands brushed over his pad, fluttering as bird wings. He was fashioning a series of clouds roaming high over the portal.

He used a fan brush, its magnetic points reacting with the screen cells of the pad to recreate the woolly spirals of the dancers. Blanche bent over his shoulder to get a closer view, fascinated by such a sophisticated instrument.

One of her long strands swept the surface, sprouting a lace of dark patches. The young girl backed up in alarm, her face flushing red. But the artist erased her mishap with his thumb.

“Do you want to draw?” he asked, smiling.

Blanche pointed an inquiring finger on the existing sketch.

“Oh! Don’t worry; this one will wait in memory.”

Elated, Blanche put her hands on the screen and began to draw a cloud. The task soon got arduous: her hands trembled, splashing ill-formed splotches instead of vaporous filaments. A few minutes later, she stopped to consider her work of art, tilting her head in an eloquent sulk.

“No, it’s very good,” Sabian said, his tone encouraging. “You did not choose an easy subject.”

An angry voice tore the calmness of the ruins.

“So here you are!”

Camped on her long legs, arms crossed over her humor sweater glowing a ferocious scarlet, Lupianne Gaillard stared at them. The wing had disheveled her thin short hair. Blanche’s older sister hid her exhaustion behind pinched lips.

She had just walked from the city, a six kims trek that the clement gravity of 0.8 g allowed her to travel in one hour. Her orthopedic soles could not prevent the growing soreness in her feet.

She raised her hand to her shoulder, to adjust the puffer linked to the flat oxygen tank hanging at her waist. Her left hand held a rigid map plate. A solitary green dot was blinking on it.

“You know it’s dangerous to play in the ruins, Blanche! You may choke, that far from the Bubble! You’re lucky Marcia hasn’t noticed your absence!”

Instead of answering to her sister, Blanche’s hands tapped swiftly on the wide bracelet on her left forearm, producing syllables, words and phrases from the red keys aligned, dark letters hurrying in line through a thin lime-green screen and disappearing on the left.

Words spout from the vocalizer hanging from the young girl’s neck.

“Marcia cannot see me outside the city. My air supply is abundant.”

Lupianne tried not to wince at the cooing uppity-class lady voice, honeyed like the female voices announcing departures and arrivals in spaceports.

Sabian noticed the sad expression on the older girl’s face. It had been he who had put together the vocalizer, using material readily available to him. His voice samples had not included a ten years-old little girl.

«Little» was a relative term: standing in her makeshift exoskeleton, Blanche topped her sister by a finger, even if Lupianne, at sixteen, had sprung up like a wild plant.

If she hadn’t got out looking for Blanche, Marcia, the Brain of the admin center who routinely checked the biological tracers of all colonists, would have sent off an alert as soon as her absence from the Bubble would become problematic. A security team would be sent out. And bothering the security for a foolish blunder would get Lupianne – the oldest of the sisters – a reprimand. It was a black mark she was determined to avoid, hence her hasty excursion.

“And I am with Sabian,” added the unreal voice.

Blanche did not feel the least embarrassed. Her baby voice was buried, along with her mother’s face, under countless layers of memories.

Lupianne scolded herself for letting her vigilance drop. Her memories went back to the accident that had cost Blanche her legs…. and their mother’s life.

*

ARMI GAILLARD HAD BEEN VISITING a building in progress in the east of the city. She liked to watch the construction sites, while waiting for her husband, an incorrigible handyman, to get out of his workshop. As often, she had taken little Blanche, age three, with her.

That day, an unexpected earthquake shook the area. The building Armi was in shuddered on its barely-consolidated foundations. The walls came loose, then the whole building collapsed.

Alerted of the imminent doom by the shaking walls, Armi had the reflex to throw her daughter by an open window. The child landed outside, alive, but her crashing had broken her lower vertebras.

Later, Armi had been lifted out of the ruins and taken to the admin center. Lupianne had followed, her stomach roiling with acids.

Her mom’s wounds had been too severe. Armi died on the following day.

Lupianne, who had always been close to her mother, felt a whole lump of her being torn aside, leaving an empty shell.

Mad with grief, her father shut himself in his workshop for longer hours. His eldest daughter made up for the lost affection by intense studies sessions.

And there was Blanche.

Unable to walk or talk, reeling under this abrupt separation that she couldn’t explain to herself, little Blanche took refuge in the clouds.

As all the grown-up on Phœnix, together with her father and sister, were busy working or studying, the girl spontaneously turned toward the only adult who had free time aplenty…

For the following years, Sabian had transported the child on his back, telling her stories from the old Gaya. And, yes, he also put together this awful vocalizer!

Seeing the new tech, Romain Gaillard had felt out staged by this stranger recently dropped on Phœnix. The man’s complicity with his daughter, from which Romain felt excluded, irritated him no end as he was sorely missed his spouse.

With the help of a friend and the doctor, cutting down on his sleep, Romain built a coarse exoskeleton, which he gave Blanche for her sixth birthday.

It was a revelation. After the first trials and errors, the child could delight in the freedom to go where she wanted, when she wanted it.

The exoskeleton held her frail legs and took its orders directly from Blanche’s nerve endings on the part of her column that was still intact. She could run hours without getting tired, and faster than any trained athlete.

Alas, the other children — and adults! — couldn’t follow her.

Soon, the little mute girl found herself more isolated than ever. She took the habit of quitting the Bubble perimeter to wander under the clouds, a practice that Romain Gaillard didn’t fancy much.

He put a tracer into Blanche’s exoskeleton and assigned the localizer to Blanche, making the elder sister responsible for any mishaps.

*

SABIAN’S KIND VOICE dispelled Lupianne’s thoughts.

“So, I guess you walked quite a distance to get here!”

She didn’t answer, even if his flattering remark had found its target. In good shape, Lupianne could cover a kim in a few minutes, not that it helped much to keep an eye on her sister.

He extended an arm towards the spider: a second seat was unfolding along the first.

“You can ride back with me,” he said.

The girl hesitated, despite the offering.

“I… don’t want to interrupt your painting,” she said, her tone hesitant.

But this was not the real cause of her reserve. Of course, Lupianne did not fear the man who had befriended Blanche, a bond the little girl shared. Growing up in a remote colony set on an inhospitable world crafted links of solidarity that would be difficult to reproduce in anonymous urban megapoles.

Lupianne’s real concern was about what her father would say when he saw them together. He often said that Sabian had a bad influence over Blanche.

The artist put back pad and stool in the basket under the spider’s abdomen.

“I’m going back home,” he said. “The light has changed too much. I’ll return here tomorrow.”