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  A Rarefied View at Dawn

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  A Rarefied View at Dawn

  by David Farland

  All Rights Copyright 2011 Dave Wolverton All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decomplied, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsiblity for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cover art: Copyright 2011 by Dave Wolverton

  Published by David Wolverton

  # ISBN-13: 978-1-61475-780-1

  A Rarefied View at Dawn

  In the sandstone sanctuary atop the mount of Kara Kune, in ancient times there was only one punishment for men who committed crimes: the guardian droids, called Valkyries, hurled them from the battlements, to fall through the cinnamon-colored mists to the jungle below, and live or die as fortune decreed.

  Now Bann and Maya raced along the wall-walk in the early dawn, their bare feet slapping the smooth sandstone ramparts, the mists boiling outside the castle like a cauldron while the coming sun silvered the sky. They were dressed alike, wearing the black silk tunics of schoolchildren with black skullcaps and golden sashes about their waists. Both had long dark hair braided down their backs, falling nearly to their knees. Of the two, Bann was the most beautiful. The girls of the city envied his lustrous dark hair, his incredibly long eyelashes, and his thin, graceful hands. He was so small-boned and delicate that he looked as if he were made of porcelain. Maya, at twelve, was two years older than Bann, and was developing the wide hips and breasts of a young woman.

  Suddenly, Bann became aware that Maya was no longer following. He turned impatiently. Maya had climbed atop the fortress's smooth wall, and now sat with her legs dangling over hundreds of feet above oblivion.

  Bann's heart thumped in his chest. He called back, "Mara, hurry, the muysafed said that there will be a surprise for us this morning!"

  Maya grinned. "The muysafed often makes such promises, silly," she teased. "It is her way of making you want to come to school."

  I know, he thought. And I'm grateful to her for it. School is so much better than home. Sometimes his mother's sad countenance weighed on him, and he hated being there.

  "But I think that today she will have the baby chicks," Bann urged. It was no secret that their teacher had received some eggs from a far-off fortress, and that she had just been waiting for them to hatch.

  "They're just chickens," Maya dismissed. "You've eaten chicken many times. Let's watch the sunrise."

  "But this is different," Bann urged. "These are alive." He couldn't express how much he wanted to see them. They were, after all, fellow creatures from Earth, a tenuous connection to his heritage. They had eyes like other earth creatures, not probas with which to sense magnetic waves. They had hearts and guts and other organs like humans.

  From far below the fortress, in the steaming jungles, sounded the rumbling hornlike cry of a yarrev, a creature that dwarfed even the largest dinosaurs of old Earth. It must have leapt a few strides, for Bann heard trees crashing and the fortress suddenly trembled slightly.

  Bann ambled back to Maya, who sat upon the stone wall. He placed a hand protectively on her shoulder, lest she slip.

  Below the walls of Kara Kune there were only rust-colored mists for as far as the eye could see. In late summer the omni-present clouds often raised high enough to tumble over the walls and cover the city for days on end. In the winter, as the air cooled, the clouds would drop low. But Bann had never seen the sprawling valley below the fortress. It was rumored that there were ocher hills and winding rivers the color cinnabar and tangled violet jungles bursting with alien life.

  But Bann saw nothing more than he had ever seen in his ten years--the sun of Lucien groping at the distant horizon, as if seeking a finger-hold in the clouds.

  "Look," Maya urged. "The clouds have dipped lower than I've ever seen, and the air is rarified today. Follow the lights toward the edge of the world."

  Bann followed her pointing finger and spotted the lights from a pair of floater ships that skimmed above the boiling red clouds. Their shimmering air sacs filled with clear light from time to time as the hydrogen furnaces fired, and their stabilizer struts and gondolas hung beneath them, making the ships look like luminous jellyfish the color of ash, hovering in the distance.

  And then Bann saw it just at the edge of the world--the very tip of a pale sanctuary shining above the mists, white castle walls dominating some mountain peak.

  "Tahaj?" he asked. It was the nearest city, forty miles away.

  "It must be," Maya agreed. "You're pretty smart, for a runt." She smiled at him playfully, then suggested. "Sit up here. There's a warm wind drifting up from the jungle. It feels good between your legs."

  Not me, Bann thought. The notion of climbing up on the wall terrified him.

  "Come on," Maya said. "It's fun. Even if you fell, we're on the east wall."

  "East?" Bann asked.

  "The east side is the easy side," Maya said. "The ground is only a hundred feet down through the mist, and the hill is steep and sandy. If the city ever comes under attack, jump off the east side, if you want to live."

  Bann heard the whine of electric motors and noticed a Valkyrie careening toward them on its single wheel. The droid had a body of carbon polymers, but wore a helmet to give it a human shape. Lasers inside the helmet projected an image on the inner surface of the visor--a gray-haired matriarch whose stern features clashed with her caring voice.

  "Please, citizen," the Valkyrie warned Bann. "Do not push her."

  Bann held Maya's shoulder, afraid that she might slip and fall if he did not hang on. Maya reached up and with her right hand and touched his left. "He'd never do that. He's my friend."

  The Valkyrie was just as stern with Maya. "Do not let your legs dangle over the wall."

  "It feels good," Maya said.

  The Valkyrie drew near, close enough to snake out a mechanical clamp if Maya tried to jump.

  "You have received a demerit," the droid notified her. "It will appear in your daily logs. Your mother and your muysafed will also be warned that you have been using thermal air currents to engage in vaginal stimulation, and that you did so in the presence of a male. Although these acts in themselves are not illegal, it will be noted that you are pubescent, and need extra guidance and monitoring."

  The droid rolled forward, placing its bulk between Bann and Maya, pushing Bann back. He didn't understand what the droid was saying--using words like pubescent and vaginal, but Bann knew that it wanted him to leave.

  He took a step backward. Maya swung her legs toward him and dropped onto the wall-walk.

  "Come on," she told him, taking his hand and casting a defiant look at the droid. They raced along the wall, leaving the Valkyrie behind.

  *****

  Class that morning was held in the dome. The midwinter sun would hardly climb above the horizon, and so the children would not have to flee into the caverns to avoid the heat.

  Instead, twelve young girls and one boy basked in a garden-like atmosphere, the grow-lights glowing lik
e small suns above them, willow trees in a small grove arching overhead, their white-robed teacher looking proudly down at her treasure--a handful of baby chicks that trundled about, some still wet from the shell. His teacher was called the muysafed, the white hair, out of respect. But actually she had dark hair and braids, though rumor said that she was over two hundred years old.

  Bann studied his chicken. It was like nothing that he had ever seen, and not quite what he had imagined. He'd once seen a holo of a bird from old Earth, a sea eagle in flight. And so he knew of feathers and wings.

  But this creature seemed to have neither. Instead, of wings, it had stubby malformed stumps. Instead of feathers, it had a covering that looked like the yellowed balls of cotton that grew in the fields atop the highest hills of the sanctuary.

  Its eyes were nothing like human eyes--dark little pools that blinked too much. And its tiny talons were the kind of thing that would give a child nightmares. Yet as he held it, Bann was delighted to feel its tiny heart kicking like a cricket within its chest, and to enjoy cool warmth. It was so like a human--nothing like the wild oily "geckoes" that sometimes climbed over the sanctuary walls upon their sticky pseudopeds.

  Bann decided that he liked his chicken. The little creature pecked at grain when Bann held it in his hand. He named it Yusaf.

  "Today," the muysafed said in a loud voice, "we are going to perform an experiment upon these chickens." She was staring right at Bann as she said it, as if to see his reaction. "Chickens are much like humans," she added. "As you can see, they have eyes like ours, and feet, and hearts that beat."

  "And lungs, too," Bann added.

  The muysafed smiled at him. Bann knew that he was one of the brightest children in the class. He felt proud to have recognized the bird's lungs.

  And wings. They have wings, and it was birds that showed mankind how to fly.

  He wanted to say that, too, but was just waiting for the appropriate moment.

  "And lungs," the muysafed admitted. "And chickens respond to some chemicals in exactly the way that we do," the teacher said. "One such chemical is a hormone called testosterone. Does anyone know what testosterone does? Amayah, the oldest girl in the class, more of a young woman really, raised her hand and said, "It's what makes a man a man."

  One girl behind Bann snickered, and others moved away from him, just barely. Only Maya drew closer, holding his hand, reassuring him.

  Talking about men was discomforting. It was men who had destroyed the old world, Earth, with their wars and violence, forcing the Three Thousand sisters to flee in their starships. Men were frightening things, evil, and were kept outside the sanctuary walls. Bann had never actually seen one. Two other boys lived within Kara Kune, but they were younger than Bann, mere toddlers. Rarely did a woman choose to conceive a boy. Usually she merely cloned herself, or mixed her seed with that of another woman.

  Still, there were men who lived outside the sanctuary, small tribes of wild men who rode the Floater ships. There were pirates, too, who sometimes stole women from the sanctuaries if the Valkyries couldn't stop them. And in some way that Bann didn't understand, these men forced women to make babies for them.

  As his teacher talked, Bann could feel blood rising to his face, and his stomach tightening, making him sick.

  "Correct," the muysafed said. "It is testosterone that turns boys into men. Among people, boys turn to men slowly. But with these chickens, we will speed the process by giving some of them large amounts of synthetic testosterone, so you can better witness the reaction."

  She drew out a syringe and injected three chicks. One got a little testosterone. Maya's got three times as much, and Bann's got ten times more than Maya's. At the end of the day, Bann got to take his chick home.

  *****

  That evening, when Bann reached the grotto where he lived with his mother Tuyallah, he raced in with Yusaf. Just as he got inside, the chick pooped. Its mess was white and stringy, with bits of yellow and gray in it. Nothing like the poop that humans made, but Bann was astonished to see how much like a person a chick could be.

  "Mom, look what I got!" he shouted as he barged through the door, holding the chick out to see. Yusaf was trembling, as if sick with a fever. "It's just a temporary reaction," the muysafed had assured Bann, "from the shot."

  Bann grinned broadly, giddy having his own chicken, but his mother only smiled tiredly, a forced smile that didn't even feign happiness.

  "So, they're doing the chicken experiment at school," she said.

  "You know about it?" Bann asked.

  "We did it when I was young," Tuyallah said. She frowned and looked away. "Let's go out tonight, to celebrate," she suggested. "We'll get dinner in the market."

  Bann was delighted. Most of the time, his mother fixed dinner at home. So they put the chick away, and began to walk to the market.

  The evening was hot. Even in the dead of winter, it could reach a hundred and twenty degrees during the day. Little red-eared lizards--remnants of an ancient attempt to terraform the planet--would race out in front of them, shiver their whole bodies, and bury themselves in the sand.

  When they reached the market, it was still too early to buy food. The baker woman had just fired up her clay ovens and was stamping the loaves with the word peace before putting them in to cook. The lamb woman was still burning her sweet-smelling saxaul wood down to coals before putting on the skewers of shish kabob.

  Bann's mother said little as she walked, only greeting other women with falsely enthusiastic, "Peace in your mind, sister, and joy in year heart," as they passed. Few of them bothered to return the greeting to a woman who was of such low social standing.

  Since dinner was not ready, his mother stopped at a stall and bought some cold green tea. She sweetened it with white grapes, the kind that are so honeyed that you can only eat two, which she squeezed right into the tea.

  When she was done, she led Bann down a road to the far side of the sanctuary, a place where Bann had never been.

  When the road was empty, his mother said softly. "I hear that you and Maya were caught up on the wall today."

  "We were just walking to school," Bann said, "like we always do."

  His mother took a deep breath. "Did she touch you?"

  "She always holds my hand," Bann answered. "She's my best friend."

  They walked farther down the road, which now switched back and dropped at a steep angle, so that they were walking deep in the shadows.

  "Of course she's your friend." Tuyallah slipped her arm through his and took his hand, gripping it tightly, almost as if she were afraid to let him go.

  "Did she ask you to touch her?" Bann's mother asked, "Between the legs?" she added hurriedly. "Or on the breasts? Or to kiss her?"

  The thought was repulsive, and Bann wanted to shrink into the ground as he answered. "No. Never."

  "Good," his mother said. "You should never do those things. Sometimes, even girls will want that. And you should never do that for them. Do you understand?"

  Bann didn't really understand, but his stomach was clenching again, and he felt so uncomfortable that he just nodded yes so that he wouldn't have to talk anymore.

  He saw some girls playing Baku, kicking their balls at one another and then rushing for the safe stones.

  "I'm the best in my class at Baku now," Bann said, thinking that he'd like to go play with the strange girls.

  "That doesn't surprise me," his mother said. "You're growing up so fast."

  She kept walking down the street. It was leading down into the lower quarters now, beneath the rust-colored clouds. When they dropped far enough, the reddish fog colored everything like blood, and the smell of yicksh--the microsopic life-forms that lived in the humidity--got thick in the air. It tasted like bitter melon.

  Down they walked, past switchback after switchback. The darkness grew more imposing with each step downward. Bann had heard that if you descended far enough, you could reach the violet jungles down in the valleys, where even the ligh
t of Lucien's bright sun could not penetrate the clouds.

  Tuyallah kept descending the steep road, and Bann followed, unsure where they were headed, until they reached a gate. A cadre of Valkyries stood by, armed with magnetic pulse rifles to repel alien creatures, and plasma weapons to fight off any incursions by men.

  "Peace to you, sisters," one of the Valkyries said as they neared, using a greeting that was common even if a boy was in the group. "Shall we escort you beyond the gate?"

  "Thank you, sister," Bann's mother replied. "It would be welcome."

  The droid began to open the gate. The electric motors had failed centuries ago, and the technicians here could only afford to repair equipment vital to the sanctuary, so the droid removed the gate's crossbars and pushed it open.

  Bann found himself breathing hard. He had never imagined leaving the city. He'd heard too many stories of cutthroats and wildmen to feel safe outside the gates.

  "Where are we going?" Bann asked.

  "To visit your father," Tuyallah replied.

  Bann's jaw dropped. "I have a father?"

  "All boys have fathers," Tuyallah answered. "But few girls do."

  "Did he hurt you?" Bann asked. "Did he force you to make me?"

  "No," his mother said. "Nothing like that. I met him here, outside the city. Just once. I . . . asked him to sleep with me, to make a baby."

  "Why?" Bann asked. His mind was racing furiously.

  "I was curious," she said. "I'd heard that men could be so . . . alluring. And the thought of meeting a male lover excited me. I guess . . . I was foolish."

  "For having me?" Bann asked.

  "No," his mother said, squeezing his hand. "Never for having you." She cleared her throat. "I was foolish to think that I could change the way that things are."

  The droid finished opening the gate, and timidly Bann stepped outside, following his mother. A pair of Valkyries led the way.