Echoes of The Kin

By Mads Sorensen

Thousands of years from now, a global Ice Age has consumed Earth. The few remaining Inuit-like survivors are facing extinction when two huge spacecraft crash land. On board are the descendants of a group who left for another planet, named Yord, ten thousand years earlier. Following a distress call from Earth, an expedition embarked from Yord on a thousand year voyage to the destitute planet. They have lived and died in space for generations on a flotilla of climatically and gravitationally controlled crafts. They are naked, devoid of possessions and totally unprepared for life in a sub-zero climate.
The Inuit (or Enuid as they call themselves) believe their gods have returned to them at their time of great need. According to Enuid legend, the leader of the gods has to be sacrificed to save the living. Success in this task will lead to the dawn of a new world where food is plentiful and humankind can once again flourish. However, the Flotillans’ hardy, humanoid slaves, the serfs, who have been mercilessly brutalised for thousands of years by their owners, have their own plans...
This is Book One of a trilogy.
Some adult content.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mads Sorensen
• Release date: Jul 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310422027

Mads Sorensen

From the age of six, Mads Sorensen knew he wanted to be a writer. In fact, he could even write before he could read, requiring his mother to read his stories back to him. While living in his native country, Denmark, Mads participated in several geological expeditions to Greenland before moving with his job in the oil industry to England. Here, he continued to pursue his dream, writing at any spare moment he could find. He started out writing novels set in the backdrop of a future Ice Age before moving to the ever popular thriller genre. With 'Echoes of The Kin' Mads has now returned to his beloved frozen future.

Book preview

Prologue

May 13th 12,591

Oduk watched the white bear standing motionless by a seal’s breathing hole. It was tiny as a mite against the sheer wall of the largest of the giant icebergs trapped in the frozen sea far from the shore. He clutched his spear and glanced at the sheet of cloud above. They would not be back at the camp until well after dark, and by then snow would be falling.

He tightened the strap around his waist and pulled their sled towards the blurred, grey-white horizon. Malik followed on behind, his long, black hair tucked under his hood.

The bear looked up later than Oduk had anticipated. It must be hungry, he thought, loosening his hood.

He detached the sled from his waist, letting the straps fall on the snow-crusted ice. Malik started hobbling towards the bear.

Behind the shoulder blade, Oduk reminded himself.

The bear had another look at the hole it would have been watching for hours, perhaps even days. Then it started moving towards Malik with a lumbering gait.

In their happier past, sled dogs would have been let loose on the bear, who would get so perplexed by the baying and snapping all around that it lost sight of the real danger and became an easy target. But during last year’s famine they had had to eat the dogs to keep their Enuid tribe alive.

Malik’s limp deteriorated to a dragging of feet, his natural anxiety adding to the credibility of his act.

Don’t overdo it, Oduk thought, as the bear slowed its movement. They couldn’t afford to lose it.

A rare bolt of fire split the clouds. Oduk looked up.

High above the berg, a massive, pebble-shaped object fell, followed by a trail of light.

He had heard of a rock coming from the sky many generations ago when The Enuid had still been thriving. It had hit the ground and turned an entire tribe to nothing.

But the giant pebble didn’t hit the ice. It headed for the land that rose in the far distance.

The bear! Malik shouted.

Oduk heard the growl before he saw its dark open maw, its nose shining black in the whiteness. He raised his spear, the bear its paw.

The bear, oddly, hesitated, and Oduk thrust his spear through its heart.

He felt a darkening of the sky and looked up once more to find another gigantic, pebble-shaped object above, much closer to the ice than the first.

The object hit the berg with a thunderous crack and carried on down. Oduk saw it was hollow, with a huge gash in its rear.

A hurricane blast swept him off his feet, sending his spear and knife dancing across the frozen pane.

The hollow pebble skipped on the ice with a horrific screech before leaping back into the air. A spray of debris burst from the gash like seeds from a pod—whole bodies, parts of bodies, steaming coils and sheets of black, skins of green, purple and blue. From the berg’s gouged-out edge, chunks and slabs of ice came crashing down.

Drud, Malik said.

Oduk barely registered the large block of ice crashing next to him. He just watched the second object, black and huge against the greyness, as it disappeared behind the cliffs of a faraway inlet. In a sled without dogs, Drud shall descend from The Land of The Sun, he recalled from Legend.

All across the ice, red and turquoise were spewed from twitching flesh. Red, the colour of Enuid blood. Turquoise, the colour of spirit blood. Could it really be?

Not far away, Oduk saw a baby boy lying on his back on the ice. His eyes were closed and he seemed unharmed, but he neither moved nor cried.

How cruel life could be, he thought. The boy had died a baby and stayed a baby in The Land of The Sun, where your age never changes.

Oduk spied a mass of twisted black material less than ten paces away. It creaked and tipped over, swathed in hissing steam. From its base, turquoise flowed across the cover of hard snow.

He crept closer, peering into the black mass, but he saw only his own diffuse shadow created by the glare off the iceberg behind. He moved aside, taking his shadow with him.

A long claw broke through a thinning vapour cloud, and a dark-skinned creature, neither man nor beast, emerged. It looked at Oduk with two ochre, globular eyes. The scent of its breath was bland yet pervasive, and the sharp smell of its turquoise blood tickled Oduk’s nostrils.

A spirit, he thought. It had to be.

Malik, the son of the shaman, had seen celestial spirits before but never in the flesh. Like Oduk, he was transfixed by the being.

It spoke a few syllables in a slow, wordless gurgle.

Oduk didn’t understand what it was saying, but he knew from Legend that the wisdom received by a spirit from countless orphaned memories far exceeded that of the wisest living man.

The raised claw fell back into the twilit deep, and the lidless ochre eyes of the spirit glazed to a dull brown. Oduk saw that several more spirits were inside, all motionless.

In a pool of turquoise, he spied a void with a shimmering halo. He touched the void with his finger but found that it had substance, as soft as moss.

Ripples scurried from the tip of his finger, and the void disappeared, taking its halo with it. With his nail, he picked out a crumb of the invisible substance and pulled his finger from the pool of spirit blood. On his skin around the substance, flakes of dirt lit up yellow.

He licked the substance. The taste was not unpleasant, a bit like rancid blubber, only far more potent. He dug it with his teeth from under his nail and let it slide down his tongue.

The R-rhym, Malik stammered.

Oduk felt a caustic bitterness streaking from his throat, carving trails of burning across his chest. From The Rhym all arose, darkness turned to light and void to substance, and into The Rhym all will again descend, he remembered from Legend. And he knew he had made a mistake.

He opened his mouth, sucking in cold air to stem the burning. But the air in his lungs and the pumping of his heart only fuelled the flames that burst from the centre of his body.

Malik leapt back, expecting, it seemed, Oduk to explode.

Oduk’s hands then feet, arms and legs went numb. His vision swam yet remained sharp.

He collapsed on the windswept ice, claws of fire tearing at his heart, and like a parting of dissimilar twins, he broke off from himself.

Rising into the frost, he saw his body lifeless below, his mouth spewing out foam on the ice. He was dead, he assumed. Soon, he would rise to The Land of The Sun and never again go hungry.

He watched the distant, landlocked horizon as it brightened to a curtain haze. From within the cloth of light, blurred, shadowy shapes of naked Enuid emerged under a billowing vault. Into their midst sailed a lithe woman, her face and neck golden as the midday Sun.

A spear of light shot through her, and the shapes withered in her glow. Then she rose to the sky and dissolved, as did the curtain and the vault, into the greyness above the horizon.

Oduk felt the cold and caught the sweetly familiar smell of bear blood. He was one with his body again, lying on the ice.

He felt a curious kind of disappointment that he wasn’t after all on his way to The Land of The Sun, until he realised what had happened.

I saw her, he told Malik.

Who?

Drud. Over the horizon. With a spear through her heart.

Malik wept and so did Oduk. At last it had happened. At last The Ice Woman at the centre of The Sun had found them worthy.

An icy wind stirred up a thin veneer of powdery snow, and Oduk started laughing.

Malik laughed, too, loudly and shrilly, as they rolled together, pummelling each other’s backs. The joy enveloping Oduk was so complete that nothing else existed.

Part I: The Flotilla

Thirteen Months Earlier

April 10th 12,590

Out of an ocean roller, Tyitti rose, her long, blonde hair clinging to her face and naked body. Behind her trailed a man even taller than her, every cube of his exhausted frame packed with muscle.

You should see me again, she whispered in his ear.

He lifted her wet hair and let it slide through his fingers, his blood-red eyes flashing. Then he scraped away a few grains of sand, which had joined the freckles bridging her nose. I will.

As he spoke in his deep, cultured voice, a black, needle-thin ring glittered from the wall between his nostrils. It had been made by serfs from the toughest, finest serf claw. They were unusual on The Flotilla, adornments of the body, and Tyitti had shivered earlier when it had rubbed delightfully cold against her nipples and vulva.

His name was Hayden, she remembered. He had been good, better than average, if lacking a little in stamina. She slapped his buttock, sending him on his way. Bring a friend next time.

She was watching his long, white hair quiver in the middle distance when Jez slung an arm around her neck from behind, wrestling her to the ground. Struggling to get back on her feet, she was met by a shower of seaweed and jellyfish.

He evaded a swipe of her hand and on quick feet reached a field of grassy dunes that rose behind. In long strides across the sand, Tyitti took up the chase.

In hollows across the dune field, Flotillan people lounged, slept or copulated, all as naked as the stunted, humanoid serfs moving between them. Tyitti wound her way through the bustle, serfs scattering before her. With her long, slender legs and narrow hips, she quickly gained on Jez. But near the top of the dunes, he pulled away again, his shorter, sturdier legs giving him an edge on steep ground.

The setting changed, and Tyitti was rushing down white water through woodland.

Cheat, Jez yelled, flapping his arms to keep his mouth above water.

She wove like a fish between the rocks. I didn’t know. And that was true. She paid little attention to the timing of the settings. It was easy to forget that Vessel 101, like the other one hundred twenty vessels of the Flotilla, was a largely empty shell, and that the settings were nothing but illusions created by differential gravity.

After The Flotilla had left the planet of Yord nine hundred ninety-two years ago, heading for ancestral Earth, the settings had been crafted and maintained by Flotillans. But over the centuries, serfs had taken over more and more of the work, and today they carried out almost all necessary tasks on The Flotilla. The serfs themselves were descendants from a sentient, Yord-native species, which had been vanquished, identity-deprived and domesticated by early Yord settlers almost nine thousand years ago.

Jez attempted escape up a bank from a pool of calmer water, but Tyitti caught him by the ankle and pulled him back in, grabbing him by his hair. Do you regret what you did?

He shook his head.

She ducked him. Do you?

He shook his head under water.

She rubbed his face in a patch of gravel. Say, I regret what I did.

He went limp, only his arms twitching a little in the passing eddies, and she yanked him back up.

A smile split his face, water sluicing from his mouth. She dropped him on the rocks and rose. Wrinkling her face in disgust, she raised a bundle of her hair, still lathered in seaweed and jellyfish film.

See what you did, she complained, though she didn’t mind. It cheered her to see her twin brother smile for a change.

A bald, orb-faced serf crouched motionless like a boulder by the next bend down-river. Jez, chuckling, beckoned it with a subtle turn of his hand. Grey as a cadaver, the serf rose to its feet and moved through the undergrowth towards them with a rolling, rhythmic gait.

The serf arrived. Its oily, leathery skin was cracked and fissured, and its one remaining lidless eye had lost its ochre sheen and turned the dull, dark amber of high age. A wound stretched from its empty eye socket, across its cluster of tiny, nose-less nostrils and lipless mouth to its absent neck. It was so deep and wide that the knotty scar tissue had trouble filling it even half. The serf, repulsive even by the standards of its kind, opened a mouth distorted and sheared by the injury. It emitted a mid-range monotone devoid of resonance.

Resting on her elbows, Tyitti dipped her toes in the pool. She cocked her head to catch a blade of sunlight cutting through the canopy.

Clean me, she ordered.

The serf extruded claws from each of its four-knuckle fingers and began to pick seaweed filaments from her hair.

Tyitti saw Jez’s demeanour darken, as if night descended, and it made her think of life after landing.

She barely felt a connection to Yord and certainly not to Earth—the planet their ancestors’ ancestors had left on The Scarabeo over ten thousand years ago, as embryos to be revived twenty-two years prior to arriving on Yord.

She didn’t see any purpose landing on Earth, a terrifying, alien entity. And yet, it was inescapable. Daily and annual cycles, the settings, even the food on The Flotilla, were Earth. But all it did in Tyitti’s opinion was prepare them for death, from disease or starvation or the teeth of predators.

Jez kicked up a clump of turf and picked from under it a small stone of flint. He stabbed a corner into his wrist, but it yielded to his skin and turned plastic.

He showed her his absent wound and the unbloodied, re-hardened flint. Then he hurled the stone against a tree the other side of the river, sending a squirrel scurrying for cover. All fake to the smallest detail, unable to any cause harm or pain. Even the plants and animals are fakes.

Tyitti shifted position a little to let the serf pull a blade of seaweed from between her breasts. I prefer it that way.

Jez pressed the tips of all ten fingers against his ribs. Real people need real lives. It’s our duty to make a go of life on Earth. But Tyitti knew from screams in his sleep that he feared the meeting with the old planet at least as much as she did.

Even if they survived landing and the shock that followed, even if the climate on Earth was benign and food plentiful, the outlook was bleak in Tyitti’s view. After almost a thousand years of carefree existence in space, they would have lost their ability, their instinct, to survive. The Flotillans, too, had become fake, unfit for real life. The best for them would be to live life to the full and then, crash, it was over.

Jez swung his arm round above his head. This place is nothing but a glorified prison, can’t you see? Rather a year of freedom than a hundred in a cage.

Tyitti twisted to her knees, and the serf, in the process of picking sand from her navel, retracted its claws just in time.

I like my prison, she said, running her fingertip down the serf’s myriad scent receptors—sprinkled across the central part of its face—to where its scar intersected its mouth. Get me some purple and bit of blue.

The serf abandoned its near completed task and disappeared into the trees to collect blue and purple fungus.

Purple won’t help us, Jez said

Tyitti felt tears bubbling up. One year, one month and three days. That’s all we’ll get. Let’s make the most of it.

We are here for a reason, and we’ll be on Earth, for a reason. He gave her that severe, almost menacing look that made the task of survival seem even more daunting, the outlook even bleaker.

When Tyitti was little, her father had told her that The Flotilla had been sent out in response to a distress signal from Earth, received on Yord late in the Eleventh Millennium. By the time The Flotilla was launched in the middle of the Twelfth Millennium, there had been no contact with Earth for three hundred years, and it was assumed that humans had become extinct on the planet.

Wave after wave of re-settlers from the over-populated Yord, one hundred ten light years from Earth, were supposed to follow in The Flotilla’s wake. But Tyitti had no wish, let alone ambition, to become a pioneer or mythical figure in future human legend. She was so happy on The Flotilla. She would swim and dive all morning, eat a little, take some purple and sample a man or two. Then she would go to sleep without a worry on her mind, had it not been for the ogre of landing.

We have no choice, Jez said. Earth is our fate.

She punched him lightly on his shoulder. There’ll be no one anywhere to thank us. There’ll be no monuments raised in our honour, because there won’t be anyone around to raise them. This is our life, and we’d better live it to the full while we have it.

It annoyed Tyitti when Jez reminded her of what lay ahead. She avoided thoughts of landing as much as possible. She would be nineteen years, nine months and eleven days by then, in just over a year’s time. She considered it unlikely that she would live to experience her twentieth birthday and was determined not to waste any of the little time she had left.

The rays of the fake Flotillan sun touched the taller of the trees the other side of the river. Another precious day was almost at an end, whatever left of it wrecked by her brother and his talk.

Two women in their late twenties emerged from the forest and grabbed Jez. They often lay in ambush for him, their favourite prey. His relative reluctance to indulge in carnal activities only whetted their appetites.

As the two women dragged Jez in between the trees, Tyitti dipped her feet in a sheltered pool and flopped on her back. Have some fun for a change, she thought. She’d had enough of him for several days.

The old serf returned with purple fungus disguised as salamander eyes, one of many treats from ancient Earth. It had brought some of the nutritious blue as well, but Tyitti wasn’t hungry any more. She just needed to forget.

Purple only, she said.

The serf impaled a salamander eye on its claw, extended fully to the length of a human finger. Tyitti opened her mouth, sucked the eye off the claw and swallowed, savouring the delicious silky paste as it slid down her gullet.

The effect was almost immediate. More than six years of practice had taught her that purple fungus was like a river. If you found its heart and flowed along it without resisting, you would soon be rushing down a white-water torrent. She closed her eyes and gave a sign for the serf to feed her a second eye.

The serf pushed the salamander eye into the moist funnel of her tongue ahead of its four-knuckle finger. Then it shoved the fungus deep down her throat.

Tyitti choked. Eyes wide open, she attempted coughing but to no avail. She jumped to her feet, clutching her silent throat.

#

Jez shook off the two women and screamed at the serf. But it had gone, as had every other serf within sight. A frequent nightmare seemed to be coming true. He felt the same tightness of chest he often did when he woke up, and sweat was springing from his brow.

He forced Tyitti to her stomach and hit her hard in her back with his fist, again and again. But nothing came out, purple or sound. She twisted her neck round to catch his gaze. Her mouth was open, her bluing, terror-struck face begging him to save her.

Only then did it sink in fully. This was not a dream. She was dying.

A serf came floating past on the water. Jez leapt after it, yelling for it to come. The serf, a young specimen still black as the night, caught an overhanging branch and hauled itself on to the bank. It sidled towards Jez, its long, suckered feet gripping the riverside boulders.

Tyitti, gasping for air she couldn’t reach, shied away from the approaching serf.

She is dying, Jez wept. He felt he was, too, or that he would if she did.

Unhurried, the serf knelt by her side, inspecting her with its lemon-coloured eyes. Then it opened its wide lipless mouth, like a stab wound. "Need help?"

Jez stared at the fold separating the serf’s head from its torso. He felt like tearing the two apart and snuffing out the creature’s miserable existence. Instead he said something he hadn’t said to a serf since the age of six:

Please.

The serf hit Tyitti hard in the back with the edge of its hand, and Jez heard a crack from her spine.

He screamed as the salamander eye shot from her mouth, and a gob of partly dissolved fungal paste slithered into the grass on a line of her mucus. She drew in a deep, whining breath.

As swiftly as it had arrived, the serf was off, called for by a couple upstream, most likely oblivious to the drama.

June 21st 12,590

The setting chosen for the Annual Brief from The Queen was a large rainforest lagoon with rocky outcrops. Tyitti saw that almost all Vessel 101’s five hundred sixty-two inhabitants had turned up, which was unusual. And yet, she wasn’t surprised. Only a minority still truly believed they could be saved from landing on Earth, but until they were down there was hope, and this was the last real chance to hear good news.

Serfs had floated an array of delicacies from Earth up the gentler slope of a skewed parasol of jets. It led to a 24th Century style barge of air hovering above the centre of the lagoon. The food, carried by serfs, ranged from raw pre-historic game right up to the bacterio-algal fudge so popular the last few decades before The Scarabeo’s departure for Yord in September 2,559. But few ate much, and those who did preferred the strips of dried serf laid out in rock hollows. This was the only food on The Flotilla not derived from fungus.

Most Flotillans were splashing around or floating in the lagoon. Some were lounging on land and yet others were swimming or jumping into the water from the rocks. A few, like Tyitti, had made their way up tree trunks to the canopy. Unlike any other, she was hanging by her knees from an outer limb of one of the tallest trees, her hair straight and still like rootlets.

Bathed in glorious sunlight, she was taking in the magnificent upside down view when a now familiar sadness encroached on her mind. This was the last Annual Brief, the first of many lasts to come, each one a step closer to that dreadful day. There would be no going back now, no comfort of knowing that there was always a next year’s Brief or Beach Orgy or Anniversary, or whatever else. Each of the many occasions and celebrations would remind her of their looming fate, and that another stretch of her short life had gone for good.

To rid her mind of thought, she started swinging back and forth, each swing of greater magnitude than the one before. Then, with a burst of energy, she tore herself from the tree and out high above the lake. In spins and somersaults she hurtled down. At the last possible moment she straightened her body and slipped into the water with scarcely a ripple.

When she resurfaced, she knew from the hush around her that the commander had arrived. Naked as everyone else on The Flotilla, he floated up the gentler slope of the parasol of jest to appear on the barge. He was early, looking drained and drawn.

Another canopy jumper hit the water as the commander cleared his throat. It was Hopper, only nine years of age. Tyitti was a brilliant swimmer and diver, the best on Vessel 101, but Hopper was a natural in the water. If they had been able to continue their blessed life on The Flotilla, he would have become a better swimmer than her in a few years’ time.

A young man near Tyitti tensed up. A short while earlier, he had jumped, too, with a whoop of joy. Now it seemed to dawn on him that the time had come for his sentence to be handed down.

We are the lucky ones, the commander began.

The young man let his anguish loose in a stream of tears. However vain and dreamy his hope of a last-minute reprieve from landing would have been, the killing of it hit him hard.

Tyitti had known since yesterday evening, after her father, the commander, had returned with instructions from The Queen. She also knew that he hated this annual confrontation, this pretence that anything could be changed. She felt for him, a puppet of The Queen, but she failed to understand why he hadn’t quit long ago. Plenty of vain souls would have been ready to step in if he had chosen to leave his post. And what was there to cling on to? The commander’s function was almost exclusively ceremonial.

He had few real duties, such as securing a regular supply of fresh serfs and ensuring that Vessel 101’s population remained between five hundred fifty and five hundred seventy-five. But serfs on Vessel 101 would notify the commander in good time before any limits were reached. They would then notify serfs on The Queen, who would instruct yet other serfs to collect and bring a supply of meat or hand out contraceptive violet fungus.

In the early days of The Flotilla, the commander would have been in true control, spending several hours every day on his or her duties. But over the centuries, the running and administration of The Flotilla had gradually been relinquished to the serfs. The past few hundred years, they had carried out virtually all necessary tasks, including piloting The Flotilla from the control globule on The Queen.

Hopper surfaced not far from Tyitti. He had been under water since he jumped from the canopy five minutes ago, or perhaps even six. He could hold his breath for longer than anyone she knew, though not as long as the four-lunged serfs, whose distant, sentient forebears had inhabited the often water-filled caves of Yord.

He was a curious creation in other aspects, too, with his small ears and a forehead towering over his flat nose. But at least, unlike Tyitti, he had beautiful brown skin. This was rare, though not exceedingly so, outside The Twelve ruling families on The Queen. Interbreeding was discouraged but impossible to control when the juices flowed during The Anniversary or Beach Orgy or any other inter-vessel event.

Having at last finished his address, Tyitti’s father let his arms drop and hunched his shoulders with what appeared a sigh of relief. It was almost over, just the questions left. Then he could sink into a haze of purple and forget.

A man rose from the rocks with obvious effort. What’s the point of landing?

It’s our reason for being, the commander said, to re-populate Earth and ring in a new era of humankind.

Our reason for being, a woman yelled from the canopy. No one ever asked me what I wanted to be. Can’t we just go past that wretched rock and carry on into space? What’s Earth to us? Why should we care what happens there? Why should we care if it has become a desert or a jungle packed with strange creatures, or even the green and pleasant land we have been told about? Why can’t we just leave whatever there is to its own? That place has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with me.

As we all know, the trajectory is controlled by focused gravity waves from Yord. The course is set and cannot be altered.

I’ve heard there’s enough slack in the waves to wobble clear of Earth’s gravity field, a man shouted from the water.

This stirred Tyitti fully alert. Somewhere deep in those words lurked the last, most fickle of hopes, one she herself scarcely dared to hold out. The Flotilla’s built-in capacity to wobble enabled it to evade objects larger than about a quarter of a vessel but too small to have been detectable from Yord. Perhaps it could be used to save them from Earth, too.

It’s not true, the commander claimed. Even if it were, Yord would blow us up when they found out.

It will take them a hundred and ten years to realise what has happened, the man carried on, and another hundred and ten after that for the annihilation beam to reach us. All of us gathered here, and our children and our children’s children, will be long dead by then.

The commander rubbed his temple with two fingers. Tyitti knew that he had had a blinding headache since he woke in the morning. Medicinal violet fungus had taken most of it, but he still didn’t look great. We have no choice.

We haven’t? a woman called Perdita shrieked from between the trees. She held up her eighteen-month-old son, Zhak. At least, I’ve had twenty-four years of life, but what about him? Is it his fault that he’s the last generation?

Earth has become a ball of ice, a round-headed young man said, and the hissing died. Unnoticed, he had sneaked up on the barge to stand just behind the commander, arms across his chest. There’ll be nothing for us there.

The man’s name was Ermen. Only fourteen years of age, he knew most of what was worth knowing about Earth’s past. Every little piece of information he picked up from eavesdropping or drinks of knowledge-laced violet fungus seemed glued to his mind. But what really made him stand out was the way he reasoned and calculated to reach conclusions well beyond anything he had received. When he spoke, and he didn’t often, most listened.

Zyda, Tyitti’s mother, stepped up beside the commander, lighting up the barge with her shock of ginger hair. Who told you about the ball of ice?

I figured it out, Ermen said with a self-satisfied smile.

Figured it out?

It’s the only way to explain...

Zyda pushed Ermen off the barge. You figured wrong. Then, with a rasping laugh, she slid down the steeper slope of the parasol of jets.

The commander was the only person left on the barge among the food and the serfs collecting it on the request of Flotillans. He seemed disoriented as he looked into the water where Zyda had disappeared.

Liar, Perdita shouted from the forest behind Tyitti. A little closer to the lake, her son Zhak was engrossed in a game with his serf minder.

Let’s have some fun, the commander bellowed and slid into the water after Zyda.

He doesn’t know more than we do, a man near Perdita said. On The Queen, they laugh at him, as they do at the other hundred nineteen peripheral commanders. They tell them nothing.

Not him, her. Weeping with anger, Perdita pointed at Zyda in the water. She may be light-skinned, but she’s from The Queen. What Ermen said must be true. She knows. I saw it in her body.

Tyitti’s mother did indeed come from The Queen, as did a handful of others on Vessel 101. Perhaps she knew something, perhaps she didn’t. But what did it matter? It was not as if anything could be done about their situation. They couldn’t send an advance party of serfs down to repair any damage Earth might have incurred or alter its environment to suit Flotillan taste and requirements.

Even if she knows, what difference does it make? someone echoed Tyitti’s thoughts.

Perdita started sobbing. I don’t want to go down.

Look, I can jump, Zhak shouted from atop a mangrove root, helped there by his serf minder. Smiling through her tears, Perdita looked on as Zhak fell rather than jumped into the water.

Tyitti watched as serfs floated up the parasol of jets, two by two, marking the end of the last Annual Brief. One was old or infirm, the other in its prime. When the barge was packed with serfs, a siren sounded.

The first of the young serfs slashed the throat of its old companion with its claw. In quick succession others followed.

The lagoon below filled fast with the turquoise of their blood, and the air above with its stinging odour. Faint blows could be heard from the barge, one for each of a serf’s four lungs, as well as the occasional burp—of a sort of rudimentary pain—escaping the nose-less nostrils of those not expired by the initial slash.

With the ritual over, the living half of the serfs cut up the half they had just expired. Then they started handing out the dripping meat to Flotillans.

But Tyitti wasn’t hungry. She picked a cake made exclusively form purple fungus. The last Anniversary was still to come, she consoled herself.

#

Jez watched the night fall after the Annual Brief, and a part of the setting changed to a 20th Century amusement park. It was illuminated by an ancient type of artificial light, the most conspicuous of which was an intricate system of fast spinning rods, just avoiding collision with each other as they passed.

Listening to the swishing noise of the rods, Jez was distracted by an elderly serf squatting nearby. Through tiny pores between its legs, it squeezed out a sprinkle of green. This was highly unusual. Serfs were permitted to defecate in The Garden only, where their excrement, along with that collected from Flotillans, was used to fertilise the Yord-native algae on which the Yord-native fungus fed.

Another act of defiance, Jez thought, shivering at the memory of Tyitti’s near death at the hands of an old serf.

That’s disgusting, a boy said. He was around thirteen years of age.

I didn’t even know they did it, a girl of similar age replied.

Oh, yes. The boy puffed himself up, as the serf scurried deeper into the amusement park with an armful of freshly cut meat from its own kind. They breed, too."

The girl looked the boy in the eye, convinced, it seemed, he was mocking her. Really?

The boy held up two fingers the width of a nail apart, closing one eye. Slick worms as long as this are kept in a secret place on The Queen, millions of them. Guess what they are?

The girl shrugged. The males?

The boy seemed surprised. How did you know?

The girl pushed him against a stall manned by a serf selling some ancient food. Stop teasing me. I know they just make the serfs on The Queen, and that we get them from there in pods of sixty.

It’s true, the boy said. They inject the males into adult serfs. A few days later, female spawn come out through the little holes between the serfs’ legs. The spawn are poured into a huge chilled incubators filled with a paste of dead Flotillans for them to feed on. They are like tadpoles, but with big mouths, and soon they grow eyes and legs and arms and…

Stop it, the girl said and pressed her lips against the boy’s mouth. He wrapped his arms around her.

Jez walked on, appalled at her ignorance. But she was far from alone. Many people of her age, and indeed some much older, didn’t know how a serf was impregnated. The location of the serf incubators─chilled to ensure that only the hardiest spawn survived─was a well-guarded secret. But information about the process was freely available through educational tableaux and knowledge-laced violet fungus drinks. Such lack of interest in the future, often brought on by denial, didn’t augur well for the time beyond landing. In particular as the serfs were expected to be an important source of food for years after.

Leaving the amusement park, Jez came across a tight crescent of shaven-headed Flotillans—mainly younger women, sitting motionless by a slow-flowing stream.

They belonged to a quasi-religious grouping, The Circle of Progress, or The Circle for short. It had been inspired by a theory developed on Yord more than eight millennia ago, about the rise and decline of individualism with the progress of civilisation. According to this theory, The Circle was about to close, with the first Homo sapiens from the steppes of Africa and the present Flotillans almost touching. According to the followers of the spun-off religion, it meant shunning the narcotic purple fungus. A small but growing puritan faction eschewed all medicinal violet as well.

Once down on Earth, they would allow their hair to grow, and when The Circle closed, all the bodies and spirits imprisoned in The Flotilla, dead and alive, would finally be released into the great primordial whole created by The Mother of All for her children. Ur, they called it. The chosen would then return to Earth to commence a second circle of existence.

As a means of coping with the prospect of landing, this was one of the better, in Jez’s opinion. At times, he wished that he, too, were able to delude himself that such a future beckoned.

Out of the stream, a bald boy of nine emerged, exhaling a blast of air. His name was Hopper, and he was pursued by a girl and a boy of his own age. Unlike him, they had plenty of hair on their heads.

Serf, the boy called.

Come and treat me, the girl demanded of Hopper, dragging herself through the fringing brush with an apparent limp.

A dark woman called Iben broke from the Circle of Progress crescent to let Hopper into her arms.

Treat me, treat me, the girl carried on, her ‘bad’ leg now trembling with mock cramp. Beside her, the boy fell over laughing.

After the birth of Hopper, Iben had refrained from sex with men. A punishment, most believed, meted out by herself for giving birth to such a strange creature. But Iben, who spoke to few outside The Circle, had once told Jez that the reality was quite the opposite. She cherished her special boy so much that she had room for no other child.

Jez knew the children were just dogs doing their parents’ bidding, yet he struggled to curb his urge to stop them. For why did their parents encourage them to do what they did? Was it from envy at the peace and equanimity with which the followers of The Circle faced landing? Or was it that Hopper’s beautiful brown skin reminded them of their inferiority to The Twelve ruling families?

You just wait till landing, Iben told the two children harassing Hopper in a smooth, even voice. It will be the end of all you pampered little beings. The ugly will become the beautiful, the weak the strong.

A woman in her thirties with a cup of purple in her hand staggered from a serving outlet towards The Circle of Progress group. She squatted by Kiri, a woman of fifteen. Despite her parents’ protestations, Kiri had joined The Circle’s recently emerged ultra-puritan splinter group. According to its doctrine, not even contraceptive violet was allowed.

Jez had known her since childhood and had been full of admiration for the way she had taken her stand and stuck to it.

"Who do you think you are fooling with all that coming-of-a-new-time