hidden.
Seen from within, on the other hand, the hometree’s crown was a realm of marvels.
Once she was in the crown, the climbing became so absurdly easy that Sara felt sure that there was no longer any danger of her falling, at least until she tried to clamber down again. There were sturdy branches aplenty, offering abundant handholds and secure footholds. The crown was tall, more like a steeple than a poplar, let alone an oak, but Sara did not feel that she was unsafe even when the combination of her weight and the breeze made it stir and sway.
She had expected to see birds in the branches of the tree, because she often heard their songs from the garden, but the birds themselves all flew away; what she actually saw was their nests—dozens of them, all but a few empty now, though one or two still contained fat chicks sounding shrill alarms. She had not expected so many creepy-crawlies, but every time she reached out for a new handhold things with lots of legs went scurrying away, and things with wings took to the air, some of them large enough to whirr or buzz—and still there were others left to squish beneath her fingers.
By this time, Mother Quilla had summoned help, but Sara could no longer see how many of her parents had come out into the garden, and had to rely on the sounds of their voices to count the witnesses to her daring.
She heard Father Gustave saying, “She’ll be quite safe if you don’t shout at her. She won’t fall unless you scare her into it,” and agreed with him wholeheartedly—but that didn’t stop Father Stephen lending his stentorian tones to the chorus of disapproval.
“Come down at once, Sara!” he shouted, louder than anyone else—but even his long legs and far-reaching arms weren’t up to the task of finding cracks big enough to serve as handholds and footholds while he hauled himself up to attic level.
She heard Mother Maryelle saying, “All kids do it,” in the weary way that Mother Maryelle always had when she was pretending that, because she had recently turned a hundred, she had to know more about the business of parenting than those members of the household who had not yet clocked up their first century. She didn’t have to hear the drowned-out protests of Father Aubrey and Mother Jolene to know that they were not in the least consoled by the universality of her mission. Nor was she—she would have preferred to believe that what she was doing was exceptional, if not actually unprecedented.
After that, though, Sara stopped listening to the voices down below, in order to concentrate her attention outwards, at the vast panorama visible from within the high canopy.
It was then that the real fear hit her, and hit her hard.
Sara had never imagined that she was, or could be, afraid of heights. After all, she had often tuned her picture window to views from mountain-tops. She had looked out from similar heights within her hood, both in and out of school. She had even used the hood to “fly” through fabulous skies, pretending that she was a bird or a dragon, or Father Gustave on a powerglider, although the experience hadn’t been very convincing. She had experienced vertigo, and had trained her Internal Technology to blank out its symptoms and restore her calm of mind.
But this was different. This time, she knew that she was in real space rather than virtual space, and that the distance between her and the ground was a space through which she could actually fall.
It was meatspace, and she was meat. If she did fall, she would fall like any other piece of meat. Although her smartsuit was armor of a sort, it couldn’t protect her from all the kinds of damage that an impact with the ground would inflict. Her Internal Technology would help her flesh to repair itself, but it wouldn’t take away all her pain because pain was a warning and had to be allowed to sound its alarm.
If she fell, it would hurt.
If she fell, she’d be hurt.
Because she knew all this, Sara’s experience was quite different from the experience of looking through a picture window or soaring in virtual space. This vertigo swamped the calming efforts of her IT, and left her giddy with terror.
It was all slightly absurd. She was surrounded by so many branches that it would have been far more difficult to fall than cling on. She knew that, too—but the terror possessed her nevertheless, while long seconds ticked by…and she actually began to believe, if only for a moment, that her parents were right, and that she really ought to do exactly what they said at all times, even if they couldn’t always agree among themselves as to what that might be.
CHAPTER IV
Mercifully, the effect was temporary. Whether it was her Internal Technology catching up with its duty, or merely her own consciousness adapting to the situation, the terror drained away. Sara became confident that she could not and would not fall, and that she was free to enjoy the view.
Terror was swiftly replaced by triumph, as she realized what a victory she had won. She had conquered her fear. She had conquered the hometree. She had conquered the brief anxiety that her parents might, after all, be right about everything.
The roofs of Blackburn were invisible from the open window of her bedroom, even if she stood on a chair, but from the crown of the hometree Sara could not only see the town sprawled across an improbably tiny section of the north-western horizon, but two other accumulations of dwellings nestling in the hills to the east. She felt slightly ashamed that she could not put a name to either of them, although she knew that the trees clustered between them were the New Forest of Rossendale—which, like the New Town Square, was only as New as the Aftermath of the Crash.
She wished, belatedly, that she had taken the trouble to consult a map before embarking on her climb. Was the ManLiv corridor closer in the south than the sea was in the west? She could not see either of them, not even Preston, which lay between Blackburn and the Ribble Estuary. She could not guess how far behind the south-western horizon the city might be, or the ruins of Old Manchester in the south-east.
She was surprised by the number of black patches littering the landscape, and by the manner in which they were aggregated around buildings which she took to be facfarms. Black was the color of SAP—the Solid Artificial Photosynthesis technology that “fixed” sunlight more efficiently than nature’s chlorophyll—but the illustrations posted in her virtual classroom always showed vast tracts laid out in the tropic regions that had once been scorched deserts, never little clusters in the grey-lit Lancashire hills. These were SAPorchards, not SAPfields. There were green fields too, though, some of them speckled with amber seed-heads and others stained yellow by oilseed rape. The green meadows provided ranges for ground-nesting birds and free-grazing sheep, while the cultivated fields produced animal feed.
She counted no less than nine skymasts on the horizon, some of them lavishly embellished with dishes, but there were no windmills, and no pylons carrying overhead power-lines, such as she had seen in picture window views of the Yorkshire side of the Pennines and the highlands of Scotland. The hometree’s electricity was carried by underground cables—which was why it had taken Powerweb so long to locate the break that had left her parents reliant on its feeble inbuilt biogenerator for nearly a week in the depths of the previous winter, causing her to miss four whole days of school.
There were fewer visible roads than Sara had expected, and for a moment or two she wondered whether this was because many of them were so deeply sunken as to be hidden even from this lofty viewpoint—but she realized eventually that, although the world seemed be mostly made of roads while you were traveling in a robocab, there was a lot more territory in between them than their claustrophobic banks allowed passengers to perceive. She was surprised how tiny the vehicles appeared to be—even the greatest of the lumbering trucks—and how exceedingly tiny the distant people seemed who could be seen walking in the vicinity of the facfarms. It was not until she had noticed them that she realized how vast the country was—and how vast the whole country must be, against whose backcloth on a map Blackburn and ManLiv seemed to lie almost cheek by jowl.
But the vastest thing of all was the sky. Sara had not expected the sky to seem different, no matter how high she climbed, because it was, after all, an absence rather than a presence, whose emptiness could hardly be increased—but she realized now how little of the sky she had been