Episode 55
Travelling Light E055S02 Transcript
[Title music: rhythmic electronic folk.]
H.R. Owen
Travelling Light: Episode Fifty Five.
[The music fades out.]
The Traveller
Entry AV85124-1. A description of the unique geography of Glisco, in the Banach Precinct.
Keywords: architecture; Banach Precinct; geology; Glisco; natural world; places and landmarks.
Notes:
I often find myself writing that such and such a place or culture was “unlike anything I have ever seen.” Partly, I know, this is a simple by-product of my relatively sheltered life before leaving on this great adventure.
Anything dissimilar the city I was born and raised in was likely to be “unlike anything I have seen”, but only as an indictment of my own limited horizons.
I still feel as if I have seen very little of what the galaxy has to offer. I have been away from home for about seven months now? And visited just over a dozen planets and a smattering of space stations. Hardly enough to have made a dent in my vast naivety.
And yet, on arriving on Glisco I found myself reaching for that well-worn phase once more. For it is truly unlike anything I have seen before!
First, a note on names. “Glisco” refers to both the planet and its only city. To speak of one is to speak of the other – an understandable identification since the entire population of the planet dwells in this one huge settlement.
At first, all I saw from the shuttle observation port was a distant, mud-coloured rock with a faint line bisecting it. It was not until I listened to the chatter of my fellow passengers that I understood that line was the city, nestled into a ravine that runs like a belt around the planet’s entire circumference.
Like most cities, Glisco began as a scattering of separate settlements, sheltered from the merciless heat and dust of the planet’s inhospitable surface by the rocky shade of an enormous natural rift in the world itself.
Over the thousands of years that Glisco has been inhabited, the space between settlements slowly filled. Other cities swallow their suburbs. Glisco swallowed its entire planet. A thousand cities became a hundred, became ten, became one.
I lost sight of the landscape when the shuttle hit the planet’s atmosphere and was swallowed momentarily in a dense bank of cloud. All sense of forward motion ceased. We hung, suspended in time, for a breath… Then two…
Then, we broke forth into blazing sunlight, endless blue above and about us while below, the city lay, slashed deep into the planet’s surface like an open wound.
The shuttle swept downwards in a great, stomach-lurching arch, diving for the city rooftops like a hunted animal running for cover. We plummeted downwards, and I had a moment of real, pure terror as I thought for certain we were going to plough straight into the buildings below.
Then, like a sudden plunge into water, we had broken the surface and slipped between the buildings down into the warren of Glisco’s heart.
You may remember my visit to Verkaren, where extreme cold made life on the surface all impossible. Like the inhabitants of Verkaren, the people of Glisco escaped the ruthless conditions of the planet’s surface by making their homes underground.
But Glisco has been inhabited far, far longer than Verkaren. Long enough that its inhabitants have not only expanded their settlement outwards. They have also moved downwards, building deeper and deeper into the ravine, until the whole city sits stacked upon itself in a dizzying, depthless labyrinth.
The shuttle came to a stop in one of the uppermost levels, a layer known locally as the Old Town, close to where this part of Glisco began all those millennia ago as a single small settlement.
We must have been, what, a hundred storeys below ground level? I could just see the cliffs on either side looming like shadows behind the shoulders of the buildings all around us.
As I made my way out of the docks, I realised I was gasping, unable to fill my lungs with the dry, dusty stuff that passed as air this close to the surface. My eyes were struggling too, fighting to adjust to the gloomy twilight within the canyon.
I needed to move deeper into the city, and had a few different choices of how to do so. I could have hired a driver to take me, or used the public lifts inside one of the port terminals. I chose instead to splash out on one of the paid visitors’ lifts, designed with tourists in mind.
Unlike the public lifts, the visitors’ lifts are open-air, and placed to give their occupants the best possible views of the city as they plunge down into its lower levels. It was not until I was aboard mine that I realised just how deep the city goes.
I have never had a problem with heights. But my knees went weak when the lift’s rails carried it out over an open mile drop, giving a clear sight not of the canyon floor below but only the blurry, distant vision of yet more rooftops.
We soon left the smell of ship’s fuel and machinery behind us, slipping into the deeper shadows of the lower levels. I stared, open-mouthed, as we passed entire neighbourhoods stacked on top of each other – temples on top of theatres on top of shopping plazas on top of factories on top of blocks of flats!
Verkaren’s cities were entirely enclosed. They felt more like a station or a ship than anything else. It was easy to forget that one was, in fact, underground, not merely indoors.
But even as we descended deeper and deeper, we could still just about make out Glisco’s sky: a wriggling, broken blue line far above, faint but undeniable. For each layer of the city we passed, the temperature dropped with us. I looked up and shivered, only partly from the cold.
Within the ravine, it is perpetual night. But Glisco is a city that refuses to be constrained. Everywhere I looked, lights twinkled and glittered in gleeful defiance of the darkness all around. I peered over the edge of the lift’s barriers, heart in my mouth, and gazed down upon an endless ocean of stars.
[The sound of the data stick whirring fades in, cutting out when the data stick is removed with a click.]
The Traveller
24ᵗʰ Avam 851
To the community at Emerraine, who carry the Light.
I had to check the date of this letter three times before I started writing. It seems impossible so little time has passed. I have felt myself caught in such a whirlwind since my last missive.
When last I wrote, I had just arrived in Glisco ahead of my rendezvous with Scarry. I spent the day before the meeting securing accommodation, and fretting.
I could not stop practising our conversation: how to phrase my questions, what the answers might be, how I might react. Needless to say, I slept poorly.
My first stop in the morning was the port communications office. There was nothing waiting, which need not signify. If Óli was away, on a dig perhaps, when my message arrived, their answer might take a few more days to reach me.
[clears throat] Scarry had offered to meet me in one of the crew lounges. I was early, but I preferred the idea of being there before him and having time to settle.
I found a table tucked away in one corner and ordered a cup of friesse, a drink a little like akhla, hot and citrussy. It made me think of Duytren, and the time she spent with me after Óli left the Tola, distracting me from my anxiety and grief.
“Cheer up,” came a voice behind me. “It might never happen.”
I sprang to my feet, nearly spilling my drink. “Captain Scarry!”
“Captain, is it? You must be feeling sorry for yourself.” Scarry eased himself into the chair opposite, throwing his long legs out in front of him in an ostentatious display of nonchalance. “Oh, sit down. You’re not on trial.”
My racing heartbeat begged to differ. I took my seat and waited in clammy, anxious silence as Scarry ordered a drink and got comfortable.
“Well,” he said at last, fixing me with those proud black eyes. “Out with it.”
My mouth was tacky. I wet it with a swallow of friesse and cleared my throat.
“First, captain, I owe you an apology. I should not have spoken to you the way I did in Mórhal. I was angry and upset, but that is no excuse-”
“Oh give it a rest! What, do you think I've been moping about with sore feelings because you got snippy at me?” A wicked glint came into his eyes. “If anything, it was a pleasant change. There are very few people I know who would ever dream of raising their voice to me like that.”
My cheeks heated, I do not know why. “All the same,” I insisted. “I would like to apologise.”
Scarry waved my words away. “Alright, alright. You’re forgiven already. Now come on!”
Rest assured, this was not how conversation had gone when I practised it in my head. I had the absurd desire to tell Scarry to stop going off-script.
“I read up on the museum you mentioned,” I began, but Scarry cut in again.
“You said that in your note already. Cut to the chase.”
[sighing] “The helmet,” I managed. “You gave the helmet-”
“Sold.”
I did not follow. “What?”
“We sold the helmet which we bought from your smuggler friends to a museum. I know all this. I was there. Will you please now explain to me why I am here?”
“Why?” The question blurted out before I could stop it. “Why go to all that effort? Why not just report us to the authorities?
“Óli had nothing to do with any of the smuggling. You could have had Hesje and the others – even me – arrested, and Óli would… Would have had nowhere to turn. Nobody to turn to. You could have swooped in and… [sighing] And…”
I trailed off, feeling foolish, my mouth gone dry again. I squirmed in my seat as Scarry regarded me, all cool impassivity.
“You're full of surprises, aren’t you, little feist? I wouldn’t have thought you capable of such cold-blooded calculation.”
My discomfort evaporated in a surge of irritation. I not dignify his comment with a response. Unfazed, Scarry took a pull on his drink, considering his next words.
“You seem to be under the impression that my crew and I are nothing but a pack of ruthless bounty hunters,” he said at last. “But I am a trader. A businessman.
I was never going to leap out of the bushes and steal your friend off to Tilfar kicking and screaming. Either they would agree to come with me, or they would make a counter offer. I never much minded which.”
[scoffing] “If you did not care either way, you could have just left them alone.”
Scarry’s mouth twisted in a grim smile. “And where would be the profit in that? I did not care how I was paid. But I was getting paid, one way or another.
“We had been tracking your movements for some time; long enough to be reasonably certain what you were up to. When we caught up with you on Koom, we were still deciding how best to approach. And then my contact got in touch.”
“Aboday,” I said, dredging up the name of the dealer who had arranged the sale.
Scarry made a gesture of assent. “She knows me as something of a collector. To be clear,” he went on, “me and mine are not in the same line of work as your former crew-mates. I prefer to stay on the windy side of the law wherever possible.
“But we do come across items on the market now and then which we know would be of particular interest to certain cultural institutions. When we do, we buy those items and deliver them into more appropriate hands.”
“For a profit,” I pointed out.
Scarry’s smile tightened, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “I do not do anything without good reason. Profit is one good reason; it is not the only one. These items belong with their people. My crew and I facilitate that return. The good gets done, whatever other motivations we may have.”
“That is not…” I began, stumbling over my words. “That is hardly…”
Scarry’s lips curled. “Hardly what? Hardly in keeping with your moral principles?”
[sighs] There was nothing I could say to that. We sat in silence, his eyes on me and mine on the ground.
“You’re not satisfied.”
He was not wrong. I felt no more at ease than I had that night in the cafe in Mórhal. But I saw no reason to discuss my feelings with him.
“Captain Scarry,” I began. “Thank you for your time. I do not wish to keep you from your work.”
“Come with me.”
I was sure I had misheard him. “…pardon?”
“Come with me. With us, on the Guillemot. See for yourself what we do and why.” He leant forwards, elbows on his knees, eyes shining with keen, knife-like intelligence. “Come and do some good, why don’t you?”
I could not answer. The suggestion was ludicrous. Before I could find the wherewithal to tell him so, Scarry knocked back the last of his drink and rose.
“We leave for Tilfar the day after tomorrow. It’s a long journey. There will be much to see and much to be done. If you would have a part in it, send me word.”
And he was gone, leaving me reeling.
It was an absurd offer. So absurd, I could almost have believed it was a joke at my expense. I could not consider it. I did not consider it. Not until I stopped in at the comms office later that evening.
I had not intended to check back so soon. But I had the dazed, untethered feeling I remembered from my first time aboard the Tola, when everything was strange and everyone I knew was far away. I suppose I wanted some comfort.
Still, I was not really expecting anything. So when the clerk told me I did, indeed, have a message waiting, I hardly knew what to feel!
It was from Óli. Two lines. “All well here. Have fun.”
I… had hoped for more. I suppose they are busy. Their studies must be taking up a good deal of their time. And they were making good friends in Clanagh when I left. I am sure they are quite occupied with the choir and Sinséar and Ranaí.
That night, I lay awake for hours, staring at the underside of the bunk above mine. My dorm-mates snored softly around me, but my mind was all a-whir.
I thought of Clanagh; of Ranaí asking me what I was doing there; of the calling I had felt to leave my home in the name of our faith. I thought of the community I had found aboard the Tola; the friends I made; the adventures we'd had.
Eventually, I rose and slipped out onto the balcony overlooking the Glisco ravine. It was warm this high up, the air humid and close. A bare scrap of wind lifted my hair, cooling the sweat on the back of my neck. And below, far below, sinking into the belly of the planet itself, the lights of the city glimmered and shone.
I am done ignoring the truth. I have been happier these two weeks travelling than I was in over a month on Kerrin. I do not want to go back. Not yet.
I have enjoyed travelling alone. I have met some wonderful people, and had the freedom to go where I would, when I would. I could forge my own path – lonelier, perhaps, but more free.
Or I could take Scarry up on his offer. I could see Tilfar. Perhaps work to undo some of the harm I have caused. I would have a crew again.
But I cannot go back to Kerrin. It is not my calling. There so much to- [cuts off, laughs and sighs] So much to see. So much to be done.
I need to keep moving. The only question is how.
[Title music: rhythmic instrumental folk. It plays throughout the closing credits.]
H.R. Owen
Travelling Light was created by H.R. Owen and Matt McDyre, and is a Monstrous Productions podcast. This episode was written and performed by H.R. Owen.
This week’s entry to the archives was based on an idea by Loxsmyth. You can see Matt's illustration for the entry on our social media accounts.
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