My old pupil, Gideon Ravenor, sustained by his force chair, rolled forward across the mossy ground to greet me. To his left, he was flanked by Kara Swole. To his right, Harlon Nayl.
SIXTEEN
Surviving Messina.
Gideon's omen.
Nothing lasts forever.
Harlon gave me a great bearhug and Kara timidly kissed my cheek on tiptoe. I gazed at them both, hardly believing it.
'You have a habit of coming back from the dead/ I said to Harlon. 'I'm just glad it's real this time.'
He frowned. "What do you mean?'
'I'll explain later. I refuse to explain anything more until you tell me how this is possible.'
Why don't we go inside?' Ravenor suggested. He led us back up the path through the punz trees and across glades where the light was stained gold by the fleshy orange leaves that formed the canopy. Brilliantly feathered lizards flitted from branch to branch and diaphanous insects the size of man's open palm fluttered like seedcases in the humid breeze.
Ravenor's force chair hissed over the ground a few centimetres in the air, surrounded and suspended by a spherical field generated by the slowly revolving and tilting antigravity hoop that encircled it.
Beyond the wooded slope, the ground was flooded. A vast lake of yellow liquid stretched out under the jungle canopy that sprouted up from the water in lurid clumps. Fronds, rushes and fibrously rooted trees formed hammock islets in the lake, along with batteries of puffy mauve or orange zutaes with giant leaves and tangles of saprophitic vines.
Antigrav walkboards bridged out across the resinous water, linking the dryland to Ravenor's camp by way of several of the hammocks.
The camp had been raised on a duralloy raft twenty metres square, held above the water by locked, cycling repulsor lift-pods. Angular, geometric, the structure the raft supported looked like a large tent, but I realised from its gentle shimmer that it was formed from intersecting fields of opaque force energy.
We went in through the one-way field membrane that formed the door and entered a cool, climate-controlled chamber lit by glow-globes. Equipment was stacked up in metal containers and there were several items of collapsible furniture. Further screens denoted adjoining rooms, veiled off. A grey-haired man in a linen robe was working at a small camp table, reviewing data on a portable codifier.
Kara unfolded three more of the stacked camp chairs while Harlon fetched bottles of chilled fruit-water and some shrink-wrapped ration packs. A young woman came in from one of the other rooms and conferred quietly with the man at the codifier.