In Solitary Read Free

been
one
for as long as I can remember. Each extra month they stay alive is a renewed ‘one’.
    ‘This is the vat which claimed the life of Askreenata – do you remember? She tried to glide the length of it and the breeze dropped? What a way to die – to drown in …’
    ‘That’s enough,’ snapped Lintar sharply. ‘Enough talk of death. You are a morbid human. Why death fascinates you so much I cannot imagine. It is dwelling on nothing, for that is death, nothingness.’
    We finished our walk back at the church and the Klees was waiting for me with a knapsack of food. Lintar slipped away, I hoped to fetch the promised crossbow. ThenI was led through the accommodation area to the sea wall.
    Beyond the sea wall, between the continent of Hess and Brytan stretched kilometres of tideland which was covered, in some places by only a few centimetres of water, at high tide. Once upon a time there had been a permanent channel of water between Brytan and Hess which made Brytan a full-time island. The earthquake of 2083 Old Time had changed the physical relationships between Brytan and Yurop, as Hess was called in those times. As well as the structural changes in the substrata of the western shores of Hess, the Soal had constructed great tidal gates, which also served them as a bridge, between the south-east tip of Brytan and the Hessian peninsula. Thus they were able to control the depth of the tideway to a certain degree and prevent flooding during the spring tides.
    I had now to go out and live on the mud wastes, never again to set foot on the dry land of my home country. I was the last human to leave Brytan and I went regretfully. The Soal had all the main land over the whole Earth. Some of them, the central continentals, had never seen a human in their whole lives, yet once upon a time we crawled over the surface of the world in our millions. Now we lived on the islands and areas of waste ground which the Soal did not want. A race of hermits that prayed to the Weyym of Boundless Space for the simultaneous death of every living Soal in the universe.

3
Needles
    …
and the subsurface Soal will quit their stark passages
…
    Mudflats must be the most depressing of all thelandscape scenes to fall on the human eye. The only marks a person can leave on that desert of sludge are footprints, and even those are transient – they remain for the length of time between two high tides. Then the world is wiped smooth and clean of a mud dweller’s only solid proof that he is not a ghost. Nothing is made, nothing is created on the mud. People are there to exist only – not to build histories for the conjecture of others. When the last body, be it a thousand years hence, has rotted away, the mud will hold no secrets. All artifacts owned by mud dwellers bear the marks of Soal manufacture, and the human bones will be taken away with the tide.
    Mud dwellers live only for a few hours at a time. They disappear with each oncoming tide, into one of the transparent needle towers, thinner and taller than minarets, that spike the mud, while the sea washes away the patterns of their existence.
    I was prodded from behind and realized I had been standing for a few minutes regarding the grey wastes. I was beginning to wonder what in Weyym’s mind had induced me to go foraging through the Tape Library. Curiosity? Rebellion? Stupidity? The Klees would say the latter. Now I was doomed to spend the rest of my life, probably a very short one, up to my eyebrows in filth.
    The Klees pushed some mudshoes into my hands just as Lintar came running towards us with a blanket, which he quickly bundled into my arms. I took it gratefully, feeling the hardness of the weapon within its folds.
    ‘Thank you Lintar,’ I said quietly.
    He nodded. ‘In case you get wet,’ he said in that peculiarshrill accent. For all the hours in the day the mushroom towers kept the temperature of the atmosphere fairly constant, at a comfortable heat. Lintar had once told me that if