Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe Read Online Free PDF Page A

see. Booms were being let down from the walls, bearing nets that dangled into the stampeding herds. Fleeing animals were soon tangled up, horses and cattle and sheep and even a few long-legged pigs, and the nets were drawn up with a groan of pulleys and winches.
    ‘And so we are fed for a few more months,’ Chan said. ‘In Ararat, even the food just comes flowing in, like the money.’
    ‘Follow me and life won’t be so easy. If I can promise you anything it’s that.’
    He grinned again. ‘Good.’
    The nets were carried through slots in the walls and dropped. The released animals, many suffering from broken limbs and crushed ribs, were hastily slaughtered and dragged away, and the booms let down into the stampede once more, like the traps of a giant angler.

IV

    Maxx loved listening to Jan Stanndish talk. To watch the lively old man sketch his diagrams and equations on bits of slate, or just wave his arms in the air, miming his fantastic hypotheses into existence.  
    And Stanndish was happy to spend time with Maxx while he waited for his chance to deliver his briefing on the urgency of the Library project to Maxx’s father – waited and waited, for Thom was always distracted by more urgent affairs, including the return of the bulk of Xaia’s fleet, laden with enough booty to distort Zeeland’s economy, but without Xaia.
    It was June now, close to the summer solstice and the height of coolsummer, the season when the world’s north pole pointed straight at the sun, which from Zeeland’s mid-latitude wheeled around the sky. Paradoxically it was not the hottest time of the year, despite the unending daylight; the sun climbed higher in the sky during the days of spring and autumn. The days were endless, literally, and full of light and warmth, and life bloomed. Stanndish walked with Maxx and pointed out the intricate dance of predator and prey, of eater and food, working at every scale from the insects living out their tiny dramas in rock crevices and dusty corners, to the hunting of wild rats and dogs out on the plains in the interior of Zeeland.  
    All living things from Earth, Stanndish said, including humans, still bore the imprint of the home world deep in their chemistry; all living things still longed for the release of terrestrial night, of hours of darkness each twenty-four-hour day. Well, the ‘sidereal day’ on Earth II, its rotation as compared to the distant stars, was more like thirty hours than twenty-four – but that was irrelevant, as on every point on the planet away from the equator there were long periods each year (eighty sidereal days at the latitude of Zeeland) where the sun never set, and in the winter an equally long period where it never rose.  
    ‘Human bodies long for sleep. Especially the young,’ said Stanndish with a gentle envy. ‘When you get old it doesn’t matter so much. Anyhow we organise our societies to allow periods of rest, even when the sun doesn’t set, and wakefulness even when it doesn’t rise. Such rules are broken in times of war – as are many rules, of course. In the world of nature there are no such treaties, but nevertheless predators and prey are adapting: unconsciously working out ways to survive, the prey to avoid being eaten while asleep, the predators to find ways not to allow their food to escape while they sleep. We’re seeing much more elaborate interactions between species as a result. All this is behavioural, and we can expect it to continue for many generations until evolutionary pressures force these exiles from Earth to abandon their outmoded “body clocks” and adapt to the peculiar cycles of high-obliquity Earth II …’
    Of course the differing lengths of the days made no apparent difference to the Purple, which sat in unregarded places in its reefs and clumps, dark and glistening.  
    If the endless days of the coolsummer were times of opportunity and danger for plants and animals, so they were for human beings too. Maxx watched,