Orion Shall Rise Read Online Free PDF

workers sought homeward. Farther on shimmered the river, around darknesses that were moored barges and boats. From its right bank the ground swelled northward, flecked by farmhouses and hamlets, to the hill of the Consvatoire. Those ivied walls were not wholly nighted; here and there, across kilometers, another light burned where a scholar sat late. In immemorial belief, which endured among many pysans, that site was hallowed. It was the highest ground along an arc where at certain times of year you saw sun or moon pass behind Skyholm.
    Seven and a half times the size of either in heaven, the aerostat hung directly overhead. Still touched by the sun, as it was for about twenty minutes after nightfall and before daybreak, it cast muted radiance across the land. In that light, Ashcroft Faylis Mayn seemed to Iern almost a being of Breizheg legend, a haunter of woods and dolmens, too beautiful to be real.
    ‘How often have I lingered here and dreamed,’ she said low. ‘But I never dreamed I would do it with … a saint.’
    Her musical Bourgoynais accent redeemed a thin voice. And apart from that – Iern’s pulse thuttered. She was small, delicately featured, with large gray eyes and long, lustrous golden hair. She was intense and intelligent, a student of history at the Consvatoire yonder. She was no girl to tumble straight into bed, but a well-born maiden. His kinsman Talence Jovain Aurillac had introduced them a few days back, and Iern quickly lost interest in tumbling the harbor girls.
    ‘Oh, come,’ he said, with an awkwardness that seldom burdened him, ‘you’re no back-country shepherdess, you’re a Clanswoman and know we’re all human. I, well, I did my job, nothing more.’
    Her gaze sought his. ‘But we carry our ancestral anims, don’t we? I think yours may come from the First Captain himself.’
    ‘What? No, surely our present Captain – Anyway, not only do you flatter me, but frankly, I’m skeptical about that belief.’
    She smiled. ‘And I … frankly. Yes, I’d rather suppose you’re a –’ She hesitated. ‘An organelle that is truly evolving.’
    Taken aback, he swallowed. ‘Are you a Gaean?’
    ‘Oh, no. I think the Gaeans have certain insights, but – but I’m simply a little delver in dusty old books. A dreamer –’ She looked upward and sighed. ‘I do believe there is a purpose behind existence. Else nothing would make sense, would it, Iern? Just consider history. How could we, you and I, stand here this evening, safe and happy, if a fate, a force, had not possessed our ancestors?’
    ‘Well –’ He searched for words but gave up. Why argue and risk spoiling the hour? His own view of the past was prosaic.
    Immediately after the War of Judgment, when chaos and radioactivity rolled to and fro across Uropa, the original crew members moved Skyholm from its station above Paris to one above Tours. The latter city had escaped obliteration. It did not escape famine and pestilence in the years that followed, but the aerostat held off desperate outsiders. Thus a measure of recovery became possible relatively fast.
    While they tried, in a rough-and-ready fashion, to be benign rulers, the Thirty – twenty-two men, eight women, from half a dozen nations which no longer existed as anything but terrains and memories – had their own survival in mind. Aloft, they were safe. But they must eat and drink; aircraft perched on landing flanges must have fuel and spare parts; the skin of their home demanded replacement about once a decade, panel by panel, as the ultraviolet and ozone of the stratosphere gnawed at its material; their needs were countless, and nothing could supply them but an advanced technology whose industrial base was gone.
    Around the world, sister aerostats fell for these reasons. The Thirty were fortunate. Guarded and reorganized, the people of the area could divert their scant excess energies to restarting or rebuilding the essential facilities. They were willing. If Ileduciel