Read Online Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks - Free Book Online

tree forest.
    Dawn was just starting to break anti-spinwards, throwing long slanting rays across the cloud-whisped indigo sky. The fainter stars had long since been submerged in the slowly brightening vault; barely a handful still twinkled. The only other heavenly objects visible were the lobed shape of Dorteseli, the larger of the two ringed gas giants in the system, and the wavering white point that was the nova Portisia.
    Kabe looked around the platform. The sunlight was so red it almost looked brown. It shone from the vastly distant atmospheres above the Orbital’s trailing plates, over the escarpment’s edge, across the dark valley with its pale islands of mist and sank onward to the low rolling hills and the distant plains on the far side. The cries of the forest’s nocturnal animals had slowly disappeared over the past twenty minutes or so, and the calls of birds were beginning to fill the night-chilled air above the low forest.
    The blimpers were dark domes scattered amongst the taller ground-hugging trees. They looked threatening to Kabe, especially in this ruddy glow. The giant black gas sacs loomed, shriveled and deflated but still impressively rotund, over the bloated bulk of the banner reservoir, while their strangler roots snaked across the ground all around them like giant tentacles, establishing their territory and keeping ordinary trees at bay. A breeze stirred the branches of the ground trees and set their leaves rustling pleasantly. The blimpers at first appeared not to be affected by the wind, thenmoved slowly, creaking and crackling, adding to the effect of monstrousness.
    The crimson sunlight was just starting to catch the tops of the more distant blimp trees, hundreds of meters away along the shallow side of the scarp; a handful of wing-fliers had already disappeared and headed down barely discernible paths into the forest. On the other side of the platform the view sank over cliffs, scree and forest into the shadows of the broad valley, where the meandering loops and oxbow lakes of Tulume River could be glimpsed through the slowly drifting patches of mist.
    â€œKabe.”
    â€œAh, Ziller.”
    Ziller wore a close-fitting dark suit, with only his head, hands and feet showing. Where the suit’s material covered the pad of his midlimb it had been reinforced with hide. It had been the Chelgrian who’d wanted to come out here originally to see the wing-fliers. Kabe had already watched this particular sport, albeit from a distance, a few years earlier, shortly after he’d first arrived on Masaq’. Then he’d been on a long articulated river barge heading down the Tulume for the Ribbon Lakes, the Great River and the city of Aquime, and had observed the distant dots of the wing-fliers from the vessel’s deck.
    This was the first time Kabe and Ziller had met since the gathering on the barge
Soliton
five days earlier. Kabe had completed or put on hold various articles and projects he had been working on and had just begun to study the material on Chel and the Chelgrians which the Contact drone E. H. Tersono had sent him. He had half expected Ziller not to contact him atall, and so had been surprised when the composer had left a message asking him to meet him at the wing-fliers’ platform at dawn.
    â€œAh, Cr. Ziller,” Feli Vitrouv said as the Chelgrian loped up and folded himself to a crouch between her and Kabe. The woman flicked an arm out above her. A wing membrane snapped out for a few meters, translucent with a hint of blue-green, then flipped back. She clicked her mouth, seemingly satisfied. “We still haven’t succeeded in persuading you to have a go, no?”.
    â€œNo. What about Kabe?”.
    â€œI’m too heavy.”
    â€œFraid so” Feli said. “Too heavy to do it properly. You could fit him with a float harness, I suppose, but that would be cheating.”
    â€œI thought the whole point of this sort of exercise was to