Julian Valentine
"I don't come cheap."
In the lowest levels, in the abyssal urban depths, of the ecumenopolis that was Nar Shaddaa, it was a rare thing indeed to see sunlight. For the inhabitants of the baroque and gleaming cloud cutters, sky towers and superskytowers—the latter reaching as much as two kilometres high— the sun was something taken for granted, just as were the other comforts of life. Since WeatherNet guaranteed that it never rained until dusk or later, the rich golden sunlight was simply expected, in the same way that one expected air to fill one’s lungs with every breath.
But hundreds of stories below the first inhabited floors of the great towers, ziggurats, and minarets, in some places actually on or under the city-planet’s surface, it was another story. Here hundreds of thousands of humans and other species lived and died, sometimes without ever catching as much as a glimpse of the fabled sky. Here the light that filtered through the omnipresent gray inversion layer was wan and pallid. The rain that reached the surface was nearly always acidic, enough so at times to etc tiny channels and grooves into ferrocarbon foundations. It was hard to believe that anything at all could survive in these dismal trenches. Yet even here life, both intelligent and otherwise, had adjusted long ago to the perpetual twilight and structured environment.
At the very bottom of the chasms, in the variegated pulsing of phosphor lights and signs, stone mites, conduit worms, and other scavengers flourished on technological detritus. Duracrete slugs blindly masticated their way through rubble. Hawk-bats built nest near power converters to keep their eggs warm. Armored rats and spider-roaches scuttled and hunted through piles of trash two stories high. And millions of other species of opportunistic and parasitic organisms, from single-celled animalcules all the way up to those self-aware enough to wish they weren’t, doggedly pursued their common quest for survival, little different from the struggles on a thousand different jungle worlds. Down here was where the jetsam of the galaxy, a motley collection of sentients dismissed by those above simply as “the underdwellers,” eked out lives of brutality and despair. It was merely a different kind of jungle, after all.
And where there’s a jungle, there are always those who hunt.
___
[member="Jodi Chapman"]
But hundreds of stories below the first inhabited floors of the great towers, ziggurats, and minarets, in some places actually on or under the city-planet’s surface, it was another story. Here hundreds of thousands of humans and other species lived and died, sometimes without ever catching as much as a glimpse of the fabled sky. Here the light that filtered through the omnipresent gray inversion layer was wan and pallid. The rain that reached the surface was nearly always acidic, enough so at times to etc tiny channels and grooves into ferrocarbon foundations. It was hard to believe that anything at all could survive in these dismal trenches. Yet even here life, both intelligent and otherwise, had adjusted long ago to the perpetual twilight and structured environment.
At the very bottom of the chasms, in the variegated pulsing of phosphor lights and signs, stone mites, conduit worms, and other scavengers flourished on technological detritus. Duracrete slugs blindly masticated their way through rubble. Hawk-bats built nest near power converters to keep their eggs warm. Armored rats and spider-roaches scuttled and hunted through piles of trash two stories high. And millions of other species of opportunistic and parasitic organisms, from single-celled animalcules all the way up to those self-aware enough to wish they weren’t, doggedly pursued their common quest for survival, little different from the struggles on a thousand different jungle worlds. Down here was where the jetsam of the galaxy, a motley collection of sentients dismissed by those above simply as “the underdwellers,” eked out lives of brutality and despair. It was merely a different kind of jungle, after all.
And where there’s a jungle, there are always those who hunt.
___
[member="Jodi Chapman"]
