Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  During my watch I had been looking through the telescopes, searching the whole of the sky, but also—methodically—returning to the sector where Surt had seen her sail-flash. I had the sighting log open on my lap, but also the book Fura had shown me in her quarters, with the strange pattern of Shadow Occupations. I had taken it with her glad permission, and between intervals of peering through eyepieces I let my eyes recover by switching on my red lamp and examining the book.

  I was drawn to the book as an itch draws a scratch, or a sore tooth draws a tongue. That did not mean I was convinced that there was sense in it, let alone some vast, disquieting truth that made a mockery of all that we had been taught as children. I thought, rather, that the book was the work of some mad or mischievous person, intended to promote further madness or confusion, rather than to illuminate some submerged truth. My intention was to find the mistake or lie and return the book to Fura, proud that I had put to bed any silliness about hundreds of unknown Occupations.

  But I could not. Not to begin with, at least, and when my red light flickered out—impaired by the storm—I had not really begun to see where I might start.

  The intercom buzzed.

  “I am detecting elevated solar activity,” Paladin said. “It would be advisable, Miss Adrana, if you were to return to the shelter of the main hull.”

  True enough; the storm might not be capable of doing much harm to the ship but that glass bubble offered much less protection for a living organism than being down below behind spans of armour and lagging. I signed off the log, closed up the telescopes, and used the hydraulic lever to return the sighting room to the safety of the hull like an eyeball being wound back into its own socket. I climbed out through the narrow connecting door, clutching only the mad journal as I left.

  “Is it a blowy one, do you think?” Strambli asked me, as I passed her along the way to the control room. “I ain’t ever been one for storms. There was a ship once, somewhere down by the Daughters of Blood and Milk, I think it was, got caught with their sails run out in a Niner, heavy on the ions, too, and they couldn’t get one of their winches to work, so they sent out half their number to slice the rigging with yardknives, or else they’d be shredded in the pull of the Daughters, and when they got ’em back every one of ’em poor coves was cooked alive in their suits—”

  “I’ve heard that story as well,” I said, gently interrupting her flow. “Only it was out by the Vault Keeper, not the Daughters. Tindouf told me something similar about the Drooling Dog. Ask Prozor and she’ll have her own version of it too, and you can bet it’ll be a different ship and crew.” I smiled and laid a hand on her wrist. “Just scare stories, Strambli. Besides, this isn’t a Niner, not even close, and even if it was our sails wouldn’t need hauling in.”

  She looked at me with mild resentment.

  “I ain’t jumpy, don’t get that idea.”

  “I didn’t think you were. Besides, we all have the right to be a little jumpy now and then. I’d say it’s a very worthwhile survival trait, wouldn’t you?”

  Her expression was non-committal. “I looked through the sighting log, after what Surt said to Fura. Did she really see sail-flash?”

  “She saw something, and perhaps it was real, but we’d be very unwise to make too much of it. The chances of another ship finding us out here are very small, and the likelihood of one taking an interest in us is even smaller. I shouldn’t lose too much sleep over any of it. Besides, we’ll soon be on a definite course, with a new plan. If we see a hint of sail-flash behind us then, we’ll have to consider our options. But I doubt we’ll see any more of Surt’s phantom.”

  “And this new course of ours—does that mean Fura’s come up with her suggestions?” She dropped her voice. “It’s been five days, Adrana. How long does she need to pull some names out of the Book of Worlds?”

  “That was what I was going to see her about.”

  “I’m glad one of us still gets an audience. Won’t be long before we’ll need permission to catch her eye, let alone have a chat.”

  “She’s got a lot on her mind, Strambli, especially after our difficulties in the Rumbler. She takes responsibility for everything that’s happened to us, and that weighs heavily on her now and again.”

  Strambli gave a slow nod. “Just as long as her ladyship favours us with her selection somewhere between now and the end of the present Occupation, I s’pose we’ll be grateful for what we can get.”

  “We’ll have made our choice by the end of the day, I’m sure of it. And forget about this storm. It’s not going to cause us any trouble.” I tried to lighten her mood. “Are you finished with your shift?”

  “I was just going to wash some pots and pans.”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I have something from Fura.”

  “Captain Ness, you mean,” Strambli said, turning from me.

  *

  For once Fura was in the control room, rather than her own quarters. She was at the Glass Armillary, which was much too big and cumbersome—not to say delicate—to be moved to any other part of the ship, even if it had been desired.

  “I thought you were still on sighting duty,” Fura said to me, as I made my presence known.

  “Paladin called me in. Anyway, the static-discharge makes the whole ship light up like a lantern, so it isn’t very good for dark adaptation anyway. I’d already swept all the sectors several times, and seen nothing.”

  “Well, it’s handy that you’re here,” she said, stroking a metal finger against the edge of the Glass Armillary. “I’ve got the choices I’d like to present to the crew, damn their insistence.”

  We had our charts and maps, and they were useful for baubles and their insides. We had our star charts as well, and they helped with celestial navigation. But such records were of little use in the three-dimensional space of the Congregation, where the worlds were in constant movement with respect to each other. In a month any fixed representation of those world’s positions would have been dangerously out of date. In half a year, many of those worlds would have been on the other side of the Old Sun, making a nonsense of any attempts to plot crossing times or plan an expedition. A navigator would have been better off throwing dice than trusting to that. But they needed something.

  Hence, the Glass Armillary.

  If you squinted, it looked like a lacy glass sphere, about three and half spans across, cumbersome and delicate as an ornamental chandelier, contained within a frame that was only bit less fragile-seeming than the glassy structure itself. When it was packed away, though, the Armillary’s “sphere” turned out to be made out of a series of concentric rings, thirty-seven in total, each of which could be tilted at an angle to its neighbours.

  The angles of the rings were set with reference to tables, and then locked, creating the sphere-like impression. The innermost ring represented the innermost processional of the Congregation; the first processional; and indeed was numbered as such. Within the inner circumference of that ring lay only empty space and the central jewel of the Old Sun. The outermost ring was numbered thirty-seven.

  Mazarile—our homeworld—lay in the thirty-fifth processional, which meant it was on one of the rings of greatest diameter, furthest from the middle.

  So were a lot of worlds—hundreds and thousands of them, although only a few hundred were named and settled.

  Each of those worlds had its own orbit. But the way the Congregation was organised, those orbits tended to be bunched together in families, like the lanes at the greyhound track. All the worlds in the thirty-fifth processional minded their own business and kept to the thirty-fifth processional. They might pull apart from each other now and then, but they would never drift too far from the confines of that ring.

  The worlds nearest the Old Sun moved in the fastest orbits, going round quicker than the ones on the outer edges. These were in the low-numbered processionals and were usually called the Shallows or the Sunwards. They were warmer, drawing the full benefit of the Old Sun’s ailing
energies and, generally speaking, they were desirable worlds on which to live, but it could be challenging to navigate between them, lending them a certain exclusivity. The bulk of people, though, made their homes in the mid-processionals. No one agreed on precisely where those began and ended, but it was commonly held to be somewhere between the tenth to the thirtieth. Beyond that lay the outer processionals, where worlds travelled further apart, commerce was sparser and more difficult, the economies slower, fashions a little behind the day, and so forth. The last handful of processionals (including Mazarile’s own) were sometimes called the Frost Margins.

  Of course, being able to name the processionals—even having glass circles with numbers on—was still only partially useful.

  Within each ring, then, were a number of secondary rings given their own tints and sub-numbering. These sub-rings were very cunningly inlaid and could be slid around by hand or adjusted minutely using something like a glass clock-key, so delicate that it needed to be locked away with a different key all of its own. There were a few of these sub-rings in each processional, and each could be assigned the designation of a particular world of interest, and marked accordingly, using coloured wax pencils. The exact position of that world could then be fixed and altered from day to day. It was still tiresome as someone had to use ephemeris tables to make the initial setting; but once marked, it was relatively easy to keep track of a world’s position, at least over the typical span of a crossing or expedition.

  There was no hope of marking all twenty thousand settled worlds, and for most purposes there was no need to, anyway. The fortunes of worlds shifted all the while. What was an important trading stopover in 1650 might be a negligible backwater by 1750. In this bright and shiny new year of 1800, most captains and crews might only need to concern themselves with a hundred or so probable destinations, excluding baubles, and a hundred worlds could be marked onto the circles, with care, and their evolving positions tracked from day to day, week to week.

  Baubles were a different, but related case. They tended not to move with the processionals, and their orbits could be irregular. They often swung out far beyond the outer worlds into the Emptyside. It was impractical to mark them in the same way as the settled worlds, so—if they were indicated at all—it was with red marbles on the end of long stalks, fixed into holes drilled into the Old Sun. There were baubles all the way down to the Sunwards, though, not just up in the Empty. Privateer crews tended to avoid those deep-orbit baubles, though, preferring to leave such easy pickings to the combines.

  There were gradations etched onto those circles and stalks, indicating how many minutes it took a squawk signal to travel from one point to another. That was sometimes useful to know for the purposes of negotiation and signalling, but mainly it was shorthand for working out approximate crossing times. Sailing out from the Old Sun was easier than moving inward, but as a rule of thumb a ship might require six months to cross from one side of the Congregation to the other—sixteen light-minutes as a photon travelled. With a ship the size of Revenger (about four hundred spans nose to tail) and a crew numbering in the single figures, it was easily practical to carry sufficient rations to keep everyone healthy. In reality, captains would replenish stores at a settled world, then plot an expedition that took in a string of baubles, visiting each in a logical sequence based on crossing times and opening auguries, spending between three and nine months away from civilisation.

  Now, with all those worlds I alluded to—squeezed into a volume only sixteen light-minutes across—and remembering that there are millions of such worlds, not thousands—you might be forgiven for wondering how such a tricky piece of clockwork could keep ticking for millions of years, without any sort of mishap.

  No one can say for certain, but collisions must be very rare. There is certainly rubble out there, and some have speculated that it represents the dust of worlds that got in the way of other worlds. Others, though, hold that such dust is merely the material that was left over when the fifty million worlds were forged. Still others hold that the rubble is evidence of the Intra-Congregational war they claim happened between the Second and Third Occupations.

  But the best explanation—from what I remember of the Museum of History—is that the worlds have an in-built aversion to colliding. Just as there are swallowers inside some of the worlds, so there are mechanisms—instincts, you might almost call them—which deter the worlds from wandering out of their tracks. Since these correcting mechanisms only have to apply a tiny alteration to forestall a collision ten thousand or a million years in the future, we have never sensed their direct influence, and perhaps we never shall.

  For the sake of completeness, I ought to say that there’s another theory, which is that, between the Occupations—when there are no monkeys around to witness anything—something comes along and gives all the worlds a tiny nudge, correcting them just enough to keep them out of trouble for a few more thousand years. Maybe that is so, but I prefer the first explanation, as it removes any possibility of this being done as a favour. Because the thing about favours is that they can always be withdrawn; and the other thing about that second explanation is that it tangles itself up in a different mystery altogether, which is why we even have the Occupations.

  Dwelling on these complications couldn’t help but send my thoughts drifting back to the mad journal, which I was still carrying, and which troubled me more than I liked.

  “Are you day-dreaming again?” Fura asked gently, snapping me back to the present, and the control room. “You’ve been staring into the glass like someone hypnotised you.”

  “I was just thinking what an awful shame something this rare and beautiful got to be in the possession of Bosa Sennen.”

  “It ain’t hers now, which is all that matters. She took good care of it, though, didn’t she?” Fura was using the little glass key to make a tiny adjustment to one of the Glass Armillary’s circles, holding an ephemeris table open in her other hand.

  “She had a rage on her,” I said, thinking back to my time as her prisoner and understudy. “But she’d always prefer to direct that rage into slow cruelty, rather than mindless violence. Besides, she knew how valuable all this glass was to her. She was like a spider, waiting on the edge of a big black web, and this was her guide to where and when to move in.”

  Fura extracted a bauble and its stalk and repositioned it carefully, threading it through the narrow gaps between the circles.

  “Did she ever involve you in her deliberations?”

  “No,” I answered, trying to be truthful while saying what Fura wanted to hear. “She listened to my reports from the bone room, and occasionally she’d bounce a question or two off me, when she was making up her own mind. But I was never the one that swayed her. I only ever got a glimpse or two of this gadget, on the few occasions she allowed me into this room. I think she was worried I might smash it, out of spite.”

  “Even after you’d seen what she did to Garval?”

  “I thought I was going to die one way or the other.” I swallowed, thinking of the vile punishment wrought on our friend Garval, who was captured at the same time as me. “But I could think of easier ways to go than at Bosa’s hands. I wasn’t in a rush to see her bad side.”

  “You speak as if there was a side of her that wasn’t bad.” Fura went to a cabinet and slipped the glass key back into its place, locking up after it. “We daren’t go into the deep processionals, not until our name’s cleared, and Trevenza Reach is out of consideration. That leaves a handful of suitable worlds that we might risk a peek at, after taking some precautions.”

  I had no idea what sort of precautions she had in mind, but my curiosity was pricked. “Go on.”

  “This is us,” she said, touching a stalk with a black marble on the end of it, not too far from the red marble of the Rumbler. “And these are three candidate worlds I’ve come up with, in the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh processionals. Forget the bright lights, ’cos none of these places is what you’d call b
ustling, even compared to dear old Mazarile.” She moved her hand to the outermost pair of disks, touching the places where she’d made a wax inscription. “But they’ll serve us, I think—or one of ’em will. The combines rarely come out this far, so there’s little chance of running into corporate trouble. There won’t likely be too many other ships in the vicinity, either, and if we need to make a run for it, there’s a lot of clear space we can lose ourselves in. First is a little spitball of a world called Metherick, or sometimes Methrick, depending on which edition of the Book of Worlds you consult. It’s in the thirty-sixth. Sphereworld, not too unlike our own dear home. Couple of ports, a few cities—towns, more like—total population around three-hundred-thousand, although that may be a little out of date.”

  “You’re right—makes Mazarile seem like the centre of the Congregation.”

  “We can’t go near anywhere too teeming. It’s backwaters or nothing, dear heart. But any one of us who doesn’t like this new life can stop off there and wait for a ship going somewhere more lively.”

  “And the likelihood of recruiting the hands we need?”

  “Who can say? Chances are there’ll be people who’re fed up with Metherick and willing to take a chance with a new crew, provided we’re not too picky. Being a sphereworld, it will cost us what little fuel we have left to get the launch in, and the ship will need to stand off at quite a distance …”

  I pulled a doubtful face. Given the choice, it would be better to find a world that did not have a swallower in it, so that we could come and go more readily.