‘You’re going to help us, Merlin?’ Malkoha asked. ‘Aren’t you?’
Merlin’s throat had become very dry. ‘I’d like to, but I must leave immediately. Twenty light-years from here is a bountiful system known to the Cohort. The great vessels of my people - the swallowships - sometimes stop in this system, to replenish supplies and make repairs. The swallowships cannot use the Way, but they are very big. If I could divert just one swallowship here, it could carry fifty thousand refugees; double that if people were prepared to accept some hardship.’
‘That’s still not many people,’ Sibia said.
‘That’s why you need to start thinking about reducing your population over the next three generations. It won’t be possible to save everyone, but if you could at least ensure that the survivors are adults of breeding age . . .’ Merlin trailed off, conscious of the dismayed faces staring at him. ‘Look,’ he said, removing a sheaf of papers from his jacket and spreading them on the table. ‘I had the ship prepare these documents. This one concerns the production of wide-spectrum antibiotic medicines. This one concerns the construction of a new type of aircraft engine, one that will allow you to exceed the speed of sound and reach much higher altitudes than are now available to you. This one concerns metallurgy and high-precision machining. This one is a plan for a two-stage liquid-fuelled rocket. You need to start learning about rocketry now, because it’s the only thing that’s going to get you into space.’ His finger moved to the final sheet. ‘This document reveals certain truths about the nature of physical reality. Energy and mass are related by this simple formula. The speed of light is an absolute constant, irrespective of the observer’s motion. This diagram shows the presence of emission lines in the spectrum of hydrogen, and a mathematical formula that predicts the spacing of those lines. All this . . . stuff should help you make some progress.’
‘Is this all you can give us?’ Sibia asked sceptically. ‘A few pages’ worth of vague sketches and cryptic formulae?’
‘They’re more than most cultures ever get. I suggest you start thinking about them straight away.’
‘I will get this to Shama,’ Coucal said, taking the drawing of a jet engine and preparing to slip it into his case.
‘Not before everything here is duplicated and archived,’ Malkoha said firmly. ‘And we must take pains to ensure none of these secrets fall into Shadowland hands.’ Then he returned his attention to Merlin. ‘Evidently, you have given this matter some thought.’
‘Just a bit.’
‘Is this the first time you have had to deal with a world such as ours, one that will die?’
‘I’ve had some prior experience of the matter. There was once a world—’
‘What happened to the place in question?’ Malkoha asked, before Merlin could finish his sentence.
‘It died.’
‘How many people were saved?’
For a moment Merlin couldn’t answer. The words seemed to lodge in the back of his throat, hard as pebbles. ‘There were just two survivors,’ he said quietly. ‘A pair of brothers.’
The walk to Tyrant was the longest he had ever taken. Ever since he had made the decision to leave Lecythus he had rehearsed the occasion in his mind, replaying it time and again. He had always imagined the crowd cheering, daunted by the news, but not cowed, Merlin raising his fist in an encouraging salute. Nothing had prepared him for the frigid silence of his audience, their judgmental expressions as he left the low buildings of the compound, their unspoken disdain hanging in the air like a proclamation.
Only Malkoha followed him all the way to Tyrant’s boarding ramp. The old soldier had his coat drawn tight across his chest, even though the wind was still and the evening not particularly cold.
‘I’m sorry,’ Merlin said, with one foot on the ramp. ‘I wish I could stay.’
‘You seem like two men to me,’ Malkoha said, his voice low. ‘One of them is braver than he gives himself credit for. The other man still has bravery to learn.’
‘I’m not running away.’
‘But you are running from something.’
‘I have to go now. If the damage to the Waynet becomes greater, I may not even be able to reach the next system.’
‘Then you must do what you think is right. I shall be sure to give your regards to Minla. She will miss you very much.’ Malkoha paused and reached into his tunic pocket. ‘I almost forgot to give you this. She would have been very upset with me if I had.’
Malkoha had given Merlin a small piece of stone, a coin-shaped sliver that must have been cut from a larger piece and then set in coloured metal so that it could be worn around the neck or wrist. Merlin examined the stone with interest, but in truth there seemed nothing remarkable about it. He’d picked up and discarded more beautiful examples a thousand times in his travels. It had been dyed red in order to emphasise the fine grain of its surface: a series of parallel lines like the pages of a book seen end-on, but with a rhythmic structure to the spacing of the lines - a widening and a narrowing - that was unlike any book Merlin had seen.
‘Tell her I appreciated it,’ he said.
‘I gave the stone to my daughter. She found it pretty.’
‘How did you come by it?’
‘I thought you were in a hurry to leave.’
Merlin’s hand closed around the stone. ‘You’re right. I should be on my way.’
‘The stone belonged to a prisoner of mine, a man named Dowitcher. He was one of their greatest thinkers: a scientist and soldier much like myself. I admired his brilliance from afar, just as I hope he admired mine. One day, our agents captured him and brought him to the Skylands. I played no part in planning his kidnap, but I was delighted that we might at last meet on equal terms. I was convinced that, as a man of reason, he would listen to my arguments and accept the wisdom of defecting to the Skylands.’
‘Did he?’
‘Not in the slightest. He was as firmly entrenched in his convictions as I was in mine. We never became friends.’
‘So where does the stone come into it?’
‘Before he died, Dowitcher found a means to torment me. He gave me the stone and told me that he had learned something of great significance from it. Something that could change our world. Something that had cosmic significance. He was looking into the sky when he said that: almost laughing. But he would not reveal what that secret was.’
Merlin hefted the stone once more. ‘I think he was playing games with you, Malkoha.’
‘That’s the conclusion I eventually reached. One day Minla took a shine to the stone - I kept it on my desk long after Dowitcher was gone - and I let her have it.’
‘And now it’s mine.’
‘You mean a lot to her, Merlin. She wanted to give you something in return for the flowers. You may forget the rest of us one day, but please don’t ever forget my daughter.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I’m lucky,’ Malkoha said, something in his tone easing, as if he was finished judging Merlin. ‘I’ll be dead long before your Waynet cuts into our sun. But Minla’s generation won’t have that luxury. They know that their world is going to end, and that every year brings that event a year nearer. They’re the ones who’ll spend their whole lives with that knowledge looming over them. They’ll never know true happiness. I don’t envy them a moment of their lives.’
That was when something in Merlin gave way, some mental slippage that he must have felt coming for many hours without quite acknowledging it to himself. Almost before he had time to reflect on his own words he found himself saying to Malkoha, ‘I’m staying.’
The other man, perhaps wary of a trick or some misunderstanding brought about by the translator, narrowed his eyes. ‘Merlin?’
‘I said I’m staying. I’ve changed my mind. Maybe it was what I always knew I had to do, or maybe it was all down to what you just said about Minla. But I’m not going anywhere.’
‘What I said just now,’ Malkoha said, ‘about there being two of you, one
braver than the other . . . I know now which man I am speaking to.’
‘I don’t feel brave. I feel scared.’
‘Then I know it to be true. Thank you, Merlin. Thank you for not leaving us.’
‘There’s a catch,’ Merlin said. ‘If I’m going to be any help to you, I have to see this whole thing out.’
Malkoha was the last to see him before he entered frostwatch. ‘Twenty years,’ Merlin said, indicating the settings, which had been recalibrated in Lecythus time-units. ‘In all that time, you don’t need to worry about me. Tyrant will take care of everything I need. If there’s a problem, the ship will either wake me or it will send out the proctors to seek assistance.’
‘You have never spoken of proctors before,’ Malkoha replied.
‘Small mechanical puppets. They have very little intelligence of their own, so they won’t be able to help you with anything creative. But you needn’t be alarmed by them.’
‘In twenty years, must we wake you?’
‘No, the ship will take care of that as well. When the time comes, the ship will allow you aboard. I may be a little groggy at first, but I’m sure you’ll make allowances.’
‘I may not be around in twenty years,’ Malkoha said gravely. ‘I am sixty years old now.’
‘I’m sure there’s still life left in you.’
‘If we should encounter a problem, a crisis—’
‘Listen to me,’ Merlin said, with sudden emphasis. ‘You need to understand one very important thing. I am not a god. My body is much the same as yours, our lifespans very similar. That’s the way we did things in the Cohort: immortality through our deeds, rather than flesh and blood. The frostwatch casket can give me a few dozen years beyond a normal human lifespan, but it can’t give me eternal life. If you keep waking me, I won’t live long enough to help you when things get really tough. If there is a crisis, you can knock on the ship three times. But I’d urge you not to do so unless things are truly dire.’
‘I will heed your counsel,’ Malkoha said.
‘Work hard. Work harder than you’ve ever dreamed possible. Time is going to eat up those seventy years faster than you can blink.’
‘I know how quickly time can eat years, Merlin.’
‘I want to wake to rockets and jet aircraft. Anything less, I’m going to be a disappointed man.’
‘We will do our best not to let you down. Sleep well, Merlin. We will take care of you and your ship, no matter what happens.’
Merlin said farewell to Malkoha. When the ship was sealed up he settled himself into the frostwatch casket and commanded Tyrant to put him to sleep.
He didn’t dream.
Nobody he recognised was there to greet Merlin when he returned to consciousness. Were it not for their uniforms, which still carried a recognisable form of the Skylanders’ crescent emblem, he could easily believe that he had been abducted by forces from the surface. His visitors crowded around his open casket, faces difficult to make out, his eyes watering against the sudden intrusion of light.
‘Can you understand me, Merlin?’ asked a woman, with a firm clear voice.
‘Yes,’ he said, after a moment in which it seemed as if his mouth was still frozen. ‘I understand you. How long have I—’
‘Twenty years, just as you instructed. We had no cause to wake you.’
He pushed himself from the casket, muscles screaming into his brain with the effort. His vision sharpened by degrees. The woman studied him with a cool detachment. She snapped her fingers at someone standing behind her and then passed Merlin a blanket. ‘Put this around you,’ she said.
The blanket had been warmed. He wrapped it around himself with gratitude, and felt some of the heat seep into his old bones. ‘That was a long one,’ he said, his tongue moving sluggishly, making him slur his words. ‘We don’t usually spend so long in frostwatch.’
‘But you’re alive and well.’
‘So it would seem.’
‘We’ve prepared a reception area in the compound. There’s food and drink, a medical team waiting to look at you. Can you walk?’
‘I can try.’
Merlin tried. His legs buckled under him before he reached the door. They would regain strength in time, but for now he needed help. They must have anticipated his difficulties, because a wheelchair was waiting at the base of Tyrant’s boarding ramp, accompanied by an orderly to push it.
‘Before you ask,’ the woman said, ‘Malkoha is dead. I’m sorry to have to tell you this.’
Merlin had grown to think of the old man as his only adult friend on Lecythus, and had been counting on his being there when he returned from frostwatch. ‘When did he die?’
‘Fourteen years ago.’
‘Force and wisdom. It must be like ancient history to you.’
‘Not to all of us,’ the woman said sternly. ‘I am Minla, Merlin. It may be fourteen years ago, but there isn’t a day when I don’t remember my father and wish he was still with us.’
As he was being propelled across the apron, Merlin looked up at the woman’s face and compared it against his memories of the little girl he had known twenty years ago. At once he saw the similarity and knew that she was telling the truth. In that moment he felt the first visceral sense of the time that had passed.
‘You can’t imagine how odd this makes me feel, Minla. Do you remember me?’
‘I remember a man I used to talk to in a room. It was a long time ago.’
‘Not to me. Do you remember the stone?’
She looked at him oddly. ‘The stone?’
‘You asked your father to give it to me, when I was due to leave Lecythus.’
‘Oh, that thing,’ Minla said. ‘Yes, I remember it now. It was the one that belonged to Dowitcher.’
‘It’s very pretty. You can have it back if you like.’
‘Keep it, Merlin. It doesn’t mean anything to me now, just as it shouldn’t have meant anything to my father. I’m embarrassed to have given it to you.’
‘I’m sorry about Malkoha.’
‘He died well, Merlin. Flying another hazardous mission for us, in very bad weather. This time it was our turn to deliver medicine to our allies. We were now making antibiotics for all the land masses in the Skyland Alliance, thanks to the process you gave us. My father flew one of the last consignments. He made it to the other land mass, but his plane was lost on the return trip.’
‘He was a good man. I only knew him a short while, but I think it was enough to tell.’
‘He often spoke of you, Merlin. I think he hoped you might teach him more than you did.’
‘I did what I could. Too much knowledge would have overwhelmed you: you wouldn’t have known where to start, or how to put the pieces together.’
‘Perhaps you should have trusted us more.’
‘You said you had no cause to wake me. Does that mean you made progress?’
‘Decide for yourself.’
He followed Minla’s instruction. The area around Tyrant was still recognisable as the old military compound, with many of the original buildings still present, albeit enlarged and adapted. But most of the dirigible docking towers were gone, as had most of the dirigibles themselves. Ranks of new aircraft now occupied the area where the towers and airships had been, bigger and heavier than anything Merlin had seen before. The swept-back geometry of their wings, the angle of the leading edge, the rakish curve of their tailplanes all owed something to the shape of Tyrant in atmospheric-entry mode. Clearly the natives had been more observant than he’d given them credit for. Merlin knew he shouldn’t have been surprised; he’d given them the blueprints for the jet turbine, after all. But it was still something of a shock to see his plans made concrete, so closely to the way he had imagined it.
‘Fuel is always a problem,’ Minla said. ‘We have the advantage of height, but little else. We rely on our scattered allies on the ground, together with raiding expeditions to Shadowland fuel bunkers.’ She pointed to one of the remaining airships.
‘Our cargo dirigibles can lift fuel all the way back to the Skylands.’
‘Are you still at war?’ Merlin asked, though her statement rather confirmed it.
‘There was a ceasefire shortly after my father’s death. It didn’t last long.’
‘You people could achieve a lot more if you pooled your efforts,’ Merlin said. ‘In seventy - make that fifty - years, you’ll be facing collective annihilation. It isn’t going to make a damned bit of difference what flag you’re saluting.’
Zima Blue and Other Stories Page 27