The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  “Come on,” he breathed, impatient, scared. He hadn’t wanted to be here anyway; never wishing to see Wylde like this.

  A Wunse soldier squirrelled inside another corkscrew chamber fiddled with a reading. “Only a few moments more, Governor.”

  Hui Neng swallowed and hardened his stare, magnifying the display. The ships jumped out, bright in the starlight: towering, brutalist silver columns, their thousand-ton cannons staring into the darkness. The ships on their bearing focused back on him, whispering Incantations across the distance. Hui Neng replied via his receiver. At his final sentence, the guns swivelled away.

  The little craft darted in, a dashing speck lost among the labyrinth of gantries and cannons. Dazzling sliver metal gleamed into his eyes before it could be dulled by the display. The humming of the craft intensified for a moment as it encountered the fields of the fortress ships, tangling, negotiating, and then died away. Hui Neng’s own suit field, gaining weight as it met the great gravity of so much refined platinum hull and weaponry, snarled and burped. Those of his Wunse guards, less heavily protected, squealed and cut out.

  They slipped through the shell of gunships and into a less densely populated volume of space, the inner sanctum, perhaps the safest place in the Immortal kingdom. Ahead of them lay Wylde’s capital ship, a disconcertingly tiny speck of silver and blue that floated like a minnow among the lumbering bodies of its wall of gunships.

  Detail resolved across the ship’s surface, its shimmering blue markings gnarled with towers that cast long shadows in the starlight. The coilship aligned itself with one of the towers and coasted into a swirling orbit. Within three seconds they were staring down at the tower’s slim peak, and half a second later were docking inside the mouth of a balcony.

  Hui Neng’s display darkened, the warm padding inside his helmet foaming up and melting into twin reservoirs on either side of his head. He took a little sip from his water spigot before it, too, disappeared into the streaming mulch and leaned his head back against the blast of cool air. Light filled his capsule and he stepped carefully down into the opened segment of hangar, a pristine, mirrored space devoid of anything but a small, naked Prismic person.

  Hui Neng paused, the fields of his diamond cerulean armour growling and stuttering in a bass drumbeat. The noise of it echoed in the sparse chamber, conflicting with the rumbles of the remaining guards. He looked back. The two suited Wunse had also climbed out. This was as far as they could go.

  Hui Neng had spent part of the journey wondering who would honour his debt first. He had an inkling Heremy, the thickset Wunse to his right, was the braver of the two.

  Much to his surprise, Humphro went first, pulling up his sleeve and cutting roughly into the veins of his wrist. The other watched, engrossed, his skin like blue cheese under the hangar lights, and when Humphro lay collapsed and squirting on the floor he did the same, remembering to salute first in the Immortal way.

  Hui Neng turned back to the Hominin person and they set off, the primate’s little padding feet leaving dissolving heat stains on the floor.

  It was rare to travel by ship these days. Hui Neng, having only recently passed out of his sleep phase, hadn’t left his palace in almost a hundred and fifty years. Others he knew still slept, unreachable for solid decades. It appeared that the Immortal body went through cycles, and an unpleasant wakefulness seemed to be next.

  He clumped along, his suit growling, trusting the little person to signal once it was safe to remove the great lumbering thing. Every minute of every hour the Ordure were striking at perceived weak spots around the fleet, testing defences and armaments, like a castle under hellish, constant siege. Of course, beside the burble of his suit magnets Hui Neng heard nothing: he was as far from any attacking Ordure ship as he was from the surface of Aquarii, and yet in these times nothing was certain.

  Hui Neng tried to avert his eyes from the Prismic person’s bottom as he walked: it was a dangling, crusty red protuberance, like a monkey’s. The slaves went naked to prevent concealed weapons, but he fancied quite a lot could be hidden up there without much fuss. Its redness reflected around the mirrored silver of the corridor, taunting his eyes wherever they looked.

  At last the air appeared to change, and they came to a glittering, diamond-shaped space that looked out upon the stars. The slave held up a finger and Hui Neng stopped, expecting that now might be the point to change out of his gear. Instead, the chamber sighed and rolled, revealing a gaping opening into a much larger space beyond. They proceeded through, and Hui Neng laid eyes on what he had come for.

  The Most Venerable Wylde’s bedchamber was the size of a stately garden of old. Its reflective walls were quite blinding for a moment until Hui Neng’s eyes adjusted, spotting old friends gathered some distance away, their reflections in the great sloping silver walls swelling the numbers. He stepped closer, recognising Biancardi and Sabran talking beneath their breath, still wearing their monumental suits of armour. Sabran saw him and smiled, his suit burping out an adjoining greeting as its field tangled with Hui Neng’s own. He couldn’t believe that it still wasn’t safe to take them off; perhaps it was their age—they still needed that comfort, the swaddling, protective weight of armour.

  “How long?” Hui Neng asked as he came to them, observing the gathering around the bed. He wasn’t ready to see his old friend, not yet—let these others, these strangers to whom their leader had no special connection, pay their respects first.

  “No way to tell,” Biancardi said. “We might be here some time, or it may well be very soon.”

  They moved slowly closer, Hui Neng feeling as if his feet were being dragged out from under him, humming and crackling and growling together, their lowered speech struggling to penetrate the noise. There were still over a hundred Immortals between himself and the throne, a hundred squabbling egos each convinced they had a better strategy to defeat the Ordure.

  They came to the bed.

  Wylde lay quite motionless in a fan of exquisite grey silks, his eyes semi-closed, like a child pretending to sleep.

  “He is in a trance very close to death,” Biancardi said, looking from their Emperor’s scarred white face to the scribe, who had his ear poised as close as possible to Wylde’s softly moving lips and was furiously noting down the whispers for the next in line to memorise.

  “The Incantations?” Hui Neng asked, nodding at the scene.

  “Almost completely recorded now,” said Sabran.

  “When can I speak to him?” he asked, wishing he hadn’t got here so late. Late, always so late.

  “You’ll have to wait until the scribe is done, I’m afraid,” Sabran replied, something in his tone suggesting that there might not be time left, even for that. Some Incantations were always lost with the passing of each Immortal Emperor: it was simply the way of things, since it had always been forbidden to write them down during an Emperor’s reign. Everything from the operation of the Uncounted Vaults and the Foundries of Gliese to opening the innermost doors on ships of the line relied upon the Most Venerable’s memory of spoken passwords—unique commands that activated the Motes: an invisible, seething cosmos of specks pumped into the atmosphere of every Firmamental space. There were now Motes of Persuasion floating around the Firmament that couldn’t be used at all; sealed halls and useless machinery clogged the fine spaces of Gliese and Cancri; ships had begun to crash. There had to be a better system, a way of passing on such vital knowledge without weakening the Emperor’s power.

  Hui Neng gazed around the faces at the bedside, seething as he saw Sotiris Gianakos kneeling almost at Wylde’s elbow. Everyone knew Hui Neng adored his Emperor the most, but there they were, letting Sotiris hear their father’s final words.

  Almost at that same moment the scribe looked up, scowling with something like frustration. Wylde’s lips had stopped moving.

  Hui Neng shot a suddenly furious glance at the scribe, who clearly didn’t want to be the first to say anything. At last, a murmur spread through the assem
bled Immortals and they moved forward as one, peering at the dead face. Something in it had changed at that moment, but Hui Neng couldn’t put his finger on what. The scribe was still bustling about with his writing materials, unwilling to be the first to speak.

  Hui Neng watched the scribe stow the crystal pages of Incantations in a case, which folded in upon itself until it was the size of an antique postage stamp in his palm. Those closest crowded around, their mutterings pierced with the grim choral hum of their suits. He searched their expressions for any emotion, any evidence of grief, and saw nothing. They were all of them, even Sotiris, dry as a bone, concerned only with the Law of Succession, their own personal gossip— some nonsense about mysterious powers developing in only the very eldest. He alone had been a friend to poor Wylde.

  His stinging eyes darted back to the scribe, who was making his way out of the chamber, already some distance away. A ship would be waiting, no doubt, to transport those Incantations to the vaults of Aquarii, there to be read only once, then destroyed.

  Hui Neng whispered into the collar of his suit, signalling his own ship, and stormed from the chamber. Mild voices drifted after him, concerned, perhaps. They knew how he’d felt, but still they’d denied him the place by the bed.

  He pushed past the naked Prism, sending it staggering, and lumbered into the rotating chamber.

  “Come on,” he snarled to his automatic pilot when the doors had revolved, the stark hangar coming into view. His ship waited, a conical blue spike spattered with reflected hangar lights. “Aquarii!” Hui Neng shouted, his throat aching with something more than the force of the yell. The coilship twisted, black fins extending from its fuselage. “I want us at twenty over point, soon as we’re beyond the flotilla.”

  Once seated, the foam welled up again inside Hui Neng’s suit, forming optical equipment over his eyes and fluffing into padding. His helmet clamped shut, drying the tears on his cheeks with a soft hiss of cool air.

  THE WISHES

  Furto woke with a start, spying Gramps creeping through the room, quite obviously attempting to soften his footfalls. Slupe, who was supposed to be on watch, was dozing in the corner. Furto slowed his breathing, watching from the shadows.

  Gramps moved softly among them, wrinkling his nose, claws retracted into his toe pads. He was a queerly un-lizard-like lizard, for all Furto knew about the things, and barely resembled the herd of Bie he professed to watch over. Indeed, when Furto had first seen him back on Coriopil, Gramps had appeared to be of a different species entirely. In the few days that they’d known each other, he seemed to have changed, too, rapidly losing the fat around his middle and shedding scales, as if he were unwell. Furto stared a little longer, wondering. Perhaps he was; perhaps the air here was as bad for him as anyone else from the Prisms’ neck of the woods, though Furto couldn’t quite believe it.

  The house swayed in the wind, a gust of flotsam blowing in. Gramps extended a claw to examine the contents of Slupe’s bag, peering after a moment more into Veril’s sleeping face. Furto watched him straighten and examine all the sleeping Vulgar in the room, noticing as the old Bie’s motions stiffened. He’d spotted that some were missing.

  “Up!” he roared, snapping them all awake.

  Jospor muttered, wiping his face, a ribbon of drool plastered across his chin.

  “Where’s your captain?” Gramps cried. “Where’s Maril? And that other one?”

  “Ah,” Jospor said, rubbing his eyes. “They were worried we’d lose our bearings, you see—”

  “Sussh!” Gramps yelled from the window, his claws extended. “Get after them!”

  The house wobbled as something large sprang from the roof, the Osseresis’s great shadow darkening the branch beyond the window.

  “He’ll be back, I’m sure,” Jospor pleaded, climbing to his feet.

  “No he won’t,” said Gramps emphatically, “not without Sussh’s help.” He ran his grey tongue across his teeth, observing the mess they’d made of the place. “But no matter, we must be off.”

  “Sussh can find them, can’t she?” Jospor asked. Furto noticed the plump little master-at-arms had the shine of tears in his eyes.

  “Oh, probably not,” Gramps replied with an air of distraction. “We have an appointment to make, and so does she.”

  “I could stay and wait,” pleaded Jospor. “Just for a few days—”

  Gramps shot him a look. “Don’t be ridiculous. I need all of you.” He ducked through the doorway and into the morning light, kicking their waste bucket back into the room. “Ablute, now!”

  It took Furto almost a day’s hard climbing to come to the realisation that they were headed up one of the arms of the Snowflake itself. Gramps, when asked, had replied only that they were travelling “to the Invigilator,” growing swiftly sullen thereafter, as if still brooding on Maril and Guirm’s disappearance.

  The white stairway, built of the same fissured base material from which the whole Hedron Star was made, rose in broken, craggy segments between dark forest, joining others as they branched in on either side. Furto wheezed and came to a stop, plonking his rear onto a step and staring at the others as they shuffled up behind.

  “What?” panted Drazlo, clattering past. “Why’re you stopping?”

  Furto ran his hand along the baked, worn slab—it was like bleached, eroded bone, chiselled with incomprehensible runic text and polished to marble grooves by countless ancient climbers before them—and twisted to glance up at the junction where this stair met the next.

  “Gramps didn’t say anything about climbing to the end of the pissing Snowflake,” Furto muttered. “I’m done. That’s it for me. I’m staying here.”

  “No you’re not,” Drazlo said, without looking back.

  Furto huffed and crossed his arms, finally climbing to his feet. He observed the remainder of the crew catching up, with chubby Jospor— officially their captain now, as far as anyone could tell—wheezing at the rear. The Osserine Sussh, back from her unsuccessful search for Maril, swept overhead; a great shadow muting the colours of their suits, the white of the stair quite dazzling again when she’d passed. Furto watched Slupe blow his nose messily into his hand, then unclip his britches and squat, deciding now was as good a time as any to do the same.

  “Furto, you grub!” Veril wailed thinly. “Wait until we’ve got past, will you?”

  He grinned as they scuttled by, shifting on the step and mooning them.

  SARSAPPUS

  “There is a vastness to creation that you cannot have perceived, Vulgar,” Gramps explained while Drazlo and Furto clambered alongside, the pink sun beating down. The old Bie had grown more voluble as the days wore on, apparently pleased with their progress up the stair.

  “The galaxies—or Thunderclouds, as they are known here—exist like a string of interdependent countries stretching off into the darkness,” Gramps continued. “The very oldest of them, out somewhere beyond the limit of understandable distances, are connected to one another, but their histories are as ancient as the universe, and their news does not reach us out here except in the form of ancient myth.” He gestured to the sky. “It is our local column, these three closely packed Thunderclouds, in which the stories of antiquity are still sharply relevant.” Gramps paused for breath, checking on the progress of the crew down below; three little shapes quivering in the heat that rose from the steps.

  “Your galaxy, of which we are at the very edge, was once a teeming place. It was called the Mighty Shadow during the time of the First-Born in the way back when, and existed in age-old harmony with the two other Thunderclouds in this column: the vast Gargantine Sovereignty, known on your Amaranthine charts as Andromeda, and its smaller but nevertheless quite potent neighbour, the Murmurian Domain. They were cousins, you see, the giant rulers of these galaxies. Imperial lines diluted and interbred over billions of years.”

  Furto almost forgot the climb; his burned hands, scalded by the baking ceramic, ceased to sting; his calves, aching from the climb, l
ost their cramp.

  But one day, Gramps explained, eighty million years ago, the accord failed. Old friendships were forgotten, all trade ceased, the debts called in. The Murmurian Domain attacked the Mighty Shadow, laying siege to its cousin and sending a force across the gulf to invade. Furto tried to imagine it, knowing his mind wasn’t built to contemplate such scale.

  Less than a hundred years later—a record, apparently, for the annexation of an entire Thundercloud—the Murmurian Domain had pursued the Mighty Shadow’s rulers into hiding, hounding them until they capitulated all territories, and bringing them as prisoners back to the Murmurian Empire. The Gargantine Sovereignty, meanwhile, did nothing.

  Gramps gave a stagey pause, as if thinking of how to go on. “You cannot conceive of the power involved in laying siege to another galaxy; it is war magnified, they are like two . . . titans engaged in battle . . .” He trailed off, staring at them. “As punishment for drawing things out so, the Murmuris sterilized your entire galaxy—something barely heard of in the history of the Greater Nimbus—killing off the life around every star.”

  Furto and Drazlo glanced at one another.

  “Almost every star, I should say, otherwise you two would not be listening to me now, and the Snowflakes would not be populated by the Osseresis. A few insignificant pockets that cooperated with the invasion were spared, one of which was your own star system—then ruled by the Epir, my ancestors—and were left to enjoy their liberty in an otherwise empty galaxy.”

  Drazlo frowned. “Who were the others? You said there were ‘pockets’?”

  Gramps waved a clawed hand dismissively. “One or two distant worlds, lying far, far beyond the limits of your Investiture. You and they shall never meet.” He hesitated. “And of course any wandering planets—those black worlds without suns—would have escaped the punishment, too.”

  “What—?” Drazlo asked, trying to articulate himself in the heat. “What king could order such a thing? Such massacre?”