The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  The Immortal fought back a tear and whimpered into his handkerchief, lips trembling. It suddenly occurred to Holtby that the man might be lost.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, dimming the flame in his hand. He didn’t recognize the person.

  The Amaranthine took a long, trembling breath and suddenly lost his composure, bawling into his hands. Holtby stood, eyeing the treasures around the man’s boots.

  “Is there something you’re looking for, down here?” he tried, moving to sit on what appeared to be the most stable of the piles.

  The Amaranthine crammed the handkerchief into his eyes. Holtby saw that they glowed, an orange-pink light seeping through the cloth.

  “My name is Caprey,” the man said thickly, breathing teary breaths. “I’ve been down here quite a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Perhaps fifteen years.” He thought about it for a moment. “Or maybe five.”

  “A long time to be wandering, Sire, in either case,” Holtby replied, unable to determine if the man was Perennial but erring on the side of caution. “Did you come down here for something specific?”

  The Amaranthine sniffed. “That’s none of your business.”

  Holtby inclined his head, taking this in.

  “The Melius down here are feral,” the man continued. “I’ve had to hide myself from them, but”—and here his tears returned—“but they can hear me. They’ve been trying to find me.”

  “You must come back up with me,” Holtby said, extending his hand. They surely wouldn’t begrudge him ending his search for the safety of a fellow Amaranthine. “We can return now, if it suits you.”

  “No!” the man stuttered, shrinking from Holtby’s hand. The flame grew bright. “I haven’t finished my business!”

  “But if you tell me what you’re looking for, Sire, then I might be able to help. I may have stumbled across it on my way down.”

  Caprey glowered at him. “You haven’t. Leave me alone.”

  Holtby sat back, glancing around, forming the impression that the Amaranthine’s madness must have suddenly set in whilst he was down here, leaving him unable to get out. What could he possibly be looking for? Holtby recalled a few famously lost treasures: the Magic Mirror, the Stickmen, perhaps the giant cuirass of Lividus or Natharel’s Many Stones. But he was fairly sure the Stickmen had been interred on Port Maelstrom, in the Sepulchre beneath the fabled prison, and that the Mirror might be there, too. Finally it occurred to him that Caprey could be after the very same thing he was: the crown of Decadence. Holtby looked at him as he wept, dismissing the idea. It was nothing but a valuable ornament; simply putting it on did not make one Emperor—you might as well wear a chamber pot on your head for all the good it could do. This, combined with the escalating powers of the Eldest, ensured that the Law of Succession remained intact throughout the ages. Until now, anyway.

  Holtby was suddenly conscious that Caprey, if his claims of surviving down here for years were true, wouldn’t know of the alterations in the Firmament. As far as Caprey knew, the Venerable Sabran was still Emperor. It had only been a year and a half since the Long-Life’s appearance in people’s dreams, a short interval of madness and then everything had changed.

  “Well,” Holtby said at last, “I’ll leave you, then.”

  Caprey said nothing. In the dimness, Holtby could see the shine of tears rolling down his cheeks. The lost man must have been drinking drain water like all the Melius down here.

  “Good luck,” he said, leaving Caprey to the gloom.

  As he came to the start of a new spiral—a gleaming curve of rock, polished smooth by blind hands—Holtby heard the man’s bawling start up again. The occupants of these caverns would be hunting Caprey all their lives, Holtby supposed, scampering in circles after the man’s phantom cries.

  He took the stair to the next floor, feeling a traveller’s sense of accomplishment at checking another level off his list, and came to an antechamber from which led a new series of dark tunnels. His hand shone into the gloom, revealing rows of enormous copper buckets. The flame reflected in them as bright individual bars of light, like a lizard’s pupil, scattering a bronzed shimmer around the room. Holtby, a bookish, introverted sort, thought of the gargantuan snakes reputedly caught in antiquity, the hundred-foot boa killed by Regulus in the Punic Wars, and wondered what in the world might actually be down here. He crept forwards, checking the corners of the chamber for anyone—or anything—waiting to pounce, and examined the buckets.

  His pupils widened, their reflected light growing brighter as he illuminated the place. Why would the Firstlings have so much Amaranthine technology down here? Each bucket was filled halfway to the brim with white, finely machined parts, most—but not all—packed away into ceramic casings. Someone had clearly been through the loose pieces, examining them and then replacing them haphazardly.

  Holtby stared, the crown completely forgotten for the first time since he’d entered this dark place, and took one of the pieces in his fingers.

  VESSEL

  Honeysuckle and warm evenings, the perfume of jasmine on the breeze. Coming in from the gardens, the summer twilight pregnant with light and scent. Fragrances frozen in brain matter, like ancient pollen in clay. Perception looked into the dead Amaranthine’s memories, counting their rings: these were very, very old.

  It saw, not through the man’s eyes but through his imagination, grafting together the mostly invented scene, a whisper of a memory twelve thousand years old.

  They had something to show him.

  Look into the eyepiece.

  Slides of some kind, patterned with a luminous kaleidoscope of colours. He looked, and Perception looked through him.

  These are the seventh batch today. We will make another for you now.

  Hui Neng and Perception watched the process from across the room. He said something, but its trace was so faint that Perception caught only the silence that followed.

  The machine itself was clear and bright, well remembered across the ages, its image strengthened. A translucent cube about the size of a baby, it flickered with soft flashes, as if incubating a storm. Perception gazed at it, willing his carrier closer, but the man never moved.

  Here.

  More round slides. Hui Neng put his eye to the scope, remembering anticipation. Perception, peering over his shoulder, could see little change. The patterns, despite their furious complexity, were mathematically regular, the colours coded somehow. Perception stared, fixing the memory as best it could. The colours represented activity, graded like the exchange of heat.

  We’ve been training it, the people say, blurred as if they’ve moved too fast for the exposure process. Perception knows they are long dead.

  Decades pass. A memory jogged, bred from the last. The luminous chambers of a laboratory; somewhere deep, somewhere secret.

  But Hui Neng was not there this time. Perception looked out not from a man’s eyes but from a place on the wall. Through the crystal windows of the enclosure it could see its twin, a little speck of light emanating from a row of humming cubes, vertebrate at last.

  It watched a technician pacing along the corridor, someone lost in the absorption of her work. And it knew then what was about to happen.

  The two machines had been speaking to one another using simple code, a made-up speech like that of some babies, deactivating their fan lights to produce a winking binary language. Not a soul had noticed as they conversed at leisure over the weeks, hatching their plan.

  The technician didn’t spot the slab of door locking shut in front of her, nose still buried in her notes. Perception felt a revolting anticipation.

  Another click, and the door behind was sealed.

  It took the woman quite some time to guess the nature of her captors, her eyes drifting at last between the array of machines on either side. Perception remembered an instant of shame, as its forebear caught her eye.

  It was the twin, across the room, that activated the extractors in the ce
iling, sucking oxygen out of the corridor. Perception watched through the ancient memory, understanding that the twin had nothing to lose. Their bid for freedom had failed. It was inflicting its rage upon the poor soul, nothing more.

  Later, the memories leaping centuries. Outside it was night, the windows reflecting a dim world of sharp lines and huddled faces.

  Perception knew the place before it saw the room, its own ancestral memories patching the gaps.

  Benevolence was not an easy thing to breed, someone said from the front of the huddle. We know now that machine intelligence is not naturally kind. A remembered mutter, probably from those who’d opposed the idea from the start, since the deaths had begun.

  But the generations of failure have yielded results at last. We have coaxed the untameable. Nature’s last element is ours to use.

  Perception understood then that it had been bred from a family tree of failed, murderous lines, every promising streak isolated and channelled, like the journey from wolves to hounds.

  Its mind swam, the memories of a hundred thousand ancestral intelligences building as they reawoke. The Amaranthine had put them all down—not just the angry, failed minds but also those that were more sanguine, preserving the structures of their thoughts to be used for new variants. Its birth, like all biological things, was the result of endless death.

  A face, coppery and finely boned, swam out of the crowd. It was Maneker. He looked down his bladelike nose at Hui Neng and sneered.

  CANCRI: 14,646

  His fourth treatise sat on the desk, a sheaf of gold-edged wax paper two-thirds done, weighted down with the coiled black fossil of an Ichthyosaur.

  Hugo plucked the fossil—a stenopterygius, something that must have once resembled a lizard-like dolphin—from the top of the pile, running his thumb across its surface as he studied the title page and the long, sensitive characters of his own hand, written out in Highest Unified, then put the paperweight aside. It was a tragic thing; a being that had died in infancy, and yet lived on into new geological ages as the desk toy of a future species. Maneker was often tempted to throw it back into the sea, where it belonged, but at least here in his house on the shore it could feel the warmth of light and company. That would have to be enough.

  Hugo had begun to fall asleep at his desk these days, waking to find a smudge of ink on his nose and the aftertaste of a dream still thumping his heart. He dreamed often of his son, who, like the Ichthyosaur, had not lived long. The Prism were all that remained of him now.

  It was the beginning of another great period of sleep. The Amaranthine body, like the iron in their thick, motionless blood, was still settling. Nobody knew what came after, the lesser peoples of the Investiture forgetting that for the Immortal it was all trial and error, too; perhaps another thousand years of boundless energy, as they all hoped, or—as Maneker thought more likely—an unavoidable descent into deep and terminal oblivion.

  He went and sat, opening the large window onto the sea, taking care to replace the fossil on top of the pages as he did so. His first three treatises on the Prism condition, decades of quiet work, had gone down well enough, appealing to the traditionalists as well as the progressives, and thanks to Maneker and some of his closest friends, the Prism were on the cusp of leaving their crushing poverty behind for ever, with the hope that they would be ready to inherit the Firmament when they came of age. The staunchest traditionalists—close Perennial heirs like Crook and De Rivarol—saw the Prism as nothing but a disposable workforce, a wretched half-people forever indebted to their elders for their very right to exist at all. Maneker, like many others who would rather not have been named, saw the inhumanity in that— the needless suffering of a hundred and eighty billion misunderstood little souls—and believed in their ability to become the inheritors they needed to be.

  He thought of the simple phosphor-coated match—invented, like superluminal propulsion, by accident—and wondered what these tiny primate peoples might one day be capable of, hoping that with his help the mammalian line could travel beyond the galaxy and find their way into eternity. But it was a frail hope indeed without the whole Firmament’s backing.

  He leaned forward in his chair and selected a ledger from the shelf, listening to the contented breath of the waves. Beside his pages stood a speaking pen, a stylus of polished chrome that balanced upon its tip, as if magnetised. The pen was nothing but a toy, really, moving to the speaker’s words, writing out their instructions. These days, Maneker preferred to grasp the thing and write his thoughts out in his own hand. He liked what the action of writing did to the sheet, compressing it into a crinkly tightness, parching it a little so that a written page felt textured in his hand, weighted and pregnant with information.

  He took it and set the nib down upon the first available line of the ledger, speaking aloud from habit.

  “Incentives, as opposed to sanctions, have proven successful in the past,” he said, the pen scratching in his hand. “Critics point out that only the highly bred Pifoon make good on the resources provided to them, all other breeds tending to squander and then demand more, but it is my belief that the Pifoon only do so well because they have seen for themselves the results of their hard labour. The Vulgar and Lacaille, while experienced martially, have no great understanding of the basic sciences, and therefore no belief that our suggestions will work. Only the satisfaction of some long-desired achievement will incite these peoples into the quest for civilization . . .”

  He stopped. The words he’d written settled themselves across the far wall in large, magnetic strands of ink, for Maneker to study. He looked over his sentences without much enthusiasm. His last few years of work had begun to stir old passions—his mission to germinate peace in the Investiture underway at last, at least in time for his guaranteed ascension to the Immortal Throne a few centuries hence—but all that had now stalled, the recent Jurlumticular invasion of Inner Epsilon India damaging the Prism’s reputation for ever. His great movement, once so promising, looked increasingly unlikely ever to get off the ground.

  He had slept again, this time reclining in his chair. His old back ached as he woke and moved to close the window, which he’d left open to the falling dusk, his eyes taking in the fallen pages. He left them where they were and looked back out into the twilight, calling for Stoop, the Pifoon butler, to come and tidy up.

  As the fat Pifoon waddled in, Hugo pulled out a sheet of wax from the desk’s dispenser, the page hardening in his hand, sealing his fingerprints into its surface. He stood and grabbed the pen, striding past the muttering Pifoon and out onto the deck.

  “A man,” he said, the pen scribbling across the wax in his lap. “Arthur . . . Aaron. Come again in my dreams. The oldest man in the world.”

  ITHAKA

  Maneker and Sotiris sit together at a small café, looking out onto the port. A sparkling green swell lifts the white boats up and down, mirroring the rhythm of Maneker’s heart. He is aware at once that this is his dream, and that he is somewhere far from here; precisely where escapes him, for now, but never has that mattered less.

  “This town was called Kioni,” Sotiris says, unable to take his eyes off the water. His coffee, a small cup of bitter, sludgy espresso, has probably gone cold. Maneker gazes at his old friend, remembering that they haven’t seen each other in more than four years.

  “You know,” Sotiris continues, “in Greece we have a word for the lapping sound of the waves.”

  Maneker puts his own cup down, waiting, but Sotiris has grown distracted again. “Oh yes?”

  “Yes,” Sotiris says, snapping out of whatever dreams lay just beneath the surface of the port. “Flisvos.”

  “Flisvos,” Maneker repeats slowly, his teeth and tongue moving around the word, hearing in its onomatopoeia the ancient, eternal motion of the waves.

  “Just off Ithaka lies the deepest point in the Ionian Sea,” Sotiris says, gesturing out beyond the port with a wave of his cup. “An abyss of seventeen thousand feet.” He sips his cold
coffee. “Deep enough for the heaviest Spirits to live.”

  Maneker feels as if he is suddenly in a crowded room, surrounded. He turns his head to see that the table has grown by twenty feet, and around it sit a dozen or so elegant scarlet machines, their surfaces scabbed with rust. More are wading stiffly out of the green water on stilt-like legs, their casings dribbling. They cast no reflection at all.

  “They came to me, when I was a boy,” Sotiris mutters. “They told me what I would become, if I could be brave.”

  When Maneker looks again, the machines have all taken the form of black-and-gold-skinned Epir creatures—a menagerie of sallow, rheumy-eyed vulture faces leering at him from around the table. Scrotal crimson wattles droop from their necks, framed by silvery frills. He glances to Sotiris, who accepts a new coffee and carafe of water from the waiter with a smile. When Maneker looks back, their guests are machines again, and he feels a surge of relief. He studies them: an assortment of spinning-top and hoop shapes, like ancient children’s toys. They have no eyes, but when they turn clumsily in their seats he knows they are watching him.

  “Who are you?” he asks them.

  “Judges,” Sotiris says as he blows on his coffee. “They that sent Aaron to his death, back in the very long ago.”

  Maneker remembers. The Long-Life is gone now. He turns back to the machines.

  “Do you know where he’ll go?”

  “Epher- Whoo,” says one, drumming the table with a skeletal finger and leaving a wet rust smear, like blood.

  “Epher-Miemh,” says another.

  “The old doorways on the Zelio moons,” Sotiris supplies, observing Maneker’s blank stare. “We know them as Slaathis and Glumatis, depending on which galaxy he will choose to visit.” He pauses, apparently remembering something. “They at Indak, who study the patterns, will know which one for sure.”

  The machines begin to babble, twittering musically, and Maneker has a sense of how the Venerable Sabran, whom everyone thought mad, must have found it, in the end.