by M. Suddain
‘I didn’t want to betray you, my boy,’ said Fabrigas gently. ‘I wanted to save you.’
‘It wasn’t up to you to save me,’ said Lambestyo. The old man’s soup had thickened his tongue. ‘I’m not for you to save. I’m not …’ he breathed again, ‘I’m not for you or anyone to save.’
‘I know,’ said Fabrigas.
‘We were supposed to take that girl somewhere. We promised.’
‘I never promised that. I simply made you promise. There was a time when I would have craved this mission, and all the mayhem and danger these children bring. I was once a great explorer. But now all I want to do is rest. To rest for ever. You didn’t think I could take you to the next universe, did you?’
‘I … no, I suppose I didn’t. I hoped you could.’
‘I was wrong to trick you. I was wrong to lie to you. Sleep now. This will soon be over.’
Five black ships eased down behind to form a cross. Five black ships each shaped like a bird of prey. Suddenly the boy captain’s eyes caught light again. ‘Why do we not start your magic engine? Why do we not make the jump?! Yes, that is a plan! That’s how we can escape!’ He made to stand, then slumped on poisoned legs. They felt the horrible impact of a missile bursting just behind, its energy gently peeling open their stern, and Fabrigas strained to hold the wheel. ‘My boy, my RIPS engine has never worked as far as I could tell. Plus, I disabled it to make sure,’ said Fabrigas quietly. ‘I disabled it so no one could use it.’
The boy’s eyes fell back into the shadows. ‘So, you tricked me again.’
‘Not again. It was all part of the same grand trick.’
Now they passed through an arch and over an amphitheatre, ancient and tumbling. The seats were etched like the fine markings on a seashell, and at the sides of the stage were two statues, each miles high, two hooved figures holding starfish beacons which hadn’t been lit for perhaps a hundred thousand years, but as they passed they could see an image of their ship projected in shadow on the ruins by the starlight behind them. ‘Imagine the plays that went on here,’ said the old man with a faint smile. ‘How quickly the ages pass.’ Another terrible crunch as a shot breached their hull. Ahead there was a gate. It was the entrance to this grand city, built near the dawn of civilisation, a circle of stone a thousand miles wide and still hanging intact. They flew towards it.
‘I’ve always wanted to fly through the Akropolis Gate. It has been a dream of mine. We’ll pass through there,’ the old man said calmly, ‘and soon it will be over.’ His captain grunted in his sleep. Descharge was snoring a wheezy metallic snore. ‘Yes. We’ll pass through there. Then we’ll rest. At last, we’ll rest. I’m sorry.’
There was no one awake to hear him. The universe was silent. Another explosion penetrated the hull, and Fabrigas heard a loud pop as the ship, sensing its imminent destruction, ejected its flight box into space. Then the old man heard another sound: a faint whirring like a machine waking up from its sleep. He checked his instruments. Nothing should be waking from its sleep. That should be the opposite of what was happening. Then there was the sound of soft bells, the gentle slip of gears, ten bells followed by ten soft clicks, and then a smell of lemons, and a mellifluous humming as all around them the ruins of the ancient city began to fade like an old photograph.
This shouldn’t be happening. This shouldn’t be happening.
‘What is this?’ the old man whispered to the crippled ship.
Then, as the brave Necronaut passed through the magnificent gates of Akropolis, the vast stone ring vanished too, like a dream, and they seemed to pass into a fog.
For the first time since he could remember, something was happening for which the old man had no explanation.
*
The pilots of the attack ships behind them were surprised to see their rabbit vanish, their kill shots pass through its dimming shadow and into space.
‘They are gone, sir,’ said McMasters.
‘Destroyed? Good. The wolf pack did its work. As I knew it would.’
‘Not destroyed, sir … Gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Vanished.’
‘It is so.’
…
‘… Sir? Your order?’
‘My order?’
‘Yes, sir. What is the next course of action?’
‘The next course of action.’
‘Yes.’
‘Go to my quarters and find my diary. Send a message to every friend and family member in it and tell them to flee for their lives. Then bring me my cyanide tablets and my telegraphic forms.’
Oh, let the seas go floatin’ by
(Let the water take me down!)
Look at how the days go by
(A-flowing merrily underground!)
Into the dreamy blue again
(Lord! And all me whisky’s gone!)
Once a-pon a lonely life
(A-flowing underground oi!)
‘Once a-pon a Lifetime’ – traditional shanty
A man called Provius walked through the slums of Carnassus, past the great oily sign, past the drowned men, until he came to the grand gated district. He was an old man whose movements were like those of a young boy. His eyes did not come to judge the forgotten sailors, the desperate crooks; even the rotting corpses and the excrement in heaps seemed to delight this man. He seemed to delight in everything he saw.
He went up into the gated district with its fancy abandoned mansions and mansionettes until he found the one he was looking for. He went up the front steps and found the door with the mark upon it. It stood ajar. He passed through the dark abandoned rooms, their rich furnishings thick with sweaty dust. He went up the stairs to the first level, stepping carefully through the intricate wire-traps left for the unwary. At the bottom of the stairs to the attic were heaps of oily rags, stacks of empty postal boxes.
He went up into the attic and found the householder hard at work at a desk made from an old door and wooden crates.
‘Hello there,’ he said.
‘I told you I did not want to join your Academy,’ replied the boy without looking up.
Provius smiled. ‘You did. And yet you carelessly left the door open for me. Is this where you have been living all this time?’
‘Yes, this is my library. It has everything I need. If I want anything else, I go out.’
Provius observed the room with its table, its single lamp, its rough bed, its piles of books, its boarded-up windows, its one lonely boy.
‘It is a fine enough study. But we have even nicer studies at the Academy. Do you not ever want to leave this place, to see other places?’ asked Provius gently.
‘I do. As I explained, some day I will have saved enough money to hire a ship, then I will discover the moon where my father has fled with my nanny. For now, this room is my ship.’
‘I see. It is a good ship. But don’t you think a great mind should have things to help him become even greater? A proper library? A real desk? Other minds to talk about his discoveries with? Things that delight him, even?’
‘In your books you say that a friar should have the most simple life possible. He should give all of himself to the pursuit of knowledge. I have everything I need to live here. This door does fine as a desk. And I need only one book. Here.’
There was a single book on the desk. It was astonishingly old, and it had a five-pointed star on the cover. Provius picked it up and examined it gravely. ‘Where did you get this, boy?’
‘I found it buried in our yard. Dark hands left it for me to find. There was a letter with it.’
Provius set the book of hexagrams aside. ‘My dear, dear boy. I can tell that you are determined to dedicate your outstanding mind to one problem: how to end your suffering. It is a noble pursuit. Perhaps the ultimate one. But to think is not just to engage a subject with your brain: it is a devotional act, a concentration of the whole of your being in a determination to remain with something until it is understood. It is grounded in the heart as much as
the brain, and so it is much closer to the concept of love than thought. A person who sees the universe and accepts everything they see will find the cloud of unknowing lifting; the person who shuts the light of the universe out – no matter how harsh that light has become – will experience only darkness.’
The boy at last looked up from his studies.
‘If you come with me to the Academy at Mnemonys you will be fed, clothed and loved. And you will be allowed to concentrate your attention on whatever problems delight you: whether it is charting the way to a lost moon, or …’ he touched a finger to the only book on the table, ‘the more esoteric branches of science. We care for our minds. We do not put shackles on them. But if you go out into the universe and say the kinds of things found in books like this, you will be thrown in prison. Or worse. Or much worse. At Mnemonys we can protect you.’
Young Fabrigas considered his visitor’s words. He seemed to gaze out of the attic window – which was robustly boarded over.
‘Can I bring my servant with me?’ said the boy.
‘You have a servant?’ said Provius, surprised.
‘Yes. His name is Carrofax. He lives in that cupboard over there.’
*
The Academy near Mnemonys was the largest known. Oh, the wonders of this place. Its library alone was so vast that the sections had to be reached by horizontal elevators. Some called it ‘The Brain of Humanity’. It took days to reach the reference stacks. Sleeper cars were used, each with a bed, a small desk and a servant. There were grand lecture halls where the monks would give talks on every imaginable subject: the properties of light around young lovers; the structure of the universe revealed in the shape of a drop of moisture on a feather from the wing of a duck.
On the way to the Academy young Fabrigas again changed his mind and tried to escape. Master Provius patiently retrieved him.
Once at the Academy the boy was as happy as he’d ever been. He had to shave his head and work devoutly to serve the friars. He had to clean the elder monks’ robes, to make them meals. He became famous for his soup, and many a monk, working late into the night on a difficult problem, would call for a bowl of it, and upon supping it would find the gloom of frustration vanishing. Fabrigas got used to staggering, blurry-eyed, to the kitchen.
Before he knew it he was an assistant researcher, then a junior friar. He even found that he had set aside his main subject of research: to find the moon where his father had fled with his nanny.
It was funny to think about it all. He would lie awake at night and ponder the unfathomable constellation of choices that had brought him to be in this universe. And so one day he announced, to universal astonishment, ‘I am leaving to become an explorer!’
And he did.
Before he knew it he was floating through space, through the broken remains of a computer the size of a galaxy. Before he knew it, everything he knew had vanished.
BOOK TWO
If life sends you demons, make demonade.
Anonymous
SPIN
It is impossible to calculate the destructiveness of tiny changes within a system.
Imagine a city, a single city within a district within a postal code within a hemisphere within a cluster within an orient within an empire. It is a city made from iron, brass, silver or gold. It is small enough to hold a few million people, or large enough to enclose a sun. But whatever its greatness, this city you live in is as fragile as a crystal cup.
There is a particularly catastrophic phenomenon in the empires of this universe; it is known simply as ‘spin’. The elemental spheres that house the human species are uncountable. Unlike the natural larger bodies – planets, moons and stars – most of these do not spin, and those that do are ‘timed’ to rotate at a very precise speed in order to generate just the amount of gravity needed to keep people in their beds at night. Most spheres rely on super-heavy objects at their centre. Some of the larger spheres harness the pull of the sun at their core, others use powerful magnets to generate attraction. In larger spheres this process becomes extremely complicated. Orbs of this size might contain a system of smaller cities in orbit around their inner suns, each generating gravity in a different way. An enormous amount of energy is expended controlling the movement of the spheres in relation to each other. But somehow a balance is achieved, and all the cities in the universe are tuned like an orchestra to play together, each one’s force balanced out by the next. The problem arises when something happens to disturb this balance.
It could be a motor or a magnet breaking down, or a subtle change in the gravitational force of a core sun. Or it could be something even more insignificant: a super-heavy freighter docking after supplying the registrar with a weight manifest in which a decimal point is incorrectly placed one step to the left. Yes, even a dot of ink can bring destruction. It could be a meteor glancing off a sphere, imparting spin upon the body. When this happens the effect is quietly catastrophic. The affected body begins to stray out of position, to draw other bodies slowly towards it. The music of the spheres then becomes a dance which, if left unchecked, will end in unfathomable destruction, the death of trillions. The engineers within an affected local group have days, or even hours, to retune their spheres and avert disaster. There are thousands of near misses each astronomical year, and all but a few are corrected without the people sleeping in their beds becoming even faintly aware of how close they’ve come to death.
It isn’t always a ballistic conclusion. Sometimes death comes softly. In one case an elite ‘gated’ sphere of some 785,000,000 souls was hit by a relatively small change in the radioactive field of a nearby sun. All the residents in the sphere were killed. The automated cleaning systems dutifully tidied up the corpses, from every home, every arcade, every dappled park bench, so that when the emergency teams arrived they found an immaculate paradise waiting to be resettled. Of course, the residual radiation meant the sphere could never be resettled. Crews prepared the sphere for demolition. The household systems, sensing their imminent destruction, turned on the crews and killed them. The city of Monoculus 9Q8 was left as a bustling ghost city: rich with the busy noises of the helpful domestic machines. One day I should write a short story about it. It would be called ‘Sometimes Death Comes Softly’.
This is the threat of small changes.
*
The Man in the Shadows was not the richest man in the universe, but through a series of small changes and visionary touches he had become arguably the most powerful. He was aboard his magnificent gold-plated yacht, the Titanrod, when he received two high-priority messages. The first, he could tell, was the answer to his question from his new secret oracle. It was sealed inside a cylinder which could only be opened by someone whose pheromone signature betrayed an awareness of the magnitude of the contents. The other message was unmarked. He slipped both into his pocket until he had a chance to read them. He was returning from his hotel – Hotel Grand Skies: the Empyrean – with a guest. His was a modest hotel, in the scheme of things, certainly not in the league of the new mega-hotels like the Empire Majestic. The Majestic had been built with 1.8 million rooms, its own airport, and a full-scale recreation of an oldeworlde-style ocean around which wealthy guests could bask and tan themselves in the light of a small-scale, artificial sun. The Empyrean was a smaller, simpler hotel in the old style. It held only 125,000 guests, but those guests were generally the most important and wealthy citizens of the universe. He got almost as much joy from his hotel as he did from his grandfather’s old yacht. They were both examples, he thought, of the one commodity that the universe had burned its way through before any other: style.
He was sailing home through a spectacular local group called Armalite IX. Taking frequent walks through his great-grandfather’s Theatre of the Gods. This ship had been his ancestor’s prized possession, and the Man in the Shadows had run through its ornate corridors as a boy – which was remarkably recently – past the gold statues of heroic figures holding torches aloft, or stooped in t
he act of trying to hold a world upon their shoulders, or simply touching their chin – as if caught in a moment of deep reflection upon the mysteries of the cosmos. These were heroes doing hero things: thinking ahead, lighting the way, groaning beneath the sphere of life. But today his appreciation of the giants was being spoiled by the presence of his guest, who, despite the fact that he was himself a kind of god, seemed unable to make his body do what he wanted.
‘You must forgive me. I have not long been made of your stuff. It takes some getting used to.’ The figure wobbled and jolted his way to the base of a statue where he leaned and puffed. He also seemed unable to properly control the volume and pitch of his speech, and he shouted at the Man in the Shadows in a high, thin voice: ‘Where I am from everything is impermanent, without form. Things are less … certain.’
‘I understand,’ said the Man in the Shadows. ‘When we are young we suffer similar deficiencies. We outgrow them in time. Now if you will please speak in a lower voice. I’d hate for anyone to overhear our business.’
‘Of course, my boy.’ The figure, dressed incongruously as a monk, lowered his voice to a hoarse shout. ‘Though our master has described your activities, I am still slightly confused about what business you are in.’ The monk stopped and placed his hand on the foot of a statue, patted it and wheezed, ‘So large, so solid. I could never have imagined that things here would seem so … real.’
The statue he wheezed upon was a muscular figure holding a baby on one palm, and he looked for all the universe as if he was about to take a bite out of the chubby peach.
‘Yes,’ said the Man in the Shadows. ‘Each of these statues weighs ninety tons. They are made from iron plated with gold. To build them from solid gold would have made them far too heavy for the ship … I am in the power business.’