Empty Between the Stars (The Songs of Old Sol Book 1)

by Stephen Hunt

  I nodded eagerly. I’d have purchased their entire dirty world-sized moon if it would have helped matters. If it was for sale. But it wouldn’t and it wasn’t. Never the easy path for William Roxley. I am sure that is a universal constant baked into the physics of existence from the first quantum firing. If there is an easy path, let it be denied to Sweet William. I might have considered it character building if I hadn’t lived for so long. Such nuisances are only character building for the first couple of centuries. After that, botherations are well-and-truly character-vexing.

  ‘The spore-spice auctions begin in a couple of weeks,’ said the soldier. ‘Keep out of trouble until then.’

  ‘Odd’s fish, m’dears, of course,’ I lied, keeping a straight face as I fibbed. How could these doltish armoured spear carriers actually believe me? Trouble was my business. My song. My raison d’être. The fingers that rubbed my rhubarb. I repacked my baggage, dropped it to the ground, and watched it regrow three legs on either side, all the better to scuttle after me. I was yet to catch my first proper glimpse of the moon’s surface. The Pleiad’s Daughter had settled on a repulser beam tower where I exited directly into the port’s visitor decontamination system. On I went. The port’s corridors and rooms were also windowless and brightly lit. They could have belonged to pettifogging bureaucracies in any number of locations – hospitals, police stations, tax offices. Like their expensive scanning equipment, the whole affair had been constructed by an offworld infrastructure outfit specializing in airlifting pre-built structures into alien locales. I took a single-direction airlock to exit the security zone and the true nature of the moon began to reveal itself. The port’s interior a vast entrance hall of polished wood – one of many local fungal timbers. Port workers idled among groups of merchants, visitors coming and going. Panhandlers hollered slogans for services and wares. I approached a deck polisher in overalls on his knees, busy rubbing wax into the floor, his bucket nearby. He looked an ancient seventy. In this place that was probably his actual age.

  ‘Local guides?’ I asked, hopefully.

  He glanced up wearily from his labours. Almost reluctantly, as though the floor was the most important thing in his life. ‘Expensive or cheap?’

  ‘Cheap, most surely.’

  ‘In the far corner, moneyass.’ Moneyass was local slang for offworlder. I smiled to myself. I didn’t feel much like a walking wallet, but that was what I was to almost everyone here. Hexator wasn’t so much Third World as Twelfth World. The cleaner pointed toward an assemblage of young urchins wearing cloth trousers and laced shirts in the local style. From the way they gathered it was obvious they weren’t a gang – rather, a group of competing free agents. I passed Master Polisher a small coin by way of thanks which he accepted gratefully. It was the currency of the foldship above; its rarity here making it far more valuable than the local currency I carried.

  The urchins’ eyes flicked nervously towards patrolling soldiers from the city watch. No advanced hex-amour on these brutes. Just swagger, black-and-crimson leather uniforms and a holstered sawn-off shotgun belted to the right leg. Excellent. So, the urchins’ presence was barely tolerated inside the port. Unlikely to have spies set to watch for the likes of me. Unlikely – but not, of course, impossible. Secret police and their informers were like crotch-itch; the scuzzers infiltrated the most unexpected places. The ragamuffins stood straighter as I approached, attempting to project a health and vigour I doubt any of them felt. My eyes darted across the group. I let my m-brain process their faces and builds, feeding me suggestions as a barely conscious hunch. The canny little bio-computer augment, curled tight inside my skull like a watchful fox, rarely let me down.

  ‘You,’ I said, pointing to a thin gawky stick of a boy at the rear. He appeared as surprised at being selected as his competitors. Delta dog in a beta pack. A few tuts and clenched jaw-lines among his chalk-skinned peers told me I had chosen exactly as intended. The lad didn’t dare push through the others, but sidled around the back to join me by my side. He attempted to reach down to take my case. I smiled as I stopped him.

  ‘Don’t bother. It has six perfectly good legs and needs its exercise.’

  ‘Is it alive or a machine, sir?’ asked the boy, nervously.

  ‘I don’t doubt it’s a little bit of both. What’s your name, laddie?’

  ‘Simenon, sir.’

  ‘I am William Roxley, Simenon. You have no family name, no house name?’

  ‘An orphan,’ mumbled the boy. ‘Simenon Wrongman.’

  Old ways, here. A bastard. A thing of shame. A Wrongman. Bottom rung of society, with all the other steps pulled far out of his reach. Defined by birth, fixed from birth. Not everywhere was like Hexator, but far too many places were. Especially this far out from the Humanitum Core. “The Empty”, sneered those born to civilization. But this border area wasn’t really empty. If it had been, my life would be a lot less troubled. “The Contested” was a better description of this stretch of the galaxy. I glanced at my newly hired guide with his distinctive shambling gait. Simenon’s face appeared pallid and gaunt, even for a native of Hexator. A sharp nose and curly black hair like someone had given a ball of string electro-shock therapy, then glued it down at random across the lad’s scalp.

  A strange bird. But then I could hardly talk. I appeared middle-aged even though I wasn’t. Handsome enough – or vain enough to think myself still so. Take your pick. Sweet William’s dark hair might be fading to silver, but his green eyes still twinkled with mischief. Six feet tall and never humbled. And you can take that to the bank.

  We left the port complex through a high arched doorway and I caught my first sight of the real Hexator outside. The world’s capital, Frente. Tidally locked to its monstrous gas giant, Li, this world-moon was a planetlet of two halves. Its habitable hemisphere lay in perpetual twilight, facing away from the storms and radiation spikes of the gas giant. The local star was way too distant for any significant night or day cycle here. Daylight on Hexator was murk. Nighttime was Stygian murk. By contrast, the half of the moon permanently facing Li existed as a burning hell-scape, seared so fiercely even the shadows had been chased away. Gravity compression of the moon’s core kept the dark side of the moon warm enough to support life. It was a tribute to humanity’s fecundity and love of making feet for children’s stockings, shaking the sheets, biting the pillow and generally playing nug-a-nug that Hexator had seemed like a good bet to some settlers in the dim and distant past. Mankind had screwed its merry way across the galaxy and we’d seen no good reason to stop when we’d arrived here ten-thousand-years earlier. A world of always-night. No wonder Simenon and his cohorts were albinos.

  Fungi were the dominant vegetation form on Hexator. Mushrooms and toadstool analogues in seemingly infinite varieties. The smallest as tiny as thumbnails, the largest as high as twenty-storey buildings. In the early days, the newly established Hexatorians – the ever-interloping us – had tried clearing the local biome to make way for a more comfortable Earth-standard ecosystem. Right up until humanity’s colonists realized that the fungi absorbed the worst excesses of Li’s energy storms. And you really didn’t want to try to survive on Hexator without a forest of perfectly adapted lightning conductors nestled around you. I believe that opening period of Hexatorian history was still referred to as the Great Burning. A pertinent warning to any axe-wielding arse-hat tempted to lay around with gay abandon.

  With the port complex sitting behind me, my guide and I overlooked a stone-paved plaza designed to overwhelm visiting villagers. Less grand to me, given the desperate clots of beggars lacking limbs, sight, and luck, rattling wooden cups for alms towards every visitor. Opposite the plaza, streets were laid out narrow and low for protection from the heavens. Given Mother Li’s rages, everything on Hexator was built low. No building more than three storeys high – most just a couple of floors – and all nestled among towering mushrooms. Human structures were largely constructed from wood-analogue harvested from hardier fungi. Many of the fu
ngi-forms radiated a gentle bio-luminance. The largest mushroom I had encountered to date was the Chanterelle-variety sitting on a plate. The effect here was as though someone had constructed a toy Tudor town among a giant mushroom wonderland. Perhaps as a reaction to living in permanent darkness, the locals lit their city like old Hong Kong. Lampposts around the plaza broke the perpetual night, strings of lanterns dangling from shopfronts and residences. Chinese lantern-style business signage. The world-moon was comfortably warm, an unwavering seventeen degrees. Clothes were mainly for social differentiation markers, here. I could have strolled around naked if it wasn’t for the constant winds whipping around Hexator. Far too strong to endure comfortably. Gusts and darkness, those were the two abiding memories visitors left Hexator with. If they made it out alive.

  Wagons and carriages rattled across the plaza, pulled by Terran horses. I felt a twinge of pity for the creatures. Their ancestors hadn’t volunteered to be dragged to distant realms inside a clone bank. Nearby, a woman cried her wares. She pushed a mobile book cart, dogeared paper tomes pressed tight on its shelves. Cheaper to rent than to buy, apparently. A flock from a local winged species sat on the cap of a nearby mushroom. Creatures that looked eighty-percent insect and twenty-percent lizard, singing not unpleasantly with gossamer wings clutched around them like a vampire’s cape.

  Simenon fixed me with a neutral gaze. ‘What sort of lodgings do you require, Master Roxley?’

  ‘Not so cheap I will get fleas or mugged, but not much more expensive than that.’

  ‘Mugged…?’

  ‘Set upon by thieves, footpads and highwaymen, Simenon.’

  The local idiomatic still tasted like magnesium on my tongue. I had downloaded the Hexatorian language the final night before departing the foldship. I briefly regretted I hadn’t allowed my m-brain to fully marinate in the language over a couple of months or more. But on reflection, it was probably better I spoke like a machine-taught rube. Native fluency with linguistic subtleties would have marked me out from travelers with honest business on the moon.

  ‘Ah, rolled,’ said Simeon. ‘Not much danger of that, sir. The city of Frente is heavily patrolled by the Watch as well as the Four’s soldiers during auction season.’

  ‘And which are the Four Families ruling Hexator presently?’

  ‘The Derechors, The Trabbs, the Seltins, and the Blez, sir.’

  He had correctly named the houses in order of precedence – by how much of the moon and its scant resources they controlled. Clever lad. And every scrap of knowledge he gained had been learned the hard way; the school of hard knocks. No m-brain downloads for this child. Not even a blackboard, wax tablet and old-fashioned stylus. Beyond apprenticeships little better than slavery, academic education in this realm was the preserve of the well-monied. Simenon spoke well, given his background – he had picked up on the vocabulary of those he toiled for. No gang argot or street speak. Fake it till you make it, I told myself.

  Simeon continued, ‘The Sparrow’s Rest is clean and reasonably priced, sir, although it does back onto a canal.’

  Which meant the tavern reeked; but you didn’t get to my age without learning how to hold your nose – both literally and figuratively. Fine, it would be largely free of foreign traders and offworld travelers, which was my real requirement.

  ‘And are there many sparrows on Hexator?’

  The lad pointed to the flock of bug-parrot-lizards humming away on the fungi cap.

  ‘Well, I can only trust my trading opportunities are prettier than your idea of sparrows.’

  The Sparrow’s Rest proved to be a coaching inn, nestled between towering clumps of cactus-shaped basidiomycota. The tavern stood two storeys-tall with a gray slated tile roof. An archway led onto its central courtyard and stables. Stacks of kindling sat piled in front of the building as smoke coiled from kitchen chimneys into a dark star-scattered sky. Upon entering, I discovered the building actually had four levels –two of them basements. In an inversion of the usual state of affairs, the most expensive rooms were rented lower down. I took a pair of connecting loft rooms at the back of the inn on the top floor. Hopefully, the Expected Ambush would transmit word of out-of-season storms with enough warning for me to scurry towards a rock-shielded burrow. I paid my landlady, one Mistress Miggs, with native coinage; my Hexatorian currency so ancient it still carried sigil codes for digital counterparts on a blockchain that no longer existed. Hexator had lost the last vestiges of its mass consumer culture by the seventh century of the land’s colonization. Now, my new landlady merely bit into the coin’s rare metal to prove its providence instead of scanning my payment to ensure it hadn’t been forged by my ship’s printer. I would have to load up on the local currency at some point. Each of the Four Families now issued its own script, as did a few of the larger local banking houses. Backed by spore-spice and bad intentions. My accommodation offered a view over a herb garden at the rear, and beyond that, a rock wall and the promised canal and its towpath. Nothing romantic about the canal. A functional conduit for the capital city’s effluent. As well as a means of transporting produce from outlying farms, quarries, and mines by horse-pulled barges and oar-wielding raftmen. One such raft drifted past as I watched, bargemen poling on three corners with a pile of cloth-wrapped bundles lumped across the barge.

  ‘Do you have any special requirements for your meals, Master Roxley?’ inquired Simenon as I inhaled warm air through the open window.

  I didn’t need my auditory filters to flag the rumbles in his belly. The boy’s pinched face spoke volumes for the irregularities of his feeding times.

  ‘I eat only raw carrots, laddie.’

  ‘Carrots?’

  I laughed at the barely disguised disappointment on his face. ‘Sorry, I enjoy teasing people far too much. One of my many foibles. You may select whatever is good, wholesome and on the menu here.’

  Simenon looked relieved.

  ‘C is for carrots, orange and tall, but on Hexator they grow not at all,’ I whistled while encouraging my case to climb on top of the room’s bed. Once settled, my palm print opened the bag and I rummaged around its contents to locate my flute. ‘Two matters to attend for me, Master Simenon. First, I need to make an offering to the gods. This is a flute … a prized musical instrument which has been in my family for generations. Take the flute down to the herb garden and plant it two hands below the soil, at least sixteen inches deep.’

  ‘This will please your gods?’

  ‘One in particular. Modd. He appreciates a good sacrifice, does Modd.’

  Simenon looked uncertain, but I doubt it was the strangest request a local guide had received from an offworlder.

  ‘And your second errand, sir?’

  ‘I need to secure the services of a robot for the duration of my stay here.’

  ‘A machine man, a ruster?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘There are not many machine men in Frente,’ said Simenon, as though there was another city on the moon where they were plentiful. Fat chance. ‘People are cheaper than rusters, here.’

  As trusty a sign as any of a failed state too long stewing in its own bath juices.

  ‘After we’ve eaten, then,’ I said.

  Locating a robot for hire was an errand poor young Simenon was guaranteed to fail at. Unless he returned with some purloined antiquated weather drone or half-senile floor polishing unit. The prospect of a satisfying meal cheered him up no end, though. He drifted downstairs to procure food against my room’s tab.

  Lunch, when it arrived, was a variety of small spherical vegetables, along with spiced shrimp-like insects whose chitin had been boiled to perfection, shells peeling away like wax paper. Simenon ate his bowl’s contents with far more relish than me. Not for the first time, I was grateful for my genetically modified gut flora. A traveller’s tummy. I could pretty much survive on dirt, bark, and discarded shoe leather and still digest a meal from it. Oh well, the tavern’s home cooking proved superior to old shoe leather by a lig
ht-year. There was also a bottle of wine – fermented from local toadstools – which tasted of notes of mouldy bread combined with an aroma of mushroom soup. That would take more getting used to. After Simenon had eaten, the boy left to try to locate my robot. I set aside my meal, half-consumed.

  At the window, I amused myself by watching the lad kneeling and muttering to himself in the herb garden as he dug and buried my flute. It spoke for the lad’s innate honesty that he hadn’t slipped out and tried to pawn my flute with the nearest fence. In a spiderweb across the window, I noted a tiny female spider leaping on its mate and filling it with toxin. She looked like a stowaway from a human world, rather than a local life-form. We had carried so much of our ancient home with us, for good or ill.

  After young Simenon disappeared from the garden I took out the small wooden prayer box that served as my shrine to Modd. I placed it carefully on the tavern’s cheap cot and unlocked its lid. A layer of sand filled the prayer box’s interior. Sanctified orange sands carefully scraped from outside a Martian temple. Kneeling before the box, I unclipped a miniature rake from the lid, not much larger than a toothpick and began to trace delicate swirls in the sand.

  ‘Modd,’ I called. ‘Modd the God. You sadist. You piece of inexcusable string sentience scraped together on the spare processing cycles on the polar underbelly of some planet-sized mainframe hidden in space so deep that all those you’ve pissed off can’t hunt you down and burn your world —’ well, people do say you should pray with passion ‘— you self-regarding arse-hole. Hear the prayer of this ant beneath your feet, this speck of dust allied with your cause, this mere node of your eternal brilliance. Wading here knee-deep in mushroom-flavoured crud for the Humanitum that birthed you, back when you were a shared cloud algorithm working out the fastest way to route autonomous traffic between major transportation hubs. Lend me a hand, pal. Give me a small sign of your blessing.’