by Jo Clayton
IV: Danny Blue
The pocket reality of the Chained God
The village at Haven Bay c. The city Dirge Arsuid Danny Blue After ten years, he emerges from the sleep pod and is propelled on his way to his meeting with the Talisman Klukesharna also: Lio Laux, owner of the ship Skia Hetaira
Braspa Pawbool, fifth-
rate sorceror in the employ of the Prenn
Ysran of Dirge Arsuid
Felsrawg Lawdrawn, thief and assassin Simms Nadaw, thief Trithil Esmoon, secret geniod, Phrasi courtesan
1
The Daniel Akamarino part of him woke first because Daniel had been through this before.
He opened his eyes and saw the translucent white petalform of the pod cap slanting up away from him. Sleep pod? He swallowed. The taste of burning insulation that filled his mouth warned him he’d been down for more than a few hours. He stared at the cracks clouding the cap and trembled with terror/rage. The starship was older than time and rotting to dust. He could have died in that pod. If the coldsleep system had broken in the smallest part, he would be dead now and rotting with the ship.
Dead and rotten. For a god’s whim, Chained God playing Spin the Boogie with Fate. Live? Die? Who cares.
Mutely cursing the god and h/its reckless interference in his life, hands shaking with anger and inanition, Daniel Akamarino stripped leech-feeders off the emaciated body he inhabited and tried to sit up.
*Your life? Our Het* The words exploded in a head already blind with pain. Ahzurdan was coming awake. Sharing the body with Daniel, he shared the terror, the rush of adrenalin, though he couldn’t know what caused it since he was entirely ignorant of starships and their mechanisms. *My life also. Daniel saw the words as black against red with liquid white halos flowing around the outside of, the letters. He cursed again, shoved angrily at the intruding Other. “Go away,” he shouted, asserting control of the voice they shared. “Leave me alone.”
Ahzurdan seemed to acquiesce, then slammed into Daniel with a sudden flare of power, trying to expel him from the body.
Their joint flesh humped, twitched, threatened to boil off the bone, their shared bones creaked and shuddered. Ahzurdan screamed, the SOUND tearing at their throat. Daniel howled and tried to shape the howl into words, to gasp at words and use them to kill the Other or, if killing were impossible, to force him from the body. This was a mistake. Words were Ahzurdan’s technology, he could unmake with them as well as make and he strove desperately to unmake Daniel Akamarino and control the body that was born from the forced melding of their flesh.
Danny Blue, their rueful and unappreciative sort-of-son, woke and hovered like a ghost above his battling half-sires.
Not so long ago in conscious time, impossible to know how long in world time, Daniel Akamarino was walking down a road in another reality, was a starman/trader looking for a bargain, was a man who had a deep contempt for self-styled magicians, considering them deluded idiots with a yen for power but too inept or lazy to acquire the real thing, or charlatans, milking the deluded idiots that swarmed about them. On that day when he was walking along that road, Daniel Akarnarino was past his first youth, with blue eyes bright in a face tanned dark, was bald except for a fringe of hair over his ears like a halfcrown of black thorns, was a tall man, lanky, loosely put together, but fast and hard when he had to be. Amiable, competent, unambitious, and generally somewhere else when you needed him.
Not so long ago in conscious time, in this reality where magicians are the technocrats, Ahzurdan was a sorceror of high rank with a dreamdust habit that was killing him. Back then he was a tall man with a handsome ruined face and eyes bluer than the sea on a sunny day, with fine black hair, a beard combed into corkscrew curls and a bold blade of a nose. Among ordinary folk for his vanity’s sake he spread a glamour about himself, wearing pride along with wool and leather, wearing power like a cloak, pride and power put on to cover the blind weak worm within. An ineffectual driven man, despite the power he commanded. Bitter, angry, dominated for too long by a neurotic mother, then a charismatic master.
Danny Blue’s half-sires, fighting insanely over a body neither had the strength to control.
He snorted with disgust when he discovered what was happening. If one part of him destroyed the other, it would be an act of suicide. Ahzurdan and Daniel Akaniarino were ghosts, incapable of independent existence; apparently neither of them could or would recognize this. Since he had no soft yearnings for easeful death, he gathered himself, slapped his warring parts into order and rolled his fragile body up until he was sitting with his legs hanging over the edge of the pod, his head cradled in dry bony hands.
He sat that way for several minutes, trying to dredge up sufficient strength to hunt out his quarters and see how much time had passed while he was stashed away in coldsleep. He scrubbed a hand across his mouth; his lips were cracked and dry. Painful. Whole body’s in bad shape, he thought. He shivered; the clammy chill of the pod chamber was seeping into him. He reached up, caught hold of the cap and levered his wasted body off the cot.
He swayed, pressed his free hand hard against his eyes as his head threatened to explode. He lowered his, hand and frowned at it. I look like the tag-end of a seven-year famine, he thought. He trembled again and his knees went soft on him. That miserable conglomeration of rot, I could have died in there. He clutched at the cap, steadied himself, then took a tentative step toward the open arch between the squat, cylindrical pod-chamber and whatever was outside it; he didn’t lift his feet but shuffled along like an aged, aged man, body bent and swaying. When he reached the arch, he closed his hand around a broken bit of the wall and stood panting and shaking as he looked about.
The chamber was only slightly larger than the one behind him. Halfway across it, shoved up against the right-hand wall, there were two wide flat couches raised waist-high off the floor and surrounded by skeletal instruments he managed to identify through a painful stretch of his imagination and Daniel’s memories. Sick bay, he thought. Thick scummy webs hung in veils from the vines that crossed and recrossed the ceiling and grew out of shattered screens ranked along the walls. Unseen vermin scuttled about. He heard the click-clack of their feet, the tentative whisper of the limp pallid leaves as they brushed past. He scowled at the mess of weed and web. This decay reminded him how lucky he was to be alive. He worked his mouth, spat on the first two fingers of his left hand, reached across his body and rubbed his fingers on the wall beside him, an offering to Tungjii Luck. He did this automatically, a habit pattern from Ahzurdan’s past life, as he struggled to think around pain that struck in from his eyes whenever he moved his head and between times was a dull, grinding ache.
Sick bay. Small. Must be officers only. Hmm. Colony ship, converted battleship, given what that misbegotten patchwork told me. That means I’m not too far off from my quarters. Shee-it, how long was I out of it? God, I wish I knew what happened while I was down. My legs feel like spaghetti, I’ll be crawling before I get there. Come on, Danny, anyplace is better than this, it’s enough to make a goat sick. Start shuffling, man. He set his teeth and began creeping toward the exit. It was half open and he could see a pale light beyond. A corridor, probably. And it was lit. A good sign. Could be it was still passable. There was air wherever you went in this ancient ship, he knew that now; metal and forcefields could exist in vacuum, but too much of the Chained God’s life or essence or whatever had spilled out of the natal computer into that cobbled together mess, bits of brain matter, bone and sinew, vegetable growths and swarms of necessary symbiotes for h/it to shut off the flow of air.
He started across the chamber, clawing awkwardly at the ancient webs, his skin crawling as he visualized spiders dropping into his eyes. The dust he knocked off the webs and the leaves drifted slow/y slowly onto him with the silky ponderance of the half-g gravity decreed by the Chained God throughout this pocket reality; he breathed shallowly, his lips pressed together, but that exuviae, that ancient scurf filled his mouth with the taste of death. He caught hold o
f the rail at the foot of the first cot and stood bent over it, feeling it give slowly slowly under the pressure of his diminished weight. The dust fell harder, the leaves above him shook with the agitated trotting of the creatures that lived up there. He moved on.
For the next half hour he moved along corridors as overgrown and dusty as the sickbay. The transition into a clean well-lighted section was abrupt, as if he passed through a membrane that blocked contamination from the unregulated life outside. He leaned against a sterile white wall, closed his eyes, sick with weariness, knowing he was near the living quarters which the Chained God had cleaned up for outsiders, the apartments he’d occupied for a month and a half before the god caught him plotting and dumped him into coldsleep. Because he was so near, the will that kept his body moving drained out of him… so near and so far. He sank onto his knees, hugged his arms across his chest and tried to dredge a last effort out of a mind and body on the verge of collapse. Just a few turns more, only a few turns more and he could rest and eat. The thought of food nauseated him, but he had to replace the flesh melted off him while he vegetated in the pod. He had to begin rebuilding wasted muscle. He rocked onto hands and knees and crawled, head hanging, eyes blind with sweat and the hair that must have kept growing while he slept; it fell in a coarse gray-streaked black curtain long enough to sweep the rubbery floorcovering. He hadn’t thought about hair before, it’d just been there on his head. He crouched where he was and scowled at the hair falling past his eyes. The Daniel memories told him that in a properly working coldsleep pod even hair growth stopped, but there was enough play in the stasis field to let small changes occur if the adjustment wasn’t precisely tailored to the metabolism of the sleeper; the wasting of his body was one of those changes, a serious one if he’d stayed much longer in the pod, the hair growth was another. And it was a crude way to measure time. He started crawling again, moving blindly along the corridor as he considered available data. The hair he’d inherited from Ahzurdan was eight to ten cm long when the god put him down. Now it was… he stopped crawling, pushed up into a squat and jerked a hair from the back of his head. It was close to thirty cm now which meant… two cm a year was a good average, take off ten already there, that left twenty which meant he was in that pod for roughly ten years. He threw the hair away and went back to crawling. Ten years?
He snarled at the friable mat that crumbled each time he set a hand down. Ten years cold storage. I’m supposed to be a good boy now, eh? Or you put me down again and maybe this time I’m snuffed? No joy, stewmeat. His mind blanked as rage took hold of him; his arms quivered and he collapsed to the floor, his body shaking with dry sobs.
His half-sires whispered sarcasms into his ears, mocking his suffering as extravagance and nonsense, a whimpering of a hypochondriacal organism, puppy looking to be petted. He slapped his hands against the mat, lifted himself on trembling arms and crawled on, fuming; his anger at the Chained God for risking him so casually was shunted aside by this annoying persistence of his sires; he was beginning to wonder if Daniel and Ahzurdan would ever fully merge with him and leave him without those irritating chains that kept jerking him back into his double past. Hair swaying in front of his nose, limbs trembling, he inched along the corridor, staying close to the left-hand wall.
A door sighed open. He stopped, blinked, then fumbled around and passed through the doorway into the chamber beyond where he collapsed in the middle of a painfully clean, faded blue carpet. He lay there and thought about pulling himself up and putting himself properly to bed, but the will to move died with his consciousness and he sank into a sleep that was close to coma.
2
For the next two weeks Danny Blue ate, slept, quelled his sires when they threatened to come apart, built back his weight and strength. And he grew more puzzled as each day passed.
He remembered the Chained God being powerfully present everywhere, sending a fantastical web of sound throughout the starship cascades of beeps, oscillating hums, bings, bongs, twangs, murmurs, sibilant sussurations, squeals and twitters, subsonic groans that raised the hair on his arms and grumbled in his belly-the god communing with Wits various pans. That continuous, pervasive noise was barriered from the living quarters, but back then, when he was living there alone, the unheard vibrations filled the rooms despite the filters, buzzing in his bone. The vibrations were gone, replaced by a silence as intangible and impenetrable as the god’s alleged mind. Silence filled the quarters, except for the sough of air through the ducts, the minor ticking of the support systems, and the noises Danny himself made. The god had withdrawn from his realm.
At first Danny was too intent on his own needs to notice that absence, except for a vague unease that wasn’t intrusive enough to break his concentration on himself. When he was no longer an animated skeleton, though, he heard the silence and wondered. And started worrying. The Chained God in h/its ordinary aspect was spooky enough. This was worse.
He worked out in the gym, his mind seething-what’s happening? what’s that obscenity getting up to? He fiddled with recalcitrant controls on the food machines-god, I’ve got to get out of here, this ship is collapsing under its own weight, it’s a wonder I lived through ten years of coldsleep, what do I do when the food and water quit? when the air goes? What is that abomination planning for me now? It has to be something or h/it wouldn’t ‘ye waked me. What? what? what? He coaxed the autotailor into fabricating new underwear and some multi-zippered shipsuits for him-how do I bust loose? is there anywhere in that backroad reality h/it can’t reach? Wit’s got h/its hooks set deep in me.
By the end of a month-standard, Danny Blue’s body was repaired sufficiently to let him settle into a workout routine; he’d trimmed his hair, leaving it long enough to brush’ his shoulders (the mane he’d inherited from Ahzurdan was one of his not-so-secret vanities); he’d found his Heverdee vest and his sandals, their leather dry and cracking but intro because the god had put them away where the vermin couldn’t get to them; he oiled the sandals and rubbed them until they were reasonably supple, then began a much more careful refurbishing of the vest.
3
He stood in the middle of a room like the inside of an egg, walls painted eggshell white, a fragile ivory carpet on the floor; there were a number of lumps about, chairs and couches folded in on themselves, put away for the moment, there were ovals of milky white glass at intervals around the walls, long axes parallel to the floor. The room was filled with soft sourceless light, as if someone had bottled sunlight and decanted it there.
“Hey,” he bellowed. “Kephalos! God! Ratmeat! Talk to me. What the hell’s going on?”
Silence.
“What do you want? I can’t read your alleged mind, Garbage Heap.”
Silence.
“Look, Rotbelly, I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life hanging round this dump.”
Silence.
Danny Blue wiped his hand across his mouth. He waited one minute, two, five…
Silence hung thick and sour about him. He brought his hands a slight distance from his body, fingers curled, palms up. He frowned at the palms as if he were trying to read the god’s answer in the lines. He dropped his hands and walked from the room.
4
The Bridge.
The visible portion of the Chained God was a queasy amalgam of metal, glass, vegetable and animal matter, shimmering shifting energy webs, the plasma of the magic that was the source of the lifestrength of the god. Instrumentation stacked blind, face on blind dead face, dials, sensor plates, keyboards, station on station grouped in a squared-off horseshoe about the massive Captain’s Chair. Dusty sweep of milkglass forescreen, fifty meters by thirty like a blind white eye dominating the chamber.
, Danny Blue stepped warily through the half-open valve and stopped just inside. Powerdown, he thought. The energy webs were ghostwriting across the heavy decaying metal and plastic of the stations, the readouts were dead, most lights were shut off. Even so he could see sketchy attempts the god had made
to refurbish Wits mahiplace, attempts that some time ago had trickled into nothing. There were carpets spread across the crumbled remnants of the floormat; even in the gloom he could see the rich colors and intricate designs, he could also see the film of dust and grit laid over the pile. There were plants in ceramic tubs, dead, all of them. Rustling at long intervals when the airflow stirred their dry leaves.
Beside the Chair the floor was bared to metal, deckmetal plated with silver in a paper-thin disc twenty meters wide, polished until it gleamed like ice in the half-light. A design was scribed on the disc, fine black lines set into the silver, a circle within a six-pointed star which itself lay within a second circle; lines inside the star crossed from point to point and intersected at the center of the design. Hexa, get away from it The thought came from Ahzurdan; he didn’t want anything to do with that figure. BinYAHtii lay in a sprawl of heavy gold chain where the lines crossed. Ignoring his half-sire’s urgings, Danny stood scowling at the talisman. Why? he thought. Though his memory was uncomfortably vague, it seemed to him that the chain and its pendant lay much as they had when he dropped the thing ten years ago. But that couldn’t be true, he’d been back to the Bridge several times since and BinYAHtii was nowhere in sight. Why was it here now, why arranged like that? why? He took a step toward the silver. The Ahzurdan phasma mindshouted a warning: AVOID AVOID.
“All right,” Danny Blue said aloud. “Hey! God! What’s going on?”
Silence.
Hands clasped behind him, arms tucked cautiously against his sides, he moved along the instrument array, examining everything minutely, touching nothing.
Dark. Blank. Dead.
Here and there a few lights wavered, monitors hooked into energy flow and life-support. The god had powered down so far h/it was in a kind of coma.
Fear stirred in Danny Blue, colder than a wind off Isspyrivo’s glaciers. The god had waited too long, whatever h/its plan was. H/it underestimated the ravages of age on h/its material fabric. Even hullsteel was mortal, given sufficient time and stress. The Chained God was dying, Wits slow time-death accelerating toward total dissolution even as Danny watched.