The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  Power stank of excrement and iron. A sweet razor tang pervaded everything, clinging greasily to the Perennials’ fine clothing and wafting about the riveted floors beyond the Long-Life’s staterooms. Ghaldezuel found he could smell it even as he passed the rusted barbican, mingling with the heady Prism foetor of the place.

  The Long-Life had at last fallen ill; some stray pathogen perhaps finding its way through the poorly sterilized locks preceding his cells. Ghaldezuel wasn’t surprised. This was a Prism place, home to scampering Ringums and Hoopies and who knew what else. Parts of the interior were overgrown where seeds had drifted in, rotted or flooded or rusted away and uninhabitable, sealed with rubber or patched over with scrap. No, he wasn’t surprised the beast had fallen ill.

  For three days, the Long-Life had lain retching blood, clawing at those who dared venture close. He wondered what would happen to that potent soul were it to be released again out here, at these speeds; whether it would simply streak away, caught in the Grand-Tile’s great wake, to disappear into the Void. He suspected not even the Long-Life himself could say for sure, and reflected suddenly at the foolishness of the being’s plan.

  As he stepped through the locks, Ghaldezuel caught a whiff of the heady miasma of vanilla pods atop the stench. The perfume only magnified the stink of sickness, coarsening and thickening it, and inside the great insulated cooling chamber where the Long-Life had made his home there was nowhere for it to drain. Ghaldezuel donned his helmet, nodding to a shambolic crowd of Lacaille guards sitting sleepily at the entrance, and entered.

  Thumbing the microphone on his chlorinated Voidsuit, he knelt in the shiny conical chamber, a rolling mist of antivirals passing his faceplate. A deep hum of static reached his ears, the silence of the place producing in his helmet noise where there was no noise.

  “Yes,” said the small, muffled voice. At the word two Perennials— De Rivarol and Hui Neng, he remembered—climbed down, beckoning Ghaldezuel. He stood and approached, stepping over buckets brimming with faeces to arrive at the end of the enormous iron bed.

  Through a crumpled curtain of fluted, gauzy material, the Long-Life looked down on him, naked apart from an embroidered hood that concealed his head. Ghaldezuel, like a great many of the Perennials, he imagined, hadn’t seen the creature in this kind of light before. White fluorescents gave the thing a pinkish, greasy look, like cured meat. Purplish scars ran the length of its body, snarling here and there and running off in different directions. He watched as it was helped on with its clothing, a shift of plain white complementing the hood. Vomit had discoloured the material around the neck and chest, where a finger-sized nugget of gnarled gold lay on a chain. Some sort of keepsake, Ghald-ezuel thought, unable to see it better through the film of curtain.

  You wanted this, he thought, tapping his gloves softly together in the Prism custom to dispel the sickness. You wanted to live, at the expense of all else. Well, this is what it’s like.

  “Look at this, Star Knight,” the Long-Life breathed once he was suitably dressed. He indicated the Perennials beside the bed. On an ornate table they had set a spherical vase of the Caudipteryx’s blood, which one of them—De Rivarol, Ghaldezuel thought it was—now heated gently with his finger. As the mixture moved, the other Perennial leaned over it like a witch at a cauldron, dipping in reams of coloured paper and inspecting them as they came out.

  “They are testing it . . . to see what has been done to me,” the Long-Life said, his eyes never leaving Ghaldezuel’s face.

  “You suspect poison?” he asked, careful to keep his voice neutral, conversational. Heaven knew what breeds of paranoia the spirit within that body had cultivated over the eons.

  The thing’s eyes never wavered. “You would not, then.”

  Ghaldezuel nodded though his suit. “Me? I suppose I might.” But he didn’t. The Caudipteryx had stuffed itself with Old World delicacies before leaving on the Grand-Tile. This was no more the result of poisoning than his own poor health on the trip, likely caught from the chill of the ship. “But even if it were, you’re getting better; they cannot have done their job well.” While he spoke, the Long-Life’s eyes had fastened to the movement of his mouth, as if lip-reading.

  “You will be well again soon,” he continued, unlatching his gaze with effort and looking to De Rivarol. “Is that not the case, Perennial?” The Amaranthine had been forced to treat him as one of their own in the Long-Life’s presence, and he would take every advantage of it.

  The Amaranthine seemed hesitant for a moment, obviously not having anticipated being brought into the conversation. “As he says, Long-Life. You have purged, and now, as we speak, your system recovers.”

  Ghaldezuel looked back to the creature, finding those eyes still upon him. The orangey-crimson pupils inside the hood’s eyeholes had locked so still that they forced Ghaldezuel to hesitate, absurdly sure that the Long-Life must have died right then and there, slumped in his bed.

  Then they blinked, wrinkled lids fluttering closed over the red depths, and slowly, fumblingly, the beast removed its hood. Ghaldezuel was conscious of that faceless, unknown mind considering him unimpeded as he spoke, and found he didn’t want to see what was revealed, not in this light. The embroidered material slid away. The Long-Life drew his lips up at the corners in a grotesque, forced smile, a mask atop a mask, faint through the material of the curtain.

  “You remind me of someone I once knew, Knight of the Stars. Perhaps you and he are very distantly related.”

  “Oh yes?” he asked, moving to the edge of the bed, one knee popping silently inside the Voidsuit as he crouched to kneel. “A Hioman, you mean?”

  “Yes. Now long gone.” The Long-Life paused before waving his claws to indicate that Ghaldezuel should stand. “You know by now that Eoziel is here,” he said, the topic of the ancient person’s life brushed away.

  Ghaldezuel bowed slightly but stood, fully aware that the Ignioz had returned to its dock, the king aboard. It had been stationed within the Yustafan, still in orbit around Saturn-Regis—now on the front line against the Vulgar-controlled moons around Jupito—and had only just caught up in time as the Grand-Tile broke away from the Old Satrapy. The king of the Lacaille had not yet visited the Long-Life, as far as Ghal-dezuel knew.

  “There will be no compensation for your loss, you will understand,” the Long-Life said, glancing to the blood cauldron. “Gliese was always to be the property of the Lacaille state.”

  Ghaldezuel toyed with his gloved fingers, trying his best approximation of a thoughtful expression. In truth he just didn’t like looking at the haggard face behind the curtain. “That is for the best, perhaps, during war.”

  The Long-Life smiled that half-smile again, perhaps remembering how it might have looked on his old, once-kindly face. Now Ghaldezuel thought it grotesque. “You have been very helpful to me, and I always reward the helpful.” He heaved himself up in bed, parting the curtains. “Walk.”

  He supported the Caudipteryx’s upper arm, feeling the slime of the thing’s sweat through his glove. They hadn’t gone far from the bed when Ghaldezuel noticed the thin, golden-skinned Amaranthine, Hui Neng, keeping pace a few steps behind.

  “There’s no point in exercising this body,” the Long-Life said, stumbling a little and forcing Ghaldezuel to tense his grip, “but I find the motion comforting.”

  “Endorphins, Long-Life,” Hui Neng ventured, stepping forward.

  The Caudipteryx ignored the Amaranthine at first, though Ghaldezuel felt the pulse in the beast’s wiry arm flutter, noting how the Long-Life’s thoughts betrayed him now, in this body, as never before.

  “Yes, endorphins. The sun has only wandered halfway around the galaxy since I began my study of nature’s motions, Neng—I bow to your wisdom.”

  The Amaranthine retreated immediately, suddenly finding something important to do beside the bowl of blood. Ghaldezuel smirked. He looked down to find the Long-Life had begun rubbing an arm up and down against his own.

  “Ca
resses,” Aaron whispered. “I could never imagine them, before. But now I know they are the very best thing in this life.”

  Ghaldezuel kept his hand where it was and gently moved his fingers, the way you might stroke the pelt of a dangerous animal, noting the look of satisfaction on the Long-Life’s hideous face.

  “In a perfect world they would be all I’d need.” Aaron looked at him, ceasing his rubbing. “What a shame that can’t be so.”

  Ghaldezuel didn’t know what to say.

  Aaron shrugged off Ghaldezuel’s hand to pick up a thick fur cowl and shuffle it on. He grasped a cane that leaned by the wall, the tendons in his mottled pink wrist standing out with the effort, and proceeded to walk unaided. “You never really touch anything, anyway, you know. It is all repulsion. I’ve gained nothing more than a sheath of electrons.”

  “You’re not happy with your present state?” Ghaldezuel asked.

  “Of course not,” the Long-Life replied sharply. “I wear this out of necessity, while I wait for something finer.”

  “The Collection,” Ghaldezuel said.

  Aaron did not reply. He was looking up into the next conical unit’s spout, where condensation dribbled along the metal sides. Ghaldezuel thought he saw something that looked like fear in the Caudipteryx’s face as he turned back the way they’d come.

  “Hugo, the Perennial I treated as my son. He thought I should . . . stop.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Ghaldezuel wasn’t sure he was even involved in the conversation any more.

  The Long-Life placed a hand against the thrumming floor, sensing the rumble of the battleship all around them. “Do you think my enemies consider me feeble? Now that I am flesh and blood and forced to take ship in this tin place?”

  “Caution is a winning strategy,” Ghaldezuel said after a moment’s hesitation. “Much underrated by the stupid.”

  “My enemies are so cautious that I don’t yet know their numbers.” Aaron turned to him. “Or from where the first organised blow will come.” He muttered to himself, licking his lips. “Maneker. It will of course be Hugo Maneker. I should not have cared for him.”

  “What could they possibly do?” Ghaldezuel asked, feeling himself slipping into dangerous territory. He ought to have kept silent, nodding where appropriate like all the simpering Amaranthine. Now he understood why the Long-Life had taken him for this little stroll.

  “Oh, very little, very little now. But in all my life I have seen that it is the smallest oversights that lead to disaster. And in this brain I feel insubstantial, I feel slow. There might be a dozen things I’ve missed.”

  Ghaldezuel remained silent.

  “But you are a cautious person,” the Caudipteryx said, glancing at him with new interest. “I ought to have made use of you much earlier.”

  Ghaldezuel bowed his head a fraction, his hands behind his back this time.

  “Tell me,” the Long-Life began, injecting a little more confidence into his rasping voice, “tell me what you would do.” He held up a claw, circling back as he examined the riveted floor. “Imagine you are a young species, on the verge of sending your first crewed machine up into the Void.”

  He stopped to mop some drool, waggling his jaw. Ghaldezuel waited.

  “But when you get there, you find that your craft bumps against a wall, clear as crystal, a sphere of glass—” he twirled his claw “—that encircles the whole planet.”

  Ghaldezuel scowled, trying to see what Aaron was getting at.

  Now the claws formed a pincer, held at eye level. “Do you make a hole, just a little one? Knowing of course that in your curiosity you risk your entire world?” Aaron’s birdlike fingers danced. “Or do you return from whence you came, defeated but content in the knowledge that there was nothing more to be done? That the galaxy will be forever sealed away from you?”

  The Long-Life’s question hung in the air while Ghaldezuel decided if an answer would actually be necessary. “Well,” he said, seeing that was indeed required, “I suppose, were I in charge of a mission to this barrier, I would have to ask myself who, or what, had installed it, and why.”

  “And?” the Long-Life asked, the unpleasant smile returning.

  “I suppose I would come to the conclusion that it was there for my species’ own safety and leave it well alone.”

  Aaron slapped his claws together, startling the Amaranthine at the blood cauldron, and hobbled back towards his bed. “The same assumption was made by my makers, the Epir, delaying their entry into the Void by one and a half thousand years.”

  Ghaldezuel stared. “By your—? This happened to the Old World?”

  “Indeed. They dithered for so long that whole regimes rose and fell within the glass sphere. Then, after many centuries during which they had scraped a portion almost to nothing for the purposes of study, the time came to ask the question anew. Should they poke a hole through that thin shell of remaining glass, knowing not how terrible the storm might be on the other side, or if they could weather it?”

  Ghaldezuel had stopped, fascinated, almost forgetting whom he was speaking with. “And?”

  Aaron grinned as he stood beside his bed, clearly pleased to have a rapt audience. “The Epir, you see, were indecisive. To defer their answer, they constructed five architectural . . . wonders, the Machine Kings, and tasked them, instead, with deciding the world’s fate.”

  Ghaldezuel pointed stupidly. “You were—”

  Aaron spun his golden pendant between his fingers and Ghald-ezuel realised what it was. A miniature sculpture of the Soul Engine. “Yes.”

  The Amaranthine were watching them. From the looks on their faces, they’d never heard this story, either.

  “It fell to me to make that hole, and make it I did. The glass shattered into particles finer than air, sweeping aurora across the skies. My builders were free.”

  “But . . . who made it? The glass sphere?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” The Long-Life let the pendant fall back against his bony chest. “What mattered then and now was that one must remain equal to a challenge. My fellows had argued for temperance, encouraging further study of the barrier. But there were things to be done . . . Just as there are things that must be done here, in this life.”

  He pointed an expressive claw at Ghaldezuel. “I have a task for you, cautious Ghaldessel, which you must complete before this delicate little body dies on me once more. This is your reward.”

  THE SHOW

  The Grand-Tile’s single hangar was a bright, reflective marvel of the Prism Investiture, a twelve-acre concourse that opened out beneath the battleship’s gargantuan exhausts, home now to ten thousand moth-balled, decaying bombers. The vast letterbox mouth of the space was— mercifully—closed, for the Lacaille possessed nothing that could keep atmospheres in, despite centuries of covert study of the Amaranthine orifice seas. In this way, Ghaldezuel had always thought, the Grand-Tile’s hangar was quite inefficient. Where on the Zlanort one could dispatch legions in staggered assaults from separate shipyards, here they must leave all at once, or not at all. There were benefits, of course: the Grand-Tile had never in its history been boarded by an enemy party due to its great single gateway. Its sisters the Zlanort and the Yustafan had each been taken dozens of times, playing host to legendary interior battles of their own.

  Ghaldezuel dawdled in this vast mechanical boneyard, walking between jet wings coated with strands of dust-heavy cobwebs and gazing at the colossal unpainted gantries that waited, unused and hung with the multicoloured flags of captured privateers. Twinkling strips of lightwire ran along the distant ceiling, more than half of which needed replacing, producing pockets of dimness that he tried to avoid walking through.

  The battleship itself had been built well before the Volirian Conflict, during the Lacaille’s age of martial prowess when they’d still been considered a solvent kingdom and the apple of the Ama-ranthine’s eye. It ran on minimal fuel and only a hundred crew, listening through its mighty trumpets to the speed-distor
ted songs of the Vaulted Lands and Tethered moons to find its course. There weren’t even any enlisted soldiers on board; the legions Eoziel had succeeded in raising at short notice waited just beyond the Gulf of Cancri, at Firmament’s End, useful only once the Grand-Tile sighted the capital.

  Ghaldezuel was still ruminating on the Long-Life’s story as he walked, not fully able to believe what he’d heard, when crazed, squeaky laughter echoed through the space. The hangar, like every other part of the Colossus, was infested with Oxel. He stepped over an actual Oxel trap: a shiny strand of razor wire heaped atop the other detritus on the hangar’s rubber floor.

  Voices floated through the parallel rows of aircraft and Ghaldezuel shrank instinctively into the shadows of a butchered old bomber, peeping through the cobwebs. A promenading company of extravagantly dressed Lacaille strolled beside a tallish, finely boned male with gingery hair swept back around his long ears. Ghaldezuel stared, catching sight of the king’s exceptionally vibrant green eyes. On his right hand, Eoziel was missing all of his fingers from a fresh Vulgar assassination attempt—the tenth in the last year.

  With a chorus of chattering laughter they passed him by, walking back towards the bridge. Ghaldezuel continued on, glancing behind to make sure none had lingered.

  Eoziel: popular rumours abounded that the unmarried king took his many aunts to bed at night in the hope of ensuring a pure succession. It was said he owed his life to the Amaranthine after making a pilgrimage into the Firmament to find a cure for a sickness that would otherwise have claimed his life. Ghaldezuel smirked, avoiding another Oxel trap. King Eoziel thought his place in Aaron’s new Investiture certain. With the Long-Life’s blessing, he believed he would inherit all the favours the Vulgar once enjoyed. But Aaron was a tricksy thing; Ghaldezuel of all people knew that. And they’ve been working hard, he thought, using what must have been Pifoon craftsmanship to shrink a copy of the Soul Engine into a wearable pendant in just a few months, so that even something so final as the destruction of the Grand-Tile itself might prove nothing more than an inconvenience.