The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  Ghaldezuel halted in an alley of dust-brown webs, imagining that little pendant on its chain, spinning through the darkness for ever.

  But you’re impatient now, aren’t you? Something’s happening, something we dayflies just wouldn’t understand. I know you won’t countenance another hundred-million-year slumber. Ghald-ezuel sneezed suddenly in the murk of dust, wiping a hand across his face and glaring into the trash-strewn alley. The Long-Life, with the Lacaille’s help, was running as fast as he could, glancing constantly over his shoulder at the regrouping of phantom enemies: enemies that might seek to stop his apotheosis—in whatever manner that might take shape—before it could come about. The Amaranthine, Ghaldezuel sensed, knew as little as he did, trusting blindly that the ancient soul would look back on them with a morsel of gratitude as it left them to their ruins.

  He walked on, barely looking where he was going. After a few minutes, he glanced up to see that he’d arrived in the presence of a white, four-legged Lacaille tank that rose out of the cobwebs like a struggling, trapped creature. Its hatches lay darkly open, the residence of generations of Oxel judging from the leaking whiff of faeces. Ghaldezuel examined the black holes leading to its interior, thinking that there was a certain guilty allure to all things pungent.

  “Time to get to work, Caldessuel.”

  He flinched. De Rivarol, the cadaverous-looking Perennial, was lurking in the next bay. He tittered at Ghaldezuel’s surprise.

  He stepped away from the tank, teeth clenched. “Very well—after you.”

  SILVER MOON

  The moon stands glimmering in the trees. At the beginnings of a clearing, Sotiris hears the rush of water. And something more—screams. He stumbles and ducks back into the trees, sprinting through the dark tangle until he reaches the edge of a tumbling stream. From the branches that crown the water’s edge, black impressions of cages hang, turning gently. Sotiris’s eyes follow the course of the stream to where it froths over a precipice and down into a plunge pool. Moonlight slides from the pouring falls, picking out the shapes of the spindly prisoners standing and rattling the bars of their cages, jaws snapping. Sotiris watches, wide-eyed, noticing the object of their fury: a smaller cage in their midst, this one containing a human form. Iro.

  He cries out but no one appears to hear, not even his sister. Glancing wildly about, he sees how he might reach the cages from a sturdy branch nearby and begins to climb. Spiked twigs rip at his nightshirt, tugging and catching until he almost falls. Sotiris hesitates, his weight swaying the cages, and seizes the branch, shaking it. They swing back and forth, the beasts bracing themselves and howling. A flock of excited flying things dash madly into the air above the river, fluttering between the branches. Sotiris slams his weight down harder until the nearest cage’s iron hook slips and it falls free, dropping into the moonlit falls.

  He advances carefully along the branch to a place where it grows too narrow to climb any further. Iro shrieks, suspended not ten feet away. The branch begins to bow, tipping him, but he doesn’t turn back. If this is a dream, why turn back? Then he recalls. This is a reward, for his services, but also a test of some kind. Act recklessly and he might never be allowed to return. He freezes, feeling himself slipping, the damp bark scraping his palms. The water below is a glittering silver haze plunging into a dark pool.

  “I’m sorry,” he says through gritted teeth, his fingers losing their battle and beginning to slide down the branch. After a graceless turn, he manages to scramble back the way he’s come, stumbling onto the bank. He stands and watches, impotent. Iro looks shrivelled inside her cage, a night-lit, emaciated thing, cowering from the others.

  Sotiris rubs his hands together and looks along the bank, thinking there ought to be a crossing, or at least a stretch of calmer water, further up.

  “I’m coming to get you,” he says quietly to himself, tears prisming the moonlight. “Just . . . just stay there. I’m coming to get you.”

  Within a minute, he loses the sound of the falls. Sotiris creeps more slowly, the terror returning, finally deciding to double back. He stumbles through the undergrowth, sure he’s returned to the very same spot, but the river is a calm, gurgling blackness beyond the trees, empty but for overhanging branches criss-crossing the risen moon.

  He knows somehow that he is coming to the edge of the woods. The thickness of the air, deep and biological and almost stifling, has begun to recede. The straggly trees are thinning, and that presence he sensed watching him from the canopies has gone. He’s glad. The feeling was cloying, a perfume too strong and sweet to be good for you, as if masking another, more unpleasant scent beneath.

  He has given up shouting Iro’s name, though it comes as second nature, calling out when someone’s lost. He knows now that even if he caught up with her, anything he said or did would be in vain. Some deep-remembered fact surfaces in his mind at the thought. The atmosphere of Old Mars, before its disastrous terraforming, had been so insubstantial that you’d need to scream into someone’s ear for them to notice a thing. It’s like that here, though what separates him and his sister, he feels, is more than just thin air.

  He looks up through the snarled tangle of branches at the morning sky. It is white and cold, but early. He has a day’s light in front of him that he mustn’t squander: a day’s light to get through the last of the forest and out into whatever lies beyond. Below, he thinks, not understanding at first why the distinction is so important. But it’s true. After here the land drops, perhaps to sea level. He will go below.

  PORT RUBANTE

  “Heave!” Weepert screamed, his little voice high with delight. “Haul! My mighty Oxel!” The cook spread his skinny arms to the sky, enjoying himself more than was strictly healthy. “I need my honey!”

  Dusky blue evening had rolled in for the second time since their arrival at the Tethered moon of Port Rubante. The Epsilon India—lovingly referred to as The Shitpot by most of its crew—perched in the tangled branches of a lone coppice of dead trees, catching the last of the sun across its hot flank. Lycaste glowed burnished crimson in its reflection, a blot of colour painting the silver tin fuselage of the ship where he sat beside it in the trees. He swung his legs, listening to the cook’s raving from atop the cockpit. The Oxel mostly ignored him, whistling beautiful tunes as they lifted their cargo by a system of pulleys up out of the field and into the open hold.

  Maneker, sat beside him, had already secured himself a box from the returning Oxel and was massaging the honey onto his gums with a finger. Lycaste had been told by Poltor that the Amaranthine liked to lather it on their skin. Maneker caught Lycaste’s look somehow and turned to face him.

  “Dry mouth,” he said, muffled. “One of the great luxuries of the Firmament, this Rubante stuff.” He added some of the ivory-coloured paste to his glass bottle, swirling it and taking a swig. The Firmament-famed substance was packaged not in glass bottles—as it was back in the Tenth—but in lead-lined wooden boxes. “Never spoils, either,” he muttered once he’d spat. “A product fit for the Immortal.”

  “Harder!” cried Weepert, raising his thin voice for the benefit of the Pifoon below. It had been agreed, much to the cook’s delight, that he would act as mock captain of the Epsilon whenever they were in the company of local Prism. Port Rubante was still largely Pifoon-held, and they would never have countenanced a foreign ship setting down—let alone making any kind of repairs or purchases—were it not for a full-blood Pifoon captain at the helm. Maneker could not show himself, and up in the makeshift tree house of wooden slats, he sat in his own self-made blind spot, revealed only to the few members of the crew. Lycaste could only speculate on how the Immortal managed to use some of his powers and not others, and wondered what other abilities Maneker might still have left, hidden, as it were, beneath his day-old bandages.

  Lycaste, for his part, had refused the chance to go with the Oxel salvage party to the great castle in the field, despite the disappointment in their faces. A full-grown Old World Melius, no matt
er how cowardly, would have constituted a superb bargaining chip. He cradled his Amaranthine gun to his chest, tense and sleep-deprived, trying his best not to show his nerves and forcing himself to laugh along with all the Oxel at Weepert’s display. A perfume, carried on the wind, stuck at the back of his throat: that of the neon yellow Canolis that grew across the world. Canolis, Maneker had explained, gesturing to the wastes of yellow, was a fuel crop worth more than its weight in Old World silk. Everything from Voidjets to rolling fortresses and Colossi battleships depended on the bright yellow flowers and their heady scent, though they were also added to the honey the Tethered moon was renowned for. It was only a matter of time, the Amaranthine said, before Port Rubante was attacked by the Lacaille or some other more bloodthirsty Prism; only the relative abundance of larger fuel moons in the outer Firmament kept Rubante safe for now.

  “I’ll have you all on cistern duty if this shit isn’t loaded within the hour!” the cook cried, his voice growing hoarse. He’d exhausted all his other threats, apparently not understanding that nobody cleaned the cisterns anyway.

  “You are tense, still,” Maneker said softly, touching his finger to the barrel of Lycaste’s pistol. “Calm yourself.” Lycaste clenched his fist around the weapon instinctively.

  “May I?” the Amaranthine asked.

  He hesitated before handing it over.

  “Ah,” Maneker smiled eyelessly. “A Decadence superlumen pistol, hollowed from a Cethegrande pearl. Four, maybe five thousand years old, precious beyond belief.” Maneker dropped the weapon back into Lycaste’s lap. “The pearls are found in the throats of huge sea mammals from the Vulgar lagoons of Impio. Their worth stemmed from the bravery required to steal each one.”

  Lycaste examined the pistol with new interest, noticing how the barrel glowed as the last of Port Rubante’s light touched it. He took another swig from the bottle Poltor had given him, hoping it would calm his nerves, and cradled the pistol again, looking off to the colossal blue castle from which the Oxel had bought their salvage and supplies.

  “You need have no part in what we’re about to do, Lycaste, remember that.”

  He nodded, forgetting once again that the Amaranthine couldn’t see him. Maneker had furnished the team of Oxel travelling to the castle with a sheaf of coded letters, dozens of messages that would catch the next week’s post—while it lasted—to be taken into the Investiture. Whatever help he sought out there would take its time responding, let alone arriving.

  “But it’ll be dangerous, too, to stay aboard the Epsilon?” Lycaste said, hoping he wouldn’t receive an answer.

  Maneker didn’t hesitate. “Very.”

  Lycaste felt his hands trembling again. He took a long drink, grimacing as he put the bottle down and worked a soggy, pickled moth from his teeth. “Some of us could die,” he mumbled, his words emerging without inflection, not as the question he’d intended. Maneker made no reply.

  Lycaste finished the bottle, unable to smile any more at Weepert’s hysterical raging. The honey was almost entirely loaded now. “There must be somewhere safe left in this whole Firmament of yours?”

  “He’s done his damage. All the Prism are free now and taking what they can. Nowhere with recognizable law will exist before the century is out.” Maneker exhaled a long breath through his nostrils. “And that hasn’t been the case since—” he shook his head “—since prehistory.”

  Lycaste had a mental image of this man, this Pretender. For some reason, his face was incredibly kind. “And you think getting to him will . . . ?”

  “Those who surround the Pretender must be purged, that’s for certain. What can be done to him—I have no idea.” Maneker gave the impression of looking at Lycaste. His bandages, now clean and missing their eerie spots of blood, were a deep pink in the sunset. “He made it understood to me once, when we spoke at length, that he would leave the Firmament’s fate to us. I don’t believe, for all his faults, that he was dishonest in that.”

  “But why—”

  “I have no idea, Lycaste. The Long-Life and I spent a long time together—” he paused “—in a sense . . . and I developed the impression that all this, this destruction, this loss of life and redistribution of lands, was simply a way of helping him get to somewhere else, somewhere he needed to be.”

  Lycaste was staring at his huge red toes, thinking on the chaos at large in the Firmament, a chaos they said was just below the soil of this hollow moon. The world beneath was overtaken, its Immortal masters already hanged and quartered by their Acolytes. He couldn’t stay here, on this odd little honey world, waiting for more Prism to come and take it. There might be one or two ships leaving for the Old World, or there might not. Maneker had said he didn’t know, and Lycaste believed him. Up above, the first foreign stars had begun to shine. Lycaste knew he ought to breathe deeply, aware that he wouldn’t get any more fresh air for some time, but his chest, tightening as if it contained a wound spring, wouldn’t let him.

  They had been eleven days in the Void since leaving Proximo, Lycaste consigning himself to his cupboard almost the entire time, sleeping or staring wide-eyed at the superluminal dance of silver stars beyond his porthole that shone like moonlight onto his blankets. In the pressurised Voidship, he felt as if his head had swelled and his hearing diminished, so that it was possible to imagine sometimes that he was out here all alone, a man sleeping and drifting among flickering light, a diver hunting treasure at the bottom of the sea.

  Occasionally—when the narrowness of his cupboard overcame him—he took brisk walks around the vessel, observing the Oxel manning the flight deck and Huerepo and Poltor playing at cards or drinking in the forward battery. Until they landed at Port Rubante, he didn’t see Maneker; the Amaranthine had been given the captain’s stateroom and did not leave it, not even to join them at meals. For a man who never ate, Lycaste wasn’t hugely surprised.

  The Oxel, he came to see, were immensely happy with their lot in life, perhaps indeed because they had so little of it. They appeared to exist in a world of constant disorder, sleeping barely an hour a day, and yet they were always lively, chattering and whistling to one another, playing games and mending things. Among their number were two or three females, though Lycaste was hard-pressed to guess the sexes apart. One was old and stayed locked away and out of sight until mealtimes. The captive Lacaille still moaned, his voice carrying along the passages, but Lycaste—like everyone else—had soon learned to block out the forlorn sounds. They would have to do something with their prisoner eventually, Poltor had told him, since rations were falling low. The Vulgar was confident they could sell or ransom him somewhere, though the Oxel apparently gave it little thought. Much like Lycaste as a younger man, they attached little value to material wealth, selling their treasures for food or repairs and—extraordinarily—setting weighty gems in their armour apparently for the stones’ strength alone. So long as Smallbone kept feeding him, the prisoner might just become a permanent fixture of their voyage.

  In the Epsilon’s hangar—Lycaste’s second-favourite place—the Oxel kept an assortment of faulty half-track vehicles and jets, along with piled crates of ordnance and weaponry. An extraordinary walking tank, perhaps a cousin of those Lycaste remembered seeing at Vilnius Second, was obviously their prize possession, and occasionally, as they neared their first port of call, Lycaste offered to help with the cleaning of it.

  After a time, he learned that the Spirit had been watching him, keeping itself politely out of his mind until it was invited in. Lycaste had found he hardly needed to speak aloud for it to understand him.

  Can you guess how fast we’re going? it had asked him as they looked out together into the silver Void one night.

  Lycaste shrugged, not having the faintest clue. A Crule, Sotiris had told him once, was called a mile elsewhere. He blew out his cheeks, searching for the most absurd figure he could think of. “A thousand miles a day.”

  Deep laughter erupted in his head. Lycaste folded his arms as it dragged on,
his eyes stinging.

  Try multiplying that number by six hundred million, the Spirit said, composing itself at last.

  “Well, of course I don’t know, do I? People don’t have to keep reminding me how stupid I am, Perception.”

  Settle down. Ignorance and stupidity are separate qualities, the former far easier to remedy. I knew less than you once—albeit for the very briefest of intervals.

  Lycaste sniffed, looking around to where he thought the Spirit might be.

  How many of your race, for example, could claim to have travelled out into the Firmament? Spoken with Amaranthine, dined aboard a Prism vessel?

  Lycaste frowned.

  Well, yes, perhaps the latter’s not something to be encouraged. But, you know, I have never been on one of these ships of the Void either—it’s a first for both of us. Its voice dropped to a whisper, tickling his ear. The greatest joy comes with appreciation, Lycaste. I have taken the time to explore, to understand and take pleasure in the method of my escape for what it is. Do you even understand this vessel we are in? How it works?

  “Not really,” he said, wary of another trap. “Huerepo said something about a bowstring.”

  A fair analogy. And have you ever felt the effect of a bow snapped against your hand?

  “Yes.”

  I imagine it hurt, yes? Stung?

  He’d nodded, the flicker of the Void illuminating his face.

  Now picture a bowstring the length of the world.

  “I’d lose my arm?”

  You’d lose more than that. The accompanying rush of air alone would obliterate your entire body and everything you stood upon.

  “You’re a ghoulish thing, aren’t you?”

  Perception seemed to chuckle. That’s not wit I detect, is it?

  Lycaste sniffed, affronted. “I can be funny, sometimes.”

  No you can’t, it said coldly. But you could learn to be. It would stand you in good stead should you decide to part from this company and make your way home.