The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  “Can you see what we’re looking for? The Bunkship?”

  Yes. About fifty-five thousand miles out, not too far from the lead.

  Lycaste stared. Slowly, as if his eyes were inventing the whole thing, the trail was resolving into myriad different colours, the superluminal light twinkling off a writhing mass of shapes. A thought, so sudden and unwelcome that it made him forget the sight, brought his gaze up to where he assumed the Spirit hung in the air. Something Perception had said.

  “What day is it, Percy? Do you know?”

  Day?

  He glanced back into the battery chamber, as if the answer would lie somewhere among the great tin guns. “It must be Ember by now. Must be.”

  I believe it’s not long until the Amaranthine new year, if that helps.

  Lycaste frowned, appalled that the thought hadn’t come to him until now. “I don’t know,” he said, trying to count in his head, “but I think I might have missed my birthday.” The memory of last year, bright and vivid, prompted a sudden ache in his throat, along with the thought that he’d let this year’s pass, like a present received without a word of thanks.

  Oh. I shouldn’t worry. The days are all the same out here, it seems. Perception paused, perhaps registering the tears just behind Lycaste’s eyes. You said you are fifty-two?

  He nodded. “I think I must be, now.” Last year, a life gone forever now. The arrival of the Players, shy smiles as he was introduced to Pentas, a gift of tiny furniture from Eranthis for his model palace.

  That is a good age to be, for your breed. Matured in practicable ways and yet young enough still.

  He didn’t reply, remembering the production the Players had staged just for him, right on his beach, flaming torches the only light. Like a dolt, he’d missed the first half, too shy to come down.

  Well, I’m going up top, Perception said, a rich, powerful tone in his head, drawing a line under the conversation. Lycaste recalled it had been talking to him. Are you coming?

  He followed the moving voice, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles and blinking. The harsh, crisp air in the ship made everyone’s eyes weep uncontrollably anyway.

  They passed from the bunk deck through to the mess and up into the elevated cockpit, Lycaste’s sadness ebbing. It was a wonderful place, much better equipped than the Epsilon’s, though its low ceiling meant he had to walk with a constant stoop. Three periscope-like gun decks rose from the ship’s nose, manned now by the remaining Oxel. Lycaste squeezed himself onto the bare tin floor, realising too late that he’d sat in something sticky.

  Somewhere behind them the Epsilon flew in convoy, piloted by Poltor and Huerepo. They called their own distance and signal checks through the comms, keeping in contact once a minute as per Maneker’s instructions.

  Between their checks, the listening trumpets blared a haunting chorus, mapping out the sounds of the Feeders as they passed at last within the forward wave antennas, and every hair on Lycaste’s body rose. The sound wasn’t anything like the howl of Port Rubante as they’d approached. This was different: this was the sound of life, a teeming cesspool of squirming, dashing bodies. Squeals and cries mingled with pops, thuds and whistles until they’d homed in on the deeper tones of the large vessel they were after.

  “Got it,” Maneker said, listening hard into the trumpets. His hand trailed along the small instruments, finding a dented dial and fiddling with it. The volume increased.

  A groaning, clicking hum filled the cockpit while they tracked the source of it.

  There, Perception said, whistling to the Oxel. They climbed their gun stations to look out, shading their eyes against the purple-green light.

  Lycaste stood. Already they were almost within the current. His mouth opened.

  For a mile above and below, the silver of the Void was packed with movement, dashing metal bodies painted in every colour Lycaste had ever seen. Smaller vessels clustered around weightier, more stately-looking things, billowing clouds and vortexes in the cauldron of suspended engine smoke. This close, the purple colouration of the trail— so obvious from afar—had almost disappeared, and Lycaste was dimly aware that they, too, would be contributing to the wondrous smear of colour, adding a minuscule dash of green as they entered the tail.

  He saw it now through the swirls of haze: a huge dented cylinder of rust-streaked, patched metal, easily a hundred times the size of their own ship, crowned with turrets at its bow. It rolled like a bolt fired from a chamber, spinning as it travelled, its banners trailing out behind through the specks of following ships.

  “That’ll be a stolen habitation tank, from pre-Amaranthine times,” Maneker said. “Similarly purloined engines welded onto the back. Not particularly inventive.”

  I admire their ingenuity. Why not use what goes to waste?

  Maneker looked up, eyebrows raised above his bandages. “You won’t be saying that soon.”

  The Spirit fell silent, a palpable charge building in the stale air. Lycaste went to his bag in the passage and began the careful ritual of donning his underclothes, wondering what the Amaranthine might have meant.

  Soon they were behind it, accelerating hard through the flock of thousands of Voidships, their squawks and chatter abruptly pouring from the trumpets.

  “This Bunk Barge called Gulty’s Home,” Poltor’s voice said weakly over the comms. “Owned by Grand Company. Twenty-five Filgurees for one night’s staying, but we can hide in there if maybe need longer— everyone else do this. I have bunkmate once stay nine years free.”

  “We only need a few hours,” Maneker said sternly over the comms. He returned to his seat, buckling himself in with unsure fingers. “You’re sure you can do this, Perception?”

  Just buy me the bits and pieces.

  Maneker nodded, his lips stretching into a slow, blind smile. Lycaste looked on, surprised. Things must be going well. The Amaranthine brought from his new fur-lined cloak a package of letters he must have written on the journey from Rubante, flicking out a hand in Lycaste’s general direction.

  Lycaste went to him, taking the package and looking at the neat script—almost as perfect as when the man could see—scrawled upon them.

  “I’m leaving these with you. Don’t lose them. I can’t recede—I can’t hide myself when we get inside, there’ll be too many eyes on us.” He turned his blind gaze on Lycaste. “And you’re not to take your pistol, Lycaste, you hear me? I can’t have any commotion.” He looked off towards the sound of the listening trumpets. “We’re too close now. Too close.”

  “But how—”

  “Perception will keep an eye on you.” He angled his bandaged head. “Won’t you, Percy?”

  I don’t recall us settling on that friendly term, Primogenitor.

  Maneker pulled his robe around him, his mouth turning down at the corners.

  Lycaste grinned, stuffing the bundle of letters down inside his collar. In the armoury he’d found a good quality Pifoon-made Voidsuit that looked as if it might fit him. After the attack on the Epsilon, Lycaste didn’t want to take any chances and had decided to wear it as often as possible. The sky-blue suit, missing its helmet and one boot, had clearly been made for a Firmamental Melius a little shorter than him. Bespoke, Huerepo had said. Lycaste wondered if it had belonged to someone important. Across its scratched steel chest it bore the Firmamental regalia: a fabulously intricate blazing gold star decorated with twenty-four flaming points, one for each of the old Satrapies of Decadence. Unlike the coal-burning things the invading Lacaille had worn, Lycaste’s used a small gas-fed boiler to heat radiator pipes in the hands and feet. The warmth inside the suit was compounded by a layer of greasy, sweat-musky fur that lined the innards. Lycaste had taken the thing apart and scrubbed it, throwing out an extremely dirty plastic groin cup and funnel set that must have collected waste, and found it much more pleasant after that. He wore one of his Firmamental boots to replace the missing part of the suit, understanding from Huerepo’s lectures that the shoe wouldn’t serve as a repl
acement should he end up outside of the ship. Now, barring a Void-worthy shoe, all he needed was a helmet, perhaps not hard to find on a Bunk Barge but probably quite expensive. He regretted asking Huerepo what would happen if he fell out into the Void without one.

  I must say, I’m quite excited to see these other Prism, Perception said beside him as the Bunk Barge grew beyond the porthole.

  “I’m not,” Lycaste replied, screwing a gauntlet into his new vambrace and wrapping a piece of Amaranthine fabric around his neck like a scarf. He shrugged on the silver cuirass he’d found in the Oratory over the top of the suit, feeling reassuringly layered in metal as he buckled it tight.

  Poltor says it holds forty thousand of the things at a time. Prisoners as well as sleepers.

  “Forty thousand,” Lycaste repeated, unable to comprehend the number. There had only been a few hundred people living in the Tenth.

  A trifling number compared with the population of the Investiture itself, of course.

  Lycaste’s ears twitched. “I heard Poltor say there were millions?”

  About a hundred and eighty billion, all told, and yet still the Amaranthine call this the Quiet Age.

  Lycaste fretted thoughtfully at the buttons on his lightly frilled collar, still unused to the process of doing them up. Last night he’d had a strange dream; by no means the first in half a year’s worth of strange beds. He looked up, tired of fiddling with the buttons and deciding they looked slightly more raffish undone, for some reason. “What did your body look like, Perception?”

  The air appeared to draw breath, contemplative. Well, I have no memory of my body. I was told they . . . that my mind was taken out while I was still in infancy.

  “But with a body,” he said, “you could have left that place?”

  If the Amaranthine hadn’t cast their spells to keep me there, yes.

  “But how? Wouldn’t you be lighter as you are?”

  I see your thinking, Lycaste, and these were my same thoughts, once. It appears, though, that it isn’t quite so simple.

  “I suppose I wouldn’t understand, even if you told me.”

  Perhaps you could. Look—imagine my spirit is measured in force, like the tip of a blade, pressed firmly. Driven into flesh I will sink quickly, easily, until I reach the bone, yes? Perception paused, apparently to give him room to take the image in, before resuming. Gravity is the hand that does the deed, driving my soul into any place of great solidity—a moon, for instance—and I am trapped.

  Lycaste frowned, uneasy at the comparison.

  Now suppose I am blunted, the pressure of my blade spread over a wider area. I may now sit, freely and without complication, on the surface of the flesh. This, it seems to me, is what happens when a soul inhabits a body—it is spread more evenly, buoyed and entwined within every little cell, and cannot sink. Gravity’s pull upon it is weakened, and it may come and go as it pleases.

  Lycaste raised his eyebrows. “That does make sense . . . I think.”

  The theory appears to have occurred to our friend the Pretender as well. Perception fell silent for a breath, a breath in which Lycaste’s mind struggled with a hundred more questions. What’s brought all this on?

  “Well,” Lycaste said, fumbling with his buttons again, “I think I saw your face.”

  Oh? A note of humour. When?

  “Last night, in a dream.”

  And what do I look like?

  Lycaste couldn’t articulate the image in his mind. What he’d really seen, at first from far above and then at eye level, as if he’d been in the process of landing a Voidship, was a mask; a mask the size of the world, wrapped around the world. It wasn’t made from wood or metal, like any masks from home, but of something like coral, its surface pitted and white like a dead and ancient reef. Inside the chambers of the material whole cities thrived, ecosystems of little white machines that trundled about like ponderous thoughts, and dwarfish Prism people wearing fabulous clothes. Upon disembarking, Lycaste had got himself swiftly lost inside the white coral chambers, running up and down for what felt like days until he found the way out.

  “I think what I saw was—” he stopped to rephrase “—I saw what the world would be like, had they let you live.”

  Indeed? And was it a good world?

  Lycaste didn’t know what to say. “I suppose so. It was very different.”

  Hmm.

  In the dream, the air within the coral chambers had been softly smoky, as if a fire smouldered somewhere in the deeper hollows of the place. Lycaste had woken thinking it was the thousands of trapped souls the vast city had produced, sunk to cling like mist to the curved floors.

  “So where,” he asked, finally doing up the buttons again, “do people’s spirits go? All those that aren’t as . . . forceful . . . as yours?” The ship groaned and thumped, ticking as it expanded and contracted. Lycaste’s throat ached. “Where will mine go?”

  He felt its kindness then, like a warmth around him. In truth, I don’t know, Lycaste. The nearest star, perhaps, or to the largest celestial body of sufficient attraction. It might be that they are light enough to escape into some other place we cannot see.

  “Ah.” He’d been thinking about this. “But what about people who die and wake up again?”

  Well, they aren’t fully dead, then, are they?

  “But—”

  Look, Lycaste. I’ve seen death. I watched this ship’s late captain leave his body.

  Lycaste gulped. “You saw him? You saw his soul?”

  Clear as day.

  “What did it look like?” He found he almost didn’t want to know.

  Dull. Like a bodily waste, voided at the end along with everything else.

  “It didn’t look like him?” For some reason, Lycaste had a mental image of a tired little Lacaille face, drifting away on the wind.

  No, Perception said sharply. Why should it? The arrangement of his eyes and mouth wasn’t him, was it?

  Lycaste felt a little chastened. He supposed not. It chilled him to imagine that, once he died, he would never have his own face again. He thought suddenly back to all the days he’d cursed the good fortune of his looks.

  “Makes you thankful, I suppose,” he said weakly.

  Appreciation, Lycaste, like I said.

  They were angling above the tangled tubing of the Bunk Barge’s engines, the serpentine shape of the Epsilon powering ahead. The Hasziom followed through the groove their old ship had ploughed in the fog, rising over the bulk of Gulty’s Home and heading for the forward access towers, which rose like crenelated castle spires in the coloured mist.

  Keep your pistol.

  “But Maneker said—”

  Tactical forgetfulness. Stuff it into your suit with the letters.

  “I’ll feel much better knowing it’s there.”

  Precisely. It serves a greater purpose as an instrument of calm.

  The air within was surprisingly cold, as if the hull of the giant ship was very thin indeed. Moisture beaded beneath Lycaste’s nose as he stepped out of the Haszxom’s hangar and looked around. The whole vast place was fogged with a dank grey pall of smoke, barely breathable in places and glowing where fire-pits lit the haze. He turned, examining the various tents and wooden structures that surrounded their dock, then stepped back to gaze upwards.

  They had come in through one of fifteen enormous, irregular holes punched into the shell of the great barrel-shaped ship, rising through a colossal set of iron doors and settling in the darkness of a frozen airlock while Poltor suited up and went to pay the bargemaster. After almost a Quarter of waiting—during which Maneker had grown exponentially more enraged at the thought of Poltor having a little drink at their expense—the overhead doors had rolled away, spilling roiling mist and light, permitting the two ships entry.

  Lycaste stumbled on rubbish as he gagged at the stink of the place, climbing a hillock of tiny bones and scraps to get a look at the foggy interior of the Bunk Barge. It was like a nest of bats he’d found once i
n the caves near his old house, a place of dripping stalagmites moulded from the creatures’ own droppings, the floor swarming with beetles and flies.

  What must once have been a smooth, bare cylindrical chamber about half a mile across had now been busily filled with an enormous, seething nest of bunk spaces made up of millions of planks of wood precariously nailed into shelves and buttresses and floors, all stretching into the middle of the huge place. Each little self-made hovel sported the glow of a distant fire, so that the place looked like a twinkling, deeply orange-lit cave veiled with a film of moving cloud, the Prism’s own crude attempt at a Vaulted Land. He shivered in the cold smoke, imagining how many times the fires must have swept out of control and burned the place up.

  A dark structure rose out of that layer of smog into the centre of the cylindrical space. Arched like the legs of a million spiders, the shadows of bridges, wobbling with tiny black Prism, stretched off up to their pinnacle: a teetering assortment of ramshackle fortresses that sprouted chimneys and walkways, unsupported but for the myriad spindly buttresses and bridges that held them up, like strings across a chasm of empty space.

  The Posthouse. That’s where we’ll have to go.

  “Was that you in there?” Lycaste thought he’d felt something ticklish slide inside the fur lining of his Voidsuit, like a tendril of mist.

  The Amaranthine has been busy. He’s calling in every favour and debt he can.

  “How do you know?”

  I’ve just read those letters you’re carrying. Hundreds of coded messages, worryingly simple to decipher. Still, he disseminates his vast fortune wisely, as far as I can tell, purchasing only the best.

  An Amaranthine fortune, Lycaste mused, picking his way through the dim air. “Have we got enough money?”

  More than enough. The Filgurees Poltor received for the prisoners will pay for everything we need. They were an experienced crew, those Lacaille.

  “But you saw to them easily enough.”

  Needs must.

  Lycaste felt the weight of the Vulgar coins Huerepo had given him as pocket money, sensing their worth in a way that he never had with silk.