The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “Can you understand what he’s saying?” Merlin asked, knowing that Tyrant would be picking up any external sounds.

  “I’m going to need more than a few minutes to crack their language, Merlin, even if it is related to something in my database, of which there’s no guarantee.”

  “Fine. I’ll improvise. Can you spin me some flowers?”

  “Where exactly are you going? What do you mean, flowers?”

  Merlin paused at the airlock. He wore long boots, tight black leather trousers, a billowing white shirt, and brocaded brown leather waistcoat, accented with scarlet trim. He’d tied back his hair and made a point of trimming his beard. “Where do you think? Outside. And I want some flowers. Flowers are good. Spin me some indigo hyacinths, the kind they used to grow on Springhaven, before the Mentality Wars. They always go down well.”

  “You’re insane. They’ll shoot you.”

  “Not if I smile and come bearing exotic alien flowers. Remember, I did just save one of their planes.”

  “You’re not even wearing armor.”

  “Armor would really scare them. Trust me, ship: this is the quickest way for them to understand I’m not a threat.”

  “It’s been a pleasure having you aboard,” Tyrant said acidly. “I’ll be sure to pass on your regards to my next owner.”

  “Just make the flowers and stop complaining.”

  Five minutes later Merlin steeled himself as the lock sequenced and the ramp lowered to kiss the ground. The cold hit him like a lover’s slap. He heard an order from the soldiers’ leader, and the massed ranks adjusted their aim. They’d been pointing at the ship before. Now it was only Merlin they were interested in.

  He raised his right hand palm open, the newly spun flowers in his left.

  “Hello. My name’s Merlin.” He thumped his chest for emphasis and said the name again, slower this time. “Mer-lin. I don’t think there’s much chance of you being able to understand me, but just in case . . . I’m not here to cause trouble.” He forced a smile, which probably looked more feral than reassuring. “Now. Who’s in charge?”

  The leader shouted another order. He heard a rattle of a hundred safety catches being released. Suddenly, the ship’s idea of sending out a proctor first sounded splendidly sensible. Merlin felt a cold line of sweat trickle down his back. After all that he had survived so far, both during his time with the Cohort and since he had become an adventuring free agent, it would be something of a letdown to die by being shot with a chemically propelled projectile. That was only one step above being mauled and eaten by a wild animal.

  Merlin walked down the ramp, one cautious step at a time. “No weapons,” he said. “Just flowers. If I wanted to hurt you, I could have hit you from space with charm-torps.”

  When he reached the apron, the leader gave another order and a trio of soldiers broke formation to cover Merlin from three angles, with the barrels of their weapons almost touching him. The leader—a cruel-looking young man with a scar down the right side of his face—shouted something in Merlin’s direction, a word that sounded vaguely like “distal,” but which was in no language Merlin recognized. When Merlin didn’t move, he felt a rifle jab into the small of his back. “Distal,” the man said again, this time with an emphasis bordering on the hysterical.

  Then another voice boomed across the apron, one that belonged to a much older man. There was something instantly commanding about the voice. Looking to the source of the exclamation, Merlin saw the wrecked aircraft entangled in its capture net, and the pilot in the process of crawling out from the tangle, with a wooden box in his hands. The rifle stopped jabbing Merlin’s back, and the cruel-looking young man fell silent while the pilot made his way over to them.

  The pilot had removed his goggles now, revealing the lined face of an older man, his gray-white beard and whiskers stark against ruddy, weatherworn skin. For a moment Merlin felt that he was looking in the mirror at an older version of himself.

  “Greetings from the Cohort,” Merlin said. “I’m the man who saved your life.”

  “Gecko,” the red-faced man said, pushing the wooden box into Merlin’s chest. “Forlorn gecko!”

  Now that Merlin had a chance to examine it properly, he saw that the box was damaged, its sides caved in and its lid ripped off. Inside was a matrix of straw padding and a great many shattered glass vials. The pilot took one of these smashed vials and held it up before Merlin’s face, honey-colored fluid draining down his fingers.

  “What is it?” Merlin asked.

  Leaving Merlin to hold the box and flowers, the red-faced pilot pointed angrily toward the wreckage of his aircraft, and in particular at the cylindrical attachment Merlin had taken for a fuel tank. He saw now that the cylinder was the repository for dozens more of these wooden boxes, most of which must have been smashed when Merlin had nudged the aircraft with Tyrant.

  “Did I do something wrong?” Merlin asked.

  In a flash the man’s anger turned to despair. He was crying, the tears smudging the soot on his cheeks. “Tangible,” he said, softer now. “All tangible inkwells. Gecko.”

  Merlin reached into the box and retrieved one of the few intact vials. He held the delicate thing to his eyes. “Medicine?”

  “Plastrum,” the man said, taking the box back from Merlin.

  “Show me what you do with this,” Merlin said, as he motioned drinking the vial. The man shook his head, narrowing his wrinkled ice-blue eyes at him as if he thought that Merlin was either stupid or making fun. Merlin rolled up the sleeve of his arm and motioned injecting himself. The pilot nodded tentatively.

  “Plastrum,” he said again. “Vestibule plastrum.”

  “You have some kind of medical crisis? Is that what you were doing, bringing medicines?”

  “Tangible,” the man repeated.

  “You need to come with me,” Merlin said. “Whatever that stuff is, we can synthesize it aboard Tyrant.” He held up the intact vial and then placed his index finger next to it. Then he pointed to the parked form of his ship and spread his fingers wide, hoping the pilot got the message that he could multiply the medicine. “One sample,” he said. “That’s all we need.”

  Suddenly there was a commotion. Merlin looked around in time to see a girl running across the apron, toward the two of them. In Cohort terms she could only have been six or seven years old. She wore a child’s version of the same greatcoat everyone else wore, buckled black boots and gloves, no hat, goggles, or breathing mask. The pilot shouted “Minla” at her approach, a single word that conveyed both warning and something more intimate, as if the older man might have been her father or grandfather. “Minla oak trefoil,” the man added, firmly but not without kindness. He sounded pleased to see her, but somewhat less than pleased that she had chosen this exact moment to run outside.

  “Spelter Malkoha,” the girl said, and hugged the pilot around the waist, which was as high as she could reach. “Spelter Malkoha, ursine Malkoha.”

  The red-faced man knelt down—his eyes were still damp—and ran a gloved finger through the girl’s unruly fringe of black hair. She had a small, monkeylike face, one that conveyed both mischief and cleverness.

  “Minla,” he said tenderly. “Minla, Minla, Minla.” Then what was clearly a rhetorical question: “Gastric spar oxen, fey legible, Minla?”

  “Gorse spelter,” she said, sounding contrite. And then, perhaps for the first time, she noticed Merlin. For an anxious moment her expression was frozen somewhere between surprise and suspicion, as if he were some kind of puzzle that had just intruded into her world.

  “You wouldn’t be called Minla, by any chance?” Merlin asked.

  “Minla,” she said, in barely a whisper.

  “Merlin. Pleased to meet you, Minla.” And then on a whim, before any of the adults could stop him, he passed her one of the indigo hyacinths that Tyrant had just spun for him, woven from the ancient molecular templates in its biolibrary. “Yours,” he said. “A pretty flower for a pretty little
girl.”

  “Oxen spray, Minla,” the red-faced man said, pointing back to one of the buildings on the edge of the apron. A soldier walked over and extended a hand to the girl, ready to escort her back inside. She moved to hand the flower back to Merlin.

  “No,” he said, “you can keep it, Minla. It’s for you.”

  She opened the collar of her coat and pushed the flower inside for safekeeping, until only its head was jutting out. The vivid indigo seemed to throw something of its hue onto her face.

  “Mer-lin?” asked the older man.

  “Yes.”

  The man tapped a fist against his own chest. “Malkoha.” And then he indicated the vial Merlin was still carrying. “Plastrum,” he said again. Then a question, accompanied by a nod toward Tyrant. “Risible plastrum?”

  “Yes,” Merlin said. “I can make you more medicine. Risible plastrum.”

  The red-faced man studied him for what seemed like many minutes. Merlin opted to say nothing: if the pilot hadn’t got the message by now, no further persuasion was going to help. Then the pilot reached down to his belt and unbuttoned the leather holster of a pistol. He removed the weapon and allowed Merlin sufficient time to examine it by eye. The low sun gleamed off an oiled black barrel, inlaid with florid white ornamentation carved from something like whalebone.

  “Mer-lin risible plastrum,” Malkoha said. Then he waved the gun for emphasis. “Spar apostle.”

  “Spar apostle,” Merlin repeated, as they walked up the boarding ramp. “No tricks.”

  Even before Tyrant had made progress in the cracking of the local language, Merlin had managed to hammer out a deal with Malkoha. The medicine had turned out to be a very simple drug, easily synthesized. A narrow-spectrum ß-lactam antibiotic, according to the ship: exactly the sort of thing the locals might use to treat a gram-positive bacterial infection—something like bacterial meningitis, for instance—if they didn’t have anything better.

  Tyrant could pump out antibiotic medicine by the hundreds of liters, or synthesize something vastly more effective in equally large quantities. But Merlin saw no sense in playing his most valuable card so early in the game. He chose instead to give Malkoha quantities of the drug in approximately the same dosage and quantity as he must have been carrying when his aircraft was damaged, packaged in similar-looking glass vials. He gave the first two consignments as a gift, in recompense for the harm he was presumed to have done when attempting to save Malkoha, and let Malkoha think that it was all that Tyrant could do to make drugs at that strength and quantity. It was only when he handed over the third consignment, on the third day, that he mentioned the materials he needed to repair his ship.

  He didn’t say anything, of course, or at least nothing that the locals could have understood. But there were enough examples lying around of the materials Merlin needed—metals and organic compounds, principally, as well as water that could be used to replenish Tyrant’s hydrogen-fusion tanks—that Merlin was able to make considerable progress just by pointing and miming. He kept talking all the while, even in Main, and did all that he could to encourage the locals to talk back in their own tongue. Even when he was inside the compound, Tyrant was observing every exchange, thanks to the microscopic surveillance devices Merlin carried on his person. Through this process, the ship was constantly testing and rejecting language models, employing its knowledge of both the general principles of human grammar and its compendious database of ancient languages recorded by the Cohort, many of which were antecedents of Main itself. Lecythus might have been isolated for tens of thousands of years, but languages older than that had been cracked by brute computation, and Merlin had no doubt that Tyrant would get there in the end, provided he gave it enough material to work with.

  It was still not clear whether the locals regarded him as their prisoner, or honored guest. He’d made no attempt to leave, and they’d made no effort to prevent him returning to his ship when it was time to collect the vials of antibiotic. Perhaps they had guessed that it would be futile to stop him, given the likely capabilities of his technology. Or perhaps they had guessed—correctly, as it happened—that Tyrant would be going nowhere until it was repaired and fueled. In any event they seemed less awed by his arrival than intrigued, shrewdly aware of what he could do for them.

  Merlin liked Malkoha, even though he knew almost nothing about the man. Clearly he was a figure of high seniority within this particular organization, be it military or political, but he was also a man brave enough to fly a hazardous mission to ferry medicines through the sky, in a time of war. And his daughter loved him, which had to count for something. Merlin now knew that Malkoha was her “spelter” or father, although he did indeed look old enough to have been spaced from her by a further generation.

  Almost everything that Merlin did learn, in those early days, was due to Minla rather than the adults. The adults seemed willing to at least attempt to answer his queries, when they could understand what he was getting at. But their chalkboard explanations usually left Merlin none the wiser. They could show him maps and printed historical and technical treatises, but none of these shed any light on the world’s many mysteries. Cracking text would take Tyrant even longer than cracking spoken language.

  Minla, though, had picture books. Malkoha’s daughter had taken an obvious liking to Merlin, even though she shared nothing in common. Merlin gave her a new flower each time he saw her, freshly spun from some exotic species in the biolibrary. Merlin made a point of never giving her flowers from a particular world twice, even when she wanted more of the same. He also made a point of always telling her something of the place from where the flowers had come, regardless of her lack of understanding. It seemed to be enough for her to hear the cadences of a story, even if it was in an alien language.

  There was not much color in Minla’s world, so Merlin’s gifts must have had a luminous appeal to them. Once a day, for a few minutes, they were allowed to meet in a drab room inside the main compound. An adult was always stationed nearby, but to all intents and purposes Merlin and the girl were permitted to interact freely. Minla would show Merlin drawings and paintings she had done, or little compositions, written down in labored handwriting in approximately the form of script Tyrant had come to refer to as Lecythus A. Merlin would examine Minla’s works and offer praise when it was merited.

  He wondered why these meetings were allowed. Minla was obviously a bright girl (he could tell that much merely from the precocious manner of her speaking, even if he hadn’t had the ample evidence of her drawings and writings). Perhaps it was felt that meeting the man from space would be an important part of her education, one that could never be repeated at a later date. Perhaps she had pestered her father into allowing her to spend more time with Merlin. Merlin could understand that; as a child he’d also formed harmless attachments to adults, often those that came bearing gifts and especially those adults that appeared interested in what he had to show them.

  Could there be more than that, though? Was it possible that the adults had decided that a child offered the best conduit for understanding, and that Minla was now their envoy? Or were they hoping to use Minla as a form of emotional blackmail, so that they might exert a subtle hold on Merlin when he decided it was time to leave?

  He didn’t know. What he was certain of was that Minla’s books raised as many questions as they answered, and that simply leafing through them was enough to open windows in his own mind, back into a childhood he’d thought consigned safely to oblivion. The books were startlingly similar to the books Merlin remembered from the Palace of Eternal Dusk, the ones he’d used to fight over with his brother. They were bound similarly, illustrated with spidery ink drawings scattered through the text or florid watercolors gathered onto glossy plates at the end of the book. Merlin liked holding the book up to the light of an open window, so that the illustrated pages shone like stained glass. It was something his father had shown him on Plenitude, when he had been Minla’s age, and her delight exactly echoed h
is own, across the unthinkable gulf of time and distance and circumstance that separated their childhoods.

  At the same time, he also paid close attention to what the books had to say. Many of the stories featured little girls involved in fanciful adventures concerning flying animals and other magic creatures. Others had the worthy, overearnest look of educational texts. Studying these latter books, Merlin began to grasp something of the history of Lecythus, at least insofar as it had been codified for the consumption of children.

  The people on Lecythus knew they’d come from the stars. In two of the books there were even paintings of a vast spherical spaceship heaving into orbit around the planet. The paintings differed in every significant detail, but Merlin felt sure that he was seeing a portrayal of the same dimly remembered historical event, much as the books in his youth had shown various representations of human settlers arriving on Plenitude. There was no reference to the Waynet, however, or anything connected to the Cohort or the Huskers. As for the locals’ theory concerning the origin of the aerial landmasses, Merlin found only one clue. It lay in a frightening sequence of pictures showing the night sky being riven by lavalike fissures, until whole chunks of the heavens dropped out of place, revealing a darker, deeper firmament beyond. Some of the pieces were shown crashing into the seas, raising awesome waves that tumbled over entire coastal communities, while others were shown hovering unsupported in the sky, with kilometers of empty space under them. If the adults remembered that it was alien weaponry that had smashed their camouflaging sky (weapons deployed by aliens that were still out here) no hint of that uncomfortable truth was allowed into Minla’s books. The destruction of the sky was shown simply as a natural catastrophe, like a flood or volcanic eruption. Enough to awe, enough to fascinate, but not enough to give nightmares.

  Awesome it must have been too. Tyrant’s own analysis had established that the aerial landmasses could be put together like a jigsaw. There were gaps in that jigsaw, but most of them could be filled by lifting chunks of land out of the seas and slotting them in place. The inhabitated aerial landmasses were all inverted compared to their supposed positions in the original sky, requiring that they must have been flipped over after the shattering. Tyrant could offer little guidance for how this could have happened, but it was clear enough that unless the chunks were inverted, life-supporting materials would spill off over the edges and rain down onto the planet again. Presumably the necessary materials had been uplifted into the air when the unsupported chunks (and these must have been pieces that did not contain gravity nullifiers, or which had been damaged beyond the capacity to support themselves) came hammering down.