Glass

by Stephen Palmer

  ‘I used to be a lesser,’ Cuensheley said sharply.

  ‘I apologise, I did not mean–’

  ‘Don’t prejudge people and they may like you better.’

  ‘I am liked well enough,’ Dwllis complained.

  Cuensheley offered no further observations, and when the flunkey returned to say that the Lord Archivist was available, they walked in silence through the columns and passages of the inner Archive, until they reached a red plastic door. This was opened for them.

  The chamber they entered was long and narrow, painted white, with lunar decorations picked out here and there in yellow. A blue stellar carpet lay on the floor. At the far end sat Querhidwe, partially visible amongst a pile of crescent cushions also decked yellow. She looked up from the book she was reading to gesture them forward. Dwllis took the lead, until he stood a few yards away.

  ‘Good day, Lord Archivist,’ he said. ‘Thank you for this audience. This is Yardkeeper Cuensheley of the Copper Courtyard.’

  Querhidwe was a ragged-looking pyuton, dressed in a one-piece suit of unbleached material, her dark hair tousled, her boots dusty. Rumour claimed she was of unstable character. She put down her book and said, ‘Why have you come today?’

  Dwllis coughed and rearranged his coat to make his speech seem more important. ‘Madam, I have witnessed two peculiar events, both related to your august Archive. In my noble capacity as Keeper of–’

  ‘Get on with it, man, for Selene’s sake.’

  ‘Indeed. The first event involves scribes and recorders of Selene making trouble in the Cemetery, and the second is the astonishing disappearance of a gnostician into your building.’

  ‘You said this has something to do with you?’

  Dwllis nodded. ‘Madam, even one as genteel as I hears rumours. Folk speak of factions emerging within the Archive of Selene.’

  Querhidwe grumpily replied, ‘Let them. Is this all you had to say?’

  ‘It is a matter of concern.’

  Querhidwe waved him away. ‘I suggest you limit your concerns to the Cemetery and the Swamps.’

  Thus chastised, they departed. Dwllis said to Cuensheley, ‘There is something afoot. The Archive of Selene is experiencing difficulties. Unless I am much mistaken we have just been brushed off.’

  Cuensheley nodded. ‘I wonder what’s going on?’

  Dwllis took a deep breath. ‘It is my duty to find out.’

  ~

  Under night gloom the surface of the Swamps twinkled.

  Bubbles popped as gases rose from the pulsating depths. Through the biochemical glitter on the surface a multitude of tiny creatures scurried, some insectoid, others pincer wielding, still others hopping on padded feet, so that a maze of dark trails was left entangled amongst the rushes and broken stalks. Occasionally a purple glider would drop on silent wings to snap up the unwary. Elsewhere, cloaked gentlemen on punts pushed their weary way from an island in the centre of the Swamps to certain outposts, secret and disguised at the perimeter wall.

  Free of fog, to the south, a dark and bubbling morass lay surrounded by twitching reeds. These reeds began to thrash as if something was gnawing their roots, and the bubbles came thick and fast, spurring gel into the air and creating a symphony of squelching slaps. The gaseous eruption brought a smell of musk and cinnamon. Nearby animals fled.

  From the depths a creature rose. Emerging between two flanks of gel, with liquids trickling from the hole, its streamlined head first thrashed, then calmed as it stared with yellow eyes at its surroundings. Struggling to be released from its womb, it pounded the gel until it managed to crawl on to a low line of hillocks, where, breathing heavy like a machine exhaust, it rested.

  It was a man with a fish head: seven feet tall, muscled like a fighter, a baleful beast. As it lay panting, its unblinking eyes gleamed with jaundiced cunning. The cloak it wore crinkled, expanded then dried, like the wings of an insect emerging from the chrysalis, to become a voluminous garment covering polished armour, thick breeches, and boots shod with metal.

  With a great inhalation the creature stood upright. Nearby lay the Swamps wall, and flickering lights from houses off Platan Street. Grunting with exertion it waded across to the wall, climbing it easily, before stamping off Swamps debris from its garments.

  It strode south, for in that direction lay the Archive of Selene.

  CHAPTER 7

  Autumn settled upon the city, and with it came hordes of achloricians. These scarlet-suited Triaders armed with slicing implements, secateurs, hoes, forks and spades prowled the eight quarters of the city with zeal, cutting down and trampling the dying plant growth, removing even those leaves with only a hint of green. On every street, in addition to glass and grime, great clods of soil were dumped where the achloricians had dug up profusely verdant plants, and many of these clumps crumbled to expose grubs, worms, platelets and springs; but despite their hunger the gasping outers could not eat this food, for all was indigestible, and only mewing flocks of aerician chicks with their hooked teeth and forked tongues took advantage of the feast. Achloricians were not indiscriminate, however; everblue foliage they left undamaged.

  But these were not the only groups on the streets, for even the short-sighted now agreed that the moon was changing shape, and many Crayans left their houses to look up at the sky and wonder what was happening. From the Archive of Selene there emerged evangelical mobs proclaiming the new age of the moon, and many heeded these words, becoming beholden to Selene’s memoirs, since they did not doubt the evidence of their eyes. So the hours during which the moon arced from horizon to horizon became giddy street demonstrations, and often it was difficult to walk from one place to another. Amidst the cables, valves, hissing pipes and other street detritus it became common to find discarded lunar sticks, pamphlets lauding Selene’s virtues, and softly glowing vinyl crescents, all items manufactured at frantic rate by Archive factories. Many outers took the opportunity to better themselves by declaiming from pedestals, and some acquired fame by this method. Others were cast down, castigated by their friends, or even shot.

  After a week of lunar madness there came a response from the Triad. It was unpleasant.

  The squads were known as noctechnes. They dressed entirely in black. Each was armed with one truncheon, one energy rifle, and a serrated scimitar. To further intimidate the populace they painted black images of fish skulls and saw-toothed daggers on their cheeks. Fins sewn upon the spines of their costumes were steel spiked. It soon became clear that their task was to dampen the lunar ardour of ordinary Crayans, for they would threaten Selene’s clerks, even when these unfortunates were speaking in public, and sometimes they would arrest citizens at random. Nobody was killed or injured, but the experience was gruelling. A silent hatred began to form against the Reeve Umia and his Archive of Noct. But the noctechnes carried out their duties as if ignoring the world.

  It was only the more observant who noted, with sinking hearts, that Cray’s gnosticians also suffered harassment from the noctechnes, and wondered what horrors such barbarism presaged.

  Dwllis became frustrated. Events of late – the appearance of the lens, his Cemetery jaunt, trouble with gnosticians and events surrounding the Archive of Selene – had caused him grief, and often he found himself, at dead of night, pacing the chambers in which his antique memories were kept, wondering if the knowledge they contained mattered at all. The pain of Querhidwe’s rejection had in particular disconcerted him. Since seeing Crimson Boney enter the Archive of Selene by a back door, he had been tormented by his inability to make a link between the Archive and the gnosticians. Then of course there was the question of the transforming moon. Somehow, the calm, rational, plebeian life that he had led seemed a shadow in the past. He felt almost an obligation to act. He needed to go out, go out into the city and discover things. Sitting reading ancient scripts no longer seemed enough. Etwe tried to dissuade him, but he ignored her and demanded that she continue manufacturing interfaces.

  Luckily he pos
sessed stocks of qe’lib’we. He found that spongy substance useful when concocting plans. It was in such a mood, mechanically chewing, his mind a fecund haze, that he conceived the idea of breaking and entering.

  Immediately he realised he could not do it alone. Etwe was useless: so was the rather dense Coelendwia. He required somebody loyal and intelligent.

  Cuensheley? No, she would take advantage of him. But further chewing failed to provide inspiration. There was no alternative. Galling though it was, he would have to ask Cuensheley for help. No longer could he sit here and vegetate.

  He found it almost impossible next morning to find the courage to speak to her. For some minutes he wandered the alley outside the Copper Courtyard, turning over in his mind certain phrases, suggestions, particular ways of asking her for help, before entering and settling at his usual table. When Cuensheley saw him she hurried over.

  ‘You already run out of–’

  ‘Good morning, Cuensheley,’ he interrupted. ‘Do you have a moment to listen to a proposition?’

  Immediately he regretted that word. Her eyes shone.

  ‘A suggestion,’ he said, ‘that is what I meant.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I have been thinking about the Archive of Selene. We have got to discover what is going on in that lunar place. Do you agree?’

  ‘I agree, and it worries me, but what can we do?’

  ‘I need an accomplice – no, no, an assistant. An assistant. I think it is time we… well… what say we wander around by ourselves when there’s nobody there?’

  Excitement was plain on her face.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘It would be no walking party.’

  ‘I realise that,’ she replied. ‘Of course I’ll help. I want to know why all this trouble’s started too.’

  ‘I’ll pay you for your trouble, so the relationship is not one of favours.’

  ‘I’m not accepting money,’ Cuensheley protested. ‘I’m your friend.’

  Dwllis tried to smile, but it came out as more of a grimace. ‘Tomorrow it is new moon,’ he said, ‘and the Archive is empty when Selene is empty. We must go inside tomorrow night.’

  ‘Without fail,’ said Cuensheley, a gleam in her eyes. ‘Thank you for asking. I won’t ruin it, don’t worry. Before I had Ilquisrey I used to be look-out for a drug-running gang.’

  Startled, Dwllis sat back. ‘You did?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Now Dwllis did laugh. ‘In fact, being look-out was what I wanted of you.’

  Cuensheley reached out and put her hand on his.

  ‘It’s nice when you laugh. You don’t laugh often.’

  Dwllis withdrew his hand. ‘I am not often amused.’

  ‘You must have some sense of humour to have hatched this plan.’

  ‘You think it a joke?’

  Cuensheley shook her head. ‘It’s inspired. But it’s too eccentric for you to have thought it up. No, you dreamed it up.’

  Dwllis was silenced by these words. She was alluding to the drug, he knew, but in her fanciful way she was making light of serious affairs. He just did not know how to deal with her: she was serious, and yet frivolous; profound, and yet…

  ~

  The next morning he spent inside the Cowhorn Tower, interrupted only by Crimson Boney bringing more memories. He took a walk in the afternoon gloom, a brief jaunt around Sphagnum Mews. It was so dark, dark as night, that he had to increase the power on the lumod he carried, though he was able to reduce it once he reached the glittering Sphagnum Street.

  At dusk there developed a blood-red sunset that lit the city for a while, creating a myriad of crimson sparks from the vitrified buildings of the Blistered Quarter. These sparks, rising in columns of dust, seemed to float like fire motes into the heavens, ascending on thermals then falling back again, ever cycling, following the convection patterns of hot and cool air created by Cray’s industrial complexes.

  That evening Dwllis and Cuensheley, dressed in dark clothes and carrying backpacks, walked down through the Blistered Quarter, past Westcity Power Station, across into Eastcity and along Hog and Broom Streets, leading them to the alley upon which the rear of Selene’s Archive abutted. Here, Dwllis pointed out the grilles through which he intended making an entrance. Cuensheley nodded. The alley, a narrow passage with perspex dimly lit, was occupied only by them. Its nearer end was visible from the Archive wall, and that end Cuensheley watched while Dwllis eased free a rusty grille. Soon he and Cuensheley had squeezed into a low-roofed chamber, the grille loose but upright behind them.

  Dwllis uncovered his lamp – pink glow-beans in a mesh – and, after brushing the dust off his clothes with a sharp tsk, tsk, he looked around.

  They stood in a simple store room. Cheap gimmicks of glowing yellow lay scattered about. The floor showed a faint luminosity, gleaming dust and scraps. One door led out and this they opened: it led into a corridor.

  From his records Dwllis had a mental picture of the Archive plan, and he suspected that he ought to go down. Seeing steps, he indicated with exaggerated gestures that they should descend. He was not so simple as to think the place wholly empty, but he knew they had little chance of meeting anybody. Descending further, he saw he had taken the correct route. Twenty feet or so below ground level, where the steps opened out, he saw a plastic door on which the silhouette of a gnostician had been glued.

  ‘This could be it,’ he said. ‘We begin here.’

  ‘Be careful Dwllis,’ Cuensheley whispered.

  ‘Keep a look-out while I investigate.’

  The door was locked. Dwllis glanced at Cuensheley, and she produced a roll of lock picks. This was a disconcerting sensation for Dwllis, since he was used to people not understanding him. With quick flicks of the wrist she picked the lock.

  ‘Easy,’ she remarked.

  The door was heavy, heavier even than the door to the Cowhorn Tower, and it took both of them to make a gap wide enough for Dwllis to slip through.

  The room looked like a laboratory of some kind. It was a hundred feet long and half as wide, a cold chamber thrumming bassy with city reverberation. One side was laid out with metal tables, the other a jumble of apparatus, empty pyuter screens, pyuter rigs stacked haphazard like boxes; and everywhere wires. There were thousands of wires. The place was unlit. Dwllis’ glow-beans threw fluttering shadows black as Noct breath.

  On the metal tables, of which there were eight, gnosticians were laid out. They were alive but unconscious; as if belonging to a lunatic’s dream, they lay insensible. Dwllis found himself unable to look at their faces and it was all he could do to stop himself running out. But a stack of pyuters lay tempting, linked to a large screen laid flat on a desk, and he felt he had to operate it. From a clay pot standing next to the screen he poured a measure of fluid, covering the miniature joints of the base, the liquid expanding like warm gel with a rainbow static following its leading edge. Seconds later an opening screen flickered into view, upon it twenty small boxes shaped as lips; the entrances to pyuter routines. Noting one set of lips labelled ‘gnos,’ Dwllis opened it with a mounted needle.

  A holograph screen surrounded his head. Information was dense and not labelled for the uninitiated, and so he found it difficult to absorb what was present. Most of it seemed to be reports and documents concerning mental augmentation performed on gnostician subjects from the west of the city. But when, with mild shock, he noticed a document labelled with Crimson Boney’s image he knew he had found a data nugget.

  Mild shock became horror. Crimson Boney had been mentally augmented by Selene’s Archivists. Worse, the gnostician had been deliberately sent into the city to find memories and take them to the Cowhorn Tower. There, nestling at the bottom of the report, was Dwllis’s own picture.

  The feelings Dwllis felt turned his stomach. Repulsed, he ducked out of the holograph screen and leaned over one of the gnostician tables. These creatures were almost sentient: perhaps they were sentient, conscious like human beings. All this time everybody had consider
ed them little more than clever animals. The clerks of the Archive of Selene had guessed this after much research, and now were using their knowledge to further their own interests, whatever those might be; the medical reports mentioned no goals. These poor creatures had been violated, had been forced to accept veins of biotechnology into their heads. Dwllis felt an upwelling of sympathy and pity in his body, and as he leaned over the table he also felt great anger at what had been done. He did not know what to do with his emotions, and so, for a few moments, he just stayed put, breathing quickly.

  A shadow moved – something at his side. He stood.

  The gnostician was quick as a light mote. It grabbed his hand and bit with its mouth. The bandages around its head flapped. It screamed, a hideous though muffled noise like an engine overstretched.

  Dwllis pulled back. His right hand felt numb.

  He heard somebody at the door, but looked at his hand. His thumb, first finger, and part of his palm were gone. They were in the gnostician’s mouth. It was rolling around on its table.

  Blood spurted.

  Throat constricting, Dwllis grabbed his right hand, trying to stop the blood. He was too shocked to breathe.

  He wailed like a child. Then Cuensheley was at his side.

  The blood stank. He missed what happened next. He stood in limbo, clutching his hand. Cuensheley was doing something, yelling for him to keep still.

  A tourniquet at the wrist. She was pulling him from the room.

  He found himself outside the room. A thought took him: he yanked himself out of her grip.

  ‘My hand!’ he managed to gasp. ‘They’ll find it! They’ll trace me!’

  Swearing, Cuensheley disappeared back into the room. Dwllis heard voices above. Archive folk. They had been discovered.

  ‘Hurry!’ he whispered.

  She reappeared.

  ‘Turn the pyuter off–’ he began.

  ‘Fool!’ she hissed at him. ‘Shut up. There’s somebody coming!’

  Dwllis, panicking, looked around for something to hide behind. Cuensheley pulled him. He tripped, hardly able to see where he was going. She caught him, tugged him on.