Glass

by Stephen Palmer

  She raised the laser and thumbed it to full power. In her other hand she held one of Mogyardra’s black tubes, though it was not loaded. When Tanglanah moved to stamp out the possibility of human beings departing, she yelled, ‘Stop!’

  All three swung round.

  ‘Stop,’ she repeated, still louder. ‘If anybody moves, I’ll fire. That includes you, Dwllis.’

  ‘Laspetosyne and I will stay put,’ Tanglanah said. ‘Do not fire upon us! What do you want, Subadwan?’

  Subadwan replied, ‘Just you. You won’t be leaving. In fact, I’ll give you a choice. You either stay here with us or take every last Crayan with you. We are not being left here to die.’

  Tanglanah stood perfectly still for a minute. Rubble fell, crashing to the ground, dust swirling down on cold gusts of wind. The Reeve’s chamber was open to the sky. Shivering, Subadwan waited.

  At last, Tanglanah spoke. ‘I cannot make the decision without consulting Greckoh, who is the oldest noophyte.’

  Subadwan frowned. ‘Where is Greckoh?’

  ‘She awaits me in the Spacefish.’

  Subadwan shrugged. ‘Then you are separated?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Subadwan shook her head. ‘I couldn’t trust you. You must realise that.’

  ‘I understand perfectly. Fortunately, there is a simple solution. Laspetosyne will contact Greckoh, during which time you will train your laser upon me. Laspetosyne will return with Greckoh’s decision. If we try to entrap you, then you may fire at me. But we are sincere. You won’t be harmed.’

  Subadwan felt confused. Detecting a trick she asked Tanglanah, ‘What will Laspetosyne do?’

  Laspetosyne answered, ‘We retain a few meditational capabilities, such as you witnessed Tanglanah performing when Gwmru imposed itself upon the city. A mental call can be made.’

  Subadwan considered. The prospect of losing Laspetosyne did not worry her. If Laspetosyne failed to return within a specified time, she would hold Tanglanah hostage. Would Tanglanah sacrifice herself for Laspetosyne? Highly unlikely. More believable would have been the reverse situation.

  She threw a glance of disrespect across to Laspetosyne. ‘I’ll give you five minutes,’ she said.

  Tanglanah told Laspetosyne, ‘You must ask only one question. Ask Greckoh if humans can leave with us. The answer must be one of either yes or no.’

  ‘I will ask,’ Laspetosyne said. She stood relaxed, and her head drooped so that her chin touched her collar bones. To Subadwan’s dismay Tanglanah adopted a similar position. She twitched, rifle ready, expecting a leap, a pounce, but Tanglanah stayed quiet as if embracing sleep. Subadwan waited, skin prickling, too afraid of a trap to do anything.

  ‘What is happening?’ Dwllis asked.

  Subadwan called out. ‘Tanglanah? Tanglanah?’

  ‘Is she in a trance, too?’

  A minute passed. It might have been less. Time’s passage flew unreal.

  In the time of an eyeblink the Archive became a tumble of wreckage – cracked, melted, blistered. Subadwan, shocked for a few seconds, realised that Gwmru had imposed itself upon the city for a final, desperate moment, and she knew who had forced it: Tanglanah and the rest of her kin.

  Dwllis stood at her side. The transmuted Pikeface was now more like a new shoot bending gracefully in a breeze, and she smelled a sweet perfume off its leaves. As for Dwllis, he too seemed different. He was frailer, smaller, bent over at the shoulders just enough to give the impression of weakness.

  She looked up. From the Spacefish figures descended. Subadwan counted them. Six.

  As they closed, Tanglanah and Laspetosyne reappeared. Tanglanah laughed. One of the six, Greckoh the black insect, approached her.

  ‘We have succeeded,’ Tanglanah said. ‘Kill them! I will prepare the astromorph.’

  In seconds, Subadwan and Dwllis faced the six electronic beings. Greckoh was at the front, the other five – a motley collection of mutated beast-women – seething with anger behind. Laspetosyne looked on from the side, the static energy of her fury raising her hair into a cap of spikes. Subadwan stepped backward. She raised her weapons.

  The black tube was gone and the laser had been replaced with Zelenaiid’s razor. Quivering with fear, Subadwan raised the glass shell, but she could find no words of warning. Failure seemed close.

  ‘We have destroyed the abstract Archive of Noct,’ Greckoh hissed through chattering mandibles. ‘You will not find us so flimsy this time, human.’ She spoke that word as if referring to the most insignificant creatures imaginable.

  Subadwan was too shocked to reply. She reached for Dwllis’s hand, grasped it, and stood firm. He too remained silent.

  One of their opponents, a woman with a dog’s head, leaped forward as if unable to restrain her anger. Instinctively Subadwan, eyes closed, lashed out with the razor.

  Silence. She opened her eyes.

  Her attacker had been transformed to glass. She hung inches away from Subadwan. Subadwan punched with her left fist, and the vitrified object smashed into a thousand pieces.

  ‘Madam,’ Dwllis said, ‘your foot!’

  Subadwan’s right foot had been transformed also.

  But Dwllis continued, ‘Madam, this is an abstract world! Your glassy foot is but a metaphor. Destroy them all!’

  Greckoh and the others had been staring at their lost comrade, but now, roaring and screaming, they leaped forward. Dwllis shrieked and staggered back, but Subadwan stood her ground, lashing out at the flailing creatures, turning them to glass with each hit, but losing her own self in the process. Every transmutation lost her part of a limb.

  Flashing seconds passed. Subadwan stood panting before a pile of shards. Laspetosyne, Greckoh, and a woman with talons and a hawk’s head stood close. Dwllis lay gibbering some yards behind.

  Subadwan glanced down at her body. The entirety of her right leg and the left foot of her Gwmru-self had vitrified. She was fading. She tottered, unable to stand firm.

  ‘Cowards!’ she yelled. ‘Come and get me!’

  Laspetosyne and Tanglanah ran towards the astromorph, but the two abstract beings leaped forward, parting to attack from left and right.

  Without thought, Subadwan grasped the shell in both hands and split it. She threw: left, right.

  Both halves hit. She staggered to the left to smash the hawk-woman, but saw that both her own hands were now glass. With no other option she punched, and both the image and her own hand shattered into flying shards.

  Greckoh she punched with her other hand. Now all her limbs were fragmenting under the stress. She collapsed to the floor.

  Laspetosyne was at the astromorph. ‘Shutdown!’ she called. ‘Shutdown! Destructive interference!’

  A rumbling began. It emanated from the base of the vehicle. Subadwan saw translucent pink leaves spiralling out from the conical green case at the top. Laspetosyne forced her way into the astromorph.

  ‘It’s launching!’ Dwllis yelled. ‘They’re inside!’

  Subadwan watched as the rumbling grew ever louder, knowing it was too late. Dwllis ran to her and dragged her away, but she fought him off like a wild animal. As he looked at her in horror and began to stumble away across the thrumming ground, she followed him, crawling as best she could.

  The astromorph engines, if engines it had, gave a wheezing whine. Subadwan and Dwllis stopped retreating. They could see the pink head of the vehicle through the ruined roof of the central chamber. A lattice of pale rootlets had grown in the air around the astromorph, out of empty space, or so it seemed. With a final wheeze the astromorph, its roots gripping the rootlet scaffolding with dazzling speed, ascended into the air above the Archive. There it paused. A tower of rootlets appeared around it, rising high into the heavens, disappearing from view in the direction of the Spacefish. With a roar the astromorph lifted itself away, climbing the tower faster than a bullet from a rifle, so fast that every pink lamina became detached and floated to the ground.

  Subadwan, tears in he
r eyes, hardly able to speak for the loss in her heart, said, ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand… Oh, Gaya, I don’t understand.’

  Dwllis stood at her side, staring, as she did, at the wisps of rootlet that twitched, hardened, then fell out of the sky, fragmenting as they did to form a rain of delicate wafers that smelled of sweet perfume and corrosive fumes. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘You see, madam, those things known as flowers never evolved around or in Cray. We have just seen the most arcane expression of our heritage: a flower. Those pink leaves are called petals. Pikeface was no fish-man, he was an ancient flower. Damn it, we have all been fooled, madam, every last one of us.’

  And then Gwmru was shut down, and they were left amidst the real ruins, the freezing, dusty, filthy ruins of the Archive of Noct.

  CHAPTER 25

  Three figures struggled north through the dead city, cloaked against the bitter wind that snaked through empty lanes – a wind no longer heated by the effluvia of a hundred factories and ten thousand machines. Around them, all was gloom. Streets were dark plastic, buildings were shattered or diseased, and only occasional noises disturbed the silence. No mechanisms. A few creeping people. Whispering gnosticians came to scavenge for glass splinters. Vast plains of glass spread to the south, deeply dark, cracks showing up like storms of brown lightning, while to the east the Swamps bubbled and stank. They too were dark.

  Frost twinkled on every exposed surface.

  Above, a tiny Spacefish gleamed in a turbid sky, like a distant salmon leaping the interstellar gulf.

  Two of the figures, Dwllis and Etwe, stood upright, Etwe pushing an improvised wheelchair in which Subadwan’s shrunken body lay amidst polythene cushions. What remained of her left leg stuck out in front of the wheelchair. Her wrists were bandaged with black cloth. Lacking hands to steady herself, she bounced and jerked as the wheelchair was pushed along crumbling streets.

  She glanced to one side to see a supine figure in a doorway. For a moment she saw a face amid the rags, and it seemed to be Aquaitra. Then the moment passed and she was pushed onward.

  They entered the Cemetery and began to negotiate its ruts of frozen mud, at length encountering a few druids sat against a barrow, tired and hungry druids with no hope in their faces. Normally they would have challenged the newcomers, but now there was no reason to do so.

  Subadwan approached one of them. ‘We’re looking for a radio. Do you have one?’

  The druid glanced at his colleagues, then said, ‘You’ll have to get inside a barrow. But you are wasting your time, for the broadcasts of the afterlife have ceased.’

  ‘Is there a barrow?’

  The druid shrugged. ‘That one over there?’ He pointed to an incomplete granite barrow. ‘Just heave the front stone over.’

  This they did. Inside, the body of a pyuton lay, dust and grime gathered upon her. The radio to which she was attached showed a blue indicator, signifying internal batteries still good.

  Etwe and Dwllis knelt by it. Etwe said, ‘I would have come here to rest, had Cray not been left to die. This would have been my place of resting.’

  Dwllis heard, but was too intent on tuning the radio to make any answer. ‘Have we got the correct band?’ he asked.

  Etwe looked. ‘I think so.’

  Then: a sound, as of abstract trees moving under the breath of an abstract breeze.

  ‘That is it,’ said Dwllis. ‘That is the Gwmru broadcast, the whisper of all those shifting memories.’

  But it was faint. The sound of Gwmru was barely audible over the cycling, phased white noise of the carrier wave. For almost half an hour they listened, before the sound faded, crackled, and then, with a resonant sound as of a door closing, died for ever.

  About the Author

  Stephen Palmer is the author of seven published SF novels – Memory Seed, Glass, Flowercrash, Muezzinland, Hallucinating, Urbis Morpheos, and The Rat & The Serpent (originally published under the name Bryn Llewellyn). His short fiction has been published by NewCon Press, Solaris, Wildside Press, SF Spectrum, Eibonvale Press, Unspoken Water and Rocket Science.

  Ebook editions of all seven novels are available, most of them from infinity plus. His most recent novel, Hairy London, is published by infinity plus in December 2013. He lives and works in Shropshire, UK.