The Only War

by Jason Wray Stevensson

  “What is the lemon in this context? You make it sound filthy.”

  “Wish I knew; there’s this old Nef I got talking with and a lot of the stuff he remembers makes no sense, but it sounds good.” Anna checks the time.

  “Don’t you have work?” Blue Cheer powered the mines, and Miles took a tin from a vending machine in the hall; the performance enhancer threw you through ten hours of toil and was available in distinctive diamond shaped pill form, or infused into a flavoured canned drink which chilled when opened. Nobody could pin down exactly which flavour, and the general consensus was antifreeze, but it was a welcome pick-me-up in the sweltering heat nonetheless. Overdoses were common, and first aid kits contained syringes pre-loaded with CBD-Ultra. This was a super-refined synthesis of the anti-psychotic component of cannabis sativa, and while it could bring a rushing miner back from the brink it would strip a sober man of healthy background levels of anxiety and paranoia, leaving him incapable of crossing the street in safety. It’s a dangerous world out there; you need to be a bit sketched out to get through the day alive.

  Annual Works Shutdown 2221 A.D.

  Back to the Garden

  Shutdown was a good time to be around New Sunlight as there were events and games throughout the holiday, but it was mostly for the families and Anna’s were back in England. She declared Miles fit to meet Mama and although apprehensive he was looking forward to it; he’d worked shutdown every year, but it wasn’t like he couldn’t use a break. Miles had dealt with the loss of his family by ignoring it; shutdown in New Sunlight would bring back things he couldn’t be doing with right now or most likely ever. Shutdown in New Sunlight without them; it was literally unthinkable. Sometimes the idea would spring upon him unbidden and he’d fight it back down like rising vomit, shivering from the strain for some time after. No way was he facing that any time soon.

  The Earth trip may take forty eight hours in a Navy cruiser with a top of the range StringStreamer Drive and military clearance for the straightest and most energetic strings, but for civilians it took five days each way so you only had a long weekend at home; the public tramp streamers were built for comfort and bustling with activity, so it was a holiday in itself. Miles is struck with a possibility.

  “England’s where a lot of this music came from; I know we don’t have much time but I’d like to visit a museum or two. You never know, I could get lucky.”

  “My sister Patricia works at the British Museum; we can meet her there, maybe have a snoop around after hours. What are you looking for? There’s no history of this beyond your big mate.”

  “Sheet music would be perfect, but anything from the era; the record from my old sleeve was flat, round and seven inches in diameter. Apparently they were mostly black and could go up to twelve across, but you need a machine to hear them. Nobody remembers these things so they’ll not be neatly labelled.”

  “Anything unclassified would be worth a look if Patricia has access; aren’t most of the exhibits in a museum in storage at any given time? I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere.”

  “I’m hoping for twentieth century music players but I could fall over one and not know it.” Anna senses something.

  “Are you about to suggest fetching the BFG along?” Miles feigns surprise.

  “Gosh! I hadn’t given it any thought. Well, now you bring it up Zed would know what to look for better than any of us; he did seem keen when I mentioned it in passing.”

  “Zed? Is that what we’re calling him now?”

  “It beats mispronouncing his real name every time I can’t avoid using it. There’s a Zed at the beginning; he doesn’t seems to mind.”

  “You know, you’re one of very few humans to strike up a friendship with a Nephilim, a practically immortal being privy to the secrets of the ages, and you spend your entire time talking about old music.”

  “You take your secrets of the ages as you find them. Not my fault if he hasn’t shown me the Ark of the Testimony; it’d be nice to have, but how much use would I get from it?”

  “As long as you both know Mama will probably insist he sleeps in the stables.” At least she wouldn’t have to tell the Nephilim to watch his language, she thought; she’d never heard one utter a profanity. If they even took the Lords’ name in vain it would be followed by a guilty skyward flick of the eyes.

  Bd Customs, in common with those attached to all domed communities, are more than happy to let anyone out. The very idea of overcrowding anywhere with an atmosphere is frankly a joke, as anyone who has driven through Northumberland can tell you, but it’s the difference between thriving outpost and mass grave out here. Getting back in is generally quite time consuming, but given the choice Bd Customs would cheerfully vacuum up everyone in the departure lounge and fire them from a cannon. Zed’s passport is a century or so out of date and processing is further hampered by a lack of biometric data or surname; even Bd Outbound have to draw the line somewhere. If you’ve no bio’s you may be a vegetable, which is a different matter as food can be scarce in the colonies.

  “Nephilim” states Miles flatly “his name’s Zed Nephilim and you can take all the bio’s you want if it’ll get the line moving.”

  “Hey!” admonished the new Mr. Nephilim in protest.

  “Oh don’t be such a baby! It’ll hardly sting, even when they scrape your eyeballs.”

  Bloomsbury, London

  Thursday Evening

  Earth was horrifying, at least until you got indoors; straight off the ship the atmospheric currents were literally breath taking. Nothing in the climate controlled domes of home could prepare Miles for this; it felt as if he were choking on cold oxygen. The sky extended up and on forever; absolutely forever with no barrier between your warm squashy little body and a deadly firmament of charged particles two thousand miles out into freezing space. Some simple hardy organisms can survive near vacuum and temperate extremes in a state akin to suspended animation, but in so doing leave themselves vulnerable to radiation; their inactive bodies cannot create proteins or rebuild DNA as quickly as cells are being attacked, and death is inevitable. Life came not to this plane or any other on a falling star; we are raised from the Earth, or to put it another way, we never left the meteor.

  The mouth of the Galactic Highways radiation tunnel was still faintly visible in the sky this far from South Downs Spaceport, a reminder there was but one way out alive. The tunnel housed an enormous coil of copper wire running its entire two thousand mile length. Your standard system hopper is essentially a massive electric cell with big magnets at each end; this arrangement enables a fully charged vessel to fling itself up the tunnel and into space where the naked sun will power up the StringStreamer drive. A ship lands by discharging into an array and lowering itself down on bursts of superheated air. You are absolutely not permitted to land with a charged drive; if it goes off in an atmosphere the sudden air displacement can be catastrophic.

  Miles felt for street furniture as they walked for fear he would be sucked back to Bd. Why did everyone else seem fine with this? All around him, the populace appeared oblivious to a Hellish wind intent on scouring them from the streets! A ridiculously powerful sun hung low on the horizon and blinded him every chance it got; the difference in rotation wasn’t doing him any favours either. It was early November, and a warm All Hallows had given way to undeniable autumn; trees waved their skeletal branches, high on chlorophyll reclaimed from tides and eddies of golden leaves swirling around his feet. Miles knew about trees; he’d seen trees in the domes and trees shouldn’t move! He could almost believe these creaking ghouls self aware and predatory, prepared at any moment to rise from the dirt and advance on gnarled and powerful roots. Gangs of noisy starlings boiled over in the upper branches, furiously broadcasting their unfathomable pride in little more than being starlings. Miles, Zed and Anna unsteadily climbed the pediment at the museums’ south entrance, holding onto each other for support. Fireworks exploded randomly everywhere, adding to their confusion; Zed explained t
his was because parliament tortured a Catholic seven hundred years ago, which seemed to Miles no explanation at all. Anna sights her sister straight away.

  “Tish! So glad we caught you! I didn’t think we were going to get here before they closed.”

  “Oh we’re open till eight thirty most days; not got your Earth legs yet? It’ll all come back in no time, don’t you worry!” she slapped her sister on the back and Miles had to catch Anna as she fell. “You sounded interested in specific exhibits over the phone.” Miles explains about the music player.

  “You’re in luck! The Living and Dying room’s running an object handling session starting in about ten minutes; anything we can’t classify usually gets called a religious artefact, but there’s something labelled ‘experimental clockwork moon phase predictor’ which you should see.” It is a hand cranked Victrola record player with a ten inch disc still in the cabinet; Miles records its output on his interface, but the museum is closing.

  “Damn; wish there was a way I could stay in here all night.” Anna puts her foot down.

  “If you think I’m facing my mother alone you have another think coming, laddie!” Zed jerks his thumb to a sign on the wall which read night watchman required – immediate start.

  “I could do that.”

  “Would you want to?” asks Miles “Seems a drag to travel five days and not even get a holiday.”

  “Put it this way; you know how nostalgic you got when the paper ran a piece on things you never see since all the new food laws came in?” Miles certainly does.

  “Sugar bombs were incredible, man! I can’t believe I forgot about those; I used to have them every morning when I was little!”

  “It’s the same thing, multiplied by a million; there are whole languages I’ve forgotten in this place! Seriously, don’t worry about me.” Anna looks to Patricia.

  “Wouldn’t it be awkward for you though? If he got the job and skipped out Tuesday back to Bd?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Oh, I clean forgot to mention! It’s my last day today; I’m starting at Viscount Tull Agricultural Comp next week.”

  “And becoming a land girl?” puzzles her sister. There was an element of green wellied heartiness about Patricia; she was nuts about ponies when they were kids, and must have seen National Velvet twenty times if she’d seen it once.

  “I’ll be Assistant to the Deputy Librarian! Viscount Tull houses the largest body of agricultural works on Earth; they lend and exchange with universities and institutions across the three systems. There are tablets dating from before the Sumerians and I’m going to touch them!” She gave an involuntary quiver of excitement “It’s my leaving do tonight and you’re all obviously invited.”

  London wasn’t a city anymore. Cities were extremely few and far between; people need a reason to live cheek by jowl, and those reasons had largely disappeared. There are man made blights to be seen here and there; the sprawl of runways and launch pads known as South Downs Spaceport, for example, covers fifteen square miles. Attached to the spaceport is the Mary Rose Space & Marine Comprehensive, itself large enough to warrant four separate places of worship, and a small town of cheap but pleasant workers houses; below all this is the docklands, where spacecraft are built and ships launched. There is that one gigafactory stretching from Vegas to Reno, and the Walled City of Pyongyang is pretty big, but teleportation meant you could live anywhere and leisure activities were contained within theme park ghettos. If you wanted to get bombed out of your mind in a deafening fun pub you went to Party Town in West Yorkshire; if your pursuits were of a higher brow you headed for WC1, London.

  With Zed being shown the ropes by a caretaker, Miles and Anna exit the museum with Patricia’s colleagues. A few streets away they descend darkened steps to a room full of smoke, and music like nothing Miles has ever heard. It made little sense at first and he had the impression for a couple of minutes they were tuning up, but then he heard something in the cacophony before it was swallowed up again. He could see the musicians were good; if he shut his ears to the sound their speed and precision took his breath away. Playing in the Igniters was musically undemanding and the trick was to make it look hard; these people were the exact mirror image of that paradigm and more than once he would like to have applauded, but this was not that kind of crowd. He is surprised to see the first silvery streaks of dawn breaking as they ascend to street level, so they get a few hours sleep and a wash at a capsule hotel. Midday sees them alighting, not looking too bedraggled all things considered, at the village stop. The Housekeeper Mrs. Besom, having been keeping half an eye on the teleticker, meets them at the door.

  “Welcome home Lady Annabel; good do was it, Lady Patricia?”

  “Awesome Mrs. Besom, I’m still a bit tiddly. Is Mama at home?”

  Anna’s mum was very posh and Patricia was posh when you thought about it, so Anna knew how to fake it from a lifetime of observation. The Cramphorns owned much of Lincolnshire and were as Saxon as it got, having been one of the few old families to weather the Norman Conquest, but Anna’s given name was less ancestral than you may suppose.

  There had been a brief fashion for those wonderfully bohemian Humber Mountain girls’ names, which evoke the circumstances of birth. The suffix bel was customarily attached, presumably a corruption of the Latin Bella, and it is all well and good to greet the world as Sunbel or Paschabel, but Patricia had been breech born slightly before the fad. Somehow she came out bottom first; they’d used forceps to extract her head and she considered herself lucky not to have been named Tongsbel.

  Following the appropriated tradition, the name Annabel was invariably bestowed upon a second daughter; if a mountain family had a third daughter the unfortunate child would be christened Annanotherbel.

  They are ensconced in a small but presumably tasteful parlour, and Miles is perched upon an occasional chair; he fought down a compulsion to touch his forelock as he wondered what the chair could possibly be on other occasions.

  “Now Annabel, are you still scraping by as an underpaid intern?”

  “Why yes Mama, although money is hardly the point!”

  “Ah, in which case your career is going to plan; I didn’t realise you had a strategy.”

  “You know I’ve made a study of the reforming philanthropists of the StringStreamer boom; actually living and working in New Sunlight is a dream come true for me.” Miles guessed their domestic arrangement was not maternal knowledge, shacked up as they were in a famously inexpensive part of Port Alpha “Do you know the local children still think Barwing’s ghost will grab them if they stay the night near his grave? It’s improving to immerse oneself in the colonies; broadens the outlook considerably.”

  “I dare say, but you’d do well to remember your Aunt Myrtle; quite the Lady Adventuress and shot full of spikes by carnivorous puffballs before her twenty-fifth birthday. I blame your father of course; I said at the time Barwings’ awful books were wholly unsuitable for children and look where they led you!” Anna is quick to defend her childhood favourites.

  “It was only the Count Scion series, not Ghastly Tales of Rotting Torment!” Miles is faintly surprised to learn Count Scion is in books now; it’s probably one of those Mandela things and he’ll get home to find the films never happened. He is whisked back to the here and now by the attention of Mama upon him.

  “Is this the boy you told me about? The chimney sweep, wasn’t it?”

  “Miles is a miner Mama, they all are out there. He’s a musician in his free time though.” A matriarchal eyebrow arches.

  “Really? They take their meals between the under butler and the first footman downstairs.” Miles ventures a defence.

  “I think I may have found a way to monetize it.”

  “Intriguing; one would think such a thing akin to monetizing thin air, or literature.”

  “With respect Ma’am, if we can monetize land we can monetize anything.” The temporal vacuum created when even time stops to watch is quite something; it feels like an abs
ence of oxygen. Anna calculates her exit; she can just about make it if she goes through Patricia, who looks thrilled and has just silently mouthed something very Saxon. After what seems a frozen eternity, Mama speaks.

  “Touché; and don’t be so formal Miles, call me Margot.” Anna’s jaw hits the floor and some cake falls onto her saucer “Do close your mouth Annabel; it’s like watching a cement mixer. Have you heard about the Marquess Fältskog?” Anna swallows and rallies.

  “Damien’s not a Marquess Mama, he’s illegitimate.”

  “Hardly a fitting observation over afternoon tea, nevertheless he is the son of a Duke if not the heir; apparently he’s been stepping out with a gardener.”

  “Brave gardener. Do I know her?”

  “Possibly, she did get the Nobel prize for something or other.” Patricia chips in.

  “Ooh! Is this Faith Lancaster, recipient of the first ever prize for palaeobotany and youngest winner since Malala Yousafzai? Lancaster’s Herbal is on the National Curriculum and she wrote it when she was eleven! Her work on the superposition of entangled hogweed may supplant the StringStreamer; it already posits what amounts to a galactic teleporter and who knows how far beyond! Damien has done well; the woman’s a genius.”

  “A glowing reference to be sure” concedes Mama “Damien is to visit with the girl on Sunday; you must promise not to swoon or pester her for an autograph, or I shall call the whole thing off.”

  As unwed young people they are allocated separate chambers so Anna is of course in Miles’ room three minutes after lights out, sitting on his bed and exhaling a lungful of Alpha Kush out the window. The psychoactive weed thrived in the gently circulating atmosphere of the domes, and grew faster than the population could smoke it; next to minerals it was Bd’s biggest export. The once Holy sacrament of marijuana had long been supplanted in the recreational marketplace by Frankenstein varieties with all the might but none of the light; at one point the only natural strains left were frozen in seed banks, and it was these which found their way aboard the Deus Vult. The Nephilim brought it to Bd; one is science and exploration in the name of God, the other is drug smuggling and quarantine evasion. Go figure.