Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  “I want someone killed.”

  The Brothers Ho smile politely.

  “Go to the assassins, patron. Employ them. Our business is not in death of that manner.”

  “Where is the artistry in employing assassins? Where is the personal sense of triumph? It is like paying to hear another composer’s sonatas; there is no satisfaction in the dry notification of a contract fulfilled. I must orchestrate it myself. It must be my own work, my own composition, my own personal vengeance.”

  “Ah, so it is the Dom Merreveth, then, patron.”

  “You pay close attention to the gossip of the Gracious.”

  “All the city has heard of your discomfiture, patron. Alas, but woman is as fickle and independent as—”

  “It is nothing to do with you. Nothing.”

  “Apologies, apologies, patron. We presume too much on our kinship.”

  “This ‘kinship’ is too slender a thing by far to support your right to gossip about your superiors. Consider this: you have a business and a respected name among all castes of the city, although you have had to relinquish your gracious name and take a common appellation. How many other disinherited clones can claim such favorable treatment? Nobler families than the Perellens have sold their engineered sons and daughters to the licensed mendicants and seraglios.”

  “Nobler families than the Perellens would not perhaps have required seven attempts.”

  “Enough. I am not responsible for our father’s whims. He wished his heir to be a composer, he cloned new sons until he had his composer, and that is it. Need I remind you that under the new law there may be only one legal claimant to any genotype? You live under sufferance and my good favor. Now, my dealings with the House Merreveth. I want to hear your suggestions for a fine present for the Gracious Dom as an apology for my behavior at his pageant.”

  From a high shelf the Brothers Ho (who we now see to be more than brothers, yet less) bring leather-bound volumes of sample books and a small imager which they employ to display their wares to Dom Perellen. They show him the wheeled gyropeds from the lava plains of Fafenny, helicoptera from the crystal forests of Chrios, fire-dwelling pyrogenes that seem mere lumps of dull stone until the moment they unfold in a blossom of flame; elegant, priceless agapanthas from Hannad, monstrous panjas from the mountains of Ninn; gooseberry-green vegemorphs that derive their motive power from sunlight and water; singing choirs of angels no larger than the palm of his hand; flocks of fritillaries on chains of silver filigree: he sees grampus, oliphaunt, kraken and werwulf; fur and feather, fang and fire. The imported exotica of a dozen worlds do not impress Dom Perellen.

  “Something more homely,” he says, “the gentle Dom is a home-loving fatherly man.” So again the books open and the imager displays: hunting trophies of every conceivable species that can be followed with fowling-piece, crossbow, or light-lance; strange near-human creatures from the forgotten quarters of the city; diorama cases of prehistorical beasts from remote epochs; dumb-waiters and mechanical tray-boys in the shapes of gallimaufs and padishants; humorous novelty collages assembled from diverse pieces of reptiles, birds, fishes, and mammals; mounted grotesques, like the two-headed kitten and the pair of Siamese-twin calves; collections of insects, birds, and small mammals; amusing novelty automata … Here Dom Perellen stops them and exclaims, “The very thing!”

  “What, patron, the House Mouse Family?”

  “Precisely, citizen. The Dom Merreveth may be doubtful of a gift to himself from me, and rightly so, for I’ll grant him a certain shrewdness, but a gift to his dear children could not possibly be suspect. And what could be more innocent, what better to delight a child’s eye, than our little family of mice? How quickly can you have a set prepared?”

  “Four days, patron?”

  “Three?”

  “It could be done, but not easily. The minutiae of detail, patron; we pride ourselves that our automata are indistinguishable from life.”

  “Your import licenses are due to expire shortly. I can arrange for another half-year’s extension.”

  “Thank you, patron, but we live in difficult and trying times. Despite the quarantine and the best efforts of the St. Charl Guard, not a night passes without the shrieks of the Ragers, the carniphages, crying from our rooftops, nor morning break without some new poor victim having fallen to them.”

  “You are vulnerable, I understand. I shall have one of my personal wardens remain to guard your workshop by night.”

  “Thank you, Grace, but for the books …”

  “Ah, the books; the books must balance, the gentlemen of the exchequer never sleep. You will be paid fairly for your work, never fear. It is the least I can do for my unfortunate siblings. Now: the automata; there are a few minor changes I wish you to make.”

  * * * *

  Now it is noon, for the carillons of St. Maikannen’s Chantry have rung out the Thirteenth Hour, and in the plaza beneath the bell-keep Dom Perellen takes wine with a few intimate friends from his circle of artists and aesthetes. They drink and laugh and stretch their elegant limbs in the weak autumn sunshine and exchange morsels of malicious gossip. But there is little pleasure in raillery for Dom Perellen for he knows that at other tables in other plazas beneath other bell-keeps other young bucks are lampooning and laughing at him.

  Later they visit the Govannon Academy and fall in with a group of five young Gracious ladies, come like them to view the paintings. Dom Perellen drops a two-forent tip to the human chaperon, and his friends distract the mechanical conscience for the few moments necessary for him to slip aside with the Infanta Phaedra on pretext of showing her the exhibition. Later, at the House Perellen, he will entertain her with some short sonatas of his own composing. On their return from the Academy, with the campaniles sounding Nineteen o’Clock and the starlings flocking and swooping about the spire of St. Severyn’s Cathedral, they are diverted from their course by the St. Charl Guards who have cordoned off an area surrounding a disused trading factor’s warehouse.

  “Ragers, Graces,” says the fat perimeter sergeant. “Carniphages. Traced a chapter of ‘em to this ‘ere warehouse. Soon have ‘em smoked out, rest assured. What you’ve got to do, Graces, bum out the Plague.”

  The Infanta Phaedra presses closer for reassurance and Dom Perellen commands his mechanical quintet to play and quench the sound of the screams. The little boat moves on. Behind, the sun-forged blades of the laser-lances cauterize the alien infection. Soon the cries are lost and all that can be heard is the gentle lilting of the music and the lap of dark water under the bow as the ebbing tide draws them down the confluence of conduits and channels toward Elder Sea.

  * * * *

  Dawn finds Dom Perellen gazing into the ceiling. Confusing ripple-reflections move across plasterwork cherubs and peacocks. The Infanta Phaedra stirs contentedly in her sleep but Dom Perellen does not hear her, for he is far away in the passages of his mind. Dawn is the hour when the death-white corpse-boats slip from their moorings behind the Hall of Weeping and steal away into the sunrise to the funeral grounds. Only the gravely smiling boatmen who crew the water-hearses know the latitude and longitude of the funeral grounds, but in his imagination Dom Perellen can see them slipping the weighted coffins over the stem into fog-shrouded Elder Sea. For this is the vision that haunts him, a corpse-boat making its slow cold passage across the bar into Elder Sea. Between the somber upright figures of the boatmen is a white coffin bearing the crest of a Gracious Family unfamiliar to him. He sees the coffin sinking into the clean cold water without even a ripple, sinking with today’s company of bakers and butchers and lawyers and priests, merchants and traders and lowly playactors, poets and painters and wise men and fools. The citizens of the City of Man fall through the water to stand side by side in serried ranks of Grace and groveler, a submarine army waiting at attention on the silt and sediment of centuries for the fanfares of the Pantochrist on the Dawn of Resurrection when all will be summoned to the rising Land of Gold. The coffin rests in the ble
ssed company of the Ancestors Beneath the Sea, those ancestors whose faces line the walls of the music room. It disturbs Dom Perellen that he cannot identify the armorial crest upon the sunken coffin.

  For two further mornings this vision is to come to him. He lies alone under the startled scrutiny of cherubs on clouds and virgins pursued by stags, for his vengeful intensity has so disturbed the Infanta Phaedra that she will not consent to any further nights with him. “Like poison,” she describes it. “Like a venom working behind the eyes.” Dom Perellen shrugs and returns to the elaborate drawing out of his revenge. There is no doubt in his mind that the unidentified coffin is that of his enemy.

  Just before noon on the second day the pneumatique delivers a message cylinder to his office. It states quite simply, Work completed, awaiting your Grace’s disposal. Respectfully, Adam Ho. In reply Dom Perellen gathers together four important pieces of paper: a Mercantile Letter of Credit for the sum of five hundred forents, an importation permiso from the Port Wardens valid for the period of five months, precise instructions on the delivery of the automata collection, and an accompanying letter to the Dom Merreveth in which Dom Perellen extends his apologies to his onetime patron for having been out of sorts at the pageant and begs, for the sake of old affection, that the good Dom overlook his breach of etiquette by accepting this humble gift to his children. He places the documents in an empty cylinder, addresses it, drops it into the slot, and thinks nothing more about it. While the cylinder crosses beneath the city, he amuses himself by composing a set of complex improvisations about a simple, repetitive theme. It entertains him for the remainder of the afternoon.

  * * * *

  Now the picture changes again, and we are in a Great House of grand halls and spacious galleries. Portraits of ancestors line its walls and the slow lap of water wears away at its stones, grain by grain, undermining the centuries. This is the House Merreveth, and we are in the nursery. Three children sleep by the glow of watch-candles, their faces folded to the pillows in simple dreams of childhood, nannies no more than a whisper away. It has been a good day; new toys to play with, a present from a friend of Papa’s, a gift to make even the most blasé of aristocratic children gasp in delight. A family of mice, perfect in every detail: Grandpa in nightshirt with pipe, Grandma with her glasses and knitting, Mamma and Pappa Mouse, Mamma in apron and mop hat, Pappa in working bib-and-braces, and the three children in their neat little school uniforms. But more wonderful still, by repeating a magic word whispered to them by a tall, soft-spoken artisier in a streetmask, the tiny diorama comes to life. Mamma sews and Pappa saws, Grandpa puffs his pipe, Grandma knits and rocks her tiny rocking chair, and the children scamper about playing Chase and Blind-Man’s Buff, tiny mouse voices squeaking.

  The adventures of the mouse family entertained the children until bedtime, and now the minute, intricate automata lie where play has left them, transfixed by slats of moonlight beaming through the nursery shutters. Then two tiny ears prick upright in the moonlight. And two more, and two more, and two tiny red eyes blink open, and a tail twitches. From the frozen postures of abandoned games the mice stretch into animation. They seem almost alive, scurrying across the nursery floor and under the door, but they are no more than precise mechanisms dressed in flensed mouse-skins. It is the boast of the Brothers Ho that their creations cannot be distinguished from reality. By the secret run-ways and traverses known only to living mice they move through the sleeping House, to mice as vast and varied in its terrain as the City of Man to men. In time they come to the Dom’s bedchamber. From behind a plasterwork rose on the coping they absorb the scene with pink sensor eyes.

  The Dom Merreveth sleeps alone: this is well known among the Gracious Houses, for the Dom’s attraction to women lies in his potency in the public world of the arts and commerce rather than in the private world of the quilts. The children dreaming in the moonlit nursery are his only insofar that he donated the culture cells to the genetic surgeons. All this is well; the plan hinges upon the Dom’s solitary nature. No harm must be done to the Infanta Serenade. The Dom tosses and turns in the restless dreams of the powerful. The mice scamper unheard and unseen across the carpet, and up the carved legs of the divan. They stand for a moment on the pillow by the Dom’s head; Grandma, Grandpa with his pipe, Mamma with her little apron, and Pappa in his dungarees, the children smart and neat in their miniature pinafores. They move to their programmed positions. Then on some silent order they flex their tiny soft paws and steel blades spring out. With surgical precision they slice open Dom Merreveth’s throat and wrists.

  By the time the servitors have rushed to answer the strange, croaking, flapping cry from the Grace’s bedchamber, the toy mice have frozen into position once again, ready for another day’s merry play.

  * * * *

  The Chant Valedictory of the High Requiem dies away in the airy clerestories of the Hall of Weeping and the fog rolls in across the square like a breaking wave. In their white funeral gowns the small groups of mourners seem as insubstantial as ghosts. They are deathly silent as the fog muffles even their footfalls and respectful whispers. Above their heads, unseen in the fog, vast powers are moving: the seraphs of the Pantochrist, risen from Elder Sea in a cloud of mystery to descend upon the City of Man and summon the soul of a dead Dom to the company of the people beneath the sea.

  The small group of young Graces part at the water-steps where their boats await them.

  “Such a shock to lose your exemplar so suddenly, Perellen,” says Dom Gerrever, the poet.

  “Ex-exemplar, citizen; I have not had dealings with the Dom for almost a year. But he did embark me upon my musical career, and I owe him thanks for that. I am sorry he is gone.”

  “Oh, come now, Perellen,” says Dom Harshadden, the playwright. “You couldn’t stand the man; he cheated you, slighted you, and humiliated you every chance he could. I’ll wager you’re glad to see him gone. And at such an opportune time too.”

  “I would not wish an end like his upon even my worst enemy,” says Dom Perellen, suddenly accused and guilty behind his mask. “He may have slighted me, and we have certainly had our differences in the past, but we are not men who murder on matters of shadowplay, are we?”

  There are murmurs of consent, but Dom Hemmenveth the painter says, “Who said anything about Dom Merreveth having been murdered?”

  “Well, he was.”

  “But not by someone of the Gracious Castes, as you seem to be implying.” Dom Perellen’s brain thumps against the front of his skull. His mouth is suddenly hot and dry.

  “By me; is that what you are trying to say, Hemmenveth?” There is a deadly calm in his voice he does not feel. Dom Hemmenveth gives ground.

  “Oh no, not at all, not at all, Perellen; as you said, we are not men who murder for shadows. Indeed, given your provocation, you did not even employ satirists; great restraint, citizen, great restraint.”

  “It was a Rager killed the gentle Dom,” suggests Dom Perellen, and his friends mutter their agreement. There being nothing more to be said, they go down to their boats and Dom Gerrever calls out in parting, “Perellen, the masque at the House Kerrender, this Matinsday, remember.” As the boats pull away from the mooring Dom Perellen remains awhile, head bent, breathing deeply, trying to regain his composure. He is trembling. It had been close. He forces the fear and the guilt down his gullet and draws himself up. It is then that he sees the solitary figure in white running across the empty, fog-shrouded plaza. For an instant the face is turned to him. Behind the funeral mask are eyes he knows.

  “Serenade!” His lunge for shore sets the gondola rocking dangerously. “Serenade!” Far away at the edge of the cloisters the figure turns again for a moment, then hurries on. “Serenade.” Doves explode into the air from the bell-keeps of the Hall of Weeping and the massive buttresses of pale stonework return his cry to him.

  * * * *

  He is to see her again: spied from a high balcony, singular for a moment among the anonymous faces of t
he street entertainers and mendicants in the Bourse. Again, as a glimpsed figure hurrying up the steps of a water-gate in Harhadden. She turns for an instant at his call but there is no recognition and she does not wait. Again, on a water-taxi sweeping past his gondola on the Canal St. Nimien. Lastly, alone at a far table in a crowded cafe by the Damantine Fountain. By the time he presses his way between the chattering luncheoners she is gone, leaving only a five-pago tip and a musky wisp of perfume prepared from the powdered wings of night moths.

  His discreet inquiries at the House Merreveth prove only that she is gone. Delving into past acquaintances from his rakish days discloses nothing. Her friends know less than he. She has vanished back into the city which raised and nurtured her. Looking out from the music-room window Dom Perellen knows that he can never find the one soul in the city’s thronging millions who does not wish to be found, for what man could explore every laneway and waterway of a city that changes and grows every hour of every day so that it may never cease growing and thus stagnate and die? There is an infinity of canals and channels which reach back into derelict quarters abandoned so long ago by the slow migration to Elder Sea that their names are forgotten and their waterways choked and stagnant, where the funeral grounds of past millennia have, in their turn, become plazas and conventicles, chapteries and arcades, and are now, centuries later, returning to the ancestors who peopled them. The City of Man is upheld by the hands of the dead.

  And she is there somewhere. She will come to him. She must. Otherwise Dom Merreveth’s death is a hollow victory. She will come in time, and time is as plentiful as water in the sea.