Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  * * * *

  After that time at the Damantine Fountain he does not see her again, not even at the ball in the House Kerrender with every Dom and Infanta in the city in attendance. Though he dances a hundred waltzes and gazes into the eyes behind a hundred masks he does not find the eyes that glow in his memories or the body that quickens the beat of his soul. There are smiling invitations from Infanta and Dom alike but he does not accept them for he had hoped with a sure and certain hope that she would have been drawn here tonight like a moth to a candle. He has not yet found her, but there are still faces to be searched for well-known eyes.

  So he dances too much and drinks too much and flirts too little and by the time his friends ask him to take them home he is obnoxiously drunk and bad-tempered. He is so unpleasant that his friends (considerably more drunk than he, but good-humored) drop him on the Florinthian Steps and sail off in his gondola in search of new diversions. The sounds of laughter and merry music recede into the fog. Dom Perellen breathes in the wet air, suddenly alone and vulnerable. It is so late it is early and there is no traffic abroad on the canals. He must walk. St. Devereux’s Preview will take him to Rerren Square and thence over the Bridge-of-the-Virtues to Samtanavya Prospect. From there it is no distance through the Lido to the House Perellen. But this is a gloomy area of derelict warehousing, and Dom Perellen recalls with a shock the friendly face of a fat Guard saying, “Ragers, Grace, carniphages. Traced a chapter of ‘em to this ‘ere warehouse.” That same warehouse which now looms before him. It puts an urgency in his step and a face in every shadow. Footfalls echo deceptively in the cold fog and the gas lanterns hiss like a slow exhalation. Scared sober, Dom Perellen stops, turns. The echo of his footfalls persists too long. They have a wrong sound, like the echo of high-heeled shoes, or claws, tapping on the cobblestones.

  “Serenade?”

  The scream shatters his soul like glass. He whirls to find himself face to face with snapping fangs and bulbous red eyes. The hot sweet stench of its breath drives him back, retching. The Rager twists its deformed body and hisses in its throat.

  Dom Perellen’s mouth is open but the words take an age to come. His heart surges against his rib cage.

  “The Rage,” whispers Dom Perellen. The Rage, the alien plague from beyond the edge of the world, brought, say some, by the vessels of the transtellar merchants which splash down in the Lagoon; sown by the agents of jealous foreign governments, say others; and yet others still maintain that it is caused by spores from an alien colonization vessel which crashed in Elder Sea thousands of years before. For the first time he is able to see the creature whole. By its shriveled breasts and wide pelvis it must once have been a woman of the City of Man. The Rage has deformed her skeleton until she stands no taller than a child, her muscles tied into powerful, tight knots beneath her fur. In the swollen bulbs of her eyes, adapted by the disease for better night vision, there dwells a certain unclean madness. Dom Perellen edges away from the creature, hands outspread in a human gesture of placation, but the Rager is beyond the reach of all things human for the plague has harrowed and violated her humanity and warped her body into an obscene travesty. She howls; the flames behind her eyes will not let her rest until she has tasted human flesh. She bares her teeth in the lantern-light and smashes Dom Perellen to the cobbles with a sweep of her arm. Then she is on him. Claws rip at his head, tearing away his flimsy party mask. Teeth the length of fingers snap in his face. The sweet stench of plague gusts hot in his nostrils. The jaws lock like cocked gin-traps for the killing bite through the throat. In his last moment Dom Perellen is aware of two things.

  A searing blue flash.

  A stench of burning meat.

  The carniphage spasms and rolls from him to lie smoking gently on the cobblestones, teeth bared to the moon. The mask is clenched in her fingers. A charred hole has been stabbed cleanly between her breasts. Across the square the St. Charl Guard holsters his light-lance and runs to assist.

  “Is His Grace all right? No wounds, bites, or scratches?” For this is the manner in which the Rage claims its victims, through spores transmitted in the saliva of the carniphage which infect the slightest wound. Dom Perellen shakes his head and mumbles, “All right, all right.” Then the trembling starts, a spastic twitching so debilitating that the Guard must help him to the launch. He is taken to the House Perellen where his servitors fuss and fluster with warm quilts and healing broths and sleeping draughts. The Dom orders them out of his sight and shuts himself in the music room. Under the benign gaze of his ancestors he works the spasms from his fingers on the manuals of the Instrument. He commences with small whispering sounds, like the wind and the water and the scampering of mice. At the beginning of Fifth Hour he adds new tones, intricate repetitive sequences of pipes and bells. Then he brings in distant thunderous bass chords: storms and tempests in the mountains of the land beneath the sea from which his people came. Convoluted treble melodies occupy him for an hour or so, then he explores matching harmonies and subtle rhythms. He constructs his music hour on hour, layer upon layer like the strata of ancient sedimentary sandstones until the windows burst open under the pressure of music and the notes pour forth into the city in a waterfall of voices, singing down the empty canals and swirling around the eaves of the ancient houses in search of hidden things.

  At last Dom Perellen lifts his hands from the manuals and the vast music dies away until only the tiny whispers and susurrations remain. In the silence after there is the sound of two hands clapping.

  Dom Perellen turns and she is there, smiling and applauding.

  She makes to leave and Dom Perellen is beside her.

  “Why have you come? Why are you here?” She will not reply but leads him on a thread of perfume made from the crushed wings of night moths out of the music room and along the passage to the bedchamber. And there, under the plaster cherubs and peacocks and virgins, she gives herself to him and stops his questions with her mouth. By the light of cobwebbed candelabra their love builds like a symphony, like the stratified music by which Dom Perellen called her out from the hidden places of the city. Dom Perellen’s hands grip great fistfuls of dark hair, he has never known such joy as she gives him her breasts and her mouth and the hidden places of her body on the divan that is wide as all the sea. Together they scale the pinnacles of pleasure in a love that threatens to consume them both and leave nothing but ashes. Yet there is something amiss in her lovemaking, something passionless and mechanical, as if they were two animals caught in the frenzy of rut. She does not utter a word, not a sigh or moan.

  At the height of their passion she drives her teeth into his shoulder with such force that she draws blood. Dom Perellen scarcely feels it, swept away on the tide of his own pleasure. It is only afterwards, in the sadness that always follows, that he notices the smell, the smell of something sweet, something rotting, something ancient and foul. It is familiar but for the moment he cannot place it. Then it is forgotten as Serenade bends to his lips again. He looks into her gentle eyes and there sees a thing which freezes the very pith of his being.

  Around each iris, in tiny stenciled letters, are the words Brothers Ho, Taxidermists.

  Then he knows what his replicate brothers have done to him. He knows why Serenade has come here; and the nature of her business among the abandoned warehouses of Sessereth. He sees her opening her lips to the carniphage’s poisoned kiss and recognizes the stench of the Rage. He feels the inhuman machinery beneath her skin, and the warm welling of blood from his shoulder. He makes a despairing lunge for the bell-pull but it was too late from the morning he saw her before the cloisters of the Hall of Weeping. Then the fire blossoms in his brain and red red pain sweeps away his reason as the Rage takes possession. He is given time for one final look at Serenade, the last memory he will take into insanity, then his humanity blows out like a candle and the animal is set free.

  * * * *

  Last of all we see a boat waiting in the dawn light by the steps beneath the Bridge-of-t
he-Virtues. In it stand three men in white wearing identical funeral masks. In the bow sits a strikingly beautiful woman, but there is a touch of strange about her perfect stillness, something too precise, almost mechanical. The three men have their hands crossed on their breasts and the air of focused attention of those listening for a distant sound, perhaps the cry of some naked, twisted creature of the night turning away from the burning light of day. A corpse-boat glides by, silent and serene as a swan, journeying out to Elder Sea. Taking its passage for a sign of some kind, the three men turn their boat away from the Bridge-of-the-Virtues, away from the Sea, and journey inwards into the City of Man to claim their inheritance.

  CHRISTIAN

  WHEN THE DAY is so hot that it scorches the tips of the sea grass into tight brown spirals arid sends the columns of ants stigger-staggering across the sand, the beach is a good place for a boy to play. He can splash through the waves as they wash on the shore. He can build castles and fortifications in the sand and watch the sea flood his moats and crumble his ramparts and capture his standard, a single gull’s feather stuck into the topmost battlement. He can set a driftwood dreadnought afloat and bombard it into submission with stones from his shore batteries, or he can write his name with a stick in the damp sand and let the tide wipe his words away. There are a thousand different games a boy can play with the sea.

  If the tide is low there are the hulks, tired gray men of the sea that have been slumping into the sand for centuries. Some have settled so deeply that only the points of their ribs protrude from the swallowing sand, and a boy can imagine that they are not the bones of ships at all, but the bones of prehistoric creatures.

  But if the tide is high there is always the Cannery. It lies half an hour’s walk down the beach, but is worth the effort, for it was made in heaven for a small boy. There are rusting steam cranes and disused canning machinery, there are chutes and slides and sluices, there are rails and dollies and hoists, but most of all there are the buildings, made from planks of that gray-brown wood that always feels warm to the touch, so old that they have begun to bulge at the sides. All the windows are broken and the doors off their hinges and light shines through the roof where the autumn gales have swept the shingles away. Parents do not trust it. They say the pier is unsafe and forbid children to play on it, but their restrictions take nothing from the magic of the place, a magic of a different kind from that of the hulks (for after all this pier has never sailed beyond the rim of the world), but no less magical for that. For above all other places, this is a boy’s place.

  Your place.

  When the day is so hot that it drives the customers indoors and Ma wants you to run errands and Da wants you to collect glasses and Sister is too busy serving and Brother too busy practicing the mandocello, when not even Mr. Cat has time for you, the Cannery is a good place to be.

  Ma’s shout chases you along the beach but you easily outran it and soon all there is to hear is the rush of surf and the mewling of the gulls slipping down the wind. The sun is bright and the sand is hot and you think that on a day like this anything could happen. So you search the sky for the telltale flickers of daylight shooting stars that you have been told are the trails of ships arriving at the edge of the world. You squint through your fingers, for the sun is very bright, but though you peer and peer you do not see even one.

  But you do see three colorful shapes dancing high on the air. A moment’s concentration reveals them: kites, one like a festival dragon with a long tail, one with a great smiling sun painted on it, and the third one, so high up that it is barely visible, no more than a dead black speck. Someone is flying kites from the end of Cannery Pier.

  There is a gaily painted caravan with a skewbald pony munching the tough sea grass in the dunes by the foot of the pier. The caravan door is open and you decide to sneak a quick look. Why not? After all, isn’t the kite flyer trespassing on the end of your pier?

  The caravan is filled with kites. There are no pots, no pans, no sink and no stove, no bed or books or bootlocker, just kites of all shapes and sizes and colors. There is one with a painted moon, and another with a cross of stars that actually twinkle, and a blue kite with clouds on it, and one with a whirlwind and crisscrossing lightning bolts, and another blue one, but with a painted rainbow, and one so black that your eyes skid off it like glass, and many many more, too many to take in with one single glance, so that all you get is an impression of lightness and brightness and color.

  You are so taken up with gazing that you do not hear the creak of the step or the tired sigh or feel the cool of a shadow falling across your back.

  “Oh,” says a voice. You turn, seized up with dread. The tall gray man before you takes a step back in surprise. “Oh,” he says again, at a loss for something better. It is hard to tell who is more surprised. You stand and stare openmouthed at each other for a long and silly time. Then the gray man frowns and says,

  “But what are you doing in my caravan?”

  At any other time you would have wilted with embarrassment, but the shock of discovery has made you defiant.

  “What are you doing on my pier?”

  The gray man gapes. A look of puzzlement crosses his face.

  “I’m sorry, I was unaware that the pier belonged to anyone. It seemed to me just to be a good windy place well away from all the people where I could fly my kites in peace.”

  And because he has not laughed at you like any other adult would, you decide to trade this kiteman trespass for trespass.

  “I don’t actually own the Cannery, nobody does, but it’s my special place. But because you think it’s special too, you can fly your kites there anytime.”

  “Thank you,” the kiteman says graciously.

  “I came in here to look at your kites,” you continue. “I saw them through the back door and came on in, because if you don’t want people to go into your caravan, you shouldn’t leave your back door open.”

  “True,” the kiteman says. “Can’t deny that. Well, having seen them, then, what do you think of my kites? Aren’t they grand?”

  What you think is that it is silly for a grown man to be playing with kites, but you keep your opinion to yourself.

  “Aye, grand,” you agree, but it is as if this gray kiteman can see right inside you, because he smiles and says,

  “Ah, you’re only saying that to keep a stranger happy. I can see that you know little of their true charms and mysteries. But you have the look of a boy with too much holiday time heavy on his hands; perhaps I might instruct you a little in the appreciation of kites? How would that sound? In return for the use of your Cannery?”

  “Sounds fine, mister.”

  “Call me Christian,” the kiteman says.

  “Fraser MacHenry,” you reply, remembering your manners.

  “Glad to make your acquaintance, Fraser,” the kiteman says, and he goes and picks up a great kite almost as gray as himself. On the kite is a painted cherub blowing a gale from apple-round cheeks and at its lowest point an ocean wave is breaking.

  “What would you want with such a dull thing on a bright afternoon like this?” you ask.

  “Because I think it’s time we had a squall,” Christian says, and, tucking the stormkite under his arm, off he sets; past the skewbald pony, who gives you a terrible look, up the dunes and across the tussocky grass to Cannery Pier where the three kites strain on the wind. A thought strikes you.

  “Who’s flying the kites if you’re not there?” you ask, ready to feel betrayed.

  “Oh, never worry, Fraser, I have this little black box I adapted from a ship’s sheet monitor I picked up in the market in Corpus Christi. Clever little thing, but cost me a fair penny, as clever little things always do; it senses the shifting of the kites on the breeze and winds or releases line accordingly.”

  At the end of the pier lie the kiteman’s few possessions: a crumpled coat of blue pilot cloth lying across a tall wooden staff with silver caps and the little black box clamped to an iron bollard.
The kiteman sits himself down. He motions for you to join him and you come and sit down beside him and dangle your legs beside his over the glinting water. He nods at his kites.

  “Well, which one would you like a go at?”

  You squint into the painfully bright sky and pass your critical eye over the hovering kites. The sun one is pretty, the dragon exciting, but neither so exciting as the black one, which must be the twin of the one you saw in the caravan.

  “The black one, please.”

  Christian shakes his head. “Sorry. Try again. You see, though I may be able, I hope, to teach you how to fly a kite forwards and backwards, and up and down, and side to side, that black one has to be flown inwards and outwards too, and to be honest, I don’t think I can teach you that.”

  “Inwards and outwards? How do you fly a kite inwards and outwards?”

  “Good question, Fraser. Wish I knew. But tell me, have you heard of people who can do something without being certain of how they do it? Well, I must be a bit like that with that kite. Now, which of the other two would you like, or would you prefer this one?” He holds out the gray stormkite, but you shake your head and say,

  “The dragon kite, please.”

  “The dragon kite it is, then,” says Christian, and unhooks the flying line from the little black machine and hauls down the big dragon kite. Close up, it is bigger than you had ever imagined. Then he shows you how cleverly it is constructed, how it generates lift from its geometry, how light and how delicate it is and yet how strong. He shows you how to fix the flying line to the bridle line, how to launch it and control it so that it holds steady in the windstream, not dipping and bellying like the rowdy gulls. Then he reels it in once more and hands kite and spool over to you.

  You botch the first two attempts and your ears burn with horrible embarrassment. But again Christian does not laugh at you. “There’s always time enough to do it well,” he says, and on your third try the great sky-dragon skips and jumps and hiccups along the pier but then the wind catches it and whips it into the air so strongly that the line sings off the spindle in your hands. You cheer as your kite climbs high high past the startled delinquent gulls, high over dirty Cannery Pier, and the bright dragon’s eye looks down to see the small dancing speck on the end of its line that is you and the larger gray spot that is Christian. He grins and unlashes the sunkite from the little black machine and together the sun and dragon tumble through the sky. Presently they are joined in their game by the gray stormkite, but within the hour you must hand the dragon kite back to Christian because the wind has grown too wild for you to master. A horizon-wide line of evil black cloud is advancing on the Cannery and gusts are tugging at your ears. Christian casts an eye on the sky and says,