The hangar flattened, settling into its lift-off position while Mira stood in the flooding sunlight. Quotes from her instruction-manual download whispered to her. The result of an inexact res-shift is catastrophic and will have an irrevocable impact on humanesque tissue. Vibration calibration must be precise or molecules in the tissues will implode the flesh.
A shiver of anticipation finished in a flush of heat that left Mira feeling faint. She had stopped perspiring. Serious dehydration was imminent. In careful order she slipped the last tethers. Where is Rast?
Insignia replied. There is a humanesque in Secondo vein. I am obliged to listen.
Mira started towards the loading door in a panic as Insignia’s elevons began to flex. ‘Rast.’
An AiV buzzed in low over the hangar and past the chalet, coming from the north. The wind from its rotors stirred a dust whirl. It arced out over the water and circled back towards her. When it reached the point of descent it come down like a flake of meteorite in the atmosphere.
Mira scrambled onto the platform-lift. Insignia. I am coming.
Saqr screams sent her stomach into a clenching spasm. As the lift reached Insignia’s wing they were already in the hangar. She felt along the biozoon’s scales for the one that would give her admission.
‘Turn around,’ a voice ordered. ‘Slowly.’
Jancz was on the ground below the Insignia’s elevons. Ilke stood next to him.
‘So dirty and dishevelled, Principessa?’
‘It’s Baronessa,’ she said coldly. ‘You should know the difference by now. You have murdered enough of us.’
‘Touchy, these aristos.’ He spoke to like but his stare never left Mira. ‘Now come down from there.’
Mira felt frantically along the scales. Which one? Tell me which one.
‘Now, Baronessa!’ Jancz raised his weapon.
A scale twitched under her fingers and she sank into it, letting it draw her in. It sealed behind her and she picked herself up and stumbled though the twisted, sloping aisles to the flight stratum.
Rast was in the Secondo vein, only her face uncovered, eyes darting, unfocused. Cathcut and Latourn were absent—in the medic stratum, Mira supposed. Rast didn’t move her head.
‘You were going to leave me,’ Mira said accusingly.
‘Yeah. Well, I didn’t. Vein up. There’s more Saqr coming and the ‘esques have some type of incendiary. We’ll have to cold start. The planet’s nav-sat is out. Dowl isn’t responding either.’ Rast’s voice sounded thick, like she was eating something sticky.
Cold start. Mira found that she had trouble breathing at the thought. She collapsed into the Primo vein and felt the couch pucker around her. She fought off the claustrophobia and tried to relax as grow-receptors skittered over her skin and burrowed in for the beginning of the inflating procedure that would protect her against g-forces.
For a moment she felt as if her throat was closing over. She swallowed repeatedly until the feeling faded. It was replaced by a sensation of body-bloating, as though she had consumed too much liquid. She flexed and contracted her muscles, knowing that the movement would release the pressure. Again the sensation faded. Nausea mounted in her throat and she found herself swallowing repeatedly.
All normal adjustments to vein-sink, Mira told herself. She concentrated on the tingling at the base of her skull where the vein insinuated itself into neural lanes. Hurry. The tingling became colour bursts before her eyes. They steadied and resolved into nothing.
Absence.
Then whispers became a flow of information, absorbed into her hindbrain with terrifying speed. Mira knew at once and intimately that the ship systems were burgeoning; that Catchut was leaning over Latourn in medic, crying; that the Saqr had positioned themselves around Insignia; that Jancz and like were fixing a patch onto her underbelly.
Insignia? Prime and Exfoliate, she told the ship.
Exfoliation while Primed is counterintuitive, Insignia replied.
Wassat mean? Rast/Secondo interjected.
Mira ignored her. It is preferable to obliteration.
Agreed, Insignia thought back.
Then proceed.
Yes, Primo. It should be noted that if skin isn’t regrown by mesopause, irrevocable tears may occur, thought Insignia.
It will be all right, Mira soothed. Proceed.
The tremor that ran through the ship mirrored itself in her body—so did the contortion, as the ship began to shed skinscales. The sensation was a hundredfold worse than vein-sink, as if her own skin had been inverted and the raw tissue exposed. Bare nerve endings prickled and shrieked.
Rast/Secondo moaned and whimpered like an animal.
At some level Mira was aware that the mercenary had urinated, just as she knew that Rast was also drooling helplessly. She instructed her pelvis to tighten against the same impulse. She would not disgrace herself.
Exfoliation crest imminent, Insignia informed her unnecessarily.
For a time Mira/Primo’s organs seemed to be in a tug-o’-war with each other. But even at the height of her pain, she maintained focus on the individual scale that held the incendiary. When it peeled off and dropped to the ground, she rejoiced.
Prime, she ordered.
Very well, Insignia sighed.
The ship lifted in a burst of beach sand, shedding iridescent scales like large moulting fish leaping from a stream. Mira/Primo felt the rush of cooling altitude on her fins, followed by heat on her belly as the incendiary detonated below them.
The plume of fire peaked and receded like a flung wave, leaving them untouched and free.
Rast/Secondo’s thought came to her, weak but marvelling. ‘Well, fuck me, Fedor! I didn’t think you had it in you.’
Mira/Primo didn’t bother to send a thought back. For a singular and infinite moment she had found herself at home.
Chaos Space
For Marcus and Jules
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Tara Wynne and Darren Nash for their unfailing support, and to Nicola Pitt for being so calm when books go missing.
MIRA
The edges of the Dowl shift-sphere were a frenzy of spacecraft. No order in their behaviour. No etiquette. Only panic.
Mira/Primo writhed in vein-sink, her senses deluged with information upon which her imagination piled fear. What have the Saqr done to Dowl? That and a hundred other questions prickled her subconscious. But only one found its way to the top. Insignia? Can we shift?
The biozoon hesitated. Dowl’s shift system is compromised.
Then we are trapped here!
I am not. We use your stations as an act of good faith—not necessity—and to protect our humanesque Innate. You do not need to use our shiftspace?
I do not need to use your systems. I am bred with Resonance ability. However, your stations are located at our optimum resonance points. I must use this space.
Then we can still resonate?
As I said... yes.
Mira’s relief translated into a surge of energy. Go, then.
Insignia slid precariously between the mêlée of stranded ships. Some were already changing direction, their auras exuding bursts of magnetic waves.
What are they doing?
They are opting for sublight travel. Maglev is still operating but unstable.
That meant someone on Dowl station was battling to keep maglev function available. Mira trembled at their courage. Insignia—go! Leave here!
A visual representation of the shiftsphere blossomed on Mira’s retina; a magnificent kaleidoscope of pulsing, spinning concentric rings. Then a low thrum started as Insignia unfolded her cephalic fins. Mira knew that the sound would escalate to something beyond her hearing range. Soon she would be immersed in the thing she had most longed for.
As they entered the outermost ring of the sphere, Mira/Primo lost all connection with her physical self. She became a force amongst other forces, an energy thrusting forward against returned energies.
It’s like swi
mming, she thought. I am swimming, not flying.
Yes, Insignia agreed jubilantly. We are. And it has been too long...
With each ring they traversed the hum-pitch rose and the opposing forces strengthened. Mira/Primo lengthened her stroke, absorbed in the rhythm and effort of her propulsion.
Then a faint disruption occurred, like a splash disturbing the perfect ripples of her movement.
A craft slid across their wake, travelling with ragged momentum.
What is it?
Desperation, replied Insignia. They are trying to shift.
But we are only partway in.
The ring ahead of us is designated for refuse ships.
They have a different shift point?
Yes. In case there is a spillage or an accident during resonance—so that ultimate shift space will not be compromised.
But they are not resonating at perfect pitch. How—?
Imperfect Shift is possible.
Insignia sent the equations and logistics tumbling into Mira/Primo’s mind. In less than an instant she understood. Imperfect Shift was possible, though high-risk, and if they were caught in the wake of it, they would be dragged into Failed Shift.
A warning from Mira’s Studium instruction manual flashed into her mind. The result of a Failed Res-shift is catastrophic and will have an irrevocable impact on humanesque tissue. Vibration calibration must be precise or molecules in die tissues will implode the flesh...
Insignia?
I am ahead of them still and I am able to accelerate but in doing so I will disrupt their accumulated speed. They may be forced into a Failed Shift.
What other option is there?
You know it.
Mira/Primo’s fingers clutched at the vein’s viscous cushioning, her eyelids fluttering—though she had no awareness of it. Death to them? Or Death to us?
Yes.
I cannot choose such a thing. I cannot!
Insignia had no sympathy for her. I can. It is very clear to me.
Oh?
If you choose the riskier option for us your baby will die.
An instant? Or protracted moments? Mira/Primo didn’t know which it was, but she felt Insignia’s satisfaction as she thought the words...
Us. Save us...
SOLE
closer closer/luscious luscious
find’m secrets/know’m all
bring’m home/bring’m home
THALES
Thales prostrated himself for the last time that day. As he lifted his lips from the cool marble floor of the Jainist upashraya, he sent a message to his moud: Quesadillas for dinner with spiced ratafia and a side of hot meat-stuffed peppers.
It was really too mild a time of year for such a meal but he could already see the smile on Rene’s face when the moud filed the dinner menu to her inbox.
He retrieved his slippers from the racks in the entry recess, shoved his feet into them and pummelled the muscles in his back. Sometimes he longed for a more active lifestyle. Already he could feel a slight softening of his torso, the natural tone of youth stealing away like a mistress at dawn. Prayer and contemplation were no substitute for physical exertion.
Thales paused in the entry of the basilica. It was small in comparison with many on Scolar but no less grand for the religion’s inauspicious Cerulean beginnings. It was probably part of the attraction for him, he mused.
He had discovered an innate perversity in his nature that he had recently stopped suppressing and begun to acknowledge. Scolar, the much-lauded hub of ideas and learning in Orion, was becoming as staid and intransigent as a Balol monk.
Oh, and chocolate linguine with pig peaches, he added to the menu.
Perhaps extra carbohydrates would give Rene the energy to make love tonight. She seemed to be gripped by preoccupations these days; a mental fatigue that affected her interest in his manliness amongst other things.
If only she would agree to have a child.
Thales craved one as deeply as he craved new knowledge. At night when he woke and couldn’t get back to sleep, he made lists of the things he could teach a child of his own, the wonders he could show them.
But Rene would not be enticed. Although she had never said as much, Thales knew that she found the whole idea slightly primitive. Sensitive to her preferences, he had instead broached the subject of non-biological parenting.
Her reaction had been clear. How could I care for a child that is not my own? It was, perhaps, the only time that he has been disappointed with her.
Sighing, Thales looked to the shards of violet light stabbing downward onto the marble surface where he’d been lying in prayer. They fell like swords from the twists of cut amethyst inlaid into the domed roof. On suns’ set, all the basilicas in the Hegel quarter burned with refraction rainbows. Each one of them had been built to capture the rays at rise and fall of Scolar’s twin suns. It was as if the universe sent its most vibrant, imperious shades cascading down to Scolar to rejoice at the City of Ideas’s importance.
Thales turned from its flaunting display and walked out onto the avenue. Others emerged from their prayers and study, and queued to enter the conduits. Thales caught glimpse of faces he knew—the Cerulean, Msr Lacroix, from the Zionist temple and the uuli near-elder Uumau. But today they avoided acknowledgement of him as though somehow preempting the next moment.
Thales?
Yes, moud?
A priority message has been logged.
Thales’s heart pumped. His petition must have been approved. He would be the first scholar to be sent to study the Entity on Belle-Monde. Proceed.
Sophos Mianos wishes to inform you that tomorrow you will take up a new post as Grievance Adjudicator at the OLOSS offices in the Bureaucratie district.
Shock caused Thales to sway as the conduit raced past the blossoming cherry trees towards his domicile in the Kant district. Only steady meditative breaths—kept his anger on a leash. He grappled with it until he reached the sanctum of his apartment.
Rene was home already, seated at her studium-adjunct, scanning through her most recent treatise.
Despite his distress, Thales paused to admire her gracefulness as she bent over the desk. She seemed thinner than she had this morning, her frailty accentuated by the freedom she had given her waist-long hair. He often begged her to let him braid it but she said he was clumsy and preferred their maid’s adept fingers. In the evenings, though, she would let him unravel it and stroke it loose. She would lean into him, her body as light as the stalk of a sunflower, her eyes unfocused and trusting.
‘Thales, calm down.’
He opened his mouth in surprise. ‘How did you know?’
She turned to him and he soaked in the sight of her intelligent oval face. ‘Your step was rushed and you spoke to Alambra brusquely.’
One of Rene’s more delightful quirks was that she never thought of their shared Made Intelligent moud as anything other than sentient. ‘But, as you ordered my favourite dinner foods before you left the upashraya, I’m assuming that whatever upset you occurred on the conduit.’
She held her arms out.
Thales ran to her like a child, kneeling to bury his head in her lap. A sudden desire somehow to subsume her into his being beset him. She was older than he but more beautiful than all the young women on Scolar. She would always be so. The beauty of her intellect held him in far greater thrall than any physical loveliness.
Rene let her hand stray through his hair. ‘Dear Thales,’ she whispered.
Hurt pride tore loose from a burning spot in his chest. ‘They have ignored my petition to study under the Entity and are moving me to OLOSS to be a Grievance Adjudicator at the Bureaucratie, Rene. This is because I oppose their staid ideals. The entire Sophos Pre-Eminence treat my arguments against their theories as though I am diseased. What happened to the acclaimed dissension of Scolar? What happened to lively discourse and the intersection of ideas? This place is dying, Rene. And we are in danger of becoming as stultified as them. It
is little wonder that the great philosopher Villon abandoned this place.’ Thales stared up into her face.
She stroked his cheeks but her expression tightened.
‘Villon was a malcontent. We are a better society without him.’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Thales hotly. He pulled away from her grasp. ‘His dissent was what kept us honest. He believed in argument and change.’
Rene smiled. ‘A philosopher for the youth. Change cannot always justify itself.’
‘Don’t denigrate his beliefs, or mine, by such a bland dismissal. It is true that Villon challenged everything, even himself. But that is the only way to ensure that our ideas advance.’
‘Villon challenged the Pre-Eminence. He sought to displace them with an anarchic model of leadership that would have allowed anyone into governance. That might have made him a champion to the younger and the less prudent, but how could you know what his motivations were? Perhaps he simply sought influence and his own kind of respectability.’
‘Respectability! Rene! How stolid you sound.’
‘And you sound like a boy suffering from hero worship. Thales, you did not know Villon. It is most likely that he used dissension as a tool.’
‘A tool? Dissension has been Scolar’s life blood. We are not taught to study in school, we are taught to think. Why assume that anything is how it seems? Or how we are told it is? And yet we are governed by old men who want nothing more than the status quo.’
‘I do not need a lecture on Scolar’s education methods, Thales. Or a mocking precis of the Pre-Eminence. Have you forgotten that my father is among them?’
‘Have you forgotten what we learned?’
Rene frowned, and pressed her fingers to her forehead. ‘Dissension creates conflict. I do not seek conflict, especially not with you. It is uncivilised and stressful.’ She dropped her hand from her face and gave Thales an almost pleading look. ‘Equilibrium is our secret weapon, dearest.’
The Sentients of Orion Page 32