Exurbia: A Novel About Caterpillars (An Infinite Triptych Book 1)

by Alex McKechnie

  The Zrastian nodded.

  You half comprehend, at least.

  ‘And what are we to do then?’ said the Zdrastian. ‘If we take the tershal tower?’

  Fortmann thought it over a moment.

  ‘Why,’ he said, ‘whatever we want.’

  36

  “I journeyed once to Cato's Hall and asked for an audience with him. He granted it. He was not as I had imagined. The machinery which composed him was elegant and modest. It was not a design I recognised. I told him of the pestilence in the city. He replied that in time the pestilence would cease, either through isolating the victims, or simply dwindling our numbers to such an extent that the disease starved. It was then that I thought, What kind of god is this? Not one worthy of the devotion we honour him with, most certainly.”

  - Saint Pergrin of Olde Erde

  Annie -

  Harsh noises from beyond the cell walls, a woman’s scream and then a scuffle. Annie rolled herself into a ball and closed her eyes so tightly that she saw stars.

  ‘At least they don’t beat us,’ murmured Princewright from somewhere close by in the dark.

  ‘I wish they would,’ Annie whispered.

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  Somehow, it would make all of this more bearable. I could trick myself into thinking I deserved the punishment. ‘They didn’t hurt you?’ she said. ‘Before?’

  ‘No. They’ve been strangely pleasant, if you can call this pleasant. I suspect the professor had something to do with it.’

  ‘Not likely.’

  ‘He isn’t a monster, you know.’

  She thought of spitting into the dark. ‘There isn’t much left of him that isn’t monster.’

  ‘Betrayal leaves a bad taste in the mouth,’ said the former tersh. ‘It’s one thing to suffer at the hands of a stranger. It’s quite another when it’s someone you once shared a bed with.’

  Shared a bed with. We did a lot more than that. She had read every thesis, every should-have-gone-nowhere paper of his, every book introduction. She had tolerated his intolerable parents while they were still alive. She had adjusted his tie. Cleaned his effects. Ignored his faux pas in public. Kissed him before he’d brushed his teeth. Gnesha’s gallstones, I would’ve given you children.

  ‘Besides, I shouldn’t think they could keep us in here forever,’ he added.

  ‘No. We’ll have to die eventually.’

  ‘Mrs. Jura. Don’t be so fatalistic. I’ve seen the inside of the empire, remember. I know it’s balanced on precarious feet as it is. Gnesha knows what all this Ixenite incarceration nonsense has done to it. There’ll be a revolt any day now.’

  ‘And if they storm the tower they’ll find the former tersh, and the ex-wife of the current tersh. And I don’t imagine they’ll hold us in high regard.’

  ‘No need to worry over it until the time comes.’

  The urge to spit was almost palpable.

  ‘What is it you hang on for, exactly?’ she said. ‘What is it that keeps you so sprightly?’

  ‘Woman,’ he said, ‘I was deposed and yet my head is still attached to my neck. That is cause for constant celebration.’

  ‘You’re as bad as Stefan; dumb optimists, both of you.’

  ‘I may not know much of the situation above us, but I know this much. Your ex-husband is wildly out of his depth and up against forces so immovable, he daren’t even blink. When all of this is over, he will tell you this himself.’

  ‘How could you possibly know that? He’s got what he wants. Power in the highest.’

  ‘If he has anything at all, it’s quite the opposite. I have lived in this tower a long time. The Great Hall was once mine. And there wasn’t a single day of my time in it when I considered myself powerful.’

  ‘You commanded the entire Exurbic populace. You were the most powerful man in ten thousand au.’

  ‘Titles. Nothing more. I was a sticking place for Exurbia’s dissatisfaction. That’s the secret of power they never let beyond the palace walls, you know. It’s miserable. It’s worse for your husband. He’s nothing more than a figurehead for Butterworth. He’s probably scared to his core.’

  A long silence, then: ‘He came to see me. Or, he saw me at least,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The medical chamber. He grovelled.’

  ‘That’s it then, he’s not a monster.’

  ‘Oh, what of it after the fact? Apologies are for missing appointments and innocent mistakes. It doesn’t mean absolution for everything.’

  The tersh was quiet. Is he sulking? For a man once with a planet at his behest, he seems to easily take offence.

  ‘The dark has been good for me in a way,’ he said then. ‘I have been revisiting my childhood. I go places. I explore the Xianxi of my youth. You would’ve liked my mother, a zardachef, one of the best. And my father, a politico.’

  ‘So that’s where you get it,’ she murmured.

  ‘You don’t give a young boy The Art of War and expect him not to grow up a little hungry for power, though I doubt my father really thought his son would one day become tersh. He never lived to see it anyway. He was not a good man. I don’t mind so much. But that’s where I go, back there. Back to one moment in particular. Maybe I was five or six. The all-sun is almost down, the moons are up already. My mother is making a stew in the kitchen. My father has just come home from whichever bureau it was he worked at. And he comes in and he puts his notes down and then he pats me on the head and he smiles. Just that. It’s the safest I ever remember being. He could’ve fought whole armies off with that smile, my father. He could’ve levelled a continent with it. If they ever come to beat me in here, that’s where I’ll go and they won’t be able to really hurt an inch of me.’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I might borrow that memory from you and use it too.’

  ‘I’m sure you have plenty of your own. Where do you go, Mrs. Jura? When we’re both quiet?’

  ‘Gentler days. My childhood too I suppose.’

  The Year of the Massive Cats. We’re twenty-two. You take me to your parents' house and we all drink zapoei until I’m too drunk to walk home. You say I can stay if I want. You give me some old clothes. We sit on your bed talking until the sun comes up about all of our failed relationships and your fear of dying and my fear of growing old and then we sleep a few inches from each other and I wake up first in the morning. Your mouth’s open a little. It’s the first time I’ve seen you without a frown. All the posturing and pretending and bravado’s gone and it’s just you, Stefan. You without armour. And it hits me - in a moment of absolute horror - that I’m in love. That is where I go back to when we’re both quiet, Tersh. To gentler days like that one when there were real people in the world. To when there was a real world at all.

  She twirled a strand of matter hair in the dark.

  ‘Do you know what love is, Tersh?’

  ‘I’ve never had the occasion to consider it.’

  ‘It’s finding out how the trick is done and still wanting to see it performed again afterwards.’

  37

  “Don't fear death. It is merely an ending. Fear immortality, for there lies a true horror.”

  - Traditional Old Erde Pergrin proverb

  Fortmann -

  Midday. The capital lay in the far distance, the occasional wisp of orange from a t’assali vent, transport capsules rising up and over the streets.

  ‘Do you think they know we’re here?’ Maria said.

  ‘Oh they know,’ said Fortmann.

  Governance wasn’t blind. The rabble could probably be seen easily enough from the tershal tower with the naked eye alone: a line of renegade gungovs stretching a good half mile across the horizon, fidgeting but resolved, four thousand vengeful burning orange eyes.

  Do they know it’s pointless then? Is this an admission of surrender? After all, nothing could stand up to such a force, not the orbital t’assali canons, not Bucephalia’s Formal Army of a few thousand
poorly trained young men, not Gnesha herself. Fortmann glassed the assembly with a field telescope. Waiting. They’re waiting for me. There was a sense of history on his shoulders, bearing him down, a partial promise of greatness. Whatever happens, my name will ring like a bell down the years now.

  ‘There is little time,’ said what was probably one of the gungov superiors. The thing wore a purple sash fashioned from grub rushes and scallix ink.

  ‘We will give it a moment,’ Fortmann said. ‘Just a moment longer.’

  Just a moment longer, yes. Let me enjoy this, here, with all of you behind me, with the weight of something behind me. They had joined him, the Zdrastian – his friend, Maria – his woman. They had come this far, willing themselves into battle no less, and now they stood at his side, waiting on his word.

  Had the imp made it inside the tower already? That may well explain the lack of defences waiting to meet them. Perhaps he’d subdued the tersh somehow, beaten the syndicate woman down with logic. It was not unthinkable. This will be easy then. ‘Can you communicate with the others?’ he said to the gungov superior.

  ‘I can.’

  ‘Then tell them to be brave. Tell them we have nothing to cower from, nothing to fear but -’

  He faltered. Well, what do they know of Old Erde?

  ‘- fear itself. Tell them that now.’

  The gungov nodded stoically. There was a fidget among the ranks. If they have hearts, they must be swelling, I’m sure of it.

  The whisper of an almost-thought, barely even a pith: Father, if you could see me. If you could see me. If you could see me. And sure enough, he saw himself, standing centrally at the line’s head, decked in full Chapterhouse garb, a protector of men, the tip of some raging and unstoppable spear. If you could see me.

  What an irregular spectre his father had been, coming home at dawn and leaving again, or simply not coming home at all. And when he did, when he stayed, talking always of matters at the tershal tower, some Ixenite plot he’d foiled, telling the story always to himself rather than those around him. Great Captain Fortmann with his medals and appointments, Great Captain Fortmann with his beautiful wife and beautiful son, with his close ties to the then tersh. And on those rare evenings when he joined them for dinner, he held the table, talking for the duration to no one in particular of the Ixenite scourge and the Ixenite filth and their limited number of days ahead, talking as though to the air, disappearing glass after glass of zapoei. And when he was quite done and he had fallen into a drunken sleep at the table, Fortmann and his mother would carry the captain silently to his chamber and lay him down and tuck him under the covers and in the morning he would be gone again, gone to the tower or gone to wherever it was he went, and when he returned a few days later, the episode would repeat itself over. Great Captain Fortmann with his medals and appointments. And then at university age, he had approached his father, made it plain that he intended to study stratigraphics. The captain had laughed from behind his skript, hadn’t looked up. The academy. It’s the academy for you. But – slowly, slowly, am I really going to defy him – I don’t want to go to the academy, he said. Eyes up on him now. What? I don’t want to go the academy, he said again. He felt a mouse. Smaller than that. What did you just say? I don’t want to go.

  He hadn’t fancied his father an athletic man but there, a sprinter, coming around the desk like a youth – say it again boy, say it again, I dare you, I dare you to say it again. I – slowly slowly, Great Captain Fortmann, with his medals and appointments – don’t want to – with his beautiful wife and beautiful son – go to the – with his chest like a bear, with his surety, with his steel face – academy.

  The bruises had stayed for weeks, black and brown marks like those on a banana, his legs and back covered in them. Medals of my own, he thought then. Medals my father has given me. And leaving that night, a few books and sundries in a journeyman’s bag, a short note pinned to the door for his mother that would explain at least in part, and closing the door silently behind him and stepping out under the moons. If you could see me now, you bitter old man, you bastard. If. I know what you’d say. You call that an army? Yes father. I call it an army. I call it my army.

  ‘We can’t delay any longer, Seer,’ said the Zdrastian. Even Mr. Covert Woof looked hesitant, nibbling anxiously at a paw.

  ‘Then,’ Fortmann said to the principal gungov, ‘we advance.’

  And so they did. Higgledy at first, almost drunken, coming down the Archenon lip in their thousands, silent save only for the crunch of the night freeze under their black metal feet. Then their steps were almost in synchrony, four thousand marching as one.

  It had been an obituary, years later when he’d joined the Chapterhouse. He’d almost missed it on the streams, but the name had leapt out. Fortmann. Captain Fortmann, passed away peacefully last night at his home surrounded by his family. The tersh has personally expressed his grief at the loss of such “an accomplished and faithful servant of Exurbia.” Surrounded by his family. Save for his errant son, it should have read. Save for his errant son who had the courage to shake off such a martinet. If you could see me now, you despot.

  ‘Where are their defences?’ Maria whispered.

  ‘What defences?’ Fortmann said, allowing himself a smile. ‘They know it’s pointless. The imp has already sabotaged them.’

  She took his hand and whispered hurriedly. ‘The imp was scared, didn’t you see? He said it wouldn’t work. He said the woman would know he was lying.'

  ‘You should have faith in our moralising friend. Look.’ He gestured to the empty fields ahead of them, the clear path between their themselves and the Bucephalian walls. ‘Their absence speaks for itself. Why, we’ll take the capital before dawn.’

  Is mother still alive? If so, she would not have moved to another city. Perhaps she still kept the family house, out on the outskirts of the capital. Perhaps she is waiting for me. When all of this is done, my name will spread through every backstreet, through every household, and I will go to see her then and she will tell me what a good thing it was that I did, what a brave man I am. And we will talk of father and she will beg for forgiveness, for never stopping him, for never grabbing his arm at its apogee as it came down to beat me again. For not protecting me when I was small and defenceless. And I will say it’s all right, it’s all right now, he’s long gone and there are no battles left to fight. He caught Maria’s eye. And when all of this is done, I will make you my wife, we will bear children, we will be good to one another. And if we should have a son I will be good to him too and let him go his own way, whichever way that will be. And I shan’t lay a finger on him nor speak ill of his passions nor put fear in him for the sake of putting fear in him. He felt the next thought coming, long before it had even fitted itself into words and tried to resist it, tried to push it back down like one might a lively dog. All will be well. All will be well then.

  There was a wail from one of the subordinate gungovs behind. Fortmann turned to it. The thing – he? she? – was staring, its pupilless burning eyes on the horizon, a black finger outstretched. He looked to where the finger pointed, out past the troop, out past the empty fields, out to the fortified walls of Bucephalia where an orange glimmer appeared, disappeared, and appeared again like a fickle match coming lit. No.

  ‘Oh Plovda,’ Maria whispered.

  ‘And time too big to hold,’ the Zdrastian prayed, ‘please alter this day in the most -’

  Fortmann put a hand up to halt the line. They had stopped already.

  ‘It is just a spark,’ Fortmann shouted. ‘Nothing more. Give it a moment.’

  Sure enough, the glimmer had disappeared. Nothing more. Please let you be nothing more.

  ‘They control the Ayakashi,’ said the Zdrastian quietly.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Fortmann. There was a low murmur in the troop now, that of an animal’s death cry. ‘What is that?’ he spat.

  ‘They are scared,’ said the Zdrastian.

  ‘Tell them not to be.
’

  He turned to the principal gungov. ‘Tell them not to be. All is well.’ All is well.

  The glimmer appeared again, this time in the fields ahead of them and vanished. The wail grew louder, the principal joining in. No. Gnesha’s mercy, no.

  ‘The second wielder,’ Maria said flatly, given up already. ‘They have the second wielder. We’re too late.’

  No.

  The wail was deafening, a few of the gungovs turning back for the epicforest, some fleeing in random directions, some staying by Fortmann’s side, but still making the noise of the warbling death cry.

  No.

  ‘Alter this day,’ the Zdrastian said, his eyes closed, ‘in the most peaceful direction. By the gods and the forces and the agencies of -’

  ‘I think I should tell you something important,’ said Maria.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Fortmann.

  ‘But it seems like this might be the last chance.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Fortmann.

  He checked the ranks. Maybe a thousand remained, gibbering, shaking, some making what looked like spiritual gestures to the sky, to whichever gods monsters like that prayed to. The imp, the damned imp. Where is he now? Watching, from the tower? Reclining on a throne I should think, laughing gay like a king. Have I made an awful miscalculation? My father. How would he face this? He would scream. All of his humanity would come out in a moment like this; he would scream like a child.

  ‘On all that’s sacred,’ Maria said.

  ‘Don’t. Not here.’

  ‘I love you.’

  It came on them like an enormous graceful bird, pulling itself straight from the ether not half a mile away. He felt the fire of it on his face, the impossible heat, its tangles of pure incensed rage. He turned to Maria. She was staring perfectly peaceably. He went to open his mouth and let whatever words hid inside it fall out. He could not move, could not even meet the Ayakashi with his eyes. All about the gungovs were scattering, running on bandying legs, climbing over those that had stumbled already, taking their young on their shoulders, making for safety. You can’t run fast enough. I can’t run fast enough.