‘Don’t read too much into things.’ The Monk stands up. ‘I’d like you to meet another friend of mine.’ He gestures at me. I hold out a hand and the young man takes it.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘I’m called Muz.’
I take the hand. He grips, briefly but strongly, and I get the sense I would have liked his real self. I feel I want to give him a name in return, but my real name is too raw. I hesitate. Then I make a decision. After all, he won’t be needing it. ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Call me Rudi.’
I catch myself giving the Monk a sidelong glance. I promise myself I am not looking for his approval, but I seem to have it anyway.
Muz nods acknowledgement. He looks at the Monk. ‘So, what now?’
‘Well, our friend down below. My friend.’
I remember why we are here. ‘The Creation Machine?’
‘Yeah.’ The Monk nods. ‘I still like that name.’
Muz looks puzzled. ‘Creation Machine? Oh . . .’ His face clears. ‘This is what everyone is getting excited about?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Wow!’ He looks at me, and back to the Monk. ‘You don’t seem excited. What’s happening?’
‘Well, I know in general terms. I can’t know any more without getting closer.’
He falls silent, and I get the feeling he is working up to something. I exchange glances with the guy called Muz, and we wait.
Finally the Monk stands up. ‘Guys, there’s something I need to tell you. A long time ago I made an agreement. Actually it would be better to call it a bargain. Or a pact. With what you call the Creation Machine. We agreed to help each other out, if we were ever . . .’ He tails off, and adds simply, ‘It’s in big trouble.’
I begin to see. From his expression, so does Muz. He gets there first. ‘Ah, this pact? Would it be a bit kind of one-way?’
‘It might be.’ The Monk smiles, and somehow it manages to be the saddest expression I have ever seen. ‘I’ve lived long, too. I have nothing to lose. What about you guys?’
Muz stands up and stretches. ‘I haven’t lived that long yet, but I reckon I’m ahead of you in one way. I already died once.’ He finishes the stretch. ‘I have stuff I’m happy to leave behind. And immortality looks shit, to be honest.’
They both look at me. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I already died once, too, but I don’t think I’m ready to do it again just yet.’
The Monk nods. ‘I’m glad,’ he says. ‘Will you come with us some of the way?’
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘As long as I can come back.’
‘Good.’
Muz snaps his fingers. ‘That could work,’ he says. ‘Listen, if you do mean to come back will you take something for me? It’s a message.’
The Monk looks from him to me and grins. This time it doesn’t look at all sad.
Traspise, Cordern
ALAMECHE WOKE EARLY, surprised to find himself having slept at all. There were no staff in the Palace – it was intended to be one of the few places anywhere where one could be truly alone and private – so he shrugged a wrap round his shoulders and helped himself to a sharp herbal infusion from a little charcoal brazier. Both the charcoal and the leaves were replenished constantly by complicated conveyor belts that clicked quietly as they disappeared through holes in the wall. He watched the belts with amusement while his drink steeped, reflecting that they were one of many things about his life and status that appealed to his sense of the ridiculous.
Then he walked over to the balcony of his room, drew aside the heavy drapes and leaned on the window ledge. The morning air was cool and sharp but the solidified crystal mush of the Palace felt oddly warm under his hands, and slightly slick. He rubbed at it, half expecting something to stick to his fingers, but nothing did.
His room was in almost the highest part of the Palace, and the walls fell away steeply below his window. There were ruins at ground level; the river that had formed the Palace in the first place still flowed round its roots, canalizing and eroding and re-depositing so that the whole structure was in a constant state of living. Or dying, depending on your point of view.
Alameche suddenly laughed. Alone, on the edge, looking into an abyss. It was too obvious a metaphor. He pushed himself upright and looked up. The sky was lightening towards first-dawn, but he could still see a great many stars. Three of them were moving in formation.
That would be the Patriarch. Alameche allowed himself one sigh.
It was time for work.
The Patriarch was surprisingly good at travelling light. Of the three ships in his convoy, only one landed, and it contained the Patriarch himself and four of his private guard. Normally they would surround him but he outpaced them, striding urgently up to Alameche and the others. His face was flushed. ‘What’s going on? Half the ships in the Spin must be out there. It’s tantamount to an invasion!’
Alameche nodded. ‘It is troubling, Excellency.’
‘Troubling? It’s outrageous.’ He shook his head. ‘What are they doing there?’
Alameche half turned to where Eskjog was hovering. ‘Ah, perhaps you . . .?’
‘If you insist.’ Eskjog floated forwards. ‘I’m afraid the news about the artefact is thoroughly out, Excellency. However, I wouldn’t be too alarmed. The mixed flotilla on your doorstep certainly represents keen interest, even friendly concern, but not a threat. Not yet, anyway.’
‘Why ever not?’ The Patriarch was even redder. ‘How many guns does it take before we have a threat?’
‘With respect, Excellency, it’s not how many guns.’ Eskjog bobbed a little closer to the Patriarch. ‘It’s where they are pointing.’
‘Well, since they have come to see us, I should think their guns are pointing at us, wouldn’t you?’
‘I doubt it. Any one of the stakeholders out there could have mopped you up at any time, quite frankly. They’re not there to have a pop at you. They’re there to stop each other having a pop at you. And, possibly, to have a pop at each other.’
The Patriarch frowned. ‘Alameche? Is this true?’
‘I think so, Excellency.’ Alameche gave a little shrug. ‘If anything, it’s probably reassuring.’
‘Really? I don’t find it so. But still.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘Is it stable?’
‘Probably yes.’ Eskjog spoke briskly. ‘Bear in mind that the Haas Corporation is one of those stakeholders, albeit at one remove, and we have a very strong interest in stability. At least for the moment.’
‘Yes, well.’ The Patriarch stared at the little machine for a while. ‘We find ourselves in your hands.’ He turned to Alameche. ‘I don’t like this position. I expect you to do something to change it, you know.’
Alameche nodded. ‘I intend to do so imminently.’
‘Good.’ The Patriarch rubbed his hands together. ‘That being so, when do I get to see this miraculous problem in the flesh?’
Alameche smiled. ‘This afternoon, we propose. Meanwhile we have arranged some entertainment.’
There was a deafening explosion. The Patriarch lifted his eye from the sight and grinned at Alameche. ‘Bang on,’ he said happily. ‘Must have got, what, two hundred?’
Alameche took a viewing glass from the pilot and squinted through it at the dispersing cloud of smoke and feathers. ‘I think you may have cleared the flock. Well done, Excellency!’
‘Thank you.’ The Patriarch cracked his knuckles. ‘Good way of taking a chap’s mind off things, this. Well done.’
Alameche bowed slightly. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘There’s a Sky Post soon. We’ll tie up for a while and have some refreshments. Meanwhile, would you care for an aperitif?’
‘Well, now you mention it.’ The Patriarch cupped his hands and blew on them. ‘It is a little cold up here.’
Balloon guns were widely illegal if you lived in the sort of society that cared about these things. On Traspise nobody cared at all, and they were one of the most popular, and hence the most expensive, attractions. From the point of view of anyone outside
the Cordern, this was not the main problem. The trouble was, the quarry of a balloon-gun hunt was a small half bird, half rodent creature called a Crowd Flitter. Every part of a Crowd Flitter tasted awful except for one organ, unique to the little creature, which generated a complex ultrasonic echo pulse and enabled it to hold its position with a vast flock to a tolerance of less than a millimetre. The balloon gun fired a cloud of micro issues that targeted the echo pulses, one missile to a Flitter. The hit rate was close to a hundred per cent, which meant that Crowd Flitters were the most endangered species in the Spin.
A balloon-gun hunt was a double-decker affair. On the upper level, close to the artificially lowered cloud-base of the hunting ground, the guns were mounted on hunting baskets suspended from vacuum balloons and towed by tethered Hover Birds, their paired sets of man-long wings counter-beating slowly. Fifty metres below, vast flapping Keep Nets, also suspended from balloons, followed the guns and caught the falling flesh, feathers, fur and fragments of bone which were all that was left after a successful strike. The tasty bits were picked out by hand and made into compressed blocks of spiced meat; Alameche had heard it was worth its own weight in trans-uranium elements. He didn’t like the taste that much.
The undulating nets always reminded him of some sort of sea creature. He grasped briefly at a stay wire as the balloon swayed in an air current. Then he handed the viewing glass back to the pilot and reached down into a hamper for a flask. He passed it to the Patriarch, who nodded, took off the cap and swigged. Then his eyes widened. ‘My goodness. I hope you’re serving that to everyone? I don’t want to make a spectacle of myself.’
Alameche took the flask and held it to his lips for a long time. He lowered it and smiled. ‘You will have nothing to worry about, Excellency. I promise.’ He handed back the flask.
‘Good.’ The Patriarch took another swig. When he lowered the flask his eyes were focused sharply on Alameche. ‘You know, there are few people I have ever trusted as much as I find myself trusting you. I hope I am right.’
Alameche half bowed. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I hope that history will judge me well.’
There was a cry from the pilot of the front balloon. Alameche looked up and squinted along the line. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the Sky Post. Let’s moor and have lunch.’
The Sky Post was far more than its name suggested. It was a cross between a forest and a town – if you could call one plant a forest.
The Weed was an accident. It was a genetic sport of a fairly ordinary, although very tall, native tree of Traspise. It had appeared during the re-engineering of the planet, and it had proved so prolific that it had nearly derailed the whole project. Multiple trunks grew from a single rootstock, throwing out suckers and seed pods with equal abandon to produce unbelievably invasive colonies of hundreds of trunks, some of them reaching over half a kilometre high. It was so durable that halting it had all but sterilized the planet; its only weakness was a tendency to burn well, but that wasn’t much help unless you wanted to torch the entire world.
The Sky Post was built around the very last surviving stand – ten smooth trunks rising from a root-ball which was rigidly confined by deep sintered stone columns, and whose seed pods were kept carefully, and chemically, infertile. It was a collection of timber buildings set in a rough circle just below the flat, wide canopies of the Weed. Their broad blackish-green leaves brushed the cloud-base. Cables from the buildings disappeared up through the canopies in discreet acknowledgement of the fact that the load of the Sky Post was now greater than could be borne by the Weed alone; above the real canopy of leaves – and invisible above the clouds – was another canopy, this time made of vacuum balloons.
They left the pilots to moor the balloons at a long platform on the edge of the Sky Post, and walked along softly creaking timber pavements to the central building. It was a long, low structure of rough trunks, and in deference to some ancient tradition or other it was roofed with turf. The Patriarch stopped and stared at it. ‘For my father’s sake! I feel as if I am about to be buried.’
Alameche didn’t have to force the laugh. ‘Nothing of the sort, Excellency, I promise. Just lunch. Shall we?’ He gestured towards the low door.
They went in. The first thing that hit them was smoke. In the centre of the long hall was a broad fire pit, glowing with charcoal. The pit was a deep wooden trench lined with sand which was black with soot and crusted with fat at the edges. A long thick spit ran from end to end of the pit, loaded with two-and four-legged beasts. Fat spat and crackled and ran, and a blue haze floated above the spit and drifted up towards the single central smoke hole.
The others were grouped around the pit on low benches. As Alameche and the Patriarch approached, the nearest figure squinted at them through the haze, and then rose from his bench. It was Garamende – inevitably, thought Alameche – and somehow he had managed to bring his four companions with him; they sat around him, blinking. Garamende bowed. ‘Greetings, Excellency.’ Then he turned to Alameche. ‘What is this, man? Death by barbecue?’
Alameche laughed. ‘Only if you eat too much. Which you mustn’t, or you’ll be too heavy for the balloons afterwards.’
Garamende pulled a face and turned towards the Patriarch. ‘See, Excellency, on top of everything else he presents me with several times my own weight in roast meat and then orders me on to a diet.’
The Patriarch laughed in return. ‘Will it work?’
‘The diet? I doubt it, Excellency.’ Garamende threw a sidelong look at Alameche. ‘Life is too short, after all. And besides, I’m too heavy already.’
‘Well, I’m sure you can leave something behind. One or two of your playthings, for example.’ The Patriarch raised his eyebrow at Garamende. ‘I do notice, you know, and I don’t approve.’
He nodded, and moved off towards the fire pit.
Garamende watched him go and then turned to Alameche. ‘Well, that’s me told,’ he said. He lowered his voice. ‘Everything on track? You still make your move when we land at the artefact site?’
‘That was what we agreed.’ Alameche patted the other man on the shoulder. ‘I have everything in hand.’
‘I’m sure you have. I just wish you’d tell me more.’
‘You’ll find out.’ Alameche patted him again, then gestured towards the fire pit. ‘Go and sit down. Eat! I’ll join you shortly.’
He turned and went back out of the hall. Outside, he took one deep breath of the cool, damp air. Then he strolled to the edge of the walkway, which formed part of a cat’s cradle of timber paths that threaded around and through the trunks. He was close to the centre of the stand; if he looked down through a gap he could see the trunks lancing down, dead straight, towards a vanishing point four hundred metres below.
He took another deep breath, looked around carefully, and reached into the pocket of his flying cape.
The thing was small enough that he could almost close his fist around it, but it was very heavy. He wondered what it was made of.
It was easy to use. Press once, then drop.
He watched as it fell, shrinking to a mote and then vanishing. For a long moment he couldn’t see anything. Then there was a tiny white flare from the centre of the stand at the limit of his vision.
He nodded. That was it. He had better get back before the Patriarch began to wonder where he was.
With his heart beating a little faster than he would have expected, he walked back to the hall. There was a bundle of canopy cables tethered near the door, and Alameche studied it until he had seen – yes. There. One slightly separate, with a smear of red near the base.
His heartbeat slowed. Everything was arranged. He ducked through the door, edged his way through the haze and sat down between the Patriarch and Garamende. Both were already eating. You served yourself. Antique hunting knives were laid out along the edges of the fire pit, and each man leaned over the smoking charcoal and carved lumps of meat. Two servants circulated with flasks of the same spirit Alameche had given the Patria
rch.
Alameche did more watching than eating, and no drinking at all. Most people were hiding their nerves well, if they were feeling them. Fiselle seemed distracted; he sat with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, staring at the fire pit. Alameche nudged Garamende and pointed at Fiselle. ‘Is he all right?’
The big man shrugged and wiped the grease off his lips with his sleeve. ‘Up to a point.’
‘What do you mean?’
Garamende looked at him for a moment. ‘My turn to be mysterious,’ he said. ‘Tell you later.’ Then he looked around. ‘Hey, talking of mysteries, where’s your little machine? Haven’t seen it today.’
‘Eskjog?’ Alameche smiled. ‘Oh, it’s busy. It’ll join us later.’
‘Hope so.’ Garamende belched, and threw some lumps of meat over his shoulder. ‘Fuck it,’ he announced. ‘I’m going out for a piss.’
He got up and lumbered towards the door. Alameche glanced back over his shoulder. The four androgynes were squatting on the floor, with the hunks of meat held to their mouths. In the flickering light there was something – feral about them.
Alameche shuddered.
‘What, all of them?’ Eskjog had seemed surprised. ‘Are you sure?’
Alameche was tired. It was very late. He and Fiselle had watched the suns down and then parted wordlessly, Fiselle walking stiffly off towards his chamber. Alameche had waited a little longer until a small spiky shape had floated up out of the darkness and followed him into his own room.
‘No, I’m not sure. That’s why all of them.’ Alameche stared at Eskjog. ‘Don’t you see? I can’t be sure. This is the only way.’ Then with a flicker of hope, ‘Unless you know different?’
‘No. Sorry. I don’t.’ Eskjog drifted over towards the windows, which were now firmly closed, and then back again. Alameche had the impression the little machine was pacing. ‘I’m not always as informed as you think I am about your own domestic politics.’ It paused, and then seemed to reach a decision. ‘Very well, I trust your judgement. There’s a completeness about your proposal. I think that will play well with the watching public, and frankly you do need that. There’s a lot of ships out there.’ It settled on a low table in front of Alameche. ‘Now, details. Do you want any help from me? Anything you like, as long as it’s deniable. Obviously I can’t do anything as immoral as actually getting involved.’
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