The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  He wonders briefly what will happen once the ferry passes out of sight, if Maneker and all those people will simply fade, no longer needed in the canvas of his dreams. He looks at the islanders as he walks away. Their faces aren’t clear. He searches out Maneker again, finding the man watching him, unsmiling.

  When he returns to the house she is there, unpacking her suitcases. He looks at what little she has brought with her for a two-week stay on the island; they will make their way to the small supermarket later to buy supplies—bread, tomatoes and oil, halloumi cheese, rich red wine in plastic bottles. He remembers that they have one less now for dinner, but the name of the departed guest is suddenly a mystery to him.

  They walk side by side to the supermarket along the narrow road between the white cuboid buildings. He knows she has something to tell him.

  “What is it?” Sotiris asks, sure that she will say she is pregnant. Briefly, absurdly, he worries that she won’t let him buy wine for their dinner.

  “I have a guest coming to stay with us,” Iro says, not looking at him. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  He is about to say that she has just brought a guest, but that isn’t true—she stepped off the boat alone. “Who have you invited?”

  “A man. You’ve met him once before, in London.” She glances at him shyly. “It’s not what you think. His name is Aaron.”

  “Aaron?” He tries to recall the name, but he knows a few Aarons. “Did he come to your house in Holland Park?”

  “Yes, just the once. He’s holidaying in Venice and wrote to say he would try and catch the morning ferry. He should be here tomorrow evening.”

  Sotiris takes his mind back to the days he spent in West London, seeing the sights while Iro was at work, but it is difficult to recall the details. “He’s a bit older than you—that Aaron? Some sort of … diplomat?”

  “That’s right. I said he could stay for the week—he was very excited to see Ithaka.”

  Sotiris looks at her. “All right. So he’s to have his own room?”

  “I told you, it’s not like that.”

  He laughs. “Fine, I won’t ask. Just don’t get your heart broken—it would ruin my holiday.”

  They make their way back to the house with a shopping bag each, sweating as they climb the hill. He thinks about the man who will come to stay but can’t remember his face. Iro hadn’t had many boyfriends that he knew of, but the ones he had met were invariably older, sedentary professionals she’d met through her contacts at the newspaper.

  Sotiris opens the fridge, taking a beer as he hears his sister turn on the rusty shower. He hopes the man she is inviting isn’t easily bored, for there’s little to do on the island that doesn’t involve eating, sleeping or swimming.

  He considers this Aaron as he steps out onto the veranda. He was English, his accent pure cut-glass, but something in his voice and mannerisms suggested that Aaron had been born abroad, perhaps on the Continent. Sotiris drains his beer and sits in one of the plastic chairs to look out at the port, wondering why the man’s heritage should interest him. He thought at the time, when he met him in London, that Aaron had been leading his sister on. She had been falling in love with him even then. He hopes she knows what she’s doing, inviting him here.

  Someone strolling along the harbour-side catches his attention and he sits up, placing the empty bottle on the table. Sotiris narrows his eyes, feeling the world move again. The figure is far away, one of many walking or driving sputtering scooters along the quay where the yachts and fishing boats are moored, but he sees this one clearly enough. It is small, like a dwarf, its skin a brilliant white. It looks up at him, little pointed ears pricked, and waves.

  Prism, he thinks, trying to find a place for that apparently familiar word. He wants to stand and shout, to warn the people walking past the creature that it is not safe. The tiny person—more primate than human—should not be here, on his little island.

  Suddenly he remembers, as the breeze ruffles his collar with a sound like a sigh, that his sister is dead.

  Threen

  Corphuso thought he could see a star. The tiny point of light was almost too faint to notice, wavering as if glimpsed through a column of rising heat. It was the only source of light he could make out, enough to know that the trees didn’t entirely obscure the deep valley where they had made their camp. As he watched it, another twinkle caught a nearby surface: the Threen sitting opposite him glancing up, the reflection of the starlight in its large round eyes. It had been watching him and now was looking to see what drew his attention. He’d thought perhaps it had gone back to the outskirts of the camp, having heard no sound around him for the last few minutes, but it had been there all along, inspecting him, close enough to reach out and touch.

  Their night-sight was said to be better than any other Prism. It surely had to be in the dripping fungal rainforests that bordered the Light Line. There was no difference between day and night here in the foothills of the Hiobs, and all was silent but for the pattering of a gentle rain from the leaves. Long ago on the Old World, the ancestors of all the imported species here would have screeched and howled into the darkness; now they kept still—life in the black rainforest made its way in creeping, careful silence, or burrowed and hidden.

  He watched the starlight glinting off the wetness of the thing’s eye a second longer, and then it was gone. He listened, waiting until he thought he heard it move away before he let himself relax. The Threen were their guides here, it was true, called by ancient debts to the aid of their Amaranthine masters, but still he didn’t like them. They spoke no Unified besides the most simple words, relying on a creole Zelioceti dialect with the Vulgar interpreter they had brought with them, and laughed glottal, high-pitched laughter if Voss—the Immortal who had accompanied him from the fortress at Nilmuth—ever tried to speak to them herself. There were originally eight Threen escorting the party of Vulgar over the Hiobs, though Corphuso suspected from the chatter whenever it was time to move again that more might have come through the forest to join the unseen group. Each day they climbed higher and higher into the mountains, the steepness of the ground the only suggestion that they might be ascending at all. He and the twenty Vulgar were connected by a rope tied around their left wrists to prevent someone from accidentally wandering off the forest trail. The Shell itself was secured inside a huge metal chest and dragged along behind them on a pallet.

  Corphuso remembered watching it being packed away in the ruined fortress at Nilmuth, jealously directing the careful wrapping of the object, its twisted digestive tract of cast bronze sealed away for the delight of some new owner. The Amaranthine Voss had told him that the attack on Nilmuth was just the beginning. News of the import of his invention was already spreading across the Prism Investiture, attracting the attention of kingdoms that might do almost anything to secure the Shell for themselves. Corphuso’s party were likely being followed through the black jungles of Port Obviado by any number of different hominid breeds, though the Threen scouts that brought up the rear were hazy in their details. He looked into the darkness, attempting to think rationally for a minute. They’d had a head start, setting off aboard a departing destroyer within a day of the failed attack on the fortress and breaking orbit near the cold equatorial port of Hrucho-Rash in a rusted Zelioceti Voidship. The Amaranthine herself had suggested they take the more well-travelled shipping lanes, slipping into the superluminal wake of a colossal bunk barge from Port Halstrom where they’d be almost impossible to spot.

  The journey through the blackness was hard and tedious, but light was absolutely forbidden here. In his mind, Corphuso pictured their progress, guessing at the density of the forest by the feel of the trunks and the distant sound of the Threen ahead hacking through undergrowth. He called to mind the vague maps he had studied before landing here, tracing their zigzagging path through the foothills against what he could remember of the charts.

  He’d first met the Threen at the hatch of the Voidship, the anaemic min
t-greens of the forest illuminated briefly in the light from the hangar. Taller than their Prism second cousins the Vulgar, indeed almost as tall as an Amaranthine, the Threen looked like skinny, undernourished children. They had covered their wide, pale eyes with strips of cloth to protect them from the hangar lights and their mottled cream skin looked glossy, as if it would be slick to the touch. Corphuso had only found out later—after hearing their unsettling slurping sounds through the night—that they used their own saliva to bathe, licking themselves clean with long pink tongues. During the short introductions as the Shell was unloaded from the hold, Corphuso had time to notice that at least one of the Threen was quite obviously unwell, its skin jaundiced and blotchy. Certain races of Prism could become ill, unlike the Amaranthine or the Melius; overenthusiastic inbreeding had made pedigrees and mongrels of them, like the dogs of the Old World. Such misfortunes rarely affected the more civilised of the Vulgar, who could live well into their fifth century if the serendipity of wealth and title placed them safely above the grind of their society. But still disease scared him, especially in this dank, lightless place.

  Corphuso closed his eyes, noticing no difference in sensation, and thought about sleeping. They would be moving again in less than three hours. The camp was dug into the side of a small earthen rise in the forest, damp tree-roots extending like buttresses to trip anyone who did not feel ahead. The smell of the makeshift latrines wafted across the camp with the light forest wind, and even now he could hear one of his Vulgar guards bumping into things as he made his way towards one of the holes.

  Port Obviado had once been an Amaranthine world, a moon cowering almost permanently in the shadow of its parent planet in the former Solar Satrapy of Kapteyn’s Star, many thousands of years ago. It was now held, like much of the system, by the Threen and their slave Prism, a dark place where no eyes could penetrate. The air here, thick with scents of urine, moss and earth, was heavier and stronger than that of some of the Vulgar kingdoms or the Old World, and Corphuso remembered as he sank into sleep some snippet of his education and the great mystery that had confronted the pre-Amaranthine conquest of the Firmament.

  Since the exploration of the first extrasolar worlds twelve thousand years before, it had been noted that around twenty-five per cent of the totally lifeless planets and moons discovered already possessed atmospheres that were perfectly agreeable to human habitation. No forms of animal, plant or microbial life existed on them and yet the air beneath their topmost clouds was harshly breathable, often with a higher concentration of oxygen than that of the Old World. After much of the Firmament was colonised by the proto-governments and kingdoms that would make up the Immortal Amaranthine, it was speculated by some that the specific concentrations of gases in many of the newly discovered realms were all roughly equivalent to that of the Old World’s early atmosphere, many millions of years before. In essence, the smell of Port Obviado—or perhaps more accurately the stench—would be perfectly recognisable to a beast of the ancient past such as the early mammalian progenitors of Amaranthine and Prism alike, perhaps even to a dinosaur. Why such facts felt important to him now was suddenly beyond him, and yet as his mind finally dissolved into sleep, Corphuso wondered what would happen if he just stopped breathing the rich, prehistoric air, what they would do with him and his fabulous machine. Its operation, though not exactly simple, could perhaps be understood through trial and error, even though many would surely perish in the process. There were others—some still locked in oubliettes on Drolgins and Filgurbirund—who had worked with him on various stages of the Shell’s design, but Corphuso knew that whoever eventually came for him would prefer the machine’s architect alive and functional. With a bitter irony he reflected that the Soul Engine (as his technicians had referred to it before the more popular name was chosen), would keep him alive only so long. Corphuso had other plans, of course, other ideas and inventions, but none so grandiose or life-changing as the machine they were currently dragging through the darkness. If he could only remain under the Immortals’ wing—unfailingly cruel and selfish though they might be—he might yet live to see them through.

  The Hiob Ranges, stretching like a pocked, serrated belt around Port Obviado’s black waist, were positioned directly between the moon’s two warring Threen Principalities. It was impossible to cross the Light Line—whether in sub-orbit or higher—from the northern to the southern hemisphere due to Lacaille corsairs, battleships and privateer fleets patrolling the shipping lanes, and since Port Obviado and its parent planet Port Cys represented the invisible border between the outer Prism Investiture and its inner regions, the only practical and efficient way around was to traverse the Hiobs. A motorized convoy in or above the blackness of the jungle was an instant and slow-moving target, and so it had been deemed necessary to land in one Principality and transport the Shell on foot through the rainforest into the next, one hundred and thirty miles south.

  If all went to plan, a squadron of Vulgar cutters would be waiting in the capital port to take them further into the Firmament and out of the Lacailles’ reach. The Vulgar were occasionally loyal and useful allies to the Amaranthine, always on call if enough influence and capital could be thrown their way. A brief end to the Vulgar’s dispute with the Lacaille—their close cousins in all but name—was theoretically possible if enough territory could be awarded to both sides, but it was a process those among the Amaranthine who oversaw such things considered one step closer to giving over the Firmament entirely. The Prism as a whole—a loosely related amalgam of eleven hominid races populating more than a thousand individual kingdom-states—represented an encroaching and eventually terminal illness to the Firmament, a system of tumours gradually strangling the Amaranthine until there would be nothing left of them and their worlds. It was only through careful management of allies and influence that the Amaranthine still held any real power at all. But time was running out, and whenever one species was strengthened to repel another, the Firmament suffered.

  Corphuso knew that the Threen—known Amaranthine-killers—had been punished most. Their holdings were among the poorest and most dangerous places in the Investiture. Despite their resentment of the Amaranthine, they were being offered a comprehensive pardon now—on the condition that they assisted Voss and Corphuso’s safe passage across the Hiobs—as well as new lands elsewhere around Kapteyn’s Star and a lifting of many of the crippling sanctions the Immortals had imposed on them over the centuries. Corphuso knew other Prism species would be taking note of the Amaranthines’ diminishing ability to honour their promises, and yet still he doubted the Immortals’ word.

  He was awoken by the feeling of someone being retied to his wrist, and together they were guided further into the camp so they could be attached to another of the still-sleeping Vulgar. When all were accounted for, he felt the rope stiffening and the sounds of the camp being packed up.

  “Corphuso?” It was Voss he’d been tied to.

  “Good morning, Amaranthine,” he squeaked as they trudged in darkness again, the rain pattering harder through the leaves. “Did you manage any sleep?”

  “Very little, Architect.” She sighed. “I expect I shall get less and less as we near the Light Line.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, wary of sounding overconfident in his knowledge of their ways, “but is it not the case that Amaranthine need less sleep than us mortal creatures?”

  The quality of Voss’s voice changed, as if she had turned to face him in the dark. “Perennials, perhaps, but I am not so old as you appear to think, Corphuso.”

  He hesitated, embarrassed. “I did not mean—”

  “Quiet,” she whispered.

  He felt her nudge his shoulder. The Threen were talking among themselves with an apparent urgency, and he heard one dash by them up the forest path to the front of the line, its feet slapping in the mud. He strained to listen. Something had happened.

  “What are they saying to each other?” she asked.

  Corphuso drop
ped his head as they walked, listening intently to the commotion up ahead. His understanding of Threen was imperfect—it did not share many similarities with Vulgar—but he could make out enough.

  “They are worried, Amaranthine. The one close by says …” He paused to listen again. “He is saying it is possible that we are being hunted. What should we do?”

  Voss stopped and Corphuso reluctantly slowed, feeling the rope tighten around his wrist. He listened to the sounds of the rain in the lightless forest. Eventually the rope around his wrist was tugged, softly at first and then harder. He waited, hearing a Threen mutter and turn back to them, the pattering of its feet growing louder.

  Before it could reach them, its sounds ceased as if it had stopped abruptly in the path ahead. Corphuso held his breath. Suddenly it screamed shrilly, the rope yanking him and the Amaranthine to the ground. Sounds of a scuffle and more of the Threen running back down the path came out of the darkness as he was dragged along by the rope, the Vulgar behind falling and cursing one after another. They were pulled across the mud, bumping into trees and stones, the Vulgar men at his rear screaming now, too. The rope became warm and wet, thick chunks of hot material sliding into his hands, and a spray of damp droplets spattered his face. He tasted the iron in them.

  “Pull!” Voss shouted, “pull backwards!”

  Corphuso rammed his boot into the earth until it gripped. More Vulgar piled into their backs. Whatever was yanking on the rope stopped and snarled, and Corphuso found himself trying to remember the names of all the evolved Old World animals that had come to live here as he leaned backwards with all his paltry weight. The thing would come for him first—being at the head of the line—maybe sparing the Vulgar behind who were pulling the Shell, and that was perhaps just as well, but for a moment he hated the idea of sacrificing his life for them. He steeled himself, staring into the darkness, hoping Voss might have one or two of the Amaranthines’ fabled tricks up her sleeve.