The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  From the cycles of the Greenmoon, Lycaste worked out that tonight would be his eleventh night in the Utopia—one of three great gardens that encircled the Black Sea—and many more since he had last seen Melilotis disappearing into the darkness. He hadn’t counted the days at first, only deciding he ought to once they began to slip by unnoticed. He could imagine only too well how easy it could be to forget the passing of time while living among Immortals. He might drop dead like a dayfly while they went about their demented business, and only then would they give him more than a moment’s thought, probably forgetting he’d ever existed within the Quarter. This sacred Utopia, or Paradise as the Glorious Bird referred to it, was like that: a sump for the forgotten, ruled over by a power higher than he’d ever known existed.

  The gardens were, he thought, a bit like a carnivorous plant he’d once kept in his bedchamber on Kipris: a long, tubular throat of a thing that preyed on any flies unlucky enough to fall into the pond of corrosive juices that filled its gullet. One day he’d looked in uninterestedly to find the insides of the plant crawling with beetles, their hooked feet clamped to the sides of the tube while they fed on the dead flies, happily munching away and unaware of any danger below. The Amaranthine were those beetles, cheerfully inhabiting a world where others must appear to perish in an instant and disappear from sight, day trippers they needn’t bother to get to know.

  He stood, pins and needles fizzing in one leg, and hobbled across the flat lawns to the closest pillar. It towered eighty feet above him, its black, shining bulk inlaid with seams of gold. Hundreds more stretched roofless into the shrieking distance, their excrement-streaked columns studded with woven nests. At the top of each column a naked statue crouched, its outstretched arms obviously designed to hold whatever the pillars once supported. No two figures were alike—he’d spent days with an aching neck looking at them all. Some were quite explicit, their legs stuck at glistening angles into the bird-flecked sky. Others frowned sulkily at whoever walked beneath. Across the lawn, another set of mirroring pillars ran, their figures peering down at him. Hundreds of the columns near the shores of the Utopia were pocked with holes and gashes and cracks that Lycaste often ran his fingers along, scars from a violent life nobody remembered.

  He strolled up to an enclosed nest, a pocket of flowers and stems with a small hole for an entrance that hung from one of the pillars, and tapped on its side. There didn’t appear to be anyone home so he went to the next one, a larger, more complicated structure with single petals sewn into its walls like scales.

  “Hello?” the minuscule voice inside asked sleepily.

  “Er, hello—do you know anything about a eulogy? Where it might be held?” Lycaste leaned his face into the musky depths of the hole. He flinched as a long magenta beak jutted out like a dagger.

  “How should I know?” The creature cawed. “Ask him.”

  Lycaste glanced around to see one of the Amaranthine mincing by, eyeing them with a jolly smile. The short man’s pale skin was lividly sunburned, but he didn’t appear to be in any pain. He wore a cape of bright feathers around his shoulders that trailed along the grass, picking up debris and the occasional squeaking baby bird that had fallen from a nest. Lycaste didn’t like trying to talk to them; it was akin to conversing with someone who didn’t wholly believe you existed, or that if you did you would soon cease to. They were such a strange disappointment to Lycaste, despite the fact that up until the last few days he’d had no idea of their existence. The person in front of him had lived for at least eleven thousand years—probably more—before falling victim to the madness that had seen him sent here. Lycaste looked down at him, unable to understand how such a thing could live for so long. Snot hung limply from the man’s nostrils as he tittered, waving his short, burned fingers in greeting. Within a minute of meeting one he’d noticed the resemblance to old Jotroffe: five fingers on each hand, small puffy face and tiny glinting eyes. It was beyond doubt that an Amaranthine had been living among them in the Tenth, but by choice rather than being consigned there.

  Lycaste stepped into his path, for it was the only tactic he’d found that worked, and gripped the man’s shoulder.

  “Old friend,” he said, in the custom of the Utopia, “where is the memorial service? On which beach?” Lycaste didn’t expect much of an answer, suspecting he’d spoken too quickly for the little man.

  The Amaranthine furrowed his brow and looked back towards the lakes in the distance, uncertain. He stared with bewilderment up at Lycaste. “You … you are very big today! They get bigger every day, don’t they?” His breathy voice was nothing more than a whisper at first, as if slowly arriving from somewhere very far away.

  Lycaste nodded. “I’m big, you’re small.”

  The man grinned and cackled, his head swinging up and down, the snot loosening and flailing. “Much smaller than you! Haha!”

  Lycaste laughed despite himself. The Immortal abruptly rushed forward without a word and hugged him tightly, warm moisture from his nose running down Lycaste’s stomach. “And they will get bigger.” He nodded, looking up. “But I’ll always stay the same.”

  Lycaste pulled away, watching his new friend cackle and totter on. This one could speak Third well, unlike many of the others. He’d try to find him again and ask more questions. He began walking towards the closest lake, occasionally meeting the mad men and women trotting by in twos and threes, some accompanied by their curious pets—various species that looked content enough talking among themselves.

  He’d never known the dead woman, now at rest for over two months but unable to decay. Apparently birds used to settle on her head and shoulders as she sat and whispered in the yellow mud of the beaches, understanding her every word. They said she told stories of when the world was different, but none of them would deign to tell Lycaste what they were. He hoped that at her eulogy some of those tales might be recounted.

  The tribute was held on the island in the centre of the next lake, and Lycaste reached it just after the Glorious Bird had begun to speak. He’d had to swim through the murky yellow water the Immortal had drowned in, terrified of feeling a hand grab his ankle and tug him down. Of course, such fears were nonsense, though: the body itself lay under a shawl of brightly dyed blankets on the island. The coloured shawl, one of the many rituals the birds observed, was supposed to attract the attention of a forgetful Creator in the event he’d lost track of the Immortal’s spirit, left for so long to wander the world.

  The miniature beach swarmed with jostling colour and fluttering feathers as he stepped ashore, the Glorious Bird politely waiting for him to sit comfortably in the silt before resuming. Slippery, slug-like fish somehow able to breathe air flopped across to the water as he sat, the shallow holes they had been scooping in the mud abandoned, and a few brightly plumed heads strained and twitched to see him, chattering in a musical chorus of greeting.

  “She was one of us,” the bird continued from its roost in the small island’s single splendid tree, hung with egg-shaped nests that swayed when he shifted his small weight from claw to claw. “A loved and cherished resident of the Paradise, given to us to look after.” He paused, gazing around, a comfortable orator. Beneath the finger of branch he perched on hung his long golden tail feathers, their tips glinting in the ruffle of a warm breeze.

  “Everyone here has a legend about her, her kindness, her gift with language, even on the days when she was not, admittedly, at her very best.”

  Some of them nodded in a shuffle of colour and plumage, and Lycaste looked over at the only other person sitting among them on the beach, a small man who had not been there when he sat down. The man was partially hidden by birds that perched casually on his shoulders and thighs, but Lycaste could see enough. His squat, miniaturised frame, finely boned head and small, dark eyes betrayed him as undoubtedly Amaranthine (now that Lycaste knew what to look for), and yet something indefinably peculiar set him apart. He looked fresher, somehow unweathered by all those thousands of years, a daisy as
yet unpressed between the pages of a book. As Lycaste watched, a tear slid falteringly down the man’s olive skin to the fold of his mouth, where it rested, shining in the sunlight.

  “And so we say a joyous farewell to another of our charges. Our friend, our mother, our daughter, the builder of our lands and the architect of our minds.”

  Without a prompt discernible to Lycaste, a flock of garish parrots began to sing. There were no words in the high lament, but it brought a tingle to Lycaste’s still-drying skin. Behind the birds’ splayed crimson feathers, the nests twisted like all the small bodies he had seen hanging as he’d walked the Artery north towards the Black Sea. The song reached higher, and he saw again the branches bending under the weight of three or four children at a time, some upside down, their faces slack and flyblown.

  Every two days’ walk on the empty, darkly forested road he’d come upon them, some ripped and desiccated by animals and heat, some fresh, as if it had happened that day. In death they’d lost their favourite colours, every one of them a shade of rotting red.

  The money was far from Lycaste’s mind as he’d started firing, first at the barrels of water and then at the ottoman in the sitting room near where Melilotis had been tied. The elegant lounge erupted, scattering wreckage and cushions, their gaudy stuffing spilling across the floor. Lycaste had aimed his fingers again before he understood what he’d found.

  Ribbons of dyed silk of various lengths, more than he could count, had been packed into every cushion and soft surface, the wealth of a modest estate of the Second squirrelled away in a single room. He ransacked the rest of the house ripping holes in things, finding more and more. The ribbons he collected in his arms and stacked in piles in the centre of the room could buy him everything he had lost. He counted them, repeatedly having to start over; it was more than everything he’d lost—he could have anything he wanted.

  While he’d been questioning Melilotis, the partially burned house had felt like as good a place as any to stay for a while longer. Now that his captive was on the loose, that option was less attractive. In the morning, cautiously watching for any sign of the man, Lycaste left for the closest intersection with the Artery. Into his pack he’d thrown pastries from the larder and a sample of the leaf in a finger-sized vial, as well as the ring and some new maps. The tight coils of money—less than a tenth of what he’d ended up burying—packed the cloth sack until it was quite heavy, and shielded his shoulder blades from the sharp metal edges of the charts he’d decided to bring along. He’d taken Callistemon’s case and stared at it for some time, eventually throwing it into the purple field.

  Lycaste passed the hanging forms of the three children without looking back, though they haunted him from the corner of his eye with the eerie whine of feasting flies. That buzzing, he knew now—that was the sound ghosts made.

  Steerilden’s Land

  The privateer successfully set down on Steerilden’s Land, the fourth planet in the Solar Satrapy of Port Elsbet. After almost exactly one Old World month, their supplies were depleted enough for bones and broths to have become a staple of every meal on board, all solid food long gone. The compartments within the hull of the Wilemo Maril were fitted to accommodate sixty Vulgar mercenaries, engineers and navigators in relative comfort, each little person requiring a volume of space no bigger than an old-style suitcase. Captain Maril, knowing the danger of the journey ahead, had filled his ship with more than a hundred men, their triple bunks squeezed between engine components, water pipes and even the layers of woolly insulation that packed the tin hollows of the hull. One especially small gunner was made to sleep full time in the scarred forward turret blister above the ship’s nose, the long guns draped with a moth-eaten blanket.

  The small craft had heard no echoes of other Prism activity during its thirty-six-trillion-mile dash from the Old World, the six-light-year void between supply stops apparently empty and silent, nothing pursuing them even if they had been spotted.

  Maril and his engineers sifted the wad of sun charts, consulting the carefully plotted constellation lines of their route as the Fourth Solar Satrapy grew in boldness ahead, a black disk in a silver field of blended stars. Locked in a vault in the captain’s quarters was the pile of Fir-mamental Ducats—the inviolable currency of the Firmament—given to Maril by the Amaranthine Bonneville: half up front, half upon delivery of his signatures. Maril had been surprised; the Immortal could easily have paid the same sum in Old World silks, knowing full well that the currency meant little anywhere in the Vulgar Empire. He wants this badly, the captain thought to himself, looking up at Jospor, his master-at-arms, as he entered the forward operations capsule.

  “Two points out, Captain,” the master-at-arms said, patting the sun charts. The haunting electromagnetic reverberations from Steerilden’s Land filled the chamber, moaning louder as the privateer approached. Mixed in with the howl was the musical tinkling from the Satrapy’s four other planets, too distant for their own rich signatures to dominate. Most Prism used sound in this way to navigate the Firmament, their ears attuned like bats’ as they fell between the unique voices of the worlds.

  Maril nodded, listening for a moment to the timeless wail of the planet’s ionosphere. “All gun crews to the forward battery,” he said, collecting a chart from the stack.

  Jospor hesitated. “You think there’ll be trouble?”

  The captain shrugged briskly. He hated having to explain himself. “The Treaty of Silp is over—we’re at war again. There are plenty who use Steerilden’s Land for resupply.”

  The master-at-arms continued to stare at him. “Should I signal Port Elsbet for permission to land?”

  Maril grimaced, pulling on a vacuum-sealed chainmail glove and fastening it to his Voidsuit. “Absolutely not. We can drop in unspotted.” He straightened, clapping and picking up his helmet. “To your station, then, Jospor.”

  Jospor returned the clapped Vulgar salute and left for the cockpit. Maril shook his head, looking into the eyes of the bulbous helmet for a moment as he cradled it in his arms. Like many who had spent time on Filgurbirund or Drolgins, Maril had heard his share of stories about the machine that would solve the Vulgar’s problems. They called it the Shell, among other names, though exactly what it did only drunkards and cretinous beggars could say with any certainty. Foolishly entombing it in a fortress on Drolgins had only pricked the ears of every enemy of the Vulgar in the Prism Investiture. The subsequent Lacaille invasion had now smashed any chance of peace between the two empires, the very reason he was fastening his suit on now and readying the forward battery.

  Maril smiled drily as he lowered the helmet over his head, locked the faceplate and fastened the collar cuffs, the weight of it paining his neck and making him slouch. That Amaranthine, Bonneville, he knew about the Shell, too. Maril couldn’t have said how—the Amaranthine were not generally invited to the Imperial planet of Filgurbirund or its moon, Drolgins—but somehow the Immortal knew and had chosen to act now. What Bonneville thought he could achieve was beyond Maril, but the Amaranthine were crafty, their antique minds accustomed to a selfishness no mortal could comprehend.

  Steerilden’s Land was temperate, forested in places and home to a range of vaguely familiar Old World species they would be able to hunt during their brief stay. The predominant plant was a variety of poppy that had taken to the climate almost too well, large swathes of continent stained a pinkish-red when viewed from orbit, the forests like islands in the huge flower meadows.

  Something had squealed on the privateer’s radar as they thundered down through the landscape of clouds, the red fields vast and bold beneath. If it had been another Voidship, it was now on the far side of the planet, obscured from the view of their antennas. Maril had listened carefully to the equipment while they landed in a storm of thick smoke, their rockets roasting flowers and grasses and causing small fires, but heard nothing more.

  The planet was about twice the mass of the Old World, its gravity strong and cumbersome. The forty per
cent oxygen atmosphere was abrasive but energising, and consequently slightly counteracted the dragging weight the Vulgar crew felt as they disembarked into the poppy fields, heavy weapons raised. Maril ordered scouts ahead into the closest ring of forest half a mile away, tired already of lifting his legs to walk through the thick carpet of flowers. He knew the next planet in the chain held pestilence in its atmosphere and hoped no diseases were present now on Steerilden’s Land. He hinged up the sharp steel nose of his faceplate and sniffed the rich air, watching the hunting crews departing through the poppies. A breed of enlarged hare was populous here, as well as a predatory, bearlike sea lion that had evolved stubby legs. One of those, spitted and roasted, might see them all the way back to Filgurbirund.

  Despite what Maril had said to his master-at-arms, only two Prism races were likely to be present anywhere near the volume of Port Elsbet: the Lacaille and the Bult, both committed enemies of the Vulgar. The Lacaille, to whom the Vulgar were most closely related—physically, if not ideologically—could be found anywhere in the Firmament between Steerilden’s Land and the Gulf of Cancri. Their monarch-state was technologically on a par with the Vulgar, composed of an organised network of ships and moons, though possessing no full planets of their own. They had long lusted over the Vulgars’ single planet, Filgurbirund, attempting and failing many times to seize it by force, and it was for this reason that the Vulgar felt superior—if only by a hair’s breadth.

  The Bult, on the other hand, were very different. Slightly taller than the Vulgar and Lacaille, skinny-featured and dark-skinned, they were itinerant pirates loosely clustered in the vicinity of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Solar Satrapies. The Vulgar feared them because they were known to be cannibals, observing no distinction between animals and other Prism. Maril had spent his life keenly avoiding any sign of the Bult and had so far been successful, for they were few and reclusive.