by Paul McAuley
‘I was impressed too. And frightened.’
‘Worth the price of admission, I think,’ Rav said. ‘And now we’ll get Gun Ako Akoi to open up your tick-tock philosopher’s head. We’ll find out about the work of Dr Gagarian and the rest of that busy little crew, and then we’ll offer it to the Saints.’
‘Assuming the Saints sent that message,’ Hari said.
He was almost certain that they had. He wanted to believe that they had. It would make everything so much simpler. But a small margin of doubt remained, because the hijackers had been so very careful to hide their identity.
‘Of course it was the Saints,’ Rav said. ‘If you can’t trust me, youngblood, at least try to believe that I know what I’m doing.’
It wasn’t just Rav’s size – his height and heft, the breadth of his wings – that made him so formidable. It wasn’t just his talons and his teeth. It was his unassailable assurance. His bombproof self-confidence.
Hari said, ‘I’ll do my best.’
7
In the bonded store of Down Town’s elevator terminal, in the close confines of a privacy module, a storekeeper with golden fur and a severe manner confirmed Hari’s identity and accepted a fee that bit a sizeable chunk out of what remained of his credit. Less than two minutes later, a bot delivered the cryoflask that contained Dr Gagarian’s head.
Outside, Rav watched as Hari examined the flask’s seal. ‘Few things are what they once were, in these debased times,’ the Ardenist said, ‘but you can still count on the integrity and discretion of the bonded stores. There’s a story that one of the last of the True suzerains put his family in storage to save them from assassination. He was killed the next day, but the storekeepers fought and defeated the mercenaries who came after his family. Their descendants are still living in storage, waiting for someone to pay a redemption fee that’s by now so astronomical that the entire Solar System wouldn’t suffice as collateral.’
‘You have a story for every occasion,’ Hari said.
‘You don’t like my stories? They’re better than any you’ll find in that book of yours.’
‘When it comes to business, I prefer plain facts to fantasies.’
It was something his father sometimes said whenever Nabhomani’s reports of his negotiations and deals became especially florid.
‘To put it plainly,’ Rav said, ‘not even I could figure out a way to look inside that head while it was in store.’
Hari paid a public maker to spin a kitbag, so that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that he was carrying the cryoflask, and he and Rav caught a car travelling west, or antispinward, along Ophir’s equatorial railway. According to Rav, they were heading towards a religious festival where the sect which owned the trinket coveted by Gun Ako Akoi was presently camped.
The car ran at a leisurely fifty kilometres per hour along a track that clung to the overhead. Hari and Rav had it to themselves. They sat in the nose like kings of the world, sweeping through sector after sector, each separated from the next by a transparent bulkhead. A sea of white sand dunes. An intricate puzzle of lakes and forest. Thick, unbroken jungle. Old towns and palaces hung from the overhead; newer settlements were scattered across the floor. Banyan patches, strings of half-buried blockhouses, clumps of flimsy shacks circled by defensive walls, villages straggling around pele towers of various heights and degrees of ruin: remnants of the war games Trues had liked to play, great slaughters organised for the entertainment of jaded suzerains and optimates. One tower, at the centre of a craggy canyonland, was as big as a town, the concentric rings of defences around its base broken and pitted by the wounds of an ancient bombardment and overgrown by trees and a shawl of creepers from which a swirl of black birds rose as the car passed by high above, hurtling onwards around Ophir’s great curve, above towers and villages and towns and fields and wilderness, above woods and fields, above stretches of deadland stripped to the fullerene strands of the world city’s rind.
All of this was contained in a habitable deck or shell fifty kilometres in diameter, wrapped around the nickel-iron keel on which Ophir had been founded. A surface area of eight thousand square kilometres. The overhead was more than a kilometre high, and there was weather beneath it. Shoals of wispy clouds; a dark rainstorm. Vast perspectives were interrupted by enormous bulkheads of diamond-fullerene composite pierced here and there by ship-sized airlocks through which rail cars and ground traffic passed.
Once, the rock at the centre of Ophir’s shell had been occupied by a single small, tented town and a scatter of vacuum-organism farms. And then the True Empire had absorbed it, and embarked on an insanely grand engineering project. Thousands of huge machines had processed primordial organic material mined from a score of comets, levelled the cratered terrain and covered it with densely woven layers of fullerene, and floated a shell a kilometre above this foundation, supported by bulkheads that divided the interior into a hundred segments, each landscaped with a different garden biome. A world city. A monument to the Trues’ hubris.
It was the one of largest structures ever built in the Solar System, yet despite its adamantine foundations and bulkheads, and the deep layers of foamed fullerenes that formed the outer skin of its shell, it was hopelessly vulnerable. Its defence system of ablative lasers and swarms of bomblets and drones was sufficient to sweep and deflect debris from its orbital path, but offered no protection from a concerted attack.
The Trues had built Ophir as an act of ego and of defiance. To prove that they could; to prove that none of their enemies could challenge them. And their enemies had called it the City of the Caves of Steel because, like that ancient construction material, it was both massive and brittle. Collision with a single rock just a few tens of metres across would utterly destroy it. When the True Empire had at last fallen, the world city had been spared only because a small majority of posthumans could not countenance the murder of several hundred thousand citizens. Five hundred years later, the descendants of those citizens were still forbidden to travel beyond the shell of the city’s overhead, and their numbers had been swollen by baseliners fleeing predatory dacoits and the capricious rule of posthuman clades. The magnificent folly of the True Empire had become a refuge and a prison.
Shortly after they’d passed through the fifth of the huge bulkheads, Rav pointed to threads of smoke bending up in the distance and said, ‘The signature of the species.’
He opened a window linked to a feed from a police drone that was keeping watch on the source of the smoke: a small grid of crude huts roofed with bundles of reeds, standing on a square of elevated ground amongst a patchwork of flooded fields. Several of the huts were on fire, and little sparks snapped in the fields, defining opposing lines of battle. Men and women lay prone at the edge of a stand of tall reeds, or crouched behind one of the low embankments that defined the boundaries of fields, or ran in jerky zigzags across open ground.
Hari said, ‘These are dacoits, attacking the village?’
‘There are no dacoits in Ophir,’ Rav said. ‘This is a war between neighbouring tribes, killing each other over differences in ideology.’
The drone’s viewpoint shifted, tracking a running man whose head suddenly burst in a puff of crimson, his body tumbling forward, collapsing in an awkward sprawl.
Rav said, ‘True suzerains brought tribes of autochthons from Earth to Ophir, and used them to fight proxy wars. The Trues are long gone, but their proxies fight on. A century ago, one of your kind, a self-styled prophet who believed himself to be enlightened beyond all ordinary human measure, visited one of the autochthons’ villages and tried to persuade its inhabitants to give up warfare. They killed him and his followers, and stuck their heads on poles. Much like the skull feeders, now I think of it.’
‘Another of your stories,’ Hari said.
‘A true story. The proxies are proud of their prowess in combat, and fiercely jealous of the ancient rivalries and resentments that feed their little wars. They fight because it defines who the
y are.’
The viewpoint of the drone widened, giving a panoptic view of the little battlefield, then zoomed in on a low rise where three men stripped to the waist were pounding big kettle drums, and a woman naked beneath a cloak of green feathers was watching the battle through field glasses.
Hari thought of the drum which had preceded the flagellants as they had marched through Fei Shen.
‘Someone knows a little about tactics,’ Rav said. ‘See the feint over there? They’re drawing their enemy in by falling back, and then they’ll strike from two sides. An old trick, but effective.’
He was watching the feed from the drone with a hungry interest. The slit pupils of his grass-green eyes were dilated. The sharp tip of his red tongue was nipped between his teeth.
‘You’re more like them than you like to think,’ Hari said.
‘We use combat – hand-to-hand combat, the noble art, nothing like the silly capering and random slaughter down there – to defeat those who are too vain or too stubborn to acknowledge that their theories have been displaced by new and better ideas. We fight to establish fundamental truths. The proxies fight over whether or not meat from a particular species of animal should be eaten, or on which day it should be eaten, or how it should be prepared. But I admit that I do rather admire them. They could certainly teach you a thing or two about revenge.’
Two lines of warriors ran at each other from either side of a flooded field, knees raised high as they splashed though the water towards each other, brandishing spears and spiked clubs. Just before they met, the rail car passed through a bulkhead and the feed snapped off.
Hari and Rav disembarked at the next station and rode the elevator to the village below. It was a small place. A handful of wooden houses strung along a paved road, with steeply pitched roofs woven from bundles of dried grasses. The ends of the beams that projected from the corners of the roofs were carved into the heads of fantastic creatures with red and gold scales, forked tongues flopping from long racks of sharp white teeth, and yellow eyes with slitted pupils glaring beneath ridged brows. Dragons, according to Rav.
‘You can find them in the next sector. Trues hunted them. There are no large species left, just little ones about the length of my hand. They live under stones, mostly, and roast unwary birds.’
Beyond the last of the houses, the road ran through a big square gate cut into the bulkhead’s gleaming cliff. Neither the road nor the houses – heaps of dumb, dead wood standing in gardens of uncertain taxonomies – were tagged. The villagers, dressed in yellow robes, engaged in enigmatic tasks in strip fields and open workshops, herding a flock of man-sized, long-necked birds, weren’t tagged either.
People who lived outside towns usually lacked bioses, Rav said. ‘Most of them are direct descendants of Trues or proxies. And this is a penitent community. They hope to atone for the sins of their ancestors by living humble lives of hard labour and prayer, and refuse connectivity and any technology that isn’t powered by muscle or wind or water. Sounds noble, doesn’t it? But the fact is, they’re frauds. Hypocrites. Because the technology they scorn built Ophir and maintains the integrity of its biomes. Without it, without the machines that repair and maintain the world city’s shell and regulate its atmospheric and hydrological cycles, the so-called wildernesses in which they live would soon die back to desert. And if a stray rock knocked a hole in their ceiling, what would they mend the hole with? The grass matting those old woman are weaving? No, they rely on other people to keep them safe and to keep their little world working.’
‘You sound as if you have a grudge against them,’ Hari said.
‘Perhaps they remind me of my own people, who gave up reason for superstition. A friend left us a scooter at the gate; otherwise, we’d have to walk to the festival.’
‘A friend?’
‘You’ll find that you have a lot in common,’ Rav said. ‘We’ll eat before we set off. Good plans are founded in regular meals.’
They ate in the village commons, boiled rice mixed with flash-fried slivers of vegetables, shreds of dark meat that Hari left in his bowl. A boy he’d seen earlier, herding the big flightless birds, sat with him. A sturdy kid a couple of years younger than Hari, with long black hair and an eager, frank curiosity. His name was Nobita. He had lived all his life in the village, expected to grow old and die there, and was the happiest person Hari had ever met.
They spoke in Pinglish, the ancient lingua franca of Earth’s Pacific Community; Nobita’s native language, Nihongo, was so old and obscure that Hari’s bios lacked the ability to translate it. The language of a proud and capable people who had built the first settlement on Earth’s Moon, but had been assimilated into general Outer culture long ago, and had more or less vanished from Earth. Their native land was under ice, now, like so many others. This village was the last refuge of traditions more than four thousand years old.
Hari learned a little of the villagers’ routine of work and prayer. He learned that the religious festival was a gathering of gypsy preachers and sects which endlessly circled the world-city, seeking to redeem the sins of their ancestors through holy and charitable works. They gathered at sacred places, and then broke up and moved on along their separate paths. Ascetics sometimes passed through the village, too, Nobita said.
‘They can cause trouble. Although they claim to reject the world of things, they like pleasures that are forbidden to us. But they are good musicians, and so are we. I have learned several songs from them, and hope to learn more.’
Hari showed him the little book that had once belonged to the ascetic hermit Kinson Ib Kana. Nobita couldn’t read the script, so Hari read out the fragment it randomly displayed. Nobita asked Hari to repeat it, then repeated it himself.
I have walked the way for a hundred years
And after a hundred more I will still be seeking
The Unknown Bird.
‘I have found some good stories in here, but I don’t really understand or appreciate this kind of stuff,’ Hari confessed. ‘My family are practical. We like things to mean what they mean.’
‘I was taught that you find the meaning in yourself, not the thing itself,’ Nobita said. ‘A small coin is nothing to a rich man, but means a meal and happiness to an indigent, or brings comfort to a grieving mother, because it was the last gift of a dead son.’
Hari explained that he’d found the book when he’d been marooned on a rock, after his family’s ship had been stolen by bandits. ‘I managed to escape, and met Rav, and now we’re looking for the bandits. I have a treasure they want, and hope to trade it for the lives of my family. But first I have to find the key to unlock it.’
Nobita said that it sounded like one of the old stories from the long ago, when people everywhere had lived as his people lived now, under the sky of Earth. Stories of fierce bandits who oppressed villages, and heroes who gave up their lives to save ordinary people, or walked the land looking for adventure because they hoped to regain the honour they had lost because of some selfish action, or because they had loved someone they were forbidden to love.
‘Rav would say that our stories haven’t changed because we haven’t changed,’ Hari said. ‘He claims to be different, but I think that he is like one of those old warrior-heroes. Or likes to think he is.’
Nobita looked across the room to where Rav was talking with several old men and women, then bent towards Hari and said quietly, ‘Have you known him long?’
‘Not really.’
‘I have seen him before. When I was very young. He fought two others like him, in the forest. They used lightning against each other, and burned many trees. You can still see some of the dead places. He killed his enemies, but he was wounded, and rested here for several days. Yes, just like one of the old heroes.’
Hari was astonished. ‘Why were they fighting?’
‘He said that they were trying to steal something from him. Something he was taking to a powerful witch who lives in a sky-castle.’
‘This witc
h. Was she called Gun Ako Akoi?’
‘You know this story?’
‘I think I am part of it,’ Hari said.
The scooter was a small, bulbous vehicle with two pairs of fan motors and a double saddle. Hari sat behind Rav as the Ardenist took them out above the forest. Although the saddle cupped Hari like a hand, it didn’t seem like a very secure perch, especially when Rav tilted left or right. Hari’s hands sweated on the grips; his stomach performed airy gymnastics.
White paths threaded through the trees below, and there were clearings where clumps of ferns and banks of bushes with glossy leaves and big red flowers grew. Man-sized flightless birds like the ones in the village rooted about amongst the ferns. Rav dipped low, scattering several of them, and told Hari that they were fun to hunt.
‘The yellow-robes eat their meat and their eggs, trade in their feathers and hides. They ride them, too.’
‘I know.’
‘I saw you talking with that kid. Learn anything interesting?’
‘I found out that we both grew up in a small world, close to our families,’ Hari said, wondering if Rav knew that he knew about the fight in the forest, and Rav’s relationship with Gun Ako Akoi.
‘The bulkheads polarise light, so that birds can detect them,’ the Ardenist said. ‘So they won’t fly into them. In one section, autochthons paint patches of the bulkhead with a polymer that scrambles the polarised light back into its ordinary random orientation. Those patches look like holes, to birds, and those that try to fly through them are knocked senseless or killed outright, and are caught in nets that the autochthons spread at the bulkhead’s base. They dance on high days and holidays in cloaks made from feathers, and wear tall headdresses of feathers too.’