“Maybe,” Greyblade allowed. “My point is, I’m not doing this out of a noble urge or a sense of what’s right. I’m doing it because it’s slightly easier than disassembling myself for parts. I’m a semi-autonomous piece of antique moistware, constructed and programmed to protect the interests of the Pinian Brotherhood. When it comes to defending the integrity of a sovereign Pinian Realm, I have no more choice in the matter than this ship does in flipping into soft-space when you make that shonky hand-gesture.”
“No free will, huh?”
“Oh, I think I have as much free will as ‘most any organism,” Greyblade disagreed. “I’m just burdened by fewer illusions.”
“So that’s the credo of the Burning Knights of Brutan the Warrior?” Çrom asked.
“I suppose so,” Greyblade replied. “We have a credo file with different examples to fit just about every occasion, though.”
“So why are you alone? When the rest of your soldiers retired, why didn’t they get dragged back into the line of deterministic duty?”
Greyblade sat in silence for what he knew was too long before answering.
“Price of command,” he said before Çrom could shift in his seat. The words felt like dust in his mouth. There was another too-long silence.
“Sounds lonely,” Çrom said, without turning around.
“You would know.”
“Yes I would.”
The conversation adjourned, although relations between the two travellers did not noticeably rankle in the following days and weeks. Skelliglyph was quick to recover from small exchanges of unpleasantries, taking the little sniping exchanges in his stride and then letting them go. At the same time, however, Greyblade got the impression that when it came to the big grudges, he held onto them far longer than he did anything so ephemeral as a mere language. They stuck to safe topics, Çrom showed no further sign that he’d taken offense or that he was still particularly interested in Greyblade’s motives, and Beyond the Walls swept from in front of them to behind them at the dizzying speed of a peak-condition Fhaste.
Lonesome Ice turned out to be another vast expanse, either a central plane or a colossal flatworld or something else entirely. It didn’t really matter. The important thing was that this one was stretched out under a blazing yellow-white sky so cold it triggered the Highwayman’s shielding, and was formed of … if not ice, then at least some sort of solid matter that melted into a clear liquid at Centre-normal temperatures. Çrom insisted it was water, and that he’d drunk it before with no ill effects.
Greyblade looked up at the sky. Glaring, yellow. Yellow like a plague warning, yellow like a deathfruit. And yet also dark. Against all reason.
Greyblade’s particle analysis, as they landed at the settlement under the Portal, was excruciatingly inconclusive on every count. The ground didn’t seem to melt into water as was classically understood in Centre-normal terms, because that required the formation of molecular bonds that didn’t seem inclined to work out here. And the less said about the dark-bright sky, the better. His night-vision enhancements and his glare reduction activated at the same time, and had a short and very distracting argument back and forth across his helmet systems.
“Atoms are really only a thing that happen to Corporate universes,” Çrom said, as the ship powered down and Greyblade reported on the sorry state of Lonesome Ice physics. “And not exactly all of them, either.”
Greyblade was not entirely satisfied with this, but had long since come to terms with the fact that the urverse didn’t turn according to his satisfaction or lack thereof. In fact, out here it didn’t turn at all if the stories were to be believed. He’d heard that some Aliens called the Corporation ‘the Tornado’, although he also had to look around and wonder where they got that name from.
It was true that the aactur that made up everything in reality did so in fundamentally different ways from Dimension to Dimension. It was the absolute founding premise of urversal physics, after all. And he could see how that distinction would be even greater between Dimensions energised by the Power Plant and Dimensions Beyond the Walls. Here, it seemed as though the aactur were just sitting around the Dimension, roughly half of them arranged in a configuration that expressed as a frigid yellow sky and the other half as a seemingly endless mass of ice. And if more stimuli were introduced, those ones decided to be water instead. And that … simply had to be enough. Aactur theory was another thing for which Greyblade understood the simplistic explanation, but was happy to be left baffled in the dust when the real science took off.
“How long do we wait here before getting clearance to move on?” Greyblade asked, because such questions were becoming traditional.
“Oh, we can move on whenever we like, really,” Çrom said. “They don’t try to enforce transit regulations any more than Barthanq does. But still, it helps improve our reputation for being good travellers. I shouldn’t think they’ll delay us long, since we have that notice from Barthanq and the cargo to go with it. Dora can grab the latest info updates and they can spray us with grunk, and then we’ll be off.”
“I’m still surprised you’re letting your precious ship get covered in grunk,” Greyblade remarked. “Still, I suppose it will help grease us into this cave of theirs.”
The ice, like the mordite plain of Barthanq, was an endless gleaming wasteland except for a sorry scatter of settlements. One squatted directly beneath the Portal through which they arrived, the Portal itself sitting in the sky about three hundred kilometres above. Another – the settlement that was their actually intended stopover point, according to Çrom – was built around and inside the entrance to a cave, at the bottom of which was another Portal.
Practically the sole concession to interdimensional hygiene and safety, and more an acknowledgement of the skyborne spores that occasionally drifted across the surface of Lonesome Ice than any concern about outside infestations, was grunk. The oily stuff, Çrom had already explained en route, was sprayed over the hull and then took about a week to evaporate off. It was ultimately harmless, and fairly pointless since most vessels had defensive and sanitation systems capable of dealing with such environmental hazards anyway. Still, it was a gesture of their willingness to play by the local rules.
The cave containing the Portal, Çrom had also explained, was almost fifteen light-years deep. This lent some credence to the possibility that Lonesome Ice was a central plane rather than a flatworld. Some credence, but not conclusive: if it was a flatworld, it was larger than all but a handful in Greyblade’s Corporate register.
“They used to have a railgun,” Çrom said fondly. “They’d stuff you in a canister, drug you up good and pump you with this slow-release nutrient stuff, and fire you at ninety-nine point nine percent light-speed down into this thing. A bit of a headache, a few wild dreams and a lifetime or two of moderately harrowing flashbacks, and you come out of the canister at the far end fifteen years or so later and they’re wiping you down and welcoming you to Bastard’s Hump,” his reminiscent smile faded. “We are not stopping there.”
“I assume we’ll be able to traverse the Portal at relative speed, regardless of how grunked up we are,” Greyblade said. “As enjoyable as a fifteen-year snooze and a mess of flashbacks sounds, we haven’t got time.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Çrom said lazily. “I don’t even know if they still have the railgun system,” he glanced back at Greyblade. “Yes,” he went on, “this place, I’ve come through on foot.”
“I guessed. I assume you took the railgun route?”
“I believe I did,” Çrom said, sitting sideways and unmoving in his seat. He stared into empty space for a few moments, then shivered and looked out of the window. “Still,” he went on brightly, “I guess desperate times call for desperate measures. Here comes the grunk truck.”
Greyblade wasn’t entirely sure what the human meant by that penultimate remark, but didn’t pursue it. Sometimes he used platitudes or homilies as punctuation. This part of our conversation i
s over. Moving on. “Any idea how they managed to make a cave a hundred and forty-odd trillion kilometres deep?” he asked, as a low-slung ground vehicle with a heavy hose at one end and a decidedly obscene-looing nozzle at the other trundled up to them and began splattering thick yellow-brown grunk across the Highwayman’s hull. It thinned as it spread, until it was a similar venomous shade as the sky.
“There are stories about that,” Çrom replied. “The cave, once you actually plot it, draws a perfectly straight line between the two Portals,” he pointed to the grunk-streaked ceiling. “The one up there, and the one in the bottom of the cave. The prevailing idea is that some sort of exotic energy pulse hit the Portal network in this vicinity, and burned the vector between the two. Like something extremely powerful jumped through from one to the other, and boiled away the ice in between.”
“Are there other signs of that sort of thing happening?” Greyblade asked, interested in spite of himself.
Çrom shrugged. “There’s signs of all sorts of weird shit out here,” he said, “once you get past the massive preponderance of absolutely doodly-squat. But it’s slightly less-scary to believe that a natural phenomenon burned a line between the Portals, than it is to think about an actual agency constructing the cave using technology,” the grunk truck finished spraying the Highwayman, raised its oozing nozzle to nasty parade-rest, and backed away with a sinuous coil of hose. “Right,” Çrom said, “let’s move.”
THE ATTEMPTED MOLREN
OF LONESOME ICE
After passing through the hanging light-curtain of the ‘spore-screens’ and landing at the settlement that surrounded the famous fifteen-light-year-deep cave, Greyblade and Çrom stood at the top of the Highwayman’s access ramp and looked out at the port. Half-frozen grunk dripped from the lip of the doorway and Greyblade barely paid attention as it plopped onto his forearm like yellow wax. Çrom, standing beside him in an iridescent thermal sheath that left nothing to the imagination – which was why he’d put his trousers and jacket over the top – was smiling benignly under the pearly sheath coating.
The local inhabitants of Lonesome Ice, aside from a couple of different varieties of the familiar knee-high armoured isopod-species, appeared to be Molren.
“This is … eerie,” Greyblade admitted.
They were Molren, only they weren’t. They were distorted, their limbs twisted and stretched, their heads and their distinctive ears misshapen and oversized. It was spooky to look at, like seeing Molren through a warped visual filter. Or in a funhouse mirror. Or an untreated generation of two after a vicious biogenic war.
“I know I said Molranoid was rare out here, but there are exceptions,” Çrom said. “I call these guys–”
“Attempted Molren,” Greyblade said, still turning his visor unnecessarily back and forth and surveying the crowd. “I know.”
He’d studied the Ballad of Sorry Çrom, despite the fact that it hadn’t been useful in any way as a guide or a map. As soon as he’d realised he was dealing with a formerly mythical figure made flesh, and that they would be at least in part retracing his steps Beyond the Walls, he had researched all the material available on the old comedy, the strange curse.
There hadn’t been much, but these creatures had actually featured in it – or something very like them. They’d probably stood the literary test of time because they were so familiar, and yet so haunting. Issue after issue of Sorry Çrom walking along endless plains of physically indefinable solids with a bunch of knee-high creepy-crawlies around him had probably never been very attractive to audiences.
He didn’t remember a trillions-of-kilometres-deep ice cave or a railgun, though. He would have thought that would have made the editorial cut.
Çrom was looking at him through the gleaming thermal.
“So you’ve done your homework,” he said, his tone neutral. “What else did you learn?”
“Everything in the Ballad,” Greyblade shrugged. “I guess I’m not going to know what’s myth and what’s real until we get it sprayed all over us, though.”
“Sometimes you won’t even know then,” Çrom grinned, and reached out to wipe grunk off Greyblade’s arm.
They sealed the ship and strode into the frigid, milling streets of the unnamed Lonesome Ice metropolis.
The Attempted Molren were for the most part dressed in loose folds of grey leather that didn’t seem particularly enhanced for the cold. They appeared to be suited to the environment, despite the fact that the chill was so aggressively acute that it was setting off Greyblade’s mid-range alerts and outlining everything in a mild amber. They looked at the newcomers with huge frost-rimed eyes, but didn’t react to them one way or another. Greyblade did hear, on the murmured outskirts of his peripheral sensors, the term mazon-hai, forbidden form / wrong form, spoken by Attempted Molren softly enough for their great ears but not, they probably thought, loudly enough to be heard by the visitors.
Çrom certainly didn’t seem to hear them, or care if he did. And even the talk sounded at best curious, mildly interested. There was no sign of hostility from the Aliens, and Greyblade considered himself an authority of recognising hostile attitudes.
“You know the story of the Attempted Molren?” Çrom asked, making no effort of his own to make himself inaudible. There probably wasn’t much point, given the hush of the place and the great ears of the locals. Greyblade wondered how much of their language data was transferred in the other direction when they took on translation packages, and reminded himself yet again to dig deeper into the transit protocols they were operating under. “Where they’re supposed to have come from, originally?”
“You mean the standardised Corporate creation myth?” Greyblade asked.
“I guess.”
“I’ve heard it,” Greyblade said. Back when DaRah, first of the Ghååla, had stepped into the empty urverse there had been no distinction between reality and unreality, nothing separating the real from the unreal. DaRah’s very thoughts as the urverse took shape were said to have become instantaneously solid. And as they formed, and even more so once the rest of the Ghååla were created to regulate what was to become the Corporation, DaRah cast those first failed creations far from the light, into the trackless wilds of Beyond the Walls. “You think that’s what these are? The distant kin of an idle thought about what a Molran might look like someday, when the Ghååla got around to making the Elder Races?”
“Could be,” Çrom said. “All sorts of crazy stuff out here. Life-forms that fill whole universes. Central planes that spit out monsters. The Worm, obviously. These guys could be the descendants of an idle thought as DaRah began to conceptualise the Molren. They might even be what Molren are meant to look like. Molran evolution isn’t fnished, after all – it’s just a very fine-toothed comb at this point.”
“The Molranoid form is also a very efficient and successful model,” Greyblade noted, “with plenty of parallel species in the Corporation alone, all arriving at the same slow-down point independently. Like the humanoid form,” he gestured to the two of them. “Only out here, Molranoid’s even more likely to succeed because of the mad cult wiping out all the humanoid species.”
“Sure, if you like the prosaic explanation…”
“Speaking of which,” Greyblade went on, “I’m detecting a bit more muttering and friction from the natives. How at-risk are we?”
“It’s still fine,” Çrom said. “These guys have a deal with Dûl – that’s our next stop, where we’re delivering the mordite? They won’t mess around with that.”
“If you say so.”
As was becoming customary, Greyblade and Çrom found their way to a suitably sedate public house and commenced to bartering for food and drinks. Their credit from Barthanq was still reasonable, and one of the patrons wanted to see inside Greyblade’s visor. Normally Greyblade would object to making a spectacle of himself, but said patron was apparently willing to host the remainder of their stopover on his personal marker. So Greyblade shrugged, lifted his visor
and gave the disturbing Attempted Molran his best snagglefanged grimace, and became the Alien’s best friend for the duration of their stay.
As was also becoming customary, Çrom departed after a couple of hours to take care of undefined private business that Greyblade had long since concluded was related to mind-altering drugs or sexual release, and had decided to neither judge nor think about in too much detail. Çrom invariably returned, and seemed endlessly confident no matter where they were. Until such time as the human actually ran into trouble, Greyblade had decided to leave him in peace.
The stopover progressed pleasantly enough, Greyblade discussing harmless matters of general knowledge with the locals and steering clear of revealing that they were from the Corporation. He and Çrom hadn’t really agreed on a set explanation of where they were from and what they were doing, but they were fairly dissimilar individuals anyway so had a certain amount of freedom to come up with different backstories for themselves. Fortunately, the inhabitants of the Beyond the Walls stopover locations they’d visited so far seemed incurious to a fault. It was probably a survival mechanism. Don’t ask a question that might turn out to have something sharp hidden in it.
Even more fortunately, it seemed as though they were now sufficiently far from the lights and heat of the turning Dimensions that it didn’t even occur to the Attempted Molren that they might be from ‘the Tornado’. The only unusual and noteworthy things were their outlandish forms, Greyblade’s ostentatious armour and their objectively, apparently urversally lovely ship.
Even so, there was no sign of hostility or avarice, although Greyblade admitted his expertise was less applicable with these Alien species anyway. The locals didn’t seem to mind his casual cross-referencing of info-package data with anecdotal evidence, and so he passed an interesting few hours building up his knowledge of the surrounding area and the history – such as it was – of Lonesome Ice. He didn’t quite get to the bottom of the railgun issue, except to confirm that they did have one for assorted cargo and even hardy passengers not in a particular hurry and not blessed with access to a relative drive. The cave, to hear the locals tell it, was stacked with demiluminal canisters in flight and even a few objects in transit moving even more slowly.32 Greyblade was glad they would be traversing the region in soft-space, since the more close and cluttered an area was, the more dangerous it tended to be when you were moving at high reality-register velocities.
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