Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘You cold, calculating bastard.’ But she said it with half a smile, admiring and loathing him at the same time.

  ‘Just find a way, Sayaca. I know you can. Oh, and one other thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Look after my brother, will you? He may not have quite my streak of brilliance, but he’s still one of a kind. You’re going to need people like him on the other side.’

  ‘We could use you too, Merlin.’

  ‘You probably could, but I’ve got other business to attend to. The small matter of an ultimate weapon against the Huskers, for instance. I’m going to find it, you know. Even if it takes me the rest of my life. I hope you’ll come back and see how I did one day.’

  Sayaca nodded, but said nothing. They both knew that there were no more words that needed to be said.

  And, true to his expectations, Sayaca and Gallinule had come through. The syrinx was with him now - an uninteresting matt-black cone that held the secrets of crossing light-years in a few breaths of subjective time - sitting in its metal harness inside Tyrant. He did not know exactly how they had persuaded the Council to release it. Quite possibly there had been no persuasion at all, merely subterfuge. One black cone looked much like another, after all.

  This, however, was the true syrinx, the last they had.

  It was unimaginably precious now, and he would do his best to learn its secrets in the weeks ahead. Countless millions had died trying to gain entry to the Waymakers’ transit system, and it was entirely possible that Merlin would simply be the next. But it did not have to be like that. He was alone now - possibly more alone than any human had ever been - but instead of despair what he felt was a cold, pure elation: he now had a mission, one that might prove to be soul-destroyingly difficult, even futile, but he had the will to accomplish it.

  Somewhere behind him the syrinx began to purr.

  MINLA’S FLOWERS

  Mission interrupted.

  Even now, I still don’t know quite what happened. The ship and I were in routine Waynet transit, all systems ticking over smoothly. I was deep in thought, a little drunk, rubbing clues together like a caveman trying to make fire with rocks, hoping for the spark that would point me towards The Gun, the one no one ever thinks I’m going to find, the one I know with every fibre of my existence is out there somewhere. I was imagining the reception I’d get when I returned to the Cohort with that prize, the slate of all my sins wiped clean when they saw that I’d actually found it, that it was real after all, and that finally we had something to use against the Huskers. In the pleasant mental haze brought on by the wine, it seemed likely that they’d forgive me anything.

  Then it happened: a violent lurch that sent wine and glass flying across the cabin, a shriek from the ship’s alarms as it went into panic-mode. I knew right away that this was no ordinary Way turbulence. The ship was tumbling badly, but I fought my way to the command deck and did what I could to bring her back under control. Seat-of-the-pants flying, the way Gallinule and I used to do it on Plenitude, when Plenitude still existed.

  That was when I knew we were outside the Waynet, dumped back into the crushing slowness of normal space. The stars outside were stationary, their colours showing no suggestion of relativistic distortion.

  ‘Damage?’ I asked.

  ‘How long have you got?’ the ship snapped back.

  I told it to ease off on the wisecracks and start giving me the bad news. And it most certainly was bad news. The precious syrinx was still functional - I touched it and felt the familiar tremble that indicated it was still sensing the nearby Waynet - but that was about the only flight-critical system that hadn’t been buckled or blown or simply wiped out of existence by the unscheduled egress.

  We were going to have to land and make repairs. For a few weeks or months - however long it took the ship to scavenge and process the raw materials it needed to fix itself - the search for my Gun would be on hold.

  That didn’t mean I was counting on a long stopover.

  The ship still had a slow tumble. Merlin squinted against hard white glare as the burning eye of a bright sun hove into view through the windows. It was white, but not killingly so. Probably a mid-sequence star, maybe a late F- or early G-type. He thought there was a hint of yellow. Had to be pretty close too.

  ‘Tell me where we are.’

  ‘It’s called Calliope,’ Tyrant told him. ‘G-type. According to the last Cohort census the system contained fifteen planet-class bodies. There were five terrestrials, four of which were uninhabitable. The fifth - the furthest from Calliope - was supposedly colonised by humans in the early Flourishing.’

  Merlin glanced at the census data as it scrolled down the cabin wall. The planet in question was called Lecythus. It was a typical watery terrestrial, like a thousand others in his experience. It even had the almost-obligatory large single moon.

  ‘Been a while, ship. What are the chances of anyone still being down there?’

  ‘Difficult to say. A later Cohort flyby failed to make contact with the settlement, but that doesn’t mean no one was alive. After the emergence of the Huskers, many planetary colonies went to great lengths to camouflage themselves against the aliens.’

  ‘So there could still be a welcoming committee.’

  ‘We’ll see. With your permission, I’ll use our remaining fuel to reach Lecythus. This will take some time. Would you like to sleep?’

  Merlin looked back at the coffin-like slab of the frostwatch cabinet. He could skip over the days or weeks it would take to reach the planet, but that would mean subjecting himself to the intense unpleasantness of frostwatch revival. Merlin had never taken kindly to being woken from normal sleep, let alone the deep hibernation of frostwatch.

  ‘Pass on that, I think. I’ve still got plenty of reading to catch up on.’

  Later - much later - Tyrant announced that they had reached orbit around Lecythus. ‘Would you like to see the view?’ the ship asked, with a playful note in its voice.

  Merlin scratched fatigue from his eyes. ‘You sound like you know something I don’t.’

  Merlin was at first reassured by what he saw. There was blue ocean down there, swatches of green and brown land mass, large islands rather than any major continental masses, cyclonic swirls of water-vapour clouds. It didn’t necessarily mean there were still people, but it was a lot more encouraging than finding a cratered, radioactive corpse of a world.

  Then he looked again. Many of those green and brown swatches of land mass were surrounded by water, as his first glimpse had indicated. But some of them appeared to be floating above the ocean completely, casting shadows beneath them. His glance flicked to the horizon, where the atmosphere was compressed into a thin bow of pure indigo. He could see the foreshortened shapes of hovering land masses, turned nearly edge-on. The land masses appeared to be one or two kilometres thick, and they all appeared to be gently curved. Perhaps half were concave in shape, so their edges were slightly upturned. The edges were frosted white, like the peaks of mountain ranges. Some of the concave masses even had little lakes near their centres. The convex masses were all a scorched tawny grey in colour, devoid of water or vegetation, save for a cap of ice at their highest point. The largest shapes, convex or concave, must have been hundreds of kilometres wide. Merlin judged that there must have been at least ten kilometres of clear airspace under each piece. A third of the planet’s surface was obscured by the floating shapes.

  ‘Any idea what we’re looking at here?’ Merlin asked. ‘This doesn’t look like anything in the census.’

  ‘I think they built an armoured sky around their world,’ the ship said. ‘And then something - very probably Husker-level ordnance - shattered that sky.’

  ‘No one could have survived that,’ Merlin said, feeling a rising tide of sadness. Tyrant was clever enough, but there were times - long times - when Merlin became acutely aware of the heartless machine lurking behind the personality. And then he felt very, very alone. Those were the hours when
he would have done anything for companionship, including returning to the Cohort and the tribunal that undoubtedly awaited him.

  ‘Someone does appear to have survived, Merlin.’

  He perked up. ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s unlikely to be a very advanced culture: no neutrino or gravimagnetic signatures, beyond those originating from the mechanisms that must still be active inside the sky pieces. But I did detect some very brief radio emissions.’

  ‘What language were they using? Main? Tradespeak? Anything else in the Cohort database?’

  ‘They were using long beeps and short beeps. I’m afraid I didn’t get the chance to determine the source of the transmission.’

  ‘Keep listening. I want to meet them.’

  ‘Don’t raise your hopes. If there are people down there, they’ve been out of contact with the rest of humanity for a considerable number of millennia.’

  ‘I only want to stop for repairs. They can’t begrudge me that, can they?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  Then something occurred to Merlin, something he realised he should have asked much earlier. ‘About the accident, ship. I take it you know why we were dumped out of the Waynet?’

  ‘I’ve run a fault-check on the syrinx. There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with it.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘I know.’ Tyrant sounded sullen. ‘I still don’t have an explanation for what went wrong. And I don’t like that any more than you do.’

  Tyrant fell into the atmosphere of Lecythus. The transmissions had resumed, allowing the ship to pinpoint the origin to one of the larger airborne masses. Shortly afterwards, a second source began transmitting from another floating mass, half the size of the first, located three thousand kilometres to the west. The way the signals started and stopped suggested some kind of agonisingly slow communication via radio pulses, one that probably had nothing to do with Merlin’s arrival.

  ‘Tell me that’s a code in our database,’ Merlin said.

  ‘It isn’t. And the code won’t tell us much about their spoken language, I’m afraid.’

  Up close, the broken edges of the floating mass soared as tall as a cliff. They were a dark, streaked grey, infinitely less regular than they had appeared from space and showing signs of weathering and erosion. There were wide ledges, dizzying promontories and cathedral-sized shadowed caves. Glinting in the low light of Calliope, ladders and walkways - impossibly thin and spindly scratches of metal - reached down from the icebound upper reaches, following zigzag trajectories that only took them a fraction of the way to the perilous lower lip, where the floating world curved back under itself.

  Merlin made out the tiny moving forms of birdlike creatures, wheeling and orbiting in powerful thermals, some of them coming and going from roosts on the lower ledges.

  ‘But that isn’t a bird,’ Tyrant said, highlighting a larger moving shape.

  Merlin felt an immediate pang of recognition as the image zoomed. It was an aircraft: a ludicrously fragile assemblage of canvas and wire. It had a crescent moon painted on both wings. There’d been a machine not much more advanced than that in the archive inside the Palace of Eternal Dusk, preserved across thirteen hundred years of family history. Merlin had even risked taking it outside once, to see for himself if he had the nerve to repeat his distant ancestor’s brave crossing. He still remembered the sting of reprimand when he’d brought it back, nearly ruined.

  This aircraft was even flimsier and slower. It was driven by a single chugging propeller rather than a battery of rocket-assisted turbines. It was following the rim of the land mass, slowly gaining altitude. Clearly it intended to make landfall. The air on Lecythus was thicker at sea level than on Plenitude, but the little machine must still have been very close to its safe operational ceiling. And yet it would have to climb even higher if it was to traverse the raised rim.

  ‘Follow it,’ Merlin said. ‘Keep us astern by a clear two kilometres. And set hull to stealth.’

  Merlin’s ship nosed in behind the struggling aircraft. He could see the single pilot now, goggled and helmeted within a crude-looking bubble canopy. The plane had reached ten kilometres, but it would need to double that to clear the upturned rim. Every hundred metres of altitude gained seemed to tax the aircraft to the limit, so that it climbed, levelled, climbed. It trailed sooty hyphens behind it. Merlin could imagine the sputtering protest from the little engine, the fear in the pilot’s belly that the motor was going to stall at any moment.

  That was when an airship hove around the edge of the visible cliff. Calliope’s rays flared off the golden swell of its envelope. Beneath the long ribbed form was a tiny gondola, equipped with multiple engines on skeletal outriggers. The airship’s nose began to turn, bringing another crescent moon emblem into view. The aircraft lined up with the airship, the two of them at about the same altitude. Merlin watched as some kind of net-like apparatus unfurled in slow motion from the belly of the gondola. The pilot gained further height, then cut the aircraft’s engine. Powerless now, it followed a shallow glide path towards the net. Clearly, the airship was going to catch the aircraft and carry it over the rim. That must have been the only way for aircraft to arrive and depart from the hovering land mass.

  Merlin watched with a sickened fascination. He’d occasionally had a presentiment when something was about to go wrong. Now he had that feeling again.

  Some gust caught the airship. It began to drift out of the aircraft’s glide path. The pilot tried to compensate - Merlin could see the play of light shift on the wings as they warped - but it was never going to be enough. Without power, the aircraft must have been cumbersome to steer. The engines on the gondola turned on their mountings, trying to shove the airship back into position.

  Beyond the airship loomed the streaked grey vastness of the great cliff.

  ‘Why did he cut the engines . . .’ Merlin breathed to himself. Then, an instant later: ‘Can we catch up? Can we do something?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. There simply isn’t time.’

  Sickened, Merlin watched as the aircraft slid past the airship, missing the net by a hundred metres. A sooty smear erupted from the engine. The pilot must have been desperately trying to restart the motor. Moments later, Merlin watched as one wingtip grazed the side of the cliff and crumpled instantly, horribly. The aircraft dropped, dashing itself to splinters and shreds against the side of the cliff. There was no possibility that the pilot could have survived.

  For a moment Merlin was numb. He was frozen, unsure what to do next. He’d been planning to land, but it seemed improper to arrive immediately after witnessing such a tragedy. Perhaps the thing to do was find an uninhabited land mass and put down there.

  ‘There’s another aircraft,’ Tyrant announced. ‘It’s approaching from the west.’

  Still shaken by what he’d seen, Merlin took the stealthed ship closer. Dirty smoke billowed from the side of the aircraft. In the canopy, the pilot was obviously engaged in a life-or-death struggle to bring his machine to safety. Even as they watched, the engine appeared to slow and then restart.

  Something slammed past Tyrant, triggering proximity alarms. ‘Some kind of shell,’ the ship told Merlin. ‘I think someone on the ground is trying to shoot down these aircraft.’

  Merlin looked down. He hadn’t paid much attention to the land mass beneath them, but now that he did - peering through the holes in a quilt of low-lying cloud - he made out the unmistakable flashes of artillery positions, laid out along the pale scratch of a fortified line.

  He began to understand why the airship dared not stray too far from the side of the land mass. Near the cliff, it at least had some measure of cover. It would have been far too vulnerable to the shells in open air.

  ‘I think it’s time to take a stand,’ he said. ‘Maintain stealth. I’m going to provide some lift-support to that aircraft. Bring us around to her rear and then approach from under her.’

  ‘Merlin, you have no idea who these p
eople are. They could be brigands, pirates, anything.’

  ‘They’re being shot at. That’s good enough for me.’

  ‘I really think we should land. I’m down to vapour pressure in the tanks now.’

  ‘So’s that brave fool of a pilot. Just do it.’

  The aircraft’s engine gave out just as Tyrant reached position. Taking the controls manually, Merlin brought his ship’s nose into contact with the underside of the aircraft’s paper-thin fuselage. Contact occurred with the faintest of bumps. The pilot glanced back down over his shoulder, but the goggled mask hid all expression. Merlin could only imagine what the pilot made of the sleek, whale-sized machine now supporting his little contraption.