The Skies Discrowned

by Tim Powers

  Frank’s attention was caught by his father’s blocking-in of the background. With a few passes of a pencil, the artist’s wrinkled hands had converted a patch of blankness into several bookshelves in perfect perspective. He set about defining the shadows with quick cross-hatching.

  Suddenly it occurred to Frank what was different about Prince Costa. This was the first time Frank had seen him wearing a sword.

  “Where’s my number eight camel hair?” asked old Rovzar, pawing through the brushes. “Right here, Dad,” replied Frank, pointing out the one in question. “Oh, yes” The painter took the brush, dipped it into the linseed oil, and began mixing a dab of paint. A loud bang echoed up from the courtyard. “What’s that?” asked the Duke.

  Several more bangs were heard, then a series of them like a string of firecrackers.

  “By God,” said Frank. “I think its gunfire. “He could hardly believe it; guns and powder were so prohibitively rare and expensive these days. Panicky yells sounded now, punctuated by more shots.

  “We’re beset!” gasped the Duke. Prince Costa ran out of the room, and the Duke took his place at the window. “Troops!” he said. “A hundred Transport soldiers are within the bailey!”

  Old Rovzar looked up. “What?” he asked. “I trust my painting won’t be interrupted?”

  “Interrupted?” shouted the Duke. “The Transports will probably use your canvas to polish their boots!” An explosion shook the palace, and the Duke scrambled back from the window. The pandemonium of shouts, shots, and screams was a mounting roar.

  The Duke ran bobbing and puffing across the carpeted floor to the desk. He yanked out drawers and began throwing bundles of letters and documents in a pile on the floor. “How did they get in?” he kept whining. “How in the devil’s name did they get in?”

  Frank glanced at his father. “Do we run for it?” he asked tensely. The young page stared at them with wide eyes.

  Frank’s father scratched his unshaven chin. “No, I guess not. We’re better off here than down in that madhouse of a courtyard. Just don’t panic. Damn, I hope nobody sticks a bayonet through this,” he said, staring at the painting.

  The hollow booms of two more explosions rattled the windowpanes. “This attack must be costing a fortune,” said Frank. The price of explosives made bombs a costly rarity in warfare, and they were generally used only in times of great need.

  The Duke had struck a match and set it to his pile of papers; most of them were yellowed with age, and they were consumed quickly, scorching the rug under them. When they had burned to fragile black curls he stamped them into powder. “What else, what else?” the distraught Duke moaned, wringing his hands.

  Suddenly, from beyond the double doors Frank heard a hoarse, triumphant yell, and then heavy-booted footsteps running up the hall toward the room they were in. The page ran to the doors and threw the bolt into the locked position.

  The Duke had heard it too and sprang to one of the bookcases. His pudgy hands snatched one of the books from the shelf, and then he stood holding it, staring wildly around the room. The attackers were pounding on the doors now. The Duke’s eyes lit on the painting and he ran to it with a glad cry. He stuffed the book—which, Frank noticed, was a leather-bound copy of Winnie the Pooh—behind the picture’s frame, so that it lay hidden between the canvas and the back of the frame. This done, he ran back to his elegant chair and sat down, exhausted. Frank and the old painter stared at him, even in this crisis puzzled by the Duke’s action.

  Six bullets splintered downward through the doors, one snapping the bolt and two more tearing through the page’s chest. The impact threw him to the floor. Frank’s numbed mind had time to be amazed at the quickness of it.

  The doors were kicked open and six men stepped into the room. Five of them were brawny soldiers who wore the gray Transport uniform and carried rifles, but it was the sixth, the leader, who held the attention of Rovzar, his son, and the Duke.

  “Costa!” exclaimed the astounded Duke. “Not you …?”

  Costa drew his sword with a sharp rasp of steel: “On guard, your Grace,” he sneered, holding the blade forward and crouching a bit. Bad form, thought Frank, who had spent a good part of his boyhood in a fencing school.

  Bad form it might have been, but it was adequate against the Duke, whose only defensive action was to cover his face with his hands. Prince Costa hesitated, then cursed and drove the tempered blade into Duke Topo’s heart. He wrenched it out, and the Duke sighed and bowed forward, leaning farther and farther, until he overbalanced and sprawled on the floor.

  One of the soldiers stepped to the still-open window and waved. “He’s dead!” he bellowed. Cheers, wails, and renewed shooting greeted this announcement. Frank could smell smoke, laced with the unfamiliar tang of gunpowder and high explosives.

  The other soldiers seized Frank and his father. “Damn it,” old Rovzar snarled. “You apes had better—” He kicked one of them expertly, leaving the Transport rolling in pain on the floor. Another raised his rifle clubwise. “Duck, Dad!” yelled Frank, at which his captor twisted his arm behind his back—Frank winced but didn’t yell, fearing that he’d distract his father.

  His father had leaped away from the descending gun-butt and made a grab at Costa’s ruffle-bordered throat. One of the soldiers next to Frank stepped aside to have a clear field of fire. “No!” screamed Frank, twisting furiously in his captor’s grasp. The soldier fired his rifle from the hip, almost casually, and the bang was startlingly loud in the small room. The bullet caught old Rovzar in the temple and spun him away from the surprised-looking Prince. Frank, painfully held by two soldiers, stared incredulously at his father’s body stretched beside the bookcase.

  “Take the kid along with the servants,” said Costa. The soldiers, one of them limping and cursing, filed out, carrying the stunned Frank like a rolled carpet. Costa closed the perforated doors behind them. He was alone now except for the three dead bodies, and he looked thoughtfully around the room. He slowly walked to the desk, observing the open drawers and the pile of ashes on the burned carpet. He searched very carefully through the papers that remained in the drawers, but took none of them. He went to the window and put one boot up on the sill, with his hand on his sword-hilt—a dramatic pose, he had been told. In the courtyard three storeys below the days outcome was clear. The guardhouse was a pile of smoking rubble, crowds of prisoners were being lined up and herded into carts, and the Transport banner snapped and fluttered on the flagpole.

  Prince Costa’s triumphant laughter echoed between the walls from the lists to the bailey, and the prisoners, all guards or servants or advisers of the old Duke, shuddered or ground their teeth in impotent rage.

  CHAPTER 2

  Dominion, it was called—a hundred stars in a field five thousand light-years across—and it was the most ambitious social experiment humans had ever embarked upon. It was a nation of more than a hundred planets, united by the silvery nerves of the Transport spaceships, the freighters that made possible the complex economic equations of supply and demand that kept the unthinkably vast Dominion empire running smoothly. Wheat from the fertile plains of planets such as Earth was shipped out to the worlds that produced ore, or fuel, or simply provided office space; and the machinery that was manufactured on Luna or Alpha Centauri III was carried to more rural planets, such as Earth. Planetary independence was a necessity of the past—now no planets government needed to struggle to be self sufficient; each world simply produced what it was best suited to and relied on the Transport ships to provide such necessities as were lacking. For centuries Dominion was a healthy organism, nourished by its varied and widespread resources, which the bloodstream of the Transport ships distributed to all its parts.

  Frank sat against the back of the horse-drawn cart, hemmed in by a dozen hot, unhappy kitchen servants. They moaned and asked each other questions that none of them knew the answers to: “Where are we going? What happened? Who are these people?” Frank was the only silent one in
the cart; he sat where he’d been thrown, staring with intensity at nothing. From time to time he flexed his tightly-bound wrists.

  The cart rattled south on the Cromlech Road, making good time since Cromlech was one of the few highways on the planet that were subject to maintenance. Within two hours they had arrived at the Barclay Transport Depot southwest of Munson, by the banks of the Malachi River. The cart, along with fifteen others like it, was taken through a gate in the chain-link fence that enclosed the Depot, across the wide concrete deck, and finally drew to a halt in front of a bleak, gray four-storey edifice. The bedraggled occupants of the carts were pulled and prodded out, lined up according to sex and height, and then divided into groups and escorted into the building. Just before he passed through the doorway, Frank caught sight of the sign above the door: DETENTION AND BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION CENTER.

  After many centuries, encompassing dozens of local golden ages, Dominion began to weaken. The fuels—fossil oils from jungle planets, and radium—became perceptibly less abundant. Transportation became increasingly expensive, and many things were no longer worth shipping. The smooth pulse of the import/export network had taken on a lurching, strained pace.

  “Name.” The officers voice had no intonation. “Francisco de Goya Rovzar.”

  “Age.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Occupation.”

  “Uh … apprentice painter.”

  “Okay, Rovzar, step over there with the others.” Frank walked away from the desk and joined a crowd of other prisoners. The room they were in seemed calculated to induce depression. The floor was of damp cement, drains set in at regular intervals; the pale green walls were chipping; the ceiling was corrugated aluminum, and naked light bulbs were hung from it on long cords.

  The perfunctory interrogation continued until all the prisoners taken that morning had been questioned and stood in a milling, spiritless crowd. The officer who had been asking the questions now stood up and faced the prisoners. He was short, with close-cropped sandy hair and a bristly moustache; his uniform was faultlessly neat.

  “Give me your attention for a moment,” he said, unnecessarily. “You are here as prisoners of the Transport Authority, and of Costa, the Duke of this planet, Octavio. Ordinarily you would be allowed a court hearing to contest the charge of treason laid against you, but the planet of Octavio has, as of this morning, been declared under martial law. When this condition is lifted you will be free to appeal your sentence. The sentence is the same for each of you: you are to be lifted tomorrow on a Transport freighter and ferried to the Orestes system to atone for your offenses in the uranium industry. Are there any questions?”

  There were none. The situation was deadly clear—the Orestes Mines were a legendary hell feared throughout the Dominion. Frank, his mind only now beginning to recover from the shock of his father’s murder, heard his sentence but filed it away without thinking about it.

  The situation did not improve. Transportation became more and more sporadic and unreliable. Industrial planets were often left for weeks without food shipments, and agricultural planets were unable to replace broken machinery or obtain fuel for what worked. The Transport Company was losing its grip on the wide-flung empire; the outer sections were dying Transport rates climbed astronomically, and the poorer planets were unable to maintain contact with the Dominion empire. They were forced to drop out and try to survive alone. In time even the richest planets began working to be self-sufficient, in case the overworked Transport Company should, one day, collapse entirely

  Late that night Frank sat awake in the darkness of one of the Depot detention pens. His cot and thin mattress were not notably uncomfortable, but his thoughts were too vivid and desperate for him to sleep. The six other men in the pen with him apparently didn’t care to think, and slept deeply.

  My father is dead, Frank told himself; but he couldn’t really believe it yet, emotionally. Impressions of his father alive were too strong—he could still see the old man laughing over a mug of beer in a tavern, or sketching strangers’ faces in a pocket notebook, or swearing as he drank his black coffee in the bleak, hungover dawns. Suddenly Frank saw how his life would be without old Rovzar to take care of, and he fearfully shied away from the lonely vision.

  His destination was the Orestes Mines. That was bad, about as bad as it could be. The mines riddled all four planets of the Orestes system, and working conditions ranged from desiccating desert heat to cold that could kill an exposed man in a matter of seconds; and over everything reigned the sovereign danger of radiation poisoning. Panic grew as it became clear to him that he was about to be devastatingly punished by men who had never seen him before and were totally indifferent to him.

  Isn’t there anyone who can get me out of this? he wondered. What about Tom Strand, my best friend? It was in the fencing school of Tom’s father, an interplanetary champion, that Frank had picked up what he knew of swordsmanship. Could Tom or his father do anything? Of course not, rasped the logical part of his mind. What could they do to reverse the decisions of the Transport and the planet government? The idea, he was forced to admit, was ridiculous.

  Panic eventually gave way to a decision. I am not going to Orestes, he thought. I simply am not going. Even though he had no plan to base this thought on, it comforted him. I am not going there, he told himself again. I will escape.

  He got up from his cot and felt his way through the inky blackness to one of the sleeping men and shook him by the shoulder. The man started violently.

  “Who is it?” he whispered in terror.

  “I’m a fellow prisoner,” Frank hissed. “Listen, we’ve got to escape. Are you with me?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, kid,” the man almost sobbed, “go back to sleep and leave me alone.”

  “You want to go to Orestes?” Frank asked wonderingly.

  “Kid—you can’t escape. Forget it. Your life won’t be real great now, but make an escape attempt and you’ll be surprised how sorry you’ll be, and for how long.”

  Frank left the man to his sleep and returned to his cot, his confident mood deflated.

  After another half hour of sitting on his ratty mattress, Frank was again convinced of the necessity of escape. Wasn’t there a wide ventilation grille set in the center of the ceiling? He tried to remember. Let’s see, he thought, they marched us in here, showed us each a cot, and then turned off the lights. But it seems to me I did notice a slotted plate set in the ceiling. I could escape through the ventilation system!

  He stood up again. It seemed to be in the center of the ceiling, he recalled. He made his way to a wall and counted the number of steps it took to walk its length; then did the same with the other wall. Twelve by eight, he thought. He then went back to the midpoint of the twelve-pace wall and took four paces out into the room, thanking Chance that no sleeping prisoners lay in his path.

  By my calculations, he mused, I should now be directly beneath that ventilation grille. He crouched; when he leaped upward with a strong kick, his fingers crooked to catch the vent. Instead, they cracked against unyielding concrete.

  He fell back to the floor, strangling a curse. His hands stung, and he could feel blood trickling down one finger. Bit of a miscalculation, Rovzar, he told himself.

  He pulled himself to his feet and got ready to jump again, this time only intending to brush the ceiling with his fingers, to feel for the vent. This is what I should have done to begin with, he thought.

  After four jumps, muffled by his rubber-soled shoes, he found the vent. His next leap gained him two fingerholds and in a moment he had got a firm grip with both hands. Now what?

  Why, he thought, I’ll bring my legs up and kick the plate until it comes loose, and then I’ll pull myself up into the hole and be off. Right-ho. He drew his legs up, and with a sort of half flip he kicked the plate with one toe. It made hardly any noise, but he was disappointed at how weak the blow was. This time he got swinging first, and then used the momentum of his pendulum motion to emphas
ize the kick as he flipped again and drove his heel at the grille.

  With an echoing clang of broken metal his foot punched completely through the grille. The recoil of the kick wrenched his hands free, but he didn’t fall back to the floor; instead he hung upside down, his foot caught in the twisted wreck of the vent.

  Shouts echoed eerily through the corridors, and the prisoners below Frank whimpered in uncomprehending fear. An alarm added its flat howl to the confusion. Frank, dangling from the ceiling, pulled at his trapped foot, hoping to be able to return to his cot before the guards arrived. Footsteps thudded in the corridor, and immediately the lights in Frank’s cell flashed on, blinding him. The will to move left his body and he relaxed, swinging limp from the mooring of his foot. He heard the door rattle and squeak open, and then something hard was driven with savage force into his stomach and consciousness left him.

  Frank came back to wakefulness by degrees, like a length of seaweed being gradually nudged to shore by succeeding waves. First he was aware of a hum of voices and a sense of being carried about. None of it seemed to demand a response.

  Then he dimly knew he was sleeping, but it was a deep, heavy sleep, and he did not want to wake up yet even though it sounded as if some people were up already.

  Abruptly, a cold finger and thumb pried his right eyelid open. Frank saw an unfocused sea of bright gray.

  “This kid’s okay,” came a loud, gravelly voice. “Throw him over there with that clown who set his bed on fire.”

  Frank had groggily assumed that the voice was speaking figuratively when it said “throw,” but now unseen hands clamped on his ankles and wrists. “Wait, wait—” Frank began mumbling. “Heave ho!” called someone cheerily, and Frank found himself lifted from whatever he’d been lying on and tossed sprawling into the air. His eyes sprang open wide and he grabbed convulsively at nothing. He saw the concrete floor rushing up at him and he managed to twist around in midair so that he landed on his hip instead of his head. The sharp, aching pain of the impact was his first clear sensation of the morning.