The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  Tomothus came to some miles out in the lagoon, the hot sun beating down. He floated blearily, a blot of red surrounding him in the still water, the pain rising as if seeping out of the sea. The monster must have found him unpalatable, he thought, paddling to turn himself. He looked down into the water, breathing hard.

  He saw the hole was almost beneath him. It was like a blue-black, diffracted eye, watching him from the seabed.

  He gargled a yelp and began to paddle in the water, knowing what happened to any who swam over it; but something was dragging him there. In a minute he was directly over the Gulp.

  What felt like invisible fingers grasped the remains of his legs, worming their way into the shredded muscle, and pulled, dragging him quickly beneath the calm waters.

  THAT BELOW

  She trails her fingers along white stucco walls, waiting.

  “Who was she, Aaron?”

  He looks at her with those colourless eyes, the kindest eyes she’s ever seen.

  “Who was who, Iro?”

  “The woman you loved more than me.”

  They met again in the evening. The sculpted trees looked pink in the light

  Her hands trembled and she tucked them into her armpits, not wanting the man to see how she’d missed him. He sat across from her in the grass, his eyes filled with gentle apprehension. She hated that look, loving it more every time they met

  “Whom do you love more?” she asked, glancing away. “Tell me.”

  When he answered, it was as if an age had passed. “She’s dead, Iro. Love can be shared.”

  “No it can’t.” She shook her head, rocking in the grass. A lover would try to reach out and touch her now, but he never did.

  “You blame me for meeting her first?”

  She looked at him. His eyes, though they possessed no colour of their own, could reflect it sometimes, and this evening they were rose-gold, like the light. “When did you meet?”

  “Before you were born.”

  “What did she die of?”

  He hesitated. “Bad things, done to her in my absence.”

  She took this in. “And did you think you could ever love again?”

  “No,”he replied quickly. Though the answer was clearly intended as a compliment, it hurt Iro all the same.

  “Why won’t you tell me her name?”

  He sighed, the pink glow in his eyes apparently searching for an answer. “It’s not that simple. You wouldn’t understand.”

  A silence fell, intensified by the woodland birds, in which she could contemplate his words. Those were the worst parts, those silences, in which everything said had a chance to settle, unchallenged, and become real. At that moment, she didn’t want to look at him any more, but worried that if she turned away he’d disappear, as he had so many times before.

  Iro blinked away tears, her eyes closing, squeezing the drops between her lashes. In the warm, hot darkness she forgot for a moment why she cried, and felt an absurd freedom.

  She opened her eyes. The heat of tears hung on their lashes.

  “Come into the water, Iro,” said his voice from behind her.

  She turned. On the lake’s surface, like an inverted reflection, stood her old friend, her old love. “Aaron.”

  He beckoned. “Come into the water with me.”

  She stood, aware that she was coolly naked in the evening air, her skin marked with the pink impressions of grass, and went down to the lake’s silted edge where the birds strutted, oblivious. On the far bank, a man watched her, and she felt vague irritation

  Aaron extended a hand, waiting. She grinned and stepped in, swallowed by dark water. Leaves floated still on the surface, and yet Aaron seemed even lighter, his bare, beautiful feet planted just over the meniscus, like a dayfly’s.

  “Closer,” he said, smiling, and yet somehow sad. She paused as she saw his face, then continued on into cold blackness.

  “Deeper.”

  TWENTY-ONE FIFTY-NINE

  He cupped the piece of light, carved shell in his hands, rubbing a thumb across its engraved message. The object was an invitation, delivered in an aureate golden box the previous morning. Sweat popped out across his skin as he contemplated the trip he’d been planning to take that day: an image of the liveried courier waiting on his step and turning away, the message returning unopened.

  Trang Hui Neng stared vacantly from the window of his carriage, his fingers trembling in his lap, the scrimshaw placed carefully on the seat beside him. The city was a place of coils—affluence nestled inside poverty, ugliness ringed again by wealth—each loop invisibly cordoned by some higher, spiral geometry. Hui Neng passed, deep in thought, through boroughs of darkness and light, registering nothing.

  He was unable to resist, as was his nature, contemplating how it would feel when it was all over; that it would almost suit him better were it not to happen at all. He’d turned down plenty in his life, reasoning after forty-four years of disappointment that ups seldom merited their downs. But this invitation wasn’t like the others. There was no end to this, if all was to be believed.

  The carriage rolled into a side street and slowed to a crawl. Hui Neng’s heart raced, urging the vehicle backwards. He might make a fool of himself—or worse, be made a fool of; what if they’d summoned him here simply to refuse him? He smoothed a hand over the lapels of his jet-grey suit, a compulsive gesture that only served to wrinkle the fabric further, and so he repeated the gesture again, and again, and again.

  Black gates of wrought iron swung open. The carriage passed through and into a marbled courtyard that appeared larger than any he’d seen in the city. Pale Corinthian pillars enclosed the space like a forest of petrified classical trees, grey strips of shade looming among their trunks. No sounds of the city drifted into the square. A pigeon or two, unaware of the significance of the place, strutted, bobbing.

  Steps extended down and he shuffled out, heart squirming, glancing at the vast open doors to the interior of the palace.

  “Welcome to Carlton House,” the footman said, taking his hand and helping him down. “They’re waiting for you.”

  Hui Neng nodded and stepped into the winter breeze, the cold sinking into his cropped hair. The doors stood like monoliths, darkly impatient. He attempted a leisurely pace; there would be others, recently arrived as he was, standing before the Panel, but to scamper was beneath him. Nobody invited to this great marble courtyard had ever scampered, he was certain of it.

  He ascended the steps and into darkness, making out dim candelabra in the gloom above. The ceilings were painted with cracked frescos of frolicking putti, a yellowed cloudscape advancing into false perspective over their tousled heads. He glanced up, aware that he could hear the burble of a host of people further inside, and experienced the usual panic of tardiness. Why hadn’t he scampered? Perhaps everyone scampered, after all.

  Silence fell, the proceedings quite obviously begun, and he found himself quickening his step up the winding stair, aware of how foolish history would regard him were he to slip and fall mere moments from Immortality.

  Doors twice his height confronted him at the top of the stairs, their tarnished gold knobs waiting. He grasped them and pushed into the room.

  Twenty pairs of eyes flicked up at the sound, examining him. Hui Neng bowed, pathetically glad to see that some of the eyes were paired with smiles, and moved to stand among the watching figures at the side of the room.

  The only person that hadn’t turned to regard him was in the process of receiving the Communion. She knelt, tongue extended, before a stooped senior member of the Panel, a man whose twisted, deformed face signified that he was among the first to have partaken of the Imperfect Communion. Hui Neng had arrived just in time to see the wafer pass from the old man’s slender white hand and into her mouth.

  The woman became very still, waiting for the momentous little thing to dissolve, her eyes closed. When her mouth began to move, inaudibly answering a question from the panel, Hui Neng knew the wafer was ful
ly gone.

  He looked at her, foolishly expecting to detect a difference in her, however subtle. Already, mere seconds after delivery, the mitochondria in every one of her cells had wound down into a contented sort of hibernation, their tickings slowed almost to nothing, their walls hardened, gates slammed and welded shut. Energy would come instead from her own motions, her slowed respiration still generating heat in smaller, more economic quantities. He tried to see what he could of her lightly flushed face, still turned away, conscious that age would never trouble her again. No known disease could ravage her, instead passing flummoxed through her systems without finding purchase and issuing back into the wide world. Water, should she choose to drink, would trickle uselessly through her innards and drizzle out again; solid food, they were told, would suddenly hold no appeal, churning in nothing but its mashed original form, unaffected by the barren tubes inside which it had spent the night. Her hair and nails would cease to grow, any last ova within her would pause their gradual drip and ossify, and the flora of her gut would perish and disappear, scoured away as if by a hundred thousand years of blustery weather.

  Now she glanced around the room, nodding at the soft congratulations of her peers, and Hui Neng saw that it was someone moderately famous, someone whose face he knew well without recalling her name.

  His eyes strayed to the pieces of wafer arranged upon the linen-covered table, a burnished little nameplate set beneath each one. Whatever those small wafers contained was a mighty force indeed, he reflected from the safety of the shadows; a potent, dangerous concoction like medical cytotoxins of old, its destructive power now harnessed to sterilize. Only the Panel held the secret of the wafer’s ingredients, refined over thirty-five years into its present form. He looked at the wizened figures standing sentinel at the end of the room, with their dour, burn-victim faces. These were the first to pay the price of experimentation, and they would be venerated in the age to come.

  It was his turn approximately ten minutes later, after two more had been inducted into the ranks of the newly ageless. Hui Neng stepped forward, feeling all eyes on him, and paced across the black and white tiled floor to where the Venerable Wylde stood, his pale hands extended.

  “Do you come with the Panel’s blessing?” Wylde asked softly when Hui Neng had knelt before him.

  He nodded, eyes flicking briefly to the man’s melted face. “I do.”

  The bony hand hovered into his field of view, palm open

  There it was: a square tab of moulded protein, stamped like a miniature waffle with exquisite designs. He stretched his neck forward, scenting something acrid, and let it be placed upon the tip of his tongue

  A second passed, then five. Hui Neng did as the previous people had, keeping his eyes closed, attempting to savour any sensation. After a moment of panic at the idea that it might have somehow fallen from his mouth, he closed his lips and tasted. There: a lingering flavour fainter than a belch, leaching immediately away

  “Congratulations, Trang,” the Venerable Wylde whispered, patting him weakly on the shoulder. He rose, bewildered at the lack of sensation, shuffling back only when he saw the next person waiting on the tiles behind him, a young man he knew, dark-skinned and wiry— Harald something

  *

  Drinks were served in the wintry gardens, and the newly honoured guests mingled among the skeletal conker trees without much enthusiasm, each person struck dumb and mute with a kind of melancholy that Hui Neng felt just as keenly. That was it. Their dearest wish had been granted. He found himself staring at steps and irregular ground with an intense mistrust; far from feeling more secure now that he had achieved Immortality, he actually felt more vulnerable. Any little external thing could still kill him, and in just as many violent ways as before. A great and terrible depression hung over him, growing darker and more livid as he spoke to people and swallowed his useless mulled wine. He examined the red scum in the bottom of the glass—a base of city water that must have passed at one time or other through a thousand plague victims—and went to find a bench as far from the crowd as possible. He noticed the occasional blank-eyed member walking back into the palace, perhaps with the intention of leaving early, and sat with his glowering thoughts

  “Trang.” It was Wylde, stooped and unwholesome in the white winter light. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  Hui Neng thought he’d seen the man accompanying Wylde at the ceremony, standing among the watchers at the side. He had a soft, pleasant face, like a parish priest’s, the fatness in it conveying a genteel innocence that Hui Neng found immediately soothing. The man’s eyes were at first one colour, then another, the depths of a lake under moving cloud

  “The Viscount Hereford,” Wylde said, inclining his head. “This is his home.”

  PART I

  TERMINAL

  Out beyond the shoals of the Amaranthine Satrapies, in the deep, cold pockets, something moved. It was visible in most spectra as a cloud of thrown motion, like a vehicle dashing along a dusty road, revealed only by the havoc it wrought. From a distance, the streak of its comet tail was ponderous, widening to a smudge of purple that encompassed thousands of following ships, all lagging now, spreading in a haze as they fought to keep up with the thing as it ploughed through the Void at seventy-eight times the speed of light. The tiny follicle at the head of this contrail was the Grand-Tile, the three-mile-wide Colossus flagship of the Lacaille navy. As it flew it listened, wave antennas concentrating on the silence behind it, never once thinking of looking up.

  In the rushing silver light hundreds of thousands of miles above, a trajectory of colour whipped silently overhead, outpacing the Grand-Tile and curving slowly down to meet it. This second cloud was made up of six hundred and four individual ships, their motions only detectable by the small cone of turbulence they left in their wakes. These ships— unlike the Colossus they chased, which ripped untidily through space like a cruciform bullet—hardly made a mark.

  Ships in the Void travelled like someone falling. Most Prism craft attained a terminal velocity of forty or fifty billion miles an hour after a week or so, thrusting radiation and matter into a bulging teardrop around them and crossing the Investiture in what was known as a Silver Month.

  Some ships, of course—many millions of hotchpotch things built from wood and plastic and plated with the thinnest, cheapest tin—flew immensely slower, juddering and dancing along like feathers caught in a gale, their interiors often without gravity and possessed of such limited stocks of air that they stopped every few days for resupply. The feral occupants of these ramshackle craft spent their lives hopping around the great celestial island chains of the Firmament and the Investiture, paddling from moon to moon just to catch their breath, asphyxiating, starving, driven half-mad from subsistence and whittled to weaklings by the absence of gravity. Some ships even fuelled the fires of their engines with the very materials they were built from, the crew taking their vessel apart piece by piece and shoving it into the furnaces, until all that was left on arrival was a small, tumbling chamber stuffed with drooling, emaciated creatures ready to set about devouring whatever unfortunate place they happened upon.

  It was just these desperate folk that the Amaranthine Hugo Maneker had set his sights on, spending a portion of his own huge wealth on hiring the very best of a wild but enthusiastic bunch, and together— their ships improved and refitted by a mysterious and powerful voice that lingered in everyone’s heads—they fell in a glowing, thrumming convoy, the largest seen anywhere in the Firmament in sixty years, past the diminishing speck of the Grand-Tile and towards the growing black sphere of the Vaulted Land of Gliese.

  Perception trailed wispily from the tailfins of the Epsilon India like a veil of spider silk spooled and stretched fine in the wind. The onrushing silver of the Void caressed its strands, bathing and warming them with gentle friction, and yet the Spirit was the furthest it had ever been from relaxed. There, lagging hundreds of thousands of miles below to port, it could see the thunderous si
gnature of the Grand-Tile churning colours in its wake. Having silently overshot the battleship that morning, they were now within range for Perception to extend itself through the frequencies and speak to its quarry, if it so chose—but of course that would spoil the game. It imagined the ancient, anxious mind of the Long-Life aboard that ship, sweating metaphorical buckets as he glanced behind, unaware that his enemies circled in the Void.

  Perception grinned an invisible grin and stilled itself, willing away the phantom adrenalin. Sounds, amplified by the great cathedral caverns of the galaxy, screamed by. They weren’t too different from those a falling person would experience, Perception supposed: the tumultuous muffled battering of wind in your ears, a slapping cacophony that hid within it a deep and deadly silence.

  The one difference out here was that this silence contained a faint, eerie chorus: the electromagnetic signatures of the stars, all competing to make their song heard. They warbled and whistled and squealed like a jungle at dawn, an ecosystem of unique, high voices that Perception had by now grown attuned to. As they swirled distantly by, their songs shifted into a lamentation, and once more the Spirit held still, savouring. It could hear the deeper tones of other galaxies, great yawning belches of conglomerated sound, and lying nearer, the turgid, chattering nebulae of unexplored stars. Closer still lay the distinguishable voices: the wailing of Sirius long passed (home of the Pifoon honey world where they’d made repairs); and the gibbering of its neighbour, Vaulted Ectries, and her many satellite worlds. Passing between their Satrapy borders, Perception had heard a hollow, sighing breath, like wind blowing through empty window frames and haunting an abandoned house: the ruined shell of the Vaulted Land of Virginis, destroyed the year before by a skycharge implanted in its sun.