The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  “Take us down there!” he said, reaching and tapping frantically on the shoulder of the Jurlumticular at the front. He pointed. “Right there.”

  PUPPETS

  Perception saw it then, the hobbling figure, quite some distance from everyone else and making its stumbling way out to a huge recessed bay in the floor.

  The Spirit sharpened itself into a needle’s point and went hypersonic, the smoked air crackling and booming in its wake.

  Lycaste felt the detonation as something accelerated through the air above them. The invisible shape of the Spirit, cloaked in a cone of rushing white air, shot past, firing across the Chamber.

  “Faster!” roared Maneker, still riding atop Lycaste’s shoulders. Huerepo, poking out of the front of Lycaste’s cuirass, was gazing wide-eyed up at Perception as it rushed overhead.

  At the last moment, Aaron’s saurian face turned, a jowly, grey-pink apparition, yellowed fangs peeping from its sagging lips. Perception saw through a lens of slow motion, watching as the face began to register surprise. But it was too late. Perception aimed for the eyes.

  Aaron the Long-Life distended his jaws, peeling apart at the seams and exploding into a thousand pieces before he could even begin to scream.

  Through a fine mist of falling blood, the Spirit turned to them, coated. Lycaste saw its form at last, a serpentine red statue brooding over its kill. The rain of blood flickered with tiny flashes, and Lycaste was reminded suddenly of the storm on the beach back home, the storm that had changed his life. Percy’s attention turned to something lying a little way across the floor as the blood swirled, convected, around it.

  The Shell. It had been made into a pendant. Perception was inspecting the thing in wonder when it felt the gravity of the other Spirit, seething across the floor like dry ice and feeling for the necklace. Perception could see a suggestion of the Long-Life as he crawled along the floor, a flickering cirrus of energy steaming from the pulverised saurian remains. And it could feel him, too; it could feel the drag as their dense gravity wells intermingled, tugging them together like a tide.

  Aaron must have felt the same. He coiled blearily away in the quantum winds, streaming and collecting on the far side of the pendant.

  Then his sharp, fiendish attention turned on Perception at last.

  The Spirits regarded each another, the Foundry and its inhabitants forgotten.

  Perception stared blankly back. Though made and destroyed in the same manner, they were not at all alike. A sensation of warped, decrepit lunacy infused this other being; an overgrown, cankerous soul long past its best.

  They circled the pendant, stray wisps of themselves reaching out to one another, compelled.

  Aaron snarled and darted for the Shell, disappearing in a blink. Perception lingered, startled, gazing upon the pendant, barely noticing as a Pifoon corpse stirred at the edge of its vision and stumbled awkwardly to its feet.

  Perception turned to the corpse, seeing in its eyes a hideous liveliness. The Pifoon body was shot through and leaked as it staggered, drawing a sword mechanically from the scabbard on its hip.

  Neon flashes rained down upon them both, sparker bolts that fizzled and exploded in pink and purple bursts. Aaron’s Pifoon body staggered right and left, sword extended in Perception’s direction, and made a drunken dash for the pendant. Perception fumbled clumsily for it, unable to touch the thing, deciding to dive into it instead—

  —and appeared within a body some distance away, sitting up with a resounding gasp. The pain was extraordinary, a new dimension. For a few moments, Perception couldn’t even think, so overwhelmed was it by the broken Pifoon’s screaming nerves. It diverted all its powers of concentration into turning the body’s head, seeing through cloudy, low-contrast eyes as the Prism-bodied figure of Aaron picked up the pendant and grinned, blood leaking from his nostrils. Perception saw his fluid motions and understood that this could be no contest: only Aaron had experience with flesh and blood.

  Perception levered itself up, using both hands planted on the blood-smeared floor, and shakily drew its spring pistol, aiming a trembling hand and popping shots around the feet of Aaron’s staggering body.

  Aaron hardly flinched, advancing towards Perception, swinging his blade in scything, chopping motions. Perception’s weapon at last found its mark, a bolt ripping through Aaron’s shin, and he gasped and staggered, flailing the sword as he came within slicing range. Perception threw up an arm to shield itself, some instinct of its father’s protecting the Pifoon body from a lethal blow, and felt the searing pain as the blade thwacked into bone.

  Perception shoved the blade away, glimpsing the energy in the other Pifoon’s eyes, and made a clumsy grab for the pendant, fingers unable to close, feeling the fresh injection of life leaving its leaking body. The pain was exquisite. Aaron dropped his blade, trying to pull his hand out of Perception’s closing fingers, a look of intense concentration suddenly crossing his face. Perception could only watch, helplessly, as the other corpse lifted the pendant slowly to his lips, muscles straining against Perception’s grip, and pushed it into his mouth. He swallowed with a grimace and turned his blood-smeared grin on Perception.

  The Spirit pushed, knocking Aaron to the floor and stamping a boot on his chest. Aaron writhed, pinned. So far, not a word had been spoken between them. Perception decided to change that.

  “You can’t have it,” Perception grunted in Unified, leaning its weight onto the shaking leg and pinning Aaron harder. “It’s mine.”

  “Jacob’s son,” Aaron gasped, grasping for a nearby sliver of metal and driving it into Perception’s ankle. “You know you can be king here, just let me go.”

  Perception clamped its teeth shut, seeing that there was only one option.

  “Let me go,” Aaron growled, working the shard deeper.

  Perception could barely stand any longer. It aimed shakily and put a bullet through Aaron’s belly and into his spine. Aaron’s eyes widened, his body paralysed.

  “Gooo,” Aaron wheezed.

  Perception looked into his eyes, making sure he was still alive, and shakily drew his own scimitar. He leaned his weight upon it, pushing it deep into the rough location of Aaron’s stomach. Blood sprayed, wetting them both, until Perception had worked the sword in a rough circle and dug its fingers into the mess of guts, feeling for the Shell. There. It fumbled for the object, hooking the pendant’s chain onto its thumb, and pulled it out, finally turning the pistol on itself.

  Pop. Through the Shell and into another Pifoon’s body some distance away. Perception stood more quickly this time, tasting blood in its mouth and spitting. There had been something, in that black second between lives; something it thought it remembered from its first death. But there wasn’t time to dwell on it: Aaron’s head turned minutely in its direction. Perception stumbled over, snatching up the Shell, closing it awkwardly in its hairy Pifoon fist. Aaron’s eyes fixed on Perception’s before glazing and rolling upwards into death.

  Perception turned. A dead cobalt-cuirassed Lacaille, quite a bit larger than Percy’s own Pifoon body, had begun twitching on the floor. The Lacaille staggered to his feet, blood pouring from holes in his neck, and barrelled across the floor towards Perception.

  Their blades met with a shriek of metal, grinding and squealing. Aaron was the defter, parrying and hurling Perception back. Percy allowed a cut and jabbed forward, scraping up the metal of Aaron’s plate armour until its sword point had lodged in his neck. Blood squirted in a wild, wobbling spray.

  Perception felt its arm loosen, severed at the shoulder and hanging from a thread of sinew. It peeled away and thumped to the floor, the blade clattering with it. Aaron smiled a red-smeared smile, one eye wandering, snatching the pendant and hurling it as far as he could towards the recessed floor. He drove his sword into Perception’s chest, crackling past the ribs and shattering the scapula as it forced its way through. Percy felt the blade as a dull heat within its body, pain sizzling along its edges, all the remaining strength
leaving its legs, and fell into Aaron’s stinking embrace. The two Spirits entwined for a moment, a flash of memories passing between them, until Perception left its body with a sigh.

  Lycaste stared, ears flattened, a cold sweat crawling through him. Aaron’s borrowed cadaver flicked its eyes in his direction.

  Lycaste’s heart fell silent. Time wound to nothing. The gaze, though it belonged to a small Lacaille person dead now for some minutes, was one he recognised. It was, somehow, like looking into a mirror.

  Aaron’s eyes gave the impression of widening a little in kind, before a fresh rain of sparker bolts from the massed Jurlumticular came arcing overhead. He spun, stalking off towards the sunken bay in the floor.

  Perception rose foggily towards the ceiling. It gazed down into the mess of fighting, trying to work out where it had been, where Aaron might have tossed the pendant, but all the Spirit’s energy appeared to have dissolved.

  Across the Star Chamber, the Pifoon were still working, their little hands hurrying, winching a platform from the depths. The Spirit wrapped itself around a damaged gantry and stared.

  Out of the floor rose an angular edifice of shimmering white, like an unprecedentedly complicated origami structure, surrounded by the twenty-four points of the Firmamental star. The Collection, Perception’s mortal remains, dismantled upon his death in that lonely tower four thousand years ago. The Spirit thought it looked like a giant two-storey head. As it gazed upon the structure, it realised the thing was indeed that: a huge death mask, made in the likeness of an Amaranthine. And then it understood. It was the image of his father, Jacob the Bold, ancient Emperor of Decadence.

  A surge of jealousy replaced the echoes of pain.

  The lone blue blotch moving towards it—Aaron’s Lacaille body— paused a moment in wonder. At his side limped an Immortal who cast repeated nervous glances behind him at what was left of the fighting.

  The glint of a blade, taken from the Amaranthine’s pocket, presented ceremonially. It disappeared again as it was thrust almost gently into the Long-Life’s side, Aaron’s own hand guiding it in, at the last.

  Lycaste and Maneker stood entranced. The Long-Life’s Lacaille body fell. The monolithic head did not stir. A small group of Pifoon had climbed twin ladders and were fussing at something where the ears should have been. Abruptly the head opened, revealing a glittering interior of complicated pieces.

  At its centre was a miniature translucent white copy, folded in the same origamic way. Lycaste watched as the smaller interior head shrivelled before their eyes, folding in upon itself until it was a polygonal diamond the size of a small egg. The Amaranthine extended his hand timidly and the diamond hovered out, landing gently on his palm.

  Bad idea, thought Perception. The ultra-dense piece of folded material dropped right through the man’s flesh, tearing a hole in it. The polygon containing Aaron’s soul thumped to the floor and opened out, spreading evenly until it had become a quivering white sheet on the ground. Perception saw how it had been designed as one colossal, ironed-out sheet of brain material, self-powered and yet containable. The material folded once, then twice, angling to a point.

  “Memory film,” Maneker whispered, almost too quietly to hear against the fading din. “Capable of assuming any form imaginable. The Stickmen, the old Amaranthine army, were made from the same material.” He stepped forward, his breathing quickening, the spell broken. “He’s trying to fly.”

  The Jurlumticular opened fire under his command, sparks ricocheting off the enormous polygonal sail.

  Once more the shape reconfigured, elongating into a spear, the light glowing through its fine material. Sparker bolts exploded around it, colouring the air pink, red flame coiling. The bust of Jacob shattered like glass, its component pieces spilling across the floor, the Pifoon turning tail. The Amaranthine, still holding his pierced hand, caught a bolt in the chest and fell.

  The Collection hesitated, forming a papery arrow that bobbed and dipped with the effort of staying afloat. It began to move, steering its wobbly way around the Chamber’s walls, accelerating and slowing again with a crack of hypersonic air, as if able to mould it beneath its wings. It found its confidence at last and shot up towards the ceiling, roaring as it elongated, and Lycaste watched as it burst through the star-shaped hole and away into the gloomy cloud.

  He and Maneker stood frozen, Lycaste’s skin bleaching to white. The fighting appeared to grow in volume for a moment before dying incrementally down. The Chamber and its thousands of inhabitants grew still, a silence descending.

  Perception drifted over to what remained of the Star Chamber’s eastern corner, passing above the small, circular groups of tired figures as they ate together, Op-Zor and Jurlumticular alike, pardoned apparently without reserve or bad blood once everyone realised the instigator himself was gone for ever.

  The marble floor was a ruined expanse of charred stains, the detritus of the battle lying everywhere. It wondered how long it would take to clear such a mess, hardly caring. Seal it all away and be done with it.

  The Spirit took a moment to locate the remains where they’d fought, eventually spotting the twinkle of the pendant that Aaron had kicked aside. Nearby lay the fallen Amaranthine. Perception gazed at the corpse, noting the triangular hole in the man’s hand where Aaron had settled and fallen through. His chest was pocked with bloody little holes—an exploding bolt, perhaps, that had dug its way into his lungs. The man’s brain, still cooling, remained unharmed.

  Perception looked at the constellation of wounds, and wondered.

  HARALD HUNDRED

  A large, fine tent stood on the shore beneath umber palms, the hot river wind singing through its guy ropes and snapping at its flag.

  In the shade of its entrance a dark figure sat, slim legs crossed, happily absorbed, looking out at the brown waters and the estuary beyond.

  Harald hummed something while he darned the newest hole in his shirt, deciding that when the evening’s preparations were done, he would get out his little wooden guitar and give it a try. The melody was something he hadn’t thought of in a long while, an old preserved thing miraculously undamaged by any intervening thought. He smiled, glad, thinking he ought to go and get his guitar now, in case it left him.

  Sunlight burned golden through the silk when he went inside, just a little too warm for comfort. Old lion-footed wooden tables and cupboards stood on rugs that carpeted the floors, books and papers and compositions lining their shelves. A little silver heardie shaped like a metronome sat by the bed. It was capable of playing a library of hundreds of tunes by snicking back and forth along a channel in its silver case. Harald glanced at it, knowing the piece of music he was thinking of wouldn’t be in there. A spark awoke in a lantern, grizzling, but he shushed it absently, wrapping his slender fingers around the neck of the instrument where it stood beside the fireplace and taking it in his lap.

  “Ha da da, da ...” he sang, strumming the first chords experimentally, then taking the guitar back out into the sun to look at the river.

  But the music was gone, dashing off into the lost parts of his memory before he could snatch it up. Harald sat back down with a grunt, returning his attention to the stitching. The wind ruffled the surface of the river, dense with pink eels that snaked and coiled just beneath the surface. The umber palms rustled, the little green bottles he’d hung among their fruit breathing a gorgeous tinkling sigh. Harald felt a sweet surge of contentment, looking up from his work at the home-made wind chimes. He strung them around each new camp, and they were always much admired.

  There. All done. The gauzy cloth shirt must have travelled with him for a good few years now and was certainly looking elderly; a dozen suns had bleached it colourless, while the weekly wash in dirty Prism seas had leached any remaining dye. He held out the shirt, inspecting it, then looked back towards the estuary. There had been genocide here, in this part of the Investiture, and the silt of the rivers was more than mere sand.

  The palm thickets appeare
d to regard this gravelly land as nutritious enough, and similarly Harald felt no great concern when he’d hiked to the river’s edge to pitch his camp and found the land made from eye sockets and toe bones and tiny pieces of vertebrae. His contentment, he hoped, had percolated into the ground, becalming the little smoothed pieces, and this had become a happy place in the weeks since he’d arrived, on the hunt for his last commission.

  His slow travels across the Investiture had taken him in a zigzag through thirteen moons and fifty-three Prism kingdoms, Bilocating from place to place as if they were a chain of unexplored celestial islands, looking for somewhere to moor up and call his own. He brought his many possessions along by grabbing a corner of his tent as he closed his eyes to travel, and everything came with him whole. Extremely useful: it was years since he’d first erected the tent, and he wasn’t entirely sure he could work out how to do it again. When he needed to leave his home—signified as Amaranthine property by its Firmamental flag—he packed his most valuable possessions, pulled on some sturdier boots and set off. When he slept, he dreamed strange dreams, his old mind infused with the air of each new place, and sometimes he even ate the local fruits and produce, just to feel at home, enjoying himself more than he’d ever thought possible. They said the age of plenty and prosperity was over, that the Amaranthine were no more, but Harald couldn’t keep the spring out of his step and the song out of his voice. Life was a marvel; an existence of precisely meted perfection, and he was surely the happiest man in all the galaxy.

  Late that evening, the fire lit and roaring beside the tent, he saw them coming.