The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  She leaned back in the doorway, the metal ring book warm in her fingers, considering how pleasant it was to do nothing, absolutely nothing, for most of the day. Much had once been expected of her as the elder and arguably brighter sister, but unlike Pentas, she’d never been all that bothered about doing anything special with her life. It had become almost a pleasure to disappoint people; when she’d left the First, bidding her niece the queen goodbye and never looking back, it was with a sense of satisfaction; she had defied their expectations, confounded them, shown those that would, given half a chance, have tried to order her life for her that she was not the predictable sort. Leaving Xanthostemon had not been hard; the two realised soon enough that they weren’t at all suited, saying no more of the matter. He was the quiet, troubled sort and possessed not a playful bone in his body. She supposed, on reflection, that those were just the kind of men she liked, then shooed the thought away with practised efficiency. You could love someone with the energy to melt iron, but let it grow cold enough and that power died away.

  Eranthis thought about that, wondering how long it had been since she’d touched someone. They weren’t the tactile sort out here, in the East. She remembered for the hundredth time how her hand had been drawn to Jatropha’s across the blanket of her bed that night. Love, it seemed, true love, was to try to merge in the grasp of an embrace—to press, desperate, into another person’s flesh and become one conjoined creature. And yet this could never happen. Love remained something always unsatisfied, an embrace repeated again and again, tighter and tighter, ever yearning.

  Unfair, she thought. And to what end?

  She looked out at the sweeping horizon of fields, their crop of nightfruit just starting to bud, hoping that young Arabis didn’t chose her husbands the same way her aunt did. She received news from Pentas every couple of months, battered letters brought by the same Imperial bird each time. They were contemplating marrying Arabis to a young Jalan Potentate, to cement the union of East and West: a terrible idea, she thought. Probably his idea. Eranthis could think of better marriages; the young King Lyonothamnus, happily supplanted by all accounts and unaware of the atrocities committed in his name, was still unwed. He and Arabis were already firm friends, her sister reported, though the young man was in his twenties, assuredly much too old for her by now. Eranthis lifted her face to the sun, glad she was no longer a part of it.

  “Eranthis.”

  Her eyes flew open.

  She searched the fields, heart thumping, feeling suddenly sick to her stomach.

  There, beneath the shade of a Copperwhill tree, a familiar figure was making his way up the slope, followed by another she didn’t recognise.

  “No,” she breathed, fury rising within her. She stood, watching him climbing the hill.

  He arrived at the school gate, pausing to let the hunched Jalan through. He waved, tentatively.

  She shook her head. No. Not here. This is my place.

  Jatropha looked up at her, apparently oblivious to the last.

  Eranthis clasped the book tightly in her fingers.

  He came to the edge of the school’s tiled courtyard, the cool Eyrall blowing past him from the west.

  “Think of a demon and it shall appear,” Eranthis hissed, hoping against hope that he would think better of crossing the tiles and just turn around, back into the wind; turn around and leave.

  He still hadn’t said a word. In his hand he held a coloured piece of something. She gazed at the thing, not recognising it at first. A blue ribbon, punctured with a series of small holes.

  Jatropha brought it to her, his palms open to show the letters of his name cut neatly into the silk.

  “Where did you find that?” she whispered, folding his small hands into hers. The silk fluttered in the wind, and she closed their fingers over it.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, and a lump rose in her throat. “It is yours, from me.”

  MERIDIAN

  Out beyond the moons of Indak-Australis, past the bustle of a hundred and eighty billion souls to the Whoop and the Never-Never and out to the very limits of the Prism Investiture, the worlds fell quiet. Beyond lay a desert of self-sustaining, oxygen-rich planets left over by the Epir expansion, their surfaces scoured and empty and swaddled in impenetrable cloud, and beyond that an icy vastness, each sun as lifeless as the last, a fallow wasteland of stars.

  Berzelius’s Optic, turned now on this no-man’s-land at the edge of its own galaxy, looked in silent awe at the lights in the darkness. The Luminary himself was half-asleep, slumped against the lens, descending into a nightmare of being pulled deep underwater. He twitched, eyelids fluttering, and scrabbled for the eyepiece, his ragged thumbnail catching on an unnoticed dial set behind the lens.

  In that moment, one hundred and twenty-six decrepit listening stations emplaced throughout the Firmament opened their ears, and Berzelius sat rod-straight, his eyes bulging, eardrums squirting blood and rupturing across the ottoman.

  Noise. Such noise as he had never heard before, and would never hear again; crashing waves of unending chaos and activity, the booming of industry, fired on a stellar scale, and the jostling voices of octillions.

  Across the gulf of intergalactic space, the Thunderclouds were alive.

  *

  The Murmurian Domain floated in the Void like a glittering deepwater fish, its drifting school of neighbouring galaxies spread like lamps in the darkness. From a distance, the Thunderclouds’ interior resembled a forest of glowering trees, the blushed, rosy glow of twenty billion stars peeping between their branches.

  Drifting closer, there came the suggestion that the stars themselves were shrouded in a milky light; a landscape of softly lit cloud like a pale, cataract-blinded eye. Closer still and the distorted screams of the galaxy were like a nocturnal jungle, warbling and whistling across the depths.

  A glint, a burnished sickle gleam of light sliding from curved glass, and it became apparent that the many thousands of stars and their atmosphere of cloud were contained. And indeed they were: encapsulated within the Ornaments, ancient crystal baubles teased finely as if between two great fingers, blown by the first generation of life.

  The bauble’s surface resolved; a colossal scratched wall of crystal, pitted and gnarled as if secreted over time, its peaks capped with silver spires that branched at their tips, aglow with light. Inside, following the trail of a minuscule nautiloid ship as it made its spinning journey into one of the great silver veins of the Ornament’s tip and through thick, milky atmosphere, it was possible to see that the glowing chandelier of stars were themselves linked, caught as if in a colossal spider’s web. The very air glittered green and pink and blue, microscopic lights of ships flaring in the mist, and a slender, light-year-long form of a Sun Swallower was visible for a moment, only to be lost again amid the murk.

  The shadowed forests at the Thundercloud’s centre were each a thousand light-years broad, a hundred million stars drifting among their branches like fireflies. Their bowers and viaducts were home to processions of trillions, all making their way in towards a hanging crescent of gnarled plaque, darkly dappled in the shade of the forest and swarming with its own little clusters of decorative suns. The house of the Sarsappus, eternal ruler of the Murmuris.

  The Wizard had, according to the tradition of aeons, decided to leave her filament ship, spending the last hundredth of her life on the great road. Her time was all but spent now, and a wonderful peace had descended over her. The viaduct up to the Sarsappus’s house was so jammed with creatures great and small that she had to stand to sleep, but it was worth it; the promised secret would soon be hers.

  Inside the house, whole weather systems lifted, curled and sank, dark clouds of warm, slanting rain sweeping in across the depths.

  A sea of jostling peoples, of every structure and colour conceivable, from the leviathan to the inchlings, swarmed inside the space. The object of their desires was clear at one end—not because it was visible, it was far too far away fo
r that, but because that was where the suns and crescent worlds had chosen to hover.

  The Chair of Wishes, a coiled piece of furniture two hundred miles from end to end, upon which lounged the fifty-six promagistrates and the Sarsappus himself. To her great disappointment, the Wizard had never seen him and wouldn’t have time to now, the wait lasting a century at best.

  She swam high above the throng, past the decorative hanging macro-galaxy of moon-sized stars and Crescent homes—a honeycomb of interconnected worlds given the honour of inhabiting the Sarsappus’s house for a season before they were moved on—bobbing in the currents, and into the deeper weather that separated the cloisters from the vault. Below, the giant inhabitants of the gone-before court now moved in the past, set aside from reality by their distance, but the Wizard gave them barely a second glance. Pets of all kinds were perched in the cloisters, or free and swimming, nipping playfully at the bright, twinkling dust motes of ascending craft.

  She was the last of the fifty-six to arrive. For ten thousand years they had travelled, collectors of wonderment and knowledge, summoned from the highest echelons of their respective segments to the haunt of the Astrologer, high in the rafters of the court.

  The Wizard ascended, the gleam of the water dazzling her crystal eyes, seeing that they were all there, waiting for her.

  The Astrologer, lurking at the bottom of a steaming pool, was asleep.

  “Wake him,” she said sharply in Reflective. “We’re all here. Let us see what he has to tell us.”

  But he must have heard, for a darkness rose within the pool, glimmering with colour as it ascended.

  The long-armed figure, painted with a craquelure of varnish, stepped mightily out of the pool. The Wizard could see that at its heart was a scraped and dented diamond shape, once probably magenta or some such colour but now faded pink by an aeon of sun exposure. The core, said rather exotically to have been forged in the depths of another Thundercloud many millions of years ago, glinted in the light, winking at them. The Wizard had laughed with all the rest at this spooky, unhinged character, until the Sarsappus had chosen the Astrologer as his favourite.

  “I was dreaming of my brother,” he said without preamble, glancing first at the newest arrival. “Strange. I haven’t thought of him in . . . in an age.”

  She heard him out, thoughts slowing, awaiting an end to opening talk.

  “And what became of him, Astrologer? Your brother?” “He was alive, in another where and when.” He hesitated, lost in thought.

  “We were summoned, Astrologer, if you recall,” the Wizard said. “I have travelled to the end of my life for the secret of your clairvoyance.”

  “I warned you,” the Astrologer said, raising his mighty dripping head. “It is a most unusual method.”

  They looked at him, their shadows stretched long across the pool.

  “Tell me, are you all sure?” the Astrologer asked. “Do you want this? More than anything?”

  “Yes!” they shouted, a scream to wake the dead in the heavens of all the galaxies, laughing together. “Of course we do!”

  He was laughing with them, the universal jabber of safety and friendship. “Good!”

  Excitement, as scarce as astatine, overcame the Wizard, and for an instant she felt as if she herself were drowning in the great pool before them.

  The Astrologer watched them all die, one by one, poisoned by a substance so rare and valuable that it was now, after being administered fifty-six ways ten thousand years ago and travelling all this way with them, extinct. He swept back into his pool and dived.

  At the bottom, he felt their souls pooling around him, drawn to the depths, heavier than the water, heavy as a star.

  When they had joined with him, consumed, he looked down into the darkness, falling asleep once more.

  And he dreamed of the future.

  He dreamed that his brother was—

  —that he was—

  —alive.

  In the darkness at the bottom of the pool, his seventy-four fingers fluttered, clenching into fists.

  His brother was coming, now, this very moment, on his way across the gulf between the Thunderclouds. On his way and looking for him. On his way to find him.

  He dreamed of some small creatures, like the Oseers of his youth, but changed, mostly hairless. They had followed his brother over, and now they were everywhere.

  He dreamed of a battle waged across the viaducts, a battle of trillions. Sun Swallowers flitting between the plaqued lands, feeding in a frenzy. It was all as murky and patchwork as a memory, reflected, like something that must have happened to him a long, long time ago.

  And there was more, so very much more.

  This time he could see so much further.

  EPILOGUE

  MIRROR

  He is home—his real home, on the cove. Lycaste looks up from his clasped fingers; he is sitting at his wobbly kitchen table, its one leg standing just a little too high off the ground, as if all the years have simply melted away. He listens: the sound of his breath, the distant exhalation of breaking surf. He opens his nostrils, drawing in the scent of varnish from the table’s surface, watching dust motes hang still in the whitewashed vaults of the ceiling. Through an open window he can see the orchard and its groves of sculpted trees. Lycaste stares out across his land, listening hard, for the knowledge comes to him as clear as day: he has been brought here in his sleep.

  An unseen hand, felt as a gentle pressure, clasps his shoulder.

  “We need to talk,” whispers Aaron the Long-Life into his ear.

  They walk together down on the wet sand, the surf sweeping regularly over their feet. Lycaste has already noticed, though he towers over the man, how their footfalls mirror one another precisely. He looks at Aaron, who is wearing an outfit he has never seen before, not even among the Amaranthine. A linen collared . . . shirt, he supposed it was called, paired with mustard-yellow trews. He walks barefoot, and his dainty feet look even smaller beside Lycaste’s great crimson toes, and yet for all the world it feels as if they are mirror images of one another, reflected by some medium other than glass, or water, and for the first time in his life, Lycaste does not feel the usual tingling butterflies in the presence of a stranger.

  Because this man is not a stranger; that has long since become clear. He hadn’t even needed to ask where anything was when he’d made the tea.

  “What should we do?” Aaron asks. The question is spoken in the unaffected way someone talks to their reflection, when they know they are alone.

  Lycaste doesn’t know the answer. He can feel, in just the few inches of air that separate them, a vast celestial distance.

  He turns his head to look down at the man; a long, lingering glance that takes in as much as it can, and wonders which of them is the future self, which the past.

  “How is this possible?” he asks, still watching those colourless eyes. “Maneker told me that you were—”

  Aaron is already nodding. “I asked myself the same question.” He glances up to meet Lycaste’s eye. “But we are both of us machine, from a certain perspective. We died so long ago that our soul has split in two.”

  Lycaste glances out to the green sea, feeling Aaron’s renewed attention on him.

  “Tell me more about your friend . . . Percy, is it? I’d like very much to know more about him.”

  GLOSSARY

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Aaron the Long-Life

  Machine soul, now inhabiting the corpse of a long-dead Epir pilot

  Ajowan

  Jalan Melius, bounty hunter

  Alfieri, Fridrik

  Amaranthine, Satrap of Virginis

  Amure

  Melius, Westerling prince

  Andolp, Count Murim

  Vulgar, Drolgins landowner

  Arabis/the Babbo

  Melius, daughter of Pentas and Callistemon, future queen of the Firstling Hegemony

  Berphio

  Vulgar, mayor of Gulpmouth

&n
bsp; Biancardi

  Amaranthine Emperor of Decadence, ruled from 10,214 AD (deceased)

  Billyup

  Awger, opportunistic creature who happens upon Arabis and steals her

  Borlo

  Vulgar, one of the four kings of Filgurbirund

  Calamus

  Jalan Melius, bounty hunter

  Callistemon

  Melius, Secondling Plenipotentiary and Arabis’s father (deceased)

  Calvine

  Amaranthine, whisperer of the seas of Cancri

  Champion Tomothus

  Vulgar, knight of Drolgins

  Charoen

  Amaranthine, assistant to Nathaniel of the Eye

  Corphuso Trohilat

  Vulgar, Inventor of the Shell

  Cunctus

  Melius, infamous Firstling king of the Old World and prisoner in the Thrasm, head of the Investiture-renowned Cunctite gang

  Daniell Bulstrode

  Human, retainer to Aaron the Long-Life during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century (deceased)

  Drazlo

  Lacaille, crewman of the Wilemo Maril

  Elise

  Amaranthine, Satrap of Port Elsbet, member of the Devout

  Eoziel XI