Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  Parleon nodded. Naturally he remembered. They had been scrawny fools from Rhum who had jumped ship when it docked at Rompez. The two of them were both thinned by their three-day run-about, both blackened with dirt. They had been hung upside down by their feet over a wall, four hundred yards from the main house. Parleon had handled it personally; tying the sobbing men’s feet together and looping the rope round; draping it over the wall and having two underbutlers haul the rope on the far side so that the bodies were drawn up the face of the brickwork. As they hung that way, arms free to flop and wave, their matted hair hanging in strands, the militia had lined up and shot them. Two volleys of bullets, and afterwards the sound of somebody pissing noisily on the far side of the wall: except that it wasn’t piss, as Parleon discovered coming round to the front, but blood, tumbling in a strong stream from a wound in one man’s neck. They were young men, very young. Boys probably. They had been fools. Their photographs had been taken, dead and upside down, for publication in one of the military newsbooks. Deterrence an important part of the function of news-reporting in the media.

  ‘Have any balloon-boats docked today?’ Cleonicles asked.

  ‘No sir. There’s a regular postal boat coming in this evening. But no boats today.’

  ‘Admetus would have called if any of his servants had absconded,’ Cleonicles said, thoughtfully. Admetus owned the estate on the far side of the Speckled Mountains. ‘This is a puzzle. Still, let’s get some militia over here, and then we can investigate. If it’s deserters, we’ll have them.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Cleonicles’ eyes were gleaming now; there was a smile on his face. The two of them hurried back towards the house together, the old man marking the grass at regular two-stride intervals with his stick.

  And now events were moving swiftly to their inevitable conclusion. This was Cleonicles’ very last hour alive, his last hour of breathing and seeing the sunlight. He left the butler at the front door, and made his own way in to the downstairs study. Something to do! Calling through on the telephone immediately, connected to the militia base at Rompez in moments. Cleonicles, here, Captain. Dangerous men, disreputable types, hanging about. That’s right, Captain. If my people say ‘disreputable’, then you can be sure there won’t be an innocent explanation for their being here. That’s excellent, Captain; I’ll expect your men within the hour.

  Cleonicles came out of the study, strangely energised. A chase! A search! That would take a shapeless, unsatisfactory sort of day and give it purpose! He would drive out with the militia and track the vermin down. Excellent!

  The hall was brighter than it had been before, and it took him a moment to work out why. Both leaves of the front door had been opened wide. Usually only one of the two large doors was opened. Why were they both open?

  The sun printed a clean-cut rectangle of brightness on the marble, and Cleonicles stepped into this bright space. A lumpy draught excluder was lain neatly against the bottom of the left-hand door. Odd, in this hot weather, to lay out a draught excluder. And stepping closer, Cleonicles could see that it wasn’t a draught excluder, but rather a stretched-out body, its arms up over its face as if shy, the fingers tangled together. He barely had time to register this.

  It was his butler, dead and dragged halfway through the doorway.

  ‘Parleon?’ Cleonicles barked, in a cross voice.

  Steps behind him.

  He turned, although not rapidly – he was an old man, after all. He did not spin sharply about. He pulled himself round with his stick, using its leverage against the marble floor to give him torque, ploc and turn, ploc and turn, and there were the two strangers coming across the hallway towards him. They were, he saw, dressed in raggedy-fringed coats marked brown and black by dirt. Their feet were naked, and so blackened with grime that they looked as though they had been painted. The thought started to form in his head that they would, surely, be leaving ugly footmarks on his beautifully polished marble; but that thought was chased away by a more adrenalised realisation. These two tramps, these two nobodies, were looking him straight in the eye! One had a sort of hat on his head, as close-fitting as an acorn’s cap on an acorn; the other was bareheaded, his hair cut very short, a crescent scar on his forehead. This man, the closer of the two, raised his arm, straight out, elbow locked, like a shy person ill-trained in social graces offering to shake hands. There was a beautiful silver ornament in his hand, something polished and gleaming, the last sort of thing you would expect two such down-at-heels to own. Had they stolen it? Something valuable from Cleonicles’ front room – and now, caught, guilty, was this man offering it back to him with his outstretched arm? No, he wasn’t offering anything. It was not an ornament. The last thing Cleonicles deduced with his conscious science mind was that this object was a gun, a polished slot-revolver, army-issue. He looked from the gun to the face of the man just in time to see him screw his eyes shut. Like (the thought popping into his head with lunatic irrelevance) a man opening a bottle of champagne, worried that the cork might fly off into his face.

  There was a fanburst of smoke and a loud smashing noise. Cleonicles’ chest clenched with pain, as if a sword had been instantly sheathed between his ribs. All his breath went out of him. He felt as if he had been punched in the torso, very hard, and the world wobbled and swung around him. A heart attack would have felt like this, perhaps; the explosive agonising pressure of it right in the middle of his chest. And silence. The detonation had numbed his hearing, possibly, or else the fall was a kind of swoon, because the world was rushing away from him now, down a long tunnel, the edges of his sight grey and out-of-focus, and even the sensation of pain from his damaged chest was oddly muffled, detuned, so that the bang on the back of his head as it collided with the marble floor was nothing more than a tap; and through the wrong end of his eye’s telescope Cleonicles saw the face of his assassin, peering down at him with an expression it was possible to read as concern. The pain was still there, somewhere, disassociated from his chest now, flowing up and down his bones. And worse than that was the swelling sense of breathlessness, the need, like the urgent need to piss on a very full bladder, the need to draw in a breath of air. Yet he didn’t draw any air into his lungs. He might as well have been breathing the vacuum which he had spent so much of his life studying. And the throbbing of the pain was removing itself now, slipping away, draining out of him, with something (the assassin’s foot, although there was no way Cleonicles could have known it) levering him over onto his side, and then onto his front, face splashing into a puddle of something wet spread on the marble. But even those sensations, of warm wetness, of cold hardness, were becoming indistinct, and the last cotton-woolly patches of Cleonicles’ consciousness dissolved into nothingness, moments before the second bullet impacted with and penetrated the back of his head.

  [fourth leaf]

  The six planets and three moons of the System had been inhabited for over four hundred years. The community of mankind had advanced a great way in those years. All the various families and peoples of the System derived from the one world of Kaspian, the originary world: ka means ‘earth’ in one early idiolect. The -spia termination is variously interpreted; the school of the linguist and historian Hierocles argue that it means ‘of the Goddess’, and relates it to an early religious cult. On the other hand, the Comparative Languages Scholar Trygaea links it to other words from early vocabularies including sca and spoh, both of which mean ‘roundness’. Trygaea, therefore, dates the suffix from the earliest realisation that the world was not flat as common sense dictated, but actually a globe.

  The older monarchy on Kaspian, under the progressive rule of King Morza, circumnavigated this globe, ships of trade and conquest fanning out over the whole bellied expanse of it. His grandson, also called Morza, presided over an empire consisting of most of the world, and his child Queen Abeth sponsored the first Bird Flight Prize, for any scientist-inventor in all her realms who could create a machine to mimic birds and fly through the air.
Such a leap! From crawling through the crumpled, horizon-hugging seas in servant-powered paddle-propeller boats to flight in less than a century! Once the Asimov brothers had theorised the fixed wing, everything else followed. The propellers that pushed ships over the sea, turned by sweat-shiny servants, could be adapted to haul craft through the air. The coal-dust engine was reworked, made more efficient, more powerful, smaller, and then fitted to ‘air propellers’ (petrol engines were another hundred years away). Rigid wings fixed crossways gave lift when pushed through the air with enough velocity. Suddenly man was up, flying. Queen Abeth conceded the prize to the brothers Asimov, although one died of a tumour between this announcement and the prize being received, and the remaining brother refused to take the half of the amount he was offered, insisting that the whole sum be his. In the end he got nothing and died bitter. But this is a footnote to history. The important thing is that men now owned the skies.

  Perhaps it is surprising that it took nearly fifty years before an adventurous soul flew high enough to realise that Kaspian’s moon was a relatively easy flight away. But then again, perhaps not: the peoples of the System have always been conservative. They trust to the time-endowed structures that guarantee the smooth running of things. Even so profound a change to culture as the Colonisation Revolution (history books call it by this slightly fanciful name) – even this had surprisingly little impact on the polished surface of genteel life. Soon enough explorers charted first the moon, and then the nearby worlds of Berthing (sunward) and Enting (in the opposite direction); but still life went through its well-oiled motions at home as if the travellers’ tales reported in newsbooks were fiction rather than fact. Families intercommunicated; there were parties, balls, hunting and fishing; there were reading groups, scientific discussion senates, giving and taking in marriage. By the time the explorers had reached out more adventurously to the comparative heat of fern-covered Aelop (not yet known as the Mudworld), or out to the relative chill of Rhum and Bohemia (where the frost that coated each blade of glass was as fine as etched glass and silky to the touch) – by the time explorers had mapped and flagged the remaining worlds and pushed to the edge of the envelope of air encompassing all the System – only by this time were the first actual settlers moving to Enting and Berthing. Planes were joined in the sky by the ample profiles of balloon-boats, larger and larger as time went on, to ferry people and their servants, livestock, possessions. Traffic between the worlds became something of a craze, albeit one that still existed only on the margins of polite society. Society was slow to accept technological novelty, but once the technology became familiar to well-bred people, once its use was established, it was developed and spread widely with alacrity.

  Four thousand two hundred miles to the moon; fourteen thousand miles from Kaspian to Enting; three hundred and seventy thousand miles from Aelop to chilly Bohemia – a year’s grand tour could take you to every world. And each world was a sight to see, with its own fauna and flora. Scientists postulated that airborne bacteria and microbes, and even some hardy insect-eggs and other forms of life, had disseminated themselves throughout the System. But each planet’s ecology had developed along unique lines. The great forests of Enting, for instance, had evolved many thousands of varieties of insects, but relatively few higher animals: some wood-rats, birds, fish, tree-pigs and, of course, bears. But on Bohemia it was the other way around. Few breeds of insects could flourish in the chill there, but a great many breeds of mammals were indigenous.

  The transition from one-world to six-world Realm happened with an extraordinary smoothness. Indeed, the sixty years or so that elapsed between the first settlers arriving on the Kaspian moon and the ratification of the Protocols of Principality as governing fully six inhabited and commissioned worlds with three attendant inhabited moons saw only two events that could in any manner be described as ‘disruptions’. The first of these was the unpleasantness that occurred on the Southern Continent of Bohemia, when a population of masterless and vagrant servants attempted to set up a secessionist stateling, and it proved necessary to apply military force. But in actuality the whole of this campaign lasted no more than three months, with another year or so for mopping up stragglers and resistance in the mountainous territory around the frozen high-altitude lake of Gauldas. Moreover, the greater proportion of casualties was on the side of the secessionists. Reputable historians deal with the whole sorry affair in a few sentences, and pass on to more important subjects.

  The second, and far more significant ‘event’ marking the transition from one world to six was not, in fact, an event at all, but rather a smooth and largely painless transition from one manner of constitution to another. One of the things that made it painless was the fact that the ruling Dynasty had ruled the world of Kaspian for less than a century before humanity moved up into the sky. So, without bloodshed or war, the six worlds evolved six separate characters, distinct cultures, and their own local centres of authority – necessarily so, of course. The notion that they were all centrally ruled from Kaspian was little more than a polite fiction, although a fiction all parties piously followed. Fact, however, presented itself as five Princes, not necessarily of the Royal Blood Direct (although, of course, all of good breeding), declaring nominal affiliation to the monarch on Kaspian but actually ruling their various worlds after their own pleasure. From this it was a short step to the monarchy of the original world itself coming to refer to itself as a ‘kingdom’ and adopting the title ‘Prince’ (or, as it might rarely be, ‘Princess’) of Kaspian. So for a while six Princes governed as one, and the paraphernalia of joint rule – royal council, a senate, stewards beneath them to undertake the less ceremonial aspects of rule – came into being, almost of its own accord. Three hundred years of peaceful, slow growth testified to the stability of this System, and time’s slow mutations continued until we arrive at the constitutional situation now prevailing. Of the six Princes only one remains, and the Stewards (who had been de facto rulers for some time) are responsible directly to him. And the source of the greatest pride for Polystom, as he grew up and was educated in the glorious history of his System, was that ‘rule’ involved so little actuality. The machine ran so smoothly, he was taught, so evenly, so perfectly harmonious was the social sculpture that ‘governance’ could be enacted with the lightest and most occasional hands upon the tiller.

  The single focus of social disturbance, in these latter days, was the Mudworld. The war there had begun before Polystom’s birth. The fern-covered hills and blue-green marshy lowlands of Aelop were almost entirely gone by the time he reached maturity.

  There was a mysterious aspect to the war. Polystom had realised, growing up, that it was one of the things polite conversation abhorred. The newsbooks, weekly or monthly, were full of reports from the fighting, of course: so much so that the names of the geographical features of the place (the Western Mire, bordered by the Lesser and Greater Broken Headlands, the Dash, Slops) acquired the familiarity of famous writers or operatic singers. People mentioned it, but nobody discussed it, nobody really talked about it. Questions from the boyish Polystom would be blocked with a polite ‘and what an inquisitive little thing he is!’ His father would look pained if pressed on this issue; his co-father would be more direct and straight out rebuke him for asking something so indelicate. Even his uncle Cleonicles was strangely reticent – strangely for him, because more usually he delighted in explanations and discussion. Polystom, not one to persevere at anything too disagreeable, soon gave up the issue. There were many things it was not possible to discuss.

  Once the little planet had been called Aelop: a steamy, marshy little world whose aboriginal life had been ferns and grasses, a large family of fat, semiaquatic cow-like beasts and innumerable insects. It had been settled; the cows had been farmed; peat had been dug out for its rich deposits and as fuel; estates had been established. Dwellers in the outer planets, where the air was cool in summer and frosty in winter, took to holidaying on Aelop, for the novelty of it. P
leasure palaces had been built overlooking the small seas of the place. That was the past. Now the whole geography of the place had been transformed by war. At some stage, clearly, things had changed. Polystom assumed, without really thinking about it, that the servants had behaved badly in some way. The proper population of Aelop had presumably been small; few people of breeding could possibly enjoy such heat all year round. But a large population of servants must have been required, tending the swamp cows, digging, as well as serving their masters. Maybe this imbalance had been dangerous. But Polystom didn’t pursue the line. If it had been an ‘insurrection’, it was beyond deduction why it had gone on so long. Any insurrection would be put down in months as a matter of course. Perhaps it was something else, although what else eluded him. All he knew was that many men flew to that world to fight there; that many glorious reputations for bravery and strength were made there; and that some died.

  Polystom’s first reaction upon hearing of Cleonicles’ death was a calm one. ‘Dead,’ he had repeated, and then turned his whole body through ninety degrees, facing himself deliberately away from the servant who had brought him the news. ‘Dead.’ As if saying the word would act as the open-sesame for his emotions.

  Nothing. There was a space where his reaction should have been, almost as if marked out in his mind, like a chalk sketch on a wall made by an artist before he filled in the design with colour and shading. But nothing more.

  ‘Murdered,’ said the servant. ‘Assassinated. It was three men, they say. Shot him with a firearm.’

  ‘Dead,’ said Polystom a third time, still trying the word on for size.

  ‘They killed his butler too. But they didn’t kill anybody else on the estate. The militia is all over the moon, now, of course. Extra troops have been sent from Kaspian, they say.’