by D Des Anges
For the last time Baxter, Hoppenstedt, Feldman, and John, at the changing of a shift, had contrived to steal an illicit broadcast from the shore, they had been disappointed to find that Hugo Waldren had been ‘temporarily replaced due to ill health’ by some lesser Celebrated whose forfeits for direct satire were disappointing and whose satires were lacklustre.
Before John could make a non-committal noise of answer (he didn’t think, one way or the other, on Hugo Waldren’s return to What’s My Purpose?) the door to the hut opened abruptly and Hoppenstedt sat up straight like a naughty schoolboy before he so much as saw who had opened it.
His response was the sensible one: John’s guts froze in place as Super Rachelsson put his pointy, officious face into the room, his hair so thickly greased that it only lifted in the wind instead of blowing about, and said, “Lancaster, a moment, if you please.”
Super Rachelsson had always had a voice that felt like chewing chalk tablets, but to hear him make a request for time did more than set John’s teeth on edge; it loosened his bowels and speeded his heart. He wiped his palms on the legs of his canvas suit, nodded to Hoppenstedt, and rose.
Lancaster's legs were steady as he stood. He could think of nothing, nothing they would know of, that warranted any form of discipline. He followed meekly as a large man can through the open-roofed oil-scented corridors between Low Monitors and Supervision, with his mind ticking.
Super Rachelsson's room was a better-constructed hut, with double-thickness walls, but a hut all the same. There was a framed painting of a croft and the metal dust and mechanical lubricant which pervaded the whole rig had been meticulously scraped away. The effect was spoiled somewhat by the rows of fresh tube valves sitting like a birds' egg collection in soft paper on the table; however much Super Rachelsson might wish he were in the service of the Prefects, he still had to run an oil rig.
All these petty, familiar observances were punctured by the presence of an Amtsperson in the centre of the room in a perfect woollen garb, and the colour and cut not of an Albion-of-the-Britons Amtsperson but the far more important Albion-of-the-Danes. It was not true that the more immaculate the clothing the greater the power, but to John's knowledge the aphorism held true at least among the lore, the Magisters, and the better classes of whore.
Beside this groomed and smooth figure, the notorious-fussy-and-clean Super Rachelsson might have been a Drill Bit Tender or the unfortunate who sluiced the head.
The Amtsperson stood as still as a rock on the creaking rig, his hands behind his back. John wondered why no one had commented on the arrival of a Mitarbeitertransport and how he had survived the crossing in such polished form; his skin was smooth, almost glassy, calling inexorably to mind the word ‘chitinous’.
Them that spend their whole life hunting a thing come to resemble it, John thought, picturing millions of feet, and night terrors.
There could be no evidence, he thought, keeping his mouth shut. Even if someone had reported his little paper votive, it meant nothing and said nothing, and it was not as if other men had not asked similar sculpture. It was of no matter.
“This is Lancaster,” Super Rachelsson said, with a kind of awed self-importance.
They had no proof of anything, John thought firmly. He was cautious to the point of paranoia. They had nothing.
“John Lancaster,” said the Albion-of-the-Danes Secure Guardian, in a jerky, slow and hoarse voice, with the diction of one who has learned the tongue later in life than childhood, but no accent, “you are to be taken for questions relating to matters of Albion's security.”
“Er,” said John, feeling there wasn't a lot more to be said.
Super Rachelsson was staring at him with the acute disgust he might afford to puke he'd just stepped into without shoes.
“You do not deny your treachery?” the Amtsperson asked in a flat, hoarse voice. A southern voice, perhaps, although not notably so; they had the temerity to call themselves Standard Accents even after the Seat of Albion and the Witegamot was moved back to York.
“Treachery?” John echoed. This might be probing, it might just be confirmation. He could almost curse El Alacrán for making him so paranoid. No, not… paranoid. Aware. While everyone else was wilfully blind to the hypocrisy and dangers he, here, saw both sides of the battle with increasing cynicism. “What?” John added, for the Amtsperson had not answered and only stared at him with eyes that seemed to have no end.
Of course, John thought, his face as blank and flat as the Amtsperson’s, Secure Guardians were hardly bound by renegade empiricism. They didn't require proof, only suspicion, and John had history. He was of the hospice, no matter how long he had been signed out, and they would know that. It was enough for suspicion to fall upon him, as it had always been.
The scent of his own singed flesh came to him like an old phantom, and John held his back very straight, so as not to shiver before one who would judge it a further sign of his guilt.
“He’s always been very quiet,” Super Rachelsson said, eager to compound John’s crimes and his own cooperation, even at the cost of a trained set of hands. “Quiet and withdrawn.”
And if I were a spy, thought John, who, unlike Super Rachelsson, had made the acquaintance of one, I would be affable and garrulous and fail to draw such attention to myself.
The Amtsperson turned a stare that had no bottom to its depths onto Super Rachelsson, and said nothing: the rig controller quailed from it, his bluster shrivelling like flowers in a late frost.
“You will leave now,” said the Amtsperson, turning his gaze back to John, who stood before it as he had stood before his treatments and before gales: as a shell, unoccupied, hardly conscious of the danger. It was impossible to imagine this man returning home to a wife, to children, whether he cossetted them or beat them. His hairless face existed only in the moment, darkness trapped behind it like water behind a dam –
– John grappled to quell the rising horrors, and told himself it was not night now.
Super Rachelsson opened the door himself, admitting the wind as if it had been eavesdropping. It blew in John’s eyes, closing them, and it tore at his cheeks, reddening them.
News of Super Rachelsson’s retrieval of John from Low Monitoring had spread: as John walked ahead of the Amtsperson as if to his execution already, several oilmen had found reasons to be nearby, and they watched him with the open curiosity of children. There were no catcalls – even the swooping gulls circling above were too far for their mocking cries to carry to him – or waves, or jeers. They watched him in front of the Amtsperson in bewildered silence, and the wind tore at them as at him.
By evening rations the rumours would start, he knew: he was always quiet. He was sure no one, not Baxter, no, had seen how he stiffened at the prospect of interrogation broadcasts, how pale he grew, but they would whisper: he was always so quiet.
When he reached the ladder, John hesitated, and for a moment in the wind and the roar of machines he thought he heard the Amtsperson hiss with frustration at the delay.
The climb down was calm; the Winterzeitwinde almost stilled to a mere vicious breeze, the other rig supports acting as shields against its force, and though his feet slipped once or twice – though he had no desire to reach the floor – John came to the end of the ladder faster than he ever had.
He looked up, expecting to see the Amtsperson – a man with little experience of such awkward footholds – far above him, but the Amtsperson was just above his head, moving with unusual ease and elbow positions which transgressed into the weird. John again felt the surge of unease, the notion that there were cracks in the man's facade, that he contained only darkness, and was ashamed that he had returned to his madness before the interrogation had even begun.
After thinking of the interrogation he was so occupied with the sounds, with the memories of his treatments at the hospice (the searing pain, the smell, the helplessness), that for a moment he did not notice that there was no Mitarbeitertransport.
Ra
ther, bobbing beside the foot, there was a black, thick-hulled craft that must be iron all through. It was smaller than a Mitarbeitertransport, and much narrower. By John's estimation it might just fit someone of El Alacrán's size (fourteen feet) if he kept very still, and was uncomfortably cramped all the time.
There was nowhere so effective for an arrest than this, John thought, so overwhelmed by conflicting sensation that he felt almost calm in the centre of this maelstrom. He could affect no escape attempt, and such an attempt was so obviously futile that the Amtsperson would not be troubled with John being fool enough to make one.
He must be arrested or drowned, and he knew if he tried to drown, he would still be arrested.
This time the frustrated hiss was loud over the sound of the sea, as the Amtsperson tried to steady the small craft with a surprisingly clumsy hand. It sounded very like one of El Alacrán's arthropod oaths, the one he usually uttered on finding himself too exhausted to properly work the handle of John's flat door.
He had heard nothing, either, of Secure Guardians having their own seacraft, and confusion slipped a tendril into the roiling broth of John’s fear.
“Get in boat,” said the Amtsperson, his hoarse voice becoming guttural with the words.
John put first one foot, then the other, into the black belly of the craft. There was no bench, so he crouched uncomfortably on the floor in the puddles of seawater that had splashed in with the rocking of the craft, and wondered where the Amtsperson would sit and how he had kept so clean if this was his transport.
The Amtsperson climbed into the boat and hunched his back in an unnatural shape: panic clawed urgently at the back of John's throat.
The Amtsperson, stiff-elbowed and blank-faced, cast off. John watched the man's surprisingly clumsy fingers with mounting unease. Being arrested was one thing, being kept in the custody of such an uncanny individual verged on another.
The vessel, large enough to crouch in but no bigger, was not their way across the sea: too much open water lay between the rig and the land, but John, hunched in the odd-smelling well where there should have been at least benchmarks, could see no other vessels.
The Amtsperson remained standing as they moved slowly from the lee of the rig and out into what turned out to be, at sea level, a brisk breeze.
The boat smelled strange, not the usual stink of diesel, mechanical lubricant, coal, and smoke at all; John saw that, along with no engine house, no boiler, and no mast, it contained not even oars or oarlocks. He wondered if they would indeed drift until retrieved by some larger covert craft hiding beyond the horizon, but it seemed impractical for such a feared agency to operate this way.
“Too tight,” the Amtsperson muttered.
It was not the words but the voice that caused John to jerk in his squat and peer at their speaker. As paint flaked to reveal rust underneath so the Amtsperson’s voice lost a shred of normality and beneath it lay a pupating mass of another language, all clicks and hisses, seeping through the Albiontongue, staining it with the ever-alien noises.
There was a creak of joints, as distinct from the creak of vessel-timbers on the wave as a cry would be (and this single-piece hull should not creak at all), and John, though possessed of no official Precognition Talent as far as testing had gone, felt moved to hold his breath.
“Down,” the Amtsperson instructed, as the craft drifted.
John stared uncomprehending, a transparent wyrm, an ugly nematode of doubt burrowing in his mind.
“Head down or lose head,” said the Amtsperson, half-hiss and half-word.
The way he saw it, John had few other options anyway. To demand his compliance was unnecessary: any violent motion would surely capsize the vessel, and like most Albionmen, John had never been able to swim more than paddling.
He lowered his head, keeping his eyes on the Amtsperson.
There was sickening wet noise and with vegetable slowness the skin of the Amtsperson began to peel away in small patches, growing in size, as if invisible fingernails were scratching at them. They seemed to dry and grow transparent as they came away, disintegrating like clear ashes on the ocean winds.
Not, then, real skin as a man might wear it but a cunning substitute, an alien artifice which John had known to disintegrate before. It was like the clear vitreous of a frog's spawn, given other hue, with as little weight as the air.
The clothing, however, must be tailored from cloth, and it split with a crack and a tear, buttons flying into the bottom of the vessel. They hit John on the forearm, bursting out into the water like an exploding seedpod. The Amtsperson swore, another arthropod hiss, presumably at the waste of such a disguise: El Alacrán had always removed his before unFolding.
He had been prepared by the clicks, but this inelegant transformation still overwhelmed him with its strangeness. Like the maggot that becomes a fly, the face and body of the Amtsperson had sloughed away their humanity to reveal an arthropod centipedal and huge. It was burdened with shimmering nut-brown carapace, antennae waving and legs free to unfurl like the cruel claws of a hunting cat.
John had no time to remark upon the situation: the centipede knocked several nubbins on the vessel's interior and with a clank of machinery that could not have fit into the tiny space, something like a scaly roof of plates began to build itself around and over them both.
In clangs and clicks more abrupt than the speech of aethropede, a mechanical carapace unfolded upwards around the vessel from its walls, each plate supporting itself in space as the next slid over it from seeming nowhere to lock into place.
The light within grew vague and more dim and the smell of what he now knew must be orgone was soon so overpowering in the rocking, stuffy space that John felt moved to cover his nose and mouth with his hand. It did little good, augmenting the stench with the panoply of industrial reeks from the deep lines of his palm, and his head grew lighter.
The darkness was at last total: not a chink of light illuminated his predicament and indeed it was only motion and common sense that informed John he was still on the sea, and still accompanied by the vast centipede.
And though he knew it was foolish, the thought of being alone in a dark enclosed space with its unseen limbs made all his hair rise on end. There was little space within the craft and he knew that if the many limbs of his captor were not touching him, it was only by a matter of half-inches.
Do not struggle, the centipede clicked, as though John would have dared move a muscle, and somewhere in the darkness it shifted.
The craft began to tip, and tip, and tipped along its length. It dipped lower at the end behind John's back, sinking below the level of the water, sinking faster and faster in a steep-nosed dive.
Fear of drowning had always been much lower on John’s list of terrors than discovery or a return to the hospital, but now it clawed its way to the fore and held him rapt and wracked in a kind of terrified survival paralysis.
He tried to reason with himself: centipedes, like all arthropods he knew of, needed air just like men, and this one would not sacrifice itself for his convoluted execution when it could as easily have decapitated him on the surface.
It did him little good; his throat still seemed to close over as the waters surely were above his head.
Chapter 5
The day before the proclamation of the captured beetle, Hana al-Fihri al Auda Bedu Ird began preparations for the University Gala-Fest, a process which required her to either expose the house birds to the cold outside the window or risk the cheeping dependents scattering seed over her best. The birds did not seem distraught by the move, though they ruffled their feathers at the wind and immediately began chirping at the hanging cages on the next windowsill across.
She pulled the window closed, leaving the six bickering finches to continue their mindless battle behind the glass, and opened the chest beside her bed. Albionwomen were mad for small birds: Hana privately thought them merely mad without qualifier. In Fihriana the family kept cats, which kept out vermin; in Albion
cats were vermin, and mustelids ran through homes chasing mice and rats. It was unsanitary and unbalanced, but to question it would be impolite.
Hana lifted out a blue silk shift embroidered with the endless flight patterns of white egrets, and each by one lifted out the accompanying paraphernalia of scarves (several, blue, embroidered), belts (several, light, only the uppermost jewelled), underskirts, and under-trousers. She examined her selection slowly for blemishes, water damage, or tears.
The key to the guests of the various Deans was to demonstrate an interest but never an expertise. They preferred an educated audience to an educated orator, and in her experience reacted most favourably to ocean colours, which both soothed their hurt feelings (at these gatherings there were always hurt feelings, as they tried to struggle upward on the backs of each other, like rats escaping a pit) and pushed down her perceived age. A little flirtation could be employed as the Magisters, keepers of commerce and trade, and Men of Good Standing filled their bellies with distilled wines and grew red-faced and belligerent: they appreciated the illusion that they were powerful, both in attraction and in influence. Middle-men always did.
Hana laid her finery on the bed, smoothed away deformities with the back of her hand (the fore was too certain to damage the fabric) and took from the chest a foggy glass jar with a screw top. She unscrewed it, and was at once enveloped in a cloud of heavy scent, rising from the jar like steam from the flanks of a horse on a cold morning. She tilted the jar and shook out a modest quantity of dried white flowers, sprinkling their fragile, crisp bodies across her clothes.
Satisfied by their quantity and potency, Hana replaced the jar and retrieved a tarnished silver pot, its top studded with what her neighbours would have been very surprised to learn were Nubian rubies. This contained a small quantity of an orange waxen mixture, which gave off the same intoxicating scent as the white blossoms, and Hana rubbed a thin film of it onto the skin behind each ear.
