Bloodsong

by Melvin Burgess

  Then it started breathing.

  I was so excited. I thought, Waaaa-ha! Actually it wasn’t obvious at first. Each breath took about ten minutes. You start off thinking it’s just a wind or something. But there it was, in and out, in and out—and you know what that meant? That meant it was alive. Machines don’t breathe.

  Wow! Ha? An organism that big, it takes ten minutes to breathe in? What was that about? There were all sorts of theories going around. People remembered Fafnir. Perhaps he had escaped Sigurd after all and he was coming back up, bigger and more dangerous than ever. But I still wasn’t convinced. It was so big. And metal growth—nothing alive grows metal. I reckoned it had to have inorganic origins. So we did tests and you know what? It wasn’t breathing at all. The gases were all wrong. It was oxygen going in but it wasn’t carbon dioxide going out. It was sulphur, ammonia, carbon monoxide, that sort of thing. Industrial waste, see? So it had developed from an inorganic base all right. It was just using the same trick as living animals to get oxygen in and waste out of a closed system.

  So—we had a closed inorganic system, underground, utilizing metal growth and imitating organic mechanics. That was when I started thinking about Crayley.

  You’ll have heard about Crayley—the factory city. Great idea—automate all your industry, set it up underground, and then just let it go. And it worked, for a long time it worked really well. It was the primitive mechano-genetic technology that bolloxed it in the end. Once genetic technology really got going, it was obsolete. No one ever worked out how to close it down, so when it was out of date, they just let it go. Think of it—haa! Hoo hoo! Hectares of rogue factory roving about underground. Everyone assumed it would just grind itself to a halt, but there were some theorists who thought that it could just about hang on down there, rambling about underground, surviving off ancient landfill sites, hydrogen and oxygen extraction from water, low-grade organic deposits, that sort of thing.

  Pickings were obviously pretty slim down there, so if it was Crayley, it had come to the surface for a very good reason—to feed. And it fed on an industrial scale. Ha! It could eat the whole fucking nation, man. That thing needed terminating for sure. And there was only one buddy who could do that—heh? Yeah, old Sigurd. Bring on the heroes, eh?

  But then the priests starting dredging up those old stories about Odin’s daughter. You know the one—how the city kidnapped her, carried her off underground years ago? They’ve been doing the rounds for years. Or she did something to displease him and he locked her down there until someone could come along clever enough to rescue her? Various versions. Yeah, well, listen—I’m a scientist but even I know this much: Stories and destinies, sometimes they’re one and the same thing. That’s the godworld. It could be true. So who was there you know fit to be Odin’s son-in-law? Yeah! But you see, Sigurd was already married.

  . . . and I said, “You?”

  “You can’t do it,” said Gudrun. It came out all wrong. Like, poor old Gunar, what are you on about?

  “Why not?” he said.

  “Because . . . because you’re too important, Gunar,” she said, and gave him a slightly crooked smile.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s not your sort of thing, though, is it?”

  It didn’t make sense. I had words on my lips—“Who do you think you are, Gunar?” But how could I say that, as if I had the only right to great deeds?

  “It isn’t your thing,” repeated Gudrun.

  “Don’t know if it’s my sort of thing or not, how would I, I n-never had a chance to try,” he told her.

  Gudrun scowled at him. “But this is . . .”

  “D-dangerous,” said Gunar, half smiling.

  “Suicide.”

  “For me, you mean.”

  “For anyone! Anyone except Sigurd.” She glanced over at me.

  “I have the equipment,” I said. “My skin. You know?”

  “We have Fafnir’s skin, I could use that.” Gunar leaned forwards and looked at me intently. “I want this,” he said. “Listen. D-done my stint. Worked hard all these years. Long hours. It’s my turn. W-want to have an adventure.”

  “Adventures aren’t what you think,” I told him.

  “Admin is,” he said. “Admin’s always what you think. That’s the trouble.”

  “Death or glory, Gunar?” teased Gudrun.

  “Death or glory. Yes,” he replied. She looked shocked. They both looked at me. I licked my lips. It was his life, he could lose it if he wanted, none of us could stop him. But this monster under the ground, the girl if she existed . . . these things were for me. That’s why I’m here. In a sense, that’s why they’re there too.

  “How can it be yours when you have Gudrun?” asked Gunar, as if he knew what I was thinking.

  “Straight to the point.” I smiled, but I was blushing.

  Gudrun was looking at me, but I found it hard to meet her eye because—well. Life doesn’t just happen, it’s designed this way. This had my name all over it. There was a girl. What did that mean?

  “I w-want this,” said Gunar again.

  “Is it for you?” I asked. “Do you know? Do you have a sense of it?”

  “I don’t know until I try.”

  “If you don’t know . . . ,” I began.

  “If you don’t know, it ain’t yours,” said Gunar for me, and he smiled. “I don’t care, Sigurd. It’s my turn, that’s all I know. It’s my turn,” he repeated, as if that explained it all.

  He was my friend. He was my brother. What else could I do?

  • • •

  Gunar’s Big Adventure, Hogni called it. They all teased him about it, but underneath they were scared. Gunar was a good man with many talents, but his gifts sat uneasily with him. He was aware himself that there was something selfish about all this. He had so much. Why was it never enough?

  All his life, Gunar had been in preparation, but right at the last moment Sigurd had stepped in and almost overnight given the nation the wealth the Niberlins would have taken lifetimes to build up. Gunar was king only in name, Sigurd was the real power, everyone knew it. As he’d said himself, Gunar was in admin. But inside him there was the sense of something else, something exciting and dangerous, waiting its time. Now was that time, but whether it was his fate to succeed or to fail he did not know.

  They set off on the journey all together, Gudrun and Sigurd, Hogni and his partner, Tybolt, and Gunar and Grimhild. It had been a long time since the Niberlins had all traveled together like this. It had been too dangerous, a single assassination attempt could wipe out the whole pack. Now ordinary things were becoming possible again. It was a show of solidarity between governed and governors, as well as a signal that the Niberlins believed Gunar could do this. But it was an anxious party that headed south toward the mouth of Crayley. Only Grimhild seemed unperturbed. Her children thought it was because she had no idea what was going on, but the truth was very different. If her eldest son died, so what? There was another at home just as good to take his place.

  • • •

  It was autumn, the year turning yellow, the harvest in. Along the road crowds gathered to cheer them on, or just to goggle at the legends. The mood of the people infected them and they became excited themselves. Gods, girls, monsters—fate was at hand. To put yourself in the hand of destiny and face it bravely—what would be better? Crayley had devoured over seven thousand souls when it sucked the village down into the ground and made a desert in the green. It would do it again, getting stronger and bigger and hungrier all the time. Gunar was offering a soldier’s sacrifice. If he died, he wouldn’t be there to mourn. Death comes to us all: when and how is not important.

  But not everyone saw it like that—Gudrun, for example, weeping in her young husband’s arms at night; Hogni, shedding his tears when Gunar wasn’t there to see them. Were they letting him ride to his death? Sigurd, too, felt helpless. A true pagan, he believed that everything that will happen is already set, but with all his heart he w
ished he could snatch this adventure from Gunar if he could. He was certain that no good could come of it.

  Progress was slow. Some roads had already been remetaled, but most were just muddy tracks. The crowds slowed them too, and it took four days to make the journey. When they got there, they found an area of devastation even worse than the bombed wreck of London.

  An area of over five square miles had been utterly destroyed. The rogue city had devoured not only the buildings and all their contents, not only the cows, sheep and grass, the hedges and plants, the people and their pets; even the topsoil and the clay beneath it had been taken down for processing. The site was as bare as a licked plate. Crayley had taken everything.

  How do you destroy a city that lives? As Gunar made his preparations to go down, Marshall Dee was trying to work out how to do just that. He was experimenting with viruses, both organic and inorganic, that would invade and destroy the city’s software, hardware, and organic components simultaneously. He had obtained the original blueprints and drawings of the old factory city, but these were of limited value. Crayley had changed out of all proportion, evolved into something dramatically different. Marshall had no idea how this was possible. The city’s computing power had been far too restricted to remake itself to anything like this degree.

  Sigurd, had he been there, might have told him where that power came from, and known in what way it was related to him. But his clone had no knowledge of anything that appertained so closely to Bryony, including the child he’d had with her.

  By the end of a week, Marshall already had some samples, which he released into the mouth of the monster. If that had worked, there would have been no need for anyone to go down there. The girl, if such a girl existed, would have to stay below. But the viruses all came back out; Crayley was filtering them. However, they came out changed, disarmed in various ways, and this gave the scientist some insight into what might and might not work next time. Working at breakneck speed—they did not know how long the city would remain dormant—he revised his initial models, and within another couple of weeks had a suite of viruses that, he believed, would have some effect at least.

  Sonar and magnetic resonance readings had mapped out the size and basic structure of Crayley. The tunnel from the mouth-head slanted down into the earth for a mile before it opened out into the city proper, which was as big as a small town and up to forty stories high.

  The maw itself was hard enough to reach. The exhalations and excretions that the city was releasing had built up on the rock bed around it and was over a meter deep in places, full of poisons and acids. The atmosphere was thick with fumes, and the slurry underfoot gave way in places to sudden pits and shafts that led all the way to nowhere. At the mouth-head itself, the heat was enough to melt lead.

  Marshall’s plan was simple. Gunar was to get as deep inside Crayley as he could and then release his vials of bugs and viruses, as if he was injecting deep inside the body of a living thing. What else he could do would depend on what he found when he was down there. He was taking explosives as well, in the hope that he might find some important areas he could blow up and disable the city still further.

  As for the girl, the daughter of Odin, the warrior-maiden . . . well. Everyone knew that in an age when the gods have come back to haunt us, such stories can become the truth; but this was politics, this was life and death and bread and water. Maybe Gunar would find her, but the main thing was Crayley had to die. Other deaths along the way seemed almost inevitable.

  That was Gunar’s mission. But his careful heart was full of love, ready to burst open—ready to be thrown away. He had dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s in other people’s stories for so long and now he wanted to tell one of his own. He wanted to rescue the girl. What would follow between himself and Odin’s daughter—well, who knows?

  Gunar and the clone rode together to the maw-head dressed in the dragon skin, inside a little tank, insulated, armored, and carrying all the supplies for the mission. Slipper walked behind. Sigurd had offered him the use of the cyber-horse and Gunar had tried to mount him, but Slipper would operate for no one except his master.

  It was a grim scene—a total desert with everything of value to life removed, where a couple of weeks before there had been buildings and workers surrounded by fields of crops and grazing herds. It was a gray morning, spattering rain. The air tasted acidic. Sigurd, who needed no protection, peered in through the visor Gunar wore and grinned at him.

  “Good place for a football match,” he said. Gunar grinned back with artificial mirth. He had never been more terrified. He felt like a child indulged to the edge of death as Sigurd followed him up to the edge of the mouth.

  Sigurd sniffed the air that only he could breathe.

  “Bad breath,” he said, and stared in a kind of horror as Gunar gave him another thin grin, even worse than the last, a rictus of terror. Why should a man put himself through this? Sigurd wondered—but then he remembered himself at the pit where he had killed Fafnir. Bravery, he thought, was a strange thing, as much stubbornness and cowardice and a fear of failure as sheer guts. In a swelling of love he flung his arms around his friend and squeezed.

  “You can do it,” he told him, although his heart told him otherwise. Gunar squeezed him back.

  “I can d-die, anyway,” he whispered. Sigurd drew back his head and looked in through the shaded visor.

  “Don’t, though,” he said, and they smiled at each other, properly this time. They embraced again, then Sigurd climbed out of the tank and onto Slipper’s back. He sat and watched as his friend drove forward into Hel.

  It was strange for the clone to be a spectator at this sport. He wanted to go forward himself so badly, it felt as if the earth itself was about to carry him down there. Slipper kept dancing on the spot, moving forward and then back, as he picked up on these conflicting messages. The air smelled familiar, and bizarrely, the feelings it carried on it were not those of fear. They were feelings of—of pleasure? Of need? He didn’t understand what they were.

  “Déjà vu,” muttered Sigurd to himself. A memory of a dream of familiarity, without any real connection to anything real. These feelings seemed to be his, but clearly they belonged to someone else. Or perhaps it was a memory from another life?

  The clone sighed, closed his eyes, and waited. Behind his lids no pictures formed, no memories rose, no revelations stirred. I miss you, said his heart. But miss who? Not Gudrun, he’d seen her only an hour before. Into the false reality of his heart, feelings whirred and spun, sought and failed. The clone was like a man who has had a limb amputated but retains the feeling. Love was in his eyes and ears, his nose and throat, in his heart, in his skin, in his fingers and toes. It was meant to be. To remove the love of Bryony from Sigurd was to remove Sigurd from Sigurd himself.

  The dragon-skin suit he had cut out for Gunar puzzled him too. Not so long ago, when he had first met Hogni, he had wanted it. What for? He had told the others it was just a memento of his victory. He knew that was not the truth, but he had no other explanation. It was another mystery inside him, that he had no place for.

  The clone leaned forward and stared into the throat of the city, as if he could see through the fire and around corners. Not for the first time, he was overcome with a dreadful feeling that he was already dead, a walking ghost who had lost his soul without even noticing. How many of us are like that? he wondered. Perhaps life itself is a fake and we are all just memories of the real thing.

  If he went down there, the clone felt, he would become real again. And he would go down there, he was certain of that. Gunar was going to fail. It was just a question of letting him find out for himself.

  And then there it was; the smell of cooking metal, red-hot glass, the acrid stink of chemicals changing, merging, falling apart under intense heat. He didn’t wait for the smell of burning flesh, though. There was a moment when he paused— perhaps Gunar would prefer death to ignominious failure. But Gunar was his friend and his brother, and Sigur
d had no choice. He pressed his heels lightly against Slipper’s sides. The horse reared up and rushed joyfully down into the fires, on Gunar’s trail.

  The clone was immediately engulfed in blazing pain but he recognized even this with a kind of pleasure. His hair and clothes caught fire, he screamed in agony and rushed on so fast that the fire blew out only to reignite by the second. It was all so familiar. Every moment was an amazement to him, on the brink of a revelation that never came. He was certain that around every corner, through every billow of smoke and fire, he would see something, something beautiful and wonderful, something that he had unaccountably forgotten; something so precious he could not conceive how his heart had lost it.

  He did not get far. The ashes of his hair, clothes, and the surface of his skin were still falling from him when he found Gunar’s tank. It stood stock still, glowing cherry red with the heat. Its wheels and tracks had jammed solid, first expanding with the heat, then welding together. Now they were starting to melt. Liquids were flowing around it, dripping down onto it. Acids and other reactives were already pitting the surface. Crayley was digesting the tank.

  It would take explosives to break open the armored vehicle, or an hour with oxyacetylene equipment while Gunar cooked like a chop inside, but drawing his sword stub the clone simply carved a hole in the side of the machine. So easy. He gloried in this. Inside Gunar was blundering about, blinded. Sigurd reached in, snatched him out, flung him over his shoulder, and leapt aboard Slipper. As they raced to the air, a great tongue of angry fire rushed after them, and a sudden flood of poisons and fluids was released around them. There was a huge bellow, a roar, and clattering from deeper down in the blazing tunnels, as if the city was furious about losing this little morsel—as if it was finding a voice for itself.

  They were outside in seconds. Gunar had become very still. Sigurd raced on, across the poisoned sands and rocks of the feed plate, beyond the fumes pouring from the mouth-head. Once he reached the grass, he flung Gunar down and, using his sword stub, cut a hole in the dragon-skin suit. Gunar was blue with lack of air. He was not breathing. Sigurd heaved on the injured man’s chest—once, twice, three times, four times—and again and again—until suddenly Gunar took a shuddering breath and turned from blue to mauve. Sigurd waited until he was sure the breathing was regular, before flinging him across Slipper and riding furiously back to headquarters, where his friend could receive some proper treatment.