Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  The Morning Star.

  Thousands of engineers work to repair her hull. Flights of haulers ferry fresh armaments from the southern missile factories to the spaceport. They unload the missile boxes on skiffs suspended on gravity cushions to funnel into the ship’s port side.

  Heliopolis is much as one would imagine it to be: preparing for a siege.

  However…Darrow knows he would never survive one.

  So I pay close attention to the spaceport. There is an aberration in the pattern that sticks out like a loose thread.

  I look back at the skiffs unloading the missiles, use the telescope’s relative positional measuring system on all forty of the unloading skiffs, yawn, and abandon the telescope tower for a book of poetry. My mind whirs as I stare at the words on the page. Those skiff models have a default 0.7-meter gravity cushion from the ground. More than half were at 0.4 meters according to the telescope. I calculate the volume of the missile boxes, and the mass that the pilum missiles should make. It does not account for the 0.3-meter sag. Not even close. Something else is in them, something at least five times as heavy. But what? Full to the brim, it would take something with a density of at least twenty grams per cubic centimeter.

  There are only a few relevant elements with military application that are dense enough to fit in the volume of those missile boxes and have enough mass to account for the substantial sag in the gravity cushion. Osmium is too rare here, and to account for the high mass, it would need to be in its pure state, which would be ridiculous because it is nearly impossible to machine-form in that state. There’s plutonium, of course, which could be part of the puzzle, but why hide plutonium? Why the deception?

  I lean toward iridium.

  Iridium is a hard transition metal three times as dense as iron. It is often used in X-ray optics and as a contact metal because of its resistance to arc erosion. More importantly, it is used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators because it can withstand operating temperatures up to 2,000 Celsius. Unless they’ve nonsensically changed the default gravity cushions on only half the skiffs, or unless Darrow is making substantial repairs to the Morning Star’s reactors, which I can assume he is not because that does not explain the deception, he is either building a massive secondary generator or a sustained EMP device of unprecedented scale.

  I close the poetry book.

  That night, Glirastes is absent again. A Thessalonican Chianti is served with lamb drizzled with rosemary-infused olive oil. The wine is rancid. I spit it across the table after my first sip. Exeter appears from nowhere. “Is the wine not to the dominus’s satisfaction?”

  “No,” I say, “it is detestable.”

  “It is our finest vintage, dominus. Thessalonica ’35.”

  “How embarrassing for your taste buds. Is the cellar in the same place? I’ll pick my own wine, since you seem incapable of basic competency.”

  I stalk past him and throw open the cellar door, which is located in the mouth of a freestanding merman statue.

  Rounding the corner at the cellar’s bottom stair, I follow a light to the back and find Glirastes waiting for me amongst dusty wine racks with a bottle of champagne. He pops it as I enter. “I believe champagne is in order when one returns from the grave,” he says. His hug is more sincere this time. He clings to me. “My old young friend, you’re a sight for weary eyes. Don’t make that face, these walls down here are quite impenetrable to that little spy trinket. Quicksilver is such an idiot. Mass-produces everything, no individual artistry. Very gauche in his spirit selection as well. We haven’t much time, so let us be quick.”

  I sit and share the champagne and answer his barrage of questions. When I have finished, he leans back and traces the rim of his champagne flute with his pinky. “That is quite a tale. All that to come here. All that to confront your nemesis? Didn’t you read the Tragedians, boy? Don’t you know how this quest for revenge will end? What if he recognized you!”

  “Wrecking balls seldom stop for conversations,” I say.

  “Yes. You can practically see that Red girl hanging in his eyes, can’t you? Gorydamn Nero. Couldn’t just slap her on the wrist. I blame him for all this. Him and that idiot Fabii. And that idiot Bellona. Frankly, your ranks are replete with idiots. So many in fact, one might suspect if they were a little poorer, a little more victimized, a little more burdened with trial, they might have had the common sense to band together instead of sniping each other in an operatic game of emotional suicide chess. To make matters worse, it hasn’t changed. Not a bit. They still bicker. Carthii and Saud. Votum and everyone. And you expect them to hold hands with the Rim!” He laughs. “You’ve always been a romantic.”

  “I thought it was a fellowship of two,” I reply.

  “Oh, shut up. You could have contacted me,” he says, thinly trying to hide his grief. “You could have let me know you weren’t dead.”

  “You have to understand what I saw.” He raises an eyebrow, always curious about Palatine gossip, especially the firsthand sort. It’s not his most noble quality. “I saw Aja hacked to ribbons and Octavia ripped here to here.” I trace the path Darrow’s blade made. “I saw the Jackal’s bombs detonating, and watched as Darrow pulled his tongue out. I saw my godfather ally with Darrow for the briefest flicker to down Lilath au Faran’s ships before they destroyed my home.”

  He shudders.

  “I saw all those people with all their plans strangled by the webs they wove. I wanted out. To his credit, Darrow spared me, and sent me away with Cassius.”

  “All this time, I thought he might have,” Glirastes says. “I would not have helped him if I really thought he murdered you.”

  I’m not sure if I believe that, but he does. “So I disappeared,” I say.

  “And did you find what you were looking for? Did you find peace?”

  “It’s not out there. At least not for me. Some men can stare at their feet and pretend the world isn’t falling apart. I cannot.”

  “And behind the Grimmus banner, you rally? Atalantia is your savior?” he sneers. “She is a monster. A woman with a cape of cadavers as long as the Via Gloria. You know that or you wouldn’t be here.” He squints at me. “She’s going to use atomics, isn’t she?”

  “Chemicals,” I admit.

  He grows terribly quiet. “If that is the woman you follow, then the worlds are already lost.”

  “There are certain realities—” I begin.

  He interrupts. “Stop. I’ve heard that all before.”

  “From yourself?” I ask. “Is that why you helped Darrow?”

  “Yes!” he snaps, slamming his glass down so hard on the table it shatters and opens a gash on his hand. He stares at the blood seeping out. “Yes. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Gold became…cruel after the Fall. Beyond cruel. As if it was their laxity that led to rebellion. Darrow is right in some things, you know. The metal miners here barely live past thirty. And the slaves…they actually call them that now. Not contractors or pioneers. Slaves.” He shakes his head. “I just didn’t realize the price my planet…my home would have to pay for my spasm of hope.”

  “Is it worth the price?” I ask.

  “What’s the alternative? Atalantia? Purges and camps? No. I’d rather we all burn nice and quick than line up for her pleasure.” He stands, ending the conversation. “I know you mean well. But if I’ve learned anything, meaning well isn’t enough. Whatever you thought I could do for you, I can’t do it. I won’t. Nothing good comes of good intentions.”

  He puts a hand on my shoulder as he departs.

  I tried to let it be his choice to help me, but in the end he leaves me no alternative but to force him as my grandmother taught.

  “I was there in Tyche when the water came in,” I lie. He quarter-turns to me. “Thousands poured to the Water Colossus to seek its heights for shelter, knowing the work of Glirastes would give
them safety. Glirastes’s genius would give them shelter. When the wave came in, it swamped the Colossus. For a moment, I thought it would pull even it out to sea. But those people were right to believe in your work. As the waves rolled back, your Colossus endured, but of the people…nothing remained. Why do you think Atalantia is using chemicals instead of nukes? She couldn’t buy you all those years ago. So now she’ll take all your precious works for herself.”

  I return upstairs to finish my dinner without appetite. My words will worm their way into Glirastes’s brain. When I am finished with the meal, Exeter comes to the table. He looks at the bottle I brought up. “I trust your choice in wine was satisfactory?”

  “It’s a stubborn vintage.”

  “I have faith in it, dominus. And in your discerning taste. Perhaps a nightcap, of the fortifying variety?”

  * * *

  —

  I wake in the night to hear the expected sound of bare feet in the hallway. There’s a peculiar wheezing sound from my arm where they injected me with anti-rads. My door opens and Glirastes stands in the doorway illuminated by the shadowy light of a green glowlamp. “The spike is frozen. To them, you’ll appear to be sleeping through the night. I want to show you something.”

  The green light casts eerie shadows on the artifacts along the walls as Glirastes leads me down a dark hallway. Rain lashes the windows. Low thunder groans.

  Glirastes stops at the end of a hall near a large wooden door with an old-fashioned lock. He searches a huge ring for the right key and unlocks it with a satisfying clunk. Lights blossom in the darkness, and I smile. The room is as delightful as in memory. Domed with a rendering of deep space. Books lining every wall. I remember the first he gave me: Silenius’s Meditations. Antiquated machines of distant ages stand covered in dust. He fusses over the dozen teacups scattered about the room. “Really should let the servants in here. But they may twist the wrong knob, then boom.” He slams a hand on the table. “All dead. Now, where did I put it? Ah. This way.” Behind a 3-D marble printer and a statue of himself with an absurdly generous phallus, he pulls back a canvas covering, unsettling a cloud of dust, to reveal a model of a sphere city as big as the two of us put together. Intricate parks and public buildings wind together, defying gravity as the surface of the city bends upside down on itself to create the spiral impression of a human eye. He waves his hand over the pupil, and the city begins to turn clockwise. He sits in a drawing chair to watch me walk around the model.

  “It is…” I begin, and pretend I cannot find the right words. Of course I remember his favorite poems.

  “It is what?” he asks in trepidation.

  “Without flaw.”

  “Use more sophisticated language.”

  I reply:

  “Cities and Thrones and Powers

  Stand in Time’s eye,

  Almost as long as flowers,

  Which daily die:

  But, as new buds put forth

  To glad new men,

  Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,

  The Cities rise again.”

  “I missed you, lad.” He sighs back in his chair. “I haven’t had a good critic in years.”

  “What is your city called?”

  “Oculus.”

  I circle the model. “I imagine it’s meant to be in orbit?”

  “Yes! Or deep space. I knew you would understand.” He runs a finger down a central aerial boulevard. “It was my last commission before the Fall. Needless to say, there was not much demand for cities with personality after that.”

  “Who commissioned it?”

  “Regulus ag Sun, old uppity Quick himself. I sent him a finished model just like this one, but we never broke ground. It was to be my greatest work. One I’ll never see completed now. You might have noticed there is something whimsical about it.” He smiles. “He asked me to build a city for a child who had never seen anything else. Of course it was just an expression, but I took it to heart. I based it off of your eye, in fact. The only child to seldom annoy me. Of course I never had children. Didn’t have the time or the inclination, but I always assumed, vainly, that mine would be as curious as you were.”

  He must be shaken deeply to presume to say that aloud to me.

  It really is one of the most marvelous of his creations, this oculus. For all its grace, it speaks of wild, hopeful ambition.

  “Darrow didn’t even look twice at it when he came here,” Glirastes murmurs. “He sees me as nothing more than a tool. I suppose it is human nature. Golds saw me as a novelty to flaunt. Mids let their jealousy label me a social climber. The lows loved me, then hated me, then loved me. All of them thought they understood my work. And maybe they did. But only you really ever understood me.”

  “You were the one who told me a great artist can never be fully understood,” I reply. “Even you must suffer the tedium of a medium.”

  “Did I ever tell you the story of the blind Copper?”

  “I don’t believe so.” Of course, I know the story. It was in his Securitas file, gleaned from his own journals, and was the key to my story of the waves and the Colossus. I forgo a stool and sit on the floor, just as I did as a child. He wants to see me as a curious boy, not a scarred, cunning judge.

  “When I was a young apprentice, my Master Maker told me of a Copper with a disease of the eye. One which surpassed even our civilization’s ingenuity to cure. When he felt his vision finally fading, he went to a bench and sat before the Library of Heliopolis. Each day he went, and his world grew smaller and darker until one day his sight was gone entirely. For years afterward he would go to that bench and sit, and in the darkness he could still see the green copper dome, the Philosopher Kings in all their marbled glory, the Water Gardens and the Orbital Torch. Of all the things he wanted to remember, it was the beauty of architecture.” He sighs. “My master told me the story to impress the importance of our craft.

  “I was a busy mind. Busier still when I found my first taste of celebrity. Twice a week, I would attend the dinner parties of Aureate. It might seem common to you,” he says with small embarrassment. “But imagine what it meant to me. An Orange from the Sledge. A guest of Votum and Augustans and even Lunes. I was treated with dignity by the finest company in the worlds. The Sovereign herself called me a genius. In their names, I built monuments, libraries, cities.

  “Yet at the unveiling of my greatest work…”

  “The Water Colossus.”

  “Correct.” He continues. “I felt empty standing there listening to the rich tell me what beauty I had made. I could see it. But I could not feel it. I don’t know why, but I remembered the story of that Copper. I sought out my master, and discovered after many weeks of searching that the blind Copper still lived.

  “I went to visit him. He was a ward of the state by then, living to die in a government Loyalty Ward. I asked him about the story, and he laughed. ‘I didn’t go for the building,’ he said, ‘I went to feed the pigeons, and watch the children play in the water, and the families line up for sweets, and to see boys flirt with girls.”

  Glirastes says nothing, and for a long time, we listen to the rain on the windows.

  “He went to see life,” Glirastes says at last. “From that moment to this, that is why I make—to see the life that grows around the dead stone I stack. For what is a building without its audience? What is a city without its people? Now…” He traces the veins in his hands. “Now that life disappears. Those people become dust. Soon there will be nothing left but my stone and the bones of my city.” His glassy eyes find mine. “I’m not a traitor, no matter what you think. No matter what Atalantia calls me. I thought Darrow’s crusade impractical, but inevitable. When he took the planet, I helped him, because I thought I could protect life. I failed. I failed. So terribly. He told me he would only use the Storm Gods for electrical interference and cloud
cover, but he lied and now Tyche is gone.”

  His eyes follow motes of dust floating through the light. His robes make soft sounds as he leans forward and runs his hands over his head.

  “I’ve been building something with his engineers. Something that will help his army escape the planet they broke. But even if he does escape before Atalantia attacks, what will become of us? Are the buildings to be saved, because they are rare and beautiful, and the people put upon the pale because they are common?” His hands drop from his head and he looks up at me like a drowning old man. “I don’t know what to do, Lysander. Tell me. What am I to do?”

  “You can trust in me,” I reply.

  “The last time I trusted a man, Tyche was swallowed by the sea.”

  “Then trust the boy you knew.”

  His eyes are forlorn as they search mine. “Is he still alive, after all this horror?”

  “Yes,” I say, reaching up to fold his thin hands in mine. “And he needs your help. The people must show Atalantia that they did not abet the enemy. That they did not simply wait to be saved. They saved themselves. I promise she will see that. I promise we will show that to the worlds with spectacle they have never before seen.”

  There’s a knock at the door. “Begone, Exeter!”

  Exeter enters anyway. “Apologies, sir, but the dominus requested a nightcap of the fortifying variety.” He strides into the room, followed by the entirety of Glirastes’s remaining staff.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Glirastes shouts. “Can’t you see we are—”

  Exeter goes swiftly to a knee and bends his head to me. The lowColor staff join him. “The Heir of Silenius has returned,” Exeter proclaims. “The loyal stand ready, my Sovereign.”

  I take Glirastes’s hands in mine. “There are more men and women in this city who believe in the order of the Society more than the empty promises of the Rising. I do not know them. But you know them, and they know you. Pick the most loyal and the most influential of each Color, and tell them the Heir of Silenius has returned. He has not forgotten them, and he asks them to join him in taking back their rightful home from the Martian marauders. Not for Votum. Not for Atalantia. But for Heliopolis and the Society.”