The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight

by Jonathan Strahan

  It has been a long time since I was at prayer.

  Count Jack gave a small moan as his Sky-chair dipped down abruptly between the close-packed stone quills of Alabaster Needles. The Chairboss whistled instructions to her crew – the lowest register of their language lay at the upper edge of our hearing – and they skilfully brought us spirally down past hives and through arches and under buttresses to the terraces of the Great Western Dock on the Grand Canal. Here humans had built cheap spray-stone lading houses and transit lodges among the sinuously carved stone. The Canal Court Hotel was cheap, but that was not its main allure; Ferid Bey had appetites best served by low rents and proximity to docks.

  While Count Jack swooned and whimpered and swore that he would never regain his land-legs, never, I tipped the Chair-boss a generous handful of saucers and she clasped her lower hands in a gesture of respect.

  "We're broke," Ferid Bey said. We sat drinking coffee on the terrace of the Canal Court watching Twav stevedores lift and lade pallets from the open hatches of cargo barges. I say coffee, it was Expeditionary Force ersatz, vile and weak and with a disturbing spritz of excremental. Ferid Bey, who as a citizen of the great Ottoman Empire, appreciated coffee, grimaced at every sip. I say terrace; it was a cranny for two tables' space beside the garbage bins which caught the wind and lifted the dust in a perpetual eddy. Ferid Bey wore his dust goggles, kept his scarf wrapped around his head and sipped his execrable coffee.

  "What do you mean, broke?" Count Jack thundered in his loudest Sopratutto voice. Startled Twavs flew up from their cargoes, twittering on the edge of audibility. "You've been at the bum-boys again, haven't you?" Ferid Bey's weakness for the rough was well known, particularly the kind who would go through his wallet the next morning. He sniffed loudly.

  "Actually, Jack, this time it's you."

  I often wondered if the slow decline of Count Jack's career was partly attributable to the fact that, after years of daily contact, agent had started to sound like client. The Count's eyes bulged. His blood pressure was bad. I'd seen the report from the pre-launch medical.

  "It's bums on seats Jack, bums on seats and we're not getting them."

  "I strew my pearls before buffoons in braid and their braying brides, and they throw them back in my face!" Count Jack bellowed. "I played La Scala, you know. La Scala! And the Pope. I'd be better off playing to the Space-bats. At least they appreciate a High-C. No Ferid, no no: you get me better audiences."

  "Any audiences would be good," Ferid Bey muttered and then said aloud, "I've got you a tour."

  Count Jack grew inches taller.

  "How many nights?"

  "Five."

  "There are that many concert halls on this arse-wipe of a world?"

  "Not so much concert halls." Ferid Bey tried to hide as much of his face as possible behind scarf, goggles and coffee cup. "More concert parties."

  "The army?" Count Jack's face was pale now, his voice quiet. I had heard this precursor to a rage the size of Olympus Mons many times. Thankfully, I had never been its target. "Bloody shit-stupid squaddies who have to be told which end of a blaster to point at the enemy?"

  "Yes Jack."

  "Would this be... upcountry?"

  "It would."

  "Would this be... close to the front?"

  "I've extended your cover."

  "Well, it's nice to know my ex-wives and agent are well provided for."

  "I've negotiated a fee commensurate with the risk."

  "What is the risk?"

  "It's a war zone, Jack."

  "What is the fee?"

  "One thousand five hundred saucers. Per show."

  "Tell me we don't need to do this, dear boy," Count Jack said to me.

  "The manager of the Grand Valley is holding your luggage to ransom," I said. "We need to do it."

  "You're coming with me." Count Jack's accusing finger hovered one inch from the bridge of his agent's nose. Ferid Bey spread his hands in resignation.

  "I would if I could Jack. Truly. Honestly. Deeply. But I've got a lead on a possible concert recording here in Unshaina, and there are talent bookers from the big Venus casinos in town, so I'm told."

  "Venus?" The Cloud Cities, forever drifting in the Storm Zone, were the glittering jewels on the interplanetary circuit. The legendary residences were a long, comfortable, well paid descent from the pinnacle of career.

  "Five nights?"

  "Five nights only. Then out."

  "Usual contract riders?"

  "Of course."

  Count Jack laughed his great, canyon-deep laugh. "We'll do it. Our brave legionnaires need steel in their steps and spunk in their spines. When do we leave?"

  "I've booked you on the Empress of Mars from the Round 'O' Dock. Eight o'clock. Sharp."

  Count Jack pouted.

  "I am prone to sea-sickness."

  "This is a canal. Anyway, the Commanderie has requisitioned all the air transport. It seems there's a big push on."

  "I shall endure it."

  "You're doing the right thing, Jack," Ferid Bey said. " Oh, and another thing; Faisal, you couldn't pick up for the coffee could you?" I suspected there was a reason Ferid Bey had brought us out to this tatty bargee hostel. "And while you're at it, could you take care of my hotel?"

  Already Count Jack was hearing the distant applause of the audience, scenting like a rare moth the faint but unmistakable pheromone of celebrity.

  "And am I... top of the bill?"

  "Always Jack," said Ferid Bey. "Always."

  From our table on the promenade deck of the Empress of Mars we watched the skymasters pass overhead. They were high and their hulls caught the evening light that had faded from the canal. I lost count after thirty; the sound of their many engines merged into a high thunder. The vibration sent ripples across the wine in our glasses on the little railed-off table at the stern of the barge. One glass for me, always untouched – I did not drink but I liked to keep Count Jack company. He was a man who craved the attention of others – without it he grew translucent and insubstantial. His hopes for another involuntary audience of passengers to charm and intimidate and cow with his relentless showbiz tales were disappointed. The Empress of Mars was a cargo tug pushing a twelve barge tow with space for eight passengers, of which we were the sole two. I was his company. I had been so enough times to know his anecdotes as thoroughly as I knew the music for his set. But I listened, and I laughed, because it is not the story that matters but the telling.

  "Headed East," Count Jack said. I did not correct him – he had never understood that on Mars West was East and East was West. Sunrise, east; sunset, west dear boy, he declared. We watched the fleet, a vast, sky-filling arrowhead, drive towards the sunset hills on the close horizon. The Grand Valley had opened out into a trench so wide we could not see the canyon walls, a terrain with its own inner terrain. "Godspeed that fleet." He had been uncharacteristically quiet and ruminative this trip. It was not the absence of a captive audience. The fleet, the heavy canal traffic – I had counted eight tows headed up-channel from the front to Unshaina since we began this first bottle of what Count Jack called his 'Evening Restorational' – had brought home to him that he was headed to war. Not pictures of war, news reports of war, rumours of war but war itself. For the first time he might be questioning the tour.

  "Does it make your joints ache, Faisal?"

  "Maestro?"

  "The gravity. Or rather, the want of gravity. Wrists, ankles, fingers, all the flexing joints. Hurt like buggery. Thumbs are the worst. I'd've have thought it would have been the opposite with it being so light here. Not a bit of it. It's all I can do to lift this glass to my lips."

  To my eyes, he navigated the glass from table to lips successfully. Count Jack poured another Evening Restorational and sank deep in his chair. The dark green waters of the canal slipped beneath our hull. Martian twilights were swift and deep. War had devastated this once populous and fertile land, left scars of black glass across the bottom lands where
heat rays had scored the regolith. The rising evening wind, the Tharseen that reversed direction depending on which end of the Grand Valley was in night, called melancholy flute sonatas from the shattered Roost pillars.

  "It's a ghastly world," Count Jack said after a second glass.

  "I find it rather peaceful. It has a particular beauty. Melancholic."

  "No not Mars. Everywhere. Everywhere's bloody ghastly and getting ghastlier. Ever since the war. War makes everything brutal. Brutal and ugly. War wants everything to be like it. It's horrible, Faisal."

  "Yes. I think we've gone too far. We're laying waste to entire civilisations. Unshaina, it's older than any city on Earth. This has gone beyond righteous justice. We're fighting because we love it."

  "Not the war, Faisal. I've moved on from the bloody war. Do keep up. Getting old. That's what's truly horrible. Old old old and I can't do a thing about it. I feel it in my joints, Faisal. This bloody planet makes me feel old. A long slow decline into incompetence, imbecility and incontinence. What have I got? A decent set of pipes. That's all. And they won't last forever. No investments no property and bugger all recording royalties. Bloody revenue cleaned me out. Rat up a drainpipe. Gone. And the bastards still have their hands out. They've threatened me, you know. Arrest. What is this, the bloody Marshalsea Gaol? I'm a Papal Knight, you know. I wield the sword of the Holy Father himself."

  "All they want is their money," I said. Count Jack had always resented paying lawyers and accountants, with the result that he had signed disastrous recording contracts and only filed tax returns when the bailiffs were at the door. This entire Martian tour would barely meet his years of outstanding tax, plus interest. "Then they'll leave you alone."

  "No they won't. They won't ever let me alone. They know Count Jack is a soft touch. They'll be back, the damnable dunners. Once they've got the taste of your blood they won't ever let their hooks out of you. Parasites. I am infested with fiscal parasites. Tax, war and old age. They make everything gross and coarse and pointless."

  Beams of white light flickered along the twilight horizon. I could not tell whether they were from sky to ground or ground to sky. The heat rays danced along the edge of the world, flickered out. New beams took their place. Flashes beyond the close horizon threw the hills into momentary relief. I cried out as the edge of world became a flickering palisade of heat rays. Count Jack was on his feet. The flashes lit his face. Seconds later the first soft rumble of distant explosions reached us. The Twav deckhands fluttered on their perches. I could make out the lower register of their consternation as a treble shrill. The edge of the world was a carnival of beams and flashes. I saw an arc of fire descend from the sky to terminate in a white flash beneath the horizon. I did not doubt that I had seen a skymaster and all her crew perish but it was beautiful. The sky blazed with the most glorious fireworks. Count Jack's eyes were wide with wonder. He threw his hand up to shield his eyes as a huge mid-air explosion turned the night white. Stark shadows lunged across the deck; the Twav rose up in a clatter of wings.

  "Oh the dear boys, the dear boys," Count Jack whispered. The sound of the explosion hit us. It rattled the windows on the pilot deck, rattled the bottle and glasses on the table. I felt it shake the core of being, shake me belly and bowel deep. The beams winked out. The horizon went dark.

  We had seen a great and terrible battle but who had fought, who had won, who had lost, whether there had been winners or losers, what its goals had been – we knew none of these. We had witnessed something terrible and beautiful and incomprehensible. I lifted the untouched glass of wine and took a sip.

  "Good God," Count Jack said, still standing. "I always thought you didn't drink. Religious reasons and all that."

  "No, I don't drink for musical reasons. It makes my joints hurt."

  I drank the wine. It may have been vinegar, it may have been the finest wine available to humanity, I did not know. I drained the glass.

  "Dear boy." Count Jack poured me another, one for himself and together we watched the edge of the world glow with distant fires.

  We played Camp Avenger on a stage rigged on empty beer barrels to a half full audience that dwindled over the course of the concert to just six rows. A Brigadier who had been drinking steadily all through the concert tried to get his troopers up onstage to dance to the Medley of Ould Irish Songs. They sensibly declined. He tripped over his own feet trying to inveigle Count Jack to Walls of Limerick with him and went straight off the stage. He split his head open on the rim of a beer keg.

  At Tharsia Regional Command the audience was less ambiguous. We were bottled off. The first one came looping in even as Count Jack came on, arms spread wide, to his theme song I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen. He stuck it through Blaze Away, Nessum Dorma and Il Mio Tesoro before an accurately hurled Mars Export Pale Ale bottle deposited its load of warm urine down the front of his dickey. He finished The Garden Where the Praties Grow, bowed and went straight off. I followed him as the first of the barrage of folding army chairs hit the stage. Without a word or a look he went straight to his tent and stripped naked.

  "I've had worse in Glasgow Empire," he said. His voice was stiff with pride. I never admired him as much. "Can you do something with these, dear boy?" He held out the wet, reeking dress suit. "And run me a bath."

  We took the money, in full and in cash, and went on, up ever the everbranching labyrinth of canals, ever closer to the battle front.

  The boat was an Expeditionary Force fast patrol craft, one heat ray turret fore, one mounted in a blister next to the captain's position. It was barely big enough for the piano, let alone us and the sullen four-man crew. They smoked constantly and tried to outrage Count Jack with their vile spacetrooper's language. He could outswear any of them. But he kept silence and dignity and our little boat threaded through the incomprehensible maze of Nyx's canals; soft green waters of Mars overhung by the purple fronds of crosier-trees, dropping the golden coins of their seed cases into the water where they sprouted corkscrew propellers and swam away. This was the land of the Oont, and their tall, heron-like figures, perched in the rear of their living punts, were our constant companions. On occasion, down the wider channels and basins, we glimpsed their legendary organic paddle-wheelers, or their pale blue ceramic stilttowns. The crew treated the Oont with undisguised contempt and idly trained the boat's weapons on them. They had accepted the mandate of the Commanderie without a fight and their cities and ships and secretive, solitary way of life went unchanged. Our Captain thought them a species of innate cowards and traitors. Only a species tamed by the touch of the heat ray could be trusted.

  For five hundred miles, up the Grand Canal and through the maze of Nyx, Twav stevedores had lifted and laid my piano with precision and delicacy. It took the Terrene army to drop it. From the foot of the gangplank I heard the jangling crash and turned to see the cargo net on the jetty and troopers grinning. At once I wanted to strip away the packing and see if anything remained. It was not my piano – I would never have risked my Bosendorfer on the vagaries of space-travel – but it was a passable upright from a company that specialised in interplanetary hire. I had grown fond of it. One does with pianos. They are like dogs. I walked on. That much I had learnt from Count Jack. Dignity, always dignity.

  Oudeman was a repair base for Third Skyfleet. We walked in the shadow of hovering skymasters. Engineers in repair rigs swarmed over hulls, lowered engines on hoists, opened hull sections, deflated gas cells. It was clear to me that the fleet had suffered grievously in recent and grim battle. Skins were gashed open to the very bones; holes stabbed through the rounded hulls from side to side. Engine pylons terminated in melted drips. Entire crew gondolas and gun turrets had been torn away. Some had been so terribly mauled they were air-going skeletons; a few lift cells wrapped around naked ship spine.

  Of the crews who had fought through such ruin, there was no sign.

  The base commander, Yuzbashi Osman, greeted us personally. He was a great fan, a great fan. A dedicate
d life-long fan. He had seen the Maestro in his every Istanbul concert. He always sat in the same seat. He had all the Maestro's recordings. He played them daily and had tried to educate his junior officers over mess dinners but the rising generation were ignorant, low men; technically competent but little better than the Devshirmey conscripts. A clap of his hands summoned batmen to carry our luggage. I understood only rudiments of his language but from his reaction to the engineers who had dropped my piano, I understood that further disrespect would not be tolerated. He cleared the camp steambath for our exclusive use. Sweated, steamed and scraped clean, a glowing Count Jack bowled into the mess tent as if he were striding on to the stage of La Scala. He was funny, he was witty, he was charming, he was glorious. Most of the junior Onbashis and Mulazims at the dinner in his honour could not speak English but his charisma transcended all language. They smiled and laughed readily.

  "Would you look at that?" Count Jack said in the backstage tent that was our dressing room. He held up a bottle of champagne, dripping from the ice bucket. "Krug. They got me my Krug. Oh the dear, lovely boys."

  At the dinner I had noted the paucity of some of the offerings and marvelled at the effort it must have taken, what personal dedication by the Yuzbashi, to fulfil a rider that was only there to check the contract had been read. Count Jack slid the bottle back into the melting ice. "I shall return to you later, beautiful thing, with my heart full of song and my feet light on the applause of my audience. I am a star, Faisal. I am a true star. Leave me, dear boy."