The Meat Tree
Page 7
Inspector of Wrecks
Of course, it’s ridiculous. It can’t possibly explain how an old-fashioned vessel, full of Earth culture, could come from somewhere else. It doesn’t make sense. Only time-wise. The whole thing refuses to add up.
Second curse was straightforward. Aranrhod: no arms for the boy. So Gwydion and Lleu – I still have a hard time thinking that name – go away to ponder. I made Nona take the Gwydion part, as I wanted to try something without her noticing.
She
So Gwydion’s a master of disguises, yes? So I change our appearance and present ourselves to Aranrhod’s court as two poets. Not my idea of entertainment, but I suppose in those days they were desperate.
He
Aranrhod does the usual medieval thing and invites them in. That night, at the feast, Gwydion entertains her.
They have a good time, as they’re a match for each other. For every story that Gwydion tells, Aranrhod knows another. And it gets very late and the drink is flowing. You know the kind of night. When the sugar in the booze keeps you up, more awake than you’ve been all day and life is funny and fits neatly into your stories. Then everything’s suddenly unbearably sad, and a song is called for. Then more alcohol until even your drunkenness is in tatters, you could go on forever, except that your eyes… and when you lie down, the room whirls around you.
She
Except that I’ve only been pretending to drink, keeping pace with Aranrhod.
We go to bed, the lad and I, and then I get busy.
He
As Aranrhod, I’m lying there, having been sick, with a terrible hangover. I hear a huge racket outside: alarms being sounded and an armed attack on the fort. I get up and, in the confusion, can’t work out who’s fighting us or why. But the only thing I think to do is to arm every man in the place. The servants have their own armoury and have already taken out pickaxes and lances. I remember the poets! They don’t bear arms, so I must supply them.
She
Next thing we hear is an urgent knocking at our door. I open and there’s a wild-eyed Aranrhod, gabbling about an enemy outside.
He
And just at that point, I decide to do my guerilla move. I’m playing Aranrhod but I make a freeze-frame and slip into the character of the boy to see what we’re dealing with.
The clamour stops suddenly as if switched off at source. I enter the room of his mind. It’s a blank, a whitewashed cube. Outside I hear birdsong. Four walls, a floor, no furniture. It’s hardly human.
It looks familiar.
She
I’m holding the whole situation in my mind. The soldiers outside, the attack on the fort, our disguises as poets.
He
Quick breath, then out into the racket and I’m Aranrhod again. The old man says that he’s willing to fight. We look out of the window and my heart sinks. There are so many ships that you can hardly see the water in the bay. I tell my women to bring two sets of arms. I’ll take care of the young one.
So I make him stand still while I strap on greaves over his shinbones, then the sabaton, the gorget, the tasset, couter, pauldron, cuirass then habergeon. Then I give him his sword and, finally, hand him a shield. I step back to admire him and see myself reflected in the polished metal.
Behind me, I see the old man put down his weapons. He starts to laugh. I berate him and make as if to help dress him too. He asks me if the boy’s properly armed. I say he is, that I did it myself.
Then I recognise them both: Gwydion and Lleu.
And it suddenly hits me. I’ve been tricked again. I rush to the window and the ships are gone.
She
I can’t help liking it when Gwydion gets his way. Aranrhod was furious this time, beside herself at having been tricked twice.
He
I look at the boy and he appears… more substantial. What I’m watching is the birth of the child into the adult world.
She
Still, it was a terrible curse, her third. First she called Gwydion an evil man and then said, ‘I will swear a destiny on the boy that he will never have a wife from the race that is on this earth at present.’
He
Lonely forever.
She
Gwydion will think of something straightforward to get round her words. I hope I play him when we get to that. It’s fun seeing the curses unravel as Gwydion walks the gaps between words and what they might mean.
He
That room. It’s me. A boy who’s been playing at being a man and has no life of his own to fall back on, other than what he gets by subterfuge. It’s my room in the dome down on Mars.
*
Synapse Log 7 Feb 2210, 21:30
Inspector of Wrecks
This is ridiculous. I refuse to be spooked.
Nona’s tired, gone to her bunk early and is fast asleep. Before we quit the game, we started on the next scene. That was a surprise. Instead of beginning to plot his trick, Gwydion went with Lleu to see King Math. I took Math’s part and I’d completely forgotten that he was a magician. Or I never knew. Anyway, why would Gwydion go to him? Aren’t his own powers strong enough to rise to the challenge of Aranrhod’s latest curse?
One thing occurred to me. I’ve been thinking all along that Gwydion was the chosen persona of the Mastermind, but now I think that it might be Math behind the whole thing. We’ll have to watch what he does very carefully on our next visit. This might change everything.
Nona was flagging, so I decided to call it a day. We left Gwydion and Math deep in conversation, as if they were plotting something. I sent Nona to bed.
Me, I can’t settle. My mind is reeling with the reappearance of Math, what it means for the story. And there’s been so much new information to absorb, that I need to go through it.
Nona sighs. She’s dreaming.
So what do we know so far about this ship?
It appears to be a standard Earth vessel of the spaceship age. But its VR capability is much more sophisticated than you’d expect for that period.
I feel watched, appraised by an entity far more highly evolved than the game we’re playing.
The paper log mentions a crew of three, two men and a woman. And yet the cassette tape I found suggests that there were many more people on board. How do I know that the tape wasn’t recorded on Earth before the crew left? I don’t.
What if it was a record of a fleeting moment on board? What are the possible explanations? Stowaways. A log that lied. That extra people joined them from another vessel. And Nona’s suggestion: that the journey they took was much further than from Earth. That’s the most radical idea of all, a new frame that changes everything.
The VR may well be a more accurate record of the voyage than the log, even though it’s through the eyes of the Mastermind. It’s like trying to reconstruct how a person danced from a few heel prints left by shoes on a floor.
And why this feeling of being interrogated by the story itself? That could be myth. It’s designed to describe the desires of the self as an archetype, so it’s hardly surprising that certain parts of the tale, or certain characters should interest us more than others, they match our preoccupations. I’ve been obsessed with Gwydion, why is that?
If I’m honest, it’s something to do with work. It’s on my mind because I’m about to retire. I love the way he conjures a future for himself and the people he loves. That seems to be key – he’s always using his magic to help someone else. His brother. His son.
What kind of magician works his magic on behalf of himself? A lonely man. A man like me.
Why did I give everything up for work? Because I believe it’s good in itself. That every action of trying to see what happened is a blow struck for the real. That it’s possible to know the exact sequence of events that led to disaster. That it’s a service to others to be able to say: The mistake was in the calibration of the log, which error led the crew to ignore the blind spot on their port side which led to collision. That the chaos of which I’m so af
raid is abated, for a moment, at least.
I love the sounds of the ship at night. The reactor’s hum and crackling of the hull as debris hits us. The click, click, click of equipment as it digests its interior measurements, adjusting to light, temperature and yaw. The fans on the hydroponics, as the plants breathe and sigh to make us our oxygen.
I know we’re in orbit, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that I’m on the night watch of a very long voyage. I feel protective of Nona as she sleeps. She’s the heart of the vessel for me. Someone who seems to need work just as much as I do. I haven’t asked why, nor has she told me. We have a pact of discretion but for the first time, I have a student whose appetite for what happened is just as strong as mine. If I’d been assigned her earlier we might have…
What was it like for those people on a long-distance flight of years? In a closed-loop system? So that nothing new could come in or go out of their vessel? So that they had to survive only on the resources they had? How would you keep the sense of a day just by counting the hours? Would you be able to sleep without the cues of light and sunset? Wouldn’t your fellow crew members’ habits become distinctly annoying? How one slurps his food? How the other farts? As you got further and further away from home, would the same things continue to be important to you? The chain of command? The original mission? Might you not start feeling ill if you imagined that the ship was toxic in some way? That pollutants had entered the system and were starting to kill you slowly, that the very air you breathed was compromised?
And what about mutiny? Disputes on a spaceship can easily become a matter of life and death.
Campion, you’re daydreaming. Get a grip.
11
Flower
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 09:00
Inspector of Wrecks
Nona seems drowsy today. The result of oversleep, perhaps. I can hardly get a word out of her before we prepare to go into VR. Not like her to be this subdued. Things had started to warm up nicely between us. Still, she’s young. Who knows what’s going through her mind.
She might have been sulking because I told her I wanted to take the Math part again, to continue to look for the Mastermind interface in his actions.
She’s sullen when she agrees to take the Gwydion part. She normally likes him. I offered her Lleu but I caught an involuntary look of disgust come over her face. I could have made something of it, no doubt. An Inspector needs to do whatever’s required to come up with an answer, there’s no room for personal preference in this job. It’s just unprofessional. When I think of some of the terrible places I’ve been. Space vessels tacky with alien flesh after fires or explosions. Holds full of shit where animal cargoes had been abandoned to die… Faeces so thick you could walk on it, like a carpet. No, you can’t be fussy in this job. And this wreck is clean compared to many others, even if it’s proving to be intractable.
I decided: what’s the point of a confrontation about roles if not strictly necessary? Math for me, Gwydion for Nona.
Apprentice
Concentrate. Gwydion. At least I’m not Lleu. That whited sepulchre. What does that mean? When I think of him, I think of a room…
He
I must admit, I’m glad not to play Lleu myself. It’s too painful to think of that empty space, even though he has a name and arms. I, Campion, have a name and the tools of my trade.
Now, Lleu needs a wife. I wonder if Math and Gwydion could find a partner for me. That would be powerful magic indeed.
*
Joint Thought Channel 8 Feb 2210, 09:02
Inspector of Wrecks
Let’s pick up where we left off yesterday. You ready?
Apprentice
I suppose.
Inspector of Wrecks
Right, here are Math and Gwydion. I think we missed this part of the conversation yesterday.
Apprentice
If you say so.
Inspector of Wrecks
It’s obvious that some of the action takes place without us.
Come on, girl! Be a little more alert, will you?
Apprentice
I’m complaining.
Inspector of Wrecks
Is that Gwydion or you?
Apprentice
Gwydion. I’m furious at Aranrhod. What kind of woman robs her own son of his rights?
I will be his mother and father too.
Inspector of Wrecks
Math’s sympathetic. He’s used to taking in waifs and strays and wants everyone who is part of the family to have a place.
Apprentice
Does he mention the sons from the forest?
Inspector of Wrecks
No.
Apprentice
I know I’m Gwydion here, but I can’t help but see things from Aranrhod’s point of view. If what we think was right and Lleu is Gwydion’s child, then why should she stand by the offspring of incest?
Inspector of Wrecks
What are you saying? Can you blame the boy for how he was made? It’s not his fault.
Apprentice
I suppose you’re right. But I don’t like him.
Inspector of Wrecks
Nona! Wake up! You’re playing Gwydion. His father. You love the boy and will do anything to care for him. Keep in your character or this is a waste of time.
Apprentice
All right! All right!
I’m at a loss what to do, and need Math’s help on this. Tricks with ships have been fine for securing a name and arms, but what’s required here is a different order of magic. Math’s clearly a more powerful magician than Gwydion, he was able to punish him.
Inspector of Wrecks
Aranrhod said what, exactly?
Apprentice
‘I will swear a destiny on the boy that he will never have a wife from the race that is on this earth at present.’
Inspector of Wrecks
Think, think. What other nations do they have on the Earth? Animals in their various clans. You mated as an animal, Gwydion. How satisfactory a wife do you think you would have made?
Apprentice
As a she-wolf? Perfectly fine, if you want a partner who can kill and hunt. I’m not sure that’s what’s required here. The boy needs a wife who can hold her own at court. That person’s not a sow nor a hind, I guarantee it.
Inspector of Wrecks
Let’s approach the problem from another angle. What are the qualities we’d want in a wife? Beauty? Ability to reproduce?
Apprentice
To be faithful, and to be a companion to Lleu for the rest of his life, a comfort. To be a match. An answer.
Inspector of Wrecks
To be… a flower. Why don’t we make a woman from flowers to be his wife? If we conjure her from this coming season’s growth she’s not of a race already on the Earth.
Apprentice
A woman from flowers?
Inspector of Wrecks
She’ll be fruitful.
Apprentice
This must be a joke.
Inspector of Wrecks
No, Math’s very serious. It will take the two of them, him and Gwydion, to achieve it.
Apprentice
And what about her?
Inspector of Wrecks
How do you mean?
Apprentice
Forced to be human, to follow a script dreamt up by two perverts in order to please a bastard created by incest?
Inspector of Wrecks
It would seem a good solution all round. An elegant magic. I’ve never come across another tale with this motif in it. Striking, I’d say. Very desirable.
Apprentice
You make me sick!
Inspector of Wrecks
It’s a stroke of genius.
Apprentice
I’ll have nothing to do with it.
Inspector of Wrecks
Nona, you’re breaking your part again. Gwydion…
Nona, don’t do that. It’s dangerous for me and for you to leave before w
e’re finished. Nona! Come back!
*
Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 10:10
Apprentice
So he says to me: ‘You can’t storm out of the VR like that just because something in it offends you.’
And I go: ‘Oh no? Just watch me.’
‘And besides,’ he says, ‘it’s just a story about wizards and flowers. I can’t imagine what can be bothering you.’
‘Then you’re more stupid than you look,’ I say.
‘I beg your pardon?’ he goes, looking ten times more dense and he sputters on, ‘You can’t try to control a story like that, it’s going against everything we’re trying to do.’
‘Oh, is it? What are Math and Gwydion doing except forcing a plot to go their way? And you’re no better.’ That wiped the superior look off his face.
‘What do you mean?’ he goes.
‘I know what you’re trying to do with me. Mould me to be a little version of you. Because you’re lonely.’
‘But it’s my job to teach you.’
‘You’re doing far more than that. You’re hoping I’ll make a Little You, to carry on your legacy.’