Nova Byzantium

by Matthew Rivett

  “That feels about right,” she said, jostling the bullion. “It’s not easy sneaking Al’ Madina gold into Nova Byzantium. Orbital pods are easy to spot near the frontier, as you already know.”

  “What did you tell them back there?”

  “As little as possible. Norsk-Statoil—even though it’s in decline—still pays protection money to the empire. The corporations call it a tax but it’s really a bribe. It allows them immunity from imperial meddling,” Miriam explained. “I told the patrolmen one of my geo-magnetometers picked up an anomaly—typical of re-entry—but mentioned nothing else. They bought it.”

  Both took turns at the helm. By morning, the northern shores of the Sea of Marmara appeared through the miasma. A halogen necklace flickered through layers of sea-gas, Constantinople’s ceaseless refurbishing factories working through the night. Beyond the industrial exurbs, closer to the city, slum districts dappled the hillside. Some called Nova Byzantium’s capital the world’s largest refugee camp, but authorities were quick to disclose that the “dormios” were periodically purged of non-citizens. The authenticity of the claims was doubted by its over-taxed citizens.

  Once known as “the Paris of the East,” Constantinople had shed such sister-city monikers. With Paris a depopulated slagheap sifted through by warring Gaulic clans, such nicknames were ironic. “The Tented City” was more appropriate, a moniker embraced by the senate and the emperor himself. It evoked notions of bygone epochs when the Ottoman sultans lived lives of luxury beneath silk pavilions; the truth was less opulent, however.

  Constantinople, unlike most cities on the Black Sea, was susceptible to episodic dead zones from the Bosphorus’ briny bacterial blooms. The senate decided long ago to seal the city. Sooty tarpaulins draped Constantinople’s taller buildings, from the Hagia Sophia in the Sultanhamet to the bleak skyscrapers of Maslak. The inner metropolis was a cocooned cityscape, embedded in the egg skein of some mammoth spider. The end result was a sprawling, climate-controlled labyrinth, the streets tinged with ancient odors no longer cleansed by rain. Outside the hermetic walls, the underclass was relegated to lives of hooded drudgery.

  Miriam pulled down the mainsail and started the cat’s electrical motor. They rounded the old city’s hilly peninsula and cruised into The Golden Horn. The inlet was now a silted estuary of waterweeds, the open-water ingress of eras past stagnant except for a few dredged canals. Up the main channel, the catamaran skirted past jellyfish seiners and clunky salvage barges. On the western shore, tucked against the city’s minaret spine, Miriam pulled up to a busy quay and docked.

  “I wasn’t expecting you for a few months,” Miriam admitted, tying off a bowline to a rusted cleat. “In the meantime, we’ll have to tuck your payload away and out of sight.”

  “When’s the flight?” Uri asked.

  “I haven’t arranged it yet. Hopefully in a few weeks if we’re lucky. No one was expecting your little stunt,” she admonished.

  In Miriam’s eyes, Uri’s bravado was disdainful and irresponsible. Archivists were creatures of survival and instinctive caution. To taunt the status quo was brash and ego—a cowboy move—rich with jinx. She’d little patience for it.

  “Where’re we going with these?” Uri said, shouldering the cumbersome duffel and stepping onto the dock.

  “I have connections. I know a restorer who works in one of the Basilica Cisterns. We’ll stash them there for now.”

  “What about your flat? No offense, but I don’t know this restorer.”

  Miriam had offered to put Uri up in an adjoining loft she’d converted into a lab. The invite was a request by Sayyid. Estranged from the city’s cosmopolitan pleasures, the sheikh didn’t trust Uri to the pull of the city’s debauchery, relying on Miriam to keep him focused on the mission. Although offended by the slight, Uri didn’t mind the insinuation. A month spent in the Beyoglu’s buggy pensions was a headache to be avoided.

  She tied off the mooring line and looked at him, liquid brown eyes narrowed. “You want to stash two megaton-caliber nuclear weapons in my home?”

  He shrugged.

  “You really are a crazy fool.”

  “It was just a thought.”

  Miriam locked the catamaran’s hatches and led him through the crowds to the old city’s pressurized gate. A whoosh of spice and incense overwhelmed him; it’d been years since he’d walked Nova Byzantium’s pulsing arteries.

  Like the old city’s stratified architecture, the narrow streets bustled with the post-modernity of technology: autos, haute couture, body-implants, and consoles. Even eyewear ran the gambit of mixed cultures, from wavelength-shifting Ferragamos to pseudo-Victorian monocles. Fashion was transitory and sentimental, an embrace of a Pre-Shock past never to reemerge. Uri preferred the sleek sterility of the caliphate’s orbital kingdom or the rusted skeletons of abandoned cities to Constantinople’s self-indulgent bohemia.

  Generations had been filled with a collective denial. Constantinople’s citizens refused to acknowledge that Nova Byzantium’s greatness had long since faded. Uri loathed the maudlin segues of the past. Life, civilization, humanity: it all needed a clean break, a sea change. His urge to burn away the clutter was now almost instinct. Nostalgia was an illness.

  Miriam walked ahead of him, her confident pace choreographed as she wove past stalls of console vendors and gray-market hackers. Despite her former life, she was equally at home in the crowded Byzantine streets, comfortable in its faded grandeur.

  The duffel’s straps dug into his shoulder as Uri labored to keep up. She’d given him no indication how far the cistern entrance was from the quay, and from her aggravated tone, she cared little about Uri’s sweaty plight. Head down, he continued to struggle with the nuclear arsenal, careful not to stumble over the street’s uneven tarmac.

  Constantinople’s mash-up of languages and accents provided Uri a cultural camouflage. Every corner of the empire was represented in shouts and conversations as they walked: Kurdish gossip, Ukrainians haggling, Armenian prayers—all synched to a soundtrack of Turkish Arabesk that pumped from the balconies and storefronts.

  Past the Yeni Mosque and through the lower spice bazaar’s automated dispensary, Miriam led him deeper into the Sultanhamet’s morning throb. Above, the rebuilt Beyezit Tower and its two hundred meters of synchronized marquees, cast an LED aurora through the tenting. A fixed beacon, it was the only landmark in the old city’s rabbit warrens.

  An exchange of Latin caught Uri’s attention. Wary of Constantinople’s paramilitaries, his guard was up. Despite the city’s cosmopolitan mix, an archivist’s anonymity was never guaranteed. Free to roam the Earth’s lawlessness, islands of law and order felt airless and vexatious. With the crush of civilization came an adjustment period.

  Miriam stopped outside the stone archway of a han, an old merchant courtyard dating from days of the Silk Road, and waited for Uri to catch up. She stared into the gate’s cyclopean retinal scanner, letting its red beam crisscross her iris. They both waited.

  “Do you have any local money?” he asked, panting.

  “A few notes, why?”

  “Then why didn’t we rent a pedicab?”

  Like a parent, she scolded him with her eyes. Uri, about to mount a defense, capitulated; the argument wasn’t worth it. He was going to have to choose his battles.

  “Never mind.”

  The blue doors swung open, pushed by unseen hydraulic arms. They walked into an arcade surrounded by shuttered storehouses. An elderly man, his face dusky and wrinkled, stood near a doorway. He was ethnically Istanbuli and wore a beige tunic underneath a tattered sports jacket, a fez canted atop his head.

  “His name is Hafiz. He does not speak Latin,” Miriam informed him.

  Uri shook his frail hand and nodded.

  Behind a collapsible gate, Hafiz led them down a spiral stair into a vast cistern. The water level, far higher than in centuries past, filled the reservoir a few meters from its vaulted arches. They stepped into a flat-bottomed punt and
pushed off from a stone landing. With Zliva and Pravo’s cumbersome weight rocking the shallow boat, Uri wrestled himself to the center. They floated through a forest of Roman columns, the chamber’s dim lighting giving the place a Styx-like ambience. Hafiz pointed out peculiarities of the sunken architectures, but Miriam’s apathetic translation left Uri ignorant. He peered into the water at the Corinthian columns wavering beneath the languid surface. He dipped his hand in and tasted the water, fresh and sweet.

  They moored next to a filtering unit. Uri pulled the containers out from the duffel and made sure the vacuum seals were fully engaged. He doubted Miriam had informed Hafiz of their deadly contents. Knowledge of a doomsday device stashed in his cistern would’ve made him less than accommodating.

  “He said you can tie it off here.” Miriam pointed to a submersed filtering unit. “Hafiz is the only one who comes down here. It’ll be safe for now. The water will cool them if they start to get hot.”

  Miriam had thought ahead. She was as shrewd as she was aloof. But as a trained geophysicist, the complicated interaction of heavy nuclei was basic science. Uri lowered the warheads into the water and tied the frayed rope to the filter’s slurping manifold.

  Back at street level, Miriam handed Hafiz a stack of Byzantine shekels and said goodbye. “Hosh cha kaluhn,” Uri blurted. The oldster gave him a dumb-deaf grimace, trying but failing to understand his mangled pidgin. Waving goodbye to the stooped Istanbuli, they continued on. He pulled out a cigarillo and lit it, his last.

  “If there’s time, I’d like to wander the Grand Bazaar—this is my last one,” he said, gesturing to the leafy roll. “There’s a tobacconist there—at least there was ten years ago.”

  Miriam again chastised him with her eyes, eyebrows raised. Arms crossed, she looked at her wristwatch then gazed off in thought.

  “I won’t be long,” Uri begged

  “All right, archivist,” Miriam said, capitulating. “But if I catch you smoking in my flat, you’ll be sleeping out on the roof with the crows.” Crows, for whatever reason, filled the skies of Constantinople with their black murders, a natural order somehow upended.

  “Understood,” Uri smiled, encouraged by Miriam’s brief flicker of warmth.

  They cut through the lush greenhouses of the Bayezid Mosque and into a cat-infested alleyway when Uri’s console beeped. He activated the communiqué reader and scrolled to two new messages.

  “Sayyid finally get a hold of you?” Miriam quipped.

  “It would appear so, however unfortunate.”

  Archivist U. Vitko, It would seem in your case that the ends justify the means, as you like to say. Congratulations on a successful, yet abbreviated journey. But let this be a warning: Any further undue risk to vital mission hardware or mission objectives will result in full termination of your contract with the caliphate. Best of luck, keep me informed ::–Sheikh Sayyid Al Azraq Hawat #138-NAQ-1B3:: sent via PDP-8 :: encryption clock 1.31 hrs ::

  “A backhanded compliment . . . you arrogant pompous inbred,” Uri whispered.

  “Are you talking to me?” Miriam snapped.

  “No, Sayyid,” Uri said, looking up. “He said if I pulled a stunt like that again, I’d no longer be an agent under contract for Al Fadah Madina.”

  “Don’t mention that name in public,” Miriam said, pressing her finger to her lips. “Our business with the sheikhdom is not to be discussed outside clandestine channels.”

  “Understood,” Uri sighed.

  “Anyway, I happen to agree with Sayyid. You risked the success of this mission with your audacious misadventure. Such foolishness is stupefying.”

  Miriam was paranoid. Uri doubted the city’s spooks had indoctrinated the slinky cats underfoot as spies. As for the other slight—poached and spitted, bones scattered across the Sinai, death was exponentially more likely trekking up from Soqotra than his celestial barnstorm. Calculi Sayyid understood well but was too prideful to admit.

  “Point taken.” He didn’t want to get into another argument; he was more interested in the second communiqué.

  Uri, it appears you’ve kept the Kali procurement for yourself after having partaken. Forbidden by sharia law, we Muslims are not allowed to indulge such hallucinogenic idolatry, so it is taboo in Al Fadah Madina. As an infidel, I would like to offer you supplemental compensation for additional inquiries into the mask’s technological beginnings. All that is required is a summary report, documenting what you find. We are very curious. :: unknown #656-PIL-9W3 :: sent via Excelsior :: encryption clock 0.003 hrs::

  The sheikh behind the Kali mask procurement had surfaced at last. The mystery man was willing to make do with a surrogate, afraid to dabble with the taboo directly. Uri had taken the bait. The sheikh had somehow accessed Uri’s console routing codes and bypassed Sayyid’s anachronistic dispatching processor. It could’ve been any one of the caliphate’s thousand sheikhs, but probably an underling within Sayyid’s inner circle. This sort of double-dealing, Uri had learned, was common among the caliphate’s brotherhood.

  CHAPTER NINE

  January 2164 C.E.

  The ship was a sunken Roman galley, a three-oared trireme, lying upright on the sandy seabed. Sitting like a captain on its cedar throne, Sava overlooked the sulfur-blackened deck from the forecastle. His legs were molded to the decking as if part of the vessel. Somewhere between his knees and ribcage, his body transmogrified from the wood’s pulpy cellulous to calcified tissue. A dull phantom ache sapped his mind.

  Clumps of aggregate floated above him, bacteria collecting into a thin mist on the wavering halocline. Past the purple strata, toward the surface, undulating blobs pulsed to an electrochemical rhythm. There were millions of them, sealing the abyssal anoxia from the fluvial waters. Dead jellyfish fell from the bloom and collected on the sea bottom; their bodies clumped into heaps of biomass.

  One of the dying creatures fell near Sava’s feet. Barely alive, its stringy tentacles pulsed to a bizarre swan song. He stared into its gelatinous center as the hypnotic yellow strands danced in the current. Unvoiced cant—a telepathic music—elicited a cross-species empathy; it was trying to speak to him.

  “What do you want?”

  “We are dying. You are our voice, the mouth of the dead, and it is you who will deliver our requiem.”

  “I . . . ” He opened his mouth as bubbles escaped through his nose. “I speak for no one.”

  “Are you not the captain? Do you not speak for your kind?”

  “This—” he said, gesturing to the ship, “—is not my warship. I am, if anything, just a passenger.”

  “You represent the empire. You are their emissary.” The limp tentacles constricted around his wooden feet. Frenzied, they dug into the waterlogged cedar like burrowing worms.

  “I did not mean to exploit you,” Sava said, eyes bulging wide. “I was desperate and I needed the money.”

  “Then you will be our watchman, our keeper. And we will be reborn with you.”

  “I . . . I don’t understand.”

  “Look at your hand, it’s quickening.”

  Sava looked down. His fingertips were glued to the wooden armrest, miniature nails bonding flesh to the wood. He couldn’t tear away. Like his legs, the throne was merging with him. He looked up at the jellyfish clouds. They were all dying now, a gelatinous precipitate raining down by the thousands. He felt the slimy mesoglea brush past him.

  “I’m a demon, aren’t I?”

  The pain intensified. He tore at his moorings, leveraging himself with his good hand. Unable to break free, he slumped. He was one with the throne, a statue forever entombed.

  “No, not a demon. Demons are only blessed by the damned.”

  The voice faded into watery silence. The deck was full of milky corpses. Like seeds, a garden of polyps sprung up from the wreck, their small flagella reaching toward the magenta light above.

  Sava sprang from his bed and grabbed his left calf with both hands to knead the muscle spasm. It happened more often late
ly: once a week, sometimes twice. The others reported carpal tunnel and numbness below the elbow, but Sava was the only one complaining of a “charley horse.” A few weeks on, the Morosov treatment’s side effects continued to plague the men.

  He straightened his leg, locked the knee, and touched his toes to relieve the cramp. As the pain retreated, he flipped on the bunk light and lit a cigarette. It was four in the morning and almost time for his watch. He put on his gear, rinsed his face in the shallow aluminum sink, and grabbed his rifle.

  The Crown of Thorns, or “the Crown” as the fifteen Alkonost called it, was a bleak post, nothing short of a living tomb. A common mess joined the mercenaries’ billets, interconnected by tall, narrow hallways. A spiral staircase led to the Crown’s operations center, a monitoring station adjoined to a meeting room filled with wobbly office loungers around a metal table. Anemic light from outside leaked in through narrow slit windows. Despite its northern latitude, the Crown was curiously never cold; ambient warmth seeped through its smooth dark concrete, possibly geothermal, no one was sure.

  “Another day of absurdity,” Sava said, slumping into the cracked vinyl of a swivel chair.

  “I don’t know, Sava. The lizards on this rock can take you apart quicker than a cranked-up Ural. Ever vigilant,” Mach said, surfing the wall of infrared and optical monitors.

  “The coffee’s not bad.” Sava sipped from a thermos canteen.

  “Selassie’s finest; straight from the Horn. A girl working in contracts owed me a favor, so I upped our logistics rider.”

  Sava’s eyes perked. “Tatiana or Ludmilla?”

  “Neither, her name’s Oksana. She knows a cousin of mine, lives in the old Jewish quarter . . . virtually family.”

  “Family didn’t stop your father from marrying your mother,” Sava laughed.

  “Never make fun of my mother,” Mach smirked, pulling out his handgun and waving at Sava.

  “But there’s just so much to make fun of,” Sava grinned, gesturing with his hands held wide. “What’s your maty up to these days, 140 kilos?”