by Paul McAuley
‘Some believe that we have already changed. That we have absorbed some of the traits and habits of the Quick,’ Prem said.
(Beside me, the Horse, who was once again pretending to doze, stirred and opened his eyes; I gave him a look and he shrugged and shut them again.)
‘We changed the Quick when we made them our servants,’ Prem said. ‘And by doing so, we changed ourselves. There are hardliners who say that we should let the Quick die out, when the war is over. That we are True, and should make sure that our proud heritage is not contaminated by posthuman decadence. Are you a hardliner, Isak?’
‘I am a servant of the Library,’ I said, and asked her which side she chose.
‘Most in my clan are hardliners,’ she said. ‘Like all the old clans.’
‘I understand they are not monolithic in their beliefs.’
‘They aren’t democracies, either. Scions must respect the beliefs of their elders and betters, and subdue their own beliefs for the greater good. It’s dangerous to have ideas that clash with the ideas of those above your rank. I’m sure it’s the same with your clan.’
‘We all try to do what is best for the Library. But we also like to talk, so there’s often little agreement over what that might be.’
There were two benches in the back of the half-track, hard against either side. Prem was sitting in the middle of one and the Horse and I sat on the other, facing her. Now she turned away, her profile keen in the wintry light as she looked out at the landscape, lost in some reverie. After a while, she said, ‘This is like one of the sagas, isn’t it? We’re on a kind of quest, and we are bound together by ties of blood and betrayal. You by Bree Sixsmith; me by Yakob. I suppose you librarians know all about those old, old stories.’
‘I know that all too many of them were tragedies.’
Prem’s smile was like a starburst in the wintry gloom. It occurred to me that if this really was like one of the old sagas, then she must be the heroine, fierce and beautiful and wild. And more than a little frightening to those who knew how dangerous such heroines were to those around them.
‘We’ll find him,’ she said. ‘I can feel it in my core. The same feeling I get on a hunt. I know it may seem foolish, to pin your hopes on something as abstract and subjective as a feeling. But if you had ever hunted, you’d know that you quickly learn to trust your instincts as much as your reasoning.’
‘I think I understand. After all, I hunt in my own small way,’ I said.
‘In hells and other virons. This is the real world, Isak, with real consequences. It’s completely different.’
‘I can assure you that actions in hells all too often have real consequences,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that why we’re here?’
Prem didn’t seem to hear me. ‘We come to places like this to renew our ties with the world in blood and death,’ she said. ‘And not always the death of our quarry. Scions are sometimes killed on hunts.’
‘Then let us hope this is no hunt, but instead our prize will fall into our hands as easily as one of those birds in the fabulous paradises of the future.’
Prem laughed, and pointed past the cabin of the half-track, towards a low cliff that rose against the iron sky. ‘We’ll find out soon enough. There’s the lodge.’
It was a rambling single-storey stone building that clung to the edge of the cliff and bridged a small river that plunged in a short waterfall to a deep pool below. Prem said that she wanted to interrogate and instruct the lodge’s staff, and left the Horse and me in a long, low-ceilinged room. Its curved wall-window gave a view of the river’s course scribbled across a rumpled plain of open scrub towards the close horizon, which had already swallowed Fomalhaut and was now rising towards the crimson spark of the minisun. The room was filled with the minisun’s cold and bloody light.
I was taking in the view and thinking that Lathi Singleton’s tier high in the thistledown city of Thule was the summer aspect of this little worldlet’s winter, and that both were as fake as any viron and far more sentimental, when movement off to one side of the pool directly below caught my eye. A quartet of riders – Prem Singleton and three Quick – on shaggy-pelted ponies, cutting away from the river and vanishing into the deep shadows at the edge of a stand of dark green conifers.
‘I hope that isn’t what it looks like,’ the Horse said.
He had come up behind me. Like Prem, he’d raided the dressing chest of the terminus, exchanging his colourful motley for a plain tunic and leggings worn under a fur coat that reached to his ankles.
‘What does it look like to you?’ I said.
‘Betrayal.’
That was what I had immediately thought, but I didn’t want to believe it. ‘Perhaps she wants some exercise after the rigours of the journey,’ I said.
‘Or perhaps she knows where her cousin is, and has gone to make some kind of bargain with him.’
‘If you believe I have been too trusting, you should say so plainly.’
The Horse shrugged inside his oversized fur coat. ‘She has a deal with you. And she also has a deal with those mysterious friends of hers. I can’t help wondering which she considers more important.’
‘You are welcome to follow her.’
The Horse struck a pose. ‘If you command it, I’ll do my best. Despite my complete – and completely ironic – lack of experience riding my totemic animal. Not to mention my utter ignorance of the territory. But I have another idea. That is, if you are in any way worried about your friend’s fidelity.’
‘You want to talk to the house servants. Exactly what I was about to suggest.’
‘Then I should do it at once,’ the Horse said.
‘Have them bring me something to eat, too,’ I said, as he walked off down the length of the room.
I turned back to the window and studied the stand of trees under which Prem and the Quicks had ridden. It was growing dark. Shadows lengthened and merged as the horizon rose up and obscured the minisun. Shells of light refracted by the worldlet’s halflife bubble slowly died away and stars stood everywhere in the black sky, shining hard and bright above an inky panorama.
More agitated by Prem’s disappearance than I cared to admit even to myself, I prowled the margins of the long room. It was carpeted with red halflife grass, and the few pieces of furniture were handmade, expensive, and shabby, in the fashion of places that are infrequently used and owned by no one in particular. The wall at the rear was of naked olivine, polished to reveal the glittering swirls of shock inclusions. There was an odd, small, square cave in the centre with a stuffed lion head mounted above it, eyes of black and gold glass and skin gone brittle and cracked and moulting. To one side was a rack of antique weaponry. Knives with long and variously shaped blades, crossbows, and rifles with long muzzles and mechanical firing pans. All of them handcrafted, all showing the wear of much use and the polish of much care.
I was examining a knife with a serrated blade as long as my forearm when the Horse returned. Carrying a tray covered with a cloth, he stalked down the length of the room, saying, ‘That was a fool’s errand. There’s no one here.’
‘No one at all?’
The Horse set the tray on a side table. ‘They must have left with your friend.’
‘A place like this must have more than three servants.’
‘Then three left with your friend, and the rest fled. Or they’re incarcerated in some place I can’t find. Or murdered. That’s a big knife. I hope you aren’t considering self-harm.’
‘I was marvelling at the inlay,’ I said, displaying the haft to the Horse. ‘It’s bone, carved so cleverly that it induces a strange and very fine emotion when you pass your fingers over it. A mingling of regret and happiness a little like nostalgia, if one can be nostalgic for something one has never experienced. The fakes sold in the Permanent Floating Market are as crude a kick as raw sugar compared to this exquisite confection. Try it.’
But the Horse flinched back when I attempted to hand the knife to him. ‘It isn’t for me
,’ he said.
‘It was made by a master craftsman from your glorious past. Carved, I believe, from bone grown in a culture of his own oocytes.’
‘That’s why it isn’t for me,’ the Horse said. ‘Your nervous system and mine, they are tuned differently. You feel only a small portion of what I would experience.’
‘Your loss,’ I said, and sheathed the knife in the rack.
‘Yes, it is.’ The Horse had a strange look that almost exactly mirrored the sensation I’d felt when I’d passed my thumb across the delicate ridges of the ancient sliver of bone. Then he shook his head and forced a smile and with a flourish whipped the cloth from the tray, revealing a plate of bread and cheese, pickles and curls of dried fish, and a bowl of white tea that steamed in the cold air. Saying, ‘I failed to find the servants, but I did manage to loot some provisions. In a crisis, it’s always good to eat when you can.’
‘This isn’t a crisis. Is it?’
‘I suppose that depends on whether or not she comes back.’
I warmed my hands on the bowl of tea. ‘She’ll come back. She needs my skills. But I admit that the manner of her departure is . . . odd.’
‘You’re wondering why she didn’t explain that she had an errand. Why she didn’t take us. Seeing as she needs our skills, and so on.’
‘I am wondering if some of her friends might be close by. After all, they arranged our travel, our disguises, and these accommodations.’
‘I’ve been wondering about them too,’ the Horse said. ‘And I’ve been wondering about a question she asked you on the ride here. About whether you side with the hardliners who believe that we Quick should be allowed to die out once the war has been won.’
‘What about it?’
‘I’ve been wondering if she left because she wasn’t satisfied by your answer.’
I sipped my tea. ‘I told her that I served the Library.’
‘I know. But you didn’t tell her that you weren’t a hardliner.’
‘That goes without saying, surely.’
‘Only if you are familiar with the customs and history of your clan. You assume that everyone you meet knows about them, even though most people don’t have the first idea about the way the Library works.’
‘Why should what I believe concern her?’
‘Because of what she believes.’
‘And what is that?’
‘This one is not sure that he should presume to hazard a guess at what a True might think.’
‘I’ll allow you an opinion about it. You have enough opinions about everything else.’
The Horse smiled. ‘Will you allow me two opinions?’
‘If I must.’
‘The first is about you. You have many admirable qualities, and there’s no doubting your skill in harrowing hells and dispatching demons. Which allied with my own small talents makes us such a formidable team.’
‘Is this about you or me?’
‘This one is your kholop. He is nothing without you.’
‘Spare me.’
‘The Library is your world. Perhaps that is why you do not realise that few people in the wider world know or care about it. Perhaps that is why you know much less about the wider world than you think.’
‘I know that I know enough, and no more.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I hope this has something to do with Prem’s disappearance.’
‘She asked you whether or not you were a hardliner.’
‘And I gave an unsatisfactory answer, according to you.’
‘You gave an answer that was clear to you and to anyone in the Library, and obscure to almost everyone else. I don’t think she realised that it was the answer she had been hoping for.’
‘Of course we are not hardliners. After all, the Library is based on Quick knowledge.’
‘And this worldlet was shaped by Quick machines. But look at it now: a half-ruined wilderness where yahoos hunt animals and various kinds of Quick cut into animal form.’
‘Yet we are remaking the Library, not destroying or perverting it.’
‘My point is that a familiarity or even a dependence on Quick technology does not always imply a sympathy with its creators. Librarians are different from most scions, yes, but most scions don’t know that.’
‘Prem may be smarter than you think.’
‘Let’s hope so, for I believe that you and she have much in common. Like librarians, some scions not only respect Quick culture, they also respect Quicks.’
‘You think Prem is one such.’
‘I told you I had two opinions to share with you. This is the second.’
‘And how do you know this?’
‘She has no servants. She was upset when that brute of a prefect massacred the workers in the hatchery. And most of all, she has at all times treated me with a touching courtesy and respect. You may think that isn’t much, but it means a lot to me. In short, she’s the very opposite of a hardliner,’ the Horse said, and explained exactly what he meant.
We talked about it a long time. At last, when it became clear that Prem might not soon return, I asked the lights in the room to dim and settled on a low couch covered in a worn and much-patched tapestry that depicted the exodus of our seedship from our last redoubt in the Solar System’s asteroid belt amidst a hectic and fanciful battle between ships and droids and drones, and slept. And woke when someone shook my shoulder, and turned over and saw Prem silhouetted against the flat pinkish light of dawn.
‘I know where he went,’ she said.
6
The battle for Cthuga was far from over. Ori and the rest of the surviving crew of The Eye of the Righteous had made no contact with the enemy since the falling star had struck their ship, but they had seen signs and wonders in the sky by day and by night. High contrails crossing and curling around each other. Sheets of lightning that flickered and danced across significant segments of the immense horizon. Deep pulsing heartbeats from far below. Screams and squawks, wails and unsettling, near-human cries in the radio spectrum. Rippling curtains of auroras. There were disturbances in the usually placid equatorial weather, too. Hazy streaks of cloud laid across thousands of kilometres high in the stratosphere. Little archipelagos of oval storms whirling around spikes of infrared energy rooted far below the upper cloud decks; thunderheads as big as continents boiling up, so tall that the station was forced to make long detours to avoid vast hailstorms and displays of thunder and lightning like the birth of something new and terrible in the world. Once, the ranging crew spotted something bright moving with great speed at approximately their level in the atmosphere, but whether it was a friendly or hostile craft was impossible to determine.
Perhaps The Eye of the Righteous was lost to enemy sight in the immensities of the planet. Or perhaps the enemy believed that it had been fully converted; or perhaps they had more important targets to deal with first. In any case, the ship sailed on unharmed, creeping slowly and uncertainly above the cloud deck, its crew always watchful, always fearful. Their ship a small world entire in itself, riding the winds ever westward, finding its way home through the signs and portents and detritus of vast battles.
There were seventeen of the crew left alive and, as was the way of Quicks, no clear leader had emerged. They preferred to talk everything through, several overlapping conversations that gradually merged into a single voice, as if coalescing around a strange attractor. It was soothing to reach that point where everyone, more or less, was thinking like everyone else, and it helped to bind them together.
Ori politely deflected suggestions that she should take control. She felt that the surviving Quick should not emulate the True now that they were, for the moment, free, masters of their own fate. No, they should revert to the old ways as much as possible, and because the old ways were known to them only by rumour and myth, they were in truth forging a new way of living. A democracy in which agreement was not won by appealing to logic or emotion or self-interest, but by a kind of mutual meditation.
And besides, she did not want the responsibility of leadership. She did not ever again want to stand out from the crowd, to become the target of someone else’s enmity. She was content to be no more important than anyone else, and to abide by whatever was decided by consensus.
Hereata pointed out the inconvenient truth that Ori wasn’t like everyone else because she alone could refuse to take command. Hira, or anyone else who dissented from the majority, would have to seize control by main force, but it was Ori’s to take if she wanted. All she had to do was reach out, and it would be placed in the palm of her hand.
‘You took charge in the moment of crisis,’ Hereata said. ‘Only you knew what to do to save the station. After that, the station was yours. The station, and everyone on it.’
‘Except Hira and Lani,’ Ori said.
‘They have no power over you,’ Hereata said. ‘Everyone knows that they made the wrong choice.’
‘I didn’t know that what I did was right until I did it,’ Ori said.
‘Of course you did,’ Hereata said. ‘You were right to forgive them, too.’
‘What else could I do? If I was a True I suppose I would have had them whipped and beaten, or given the long drop. But we are not Trues, and we should not behave like them. And besides, we have to fix up this poor old wreck before the enemy finds it again, and we need all the help we can get.’
For the moment, Ori and Hira had settled on frosty politeness and exaggerated observation of every small courtesy, and as in all things Lani followed her bunky’s example. But Ori knew that this truce could not last for ever. Hira was a danger to everyone because she refused to accept the reality of their situation. At every meeting, she argued that they should chase down and engage with the enemy because that had been Commander Tenkiller’s last order, and that they should also attempt to make contact with other stations where Trues would be able to tell them what to do; their debates on how to survive from day to day were, according to her, tantamount to mutiny. Ori tolerated this nonsense as best she could, but privately believed that Hira should have remained in custody so that she couldn’t poison the consensual process with her dangerous ideas. Sooner or later, the woman would attempt to assert herself again, and Ori would have to intervene.
