The Thran

by J. Robert King

  “Not this again,” she responded, lifting the napkin from her lap, crumpling it, and letting it fall across her plate. “We explained all this no more than twenty minutes ago.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s as if you’ve split into two people who don’t talk to each other.”

  Yawgmoth nodded. “Not a typical effect of the phthisis, from what I’ve—”

  “Shut up,” Glacian growled at Yawgmoth. He turned wrathful eyes on his wife. “A candlelight dinner? When I’m sitting in the other room?”

  Rebbec bowed her head, seeming to muster patience. “I invited you to this a week ago. You said you wouldn’t come if—”

  “If I’d be here,” Yawgmoth put in.

  “Shut up!” Glacian demanded.

  “And I had already asked him. It was in appreciation for his intensive work on your case.”

  “Intensive work?”

  “Yawgmoth has been working long into the night on your condition….”

  “On worsening it!” Glacian fumed. “I suppose you’ve worked long into the night with him? Sometimes you even discuss me together in your sleep.”

  Rebbec blanched, and her eyes grew angry. “What are you trying to imply?”

  “Oh, isn’t it obvious? Throw off the old genius for the new? Trade in the used up old leper for the man who preys on used up old lepers—”

  “Stop, Glacian,” Rebbec hissed. “Stop before you say something you regret.”

  “I’ve never said anything I regret.”

  “Yes! And look at you!” Yawgmoth shouted, standing. “Bitter. Angry. Paranoid. Alone except for one person in all the world and determined to push her away too. This is how you pay back fidelity?”

  “All right, enough, both of you!” Rebbec said. She rubbed her temples in pain. “We’ve had this argument already—just twenty minutes ago. Now dinner is done. Show us what you wanted us to see.”

  Glacian shook his head, a petulant child. “Take me back, Xod.”

  With a sigh, the young man said, “Just like last time.” He pulled on the wheeled chair.

  “Wait, Xod,” Yawgmoth said, striding toward them. “I don’t want another dinner interrupted.”

  “You’ll not have another dinner with my wife! Go, Xod.”

  “Stay, Xod,” Yawgmoth commanded. He stooped and snatched up the pile of papers. “Ah, this.” He nodded, casually flipping through the pages and holding out drawings for Rebbec to look at. “Ingenious, really. He’s discovered that every charged powerstone contains a large plane. See—here’s the logic string that proves it, and a set of calculations—”

  “Give that back!” Glacian shouted. His hands clawed impotently at the air. “Xod, get it back!”

  Xod strode out around the wheeled chair.

  Yawgmoth held a staying hand before him. “Here—these are sketches of buildings you could build in those spaces. One foundation stone in your temple could hold ten thousand such buildings, a million people—the whole of Halcyon and the caves and the people for two hundred miles.”

  Looking up from the page, Rebbec said, “Glacian, this is magnificent!”

  “Give it back! How do you know all this?”

  Yawgmoth shrugged, flipping pages. “You said you’d been working on your own cure. I was understandably curious. You sleep a lot—I didn’t even have to lift pages. They were all laid out in front of me.”

  “You’re a thief. You steal other men’s ideas. You claim them for your own,” Glacian roared.

  “Look at this—cities within cities!” Rebbec marveled.

  “There’s just one catch,” Yawgmoth said with a gentle laugh. “There’s no way to get into or out of one of these planes—infinite spaces that can never be reached.”

  “Give me that!” Glacian said, wrenching the papers from the hands of his tormentor. In a fit of pique, he flung back the incinerator grate and hurled the pages within. Immediately, they burst into flame.

  “No!” Rebbec shouted, falling to her knees before the incinerator. With bare hands she raked burning pages from the fire and patted them out on the floor. “Why did you do that?”

  “You don’t deserve my work. The city doesn’t deserve my work,” Glacian hissed. “Take me out of here, Xod.”

  “Gladly,” the young man responded and pulled him toward the door.

  Even as Rebbec hauled charred sketches and equations from the fire, Yawgmoth circled before the man in the wheeled chair and knelt down in his path.

  “Here’s a little something for you to think about as you look for a door into those crystals. If a plane is created whenever a powerstone is charged, perhaps a powerstone could be charged by absorbing an existing plane. If you find a doorway in, you may also find a means of absorbing large tracts of land, even whole worlds—a doomsday weapon. As with all your discoveries, the brilliance of this new theory casts a killing shadow.”

  “Let go! Let go!” Glacian shrieked, pounding on Yawgmoth’s hand. “Get me out of here, Xod. Get me out of here!”

  Yawgmoth released the chair and stood, letting the invalid pass. He crossed arms over his chest, shook his head, and laughed.

  “Get over here,” Rebbec called, struggling to put out the burning pages. “Help me save what I can.”

  With a casual shrug, Yawgmoth approached. “We’ll save what we can. Don’t worry about the rest. I’ve memorized much of it. I’m not the genius of Halcyon for nothing, you know.”

  * * *

  —

  Glacian awoke that night in his bed. Morning crouched below the horizon. He didn’t remember going to bed. He didn’t remember being strapped in. The last thing he remembered was sitting in the lab, waiting angrily for Yawgmoth and Rebbec to finish their meal and come see his work.

  His work!

  By the light of early morning, he could see the papers did not rest on the stand beside the bed. Whoever had put him here must have left it lying on his desk like a half-finished meal. Glacian slipped one arm from beneath the straps, grasped a cane, and rapped loudly on the bed frame. He had to keep up the racket for whole minutes—he, an invalid with barely the strength to breathe—before the sleepy healer on duty came from the next room.

  It was Xod, muzzy and ruffled. “What? What is it?”

  “Go get the manuscript.”

  Xod gave a weary sigh. “What manuscript?”

  “The one I’ve been working on for six months, you idiot. What other manuscript?”

  A look of dread filled the young man’s eyes. “Oh, no. Not this—”

  “Not what? Bring me the manuscript.”

  “You burned the manuscript.”

  “What?”

  “I was there. You threw it into the incinerator.”

  “You liar! You lying monster! Where is it? Where are you hiding it?”

  “I’m not hiding it. Ask Yawgmoth. Ask your wife!”

  “You’re all in this together.”

  “They’ve got whatever’s left of it—burned up bits.”

  “I can’t believe it! You’re trying to destroy me. Yawgmoth is stealing my ideas.”

  “It’s not like that at all—”

  “Monsters! Damned monsters!”

  This was no sedan chair. Rebbec had helped design the interior spaces of this flying ship, had pored over her husband’s plans for canvas and spar, propeller and strut. Now she rode in it, in the seat beside Yawgmoth.

  “I had no idea you were a flyer,” she said, her eyes tracing out the fertile lowlands of the Losanon Basin. The broad valley led to the great city of the same name and beyond to the sea.

  “I learned when I was a healer in Jamuraa. It was the only way one man could cover two hundred thousand square miles of sparsely populated tribal lands.” He adjusted a lever—the cockpit bristled with them, each labeled as to
function and each bearing a distinctive grip so they could be manipulated without looking. “Of course, those craft weren’t anything like this—held together with vines and spit, driven by powerstone chips the size of your thumb nail. Not like this.”

  Even among airships, there were few like this. Most were cargo dirigibles with great masses of inflated canvas above, providing lift to the slow and ponderous craft. They often had slim propellers at the end of pivoting arms. Sleeker craft were fewer—war vessels stationed along the borders of the empire, poised for air strikes against barbarian incursions. These fast bombers and fighters rarely approached Halcyon.

  The ship they rode in now was the elite of the elite—one of eight cutters built by the Thran capital. They were designed for the express purpose of quickly fetching elders and eldests from far-flung city-states to attend emergency councils. Each cutter could carry up to thirty persons with little room for other provisions. The vessel held itself aloft by means of a rigid set of curved wings that arced up from the central hull of the craft. These were aided by a pair of buoyant vacuum spheres, one in the nose and the other in the tail. The wings and silver-painted canvas of the cutter made it seem a giant shark with mouth agape. Its tremendous speed and agility only strengthened the impression. Regional uprisings had been averted by the fearsome sight of eight shark-skinned cutters arriving over a city.

  The cutters flew once or twice a year, revolts were quelled, and peace was restored. This time, the uprising was not an oppressed underclass. It was a disease. This time, Halcyon flew its own delegates out to the cities at large.

  “We’ll be able to see Losanon soon,” Yawgmoth said, easing a lever that was linked to ten separate struts. “It is a beautiful place—tropical with palms and lush forests. It’s also booming. They’ve been converting swamp where they can and building stilt houses on it where they cannot. This will be an interesting stop for you. You said you wanted to study the architecture of the empire—”

  “The architecture of the empire…Yes. That’s why I came,” Rebbec said, nodding as if to convince herself. In truth, she had come for a whole host of ill-defined reasons, the least of which was the architecture of the empire.

  Rebbec had come because Glacian had been comatose for nearly two months. The shock of his burned manuscript had been too much. Her bedside vigil had grown heartbreaking. Every night—in penance for some offense she still could not identify—she sat by his bedside and reconstructed the burned fragments of his notes. She read aloud from the theories until she herself had them nearly memorized. She grilled Yawgmoth to provide what he remembered of the missing pages. None was enough. None of it brought her husband back. He did not so much as open an eye, mutter a word.

  Yawgmoth spoke a word, spoke three: “Come with me.” That was the main reason Rebbec had come. Yawgmoth had asked her to. She could use a couple months away from the sickbed, a couple months in the company of this visionary genius, tirelessly saving Halcyon and the whole empire.

  That was why Yawgmoth made this trip—to save the empire.

  He had found advanced cases of phthisis among elders and eldests of the council. This was no longer a plague of the poor. Many of those suffering from the phthisis had once opposed the efforts they now benefited from. That sent a scare through the whole empire. The council voted that Yawgmoth should establish healing corps in the other seven city-states.

  Each would be run by healers trained by Yawgmoth himself. Fourteen such healers rode now in the cutter amidships. Another group of thirty or so would meet them in the cities—one time exiles with Yawgmoth. This core of eugenicists would train locals in the treatment of phthisis, the principles of physical medicine—surgical technique, drug application, experimentation, vivisection—and techniques for handling hostile interviews and plague revolts. They would be healers and fighters. After these two months, each city of the empire would have the seed of a healing army planted in its heart.

  To make one trip count for two, Yawgmoth would also assess the military reforms in each city-state. He was empowered to suggest—and sometimes require—further action to reform the weak and corruption-riddled imperial guard and Thran army.

  That is why Yawgmoth made this trip: Healers and soldiers.

  “Look, there. Is that the delta?” Rebbec asked. She pointed beyond the shell of the fore-wing.

  There the wide brown river that had snaked lazily through the basin emptied onto an alluvial plain. Among hulking willows and tall tangles of cypress, a city spread. Its lights glimmered low above ever-present water. Every fire cast a shimmering twin in the black flood beneath. The outlying homes seemed natural outgrowths of the muddy embankments. Some had a globular logic, like bubbles mounding above a submerged pocket of decay. Others were bulbous and half-sunken like the cypress roots that surrounded them. Thatched lodges shouldered their round roofs among palms. Stilt houses waded in furtive herds in the gentler eddies and backwaters of the almighty river.

  Rebbec laughed. She could not remember the last time she had laughed.

  Yawgmoth smiled, turning toward her. “What is it?”

  “The architecture of the empire—” she giggled happily. “—beautiful forms, perfectly adapted to the landscape, perfectly evolved for this watery basin. But can you imagine any of these shaggy ungulates lining the streets of Halcyon?”

  He was laughing now too. “A bit too earthy, yes.”

  “A bit too marshy,” Rebbec added, wiping a tear from her eye. “Behind buildings like these, you expect to find gnat swarms and piles of droppings.”

  Yawgmoth slapped the arm of his seat. “Now don’t make me crash.”

  Deeper into the delta, the traditional materials—thatch, bamboo, mud, and wood—were replaced by stone, mortar, plaster, and glass. The natural duns and reds gave way to shades of white and gray. The small-scale forms were amplified and reinvented in a civic architecture of domes and curves.

  Rebbec shook her head and sighed contentedly as the cutter passed alongside the white tumble of the central city.

  “I shouldn’t laugh. There is much I can learn here. Many beautiful forms.”

  Yawgmoth released one lever he had been drawing back, and his hand dropped, warm and muscular, to her knee.

  “If laughter is all Losanon can offer you, just now, it offers plenty.”

  * * *

  —

  The quarantine in the Caves of the Damned was filling.

  Gix laughed ruefully. “Lovely beds.”

  The loads of lumber had kept coming, and the refugees atop them. According to plans Yawgmoth had sent, Gix and his crew had constructed deep shelves along the walls of the great cavern. The sick would lie there, side by side, heads outward. Each shelf was tilted toward the wall, with the lower half of the patients left bare. Liquid and solid waste were channeled down to fall between the scaffold and the wall. Once a week, a brigade of buckets doused the patients, and the overflow rinsed their bunks. Yawgmoth considered it an innovation.

  Gix considered it an atrocity. Lesions grew rampantly. Bedsores and splinters ravaged skin. Rancid meat gruel was ladled into cracked lips. In wet darkness, the sick lay. They died. Patients were encouraged to report deaths immediately. It meant more elbow-room and more gruel. Health corps workers stripped the fresher bodies, pierced them with meat hooks, and hoisted them to a conveyor that crossed the ceiling. They were disposed of in an adjacent cavern, redolent with steam. The dead who had begun to rot were left longer, some so rat-eaten that only bone and hair remained for the barrows. Once a week, serum arrived. Once a day, there was more rancid meat gruel. Atrocity.

  Were Gix to rebel, Yawgmoth would simply cut off the supply of serum. Every last one would die—corpses ensconced in a wall crypt. If Gix obeyed, these poor wretches lived on, and another batch of prisoners got to ascend.

  “Better to live in atrocity than to die in glory.”

  It had become the
commanding principle of Gix’s life. It was why he had not died in that first attack on the mana rig four years ago. It was why he had not killed Glacian, had not killed Rebbec, had called off the riots and become the servant of the oppressor. All Gix’s ideals melted away before the simmering gaze of Death. Self-preservation kept Gix alive but transformed him into the image of his cruel master.

  A runner came up the foot path. He was a young boy—the one who had arrived on that first elevator ride. He had survived an ordeal that had killed a man. The message was not lost on the lad. He made himself Gix’s assistant, was ever present and damnably helpful. Gix didn’t even know his name.

  “There’s another shipment arriving….Lumber and lepers.” The boy had overheard Gix’s disparaging comment one day and had made it standard terminology. “Word has it…there are twenty-three this time.”

  “Damn that Yawgmoth,” Gix cursed. “We’ve no more room!”

  “No point cursing Yawgmoth,” the boy pointed out unhelpfully.

  “He’s the one who put you here, boy. He’s the one who damned you.”

  An ingenuous smile crossed his face. “He’s the one who’ll save me, like he’s saved all those others. The upper caves are emptying. He calls people to the light.” It was religious rhetoric from the Faith of the Damned. The cult had arisen in the last year, and it made a savior of Yawgmoth.

  Gix hissed, “Everyone who climbs out of here climbs a pile of corpses.”

  “You know, with the upper caves emptying, we could take over one of them. Make it a quarantine. There’d be room for hundreds more.”

  Blinking wearily, Gix sighed. “Yes. Of course. It is a good idea.”

  * * *

  —

  Health corps were operational now in the seven Thran city-states. Fourteen pairs of founders were in place, thirty-some eugenicists had returned from exile, and locals were lining up to learn to heal and fight. Among the citizens, many cases were already diagnosed. A great many artificers, forever surrounded by powerstone matrices, were succumbing to the disease. The oldest and best artificers were the most sorely afflicted. They who once had banished the eugenicists were now at their mercy. Hastily built quarantine camps were filling with artificers.