Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  “No, no,” Zal said. “Don’t disturb her. But if Zarzaret is in town, I want to see him.”

  “As you wish.” The sprite flew away on its dragonish wings, bumping up and down with the weight of its burden.

  The smell of the canals, thick and rotting, mingled with the far more pleasant scents of the gardens and the wafting traces of various spicy foods in the warm morning air. Zal took a deep breath and felt his ears prickle with the amount of waste aether drifting about from all the sorcery that burned on day and night in every house and corner. It was almost the antithesis of Alfheim but just as abundant in its way. Not far off, among a glade of deathflame trees, fire elementals spiralled like gnats in the thin branches. The blue hiss and flare of methane burn danced in the heart of the black flowers, carbon petalled. White and blue fire sprites darted between them, sipping, while their larger cousins whirled together into vortices of lazy fire, licking on the tar sap that oozed from the flat rubbery bark. Black smokes plumed lazily here and there.

  At the centre of the gathering Zal, adept in fire, could feel the beginnings of a firestorm building. The outer elementals were whistling to their airy counterparts to beckon drafts into their midst, promising the lift of heat and a ride up through the muggy daytime into the cool, pristine heights of the upper atmosphere in return for a concentrated influx of oxygen. Between the roots of the oldest trees small pools of petroleum fractions shivered and hazed the air just beneath the fire blazers’ gathering tribe.

  Events like this were reasonably rare and fire blooms even more so, since he could never see one in Otopia short of wantonly loitering around fire stations waiting to be called. In Alfheim it meant volcano walking. But Demonia was rich with hydrocarbons and life-forms which processed the same. He thought it couldn’t hurt just to take a look and moved closer. Other adept demons, attracted by the same sense of an impending surge, drifted in from the sky and across from various entry points into the park from the city. Two of them from the same Talent path as Zal, from the Mousa, had brought pyre flutes together with bellows-pump.

  “Long-ears,” said one of them to Zal, even though his own ears were at least as large beneath his curling horns. “Longtime we not see you in the Guildhalls, you been missing us, heh?”

  Under the demon’s attention and with proximity to the others, Zal felt the flare on his back grow warm and begin to blossom through his skin. Beside him the rest attuned themselves to one another and to the tone of the fires dancing in the trees, changing gently from reds and yellows to the hotter fires of blue and white. A surge of energy, the first ripple of a promise, went around them, passed from one to another like a torch. It lit their flares more brightly for the instant as it moved and with it the mages in the group began muttering some incantation to the elementals, attracting their attention.

  The demon who had spoken to Zal produced a wind whistle and began to blow it. Compared to the tiny numbers of such beings in Otopia the gathering of elementals was shocking with its suddenness and ferocity. Within seconds the wind was strong enough to require an effort to withstand. Zal’s hair whipped around, blinding him and lashing his face. He heard the soft fluttering of fire in the glade become a hiss and then, as the pools lit with a soft explosion a wave of heat physically pushed him back into the onrushing wind so he was caught between the flame and the air. The hiss became a ferocious roar. He and the other watching demons were suddenly all sucked forwards to the blaze by the backdraft, the mischievous hands and tendrils of air elementals tugging at them in passing as they hurtled into the heart of the flame.

  They did not burn. The fire caused the natural fire of their flares to ignite and spread out into sheets of incandescent energy; aether channelled into flame, as individual as a fingerprint and as harmless to the one enveloped in it as his or her own skin. It was the fire that touched the living flames of the elementals as they gathered and united into a single storm entity, fuelled on the energy of the demons and the sap of the trees, lent power by the sharing of the air.

  A spinning column of fire shot up into the sky. The demons with wings rode on it as high as they could and those without, including Zal, floated in the rotating pool at its base like swimmers, each barely visible to the others through curtains of blazing plasma. From their places the musicians flung their pyre flutes outward and down where their enchanted bases sent ceramic roots down into the fuel source. Air and fuel mixed and shot up through the pipes, sounding two burring notes of continuous burn at pitches calibrated by demon technicians to induce an even greater waveform for maximum combustion. The two tubes vibrated with the incredible sound, there as invitation for the god of Fire to use as a voice.

  Since his rebirth Zal had not experienced anything like it. Once the burn had reached a tipover point the energy for which he had been only the conduit from his aether connection to the fire suddenly reversed flow. Now the power of the mighty elemental and his fellow demons began to charge him with enormous, astonishing force. The moment it began to happen he became simultaneously aware of two things. One was that this was exactly what he hoped would happen when he first noticed the elementals and pretended he was only curious about them. The other was that it was far more powerful than he had imagined and there was a third thing—he realised he was out of practice and couldn’t handle it.

  For a few brief moments the hit was joyous and a merciful release from the near-sterility of Otopian life. He couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to leave an aetheric region for such a place. Nothing could compare to the incredible vitality of this! And then it was too much and what had been ecstasy became pain in his nerves and pain in his andalune as the vibrations—frequencies not natural to its ordinary elven system—began to disrupt its normal flow. He felt fire from the flare begin to eat its way through from the realm of the aetheric into his flesh body. If he did not discharge it in some way it could easily burst across the gap into a different form, its physical form which was more than able to burn him to a cinder.

  Inside the vortex there was nothing to do with the energy but create more flame. He realised he had to get out and then his thoughts became a blur of roaring, singing noise and a voice said from the fire, “Sing for me.”

  He opened his eyes to the flat azure skies he knew well. Beneath him was hot sand and the dry air was hazed with shivering mirages and the colours of half-formed things.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck,” he said and let his head fall back down to the ground.

  He was in Zoomenon.

  CHAPTER TEN

  There was an instant when Malachi felt he would not be able to continue in this dreadful halfway world of chaos, that he must lose track of his forms: humanoid, feline, element, and dream. All his life he had shifted from one to another, mostly at his own whim and occasionally as a result of some charm cast upon him but he had only recently learnt to loiter in I-space and bear the discomfort of not resolving his state into one definite organisation. The desire, the survival instinct to do so was incredibly strong. It tore at him tooth and claw, a scrabbling, dry kind of fear rising all the time the more he delayed its gratification. This was made worse by the fact that he could make out almost nothing save indistinct masses of shifting aether with the occasional ghostly imprint deep in their midst. If Calliope let go of him in this place where most of his senses were useless and he was not even sure which way was up, or indeed any direction, he thought he would be lost forever. He knew, intellectually, that all he had to do was resolve himself into one of his forms and it would be done with and that he would be able to do that at any time, but the longer he did not do it the more doubt grew in him that he could do it.

  “Step out,” Jones said to him in a voice that came to his mind through the aether wave. He needed no other prompt.

  Her pulling had altered the exit point. Although he had left from his Otopian offices he had made some transit across I-space and was now somewhere quite other. It was a place he didn’t immediately recognise, but that was not surprising given
that all he could see of it was a series of untidy rooms full of strange, humming equipment; both computers and other gear more reminiscent of the grand arcane engineering feats he was used to the demons building. Jones stood in front of him, grinning, and gestured at the hovel with pride.

  Malachi stepped out of the one clear circle in the place and an empty card drinks cup crumpled under his foot. Behind him he heard the breath and movement of several others, arriving into four-dimensional reality with whuffs of cool air and the sharp smells of cold seaside days.

  “Welcome,” Jones said, “to the one and only Ghost Research Centre.”

  Figures of a demon, two other fey, and a shadow elf marched past him with the universal, preoccupied expressions of scientists focused on an important problem. With great energy they went to work at various places on different things. They barely spoke but moved with economy and ease, helping each other to do their tasks. Malachi shivered. There was about them the indefinable oddity of all brinkmen, a haunted quality, as if they were privy to some information about reality which was too awkward and horrible to impart. He had always guessed that’s what they really were like, and now he was about to find out.

  “Where is this?” he asked.

  Jones’s grin intensified. “Nowhere,” she said. “It is an island floating in the aetheric deeps of the Interstitial. A created place, sustained by constant intent.” She pointed at the pale grey walls. “Those are the limit.”

  What Malachi had taken for concrete and plaster was the border of their whole tiny world. He looked around and down at the floor. “Intent, as in enchantment?”

  “Intent is the cornerstone of enchantment, the root,” Jones said. “It comes before. Only intent is sufficient in I-space. No mere enchantment can hold the aetheric region back.”

  “But . . .” Malachi began. It had always been his understanding that yes, intent came before most things naturally, but how could it possibly be more powerful than enchantment? “Wishes aren’t horses . . .”

  “This kind of intent is highly focused. It requires constant, active attention.” Jones beckoned and he followed her, stepping over bags and piles of broken equipment, boxes of unidentifiable instruments, clothes, litter. “No person would be able to create this kind of stability, so here we have our Watcher. The One Who Abides.” She pointed to an undistinguished grey box. “The aetheric weather here is too forceful for enchantments to survive. The decay of organisation into entropy, which effects all spells, is so severe here that even the greatest sorcerers could not hold long against the erosion. As all energy in the material universe seeks to become stable through a transition into iron, so aether is the opposite, seeking always to become unstable through transitions into pure energy. Material energy and magical energy are dynamically opposed forces.”

  “Fighting for equilibrium?” Malachi asked.

  “It is not known. To be sure, we are not convinced the two systems interact with one another at all in the sense that you mean. Still, our research focuses on the aetheric and in that world we are sure that chaos is the basic state of nature.”

  The box had wires running in and out of it, roped together with untidy cable ties. It had a single readout—a set of digital numbers flickered up and down within a couple of thousandths every other second or so. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “The AI concentrates on maintaining our space and privacy here,” Jones said. “That’s all it does. Its will forms the walls. It is a program of intent running on a single machine. Rather simple actually. Barely qualifies as AI. But as long as the generator holds out then it needs no rest and its concentration varies only slightly, as you see, according to the flows of electrons and the cosmic and various other minor disruptions that occur within its circuits.” She gave the box a peremptory once-over and then led onward past a stack of still-packed bags and personal items that he realised were the piled-up goods of the individuals here, their sleeping bags and mats, their pillows, clothing, and so on.

  “You live here?”

  “Yes.” She kicked through a heap of coats and went into a small room that was mercifully free of clutter. It had a functional food unit and was as clean as the rest of the place was not. There was a cleaning rota in red pen stuck to the refrigerator with sticky tape. “This is where we eat and drink, standing up because no room. No eating at the equipment . . .”

  Malachi found that hard to believe.

  “. . . you can find the Otopian food in this cupboard and here . . . and drink whatever the unit makes that you like. The bathroom is here . . .” She moved out and through the only doorway with an actual door in it and put the light on in a poky wet room with a hole in the floor and a showerhead. “Pee and whatever it is you have to do down the hole, everything, in fact, down the hole . . .”

  “Where does it go?” he asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” she said and put the light off. “Now, you’ve got no gear but we sleep in shifts so just bunk down anywhere and . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” Malachi said. “How long a stay did you have in mind?”

  Jones put her hands on her hips and tossed her long hair over her shoulder. “You have to see several important things. They’re not exactly predictable, like weather systems, but they are reliable enough, like tornados. We know certain places and times are likely points for them to occur. Given reasonable odds you shouldn’t have to be here more than a couple of weeks.”

  “Weeks!” he gasped, like a laugh. “I’m still at work.” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t leave the office for another five hours . . . I can’t stay here that long.”

  Calliope stared at him, unmoving. Her cool grey eyes were like granite. They stared right through him. She spoke coolly. “If you want to know anything worth knowing, you stay.” Clearly by her expression she was perfectly happy to share knowledge or for him to leave. She didn’t give a toss but she would soon lose her patience. She was already looking like he was wasting her time and that haunted, driven look . . . that was ferocious. He was cat all through but he didn’t like it on him.

  “Something about the Others?” he hedged.

  “And the rest,” she said, and added, “We are self-funding, self-regulating. Nobody knows what we know. Nobody. Not any agency and not any government. You know why? Because they’re too busy worrying about each other to worry about I-space. But they should worry about it. A lot.”

  Malachi began to see a reason. “You want me to bring it to attention.”

  She nodded. “That’s the deal, pussycat. I help you with your issues and your case. You help us get something better than this two-bit operation without getting taken over.”

  He became aware of everyone else in the room suddenly shifting their focus to him. Of course aether responded to intent that strong . . . what could resist the demand of so many directed wills? He was aetheric and the response was strong, but he was trained and he detached from the need to comply. “What if I can’t deliver? I’m hardly a major player and my evidence . . . depends how good it is.”

  Jones’s eyes flickered around her colleagues, taking reaction. She glanced back at him. “We’ll get your evidence.”

  He liked the feeling of her conviction. He always followed his instinct. “Deal.”

  “Now,” said the imp beside Lila’s ear as they reached the Souk entrance. “Where would you look for the best mages?”

  Lila was transfixed. The Souk was in a particularly beautiful part of Bathshebat, an old town centre around which the great city had grown. Demon architecture, like everything else they undertook, was lavish and, as it constantly surprised her, exquisite. This old style was from an artistic period of great diversity and imagination but also an almost spartan attitude to materials and engineering. A thousand years ago the views on magic and materials science had been quite different to the prevailing vision of the modern era. Where now demons were joyfully inventing and researching with both disciplines as it suited them, at that time the two means of manipulating
and discovering the world were kept separate and pursued by individuals who might never pay much attention to the alternative. Their domestic and civilian buildings were all products of material engineering. In the oldest parts of the Souk these were native substances that could be sourced in the area—petrified wood, ebony, magmastone, and locally made concretes in various lovely colours. Later, the imp told her with pride, stone, wood, and metals had been sourced from all over the world and these had given rise to the incredible buildings she now stood among, as rich in their own way as treasure houses.

  “The Souk is the Hoard of Demonia,” the imp said with quiet reverence. “The product of a backward age, but an age of enormous aesthetic power and spiritual integrity.”

  Lila stared at beautiful structures that reminded her of woods, of animals and natural things even though they were geometrically perfected and were absolutely mathematically manufactured. Demon buildings were symphonies for the eye. “This reminds me of something, an Otopian designer . . .”

  “Antoni Gaudi,” the imp said fondly, head on one side. “Of course, we were whispering in his ear and in the ears of many of your race down the long ages of your history. We have much to be thankful for.” “You were?” She turned to try and stare into the imp’s ugly little face and he smiled with beatific pleasure.

  “Oh yes, us and the others.”

  “What others?”

  “Others of other races I meant,” he said hastily. “Now, as you see before you, we are at the Palace of Seven Seasons and it is in here you will find the best mages because obviously it is the best place. Not like in some backwater like Alfheim where the best will always seek to hide themselves in spurious fake humility, sackcloth and monasteries and the like, which is ego run riot and hiding in mortified clothing. No, in Demonia if you see someone who looks powerful, ruthless, and ferocious then you may take it that they are, for we are true to our appearances. We play quite fair.”