Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  That stilled me. The simple fact of it. I was no stranger to the technicalities of space travel; such was common knowledge at the court of any lord in the Imperium. And yet to have it recounted so, spoken plain and simply, without feeling, shocked my naïve mind to alertness. It was called slipping in those days, the way a sailor lost time—perhaps it still is. Thirteen years would just melt away, and I would not even notice.

  I signaled my understanding, eyes locked on the cold machines. At length I thrust my chin in the direction of the two occupied machines. “Who are the others?”

  “Hmm?” Demetri looked back over his shoulder, hair almost sparkling with the movement. “Oh, them?” He made a dismissive gesture. “Norman migrants—an urban farm technician and his husband. Been on board twenty-one years. They’re for Siena, when we get there.”

  From where I stood I could just make out two faces—one pale and one faintly copper-toned—beneath the frosted dark glass. Suspended as they were in darkness, I thought of biological samples, flayed and plastinated or else packed in formaldehyde, pickled like onions and left on the shelves of some mad scientist’s laboratory. They looked dead, and in a sense they were: the processes of their lives suspended, forwarded to another day. I had known this moment would come, and yet nothing could have prepared me for the unnatural horror of it. Fear is death to reason, I told myself, and again it was Gibson’s voice, quieting me with the familiar words. Reason, death to fear. This was only cryonic fugue, routine and commonplace. I wasn’t going to die. Not there. Not today.

  I took in a deep breath, and when I exhaled it, I nodded. “I’m ready.”

  “Good!” Juno’s voice sounded from behind me, and turning, I saw her enter, leading a wax-faced, mustachioed man with lank blond hair pulled back into a tail. To my disgust, the little homunculus followed thereafter, knuckles literally dragging on the floor. “Sarric, prep the casket.”

  The blond man with the mustache bowed his head silently and rubbed the geometric tangle tattooed onto his too-high forehead, diamonds and triangles interlocking. “Just a moment.” The man—the doctor whom Demetri Arello had mentioned in passing before—brushed past me, moving almost silently, exhaling little breaths of steam into the chilly air. He busied himself with the fugue crèche nearest the two occupied ones.

  “Putting you back in the bottle, eh?” asked the homunculus, lifting his dragging queue and draping the disgusting rope of hair over his shoulders like a shawl. He tittered. “Back where you came from.”

  Juno kicked the creature in the back of one knee, sharply but not hard.

  I ignored the little hobgoblin and the woman both. “You,” the doctor said, clapping his hands together to crush out a series of holographs. “You must disrobe.” He didn’t look up as he spoke, crouching to examine a screen embedded in the wall beside the crèche. “There a locker here for him, Captain?” His voice was strange, crackling and throaty. Tavrosi, I decided, thinking back to the language I thought I’d heard from the grubby girls I had seen in the ship’s hallway before dust-off. The man was one of the clansmen of the Tavros Demarchy, which explained the tattoos. Valka had such tattoos. They told the man’s genetic and personal histories in a symbolic language I’d never learned to read.

  “Over there!” Demetri pointed to a bank of dinted metal storage lockers. “Put everything in there.”

  I froze, taking in the grinning captain, his beautiful wife, the wax-faced doctor, and their little pet monster. “Could I get some privacy, then?”

  Except for the doctor, they all laughed, and Saltus said, “We’ll all be able to see your little cock once you’re in the freeze, cousin. No point getting shy now.” The creature bared its too many teeth. Juno kicked him again, and he yelped, falling sideways into the wall.

  “Leave the boy alone, Salt,” she said, reaching down to grab the homunculus by the scruff of his neck. “Go on now.” And she half pushed, half threw the little man back toward the door.

  Obedience to necessity already had me removing my coat, the long jacket that Gibson had told me I wouldn’t be needing. Demetri prized open one of the lockers, held it open while I hung the coat neatly inside. As I swung it into place, the universal card I’d extracted from the Mining Guild factionarius tumbled out and clattered to the floor. I lunged for it, hoping to grab it before Demetri could see what it was. I shoved it back into the lining of the coat, caught the captain watching me with pale eyebrows raised. “Get me to Teukros, and it’s yours.” I wouldn’t need it anyway. “I swear it.”

  The doctor was watching us. “What was it?”

  “A bank card,” Demetri replied. “How much?”

  “Plenty.”

  At last I was naked, shivering in the air, gooseflesh pimpling my pale skin. I held my hands over my sex, trying not to meet the eyes of the woman and the two men around me. The doctor moved forward, placing a dry hand on my shoulder. “Come on, now.” He guided me toward the open crèche and helped me step inside. I pulled myself up with one hand, using the other to cover myself. Seeing my ring, the doctor caught my free hand. “You will want this off. ’Twill burn you.”

  I shook my head vigorously. “Then it burns me.” I looked at the locker, thinking of the universal card. Mother had hired these people, and apparently Adaeze Feng had recommended them, but that didn’t mean I had to trust them. And the ring was all I would have left of the boy I had been: a single loop of silver, the carnelian bezel with its laser-cut devil sigil masking terabytes of crystal storage. It held both copies of the contract I’d made with the Mining Guild as well as all manner of other documents, my identification not the least of them. I would not part with it.

  Doctor Sarric snorted. “Imperial barbarian foolishness.”

  “Leave it, Sarric,” Demetri said, stepping closer, fists planted squarely on his hips. “We’re not trying to rob you, boy. We aren’t pirates. Pirates would have dumped you out the airlock the moment we left Delos.”

  The white plastic padding at the back of the crèche clung to my bare skin, and I shuddered, standing there naked. “It’s not that, Captain. It’s . . . it’s a palatine thing.”

  That made him laugh. “You really don’t want to be wearing that ring when you go in.”

  “I’m keeping it.” I tightened my jaw, lay my head back in the cradle meant for it. “Let’s get on with it.”

  The doctor glanced to his captain, scratching his head just above one small ear. “Demetri?”

  The Jaddian merchant waved a hand in dismissal. “The lad can do as he likes, Sarric.”

  The physician pushed air through his yellow teeth. “As you wish, then.” And without preamble he slapped a sensor tape to my chest, then another. A third. He barely looked at me as he did so, then pulled a self-sterilizing needle from a slot inside the crèche beside me. It hissed as it pierced my arm, and he fastened the securing strap about my biceps. “’Tis going to get cold rather fast.”

  It already had. The freeze crept from the needle site in my arm, the blood transmuting, cells hardening without tearing. My brain began to go fuzzy, and as if from far away I heard Doctor Sarric say, “He’s ready. Seal the crèche.” I heard rather than saw the dark glass slam down over me, trapping me as in a sarcophagus. Something coolly gelatinous began to rise about my ankles. Darkness blossomed behind my eyes, and through that darkness I again perceived the funeral masks of my ancestors as they hung above the doors to the council chamber beneath the Dome of Bright Carvings, their violet gaze accusatory and unkind.

  The preservative gel rose about me even as I froze from within. I wanted to scream, to slam my fists against the walls of the tank, but the strength was already gone from me. I was drowning—I knew I was drowning, knew there was nothing I could do. I was going to die in that tank. And then the worst part of all happened.

  My breathing stopped. The fluid was not even to my chin, and my breathing stopped. Then it was in me, black wa
ter thick as oil flooding down my throat, up my nose. That outer dark took me, and I plunged into blackness and cold.

  And when I awoke, my world had ended.

  CHAPTER 22

  MARLOWE ALONE

  THE FIRST THING I noticed was the stink. Wherever I was, the stench of rotting fish and raw sewage was overpowering. Then it was the heat, damp and oppressive, clinging to me like wet canvas. And light. There was light. A universe of it, almost as bright as the light of Gododdin’s sun; perhaps it was that light, cast backward across time to blind me in my childhood, to turn me back. I could not see.

  “He’s alive.” The sound was wrong, remote, as if I were hearing that voice down a long rubber tube or washed along with the surf of some moon-tossed sea. “Someone get water!” I could just make out the sound of bare feet slapping on stone, and then someone was propping me up, forcing me to drink water from a clay bowl. The white universe faded a little, graying and reddening to indistinct blurs. I coughed, felt the water spill onto my chest. Then I doubled over, shoulders heaving as I forced something glutinous and sour from my lungs and throat. The same someone held my shoulders, kept me from falling. “In Earth’s name, girl, get a fucking mop!” the voice called out. “He’s coughing up more of that shit again.”

  It was all I could do to breathe, to still the sudden pounding in the capillaries of my skull. Groaning, I allowed myself to be pushed back against the linens. I was in a bed. Gods, but I was heavy. My limbs felt like they were made of stone. “Where?” I rasped, voice barely more than a croak. “Where?”

  A rough hand settled over my eyes, testing my forehead. “You’re safe. You’re safe now. Got you in off the street.”

  “Street?” It didn’t make any sense. But a more pressing thought came to me, and I said, “I can’t see.”

  The voice—that of an old woman—said, “Fugue blindness. It will pass.” I heard another person shuffle into the room, followed by a slopping sound. Someone had found that mop the speaker had shouted for. “The boys found you lying in an alley near the starport. Terrible business. Still, one sees it all the time in cases like yours.” I wanted to ask what she meant by cases like mine, but my tongue felt thick and swollen in my mouth, and I didn’t even try. “Terrible business,” the raspy voice repeated. “But at least they didn’t sell you for meat, eh? Abandoned is better.” She jostled me by the shoulder. “We can fix abandoned.”

  It was a good minute before I found my words again, during which time I came to distinguish a rusted blur above and to my right. It might have been the shape of the old woman. “Teukros?” I wheezed, coughing into the air above me; I felt flecks of spittle fall on my naked chest. “Was going . . . going to Teukros.”

  “Teukros?” The ragged voice went paper-thin, and the rusted blur leaned in closer, so close I could smell the alkaline bite of verrox stimulant on the speaker’s breath. “Bless us, no. This is Emesh, in the Veil.”

  “No.” I felt myself shake my head, but it seemed to be happening to someone else. “No no no . . .” I squeezed my eyes shut, willing them to work better, as if the strain would force the delicate muscles there to tighten, to sharpen again.

  The stranger’s hand settled again on my shoulder. “It’ll be fine, lad. You’ll be all right. You’ll see.” The water again, tepid and oily. I drank it greedily, spilling more of it onto my chest. It didn’t matter. Hands on my arm, my face. I think I dozed. It is true what they say about fugue: you do not dream. I felt . . . what? Displacement? Disconcert? Yes and yes, but it was something more than that. I felt an incredible sense of discontinuity, the way I imagined an infant might feel if it possessed the faculty and the language for complex thought. There was no sense of what had come before, as a sleeper feels upon waking. I had no sense of yesterday and so felt hollow and blank. Distant, as if I were only then beginning to dream.

  As if to confirm that supposition, I saw Tor Gibson’s face peering at me when I opened my eyes, the scholiast’s wrinkled visage comporting itself into a frown, the only clear point in all the blurry world. His lips moved, but I could not hear him, and when at last I blinked, he was gone, leaving me awash in a place of indistinct color.

  At least my words had found me. “Where am I?”

  “You deaf?” the old woman asked, clicking her fingers beside my ear to prove her point. “I said you was on Emesh, didn’t I?”

  Grunting, I said, “Specifically.”

  There was a creaking of wooden joints. “In my clinic. The boys found you left for dead in an alley. I’d say it was a horror if we didn’t pull castoffs like you out of the gutter every other Tuesday. Ships dump their passengers all the time, pop them right out of their crèches and drop them where they think no one will look.” She sighed, throat rattling. “And with the war on, people are bringing in all sorts—the streets get more crowded every day. Empty ships found smashed on the trade lanes . . . You’re lucky you’re here.” Above me the whirling of a ceiling fan came into dull focus, and around it the shape of a dingy red-brick room. My savior stood over me, a hunched, hook-nosed beast with warts stippling her red face. I think she saw my eyes gain focus, for she smiled then, not unkindly. “You have a name, lad?”

  “Hadrian,” I said, more on reflex than anything else.

  She whistled. “That’s a proper fancy name for someone found naked in a gutter.” She squinted at me, her right eye gone blind and crusted over with some red growth near the nose. “You some sort of lord?” Her white hair fell lank past her hunched shoulders almost to her navel, though she had tried in vain to tie it back. She looked like the witch character in Eudoran mask theater, and I half expected to see a black cat in her arms.

  “No,” I said too quickly. “No, I’m not.” Then I noticed the small girl behind the witch-woman. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, willowy and fair but thin. So thin. And those freckles—they were plebeians, no doubt about it. Perhaps even serfs. Wherever I was, wherever this Emesh was exactly, I had washed out at the bottom of it. “What happened to Demetri? To the Eurynasir?”

  “That your ship?” The crone pulled a spindle-legged chair from one corner of the baking, dingy little ward and seated herself beside me. Down the hall someone moaned, and turning I beheld several more beds like mine, a dozen or more. Most were empty, but three toward the far end had men lying on them. The old woman snapped her fingers. “Maris, go and see if the poor bastards’ beds need cleaning.” When the girl didn’t move but seemed glued to the spot, the old woman snapped her fingers again. “Damn it, girl! I’ll be fine with his lordship here, thank you!” She waved a dismissive hand, and the young woman scurried off. When she’d been gone a moment, the old woman grunted, folding twisted, thin-skinned hands in her lap. I didn’t like the way she’d said lordship, the word edged in mockery. “This won’t be easy for you to hear, lad—ships dump people. All the time. Captain gets a better price for his berth, changes his flight plan, decides your scrawny arse ain’t worth the fuel or the time-debt.”

  Even as she was speaking, I was shaking my head again. “No, not this one.” It didn’t fit, wouldn’t fit. Demetri had nine thousand marks to collect on Teukros, to say nothing of my universal card. And there was my mother to contend with. Oh, the Empire was vast and the galaxy vaster still, but one did not simply cross the scion of an Imperial vicereine. There must be some reason, some explanation. Somehow it all had to make sense. I clamored for the calm of the apatheia, yearning to see as a scholiast sees, but my pretenses there were only that: pretenses. I bunched my sheets in my fists and shut my eyes. “He hadn’t been paid yet. Something must have happened.”

  “Well, if you say so, lad. If you say so.” She peered past me out the unglassed window at a world I could not see. She didn’t believe me. “When you’re well you can go to the starport, have yourself a good look round. You’ll find your captain long gone. I bet dumping you was the last thing they did before dust-off.”

  That
silenced me a long while, and I shifted uncomfortably on the linens. Something scraped my hand, raw and painful, and looking down I saw a white bandage wound around my thumb where my ring had been. “How long?”

  “Until you’re well? Tomorrow.”

  I shook my head. It hurt. “How long was I . . . frozen? What year is it?”

  “It’s Year 447 of the Dominion of House Mataro.”

  “No.” I tried to raise a hand but failed. “No good, what’s the standard year?”

  The old woman’s expression soured. “I look like a spacer to you? What good’s the Imperial star date to me?”

  A new thought smashed its way into my universe. “My things?”

  “You didn’t even have pants on when they found you. You’ve bigger things to worry about than what happened to your effects. We’ll find something for you in the back; poor dead bastards leave enough lying around to clutter the whole fucking Empire.”

  “But my money!” I said, sitting up straight so quickly it made my head swim. “I have to pay you!”

  The old woman smiled, baring her crooked teeth, the enamel stained the mint-green of the serial verrox abuser. “You’re a lord, ain’t you? It’s writ all over that pretty white skin of yours.” She traced a finger down my exposed arm as she spoke, and I yanked it away. “You got to have an account. With Roths or the Mandari or some shit. I don’t know.”

  Then she left, still muttering, heaving herself onto her feet and passing down the hall to join her servant.

  An account. I cannot easily describe the fear that thought put in me. An account; my family. The old woman had said this planet—Emesh—was in the Veil. That would have to be the Veil of Marinus, where the Norma Arm just began to stretch its way around the galactic core and away from the Empire’s heart in the old Spur of Orion. The crest of the wave of colonial expansion that had brought our mighty civilization into contact with the Cielcin. The gods only knew how far I was from home, how lost, and how much time had fled from me. I shut my eyes, squeezing out tears as another more horrible realization struck me. Worse than my situation; worse than the fact that I was lost and alone on a world I had never heard of; worse than the loss of my hard-won universal card.