The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘He fell in love with a spaceship ghost as well,’ Talia added weakly.

  ‘There’s life in the dark matter, isn’t there? Things that we can only ever guess at but never see,’ feminine Lodup asked. ‘In the spaces between.’ The old man nodded, very slowly. ‘I’m sorry, but we do not have much time …’ The voice was masculine now. Very suddenly the octopus looked old and sickly.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Talia demanded. Vic held her tighter.

  ‘Lidakika suggests you contact the last of the Lloigor machines, see what they have seen, the life they have observed, which was nothing to do with you or your children …’ masculine Lodup said, ignoring Talia’s question.

  ‘Only the hated universe,’ the old man said. Vic felt hope slipping away. Then wondered why he was so engaged. It could make little difference now, but he desperately wanted to convince the old man. Perhaps he just wanted to see Talia happy, possibly for the last time.

  ‘She says to look through her eyes, for the last time, see the racial memories of your grandchildren. Perhaps it will help you take comfort.’ Lodup reached over, touched the old man, and then died. Collapsed to the floor. Talia rushed over to him. Vic followed more slowly.

  ‘What happened?’ Talia asked.

  The old man waited a beat before answering. ‘The city died millions of years ago now. I carry your minds, I carry what you were.’

  Talia stood up and staggered back from the old man. Vic was just staring. The words of Bress, Scab’s much nicer clone, came back to him: It’s so cold back in our universe that the simplest of its thought processes could take millions of years.

  ‘How long?’ Talia asked, appalled.

  The old man shrugged. ‘Billions of years, as you measure things.’

  ‘What will you do?’ Vic asked, suddenly extremely frightened of the answer.

  ‘A long time ago I made a mistake. My children tried to talk to me and I lashed out and hurt them, and nobody would ever speak to me again because they were afraid. I cannot go back to change events now. There is not the energy left.’

  ‘You’ll stop collapsing possible universes?’ Talia asked. There was hope in her voice despite the knowledge that she could never go back.

  ‘I made the decision when I understood your sacrifice,’ he said. He swallowed hard as he struggled to speak. ‘Only here, now, can I see the great beauty of it all, and it is only a memory, but it is a memory greater than the pain.’

  ‘If only we knew then …’ Vic said quietly. The old man looked up at them, both his eyes glistening with tears.

  ‘I do not deserve it, but will you stay with me?’ he asked. Talia nodded and moved to his chair. She reached down to touch the side of his face with her hand.

  Epilogue

  Ancient Britain

  Tangwen went walking in the woods. The child was making noise, but that didn’t bother her. Unless the forest spirits turned on her there was little that could threaten them. She had her bow, her hatchet, and her dagger for bears, lynxes and wolves, though the land was slowly returning to normal, and the animals mostly left people alone.

  All had tried to give her advice on being a mother. In the end she had decided to do what she felt was right once she had worked out how to keep them both alive, though only the girl was with her now. She had given birth to the twins that were not twins in early winter, in Gaul, where she had found the rest of her tribe. Come summer she had deemed the girl strong enough to travel. Tangwen had named her Kush. It probably wasn’t a girl’s name in the hot southern lands, but she did not care. Kush deserved to be remembered. Love of her children, well Kush anyway, did not stop her from still being very angry with Britha. The boy she had named Fachtna. A revenge against his father.

  Shortly after Fachtna’s birth the brass scorpion had turned up. Tangwen had tried to get rid of it. Tried everything, including violence, but the thing would not leave the boy’s side. It at least had the sense to hide when others were present.

  The scorpion was one of a number of reasons that Fachtna frightened her. She knew it was not good to feel that way about a child, but she couldn’t help it. The child never cried. He just stared. A dryw from one of the Gaulish tribes had advised her to drown Fachtna in the river, an offering to the gods. She had told him that she had seen the gods. The death of a child seemed of little interest to them.

  When she had returned to Ynys Prydain she had gone to the lands of the Trinovantes, and visited with Anharad. The woman who had done so much to keep them together, to keep them alive when they had fled from the spawn of Andraste, was little more than a shell now. She had lost so much, and the still-silent Mabon was well on his way to becoming a warrior. He would soon be rushing off to risk himself for honour and glory in disputes and squabbles that seemed so petty after she had seen the Otherworld burn. More and more the memories came to seem little more than bad dreams. Anharad’s one solace was Caithna. Tangwen had considered taking the girl back north to her people, the strange and fierce Pecht, but if what Britha had said was true then little of her tribe was left. The girl might have been the tribe’s only survivor. Still, she was starting to come alive, and her presence in turn enlivened Anharad. Despite everything Tangwen had left Anharad as a friend.

  One day I will go north, she thought. If Caithna is of an age, and wishes it, she can accompany me. I will take Kush with me and we can meet these fierce, moonstruck northerners. But for now, a walk in the woods.

  She had looked for her Father, but the crystal cave had been empty.

  She had smelled the bodies before she found them. They had been drained of blood and then flayed. A warning. She smiled.

  ‘I know you’re there!’ she called. ‘Take me to him.’ The blood-painted, ash-covered gwyllion seemed to grow out of the trees like the forest ghosts they were feared to be.

  She was marched through the woods blindfolded. They had even blindfolded Kush because they knew no better. They had taken her upriver in log dugout boats. Finally they had removed the blindfold, and mother and child had crawled through the tunnel and into the earthen cave supported by the root structure of a mighty oak. It was where she and Kush had first spoken with Guidgen. The weapons that had been blessed by the chalice were leant against the earthen walls, oiled and wrapped in skins. The Red Chalice was in the centre of the fire. She realised then how much she hated the thing. The old dryw was there, sat on the other side of the fire, Germelqart too. Both of them looked fatter and happier than when she had last seen them. They took turns embracing her. It was difficult in the cramped confines of the earthen cave.

  ‘I had not thought to see you again, Tangwen Serpent-Child,’ Germelqart said. He was watching Kush wriggle in her lap.

  ‘It takes more than a hill falling on top of me to kill me,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘May I hold her?’ Guidgen asked. Tangwen nodded and the old dryw lifted the child out of her lap and started fussing over her, making her laugh and smile. ‘What did you name her?’

  ‘Kush,’ she said quietly. Germelqart nodded in gratitude and then had to turn away with tears in his eyes.

  ‘She has the blood of the gods in her veins,’ Guidgen said, tickling Kush’s belly, making her laugh and kick her legs about. ‘Yes you do! Yes you do!’

  ‘The boy?’ Germelqart asked. Tangwen considered asking him how he knew.

  ‘Fostered by my people,’ Tangwen said, trying to suppress the guilt she felt for baby Fachtna. ‘He will be trained as a warrior, though if he shows aptitude he will be given the opportunity to become a dryw.’ Germelqart nodded. Neither of them commented on the fact that it sounded like Tangwen was planning on having little to do with Fachtna.

  ‘But it is Kush who has the blood of Andraste in her? Who is the child of the goddess as much as she was the child of Fachtna, Britha, and yourself?’ Guidgen asked. Britha frowned. The old dryw had made Kush’s parentage sound so complicated, and it was, she had been born of magic. It was much simpler for Tangwen, however. Kush was her daught
er.

  ‘We need to protect your daughter and her line,’ Germelqart said. Tangwen gritted her teeth. She did not like the way that they were making plans for the child already when she was but seven moons old. ‘And the chalice, and the weapons.’

  ‘We need to look to the threats against Ynys Prydain. There are other items of great magic out there, others who carry the blood of the gods in their veins, the unquiet dead of the Underworld, the magics of the fair folk from the Otherworld …’

  ‘The Otherworld is fallen. I saw it burn,’ Tangwen told them. Both of them stared at her, clearly not sure what to say to that.

  ‘Will you help us?’ Germelqart asked. Guidgen had drawn an iron-bladed knife and held it against the palm of his hand, away from the wriggling Kush. Tangwen thought on it. It could never be harder than the winter before last had been, surely. At least now they knew what they faced. She nodded. The cold iron scored a line of blood on the old man’s palm.

  ‘We will make a Circle,’ Guidgen said.

  Terminal Island, Los Angeles – Now –

  Grace breathed in and held it. Her finger squeezed the trigger. The rifle kicked back into her shoulder, and the crack of the bullet echoed out across the water between the artificial islands. The Pennangalan fell over, but she would get back up. Grace had hidden herself as well as she could with the time she’d had, but the ridiculously dressed post-apocalyptic pirate marines had a good idea where she was now. They were holding off, presumably as a result of du Bois’s negotiations. She could hear the shouting.

  Grace looked through the Purdey’s new scope, settling the crosshairs on Mr Brown. A bullet, even a nanite-tipped one, would do no good. She shifted the scope so it settled on du Bois. Even now it still felt like it had been him. Pretty much the ultimate betrayal, and behaviour at odds with everything she knew about du Bois since he had helped her out of the blood-soaked ruins in Spitalfields. She moved the rifle again until it settled on King Jeremy. A sociopathic little prick who used people as his playthings. It would be so easy to squeeze the trigger. Mr Brown had to die in a nuclear explosion. Had to. It would kill her, and the others, but frankly their plan was stupid and doomed to failure. They were going right into the heart of the madness. She didn’t want to die, but she didn’t think this was going to be much of a world to live in, and Brown deserved to be destroyed for what he’d done. She wasn’t quite sure how old she was, because nobody had thought to remember the date she’d been born in the rookery she’d grown up in, but she was more than a hundred-and-forty years old. It was a good innings in anybody’s book.

  They were turning now, moving towards the submarine. Her throat was suddenly dry. The crosshairs were over the back of King Jeremy’s head. Her finger curled round the trigger, started to squeeze. Then she relaxed, looked up from the scope and smiled. No. If she died, if she further harmed her life in any other way, then he won. He’d implanted the memories to split her and du Bois up. She still wasn’t sure why he had done that, but she wanted to make sure he had failed.

  Working quickly she packed the Purdey back into its case, and strapped it to her webbing, all the while looking around. Patron, du Bois, and the others had disappeared into the sub, and now she suspected that all bets were off as far as the pirate marines went. She picked up Beth’s LMG that she’d swapped for her carbine, checked it, and clipped it to its sling. She could see some movement, but nobody had started shooting yet. Grace had picked her position on the cargo containers not just because it provided a clear view of the kill-zone, but because it provided a straight run to the Cougar.

  ‘All right, boys,’ she muttered to herself. ‘You don’t shoot me, I won’t shoot you.’ She started to run, leaping from container to container. Immediately she was taking sporadic, but annoyingly accurate, fire. She felt the hammer blows of the bullets impacting her nanite-reinforced bike armour, staggering her, but she kept running. She leapt off a stack of three containers, dropping onto a stack of two. Stopping to suppress some of the heavier and more accurate fire, she aimed up at a sniper position on one of the cranes. Tracers flew upwards, sparking off superstructure or arcing off over the water. She was running again, dropping down from a stack of two to a stack of one, bullets flying past her from gunmen between the stacks. A bullet creased her armoured skull, and she almost went down. She fired on the run, inaccurately trying to suppress the most concentrated areas of fire and the sniper. She reached the end of the container and leapt, getting shot in the legs from below before landing and collapsing, with a cry of pain, on the roof of the Cougar.

  ‘Fuck!’ she screamed. She pulled a fragmentation grenade from her webbing, pulled the pin, let the spoon flick off, cooked it for several seconds, and then dropped it between the Cougar and the container. The explosion rocked the armoured vehicle. She saw a body bounce off the lip of the armoured truck’s roof. This is going to hurt. She rolled off the top of the vehicle and dropped to the ground. She screamed out and collapsed. She was getting shot again. She sent a long, undisciplined burst of fire past the front of the vehicle, and then another past the back, just trying to keep the pirate marines’ heads down. She staggered to her feet and dragged the door of the Cougar open, swinging on it, which was the reason that the marine sitting in the driver’s seat missed her with the two rounds from the Beretta M9A1. Grace dragged him down from the vehicle and stamped on his face, sending pain lancing up her legs. She grabbed the pistol. It would replace the one she’d lost in the chase, and she could convert it to full automatic if she ever found the tools. Grace climbed into the relative armoured safety of the Cougar, slamming the door and locking it behind her. The submarine was pulling away from the dock as she drove away in a hail of gunfire.

  Grace had used the weight and armour of the Cougar to bully her way through LA. The streets were filled with the dead as the inhabitants killed more and more of each other in a constant no-holds-barred riot. Closer to the sea the city had already started to warp and mutate, the result of what Grace thought was the awakened Seeders’ terraforming process. Kanamwayso had infected LA like a virus, replicating even as it killed.

  She had healed as much as she could, relying on the energy bars and drinks rather than wasting any of the remaining drips. She had taken a little fire as she had driven into the castle in Laurel Canyon. Most of the gunmen had died in the chase. The fight to clear the structure was very one-sided. Then she had taken all the food, water, fuel, ammunition, and anything else useful she could find, and loaded it into the back of the Cougar.

  ‘Eileen!’ Grace shouted as she entered the house. ‘It’s Grace, it’s safe to come down.’ She looked up as Eileen, Dora, with her shotgun, and Ralph appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Grace?’ Eileen said.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ Grace said. ‘Get everyone, gather what you need, but only what you need. I have a vehicle and supplies, but we need to get going.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Eileen asked. Andrea had come out to hug her mother. Grace looked at the frightened little girl for a moment before answering. ‘We’re going to find a safe place out in the desert.’ Eileen turned and started organising everyone. Grace went out to stand watch by the Cougar. Soon they would drive out of the canyon. The sun was setting on LA.

  The City

  Scab stared down at Talia and Vic’s bodies. He still felt the touch of Talia’s lips on his own. Bress, his nauseating clone, reached down and checked the pulse in Talia’s neck.

  ‘Dead,’ he said. Scab didn’t like that. He wasn’t sure why. Bress was pushing open Talia’s eyes, examining them as though he was looking for something.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ somebody said. Scab was surprised to find that it had been him. Bress turned to look up at him, studying him. Scab’s grip tightened on his tumbler pistol. The black roiling mass of hate was receding back the way it had come through the city, like a tide going out.

  ‘The city took their spirits,’ the human woman said. Her name was Britha. She was holding her swolle
n head, clearly pained. His clone moved to comfort her in a way he knew he never could. He just watched. ‘It sent them somewhere else.’

  ‘Did it work?’ Scab asked. It suddenly seemed important. Not because of existence – that was meaningless, abstract nonsense – but because for him to lose Vic and Talia it had to be worth something.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bress said as he helped Britha to her feet. She was clearly in a lot of pain. It wasn’t a very comforting answer.

  ‘I don’t think I have much longer,’ she said.

  ‘Even here there are people, well, things really, that might be able to help.’ They started to walk away, Bress helping Britha.

  ‘Hey,’ Scab said. They stopped, and Bress looked back. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘What it took me the longest time to learn was that I made myself unhappy. You try too hard,’ Bress told him, then he turned away from Scab and both of them walked deeper into the city. It was easy for him to say, his mind had had aeons to be destroyed and rebuilt. Scab turned back to look at his two dead … friends. With a thought his armour folded away and he looked around at the city. His new home. He took his cigarette case from the breast pocket of his suit, took out a cigarette, and lit it. He didn’t like the taste. He needed a purpose.

  Woodbine sat down between Talia and Vic’s bodies in the ruins, and accessed the Monk’s, Beth’s, immersion construct.

  He was standing on a pebble beach on a primitive pre-Loss Earth, next to a terminal for primitive ground effect vehicles. Beyond the terminal were the bright lights of some kind of entertainment area. Over the water he could see an island; behind him, the lights of a tiny city. The air smelled funny here.