Creation Machine

by Andrew Bannister

  Garamende swung himself out of the saddle, landing far more lightly than his girth suggested. He gestured for the telescope, shoved it against his eye and searched for a moment. Alameche watched the instrument move from side to side, then stop suddenly. The big man held his position for a long time. Then he lowered the telescope and turned to Alameche. ‘Well, fuck my only infant daughter,’ he said quietly. He handed the telescope to Fiselle. The thin man held up the telescope, and Alameche marvelled that he could hold it horizontal without falling over. He repeated Garamende’s actions, and then handed the telescope slowly back to Alameche, one eyebrow raised.

  Alameche allowed himself a smile. He gestured towards the dozing Rethi. ‘There, my Lords,’ he said. ‘Am I forgiven for a morning of drought?’

  Garamende thumped him on the shoulder. ‘Of course! As if you needed forgiving. Eh?’ He nudged Fiselle.

  The thin man nodded. ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘Now all we need to do is to bring it down.’ He turned to Garamende, his face neutral. ‘Have you any suggestions?’

  ‘Of course I bloody have! God’s cock, man, do you think I’m an unweaned child?’ The big man reached behind him, pulled his crossbow out of its saddle holster and thumbed the stud so that it hummed with energy. He waved it towards the Rethi. ‘A few good bolts up the arse and it’s ours.’

  Alameche smiled, and reached for his own weapon. ‘It has the merit of directness,’ he admitted. ‘But I promised you some sport, not just a kill. I think I have another suggestion.’

  Fiselle managed to cock the eyebrow even further. ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Alameche turned round and squinted towards where the waiting beaters squatted. They had formed a sort of defensive ring around the boy who had been scored by the Sorrow Spines. Even at this distance the tracks of blood down his side were obvious. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘I think so.’

  They made the beaters drive a stake into the hard ground, and bring a chain.

  The injured boy’s pacing was almost mechanical. He marked out the restless hundred paces from one end of the path allowed by his chain to the other, then turned and repeated the journey in reverse. Half the time, his scored flank faced the onlookers. If he stopped, the beaters were instructed to use the whips they had been given.

  Even though the boy had only passed back and forwards a few times, Alameche would have sworn that the ground bore his imprint. It was almost as if the sod was somehow complicit – as if it was waiting to be violated by the boy’s doomed feet. Perhaps after all there was something in the old legend, that there was some sort of bond between this arid rock and its half-witted natives.

  Or perhaps not. Whatever. He turned to his companions. ‘Well, we have our bait,’ he said. ‘Who wants the honour?’

  He had expected Garamende to speak, but the big man merely grinned. ‘I’ll pass,’ he said. ‘Why not let Fiselle try out that antique he has over his shoulder?’

  The thin man’s lips twisted and he held up the old musket. ‘If I may?’

  ‘Of course.’ Alameche stood aside. Fiselle rammed a charge and ball down the barrel, cocked the musket and raised it to his shoulder. Alameche put the telescope to his eye and sighted on the dozing Rethi. He braced himself and waited for the explosion.

  ‘My Lord Alameche!’

  The shout came from behind them, and there was the sound of hooves. Fiselle swore and lowered his weapon. All three men turned round.

  Like them, the rider was streaked with dust – and his mount was steaming and wheezing with effort. A beater was running in front of him, his face frantic. He ran up to Alameche and threw himself to the ground. ‘Sire! I begged him to wait, but he would not listen!’

  Alameche kicked the boy aside and walked towards the messenger. Even through the thick dust he could see the scarlet tabs on the man’s jacket. The man was from the Citadel. He frowned. ‘Well?’

  Wordlessly the man swung a satchel off his shoulder, reached into it and held out a glassy-looking bead about the size of a pea. Alameche took it, and the messenger wheeled his mount round and galloped off.

  Garamende walked up to him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A message from the Patriarch, I expect.’ Alameche rolled the bead between his fingers. It flattened, and quickly spread itself out to become a paper-thin tablet that just covered the palm of his hand. Alameche thumbed the surface of the tablet, which filled with images and glyphs. He read for a moment before looking up at Garamende. ‘Ah, I need to be alone, old friend. If you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘Of course.’ Garamende clapped him on the shoulder and marched off, bellowing for Fiselle to let him try out that museum piece of a musket, if he was sure it wouldn’t blow his fucking hand off.

  Alameche waited until the man was almost out of sight. Then he stroked the surface of the tablet again. It spoke, in a reedy voice.

  ‘Well? Are you alone?’

  Alameche glanced at the distant Garamende, who was holding Fiselle’s musket out in front of him in a declamatory pose as if he was giving a lecture. ‘Apparently yes,’ he said.

  ‘Apparently? Ah.’ There was a short silence. Alameche grinned. His carefully nuanced reply seemed to be causing the device some reflection. When it spoke again it sounded faintly testy. ‘His Excellency the Final Patriarch hopes that you are enjoying your barbaric medieval rituals. He trusts both that they have not driven your court diary from your mind, and that you have not butchered too many of his chattels.’ The voice paused as if it was drawing breath. ‘His Excellency further observes that he would value your attendance to discuss arrangements for tomorrow evening, when as you are sure to recall the Court and guests will celebrate the anniversary of the Elevation of the Patriarch. He begs that you will visit him at your convenience.’

  Alameche cocked an eyebrow at the tablet. One nuance deserves another, he thought. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Please tell His Excellency that I shall indeed visit him . . . at my convenience.’

  The surface of the tablet went blank. Alameche looked at it thoughtfully – the day was getting more interesting – and then crumpled it into a ball and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He turned towards Garamende and Fiselle, who were still arguing about ancient weapons, and held up his hands. ‘Gentlemen!’

  ‘Ah ha . . .’ Garamende abandoned a point in mid flow and strode towards Alameche. ‘Back with us? All well, I hope?’

  ‘Well enough.’ Alameche smiled, allowing just a little ruefulness to cross his face. ‘I was planning to eat with you when we had finished. Now it seems I’ll be eating with others.’

  ‘Oh?’ Garamende was solicitous. ‘Something of import?’

  Alameche shook his head. ‘Something of none, I imagine. But still, when the Master calls . . .’

  ‘Quite. Well,’ and Garamende laid a hand on Alameche’s shoulder, ‘work is work.’ He turned and called to Fiselle, who was still fiddling with the musket. ‘We’re being abandoned, man. Will you stay and finish the hunt or shall we give up together and find a drink instead?’

  The thin man looked reflective. ‘I find I have less taste for this than I thought. Perhaps after all we should drink.’ He gestured to the tethered boy. ‘What about him? I assume we won’t just leave him to bake?’

  ‘Ah. No.’ Alameche looked at the boy for a moment. Then he turned to Fiselle. ‘Does that musket really work?’

  ‘So I was told.’ Fiselle held it out, and Alameche took it. The dark metal was hot and oily-smelling. He re-cocked it, made to raise it, and then paused. ‘I should mount up, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Just in case.’

  The two men looked at each other, and then climbed on to their beasts.

  Alameche lifted the musket to his shoulder and sighted on the Rethi.

  The rasp-click of the mechanism and the ragged boom were almost simultaneous. The butt kicked against his shoulder.

  The Rethi sprang up and gave a sawing cry of pain. It swung round, sighted the tethered boy, lowered its head and charged. The boy gave a ragged yel
p and began to run, tripping over the chain and crashing to the ground with every other step.

  Alameche mounted quickly and urged his beast to a gallop. Behind him he could still hear the hurried feet of the beaters, the jangle and clash of the boy and, growing quickly louder, the syncopated thunder of the Rethi’s feet. Then a pause – and then an inhumanly high scream of pain and terror. It didn’t stop; obviously the Rethi had decided to feed immediately. Rethis weren’t interested in fresh muscle tissue. Instead they used a prehensile proboscis tipped with horny claws to access internal organs. It usually went in through the anus and followed the gut up into the abdominal cavity.

  Alameche had heard it was quite painful, but he barely noticed the cry. He was busy wondering why the Patriarch, for the first time in twenty years, had used the code word that meant a maximum emergency.

  Convenience, indeed. Something which Alameche suspected would soon be in short supply.

  All forms of mechanized transport were banned from the seared desert, thorn-tangled veldt and scattered salt lakes that together formed the Distal Plains. The hunting party had penetrated over twenty kilometres into the Plains during the morning, and it would normally have taken Alameche at least an hour to ride back to the edge where the beast-houses and the maglev terminus lay.

  Today, it took forty minutes.

  The beast-houses formed three sides of an ugly concrete square with its open side towards the Plains. Alameche galloped his gasping mount straight into the square and dismounted while it was still moving, calling for the Beast Master as he landed. He had to call twice more before the man ran out of his shelter and scampered across the concrete, adjusting his clothes. He halted in front of Alameche and stood, shifting from foot to foot on the baking surface. Alameche looked down. ‘No boots?’ he asked.

  The Beast Master flinched and glanced down at his bare feet.

  Alameche smiled. ‘I imagine I interrupted something,’ he said. ‘I hope she – it had better be a she, hadn’t it? – will forgive us both.’

  The man’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth, but before he could say anything there was a crash from the end of the yard.

  Alameche’s mount had collapsed. It was lying quite still with its head turned towards them. Its mouth was open in a foamringed rictus, and drops of blood from its nostrils made dark smudges in the wind-blown sand that covered the yard.

  Alameche glanced briefly at it and then looked back at the Beast Master, whose face looked ready to crumple. ‘Hard ridden, I grant you, but clearly ill-prepared. Rather like its trainer, and perhaps in both senses?’ He glanced towards the door to the shelter, and nodded to himself. He had been right. A face had been peering round the door – a face that had vanished when Alameche had looked at it. A young male face.

  It looked as if the Beast Master had seen it too because he made an odd, high, whimpering noise deep in his throat. He fell to his knees and made to grasp Alameche’s legs, but Alameche shook his head and took a few steps backward, leaving the man grovelling on his face in the dust. He leaned down and spoke to the lank matted hairs on the back of the man’s neck. ‘Get me transport here within ten minutes, pederast,’ he said softly, ‘and you will only die by poisoning. If not, you and your catamite will both be placed in acid baths. Him first.’

  The man gave an agonized cry, sprang to his feet and ran back to his shelter. Alameche watched him go. Then he walked across the square and through the opening that led to the maglev terminal. The suspended rail, which always looked far too slender to Alameche’s eyes, flicked off across the desert between blocky white columns blurred by heat shimmer. He supposed the people who had built it knew what they were doing. It occurred to him that even if they didn’t they were far beyond his vengeance, unlike almost everyone else on the planet. The sense of powerlessness was almost refreshing. He relaxed and waited.

  The transport arrived in eight minutes. Alameche stood up and stretched as the line of empty cars slowed to a halt and dipped to the level of the platform, doors sliding open. He walked into the nearest car and turned to look back at the terminus. The Beast Master was standing by the exit, his hands straight down by his sides. To his credit, the man managed to keep his head up and his eyes forwards.

  Alameche waved. ‘Well done,’ he called. ‘Two minutes to spare.’

  The man jerked with relief. Alameche felt the floor of the car tremble as it rose into the magnetic field, and the door began to close. He couldn’t help himself; on an impulse he reached out his hand into the aperture, and the door froze. ‘Of course,’ he called, ‘acid is a kind of poison.’ Then he withdrew his hand. The door closed, there was a warning chime, and Alameche sat down as the car accelerated quickly. He allowed himself one short look back. The Beast Master was still standing at the exit, his hands by his sides, but somehow his posture had changed entirely. He looked as if he was hanging from something, rather like a piece of game strung up for the blood to drain before being skinned and gutted. Alameche looked away. He had no personal objection to pederasty – or indeed almost anything else – but the point had to be made.

  The speed of sound in the old, hot, thin atmosphere of Taussich was about a thousand kilometres per hour. Accelerating hard, the car passed through the sound barrier with a muffled whoosh in ten minutes and went on powering forwards.

  It was fifteen hundred kilometres to the Citadel. They would be there in an hour. Alameche sat back in his seat, allowing the force of the car’s acceleration to massage his back against the deep padding. He reached for his commer. Of course, it would have been easier and even a little quicker to use the commer to summon the maglev instead of the Beast Master, but that would have spoiled all the fun.

  Alameche powered up the commer and confirmed that having left the desert he was now back on the comm net. First he sent a terse message to Security about the Beast Master and his little friend. Then he began to catch up with correspondence. Even the commer was somewhat dated; he could have had an eye implant, but he had never been convinced that the security issue had been settled. Besides, he had a residual distaste for having sharp objects near his eyeball. In his experience – and it was extensive – that sort of thing happened to other people.

  The maglev looped across the fringes of the desert and began to climb away from the plateau into the foothills of the Basin Ranges. From here, the land rose unevenly to a high point almost a kilometre above the desert, and then dropped sharply into the Great Basin, a volcanic caldera fifty kilometres across, thickly forested and with the Citadel rising up from its centre.

  As well as being the centre of the Basin, the Citadel was the secular, religious and military centre of an empire which now ruled over five out of the six planets which occupied the Cordern, an isolated area within the centre of the Spin. This central rule was both recent, not yet two generations old, and unprecedented. The planets of the Cordern had earned their segregated status by being, in the view of almost everyone else in the Spin, either ungovernable or not worth the trouble. Through sheer bloody-mindedness the previous Patriarch had proved the first of those to be wrong, albeit at a human price which was agreed outside the Cordern to be appalling.

  But, as Alameche knew, life is cheap and renews itself once a generation whereas mineral resources are limited and valuable. None of the five planets was especially rich in anything, but provided you didn’t mind working their populations to death and leaving their ecosystems in ruins, you could extract enough from them to provide for a decent lifestyle and a growing military strength for their rulers.

  Bootstraps, as the Patriarch said. Or stepping stones, as Alameche preferred to think of it. Five – hopefully soon to be six – planets to begin with, and then outwards, with a little external help.

  And that, Alameche assumed, was what this summons was about. A visit from some friends. The same friends, come to that, who had provided the maglev, as well as a few other comforts. Alameche wondered what they had in their pockets this time. And, of course, how much it migh
t cost. In view of recent discoveries, that was the most interesting question of all.

  Normally Alameche would have stopped by his residence to freshen up before going on to meet the Patriarch but the summons, even if coded, had been unambiguous. Be here, now. So he was here, dusty clothes and grimed face notwithstanding. ‘Here’ was the outer Palazzo of the Citadel Reception Suite, and ‘now’ was just over an hour and a half after the summons had reached him in the middle of the Distal Plains. Alameche was thinking of claiming some sort of record.

  His Excellency Chast, the Final Patriarch of the People’s Democratic Republic of the Planet of Taussich and the Fortunate Protectorates of the Spin Centre, looked up from the board game he had been peering at. ‘Ah, Alameche,’ he said. ‘Thank goodness. You rescue me from certain defeat. May I introduce Ambassador Eskjog, who is here representing some friends of friends and who is, well, who at least is much better at Baffle than I am.’

  Alameche bowed. ‘Ambassador.’

  A small spiky object about the size of a human head was floating on the opposite side of the game board. The spikes, which ranged in length from fingernail to hand’s breadth, were mainly shades of grey. Alameche thought it looked like a gothic cross between a sea creature and a mace. It rose to head height and turned so that one of its longer spikes was pointing at Alameche. ‘A pleasure,’ it said, in a voice far deeper and somehow more human than Alameche was expecting. ‘I have heard a great deal about you.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Alameche lowered his head. ‘I hope it is to my credit?’

  ‘It depends what you mean by credit.’ The machine sounded amused. ‘By any human standards, and I assure you that I am legally human where I come from, you sound ghastly. But I expect that is part of the job description.’