The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  One last tease of a hiccup in this law came during the tedious project of cataloguing Saturn’s rings in the thirtieth century, when a school of mining rigs chanced upon the wrecked hulk of an unknown and impossibly strange craft, embedded and deep-frozen within one of the trillions of rocks that made up the grain of the spectacular rings. Analysis revealed a wonder, however disappointingly tied to Earth it might originally have been. Entombed in permanent shadow within the flamboyant structure were two occupants, their shocked faces frozen in a death that had occurred approximately seventy-nine million years before. They were theropods, more specifically a subspecies cross-breed of Caudipteryx and Dromaeosaur, starkly plumed in hues of blue-tinged silver and ebony, elegant white machine suits of staggering complexity encasing their shrivelled, eerie bodies. Of course it was exciting that members of a race of dinosaur—long and quite famously extinct—had apparently been clever enough to escape the tug of Earth, but they still weren’t what everyone was hoping for: something truly from another world.

  Denial was replaced, reasonably enough, by extraordinary vanity, followed by the triumphant rekindling of religious dependence. Theology became a science once again and God was searched for with a hunger that humankind, in all its earlier childish fervour, had never known. But there was no trace of him, her, it or them, either, and by then humanity was unrecognisable. Only the precious few Immortals—the Amaranthine—had not regressed into barbarism, though their enemies waited, circling, for the ever-dimming lights to go out.

  *

  Dusk has fallen, a sumptuous half-light shrouding the harbour. One or two stars have found their way through the depths of sky. He glances up at them, remembering again that they aren’t real, that the world he sees around him is sealed like a bubble of air in an amber nugget. Sotiris looks down at himself in the gloom, peering at his reflection in the wine glass. He is perhaps in his mid-twenties, suggesting it is somewhere around 2180.

  Someone is making him dream this.

  The petrol engine of a scooter growls to a stop. Aaron, his hair wet, sits astride. He nods a greeting and kicks out the stand, leaning the scooter carefully as if he’d never parked one before. Lights are just starting to come on in the harbour, the window of the gelati shop across the street flickering.

  “You’ve remembered now,” says Aaron matter-of-factly, taking a seat at the table.

  “Yes, I think I have.” He drains his glass. “Iro’s gone, isn’t she?”

  “For the time being.”

  Sotiris looks at him, noting again the kindness in the man’s eerily forgettable face. “What does that mean?”

  Aaron picks up the bottle and pours himself a glass, inspecting it in the twilight. “We’ll talk about that later. For now, it’s just us two.”

  Sotiris nods, aware that the dream will end soon enough. “All right.”

  The man across from him studies his face for a while, spinning the glass deftly in his hand. It makes a sighing noise. “I have a proposition for you, Sotiris Gianakos.”

  Sotiris smiles, safe in the knowledge that he is conversing with an element of himself, some schizophrenic by-product of living so long. “You are Maneker’s hopeful new king, aren’t you? The one everyone’s so afraid of.”

  Aaron scowls for a moment, the glass pausing in his hands. “You think me a trick of your mind.”

  “Of course.”

  He breathes out, the glass resuming its spin. Sotiris looks away to the dark water, hearing something slosh beneath the surface near the buoys. Suddenly he feels cold, a shudder passing through him. He looks back.

  The putrefying corpse of some kind of animal sits where Aaron had been, staring at him with milky eyes peeled wide. Its body is bloated and yellow-black with decay, some kind of larvae wriggling in a hole around its torn nostril.

  It bursts.

  Sotiris woke screaming.

  Thunder

  They were dreams of extreme pressure, compressing and constricting Lycaste’s skull without any sensation of pain, as if something huge had suddenly caught hold of him. In his dream, that danger had always been there, flitting at the edge of his vision, until without warning it had struck. He lay remembering the feeling as it dissipated, trying to stick the experience down before it left him entirely. Something other than the dream had woken him, but he had no idea what. He turned in the bed, recalling the shock of realising he’d seen the shapeless underwater monster in that colourful, sensory-laden nightmare so many times before without understanding what it was, and by then it had been too late.

  Lycaste mulled over the night before, discarding the dream for the necessary space to think. Pentas was long gone, her scent taken with her so that only the sharp smell of his model paint remained in the room. He couldn’t believe what she’d told him; couldn’t believe that she was capable of such cruelty or that it was even true. She loved him, he was certain. It would simply take her time to admit it.

  He stood and stretched in the main tower’s spare bedchamber, watching through the open circular window as waves smoothed the pebbles down on the beach. There it was again, the knocking sound that had brought him from that horrible dream. He had a visitor.

  Most of the local Province had already come to see Drimys in the last week, the headline news of the man’s terrible injuries filtering faster than most local gossip. As Lycaste made his way down the tower steps, he wondered who might be so remote as to have only just heard. He reached the hallway, smoothing his hair quickly, and opened the door.

  “Lycaste Cruenta Melius, good morning. Did I wake you?”

  He blinked and looked down at the wizened, freakish form of Jotroffe on his doorstep. Only very strange people indeed bothered to use full names. He wondered how the hermit knew his. The shrunken little man—looking particularly unusual in the morning light—laid his crook against the wall and pointed to a covered basket on the front step. “For Drimys. I hear he did himself a mischief.”

  Lycaste wasn’t sure that what they’d been through could constitute a mischief, but he was at least glad the man had chosen a current topic of conversation for once. “That’s very kind of you, Jotroffe. I shall see he gets it.”

  Jotroffe cackled, exposing tiny square teeth in a small mouth nothing like Lycaste’s own, and retrieved his stick. He pointed it vaguely to the sky, his small head turning this way and that as if in search of clouds. “I think the barometric pressure will be of interest today, worth keeping a record of.” He leaned on his stick, suddenly looking at Lycaste with great interest. “Do you own a barometer?”

  Lycaste took the basket on the step, making sure to swing the door shut behind him in case the old bore made a dash for his kitchen. “I don’t think so, Jotroffe.” He pointed at the basket. “Thank you, again, for the gift.”

  Jotroffe nodded with a smile, regarding the basket briefly and then returning his attention to the sky. “It is possible to construct a fully functional barometer using a bottle, a hollow reed and a rubber balloon, among other things—the resulting readings are often quite fascinating. One of these days I must pop round and show you. In fact …” He began to rummage in the small, colourfully woven bag he wore over his shoulder, voice trailing off. “I believe I might have some of the necessary equipment about my person—”

  “I’ll have to consult my diary,” said Lycaste quickly, pushing the door open again to step back into his hallway. He kept his hand on the latch. “Do come again.”

  Jotroffe lifted his cane, leaning its tip carefully against the door to prevent it from closing. Lycaste looked down, astounded.

  They stared at each other.

  “Be careful, Lycaste,” the strange man said. “Remember to be careful.”

  “I … shall,” he stammered, watching as Jotroffe’s stick came away from his door. The man smiled.

  “Farewell, then,” Lycaste said, “and … thank you for the advice.” He closed the door slowly, waving, until the heavy latch snicked shut. When he was sure the old man had gone, he dumped
the basket on the table and sat down, abruptly convinced that he had just been threatened in some way. He pulled the basket towards him and peered carefully inside, half expecting to find something made from toenails or armpit hair, instead lifting out a fine-smelling cake. Stored in the bottom of the basket beneath the cake were two sealed amber jars of quince jam and a ring book. Lycaste examined the book briefly and sniffed the jams suspiciously, taking one jar for his larder and reconsidering the idea of growing some quinces for himself.

  Balloons and straws, barometric pressure. What had the fool been talking about? Lycaste cut himself a small slice of the cake to try since he’d not yet had breakfast and took the rest over to the steps leading to his underground cellar. It was possible that Jotroffe had been referring to the approaching storm, though what those random objects had to do with it, he didn’t know.

  He remembered that some of the others had wanted to see the lightning Elcholtzia promised would occur and decided to go up to the east windows to see if he could catch a glimpse before he went back to work on his palace, the thought of a whole day’s uninterrupted model-painting lifting his spirits at last.

  He climbed the spiral stairs up to the servant birds’ winter rooms, steadying himself tiredly a few times against the cool wall. The chamber was filled with Sonerila’s possessions collected over the years, fascinating things he didn’t understand, found strewn on the beach or in the cliffs. By far the most interesting were the chunks of stone with animals apparently trapped inside. He took one from the shelf and turned it this way and that, trying to see how it was made. It had blended to rock, leaving only an impression. Elcholtzia said the rock surrounding such things was a kind of vomit, that the specimens Sonerila had found must have puked up their mineral-rich innards and been stuck within them as they cooled to a block. It didn’t sound nice to Lycaste, who worried every now and then that the same thing might happen to him. Impatiens agreed with Eranthis that perhaps it was something their ancestors had done deliberately, discounting the ridiculous notion of a deadly incontinence. If that were true, it looked like the cruellest of punishments.

  Lycaste’s favourites were the large spirals, like oversized snails. Other things scattered about the room were undoubtedly man-made but had no discernible purpose. There were spheres, coils, twists of metal and the edge of something very hard and very bright, not dulled like the others by salt and coral, its surface embossed with clean symbols unlike any he had seen before. They bore a vague similarity to the runes etched inside the walls of some of the caves. Drimys had thought he might able to break the code and decipher them but there weren’t enough of the markings. Lycaste didn’t want to know what they meant; they were from another time, when things mattered that didn’t matter any more. Some of the objects in the chamber were obviously collected just because they were shiny or glossy, and there were a great many of those, along with recent ring books and toys. The toys were mostly puppets and dolls from when Sonerila was small, often on loan to Briza on the condition that he was gentle with them.

  The servant wasn’t there so Lycaste crossed the landing to the window, noticing the heavy storm clouds coming from the direction of the hills. He stopped to gaze at them, intrigued.

  It was like a landscape in the sky, the clouds mountainous towers of roiling mist sinking between shredded black spears to steep-sided valleys. He listened. There it was—a choked boom followed by a rolling, broken series of beats, like pieces of the world being dropped from unimaginable heights and hitting things as they fell. It came from the depths of the cloud valleys, as if the storm was crumbling in on itself. He strained to listen to the last of it, still quiet and distant. The sound was power, vast and voluminous even from that distance.

  He descended the tower and went outside. The air was still and lit with a yellowish tinge—it was like waking from a confused dream at an odd hour. He could see people beneath the foil tree at the edge of the orchard, all observing the clouds. The valleys of thunder filled the sky but were not quite overhead. Rolling cracks like a drumbeat from somewhere high and far broke across the hills.

  When the sounds of the sky subsided to a crackling gurgle, Lycaste heard them: Eranthis appeared to be arguing, her voice clear then lost again under a fresh boom of crisp, galloping thunder. He saw Pentas and walked cautiously over to the tree beneath which they stood, stooping as he brushed its overhanging branches, and tiny slivers of metal fell twisting from his shoulders. Small wild birds nested in its twisted canopy, chirping anxiously as the thunder splintered the sky.

  The woman she was arguing with was Pamianthe, Briza’s mother. She and Drimys, though still married by law, had been living apart for years. Lycaste joined them wearily, having always been nervous around the woman.

  “I should have summoned a Mediary before I left Odemiz,” Pamianthe said tersely. “Briza would be in schooling by now and know twice as many words. The children in Izmirean can already write!”

  “We all know what Mediaries are like,” Eranthis replied, glowering at the woman.

  Lycaste watched Pentas flinch, wanting to hold her in his arms.

  “I’m taking him, Eranthis. His father can’t look after him.”

  Impatiens knelt by the boy, who was looking thoroughly confused, and whispered in his ear. He stood up again, turning to Pamianthe. “Lycaste is going to take Briza to pick some flowers for Drimys. It’s better we have this conversation without him here, don’t you think, Pamianthe?” He looked at Lycaste.

  Lycaste nodded, taking Briza’s hand and exchanging glances with Pentas.

  Pamianthe caught his arm. “Bring him back before the Quarter’s out, Lycaste, we’ll be leaving.”

  He took Briza out of the orchard, deep concern on the boy’s round face, and into the grove of wild flowers at its edge. Beyond them, the curling darkness choked the sky and blew a moist, surprisingly fresh breeze their way. They climbed the bank where tall orchids rooted in the jungle paths and pink grasshoppers bounced madly away at their approach, palms above the bank swaying lethargically like seaweed under the tortured clouds, thunder rupturing around them. Briza laughed, his troubles forgotten, and ran squealing among the slowest of the grasshoppers, their tiny shapes leaping whenever a boom ripped through the sky. Lycaste began picking the most elegant light blue flowers while he tried to see what was going on beneath the foil tree.

  Briza trotted up with some weeds and dumped them into Lycaste’s arms. “Are these for Daddo?” asked the boy, casting about for more of the unattractive plants among the rippling grass.

  Lycaste nodded and pointed to some tiny scarlet flowers. “These ones, Briza, pick some of these here.”

  Briza crouched down, deciding which ones to select, his tongue sticking out of his mouth. “The man in the caves likes flowers.”

  Lycaste frowned, genuinely thinking he’d misheard. His hand clenched around an orchid stem but didn’t pull. “The man in the caves?”

  Briza hummed and tore some red petals from a flower, throwing them into the increasing wind. “He gave me some.”

  “When did you see a man, Briza?” He shot his gaze towards the rocks, in plain view at the end of the beach.

  “Today,” said Briza in a sing-song voice. He spied a lone grasshopper and ran to chase it, his flowers forgotten.

  The caves. From there anyone could see most of the house and gardens. He walked back to the orchard to get a better look, making sure Briza remained in view as he played in the grass. The others were still arguing beneath the tree.

  He picked up a branch the length of his thigh from the woodpile and swung it tentatively, feeling its weight, then set off along the beach. The first spots of rain began to speckle his body and darken the pebbles, while out to sea something flashed, bright as lit magnesium against the grim sky. He stopped to look down at himself, wiping away the slickness on his skin. Lycaste had felt rain before, but not for some years and then only briefly. That which dropped on him now was heavier, thicker. It smelled different. Bass thunde
r rolled over the beach as he shook his head and marched more quickly towards the caves, gaping greyly in the thickening rain beyond his overturned boat. He swung the stick again, reassuringly heavy in his fist, his fingers still stained from the orchids.

  Lycaste had no idea what he was going to do when he got there. He looked down at his rain-slicked body as he walked, his dainty ankles coated in rough wet sand, and slowed. His slender physique wouldn’t even deter a child. He hoped the stick might be threatening enough—if it had to be. He swung it again.

  “Who are you?” Lycaste said to the whispering rain and grinding clouds, practising lowering his voice and settling his shoulders to look threatening. It was absurd, but the best he could do. He stopped, looking back to the dark green slope of orchard and ahead to the caves. He was soaked. In a drawer somewhere lay the heirloom—a finely wrought old pistol ring that he had never tested. He should have thought of it sooner, should have gone and tried it before he’d started out. Stupid.

  Almost there, he watched the caves closely as he approached, looking for any sign of movement among their crags. The darkening sea slammed against the furthest rocks, white spray showering the cave-mouth. He had to enter there or walk around next to the heaving water. Another flash came from somewhere behind him as he stepped gingerly up onto the first smooth, barnacled slab leading to the cave.

  The tumbling surf grew quieter as he stepped in. A bed of smoother sand reached far inside, soft on his raw feet. He crept further, trying to separate the volume of the waves from any sounds inside. Heaped seaweed rotted against the stone, rank and sharp in his nostrils. It became darker, but his eyes adjusted quickly to the bleak light that filtered from outside; the forms of rock reared and tumbled about him, sometimes narrowing so much that a man could only just squeeze through. Every time he reached those places, he was convinced someone would leap out, catching him trapped. But he heard nothing, just the dwindling grumble and smash of the elements.