by John Meaney
“You.” Chef Keldur pointed to the rust-uniformed servant who stood by the desserts. “Personatropes for Eldriv.”
“Sir.” The servant waited for a moment, checking the microdrone as it began to pour sauce over the desserts, then hurried off along an aisle.
“One refresher dose only,” Keldur called after him. “No more.”
Malkoril asked the pale man: “How goes it, Eldriv?”
“The play will be magnificent.” A haughty sniff. “You’ll excuse my frustration: the creative urge.”
Malkoril kept a straight face as Eldriv withdrew.
Chef Keldur and Major-Steward Malkoril walked along a wide aisle, trailed by Tom. Silver drones floated and golden microdrones flitted among the square, ornate columns.
On one steel table lay a slab of meatblock, carved into an elaborate double helix. Keldur and Malkoril halted.
“Ah, Chef.” A long-mustachioed man was replacing a lattice blade, from a matched set of six, in its velvet-lined brass case.
“Bertil.”
Behind the mustachioed man, eight anxious-faced young servants were huddled.
“My trainees”-—with a disdainful glance—”have ruined this food sculpture. We’ll need another block.”
“Your section’s already over budget, Bertil.”
“But perfection—”
“—is a balanced ledger.” Keldur stared the man down. “Don’t ask again.”
Then he and Malkoril walked on.
Tom stayed three paces behind, but he could hear Chef Keldur’s muttered complaint—”Am I a pharmacoder, a circus manager, or what?”—and Malkoril’s answering chuckle.
The trainees are going to pay for Bertil’s loss of face. Tom glanced back at their worried expressions. But why doesn’t that bother me?
“Tray duty, boy.”
They had stopped by a shining copper workbench, and were looking at Tom.
“You’ll start here.”
“And call it.”
For repetition after repetition, under Keldur’s supervision, Tom summoned the tray.
“Again.”
Each time, it floated slowly across the workbench, hovered, then Tom placed his right hand—his only hand—underneath, and swung the tray to his shoulder.
“One thousand. Stop now.”
A thousand repetitions.
“Sir.” Tom’s shoulder and forearm burned.
“Go to store number three. Ask for Jak.”
Trembling with fatigue, Tom bowed.
Outside in the corridor, he looked right and left. Opalescent walls, but an unfamiliar teal-green, furlike carpet. The wrong corridor? Or had it changed?
Confused, Tom tried to construct a mental map.
“Left,” he decided, but a strange ripple passed through the soft, green floor.
He stopped.
“Wrong way?”
One wall’s shining material shifted, extruding a stubby arm, and a thick finger pointed back along the corridor.
Tom knelt down to pat the soft floor. “Thank you very much,” he said and smiled, bemused.
“You’re Jak?”
“Right.” The tall youth had lank, dark hair and was dressed like Tom in ivory and black. “Like the holodramas.”
“Sorry? Oh—like a Jack.”
But real Jacks were not heroic: Tom remembered the blue, motile dermaweb, the microfaceted eyes, searching for the Pilot’s hidden crystal.
“You’re Corcorigan, then.”
“Tom.”
A smile flitted across Jak’s face. “This way, Corcorigan.”
“Alexon, Tat, Jyonner, Mazh—he’s the ugly one—then Driuvik…” Jak pointed them out in turn. Twelve, including Tom, at the black table in the gleaming obsidian room.
“And the pervert opposite you is Jak,” said Tat, a strong-featured oriental. “But he answers to ‘cretin.’”
Rectangular membranes—black, like everything else in here— marked the dorm’s walls: entrances to their individual rooms.
“Forceful answer, too.” Jak hooked fishblock from his bowl with a tine-spoon. “If you push me.”
“In your dreams.”
When the meal was over, Tom retired to his room—not before seeing a blank-faced serving wench come in to clear the table: there were hierarchies even here—and sat down on the black bed.
Luxury.
“Hiya.” Jak’s head and shoulders protruded through the membrane. “You OK?”
“Yes. Too much OK.”
“What do you mean?” But Jak’s glance flickered across Tom’s abbreviated left sleeve.
“You know what I mean.”
A pause.
“That’ll be the implant,” said Jak.
He drew back through the membrane, leaving Tom alone.
~ * ~
19
NULAPEIRON AD 3405
Late night: a dim orange lustre to the Palace corridors. Tom was “shadowing” Jak, learning by observation.
The stolen brass cylinder was hard, tucked inside Tom’s waistband.
Lattice blade.
They bore left, into a plush, wide tunnel, eerie in the muted light. A slowly revolving impossible triangle, three or four metres to a side, hung in mid-air.
“Get in here.” Jak, without dropping his tray, stepped smartly into an alcove.
“What—?”
Tom was staring at the triangle, bone-white and inlaid with platinum, trying to figure the perspective. Was it holo or solid? A composite?
Jak tugged Tom into the alcove just as three silver shapes whipped through the air.
“Mad buggers.”
One of the lev-bikes hurtled through the turning triangle’s hollow centre, catching the opportunity just right. Manic laughter echoed back as all three lev-bikes zipped along the tunnel’s diminishing perspective, hooked into a dangerous turn, and were gone.
“Thanks, Jak.” As they stepped back into the corridor, Tom checked the smooth brass cylinder: the lattice blade was still secure, hidden beneath his jerkin. “Thanks for mentioning the implant, too.”
“No secret.” Jak shrugged his narrow shoulders, then hoisted his tray back into position. “Coming?”
Earlier, totally submerged in the bubbling black aerogel of his bathing alcove, Tom had found the implant: a lump, buried between his chest and left shoulder-muscle. Too big for femtotech.
At their destination, Jak went first through the membrane. Gossamer-fine, it slid over Tom’s skin as he followed, hand held against his waist to secure the secreted brass cylinder.
Inside, a polished red granite floor shone beneath the groined ceiling, the floating amber glowclusters.
“You can’t go any further.” A small, chubby-faced child, maybe five SY old, looked up at them.
Jak stopped dead.
Beyond, on soaring, twisted, stalklike columns, two grey marble platforms hung. Facing each other, each platform held two rows of seats, but currently held only four youngsters.
It was a junior debate, and the moderator—a small black-skinned boy—sat on a jade chair dangling in mid-air from a cable extruded from the high ceiling.
“Why’s that?” asked Tom.
The little girl’s eyes grew round. “Zeno’s paradox.” She spoke with a slight lisp. “Before you reach the table”—her small chubby hand pointed to a lev-table near the moderator’s chair—”you have to get halfway there. Before that, you have to get a quarter-way there. Before that . . .”
She continued in a singsong voice, enumerating fractions.
Jak was standing stiffly, not moving, because of the girl’s implicit command. He gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
I’m breaching protocol, Tom realized. But if I don’t, we could be here all night.
From the suspended chair, the moderator announced: “The motion before the house is that this motion, its outcome being predestined, is not a motion.”
“We can get there,” Tom whispered, interrupting the girl’s conti
nuing recitation, “in no time at all.”
She stopped, mouth open.
“If I take lots of small steps, really small,” Tom began.
“Infinitesimal,” the little girl said solemnly.
“Right.” Tom was impressed. “And it takes no time to cross each infinitesimal distance, so . . .”
The girl’s face lit up as she spotted the conclusion. “It’s instantaneous.”
“That’s Tom’s paradox.”
“Tom’s paradox,” she repeated. Then she stuck her thumb in her mouth, turned, and scampered away.
“Salle d’armes,” said the sous-chef. “Tertiary studio. You know the way?”
“Yes, sir.”
It was the morning shift, and things were busy.
“It’s for Maestro da Silva.”
Not nobility, then. If Tom had not been available, they could have sent a smart-tray via a drone.
Once outside, tray over his right shoulder, he checked the direction in which the salle d’armes lay. “This way?”
A ripple of agreement along the wall.
“Thanks.”
Clash of blades, stamp of feet. Exertion’s heavy scent; aggression’s tingling edge on the cool air.
A tremor passed through Tom as he reached the open archway.
Inside, the fencing-master’s students stamped and lunged, span and cut. Blue-clad, masked, their blades a fast-moving blur.
“Watch your line, Master Adams!”
“Maestro.” A blade salute, and the bout was rejoined.
“Better.”
The fencing-master wore black, and his long hair and goatee beard were dark, tinged with grey. He was lean and his eyes were quick.
“Bind, disengage.” He walked among his students, alert to everything. “Mistress Faledria: flèche with the hips low.”
Maestro da Silva was not the fencing-master whose demo had featured Dervlin, but he was of the same physical type: whipcord-thin and very fit.
To one side, three maskless fencers practised individually within holospheres. Colour-coded radii spiked through the air, arcs hung in brilliant curves, as their blades traced the intricate sequences.
Tom looked for a table, found one.
“Ow!”
A light foil bent almost double: stop-hit against a charging opponent’s exposed ribcage.
Tom set down his tray.
A buzzer sounded, and the fencing-master called out, “Arretez!” The fencers stepped back from their opponents, sketching formal salutes with their blades.
“Out of my way, oaf!” A burly youth pushed past.
“Sorry, sir.” Tom made the requisite genuflection of apology, but the youth was already lost among the bustle of sweat-stained students, masks under their arms, leaving the chamber.
“Lord Avernon?” the fencing-master called to a pale-skinned lad who looked thin and exhausted. “Are you all right?”
The boy nodded. Unsteadily, he walked out.
As the others left, Tom watched. Some merely glanced at the fencing-master, a few gave short bows—the better fencers, Tom guessed—and smiles. But their teacher was not noble-born.
“Thank you, Maestro—” a young woman began.
A graceful nod from the fencing-master.
“—and I’ll keep my hips low next time.”
A smile tugged at Maestro da Silva’s lean face, but then he glanced at the open archway and frowned.
Tom hurried from the chamber.
I hope Bertil’s not sculpting food today. The lattice blade which Tom had slipped from the brass case was in his room. But I should be more anxious than I am.
As he walked on, the fencers were dispersing, taking different exits from the main corridor. No sign of the young Lord.
Not to worry.
Tom backtracked, taking his time. He checked three side corridors, going a little way along them before returning. In the fourth corridor, he spotted Lord Avernon: the boy was still walking, putting a hand out for balance.
Tom held back.
The boy’s footsteps faltered and he coughed, rasping, then his knees gave way. Somehow, Tom caught him just before his head hit the floor.
What do I do?
Awkwardly, he pulled at the boy.
“Help me ...”
Then the floor began to flow, carrying Tom and Lord Avernon along, though it seemed for ever before Tom finally dragged the wheezing, unconscious boy through the unadorned archway, calling out the maestro’s name.
Blood spurted.
Fist and stallion. Tom fought to hold the image in his mind, but his naked body was drenched with sweat and the brass cylinder was slippery in his grip.
Again.
The lattice blade field crackled back into life.
Fist and stallion.
Logotropic flashback from the Captain’s classes overlaid visual/ proprioreceptive stimuli: between anterior deltoid and the pectoralis group, he sighted in on the target. Old nano, from its size, drexling nanocytes into the thoraco-acromial artery.
He whimpered as white light bit into his shoulder. Bloody rivulets ran down his chest.
Fist and—
The hilt twisted in his grip and he thumbed it off, put it down, then hooked his thumb into the open wound and pulled the thing out.
-—stallion!
Tiny gobbets hung to the implant as it arced across the black bathing-alcove, bounced off the wall with a clang, and fell. It rolled to a stop.
~ * ~
20
NULAPEIRON AD 3405
The left arm burned.
Sliding in and out of sleep, among fitful dreams of Mother dancing, callously laughing, while Paradox, no longer kittenish, was starving, ribs visible, and Father’s corpse span endlessly in the Vortex Mortis—the arm was there, but not in reality: instantiated in pain.
“—awake yet?”
Waves of grey exhaustion crashed upon Tom.
“I said, are you—?” Jak, leaning in through the black membrane.
“All right, all right.”
“Visitor.” He popped back out of sight.
Tom rolled to his left—and he could feel, exquisitely, every detail of his nonexistent left arm: had it been real, it would have been inside both sleeping-pad and floor—and sat up, just as Maestro da Silva came inside the all-black room.
“Morning. May I sit?”
“Er . . .”
Tom blinked as the fencing-master said: “Float-pad,” and a lozenge of black wall slid out into mid-air and hovered.
“Morning . . .” Tom cleared his throat. “Ah, good morning, Maestro.” Tom pulled the sheet around his waist.
Maestro da Silva sat down on the pad and crossed his legs.
“With that accent . . . You’re from Duke Khaznhov’s realm?”
“No, here. This demesne, but—” Tom’s gaze dropped to the floor.
“Ah. How many strata?”
“I’m not sure.”
A pause. Then, “Sometimes, when an opponent has a sophisticated strategy of compound attacks, you can use intricacy and momentum to your advantage.”
“Er, right.”
“But you’re not a sportsman.” Not quite a question; the Maestro deliberately did not look at Tom’s softly unathletic body. “What are your interests?”
“Poetry, sir.” Tom swallowed. “And maths. Languages.”
“Hmm.” He pointed at Tom’s stump. “Once you’re here, the punishments for poor performance are quite mild. Demerits and the like. Had you noticed?”
Tat was currently working extra duties, to clear the twelve demerits he had earned for spilling soup on one of Lady Darinia’s grand-nieces.
“Yes, sir.”
The use of tranquilizer-implants was unmonitored: there had been no repercussions from cutting the thing out. The powers-that-be did not want their subjects to be mindless zombies.
