Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘It’s done well enough to last this long. Anyway, if Spearpoint moved, the Mire would move with it. Doesn’t that rather exempt it from criticism?’

  ‘So what?’ she asked, disinterestedly. ‘The Mire has to be somewhere. All I care about is that it isn’t here, getting in my way when I have a ship to fly.’

  ‘I’m given to understand that you’re very good at it.’ He looked at the photographs again, then back at Curtana, gauging the similarity of the face he saw in the images against the one opposite him. Like Curtana he was dark-skinned, but the resemblance went deeper than that. He could see the same eyes, the same delicate features. ‘That man ... is he by any chance your father?’

  ‘Was,’ she corrected. ‘He died ten years ago. Got into an encounter with Skullboys over Sunburn Flats.’

  ‘And he flew this ship?’

  ‘And his father before him, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather all the way back to when they laid her keel. Been in the family for more than ten generations. She’s a hundred and fifty years old. Not the oldest ship in Swarm by any measure, but one of the oldest. That’s why I won’t see her endangered. She’ll go down in flames one day, but it won’t be under my command.’

  ‘I would have thought being on some long-range scouting mission qualified as hazardous in anyone’s book.’

  ‘That’s what she was built for,’ Curtana said. ‘I’m talking about the danger from internal elements, such as people I can’t be sure aren’t lying to me.’

  ‘I don’t know what I can do to convince you of my good intentions.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something.’ Curtana seemed on the verge of dismissing him when a thought occurred to her. She reached into a drawer under the fold-down desk and produced a small black volume that Quillon recognised. ‘We confiscated this from your friend, on the assumption she might have another weapon concealed somewhere inside it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We found nothing. She may as well have it back.’ Curtana riffled the translucent pages before handing the book over. ‘Are you a religious man?’

  Quillon shifted awkwardly on the seat. His wing-buds were catching on the high fretted back.

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘That’s one thing we have in common, at least. Frankly, I wouldn’t have expected it of Meroka, either. That tongue of hers—’

  ‘She can’t help it, I assure you.’

  Something in his words or expression drew a smile on Curtana’s serious face. ‘Defending her again, Doctor?’

  He fingered the Testament. ‘Merely stating the facts.’

  ‘Ricasso thinks there’s hidden wisdom in that book. Truths smeared almost out of all recognition. He’s not a believer himself - he doesn’t hold with all that fire and brimstone, Mire as God’s Eye burning through the world stuff - but he doesn’t dismiss the practical value of close study of the Testament. But then Ricasso believes a lot of strange things. That’s another thing Spatha and the dissenters don’t like about him.’

  ‘I presume you know him quite well?’

  ‘I don’t have a lot of choice,’ Curtana said. ‘I’m his god-daughter.’

  In the early morning he returned to sickbay. It was not as crowded as it had been the evening before and some screens had been set up between the makeshift beds. Quillon had already been informed that one of the crewmen had died from unavoidable complications, while two others had been deemed well enough to be discharged as walking wounded. Gambeson was half-awake, riffling through notes and the depleted remains of his medical rations. He had the caved-in, shop-soiled look of a man who had not slept in weeks.

  ‘I’m told we should be back in Swarm by mid-morning,’ Gambeson said, pausing to scratch at his beard, which had grown progressively more unruly since their first encounter. ‘Not a day too soon, in all honesty. We won’t lose any more men, but it’s been a close-run thing. You can take some credit for that, Doctor.’ He held a bottle up to the light, inspecting the thimbleful of medicine still inside, perhaps deciding that it was too precious to discard.

  ‘I wondered how Meroka was faring.’

  ‘Much improved. I spoke to her earlier. She may be sleeping now, but if you wish to talk to her yourself, I won’t object.’

  ‘You’d better clear another bed,’ Quillon said, steeling himself. ‘You may have a new patient coming in.’

  Gambeson made an effort to smile, but he was clearly much too exhausted for that. He nodded in the direction of one of the screened-off beds. Meroka had been moved since the night before, and was now next to one of the shuttered windows. Quillon parted the screens, certain that if Meroka was awake, she would have heard their conversation.

  She was. She had.

  ‘We haven’t got anything to talk about, Cutter.’ She sounded drowsy, the words slurred. He could see that the dressing on her shoulder had been changed recently.

  ‘You hate me that much?’

  ‘I hate what you are, and the fact that you lied.’

  ‘That would mean hating Fray as well.’

  ‘My problem, not yours.’

  ‘I envy you, Meroka. It must be refreshingly simple to live in your world. Everything’s so clear-cut, isn’t it? Angels bad. Humans good. No matter that the angels aren’t all the same, and some of the humans have done far worse things to each other than angels ever have.’

  ‘You finished sermonising?’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘Then get the fuck away from me.’

  ‘I hope you’ll forgive me in time,’ Quillon said. ‘For what it’s worth, I enjoyed your company, when you weren’t convinced I was the devil incarnate.’ He paused and drew out the Testament. ‘I brought you this. Based on what Tulwar said, I’m assuming it means something to you, other than as a means of safekeeping weapons.’ He placed the Testament down on her chest, where she could reach it with her good arm.

  Then he left, before she could say a word.

  Later that morning they approached a high crater wall, castellated with notches, rimmed in amber fire by the ascending sun. Quillon was allowed onto the command bridge, and then onto the balcony that ran around the gondola, affording the best view. The airship was still maintaining a ground speed of fifty leagues per hour, according to the instruments he had glimpsed on his way through the bridge. That was faster than most trains, even the electric express service between Neon Heights and Circuit City, but there was little more than a breeze on the outside. He kept having to resist the urge to check that his hat was still jammed on his head.

  ‘You were expecting it to be gustier,’ Spatha said, joining him on the balcony.

  Quillon prickled at the security officer’s unheralded arrival. ‘Are we moving with the wind?’

  ‘We’d have a much faster ground speed if that was the case. The air’s fairly still today. But an airship’s not like an aeroplane. Yes, we know about aeroplanes, Doctor Quillon - we don’t use airships simply because we haven’t grasped the possibilities of heavier-than-air flight. In this zone, and most of the airspace we operate in, you simply cannot build an internal-combustion engine with a sufficiently high power-to-weight ratio to make it effective. Dirigibles, on the other hand, can still be made to work.’

  ‘I never thought otherwise,’ Quillon said, though in truth he had given the matter no thought whatsoever.

  ‘An aeroplane cuts through air like a knife. An airship drags air with it, like a glove. We’re close enough to the envelope to feel the benefit of that here.’

  ‘Thank you for answering that question for me.’

  ‘We’ll be at Swarm shortly. Once there, you’ll cease to be under the specific jurisdiction of Painted Lady. I expect you think that’s the last you’ll see of me.’

  ‘I imagine that’s not really in my hands.’

  ‘Come with me, Doctor, I’d like to show you something - I think you’ll find it invigorating. You do have a head for heights, don’t you? Of course. How could you not?’

  ‘Wha
t would happen if I stayed here?’

  ‘You might meet with an unfortunate accident. We’re not overlooked by any part of the gondola here. If you were to slip over that railing, no one would notice.’

  ‘I might.’

  Spatha winked. ‘You could always try flapping those little wings.’

  Knowing he had no choice, he followed Spatha around the curve of the gondola to a gate in the railing. They were intermittently in view of the gondola’s bridge and windows, but everyone aboard seemed far too preoccupied with the approach to the crater wall to care about what was happening outside. They were in safe airspace now, the sky empty of Skullboy marauders. Spatha opened the gate’s latch. It led to one of the starboard engine spars, a narrow plank with a waist-high wire hand-guide on the trailing side, the engine a distant snarling mass at the far end of it. The spar was supported by tensioned cables rising up to meet the top of the gondola and the brooding undercurve of the envelope.

  ‘Walk it, Doctor,’ Spatha invited.

  ‘If you’re going to kill me, why don’t we just get it over with now?’

  ‘I’m not going to kill you.’ Spatha sounded affronted and startled. ‘I’m just satisfying myself that you can meet one of the standard requirements for operational crew. We must all be prepared to go out on those engine spars, when needs must. Things malfunction and need repairing. Propeller pitch can’t be adjusted from within the gondola, only by someone out there. In the heat of battle, or when we hit an uncharted zone boundary, there isn’t time to wait until a technician arrives. All crew have to be able to do it.’

  ‘I thought I was a client, last I heard.’

  ‘Let’s just say that you’ve entered a transitional state.’

  Quillon knew there was no point resisting. He stepped out onto the spar, feeling the vibration of the engine through the soles of his shoes. There was nothing to prevent him from falling forwards, and only the thin guide-wire to arrest him should he fall back. The wire provided more of a psychological than an actual benefit. He clutched it nonetheless. Spatha, who was not holding on to anything, nodded for him to walk further out. ‘You can’t reach the engine from here.’

  The gangway was only wide enough for one man to pass at a time. Quillon had not felt any vertigo when he had been inside the airship, not even when he had looked down at the ground sliding beneath her from the balcony. Now it arrived in full, paralysing force. The terrain was beginning to rise up to meet the crater wall, but it was still an upsettingly long way to the ground. It was a fallacy that angels didn’t suffer from fear of heights. Fear of heights was a very sensible phobia to cultivate, even if you had wings. But Quillon didn’t even have wings. He just had the useless stumps of wings, confined under the fabric of his shirt.

  ‘Further, Doctor. All the way out. Show us what you’re made of.’ Quillon could barely raise his eyes to the engine, let alone work out how far he had already come. The wind began to increase as soon as he left the airship’s cocoon of still air. The plank trembled and thrummed, like a horse shivering to dislodge a mosquito. He kept inching along sideways, his back to the direction of motion, hands on the wire, sliding along it rather than letting go completely.

  ‘Have you proved your point?’ he asked, raising his voice above the engine and the wind.

  ‘Not yet. Carry on.’

  He risked a sideways glance. Spatha was right there, his arms folded, leaning into the wind, a grin of quiet amusement on his face, no less at ease than if he had been standing on solid ground. Quillon redoubled his grip on the wire and continued his shaking, fear-drenched advance. The wind dug its talons into him, trying to rip his coat from his frame. Now his hat really was beginning to loosen, but he could not bring himself to let go of the wire, not even with one hand. The hat popped off, and he felt cold air skim his scalp.

  ‘Just a little further, Doctor. You’re doing fine, for a Spearpointer. We’ll have you on engine duty in no time.’

  ‘I had you down as a xenophobic zealot,’ Quillon said. ‘I didn’t realise you were also a sadist.’

  ‘We all have our hidden depths.’

  He must have been two-thirds of the way to the end of the strut. All he was conscious of was being suspended in space between two fixed landmarks: the engine, and the much larger bulk of the airship. Now the terror of reaching the engine was beginning to ebb, to be replaced by the equally potent terror of returning to the airship. He continued his sideways progress, his heart beating too fast, his hands dead and cold on the wire. The engine was nearly in reach. He could feel the heat belching from its exhaust nozzles. The noise was savage, feral, like the world being torn in two.

  ‘Reach out, Doctor. Place a hand on the cowling. That’s all I ask for today.’

  He dared to let go of the wire with his left hand, leaning to his left to touch the engine. He gripped the wire as well as he could with his right hand, the one the Skullboy had sunk its teeth into, and his feet were still firmly planted on the plank, with its anti-slip coating. But even so he slipped, or had his feet kicked out from under him. It was so sudden that he could not say which had happened. All he knew was that he went from reaching to hanging, holding on to the wire with his right hand, his wrist twisting violent as his body was sucked back under the wire into open air. Still the wind tried to rip him free. He gasped something, gulped in terror and shock, seeing Spatha standing over him, Spatha’s boots still on the plank, Spatha’s arms still folded. Quillon’s feet were dangling into space. His left hand grasped at nothing. His right hand began to lose its grip on the wire.

  Spatha moved with startling speed. Anchoring himself with one hand, he grasped Quillon’s sleeve with the other and hauled him back onto the plank.

  ‘There you are, Doctor. I’ve got you now.’

  Quillon wanted to spit something back at him, but all he could feel was pathetic, shaming gratitude that he had not been allowed to die. His calm still unruffled, Spatha helped him to his feet. Wordlessly they began to work their way back towards the gondola. ‘I think we’ll call it a day for now,’ Spatha said eventually, when he had reached the gate.

  ‘You’ve made your point,’ Quillon said, forcing the words out between gasps for breath.

  ‘I’ve not even begun,’ Spatha said.

  But then Quillon saw something that rendered any possible reply superfluous. They were cresting the crater wall, slipping through one of the deeper notches, plunging cliffs of weathered rock sliding by on either side, seemingly close enough to scrape the propellers.

  Beyond, sheltered inside the crater, lay what could only be Swarm.

  He could not begin to count the ships. There must have been a hundred, a hundred and fifty of them, at the very least. They were packed together densely at the core, more dispersed around the edges of the perimeter, and although the entire formation was holding position within the crater wall, the individual craft were in constant nervous motion. They were all imaginable shapes and sizes and colours, the sole constancy being that they were all airships, and that each craft had at least one propeller. Some had many more than that, and some - like Painted Lady - were augmented with wings and fins, scalloped and elegant and painted with dazzling designs in glorious heraldic colours. She was, now that he had something to measure her against, by no means the largest airship. Patrolling the edge of the formation, quartering back and forth, were ships of similar size and armament to Curtana’s. Quillon guessed that these must be Swarm’s scouts and protectors, fast, agile airships tasked with guarding the weaker, slower ships. There were some with huge, multi-decked gondolas, large as skyscrapers turned sideways, pinned under enormous, sagging, sluglike envelopes, propelled by an absurd number of tiny whirring engines. Some of these huge craft were even joined together, connected by bridges and ladders of swaying rope. Much tinier ships - little more than teardrop-shaped balloons with a single cabin tucked under them - buzzed though the gaps between the behemoths as if they were nothing more substantial than cloudbanks. There were too many of
the tiny ships to begin numbering them in the main count; they were, Quillon supposed, merely the ferries and taxis serving the aerial city that Swarm constituted.

  He couldn’t see all the way through it. The ships were packed too densely for that, darkening into purple gloom as they robbed each other of sunlight. He was aware only that the very largest ships - fat, juicy maggots that were anything up to a quarter of a league from nose to tail - were cloistered deep within the formation. He could see parts of them as the formation shifted, but never the whole thing.

  And then there was the sound, which he was only now becoming properly aware of. Even above the noise of Painted Lady’s own engines, he could hear the cumulative drone of Swarm. Not just four engines but - he could easily believe - four thousand: four thousand variable-pitch airscrews whisking the air, either to hold station or to maintain darting patrol patterns. Four thousand subtly different engine notes, not one tuned to exactly the same tone as any other, but combining, merging, threading, echoing off the crater walls to form one endless, throbbing, harmonically rich chorus that was utterly, shockingly familiar.

  The hum of the city.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Painted Lady docked under the belly of a much larger dirigible, a dark green juggernaut that Quillon presumed was a dedicated repair and refurbishment facility for servicing long-range airships. She had a long, narrow central gondola, flanked by half a dozen berthing positions where entire ships could be locked into place, constrained by ropes, cables and an arrangement of massive grapples. Two other craft were already docked, one running her engines on a test cycle, the other with her envelope flayed open like a skinned carcass, exposing a lacy internal skeleton of metal stiffening hoops and lateral struts, the gasbags deflated so that she generated no lift of her own. Airmen of both sexes crawled over the autopsied form, industrious as beetles. Some of them were roped up for safety, but others were entirely dependent on hand- and footholds, blithely dismissive of the possibility of falling.