Howling Dark (Sun Eater)

by Christopher Ruocchio

  The visitor’s port was a single road, proceeding left and right in a great loop so that it made a circuit around the Enigma’s entire circumference, with ships docked in berths to either side. The concourse lay open to the air, which hugged the rotating inner surface of the Sojourner or else was contained by the static fields that guarded the ship’s open mouth. I realized on stepping out from the shadow of the umbilical hall that my original understanding of the ship had been wrong. This was not March Station. Not a city at all. There were very few other people on the concourse, and most of them seemed to know exactly where they were going and why. They moved ship to ship with the determination of executives on the cusp of some business arrangement. Perhaps that’s what they were. A coterie of women in the gray and violet uniforms of the Wong-Hopper Consortium filed past, and I marveled to see something so commonplace in that strange land as the Mandari in their tall hats. A Durantine ship’s captain in doublet and hose hurried past, accompanied by a gaunt man with papery skin. Some emotion in the face of the latter one drew my eye, and it took me a moment to realize that it was no emotion at all.

  “That was an android,” I whispered to Switch, looking back over my shoulder like the rube I felt. I had heard the Durantines kept androids aboard their ships, trusted them to watch their crews while they slept the long sleep between the stars. I shivered. It sounded like a recipe for horror, like the premise of some grim Eudoran masque.

  Switch made the sign of the sun disc discreetly, whispered, “What are we doing out here, Had?”

  “Just getting a sense for the place,” I said, resuming my walk, checking the drape of my lacerna over my armor. “Get a sense for what Vorgossos is going to be like. I don’t want to be wrong-footed when we get there.”

  “Should have brought Doctor Onderra,” Switch said, sticking close to my side. Up ahead, a box like an upright sarcophagus floated on repulsors, flanked by guards dressed in deep blue cloaks with black feathers adorning the crests of their helms. I did not recognize the livery. They held a silk awning on tentpoles over the top of the sarcophagus, and as they approached I could see the metal arms extruding from the sides of the artifact. It had four faces, front and back and either side, carved of some pale wood that contrasted with the black metal. We had to step aside as the strange procession passed. I wondered what it was. Some religious item? Or else some fey Exalted from the depths of space. “She knows about demoniacs.”

  “She is a demoniac, you know,” I said, continuing forward.

  I didn’t have to look to see the fear in my friend’s face. “I know that, Had, I do. But she’s not an eight-foot metal spider, either.” He stopped, forcing me to stop with him. Opposite us, a man with four arms of jointed bone clung from the underside of a starship, working at some instrumentation panel with tools I did not understand. “I’d take the Pale over this lot. The God Emperor did right to wipe out the Mericanii. Can you imagine if this were everywhere?”

  I was seeing the dead eyes of the SOMs in that cafe on Rustam, the way their shattered bodies still moved, severed limbs writhing, clawing after me. The memory smoldered, the light of it reflected in my friend’s drawn face. A little girl hurried out of the ship the four-armed man was working on, carrying a pocket plasma cutter. Her greasy coveralls swamped her tiny frame, and she stomped a bit in boots too big for her, but she laughed, and held the plasma tool up for the chimeric man harnessed to the hull of the ship above her. A father and child, I realized with a start, or else something very like it.

  Far above our heads, the far side of the Exalted ship glittered in the dimness, distinguishable from the native stars only by their regularity—the grid pattern of them. The crowd grew thicker as we pressed on, dozens of people and creatures of all descriptions crowded into what seemed suddenly a narrow lane. The too-familiar glisten of holographs danced above our heads, recreating the feel of the streets on March Station and in Rustam, all of it shouting for a shard of my attention.

  Long ago, Sir Roban, my father’s lictor, would take me to the Meidua bazaar that I might see the people whom I might one day rule. Rushes had littered the ground outside, and livestock shipped in from upcountry snuffled in pens beside parked shuttlecraft. The air was close inside, thick with smoke and the sound of voices, unwashed bodies pressing, moving through a dance as old as Ur. In a way, that concourse reminded me of nothing so much as the Meidua bazaar. Not a proper streetfront as in Borosevo, but a riot of informality pressing all around. It was as if all those strange persons had unburdened their ships’ holds and spilled their contents upon the concourse, so that Durantine electronics might be had alongside Imperial cloth and genetic sculptures from the aesthetes in Jadd.

  We passed by a Nipponese man with tattooed arms holding court with a pair of Tavrosi clansmen haggling over the price of solar sailcloth. Beyond them an Extrasolarian—her body replaced with white porcelain—sold some things sinister in tiny vials. Some of the contents moved.

  “Why the marketplace?” Switch asked. “Don’t these Extras use their dataspheres and whatnot? Communicate that way?”

  I stopped to admire a caged bird standing among a collection of animals being sold by a Jaddian man in a turban. In a quiet voice, I answered, “I suppose they want the company. It’s not easy being locked up on these ships for so long, and most of this lot don’t make landfall.” I stooped a little, putting my face on a level with the bird’s. I’d never seen its like before. Not graceful, slender like the raven Antonius Brevon had kept, but squat, large-eyed, its snow-feathered crest evoking horns.

  “You like our owl!” the Jaddian said, accent thick on his tongue. He tugged at his beard. “Jacopo designed it himself. It’s good?”

  “Innino formoso,” I said, speaking Jaddian. “It’s artificial?”

  “He speaks Jaddian!” the merchant said, throwing up his hands. “Artificial, yes. Jacopo designs the finest pets in the galaxy. Prince Aldia himself is owning two of Jacopo’s cats. You like cats?”

  I raised a hand. “Perhaps later, sirrah.” And hurried off, ignoring the merchanter’s attempts to sell to my retreating back. Switch and I proceeded along the curving road, the metal decking rising to meet our feet. As I have grown older, I find I like the simulated gravity of spinships less and less. I did not like it then. But what disquiet I felt on account of the centripetal gravity was lost beneath the foreign wonder of that place: the dark structure, the flashing lights, the confusion of forms familiar and bizarre. It was all my eye could do to soak them in, to commit to memory the impressions of machine and flesh and the conjunction of the two. Never before had I attempted to draw such a thing in my sketchbook. I longed to try.

  “We should head back,” Switch said, gripping my shoulder.

  “Soon,” I said. But I had seen something. Up ahead, moving through the crowd, there was a shape. Man-like but not man. Shorter and rounder in the shoulder, huddled in a hooded orange mantle. I don’t know what had recommended it to my attention, obscured as it was by the press of forms around. Something in the movement of it, the waddling gait. The sleeves of its mantle were dressed in green feathers big as swords, and they fluttered as it walked beside a tall woman in a cloak the color of pale seas. Presently it turned, and I started, transfixed and transfigured to the boy I had almost forgotten I once was. “Switch,” I said, reaching blindly for my friend, unable to take my eyes away. “It’s an Irchtani.”

  “A what?” he asked. Then he saw it and grew silent.

  The xenobite whose people Simeon the Red—my childhood hero—had befriended opened its long beak to speak. I could not hear it through the crowd, but could see the shadows of a green-feathered face beneath the cowl, and a hooked, black beak failing to red. The feathers I had taken as sleeves were on bare arms, and its elbows almost touched the floor, most unlike a terranic bird. It held its hands clasped before itself, scaled digits at the end of arms longer than it was tall.

  All the old stories
came rushing back to me, kindling in my chest a kind of glee I had not known since . . . since those first days with Jinan after Pharos. I lurched forward, thinking that I might speak with one of the heroic birdmen out of childhood legend, and so touch a piece of Simeon’s story and the sacred past. I little thought that this was a stranger, and like as ignorant of Simeon as I was ignorant of its own name. As children we imagine that there is a secret mythology in nature, and that everything in nature is a party to it. As we grow, we experience enough of nature to know there is no such magic, and are forced to inhabit the everyday. We trade the mythology of childhood for knife-edged reality and call it truth, forgetting that there are deep truths, and deeper magics in our universe.

  Someone banged into me, and I lost sight of the xenobite and its human companion. Someone shouted something in a language I did not understand. An insult I thought it was, and turned. Where was Switch? I looked around in confusion, lost for a time. Whoever had accosted me was gone, melted back into the throng. I called for Switch, cast about for his fiery hair. Saw nothing. A woman in dyed cerulean, concealed but for her eyes, loomed up, and a hulking man in a pressure suit laden with hoses and knobs. Behind them a pair of dryads green-skinned as Ilex with flowers in their hair passed in the company of a saffron-robed priest. Faces. Faces. So many faces and colors. Men and machines and homunculi passing by. Despair gripped me; I had lost sight of the Irchtani. Someone tugged my cape, the lacerna pinching where it was clipped onto the breastplate of my armor.

  Spinning, expecting to find Switch, I found no one, only the crowd still flowing around me like a sea. For the second time, I froze, seeing among those faces a face familiar to me. Skin the color of old parchment and just as wrinkled. The nostril slitted by a cathar’s knife, the hair and sideburns wild and leonine. The eyes green as the scholiast’s robes he wore.

  “Gibson!” I cried, uncomprehending. It wasn’t possible. I pushed through the crowd, so certain of what I had seen. He went down a side street, beneath the shadows of two ships, and I followed, seized him by his arm, turning him to face me, the beginnings of tears in my eyes.

  It was only an old man in a green jacket. He watched me with eyes half confused and half afraid, and I—embarrassed—turned away. Deep truths there may be, but none is deeper than this: Those lost to us do not return, nor the years turn back. Rather it is that we carry a piece of those lost to us within ourselves, or on our backs. Thus ghosts are real, and we never escape them. Turning and turning about, I realized I had lost my place, having taken some turn in all that warren of black iron and cold neon. People still moved about, walking with purpose or wandering among the stalls.

  “You, sir! You’ve the look of a man with purpose!”

  The speaker was a man in a tall hat, such the Mandari often wear. His eyes were concealed behind a pair of spectacles—or perhaps they were that pair of spectacles—though he was elsewise only human, unless one counted the white light blinking under the skin of his left ear. Shaking my head, I said, “Only a man who’s lost his way.”

  “Haven’t we all, sirrah?”

  “Which way to the concourse? I mean.”

  “But, sirrah! You are in the right place! You have found the only oracle on the Enigma of Hours!”

  “Oracle?” I said, confused, still scanning the street for Switch and growing angry with myself for running off as I had. How could I have believed it was Gibson I saw? Yet I’d been so sure of myself.

  The man with the spectacles and the tall hat smiled, revealing gold teeth the like of which the ancients once wore. “Sees the future, sees the past. Took a dip in one of them Deeps, he did. Nearly killed him. Only drove him mad. All that Time laid bare as houris in the Emperor’s harem to his eye. Might see things worth seeing in Time past or future. Things you ain’t seen. Things you ain’t known. Only a kilo to see him. Three to ask a question. Five to speak a time.”

  I am not a man given to superstition. Less so in my youth. Even having seen those things I’ve seen since, I cannot say what held me there. I might have dismissed the charlatan as easily as I had Jacopo the gene sculptor. But something held me in place. Maybe it was having imagined I saw Gibson on that street, maybe it was the inhuman Irchtani, I don’t know. But I did not dismiss the nuncius out of hand. Something in his story snagged on a corner of my mind, and I asked, “What’s a Deep?”

  “He doesn’t know?” the man said, sweeping his hat from his head. The bare scalp beneath peeled like aging plaster, and beneath that pallor wires twined against bone. “Wells, they are. Cisterns built by those as came before. Those as drink their waters come back changed.” He leaned toward me, raising one painted hand to whisper conspiratorially, “If they come back at all.”

  “Those who came before?” I repeated. “You mean . . . do you mean the Quiet?” Switch was right, Valka should have come with us. I still did not know what a Deep was.

  The nuncius only smiled. “The man within sees time as a kind of space. Sees the past, sees the future. All he has to do is look at you.”

  “But how?” I said, growing colder. “Do you expect me to just take your word for it?”

  The nuncius frowned. “He has drunk of the Deeps on Apas. The Deeps changed him. Their waters contain a xenobite, an animalcule that changes the blood. Breaks the helix and remakes it. Jari came away changed.”

  “Jari?”

  The Exalted nodded. “My crewman. Jari asked the Deep to show him his future, but the human mind can handle only so much. He sees!”

  “What does he see?”

  “Everything.”

  The door I’d been ushered through opened onto a rusted hull, and it was only then that I considered the possibility I might be kidnapped. I told myself that whoever the nuncius was, he wouldn’t jeopardize his place on the Enigma over one captive. And I still had my terminal, and it still drew a signal. Standing in the entryway, I keyed a message to Switch, explaining where I was—but not what I was doing—and left orders to wait for me.

  I’d thought I was entering a ship, one of the many moored along the Enigma’s concourse. I hadn’t. Pipes bracketed the walls of what seemed a kind of service tunnel, flowing like the sinews of a man’s body around a bend and down, recalling for me nothing so much as the black pits beneath Calagah.

  The door at the end of the passage stood open, revealing a round, low-ceilinged chamber whose metal-grated floor opened on a blackness whose depth could not be guessed. I thought it a blast tunnel to direct the flame of fusion drives for ships lifting off from the visitor’s port, though I knew enough of starship design to doubt such a thing would or should be built so close to a crowded street. The pipes that flowed along the hall rose here, hurrying along further halls, over bulkheads permanently opened, and up along the domed ceiling through a narrow sort of oculus through which the room’s only light fell.

  The Exalted—for Exalted he must be—sat like a smashed statue. What limbs remained were fragmented, one metal calf removed at the knee, both arms gone to the shoulder. Exposed wires and fiber optics twisted, and but for hoses I guessed were for nutrient delivery and waste removal, it stood apart on a stack of old pallets draped with a starry cloth.

  This rusting carnival twitched as I approached, turning a single red eye on me from the center of its forehead. Laser-bright it was, and I shielded my own eyes as its point tracked across my face. I could still see its face—the only human thing in all that nightmare of steel. The dark skin gone ashen, as though there were no blood and little fluid beneath its surface. The human eyes were closed. But it moved like a human face, and spoke with a human voice, deep as darkness.

  “Marko? Is that you?” One of the dismembered metal arms twitched.

  All I could think to say was, “No.”

  The oracle’s head jerked up, cocked to one side. I could see milk-white polymer beneath the ashen skin, blended with the flesh of the neck. I shivered. It was less human th
an Brevon had been, nearly all machine and monster. “A guest? A guest. Why does Marko disturb him?”

  “Who?”

  “This.” The dismembered hand curled into a fist, flopped as it bent at the elbow. “Jari.”

  “He said you were an oracle. That you see time.”

  “Time.” The Exalted turned its head away. “Time yes, we see.”

  “The future?” I asked. “Can you see the future?”

  “There is no future,” the seer replied. “Everything already is. They have only to choose.”

  Circling the dais so my back was not to the tunnel whence I’d came, I said, “I don’t understand.”

  “Jari drank dark water,” the Exalted said. “Jari died.” I kept my silence, watching the dark face nestled amid steel. “Jari wanted eyes to see.” Its eyes were closed. In a sing-song voice he wheezed, “The water gave us eyes.” The words had the weight of prayer. “The water gave us eyes.” It made a racking, wheezing sound, the metal plates of its body flexing as it moved.

  There was nothing in my experience at Calagah or in all of Valka’s literature to suggest a connection between the Quiet and water. Nothing of these Deeps. The nuncius, Marko, had said they were a species of xenobite. A microorganism that altered life.

  “You can see time?” I asked.

  “With my own eyes,” Jari said, not looking at me. “With my own eyes.” The oracle jerked its head. Its dismembered limbs writhed on the floor. I felt a twinge of pity for the creature, alone and insane, its humanity long gone. “The water took him. Took his eyes. Gave. Us. New. Ones.”

  Forgetting my trepidation, I approached the dais. “Who did they take?”

  “Jari. We took Jari.”

  “Then who are you?” I asked, placing one gloved and gauntleted hand on the prophet’s shoulder. When it didn’t answer, I said, “Look at me, please. There’s something I need to know.”