Exurbia: A Novel About Caterpillars (An Infinite Triptych Book 1) Page 14

  23

  “There are no poems left to write now, no candles left to light. You need only trace my steps and walk into the long clear day.”

  - The Second Wielder

  261 -

  ‘After the Pergrin Decree,’ Maria said, ‘Old Erde put all of its efforts into reaching the stars.’

  261 twirled a strand of his hair in thought as he listened. He was used to the sensation of it on his head now.

  ‘And maybe, in a way, the Decree was a good thing. Instead of wireminds designing everything for them, the Old Erders had to overcome technological issues on their own. The weld drive took another two hundred years to discover, and even then it had some serious issues.’

  ‘Such as what, exactly?’

  ‘Spatial fissures. Didn’t the cave tell you any of this?’

  ‘The cave only ever informed me of current events, and the occasional historical item for the purposes of context.’

  ‘Well, I’m not an authority on the subject, Fortmann knows more about all of this, but as I understand it, welding slams two points in space together. The resulting energy release is massive, so massive in fact that it creates a dead spot wherever the craft arrived, a few light years across at least. No vacuum energy, no string matrices, nothing. It stays a dead spot forever. Nothing can fly through it. A few early expeditions tried to and never came back. As I guess you can imagine, it makes interstellar travel a pretty rare novelty.’

  The cave said there were over nine hundred colonised syndicate worlds, and at least one hundred independent planets. If the weld fallout has an even radial distribution of two light years, at least, that means over forty thousand light years of fallout space across the galaxy.

  ‘That’s madness,’ said 261. Maria eyed him a little excitedly. She’s alarmed at me making value judgements. ‘From the syndicate’s perspective, I mean,' he added. 'It would only take ten weld jumps to a planet before the planet’s surrounding space becomes so damaged that further travel to and from is impossible.’

  ‘And therein lies the syndicate’s problem. A boat big enough for just one crewman creates a dead spot wider than the distance between Old Erde and its nearest star. Not bad for a ball of t’assali the size of a human head, don't you think?’

  ‘Madness…’ said the imp again.

  ‘It certainly makes maintaining an empire something of a problem, yes.’

  Fortmann had been watching quietly from across the room. Now he put his legs up on the windowsill and chewed his lip.

  ‘Why is it madness, 261?’

  This is some kind of test. There are at least three of these a day from him.

  ‘It seems extremely wasteful,’ said the imp.

  ‘And that bothers you on an emotional level?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware. I only mean that it seems like an extremely inefficient method of travel. What is the point in colonising a galaxy when you destroy it in the process?’

  Maria was unabashedly smiling then. She believes I am cultivating a sense of ‘care’.

  ‘Which makes the refulgent Miss Butterworth’s appearance on Exurbia all the more bizarre,’ said Fortmann. ‘No spatial fissures were found by the Bureau of Celestials. Either she somehow found a way to hide the damage, or she didn’t arrive by weld drive at all.’

  ‘There is a strong likelihood,’ said 261, ‘that the latter hypothesis is correct. The syndicate has had some two centuries to develop new propulsion. They may well be using something far more advanced.’

  ‘No,’ said Maria, ‘that doesn’t make sense either. If they can send more than just one ship, and they thought we were about to break the Pergrin Decree, why didn’t they just send a warfleet instead?’

  Insoluble quandary at this present moment. The thought sent a spasm of nausea through him.

  ‘Look,’ Fortmann said, shifting to a more formal position.

  Now he will make a request of me.

  ‘We know that just before you were freed from the cave, you authorised a message to the syndicate hub.’

  ‘That’s correct.’ There is no sense in lying about this. They obviously have the records somehow.

  ‘Can you tell us what the message said?’

  ‘Certainly. It asked for confirmation from the hub that Miss Butterworth was in fact a syndicate member rather than a rogue imposter.’

  ‘And that was all the message said?’

  ‘If I recall correctly, yes.’

  Fortmann appeared detachedly sceptical. Perhaps he thinks I gave the hub information about his chapter of Ixenites. Typical unwarranted self-importance.

  ‘Well, Exurbia received a reply yesterday. We don’t know what it actually said, only that it arrived,’ Fortmann said.

  ‘You ascertained this using Takashi’s implant?’

  ‘Of course. But we can’t infiltrate the Governance streams deeply enough to actually get to the message itself. It’s stored in a separate node.’

  I should have guessed.

  ‘And it will only be accessible from the cave,’ 261 said. ‘You want to break back into it and intercept the reply. You need my assistance since the cave won’t operate without my voice commands and a genetic print.’

  Maria shot Fortmann a smug smile. ‘I told you he wouldn’t need it explained.’

  ‘However,’ said 261, ‘in all likelihood, my genetic print will have been removed from the Governance streams on account of my leaving the cave. It won’t recognise me as an authority.’

  ‘No,’ Fortmann said. ‘That won’t have happened.’

  ‘Why? Do you have evidence to the contrary?’

  ‘Governance still believes you can be recovered. Your authority in the system will still be active,’ said Fortmann. ‘Obviously though we can’t do this without your help. Getting back into the cave itself won’t be a problem. Governance still isn’t sure how we did it, if the report from the day we removed you is anything to be believed. Chances are they aren’t even aware of the access tunnels we used, they’re so old. But we’ll need your consent.’

  ‘I consent,’ said 261 without hesitation. Fortmann and Maria stared in surprise.

  ‘The reply will hopefully settle the matter of Miss Butterworth’s origin,’ he added. ‘Whatever the outcome, the information will be beneficial for the whole of Exurbia. I consent.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fortmann carefully, ‘and I hope you won’t be offended by my saying so, but there’s always the chance you’re saying what we want to hear, and that you’ll turn on us once we’re inside the cave.’

  ‘There is that possibility yes, but it wouldn’t benefit me in any way. If I was going to escape, I would try it from the confines of the apartment we’re in now, not the cave itself. Besides, it’s highly likely that you’ve counterfeited a steropticon of me pledging my allegiance to your cause and distributed it throughout the streams meaning I can’t return anyway.’

  ‘Then you’ve somehow seen the speech in question?’

  ‘No. I only surmised it from what you have now just said. You wouldn’t take me with you without some kind of assurance that I wouldn’t try to return to the cave. A counterfeited pledge of allegiance to your order, and the Ixenite cause at large, was the most predictable way of guaranteeing this.’

  ‘Gnesha…’ said Maria.

  ‘You’re correct, 261. Miss Butterworth herself played it during one of her speeches. Then you’ll help us?’

  ‘I have no choice in the matter, just as I had no choice in designing the faux Pergrin mallet. Ergo yes, I will help you.’

  ‘We didn’t mean it to be blackmail,’ Maria said.

  ‘No,’ said 261. ‘I’m sure you didn’t.’

  A burning candletip of rage appeared in the imp. Then what exactly did you mean it to be? What exactly would you call the removal of a man from his home, the sullying of his name, and the defamation of his character for the entire planet to see? His biceps tensed beneath the dayrobes, bulks of roped muscle made enormous by the testosterone synthesi
ser Maria had planted on his cheek all those months ago.

  ‘And if I can be candid 261, there’s still the issue of the botched mallet assassination. How did you know Butterworth would take the device instead?’ said Fortmann.

  ‘There is no way I could have known it.’

  ‘But you suspected it?’

  There’s no way I could have suspected -’

  ‘But you did, Imp! You did.’ Fortmann calmed himself, ignored Maria’s admonishing glare and continued. ‘Either she’s godly and prescient, else you are.’

  ‘I am trained to do what I can with the information provided, to the best of my abilities. There was no information to suggest that the Pergrin ceremony would not play out as it has hundreds of times previously. Miss Butterworth likely has access to technology she has failed to make apparent, which she used to detect the t'assali within the mallet. That is my honest appraisal.’

  ‘Just what I wanted to hear,’ Fortmann said. ‘You're becoming something of a soothsayer.’

  261 flexed his muscles again invisibly under the dayrobe. I could remove your head from your neck, Seer. It would be no great challenge.

  24

  “It is my duty as a historian to establish what came to pass based on fragments of evidence. But accounts and writings are little better than fancies. It is the thoughts and notions that wrought history's fire that really interests me.”

  - Grand Socratic Herodotus, Fifth Historian of the Syndicate Hub

  Annie -

  The gungov marched her through the labyrinth of the tershal tower and stopped finally at a partition. It slid aside without apparent command. There was only dark beyond the threshold. The gungov pointed inside.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Annie said.

  The thing put a forcible hand to her back.

  ‘I don’t like the dark. What’s in there?’

  The burning orange cavities of its eyes regarded her without wavering.

  ‘I deserve to know. You can’t just throw me in a hole and leave me to rot.’ But that’s exactly what you intend to do, isn’t it?

  The gungov raised a hand. The black tip of the index finger burned suddenly with t’assali fire and it wrote then in the stonework of the wall with the flame.

  “There is no justice, only the powerful and the powerless.”

  She reeled. ‘You can hear me then? You understand?’

  With the other hand, it shoved her over the threshold, turning away as the partition slid shut. She squinted but there wasn’t a hint of light in the chamber. Then, slumping against the partition, she began to sob gently. Her face would be printed all over the noticeboards of the Bureau of Celestials now no doubt, a warning to all the interns and potential upstarts that dissidence resulted in harsh and promptly administered punishment. They will keep me here until I die, this room. Would I have believed it had I been told? That one day he would be a tyrant, that one day he would have mechanised humanoid behemoths doing his bidding and throwing people in the dark? Not for a second. She let the tears come then.

  ‘Tell me you brought a little zapoei with you,’ said a strained male voice. A pause, then: ‘Shall I take that as a no?’

  ‘Where -’ she said, trying to stifle the next wave of sobs.

  ‘A few feet away. The chamber is about the size of a bedroom. Just stay put and get your strength back.’

  This is a trick. But what else could they want from me now? ‘You defied Governance too?’ she said.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Weakness. You’re the professor’s wife, aren’t you?’

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘Probably. What exactly have you done?’

  ‘Access strings. I stole them. For my ex-husband.’

  An admonishing whistle came from across the chamber. ‘Gnesha. That can’t be good. What did your husband want them for?’

  ‘To hide, he said. Instead he gave them to the syndicate whore.’

  ‘He's helping Butterworth?’

  ‘It happened months ago. Plovda, how long have you been in here?’ Annie said, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.

  The reply was slow and morose: ‘That long, at least.’

  ‘Then you don’t know that Stefan is the grand tersh?’

  The stranger was silent. She saw Stefan’s face before her: young, his hair unkempt and his clothes studentish and ridiculous. There had been something strangely appealing about him then, even before he’d matured; something boyish and alluring. They had met for midnight adventures in the Governance Academy forests, drinking wine until the sun came up and making it back in time for the next day’s classes. Butterflies, she thought. Everything had been butterflies then. This is no forest adventure now.

  ‘Professor Jura,’ said the voice slowly, ‘is the grand tersh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How could that possibly have happened?’

  ‘After Tersh Princewright was removed, the syndicate whore had him declared the new tersh.’

  ‘After Tersh Princewright was framed, you mean?’

  ‘Oh, who knows. He had every reason to try and kill her.’

  ‘You’re right, but it still doesn’t mean for a second that I did it.’

  How didn’t I realise? Have all these weeks of beating beaten the sense out of me?

  ‘Your Eminence,’ she said, straightening her posture in the dark as though he might see.

  ‘I will forgive it this once, but don’t ever call me that again. I am dirt in a sinkhole now.’

  ‘I didn’t realise -’

  ‘Dirt in a sinkhole, little more. What has happened out there? What’s the bastard doing to Exurbia?’

  ‘It’s not Jura, it’s the syndicate women. She’s got him on a lead. They’re raiding every project, every district, crying Ixenite at the smallest provocation and throwing them all in cells like these.’

  ‘Perhaps my rule was just too lenient,’ said the former tersh.

  ‘You can’t seriously mean that.’

  ‘If breaking the Decree is as dangerous as Butterworth makes out, maybe extreme force is justified. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now anyhow. What does she want?’

  ‘There are rumours that she’s going to annex the planet, absorb it back into the syndicate.’

  ‘We’re the furthest world from the hub, by far. What would they want with us?’

  And then, realising it suddenly for the first time herself: ‘The Ayakashi.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Ayakashi,’ she said again. ‘They want the Ayakashi.’

  ‘No one would could have use for it.’

  ‘They would if they could control it. Imagine having that kind of power at your fingertips, concentrated t’assali. You could level a planet in a few hours.’

  ‘Next you’re going to tell me you believe in Gnesha and Plovda. It’s a quirk of Exurbia,’ said the former tersh. ‘Nothing more. They haven’t got a damn clue how it works.’

  ‘Some men at the Bureau of Celestials thought they did, a few of the engineers. Why does it always attack cities? Why never just a forest or a mountain?’

  He was silent.

  ‘Because it’s a creature, maybe even a conscious one. And it’s angry. And if they could tame it, or understand it, they could lay waste to any world they wanted. She's here for the Ayakashi.’ And they’re listening, surely. Probably listening to all of this. No matter. She heard him scuffle in the dark, rearranging his enormous bulk. Months in this cell. He must be a little thinner now; a little slimmer around the middle.

  ‘If someone could just get to the t’assali satellite controls,’ he said longingly.

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Aim them at this hell-haunted tower, vapourise it. Five combined beams should be enough. That would certainly be a turning moment, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘But they can’t be aimed at the Exubic ground. They’re for space defence. Everybody knows that.’

  ‘Convenient lie. T
ersh Faber - Gnesha protect him - once used them to take out an imminent Pergrin threat.’

  ‘And I’ve just given the access strings to the syndicate woman,’ Annie said quietly, hoping that the dark would eat her.

  ‘She probably doesn’t even know how to use them, not without Jura’s help, or someone from the Bureau of Celestials.

  A pause, the sound of a distant drip, then: ‘I think that’s quite enough,’ Annie said. ‘I’m finished.’

  ‘Dead you mean?’

  ‘No, just too weak to continue. The bastard. The bastard.’

  ‘He always was a queer one, your husband. What do you think it is he intends to do now?’

  ‘Whatever she wants him to. He’s a pet. That much is clear.’ Then, to any tinears that might be listening: ‘He’s a pet!’

  ‘She doesn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘Butterworth. She never sleeps. There was a camera in her chambers. She just stays up and works or watches the city.’

  ‘Maybe she’s mechanical. Jura would know about all about that. I think they’re mating.’

  He groaned disgustedly, then: ‘Mechanical, like a wiremind?’

  ‘I don’t know. It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? The sociopathy, the prescience.’

  ‘Why would a wiremind come to stop the birth of more wireminds?’

  ‘No one likes competition.’

  He chuckled, and soon it turned into a bellow, the kind of bellow a man makes when he hasn’t laughed in weeks, in months, and she joined in for good measure and began to feel a little better then.

  25

  “What a strange time this will be to reflect on for them, those creatures that come after us. Why, we will appear as little more than bacteria.”

  - Tersh Stanislav of Exurbia

  Moxie and The Crone -

  You are the gestalt, as we are all the gestalt. The tersh is eternal and he is the gestalt too. Moonless, almost morning. The Ayakashi condensed from nothing at all, streams of orange ribbon that danced and gambolled. Then, formed, it paused for a second like a dog sniffing the wind and snaked down the mountain pass towards Bucephalia. Alarms were already sounding in the city, wild modulating screeches that woke the cityfolk from their sleep. Thousands gathered at their windows to watch the mass approaching. Some ran, though most remained in their bedrooms, knowing that running would do little more than waste the few remaining moments left alive. The Ayakashi bucked at the city borders, making quick work of the gates, reducing them to feeble scorches on the dirt. Next it bore straight into the outskirts library and incinerated first the volumes, then the roof until there was little left but ash. Lights flickered on in the tershal tower. Somebody was watching, perhaps even the tersh himself. Almost at the outer suburbs now, it split into a thousand coral-like branches to cover more area, ready to gut the-