Flowercrash (9 page)

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Have you been there? No. Listen to fewer scare stories and pay more attention to the facts.”

“Well, I won’t let you go alone,” he declared. “Kirifaïfra will go with you.”

“I wasn’t going alone,” Manserphine replied, annoyed at his presumption. “I am going with the gynoid.”

“Aitlantazyn,” supplied Pollonzyn.

“So there.” Though, thinking about it, a trio including Kirifaïfra would be better. “I’ll consider your offer,” she told Vishilkaïr. “You haven’t even asked him yet.”

“Oh, he’ll go.”

Manserphine frowned, rattled by this certainty. Recently she had been thinking far too much about Kirifaïfra. “You will have to free him from work tomorrow.”

“As you wish.”

So it was settled. Next morning dawned clear and icy, and as the sun rose out of sea mist Aitlantazyn presented herself at the inn door. She was tall and bulky, but carried herself with the grace of a gymnast. A scimitar and a club hung at her belt. The pigment in her plastic skin had coalesced in the cold, making her look like the victim of dermatitis. Her huge eyes were orange with glittering golden sparks. She spoke Veneris dialect, beginning with, “Good morning, Interpreter.”

“Manserphine,” came the automatic correction.

“Are we ready to go?” Aitlantazyn asked.

Manserphine glanced inside the inn. “I think Kirifaïfra is still winding his pigtail. Vain man.”

“A man is coming with us?”

“Do you object?”

“I am yours to command. But it is unusual.”

Manserphine uttered a single humourless laugh. “He and his uncle are both unusual men. Quiet, now, here he comes.”

Kirifaïfra was dressed in a woollen greatcoat, black knee boots and a red scarf that he coiled around his neck. On his broad back hung a rucksack. He grinned.

“I’ll take that as the signal to move off,” Manserphine said.

For some time they did not speak, as they trod the streets of the urb trying to avoid flowers deactivated by frost that flopped from the central aisle to outer paths. The extreme narrowness of the streets made walking difficult. Overhanging buildings reduced light to gleams and beams. But once they were away from Veneris they struck a path that led west around the autohives, and Kirifaïfra began to chat about the weather, the likelihood of snow, and the possible date for spring and the reactivation of the flower networks. He estimated that day as a month ahead. Manserphine thought six weeks.

After an hour they saw the Water Meadows ahead, snail-infested flats stretching as far as the eye could see. Beyond, just out of sight, lay Aequalaïs.

“Here we come to our first decision,” Manserphine said. “Do we go across or under?”

“Let us check the nearest tunnel,” Aitlantazyn suggested. “I can see the dark hemisphere of an entrance not a quarter of a mile away.”

This they did. A foul breeze rose up from the entrance, but still Aitlantazyn led them down the crumbling stone steps to the tunnel mouth, gesturing with her free hand for them to stay back. She took a torch from her pocket and spoke to it, whereupon it produced a cone of light. The tunnel looked clear, though a few inches of water sloshed inside it, and algae of all species hung in strings from the walls and roof. Aitlantazyn gestured them on, shining the torch on anything ahead that might offer danger.

The tunnel was long. After fifteen minutes they still could not see the end, and Manserphine began to feel uncomfortable, but then she saw a light ahead, and she splashed past Aitlantazyn. The gynoid stopped her, grabbing her shoulder with a single, immense hand. “Not yet,” she whispered. She walked on ahead and when certain it was clear waved them on. They ascended the steps and looked out over Aequalaïs.

Covering the shallow slope down to the sea Manserphine saw scores of buildings, all glassy and bright and perfectly cuboid, reflecting the rays of the sun so that it was like confronting a garden of mirrors. The broad streets between these tower blocks ran with water. All were devoid of people. They saw nothing of flowers, just verges of green dotted with white salt marks. Above them, gulls flew, keening as they wheeled about, while at their feet, in innumerable brackish pools, they saw crayfish, aluminium crabs, and the shifting rainbows of anemone tentacles.

“Who lives here?” Kirifaïfra whispered into her ear.

“Strictly speaking nobody lives here permanently. Most of the people are based in the Shrine of the Sea, which is huge.” She pointed east. “It must be over there, behind the dunes. But there are roving bands of people who dwell in these buildings, living off the sea. If you look on the horizon you can see some of their fishing smacks.”

“What do you know of these people?”

“Not much. They are as isolated as the Sea-Clerics. Although there are tales of attacks, they will leave us alone as long as we don’t threaten them. Their lives are too precarious to consider aggression. No, it is the Shrine of the Sea that we must be careful of.”

“Then we will be. What do we do now?”

Manserphine considered. “Let’s walk towards the sea. We are looking for winter flowering blooms—I want to sift a few networks. Eventually I’d like to access the Shrine networks, but we’ll have to locate the right species first.”

They began walking down the nearest street, ice edged though damp in its centre. Manserphine found herself jumping as reflections appeared in glass panels to their sides. In these mirrors they looked very small; dwarfed by their environment. They came across a few small flowers, but these were data collectors and had no screens. Plants here were prickly, pale, often succulent or cactus-like, but their leaves and buds glowed under the touch of Manserphine’s hand. It was something she had never seen before, and it moved her, as if they were affirming a connection.

Soon she was looking down upon the beach itself, russet in morning light, with the sea rippling in a wriggling line. She looked to her left and saw a golden spire. “There it is!”

Carefully, they moved towards it, until the whole Shrine was visible. Inside a salt-encrusted wall encompassing an area of six acres stood the Shrine of the Sea, a series of golden onions massing up to one vast central dome, from which the spire emerged. It shone. Windows and external doors showed up as dark dots. Behind the Shrine they saw the ends of jetties, and boats moored in an artificial harbour. Manserphine, who had only seen the place in pictures, was impressed by its grandeur. She looked down at the wall. There stood the single entrance, the black gate that was Iron Maw.

“Look to your left,” Kirifaïfra said. “I see white and yellow flowers.”

They crawled down a sandy hillock to the strip of foliage Kirifaïfra had seen. Flickering lights inside the giant mimulus blooms seemed to greet them, and again Manserphine received the impression, as if from the echo of a vision, that they were aware of her, responding to her presence.

She thrust the thought aside. Time to explore. The miniature screens inside the newly opened flowers were insensitive to her insect pen, so she was forced to resort to the old standby of anther tickling. At times like this the network ecology could really annoy. Eventually, she had windows up that allowed her to view the types of information used and acquired by the less important sections of the Shrine. She noticed that the Shrine had been using great quantities of softpetal, but she did not have enough privileges to find out what they wanted it for. Sculpting of some description? She wondered where they found the stuff, and where the effluent went that followed its use.

“This is going to be difficult,” she said. “To find out important things I would have to get inside the Shrine. The flower networks around here are just too strange, not to mention quiet because it is winter.”

“Perhaps we could return in the summer,” Kirifaïfra suggested.

Manserphine sighed. She did not regret coming, in fact she felt a connection with this urb and its lonely Shrine, a connection growing stronger with the passing weeks; there was an as yet undiscovered ocean within her. But there were too many obstacles here, and she was an outsider.

But when five minutes later she noticed a sub-set of information refering to dresses, she learned a singular fact. The idea to create the softpetal impregnated dress had not originated in the Shrine of Flower Sculpture, rather it had been devised by Sea-Clerics and then shunted in disguise to Cirishnyan’s data beds. Yet another connection…

“Hola!”

They all span around. From the dune behind them came five women. Aitlantazyn had been looking down at the Shrine; now she turned around and flourished her scimitar.

“Hola, zeema ssoo!”

Manserphine pulled Aitlantazyn’s arm down. The women were dressed in sumptuous black cloaks and they wore silver circlets on their brows. These were cleric guards from the Shrine.

“Tell them we’ll go away,” Kirifaïfra urged.

Manserphine cleared her throat. “I’m not sure I can. I don’t speak their private tongue, only the dialect. This lot have probably never seen anybody from another urb.”

“Kanka graya! Ye, te, zeema ssoo!”

Manserphine shrugged, then held her hands out, palms up, and said, “We come, we stay, we smell the tang, we go.”

The five women approached, frowning at one another and talking in their rhyming tongue. One knelt to speak into a flower, which she then turned to face them, as if transmitting an image. Manserphine did not like this at all.

In a leaden voice she said, “If we are taken inside the Shrine it is not inconceivable that we’ll never leave.” She hesitated. “It happened to my great-grandmother. So my mother told me.”

“Never mind that,” Kirifaïfra said, “how do we get away?”

“I don’t know.”

“Shall I make a move?” Aitlantazyn asked.

“No. Stay still. Don’t threaten them.”

Manserphine began signing that they were from the north and wanted to return home. The leader of the group, who had spoken to the flower, nodded and smiled at her, a disconcerting action that made her falter.

“Look!” Kirifaïfra said, pointing to the Shrine.

From Iron Maw a single woman had emerged, and now she was running towards them. As she closed Manserphine saw that she was a tall woman whose tails of beaded hair swung around her head like angry serpents. She wore a rich blue cloak and under that a flowing, full-length dress like Manserphine’s; also a silver circlet upon her brow. She wore sandals, allowing a view of ten toes, six of which boasted a ring. A fierce woman, yet beautiful.

Manserphine recognised her. “This is Fnfayrq, the Shoreline Cleric.”

“The who?”

“This is the public face of the Shrine. She’s supposed to take her place in the Outer Garden every spring, but she never does. There are only two Sea-Clerics above her in the hierarchy.”

“Is this the end of us, then?” asked Kirifaïfra.

“I don’t know. But at least I can talk to her.”

Fnfayrq closed, then stood a few yards away. She stared at Manserphine, shock plain in her face. “You, here, so sea soon, when all is dark in the mind?”

Manserphine was confused by Fnfayrq’s anger at their presence. It was as if they had dared to cross a line drawn in the sand. She replied, “We came to breathe, we live, we draw together, shore-sounds fading quietly to silence.” Manserphine hoped that telling the Sea-Cleric of their intention to leave Aequalaïs was not too forward.

Fnfayrq replied, “But you, lover, you dive into us, you pour yourself into our minds, so sea soon?”

Fnfayrq objected to
her
presence. Manserphine frowned. Why should her appearance cause Fnfayrq so much anguish? She began, “Truthfully, lover, all is waves—”

Contemptuously Fnfayrq gestured for silence. Her blue eyes, now clouded, held nothing but savage anger. From the pocket of her cloak she pulled a bracelet, a coiled cylinder of dark silver set with amber, which she unwound, grunting with the effort. She walked up to Manserphine and looked into her eyes. Anger. And fear. Manserphine understood now that the Sea- Cleric was terrified by her appearance here. The anger was a cover for something deeper.

Fnfayrq grabbed Manserphine’s hand and the bracelet coiled itself three times around her wrist, making her skin crawl at the slithering sensation. Its weight made her flex her arm muscles to compensate. She stared at it.

Fnfayrq told her it would ensure she never returned to the dunes. And she could never pull it off. Manserphine just stared.

Fnfayrq pointed north and spoke to the five guards. “Im ssaa, gu, tu!”

As Fnfayrq turned and walked away Manserphine felt her mind change. The guards seemed like giants, oppressing her. She felt sick at having to stand on this ground. When the guards began to make north she followed, Kirifaïfra and Aitlantazyn behind her, expressions of confusion on their faces.

Because she knew she was leaving Aequalaïs the pain in her mind was less than it might otherwise have been, for she saw the place now as a dead land of metal and mirror, fit for nobody. Tears of joy ran from her eyes when she saw a tunnel entrance, and she ran toward it, while the five guards pointed and sniggered to themselves. They stood still.

But this was not quite the end. To her right she saw figures crawling along the streets. The guards turned to see where she was looking, and their smirking faces changed to faces of shock. The newcomers were mermaids, five of them, a merman bringing up the rear, each raising an arm to plead with Manserphine while pulling themselves along with the other. Their expressions mingled joy and fear. All were naked, but their skins and scales were coated with a thick film, colours swirling like oil on water. Manserphine stared at them, reminded at once of the mermaid of her visions. Suddenly frightened, she ran.

 
With Aitlantazyn and Kirifaïfra already at the tunnel, all that remained was the final walk. The moment they were out she felt better. The dark cloud of suspicion that had settled upon her lifted, and she became her old self. But the memory of the place was bad, like a nightmare, and the mermaids, who before had seemed pathetic in their attempts to reach her, now seemed like venomous fish.

An hour later they sat exhausted in the common room of the Determinate Inn. Manserphine flung her coat to the floor and wrung out the sopping edges of her dress, which had dragged through mud and water, kicking off her boots then tying up her dress to warm her bare legs at the fire. Kirifaïfra drank mead from a tankard, eyeing his uncle. Aitlantazyn sat silent.