Revenger 9780575090569 (8 page)

Adrana relieved herself of the neural bridge. We uncoupled from the skull and hooked the bridges back onto the wall.

‘Better luck next time, I suppose,’ I said.

‘Luck has nothing to do with it,’ Cazaray answered. ‘What you have is in your lamps, and there’s no mistaking that. You’ll come through, and those bones
will
talk.’ Then he moved to the wall and retrieved one of the bridges for himself. ‘Normally it’s best to work alone. But you can watch, if you like.’

‘I thought it was getting harder for you,’ Adrana said.

‘It is.’

Cazaray put on the bridge, adjusting it until it was a tight fit over his blond locks, then spooled out the contact wire and slipped it into several probes in succession, concentration making a mask of his face until something eased and he gave the slightest of nods, followed by a
half-
voiced: ‘I have it. It’s faint today, so you shouldn’t worry about not feeling anything.’ Then he started babbling. His eyes were open, but they had begun to roll up under his lids. We caught words, phrases, but never the whole of it. ‘Down to the Sunward processionals . . . two orbits beyond the Dargan Gap. Opening auguries for the Jewel of Sundabar.
Fire Witch
, dropping sail at Auzar – assistance required. Wedza’s Eye will close in eight days, eight hours.’

More of that. He stayed in that babbling state for two or three minutes, before his eyes snapped back into focus and, like a man waking from a restful sleep, he at last moved his hands to the neural bridge.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ we answered.

‘I don’t always remember all of it. And a lot of it isn’t worth remembering – it’s just noise, certainly nothing Captain Rackamore needs to hear.’

‘And this time?’ I asked.

‘Did you hear me speak of auguries? That’s useful knowledge. Intelligence. Someone else’s idea of where and when baubles will open, and for how long. Knowledge like that can make or break an expedition.’

‘Then why would anyone share it?’ Adrana asked.

‘They don’t mean to.’ Cazaray unplugged from the skull and hung up the neural bridge. ‘We operate alone, for the most part, but there are other ships that we’ll occasionally help out, if they’ve done the captain a favour in the past. Some of the other ships, though, operate together all the time. They’re run by governments, or the private combines. And they have to communicate, to coordinate their efforts. Squawking’s all right – but it’s slow, easily intercepted, and signals don’t always get all the way through the Congregation, especially if the Old Sun’s putting out a storm. The superloom – that’s what we call the system of the skulls – is much, much faster, it’s hard to jam it, and there’s not much signal attenuation.’

‘But you’ve just listened in,’ I said.

‘They take matched skulls, matched pairs of readers, and put them on different ships. But if you’re good – if you’re experienced, and you’ve got a skull that’s especially sensitive in its own right – like this one – then you can catch a rumour of a rumour.’ Cazaray gave a
self-
deprecating shrug. ‘I make it sound easy.’

I smiled. ‘You don’t.’

‘You said it was hard to jam,’ Adrana said. ‘But you didn’t say it was impossible. What would it take to do that to a skull?’

Her question had been innocent enough. But something clouded his face when Cazaray answered us.

‘Nothing you’ll ever need worry about.’

4

I’d been in bigger and grander libraries than Rackamore’s, but I could safely say I’d never been in a library on a ship, or one laid out in such curvy, swoopy lines, or one that was full of such strange and old books. It was up near the front of the
Monetta
, built into a room that connected through to both his galley and the quarters, and I got the impression Rackamore liked it the most of any of the places on his ship.

‘You’ll find things easier now we’re under sail,’ he said, standing up, one booted foot resting on the rail beneath the lowest shelf. He still had his white shirt and leather waistcoat on, but he’d undone his hair so that it spilled out in a black fan across his neck and shoulders. ‘We pull twice as hard as when we’re on ion thrust, so your inner ear has even less reason to feel confused. I confess I’m never entirely at ease until the sails are out.’

‘Will the sails carry us all the way to the bauble, Captain?’

‘More or less.’ He studied me shrewdly. ‘Do you have some idea of how we sail?’

‘The solar wind blows on the sails, Captain. The sails move the ship. Just like a boat on water.’

He smiled. ‘Well, not
quite
. Some of the worlds have small seas, and people sail on them, I know. But it’s not the same as solar sailing. A boat can sail into the wind, but we can’t – there’s no other medium for us to push against, the way a boat’s keel works against the water. So we can’t tack, in the nautical sense. But we
can
use orbital mechanics to our advantage. We’re in a gravity well, you see, and that means we have angular momentum to play with. The sails can add or subtract from our motion around the Old Sun, if we tilt them – and that means we can move between orbits, provided we’re patient. Which we are, most of the time. And if we’re in a hurry, there’s the ion engine. The sails can serve as energy collectors as well – they have both a reflective surface and an absorbent one, and Hirtshal can flex one or other to face the Sun. There’s no part of the Congregation we can’t reach in under two years of sail, and many worlds are only weeks or months apart – some even closer.’

‘How many of those worlds have you seen, Captain?’

‘You can drop the formality, Fura. I invited you here, didn’t I?’ But he still gave some consideration to what I’d asked. ‘It must be fewer than a hundred. Which means that for every world I’ve stood on, there are at least two hundred I’ve yet to see. And that’s just a tiny fraction of all the worlds – just the few to which we’ve given names, and found a way to live on.’ He beckoned me nearer. ‘Here. We spoke of the
Book of Worlds
before. I think these might be of interest.’

It was a bit awkward, being alone with him. Adrana never cared for books as much as I did, so she’d turned her nose up when I mentioned visiting his library. I wasn’t sweet on him either, no matter what Adrana might have cooked up in her head. He was handsome enough, but he was a lot older than me and there was something stiff and serious about him that made him seem more like an uncle or a teacher. It wasn’t that I had anything against him, although I don’t suppose at that point I’d had much chance to really know him. But he was the captain and I was the newcomer, and it was the right and proper way of it that I should be timid and respectful around him.

The truth was, though, whatever I thought of Rackamore, I
was
sweet on his books.

‘These can’t be real,’ I said. ‘There can’t be this many of them, all different from each other, all in one place . . .’

I caught the pride in his answer.

‘They’re real. All of them.’

I counted the black spines, read the fine silver lettering, took in the gradual alteration in the style of the script, from curving to blocky and back to curving again. He had twenty editions of the
Book of Worlds
, going back much earlier than any I’d ever seen before.

I reached out a hand – then pulled it back like I’d been about to reach for the wrong knife at the table.

Rackamore smiled. ‘Go ahead.’

I took out the earliest one, the worn binding feeling leathery and fragile under my fingertips. It was still a heavy volume, but there were far fewer pages in it than in the edition at home. I turned the thin pages carefully, scared that I might tear them from the binding. The lettering was
old-
fashioned, the words sometimes unfamiliar, the phrasing archaic where I could make sense of it at all. I also fancied that there were fewer entries in the whole book, and that the space given to each was more generous than in our own volume.

I searched for Mazarile, but it wasn’t in there.

‘That book is nine hundred years old,’ Rackamore said, in a low and reverent tone, as if some ghost or spirit hiding in the book might be roused if he spoke too harshly. ‘There are only five thousand entries. The number of worlds occupied by people was about a quarter as many as there are today. Supposedly there are even earlier editions, each rarer than the last, although I’ve never chanced upon one of them. These books trace our expansion from a single starting point – the gradual spread from world to world, slow and difficult at first. Then we got better at it, and more confident, and the number of occupied worlds swelled far beyond ten thousand.’ He took the old edition back from me, slotted it back onto the shelf, and ran his finger halfway along the row of spines. ‘Here. A 1384 edition. Four hundred and fifteen years ago.’ He drew out the volume, blew dust off it, stroked his finger against the binding, then offered it to me. ‘Many more pages, and fewer lines per entry. There were seventeen thousand occupied worlds at that point and the rate of expansion was slowing down. There might be fifty million potential worlds in the Congregation, but we can only live on about twenty thousand of them. The rest are cracked wide open – no lungstuff, no water, and too knotty to seal them off and bring in those things even if we had the will. Or they’re already totally bottled in, with no way in or out that we know. Or in some other way inimical to settlement – haunted by bad things left over from earlier Occupations. Wrapped in bauble fields that we can’t break through and that don’t show any sign of opening any time soon. That’s the wonder and frustration of it, Arafura – fifty million prizes, and we’ll never know most of them before our time is done.’

I found Mazarile:

Prosperous sphereworld in the
thirty-
fifth processional, with a diameter of eight and one third leagues. A swallower sits at its core. Seven principal settlements, of which Hadramaw and Incer are the two largest. Opposing spacedocks, amenable to improvement. Population at last census, two and four fifths million . . .

‘Our time,’ I said, with a little shiver. ‘You think it will end?’

‘Most assuredly. You’ve seen the Hall of History on Mazarile – there are similar institutions on most worlds. Each of those coloured bars represents an empire, a dominion, a parliament of worlds, much like our own. Earlier Occupations, earlier phases of expansion, settlement and stagnation. They passed. So, eventually, will we.’

‘But not today.’

‘And not tomorrow, hopefully, since I still have some rather onerous debts to settle.’ He took the book from me – I’d done no more than leaf through the pages, unable to take any of it in – and moved me along the shelves. ‘Understand this library and you’re halfway to understanding me. Sunjammers don’t put the spur into me. Nor baubles, especially. But I
am
spurred by what baubles contain, especially if they offer us some illumination on the past.’ He snatched out a book and opened the covers. Instead of pages there was only a milky rectangle, like an opaque slab of crystal. ‘Whatever this was, it doesn’t work for us now. Sometimes something flickers across it. We were caught in a solar storm once,
ghost-
fire lighting the rigging, and half the mute books in this room lit up and started showing pictures and words. But none of them were in languages I knew, and before I had a chance to scribble down more than a few fragments, the storm abated.’

‘Are all the old books like that?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Some of them are in a written form, and occasionally the scholars have made some small headway with the languages. Only the monkey languages, though – never the alien ones.’

‘I saw a Crawly in Hadramaw,’ I felt obliged to say, remembering the alien shuffling along behind the spacesuited men in Neural Alley. ‘We know their language, don’t we?’

‘Only because it’s worth their while to share it. But I’ll say this: there’s nothing we know about the Crawlies that the Crawlies don’t want us to know.’

‘They help us, don’t they?’

‘In their fashion. They put mirrors in the high orbits, so we can use solar pressure more efficiently. They understand swallowers better than we do, and they can stop worlds crashing into each other when their orbits start drifting. I don’t say that they haven’t been of benefit to us. But of all the other places in the Swirly, what brings them here?’

‘Perhaps there’s no one else out there that they like being around as much as us.’

‘I suppose,’ Rackamore said.

‘It’s good of them to run the banks for us, isn’t it? We made a mess of it, my father said. The crash of 1566 proved that? Hundreds of worlds went bankrupt because people aren’t honest enough to handle money on that scale. People were starving, actually starving and dying, because of the greed and incompetence of bankers. But the aliens don’t need money for anything, not
our
money, anyway, so there’s no reason for them not to be trusted with it.’

‘There’s truth in that,’ Rackamore said. ‘But some might point out that the Crawlies hadn’t been in the Congregation for very long before the crash. Fifty years. Maybe less. They were newcomers, just like the Hardshells or Clackers today. A coincidence, I suppose.’

‘What?’

Rackamore gave a shrug, as if none of this was worth dwelling on. ‘I mull on things overmuch. Search for patterns, and you’ll find them, as surely as sailors see old lovers in the billowing of photon sails. But I suppose it gives me a reason to keep looking for things, and sometimes what you turn up isn’t the thing you had in mind, but something better. Who knows what we’ll find, in this bauble or the one after?’

I didn’t ask him how far we still had to sail. I supposed I’d get my answer sooner or later. But I couldn’t stop thinking of the Crawly, of the whiskerlike appendage poking in and out of its proboscis, drawing molecules out of the lungstuff, catching the chemical stink of wealth.

Cazaray kept on with us in the bone room. There were two sessions per day, one in the morning watch, the other in the afternoon. The routine was always the same. We’d put on the neural bridges, plug in, flush our minds out, and try to snatch a whisper from the wind. The first day had been a failure, the two sessions of the second not much better. Even Adrana didn’t dare claim that she’d picked up anything, even when Cazaray told her that the skull was indeed receiving something.

On the second session of the third day, though, after trying five or six different input points, Adrana tensed up. I was watching her by then, certain that my own efforts weren’t getting anywhere.

‘Something . . .’ she whispered. ‘A voice. A word, really clear. As if someone just spoke it into my head.’

‘Which was?’ Cazaray asked.

‘Daxian.’

After a moment he said: ‘Have you heard this name before?’

‘No,’ Adrana answered.

‘It’s a world, I think. One of the settled ones. A wheelworld, pretty deep down.’

‘Maybe she read it in the
Book of Worlds
, and the name jammed in her memory,’ I said.

‘And maybe she didn’t,’ Adrana shot back.

Cazaray got her to try several other inputs, but nothing came through on them. When he stuck the neural bridge on himself, the only contact he found was on the same input where Adrana had heard Daxian. It was faint today, he said, looking at her with something between doubt and awe. ‘If you dragged some sense out of that, after only three days in the bone room . . .’

‘Let me try again,’ she said.

‘No – we can’t rush this. Your brain is adjusting to the skull, just as the skull’s coming to terms with you. Tomorrow we go again. You too, Arafura. If your sister’s able to tune in this quickly, you may not be far behind.’

I checked on that world, too. Looked it up in one of the
Book of Worlds
, the same edition we had back home. I turned to the page where Daxian should have been, had it existed.

Dastrogar

Daxperil

Dazazoth

But no Daxian. I slid the book back, certain now that my sister couldn’t have picked up on the name from that edition. I ran my finger along the spines of the other editions until I got to Rackamore’s most recent copy, and fumbled my way to the entry for Daxian. There it was:

Wheelworld in the third processional. Settled less than a century ago by
venture-
expansionists from the Conjugate Worlds of Thrisp and Trenniger. Diameter:
sixty-
six leagues.
Spin-
generated gravity at inner surface: nine tenths of a gee. Population one million, three hundred thousand at last census . . .

Later, when we were alone, I asked her what it had been like.

‘It wasn’t like a voice,’ she said, after thinking about it for a few seconds. ‘I know I said it was, but that was the best I could come up with. It was something different. If a voice is raised lettering, something that stands out, this was the opposite. Like a word pushed into silence, the way you can make a word into clay. Silence shouldn’t be able to do that.’ She paused – I knew she was trying to do her best to put into language something not easily explicable in anything but its own alien terms. ‘There was a mind behind that word. A monkey mind, someone like you and me, in a bone room somewhere, plugged into an alien skull. But do you remember what Cazaray said about carrier signals – that all we’re doing is imprinting our own messages on something else? There was another mind underneath the transmission. Something dead, cold and very, very alien. And yet still thinking, or still trying to think.’