Aestival Tide (3 page)

Her cheeks grew cool with mist and she sighed, opening her eyes. The rickshaw had stopped at the outermost rim of the Thrones Level Grid. The avenue here was in blessedly good repair, the surface beneath her feet smooth and cool. Only, behind one of the rickshaw's wheels, she noticed a crack in the pavement, like a thread of water running down the avenue.

“That's odd,” she said aloud. The rickshaw driver cocked his head at her and shrugged.

“Something new,” he said, spitting a crimson mouthful of betel juice onto the ground. “Cracks. I had to repair a wheel bearing twice in three days.”

“Cracks,” Ceryl repeated softly, and stared down at the ground.

Behind her were the broken spires and crooked facades of Thrones' residential neighborhoods. Like everything else on the upper levels of Araboth, these apartments were prefabricated by the Architects. Over the last few centuries the metal and plasteel structures had cracked and buckled under the weight of the levels above, until all of Thrones seemed to be caving in upon itself, albeit in a subdued, almost genteel manner. Although of course living quarters here were a vast improvement over the dayglo ghettos of Virtues, where the hermaphrodites lived, or the grim cubicles that housed the 'filers and media crews on Powers. At least on Thrones the roads had always been in good repair.

Ceryl sighed and rubbed her nose. A few yards in front of her, a shimmering heat fence crackled and sparked as moisture filtered down from the Quincunx Domes. Beyond the fence was nothing, a dizzying plunge to the next level, Dominations, and thence to Virtues, and Powers, and so on down to the lowest level of the crazily layered ziggurat that was Araboth. If one could see the city from above (but of course you could not, unless you were an Aviator), it would resemble a huge and living pagoda, its vaulted domes rearing above the nine levels like the chitinous shell of some monstrous arthropod. And Outside, the sea: smashing against the domes during the months-long storm season, whispering through the dreams of the Imperators' children as they slept in their gilded beds on Cherubim.

It was only the Architects that protected them from the horrors of the sea and the world Outside. There, an earth seeded by centuries of radiation and viral rains had given birth to heteroclites and demons. Only the tireless Architects protected them from that. On the uppermost levels, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Ascendants' robotic engineers constantly built and rebuilt Araboth's pinnacles and spires and moats. You might wake one morning and find that the outside of your chambers had been gilded. Or there might be a new place of worship where last night there had been nothing: a shining new crucifix-speared mosque, wherein the Orsinate propitiated the horrors of the ravening world with offerings of prisoners taken in ceaseless raids against the Commonwealth.

Or, if you were unfortunate enough to live on the lower levels, you might find that in a single night the Architects had destroyed your ghetto on Powers. Or they might have torched a refinery on Archangels, immolating thousands of
rasas
as the Architects' grinding machines leveled factories and apartment buildings made of polymer-strengthened paper. The next day perhaps an ice-blue lake would be there, with Orsinate bastards skimming across its surface in their azure gas-fired proas, while from its banks their replicant nursemaids stood guard with blank yet watchful eyes.

Or there might be nothing there at all, a smoking ruin such as Ceryl's dead lover Giton Arrowsmith had found once, where his chambers had been. That was before Ceryl's promotion to the pleasure cabinet. She had never thought she would look back with any fondness upon Giton's fishy-smelling cubicle on Dominations; but here she was, tearfully nostalgic in front of a heat fence on Thrones. There was no reason for it, for any of it. There was
absolutely
no reasoning behind the Architects' ceaseless construction and deconstruction of the city. Even the margravine Âziz admitted to that, and Sajur Panggang, the Architect Imperator who was supposed to monitor the great machines.

“We grew lazy and forgot how to program them,” he had told Ceryl once, and shrugged. “So now they program themselves. I, um, occasionally make
suggestions
to them, and if I'm fortunate, well, they listen to me.”

He was a small slender man, the Architect Imperator, with the large gentle eyes and strong chin of his Orsina cousins. Unlike his cousins, Sajur was gifted with a keen, if narrowly focused, intelligence. The Architects had designed most of the buildings in Araboth—for example, those dizzying residences on Cherubim that assumed such bizarrely baroque proportions that they could scarcely be looked at by a sane person, let alone lived in. But Sajur Panggang had created the Reception Areas, the labyrinthine prisons that supplied the vivariums on Dominations with food. And he had also designed many of Araboth's hundreds of kerchief-sized parks, where the marvel of holographic landscaping made it seem that one gazed across a moor swept with lavender sage in bloom, or peered up at the unimaginably distant bulk of mountains with peaks so sharp they might have been cut from paper—which, in essence, they were.

“The Orsinas have never been known for their intellect,” Sajur had confessed to Ceryl. This was not long after his wife's murder. Ceryl, recalling her own grief after Giton's death, had expressed her sympathy for Sajur's bereavement. “It's a miracle it's all still standing, really.”

He had cast an ironic glance at the ceiling, and stroked the elegant cobalt cylinder of a drafting mannequin. “A wonderful, wonderful miracle.” Ceryl recalled him enviously. She wished
she
could consider anything inside of Araboth a miracle. Because as she stared out at the heat fence sparking a few feet in front of her, the pale violet light that made everything look like its own shadow, Ceryl felt only despair.

Behind her the moujik girl gasped. Ceryl's knee bumped the open door as she turned and with one hand brushed a tendril of greasy hair from the child's forehead. As she watched a film covered the girl's wide eyes, like gray silk. Then she was still. Ceryl continued to stare at her, aware that she was experiencing nothing but a faint and rising nausea, the same feeling she had if she lingered too long at one of the promenades on Cherubim, looking down upon the dwindling lights of Araboth's lower levels.

So,
she thought, and grinned miserably. She really
was
incapable of the higher emotions. Not even Giton's execution, not even this child dying in her lap, could move her. Only to the morphodites, the dream-mantics, could she confess what truly sickened her and haunted her dreams: the city itself beneath its shell of eternal twilight, breathing softly all around her, while its unseen Architects chattered and hummed and ordered the endless renovation of their animate hive.

She let her breath out in a long gasp and slid to the edge of the seat. A gust of hot air shot up from beyond the heat fence, heavy with the doughy smell of fermentation from one of the vivariums below. Ceryl lifted her head. She looked out over the abyss and saw a fouga, a dirigible warship, moving slowly and with a resonant wasplike hum toward the skygate in the highest of the Quincunx Domes. Behind it trailed a yolk-yellow banner, a pennon signaling an Ascendant triumph.

Ceryl sighed. The fouga would be returning from a skirmish with the Balkhash Commonwealth. She had seen last night's broadcast, showing scenes of neurological warfare played out against the calm blue reach of an island in the Archipelago. The sight of men and women writhing and howling on the beach had finally proven too much for her, and she'd switched the screen off. No one really believed in the 'files, of course. Ceryl herself had once watched an ostensibly live broadcast of a desert battle being produced in a studio on Powers Level. A number of moujiks and even a few uniformed
rasas
stood in for the Commonwealth soldiers and Ascendant janissaries. Ceryl was only mildly shocked to learn that the blood, at least, was real.

The wars were real, too. Hundreds of wars, even thousands of them. Over the last four centuries the world had shattered into a thousand parts, each with its own petty tyrant fighting its neighbors for dwindling resources. The Shining that brought about the First Ascension all but destroyed the subtle network that held the world together. The next holocaust obliterated the faltering remnants of any telecommunications systems. That Shining was followed by others, too many to count. Those who survived the nuclear holocausts fell victim to mutagenic rains that desolated most of this continent and its southern antipode. Of the rest of the world, only the Archipelago and parts of the subcontinent, and Wyalong, the great Austral island, were relatively untouched by the viral wars. The Balkhash Commonwealth held sway over the detritus of Eurasia; the HÃ¥bilis Emirate controlled the Glass Continent and the Desert Lands. The vast mutated jungles and radiation deserts of the Americas had become the object of more wars than anyone could count. For two hundred years now they had for the most part been controlled by the NASNA Ascendancy—although that word “control” scarcely applied. There were huge areas of the continents where no Ascendants had ever stepped, where those who had survived the holocausts and viral wars had reverted to forms of barbarism surpassing even the excesses of their ancestors.

A few pockets of technological sophistication remained. Araboth was one of them. Ceryl could not have pointed out any of the others on a map. She knew that the centuries-long wars with the Balkhash Commonwealth and the HÃ¥bilis Emirates continued, but she could not have told you why. Something to do with water, maybe, or the hydrofarms still active in the western ocean.

Probably the Orsinate themselves did not really know. In the tangled web of diplomatic intrigue and barbarism that now constituted the civilized world, even the Orsinate took their commands from a higher source. The true Ascendants, the supreme military aristocracy who after the First Ascension had rebelled against their commanders and forsaken the ravaged earth for the network of HORUS stations circling the planet. Since then the Ascendant Autocracy lived in the HORUS stations, where they cosseted their ancient computers and failing stores of military hardware. Only the NASNA Aviators traveled between HORUS and the rest of the world, seeding the great prairies with viral rains, poisoning the hydrofarms of the HÃ¥bilis Emirate with metrophages and burning gases.

And now here was an Aviator fouga returning to Araboth from some unknown mission. Maybe last night's broadcast had been real, after all. There might be more prisoners from the Emirate, captured to slave in the refineries of Archangels Level. Or the fouga might carry no one but the Aviators, returning for one of their periodic shows of triumph: a twitch of the long chain that stretched from Araboth to the heavens.

Ceryl heard a distant sound like the crash of waves. Slowly the shining skygate opened, like a bandage peeled away to show the wound beneath. Ceryl squinted to catch a glimpse of what was beyond, a purple sky fraught with orange flashes. The domes of Araboth besieged by enemy fire, perhaps; or perhaps nothing, perhaps some normal atmospheric disturbance—fallout from one of the HORUS colonies, or lightning. It was late spring, Outside; nearly Æstival Tide. That was the only time that Araboth opened its gates to the world: once every decade, when the city's populace would surge from the Lahatiel Gate onto the beach Outside and purge itself in the ritual of ecstatic terror known as the Great Fear. Because the world Outside was a horror. And no matter that it was a man-made horror—to look upon that world more than once every ten years would drive one mad. Everything connected with it—the color of the ocean, the hot smell of it, the roaring of the wind—had over the centuries acquired a patina of superstitious terror. Even those children conceived during Æstival Tide (and there were many; the Great Fear was a powerful incentive to lust) were believed to be contaminated. Their screams during the sacrificial hecatombs had inspired many of the Orsinate's artists.

But that was a long way off yet. The city had yet to survive, the Healing Wind. Because immediately after Æstival Tide (and sometimes earlier) the storm season would begin, with the murderous hurricanes and typhoons that were the ill-born children of Science as surely as were the geneslaves and the hermaphrodites and other monsters. The storms came each year, of course, but it was commonly believed that those following Æstival Tide were more furious and malign than in other years. The moujiks had names for these hurricanes. They believed that there were really only two of them, Baratdaja the Healing Wind and Ucalegon the Prince of Storms, and that they returned decade after decade to batter the domes like the hands of some monstrous lunatic. But inside of Araboth all was safe, all was still; all was under the protection of the softly humming Architects. And alone perhaps among the people there, Ceryl would awaken terrified in her broad, sumptuous, and empty bed and feel it all shaking around her, the Healing Wind gnawing at Araboth until the city collapsed in upon itself like a marzipan egg.

Leaning forward she stared at the crack in the pavement. On the lower levels, an avenue with only one such minor flaw would be a miracle. Here on Thrones, however, where the members of the Orsinate's pleasure cabinet lived, Ceryl had never seen so much as a pebble out of place. And so close to Æstival Tide… The crack seemed a bad omen.

She thought of her dream, then. Of the wall of water green as—well, green as water—and alive, shattering into millions of fragments, arms, heads, bloated bodies like drumfish smashing into the crumbling seawall. She recalled the small body beside her and shivered. From where the driver stood, waiting, she heard the brisk snap of a candicaine pipette, a snuffling noise as he inhaled. Ceryl kicked at a slip of paper blowing past, stirred up by the change of pressure from the skygate's opening.
WELCOME THE HEALING WIND!
she read. Another flyer printed illegally by one of Araboth's many doomsday cults. She fumbled in her pockets for more of her own pipettes but found nothing, only bits of glassine and powder. Her month's narcotic ration was long spent. Her last morpha tube had gone to sedate the moujik girl.