There was no way of telling. All I could do was run the message, do what I was told, trust that Sol was doing things right and not just trying to remind me of my place.
T
HE
L
OOP WAS
to the west of our Ipp, just past the centre of the city. It was a hazardous journey at the best of times, a cut through territory that was truly alien, where you could never be sure of what you would encounter, what rules to follow, what risks there might be. But on this day, it was even worse: the tensions in the city had reached levels I had never before encountered.
I took a circuitous route out of the nest, hoping to bump into the visitors from Angiere, but I did not see them. Ruth and Divine were in the foreyard, drinking tea and making doe eyes at each other. I ignored their almost subliminal click exchanges. I didn’t need to know.
Divine waved me over to join them, but I shook my head. “!¡
self-important
¡! Business to be taken care of.”
They smirked into each other’s faces, and for an instant I wondered how others saw me: heir apparent or messenger boy, figure of fun. My head was all over the place, I realised: up one moment, down the next. I wasn’t usually so erratic.
I passed out of the Ipp with no trouble, through the checkpoint and into Cheapside E, the site of my first night run, when I had so nearly been caught and betrayed the whole nest with my sloppiness.
Soon, I was crossing the line into Central, a boundary marked by a humped bridge over a wide canal. The duty grunt scanned my wrist and peered into my face: my pids said I was me today, and cleared for all central zones outside the hours of curfew.
The grunt paused for far too long, and I realised it was communicating with someone or something that was not there: its superiors, or their security systems.
I kept my smarts, stayed calm. I didn’t look around for escape routes, because I’d already done that as a matter of course, on approaching the checkpoint.
Eventually, the grunt clicked me through, with a big sigh of caustic gases that made my eyes sting.
Just off the bridge, I had to stop. My senses were being assaulted. I was dizzy and dazzled and my head was spinning. How to even begin to describe?
With the street, perhaps. Back in the Ipp, our main streets are surfaced with cobbles or flat slabs that crack within weeks of being laid. Side-streets are mud, packed with hard core that flattens itself over time. A bridge is a cobbled-together affair made mainly of wooden spans, with occasional sheets of metal or plastic salvaged from beyond the Ipp.
Out in the commercial districts, the streets are smooth with tar and fine grit that repairs and maintains itself; some are topped with a rubberised plastic, yielding to the footfall and repellent of water and other spillages. Even the side-streets and alleyways where humans are allowed to pass are smooth-surfaced and flawless.
Here, in Central, the roads were alive. Place your foot and the surface would arrange itself to your imprint; lift that foot and the surface gave you an extra push – wheeled vehicles got such a push from the road surfaces that they barely needed to propel themselves at all, or so I had been told.
All around, the buildings loomed above me. Buildings with mirrored fronts, moving images blending with what they reflected, so that it looked as if my inverted self was passing through a distorted, surreal landscape. Buildings that were all sharp angles and flat surfaces; buildings that were organically globular, jellied so that beings passed through apparently solid walls, absorbed into the bodies of the buildings. I did not know what was inside them; perhaps you passed through into air, like a normal building, or perhaps you remained in jelly or fluid as you conducted your business. Other buildings were covered in webbed silk nests that were alive with dragonflies and all varieties of flying creatures – the nests could have been the homes of sentient beings or they could have been the nests of parasites and vermin.
Looking up: the undersides of the mushroom towers were lit up with rhythmic traceries of light, all supported by implausibly slender central stalks. Flying vehicles darted and twisted; flying beings cut through the flow.
And all about, a seething, chaotic throng of bodies. Aliens of all varieties mixed with humans and trogs. The humans and nearly-men here were business-like, some of them half-mech, others cauled in alien webbing, controlled, not human at all.
The aliens walked on two legs, three, four or more; they floated on personal transports; they sat in self-contained personal environments, sealed off from the world. They strode, rolled, flitted, hopped, skittered, flew, ran... They travelled in all directions, yet appeared to know when to give way and when to plough on. They chattered, clicked, shrieked and yammered; they rumbled and groaned and whooped and roared. They smelled of urea and dung and decay, of perfumed flowers and sharp spices, of raw meat and chlorine.
There must be a billion cities like this on a million worlds. More. I couldn’t grasp the scale of the universe, couldn’t hold it in my head. Perhaps this was why we humans hid in our Ipps: we really were the hangers-on, unable to take the pace of being full members of such a diverse, galaxy-spanning community.
After that initial pause, I managed to gather myself and walk through it all, Sol’s message in my pocket, my path never straight for all the beings barging through, cutting across, blocking my way with wings held wide to convert me to their cult or to recruit me for something I couldn’t understand or to sell me phreaks, knick-knacks, philosophies or experiences. I tried to duck my head low and avoid betraying any kind of interest with even a glance, but still they harangued, still they confronted, still they yelled and touched and phreaked with my head as I tried to pass.
Armed grunts stood in clusters at every junction, watching, sniffing, tasting. I kept my head down, trying not to catch undue attention from them, too. There were orphids and dome-headed craniates, but also several varieties I didn’t know. At least with the ones we knew, we had some idea of the trigger points, the rules and implicit understandings encoded in their behaviour.
Already on edge because of the grunts and the kaleidoscope of alienness all around me, I almost lost it at one point when I heard a buzzing and looked up, and a swarm of tiny black flies descended in a cloud around my face.
The previous night’s account of the destruction of Angiere came back to me in a flash of panic, but the flies were just flies and I swatted them away. They left a citrus-scented vapour of panic in their wake, and for an instant my head was filled with terror again, and then it was gone, and I was just stumbling, disoriented, senses bejazzled by the bombardment of images and sounds and scents.
T
HE
L
OOP WAS
an Ipp enclosed on three boundaries by a lazy bend of the Swayne, the great river that wound its way through our city. The Ipp could even be considered an island, as a canal had been cut across its land-locked neck, short-cutting the loop in the river.
I passed through the checkpoint more easily this time – the aliens cared more about those entering their own zones than leaving – and paused on a bridge over this canal. When I leaned on the railing, its surface yielded under my arms like jelly.
Swallows skimmed the water here, their backs flashing an iridescent oily blue as they emerged from the bridge’s shadow.
The message in my pocket was like a stone weight. I wanted to open it, I wanted to know if Sol was just sending me on a pointless mission to punish me for my foolhardiness in following her and the four refugees from Angiere last night.
I resisted, and headed on into the Ipp.
The streets here were narrow, wood-framed buildings leaning together to cut out the sunlight. It felt as if I were entering a network of caves.
The ground floors of the buildings appeared to contain a mix of shops and offices, but it was hard to see much through their tiny bull’s-eye glass windows, just people moving about or hunched over desks, lit in sepia tones by gaslight.
The street was eerily empty after the bustle of Central, just an old petticoated woman scrubbing at a wooden door, and a couple of rag-wrapped derelicts sharing a plastic tube of something noxious.
Sol’s directions took me as far as the end of the narrow street.
I emerged on a square, dazzled by sunlight again. Three horses were tethered to a rail by a drinking trough in the centre of the square, shaded by a cluster of lime trees. On the far side, a row of hand-pulled stalls was lined up, selling pastries, fruit, drinks.
“!¡
hostility | warning
¡! Dunnat move, see?”
I froze.
It was a female voice. Young, I guessed. Street talk, made even harder to understand by her throaty Loop accent.
I heard footsteps as she circled round and into view. Coal-haired, mid-teens, skin as white as Divine’s, whiter maybe. She was thin, but her face still carried the puppy fat of youth; her eyes were smudged dark with kohl, and her lips were blood red. She wore some kind of trashy black lace petticoat-skirt, and a ribbed bustiere that pushed her small breasts up as if they were being displayed on a meat rack. And resting casually across one arm she carried a pistol crossbow, its stock a polished rosy-brown wood with ivory and brass inlay, its string drawn, aimed vaguely at my lower midriff.
“!¡
threat | no-messing
¡! Ya biz?”
“!¡
calming | non-threatening
¡!” I clicked, struggling to keep the disdain from my response. “Yes,” I went on. “I have business here. I’m from Cragside Ipp; South-East 6. Sent by Sol Virtue with a message for nest-father Frankhay. I’s biz, see?”
She clicked something hard to decipher. Derision. Frustration. Aggression.
Then she clicked a rapid-fire sequence, and suddenly another of Frankhay’s minders appeared from between two buildings to my left. This one was a year or two younger, barely into adolescence. It was hard to tell if it was male or female; he – or she – had the square jaw of a boy, but wore a similar outfit of black lace and knee-high leather boots.
The new arrival didn’t carry a crossbow. Instead, the child had me in the sights of a wide-mouthed blunderbuss that looked big enough to stop a troop-carrier.
They marched me down a side-street and then on a twisting route that turned and doubled back several times, before finally ending up at an alehouse somewhere in the heart of the Loop.
The public bar was packed, the air heavy with the smells of sawdust, beer, phreaks and smoke. In one corner, a couple of benches had been pushed together as a makeshift stage upon which two slope-headed, almost-human aliens performed some kind of strange slapstick routine. It felt as if I’d stepped into another world; the Loop was like something out of Vechko’s stories of history.
The one with the blunderbuss pushed ahead into a back room: another bar, quieter this time, with only a couple of lacy minders on the door and a small group playing cards at a long, uneven table by the wall.
“Nest-father, you have a visitor from Cragside,” said the girl, dropping the street talk.
A man with collar-length white hair and a black brocade frock-coat turned slowly in his seat. This was probably meant to intimidate me, but to tell the truth I’d seen it all before. If you want intimidating, just come and visit Sol Virtue when she doesn’t want to see you...
Sitting with his back to the entrance was show: a statement that he didn’t need to worry about his safety here, didn’t need to see who was coming.
I dipped my head and clicked softly in deference.
He turned fully now, and I saw that the frock-coat was secured with brass buttons, a pink silk shirt beneath with thick body hair tufting out at the neck. His brocade breeches were cut at the knee, just above a pair of high, strapped-up boots with a four-finger wedge heel.
“Cragside, is it?” he said, pulling at one bushy sideburn and peering at me through thick eye-glasses. “Don’t hear much from Mother Virtue these days. What is it, lad?”
I reached for my pocket, and crossbow girl instantly adjusted her aim towards my head. At a brief wave of a finger from Frankhay, she relaxed and I was able to extract the sealed note from my pocket.
Frankhay took the fold of paper, opened it and handed it to a woman at his side to read. It seemed fitting that the nest-father of such a backward Ipp couldn’t even read.
The woman whispered into his ear and he nodded.
“!¡
probing
¡! Sol says you know all about this,” he said.
I nodded. At that stage I didn’t know what it was that I was supposed to know all about, but if Sol said I did, then I’d go along with her. I clearly wasn’t just a message-carrier, then.
“!¡
hierarchy
¡! So then, you going to tell me? Angiere. What happened at Angiere? It’s gotta be big, or Sol Virtue wouldn’t be asking for a pact ’tween Cragside and the Loop. Sol doesn’t lower herself to make deals with the likes of us, ’less she’s scared of something. That right, lad?”
“!¡
assertive
¡! She’s not scared,” I said, thinking fast. “She’s just a good judge of a situation.”
Frankhay shrugged and let it pass.
A ripple of applause and laughter came from the front bar.
I realised Frankhay was still waiting for me to tell him what I knew of the fall of Angiere, so I recounted the story told by Callo and her friends: the slow start, targeting individuals, followed by whole nests being targeted and then destruction of the entire city by beams from the sky.
Partway through, my attention started to wander. There were seventeen people here, not including me. Several were visibly armed with knives and bulbous-handled pistols; others were almost certainly less visibly armed, but deadly just the same. All wore a variant of the black lace that seemed to be some kind of uniform for Frankhay’s nest, from discreet armbands to bustieres and what I now realised was a kilt, as worn by the blunderbuss kid.
That was when I saw her.
Sitting just beyond the main group, she had one knee drawn up so that her chin could rest on it. She wore a figure-hugging lace vest, leggings that looked as if they had been made from netting, and the same black knee-length boots she had worn the previous day at Precept Square.