Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (10 page)

As Dark Companion was still on the other side of Midas, dragging all the world's seas with it, I had a solution to that problem. There was now no water between me and the bottom of Hell's Point, three vertical kilometres downwards, and at this time of year, if I went in head first, I'd be certain to break my neck rather than floundering encased in ooze while things I couldn't see ate my face. The ooze might even be dry, cracked mud, though that was unlikely at any time of year. Hell's Point had originally been named Hellespont by a human explorer with a classical education. The name had degenerated over time—or perhaps become more accurate. Every Spring Tide, the pull of two stars, one living, one dead, combined to send all of Midas's oceans thundering up this narrow channel, sometimes high enough to bubble out over the galena plateau it cut through. The Crashing Bore. I'd seen rocks the size of condominia rolling around in it like flotsam.

And for the rest of the year, Hell's Point was simply a vertical, dizzying crack in the earth to the base of which no sunlight and virtually no gamma penetrated. Occasional foolish noobs still made very temporary settlements in it. The Robinsonade Guaranteed Lashup Company, more sensibly, had slung wire ropes across it and made a suspension bridge connecting Chrystopia Fields to Gulvellir Forest.

At least I wasn't still in Chrystopia Fields.

It was a long, long way down. I could see clouds drifting beneath me.

It was, in fact, almost annoying when I heard Brad's concerned voice behind me: “What are you doing out here, skipper?"

I turned to her ruefully, grinning out a mouth full of rotten Robinsonade teeth. “Asking myself the same question."

I'd had a ship once. I still
had
a ship, in fact, sitting mouldering amid a thousand others in the heavy metal muck of Despond Slough. A ship that was now useless to me.

I'd bought the ship in a savage downturn in the ship market. She was a slaver, purpose built to carry human beings alive-if-unhappy out of human space into the Proprietor worlds. Unlike the slavers you've heard about in dramatic exposés and shockumentaries, this one had waste disposal, galley spaces, and rotational gravity. She'd been built by the old United States of America to dispose of its antisocial elements. But the bottom had dropped out of the market once New Topia had started producing its first made-for-slavery clones. New Topia was one hundred light years closer to the Proprietor homeworlds; there was no way the old inner systems could compete. Thousands of tonnes of prime product ended up dumped on inhospitable, marginally habitable planets and given a freedom it neither wanted nor needed.

I'd intended to revamp the
Marcus Crassus
as an economy transit shuttle. With only the removal of half a metre of radiation shielding from the outer hull and the addition of a whole load of danger—death can result from exposure to vacuum stickers on the airlock doors, I'd meet U.N. regulations for carrying fee paying passengers. That is, if I kept off the main shipping lanes, the economical lanes, the lanes big starlines monopolized because they made the money.

Have you seen the wee bijou flaw in my business plan yet?

The family home had had to go, of course. For over a thousand years, my ancestors had maintained it, steadily surrounded by soaring blocks of what the European Housing Directorate proudly called ‘VUV', which stands for ‘Vertical Urban Villages'. We'd defended it against Wallace, Longshanks, Cromwell, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, depending on whose side we were on at the time; but we'd been unable to defend it against my own temptation. The land was at a premium; it was time to sell.

So the McQuarrie family seat had been bought by a sympathetic landgrab consortium that had promised to put up a new building ‘in keeping with the original site'. How it was going to do that in geodesic gunnite, I had no idea, though I believe parts of Kinlochbeul Castle's west front now adorn their corporate headquarters in Liège. Once I'd exchanged family home for ship, I'd only had to add seventeen other postgrad qualifications to my solitary biochemistry degree before those same U.N. regulations would allow me anywhere near a spaceship.

In any case, that was how I and the newly renamed
Kinlochbeul Castle
ended up on the ninth planet of Atlas A, 440 light years from Earth. Atlas A is a blue giant star, part of the Pleiades Cluster, and its light hurts the eyes. The natives are a curious lot, a race who shouldn't by rights exist. Their star's age, after all, is measured in millions of years rather than billions—they haven't had
time
to evolve intelligence. The odds are heavily against there being life on their world, let alone civilization. That's why few ships ever explore the parts of the Network that come out near massive stars. Life isn't often found there. There's no-one to buy from or sell to, and no-one to buy or sell. If anyone is doing anything out near such stars, it's dredging heavy metals. Giant stars swim in a soup of the stuff.

The Jackinaboxes are protected from their own giant star by an atmosphere hundreds of miles in depth. Their world is still on the cool side of turning Venusian, however. It does occasionally rain enough sulphuric acid to dissolve a small child, but then, I hear it does that in Beijing these days too. The ‘boxes are called ‘boxes because they have the ability, in an aquafortis storm, to instantly deflate their pneumatic skeletons and coil up inside their acid-resistant braincases, like a cartoon character folding up into his hat. They do this if they're startled too, sometimes prompting sociopathic Scots visitors to yell at them suddenly purely for the evil fun of it.

Gravity is high on Atlas A9, and cloud cover is constant. For that reason, those few ‘boxes who ever managed to scale the heights of Nine's immense cloud-piercing mountain ranges became a class apart, scientist and priesthood together squashed into one hat or box. Their planetary religion—and there was only one, it having spread very quickly and utterly mercilessly—centred around astronomical observation. It was boosted to new levels when the priesthood contacted beings from other worlds, flying down from the sky in great white birds that farted tongues of flame. This is where I come in.

In actual fact, by the time
Kinlochbeul Castle
arrived on Nine, they'd discovered spaceflight and built over one hundred telescopes the size of Vertical Urban Villages in Nine-stationary orbit, but the great white bird idea is more poetic. In any case, I'd stocked up on glass beads in case I ran into any sophonts on my wanderings, and I had a storage locker full of weapons grade plutonium. Medicines don't work from biochemistry to biochemistry, cultural artefacts that are beautiful to one species leave another cold, but
everyone
loves weapons grade plutonium. The ‘boxes’ civilization ran on it. Their world hadn't had life long enough to acquire fossil fuel deposits, so existence was wind- and muscle-powered for the peasantry, nuclear-powered for the astronomer-aristocracy.

But what did these creatures have to offer in return?

In answer, I'd been led into a room of gold.

Now, I'll grant that gold is a whole lot less rare than it used to be. We have machines for digesting whole asteroids and crapping out the stuff, and filtering it out of sea water. But the energy expended in dragging a tonne of gold the length of ten or eleven solar systems, the average length of voyage we're talking node-to-node out to the Chi Lupi goldfields, still makes it valuable, and the astronomarchs’ treasure room was a wonder to behold. White gold interlaid with red interlaced with rose interwoven with black mapped out the heavens, the black gold rendered by nanoscale indents in the metal cut by laser to absorb all light, making it the deep black of vacuum. They'd alloyed gold with aluminium to pick out purple stars, with silver to produce greens, with copper to make pinks. The Pleiades gas clouds had been rendered most lovingly of all, in hand-hammered, blade-thin blue gold sheets with LEDs behind them, shining bright.

The first thing I noticed was that all the stars were in the wrong place. Their world might be young, but their civilization was old, old enough for only the lead stars in the Pleiades to have begun pushing bow waves into the Maia Nebula.

I remarked on the amount of gold. They asked me, the boneless bastards, whether gold was a thing I was interested in. They claimed gold was a commonplace to them, which was odd, as I hadn't seen any jangling on the peasants in the fields. They offered me an obscenely large amount of it, enough to fill my ship,
or alternatively,
they could offer me the knowledge of where they
got
their gold. They seemed to have latched on to one human proverb, which they used a great deal. The proverb was
give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he eats for life.
I suppose I should have asked them where they'd learned the proverb.

Bastards.

Their gold, they said, came from a world orbiting further out in the Atlas A system. It was known by then, of course, that Atlas A had a miniature companion far smaller than the equally gigantic Atlas B, though the companion was far too dim and dense to be anything other than a brown dwarf, neutron star or collapsar. In a tight orbit around this companion, the ‘boxes said, anchored in place by star-sized gravity, was a world where
gold could be made to walk into the smelter.
What did they mean by that? They gave away nothing. But they were perfectly prepared to
sell
me, for my entire cargo of plute, a set of pusher drives powered by micronuclear explosions, effectively a Daedalus drive of the sort human beings had envisaged using for travelling from solar system to solar system back in the way-back-when. Of course, human beings had ended up doing nothing of the sort, as we'd discovered the Node system that had allowed us to travel faster than light for free. But Atlas A's dark companion had no Node. Evidently the Nodebuilders had not been interested in gold. And the companion star, if star it was, was as far away from Atlas A9 as Jupiter from the Sun. Only the companion's own dim radiation kept the planet warm.

It would be a year there, and a year back. But they guaranteed me as much gold as I could get back to A9 with (which I should have realized potentially included, in the event of my not being able to get back to A9 at all, the amount
no gold at all).
They sold me the tools to mine the gold, and a miniature cyanide plant for refining the ore. In under three years’ time, I would be set for life.

"
Careful
, Yuri, you'll spook him. The last thing we want's a sympathetic detonation of the whole herd."

Yuri, clearly visible in deep camouflage on the other side of the herd of chrysolopes, hissed into his radio: “The last thing I am wanting, Alasdair, is for him to charge me. He must be massing over three hundred kilos. That is one hundred kilos of xenonogold ester bound up in his big fat hairy ass. If I am needing to put a bullet in him at close range the blast will blow the slug back up my pipe and my face round the other side of my head. If anyone is getting spooked here, it is me."

The chrysolopes were one of the few herds remaining in our area—one of the few remaining in the whole of Gulvellir Forest. They stood shoulder-high at the shoulder, and had magnificent dorsal crests that would fluoresce visibly at Hard Dawn if Atlas A were still below the horizon, metabolizing warmth for the beasts out of high energy x- and gamma-rays that would kill a human being on contact. They had no natural weapons; they needed none.

Many years ago on Earth, chemists had discovered xenon and gold would form cationic complexes; out by Atlas A we'd found out they'd form polymers. The chrysolopes’ fat deposits, an essential defence against winter cold that could freeze dry ice out of the air, were not made of carbon/hydrogen triesters, but freakish xenonogold analogues. Noble gases and noble metals are very difficult to put together and very, very easy to convince to come apart. How the ‘lopes synthesized such materials inside themselves was anyone's guess—no zoologist had taken the trouble to get close enough to a live ‘lope to examine it. Almost certainly, though, it was something to do with the high energy photons they collected in their dorsal crests. Dead ‘lope flesh also stank of fluorine and burned incautious fingers; the noble molecules were stable only in the presence of fluoride counterions. And they weren't that stable in any event. The fat deposits on a chrysolope, besides keeping it warm through a long hard winter, were several orders more explosive than nitroglycerine, plastique or that other gold compound known to mediaeval alchemists,
aurum fulminans.
The chrysolopes’ natural defence was to explode if you messed with them. Or, in occasional cases, if they farted too hard.

High above, green lamina of auroras rippled in the evening sky. Dark Companion could not be seen, but its position could be inferred from its terrible gravitomagnetic effects on all matter around it. Only the fact that we were still inside the Pleiades cluster made stars visible through the aurorae, and there were aurorae even where we were, close to the equator. Across the clearing, a patch of Hackle Grass was standing up in the increased magnetic field. Companion-rise was approaching. We needed to nail the herd leader and go to ground, get a metre of earth between ourselves and hard gamma.

"Easy with the LED pipe, Yuri, or you'll be the one scraping up everything that's left of him into a bucket. But we need to get this done quickly. There's a tzee hereabouts, a big one. I saw its foot-craters a quarter kilometre back."

The radio scoffed in my ear. “Tzee feet are smaller than the craters they are making. They are just travelling fast."

I took a swig from the sweetwater canteen at my belt. Water, water everywhere was dripping on my head out of the rain jungle, but there was no way of knowing whether it
was
rain or whether it had dripped out of some form of Midas plant life, in which case it would give me heavy metal poisoning and cause organ shutdown weeks in my future. “I'm less concerned with the size of its feet and more with the size of the hole it'll leave in me. A ‘lope factory dozer up near Oro Que Camina had its crew killed to a man by one."