Terminal World (53 page)

‘Spatha wasn’t acting in self-interest. He was concerned about Swarm’s survival.’

‘Go back and defend him, if it matters so much to you. Where I’m sitting, self-interest and Swarm’s survival add up to the same thing.’

‘Fucker had it coming,’ Meroka said. ‘You saw how he hurt the kid.’

Nimcha was asleep in her mother’s arms. Even Kalis looked on the edge of exhaustion, as if she had borne part of her daughter’s torments herself.

‘He is a bad man,’ Kalis said. ‘He should die. But quickly. I will draw the knife, if this is allowed.’

‘Well, first things first,’ Agraffe said with a hasty smile. ‘Due process and all that. There’ll still be a trial, with all the trimmings. And now that this has brought matters to a head, Ricasso will want to see a real binding show of loyalty from the dissenters. If they’re not ready to - how did Spatha put it? - submit to his authority, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ricasso invites them to take their ships and head for the other side of the Earth.’

‘He’d do that? He’d split Swarm?’

‘More like amputate the part of it that isn’t healthy. Any other time, Ricasso’d rather cut his own arm off than lose one good ship. But now? We’re actually going to
help
the Spearpointers.’ Agraffe grinned at the very idea, a proposition so utterly at odds with the natural order of things that the only rational response was hilarity. ‘If that isn’t a sign that we’ve begun a new chapter, I don’t know what is.’

‘We’ve a way to go yet.’

‘Swarm’s come through harder crossings than this. Granted, we’ll have Skullboys to deal with when we get near Spearpoint. But until then? I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It’s just dead landscape. The only thing we’re likely to die of is boredom.’

They were coming up on
Painted Lady.
She loomed out of the darkness, looking astonishingly, absurdly small after the cavernous, gilded luxury of
Purple Emperor.
Quillon’s heart tensed at the thought of making any prolonged crossing in that metal bucket of a gondola, for all her armour and equipment. But the Bane would be a crossing like nothing attempted in recorded history.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Meroka said, as they readied to disembark. ‘Piece of piss, right?’

‘Yes,’ Quillon said, ruminating on the words. ‘A piece of piss. Exactly the sentiment I was searching for.’

Come the morning, what had been a pale line on the horizon had transformed into a broad swathe, coming nearer with each watch.

‘I can’t tell you how weird this feels,’ Curtana said, when the other officers had left the dining table. ‘We’re actually steering for the damned thing, at full cruise power. I’ve spent most of my adult life doing everything possible to keep away from it.’

‘How are the instruments?’ Quillon asked, finishing the last drop of coffee. It was as black as crude firesap and preternaturally strong, as if all the coffee he’d tasted in his life before that point had been diluted.

‘All readings are absolutely normal, for this zone. Ordinarily we’d be seeing strong signs of transition by now, as we get closer to the boundary. Mechanical systems would be starting to fail - engines overheating, clocks and gauges jamming up, just like when Nimcha did her trick. You’d be doling out the antizonals and even then it wouldn’t be enough to stop us feeling ill.’

‘Then that’s a good sign. Ricasso was right to extrapolate from those earlier readings.’

The zone disturbance initiated by Nimcha’s fit had been more of a tremor than a squall or storm. Back in Neon Heights it would have been a seven-day wonder, with the Boundary Commission likely needing to make only trifling alterations to their maps. So it was here. More widespread changes could not be ruled out beyond the limit of Swarm’s instruments, but the conditions the fleet was moving through now were in no measurable way changed from those before Nimcha had brought the disturbance. All of Swarm had felt it, both on a physiological and mechanical level, but the tremor had been too short-lived to cause lasting damage. A few engines would need to be overhauled, and a few airmen would require additional medication to deal with the after-effects, but in all other respects Swarm was left unscathed.

They had been lucky: incredibly so. And for better or worse, Ricasso had finally got his demonstration of Nimcha’s powers.

‘Doing this still makes me uneasy,’ Curtana said. ‘It’s not just me, either. Of course, none of the other officers are letting anything show.’

‘Perhaps when we’ve crossed the former boundary, and things still haven’t changed, they’ll begin to adjust to it,’ Quillon said.

‘Let me show you something. It won’t take long and I could use some fresh air anyway.’

Outside on
Painted Lady’
s balcony Quillon breathed in the cool and humid morning air, letting it flood his lungs. Coils of vapour loitered over the dark, densely vegetated landscape below. It was one of the thickest tracts of woodland they had crossed since being rescued near Spearpoint, proof not only that the city’s reach was limited, but that the effects of the cooling world were not yet uniform.

The drone of the engines was steady and reassuring, like a mother’s heartbeat. They were the only engines to be heard. After so long in Swarm, it was strange to have empty sky in all directions.

‘Notice anything different?’ Curtana asked.

Quillon surveyed the landscape, the monotonous canopy reaching away in all directions, uninterrupted by anything except the approaching margin of the Bane.

‘I’m no botanist,’ he said. ‘If there is some change in the vegetation, you’ll have to point it out to me.’

Curtana pulled a speaking tube from the gondola’s wall. ‘Engines. Immediate dead stop for two minutes. Resume normal cruise speed thereafter.’

Painted Lady’
s motors sputtered to a halt. Robbed of power, the airship began to slow down abruptly as wind resistance overcame her momentum. Quillon reached to steady himself as the gondola seemed to tip forwards. With the engines shut off, the only sound was a faint creaking from the rigging lines supporting the propulsion struts.

‘Listen,’ Curtana said, in little more than a whisper. ‘All the birds and animals down there, you’d think they’d be at their loudest now. It’s morning, after all.’

‘I’m not hearing much.’

‘That’s because there’s nothing to hear.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Only trees and plants.’ Curtana was leaning over the railing with a cavalier disregard for her own safety. ‘We call it the Deadening. It’s marked on most of the maps, a pink margin around the red line of the Bane. This is where nature starts giving up. If we put you down in that forest right now, you’d find a mausoleum, a green crypt. You’d be the only thing down there with a nervous system. Animals - birds, insects, mammals - they just can’t survive. Their cells don’t work properly any more - it’s like the machinery inside them becomes too complicated to function, falls apart like a broken toy. Metabolic pathways suddenly become metabolic blocks. Plants survive, more or less - they’re slower and hardier, and not as complicated inside. But as you go deeper and deeper into the Deadening, even the toughest of them find it hard going. Eventually plant life stops altogether. You’ve got some basic life forms on the fringe of the Bane, clinging on to existence - single-celled organisms and simple bacterial colonies. Then there’s nothing. Absolute sterility. This is a lush paradise compared to what’s ahead.’

‘We’re flying over it now, and we’re still alive,’ Quillon said. ‘But we’re just animals as well. There’s no reason why birds, insects and mammals couldn’t follow us in.’

‘They will, given time. In a few years, they’ll have colonised this entire jungle, so long as the Bane doesn’t snap back, and the world doesn’t freeze over. But that just means there’s a new Deadening somewhere else. When the shift happened, it was death for millions of creatures. They wouldn’t have had time to escape, even if they had the instincts to start moving.’ Curtana paused. ‘The Deadening’s an omen. It’s the last warning, when all your instruments have lied and you’ve somehow remained immune to the onset of zone sickness. It’s telling you to turn back now, while you still can.’

One by one the engines rattled back into life and
Painted Lady
began to move again. With her motors roaring, it should have been impossible to tell that the forest was dead. But now that Quillon knew what was below, now that he was aware of the profound absence of higher life beneath that dark canopy, he swore there was a sinister quietness lapping at the edge of his thoughts, a ravenous absence seeking to swallow everything into its own all-consuming silence.

He returned indoors and busied himself with matters medical.

 

The Deadening was a narrow margin, never wider than fifteen leagues. By the middle of the morning they had passed all the way across it, into what - according to the maps - was the beginning of the Bane proper. Quillon had watched as the foliage thinned out from dense dark canopy to an impoverished, bleached scrub, and soon only pockets of tenacious green persisted amidst a landscape of dead, biologically inert soil and bare, bone-coloured rocks. The green pockets were the hardiest mosses and lichens, their simple, robust biologies able to keep them alive when more complicated organisms failed. But even they could only push so far into the zone of lifelessness, and eventually even these basic organisms could not sustain themselves. They grew warped and atavistic, and then not at all. The landscape changed to rock and dust, totally bereft of living things. It was not a desert, for in the many lakes and pools there was an abundance of fresh water, gleaming back at them under the blue sky with mirrored purity. But there was nothing that could make use of that water, so even the shorelines were devoid of life. Had normal conditions prevailed, the crew would already have been dying in the most wretched way imaginable.

No one had yet come to him with any complaints, and Quillon was as certain as he could be that he was free from symptoms of zone sickness. His mind was clear, his recall and concentration excellent, his coordination acute. And yet there
was
something: the faintest twinge of nausea, a lingering tightness at the base of his throat. Unless it had something to do with the motion of the airship it could only be psychosomatic.

Quillon allowed himself to believe that - provided external conditions remained stable - there was no reason for it to worsen. On this matter, at least, there were grounds for cautious optimism. The clocks and gauges in
Painted Lady’
s chart room were obstinate in their conviction that the airship was still passing through perfectly normal airspace. No hint of a change-vector had yet been detected.

Quillon was as fond of the chart room as he was of Gambeson’s library back on
Purple Emperor
. The windowless, vibration-proofed, brown-veneered room, with its caged birds, shelves of ticking instruments, whirring springs and weights, scratching pen-traces and slowly winding paper rolls was a place of lulling, hypnotic ease. As often as not one of the other crew members was present, doting on the birds, taking down readings or making some tiny adjustment to one of the glittering mechanisms, but Quillon’s intrusions were tolerated, and he was grateful for the company himself. He passed many hours in technical conversation with the crew, fascinated by the subtle principles embodied in their instruments.

It was not difficult to build a device that would detect the transition to a lower-state zone, the kind that normally infested the Bane. Finely meshed gears would bind up as microscopic tolerances became unworkable. Clocks would slow and then stop. So, too, would the pistons and other precise moving parts in
Painted Lady‘
s internal-combustion engines, rendering the motors inoperable. Such failures warned of biological changes that could be expected as the zone transition intensified. It was considerably more difficult to build instruments that could register transitions in the other direction.
Painted Lady’
s chugging engines would keep working even if she drifted into a zone where they were technologically obsolete. But for the ship’s passengers, the effects could be just as unpleasant as if the change was in the other direction. Humans were adaptive organisms, and from the earliest stages of foetal growth their nervous systems had developed under the influence of the prevailing zone. By the time they reached adulthood, their minds had become highly attuned to its characteristics. Hereditary factors played a role as well, since many individuals were descended from chains of ancestors who had only ever lived in the same conditions. Over time, each habitable zone had selected for those best able to function and reproduce within it.

The chart room contained a few instruments capable of registering higher-grade transitions, but they were staggeringly complicated and correspondingly difficult to maintain and operate. As such, they were accorded both respect and a certain degree of disdain, like attention-seeking divas in an opera company. Experienced crew preferred to put their faith in the caged zebra finches, which had been raised in Swarm and would stop singing - and eventually drop off their perches - long before human beings sensed a zone transition. The chirruping of the birds seemed to accord perfectly with the tick and whirr of the instruments.

And all was well. The birds were active, the readouts all perfectly normal. The accuracy of the clocks was constantly being cross-checked against readings taken aboard the other airships, flashed over by heliograph. So far there had been no hint of change across the entire formation, from
Painted Lady
to Swarm to the trailing airship. Had the Bane retreated by only a hundred leagues, there would have been clear evidence of that by now. It must have shifted at least one hundred and fifty leagues and perhaps further - a reshaping of the entire hemispheric geography.

By the early part of the afternoon, they had pushed far enough into the Bane that even the Deadening had retreated to a dismal grey-green strip on the horizon. The monotonous landscape of rock and water rolled underneath like a loop of film being played over and over again, or so it seemed to Quillon after spending only a few hours on the observation deck. A forest could be monotonous as well, but it was the monotony of abundance rather than absence. This was a world stripped to the bones, the skull poking through the face.