The Meat Tree (10 page)

As Aranrhod, I'm lying there, having been sick, with a terrible hangover. I hear a huge racket outside: alarms being sounded and an armed attack on the fort. I get up and, in the confusion, can't work out who's fighting us or why. But the only thing I think to do is to arm every man in the place. The servants have their own armoury and have already taken out pickaxes and lances. I remember the poets! They don't bear arms, so I must supply them.

She

Next thing we hear is an urgent knocking at our
door. I open and there's a wild-eyed Aranrhod,
gabbling about an enemy outside.

He

And just at that point, I decide to do my guerilla move. I'm playing Aranrhod but I make a freeze-frame and slip into the character of the boy to see what we're dealing with.

The clamour stops suddenly as if switched off at source. I enter the room of his mind. It's a blank, a whitewashed cube. Outside I hear birdsong. Four walls, a floor, no furniture. It's hardly human.

It looks familiar.

She

I'm holding the whole situation in my mind. The soldiers outside, the attack on the fort, our disguises as poets.

He

Quick breath, then out into the racket and I'm
Aranrhod again. The old man says that he's willing to fight. We look out of the window and my heart sinks. There are so many ships that you can hardly see the water in the bay. I tell my women to bring two sets of arms. I'll take care of the young one.

So I make him stand still while I strap on greaves
over his shinbones, then the sabaton, the gorget,
the tasset, couter, pauldron, cuirass then habergeon. Then I give him his sword and, finally, hand him a
shield. I step back to admire him and see myself
reflected in the polished metal.

Behind me, I see the old man put down his weapons. He starts to laugh. I berate him and make as if to help dress him too. He asks me if the boy's properly armed. I say he is, that I did it myself.

Then I recognise them both: Gwydion and Lleu.

And it suddenly hits me. I've been tricked again. I rush to the window and the ships are gone.

She

I can't help liking it when Gwydion gets his way.
Aranrhod was furious this time, beside herself at
having been tricked twice.

He

I look at the boy and he appears… more substantial. What I'm watching is the birth of the child into the adult world.

She

Still, it was a terrible curse, her third. First she called Gwydion an evil man and then said, ‘I will swear a destiny on the boy that he will never have a wife from the race that is on this earth at present.'

He

Lonely forever.

She

Gwydion will think of something straightforward
to get round her words. I hope I play him when we get to that. It's fun seeing the curses unravel as Gwydion walks the gaps between words and what they might mean.

He

That room. It's me. A boy who's been playing at being a man and has no life of his own to fall back on, other than what he gets by subterfuge. It's my room in the dome down on Mars.

*

Synapse Log 7 Feb 2210, 21:30

Inspector of
Wrecks

This is ridiculous. I refuse to be spooked.

Nona's tired, gone to her bunk early and is fast asleep. Before we quit the game, we started on the next scene. That was a surprise. Instead of beginning to plot his trick, Gwydion went with Lleu to see King Math. I took Math's part and I'd completely forgotten that he was a magician. Or I never knew. Anyway, why would Gwydion go to him? Aren't his own powers strong enough to rise to the challenge of Aranrhod's latest curse?

One thing occurred to me. I've been thinking all along that Gwydion was the chosen persona of the Mastermind, but now I think that it might be Math behind the whole thing. We'll have to watch what he does very carefully on our next visit. This might change everything.

Nona was flagging, so I decided to call it a day.
We left Gwydion and Math deep in conversation, as if they were plotting something. I sent Nona to bed.

Me, I can't settle. My mind is reeling with the reappearance of Math, what it means for the story.
And there's been so much new information to
absorb, that I need to go through it.

Nona sighs. She's dreaming.

So what do we know so far about this ship?

It appears to be a standard Earth vessel of the spaceship age. But its VR capability is much more sophisticated than you'd expect for that period.

I feel watched, appraised by an entity far more highly evolved than the game we're playing.

The paper log mentions a crew of three, two men
and a woman. And yet the cassette tape I found
suggests that there were many more people on board. How do I know that the tape wasn't recorded on Earth before the crew left? I don't.

What if it was a record of a fleeting moment on board? What are the possible explanations?
Stowaways. A log that lied. That extra people joined them from another vessel. And Nona's suggestion: that the journey they took was much further than
from Earth. That's the most radical idea of all, a
new frame that changes everything.

The VR may well be a more accurate record of the voyage than the log, even though it's through the eyes of the Mastermind. It's like trying to reconstruct how a person danced from a few heel prints left by shoes on a floor.

And why this feeling of being interrogated by the story itself? That could be myth. It's designed to describe the desires of the self as an archetype, so it's hardly surprising that certain parts of the tale, or certain characters should interest us more than others, they match our preoccupations. I've been obsessed with Gwydion, why is that?

If I'm honest, it's something to do with work. It's on my mind because I'm about to retire. I love the way he conjures a future for himself and the people he loves. That seems to be key – he's always using his magic to help someone else. His brother. His son.

What kind of magician works his magic on behalf of himself? A lonely man. A man like me.

Why did I give everything up for work? Because
I believe it's good in itself. That every action of
trying to see what happened is a blow struck for the
real. That it's possible to know the exact sequence
of events that led to disaster. That it's a service to
others to be able to say: The mistake was in the
calibration of the log, which error led the crew to ignore the blind spot on their port side which led to collision. That the chaos of which I'm so afraid is abated, for a moment, at least.

I love the sounds of the ship at night. The reactor's
hum and crackling of the hull as debris hits us.
The click, click, click of equipment as it digests its
interior measurements, adjusting to light, temperature and yaw. The fans on the hydroponics, as the plants breathe and sigh to make us our oxygen.

I know we're in orbit, but it doesn't take much to imagine that I'm on the night watch of a very long voyage. I feel protective of Nona as she sleeps. She's the heart of the vessel for me. Someone who seems
to need work just as much as I do. I haven't asked why, nor has she told me. We have a pact of discretion
but for the first time, I have a student whose appetite for what happened is just as strong as mine. If I'd been assigned her earlier we might have…

What was it like for those people on a long-
distance flight of years? In a closed-loop system? So
that nothing new could come in or go out of
their vessel? So that they had to survive only on the resources they had? How would you keep the sense of a day just by counting the hours? Would you be able to sleep without the cues of light and sunset? Wouldn't your fellow crew members' habits become distinctly annoying? How one slurps his food? How the other farts? As you got further and further away from home, would the same things continue to be important to you? The chain of command? The original mission? Might you not start feeling ill if you imagined that the ship was toxic in some way? That pollutants had entered the system and were starting to kill you slowly, that the very air you breathed was compromised?

And what about mutiny? Disputes on a spaceship can easily become a matter of life and death.

Campion, you're daydreaming. Get a grip.

11

Flower

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 09:00

Inspector of
Wrecks

Nona seems drowsy today. The result of oversleep, perhaps. I can hardly get a word out of her before we prepare to go into VR. Not like her to be this
subdued. Things had started to warm up nicely
between us. Still, she's young. Who knows what's going through her mind.

She might have been sulking because I told her I wanted to take the Math part again, to continue to look for the Mastermind interface in his actions.

She's sullen when she agrees to take the Gwydion part. She normally likes him. I offered her Lleu but I caught an involuntary look of disgust come over her face. I could have made something of it, no doubt. An Inspector needs to do whatever's required
to come up with an answer, there's no room for
personal preference in this job. It's just unprofessional. When I think of some of the terrible places
I've been. Space vessels tacky with alien flesh after fires or explosions. Holds full of shit where animal cargoes had been abandoned to die… Faeces so
thick you could walk on it, like a carpet. No, you can't be fussy in this job. And this wreck is clean
compared to many others, even if it's proving to
be intractable.

I decided: what's the point of a confrontation about roles if not strictly necessary? Math for me, Gwydion for Nona.

Apprentice

Concentrate. Gwydion. At least I'm not Lleu. That whited sepulchre. What does that mean? When I think of him, I think of a room…

He

I must admit, I'm glad not to play Lleu myself. It's too painful to think of that empty space, even though he has a name and arms. I, Campion, have a name and the tools of my trade.

Now, Lleu needs a wife. I wonder if Math and Gwydion could find a partner for me. That would be powerful magic indeed.

*

Joint Thought Channel 8 Feb 2210, 09:02

Inspector of
Wrecks

Let's pick up where we left off yesterday. You ready?

Apprentice

I suppose.

Inspector of
Wrecks

Right, here are Math and Gwydion. I think we missed this part of the conversation yesterday.

Apprentice

If you say so.

Inspector of
Wrecks

It's obvious that some of the action takes place without us.

Come on, girl! Be a little more alert, will you?

Apprentice

I'm complaining.

Inspector of
Wrecks

Is that Gwydion or you?

Apprentice

Gwydion. I'm furious at Aranrhod. What kind of woman robs her own son of his rights?

I will be his mother and father too.

Inspector of
Wrecks

Math's sympathetic. He's used to taking in waifs and
strays and wants everyone who is part of the family to have a place.

Apprentice

Does he mention the sons from the forest?

Inspector of
Wrecks

No.

Apprentice

I know I'm Gwydion here, but I can't help but see things from Aranrhod's point of view. If what we think was right and Lleu is Gwydion's child, then why should she stand by the offspring of incest?

Inspector of
Wrecks

What are you saying? Can you blame the boy for how he was made? It's not his fault.

Apprentice

I suppose you're right. But I don't like him.

Inspector of
Wrecks

Nona! Wake up! You're playing Gwydion. His father.
You love the boy and will do anything to care for him. Keep in your character or this is a waste of time.

Apprentice

All right! All right!

I'm at a loss what to do, and need Math's help on this. Tricks with ships have been fine for securing a name and arms, but what's required here is a different order of magic. Math's clearly a more powerful magician than Gwydion, he was able to punish him.

Inspector of
Wrecks