Analog SFF, December 2005 Read online

  “It's a small independent station,” he told the admiral. “Paranoid about pirates and military raids—they won't take kindly to seeing your ships out here, sir."

  “Hmm. But they could have some of the supplies we need to fix the Tormentor's masts, eh?” Fanning squinted at the distant glow. “They've probably got divers in the water now, watching us dig her out. Can't hide that we're military...” He thought for a second, then nodded. “You, the boy, Carrier, and two carpenters. Go in, negotiate a purchase. Foreman'll give you a manifest. Tell them we've no interest in them beyond buying what we need."

  “But why us?"

  “You because you know the place. The boy because he looks harmless. Carrier because he also looks harmless, and because you and he are obviously civilians.” He looked down his nose at Hayden's shabby shirt and trousers.

  “Sir!” It was the armorer, Mahallan, coming up from below. “This settlement—they might have some of the things I need."

  “Go on with you, then.” Venera Fanning had also appeared. As she sailed in from the left, the admiral glared at her and said, “Not a chance."

  “He's my pilot.” She indicated Hayden. “He takes orders from me."

  “I'm the only one who gives orders on this ship.” Fanning turned away from her. Venera's eyes narrowed, but she didn't protest any further.

  “There's no sign,” muttered Slew, the head carpenter. Hayden shot him an incredulous look. There certainly was no garish, brightly-colored sign over the entrance to Warea; “You mean one that says ‘Loot Me?'” he asked.

  “How does it work?” Mahallan climbed down from one sidecar of the bike as Hayden reached out to clip a line to the nearest strut of the entrance framework. They floated just outside the dark shaft that led into Warea; nobody had come out to greet them. Mahallan's question was unnecessary, though, Hayden thought. The scaffolding of the entrance shaft stuck ten feet out of the water, far enough to make it plain how it was constructed.

  “Look, it's simple,” he said, slapping the translucent wall of the shaft; it made a faint drumming sound. The builders of Warea had taken a simple wooden skeleton, the sort the Rush docking tubes were made of, and wrapped it in wax paper. Then they'd stuck the assembly into the side of the sea, like a needle into the skin of a giant. Up this close, he could see faint striations of tangleweed matted under the surface of the water. Warea probably cultivated the stuff—which was an animal, not a plant—to provide structural integrity to the vast ball of water in which they lived. Without it, a stiff breeze could tear the sea apart.

  The shaft made an impenetrably dark hole in the water, unlit, possibly leading nowhere—except that a tickle of air teased Hayden's brow, and his bike was slowly being sucked inwards.

  “We're wasting time.” Carrier kicked forward, his foot-fins driving him quickly into the dark. Hayden flipped off the bike and gestured for Martor to follow. Mahallan was already inside the tunnel, flanked by the carpenters.

  Inside there was little to tell they were entering a world of water. The tunnel was a lattice of beams, like those of any freefall scaffold. The surface stretched between them could have been stone in the dimness of lamplight. Only the clammy chill suggested the nearby presence of the sea.

  “I would have thought the walls would bulge inward or something,” said Mahallan. “But of course they don't. No gravity, no pressure."

  “I've heard that word before,” said Martor in an overly-casual way. “Gravity. Spin makes it, right?"

  Mahallan had been doing a hand-over-hand walk along the struts. Now she stopped to look at Martor, and in the dim light he saw her eyes had gone wide. “Sometimes I forget,” she murmured, “that the strangest of things here are the ones I talk to."

  “Now what's that supposed to mean?” But she had turned away already. Ahead, Carrier shouted for them to be quiet.

  He was silhouetted by flickering lamplight from a number of fan-driven lanterns. Beyond him the tunnel opened up into a broad space—a cubic chamber walled in wax paper and about forty feet on a side. This was a hangar, Hayden realized, for it was filled with bikes and other flying devices. The air here was cold and damp, but the six men who were pointing their rifles at the newcomers didn't seem to feel it. They were uniformly dressed in dark leathers, and their narrow pale faces had the sameness of kin. It seemed like a small welcoming committee, but Hayden was sure that the faint motion of the paper walls next to him indicated more men hiding in the water outside.

  “State your business,” said their leader, who was clearly the oldest. The father of the others, perhaps?

  “Trade,” said Carrier. “Carpentry supplies. We can pay you whatever you think is appropriate."

  “We're not trading,” said the older man. “Be on your way."

  There was a momentary silence; Carrier hung perfectly still. “What now?” Mahallan whispered to Hayden. “Does he threaten them?"

  Hayden shook his head. “It's hardly worth our while to fight a pitched battle for some nails and wood, and they know it. I don't know what he'll—” He stopped, because Carrier was speaking again.

  “As you can plainly see,” he said, “our charting expedition is well-enough supplied that we don't need your help. But it'll shorten our stay if you do help us."

  “Charting?” The older man looked alarm. “Charting what?"

  “Oh, just the various objects in this part of Winter,” said Carrier with a negligent wave of his hand. “Forests, rocks, lakes—anything that might drift into our space someday. Or that might be useful or militarily significant."

  “We're of no use to nobody,” said the leader. He was visibly tense now. “We want to be left alone."

  “Well, then,” purred Carrier, “I'm sure our captain could be persuaded to leave one or two objects off of the charts. If, that is, we received something in return."

  “Wait here.” The man turned and left through a prosaic-looking door that opened out of the hangar's far wall. A few minutes later he returned, looking unhappy. “Come ahead,” he said. “You can trade."

  So it was that they entered Warea and learned how the cast-out and the fugitive lived in the empty spaces between the nations. The walls of the short corridor between the hangar and the town complex glowed from distant lamplight; long shadows cast on the paper walls suggested some sort of layered barrier between the cold of the sea and the town. In fact as they passed through the next door, the temperature rose and the dampness receded. The silhouetted bodies of the people in front of Hayden split off one by one, opening more and more of the space to his view until he was there himself, gaping about at the cave that was Warea.

  Mostly it was just a cube like the hangar, but several hundred feet across. Floating in this space in a disorganized jumble were various multi-sided houses, each one tethered to its neighbors or the space's outer struts. Numerous openings led off from the main cube, some terminating almost immediately in walls of gelid water, others twisting away, their lamp lit outlines faintly visible through the paper walls of the cave. The place reeked of burning kerosene and rot, but it was reasonably warm, and the big industrial lanterns with their grumbling fans at least prevented an aura of total gloom from overtaking the citizens.

  Some of these were staring in open hostility as Carrier led his group into their crowded airspace. The town elders who had decreed that they could enter had discretely retreated, or chose to remain anonymous within the mass of people. Carrier stopped to ask directions and while he did, Hayden examined the people. They had a familiar look: sallow, overstretched, and glum. For the most part they were exiles who remembered growing up within the light of a sun. Unhappy they might be, but few of them showed the signs of weight-deprivation.

  In a few minutes he saw why. The far wall of the cube was moving—swinging up and to the left with a constant rumble that quivered the walls. The cube was only part of Warea. An entire town was embedded in the sea, and on part of its rotation the wheel passed through the cube like a giant saw cutting into a block of
wood. Hayden watched houses, shops and markets pop out of the cube's wall and swing up to vanish through the ceiling in steady and relentless motion.

  “It's not a small place,” muttered Carrier. “There's two markets. Dry goods on the wheel, armorer. Building materials here."

  “We'll split up, then,” said Mahallan helpfully.

  “Watch yourselves,” said Carrier with a disapproving frown. “Meet back here in an hour."

  Hayden, Martor, and the armorer watched the others vanish into a cloud of people in the building market. The place was crowded with huge baskets filled with white bricks and beams. “Looks like they'll find what they need right off,” said Mahallan worriedly. “Let's hurry—we wouldn't want to keep them waiting."

  Hayden shrugged and turned to coast in the direction of the wheel's axis. “I didn't see any wood back there,” he commented.

  “But what was all that white stuff?"

  “Same as these houses are built with?” He did a course correction by slapping one on the way by. Its white brick surface undulated slightly. “Paper. They fold origami bricks and beams in triangular sections and then fill them with water. You get beams and bricks that are stiff and incompressible."

  “Really?” She seemed inclined to stop and admire the buildings. Hayden pressed on; now that he'd escaped Carrier's roving eye, he could run an errand of his own.

  Mahallan and Martor caught up to him as he was entering the big barrel-shaped axis of the wheel. A sullen local flapped by on ragged foot-wings, and the armorer watched him go. “Who are these people?” she asked. “They don't seem happy to see us."

  “Refugees, most of them,” he said. “A lot of them will be from Aerie, which was conquered by Slipstream about ten years ago. And some are pirates."

  “This is a pirate town?” Mahallan laughed in apparent delight as they hand-walked down the top few yards of the yin-yang staircase that led to the rim of the wheel.

  Where the curve of the staircase began to flatten out, the rungs of the staircase were replaced with steps, at first impossibly tall ones. As Hayden flipped over and began using his feet, he said, “You asked who these people are. Can I ask who you are? You don't seem to know the first thing about how the world operates, and yet you're our armorer. That's more than a little..."

  “Odd?” Mahallan shrugged. “It's a fair question. But I'm surprised nobody told you. I'm not from Virga."

  “Told you,” mouthed Martor behind her back.

  “Then where... ?"

  The nearly-vertical staircase rapidly leveled out as they descended past the town's rooftops. Weight and the familiar, homey sensation of vertigo increased with each step. As she entered gravity, Mahallan seemed to shrink. Her normally cheerful face was clouded by unhappiness.

  “Where is a difficult thing to answer,” she said. “My world isn't like yours—Oh, I expect you'd think I mean that I come from a planet, with land and mountains and so on.” Hayden had never heard either of these words before, but he kept his expression neutral as Mahallan went on. “But the rules ... of reality ... you might say ... are different in my world. Identity and location are very fluid things. Too fluid. Too arbitrary; I prefer it here."

  He shook his head. “I don't understand."

  “Good,” she said with a sad smile. “That means we can still be friends."

  They had reached the street. Down had made itself forcefully known, and if it wasn't quite perpendicular to the decking but heavily skewed in the direction of the town's rotation, it was still comfortable to Hayden. “That looks like the market up there,” he said, pointing.

  “Good.” Her smile was back. “Let's look for some chemicals I need. They'll likely be lurking in ordinary household materials—"

  “Listen, I'll catch up to you,” said Hayden. “I need to, uh, use the privy."

  “Oh, well, whatever. We'll just be up here.” She and Martor walked away, heads leaning together in intense dialog. Hayden watched them go for a minute, then paced in the opposite direction.

  The town didn't have a post office as such; the scarred, tattooed, and beetle-browed bartender doubled as the postmaster at the mendicant's lodge. Hayden stood at a stained counter under dim lamplight while he served an old, yammering, and odiferous man with patience and surprising gentleness. When he finally turned his attention to Hayden, he squinted and scowled in open hostility. “Who the hell are you?"

  “I'd like to send a letter,” said Hayden. “By irregular mail."

  The man's black eyebrows rose. “Where would this hypothetical piece of irregular mail be going?"

  Hayden had thought about what to say on the way into Warea. The sight of a particular tattoo on the bartender's forearm had confirmed his hope about what might be possible here. “It's going to an agency of the government of Aerie,” he said calmly. “In Rush."

  The bartender's eyes widened. “You're from that ship,” he said finally.

  “Yes. But I'm not of that ship. Listen, I do have money—"

  The man's face had taken on a hungry expression. “Save it. Who's this message going to?"

  “First of all, I need to know whether you've got someone who can reliably deliver it to an ... unusual address ... and speak to no one about the details afterwards."

  The bartender leaned his elbows on the creaking wood and got down to business. “What we do, see, is put an envelope in an envelope. First one goes to our man in Rush via the next cutter that trades into the border of Aerie. Your envelope is in his envelope. He only opens it on his way to do your drop. We do it all the time. I can vouch for the reliability of the courier—but there's a hazard pay premium if it's going to be delivered somewhere like, say, inside a jail or barracks."

  Hayden shook his head. “Nowhere that special.” The man handed him paper and a pen and he began scratching out a note.

  “Any way you can satisfy a fellow's curiosity?” asked the bartender as he tried to read Hayden's writing upside-down and in poor light.

  “It would probably be worth my life if word went any further than you,” said Hayden. “So, no.” He grinned up at the man. “But it's for Aerie."

  He counted out some coins and slid them across the bar, then folded and sealed the envelope. “Say,” he said casually, “do you ever get trade here from the freebooter Wilson's Revenge?"

  The bartender pursed his lips, then shook his head. “Never heard of it. Friends of yours?"

  “Not exactly. Thanks.” He stuck out his hand and the bartender shook it. “For Aerie."

  “For Aerie."

  Hayden walked back out to the street, feeling relieved, and inches taller.

  7

  The Occupants

  Strut Fourteen,

  Tromp L'oeil Elevated Platform

  Quartet 1, Cylinder 2

  Rush, Slipstream

  6th Recession, Year 1580 A.V.

  Seven ships of the Slipstream Expeditionary Force split off from the main party near the diametric border of Aerie on 1st of Recession. The ships are the Severance, the Tormentor, the Unseen Hand, Rush's Arrow, the Clarity, the Arrest, and the Rook. ADMIRAL FANNING IS COMMANDING THE ROOK.

  These ships continued on a diametric course outward from Aerie for four days before stopping at the Winter town of Warea. Their destination after this is UNKNOWN, but they are all equipped for Winter navigation and well supplied. The expedition appears urgent. Also aboard are Lady Fanning and an armorer from outside Virga named Aubri Mahallan.

  Regardless of the ultimate purpose of this force, its absence from the main body of the fleet may make for a strategic advantage.

  Yours,

  A reluctant recruit.

  * * * *

  By Hayden's reckoning, the ships were making barely fifteen miles per hour—nosing cautiously through the dark clouds, occasionally stalling while the commanders tried to figure out their current position by peering with narrowed eyes at the tracks their gyroscopes had made through tanks of glycerine. Twice great oceans of clear air opened up in fro
nt of them. The admiral took the opportunity and ordered full speed ahead. Hayden tracked down Martor on these occasions and took him for rides aboard his bike, opening it up to full speed and once tearing the poor boy loose entirely. Hayden circled back to find him arrowing on through the dark, sleeves rippling in the wind and utterly calm in his certainty that Hayden would return for him.

  In the quietest hours of the night watch, he and Martor would meet Mahallan in her little box-shaped workshop. She had them building things—though what those things were, she wouldn't explain. “It's to do with electricity,” was all she'd said. The devices (significantly, there were seven of them) were boxes full of metal wires that poked into and through various other, smaller boxes and tubes. Mahallan spent most of her time working on these little containers, filling them with carefully mixed pastes and powders that stank of oils and metal. Every now and then she would get Martor or Hayden to pedal a stationary bike that was attached to a big metal can connected by more wires to one of the boxes; and then she would poke about inside the new device using some metal prods. It was by turns fascinating and boring to watch. So, they whiled away the time by talking.

  Both Hayden and Martor wanted to know about the strange outside world where Mahallan was from. At first she wouldn't talk about it. On the third night, as they hovered around one of her strange boxes watching an expanding sphere of smoke extrude out of its side, she sighed and said, “This is the most wonderful thing, for me."

  “What's that, lady?” Martor had turned to fetch a leather curtain. She waited as he deftly scooped the smoke into it and glided over to the porthole to squirt it outside. When he returned, she pried open the lid of the box and said, “It's wonderful to me that we can sit here and build things whose behaviors we design ourselves. Like this ship.” She patted the wall. “Things like this are made using knowledge.” She savored the word.

  “Don't you have knowledge where you come from?” Hayden asked the question facetiously, but to his surprise, she shook her head.

  “No, we don't. Not about the physical world, anyway. The systems of Artificial Nature make it unnecessary for us to know anything.” She saw his look of puzzlement and grimaced. “I know, it's hard to explain. That's why I haven't talked about where I come from. Listen, in the worlds beyond Virga, humans no longer have to make things for themselves. Artificial Nature makes them for us. And no two devices or machines are alike; each one evolves in its own pre-physical virtual world. Even two tools intended to do the same job, while they may look identical, might work in totally different ways. And because each device is evolved, not ... designed, is the word you use here ... no one can say how a given one works. You could spend years studying how one engine operates, but that wouldn't tell you how other engines necessarily function. So there's no incentive to try. It's been this way on most worlds for thousands of years.