A Quantum Mythology (21 page)

‘So what have we got here?’ she muttered to herself. ‘There you go.’ She gave Vic open access to the yacht’s systems, presumably just to annoy Scab. Moments later, a worm ate that access and he found himself limited again. ‘Petty. So we’ve got a high-performance yacht with frankly illegal stealth systems, and it’s armed to the teeth. Hmm. A little above you guys’ pay grade. A spayed AI – typical control freak Scab. Medical systems. Want to tell me who she is now?’ Vic still didn’t answer. She concentrated for a moment longer, then she was looking at Vic. ‘She’s pre-Loss, and she’s carrying pure-strain S-tech.’ Vic still didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. ‘I already don’t like her. I don’t like the venomous looks she gives me, as if she thinks she matters. I don’t like the sobbing, or the whining. Felines have sensitive hearing, you know? I don’t like her smell, and frankly her clothes are fucking stupid. What sex is she, anyway? Girly girl?’

‘Base human female. There were only two, possibly three genders originally.’

‘If I kill her, do my problems go away?’

‘In that Scab will kill you, permanently, then I suppose so,’ Vic told her. Elodie nodded as she considered this. ‘She’s under my protection.’

Elodie snorted with laughter. ‘Oh, Vic,’ she said, grinning. ‘Is it love?’ Then her face hardened. ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid. If she’s here, she’s a commodity.’

‘You think you’re not?’ Vic asked.

Elodie strode across the room to him and reached up to hold his face in her hand. Vic felt claws hard enough to do some damage tap against his armoured chitin.

‘I may have to dance for a while but that’s all. You can’t make him jealous. The only thing he cares about is if something inconveniences him, and then he’ll just destroy it.’

Vic removed Elodie’s hand from his face. ‘Stay away from her.’

‘No,’ Elodie told him. ‘You keep her out of my way.’

Vic turned to go. He was wondering how he, someone who’d helped destroy cities on CR worlds as part of a Thunder Squad, who was half of the most feared bounty killer duo in Known Space, had somehow managed to end up even further down the pecking order on a ship with only four people on it.

‘I like you, Vic. It’s probably the contrast,’ Elodie said as he left, the room sealing behind him.

Vic found her curled up in one of the corridors on the plush, wine-red carpeted floor. Half the wall was similarly carpeted, and above that the smart matter had taken the form of dark wood panels. It was odd, the ’sect thought as he looked at the sobbing pre-Loss nat human. She was visibly miserable but had decided to be out in the corridor rather than inside her chamber, which at least gave the illusion of providing solitude even though she was monitored at all times.

Vic watched her cry for a while. Her sobs were wracking her body in a way that looked positively painful, and as a humanophile, he was slightly envious of them. He wandered off again, the carpet deadening the sound of his heavy armoured frame. He ’faced some instructions to the yacht’s assembler – it had kept his preferences from previous attempts. This time, instead of having the assembler attempt to re-create a real flower, he had the
Basilisk II
construct one from surgical steel.

He returned a few minutes later with the tray of assorted drugs. Talia was still curled up on the carpet, sobbing.

‘I’m not sure what the human protocol for this is,’ Vic said. Few of the human genders were this emotional and vulnerable these days, not even in immersions, although some of the historical ones suggested an early human predisposition towards hysteria. ‘I have chocolate, red wine and morphine,’ he said cheerfully.

She looked up at him with a tear-stained face, her make-up running. Scab didn’t understand the make-up. He was getting better and better at judging human aesthetics, and the make-up just obscured her actual attractiveness.

‘Do you want to get fucked-up?’ he asked hopefully. He was learning that direct sexual enquiries were not always the way forward. They only worked for monsters like Scab, apparently.

‘So it’s just, like, every guy I choose is a bigger wanker than the previous one.’

Vic accessed the pre-Loss lexicon he’d been building to look up ‘wanker’. If his information on human mores was correct, then he was pretty sure that most humans, and indeed most uplifts bar the ’sects, were ‘wankers’ unless they belonged to some of the more extreme ascetic orders within the Church. He hoped it wasn’t a member of the Church she was looking for.

Her chamber within the yacht was odd. It was very dark, for a start, and cluttered with many things she had fabricated in the assembler that looked unnecessary to Vic, but then he remembered that she didn’t have access to all the entertainment. She’d had the smart-matter hull create a circular porthole that reminded him of a spider’s web, and Red Space bathed the room in its deceptively warm glow. Her bed was very soft and extremely large for her small frame, which gave Vic hope. It also held a number of strangely inanimate stuffed toys, which he thought she was too old for, and all of which looked slightly grotesque. He’d been quite surprised to see actual paper books. In many ways she was lucky that the yacht’s entertainment libraries were equipped with old-fashioned audio and visual entertainments. He was less sure about the odd keening noise the room was playing. Talia had assured him it was music, though apparently it had no accompanying soundscape, either emotive, psychological or even visual.

‘It’s like I find the single biggest bastard I can in any given situation and latch on to him.’ This Vic could understand. She was smoking a cigarette made of tetrahydrocannabinol. She had offered him some, but his various filters would have made it pointless even if he inhaled like humans. Instead he had been trying to use his internal drug stores to synthesise a similar effect. He’d only succeeded in making himself lethargic and slightly paranoid – or rather, had caused a slight increase in his healthy baseline paranoia.

‘I think I do that, too,’ Vic told her. She nodded, though Vic suspected this had more to do with social conventions than her actually listening to him. Talia took another swig of red wine from the bottle. ‘Is that why you fucked Scab?’ Vic asked, more to try and coax out of her the next thing he was supposed to feel sympathetic about than anything else. He panicked when her face started to crumple again. He decided at this point he wasn’t going to say anything else until he had cross-referenced it with the human social-interaction library stored in his neunonics.

She started crying again. He tried patting her shoulder. It was one
of the appropriate responses, apparently. She almost managed not to flinch away from his armoured chitinous touch this time.

‘Well, why did you?’ he asked, forgetting to cross-reference. He’d been a little hurt. He did feel sympathy for her. She was thousands of years away from anything she even remotely knew. The last thing she’d had any kind of relationship with was a living alien spaceship they’d murdered, she was going to be sold to the highest bidder, and if she was lucky, it wouldn’t result in vivisection. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m not really very good at this. Normally I just find a human female who wants to experiment, try not to crush her whilst we copulate, use a cocktail of drugs to fake an orgasm and then listen to her tell me it was just a phase she was going through.’

Talia was staring at him. Then she burst out laughing, much to Vic’s relief.

‘Oh my god, this is so weird! I’m in space, talking to a giant insect. This is like … I don’t know … William Burroughs or something.’ She reached out to touch him. Vic’s tactile sensors appeared to enjoy it. ‘Look, seriously, you don’t want to be involved with me—’

‘Do you mean get sexed-up?’

‘I’m a fucking mess, I really am,’ she carried on as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘I mean, the thing with Scab. It’s classic me, and we’re just too different.’ She glanced up at the big insect. Vic thought her eyes looked particularly big, for some reason.

‘But why Scab? I’m not trying to make you weep like an infant again. I’m much nicer than him, but I’ve also killed rather a lot of people as well.’

Talia stared at him for a while. ‘Well, he’s human. We don’t really think of insects as things we have sex with where I come from.’

‘Things?’

‘I’m sorry, people. And look at it from my perspective – I’m alone out here and everything’s strange. He appears to be the most dangerous person ever. I thought if I could get him to like me even a little—’

‘He doesn’t really like people,’ Vic told her. ‘So you weren’t really attracted to him?’ She didn’t answer. Instead she looked away from him and drew her legs up to hug them more tightly.

‘Oh,’ Vic said. She had told him about her boyfriends. The one who beat her, who her mean sister had killed. The one who had stolen her stuff and thrown her out. Another who wouldn’t share his drugs with her. The last one had apparently pimped her out. Then she was kidnapped for her blood. Vic assumed it was for the strange application of pure-strain S-tech she contained within her. Then Scab. It made sense, he thought.

‘It sounds like the best one you were intimate with was the Seeder ship.’

This time the tears in her eyes were different. They weren’t coming from big body-wracking sobs. She turned away and lay down.

‘You know I can’t remember it. I keep reaching for it. It feels so close but I can never get to it. I think I was at peace. I think it was beautiful. Imagine if you felt the universe, and it wasn’t all cold? Imagine if it sang, and you could hear it?’ She didn’t say anything else for a long time. ‘And then you guys murdered her, didn’t you?’ she said angrily.

Oh, fuck
, Vic thought, and struggled to find a correlation in the library of human interaction to murdering the alien spaceship that the girl he fancied was bonded to. ‘Sorry,’ he hazarded.

She rolled back over and sat upright. Analysis subroutines in his neunonics told him she was struggling to control rage. She exhaled smoke at him.

‘Sorry?
Sorry!
It’s all just predator and prey to you guys, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Vic answered honestly.

‘And now pussycat super-bitch is on board, the ultimate psycho has a new fucktoy, so screw you, Talia, you’re still going up on the block for auction.’

Vic reached over to touch her again. This time she flinched from him. This time she couldn’t hide the expression of disgust quickly enough.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he told her. He was starting to think he’d pushed the whole human thing too far. It just wasn’t worth feeling like this.

Then she looked up at him and her expression completely changed again. He was pretty sure it was contrite. She reached out to touch his upper arm.

‘No, I’m sorry. Look, you have to understand this sort of thing doesn’t happen. I have a boring life. I’m from a boring family, in a boring town. To me this is like living a nightmare. Everyone I know is dead – my dad, my friends, my fucking sister, all gone. There’s not even some future Earth to go back to, and nobody seems to really know why. I’m doing the best I can, but can you help me?’

She sounded desperate. She was pleading. He reached down to place the hand of one of his lower arms on her shoulder. This time she didn’t flinch.

‘Yes,’ he told her.

‘Protect me from him. Please. Don’t let him sell me.’

There was pain but with no actual apparent physiological cause. He ran a diagnostic of all his physical and mechanical systems but found nothing amiss.

‘I can’t do that, Talia. I don’t think anyone can.’

She threw herself down on the bed and rolled away from him. ‘Please go,’ she said coldly.

Vic stood up and left the room. He knew Scab could have heard every word if he’d been monitoring them. He almost expected to find him out in the corridor, leaning on the wall, smoking. Holding something hard, sharp and pain-inducing in his hand. Wanting to make it wet. But the corridor was empty.

Mr Hat sat in his temple. He was in his bath chair. The bath chair was on a jagged, irregular spike of glass rising from a blasted, blackened landscape into a starless, dark-purple sky.

Images of violence and atrocity cascaded down the glass of the temple to play across Mr Hat’s scaled features. They were visual representations of the history of his current prey, Woodbine Scab, uploaded as raw immersive audio and visual data. The display was completely unnecessary, of course, but it was a ritual he enjoyed at the start of a hunt. He felt it mimicked ancient lizard hunting rites that had involved the consumption of the image of the prey they intended to hunt.

As he assimilated the information on Scab, intelligent investigation programs began sifting through it using criteria he had selected. Far above him, black-immersion simulations of Scab howled in their cages as interrogation, torture and psychosurgical subroutines went to work on them. Mr Hat suspected only the psychosurgical programs would be of use against the shade of Woodbine Scab.

As the software sifted through the raw data, he relaxed in his bath chair and leaned back. The featureless dataforms of his automatons were naked and writhing all over each other, creating a living carpet on the floor of the temple as they debased themselves before him.

A while later he found something of interest. He dropped out of the illegal deification immersion and back into the black metal and brass of his ship’s Command and Control. He started ’facing instructions to the ship. He spared a moment to glance at the eyeless human blank seated in the tailored couch at the base of his command column. The blank’s S-tech-augmented, biologically entangled twin remained with his employer. Their means of instantaneous communication for the moment when Mr Hat found Scab.

15

Ancient Britain

Everything sickened with life. It was the opposite of what they thought they wanted. It was a corruption of the order of the gods. Things moved that shouldn’t move. Creature merged and fused with creature in a perversion and a mockery of the hated gods of birth and life. It was as if the principles of the male magic of iron and the forge had fused with the principles of the female magic of birth and life. Even as they made it back to the Plain of the Dead, Ysgawyn
knew that his dreams of ruling part of Annwn, the land of the dead, had been shattered. He had prayed and sacrificed for a quiet, chill place, a kingdom of fear where his will was paramount. That dream was over, because even here on the plain, in the borderlands between the two worlds of the living and the dead, the sickness of fecund, unrestrained life still threatened.

They had ridden hard, fleeing the monstrosities emerging from the sea between the three islands. Riding west back to their mound homes. Even the horses blessed by Crom Dhubh, those he had turned into white, Otherworldly steeds with red eyes, were pressed to their limits. Their flanks were soaked with salt sweat, panting for breath when they risked slowing their gallop.

Some of the weaker ones had succumbed to the sickness of life, and their skins had started to slough off as they sank into their mounts, fusing with them. Others developed screaming mouths in their flesh or vestigial limbs. Where possible, the other members of the tribe killed them and left them where they fell. No burial, no ritual, no words said.

‘We need to rest,’ Gwynn said. He was one of the seven remaining warriors from the original warband. Ysgawyn was beyond speech. He simply nodded and slipped down from his horse. His knees came close to buckling, but he managed to stagger back to his feet.

‘What’s that?’ asked Brys, the only remaining greybeard. He had been a close friend of Gwydion’s, before their old warmaster was killed during the battle on the causeway. Ysgawyn closed his eyes. He did not want to look. This was home, that was enough. He could bear no more. The sacrificers could wall them in their tombs, inscribe wards sacred to Arawn on the stone and leave him there, for all he cared.

‘People,’ Gwynn said, and even as tired as the young warrior was, Ysgawyn could hear the surprise in his voice.

His head nodded forward tiredly as he forced himself to look at the plain. The full moon cast long shadows of the figures lurching towards them, emaciated to the point of skeletal.

‘Unless they have something very compelling to say, kill them,’ Ysgawyn managed, slurring only slightly. He heard the satisfying noise of iron sliding from leather. He drew his own sword, though he barely felt strong enough to hold it. He forced himself to walk to where his men stood. He counted about thirty of the emaciated shadows staggering across the plain towards them.

‘Ysgawyn,’ Brys said quietly. The
rhi
turned to look at the greybeard. The big, once powerfully built man looked gaunt and haggard. Worse, he looked afraid. ‘I think one of them just came out of a mound.’

Ysgawyn turned back to the figures lurching towards them, suspicion mounting with fear.

‘If they have trespassed, they must fall. Gwynn – a casting spear.’

Gwynn was the youngest among them and still had the strength to throw one of the light casting spears. It caught the closest figure in the ribs. The sound that echoed across the plain was wrong. It did not sound like a spearhead sinking into flesh. All eyes turned to Ysgawyn. Ysgawyn closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He opened his eyes and slowly, tiredly, took his limed, leather-covered oak shield from his saddle before walking out onto the plain ahead of his watching men. He made his way towards the closest one with a vigour and an air of courage he did not feel.

‘Do you trespass in these borderlands because you wish to travel to Annwn?’ he managed to demand. ‘Know that you will do so as our slaves.’

There was no answer. For the first time, the quiet of the plain bothered Ysgawyn. He moved closer to the figure. There was movement, some kind of slithering around the man’s legs, and pale metal glinted in the moonlight. The skeletal form was wearing arm and neck torcs and its eyes were black holes. Its desiccated skin was limed in the style of the Corpse People. It reached out a bony hand for Ysgawyn. The
rhi
of the Corpse People was appalled to see something move around the arm and push under the cracking skin, fattening up the limb before returning the arm to more normal proportions. Ysgawyn realised there was also movement in the thing’s rib cage. It looked like hanging, bloody, soil-covered fruit, more rudimentary than the internal organs he had seen before in the split-open battle wounded and the dead. As the figure moved, it had to pull at its leg to separate it from the earth, yanking dirt up with each step. The dirt flowed like liquid as it climbed the thing’s leg.

Ysgawyn swallowed hard. Dead skin fell from the thing’s face like snow, but not before he recognised the figure reaching for him. He did not soil himself because he had eaten so little, but he did piss himself as his long-dead father reached out for him. He swung wildly with his sword. He heard dry bones crack. It did not feel like he had hit flesh.

‘Run! Run!’ he screamed.

Tangwen was younger, but not much younger. She was still a hunter for her tribe, but her face didn’t hurt all the time, or make her want to weep when she caught its reflection in the water. She was sitting in the crystal cave on the ground, looking up at Father on his wooden chair.

They kept Father secret, and his magics hid him from insane gods. She was, however, only slightly aware of how unnatural many other tribes would find his serpentine appearance.

Here, on the floor, was a good place. This was where he told stories of long ago and places far away. He said that the land was vast, and round like an apple, and filled with many wondrous people, creatures and things. They knew he made these stories up to amuse the children. What he spoke of simply wasn’t possible, even with the mightiest of magics, but she had always liked the stories anyway.

She was not, however, here for stories.

‘Daughter, I am so sorry, what I do this night is wrong. I swore I would never invade the mind of one of your people, but this is too important.’

‘There is nothing I would hide from you,’ she said. Too late she thought of her weakness, her hesitation at the wicker man. She thought about the boy that Britha had killed. The one they rescued from the Corpse People. She turned away from Father. She felt the familiar, gentle touch of cold, dry, scaled, clawed hands against the skin of her face. Then they faded. She looked up and saw him shimmer. The cave started to disappear, but then it returned.

‘It’s all right, child. I do not judge. I sing the mindsong to the blood we share as you sleep, but the magics are weak. We do not have long.’

‘We are coming back. I have people with me. More than died fighting the Lochlannach, but some will return to their own tribes—’

‘No, you must not return here,’ Father told her. She could hear the hiss in his words now. She heard it rarely, and it had always frightened her. It meant he was agitated, and she was used to him being the calm centre of her tribe’s life.

I have to return,
she thought. Being told not to come home made her want to weep so much. She missed the marshes and the swamps, her close family and her larger family. She had done enough. She wanted to go home.

‘The family are leaving, going west across the sea to Gaul. The Muileartach’s womb has burst and spilled out poisoned life fathered by the Dark Man. We cannot stand against this. We must run. Ynys Prydain is lost.’

‘We can fight this—’ Tangwen began, though war with the monstrous things she had witnessed was the last thing she wanted. She just wanted to rest.

‘We do not have the magics,’ Father said sadly.

‘But we fought the Lochlannach, and we beat them!’

‘Your friends – Britha, Fachtna, Teardrop – they could fight this poisoned tide, but they are too few—’

‘And they are gone,’ she said sadly.

‘Their weapons?’

‘Gone. But you have their magics, we have drunk of your blood, soaked our arrowheads and speartips in it.’

‘They had the blood of the Muileartach, and the magics of the
Ubh Blaosc
, though I do not know that name. I am weak by comparison. Some of your blood on your weapons might help, but it would need to be replenished so often that it would never be enough.’

‘I heal quickly!’

‘Because of that same blood. You would heal more slowly if you were to do this.’

‘Do I need a ritual? The help of the
dryw
?’ she asked, thinking back to the ritual Teardrop had performed on the Crown of Andraste when she thought Britha and Fachtna were dead.

‘No, daughter. No ritual. The magic is in the blood. Just think on what you want it to do before you cut yourself.’

‘There must be other magics powerful enough.’

She saw him hesitate. She could tell he was trying to hide something from her. For all that people said of serpents, Father had always been a bad liar.

‘Please,’ she said.

‘Only the Lochlannach have magics powerful enough.’

She felt her heart sink. ‘Kush’s axe?’

‘He is but one man,’ he finally said. ‘There is no hope for this land. Take your people north and then make for the coast. Go to Gaul and meet your family there.’

She realised what was wrong with what he had said.

‘And you will travel with them?’ she demanded, feeling the tears come, knowing the answer.

‘I cannot leave this place—’

‘I will come back for you—’

‘No! I forbid it!’ Suddenly Father looked over his shoulder. A moment of fear, which he forced down, and turned back to look at her. Bending in close, cradling her head in his arms.

Over his serpentine form she could see something indistinct, a shimmering dark shape she couldn’t quite make out, and which made her sick to look at it.

‘Tangwen! Tangwen! They are close now.’
The voice came from so far away.

‘You have to go now,’ Father told her. She wanted to look at him one last time but she couldn’t take her eyes off the dark shape in the crystal cave. She felt something dirty and corrupt squirm in the back of her mind, like the thoughts she knew she shouldn’t have, but which came unbidden anyway.

‘Enough!’ Half-hiss, half-shout. She shrank away. She had never seen Father angry before. He stood and turned on the thing behind him.

Tangwen found herself reaching for her spear, looking up at Anharad.

‘I have broken the mindsong. She is nothing to you,’ Father said.

‘Her blood is weak,’ Crom Dhubh said, from where he stood in the crystal cave that existed in the mindsong. The Dark Man had pushed his way into it.

‘You failed,’ Father told him.

‘Tell me, do you know me? Did we walk the same streets?’

‘You can have me if you leave my children be,’ Father said, visibly afraid.

‘I don’t want you. I probably won’t even be that amused when our poisoned children find you and drag you from your hole so that you can hear the sleeping gods.’

Father stared at him, the fear slowly draining away. ‘You are a petty, spiteful creature.’

Crom Dhubh considered this. ‘I just don’t lie to myself. The first lesson we all learn is pain.’ Suddenly the Dark Man looked directly up at him. ‘Did you feel that?’

And he had. Something had moved deep in the earth. Part of the network of ancient gates had been activated. A bridge from another place.

Tangwen had made the spear by securely tying the knife she’d taken from the Isle of Madness to a stout branch she’d found. Still tired, she carried it as she followed Anharad. They had rested for the night on a rise looking down over a densely wooded valley. After escaping from the Isle of Madness, they had travelled for days. Tangwen had no idea where they were, but somehow the thirty or so survivors from the wicker man were looking to her for leadership. She didn’t want the responsibility. She didn’t want their hopes pinned on her.

They had passed a number of settlements, most of them abandoned fortified farms, sometimes villages of roundhouses where the richness of the land could support them. They had only seen one fort, built on a low hill not much higher than the surrounding countryside. All the settlements had been abandoned and some of them raided, presumably by the Corpse People.

Tangwen had not felt any guilt whatsoever about looting these places for food and clothing. There was little in the way of weapons left behind.

They were in the territory of the Atrebates at the moment. She assumed they had sent scouts south when the Corpse People raided. The scouts would have returned with news of the plague of monstrous things that had crawled from the sea. What was bothering Tangwen was that the Atrebates, and indeed many of the inhabitants of Ynys Prydain, were not a cowardly or timid people. She was surprised they had run. But she was also relieved. She believed Father – there was no fighting the madness at her back.

The thirty or so survivors with them were either strong, clever or simply very lucky. She could not think about how many had died because it made her sick. Other than her and Kush, there were no other real warriors. The boy, Mabon, was learning to be a warrior when he was taken, and Anharad, his grandmother, had been schooled in the use of sword and shield when she was younger. Many of the others had been spear-carriers at one time or another, landsmen and -women pressed into service to support their tribes’ warriors during times of conflict. They were from many different tribes, though mostly coastal ones like her own Catuvellauni; the Cantiaci; the Trinovantes, old enemies of her people; the fearsome Iceni who lived directly to the north of her people’s lands; the Corielatavi; the Parisi; the Brigantes. Then stranger people from further north of whom she had only ever heard stories. The Goddodin and others who spoke a language so different from her own that she barely understood them, though they looked and sounded a little like Britha. Most of them were young, because it was the young who had been strong enough to survive. There were only a few children other than Mabon. Two of them, a boy and a girl, were with their mother, a fierce Corielatavi woman who, even now, kept her children strictly disciplined. Tangwen was of the opinion that was why they were still alive. The other child was a silent, terrified-looking northern girl. She was on her own and spoke little. Tangwen and Anharad were taking turns keeping an eye on her.