Parallax View (13 page)

“You are the talk of the party,” the stranger said, as if this were likely to impress Frayn.

The fluxmaster laughed dismissively. “I am the talk of every ’port I visit on this corrupt little backwater of a planet,” he said.

Fluxships were far more efficient than conventional starships and the new fluxship-derived constructs, their method of propulsion considered magical by the uninitiated. Frayn and his crew were regarded with something close to awe by the planet’s citizens, and hatred by the owners of the lines whose business was suffering in competition against his ship.

Frayn had been on Earth for almost five years now; far, far too long, according to his crew.

“What do you want?” Frayn asked. They always wanted something, if only the kudos of having spent some time with the fluxmaster, a man in tune with the enigmatic flow of time and space.

The other man averted his gaze. “I...” he started, then stopped. “I understand that you are bound for Shanghai. I wish to buy passage with you.”

Hannor exchanged a glance with Frayn and grunted his disbelief.

Frayn smiled to himself. “A Rationalist like yourself? I thought your kind disdained the flux and all it stands for?”

The man gestured. “I disdain the crass mysticism and lore surrounding the flux,” he said. “I cannot dispute the fact that the flux itself works.”

“Passage aboard my ship is expensive,” Frayn snapped. “It would cost... two hundred kay.”

The man brandished a clip. “My money is good,” he said, his reaction more that of a piqued child than a middle-aged man.

And you are willing to pay well over the odds
, Frayn mused. He stared at the man. His suppressed air of desperation was unmistakable. Frayn judged that his casual bonhomie at the party had been no more than a facade.

Frayn wondered what the man might be running from.

“The price you pay is not only monetary,” Frayn said.

“I understand. A day of dreamflux will age me six months.”

Frayn nodded. The flux took a heavy physical toll on those less attuned than the fluxmaster and his crew.

“I am aware of the repercussions of riding in your biological machine,” the man continued. “It is a price I am willing to pay.”

Frayn stared at the man’s thin, striated face. Everything about this deal made him suspicious. He should turn it down.

He took the man’s clip and pressed it to his own, transferring the money. “Be at the ’port at dawn,” he said. “We leave at six whether you’re there or not.”

The man bowed with mocking formality to Frayn, shot a glance of loathing towards Hannor, and quickly departed the patio.

Hannor’s ruby eyes, during daylight hours retracted from the harsh light of the sun, now regarded Frayn with concern.

“I know,” Frayn responded. “I too am loathe to trust him... and yet something tells me this time me to ignore my instincts.”

Hannor, as ever, was silent.

That night, secluded in his hotel room, Julius Frayn slid the dreamloop over his head and Sylvian’s ghost was with him again.

In this dream, dredged from his subconscious by the ’loop, Frayn and his son were on Cynthera. Sylvian was twelve – the age he argued with Frayn and left home – and they were attending the Enjoining of Frayn’s wife, Elisabetha.

Her comatose body was born aloft through the jungle by the elders of the clan. Frayn and Sylvian followed, like mourners at a funeral. Except, Frayn celebrated the fact of his wife’s Enjoining, and its consequences.

Beside him, however, Sylvian was silent with disbelief.

The dream was merely a series of gaudy jungle images taken from his memory of the Enjoining, but the time before and after the ceremony had been difficult for Frayn.

Sylvian had refused to acknowledge the rightness of his mother’s transition. He confronted Frayn in the longroom of the ancestral manse, while in a hallowed nether chamber clan surgeons prepared Elisabetha’s body.

“You can’t do this to me!” Sylvian wailed with all the indignity of his inexperienced twelve years. “You can’t let Mother die!”

“Sylvian,” Frayn said patiently. “How many times must I repeat: Elisabetha will not die. The Enjoining is a time of celebration, the beginning of a renewed and prolonged existence for your mother.”

“But what
kind
of life will she lead in that... that
thing
?” Sylvian raged.

“Sylvian, it was ordained, long before your birth. Elisabetha was destined to fulfil her familial role as Caller of the Songlines, and I was to be the fluxmaster–”

Sylvian’s hitherto pretty face became ugly. “So you’re doing this for yourself!”

Frayn almost despaired. Twelve years ago the birth of his son had been a cause for celebration: he would have an heir who would continue his reign as fluxmaster. Not long after the birth, the clan surgeons broke the bad news: Sylvian was without the ability. He was a mundane, a normal.

Frayn knew that his relationship with the boy had suffered in consequence: how could he show the child the same affection as he would a boy who had inherited his ability with the flux?

Without the talent, Sylvian failed to appreciate the sacrifice of Elisabetha to the brood queen.

In the dream, Frayn experienced the enjoining. The pall-bearers reached the Calling chamber, the exo-skeletal superstructure of the brood queen, and filed inside, their footsteps echoing in the osseous confines.

Elisabetha’s body was lowered on its bier, placed with reverence in the hollowed cavity of the queen’s cerebral nacelle. Frayn stepped forward: tradition dictated that he remove his wife’s gown, the divestment symbolic of her renunciation of the physical realm.

He unfastened the silken bows with trembling fingers and parted the gown, revealing her stark and ivory nakedness to the eyes of the elders.

The surgeons had worked with their customary expertise: a hundred blood-red tubers emerged from the pale flesh of the Caller of the Songlines.

Frayn felt an overwhelming emotion well within him: gratitude and love. The elders began an echoing plainsong.

Then, from the porous bone of the Queen’s cerebral nacelle, tentacles emerged squirming and found their blind way towards the sacrificial body.

One by one they clamped onto the tubers, and Elisabetha spasmed in ecstasy.

Seconds later Frayn was aware of her glorious ascent, her departure from this banal realm of the flesh. She enjoined with the quiddity of the universe and called the Songlines.

And within his mind, almost bringing him to his knees in an exquisite climax of rapture, Frayn heard her Calling.

He was only distantly aware of his son’s scream as Sylvian turned and ran from the hallowed chamber.

Frayn worked hard to win back the affection of his son during the course of the next month. But Sylvian would not be mollified. Frayn experienced guilt that he had failed to communicate the sublimity of Elisabetha’s experience to his confused son: he wondered how much he secretly resented Sylvian for being unable to continue his proud and talented lineage.

His guilt became a painful brand when, one month after Elisabetha’s Enjoining, Sylvian departed the ancestral manse forever, leaving a note explaining that he was working passage aboard a slow-ship bound for Earth. That Sylvian had chosen to flee like that was bad enough; even worse was the thought of the conditions he might have to endure aboard the ship.

A week later Frayn became master of his first fluxship and flew the Songlines to humanity’s homeplanet. For the past five long years he had spent much of his time and effort in trying to find his son.

The ship was as magnificent as ever.

A sleek jet dewdrop the size of a small building, the fluxship rested on a double row of stubby, vestigial legs. The first light of dawn glanced off the arched, chitinous carapace, and Frayn felt the need to be once again coursing the Songlines.

A troupe of hyperactive synth-macaques swarmed over the
Oh Carrollian
, scrubbing at the portholes and the multi-faceted, horseshoe-shaped array of eyes wrapped around the ship’s bulbous headpiece.

Hannor was calling the macaques to extra effort, urging industry with his calm baritone. Frayn clapped a hand on the alien’s angular shoulders. He breathed the Cyntheran’s rubbery scent. “All ready?”

Hannor dipped his hooded head. He drew back the cowl that protected his scales from the dry air. His blunt, reptilian face regarded Frayn. Tight slits showed that the Cyntheran had retracted his sensitive eyes for further protection. Blind, yet all seeing.

“The flux is strong, Brother Frayn. The Songlines call to me.”

Frayn touched his Second on the back. “We’ll go soon,” he said. “I’ll get Harque.”

He sensed the quick thrill rushing through the alien’s mind. Millennia ago, Hannor’s ancestors had ridden the flux creatures through the steaming jungles of Cynthera, linked mind to mind. Over the centuries the ability had been lost to the majority of natives; only occasionally did a sport show the talent. Hannor was one such, and Frayn was privileged to have him as his second.

The sun was rising with a visual fanfare of cerise and tangerine banners when Frayn passed a rope through the ring in Harque’s nose and led him from the stable. The great Thaptor shambled into the daylight, his slow progress watched with amazement by a crowd of beggars and street-urchins.

They had evidently never seen such a beast before, perhaps not even imagined that one could exist: vaguely hippo-like, but distorted, etiolated, his pale flesh imprinted with serried rows of grooves from long confinement in the fluxship’s braincase.

Harque trudged along with bad grace at being woken so early and muttered complaints in his monosyllabic language. He halted defiantly to fart and stolidly evacuate prodigious cobs of steaming vegetable matter, and only then deigned to resume his laborious progress across the cobbles of the ’port.

Frayn was aware of a curious unease in the beast’s manner. He tried asking Harque what troubled him, but the Thaptor’s understanding was so rudimentary, his ability to communicate so limited, that his only reply was: “Tired. Uncomfortable. Don’t like [unintelligible]. Want sleep.”

Frayn led the Thaptor up the loading ramp into the
Oh Carrollian
. The fluxship’s cavernous abdominal cavity was packed tight with cargo, leaving only a tortuous passage through to the braincase. Unlike the lavishly decorated passenger quarters, this far forward the ship was bare and functional, the surfaces polished through use with a lustre like obsidian.

Hannor waited by the narrow entry to the braincase. Between them, they eased and chivvied the reluctant Harque into his osseous confinement.

Here in the cool interior, Hannor was unhooded and Frayn could see his worried expression. When the alien’s newly exposed pale eyes turned to him, a sudden burst of empathy confirmed his Second’s concern.

For the smooth passage of the ship across the flux, it was necessary that Master, Second and Thaptor shared harmonious cerebral communications. Any disturbance endangered the entire ship.

He left Hannor settling the Thaptor and went down to supervise the unshackling of the fluxship from its moorings.

As he stepped from the ramp into the ruby light of dawn, he made out the slim figure of their passenger. Again, Frayn had to stifle his unease. It was business, that was all. In a day he would be rid of this wealthy fugitive and whatever threat his presence might present.

“You are just in time,” Frayn said. “We were about to embark without you, Mr...?”

The man nodded. He wore a light suit this morning, in deference to the dawn’s chill. He looked almost sombre. “Di Stefano,” he said. “Gianluca di Stefano. So you meant it when you said you would leave without me.”

Frayn gestured towards the ramp. “Please,” he said. “I’ll show you to your cabin.”

As befitted the fluxship’s status as transport for the ultra-rich, di Stefano’s cabin in the thoracic sub-chamber was lined with fine carpets and tapestries, the exposed chitinous fretwork of the domed ceiling picked out in gold leaf. The effect was baroque and, to Frayn’s more pragmatic tastes, quite obscene.

He indicated a tasselled cord. “Pull it if you require anything,” he said, “or if you wish to move about the ship during the journey – someone will come and attend to you. The subjective duration of the flight will be only two hours, although objectively our journey is almost instantaneous.” He smiled. “That is why you are paying so much, after all.”

Frayn climbed the spiral staircase to the nacelle behind the ship’s horseshoe array of eyes. Hannor was already there: lost to the physical, absorbed by the flux. Frayn could sense the wash of his near-religious ecstasy.

Strictly speaking, the giant synth that was the fluxship was mostly dead. It had been engineered so that only a tiny part of its brain – that part which accessed the ur-reality of the flux – still functioned. The Thaptor, locked into the confines of the ship’s braincase, acted as an amplifier; the combined efforts of Master and Second controlled the raw channelling of ship and beast, allowing the vessel to navigate the Songlines broadcast by the Caller on Cynthera – Elisabetha.

To adapt an old truism: any level of evolution sufficiently advanced from our own is indistinguishable from the supernatural. The flux-creatures were so mentally attuned to the fabric of the universe that they could haul themselves along the Songlines called through time and space in a way which defied the laws of physics as they were understood.

Humans capable of mastering the flux, as Frayn and Elisabetha had learned to do, were rare. More technological approaches had been adopted on those planets which had opposed the use of living fluxships, including Earth. Generally, they were less effective and the biological toll on travellers was greater – there was nothing to match a living fluxship.

Taking a deep, calming breath, Frayn lowered himself into a padded recliner that looked as if it had grown out of the chitinous floor of the command nacelle. Immediately, a trumpet-like hood descended, moulded itself to his face.

He could
see
now. He could sense Elisabetha, calling to him.