Space Magic (30 page)

Kyrie took a bite... and immediately spat it out. “This tastes like shit!” she said.

“Yes,” Theo said, and smiled. “My own, to be precise.”

Kyrie sat, mouth open, too stunned to say anything.

“I decided to cut short the agony of waiting and give you your opportunity to attack in the first course.”

“You...” Then she snapped her mouth shut and gave him a brief bow of acknowledgment, not taking her eyes off him. “Very well. I, Kyrie Destinia Strommond of the Pulp Revenants, do take the gravest offense at this violation of protocol, and under Article XVII, Section 7 of the Grand Compact of Humanity, I invoke my right to restitution.” And then she clapped her hands together and vanished with a blue flash, leaving behind the tingle of thaumaturgical energies and the smell of ozone.

Theo bent down and spoke to the brass trumpet fastened to the arm of his chair. “We are at war.”

“Acknowledged,” came the voices of the Fathers, and alarms sounded throughout the House.

Throwing his napkin on the floor, Theo hurried up the spiral stair to the library. The bookshelves had already been cleared away, replaced by screens and crystals showing views from throughout the House and the air nearby. On one screen, zombies in pale shimmering armor waded through hip-deep acid, their spider-rifles spitting poisonous metal spiders at the defenders. On another, an enormous zombie, stripped to the waist, mowed through Theo’s black-uniformed troops with a broadsword in each hand.

But Theo’s attention was riveted to the three-dimensional display in the center of the room, a rotating web of crystal threads that depicted the House and the airships nearby. With the exception of the
Edison
, they were all Musings ships; on Reunion Day, all members of each House would be with their loved ones. And the Musings’ best zeppelins were no match even for the
Edison
in which Theo had served, never mind her new configuration.

Nonetheless, Theo ordered his zeppelins into combat.
Tarantella
and
Eagle Scout
immediately slipped their moorings and drove ponderously toward the
Edison
, followed shortly by
Razor
and
Wedgwood
.
Edison
responded smartly, whipping out of her berth with the full power of her seven enormous engines. She began hammering the Musings’ airships with missiles, lasers, and black coruscating webs of arcane energy; soon
Razor
and
Eagle Scout
had been reduced to embers, fluttering down into the endless dark, and
Tarantella
was listing badly.

Theo cursed the loss of life, but the attack had achieved the desired effect: it had brought
Edison
out into the range of his zeppelin gun. He ordered his first subcommander to take charge of the aerial defense and clambered up the ladder to the highest point in the House.

Zenobia had done well. The zeppelin gun gleamed, its long brass barrel polished to perfection, its sights precisely aligned, its every nickel-plated wheel and lever gleaming bright. The harpoon was loaded and charged, humming with electricity and shimmering with thaumaturgical energies.

This one harpoon had cost nearly half of Theo’s defense budget five years ago. The arguments had gone on for months. Now he was vindicated, and nothing could have made him more miserable.

Theo stepped into the zeppelin gun’s shoulder braces and placed his hands on the grips. The dome overhead divided smoothly, letting in a wedge of night and fog. He peered through the gunsight at the
Edison
, heeling hard to the right as it unleashed a flight of missiles at
Wedgwood
. With only the one harpoon, he had to be certain of his aim.

“Commander!” cried his second subcommander from the room below. “The zombies are breaking through into the Blue Star section!”

Theo spat out a curse, then spoke into the trumpet to the House Fathers. “Cut loose the Red Diamond section immediately.”

“Acknowledged.” A new set of alarms sounded, ear-shattering and urgent. On the displays, those Musings troops not directly engaged with the enemy dropped their weapons and ran; in the library, subcommanders and lieutenants began securing equipment.

The voices of the House Fathers sounded over the public address system. “The Red Diamond sector will be separated in sixty seconds.” It was the first time Theo could recall the Fathers speaking to the entire House at once.

“Fifty seconds.” In the sight, the
Edison
had finished off the
Wedgwood
and was turning to strafe the House. She would be closer than the gun’s minimum range in less than a minute. He engaged the harpoon’s tracking, evasion, and anti-thaumaturgical systems.

“Forty seconds.” Theo breathed a prayer and pressed the firing stud. The floor shuddered and, with a scream of superheated steam, the harpoon flung itself out of the gun, trailing its cable behind.

“Thirty seconds.” Steam obscured Theo’s view. The floor thrummed as the cable paid out. Theo cursed, over and over.

“Twenty seconds.” The view in the gunsight cleared just as the harpoon pierced
Edison
’s silvery envelope. The great zeppelin twitched all over at the impact, then convulsed as a mighty charge flowed into the harpoon from the alchemical batteries beneath Theo’s feet. He could almost hear her scream through the gunsight.

“Ten seconds.”
Edison
continued to quiver and shake as though with fever, jerking and twisting, but the harpoon held firm in her envelope. Reluctantly Theo stepped back from the gun and slid down the ladder.

“Five. Four. Three. Two. One.” Theo held onto the ladder as though it were his long-lost sister.

A rumble as though the whole House had indigestion vibrated through the floor, the wall, and the ladder, as chemical and magical explosions severed the structural connections between the Red Diamond section and the rest of the House. Half the displays went black; most of the rest showed pandemonium.

In the center of the room, displayed in a tracery of crystalline filaments, a large lobe fell slowly away from the House, while three huge gasbags detached from the top of the structure to compensate for the lost weight.

Meanwhile,
Edison
thrashed at the end of her line. Then, suddenly, she reversed herself and dove toward the House. “No!” someone shouted—Theo realized it was himself.

The ghostly, crystalline
Edison
smashed into the top of the ghostly, crystalline House. The impact drove the House sideways, knocking everyone in the library except Theo, who still clung to the ladder, off their feet. The lights flickered, along with the technological displays; when they cleared, it was plain that two of the House’s gasbags had been destroyed by the collision. Above them the
Edison
floated free, still connected by the slack cable but no longer twitching. It was unclear whether she was dead or alive.

Theo dragged himself to the nearest trumpet, as the floor shivered and tilted and a queasy feeling of uncontrolled descent flowed through his stomach. “Deploy emergency lift!” he shouted to the House Fathers.

“We have already done so,” came the reply. “It is not sufficient. Too much reserve gas was lost in the detachment of the three gasbags that supported the Red Diamond section.”

Theo sagged against the wall. The House of the Guided Musings was doomed. Helpless, he watched the altimeter drop. The room tilted slowly to one side as the crystalline model of the House fell away from the model of the
Edison
.

And then the
Edison
came to the end of the cable. Or perhaps the House did. In either case, there was a sickening jerk and the floor suddenly tilted fifteen further degrees. Theo’s head slammed against the wall and he lost consciousness.

When he recovered, probably only a few seconds later, the three-dimensional display showed the
Edison
floating at the top of the cable, docile as a child’s balloon. The altimeter was nearly stable; the great zeppelin had just enough lift to compensate for the two destroyed gasbags.

Theo stumbled across the tilted, debris-littered floor to the ladder, then clambered up to the gun room. The cable stretched through a gash in the dome, thrumming like a guitar string, and the whole room groaned with structural stress; there was no telling how long the cable, or the drum to which it was attached, or the structure to which the drum was in turn secured, would hold out.

He climbed up on the zeppelin gun, now bent nearly in half, and put his head next to the cable. Peering along its length, through the broken dome, he saw the
Edison
rotating slowly high above. Gas leaked from the rent where the harpoon pierced her skin.

And he heard his own name.

He looked around, but he was alone in the gun room, and the voice was so soft it could not have come from very far away.

Then he heard his name again, and this time he felt it as well—felt it thrumming under his fingers in the cable that held the House to the
Edison
.

He pressed his ear to the cable.

Theo
, came Edie’s voice, vibrating down the cable to his ear. Or perhaps it was just his imagination.
Theo, Theo, Theo... I still love you, Theo, though you have killed me.

“I still love you, too, Edie,” he whispered to the cable.

All around him the shadows deepened, as the House’s lighting failed and the endless night crept in.

This is a story about a bird. A bird, a ship, a machine, a woman—she was all these things, and none, but first and fundamentally a bird.

It is also a story about a man—a gambler, a liar, and a cheat, but only for the best of reasons.

No doubt you know the famous
Portrait of Denali Eu
, also called
The Third Decision
, whose eyes have been described as “two pools of sadness iced over with determination.” This is the story behind that painting.

It is a love story. It is a sad story. And it is true.

-o0o-

The story begins in a time before shiftspace, before Conner and Hua, even before the caster people. The beginning of the story lies in the time of the bird ships.

Before the bird ships, just to go from one star to another, people either had to give up their whole lives and hope their children’s children would remember why they had come, or freeze themselves and hope they could be thawed at the other end. Then the man called Doctor Jay made a great and horrible discovery: he learned that a living mind could change the shape of space. He found a way to weld a human brain to the keel of a starship, in such a way that the ship could travel from star to star in months instead of years.

After the execution of Doctor Jay, people learned that the part of the brain called the visual cortex was the key to changing the shape of space. And so they found a creature whose brain was almost all visual cortex, the
Aquila chrysaetos
, or as it was known in those days the golden eagle. This was a bird that has been lost to us; it had wings broader than a tall man is tall, golden brown feathers long and light as a lover’s touch, and eyes black and sharp as a clear winter night. But to the people of this time it was just another animal, and they did not appreciate it while they had it.

They took the egg of a golden eagle, and they hatched it in a warm box, and they let it fly and learn and grow, and then they killed it. And they took its brain and they placed it at the top of a cunning construction of plastic and silicon which gave it the intelligence of a human, and this they welded to the keel of the starship.

It may seem to you that it is as cruel to give a bird the intelligence of a human, only to enslave its brain, as it is to take the brain of a human and enslave that. And so it is. But the people of this time drew a rigid distinction between born-people and made-people, and to them this seemed only just and right.

Now it happens that one golden eagle brain, which was called Nerissa Zeebnen-Fearsig, was installed into a ship of surpassing beauty. It was a great broad shining arrowhead of silver metal, this ship, filigreed and inlaid with gold, and filled with clever and intricate mechanisms of subtle pleasure.

The ship traveled many thousands of light-years in the service of many captains. Love affairs and assassinations were planned and executed within its silver hull; it was used for a time as an emperor’s private yacht; it even carried Magister Ai on part of his expedition to the Forgotten Worlds. But Nerissa the shipbrain saw none of these things, for she had been given eyes that saw only outward. She knew her masters only by the sound of their voices and the feel of their hands on her controls.

When the ship was under way, Nerissa felt the joy of flight, a pure unthinking joy she remembered from her time as a creature of muscle and feather. But most of her time was spent contemplating the silent stars or the wall of some dock, awaiting the whim of her owner and master.

Over the years the masters’ voices changed. Cultured tones accustomed to command were replaced by harsher, more unforgiving voices, and the ship’s rich appointments were removed one by one. In time even basic maintenance was postponed or disregarded, and Nerissa found herself more and more often in places of darkness and decay. She despaired, even feared for her life, but shipbrains had no rights. The strongest protest she was allowed was “Sir and Master, that course of action may be inadvisable.”

Finally the last and roughest owner, a man with grating voice and hard unsubtle hands, ran the ship into a docking probe in a foul decrepit port. The tarnished silver hull gave way, the air gushed out, and the man died, leaving a legacy so tattered and filthy that none could bear to touch it. Ownerless, airless, the hulk was towed to a wrecking yard and forgotten. Nerissa wept as the ship’s power failed, her vision fading to monochrome and then to black. Reduced to the barest reserves of energy, she fell into a deep uneasy sleep.

While she slept the universe changed. Conner and Hua discovered shiftspace, and travel between planets became something the merely well-off could afford. The Clash of Cultures burst into full flower almost at once, as ten thousand faiths and religions and philosophies collided and mingled. It was a time of violence and strife, but in time a few ideas emerged as points of agreement, and one of these was that what had been done to the golden eagles was wrong. So the hatcheries were closed, the ships retired, and the shipbrains compassionately killed.