The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (44 page)

Its head was a scarred metal ball.

“THIS IS NOT YOUR PLACE.” Even half-deaf as he was, the words battered Jessie like a headwind. They were like gravel speaking. If his team from the
Mistelle
were here, they’d be turning tail at this point; they would probably hear the words, even as far away as the wreck.

Jessie reached down and pointedly turned off the jet. “I’ve come to talk to you,” he said.

“YOU BRING NO ORDERS,” said the precipice moth. It began to hunker back into the hollow where it had been coiled.

“I bring news!” Jessie had rehearsed what he was going to say, picturing over and over in his mind the impresario of the circus and how he would gesture and stretch out his vowels to make his speech pretty and important-sounding. Now, though, Jessie couldn’t remember his lines. “It’s about the key to Candesce!”

The moth stopped. Now that it was motionless, he could see how its body was festooned with weapons: its fingers were daggers, gun barrels poked under its wrists. The moth was a war machine, half-flesh, half-ordnance.

“CLARIFY.”

Jessie blew out the breath he’d been holding and immediately started coughing. To his dismay little dots of blood spun through the air in the direction of the moth. It cocked its head, but said nothing.

When he had the spasms under control, Jessie told the monster what he’d overheard in the amphitheatre. “What the leader meant – I think he meant – was that the strategy of relying on Candesce to protect us isn’t working anymore. Those things from outside, they’ve gotten in at least twice in the last two years. They’re figuring it out.”

“We destroy them if they enter.” The moth’s voice was not so overwhelming now; or maybe he was just going deaf.

“Begging your pardon,” said Jessie, “but they slipped past you both times. Maybe you’re catching some of them, but not enough.”

There was a long pause. “Perhaps,” said the moth at last. Jessie grinned because that one word, a hint of doubt, had for him turned the moth from a mythical dragon into an old soldier, who might need his help after all.

“I’m here on behalf of humanity to ask you for the key to Candesce,” he recited; he’d remembered his speech. “We can’t remain at the mercy of the sun of suns and the things from outside. We have to steer our own course now, because the other way’s not working. The home guard didn’t know where you were, and they’d never have listened to me; so I came here myself.”

“The home guard cannot be trusted,” said the moth.

Jessie blinked in surprise. But then again, in the story of Admiral Fanning and the key, the moth had not in the end given it to the guard, though it had had the chance.

The moth shifted, leaning forward slightly. “Do you want the key?” it asked.

“I can’t use it.” He could explain why, but Jessie didn’t want to.

“You’re dying,” said the moth.

The words felt like a punch in the stomach. It was one thing for Jessie to say it. He could pretend he was brave. But the moth was putting it out there, a fact on the table. He glared at it.

“I’m dying too,” said the moth.

“W-
what
?”

“That is why I’m here,” it said. “Men cannot enter this creature. My body would be absorbed by it, rather than be cut up and used by you. Or so I had thought.”

“Then give me the key,” said Jessie quickly. “I’ll take it to the home guard. You know you can trust me,” he added, “because I can’t use the key to my own advantage. I’ll live long enough to deliver it to the home guard, but not long enough to use it.”

“
I don’t have the key
.”

Jessie blinked at the monster for a time. He’d simply assumed that the moth that had been seen entering this capital bug was the same one that had met Chaison Fanning in Slipstream. But of course there was no reason that should be the case. There were thousands, maybe millions of moths in Virga. They were almost never seen, but two had been spotted in the same year.

“That’s it, then,” he said at last. After that, there was a long silence between them, but the precipice moth made no effort to fit itself back into its hole. Jessie looked around, mused at the drifting jet for a while, then gave a deep sigh.

He turned to the moth. “Can I ask you a favour?”

“What is it?”

“I’d like to . . . stay here to die. If that wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience for you.”

The precipice moth put out an iron-taloned forelimb, then another, very slowly, as if sneaking up on Jessie. It brought its round leaden head near to his, and seemed to sniff at him.

“I have a better idea,” it said. Then it snatched him up in its great claws, opened its wide lidless mouth, and
bit
.

Jessie screamed as his whole torso was engulfed in that dry maw. He felt his chest being ripped open, felt his lungs being torn out – curiously, not as pain but as a physical wrenching – and then everything blurred and went grey.

But not black. He blinked, coming to himself, to discover he was still alive. He was hovering in a nebula of blood, millions of tiny droplets of it spinning and drifting around him like little worlds. Gingerly, he reached up to touch his chest. It was whole, and when he took a tentative breath, the expected pain wasn’t there.

Then he spotted the moth. It was watching him from its cavity in the capital bug’s flesh. “W-what did – where is it?”

“I ate your disease,” said the moth. “Battlefield medicine, it is allowed.”

“But why?”

“Few moths know which one of us has the key, or where it is,” it said. “I cannot broadcast what I know, Candesce jams all lightspeed communications. I am now too weak to travel.

“You will take your message to the moth that has the key. It will decide.”

“But I’m – I’m not going to —?”

“I could not risk your dying during the journey. You are disease-free now.”

Jessie couldn’t take it in. He breathed deeply, then again. It would hit him sometime later, he knew; for now, all he could think to say was, “So where’s the one that does have the key?”

The moth told him and Jessie laughed, because it was obvious. “So I’ll wait until night and go in,” he said. “That should be easy.”

The precipice moth shifted, shook its head. “It will not speak to you. Not unless you prove you are committed to the course that you say you are.”

There was a warning in those words but Jessie didn’t care. All that mattered was that he was going to live. “I’ll do it.”

The moth shook its head. “I think you will not,” it said.

“You think I’ll forget the whole thing, take my treasure from the ship over there,” he nodded behind him, “and just set myself up somewhere? Or you think I’ll take the key for myself, auction it off to the highest bidder? But I won’t, you see. I owe you. I’ll do as you ask.”

It shook its head. “You do not understand.” By degrees it was inching its way back into its hole. Jessie watched it, chewing his lip. Then he looked around at the beautiful jewelled tapestries it had made in the spiders’ webs.

“Hey,” he said. “Before I go, can I do something for
you
?”

“There is nothing you can do for me,” murmured the moth.

“I don’t know about that. I can’t do very
many
things,” he said as he snapped off some smaller stalks of the strange grass. He hefted a couple in his hands. “But the one or two things I can do, I do pretty well.” He eyed the moth as he began spinning the stalks between his hands.

“Have you ever seen freefall juggling?”

Jessie stood alone on the tarred deck of a docking arm. His bags were huddled around his feet; there was nobody else standing where he was, the nearest crowd a hundred feet away.

The dock was an open-ended barrel, six hundred feet across and twice as deep. Its rim was gnarled with cable mounts for the spokes that radiated out to the distant rim of the iron city-wheel. This far from the turning rim, Jessie weighed only a pound, but his whole posture was a slump of misery.

There was only air where his ship was supposed to be.

He’d been late packing; the others had gone to get Dad at the circus pitch that had been strung, like a hammock, between the spokes of the city. Jessie was old enough to pack for himself, so he had to. He was old enough to find his way to the docks, too, but he’d been delayed, just by one thing and another.

And the ship wasn’t here.

He stared into the sky as it greyed with the approach of a water-laden cloud. The long spindle-shapes of a dozen ships nosed at other points on the circular dock, like hummingbirds sipping at a flower. Passengers and crew were hand-walking up the ropes of their long proboscises. Jessie could hear conversations, laughter from behind him where various beverage huts and newspaper stands clustered.

But where would they go?

Without him? The answer, of course, was
anywhere
.

In that moment Jessie focused his imagination in a single desperate image: the picture of his father dressed as the hero, the way he used to be, arrowing out of the sky – and Jessie reaching up, ready for the catch. He willed it with everything he had, but instead, the grey cloud that had been approaching began to funnel through the docks propelled by a tailwind. It manifested as a horizontal drizzle. Jessie hunched into it, blinking and licking his lips.

A hand fell on his shoulder.

Jessie looked up. One of the businessmen who’d been waiting for another ship was standing over him. The man was well-dressed, sporting the garish feathered hat his class wore. He had a kindly, well-lined face and hair the colour of the clouds.

“Son,” he said, “were you looking for the ship to Mespina?”

Jessie nodded.

“They moved the gate,” said the businessman. He raised his head and pointed way up the curve of the dock. Just for a second, his outline was prismed by the water beading on Jessie’s eyelashes. “It’s at 2:30, there, see it?”

Jessie nodded, and reached to pick up his bags.

“Good luck,” said the man as he sauntered, in ten-foot strides, back to his companions.

“Thanks,” Jessie murmured too late. But he was thunderstruck. In a daze he tiptoed around the dock to find Father and his brothers waiting impatiently, the ship about to leave. They hadn’t looked for him, of course. He answered their angry questions in monosyllables. All he could do was contemplate the wonder of having been saved by that man’s simple little gesture. The world must be crammed with people who could be saved just as easily, if somebody bothered to take a minute out of their day to do it.

From that moment forward, Jessie didn’t daydream about putting out a burning city or rescuing the crew of a corkscrewing passenger liner. His fantasies were about seeing that lone, uncertain figure, standing by itself on a dock or outside a charity diner – and of approaching and, with just ten words or a coin, saving a life.

He wasn’t able to visit the wrecked treasure ship, because the capital bug’s sound organs were recovering. The drone was already louder than Jessie’s jet as he left the bowl-shaped garden of the bug’s gut. From the zone just under the perforated skin of the bug’s back, he could see that the main hull of the wreck was missing, presumably towed by the
Mistelle
, because that was gone too.

When Jessie rose out of the bug’s back, there was no sign of the
Mistelle
in the surrounding air either. A massive cloud front – mushroom and dome-shaped wads of it as big as the bug – was moving in and would obscure one of the suns in minutes.
Mistelle
was probably in there somewhere but he would have the devil of a time finding it. Jessie shrugged, and turned the jet away.

He had plucked some perfect salt crystals, long as his thigh, from the precipice moth’s forest, just in case. He’d be able to sell these for food and fuel as he traveled.

He did exactly this, in two days reaching the outskirts of the principalities, and civilized airs. Here he was able to blend in with streams of traffic that coursed through the air like blood through the arteries of some world-sized, invisible beast. The sky was full of suns, all competing to tinge the air with their colours. The grandly turning iron wheel cities and green clouds of forest had a wealth of light they could choose to bask in. All those lesser suns were shamed when Candesce awoke from its night cycle, and all cities, farms, and factories turned to the sun of suns during this true day.

Billions of human lives marked their spans by Candesce’s radiance. All of the principalities were visible here: he could trace the curve of an immense bubble, many hundreds of miles across, that was sketched onto the sky by innumerable cities and houses, spherical lakes, and drifting farms. Nearby he could tell what they were; further away, they blended and blurred together into one continuous surface whose curve he could see aiming to converge on the far side of Candesce. The sun of suns was too bright to follow that curve to its antipode – but, at night! Then, it was all so clear, a hollow sphere made of glittering stars, city and window lights in uncountable millions encircling an absence where Candesce slumbered or – some said – prowled the air like a hungry falcon.

The bubble had an inner limit because nothing could survive the heat too close to Candesce. The cities and forests were kept at bay, and clouds dissolved and lakes boiled away if they crossed that line. The line was called the
anthropause
, and only at night did the cremation fleets sail across it carrying their silent cargoes, or the technology scavengers who dared to look for the cast-offs of Candesce’s inhuman industry. These fleets made tiny drifts of light that edged into the black immensity of Candesce’s inmost regions; but sensible people stayed out.