ASIM issue 55 Read online

  “Indeed,” Aquamarine said. “But nevertheless, a very basic, almost primitive alphabetic-based graphic code, the sort of thing our ancestors were using twelve million years ago, when they were still corporeal. On that assumption, we ran a ReverseCrypt scan on it, and we came up with a coherent, intelligible result.”

  Pause. After a few seconds, Burnt Umber could resist no longer. “So,” she said. “Who’s a clever boy, then? What does it say?”

  Aquamarine dimmed gravely. “Of course, we can’t be entirely sure—”

  “Enough with the dramatic pauses,” Burnt Umber snapped. “Come on. What?”

  Aquamarine lowered his voice, accidentally or deliberately choosing a frequency that made the chamber walls vibrate ever so slightly. “Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine,” he said.

  * * *

  There was a hushed silence, broken only by the distant whirring of cooling fans. Eventually, the archbishop said, “What does that mean?”

  “We’ve done some preliminary research,” Aquamarine said. “Spaceways, according to IntuitMax 4.2 For Lenses, would seem to refer to some sort of commercial mass passenger transport carrier. That would fit in with inflight. Magazine is an ancient concept which is rather hard for us to understand; it’s a sort of unimportant or trivial data storage unit, designed to be used once and then casually discarded.”

  “Good heavens,” said the archbishop.

  “Quite. However,” Aquamarine went on, “there are parallels from our own ancient societies. Fourteen million years ago, our ancestors made similar data storage modules out of thin sheets of compressed wood pulp. Such records as survive would indeed seem to suggest that they would have looked remarkably like that.”

  Two dozen beams of coloured light focussed on the artefact’s mildly iridescent surface, causing it to bubble slightly. “You’re saying,” Burnt Umber said slowly, “that this thing’s a fourteen million year old data terminal?”

  Aquamarine flared, a trifle patronising. “Alas, nothing so straightforward. As I think I said just now, this thing is not from our space. Also, it’s not particularly old; thirty days, perhaps, something of that order. I’m afraid radiocarbon can’t be much more precise than that where recent objects are concerned. In any event, whatever it is and wherever it’s from, it’s come a very long way in a very short time.”

  “Can you tell us any more about it?” the archbishop said hopefully.

  “The concept of the inflight magazine,” Aquamarine went on, “is in fact mirrored in the records of our own Ninety-Seventh Dynasty on Anhydrous White Prime. Commercial passenger transporters on long-haul journeys issued their customers with data storage pads; something to read, to keep them from getting bored.” He hesitated, then went on, “We believe that that might possibly have been designed to serve an analogous function.”

  Everyone had gone dim, almost dark. “You can’t be serious,” Burnt Umber said at last. “If someone was running an airline around here, we’d know about it, surely.”

  “The galaxy is a very big place,” Aquamarine said gently. “There are outlying systems the Fleet no longer patrols regularly, as a result,” he added sweetly, “of the recent budget cuts which the civil authority saw fit to impose. It’s conceivable, given the probable differences in phase and temporal perception, that an alien society could have been in regular contact with one or more of those systems for quite some time without our knowledge.”

  “You said alien,” interrupted Rose Madder 10772, the Deputy Assistant Deputy at Foreign Affairs. “Excuse me, but since the Unification, there are no more aliens. Every sentient species in the galaxy is now a member of the Union. We’re all one big happy family.”

  Aquamarine shone with a strange intensity that seemed to overawe his listeners. “Every sentient species in the galaxy, yes,” he said. “In this galaxy.” He paused. “There are others.”

  The stunned gloom that greeted that remark only served to emphasise the brightness with which Aquamarine was now shining. “Come off it, Admiral,” Rose Madder croaked. “You do realise what you’re saying.”

  “I always—” Aquamarine stopped, then went on in a slightly calmer voice. “I agree, the implications are extremely serious. That’s why we have to make contingency plans now, as soon as possible.”

  “Excuse me,” Burnt Umber said, “but am I missing something?”

  Rose Madder pivoted and shone at her, creating a fascinating rainbow effect. “If this airline’s being run by aliens, they must be from outside this galaxy. The nearest galaxy to our own is two and a half million us-years away. Any race or civilisation capable of running scheduled passenger services across the intergalactic void would have to be quite unbelievably advanced.” He paused, and focused himself laser-tight. “I put it to you, Chief Assistant Deputy Undersecretary. Will you be able to sleep soundly tonight, knowing there’s something like that out there?”

  (continued in Part Two)

  Angel Air

  …Jacob A Boyd

  From the stone perch of his beacon tower, Mort pointed toward the sailing ships docked in the bay and told the young boy everything he knew. Without instructions from the tower, the ships travelling through the narrow mouth of the bay would run themselves aground on the shifting sandbars. Throwing a scoop of blue empyrean powder into the beacon fire sent a sapphire flare, which signalled the ships to veer right. A scoop of green powder sent an emerald flare, telling them to veer left. A mixture of the two powders flared ruby, warning ships to stay away.

  “You must care for these powders,” Mort told the boy. “They are more precious than gems. Understand?”

  The boy nodded and blinked back tears. Mort looked away, out the window. He had been in the same situation a little over half a century earlier: orphaned and sent to the beacon master as an apprentice. From the boy’s smooth, southland features and slight stature, Mort suspected he wasn’t yet a teenager, as Mort, himself, had been. The southland’s wide-bottomed ships had secured port permits only twelve years ago. If anything, the boy was an early second-generation homesteader. Mort knew his experience fell short when trying to understand all the boy was going through; in the tower, he was cut off from the deluge of new peoples and cultures.

  Mort gazed at the shacks along the rocky edge of the port where the boy had lived until a day ago. Their rustic vitality pained him. He felt guilty somehow, like he had inadvertently started the chain of events that uprooted the boy. Over the long years, as Mort grew into the tenure of his post, the speed of sea trade through the port had grown too slow for the merchants guild. To keep up with expanding demand, they were blasting a land route through the high mountains that penned the port against the sea—boulders jarred loose by their explosions had tumbled down the mountainside and killed the boy’s parents.

  Mort wished he could have been quicker while guiding the ships through the sandbars.

  Still, Mort could not bear to ask the boy for his name. If he was to one day take over running the tower, he needed a master, not a father, not a friend. Mort remained aloof, stern.

  “Look,” Mort said, directing the boy toward the differing shades of water on the seaward side of the bay. The boy looked. Mort told him how to read the differences to know where the sand lay below. In the warm sunlight angling through the window, Mort scrutinised him for signs of physical aptitude. Beside Mort’s own work-shaped frame, the boy seemed lacking.

  “Say something, boy. Do you at least understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what could happen if you make a mistake?”

  “Ships could crash.”

  “And block off the port.”

  “So?”

  Mort drew back his hand to slap the boy, then lowered it. He was not accustomed to explaining himself or being spoken to with such insolence, but the boy was not just another page who came and went. He was the beacon master’s apprentice, his apprentice. The boy was not to be handled roughly by anyone.

  “Nothing grows here
,” Mort said. “And there are no mines, so every meal you’ve ever eaten, every surface you’ve ever eaten off of, and every utensil you’ve ever eaten with came from other lands. If the port is blocked, tables wither. This place only exists because it’s a waypoint between the faraway places that have the resources which make life here possible. If ships can’t enter the bay or they lose confidence in the tower’s guidance, they’ll push on and leave us behind.”

  The boy nodded. His sad, olive-brown eyes fixed on the stone floor. “Is that all for today?”

  Mort swallowed back rising ire—how could the boy think he could call lessons to an end? Had he not yet understood his position? Mort glared at him. As though the boy’s hands were used to being held, they fidgeted with the end of his long, dark-haired braid. Mort’s temper cooled; he remembered what it had been like.

  “Yes,” Mort said, rubbing a calloused palm over his shaved scalp, the haircut of his station. “That’s all for today.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “No,” Mort said. “You can never leave the beacon tower.”

  “You can’t stop me. I’ll run away.”

  “Then the people of the port will find you, execute you, and replace you with someone who will stay put.”

  The boy looked up from his braid. His narrow eyes widened. Mort could tell he wished he had been with his parents when the boulders fell.

  “My neighbours will kill me?” the boy asked.

  Mort felt he had been harsh with the truth, that he should blunt its sting, then thought better of it. He clasped his hands inside the muff pouch of his raw silk wrap tunic.

  “Yes,” Mort said.

  “Why? Why me?”

  “You’re an orphan. You have nobody. But in the tower, the people of the port will take care of you. And for that, you must take care of them. It’s an honour, boy. Turning your back on the honour is a grave insult.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” the boy said, his voice a whimper. “I never wanted my parents to die.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “You are home.”

  * * *

  The wind grew dry and cold and turned inland off the sea. During the following week, port traffic slowed in anticipation of the living thistle fluffs called angel air, which annually flew into the port like a fog bank.

  Mort stoked the beacon fire and guided the few incoming ships to safety. Each in turn, the ships responded to his flares and jibed back and forth like blind fish as they made their way through the corridor of shoals. The route of one was never the same as those that had gone before.

  “You can no more expect the sand to stay in place than you can expect the clouds to keep still,” Mort said.

  Silent, the boy nodded and touched his bare scalp.

  To officially commence the boy’s apprenticeship, Mort had cut off the boy’s braid then shaved his head—a sensible precaution when working with fire and explosive powders. Since then, Mort felt like the boy had been shutting him out.

  The sharp, burnt smell from the empyrean powders clung to Mort’s nostrils, though compared to the stench during the summer rush that had just passed, the elemental stink was subdued. It comforted Mort and made him feel like it was a good, slow time to ease the boy into the life he was to assume. He appreciated the timing of the boy’s arrival; in his advancing age he saw relief in more forms than he had in his youth. Yet as the boy cringed away from the heat of the beacon fire, turned his nose up at the powders, and complained about the stains they left on his hands, Mort wished the boy could have been older.

  Over the course of the week, the empyrean powder stores ran low. The powders were the one thing over which Mort commanded a monopoly, and as he managed his shrinking stock, it was as though his bodily humours were steadily being drained. He told the tower’s pages to bring more, but when they hadn’t returned by the time the last ship entered port, he glared out over the calm waters in restive outrage. His stomach ached. Hardly enough remained in the bins for one combined flare; it had been close.

  From what Mort could tell, the port was fully engaged in preparations for the angel air. His empyrean powders would have to wait for it to pass. Nothing was coming or going. Even the merchants guild had stopped work, despite their impatience to blast a trade route through the snow-capped mountains. Their pops and rumbles faded. Except for the people gathering wood into piles along the rocky shore, the port had retreated inside.

  The boy seemed to sense Mort’s agitation and sank deeper into quiet, further out of the way, until Mort felt like he was alone again. Brooding, Mort sat at his perch and watched the wood piles rise like bulwarks against the sea.

  He sniffed the dry air. “Foul winds,” he said, his voice full of venom. “A plague every year.”

  The boy drew up stiff, and Mort suddenly remembered him. A maligned expression scrunched the boy’s smooth features.

  “That’s blasphemy,” the boy said. “My mother said that thistle sickness isn’t to be feared. She said that it’s to be honoured. Anyone who revives someone from thistle sickness has all their faults forgiven, all their misdeeds pardoned, and goes directly to heaven. And the person that’s revived becomes like a king.”

  Mort was glad the boy had stopped sulking, if only for a minute, and had regained his voice to show he had a brain in his head. But he didn’t know where to start addressing the boy’s misunderstanding.

  Finally, Mort said, “Angel air is a pestilence. Pure and simple. Don’t fool yourself.”

  The boy’s eyebrows pitched in doubt. As Mort went on, he felt like he had been talking to himself for far too long and now could not get through to anyone else.

  “Those old stories about redemption were just a quaint way to give hope to a community from a more primitive time. I’m surprised your parents bought into them so readily; Southlanders are supposed to be practical people. It’s useless to try to save the thistle sick. I don’t know why people still try. It’s only by luck that any of them survive. The thistles are parasites, not angels.”

  “How do you know?” The boy asked.

  Mort could not remember the last time he had heard such challenge. The boy’s mind, he suspected, was sharp, after all.

  “I had thistle sickness once,” Mort said.

  The boy’s eyes widened with the first sign of reverence he had shown since arriving at the tower.

  “What happened?” the boy asked.

  “While I was apprenticed to the beacon master,” Mort said, “the thistle made its way into the tower and touched me. When I woke from the fever, thistles had killed my master and not me. My tongue was swollen red, the same as my master’s hands, and I couldn’t get the taste of dirt from my mouth for months. That’s it.” Mort pounded a fist against the perch’s stone handgrip, which had been worn smooth by many hands long before he had ever grasped it. “And I’m no king, boy. I’m stuck within these walls the same as you.”

  Mort stared out toward the horizon. From how the boy mimicked him, Mort saw that the boy had been impressed. As Mort listened to the cold wind and hushed crush of the tide far below, he felt like he was teaching the boy an important lesson about silence, about what to expect.

  “There it is,” the boy said, pointing out to sea.

  Mort peered toward the horizon. “What do you see?”

  “Angel air. It’s coming in.”

  It was like a thin haze far out at sea, where all the signs of the sea and sky said there should not be haze. Mort did not know how he had missed it. The wind whistled into the window and chilled him. He rubbed stiff fingers against his eyes.

  “They’re lighting the firewalls,” the boy said.

  Along the shore, the wood piles ignited and smoked. Slowly, ponderously, the bank of living thistle fluffs flew in off the sea, met the screen of flying embers and hot air, and rose as the sea’s wind drove it over the firewall.

  “Back away from the window,” Mort said.

  The boy faced him as if
hurt. “But I want to catch the thistle,” he said. “Like you did.”

  “No one tries to catch the thistle, boy,” Mort said.

  Mort trembled as the memory of thistle sickness returned to him. He could not find his voice. The pain of it had been a bottomless hunger worsened by sweltering waves of heat. The boy was deluded to want such a thing for any reason.

  “My master didn’t choose to die,” Mort said. “And neither will we. If you get sick, I won’t be able to help you. I have nothing more than the port has, and none in the port have survived thistle sickness since I did.”

  Mort shuttered and locked the window, then sped through the tower, closing and locking the rest.

  * * *

  When the tower’s pages returned, they brought coal and wood and food. The couriers dedicated to delivering empyrean powders came, too. They were wrapped from head to toe in white silk, to show if any of the powder from their kegs had gotten out. The powders came from remote lands—some said from the very atolls where the angel air originated—and cost many men their lives to obtain. If Mort treated them properly, the kegs contained just enough to get by until the next shipment. It was up to him to be conscientious. Once the couriers delivered the kegs, the pages told him how the port had fared from the angel air.

  It had landed on forty people, the largest number in as many years. As the green pox where the thistles had touched spread over their bodies, the sick had lost their hair and wasted away, despite their voracious appetites. The port had banded together to save them, all but starving and bankrupting itself. Unguents and tinctures and poultices had no effect. Food would not sate. Water would not slake. Medicine and massage would not cure. Prayers and sacrifices found no answers. Ship captains, porters, blast managers, charge setters, merchants, craftsmen, all forty of the sick thinned so that their skins stretched over their skeletons, their green thistle pox glowed blue, then their extremities swelled and they died. They were being cremated en masse on a terrace cut specially for the purpose into the mountainside. Port traffic wouldn’t recommence until after the cremation, to avoid confusing the ships.