Empire Dreams Page 6

  “Go on, get out of here before it starts.”

  “Will you be here tomorrow?” you ask.

  “Oh, I should think so. Look for me under … a blue kite, I think.” And with that the first knuckles of rain rap on the shingles and chase you all the way up the beach to home. Da is bent over the wireless listening to the Coast Guard weather forecast and shaking his head.

  Towards midnight the squall clears sufficiently for the storm shutters to be lifted and the refugee customers ushered gently home. For you, unable to sleep on account of all the wonders buzzing round in your head, this is a chance to unhook Da’s binoculars from their peg and sneak up to the weather room. Despite the lateness of the hour it is still light, for this time of the year the sun never really sets, and by the gloaming you can clearly distinguish the caravan sheltered in the dunes, even the skewbald pony chewing contentedly at its thistles, and there at the end of the pier, is that Christian himself? You fumble the magnification up five and now you are certain, it is Christian, his coat of blue pilot cloth pulled on against the chill, and above him, his kites; one dead black, sprinkled with stars, the other a bold white half-moon riding up the sky. Far away around the edge of the world the real moon is rising to meet it, and on the face of the white moon is a sharp black spot: the black kite.

  You return the binoculars to their case and are about to tiptoe back across the treacherous floorboards when something goes click! in your head, something you saw today, a wooden staff with silver heels. Close concentration reveals forgotten details: the notches on the staff, little nickmarks all the way down its length to within six inches of its foot. Memory clarifies: one of Da’s hand-me-down sailing stories: that there’s a mark on his staff for every passage of Cape Infinity a Pilot makes. Reason concludes: the man flying kites from Cannery Pier can be nothing other than a Pilot.

  * * * *

  And now it is another hot, irritable day and you are getting underfoot even if you’re just sitting playing with Mr. Cat on the window ledge. Ma throws a packed lunch at you and chases you out of the house, forbidden to return before tea. So away down the beach you go, secretly glad because there are a hundred questions you want to ask, each of which breeds a thousand more, and the answer to even one of them would be worth ten of Da’s stupid old sailor stories. Your head rings with echoes of Pilots and SailShips, black suns and lightspeed horizons, sudden squalls and staffs and kites that fly inwards and outwards; half-understood fragments of overheard stories or lessons from school that have all solidified in the presence of a real Pilot flying his kites from the end of your pier. And as sure as eggs are eggs, there is the blue kite flying proudly in the clear morning air, so blue that it makes the sky seem pale in comparison.

  As the tide is out you have planned to take Christian for a walk out to the hulks. Maybe they will prompt him to answer some of your nervous questions. Christian is only too pleased to fasten his kites, the blue, the black, and the bright yellow sun, to his little black box and follow you down the weedy-wet steps onto the sand.

  “A fine morning for a walk,” he declares and comes with you out over the sand ripples and through the shallow drift-locked lagoons to the damp place where the hulks lie. Behind you two lines of wet footprints meander over the glistening sand. Seagulls bicker above you and all around stand the tired old bones of the hulks. You squeeze puddingy sand between your toes and point to a barnacle-crusty cylinder of rusting plate about a mile off, slightly less decrepit than its two companions.

  “My Da says when he was a wee boy he can remember that one coming down.” Christian screws up his eyes against the glare and peers.

  “He’s not the only one,” he says. Now what could that mean? Subtlety breeds subtlety, it seems. Time for a more direct approach.

  “You were a Pilot once, weren’t you, Christian?”

  “Oh, you must have seen my staff yesterday, I left it on the pier, I remember. Well, yes, I am a Pilot, and let me see; yes, I am hundreds of worldbound years old, yes, I was conning ships around Cape Infinity when your grandfather’s grandfather was your age, and no, I am not immortal, for not even a Pilot can cheat God, but perhaps I am a little less mortal than I once was, though my starfaring days are done. And that’s your first question answered, Fraser.”

  Now it’s your turn to gape.

  “But how did you know that?”

  “Foursight, Fraser, but it doesn’t take foursight to tell me that you’d like to know every little thing I had to learn to be a Pilot. And I’d tell you that if I started now to tell you all that I learned I might be finished by St. Agnes’s Eve, 1816, because it takes ten years for a man to learn the Pilot’s art, and only then if he’s the right man, for without the gift of foursight you might as well try teaching a handful of sand from this beach. Instead I think I’ll tell you a story, and it’s a story in three parts and this is the first part of it.”

  THE STORY OF THE BOY WHO WANTED TO BE HAPPY

  IN THE NARROW lands that lie between the mountains and the sea there stood a city of warm red brick. In the winter the snow lay deep in its streets and in spring and autumn the sea-fog would hang for weeks over it like wet, gray wool, but in the summer the red brick buildings would sigh and stretch and release a gentle friendly warmth into the air.

  Now, this city had but one Law, and it was the wisest Law ever made, for it held that nothing was higher than Happiness. To this end, every child who reached the age of twelve (for the years of that city are longer than yours, Fraser) was tested so that they might find the station in life which afforded them the greatest happiness. For everyone was happy in that city, from the street sweeper with his besom to the High Portreeve with his gold chain of office, for everyone was in the position to which he was best suited, and everyone who married, married someone who had been tested to be their perfect match in temperament and character, and there was no envy or greed or jealousy of another, for everyone was content. Tears were never seen in the streets of that city, nor the sounds of sorrow ever heard, for sadness and sorrow had been abolished.

  Now, in this city lived a boy. In many ways he was like you, Fraser, for he loved to watch the steam-tugs laboring up the Musgrave Channel to Templemore Dock with laden transports wallowing in tow, or sometimes he might ditch school and cycle out along the pier to the Mole House with borrowed binoculars to wait for hours for the tremendous fountain of sunlit water that heralded the arrival of a ship in the bay. But though he loved the ships, as all boys can before life grinds the love out of them, there was something he loved better. For he was clever with his hands and had a quick and playful mind and what he wanted most in the world to be was a toymaker. He wanted to make little painted wooden farm animals, and clever, intricate puppets, and toy trains with real steam locomotives, and baby dolls so lifelike that you would hesitate to hug them for fear they might cry: this he knew would make him truly happy.

  At the age of twelve he went to be tested, as everyone must if they wished to remain a citizen of that city. He filled the forms and completed the aptitude tests and submitted to the medical and psychological examinations, and in the middle of his gene-scan chart they saw a great peak in the graph and they knew then that he was that most singular of men, one possessed of the gift of foursight, who could see into a wider present than they did, one that went a little bit outward and a little bit inward into time.

  So they summoned him to the Bureau of Happiness and told him that with such a gift he could never be truly happy as a toymaker, that he must go to Trinity House and learn the Pilot’s Art, for such a great gift must be used for the good of the people of all the worlds and not be buried forever in some dingy toymaker’s workshop. Finally convinced that he could not be happy any other way, the boy let them put him on an Admiralty ship called the Edmund Foxx, and the ship spread her sails to catch the winds between the worlds and sailed away from the city where Happiness was Law and the boy never returned there again.

  And though many worldbound years passed, it only see
med a few days to the boy until he found himself treading the ancient halls of Trinity House. There they taught him to use his foursight to sense the possible futures that radiate away from the pivot-pin of present like the ribs of a fan, and the possible pasts that likewise converge upon it; they taught him to feel the tides on his skin, and the currents that flow under space and time; they taught him shipcraft in thrilling races round the sun in solos which were little more than a sail and a lifepod; they taught him the mysteries that lie at the unseen hearts of black suns and how they might be twisted to permit a ship to pass safely through to another place and time. And when they had taught him all they knew, they sent him out to sail the Nineteen Worlds under the staff of Navigator-Meister Koch to learn those things which cannot be taught. And at the end of all this, he was a boy no longer but a man, and a man but briefly, for when he took up the silver-shod staff and badge of Trinity House he became a Pilot. But do you know, Fraser, in all those years they never once thought to ask him if he was happy, for in the consideration of what is highest, Happiness always bows to the Law, and the Law to Expediency.

  And that is the first part of Christian’s story.

  * * * *

  “But how do you fly a kite inwards and outwards?”

  It is a gusty, roary sort of day. Overweight white clouds with dirty gray bottoms hurry across the sky. Too blustery for the sunkite, reckons Christian, so he has only the black kite, which no weather seems to worry, and a blue kite speckled with scuds of painted cloud, up flying this morning. Christian considers your question.

  “Hard to explain, maybe easier to show. Try touching your fingers gently to the flying line, there … Now, what do you feel?”

  You brush the line with your fingers. An odd sensation hums through them.

  “It tingles,” you whisper.

  “But not unpleasantly?” You nod your head. “That’s good. Now, close your fist on the line and pull it as hard as you like. Go ahead, pull, and don’t forget to watch the kite.” Puzzled, you keep one eye on the sky and tug the line firmly. Nothing happens. The line twangs from your fingers.

  “Try again, harder, as hard as you can.” You seize the line and heave for all your worth. It does not move one inch. It is like trying to pull an iron paling out of the school fence. Up there the black kite does not even waver.

  “What’s happening? Why won’t it move?”

  “Well, you see, most kites fly in the three dimensions that we’re familiar with in our world, but some kites fly in four or even five dimensions and go a little bit outward and a little bit inward into time. So unless you can hold the flying line in those additional dimensions, the kite’s not going to budge in these three. Then of course, the nature of the wind has a lot to do with it. Now, my weatherkites, they fly on the worldwind and respond to the world’s weather, but the Black Kite (which is made from special, sensitive sail-fabric I buy from a man in Corpus Christi, and is as much a creature of the flyer’s mood and whim as the wind’s), it flies on the higher starwinds and responds not to the brightsun, but to the darksun out there at the edge of our system of worlds.”

  “But what would you want a kite like that for?”

  “Many reasons, Fraser, but chiefly so that I know when anything arrives or departs from our universe at Cape Infinity. You remember that tingle you felt?” It had felt like a distant shout sounds when you cannot make out what the words are, like something you can never fully know. “Well, that’s a foursight impression drawn down from the sky. In a way, it’s sort of like …”

  “The aerial on my Da’s wireless!” you shout as things become clear.

  “Well put. You see, over the years I’ve been waiting, my foursight has grown weak. Oh, I can still foursee big, obvious things, like the weather, or the first question that comes into your head, but I’ve lost the subtlety for the small things, like when a particular ship comes through Cape Infinity, or even when a small boy decides to have a look around my caravan. People muddy the timestream and cloud my foursight; they’re always deciding, or not deciding, and from each decision, or lack of it, a whole new universe springs into being. You understand?”

  “I think so…. So you need something to make the wee things louder,” you say, thinking of Miss Latimer’s ear trumpet from school. “And there’re no people here to bother you. Except me.”

  Christian laughs, a wonderful sound like ripples chuckling on the shore.

  “Oh, you’re no bother, Fraser. You do me a power of good, because it’s a man’s duty to reflect upon his past in his retirement, and you remind me of that duty. Apart from that, I like having you here to talk to.”

  Something Christian had said prompts a question:

  “Did you say you were waiting for your kite to tell you when a special ship came?”

  “I suppose I did, in so many words. Mind you, she’d hardly qualify as a ‘ship’ anymore, though she’ll be under sail and airtight: ‘hulk’ might be a truer description, but she’s nothing like those poor old rusting things out there in the sand, she’s a true ship, what you people call a ‘Sail Module.’ And she’ll come down like a true ship, in a blaze of fire and glory, because like all Sail Modules she’s too lightly built to survive entry into the atmosphere though she’s laughed at Cape Infinity.

  “Tell me, Fraser, have you ever seen meteors burn across the sky out of their proper season and wondered to yourself how they came to be there? You see, they might not be meteors at all, but the hulk of some SailShip burning away to nothing up there on the edge of the world. Despite our machines and our harnessing of foursight so that we can reach out over the lightspeed horizon and out of possible danger, travel between the worlds is still a perilous business. For although we created Cape Infinity, it is beyond our control and always will be, for in it we’ve finally made something which is our master.”

  And with that he will not say another word about ships or suns or black kites, but sits there gazing at the distant hulks with a look on his face that is a curious mixture of recognition and grief.

  Your stomach reminds you that you have spent all morning talking and you are eager to unwrap your lunch. As usual Christian has forgotten to bring any, so you offer him a share of your cockelty pie and pickled onions.

  “Oh, no, thank you, Fraser, I’m not all that hungry … I don’t seem to have the appetite I used to.”

  The fact is, he doesn’t seem to have an appetite at all because you have never seen him eat. And he mustn’t need as much sleep as he used to either, because some mornings you have seen him sitting there at one or two or even three o’clock, just sitting there as still and solid as that iron bollard beside you.

  “Christian, why do you tell me all these things?”

  Christian smiles. “Who can really say why we do one thing rather than another? But, enough talking, for the wind’s up and the sun’s bright and the day’s just perfect for flying a kite.”

  THE STORY OF THE PILOT AND HIS PUPIL.

  THIS IS A love story, and like all love stories there is more pain and cruelty in it than love.

  Now, there are two types of men who sail between the worlds. There are those who love to adventure in uncharted skies and feel the long wind in their sails, and there are those who love to specialize in one part of space until they know the weave of its fabric like they know their own skin. The Pilot was one of the latter. For more worldbound years than you would guess, Fraser, he had conned SailShips through the singularity until it was said that he knew Cape Infinity better than he knew his own doorstep. And there was many a word of truth in that, for he was the kind of man who lived two months out of twenty years in his little house on Water Street, who was only truly happy with a ship’s deck under his feet, and who had as many marks on his staff as a man of three times his subjective years. He remained changeless while the people he passed in the streets of the city grew older and they muttered to themselves that no one could cheat God and not reap the reward some day.

  Now, about this time the A
dmiralty commissioned a ship for a seeding run to the then-uninhabitable New South Georgia Colony. Never a popular business, this planetary seeding; you’d think that in return for a whole new world the Admiralty would be a little more generous with their bonuses than they are. The name of this ship was Esperanza and there was never a ship quite as fine as she; bright and clean as a new-minted florin and still ringing from the hammers of the building docks at Coble. Everything about her was as new as ninepence, including her Master, and an apprentice sent from Trinity House to sail Cape Infinity under the staff of the Pilot. Two more different people than Master Roche and Apprentice Anelle you would be hard put to imagine, Fraser. Roche was a great heavy slug of a man; newly symbiosed and unable to do any wrong: his machineself was from an Admiralty warship crippled in a skirmish with Commonality privateers and his fleshself had been Chief Engineer on a decommissioned Company trader. A recipe, Fraser, for as boorish and insensitive a creature as ever aspired to the command of a star vessel.

  Anelle was unlike him as black is white. Now, it’s not unusual as you might think to have woman Pilots, for no one can say where the gift of foursight will rest, but it’s said that for women and ships, where beauty leads sorrow always comes following, and Anelle was as beautiful as a Darkwinter’s night is long. There was never one as lively, as quick to learn and laugh, as Anelle, and of course the Pilot soon came to love her for her dark beauty. But it is not wise for any teacher to love his pupil too much. And if the Pilot came to love his apprentice, he also came to hate his Master, and this is why.