Wolff looked at the clock attached to his belt. It would likely take Jed more than an hour to remove Taggart’s program. “Steel and Flame, how do you mate with five other individuals at once?”
“I not, that would be silly,” the morran retorted. “I
relay
.” The morran had begun to make its stumbling way along the wall of the corridor, feeling with its tentacles. Wolff followed.
“Relay?”
“In your species, male mates with female, she give birth. In my species, male mates with me, I mates with semale, semale mates with emale, emale mates with gremale, gremale mates with female, and female give births.”
“Does that make you a him or a her?”
“Neither, sirrah. Me’s an
aem
or an
ae
.”
“Oh,” said Wolff. “I suppose your other sexes are e and se and gre, then?”
“Correct.”
“Are there many females and gremales, and fewer of the sexes toward male?”
“Oh, yes.” The morran assumed a strutting pace, its head still turned away from the light. “I am rare. and there are only five males in Carck-Westmathlon, and me’s had sex with all of them.”
“Carck-Westmathlon? Is that the circumfercirc’s name?”
Rh’Arrol clicked distractedly to aerself. “No, just the name of this quarter.”
“I see.” Wolff smiled. “And do the men who live here call it that?”
“It is not entirely a morran word. Carck and mathlon yes, but West is a word from the vocabulary of your species. Carck means ‘free’ in your language. Math means ‘large in scope’, and lon means ‘of water.’”
“Western free place of big water?”
“Big place of free water, fact. Pay rent. Forty leagues in height, thirty in depth, and a-hundred-and-nine in span. History has it that this void construction was one of the first to cycle waste products through modified bacteria in order to purify water and generate feedstock to go toward new synthesis.”
“You seem very well educated,” Wolff commented. Incongruously so. Half of Rh’Arrol’s speech seemed to be quoted from textbooks, the other half an uneducated morran attempt to speak the language of men.
“Oh yes.” Proud colours tainted Rh’Arrol’s chromatic quills. “Me’s writing a book on genealogy and the lineage of morrans on Carck-Westmathlon.” The morran was now sniffing and clicking at a junction in the passage.
“Indeed. Are you sure you know where you’re going, Rh’Arrol?”
Rh’Arrol clicked. “Yes, you wishes me takes you to the man-who-is-leader—the Seignior. Fortunate for you that he lives in this sector. Well, it’s this way, although I could be wrong in this wretched light. Men, and their stupid propensity for it!”
“Why do you choose to live here, then?” Wolff followed the blundering creature.
“While the men sleep, the corridors darker, and we wake and emerge.”
“Ah, so you’re nocturnal. A tenancy in the docking pipes would seem convenient.”
“Is safe enough.”
Wolff kept up the conversation in a detached sort of manner, glancing repeatedly at his clock. “Where exactly are we going?”
Rh’Arrol surveyed the approaching wall with a barrage of sound, and butted aer nose against a panel. Another cavity opened in the wall. Inside, Rh’Arrol switched off the light, closed the door, and set the pneumatic lift on its way up.
“The ship is yours?” The morran’s huge golden eyes narrowed in the gloom, aer voice lowering. “I know of only one breed of man that uses a ship of that specification, and they are seen even less often than they are spoken of.”
Wolff sat down on a chair inside the lift. “No, the ship is not mine.” He gazed at the rapidly flickering readout on the lift wall. “I am a passenger.”
“This is destination, or does you intend to return to the ship?”
“Oh, I intend to return. Soon, I hope. But first I have some business here.”
Wolff thought again of the Archer, Jed. Ever since the
Larkspur
had been hauled aground at the salvage station, he had been deeply intrigued by her kind. The
Larkspur
had been a ship, very much like the
Shamrock
, with dark corridors and an engine with an immensely powerful chimaera array. On the bridge the thin, frail body of its commander had lain, mummified over several centuries by the deathly cold penetrating the ship, a thin silver band still on her forehead. Wolff remembered the Archer’s face, hard and pale as a marble sculpture, almost as though the female still slept after so long drifting in the void. Like Jed, she was fine-boned, with the almost complete melanin absence in the skin that the light of no sun had seemed to ever touch. Very dark hair, almost black, thickly mingled with the grey of age had been styled in the same precise, symmetrical manner as Jed’s. She had worn the same skullcap of dark polymer, and the same richly patterned overtunic of some soft material, fringed at the hems and coming down to the knees and elbows, over black close-fitting garments covering the arms and legs.
Wolff had felt a kind of fearful wonder as he looked upon the body on the bridge, that he, Gerald Wolff, stood here in this sepulchre, a place this Archer would never have allowed any other than herself and her apprentices to tread.
Why would someone want such a lifestyle? Who would want that unbearable solitude, century after century? Wolff remembered the sad loneliness in Belthede’s petrified countenance, and wondered what it could have been that had driven her to lie down and die after all that time. She had died of no injury. Her brain had simply shut down to leave her body to waste.
Some of that same despairing loneliness he saw, too, in young Jed, held in check by that unbreakable fiery arrogance, although it was drilled into this Code of hers too much to call spirit. He could almost see something beneath that defiance in her eyes that held over the ravages conurin and solitude had brought upon her, something that could eventually consume her and expunge the proud fire that held her above Belthede’s final indignity. Something inside her screamed out for someone solid and real to pull her out of her world of shadows.
It wasn’t just the Archer. It was the same whimsical tangent Wolff always took. He was ever drawn to a challenge, and something about Jed challenged him. He felt a sudden urge to turn back and forgo this foray and the possible learning of Taggart’s motives for coming here. He imagined the ship leaving the docking dendrites, him losing the chance for good. He’d come away without insurance.
“Why so taciturn, Gerald Wolff?” said Rh’Arrol casually.
“Time and tide wait for no man,” Wolff murmured.
Rh’Arrol made a narrow-eyed, open-nostrilled face at the apparent non sequitur.
The lift came to a halt and the door slid back. Rh’Arrol stuck out aer neck and surveyed the corridor noisily before leading the way.
This passageway was of a more subtle décor, and as Rh’Arrol led him, swinging aer neck about and clicking as though ae half expected some wild beast to leap out upon aer. The passageway gave way to a wide cavern of sand-coloured stone, mottled with dark and light bands, and stalactites and stalagmites forming pillars, like some sprawling cave system. Yet it was all too regular and organised to be convincing as a natural formation. Globes embedded in the higher ceilings emitted a soft light, and what looked like bamboo plants were set out in hollows filled with growing medium. Massive windows of vitreous alloy along one side of the garden let in bright sunlight, Satigenaria’s brilliance illuminating the ring wall with glaring albedo as it stretched away into mind-numbing perspective. The lift must have brought them through the entire breadth of the circumfercirc stratum.
The morran dropped into shadow, and began to push its way through thick, shade-dwelling leaves. The flora changed as Wolff followed Rh’Arrol farther, varying from acrogens in the shade of many different species, to equally different varieties of cacti in the hottest, brightest parts. But again, it was something blatantly artificial trying to look natural. All this was an elaborate display case for some rich fool’s horticultural findings.
As Rh’Arrol hurried along, Wolff lagged behind, looking at the specimens and their immaculate labelling. No fallen foliage littered the floor. No dead branches hung skeletal from the trees, nor did sallowness or blot despoil the many-hued leaves.
Wolff sat on a stone wall beside a fake stream. He rubbed at his leg. The blood had clotted and the fabric of his trousers stuck to him.
Rh’Arrol continued for a few yards without noticing then looked around abruptly. “Why does you stop?” ae demanded.
Wolff shrugged and Rh’Arrol scurried back to lurk under a succulent.
“Just thinking,” Wolff said.
Rh’Arrol crouched, bending knees over back in a defensive posture. “We should not be tarrying here.”
“Relax.” Wolff waved a hand at the surroundings. “Water’s free. So drink it. Eat the fruit.” Wolff reached out a hand and plucked a green-striped fruit with a long tail from a branch. Rh’Arrol stared at him as he sank his teeth into the succulent flesh.
“Not eat fruit!” The morran’s eyes widened. “Forbidden fruit!”
“Mmm,” concurred Wolff.
“Look, the water is free. The garden belongs the seignior. The trees and the fruit draw nutrients from the soil and belong to him. Come with me, Gerald Wolff. It is not far now.”
Wolff looked at his clock again and considered how he was going to go about this matter, and how he might break the surface of the water with this seignior. The sort of man who planted public gardens and forbade the public from eating the fruit was unlikely to be the sort who would humour some wandering maverick who hitched rides with the mysterious Archers, even if his intentions were noble.
Like Rh’Arrol had said, it wasn’t far before the garden gave way to a sequence of chambers with solid-looking doors in the walls.
Rh’Arrol led him to one such door. It had a brass knocker on the front, so he knocked. A male voice barked something from within, and he took it as an invitation to enter and pushed the door back.
Wolff passed through the doorway and found a man awaiting him. His shoulders were tensed and his hands spread, their thin fingers splayed upon the desk at which he sat.
Upon seeing Wolff, he appeared to let his guard down marginally, and drew a slender stylus from a rack of writing implements beside a plate bearing fruit, fibre loaf, and a piece of green cheese with a silver-hilted dirk stabbed in it.
“You should know how it displeases me to be disturbed,” the man snapped. He grimaced, showing slightly discoloured fangs.
“Well, forgive me, for I don’t. Are you the seignior?” Wolff addressed him.
“I am not,” the man replied, with some hauteur. His dark, lank hair was receding and drawn back into a greasy knot behind his head, and the way he arched his eyebrows gave the illusion that he’d stretched his forehead in the act of tying back his hair. A small dent was evident in the dead center of his forehead. He was clean-shaven, apart from a sleek growth of beard on his chin drawn into a tapering fork with some sort of polymer gel, like a viper’s tongue. His face was thin, sunken about the cheeks and with keen, dark-rimmed, grey eyes. His precise, efficient movements caught Wolff’s attention, and when he spoke, his teeth, long in the canines and marred and convoluted, showed, as well as a slick, dark tongue with a narrow tip. Wolff looked again at how he meticulously held the long shaft of the pen—an Archer, an arrow, that same brooding intelligence.
“I wish to see the seignior.”
The man narrowed his eyes. “You are not of this system.”
“No. I arrived here on the ship, the
Shamrock
.”
The man’s frown deepened, his eyes retracting into slits of white in the recesses of the dark sockets. “What breed of man doth curry the favour of the star Archers?”
“My name is Gerald Wolff, and yours?”
“Castellan Viprion, advisor of the management.” The castellan’s eyes turned and his gaze settled briefly on Rh’Arrol. “Citizen Wolff, on Carck-Westmath we do not bring morrans into the areas designated for the habitation of men.”
Rh’Arrol’s quills flushed and aer tentacles twitched, somewhere between meekness and annoyance.
“This morran is with me and does not concern you. As I said, I wish an audience with the seignior.”
“Are you sure you wish to see the seignior?” Viprion licked his lips.
“That is what I asked, is it not?” Viprion’s tone annoyed Wolff. Something in his parlance suggested a cryptic undertone to each assertion.
Viprion got to his feet in an unhurried sort of way. His clothing was entirely black, covered with lurid sequins, and belted tightly around an already lean waist. His thinness and discoloured teeth already suggested that he was a conurin addict. Something between a smile and a sneer twisted his mouth. “I would not grant you permission to see the seignior under normal circumstances, particularly not with a morran. However, a man with the benediction of the Archers I see may be a separate case. Follow, then, if that’s your will.”
The castellan led them through another door and down a long corridor. He walked ahead of Wolff and Rh’Arrol, paying them little attention. Wolff had not known Viprion for long, but already he had formed a preliminary opinion of the castellan as untrustworthy and almost loathsome. This man was no idiot, Wolff thought. He could surely not overlook security. How could he know no weapon was hidden about Wolff’s person, or in Rh’Arrol’s smock, considering the contempt with which morrankind seemed to be treated on Carck-Westmathlon?