offers: rival cyberneticists vying for the prestige of tackling such a difficult project. Things were different. Even the crudest kinds of surgery were now difficult or impossibly expensive. Only a handful of specialists retained the means to even attempt such work, and they were free to charge whatever they liked.
Even Celestine, who had been wealthier than me, could only afford to have me repaired, not rectified. That — and the other matter — almost bankrupted us.
And yet she cared for me.
There were those who saw us and imagined that the creature with her — the thing that trotted by her like a stiff, diamond-skinned, grotesque mechanical dog — was merely a strange choice of pet. Sometimes they sensed something unusual in our relationship — the way she might whisper an aside to me, or the way I might appear to be leading her — and they would look at me, intently, before I stared into their eyes with the blinding red scrutiny of my vision.
Then they would always look away.
And for a long time — until the dreams became too much — that was how it was.
Yet now I pad into the night, Celestine unaware that I have left our apartment. Outside, dangerous gangs infiltrate the shadowed, half-flooded streets. They call this part of Chasm City the Mulch and it is the only place where we can afford to live now. Certainly we could have afforded something better — something much better — if I had not been forced to put aside money in readiness for this day. But Celestine knows nothing of that.
The Mulch is not as bad as it used to be, but it would still have struck the earlier me as a vile place in which to exist. Even now I am instinctively wary, my enhanced eyes dwelling on the various crudely fashioned blades and crossbows that the gangs flaunt. Not all of the creatures who haunt the night are technically human. There are things with gills that can barely breathe in open air. There are other things that resemble pigs, and they are the worst of all.
But I do not fear them.
I slink between shadows, my thin, doglike form confusing them. I squeeze through the gaps in collapsed buildings, effortlessly escaping the few who are foolish enough to chase me. Now and then I even stop and confront them, standing with my back arched.
My red gaze stabs through them.
I continue on my way.
Presently I reach the appointed area. At first it looks deserted — there are no gangs here — but then a figure emerges from the gloom, trudging through ankle-deep caramel-brown floodwater. The figure is thin and dark, and with each step it makes there is a small, precise whine. It comes into view and I observe that the woman — for it is a woman, I think — is wearing an exoskeleton. Her skin is the black of interstellar space, and her small, exquisitely featured head is perched above a neck that has been extended by several vertebrae. She wears copper rings around her neck, and her fingernails — which I see clicking against the thighs of her exoskeleton — are as long as stilettos.
I think she is strange, but she sees me and flinches.
‘Are you… ?’ she starts to say.
‘I am Richard Swift,’ I answer.
She nods almost imperceptibly — it cannot be easy, bending that neck — and introduces herself. ‘I am Triumvir Verika Abebi, of the lighthugger Poseidon. I sincerely hope you are not wasting my time.’
‘I can pay you, don’t you worry.’
She looks at me with something between pity and awe. ‘You haven’t even told me what it is you want.’
‘That’s easy,’ I say. ‘I want you to take me somewhere.’
TURQUOISE DAYS
‘Set sail in those Turquoise Days’
ONE
Naqi Okpik waited until her sister was safely asleep before she stepped onto the railed balcony that circled the gondola.
It was the most perfectly warm and still summer night in months. Even the breeze caused by the airship’s motion was warmer than usual, as soft against her cheek as the breath of an attentive lover. Above, yet hidden by the black curve of the vacuum-bag, the two moons were nearly at their fullest. Microscopic creatures sparkled a hundred metres under the airship, great schools of them daubing galaxies against the profound black of the sea. Spirals, flukes and arms of luminescence wheeled and coiled as if in thrall to secret music.
Naqi looked to the rear, where the airship’s ceramic-jacketed sensor pod carved a twinkling furrow. Pinks and rubies and furious greens sparkled in the wake. Occasionally they darted from point to point with the nervous motion of kingfishers. As ever, she was alert to anything unusual in movements of the messenger sprites, anything that might merit a note in the latest circular, or even a full-blown article in one of the major journals of Juggler studies. But there was nothing odd happening tonight, no yet-to-be catalogued forms or behaviour patterns, nothing that might indicate more significant Pattern Juggler activity.
She walked around the airship’s balcony until she had reached the stern, where the submersible sensor pod was tethered by a long fibre-optic dragline. Naqi pulled a long hinged stick from her pocket, flicked it open in the manner of a courtesan’s fan and then waved it close to the winch assembly. The default watercoloured lilies and sea serpents melted away, replaced by tables of numbers, sinuous graphs and trembling histograms. A glance established that there was nothing surprising here either, but the data would still form a useful calibration set for other experiments.
As she closed the fan — delicately, for it was worth almost as much as the airship itself — Naqi reminded herself that it was a day since she had gathered the last batch of incoming messages. Rot had taken out the connection between the antenna and the gondola during the last expedition, and since then collecting the messages had become a chore, to be taken in turns or traded for less tedious tasks.
Naqi gripped a handrail and swung out behind the airship. Here the vacuum-bag overhung the gondola by only a metre, and a grilled ladder allowed her to climb around the overhang and scramble onto the flat top of the bag. She moved gingerly, bare feet against rusting rungs, doing her best not to disturb Mina. The airship rocked and creaked a little as she found her balance on the top and then was again silent and still. The churning of its motors was so quiet that Naqi had long ago filtered the sound from her experience.
All was calm, beautifully so.
In the moonlight the antenna was a single dark flower rising from the broad back of the bladder. Naqi started moving along the railed catwalk that led to it, steadying herself as she went but feeling much less vertigo than would have been the case in daylight.
Then she froze, certain that she was being watched.
Just within Naqi’s peripheral vision appeared a messenger sprite. It had flown to the height of the airship and was now shadowing it from a distance of ten or twelve metres. Naqi gasped, delighted and unnerved at the same time. Apart from dead specimens this was the first time Naqi had ever seen a sprite this close. The organism had the approximate size and morphology of a terrestrial hummingbird, yet it glowed like a lantern. Naqi recognised it immediately as a long-range packet carrier. Its belly would be stuffed with data coded into tightly packed wads of RNA, locked within microscopic protein capsomeres. The packet carrier’s head was a smooth teardrop, patterned with luminous pastel markings, but lacking any other detail save for two black eyes positioned above the midline. Inside the head was a cluster of neurones, which encoded the positions of the brightest circumpolar stars. Other than that, sprites had only the most rudimentary kind of intelligence. They existed to shift information between nodal points in the ocean when the usual chemical signalling pathways were deemed too slow or imprecise. The
