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Anthony Peacey
ended thousands of years ago for the emperors. Trivash in its last
millennia had become a Sullenbauer culture: much of the science
they used they no longer understood, leaning thoughtlessly upon
vast networks of self-renewing data and technical instrumentation.
The young science of Fomalhaut was a shot in the arm for a while,
but Fomalhaut broke free, built its muscles and appeared one day
over Trivash in a myriad silver ships that burnt away even the blue-
lilac sky of the emperors’ garden world — and most of the other
Trivashti worlds while they were at it.
‘The tombs of some of the emperors have long been supposed to
be like palaces,’ said Fainey-Juveh.
M y imagination took new visionary leaps into these wondrous
subterranean silent places where everything the emperor had
touched in life was meticulously, miraculously, preserved and the
emperors themselves lay embedded in living crystal — but really
living, a thing from some weird lost star, a thing with a lifespan of
billions of years, a thing with unparalleled mother love that would
atom by atom guard whatever was with proper scientific ritual
introduced into its body. O Sleezy, my Sleezy I would maybe have
to abandon you for this ageless mother immortal crystal but that I
supposed all this talk of tombs beneath the glass-slag surface of
Trivash to be legend now.
‘Those of the early last millennium were supposed to have been
the most magnificent,’ said Fainey-Juveh.
I should have known he was getting at something, he was speaking in an even drier, less accented voice.
‘They must have believed in an afterlife,’ I suggested.
‘By then science and magic could scarcely be separated in their
thought, some believe.’ His vanishing breath of emphasis scorned
the some who believed that. ‘O r a man like Sesemene may have calculated to preserve his body until a future science could restore him to life.’
For a strange moment I thought this crazy Fainey-Juveh with his
shopping bag of atom-tagged reagents wanted to find Sesemene,
breathe that monstrous soul back into the nostrils of the eagle beak
and set him loose in the mediocre m odern cosmos.
O ut of silence and the muted instrument hum, eyeglasses swivelling to pin me with twin batteries of reflected lights, he said, ‘Would you like to see his tomb?’
‘Yeah, sure. That would be some sight, hey?’
Then I realised what he meant.
Jaggm g
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Silence.
My heart was beating.
He saw me, and smiled.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’
Yes yes yes. Kolissa would have to wait a day or two more. The
revolution would be small stuff. No j agger could refuse such an opportunity — he would not be a jagger. W hat I understood perfectly now was — Fainey-Juveh knew what he was doing. He had found
the deepest deep palace-tomb of Sesemene, access was assured, the
tomb was undisturbed, Sesemene himself slept within his immortal
mother self mother father self of self crystal. And I would actually
see that face — would see that face —
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I am an archaeologist,’ he said.
O f course.
Then his sneak relayed a hard bored voice telling us we could not
approach Otzapoc. No picture, but I visionarily saw a tiny cutback moustache jerking up and down as the words were projected.
No discussion either — the voice was still twenty minutes away, so
forty minutes between question and answer except that no answer
would come, it sounded like. That shitwit Jahenry! How long
would this last? I had just decided to go to Trivash for a few days but
— yes, but, but — as soon as this big prick tells me I can’t land on
Otzapoc anyway, I want only to go there, to Otzapoc, to Kolissa,
and all my bloody fears for her come rushing back, and gaudy gossamer empires or fossil empires of the fairytale kids’ story past are forgotten, for I am tiny and empty in some tinfoil little insect can
lost in endless space night — empty, empty in the stomach with my
guts hanging down a pillar, or they’re lost out there in space back
before our last cut in the far lost utter cold like a bunch of frozen
sausages.
Fainey-Juveh is not pleased either. His eyeglasses are blank windows, facing me though probably thinking of something else like some nuisance this is going to cause him. At last he says,
‘God damn them!’
We were half a Bubutap year away from Bubutap along that
great one’s orbit, we had to cross the system slinging high over
Bennet-Kenny, a seven hour run. Now that I was thrown upon his
hospitality for a time beyond our control I wondered if he
