The Neutronium Alchemist

  “Yet you spoke the truth, lady. As always. It was foolish of me, I admit, aye, and reckless too. For you and the little one must remain safe up here.” He turned and looked at the holoscreen. They were over the side of Norfolk which was turned to face Duchess, a harsh vista of reds and black.

  “Why, Fletcher? What was so important about following Quinn Dexter? The navy can take care of him. Are you worried what’ll happen if he gets loose on another planet?”

  “Not exactly, lady. Alas, there are many possessed abroad in your fine Confederation now. No, I have seen into that man’s heart, and he frightens me sorely, Lady Louise, a fright more profound than the hell of beyond. He is the strange one I felt earlier. He is not as other possessed. He is a monster, a bringer of evil. I have resolved this matter in my own mind, though it has taken many hours of struggle. I must become his nemesis.”

  “Dexter’s?” she said weakly.

  “Yes, my lady. I think he may be the reason Our Lord blessed me to return. I am vouchsafed a clarity in this regard I cannot in conscience ignore. I must raise the alarm before he can advance his schemes further to the misery of other worlds.”

  “But it’s not possible for us to go after him.”

  “Aye, lady, such a conundrum has a fierce grip upon my heart, borrowed though it be. It squeezes like a fire. To have been so close, and to lose the scent.”

  “We might not have lost him,” Louise said, her thoughts aching they were spinning so fast.

  “How so, lady?”

  “He said he was going to Earth. To Earth so he could hurt someone … Banneth. He was going to hurt Banneth.”

  “Then Banneth must be warned. He will commit such terrible atrocities in pursuit of his devilsome aims. I can never purge what he said of the little one from my mind. To even think such filth. Only in his head do such ideas dwell.”

  “Well, we are going to Mars anyway. I expect there will be more ships flying to Earth than to Tranquillity. But I don’t have a clue how you could find Banneth once you get there.”

  “Every voyage is divided into stages, lady. It is best to sail them one at a time.”

  She watched him for some while as the holoscreen’s pallid light washed across his rapt face. “Why did you mutiny, Fletcher? Was it truly terrible on the Bounty?”

  He gazed at her in surprise, then slowly smiled. “Not the conditions, lady, though I doubt you would much care for them. It was one man, my captain. He it was, the force moving my life towards the shore of destiny. William Bligh was my friend when the voyage started, strange though it is to recount such a fact now. But oh, how the sea changed him.

  He was embittered by his lack of promotion, fired by his notions of how a ship should be run. Never have I witnessed such barbarism from a man who claimed to be civilized, nor endured such treatment at his hands. I will spare you the anguish of detail, my fair lady Louise, but suffice it to say that all men have a breaking point. And mine was found during that long, dreadful voyage. However, I endure no shame over my actions. Many good and honest men were freed from his tyranny.”

  “Then you were in the right?”

  “I believe so. If this day I were called before the captains in a court-martial, I could give a just account of my actions.”

  “Now you want to do something similar again. Freeing people, I mean.”

  “Yes, lady. Though I would endure a thousand voyages with Bligh as my master in preference to one with Quinn Dexter. I had thought William Bligh versed in the ways of cruelty. I see now how mistaken I was. Now, to my horror, I have looked upon true evil. I will not forget the form it takes.”

  Chapter 10

  The reporters had spent several days in prison, a phrase which their Organization captors studiously avoided; the preferred designation was house arrest, or protective confinement. They’d been singled out and spared when the possessed spread through San Angeles, then corralled with their families in the Uorestone Tower. Patricia Mangano who was in charge of the guard detail allowed the children to play in the opulent lounges while parents mixed freely, speculating on their circumstances and rehashing old gossip as only their profession knew how.

  Five times in the last couple of days small groups had been taken out to tour the city, observing the steady falsification of buildings which was the hallmark of a land under possession. Once-familiar suburban streets had undergone timewarps overnight. It was as though some kind of dark architectural ivy were slowly creeping its way upwards, turning chrome-glass to stone, crinkling flat surfaces into arches, pillars, and statues. A plethora of era enclaves had emerged, ranging from 1950s New York avenues to timeless whitewashed Mediterranean villas, Russian dachas to traditional Japanese houses. All of them were ameliorated, more wistful renderings of real life.

  The reporters recorded it all as faithfully as they could with their glitch-prone neural nanonic memory cells. This morning, though, was different. All of them had been summoned from their rooms, herded onto buses, and driven the five kilometres to City Hall. They were escorted from the buses by Organization gangsters and assembled on the sidewalk, forming a line between the autoway and the skyscraper’s elaborate arched entrance. On Patricia’s order the gangsters took several paces back, leaving the reporters to themselves.

  Gus Remar found his neural nanonics coming back on-line, and immediately started to record his full sensorium, datavising his flek recorder block to make a backup copy. It had been a long time since he’d covered a story in the field. These days he was a senior studio editor at the city’s Time Universe bureau, but the old skill was still there. He started to scan around.

  There were no vehicles using the autoway, but crowds were lining the sidewalk, five or six deep at the barrier. When he switched to long-range focus he could see they stretched back for about three blocks. The possessed were a majority, easy to spot in their epoch garments: the outlandish and the tediously uninspired. They seemed to be mingling easily enough with the non-possessed.

  A slight fracas two hundred metres away at the back of the crowd caught Gus’s attention. His enhanced retinas zoomed in.

  Two men were pushing at each other, faces red with anger. One was a dark, handsome youth, barely twenty with perfectly trimmed black hair; dressed in leather jacket and trousers. An acoustic guitar was slung over his back. The second was older, in his forties, and considerably fatter. His attire was the most bizarre Gus had yet seen on display; some kind of white suit, smothered in rhinestones, with trousers flaring over thirty centimetres around his ankles, and collars which looked like small aircraft wings. Large amber-tinted sunglasses covered a third of his puffed-out face. If it hadn’t been for the circumstances, Gus would have said it was a father quarrelling with his son. He shunted his audio discrimination program into primary mode.

  “Goddamn fake,” the younger man shouted with a rich Southern drawl. “I was never this.” Hands flicked insultingly over the front of the white costume, ruffling the fit. “You’re what they squeezed me into. You ain’t nothing but a sick disease the record companies cooked up to make money. I would never come back as you.”

  The larger man pushed him away. “Who are you calling a fake, son? I am the King, the one and only.”

  The shoving began in earnest; both of them trying to floor the other.

  Amber sunglasses went spinning. Organization gangsters moved in quickly to separate them, but not before the younger Elvis had unslung his guitar ready to brain the Vegas version.

  Gus never saw the outcome. The crowd started cheering. A cavalcade had turned onto the autoway. Police motorcycles (Harley-Davidsons, according to Gus’s encyclopedia memory file) appeared first, ten of them with blue and red lights flashing. They were followed by a huge limousine which crawled along at little more than walking pace: a 1920s Cadillac sedan which looked absurdly massive, fat tyres bulging from the weight of its armour plated bodywork. Glass that was at least five centimetres thick shaded the interior aquarium-green. There was one man sitting in the back, wav
ing happily at the crowd.

  The city was going wild for him. Al grinned around his cigar and gave them a thumbs-up. Je-zus, but it was like the good old days, riding around in this very same bulletproof Cadillac with the pedestrians staring openmouthed as he went past. In Chicago they’d known it contained a prince of the city. And now in San Angeles they goddamn well knew it again.

  The Cadillac drew to a halt outside City Hall. A smiling Dwight Salerno came down the steps to open the door.

  “Good to see you back, Al. We missed you.”

  Al kissed him on both cheeks, then turned to face the ecstatic crowd, clasping his hands together above his head like he was a prizefighter posing over a whipped opponent. They roared their approval. White fire cascaded and fizzed over the autoway as if Zeus were putting on a Fourth of July display.

  “I love you guys!” Al bellowed at the faceless mass of chuckleheads.

  “Together ain’t no miserable Confederation fucker gonna stop us doing what we wanna do.”

  They couldn’t hear the words, not even those in the front rank. But the content was clear enough. The laudation increased.

  With one hand still waving frantically, Al turned around and bounded up the stairs into City Hall. Always leave them wanting more, Jez said.

  The conference was held in the lobby, a vaulting four-storey cavern that took up over half of the ground floor. An avenue of huge palm trees, cloned from California originals, stretched from the doors to the vast reception desk. Today their solartubes were diminished to an off-white fluorescence, their bowls of loam drying out. Other signs of neglect and hurried tidying were in evidence: defunct valet mechanoids lined up along one wall, emergency exit doors missing, scraps of rubbish swept into piles behind stilled escalators.

  The reception desk had been completely cleared, and a row of chairs placed behind it. Al sat in the centre, with two lieutenants on either side. His chair had been raised slightly. He watched the nervous reporters being brought in and marshalled on the floor in front of him.

  When they’d shushed down he rose to his feet.

  “My name is Al Capone, and I suppose you’re all wondering why I asked you here,” he said, and chuckled. Their answering grins were few and far between. Tight asses. “Okay, I’ll lay it on the line for you; you’re here because I want the whole Confederation to know what’s been going down in these parts. Once they know and understand then that’s gonna save everyone a shitload of grief.” He took off his grey fedora and put it down carefully on the polished desk. “It’s an easy situation. My Organization is now in charge of the whole New California system. We’re keeping the planet and the asteroid settlements in order, no exceptions. Now we ain’t out to harm anyone, we just use our clout to keep things flowing along as best they’ll go, same as any other government.”

  “Are you running the Edenist habitats, too?” a reporter asked. The rest flinched, waiting for Patricia Mangano’s retribution. It never came, though she looked far from happy.

  “Smart of you, buddy,” Al acknowledged with a grudging smile. “No, I ain’t running the Edenist habitats. I could. But I ain’t. Know why? Because we’re about evenly matched, that’s why. We could do a lot of damage to each other if we ever came to fighting. Too much. I don’t want that. I don’t want people sent into the beyond on account of some penny-ante dispute over territory. I’ve been there myself, it’s worse than any fucking nightmare you can imagine; it shouldn’t happen to anyone.”

  “Why do you think you’ve been returned from the beyond, Al? Has God passed judgement on you?”

  “You got me there, lady. I don’t know why any of this started. But I’ll tell you guys this much: I never saw no angels or no demons while I was stuck in the beyond, none of us did. All I know is we’re back. It ain’t no one’s fault, it just happened. And now we gotta make the best of what’s a pretty shitty deal, that’s what the Organization is for.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Capone,” Gus said, encouraged by the response to earlier questions. “What’s the point of your Organization? You don’t need it. The possessed can do whatever they want.”

  “Sorry, buddy, you’re way wrong there. Maybe we don’t need quite the same government as we had before, not all that tax, and regulations, and ideology, and shit. But you’ve got to have order, and that’s what I provide. I’m doing everyone a favour by taking charge like this. I’m protecting the possessed from attack by the Confederation Navy. I’m looking out for a whole load of non-possessed; because I’m telling you, without me you certainly wouldn’t be standing here in charge of your own body. See, I’m providing for all kinds of people, even though half of them don’t appreciate it right now. The possessed didn’t have jack shit worked out about where they were going until I came along. Now we’re all working together, making it happen. All because of me and the Organization. If I hadn’t stepped in and kept things going the cities would have busted down, we would have had a whole flood of lost boys heading for the countryside. Listen, I’ve seen the Depression firsthand, I know what it’s like for people who don’t have a job or something to do. And that’s what we were heading for here.”

  “So what are your long-range goals, Al? What’s your Organization going to do next?”

  “Smooth things out. No one is trying to deny things are still a little rough around the edges down here. We need to work on what kind of society we can build.”

  “Is it true you’re planning to attack the Confederation?”

  “That’s pure bullshit, buddy. Je-zus, I don’t know where you got that rumour from. No of course we’re not going to attack anyone. But we can defend ourselves pretty good if the Confederation Navy tries any funny stuff, we sure got the ships for that. Hell, I don’t want that to happen.

  We just want to be peaceable neighbours with everyone. I might even ask if we can join the Confederation.” At the murmur of surprise echoing through the lobby he grinned around happily. “Yeah. Why the hell not? Sure we can ask to join. Maybe some good will come out of it, some kind of compromise that’ll make everyone happy; a solution to all the souls that wanna come back. The Organization can pay Confederation longhairs to grow us all new bodies from scratch, something like that.”

  “You mean you’d give up your body if a clone was available?”

  Al frowned as Emmet leaned over to murmur in his ear, explaining what a clone was. “Sure,” he said. “Like I told you, we’re all the victims of circumstance.”

  “You believe peaceful coexistence is possible?”

  Al’s jocularity darkened. “You’d better fucking believe it, buddy. We’re back, and we’re here to stay. Grab that? What I’m trying to convince you guys is that we ain’t no end of the world threat, it’s not us who’s the riders of the Apocalypse. We’ve proved possessed and non-possessed can live together on this planet. Okay, so people out there are alarmed right now, that’s only natural. But we’re frightened too, you can’t expect us to go back to the beyond. We’ve got to work together on this. I’m personally offering the Assembly President my hand in friendship. Now that’s an offer he can’t refuse.”

  ***

  The glowing red clouds had begun to grow, small ruby speckles blossoming right across Norfolk. Louise, Fletcher, and Genevieve spent their first day in orbit watching the images received by the Far Realm’s external cameras. Kesteven island was by far the worst. A solid crimson aureole had gathered to mask the land, its shape a distended mockery of the coastline it was obscuring. Strands of ordinary white cloud malingered around its disciplined edges, only to be rebuffed by invisible winds if they drifted too close.

  Fletcher assured the girls that in itself the red cloud was harmless. “A simple manifestation of will,” he proclaimed. “Nothing more.”

  “You mean it’s just a wish?” Genevieve asked, intrigued. She had woken almost purged of her emotional turmoil; there were none of yesterday’s periods of manic exuberance or haunted silences. Although she was quieter than usual; which Louise thought was about
right. She didn’t feel like talking much, either. Neither she nor Fletcher had mentioned the Tantu.

  “Quite so, little one.”

  “But why are they wishing it?”

  “So that they can seek refuge below it from the emptiness of the universe. Even this planet’s sky, which has little night, is not a sight to cherish.”

  Over thirty islands now had traces of redness in the air. Louise likened it to watching the outbreak of some terrible disease, a swelling cancer gnawing away at the flesh of her world.

  Furay and Endron had come down into the lounge a few times, keeping them informed of the navy squadron’s actions, and the army’s progress. Neither of which amounted to much. The army had landed on two islands, Shropshire and Lindsey, hoping to retake their capitals. But reports from the forwards units were confused.

  “Same problem as we had with Kesteven,” Furay confided when he brought them lunch. “We can’t support the lads on the ground because we don’t have any reliable targeting information. And that red cloud has got the admiral badly worried. None of the technical staff can explain it.”

  By midafternoon, ship’s time, the army commanders had lost contact with half of their troops. The red cloud was visible over forty-eight islands, nine of which it covered completely. As Duke-day ended for Ramsey island slender wisps were located over a couple of villages. Teams of reserve soldiers were hurriedly flown in from Norwich. In both cases contact was lost within fifteen minutes of them entering the area.

  Louise watched grimly as the coiling cloud thickened over each village.

  “I was right,” she said miserably. “There’s nothing anybody here can do. It’s only a matter of time now.”

  ***

  Tolton made his way up the narrow creek, water from the narrow stream slopping over his glittery purple shoes. The top of the steep bank, a fringe of sandy grass, was several centimetres above his head. He couldn’t see out onto the parkland, and nobody could see him—thankfully.