Marmodesse. Part 1

Marmodesse.

Terry Dowling.

WE were looking for Dewi Dammo and stood a better chance than most. We had an informer: careful, clever, threatened Peter Pederson, a double agent betrayed and hunted, fully conditioned by Dewi and about to die. He sat across from us in the quiet lobby of the Grand Hotel in Angel Bay, and we could see at a glance that Dewi had gotten to him. The face was haggard, the eyes he turned on us were dull from the death-conditioning. Every thought about Dewi's affairs merely hastened his end, and had brought Pederson to the point where the suffering was too great.

Death was the only choice, and he had come to us because he knew we were after Dewi.

"We want him, Peter," I said, and my gesture included not only the small group of us from Rynosseros sitting in the big lobby chairs on this quiet afternoon, but the white-suited doctor Peter had told his story to on the phone and had arranged to meet at this fateful rendezvous. Jarvain Alis, flanked by his two silent a.s.sistants, was a member of the exclusive Inner Eye medical-religious sect, and his people had ample cause to hate Dewi.

"Like you, Captain Tom, I have been briefed on the phone," Doctor Alis said.

"Peter is an old patient of mine. It was easy to invoke some hypnotic restrainers we once used, to ease his spirits now and relieve the suffering. He is still very aware. He knows you cannot undo an expensive, professionally-seeded death-conditioning like these new ones, especially one so advanced. Cryogenics postpones it, nothing more; lobotomies give you a half-life, without awareness ever again. Peter has chosen a quick moment of "At present, my son and I are extremely interested in genetics and heredity." agony on the chance that what he tells us might bring Dewi to justice. Is this correct, Peter?"

Pederson nodded, his face showing intense concentration. With the strange detachment of his sect, Jarvain Alis continued. "You won't get much, gentlemen. Ten words maximum. The constrainer is first cla.s.s. We must listen carefully."

I leant forward in my chair, ready to do just that. My companions - Shannon, Rim and Scarbo - did the same.

"Peter, we need an ident.i.ty clue of some kind and a location. Is that clear?"

"Yes," Pederson said, his face pale with stress, his mouth a tight line. Despite Doctor Alis' hypnotically-implanted distractors, the effort to speak at all had become an incredible burden. The voice was a ghost of the strong tones I had heard on the phone an hour before, asking us to come to the Grand Hotel.

I turned to Shannon, Rim and Scarbo. "This is it," I said and switched on the portable recorder we had with us. I moved closer to Pederson. "All right, Peter. An ident.i.ty clue and a location. Doctor Alis, release him."

"Sovereign!" Alis said, giving the keyword. Pederson slumped a little. His dull eyes gained some life, darted a wild glance about the room. looked at Alis and pleadingly at the rest of us.

"Now!" I said.

"Three ...!" Pederson managed to say, then screamed, doubling up in agony, unable to finish. "Location." I cried.

Pederson shouted words garbled by pain and, death. He dropped to the floor, spasmed twice and was dead.

Jarvain Alis went to him at once, made a quick, examination, then gestured to his two a.s.sistants, who came and carried the body away. In the s.p.a.ce, of a minute, it was as if all that terror and suffering had not existed. The lobby was quiet, deserter but fordthe five of us. The hotel staff had not even broken their siestas to see what had happened. Questions were rarely asked in Angel Bay.

I pa.s.sed out pieces of paper and pencils for the next part of the proceedings.

"Playback!" Doctor Alis said, with the same coolness as before. I touched the contact. Pederson's voice came back to us, anything like words enhanced, the sounds of his agony dampened by the machine's sorters. Adefinite word pattern was evident in the tonalities. We played it six, nine, twelve times, each of us writing down our interpretations on the pieces of paper.

We were some time at it, but eventually the writing stopped and the papers were pa.s.sed in. I recorded the suggestions on the white message boardd we had borrowed from the reception desk earlierer.

"We all agree on Peter's first word: Three," I said. "These are the final interpretations offered for the others."

I love the debtors.

I love the detours.

I love (a name: Ladetous?) I love the dead too.

Isle of Ladettus.

"Only the last one seems to be a location," Jarvain Alis said. "Where is Ladettus?"

Behind me, old Ben Scarbo made a thoughtful sound. "No, Doctor. It's a consonance, d'ye see? We at least know it's an island. "I love" is 'Isle of'. The other suggestions don't begin to satisfy Tom's arrangement with Pederson for a location."

"Ben's right," I said. "Compare 'Ladettus' in the last one with the final words in the first two: 'the debtors' and 'the detours'."

"Yeah," Scarbo continued. "Like your Inner Eye - a consonance." Alis' manner became even more cool. "What do you mean?" Scarbo snorted. "Inner Eye is a schism, a religious medical order like the Knights Hospitaller used to be or the Cistercians or..."

"No, Captain. Let your friend continue!"

"...a splinter sect of Christianity, based on the letters above Christ's head on Calvary: INRI. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. I-N-R-I, you see? Inner Eye. A consonance."

"That is not true!"

"I wouldn't know, Doctor. But that pupil-less eye you wear is the sign of the fish, Ichthus, the sign for Jesus, very stylised. Don't take offence. It's just an example."

But Jarvain Alis was on his feet, staring down at us. "Our sign is from Egypt's Old Kingdom, from the Third Dynasty. It represents the modified Eye of Ra and pre-dates Christianity. It goes back to Imhotep and the early Pyramid Age. It takes on some of the Atenist teachings. Why do you persist in this?

Why not speak of the Third Eye, the pineal gland, or the Cult of the Secret Self?"

"I-N-R-I," Scarbo said.

"I will not put up with this, Captain Tom! I wish you luck. I trust you will keep my people informed so that we too can seek retribution from Dewi Dammo in our turn."

He stalked off, joined his a.s.sistants at the door to the street, and left the hotel.

I stared at Scarbo. "Ben, why?"

Our wiry old kitemaster went to the board. "I don't trust him, Tom. You know as well as I do that those distractors in poor Pederson could've been repressors, put there by the man supposed to help him. Doctor Alis could be working with Dewi; he could be Dewi Dammo for all we know.!"

"So why have him leave? Why not keep him here where we can watch him?"

"Because we don't want him to know what we know."

"What do we know, Ben?" Rim said.

Scarbo took up the board marker and added five more words to the list.

"Isle of the Dead Tours," he said. "We've got our location. The Inland Sea. The mortuary islands."

Of all the terraforming projects carried out by the Ab'0 Princess in the new Australia, the Inland Sea is arguably the most beautiful. The vast freshwater lake lies to the north-east of the burning inner deserts, 70 square miles of warm clear water lapping at the doorsteps of twelve resort towns, bordered by marinas and narrow fertile strips as dependent on the cooling breezes and the irrigation channels as ever the lands of Egypt and Sumer were on their rivers of plenty.

Dotted across the Inland Sea are the small mortuary islands, created, maintained and owned by the different tribes, who rent out their facilities. If Pederson's last words could be believed, it would be just like Dewi to be hiding there, working his mischief through agents.

That much conformed with what we knew of Dewi. By all accounts he was a ruthless individual, completely self-serving and very cruel, if the stories could be believed. Some maintained he was the ageing scientist who had devised the charling process, who had gone to the Inland Sea to die, following the dictates of Inner Eye. But these were only rumours. Dewi could well be half a continent away. We knew for certain only that he had operations along the Charling Coast, that he had some way of keeping the powerful Ab'O tribes there reasonably in check, that the great fortune he had ama.s.sed was used to pay for expensive hi-tech a.s.sistance, to help him run his many illicit operations: weapons and drug smuggling, black-marketing in hi-tech and charling products. More importantly, the isles of the dead were there and it was the only clue we had.

We set out from Angel Bay the next morning, running under twenty cables and forty kites along Adanaya-Nos, the Road to the Sea.

We had the desert to ourselves. A tribal sand-ship left Angel Bay as we did, but it was a small charvi and its fourteen kites could not compete with the mighty tiers and parafoils Scarbo put in the warm blue sky. Rynosseros was a splendid sight under her canopy, the "proud heart of the peac.o.c.k" to use Scarbo's talk.

I stood on the p.o.o.p with Shannon and Ben, watching the desert and laughing at Scarbo's excesses. There is always something exhilarating about heading for the Inland Sea at the heart of the continent. Despite the serious nature of our mission, the mood affected us all, and Scarbo was using the perfect conditions to dress Rynosseros for both speed and display, thinking to roll into Port Merilyn as what the caste conscious Ab'Os call a G.o.d-ship. Shannon and I watched him minding the cables with his keen eye, running back and forth from cable-boss to helm, shouting instructions to Rim, Strengi and Hammon. Shannon and I made our jokes but it was good to see Scarbo this happy. He is a grand master of the aeropleuristic art, possibly the best living kitesman there is. Jib-kites, moonrakers, harvesters, Rogallo limp-wings, the fanciful insect-shaped semis, the Edo and Sode variables, the five-point stars, the six-points, the Bede Wing, the man-lifters, the deep-skies, the wind-misers and angels, Scarbo knows them all. I cannot count the times other charvis have matched speed with us and sent their kitemasters across on a bosun's line so they can ask Scabo about line-fouling or multiple-drogues or arranging top-kites and racing footmen - kiting lore so many younger kitesmen have lost or never bothered to learn.

There have been famous duels too. Red Lucas, the Queenslander, once raced us from Sollelen to Ayuguyar, an undeclared contest between his kitemaster, a Tongan named Mussezo, and Scarbo. For the better part of a day, Lucas' charvi matched Rynosseros, but with Ayuguyar in sight, Scarbo sent up two splendid Chinese Hawks, judging the winds so perfectly that the twenty-six cables he had running weren't fouled. We won that race by a hundred lengths. Mussezo had his own ship given to him by the Prince of the San-Topuri that day, though Scarbo refused the offer first, to my delight. I told Ben he could have been unrivalled king of the bright new Australian deserts, but he just grinned and said he was that already surely.

Shannon pointed to Scarbo's latest success-four brightly-coloured rollers. I laughed at the extravagance, at the sheer recklessness of it. Rollers are next to useless but they are beautiful to see, fabulous spinning tubes of colour that made Rynosseros seem like a strange machine frantically harvesting the sky.

"They'll never forget us!" I shouted down at the old man, and Scarbo grinned back.

But then two of our primary parafoils exploded above our heads and the sky shed ribbons of fire.

"Stations!" I cried, though the crew had already reacted. Scarbo showed the other side of his mastery then. The instant he saw we were under attack, he was at the cable-boss, freeing cables, dumping the display, shedding most of the upper canopy. Only he could do that so swiftly by hand, dodging the cables whipping up around him even as Shannon, in perfect synchronisation, brought costly stored power to the hull, pulling us safely clear of the settling canopy.

We hadn't seen our attacker yet, too much was happening, but if it was behind us then our falling kites worked in our favour, becoming a definite navigation hazard.

As the canopy sheared away, above and behind, Scarbo sent up our four racing footmen, the small st.u.r.dy wind-runners, and the wind-thieves to give us speed. The armatures and booms went out, Strengi got a pair of death-lamps clear of Scarbo's lines, the small refractive surfaces angling for the sun. Hammon brought up snaphaunces while Rim got a deck-lens working. Now we saw them - three charvis running at us from the stern, a mile distant but closing, low swift hulls each under a parasol of drab battle kites, with death lamps out above like the uppermost mantle in a rainforest, twisting and flashing, sending streaks of deadly light at us. Miraculously, all three had escaped our dumped canopy, or perhaps, further back, out of clear sight now with the dust-haze that had risen, another ship was at rest, having deliberately snared our kites so the others could proceed.

Rynosseros ran at 110k's. For a moment, we pulled ahead, but then our pursuers went to stored power as well and started gaining.

"Something's wrong!" Rim cried, at the controls of our lamps. "They're hitting us but we're not hitting them!"

Overhead, one of our footmen then another streamed a trail of smoke and began falling. Scarbo dumped them. I turned to Rim.

"Insulated hulls?" I asked.

"More than that," he said. "They're too close. Our lamps should be doing more in that grouping."

It was true, and it confirmed a suspicion I had. Fully-kited charvolants cannot travel so closely together at such speeds - too many accidents can happen, line-fouling, collisions from pitted road surfaces and faulty drive-cables, so many other factors. It was as unlikely as all three ships avoiding our canopy earlier, or all those death-lamps causing so little damage to us.

I stopped looking at three separate ships, studied instead the overall configuration of hulls and kites.

"Too much symmetry!" I cried.

"The left one's a fake!" Rim said at the same moment.

"Mirror-ships!" Scarbo yelled up from the commons. We all saw it. There was only one ship. The other two were enantiomorphs, dense high-resolution holoforms projected on a broad and powerful band - mirror images, reversed to give variations. It was a breach of Ab'0 codes - our attacker had illegal technology aboard and was not afraid to use it. Dewi was taking no chances. He could afford such risks, though by playing his hand he had at least confirmed Pederson's clue.

The Inland Sea, the Charling Coast, was it.

Now there was the sharp racket of snaphauce fire. Young Hamon was firing shot after shot at the death-lamps of the middle charvi, ignoring the two at the sides. Down on the commons, Scarbo and Strengi were coupling up two fighting kites: Spider, our black Javanese Avenger with its sharp edges, hooks and snare lines, and a special fighter known as Pinata.

When I saw what Ben was planning, I began losing speed, but gradually so our pursuer would not guess. With so few kites left, it seemed a natural development; we were a ship with low power reserves.

Spider shot out on helium lifts towards the charvi a hundred metres behind us. At the same time, up went Pinata, an innocent-looking inflatable, trailing back as if too hastily lofted and misdirected by a loose cable. Dewi's ship retaliated at once, not with lamps, lenses or mirror-flash, but with more illegal hi-tech. A beam of dazzling coherent light stabbed out from a deck-laser. Spider was gone in a burst of flame. But it had been a decoy, giving a more immediate target and letting Pinata get well clear of Rynosseros on its trailing line.

The laser bolt which then struck our silver inflatable did two things. It sent a power surge down the conducting cable into our acc.u.mulators, and it ruptured the insulated bladder, releasing a matrix of expanding grapple-lines which settled over the raider's canopy and dragged it to the desert. I added more drive to the wheels, using the new power to draw Rynosseros slowly clear of our pursuer. At the same time, Rim and Strengi used deck-lenses to burn the falling kites. There was an explosion, a whoof of flame as a parafoil went up - hydrogen-filled, a careless expedient on a war craft. The raider slowed, veered to one side, exposing its wheels. Rim got a burn-point on the tyres; another series of explosions there. The travel platform sagged and skewed about, the charvi nosed into the sand under its own burning kites and came to a stop.

It was a bizarre spectacle. The projector was operating through it all, and each stage in the raider's misfortune was duplicated by the ghost-ship to either side. The last thing we saw as we pulled ahead was the real ship's crew abandoning their burning vessel, again shown in triplicate. We soon discovered why.

Dewi's use of hi-tech had been monitored at last by an Ab'0 satellite in geosynchronous...o...b..t over the Inland Sea territories. The tiny figures were barely clear when beams of light struck from the sky. The three burning ships became one as the projector was destroyed; the one exploded in a gout of white light so that only a smoking black hulk remained.

WE reached the Inland Sea with a much more modest display than we had intended - a blackened, damaged hull with drab and functional battle-kites for a canopy and death-lamps aloft, bright twisting diamonds in the afternoon sky. The Adanaya-Nos became the Great Circuit Road linking the famous resort towns: Merlina, Inlansay, La Jetee, Port Merilyn, to the Bay of Shallows and the rest of the Charling Coast.

We began winding down our fighters, and fell into line behind two magnificent tribal charvolants, both G.o.d-ships, racing fully-kited across the graded sand, splendid canopies stretched out before them like the disembodied wings of enormous b.u.t.terflies.

Scarbo sent up our big parafoil, Red Man, and two bright blue Angels, all we had, and we rolled into Port Merilyn as bravely as we could. An hour later, we were dining on the terrace of the Hotel Dis, looking out across the Sea to the islands in the distance. A welcome breeze ruffled the water and cooled the lakeside terraces. Around the sh.o.r.e, in plain view of where we sat, was the marina where the charling fleets moored and the excursion boats waited to take tourists and clients out to the mortuary islands - the Bocklins, the nearer Ambrilles and a few of the others. By shading my eyes from the glare, I could just make out the island where my ex-crewman, Griff, had gone to die and be changed, a tiny dark point where the dazzling waters of the lake met the sky. My mind wandered. I was lost in the dazzle, in thoughts of poor old Griff and Dewi and the Inland Sea and the isles of the dead.

Of all the strange and different funeral customs observed by the Ab'0 tribes, there is none more bizarre than the practice of charling. For a start,it is available to all Ab'Os, not just to the Princes, Elders and Clever Men who almost always go into the gas at Crater Lake, submitting themselves to those creatures called vanities and becoming sacred Stone Men. Charling is for the common folk: the warriors, the women, the young and the old, even for Nationals like ourselves who find the thought of this brief afterlife acceptable. Just as the Clever Men go to Crater Lake, Ab'Os from all across Australia arrange to have themselves brought to the Inland Sea when they die, and their bodies given the injections which introduce the parasite and lead to their transitory new lives as water-creatures. I have seen the preparations only once, when old Griff asked me to be his usher. We went to the Inland Sea together, took an excursion boat out to one of the Bocklins, and on a brilliantly fine day, he committed himself to the necropolis for his final hours. I sat with him in the small waiting cell cut into the living stone of the island and watched him die. Three days I sat at his side, listening to the numbing constant drone of cicadas in the cedars above the hypogea, watching dust motes dance in the bar of hot sunlight from the single narrow door.

When the life went out of him, a sensor chimed. The old Ab'0 doctors came in and with rough but practised hands injected the strange charling cultures into the base of his spine, his neck, his belly - still full with the forced meal they had given him only a few hours before.

I stayed on the island till the growths took hold, till the first signs of change were evident: the swelling and sharpening of the dear old face, the thickening of the torso, flanks and thighs, the disturbing, quite distinct beginnings of the sleek, nuked, motile form he would become. I left then, returning to the resort town on the sh.o.r.e, going back to the Rynosseros and the deserts, and though it is a delicacy, I have not eaten charling since.

The others at the table did not seem to care, however. They ate their a.s.sorted dishes with relish, and if any of them had been out to the mortuary islands and seen the preparations, they had obviously overcome their revulsion. I knew many connoisseurs who had preferred not to think of the origins of the meat at all, and others who professed to accept the Ab'0 Inner Eye idea that something of the dead host's ident.i.ty was pa.s.sed on, something more than the human skeleton about which the charling ultimately formed itself once the flesh was consumed. One or two gastronomes openly acknowledged their ghoulishness, saying it was exactly the circ.u.mstances of how the meat was made which gave it such zest, such appeal. though all but Calmani made sure the catches they dined from were carefully a.s.sayed so there was no sign of corpse-taint. Calmani said he actually preferred the slightest hint of carrion in his charling.

"May I join you, Captain Tom?"

I returned from the dazzle to find Jarvain Alis standing by our table. With him were two Inner Eye adepts,a young Samoan woman, slender and very beautiful,and a handsome dark man, also of Oceanian stock. All three wore the soft white garments of their sect, with the simple gold ellipse at the collars.

I gestured for them to share our table, not even bothering to mention our failure to inform Alis of our destination. What I did do was ask the maitre d'hotel to bring a monitor to our table. It cost a ridiculous fee and needed an Ab'0 to witness its use, but it was time for precautions. When the small instrument arrived, I broke the seal and handed the device to Doctor Alis. With the barest hint of a smile, he accepted it. It became quiet on the terrace, my crew and the other patrons all watching.

"Say your true name," I said.

"Jarvain Alis."

"Are you Dewi Dammo?"

"No."

The telltale shone green. Alis pa.s.sed the monitorto his companions, giving it to the woman first. "Say your true name," I said again.

"Tallin Okani."

"Are you Dewi Dammo?"

"No."

The light remained green. She pa.s.sed the monitor on. Jarvain Alis' smile broadened. "Say your true name."

"Pride Parran Okani."

"Are you Dewi Dammo?"

"No."

Again, no change. I took the monitor and pa.s.sed it back to Alis.