Expatria: The Box Set (25 page)

PART ONE

Deadacre Days

CHAPTER 1

'If you were to kill me now the consequences would, I believe, be unforeseeable.' But the blade still pressed against Kasimir Sukui's throat, the arm was tight across his chest. If he moved, his windpipe would almost certainly be severed. He understood the situation.

He was, if little else, a rational man.

He blinked twice and surveyed the dismal gathering. Earlier, he had been uneasy to see that the funeral would have such a large Conventist presence, but he had decided the risk of conflict was low. Now, he was reminded that the laws of probability were no more than a guide, particularly when set against the capriciousness of human nature.

A short distance down the slope Edward Olfarssen-Hanrahan, Prime of Newest Delhi, was spread-eagled in the dirt, his feet hanging over the edge of his wife's open grave. Mathias Hanrahan, the Prime's half-brother, was nearby; his nose had been bloodied and his arms were pinned together by four guards, but still he struggled. Sukui managed to smile: Mathias had never known when to desist. Other mourners were being held or threatened whilst yet more stood glumly, surrounded by guards. The least important captives had been rounded up into one walled corner of the cemetery, overhung by boondog trees and trailing lariats of lichen.

The fighting was mostly over. Sukui decided to try a different approach.

'My name is Kasimir Sukui, special adviser to Prime Salvo Andric of Alabama City. I am merely an observer.' A Matre, swamped by a dove-grey gown, was approaching. Sukui raised his voice for her benefit. 'I am the representative of a foreign power. I demand that you release me.'

The Matre stopped before Sukui and allowed her gaze to roam over his lilac robes, up to his diamond-shaped skull-cap and back to rest briefly on his face. She nodded to his captor and the blade was pulled away.

Sukui stretched, allowed himself a deep breath, and then was pushed roughly towards the gathering of the lowliest mourners in the walled corner of the Deadacre cemetery.

He looked around, first at the Conventist Guards penning the captives in and then at his fellow prisoners. There were minor dignitaries, favoured servants, officials of the Primal Guard and the Populous Council of Newest Delhi. He looked again at the Conventists and wondered if he dared to note the details in his diary. It was a fascinating situation, so unexpected. So
irrational
. He smiled, deciding that notes would be unwise. He looked around and tried to take it all in. With the aid of hindsight, he wondered if there had been signs that might have anticipated this course of events. It was an interesting problem.

~

Greta Olfarssen-Hanrahan had jumped over the parapet of West Wall some fifteen days earlier. Prime Edward had remained devoted to her, despite her attempts to control him. Perhaps he had managed to believe that she was an innocent, led astray by the Convent, but Sukui thought it more likely that he knew what had happened, that he had known at one level for some time. At the end it had been clear that Greta despised Edward but he had stood by her for longer than even his position as Prime had required.

As befitted the Prime Consort, Greta had lain in state since her death—her broken body covered in a simple olive drape—but her burial had been planned as a simple affair. There were to be no more than two hundred guests at the Deadacre, a civil cemetery eight kilometres inland from the gates of Newest Delhi. It was to be a private occasion. 'It will be the burial of my partner, not the burial of a Prime Consort,' Edward had told his equerry a few days before, during a meeting with Sukui and the observers from Alabama City.

But the Convent clearly had an alternative in mind.

~

On his arrival in Newest Delhi, Sukui had known little of the Convent. Naturally, he had heard the rumours of the puppet Prime being run by his wife and so, ultimately, by the sorority. But also, he knew of the power of the story, he knew the way rumours became exaggerated as they passed from person to person. A story that crosses the breadth of a city is always a different story, his mother had often told him.

Thinking such thoughts one morning, early in his stay in Newest Delhi, he realised that his own generation marked the end of an era: a planet that had fought the old ways for so long was about to be swept away under a deluge of new technology. He shouldered his backpack and sighed. It was not a change that he opposed—he had, to some extent, been responsible for this revolution—but still he found that the prospect left him with an uneasy sense of anticipation..

Despite many days of wearing the trifacsimile projector strapped to his back, it was still something of a strain. He was too old for such effort. He tightened the straps and looked around at the inside of the tent that he shared with six members of the Pageant of the Holy Charities. The accommodation was harsh but he had known worse.

He reached behind him. The device felt secure. Adjusting the lens system on his shoulder with one hand, he flipped the power switch with the other.

And a figure appeared before him. Although short, her eyes were at the level of his own. Her blurred, ghostly feet floated a metre from the ground. Her body glowed preternaturally bright in the dim confines of the tent. Sukui glanced at her, bowed his head, looked up again at the intensity of her eyes under their protruding supraorbital ridge. 'I do not believe we have—'

'No,' she said quickly. 'My name is Stopp. I'm Decker's niece. He asked me to step in for him if that would be OK by you.' She shrugged, forced a brief smile, waited for a response.

'Certainly,' said Sukui. 'I would be honoured.' This time Stopp managed a more confident smile. 'I would be grateful if you would accompany me.'

And so, Sukui left the tent, accompanied by this trifacsimile of Stopp. Trifax technology had been rediscovered by one of Sukui's research groups in Alabama City. Whilst the projector in his backpack cast up this quasi-hologrammatic representation of Stopp before him, this dancing fiction of light, a small camera unit transmitted pictures up to the orbital colonies. With the backpack activated, his every move was being observed by the real Stopp in Ark Red or Station Yellow, or perhaps one of the conglomerations of tubeways and living units they called Babeloah or Gable Ends. The sense of being overseen made Sukui feel secure; he had travelled widely, but rarely had he felt so safe in a strange land.

The market-place was bustling, just how Mathias had always described it. Sukui wandered from stall to stall accompanied, at first, by the trifax of Stopp. Eventually he paused in the shadow of West Wall. Traders and shoppers nearby stopped their business to stare. The children were less reticent and they crowded around him, staring in awe at what they called the 'angel'. 'Excuse me,' he said to the microphone on his shoulder. He deactivated the projector, careful to ensure that the camera was still running.

'Eyes only is OK by me,' said Stopp. 'Less attention, huh?'

Leaving the disappointed crowd behind, Sukui headed away from the market. He still had no clear intention but he knew that, if nothing else, he could help educate his orbital observer in the ways of Expatria. He had come to Newest Delhi to spread word of the existence of the orbital colonies, a task that had acquired its own momentum: now he felt, for the first time in his memory, unemployed.

His four days in Newest Delhi had been spent in exploration and he had finally decided that there was no reason to prolong his stay in the city. And then a junior equerry had given him a message from Prime Edward, apologising for the lack of hospitality and requesting that he should represent Alabama City at the funeral of his wife.

Sukui found himself in a trading street, shops and craft-houses lining the packed-mud road. In a little clearing there was a well, a bucket and coiled rope standing on its bricked enclosure. Sukui went to it, lowered the bucket and drew up some water. He dipped a cupped hand into the bucket and raised it to his mouth.

'You're going to drink
that?
'

Sukui glanced at the brown water and then drank. 'This is how we live,' he said into his shoulder microphone. 'Here, on the planetary surface.'

To one side of the well there was another bricked enclosure, its white canopy only as high as Sukui's chest. He squatted and looked inside. The inner surface of the wall had been whitewashed and there were black soot marks where the shelf-fuls of candles had left their mark. Pictures of tumbling triangles had been engraved on the brickwork, along with mystic words and number sequences; the centre-piece was a cross with a female martyr nailed to its limbs. It was this that finally persuaded Sukui that he was looking at a Conventist shrine.

A noise from behind made him look up sharply. 'I am not alone,' he said, pointing at the pack on his back.

A tall, grey-haired man looked down at him. 'That is not of this world,' he said, dismissing the trifax projector. 'Please respect this place of prayer,' he added, crossing himself as he spoke. He was carrying a twisted purple candle, like those in the shrine.

'You are a member of the Convent? I thought—'

'I am
kleiner
,' said the man. 'I have been accepted by my Sisters.' He gave a pious smile. Then he looked more closely at Sukui, appearing to recognise his features. 'You were there, weren't you? You were there when...'

Sukui bowed his head and waited.

'She died for us all, didn't she? Sister Greta, I mean.' The man's eyes had become glazed. 'They say she was going to be a Matre, pretty soon. But now she has gone up with Mary/Deus—we can only head forwards.'

'She died quickly,' said Sukui, feeling uneasy, wondering what lay behind this man's beliefs.

'Speed is irrelevant,' said the man. 'She died for us all.' He crossed himself again and kneeled to light his candle and pray.

The encounter had unsettled Sukui. Later, noting down the details in his diary, he recognised the reason for his unease. It was the man's intensity, the look of purest conviction in his eyes.

'Why was he armed?' Stopp had asked as they left the shrine.

Sukui, too, had noticed the long knife strapped to the man's thigh; it was another of the reasons for his unease. 'This is how we live,' he had told her. 'This is how we live.'

~

On the morning of Greta Olfarssen-Hanrahan's funeral Sukui had been woken by the smell of mint tea, brought to him in his room in the guest wing of the Primal Manse by a masked servant. The day after his encounter with the Conventist kleiner, Sukui had been approached by another junior equerry and invited to stay at the Manse for the rest of his time in Newest Delhi.

Looking around the room, he realised that he had become accustomed to this lifestyle—the tents of the Pageant were not suited to a man of his middle years.

'How long do I have?' he asked, but the servant merely bowed her head and retreated. He was still unfamiliar with the ways of this strange city, more alien in atmosphere than anywhere on all Expatria.

He had only the robe that he had travelled in; when he found it by the opened window he saw that it had been cleaned and neatly folded. He pulled it over his head and secured it with a length of cord. Outside, he could see the procession gathering already, loosely clustered around a line of horse-drawn coaches to one side of the Playa Cruzo.

He hurried down to join them.

They waited in the drizzle for nearly an hour before the Primal coach appeared through a high wooden gate in the Administry Wing of the Manse.

It was followed by the hearse.

Sukui watched the carriages draw past, Edward looking sombre whilst his mother talked past him to his two half-sisters. Greta looked uncomfortable in her glass-sided hearse. This was the first time Sukui had seen her at such close quarters. He had always thought that
rigor mortis
was a permanent condition of the corpse, but Greta jiggled about irrepressibly, in time with the movements of her coach. Sukui noted this observation down, as he noted down any new observation; it was a central part of his discipline.

Not considered worthy of a place in one of the four coaches that followed, Sukui had to walk the eight kilometres to the Deadacre. A small knot of people had gathered to watch the procession's departure, with others waiting along the route, but the majority of Newest Delhi's citizens had honoured their Prime's request for the funeral to be a private occasion.

As they passed through the city's varied districts Sukui sported the occasional pastel-gowned pageanteer, their accompanying orbital trifacsimiles drawing the inevitable small crowds. The holy crusade of the Pageant was to open Expatria up to other worlds, to spread the knowledge that a ship was heading for Expatria—the first contact between the colonies and Earth in nearly 500 Expatrian years and it had taken a semi-religious pageant to spread the knowledge... Although Sukui welcomed their goals and the energy they had brought to the spreading of this information, he had distanced himself from the Pageant, feeling uncomfortable with the alcohol-tainted ramblings of their founder and prophet, Chet Alpha.

As the stake-fencing of Newest Delhi's inland defences retreated behind the procession, Sukui forgot about the Pageant. Walking quietly, he studied the people around him. As it was a private funeral, no one from the observer unit had been invited so Sukui was the only southerner present. He knew a few faces from the crowd: some he had met on earlier diplomatic missions, and several had been part of the Hanrahan delegation that had visited Alabama City nearly two months ago in order to negotiate the Treaty of Accord.

But it was a restrained occasion. People kept their distance; conversation was muted, expressions were kept studiously sombre. Walking slightly apart so he could take in his new surroundings, Sukui tried to determine what it was that marked this landscape as
northern
. Naturally, the species were different because of the warmer climate, but there was more than that, there was something peculiar to the landscape itself. The soil was greyer, perhaps as a result of the greater volcanism in these parts. But still there was more, an atmosphere...