The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (78 page)

"Oh the dear boys, the dear boys," Count Jack whispered. The sound of the explosion hit us. It rattled the windows on the pilot deck, rattled the bottle and glasses on the table. I felt it shake the core of being, shake me belly and bowel deep. The beams winked out. The horizon went dark.

We had seen a great and terrible battle but who had fought, who had won, who had lost, whether there had been winners or losers, what its goals had been – we knew none of these. We had witnessed something terrible and beautiful and incomprehensible. I lifted the untouched glass of wine and took a sip.

"Good God," Count Jack said, still standing. "I always thought you didn't drink. Religious reasons and all that."

"No, I don't drink for musical reasons. It makes my joints hurt."

I drank the wine. It may have been vinegar, it may have been the finest wine available to humanity, I did not know. I drained the glass.

"Dear boy." Count Jack poured me another, one for himself and together we watched the edge of the world glow with distant fires.

W
e played Camp Avenger on a stage rigged on empty beer barrels to a half full audience that dwindled over the course of the concert to just six rows. A Brigadier who had been drinking steadily all through the concert tried to get his troopers up onstage to dance to the Medley of Ould Irish Songs. They sensibly declined. He tripped over his own feet trying to inveigle Count Jack to
Walls of Limerick
with him and went straight off the stage. He split his head open on the rim of a beer keg.

At Tharsia Regional Command the audience was less ambiguous. We were bottled off. The first one came looping in even as Count Jack came on, arms spread wide, to his theme song
I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen
. He stuck it through
Blaze Away
,
Nessum Dorma
and
Il Mio Tesoro
before an accurately hurled Mars Export Pale Ale bottle deposited its load of warm urine down the front of his dickey. He finished
The Garden Where the Praties Grow
, bowed and went straight off. I followed him as the first of the barrage of folding army chairs hit the stage. Without a word or a look he went straight to his tent and stripped naked.

"I've had worse in Glasgow Empire," he said. His voice was stiff with pride. I never admired him as much. "Can you do something with these, dear boy?" He held out the wet, reeking dress suit. "And run me a bath."

We took the money, in full and in cash, and went on, up ever the everbranching labyrinth of canals, ever closer to the battle front.

The boat was an Expeditionary Force fast patrol craft, one heat ray turret fore, one mounted in a blister next to the captain's position. It was barely big enough for the piano, let alone us and the sullen four-man crew. They smoked constantly and tried to outrage Count Jack with their vile spacetrooper's language. He could outswear any of them. But he kept silence and dignity and our little boat threaded through the incomprehensible maze of Nyx's canals; soft green waters of Mars overhung by the purple fronds of crosier-trees, dropping the golden coins of their seed cases into the water where they sprouted corkscrew propellers and swam away. This was the land of the Oont, and their tall, heron-like figures, perched in the rear of their living punts, were our constant companions. On occasion, down the wider channels and basins, we glimpsed their legendary organic paddle-wheelers, or their pale blue ceramic stilttowns. The crew treated the Oont with undisguised contempt and idly trained the boat's weapons on them. They had accepted the mandate of the Commanderie without a fight and their cities and ships and secretive, solitary way of life went unchanged. Our Captain thought them a species of innate cowards and traitors. Only a species tamed by the touch of the heat ray could be trusted.

For five hundred miles, up the Grand Canal and through the maze of Nyx, Twav stevedores had lifted and laid my piano with precision and delicacy. It took the Terrene army to drop it. From the foot of the gangplank I heard the jangling crash and turned to see the cargo net on the jetty and troopers grinning. At once I wanted to strip away the packing and see if anything remained. It was not my piano – I would never have risked my Bosendorfer on the vagaries of space-travel – but it was a passable upright from a company that specialised in interplanetary hire. I had grown fond of it. One does with pianos. They are like dogs. I walked on. That much I had learnt from Count Jack. Dignity, always dignity.

Oudeman was a repair base for Third Skyfleet. We walked in the shadow of hovering skymasters. Engineers in repair rigs swarmed over hulls, lowered engines on hoists, opened hull sections, deflated gas cells. It was clear to me that the fleet had suffered grievously in recent and grim battle. Skins were gashed open to the very bones; holes stabbed through the rounded hulls from side to side. Engine pylons terminated in melted drips. Entire crew gondolas and gun turrets had been torn away. Some had been so terribly mauled they were air-going skeletons; a few lift cells wrapped around naked ship spine.

Of the crews who had fought through such ruin, there was no sign.

The base commander, Yuzbashi Osman, greeted us personally. He was a great fan, a great fan. A dedicated life-long fan. He had seen the Maestro in his every Istanbul concert. He always sat in the same seat. He had all the Maestro's recordings. He played them daily and had tried to educate his junior officers over mess dinners but the rising generation were ignorant, low men; technically competent but little better than the Devshirmey conscripts. A clap of his hands summoned batmen to carry our luggage. I understood only rudiments of his language but from his reaction to the engineers who had dropped my piano, I understood that further disrespect would not be tolerated. He cleared the camp steambath for our exclusive use. Sweated, steamed and scraped clean, a glowing Count Jack bowled into the mess tent as if he were striding on to the stage of La Scala. He was funny, he was witty, he was charming, he was glorious. Most of the junior Onbashis and Mulazims at the dinner in his honour could not speak English but his charisma transcended all language. They smiled and laughed readily.

"Would you look at that?" Count Jack said in the backstage tent that was our dressing room. He held up a bottle of champagne, dripping from the ice bucket. "Krug. They got me my Krug. Oh the dear, lovely boys."

At the dinner I had noted the paucity of some of the offerings and marvelled at the effort it must have taken, what personal dedication by the Yuzbashi, to fulfil a rider that was only there to check the contract had been read. Count Jack slid the bottle back into the melting ice. "I shall return to you later, beautiful thing, with my heart full of song and my feet light on the applause of my audience. I am a star, Faisal. I am a true star. Leave me, dear boy."

Count Jack required time and space alone to prepare his entrance. This was the time he changed from Count James Fitzgerald to the Country Count from Kildare. It was a deeply private transformation and one I knew I would never be permitted to watch. The stage was a temporary rig bolted together from Skymaster spares. The hovering ships lit the stage with their search-lights. A follow-spot tracked me to the piano. I bowed, acknowledged the applause of the audience, flicked out the tails of my evening coat and sat down. That is all an accompanist need do.

I played a few glissandi to check the piano was still functioning after its disrespectful handling by the dock crew. Passable, to the tin ears of Sky Fleet engineers. Then I played the short overture to create that allimportant sense of expectation in the audience and went straight into the music for Count Jack's entrance. The spotlight picked him up as he swept on to the stage,
I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen
bursting from his broad chest. He was radiant. He commanded every eye. The silence in the deep Martian night was the most profound I think I have ever heard. He strode to the front of the stage. The spotlight adored him. He luxuriated in the applause as if it were the end of the concert, not the first number. He was a shameless showman. I lifted my hands to the keyboard to introduce
Turna a Surriento.

And the night exploded into towering blossoms of flame. For an instant the audience sat transfixed, as if Count Jack stood had somehow summoned the most astonishing of operatic effects. Then the alarms blared out all across the camp. Count Jack and I both saw clearly the spider-shapes of War Tripods, tall as trees, wading through the flames. Heat rays flashed out, white swords, as the audience scattered to take up posts and weapons. Still Count Jack held the spotlight, until an Onbashi leaped up, tackled him and knocked him out of the firing-line just as a heat ray cut a ten thousand degree arc across the stage. He had no English, he needed no English. We ran. I glanced back once. I knew what I would see, but I had to see it: my piano, that same cheap, sturdy hire upright piano that I had shipped across one hundred million miles of space, through the concert halls and grand opera houses, on dusty roads and railways, down calm green canals: my piano explode in a fountain of blazing hammers and whipping, melting wires. A War Tripod strode over us, its heat rays arms swivelling, seeking new targets. I looked up into the weaving thicket of tentacles beneath the hull, then the raised steel hoof passed over me and came down squarely and finally on our dressing room tent.

"My Krug!" Count Jack cried out.

A heat ray cut a glowing arc of lava across the ground before me. I was lucky – you cannot dodge these things or see them coming, hear their ricochets or guess their approach. They are light itself. All you can be is moving in the right direction, have the right momentum: be lucky. Our Onbashi was not lucky. He ran into the heat ray and vanished into a puff of ash. A death so fast, so total it became something more than death. It was annihilation.

"Maestro! With me!"

Count Jack had been standing, staring, transfixed. I took his hand, his palm still damp with concert sweat, and skirted around the end of the still-smoking scar. We ducked, we ran at a crouch, we zigzagged in our tails and dickie bows. There was no good reason for it. We had seen it in war movies. The Uliri war machines strode across the camp, slashing glowing lava tracks across it with their heat rays, their weapon-arms seeking out fresh targets. But our soldiers had reached their defensive positions, and were fighting back, turning the Uliri's own weapon against them, and bolstering it with a veritable hail of ordnance. The troopers who had manned our spotlights now turned to the heat-rays. Skymasters were casting off, their turret gunners seeking out the many-eyed heads of the Uliri tripods. The war machine that had so hideously killed the brave Onbashi stood in the river, eye-blisters turning this way, that way, seeking targets. A weapon-arm fixed on us. The aperture of the heat ray opened. Hesitated. Pulled away. Grasping cables uncoiled from between the legs. We scuttled for cover behind a stack of barrels – not that they would have saved us. Then a missile cut a streak of red across the night. The war machine's front left knee-joint exploded. The machine wavered for balance on two, then a skymaster cut low across the canal bank and severed the front right off at the thigh with a searing slash of a heat ray. The monster wavered, toppled, came down in a blast and crash and wave of spray, right on top of the boat that would have carried us to safety. Smashed to flinders. Escape hatches opened; pale shapes wriggled free, squirmed down the hull towards land. I pushed Count Jack to the ground as the skymaster opened up. Bullets screamed around us. Count Jack's eyes were wide with fear, and something else, something I had not imagined in the man: excitement. War might be brutal and ghastly and ugly, as he had declaimed on the
Empress of Mars
, but there was a terrible, primal power in it. I saw the same thrill, the same joy, the same power that had commanded audiences from Tipperary to Timbuktoo. I saw it and I knew that, if we ever returned to Earth and England, I would ever be the accompanist, the amanuensis, the dear boy; and that even if he sang to an empty hall, Count James Fitzgerald would always be the Maestro, Sopratutto. All there was in me was fear; solid fear. Perhaps that is why I was brave. The guns fell silent. I looked over the top of the barrels. Silvery Uliri bodies were strewn across the dock. I saw the canal run with purple blood like paint in water.

The skymaster turned and came in over the canal to a low hover. A boarding ramp lowered and touched the ground. A skyman crouched at the top of the ramp, beckoning urgently.

"Run Maestro, run!" I shouted and dragged Count Jack to his feet. We ran. Around us heat rays danced and stabbed like some dark tango. A blazing war machine stumbled blindly, crushing tents, bivouacs, repair sheds beneath its feet, shedding sheets of flame. Ten steps from the foot of the ramp, I heard a noise that turned me to ice: a great ululating cry from the hills behind the camp, ringing from horizon to horizon, back and forth, wash and backwash, a breaking wave of sound. I had never heard it but I had heard of it, the war-song of the Uliri padva infantry. A hand seized mine: the skyman dragged me and Count Jack like a human chain into the troop hold. As the ramp closed, I saw the skyline bubble and flow, like a silver sheen of oil, down the hillside towards us. Padvas. Thousands of them. As the skymaster lifted and the hull sealed the last, the very last sight I had was Yuzbashi Osman looking up at us. He raised a hand in salute. Then he turned, drew his sword and with a cry that pierced even the engine drone of the skymaster, every janissary of Oudeman Camp drew his blade. Swordpoints glittered, then they charged. The skymaster spun in the air, I saw no more.

"Did you see that?" Count Jack said to me. He gripped my shoulders. His face was pale with shock but there was a mad strength in his fingers. "Did you? How horrible, how horrible. And yet, how wonderful! Oh, the mystery, Faisal, the mystery!" Tears ran down his ash-smudged face.

W
e fled through the labyrinth of the night. We had no doubt that we were being pursued through those narrow, twining canyons. The skycaptain's pinger picked up fleeting, suggestive contacts of what we had all heard: terrible cries, echoes of echoes in the stone redoubts of Noctis, far away but always, always keeping pace with us. The main hold of the skymaster was windowless and though the skycaptain spoke no English, he had made it most clear to us that we were to keep away from his crew, whether they were in engineering, the gun blisters or the bridge and navigation pods. So we sat on the hard steel mesh of the dimly lit cargo hold, ostensibly telling old musician stories we had told many times before, pausing every time our indiscriminate ears brought us some report of the war outside. Hearing is a much more primal sense than vision. To see is to understand. To hear is to apprehend. Eyes can be closed. Ears are ever open. Maestro broke off the oft-told story of singing for the Pope, and how thin the towels were, and what cheap bastards the Holy See had turned out to be. His ears, as I have said, were almost supernaturally keen. His eyes went wide. The Twav battledores on their perches in the skymarine roosts riffled their scales, shining like oil on water, and shifted their grips on their weaponry. A split second later, I heard the cries. Stuttering and rhythmic, they rose over three octaves from a bass drone to a soprano, nerve shredding yammer. Two behind us, striking chords and harmonics from each other like some experimental piece of serialist music. Another answered, ahead of us. And another, far away, muted by the wind-sculpted rock labyrinth. A fifth, close, to our right. Back and forth, call and response. I clapped my hands over my ears, not from the pain of the shrill upper registers, but at the hideous musicality of these unseen voices. They sang scales and harmonies alien to me, but their music called the musician in me.