Chapter One: The Invited (4) Fish at the Zenith
On the sixth day they were shown Dunbine.
Three of them, standing side by side on the open ground: taller than Drumlo and far thinner, with shoulders, with a waist, with long legs in something near human proportion. Three different colours—one pale violet, one dark blue, one dark green—and the shells not pieced but each plate curving with the muscle beneath it, the seams as fine as the line where a beetle’s wing-cases close. A horn curving backward on each side of the head. On the back, a swollen shell-pack with the wings folded under it.
Shou stood at its feet looking up until the back of his neck was against his collar.
He had seen a lot of robots. All his life—in anime, in the windows of model shops. Those things had rivets and vents and the straight lines of things pressed in a factory. There was not one straight line on this. It did not look made. It looked as if something had lived, and died, and been hollowed out, and had something else packed into it.
“The new type,” Shot said. It was rare for him to speak first. “A local can still fly Drumlo. Not this. It needs too much aura; a local knight sits in it and cannot even stand it up. It was built to your measure.”
His hands were behind his back.
“In other words, gentlemen, without you these three are three very expensive specimens. Lord Drake has waited two years for them to move.”
The pale violet one was given to Shou. The cockpit was in the chest. From outside, the shell cover was opaque; Shou climbed in, the cover closed over his head, the cockpit went dark for an instant, and then the whole front shell slowly cleared, like ice thawing, and the ground, the people, the castle wall came up through it bit by bit, tinted the faintest blue-green.
The seat was warm. He took the two short grips and the pads on their heads lay against his palms.
He smelled something. Not petrol, not engine oil, not hot metal. Something faint, like ferns after rain, and like blood.
Todd went up first. His machine barely swayed as it left the ground, the wings spread into mist, it went straight up, flew one clean circle above the wall, and came down with its feet together and knees slightly bent. Some of the knights at the edge of the ground cheered. Trained men are different.
Tokamak went second. He went up slowly, carefully, and flew low. On landing the left foot touched first, the machine tilted, he corrected, over-corrected, and the whole Dunbine went down on its side and ploughed a furrow with its shoulder. The ground crew rushed in. The cover opened and Tokamak climbed out on his own, a cut on his forehead, pressing his sleeve to it, and waved toward Shou to say he was all right.
Shou’s turn.
He shut his eyes and looked for the thing that had broken the crossbeam. The starting gate. The lunge.
His stomach knew first. His whole insides dropped, the way they had the instant the front wheel kicked up that night, and he very nearly let go. When he opened his eyes the castle wall was under his feet.
He saw this place from above for the first time.
The castle was smaller than he had thought, a ring of grey wall cinching a huddle of roofs; the tower he lived in, the garden, the gap in the east wall not yet mended. Outside the walls were fields, squared off, with people in them who looked up at him, very small. Smoke rose from the workshop. Beyond was forest, black-green, laid out all the way to the foot of a range of mountains.
He looked for a road. While he was learning to keep the thing from drifting left he searched with everything he had: a road he knew, a guardrail, a telephone pole, anything of Earth.
Nothing.
He looked up.
The sky had no top. That even, watery white grew brighter the higher it went, until at its brightest there was a slow pattern moving in it, light and dark, light and dark, huge and far off, like the surface of a swimming pool seen by someone sunk at the bottom looking up.
And Shou understood what the moon had been that night. Not what it was called; where it was. In water. The whole sky over his head was water and he was under it, this castle, these fields, these people, all of them under the water.
His breathing broke. Dunbine dropped a length, he cried out, his hands crushed the pads, and the machine shot upward again. On the ground they were waving flags. He followed the flags, crookedly, and got himself down.
He landed hard. The muscle-bundles in the knees creaked. But he stood.
When the cover opened his hands were shaking, his palms crimson, his ten fingers refusing to straighten for a moment. He leaned over the lip of the cockpit and brought up a little acid. Below, people were clapping. He did not hear them.
He was looking at a low tower inside the castle. He had seen it from up there: a round tower, no windows, a flat top with an opening like a cistern in it, the opening covered by an iron grate, and a soldier at each of the four corners.
In the whole castle, that was the one place you could only see from the sky.
＊
Shot said that while their hands were warm they would make a long flight that afternoon.
Not combat, he stressed: a familiarisation flight. Follow the northern border of the territory in a loop, turn back in front of a mountain called Inuchan, let the three of them learn what a long flight costs. Lady Garalia would lead, with four Doro as escort. The Dunbines’ armament was not fitted yet—only the pair of claws in the wrists and a sword, which they would not need anyway.
Tokamak’s machine had a dent in the shoulder from the fall; the ground crew said it did not matter. He had a cloth soaked in something stuck to his forehead, and before he climbed into the cockpit he pressed his left breast pocket once.
They flew for about an hour.
Shou was beginning to get the feel of it: do not try to “control” it. This was not a bike; there was no gap between throttle and brake. You thought of where you wanted to be and it was there; you hesitated and it hesitated with you. The hard part was not making it move. It was having only one thing in your heart. He could not. In his heart was the tower with no windows, the half-tank of fuel, the message from his mother’s manager that he had read and not answered, and Dunbine wobbled along with him all the way, and Garalia looked back twice from in front, and the second time could not even be bothered to shout.
Todd flew best, so well he got bored and did a roll on the outside of the formation. Tokamak flew last, low and steady, hugging the treetops. Shou thought afterwards that it was the way a man flies who knows that things fall out of the sky.
The mountain was ahead. Grey, steep, bare of trees above the waist.
Garalia raised her hand: turn back.
Shou never did work out where the first shot came from. He only saw the Doro on the far left tilt suddenly, two of its feelers snapped off, and the two soldiers on top of it drop like beans. Then a swarm of things came over the ridge, seven or eight of them, small, triangular, each with a man hanging under it, soundless, gliding down on the wind off the slope as fast as if someone had thrown them.
“Enemy!” Garalia’s voice slammed straight into his head. “Holy Warriors, fall back! Fall back! Unarmed machines, back!”
Shou did not know how to fall back. He still had to think to turn. He saw Todd’s machine side-roll and peel away, clean and quick; he saw the triangular things sweep over his head with the men under them holding long tubes, the mouths of the tubes flashing; he heard something hit Dunbine’s chest shell, clang, clang, clang, dull, like stones thrown at an upturned pot.
He curled up, and Dunbine curled with him.
“Down!” Tokamak’s voice, close, clear; at some point the man had come up behind and beside him and put his own dented machine between Shou and the mountain. “Shou! Down, into the trees! They can’t come in among the trees—”
The light came from Shou’s upper right. He did not see who, or what. He saw only a very thin, very straight bright line that touched the back of Tokamak’s Dunbine, dead in the centre of the swollen shell-pack.
For an instant nothing happened.
Tokamak’s machine still held the posture of its spread, shielding arms. Through the blue-green tint of his own shell Shou saw a blurred figure behind the cover opposite, which seemed to turn its head and look his way.
Then the shell-pack lit from inside.
The explosion had no sound, or Shou did not remember one. He remembered the light, remembered Dunbine shoved bodily backward by an invisible hand, sky and ground turning over three or four times, treetops whipping his legs. When he had the machine steady, where Tokamak had been there was only a ball of smoke coming apart, and a few dark green fragments trailing fire, falling slowly, into the forest.
Not one of them was big enough to hold a man.
Shou’s mouth was open and no sound came out. He did not know what the feeling was, because he had never had it. Later he knew: it is the feeling of seeing a person die for the first time, which is nothing, only the mouth hanging open.
His palms began to burn. Not the hot-tea burn of before. The pads jumped under his hands, once, once, in time with his heartbeat and faster and faster, the smell of ferns and blood in the cockpit was suddenly thick enough to choke on, and across the clear shell in front of him, from the edges inward, spread a faint wash of red.
Dunbine drew its sword by itself.
He had not thought of drawing it. He had not thought anything. He was looking at the smoke.
“—Holy Warrior! Can you hear me! Drake’s Holy Warrior!”
A woman’s voice. Not Garalia.
A machine was across his path: the thin one, the fast one with dark wings, the one that had dropped bombs over the garden that evening. There was a launcher on each shoulder, the left one empty, the right one with two rounds left, warheads pointed at him.
“Put the sword down! Your machine’s unarmed, I can see that! I don’t want to kill you!”
“You just killed him!”
The voice came out of Shou’s throat, and he did not recognise it. Dunbine lunged forward faster than his own neck could follow, the dark machine slid aside, his sword cut nothing, and the whole machine went under the other’s wing and nearly into the mountainside.
“He was in front of you—my man couldn’t see!” The woman’s voice shook, the shaking of a voice held down hard to keep it from breaking. “I’m not here to kill anyone, I’m here for you! Listen to me, you’re from Upper Earth and so am I! My name is Marvel Frozen, I’m from Dallas, and a year ago the one standing where you are now was me!”
Shou brought the machine round. He was panting, badly, and the red on the shell in front of him deepened and paled, deepened and paled.
“Drake Luft is a man possessed by the lust for power. He didn’t call you here for any peace. He wants bodies that can fly those machines, he wants to use them to swallow the land of A and then everything outside it! Today you fly one run for him, tomorrow he tells you to burn a village, and you’ll go, because by then you’ll already have burned something else. I know, because I—”
“He had a daughter!” Shou roared back. “Eleven years old! He hadn’t seen her for three years! He just wanted to go home!”
There was no sound from the other side.
For a long time—long enough that Shou could hear his own blood in his ears.
Marvel Frozen. A Texan, fallen down the same road a year before, who had flown for Drake for a year, burned things for him, and left. She flew for the other side now. Shou would learn all of this much later, piece by piece; right now he knew only that the voice across from him was shaking, and that so was his own.
“…Leave that man,” Marvel said at last, her voice gone low. “While your hands are still clean. Next time we meet in the sky, I’ll kill you. I mean it.”
“You think you can!”
She did not answer. The dark machine backed off, beat its wings once, and climbed away over the ridge. The triangular gliders were gone. Only Garalia and Todd were left in the sky, and two Doro. There had been four when they set out.
Shou did not go after her.
He could not. When the red drained out of the shell in front of him, something drained out of his body with it; his arms were too heavy to lift, there was heat inside his nose, something ran down onto his lip, he licked it, and it was salt.
＊
Nobody spoke on the way back.
After they landed the ground crew gathered round to check the machine and count the hits on the chest shell: seven, none through. Someone asked him the number of enemy machines, their bearing, what weapons they used. Shou answered what he remembered. Halfway through he stopped and asked a question of his own.
“The forest. Will anyone go and look?”
The man questioning him raised his head. He had not understood.
“Tokamak. Will anyone go and look for him?”
“Holy Warrior,” the man said, very politely, “that was a direct hit on the aura amplifier. Nothing will be left. As for the machine, Master Shot has said there is still material; another can be built in two months.”
Shou nodded.
Across the ground Garalia was reporting to Bern, not loudly, but Shou heard it: two Doro lost, one Dunbine, no pilots survived. When she said “pilots” she did not count the one from Upper Earth separately from the four local soldiers on the Doro. Shou did not know why, but of everything that day, this was the only thing that did not make him feel worse.
Todd was leaning against the foot of his own machine, his face white. He saw Shou coming and tried to think of something smart to say; his mouth opened and shut and nothing came out.
“Unarmed,” he said at last, after a long time, his voice dry. “They sent us up unarmed. Back in training in Texas somebody would’ve gone to court-martial for that.”
He scrubbed his face hard with his palm.
“I’m not letting that happen to me again. I don’t care who they want me to fight. Next time I go up, I’m carrying something.”
Shou did not answer. He walked past Todd, past the two Dunbines still standing, past the third place, now empty. The furrow Tokamak’s machine had ploughed that morning was still in the ground. Nobody had filled it in.
That night the door of his room was not barred. He supposed that counted as a reward.
Shou sat on the edge of the bed and took out the phone. Thirty-one per cent. He opened the map; the blue dot was still on the Chuo Expressway, and the pale ring around it had widened until it covered half of Hachioji. He opened the photos and scrolled back: past the practice track, past the bike, past a screenshot he did not remember taking of his mother talking on television.
He had no photograph of Tokamak. Six days, and even the man’s surname he had heard from Bern’s mouth; he had not even asked the name of the eleven-year-old girl. He would remember that for a long time, longer than he expected to.
He thought about what the woman from Dallas had said. About what the little thing that bit him had said. They might be telling the truth. Drake might be that kind of man; Tokamak himself had said the bald one was not entertaining guests.
But this afternoon it was their side that had opened fire.
And the tower with no windows was inside Drake’s walls.
Shou held down the power button and looked at the slider that appeared on the screen, and his thumb stayed there a long time. He thought of a dead phone with a cartoon cat sticker on the back, somewhere in the forest now, or nowhere.
He pushed the slider across.
When the screen went dark, only the blue-white light from the window was left in the room. It was coming apart again, hundreds of points of light swimming slowly in water very, very high up, and this time he did not look away; he kept his head tilted back and watched until they gathered again.
The two little rows of tooth-marks on the back of his hand had already scabbed over.
→ Chapter Two: Behind the Firelight (1) In the Cage, On the Shoulder