Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

Paper, luminous paint (not reproduced.) The original papercut is mildly radioactive.

BY HIGH-TRAIN TO Camahoo.

We have our own carriage. It is of aged gothar-wood, still fragrant and spicy. The hammocks do not suit me at all. Indeed, the whole train has a rocking, swaying lollop that makes me seasick. In the caravanserai at Loogaza the contraption looked both ridiculous and impractical. But here, on the Stalva, its ingenuity reveals itself. The twenty-foot high wheels carry us high above the grass, though I am in fear of grass fires – the steam-tractor at the head of the train does throw off the most ferocious pother of soot and embers.

I am quite content to remain in my carriage and work on my Stalva-grass study – I think this may be most sculptural. The swaying makes for many a slip with the scissor, but I think I have caught the feathery, almost downy nature of the flowerheads. Of a maritime people, the Princess is at home in this rolling ocean of grass and spends much of her time on the observation balcony watching the patterns the wind draws across the grasslands.

It was there that she fell into conversation with the Honorable Cormac de Buitlear, a fellow Irishman. Inevitably, he ingratiated himself and within minutes was taking tea in our carriage. The Inner Worlds are infested with young men claiming to be the junior sons of minor Irish gentry, but a few minutes gentle questioning revealed not only that he was indeed the Honourable Cormac – of the Bagenalstown De Buitlears – but a relative, close enough to know of my husband’s demise, and the scandal of the Blue Empress.

Our conversation went like this.

HIMSELF: The Grangegorman Hydes. My father used to knock around with your elder brother – what was he called?

MYSELF: Richard.

HIMSELF: The younger brother – wasn’t he a bit of a black sheep? I remember there was this tremendous scandal. Some jewel – a sapphire as big as a thrush’s egg. Yes – that was the expression they used in the papers. A thrush’s egg. What was it called?

MYSELF: The Blue Empress.

HIMSELF: Yes! That was it. Your grandfather was presented it by some Martian princess. Services rendered.

MYSELF: He helped her escape across the Tharsis steppe in the revolution of ’11, and then organised the White Brigades to help her regain the Jasper Throne.

HIMSELF: You woke up one morning to find the stone gone and him vanished. Stolen.

I could see that Princess Latufui found The Honourable Cormac’s bluntness distressing but if one claims the privileges of a noble family, one must also claim the shames.

MYSELF: It was never proved that Arthur stole the Blue Empress.

HIMSELF: No no. But you know how tongues wag in the country. And his disappearance was, you must admit, timely . How long ago was that now? God, I must have been a wee gossoon.

MYSELF: Fifteen years.

HIMSELF: Fifteen years. And not a word? Do you know if he’s even alive?

MYSELF: We believe he fled to the Inner Worlds. Every few years we hear of a sighting but most of them are so contrary we dismiss them. He made his choice. As for the Blue Empress; broken up and sold long ago, I don’t doubt.

HIMSELF: And here I find you on a jaunt across one of the Inner Worlds.

MYSELF: I am creating a new album of papercuts. The Botanica Veneris.

HIMSELF: Of course. If I might make so bold, Lady Rathangan: the Blue Empress: do you believe Arthur took it?

And I made him no verbal answer but gave the smallest shake of my head.

PRINCESS LATUFUI HAD been restless all this evening – the time before sleep, that is: Great Evening was still many Terrene days off. Can we ever truly adapt to the monstrous Venerian calendar? Arthur has been on this world for fifteen years – has he drifted not just to another world, but another clock, another calendar? I worked on my Stalva-grass cut – I find that curving the leaf-bearing nodes gives the necessary three-dimensionality – but my heart was not in it. Latufui sipped at tea and fumbled at stitching and pushed newspapers around until eventually she threw open the cabin door in frustration and demanded I join her on the balcony.

The rolling travel of the high-train made me grip the rail for dear life, but the high-plain was as sharp and fresh as if starched, and there, a long line on the horizon beyond the belching smokestack and pumping pistons of the tractor, were the Palisades of Exx: a grey wall from one horizon to the other. Clouds hid the peaks, like a curtain lowered from the sky.

Dark against the grey mountains I saw the spires of the observatories of Camahoo. This was the Thent homeland; and I was apprehensive, for among those towers and minarets is a hoondahvi, a Thent opium den, owned by the person who may be able to tell me the next part of my brother’s story – a story increasingly disturbing and dark. A person who is not human.

“Ida, dear friend. There is a thing I must ask you.”

“Anything, dear Latufui.”

“I must tell you, it is not a thing that can be asked softly.”

My heart turned over in my chest. I knew what Latufui would ask.

“Ida: have you come to this world to look for your brother?”

She did me the courtesy of a direct question. I owed it a direct answer.

“Yes,” I said. “I have come to find Arthur.”

“I thought so.”

“For how long?”

“Since Ledekh-Olkoi. Ah, I cannot say the words right. When you went to get papers and gum and returned empty-handed.”

“I went to see a Mr Stafford Grimes. I had information that he had met my brother soon after his arrival on this world. He directed me to Mr Okiring, a retired asjan hunter in Yez Tok.”

“And Camahoo? Is this another link in the chain?”

“It is. But the Botanica is no sham. I have an obligation to my backers – you know the state of my finances as well as I, Latufui. The late Count Rathangan was a profligate man. He ran the estate into the ground.”

“I could wish you had trusted me. All those weeks of planning and organising. The maps, the itineraries, the tickets, the transplanetary calls to agents and factors. I was so excited! A journey to another world! But for you there was always something else. None of that was the whole truth. None of it was honest.”

“Oh my dear Latufui...” But how could I say that I had not told her because I feared what Arthur might have become. Fears that seemed to be borne out by every ruined life that had touched his. What would I find? Did anything remain of the wild, carefree boy I remembered chasing old Bunty the dog across the summer lawns of Grangegorman? Would he listen to me? “There is a wrong to right. An old debt to be cancelled. It’s a family thing.”

“I live in your house, but not in your family,” Princess Latufui said. Her words were barbed with truth. They tore me. “We would not do that in Tonga. Your ways are different. And I thought I was more than a companion.”

“Oh my dear Latufui.” I took her hands in mine. “You are far far more to me than a companion. You are my life. But you of all people should understand my family. We are on another world, but we are not so far from Rathangan, I think. I am seeking Arthur, and I do not know what I will find, but I promise you, what he says to me, I will tell to you. Everything.”

Now she laid her hands over mine, and there we stood, cupping hands on the balcony rail, watching the needle spires of Camahoo rise from the grass spears of the Stalva.

PLATE 7 V vallumque foenum : Stalva Pike Grass. Another non-Terrene that is finding favour in Terrestrial ornamental gardens. Earth never receives sufficient sunlight for it to attain its full Stalva height. Yetten in the Stalva Thent dialect.