Paul McAuley: Child of the River

At the same moment, one of the Constable’s sons cried out. “Boat ahead! Leastways, there’s running lights.”

This was Urthank, a dull-witted brute grown as heavy and muscular as his father. The Constable knew that it would not be long before Urthank roared his challenge, and knew too that the boy would lose. Urthank was too stupid to wait for the right moment; it was not in his nature to suppress an impulse. No, Urthank would not defeat him. It would be one of the others. But Urthank’s challenge would be the beginning of the end.

The Constable searched the darkness. For a moment he thought he glimpsed a fugitive glimmer, but only for a moment. It could have been a mote floating in his eye, or a dim star glinting at the edge of the world’s level horizon.

“You were dreaming,” he said. “Set to rowing, or the sun will be up before we get back.”

“I saw it,” Urthank insisted.

The other son, Unthank, laughed.

“There!” Urthank said. “There it is again! Dead ahead, just like I said.”

This time the Constable saw the flicker of light. His first thought was that perhaps the trader had not been boasting after all. He said quietly, “Go forward. Feathered oars.”

As the skiff glided against the current, the Constable fumbled a clamshell case from the pouch hung on the belt of his white linen kilt. The trader whose tongue had been cut out was making wet, choking sounds. The Constable kicked him into silence before opening the case and lifting out the spectacles that rested on the water-stained silk lining. The spectacles were the most valuable heirloom of the Constable’s family; they had passed from defeated father to victorious son for more than a hundred generations. They were shaped like bladeless scissors, and the Constable unfolded them and carefully pinched them over his bulbous nose.

At once, the hull of the flat skiff and the bales of contraband cigarettes stacked in the forward well seemed to gain a luminous sheen; the bent backs of the Constable’s sons and the supine bodies of the two prisoners glowed with furnace light. The Constable scanned the river, ignoring flaws in the old glass of the lenses which warped or smudged the amplified light, and saw, half a league from the skiff, a knot of tiny, intensely brilliant specks dancing above the river’s surface.

“Machines,” the Constable breathed. He stepped between the prisoners and pointed out the place to his sons.

The skiff glided forward under the Constable’s guidance. As it drew closer, the Constable saw that there were hundreds of machines, a busy cloud swirling around an invisible pivot.

He was used to seeing one or two flitting through the sky above Aeolis on their inscrutable business, but he had never before seen so many in one place.

Something knocked against the side of the skiff, and Urthank cursed and feathered his oar. It was a waterlogged coffin. Every day, thousands were launched from Ys. For a moment, a woman’s face gazed up at the Constable through a glaze of water, glowing greenly amidst a halo of rotting flowers. Then the coffin turned end for end and was borne away.

The skiff had turned in the current, too. Now it was broadside to the cloud of machines, and for the first time the Constable saw what they attended.

A boat. A white boat riding high on the river’s slow current.

The Constable took off his spectacles, and discovered that the boat was glimmering with a spectral luminescence. The water around it glowed too, as if it floated in the center of one of the shoals of luminous plankton that sometimes rose to the surface of the river on a calm summer night. The glow spread around the skiff, each stroke of the oars broke its pearly light into whirling interlocking spokes, as if the ghost of a machine lived just beneath the river’s skin.

The tongue-cut trader groaned and coughed; his partner raised himself up on his elbows to watch as the white boat turned on the river’s current, light as a leaf, a dancer barely touching the water.

The boat had a sharp, raised prow, and incurved sides that sealed it shut and swept back in a fan, like the tail of a dove.

It was barely larger than an ordinary coffin. It made another turn, seemed to stretch like a cat, and then it was alongside the skiff, pressed right against it without even a bump.

Suddenly, the Constable and his sons were inside the cloud of machines. It was as if they had fallen headfirst into a nebula, for there were hundreds of them, each burning with ferocious white light, none bigger than a rhinoceros beetle.

Urthank tried to swat one that hung in front of his snout, and cursed when it stung him with a flare of red light and a crisp sizzle.

“Steady,” the Constable said, and someone else said hoarsely, “Flee.”

Astonished, the Constable turned from his inspection of the glimmering boat.

“Flee,” the second trader said again. “Flee, you fools!”

Both of the Constable’s sons had shipped their oars and were looking at their father. They were waiting for his lead.

The Constable put away his spectacles and shoved the butt end of his whip in his belt. He could not show that he was afraid. He reached through the whirling lights of the machines and touched the white boat.

Its hull was as light and close-woven as feathers, and at the Constable’s touch, the incurved sides peeled back with a sticky, crackling sound. As a boy, the Constable had been given to wandering the wild shore downriver of Aeolis, and he had once come across a blood orchid growing in the cloven root of a kapok tree. The orchid had made precisely the same noise when, sensing his body heat, it had spread its fleshy lobes wide to reveal the lubricious curves of its creamy pistil. He had fled in terror before the blood orchid’s perfume could overwhelm him, and the ghost of that fear stayed his hand now.

The hull vibrated under his fingertips with a quick, eager pulse. Light poured out from the boat’s interior, rich and golden and filled with floating motes. A body made a shadow inside this light, and the Constable thought at once that the boat was no more than a coffin set adrift on the river’s current. The coffin of some lord or lady no doubt, but in function no different from the shoddy cardboard coffins of the poor or the enameled wooden coffins of the artisans and traders.

And then the baby started to cry.

The Constable squinted through the light, saw something move within it, and reached out. For a moment he was at the incandescent heart of the machines’ intricate dance, and then they were gone, dispersing in flat trajectories into the darkness. The baby, a boy, pale and fat and hairless, squirmed in the Constable’s hands.

The golden light was dying back inside the white boat. In moments, only traces remained, iridescent veins and dabs that fitfully illuminated the corpse on which the baby had been lying.

It was the corpse of a woman, naked, flat-breasted and starveling-thin, and as hairless as the baby. She had been shot, once through the chest and once in the head, but there was no blood. One hand was three-fingered, like the grabs of the cranes of Aeolis’s docks; the other was monstrously swollen and bifurcate, like a lobster’s claw. Her skin had a silvery-gray cast; her huge eyes, divided into a honeycomb of cells, were like the compound lenses of certain insects, and the color of blood rubies. Within each facet lived a flickering glint of golden light, and although the Constable knew that these were merely reflections of the white boat’s fading light, he had the strange feeling that things, malevolently watchful things, lived behind the dead woman’s strange eyes.

“Heresy,” the second trader said. Somehow, he had got up on his knees and was staring wide-eyed at the white boat.

The Constable kicked the trader in the stomach; the man coughed and flopped back into the bilge water alongside his partner. The trader glared up at the Constable and said again, “Heresy. When they allowed the ship of the Ancients of Days to pass beyond Ys and sail downriver, our benevolent bureaucracies let heresy loose into the world.”