Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

‘Is he dead?’ the daemon asked Fith, nodding at Brom.

‘We’re both dead,’ Fith replied. That was all that was left for him now; the voyage to the Underverse to be remade.

‘I haven’t got time,’ the daemon said to the Upplander. ‘Just you.’

‘You’ll take them. After what they gave today, keeping me alive, you’ll take them.’

The daemon let out a soft, throbbing growl. He stepped back and took some sort of tool or wand from his belt. When he adjusted it, it made small, musical noises.

The daemon looked out to sea, out into the storm in the direction he had come from. Fith followed his gaze. Driving sleet flecked his face and made him blink and wince. He could hear a noise like a storm inside the storm.

The daemon’s boat appeared. Fith had never seen its like before, but he recognised the smooth boat-lines of the hull, and fins like rudders. It was not an ice rig or a water boat: it was an air boat, a boat for riding the wind and the storm. It came slowly towards them across the ice, hanging in the sky at mast-top height. Screaming air blasted down from it, keeping it up. The air flung ice chips up off the sea. Small green candles lit on and off at the corners of its wind rigs.

It came closer, until Fith had to shield his face from the blitzing air and the ice chips. Then it settled down on the sea crust with a crunch and opened a set of jaws as large as the hrosshvalur’s.

The daemon scooped up the Upplander in his arms. The Upplander shrieked as his broken leg bones ground and rubbed. The daemon didn’t seem particularly bothered. He looked at Fith.

‘Bring him,’ he said, nodding at Brom again. ‘Follow. Don’t touch anything.’

*

Hawser had been working in the upper strata of Karelia Hive for over eight months when someone from the Council legation finally agreed to see him.

‘You work in the library, don’t you?’ the man asked. His name was Bakunin, and he was an understaffer for Emantine, whose adjunct had repeatedly refused Hawser’s written approaches for an interview or assessment. Indirectly, this meant that Bakunin reported to the municipal and clerical authorities, and was therefore part of the greater administrative mechanism that eventually came to the attention of Jaffed Kelpanton in the Ministry of the Sigillite.

‘Yes, the Library of the Universitariate. But I’m not attached to the Universitariate. It’s a temporary position.’

‘Oh,’ said Bakunin, as if Hawser had said something interesting. The man had one eye on his appointment slate and could not disguise his eagerness to be elsewhere.

They’d met in the culinahalle on Aleksanterinkatu 66106. It was a high-spar place, with a good reputation and great views down over the summitstratum commercias. Acrobats and wire artists were performing over the drop in the late afternoon sun that flooded through the solar frames.

‘So, your position?’ Bakunin inquired. Elegant transhuman waiters with elective augmetic modifications had brought them a kettle of whurpu leaf and a silver tray of snow pastries.

‘I’m contracted to supervise the renovation. I’m a data archaeologist.’

‘Ah yes. I remember. The library was bombed, wasn’t it?’

‘Pro-Panpacifists detonated two wipe devices during the insurrection.’

Bakunin nodded. ‘There can be nothing whatsoever to recover.’

‘The Hive Council certainly didn’t believe so. They passed the area for demolition.’

‘But you disagreed?’

Hawser smiled. ‘I persuaded the Universitariate Board to hire me on a trial basis. So far, I’ve recovered seven thousand texts from an archive that had been deemed worthless.’

‘Good for you,’ said Bakunin. ‘Good for you.’

‘Good for all of us,’ said Hawser. ‘Which brings me to the purpose of this meeting. Have you had a chance to read my petition?’

Bakunin smiled thinly. ‘I confess, no. Not cover to cover. Things are very busy at the moment. I have reviewed it quickly, however. As far as the general thrust of your position goes, I am with you all the way. All the way. But I can’t see how it isn’t already covered under the terms of the Enactment of Remembrance and–’

Hawser raised his hand gently. ‘Please, don’t point me to the Offices of the Remembrancers. My requests keep getting channelled in that direction.’

‘But surely you’re talking about commemoration, about the systematic accumulation of data to document the liberation and unification of human civilisation. We are blessed to be living through the greatest moment in the history of our species, and it is only right that we memorialise it. The Sigillite himself supports and promotes the notion. You know he was a direct signatory of the Enactment?’

‘I know. I am aware of his support. I celebrate it. So often, at the great moments in history, the historian is forgotten.’

‘From my review of your statements and personal history,’ said Bakunin, ‘I am in no doubt that I can secure you a high-profile position in the Remembrance order. I can recommend you, and I’m confident I can do the same for several other names on the list you submitted.’

‘I’m grateful,’ said Hawser, ‘truly, I am. But that’s not why I requested this meeting. The remembrancers perform a vital function. Of course we must record, in great detail, the events that are surrounding us. Of course we must, for the public good, for the greater glory, for posterity, but I am proposing a rather more subtle endeavour, one that I fear is being overlooked. I’m not talking about writing down what we’re doing. I’m talking about writing down what we know. I’m talking about preserving human knowledge, systemising it, working out what we know and what we’ve forgotten.’

The understaffer blinked, and his smile became rather vacuous. ‘That’s surely… pardon me, ser… but that’s surely an organic process of the Imperium. We do that as we go along, don’t we? I mean, we must. We accumulate knowledge.’

‘Yes, but not rigorously, not methodically. And when a resource is lost, like the library here in Karelia, we shrug and say oh dear. But that data wasn’t lost, not all of it. I ask the question – did we even know what we had lost when the wipe devices detonated? Did we have any idea of the holes it was eating in the collective knowledge of our species?’

Bakunin looked uncomfortable.

‘I need someone to champion this, ser,’ Hawser said. He knew he was getting bright-eyed and eager, and he knew that people often found that enthusiasm off-putting. Bakunin looked uneasy but Hawser couldn’t help himself. ‘We… and by we I mean all the academics who have put their names to my petition… we need someone to take this up the line in the Administratum. To get it noticed. To get it to the attention of somebody who has the position and influence to action it.’

‘With respect–’

‘With respect, ser, I do not want to spend the remainder of my career following the various Crusade forces around like a loyal dog, dutifully recording every last detail of their meritorious actions. I want to see a greater process at work, an audit of human knowledge. We must find out the limits of what we know. We must identify the blanks, and then strive to fill those blanks or renovate missing data.’

Bakunin let out a nervous little laugh.