Neal Asher: The Voyage of the Sable Keech

The creature seemed ill-formed—soft and immature—and she could not find its nascent sexual organs. That was very odd as, being this size, it should at least be approaching adulthood. Perhaps she had stumbled on an aberrant colony of mutants. Or perhaps these were whelks affected by some agent, some pollutant. It had happened on Earth a long time ago: creatures similar to this changing their sexual characteristics because of pollution by human birth-control chemicals or antifouling paints on boats. Some there now were also genfactored to grow simply as meat and so did not require sex organs. But here the process could not have been initiated by humans; there just were not enough of them, and their society was not sufficiently industrialized to affect their environment. Maybe some connection with whatever had happened here on this island? Erlin allowed her attention to stray back to her screen, and for a moment just could not fathom what she was seeing. Then the view came clear. She was now looking at her own dwelling, viewed from a point out at sea and some metres above the water.

Erlin stepped to the doorway and gaped. A year of navel-gazing had obviously rotted her brain. The tip of an enormous pyramidal spiral shell was now two metres above the waves, her camera eye still clinging in place on its tip. Of course, frog and hammer whelks were adolescent by the time they reached the size of the one on the table, which it now appeared was the juvenile of a very different and much larger species. She had not been studying a colony, but a brood of creatures that were a magnitude larger than the oldest whelk of the other kind.

And now the mother whelk was coming ashore after one of her missing offspring.

Sprout and two others leapt ashore to wrap kelp-fibre ropes around gleaming bubble-metal bollards. Anne and Boris shortly joined them, hauling on the ropes to bring the Treader up against the jetty, while the three youngsters—not yet as strong as the two older crew and incapable of such a feat—took up the slack and finally tied off the ropes. Grumbling to himself, Peck lowered the gangplank, then stood staring suspiciously inshore. Peck had a bit of a thing about islands, but then some particularly horrible things had happened to him on one particular island. Carrying a box hung by a strap from his shoulder, Ambel slapped Peck on the shoulder and stepped past him.

‘Come on, Peck. The only skinners here are fish skinners,’ he said.

Ambel then turned to peer up at Galegrabber, who was waiting expectantly. He reached into his pocket and took out a roll of notes, unfolded a couple and eyed the picture of a sail’s head on them, before holding them up. Galegrabber reached down a spider claw, delicately took the notes then secreted them somewhere about its person.

‘That completes this contract,’ said Ambel. ‘But we’ll be sailing again,’ Ambel gazed towards the lemon-yellow sun nestling in jade clouds on the horizon, ‘in the morning, so if you want to take on some more work…’ The Captain shrugged.

The sail swung its head round to stare out to sea, where rhinoworms were exuberantly hunting whelks and leeches amid the remaining reefs. ‘I’ll grab a bite and get back to you.’

The creature now released its spiderclaw holds in the spars, drew in its veined translucent wings and, like a giant spider tangled in sheets of pink cloth, hauled itself to the masthead. There, with a dull thumping, it spread its wings again and launched into the sky. Ambel turned to the gangplank and stepped down.

Ten years ago, Olian Tay had lived alone on this island in her tower, adding to her black museum and researching the past crimes of the Eight—Jay Hoop and his pirate crew who, based here on Spatterjay, had terrorized this sector of space for nearly two centuries, before moving on to kidnapping and coring humans to sell to the Prador during that long-ago war. Some years ago she had expected to make a small fortune on Earth by displaying two items that had come into her possession, but before she could commit herself to the journey, things changed very rapidly on Spatterjay.

The increasing influx of Polity citizens in search of novel immortality brought with it a flood of wealth. Windcheater, the brightest of the living sails, had risen to power because he was both politically adept and financially acute. He knew the old currency of Spatterjay, based only on equivalency, needed to be replaced with currency based on something of genuine value to the larger human population. Gems there were aplenty, but to Hoopers, who until recent years despised personal decoration, they were worth only as much as they could be sold for to a Polity citizen. Polity citizens, moreover, being able to obtain manufactured diamonds, rubies, emeralds and many others, were only interested in rarities: unique gems like some types of fossilized wood or opalized skulls, of which the supply was limited. Windcheater toyed briefly with basing a currency on artefacts remaining from the time of the Eight but, again, not enough of them were available. Then he had his brilliant idea.

The immortal and practically indestructible Hoopers valued one thing above anything else, something they rarely used yet always coveted: the poison sprine and the quick (though messy) death it could impart. Windcheater based his new currency on sprine. The fifty New Skind banknote thus promised to pay the bearer one death measure of sprine. But where to keep the gathered sprine safe from nefarious Hoopers, and from those that might want to control Hoopers? Olian Tay made her fortune because she was the only individual on the planet with a secure vault, around which she established Olian’s: the first planetary bank of Spatterjay.

Strolling along the walkway leading from the jetties into the island, Ambel gazed ahead at cleared dingle and the new structures built there and being built. Olian’s tower stood at the centre of this, but now a long low building led to it. Anyone coming to the bank must now enter through her museum and get to know something of Spatterjay’s past.

‘I’ll bugger off now,’ said Peck. ‘Any chance I can have mine now?’

Ambel nodded, took out his cash roll and counted out Peck’s wages. ‘Any of the rest of you?’ Sild and Sprout took their payments, as did other crew members; only Anne and Boris stayed with Ambel to enter the museum. Over his shoulder Ambel told those departing, ‘First thing in the morning. No excuses.’

The life-size and lifelike statue just inside the door was the reason Peck did not enjoy this place. The Skinner loomed four metres tall over the entryway: his skin was blue, he was famine thin and possessed spidery grasping hands. His head was monstrous: hoglike and bony under taut-stretched parchment skin. The Skinner, which had lived up to its name in Peck’s case. Ambel moved on, viewing display cases containing skeletons with spider thralls attached at the backs of their necks, or with skulls open to show deeper thralls installed after coring to replace the human brain removed. Other skeletons were weirdly distorted, showing the initial stages of viral mutation which if it had been allowed to go on long enough would have resulted in the statue by the door. There were slave collars, weapons, mounds of personal belongings—all that remained of the millions of humans who had been processed here nearly a millennium ago. He came eventually to single cases containing models of the infamous Eight: the Talsca twins, Jay Hoop as he had looked before his transformation into the Skinner… and Ambel himself when he had been Balem Gosk, before the Old Captains threw him into the sea to lose most of his body and, throughout an eternity of agony, his mind as well. Two models only were missing from the set.