Аластер Рейнольдс - The Iron Tactician

‘The immersion suit’s connecting into your nervous system,’ Merlin said. ‘It’s fast and painless and there won’t be any lasting damage. Do you feel it too, Prince?’

‘It might not be painful,’ Baskin said. ‘But I wouldn’t exactly call it pleasant.’

‘Trust us,’ Merlin said. ‘We’re good at this sort of thing.’

At last he felt ready to give the Iron Tactician his full attention.

Its spherical form rested on a pedestal in the middle of the chamber, the low light turning its metallic plating to a kind of coppery brown. It was about as large as an escape capsule, with a strange brooding presence about it. There were no eyes or cameras anywhere on it, at least none that Merlin recognised. But he had the skin-crawling sensation of being watched, noticed, contemplated, by an intellect not at all like his own.

He raised his hands.

‘I’m Merlin. I know what you are, I think. You should know what I am, as well. I tried to take you, and I tried to hurt your world. I’m sorry for the people I killed. But I stand before you now unarmed. I have no weapons, no armour, and I doubt very much that there’s anything I could do to hurt you.’

‘You’re wasting your words,’ Baskin said behind him, rubbing at the back of his neck.

‘No,’ Struxer said. ‘He isn’t. The Tactician hears him. It’s fully aware of what happens around it.’

Merlin touched the metal integument of the Iron Tactician, feeling the warmth and throb of hidden mechanisms. It hummed and churned in his presence, and gave off soft liquid sounds, like some huge boiler or laundry machine. He stroked his hand across the battered curve of one of the thick armoured plates, over the groove between one plate and the next. The plates had been unbolted or hinged back in places, revealing gold-plated connections, power and chemical sockets, or even rugged banks of dials and controls. Needles twitched and lights flashed, hinting at mysterious processes going on deep within the armour. Here and there a green glow shone through little windows of dark glass.

Tyrant whispered into Merlin’s ear, via the translator earpiece. He nodded, mouthed back his answer, then returned his attention to the sphere.

‘You sense my ship,’ Merlin said. ‘It tells me that it understands your support apparatus – that it can map me into your electronic sensorium using this immersion suit. I’d like to step inside, if that’s all right?’

No answer was forthcoming – none that Merlin or his ship recognised. But he had made his decision by then, and he felt fully and irrevocably committed to it.. ‘Put us through, ship – all of us. We’ll take our chances.’

‘And if things take a turn for the worse?’ Tyrant asked.

‘Save yourself, however you’re able. Scuttle away and find someone else that can make good use of you.’

‘It just wouldn’t be the same,’ Tyrant said.

The immersion suits snatched them from the chamber. The dislocation lasted an instant and then Merlin found himself standing next to his companions, in a high-ceilinged room that might well have been an annex of the Palace of Eternal Dusk. But the architectural notes were subtly unfamiliar, the play of light through the windows not that of his home, and the distant line of hills remained resolutely fixed. Marbled floor lay under their feet. White stone walls framed the elegant archwork of the windows.

‘I know this place,’ Baskin said, looking around. ‘I spent a large part of my youth in these rooms. This was the imperial palace in Lurga, as it was before the abandonment.’ Even in the sensorium he wore a facsimile of the immersion suit, and he stroked the thin fabric of its sleeve with unconcealed wonder. ‘This is a remarkable technology, Merlin. I feel as if I’ve stepped back into my childhood. But why these rooms – why recreate the palace?’

Only one doorway led out of the room in which they stood. It faced a short corridor, with high windows on one side and doors on the other. Merlin beckoned them forward. ‘You should tell him, Struxer. Then I can see how close I’ve come to figuring it out for myself.’

‘Figured what out?’ Baskin asked.

‘What really happened when they attacked this place,’ Merlin said.

They walked into the corridor. Struxer seemed at first loss for how to start. His jaw moved, but no sounds came. Then he glanced down, swallowed, and found the words he needed.

‘The attack’s a matter of record,’ he said. ‘The young Prince Baskin was the target, and he was gravely injured. Spent days and days half-buried, in darkness and cold, until the teams found him. Then the prince was nurtured back to strength, and finally allowed back into the world. But that’s not really what happened.’

They were walking along the line of windows. The view beyond was vastly more idyllic than any part of the real Havergal. White towers lay amongst woods and lakes, with purple-tinged hills rising in the distance, the sky beyond them an infinite storybook blue.

‘I assure you it did,’ Baskin said. ‘I’d remember otherwise, wouldn’t I?’

‘Not if they didn’t want you to,’ Merlin said. He walked on for a few paces. ‘There was an assassination strike. But it didn’t play out the way you think it did. The real prince was terribly injured – much worse than your memories have it.’

Now an anger was pushing through Baskin’s voice. ‘What do you mean, the “real prince”?’

‘You were substituted,’ Struxer said, ‘the assassination attempt played down, no mention made of the extent of the real Prince’s injuries.’

‘My bloodline,’ Teal said. ‘This is the reason it’s broken, isn’t it?’

Merlin nodded, but let Struxer continue. ‘They rebuilt this palace as best they could. Even then it was never as idealised as this. Most of the east wing was gone. The view through these windows was… less pretty. It was only ever a stopgap, before Lurga had to be abandoned completely.’

They had reached the only open door in the corridor. With the sunlit view behind their backs their shadows pushed across the door’s threshold, into the small circular room beyond.

In the middle of the room a small boy knelt surrounded by wooden battlements and toy armies. They ranged away from him in complex, concentric formations – organised into interlocking ranks and files as tricky as any puzzle. The boy was reaching out to move one of the pieces, his hand dithering in the air.

‘No,’ Baskin whispered. ‘This isn’t how it is. There isn’t a child inside this thing.’

Struxer answered softly. ‘After the attack, the real Prince was kept alive by the best doctors on Havergal. It was all done in great secrecy. It had to be. What had become of him, the extent of his injuries, his dependence on machines to keep him alive… all of that would have been far too upsetting for the populace. The war was going badly: public morale was low enough as it was. The only solution, the only way to maintain the illusion, was to bring in another boy. You looked similar enough, so you were brought in to live out his life. One boy swapped for another.’

‘That’s not what happened.’

‘Boys change from year to year, so the ruse was never obvious,’ Struxer said. ‘But you had to believe. So you were raised exactly as the Prince had been raised, in this palace, surrounded by the same things, and told stories of his life just as if it had been your own. Those games of war, the soldiers and campaigns? They were never part of your previous life, but slowly you started to believe an imagined past over the real one – a fiction that you accepted as the truth.’

‘You said you grew bored of war,’ Teal said. ‘That you were a sickly child who turned away from tabletop battles and became fascinated by languages instead. That was the real you breaking through, wasn’t it? They could surround you with the instruments of war, try to make you dream of it, but they couldn’t turn you into the person you were not – even if most of the time you believed the lie.’