CORDELIA PA
I awoke in my father’s cabin. I had been dreaming about the Intrusion. For a few moments, I drowsed, listening to the now-familiar clanks and groans of the Gigolo Aunt. From the way the deck lay still, I could tell we remained stuck on the frozen Plate, with the ship’s black wings folded against her hull rather than clawing at the hypervoid.
My head ached and my memories felt cobwebby and jumbled, like notes scrawled in an unfamiliar hand. Behind them, I had the sense of another mind, the liminal echoes of somebody else’s interior monologue.
I’m pasting all my flight experience, all my knowledge of captaining the Gigolo Aunt, into your memory…
I propped myself up on my elbows. All that had been a dream, hadn’t it? But then, why was I wearing a pressure suit? The bulky garment encased me from boots to collar, leaving only my hands and head free. While I had been sleeping, someone had detached my gauntlets and helmet from their metal rings at wrists and neck, and dumped them untidily onto the nightstand beside my bunk. The crystal reader lay next to them, but the crystal containing my father’s mind-map was gone.
Swallowed…
Moving carefully, I swung my feet down onto the floor and tried to take off the suit. Velcro patches secured the zip at the side. I ripped them open and pulled down the fastener, then shrugged my arms out of their sleeves. However, I couldn’t get my legs out while the metal neck ring remained, and I couldn’t get that off without pulling it over my head, which was impossible with my feet still in the suit. I’d never worn a pressure suit before, and therefore had no idea of the correct way to get the thing off. I had to stand up and improvise. After a lot of wriggling and cursing, I managed to angle a hip far enough through the open zipper that I was able to prise the neck ring up and over my head, and emerged tousle-haired from the back of the suit like a dragonfly bursting from the ruptured seams of its larval skin. Sitting on the bed, I kicked my feet free. Beneath the suit, I wore my shipboard fatigues. I brushed them down with my hand, smoothing out the creases, and regarded myself in the dirty mirror above the cabin’s steel washbasin. My hair looked as white as ever, and my eyes just as mismatched. Beneath the cabin’s buttery lights, even the skin on my hands appeared faultlessly normal.
Had I really fallen into the Intrusion?
I climbed the ladder out of the cabin, and found Lomax on the Gigolo Aunt’s bridge. The older woman was asleep in the pilot’s couch, hunched over the control console with her cheek resting on her fist. The main lights were off and the scrolling reflections of the screens flickered across her features like the lambent glow of a campfire. Without making a sound, and without knowing quite why I did it, I slipped into the co-pilot’s berth and wriggled down as if snuggling under a pile of heaped animal skins. The bridge felt like home. I knew the placement and function of each and every light and screen, the location of every scuff and scratch. Answers could wait. Right now, I was warm and safe, and content to lie there in the wavering, cave-like shadows, watching the light play across the planes of Lomax’s face.
* * *
I must have dozed, because when I next opened my eyes, Lomax was watching me in the semi-darkness.
“Are you okay?”
I stretched and yawned. “I think so.”
“No ill effects, no dizziness?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“We got caught in an aftershock. Reality turned weird for a few minutes.”
“Ah, that explains it.”
“What?”
“I was dreaming about my father and the Intrusion. At least, I think it was a dream…” I inclined my head, listening in vain for the squeaks and strains of the ship’s machinery. “We’re still grounded?”
Lomax’s brow puckered. “Yes, that’s right.”
“But we made it through the aftershock okay?”
“By the hair of our pelts.” Lomax held up her hand, finger and thumb spaced less than a centimetre apart. “That was a nasty one.”
“How’s the woman we found?”
“Unchanged—she’s still unconscious. No sign of waking.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Brof and Spider have been working on the engines. Gant reckons we might be underway in a few hours, unless there are further shocks.”
“Where are we going?”
“Cold Chapel.”
The blood turned icy in my arteries. “Cold Chapel?”
“The coordinates are already loaded into the navigational array. I assumed you’d done it.”
“My father wants me to…” I trailed off. There was something I had to do, someone I had to confront.
Lomax frowned. “Nick wants you to do something?”
“Yeah, I spoke to him.” My memories were a blizzard of disjointed shards, but some of those shards were colliding and sticking, clumping together in a slow accretion of sense and meaning. “And he wants me to find his… son.”
“Lewis?” Lomax looked concerned. “Was this part of your dream?”
I shook my head. “No, this is real. I didn’t know about Lewis, so how could I have dreamt about him? I don’t know how or why, but this is real.” I lay back. My short white hair flattened against the headrest. The tips of my fingers prickled. “Apparently, he has something I need.”
* * *
Falling from the mist, the Gigolo Aunt erupted from the hypervoid a quarter of a million miles above Cold Chapel. For a couple of beats, her black mesh wings raked the vacuum. Then, finding no traction, they furled themselves tightly against the hull. The fusion motors at the stern coughed into full voice, and the old ship surged forward.
On the bridge, I considered the limb of the planet below. As its name suggested, Cold Chapel was a bleak and uninviting world—a world of jagged mountain crags and shallow, brackish seas—barely more hospitable than the frozen Plate whose snow we’d shaken from our landing gear a few hours before. The first humans to reach it had been the crew of the Widening Gyre, an asteroidsized lump of rock and machinery still tumbling in orbit around the planet. Cold Chapel was a frontier world, on the bleeding edge of the Intrusion, its settlers locked in relentless conflict with an evaporating atmosphere and encroaching ice age, wholly dependent on trading ships like the Gigolo Aunt for even the most basic of supplies.
I knew all this, and yet I should not have. The information was there in my memory, but it came with flashes of emotion and broken association that weren’t mine, that hurt my head and fired off as many questions as they answered. I had never been to Cold Chapel yet I recognised the planet; I remembered nights in a log cabin on one of the ridgeback peaks, the smell of the imported pine trees, the sigh of the dawn wind. I remembered the teeth-aching shock of the cold spring water where it bubbled up between the rocks, the call of buzzards circling over the valley.
The sight of the Widening Gyre brought claustrophobic snapshots of roughly hewn corridors and dancing flames, of extreme cold and suffocation.
These weren’t my memories, I knew; these were the memories and sensations of an insane old man who’d somehow hacked them out of his own brain and installed them in mine. And the worst part was, even I wasn’t sure where the boundary lay. Some of my earliest memories seemed to have been overwritten by the imported ones. I could no longer remember what my house on Alpha Plate had looked like, or the shuttle ride to City Plate Two, the only time I’d been off-Plate until I stepped aboard the Gigolo Aunt a decade later. How much of what was going on in my head now was me? I tried to focus on my earliest memory…
* * *
A six-year-old girl plays in an alley between two tall and ancient apartment blocks. She has a ratty old blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her uncle is out, hustling the bars on the port’s periphery, playing for coins, looking for work. Her half-brother is asleep upstairs, in one of the small rooms the three of them share.
The girl’s name is Cordelia, and she can do magic. With a wave of her tingling fingertips she can conjure playthings from the alley’s floor. Small stick figures—living dolls, real toy soldiers—extrude themselves at her bidding, rising up like plants bursting from soil. She hunches over them in wide-eyed delight. They are her puppets, and they ebb and flow to the vagaries of her six-year-old whims.
In a few years, she will have suppressed her strange ability to mould and sculpt the metal that forms the surface of her world, and she will have convinced herself that the little figures capering before her now are nothing more than the products of an overactive child’s imagination; but, for the moment, she’s content to squat here, draped in her blanket, and watch them dance.
* * *
How much of my life had I forgotten? I tried to name some of the kids I’d grown up with around the fringes of the port, but could only come up with half a dozen, and some of those I was sure belonged to children my father had known in his youth. I was only supposed to have his knowledge of flying the Aunt, but it seemed other memories had bled through, caught in the grey area between what he did and who he was.
I thought about what Nick had said in the Intrusion. If it’s true that we are the sum of our memories, that the remembrances of things past shape our very personalities, what happens, I wondered, when we forget? When our memories are lost or taken from us, what remains? When new memories are implanted and the things that make us who we are become changed, who then do we become?
Was I still me?
* * *
The Gigolo Aunt groaned as it hit the first wisps of atmosphere, somewhere above the planet’s equator. In the co-pilot’s chair, I felt every jolt and dip of the old craft’s fiery descent. On one level, the experience seemed routine, as if I’d carved a thousand smoky trails through a thousand alien skies; on another, it was still a relatively new and unsettling ordeal. To a girl raised on the Plates, the buffeting, juddering ride through a planet’s atmosphere always felt like the prelude to a crash.
“This is normal,” I kept repeating under my breath, hands gripping the armrests of my couch, realising as I said it that I’d been here and done this all before, time and time again, in another life.
For a giddy instant, as the ship bucked and swayed, I fell away and was Nick Moriarty. My hands—so thin and girlish to his eyes—reached forward, palms itching to caress the controls, to make the elderly ship leap and dance to my touch.
Then suddenly we were through the worst of it, and I returned. The sky cleared to a crisp blue flecked with thumb smudges of grey and white. The land rolled beneath us like a relief map. Even though I’d lived my entire childhood confined to the globe-lit gloom of the Plates, the vast, airy vault looked so achingly familiar it took my breath away.
From the pilot’s station, Lomax gave a sideways look. “Are you all right, kid? Not feeling ill?”
“I’m fine.”
The hull pinged and ticked as it cooled in the high-altitude air.
“You look a bit pale. If you’re going to hurl, do it someplace else, okay?”
“I said I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? Because—”
“I said I was fine, Tess. Now why don’t you stop fussing and keep your eyes on the damn road?”
I clapped my hands over my mouth. I had spoken, but the words had not been mine.
“What did you say?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from.”
“You sounded…”
“Like my father?” I swallowed, fighting the urge to gabble. “I know, and I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it.”
Lomax clenched her jaw. “Just don’t ever call me Tess,” she growled. Her voice dropped to a murmur. “Nobody calls me that. Only Nick. He was the only one.”
I felt my cheeks redden. “I won’t do it again,” I said, “I promise.”
Lomax turned back to her console. “See that you don’t.” She rolled her eyes as if to say, I wish to hell I’d never taken this stupid job.
Ahead, the spaceport loomed out of the landscape—a long strip of runway on a floodplain sandwiched between sharp, snow-capped mountains on one side and a stark, rocky shoreline on the other.
* * *
Sometimes, I thought as I followed Lomax through the heavy steel doors of the downport tavern, the more you knew about where you were, the less you knew about who you were, and vice versa.
The tavern had been built into a low, sturdy bunker on the edge of the landing field. Much to Spider’s annoyance, we had left him standing outside, huddled in his coat, cradling his Hooper gun and muttering obscenities into the wind. If we ran into anything we couldn’t handle by ourselves, we could summon him with a word.
Inside, the room had been laid out in the traditional fashion. The parts of my brain that were running Nick Moriarty’s old memories recognised it as kin to a hundred other similar dives. For some reason, bars adjacent to airports, railway stations and bus terminals were always the same; they always had the same smell, the same clientele, and that went double for starports. The wastrels clogging up this particular sinkhole were little different to the burned-out scavengers loitering in the taverns at the edge of my home Plate. They resembled the ghosts of long-dead passengers, forever awaiting a train they had already missed. They had been beaten down by life on the periphery, stranded by their own indolence and enervation, the perpetual inhabitants of a transitory landscape. I recognised this in them because I also recognised it in myself. I had spent my young life scrabbling in the margins, and would still be doing so had the Gigolo Aunt not dropped from the void and snatched me away.
Nobody turned to look as Lomax and I made our way to the counter. The drinkers sat hunched over their regrets, unable to make eye contact with anybody, even their own reflections in the mirror behind the bar. An overhead fan stirred the fetid air. A metal spear had been fixed to the wall above the mirror. Indigenous feathered rodents the size of my thumb fussed and skittered beneath the tables, bickering over spilled beer and peanut husks.
Lomax tapped a credit disk on the wooden counter. When the barman looked up from the pornographic tattoos on his forearms, she held up two fingers. “Dos cervezas.”
He looked her up and down, and his eyes settled on the credit disk in her hand. He shrugged and rubbed the bristles on his unshaven chin. With every movement seemingly designed to convey his contempt and disinclination, he retrieved a brace of bottles from a plastic crate beside the refrigerator and clonked them onto the counter.
I reached for one, but Lomax caught my sleeve. “These are warm,” she said.
The barman shrugged again, as if to say the temperature of the drinks was the least of his concerns. He reached for the money, but Lomax held it back. “You can speak, can’t you?”
“Si.”
“Good, because we’re looking for somebody.” The man’s eyes narrowed. “Try somewhere else.”
“We did. They said to come here.”
“Then I can’t help you.” His eyes were still on the disk. Lomax kept it just out of his reach. She spoke in a low, hoarse whisper.
“I think you can.” She leant forward across the wooden bar, resting her weight on the heels of her hands. “We’re looking for a guy called Lewis Pembroke. He’s a friend.”
“I don’t know him.”
“I’ve heard otherwise.”
The man glanced at me, taking in my platinum crop and mismatched eyes. He sniffed and spat onto the floor. “If he’s such a great friend of yours, ladies, how come you don’t know where he lives?”
“I’m a friend of his father. I’ve never been to his place.”
“Then why don’t you just send him a message?”
“I did.” Lomax pushed herself back into an upright position. We had tried the planet’s rudimentary social network, but Lewis hadn’t responded to our requests for a meeting.
“So,” the barman picked at a canine with the nail of his little finger, “why are you bothering me?”
“We’re in something of a hurry.”
The barman grinned, revealing more gold teeth. “Then I’m afraid you’re kind of screwed, ladies.” He moved away to serve a customer at the far end of the bar. Lomax scowled after him.
“Asshole.”
I wasn’t paying attention. I looked down at my open hands and rubbed the tips of my index fingers against the pads of my thumbs.
Lomax frowned. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not sure…” The skin itched. In the back of my skull, above the desultory rattle of the ceiling fan, I heard the voices of the Plates. The tingling in my fingers grew worse, and I became terrified they might start to glow again. I clenched them into fists and stuffed them into the pockets of my ship fatigues. Still the voice called in short, incomprehensible beseechments, its pitch lone and plaintive like the cry of a lost hunting hawk seeking its master.
On the wall above the mirror, the metal spear began to rattle against the clips holding it in place. The barman turned to look at it. The other drinkers fell silent.
“What the—?”
For a few seconds, the only sounds in the room were the squeak of the overhead fan and the jangle of the weapon in its mount.
“Come on,” I said, tugging Lomax’s sleeve. “We have to leave.”
The older woman gave me a curious look but didn’t argue. Once outside, she asked, “What was that all about?”
I withdrew my hands from my pockets. The ends of my fingers smouldered.
“The spear,” I said.
Lomax took a step backwards. Her hand went to the gun at her hip. “How are you doing that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has it happened before?”
“Once, in the Burrow, when you found us.” I thought of the alley that ran alongside my uncle’s building, of the little toy figures I used to conjure from the fabric of the Plates. “Maybe more than once,” I admitted.
Slowly, Lomax moved her hand away from her holster. “Does it hurt?”
I flexed my hands. “It prickles.”
Spider sidled up to us, Hooper gun over one shoulder. His dreadlocks brushed the collar of his long coat. The coat’s frayed hem flapped around his ankles.
“What’s happening, fam?” His eyes were on the street, not us.
“Cordelia’s sensitive.”
“No shit.”
Lomax scowled. Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “No, idiot. I mean she’s sensitive.”
Spider hooked a sceptical eyebrow. “What, like she can sense artefacts and shit?”
“More than that. I think she can interact with them.”
“No way.”
Lomax jerked a thumb at the door of the bar. “There was a Hearther spear on the wall in there. She made it dance.”
For the first time, Spider looked directly at me. His brown eyes drank me in from head to toe, and he frowned. “What are we going to do with her?”
Lomax put an arm around my shoulders. “We’re going to get her out of here before anybody gets any bright ideas.”
I squirmed against her embrace. “What kind of ideas?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
Lomax looked down at me with pitying eyes. “Your father was sensitive too. Not as much as you, maybe, but he had a nose for Hearther tech. He could tell a forgery from a genuine artefact at a hundred paces.”
“So?”
“So, people with your talent are valuable. Valuable enough to make kidnapping a very real possibility.”
I flushed. “But I don’t have a talent.” I held out my palms. “I don’t even know what this is.”
Yes you do. Nick Moriarty’s voice whispered in my head like the sound of waves on a half-remembered beach. You’ve known it all your life. You’ve heard the song of the Plates, felt their material beneath your feet; lived and breathed your days in the hollow spaces of the empty city; used your intuition to locate artefacts amidst the ruins, just often enough to keep you and your family in food…
I put my knuckles to my temples. “Stop it.”
You have ability, Cordelia; you just choose to ignore it.
“Shut up. You don’t know me.”
Lomax and Spider were staring at me, unsure how to react.
Ah, but I do. I know you better than anybody, better even than you know yourself.
“How could you?”
Because I helped the Intrusion build you.
* * *
“How are you going to find him without an address?” Spider gave the town a wary squint.
Lomax inclined her head in my direction. “We found this one, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, eventually. But we were poking around for hours trying to track her down.”
I waved at them to be quiet. I was listening to other voices—faint, faraway and alien. Squeezing my eyes closed, I turned in a slow circle.
“There.” My eyes opened and my hand came up to point. “That way.”
The other two watched as I turned up the fur-lined hood of my coat and started walking, tramping off into the cold, rocky night.
“Come on,” I said.
The words I was hearing in my head were untranslatable, but nonetheless familiar. From somewhere in this settlement, ancient Plate artefacts were calling—and Nick Moriarty’s memories were telling me of the gifts he’d brought for Lewis over the years. The boy lacked Cordelia’s talent, so wouldn’t be left the ship; instead, Nick had brought souvenirs and trinkets from the Plates in order to secure the financial future of his one and only male heir, curios and sculptures skimmed from shipments to universities and institutes on a dozen worlds.
“I hear them,” I called back over my shoulder, breath fogging, not caring if my words were understood. “If we find them, we’ll find him.”
Without waiting for Lomax and Spider to catch up, I marched through the tangled streets of the bleak encampment, only hesitating momentarily at intersections as I tried to hone down the source of the voices. Spider and Lomax tailed along behind like bodyguards, their weapons sweeping every doorway and shadow for possible threats. I could be of no use to them if I was snatched and pressed into service as a kind of human Geiger counter, my talent clicking with the potential value of each scavenged object.
As I walked, I dug my fingernails into my palms. I’d never been this angry in my life.
I helped the Intrusion build you, my father had said, his tone flat and matter-of-fact as if such a revelation meant almost nothing.
I did a deal, he told me now, trying to explain. Years ago, before you were born, I fell into the Intrusion. The Hearthers left a lot of stuff in there. Weapons and such, to stop their creations following them. An intelligence. It offered me my life, and in return, I let it engineer my sperm.
“But why? Why would you do that?”
Those were the terms of the deal. I felt rather than heard him sigh. When he spoke again, he sounded tired. It was trying to create a human compatible with Plate-builder technology.
“And so you helped it make me?”
It knew I was “sensitive”, so it jammed my testicles with genes harvested from a thousand others with similar talents. In return for a second chance, all I had to do was impregnate a woman who lived on the Plates, and then, once you were born, leave you there until you reached adulthood.
“That was part of the deal was it, that you had to abandon me?”
The Intrusion thought you should be immersed in that environment, and surrounded by that technology, in order for the enhanced genetic trait to come to the fore. In order to maximise your potential, it felt you needed to be in close proximity with the Plates, from conception onwards. It couldn’t fabricate that connection; it needed to be forged over years and decades.
“What about Lewis? You stayed in contact with him.”
He’s my son.
“I’m your daughter.”
In some senses, you have a thousand parents.
There were few people on the street. My hurt and anger must have shown in my expression, as those I passed crossed the road to avoid me. “Is that why you looked after him and not me?”
I tried to give your mother money, but she wouldn’t accept it. And I admit, once she died, I dropped the ball. I could have sent Caleb funds, but I was worried he’d just spend them on drink.
“Did my mother know?”
Of course not.
“So, you just bred me and waved goodbye.”
It wasn’t like that. I did what I could. You had the talent as a little kid, although it faded as you grew older. But later, when you started scavenging, you developed a knack of finding things. Your talent began to re-emerge.
“I didn’t find much.” I saw my reflection in a shop window: fur-lined coat; a tousled shock of white hair; a freak arguing with herself.
You found enough to stop you starving.
“No thanks to you.”
No.
“You said you wanted to give me the Gigolo Aunt to make up for abandoning me, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?”
I wanted to give you a choice, a way out.
“To ease your conscience?”
No, look—
“Shut up.” I stopped walking. Spider and Lomax came up beside me. Ahead, pushed up against the edge of the plateau, on the literal edge of town, stood a stone villa. Its walls had been built from large, roughly cut blocks. Thick iron bars caged its windows and steel plates protected the door. Behind it, a sheer cliff dropped away to the burnished silver sheen of a shallow lake.
Spider adjusted his grip on the oversized Hooper gun.
“This the place?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to knock, or should I just blow a hole through the door?”
I pursed my lips. It was a good question.
“Blow it,” I said.