Iron Sunrise

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER EDITORIAL

Frank stubbed out his cigar angrily, grinding what was left of it into the ashtray with his thumb. “Fuck ’em,” he grumbled to himself. “Fuck ’em.” He took a deep breath, sucking in the blue soup that passed for air in his cramped stateroom. Sooner or later he’d have to turn the ventilation back on and pull down the plastic film he’d spread all over the smoke detector — otherwise, the life-support stewards would come round and give him their usual patronizing-but-polite lecture on shipboard life-support systems — but for now he took an obscure comfort in his ability to inhale the smog of his choice. Everything else about this ship was out of his grasp, locked down like a mobile theme park, and as a compulsive control-twiddler, Frank was pathologically uncomfortable with any environment he couldn’t mess up to his heart’s content.

Frank was pissed. He was so angry he had to get up and walk, before he gave in to the temptation to start banging his head on the bulkhead. It was one of his biggest problems, he admitted: he had an appalling capacity to feel other people’s pain. If he’d been able to have it surgically removed, he’d have done so — maybe he’d then have been able to make a career for himself in politics. But as it was, given his vocation, it just gave him violent conscience-aches. Especially when, as on this cruise, he was going to have to exorcise some of his own ghosts. So he blinked away the workflow and copy windows, folded up his keyboard and dropped it in a pocket, stood up, took a final deep breath of the blue toxic waste cloud — then opened the door for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours.

Somewhere in the crew quarters of the Romanov an alarm siren was probably whooping: “Danger! The troll in suite B312 has emerged! Send deodorant spray and prepare to decontaminate corridor B3! Danger! Danger! Chemical warfare alert!” He sniffed the unnaturally pure air, nostrils flaring. A big man, with a beetling brow and an expressive nose, one of his ex-lovers had described him as resembling a male silverback gorilla, a resemblance that his silver-and-black close-cropped hair only emphasized. Right then his skin glowed with youthful vigor, and he was almost vibrating with energy: he’d had his first telomere reset and aging fix only six months before, and was filled with a restless teenage exuberance that he’d almost forgotten existed. It was overflowing into his work by way of pugnacious editorials and take-no-prisoners prose, and after a few hours of writing it nearly had him bouncing off the ceiling.

The corridor was lined with doorways and walled with plush beige carpet, recessed handholds, and safety nets ready to turn it into a series of safety cubes in event of off-axis acceleration. Here and there, recessed false windows looked out onto scenes of bucolic harmony, desert sunsets and sandy beaches, vying with lush tropical rain forests and breathtaking starscapes. Indirect lighting turned it into a shadowless tube, bland as a business hotel and twice as boring. And it smelled of synthetic pine.

Frank snorted as he ambled along the corridor. He detested and despised this aspect of interstellar travel. What was the point of embarking on a perilous journey to far-off worlds if the experience was much like checking into one of those expensively manicured racks of self-contained service apartments designed to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator shit-for-brains salesdrone? Hotels with carefully bland hand-painted artwork on the walls, a cupboard where the ready-meal of your choice would appear in a prepack ready to eat, and the ceiling above the emperor-sized bed was ready to screen a hundred thousand crap movies or play a million shit immersives.

Well, fuck ’em! Fuck the complacent assholes, and their trade-mission-to-the-stars quick buck mentality. Inward-looking, pampered, greedy, and unwilling to look at anything beyond the end of their noses that doesn’t come with a reassuringly expensive price tag attached. Fuck ’em and their consumer demand for bland, boring flying hotels with supercilious or patronizing hired help, and absolutely nothing that might give them any sign they weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto, that they might actually be aboard a million tons of smart matter wrapped around a quantum black hole slipping across the event horizon of the observable universe on a wave of curved space-time. Gosh, if they realized what was happening, they might be disturbed, frightened, even! And that might make them less inclined to buy a ticket with WhiteStar in future, thus impacting the corporate bottom line, so …

Frank had traveled by oxcart. He’d traveled on antiquated tramp freighters that had to spin their crew quarters like a wheel to provide a semblance of gravity. He’d spent one memorable night huddling with other survivors on the back of an armored personnel carrier thundering across desert sands, neck itching in the edgily imagined sights of the victor’s gunships, and he’d spent a whole week huddled in the bottom of a motorized vaporetto in a swampy river delta near the town of Memphis, on Octavio. Compared to any of those experiences this was the lap of luxury. It was also puerile, bland, and — worst of all — characterless.

At the end of the gently curving corridor Frank pushed through a loose curtain that secured access onto a landing that curved around the diamond-walled helix of a grand staircase, spacecraft-style. The staircase itself was organic, grown painstakingly from a single modified mahogany tree that had been coaxed into a spiral inside its protective tube, warped into a half-moon cross-section, then brutally slain and partially dissected by a team of expert carpenters. It led up through the eleven passenger decks of the ship, all the way to the stellarium with its diamond-phase optically clean dome — covered, now, because the aberration of starlight from the ship’s pilot wave had dimmed everything except gamma-ray bursters to invisibility. He glanced around, puzzled by the lack of passengers or white-suited human stewards, then did a double take as he checked his watch. “Four in the morning?” he grunted at nobody in particular. “Huh.” Not that the hour meant much to him, but most people lived by the ship’s clocks, trying to keep a grip on the empire time standard that bound the interstellar trading circuits together, which meant they’d be asleep, and most of the public areas would be shut for maintenance.

The night bar on F deck was still open, and Frank was only slightly breathless from hauling himself round fifteen hundred degrees of corkscrewing staircase when he arrived, pushed through the gilt-and-crystal doors, and looked around.

A handful of night owls hung out in the bar even at this late hour: one or two lone drinkers grimly tucked away the hard stuff, and a circle of half a dozen chattering friends clustered around a table in the corner. It was often hard to judge people’s age, but there was something that looked young about their social interaction. Maybe they were students on the Grand Tour, or a troupe of workers caught up in one of those unusual vortices of labor market liquidity that made it cheaper to take the workers where the work was rather than vice versa. Frank had seen that before — he’d been on the receiving end himself once, back when he was young and clueless. He snorted to himself and slouched onto one of the barstools. “I’ll have a Wray and Nephew on ice, no mixer,” he grunted at the bartender, who nodded silently, realized that Frank didn’t want a whole lot of chatter with his drink, and turned away to serve it up.

“Good voyage so far, eh, what-what?” chirped a voice from somewhere by his left shoulder.

Frank glanced round. “Good for some,” he said, biting back his first impulsive comment. You never could tell who you’d run across in a bar at four in the morning, as at least one senior government bureaucrat had discovered after being mugged by the Times and left for dead in the Appointments pages. Frank had no intention of giving anything away, even to an obvious weirdo. Which this guerrilla conversationalist clearly was, from the tips of his ankle boots — one of which was red, and the other green — to the top of his pointy plush skull cap (which was electric blue with a dusting of holographic stars). Soulfully deep brown eyes and crimson moustache notwithstanding, he looked like an escapee from a reeducation camp for fashion criminals. “You’ll pardon me for saying this, but I didn’t come down here for a co-therapy session,” Frank rumbled. The bartender punctuated his observation with a clink of crystal on teak; Frank picked up his shot glass and sniffed the colorless liquid.

“That’s all right, I didn’t come here for a good laugh, either.” The colorful squirt nodded in exaggerated approval then snapped his fingers at the bartender. I’ll have one of whatever he’s having,” he piped.

Frank stifled a sigh and glanced at the gaggle of youths. They had a depressingly clean-cut, short-haired, brutally scrubbed look: there was not a single piercing, chromatophore, braid, or brand among the whole lot. It reminded him of something disturbing he’d seen somewhere, but in thirty-odd years of traveling around the settled worlds he’d seen enough that the specifics were vague. They seemed suspiciously healthy in a red-cheeked outdoors kind of way. Probably Dresdener students, children of the hereditary managementariat, off on their state-funded wanderjahr between high gymnasium studies and entry into the government bureaucracy. They all wore baggy brown trousers and gray sweaters, as identically cut as a uniform, or maybe they just came from a world where fashion victims were run out of town on a rail. There was just enough variation to suggest that they’d actually chosen to dress for conformity rather than having it thrust upon them. He glanced back at the technicolor squirt. “It’s cask-strength,” he warned, unsure why he was giving even that much away.

“That’s okay.” The squirt took a brief sniff, then threw back half the glass. “Wheel Hey, I’ll have another of these. What did you say it was called?”

“Wray and Nephew,” Frank said wearily. “It’s an old and horribly expensive rum imported direct from Old Earth, and you are going to regret it tomorrow morning. Um, evening. Or whenever you get the bill.”

“So?” The paint factory explosion picked up his glass, twirled it around, and threw the contents at the back of his throat. “Wow. I needed that. Thank you for the introduction. I can tell we’re going to have a long and fruitful relationship. Me and the bottle, I mean.”

“Well, so long as you don’t blame me for the hangover…” Frank took a sip and glanced around the bar, but with the exception of the Germanic diaspora clones there didn’t seem to be any prospect of rescue.

“So where are you going, what-what?” asked the squirt, as the bartender planted a second glass in front of him.

“Septagon, next.” Frank surrendered to the inevitable. “Then probably on to New Dresden, then over to Vienna — I hear they’ve taken in some refugees from Moscow. Would you know anything about that? I’m skipping Newpeace.” He shuddered briefly. “Then when the ship closes the loop back to New Dresden, I’m coming aboard again for the run back to Septagon and Earth, or wherever else work takes me.”

“Ah! Hmm.” A thoughtful look creased the short guy’s face. “You a journalist, then?”

“No, I’m a warblogger,” Frank admitted, unsure whether to be irritated or flattered. “What are you here for?”

“I’m a clown, and my stage name’s Svengali. Only I’m off duty right now, and if you ask me to crack a joke, I’ll have to make inquiries as to whether your home culture permits dueling.”

“Erm.” Frank focused on the short man properly, and somewhere in his mind a metaphorical gear train revolved and locked into place with a clunk. He took a big sip of rum, rolled it around his mouth, and swallowed. “So. Who are you really? Uh, I’m not recording this — I’m off duty too.”

“A man after my own heart.” Svengali grinned humorlessly. “There’s nothing funny about being a clown, at least not after the first six thousand repetitions. I can’t even remember my own name. I’m working my way around the fucking galaxy entertaining morons who live in shitholes and stashing away all the blat I can manage. People who don’t live in shitholes I don’t perform for because I might want to retire to a non-shithole one of these days.”

“Oh. So you’re working for WhiteStar?”

“Yes, but strictly contract. I don’t hold with industrial serfdom.”

“Oh. So is there much call for clowns on a liner?”

Svengali took another sip of rum before replying in a bored monotone: “The WhiteStar liner Romanov carries 2,318 passengers, 642 cabin crew, and 76 engineering and flight crew. By our next port of call, in eleven days’ time, that number will have increased by one — two births and, according to the actuaries, there’s a 70 percent probability of at least one death on this voyage, although there hasn’t been one yet. There are thirty-one assorted relatives and hangers-on of crew members aboard, too. Now, most of this mob are well into their extended adulthood, but of the total, 118 are prepubertal horrors suffering from too much adult attention — they’re mostly single children, or have siblings more than twenty years older than them, which makes for much the same species of spoiled brat. Someone has to keep the yard apes entertained, and they’re far more demanding than adults: cheap passives and interactives only go so far. In fact” — Svengali raised his glass and tipped the bartender a wink — “they’re exhausting. And that’s before you get me started on the so-called adults.”

Frank put his glass down. “The revue,” he said. “That damn cabaret act that keeps spamming me with invitations. Is that anything to do with you?”

Svengali looked disturbed. “Don’t blame me,” he said. “It’s official company Ents policy to rape the nostalgia market for all it’s worth. Consider yourself, a business traveler who can use his time productively on the journey: you’re an exception to the general rule, which is that most travelers are bored silly and can’t do anything about it. People travel to arrive at a destination. So, why would they want to stay awake through weeks of boredom, eating their heads off in an expensive stateroom when they could be tucked up in a vitrification pod in the cargo bay? Deadheads in steerage consume no oxygen, don’t get bored, and buy no expensive meals or entertainments en route. So the company has to lay on diversions and novelties if they are to extract the maximum revenue from their passengers. Do you realize that the Ents manager on this ship outranks the chief engineer? Or that there’s an unofficial revenue enhancement target of 50 percent over the bare room and board tariff per waking passenger?” He nodded slyly at Frank’s refilled glass of rum. “For all you know, I could be a revenue protection officer and this glass of mine is drinking water. I’m here to keep you drinking in this bar until you collapse under the table, to the greater glory of WhiteStar’s bottom line.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Frank said with a degree of magisterial assurance that came from three shots of cask-strength rum and a finely tuned bullshit detector. “You’re a fucking anarchist, and your next drink’s on me, right?”

“Um.” Svengali sighed. “You’re making presumptions on my honesty, and I’ve only known you for five minutes, but I thank you from the bottom of my bitter and twisted little ventricles. What kind of blogger are you, to be giving precious alcohol away?”

“One who wants to get drunk as a skunk, in company. Hard fucking editorial, the copy fought back, and there are no politicians to go beat up on until we get wherever it is that we’re going. My momma always told me that drinking on your own was bad, so I’m doing my best to live up to her advice. Really, you won’t like me anymore when you get to know me; I’m heartless when I’m sober.”

“Hmm, I may be able to help you. I’ve got the heart of an eight-year-old boy; I keep it in a jar of formaldehyde in my luggage. Er, please excuse me — if that’s funny I’m supposed to bill you.”

“Don’t worry, it was dead on arrival.”

“That’s all right then.”

“Make mine a Tallisker,” said Frank, turning to the bartender. “What cigars have you got?”

“Cigars, you say?” asked Svengali: “I’m fresh out of bangers.”

“Yeah, cigars.” In the far corner the clean-living crew began singing something outdoors-ish and rhythmic in what sounded to Frank’s ear to be a dialect descended from German. Much thumping of beer glasses ensued. Svengali winced and took two fat Havanas from the offered humidor, then passed one to Frank. “Hey, you got a light?” Svengali shrugged and snapped his fingers. Flame blossomed.

“Thanks.” Frank took an experimental puff, winced slightly, and took another. “That’s better. Whisky and cigars, what else is there to life?”

“Good sex, money, and the death of enemies,” said Svengali. “Not right now, I hasten to add: experience and honesty compels me to admit that mixing shipboard life with sex, money, and murder is generally a bad idea. But once I get off at New Dresden — end of this circuit, for now, for me — I confess I might just indulge in one or the other preoccupation.”

“Not murder, I hope.”

Svengali grinned humorlessly. “And what would a simple clown have to do with that? The only things I murder are straight lines.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Frank took another puff from his cigar and let the smoke trickle out in a thick blue stream. He pretended not to notice the bartender surreptitiously inserting a pair of nose plugs. “Did you ever run into any refugees from Moscow?”

“Hmm, that would be about, what, four years ago indeed?”

“About that,” Frank agreed. “The event itself happened” — he paused to check his watch — “about four years and nine months ago, normalized empire time.”

“Hmm.” Svengali nodded. “Yes, there were outlying stations weren’t there? I remember that.” He put his cigar down for a moment. “It really bit the flight schedules hereabouts. Every ship had to stand to arms for rescue missions! Indeed it did. However, I was working for a most malignant circus impresario at the time, groundside on Morgaine — a woman by the name of Eleanor Ringling. She had this strange idea that clowning was in the nature of unskilled labor, and used us harder than the animals. In the end I actually had to escape from that one, false papers and cash down for a freezer ticket off planet because she was trying to tie me up in court over an alleged bond of indenture she’d faked my spittle on.” He snorted. “Think I’ll stay on the rum, what?”

“Be my guest.” Frank puffed on his cigar, which, while not on a par with his private supply, was well within the remit of various arms control committees and definitely suitable for a public drinking establishment. “Hmm. Ringling. Name rings a bell, I think. Didn’t she turn up dead under peculiar circumstances a couple of years ago? Caused a scandal or something.”

“I couldn’t possibly comment. But it wouldn’t surprise me if an elephant sat on her — the woman had a way of making enemies. If I’m ever on the same continent, I think I’ll make a point of visiting her grave. Just to make sure she’s dead, you understand.”

“You must have got on like a house on fire.”

“Oh we did, we did,” Svengali said fervently. “She was the arsonist and I was the accelerant: her predilection for being tied up and sat on a butt plug while being beaten with sausages by a man wearing a rubber nose was the ignition source. We—” He stopped, looking at something behind Frank.

“What is” — Frank turned round — “it?” he finished, looking up, and up again, at the silent and disapproving face of one of the youths from the other table. He was blond, lantern-jawed, and built like a nuclear missile bunker. He was so tall that he even succeeded in looking over Frank.

“You are poisoning the air,” he said, icily polite. “Please cease and desist at once.”

“Really?” Frank switched on his shit-eating grin: There’s going to be trouble. “How strange, I hadn’t noticed. This is a public bar, isn’t it?”

“Yes. The matter stands. I do not intend to inhale your vile stench any further.” The kid’s nostrils flared.

Frank took a full mouthful of smoke and allowed it to dribble out of his nostrils. “Hey, bartender. Would you care to fill laughing boy here in on shipboard fire safety?”

“Certainly.” It was the first thing he’d heard the bartender say since he arrived. She looked like the strong, silent type, another young woman working her way around the worlds to broaden her horizons on a budget. One side of her head was shaven to reveal an inset intaglio of golden wires; her shoulder muscles bulged slightly under her historically inauthentic tank top and bow tie. “Sir, this is a general intoxicants bar. For passengers who wish to smoke, drink, and inject. It’s the only part of this ship they’re allowed to do that in, on this deck.”

“So.” Frank glared at the fellow. “What part of that don’t you understand? This is the smoking bar, and if you’d like to avoid the smell, I suggest you find a nonsmoking bar — or take it up with the Captain.”

“I don’t think so.” For a moment square-jaw looked mildly annoyed, as if a mosquito was buzzing around his ears, then an instant later Frank felt a hand like an industrial robot’s grab him by the throat.

“Hans! No!” It was one of the women from the table, rising to her feet. “I forbid it!” Her voice rang with the unmistakable sound of self-assured authority.

Hans let go instantly and took a step back from Frank, who coughed and glared at him, too startled to even raise a fist. “Hey, asshole! You looking for a—”

A hand landed on his shoulder from behind. “Don’t,” whispered Svengali. “Just don’t.”

“Hans. Apologize to the man,” said the blonde. “At once.”

Hans froze, his face like stone. “I am sorry,” he said tonelessly. “I did not intend to lay hands on you. I must atone now. Mathilde?”

“Go — I think you should go to your room,” said the woman, moderating her tone. Hans turned on his heel and marched toward the door. Frank stared at his back in gathering fury, but by the time he glanced back at the table the strength-through-joy types were all studiously avoiding looking in his direction.

“What the fuck was that about?” he demanded.

“I can call the purser’s office if you’d like an escort back to your room,” the bartender suggested. She finally brought both hands out from below the bar. “That guy was fast.”

“Fast?” Frank blinked. “Yeah, I’d say. He was like some kind of martial arts—” He stopped, rubbed his throat, glanced down at the ashtray. His cigar lay, half-burned, mashed flat as a pancake. “Oh fuck. That kind of fast. Did you see that?” he asked, beginning to tremble.

’Yeah,” Svengali said quietly. “Military-grade implants. I think my friend here could do with that escort,” he told the bartender. “Don’t turn your back on that guy if you see him again,” he added in a low conversational tone, pitched to avoid the other side of the room.

“I don’t understand—”

“This drink’s on me. One for you, too,” Svengali told the bartender.

“Thanks.” She poured them both a shot of rum, then pulled out a bottle of some kind of smart drink. “Sven, did my eyes fool me, or did you have some sort of gadget in your hand?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment, Eloise.” The clown shrugged, then knocked back half the glass in one go. “Hmm. That must be my fifth shot this evening. Better crank up my liver.”

“What was that about—”

“We get all types through here,” said Eloise the bartender. She leaned forward on the bar. “Don’t mess with these folks,” she whispered.

“Anything special?” asked Svengali.

“Just a feeling.” She put the bottle down. “They’re flakes.”

“Flakes? I’ve done flakes.” Svengali shrugged. “We’ve got fucking Peter Pans and Lolitas on the manifest. Flakes don’t go crazy over a little cigar smoke in a red-eye bar.”

“They’re not normal flakes,” she insisted.

“I think he’d have killed me if she hadn’t stopped him,” Frank managed to say. His hand holding the glass was shaking, rattling quietly on the bar top.

“Probably not.” Svengali finished his shot glass. “Just rendered you unconscious until the cleanup team got here.” He raised an eyebrow at Eloise. “Is there a panic button under the bar, or were you just masturbating furiously?”

“Panic button, putz.” She paused. “Say, nobody told me about any ersatz juvies. How do I tell if they come in my bar?”

“Go by the room tag manifest for their ages. Don’t assume kids are as young as they look. Or old folks, for that matter. You come from somewhere that restricts life extension rights, don’t you?” Svengali shrugged. “At least most of the Lolitas have a handle on how to behave in public, unlike dumb-as-a-plank there. Damn good thing, that, it can be really embarrassing when the eight-year-old you’re trying to distract with a string of brightly dyed handkerchiefs turns out to have designed the weaving machine that made them. Anyway, who are those people?”

“One minute.” Eloise turned away and did something with the bar slate. “That’s funny,” she said. “They’re all from someplace called Tonto. En route to Newpeace. Either of you ever heard of it?”

There was a dull clank as Frank dropped his glass on the floor.

“Oh shit,” he said.

Svengali stared at him. “You dropped your drink. Funny, I had you pegged for a man with bottle. You going to tell me what’s bugging you, big boy?”

“I’ve met people from there before.” He glanced at the mirror behind the bar, taking in the table, the five clean-cut types playing cards and studiously ignoring him, their quasi-uniform appearance and robust backwoods build. “Them. Here. Oh shit. I thought the Romanov was only making a refueling stop, but it must be a real port of call.”

An elbow prodded him in the ribs; he found Svengali staring up at him, speculation writ large on the off-duty clown’s face. “Come on, back to my room. I’ve got a bottle stashed in my trunk; you can tell me all about it. Eloise, room party after your shift?”

“I’m off in ten minutes, or whenever Lucid relieves me,” she said. Glancing at him, interestedly: “Is it a good story?”

“A story?” Frank echoed. “You could say.” He glanced at the table. A flashback to icy terror prickled across his skin, turned his guts to water. “We’d better leave quietly.” The woman, Mathilde, the one in charge, was watching him in one of the gilt-framed mirrors. Her expression wasn’t so much unfriendly as disinterested, like a woman trying to make up her mind whether or not to swat a buzzing insect. “Before they really notice us.”

“Now?” Svengali hopped down off his stool and got an arm under Frank’s shoulder. He’d had rather a lot to drink, but for some reason Svengali seemed almost sober. Frank, for his part, wasn’t sober so much as so frightened that it felt like it. He let Svengali lead him through the door, toward a lift cube, then from it down a narrow uncarpeted corridor to a small, cramped crew stateroom. “Come on. Not much farther,” said Svengali. “You want that drink?”

“I want—” Frank shivered. “Yeah,” he said. “Preferably somewhere where they don’t know it’s my room.”

“Somewhere.” Svengali keyed the door open, waved Frank down at one end of the narrow bunk, and shut the door. He rummaged in one of the overhead lockers and pulled out a metal flask and a pair of collapsible shot glasses. “So how come you know those guys?”

“I’m not sure.” Frank grimaced. “But they’re from Tonto, and going to New-peace. I had a really bad time on Newpeace once…”