The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 15

The Sea Caves formed a vast natural cavern system. Einduix led them down a tall narrow corridor. Stalactites hung down like hungry teeth. Black iron railings were in places buried under a half-meter of white flowstone, and Ruiz wondered how long it had been since humans had walked this route.

They passed numerous junctions; the path changed levels several times. “Are you sure you remember the way?” Ruiz asked.

“Yes,” said Einduix. “Never can a stackperson forget; otherwise we would lose our way in the stacks.”

Eventually they came to a crawlway, where the ceiling pressed close to the floor, creating an opening like a wide frowning mouth.

Einduix stopped, looked at Ruiz critically. “It is possible that you are too large. We must try, however. On your belly! You first; then I will follow, the better to pull you out if you become stuck.”

Ruiz took a deep breath. He had never liked confined spaces. But he got down and wriggled under the overhang and began a long painful crawl over sharp gravel.

Only once did he find himself jammed between the overhead and the gravel. For a moment he couldn’t seem to get his breath, and he almost sobbed, trying to fill his lungs. The stone seemed to press down on his back, and he had the terrifying illusion that it had settled a little closer to the gravel and was about to crush him. Was the island subject to earthquakes? He struggled to no avail, writhing like a bug under a giant thumb.

“Ruiz Aw! Attend!” Einduix spoke sharply. “Let out your breath. To the left is more clearance.”

Ruiz controlled himself, realized that he had been holding his breath, as if that small pneumatic pressure could hold the stone up. He concentrated on emptying his lungs, and the stone released him.

When they emerged into another high-ceilinged room, Ruiz felt a joyful sense of release. They rested on a flat-topped formation for a few minutes, though Einduix seemed untaxed by the crawl, despite his age and apparent frailty.

The thunder of the sea shook the stone here, an insistent vibration, as if the stone under Ruiz’s hand were the skin of some living creature. “How close are we?” asked Ruiz.

“Close,” said Einduix. He frowned and gave Ruiz a searching look. “On the lifeboat, after Loracca died, you seemed to own some small knowledge of the sea. True?”

“I’ve sailed several seas,” said Ruiz. “I claim no great expertise, but I can navigate well enough to find the coast.”

“The escape boats are uncomplicated — but old and somewhat fragile.” Einduix got up and pointed. “We must go, and hope that Roderigo waits elsewhere.”

They walked the last hundred meters on condensation-slick rock and came out under the great dome of the Sea Caves, filled now with the gray cold light of dawn.

They stood among the ruins of warehouses, now reduced to a few low walls. Among these remnants huge pillars rose to the roof high above. These appeared to be natural formations, once carved with decorative reliefs. Ruiz stepped closer to one of these, but the carving was obscured by delicate calcite veils, evidently formed since the destruction of the Compendium.

Long piers had once extended from the warehouses into the sea; these lay in broken tumbles, submerged for the most part.

A mild surge ran into the Sea Caves. It seemed the worst of the booming surf broke on the windward side of the island, just east of the caves. The sound was very loud, as if the arch of the cave somehow focused and amplified it.

Ruiz could see a small arc of horizon beyond the entrance; the sea was frothed with whitecaps and the sky had a brassy dangerous look.

“The weather does not entirely bless us,” said Einduix. “But at least Roderigo does, by its absence.”

“I should go as soon as possible, bad weather or no,” said Ruiz. “Roderigo will be searching for me.”

“True. So, follow!”

Einduix set off through the ruins, zigzagging from one pillar to another in an apparently random pattern. Ruiz followed, feeling somewhat foolish. How could anything useful survive in the midst of this destruction and decay?

By the time Einduix stopped before a pillar, Ruiz had begun to wonder just how sane the stackfolk could be, after all this time spent hiding and brooding.

Einduix picked up a jagged stone and chipped carefully at the calcite. In a minute he had uncovered a dim carving of a mermaid. “Ah,” he said, and pressed it. Nothing happened. He frowned and tapped fussily with his stone. He pressed again, and the carving sank into the stone.

Einduix stepped back nimbly, as the pillar hissed. Calcite fell from its side in glittering fragments; a seam opened. A tall narrow door swung out, to reveal a long bundle wrapped in mirror-finish monomol.

“Escape boat,” said Einduix, with evident satisfaction. “Help me to assemble it.”

When they were done, a graceful catamaran lay on the wet stone. Seven meters long, laminated wood hulls like two bright curving knives, a spidery platform of carbon-fiber slats linking them — the boat seemed extravagantly beautiful, to Ruiz’s anxious eyes. A tall wingmast of some clear composite material rose from the platform, controlled by a crank wheel at the helmsman’s station. A tiny jib hung from the forestay.

“She is fast,” said Einduix. “Once she was strong. Use care, Ruiz Aw. The fibers of her hull were encapsulated with inert resins, but time is time.”

Then the little man demonstrated the controls, showed Ruiz the survival capsule, with its ancient water canisters and nutrient blocks, its charts and compass, its sextant. He smiled at the navigation almanacs, so long out of date. On a chart he pointed out the course Ruiz must take.

“Do you proceed direct to SeaStack?”

“Yes,” said Ruiz. “If I’m right, the pirates will still be letting traffic in; they’ll need soldiers and slaves. My biggest worry is getting too close to the Namp shore. Other than that, I should be all right, if no margar hunters stumble across me.”

“She is radar-transparent, but not invisible,” said Einduix, patting a gunwale. “You’ll need some luck, Ruiz Aw.”

Just before they picked up the catamaran and slid its hulls into the green sea, Ruiz took Einduix’s small hand between his. “You’re staying?”

“Yes,” said Einduix. “Here is my place, if only to die. But we stackfolk live a long long time; what use ephemeral librarians?” He laughed. “So I can hope to see Roderigo’s death before my own.”

“I hope for the same,” said Ruiz. “Well, thank you. And thank Joe for me.”

A strange look crossed Einduix’s ancient face. “‘Joe’ never was his name, Ruiz Aw. You should understand: In a time long lost, in a place long dead… far away from the sadness here and now, Somnire the Glorious was his name.”

Einduix gave his hand a little shake. “Good luck to you, Ruiz Aw, and good-bye.”

Gejas had buried the sad ugly remains of The Yellowleaf under a cairn of heavy stones, to keep the scavengers away from her until she could be returned to Roderigo.

And then, not knowing what else to do, he had climbed up to the heights, so that he could look down on the island. So that he could see Ruiz Aw when the slayer finally crept from his hiding spot.

The sun set, the sun rose, and still the slayer had not shown himself.

By midmorning Gejas began to grow restless. What would he do if the slayer had met some accident among the ruins? A pack of joykillers from Delt, perhaps? Or maybe he had fallen into some pit; the island was riddled with caves. Had The Yellowleaf inflicted some wound on the slayer, some slow-to-kill injury, and did Ruiz Aw now lie in some unfindable place, bright with fever or dull with lost blood?

These thoughts moved Gejas to a great anger. “No!” he shouted, raising his face to the sky. “You will live, until I find you.”

When he looked back down at the north headland of the island, he saw a tiny boat make out from the cliffs.

Who else could it be? His fury increased; what could he do to prevent the slayer’s escape? Nothing, nothing.

His head buzzed; he clamped his jaw so tight his teeth creaked. All he could do was watch the slayer sail away, unpunished.

As he watched, the boat tacked to the east, clearing the headland by several hundred meters. It fell off onto a course that would bring it down the island’s windward shore.

After a bit, he could see the slayer’s small figure, crouched over the tiller, feathering the wingmast into the strongest puffs. The boat was very fast, slashing over the sea, throwing roostertails of spray several meters into the air.

In minutes Ruiz Aw would be gone. But then Gejas realized something that gave him hope. The boat was sailing to the southeast, in the direction of SeaStack.

SeaStack. Gejas’s anger was gone, replaced by a sort of violent contentment. Soon Roderigo would send a boat for him. They would make him suffer for The Yellowleaf’s loss, they would hurt him and try to break his mind; that was Roderigo’s way, and a good one.

But he would survive. Because The Yellowleaf — and by extension, her tongue Gejas — had been Roderigo’s greatest student of that strange city, eventually they would allow him to take a force into SeaStack.

Where Ruiz Aw was bound, for reasons Gejas could not comprehend. Because of his dirtworld woman? Because of the slaver Corean? It didn’t matter.

Gejas turned away from the sea and made himself comfortable, to wait.

Ruiz Aw had his hands full with the catamaran. The lee hull sliced deep into the waves, pressed down by the weight of the wind. Einduix had warned him about allowing the lee bow to dig in; apparently the boat was capable of tripping over its nose. The weather hull hissed along the surface, trembling. Ruiz could feel its willingness to rise, to capsize the boat laterally.

He cranked the wingmast out a few more degrees to spill a little wind, and the weather hull settled a bit more firmly into the sea.

He began to get a feel for the boat’s helm, and some of the tension drained from his muscles. If the wind grew no stronger, he should be able to manage.

In the early afternoon the wind dropped, and Ruiz was able to lash the tiller for a while. He swallowed a mouthful of antique water, but was unable to bring himself to try the nutrient block. It had a gray, mummified quality and a musty smell. For all he knew, it had always been that way, but at his present speed he’d reach SeaStack long before hunger became a serious problem.

He took a sight with the small bubble-sextant, crossed the position line with his dead-reckoning track. He marked the fix on his chart with a certain satisfaction; for the past three hours he had averaged fourteen knots. He began to feel an ambiguous hope. It seemed he might survive to reach SeaStack, and that was good. But then he would find himself in SeaStack, facing an impossible task.

He unlashed the tiller and concentrated on the task at hand, and in that concentration he found some comfort. He passed the afternoon in a state of almost pleasant thoughtlessness.

As night began to fall over the sea, low clouds raced across the horizon to the west, and the wind grew heavier. The waves grew taller and began to break with a tumbling hiss.

Ruiz shivered, and feathered the sail into the wind, adjusting its camber to its maximum flatness. Still the boat rushed along in a welter of foam, quivering with the urgency of its passage. Ruiz grew more anxious.

With complete darkness, the speed became more frightening, and the growing seas more ominous.

Ruiz struggled with the helm, trying to take the seas consistently on the quarter, so that their force shoved the boat harmlessly ahead. But the sound of the wind sang a higher note, and the boat was beginning to move so fast that Ruiz worried it would fly down the face of a wave and bury itself in the back of the next wave.

He tried to remember what to do, tried to pick the bones of memories from a long-ago time, when he had fought a campaign on a water-world.

Finally it came to him. He waited for a lull. When it arrived he cranked the jib slightly to weather, put the tiller down to leeward.

The boat paused in her headlong rush, spun up into the wind, and sat there, riding the waves like a duck.

Ruiz lashed the tiller down, wiped the spray from his eyes, and crawled into the coffin-sized berth in the weather hull. He latched the hatch carefully and lay down on the thin cushion.

For some reason, a thin thread of happiness ran through him. He didn’t know why. The boat jounced violently, the wind shrieked, breaking crests thumped the topsides.

But after a while, remarkably, he slept.

He slept, in fact, until well after daybreak, and it was the silence that finally woke him.

When he went on deck, he found that the breeze had dropped to a zephyr, and the boat sat on a glassy sea. A leftover swell lifted the boat up and down, and Ruiz was once again glad he didn’t suffer from motion sickness.

He unlashed the tiller and set his course toward Sea-Stack.

His progress was less impressive than it had been the day before. He could coax only three or four knots from the unsteady wind. He experimented with the wing. He trailed a fishing line, with no results. He took a sun sight and pored over his charts. He couldn’t be certain how much the storm had set him to the east until he could get a crossing line in the afternoon. He kept glancing to port, as if he expected the low coast of Namp to appear there.

In the early afternoon he saw a margar, a lone bull who came to the surface to clear its spiracles, two kilometers off the starboard bow. The great reptile rolled on the surface in a thrash of foam, its spiracles moaning, one upraised vane catching the sun with a white glitter.

Ruiz held his breath until it had submerged. Had it seen him? Would it be interested in his insubstantial craft?

Time passed and he remained uneaten.

He was beginning to relax when he saw a slim black hull on the eastern horizon.

When it suddenly veered toward him in a cloud of spray, he wondered if perhaps it might have been better to be a margar’s dinner.

No, he thought fiercely. None of that. He checked his wireblade.

In a few seconds he could see clearly the glaring raptor eyes painted on the approaching boat’s bow. Castle Delt, he thought, shocked. The vessel was a small, fast, open-cockpit squirtboat, used for reconnaissance and infiltration. Two armored figures crouched behind the boat’s windscreen.

He touched the haft of his wireblade — an absurdly inadequate weapon. He cast about desperately for a plan, but nothing came to him.

Eventually he decided that his best course would be to present the appearance of helplessness and hope that the Deltans grew careless.

He pinched his cheeks until a prickling warmth told him they were pink, and combed his fingers through his tangled hair, smoothing it as best he could.

The boat came alongside, sending a wave splashing over the catamaran’s port hull. Its engine roared and then fell to a low throb. Grappling pitons fired into the catamaran; their lanyards retracted, jerking the boats together.

Ruiz smiled brightly at the boat’s crew — two black-masked Deltans, their light armor painted in black and fluorescent green stripes. Red chevrons on their masks identified them as members of the officer class known as Sub-Dominators: young, untried, platoon-level commanders. They weren’t wearing their helmets; apparently they considered him easy prey.

One held a splinter gun in his hands and played carelessly with the safety lever.

“Hello,” said Ruiz, standing up, hands clasped at his breast. He pitched his voice as sweetly and hopefully as he could. “I’m so glad you’ve found me!”

One of them laughed, with a somewhat forced harshness. Ruiz could imagine him in a classroom, with some scarred veteran saying, “Laugh to curdle the blood! All together now: laugh!”

His hopes rose.

“Yes,” said Ruiz. “I don’t know what I would have done.” He simpered, and thrust out his hip and made his body seem as soft and vulnerable as he could.

“What are you doing out here, boy?” demanded the one with the splinter gun.

Ruiz assumed a theatrically tragic expression. “Roderigo harvested our village, kind sir. I escaped, through great good fortune — or so I thought…. And then I found myself out on the sea, alone. With no protector.” Ruiz licked his lips, widened his eyes.

The laugher practiced his bloodcurdler again, this time with more confidence. “We’ll protect you,” he said. “Come aboard.”

Ruiz clambered over the gunwale, moving with an eager dainty awkwardness, as if the hard steel of the rail hurt his hands. “Oh, thank, you, kind sirs, thank you,” he babbled.

The one with the splinter gun latched back his safety and fired an economical burst, cutting the catamaran in half. Ruiz concealed a wince; he had grown fond of the fragile thing.

“Perhaps you have something I could eat; I’ve drifted for days and the emergency rations were unbearable.” He rolled his eyes and smiled, as he settled between the two Deltans.

The laugher stood and began to unbuckle his armor’s pelvic girdle. “I’ve got something you can eat,” he said jovially.

“Oh no,” said the one with the gun. “I don’t take your leavings this time. Me first.” He didn’t exactly point his weapon at the other Deltan, but the muzzle wandered close.

“Sirs, sirs,” said Ruiz nervously. “No need to quarrel. I can surely satisfy you both at the same time. For what other reason did the deities give us more than one erotic orifice? Women are more blessed in this regard than we are — but there are only two of you.”

They both laughed, less harshly — Ruiz detected a note of relief. The one with the gun locked it to a retaining clip, and they both unlatched their armor.

The laugher stretched out in the bows; the other stood behind Ruiz, fingering himself.

It was too easy. But he accepted his good luck, as he was required to do. The wireblade slipped from its hiding place and he stabbed backward into the groin of the one there, ripping the blade transversely free. He reversed the point and drove it up into the laugher’s belly.

Almost before the man could react, Ruiz sawed the knife back and forth, withdrew it, and turned to finish the man who had carried the gun.

He hardly noticed the screams, even though they were more bloodcurdling by far than the laughs had been.

When it was over, and the corpses gone over the side, Ruiz examined his prize. The squirtboat seemed in fine condition, apart from the blood that spattered it. Its fuel cell registered a full charge, the engine purred. He rummaged through the lockers and found a good selection of weaponry in the portside one: splinter guns and ruptors, monomol garrotes and elbow axes, stun grenades and nerve lashes.

In the starboard locker he found pouches of irradiated rations and cases of potables. He opened a pouch of stew and a chillcan of beer, but he suffered from an odd lack of appetite.

His eyes wandered about the cockpit, lingering on the splashes of blood, the heap of armor he had taken from the taller Deltan. He felt almost sick to his stomach; finally he drained the beer and threw the stew overboard.

After a while he stirred himself and began to perform the necessary tasks. He rinsed the armor clean and buckled it on. In one of the armor’s storage slots he found a wad of SeaStack currency; apparently the Sub-Dominators were on their way to a SeaStack vacation. He tried a harsh laugh, and to his ears it sounded infinitely more menacing than the laugh the dead Deltan had been practicing.

“Well, I’m an experienced monster,” he said, as if to an invisible companion, and smiled. His face felt odd, so he stopped smiling.

He took a bucket and washed the rest of the blood down into the bilge, where an automatic pump whirred and discharged it into the sea.

Despite the sleep he had gotten the night before, he felt a feverish exhaustion. But he sat down in the helmsman’s seat and saw that the navigation computer was already set up with the coordinates of SeaStack. Before he pressed the execute bar, he had a thought; he looked under the dashboard and saw a black box with Delt’s logo: a remote controller. He pried up the connector and jerked the datacable loose.

The boat was now his — or so he hoped.

He buckled on the restraint harness and sent the boat arrowing over the sea at its maximum speed. The sensation was like riding a skipping stone at seventy knots.

He and the bruises he would collect would arrive at SeaStack in the morning, provided he avoided enemies with speedier boats.

Ruiz drove the boat through the night in a state of comatose vigilance. He submerged his thoughts in the sensations of speed, narrowing the focus of his mind to throttle and wheel and the heaving surface of the sea.

He was quite surprised when the dawn showed him the tips of SeaStack’s tallest structures, rising above the horizon.

He jerked back on the throttle bar and the boat came off the plane, settling into the sea with a flare of spray. The engine’s scream dropped to a mutter.

What was his plan? At that moment his head was filled with a terrifying indecision, and nothing else. He had promised Somnire something… hadn’t he? No, actually he hadn’t said he would do anything; Somnire had told him he must do as his heart directed.

At the moment his heart told him to flee as far from SeaStack as he could get, to run away from Sook, to hope that he died a peaceful death long before humanity was consumed by what lay under Yubere’s stronghold.

He sighed. No, it wasn’t his heart speaking — it was common sense.

For some reason he thought of his foolish youth, when he had called himself an emancipator, when he had still believed that the institution of slavery could be destroyed. He thought of the pain, the disappointment, the blood spilled, the friendships betrayed, all in the name of that hopeless chimera.

As he mused, he discovered to his surprise that he no longer regarded that younger self with his customary bitter contempt. Something had changed. Something had thawed the ice that had filled his heart for so long, and now his heart demanded that he go into Sook and do his best to destroy the Orpheus Machine. “How strange,” he said aloud, and his voice shook a little.

He laughed, then, and had a pleasant thought. Perhaps Corean had sold Nisa somewhere; perhaps in SeaStack he could consult the market listings, if the market still survived the disturbances in the city. Maybe he could still find her.

When he began to wonder where he could access the market datastreams, the beginning of a plan formed in his mind, just a faint glimmer of possibility — but it was better than no plan at all.

Ruiz Aw took the Deltan’s helmet from its locker and settled it over his head. He took a deep breath and shoved the throttle bar forward.