Perdigon Read online

  Perdigon

  Tom Caldwell

  London Toronto Gomorrah Dilmun

  Perdigon

  © 2019 Tom Caldwell

  Book Design: Tom Caldwell

  Stock Photography: Frédéric Paulussen; randreu, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60578411

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author. Contact him at [email protected].

  3 0 6 3 7 7 6 8 8 6 4 2 2 6 2 0 2 6 0 7 4 6 8 3 9 3

  For my wife, Clare,

  who has heard these stories before.

  Contents

  Prologue: The Middle of the Thundercloud

  Chapter 1: Sparrow, Emerald, Submarine

  Chapter 2: Midrash

  Chapter 3: Made to Serve the Master

  Chapter 4: You Owe the Utmost Reverence to a Child

  Chapter 5: The Light That Will Cease to Fail

  Chapter 6: Mightily and Sweetly Ordering All Things

  Chapter 7: Cúchulainn’s Fight with the Sea

  Chapter 8: Le Nez de Cléopatre

  Chapter 9: Une Folle Entreprise

  Chapter 10: The Bronze Horseman

  Epilogue: Weapons and Treasures

  Remember the days, consider the years of ages past;

  ask your father, he will inform you;

  your elders, they will tell you.

  — Deuteronomy 32:7

  “Earth loves the rain; the proud sky loves to give it.”

  The whole world loves to create futurity.

  — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.21

  Prologue

  The Middle of the Thundercloud

  Bonaventure was a typical colonial town, young and ugly, its skyline dominated by raw industry: the piston towers of the power plant, racked all around by pylons, and the pre-fab hulk of the cannery. The spaceport’s launchpad dominated the flat western horizon, casting a long shadow that never moved; the planet Perdigon was tide-locked, and the colonists lived in permanent twilight, under a dull red sun that never moved from the eastern horizon.

  Yet Bonaventure had its whimsies too. People were hungry for colour and light out here, and the town was full of neon signs, blinking and flashing in blue and pink, like a tiny Las Vegas. Automated bell-towers struck the Angelus in a synthesised cacophony all over town, three times a day. A statue of the Virgin was perched on the great cement water tower, ready for her assumption.

  The high school, Urban V, was an anonymous sugar-cube of white concrete. Inside, it was overcrowded and banged up, stuffy, smelling of wet coats and floor polish. The auditorium’s stage had seen all too many improv tournaments and productions of Godspell. Probably more entertaining than anything Ezra Barany had planned for tonight.

  “I mean, at least they’re not burning me at the stake,” Ezra was saying, as they waited in the wings. The curtains smelled dusty. Everything back here was dusty. “But still, I shouldn’t even be here. This is your program, it should be you giving the speech.”

  “Well, what’s mine is yours, Ez,” said his husband Jacob, putting an arm around him. Probably to prevent any escape attempts. “And you’re the boss, you’re the CEO of the company, so you’re the one they want to see.”

  “No, I’m very skippable.” Ezra was skimming through the speech on his tablet, although at this point it was just to torture himself. Nice paragraphs, idiot. Better get a drink of water before you attack that. “They’re gonna figure that out in a minute here.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, it doesn’t matter whether you do a good job or not,” said Jacob. “I’m telling you. They just care that you showed up. If you skipped this event and let me make the appearance alone, they’d think you were snubbing them on purpose. They’d think it was out of contempt.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it’s your company. It’s just you and the cannery out here, Ez, and the president of the cannery is going to show up every time. Every hockey game, every town hall, every agricultural fair, he’s showing his smiling face.”

  Ezra had grown up in cow country and hadn’t been popular there, so he didn’t think he was going to be a hit at the Bonaventure agricultural fair either. “Yeah, well, he probably loves that stuff. And the cannery makes cat food, okay? I do biotech, that gets a very different reaction. Nobody thinks the cannery is inherently creepy.”

  “No, they don’t, that’s my point. Because the cannery boss goes to the hockey games. That’s the only reason. It’s not because the cannery’s such a great place to work,” said Jacob. “And they wouldn’t think you’re creepy either, if they got to know you better.”

  “I don’t take you seriously as a source on that, you’re biased.” Ezra folded his tablet and unfolded it again, flipping its front-facing camera on to make sure his tie was straight. It wasn’t. “Are we—we’re not first, right?”

  “The choir’s going on first.” Jacob guided Ezra back to one of the stacking chairs to sit down. “Just try to relax.”

  Ezra gave up and sat, resting his elbows on his knees, clicking his tablet open and closed over and over. He’d been ‘trying to relax’ since early adolescence, and since then had learned a lot of technique that he was seldom able to put into practice. Exercises. Maxims. Mantras. Bullshit. Crowds of strangers like this made his head too noisy, too many unfamiliar worldlines and possible futures colliding. Trying to focus without triggering any visions was tricky; he didn’t want to see anything tonight. Tonight, he was supposed to act normal.

  He started counting breaths.

  The high school choir of Urban V was lined up on stage, a row of red cummerbunds. They weren’t very good, reedy sopranos and an uneven tenor section, drifting unsteadily around the notes. but after a few bars he recognised the piece. Josquin des Prez, one of Ezra’s favourites. Someone must have told the choir director—likely Jacob, always eager to please.

  It was the beautiful Ave Maria Virgo Serena, a motet that sounded discovered rather than written, a natural formation, like a vast cave. Ezra’s parents were classical music nerds, and the stereo algorithm at their house in Butler territory used to shuffle through Dufay and Monteverdi while he did his homework. Right, you snob, that’s exactly why these people don’t like you.

  But they were singing it, so it wasn’t an unbridgeable gap. He closed his eyes and listened to the motet’s familiar call-and-response structure, the first motif echoing from soprano to bass, simple at first and then flowering with variations and elaborations. He let himself rock gently with the tempo, deliberately slowing his breathing some more. Deep diaphragmatic breaths. Five, four, three, two, one.

  The choir finished the motet in unison on Josquin’s tender, earnest final couplet: O Mater Dei, memento mei. Whether or not the composer had really believed in what he was writing (Ezra hoped not), that line felt real. Josquin had wanted somebody, at least, to remember him. And they had, for centuries. Even in a shitty colonial high school forty light-years away from Earth, they remembered him. If mastery got you anywhere, this was where it got you.

  The choir took their bows and filed offstage again. Jacob was playing emcee at the lectern, serving up his best hometown-boy cornpone for the crowd. They liked him here. “Perdigon may be a chilly planet, but let’s give a warm Bonaventure welcome to Ezra Barany, founder of Taltos Labs.”

  Ezra’s carefully-constructed sense of calm promptly fell apart, but he took the stage. He tried to keep his eyes averted from the crowd, though he got some terrifying glimpses. Even the applause felt hostile.

  Big crowd. Too big. He always thought of Bonaventure as a drearily white enclave, but it was always more diverse
than he remembered, despite its religious homogeneity. Haitian and Indian parents were side by side with the French and Irish families. You get to fail in front of a broader cross-section of the population, that’s amazing.

  He took the lectern and adjusted the mic, wincing at the noise. “Thanks to, uh, thanks to the choir here at Urban V,” he said, risking an unrehearsed sentence. “That was actually cool. Um. So, yeah, welcome to this…informational expo,” he went on. Forget looking at the crowd. He would read from his tablet and they’d sit there and like it. Get through this.

  “I’m hoping that we can demystify Taltos a little bit tonight,” he said. “We are a biotech company originally from Portland, Oregon, on Earth…uh, that’s the map right there, yeah.” The Lumen was connected properly, at least, so he didn’t have to wrestle with the projector.

  “Our mission is to explore the frontiers of human consciousness, particularly those rarely documented abilities that were previously shrouded in…” The speech had the word superstition, but Ezra decided at the last second that the crowd wouldn’t like that. “In myth, and, uh, in folklore. Precognition, telepathy. These abilities have been observed in many cultures throughout human history. Many saints, for example, developed their native psionic ability through the discipline of regular prayer and meditation.” Jacob had fed him some examples to use. “Padre Pio, for instance, displayed rudimentary telepathy and psychic projection. Visionaries like Joan of Arc and even St. Paul may have experienced the same neurological phenomena that occur with psionics as we know them today.

  “This is not to cast doubt on the spiritual significance of these figures,” he read on. Jacob had written this section. Neither of them was Catholic, but Jacob knew how to sweet-talk the religious types and Ezra really didn’t. “In fact, current research makes their miraculous abilities…um, plausible. The research at Taltos Labs is very much compatible with a wide range of spiritual and philosophical frameworks. Bishop, uh, Bellefeuille will have more to say about that later tonight.”

  A titter in the crowd. Definitely pronounced that wrong.

  “A bit more history about the company. Taltos restructured in 2085, when Roshan Tehrani and Liz Murdoch left to develop Ahriman Technologies.” They’d been twenty-three, twenty-four. Slide of Roshan, with a bad haircut and a worse outfit. A perennial fashion victim, Roshan always looked great in yesterday’s selfie but terrible in photos from a decade ago. But he was happy, grinning and holding an oversized cheque with the longsuffering Murdoch. Liz hated having her picture taken, and she wasn’t even looking at the camera this time, her gaze lingering on something off to the far right. Unlike Roshan, she was never in fashion, so she was never out of it either: she wore jeans and a t-shirt that was still in regular rotation, her long flyaway dark hair braided down her back.

  Ezra clicked through to the next slide. “That’s Martin Dudley, one of our original developers. He took his talents to work for Magnus Vollan at Bija.” Technically, that was a betrayal, but Ezra didn’t have any hard feelings. Vollan had tried to hire away any developers who understood the Taltos psionic stimulator technology, and had only partially succeeded.

  The truth was that Marty had been dead weight at Taltos. He was a good guy but a weak coder, and had never understood the tech very well in the first place. Ezra had hired him because they were old friends from Butler Territory. In his slide, Marty looked rumpled and vaguely surprised by the camera, as if he’d just woken up. A LumenNews caption labelled him Bija Psionics Expert Martin Dudley.

  “And of course, Jacob Roth, my partner, suggested the move to his old stomping grounds here on Perdigon.” Slide of Jacob at 15, rail-thin and lanky, grinning through his braces at a debate tournament on this same stage at Urban V. The crowd softened, said aww. “I know. Cute,” said Ezra, smiling down at his tablet.

  “Right, so much for the past,” he went on, flipping to the next section of the awful speech. “Since we settled on Perdigon, in our location just south of St. Columban’s Abbey, we’ve hit our growth benchmarks every year. Our employees enjoy a range of social services, such as the recreation building, the Green Bikes, nature club, food bank, library, cinema, uhh, that one’s…I think that’s a Christmas party…” Ezra was getting lost in the slides. “I don’t think they invited me. I don’t like parties. Uh, so tonight we’re announcing our early educational plan. We hope to make Urban V half its current size, so that your teachers can do twice as good a job. Parents and children can carpool together to the Taltos campus, and enjoy jam-packed days of work, study, and play before coming home to Bonaventure in the evenings…”

  It went okay, all things considered. Ezra stumbled through to the end of the speech, made a jerky bow, and fled the stage. The mayor of Bonaventure went next, then the bishop, and then there was food. Finally. Ezra got to eat most of a cheese plate in peace while Jacob schmoozed with the colonists.

  Who mostly left Ezra alone, thank God. Maybe they still thought precogs were creepy, or maybe he’d just done a good job of boring them to death. Either way, he was happy to get a break. A few ambitious families buttonholed him, anxious to line up jobs and internships at Taltos. Good thing, too, because the company couldn’t comfortably afford too many relocation packages—hiring from Bonaventure made sense.

  “This is our oldest, Shruti,” an older Indian woman was telling him, presenting her daughter. “She’s leaving home in August, going to university on Nephele, but all summer she could work with you in IT…”

  “Yeah, definitely—maybe, I mean, definitely maybe,” Ezra was saying. “Jacob can give her a tour of the place next week, see if it’s a good fit. For her, for you, I mean. Um, what’s your IT background like?”

  Shruti answered him, rhyming off the systems and coding languages she knew. She was a skinny kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen, angular and awkward, with long dark hair pulled back in a smooth ponytail.

  Ezra tried to pay attention to what she was saying, but he was starting to zone out, overstimulated by all the social demands of the evening. Something was pressing in on the edges of his awareness, not quite a vision.

  The opposite of a vision, in fact: instead of feeling dozens of worldlines squirming like bait in a can, the future felt occluded, the way the horizon seems too close in foggy weather. Poor visibility. Low clouds. His head felt like it was caving in like a sandcastle at high tide.

  “Mr. Barany?”

  “Sorry,” Ezra said automatically, snapping back to the present. Shruti had sunk back, arms folded, discouraged when he hadn’t responded to her coding résumé. “Right, that sounds amazing, so you’re gonna want to talk to Jacob Roth, the very tall gentleman over there with black hair. Just tell him I recommended you. Captain Barany sends his compliments to his first officer, ha.”

  Awkward Age of Sail jokes. This is going well.

  Shruti’s family left him alone, and Ezra escaped to get some air in the parking lot. Perdigon had no axial tilt to speak of, and its climate never shifted much—cool, wet, daily rains that sometimes turned to snow or sleet, seldom enough to stick. It would have been winter weather, back home in Indiana, or a chilly spring.

  He sat down on the curb outside, listening to the clattering rush of the Bonaventure light rail passing through town. A signal tower blinked red in the distance, and low in the dusk sky he could see the steady lights of the star system’s other planets. Lydgate, bright as Venus, and Hélinand, bigger but dimmer. The nearby swamps sang with spring peepers. Decent air today, without a whiff of Perdigon’s treacherous swamp gases, but Ezra pulled his breathing mask up from his collar just in case.

  His head beginning to pound, he tried to feel his way through the clouds inside his skull. Like a lightning-storm viewed from a plane, the clouds were shot through with a crackle of unbearable brightness, fire in a sky full of smoke. But the clouds and smoke weren’t hiding anything. That was the terror of it. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see what lay ahead—he could see, and he saw nothing.

  Something was wrong.


  Chapter 1

  Sparrow, Emerald, Submarine

  Something had been wrong for days.

  The visions were too frequent. Ezra was having two or three of them a day, his dreams short-circuiting into seizures at dawn. Today Jacob was seeing him through a hard morning.

  Ezra had been lying still for a few minutes, convulsions finished, staring blankly at the ceiling—his expression, in another context, would have looked like boredom. Still blinking, eyes unmoving. Jacob, kneeling beside him, kept one hand resting on his chest, just to be sure. In, out.

  Ezra’s breathing was deep and harsh, mechanical, rasping through dry lips. The air inside the compound was always parched, because water was expensive and the atmo controls didn’t disperse humidity as well as they should have done. The kitchens would billow with steam while the air in the offices and coding labs was dead, inert, dry as paper. Jacob planned to investigate that, when he had time. He didn’t have a lot of time.

  “Can you hear me yet?” Jacob murmured, taking Ezra’s hand in his. “Squeeze if you can hear, come on, everything’s okay…”

  No return squeeze. You couldn’t rush this part.

  Jacob glanced up at the time, where the Lumen was projecting it on the wall. A little after nine. Morning, then.

  They went by Earth time here, eight hours behind Greenwich Mean. In Perdigon’s permanent twilight, the Taltos compound wrangled employees’ circadian rhythms with a system of lights and artificial sounds: weather, birds, traffic. Just like home. There were very few windows. Not much to see out there, anyway.

  “Squeeze my hand, Ez,” Jacob reminded him, squeezing firmly. “Just once. Can you try?” Nothing. “It’s okay if you can’t, I’m right here. It’s okay.”

  Outside the door, the girl from Bonaventure was pacing in the corridor, her steps a little loud on the tiles, as if she thought Jacob might have forgotten about her. Too diffident to ask if everything was all right. She’d have to wait.