The Phoenix in Flight Read online

  The Phoenix in Flight

  Exordium: Book 1

  Sherwood Smith

  &

  Dave Trowbridge

  Book View Café

  December 27, 2011

  ISBN: 978161138 059 0

  Copyright © 2011 Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge

  PROLOGUE

  We are the children of conflict. We have been shaped by struggle: against the Collective and its descendant, the Hegemony; against the Adamantines, machines turned masters; against the Shiidra, ancient and implacably hostile; and against the diluting force of interstellar distance. To the student of humanity, it often seems that what we are depends as much on what opposes us as on what sustains us.

  We are the children of the Exile. No matter how far diverged by their singular histories, every human culture in the Thousand Suns resonates to its tragic echoes. How else could it be? All of us—Downsider, Highdweller, even Rifter—are descended from the many and varied groups who rejected the sterile conformity of the Solar Collective and chose instead to flee in primitive starships through the Vortex.

  We are the children of a mystery. We do not know what the Vortex was. Perhaps it was an artifact of the sophonts we call the Ur, or of the unknown enemy that destroyed them so long ago. The Vortex opened only twice: once, to bring humankind here from the other side of the Galaxy, scattering us through both space and time; once more, to disgorge a cybernetic horror engendered by the Hegemony. We do not know if it will ever open again. Without it, there is no return to Earth, if Earth even still exists.

  Thus we are a deeply praeterite people, fascinated by the bits of Earthly life our various ancestors carried with them through the Vortex. In the face of all the forces arrayed against us, these fragments keep us human, for they are sacraments of the deep realities that made our forebears choose Exile and remain rooted in the fertile ground of their natural cultures. Our languages, religions, social and political structures are grounded in these fragments; to the extent that an innovation departs from these roots, it is recognized as false, and fails.

  We are the Phoenix, ever regenerate from the flames of conflict, which burn away the dross to reveal the gold of true humanity. Sundered from the mother of humankind by an immensity of space-time, we yet remain the children of Earth.

  Magister Davidiah Jones

  Gnostor of Archetype and Ritual

  The Roots of Human Process

  Torigan Prime, A.A. 787

  What would we do without our enemies?

  The Sanctus Teilhard

  (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

  The Phenomenon of Man

  Lost Earth, ca. 200 B.E.

  N!Kirr was out of catalepsy into second sleep before he felt his own mind again. He fled the awareness of his other lives and rose slowly toward consciousness.

  Pushing his way through first sleep, the aged Guardian folded himself upright, his movements almost involuntary through habit, and locked his secondary knees against his thorax with the deliberate grace of twenty millennia.

  The air tasted foul, like a moldy klopt egg, and N!Kirr flexed his mandibles irritably. The harsh clatter echoed through a thousand images of the vault, as he registered the dust-laden sunbeams lancing into the cool darkness through the Sunset Arch.

  Sunset? he thought. Disbelief wrenched his eyes into focus, and their iridescent facets glinted as the Guardian peered about, hissing with vexation. Had he lost a night and a day, then? Where were his under-bearers, and his acolytes? Such a thing had never happened before!

  “They shall have their shells broken for this! Sunset!” N!Kirr, confused and dizzy, spoke at last, his anger leaking away.

  “Sunset,” returned the vault, its echoes blurring the chattering syllables, and N!Kirr swayed, overcome by a sudden sense of wrongness. The sunset light was the color of an offworlder’s blood; the setting Egg was entering Red Victory, one phase of the patient pulse of life that would one day hatch another demon.

  A swarm of acolytes scurried toward him, the edges of their chelae pale with confusion and fear, but N!Kirr ignored them. A successor will see the hatching, thought the Guardian dispassionately, in that timeless instant before the star-born demon shall swallow him and all our race into its consuming fury.

  “All the stars shall mark our passing, and the fulfillment of our vigil and our trust.” The Guardian spoke to himself, but the acolytes milling about his dais subsided into a respectful silence, except for those who started scribbling on the writing plates hanging from their necks.

  Droogflies! he thought angrily, vexed by their dependence on him. He had seen too many of their generations fleeting past him, their brief lives blurring into anonymity, and he was tired.

  Still confused by the apparent loss of a day, N!Kirr looked down at the focus of the Shrine and of his people. At the base of his thorax lay the Heart of the Demon, partially sunken in the spiral-incised stone of the Guardian’s dais. Its perfectly-reflecting surface mirrored in curved distortion his anxious face as he bent over it, and the faces of his frightened attendants, waiting silently for his guidance. His age-reddened chelae stroked his throat patches in a rasping sigh, and he cautiously sank his mind into the small sphere, seeking the Pattern. The feeling of wrongness intensified and the stone-prisoned sphere assumed a numinous clarity to his eyes as he found only emptiness.

  N!Kirr brought his forearms down and stabbed at the Heart of the Demon with his killing-thumbs. There was a muffled pop and the mirror-sphere vanished, leaving only its shape in the stone and a few silvery tatters. The acolytes shrieked in unison and fled in all directions, their limbs clattering in noisy terror against the inlaid stone.

  The Guardian stilled as the shock overthrew the haze of ancient ritual endlessly repeated, and left him completely alert. The Heart of the Demon had been stolen, and a simulacrum placed in its stead while he slept. The offworlders!

  N!Kirr closed his eyes. Twenty thousand years he’d watched, and generations of Guardians before him, and the Heart was gone. The Devourer would wake again.

  The vault seemed to echo to many voices, all familiar though never heard before, multiplied by the carven wall of the Shrine to a tapestry of compulsion and demand. N!Kirr surrendered to them gratefully, yielding up the crushing knowledge of his race’s failure, so near the end of their long vigil, and the voices swelled into a cold, blinding light that took him into oblivion.

  The next day, at the urging of its fellows, an acolyte crept timidly back into the Shrine. It found the Guardian still standing there, its carapace cold and lightless. Shortly after that, for the first time in ten million years, the Shrine was empty of life and movement, a hollow shell abandoned in the bloody light of a dying sun.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  ARTHELION ORBIT

  Soft music played in the Suite Royal of the glittership Luxochronus. The immense monocrystal viewport that made up one wall of the suite’s richly-appointed parlor displayed a spectacular view of cloud-swirled Arthelion. The planet curved away vast beneath the ship; above, the Highdwellings in synchronous orbit were a golden arc disappearing over the terminator into the planet’s shadow.

  Eleris vlith-Chandreseki ignored the panorama from long habit. As a girl, born a Highdweller and raised on a vast inside-out world where the emptiness of space was unseen and underfoot, she’d found such views threatening in a way that her Downsider cousins couldn’t understand. By the time she’d returned home after her schooling and Grand Tour, she’d seen its like too many times to be impressed.

  To Eleris the glory of space existed merely as a backdrop for the slim figure standing in front of the viewport, his hands loose, his head a little to one side as he g
azed out at the planet below—from which his family had ruled the Thousand Suns for nearly a millennium.

  Eleris shook back her tumble of curls to lie across her naked back, and grinned as she padded barefoot across the floor of living mosses, remembering a party in this same room seven years ago, when she turned twenty. Life is too short to waste on men who are not rich, pretty, and powerful, she’d said to her cousin.

  You’ll never get all three, Leda had retorted.

  Brandon nyr-Arkad had proved Leda wrong... or was going to prove her wrong. He was easily the handsomest of the three royal sons, and his name brought wealth and prestige enough for the most discriminating taste. Together they could lead Douloi society, which the rest of the Panarchy emulated.

  If only he had the wit to cooperate!

  She closed the distance between them, her bracelets tinkling faintly as she reached up to run her fingers through the silken black waves of his hair. How could Brandon be so beautiful and yet so oblivious?

  “What,” she whispered into his ear before nipping it, “are you thinking about so passionately?”

  His utter lack of any hint of passion made her statement a tease, but she might as well have saved her breath.

  “That last game,” he admitted. “There was an interesting tactical tradeoff that I might have handled better, if...”

  “Brandon.”

  “Eleris?”

  He turned, his blue-gray eyes as guileless as a child’s.

  Exasperation caught in her chest, and she forced a smile. “Brandon, Phalanx is a game for children.”

  “Not Level Three.” He turned out his hands, smiling ruefully. “I thought you enjoyed betting on me.”

  The exasperation intensified to irritation. She breathed in slowly and consciously dismissed it. He was never haughty or tiresome about the deference due his rank, unlike (for instance) Krysarchei Phaelia Inesset, whom he was expected to marry, and he never sneered dismissively at anyone outside of the Navy, or the Council, like his oldest brother, the Aerenarch Semion.

  She leaned up to kiss Brandon. He tasted of blue-wine. Pay attention, she thought, but she’d learned that saying so was useless, you had to give a lover something to pay attention to.

  He was always somewhat cloud-minded, but today he was worse than usual. Why? He’d only had that single glass of wine since their arrival back. Maybe he was more like the middle brother than she’d assumed. Everyone said that Galen was kind, and gentle, but all he thought about was art and music.

  Eleris leaned against him. “Brandon, we need to...” Not ‘talk.’ That was too serious. Brandon was never serious, and she had no intention of lecturing him on his duty, as she had overheard the Krysarchei Phaelia (who never let anyone forget her title) and her horrible mother doing once. “What are we doing next?”

  He grinned, his eyelids lifting—now he was seeing her. She wore only her body art of climbing roses, a gem embedded in the center of each blossom, and an elegant bracelet on each wrist.

  She stepped back and struck a pose, tossed her hair back again, and reveled in his appreciative gaze. “Afterward.”

  But his answering grin began fading to distraction. She knew very well the effect she had on her lovers, which meant his distraction had an external cause. She dropped the pose and closed the distance between them. “Brandon, is something wrong?”

  His head tipped. “We haven’t sampled all the delights of the old Luxo yet. Ship layover is only three more days. We could stay on for the next leg. What are you in the mood for? Winter or summer? Grav-skiing in the Gargantua Range on Thisselion? Delph-tag in the Bhopal Archipelago on Hanuman?”

  She caught his hands, and began sliding her fingers up his arms. “Brandon, your Enkainion is only a month off, right here on Arthelion.”

  He seemed genuinely surprised. “And so? We can’t get in a little more fun before the harness slips on me for life? I can get us a last-minute courier back from anywhere.”

  Eleris laughed. She’d been trained to laugh beautifully. It hid the exasperation. “Brandon, you sound as if you’d have to report to that Naval academy again, or something equally dreary. You know very well what you will be doing after your Enkainion: exactly what you do now.”

  His breath hitched, so slight a break in the fremitus of his breathing that she would not have caught it had she not had her arms twined around him. She looked up, startled—there had been nothing in what she said to trigger such a reaction—but his smile was the same rueful grin. “Contrary. There will be no more asking if you like summer or winter.”

  Ah. Was it the prospect of having every day scheduled that he resented? Why, when it would be nothing but parties, galas, celebrations, and maybe some formal rituals at which he’d preside as the Arkad representative, so that his older brother and his father would be free for their boring politicking?

  “Is it spontaneity you wish for? Surely you cannot resent the necessity for schedules—think of how long it takes to plan the very best parties!”

  “Spontaneity?” He set his hands on her shoulders, his gaze steady, wide with question. “I thought you wanted to run away.”

  Eleris stared back, trying to get past his obtuseness. Did he want to be alone with her for even longer? They’d been as good as alone for weeks. She hadn’t even known how many guards he had, they were so unobtrusive, until her staff had contacted her about all the supplies they ordered; she’d only noticed them sweeping the area when they arrived or departed ports. And once, at one of those exclusive clubs where high stakes Phalanx was played (and they were certainly not alone then) Brandon had dived into the crowd and pulled forward a huge man, insisting on him joining the game. Together they’d taken on all comers until Brandon, laughing, said he was forced to drop out, after which he’d lingered, watching his guardsman win game after game, until he, too, was defeated—by some old woman from somewhere out-octant. Some fun!

  Being alone with Brandon was plenty of fun, but the irresistible seduction was the image of herself presiding over the Mandala. With Brandon’s pretty face at her elbow, she would become the greatest social leader in at least three centuries.

  “We’ve been glitter-skipping for the past...” She glanced at her boswell, its tiny face built into her bracelet. It showed Arthelion time. “Two months. And I have loved every moment,” she said quickly. “But your Enkainion...”

  He shrugged. “So? It’s all planned out. There’s nothing for me to do except show up and trot through the ritual like a trained dog.”

  Steward Halkyn, who had charge of the Palace Major and Minor, was famous for being the most perfect of a long line of Halkyn stewards. He would see to it that the Enkainion was exactly as it should be, though why Brandon didn’t want to oversee it, she didn’t know. She’d loved overseeing every aspect of her own Enkainion, when she was twenty-five.

  She had tucked herself against him. One of his hands caressed her shoulder and stroked through her hair down her back, but the gesture was more absent than insistent. She tipped her head, and yes, his gaze had wandered to the viewport again.

  Was he annoyed about the reminder of his approaching Enkainion? No, there was no anger in the curve of his lips, just absence. He didn’t seem to care at all. Maybe it was his age. The Arkads traditionally held their ‘coming of age’ ceremonials late. Historically, after the last royal child went through his or her Enkainion, the Panarch or Kyriarch usually announced which child would be heir, if there was more than one. But that would be no surprise. Everyone knew that the oldest son, Aerenarch Semion, would be heir, in spite of the fact that he’d not been in court for five years. He was effectively running the Navy already.

  Politics! Eleris shrugged. She didn’t care about politics. Brandon had to make a political marriage—word was, it had been arranged by Semion himself, in order to bind the Vandraska shipyards tighter to the Arkads through the Inesset family. But Brandon would never be involved in politics, he was the center of Arthelion’s social life.

  A ne
w thought occurred: maybe he wasn’t lost in thought, but in communication. Did he have neural induction on his boswell? His throat wasn’t bobbing in that horrible awkward way that most people subvocalized.

  She shifted her stance and stood squarely in front of him. “Brandon...” She sighed his name.

  “Eleris?” Brandon asked, then his forehead puckered, and finally he really seemed to see her. “Have I done something wrong?” His smile twisted, mocking, but she sensed... regret? “Or is my joke about running away together so terrifying that...”

  In answer she began untabbing his tunic. Then she paused, and ventured a small gamble, since her main game hung unresolved. “It’s just that when I proposed this journey, I, well, I didn’t quite count on how lengthy it would be. And I have loved it, but...”

  Brandon’s head tipped in quick concern. “Is it money?” he asked bluntly, without any insinuations whatsoever. He grimaced. “Eleris, I never think about those things. You should have brought it up.”

  She couldn’t prevent a retort, but she kept her tone light, “You don’t have to think about those things.”

  “I know.” He grimaced again. “Does that sound intolerable? My... someone I knew ten years ago once... but then people who go on about a third party are usually bores.”

  Eleris bit her lip. I don’t care about anyone you knew ten years ago. But she couldn’t say that. She forced a smile. “You know that many deem it vulgar to make any reference to resources. ‘The life of art requires art to appear effortless.’”

  Brandon lifted a shoulder. “My brother Galen, whom I consider the expert on art, says that that rule is more posturing on the part of the wealthy, and for an example of resource and effort being part of art, we have only to look at the mystery of the Ur.”

  Eleris fluttered her fingers, dismissing that long-dead race and their immense ‘art’ projects involving entire suns and planets. She’d won a small victory—her credit would survive this venture—and she had no intention of giving up her campaign. She’d succeeded in removing his tunic and shirt, her hands running over his smooth skin, enjoying the taut musculature, by habit avoiding the ugly pucker of the scar on his back. Why didn’t he have it removed? It would cost a fraction of what she spent on her body art.