Liquid Crystal Nightingale Read online

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2020 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith

  Editors: David Thomas Moore, Michael Rowley and Kate Coe

  Marketing and PR: Hanna Waigh

  Cover: Adam Tredowski

  Design: Sam Gretton, Oz Osborne and Gemma Sheldrake

  Copyright © 2020 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-272-2

  Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  To my family

  CHAPTER ONE

  TYRO PLEO TANZA made a vow as she rode the T-Car network to the ends of Chatoyance, her home city settlement.

  Leave.

  Although not right at this moment. She sat in the last carriage of the T-Car as it sliced through the air, and if she jumped out now she would end up on—and like—the streets below: a total mess. All T-Cars ran along miles of track suspended above the streets, and she could see the moss green band of a minor canal flowing beneath the window on her right. People assembled on the station platforms built above the tracks; the passing T-Car illuminated their faces and Pleo glimpsed them staring into the middle distance like the passengers in the carriage. The six passengers teetered on the edge of narrow seats or leaned against beige walls scoured so often they acquired a uniform sandblasted finish.

  Chatoyants ensconced themselves in cocoons of inattention on the T-Car network. After the death of Cerussa, her twin sister, Pleo duly swapped her cocoon for armour. Unlike these people, her life would not degrade into routine—thanks to her vows she rode with purpose today. They provided her with much-needed spiritual ballast, no different from the prayers wrapped together with amulets and mementos sold to the tourists and devotees at the Temple of Gachala, the emerald sun at the centre of the Archer’s Ring system.

  The commuters around Pleo covered their eyes at the same moment as if taking part in a choreographed dance. It meant the T-Car was nearing the temple. The looming prism of vivid teal speckled with gold mirror fragments was an architectural marvel, but the sunlight reflecting off the cantilevered roof made the view dangerous despite the thick UV film coating the T-Car’s windows. Pleo averted her gaze as the diffused light bleached the carriage interior for a few seconds. Right now there would be a few senior nuns at the entrance to greet devotees and visitors, exhorting them to pray to Gachala the Emerald Sun for better tomorrows.

  An emerald sun made as much sense to Pleo as the temple’s architectural opulence. Gachala was a simmering green at sunset for only a minute, when its light was scattered through a cleaner atmosphere due to a lull in activity between Shineshifts. Still, she had visited the temple once a week and only stopped going when Cerussa died.

  Over the past year she attempted to keep a journal in Cerussa’s honour since her sister had always confided in her diary. The expected outpouring of words failed to manifest after Cerussa’s unplanned funeral, but during the early rush hour commutes Pleo found herself scrawling the same words over and over again onto her standard issue moth-wing paper pad:

  Chatoyance means ‘cat’s eye’ in old Terran French. People who live here are called Chatoyants, and those who don’t live here assume the city blinks when seen from space. But they’re wrong: there is no giant eye that opens and closes. We have city zones which light up, one after the other, in bands of light that travel towards each other at the centre of Chatoyance and meet at the Pupil. When a band lights up the other zones remain dimmed. Chatoyants who work when their professional zone lights up call the eight-hour period a Shineshift. Those living in the unlit Zones are supposed to rest and sleep. I can’t sleep since Cerussa died.

  Other passengers never cared for Pleo’s notes; their sporadic attention turned to the highlights, news updated in real time and printed on moth-paper strips generated by a pair of specialised carriage columns. One detailed T-Car running times, delays and station statuses, and the other column was for news. These highlights fluttered like prayer flags every time the T-Car hit the switch tracks. Each passenger tore off a highlight and discarded it after reading, where it fragmented into transparent specks before settling on the carriage floor. Sometimes a highlight did not break up and remained on the floor, twitching until the energy contained in its splicing of butterfly neurons, cellulose and gossamer ran its course.

  Pleo was old enough to remember panelscreens in stations and on T-Cars before the highlight columns replaced them. Chatoyance Metro had decided it was harder to vandalise columns housed in reinforced glass than screens.

  A fuchsia square containing a stylised black moth symbol was embossed onto both columns at eye level. Pleo figured these physical hazard warnings also deterred vandals, especially when they were unsure of the nature of the hazard. She knew exactly what it was because she had to memorise all types of warning signs in Polyteknical. The liquid inside the columns, from which the highlights were manufactured, was a mixture of insect-derived silk proteins and chemical stabilisers, and it also had an affinity for keratin in its unprocessed state. The fuchsia warning sign was also a challenge: puncture or burst a highlights column and find yourself sprayed in a quick-drying liquid that stuck skin and hair together, or sealed eyelids and mouths shut.

  A pair of autonomous municipal-drones clicked and whirred as they scrubbed down the walls at every stop. When the T-Car was moving they rested on the ceiling like fluorescent yellow beetles. Pleo ignored them and watched two Constabulary officers, both female and decked out in their municipal indigo uniforms, boarding the neighbouring carriage through its roof-hatch and perform a cursory sweep before moving on to the next carriage. Through the scratched glass she glimpsed them going through the same motions before they moved out of sight.

  On this morning Pleo added a new sentence to her story:

  Today is the day I took her body to Leroi Minor Canal.

  She finished and tore out the page. The minute golden scales covering the paper’s surface ensured it remained stuck onto the bottom rail of the window next to her seat. That she had changed nothing in her story just meant that her life was the same a year later: still a tyro-level gemmologist at Chatoyance Polytechnikal.

  When she got off at the circular hub of Polytechnikal Station, leaving the drones to wipe away her note before it fell to the floor and joined the highlights, she regretted the amendment. She was leaving an extra part of herself behind in her eagerness to disclose a thought, which hitherto had been too personal to express in public.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE APERTURE HATCHES contracted in the T-Car. Marsh felt all of them closing around his neck.

  Chatoyance was too small for him—especially in the mornings.

  This sense of confinement befitted him. Marsh was from Cabuchon, the elder sister city of Chatoyance, and the administrative capital was the vanguard of the Archer’s
Ring. Over generations the Corund had governed from Cabuchon to realign disorder into order, generating prospects on the many settlements and constructs orbiting Gachala. The documentaries Marsh had seen in school hinted at the giddy promise of those formative times, embodied in the catchphrase: “Same dreams and same destinations.”

  Those pioneer Waves of settlers may have held to the common dream of seeing the Archer’s Ring in their lifetimes, but not all of them ended up on the same settlement. Past successive Waves had relayed people to Cabuchon, the more beautiful elder sister, but more recent arrivals settled for second-best on Chatoyance, the younger Cinderella sibling relegated to the drudgery of manufacturing and industry.

  Chatoyance had thrown itself into this role with a single-mindedness Marsh begrudgingly admired. Observing Shineshifts made Chatoyants proud of their ability to smoothly transition between work and rest. The air during Shineshift changes vibrated so much that he stood inside station entrances to absorb the energy. Segmented acoustic barriers lined the T-Car tracks to absorb the noise, but the klaxons blared loud enough to rattle teeth in commuters’ jaws. If it drizzled there was so much ozone at ground level he could taste it through his mouthguard filter. This brief thrill came at a price though: it always nauseated him before he made it to a station platform.

  Not all Chatoyants were so resigned to their stations in life, and the view of the Tiers from the T-Car windows attested to the success of some of their number. Marsh spotted the structures rising out of the north sector of Chatoyance, all staggered like coral outcroppings set on a sheer reef wall. The Tiers housed the abodes of the city’s wealthy and holiday retreats for those stifled by Cabuchon’s administrative order. Marsh could make out tiny figures inside the habitats on the lower levels from this distance, but the haze always reduced his view to a dreamlike impression of decaying grandeur.

  He shifted his attention back inside the carriage. Marsh had been riding on T-Cars and working Shineshifts for nine months—still not long enough to shake off the feeling that the passengers were giving him sidelong glances when they were not scanning the highlights. Defiant, he stared back as a Cabuchoner, although one in self-imposed exile. He was still too fresh-faced and bright-eyed to pass as a native Chatoyant. Give yourself enough time and you won’t know the difference.

  Movement attracted his attention despite the rattle and jerks of the T-Car. Marsh recognised the woman who had been scrawling in her moth-paper pad and sticking the pages on the carriage walls. She lifted her face to gaze at the roof hatch, presenting her profile to Marsh. Her refined angular features and proud bearing reminded him of his Chinese great-grandmother, one of many during the Second Wave of mining colonists who had settled in the outer Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud before the establishment of the Archer’s Ring.

  Perhaps this woman was an offworld empress in austere disguise, paying an incognito visit to Chatoyance. Diplomatic immunity would permit her a spot of irreverence. But her minimal modifications told him otherwise—Gemmologist: Tyro level. A few students obtained similar modifications back on Cabuchon, outside the minor satellite campus of Polyteknical, but here the students went all the way as they channeled vocation into profession. Marsh had seen those with full modifications travel in T-Car carriages reserved for them, no doubt courtesy of government and Chatoyance Settlement Transport. Over several months Marsh had seen gradual changes in the appearance of other students on the T-Cars and he foresaw hers with depressing inevitability. The nostrils would be stoppered with silicone plugs or entirely sealed off with white cartilage implants, her thick black hair shorn off and her slate-grey eyes glazed over with intraocular lenses. He cringed at the thought and hoped the lenses were removable, but it was unlikely; the more modifications gemmologists and lapidarists possessed, the higher the wages they commanded.

  Today she changed tack, leaving a note at the bottom of the window level with her seat. A pink keloid scar wrapped itself around her wrist like a shiny bracelet and a bone-white forcep emerged from under one chrome-plated fingernail. The paper made a raspy protest as she used the forcep to tear it. When she was done, the forcep retracted and she rose from her seat to grasp the carriage pole.

  At Polytechnikal Station the T-Car shuddered to a stop under the weathered platform. Klaxons blared as the woman stood up, along with six other passengers, and grabbed straps attached to the top of the carriage pole in front of them. As she stepped onto a rung set into the foot of the pole, Marsh glimpsed the back of her head. Her hair was coiled into a large bun at the nape of her neck, like a lustrous black ammonite. The roof hatch slid open and the pole hoisted her and the other passengers through it, like a firefighter’s drill in reverse. Before the next wave of passengers descended into the carriage, Marsh got up and quickly occupied her seat to see what she had written before the drones could scrub it away.

  As per his unspoken routine en route to work he always read what she had written after she had alighted at her stop, and over time Marsh found her repetitive notes more enthralling than the news highlights fluttering on the columns. Still wary of Chatoyant conventions, he never approached her on the T-Car to ask what compelled her to write the same words day after day.

  Today Marsh discovered she had added an extra sentence:

  ...I can’t sleep since Cerussa died. Today is the day and I took her body to Leroi Minor Canal.

  During his spell of work on Chatoyance, Marsh had handled a few specimens of cerussa—lustrous white lead. In its crystalline form, cerussite, it displayed a distinctive twinning habit, most commonly expressed as chevrons radiating from a central axis of growth. He guessed that ‘Cerussa’ was the name of the woman’s deceased sister or lover, although he could not work out the association with Leroi Minor Canal, one of Chatoyance’s numerous waterways.

  The roof hatch of the carriage hissed as it contracted shut and three stations later, the T-Car pulled into the sprawling Water Hyacinth Terminal Interchange, or The ’Cinth as all Chatoyant commuters preferred to call it. The sky darkened to burnished steel, promising heavy rain later, although it was already shot through with wispy clouds generated by airbourne cloud-seeders.

  As the pole hoisted Marsh to the opened ceiling hatch he reached out to tear off a fresh highlight, but two came away instead. Liquid—he used to think it was either stored water for emergencies or vehicle coolant—sloshed inside the column as the T-Car swayed with the new weight of embarking passengers. The damp translucent highlights stuck to his fingertips as he quickly read the first one:

  SIGNET STANDS FIRM IN DISPUTE WITH ANIUM OVER CLAIMS ON MARINER ASTEROID BELT

  The other two Sister Ring Settlements were embroiled in their own politicking and negotiations would break down to start up in perpetuity.

  He read the second highlight and decided it was of even less consequence:

  ARONT CORPORATION CONFIRMS ITS NEW NORTH-SOUTH CANAL TO OPEN ON SCHEDULE.

  As soon as the pole lifted him to the platform area Marsh dropped the highlights onto the floor and did not speculate about the woman further.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THREE YEARS EARLIER the narrow street outside Pleo’s home had turned into a scarlet river.

  She peered out of her bedroom window and on to vivid red flowing past it. The road was covered with paper nightingales; their creators had sought comfort in repetition by folding each bird out of dyed coffee filters and decorating their little wings with prayers for their loved ones’ safe return.

  Passersby had dropped freshly-folded nightingales into the paper river and hurried on with their business. Two boys knelt on the other side of the road, gathering up handfuls of the nightingales and tossing them into the air. Their shrieks of delight broke the reverent morning hush. Paper birds drifted down like red snow in the crisp air.

  A woman’s voice called out to the boys. Her words had been unclear but when they did not acknowledge what she said she came running down the street to drag them away. Her hair was wrapped in an orange scarf. Their mother, Pl
eo assumed.

  Pleo had yanked down the shutter. Today was going to be like yesterday and the weeks before; all of Blue Taro and Boxthorn on edge as they waited for the names. She didn’t want to append the clauses ‘of the dead’ or ‘of the living’ until she received confirmation either way.

  Her father, Idilman Tanza, had been one of the forty miners trapped in the Bhakun Mine on the asteroid Kerte Yurgi. Pleo had no time to think of him or the other thirty-nine—it seemed all of Blue Taro and Boxthorn was milling in and out of her home as it turned into a communal meeting point. Pleo’s memory of the day the news broke was disordered. It began with with a flurry of knocks on the front door, accompanied by variations of: “Tell us it’s not that asteroid, tell us it’s not Kerte Yurgi. It’s a mistake!”

  People began streaming in, hugging her mother, Guli, holding her hands or crying on her shoulder. They either refused offerings of menthe tea and manti dumplings or drank gallons while emptying the pantry. Pleo’s back ached from the weight of the frozen bags of dumplings she hauled out of the freezer. But all of them wanted to know if Guli had any news not reported in the highlights, as if she could access an exclusive source because her husband was the mine manager.

  The only people who had not come for information were the two Mining Union leaders. Pleo had never seen them pay a visit before. It seemed inappropriate for them to only turn up when a tragedy dovetailed with a longstanding issue. Both men had come with greetings and reassurances that rang as hollow as an emptied mine.

  “We don’t know yet if it’s an act of war,” Guli told the two union men. “So far CIM has still kept quiet.” The men had fidgeted with their cups of tea before setting them down on the wooden coffee table. Pleo watched them watching each other, realising both were waiting for the other to broach a sensitive subject.