“Clean this up, Khum,” he ordered, and went into the main room.
His father was not there. Sajur must have gone directly from the ceremony to whatever celebrations followed. In the hall behind Hobi, Khum stood obediently, his bronze muzzle raised as he intoned in his harsh voice, “Sajur Panggang has requested that you join him immediately in the Four Hundredth Room. Âziz Orsina has called an inquisition to celebrate the Investiture of the new Aviator Imperator.”
Hobi made a face.
“Fine.” He hurried down the hall.
But as he passed his father’s study he paused. For the first time in months, the door was ajar. Not only that, it had been propped open with a chunk of malachite. Hobi stared at the polished green stone, trying to figure out what obscure message it might hold for him. Then he entered the room.
It was as always; the Architects buzzing and clicking as glowing scrolls of numbers and architectural renderings moved across their screens. Beneath the mercury lamp on his father’s desk several spent ampules of amphaze were scattered. Hobi picked one up and sniffed it, then glanced at the monitor on the desk.
There was a message on the screen. The violet letters flickered the way they did when an urgent missive from the margravines was displayed; but there was no sign of the Orsinate’s emblem, no flowing script or crabbed hand to indicate Shiyung or Âziz’s signature. Only this, spelled out in capitals—
ONE TREMBLES TO THINK OF THAT MYSTERIOUS THING IN THE SOUL, WHICH SEEMS TO ACKNOWLEDGE NO HUMAN JURISDICTION BUT, IN SPITE OF THE INDIVIDUAL’S OWN INNOCENT SELF, WILL STILL DREAM HORRID DREAMS, AND MUTTER UNMENTIONABLE THOUGHTS.
“ Huh? ”
Hobi frowned, leaning forward until the letters blurred in front of him. He read it again, then a third time. He was reaching for the handles of the imprimatur to record it when the message disappeared, replaced by a violet string of numerals.
He swore, switched the imprimatur on anyway, but of course the message was lost. He tried to recall what it had said—something about dreams, horrible thoughts—and felt cold.
A warning—for his father? But there had been that open door.
From his father?
He cursed again, more loudly, and glanced at the other screens. He thought of what Nasrani had said of his own education—“ I had the finest tutors ”—and wished that he had learned to understand the meaningless figures and renderings that the Architects produced without end as they maintained the city.
But it was too late for that. He lingered another minute, tracing the edges of a monitor, then left.
Hobi’s bedroom was at the end of a long corridor, behind the bathing chamber and the rows of steel cabinets where the replicants recharged during their offtimes. It was a large bedroom, larger even than Sajur’s, but looked smaller because of the clutter. To reach his bed Hobi had to step over mounds of clothes and unwatched ’files, and pull aside a curtain of raw silk that drooped from the ceiling in silvery folds. Hobi hated seeing the walls or ceiling or floor of his chamber. He hated it because no sooner would he grow accustomed to a particularly nice line of molding, painted lemon-yellow perhaps, or an airy expanse of billowing muslin or a mosaic of black and white rubber on the floor; no sooner would he find himself waking and turning expectantly to gaze upon an ochre stucco wall but he would find that while he slept the silent and efficient Architects had changed it. Black industrial girders would have replaced the muslin (later bright orange bricks would replace the girders), the stucco had given way to a mirrored surface so sleek he half expected it to be wet, and instead of the rough but comforting sisal flooring his feet would fall upon fine soft sand.
“Can’t you stop it? Can’t you say something to them?” he had demanded of his father. But Sajur Panggang only shook his head, sighing.
“I don’t control the Architects, Hobi, you know that. I read them and keep them running, but they take care of themselves.”
Hobi would stalk off in a fury, to glare at the new walls of exposed artificial wood and dig through the sand to discover the naked flooring beneath (he never did). But gradually he did find a way to fight back. Gradually things began to fill Hobi’s room. Empty Amity decanters and bottles of wine, jacquard robes filched from his father’s closets, heaps of prosthetic arms bartered from a friend who knew a friend who knew a moujik, candle-ends, expired lumieres, broken light bulbs, computer circuitry, chessboards, empty candicaine pipettes and morpha tubes, tobacco tins and snuff envelopes, more pidgin-lettered posters torn from the walls outside (PRAY THE HEALING WIND! BLESSED NAROUZ SAVES!), ’files of military formations and the atrocities of the Archipelago Conflict and one (black market) ’file showing scenes of a place Outside called the Zaragoza Mountains.
All of it heaped around Hobi’s bed in an attempt to give some sense of permanence to the room. His mother had detested it, of course—
“Clean this up! It’s filthy, it will make you ill—”
But his mother was dead now, and his father had never (to his son’s knowledge) set foot inside the muddle that was Hobi’s room.
Hobi settled into it like a tapir in its lair. Lying in bed he would let one hand fall to rest upon a stack of ’files, or fondle the desiccated stalks of a tiny and utterly illegal bamboo he had tried to grow from a stolen cutting; and it would comfort him.
Now he kicked his way through the clothes and broken vials. Dead bamboo crackled beneath his foot. An immense book lay open on one side of the bed, an ancient atlas he’d stolen from his father’s library. Hobi shoved it onto the floor and flopped down on the bed, closing his eyes.
From somewhere far overhead he heard faint cheering, and smelled the faintest breath of the sea. He thought of the Undercity and Nasrani’s hidden children, of the festival a few days hence. He thought of the hole he had seen, that gaping mouth of the underworld; of his father hunched over the ancient monitors in his office. He thought of these things, and of the nemosyne. Slowly he brought his hand to his face and inhaled, breathing in the smell of that livid darkness, the unmistakable raw taint of earth.
The new Aviator Imperator had finished speaking. As the throng on the boulevard cheered and the assembled Aviators gave him a final salute, the rasa turned and walked stiffly back to his palanquin. Ceryl was close enough that she could hear the grating sound his legs made as he moved. The aardmen stumbled to their feet, waited until the Aviator had climbed back onto the palanquin before raising it once more. Then they all waited as the three margravines passed, Âziz first and then Nike and Shiyung last of all. As she walked by him the rasa raised his head and gazed at her, but Shiyung ignored him. The margravines disappeared inside the doors of the palace, the Imperators close behind them; then all the rest of the Orsinate’s entourage, cabals and cabinets and diplomats all crowding the entrance and talking excitedly. The aardmen remained standing beneath their heavy litter as though confused, growling softly as the last members of the Linguistics Cabal shoved their way inside.
On the colonnade Ceryl remained silent, staring at the aardmen. She was afraid to walk past them—not afraid of the aardmen, but of what they carried. She saw the rasa Aviator Imperator there upon the palanquin; but she remembered Margalis Tast’annin. Several years earlier, the supposed details of his affair with Shiyung had been broadcast nightly on the ’files. The official word was that the affair ended when Tast’annin was sent to the front to command the Archipelago Conflict; but a professional courtesan who had been an intimate of Shiyung’s told Ceryl that the break had been the Aviator’s desire, and not the margravine’s. His subsequent posting to the Archipelago had been intended as an exile of sorts, but of course he had triumphed there. Afterward there had been his long sojourn back on the HORUS stations, and then the disaster in the Capital.