Space Writing

It was the height of the short winter and the sky was a milky white, the sun large in it. There was such a wall of light that the shadows cast by the countless light-posts and signs and ornamental protrusions from the grey stone buildings that lined the streets were thin, insubstantial things. Not forensic dark outlines, just greyish smudges on a grey floor on which ashlike snow – or rather the accreted dust and detritus that passed for cloud-stuff on a planet with barely any surface water - was falling in fitful smears.



 It was cold even with the sun close enough to be a swimming, rippling mass in the sky. Cold even for the norm, a kind of coldness that ached more than bit. Some families walked the streets, dressed in long greatcoats and false-fur hats (there was nothing alive to glean true fur from here).  If one looked directly upwards, between the towering, arched buildings, the silvery streak that was the Artificial Ring could be seen, and somewhere in the forest of roofs there would be one of the Space Elevators. Cars, noiseless dagger-like vehicles with obscured windows, lined up neatly at junctions and moved with mathematical precision into the eternal circular flow around the perimeter of the Place of Conquest. In the centre of that immense, inefficient expanse, in the centre of a clock-face of monoliths on which were carved scenes from the city's history, was a statue that towered high, the globe it held in one upraised hand almost reaching the roof of the buildings around it. That globe, mottled with smears of the sticky falling snow, looked like a piece of rotten fruit, which perhaps summed up the earth on which it stood. To look at the planet from orbit was to see a scaly sea of buildings, for on the surface there was little else; for sure, in the mountains at the poles there were the mines and the accessways down to the underground caverns almost to its pitiful, icy core where banks of food plants grew the needed supplies for life. But aboveground there were only the buildings, monuments to the people who had emerged from the greyness to take a world of their own.



 This grey planet had evolved a grim and tenacious species who had, from their first moments of sentience, realised that to survive would be to eradicate all competition. For the world, a late-comer to the evolutionary party, had scarcely the resources to support the teeming cornucopia of life that had sprung forth, and the competition that had ensued had been more fiercely-fought than most. Once a dominant species had emerged, the fight to survive had changed to one to endure, and then to escape. In what had been an eye-blink for the dying sun, its children forged outwards; all reserves of resources depleted with the sole intent of taking other worlds' bounty and escaping the narrowing net of scarcity.



 Yet now there was no scarcity, the unity in the face of death which had driven the species to the stars now no longer needed with the same urgency. Rulers of a hundred worlds, what had been at first little more than a dying life-form on the edge of existence was now feared by rivals and worshipped by their conquered thralls. Such was the story carved in the almost black blocks of polished stone in the Place of Conquest, a story that probably everyone who walked its ways would have read at some point in their lives. The proof – the scientific, empirical, undeniable proof held with the faith that some lesser species reserved for gods – that they were the superior beings, the ultimate living creatures. Could those humanoids of the third planet, whose ships – or rather ship, for they had been first encountered before they truly counted as a spacefaring race and so ignored - had been patchwork sky-cities filled with non-combatants, have fought to survive like they had?



 Being in the shadow of such greatness – of the history of a species whose right to rule space had, as the immense inscription on the statue's pedestal stated, been proven through evolution – was supposed to be inspiring. To think otherwise was simply not done.



 The young woman standing in the shadow of the statue looked suspicious, but it was hard to look any other way in the thick coat and hat needed to not freeze in the short winter. Every few minutes she checked her watch, peeling back layers of serge and leather gloves to reveal its face. Her eyes were covered with polarised goggles, needed to be able to look up without being blinded by the wan, too-close sun, and from the brim of her furred hat a curl of silvery hair twisted errantly. With clumsy fingers she tried to push it back, but kept missing the lock, and in time gave up. Judging her age under so many layers of clothes would have been hard, but at the same time any local would have known there were not many who would be waiting alone in the Place of Conquest in the middle of the morning, least of all in winter. She was waiting for her appointment at the Record Office.



 Her people had made bureaucracy into an art-form, a cult to fill the gap caused by their contempt for religion. Of the streets and streets of tall, forbidding buildings, too many were nothing but cavernous offices where the minutiae of managing an empire spanning star systems took place.



 The clock set into the face of one of the buildings, a long and narrow oval marked with angular digits, chimed with a single, hollow sound that was absorbed in the falling snow. Pulling her coat around her again as the snow began to fall faster, she waited for an opportunity to cross the road, darting between gridlocked cars as her unsuitable boots crunched and skidded on the ground. She was glad the windows were tinted, for she was sure the chauffeurs would be cursing her.



 The doors to the Record Office were four times the height of a full-grown man, and she barely reached the second set of immense bevelled panels that adorned them. Actually opening them was an equally troublesome prospect to even standing up to them; the handle was positioned awkwardly in a way which, while it looked imposing, made getting sufficient leverage upon the door a challenge when the ground was slippery. Yet she managed to enter, scrabbling at the polished granite of the steps and then awkwardly stumbling in where her coat deposited grey detritus on the marbled floor. Inside was not the funereal silence that one might have expected from its cathedral-like exterior, but an incessant chattering of keyboards; mezzanines piled on mezzanines filled with typists and clerks contributed to a deafening barrage of sound. Data-stacks arranged like gravestones formed neat ranks along the ground floor, and everything seemed pointed towards an enclosed room in the centre, a glass pillar reaching up to the roof with its own landings. She had seen these before when necessity had taken her to other buildings of the Administrative Bureau; panopticons. Cameras positioned around the work-floors would report to the managers in the middle, she knew that. In this way the workers were quite alone with their work, but never out of sight.



 Inside was beautifully quiet, the glass a perfect barrier to sound, and she approached the young man at the desk. His hair was dark, a bluish colour, and peeked from beneath a smart cap in short spikes.



 “I have been summoned here regarding the Rite of Placement.” It would be dangerous to attempt familiarity.



 “You are the last today. Wait here.” A kid-gloved hand jabbed towards a bank of seats by the two lift shafts in which crystal capsules slid up and down.



 There was another man there, waiting for someone or something, and she smiled to see him.



 “Syrah!”



 “Clorai!”



 Before they could greet each other any more there was a polite cough from the desk, and they continued in whispers.



 “Did you get-”



 “I am to be governor of a mining-colony, not far from the home system. They said my grasp of economic theory was quite unparalleled. I am just waiting for my family's driver to arrive. Have you transport back?”



 “No.”



 “I'll be waiting here, I'll have the car wait too.” Before they could continue, the lift chimed and a fleet officer stepped out as if ceding his place to Clorai. “Good luck.”



 She hesitated, unsure if it was time to go up, until the man at the desk gestured to the waiting lift. There was nothing to do but watch the workers on the mezzanines during the slow trip, seeing their silent ranks under the slit windows and strip lighting. Some of the walls, on the lowest levels where the newest recruits entered their life in the Bureau, were too low for their own windows and instead took light from the immense vaulted field of glass above the doors. Their walls had, written upon them in finely-serifed capitals, an inscription that Clorai vaguely knew.



 EACH TO THEIR RIGHTFUL PLACE THAT OUR DESTINY MAY BE FULFILLED.



 It was the first edict of the first Rightful Emperor, when the great city had been in its infancy. A reminder to all whole would live as part of the empire that there was a place for them.



 The floor of the topmost level of the building, in the domed capital of the tower, was tiled and on those tiles the First Edict was written in small gold letters. Clorai hung her hat and goggles over a waiting stand, and shrugged her coat off in a shower of ash. She caught it heavily by the collar, surprised a little by the weight of the thick material, and hung it with the rest of her clothes before looking guiltily back at the trail of ash she had left on the tiles. It broke the maxims into meaningless strings of letters and in time melted back into the muddy grey slime that replaced proper crisp snowmelt.



 Someone would clean it in time, someone so low in society that Clorai could not even comprehend their existence. One of the ashen-faced, scarf-wrapped menials who emerged from corners to do jobs citizens did not. The empire considered it a point of superiority that it did not give all its lowest of duties to subjugated races; it did not trust them to do them to the standard required.



 The office of the Vice-Minister of Duty was a roughly circular room lined with bookshelves, its ceiling a glass dome with a wrought-metal balcony running around it. He himself was sat at a desk that fanned out like the teeth of a gear, tapping at a projected screen that shimmered with orange light.



 “Clorai Celesa Ilen Cavil, 280 cycles old, entered for court examinations in her 279th cycle and the 25,130th cycle of the imperial calendar. Final grade, failure. No appeal permissible. Recommendation of the Council of Duties is candidate be assigned military service or entry to Administrative Bureau.” More tapping on the screen as Clorai began to understand what he had said. “Two positions suitable. Births, Marriages and Deaths Under-Clerk in Population Control Office, effective immediately. Third Fire Control Officer, Light Battleship Contempt, Captain Gohto Goral, effective with deployment of Battlefleet Lemure.”



 She stood frozen.



 “Signature, please.”



 A holographic slate was placed in front of her with two fields to fill in. A simple binary choice of position, and a signature to confirm it.



 Without thinking, the sight of the unfortunates in the Record Office too fresh in her mind, she ticked Military Service and signed.



 “Good day to you. Information will arrive in the post detailing the requirements of the position.”



 And with that, she was again in the foyer waiting for a lift. The initial silencing shock had faded into countless sickening realisations, first and foremost that that her family had failed. Her elder sister, Clera, had scraped a pass in her own court examinations and now served as Under-Secretary for Subterranean Farms for the Northeast Region – a political role, with the associated honour, but not the advancement the Cavil family sought. As Clorai had failed, their only hope lay in her brother Cantra – and he was barely seventy cycles old and would not be taking his examinations for over two hundred more. And in that time the Cavil name would decline (for the Cavil matriach, Celesa, had seen her star dim in time and Admiral Ilen Cavil was long dead) and even if Cantra passed with flying colours it would likely take a generation of successes to give a Cavil a chance at greatness.



 She could not understand how she had failed. She had driven herself almost to destruction learning the theories of governance and strategy, and applied them as needed. She had taught herself the metres of noble poetry, the artistic skills of the empire, and become almost proficient at composition.



 Yet she had failed, and Syrah had succeeded. He was waiting downstairs and had the grace to say little.



 The Cavil mansion was a vaulted building thick with flying buttresses and fluted, organ-pipe-like towers. Built in a heavy industrial-gothic style popularised some millennia ago, it was what Clorai knew as home. The gatekeeper, a rasping-voiced servant who had vague, addled memories of the house's construction, peered at the unknown driver.



 “Name?”



 “Syrah Serdil Failen Serras, of the House of Serras. Governor of Mining Colony Inga Veile.”



 “I will introduce you.”



 Sure enough, when they arrived, he was announced as Governor Serras of Inga Veile, and if anything that made Clorai's anxieties worse. Her family had no love for Syrah, and for him to be a colonial governor and her a minor officer on a warship would just anger them more.



 “Shall I remain outside?”



 “No, Syrah. Please... be with me.” She had never quite found the time or words to say what he meant to her.



 They were in the sun-room, cruel joke as it was to call it such. The growing of sickly, spidery plants was an affectation of the highest classes and the widow Celesa was considered something of an authority. Clorai's mother was reading, her skin, age-paled as it was to a papery white against which her blue hair jarred witchlike, looking more dessicated than ever. In that skeletal face Clorai saw her – and Clera's – futures, slow fossilisation in ignominy. Clera herself was wearing her uniform of office, an elaborately-ornamented suit and a beret slouched across her head like an afterthought.



 “I remember when you were the irksome beau at the dance, Syrah Serras.” Clera had on her most affected voice. “Colonial governor, now, and yet also taxi-driver.”



 “Lady Cavil, that is hardly necessary.” Clorai felt unseemly sensations at the way he spoke to her hated sister, envy at the confidence she had no cause to show. “I was merely saving your sister some time, and keeping her out of the storm.” The roof was now painted with the slimy streaks of ash as the snow fell faster, and the driveway to the mansion had been treacherous even for the car Syrah had chartered.



 “Indeed, although my sister has a tongue in her head and should speak for herself. I presume you failed, my dear?” Celesa Cavil looked up for the first time as Clera spoke for her.



 “I...”



 “You failed then. I told you, mother.”



 “Where did you end up?” Celesa's voice was strangled, as if Clera had taken all the possible anger and disdain from it. “Where?”



 “The Fleet, mother.” Clorai tried diplomacy, tried making the best of a future she could not fully comprehend.



 “Perhaps you will die before you see this house's total decline then. Probably for the best.” Clera interrupted the conversation again, oblivious to her hypocrisy. “It is probably too much to expect you are a captain?”



 “I am a bridge officer.” Again with the half-truths, this time simply because Clorai knew nothing of what life was like on a ship. “I believe one may advance.”



 “And I am a civil servant yet there is no glory or advancement in administrating farms, my dear. Some realism, please.” She suddenly turned to Syrah. “And why are you still here?”



 “My apologies. It has been an honour, as always, Lady Cavil.” Directed, Clorai noticed with an internal smile, at Celesa. Syrah left the room and she was left alone, standing for there was nowhere to sit. Clera was staring at her now with fixed, milky-white eyes, while her mother had been sat motionlessly looking into the space between where there had once been two people.



 “When do you leave?” Clera's taunts had been bearable, because Clorai knew they were born from selfishness. Clera had discovered the worst fate possible, to be mediocre yet not a failure, and all her arrogance was now for nothing. But her mother was a different person entirely. “You have said your piece Clera and now I will speak to my daughter. When do you leave?”



 “I will receive a letter from the Admiralty soon.”



 “It cannot be soon enough. To fail... to fail... I cannot have Cantra... think of him. Think of your brother. Be glad he is at the academy now, not here to see this.”



 “But father-”



 “Father? You bring up your father? Ilen Isai, when I married him, walked from the Admiralty with his head high, a man born to lead. You skulk from the Record Office in the shadow of a Serras brat and make him look successful. I knew you were stupid, daughter, but this is beyond bearable.”



 She had nothing to say. The storm was building in a near-horizontal wall of grey and she staggered from the sun-room to the sound of it slapping thickly against the crystal-glass windows.



 “She raised the name of Ilen. My dear Ilen.” A holographic painting of the former complete Cavil family – from a time before the birth of Cantra – shimmered on the wall and the absent father looked down on his widow. “Do me well, Clera. Please do me well.”