The Fatal Fire

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

"Mytilene," he told them, "is a pleasure world. Or, rather, I should say worlds. You can fly from any planet to any other in the atmosphere. "The whole ball, which is much larger than Jupiter, is held together by electromagnetic forces created and maintained by the machines and the robot brains on the centre planet - which spins of itself, but does not move within the gaseous envelope.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 157

Sample

THEY began flaying Bella Rose exactly two and a quarter minutes after she died. The time interval was accounted for by the gentle removal from the tenement room of the sorrowing and semi-hysterical mother and sisters and the quiet, capable entrance of Honest John Flayer.

Honest John opened his plastic case on the walnut dressing stand, revealing, laid out ready to hand, his chrome steel instruments. Because he could not always be sure that an electricity supply would be available most of his instruments were manually operated.

Bella Rose’s father stayed. He knew Honest John Flayer as well as any man knew another in the Pool; but as the dim fluorescent lighting caught and ran along the edges of Flayer’s instruments, Bella Rose’s father wanted to see that these, and only these, instruments were used.

Bella Rose was seventeen when she died. Her skin possessed that translucent, ivory white, ethereal quality that so often transfigures young girls, making of them insubstantial, gossamer creatures from another and brighter world. Her illness had rendered her skin a miracle of beauty. Her father’s hands were not quite; steady as he obeyed Flayer’s curt commands.

“Hold steady, Talbot!” and “Take this, Talbot!” and “The little knife at the end, no, not that one—yes, that and, eventually, “The plastic sheath, Talbot.”

A small pneume-fan was running, droning to itself, making some effort at expelling the room-air. Honest John straightened his back, knuckling his spine. He crossed to the sink. Water splashed.

“My assistant, young Edward, is himself ill today, Talbot. Having obtained the merchandise, I’m at my wits’ end to get it delivered.” He reached for the paper towels. “You know as well as I deterioration—” He wiped his face, stifling the rest of the sentence.

Talbot said. “Julian can go.”

Honest John lowered the towel. “Your adopted son? Is it fitting, Talbot? His own sister …”

“Julian is eighteen. He has his own way to make in the Pool.” Talbot would not look at the plastic wrapped bundle lying quietly on the table. “And, anyway, he doesn’t know.”

Flayer nodded, wadding the towels and tossing them into the disposal chute. “He’s a bright lad. He could be trusted outside the Pool.” He paused, considering. “Maybe I could take him as apprentice. And, again, maybe not.”

Talbot’s thin, bony face, ridged and harrowed by life in the Pool, was relaxing some of the stiffness it had acquired when Flayer was about his task. “Julian does not know his sister—has died. I sent him yesterday on an errand across Pool. He is due back any minute. He will go. He will not know what he carries or why he is being sent—but he will go.” Talbot spoke in short, breathy gushes, closing his mouth firmly after each phrase.

“If you agree. It would be a kindness not to tell him.”

“Yes. I agree. If you take him as apprentice …”

Honest John began to pack away his instruments, spraying them all carefully with the antiseptic aerosol that had already been used to sterilise the plastic bag and its contents. He wrapped his gauze mask and folded the tapes meticulously. His white operating smock went into a separate container and was zipped up, stowed away with the rest in the case.

“Apprentice to a Flayer means, if he is quick and smart and successful, an assured non-occupation within the Pool. He need never be forced to work for the rest of his”

“The Talbots never work!” Talbot said fiercely, proudly. “The family has not worked for five hundred years. No-one could force Julian to work.”

Honest John did not often trouble himself about genealogy. But now he was led to say, quietly: “But Julian is only half a Talbot—he might be your sister’s child; but his name is Justin—Julian Justin. That’s no Pool name.”

The reaction from the man who had just lost a daughter and helped in her flaying was deadened, repressed. Normally, such talk might have led to a formal challenge. As it was, Talbot hunched his shoulders, and said: “I know all that, John. The boy is not truthfully one of us. Who his father was, of course, we don’t know. Mary never told us. I took her in, willingly, she told us that the child was to be called Julia or Julian, depending on the sex, and nothing more.”

“And when she died in childbirth,” Flayer finished, “She talked of a man called Justin. So you called the boy Julian Justin.”

“Yes. I have never worried about his origins. He is one of the Talbot family. If you take him as apprentice I would esteem it a favour, John. I’m sure we can arrange—”

“We can discuss that later,” Flayer said. “At the moment my main preoccupation is in getting this delivered.”

This was the nearest either man had so far reached in touching upon money. Money, in the Pool, operated on two levels. There was Aristo money; real money, the solid, heavy soldar and crisp, crackling notes printed on Company presses, good anywhere in the Solar System and the Solar Technocratic Empire. The paper and print were electrically inert but dust-repellent. Aristo money never circulated dirty or crumpled.

There was also Pool money. This might be a filthy, tattered, almost indecipherable note, or a well-clipped coin dating from a thousand years before. Pool money was good only so long as the vendor was willing to accept it.

Mostly, in the Pool, labour and services were paid for in kind.

No-one, of course, ever worked. ‘Work’ was something the Aristos and the Company men did. Whilst not exactly in the class of a swear word, it had, on occasion, been known to strike a shudder into the more nervous of the inhabitants of the Pool. Neither Honest John Flayer nor Talbot were nervous men. Yet both, shamedly, startled at the tread on the stair and their gazes flew to the plastic wrapped bundle.

“Here’s Julian, now,” Talbot said, “Give him his instructions and remember, please, not to tell him—”

“I’m not a fool, Talbot.” Honest John picked up his case and nodded towards the bundle. “And I’d suggest we talked to Julian in the outer room.”

Talbot snatched the bundle. Both men left the room.

On the bed, the flayed corpse of Bella Rose lay, quietly, waiting for the next buyers.

Julian Justin leaped acrobatically and not very elegantly from the crevice in the ironwork of the monorail supporting pillar where he had crouched momentarily whilst seeking to discover if the hounds were still on his trail. The limp chicken clenched by its legs in his left hand swung gaily. His right hand and arm flailed the air in balance as he leaped; when he landed on the cracked concrete under the monorail arches that hand and arm swung forward, his body flowed in rhythmic action and, at once, he was running fleetly away into the shadows.

Stray chickens, in the Pool, were the property of the quickest eye and readiest hand.

And for Julian Justin, even though he was eighteen and therefore eligible to join the ranks of the non-employed, old habits died hard. A week ago, before his eighteenth birthday, the chicken-procurement would have been followed, had he been caught, by a sound thrashing, and a reprimand delivered to his father. Today, the chicken swinging in his square left hand represented a greater threat to his safety and security—if he was caught.

The Pool had its own rough and ready treatment of criminals. He ran swiftly down under the monorail, sure-footed over the rotten concrete. Thinking of the over-turned market stall and the oranges and apples and cabbages and potatoes rolling every, which way in confusion, of the strings of sausages caught and snared around the donkey’s ears, of the uproar and the hullabaloo, Julian Justin laughed aloud. And then, as though heaven-sent, the chicken had squawked and run all feather-bristling, right under his feet.

The challenge, of course, had proved irresistible.

Thinking back to that moment, Justin couldn’t have explained just why he had found it necessary to stoop, snatch, and scamper. Worry about being caught hadn’t even occurred to him. Instead there had been some hazy notion of a bubbling-hot invigorating chicken broth for Bella Rose. The more he thought about his sister. Bella Rose, as he ran hard and silently down there under the monorail, the more he knew that to have ignored the chicken would have been a crime.

Above his head the grumbling, shushing whoosh of a train pounded up, overtook him in a wail and diminuendoed ahead. He ran on without pause. Ten more supporting pillars to go, and then he would cut off from the monorail shadows, angle under the platform supports, and, after negotiating half-a-dozen twisting alleys, cramped between tall tenements, arrive home. He was looking forward to that. He didn’t like spending the night away from home, even when it was in the enjoyable company of Aunt Jane, who had never been known to frown.

He was counting without thinking—seven, eight, nine—and at the tenth his rapid footsteps took him automatically away under the overhand of the platform.

A long arm reached out, caught his biceps, hauled him to a stop.

Justin swung. Just in time he recognised Raphe Bartram and checked his fist.

“You’re getting careless, Julian,” Bartram said. He laughed. “Chicken careless.”

“You nitwit, Raphe!” Justin paused, breathing evenly and deeply. “I might have laid you out.”

“Not this laddie, Julian. Chicken booked for Bella Rose, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

Bartram sighed mockingly. “Oh, well. Brothers-in-arms must expect a fair face to part them—”

“She’s my sister, idiot. And, anyway, you’re the one who’s—”

“Save it, Julian, save it. I was waiting for you.” Bartram reached into the ragged nylon trousers that swathed his legs and which were turned up a good six inches at the ends. The thick leather belt that supported them was his only article of clothing that hadn’t been filched from a dustbin. Justin himself was no better dressed. Between them they might just have provided rags enough to dust off an Aristo flier.

“Here,” Bartram said, proffering a single large and golden orange. “This is for Bella Rose.”

“Why don’t you bring it to her yourself? Scared?”

“Scared! Me! Scared of a girl—” Then Bartram chuckled, softly. Both boys began to walk quickly along between the tall buildings. “I suppose I am. I suppose I am. But then, you see, Bella Rose is—is special.”

“I know. Come on, lowthrust, let’s run.”

They both ran, felinely, along the concrete paving.

A fork in the road showed up ahead. Abruptly, leaving Raphe Bartram still running, Justin stopped. He stood, poised, expectant, calculating.

Bartram slowed down, turning to face his friend. “What is it, Julian?”

Justin moistened his lips. “Take the left fork, Raphe.”

“But that’s the long way around—” Bartram began. Then he smiled, shook his head, and finished: “Okay. Seeing colours again, Julian?”

“The colour of the right fork is all wrong. Well, it’s not colour, exactly. You know. Am I ever wrong?”

“No. No, you’re never wrong, Julian. Come on, let’s go.” Bartram began to run swiftly along the left hand fork. Justin followed, equally swiftly, equally silently.

They had gone about twenty yards up the fork between tall sweating walls when the Tightness of Justin’s prophecy was proved. From the right hand fork a patrol flier hummed gently, vanes barely turning, idling along a half dozen feet above the pavement. Clearly through the windows the two Pool urchins could see the hard, contemptuous profiles of the flics; Aristo police who would patrol casually until the mood took them to create some fun—and then no Pool resident was safe. Neither Justin nor Bartram bothered to waste time and energy shaking fists at the fliers, much as they might have wanted to do. They simply took a long, careful look and then turned and ran-on.

No one of the Pool’s non-employables ever bothered to worry about the flics’ motives; flics meant trouble and the immediate response to that was automatic avoidance. Around them now were familiar landmarks. They scampered along between the towering walls. People were reappearing again after that quick ducking out of sight that preceded like an invisible wave the progress of the police flier. Justin and Bartram nodded to other lads they knew, hurling back abuse, exchanging insults and retaining possession of the chicken. One or two folk asked after Bella Rose; but neither lad could give a straight answer. Justin felt anxious, a little afraid, feeling the urgency of returning home as fast as he could. Nagging away at his mind, on top of everything else, there was the problem of what he was going to do in life to be considered.

Like every other youngster he had discussed the possibility of leaving the Poo. . .