Tristan and Arianne

By Mark Haviland

Tristan Cray is one of the bullions on countless worlds ruled by the autocratic Dynasty of Hadd.  Recruited into military service, he deserts, and lands on the remote planet Thelema, home to a secular monastery.  He meets Arianne, daughter of the director, and begins to fall in love with her.  When Dynasty forces come looking for him, the pair flee, and join the resistance.  The battle to overhtrow the Dynasty begins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Haviland
• Release date: Oct 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386904755

Book preview

Prologue.

Simoon City sleeps .  The modest principal community of Sim-sim Simoon, a quiet world in the Middle Sectors of Hadd, basks in the hot afternoon sun.  The public places are deserted.  In the Plaza of Public Audiences, Mayor Laennec’s chair stands on its little square island, four dainty footbridges crossing the square moat around it to the body of the plaza.  Not a zephyr stirs the water in the moat.  The Hall of Private Audiences offers cool shade, but there is no one seeking it.

The stillness in the air is palpable.  The dry, dusty heat is stifling.  The silence fairly roars.

A faint, ragged rhythm becomes perceptible.  Gradually, as it grows louder, it can be identified as the slap of sandals on the ancient flagstones.  Running, faltering steps are heard, echoing off the walls of the public buildings and grandiose town houses.  Past Anch Micholi, the purpose-built House of Hide-And-Seek, constructed by a past mayor with a peculiar sense of whimsy and a fondness for chasing young girls, and into the broad space of the Central Square comes the runner, a tubby young man with a red face for whom such exercise is clearly not habitual.  He half stumbles along a diagonal course across the square before pausing, leaning on the wall of the Treasurer’s residence, panting noisily.

He looks up, and in the direction of his goal, the chaturanga court.  Above the outer wall of the court, he sees floating a small metallic globe, unquestionably alien in origin:  the narrowcaster.  With the exception of the elite chosen few invited to the afternoon’s chaturanga game, the entire populace is watching at home.  The thought spurs him on, and he begins running anew.

The globe doubles as a security guard, and at his approach, it turns slightly, scanning his body for anything which might serve as a weapon.  It sees nothing, and dismisses him from its silicon mind.

He approaches the entrance to the court.  He hears applause from within.  As he nears the gate, two guards who have been taking advantage of deep shade emerge into the sunlight and confront him.  In their hands are pulse weapons, and the young man hesitates.  He has never seen a firearm before, much less been a potential target.

He establishes eye contact with the guards.  Their gaze is at first steely, but then they crack smiles, unable to maintain the charade.  They know who he is, and have been expecting him.  Their demeanour says it all:  he is harmless.  Nevertheless, they gesture to a disc on the ground beside them, and he steps on to it.  He is scanned again, and declared clean.

Number?  says one of the guards.

The young man is still breathing heavily.  He struggles to speak.  Nine two eight three seven zero two eight nine nine two six...

The guards are laughing.  In the empire governed by, and known as, the Dynasty of Hadd, one’s status is inversely proportional to one’s number.  The higher the status, the lower the number.  And vice versa.  Anyone with a number of twelve digits, or more, is on the very lowest rungs of Dynastic society.

There is, moreover, another reason for their mirth.  He knows it.  The fact that he is overweight marks him out as a Naysayer.  Throughout the Hadd Dynasty, nanotechnology is the norm.  Assemblers, tiny machines a countable number of atoms small, lurk in every cell of every man, woman, child and domestic animal, patrolling, comparing actuality with cytological templates fed to them by nanocomputers, and repairing, constantly repairing, with the consequence that everyone has the physique of an anatomy text-plaque.  No one gets sick, no one gets old, and no one dies. 

Except the Naysayers, a tiny clique who see all this as unnatural.  Nature, they argue, isn’t meant to be perfect.  Sickness, decrepitude and death, they argue, are part of the natural order of things.  Part of the plan, say those who believe there is a plan.  The rest of civilisation chuckles at their eccentricity then goes about its business.

It became fairly inevitable that the Naysayers would band together for mutual support, and that in time certain worlds would become Naysayer ghettos.  Sim-sim Simoon is such a world.

The young man reaches into his girdle pouch.  He divides the credits it contains equally between the two guards, and advances nervously into the deep shadow in front of the gate.  He has never bribed anyone or done anything like it in his life.  His eyes do not adjust quickly enough, and he loses his footing on the steps, lurching heavily against the gatepost.  Behind him, the guards can scarcely contain their hilarity.

Inside, he is directed to a side door.  Groping his way down more steps, he finds himself in a narrow passage.  There are more guards, peering through small windows set at eye level.  They stand aside to give him room.  He has to stand on tiptoe a little to see properly.  His heart pounds with a still more frenetic rhythm as he takes in the view beyond the glass.

The game of chaturanga is played throughout the Dynastic Systems, a game about the acqisition of territory, routinely played as a tabletop game.  The wealthy, however, sometimes delight in setting up a court as a chaturanga field, with live players instead of small inanimate pieces.  This, however, is like no game of chaturanga that the young man has ever seen or heard of.  But then,  considering who it is that is playing...

The young man’s eyes dart in every direction at once.  But inescapably, his gaze is drawn back to the occupants of the players’ seats.  Mayor Laennec, of course, is one.  The young man has met him once or twice at university functions.

But the other...  The trim, haughty stranger with the flowing golden locks and the lavender sheenex suit of conservative cut, surrounded by a phalanx of guards, can it really be that the ruler of the Dynasty has - as they say - dropped in on this little backwater while on a hunting trip?  If this is not some elaborate charade  (and what would be the purpose of that, the young man muses )  then here is the master of all known worlds, here is the supreme leader, here is the man whose number is One, here is Hadd!

The young man feasts his eyes on the potentate for a while, then draws them away.  His attention moves to the pieces on the board, and his heart drums against his ribs.  For, at the behest of the dribbling lecher Hadd, Simoon City’s fairest flowers have been rounded up and made to appear wearing the most miniscule shreds of costume.  It is an affront to all decency, and that it should be perpetrated by the man who is society’s focal point merely serves to confirm all suspicions regarding the decadence of the Inner Systems.

The young man wallows in his outrage.  He hopes to keep at bay that other response to what he sees.  He feels he is a peeping Tom, looking on women’s bodies as only a husband should look at his wife.  There are long slender thighs, sweet curving buttocks, thinly veiled breasts, and the man is trembling, torn between moral indignation and basic lust.

And then Mayor Laennec declares a move, and the piece on the court changes position accordingly.  Mayor Laennec is no mean chaturanga player, but today, inevitably, he is making bad moves.  He has to.  It is bad form, the worst possible form, to beat Hadd at chaturanga.  This move is bad for Mayor Laennec, but worse for the young man, for as the piece moves aside, she reveals Martine, the young man’s betrothed, standing beyond her, rigid at her place on the court, her fists clenched against her sides, her head sunken in despair.

The young man stares, transfixed in horror.  Martine, his own dear Martine, so shamefully, so publicly unclothed.  It is beyond words.  He covers his eyes, he wants to run from this place, but he is riveted.  He drags his hands away, his fingernails clawing at his cheeks. 

Grimly he watches the game’s progress.  One by one, Mayor Laennec’s pieces are removed from the court.  He is being careful not to make it too obvious that he is losing deliberately.  But Hadd, undoubtedly, expects nothing less.

As part of a delicate manoeuvre, carefully designed to look like a last ditch attempt to save a hopeless situation, Mayor Laennec sacrifices Martine.  With visible relief, she begins to walk off the court.  Hadd clears his throat.  She freezes, lifting her head for almost the first time, and looks with trepidation on the supreme ruler.  He is beckoning to her.  Slowly, with the steps of an automaton, she begins to walk towards him.

"No!"

The young man bellows and smashes the window with his fist.  The guards drag him away and eject him from the chaturanga court.  Sprawling in the dust,  blood streaming from his lacerated arm, he feels the rage welling in his throat, a burning, all-consuming hatred of Hadd.

Chapter One.

Another blast sent shudders through the ship.  Tristan Cray felt them, but he could not see the ship.  With the virtu-round system on, it was as if he were floating alone in space, his control systems ghostly panels of lights against the star-spangled black background.  Alone in space, with just a pursuing Dynastic frigate for company. 

Dimly wondering how he had allowed himself to be volunteered as rear gunner, he looked away from the sinister grey shape of the pursuing vessel and pondered a panel showing the sorry state of his own ship.  A schematic of the patrol craft showed precisely where she had been hit, which systems were down and which were ailing.  The self-repair nanosystems were being constantly interrupted by electromagnetic interference, and were unable to fix the broken circuits fast enough.  One more good hit from the frigate and they would all be stardust.

Tris?  Tris, are you there?  Smeed’s voice came through the comset.

Course I’m here,  Tristan snapped.  You think I’m out picking daisies?

Tris, we’re in luck,  Smeed called.  There’s a habitable world coming up.  Name of Thelema, and it has a colony of some sort.  If we can get down into the atmosphere they can’t follow us.

They’ll send down landing parties,  Tristan observed.  They certainly aren’t going to let us just walk away.

It’s our best chance, Tris.  We...

A red light winked angrily at Tristan.  They’re powering up the weapons again,  he barked.  They aren’t going to give you that chance.

Throw everything at them,  said Smeed. 

Tristan felt a jolt as Smeed accelerated.  He looked glumly at his display.  There was precious little left to throw.

A flash from the frigate.  Heavy artillery incoming.  Tristan launched the last chaff canisters.  They sped out to greet the enemy, scattering at the last moment and bursting like fireworks.  Even through the filters, the blast was brilliant.

But one neutron shell got through.  Tristan’s finger jabbed at the automatic counter-fire panel, then saw that automatic control was inoperative.  He cursed softly and brought up the manual targeting system.  The Dynasty would see how well they had taught their own.

He jiggled the target square towards the approaching shell.  He would have one shot.  The cross-hairs edged closer, closer, until they were over the spot of light  in the square.  Tristan thumbed the firing button.

An explosion blossomed.  The patrol craft bucked on the shock wave.  Debris clattered and skittered over its hull.  They had bought a little time, but would it be enough?

The frigate loomed closer, continuously closer.  They were about to let go another salvo.

Smeed’s voice was heard again.  Entering atmosphere... now.

Almost simultaneously, the frigate practically disappeared behind a wave of its own firepower.  Tristan hit his own firing button, but there was nothing there.

He switched off the virtu-round system, and the gunner’s cabin materialised around him.  He released the safety-grip on his chair and made for the door.  The ship was already being buffeted by the ride through the upper atmosphere of the planet, and it was already getting appreciably warmer.  If they weren’t destroyed by the frigate, the heat shield might give out, and they would fry.

Tristan lurched down the passage, grabbing wildly at handholds as the ship rocked more violently.  His boots clung reassuringly to the deck.  It was the only thing in all this that was reassuring.

Incoming!  Smeed’s voice hit a new high note.  Beyond it, he could hear the others in a state of panic.

And then it hit.  The ship went into spasm.  Tristan was thrown to the floor as it plunged into a steep headlong dive, and he slid uncontrollably, straight towards the bulkhead, until, at the last moment, the floor and walls wrenched open with an ear-piercing metallic screech, brilliant light burst in, and, screaming, Tristan was pitched out into white emptiness.

Plunging through cloud in absolute terror for seconds that were stretched to an eternity, Tristan knew impact was imminent.  He was falling, falling endlessly through a featureless fog, bracing for the end.

And then, another sensation, impact with yielding white, bitter cold, and a continued falling, but less vertical.  On and on it went, while another part of his brain distantly registered a jarring and a brilliance in the clouds, perceived like the sun through fog, but brighter, and hotter, and a tremor that passed through everything.  He knew that the ship had crashed.

Still the plunge went on, helter skelter, while he sensed dimly a lethal rain of debris falling around him, and hitting him once or twice. 

Shards of rock appeared through the snow, growing swiftly more numerous, and then bone-jarring impacts and searing pain wracked his body.  He careered into a crag and lay still.

Chapter Two.

Tristan was doing the thing he loved, flying the little utility airhopper over the clints and grikes of the limestone karst near his home.  Eagerly he examined the dark fissures, looking for the little creatures that hid from the sun, but also hoping that one day he would stumble on a new cave, maybe even a whole unexplored system.

He had been turning about aimlessly for most of the afternoon when something caught his eye.  A deeper black within the shadows.  He set the airhopper down on the flat pavement and swiftly dropped down between the zomo bushes, bright with their pale blue flowers, but with razor-sharp thorns. He weaved expertly to avoid becoming snagged.

And there it was, unmistakably.  He pulled the lantern off his belt and set it to float mode, then swung his legs over the lip of the crevice and began to ease himself down into the darkness. 

His nanosuit kept his body warm, but he felt the chill on his face as soon as he slipped out of the sunlight, and the cold stone felt clammy to the touch.  The lantern floating close by his side showed that he was in a passageway that descended steeply.  Cautiously he descended.  It was slippery underfoot, and he had to look carefully for hand- and footholds. 

After about ten metres, the walls of the passage vanished, and he was conscious of entering a much larger space.  To his right, a large stalagmite thrust upwards from the wall, and he positioned himself firmly in the angle before adjusting the setting for the lantern.

He sent it out into the void, tracing walls and ceiling, and revealing that he was near the top of a cavern of truly stupendous size, easily dwarfing any cave he had been in before.  He sent a command to the lantern to drop slowly down to the floor, and he saw that it was a tangle of rocks and columns.  It would not be easy to find a path through them. 

The lantern continued its itineration, and Tristan wondered if this was the first light this place had ever seen.  As it reached the bottom of the wall below his feet, he saw that he was, at any rate, not the first to discover this place.  A large pile of animal bones bore testimony to the sad, lonely deaths of creatures that had stumbled in here since time immemorial and had been unable to climb out again.  Tristan gave a shudder, and was grateful he had left the airhopper in a highly visible spot, where it would flag his whereabouts.  He looked again at the skeletal remains beneath him, and felt hugely relieved that none of them appeared to be human.

He played the lantern over the cavern wall until he had calculated a route by which he could safely descend, and, more importantly, by which he could return to his present position.  When he was satisfied, he brought the lantern back close to him, resumed the float setting, and slowly, cautiously, began to descend.  Narrow ledges projecting from the cavern wall facilitated climbing, even though at one point they were crossed by a broad flowstone sheet, which Tristan had to negotiate with the utmost care.

At last he found himself safely on the bottom.  He ventured toward the middle of the cavern, and was surprised to discover a stream weaving its way across the floor.  He gingerly stepped into its icy water and began following its course, watchful always not to lose his footing.

At the far end of the cavern, concealed by calcium carbonate tumescences of Gargantuan proportions, the stream fed a small lake.  The lantern dimly picked out what appeared to be a tunnel in the cavern wall.  Conscious all the while that he was probably being foolhardy in the extreme, he waded into the lake.

He was up to his waist before the bottom levelled out.  The lantern hovering at his shoulder revealed that the roof of the tunnel was very low.  Indeed, he would have to bend until his face was almost in the water to keep from cracking his skull open.  He advanced.  The lantern accompanied him, it too almost in the water.  He edged along the tunnel for some minutes, losing all sense of distance, nearly falling over a large boulder in the bed of the stream, left there by some unstoppable flood in times past.  And then the tunnel was behind him.

Again he sent the lantern to explore.  This cave was smaller than the last, and less crowded with speliothems.  The stream fed another lake, a kind of sump, which occupied most of the cave.  Tristan moved to one side of the lake where there emerged a raised area like a kind of natural podium.  He pulled himself out and sat, dangling his feet in the water.

And then it was that he became aware of a sound.  At first he assumed it was another watercourse somewhere close by, but the sound was not that of rushing water.  It was more in the nature of a hiss, and, moreover, it appeared to be coming closer.  Tristan’s curiosity metamorphosed into alarm as the volume and intensity of the sound increased.

He jumped to his feet and ran to the wall at the rear of the podium.  He placed his hand on the rock.  It was vibrating.  Struggling to find an explanation, he considered that some great subterranean river was rushing through the rock close by.  But that was not possible.  The sound had not been there a moment before.  There had to be another explanation.

Some seed of a notion germinated at the back of his mind, suggesting that this could be a living creature.  He gawped inwardly at the possibility.  It seemed impossible, but what other explanation could there be?

Petrified, he waited for the sound to pass.  It did not.  No creature could be so big that it took minutes to pass by.

To remain was insanity.  Tristan jumped into the lake and splashed back through the tunnel, the lantern bobbing at his side.  He ran along the stream bed and scrambled up the cavern wall, losing his footing several times in his haste, and taking enormous risks as he scrabbled between the stalactites.  He hauled himself up into the passageway, immensely relieved to see daylight.

The sound was fading.

Tristan disregarded the zomo thorns that hooked onto his nanosuit and his flesh:  they would mend themselves.  He hastened towards the airhopper.

Chapter Three.

Tristan stirred.  He shook the snow out of his hair.  The memory of his encounter with the... whatever it was... lingered.  He had thought about it from time to time, but why had it come to him again now, of all times?

He drew himself gingerly to his feet.  He smiled.  The cell repair technology in his system had done its work.  Whatever damage had been done in the fall had been mended.  He had never before put his body’s self-repair system to such an extreme test, and was gratified with how well it worked.

But he was hungry, and the terrain offered little that even the  molecular converter pack on his belt could turn into sustenance.  And while his suit would protect him, his face was exposed.  Some shelter might be handy.  Through the thick cloud he could tell that the sun was going down.

He began an awkward shambling walk down the mountain slope.  Several times he lost his footing and slid on his bottom.  This hastened his descent, even though it was a little ungraceful.  He was thankful there were no witnesses.  And then, with a pang of guilt, he remembered Smeed and Jokesh and Montague, and wondered what had happened to them.

He came down into a gully that seemed to lead nowhere.