‘... the danger they‘re in. But I can’t tell them.’’

  It was not just each other’s subvocalized murmurs that the twins could detect; this was the fearful man outside, muttering to himself without realizing, as he stopped in indecision directly outside the door.

  ‘... don’t deserve to die. But if I, if I tell, then they’ll know, everyone will know … ‘

  Though they could not see him, the twins knew from the rustle of cloth, the stink of noradrenaline, what was happening in the corridor. The hesitant hand reaching for the door-plate; the profuse sweating; the hesitation. The trembling.

  A sob, almost silent and probably unconscious.

  Then the withdrawal, both hands jammed into pockets and the shoulders slumping as he turned and slouched away ... he was crying mutely and without tears as he gave in to cowardice and demeaned himself still further.

  Yet he could not know that he had delivered the message, despite the shivering fear. And he had not needed to enter the twins’ bedroom for them to know who he was. The scent-signature he transmitted was blaring at the chemical equivalent of top volume.

  His name was Solly. He was the engineer who had shown them around the facility, and he seemed convinced that anyone who tried to fly the new ship today would be torn into oblivion.

  At 5:45 the alarm beeped.

  ‘Ugh.’ Dirk sounded like someone who had just woken up. ‘Shut up.’

  There was one last defiant beep, then silence.

  ‘ ‘Mornin’,’ Kian mumbled.

  Dirk used the adjoining bathroom first, and came out drinking a long glass of water. He pulled his tracksuit from a drawer as Kian brushed past him.

  Ten minutes later they were outside, breathing deeply in the pre-dawn air, drawing energy as they stretched and turned. Then they moved off in a slow jog across the sand.

  ‘One circuit of the base?’

  ‘That should— No, look.’

  They slowed to a walk, then stopped. One of the big hangars was opening.

  White light flooded out, revealing the huge predatory bird cast in gleaming bronze, banded with blue-green ceramic which gave off its own quiet glow.

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  ‘You got that right.’

  Like the attendants of some mighty deity, small vehicles guided the delta-winged vessel out into the open. They made a long slow arc as it moved onto a purple track which led to the main, dark-yellow runway.

  ‘I can’t believe they’d trust us with this.’

  ‘The numbers, the cost... It’s real.’

  Later, when they had graduated and been through the final training, Dirk and Kian would each have a vessel configured to their own body and nervous system. For now, for the purposes of interfacing and initial flights, the twins were so similar that one ship would suffice for both.

  Yet the expense, the sheer size and weight of the vessel and the knowledge that it had cost millions to build, would cost millions more to maintain ... it was real.

  It was theirs.

  For the first time they began to accept the enormity of the path that was laid out for them.

  But what did Solly mean?

  As the twins began to jog once more, this time heading towards the open hangar, their heavier breathing concealed words no eavesdropper could detect.

  A bomb on board?

  Maybe.

  Still, they could not help smiling as they upped the pace, ran towards the bright solid polished ship.

  Could be a weapon out in the desert.

  Ready to launch when we do.

  Pre-dawn gave way to dawn.

  A liquid golden blaze slid and dripped along the great polished ship, bronze and powerful as it pointed towards the rising molten sun, filled with the hope and energy of the thousands of men and women and machines who had designed and constructed the vessel.

  And if there was a price to be paid by young Pilots submitting themselves to the machiavellian systems of the vast organization which dared to trade with the stars, then it was one they could not help paying in their eagerness to fulfil their bounding ambition: to leap forth from the home planet, into a universe filled with golden space and black spiked stars.

  For they were young, and they were proud.

  Ready to fly.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  38

  NULAPEIRON AD 3426

  Tom had an abiding interest in the true nature of spacetime, in the logical rigours of exploring the structure beneath the surface illusion of reality. But this was not the time for cosmological thinking. Now, he had to pull together everything he had learned about minds and emotions, cognitive strategies and modes of perception, and the thousand subtle ways in which thought and body and environment were linked.

  Today, Tom would have to manipulate people with an expertise he had never attained before. It was a very different approach to the logosophical disciplines.

  Tom remembered his first day at the Sorites School: turning up as directed, where the tall, white-haired Lord Velond waited in an otherwise empty tutorial chamber. Tom was young and a servitor still, and he expected to be serving drinks or moving furniture. But Lord Velond’s words shifted his life onto a very different track.

  ‘We need your brain, laddie. Not your brawn.’

  When Lady Sylvana and the other noble students filed in, Tom took his seat as if he were one of the privileged elite, and not a delta-class servitor whose role in life was menial and whose legal status was little more than that of chattel.

  Vistas of logosophical knowledge began to open up that day.

  But Lord Velond was not the only person who taught at the Sorites School. Tom could never forget the famous Rhetor Primus, Lord Linski, who taught the pyschomanipulative arts as part of rhetoric. Linski’s ability to transform a person’s emotions and deeply held beliefs with or without the use of logotropes was legendary.

  After the first hectoday under Linski’s tutelage, an unspoken conspiracy spread among the students during a particular lecture. They tried to turn the tables and subtly manipulate Lord Linski by minute nods or shakes of the head, using the language of posture and gesture to reinforce or dissuade his movements. It was a form of feedback, and they intended to control Linski so that he would end up standing where they wanted him to.

  Just when they thought they had succeeded, and Lord Linski stood on the spot they had been guiding to, smiles broke out upon the students’ faces. That was Lord Linski’s cue. He made a grand, sweeping gesture that caused a long-prepared tricon to display itself: I predict the whole class will be facing this spot - the correct location relative to the chamber’s walls was denoted in the tricon’s geometry - and smiling at me, at two minutes before Snapdragon Hour.

  The class gasped, then broke just as a musical tone sounded, denoting Snapdragon Hour. Time for a new class to begin.

  Yet the most profound lesson that Tom received in manipulating another’s will occurred not when Lord Linski was teaching, but when Linski was absent from the Sorites School, attending a conference in Sektor Grayleim. It was Lord Velond who replaced him.

  The students always began tutorials by opening up their infopads, causing blank phase spaces to blossom by each chair. This time, Lord Velond clapped his hands to interrupt them. The unexpected sound reverberated through the chamber.

  ‘You know that induction and deduction are my fields.’ His elegant voice rang. ‘So, since my colleague, Lord Linski, is both Rhetor Primus and absent, I would not presume to teach in his place.’

  A couple of young Lords laughed politely.

  ‘Instead,’ continued Lord Velond, ‘I believe we should all go shopping.’

  Tom’s head ached.

  He had been learning the Laksheesh names of colours, and how they related to triconic representations, and it was harder than expected. In formal intercourse, there were sixteen thousand hues identified, and their names related not only to electromagnetic frequency but to historical and cultural references unfamiliar to Tom.

  The modern term for teal-green, Vakdosh, rhymed with the Old Laksheesh term for death. If you did not know that teal was the archaic colour of mourning, it made no semantic sense.

  Tom was about to raise his hand and ask for permission to remain behind and study alone, when he saw something the other students (he thought) did not: the dance of amusement in Lord Velond’s normally unreadable eyes.

  Tom shut down his display. Chairs slid silently back as students stood. Tom took his place among the rest.

  Going shopping?

  He did not think so.

  Before descending, the tutorial group stopped in an antechamber where servitors took their discarded cloaks and half-capes. The noble-born students pulled on surcoats which made them look like young freedmen and freedwomen: apprentices, perhaps, to the white-haired man in the faded green ankle-length coat, for Lord Velond had adopted the appearance of a down-at-heel trader. Velond left his platinum cane in the care of Malgrix Groshe, the alpha servitor who acted as chief caretaker for the School.

  Even Tom, though he was not dressed as a Lord, pulled on a drab orange vestment which obscured his black-and-ivory tunic in the house livery of Palace Darinia.

  Then Lord Velond led the group to a brown stone chamber where a round steel door was set in the flagstones: a floor hatch leading down to the Secundum Stratum, in a location where no-one would expect it.

  Lord Velond himself, when the door had rotated open and the descending slats had clicked into place to form a spiral stairway, was the first to go down, exuding an air of devilish mischief. The chamber below boasted a second floor hatch, allowing them to descend again.

  ‘No thumb rings,’ he said, when they finally gathered in a chamber on the Pentium Stratum, four strata below the Sorites School, but a universe away from the world in which the Palace aristocracy lived.

  Lord Velond removed the noble-house ring which denoted his rank and inserted it inside his belt. Those among the students who had thin fabric gloves pulled them on; the others followed Lord Velond’s lead - save for Tom, who had no need for subterfuge in order to appear a commoner.

  They trooped out into a jade-lined broadway, and followed Lord Velond to the nearest mall. From carts and modest boutiques, vendors plied their trade. More than one of the young Ladies - Sylvana among them - paused at a stall where bolts of exotic fabric and racks of subtle bottled fragrances were on show. Lord Velond walked on, tall and straight-backed and as vigorous as a man half his age.

  They passed a tavern, then an antiques shop where several of the Lords, including Qizan and Shrolikin (who were among the least prejudiced when it came to having a lowborn studying in their midst), could not help admiring the stained old short-swords and bucklers. Qizan was on the point of picking up a battered vibe-gun when Lord Velond cleared his throat. Qizan took the hint, snatching back his hand as though a narl-serpent had tried to bite him.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  They passed through a wide circular chamber of raw stone whose bulging pillars were adorned with holoflames, while the floor space was set out as a temporary market. It reminded Tom of home, of the smaller marketplace in Salis Core where Father had sold his carved statuettes and talismans. But that was many strata lower than this, and there was no way to contact anyone there.

  Did Trade Mulgrave, their old neighbour and family friend, ever wonder what had happened to Tom? Had she learned of his abrupt departure from the Ragged School, his swift involuntary entry into servitude?

  Tom shook his head, and hurried to rejoin the group.

  They stopped in a tunnel beyond the marketplace, and gathered around Lord Velond.

  ‘There was a garment vendor back there,’ Lord Velond said, ‘by the cracked pillar. No, don’t look round, Shrolikin, there’s a good lad.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I trust you’ll all believe me when I say, I’ve never set eyes on the proprietor before, and he certainly does not know who I am. Are you prepared to take my word on that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Good. Then follow me, and let’s see what occurs.’

  The young nobles looked at each other. There were shrugs and a few giggles before they followed Lord Velond between the stalls and congregated near the garment seller.

  The cloaks hanging from the racks looked like discarded fabric that Malkoril, in the Palace kitchens, would have decreed should be used only to wipe floors, and only then after a drone had done the major cleaning work.

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Lord Velond to the vendor, ‘that you sold me a tunic two tendays ago.’ It was worded like a question, but the intonation said something different.

  Lady Sylvana, in her peasant garb, was round-eyed with surprise, and scarcely noticed the two common-born youths at the far side of the market who had stopped to stare at her perfect face. Instead, Sylvana turned round to Tom and whispered:

  ‘Didn‘t Velond say he‘d never been here before?’

  Tom nodded. Viscount Humphrey, who had been frowning at them for not staying silent, looked thoughtful, then grinned.

  What is Lord Velond up to?

  Lord Velond, despite his faded green surcoat, appeared commanding as he straightened, and looked the vendor in the eye.

  ‘W-what?’ said the vendor.

  ‘I’m not saying you will have to pay me the full dozen minims.’ Velond tilted his head a little. ‘The garment was unsatisfactory, but credit where credit is due. I know you are an honest trader.’

  The vendor’s hands trembled as he reached behind the stall. Then he stopped and stared at Lord Velond. ‘I don’t...’

  His will was already crumbling when Lord Velond issued the final hidden command: ‘These twelve or so folk will see you return my minims. You will feel so much better, I’m sure, when you’ve given me my refund.’

  As though afflicted with palsy, the vendor shook as he dropped the cred-spindles into Lord Velond’s cupped hands. Then he gave a sick, weak smile, and backed off, wiping sweat from his face.

  ‘And good day to you, sir,’ said Velond.

  He commanded the stallholder.

  Then Lord Velond gave a short bow, turned and walked away through the group of students. They parted as if repelled by a magnet, then followed along, drawn into his wake.

  Forced him to hand over the credit.

  Tom remained for a moment, regarding the vendor who had been cheated of his credit. The thing was, Lord Linski had talked about the theory which they had seen Lord Velond applying here.

  ‘Ilse different intonation in the key words,’ Linski had told them. ‘Embed a directive inside what appears to be an innocuous sentence, even a sentence whose surface meaning is the opposite of your intended meaning. Be subtle in your use of posture, sparing in your use of touch.’

  Rationally, Tom knew which of the words must have been commands: will, pay me, dozen minims, so forth. But Lord Velond had not even had to tap the vendor on the shoulder - a common technique - in order to shock him into a different state of mind.

  I couldn‘t hear a difference in the tone.

  Tom knew what Velond had done. He did not know how he had done it.

  The rest of the group was following Lord Velond, drawn along by his personal magnetism, or a desire to be like him ... or perhaps in response to a hidden command which made sense only to a Lord, to someone whose noble-house upbringing brought a certain sensibility to attitude and intonation.

  By study and hard work (solo at first, then under Mistress eh’Nalephi’s tutelage), Tom had accumulated merit-points. Each new accreditation earned merit-points which allowed him to access more eduthreads. But since starting at the Sorites School, he no longer had to use merit-points, save for additional study modules purchased from the Palace AIs. Recently, Tom had converted some of his bonuses into cred-spindles.

  He spent them at crystal shops whenever he could, buying ancient dramas and logosophy texts and anything else that snagged his interest.

  Now, Tom dug inside his waistband, found four spindles, checked their values. Four spindles, containing three minims each. The vendor had handed exactly twelve minims over to Lord Velond.

  Is that a coincidence?

  The hairs prickled on the back of Tom’s neck.