A MEMORY

MANZIPOR,
THIRTY YEARS EARLIER

THEY HAD A house on the summit of Mount Resyde, with long colonnades that overlooked the cataracts. The sky was golden, until sunset, when it caught fire. Light-bugs, heavy with pollenfibres, ambled through the warm air in the atrium each evening. Ibram imagined they were navigators, charting secret paths through the Empyrean, between the hidden torments of the warp.

He played on the sundecks overlooking the mists of the deep cataract falls that thundered down into the eight kilometre chasms of the Northern Rift. Sometimes from there, you could see fighting ships and Imperium cutters lifting or making planetfall at the great landing silos at Lanatre Fields. From this distance they looked just like light-bugs in the dark evening sky.

Ibram would always point, and declare his father was on one.

His nurse, and the old tutor Benthlay, always corrected him. They had no imagination. Benthlay didn’t even have any arms. He would point to the lights with his buzzing prosthetic limbs and patiently explain that if Ibram’s father had been coming home, they would have had word in advance.

But Oric, the cook from the kitchen block, had a broader mind. He would lift the boy in his meaty arms and point his nose to the sky to catch a glimpse of every ship and every shuttle. Ibram had a toy dreadnought that his Uncle Dercius had carved for him from a hunk of plastene. Ibram would swoop it around in his hands as he hung from Oric’s arms, dog-fighting the lights in the sky.

Oric had a huge lightning flash tattoo on his left forearm that fascinated Ibram. ‘Imperial Guard,’ he would say, in answer to the child’s questions. ‘Jantine Third for eight years. Mark of honour.’

He never said much else. Every time he put the boy down and returned to the kitchens, Ibram wondered about the buzzing noise that came from under his long chef’s overalls. It sounded just like the noise his tutor’s arms made when they gestured.

The night Uncle Dercius visited, it was without advance word of his coming.

Oric had been playing with him on the sundecks, and had carved him a new frigate out of wood. When they heard Uncle Dercius’s voice, Ibram had leapt down and run into the parlour.

He hit against Dercius’s uniformed legs like a meteor and hugged tight.

‘Ibram, Ibram! Such a strong grip! Are you pleased to see your uncle, eh?’

Dercius looked a thousand metres tall in his mauve Jantine uniform. He smiled down at the boy, but there was something sad in his eyes.

Oric entered the room behind them, making apologies. ‘I must get back to the kitchen,’ he averred.

Uncle Dercius did a strange thing: he crossed directly to Oric and embraced him. ‘Good to see you, old friend.’

‘And you, sir. Been a long time.’

‘Have you brought me a toy, uncle?’ Ibram interrupted, shaking off the hand of his concerned-looking nurse.

Dercius crossed back to him.

‘Would I let you down?’ he chuckled. He pulled a signet ring off his left little finger and hugged Ibram to his side. ‘Know what this is?’

‘A ring!’

‘Smart boy! But it’s more.’ Dercius carefully turned the milled edge of the ring setting and it popped open. A thin, truncated beam of laser light stabbed out. ‘Do you know what this is?’

Ibram shook his head.

‘It’s a key. Officers like me need a way to open certain secret dispatches. Secret orders. You know what they are?’

‘My father told me! There are different codes… it’s called “security clearance”.’

Dercius and the others laughed at the precocity of the little boy. But there was a false note in it.

‘You’re right! Codes like Panther, Esculis, Cryptox, or the old colour-code levels: cyan, scarlet, it goes up, magenta, obsidian and vermilion,’ Dercius said, taking the ring off. ‘Generals like me are given these signet rings to open and decode them.

‘Does my father have one, uncle?’

A pause. ‘Of course.’

‘Is my father coming home? Is he with you?’

‘Listen to me, Ibram, there’s–‘

Ibram took the ring and studied it. ‘Can really I have this, Uncle Dercius? Is it for me?’

Ibram looked up suddenly from the ring in his hands and found that everyone was staring at him intently.

‘I didn’t steal it!’ he announced.

‘Of course you can have it. It’s yours…’ Dercius said, hun kering down by his side, looking as if he was preoccupied by something.

‘Listen, Ibram: there’s something I have to tell you… About your father.’