The Fall of the Families Read online

  THE FALL OF THE FAMILIES

  Phillip Mann

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  The Anthem of the Eleven Great Families

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Book Three: Movement

  Website

  Also by Phillip Mann

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE ANTHEM OF THE ELEVEN GREAT FAMILIES

  First are the Proctors, the greatest and best

  They keep the great wheel spinning from the centre where they rest.

  Second are the Wong the warriors, saviours of our race,

  They chased away the Hammer and put them in their place.

  Third is the Conspiracy of the Bogdanovich and Shell

  They fight for truth and justice and liberty as well.

  The Xerxes de la Tour Souvent are fourth on our list

  Where love is found and tenderness, they are never missed.

  The Paxwax Fifth are generous to the meek and mild,

  They give the food that keeps alive every little child.

  The Lamprey Sixth love the light, their father was the sun,

  Their children are the stars that shine upon us everyone.

  The Freilander and Porterhouse hold the seventh place,

  They stopped the lien in his tracks and kicked him in the face.

  The Longstock and the Paragon,

  The Sith and Felice too,

  Help keep the goblins on their knees

  And so I hope do you.

  1

  ON ODIN’S HOMEWORLD

  High on a stony headland, above a grey and white and roaring sea, crouched a small creature. In appearance it was like a dome of red wax. Its name was Odin.

  Chasms opened up between the waves as they raced in to the land and thumped against the headland and hurled rockets of spray upwards. The wind caught the spray and drove it inland. Cold water spattered the small creature and sluiced over it and dribbled away down the cliff face.

  Odin felt relief. The slap of the salt spray and the cut of the wind dulled the ache he felt inside him.

  For days he had stood there while the storm battered the hard stony shore. Now the tempest was weakening. Fitful rays of pale sunlight were slicing through the clouds. Soon the sea would calm to a heavy swell. But it would never become truly calm; that was not the way on Odin’s world. Already a new storm was brewing among the tight-packed ice boulders of the southern sea and within days that storm would break across the land, bringing joy to the Gerbes who lived by the shore.

  But Odin would not feel it.

  Odin was saying goodbye to his world. While he had crouched under the storm he had sent his thoughts out over the surface of the sea. He had joined with others of his kind. He had drawn strength from the veins of bright silvery thought which rippled across the face of his Home world.

  Now it was close to the time when Odin must leave.

  He had felt the Inner Circle calling him back, gentle but irresistible. He had felt a call like duty, a compulsion like guilt, and he had no choice but to obey.

  So, while the sun brightened the backs of the surging waves, Odin flexed his trunk. His glossy skin roughened as veins and flukes began to appear. Stealthily he withdrew his tough roots from the crevices between rocks.

  Finally, all that held him steady in the face of the buffeting wind was his great basal sucker. Carefully, tactfully, he loosened its grip. Fine yellow tendrils at the side of the sucker emerged and began to feel about for purchase on the land. They stiffened, lifting him, and began to creep like a thousand small legs. The sucker dilated and compressed and Odin began to glide down the headland and away from the sea.

  There was no turning back. For several days Odin toiled over a plateau of bare rock. Patiently he worked his way along valleys and up streams. Nothing stopped him and he never paused.

  As he moved, he thought. The time on his Homeworld had given Odin perspective. He remembered Pawl Paxwax, the human with the awkward legs and strange yellow eyes. Odin had helped to save him, had helped to keep his mind calm at a time of crisis. When Odin left Pawl’s Homeworld it was as though he had left part of himself behind. Now that man would be riding high, Master of Paxwax. Odin wondered if Pawl ever thought about him, and knew at the same instant that he did. Pawl had a quirky, defensive mind, quick to anger, but he was first and foremost loyal.

  Odin remembered the time of their first meeting. How nervous and skittish Pawl had been, encountering his first alien and feeling it push into his mind! He was clumsy and maladroit at mind control. That was the way with human
s. But he had adapted quickly. Then how easily they had flowed together!

  There was the time later, when Pawl was being too defensive and Odin had bitten into his mind suddenly and extracted a memory of Laurel Beltane. That had been dangerous. Pawl’s anger and distress had proved almost too much for the small Gerbes to control … but the shock had been worth it, because out of it grew a deeper trust. Odin remembered clearly the time they sat together and Odin revealed his “face”. Pawl sat staring at him, yellow-eyed, as though memorizing every detail, and then he reached forward and touched one of Odin’s tendrils. An act of trust for both of them. Though they can share with their minds, creatures that are alien to one another find touching the hardest act of all. Odin knew that despite the wishes of the Inner Circle, he had come to share with Pawl Paxwax. He had moved dangerously close in sympathy. And could it be otherwise? Gerbes were not tricksters. They thrived on the easy intimacy of minds sliding over minds.

  Every inch that Odin travelled was bringing him closer to Pawl’s Homeworld, no matter how indirect the route. And what then? What when he was there?

  Odin was not clear about details but he knew that somehow he was to accomplish the downfall of the man. That hurt. That made the stone within him throb and wrinkle. For the sake of the Inner Circle, for the sake of the whole order of aliens which Odin served, Odin must become a traitor. It was a monstrous defection from his nature and it would inevitably, without question, kill him. Odin knew that when the final crisis came and he betrayed Pawl Paxwax, he would still love him and would serve him to the end. And his own inevitable death …? Odin thought about that too. Somewhere lonely, he hoped. Somewhere where he could dissolve unobserved; in a place where he could deposit his stone under the feet of oxen and let it be trampled down.

  Odin could not read the future, but he had some sense of its shape, and it held nothing good for him.

  With these dark but quite realistic thoughts in his mind, Odin travelled over cold stony uplands. He had other worries too. Questions which would not go away. He did not understand himself. Why had he offered to go to Pawl’s Homeworld in the first place? That was not in the nature of Gerbes. Gerbes were quiet solitary creatures, lovers of wind and sea. Apart from assisting as translators, they did not join with the strong militant minds of Sanctum. The fighting could be left to the Hammer and the Parasol and the Spiderets. They delighted in such things. It was more in the nature of a Gerbes to let itself be killed than to kill. Perhaps I was chosen, thought Odin, because I am meek. But why? And was it a free choice?

  Such questions could not be left and Odin decided to find out the truth when he was back on Sanctum.

  Now the summit of the hill was close. The wind had freshened, driving before it pellets of snow which lodged under boulders and did not melt. Odin felt his glands lard his body with oils as the temperature dropped. At the crest of the hill and looking incongruous on the wild world was an aerial made of copper and bright blue strands of bio-crystalline fibre. This aerial was the only manufactured object on the entire planet. It was the only evidence that the Gerbes maintained links with outer space.

  Settling to the ground as Odin approached was the blunt box shape of a magnetic shuttle. This would carry Odin quickly up into the darkness of near space where the Way Gate platform turned. The front of the shuttle broke open and a ramp lowered. Odin only had to enter.

  There, at the lip of the shuttle, he performed a brief ceremony. He sent his mind out for one last time and felt the response of thousands of Gerbes scattered round the distant shore. It was like a great silver sea that for a moment engulfed him and made him dizzy. They were wishing him well in their many different ways. They were saying farewell.

  Odin shook. His tendrils lifted and felt about in the wind. One by one, small Gerbes worked their way out of his tufted fibre and flopped down on to the cold stony ground. They lost no time in squirming and sliding their way out of the wind and under the rocks. Soon they would begin their own long journey to the sea.

  It was over. Odin’s last visit to his Homeworld was over. He knew he would never return. Odin’s next stop was Sanctum where he would receive his instructions from the Inner Circle.

  Odin mounted the ramp and glided into the shuttle and its door lifted and closed. He was alone.

  2

  ON BENNET:

  THE HOMEWORLD OF PAWL PAXWAX

  Fortune favours the brave, as they say …

  … but still it helps to have powerful friends and Pawl Paxwax, now undisputed Master of the fifth most powerful family in the known galaxy, did not know just how lucky he was. Certainly he had no idea how extensively Odin and the order of the Inner Circle had helped in his survival.

  Now the brief but bloody war was over. A speedy inventory of his domain to see what damage the Paxwax had suffered told a sorry tale.

  Pawl was the victor because he had survived. He had survived because the great advance of the Xerxes and Lamprey forces had been stymied. But it had been a close thing. The war had reached deep into his empire, where a terrible price of burnt worlds and plain murder had been paid. One such world was Thalatta, the Homeworld of Laurel Beltane. The war had broken the vast network of Way Gates which connected the empires of the Eleven Families and it would be years before this damage could be repaired. Many worlds had been overrun and it was widely believed that in some parts of his domain, now inaccessible, battle still raged. Most of the damage was the product of desperation in the last stages of the war, when the word went out: “Kill. Kill anything.”

  But now at least Pawl’s empire was secure. The Families which had attacked him, the Xerxes de la Tour Souvent Fourth and the Lamprey Sixth, were in disgrace and licking their wounds. The Lamprey would never recover. The sisters who ruled the Xerxes were made of sterner stuff. They accepted defeat with a bitter, angry pride.

  Being the man he was, Pawl’s first action after the war was to marry. He married Laurel Beltane and thereby asserted his independence. His decision to marry this lady had precipitated the war and now it marked its ending. In some quarters there were murmurs that Pawl was thumbing his nose at the great Code which governed all relations among the eleven ruling Families, for Laurel Beltane was an outsider: her family, being the 56th, was low in the pecking order. But the Masters of the Eleven Great Families, swept along no doubt by the euphoria of battle, were magnanimous. Pawl was young (they said). He had demonstrated courage. He had a certain glamour. He had shown ruthlessness (and this they admired). Let him have his girl. He would learn with age. Soon power would work its corrosion upon him, striking at his idealism. Inevitably he would fall into line.

  Pawl did not delay. He announced his marriage within hours of his victory. He accepted the good wishes of the Proctor First and the Shell-Bogdanovich Conspiracy Second. (He acknowledged that the Shell-Bogdanovich had been his greatest allies and members of that Family were the only ones to witness his marriage.) Old Man Wong, who ruled the Wong Third, sent him valuable presents: icons saved from the Homeworld of Home worlds, Earth itself. The Xerxes Fourth and the Lamprey Sixth no longer mattered. Nor did the Confederation of the Freilander and Porterhouse. This unhappy family was engaged in a civil war and even while Pawl was counting his lost worlds, the Proctor and Wong began to dissect its empire. Soon the leaders of the Freilander and Porterhouse would be little more than petty chieftains.

  The Longstock Eighth were courteous and distant. They had hoped that Pawl would choose one of their daughters. But when his announcement was made they bowed to necessity.

  The outer families, the Paragon, Sith and the Felice, all showed themselves keen to see stability return. They were all ambitious and saw advantage to themselves in being associated with the victor.

  So Pawl’s marriage was accepted, despite the Code, but he married a sad bride.

  The loss of her Homeworld and the death of her father left Laurel Beltane feeling a vast emptiness inside her. She and her brother Paris were now all that remained of the Beltane family. They c
ould not accept that. Paris, being young – only in his mid-teens – found comfort in the gymnasium and combat room on Pawl’s world. He trained day and night, working his body into a tight bond of muscle, and each night dropped on to his bed exhausted after killing a simulated army of Spiderets and Sennet Bats.

  Laurel’s defences were more complicated. She pretended that her father was still alive and that her Homeworld still shone, blue and gold somewhere out in space. She convinced herself that sometime her father would call to her, friendly and kind and wise, and that they would swim together again, hunting Dapplebacks, just as they had when she was a girl.

  But sometimes this defence gave way before reality and she knew that her Homeworld was no more than a black cinder. Pawl did what he could to comfort her. He loved her and pressed her close to him and whispered to her, trying in any way he could to combat the darkness which was souring her spirit. At such times Laurel held to him desperately. They made love passionately, trying to obliterate the memories. But in the morning it all came back. In her heart Laurel blamed Pawl for the destruction of her family. At the same time she loved Pawl, for he was good and kind and gentle, and was all that she had.

  Pawl was at a loss for what to do for the best. Only occasionally did flashes of his one-time roguish mistress appear … and these he nurtured like a man protecting a tiny flame in a dark forest.

  Make no mistake, Pawl’s love for Laurel made him desperate. Privately he cursed the Xerxes and the Lamprey and the whole order of the Families which had led to this destruction. But no amount of cursing could change what had happened.

  He knew that Laurel loved swimming and so he arranged for pontoons to be placed across some of the most attractive bays on his island to hold back the bright red algae which crusted the sea. The island was artificial. It had been constructed generations earlier by one of Pawl’s ancestors and had many ornamental bays. He discovered that Laurel felt most at her ease when she was far away from the towers and courtyards and bustling streets of the main living quarters. Whenever possible he arranged for them to slip away up into the wild lands which bordered the farm enclosures. They carried provisions on their backs. Wynn, the giant bio-crystalline brain, took charge of the day-to-day affairs of the Homeworld during their absence.