Free Sliding Void by Stephen Hunt Page A

built up empathy with the customer. When all the hardship pilots died later on in a freak asteroid strike on the flight deck, it made becoming an emergency pilot – tape and virus trained – feel like an actual achievement they might have lucked into. The Gravity Rose made a lot more sense after the show, but everywhere Calder went, he was seeing things – experiencing things – with two sets of eyes. There was the modern thirtieth century perspective, where a robot like this was just a Sony R4-serv180 maintenance model, as ubiquitous on a ship’s decks as the Model T automobile was on the highways of an earlier age. Then there was the viewpoint of Prince Calder Durk, where the walking box was nothing more than the iron golem of that creation of sorcery, Zeno. The modern frame of reference laid over the real, hard, primitive life that had been his until recently. The sense of disorientation wasn’t helped by the fact that in the sims he was always living his tightly compressed artificial life through the character and personality of an avatar, living adventures that weren’t his. It was a mind fuck of epic proportions. Was he whisking along watching a great metal temple move magically through the star-spattered heavens? Was he riding a half-arsed independent merchantman, the bane of every TAP agent and in-system police officer, with their smuggling, unlicensed cargoes and chancers’ scruples? Or was he actually rattling through an antique held together with sticking plaster and unfounded optimism – the kind of ship that wouldn’t stand up to the first pass from the hardships of a carrier’s fighter wing? Hell, they’d be lucky to survive the radiation blast from a warning shot off the bows.
    The trouble was, none of those competing worldviews seemed real to Calder, least of all the first twenty years of his life on Hesperus. Perhaps I should be glad of that. Real would be freezing out in the plains with the hand of every loyal villager turned against me for the reward Sibylla has out on my head. Real would be having my feet chained in a pot in front of the walls of Narvalo and watching it filled with oil before some nice priest arrived to entertain the mob with a burning torch. If sorcery this be, then I suppose my hat should be off to Matobo the Magnificent . Everywhere Calder travelled on the ship was as warm as a banqueting hall crammed with guests and toasted by a dozen roaring fireplaces. Not just the warmth he felt inside when he was in Lana Fiveworlds’ presence, either. He’d almost forgotten what feeling cold was like – and as a prince royal, he’d felt it a lot less frequently than most. Well, it was always said that heaven’s fields outside the Halls of the Twice-born lay as a perpetual paradise. Happy to report, it’s true. Somehow, Calder didn’t think the priests had the Gravity Rose in mind when they’d sung their hymns. The Gravity Rose was less like the ice schooners of Calder’s experience. She seemed closer to a deserted city, empty except for a handful of crew and thousands of semi-autonomous machines that tended her acres of echoing, empty cargo chambers, every space as still as a cathedral. Deck after deck of uninhabited passenger cabins, each identical with neatly made beds and powered down entertainment cubicles, each as devoid of human life as the next. Restaurants and large communal areas, all powered down and waiting the reanimating touch of contract stewards and stewardesses who could be hired in to run the decks. Even the vessel’s hydroponics domes, filled with lush tropical forests where you might – at a push – pretend you were under an honest farmers’ greenhouse – were empty of woollen-gloved yeomen tending the soil, the air in the domes far too humid to be back on Hesperus. Only agricultural robots climbing up trunks and spraying fruit, turning over the soil, a hanging mesh of irrigation pipes blasting mists of water and plant food into the undergrowth. The whole