Cage of Souls

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

We were civilised. Life was humanity; animals belonged in books. The fecundity of the jungle was a rioting horror. Birds with necks like serpents hunched on branches at the water’s edge, watching the boat sourly.

I could hear the capital letters.

I am always happiest when I can tell people things that they do not know.

He had a strange code of conduct. He would only take our food with permission, which he exacted with skilfully applied violence.

Like every other innovation of the rich, though, this tinkering gained its power from being seen and admired.

There was a horrible soft quality to him, as though he might have no bones, nothing more than a pale, smooth fungus in the shape of a man.

One of the Academy Masters once said that nobody ever made a statue of a man running away. My answer to that is that very few living men get statues.

There was a great deal of deficit spending, but that was endemic in our culture.

As the world becomes unliveable, so life throws up things that can survive in it, faster and faster.

It is easy for a comfortable, free man to cry at the fall of every little bird. A prisoner in fear of his life has precious little regret to spare for anyone else.

Still, and in spite of this, she had a distinction that none of the others could claim. Shadrapar was the last of all cities. Oh, perhaps there was some metropolis clinging to the other side of the world, but we knew nothing of any other human settlement. Shadrapar was all to us. Books tell of places known as “the Queen of Cities” or “Empress of Cities”. Shadrapar was the Widow of Cities.

My story is, despite all that has happened, one of hope, and there is no hope for the oceans.

Others met stubbornly and silently and were hunted for their practices, but faith feeds on persecution. If you try to stop someone doing something, even for a perfectly obvious reason, they will assume there is some great secret you are trying to keep from them.

Vermin are an enduring and ubiquitous bunch who will outlive us, I am sure. They are hairy rodents with long tails, about half the size of a man. Their forepaws are quite like hands, and their instinctive behaviours include crafting tools, keeping possessions and leaving messages for each other. Despite this, the Masters of the Academy have issued official proclamations to state that Vermin are, without doubt, dumb animals, and therefore fair game.

all the rest of the team needed to be was willing and expendable.

We tried a spontaneous exercise in the old democracy, and Tarent carried it by superior force of personality rather than reasoning or merit. This is exactly why democracy could never work as a governmental system.

The world and the sun were both on their way out, and it seemed reasonable to most of Shadrapar that God was dying with them.

Being in debt was nothing to be ashamed of; being caught certainly was.

Hand in hand with the debtor culture was a love of hypocrisy. It was another civic pastime.

“They consumed the Earth’s resources. Some were frugal, others wasteful, but they all burned what could be burned, mined what lay in the earth, electrolysed minerals from the waters and in all ways used up everything of value in the planet. The only reasons we have anything left is that we are so few in number that the little we use up makes no difference at all. Were we to adopt the old industry and technology we would run out of energy and materiel. We would merely accelerate our slide into the jaws of nature.

Rain over the city is not like the simple sky-thrown water of the jungle. It has other things in it, chemicals drawn from the poisonous air across the sea. When it rains, they put great sails up over the crops to protect them, and everyone gets indoors and stays there. After the rains there is a thin, greasy film over everything, a clear, plasticky stuff that must be scraped off. Rain is foul in Shadrapar, then as now, and thankfully it came no more than about three times a year.

We knew in our hearts that we were doomed, and therefore why try to fight for a better tomorrow.

If we are to Save ourselves we must cast out these false teachers, these pedants and searchers and Evil men who seek to Know. They Pick at the Fabric of the world and decay it with their never-ending questions. God does not intend us to Question His creation! God will return to His full health only when these Men of Sin and Science have been purged from the ranks of the Right and cast into the barren spaces.”

The chemicals from the old days still leak out and will do until the sun dies. As far as chemical waste goes, the ancients built to last.”

I initially took this as a euphemism,

“Affection in the strangest places finds its root, or so I have read,” he quoted. I had read the same. In fact, it was from Lying in State by Sandor, the author almost certainly killed by Gaki. He had been applying the maxim to the unsuitable kind of people who become popular presidents.

Earlier, it had rained a little, which scared me. Back home that meant all kinds of liquid plastic and chemical evil. In the jungles, if you can believe it, rain was just water, which was as strange to me as anything had been. I stood with it running down my face and spotting damp on my clothes, and had nothing to connect it to, no way to relate to it. It was as though it was an experience designed by an alien species and I lacked the mindset to appreciate it.

No-one is left who knows our past and what I am, for the Island keeps no records.

He loved to read and to be surrounded by books, all that dormant knowledge like a warm, protective garment.

“War,” said Sergei, “is just capitalism by other means.”

Nobody under the effects of Faith was entirely rational.

“No man is rich like this without stealing from the people,” Sergei observed. “The greatest thieves are always the wealthy.”

It was a rich man’s museum, a private gathering of rarities without context.

“The man who raised the mob. The greatest threat to civil disorder that Shadrapar has seen for a generation.” “Raised the mob?” I demanded. “The mob was raised against me and mine!” He shrugged callously. “It was raised, and someone must be to blame. You were there. The Lord Justiciar is most keen to have you before him for sentencing.”

The haven of the dispossessed, the lower frontier of human knowledge, had been swept away at the cost of countless lives for the sake of some rich man’s lie.

“On balance, I think politics has done enough harm for one lifetime,” Kiera decided.