House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

  The prisoner smiled or sneered - it was difficult to tell which. ‘I saw what we did to you, Gentian. I know how many we killed.’

  ‘There were survivors - more than you realised. And latecomers, too.’

  ‘I only have your word on that.’

  ‘You want to see the others, I’ll bring you out of stasis. That should feel real enough.’

  ‘You won’t risk it. Bring me out and you stand a very good chance of ending up with nothing.’

  ‘You don’t think I’ll take that chance? You’re not that precious to me.’

  ‘Again, I only have your word.’

  ‘You know how many of you were in the ship.’

  ‘But I don’t know how many of us survived. You can show me the other three, but I don’t have to believe I’m seeing anything other than a projection.’

  ‘Who sent you?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Wrong answer. Tell me about the Marcellin involvement in this atrocity.’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘The Marcellins were tasked with disposing of the H-guns. If they’d done that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Is there collusion at Line-level, or was Grilse acting independently of the other shatterlings?’

  ‘Who’s Grilse?’

  ‘My patience isn’t infinite,’ Mezereon said. Her hand was on the lever of the stasis cabinet now. ‘I can pull this all the way to the left, bring you out. Would you like me to do that?’

  ‘Whatever makes you happiest.’

  ‘Tell me what Campion’s thread had to do with the ambush. What was in it that mattered so much?’

  ‘Ask Campion. Or did we kill him as well?’

  ‘Are you a member of one of the Lines? Are you Marcellin?’

  ‘Do I look Marcellin to you?’

  ‘I’d say you were Mellicta, if I had to put money on it. I didn’t notice the resemblance until you started speaking, but you all have that arrogant set to your jaws, that fuck-you glint in your eyes.’ Mezereon watched him very intently, alert to the slightest betrayal of his true feelings. It was frustrating, not being able to look into his mind directly. But no useful scans could penetrate the stasis bubble.

  ‘You think I’m working for the House of Moths, take it up with them.’

  Mezereon nodded sagely. ‘You’re one of them. A Starmover.’ Without warning, her hand pushed the dial to its earlier setting, freezing the shatterling into immobility. Even with Synchromesh he appeared inert, since there was still a thousandfold gap between our time rates.

  ‘If he’s Mellicta I want to know now,’ Mezereon said. Behind her, the light that rammed through the narrow slots in the walls changed its angle perceptibly.

  From elsewhere in the audience Aconite spoke up. ‘There’ll be a list of all Mellicta shatterlings in the trove. It won’t guarantee a match - they change their looks the same way we do - but there’s no harm in checking.’

  ‘Do it,’ Mezereon said. ‘And don’t forget to check against shatterlings lost to attrition.’

  Aconite’s hand moved to his chronometer. He dialled himself back into normal time and became a blur as he moved to the exit of the interrogation room. The door opened and closed, flashing dusky sky for an instant. A few subjective seconds later, the door flashed again and Aconite was back in his chair, adjusting into our time-flow.

  ‘We’ve got a name,’ he said. ‘A Mellicta shatterling named Thorn. He was lost to attrition ten of their circuits ago.’

  ‘Same time as Grilse, give or take a circuit,’ Mezereon said. ‘That makes two of them - both shatterlings presumed dead, but who were alive after all. Perhaps we should take a closer look at the other two - we might find the same story.’

  ‘There’s a question I’d like to ask him,’ I said.

  Mezereon’s gaze snapped onto me. If she was grateful for my having rescued her, no trace of that gratitude now remained. ‘What, Campion?’

  ‘I’d like to know if he’s heard of the House of Suns.’

  ‘There’s no such Line,’ Mezereon said.

  ‘I’d still like to see how he reacts.’

  ‘Why? What do you imagine he might say? Grilse never mentioned such a thing.’

  ‘I’ve just got a suspicion that something called the House of Suns may be involved. It was something Hesperus mentioned, although his memory was too damaged for him to say where the phrase originated.’

  ‘How can there be a Line no one’s heard about?’ asked Charlock. ‘We know what we are - who’s in the Commonality, who’s been expelled. There’s no room in our history for a hidden Line.’

  ‘A Line could have arisen recently,’ said Valerian. ‘One too new to have entered the troves.’

  ‘We might as well ask,’ Melilot said, leaning forward in her seat. ‘I agree with Campion. Everything points to a connection with the Vigilance, and we know Hesperus was interested in that. If we had thousands of years, we could send someone back to the Vigilance to ask some more questions. But we don’t, so we have to make do with what we have on Neume.’

  I glanced down at my chronometer, at the viciously whirling hand. We had been in Mezereon’s time frame for nearly four minutes of subjective time. In the real world nearly six hours had elapsed.

  ‘Ask him,’ I said.

  A scowl played across Mezereon’s face; she did not care to be dictated to. But she yanked the lever back to the hundred setting.

  ‘Having fun?’ the prisoner asked.

  ‘You’re Thorn, a shatterling of Mellicta Line,’ Mezereon said. ‘You were believed lost to attrition. You attempted to slingshot through a double degenerate binary and miscalculated the tidal forces. So the troves tell us, in any case.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘There is no doubt.’ Mezereon’s eyes flashed in my direction, resentfully. ‘But tell me something else, Thorn. Tell me about the House of Suns.’

  ‘There’s no such thing.’

  But his answer, we all saw, had been just too glib, too quick.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Cadence and Cascade knelt before the remains of Hesperus. They were aboard my ship, in orbit around Neume. They had been like that for at least two hours, side by side, with their silver and white hands touching him where his body emerged from the warped golden growth that had bonded him to the wreckage of his ship. The two living robots had been silent and still, with only the movement of the lights in their skulls - agitated and rhythmic - indicating the continuation of machine consciousness. As for Hesperus, there had been no visible change in his condition since I had last seen him. The lights in his head were dim and ember-like, their movements almost imperceptible. Cadence and Cascade’s hands were not just touching him, but appeared to be pressing into his body, as if the gold armour of his skin was no more resilient than clay. But when they withdrew their hands, slowly and in unison, no impression remained.

  Cadence turned her lovely silver face to mine. ‘He is not dead, Purslane. Threatened with grave injury, he has consolidated his mental processes, whittling himself down to a tiny, flickering candle of intelligence and memory. He can be saved. But there is nothing we can do for him here.’

  ‘On Neume?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing there either,’ Cascade said, his voice as soothing and reassuring as ever, even when he was imparting dismal news. ‘He must be returned to the Machine People, in the Monoceros Ring. There he can be brought back to full functionality, and rewarded for his efforts on our behalf.’

  I thought of the tens of thousands of years that might pass before he reached Machine Space. As much time again might elapse before he returned to us, if that ever happened. Even for a shatterling, used to thinking in terms of circuits, the weight of those years felt enormous, interminable.

  ‘Will he survive the journey?’

  ‘That would depend on the ship,’ Cadence said. ‘It would need to be a fast one, to minimise the subjective time interval. Since he cannot be placed in abeyance, he must endure every second of the vo
yage, as measured by ship clocks.’

  ‘Can’t we make a stasis cabinet large enough?’

  ‘Not with Neume technology. And we lack the tools to manufacture one ourselves.’

  ‘Can he be taken apart, broken into smaller pieces? If we can just get part of him into a cabinet—’

  ‘He would not survive dismantling,’ Cascade said. ‘Besides, his sentience is distributed throughout his body. No part of him could be safely discarded.’

  ‘You said he’d consolidated himself, shrunk his consciousness down,’ I said to Cadence.

  ‘I was speaking metaphorically,’ she said. ‘The technicalities would not lie within your compass of understanding. Rest assured that transportation is his only chance.’

  ‘Will he survive a trip down to Neume?’

  ‘If he is handled gently,’ Cadence said.

  ‘Then I’d still like to present him to the Spirit, as we discussed before. It may not make any difference, but at least I’ll have tried.’

  ‘We have no objections,’ said Cascade. ‘There are risks in transporting him to the surface, obviously, but there are also risks in returning him home as he is.’

  ‘You think he’s going to die, whatever happens,’ I said.

  ‘The possibility is always there,’ Cadence said. ‘But we shall not obstruct you in your wishes. Would you like to take him down to Neume now? We can assist with the operation.’

  ‘I still haven’t had the final say-so from the authorities—’

  ‘We will speak on your behalf if further persuasion is required,’ Cascade said. ‘If he communicated this wish to you, then we are also compelled to honour it.’

  ‘Let us move him now,’ said Cadence.

  I stood back. ‘If you think—’

  ‘We shall treat him with kindness and care,’ Cascade told me.

  I watched as they moved to either side of Hesperus’s misshapen bulk and took hold of his extremities. They lifted him without effort, smoothly and gracefully. I had been about to offer to turn off the gravity, or bring a cargo handler, but the robots had no need of my assistance.

  They carried him through the ship and into the vast cavern of my main cargo bay, where I had docked the shuttle. The robots had asked me about the bay’s contents when we arrived, amused by - or at least politely interested in - the number of ships I carried around with me, but now their attention was fixed on their patient and they paid no heed to the ships.

  It was after sundown when we landed at Ymir, the cooling barchans singing into the night. I had the robots deliver Hesperus to a secure room in the tower where we were all being accommodated. It felt wrong to lock him away in there, stored like a piece of luggage, but the room would notify me of any changes in his condition.

  Returning to my own quarters, I was surprised not to find Campion waiting for me. He wasn’t in his own rooms, either. I felt let down. I had seen the concern on his face when I left, or imagined I had seen it, so I had assumed he would be awaiting my return, to let me know he was glad to have me back.

  Feeling sullen and sorry for myself, and realising that it was too late to join the other shatterlings for the evening meal, I had the room prepare me food to Gentian standards. I ate it without enthusiasm, sitting on my bed with my shoes off, facing the open window to my balcony and watching the curtains stir in the warm breeze. Now and then a flying figure buzzed past, coloured wings glowing like stained-glass windows in the sky.

  Most of these honey-coloured creatures would be dead before a single Gentian touched down on another world, but they did not appear to mind. Nor did they seem any less contented than other galactic cultures. They flew as if they had been born to the air, and their wings were delightful. So what if they had seen nothing of the wider galaxy, beyond what was shown to them by visiting travellers? So what if their civilisation (according to the dour prognostications of the Universal Actuary) showed every indication of being ephemeral, doomed to become part of the endless, rolling despond of turnover within a circuit or two? The people of Neume were thinking of today, not some century in the distant future.

  Perhaps the Lines had it all wrong, I thought. We accumulated experience for the sake of it, stretched our lives out across millions of years, but even when things were going well - even when we were not being ambushed, pushed to the brink of extinction - there was a neurotic anxiety at the back of all our minds, a shrill voice instructing us to see everything, to look round every corner, to leave no stone unturned. We were like children who had to try every sweet in the shop, even if it made us sick. We knew there was more of the galaxy than we could ever encompass by ourselves, but the voice did not allow us to take that as licence to give up. All it said was try harder.

  And where had it taken us? Thirty-two circuits of the galaxy, and I still did not feel as if I knew anything more than when I had first stepped out of the vat, naked as a new mole-rat, ravenous with Abigail’s insane craving to gorge herself on reality. People lived and died and did strange, pointless things to themselves. So did societies, be they city-sized states or galactic empires encompassing thousands of solar systems. Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.

  ‘You’re back,’ Campion said, standing at my door. He had entered silently, his footsteps disguised by the swish of the curtains and a squall of brassy Ymirian music from one of the adjoining towers. It was the end of the working week and the locals were partying before going home.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, turning around, my expression blank.

  ‘I was with Mezereon,’ he said, tapping his chronometer. ‘We dialled for six hours. It went by in a flash - just a few minutes of subjective time. It wasn’t until I came out that I realised how late it was. I’m really sorry - I wanted to be here when you came back down.’

  I felt so miserable, so dejected, that I was ready to forgive him anything. All I wanted was a hint that he had meant to be there. I could not blame him for losing track of time under the influence of ‘mesh - it had happened to all of us.

  ‘I missed you,’ I said. ‘Things didn’t go too well.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Campion walked into the room, leaned over the bed and kissed me. ‘Tell me what happened - assuming you want to talk about it.’

  ‘Nothing, really. They touched him for a long time and then said there wasn’t anything they could do. He isn’t dead, but they can’t help him. They could if they took him back to the other Machine People, but there’s no guarantee he’d survive the journey.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Here. In another room. They let me bring him down.’

  ‘Did you hear anything about the Spirit?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘There’s still time. If we don’t get anywhere by tomorrow morning, we’ll schedule another meeting with the magistrate. She’ll come round in the end. Everyone does, eventually.’

  I did not feel his optimism, but I was too weary and deflated to argue the point. Campion had the maker prepare two glasses of cold white wine. Rather than bringing mine to the bed, he walked out onto the balcony, the glasses chinking in his hand. I stirred gloomily and followed him, leaving my shoes by the bed. The music rose and fell in surging, seasick waves, as if it was playing at the wrong speed.

  ‘Tell me what happened with Mezereon,’ I said.

  He told me everything about the afternoon. ‘We know more than we did this morning. He’s Thorn, a Mellicta shatterling. He also knows more than he’s telling us about the House of Suns.’

  ‘Whose idea was it to ask him about that?’

  ‘Just a hunch.’

  I took my glass from his hand. ‘A good one.’

  ‘We still don’t know what it is. A hidden Line, maybe, something the Commonality doesn’t even know about? And how do the Marcellins and Mellictans fit into it?’

  ‘Or the Gentians. We’re involved as we
ll.’

  ‘Because they ambushed us?’

  ‘Because the ambush required Line infiltration. We worked that one out already. Nobody could have got those H-guns close to the planet otherwise.’

  ‘I’m trying not to think about that,’ Campion said. ‘It’s bad enough knowing there might be another Line out there that wants us dead without thinking about snakes in the grass.’

  ‘It could even be one of us.’

  ‘You and me?’

  ‘I mean one of the survivors - one of the Gentians who made it to Neume. If someone knew about the ambush, it wouldn’t have been difficult to hide during the attack and then make it look as if you’d only just survived. How do we know the snake isn’t sitting down to breakfast with us, working out how to finish the rest of us off? Some of us have been acting a little oddly.’

  ‘You mean like Betony?’ Campion asked, oblivious to the possibility that someone might be spying on us. ‘No, it won’t be him. He’s just seen his chance for scoring a few points at our expense, that’s all. It’ll be someone keeping a low profile, someone we haven’t even begun to suspect.’

  ‘Or no one,’ I added. ‘There might not be a snake after all.’

  ‘No, there might not be. But until we know otherwise, I think we ought to assume the worst. We were getting complacent - that’s why someone was almost able to wipe us out. Those ships should have been inspected for concealed weapons before they got within attack range of the reunion world.’

  ‘Should-haves don’t count. And can you imagine how long that would take? Longer than the reunion itself. Just think of the time it would take to search through Silver Wings’ hold - and I’m not the worst hoarder by a long way.’ I shook my head. ‘No recriminations, no going over old ground. The way we did things worked fine for thirty-two circuits. There can’t have been too much wrong with it.’