House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

  By now the glass had passed through his head and was beginning to divide him at the shoulders and upper torso. The expression on his face had altered subtly, in a way that might easily be mistaken for the effect of the play of light as clouds passed over the piazza. The aspic-of-machines was allowing him to move his facial muscles just enough to register disquiet, and perhaps even horror, at what was being done to him. Even if he wished to talk now, it would make no difference to Mezereon.

  I watched, mesmerised and repelled, as the glass completed sectioning the prisoner. When the pane reached the base of the cabinet, it halted. Since we could no longer see the pale edges of the pane, the effect was as if the prisoner had been restored to his former integrity. This was illusory. Mezereon gestured towards the cabinet and it partitioned itself into two halves, each of which contained one portion of the divided man. The two halves folded away from each other, the man opened for inspection like a lavishly illustrated book. The pane must have split itself into two thinner layers, each of which was holding back a wall of tissue, muscle, sinew, bone and pumping fluid, all pinks and whites and reds and livery purples. The visible detail in the two sections was identical, except that one was a precise mirror image of the other. A living mirror, too, for the man was still alive, still breathing. We could see the rise and fall of his chest behind the glass, the outline of his pleural cavity, his heart pumping like the speeded-up opening and contraction of a flower.

  Mezereon allowed us to examine him a moment longer, then rotated the front section, the one that contained his face, until it was looking back at the rear section.

  ‘This is you,’ she said, indicating the living anatomical chart he had become. ‘This is not a projection, but rather your own self, cut down the middle and trapped behind glass. It is necessary that you understand this. Indicate your assent by nodding. The aspic-of-machines will permit you this movement.’

  I suppose the man had no choice but to nod, or perhaps he was made to do so by the machine in which he was trapped. As his head bowed, the other half echoed the movement with no detectable delay. The action, as the half-head tilted forward into the plane of the glass, revealed a squirming, ever-changing cross section of skull and brain.

  ‘This will be the last conscious movement you make,’ Mezereon said. ‘You will continue to breathe, and blood will continue to flow through your body, but you will remain fixed in position. You can, of course, still talk to me - your intention to speak is all I need.’ She looked away from the prisoner towards her audience, playing to the house. ‘The sectioning will continue until you have no physical existence, except as several hundred wafer-thin slices trapped under glass - and rest assured I will go that far. You can halt that process at any time by giving us the information we seek, in a verifiable form.’

  ‘I have nothing to say to you,’ he answered, his voice unchanged but strange nonetheless, given that it had emerged fully formed from only half a man.

  Mezereon nodded as if she had expected his response. ‘I’d have been disappointed if you’d let us stop now,’ she said.

  Two more panes lowered from the orbiting flock and came into hovering position above the prisoner’s two halves, aligned in parallel with the first division.

  Mezereon sliced her prisoner again. Then she kept going, following a geometric progression.

  I turned to leave the piazza, imagining that I would be one of the first to do so, and realised that Purslane must have already departed.

  When it had been decreed that nothing more would be learned from Cyphel’s remains, her body was brought out into the open on a hovering platform, the platform tilted slightly forward so that the fact of her death and the evidence of her injuries were obvious to all. Cyphel was much as she had been when found, except that her body had been arranged in a suggestion of repose. Visible in outline beneath a translucent sheet, her arms were at her sides, her legs had been straightened, the bones pushed back under her skin, the blood cleaned from her wounds, and although she did not have much of a face left to look with, the angle of her head suggested that she was looking expectantly upwards, into the evening sky. Four shatterlings accompanied the platform until it came to rest over a table-sized block and lowered slowly into place. The rest of us formed a circle, holding torches in the air, and then advanced slowly until we were gathered in a small crowd around Cyphel. There were fifty of us present rather than fifty-one, for as always one shatterling - it happened to be Medick on this occasion - was away from Neume on patrol duties. But there were fifty-one torches, a flame for every survivor, with the spare one being passed from hand to hand in symbolic recognition of the shatterling who was not present at the funeral.

  Our witnesses - the shatterlings from other Lines, our guests and the dignitaries from Ymir and the other cities of Neume - surrounded us at a respectful distance, standing on a circle of raised flooring. They were soberly dressed. Our clothes also befitted the occasion - we all wore black garments, devoid of ostentation save for embroidered black flowers that were all but invisible. Purslane’s hair was combed back from her forehead, secured by a simple flower-shaped clasp. She wore no make-up or jewellery; nor did anyone else. The air was cold, but our clothes had been forbidden from warming us or assisting with the burden of the torches. Mine weighed heavy in my hand, as if the more it burned the heavier it became.

  I was not surprised that Betony had chosen to speak for Cyphel, but for once I did not begrudge his putting himself forward. I had known Cyphel as well as anyone present, even if I had not been one of her closest friends. Her closest friends had died in the ambush - at best I only counted as a close acquaintance. I felt a sense of obligation towards her, a conviction that there were aspects of her character I understood better than anyone else, but I had no wish to hurt Purslane by dwelling on my feelings for Cyphel. Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over. Besides, my knowledge of Line traditions was not as exhaustive as it might have been. As we had told the robots, funerals of this kind were exceptionally rare events - there was not usually a body involved, and there was often no conclusive evidence that the shatterling in question was really dead.

  Betony kept his speech brief. He said that although Cyphel’s death would cast a long shadow over what remained of the Line, and that the circumstances of her death were still under investigation and might yet lead to unpleasant revelations, that was no reason not to celebrate the life she had lived. She had seen and done glorious things; she had touched countless lives; she had carried a thread of memory across six million years; she had been loved and admired and envied. He spoke of a dozen or so significant milestones in her life, blowing the dust off events that had happened many circuits ago.

  I had steeled myself to be annoyed by Betony’s words, but (to my own lingering irritation) I found nothing to disagree with. Afterwards, when Cyphel’s life had been played out across the sky, I thought back to what he had said and found nothing I would have changed; nothing I would have amplified or amended. His summing-up of her life had the pure simplicity of a haiku; it had been honed and polished, and it was delivered with conviction and respect and something of the same love he had mentioned in connection with her. I was still resentful of the way Betony had taken command of the Line, but when he spoke for Cyphel, I discarded any thought, however improbable it had seemed, that he might have been her murderer.

  When the words had been spoken, Betony pulled the sheet down from Cyphel’s neck, revealing the true extent of her injuries. Cyphel was naked except for the rings on her fingers. We all flinched, even those of us who had already seen her body after the fall. Then Betony handed his torch to another shatterling, and from one pocket he produced a thick black tube of aspic-of-machines. He cupped one hand and squeezed a dollop into the palm, then smeared the aspic onto Cyphel’s forearm, where the skin had been ruptured when a bone had pushed its way through. Then he stood back a little and pressed the tube into the thick fingers of Weld, who had
been standing next to him. Betony reclaimed his torch and took hold of Weld’s while the other shatterling squeezed aspic onto his palm and daubed it onto Cyphel, this time across the dented arc of her brow. Weld then passed the aspic to Charlock, who rubbed the translucent glistening paste across Cyphel’s belly. So it continued, until all who were present had taken their turn. I do not know why I was the last; whether it just worked out that way or whether the group had arrived at the collective decision that it must fall to me to make the final daub. By then the only visible part of Cyphel that had not been covered was the smashed travesty of her face. As my hand applied the aspic, my fingers touching hard ridges of bone and cartilage where there should have been skin, I shuddered with the effort of not breaking down into sobs. Then I took my torch from Purslane and stood back, my hand still shaking. The circle had widened, opening space around the reclining form.

  By the time I had finished, the aspic had already begun to do its work. It was infiltrating Cyphel’s body, as far as it needed to go to undo a given injury. Her forearm stiffened momentarily, the fingers of her hand tremoring as if Cyphel were dreaming. Around the point where the bone had come through, the hole in her flesh began to seal over. The dent in her brow smoothed itself out and the recognisable structure of a nose began to appear beneath the glistening mask. The machines were not restoring Cyphel to life; it was much too late for that. Not that an illusion of life would have been beyond them: they could have animated her corpse, repaired cells and coaxed their metabolic cycles to start up again. They could have made her sit up and smile; made her walk and talk and laugh. But there would have been no mind behind those eyes, or at least none that retained anything of Cyphel.

  As the process continued and the figure on the couch began to look less and less like a broken corpse and more and more like a sleeping woman, a squadron of our ships moved into position above Ymir. They were not orbiting, but holding station above this fixed point on Neume, just beyond the ionosphere. The sun had long since fallen below the horizon, but the ships were so high up that the sun’s rays still caught the edges of their hulls, picking them out like a fleet of new moons, edged in scimitar-bright lines of silver and gold and fiery red. The ships arranged themselves into a square formation, spanning thousands of kilometres of space. Then they activated their impassors and began to project and shape the fields so that they pushed down into the ionosphere, tangling with the planet’s native magnetosphere. Squeezing, crimping, folding and stretching the field lines of the magnetosphere, the ships began to paint the sky with auroral colours. Curtains of light, the most delicate ruby or green, rippled from horizon to horizon. The colours intensified until the ships were almost hidden behind the display, silent puppeteers retreating from view. They stripped ions from their hulls and injected them into the atmosphere, to stain and dye their handiwork. The curtains flickered and shimmered and intertwined, dancing with increasing swiftness, different hues being introduced, until shapes became apparent. The shapes formed images: we were being shown a sequence of pictures drawn from Cyphel’s strands, sampled from those stored inside her ship. There were landscapes and cities, moons and planets - as rich a cross section of galactic history as any of us had tasted. Cyphel was absent from most of the images, but that only served to make her presence in some of them the more poignant. She was usually caught with her back to us, a distant figure standing on some cliff or high building with one hand on her hip and another shielding her eyes from the sun, lost in the rapture of scale and scenery, drunk on the very idea of being human, a monkey who had hit the big time. Her hair was the electric white of a comet’s tail, streaming back from her brow as if fingered by a caress of photon pressure.

  As we watched the episodes play across the canvas that the ships had made of the sky, the aspic-of-machines slowly undid Cyphel’s injuries. At last the glistening caul completed its work and slithered off her, awaiting its next duty. Turned gold under the light of our torches, Cyphel lay uncorrupted. Her expression was one of patient serenity. Her eyes were closed, but she looked as if it would only take a raised voice, a careless laugh, to jolt her from the carefree drowse in which she lay.

  The platform began to rise again, detaching from the block where it had rested. At first it rose so slowly that it took at least a minute for her body to rise higher than my line of sight. Only then did the platform begin to quicken its ascent, rising into the air with increasing swiftness. The torch, which had felt so heavy until then, began to lighten. There was a point where it weighed nothing at all, and then a moment later it was trying to escape from my hand, as if being pulled from above on an invisible thread. All around me, the other shatterlings stretched their arms and redoubled their grips, anxious to retain their torches until the appointed moment.

  ‘Release,’ Betony said, very quietly, and we all let go. The timing was impeccable, for the fifty-one torches rose in a flame-lit ring, maintaining elegant formation until they had caught up with the rising platform. Lowering our hands to our sides, our muscles still aching from the effort, we watched the dark rectangle of the platform become smaller and smaller, until it was only by the diminishing circle of fire that we could judge where it was.

  It would take a while for Cyphel to reach space; all that remained was for us to continue watching the display of scenes from her life, reflecting on how she had touched all of us in one way or another. I felt solidarity with almost everyone else present, including Betony, including Mezereon, including those other shatterlings whom I felt had been complicit in Purslane’s punishment. But somewhere amongst us, I felt certain, was someone who was not sorry about what had happened to Cyphel. In every grave face I tried to read a sign of masked emotions, of quiet satisfaction that she had been disposed of so efficiently, but I saw nothing but sincere grief.

  We were not just mourning Cyphel, I knew. This was her night, her funeral, but the fact of it had flung wide an emotional door in our hearts that had been locked until now. This was the night when we first took account of the more than eight hundred shatterlings who had died in the ambush. They would all be honoured in the traditional way when the time was right; they would all be accorded memorials; but that did not mean we could not begin to grieve for them now. As the realisation of what had been done to us hit me with renewed force, as I began to truly apprehend the scale of that crime - a realisation that it had taken the particularity of Cyphel’s funeral to force upon me—I felt the coldest of all chills pass through me.

  Not long after, Cyphel reached space and the platform tilted to release her for her long fall back to Neume’s atmosphere. We watched as she scratched a line of glorious fire across the sky, a line that began faintly, flared to a ribbon of pastel blue, reached a climax that had us narrowing our eyes, then faded slowly away before splitting into fingers of dulling red, Cyphel giving up every atom of her body, every atom of her existence, all that she had ever been, all that she ever would have been, until all that remained of her was the figment we held in our memories, no more and no less.

  Long after she had faded, the ships continued playing images of her life, until that too dimmed and the planet’s magnetosphere was allowed to relax back to its normal configuration. The squadron, dark now, pulled away into parking orbit. The audience of shatterlings, guests and Ymirians at last began to disperse, shivering even as our clothes were finally allowed to warm us.

  Cyphel’s funeral was over. We had honoured her. Now it was time to get on with being Gentian Line.

  Later that evening, after Purslane had gone to sleep, I stood alone on one of the balconies. I was thinking of all the pieces of Cyphel’s life that had played across the sky, trying to fit them into some kind of order, wondering what she would have made of it all had she been one of the spectators. Then I became aware of a heavy, trudging presence, a sound like carpet scuffing on stone. I turned around with an empty wine glass in my hand, lost somewhere along the drunken, ill-defined border between nostalgic remembrance and bitter, spiralling melancholy.

/>   It was Ugarit-Panth, the elephantine being I had spoken to shortly after our arrival on Neume.

  I raised the glass in welcome. ‘Hello, Ambassador. How did you like the funeral?’

  He stopped a few metres from me, but still close enough that his trunk could have swiped my face. ‘It was very moving, shatterling,’ he said, his human-looking mouth moving beneath that long, wrinkled, faintly disgusting appendage.

  ‘She was one of the best of us. I’m going to miss her a lot.’

  ‘As much as you’d miss your civilisation, if it ceased to exist?’ It was difficult for him to look at me head-on - his eyes were set in the sides of his skull, not the front of his face. He had to look at me askance, alternating between one eye and the other as if he wanted to balance the demand on his brain hemispheres.

  I tried to push aside the mental fog induced by the wine. ‘There are individuals who matter more to me than Gentian Line, yes. If I didn’t realise that before, I realise it now.’

  ‘It’s easy to see that now, with your Line pushed almost to the point of extinction.’

  Something in his tone put me on edge. I took a step back from the balcony’s railing, Cyphel’s long fall flashing through my mind. The Roving Ambassador of the Consentiency of the Thousand Worlds was a huge, ponderous creature, weighing about twenty times more than me even before one allowed for his heavy-looking red armour and ornamental metalwork. I was prone to clumsiness when drunk - what he could do in a similar state of intoxication did not bear thinking about. I even began to wonder if the Ymirians had designed their balconies for such massive individuals.