‘And now?’
‘Work it out, Campion. Cadence and Cascade want the opener so that they can release the First Machines back into our galaxy. That’s why it’s so vital to stop them. You’re not just dealing with a few pissed-off robots that have been stuck inside a box for five million years - there’s an entire galaxy’s worth of them waiting to pour on through. Oh, and I think we can take it as a given that they’re not going to be in a reconciliatory mood.’
‘We’ll do what we can,’ I said.
‘But you won’t do anything that might hurt Purslane.’
‘You were prepared to kill her. It didn’t make much difference to the outcome.’
‘I only had one ship, Campion - you have four. But what do I care? It’s your problem now, not mine. I’ve told you everything I know - not because I give a damn what you think of me, but because I want you to understand how important it is to stop Silver Wings. But I’m done now - I’ ve said my piece. You can go ahead and kill me.’
‘You seem very resigned to it,’ Charlock said.
‘What choice have I got? Even with its impasse raised, this pod wouldn’t survive a concentrated attack from your ships for very long.’
Charlock shrugged. ‘No, it probably wouldn’t.’
‘I think I’d sooner it was quick. I shall put myself in abeyance, then I won’t know a thing. Do what you will with me.’
Charlock nodded. ‘We will.’
Galingale reached out of view and touched a control. Restraints whirred, sucking him deeper into his chair. He braced himself, like a man expecting an electric shock. Then the red cocoon of stasis locked around him.
‘We can draw straws, if you like,’ Charlock said.
‘For who gets to kill him?’ asked Tansy.
‘For who gets to take him back to Neume. One of us has to abandon the chase and return home. He said he’d told us everything, but we’d be fools to take him at his word.’
‘I agree,’ I said.
‘Not that I’m not up for a chase,’ Sorrel said, ‘but Snowstorm’s already pushed to the limit. I’m not going to be much good if Silver Wings pulls some thrust out of the bag.’ He glanced at Orache, who was sharing his ship - nothing in her expression said she disagreed with him.
‘Someone has to go back,’ I said. ‘It might as well be Sorrel. Anyone else who doesn’t want to stick around for the chase, I suggest you make arrangements to whisk over to Snowstorm as soon as you can. Really, though, I think you all should go. Dalliance is at least as fast as any of the remaining ships. There’s no reason for the rest of you to be dragged halfway across the galaxy.’
‘I’d much rather see this through,’ Tansy said.
‘Me, too,’ Henbane echoed, after a moment’s reflection.
‘Then I’ll take Galingale back to Neume,’ Sorrel said. ‘One of us has to go back and let them know what happened out here. They’ll never entirely believe anything in a signal, but when I show up in the flesh, I think they’ll listen.’ He singled me out, our eyes meeting for a moment, and said, ‘I’ll speak well of Purslane, Campion. And you, of course. I’ll let the doubters know they were wrong.’
‘One day she’ll get to tell them in person. Good luck, Sorrel. Get back to Neume, help the Line consolidate. I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to be out of touch for a while. But we’re still Gentian. Sooner or later, you’ll find a way to get a message to us.’
‘I don’t doubt that for a second.’
‘In a way, I’m almost envious of you,’ I said.
‘Missing the singing dunes of Neume already?’
‘Not exactly. But I’d give a lot to see the look on Galingale’s face when they pull him out of stasis. Especially if the first person he sees is Mezereon, sharpening her knives.’
CHAPTER FORTY
Beyond the window, the white-walled room was as still as a painting. Occasionally my eyes convinced me that there was a flicker of subliminal movement, but I soon learned not to trust them. At my current level of time compression, Hesperus would have had to spend many hours in the same position just to register to my senses. There was no reason to assume he was out there at all. Unless the casket relinquished control to me, as it had refused to do after the stasis first took hold, I stood a very good chance of dying in there.
This thought was chasing its tail through my head for the thousandth or ten thousandth time when the casket’s voice calmly informed me that the transition to realtime was imminent. ‘Stasis ratio is now one hundred thousand and falling,’ it said. ‘Ten thousand and falling. Field stability optimal.’
The field dialled down from ten thousand to one thousand, through the hundreds, into the tens, and then released me. The chair’s bindings eased apart, allowing me to slip my hands and feet out of the hoops. I could move my head again. My neck and spine felt as if they had calcified together. I did not like stasis.
The door opened with a huff of air and the chair emerged from the casket. Pushing the discomfort aside, I eased myself to my feet, keeping one hand on the back of the chair for support. It was less than twenty-four subjective hours since I had last been in that room, but if the cabinet had kept me at a stasis level of a million for the entire duration of my confinement, the better part of three thousand years had passed aboard the ark. I hobbled to a wall and scuffed my hand against the white material, with the absurd expectation that a film of dust might have built up there. My fingertips came away forensically clean. Every surface in the room gleamed with polished newness, as if it was only minutes old.
‘Hesperus?’ I called, my voice hoarse until I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Hesperus? It’s Purslane. I’m out.’
There was no answer. I breathed in the ancient, still air. There were atoms in the room that had not been through a human lung for thirty centuries.
Something caught my eye in the adjoining room, visible through the open doorway - a flash of colour and glass. My legs still unsteady, I made my cautious way out of the casket room. I found a white table set for me, with a white chair next to it. Breakfast had been served. There was a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, a croissant on a plate, a pot of coffee and a bowl of fruit. There was a bunch of flowers in a vase, and a folded white card like a menu. I touched the croissant and found that it was still warm. I sniffed the coffee - it was dark and strong, the way I liked it, and boiling hot. I pulled the seat out and sat down, grateful to rest my wobbly legs for a while. I poured some of the coffee into a white china cup and held it to my nose, taking in the aroma before I allowed myself a sip. I tore off the end of the croissant and stuffed it into my mouth. After a day in the stasis casket, I was ravenous. After the first bite, I could not stop myself. I finished off the croissant and three pieces of fruit. I gulped down the juice and drank two cups of coffee. Only then did I open the stiff white card. Inside was a message in fine gold writing. It was written in very elegant script, but just a touch too precise to have ever been the work of a human hand. Hesperus had signed it, but there had been no need.
He told me that he was sorry he could not be with me on the day of my emergence from stasis, but that he was unavoidably detained elsewhere. He had arranged for the ark’s robot janitors to prepare this breakfast just before my stasis interval was due to expire; he trusted it was to my taste, insofar as he had been able to judge it. At the time he had issued the instructions, he wrote, my emergence still lay many centuries in the future - but he had been confident that the janitors would execute their orders with due scrupulousness, as he had requested.
‘I cannot be certain that I will still be alive when you read this,’ Hesperus had written. ‘If I am, then you will find me on the bridge of Silver Wings, doing what I may. I should very much like to see you, but circumstances dictate that you must come to me, not the other way around. Before you do, I would urge you to examine the ark’s cargo hold - I believe you will find the contents illuminating. Before you leave the ark itself, you must make an assessment of the present da
ngers. If all is well, you will see an abundance of golden threads leading out of the cargo bay. If you follow them, they will bring you to me. If there are white threads only, it will not be safe for you. If there are golden and white threads, you would be advised to exercise caution. Use the whiskways only if you have no other choice.’ Almost as an afterthought, he had added, ‘I have had the maker prepare a spacesuit suitable for your needs. I trust you will find it satisfactory, and I look forward to renewing our acquaintance. I remain your friend, Hesperus.’
‘Thank you,’ I said quietly.
I finished my breakfast. Then I emptied my bladder, bathed and had a maker prepare me a change of clothes. Only then did I start looking around the ark for the other messages he might have left.
It was not long before I encountered one of the threads. I was walking down a corridor, trying to find the spacesuit, when I came across an obstruction that had not been there before. A fist-thick cable punched its way from one wall to the other, at chest height. It was white and as smooth as an icicle, but the way the wall material had splintered around the intrusion made me doubtful that it was part of the ark’s own systems. Not long afterwards I found another white branch, this time running across the floor and forking in two directions. One fork plunged into the floor; the other curved up the wall and went through the ceiling.
I walked on, a feeling of dread churning in my stomach. In the next large room I found a cross-knitted tangle of white and gold cables, rupturing through various surfaces, stretching through the air in different directions like the strands of a monstrous cobweb. I had to pick and fight my way through the tangle. The cables were stiff and hard. Some of the white ones were wrapped around the gold, and vice versa - it was like vines trying to strangle a larger trunk. Although everything was still, I had the sense that this was a frozen moment in a titanic struggle.
It was the same everywhere I went. In some parts of the ark the white cables dominated; in others the gold. In various critical areas the white and gold cables were competing for control. Here and there I found a cable that came to an abrupt, severed end. I kept thinking of Cadence, pushing tendrils from her wounds, trying to connect with any useful system aboard the ark so that she could work mischief. I was seeing the evidence of something similar, but on a much larger scale.
I remembered Hesperus’s recommendation that I visit the ark’s cargo bay. I would not have considered going there at all if he hadn’t suggested it, my memory insisting that it was as empty as the rest of the ancient liner. But now that he had planted the thought in my mind, I felt a dark compulsion guiding me onwards, as if I was sleepwalking towards a destination known only to my subconscious mind. The going became increasingly difficult - the density of white and gold cables doubling and redoubling until it was all I could do to squeeze through the narrow interstices. There were parts of the ark that they had left well alone, and parts that they were still fighting for. The cargo hold was clearly of paramount importance.
Eventually the obstructions thinned out - it was as if I had passed into the eye of the storm - and I found a window offering a view through a thick wall into what should have been the unlit space of the hold. The hold was not unlit today, but the light coming through that window was not as steady as I would have expected. It was flickering, tinged with blue and violet. I looked into the hold, squinting against the brightness. The ark’s hold was not empty at all. Suspended in the middle, occupying most of its length, was a machine that was both instantly recognisable and deeply unfamiliar to me. It was a series of eight brass-coloured spheres, joined together as if on a spit. The spheres, each of which was easily a hundred metres across, were as reflective as mirrors and entirely featureless.
I was looking at the single-use opener. It was floating against the ark’s interior gravity, suspended by its own levators. It was also generating an impasse - eight spherical bubbles merging into a kind of crimped sausage shape. I could trace the quivering surface of the impasse by the energies flickering across it, forming transient spectral patterns like oil on water. Weapons were arranged around the opener, directing their fire against the impasse. They were a larger version of the energy-pistol that the maker had created for me, floating in the air, each weapon trailing a gold cable back into the gold nervous system that Hesperus had cobwebbed around the inside of the bay.
I realised then that I must always have known that the opener was in the ark. When I chose this ship as our place of refuge, my subconscious had been directing me, knowing that the robots would be wary of attacking the ark if they suspected the opener was inside it. And if I had known of the opener, then I had also known of the stardam it was made for. On that level, I must also have known of my complicity in the extinction of the First Machines, long before I needed it spelled out.
I left the opener and navigated back through the ark until I reached a gold-threaded area where Hesperus had established clear control. It was there that I found the spacesuit, waiting by a high-capacity maker. Hesperus had done well - the suit was an exact fit, and although it was a very long time since I had worn one, the memories came back soon enough.
‘Hello, Purslane,’ the helmet said as it lit up with status icons. ‘I would have spoken to you sooner but I could not find an easy route into your skull. I was hoping you would find the suit eventually.’
I smiled. For all my fears, for all that I did not know if I would ever see Campion or the other shatterlings again, it was still good to hear his voice. ‘You’re all right.’
‘And so are you, I trust.’ There was something evasive about his answer, I thought. ‘I am sorry to have kept you in abeyance for so long, but I believed it was in your best interests. There really was no sense in you remaining conscious for the entire voyage, even if that could have been arranged. After Galingale’s attack ...’
He was talking about something that had happened thousands of years ago. To me it was yesterday’s news.
‘What happened?’
‘He was unsuccessful.’
‘In killing me, or in slowing Silver Wings?’
‘Neither objective was achieved. Galingale met greater resistance than he had anticipated. His ship was damaged - it fell back towards the other vehicles. There was an altercation, during which unpleasantness Betony’s ship was destroyed. I learned this from Campion during our subsequent conversations.’
‘You’ve been in touch with Campion?’
‘Not recently, but I have every confidence that he is still alive. His ship, Dalliance, has been following us ever since.’
‘And the others?’
‘They’ve all gone now, Purslane. Dalliance is the last one left. But Campion is alive - I am sure of it. He must be in abeyance, awaiting news of a change in our status. Very shortly he will have it.’
‘Where are we?’
‘Approaching the stardam. We have travelled sixty-two thousand years from Neume.’
It was the longest crossing I had ever made, in all the circuits since I had left the Golden Hour for the first time. Although I had been half-expecting this news, it still triggered a demoralising psychic vertigo. Human beings were not meant for this kind of thing - we had evolved to grub around within a few kilometres of the same village, in the same time zone, under the same fixed stars.
‘You mentioned that it might not be safe for me to come to see you,’ I said.
‘I think you may. Take care, but do not be unduly concerned. The whiskways are safe now. I have secured them in readiness. Come up to the bridge - there is much to discuss.’
I left the ark, not without trepidation. Stepping outside for the first time since Cadence and Hesperus had fought each other, I kept expecting to find one of her severed limbs inching across the floor, dragging itself along by a fine silver thread. But that incident lay thousands of years in the past as far as the ship was concerned.
All around me, the bay appeared superficially unchanged - the same looming vastness, ceiling and walls kilometres distant, a volume larg
e enough to swallow the white ark, with its own huge cargo, and make it look tiny. But a second glance told me that nothing was as I had left it. Every visible ship in the bay was covered in a gristle of white and gold strands, braided together in thick, fibrous mats. The outlines of the ships were rounded, indistinct, like mansions overrun by foliage. The cables had encroached on every surface, obscuring their true form. Even the white ark itself was now almost unrecognisable. A forest of cables enveloped the old ship, gold and white, branching and rebranching in dismaying complexity, punching through her barely visible hull in hundreds of places. The door where I emerged was one of the few clear spots; it was encircled by a thick moat of gold cables, keeping the white at bay, and the gold cables extended away from the ark to form a kind of braided tunnel, a passage through the forest floor.
‘You’ve been busy,’ I said.
‘It passed the time.’
I walked out into the cargo bay, to the nearest whisking point. This part of the ship looked more or less as I remembered it - there was the occasional gold cable, but other than that the walls and surfaces were unchanged. The go-board hovered in readiness. I punched for up-ship, whisked there in an eyeblink, walked from one side of the concourse to the other across the bridge with its kilometres-long central trunk shaft rising and falling above and below. The anvil-shaped machines, normally moving up and down the shaft, were still, bound in vast cobwebs of gold and white.
I punched another go-board and reached the bridge.
‘I’ve provided atmosphere,’ Hesperus said. ‘It’s safe to remove your helmet.’
Until that moment I had not known for sure that he was still alive; that the voice I had been hearing was not an impersonation performed by Cascade.
But Hesperus was still alive - in a manner of speaking. There were two robots on the bridge, situated more or less opposite one another. Cascade was to my left, his head and torso attached to one wall. Hesperus was on the other side, positioned in a similar fashion. Both robots had lost all their limbs - or, more accurately, had grown so many extensions from their bodies that their limbs had been transformed beyond recognition and duplicated many times over. Cascade was a many-limbed starfish with a humanoid torso and head at his epicentre; Hesperus was a gold star radiating out in all the directions of the compass. The limbs had the thickness of arm or leg joints where they erupted from all over their bodies, and then tapered down to the diameters of the cables I had already seen. They reached away from the two robots, tangling together where they made contact, forming a dense, labyrinthine quilt of white and gold filaments. I tried to follow a single cable, but it was futile - the pattern was too complicated. But I was certain that most, if not all, of the cables eventually found their way out of this room. This was the nerve centre. From here, the two robots had extended their bodies to encompass every vital system of Silver Wings and her cargo. They must have consumed and converted thousands, even millions of tonnes’ worth of matter - digesting the ship’s own fabric, remaking it for their own ends.
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