Forqueray happened to be standing in the way.
The javelin passed through him as if he were made of smoke; its progress was unimpeded by his presence. But it dragged behind it a comet-tail of gore, exploding out of his suit where he had been speared, just below the elbow. The pressure in the room was still considerably less than atmospheric.
Forqueray’s suit reacted with impressive speed, but it was still sluggish compared to the javelin.
It assessed the damage that had been inflicted on the arm, aware of how quickly its self-repair systems could work to seal that inch-wide hole, and came to a rapid conclusion. The integrity could be restored, but not before unacceptable blood and pressure loss. Since its duty was always to keep its wearer alive, no matter what the costs, it opted to sever the arm above the wound; hyper-sharp irised blades snicked through flesh and bone in an instant.
All that took place long before any pain signals had a chance to reach his brain. The first thing Forqueray knew of his misfortune was when his arm clanged to his feet.
‘I think—’ he started saying. Hirz dashed over to the Ultra and did her best to support him.
Forqueray’s truncated arm ended in a smooth silver iris.
‘Don’t talk,’ Childe said.
Forqueray, who was still standing, looked at his injury with something close to fascination. ‘I—’
‘I said don’t talk.’ Childe knelt down and picked up the amputated arm, showing the evidence to Forqueray. The hole went right through it, as cleanly bored as a rifle barrel.
‘I’ll live,’ Forqueray managed.
‘Yes, you will,’ Trintignant said. ‘And you may also count yourself fortunate. Had the projectile pierced your body, rather than one of its extremities, I do not believe we would be having this conversation.’
‘You call this fortunate?’
‘A wound such as yours can be made good with only trivial intervention. We have all the equipment we need aboard the shuttle.’
Hirz looked around uneasily. ‘You think the punishment’s over?’
‘I think we’d know if it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘That was our first mistake, after all. We can expect things to be a little worse in future, of course.’
‘Then we’d better not make any more screw-ups, had we?’ Hirz was directing her words at Celestine.
I had expected an angry rebuttal. Celestine would have been perfectly correct to remind Hirz that - had the rest of us been forced to make that choice - our chances of hitting the correct answer would have been a miserable one in six.
But instead Celestine just spoke with the flat, soporific tones of one who could not quite believe she had made such an error.
‘I’m sorry . . . I must have . . .’
‘Made the wrong decision. Yes.’ I nodded. ‘And there’ll undoubtedly be others. You did your best, Celestine - better than any of us could have managed.’
‘It wasn’t good enough.’
‘No, but you narrowed the field down to two possibilities. That’s a lot better than six.’
‘He’s right,’ Childe said. ‘Celestine, don’t cut yourself up about this. Without you we wouldn’t have got as far as we did. Now go ahead and press the other answer - the one you settled on originally - and we’ll get Forqueray back to base camp.’
The Ultra glared at him. ‘I’m fine, Childe. I can continue.’
‘Maybe you can, but it’s still time for a temporary retreat. We’ll get that arm looked at properly, and then we’ll come back with lightweight suits. We can’t carry on much further with these, anyway - and I don’t particularly fancy continuing with no armour at all.’
Celestine turned back to the frame. ‘I can’t promise that this is the right one, either.’
‘We’ll take that chance. Just hit them in sequence - best choice first - until the Spire opens a route back to the start.’
She pressed the symbol that had been her first choice, before she had analysed the problem more deeply and seen a phantom trap.
As always, Blood Spire did not oblige us with an instant judgement on the choice we had made. There was a moment when all of us tensed, expecting the javelins to come again . . . but this time we were spared further punishment.
The door opened, exposing the next chamber.
We did not step through, of course. Instead, we turned around and made our way back through the succession of rooms we had already traversed, descending all the while, almost laughing at the childish simplicity of the very earliest puzzles compared to those we had faced before the attack.
As the doors opened and closed in sequence, the air thinned out and the skin of Blood Spire became colder; less like a living thing, more like an ancient, brooding machine. But still that distant, throbbing respiratory vibration rattled the floors, lower now, and slower: the Spire letting us know it was aware of our presence and, perhaps, the tiniest bit disappointed at this turning back.
‘All right, you bastard,’ Childe said. ‘We’re retreating, but only for now. We’re coming back, understand?’
‘You don’t have to take it personally,’ I said.
‘Oh, but I do,’ Childe said. ‘I take it very personally indeed.’
We reached the first chamber, and then dropped down through what had been the entrance hole. After that, it was just a short flight back to the waiting shuttle.
It was dark outside.
We had been in the Spire for more than nineteen hours.
FOUR
‘It’ll do,’ Forqueray said, tilting his new arm this way and that.
‘Do?’ Trintignant sounded mortally wounded. ‘My dear fellow, it is a work of exquisite craftsmanship; a thing of beauty. It is unlikely that you will see its like again, unless of course I am called upon to perform a similar procedure.’
We were sitting inside the shuttle, still parked on Golgotha’s surface. The ship was a squat, aerodynamically blunt cylinder which had landed tail-down and then expanded a cluster of eight bubbletents around itself: six for our personal quarters during the expedition, one commons area, and a general medical bay equipped with all the equipment Trintigant needed to do his work. Surprisingly - to me, at least, who admitted to some unfamiliarity with these things - the shuttle’s fabricators had been more than able to come up with the various cybernetic components that the Doctor required, and the surgical tools at his disposal - glistening, semi-sentient things which moved to his will almost before they were summoned - were clearly state-of-the-art by any reasonable measure.
‘Yes, well, I’d have rather you’d reattached my old arm,’ Forqueray said, opening and closing the sleek metal gauntlet of his replacement.
‘It would have been almost insultingly trivial to do that,’ Trintignant said. ‘A new hand could have been cultured and regrafted in a few hours. If that did not appeal to you, I could have programmed your stump to regenerate a hand of its own accord; a perfectly simple matter of stem-cell manipulation. But what would have been the point? You would be very likely to lose it as soon as we suffer our next punishment. Now you will only be losing machinery - a far less traumatic prospect.’
‘You’re enjoying this,’ Hirz said, ‘aren’t you?’
‘It would be churlish to deny it,’ Trintignant said. ‘When you have been deprived of willing subjects as long as I have, it’s only natural to take pleasure in those little opportunities for practice that fate sees fit to present.’
Hirz nodded knowingly. She had not heard of Trintignant upon our first meeting, I recalled, but she had lost no time in forming her subsequent opinion of the man. ‘Except you won’t just stop with a hand, will you? I checked up on you, Doc - after that meeting in Childe’s house. I hacked into some of the medical records that the Stoner authorities still haven’t declassified, because they’re just too damned disturbing. You really went the whole hog, didn’t you? Some of the things I saw in those files - your victims - they stopped me from sleeping.’
And yet still she had chosen to come with us, I thought. Evidently the allu
re of Childe’s promised reward outweighed any reservations she might have had about sharing a room with Trintignant. But I wondered about those medical records. Certainly, the publicly released data had contained more than enough atrocities for the average nightmare. It chilled the blood to think that Trintignant’s most heinous crimes had never been fully revealed.
‘Is it true?’ I said. ‘Were there really worse things?’
‘That depends,’ Trintignant said. ‘There were subjects upon whom I pushed my experimental techniques further than is generally realised, if that is what you mean. But did I ever approach what I considered were the true limits? No. I was always hindered.’
‘Until, perhaps, now,’ I said.
The rigid silver mask swivelled to face us all in turn. ‘That is as maybe. But please give the following matter some consideration. I can surgically remove all your limbs now, cleanly, with the minimum of complications. The detached members could be put into cryogenic storage, replaced by prosthetic systems until we have completed the task that lies ahead of us.’
‘Thanks . . .’ I said, looking around at the others. ‘But I think we’ll pass on that one, Doctor.’
Trintigant offered his palms magnanimously. ‘I am at your disposal, should you wish to reconsider.’
We spent a full day in the shuttle before returning to the Spire. I had been mortally tired, but when I finally slept, it was only to submerge myself in yet more labyrinthine dreams, much like those Childe had pumped into our heads during the reefersleep transition. I woke feeling angry and cheated, and resolved to confront him about it.
But something else snagged my attention.
There was something wrong with my wrist. Buried just beneath the skin was a hard rectangle, showing darkly through my flesh. Turning my wrist this way and that, I admired the object, acutely - and strangely - conscious of its rectilinearity. I looked around me, and felt the same visceral awareness of the other shapes which formed my surroundings. I did not know whether I was more disturbed at the presence of the alien object under my flesh, or my unnatural reaction to it.
I stumbled groggily into the common quarters of the shuttle, presenting my wrist to Childe, who was sitting there with Celestine.
She looked at me before Childe had a chance to answer. ‘So you’ve got one too,’ she said, showing me the similar shape lurking just below her own skin. The shape rhymed - there was no other word for it - with the surrounding panels and extrusions of the commons. ‘Um, Richard?’ she added.
‘I’m feeling a little strange.’
‘Blame Childe. He put them there. Didn’t you, you lying rat?’
‘It’s easily removed,’ he said, all innocence. ‘It just seemed more prudent to implant the devices while you were all asleep anyway, so as not to waste any more time than necessary.’
‘It’s not just the thing in my wrist,’ I said, ‘whatever it is.’
‘It’s something to keep us awake,’ Celestine said, her anger just barely under control. Feeling less myself than ever, I watched the way her face changed shape as she spoke, conscious of the armature of muscle and bone lying just beneath the skin.
‘Awake?’ I managed.
‘A . . . shunt, of some kind,’ she said. ‘Ultras use them, I gather. It sucks fatigue poisons out of the blood, and puts other chemicals back into the blood to upset the brain’s normal sleeping cycle. With one of these you can stay conscious for weeks, with almost no psychological problems.’
I forced a smile, ignoring the sense of wrongness I felt. ‘It’s the almost part that worries me.’
‘Me too.’ She glared at Childe. ‘But much as I hate the little rat for doing this without my permission, I admit to seeing the sense in it.’
I felt the bump in my wrist again. ‘Trintignant’s work, I presume? ’
‘Count yourself lucky he didn’t hack your arms and legs off while he was at it.’
Childe interrupted her. ‘I told him to install the shunts. We can still catnap, if we have the chance. But these devices will let us stay alert when we need alertness. They’re really no more sinister than that.’
‘There’s something else . . .’ I said tentatively. I glanced at Celestine, trying to judge if she felt as oddly as I did. ‘Since I’ve been awake, I’ve . . . experienced things differently. I keep seeing shapes in a new light. What exactly have you done to me, Childe?’
‘Again, nothing irreversible. Just a small medichine infusion—’
I tried to keep my temper. ‘What sort of medichines?’
‘Neural modifiers.’ He raised a hand defensively, and I saw the same rectangular bulge under his skin. ‘Your brain is already swarming with Demarchist implants and cellular machines, Richard, so why pretend that what I’ve done is anything more than a continuation of what was already there?’
‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ said Hirz, who had been standing at the door to the commons for the last few seconds. ‘Is it to do with the weird shit I’ve been dealing with since waking up?’
‘Very probably,’ I said, relieved that at least I was not going insane. ‘Let me guess - heightened mathematical and spatial awareness?’
‘If that’s what you call it, yeah. Seeing shapes everywhere, and thinking of them fitting together . . .’
Hirz turned to look at Childe. Small as she was, she looked easily capable of inflicting injury. ‘Start talking, dickhead.’
Childe spoke with quiet calm. ‘I put modifiers in your brain, via the wrist shunt. The modifiers haven’t performed any radical neural restructuring, but they are suppressing and enhancing certain regions of brain function. The effect - crudely speaking - is to enhance your spatial abilities, at the expense of some less essential functions. What you are getting is a glimpse into the cognitive realms that Celestine inhabits as a matter of routine.’ Celestine opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off with a raised palm. ‘No more than a glimpse, no, but I think you’ll agree that - given the kinds of challenges the Spire likes to throw at us - the modifiers will give us an edge that we lacked previously.’
‘You mean you’ve turned us all into maths geniuses, overnight?’
‘Broadly speaking, yes.’
‘Well, that’ll come in handy,’ Hirz said.
‘It will?’
‘Yeah. When you try and fit the pieces of your dick back together.’
She lunged for him.
‘Hirz, I . . .’
‘Stop,’ I said, interceding. ‘Childe was wrong to do this without our consent, but - given the situation we find ourselves in - the idea makes sense.’
‘Whose side are you on?’ Hirz said, backing away with a look of righteous fury in her eyes.
‘Nobody’s,’ I said. ‘I just want to do whatever it takes to beat the Spire.’
Hirz glared at Childe. ‘All right. This time. But you try another stunt like that, and . . .’
But even then it was obvious that Hirz had come to the conclusion that I had already arrived at myself: that, given what the Spire was likely to test us with, it was better to accept these machines than ask for them to be flushed out of our systems.
There was just one troubling thought which I could not quite dismiss.
Would I have welcomed the machines so willingly before they had invaded my head, or were they partly influencing my decision?
I had no idea.
But I decided to worry about that later.
FIVE
‘Three hours,’ Childe said triumphantly. ‘Took us nineteen to reach this point on our last trip through. That has to mean something, doesn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ Hirz said snidely. ‘It means it’s a piece of piss when you know the answers.’
We were standing by the door where Celestine had made her mistake the last time. She had just pressed the correct topological symbol and the door had opened to admit us to the chamber beyond, one we had not so far stepped into. From now on we would be facing fresh challenges again, rather than passing through those
we had already faced. The Spire, it appeared, was more interested in probing the limits of our understanding than getting us simply to solve permutations of the same basic challenge.
It wanted to break us, not stress us.
More and more I was thinking of it as a sentient thing: inquisitive and patient and - when the mood took it - immensely capable of cruelty.
‘What’s in there?’ Forqueray said.
Hirz had gone ahead into the unexplored room.
‘Well, fuck me if it isn’t another puzzle.’
‘Describe it, would you?’
‘Weird shape shit, I think.’ She was quiet for a few seconds. ‘Yeah. Shapes in four dimensions again. Celestine - you wanna take a look at this? I think it’s right up your street.’
‘Any idea what the nature of the task is?’ Celestine asked.
‘Fuck, I don’t know. Something to do with stretching, I think . . .’
‘Topological deformations,’ Celestine murmured before joining Hirz in the chamber.
For a minute or so the two of them conferred, studying the marked doorframe like a pair of discerning art critics.
On the last run through, Hirz and Celestine had shared almost no common ground: it was unnerving to see how much Hirz now grasped. The machines Childe had pumped into our skulls had improved the mathematical skills of all of us - with the possible exception of Trintignant, who I suspected had not received the therapy - but the effects had differed in nuance, degree and stability. My mathematical brilliance came in feverish, unpredictable waves, like inspiration to a laudanum-addicted poet. Forqueray had gained an astonishing fluency in arithmetic, able to count huge numbers of things simply by looking at them for a moment.
But Hirz’s change had been the most dramatic of all, something even Childe was taken aback by. On the second pass through the Spire she had been intuiting the answers to many of the problems at a glance, and I was certain that she was not always remembering what the correct answer had been. Now, as we encountered the tasks that had challenged even Celestine, Hirz was still able to perceive the essence of a problem, even if it was beyond her to articulate the details in the formal language of mathematics.
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