‘Not if we dig deep enough,’ Merlin said.
‘Forget it. There’s no way we can hide now. Not the way it was planned, anyway. Unless—’
‘Don’t tell me: we’d be perfectly safe if we could store ourselves as patterns in some machine memory?’
‘Don’t sound so nauseated. You can’t argue with the logic. We’d be nearly invulnerable. The storage media could be physically tiny, distributed in many locations. Impossible for the Huskers to find them all.’
‘The Council can decide,’ Sayaca said, raising a hand to shut the two of them up. ‘Let’s see how they take my discovery, first.’
‘It was Pauraque’s discovery,’ Merlin said quietly.
‘Whatever.’
She was already walking away from them, crossing the auditorium’s floor towards the podium where she would address the congregation. Sayaca walked on air, striding across the clouds. It was a trick, of course: the real view outside the station was constantly changing because of the structure’s rotation, but the illusion was flawless.
‘It may have been Pauraque who discovered the storm,’ Gallinule said, ‘but it was Sayaca who interpreted it.’
‘I wasn’t trying to take anything away from her.’
‘Good.’
Now she stepped up to the podium, the hem of her electric-blue gown floating above the clouds. She stood pridefully, surveying the people who had gathered here to hear her speak. Her expression was one of complete calm and self-assurance, but Merlin saw how tightly she grasped the edges of the podium. He sensed that beneath that shell of control she was acutely nervous, knowing that this was the most important moment in her life, the one that would make her reputation amongst the seniors and perhaps shape all of their destinies.
‘Seniors . . .’ Sayaca said. ‘Thank you for coming here. I hope that by the time I’ve finished speaking, you’ll feel that your time wasn’t wasted.’ Then she extended a hand towards the middle of the room and an image of Ghost sprang into being. ‘Ever since we identified this system as our only chance of concealment, we’ve had to ignore the troubling aspects of the place. Bright Boy’s anomalous mass-luminosity relationship, for instance. The seismic discrepancies in Cinder. Pauraque’s deep-atmospheric phenomenon in Ghost. Now the time has come to deal with these puzzles. I’m afraid that what they tell us may not be entirely to our liking.’
Promising start, Merlin thought. She had spoken for more than half a minute without using a single mathematical expression.
Sayaca began to speak again, but she was cut off abruptly by another speaker. ‘Sayaca, there’s something we should discuss first.’ Everyone’s attention moved to the interjector. Merlin recognised him immediately: Weaver. Cruelly handsome, the boy had outgrown his adolescent awkwardness in the years since Merlin had first known him as one of Sayaca’s class.
‘What is it?’ she said, only the tiniest hint of suspicion in her voice.
‘Some news we’ve just obtained.’ Weaver looked around the room, clearly enjoying his moment in the limelight while attempting to maintain the appropriate air of solemnity. ‘We’ve been looking along the Way, as a matter of routine, monitoring the swarm that lies ahead of us. Sometimes off the line of the Way too - just in case we find anything. We’ve also been following the Bluethroat.’
It was so long since anyone had mentioned that name that it took Merlin an instant to place it. Of course, the Bluethroat. The part of the original ship that Crombec had flown onward, while the rest of them piled into Starling and slowed down around Bright Boy. It was not that anyone hated Crombec or wished to excise him and his followers from history, simply that there had been more than enough to focus on in the new system.
‘Go on . . .’ Sayaca said.
‘There was a flash. A tiny burst of energy light-years from here, but in the direction we know Crombec was headed. I think the implications are clear enough. They met Huskers, even in interstellar space.’
‘Force and wisdom,’ said Shikra, the archivist in charge of the Cohort’s most precious data troves. ‘They can’t have survived.’
Merlin raised his voice above the sudden murmur of debate. ‘When did you find this out, Weaver?’
‘A few days ago.’
‘And you waited until now to let us know?’
Weaver shifted uncomfortably, beginning to sweat. ‘There were questions of interpretation. We couldn’t release the news until we were sure of it.’ Then he nodded towards Sayaca. ‘You know what I mean, don’t you?’
‘Believe me, I know exactly what you mean,’ she said, shaking her head. She must have known that the moment was no longer hers; that even if she held the attention of the audience again, their minds would not be fully on what she had to say.
She handled it well, Merlin thought.
But irrespective of what she had found in Ghost, the news was very bad. The deaths of Crombec and his followers could only mean that the immediate volume of space was much thicker with Husker assets than anyone had dared fear. Forget the two swarms they had already known about; there might be dozens more, lurking quietly only one or two light-years from the system. And perhaps they had learned enough from Crombec’s trajectory to guess that there must be other humans nearby. It would not take them long to arrive.
In a handful of years they might be here.
‘This is gravely serious,’ one of the other seniors said, raising her voice above the others. ‘But it must not be allowed to overshadow the news Sayaca has for us.’ She nodded at Sayaca expectantly. ‘Continue, won’t you?’
Months later, Merlin and Gallinule were alone in the Palace, standing on the balcony. Gallinule was toying with a white mouse, letting it run along the balustrade’s narrow top before picking it up and placing it at the start again. They had put Weaver’s spiteful sabotage long behind them, once it became clear that it had barely dented the impact of Sayaca’s announcement. Even the most conservative seniors had accepted the shadow-matter hypothesis, even if the precise nature of what the shadow matter represented was not yet clear.
Which was not to say that Weaver’s own announcement had been ignored, either. The Huskers were no longer a remote threat, decades away from Bright Boy. The fact that they were almost certainly converging on the system brought an air of apocalyptic gloom to the whole hideaway enterprise. They were living in end times, certain that no actions they now took would really make much difference.
It’s been centuries since we made contact with another human faction, another element of the Cohort, Merlin thought. For all we know, there are no more humans anywhere in the galaxy. We are all that remains; the last niche the Huskers haven’t yet sterilised. And in a few years we might all be dead as well.
‘I almost envy Sayaca,’ Gallinule said. ‘She’s completely absorbed in her work in Cinder again. As if nothing else will ever affect her. Don’t you admire that kind of dedication?’
‘She thinks she’ll find something in Cinder that will save us all.’
‘At least she’s still optimistic. Or desperate, depending on your point of view. She sends her regards, incidentally.’
‘Thanks,’ Merlin said, biting his tongue.
Gallinule had just returned from Cinder, his third and longest trip there since Sayaca had left Ghost. Once the shadow-matter hypothesis had been accepted, Sayaca had seen no reason to stay here. Other gifted people could handle this line of enquiry while she returned to her beloved tunnels. Merlin had visited her once, but the reception she had given him had been no more than cordial. He had not gone back.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Gallinule said.
Suspended far out to sea was a representation of what they now knew to be lurking inside Ghost. It was the sharpest view Merlin had seen yet, gleaned by swarms of gravitational-mapping drones swimming through the atmosphere. What the thing looked like, to Merlin’s eye, was a sphere wrapped around with dense, branching circuitry. The closer they looked, the sharper their focus, the more circuitry appeared, on st
eadily smaller scales, down to the current limiting resolution of about ten metres. Anything smaller than that was simply blurred away. But what they saw was enough. They had been right, all those months ago: this was nothing natural. And it was not quite a sphere, either: resolution was good enough now to see a teardrop shape, with the sharp end pointed more or less parallel to the surface of the liquid hydrogen ocean.
‘I think it scares me,’ Merlin said. ‘I think it shows that this is the worst possible place we could ever have picked to hide.’
‘Then we have to accept my solution,’ Gallinule said. ‘Become software. It can be done, you know. In a few months we’ll have the technology to scan ourselves.’ He held up the mouse again. ‘See this little fellow? He was the first. I scanned him a few days ago.’
Merlin stared at the mouse.
‘This is really him,’ Gallinule continued. ‘Not simply a projection of a real mouse into the Palace’s environment, or even a convincing fake. Slice him open and you’d find everything you’d expect. He only exists here now, but his behaviour hasn’t changed at all.’
‘What happened to the real mouse, Gallinule?’
Gallinule shrugged. ‘Died, of course. I’m afraid the scanning procedure’s still fairly destructive.’
‘So the little catch in your plan for our salvation is that we’d have to die to get inside your machine?’
‘If we don’t do it, we die anyway. Not much to debate, is there?’
‘Not if you put it in those terms, no. We could of course experiment with the final syrinx and find a better way to escape, but I suppose that’s too much of an imaginative leap for anyone to make.’
‘Except you, of course.’
They were silent for long moments. Merlin stared out to sea, the Palace’s reality utterly solid to him now. He did not think that it felt any less real to the mouse. This was how it could be for all of them, if Gallinule had his way: inhabiting any environment they liked until the Husker threat was over. They could skip over that time if they wished, or spend it exploring a multitude of simulated worlds. The trouble was, would there be anything to lure them back into the real world when the danger had passed? Would they even bother remembering what had come before? The Palace was already tantalising enough. There had been times when Merlin had found it difficult to leave the place. It was like a door into his youth.
‘Gallinule . . .’ Merlin said. ‘There’s something I always meant to ask you about the Palace. You’ve made it as real as humanly possible. There isn’t a detail out of place. Sometimes it makes me want to cry, it’s so close to what I remember. But there’s something missing. Someone, to be exact. Whenever we were here - back in the real Palace, I mean - then she was always here as well.’
Gallinule stared at him in something like horror. ‘You’re asking me if I ever thought of simulating Mother?’
‘Don’t tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind. I know you could have done it as well.’
‘It would have been a travesty.’
Merlin nodded. ‘I know. But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have thought of it.’
Gallinule shook his head slowly and sadly, as if infinitely disappointed by his brother’s presumption. In the silence that followed, Merlin stared out at the shadow-matter object that hung over the sea. Whatever happened now, he thought, things between him and Gallinule could never be quite the same. It was not simply that he knew Gallinule was lying about their mother. Gallinule would have tried recreating her; anything less would have been an unforgivable lapse in his brother’s devotion to detail. No; what had truly come between them was Sayaca. She and Gallinule were lovers now, Merlin knew, and yet this was something that he had never discussed with his brother. Time had passed and now there seemed no sensible way to broach the subject. It was simply there - unavoidable, like the knowledge that they would probably all die before very long. There was nothing to be done about it, so no point in discussing it. But in the same moment he realised something else, something that had been nagging at the back of his mind since the very earliest maps of the anomaly had been transmitted.
‘Expand the scale,’ he said. ‘Zoom out, massively.’
Gallinule looked at him wordlessly, but obeyed his brother all the same. The anomaly shrank towards invisibility.
‘Now show the anomaly’s position within the system. All planetary positions to be exactly as they are now.’
A vast, luminous orrery filled the sky: concentric circles centred on Bright Boy, with nodal points for the planets.
‘Now extend a vector with its origin in the anomaly, parallel to the anomaly’s long axis. Make it as long as necessary.’
‘What are you thinking?’ Gallinule said, all animosity gone now.
‘That the anomaly was only ever a pointer, directing our attention to the really important thing. Just do it, will you?’
A straight line knifed out from Ghost - the anomaly insignificant at this scale - and cut across the system, towards Bright Boy and the inner worlds.
Knifing straight through Cinder.
PART FIVE
‘I wanted you to be the first to know,’ Sayaca said, her semblance standing regally in his quarters like a playing-card monarch. ‘We’ve found signals coming from inside the planet. Gravitational signals - exactly what we’d expect if someone in the shadow universe was trying to contact us.’
Merlin studied the beautiful lines of her face, reminding himself that all he was speaking to was a cunning approximation of the real Sayaca, who was light-hours of communicational time-lag down-system.
‘How do they do it? Get a signal across, I mean.’
‘There’s only one way: you have to move large masses around quickly, creating a high-frequency ripple in space-time. They’re using black holes, I think: miniature ones, like the thing you first thought we’d found in Ghost. Charged up and oscillated, so that they give off an amplitude-modulated gravitational wave.’
Merlin shrugged. ‘So it wasn’t such a stupid idea to begin with.’
Sayaca smiled tolerantly. ‘We still don’t know how they make and manipulate them. But that doesn’t matter for now. What does is that the message is clearly intended for us. It’s only commenced since we reached into Cinder’s deeper layers. Somehow that action alerted them - whoever they are - to our presence.’
Merlin shivered despite himself. ‘Is there any chance that these signals could be picked up by the Huskers as well?’
‘Every chance, I’d say - unless they stop before they get here. Which is why we’ve been working so hard to decode the signal.’
‘And you have?’
Sayaca nodded. ‘We identified recurrent patterns in the gravitational signal, a block of data that the shadow people were sending over and over again. Within this block of data were two kinds of bits: a strong gravitational pulse and a weaker one, like a one and zero in binary notation. The number of bits in the signal was equal to the product of three primes - definitely not accidental - so we reassembled the data-set along three axes, forming a three-dimensional image.’ Sayaca paused and lifted her palm. What appeared in mid-air was a solid rectangular form, slab-sided and featureless. It rotated lazily, revealing its blankness to the audience.
‘Doesn’t look like much,’ Merlin said.
‘That’s because the outer layer of the solid is all ones. In fact, only a tiny part of its volume is made up of zeroes at all. I’ll remove the ones and display only the zero values . . .’
A touch of showmanship: the surface of the box suddenly seemed to be made out of interlocking birds, frozen in formation for an instant before flying in a million different directions. Suddenly what she was showing him made a lot more sense. It was like a ball of loosely knotted string. A map of Cinder’s crustal tunnels, plunging more deeply towards the core than their own maps even hinted. Five or six hundred kilometres into the lithosphere.
‘But it doesn’t tell us anything we wouldn’t have learned eventually—’ Merlin said.
&
nbsp; ‘No; I think it does.’ Sayaca made the image enlarge, until she was showing him the deep end of one particular tunnel. It was capped by a nearly spherical chamber. ‘All the other shafts end abruptly, even those that branch off from this one at higher levels. But they’ve clearly drawn our attention to this chamber. That has to mean something.’
‘You think there’s something there, don’t you?’
‘We’ll know soon enough. By the time this semblance speaks to you, Gallinule and I will have almost reached that chamber. Wish us the best of luck, won’t you? Whatever we find in there, I’m fairly certain it’ll change things for us.’
Zima Blue and Other Stories Page 22
