‘Meant to inspire confidence, is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s an old family heirloom,’ Childe said, swinging open a black door in the side of the carriage. ‘My uncle Giles made automata. Unfortunately — for reasons we’ll come to — he was a bit of a miserable bastard. But don’t let it put you off.’
He helped us aboard, then climbed inside himself, sealed the door and knocked on the roof. I heard the mechanical horses snort; alloy hooves hammered the ground impatiently. Then we were moving, curving around and ascending the gentle arc of the bridge of bone.
‘Have you been here during the entire period of your absence, Mister Childe?’ Trintignant asked.
He nodded. ‘Ever since that family business came up, I’ve allowed myself the occasional visit back to the city — just like I did today — but I’ve tried to keep such excursions to a minimum.’
‘Didn’t you have horns the last time we met?’ I said.
He rubbed the smooth skin of his scalp where the horns had been. ‘Had to have them removed. I couldn’t very well disguise myself otherwise.’
We crossed the bridge and navigated a path between the tall trees which sheltered the island’s structure. Childe’s carriage pulled up to a smart stop in front of the building and I was afforded my first unobstructed view of our destination. It was not one to induce great cheer. The house’s architecture was haphazard: whatever basic symmetry it might once have had was lost under a profusion of additions and modifications. The roof was a jumbled collision of angles and spires, jutting turrets and sinister oubliettes. Not all of the embellishments had been arranged at strict right angles to their neighbours, and the style and apparent age of the house varied jarringly from place to place. Since our arrival in the cave the overhead lights had dimmed, simulating the onset of dusk, but only a few windows were illuminated, clustered together in the left-hand wing. The rest of the house had a forbidding aspect, the paleness of its stone, the irregularity of its construction and the darkness of its many windows suggesting a pile of skulls.
Almost before we had disembarked from the carriage, a reception party emerged from the house. It was a troupe of servitors — humanoid household robots, of the kind anyone would have felt comfortable with in the city proper — but they had been reworked to resemble skeletal ghouls or headless knights. Their mechanisms had been sabotaged so that they limped and creaked, and they had all had their voiceboxes disabled.
‘Had a lot of time on his hands, your uncle,’ I said.
‘You’d have loved Giles, Richard. He was a scream.’
‘I’ll take your word for it, I think.’
The servitors escorted us into the central part of the house, then took us through a maze of chill, dark corridors.
Finally we reached a large room walled in plush red velvet. A holoclavier sat in one corner, with a book of sheet music spread open above the projected keyboard. There was a malachite escritoire, a number of well-stocked bookcases, a single chandelier, three smaller candelabra and two fireplaces of distinctly Gothic appearance, in one of which roared an actual fire. But the room’s central feature was a mahogany table, around which three additional guests were gathered.
‘Sorry to keep everyone waiting,’ Childe said, closing a pair of sturdy wooden doors behind us. ‘Now. Introductions.’
The others looked at us with no more than mild interest.
The only man amongst them wore an elaborately ornamented exoskeleton: a baroque support structure of struts, hinged plates, cables and servo-mechanisms. His face was a skull papered with deathly white skin, shading to black under his bladelike cheekbones. His eyes were concealed behind goggles, his hair a spray of stiff black dreadlocks.
Periodically he inhaled from a glass pipe, connected to a miniature refinery of bubbling apparatus placed before him on the table.
‘Allow me to introduce Captain Forqueray,’ Childe said. ‘Captain — this is Richard Swift and… um, Doctor Trintignant.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, leaning across the table to shake Forqueray’s hand. His grip felt like the cold clasp of a squid.
‘The Captain is an Ultra; the master of the lighthugger Apollyon, currently in orbit around Yellowstone,’ Childe added.
Trintignant refrained from approaching him.
‘Shy, Doctor?’ Forqueray said, his voice simultaneously deep and flawed, like a cracked bell.
‘No, merely cautious. It is a matter of common knowledge that I have enemies amongst the Ultras.’
Trintignant removed his homburg and patted his crown delicately, as if smoothing down errant hairs. Silver waves had been sculpted into his head-mask, so that he resembled a bewigged Regency fop dipped in mercury.
‘You’ve enemies everywhere,’ said Forqueray between gurgling inhalations. ‘But I bear you no personal animosity for your atrocities, and I guarantee that my crew will extend you the same courtesy.’
‘Very gracious of you,’ Trintignant said, before shaking the Ultra’s hand for the minimum time compatible with politeness. ‘But why should your crew concern me?’
‘Never mind that.’ It was one of the two women speaking now. ‘Who is this guy, and why does everyone hate him?’
‘Allow me to introduce Hirz,’ Childe said, indicating the woman who had spoken. She was small enough to have been a child, except that her face was clearly that of an adult woman. She was dressed in austere, tight-fitting black clothes which only emphasised her diminutive build. ‘Hirz is — for want of a better word — a mercenary.’
‘Except I prefer to think of myself as an information retrieval specialist. I specialise in clandestine infiltration for high-level corporate clients in the Glitter Band — physical espionage, some of the time. Mostly, though, I’m what used to be called a hacker. I’m also pretty damned good at my job.’ Hirz paused to swig down some wine. ‘But enough about me. Who’s the silver dude, and what did Forqueray mean about atrocities?’
‘You’re seriously telling me you’re unaware of Trintignant’s reputation?’ I said.
‘Hey, listen. I get myself frozen between assignments. That means I miss a lot of shit that goes down in Chasm City. Get over it.’
I shrugged and — with one eye on the Doctor himself — told Hirz what I knew about Trintignant. I sketched in his early career as an experimental cyberneticist, how his reputation for fearless innovation had eventually brought him to Calvin Sylveste’s attention.
Calvin had recruited Trintignant to his own research team, but the collaboration had not been a happy one. Trintignant’s desire to find the ultimate fusion of flesh and machine had become obsessive; even — some said — perverse. After a scandal involving experimentation on unconsenting subjects, Trintignant had been forced to pursue his work alone, his methods too extreme even for Calvin.
So Trintignant had gone to ground, and continued his gruesome experiments with his only remaining subject.
Himself.
‘So let’s see,’ said the final guest. ‘Who have we got? An obsessive and thwarted cyberneticist with a taste for extreme modification. An intrusion specialist with a talent for breaking into highly protected — and dangerous — environments. A man with a starship at his disposal and the crew to operate it.’
Then she looked at Childe, and while her gaze was averted I admired the fine, faintly familiar profile of her face. Her long hair was the sheer black of interstellar space, pinned back from her face by a jewelled clasp which flickered with a constellation of embedded pastel lights. Who was she? I felt sure we had met once or maybe twice before. Perhaps we had passed each other amongst the shrines in the Monument to the Eighty, visiting the dead.
‘And Childe,’ she continued. ‘A man once known for his love of intricate challenges, but long assumed dead.’ Then she turned her piercing eyes upon me. ‘And, finally, you.’
‘I know you, I think—’ I said, her name on the tip of my tongue.
‘Of course you do.’ Her look, suddenly, was contemptuous. ‘I’m Celesti
ne. You used to be married to me.’
All along, Childe had known she was here.
‘Do you mind if I ask what this is about?’ I said, doing my best to sound as reasonable as possible, rather than someone on the verge of losing their temper in polite company.
Celestine withdrew her hand once I had shaken it. ‘Roland invited me here, Richard. Just the same way he did you, with the same veiled hints about having found something.’
‘But you’re…’
‘Your ex-wife?’ She nodded. ‘Exactly how much do you remember, Richard? I heard the strangest rumours, you know. That you’d had me deleted from your long-term memory.’
‘I had you suppressed, not deleted. There’s a subtle distinction.’
She nodded knowingly. ‘So I gather.’
I looked at the other guests, who were observing us. Even Forqueray was waiting, the pipe of his apparatus poised an inch from his mouth in expectation. They were waiting for me to say something; anything.
‘Why exactly are you here, Celestine?’
‘You don’t remember, do you?’
‘Remember what?’
‘What it was I used to do, Richard, when we were married.’
‘I confess I don’t, no.’
Childe coughed. ‘Your wife, Richard, was as fascinated by the alien as you were. She was one of the city’s foremost specialists on the Pattern Jugglers, although she’d be entirely too modest to admit it herself.’ He paused, apparently seeking Celestine’s permission to continue. ‘She visited them, long before you met, spending several years of her life at the study station on Spindrift. You swam with the Jugglers, didn’t you, Celestine?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘And allowed them to reshape your mind, transforming its neural pathways into something deeply — albeit usually temporarily — alien.’
‘It wasn’t that big a deal,’ Celestine said.
‘Not if you’d been fortunate enough to have it happen to you, no. But for someone like Richard — who craved knowledge of the alien with every fibre of his existence — it would have been anything but mundane.’ He turned to me. ‘Isn’t that true?’
‘I admit I’d have done a great deal to experience communion with the Jugglers,’ I said, knowing that it was pointless to deny it. ‘But it just wasn’t possible. My family lacked the resources to send me to one of the Juggler worlds, and the bodies that might ordinarily have funded that kind of trip — the Sylveste Institute, for instance — had turned their attentions elsewhere.’
‘In which case Celestine was deeply fortunate, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I don’t think anyone would deny that,’ I said. ‘To speculate about the shape of alien consciousness is one thing; but to drink it; to bathe in the full flood of it — to know it intimately, like a lover…’ I trailed off for a moment. ‘Wait a minute. Shouldn’t you be on Resurgam, Celestine? There isn’t time for the expedition to have gone there and come back.’
She eyed me with raptorial intent before answering, ‘I never went.’
Childe leaned over and refreshed my glass. ‘She was turned down at the last minute, Richard. Sylveste had a grudge against anyone who’d visited the Jugglers; he suddenly decided they were all unstable and couldn’t be trusted.’
I looked at Celestine wonderingly. ‘Then all this time… ?’
‘I’ve been here, in Chasm City. Oh, don’t look so crushed, Richard. By the time I learned I’d been turned down, you’d already decided to flush me out of your past. It was better for both of us this way.’
‘But the deception…’
Childe put one hand on my shoulder, calmingly. ‘There wasn’t any. She just didn’t make contact again. No lies; no deception; nothing to hold a grudge about.’
I looked at him, angrily. ‘Then why the hell is she here?’ ‘Because I happen to have use for someone with the skills that the Jugglers gave to Celestine.’
‘Which included?’ I said.
‘Extreme mathematical prowess.’
‘And why would that have been useful?’
Childe turned to the Ultra, indicating that the man should remove his bubbling apparatus.
‘I’m about to show you.’
The table housed an antique holo-projection system. Childe handed out viewers which resembled lorgnette binoculars, and, like so many myopic opera buffs, we studied the apparitions which floated into existence above the polished mahogany surface.
Stars: incalculable numbers of them — hard white and blood-red gems, strewn in lacy patterns against deep velvet blue.
Childe narrated:
‘The better part of two and a half centuries ago, my uncle Giles — whose somewhat pessimistic handiwork you have already seen — made a momentous decision. He embarked on what we in the family referred to as the Program, and then only in terms of extreme secrecy.’
Childe told us that the Program was an attempt at covert deep space exploration.
Giles had conceived the work, funding it directly from the family’s finances. He had done this with such ingenuity that the apparent wealth of House Childe had never faltered, even as the Program entered its most expensive phase. Only a few select members of the Childe dynasty had even known of the Program’s existence, and that number had dwindled as time passed.
The bulk of the money had been paid to the Ultras, who had already emerged as a powerful faction by that time.
They had built the autonomous robot space probes according to this uncle’s desires, and then launched them towards a variety of target systems. The Ultras could have delivered his probes to any system within range of their lighthugger ships, but the whole point of the exercise was to restrict the knowledge of any possible discoveries to the family alone. So the envoys crossed space by themselves, at only a fraction of the speed of light, and the targets they were sent to were all poorly explored systems on the ragged edge of human space.
The probes decelerated by use of solar sails, picked the most interesting worlds to explore, and then fell into orbit around them.
Robots were sent down, equipped to survive on the surface for many decades.
Childe waved his hand across the table. Lines radiated out from one of the redder suns in the display, which I assumed was Yellowstone’s star. The lines reached out towards other stars, forming a three-dimensional scarlet dandelion several dozen light-years wide.
‘These machines must have been reasonably intelligent,’ Celestine said. ‘Especially by the standards of the time.’
Childe nodded keenly. ‘Oh, they were. Cunning little blighters. Subtle and stealthy and diligent. They had to be, to operate so far from human supervision.’
‘And I presume they found something?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Childe said testily, like a conjurer whose carefully scripted patter was being ruined by a persistent heckler. ‘But not immediately. Giles didn’t expect it to be immediate, of course — the envoys would take decades to reach the closest systems they’d been assigned to, and there’d still be the communicational time-lag to take into consideration. So my uncle resigned himself to forty or fifty years of waiting, and that was erring on the optimistic side.’ He paused and sipped from his wine. ‘Too bloody optimistic, as it happened. Fifty years passed… then sixty… but nothing of any consequence was ever reported back to Yellowstone, at least not in his lifetime. The envoys did, on occasion, find something interesting — but by then other human explorers had usually stumbled on the same find. And as the decades wore on, and the envoys failed to justify their invention, my uncle grew steadily more maudlin and bitter.’
‘I’d never have guessed,’ Celestine said.
‘He died, eventually — bitter and resentful; feeling that the universe had played some sick cosmic trick on him. He could have lived for another fifty or sixty years with the right treatments, but I think by then he knew it would be a waste of time.’
‘You faked your death a century and a half ago,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you tell me it had
something to do with the family business?’
He nodded in my direction. ‘That was when my uncle told me about the Program. I didn’t know anything about it until then — hadn’t heard even the tiniest hint of a rumour. No one in the family had. By then, of course, the project was costing us almost nothing, so there wasn’t even a financial drain to be concealed. ’
‘And since then?’
‘I vowed not to make my uncle’s mistake. I resolved to sleep until the machines sent back a report, and then sleep again if the report turned out to be a false alarm.’
‘Sleep?’ I said.
He clicked his fingers and one entire wall of the room whisked back to reveal a sterile, machine-filled chamber.
I studied its contents.
There was a reefersleep casket of the kind Forqueray and his ilk used aboard their ships, attended by numerous complicated hunks of gleaming green support machinery. By use of such a casket, one might prolong the four hundred-odd years of a normal human lifespan by many centuries, though reefersleep was not without its risks.
‘I spent a century and a half in that contraption,’ he said, ‘waking every fifteen or twenty years whenever a report trickled in from one of the envoys. Waking is the worst part. It feels like you’re made of glass; as if the next movement you make — the next breath you take — will cause you to shatter into a billion pieces. It always passes, and you always forget it an hour later, but it’s never easier the next time.’ He shuddered visibly. ‘In fact, sometimes I think it gets harder each time.’
‘Then your equipment needs servicing,’ Forqueray said dismissively. I suspected it was bluff. Ultras often wore a lock of braided hair for every crossing they had made across interstellar space and survived all the myriad misfortunes which might befall a ship. But that braid also symbolised every occasion on which they had been woken from the dead, at the end of the journey.
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