It only took three or four minutes to get out of the bulky suits and into the new ones; most of this time was taken up running status checks. For a minute or so, with the exception of Hirz, we had all breathed Spire air.
It was astringent, blood-hot, humid, and smelt faintly of machine oil.
It was a relief when the helmets flooded with the cold, tasteless air of the suits’ backpack recyclers.
‘Hey.’ Hirz, the only one still wearing her original suit, knelt down and touched the floor. ‘Check this out.’
I followed her, pressing the flimsy fabric of my glove against the surface.
The structure’s vibrations rose and fell with increased strength, as if we had excited it by removing our hard protective shells.
‘It’s like the fucking thing’s getting a hard-on,’ Hirz said.
‘Let’s push on,’ Childe said. ‘We’re still armoured — just not as effectively as before — but if we keep being smart, it won’t matter.’
‘Yeah. But it’s the being smart part that worries me. No one smart would come within pissing distance of this fucking place.’
‘What does that make you, Hirz?’ Celestine asked.
‘Greedier than you’ll ever know,’ she said.
Nonetheless we made good progress for another eleven rooms. Now and then a stained-glass window allowed a view out of Golgotha’s surface, which looked very far below us. By Forqueray’s estimate we had gained forty-five vertical metres since entering the Spire. Although two hundred further metres lay ahead — the bulk of the climb, in fact — for the first time it began to appear possible that we might succeed. That, of course, was contingent on several assumptions. One was that the problems, while growing steadily more difficult, would not become insoluble. The other was that the doorways would not continue to narrow now that we had discarded the bulky suits.
But they did.
As always, the narrowing was imperceptible from room to room, but after five or six it could not be ignored. After ten or fifteen more rooms we would again have to scrape our way between them.
And what if the narrowing continued beyond that point?
‘We won’t be able to go on,’ I said. ‘We won’t fit — even if we’re naked.’
‘You are entirely too defeatist,’ Trintignant said.
Childe sounded reasonable. ‘What would you propose, Doctor?’
‘Nothing more than a few minor readjustments of the basic human body-plan. Just enough to enable us to squeeze through apertures which would be impassable with our current… encumbrances. ’
Trintignant looked avariciously at my arms and legs.
‘It wouldn’t be worth it,’ I said. ‘I’ll accept your help after I’ve been injured, but if you’re thinking that I’d submit to anything more drastic… well, I’m afraid you’re severely mistaken, Doctor.’
‘Amen to that,’ Hirz said. ‘For a while back there, Swift, I really thought this place was getting to you.’
‘It isn’t,’ I said. ‘Not remotely. And in any case, we’re thinking many rooms ahead here, when we might not even be able to get through the next.’
‘I agree,’ Childe said. ‘We’ll take it one at a time. Doctor Trintignant, put your wilder fantasies aside, at least for now.’
‘Consider them relegated to mere daydreams,’ Trintignant said.
So we pushed on.
Now that we had passed through so many doors, it was possible to see that the Spire’s tasks came in waves; that there might, for instance, be a series of problems which depended on prime number theory, followed by another series which hinged on the properties of higher-dimensional solids. For several rooms in sequence we were confronted by questions related to tiling patterns — tessellations — while another sequence tested our understanding of cellular automata: odd chequerboard armies of shapes which obeyed simple rules and yet interacted in stunningly complex ways. The final challenge in each set would always be the hardest; the one where we were most likely to make a mistake. We were quite prepared to take three or four hours to pass each door, if that was the time it took to be certain — in Celestine’s mind at least — that the answer was clear.
And though the shunts were leaching fatigue poisons from our blood, and though the modifiers were enabling us to think with a clarity we had never known before, a kind of exhaustion always crept over us after solving one of the harder challenges. It normally passed in a few tens of minutes, but until then we generally waited before venturing through the now open door, gathering our strength again.
In those quiet minutes we spoke amongst ourselves, discussing what had happened and what we could expect.
‘It’s happened again,’ I said, addressing Celestine on the private channel.
Her answer came back, no more terse than I had expected. ‘What?’
‘For a while the rest of us could keep up with you. Even Hirz. Or, if not keep up, then at least not lose sight of you completely. But you’re pulling ahead again, aren’t you? Those Juggler routines are kicking in again.’
She took her time replying. ‘You have Childe’s medichines.’
‘Yes. But all they can do is work with the basic neural topology, suppressing and enhancing activity without altering the layout of the connections in any significant way. And the ’chines are broad-spectrum; not tuned specifically to any one of us.’
Celestine looked at the only one of us still wearing one of the original suits. ‘They worked on Hirz.’
‘Must have been luck. But yes, you’re right. She couldn’t see as far as you, though, even with the modifiers.’
Celestine tapped the shunt in her wrist, still faintly visible beneath the tight-fitting fabric of her suit. ‘I took a spike of the modifiers as well.’
‘I doubt that it gave you much of an edge over what you already had.’
‘Maybe not.’ She paused. ‘Is there a point to this conversation, Richard?’
‘Not really,’ I said, stung by her response. ‘I just…’
‘Wanted to talk, yes.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘You can hardly blame me if I don’t, can you? This isn’t exactly the place for small talk, let alone with someone who chose to have me erased from his memory.’
‘Would it make any difference if I said I was sorry about that?’
I could tell from the tone of her response that my answer had not been quite the one she was expecting. ‘It’s easy to say you’re sorry, now… now that it suits you to say as much. That’s not how you felt at the time, is it?’
I fumbled for an answer which was not too distant from the truth. ‘Would you believe me if I said I’d had you suppressed because I still loved you, and not for any other reason?’
‘That’s just a little too convenient, isn’t it?’
‘But not necessarily a lie. And can you blame me for it? We were in love, Celestine. You can’t deny that. Just because things happened between us…’ A question I had been meaning to ask her forced itself to the front of my mind. ‘Why didn’t you contact me again, after you were told you couldn’t go to Resurgam?’
‘Our relationship was over, Richard.’
‘But we’d parted on reasonably amicable terms. If the Resurgam expedition hadn’t come up, we might not have parted at all.’
Celestine sighed; one of exasperation. ‘Well, since you asked, I did try and contact you.’
‘You did?’
‘But by the time I’d made my mind up, I learned about the way you’d had me suppressed. How do you imagine that made me feel, Richard? Like a small, disposable part of your past — something to be wadded up and flicked away when it offended you?’
‘It wasn’t like that at all. I never thought I’d see you again.’
She snorted. ‘And maybe you wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for dear old Roland Childe.’
I kept my voice level. ‘He asked me along because we both used to test each other with challenges like this. I presume he needed someone with your ki
nd of Juggler transform. Childe wouldn’t have cared about our past.’
Her eyes flashed behind the visor of her helmet. ‘And you don’t care either, do you?’
‘About Childe’s motives? No. They’re neither my concern nor my interest. All that bothers me now is this.’
I patted the Spire’s thrumming floor.
‘There’s more here than meets the eye, Richard.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Haven’t you noticed how—’ She looked at me for several seconds, as if on the verge of revealing something, then shook her head. ‘Never mind.’
‘What, for pity’s sake?’
‘Doesn’t it strike you that Childe has been just a little too well prepared?’
‘I wouldn’t say there’s any such thing as being too well prepared for a thing like Blood Spire, Celestine.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’ She fingered the fabric of her skintight. ‘These suits, for instance. How did he know we wouldn’t be able to go all the way with the larger ones?’
I shrugged, a gesture that was now perfectly visible. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he learned a few things from Argyle, before he died.’
‘Then what about Doctor Trintignant? That ghoul isn’t remotely interested in solving the Spire. He hasn’t contributed to a single problem yet. And yet he’s already proved his value, hasn’t he?’
‘I don’t follow.’
Celestine rubbed her shunt. ‘These things. And the neural modifiers — Trintignant supervised their installation. And I haven’t even mentioned Forqueray’s arm, or the medical equipment aboard the shuttle.’
‘I still don’t see what you’re getting at.’
‘I don’t know what leverage Childe’s used to get his co-operation — it’s got to be more than bribery or avarice — but I have a very, very nasty idea. And all of it points to something even more disturbing.’
I was wearying of this. With the challenge of the next door ahead of us, the last thing I needed was paranoiac theory-mongering.
‘Which is?’
‘Childe knows too much about this place.’
Another room, another wrong answer, another punishment.
It made the last look like a minor reprimand. I remembered a swift metallic flicker of machines emerging from hatches which opened in the seamless walls: not javelins now, but jointed, articulated pincers and viciously curved scissors. I remembered high-pressure jets of vivid arterial blood spraying the room like pink banners, the shards of shattered bone hammering against the walls like shrapnel. I remembered an unwanted and brutal lesson in the anatomy of the human body; the elegance with which muscle, bone and sinew were anchored to each other and the horrid ease with which they could be flensed apart — filleted — by surgically sharp metallic instruments.
I remembered screams.
I remembered indescribable pain, before the analgesics kicked in.
Afterwards, when we had time to think about what had happened, I do not think any of us thought of blaming Celestine for making another mistake. Childe’s modifiers had given us a healthy respect for the difficulty of what she was doing, and — as before — her second choice had been the correct one; the one that opened a route back to the Spire’s exit.
And besides…
Celestine had suffered as well.
It was Forqueray who had caught the worst of it, though. Perhaps the Spire, having tasted his blood once, had decided it wanted much more of it — more than could be provided by the sacrifice of a mere limb. It had quartered him: two quick opposed snips with the nightmarish scissors; a bisection followed an instant later by a hideous transection.
Four pieces of Forqueray had thudded to the Spire’s floor; his interior organs were laid open like a wax model in a medical school. Various machines nestled neatly amongst his innards, sliced along the same planes. What remained of him spasmed once or twice, then — with the exception of his replacement arm, which continued to twitch — he was mercifully still. A moment or two passed, and then — with whiplash speed — jointed arms seized his pieces and pulled him into the wall, leaving slick red skid-marks.
Forqueray’s death would have been bad enough, but by then the Spire was already inflicting further punishment.
I saw Celestine drop to the ground, one arm pressed around the stump of another, blood spraying from the wound despite the pressure she was applying. Through her visor her face turned ghostly.
Childe’s right hand was missing all the fingers. He pressed the ruined hand against his chest, grimacing, but managed to stay on his feet.
Trintignant had lost a leg. But there was no blood gushing from the wound; no evidence of severed muscle and bone. I saw only damaged mechanisms; twisted and snapped steel and plastic armatures; buzzing cables and stuttering optic fibres; interrupted feedlines oozing sickly green fluids.
Trintignant, nonetheless, fell to the floor.
I also felt myself falling, looking down to see that my right leg ended just below the knee; realising that my own blood was hosing out in a hard scarlet stream. I hit the floor — the pain of the injury having yet to reach my brain — and reached out in reflex for the stump. But only one hand presented itself; my left arm had been curtailed neatly above the wrist. In my peripheral vision I saw my detached hand, still gloved, perched on the floor like an absurd white crab.
Pain flowered in my skull.
I screamed.
SIX
‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ Hirz said.
Childe looked up at her from his recovery couch. ‘You’re leaving us?’
‘Damn right I am.’
‘You disappoint me.’
‘Fine, but I’m still shipping out.’
Childe stroked his forehead, tracing its shape with the new steel gauntlet Trintignant had attached to his arm. ‘If anyone should be quitting, it isn’t you, Hirz. You walked out of the Spire without a scratch. Look at the rest of us.’
‘Thanks, but I’ve just had my dinner.’
Trintignant lifted his silver mask towards her. ‘Now there is no call for that. I admit the replacements I have fashioned here possess a certain brutal esthétique, but in functional terms they are without equal.’ As if to demonstrate his point, he flexed his own replacement leg.
It was a replacement, rather than simply the old one salvaged, repaired and reattached. Hirz — who had picked up as many pieces of us as she could manage — had never found the other part of Trintignant. Nor had an examination of the area around the Spire — where we had found the pieces of Forqueray — revealed any significant part of the Doctor. The Spire had allowed us to take back Forqueray’s arm after it had been severed, but it appeared to have decided to keep all metallic things for itself.
I stood up from my own couch, testing the way my new leg supported my weight. There was no denying the excellence of Trintignant’s work. The prosthesis had interfaced with my existing nervous system so perfectly that I had already accepted the leg into my body image. When I walked on it I did so with only the tiniest trace of a limp, and that would surely vanish once I had grown accustomed to the replacement.
‘I could take the other one off as well,’ Trintignant piped, rubbing his hands together. ‘Then you would have perfect neural equilibrium… shall I do it?’
‘You want to, don’t you?’
‘I admit I have always been offended by asymmetry.’
I felt my other leg; the flesh and blood one that now felt so vulnerable, so unlikely to last the course.
‘You’ll just have to be patient,’ I said.
‘Well, all things come to he who waits. And how is the arm doing?’
Like Childe, I now boasted one steel gauntlet instead of a hand. I flexed it, hearing the tiny, shrill whine of actuators. When I touched something I felt prickles of sensation; the hand was capable of registering subtle gradations of warmth or coldness. Celestine’s replacement was very similar, although sleeker and somehow more feminine. At least our injuries ha
d demanded as much, I thought; unlike Childe, who had lost only his fingers, but who had appeared to welcome more of the Doctor’s gleaming handiwork than was strictly necessary.
‘It’ll do,’ I said, remembering how much Forqueray had irritated the Doctor with the same remark.
‘Don’t you get it?’ Hirz said. ‘If Trintignant had his way, you’d be like him by now. Christ only knows where he’ll stop.’
Trintignant shrugged. ‘I merely repair what the Spire damages.’
‘Yeah. The two of you make a great team, Doc.’ She looked at him with an expression of pure loathing. ‘Well, sorry, but you’re not getting your hands on me.’
Trintignant appraised her. ‘No great loss, when there is so little raw material with which to work.’
‘Screw you, creep.’
Hirz left the room.
‘Looks like she means it when she says she’s quitting,’ I said, breaking the silence that ensued.
Celestine nodded. ‘I can’t say I entirely blame her, either.’
‘You don’t?’ Childe asked.
‘No. She’s right. This whole thing is in serious danger of turning into some kind of sick exercise in self-mutilation.’ Celestine looked at her own steel hand, not quite masking her own revulsion. ‘What will it take, Childe? What will we turn into by the time we beat this thing?’
He shrugged. ‘Nothing that can’t be reversed.’
‘But maybe by then we won’t want it reversed, will we?’
‘Listen, Celestine.’ Childe propped himself against a bulkhead. ‘What we’re doing here is trying to beat an elemental thing. Reach its summit, if you will. In that respect Blood Spire isn’t very different from a mountain. It punishes us when we make mistakes, but then so do mountains. Occasionally, it kills. More often than not it leaves us only with a reminder of what it can do. Blood Spire snips off a finger or two. A mountain achieves the same effect with frostbite. Where’s the difference?’
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