by Paul McAuley
‘Wildsiders?’
Jaguar Boy shrugged and yawned – an unsettlingly wide and deep yawn that would have dislocated a human jaw.
The Child said, ‘Are we going there now?’
‘After dark. Rest now.’
The Child dozed fitfully, waking once to hear a helicopter whomping somewhere in the middle distance. She sat up and looked for it, but the trees closed everywhere overhead apart from a narrow patch of sky directly above the clearing. The pulse of the helicopter grew nearer, then slowly faded away into the rapturous silence of the forest. She supposed that the army was searching for her, and she felt a pang of sorrow and guilt, wondering how her mother felt. But her mother had betrayed her, and the pang quickly passed.
In the brief blue evening they ate more fruit and went on. The Child was still unafraid. The night-time forest was a spooky place, but she was confident that she could navigate it. She knew which trees and bushes bore edible fruit or berries and which had bark that yielded strong fibres which could be woven into twine and nets. She knew about hollow vines that yielded a mouthful of water when cut, moss that could be used to make antiseptic poultices, how to find a river by following the slope of the ground, and much more. She found a handful of berries on a skeletal bush, dry but still sweet. And she spotted a heavy cluster of pupunha fruit and shared them with Jaguar Boy, who cracked the husks with his strong jaws.
‘I thought you’d eat raw meat,’ she told him. ‘But I suppose your digestive system is just like mine.’
Jaguar Boy smiled his wide smile. In the false light of the Child’s glasses, his markings looked like the tattoos of the initiate of some unnamed increate god.
They walked on, and at last reached a road, with wide margins of dry scrub on either side and the dark wall of the forest rearing up against the night sky on the far side.
Stars were shooting across the sky.
The Child unhooked her glasses, saw that the sky’s black dome was gridded with a faint net of blue cords that met at knots or nodes of brighter blue. Each square of the luminous mesh subtended a full two degrees of sky, far larger than the moon when it was full, knitting a pattern that stretched from horizon to horizon. Beneath this sky net, falling stars drew long bright streaks that radiated from opposing focal points in the sky, meeting more or less overhead, passing each other and terminating in little flowers of red or green or white. Forming a great figure that reminded the Child of a mitotic spindle in a dividing cell at anaphase, when the two sets of replicated chromosomes draw away from each other. She knew that many meteors were fragments of spent comet nuclei captured by the sun’s gravity well; regular showers like the Leonids or the Caprids appeared year after year at the same time and in the same part of the sky when Earth crossed their orbits. She also knew that there were no such showers at this time of year, and yet there it was, not one but two great displays flinging themselves at each other, burning across the sky and dying in extravagant bouquets of fiery light.
Jaguar Boy pointed east. Two large stars were rising, one after the other. The Child knew that certain ancients had called comets hairy stars: these stars were hairy indeed, one burning sullen red, the other a dirty green-white, each radiating spikes and fine featherings of fire like a child’s drawing of the sun. Their light was bright enough to cast shadows, the Child’s and Jaguar Boy’s mingling with the spidery shadows of the dead bushes and clumps of dry grass and visibly shrinking as the two stars raced up the sky with startling swiftness, moving faster than any satellite or power station.
They moved, it seemed, beneath the faint blue net, which was beginning to fall apart. A node would flare brightly and stars would fall, some streaking straight down, others tumbling eccentrically. The Child followed one as it tumbled, saw it gutter and almost go out, saw it flare brightly again and shatter in a shower of meteors that fell and faded in graceful arcs. There were great holes in the net now, and still stars fell, or streaked across the sky from the nodes to the west and the east and exploded like fireworks.
The Child, full of wonder and awe, not at all frightened, asked Jaguar Boy what was happening, and he spoke one word.
‘War.’
‘War? Like the war between China and Russia before the Overturn?’
But Jaguar Boy was already walking away, and wouldn’t answer any of her questions as they crossed the road, which still retained the day’s baking heat, and moved through the dry and gullied scrub towards the forest.
When they reached the trees, the two hairy stars were sinking towards the east. The great net in the sky was grievously holed; stars were still streaking across the sky. The Child put on her glasses again as she followed Jaguar Boy into the forest, and when they came out into open ground at the margin of a river some hours later the sky was black and quiet and the stars were fixed in their eternal patterns.
Jaguar Boy led the Child along the bank of the river, moving upstream, high above banks of mud that sloped to the shrunken watercourse. A tall berm or dam of logs spread across their path, vanishing into the trees on either side. Lights burned here and there on its flat top. The Child asked who lived there, thinking that they had come at last to an encampment of wildsiders.
‘This is the home of the River Folk,’ Jaguar Boy said. ‘They are expecting you.’
2
While Prem was engaged with arranging our ride from T to Avalon, the Horse and I managed to merge our securities and have a quick, private conversation. He asked me if I was going to attempt to contact the Library; I told him that it wouldn’t be a good idea.
‘We know there is at least one traitor in the Library. There may be others. So any contact at this point may endanger our mission.’
‘I confess to being confused as to what our mission is, now that we are working for someone who is no longer the Library’s client,’ the Horse said.
‘I am not working for Prem. My interests happen to coincide with hers.’
‘If only we could be certain of her interests.’
‘We both need to find this hell. That’s enough for now.’
‘If it exists.’
‘You saw what I saw.’
‘I saw a dream inside the skull of a dead man,’ the Horse said, with a whole-body shiver. He seemed to have shrunken inside his borrowed coveralls. Somewhere in our brief adventure he’d lost his cap.
‘We’ll find this hell and locate and define its back doors,’ I said. ‘And then we’ll return to the Library and tell all.’
‘I hope this redeems you. I really do. But it is a heavy hope to hang on such a frail thread.’
‘If I fail, it is my failure, not yours. But I will not fail,’ I said.
I was confident that I could find and harrow the hell, but I was not sure what I would find in it, and I had serious doubts about my alliance with Prem Singleton. Despite her denial, it was obvious that she had her own agenda, that she had not agreed to help Lathi Singleton find her son out of friendship or familial loyalty, but because she’d been involved from the beginning in his search for data about the ancient starship. And now he was dead or in bad trouble, or perhaps he had betrayed her and disappeared with the knowledge they’d been searching for. In any case, she had her own reasons for wanting to find him.
She definitely had traction in the right places and knew how to use it, securing passage for us on a freighter that would make a diversion to Avalon, but my plan to question her during the trip was quickly thwarted. We’d barely kicked off from T’s port when Our Thing announced that the enemy had breached Cthuga’s defences, entered its atmosphere in force, and established a beachhead. Every kind of fighting was still going on, from drones battling drones with kinetic and high-energy weapons to desperate hand-to-hand combat in pelagic stations, but Our Thing claimed that we had won a great victory: the Ghosts had thrown a large percentage of their resources at us, and had been defeated and repulsed.
Prem announced that she had to consult with her clan and suited up and went outside, leaving me to di
scuss the news with the captain of the freighter, a cynical veteran who believed that although the action at Cthuga was a major battle, a big push and a big push back, it wasn’t decisive. We’d been fighting for so long, the captain said, that it was inconceivable that a single event would end the war one way or another. As far I was concerned, the battle for Cthuga was a remote and distant scuffle, hardly unprecedented and of unknown significance to my quest to locate and characterise the back doors into the Library. Still, I remembered the Redactor Svern’s little lecture, back in his memory palace, and wondered if he was pleased to have been proven right.
Prem spent most of the rest of the trip outside. I listened inattentively to the war stories of the freighter’s captain while watching her in a discrete window, perched in her p-suit at the end of one of the load booms that radiated like a spiky necklace from the midpoint of the long trunnion spar that coupled the tiny lifesystem to the motor pod. But I had no way of knowing who she was talking to, or what she was talking about.
At last, Avalon swam into view. As it expanded from a faint star to a fuzzy disc the ship’s crew – half a dozen Quicks who, wedded to symbiotic p-suits, their arms and legs replaced by tentacular implants, spent their brief lives in raw vacuum – readied a transit pod. The Horse and I suited up and climbed inside. Prem joined us, still cloaked in her security, still talking to her clan, and the pod shot out along the boom and fell towards Avalon while the freighter accelerated away towards its final destination.
It’s an icy worldlet, Avalon. An irregular ovoid sphere clad in lightly cratered plains of water-ice fractured with pressure ridges. A tug intercepted our pod and carried us halfway around Avalon’s waist in an arc that terminated at the port that sprawled across the flat floor of an impact crater. As soon as we debarked, we were surrounded by an escort of troopers in full armour. The Horse was marched off in one direction, and Prem and I were marched off in another. I told Prem that I was impressed by the reception but it was hardly necessary; she said that it was nothing to do with her. She was quiet and reserved; preoccupied, perhaps, with the implications of the attack on Cthuga. It was left to me to tell the captain in charge of the troopers that I needed my kholop if I was to perform my work properly.
‘There’s nothing for you to do here,’ the captain said. ‘Everything is under control.’
‘What is under control? What happened here?’
‘The prefect will explain everything.’
‘If Yakob Singleton opened up a hell here, I very much doubt it.’
‘The prefect will explain everything,’ the captain said again.
I was still arguing with him when we entered a capsule that immediately and at great speed dropped two kilometres down a vertical shaft. Vicious deceleration brought me to my knees and two troopers moved in on either side and lifted me up and carried me by main force to the flat slab of a cargo sled. Once everyone was aboard, it glided away down the centre of a broad serviceway cut through the upper part of a small sea that Quick machines had melted in the adamantine water-ice of Avalon’s crust with shaped antimatter bomblets, and was kept liquid by heat pumps connected by superconducting cables to the worldlet’s silicate core, which still retained heat from the decay of aluminium isotopes.
The serviceway’s tunnel dwindled away for kilometres ahead. The air was freezing and the walls of the serviceway were transparent diamond and water pressing all around glimmered ghostly blue in the bright lights floating overhead. The sled was the only moving thing visible. No Quick workers, no bots. Just the transparent walls and floating lights flashing past. At last we halted at the centre of a workpod that encircled the serviceway. Security bots hung in the air, weapons everted. Several scanned me; my security hardened as they tried to get inside my armoury and for a moment I was deaf and blind. When the spasm passed, the captain of the troopers was in my face, wanting to know what weapons I was carrying.
‘They are not weapons. They are the tools of my trade,’ I said.
‘Security says they are weapons. Hand them over.’
‘I can’t do that. They are particular to my clan. And I may need to use them.’
The captain repeated his demand. The pair of troopers held me fast and a security bot hovered behind him, the muzzle of a glaser aimed at me as it pulsed my security every thirty milliseconds, trying to find a way inside.
Prem stepped up and said that she needed my skills. ‘Your prefect will need them too.’
‘Everything is under control,’ the captain said.
‘You don’t know that. I don’t know that. Only this man can know for sure.’
Prem looked slim and vulnerable amongst the armoured troopers, but she showed no fear and carried herself with forthright authority.
I sensed traffic as the captain consulted someone. He said, ‘On your responsibility, Majistra.’
‘All of it is my responsibility.’
The troopers picked me up again and carried me down a passage to a platform that overlooked a long, red-lit chamber, where I was unceremoniously dumped on the floor in front of a heavyset man in scarlet and yellow: Dyal Cardinale, the prefect of Avalon, according to my security. He looked at me, then at Prem, affecting nonchalance.
‘I appreciate your offer of help,’ he said. ‘But as you can see, everything is under control.’
‘Where is my cousin?’ Prem said.
‘He came here and did his work, and left.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘I regret that I did not enquire,’ the prefect said.
‘I’ll want traffic records,’ Prem said.
‘I’ll show you everything,’ the prefect said.
Prem turned to me and said, ‘What do you see, Isak?’
I got to my feet, moving slowly, aware of the troopers and the drones watching me. Below the platform, troopers stood over a small crew of Quick workers who lay face down on the floor, hands clasped on the backs of their necks. Beyond were ranks of cradles, each brimful of water, each containing the small sleek form of a newborn Quick adapted for aquatic life. The newborns chirped and trilled and splashed, agitated no doubt by the sudden change in their routines. Everywhere else was still and quiet, and I told Prem so.
‘This isn’t the locus of the infection,’ the prefect said. ‘We have dealt with that. No, this is the locus of an insurrection. And as you can see, we have dealt with that, too.’
‘My cousin came here to look for something,’ Prem said.
‘And he found it, and dealt with it,’ the prefect said.
‘A hell,’ Prem said.
‘What else?’
‘It is in the mind of one of the heat pumps installed by the Quick construction machines,’ I said, and recited the coordinates that I’d pulled from the brain of the undead leader of the Billion Blossoms.
Prem gave me a sharp look, then told the prefect that we needed to go there at once.
‘There is no need.’
‘With respect, you don’t know what you are dealing with.’
‘With respect, I believe that we do,’ the prefect said, with wintry politeness. ‘After the pump’s mind had been purged by your cousin and his assistant, I discovered that several workers had died. It seems as if they had fought each other to the death, using fists and teeth and nails. Very messy. I also discovered a clandestine comm line to the heat pump. It was obvious that they were wreckers, and that they had been controlled by demons in the hell hidden in the pump’s mind. So I took appropriate precautions.’
Prem said, ‘My cousin had an assistant? He came here with someone?’
The prefect said, ‘He had specialist help. Just like you.’
‘Did she claim to be working for the Library of the Homesun?’
‘Was her name Bree Sixsmith?’
Prem and I had spoken at the same time.
The prefect looked at me, then at Prem.
Prem said, ‘No doubt you have confirmed my authority.’
‘Yes, Majistra.’
�
�Then you will help me understand what they did here.’
The prefect threw a packet of information at me, and told Prem, ‘I have just given your servant a copy of their report. Their authority was confirmed at the highest level of security. I had no reason to doubt that they were acting in anything other than an official capacity.’
He wore rings on every finger. Some were the kind that augments memory and other mental facilities; others were the kind that command machines. He was twisting one, a plain black band on his right forefinger, back and forth. I was certain that it was some kind of weapon.
‘She turned him,’ Prem said to me. ‘She caught up with Yakob and she turned him.’
‘I think so too,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Do you have any idea what they found?’
‘According to their report, they harrowed and erased a hell,’ I said.
‘After they used the gateway inside it,’ Prem said.
‘The hell they claim to have erased was nothing like the one in the ship,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a copy of part of the Library, but appears to have been a genuine hell, inhabited by a clutch of minor demons. But even on a first reading, it seems very thin. Generic. As if patched together from records of other hells.’
The prefect said, ‘It was a real hell, with real demons. They infected my workers.’
‘I would like to inspect the heat pump,’ I said. ‘No doubt every trace of the hell has been erased, but I think it likely that something was left behind. A trap.’
Prem understood. ‘Those workers were cultists.’
‘I think so. They used the gateway to access data stored in the Library. After your cousin and Bree Sixsmith left, they wanted to find out what had been done to their archive. They looked inside the heat pump’s mind. And they found a demon.’
‘And it made them kill each other,’ Prem said. ‘How elegant.’
‘They worked here,’ the prefect said. ‘The Quick infected by the demon. They worked in this place. These prisoners also worked here, and may have useful information about the conspiracy. You are welcome to question them in any way you see fit. I have held them in isolation. I have put the entire sector in isolation. Nothing in or out until you arrived. The situation is completely contained.’
