Mindgames: Fool's Mate

by Neal Asher

  ‘How far away is your ship?’ he said, standing up.

  ‘Fifty miles,’ replied the Clown, and Carroll groaned.

  The Clown went on, ‘There will be food and drink there as well. Can you walk fifty miles?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess I'll have to,’ he said. Couldn't you have put that transporter thing nearer to your ship?’

  ‘No, because I did not put it there. There are many like it scattered across the whole disc, but they are thousands of miles apart. That one was the nearest.’

  Carroll nodded. ‘You always have an explanation.’ But he was not thinking about what he was saying. The Clown's previous mention of food was making his mouth water. Still nodding he drifted, staring at the non-horizon.

  ‘My ship is there,’ said the Clown. Carroll turned to gaze where the Clown was pointing, to the left of the sun. There he was able to discern something, hazily. It did not occur to him until he started walking that if he could see it from fifty miles away then it must be immense.

  Chapter Seven

  It looked like the beached remains of some titanic cetacean: a great grey mass of improbable immensity with exposed ribs at its highest point, reaching into the sky like claws, but clad with metal plates lower down, clinging to them like mummified skin. Ahead lay a gigantic engine something like an airliner’s turbine, and as Carroll drew closer to it, stepping amongst lesser wreckage strewn all about, he wondered what the Four had done to bring this leviathan down.

  The torn and shattered of machinery scattered on the ground amidst the soul discs looked like nothing Earthly. Its component parts did not have the square order of human built machines, rather, they were close packed and rounded like organs, and were connected with what looked like veins, arteries, and intestinal tubes. Though the machinery around him seemed mostly to be made of metal Carroll had the disturbing feeling that he was walking amidst the remains of some huge and savagely mutilated beast.

  At length he came to and passed the massive engine, then followed the path of an unlikely sized cable to the ship. When he finally passed the sheared off end of the cable, which exposed its hollow silvered interior, he turned to his left and walked along in the ship's shadow. Here there was little wreckage and he could not see the exposed ribs above. The mass of wreckage he had passed previously he surmised to be some part of the ship that had come down separately and perhaps with greater force. Here all he could see that might have been damage was irregularities in the vertical curve of the ship's hull, almost as if in places it had collapsed under its own weight, or supporting struts and rib beams inside had bent or broken.

  There were no portals or windows of any kind, as far as Carroll could see, just the curving grey mass of the hull reaching to a height he estimated to be easily more than half a mile. The further he got from the end of the cable the more he comprehended the sheer scale of the ship, and as a consequence realized how he did not comprehend the scale of the construction it rested on. A folly of gods, he thought, and pursued the thought no further.

  The hull of the ship curved round and after walking many miles he eventually found himself on the other side of it. If there had been some kind of nose cone he had not seen it, and as yet he had no idea of its overall shape. If there had been some change in the curve he had been following he had not seen that either. All he had seen was the grey mass of the hull looming above him with indifferent immensity and all he noticed was his change in position in relation to the sun and the shadows cast.

  Eventually he came to another engine, connected to the ship by a massive strut, and held perhaps two hundred feet from the ground. As he walked underneath it he tried to compare it to walking under the wing of a Boeing. It did not compare. The engine itself was bigger than such an aircraft and the strut could have been used as a runway. It seemed to Carroll that it took a very long time to walk from under it, all the while trying not to think of the millions of tons poised above him. No Earthly experience was the same. Humankind just did not build on this scale.

  Beyond the engine he come to where more wreckage was strewn from a rent in the grey skin of the ship. Here the rib beams lay exposed and the skin belled out as if from some internal explosion. At length Carroll came to a point where the rent reached to the ground, and he entered the ship.

  Once inside Carroll had little choice as to the direction he took because there were few ways through the tangle of machinery through which he could worm. He climbed up and in as if into a tree as he negotiated the dense tangle of beams, tubes, and wires.

  Massive cylinders and organ-shaped lumps of metal were everywhere he climbed and coloured crystal sliced his hands like glass. It was like climbing through some strange nightmarish junkyard, and he wondered perhaps if he had made the right choice, to enter the ship. At length he came to a cathedral sized, heart-shaped chamber from which numerous tunnels branched. The floor was curved more acutely than the walls and as he entered he slipped and slid down a metal slope to the centre of the chamber. After inspecting the friction burns on his hands and swearing he stood up and looked around.

  The walls of the chamber were of what appeared to Carroll like concrete reinforcing grids layered in no apparent order. The ceiling and floor though were just plain hemispheres of metal, the same metal used to fashion the branching tunnels. To Carroll the chamber looked like some kind of gigantic filter, but to filter what? Fuel? Lubricant? He doubted somehow that this ship was so primitive as to require fuel that needed to be filtered or to require lubricants. But then, what did he know? This chamber, like the scattered wreckage and the huge engines outside, was beyond his apprehension at that moment. He studied the dark maws of the tunnels wondering which one might lead him to those requisites of survival the Clown had mentioned. At random he chose one, entered, and was swallowed by darkness.

  The ship was seemingly unending, and what was impressed on Carroll now more than ever before, was the sure knowledge that nothing here had been designed for anything resembling the human form. There were no floors intentionally designed for a man to walk upon, no stairs, and no rooms of a comfortable human scale. Carroll felt like an ant lost in the workings of an aeroplane engine. Had there been power there, had the ship been in working order, he suspected his lifespan would have been as long as the ant's. It occurred to him, as he groped from darkness to twilight and back into darkness, that somewhere there might be some kind of control centre, though he would not have betted on this. With this in mind he directed his search accordingly, always moving to the larger passages, and ever upwards.

  Eventually he became too tired to go on. Without food his energy reserves were becoming badly depleted. In semi dark he sat down on one of the cylinders that protruded from a ledge he had been negotiating and from there peered down into a pit of shadow. After a moment he leant back against outwardly curving rods of a glasslike substance and closed his eyes, and it was some time before he opened them again.

  As he awoke Carroll became aware of extreme discomfort. In half sleep he could not make up his mind whether it was cold of just his uncomfortable position. Coming fully awake he realized his bladder was protesting. He stood and moved sluggishly to the edge of the pit and there relieved himself into the shadows. It was a moment before he saw that in those shadows, just beyond where he lost sight of his stream of urine, something the size of an elephant had begun shifting.

  ‘Oh hell,’ he said softly as he did up his fly and stepped back from the edge. It occurred to him that he would rather not annoy something of that size and that urinating on it was probably not a good move.

  Noises began to issue from the pit, noises as of relays closing and electric motors starting up. Carroll shrank back against the wall of glass rods as red and orange glows lit up the surrounding area. Then something began to rise.

  The red and orange lights were part of it, a small part. It looked like a mass of scrap metal pressed into a huge ball: cylinders, boxes, and the ubiquitous organ-shaped components, all bound together with segmented tubes tha
t seemed to writhe in the changes of light and shade. It also possessed metallic claws and pincers that waved aimlessly in the air or snapped at phantoms, and other insect shapes on its surface that Carroll was sure were moving, and which made his skin crawl.

  ‘It will not kill you.’

  Carroll looked round at the spectral figure of the Clown floating, luminously, only a short distance from him.

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ said Carroll dryly, ‘don't you just love surprises.’

  ‘I had expected you to wait outside the ship,’ said the Clown.

  ‘Then you misjudged my spirit of adventure and my boredom threshold.’ Carroll returned his attention to the robot. ‘You see, I get bored waiting around for you to tell me what to do next.’

  ‘I am pushing our enemies from every side, leaving them false trails and giving them the false hope that they might have undermined any plans I have laid. Hopefully they will be unprepared when we really do strike.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Carroll’s interest was inversely proportional to his physical discomfort, ‘and what part do I play, or rather when do I get to play my part?’

  ‘You will see,’ said the Clown cryptically, ‘for now you must follow this robot. I will return when you have reached your destination.’ And with that the Clown receded as if into distance and was gone.

  Humming and throbbing the robot rose and moved to the left. Carroll was exhausted, hungry, and thirsty, and even though he was beginning to doubt the Clown's motives for directing him to this place he could do little other than follow the instructions he was given. With a desultory frown he followed the robot, scrambling along the edge while the robot floated through the air with annoying ease. After a short time the robot led him to a slightly spiralling hexagonal section of pipe, and there Carroll hesitated when it followed the pipe up into darkness. A sudden tired and desperate recklessness came over him. Abruptly he ran up the pipe until he was opposite the robot, searched for handholds then jumped. The robot did little more than jerk, then hum as its motors corrected for the extra weight, and continue on its way.

  For a moment Carroll just hung in place with his eyes closed, gasping for breath. Movement under his cheek made him open his eyes in trepidation. He had forgotten about the insect shapes. Close to he saw metal antlike bodies joined by tubes or wires ranging from an inch in diameter to the thickness of a hair. These creature things, like the large segmented tubes he clung to, seemed to be holding the robot together. In fact it looked to Carroll like the robot was a huge mobile colony, a swarm. Shivering with phobia Carroll hauled himself up to a more secure position and tried not to think about what was underneath him.

  His steady and unworldly mount took Carroll onwards through the nightmarish interior of the ship, and perhaps because it knew his position, it took him by ways he knew he could not have negotiated on foot. It took him through gradually larger and larger spaces so that at times there was nothing visible all around him. It took him past machines of unknown purpose – strange, troubling machines. It took him past structural members like gigantic bones, or trees, he could not make up his mind . And it brought him at last to a vast, spherical, ribbed and blue-lit chamber, where it set him down in the wreckage below two enormous opposed constructions like the business ends of a spot welder.

  The two structures rose above him like prehistoric megaliths, yet it seemed likely to Carroll, from all that he had learnt, that these things had been constructed long before the human race could have been said to have existed. He stepped from the settled robot and stumbled on the wreckage which made him inspect it more closely. He saw that it was of the same strange broken machinery he had seen outside the ship, only this wreckage had been exposed to extreme heat and lay in solid masses, fused to the floor. It was not this that held his attention though. Lying amongst the fused machinery were bones, real bones, not part of the weird structure or machinery of the ship, a whole skeleton in fact. An alien skeleton.

  Carroll knew enough about anatomy to recognize that no Earth-born creature would have a skeleton like this. It was vaguely mammalian, but there was also something of an insect’s exoskeleton about it. On closer inspection he could tell that some of the bones had contained organs, like a skull does, only these bones bore no resemblance to skulls. The only bones he could see that bore any resemblance to anything he knew were what looked like dinosaur's vertebrae, and ribs forming a three cavity body like a trilobite's. He stooped to pick up one of the vertebrae. It was as light as cobwebs and crumbled to dust in his hand.

  For a moment Carroll just stared, allowing the flaky dust to sift through his fingers. The he stood and turned away from the skeleton. Its alien form made him uneasy, and he had more immediate concerns such as thirst and hunger. With the desultory attitude of someone at the limit of his physical resources he wandered round the chamber in search of water. He found none and at length sank down in a fugue by one of the megaliths. Eventually the Clown reappeared.

  ‘Jason Carroll–’ began the Clown, but Carroll interrupted.

  ‘If I don't get something to drink then something to eat, soon, I will die... then what of all your plans for me? Or was that the plan?’ he rasped, his swollen tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth.

  The Clown turned and walked to the robot, the apparent motion of his legs bearing no relation to his forwards progress. At his approach the robot rose up into the air to hover, expectantly. From the Clown, and from the air all around him, issued a multi-toned moaning, clicking, and buzzing. When the sounds finally ceased the robot rose further, then, at unexpected speed, shot up across then out of the chamber.

  ‘It will return shortly with what you require. It will also scan your–’ The Clown did not finish. Once again he was abruptly missing.

  Carroll sat back against a piece of wreckage. What the Hell is going on? He wondered irritably. What was the Clown up to now? He tried to piece together the course of events and make sense out of them.

  First, the Clown had contacted him via his dreams then approached when he was well into the game and near its centre. From this he surmised that he had been one of many. This would account for Ramses' reaction when he had mentioned the Clown. Was it because he was the closest to winning that he had been chosen for what the Clown required? He thought on that a moment. No, no ... the Clown had told him he had been chosen for his ... abilities... Perhaps all the fighters had had dreams about a Clown. What was it he wondered that he could do that the Clown and all his machines could not? He had no idea. It was difficult to think with his tongue swollen in his mouth and his body crying out for liquid. He looked up anxiously for the robot.

  The robot eventually returned with a metallic, kidney-shaped bladder in one of its claw manipulators. Tubes depended from this as from a real kidney, and from the ragged end of one of these water spilled. Carroll lurched to his feet and had his hands on the bladder before the robot had even landed. He drank deep once the bladder was released to him. Nothing could have tasted more delicious than the bitter metallic water. It was cool on his chapped lips, trickled soothingly past his ceramic tongue, and thawed the sore dryness of his throat.

  After a few minutes he had sated his thirst and took another package proffered to him by the robot. Wrapped in a nacreous sheet of some silky fabric the content of the package contained was not easy to identify. It was about the size and shape of a slice of bread, had a fibrous, puttylike consistency and smelt of brewer’s yeast and oranges. After a moment Carroll remembered where he had smelt something similar to this. The substance smelt just like multi-vitamin tablets. He assumed it must be food and took a bite. Immediately his mouth was awash with saliva and before he knew it he had eaten half of the slab. By an act of will he stopped eating and drank some more water, then he waited to see if he was going to vomit, not because he thought the food might be poisonous, but because he did not know if his stomach could handle it after being so long without solids. Then, when everything seemed to be fine, he ate the rest.

  Whi
le Carroll sated his hunger and thirst the robot rested before him with its lights flickering to the promptings of hidden thoughts. Eventually, as if coming to a decision, it rose into the air. Carroll watched it go without much interest, then he found the most comfortable spot he could amongst the wreckage, and was soon asleep.

  Chapter Eight

  He was in Northern Ireland. There were snipers. That was the main thing he remembered, though he was sure he had been involved in an intricate situation beforehand that explained their presence. Coming out of the tight bowel-clenching fear of physical injury, he became aware that he was dreaming and that the staccato rattling he was hearing was not from automatic weapons, but from something near to where he slept. He then woke fully.

  The chamber was lit now with a soft blue radiance issuing from no discernible source. Wiping the sleep from his eyes Carroll saw that the robot had returned and was the source of the noise. With its many manipulators and tool-bearing appendages it was working on a machine that had not been present when Carroll had fallen asleep. The machine looked something like a creation booth, something like a resurrection machine, and a lot like a water tank with a door in it.

  Yawning and still rubbing at his eyes, Carroll stood and approached to watch the work in progress. Abruptly he had to jerk away as an arc welder flashed and sprayed the floor with molten globules. It was a moment before his sight returned, and when it did he realized that the robot had ceased to work.

  ‘Warning given time weld unshielded next,’ said the robot in a voice that was a combination of Carroll's and the Clown's. Blinking with surprise Carroll saw that the voice issued from a new addition to its chaotic structure. Held, seemingly at random by the insect shapes, was a metal copy of the human speech making apparatus from lungs to lips, either side of which were ears. Carroll had seen some strange things lately but this was the most Daliesque.