by Neal Asher
‘Take my disc up there, and place it where it must go.’
Carroll nodded, and wincing, took the disc under his good arm, two fingers in the conveniently positioned hole, and stepped carefully through the tangle of machinery to the bottom of the ramp. Am I doing the right thing? He wondered as he mounted the ramp. How could he possibly know? Suddenly such thoughts were far from his mind as a powerful blast rocked the chamber. The Clown, floating ahead of him on the ramp, tilted to look up at the roof of the chamber.
‘They detect ... power drain!’ the Clown yelled, his voice going in and out of human audibility. Carroll watched the Clown shape before him and truly understood, for the first time, that this was not what he was to resurrect. Another blast shook the chamber, closer this time. Carroll went down on his knees to prevent himself falling from the ramp walk. He knew he had no alternatives. He must do as the Clown bid him.
‘Hurr... eey... eey!’ came the Clown's distorted shout. As Carroll stumbled to his feet he saw the Clown shape flicker and subliminally become something else before returning to normal.
Another blast rocked the chamber. The ceiling cracked and a boulder-sized chunk of a substance like crystallised resin crashed to the floor and shattered into a thousand broken-flint pieces. Carroll struggled on as the blasts continued with frightening regularity. All he could do...
The resin substance started to rain continuously and nearby fires lit up the chamber as Carroll reached the top of the ramp. It would take him just a moment now to place the disc into its indentation, but he hesitated.
‘You took that form for my sake! It was not forced on you!’ he shouted at the Clown. ‘You lied to me! Is that all you lied about!?’
The Clown's reply was immediate and succinct. ‘That is all, but there is much I have not told you.’
‘Why?!’ Carroll yelled, rolling the disc into position next to the indentation.
‘Because my true form would be a nightmare to you. Because there is so much you simply cannot understand.’
Carroll peered up at the cracked ceiling, back at the Clown, then allowed the disc to drop into place. It seemed to hesitate as it fell, but when it finally settled into position the effect was immediate.
Like a coin into a juke box, thought Carroll irreverently as around him the machinery came alive with light, movement, and a low grating hum of unthinkable power. He turned and ran down the ramp, leapt onto his craft, and took it to a relatively safe position at the side of the chamber. And from there he watched a nightmare come to life.
Greenish fluid pulsed from one of the tanks and filled pipes Carroll had taken to be opaque. Some parts of the machinery glowed with heat while other parts frosted as they were super-cooled. Yellow-white, red, and blue lasers flashed at ground level like spider silk, their presence only becoming visible when they speared gusts of steam or coloured vapour. Carroll gaped in awed amazement, aware that all this power was not only directed at the disc. He got the impression that the disc was only a stepping stone to the two megaliths at the centre of the chamber. He watched as cycles of light and power built to a crescendo as the disc turned blinding white hot and the megaliths turned dull red. Then he watched as between the two top opposing faces lightning crackled as if between the fingers of Zeus.
The lightning went on and on, and even though it was leaving lines of blackness across his vision Carroll could not draw his eyes away. Something was happening there, something more than that brute, candent display of power. A three dimensional pattern of bluish light began to form; a pattern like a flaw in a precious stone. And this flaw grew larger and brighter round something solid, something that shifted with feral life.
In the light it moved with the slow, speed belying sinuosity of a snake, its terrible head thrust forwards on a cable strength neck, its lower jaw a slowly extending mandible like a dragon fly larva's, though little else of it could be compared to an insect. None of its sensory apparatus was recognizable to Carroll. There were hollows where eyes might have been, but no eyes. There were tufts of fibre round its mouth parts and rows of nodes along its horse-like face. All these might have been sense organs, but what they were sensing was a mystery to Carroll. He turned away to rest his eyes. It was easy to try and compare aspects of this creature with creatures of Earth, but such comparison missed out on what came over most strongly to him, what he had first felt when seeing what must have been the skeleton of its original body on the floor below. It was alien. It was the product of ecology and evolution other than that of Earth. It was extraneous, not easily amenable to human comprehension. Carroll shuddered and wondered just what he had done.
At length the lightning flashed out, and as if this were a signal the bombardment ceased also. Carroll returned his gaze to the fingers of Zeus and saw that the creature was gone. Then he lowered his gaze to see it standing by its disc. This is the Clown, he thought, and had to repress the hysterical laughter that bubbled up in his throat.
The Clown reached down and took up its disc in what might perhaps have been described as a hand. As it did so Carroll reached across and took up a weapon he had not used as yet: a multiple rocket launcher, something in shape like a large version of an old tommy gun, only the circular magazine was a ring with nine missiles on it. The Clown let out a cry that was as alien in its joy as it itself was in appearance. One handed, Carroll aimed the launcher and pulled back and held the trigger. Four missiles sped away on tongues of fire before he lost control of the launcher.
One impacted on what remained of the ceiling of the chamber. The other three struck the black throne that had been silently descending through the hole in that ceiling. The Four had arrived.
Chapter Ten
The green skinned, multi-armed goddess of death blew apart along with her throne. As the recoil threw Carroll back he was gratified to see her burning fragments falling through the air, but falling to the deck of his craft he saw Quetzalcoatl coming through the ceiling on its floating dais, closely followed by the Reaper and Anubis. But they did not head towards him though; the Clown was their main concern.
The moment Carroll had fired the missiles the Clown's head had snapped round to trace their course. As they impacted it moved with unhuman speed and grace. Its limbs became a blur as it shot to one side. Even so the stab of lasers traced its path across the machinery that had resurrected it. Upon reaching the wall its limbs blurred again and the disc emitted a sonic crack as it left its hand. Carroll did not see the disc in flight. All he saw was Quetzalcoatl's dais rip apart and explode, and the feathered serpent falling in two writhing and electrically crackling pieces.
The Clown was gone again as the spot it had been standing in became a molten pool. It went up the curving and completely smooth wall as if it had not heard of gravity. When it reached the level of the Reaper's throne it leapt out from the wall in a flat trajectory. It hit the Reaper's throne hard and fast, knocking it against the edge of the chamber. Pieces of throne fell, shortly followed by dismembered pieces of Reaper. The Clown leapt as a line of red sliced the Reaper's throne in two.
By this time Carroll had retrieved his missile launcher. He fired two missiles. One missed Anubis and streaked off through the hole in the ceiling to explode somewhere else in the ship. The other exploded behind the throne and sent it spinning out of control. Lines of laser light filled the smoky chamber, burning and cutting, as Anubis kept his finger on the firing button. Carroll levelled his launcher again then for no apparent reason found himself falling. A second later the familiar smell of charred flesh reached his nostrils. He glanced up and saw the Clown leaping towards the gyrating throne, then he looked down with dread to see, as he had feared, that his legs were no longer attached to his body. It was fortunate that unconsciousness through blood-loss and shock reached him before the pain.
♠♠♠
With that familiar metallic taste in his mouth Carroll wondered at the strangeness of thing – about how he had come to know both sides of death. He had killed. He had died. And he
had seen things strange and terrible, and was now hoping that perhaps some degree of normality might now return to his life, or rather, familiarity, for his life had never been normal. He opened his eyes to gaze up into star-pinned space and knew that he was not in a resurrection machine. He could feel a hard floor against his back, the sensation of movement, wind gusting in his face.
‘You wake,’ came the Clown's voice in his mind, where he now realized it had always been.
‘I certainly do,’ said Carroll as he sat upright. He was on the back of the leaf craft, whilst the Clown, the creature, was at the other end of the craft guiding it away from the bloody eye of the sun. Carroll shuddered and averted his eyes, ostensibly to inspect his legs.
He was wearing the same clothes as before. His trousers had been repaired in some way, and when he pulled them down he saw that the same applied to his legs. There were neat scars encircling them just below his genitals. His arm had been healed also. There was no pain anywhere, no loss of mobility, only scars.
‘Neat job,’ he said.
The Clown's strange, blackly silhouetted head turned towards him. ‘It is easier to repair than rebuild totally.’
‘I didn't die then?’ said Carroll.
‘What is death?’ countered the Clown, and turned away.
Carroll found he had no answer to that and turned to inspect the obvious alterations to the craft. All his additions had be removed and replaced by artefacts of the Clown's alien technology, some of which looked like living things, some of which defied comparison. The only things Carroll had any idea about looked like pedestal mounted road drills, which he assumed to be weapons of some kind.
‘Where are we going?’ he eventually asked.
‘To finish the battle. To end the war,’ replied the Clown.
‘It is not over then?’
‘No, the Four will resurrect themselves as did the Reaper, and will continue to do so until their source of power is destroyed.’
‘And where is that source?’
‘Under the matter converter. Under your steel plain, hence their swift reaction when I caused it to be moved.’
‘But how are you–’ began Carroll, but the Clown interrupted him.
‘Now!’ The voice in Carroll's head held menace. ‘Now I have control again they will not trap me. They are done. Their time is ended.’
Carroll nodded, the skin on his back crawling, as something inside him shrieked, ‘Alien! Alien! Alien!’
In time the titanic matter converter came into view and the Clown brought the craft to a mid-air halt. Carroll flinched as the alien reached back, but it was only groping for the veined sphere next to Carroll's legs. It picked this up and held it up before its. Immediately the sphere began to throb yellow light picking out the veins on its surface like rivulets of molten metal.
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Carroll to himself, feeling he should have said it long ago. No cards here but discs, and the Clown certainly wasn’t a white rabbit – a Jabberwock perhaps, but one no vorpal sword could slay.
Down below the matter converter shifted, changed its position like a giant in unquiet slumber, yet, such was its immensity, it gave the illusion that all else was shifting. Then, with the stately grace of something titanic moving, it rose. Carroll felt a tremor run through the air as it detached itself from the ground, then a low bone-numbing vibration as it went up and up. An island in the sky, thought Carroll, and repressed what he felt to be a dangerously uncontrolled laugh. A seemingly endless cliff of metal slid past. Carroll gripped the edge of the raft even though he knew it was an illusion that they were falling. He just could not make himself grasp on a visceral level that it was the converter rising, and they, so small and insignificant in comparison, were stationary. He only released the edge of the raft once the steel cliff finally passed and the whole huge object continued to rise.
At a height that must have been over five miles, the converter halted its ascent and began to turn over. It was then that Carroll saw its shape and, of course, it was hexagonal. He also saw something falling from it like dust from a table top. Ash? Mirrored buildings? Weapons? People? Carroll felt tears well in his eyes, yet they were not tears of grief. It was as if his body was frantically searching for a suitable emotional response to something beyond it compass. Perhaps next would come laughter, or madness.
Soon the converter exposed its top side to him and he saw the multihued glimmer of what he had known as the game-board. Then, as if some god had flicked on a light switch in fantastic heaven, the game-board flared with power, and rainbow light stabbed down at the plain below. Carroll shielded his eyes for a moment, then lowered his arm as fascination drew his gaze back. Below the matter converter lay a hole miles in diameter and descending into darkness.
‘They made their base in this duct which leads to the main storage tanks of the disc,’ came the Clown's thought. ‘It is from here that the sea rises.’ And as Carroll assimilated those words there came a roar as of titans. For a moment he thought he saw four black shapes rising from the hole, but in that moment they were erased by a vertical explosion of cubic miles of water. Carroll shook his head. This left him in doubt as to who was master here now. The time of the Four had certainly ended.
At length the light from the converter went out over the tsunamis below. As shock waves and spray crashed around the craft the gigantic shape of the converter began to move again. Mostly in silhouette it seemed to suck away the stars like some vast maw then spit them out behind. It made no noise now that its first piece of work was done.
‘The seas first,’ came the Clown's introspective thought, ‘from them came the first life on your world.’
‘How long will it take now?’ Carroll asked, repressing the urge to ask if it would take seven days and seven nights with the usual rest period.
‘The mass for the seas is stored within the disc. It will take one Earth year to bring it all to the surface.’
‘Will it flood all the surface?’ asked Carroll numbly.
‘No, there are hollows in the disc to be filled up. We are in one now. Many large oceans are required here for balancing and cooling. They can be pumped to different areas of the disc should there be any precession or major heating stresses...’
‘Then what?’
‘Then land. Two years, perhaps more. It will take time to sculpt mountains and deserts and the like.’
‘Deserts?’
‘Yes... and for the enjoyment of the life I will bring into being here, the matter converters will themselves be converted into fusion furnaces – miniature suns.’
Carroll could not keep the wonderment from his voice as he asked his next question. ‘And life... how long?’
‘Another hundred years,’ the Clown replied, swivelling its terrifying head towards him, ‘already there are planktons and algae in this ocean. The matter converter did not merely bring the water to the surface. A less complex mechanism could have done that. In a year all the oceans will be in place and shoaling with life, but it will take longer to establish the larger fauna and flora whose information I have stored.’ The head tilted then in what might have been introspection. ‘Perhaps a decade or so after that will see all checks and inspection completed, then it will be time to resurrect the human race.’
Carroll swallowed dryly and licked at his salty lips. Nearby lay his bag, and in it the discs of his friends. A hundred years, he thought. In that time he knew he would see wonders. And it was little enough time to wait for eternity.
THE END
Table of Contents
MINDGAMES: FOOL'S MATE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
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