by Gary Gibson
Sam somehow found the strength to turn and glare blearily at Vaughn, whose lash hung limp towards the broken earth. ‘Ernst, it’s over. You can’t see what I can see. You’re right: we should be working together. But . . . but not towards the destruction of an entire world. That’s not God’s plan, Vaughn. It was never my plan, either. There are greater things involved here, Ernst, believe me.’
And Sam almost told him, then, it being so hard not to share what he knew – what so few could possibly have guessed. After all these years of wondering if there was a way to amplify the power that already lay within him: and it had been right there all along.
Pain.
Sam Roy was now a connoisseur of pain, having known little else for over two centuries. Short of throwing him down into the core of a star, there was little that would kill him. Vaughn knew this, of course, and used it to prolong Sam’s suffering indefinitely. Pain in itself was a source of power, and when Vaughn came to punish Sam for doing what he was destined to do, the pain itself drove Sam to new levels of precognitive ability. As his flesh opened to bleed beneath the freezing sunlight, the clarity of his visions grew and, with it, came understanding. An understanding of which Ernst Vaughn, with his relatively limited vision, could only ever grasp a fragment.
But what little Vaughn did know was still enough to incite him to murder an entire world.
‘I’m going to tell you something you don’t know,’ said Sam, carefully twisting his head around to look at Vaughn. ‘Do you want to hear it?’
Vaughn said nothing, merely stood there gazing at him. ‘Go on,’ he at last said quietly.
Sam spoke with growing certainty. ‘You can’t win – and do you want to know why? You know how they used to say everyone makes their own future? That’s all we ever did, Ernst. It doesn’t become real until we see it there, in the future; and that’s when we, here in the present, simply become that point’s past, rushing towards what is suddenly inevitable, unalterable.’
Vaughn scowled. ‘Nonsense, that’s an insult to the divine plan. We don’t create the future, God does. You’re becoming arrogant, Sam.’
But Sam knew it to be true, and wondered if that was fear he could see in his brother’s eyes.
‘But the point is, it depends on how well you can see, doesn’t it? And Trencher and I could always see much further than you could.’
‘This is sounding old, Sam. You’re wrong, I’ve heard all this before. You’re starting to repeat yourself.’ Vaughn’s eyes were blank but murderous.
‘When I see the future, I see much more – and in more detail than you ever possibly could. We both know it, however much you deny it. I spent years studying the Citadel, and it gave up its secrets to me. The salvation of this entire world is there. I can foresee every second of what will happen here in the next few days, all laid out like chess moves described in a textbook. And the more clearly I see, the more that future becomes real, while your imagined conquest becomes nothing more than a figment of your fucked-up imagination.’
Vaughn came towards him with a snarl, his hands clenching, ready for further brutality. Sam continued quickly. ‘Anything that happens here happens largely because I see so much of it. Yet I think we both know who else sees more than either of us.’ Vaughn moved behind the great boulder to which Sam was tethered, near the cliff edge. Sam spoke on: ‘Trencher could always see so much clearer, further than you, Vaughn. I certainly could, too. I know what’s going to happen. I know where it’s going to go wrong for you, but you’ll never know until it actually happens.’
Sam and his rock stood near the top of the path. He’d managed to wolf down some food before his brother had come looking for him. Sam knew what was going to happen next: had known since Vaughn had chained him here. He knew every word that would be said, every deed that would be done, so he fulfilled his lines like a good actor, or perhaps because he simply had no choice.
But there was a way out. If only he could grasp it, he could defy eternity, and the certainty of his foreknowledge. That was the true secret of the Angels, of what they were, and of where they had gone.
‘It’s too late now, Ernst. You should have thrown me into the heart of a star while you had the chance. Maybe that would have changed the way things worked out, if you’d done it early enough – but not now. Not now.’ Vaughn pushed at Sam’s rock until it started to shift. Sam could see how much effort it was for Vaughn, not having Sam’s centuries of practice. The shape and the surface of that rock was like a lover’s skin to him now, something so utterly familiar.
He was dragged along, his body limp and pain-racked, as Vaughn started to roll the rock closer to the edge of the cliff. The manacles around Sam’s thin, skeletal wrists became taut. ‘Of course, it’s not me you’re really afraid of. You thought that if you could at least bring him here, where you could see him, you could then contain him, stop him interfering. Bad mistake, Ernst, really.’ Sam clawed at the soil with his fingers, as the great boulder rolled slowly closer and closer to the cliff edge. It was a long way down. But Sam didn’t fight it, because it was going to happen, as surely as the sun set in the evening and rose again in the morning.
He’d warned Matthew how long he and the others would have, timed it to the last second. Trencher is the one who sees all, thought Sam. The one for whom reality coalesces around whichever path he chooses through the fog of quantum probabilities that is all our futures. The one whose eye truly is like the eye of God. The unwilling messiah. Who always knew he would be here, in this time, in this place, and for all his incipient godhood – for all our incipient godhood, he thought, as the great ball of stone teetered on the edge of the cliff, over the snowy wastes far below – is as trapped by his fate as any of the rest of us.
Our curse was always to know it.
The great stone toppled over the upper edge of the path that wound its way far, far down the face of the cliff. It dragged Sam Roy after it and, as his bones shattered and his body ruptured, he screamed, not so much because of the pain but because he’d always known he would scream when this time came.
A few hours before, Vaughn had watched as the shuttle from the Jager appeared, zooming low over the Southern Teive range, dropping onto a stable ice-field less than a mile from the New Coventry settlement. It kicked up a furious cloud of superheated steam that burned away millennia-old permafrost in an instant. Vaughn stood at his favourite place – where he liked to stand on mornings like this – watching the craft settle down, the powerful whine of its engines dropping to a loud hum.
Even in this age of technology, it was still a wonder to know that you could reach out, even across half a galaxy, and trigger a sequence of events that would deliver someone to you with what seemed the minimum of fuss.
The whole town had turned out to watch.
They had lowered the shield long enough to allow the shuttle to find its way through to them. It had been only for a few minutes, so it was an acceptable risk. The military authorities who administered the Kasper Angel Station were still in considerable turmoil, and did not benefit from knowing the purpose or the nature of what had attacked them. Although, of course, there had been some unexpected results.
Vaughn could smell the excitement in the air – in all his people. The Endtime was approaching, which would finally liberate mankind from the shackles of the past. Young men and women, the inheritors of the world that would be their Eden, their fresh beginning under the eyes of God, stepped forward onto the ice-field. They were dressed in the uniforms of the Coventry militia, all fiercely loyal to the Primalist cause. More specifically, they carried equipment that would allow them to isolate any nanocytes that might have hitched a ride this far down the gravity well.
There was an air of ceremony in the way they moved towards the shuttle, because they had been taught to understand the nature of the Adversary. They had been taught that Trencher was the only one with the power to thwart God’s plan. Part of that teaching had also been that Sam Roy had aided the Adversary, and w
as to be punished eternally for that sin – or until he repented and joined them in the world that lay ahead.
After the fire came, and they had retreated into the caverns deep beneath the Teive Mountains, they would re-emerge into a world renewed. New cities would be built for future generations, as the cosmic fire spread further on through the galaxy, destroying base, unholy life as it proceeded. The Kaspians would become merely a story told to children, something half-forgotten, unworthy, and God would smile on the righteous and bless them all. This was a good thing, a holy thing. Vaughn stepped forward just as the shuttle’s hatch opened with a hiss, some of his militia entering first.
He sensed immediately that something was wrong.
Running up to the ship, he stared into the dark space beyond. He could not find words to describe the sensation he felt: a cold, dark feeling, of loss and failure.
Before he slipped inside the shuttle, Vaughn glanced back to see a sea of several hundred anxious faces.
He thought again about the Primalists back on Earth, and the way they had tried to cast him out so long ago, but now all rotting in their worm-filled graves, sleeping the sleep of absolute death. A few had believed they could gain salvation by helping him, and his miraculous appearance to those few back on the homeworld had secured their loyalty. He could not countenance the possibility that one or more of them had now betrayed him.
The shuttle rang with hollow footsteps. Then he found three of his people standing around a single deep-sleep coffin. It was open, and empty.
As Vaughn stood there, flexing and unflexing his fingers, he reached out with his mind, looking desperately for Trencher, but it was impossible. The farseeing was . . . difficult, at times unpredictable, particularly if he couldn’t picture the place in his mind’s eye. Sam, damn him, was the only one with any real talent for that kind of thing. It didn’t seem right to be given so much by God, but to be able to use it so ineffectually . . . A low moan escaped his lips as he realized the impossible had happened.
Trencher had been on board.
But now Trencher was very, very gone.
Seventeen
Elias
It came upon Elias like a storm: like a great wind had blown up, and he himself was somehow receiving its undivided attention.
‘Elias, what’s wrong?’
‘Trencher.’ A sense of the future rushed through Elias’s mind, but it was a storm of conflicting images. He envisaged one of the aliens hefting some kind of effigy in its paws, a briefly snatched image of Vaughn in some high mountainous place, then he saw . . . an end, the void; the same one he had seen before, but this time different.
‘Trencher’s alive,’ said Elias. ‘I need to find him.’
The wagon had come to a halt, and Elias peered through the slats. They had arrived at some kind of vast encampment, and he wondered if they had been taken to one of the Kaspian cities. But he couldn’t see anything looking like solid buildings; all he did see had an air of impermanence.
Ursu
He’d found a place to stay out of sight for a few days, while he waited for a ship that could take him further north. He would head upstream, along a great river extending almost as wide as the seas further south. He’d learned that this was one of the best routes north: it meant he could cut east once he was back on dry land, thus avoiding many of the intervening mountain peaks. The worst of his journey, he suspected, was behind him.
The inhabitants of the village were barely distinguishable from the tribesfolk who had captured him soon after his flight from Nubala. But their ways seemed considerably more peaceful, thankfully.
This far north, he’d expected to be out of reach of the military forces of Xan, but even in this benighted twilight land the Emperor’s soldiers made their presence known. He understood, now, why they wanted Shecumpeh so badly – the object he had once regarded as a god.
He was surprised at how oblivious these people seemed to the military forces invading their daily lives. But in time he came to realize that they continued to lead a life otherwise undisturbed, and would likely continue so long after both he and the soldiers were gone. Like the tribesfolk who wandered the ice, they had no god jealously guarded behind city walls.
Ursu had found himself a day’s work with some fishermen who worked the river, earning him enough food to keep his hunger at bay for one night. He had woken up in darkness, to find the Shai addressing him.
He didn’t enjoy the knowledge he had been regularly given. He now realized it had not been Shecumpeh speaking to him, so long ago, in the depths below the House of Shecumpeh, but this malformed Shai, speaking through Shecumpeh, the god somehow amplifying the creature’s thoughts.
It was his role now to carry Shecumpeh back to the place from which it had been removed so long ago, from a cavern lying deep within the city of Baul.
Once he had gone upriver, the Shai had told him, he must start moving west along the coast, and then he would be able to find a path that would lead him to Baul.
Kim
She watched Elias crouching in a corner of the wagon. He was staring out through the slats, his eyes bright with the starlight.
‘I’m beginning to think we should try and make a break for it,’ Kim suggested, after a long silence. Vincent was breathing much more steadily now, but he still hadn’t woken up.
‘I’ve been watching them,’ Elias replied softly, ‘and there are always at least three of them guarding us. They’re armed.’
‘Maybe we should figure out what they’re going to do with us,’ she said. ‘We haven’t had any food in over twelve hours. We’re going to starve if this goes on.’ She showed him her precious vial. ‘These are memory Books.’
‘You need Observer bioware to use those things, surely?’ Realization dawned in his eyes even as he spoke. ‘I see’ – he hesitated – ‘you’re an Observer?’
‘I had the bioware implanted illegally. Don’t ask why, but I had my reasons.’
He looked at the vial uncertainly. She could read his mind; they didn’t look like much.
‘These contain the memories of someone I was very close to, someone who happened to be an expert on this world.’ He looked at her, surprised, and for the first time in a long while, she felt she had the upper hand.
‘So you’re saying,’ he said carefully, ‘that everything we need to know about surviving on Kasper will be in these things?’
‘There’s certainly a chance that some of it is.’ Seeing the scepticism on his face, she continued, ‘Put it this way, if what we need to know now is by any chance contained in these, I’ll need to find it soon.’
‘So were you planning on doing this sometime soon?’
‘I’m not sure if I should while we’re still here. I think it’s too dangerous. I need the right time to use the Books. If I’m distracted by other things, I won’t get the full benefit.’
Something else was happening outside. A glimpse confirmed that a dozen or more of the alien creatures were approaching, some of them carrying burning torches. For a blood-freezing moment, Kim wondered if they intended to burn the three of them alive inside the wagon.
But the vehicle shook as one side of it was lowered.
They stood up slowly, and stared down at the assemblage of heavily armed aliens standing around them, ears flicking gently against their fur-covered skulls.
The wagon was tethered to a trio of monstrous creatures, with wide mouths and slab-like teeth, their heads swaying gently back and forth in the night air.
After a few uncomfortable moments of appraising each other, there was commotion as another group appeared. Rough, sharp-clawed paws reached out and pulled them to the ground. Kim watched in alarm as some of them sniffed and prodded at Vincent’s prone form, but to her relief they decided to leave him where he was. She noticed Elias had a bright glitter in his eyes.
The clothes worn by the newly arrived group of Kaspians seemed more ornate and richly coloured, and several had jewels pinned through their ears.
Elias glanced at her. ‘Don’t suppose you speak the language?’
She stared at him for a few seconds, then realized it was a joke.
‘We couldn’t speak their language even if we tried. Our mouths are constructed differently.’
The Kaspian with the jewelled ears came closer, emitting a series of sounds like rapid clicks and multi-pitched barking.
‘It’s trying to say something to us,’ she whispered. ‘And it expects us to answer.’
Elias and Kim stared at each other for a moment before he turned back to the alien.
‘Hello,’ he attempted. This had the effect of merely producing further clicking noises all round. The Kaspian leader shook its head in a gesture, so naturally human, of resigned defeat. A reaction so familiar only accentuated the utter strangeness of the situation.
Paws tipped with long black claws reached out to tug them forward again.
They were then pushed and shoved deeper amongst the tents, to an open space surrounded by pavilions with strange, looping designs painted on them. A faint memory triggered in Kim’s mind, a memory that wasn’t even hers, but something relating to the power structure on this planet. She thought of the vial of Books in her pocket, reaching a hand in to touch them for reassurance.
In the open space lay a pile of metallic junk that inspection revealed to be interior parts of the Goblin. The jewelled Kaspian gestured first at the debris, then at Kim and Elias. They had no idea what it was asking them.
His attention drifting, Elias stared towards the distant horizon, wondering what had happened to Trencher.
Ursu
‘These creatures that live in the heart of a star,’ said Ursu, ‘what are they?’
– Not the heart of a star, the monstrous Shai spoke inside his head. – In a galaxy, a cloud of stars.
Ursu shook his head. He’d been travelling inland away from the river for several days now. Whenever he slept, he kept the Angel device well wrapped in a ragged cloth; otherwise the otherworldly blue light it radiated became too visible in the night.
