Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  ‘Where did the three go?’

  ‘To search,’ she said.

  ‘Did you meet them again?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head and her curling, thick black hair moved like a waterfall, rippling its full length. ‘Never. They had to search until it was found. They went far beyond any place I came to. Mages tried to guide them from without, they said. I did look of course. I was lonely. But I hated it there. And I never found any trace of them. Nothing.’

  ‘You didn’t call their names?’

  Xavi shook her head. ‘When I understood that they might never find their quarry I knew I couldn’t wait. I decided I would be revenged for us all. That decision saved my sanity. And I pursued it. The rest you know.’

  Bentley nodded. ‘Do you think they may have come to the same decision?’

  ‘I suppose you think that because the mages died,’ Xaviendra said, smoothing paint flakes off her skirt. ‘No. They were bound to the duty.’

  ‘Interesting that the attacks and the sickness stopped when the three were trapped Under,’ Bentley said.

  Xaviendra frowned slightly. ‘I don’t have an explanation for you. Perhaps the Sleeper was bound to the mages and their attacks on it killed them instead. Such things are not uncommon among magekind and their creatures.’

  Bentley smiled. ‘What do you mean, creatures?’

  ‘They can make mirrors of themselves, like clones, or creatures of other dimensional natures, which are linked by sharing spirit. A mage creature has most of the powers of the master mage. A mage always has control of their creations; they have the same will. The Sleeper consumed all.’

  ‘An anti-magic?’

  ‘Something like that. A mage vampire perhaps, but without mind. Nothing they did could touch it. I believed their actions to be evil and unforgivable but at the same time I witnessed their fear. It was overwhelming. They were provoked by terror of annihilation and guilt, because if they had not opened their way to this place, they would not have attracted the creature’s attention. I did not see it myself. As I said. I saw them and what they did.’

  The recording ended. Lila opened her eyes and looked at Bentley. Quite aside from the obvious information was an implication it was impossible to ignore. Cyborgs weren’t the only ones with clones. ‘She’s been out the whole bloody time.’

  The android moved as if it sighed. ‘It is possible.’

  Lila ground her teeth. Just as it seemed there could be no more complication, one presented itself, fait accompli, right beneath her nose. ‘Where’s Sarasilien?’

  ‘I believe he is still here.’

  ‘Doing what, I wonder?’

  Bentley made an equivocal face and shrugged.

  ‘What bothers me the most about all of this is that I can’t reconcile him with this monster that history paints him as,’ Lila said. ‘I don’t know what to believe about him any more and I don’t trust him to tell the truth because he kept too much back.’

  Bentley nodded. ‘When I first decided to take this form on I thought it would liberate me from the weaker parts of my humanity. It was a sign of the war, of my loss of so much of myself, I thought. I was a walking testament to the horror of a kind of murder. I thought I’d search the Signal and find the truth there – of who I was and would have been, of what was stolen and what could have been changed without harm. But the Signal is everything, all information that could be. Yeah, the world and everything that ever happened is in it, but among all the possibilities it’s so hard to find. The past is there, and the present, and the future and all the never-was too. I thought it would have all the answers. I’d mine them out. I’d mine myself out. I’d be . . .’

  ‘Saved,’ Lila said, feeling the word as Bentley said it too.

  ‘Yeah. Knowledge would have the answers. How could it be wrong?’ Bentley laughed gently. ‘And you know what? I bet you do know . . .’

  ‘Tell me,’ Lila said.

  ‘The more I saw and looked at it from every angle, the more I saw that it was meaningless. I was trying to find the end of a story and I was looking at numbers. I was looking for the happy ending but there’s no ending except the terminal numbers and then after them an emptiness. There’s no meaning, unless I make one by the path I follow through the numbers, my pattern. That’s the sum total of everything. It is truth, but it has no meaning at all. How can that be? I wondered at it and I tried to make that into a meaning as well.’ She laughed harder this time and slapped her knee. ‘I think you are heading the same way.’

  Lila squeezed Bentley’s hand for a moment and felt an answering squeeze before they let go. For a second or two they watched Malachi and Greer shuffling around each other and the faces in the windows, anxious, pressing, wondering.

  ‘But,’ Lila said, seeing a quoit fly erratically from Malachi’s claw and hit the mark nonetheless, ‘human beings do not exist in the context of the sum total of all possibilities. They are finite and extremely particular. The world of relevance to them is small, much smaller than they like to imagine. They have no aetheric skill. They have short lives. They are primates, social, with extremely limited perception of their environment, which is nonetheless more than good enough for them to live rich, full lives, if only they are able to live in tune with their own nature. But they don’t want to recognise their nature, because it is so absolute, so definite and so inescapable. So they pretend it is something else, that they can be and do everything, anything, and that they are fit to do it. They believe that science and technology has transformed them into masters of the universe, or that surely it will in time, and think they have changed somehow from their foolish, ignorant ancestors who had nothing but sticks and stones. They think I’m different. But I’m just a woman, human, with a lot of sticks and stones to her name. Even if the sticks and stones of my body mean I will not die easily, nothing will prevent it in the end. And nothing, no matter how marvellous, and I have been and seen some marvellous things, truly, nothing will change me from my self. I am human and that is all. There can be no more for me. I know that you’re right. In the lens of everything there is no meaning I could make that is of any use or significance except that I could maybe help someone else to live a more satisfying life, but that’s a vain aspiration. The best I can do is live my own life as I feel it is best, as if it mattered more than anything because it’s all there is, even though none of it is of the slightest importance.’

  Lila grimaced. ‘Suppose the three Betrayed do come, and can’t be stopped, suppose they end the world as it is now, take their vengeance, destroy Sarasilien, break the order in which humans live and die? You know, I try to care, but I can only care for myself, and what matters to me. It really doesn’t matter what happens at all. But I can only carry on living if I feel that it does. Action is purposeless, meaningless, but it is demanded of me, because I was made this way to act, not to sit around talking and watching dead people walk and talk while others die, innocent or damned, well or badly, deserving or not.’

  ‘Another go?’ Greer looked over, held his rings out towards Lila. ‘You could play each other. Might be a bit of a long match—’

  ‘I’ll sit this one out,’ Lila called. Bentley gave him a friendly nod. He nodded back, clearly wishing he knew what they were talking about but not insisting.

  ‘There is much satisfaction in action,’ Bentley said quietly, keeping her voice low.

  ‘It’s the consolation of the weak,’ Lila said. ‘Look at Xavi. Look at Sarasilien.’

  ‘You’re very angry with him.’

  ‘Yes I am. I prefer to believe that power is given to the strong and deserving. And he spits in the face of that belief. He treads it and smashes it flat and throws it at me. I want him to be worth all that he has spent.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because then there is justice and a happy ending to be found. There’s fairness. And I don’t have to pity him and destroy him.’

  ‘Destroy?’ The whisper was so quiet nobody but Lila could have heard it
.

  ‘Surely,’ Lila said, gripping the bench with her hands, her feet tucked under it together, her face set like a little girl who has to endure being the outcast in the playground day after day. ‘But I will look very hard for any reason not to. Very hard. But it will have to be such a good reason I doubt it exists.’

  ‘Revenge?’ ventured the android curiously.

  ‘Necessity,’ Lila said.

  ‘I don’t understand. You’re not the kind of person who does that.’

  ‘Yes I am,’ Lila said. ‘I am strong and I will not let evil run wild in weak creatures to spoil the world when I see it happening and have the ability to stop it.’

  ‘Evil?’

  But Lila didn’t answer Bentley this time. Her jaw was set. She watched Greer hustling through his game and Malachi grumpily keeping pace. They were waiting for her, not the other way around. Slowly she relaxed her hands and let go of the wooden slats. She sat back and rested, turning her face towards the sun and finding a patch of warm light. It shone through her eyelids red, glowing, blood red. When she was a little girl she had found its colour and brightness so comforting, the heat and the light soothing and calming. It still had that power. In the garden the quoits thumped and the men’s voices mumbled.

  Lila leaned back and let the sun shine on her.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Zal watched the filthy black waters of Bathshebat lagoon pass under him and resisted the urge to turn and look over his shoulder but he saw it anyway in his mind – the receding shape of Lila Black, growing smaller. The only thing he didn’t see was the expression on her face. In his imagination he couldn’t get the grim resoluteness to change, or the misgiving to soften into a smile.

  The black water sparkled where it caught the nightlights of the Opera House – a building that still employed real flaming torches, enhanced to brilliant whiteness by magnesium and other elemental powders. The vast glass dome above the auditorium was glowing with colours and the rippling lights of a concert in performance and he could just hear the higher notes and feel the driving thump of the bass as they angled overhead on their turn out towards the ocean. He wished he were there instead, lost in the music.

  As it was the drake was listening in to him though it didn’t make any observation. Its wings beat at the heavy, dead air, stirring the miasma of smoke and cooking oil and spice up with the stink of the water. It was in some reverie in which its emotions ran a similar line to his own. For reasons best known to itself Unloyal had its own regrets about parting with Demonia. Years ago Zal would have solaced himself with a bottle of jack or a hit of elemental fire, but now he hadn’t even packed alcohol in his bag. He felt the strange tidal pull of the succubus charm in his blood. It beat at the walls of his heart and threatened to break it in bits, drumming love songs unrequited. The drake heard him and its amusement showed in its skin, as demonic as any native creature; flaring blue and gold.

  He touched the clone harness he wore with his fingertips, wondering how it worked and thinking he really should have asked that earlier. But at the time he had wanted to convince Lila that he was strong and fit, sure of himself, the old Zal, and he didn’t want to confess that her talk of clone material made him uneasy and sad for reasons that he didn’t fully understand and wasn’t sure that he wanted to. He thought maybe it was that he was surpassed now, and worse, that he didn’t mind.

  As the drake pounded through the night, forcing great curtains of it aside, he saw the portal point opening far ahead of them. Drakes like this made their own transit gates from world to world, limited only by their foreknowledge. He knew nothing about them. He went on trust, on a whim, on the edge of a risk he couldn’t have calculated even if he did understand it. He grabbed onto this moment with everything he was and felt the spark of an older and much more glorious feeling come to life in his chest.

  To his surprise the drake reacted to this and moved with fresh purpose towards the rapidly expanding veil. At the edges of the gap Zal felt the aetheric turbulence of a critical wave and pulled his andalune. body as closely to his core as he was able. Still the riptides of the edge dragged some of it away into their odd gravity, across other perpendicular planes and he was flayed as they passed through. Another reason not to take too many of this kind of ride, he thought, wondering how many crossings it would take to pare him away to nothing and what would happen then.

  The drake, by contrast, suffered no degradation, possibly an improvement if its shift of mood was anything to go by.

  They burst into the cooler, fresher morning skies of his home world and he looked around him for familiar landmarks eagerly and found none. The only feeling of recognition within him was the drake’s presence. It knew the place very well.

  A mountain range was spread beneath them from side to side, and to his left one of the lesser peaks bore the distinctive marks of geomantic carving. Black pits filled it like a hundred sightless eyes and here and there regular lines showed where walkways cut across the jagged, impassable cliffs from point to point. Tattered banners of purple and red hung down from several openings, their symbols of gold thread too small to see at this distance. A bitter cold wind tore across the peaks, making Zal hunch close in to the saddle although this did nothing to protect him.

  ‘Where is this?’ he spoke aloud though the words were ripped away and the drake couldn’t have heard him with its ears.

  It told him the name of a place so old that he thought it was a legend. It occurred to him that the creature could easily have moved them in time, but the drake assured him this was a perfectly concurrent reality. He supposed it didn’t matter. One place was as good as any other to start. He wished it weren’t so cold though. Fire and shadow might be his elements now, but he was elf enough to freeze his ass off, that was clear. He stuffed his hands into his armpits and hunched even lower.

  The drake banked them down, negotiating horrible shear off the cliffs with ease and took them towards the settlement, aiming for the largest of the black openings in the rock. Above them the sky was a fierce blue, the sun a dazzling glare. It felt so empty, and peculiar, a wild place – uninhabited, Zal thought, and only then realised it was because he felt no connection or answering andalune, as if everyone and everything had died.

  He pressed his lips together, biting them and narrowing his nostrils, eyes closed as they slowed and came to alight on the ledge. A sudden darkness enveloped him, and the wind’s force eased although now it sounded like a freight train all around him, booming and thundering enough to make his ears try to fold themselves closed. In the relative shelter of the hall he let his aether body reach out. He was strong and it reached far, and it found nothing to connect to.

  Gasping and holding onto the freezing saddle, his eyes open to see the world reduced to a blue archway of shocking brilliance, Zal knew two things that made no sense to him. People were there and, in the most important way, they were not there. They were alive, but to him and to the world around them they were dead. He was a jack without a port to connect to and there was no sound.

  The drake heard him perfectly and agreed. It affirmed what he already knew. Alfheim was silent. In communications terminology, it was dark. Lila had said it but he hadn’t believed she meant this. He thought she meant the elves had sealed themselves away behind a diplomatic wall, not a literal thing. What he knew of as life, as people, as Alfheim, was dead air.

  With numb hands he fumbled the saddle straps and released himself, taking more time and care climbing down from the seat than an old man descending steep stairs. When his boots touched the grooved stone his eyes had at last adjusted to the light and he saw they were in a hall that was used to flying visitors and their mounts, though it wasn’t expecting them now. Old snow had formed ice on the trash and debris of what had been awnings and furniture. Doors into the cliff were closed fast or hanging on their hinges. Nobody had been here in a long time.

  Delatra, he remembered its name as he saw its sigil on one of the banners – a silver leaf backed by
a black sun. His mother had told him about it because she was apprenticed there in her youth. It had been a seat of the highest learning, where everything most precious to the elves was taken and lovingly stored, where magic was learned, developed and coveted. The legendary status came from the fact that in the more recent years of governance Delatra had been reduced, saved from extinction at the hands of the shadow uprising only with the sacrifice of many lives. Delatra had ended the worst of the conflict, because the shadowkin had turned aside from destruction and surrendered there, on the verge of victory. The story had never made sense to him. The offered reason for the change of heart was their awe at Delatra’s grandeur and riches, its unparalleled value. Zal didn’t buy it then, and he didn’t buy it now. He was sure that there’d been a better reason, and no doubt it was one that was secret to save important heads from the block. With something like remorse he felt his long-neglected Jayon Daga agent’s wits flood back into his system full force.

  The drake chuckled in his head, a soundless mirth that was knowing and watchful at the same time.

  Zal shivered and slung his pack onto his shoulders. He instructed the drake to get out and look for other settlements or anything in the area. He would meet it here again by nightfall. As he stood staring with misgiving at the broken doorway ahead of him he felt the creature’s psychic presence increase and for the first time felt it as a predatory gaze between his shoulders, but he didn’t turn around to see what it was doing. With a scrape of claw on stone he heard it move and then an airshock hit him and knocked him forward as it took off. His misery would have been deep then but at that moment he felt the harness heating up and it was better, not by much, but better.