“Then will you be following my advice?”
He moved his hand to the escritoire, ready to eject the cartridge. “I’ll think about it.”
TWO
Aboard a lighthugger, interstellar space, 2543
The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up.
She had just boarded the elevator from the bridge, weary after eighteen hours in consultation with various simulations of once-living figures from the ship’s distant past. She had been trying to catch them out, hoping one or more of them would disclose some revealing fact about the origins of the cache. It had been gruelling work, not least because some of the older beta-level personae could not even speak modern Norte, and for some reason the software which ran them was unwilling to do any translating. Volyova had been chain-smoking for the entire session, trying to get her head around the grammatical peculiarities of middle Norte, and she was not about to stop filling her lungs now. In fact, back stiff from the nervous tension of the exchanges, she needed it more than ever. The elevator’s air-conditioning was functioning imperfectly, so it took only a few seconds for her to veil the interior with smoke.
Volyova hoisted the cuff of her fleece-lined leather jacket and spoke into the bracelet which wrapped around her bony wrist. “The Captain’s level,” she said, addressing the Nostalgia for Infinity, which would in turn assign a microscopic aspect of itself to the primitive task of controlling the elevator. A moment later, the floor plunged away.
“Do you wish musical accompaniment for this transit?”
“No, and as I’ve had to remind you on approximately one thousand previous occasions, what I wish is silence. Shut up and let me think.”
She rode the spinal trunk, the four-kilometre-long shaft which threaded the entire length of the ship. She had boarded somewhere near the nominal top of the shaft (there were only 1050 levels that she knew of) and was now descending at ten decks a second. The elevator was a glass-walled, field-suspended box, and occasionally the lining of the trackless shaft turned transparent, allowing her to judge her location without reference to the elevator’s internal map. She was descending through forests now: tiered gardens of planetary vegetation grown wild with neglect, and dying, for the UV lamps which had once supplied the forest with sunlight were mostly broken now, and no one could be bothered repairing them. Below the forests, she ghosted through the high eight hundreds; vast realms of the ship which had once been at the disposal of the crew, when the crew numbered thousands. Below 800 the elevator passed through the vast and now immobile armature which spaced the ship’s rotatable habitat and nonrotatable utility sections, and then dropped through two hundred levels of cryogenic storage bays; sufficient capacity for one hundred thousand sleepers—had there been any.
Volyova was now more than a kilometre below her starting point, but the ship’s ambient pressure remained constant, life-support one of the rare systems which still functioned as intended. Nonetheless some residual instinct told her that ears should be popping with the rush of descent.
“Atrium levels,” said the elevator, accessing a long-redundant record of the ship’s prior layout. “For your enjoyment and recreation needs.”
“Very droll.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, you’d need a pretty odd definition of recreation. Unless your idea of relaxation happened to be suiting-up in full vacuum-rated armour and dosing on a bowel-loosening regimen of anti-radiation therapies. Which doesn’t strike me as being particularly pleasurable.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Forget it,” Volyova said, sighing.
For another kilometre she passed through only sparsely pressurised districts. Volyova felt her weight lessen and knew she was passing the engines—braced beyond the hull on elegant, swept-back spars. Gape-mouthed, they sucked in tiny amounts of interstellar hydrogen and subjected the harvest to some frankly unimaginable physics. No one, not even Volyova, pretended to know how the Conjoiner engines worked. What mattered was that they functioned. What also mattered was that they gave off a steady warm glow of exotic particle radiation, and while most would have been mopped up by the ship’s hull shielding, some of it would get through. That was why the elevator sped up momentarily as it dropped past the engines, and then slowed down to its normal descent speed once it had passed out of danger.
Now she was two-thirds of the way down the ship. She knew this district better than any of the other crew members: Sajaki, Hegazi and the others seldom came down this far unless they had excellent reason. And who could blame them? The further down they went, the closer they got to the Captain. She was the only one who was not terrified by the very idea of his proximity.
No; far from fearing this realm of the ship, she had made an empire of it. At level 612 she could have disembarked, navigated to the spider-room and taken it outside the hull, where she could listen to the ghosts which haunted the spaces between the stars. Tempting—always so. But she had work to do—she was on a specific errand—and the ghosts would still be there another time. At level 500, she passed the floor which contained the gunnery, and thought of all the problems which it represented, and had to resist stopping to carry out a few new investigations. Then the gunnery was gone and she was falling through the cache chamber—one of several huge, non-pressurised inclusions within the ship.
The chamber was enormous; the best part of half a kilometre from end to end, but it was dark now and Volyova had to imagine for herself the forty things which it contained. That was never hard. While there were many unanswered questions relating to the functions and origins of the things, Volyova knew their shapes and relative positions perfectly, as if they were the carefully positioned furnishings of a blind person’s bedroom. Even in the elevator she felt she could reach out and stroke the alloy husk of the nearest of them, just to reassure herself that it was still there. She had been learning what she could of the things for most of the time since she had joined the Triumvirate, but she would not have claimed to have been at ease with any of them. She approached them with the nervousness of a new lover, knowing that the knowledge she had gleaned to date was entirely skin-deep, and that what lay below might shatter every illusion she had.
She was never entirely sorry to exit the cache.
At 450 she shot through another armature, spacing the utility section from the ship’s tapering conic tail, which extended below for another kilometre. Again a surge as the elevator rode through a rad-zone, then the beginning of prolonged deceleration which would eventually bring it to a halt. It was passing through the second set of cryogenic storage decks, two hundred and fifty levels capable of holding one hundred and twenty thousand, though of course there was currently only one sleeper, if one was so generously inclined as to describe the Captain’s state as sleep. The elevator was slowing now. Midway through the cryo levels it stopped, cordially announcing that it had reached her destination.
“Passenger cryogenic sleep level concierge,” said the elevator. “For your in-flight reefersleep requirements. Thank you for using this service.”
The door opened and she stepped across the threshold, glancing down at the converging, illuminated walls of the shaft framed by the gap. She had travelled almost the entire length of the ship (or height—it was difficult not to think of the ship as a tremendously tall building) and yet the shaft seemed to drop down to infinite depths below. The ship was so large—so stupidly large—that even its extremities beggared the mind.
“Yes, yes. Now kindly piss off.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Go away.”
Not that the elevator would, of course—at least not for any real purpose other than placating her. It had nothing else to do but wait for her. Being the sole person awake, Volyova was the only one who had any cause to use the elevators at all.
It was a long hike from the spinal shaft to the place where they kept the Captain. She could not take the most direct route either, since whole sect
ions of the ship were inaccessible, riddled with viruses which were causing widespread malfunction. Some districts were flooded with coolant, while others were infested with rogue janitor-rats. Others were patrolled by defence drogues which had gone berserk and so were best avoided, unless Volyova felt in the mood for sport. Others were filled with toxic gas, or vacuum, or too much high-rad, or were rumoured to be haunted.
Volyova did not believe in hauntings, (though of course she had her own ghosts, accessed via the spider-room), but the rest she took very seriously indeed. Some parts of the ship she would not enter unless armed. But she knew the Captain’s surroundings well enough not to take excessive precautions. It was cold, though, and she hiked up the collar of her jacket, tugged the bib of her cap tighter down, its mesh fabric crunching against her scalp stubble. She lit another cigarette, hard sucks perishing the vacuum in her head, replacing it with a frosty military alertness. Being alone suited her. She looked forward to human company, but not with any great fervour. And certainly not if that company also entailed dealing with the Nagorny situation. Perhaps when they reached the Yellowstone system she would consider locating a new Gunnery Officer.
Now, how had that worry escaped from her mental partitioning?
It was not Nagorny that concerned her now, but the Captain. And here he was, or at least the outermost extent of what he had now become. Volyova composed herself. That composure was necessary. What she had to examine always made her sick. It was worse for her than for the others; her repulsion stronger. She was brezgati; squeamish.
The miracle was that the reefersleep unit which cased Brannigan was still functional. It was a very old model, Volyova knew—sturdily built. It was still striving to hold the cells of his body in stasis, even though the shell of the reefer had ruptured in great Palaeolithic cracks, fibrous metallic growth spilling out. The growth came from within the reefer, like a fungal invasion. Whatever remained of Brannigan remained at its heart.
It was bitterly cold near the reefer, and Volyova soon found herself shivering. But there was work to do. She fished a curette from her jacket and used it to burn off slivers of the growth for analysis. Back in her lab she would attack them with various viral weapons, hoping to find one which had an edge on the growth. She knew from experience that the routine was largely futile—the growth had a fantastic capacity for corrupting the molecular tools with which she probed it. Not that there was any pressing hurry: the reefer kept Brannigan at only a few hundred millikelvin above absolute zero, and that cold did appear to offer some hindrance to the spread: On the negative side, Volyova knew that no human being had ever survived revival from such a cold, but that seemed oddly irrelevant against the Captain’s condition.
She spoke into her bracelet, voice hushed. “Open my log file on the Captain and append this entry.”
The bracelet chirped to indicate readiness.
“Third check on Captain Brannigan since my revival. Extent of spread of the…”
She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.
“… of the illness, seems unchanged since last entry. No more than a few millimetres of encroachment. Cryogenic functions are still green, miraculously. But I think we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the unit’s failure at some point in the future…” Thinking to herself, that when it did fail, if they were not speedy in transferring the Captain to a new reefer (exactly how was an unanswered question), then he would certainly be one less problem for them to worry about. His own problems would be over as well—she sincerely hoped.
She told the bracelet: “Close log file.” And then added, wishing devoutly that she had spared herself one smoke for this moment: “Warm Captain’s brain core by fifty millikelvins.”
Experience had told her that this was the minimum necessary temperature increase. Short of it, his brain would remain locked in glacial stasis. Above, the plague would begin to transform him too rapidly for her tastes.
“Captain?” she said. “Can you hear me? It’s Ilia.”
Sylveste stepped down from the crawler and walked back towards the grid. During his meeting with Calvin the wind had increased appreciably; he could feel it stinging his cheeks, the scouring dust a witch’s caress.
“I hope that little conversation was beneficial,” Pascale said, snatching away her mask to bellow into the wind. She knew all about Calvin, even though she had never spoken to him directly. “Have you agreed to see sense now?”
“Get Sluka for me.”
Ordinarily she might have rejected an order like that; now she just accepted his mood and returned to the other crawler, emerging shortly afterwards with Sluka and a handful of other workers.
“You’re ready to listen to us, I take it?” Sluka stood before him, the wind whipping a loose strand of hair across her goggles. She took periodic inhalations from her mask, cupped in one hand, while the other hand rested on her hip. “If so, I think you’ll find we can be reasonable. We all have your reputation in mind. None of us will speak of this matter once we return to Mantell. We’ll say you gave the order to withdraw once the advisory came in. The credit will be yours.”
“And you think any of that matters in the long term?”
Sluka snarled: “What’s so damned important about one obelisk? For that matter, what’s so damned important about the Amarantin?”
“You never really saw the big picture, did you?”
Discreetly—but not so discreetly that he missed her doing it—Pascale had begun taping the exchange, standing to one side with her compad’s detachable camera in one hand. “Some people might say there never was one to see,” Sluka said. “That you inflated the significance of the Amarantin just to keep the archaeologists in business.”
“You’d say that, wouldn’t you, Sluka? But then again, you were never exactly one of us to begin with.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that if Girardieau had wanted to plant a dissenter in our midst, you’d have made an excellent candidate.”
Sluka turned back to what Sylveste was increasingly thinking of as her mob. “Listen to the poor bastard—sinking into conspiracy theories already. Now we’re getting a taste of what the rest of the colony has seen for years.” Then her attention snapped back to him. “There’s no point talking to you. We’re leaving as soon as we have the equipment packed—sooner, if the storm intensifies. You can come with us.” She caught her breath from the mask, colour returning to her cheeks. “Or you can take your chances out here. The choice is entirely yours.”
He looked beyond her, to the mob. “Go on, then. Leave. Don’t allow anything as trivial as loyalty to get in your way. Unless one of you has the guts to stay here and finish the job they came to do.” He looked from face to face, meeting only awkwardly averted gazes. He barely knew any of their names. He recognised them, but only from recent experience; certainly none of them had come on the ship from Yellowstone; certainly none had known anything other than Resurgam, with its handful of human settlements strewn like a few rubies across otherwise total desolation. To them he must have seemed monstrously atavistic.
“Sir,” one of them said—possibly the one who had first alerted him to the storm. “Sir; it’s not that we don’t respect you. But we have to think of ourselves as well. Can’t you understand that? Whatever’s buried here, it isn’t worth this risk.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Sylveste said. “It’s worth more risk than you can possibly imagine. Don’t you understand? The Event didn’t happen to the Amarantin. They caused it. They made it happen.”
Sluka shook her head slowly. “They made their sun flare up? Is that what you actually believe?”
“In a word, yes,”
“Then you’re a lot further gone than I feared.” Sluka turned her back to him to address her mob. “Power up the crawlers. We’re leaving now.�
�
“What about the equipment?” Sylveste said.
“It can stay here and rust for all I care.” The mob began to disperse towards the two hulking machines.
“Wait!” Sylveste shouted. “Listen to me! You only need to take one crawler—there’s enough room for all of you in one, if you leave the equipment behind.”
Sluka faced him again. “And you?”
“I’ll stay here—finish the work myself, along with anyone else who wants to stay.”
She shook her head, snatching off her mask to spit on the ground in disgust. But when she left, she caught up with the rest of her brigade and directed them towards the nearest crawler, leaving the other—the one containing his stateroom—for him alone. Sluka’s mob entered the machine, some of them carrying small items of equipment or boxed artefacts and bones recovered from the dig: scholarly instincts prevailing even in rebellion. He watched the crawler’s ramps and hatches fold shut, then the machine rose on its legs, shuffled around and moved away from the dig. In less than a minute it had passed out of view completely, and the noise of its engines was no longer audible above the roar of the wind.
He looked around to see who was still with him.
There was Pascale—but that was almost inevitable; he suspected she would dog him to his grave if there was a good story in it. A handful of students who had resisted Sluka; ashamedly he could not place their names. Perhaps half a dozen more still down in the Wheeler grid, if he was lucky.
Composing himself, he snapped his fingers towards two of those who had stayed. “Start dismantling the imaging gravitometers; we won’t need them again.” He addressed another pair. “Begin at the back of the grid and start collecting all the tools left behind by Sluka’s deserters, together with field notes and any boxed artefacts. When you’re done, you can meet me at the base of the large pit.”
“What are you planning now?” Pascale said, turning off her camera and allowing it to whisk back into her compad.
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