Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  Then he was gone, and it was as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Kalis persisted.

  He had been given no guidance as to what he was and was not allowed to discuss with them. ‘There’s a refuelling point somewhere ahead of us. That’s where they’re taking Swarm.’

  ‘Will we return to Spearpoint?’ Kalis asked directly.

  It was an odd question because Swarm itself had never been near Spearpoint, not since the Sundering, and even Painted Lady had not come closer than a day’s ride from the base of the structure.

  ‘If anything, Swarm will take us even further away. I don’t think they’ve got any plans to go anywhere near Spearpoint. They don’t like it very much.’

  ‘The further we go, the more ill she will become,’ Kalis said. ‘She dreams of it now. The dreams make her sick.’

  ‘You told me of bad dreams. Are these the same ones?’

  ‘She dreams of a dark tower and the Eye of God burning inside it. It draws her nearer. Only she can close the Eye. When she cannot do this, she becomes sick.’

  ‘The tower wants me to make it better,’ Nimcha said.

  Quillon took a deep breath. ‘You’re saying Spearpoint is the thing causing your bad dreams and convulsions?’

  ‘She has told you,’ Kalis said. ‘Why would you doubt her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He lowered himself into a high-backed white chair. ‘I don’t know anything any more. I accept that Nimcha has power over the zones - at least, I think I do. Does that mean I should automatically accept that the Mire - the Eye of God - has power over Nimcha? Perhaps you’re right, and I should just take this as the natural order of things. Or perhaps I’m going quietly insane.’

  ‘The zones begin and end in the Eye of God. Nimcha speaks to the zones. Therefore the Eye speaks back to Nimcha. Is this so hard to accept?’

  ‘Let’s deal with the practicalities for now. I’ve told Gambeson that the convulsions aren’t a cause for concern. But if what you tell me is correct, then my reassurance was premature. But on the other hand, I can’t exactly tell him the truth.’

  Kalis said sternly, ‘No one must know.’

  ‘You realise this puts me in a bind. Gambeson only wants to do the best for Nimcha. But he can’t be allowed to examine her too closely.’

  ‘You must keep him away,’ Kalis insisted.

  ‘There’s a limit to how long I can deflect him. If he was a poorer doctor he wouldn’t care so much.’

  ‘You must make them go back to Spearpoint,’ Nimcha said. ‘Then the dreams will end, and I won’t have the pain in my head any more.’

  ‘They won’t go back,’ Quillon said. ‘They just won’t. I’m sorry. I wish it was some other way. But you can’t grasp the amount of hatred they have for that place.’

  ‘She will get more and more ill,’ Kalis said. She left the rest unspoken, but he knew what she was implying. Nimcha could easily die if the convulsions worsened.

  ‘I don’t know what I can do. I can’t tell them why we have to return to Spearpoint, because that would mean telling them about Nimcha. And I won’t be able to talk them into it unless there’s a reason.’

  ‘What if you gave them a reason?’ Kalis asked.

  ‘Just like that? Against the grain of everything they believe in? I’m barely more than a prisoner, Kalis. They have no reason to listen to anything I say, much less to accept that we should return to Spearpoint.’

  ‘Then we must leave Swarm,’ the mother decided.

  ‘And survive out there somehow, on our own? Even if they agree to let us go? We’re thousands of leagues away from where we were picked up. It would take a year to cross all that land on foot, assuming we somehow managed not to get ourselves killed on the way. Our record’s not too good in that regard. We barely made it out of Spearpoint’s shadow!’

  ‘You will find a way,’ Kalis said, as if the mere act of commanding him was enough to make the thing possible.

  ‘I don’t think you understand the difficulties.’

  ‘You will find a way,’ she repeated. ‘And it must be soon.’

  ‘I can close the Eye of God,’ Nimcha said. ‘I can put things back the way they used to be.’

  ‘Before the storm?’ Quillon asked, half-humouring her, half-believing every word the girl said.

  ‘Not before the storm,’ Nimcha answered. ‘Before everything.’

  Ricasso, as was his usual habit at the start of their evening meetings, stood at the stateroom window, one hand behind his back and a slender-stemmed glass in the other, charged with whatever pale spirit had taken his fancy, his attention on the visible portion of the fleet. With the lowering of the sun, the envelopes, engines and gaily painted empennages of the airships turned dark, save for the illuminated parts of their gondolas. Collisions, always a liability when Swarm moved in tight formation, were now even more of a hazard. Ricasso obviously had supreme faith in his airmen. But he seemed to feel that his own vigilance was a necessary component to the enterprise, as if by watching the bobbing, shifting gondolas, he too helped to keep them from straying too close.

  ‘Night’s always been a double-edged sword,’ he said quietly, as Quillon was let into the stateroom. ‘It gives us cover from the Skullboys and other enemies. But there isn’t an airman alive who wouldn’t rather navigate by day.’

  ‘Have we far to go?’

  ‘We’ll reach the fuel tomorrow, by noon if all goes well. We’ll spend a day or two replenishing the tanks. Depending on the stocks, we’ll either suck the wells dry or leave a ship or two behind to safeguard them until we’re next in the area.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘We think about where we’re going to get our next fuel from. We can’t ever rely on one facility. That’s how it is, Doctor. It never ends.’ Ricasso turned from the window and worked the slats, closing them on the darkening view. ‘Don’t pity us; it’s what we’re used to. We wouldn’t have it any other way.’

  Quillon still knew very little about Ricasso, beyond what Curtana had told him. He didn’t seem to have a wife or partner or any immediate family. He had been a captain, like Curtana, like her father and grandfather before her. His ship, Quillon had learned, had been Cinnabar, and he was said to have flown her over the snow-cap of the Mother Goddess, higher than almost any captain had ever taken a ship before. He had gained the respect of a majority of his serving colleagues, and by dint of that had been ... ‘elected’ was probably the wrong word - put forward as Swarm’s de facto leader. It wasn’t democracy, as Curtana had already pointed out, but it was as close to it as Swarm was likely to get. Quillon had seen the show-of-flags when the decision was taken to move north, each airship dropping a string of brightly coloured banners from its gondola. The imprimatur had been near-unanimous, but that was only because there was, this time, no practical alternative. When the decision was less clear-cut, unanimity could not be counted on.

  Ricasso had been close to Curtana’s father and he clearly looked on Curtana as something more than just another captain. All the same, Quillon doubted that favouritism had played much of a role in her ascendancy. Her father’s genes might have had some bearing, but she was clearly a superb and much-admired captain in her own right, and woe betide anyone who thought otherwise. She had her differences with Ricasso - Curtana hadn’t quite concealed her exasperation at the amount of time he spent on his scholarly interests - but at the same time she left Quillon in no doubt that she considered Swarm under Ricasso to be vastly preferable to the alternative. She was a captain of a fighting ship, but she saw her duty as the protection of an essentially pacific entity, rather than being one cog in an ever-more-belligerent war machine.

  ‘All this travelling from one fuel supply to the next, though,’ Quillon said. ‘It could be considered something of a futile existence.’

  ‘You’ve distanced yourself from that remark, so I’ll take no particular umbrage with it. But is living in a city any different? Spearpoint exists only to keep
existing. A city’s only ever three hot meals away from anarchy. We’re just the same. The difference is, we get to see a bit of the world while we’re waiting.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You sound sceptical, Doctor.’ Ricasso touched a finger to his forehead, as if some revelatory insight had just struck him. ‘Doubtless you’re thinking of all the great art and music Spearpoint gives to the world, its endless cultural achievements. Things that transcend mere survival. Well, we have our own art. It might not be to your taste, but it’s still art.’

  ‘Do airships feature in much of it?’

  ‘I see you’re already acquainted. That doesn’t make it any less worthwhile, though. I’m willing to bet streets and buildings feature in quite a lot of yours.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘We make music as well. You might like some of it. Granted, living with the background noise of several thousand constantly functioning piston engines does tend to colour one’s appreciation of harmony ... I’m informed that, to the unschooled ear, our music sounds very mechanical and droning, almost like lots of engines being run at the same time.’

  Quillon smiled. He couldn’t tell if Ricasso was teasing him. ‘And our music?’

  ‘The music of Spearpoint, or the part of it you come from? I’m not sure. All I know is that the piece I once had the misfortune to hear sounded like many vehicles trying to squeeze into the same place at the same time. All frantic and cacophonic, with horns and squeals and elements that sounded like metal being scraped with sharp fingernails.’

  ‘I think I know the very piece.’

  ‘Do you care for music, Doctor?’ Ricasso had perambulated to a drinks cabinet and was in the process of preparing something for Quillon, chinking coloured bottles together like a boy with his first chemistry set.

  ‘Not really. Or rather, I was brought up with the music of the Celestial Levels, and anything else can’t help but sound rather flat and uninspired by comparison.’ He paused. ‘It was ... lovely. But I think I needed a head full of machines to get the full effect. When they took them away, they also took away a large part of my ability to appreciate music. All I really have left now is the memory of having appreciated it. Like waking from a dream filled with a sense of exultation, but being completely unable to recall exactly what it was about the dream that was so delightful.’

  Ricasso directed Quillon to take one of the lounge chairs. He passed him the drink he had just fixed, which was a chemical green colour. ‘When you’re not listening to music of unspeakable beauty, do angels ever give much thought to why they exist in the first place?’

  ‘Only angels could survive in the Celestial Levels.’

  ‘Undoubtedly the case, but not what I was asking.’ Ricasso paused to move one of the black markers on the chequerboard game that was still in progress on the table. ‘Consider this, Doctor. Could angels have come into existence in any other zone, and then colonised the Celestial Levels?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Quillon answered carefully. ‘The machines inside us couldn’t function anywhere else. That’s why they had to be removed before I could descend to Neon Heights. My body is reverting to angel physiology, but without the machines I’ll never become exactly the way I used to be.’

  ‘These machines, then. How are they made? Who designs them?’

  ‘No one. The machines make themselves. They copy and self-repair, endlessly. Angels are born exactly the same way that pre—I mean, ordinary humans are - their blood just contains machines inherited from the mother.’

  ‘So you understand the basic nature of these machines - enough to make use of them, enough to remove them without killing the host - but you couldn’t make them again if you had to?’

  Quillon had the sense that he was being steered into a trap. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘But then why would you need to? You’ve had the machines inside you for thousands of years. They haven’t let you down yet, and they probably won’t let you down in the future. But someone must have made them once.’

  ‘And I suppose there’s a passage about it in the Testament?’

  Ricasso’s smile was one of self-recognition. ‘Actually, this time there isn’t - or if there is, it’s so camouflaged with metaphor that even I haven’t teased it out. But the point still stands: angels are merely people with some highly technical modifications. They appear uniquely suited to life in the Celestial Levels, but maybe that’s just the way it looks to us now, after thousands of years. There’ll have been a degree of adaptation, to be sure, but not enough to produce creatures such as you out of wholecloth. There must have been something like angels from the very beginning, before the zones formed. Before, as the Testament informs us, the gates of paradise were closed, and the angels were effectively locked into the Celestial Levels.’

  ‘The Testament also tells us that people were once like children, and lived to be twice as old as we do now.’

  ‘I don’t claim to have fathomed all the mysteries. But I do have a theory about the angels. Once, they were very common. They may even have been the dominant form. There were two kinds of people: those who lived on the ground, who looked much like myself, and who were biologically much the way we Swarmers are now. And there were those who had augmented themselves to fly, and to make use of machines; machines that allowed them to tap into a realm of the senses mere humans will never comprehend. Perhaps it was a matter of personal choice, whether you became an angel or stayed with the old anatomy. Or perhaps choice had nothing to do with it. Perhaps it was even a punishment or penance, to be remade as ordinary men, and cast down to the ground. But one thing is clear to me. Even if the angels owned the skies, even if they dared to traverse the airless spaces above the atmosphere, most of them would not have been able to survive when the zones formed. Just as an angel could not exist here, in the zone we now inhabit, so most angels would have perished when the zones came into being. Only a few would have been fortunate enough to find themselves in a zone that could still support the kind of being they had become. And so they thrived - or at least did not die - while all the others dropped from the sky like stones. And that is why there are angels in the Celestial Levels now. Not because of some unique convergence of function and form, but because they were lucky.’

  ‘It’s a theory,’ Quillon allowed.

  ‘It’s more than that. In our travels we occasionally come into contact with surface traders who specialise in artefacts of an antiquarian nature. I have a particular fondness for old bones, as it happens. In fact I’ve made it a minor hobby of mine to collect the skeletons of fallen angels. There is no part of the Earth where they cannot be found. It’s as if they were everywhere, until the zones killed most of them.’ He paused and took a gulp from his drink. ‘I apologise if this is distasteful to you. I mean no offence. All that really interests me is the nature of our world. The angels are a part of that mystery, so I’ve naturally applied myself to the question of their origin with some considerable vigour. But I’m just as interested in the origins of Spearpoint, or Soul’s Rest, or the carnivorgs—’

  ‘I know about your interest in vorgs,’ Quillon said.

  ‘Do you, Doctor?’

  ‘I saw one of them being captured and put in a crate for you. I saw it being unloaded from Painted Lady.’

  ‘Then you know all my innermost secrets.’ Ricasso hesitated and looked at his watches. For all their animosity, Quillon reflected, the wearing of watches was at least one thing that Spearpointers and Swarmers had in common. ‘It’s not too late. Would you like to see my monsters?’

  ‘As long as they don’t try to suck my brains out.’

  ‘Very little chance of that, I assure you. They pose no danger now. I’m even hoping some small good can come of them.’

  They finished their drinks and left the stateroom. Ricasso whispered something to the guards and they were escorted away from the part of Purple Emperor Quillon had begun to become at least moderately familiar with. Ricasso bustled ahead, f
lushed with enthusiasm at the chance to show off. They descended to another level - they were surely near the bottom of the gondola now - and through a series of dark, echoey storage rooms lined with stacked towers of lashed-down crates holding—so Quillon was informed by the yellowing labels - various consumable supplies and replacement parts. Some of the crates near the back walls looked dusty and neglected, as if they hadn’t been opened in years. It was a measure of Purple Emperor’s vast size that all this dead tonnage could be tolerated, even forgotten about.

  At length they came to a room near what Quillon estimated must be somewhere near the rear of the gondola. Ricasso opened the impressively armoured door with a hefty key, and then repeated the procedure with another door just beyond the first. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t do much damage even if they did get out, but it wouldn’t reflect well on me.’

  ‘I thought you were in charge.’

  ‘I am, but there’s no shortage of dissenters who’d snatch at every chance to dethrone me.’ He affected a high, whining tone of voice. “‘Neglecting his responsibilities.” “Wasting his time with pet distractions.” “Tinkering when he should be running Swarm” - you get the idea.’ He grunted and shifted back to his normal register. ‘The fact that I’m doing all this because of Swarm escapes them entirely.’

  He led Quillon into what at first glance appeared to be a kind of airborne dungeon or torture chamber. Cages ran along one side, benches along the other, littered with all manner of tools ranging from delicate and precise to brutal and frightening. In the absence of windows the room was lit by a series of pink-tinged lanterns, suspended on chains, which were already illuminated when they entered. From somewhere came the thudding pulse of an internal-combustion engine. Above the benches, wheels and cables and shafts spun endlessly. Rubber belts transmitted this power to the waiting tools and devices.