Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  Quillon coughed lightly. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Twenty-two ships have just pulled away from Swarm and started making their way back west. Do you want to know why?’

  He moved to the window next to her and peered through the glass. There was an instant when the landscape did not look any different from the day before, when he feared that Curtana and her crew were seeing mirages. Then his eyes began to pick out what the Swarmers had already seen.

  Wrecked machines everywhere.

  Little silver and white blemishes on the ground, like the discarded tinsel-foil litter of the Gods. He took in dozens, and then hundreds, of the smashed things. There was hardly a square league that did not contain some piece of broken machinery.

  ‘I see,’ he said, the closest he could come to a useful observation.

  ‘They weren’t there when we lost sight of the ground last night,’ Curtana said. ‘But since sunup, we’ve flown over thousands of the things, and they’re everywhere, in all directions as far as we can see.’

  ‘Are we running slow because of a fault?’

  ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with the ship. We’re just trying to assess what it means and confer with Swarm - what’s left of Swarm - about how we respond. According to the flanking airships, the wrecks go all the way to the horizon. This isn’t something we can steer around.’

  ‘I suppose it isn’t something you can hide from Swarm either.’

  ‘No,’ she said on a falling note. ‘Everyone knows now. That’s why the dissidents have decided to cut their losses. They don’t like the omens.’ Curtana grimaced. ‘For once, I can’t blame them - it’s not an encouraging sight, is it?’

  ‘Whatever happened to these machines, there’s no reason to think it’s going to happen to us.’

  ‘No, and just because you find a skull nailed to a tree, it doesn’t mean you’re entering a really bad part of the woods. But still.’

  Quillon took in more of the slowly passing scene, awed by the scale of the destruction. ‘So many of them,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to credit. Do you think they’re all from the same civilisation?’

  ‘Fair bet. They look basically similar to the one we found yesterday. Maybe a few details changed here and there, but clearly made by the same culture. And now that we’ve surveyed a large number of the wrecks, for the most part they’re pointing in roughly the same direction.’

  Quillon had already noticed as much. ‘Back the way we’ve come - implying that they flew here from somewhere ahead of us.’ As he spoke he found himself glancing at the mountain, the one that Meroka was peering at through the binoculars.

  ‘Right, and there seem to be more of them the further we go. I guess only a few made it as far as the one we saw yesterday.’ Curtana hesitated. ‘Here’s the hard part. We’ve seen bodies as well. Pilots who survived the crash, crawled out of the wreckage and died soon after. I was expecting skeletons, but they look like they only just died.’

  ‘Nothing decays out here,’ Quillon said. ‘If a body fell in the right position, sheltered from winds, a corpse could last a long time.’

  ‘I think that’s what really pushed those twenty-two captains to leave, not the wrecks.’

  ‘Is that the end of it? Has everyone left who isn’t absolutely behind Ricasso?’

  ‘He hopes do. But morale’s somewhat fragile.’

  ‘Perhaps the citizens would feel a little more reassured if they knew that those pilots could have been here for thousands of years. I could make a statement—’

  ‘We’ve already circulated one. Problem is, there’s a limit to how much rational argument people will swallow when they’re flying over a desert littered with incorrupted corpses.’

  ‘Understandable.’

  After a while she said, ‘Do you think they were suicide pilots?’

  ‘I sincerely hope not.’

  ‘So do I. But I keep wondering, how much chance of success did these bastards really think they had? And what kind of desperation made them strap themselves into those machines? Do you think they even knew where the Bane ended?’

  ‘We may never know.’

  ‘I guess they didn’t all die at the same time. Some of them outlasted their machines by a little while, and some of them were probably already dead by the time the aircraft stopped working. I suppose they were the lucky ones. At least they didn’t have to crawl outside and die, knowing there was no chance of rescue.’

  ‘Perhaps they had suicide pills, to ease the suffering in the event of a crash. Perhaps some of them even made it out of the Bane, into habitable territory.’

  ‘And were then captured and tortured by the nearest bunch of pre-technological dirt-rats. Sorry. I am trying to look on the bright side here, honestly.’

  ‘If it happened thousands of years ago, our history books won’t have recorded it. But we can’t always assume the worst.’

  ‘There you go with that optimism thing again.’

  After a few moments Quillon asked, ‘What does Ricasso make of all this?’

  ‘Whatever he knew in advance, I don’t think he was expecting anything on this scale. But it’s either turn around and follow the others, or keep going. And I know what my father would have done.’

  By noon, the density of crashed machines had doubled compared to his first sighting. Aside from the occasional wreck that must have been a more advanced craft that had fallen short, these vessels were visibly less sophisticated than the ones they had overflown earlier. Bright, stainless metal was now replaced by tarnished and rusting panelling, with the occasional dab of faded and flaking paint. The craft were clumsier looking, insofar as it was possible to judge from their smashed ruins.

  ‘While you were asleep,’ Curtana said when she joined Quillon on the observation balcony, ‘a boat caught up with us and ferried the unexposed plates back to Purple Emperor. Ricasso’s been looking at the images all morning. According to the latest flash, he’s pretty confident that the first machine we saw was a rocket, rather than an air-breathing machine. Probably liquid-fuelled, semi-ballistic, like a missile with a pilot strapped in. Once his motor burned out, he’d have been hoping to glide all the way to safety.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Ricasso doesn’t need us to send photographs back to him - he can just look out of the window. He reckons these were mostly powered by jet turbines - you can sometimes see the intakes where the air gets sucked in for combustion. Making jets work obviously wasn’t a problem for these people. And after they’d developed jets, they moved on to rockets, which are even tougher to build. You need high-speed pumps, sophisticated metallurgy, cryogenic cooling systems, automated control systems ... all way beyond anything we can get to work.’

  ‘And you’re confident all these machines originated from the same people?’

  ‘I’d say so. Whenever we’ve seen any markings, it’s always the same basic symbol - a red rectangle with some stars in it - and the same kind of lettering. The symbol varies in design - as if we’re seeing different iterations of it - but it’s always the same basic form.’

  ‘And the language - is it something you’re familiar with?’

  ‘No, it’s like nothing in the books. Which makes sense, if these people have been cut off for as long as we think. There’s no reason why we should expect to understand them.’

  ‘I wonder how long they kept trying to break out,’ Quillon said.

  ‘Hold that thought. I suspect we’re going to find out whether we like it or not.’

  Hour by hour, the picture underneath underwent subtle changes. The density of fallen machines rose and fell in slow waves, implying periods of intense, industrialised escape activity, followed by fallow times when the effort was less concentrated. The jet aircraft became increasingly basic, until they gave way to propeller-driven machines of a design and sophistication that would not have been out of place in Swarm. By turns, even these sleek monoplanes, with their enclosed cockpits and retractable undercarriages, gave way to ungainly bip
lanes and triplanes, fashioned (insofar as it could be judged) as much from wood and fabric as from metal. Eventually even these carcasses gave way to the huge, proud-boned remains of ancient airships, lying on the ground where they had fallen.

  That was when Meroka said, ‘There’s something you all need to know.’

  ‘What is it?’ Curtana asked.

  ‘That mountain ahead of us ... well, it ain’t no mountain.’ She paused and swallowed hard. ‘It looks a fuck of a lot like Spearpoint to me.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Between Swarm and the mountain lay a tremendous wall. Quillon realised that it was the thing he had mistaken for atmospheric haze when looking at the mountain earlier. It cut across the landscape like a knife slash. As the telescopes were trained on it, the line revealed itself to be an obviously man-made structure, punctuated at regular intervals by towers and fortified gates, its heights gleaming like polished ivory, its lower flanks lost under wind-blown mounds of dirt and dust. Here and there the structure was riven by vast cracks, or punctured by the scorched craters of what must have been ferocious lightning bolts. But it had endured.

  It was tall: two or three hundred spans, at the very least, and taller again where the towers and battlements rose. It spanned the horizon to the limits of visibility, blocking their way - symbolically, at least - for hundreds of leagues in either direction, perhaps further.

  But the wall was not the most awesome thing, nor even the second. The second most awesome thing was a wreck. It had crashed down onto the wall five or six leagues to port, sagging broken-spined with one half on the nearside and the other half on the far side, like a colossal maggot trying to wriggle over an obstacle. It was not an airship. It had never been an airship. The wreck’s shape echoed an airship’s envelope, but there the similarity ended. It was much too large, to begin with: easily a league from one end to the other, and perhaps a tenth of a league in height. It had no gondola or engines or empennage. It had ruptured as it crashed onto the wall, its upper surface zipping open like an overcooked sausage. The skin was weathered white, offset by the faded remnants of orange or red markings: oblique slashes and hyphens, chains of angular hieroglyphics, tiny pinprick dots of windows laid out in lines at all angles, rather than merely parallel to the ground. There were bulges and protuberances at various points along the bent hull, antenna-like spines or probes thrusting forwards (or back - it was impossible to tell which way the ship had been flying before it crashed). Unlike an airship, this vessel’s interior was definitely not hollow. It was full of tight-packed machinery, broken and bent but still otherwise much as it would have been when the ship crashed. It glinted with absurd, festering detail, like a cliff seen through binoculars. The ship managed to convey both overwhelming scale and immense, cunning miniaturisation, almost as if, somehow, it should have been even huger.

  ‘No one made that,’ Curtana said, breaking the awed silence. ‘No one could ever have made that. It’s just too ... just too ...’ She trailed off, shaking her head in frustration.

  ‘I imagine Ricasso has a theory or two,’ Quillon said. ‘He thinks we used to be able to travel through the void above the atmosphere, from world to world. I suspect that may be one of his void-crossers. A ship of space.’

  ‘Ordinarily I’d laugh at something like that,’ Curtana said.

  ‘But not today.’

  ‘We couldn’t even fake something like that. And that’s not a fake. That’s something that used to be in the air, flying around.’

  ‘The technology is way beyond anything we’ve seen so far - the rockets, the aircraft. Do you think it came later, or before?’ Agraffe asked.

  ‘That’s one for Ricasso to figure out, not me,’ Curtana replied.

  The void-crosser had crushed part of the wall beneath it, but not demolished it completely. Painted Lady hovered now, her guns pointed with timid ineffectualness at the forbidding structure. Curtana flashed Ricasso and waited for his answer. This time his response did not arrive immediately. There was time for Swarm to move close enough to view the wall for itself; time for Ricasso to digest the significance of the wreck, the wall, the looming, paradoxical thing beyond the wall, and consider the combined ramifications.

  Then an answer flashed back from Purple Emperor.

  ‘We continue,’ Curtana muttered, reading the transmission when it was handed to her by the signals officer. ‘As if there was ever any doubt.’ She grabbed the speaking tube. ‘Engines to cruise power - trim for five hundred spans. I want a close look as we go over the top. Machine-gunners are authorised to fire at will if necessary, using short controlled bursts.’

  The intervening terrain was as littered with machines as the desolate leagues that had preceded it. Few winged aircraft now, save for a handful that must have come down short, but numberless smashed and skeletal airships, many balloons, their ruined envelopes lying across the ground like the flattened bodies of beached jellyfish. Closer in - within the last few leagues - there were wheeled machines that had clearly never been meant to fly: huge, ponderous contraptions like moving statuary or siege engines, some of the larger ones with metal smokestacks jutting from their backs like the defensive spines of ancient lizards. Some of them appeared to be made entirely of wood, right down to their huge spokeless wheels. One even had the remains of sails and rigging rising from its back, with tiny pale corpses lying amongst the collapsed ropes and shattered timbers. Had they seriously meant to sail their way beyond the wall? Quillon wondered. Perhaps from the vantage point of the wall, there appeared to be a navigable path, a ready-made road that would take them over the horizon when the winds were in their favour. But that would have been a treacherous lie. Those men had effectively been dead the moment they passed beyond the wall, or whatever earlier structure existed at the time they had begun their doomed journey. The wall as it now stood - damage and all - was surely the work of a mature society, the kind that could build flying machines. The wind-powered land-yachts belonged to a more rustic culture, one that crafted objects from wood and canvas and crudely fashioned iron. It was easy to imagine that a thousand years separated the balloons from the rockets. Maybe more than that.

  And always, always, that red rectangle of which Curtana had spoken. Five stars in the corner - one large, four smaller. All the smashed machines carried some form of it, if they carried any symbology at all. The sole exception was the void-crosser.

  Quillon didn’t want to think about how much time separated that cloud-sized argosy from everything else. Perhaps it - and the wall - were the oldest things of all. Save, of course, for Spearpoint.

  It wasn’t, as they had quickly realised, their Spearpoint - but in all other respects it was clearly the same type of structure. It rammed out of the ground, a slowly narrowing helical spike, tapering to perhaps half a league across at the point where it ended, its soaring rise abruptly terminated six leagues from the ground. Their Spearpoint went on upwards, narrowing to the merest sliver as it daggered out of the atmosphere above the Celestial Levels. This one just stopped. It was a flinty black in colour, and nowhere on it, save for the very lowest part, was there any indication that people had ever called it home. No city-districts winding their way up the spiral ledge, no empty buildings, disused roads, commuter lines, elevators and funicular tracks. It was Spearpoint lopped off at the top and scoured back to its skin.

  ‘Ricasso knew about this,’ Curtana said in a barely audible mutter. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise. He knew there was something here, something he was interested in. Must have been a clue on one of those old charts of his.’ In an even softer hiss she added, ‘The lying bastard.’

  ‘He was still right to push for crossing the Bane,’ Quillon said.

  ‘He’s still got some explaining to do. Now I know why he got over the smashing of his laboratory so easily. He knew this was coming up as a consolation prize.’

  Painted Lady climbed to five hundred spans. Curtana aimed her over the flat-topped section of wall between two of t
he towers, while the other ships hung astern to watch what happened.

  As the airship neared the great structure, so the wall’s immense size and age impressed themselves upon Quillon with renewed and demoralising force. Had this not been deep inside the Bane, he was certain that vegetation would have smothered the edifice from its ramparts to the tops of its towers, reducing it to little more than a peculiarly regular green ridge, thrusting up from jungle canopy. But here nothing, not even the lowliest weed, had been able to endure. Yet the wall was still subject to the weather, and countless storms must have dashed against those white cliffs over the centuries and millennia. They’d had almost no measurable effect.

  At last the top of the wall was directly under them. It was twenty spans across, room enough for garrisons and weaponry, but the fortifications he had noted earlier were clearly ornamental. The walls curved away in a gentle arc to either horizon. If the ends joined up, Curtana said, it could easily be a hundred leagues from side to side.

  The inner face of the wall fell in steps rather than a single smooth descent. Connecting the ledges was a complex arrangement of ramps and stairways, some clearly grafted on to the worn remnants of older constructions. Plain white buildings crowded the lower ledges, tall houses and tenements piled in leaning, haphazard ranks like books in an untidy library. Again, it was clear that many phases of building and renewal had occurred. There were structures on the ground, but they were grouped into distinct communities with tracts of open space between them, rather than a single vast city pressing against the wall. Quillon made out the pale scratches of arrow-straight roads threading from one village or hamlet to the next. Many of them radiated out from the base of the broken Spearpoint, echoing the semaphore lines of Quillon’s home. Perhaps these roads and towns had once been set amongst trees and grassland, rather than the dusty rock and dirt that now surrounded them.