Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  Part of its frontage moved. Pieces of articulated machinery hinged away from the lamp-dotted edifice, unfolding and elongating into a kind of mechanical trunk. The trunk swung through the air, lashing over their heads. Quillon couldn’t help but flinch. It was easily powerful enough to crush them all with a single flick.

  But Juggernaut was more interested in Fray’s offering. The trunk curled around the spinguns. It lifted them into the air as if they were twigs, then folded back into the main mass. Just before the arm vanished back into the robot, Quillon saw pieces of the frontage maw widen, opening an impromptu mouth into glowing, red-lit mechanical innards. It was like the inside of a furnace or foundry. The spinguns had been consumed.

  Clattering sounds ensued. Then Juggernaut quietened again. ‘Welcome, Fray,’ it said. ‘Welcome, Meroka. Welcome, companions of Fray and Meroka.’

  Inasmuch as Quillon had been expecting the Mad Machine to speak at all, it was not with this voice. This was polite, dignified, almost ceremonial. It was just barely louder than if there had been someone standing there addressing them. It was the voice of a slightly disciplinarian but basically kind-hearted schoolmistress, not a machine as large as a building.

  ‘I’ll bring more next time,’ Fray said. ‘This is all we had on us. I’m afraid we weren’t planning on this visit right now.’

  The machine cogitated. It clattered and hummed. ‘This will suffice, Fray. You have been generous in the past: You will be generous in the future.’ It said this with flat assurance, as if it either had a complete grasp of human nature, of Fray, of future events, or all three.

  ‘We need your help,’ Meroka said, electing to speak for the first time. Quillon heard a quiver in her voice that was entirely new to him.

  The lamps swivelled en masse to focus on Meroka. ‘What is the nature of the difficulty?’ Juggernaut asked.

  ‘It’s not so much a difficulty, as ...’ Meroka faltered. ‘We brought this girl with us. She needs to get somewhere. We thought maybe you could help us with that.’

  ‘Where does she need to go?’

  ‘We don’t know. Near the Mire, maybe. Or not. Just somewhere she can act, or do whatever it is Spearpoint wants her to do.’

  ‘I do not understand you.’

  ‘Show them your head,’ Meroka said. ‘Maybe it’ll help.’

  Nimcha hesitated at first, then took a brave step away from Kalis. She walked into the glare of the machine, the lamps angling onto her, turning her into a silhouette with multiple shadows. She stood resolute, with her arms at her sides. Then she turned slowly around and presented the back of her head for Juggernaut’s inspection.

  ‘She’s the genuine article,’ Fray said, glancing back at Quillon as if to say he sincerely hoped this was the case.

  ‘I have been instructed to act on this symbol. She will come with me, to the other machines. They will know what to do.’

  And even as it spoke, Juggernaut folded out its arm again, the configuration not quite the same this time, as if the jumbled components had locked together in a different permutation. The arm ended in a flattened, paddle-shaped platform, which it placed on the ground just in front of Nimcha. ‘Step on,’ the machine commanded, not without kindness.

  ‘No,’ Kalis said, taking a step towards her daughter.

  Quillon reached out and took her arm. ‘We brought her this far because she was dying, Kalis. If she doesn’t complete this journey, she’ll only get worse.’

  ‘This is what must be done,’ Juggernaut said. ‘She must be taken.’

  ‘Taken where?’ Kalis cut in, her own voice higher and louder than Juggernaut’s.

  ‘To the others,’ the machine replied.

  Nimcha looked back, torn between the opposing poles of Juggernaut and Kalis. On some level, Quillon was certain, she felt compelled to go where the machine wanted her to. The thing in her head - the thing that had expressed itself via the birthmark, and which had given her the link to Spearpoint - was urging her to take that final step. On another, she was just a girl on the point of being wrenched away from the mother who had nurtured and protected her all her life. He could almost feel the psychic strain of that conflict, threatening to snap her in two.

  ‘We have to go with her,’ he said, his own voice coming from somewhere inside him that he barely knew existed. ‘Is that possible, Juggernaut? Can you take us with her?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re getting into,’ Fray said warningly.

  ‘I know,’ Quillon replied. ‘Trust me on this.’

  ‘I will not leave her,’ Kalis said. ‘I will do all that I can to see her healed, but I will not leave her.’

  Juggernaut clanked and clattered and hummed. ‘You may come,’ it said finally, as if the matter had been given due process. ‘Those who wish to.’

  ‘I will not leave my daughter,’ Kalis said.

  Quillon nodded. ‘And I won’t leave my patients. I can’t say I’ve been much use to either of you, but I am still your doctor. Will you let me come with you, Kalis?’

  ‘Why do you ask me, and not the machine?’ she asked, taken aback.

  ‘Because you also have a say in this.’

  She looked at him for lingering moments, then nodded slightly. ‘If you will, Quillon.’

  ‘Sign me up as well,’ Meroka said.

  ‘No,’ Quillon said sharply. ‘You’ve done enough for all of us, Meroka. You don’t have to come any further. There’s nothing left to prove.’

  ‘It was never about proving anything, Cutter.’

  ‘My point still stands. I don’t know where we’re being taken, or what’s in store for us when we get there. If we’re being taken anywhere near the Mire, then the zone transitions are going to be rapid, severe and essentially unpredictable. Nimcha and Kalis have natural tolerance. I have the tolerance the angels gave me, before they sent me down to Neon Heights. It’s still going to be difficult for us, and you don’t have either of these advantages.’

  ‘Cutter’s right,’ Fray said, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘Anyway, your talents would be better put to use elsewhere. You can be sure Tulwar’s in the tunnels by now, and he’ll have the usual entrances and exits covered. But of course, those aren’t the only ways in and out. You, um, didn’t tell him about the other routes, did you?’

  Meroka glared at him.

  ‘No, of course you didn’t,’ Fray said hastily. ‘Point is, they don’t know about the other bolt-hole. Take Malkin there and tool up. There are more spinguns and ammunition and enough supplies to hold out there for a few days if you need to.’

  ‘Purple Emperor and the rest of the fleet still think Tulwar’s the man to deal with,’ Quillon said. ‘Someone needs to get word to them, without Tulwar finding out.’

  ‘We could always burn down the bathhouse,’ Malkin said.

  ‘Curtana and Agraffe are friends of ours from Swarm, and they’re currently recuperating in the bathhouse. We don’t want them or any other innocent people caught up in this. But the head needs decapitating. Ricasso and the others must be warned that this isn’t a man they can trust. If they can get enough airmen down to take control of the bathhouse ...’ Quillon trailed off, trusting he could leave the details to someone better equipped to furnish them. ‘We need to get someone to the bathhouse if we can. Or at the very least flash a heliograph message to the other ships.’

  ‘Shaving mirror in the other bolt-hole,’ Fray said, rubbing his stubble-free chin. ‘Good job I care about appearances. They’re coming in from the west, right?’

  Quillon nodded. ‘If the wind holds.’

  ‘Use the exit by the old Second District Gas and Electric substation. That’ll put you within range of the bathhouse, and you should have no problem getting a line of sight from anywhere in that district.’

  ‘Tulwar never mentioned that entrance,’ Quillon said.

  ‘Because Tulwar doesn’t know about it. You think I wanted my lieutenants to know everything, Cutter?’

  ‘Hope one of you knows
how to signal those ships,’ Malkin said, ‘because I figure I must have skipped school the day they taught about heliographs.’

  ‘Yeah, well I didn’t,’ Meroka said. ‘Not saying I’ll be as fast as a Swarmer, or that I won’t make a few screw-ups, but I should be able to get something through.’

  Fray looked impressed and proud at the same time. ‘Really?’

  ‘That time on the blimps wasn’t completely wasted, you know.’

  ‘You never fail to surprise me,’ Fray said.

  Juggernaut clattered and hummed. There was an edge of brooding impatience in the sounds it made.

  ‘I think we’d better be on our way,’ Quillon said. He turned to the machine. ‘How do we ... travel with you, Juggernaut? If that isn’t a stupid question?’

  ‘I shall provide for your comfort and safety. The journey will not be long, but we will be passing through a number of change-boundaries.’

  ‘The vectors must all be towards higher-state zones, or you wouldn’t be able to function there,’ Quillon surmised. ‘This zone is probably the lowest state you can endure.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I think we’ll be back,’ Quillon said slowly, ‘but I’m not sure. We shouldn’t take anything as a given. Meroka ... I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye. We’ve both kept things from each other, me particularly.’

  ‘There were reasons for that, Cutter,’ Fray said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Meroka. ‘Cutter and me ... we’re good. He got Swarm to come back here and ... that wasn’t nothing. Can’t say I’m ever going to be the angels’ number-one fan but they’re not all bad. Some of them have even got the balls to do the right thing, when it needs doing.’

  ‘High praise,’ Fray told Quillon. ‘I’d quit while you were ahead, if I were you.’

  ‘Are you going, Meroka?’ asked Nimcha.

  ‘Can’t come any further, girl. Someone needs to get that message to Swarm, and I don’t think we want to trust it to Malkin.’ Meroka reached out and took Nimcha’s hands. Meroka was a small woman but her hands were still much larger and more grown-up than Nimcha’s. She squeezed them gently. ‘You’re going to start being well again, kid. This is what this has all been about.’

  ‘Thank you for reading to me.’

  ‘Did you like the stories?’

  Nimcha did something which, until then, Quillon would not have said she was capable of. She smiled. It was a hesitant, gap-toothed smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Meroka gave a big grin in return, the two of them sharing a joke. ‘They sucked, didn’t they? All that airship stuff?’

  ‘They sucked,’ Nimcha agreed, sounding, for a moment, like nothing so much as a smaller, feistier version of Meroka.

  ‘Thank you,’ Kalis told her. ‘You have been kind to us. You did not have to be.’

  ‘Thank Cutter. He was the one overruled me when it came to rescuing you.’

  ‘I thank you both.’

  ‘And now,’ Quillon said, ‘I really do think we need to be on our way. We don’t want to test Juggernaut’s patience indefinitely.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The machine took them. It folded out parts of itself to make platforms they could stand on, like the running boards of limousines. Quillon and Fray, Nimcha and Kalis climbed aboard, the four of them holding on to the ragged metal side of Juggernaut and each other as the machine rumbled and cranked itself into something approximating uniform motion. It felt as if they were riding an accelerating avalanche. Beneath their feet, huge chunks of Juggernaut detached from the main mass and moved up, down, backwards and forwards, no part of it appearing to be in any way coordinated with the next, but the whole somehow conspiring to make the machine move along, as if it was on wheels or tracks.

  They moved along tunnels wide enough to take not just trains, but perhaps an airship or two. The slope steepened, climbing and diving, until at times they were travelling down shafts that were practically vertical. Juggernaut protected its human cargo, constantly rearranging its tumbling, shifting, chaotic form so that they were always kept upright and out of harm’s way.

  The boundaries came hard, like a series of waves breaking one after the other. Quillon compensated as best as he could, dispensing Morphax- 55 from his medical bag even as the effects intensified and impaired his own ability to think clearly. This was testing the limits of his own tolerance, just as surely as it was testing the limits of Nimcha and Kalis’s. As for Fray, he didn’t want to think what this was doing to the already damaged, decaying infrastructure of his nervous system. Fray, though, was surely aware of that as well. Quillon just hoped that the massive dose of antizonal medicine Fray was now receiving would be sufficient to keep him going for a little while, even at the expense of his longer-term health.

  But for all that, the journey was still astonishing. They were moving through regions of Spearpoint that had hardly been witnessed by human eyes in thousands of years. Certainly, he suspected, by very few people who had ever had the chance to report back on what they had seen. At one point the wide shaft down which Juggernaut was passing became transparent on one convexly curved side, and he realised - or guessed - that they were looking into Spearpoint’s central shaft, akin to the one that he and Ricasso had looked down into from Painted Lady’s spotter balloon. Then that passed and the tunnel was windowless again, and the zone changes continued, each more abrupt than the last.

  But then there came a point when he felt the change-vector shift in the opposite direction, and suddenly they were passing back into lower-state zones, the symptoms easing, though never quite fading completely. When Juggernaut eventually brought them to a halt, he judged that they had returned to conditions not radically different from those in the vault where Juggernaut had first appeared. The effects of all the boundaries they had passed through could not be shrugged off, nor was it possible to ignore the levels of Morphax-55 they had all been forced to consume. But for now this was a kind of respite, and he sensed all of them welcoming it.

  It was another vault, at least as big, if not bigger, than the first. But this one was illuminated from the start, so he had no difficulty in surveying their surroundings. Juggernaut lowered them almost to the ground and they stepped off, all save Nimcha, who was helped down by her mother. Juggernaut’s clattering and humming was but one component in a louder chorus now, for there were other machines present, about a dozen of them.

  They were all similar to Juggernaut, in that they appeared to be composed largely of junk and mechanical detritus, scavenged and refashioned into enormous, jumbled components. Six or seven were roughly Juggernaut’s size and shape, but the others were larger, and one was larger still, twice as tall and wide and long as any of the others. By the manner in which the other machines were situated around this one, Quillon couldn’t help but think of it as their leader, or at the very least the one that was owed the most respect. Juggernaut, indeed, shuffled and clattered to one side as soon as the humans had disembarked. And then the large one spoke.

  ‘Bring her.’

  The voice was louder, more commanding than Juggernaut’s. It was female, but with a markedly different timbre and inflection. And as the machine spoke, the jumbled elements of its front moved in such a way as to suggest, between moments of shifting chaos, a woman’s face.

  ‘Do you know this one?’ Quillon whispered.

  ‘New to me, Cutter,’ Fray said. ‘Never been this deep before.’ He was trembling badly, a line of sweat on his forehead, having to lean with one hand on his knee to support himself.

  ‘Bring her!’ the machine commanded again, this time with more emphasis.

  Nimcha and Kalis stood hand in hand. Fray shuffled in front of them, still stooping, until he stood before the great, shifting face of the largest machine.

  ‘We’ll bring her if we feel like it. First it might help if we knew who - what - we’re dealing with.’

  A volcanic rumble emanated from the machine, as of
terrible potent fury welling up from within. It sounded angry enough to smite them all to bloody pulp in an instant. But - Quillon tried to tell himself - the sound might have been no more than the audible correlate of powerful mentation going on inside.

  ‘I am ... the final one,’ the machine announced.

  ‘The final what?’ Fray persisted. ‘Help us out here, please.’

  The face broke apart. It quelled its shifting and cracked open along fracture lines, peeling wide like a flower, exposing part of the machine’s glowing red core. Quillon was reminded of Juggernaut’s mouth, the furnace into which Fray’s offering had been placed. This was not quite the same, however. There was something in there. It resembled, at first glance, an elaborate wheel-shaped sculpture, tipped up to face them. At the hub of the sculpture was a glass sarcophagus, and inside the sarcophagus, though barely discernible behind a layer of frost, lay an adult human figure, a bald, white-gowned woman, orientated with her head uppermost. The woman’s eyes were closed, her arms folded in front of her so that they crossed at the wrists, the posture conveying a saintlike dignity. Grouped around the woman, each at the end of one of the wheel’s spokes, were other sarcophagi, ten in all, and of those, five were presently occupied.

  Fray glanced back at Quillon, then returned his attention to the machine. ‘That’s you, I figure, in the middle. You were a human woman, and now you’re ... this. Asleep, I guess. Plumbed into whatever it is the others are plumbed into.’

  ‘I think they’re the same as Nimcha,’ Quillon said. ‘Tectomancers.’

  ‘Tell us what happened,’ Fray called.

  The woman did not move or respond in any observable sense. But Quillon, like Fray, was in no doubt that on some level they were communicating with her.

  ‘There was a mistake,’ she said. ‘We opened the wrong door. We let it through.’

  ‘Let what through?’

  ‘The Mire,’ Quillon said. ‘The Eye of God.’

  ‘The network collapsed under the influx, branch by branch, all the way back to here, back to Earthgate, back to the control nexus, from which we had given the command to open the door.’