After less than an hour of flight, seeing nothing in the heavens above or in the skies beneath that would have led anyone to think there was life anywhere else in all the universe, he slowed and dropped, a shaftless arrowhead heading straight for the heart of the planet. He let the increasing density slow him further, feeling the resulting friction-heat leak through the gascraft's hull and into his flesh.
Through the upper shear boundary - only hazily defined, kilometres thick, prone to vast slow waves and unpredictable swells and sudden troughs - he entered the shear zone itself, starting to circle through the crushing fluidity of jelly-thick atmosphere. If the section of CloudTunnel was still in the volume, this was where it ought to be, fallen amongst the depths, making its slow way down to an equilibrium of weight and buoyancy within the gradually thickening press of hydrogen gas turning to liquid.
There was always a chance that it had gone the other way, lifting towards the cloud tops, but that would be unusual. Disused CloudTunnel, ribbed with vacuum tubes, tended to gain gas and therefore additional weight through osmosis over the millennia. When Fassin had been here two hundred years earlier, Valseir was already having to add buoyancy to the Tunnel to keep it from sinking too fast and dragging the whole house and library complex with it. Anyway, if the derelict section had risen it ought to have stayed within the same atmospheric band and so shown up somewhere on the charts of the Poaflias, and it hadn't.
He went on spiralling, keeping slow, sonosensing only gently so that there would be less chance of anybody who might be listening nearby overhearing him. (Could the colonel have followed him without him being aware of her? Probably. But why would she? Still, he had the feeling he ought to be as discreet as he could.) Light wasn't much use. CloudTunnel wall would appear almost transparent down here. Probes for magnetic and radiation vestiges were of even less utility, and there would be no scent trace either.
After two hours, near the limit of the time that he thought he could reasonably spend away from the house, and some time after he'd decided the hell with discretion and ramped his active sensors up to maximum, Fassin found one end of the CloudTunnel, looming out of the gel-thick mist like a vast dark mouth. He took the little gascraft into the forty-metre-wide maw, turning up his sonosense now that the signals would be shielded by the walls of the CloudTunnel section itself. He increased his speed, too, barrelling along the great slowly curving tube like the ghost of some Dweller long gone.
The study shell was still there, a hollow sphere almost filling the CloudTunnel tube near the mid-point of its eighty-kilometre length, but it had been ransacked, stripped bare. Whatever secrets it might have held had long since been taken or trashed.
Fassin turned some lights on to check round the place, finding nothing intact, nothing beyond empty shelves and ragged lengths of carbon board, diamond dust like frosted ice and frayed fibres, waving in the turbulence of his passing.
He formed a tiny cavity with his sonosense and watched it collapse instantly, snapped to nothing by the grinding weight of the column of gas above it. A fine place to feel crushed, he thought, then went back the way he'd come and ascended slowly to the house and Library Twenty-One again.
The colonel was there. She looked startled when he appeared from behind the hidden door, even though he'd told her earlier what he intended to do.
'Major. Seer Taak. Fassin,' she said. She sounded . . . odd.
Fassin looked around. Nobody else here; good, he thought. 'Yes?' he said, letting the bookcase door close behind him.
Hatherence floated right up to him, stopping just a metre away. Her esuit showed a uniform dull grey he hadn't seen her display before.
'Colonel,' he asked her. 'Are you all right? Is everything—' 'There is ... you must prepare ... I ... I am sorry to ...
There is bad news, Fassin,' she said finally, in a rushed, broken voice. 'Very bad news. I am so sorry.'
*
The Archimandrite Luseferous did not really buy into the whole idea of the Truth. Of course, when he had been rising within the ranks of the Cessoria he had given every appearance of believing in it, and had been a gifted evangelist and disputer, arguing, many times, with great force, logic and passion for the Church and its views. He had been often commended for this. He could see at the time that his superiors were impressed, see it even when they didn't want to admit to him or to themselves that they had been impressed. He had a gift for argument. And for dissembling, for lying (if you insisted on using such crude, un-nuanced terminology), for appearing to believe one thing while, at best, actually not caring one way or the other. He had never really cared whether the Truth was true.
The idea of faith interested him, even fascinated him, not as an intellectual idea, not as a concept or some abstract theoretical framework, but as a way of controlling people, as a way of understanding and so manipulating them. As a flaw, in the end, as something which was wrong with others that was not wrong with him.
Sometimes he could not believe all the advantages other people seemed prepared to hand him. They had faith and so would do things that were plainly not in their own immediate (or, often, long-term) best interests, because they just believed what they had been told; they experienced altruism and so did things that, again, were not necessarily to their advantage; they had sentimental or emotional attachments to others and so could be coerced, once more, into doing things they would not have done otherwise. And - best of all, he sometimes thought - people were self-deceiving. They thought they were brave when they were really cowards, or imagined they could think for themselves when they most blatantly could not, or believed they were clever when they were just good at passing exams, or thought they were compassionate when they were just sentimental.
The real strength came from a perfectly simple maxim: Be completely honest with yourself; only ever deceive others.
So many edges! So many ways that people made his progress easier. If everybody he'd ever met and competed with and struggled against had been just like him in these respects he'd have had a much harder rise to power. He might not even have prevailed at all, because without all these advantages it largely came down to luck, and he might not have had sufficient.
In the old days he had once wondered how many of the Cessorian high command, his old bosses, really believed in the Truth. He strongly suspected that the higher you went, the greater grew the proportion of those who didn't really believe at all. They were in it for the power, the glory, the control and the glamour.
Now he rarely thought about any of that. Now he would just assume that anybody in such a position would be completely and cynically self-interested and be mildly surprised and even slightly disgusted to find that any of them really did have genuine faith. The disgust would come from the feeling that the person concerned was letting down the side, and the suspicion that they would feel they were somehow - perversely - superior to their less-deluded peers.
'And so you really believe in all that? You really do?'
'Sir, of course, sir! It is the rational faith. Simple logic dictates. It is inescapable. You know this better than I, sir. Sir, I think you tease me.' The girl looked away, smiling down, coquettish, shy, perhaps a little alarmed, just possibly even daring to feel slightly insulted.
He reached out and took her hair, swinging her face round to his, a gold-dark silhouette against the sparse sprinkle of distant stars. 'Child, I am not sure that in all my life I have ever teased. Not once.'
The girl did not seem to know what to say. She looked around, perhaps at the pale stars through the screen-glass, perhaps at the snow-white tumble of low-gee puff-bedding, perhaps at the shell of screens forming the walls of their little nest, surfaces on which startlingly detailed and inventive acts of sexuality were being enacted. Perhaps she looked at her two companions, both now curled and asleep.
'Well, then, sir,' she said at last, 'not teased. I would not say you teased me. Perhaps rather that you make fun of me because you are so much more educated and clever than me.'
That, the Archimandrite thought, was perhaps more like it. But he still was not sure. Did this young thing still carry the Truth inside her, even after all the normal-span generations that had come and gone since he'd formally swept away all this nonsense?
In a way it didn't matter in the slightest; as long as nobody ever began to use their religion to organise against him he could not care less what people really thought. Obey me, fear me. Hate me if you want. Don't ever pretend to love me. That was all he asked of people. Faith was just another lever, like sentiment, like empathy, like love (or what people thought was love, what they claimed was love, the fanciful, maybe even dishonest bit that wasn't lust, which was honest. And, of course, another lever).
But he wanted to know. A less civilised fellow in his situation would have considered having the girl tortured to find out the truth, but people being tortured over something like this soon ended up just telling you what they thought you wanted to hear - anything to get the pain to stop. He'd learned that quickly enough. There was a better way.
He reached for the pod's remote control and adjusted the spin, creating the illusion of gravity once more. 'Go on all fours in front of the window,' he told the girl. 'It's time again.'
'Sir, of course, sir.' The girl quickly assumed the position he wanted, crouched against the oncoming star field, seemingly fixed even though the pod was revolving. The brightest sun, screen dead-centre, was Ulubis.
Luseferous had had his genitals enhanced in all sorts of ways. One improvement was that he carried glands inside his body which allowed him to produce many different secretions which his ejaculate could then carry into the bodies of others (but whose effects he was proof against, obviously), including irritants, hallucinogens, cannabinoids, capsainoids, sleeping draughts and truth serums. He went briefly into the little-death little-trance, the petit mal which allowed him to select one of these, and chose the last-mentioned, the truth drug. He took the girl anally; it was faster-acting that way. And discovered that she really did believe in the Truth. Though it also emerged that she thought he was horribly ancient and weird-looking and a frightening, sick-minded old sadist and she absolutely hated being fucked by him.
He thought about inseminating her with thanaticin, or employing one of the physical options his remade penis made possible: the shaved horsetail, perhaps. Or just ejecting her into the vacuum and watching her die.
In the end Luseferous decided that letting her live with such constant degradation was punishment enough. He'd always said he preferred being despised, after all.
He would make her his favourite. Probably wise to put her on suicide watch, too.
*
The Dwellers held that the ability to suffer was what ultimately marked out sentient life from any other sort. They didn't mean just the ability to feel physical pain, they meant real suffering, they meant the sort of suffering that was all the worse because the creature undergoing the experience could appreciate it fully, could think back to when it had not suffered so, look forward to when it might stop (or despair of it ever stopping - despair was a large component of this) and know that if things had been different it might not be suffering now. Brains required, see? Imagination. Any brainless thing with a rudimentary nervous system could feel pain. Suffering took intelligence.
Of course, Dwellers didn't feel pain, and claimed never to suffer, except in the trivial sense of suffering fools because they were part of the family, or experiencing the deleterious physical and mental effects of a serious hangover. So, by their own reckoning, they weren't really sentient. At which point the average Dweller, assuming without question that they were absolutely self-evidently the most sentient and intelligent things around in anybody's neck of the woods, would just throw their spine-limbs out, shake their mantle ruff and start talking loudly about paradoxes.
He faced to spin, carried in the jet stream at five hundred kilometres per hour. Motionless. He side-slipped, found a small eddy, just a curl, a tiny yellow-white wisp a couple of klicks across in the great empty skies of orange and red and brown. He moved through the gas. It felt slick against the arrowhead's skin. He let the eddy carry him round in a slow gyration for a while, then pointed down and fell, twisting slowly as he went, down through the hazes and the clouds and the slowly thickening weight and press of gas, down to where the temperature was suitable, where he levelled out and did something he had never done before; he opened the cover of the little gascraft and let the atmosphere in, let Nasqueron in, let it touch his naked human skin.
Alarms were beeping and flashing and when he opened his eyes they stung in the dim orange light that seemed to shine from all around. He still had the gillfluid in his mouth and nose and throat and lungs, though now he was forced to try and breathe by himself, just his chest muscles against the pull of Nasqueron's gravity field. He was still connected to the gascraft by the interface collar, too, and, when he could not raise himself up from the bed of shock-gel, he made the little arrowhead tip gradually towards its nose, so that he was propped three-quarters of the way towards a standing position.
Blood roared in his ears. His feet and legs protested at the weight as he was slowly forced down through the gel until he was partly standing on the far end of the cramped coffin shape that contained him.
Now he could force himself away from the mould. He used his elbows, forcing himself forward. The stinging in his eyes was making them water. Tears at last. Shaking with the effort, he pulled at one sticky-slippy strand of the gillfluid where it disappeared into his right nostril, and opened his mouth, gulping some of the gas.
Nasqueron smelled of rotten eggs.
He looked around, blinking the tears away as best he could, the interface collar sucking at his neck, trying to keep contact while he tried to look up and out. It was a muddy-looking old place, Nasqueron. Like a big bowl of beaten egg, with a load of liquid shit stirred in and little drops of blood spattered throughout. And sulphurous on the palate. He let the gillfluid snap back, filling his nose, granting him pure oxygen-rich air again, though the stench still lingered.
He was sweating, partly from the exertion, partly from the heat. Maybe he should have chosen to do this a bit further up. Now his nose was tingling, too, as well as his streaming eyes. He wondered if he could sneeze with the gillfluid inside him. Would it come splattering up out of him, some ghastly lung-vomit, ejected, left drooped over the side of the gascraft like some pale blue mass of seaweed, leaving him to gasp and choke and die?
He could hardly see because of the tears now, Nasqueron's noxious skies finally drawing from him what he had not been able to express for himself.
All of them.
The whole Sept.
They'd made the move to the Winter complex early. The warhead had fallen there, killing all of them: Slovius, Zab, Verpych, all his family, all the people he had grown up with, all those he had known and loved through his childhood and as he had grown, all the people who had made him whoever he now was, whatever he had been, until this moment.
It had been quick. Instantaneous, indeed, but so what? They had felt no pain but they were dead, gone, beyond recall.
Only they were not beyond recall. He could not stop recalling, he could not cease bringing them back to life in his head, if only to apologise. He had suggested to Slovius that they get away from the Autumn House. He'd meant a neutral place, some hotel or university complex, but they'd gone to another of the Sept's Seasonal Houses instead - a compromise. And that had killed them. He had killed them. His well-meant advice, his desire to care and protect, and to be known to have thought of this, had taken them all away.
He thought of just letting the craft tip further over, beyond ninety degrees, letting himself fall out, jerked down by his own mass, hurtling him plummeting downwards into that great sucking breath of gas-giant gravity, the gillfluid wrenched from him, perhaps taking some parts of his lungs with it as it ripped away, tearing him apart and letting him fill the bloody, ragged remains with alien gas for his last
scream - falsetto, like the voice you got when you sucked helium from a party balloon -as he plunged into the depths.
The signals and messages had finally caught up with them round about the time he'd been floating through the wreckage of Valseir's wrecked study. All the shocked mailings, all the garbled queries, all the official notices, all the messages of support and sympathy, all the requests and follow-up signals asking for confirmation that he was still alive, all the news mentions, all the Ocula's revised orders: they had all come through in a flood, a great tangled knot of incoming data, held up by the Shrievalty's default secrecy, especially in a time of threat, the usual chaos of Dweller communications in general and the particular breakdown in the smooth running of signalling protocols transmission that always attended a Formal War, an effect always at its most extreme within the war zone itself.
Dead, all dead. But then, not quite all dead (a Sept was no small thing, and reality was rarely quite so neat). Just as-good-as all. Five junior servants, on leave or errands, had survived, as had one of his second cousins and her infant son. That was all. Enough to make it not a clean break, however awful, sufficient so that he would be expected to keep going, provide leadership, be strong ... all that easily said clichéd stuff. His mother, absent, might have survived, but she'd been killed too, in another attack - unrelated, it was supposed, just sheer bad luck - on the Cessorian habitat in the Kuiper belt where she'd been on a Retreat for the last half year.
He supposed he ought to be thankful that Jaal was still alive, that she had not been calling at the Winter House at the time of the attack. Instead he had a succession of alarmed, shocked, plaintive and then numb-sounding messages from her, the last few pleading for him to get in touch if he could, if he was alive, if he was somewhere in Nasqueron and could hear this or read this…
He had been listed as missing by the Shrievalty Ocula after the attack on Third Fury. Officially he still was. They hadn't been sure that he and Colonel Hatherence were still alive until they'd received her relayed signal days later, and subsequently had thought it best to keep his survival a secret for the time being. His interview with the news service in Hauskip had complicated matters - however, this was already being denounced as a fake even without their intervention, and a degree of confusion had ensued. Listed as missing in action, he was still officially alive and so Chief Seer of Sept Bantrabal. That would not change for at least a year.
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