Godlike Machines (36 page)

Ultimately I decided that the level had simply been mined out. Its tidy emptiness spoke of an orderly withdrawal, not a rout. There were, however, several instances of graffiti left by the last of the miners and by those like Cotton and I, who had stumbled across the level by chance. Perhaps it was one of these latter wanderers who wrote in vulgar tone of the Director’s parentage. Perhaps one of the miners scrawled the message of love and longing to an absent partner that I found in an empty bedroom. I could not decide who had been responsible for the endless series of bullseyes encircling a boardroom, where the level’s manager might have pondered the difficult decision to leave.

While reading one of the strangest pieces—an ode in charcoal to stars apparently glimpsed in the deepest levels of the mine-a metaphor, surely—I heard the sound of a door hissing open.

My heart jumped into my throat. Fearing that Cotton had woken and taken the opportunity to abandon her clueless companion, I retraced my steps at full-tilt to the entrance hall.

I arrived to find Cotton lying on her side with her field-suit sealed right up to her throat, exactly as I had left her, with an unknown man looking down at her sleeping form. It must have been he who had entered via the sliding portal that stood open behind him. His footsteps were distinct in the dust, larger than either of ours and spaced well apart.

I skidded to a halt in the dust opposite him. His gaze shifted to me, with something of Cotton in its cool regard. I was momentarily nonplussed at both his presence and size. He wore a sturdy black fieldsuit and carried a pack, and displayed no ID.

“You’re with her, I presume,” he said.

“I am. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“I’m with Terminus. Aren’t you?”

At the sound of our voices, Cotton stirred. Her eyes flickered open. She stared blankly up at us until the scales fell away. The retrograde trajectory of her recollection was played out nakedly across her face. The abandoned level; the Director; her own corpse. I understood that part of her had thought she might never awake from that slumber.

Both of us went to offer her a hand, and she took the largest, that of the new arrival.

“Huw Kindred,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I was going to ask you the same question, Emma.” He set her on her feet and brushed dust gently from her cheek. “The Director carved a trail right across the Structure. I never thought to find you at its end.”

“That’s not the half of it.”

“I bet. Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Later. Got any food? I’ve been running on internals for a week.”

“Sure.” Kindred shrugged off his pack and reached inside. My stomach grumbled as he handed Cotton a silver packet. Our eyes briefly met. His were ocean blue.

“Who’s this guy?” Kindred asked. “I mentioned Terminus and he looked as blank as a fish.”

“Donaldan Lough,” she said around a mouthful of the concentrate he had given her. “He’s a Geviran.”

“Never thought I’d see you running with a native. How’d that come about?”

She frowned as though struggling to recollect a dream: her wiped memory dump; the codes; our hurried flight. I wondered if it always took her this long to wake up. “It’s a long story. Later.”

I temporarily put aside my curiosity regarding the mysterious Terminus, just as I let them accept the mistaken assumption about my origins. Kindred seemed to swallow it easily enough. We shook hands. Still wary of this stranger in our midst, I responded to his offer of food with a simple negative. He nodded and re-sealed the pack.

“How long’s it been, Emma? The last time I saw you was in Margelise, I think, almost a year ago.”

“Just a month for me.” Sudden fright struck her. “You’re not safe, Huw. We’re marked. The Director is following us, and it’ll take you if you stay around.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been here-how long? Minutes now and nothing’s happened. I’ll take my chances if you’ll keep your eyes on me. Okay?”

Kindred looked to us for agreement, and I nodded automatically. Whoever he was, Cotton knew and trusted him. For my part, I was coming to view him as a possible source of information about the wider expanses of the mine. Thus far, Cotton had been reticent on almost every point I wished to explore.

“We shouldn’t stay here, though,” said Kindred. “I’m not the only one following that trail.”

“Not sideways,” she said, looking haunted and harried at the thought of going. “I’m not putting anyone else at risk by heading somewhere populated. There’s just the one door. I’m sure we’d get a fine reception back the way we came.”

“Deeper, then. There might be another exit. At the very worst, we can hide in the lower levels until the fuss dies down.”

He put his suggestion to her in easy tones, as though considering a walk through a hydropark.

She took a deep shuddering breath, and looked down at her feet.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re right.”

“I found an elevator cluster not far from here,” I informed them. “If the shafts are clear, we should be able to get them working.”

“Are you going to come with us, Don?” she said, looking at me with her cool brown eyes. “You don’t have to, you know. You can step away and go home any time you want.”

If only it was that easy, I thought. Home was further away than she could possibly imagine.

Follow the mystery.

“Let’s go, then,” she said. “It’s just us, Huw. We didn’t bring anything. If Don and I had known how far we were going, we would’ve packed, eh?”

I could not help but echo her smile. “Lunch, at least.” She tossed me the remains of her concentrate bar, and this time, gratefully, I accepted.

I led them through the empty corridors to where I had found several inert freight carriages, thick with dust and cobwebs. Spiders are rare in the mines but not unknown. Many forms of life have crept down from the surface, and most have evolved resistance to the usual forms of pest control. In this abandoned level, nature was claiming a new home. As well as webs, I had seen a dead cockroach, a line of ants, and several patches of mould. In a century, I fantasized, it might be completely overgrown.

Kindred proved a dab hand at reviving old equipment. Whether rousing inactive chips or goading static programs into action, he worked calmly and coolly, issuing instructions to either Cotton or myself, whoever happened to be nearest when need arose. The three of us soon had a sizeable chunk of the abandoned level functioning again. Lights blazed; air stirred; electrons flowed.

The mouth of one of the giant freight elevators opened with a cadaverous sigh. Cotton and I stepped inside. Kindred followed a moment later, after instructing the machines to resume their dormancy the moment we were safely at the bottom. He also swept the floor clean of footprints behind us. The trail would end there, in that cold and empty ruin.

“Does this place have a name?” Cotton asked him as the elevator shuddered and began to descend.

“Samagrinig,” he said.

“Never heard of it. I recognized Iesia and Baskaba as we passed through, but we were running blind most of the way. There wasn’t time to consult the charts.”

The names meant nothing to me, but I didn’t interrupt the conversation to interrogate them. I hoped to learn simply by letting them talk.

“Word reached me in Panaion,” Kindred said. “I was in the middle of something, but I couldn’t resist. The trail was close, and still warm. Hot, even. Most people were running from it, but you know that’s not my way.”

“Huw’s notorious,” Cotton said to me with prideful tones. “We don’t have tornados down here, obviously, but he’d be chasing them if we did. It’s a miracle he hasn’t been sucked up yet.”

He shrugged off her concern. “I’m in no more danger than anyone else. Less, probably. Statistically speaking, the chances of the Director striking twice in one place are minimal. Once satiated, it moves on. You’re more likely to be hit anywhere other than where the ground is still smoking.”

“Don here thinks it’s protecting the mine’s alien origins.”

“He might be right.”

“He might be wrong, too.”

“We’re all wrong until proven otherwise.” Kindred granted me a conspiratorial wink.

“Any word of Trelayne?” she asked him.

“Still obsessed, I see.”

“Now more than ever.”

“Well, as it happens,” he said, “I was on Panaion for just that very reason. But come on, kid. You haven’t told me what you’re doing here yet.”

“It’s all connected, Huw. One thing leads to the other.”

With a groan and a shudder, the elevator ground to a halt. Kindred stood at the fore of the carriage, waiting for the heavy metal doors to divide, but Cotton and I hadn’t forgotten the lessons we’d learned during our headlong flight. We waited well back until we were sure what lay beyond.

The opening doors revealed nothing but blackness. Kindred produced a torch from his pack and snapped it on. Stepping out of the pool of light spilling from the carriage, he blazed the way for us, pacing out a rectangular narthex more than ten meters square, lined with blocky, functional control panels. All were inactive until he prodded them into life.

I stepped out with Cotton and breathed deeply of thick, dry air. A distant subsonic rumble through the floor and walls made itself felt in my bones. Not until Kindred once again brought the machines to life did I realize its source.

First came lights, flickering like tiny eyes all across the control boards, then a whir as two panels on opposite walls slid up into the ceiling, revealing windows to the mine-face beyond. Floodlights flared somewhere above us, shining powerfully into a hellish landscape, one where heavy gases roiled and tore at exposed rock. I stepped back, reminded of footage I had seen of worlds in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect. Subjected to crushing pressure, powerful acids, and soaring temperatures, the surfaces of such planets are flatly inhospitable to human life. Somehow, in the belly of Gevira, such a place existed—and thus I perceived why this level had been abandoned. Something must have gone wrong, I told myself. An industrial accident must have created this vile cocktail, or else a misguided exploratory probe had found a pocket of primordial fumes, preserved in a toxic bubble since the world’s creation. Rather than clean it up, the manager of the level had ordered it contained and the facility abandoned. Given the extensive reach of the Geviran excavations, there had undoubtedly been greener pastures elsewhere.

So I told myself as I stared out into that foul, turbulent soup. Half-visible through the murk, frozen in attitudes of abandonment, giant diggers crouched over great rents in the rock, waiting for the command to resume their labor. Despite their Brobdignagian size, I was amazed they hadn’t corroded away to nothing—as my own certainties were to corrode in due course.

But I am leaping ahead of myself—something that becomes harder to avoid, the deeper one gets in the mines. By this point in our journey, I had no idea how deep I actually was. My heaviness had changed several times during the previous day, so much so that I had begun to ignore what every member of the Guild knows instinctively from birth: one’s mass, and the ability to determine from apparent fluctuations in weight the strength of a gravitational field.

A door led from the narthex into the level’s maze of airlocks and workstations, but the three of us made no immediate move to explore further. The tortured view had captured us, and the rumbling of the wind challenged us to speak only that which was most profound. It came as no surprise, then, when Cotton broke the silence to tell Kindred of her fate.

“I’m going to die, Huw. That’s where all this starts and ends.”

Kindred turned to face her, worry openly displayed on his face. “How do you know that?”

“I saw my own corpse. Don showed it to me. There were two access codes in its memory dump.”

“That’s why he’s along for the ride, then.” His ready sympathy was for me, now. “I thought you two were—”

“No,” she said, before I too could disabuse him of the notion. “But he’s important, I think. Everything is. It has to be. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I’d be hiding under a bunk somewhere, keeping my head down. Or in a rundown dive, drinking myself to death.”

“That would be in character.”

“Don’t joke with me, Huw. This is serious.”

“Of course it is. I’m sorry.”

“You need to know something,” she said. “You both do. About the body.”

“It’s a fake?” I asked, startled by the way hope suddenly leapt at the thought.

“No, Don. It’s real. But it’s not random; it’s not the kind of thing the mine throws up sometimes, for no reason at all. It’s a message.”

Kindred’s mighty brows bunched into a frown. “From whom?”

“From me.”

He folded his arms and shook his head. “Don’t joke with
me,
Emma. Not about this.”

“I’m serious, Huw. If you let me explain—”

“No. I don’t want to hear it.”

“I do,” said I. “We may not understand it, but I think she’s telling the truth.”

She wasn’t the only one. I could see that mortality was hanging heavily on her, but the excitement I had seen earlier was also present. The certainty of her death was not entirely a millstone.

She smiled with a mixture of gratitude and grief. “It takes a newbie to cut through the crap, sometimes. Forget the mines, Huw: we tie
ourselves
in knots, and then we have no idea how to untangle them. That’s us, Huw, and that’s me, and that’s how it’s always going to end. We live by the sword. We know what’s coming.”

The light was brightest in her corner of the control room. A halo seemed to surround her form, drawing the eye irresistibly to her. Even Kindred couldn’t look away forever.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice surprisingly soft from such a large frame.

“I’ve been chasing Trelayne and his answers half my life,” she said. “I’ve followed clues from one side of the mine to the other. It’s consumed my every thought as long as I’ve known you. Like the freehold miners, few of my seams pay out. Fool’s gold and quartz are all I ever seem to find. But I know the mother lode is out there somewhere, and there are only two ways I’m ever going to stop looking for Trelayne and his answers. One is if the search kills me first. The other is if it doesn’t.