Godlike Machines (37 page)

“The moment I saw my body, I knew it had finally come down to one or the other. When I checked the memory dump, I knew exactly which one.”

I thought I saw Kindred wince, but his face was too deep in shadow to be sure of it.

I simply stared at her in amazement. Two access codes and a name: that was all it took to send her hell-bent through the mines, trusting in the Mobius strip of time to lead her along the path her future self had already followed—the future self who for some presently unknown reason had sent her own body back to herself, both as a clue and in order to complete the loop.

“My own corpse,” she said, “is proof that I’ve found-that I
will
find—the mother load. Trelayne, answers, everything. After so many dead ends and disappointments, it takes a clue like that to convince me, and I’ll follow it without question, wherever it takes me. I die, but I die complete. That’s why I’m here. That’s why—” She stopped and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. She swallowed twice, then dropped her hand, continued: “That’s why, Huw, I need you to tell me everything you learned on Panaion.”

“No.” Kindred shook his head. “Don’t ask me to do that.”

“I have to, and you will tell me.”

“No!” He paced one circuit around the control room, glaring at her as he passed.

“In a sense, you’ve already done it.”

“Never.”

One slab-like fist punched at the switches he had brought to life. The door leading from the narthex deeper into the level hissed open. Stale air rolled over us all, but that wasn’t enough to prevent Kindred stalking off into the darkness, away from Cotton and her demands.

“Huw!”

He ignored her. His bear-like shoulders were bunched and tight. The doors slid shut behind him, and Cotton sagged.

I thought that I should offer her something, but I knew not what. Reassurance? Space? I was unwillingly embroiled in their shared history, when all I desired were answers.

Looking back on it now, on her entreaty and Kindred’s brooding frustration, I suppose she felt the same.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

“We had—Huw and I had one of those things that is never really alive but never really dies either.”

“You don’t need to explain.”

“I guess I did warn you,” she said, “about getting tangled up in this.”

“You did, and I’m still here.” I essayed a weak smile. “So are you, if that gives you any reason to be hopeful.”

She returned the smile. “Of what?”

“I’m not sure.”

The only sound for a long time was the howling of the acrid wind.

Seeking to occupy my mind with more than just idle introspection, I followed an instinct. If Cotton’s bizarre story about sending her own body back as a message were true, it wasn’t
entirely
true. She hadn’t mentioned an accomplice, and I knew she had at least one. Calling up the image of the man who had placed her body in its final resting place, I studied it with fresh eyes. Again the hint of familiarity in that cheekbone and nose. Comparing the figure against Kindred’s, however, proved fruitless. Not only was Kindred’s face an entirely different structure, but his physical form was considerably larger. There was no possible way the two could be said to match. Thus I dismissed that theory, plausible though it had initially seemed.

I had other threads to follow. Restless and chilled, I began to pace around the control room as Kindred had done.

“Tell me about Terminus,” I said.

She looked up with red eyes, caught momentarily off-guard. “About what?”

“You know what, Cotton. You mentioned it moments before we were almost shot, and your friend brought it up twice. He asked me if I was
with
Terminus. Should I feel left out of something?”

“No,” she said, leaning her hip against one of the control panels, folding her arms and crossing her legs. She couldn’t have looked more defensive if she tried. “Terminus is an organization—an affiliation might be better—that stretches right across the mines. People don’t join so much as become absorbed into it. If you ask enough questions, maybe even answer a few, and if you survive long enough, you’ll eventually find yourself hooked up to it.”

“So Kindred is part of Terminus,” I said, “and so are you.”

“Yes-but don’t look at me like that. I’m not a spy, skulking and thieving from your friends back home. I was just passing through, looking for answers. Trelayne’s trail had gone cold. It helps, sometimes, to flail about at random.”

“Who do you report to?”

“No one. That is, no boss or anyone like that. I talk to other agents when the opportunity arises; there are channels for passing information back and forth; sometimes, although very rarely, we’ll leak something to the public, if we think it’s in their best interest.”

“So if you knew what the Director was, you wouldn’t keep it a secret.”

“I don’t see why we would. Terminus exists to find out who built the mines and how they managed it—a living architect would be the Holy Grail for most of us—but making the mines safer for everyone is the most important thing of all. I’d trade a proper map for that, at the moment.”

“Are you suggesting that the mines haven’t been completely charted yet?”

“It’s a big job.”

“But you’ve been at it for hundreds of years. Gevira must be riddled through like Emmental cheese!”

She laughed. “Donaldan Lough, you are
such
a newb. Where do you think we are right now? Not Gevira, surely.”

“Where else would we be?”

“You heard Huw. We’re on Samagrinig, and that could be halfway across the universe from where we started.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m serious. What do you think that is outside the windows?”

I ceased my pacing, a familiar sense of anger and humiliation swelling like cancer in my breast. This new mockery revealed her to be no better than Officer Gluis, a fact made all the worse by our joint endurance of the previous day’s crises. The very moment one of her compatriots joined us, thus forming a bloc—if a fractious one—against my minority of one, she expelled me from her confidence and would throw my lot, no doubt, among the mine’s other newbies.

Is that how she saw me, I wondered—as fodder for the Geviran mines, as mere sport for the Director?

“Don’t play me for a fool, Cotton. I’m not the naif you take me to be.”

“I’m not taking you for anything. I’m just telling you the way it is.”

“That we’ve traveled from one world to another by—by elevator? Next you’ll propose that the Director is an invisible white rabbit or that we should ask directions from the Queen of Hearts!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Her anger was rapidly becoming the equal of mine. “You said no one was asking the questions that need to be answered. Well, maybe it’s because, like you, they don’t like answers. The first thing everyone in Terminus does is the math. It tells you that the mine contains enough people to fill a dozen planets. The mine exports sufficient energy to light up a solar system. The mass of every mineral extracted comes to several Jovian worlds. Where do you think all that comes from? From a tiny backwater world like Gevira? You can say that the numbers are lying, but deep down you’ll know that it’s really you, lying to yourself, and the sooner you accept it, the happier and crazier you’ll be.”

“Like you?”

“Damn straight like me. Do you have a better solution?”

We stood nose to nose, yelling at each other. My fury was so great that the cover I had carefully maintained seemed an irrelevant thing beside the impulse to prove to this woman that there was more to the world than the mines and her obsession. Far across the gulfs of space glittering civilizations reached, connected by the Great Ship Fleets and the Guild to which I myself belonged. It has taken millennia to establish and unimaginable efforts to maintain. My ache to impress upon her the impossibility of a network such as the one she described-in which those empty gulfs could be crossed in a matter of moments, with no more effort than the pushing of a button-could not be measured.

Somehow I subsumed that impulse. I thought of you, Master Catterson, and the ranks of Guildsmen depending on my steadfastness. I would not betray my vows solely to impress a madwoman, no matter what revelations she promised. Such a promise was tainted, anyway, if this proposition was a taste of that to come.

“The only solution I have,” I said in level tones, “is to retrace our steps and return to the surface. Once we’re out of the mines, we and the people around us will be safe from the Director. We’ll have time to examine your theory with clinical dispassion and see where it leads us. We won’t need to cower like criminals in the dark, lending credence to propositions we would never entertain in the clear daylight. What do you say?”

“I can’t leave here until I find Trelayne,” she said firmly. “He has all the answers I need.”

“What if he turns out to be nothing but a rumour? You’ll have wasted your final hours chasing the ghost of hope.”

“It’s no more a ghost than I am. Look at me. You’ve seen my corpse. I’ve told you what it means. How much more proof do I need?”

“That aliens learned how to connect worlds by tissue paper and a bit of pluck? A lot more proof than your word on it, I’m afraid.”

“What about Huw and all of Terminus? What about the evidence of your senses?” She turned away with palms pressed to her forehead as though containing a migraine. “Oh, Don, you can’t possibly be so ignorant about
everything.”

“Indeed he can’t, Emma,” said Huw Kindred from behind me. “Don’t say any more. I think he’s heard quite enough.”

I turned to find Kindred standing in the entrance we had come through with a compact firearm in his hand. He must have looped around through the empty level and returned to the elevator cluster via a corridor we had not noticed. That, however, was the least of my present concerns. The firearm was pointed directly at me. It looked tiny, like a toy, but I was convinced of its lethality.

“What is the meaning of this?” I spluttered.

“Just step away from her, flyboy, and don’t make any sudden moves. That’s it. Put your hands above your head. Now, do you want to tell her where you’re from or shall I?”

It’s no exaggeration to say that every muscle in my body went rigid.

“Have you gone completely insane, Huw?” Cotton went to put herself between us, but Kindred’s hefty forearm pushed her back.

“I was thinking, Emma,” he said, “about what you told me. Your corpse, the deal you made with yourself, the information you want from me. I had just about decided to give in to you, when it came to me. None of this is real. It’s a fake, like this guy suggested.” The gun shifted to indicate me, then returned once more to target the center of my chest. “Only he’s the one behind it. It’s a trick, Emma, and you fell for it.”

My thoughts moved at lightning speed. I was ready for either fight or flight the very moment an opportunity presented itself.

“It’s not a trick,” I said.

“Shut up.”

“Are you going to tell
me
to shut up too, Huw?” Cotton stared up at him with a pained look on her face. “I can tell the difference. He’s not lying. Why would he? What’s he got to gain?”

“Everything,” said Kindred, eying me with intense animosity along the gun’s sights. “He’s a spacer.”

Her gaze darted to me, then back to Kindred. “What?”

“Ask yourself, Emma. Why
does
he seem so ignorant? He’s not just a newbie; he’s after everything we’ve learned about the mines for bosses elsewhere. That’s why he’s hitched up with you. He wants answers and he doesn’t care how he gets them. You and your obsession would have given him everything he wanted, if I hadn’t come along to stop you.”

“No,” she said. The blue sky of her certainty was beginning to cloud over with doubt. “I’m not that gullible.”

“Really? Remember that time you tunneled a mile into a volcano just because someone had told you Trelayne had left a memory dump there? You almost died, and for what?”

“Nothing, but this is different.”

“Sure it is. Not satisfied with all the stars, the spacers want what we’ve got too.” His lips tightened and I braced myself for the gun to fire. “What flag do you fly under, star man? Whose picture do you salute each morning?”

I would never tell him. “You’ve made a mistake, Kindred. I’m not who you think I am.”

“Don’t,” he snarled. “You’re all the same. You and your fucking empires. You can’t keep your noses out of the Structure. You’re vermin.”

That struck a nerve. “And what are you? This place—whatever it is—it’s amazing, but you no more than occupy it. You’re squatters, that’s all. Humanity has become rats in the walls.”

“The Director, Huw,” Cotton persisted, defending my lie without knowing it. “It chased us. How could he fake that?”

“Coincidence. Or some spacer trick.”

“Now you sound paranoid.”

“Do I?”

They were shouting at each other now. “It’s my decision, Huw. Put the gun down—”

“You’re crazy to trust this astronaut!”

“—put the gun down and tell me what I need to know.”

“I’m not going to let you kill yourself!”

They were as distracted as they were ever going to get. Turning sideways to present a smaller target, I moved suddenly to my left. Kindred’s gun arm went to follow me but collided with Cotton, putting his aim off. He fired anyway, and the discharge was deafeningly loud. I ducked automatically, unharmed, and ran.

Ran through the door he had come through, heading not for the exit—the doors would take too long to open-but for the route I suspected he had followed. He had left the portal ajar, and I threw myself headlong into the darkness on the other side. Two shots followed me, but Kindred’s aim was poor. I was fast and desperate where he was big and conflicted. My lead was the only advantage I had. I was determined to keep it as long as I could.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness, picking out faint edges in infrared and the flaming patches where Kindred had walked. I stuck to those footprints to throw him off even though it slowed me down. Two sharp turns put walls between me and the door, so when his voice boomed out at me at least I knew I wouldn’t be shot in the back.