House of Suns (12 page)

‘Doctor Meninx was a bit taken aback,’ Campion said.

‘What did you want to tell us?’ I asked.

‘The same thing you wish to know: what is the matter with my arm?’

Campion said, ‘Doctor Meninx saw you examining something, but he couldn’t tell what it was.’

‘It must have been rather distressing for him, as it was for me,’ Hesperus replied.

‘For you?’ I asked.

‘I was as surprised by my discovery as Doctor Meninx. Even now, I do not quite know what to make of it.’ The metal mask of his face had composed itself into a calm, watchful expression, as if Hesperus had already surrendered to his fate. ‘Would you like to see what lies under the skin of my arm? The plating is only loosely attached.’ Before waiting to hear what Campion and I might have to say in reply, Hesperus bent his left arm at the elbow and took hold of a section of plating with his right hand. It came loose and clattered to the floor. He removed another piece, and another, until only the hand remained covered. Then he took hold of the hand and tugged the jointed gauntlet away, as if he had removed a glove.

From the elbow to the tips of his fingers, his forearm appeared to be completely human. It was muscular and masculine, covered in dark skin and a lustre of sweat. The skin on his palm and on the underside of his fingers was slightly paler. As he rotated the arm for our inspection, flexing the fingers, I could see the hairs on the back of his hand, the cuticles of his fingernails, the veins under the skin.

‘It is as real as it appears,’ Hesperus said, while we said nothing at all. ‘It is human skin, over human musculature.’ Slowly and deliberately, he scratched the thumb of his right hand against the wrist of his organic arm, drawing a bead of blood. ‘It bleeds. And heals, too. That is what I was ascertaining when I was disturbed by Doctor Meninx. I had scratched it a day earlier and was intent on gauging the degree to which the wound had repaired itself.’

Campion was the first to say anything. ‘You talk as if you don’t know what that thing is.’

‘Did I not tell you that I was surprised by my discovery?’

‘How could you not know why that arm’s the way it is?’

‘I already told you that I know next to nothing about myself. It is a miracle I even remember my name. Do you imagine I was intent on concealing this from you?’

‘But you did conceal it,’ Campion said.

‘Only because I wished to understand it before I brought it to your attention. From the moment I regained movement, I was troubled by the mismatch between my arms. I tried to peer through the plating, but I am opaque to my own sensors. Eventually I steeled myself to remove some of that plating, so that I might glimpse the mystery for myself. At first I could not believe ...’ It was the first time I had heard him falter. ‘I hope you will not be offended when I say that I was disgusted at what had been done to me. Not because I am repelled by the organic, but because the organic has no place inside me. You, I think, would be rightly repelled were you to wake up and scratch your own skin and find the gleam of metal beneath it. Yet I convinced myself that there must be a rational explanation for it, one that would satisfy you as well.’ Hesperus lowered the arm slowly. ‘But there is none. I can offer no explanation for the arm’s presence.’

‘Could you have been damaged?’ I asked. ‘Maybe you lost the original arm, and the only replacement available was from a human cadaver. You grafted it on until you could be repaired properly, and then forgot about the accident.’

‘We would never have cause to do such a thing. Were I to lose my arm, I could repair myself in short order provided I was given access to the necessary raw materials - metals, plastics, aspic-of-machines. If raw materials were not in abundance, I could allocate enough of my existing mass to effect the repair with little impairment to my functioning. I would not need to grub around cadavers.’

‘So Ateshga did it, not you,’ Campion said. ‘He damaged you and then fixed you up with an organic part, not knowing you could repair yourself.’

‘I wish that could be the explanation, but unfortunately I know it cannot. The arm is an integral part of me. Once the casing was removed, I was able to peer deeper into the structure. I established that beneath the flesh and muscle is essentially the same mechanical skeleton you would find inside my other arm.’ He flexed his fingers again. ‘I could still do great harm, if that was my intention. True, the skeleton has been modified to mimic the architecture of human bone and form a support matrix for the organic outgrowth. It has also been augmented with devices whose function I cannot elucidate, but which appear to supply the organic components with the chemicals they need to stay alive.’

‘What are you saying?’ I asked. ‘That the arm was grown deliberately, from the inside out?’

‘I see no other explanation, Purslane. I have already told you that I am capable of repairing myself. It is also true that it would be within my capabilities to grow this arm.’

‘Why would you have done that?’ I asked.

Hesperus looked sad. ‘Now we enter the realm of speculation, I am afraid. If I could give you an honest and unambiguous answer, I would not hesitate to do so. But I can only draw the same conclusions as you.’

‘Could someone have forced this transformation on you?’ Campion asked. ‘Coerced you to do it, for some reason or another?’

‘One struggles to imagine why. One also struggles to imagine any circumstances under which I might be coerced to do anything.’

‘You can understand why I’d much prefer it if you had been coerced.’

‘Because if coercion was not involved, then the transformation can be presumed to have taken place voluntarily? Yes, that alternative had not escaped me.’ Hesperus looked with what appeared to be renewed revulsion at his arm. ‘I should like it if I might be permitted to replace the metal casing.’

‘You’re as upset by it as the rest of us,’ I said, wonderingly.

‘Doctor Meninx was right to be disturbed.’

‘You can hide it, if you want,’ I replied, ‘but I’m not upset by it. It’s just another part of you. If it exists, it exists for a reason - even if we can’t see it yet.’

Campion shot me a
speak for yourself
look.

Hesperus slipped the glove back over his fingers, then knelt to recover the discarded gold plates. He snapped them into place with astonishing speed, as if anxious to rid himself of the view of that arm as quickly as possible. The arm soon looked as it had before, but now that I knew what was underneath it I could only think of that skin and muscle trying to force their way through the metal.

‘What now?’ Campion asked quietly.

‘Hesperus and Doctor Meninx still need to clear the air between them.’ I looked around warily, just in case one of the doctor’s papery avatars had crept up on us while we were preoccupied. Seeing that we were alone, I smiled awkwardly. ‘Campion can speak to him first, Hesperus. Then I suggest that Meninx pays a visit to your cabin and gets the story from the horse’s mouth.’

‘Except there is no story,’ Hesperus said.

‘Tell him what you’ve told us and he’ll have no grounds for complaint. You came to us on your own, after all. That counts in your favour, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘If my presence is no longer desirable, I would be glad to return to the cage.’

‘No, that won’t be necessary.’

Slowly Campion held up a hand. ‘Wait—let’s not rush ahead of ourselves. We may not suspect Hesperus of any conscious wrongdoing, but that arm’s still a cause for concern. Until Hesperus can explain it, until he can rationalise it, I’m not sure I’m exactly thrilled by the idea of him walking around. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for him to go back into the cage, on a voluntary basis—’

‘I have no more intention of hurting you now than I did before I learned about the arm,’ Hesperus said.

‘I know—I believe you. But what if the arm has other ideas?’

I shook my head disappointedly. ‘It’s a lump of meat, Campion - it can’t act independently of Hesperus. Just because you’re unnerved by it doesn’t mean it’s going to creep into your room and strangle you at night. He isn’t going back into the cage. If you don’t want him on
Dalliance,
he’s more than welcome aboard
Silver Wings.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘That’s what it sounded like. He’s our guest and we agreed to help him piece together the puzzle of his past. The arm’s just another clue, that’s all.’

‘I have no wish to cause a rift between you,’ Hesperus said.

‘Oh, this isn’t a rift,’ I said haughtily. ‘This is barely a tiff. Not even on the radar. Campion and I are agreed - you’ll stay out of the cage. But since we’re all going to be entering abeyance shortly anyway, the point is pretty much moot. You can switch yourself off, or whatever it is you do, can’t you?’

‘I can shut down my core functions, although housekeeping tasks will remain active.’ He cast a sidelong glance at his now-sheathed arm. ‘It is apparent to me now that I must keep the arm alive, which would not be possible were I to go into total shutdown. Starved of oxygen, it would begin to decay.’

I nodded emphatically, trying to rid my mind of the idea of that arm turning into a rotten, gangrenous mass while it was still attached to him.

‘No, the arm has to stay alive - it’s the only way we’ll ever find out anything about it - or you, for that matter.’

‘I also suspect that the arm is a key to my true identity, or the true nature of my mission,’ Hesperus said. ‘What I cannot grasp is why I made no effort to conceal the transformation by retaining perfect symmetry between my left and right sides. It is almost as if I had no need for subterfuge. The armour that encases the skin could almost be viewed as a barrier, to protect it during growth.’

‘We’ll get to the bottom of it,’ I said, with more assurance than I really felt. If my years as a shatterling had taught me anything, it was that not all questions had answers. Societies had reduced themselves to radioactive dust because they could not accept that single unpalatable truth.

Shatterlings were supposed to be a bit cleverer than that.

‘It’s not good,’ I said, after I had run every possibility through
Dalliance’s
course plotter.

‘How not good?’ Purslane asked, leaning against a floating console, one foot tucked behind the other.

‘Fifty-five years. That’s how late we’re going to be. Even if you were to push
Silver Wings
to the limit and leave me to make my own way there, you still wouldn’t shave more than a year off that figure.’

‘Fifty-five years does not sound so excessive when it has already been two hundred thousand years since your last reunion,’ Hesperus said, staring up at the huge map of the galaxy painted on my displayer, marked with the winding red line that showed our progress to date. The details of this final part of our circuit - our stopover around the Centaurs’ world, our detour to Ateshga and now the last sprint to the reunion - had been enlarged below the main image, since a few hundred lights was barely a scratch against the vast territory we had already crossed. ‘Or am I mistaken?’

‘No, you’re not mistaken,’ I said. ‘In any other situation, we wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over fifty years, or even a hundred. But you’re not supposed to be this late for a reunion. No one ever shows up precisely at the agreed time, but most of the Line members will have arrived within a year or two. There’ll be a handful of stragglers who come in somewhere inside the first five years, and one or two who get there inside ten, but they’ll be looked on sternly. Anyone showing up later than that will either have had prior dispensation to be late, or they’d better have a cast-iron excuse.’

 

‘Which we don’t,’ Purslane said.

‘You could not have been expected to anticipate Ateshga’s treachery,’ said Hesperus.

‘No, but Ateshga didn’t end up costing us all that much time. The mistake was placing too much faith in the Centaurs.’ Purslane was giving me a dark look as she said this.

I held up my hands in mock surrender. ‘I admit it, all right? The horses were a bad idea. The point isn’t to pick over my mistakes but to see how we can make the best of a bad situation. I’ll get the Doctor Meninx business out of the way first: let Fescue and the others have their pound of flesh. Then I’ll wheel on Hesperus and show them what a good, industrious Gentian I’ve been.’

‘And me?’ Purslane asked. ‘Do I get to share in any of your glory?’

‘Only if you’re prepared to admit we consorted. Otherwise it could get a little tricky.’

‘They’ll work out we consorted when we both show up late. No point even thinking of hiding that.’

‘I suppose you’ve got a point there.’

Purslane crossed her arms. ‘Yes, I do. So we’ll both be taking credit for Hesperus.’

‘For my part,’ Hesperus said, ‘I will speak well of you, and of everything you have done for me.’

‘You’ll have your work cut out by the time I’ve finished stating my manifold grievances,’ said Doctor Meninx.

‘You’ll only have a thousand days and nights,’ I said, ‘so I’d get an early start if I were you.’

The avatar’s expression turned furious. ‘You would do well not to mock me, shatterling.’

‘Mocking you was the furthest thing from my mind, Doctor.’ I clapped my hands cheerily. ‘Now: the practical arrangements. Purslane and I will be entering abeyance as soon as we’ve finished editing our strands, which shouldn’t require more than a day or so. Doctor Meninx: I presume you’ll be putting yourself asleep until we reach the reunion system?’

‘What I do in my tank is my own business.’

‘All I was going to ask was, is there anything you would like Hesperus to keep his eye on while the rest of us are under?’

‘Keep his eye on?’ the avatar asked, with instant suspicion.

‘I will not be entering abeyance,’ our golden guest informed the avatar. ‘I have already volunteered to assist Campion by monitoring his other sleepers, ensuring that nothing untoward happens to them. I would be happy to extend the same courtesy to you, Doctor Meninx.’