House of Suns (16 page)

Fescue halted, and for a moment it appeared that he was done. Then he raised his chin, striking a defiant pose, and said, ‘I wish I knew how many of you were out there. I would like to think that there are still latecomers on their way home, but for all I know attrition may already have taken every last one of you. I will say this, though, in the vain hope that it reaches some remnants of the Line. Now you and a handful of survivors carry the candle that Abigail set aflame. That is a singular responsibility: a greater burden than you have ever been required to shoulder. You must not let the rest of us down.’

Fescue bowed his head. The image froze and then flicked back to its starting position, ready for the speech to be replayed.

We watched it again, in case there was some nuance that had escaped us the first time.

When our messenger was done, Campion said, ‘This can’t be real. Someone’s faked it. Someone’s figured out how to send an emergency signal, impersonating Fescue.’

‘Why would anyone do that?’ I asked. There was a coldness growing inside me, a realisation that our future had just become stranger and more frightening than it had appeared only a few minutes ago, but for now I was still capable of reasoned thought.

‘To get at us, of course! To give us a reason to skip the reunion completely. God knows we’ve got enough enemies, enough people who’d love to see us miss the boat.’

‘They wouldn’t dare use Fescue’s name unless they had his authority. He sent this message, or delegated it to someone he trusted.’

‘Fescue hates us! He’s got every reason in the world to trick us with something like this.’

‘And risk excommunication? If he sent this signal via omni-directional broadcast, then it’ll have been intercepted by every shatterling who hadn’t yet made it to the reunion. Fescue might have an axe to grind against us, but he’s not vindictive, and he definitely isn’t stupid.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I’ve been thinking all this through as well, you know. I’d love to believe this is a hoax, aimed solely at us. But that’s not how it looks to me. I think this is real. I think something horrible has happened and we’re being warned to get as far away from the reunion as we can.’

‘That would also be my conclusion,’ Hesperus said.

‘Did anyone ask you?’ Campion snapped.

‘My apologies. I should not have spoken.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you should have, because you’re right. This is real, and we have to take it seriously. Listen to Hesperus, Campion. He has every reason to want to make it to that reunion: it’s where we’ve promised him he’ll find other Machine People. And now that message is saying the party’s off, and Hesperus still believes it. Doesn’t that tell you something?’

Campion spread his hands before his face, as if he wished to bury it in them.

‘I can’t deal with this. It’s got to be some kind of mistake, something blown out of all proportion.’

‘Or it’s exactly what Fescue said it was: an actual ambush, with huge losses. We’ll know soon enough, in any case. Now that we’ve a reason to, we can concentrate our sensors on the system ahead. With two ships, we can establish an observational baseline wide enough to resolve the nebula - if it’s really there.’

‘It may be easier than that,’ Hesperus said. ‘If the system is now dust-cloaked, the spectral properties of the star will be modified. It will appear redder, and contain the absorption lines characteristic of the elements making up the planet.’

‘Silver,’
I said hesitantly, because I knew I was on the verge of having a harrowing possibility confirmed, ‘tell me if there’s anything unusual about the target star, compared against the trove.’

It did not take long.
Silver Wings
informed us that the star was indeed redder than expected, and that its atmosphere contained unusually strong spectral signatures of nickel and iron, proving that the sun was shrouded in the rubble that had once been our reunion world. Furthermore, even at our present distance of thirteen lights, there was clear evidence of the nebula: a warm, glowing ellipse like a thumbprint pressed over the hard point of the star.

That was when we knew for sure that we were not being hoaxed, and that everything was going to be different from now on. The first six million years had been all fun and games.

Now we were growing up.

‘What if there are survivors still hiding out in the cloud?’ Campion asked. ‘Don’t we owe it to them to have a closer look?’

‘Fescue said it was already eight years since the attack when he made the transmission. Add another thirteen years for the signal to reach us: that’s twenty-one years. Add another thirteen before we arrive - that’s thirty-four years.’

‘Fescue survived for eight years or he wouldn’t have been able to send that signal.’

‘He didn’t say he was still there. The message’s apparent point of origin tells us nothing. It could have been relayed from a ship on its way to the fallback.’

‘Read between the lines. He was hurt. If he was anywhere else other than inside the system, he’d have been able to get himself fixed. His ship must have been damaged, and chances are it was still inside the cloud. Fescue must have been hiding there ever since the attack. That means we have to consider the possibility of other survivors.’ His voice notched higher. ‘If we were down in that system, crippled but still alive, we’d be counting on outside help as well.’

‘The survival of the Line outweighs the survival of individual shatterlings.’

‘Ask yourself what Fescue would have done,’ Campion said quietly.

‘What?’

‘Put yourself in Fescue’s shoes - as if he was the one running into this transmission, not us. As if we sent it, and he was the one who had to decide how to act. Fescue was right to warn us, but he knew damned well we wouldn’t listen. I may not care for that arrogant, hypocritical arsehole, but do you think he’d have been very likely to listen? I don’t even know if I’m proposing the right thing, or something worse than stupid, but I know we can’t just dismiss it out of hand. These are our brothers and sisters, our fellow shatterlings. They’re pieces of us, pieces of what we are, pieces of what make us human. If we abandon them, we may as well forget about the Line. We won’t have any right to call ourselves Gentian any more.’

We went to see the doctor.

The tank was as dark as ever, but now there was something bulging against the glass from within, revealed in flattened pale islands interrupted by rivers and inlets of random shadow. I looked at it for a few numb moments, trying to work out how that pale, doughy mass could have been introduced into the tank without Doctor Meninx becoming aware of it. Then I made out the flattened, ruptured oval of something that had once been an eye, and it dawned on me, slowly and then with increasing conviction, that the pale mass was Doctor Meninx, and that he had bloated to at least twice his previous volume, until he could expand no more.

I scrambled up the ladder to the top of the tank. I folded back the hinged section of walkway and began to twist the circular hatchway. I spun it free and began to lever it back, but I had only opened it a crack when I was assaulted by a noxious, vinegary stench.

I slammed the hatch back down.

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘I cannot say,’ Hesperus replied.

My hands trembling, I lowered myself down the side of the tank, back onto the safety of the floor. I had never really liked Doctor Meninx, and I had liked him less and less as his true prejudices bubbled to the surface. But he had been a fellow starfarer, a being who had travelled far, swum in oceans of memory and experience, and now all that memory and experience were gone.

The anger hit me with the cold force of a supernova shockwave.

‘What do you mean, you
cannot
say? You were fucking
awake,
Hesperus. You were the only one he had anything to fear from. The only one he thought might want to kill him. And now he’s dead.’

Hesperus stood at the entrance to the chamber, his arms at his sides, his head lowered slightly, like a schoolboy summoned for punishment.

‘I understand your reaction, Purslane, but as I have already explained to Campion, this was not my doing.’

‘Why didn’t you try to help him?’ Campion asked.

‘I did, despite your request that I keep away from him. When I detected signs that Doctor Meninx’s tank chemistry was amiss - signs that I stress were by no means compellingly obvious - I attempted to adjust the equipment in such a way as to remedy the perceived imbalance. I soon discovered that the equipment was not amenable to outside interference.’

I was still not ready to let go of my suspicion, but I wanted to hear the rest of his defence. ‘And?’

‘I discovered that by merely tampering with the equipment I had raised Doctor Meninx from his drug-induced slumber. Upon his return to partial consciousness, I attempted to explain the nature of his predicament. Unfortunately, Doctor Meninx refused to believe that my intentions were anything other than improper. He urged me to desist tampering with his tank at the earliest opportunity.’

‘Did you?’

‘Of course not: I persisted, despite Doctor Meninx’s far from lucid protestations. Yet as I attempted assist him, the doctor succeeded in activating certain devices built into his tank, the purpose of which was deter outside interference. These countermeasures, though posing no serious threat to my own existence, nonetheless made it prohibitively difficult for me to access the very mechanisms I sought to examine and adjust. With regret, I was forced to abandon my efforts. I could not save the doctor, but merely witness his inevitable decline. It was at this point that I attempted to raise you from abeyance, without success.’

‘And then?’

‘I made a number of subsequent attempts both to reason with the doctor and to repair the chemical imbalance, but on all such occasions I was forced to retreat. Eventually there came a day when the doctor appeared insensate, and shortly afterwards I concluded that he was dead. Other than monitoring the integrity of the tank, in case it should rupture and spill the contents into your ship, I have had nothing more to do with the personage.’

‘Open and shut, in other words,’ Campion said.

‘I can only speak the truth,’ Hesperus replied.

He was with us when we ran the Belladonna algorithm. We were looking at a portion of the Milky Way, writ large on Campion’s displayer. The view had already zoomed in on
Dalliance’s
position, with only a thousand lights or so visible in any direction - about the thickness of the disc itself. The red line that marked
Dalliance’s
future course was arrowing out towards the extremities of the galaxy. A cone projected ahead of the ship, indicating the algorithm’s search volume.

‘It requires us to search in the direction of the galactic anti-centre,’ I said. ‘We look along a radial line extending away from the core that passes through the position of the reunion system. As it happens, that’s pretty close to our present heading.’

‘The volume will encompass the system you were already approaching,’ said Hesperus. ‘Will that not lead to an ambiguity?’

‘Belladonna explicitly instructs us to ignore the reunion system, and any suitable systems lying closer to the galactic centre,’ I said. ‘It obliges us to look beyond, until we find a star of the right spectral type and with the right formation of planets. It must lie at least fifty years from the designated reunion world to give us a chance of getting there without being tracked - any closer and we could be followed too easily. There has to be a rocky world in a circular orbit at a suitable distance from the star.’

‘The world must be life-supporting?’

‘Not necessarily, but it shouldn’t be so inhospitable that it could never be scaped. We could easily spend several thousand years in the vicinity of the fallback. That’s long enough to modify a climate, even to shift a borderline case to true habitability.’

‘And if the world is already occupied?’

‘Then we’ll be guests of whoever owns the place. Most civilisations know enough about the Lines not to turn them down in their hour of need.’

‘And if they should turn you down?’

‘It’s not something you do twice.’

After a moment Campion said, ‘Looks like we have a candidate.’

The image zoomed in again, dizzyingly, on a solitary yellow star. It was ninety lights beyond the reunion system - practically on its doorstep in galactic terms, but safely beyond the proscribed margin of fifty lights. Provided we did not head there directly, but went off in a false direction before steering back towards it once we were out of detection range, we would be able to reach the system without being followed.

I digested the trove data scrolling down next to the star. The summary was in all likelihood no more than the last layer of virgin ice on a mountain of data known to Gentian Line. Given the perceptual bottlenecks of the human central nervous system, there might be more ‘known’ about this world than could ever be absorbed in a normal lifetime.

‘Neume,’ said Campion, stroking his chin. ‘Rings a bell - although I suppose there are thousands of Neumes out there.’

‘No—I’m getting it as well, and I think the memory’s specific to this sector. One of us must have been there. Not you or I, or it would come through stronger. It must have been quite a few circuits ago - enough for the place to have changed a bit.’

According to the trove, the planet had seen many native civilisations. No one was listed as living there now, but that was no guarantee that we would find the world unoccupied. The trove’s last update on the matter was twelve kilo-years stale.

‘The world touches a chord of familiarity with me as well,’ Hesperus said.

‘You’ve been to Neume?’ I asked.

‘Not been, I think. Nothing in my bones tells me I have walked that soil. But I may have intended to go there, as part of my wider explorations.’

‘There’s something on Neume called the Spirit of the Air,’ Campion said, reading a few lines further down the summary. ‘Some kind of posthuman machine intelligence, I think, although it’s all a bit vague. Any chance you were interested in that?’