House of Suns (27 page)

‘Likewise,’ Cascade said, tilting his milk-white head in greeting. ‘We share your horror at the atrocity that has befallen your Line.’ His voice was deep, resonant and infinitely soothing: something in it seemed to reach inside my soul and assure me that, while I was in his presence, no harm could come to me or anyone I cared for. He added, ‘Rest assured that the Machine People will do all in their power to assist you in bringing the perpetrators to justice. This is my promise to you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Were you the only Machine People to make it to the reunion?’ Purslane asked.

‘To our knowledge,’ said the lovely Cadence. ‘Of course, some may have expired in the approach to the reunion, after the ambush had already taken place. I think it unlikely, though. We have a strong sense of self-preservation.’

I thought of the way Hesperus had thrown himself into danger to help the rest of us, but thought better of commenting.

‘Did you hear about our guest?’ Purslane asked.

‘Hesperus?’ asked Cascade. ‘Yes, of course. His wellbeing is a matter of the gravest concern to us. We would like to examine him at the earliest opportunity.’

‘We are grateful for everything you have done for him,’ Cadence added. ‘Where is he now?’

‘Aboard my ship,
Silver Wings of Morning,’
Purslane said. ‘She’s in orbit - we had to leave them up there.’

‘We should probably talk about this later,’ I said. ‘Hesperus has survived until now - another day or two won’t make much difference.’

Cadence and Cascade nodded as one. ‘Then we shall speak tomorrow,’ the female robot said. Her silver face was all chiselled edges and flat surfaces, but it still managed to look heart-stoppingly feminine. I wondered if Purslane felt the same attraction to Cadence’s masculine counterpart.

Betony extended a hand to the elephantine posthuman. ‘Let me also introduce Roving Ambassador Ugarit-Panth of the Consentiency of the Thousand Worlds, a very respected and stable mid-level supercivilisation located in the Perseus Arm.’

The ambassasor raised his trunk. The tip ended in a five-digited hand with a pink orifice in the palm. I reached out and shook the revolting appendage, smiling sympathetically.

‘I’m really sorry, Ambassador.’

His dark eyes were set on either side of a massive, bulging brow. ‘Sorry about what, shatterling?’

‘About what happened, obviously—’

‘About what happened to what?’

‘When the stardam failed ...’ I trailed off: Betony had hooked his arm under mine and was propelling me onwards.

‘He’s got his civilisations mixed up, Ambassador - he’s thinking of the Pantropic Nexus. Aren’t you, Campion?’

‘Of course,’ I said, flustered.

‘Which isn’t even
in
the Perseus Arm. But that’s Campion for you - galactic geopolitics was never your strong point, was it?’

‘Apparently not,’ I said, mystified.

‘What stardam failure do you speak of?’ the ambassador asked.

‘There was a
rumour
of a stardam failure,’ Purslane said, leaning between the ambassador and me. ‘But I looked into it, and it was just a scheduled detonation. Sometimes stars are allowed to go supernova, especially if there’s a star-forming nebula nearby that needs metal enrichment, or a triggering kick before it begins to collapse.’

‘And the involvement of the Pantropic Nexus?’

‘They were warned to limit their expansion into the hazard zone. When the star blew, some of their systems were irradiated at life-cleansing intensities. That’s probably what Campion was thinking of.’

‘I was,’ I said, nodding vigorously. ‘The Pantropic Nexus. The fools.’

‘We shall speak more of this matter,’ the ambassador said, in Betony’s direction.

Betony smiled tightly. ‘And this is the honoured shatterling Japji of Torquata Line ...’ When we were safely out of earshot of the elephantine ambassador, he hissed, ‘He doesn’t know.’

‘So I gathered. When were you planning on telling him?’

‘We weren’t.’

‘Isn’t that rather irresponsible?’

‘Not really. He’s borderline suicidal as it is. You know what they do when they’re ready to kill themselves?’

‘I’m sure you’re about to tell me.’

‘Wander off into the desert and blow themselves up. There’s a small anti-matter device stuffed inside his ribcage.’

‘Ah. And you think—’

‘Until we can be absolutely confident that he won’t detonate near any of us, and that if he does we can screen the blast ... we have to keep him in a state of enlightened deception. We’ve already altered the local troves so that they don’t say anything about the Consentiency being wiped out by a failed stardam. Now we’ve got to go in again and change the entry for the Pantropic Nexus.’

‘I’d be depressed if I thought everyone was lying to me.’

‘Everything was just fine until you blundered in and started commiserating with him.’

‘Maybe you should have told me first, instead of relying on telepathy.’

‘I did drop a fairly broad hint when I introduced him. You know, the fact that I
wasn’t
talking about his civilisation in the past tense. Or didn’t you notice that?’ Then he nodded at Purslane. ‘That was good, though, all that stuff about the Nexus - at least one of you was thinking on their feet.’

‘I’ve only been on this planet for ten minutes,’ I said. ‘Already I feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome.’

Purslane looked at me with icy forbearance. ‘Work really hard, and maybe next time you can get it down to five.’

We stayed on the landing deck until the evening air turned cold, with shatterlings, guests and Ymirian functionaries mingling amidst floating trays laden with drinks and nibbles. Most of the other shatterlings had been on Ymir for years, but Campion and I were only days of subjective time away from the reunion system. To us the mental wound was still bright and agonising, much too raw to be soothed by banter and idle reassurance. In a restless moment I pulled away from the crowd and made my way to the edge of the deck, standing with my feet close to the unguarded edge. It was a long way down to the sloping ground of the Benevolence finger, and even further to the twinkling, ever-shifting dunes beneath.

‘If you listen carefully you can hear it singing,’ Campion said softly, for he had joined me at the edge.

‘I can’t hear anything, not with that party going on.’

‘They’re filtering inside. In a little while there’ll just be a few stragglers like you and me left outdoors.’

‘Did you smooth things over with Betony?’

Campion grinned quickly. ‘I think so. He says he’ll have to make sure the elephant only gets to access trove data that has been doctored to fit the story, but they’ve been doing that since he got here anyway. They’ll have to make a few more changes to gloss over the bit about the stardam failure, but it shouldn’t be a problem.’

‘They should just tell him. It isn’t kind, keeping him in the dark like that.’

‘But see it from their side.’

‘He wouldn’t blow up.’

‘I don’t know. It’s not as if something like that hasn’t happened before.’

‘There’s precedence for everything in galactic history. Every conceivable event has already happened at least once. But that doesn’t make it likely that it’ll happen again, here and now.’

‘Fine - you go and tell him. I’ll take a trip back up to orbit and watch the fireworks.’

‘And abandon me down here?’

Campion closed his hand around mine. ‘Not really.’

After a while I said, ‘What did you think about the robots?’

‘I’m glad they’re here. Now that Cadence and Cascade are involved, it means it’s more than just Gentian Line that’s been attacked. If the Machine People feel aggrieved, we’ll have their power backing us all the way. I’d certainly rather have them on my side than against me.’

‘I was thinking more about their attitude to Hesperus.’

‘In what way?’

‘Do you actually think they want to help him?’

‘That’s what they said, isn’t it?’

I pulled my gown tighter against the chill. ‘I don’t know. How can we be sure they’re not just going to dismantle him, rather than making him well again?’

‘If making him well isn’t an option, dismantling may be the only alternative. At least that way they’d be able to access the information he accumulated before his amnesia.’

‘But he’s our friend, Campion. We can’t just hand him over like some worn-out thing, to be stripped down and recycled.’

‘He’s a machine. That’s what happens when they break down.’

‘Possibly the coldest thing you’ve ever said.’

‘It’s not that I don’t care,’ Campion said hastily, ‘but we have to be realistic. Who stands a better chance of fixing him - the Machine People, the civilisation he came from, or some nebulous entity called the Spirit of the Air, about which we know almost nothing?’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway - aren’t we being a little premature? They haven’t even seen him yet. Shouldn’t we wait to hear what they have to say after that?’

‘Cadence and Cascade are just two robots. They might know how to fix him, but that doesn’t mean they have the resources this far from the Monoceros Ring.’

‘Then we let them take him home.’

‘Campion, he sent us a message. He was very specific about Neume. He couldn’t have known Cadence and Cascade were going to be here, but he did know about the Spirit.’

‘If he’d known about the other robots he’d have told us to entrust him to them. They’re other robots, just like Hesperus. They’re bound to know what’s best for him. He told us to make sure we got his notes and drawings back to his people.’

‘That’s not the same as saying he’d have entrusted himself to them.’

‘We can talk about this all night and still not get any nearer to agreement. Besides, it’s pointless speculating about the Spirit of the Air before we’ve talked to the magistrate again. From where I was standing, she didn’t sound awfully keen on the idea of giving us direct access to it.’

‘We’re a Line,’ I said. ‘We ask nicely the first time. But if we don’t get what we want, we take it anyway. That’s the way we’ve always done things. It’s the way we’re expected to do things.’

‘Go around bullying lesser cultures, you mean?’

‘We’ve been around long enough to earn the right.’ I groaned inwardly, listening to myself. It was the kind of thing I loathed to hear coming out of the mouths of other shatterlings: the idea that we would use force the instant diplomacy and persuasion failed us. Bully our way around, in other words, just as Campion put it. But I was only thinking of Hesperus. I did not want anything or anyone to stand in the way of bringing him back to life.

‘Listen,’ Campion said, ‘it’s starting.’

‘What?’

‘The music. The song of the dunes.’

I heard it then, although the sound must have been rising in intensity for several minutes, pushing itself into audibility. Campion was correct that most of the celebrants had moved into the tower, leaving only a dozen or so people on the deck, most of whom were silent. The noise was low and alien, a mournful, bass-rich drone that rose and fell in pitch like a deathly slow siren.

‘Is it the wind?’ I whispered, hardly daring to speak.

‘Not the wind, no. It works best when the air is almost totally still.’

‘You haven’t been here before.’

‘But I’ve been on worlds with dunes before. So have you, but probably never at the right time. Face it, there are a lot of experiences neither of us have had yet. It’s why we keep living.’

‘So if not the wind—’

‘It’s all down to avalanches,’ Campion said, in the same respectful whisper. ‘Sand grains start sliding downhill, just beneath the outer membrane of the dunes. Actually, the technical term is barchans - those are the sinuous dunes, where you get the right conditions for the singing. The avalanching grains set up some kind of resonance with the outermost layer. It starts oscillating, rippling free like a vast drumskin. The oscillations feed back into the avalanching grains, forcing them to synchronise themselves. The membrane vibrates even more strongly and sets up excitations in the surrounding airmass. You get something like music.’ After a pause he said, ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’

‘Wonderful and a little spooky.’

‘Like all the best things in the universe.’ After a pause he said, ‘I was talking to Cyphel just now.’

‘You always did have an eye for her.’

‘I looked but I didn’t touch. The point is, she said something that made me think. We’ve a lot on our minds at the moment - Hesperus, the other robots, Grilse and the other prisoners, why anyone would want to destroy the Line and what will happen if they find us again. Enough worry for a lifetime, even by Line standards. But despite all of that
we’re still alive.
We’re still alive and we still have friends, and somewhere to stay, and it’s a beautiful evening and the dunes of Neume are singing to us. Those dunes aren’t just any old dunes, you know. They’re the shattered remains of the Provider mega-structures, after their culture fell out of the sky. We’re being serenaded by the twinkling remains of a dead supercivilisation, the relics of people who thought themselves gods, if only for a few instants of galactic time. Now - how does that make you feel?’

‘Like I’m living too late,’ I said.

The Line was in private session for breakfast, on a terrace near the top of the building’s onion-shaped summit. The terrace was partially open, with one half covered by a domed roof. Ymir crowded away in all directions, with vehicles and citizens flitting between towers in ceaseless, dizzying motion. There were coloured flags on the bridges and aerial promenades. The air was cool but invigorating, and I felt refreshed after the night’s sleep. The world’s rotation had been adjusted to a Line-standard day circuits ago, and because we were near the vernal equinox, Ymir had enjoyed nearly twelve hours of uninterrupted darkness.