House of Suns (34 page)

But there remained the matter of Hesperus. It was agreed that the robots would not depart until I had brought him into the presence of the Spirit of the Air, whatever the outcome of that might be. If he was healed, they would leave with or without him, according to his wishes. Otherwise, they would gather his remains (if any were left) and convey him back to their part of the galaxy. It was agreed that the robots would depart on a trajectory that would avoid any chance of detection by the ambushing elements, even if that added a few centuries to their journey time. Of course, once they left Neume, we would have no means of enforcing that agreement.

Weighed down with apprehension, stung by what had been done to me, the last thing I felt like was watching Mezereon resume her interrogation of the prisoners. But Campion assured me it would take my mind off what had happened at breakfast.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said sourly, but I went along anyway.

The magistrate had told me to expect a flier at three, which left five hours, allowing for a margin of error. By the time Campion and I arrived, most of the room was already dialled up on Synchromesh, the shatterlings sitting as stiffly and mutely as statues. All four cabinets were present, but only one of the occupants - the one on the right - was dialled down to a low stasis factor. Mezereon’s voice tolled like a very low, ominously cracked bell.

I let the drops settle into my eyes and then dialled up, not forgetting to set the expiration mechanism to bring me out in time for my meeting. Mezereon shifted into sudden, hectoring life.

‘We know exactly who you are,’ she said, strolling up and down the plinth in front of the cabinets. ‘What we don’t know is why you’ve come back from the dead. Would you like to tell me what really happened, Thorn, when you were supposedly lost to attrition? Was your disappearance engineered so that you could attack other Lines with impunity?’

‘Go figure,’ said the man in the cabinet.

‘Grilse was also lost to attrition. That suggests a pattern to me.’

‘Very attentive of you.’

‘I’m willing to bet the other two are also lost shatterlings. We’ll identify their lines soon enough - Marcellin, Mellictan or otherwise. In the meantime you can help me with the House of Suns.’

‘You already asked me about that.’

‘And you told me that you know nothing, but I don’t believe you. Is it a Line, Thorn, one that the Commonality doesn’t know about?’

‘There isn’t any such thing.’

‘That we know of. But if such a thing existed, could it be kept secret?’ Mezereon stroked her chin. ‘Possibly, if there was a good enough reason. But who’d benefit from the existence of a hidden Line?’

‘Call me when you find out.’

‘I think you know all about it. I think you may even be a part of it.’

‘You’ve already tied me to the Mellictans.’

‘But you left them. What’s to say you didn’t join the House of Suns afterwards?’

‘No one swaps between Lines. That’s not how it works.’

‘But the House of Suns is something else. It might operate according to entirely different rules. Feeding itself from the attrition of other Lines, for instance. That’s feasible. It could happen.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘There’d need to be infiltration at Line-level, of course. Those shatterlings would need to fake their own deaths, which would mean elaborate planning. They’d have to know they were joining the House of Suns ahead of time. And they’d need to think it was better than staying inside their own Line, with all the rewards and limitless possibilities that entails. Tough call, wouldn’t you say? Being a shatterling is close to being a god. You’d need to offer someone the chance to become better than a god before they took that bait.’

There was a glimmer of wounded recognition in Thorn’s eyes - a hint that Mezereon had put her finger on something raw. I shuddered to think of the devil’s bargain he must have signed up to. Mezereon was right: we did have almost everything we could dream of. We had lived for millions of years, crossed the galaxy countless times over, drunk from the riches and glories of ten million cultures. Matter and energy were our playthings. We could swaddle stars to stop them shining; we could flick worlds around as if they were specks of dirt. Entire civilisations owed their existence to our good deeds, unwitnessed and uncom memorated. We did marvellous, saintly things and we never stopped to ask for thanks.

What could be
better
than being a shatterling?

Only one thing, I thought to myself.

Being a wicked shatterling. Being a devil instead of an angel. Having all that power, all that wisdom, but being able to do anything with it. Being able to destroy as well as create.

‘I was hoping you’d tell me everything you know about the House of Suns voluntarily,’ Mezereon said. ‘It would have been easier that way, saved us all a lot of unpleasantness. But obviously that’s not going to happen. I’m going to dial you out of stasis, back into realtime. You may or may not survive the emergence. If you do, it will only be to face further interrogation. As soon as I get a living body, I’m going to section it. You know what that means, Thorn? Of course you do - you’re a man of the world. You’ve seen some horrible, sickening things. We all have. Now you’re going to become one of them - unless you talk.’

‘I don’t know anything about the House of Suns,’ he said. But there was something in his voice we had not heard before. He was frightened; the mask of defiance was beginning to crack.

Mezereon reached for the handle. ‘You’re at one hundred now. I’m taking you down to ten.’

She wrenched the lever to the left until it was resting at the penultimate notch. The cabinet made a groaning, decelerating noise, as of some huge turbine being suddenly braked. The cabinet quivered on the pedestal. The dials around the main lever tremored, registering savage, undamped time-stresses.

Mezereon adjusted her chronometer to match her subjective rate with Thorn’s. Around the room, her hidden audience did likewise.

‘I’m dialling back in a moment. This is your last chance to tell me what I want to know. Why did you ambush us? What is the House of Suns?’

‘You won’t do it,’ Thorn said. ‘You need me alive too much. In here I can always tell you something, even if you can’t force it out of me.’

‘Why did you ambush us?’

‘You had it coming.’

‘What is the House of Suns?’

‘Something you’ll die never knowing about.’

Mezereon twisted the dial on her chronometer, her movements accelerating from my perspective as the drug released her back into normal time. I reached for my own chronometer, but before I could do so Mezereon’s hand had flashed to the lever and slammed it all the way to the left. The cabinet flickered and emitted a sharp coughing noise.

I knew instantly that Thorn had died; a safe emergence would have been much less dramatic.

The details of stasis technology have never been of interest to me. All I have ever pretended to understand is that the cabinet holds its occupant inside a bubble of spacetime separated from that which surrounds it by a microscopic membrane, like the white of an egg around the yolk. As the bubble approaches normal time-flow, the interface between the bubble and external spacetime should evaporate away into quantum indeterminacy. Most of the time, that is what happens. But once in a while, often with old or poorly designed caskets, the boundary behaves very differently. It adheres to the contents of the bubble, sticking like glue. In the same moment of failure, the interior of the bubble tears open and pushes outwards, compressing the contents against the unyielding barrier of that skintight membrane.

We call it husking.

That was what happened to Thorn. His shattered parts, and the pieces of his throne, rained onto the hard floor of the plinth. Mezereon knelt down and sorted through them until she found a piece of his face. It was like a clay imprint of an actor mimicking terror; clay that had been fired until it was glossy.

‘You should have waited,’ said Charlock, rising from his seat. ‘He hadn’t told us enough.’

Mezereon sounded quite unfazed. ‘He’d told me everything he was ever going to. No amount of persuasion would have convinced him I was serious. The only way to do that was to take this chance.’

‘You lost one prisoner.’

‘There are three more. Now I can show them the empty cabinet and let them know I mean business.’ She lofted the piece of his flesh like a trophy. ‘And this - they’ll recognise the face.’

Still holding the fragment, kicking her way through the rest of him, Mezereon walked to the second cabinet. Her hand moved to the stasis dial, ready to bring the prisoner within reach of Synchromesh.

O
ne day the little boy and his robot guards went up the ramp into his ship and that was the last time I ever saw him the way he really was. I had no idea of that at the time; all I knew was that we had spent another afternoon in Palatial; another afternoon playing the long game of empire. But it was not the last I saw of Count Mordax.

I was thirty-five, by the usual reckoning; by all objective measurements, I was still a girl of around eleven or twelve years of age - an unusually precocious girl, a girl with an adult’s worth of memories (even if most of them consisted of life in the same house) but a girl all the same. But after three and a half decades it was decreed by my guardians that it was time for my development to be allowed to proceed normally again. I was called into Madame Kleinfelter’s office and she asked me to roll up my sleeve. There was a small bump under the skin just below the crook of my elbow. Madame Kleinfelter touched a blunt stylus to the bump and I felt a tingle, and that was the end of it. The bump was gone, and the biological machinery that had held me at a fixed age was no longer inside me.

I felt no different, of course. But a clock that had been silent for years had just begun ticking.

‘Why now?’ I asked.

‘When you were born,’ Madame Kleinfelter said, ‘it was never intended that you would be kept the way you have been. A modest degree of prolongation, yes ... that’s the norm nowadays, throughout the Golden Hour. Why race through childhood when you have a couple of hundred years ahead of you? But to be held at prepuberty for thirty-five years ... that is unusual, even by modern standards.’ She put down the stylus and steepled her thick, wrinkled fingers, as she often did when delivering a lecture. ‘It was done at your mother’s request, Abigail - back when she enjoyed extended periods of lucidity. The specialists convinced her that her madness could be cured, given time. They warned her that it might take a while - decades, even. Your mother chose to hold you in a state of suspended development, so that she could still enjoy your childhood when she recovered. She could have had you frozen, of course ... but this was her preferred method. She wanted to able to look at you when she was lucid, to see you learning and playing. She did not want to look at a doll in a tank.’ Her fingers tensed around each other. ‘But your mother is not getting any better. If I have occasionally led you to think that the prognosis for recovery was better than it is, then I apologise. But nothing I did was done lightly. I was always thinking of you first, Abigail.’

‘Then my mother won’t be cured.’

‘They will keep trying. But her psychosis is now all-consuming. Every measure they have taken - and these are the best doctors in the Golden Hour - has resulted in an incremental worsening of her condition. The moments of lucidity have grown further and further apart. Perhaps they will stumble on a cure tomorrow, but we can no longer count on that. Which brings me to the difficult matter of the family business. Now that the likelihood of your mother recovering her faculties is so small, we must, with heavy hearts, look to the future.’

‘To me,’ I said. I felt faint, as if I had stood up too suddenly.

‘This is no easy path you are about to walk, Abigail. You are going to grow up now. You are going to become a woman. And when the time is right, you are going to assume the mantle that your mother once wore. You will lead the family, as she once did. Everything that she made, everything that she built, all the knowledge and cleverness she gathered, will be in your hands. It will be like an incredibly valuable ornament, a thing of fine coloured glass and rare jewels. In your hands, it will be safe. But you must never, ever drop it.’

When we were done, I went to my playroom and entered the room-within-a-room that held the green cube of Palatial. Although the developmental inhibitor had been removed, it was inconceivable that any measurable change had occurred within me. But I still felt as if the green cube, and the enchanted landscape it held, was something that belonged to my childhood. It was not that the game suddenly held no fascination for me. I could still feel its allure. But it would have been unseemly, inappropriate, even sordid, to step through the portal again.

It may have been a month, or maybe a year later; I do not recall precisely. But there came a day when Madame Kleinfelter summoned me to her office.