House of Suns (40 page)

‘Most unfortunate,’ Cascade echoed, his hands clasped demurely. ‘But you should not blame yourselves for this failure. It was clear to us that you had Hesperus’s best interests at heart. In all honesty, he would probably not have survived the journey back to Machine Space.’

‘You thought he might,’ Campion said.

‘We were erring on the side of optimism, so as not to discourage you too greatly,’ Cadence answered.

‘The Spirit has taken him,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t mean we failed.’

‘How can it be otherwise?’ Cascade asked softly, the way one might address a child who was under some fundamental misapprehension about the state of reality.

‘It’s taken things before,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it’s returned them the same day, but it’s also happened weeks or months later. The fact that it didn’t put Hesperus back together last night doesn’t mean it won’t reassemble him at some point in the future. We just have to be patient, to wait for that outcome.’

‘Patience is one of our virtues,’ Cadence said. ‘Nonetheless, we are still obliged to return to the Monoceros Ring at the earliest opportunity. We owe it to Gentian Line, and the Commonality. The sooner the news of your misfortune reaches our fellow machines, the better they can organise their response. You may not think a year or two will make much difference, given the enormity of the journey ahead of us—’

‘It had occurred to me,’ I said.

‘But a thorough analysis of galactic history reveals that many events would have gone differently if critical information had arrived a year earlier, or a year later. We cannot count on being exceptions.’

‘In other words, you still need my ship.’

‘Regrettably, yes,’ Cascade said.

‘I guess I’m resigned to it now. You can take her whenever you want, as far as I’m concerned. I saw her when the sun rose, lit up like a morning star. It tore my heart out to know she isn’t mine any more. The sooner she’s out of my sight, the better.’

The robots glanced at each other briefly. ‘We will not delay, in that case. An early departure suits us very well, and will hopefully cause you he minimum of distress.’

‘I’d still like to empty my hold first. It may not mean anything to you, but there are things in there to which I have a sentimental attachment. The Line didn’t say anything about taking them from me - just the ship they’re in.’

‘Is there something of particular value?’ Cadence asked.

‘Not really. But they’re part of me, part of my past. I like to keep things. Campion doesn’t feel the same way, but I can’t help who I am.’

‘You should let her clean out
Silver Wings,’
Campion said, addressing the robots. ‘It won’t take long, and the ship will be even faster without all that dead weight in her cargo hold.’

‘I see no practical objections,’ Cascade said, ‘but it would be desirable to assign formal ownership of your ship to us as soon as possible. That way we will be able to familiarise ourselves with her control systems. Might we do that imminently? You could begin unloading your possessions while we are adapting to the ship. Once you are done, we should be ready to leave orbit with the minimum of delay.’

‘Don’t expect me to jump for joy at the prospect,’ I said.

‘We appreciate how traumatic this must be,’ Cadence said. ‘It may not be much consolation, but you will have earned the gratitude of the Machine People.’

‘Hasn’t she already earned it?’ Campion asked.

‘Of course,’ Cascade replied, nodding slightly.

‘I’m drained now,’ I said. ‘Drained, and I still need to speak to Mister Jynx about what happened last night. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to
that.
If it’s all right with you, we’ll go up to the ship tomorrow.’

‘That would be most satisfactory,’ the robots said together.

Mezereon’s interrogations continued for the rest of the day. Purslane left me to sit in on them alone while she debriefed the Ymirian scientist about our experiences in the eye of the Spirit.

Although there had been no public censure, I had the impression that Mezereon had been chastised for what she had done to Thorn, the shatterling from the House of Moths. She might not have intended to kill him, but she must have known that the likelihood of him surviving emergence was not great. And while Mezereon might have convinced herself that he had said all he was going to say, I suspected that Aconite and the others were a lot less certain. Their presence was much more conspicuous this time. Mezereon was still leading the proceedings, but Aconite, Lucerne, Melilot and Valerian were sitting in a separate row of their own, between the audience and the plinth. They did not say much, but Mezereon was paying them nearly as much attention as she paid the prisoners. Her every move was under scrutiny, and she did nothing without glancing at her four fellow survivors, seeking tacit permission to proceed. At the same time, there was something defiant, almost cocksure, in the way she conducted herself. She might have been slapped on the wrist, told not to cross the line again, but she had not been dethroned. That would have been an admission that Betony and the others had made a mistake in handing this assignment to Mezereon, and
that
would never do. Mezereon seemed emboldened, not cowed.

The caskets - three occupied and one empty - had been arranged in an arc so that each was visible to the other. Mezereon had dialled all the prisoners down to one hundred, and we were all dosed on Synchromesh to an equivalent factor. The twelve-hour interrogation session would have lasted a subjective interval equivalent to seven and a half minutes - scarcely enough time for niceties in a normal conversation. But this was not a normal conversation. Mezereon was ablaze with righteous fury, hammering each question home almost before the prisoners had had a chance to answer the last one. When she reached an impasse, she dialled herself back down to normal time and consulted with the four. The day still slammed by.

At the end of it she had made remarkably little progress. Facial matching had established that the two unknown prisoners might be lost shatterlings of Ectobius and Jurtina Lines, a supposition which caused no little awkwardness given that we were hosting guests from those two Lines. But Mezereon had not been able to persuade them to reveal their identities. Nor had they shed any further light on the nature of the House of Suns, which remained as mysterious as when Hesperus had first mentioned it. Grilse was the only one who showed a flicker of recognition, but even that might have been my imagination.

‘I think we know each other pretty well by now,’ Mezereon said to Grilse.

I remembered Melilot’s comment about Mezereon being zealous in her pursuit of the truth, when the survivors were still hiding in the ruins of the reunion system.

‘Make your mind up,’ Grilse said. ‘Dial me down, or dial me up.’ He had a rough, leathery voice, as if his vocal cords had been left out to dry in the sun.

‘There are three of you now. Thorn died.’

‘Who’s Thorn?’

‘The Mellictan shatterling, your accomplice. The other two are an Ectobius and a Jurtina. You’re all shatterlings supposedly lost to attrition.’

‘You sound as if you already know all the answers, Mezereon.’

‘I’m getting there.’ She leaned back on her heels, stretching her back like a yawning cat. ‘I asked Thorn about the House of Suns. Now I’m asking you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It’s a Line, obviously. Joining the dots, the House of Suns is made up of shatterlings who used to belong to other Lines. Perhaps they need to replenish their numbers now and then; I don’t know. Perhaps it infiltrates known Lines by replacing legitimate members with perfect copies. If that’s the case, then the real Grilse might have died millions of years ago. If you took his place during a circuit, then showed up at the reunion with his body and face, his genes, a set of his memories - we probably wouldn’t have known the difference. Why did you do this to us, Grilse? What did we do to deserve this?’

‘You existed. That was enough.’

‘You mentioned Campion when we were still in the ambush system. You were taunting us, thinking we’d never get our hands on the man or his trove. That was
your
mistake, Grilse. Campion survived, you see. He made it. And that means we have an excellent chance of piecing together the reason for your crime.’

‘I’m not stopping you.’

‘Watch this, Grilse. I’m going to show you exactly how serious I am.’ Mezereon moved to the second cabinet and placed her hand on the stasis lever. The prisoner - the one we thought was an Ectobius - squirmed in his seat, frightened by what Mezereon was going to do next. He started speaking, but Mezereon must have disabled the microphone amplifying his words.

‘It’s too late now,’ she said. ‘You had your chance. Now you can make yourself much more useful to me by showing Grilse that I mean business.’

I felt a tightness in my throat, the need to say something. Mezereon shot a look at Aconite and the others, but there was no audible exchange between them. Mezereon stiffened her jaw, nodded once, then yanked the handle all the way to the left.

When the cabinet’s stasis bubble collapsed it gave off the same muffled cough that had signified Thorn’s demise, but the failure mode here was not quite the same. When the impassors released their hold on the man-shaped husk, only dust rained down. It formed a neat grey pyramid at Mezereon’s feet. She crouched down, cupped some of it in her hands and then let it drain in dark banners through her fingers.

Then she stood and ground her heels into the dust.

‘Did you get all that, Grilse?’ she asked, moving to the other cabinet, the one that held the suspected Jurtina shatterling. ‘The same thing could be happening to you in a few minutes. I’m willing to do it - more than willing, eager.’

‘We made your ambush painless,’ Grilse said. ‘There was no malice in it, no intention to cause you distress. It was meant to be fast and surgical. We are not monsters.’

‘You call
me
a monster?’

‘Take a look in a mirror.’

‘Tell me why you ambushed us.’

‘What makes you think we know?’

‘You mentioned Campion, when you didn’t think it would cost you.’

‘I was told it had something to do with Campion’s thread. That’s all any of us were meant to know. It was already too much.’

‘Who told you?’

I saw the fear crawl under his skin. Was that the first time Grilse had hinted at being in the service of someone else, a higher agency? If so, the indiscretion could not have happened at a worse time for him. Mezereon was not going to let it go.

‘You know what, Mezereon? All of you?’ He glared at us from inside the cabinet. ‘I know there’s an audience out there - I can feel them. I still think there’s a way to win. A way to destroy the rest of you. Why don’t I let you claw yourselves apart, like rabid wolves, looking for a traitor amongst you? Or maybe more than one?’

‘There’s no traitor amongst us,’ Mezereon said, with automatic certainty.

‘You think you’d know if there was?’ Grilse’s smile was either insane or that of a man who knew he had nothing to lose. ‘There is one, Mezereon. Trust me on that. He or she - I won’t say which - could well be sitting in your audience right now. And he or she knows exactly what happened and why. I wouldn’t mind betting they’re already making plans to finish the rest of you off, irrespective of anything I say.’

‘Give me a name,’ Mezereon said.

‘That’s the last thing I’m going to do. Figure it out for yourself. Do some more interrogating.’

She touched her hand to the stasis lever of the Jurtina’s cabinet. ‘A name.’

‘What if I said you were the traitor? Would you allow yourself to be subjected to questioning?’

‘Don’t do this,’ said the Jurtina.

Mezereon looked at him with weary scepticism. ‘Because you’re going to tell me everything?’

‘I don’t know anything, only that we had to kill you.’

‘Where did the H-guns come from?’

‘A secret cache known to the Marcellins. Most of the weapons were decommissioned after the Homunculus wars, but a few were kept aside, in case they were needed again.’

Her attention returned to Grilse. ‘Is this true?’

‘There was a cache. But the rest of the Line didn’t know about it. They weren’t culpable.’

‘We’ll let the Commonality decide on that one.’ Mezereon returned to the Jurtina. ‘You haven’t told me anything I hadn’t already worked out for myself. Unless you’re withholding information, you are of no further use to this investigation, except as a means to demonstrate my determination.’

‘No,’ the Jurtina said.

Mezereon began to pull the handle towards the left, slowly this time. The prisoner began to speed up from our perspective, twitching and fidgeting increasingly quickly.

Something exploded inside me.

‘Wait!’ I shouted, before she had tugged it all the way across. ‘There’s got to be a better way than this.’

Mezereon looked at me with icy disdain. ‘Something to contribute, Campion? You’ve been spectacularly silent until now.’

‘Dial down,’ I said, conscious of the whirling hand on my chronometer. ‘We can discuss this in realtime.’

‘I’m happy discussing it now.’

Aconite stood and turned towards me, hands raised placatingly. ‘Leave this to us, old man. We’ve got it under control.’

‘No, you haven’t. Mezereon’s burning her way through prisoners like she’s tossing coals on a fire. There are two left. We can’t afford to lose another one.’

‘I only need one to talk,’ Mezereon said, and began to tug the handle towards its limit.

I dialled myself down. I was alone in a room full of superhumanly accurate wax effigies. I dashed from the audience, through the electric tingle of the screen that had blocked the audience from view, onto Mezereon’s plinth. She was still looking at where I had been seated, but her expression was beginning to shift - it was like watching the beginning of a very slow landslide. Her head started to track, following the blur of motion that I must have made from her perspective. I forced her stiff fingers from the Jurtina’s handle and pushed it back up to a high stasis level. Behind me there was a sudden commotion as other shatterlings emerged from Synchromesh. Mezereon’s right hand started to inch towards her own chronometer.