Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (18 page)

Even as I'm speaking I slowly work my peripheral vision round the room, scanning for anything to serve as a weapon, without shifting the focus of my gaze from Ruins' face. It's a graysmith's trick, one learnt from diving a hundred minds: how to split the mind's attention into separate functions and leave them running on near autopilot. There's nothing though. The room is plain and functional, surely exactly as it had once been in its godship days, though inverted 180 degrees.

Ruins clears his throat politely. "You'd like an answer, so an answer you shall have. I believe in potential, Ritry. May I call you Ritry?"

I make a noncommittal gesture, and he continues smoothly. "Excellent. I hope you won't mind that I use your first name, whereas I have only given you my last, and a false name at that. Perhaps, in time, though my true name is as meaningless now as the truth behind the first Jamestown colony. Yet to the topic of potential. As I told you in the shark-arena, after an evening spent squandering your considerable and unique brain through alcohol, salacity, and the adrenal opiate, I have watched you for all of your life. Will it be showing my hand too much, to venture that you are unique? That you are, in some ways, much as I am and was? Would such a comparison offend you?"

I frown. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

His smile broadens, and he waves a hand vaguely at me. "Coarseness is certainly a part of your charm, though it too is merely a shield, keeping you from the reality you so cravenly seek. Ritry, do not be a child. You well understand what I am saying, and we are both fucking adults here, are we not?"

I grunt. It might be galling to have this psychopath call me a child, if he weren't such a child himself in all his parlor tricks and games. "Stop blathering then. Stop feeding me a line of bullshit. If you care about potential, what about that poor sad case in the Napoleon suit? What kind of fetish is that, by the way? And what about his potential?" I click my fingers. "Cut off at the balls, staff and scrotum both."

Mr. Ruins allows a rich laugh. "Colorful. But what potential did he have, Ritry? The unconsidered life is not worth living, have you heard that expression? His life was deeply unconsidered. He was an animal following a base line of programming written from his birth, and to extinguish him from the bond-lines was no more consequential than the slaughter of a pig for its meat. Another pig will simply rise to take his place."

"That is just weird," I say. "I hope you didn't take a bite out of him, while he was resting."

He laughs again. "So vituperative. Ritry, dead flesh is of no consequence to me. The true vitality comes from those living, and the trails they leave behind. But to take your deeper, unintended point, in that sense did I take a bite from him? Only in the most ephemeral way, in no way something that would impact upon him beyond the veil. It wasn't very nourishing or tasty either, but then I take my meals when the opportunity presents."

A long moment passes in which I say nothing, just look at him. He seems content to merely look back at me. Is he talking about eating people, or not? He doesn't have a weapon. Perhaps I could rush him, take him down and have an end to it, but I just don't know enough.

"You're mad," I say, instead.

"That has been said, yes. But then why are you here? Are you mad too? Everything you have said so far, you knew before you came. You could have taken the old man's speedboat in any direction, to any city. You would have had a fair chance to hit the wall at some point, and indebt yourself to cross it. A new life might await you on the other side, but instead you came here. What does that say about you, Ritry?"

That is a galling question, because I have no good answer. A flip answer, that this seemed safer, more isolated, will not suffice. His gaze only pisses me off more, so I draw it away. His folder lies on the floor, by my feet, and I pick it up and hold it out. "I felt like taking a vacation. This is some kind of travel guide?" 

"An avoidance tactic? Very well. It is an education. Tell me Ritry, how did you dream last night?"

An involuntary shudder rushes through me. Ruins notices and smiles. "I could feel your dreams from here. They were good, the best you've had in years, were they not? That was the balm of forgiveness, of a clean break. That is my gift to you. It remains to see how you will invest the funds."

I try to ignore him, instead flick through the folder, to the first page now buried somewhere in the middle. It is stained with Carrolla's blood, crumpled and spattered by crusting salt. I scan the page to the bottom, to the final line, and read it aloud.

"I want to help you Ritry, and I will. Come find me, and I'll give you more than everything you ever wanted. I'll give you something to want." I look up at him. "So what am I supposed to want?"

Ruins smiles wide, showing those crazy white shark-teeth. "More. Your due. Do you know the story of Napoleon, Ritry? It will shock you if I say I was there with him, through his days as Emperor, through his banishment on Elba, through his resurgence and back to exile again. You know this faintly, I believe, from an engram injected in your skirmish days. But then I am quite old. To the point though, you will not know of his second resurgence, the time he swept the Gaullic coast clean of pretenders and the blood of his rivals ran in the ornate halls of Versailles. You will not know it, because I took it all."

He snatches at the air with one gray-gloved hand. "I took the whole of it, from all the minds that might know it, and it made me strong. Because Ritry, I am a predator."

His teeth gleam menacingly. At that moment, a deep rain cloud passes over the sun and the room grows cold and chill. "I am a predator, and so are you. We exist to hunt, and shorn of the hunt, we are nothing. I suspected it in you from the start, and so I have watched you throughout. Why else are you so pathetically miserable? No, don't deny it, you are. It is because you have curtailed yourself. It sickens me, to be honest, because the potential to thrive is there. I hope to unleash it. Perhaps one day we will feast on the greatest minds alive, together."

I have to will myself not to take a step back. What began as faintly amusing if bizarre is now repellently charismatic. The madness seems to burn up off him in waves, glowing through his cheeks.

"Napoleon was hundreds of years ago," I say. "You're no more than 50."

Ruins laughs again, and the density of the madness radiating off him abates. "Quite right. I am yet young, and in my prime! But answer me this, and be honest with yourself if not me. You felt something here, in this place, and it has fuelled you, has it not? You feel invigorated, flush with new strength. Why, your customary hangover has even failed to materialize. Wonders, praise the Lord! But heed this, Ritry. Dreams do not come from nothing. They are messages through the eternal aether, and the old power of this place," he stretches his arms out to encompass the godship, "has entered you, though you did not seek it directly. Seek it directly, and the flow will be so much stronger. There is power in bonds, Ritry, in the shapes we humans leave behind, every bit as much as there is in living thought. There is power in breaking bonds of life and memory, just as there is with breaking the bonds of the atom. Therefore, this is your trail of crumbs." He points at the folder. "Take it or do not; I offer you that choice. The paths lie before you. Can you truly turn away now?"

I drop the folder on the bed. "You're talking about resonance," I say. "About harvesting that energy."

Resonance is a theory in graysmithing aligned with the radio-tuning philosophy I described to Don Zachary, that there is an un-seeable aether of consciousness around us like molten amber, a kind of pluripotential amniotic record which captures every single bond between us and crystalizes our every thought and emotion for all time. Deep-divers have sought to prove its existence for decades, by trying to crack open the Solid Core and find the spider web of bonds linking us all through the aether, but all of those who got close enough to see were too deep to ever come back.

Ruins clicks his fingers. "Precisely. It is a resource just as the hydrates under the Arctic pack were, worthy of fighting over. And out here, what is the cost? Every soul who left their pattern in this place is long gone or dead. To swallow the marrow of it is no different from gathering in corn grown with the sun, from the soil."

"Or slaughtering a pig."

"Ha! Indeed. Perhaps you will come to see that the two are not so very different. Did you grieve for your lost lover, Ven, when the mind-bomb dropped upon your subglacic, or were you too busy scrabbling to survive? Life is a war, Ritry, and right now you are its biggest loser. But is that all you are, casualty of a specific kind of surrender? Are you the lion who will not bloody his claws or fangs for the pain it will cause his prey? So the lion pines and dies, and what does he honor any living thing that he will not do as his nature dictates, to the best of his ability? What do you honor Ritry, to deny yourself? Napoleon fought until the last, and I honor him for it. He has become a part of everything I do, and in this I preserve him. Can any man hope for better?"

I point at the folder. "So this is training. To sharpen my claws."

Mr. Ruins shrugs. "You will decide that. I will be watching. And remember, I too am a lion, one far more powerful than you, and I have slaughtered other lions before. Farewell Ritry Goligh. May your training be everything you wish for."

He turns and strides from the room. I stand there stunned for a few moments, as though I have been visited by a ghost. His footsteps clang down the floor-ceiling without, until abruptly they stop.

I follow, peer up and down the habitation corridor, but of course there is no sign of him. Was he ever here? I wonder if I could dive the Solid Core, I might be able to track his movements through the eternal amber record, his pathways and meanderings.

A shudder passes through me. I wonder if Mr. Ruins just gave me permission to murder people and eat their souls. He is undoubtedly mad, or mad from the viewpoint of the world I have always known. But perhaps that too is a kind of sane, one that I have never seen before.

Hmm. These thoughts should be important, but strangely they do not concern me overly. They are squashed beneath the euphoria I feel rising within. The effect of the dream is still with me. The dawn has buoyed me up.

I feel hungry. I know there are more pineapple and meatball cans with my name on them. I start back through the dead cathedral ship, the bonds of a thousand lost souls rubbing up against the skin of my mind, heading for a sugary breakfast in the canteen.

LAG A

Ray comes up through the hole sweating, and claims he saw a room full of statues that were expanding, crushing him into a corner so tightly that he was pressed into a ball, then down to the size of a pea. There wasn't any pain, but he continually became smaller and smaller.

This appears to utterly terrify him.

Doe is cool as ever, and explains that in her dream she killed first me, then Ray and Far, then ran back down to kill So. It disturbs me how little this seems to concern her.

Far comes last, tugged through on the end of a rope as he was too frightened to pass through on his own. When he appears amongst us he is white and shaking so hard a hot sweat drips off him.

"What did you see, Far?" Doe asks, but Ray shakes his head. Instead he starts pinging Far on the nose, the eyebrow, the ear, until the tones bring the boy back to some kind of normalcy.

The tones actually sound somewhat different in this space, flatter somehow, or sharper. Doe and I watch, talking quietly on blood-mic.

"What does it mean?" she asks. "What person makes tones when they're struck?"

"Someone very special," I say.

Soon the boy is calm again, though the haunted, hunted look remains in his eyes, and the welts in his neck are lividly bright.

"What are those?" I ask Ray.

He shrugs, then lifts up the boy's shirt. Far barely seems to notice. Beneath his miniature tree-bark armor and black uniform, his chest is a map of welts, scars, and burns.

"Gods," whispers Doe.

Ray puts his shirt back down, pats the boy on his head. "He's had a rough time."

Doe unspools the first length of comms cable, fastens it to the RG-stubbled corridor floor with a gamma-clamp, and feeds the end carefully back down the gap.

I access it through my HUD and blood-mic to So at base-camp.

"So, can you hear me? Come in, So."

After a five second delay of hazy white noise on the line, So responds. "Roger, Me. I have you orbitally located. You're in the outer ring, over?"

"It's good to hear your voice, So. Yes we are. It was strange getting in, but we're here. Are you getting telemetries?"

I look up at Ray, who is holding out two complex reticulated metal structures, wired into his suit-mount. These are the telemetry scouts, which should be bouncing the tunnels all around us with recursive sonar, building a map. They look like old-style television aerials.

"It's coming in Me, I've got it," says So in her far-off voice. "It looks like you're in one of the spin models, if I just run a simulation," the image slings over to my HUD, as SO manipulates the rotational axis of the flat map to three dimensions multiple times.

"It's like turning a key in a lock," she goes on, "but it's like a safe too, because there are so many angles it can turn at."

I turn around to study the corridor walls and floor while So attempts to match the map in the corner of the HUD. Passageways stretch off in five directions, which we already decided to address by the direction of subtle rotation in the Solid Core: North, South, East and West, plus Inward. They each recede away, spotted by striplights that seem to follow no regular pattern. Perhaps their organization is a clue, or just chaos.

Each of the passages has a slight and visible curve, following the arc of the Solid Core. Even the Inward shaft leading up seems to curve, making determination of what lies beyond it impossible.