“Tell me the rest.”
“Then we did find other grubs. But they weren’t like us. Not like grubs at all, really. They didn’t want to . . . tolerate us. They were like a void warren but . . . empty. Just the void warren.”
A ship with no living things aboard it.
“Machine intelligences?”
The mouth smiled again. It was quite obscene, really. “Yes. Machine intelligences. Hungry machines. Machines that eat grubs. Machines that eat us.”
Machines that eat us.
I thought of the way the maggot had said that; as if all it amounted to was a mildly irritating aspect of reality; something that had to be endured but which could not really be blamed upon anyone. I remembered my revulsion at the thought of the maggot’s defeatist mode of thinking.
No—not my revulsion, I told myself. Sky Haussmann’s.
I was right—wasn’t I?
Ratko led the three of us through the crudely excavated tunnels of the Dream Fuel factory. Now and then we passed through widened chambers, dimly lit, where workers in glossy grey coats leaned over benches so densely covered with chemical equipment that they resembled miniature glass cities. There were enormous retorts filled with litres of dark, twinkling blood-red Dream Fuel. At the very end of the production line, neat racks of filled vials waited ready for distribution. Many of the workers had goggles like those worn by Ratko, specialised lenses clicking and whirring into place for each task in the production process.
“Where are you taking us?” I said.
“You wanted a drink, didn’t you?”
Quirrenbach whispered, “He’s taking us to see the man, I think. The man runs all this, so don’t underestimate him—even if he does have quite an unusual belief system.”
“Gideon?” Zebra asked.
“Well, that’s part of it,” Ratko said, obviously misunderstanding her.
We passed through another series of production labs, and then were led into a rough-walled office where a wizened old man lay—or sat, it wasn’t immediately clear—before an enormous, battered metal desk. The man was in a kind of wheelchair: a brutish, black, armoured contraption which was simmering gently, steam whispering out of leaking valves. Feedlines reached from the chair back into the wall. Presumably it could be decoupled from them when he needed to move around, gliding on the skeletal, curved-spoke wheels from which his chair was suspended.
The man’s body was hard to make out under its layers of aluminised blanketing. Two exquisitely bony arms emerged, the left placed across his thigh, the right toying with the army of black control levers and buttons set into one arm of the chair.
“Hello,” Zebra said. “You must be the man.”
He looked at each of us in turn. The man’s face was skin draped over bone, worn almost parchment-thin in places, so that he had a strangely translucent quality to him. But there was still an aura of handsomeness to him, and his eyes, when they finally looked in my direction, were like two piercing chips of interstellar ice. His jaw was strong, set almost contemptuously. His lips quivered as if he were on the verge of replying.
Instead, his right hand moved across the array of controls, depressing levers and pushing buttons with a dexterity that surprised me. His fingers, though they were thin, looked as strong and dangerous as the talons of a vulture.
He lifted his hand from the levers. Something started happening inside the chair, a rapid noisy clatter of mechanical switches. When the clatter stopped the chair began to speak, synthesising his words with a series of chime-like whistles which—if you concentrated—could be understood.
“Self-evidently. What can I do for you?”
I stared at him in wonder. I had been assuming that Gideon would be many things, but I had never imagined anything like this.
“You can fix us the drinks Ratko promised,” I said.
The man nodded—the movement was economical, to say the least—and Ratko went to a cupboard set into a rocky niche in one corner of the office. He came back with two glasses of water. I drank mine in one gulp. It didn’t taste too bad, considering it had probably been steam only a little while earlier. Ratko offered something to Zebra and she accepted with clear misgivings, thirst obviously suppressing concerns that we might be poisoned. I put the empty glass down on his battered metal desk.
“You’re not quite what I was expecting, Gideon.”
Quirrenbach nudged me. “This isn’t Gideon, Tanner. This is, well . . .” and then he trailed off before adding weakly, “The man, like I said.”
The man punched a new set of orders into the chair. There was more clattering—it went on for about fifteen seconds—before the voice began to pipe out again, “No, I’m not Gideon. But you’ve probably heard of me. I made this place.”
“What,” said Zebra. “This maze of tunnels?”
“No,” he said, after another pause while the chair processed the words. “No. Not this maze of tunnels. This whole city. This whole planet.” He had programmed a pause at that point. “I am Marco Ferris.”
I remembered what Quirrenbach had just told me about the man having an unusual belief system. Well, this certainly fitted the bill. But I couldn’t help but feel some sneaking empathy with the man in the steam-driven wheelchair.
After all, I wasn’t exactly sure who I was any more.
“Well, Marco,” I said. “Answer a question for me. Are you running this place, or is Gideon in charge? In fact, does Gideon even exist?”
The chair cluttered and clacked. “Oh, I am definitely running this place, Mister . . .” He dismissed my name with a minute wave of his other hand; too much trouble to stop mid-sentence and query me. “But Gideon is here. Gideon has always been here. Without Gideon, I would not be here.”
“Well, why don’t you take us to see him?” Zebra said.
“Because there is no need. Because no one gets to see Gideon without excellent reason. You do all your business through me, so why involve Gideon? Gideon is just the supplier. He doesn’t know anything.”
“We’d still like a word with him,” I said.
“I’m sorry. Not possible. Not possible at all.” He backed the chair away from the desk, the huge curved-spoke wheels rumbling on the floor.
“I still want to see Gideon.”
“Hey,” said Ratko, stepping forward to interpose between myself and the man who thought he was Marco Ferris. “You heard the man, didn’t you?”
Ratko moved, but he was an amateur. I dropped him, leaving him moaning on the floor with a fractured forearm. I motioned to Zebra to lean down and help herself to the gun Ratko had been about to pull. Now we were both armed. I pulled out my own weapon, while Zebra aimed the other gun at Ferris, or whoever the man really was.
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “Take me to Gideon. Or take me to Gideon weeping in agony. How does that sound?”
He pushed and tugged at another set of controls, causing the chair to unplug itself from its steam feed-lines. I suppose there could have been weapons set into the chair, but I didn’t think they would be fast enough to do him much good.
“This way,” Ferris said, after another, briefer period of clattering.
He took us along more tunnels, spiralling downwards again. The chair propelled itself along with a series of rapid puffs, Ferris steering it expertly through narrow chicanes of rock. I wondered about him. Quirrenbach—and perhaps Zebra—appeared to accept that he was delusional. But then if he wasn’t who he claimed, who was he?
“Tell me how you got here,” I said. “And tell me what it has to do with Gideon.”
More clattering. “That’s a long story. Luckily it’s one I’ve often been asked to recount. That’s why I have this preprogrammed statement ready.”
The chair clattered some more and then the voice recommenced: “I was born on Yellowstone, created in a steel womb and raised by robots. That was before we could transport living people from star to star. You had to be grown from a frozen egg cell; coaxed to life by robots that had alrea
dy arrived.” Ferris had been one of the Amerikanos; that much I knew already. That period was such a long time ago—before even Sky Haussmann’s time—that, in my mind at least, it had begun to blend into a general historical background of sailing ships, conquistadors, concentration camps and black plagues.
“We found the chasm,” Ferris told me. “That was the odd thing. No one had seen it from Earth’s system, even with the best instruments. It was too small a feature. But as soon as we started exploring our world, there it was. A deep hole in the planet’s crust, belching heat and a mixture of gases we could begin to process for air.
“It made very little sense, geologically. Oh, I’ve seen the theories—how Yellowstone must have been tidally stressed by an encounter with the gas giant in the recent past, and how all that heat energy in her core has to percolate to the surface, escaping through vents like the chasm. And perhaps there’s some truth in that, though it can’t be the whole story. It doesn’t explain the strangeness of the chasm; why the gases are so different to the rest of the atmosphere: warmer, wetter, several degrees less toxic. It was almost like a calling card. That, in fact, is exactly what it was. I should know. I went down into it to see what was at the bottom.”
He had gone in with one of the atmospheric explorers, spiralling deeper and deeper into the chasm until he was well below the mist layer. Radar kept him from smashing into the sides, but it was still hazardous, and at some point his single-seat craft had suffered a power lapse, causing it to sink even deeper. Eventually he had bottomed out, thirty kilometres beneath the surface. His ship had landed on a layer of lightly packed rubble which filled the entire floor of the chasm. Automated repair processes had kicked in, but it would take tens of hours before the ship could carry him back up to the surface.
With nothing better to do, Ferris had donned one of the atmosphere suits—designed to cope with extremes of pressure, temperature and chemistry—and had begun exploring the layer of rubble. He called it the scree. The warm, wet, oxygen-rich air was steaming up through the gaps in the rocks.
Ferris scrambled down, finding a route through the rubble. It was perilously hot, and he could have fallen to his death many times, but he managed to keep his footing and negotiate a route which took him down hundreds of metres. The rubble pressed down on the layers below, but there were always gaps he could squeeze through; places where he could anchor pitons and lines. The thought of dying was with him always, but it was only ever an abstract thing. None of the first-born Amerikanos had ever had to understand death; they’d never had to watch people grow older than themselves and die. It was something that they did not grasp on a visceral level.
Which was good. Because if Ferris had understood the risks a little better, and understood exactly what death entailed, he probably would not have gone as deeply into the scree as he had.
And he would never have found Gideon.
They must have expanded through space until they met another species, Sky thought—some kind of robot or cyborg intelligence.
Gradually, tediously, he got something resembling a coherent story out of Travelling Fearlessly. The grubs had been a peaceable, innocent starfaring culture for many millions of years until they had run into the machines. The grubs had expanded into space for arcane reasons of their own which Travelling Fearlessly was not able to explain, except to convey that they had little to do with curiosity or a need for resources. It seemed to be simply what grubs did; an imperative which had been hardwired into them in evolutionary antiquity. They had no overwhelming interest in technology or science for their own sakes, seeming to get by on techniques they had acquired so long ago in racial memory terms that the underlying principles had been forgotten.
Predictably, they had not fared well when their outlying colonies had encountered the grub-eating machines. The grub-eaters began to make slow incursions into grub space, pressuring the aliens to modify behaviour patterns that had been locked rigid for tens of millions of years. To survive, the grubs first had to grasp that they were being persecuted.
Even that took a million years to sink in.
Then, with glacial slowness, they began, if not to fight back, then at the very least to develop survival strategies. They abandoned their surface colonies and evacuated themselves entirely into interstellar space, the better to hide from the grub-eaters. They constructed void warrens as large as small planets. By and by they encountered the harried remnants of other species who were also being persecuted by the eaters, though they had a different name for them. The grubs appropriated technologies as it suited their needs, usually without bothering to understand them. Control of gravity and inertia had come from a symbiotic race called the Nestbuilders. A form of instantaneous communication had been bequeathed by a culture who called themselves the Jumper Clowns. The grubs had been sternly admonished when they had asked if the same principles might be extended to instantaneous travel. To the Jumper Clowns there was a fine, blasphemous line between faster-than-light signalling and travel. The one was acceptable within tightly specified parameters of usage. The other was an unspeakable perversion; a concept so distasteful that it caused refined Jumper Clowns to shrivel up and die in revulsion.
Only the most uncouth of young species failed to grasp this.
But for all the technologies that the grubs and their loose allies held, it was never enough to beat the machines. They were always swifter; always stronger. Now and then there were organic victories, but the general drift of things was always such that the grub-eaters would win.
Sky was thinking about that when Gomez called him again. The urgency in his voice was obvious despite the weakness of the signal.
“Sky. Bad news. The two shuttles have launched a pair of drones. They might just be cameras, but my guess is they’ll have anti-collision warheads on them. They’re on high-gee trajectories and they’ll reach us in about fifteen minutes.”
“They wouldn’t do it,” Norquinco said. “They wouldn’t attack us without first finding out what’s going on here. They’d run the risk of destroying a whole Flotilla ship which has, um, survivors and supplies on it, just like we thought it would have.”
“No,” Sky said. “They’d do it—if only to stop us getting hold of whatever they think’s on her.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Why not? It’s exactly what I’d do.”
He told Gomez to sit tight and killed the link. The fraction of a day he had imagined they would have to themselves had now compressed down to less than a quarter of an hour. It was probably not enough time to make it back to the shuttle and get away, even if there had been no obstructions to cut through. But there was still time to do something. Time, in fact, to hear the rest of what Travelling Fearlessly had to say. It might make all the difference. Trying not to think of the minutes ticking away, and the missiles haring closer, he told the grub to continue his story.
The grub was happy to oblige.
“Gideon,” the man in the chair said, after he had curtailed the telling of his story with an abrupt sequence of commands.
We had arrived in a natural cavern, high up on one side of a concave rock face. There was a ledge here, large enough to accommodate the wheelchair. I thought of pushing Ferris over the edge, but there was a sturdy-looking safety rail, uninterrupted except for a point where it allowed entrance to a caged spiral staircase that led all the way down to the chamber’s floor.
“Fuck,” Quirrenbach said, looking over the edge.
“You’re getting the hang of it,” I said.
I would have been as shocked as Quirrenbach, I suppose—except that I’d been forewarned by what Sky had found inside the Caleuche. There was another maggot down there—bigger even than the one Sky had seen, I thought—but it was alone; there were no helper grubs with it.
“This wasn’t quite what I was expecting,” Zebra said.
“It’s not what anyone’s ever expecting,” the man in the chair said.
“Someone please tell me what the f
uck that thing is,” Quirrenbach said, like someone hanging very grimly onto the last tattered shred of sanity.
“Much what it looks like,” I said. “A large alien creature. Intelligent, too, in its own special way. They call themselves the grubs.”
Quirrenbach spoke through clenched jaw, the words emerging one at a time. “How. Do. You. Know.”
“Because I had the pleasure of meeting one before.”
“When?” Zebra asked.
“A long, long time ago.”
Quirrenbach sounded like a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “You’re losing me, Tanner.”
“Believe me, I’m not quite sure I believe it all myself.” I nodded at Ferris. “You and him—the maggot—you have quite a relationship going, don’t you?”
The chair clattered. “It’s really rather simple. Gideon gives us something we need. I keep Gideon alive. What could be fairer than that?”
“You torture it.”
“Sometimes he needs encouragement, that’s all.”
I looked down at the maggot again. It rested in a metal enclosure, a steep-sided bath that was knee-deep in brackish dark fluid, like squid ink. He was chained in place, and all around him loomed scaffolding and catwalks. Obscure, industrial-looking machines waited on gantries to be moved over the maggot. Electrical cables and fluid lines plunged into him at various points along his length.
“Where did you find him?” Zebra said.
“Here, as it happens,” Ferris told her. “He was inside the remains of a ship. It had crashed here, at the base of the chasm, maybe a million years ago. A million years. But that’s nothing to him. Though damaged and incapable of flight, the ship had kept him alive, in semi-hibernation, for all that time.”
“It just crashed here?” I said.
“There was more to it than that. It was running away from something. What, I’ve never really found out.”
I interrupted the sequence of sounds emanating from the chair. “Let me guess. A race of sentient, killer machines. They’d been attacking his race—and others—for millions of years themselves; harrying them from star to star. Eventually the grubs were pushed back into interstellar space, cowering away from starlight. But something must have driven this one here—a spying mission or something.”