“And the dolphins?”
“Engineered by them. For what purpose, we can’t begin to guess. Perhaps to serve as aquatic infantry, in some planned invasion of Earth’s oceans. Or perhaps they were simply an experiment which was never completed, interrupted by the war’s decline. Whatever the case, a family of dolphins was captured from the Chimerics by agents of the Confederacion Sudamericana.”
That, Sky well knew, was the organisation that had spear-headed the construction of the Flotilla. The Confederacion had remained studiously neutral for most of the war, concentrating on ambitions beyond the narrow confines of the solar system. After garnering a handful of allies, they had built and launched humankind’s first serious attempt at crossing interstellar space.
“We took Sleek and the others with us?”
“Yes, thinking they’d come in useful at Journey’s End. But removing the augmentation that the Chimerics had added was a lot harder than it looked. In the end it was easier to leave it in place. Then when the next generation of dolphins was born, it was found that they couldn’t communicate with the adults properly unless they had the augmentation as well. So we copied it and implanted it in the young.”
“But they ended up psychotic.”
Clown registered the tiniest flicker of surprise, his answer not immediately forthcoming. Later Sky would learn that in those frozen moments Clown was seeking advice from one of his parents, or one of the other adults, about how best to respond.
“Yes . . .” Clown said finally. “But that wasn’t necessarily our fault.”
“What, not our fault to keep them down in the hold, with only a few cubic metres to swim around in?”
“Believe me, the conditions we keep them in now are vastly preferable to the Chimerics’ experimentation lab.”
“But the dolphins can’t be expected to remember that, can they?”
“They’re happier, trust me.”
“How can you know?”
“Because I’m Clown.” The mask of his face, ever-smiling, pulled into a more agonised smile. “Clown always knows.” Sky was about ask Clown exactly what he meant by that when there was a flash of light. It was very bright and sudden, but completely silent, and it had come from the window strip along one wall. When Sky blinked he could still see the after-image of the window: a hard-edged pink rectangle.
“What happened?” he asked, still blinking.
But there was something very wrong with Clown, and indeed, with the entire view. In the instant of the flash, Clown had become misshapen, stretched and malformed in all the wrong directions, painted across the walls, his expression frozen. The boat in which they had seemed to be standing curved away in sickeningly distorted perspective. It was as if the entire scene had been rendered in thick wet pain which someone had begun to stir with a stick.
Clown had never allowed that to happen before.
Worse still, the room’s source of illumination—the glowing imagery on the walls—became dark, then black. There was no light save for the faintest milky glow from the high-set window. But even that faded after a while, leaving Sky alone in utter darkness.
“Clown?” Sky said, at first quietly, and then with more insistence.
No answer came. Sky began to feel something odd and unwelcome. It came from deep within him; a welling-up of fear and anxiety that had everything to do with a typical three-year-old’s response to the situation and nothing to do with the gloss of adulthood and precocity which normally distanced Sky from other children of his age. He was suddenly a small child, alone in the dark, not understanding what was happening.
He asked for Clown again, but there was desperation in his voice; a realisation that Clown would already have answered him if that were possible. No; Clown was gone; the bright nursery had become dark and—yes—cold, and he could hear nothing; not even the normal background noises of the Santiago .
Sky crawled until he met the wall, and then navigated around the room, trying to find the door. But when the door shut, it sealed itself invisibly flush, and now he could not locate even the hair-thin crack which would have betrayed its position. There was no interior handle or control, for—had he not been banished to the room—Clown would normally have opened the door at his request.
Sky groped for an appropriate response and found that, whether he liked it or not, one was happening to him anyway. He was starting to cry; something he could not remember having done since he was much younger.
He cried and cried and—however long that took—finally ran out of tears, his eyes feeling sore when he rubbed them.
He asked for Clown again, and then listened intently, and still there was nothing. He tried screaming, but that did no good either, and eventually his throat became too raw for him to continue.
He had probably been alone only for twenty minutes, but now that time stretched onwards to what was almost certainly an hour, and then perhaps two hours, and then tortured multiples of hours. Under any circumstances, that time would have seemed long, but not understanding his plight—wondering maybe if it were some deeper punishment his father had not told him about—it was almost an eternity. Then even the idea that Titus was inflicting this on him began to seem unlikely, and while his body shivered, his mind began to explore nastier avenues. He imagined that the nursery had somehow become detached from the rest of the ship, and that he was falling away through space, away from the Santiago—away from the Flotilla—and that by the time anyone knew, it would be far too late to do anything about it. Or perhaps monsters had invaded the ship from beyond the hull, silently exterminating all aboard it, and he was the only person left aboard that they had not yet found, even though it would only be a matter of time . . .
He heard a scratching from one side of the room.
It was, of course, the adults. They worked the door for some time before persuading it to open, and when it did, a crack of amber light spilled across the floor towards him. His father was the first to enter, accompanied by four or five other grown-ups Sky could not name. They were tall, stooping shapes carrying torches. Their faces were ashen in the torchlight; grave as storybook kings. The air that came into the room was colder than it usually was—it made him shiver even more—and the adults’ breath stabbed out in dragonlike exhalations.
“He’s safe,” his father said, to one of the other adults.
“Good, Titus,” a man answered. “Let’s get him somewhere secure, then we’ll continue working our way downship.”
“Schuyler, come here.” His father was kneeling down, his arms open. “Come here, my boy. You’re safe now. No need to worry. Been crying, haven’t you?”
“Clown went away,” Sky managed.
“Clown?” one of the others asked.
His father turned to the man. “The nursery’s main educational program, that’s all. It would have been one of the first non-essential processes to be terminated.”
“Make Clown come back,” Sky said. “Please.”
“Later,” his father said. “Clown’s . . . taking a rest, that’s all. He’ll be back in no time at all. And you, my boy, probably want something to eat or drink, don’t you?”
“Where’s mother?”
“She’s . . .” His father paused. “She can’t be here right now, Schuyler, but she sends her love.”
He watched one of the other men touch his father’s arm. “He’ll be safer with the other kids, Titus, in the main creche.”
“He isn’t like one of the other kids,” his father said.
Now they were ushering him out, into the cold. The corridor beyond the nursery plunged into darkness in either direction, away from the little pool of light defined by the adults’ torches.
“What happened?” Sky said, realising for the first time that it was not just his own microcosm that had been upset; that whatever had happened had touched the world of the adults as well. He had never seen the ship like this before.
“Something very, very bad,” his father said.
FIVE
<
br /> I came crashing out of the dream of Sky Haussmann and for a moment thought I was still inside another dream, one whose central feature was a terrifying sense of loss and dislocation.
Then I realised it wasn’t a dream at all.
I was wide awake, but it felt as if half my mind was still sound asleep: the part that held memory and identity and any comforting sense of how I had ended up where I now found myself; any threadlike connection to the past. What past? I expected to look back and at some point to encounter sharp details—a name; a hint of who I was—but it was like trying to focus on grey fog.
Yet I could still name things; language was still there. I was lying on a hard bed under a thin brown, knitted blanket. I felt alert and rested—and at the same time completely helpless. I looked around and nothing clicked; there was not the slightest tinge of familiarity on any level. I held my hand in front of my face, studying the ridge-lines of veins on the back of it, and it looked only slightly less strange.
Yet I remembered the details of the dream well enough. It had been dazzlingly vivid; less the way a dream ought to be—incoherent, with shifting perspectives and haphazard logic—than a strictly linear slice of documentary. It was as if I had been there with Sky Haussmann; not seeing things from exactly his point of view, but following him like an obsessive phantom.
Something made me turn my hand over.
There was a neat rust-spot of dried blood in the middle of my palm, and when I examined the sheet beneath me, I saw more freckles of dried blood, where I must have been bleeding before I woke up.
Something almost solidified in the fog; a memory almost assuming definition.
I got out of the bed, naked, and looked around me. I was in a room with roughly shaped walls—not hewn from rock, but formed from something like dried clay, painted over with brilliant white stucco. There was a stool adjacent to the bed and a small cupboard, both made from a type of wood I didn’t recognise. There was no ornamentation anywhere except for a small brown vase set into an alcove in one wall.
I stared at the vase in horror.
There was something about it that filled me with terror; terror that I knew instantly to be irrational, but couldn’t do anything about. So maybe there is some neurological damage, I heard myself say—you’ve still got language, but there’s something deeply screwed up somewhere in your limbic system, or whatever part of the brain handles that old mammalian innovation called fear. But as I found the focus of my fear, I realised it wasn’t actually the vase at all.
It was the alcove.
There was something hiding in it: something terrible. And when I realised that, I snapped. My heart was racing. I had to get out of the room; had to get away from the thing that I knew made no sense, but which was still turning my blood to ice. There was an open doorway at one end of the room, leading “outside”—wherever that was.
I stumbled through it.
My feet touched grass; I was standing on a patch of moist, neatly cut lawn surrounded on two sides by overgrowth and rock. The chalet where I’d woken was behind me, set into a rising slope, with the overgrowth threatening to lap over it. But the slope simply kept on rising; assuming an ever-steepening angle—reaching vertical and then curving over again in a dizzying verdant arc, so that the foliage resembled Chinese spinach glued to the sides of a bowl. It was difficult to judge distance, but the world’s ceiling must have been about a kilometre over my head. On the fourth side, the ground dropped away a little before resuming its climb on the opposite side of a toylike valley. It rose and rose and met the ground which climbed behind me.
Beyond the overgrowth and rock on either side of me, I could just make out the distant ends of the world, blurred and blued by the haze of intervening air. At first glance, I seemed to be in a very long cylinder-shaped habitat, but that wasn’t the case: the sides met each other at either end, suggesting that the overall shape of the structure was that of a spindle: two cones placed back to back with my chalet somewhere near the point of maximum width.
I racked my memory for knowledge of habitat design and came up with nothing except the nagging sense that there was something out of the ordinary about this place.
There was a hot blue-white filament running the length of the habitat; some kind of enclosed plasma tube which must have been able to be dimmed and shaded to simulate sunset and darkness. The greenery was enlivened and counterpointed by small waterfalls and precipitous rockfaces, artfully arranged like details in a Japanese watercolour. On the far side of the world I saw tiered, ornamental gardens; a quilt of different cultivations like a matrix of pixels. Here and there, dotted like white pebbles, I saw other chalets and the occasional larger hamlet or dwelling. Stone roads meandered around the valley’s contours, linking chalets and communities. Those near the endpoints of the two cones were closer to the habitat’s spin axis and the illusion of gravity must have been weaker there. I wondered if the need for that had been a driving force in the habitat’s design.
Just as I was beginning to seriously wonder where I was, something crept out of the undergrowth, picking its way into the clearing via an elaborate set of articulated metal legs. My hand shaped itself around a nonexistent gun, as if, on some muscular level, it had expected to find one.
The machine came to a halt, ticking to itself. The spider legs supported a green ovoid body, featureless except for a single glowing blue snowflake motif.
I stepped backwards.
“Tanner Mirabel?”
The voice came from the machine, but there was something about it which told me the voice didn’t belong to the robot. It sounded human and female, and not entirely sure of itself.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh dear. My Castellano isn’t all it could be . . .” She had said the latter in Norte, but now she shifted to the language I’d spoken, sounding even more hesitant than before. “I hope you can understand me. I don’t get much practice in Castellano. I’m—um—hoping you recognise your name, Tanner. Tanner Mirabel, I should say. Um, Mister Mirabel, that is. Am I making any sense?”
“Yes,” I said. “But we can speak Norte if it makes it any easier on you. If you can put up with me being the rusty one.”
“You speak both very well, Tanner. You don’t mind if I call you Tanner, do you?”
“I’m afraid you could call me just about anything you liked.”
“Ah. Then there is some amnesia, am I correct in assuming that?”
“I’d say there’s more than a little, to be honest.”
I heard a sigh. “Well, that’s what we’re here for. That is indeed what we’re here for. Not that we wish it upon our clients, of course . . . but if, God forgive, they happen to have it, they’ve really come to the very best place. Not, of course, that they had much choice, though . . . Oh dear, I’m rambling, aren’t I? I always do this. You must feel confused enough without me wittering on. You see we weren’t expecting that you’d wake quite so soon. That’s why there isn’t anyone to meet you, you see.” There was another sigh, but this one was more businesslike; as if she was steeling herself to get to work. “Now then. You’re in no danger, Tanner, but it would be best if you stayed by the house for now, until someone arrives.”
“Why. What’s wrong with me?”
“Well, you’re completely naked, for a start.”
I nodded. “And you’re not just a robot, are you? Well, I’m sorry. I don’t usually do this.”
“There’s no need at all to apologise, Tanner. No need at all. It’s quite right and proper that you should be a little disorientated. You’ve been asleep for a great length of time, after all. Physically, you may have suffered no obvious ill effects . . . none at all that I can see, in fact . . .” She paused, then seemed to snap out of whatever reverie she was in. “But mentally, well . . . it’s only to be expected, really. This kind of transient memory loss is really much commoner than they would have us believe.”
“I’m glad you used the word ‘transient’ there.”
“Well, usually.”
I smiled, wondered if that was an attempt at humour or just a crass statement of the statistics.
“Who would ‘they’ be, while we’re at it?”
“Well, obviously, the people who brought you here. The Ultras.”
I knelt down and fingered the grass, crushing a blade until it left green pulp on my thumb. I sniffed the residue. If this was a simulation, it was an extraordinarily detailed one. Even battle-planners would have been impressed.
“Ultras?”
“You came here on their ship, Tanner. You were frozen for the journey. Now you have thaw amnesia.”
The phrase caused a fragment of my past to fall lopsidedly into place. Someone had spoken to me of thaw amnesia—either very recently or very long ago. It looked like both possibilities might be correct. The person had been the cyborg crewperson of a starship.
I tried to remember what they had told me, but it was like groping through the same grey fog as before, except this time I did have the sense that there were things within the fog; jagged shards of memory: brittle, petrified trees, reaching out stiff branches to reconnect with the present. Sooner or later I was going to stumble into a major thicket.
But for now all I remembered were reassurances; that I should have no qualms about whatever it was they were about to do to me; that thaw amnesia was a modern myth; very much rarer than I had been led to believe. Which must have been a slight distortion of the facts, at the very least. But then the truth—that shades of amnesia were almost normal—wouldn’t have been conducive to good business.
“I don’t think I was expecting this,” I said.
“Funnily enough, almost no one ever does. The hard cases are the ones who don’t even remember ever dealing with Ultras. You’re not that badly off, are you?”