Skade reached Felka’s quarters. She entered and found Felka where she had left her last time, sitting cross-legged on a part of the floor that she had instructed to become soft. Her clothes had a stale, crumpled look. Her flesh was pasty and her hair was a nestlike tangle of greasy knots. Here and there Skade saw patches of raw pink scalp, where Felka had tugged out locks of her own hair. She sat perfectly still, one hand on either knee. Her chin was raised slightly and her eyes were closed. There was a faint glistening trail of mucus leading from one nostril to the top of her lip.
Skade audited the neural connections between Felka and the rest of the ship. To her surprise, she detected no significant traffic. Skade had assumed that Felka must have been roaming through a cybernetic environment, as had been the case on her last two visits. Skade had explored them for herself and found vast puzzlelike edifices of Felka’s own making. They were clearly surrogates for the Wall. But this was not the case on this occasion. After abandoning the real, Felka had taken the next logical step, back to the place where it had all begun.
She had gone back into her skull.
Skade lowered herself to Felka’s level, then reached out and touched her brow. She expected Felka to flinch against the cold metal contact, but she might as well have been touching a wax dummy.
Felka… can you hear me? I know you’re in there somewhere. This is Skade. There is something you need to know.
She waited for a response; none came. Felka. It concerns Clavain. I’ve done what I can to make him turn away, but he hasn’t responded to any of my attempts at persuasion. My last effort was the one I thought most likely to persuade him. Shall I tell you what it was?
Felka breathed in and out, slowly and regularly.
I used you. I promised Clavain that if he turned back, I’d give you back to him. Alive, of course. I thought that was fair. But he wasn’t interested. He made no response to my overture. Do you see, Felka? You can’t mean as much to him as his beloved mission.
She stood up and then strolled around the seated meditative figure. I hoped you would, you know. It would have been the best solution for both of us. But it was Clavain’s call, and he showed where his priorities lay. They weren’t with you, Felka. After all those years, all those centuries, you didn’t mean as much to him as forty mindless machines. I’ll admit, I was surprised.
Still Felka said nothing. Skade felt an urge to dive into her skull and find the warm and comforting place into which she had retreated. Had Felka been a normal Conjoiner, it would have been within Skade’s capabilities to invade her most private mental spaces. But Felka’s mind was put together differently. Skade could skim its surface, occasionally glimpse its depths, but no more than that.
Skade sighed. She had not really wanted to torment Felka, but she had hoped to prise her out of her withdrawal by turning her against Clavain.
It had not worked.
Skade stood behind Felka. She closed her eyes and issued a stream of commands to the spinal medical device she had attached to Felka. The effect was immediate and gratifying. Felka collapsed, sagging in on herself. Her mouth lolled open, oozing saliva. Delicately, Skade picked her up and carried her out of the room.
The silver sun burned overhead, a blank coin shining through a caul of grey sea fog. Skade settled into a flesh-and-blood body, as she had before. She was standing on a flat-topped rock; the air was cold to the bone and prickled with ozone and the briny stench of rotting seaweed. In the distance, a billion pebbles sighed orgasmically under the assault of another sea wave.
It was the same place again. She wondered if the Wolf was becoming just the tiniest bit predictable.
Skade peered into the fog around her. There, no more than a dozen paces from her, was another human figure. But it was neither Galiana nor the Wolf this time. It was a small child, crouched on a rock about the same size as the one Skade stood on. Cautiously, Skade hopped and skipped her way from rock to rock, dancing across the pools and the razor-edged ridges that linked them. Being fully human again was both disturbing and exhilarating. She felt more fragile than she had ever done before Clavain had hurt her, conscious that beneath her skin was only soft muscle and brittle bone. It was good to be invincible. But at the same time it was good to feel the universe chemically invading her through every pore of her skin, to feel the wind stroking every hair on the back of her hand, to feel every ridge and crack of the seaworn rock beneath her feet.
She reached the child. It was Felka — no surprise there — but as she must have been on Mars, when Clavain rescued her.
Felka sat cross-legged, much as she had been in the cabin. She wore a damp, filthy, seaweed-stained torn dress that left her legs and arms bare. Her hair, like Skade’s, was long and dark, falling in lank strands across her face. The sea fog lent the scene a bleached, monochrome aspect.
Felka glanced up at her, made eye contact for a second and then returned to the activity she had been engaged in before. Around her, forming a ragged ring, were many tiny parts of hard-shelled sea-creatures: legs and pincers, claws and tail pieces, whiplike antennae, broken scabs of carapacial shell, aligned and orientated with maniacal precision. The conjunctions of the many pale parts resembled a kind of anatomical algebra. Felka stared at the arrangement silently, occasionally pivoting around on her haunches to examine a different part of it. Only now and then would she pick up one of the pieces — a hinged, barbed limb, perhaps — and reposition it elsewhere. Her expression was blank, not at all like a child at play. It was more as if she was engaged in some task that demanded her solemn and total attention, an activity too intense to be pleasurable.
Felka…
She looked up again, questioningly, only to return to her game.
The distant waves crashed again. Beyond Felka the grey wall of mist lost some of its opacity for a moment. Skade could still not make out the sea, but she could see much further than had been possible before. The pattern of rockpools stretched into the distance, a mind-wrenching tessellation. But there was something else out there, at the limit of vision. It was only slightly darker than the grey itself, and it shifted in and out of existence, but she was certain that there was something there. It was a grey spire, a vast towerlike thing ramming into the greyness of the sky. It appeared to lie a great distance away, perhaps beyond the sea itself, or thrusting out of the sea some distance from land.
Felka noticed it too. She looked at the object, her expression unchanging, and only when she had seen enough of it did she return to her animal parts. Skade was just wondering what it could be when the fog closed in again and she became aware of a third presence.
The Wolf had arrived. It — or she — stood only a few paces beyond Felka. The form remained indistinct, but whenever the fog abated or the form became more solid, Skade thought she saw a woman rather than an animal.
The roar of the waves, which had always been there, shifted into language again. ‘You brought Felka, Skade. I’m pleased.’
‘This representation of her,’ Skade asked, remembering to speak aloud as the Wolf had demanded of her before. She nodded towards the girl. ‘Is that how she sees herself now — as a child again — or how you wish me to see her?’
‘A little of both, perhaps,’ said the Wolf.
‘I asked for your help,’ Skade said. ‘You said that you would be more cooperative if I brought Felka with me. Well, I have. And Clavain is still behind me. He hasn’t shown any sign of giving up.’
‘What have you tried?’
‘Using her as a bargaining chip. But Clavain didn’t bite.’
‘Did you imagine he ever would?’
‘I thought he cared about Felka enough to have second thoughts.’
‘You misunderstand Clavain,’ the Wolf said. ‘He won’t have given up on her.’
‘Only Galiana would know that, wouldn’t she?’
The Wolf did not answer Skade directly. ‘What was your response, when Clavain failed to retreat?’
‘I did what I said I would. Launched
a shuttle, which he will now have great difficulty in intercepting.’
‘But an interception is still possible?’
Skade nodded. ‘That was the idea. He won’t be able to reach it with one of his own shuttles, but his main ship will still be able to achieve a rendezvous.’
There was amusement in the Wolf’s voice. ‘Are you certain that one of his shuttles can’t reach yours?’
‘It isn’t energetically feasible. He would have had to launch long before I made my move, and guess the direction I was going to send my shuttle in.’
‘Or cover every possibility,’ the Wolf said.
‘He couldn’t do that,’ Skade said, with a great deal less certainty than she thought she should feel. ‘He’d need to launch a flotilla of shuttles, wasting all that fuel on the off-chance that one…’ She trailed off.
‘If Clavain deemed the effort worth it, he would do exactly that, even if it cost him precious fuel. What did he expect to find in the shuttle, incidentally?’
‘I told him I’d return Felka.’
The Wolf shifted. Now its form lingered near Felka, though it was no more distinct that it had been an instant earlier. ‘She’s still here.’
‘I put a weapon in the shuttle. A crustbuster warhead, set for a teratonne detonation.’
She saw the Wolf nod appreciatively. ‘You hoped he would have to steer his ship to the rendezvous point. Doubtless you arranged some form of proximity fuse. Very clever, Skade. I’m actually quite impressed by your ruthlessness.’
‘But you don’t think he’ll fall for it.’
‘You’ll know soon enough, won’t you?’
Skade nodded, certain now that she had failed. Distantly, the sea mist parted again, and she was afforded another glimpse of the pale tower. In all likelihood it was actually very dark when seen up close. It rose high and sheer, like a sea-stack. But it looked less like a natural formation than a giant taper-sided building.
‘What is that?’ Skade asked.
‘What is what?’
‘That…’ But when Skade looked back towards the tower, it was no longer visible. Either the mist had closed in to conceal it, or it had ceased to exist.
‘There’s nothing there,’ the Wolf said.
Skade chose her words carefully. ‘Wolf, listen to me. If Clavain survives this, I am prepared to do what we discussed before.’
‘The unthinkable, Skade? A state-four transition?’
Even Felka halted her game, looking up at the two adults. The moment was pregnant, stretching eternally.
‘I understand the dangers. But we need to do it to finally slip ahead of him. We need to make a jump through the zero-mass boundary into state four. Into the tachyonic-mass phase.’
Again that horrible lupine glint of a smile. ‘Very few organisms have ever travelled faster than light, Skade.’
‘I’m prepared to become one of them. What do I need to do?’
‘You know full well. The machinery you have made is almost capable of it, but it will require a few modifications. Nothing that your manufactories can’t handle. But to make the changes you will need to take advice from Exordium.’
Skade nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here. That’s why I brought Felka.’
‘Then let us begin.’
Felka went back to her game, ignoring the two of them. Skade issued the coded sequence of neural commands that would make the Exordium machinery initiate coherence coupling.
‘It’s starting, Wolf.’
‘I know. I can feel it, too.’
Felka looked up from her game.
Skade sensed herself become plural. From out of the sea fog, from a direction she could neither describe nor point to, came a feeling of something receding into vast, chill distance, like a white corridor reaching to the bleak edge of eternity. The hairs on the back of Skade’s neck prickled. She knew that there was something profoundly wrong about what she was doing. The pre-monitionary sense of evil was quite tangible. But she had to stand her ground and do what had to be done.
Like the Wolf said, fears had to be faced.
Skade listened intently. She thought she heard voices whispering down the corridor.
‘Beast?’
‘Yes, Little Miss?’
‘Have you been completely honest with me?’
‘Why would one have been anything other than honest, Little Miss?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering, Beast.’
Antoinette was alone on the lower flight deck of Storm Bird. Her freighter was locked in a loom of heavy repair scaffolding in one of Zodiacal Light’s shuttle bays, braced to withstand even the increased acceleration rate of the light-hugger. The freighter had been here ever since they had taken the lighthugger, the damage it had sustained painstakingly being put right under Xavier’s expert direction. Xavier had relied on hyperpigs and shipboard servitors to help him do the work, and at first the repairs had gone more slowly than they would have with a fully trained monkey workforce. But although they had some dexterity problems, the pigs were ultimately cleverer than hyperprimates, and once the initial difficulties had been overcome and the servitors programmed properly, the work had gone very well. Xavier hadn’t just repaired the hull; he had completely re-armoured it. The engines, from docking thrusters right up to the main tokamak fusion powerplant, had been overhauled and tweaked for improved performance. The deterrents, the many weapons buried in camouflaged hideaways around the ship, had been upgraded and linked into an integrated weapons command net. There was no point pussyfooting now, Xavier had said. They had no reason to pretend that Storm Bird was just a freighter any more. Where they were headed, there would be no nosey authorities to hide anything from.
But once the acceleration rate had increased and they all had to either stay still or submit to the use of awkward, bulky exoskeletons, Antoinette had made fewer visits to her ship. It was not just that the work was nearly done, and there was nothing for her to supervise; there was something else that kept her away.
She supposed that on some level she had always had her suspicions. There had been times when she felt that she was not alone on Storm Bird; that Beast’s vigilance extended to more than just the mindless watchful scrutiny of a gamma-level persona. That there had been something more to him.
But that would have meant that Xavier — and her father — had lied to her. And that was something she was not prepared to deal with.
Until now.
During a brief lull when the acceleration was throttled back for technical checks, Antoinette had boarded Storm Bird. Out of sheer curiosity, expecting the information to have been erased from the ship’s archives, she had looked for herself to see whether they had anything to say on the matter of the Mandelstam Ruling.
They had, too.
But even if they hadn’t, she thought she would have guessed.
The doubts had begun to surface properly after the whole business with Clavain had started. There had been the time when Beast jumped the gun during the banshee attack, exactly as if her ship had ‘panicked’, except that for a gamma-level intelligence that was simply not possible.
Then there had been time when the police proxy, the one that was now counting out the rest of its life in a dank cellar in the Chateau, had quizzed her on her father’s relationship with Lyle Merrick. The proxy had mentioned the Mandelstam Ruling.
It had meant nothing to her at the time.
But now she knew.
Then there had been the time when Beast had inadvertently referred to itself as T, as if a scrupulously maintained facade had just, for the tiniest of moments, slipped aside. As if she had glimpsed the true face of something.
‘Little Miss… ?’
‘I know.’
‘Know what, Little Miss?’
‘What you are. Who you are.’
‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but…’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘Little Miss… if one might…’
‘I said shut the fuc
k up.’ Antoinette hit the panel of the flight deck console with the heel of her hand. It was the closest thing she could find to hitting Beast, and for a moment she felt a warm glow of retribution. ‘I know all about what happened. I found out about the Mandelstam Ruling.’
‘The Mandelstam Ruling, Little Miss?’
‘Don’t sound so fucking innocent. I know you know all about it. It’s the law they passed just before you died. The one about irreversible neural death sentences.’
‘Irreversible neural death, Little…’
The one that says that the authorities — the Ferrisville Convention — have the right to impound and erase any beta- or alpha-level copies of someone sentenced to permanent death. It says that no matter how many backups of yourself you make, no matter whether they’re simulacra or genuine neural scans, the authorities get to round them up and wipe them out.‘
‘That sounds rather extreme, Little Miss.’
‘It does, doesn’t it? And they take it seriously, too. Anyone caught harbouring a copy of a sentenced felon is in just as much trouble themselves. Of course, there are loopholes — a simulation can be hidden almost anywhere, or beamed to somewhere beyond Ferrisville jurisdiction. But there are still risks. I checked, Beast. The authorities have caught people who sheltered copies, against the Mandelstam Ruling. They all got the death sentence, too.’
‘It would seem a rather cavalier thing to do.’
She smiled. ‘Wouldn’t it just? But what if you didn’t even know you were sheltering one? How would that change the equation?’
‘One hesitates to speculate.’
‘I doubt it would change the equation one fucking inch. Not where the cops are concerned. Which would make it all the more irresponsible, don’t you think, for someone to trick someone else into harbouring an illegal simulation?’