‘The device will only respond to organic life. An empty suit would be interpreted as machine sentience.’
‘This — thing — is a device? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It is an Inhibitor device.’
For a moment the words seemed meaningless, but only for a moment. Then – fuzzily — the words attached to some of the memories he retained from his time in the white light; the portal to the Hades matrix. Those memories attached to others; an endless braid of association.
And he came to a kind of understanding.
More than ever, he knew that he should not continue; that if he reached the inner realm of the jewel — of the Inhibitor device, as he now knew it to be — things would be very, very bad. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine how things could be worse.
‘We can’t go on,’ Calvin said. ‘I understand now what this is.’
‘Me too, belatedly.’
The device had been left here by the Inhibitors. They had placed it in orbit around Hades, next to the glimmering white portal; something older even than the Inhibitors. It did not bother them that they did not properly understand its function, or have any real inkling of who had placed it there, next to the neutron star which — according to some puzzling indications they had allowed to linger unexplored — was not quite as it should be. But, the enigma of its origin aside, it entirely suited their plans. Their own devices were constructed to lure the sentient, and by placing one of them next to an entity even more perplexing, they were guaranteed visitors. It was a strategy they followed across the galaxy, in fact: leaving Inhibitor devices in close proximity to objects of astrophysical interest, or near the ruins of extinct cultures. Anywhere where they were likely to draw attention.
And the Amarantin had come, and tinkered, and made themselves known to the device. It had studied them, and learned their weaknesses.
And it had wiped them out — all except for a handful of descendants of the Banished, who found two means to escape the ruthless predation of the Inhibitors. Some had used the portal itself, mapping themselves into the crustal matrix, where they continued to run as simulations, preserved in the impervious amber of nuclear matter enslaved for computational purposes.
It was hardly living, Sylveste thought, but at least something of them had been preserved.
And then there were the others: the others who had found the other way to escape the Inhibitors. Their mode of escape had been no less drastic, no less irreversible…
‘They became the Shrouders, didn’t they?’ Calvin was speaking now — or was it Sylveste, voicing his own thoughts, the way he sometimes did, in the heat of concentration? He could barely tell, much less care. ‘This was in the last days; when Resurgam was already gone, and most of the spaceborn had already been tracked down and annihilated. One faction went into the Hades matrix. Another learned what they could about manipulating spacetime, probably from the transformations near the portal. And they found a solution; a way to barricade themselves against the Inhibitor weapons. They found a way to wrap spacetime around themselves; a way to curdle and solidify it, until it formed an impervious shell. And they retreated behind those shells and sealed them for eternity.
‘But at least it was better than dying.’
Everything, for an instant, was clear in his head. How those behind the Shrouds had waited, and waited, barely cognisant of the outside universe; barely able to communicate with it, so secure were the walls they had wrapped around themselves.
And they had waited.
They had known, even at the time of enclosure, that the systems left behind by the Inhibitors were slowly failing; slowly losing their ability to suppress intelligence. Not soon enough, for them — but after a million years of waiting, trapped in their bubble of spacetime, they began to wonder if the threat had now diminished…
They could not simply dismantle the Shrouds and look around — far too hazardous; especially as the Inhibitor machines were nothing if not patient. Their apparent silence might only be part of the trap, a waiting game designed to entice the Amarantin — who were now the Shrouders — out of their shells, into the open arena of naked space, where they could be destroyed with ease, terminating the million-year purge against their kind.
Yet, in time, others came.
Perhaps there was something about this region of space which favoured the evolution of vertebrate life, or perhaps it was only coincidence, but in the newly starfaring humans, the Shrouders saw echoes of what they had once been. Something of the same psychosis, almost: the simultaneous craving for solitude and companionship; the need for the comfort of society and the open steppes of space; a schism which drove them onwards, outwards.
Philip Lascaille had been the first to meet them, around the Shroud which now bore his name.
The tortured spacetime around the Shroud had ripped his mind open, twisted it and reassembled it, into a drooling travesty of what it had once been. But it was a travesty shot with brilliance. They had put something in him; the knowledge that was needed for someone else to get much closer… and the lie that would make him do it.
Just before he died, Lascaille had communicated this to the young Dan Sylveste. Go to the Jugglers, he had said.
Because the Amarantin had once visited them; once imprinted their neural patterns into the Juggler ocean. Those patterns stabilised the spacetime around the Shroud; enabled one to penetrate deeper into its thickening folds without being torn asunder by the stresses. It was how Sylveste, having accepted the Juggler transform, was able to ride the storms into the depths of the Shroud itself.
He came out alive.
But changed.
Something had come back with him; something which called itself Sun Stealer, though he knew now that this was no more than a mythname; that the thing which had lived within him ever since was better thought of as an assemblage; an artificial personality woven into the shell of the Shroud, put there by those within who wanted Sylveste to act as their emissary; to extend their influence beyond the curtain of impassable spacetime.
What they wanted him to do was very simple, in hindsight.
Travel to Resurgam, where the bones of their corporeal ancestors were buried.
Find the Inhibitor device.
Place himself in a position where, if the device was still functioning, it would activate and identify him as a member of a newly uprisen intelligent culture.
If the Inhibitors were still around, humanity would be identified as the next species to be put to the slaughter.
If not, the Shrouders could emerge into safety.
Now the bluish light which surrounded him seemed evil; unspeakably so. He knew that simply by entering this place he might have already done too much; already exhibited enough apparent intelligence to convince the Inhibitor device that he represented a breed worthy of extinction.
He hated what the Amarantin had become; hated himself for devoting so much of his life to their study. But what could he do now? It was far too late for second thoughts.
The tunnel had widened, and where he found himself — still without any conscious control of the suit — was in a faceted chamber, bathed in the same putrid blue glow. The chamber was filled with odd hanging shapes, reminding him of reconstructions he had seen of the inside of a human cell. The shapes were all rectilinear, complexly interconnected rectangles and squares and rhomboids, forming hanging sculptures which subscribed to no recognisable aesthetic tendency.
‘What are they?’ he breathed.
‘Think of them as puzzles,’ Sun Stealer said. ‘The idea is that, as an intelligent explorer, you feel a curious urge to complete them, to move the shapes into the geometric configurations which are implied in the pieces.’
He could see what Sun Stealer meant. The nearest assemblage, for instance. It was obvious that with a few manipulations he could make the shapes into a tesseract… almost tempting… ‘I won’t do it,’ he said.
‘You won’t have to.’ And in demonstration, Sun Stea
ler made the limbs of his suit reach out towards the assemblage, which was much closer than he had first guessed. The suit fingers grasped for the first piece, swinging it effortlessly into place. ‘There will be other tests, other chambers,’ the alien said. ‘Your mental processes will be subjected to rigid scrutiny, and — later — your biology. I do not expect that the latter procedure will be especially pleasant. But neither will it be fatal. That would deter others, from which a broader picture of the enemy could be assembled.’ There was something almost like humour in the thing’s voice now; as if he had been long enough in human company to glean some of their manners. ‘You, alas, will be the only human representative to enter this device. But rest assured you will prove an excellent specimen.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Sylveste said.
The first hint of alarm entered Sun Stealer’s implacable, noiseless voice. ‘Please explain.’
For a moment Sylveste did not oblige. ‘Calvin,’ he said. ‘There’s something I have to say.’ Even as he spoke, he was not really sure why he was doing so, not really sure who he was addressing. ‘When we were in the white light — when we shared everything, in the Hades matrix — there was something I found out; something I should have known years ago.’
‘About you, that is.’
‘About me, yes. About what I am.’ Sylveste wanted to cry, now, knowing that this would be his last chance, but his eyes did not allow that; they never had. ‘About why I can’t hate you, unless I want to turn that hatred against myself. If I ever really hated you in the first place.’
‘It didn’t really work, did it? What I made of you. It wasn’t the way I planned it. But I can’t say I’m disappointed with the way you turned out.’ Calvin corrected himself. ‘The way I turned out.’
‘I’m glad I found out, even if it has to be now.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘You already know. We shared everything, didn’t we?’ Sylveste found himself laughing. ‘Now you know my secrets, as well.’
‘Ah. You’re talking about that little secret, aren’t you?’
‘What?’ hissed Sun Stealer; voice like the radio crackle of distant quasars.
‘I guess you were privy to the conversations I had on the ship,’ he said, addressing the alien again. ‘When I let them think I’d been bluffing.’
‘Bluffing?’ it asked. ‘About what?’
‘About the hot-dust in my eyes,’ Sylveste said.
He laughed, louder this time. And then executed the series of neural triggers, long committed to memory, which initiated a cascade of events in the circuitry of his eyes, and — finally — in the tiny motes of contained antimatter embedded within them.
There was a light purer than any he had known, even in the portal which led to Hades. And then there was nothing.
Volyova saw it first.
She was waiting for the Infinity to finish her off; watching the vast conic form of the vessel, dark as night, visible only because it blocked starlight, edging closer towards her with sharklike deliberation. Doubtless somewhere in its hugeness, systems were pondering over the matter of how to expedite her death in the most interesting manner. That was the only explanation for why it had not already killed her, since she was within strike-range of every one of its weapons. Perhaps Sun Stealer’s presence aboard the ship had given it a kind of sick sense of humour; a desire to put her to death with sadistic slowness; a process that commenced with this deathly wait for something to happen. Her imagination was now her worst enemy, efficiently reminding her of all the systems which might suit Sun Stealer’s purpose; the defences which could boil her over hours, or dismember her without killing her immediately (lasers which were tuned to cauterise flesh, for instance), or crush her (a squad of external servitors, for instance). Oh, the processes of her mind were a glorious thing. And it was, by and large, that same fertility which had given rise to so many possible modes of execution.
But then she saw it.
The flash, sparking from the surface of Cerberus, briefly marking the spot where the bridgehead was installed. It was as if, for a split second, a tremendous light had ignited within the world, only to be immediately dimmed.
Or a tremendous explosion.
She watched entrails of rock and scalded machinery puff into space.
Khouri took a moment to come to terms with the fact that she was not actually dead, despite the certainty she had felt that this would come to pass. At the very least, she had expected to wake transiently to pain, her last moments of consciousness before Hades pulled her apart; body and soul flensed by the monstrous talons of gravity around the neutron star. She had also expected to wake to the worst headache since the Mademoiselle had invoked her buried memories of the Dawn War. But this time it would be a headache of purely chemical origin.
They had found the drinks cabinet in the spider-room.
And they had drunk it empty.
But her head felt achingly clear of any intoxication, like a freshly scrubbed window. She had come to consciousness swiftly as well, with no groggy transition, as if there had been no existence in the instant before her eyes opened. But it was not in the spider-room. Now that she thought about it, she remembered waking; remembered the terrible onset of those tides; how she and Pascale had crawled to the midpoint of the room to lessen the differential stresses. But it had surely failed; they had known at that point there was no possible way to survive; that the only thing they could do was to somehow lessen the pain-
Where in hell’s name was she?
She had awakened with her back against a hard surface, unyielding as concrete. Above, the stars cartwheeled with insane speed through the sky, and there was something wrong with the way they moved; as if seen through a thick lens which stretched from horizon to horizon. She found she could move and struggled to her feet, almost toppling back as she did so.
She was wearing a suit.
She had not been wearing one in the spider-room. It was the same kind that she had used during her surface activities on Resurgam; the same kind that Sylveste would have taken with him into Cerberus. How could this be? If this experience was a dream, then it was unlike any she had known, because she could consciously question its contradictions without the whole edifice crumbling around her.
She was on a plain. It was the colour of cooling metal; almost but not quite bright enough to hurt the eye. It was as flat as a beach after the tide had retreated. The plain, now that she looked at it more closely, was patterned; not randomly, but in the intricately ordered manner of a Persian carpet. Between each level of patterning was another, until the ordering teetered on the edge of the microscopic and probably plunged down to even smaller realms, towards the subnuclear and the quantum. And it was shifting; blurring in and out of focus, never the same from moment to moment. Eventually it started to make her feel vaguely unwell, so she snapped her attention away to the horizon.
It seemed very close indeed.
She started walking. Her feet crunched into the flickering ground. The patterns rearranged themselves to create smooth stepping stones where she could plant her feet.
Something lay ahead.
It rose above the close curve of the horizon: a slight mound, a raised plinth stark against the tumbling starscape. She approached it, and as she neared it she saw movement. The raised part was like the entrance to a subway, three low walls enclosing a series of descending steps, burrowing into the world.
The movement was a figure emerging from the depths; a woman. She heaved herself up the steps with strength and patience, as if she were taking the morning air for the first time. Unlike Khouri, she wore no spacesuit. In fact, she was dressed in exactly the way Khouri remembered her from the last time they were together.
It was Pascale Sylveste.
‘I’ve been waiting a long time,’ she said, her voice carrying across the airless black space between them.
‘Pascale?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and then qualified herself. ‘I
n a manner of speaking. Oh dear; this isn’t going to be easy to explain — and I’ve had so long to rehearse it…’
‘What happened, Pascale?’ It seemed impudent to ask her why she wasn’t wearing a suit; why she wasn’t dead. ‘Where is this?’
‘Haven’t you guessed yet?’
‘Sorry to disappoint you.’
Pascale smiled sympathetically. ‘You’re on Hades. Remember that? The neutron star; the one which was pulling us in. Well, it wasn’t. A neutron star, I mean.’
‘On it?’
‘On it, yes. I don’t think you were expecting that.’
‘No; you could say that.’
‘I’ve been here as long as you have,’ Pascale said. ‘Which is only a few hours. But I’ve spent the time beneath the crust, where things happen a bit quicker. So it seems like considerably more than a few hours to me.’
‘How much more?’
‘Try a few decades… although time really doesn’t pass at all here, in some respects.’
Khouri nodded, as if all this made perfect sense. ‘Pascale… I think you need to explain…’
‘Good idea. I’ll do it on the way down.’
‘The way down where?’
She beckoned Khouri towards the stairs which descended into the cherry-red plain, as if she were inviting a neighbour indoors for cocktails.
‘Inside,’ Pascale said. ‘Into the matrix.’
Death had still not come.
Over the next hour, using the suit’s image-zoom overlay, Volyova watched the bridgehead slowly lose its form, like a piece of pottery being inexpertly shaped. Gradually it began to dissolve into the crust. It was being digested, having finally lost the battle against Cerberus.
Too soon; too soon.
The wrongness of it gnawed into her. She might be about to die, but she did not like seeing one of her creations fail, and — dammit — fail so prematurely.
Finally, unable to take any more, she turned towards the ship, pointing towards her with daggerlike intent, and spread her arms wide. She had no idea if the ship was capable of reading her vocal transmissions.