Angel Stations (42 page)

‘I’ve been watching them,’ Elias replied softly, ‘and there are always at least three of them guarding us. They’re armed.’

‘Maybe we should figure out what they’re going to do with us,’ she said. ‘We haven’t had any food in over twelve hours. We’re going to starve if this goes on.’ She showed him her precious vial. ‘These are memory Books.’

‘You need Observer bioware to use those things, surely?’ Realization dawned in his eyes even as he spoke. ‘I see’ – he hesitated – ‘you’re an Observer?’

‘I had the bioware implanted illegally. Don’t ask why, but I had my reasons.’

He looked at the vial uncertainly. She could read his mind; they didn’t look like much.

‘These contain the memories of someone I was very close to, someone who happened to be an expert on this world.’ He looked at her, surprised, and for the first time in a long while, she felt she had the upper hand.

‘So you’re saying,’ he said carefully, ‘that everything we need to know about surviving on Kasper will be in these things?’

‘There’s certainly a chance that some of it is.’ Seeing the scepticism on his face, she continued, ‘Put it this way, if what we need to know now is by any chance contained in these, I’ll need to find it soon.’

‘So were you planning on doing this sometime soon?’

‘I’m not sure if I should while we’re still here. I think it’s too dangerous. I need the right time to use the Books. If I’m distracted by other things, I won’t get the full benefit.’

Something else was happening outside. A glimpse confirmed that a dozen or more of the alien creatures were approaching, some of them carrying burning torches. For a blood-freezing moment, Kim wondered if they intended to burn the three of them alive inside the wagon.

But the vehicle shook as one side of it was lowered.

They stood up slowly, and stared down at the assemblage of heavily armed aliens standing around them, ears flicking gently against their fur-covered skulls.

The wagon was tethered to a trio of monstrous creatures, with wide mouths and slab-like teeth, their heads swaying gently back and forth in the night air.

After a few uncomfortable moments of appraising each other, there was commotion as another group appeared. Rough, sharp-clawed paws reached out and pulled them to the ground. Kim watched in alarm as some of them sniffed and prodded at Vincent’s prone form, but to her relief they decided to leave him where he was. She noticed Elias had a bright glitter in his eyes.

The clothes worn by the newly arrived group of Kaspians seemed more ornate and richly coloured, and several had jewels pinned through their ears.

Elias glanced at her. ‘Don’t suppose you speak the language?’

She stared at him for a few seconds, then realized it was a joke.

‘We couldn’t speak their language even if we tried. Our mouths are constructed differently.’

The Kaspian with the jewelled ears came closer, emitting a series of sounds like rapid clicks and multi-pitched barking.

‘It’s trying to say something to us,’ she whispered. ‘And it expects us to answer.’

Elias and Kim stared at each other for a moment before he turned back to the alien.

‘Hello,’ he attempted. This had the effect of merely producing further clicking noises all round. The Kaspian leader shook its head in a gesture, so naturally human, of resigned defeat. A reaction so familiar only accentuated the utter strangeness of the situation.

Paws tipped with long black claws reached out to tug them forward again.

They were then pushed and shoved deeper amongst the tents, to an open space surrounded by pavilions with strange, looping designs painted on them. A faint memory triggered in Kim’s mind, a memory that wasn’t even hers, but something relating to the power structure on this planet. She thought of the vial of Books in her pocket, reaching a hand in to touch them for reassurance.

In the open space lay a pile of metallic junk that inspection revealed to be interior parts of the Goblin. The jewelled Kaspian gestured first at the debris, then at Kim and Elias. They had no idea what it was asking them.

His attention drifting, Elias stared towards the distant horizon, wondering what had happened to Trencher.

Ursu

‘These creatures that live in the heart of a star,’ said Ursu, ‘what are they?’

– Not the heart of a star, the monstrous Shai spoke inside his head. – In a galaxy, a cloud of stars.

Ursu shook his head. He’d been travelling inland away from the river for several days now. Whenever he slept, he kept the Angel device well wrapped in a ragged cloth; otherwise the otherworldly blue light it radiated became too visible in the night.

When this is all over
, Ursu thought to himself,
I’m going to go home. I’m going to see if there’s anything left of the city. But I won’t be a priest this time
. Perhaps Xan’s soldiers had already killed all the priests of Nubala in their desperate hunt for the Shecumpeh device. And perhaps that was just as well, since he couldn’t imagine Uftheyen or any of the other priests accepting what Ursu now knew to be true.

The picture of a galaxy arose in his mind as he trudged along. Clouds of stars, thought Ursu, but that was all too much to take in. He shook his head, feeling irrationally angry.

‘All right, they live in the heart of the galaxy. And you’ve told me about them, but only that they oppose these creatures you call—’

– Angels, yes, who imprisoned another race within the singularity that lies at the heart of the galaxy we inhabit. As the creature mentioned
singularity
, the word was translated in Ursu’s mind into something close to a comprehensible concept. A ball of rock, but the size of an entire world, being squeezed by enormous hands until its own internal heat ignited it into a star, then being crushed again, and again, reducing to the size of a mountain, of a house, until finally it sucked in all its own light.

Then the Shai revealed the image of a great cloud of stars drawing rapidly closer to each other, eaten up by their own heat and density, squeezed together until they became something else – something terrible and dark that lay beyond the veil of stars Ursu saw nightly in the sky above him . . .

But this was too terrible a concept to think about. He shook his head, as if to free his mind of it. It reminded him of the well he had been trapped in, but bottomless, so that you could fall forever, and ever, and ever.

Ursu was now climbing upwards, nearing the crest of a steep hill that granted him a view of the distant ocean, now reduced to a thin silver line on the horizon behind him. He imagined he could make out ships pushing through blustery winds, on their way to distant ports. Nubala had been cold, but Ursu was here experiencing an intensity of cold that required an entire, undiscovered vocabulary to describe.

The inhabitants of the last little town had been strange, small folk distinguished with broad, flat ears who spoke some dialect Ursu could barely make out. They had directed him inland to the east, towards the Northern Teive Mountains. They thought he was crazy, to travel alone so far into such a hostile land. It was the land, they warned, of white, icy death.

‘Why were the Angels at war with these other creatures?’ he pressed the Shai.

– A philosophical disagreement. They did not communicate with anything you might recognize as a spoken language. Instead they communicated their ideas between themselves soundlessly, mind to mind.

Ursu struggled to understand. ‘You mean mind-readers?’

– Nothing so crude. They used technological means – directly.

‘I still don’t understand.’ Ursu watched his breath clouding in the crisp morning air as he came to the top of the craggy hill, and caught his first glimpse of the Northern Teive Mountains, those cruelly jagged cousins of the Southern Teive range.

– Remember how the effigy spoke to you, when you still believed it was in itself a god. And how I speak to you now drawing on your memories and sensations. So much conflict on your world and mine arises from misunderstanding: a misheard word, a misinterpreted action. Breakdowns in communication can lead to wars and injustice, because, for all our skills at communicating with each other, we do not always do it as well as we should.

– Well, the Angels recognized this fact, and found a means to communicate intent directly, in such a way that the recipient understood not only the message, but also the context of the message from the specific emotional or even social circumstances of the communicant.

Ursu was struck by this. ‘You are saying the gods were created as facilitators, as a way of avoiding the possibility of misunderstanding.’

– Yes, but they have other purposes too . . . as guardians, caretakers. The Angels realized an attack was coming.

‘They saw into the future?’

– Something like that, yes.

Ursu thought for a while. ‘You told me earlier that they had no free will.’

– When the future becomes the present, in that eyeblink before it becomes the past, it becomes set, unchangeable. Nothing can alter it then. But if you look into the future, that act of seeing itself fixes the future in place. In a sense, the future is determined by the one with the greatest ability to perceive it. Sometimes, the mere act of looking at something is to change it.

‘And you can see the future?’

– Yes.

Ursu thought hard. ‘And just because you see it, it
must
become what you see?’

– That is the essence of it, yes. However, I am not the only one with the ability, and that is where matters begin to grow complicated.

There was a sparse forest in the valley ahead. It looked dark, forbidding, but he’d have to traverse it to get anywhere near the mountains.

‘So what will happen after all this is over?’ asked Ursu, finding his way down this side of the hill’s more gentle incline. In the distance, he could see tribal totems rising from the plain beyond the forest, great stone pillars maybe half as old as the world.

– Ursu, as long as I and people like me exist, free will is gone from our lives and yours. To remove us completely from this existence is the only way to recover that free will. The Shai who is my enemy wishes to be a god. But I should think otherwise, and you are going to save your world.

‘And am I going to succeed?’

This time there was no answer.

Sam Roy

He opened his eyes. The vision of the Kaspian ex-priest faded, to be replaced by the shelter he had dug from the snow. He had managed to drag himself away from the bottom of the cliff he had fallen down, a considerable journey still from where Ursu tramped north towards the Citadel.

After he had initially betrayed Ernst, it had rapidly become clear to Sam that the man would have had a higher calling as a medieval torturer. When he wasn’t in too searing agony to think, Sam had been almost impressed with the range of carefully deliberated cruelty of which Ernst was capable.

As Sam had landed at the bottom of the cliff, most of the bones in his body were smashed. He was still alive, however. Neither he nor Ernst ever knew just what it would take to actually kill them.

After centuries of torment, Sam was sure his pain threshold must be as high as any in human history. It had become, by this time, merely a state of being.

At least he was no longer manacled to the ball of rock. Though it had shattered on the long drop down, he was still left with the heavy steel chains fitted tight around his scrawny wrists. He painfully gathered them into his arms.

Of course, he had known in advance for all these decades that this would eventually happen. Worse still, he had known that he would be dismayed and horrified by the even greater damage to his ruined body. Nor would this foreknowledge negate the fear and the doubt he would feel.

When it occurred, his communication with the Kaspian god-machines had led him to certain conclusions suggesting why the Angels were no longer present in the universe. Except those self-same conclusions led to yet further questions, such as why the Angels had deliberately booby-trapped human DNA with the key to incipient godhood.

He suspected the answer lay with the intelligence now imprisoned within the heart of the galaxy. In his farseeing conversations with the sentient machines, the Kaspian gods had seemed unclear on the precise nature of that intelligence. But that the answer lay in the Kaspian’s fabled city of Baul was a conclusion he had drawn for himself.

Sam hadn’t ever lied to the young Kaspian priest, but the awful truth was that he didn’t really know how things would finally turn out. Had never known that, couldn’t know, however hard he tried to probe the future . . .

He lay whimpering there, deep in his snowy cell, and waited for his bones to knit. His skin was blue with cold, but he still could not attain the luxury of death. In a few hours from now, he’d struggle forth again . . . and then certain things would inevitably happen. But in Baul itself – the vast artefact that humans had named the Citadel – he didn’t know what would transpire, could only be vaguely sure of events leading up to the crisis.

Beyond that point, he saw only a blackness, a void more terrifying, more innately disturbing, than any knowledge of the future he carried within himself.

Roke

When Roke had first set his eyes on them, he had been terrified of these creatures, the Shai.

Communication was proving impossible with them, as they did not appear to have one of those small metal boxes the Shai Vaughn possessed, allowing them to respond back in one of the Kaspian tongues. When Roke addressed them, they reacted only in confusion.

Roke had therefore gained the distinct impression that these three Shai were not connected to Vaughn, or at least were not nearly as powerful. Were there conclusions to be drawn from their sudden dramatic appearance? Roke had seen the ruins of the craft that had flown blazing over their heads, and the swathe of destruction it had cut through the forest. Were they fleeing from something? Roke couldn’t begin to guess. But the unexpected factor was their substantiality. They felt real to the touch: made of flesh and blood, not phantom creatures.