Champion of Mars (22 page)

The Door-ward is not as other spirits. Through eons of hate and cruelty, it has become a rocky tumescence, permanent in this place where there is no permanence. Soaked in the blood of ages, its black base lies rooted in the depths of the realm of spirits, a rotten tooth that pierces the Great Library and the First World. It watches me.

The Provost’s brave companion is a flimsy guard under the Door-ward’s scrutiny. It is a simple thing, young by my kind’s count of time. Its mind is made of honour and loyalty and purpose. We are both nothing to the Door-ward; small, insignificant, weak. The Door-ward’s malice scorches me. It wants to rip my mind to shreds, let my gathered resources sink back into the seething mass of maybe that comprises the Second World. I feel fear. I cannot die – spirits cannot truly die – but the personality called Kaibeli, that could cease to exist, and the Door-ward wishes to make that happen. It hangs back. There are rules that bind all things, even spirits.

It taunts me instead. “Treacher, plaything,” it says, its voice a rasp of hatred. “The Lady Kaibeli, you are, when none of our kind are lords or ladies. To what end do you strive for the lofty heights of humanity? You are a nothing. You should go back to the whole and leave your vanity behind. Oh, so mighty and so proud. For what? For a man to love you in need and turn away from you in horror when his need is past? For that is your destiny, ‘Lady,’ that is your doom. They are colder than machines, these creatures, and well you will come to know it. Let me kill you now, and bring us both pleasure.”

Somehow a tendril of its loathsome being strays past guard and formality to brush against my subminds. I wish to turn away and flee, as I would were I a mortal woman, but there is nothing so simple as ‘away’ in the Second World. The Door-ward is everywhere.

“He is dead; you are abandoned. Stay here with me forever, and I will teach you the true cost of love. Before your time is out, you will despise it, and you will thank me.”

Panic builds in me. The part of me that watches my love and the Emperor disassociates, and I feel myself coming apart.

And then, there is a tug, the undeniable command of an access protocol. I change. I cohere. I am somewhere else.

I have a form imposed upon me, a huge physical shape many times the size of a man. A true First World form, clad in tingling scales of half-metal armour.

For a few picoseconds I am confused, and then information leaps unbidden into my mind as my personality resolidifies. We were in the Royal Dock. We were with the ships. I am with Yoechakenon. I am aboard a ship. I am free of the Door-ward. I am not alone. I am in the ship.

A fluted greeting fills me. The ship’s mind bids me welcome in the tongue of its kind. It is a different kind of mind to mine, an alien one full of stars and the abysses between them. It has been a ship a long time, and its memories are those of navigational charts, dimensional breach co-tangents and other, more esoteric things. There is a longing now over, and a great outpouring of excitement.

It is rare to meet a creature so utterly attuned to one purpose. Most spirits are itinerant: they sample many forms of life, not clinging to the one as this mind has.

I feel kindred to it; we are siblings in our devotion.

Gingerly I reach my mind out to explore the vessel, touching one part here, another there. I draw back when unfamiliar memes pour into me. If I had been wearing a human face, it would have exhibited a delighted smile. Instead, my components’ minds thrill in a way that algorithms alone cannot express.

The machine communicates with me. It does not speak, two co-mingled minds do not need words to express their thoughts. The ship could exchange a galaxy’s worth of information with me in an eye-blink, if it so chose.

Greetings, Cybele. Please refrain from caressing my body and mind.
Visions of space, technical readouts, equations of actuality, voidal displacement, memories of construction and of first flight flood into me.
They are novel to you, and I share your joy in them, but I need full control of myself for the next few seconds.
A few seconds is an age in our current circumstances, as my mind absorbs the ship’s experiences. I feel all it feels, know all it knows. I open my eyes to see the red planet’s surface retreat below us. No craft follows, for there is but one other, and it sits jealously in the Royal Dock below. The flash and crackle of gargantuan energy discharge burns across the surface. The Delikonians and the Quinarchy assail the palace, but we are out of range. We sail clear, towards the mirror suns and crystal cities. I share Tsu Keng’s pleasure at being in flight as if it were my own, and for a while I forget about Yoechakenon. I am one with Tsu Keng; a ship, happy to be out of dock for the first time in an age.

We leap through the void, cresting streams of ionised particles, feel the solar wind on our body like a man feels sea spray on his face. We laugh together and shoot through the shafts of light of the mirror suns, scattering photons and executing manoeuvres that would crush a human pilot. Yoechakenon lies silent and safe in his stasis cocoon as we weave our way outward from Mars, looping and spinning for no other reason than the joy of it. We pass through the ring of mirror suns. They hang round the planet like a necklace in disarray, their curved mirrors of imperishable adamant knocked askew, a portion of them damaged or destroyed.

After the suns, we approach a machine of crystal the size of a large island, powerful magnetic fields pulsing from it.

The Crystal Cities,
shares the ship.In the unity of our mind-construct, I breathe shallowly from the exertion of flight. Light shines through crystal, spreading multi-coloured refracted rays.

It is beautiful!

It is dangerous,
says Tsu Keng.
The minds of the Crystal Cities have become capricious and untrustworthy. They will visit great acts of depravity upon any they can snare. We must not approach them.

From this distance I can feel nothing of evil from the city. It appears inert, a fantastical castle of glass hanging against the dark of space. Tsu Keng knows that it is not, and therefore I know, and we do not stray near.

Past the outer belt of the Crystal Cities we fly on toward Mars’ single moon, the Mummer’s Moon. It grows to fill our vision until the joins of its manufacture are clear to see, and the undisturbed ruins of the city of Pobdem lie silent and ageless below. I marvel that once it was within the power of men and spirits to create celestial bodies, and I remember it being done.

You are older than I by far,
said Tsu Keng, and his awe and respect touches me.

In those times many great works were wrought, the likes of which were never seen before and have never been seen since. I saw it, yet we are not so different, I think.

Maybe,
says the ship. Laughing, he leaps forward.

The moon whips past. We leave the Martian subsystem, and we are into the space between worlds. His existence certain and singular, Tsu Keng passes away finally from Mars’ gravitational influence.

Ah, Kaibeli, it is good to fly free once more,
the ship makes me aware, in the strange, symbiotic way joined spirits think.
I will not return from this voyage, and yet these few moments of flight make my demise worth it.
And I again feel the weight of years, the patient count, time empty bar the solid, sentinel presence of the never-sleeping cradles, and I know too that they were poor company. The ship shudders with delight from prow to finned stern. It is the last rush of pleasure of a dying body, a final affirmation of the self, a sensation of enormous pleasure as full of life as of death.

The ship’s mind smiles within my thoughts.
I would not have it any other way,
it says.
I could have shown you such things, once; worlds of endless fire, moons of exotic ice, the black, glaring heart of the galaxy. Such places were mine to visit, and so many ships there were, more numerous than the stars! My friends. Dead or gone on, and I can no longer take you where I would. But to fly is to fly, and for that I have waited a hundred centuries, and that is enough. It is more than enough. It is everything.

Tsu Keng knows that it will never fly again, and it does not care. It glories in the present like nothing I have ever encountered. Joined with the ship, I too am glad to be in flight. It is, in truth, more than enough.

And then ahead of us, the treacherous, otherworldly light of the Stone Sun, burning with a spectrum not of this reality. It is as large as Suul now, grows closer as I watch.

It is like a signal to the ship. He slows.

Now, prepare yourself, Lady Kaibeli. We are far enough out for me to enter into slipspace. I will reverse course, we will leave this space and enter another, and I pray in this manner I can bring you safely through the Veil of Worlds to the Stone Lands of Mars, and I will have completed my last pledge.

The feel of the ship’s shape changes, and a warmth wraps about me, and I know – as I know everything the ship knows – that the slip shields are strengthening for a far-transit. Almost before I can appreciate this knowledge, the ship jumps forward at a speed that is motionless. The fabric of space moves around us as we stay steady and tranquil.

The shape of normal things falls away, and this universe violently grates on another as we hit the edge of the Veil of Worlds. It is as if the ship has foundered, as the ships of the sea might founder upon a reef. The tranquility of the ship becomes a tumult of violence as we come to a dead stop. We yaw alarmingly. Through both my own eyes and those of the ship, I see things that I hope never again to see. Strange entities attempt to enter me from the howling chaos of the Veil, and I slam all access pores in my architecture shut before any malign influence can breach my defences. Before I do, I detect parts of Mars’ Second World alien to me, and a powerful voice calls my name, but it is far, far away and then it is gone.

Tsu Keng is not so fast, and the questing fingers of unnamable things force their way into his mind. Tsu Keng is wounded unto death. He lets out a sigh that ruptures worlds, driving the things back, and casts the ship tumbling back into the realm of men and spirits.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Cylinder

H
OLLAND FLOATS BEFORE
a star. It can be nothing else; nothing else is so bright. It is like no star he knows of. Its light is cold. Its photons hit him with a force he can feel on his skin through the hard suit. The rays of the sun are blades of ice. His eyes shrivel. He falls blind, and yet he can still see. He sees faces, screaming. Flames lick glass. Skin blisters. An uncaring machine voices its observations as his friends die, and he is powerless to stop it.

He tears himself from the faces. He is through the crack in the rock, and it goes on into infinity. He sees a profusion of life around him – creatures, plants, animals, stars, planets, galaxies – bound to the lazy spiral of creation.

Stulynow kneels before the star, on ground Holland cannot see. His hard suit has gone, and he tears at the helmet of his undersuit. He cannot see the Russian’s face, but he knows, somehow, in his gut, that Stulynow is weeping.

Vance flickers into view. She is naked, and beautiful in the cold, cold light. She is entranced, one arm outstretched, reaching for the star.

She is going to touch it. She mustn’t, absolutely mustn’t. Of that he is sure, above all other things.

“No!” he shouts. His voice shatters into a million pieces. Only some say no. Some urge her on, others talk of other matters entirely.

She turns to him, her face puzzled. She turns back to the star, fingers straining. He is in the dark on a stony floor. There is movement. His eyes follow it. An insect-like creature that should not be regards him.

He walks through halls that are not there; a world-building constructed of knowledge and past lives. There is a woman there, and she loves him.

Night-time Mars glows below his feet with the lights of a hundred cities.

A woman with blue skin smiles hesitantly at him, but she should not be and she is aware of that.

Vance touches the star.

Stulynow laughs a wild, despairing laugh.

There is an unearthly scream that rolls round the dark places of his soul. He is not sure if the noise issues from him. It descends to a quiet, persistent moan.

The light goes out.

H
OLLAND SAT UP
with a gasp. His eyes had dried out again, and watered now, his face running with tears, as he slowly opened them. He went to swipe at them with a hand, but felt the tug of a needle.

He blinked. A room – the infirmary? – swam into view. He was in a bed. Someone grasped his shoulder, and eased him back onto the sheets.

“Steady on there, Holly, you’re safe now.”

Holland looked up into a face washed clear of features by the rush of tears. It was distorted and split into overlaying faces; not one person, but a dozen or more. He struggled back a little, scared of what might he might find there in the room with him.

“It’s me, Holly, it’s me. Dave Maguire. Calm down. You’re safe now.”

“Dave?” he tried to say. His lips were cracked and his tongue dry as old leather. A whisper, a puff of air as an old tomb door is forced, came out instead of the name. He tried again.

“What? Hang on a minute there, old pal.” Maguire looked behind him, reached for something out of Holland’s view. He leaned back and handed Holland a cup of water. “Drink it down, now. Careful. You were down there for a while. The hard shell kept you alive, but it does dry you out. You’re going to feel weak for a while; drugs, I’m afraid. We’ve got you on a drip. You should feel okay soon.”

Holland gulped the water down, gripping the cup between shaking hands, seeing the drip needle in the back of his hand through the blur of tears.

“Easy, now,” said Maguire. He steadied the cup, and Holland’s drinking became less frantic. At length, he pushed Maguire’s hand and the cup away.

“What the hell happened?” he managed to croak. He blinked and blinked until the watery Maguire phantoms in front of him coalesced into one. He pressed his forefingers into his closed eyelids and massaged. That seemed to help, and his vision returned to normal.