Faith (42 page)

Her starboard flank had become a silvered landscape, a relief map of hills and valleys and plains. The sockets of Her windows were lakes of liquid silver. The landscape filled the Bridge screen. A headup display said they were travelling through the Gulf alongside an object whose shape and size were similar to theirs, but it was a lie. They floated miles above it.

As perspective altered, so did magnitude. The lakes became oceans, the hills became mountains, the valleys grew as deep as the Sakhran Great Bowl. Now they were floating above the face of a planet. The Bridge screen couldn’t contain it; the silver landscape filled all 360 degrees of it, and rushed out past sight beyond its top and bottom edges. They’d seen the roaring fiery face of Horus 5 and the blank blurred face of Horus 4, and this was bigger: and all done in silver, height and depth picked out in gradations of silver-white through silver-grey to silver-black. They floated miles above it, and it swam years below them.

As perspective and magnitude altered, so did colour. Shadows welled up inside the liquid silver, never quite reaching its surface, but tinting it like internal bruises: silver green in the valleys, silver blue in the oceans, silver white on the mountain- peaks. Thahl made the Bridge screen magnify one of the oceans. Once it had been a window, then a lake. Now it had bays and inlets, and on its silver-yellow beaches things were crawling out, some to die and some to evolve.

Then the last alteration: time. Alternate bands of light and darkness chased each other across the face of the silver, first slowly, like the turning of pages, then faster. The things which had crawled out of the ocean moved away into the land, from which others returned, altered. They made geometric shapes and grid patterns which grew and reached out lines, some straight and some curved, to cover the landscape and join each other. The pages turned faster and the patterns grew; then stopped growing and stayed the same, page after page; then dwindled and lost their connecting lines; then stayed, diminished, page after page. Was it the face of Her home planet? Or of other planets, after She had visited them? It was too enormous and small, too fast and slow, to have any meaning. Or, like the layers of darkness and light on the inner surfaces of Her windows, when they had been windows, its meaning might go on forever.

“It’s a lie,” Foord said. “Get us out of here.”

•

The
Charles Manson
turned in its own length, engaged ion drive at fifty percent, and headed away: not only to escape what She was doing or becoming, but to escape the sixteen hundred feet of confinement they shared with Her in the vastness of the Gulf. Already the oppressive weight of the last few hours, to which none of them would have admitted, began to lift.

The image on the Bridge screen was now a rear view, but it still filled the screen because more of it poured back into the screen from its upper and lower edges as they moved away. At thirty thousand feet, which they reached almost instantly, it still hadn’t diminished. They knew it was a lie. They knew She’d done something to the screen or to the sensors feeding it, or to the fabric of the space between them, but it wouldn’t go. Thahl killed the headup displays which recorded its distance and mass and composition, and wished he could also kill the image. One was a lie, and both were meaningless.

“No,” Foord answered Cyr before she asked, “we’re not running away…Kaang, what’s our distance?”

“Eighty thousand feet, Commander.”

“Take us to a hundred and fifty thousand, please. Cyr, be ready with particle beams.”

“Commander,” Cyr said, “that silver is the same composition as Her pyramid.”

“And it’s a lie. Whatever She’s done to our instruments or our senses, it’s a lie.”

“We never fired beams at the pyramid! If we fire them at
that
, we don’t know how it’ll react.”

“Whatever it does, will also be a lie.”

“Commander, you seem…”

“
No.
This is me talking, Cyr. Not Her.”

“That could be Her talking.”

“No. She doesn’t do possession, She does events and predicts our reactions.” Because, he was beginning to suspect, but didn’t dare say,
She knows us and has always known us.

•

At one hundred and fifty thousand feet, the image stopped filling the screen. For the first time they could see the whole of it receding, just as if it was a real object, but that only made it stranger.

They had expected that when they could see its boundaries, when they could see the whole of it floating against the backdrop of the Gulf, the lie of its magnitude would give way to what it really was: just a ship, like them. But the silver extrusion blurred its edges and made it look like an oil-smear on a wet pavement. It turned the distance between them into an imagined alleyway, smelling of rain and urine.

Kaang turned the
Charles Manson
in its own length and brought it to rest, facing Her.

“Thank you, Kaang. Cyr, particle beams, please.”

They stabbed out. Foord imagined them as a wind blowing through the wet alleyway, making rubbish stir on the ground, and posters flap against walls like bats nailed there by one wing. All of this was a lie: particle beams were near-instantaneous, and while Foord’s imaginings were still forming, the beams had already impacted Her starboard side. She did not use Her flickerfields.

The silver extrusion turned the bruise-colour of the beams, then flared white. It swirled away from Her hull, cleanly and easily, as if it had never been more than a cloak someone had thrown over Her which She was now throwing back. As it swirled away from Her, it used the beams’ energy to re-order itself, and became something else. A replica of Her, done in gradations of grey.

“Full-size,” Foord said to Cyr. “Yours was less than quarter-size.” She shot him a venomous glance.

The replica moved slowly towards them, leaving the original behind it. Like the original, it was sideways-on to them, presenting its starboard side. It stopped. Foord motioned Cyr to hold fire.

In front of it, between them, light grey and dark grey shadows of tractor beams—Hers, and theirs—fought each other to stalemate, forming a tangled mass from which, one by one, they removed themselves and were gone. Pallid grey washes of harmonic-gun light played up and down the length of its hull. Grey shadow-lines of lasers peppered it, and were turned back as some of its hull-scales became pewter-grey mirrors. Pale Fire Opals branched in a giant Y above it, swarmed down to enter the two great craters on its unseen port side, and were gone.

More harmonic-gun fire. Light moved inside the replica, an unnameable shade of grey. A line of its windows exploded. From the replica burst a replica of the silver extrusion from which the replica was made. It became a landscape, then a planet’s face. It was a lie, telling a replica of a lie. Pages of light and darkness chased each other across its surface, networks of lines grew over it and diminished, and
then
it rushed towards them, filling the screen. The shadows of its surface details grew larger. The moment before it hit them one of the grey seas, which had been a lake and before that an exploded window, opened to swallow them.

The replica passed over, under and around them, raking their hull. The Bridge screen switched to a rear view showing it swirling away, dissipating back to what it had always been: almost nothing. Thahl reinstated the Bridge screen headups, and they said it was insubstantial and incapable of analysis. Smithson relayed damage reports one by one: superficial striations on the hull, to add to those they already carried. She should have continued to infinity, Foord thought: one replica makes another, which makes another.

Ahead of them, She remained at a hundred and fifty thousand feet. Nothing of the silver extrusion was left on Her. The Bridge screen, before anyone instructed it, focussed on the line of exploded windows.Their edges were jagged where the explosions had torn out a few surrounding hull-plates, but in each one, set deeper inside than the dark glass had been, was an opaque surface the same dark shade as the patterns spreading over Her. It looked as if they’d been boarded up from inside.

“Particle beams, please, Cyr.”

This time there was no illusion of a dripping alleyway. The beams reached Her immediately, and immediately She deployed Her flickerfields. They held, and continued to hold, with no detectable weakening, as the beams fired again and again. She even returned fire with Her own beams, just once. It was no more than a gesture, and the
Charles Manson
’s flickerfields held it easily; but the gesture stayed, hanging between them.
Maybe
, thought Foord sourly,
it was only a replica of a gesture.

Again Foord had the beginnings of an erection and the taste of vomit along the sides of his tongue. He still carried the compulsion to destroy Her, and the ambivalence that went with it. He wondered if the compulsion came from him and the ambivalence from Her, but he knew the truth was worse: the ambivalence was his too.

All of this made it a bad time for Cyr to say what she said next.

“‘Insubstantial and incapable of analysis.’ It wasn’t real. We’re still here.”

His glance at her was as venomous as the one she had given him.

“Why is
She
still here?”

“Because you haven’t done what I suggested, Commander. We should go for Her port side.” She returned his glance; they shared, not body fluids, but venom.

“Kaang.”

“Commander?”

“Take us closeup again. Same distance as before, but this time on Her
port
side. And Kaang.”

“Yes, Commander?”

“This will be difficult. She doesn’t want us there.”

Faith crawled through the Gulf at thirty percent ion speed. The crippled gait, a mixture of roll and pitch produced by Her impaired drives flowing over the wreckage of the stern crater, was asymmetric and repetitive. Her hull was covered in the swirling watered-silk patterns, dark against the silver of the hull plates. It was like the darkness of the Gulf was bleeding into Her.

A hundred and fifty thousand feet away, Cyr watched Her on the Bridge screen and considered the dark swirling patterns, and how they lessened Her; Foord’s two missiles had changed everything. Made Her fight for Her life.
But we haven’t seen a hundredth of what She’ll do to live. It’ll get strange.

Kaang also looked at the patterns.
Like an airless version of oxidation,
she thought, and forgot them.

The Bridge screen panned back, and back. Faith became invisible against the immensity of the Gulf. Ahead of Her were the inner planets, Sakhra and Horus 1 and 2. They were so far away they showed only as specks, scarcely more visible than Faith, and indistinguishable from the backdrop of stars. Only Horus itself was bigger than the other stars, and not by much.

A sound like doors slamming in a corridor ran up and down the ship. It was the locking of seat harnesses, for everyone except Kaang; hers would come later. She glanced across at Thahl and noticed that he had extended the claws of one hand and was tapping them absently on the rim of his console, tap-tap-
tap
, tap-
tap
, tap-
tap-tap
-tap. The sequence was irregular but, when Thahl repeated it, became part of a larger regularity; the same rhythm as the sequence of Her rolling motions, which Thahl was echoing as he watched Her on the screen. Repetition: the watered-silk patterns spreading over Her had of course been analysed for repetition, but none was found. Perhaps if there was another one of Her, or another million, the end of the sequence would be seen and it would start to repeat. That was as near, and as far, as they could get to the meaning of what was happening to Her.

Kaang watched the screen for a few moments more. Her face was expressionless.

She locked her seat harness, and wrenched the
Charles Manson
to port. The starboard manoeuvre drives erupted as she pushed them directly from zero to overload, and she augmented them by vectoring the main drives. The
Charles Manson
whipped sideways and diagonally, and flung them down a straight line which would end sixteen hundred feet on Her port side. The move was too quick for the gravity compensators, and everything loose on the Bridge exploded into midair. The ship strained and shrieked as loudly as it had at Horus 4, but there it was only fighting one force; Kaang was throwing forces at it from all directions. By the time the debris on the Bridge had landed, but before it bounced, they had almost reached the point on Her port side for which Kaang had aimed; but She rolled with the move, and still presented Her starboard side to them. Kaang did not decelerate but flew past Her, turned at fifty thousand feet and executed the same move, with the same result. She executed it again, turning the
Charles Manson
at twenty thousand feet this time, standing it almost vertically on its nose and plunging it
under
Her, to come up again on Her starboard side because Faith, again, had rolled with Kaang’s move. Kaang turned immediately and headed back, apparently on a ramming course; at nine hundred feet she wrenched the
Charles Manson
above Her, but again Faith rolled and presented Her starboard side. Kaang had expected this and fired the ventral manoeuvre drives, then vectored the main drives to augment them. It looked like the
Charles Manson
had hit an invisible wall. It stood for an instant on its stern, then pitched backwards over Her, aiming again for a point sixteen hundred feet on Her port side. This time it was closer, but still Faith rolled with the move and kept Her starboard facing them. When Kaang saw it had failed she did not decelerate or turn but continued until they were eighty thousand feet from Her, and still facing Her starboard side. Kaang brought them to rest, and glanced around the Bridge.

One by one, minor damage alarms sounded. She ignored them. She glimpsed the expressions of Foord and the others, and ignored them too. She knew it was always going to be unequal; whatever move she made, however complex and spectacular, Faith had only to wait for it and roll with it. Kaang shrugged, and started over again.