House of Suns (17 page)

‘You mean as one machine to another?’

‘You tell me.’

Campion was still suspicious of Hesperus, even though we had agreed to give him the benefit of the doubt where Doctor Meninx was concerned.

‘It is certainly possible. It is also possible that I am quite mistaken about Neume. As you say, there may be other worlds with that name.’

‘I guess you’ll know when we get there,’ I said.

‘One can but hope,’ Hesperus said. ‘Of course, there is the small matter of the ambush to deal with first. I wonder if I might be of assistance in that regard?’

‘We can’t trust him,’ Campion said, lying against me. ‘Even if we wanted to trust him, it’d be the wrong thing to do.’

‘He’s offered to help us. I’ve told him I’ll let him pick a ship from my cargo bay, something he can use.’

‘Could be a ruse.’

‘You mean, he’s going to take the ship and never come back?’

‘It’s a distinct possibility.’

‘Yes, and so is the possibility that he’s telling us the truth.’ I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘So what if he does leave us? We’ll have lost a guest and a ship I probably don’t even remember acquiring. Hardly the worst thing we’re going to have to deal with.’

‘I’ll remind you of that when he turns his guns on us.’

‘He’s a rational sentient, Campion - not a vengeance-crazed psychopath.’ I ran a finger though the fine hair of his chest, across his belly and down to his sleeping penis. We had been lying together in a warm post-coital haze, until I made the mistake of starting a conversation. ‘The mad one was Doctor Meninx. Hesperus just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘So he says.’

‘Do you actually believe he murdered Meninx?’

Campion struggled with his reply. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I think the doctor just took one short cut too many with his equipment. But I have to act as if I’m taking the matter seriously. I can’t appear negligent where the death of a guest is concerned.’

‘Even when the other guest has volunteered to put his life on the line to help us?’

‘Don’t make this any harder than it already is. I’m just saying, Hesperus has some ground to make up. He has to earn my trust again. Earn
our
trust.’

I caressed him until he began to show faint signs of life. ‘He’s earned mine already. You’re the one who needs to catch up, Campion.’

Hesperus ran a golden hand along the golden flank of the little spacecraft he had found tucked in one corner of the enormous room. It was scarcely larger than a whale, more a trinket than a ship.

‘It’s called
Vespertine,’
I said. ‘That’s about all I remember. I think someone may have given it to me as a gift. I can’t recall the last time I had to use a shuttle to move between vessels, rather than just whisking over. Been a while since I dealt with an entry-level civilisation.’

‘This is more than a shuttle,’ Hesperus said, still stroking the little ship’s skin.

‘What are we dealing with, then?’

‘A true interstellar vehicle, Purslane. I believe that the lateral bulge conceals part of a small parametric engine, or something employing similar principles.’

I shrugged. ‘Doesn’t change much. There are other interstellar ships in here. I keep them for trade.’

We were in
Silver Wings’
main storage/cargo bay, in the aft third of my ship. The bay was a rectangular pressurised space eight kilometres long, three across and nearly two in height. We had entered through the cliff-like edifice of the forward wall and followed a series of suspended walkways through the chamber, winding between the many ships and ship-sized artefacts that formed my private collection. They loomed huge, most of them cloaked in shadow or darkness except for the odd clean or ragged edge, a smooth or imbricated surface, limned by the cold blue radiance of the distant ceiling-mounted spotlights.

Lately I spent as little time as possible in the main bay. The clutter of the place, the disordered collection of ships and artefacts, was an uncomfortable reminder of the disorder in my head. My skull was a pressure cooker, crammed with too much history. They both needed sorting out, but the longer I put off either task, the less enthusiasm I had.

Campion had always been less sentimental than me. He could ditch ancient treasure, or submit to memory consolidation, without a moment’s hesitation. He moved through life with less baggage, less to weigh him down, less to anchor him to his own history. I had always admired him for that willingness to discard his own past, while knowing it was one of the things that made us distinct, a bridge I could never cross if I wished to remain Purslane.

And I did, of course.

Sometimes I thought of Abigail making clay dolls of us, the way a girl might pass a rainy afternoon, with no thought for what would become of those dolls when she sent them into the world. How trivial it must have been for her to adjust the parameters of her personality before pouring a measure of it into each of her shatterlings. Did it cross her mind, even for an instant, that there might be less than joyous consequences? That on some unthinkably distant day one of her shatterlings would be standing in a vast room halfway across the galaxy, weighed down with the melancholic sense of being an unwilling curator in some dusty, little-visited museum of her own existence?

Hesperus was looking at me, waiting for me to continue.

‘Shatterlings tend to be hoarders, as you may have noticed. I’ve never had much use for half the stuff in here, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. I’d be too worried about throwing away something really vital, without realising it.’

‘I quite understand. But this ship may yet have possibilities. I should like permission to go aboard, if it will not inconvenience you.’

Vespertine
floated in a weightless cradle just beyond the gravity bubble encompassing the walkway. Hesperus had to lean over the railing to reach its skin. It was ridged with a Byzantine design, mazes and chevrons and interlocked flower-like forms, vanishing down to a fractal haze of microscopic detail that made the edges appear out of focus. I presumed the design served some arcane field-modifying effect, much as the roughened skin of a shark assisted it in swimming.

‘Is there something in particular about this ship that interests you?’

‘I should like to see if it is functional, and whether it will accept me as a pilot.’

‘I don’t blame you for wanting to leave us, Hesperus.’

‘Not my intention. I am considering how I may be of practical assistance during the forthcoming encounter.’

‘But this is just a tiny little minnow.’

‘Size may well be the issue here, but not in the sense you are implying. A ship as small as this one would be limited in its agility not by the power output of its engine, but by the strength of its dampening field. But I am not human. Unbalanced forces that would reduce you to red jelly - I am sorry to be so graphic, but it is necessary to make my point - would register with me only as a mild impediment to free movement.’

‘Being able to move fast isn’t going to protect you from everything that might be hiding in that cloud.’

‘My mission must have been evaluated as a high-risk enterprise from the moment I left Machine Space. I would have gone into it knowing that there would be moments of crisis and uncertainty. In that respect, nothing has changed.’

‘Did Campion show you the structures?’

‘Yes, he did.’

As she had refined her observations of the reunion system, Silver Wings had detected bright objects embedded in the cloud. They were huge glowing structures of irregular shape, branching into jagged fingers like frozen lightning bolts. They were shrouded in dust now, difficult to examine, but we would see them up close when we slammed through the cloud.

We had no idea what they were - deep trove searches were continuing - but their presence did nothing to lighten our mood.

‘They don’t worry you?’

‘They are certainly puzzling. I may even know what they are, on a level of memory I cannot presently access. I also have every confidence that I can steer around them without coming to harm.’

Despite everything that had happened, the weight of knowledge bearing down on me, his bravery stirred me. ‘What I said earlier still applies. If you want to leave, you can take any of these ships. I won’t hold it against you, and neither will Campion.’

‘I am still in your debt. I have no intention of leaving until that is settled. Now, may I be permitted to examine the ship? If I am to make the best use of it, I may wish to modify some of her control systems. I know there is still time, but the sooner I start the better.’

‘Campion and I will be going into abeyance shortly. We’ll come out when we’re closer, about to begin slowdown.’

I told
Silver Wings
to release the security binding on the golden ship, allowing Hesperus to board it. Part of the handrail vanished and a portion of the flooring bulged outwards to connect with a baroque doorway that had just formed in the side of the ship. Soft blue light emanated from the interior, highlighting the chromed flanges on the sides of Hesperus’s face. He stepped through the blue-lit doorway, one gold machine entering another. After a moment the doorway rendered itself impassable - it was as if a pane had frosted over with gold leaf - and then vanished back into the baroque patterning of the hull, leaving no trace of its former existence. The railing remade itself. A breeze, caused by a shift in the miniature weather system that inhabited this bay, flicked a hair across my brow. I had not been there for so long that my entrance had disturbed the equilibrium of the captured atmosphere.

There are times when you go into abeyance with the weight of the world on your shoulders, and come out with all your problems suddenly diminished - still there, still meriting your attention, but no longer having the looming stature that they did before.

This was not one of those times. I came out of the casket with the same dread feeling that I had had going in.

We braked hard and braked sudden, pushing our engines to the limit. Until the moment when we began slowdown and dug claws into spacetime like cats sliding down a wall, there would have been little or no warning of our imminent arrival.

Two per cent of the speed of light was almost not moving at all by the standards of Gentian Line - a speed so imperceptibly slow that it was best measured in kilometres per second, a unit more usually associated with travel in a planetary atmosphere. But it was still much faster than the orbital motion of any of the bodies making up the system, whether they were the remaining planets and moons or the dust, grit and tumbling boulders of the shattered planet. Campion had already pulled away to a distance of two minutes—thirty-six million kilometres - beginning his separation many hours ago. Now our two ships were moving along parallel trajectories, like bullets shot from a double-barrelled rifle, and would remain so as we slipped through the cloud, piercing it more or less at its widest point, and passing either side of the sun. Both ships would be peering into the surrounding volume, looking for indications of technological activity. Allowing for the effectiveness of our sensors, we should be able to sweep twenty per cent of the cloud with a sensitivity high enough to detect typical ship signatures. There were places to hide: warm knots and eddies in the cloud caused by the to-and-fro influence of the remaining worlds. A ship could hide itself, masked to eyes that worked on gravity and heat.

All the while we would be doing our best not to be seen. That meant no communications unless absolutely necessary: by the time we were deep inside the cloud there would be too great a chance of a tight-beam being scattered in all directions by intervening debris, rendering our private communications at least detectable by foreign parties, if not decipherable. It also meant using our engines as infrequently as possible, and not raising our impassors to full effectiveness until a collision was imminent. Running dark, in other words: coasting without screens, and relying solely on passive sensor methods.

I watched Hesperus leave. Before he entered
Vespertine
we touched hands. His was very cold, very metallic, but somehow pliant in the way it yielded to my touch. He slipped out of my grasp and retreated through the blue-lit doorway of the golden ship. The doorway formed over and vanished back into the blurred surface of the hull. A humming note rose and stabilised. A few seconds later, the hull blurring intensified, as if I was seeing the golden craft through a veil of tears.
Vespertine
moved away from the catwalk, slipping free of its force cradle. The railing reformed. I clutched it, watching Hesperus navigate between the much larger and darker vessels filling my hold. Gradually it dwindled to a tiny, fuzzy mote of self-illuminated gold. The bay door had opened wide. Hesperus penetrated the atmosphere curtain and entered open space. He hovered outside for a few seconds before engaging the engine, appearing to blink out of existence as the massive acceleration snatched him away.

I watched the door close and then whisked back to the bridge.

‘Vespertine
is loose,’ I told Campion.

His reply came back four minutes later. ‘I didn’t see a thing, and I was watching very closely. I hope that bodes well, if and when we run into trouble.’

His image was based on
Silver Wings’
own memories of Campion, not any visual information arriving over the talk-beam. It would have been pointless and dangerous to send more data than was strictly necessary, so our exchange consisted only of the words we spoke, accompanied by a few cues for gesture, emphasis and inflection, rendered back into a convincing simulacrum of speech.

An hour passed, and then my ship had something to tell me.

‘My trove’s turned something up,’ I reported to Campion. ‘The bright structures in the cloud - I think they may confirm another part of Fescue’s story. The trove thinks they may be lesions - a kind of residue left over from the use of Homunculus weapons. That’s not good news, obviously. Not only would it mean we
are
dealing with H-guns - after all this time - but it also means someone’s used them more recently than thirty-four years ago. Lesions have a decay half-life, even in hard vacuum. They wouldn’t last long in this kind of environment.’