House of Suns (24 page)

‘She’s been like this for thirty years,’ Madame Kleinfelter said. ‘It may look unpleasant, but she’s in no pain. Her only distress comes from the things she imagines for herself. She has good days and bad days. On the good days, she can talk to us more or less normally. She still maintains her belief system, even then, but she has enough focus and concentration that she can discuss the family’s affairs, contribute to policy decisions and make further plans for the house.’

‘Is this a good day or a bad day?’

‘This is in the middle. She’s in there somewhere, fighting or running from something only she can see. But she can’t talk to us - she’s too preoccupied.’

‘Tell me about the house.’

‘Your mother convinced herself that there was a way to keep the ghosts at bay. Here at the heart of the house, she feels relatively safe. She wouldn’t dream of venturing into the peripheral wings even if she were able. Much too vulnerable, in her view. As her psychosis took hold she moved deeper and deeper into the house, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the outside world. This became her world. To begin with it was just a few rooms. Then it contracted down to just this one, and then to just this tank. Even that wasn’t enough. She constructed barriers to fool and delay the ghosts. Corridors that don’t lead anywhere, or which spiral back on themselves. Hidden stairways that they won’t see. Mirrors everywhere, to baffle and confuse her tormentors. Doors that open onto walls. Of course, even that isn’t sufficient by itself. The ghosts are clever and resourceful, and they’ll keep trying to find a way in. That’s why the house has to keep changing, so that they never get used to one particular configuration. There must always be new wings and new towers, expanding ever outwards. And what already exists must be reshaped all the time, to create labyrinths and traps. The process must never end, Abigail. While the house remains in flux, your mother manages to hold on to a fragment of sanity, even if it’s only on the good days. If it were to stop changing, if she were to believe that there was now no obstacle to the ghosts reaching her, I do not think she would be able to hold on to that fragment. We would have lost her for ever.’ Madame Kleinfelter paused and took my hand in hers, which was large and rough-skinned. ‘As it is, there is still hope. The specialists still believe they can bring her back. That’s why we keep up with her wishes, and the house is the way it is. It has meant you growing up in a strange environment, one that many children would have found frightening and disorientating. But you have done very well, Abigail. We are all proud of you - each and every one of us, including your mother.’

‘Will she know I have seen her now?’

‘She knows everything. There are cameras throughout the house, watching every door, every corridor. They feed back into her mind. It’s not so that she can keep an eye on us.’

‘The ghosts,’ I said.

‘Yes. Your mother watches for the slightest changes in light and shade. When she becomes agitated, it’s generally because she thinks she’s seen something.’

‘She saw something just now.’

‘There are no ghosts, Abigail. They’re all in her mind. You must remember that.’

‘I’m not silly.’ But then, I wondered, why did the staff like some parts of the house more than others? Why were there quiet, still rooms where no one ever liked to stay longer than they had to? If not because of ghosts, was it because my mother’s disturbed imagination was seeping out through those cameras, like a silent, invisible nerve gas?

‘I’ve seen enough,’ I said.

‘If I could speak to that little boy—’

‘It’s not his fault. He only told me what I had to know eventually.’

Madame Kleinfelter nodded kindly and drew the metal shutters on my mother. I wondered at the awesome relief she must now feel; how long she had been dreading this encounter, the weight of it pressing down on her like an iron spike, through all the decades since I had been born ...

We had company from the moment we entered the Belladonna system. A ship arrowed in and tracked us, bristling with nervous potency. It was
Adonis Blue,
the warty green toad of a ship belonging to a shatterling named Betony. From the moment he intercepted us he had been excessively cautious, probing me with his deep-penetration sensors and insisting on several extra layers of authentication before he was ready to concede that I was not necessarily hostile.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Campion,’ Betony’s imago said, ‘but we had to play things safe.’ He studied me with deep-penetration eyes, as if there might be a vital, betraying clue in the composure of my face. ‘It is you,’ he said, nodding slowly. ‘You made it out after all. The other ship - that would be Purslane, wouldn’t it?
Silver Wings of Morning.
You’re like two pennies that keep turning up at the same time.’ Before I could find malice in his remark, he added, ‘Today I couldn’t be happier to see you.’

‘We’re both alive. But it’s better than that. We’re carrying five other survivors: Aconite, Mezereon, Lucerne, Melilot and Valerian. They’re all still in abeyance, but otherwise safe and sound.’

‘Seven of you?’ Betony almost laughed with delight. ‘That’s wonderful news - it’s been so long since anyone else showed up that we’d all but stopped hoping. Do you have news about anyone else?’

‘I can’t say for certain, but from what I saw of the reunion system, it isn’t likely.’ All of a sudden I felt a rush of emotion. Betony had never been one of my favourites amongst the other shatterlings. More than once I had seen him as an understudy to Fescue, plotting and manipulating for influence within the Line. But if I had been wrong about Fescue, then it was entirely possible that I was wrong about Betony. All the old grievances and suspicions felt like baggage I could ill afford to carry. ‘It’s good to see you, Betony!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m almost too scared to ask how many others are with you.’

‘There are forty-five of us. You seven take the total to fifty-two. There may be some more out there, still on their way, but I’m not optimistic.’

‘Fifty-two,’ I said, numbed in a way I had not been anticipating. I had considered worse scenarios than this, up to and including the possibility that there might only be the seven of us. But in my heart I had clung to the hope that there might be more than a hundred.

‘I know,’ Betony said, acknowledging my thoughts as if he had read my mind. ‘It’s not many. But we have to count ourselves lucky that anyone got out at all. And it is more than fifty, which means we have a valid quorum. We wouldn’t have let that stop us if a decision needed to be taken, but it’s good to know we can still do things by the book.’

Abigail had never specified what would happen if there were fewer than fifty Line members
in total:
she must have considered that state of affairs so unlikely as to require no specific provisions, any more than she had told us what we should do if the universe began to collapse, or the Priors returned from the dead to reclaim the galaxy.

But here we were, with just two members over the allowed minimum. I could see a wild relief in Betony, who had always been one for cleaving to Abigail’s hallowed commandments.

‘You’ll meet the others in due course,’ he said. ‘They’re all on Neume, apart from those of us seconded to patrol duties. Any ship entering this system is regarded with extreme suspicion - I regret to say that we’ve already had to destroy three incoming vehicles that could not prove themselves to be friendly. They all turned out to be exploratory probes from local nascents, but you can understand our nervousness.’

‘I don’t think anyone will have followed us,’ I said. ‘We had pursuers, but we shook them off. Betony - there’s something else you need to know. We’re carrying prisoners. Aconite and the others managed to capture them around the time that Fescue died.’

‘Yes, we heard about Fescue. It was terrible news. But he died well, didn’t he? A credit to the Line, right to the end.’ He nodded and was silent for a few moments, lost in a reverie as if this was the first time he had thought to dwell on the dead man. Then: ‘Tell me about the prisoners.’

‘There are four of them. We only know the name of one: he’s Grilse, a Marcellin shatterling.’ Anticipating his reaction, I said, ‘I know - we’ve never had problems with Marcellin Line before. Maybe Grilse was acting alone. He was supposedly lost to attrition ten or eleven of their circuits ago.’

‘Have you interrogated him?’

‘Aconite and Mezereon got what they could out of him, but didn’t want to kill him. They reckoned it was best to wait until we landed on Neume before pushing him harder.’

‘They did the right thing. If these prisoners are our only link to the ambushers, we must treat them as if they were the most precious things in the universe. In our case they may well be. But there’ll be no landings, I’m sorry to say.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Local custom. The troves were a bit out of date: by the time we arrived, there was a civilisation on Neume again.’

‘And the locals don’t want us to land?’

‘Oh,
they
wouldn’t mind. They’ve nothing against the Lines or our ships. We’ve been made more than welcome, as a matter of fact. The complicating factor is the Fracto-Coagulation, also known as the Spirit of the Air.’

‘The posthuman intelligence?’ I asked, remembering the summary the trove had provided when we had first learned the identity of the Belladonna fallback.

Betony looked pleased. ‘You’ve done your homework. The Spirit’s been here for millions of years—longer than any tenant civilisation. The locals are very protective of it - as well they might be, given that it’s about the only reason anyone ever visits. They study it and worship it and sometimes you can’t tell the difference. But what they’re very clear on is that they don’t want anyone or anything upsetting it - and the intrusion of fifty-kilometre-long starships into its atmosphere very much falls into that category.’

‘Then we’ll whisk down, I suppose.’

‘No vacuum towers, Campion. You’ll have to come down in shuttles, I’m afraid - hope that won’t cramp your style too much.’

‘We’ll manage.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Is Purslane awake as well?’

‘She’ll be coming around about now. In any case,
Silver Wings
is programmed to follow
Dalliance
unless I do something really stupid.’

‘Follow me in, then, and we’ll find you somewhere to park your ships. I can’t promise much of a welcoming party - the collective mood’s taken a bit of battering lately. But we’ll do our best.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ I said.

Betony’s green toad of a ship spun around and kicked spacetime in my face.

‘You’re sure it’s him, and not a trick by the ambushers?’

‘Yes,’ I said, with supreme patience, for she had asked me this five or six times since her emergence from the cryophagus, each time listening to my reply and deeming it sufficient. ‘If it isn’t Betony, someone’s broken so deeply into Gentian secrets that we may as well give up now.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That sounds reasonable.’

Purslane still had a sleepy look about her, a stiffness in her movements and a lack of focus in her eyes. She had whisked to
Dalliance
as soon as the casket released her. After a little while, her eyes became sharper and her mental gears found their normal mesh. As the fogginess cleared I told her what I had gathered from Betony.

‘I need to see Hesperus,’ she said suddenly. ‘I want to know if the lights are still on.’

The lights were still on, but I could not swear that they were not dimmer and slower than before we had gone into abeyance. I held my tongue, not wanting to say so in Purslane’s presence. Behind the fretted stained-glass windows of his skull, they orbited like the planets and moons of a clockwork orrery that had nearly run down to stillness.

‘There’s still something there,’ I said, trying to strike a balance between optimism and pragmatism. ‘It may not be much, but—’

‘Don’t try to gee me up, Campion - I know he’s worse than he was before. But he’s still there. Whatever made that mark on the glass, it’s still inside him.’

I had neglected to ask Betony whether the surviving shatterlings had brought any guests with them, and of those guests whether any were Machine People. All of a sudden it did not seem very likely.

‘We’ll get help for him on Neume. There’s a culture down there. They may know things we don’t. They’ve been studying a machine-based posthuman intelligence—’

‘That’s like saying “that man studies water lilies, so he can set my broken leg”.’

‘I’m just saying we’re not out of avenues to explore.’

After a silence she said, ‘Have you seen Neume yet?’

‘Betony’s guiding us into orbit. I thought I’d wait until you were awake before taking a closer look.’

‘We’re not landing?’

‘There are issues. Best not to get on the wrong side of the locals, if we can help it.’