House of Suns (39 page)

The extremity probed nearer, and I made the error of believing that we were about to succeed; that our offering would be both accepted and understood for what it was. Perhaps there was a moment of contact between one of the machines and Hesperus’s gold skin, but the arm retreated with dismaying swiftness, vanishing back into the core precisely as if it had touched fire, or electricity, or some agonising toxin. The core pulsed with a deeper, more profound blackness, and the roar - which had already sounded impossibly loud - intensified. The rain that I had felt earlier returned in slashing sheets as moisture was precipitated out of the air by the furious motion of those flocking machines.

The epicentre of the cloud, which had begun to drift over the plinth, shifted directly over us. The Spirit appeared to have lost all interest in Hesperus.

‘This isn’t going right.’

‘There’s nothing we can do now,’ Purslane answered, as if I had been looking for reassurance.

A multitude of flapping things descended to inspect us. There was a scissoring clatter as their wings touched each other, but I never saw one of the machines drop out of the sky, or come to any apparent harm. Now and then one of them would hover directly ahead of me, fixing me with the intense sparkle of its lights, which obviously served as both sensor and communicator. Occasionally I felt the brush of cold metal against my skin, and though I did my best to stand unperturbed, it was impossible not to flinch. After one icy contact I lifted my hand to my cheek and came away with blood on my fingers, yet there was no pain from the wound and it ceased bleeding shortly afterwards. Purslane had been grazed as well, sliced on the side of her neck and on the back of her hand, but she appeared oblivious. I do not think the Spirit meant to hurt us, merely that the actions of its individual elements were not as well coordinated as the whole.

Then something unexpected happened, something Mister Jynx had not spoken of. I felt the machines swarm around me in greater numbers than ever, until their flapping density hid Purslane almost entirely from view. They closed around in a fluttering mass and all of a sudden I was aloft, suspended in the air, with the machines supporting my limbs. I called out to Purslane, but she could not have heard me above the noise of the Spirit. The swirling darkness gave me a sense of motion, but I could not tell whether it was illusory or real. I began to tip back, but no sooner had I started than I lost all notion of up and down. I flailed helplessly, but the machines hindered my movements so efficiently that I felt like a dreamer, caught in some slowly stiffening paralysis.

Abruptly there was only silver sand beneath my feet. I had been carried off the platform, beyond its edge. I had seldom experienced an acute fear of heights, for in most circumstances I had been protected by the devices that watched over me, whether they were part of the clothes I wore, the robot aides that accompanied me, or the environment in which I found myself. Now that fear arrived in full measure, as if to repay me for the times I had evaded it.
Dalliance
could not help me now, nor
Silver Wings
assist Purslane. My clothes were garments of dumb fabric, lacking even the ability to secrete medicine should I fall injured.

But a drop from this height would result in worse than injury.
This is how attrition happens,
I thought to myself. You take one chance too many, imagining that all the previous instances of good fortune have somehow immunised you against hazard, when in fact you have simply been extraordinarily fortunate
until now.

I was thinking that when the machines dropped me.

I could only have fallen for a second, but it might as well have been a lifetime. I had time to reflect on many things, not the least of which was the unpleasant circumstances that would shortly attend my imminent demise. I had always taken it for granted that I would not leave behind a body, and most definitely not a body broken and bloodied after a fall. From this height, those dunes would smash me as if they were rock. I wondered if Purslane was also falling, and whether we would see each other before the two of us hit the ground. I wondered if the machines had spared her, and felt a momentary spasm of resentment at the thought that they might have chosen her over me.

Then I was not falling. The machines had swooped under me and arrested my descent. The dark mass coagulated around me once more and I had the giddy impression of gaining height with immense speed - until the machines released me once more and I was in clear space, hundreds of metres above the platform, toward which I was rushing.

Once again the machines came to my rescue.

I was being played with, I realised: tossed around the way a cat may torment a bird. The same thing must have been happening to Purslane, although I was never allowed even a glimpse of her. I could not say that I became resigned to my fate, but since my death had clearly been postponed, I did become fractionally calmer, and my thoughts slowed down to something like their normal rate.

I could not say how long the machines toyed with me: it may only have been tens of seconds, or it may have occupied several minutes. In the black furnace of their swarming, time had become as difficult to gauge as motion and position.

But eventually it did end, and I found myself dropped unceremoniously back onto the platform, the impact hard enough to knock the wind from me yet not enough to break any bones. Spread-eagled on the white ground, I gaped for air like a stranded fish. It was at least a minute before I could give any thought to trying to stand up. When I did, my chest was heaving and my heart hammering. The air was still furious with machines, but they were no longer approaching any closer than within a few metres of me.

‘Purslane,’ I called out, feebly, before gathering my strength and bellowing her name a second time.

‘Campion,’ she called back. ‘I’m over here!’

She was only a dozen or so paces away, but I only glimpsed her in fitful instants, as the curtain of machines thinned out momentarily. I stumbled in her direction, my knee aching from where I had bruised it in falling, and she staggered toward me, holding her arms out at full length as if she had become a somnambulist. We embraced and examined each other for signs of injury. Other than the superficial cuts we had already sustained, and the bruises that were hidden by our clothes, neither of us appeared the worse for our ordeal.

‘The fucking thing—’ I started saying.

Purslane touched a finger to her lips. ‘It’s still around us, and it almost certainly understands Trans. You might not want to offend it.’

I nodded meekly, but my anger was still barely contained. I did not feel myself to be in the presence of something evil, but I did sense a wicked intelligence at play, like the mind of a naughty or mischievous child writ malignantly large.

‘I thought I was going to die,’ I said.

‘So did I. But I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised - they warned us it can get playful. Now I know why Mister Jynx was in such a hurry to leave.’

‘If that was playful, I’d hate to see aggressive.’

‘We’d be in pieces down on those dunes. But something’s happening, Campion.’ She peered over my shoulder at whatever was going on behind me. I spun cautiously around and saw that the storm had pulled back far enough to afford us an obstructed view of the plinth. ‘It’s taking him,’ Purslane said, with awe in her voice.

Despite its earlier hesitancy, the Spirit of the Air was now in full contact with Hesperus. It was not just examining him, though the swarm covered almost the whole of his body, but was dismantling Hesperus, consuming him in a wave that began at the rear of the plinth, where he was a fused mass, and progressed forward to the humanoid part of him that had seemed aware of our presence before. Where the wave had passed, nothing of him remained. Flecks and chips of gold glinted out of the whirling black funnel that was drinking him into the sky.

‘I hope we did the right thing,’ I said, staring at the spectacle with a feeling somewhere between horror and exhilaration. ‘Is it killing him, or taking him away to make him better?’

‘It could be incorporating his material into itself, or digesting his memories and personality.’ Her hand closed around mine. ‘There was nothing else we could do for him, Campion. He was already dead. This was his last, best chance.’

After that, there was nothing more to say. We watched until the swarm had stripped the plinth bare, until the last fleck of gold had tumbled up the sucking spout and the spout itself had pulled back into the roaring black eye. The Spirit hovered above us for several more minutes, more lights than ever flickering in its belly, as if it had much to think about now that it had taken Hesperus. Then, quite without warning, the noise and the wind and the lashing rain abated, and the Spirit moved its elements further apart so that the darkening indigo of the sky shone through the gaps. Then the Spirit gathered itself, undulated and danced for a number of minutes, and then shot away towards the setting sun.

Purslane and I watched it until it was only a billowing smudge in the distance. Then we went to the shelter and prepared to wait until morning.

Betony poured himself a measure of impossibly black coffee, shaking his head with an air of patrician disappointment. ‘I hear that your little gambit failed. I wish I could say that I was surprised.’

‘We don’t know enough to jump to any sort of conclusion,’ I said. It was morning and the sky was cloud-flecked and more wintry than it had been before. It was as if the arrival of the Spirit had heralded a cold new season. The flags on the bridges and walkways seemed to have faded overnight, becoming drab and washed-out.

‘Was the robot healed?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘But nothing of him remained on the observation platform. The Spirit destroyed him, which was always one possible outcome. How can there be any question of him still being healed if he doesn’t exist?’

‘We don’t know that he doesn’t exist. There’s documented evidence of the Spirit destroying things - taking them, at least - and then putting hem back later.’

‘Nothing you can count on, though.’

‘It still happens.’

Campion spoke up. ‘As a rule, the only times the Spirit has done this has been when the offering has been something complex. It’s like a child, fascinated by bright, shiny toys. Much cleverer than a child, obviously - probably cleverer than most entities we’ve ever encountered. But it still prizes novelty and complexity. And there’s nothing more novel or complex than another machine intelligence.’

Betony looked at him with his chin resting on his hands. ‘So when do you expect Hesperus to pop back into life, with his faculties magically restored?’

‘We don’t “expect” anything,’ Campion said. ‘We just knew that what we were doing wasn’t ridiculous; that there was a chance of success. Hesperus must have thought the same, or he wouldn’t have sent that signal to us.’

‘It may not happen for days or years,’ I said, ‘but I think he will return. His essence has been incorporated into the Spirit now, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be reconstituted. It took him apart like a puzzle, piece by piece, but it will have remembered where everything goes. It knows what he is, what he was meant to be before he was hurt, and it can make him new again.’

‘Well, I suppose there’s no harm in taking an optimistic view.’

‘It’s no more optimistic than thinking we actually have a future,’ I snapped back. ‘I may be stupid and naive, but at least I’m not living under the delusion that we still have a Line; that it’s all business as usual. Look at us - sitting around this table as if we’re all one big happy family.’

‘I see you haven’t got over the ship business yet, Purslane. I was hoping you’d be able to look beyond your own concerns and think of our wider responsibilities.’

‘Don’t lecture me on responsibility, Betony.’

Campion touched my hand and coughed. ‘Did anything happen while we were away? The last thing I remember was Mezereon killing one of our prisoners.’

‘The cabinet killed him, not me,’ Mezereon said, from across the table. She had a piece of bread in her hands and was tearing into it with such violence that I feared she was visualising Campion’s neck. ‘He was squeezed dry, anyway. He wasn’t going to tell us anything else from inside the box.’

‘Another day or two of trying wouldn’t have hurt.’

‘Or a week or two, or a year or two? Where would you have drawn the line, Campion? Sooner or later we had to dial him down.’

‘There are still three more,’ Aconite said. ‘We’re not finished just yet.’

Campion turned to Cyphel, who had said nothing until now. She had been watching the argument with a look of sceptical amusement, as if we were all players in some performance of which she was the only neutral observer.

‘Campion,’ she said, acknowledging his stare. ‘Something on your mind?’

‘Just wondering if you’ve made any progress.’

‘It’s coming along. I’ve read in nearly everyone - but even missing a few, I already think I have enough of a signal to reconstruct your strand.’ She brushed a jewelled finger through her hair, hooking a white lock behind an ear. ‘I’ll wait until I have everyone read in, though, before I start analysing. What’s a day or two more, when the ambush already happened more than a century ago?’

‘The sooner we have his strand, the better,’ Betony said.

‘I’m very close, Betony. And I have the navigation logs, the flight-plans everyone filed before departing the last reunion. I haven’t run a correlation yet, but as soon as I’ve completed work on the strand, that’ll be the first thing I do.’

‘No sense in rushing things,’ Galingale said. ‘If Cyphel’s going to all this trouble, it’d be silly not to do the job properly. Right?’

‘Right,’ Cyphel said. ‘At least someone understands.’

 

‘It is most unfortunate, what has happened,’ said Cadence, when we met the two robots after breakfast.