House of Suns (44 page)

I had steeled myself to be annoyed by Betony’s words, but (to my own lingering irritation) I found nothing to disagree with. Afterwards, when Cyphel’s life had been played out across the sky, I thought back to what he had said and found nothing I would have changed; nothing I would have amplified or amended. His summing-up of her life had the pure simplicity of a haiku; it had been honed and polished, and it was delivered with conviction and respect and something of the same love he had mentioned in connection with her. I was still resentful of the way Betony had taken command of the Line, but when he spoke for Cyphel, I discarded any thought, however improbable it had seemed, that he might have been her murderer.

When the words had been spoken, Betony pulled the sheet down from Cyphel’s neck, revealing the true extent of her injuries. Cyphel was naked except for the rings on her fingers. We all flinched, even those of us who had already seen her body after the fall. Then Betony handed his torch to another shatterling, and from one pocket he produced a thick black tube of aspic-of-machines. He cupped one hand and squeezed a dollop into the palm, then smeared the aspic onto Cyphel’s forearm, where the skin had been ruptured when a bone had pushed its way through. Then he stood back a little and pressed the tube into the thick fingers of Weld, who had been standing next to him. Betony reclaimed his torch and took hold of Weld’s while the other shatterling squeezed aspic onto his palm and daubed it onto Cyphel, this time across the dented arc of her brow. Weld then passed the aspic to Charlock, who rubbed the translucent glistening paste across Cyphel’s belly. So it continued, until all who were present had taken their turn. I do not know why I was the last; whether it just worked out that way or whether the group had arrived at the collective decision that it must fall to me to make the final daub. By then the only visible part of Cyphel that had not been covered was the smashed travesty of her face. As my hand applied the aspic, my fingers touching hard ridges of bone and cartilage where there should have been skin, I shuddered with the effort of not breaking down into sobs. Then I took my torch from Purslane and stood back, my hand still shaking. The circle had widened, opening space around the reclining form.

By the time I had finished, the aspic had already begun to do its work. It was infiltrating Cyphel’s body, as far as it needed to go to undo a given injury. Her forearm stiffened momentarily, the fingers of her hand tremoring as if Cyphel were dreaming. Around the point where the bone had come through, the hole in her flesh began to seal over. The dent in her brow smoothed itself out and the recognisable structure of a nose began to appear beneath the glistening mask. The machines were not restoring Cyphel to life; it was much too late for that. Not that an illusion of life would have been beyond them: they could have animated her corpse, repaired cells and coaxed their metabolic cycles to start up again. They could have made her sit up and smile; made her walk and talk and laugh. But there would have been no mind behind those eyes, or at least none that retained anything of Cyphel.

As the process continued and the figure on the couch began to look less and less like a broken corpse and more and more like a sleeping woman, a squadron of our ships moved into position above Ymir. They were not orbiting, but holding station above this fixed point on Neume, just beyond the ionosphere. The sun had long since fallen below the horizon, but the ships were so high up that the sun’s rays still caught the edges of their hulls, picking them out like a fleet of new moons, edged in scimitar-bright lines of silver and gold and fiery red. The ships arranged themselves into a square formation, spanning thousands of kilometres of space. Then they activated their impassors and began to project and shape the fields so that they pushed down into the ionosphere, tangling with the planet’s native magnetosphere. Squeezing, crimping, folding and stretching the field lines of the magnetosphere, the ships began to paint the sky with auroral colours. Curtains of light, the most delicate ruby or green, rippled from horizon to horizon. The colours intensified until the ships were almost hidden behind the display, silent puppeteers retreating from view. They stripped ions from their hulls and injected them into the atmosphere, to stain and dye their handiwork. The curtains flickered and shimmered and intertwined, dancing with increasing swiftness, different hues being introduced, until shapes became apparent. The shapes formed images: we were being shown a sequence of pictures drawn from Cyphel’s strands, sampled from those stored inside her ship. There were landscapes and cities, moons and planets - as rich a cross section of galactic history as any of us had tasted. Cyphel was absent from most of the images, but that only served to make her presence in some of them the more poignant. She was usually caught with her back to us, a distant figure standing on some cliff or high building with one hand on her hip and another shielding her eyes from the sun, lost in the rapture of scale and scenery, drunk on the very idea of being human, a monkey who had hit the big time. Her hair was the electric white of a comet’s tail, streaming back from her brow as if fingered by a caress of photon pressure.

As we watched the episodes play across the canvas that the ships had made of the sky, the aspic-of-machines slowly undid Cyphel’s injuries. At last the glistening caul completed its work and slithered off her, awaiting its next duty. Turned gold under the light of our torches, Cyphel lay uncorrupted. Her expression was one of patient serenity. Her eyes were closed, but she looked as if it would only take a raised voice, a careless laugh, to jolt her from the carefree drowse in which she lay.

The platform began to rise again, detaching from the block where it had rested. At first it rose so slowly that it took at least a minute for her body to rise higher than my line of sight. Only then did the platform begin to quicken its ascent, rising into the air with increasing swiftness. The torch, which had felt so heavy until then, began to lighten. There was a point where it weighed nothing at all, and then a moment later it was trying to escape from my hand, as if being pulled from above on an invisible thread. All around me, the other shatterlings stretched their arms and redoubled their grips, anxious to retain their torches until the appointed moment.

‘Release,’ Betony said, very quietly, and we all let go. The timing was impeccable, for the fifty-one torches rose in a flame-lit ring, maintaining elegant formation until they had caught up with the rising platform. Lowering our hands to our sides, our muscles still aching from the effort, we watched the dark rectangle of the platform become smaller and smaller, until it was only by the diminishing circle of fire that we could judge where it was.

It would take a while for Cyphel to reach space; all that remained was for us to continue watching the display of scenes from her life, reflecting on how she had touched all of us in one way or another. I felt solidarity with almost everyone else present, including Betony, including Mezereon, including those other shatterlings whom I felt had been complicit in Purslane’s punishment. But somewhere amongst us, I felt certain, was someone who was not sorry about what had happened to Cyphel. In every grave face I tried to read a sign of masked emotions, of quiet satisfaction that she had been disposed of so efficiently, but I saw nothing but sincere grief.

We were not just mourning Cyphel, I knew. This was her night, her funeral, but the fact of it had flung wide an emotional door in our hearts that had been locked until now. This was the night when we first took account of the more than eight hundred shatterlings who had died in the ambush. They would all be honoured in the traditional way when the time was right; they would all be accorded memorials; but that did not mean we could not begin to grieve for them now. As the realisation of what had been done to us hit me with renewed force, as I began to truly apprehend the scale of that crime - a realisation that it had taken the particularity of Cyphel’s funeral to force upon me—I felt the coldest of all chills pass through me.

Not long after, Cyphel reached space and the platform tilted to release her for her long fall back to Neume’s atmosphere. We watched as she scratched a line of glorious fire across the sky, a line that began faintly, flared to a ribbon of pastel blue, reached a climax that had us narrowing our eyes, then faded slowly away before splitting into fingers of dulling red, Cyphel giving up every atom of her body, every atom of her existence, all that she had ever been, all that she ever would have been, until all that remained of her was the figment we held in our memories, no more and no less.

Long after she had faded, the ships continued playing images of her life, until that too dimmed and the planet’s magnetosphere was allowed to relax back to its normal configuration. The squadron, dark now, pulled away into parking orbit. The audience of shatterlings, guests and Ymirians at last began to disperse, shivering even as our clothes were finally allowed to warm us.

Cyphel’s funeral was over. We had honoured her. Now it was time to get on with being Gentian Line.

 

Later that evening, after Purslane had gone to sleep, I stood alone on one of the balconies. I was thinking of all the pieces of Cyphel’s life that had played across the sky, trying to fit them into some kind of order, wondering what she would have made of it all had she been one of the spectators. Then I became aware of a heavy, trudging presence, a sound like carpet scuffing on stone. I turned around with an empty wine glass in my hand, lost somewhere along the drunken, ill-defined border between nostalgic remembrance and bitter, spiralling melancholy.

It was Ugarit-Panth, the elephantine being I had spoken to shortly after our arrival on Neume.

I raised the glass in welcome. ‘Hello, Ambassador. How did you like the funeral?’

He stopped a few metres from me, but still close enough that his trunk could have swiped my face. ‘It was very moving, shatterling,’ he said, his human-looking mouth moving beneath that long, wrinkled, faintly disgusting appendage.

‘She was one of the best of us. I’m going to miss her a lot.’

‘As much as you’d miss your civilisation, if it ceased to exist?’ It was difficult for him to look at me head-on - his eyes were set in the sides of his skull, not the front of his face. He had to look at me askance, alternating between one eye and the other as if he wanted to balance the demand on his brain hemispheres.

I tried to push aside the mental fog induced by the wine. ‘There are individuals who matter more to me than Gentian Line, yes. If I didn’t realise that before, I realise it now.’

‘It’s easy to see that now, with your Line pushed almost to the point of extinction.’

Something in his tone put me on edge. I took a step back from the balcony’s railing, Cyphel’s long fall flashing through my mind. The Roving Ambassador of the Consentiency of the Thousand Worlds was a huge, ponderous creature, weighing about twenty times more than me even before one allowed for his heavy-looking red armour and ornamental metalwork. I was prone to clumsiness when drunk - what he could do in a similar state of intoxication did not bear thinking about. I even began to wonder if the Ymirians had designed their balconies for such massive individuals.

‘Extinction’s never good,’ I said, with an over-emphatic smile.

‘No, it’s not.’ Ugarit-Panth took another step closer to me - four steps, in fact, one for each of his tree-thick legs. All of a sudden I got the full-bore stink of his breath in my face. It was like opening a warm oven full of rotting vegetables. ‘You very nearly blew it, shatterling. I bet you thought you were in the clear.’

‘Nearly blew what?’

‘The first time we met. You commiserated with me.’

‘Did I?’

‘You were sorry that my civilisation had been wiped out by the failure of a stardam.’

‘I got that wrong, though. I was thinking of the Pantropic Nexus - different civilisation altogether. I wasn’t even in the right spiral arm!’

‘Ah, but you were. Your mistake was puzzling to me. You were so certain, so genuine in your sympathies. It began to prey on my mind.’

I looked around, desperately hoping that another shatterling would come to my rescue. ‘But it was a mistake.’

‘Don’t compound your error by lying even more. I tried consulting Gentian Line’s troves later that night. For some reason, my guest access was temporarily blocked. In the morning, it was all excused away - a problem with the security settings caused when they were altered to allow for the latest batch of survivors.’

‘Well, then—nothing to worry about.’

‘You would say that. But at the next opportunity I checked again. I looked up the entry for my civilisation - the Consentiency. There was a stardam, as I knew full well. Gentian Line installed it. Reassuringly, there was no record of it having detonated prematurely.’

‘That’s that settled,’ I said, trying to strike a note of finality, so that we could change the subject.

‘Still, I had my doubts. Couldn’t put them to bed. I looked up the entry for the Pantropic Nexus. Can’t say I’d ever heard of them, but there they were - along with a note to the effect that the entire civilisation had been wiped out during the premature collapse of a Gentian stardam.’ His vast grey brow, the part of it visible between the plates of his armour, wrinkled impressively.

‘It’s the only one that’s ever failed.’

‘You’re absolutely certain of that?’

‘It’s not something we take lightly. The pride of the Line rests on our handiwork. Stardams are what we do. Even if we allow for that one failure, we’ve spared billions of lives that would otherwise have been lost ... but that doesn’t make it excusable. Not at all.’

‘I’m very glad to hear you say that, shatterling. But still my qualms weren’t entirely silenced. It occurred to me - suppose that the Consentiency’s stardam
had
failed after all. Would Gentian Line be in a hurry to tell me?’

‘We wouldn’t lie about something like that. If the dam failed, we’d admit culpability.’