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Order, of a kind, was established. The caverns came to resemble a blend of nomad camps and field hospital triage wards. People slumped where they found a spare patch of ground, waiting to be told what to do next. The personality resumed its accustomed role, and started issuing orders.
Cancers and aggravated anorexias were assessed and prioritized, the medical packages distributed accordingly. Like the fusion generators and physics lab equipment, they worked best in the deeper caverns. Teams were formed from the healthiest, and assigned to food procurement duties.
There were also teams to strip the starscrapers of equipment, clothes, blankets—a broad range of essentials. Transport had to be organized.
The ghosts followed faithfully after their old hosts, of course, flittering across the desert during the twilight hours to skulk about in the hollows and crevices decorating the base of the northern endcap during the day. Naked hostility continued to act as an intangible buffer, preventing them from entering any of the subterranean passages.
It also expelled Dariat. The refugees didn’t distinguish between ghosts.
In any case, had they discovered he was the architect of their current status, their antipathy would probably have wiped him out altogether. His one consolation was that the personality was now part self. It wouldn’t disregard him and his needs as an annoying irritation.
In part he was right, though the assumption of privilege was an arrogant one—the pure Dariat of old. However, in these strange, dire times, there were even useful jobs to be had for cooperative ghosts. The personality gave him Tolton as a partner, and detailed the pair of them to take an inventory of the starscrapers.
“Him!” Tolton had exclaimed in dismay when Erentz explained his new duties.
She looked from the shocked and indignant street poet to the fat ghost with his mocking smile. “You worked well together before,” she ventured. “I’m proof of that.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Okay. Most of that row need seeing to.” She gestured at the long line of beds along the polyp wall. It was one of eight similar rows in the vaulting cavern; made up from mattresses or clustered pillows hurriedly shoved into a loose kind of order. The ailing occupants were wrapped in dirty blankets like big shivering pupas. They moaned and drooled and soiled themselves as the nanonic packages sluggishly repaired their damaged cells. Their helpless state meant they needed constant nursing.
And there were few enough people left over from the teams prospecting the habitat able to do that.
“Which starscraper do we start with?” Tolton asked.
Each starscraper took at least three days to inventory properly. They’d adopted a comfortable routine by the time they started on their third, the Djerba. The tower had survived Valisk’s recent calamities with minimal damage. Kiera’s wrecking teams hadn’t got round to “reclaiming” it from Rubra’s control. There had been few clashes between possessed and servitors inside before it was abandoned. That meant it should contain plenty of useful items. They just needed cataloguing.
To send the work teams down on a see/grab brief was inefficient, especially as there were so few of them. And the personality’s thought routines had almost been banished from the habitat’s extremities; its memories of room contents were unreliable at best.
“Mostly offices,” Tolton decided as he waved a lightstick around. He was holding one in his hand, with another two slung across his chest on improvised straps. Together, the three units provided almost as much illumination as one working at full efficiency.
“Looks like it,” Dariat said. They were on the twenty-third floor vestibule, where the walls were broken by anonymously identical doors.
Tall potted plants in big troughs were wilting, deprived of light their leaves were turning yellow-brown and falling onto the blue and white carpet.
They moved down the vestibule, reading names on the doors. So far offices had resulted in very few worthwhile finds; they’d learned that unless the company was a hardware or medical supplier there was little point in going in and searching. Occasionally the personality’s localized memory would recall a useful item, but the neural strata was becoming more incapable with each floor they descended.
“Thirty years,” Tolton mused. “That’s a long time to hate.” There hadn’t been much else to do except swap life stories.
Dariat smiled in recollection. “You’d understand if you’d ever seen Anastasia. She was the most perfect girl ever to be born.”
“Sounds like I’ll have to write about her some time. But I think your story is more interesting. Man, there’s a lot of suffering in you. You died for her, you actually did it. Actually went and killed yourself. I thought that kind of thing really did only happen in poems and Russian novels.”
“Don’t be too impressed. I only did it after I knew for sure souls existed. Besides—” He gestured down at his huge frame and grubby toga. “I wasn’t losing a lot.”
“Yeah? Well I’m no sensevise star, but I’m hanging on to what I’ve got for as long as I can. Especially now I know there are souls.”
“Don’t worry about the beyond. You can leave it behind if you really want to.”
“Tell that to the ghosts upstairs. In fact, I’m even keener to hang on to my body while we’re in this continuum.”
Tolton stopped outside a sensevise recording studio, and gave Dariat a shrewd look. “You’re in touch with the personality, is there any chance of us getting out of here?”
“Too early to say. We really don’t know very much about the dark continuum yet.”
“Hey, this is me you’re talking to. I survived the whole occupation, you know. Quit with the company line and level with me.”
“I wasn’t going to hold anything back. The one conjecture all my illustrious relatives are worried about is the lobster pot.”
“Lobster pot?”
“Once you get in, you can’t get out. It’s the energy levels, you see. Judging by the way our energy is being absorbed by this continuum’s fabric it doesn’t have the same active energy state. We’re louder and stronger than normal conditions here. And that strength is slowly being drained away, just by being here. It’s an entropy equilibrium effect.
Everything levels out in the end. So if we take height as a metaphor, we’re at the bottom of a very deep hole with our universe at the top; which means it’s going to take a hell of an effort to lift ourselves out again. Logically, we need to escape through some kind of wormhole. But even if we knew how to align its terminus coordinates so that it opens inside our own universe, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to generate one. Back in our universe, they took a lot of very precisely focused energy to open, and the nature of this continuum works against that. With this constant debilitation effect, it may not be possible to concentrate enough energy, it’ll dissipate before it reaches critical distortion point.”
“Shit. There’s got to be something we can do.”
“If those rules do apply, our best bet is to try and send a message out. That’s what the personality and my relatives are working towards. If they know where we are, the Confederation might be able to open a wormhole to us from their side.”
“Might be able?”
“All new suggestions welcome. But as it stands, getting them to lower us a rope is the best we can come up with.”
“Some rescue plan. The Confederation has its own problems right now.”
“If they can learn how to grab us back, they’ll be half way to solving them.”
“Sure.”
They reached the end of the vestibule and automatically turned round.
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“Sounds like a real priority job we got ourselves here.” Tolton slithered through a partly open muscle membrane and into the stairwell. The quivering lips didn’t bother him nearly so much now.
Dariat followed him, taking care to use the gap. He could slip through solid surfaces, he’d found, if he really wanted to. It was like sinking through ice.
One of the random power surges flowered around them. Electrophorescent cells shone brightly again, illuminating the stairs in stark blue-tinged light. A jet of foggy air streamed out of a tubule vent, sounding like a sorrowful sigh. A thin film of grey water was slicking every surface.
Tolton could see the breath in front of his face. He gripped the handrail tighter, fearful of slipping.
“We’re not going to be able to salvage stuff from the starscrapers for much longer,” Tolton said, wiping his hand against his leather jacket. “They’re getting worse.”
“You should see what kind of state the ducts and tubules are in.”
The street poet grunted in resentment. He was actually eating a lot better than most of the population. Inventory duties had a great many perks. The private apartments with their small stocks of quality food and fashionable clothes were his to pick over as he wished. The salvage teams were only interested in the larger stores that were in restaurants and bars. And now the endless succession of lightless floors no longer bothered him, he was glad to be away from the caverns with all their suffering—and smell.
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The startled tone made him halt. <
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Affinity made him aware of the consternation spreading through his relatives, most of whom were in the counter-rotating spaceport and the caverns.
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One of the slow flares of red and blue phosphorescence was shimmering through the ebony nebula, sixty kilometres away from the southern endcap.
As it dwindled, several more began to bloom in the distance, sending pastel waves of light washing across the gigantic habitat’s shell. The personality didn’t believe the sudden increase in frequency was a coincidence. It was busy concentrating on collecting the images from its external sensitive cells. Once again, Dariat was uncomfortably aware of the effort expended in what should be a simple observation routine.
A speck of hoary-grey flitted among the strands of blackness, snapping in and out of view. Following the smooth curving motions put Dariat in mind of a skier, the thing’s course was very much like a slalom run. Every turn brought it closer to Valisk.
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The initial consternation of Rubra’s descendants had given way to a slick buzz of activity. Those out in the spaceport were activating systems, aligning them on the visitor. An MSV was powered up, ready for an inspection/interception flight.
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The visitor darted behind another frayed column of blackness. When it re-emerged it was soaring almost at right angles to its original course. Its petals were bending and flexing.
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Several spaceport dishes started tracking the visitor. They began transmitting the standard CAB xenoc interface communication protocol on a multi-spectrum sweep. Dariat allowed his affinity bond to decline to a background whisper. “Come on,” he told a frowning Tolton. “We’ve got to find a window.”
The visitor didn’t respond to the interface protocol. Nor did it show any awareness of the radar pulses fired at it. That was perhaps understandable, given that they produced no return signal. The only noticeable change as it spun and danced ever-closer was the way shadows congealed around it. Visually it actually appeared to grow smaller, as though it were flying away from the habitat.
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The visitor was within five kilometres of the shell now, about where the filigree of nebula strands began. There was only empty space between it and the habitat now.
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The visitor left the convoluted weave of the nebula and flashed towards the vast bulk of the habitat. By now its deceptive glamour had reduced it to a rosette of oyster ribbons twirling gracelessly in the wake of a fluctuating warp point. The image of the nebula and its strange borealis storms fluxed and bent as the visitor traversed them; oscillating between iridescent scintillations and a black boundary deeper than an event horizon. Nothing about it remained stable.
It streaked over to within fifty metres of the shell then veered round to follow the curve, wriggling wildly from side to side. The quick serpentine orbit allowed it to cover a considerable portion of the habitat’s exterior.
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“Wipe the glass again,” Dariat told Tolton.
The soaking table cloth smeared the moisture in long streaks. Tiny flecks of frost were glistening dull white over the rest of the big oval. Tolton switched off two of his lightsticks. Both of them peered forward. The visitor arched over the rim of the shell, lensing thin spires of vermilion and indigo light as it came. They wavered in the runnels of water, wobbling insubstantially before sinking back down into the visitor’s core. Now all that remained was a black knot in the continuum’s fabric racing over the dark rust-coloured polyp.
Tolton’s weak grin was bloated with uncertainly. “Am I being paranoid, or is that heading towards us?”
In the earlier time and place, long ago and far away, they had called themselves the Orgathé. Now, names had lost all meani
ng and relevance, or perhaps they themselves had devolved into something else, such was the way of this atrocious existence. There were many others adrift in the dark continuum, sharing their fate. Identity was no longer singular. A myriad of racial traits had blended and faded into a singleton over the aeons.
Purpose, though, purpose remained steadfast. The quest for light and strength, a return to the sweet heights from whence they had all fallen.
A dream sustained even within the mélange. Few forms existed now outside of the mélange. The process of diminution claimed every life to fall into these depths. But this one had risen yet again, buoyed up by the tides of chaotic chance that rioted within the mélange, spat out to roam the murk for as long as it had strength. The freeflying state of such escapees was still that of the Orgathé, though the essence of many others rode upon its wings. Its chimerical shape was a tortured mockery of the once glorious avian lords who ruled the swift air currents of their homeworld.
Ahead of it now drifted the exotic object. It was composed of a substance to be found only in the oldest of the Orgathé’s memories, those that pre-dated the dark continuum. How strange that it could barely recognize the antecedent of its own salvation.
Matter. Solid organized matter. Alive with a heat so fierce it took the Orgathé some time to acclimatise to the radiance; elevating itself to a near ecstatic level of warmth. Incredibly, just within the scorching surface, a sheet of life energy burned bright and vigorous. The entire object was a single mighty entity. Yet passive. Vulnerable. This was a feast which would sustain a huge proportion of the mélange for a long time. It might even trigger a total dispersal.
The Orgathé slithered close to the object’s surface, feeling the mind within follow its flight. Vast swirls of rich thought flowed underneath it as it basked in the warmth. But there was no way to reach the abundant life-energy through the hard surface. If the Orgathé attempted to claw its way through, it would surely incinerate itself. Contact with so much heat for so long could probably not be sustained. But the craving within itself from proximity to so much vital life-energy was overwhelming.
There must be some way in. Some orifice or chink. The Orgathé coasted along over the object, heading for the spikes radiating out from the centre. They were smaller, weaker than the rest of it. Long hollow minarets leaking their energy away into the dark continuum. The life-energy was shallower here, the heat not so intense. Each of the structures was broken by thousands of dark ovals, curtained by cooler sheets of transparent matter. Light twinkled briefly through some of them, never lasting long. Except one. A single oval burning steadily.
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