‘Shatterlings have wiped their strands before,’ I said. ‘No one got censured for it then, so why pick on Campion and me now?’
Betony looked strained. ‘Calm down, please. If there is to be censure it will be mild, and your former good conduct will be taken into account. There will be no talk of excommunication from the Line - nothing you have done even begins to warrant that. But there must be discipline, Purslane. Now more than ever.’
I sank back in my seat, feeling as if I had been slapped hard in the face. My hands were shaking, so I buried them in my lap. The worst thing was that I almost agreed with him. There did have to be discipline, especially considering our perilous position. Shatterlings had free will most of the time. But what if one of us were to whisk aboard our ship and head back to the reunion system, thereby alerting the ambushers to our hideaway? I would have no qualms about pursuing and executing a shatterling who did that, even if they were Gentian. I would even fire the gamma-cannon myself if I believed that the Line’s existence depended on it.
‘Can I make one request?’ I asked, when the colour had returned to my cheeks.
‘Go ahead,’ Betony said.
‘Before we arrived around Neume, Hesperus communicated a wish to Campion and me. It was clear that he wanted to be brought to Neume and into the presence of the Spirit of the Air.’
‘He made this explicit?’
‘As explicit as he could, given the circumstances.’ My throat grew dry;
I sensed that if I did not make my case convincingly now, I would not get a second chance. ‘I spoke to the magistrate already, but it wasn’t the right time to persuade her. Now I’d like Line backing to press for contact with the Spirit.’
‘Did you mention this to Cadence and Cascade?’
‘I didn’t want to mention the Spirit again with the magistrate around.’
‘They will have their own view as to how to proceed,’ Betony said. ‘If Hesperus is one of them, the simplest thing would be to hand him over and consider the matter closed.’
‘The simplest, but not necessarily the right thing,’ Aconite said. ‘If Hesperus communicated a specific desire to Purslane, we have to honour it.’
‘I agree,’ Henbane said.
‘But we can’t afford to anger the Machine People, either,’ said Whin, a male shatterling who had been silent until now. ‘If they want to examine Hesperus, what right do we have to insist otherwise?’
‘It does put us in a diplomatic bind,’ Sainfoin said thoughtfully. ‘But as a Line our responsibility has always been to our guests, above any other concerns. If Hesperus did make this request of Purslane, we must honour his wishes. That doesn’t necessarily imply a confrontation with the Machine People. Cadence and Cascade have been more than understanding until now, and I don’t expect that to change if we explain our predicament to them.’
‘You know them better than any of us,’ Betony said to Sainfoin, the shatterling who had brought the robots to the reunion in the first place.
‘They’re reasonable,’ she said. ‘They’ll see our side of things. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore any suggestions they make.’
Aconite said, ‘You have my unconditional backing, Purslane, for what it’s worth.’
‘Mine too,’ Mezereon said. ‘And you can include Valerian, Lucerne and Melilot. They’ll back you all the way when they learn what Hesperus did for us.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Count me in,’ Henbane said.
Before the murmur of approval turned into a storm, Betony nodded once. ‘Very well - Purslane has Line authority to petition the Neume administration for access to the Spirit of the Air. But before you take the matter any further, Purslane ... have you the faintest idea what you’re dealing with?’
Campion came to my room later that morning, while I was waiting to hear back from the magistrate concerning my request for an audience. I was standing on the little low-walled balcony that jutted out from the side of the room, accessed through a matter-permeable window, composing my thoughts, trying to marshal the facts of my case into something resembling a persuasive, logically sustained argument. Betony’s had unsettled me, opening a chink of doubt where before there had been only neutron-dense certainty. I had gone into the trove and learned that the Spirit’s displeasure had brought down entire civilisations. But we also had the Spirit to thank for the fact that anyone could live on Neume in the first place. In the absence of any large-scale organisms, it was the Spirit that kept the atmosphere in its current dynamically unstable state, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and returning oxygen. There was no way the machine intelligence was doing that simply for its own benefit.
So it tolerated us, even, perhaps, encouraged our presence. But that did not mean it would spare me if it judged me an irritation. I looked out towards the slivers of clear blue sky visible between the golden towers of Ymir and wondered if I had the nerve to do what had to be done.
‘I brought you this.’
I turned around at Campion’s voice, watching as he stepped through onto the balcony. He was clutching a piece of chocolate bread wrapped in paper.
‘Thank you.’
‘I didn’t have any more of an appetite than you did, but I reckoned you’d get some of yours back by mid-morning.’
I took the chocolate bread and bit into a corner. ‘You’re right, as usual. I’ve got a stomach full of butterflies, but I’m still hungry. How do you think we did back there?’
‘Atrociously. But I don’t think anyone could have done much better, given what we had to work with.’
‘I’m surprised at Betony.’
‘I’m not. He’s a schemer who’s just seen his chance to exert real influence within the Line. It was never a possibility when Fescue and the other alpha males were around, but now he’s almost got a clear field to himself.’
‘Don’t forget the alpha females.’
‘And did you see how he lorded it over that table, as if we’d already voted him emperor? And he has the gall to accuse me of flouting Line traditions! We’re supposed to be egalitarian, without leaders.’
‘In times of crisis, the Line is allowed to form a decision-making quorum.’
‘Yes - but we’ve managed to get by without one for most of our history. You can be sure that Betony was at the head of the queue when the idea of forming a new quorum was mooted. I wouldn’t be surprised if he suggested it. Why do we need a quorum, anyway? We’re perfectly capable of taking decisions en masse - more so now than ever.’
‘The others will keep him in check. We’ve still got friends. Did you see how they rallied when I asked for permission to visit the magistrate? Half the table was behind me.’
‘Hm.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing, really. I’m just wondering whether that vote of support was as sympathetic as it appeared.’
‘How could it be anything other than sympathetic?’
‘Some of them could be hoping that you fall flat on your face, by being denied access. I wouldn’t even be surprised if one or two are hoping you do get access and then make a fool of yourself with the Spirit.’
‘No one wants me to die, though.’
‘No,’ Campion said. ‘They’re not that bad. Some of them may not like us, but we’re still kin. I wouldn’t wish death on another Gentian shatterling, and I don’t think the others are any different.’
‘I’d like to think so. I’m still worried about this censure thing, though. I feel as if there’s a sword hanging over me.’
‘If it works out with Hesperus, all our problems could be over.’
‘All of them?’
‘All right,’ Campion said, ‘some of them. But at least he’d speak up for us. Who’s going to doubt the word of a Machine Person?’
‘In other words, there’s even more reason to risk everything with the Spirit.’
‘That and the fact that he’s our friend, and it’d be great to have him back.’
>
‘I’ve been doing some reading. Betony wasn’t exaggerating - we could be putting ourselves at risk with the Spirit.’
‘We’ve been putting ourselves at risk since they hatched us.’
‘True.’ I finished the chocolate bread and started folding the paper into an origami dove. ‘Thanks for thinking of me. No matter what happens here, no matter what happens to us after Neume, I’m glad we’re together.’
‘I’m not going anywhere without you.’
‘At least our consorting is out in the open now. No need to be coy about it.’
Campion looked grave. ‘They’ll make us pay, one way or another. I hope you realise that.’
I finished the dove. It gained a pair of almond-coloured eyes and watercoloured feathers, and started flapping. I released it into the air and watched it fly away into the distance, heading off to be recycled. Campion and I held hands, then pulled ourselves close to each other. ‘Let them do their worst. I’m ready for it.’
Presently there was a chime from my room.
Jindabyne’s office was on the very summit of her building, in a foursided cupola affording excellent views in all directions. Wings, hung like ceremonial sabres, decorated the walls between the windows. Their glassy facets were stained in ruby, green and blue and inscribed with wavery lines of Ymirian script. There were also photographs and a couple of strange, rebus-like Neume art pieces, all of which resembled the blueprints for fiendishly difficult garden mazes. Three of the bulbous, convex windows revealed only a dense cityscape of golden spires, but the fourth, westerly facing window looked out to the silver desert, where the endlessly shifting barchans reached in serpentine waves all the way to the horizon. It was a clear, still day, and I could see a solitary white tower at the limit of visibility.
‘This is an extraordinarily unusual request,’ Jindabyne informed us when we had taken seats facing her desk. ‘You must understand my natural scepticism. Gentian Line has never shown much interest in this world, yet all of a sudden you want access to our deepest mysteries.’ There was a complicated, hookah-like apparatus perched on Jindabyne’s desk - a painted kettle, hissing and burbling, festooned with pipes and valves. Now and then the fine-furred magistrate would inhale from a mouthpiece on the end of a segmented hose. Campion and I had been given two cups of watery, ginger-flavoured tea - the crockery kept chinking in our hands. ‘You flatter us with your attention,’ Jindabyne went on, ‘but I can’t help feeling like a woman receiving insincere compliments because she has something someone wants. What do your troves tell you about the Spirit?’
‘That it is also known as the Fracto-Coagulation,’ I said. ‘That it is an airborne entity composed of many individual elements; that it was once a human mind, a human being, a man who may once have been called Valmik, who was alive in the Golden Hour.’
‘Then it would seem that you are wasting your time.’
Campion spoke now. ‘The trove also tells us that the Spirit of the Air has occasionally interceded to raise the dead, both biological and machine.’
‘It has also killed many individuals who were not dead to begin with.’
‘But the trove also says that many of the incidents could be blamed on provocation by the involved parties,’ Campion replied, ‘by them acting in a way that was known to irritate the Spirit.’
‘No one went to the Spirit intending to provoke it, shatterling. They all thought they were being cleverer than those who’d come before.’
‘We don’,’ I said. ‘We’re fully aware of the risks, and that we might not survive a direct encounter. But we still have to do this. We owe it to our friend.’
Jindabyne sucked on her pipe. The kettle bubbled furiously. ‘The Machine Person. Shouldn’t he be entrusted to Cadence and Cascade?’
‘They’ll be consulted, obviously,’ I said, ‘but Hesperus must have known that the Spirit offered his best chance of survival, not his fellow machines.’
Jindabyne scratched the honey-coloured fur on the side of her cheek. Until the light caught her at a certain angle, the fur could have been mistaken for human skin. ‘You put me in an invidious position.’
‘All we’re asking for is the same access privileges that have already been granted to countless travellers in the past,’ I said.
‘Times were different then. The Spirit was more predictable. Lately - I’ m talking of recent centuries, not years - it has grown more capricious. There were some unpleasant incidents. The scientific council convinced the combined authorities that there should be no more casual encounters. So far the Spirit has confined its displeasure to individuals or small groups of individuals, but what if it should tire of human presence on Neume? They say it brought down the Plastic, and later the Providers.’
‘If it didn’t want your company, I imagine it would have got rid of you already,’ Campion said.
‘Easy for you to say. You’re just guests here - you can leave any time you want. You don’t depend on the Spirit for the air you breathe.’
‘We understand,’ I said, soothingly. ‘We’re making an unusual request, and you’re perfectly entitled to turn us down. But I promise you that we won’t do anything without the guidance of the scientific council. If there is any hint that the Spirit is being displeased, we’ll stop immediately.’
‘You know I cannot refuse you,’ Jindabyne said.
‘Of course you can,’ I said.
‘Really? With the full weight of Gentian Line watching my every move? There may be fewer than fifty ships in orbit around Neume, but we all know what those ships could do to Neume if we refuse to cooperate. You could turn these towers to dust, scour everything back to the last relics of the Benevolence.’
‘It isn’t like that at all,’ Campion said. ‘We didn’t come here to bully our way into anything.’
‘You may not think so. Privately, it may even be true. But you are a Line, a member of the Commonality. The Lines always get what they want. There are never exceptions.’
‘But we asked,’ I said, plaintively.
‘In the full and certain knowledge of my eventual compliance.’
‘Not Gentian Line,’ Campion said. ‘That’s never been how we do things.’
‘Then if I refused, that would be an end to it?’
Campion and I exchanged wary looks. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Absolutely. You have sovereignty here. We don’t.’
‘Shatterling Betony is a determined man. If you took news of my refusal to him, how do you think he’d respond? Not well, I suspect. You may have principles, shatterlings, but acting collectively, you are monsters. I have seen it, from other Lines.’
‘We’re not monsters,’ I said. ‘If you don’t believe me, turn us down. I swear no harm will come to you.’
‘And a thousand years from now? Ten thousand? Nothing to you.’
‘Everything’s different now,’ Campion said. ‘Even if we did act like that in the past, we’re not the same now.’
Jindabyne placed her mouthpiece in the clawed hook of a malachite desk-stand. ‘Go now,’ she said, picking up a sheet of paper from her desk. ‘You will have word of my decision later today.’
Cadence and Cascade met me on a private balcony of the tower where we had our rooms. It was noon. Campion reclined in a low chair with an apple in his hand, saying as little as he could get away with.
‘Thank you for agreeing to come,’ I said, nodding at the two flawless creatures.
Cadence, the silver one with the female anatomy, nodded. ‘It is the least we could do, Purslane. Cascade and I are most anxious to visit Hesperus, and see what may be done for him. It may surprise you that we have feelings of compassion towards our fellow machines, but that is how we are. It tears at us to think that Hesperus may be suffering.’
‘Do you die?’ I asked.
‘Of course we die,’ Cascade said. ‘We are not indestructible. Far from home, far from the support systems of our culture, we are scarcely less vulnerable to injury than human beings.’ He touched a white fin
ger to his chest. ‘With the right weapon, you could kill me now.’
‘But your experiences have been recorded somewhere else, back in the Monoceros Ring.’
‘The nearest part of the Ring is tens of thousands of lights away. Much has happened to me since my departure, very little of which has been communicated back home. If I were to die now, it would take tens of thousands of years for news of my death to reach the Ring. Then they might activate a copy of me, with my last full set of memories. But I would not consider that entity to be me, merely an entity with whom I have certain things in common.’ He bowed his beautiful head. ‘You must understand, being a shatterling. Each of you carries a very similar set of memories, but that does not mean you would think lightly of dying.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We wouldn’t. But what about Hesperus? Could he really die?’
‘Undoubtedly. Until we examine him, we can only speculate about the nature of his injuries. What is certain is that his chances of being repaired will be greatest if he is returned to the Ring.’
‘We would need a ship for that,’ Cadence said.
‘You don’t have one?’
‘Sainfoin brought us here. We have no vehicle of our own.’
Campion crunched noisily on his apple, the ancient human sound punctuating my thoughts. He was observing things very carefully, though giving every impression of studied indifference.
‘You must have had a ship at some point,’ I said.
‘Once,’ Cadence said offhandedly. ‘It was destroyed long before we reached the Dorcus reunion. Since then we have been at the mercy of human charity.’ The robot waved a hand as if to wipe away the problem. ‘It is of no matter. Ships are mute machines with no more sentience than a pebble. They have no intrinsic value to us.’
‘It would be good if you could look at Hesperus,’ I said. ‘At the very least, help me get him down to Neume in one piece. I’m afraid of moving him now.’
‘There is no need for him to come here,’ Cascade said. ‘Whatever we can do for him, we can do aboard your ship.’
‘You don’t need the resources of Ymir?’ I asked.
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