Cadence made a tiny clucking sound, which I took to be the Machine Person equivalent of a derisive snort. ‘The citizens of Neume mean well, but using their machines to repair Hesperus would be like trying to perform brain surgery on you with a few pieces of flint.’
‘If flint’s all you have, you go with flint.’
Cascade’s ivory mask shaped a thin smile. ‘But we can do better than that. We are flexible machines. The humanoid forms we assume now are mere conveniences. It would be a simple matter for us to form the necessary interfaces to assist Hesperus. But first we must be aboard your ship.’
‘That can be arranged. But I’d still like to bring him down to Neume.’
‘There is no need,’ Cascade said again.
‘For me there is. It’s complicated, but Hesperus asked us to do something for him.’ I took a deep breath. ‘You’ve already spent time on Neume - doubtless you know of the Spirit of the Air.’
‘Yes,’ Cadence said guardedly.
‘Have you had contact with it since your arrival?’
She - I could not help but think of the machine as a she - shook her slim-necked, imperious head. ‘None at all. There has been no need. It is not a true machine intelligence, and therefore of only passing interest to us.’
‘Does that apply to people as well?’
‘Quite the contrary. We find organic intelligences infinitely fascinating. All that slippery grey meat emulating consciousness - what is there not to be fascinated by?’
‘The Spirit,’ Cascade said, ‘represents an intermediate stage of sophistication between human and true machine consciousness. Its origin is obscure, its nature unstable. There are too many variables to make it amenable as a study subject.’
And, I thought quietly, you might fear it a little as well. If it scared humans, then it might hold similar terrors for Machine People. Campion caught my eye from across the balcony and winked once.
‘Well, I’m interested in it,’ I said. ‘Hesperus was fully aware of our destination. It is our belief that he wished to be brought into the presence of the Spirit.’
‘What purpose do you expect that to serve?’ Cascade asked.
‘There are documented instances of the Spirit interceding to heal injured pilgrims or repair damaged machines,’ I said. ‘It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Spirit will do something similar for Hesperus.’
‘Or take him apart.’
‘In which case he’ll have communicated part of himself into the memory of the Spirit. He must have been willing to take that chance.’
‘This is most unorthodox,’ Cadence said.
‘Being here is unorthodox. Having an injured Machine Person for a guest is unorthodox.’
‘Nonetheless.’
There was a silence. The machines stood still, but the lights in their heads flared and spun like demented fireflies. I had the sense of some vast, inscrutable conversation taking place before me, at a speed I could scarcely comprehend. Those seconds of silence might have consumed subjective years of frenzied debate in the accelerated time frame of machine consciousness.
They are cleverer than us, I thought. Cleverer and stronger and faster, and soon it will come to a head, us or them.
‘We will journey to your ship and inspect Hesperus,’ Cadence said.
Cascade added, ‘We will attempt to establish a communication link with him. If that fails, you may bring him down to the surface and present him to the Spirit.’
I felt dizzy and elated in equal measure. I could not begrudge them a chance at communication first. At the very least, it might enable Hesperus to clarify his wishes.
‘Thank you,’ I said, when I had gathered my thoughts again. ‘I’m enormously grateful.’
‘You were expecting obstruction?’ Cascade asked mildly.
‘I wouldn’t have been offended if you’d refused. He’s our guest, but he’s your fellow citizen. If you felt that you had a better claim over him ... I wouldn’t have argued.’
‘But you would have been sad,’ Cadence said.
‘Yes. I’d have felt as if we’d let him down.’
‘We would not want that to happen. You have taken care of him until now, and we are grateful to you for that.’ Cascade turned to face his silver companion, then glanced back at me. ‘When may we visit your ship, Purslane?’
‘As soon as I have Line authorisation to take my shuttle back into orbit. That shouldn’t be a problem, but it may take a few hours.’
Cadence bowed. ‘Then we shall await your instructions.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In the early afternoon of our first full day on Neume, the other three shatterlings we had transported were released from abeyance. By the time they emerged into daylight, on the large landing deck where we had gathered the night before, they had the stunned, wary look of people who could not quite believe their reversal of fortune. It was as if they had woken from one dream and could not quite shake the sense that they were now in another, from which they might be roused at any moment.
When they had met the customary grouping of shatterlings, guests and civic dignitaries - fewer in number than the evening before, not that Lucerne, Melilot and Valerian would ever know - they came over to speak to Purslane and me.
‘Aconite told us what happened, Campion,’ Melilot said to me. ‘We can’t ever repay you for what you’ve done for us.’
‘You’d have done the same,’ I said.
‘I’d like to think so, but I won’t ever know for sure. The point is you did do it, knowing the risks. Thank you, Campion and Purslane. You make me proud to be Gentian.’
‘There’s talk of censure,’ I said, glancing over my shoulder to check whether Betony might still be in earshot. ‘Purslane and I will need all the friends we can get if it comes to a vote as to how we should be punished.’
‘They can’t be serious,’ said the darkly handsome Valerian.
‘They are, unfortunately,’ Purslane said. ‘But if we have at least some allies, I feel better already.’
‘You have more allies than you imagine,’ Lucerne said. Then she looked sharply at the other two. ‘Grilse and the others ... what happened to them?’
‘They’re here,’ I said. ‘Still in stasis. Mezereon’s been charged with getting information out of them.’
‘She’ll do it, too,’ Valerian said.
‘You make that sound like a bad thing.’
Melilot lowered her voice. ‘Mezereon was ... zealous when it came to interrogating Grilse.’
‘I’d have been pretty zealous myself,’ Purslane said.
‘But not as much as Mezereon. We almost had to restrain her. We didn’t want the prisoner dying on us before we got anything useful out of him. And now she’s in charge of them all?’
‘There’ll be due oversight,’ I said.
‘There’d better be,’ Lucerne said. ‘None of us gives a damn what happens to Grilse - they can throw him to the wolves for all I care. But not before the fucker’s talked.’
The afternoon was eventful. Cyphel was making arrangements to recover my strand from the heads of the surviving shatterlings, which meant each of us submitting to a delicate, time-consuming memory read. The hard part was not preparing the equipment, for the machinery was easily fabricated from standard maker files, but organising us all so that the work could be accomplished in days, not weeks. As a token of goodwill, and to show that I was not purposefully concealing anything, I offered myself up as her first subject.
‘I can skip you, Campion,’ Cyphel said when we were alone in the room assigned for her work. ‘It’s kind of you to offer, but there’ll be interference between the strand and your own base memories of the same experiences. I’ve never understood why the Line insists on each of us receiving our own strands.’
‘Tradition,’ I said. ‘And a safeguard against sabotage. If I decided to plant something nasty in the head of every other shatterling, I couldn’t do it without infecting myself.’
‘Y
ou could take precautions, if that was what you intended.’
‘But it would be more complicated, and therefore more likely to go wrong. All the same, I suppose the tradition is more symbolic than practical. Do you want to scan me or not?’
‘Yes, assuming you’ve got nothing better to do. Wouldn’t you rather be watching Mezereon getting her kicks?’
‘I detect a faint note of disapproval.’
Cyphel wrinkled her nose, as if there was a bad smell in the room. ‘Let’s give it a try. If the signal-to-noise ratio is too low to be useful, I’ll discard you from the set.’
‘Sounds painful.’
‘Lie down here,’ she said, with exaggerated sternness. Cyphel knew that I liked her and there was a pleasurable tension in all our exchanges. I think she liked me a little bit as well.
I lay on the couch and breathed out while she began her work. She took a thing like a tube of paint and squeezed the contents onto her left hand and arm, up to her elbow, forming a thick web of waxy lines that reached from the crook of her arm to the tips of her fingers. She had many rings on her left hand, none on the right, but she kept the waxy lines from interfering with her jewellery. In seconds the aspic-of-machines cured into a flexible network. Cyphel held her hand close to my scalp, as if she was warming her palm from a hot stone. She moved the hand slowly, fingers stiffened like a dancer‘s, occasionally glancing aside at a summary updating on the room’s wall. As the skull-penetrating sensors rummaged through my memories, identifying those patterns tagged as being part of a strand, I felt brief, subliminal flickers of recall ghosting into consciousness, like pictures projected faintly onto a screen. It was like walking into Palatial, feeling the game pick through my mind.
‘Did you get anywhere with the flight logs?’
‘Keep still. This’ll go a lot quicker if you don’t move and you don’t talk.’
‘Sorry.’
‘To answer your question, I haven’t looked at the logs yet. I’ll do that once I’ve got enough strands read in to begin the correlative matching. The logs probably won’t come to anything, but we may as well look into it. You owe me one, you realise. I saved your skin out there.’
I mumbled agreement.
‘I’m sure you’ll find a way to pay me back. One day I might do something as idiotic as wipe my own strands - who knows?’ With her free hand, Cyphel pushed back a stray strand of blue-white hair. ‘You’re infuriating, Campion. There are times when I think you embody the best of what the Line stands for, and other times when I think we should have excommunicated you circuits ago. Your problem is that you don’t take it seriously enough. Which is good, sometimes - we can’t all be like Fescue, or Betony - but other times ... well, I won’t labour the point; I’m sure you’ll hear it often enough in days to come. At least you have Purslane to keep you on the straight and narrow. You could power empires with that woman’s patience. If it were me, we’d already have built a memorial to you.’
By which she meant that she would have killed me.
Cyphel was soon done and invited me to move off the couch. ‘You got a clean extraction?’
‘No worse than I was expecting.’ She peeled the waxy lines of aspic-of-machines from her arm and fingers, squeezing them into a ball which oozed back into the tube it had come from. ‘Nothing I can work with yet, but by the time I’ve added together all the others, we should be getting somewhere. Just between you and me - because it’s going to come out anyway - you weren’t trying to hide anything, were you? I mean, that’s not why you deleted your strand?’
‘If I had something to hide, I’m doing it so well I don’t even know about it.’
‘That could be true. The tricks we can play with memory. But ...’ Cyphel trailed off. ‘After all this, I do trust you. You have your faults, not even you can deny that, but I don’t think you had anything to do with the ambush. You’re like a boy looking for pretty shells on a beach. You picked up something that caught your eye, and you brought it home and showed it off to everyone else, but even you didn’t have any idea of its true significance.’ Cyphel paused significantly. ‘Someone did, though. Someone saw what you’d brought home and decided we all had to die because of it. Now all we have to do is find that shell.’
‘I’m glad you made it, Cyphel.’
‘That makes two of us,’ she said.
The four cabinets were grouped together on a raised plinth, surrounded by bare flooring. Mezereon had been given an entire room for her interrogations. Beyond the open area stood a series of stepped benches from which interested parties could witness the proceedings; beyond the benches rose walls through which narrow-slitted windows admitted pencil-thin shafts of wan daylight. There was more than enough space for all the shatterlings, as well as our guests and a small congregation of locals. Many witnesses were already present when the conveyor dropped me off outside, having just watched Purslane’s shuttle climb back into the sky. I was burning with curiosity, desperate to hear what these frozen prisoners had to say of their part in the crime.
Mezereon’s timing and showmanship were impeccable. By the time she arrived, the atmosphere was electric and conversation dropped to an alert, anticipatory silence in an instant.
She strode to the plinth and stood before it, the cabinets looming over her thin, dark-clad form. ‘Thank you, shatterlings and guests,’ she said, pivoting on her heels to address the audience. ‘Today I will be using Synchromesh to reach the prisoners.’ She raised one arm high so that her sleeve slipped down to reveal a bulky white chronometer clamped around the pale stick of her wrist, the watch set with pearly dials and many knurled knobs. ‘Since you were warned, I presume that most of you have your own ’mesh, or an equivalent means of decelerating your subjective time-flow. Please prepare to administer a slowdown rate of one hundred, but only at my command.’
She spun around and stepped onto the plinth, walking to the rightmost cabinet. Like the other three, its doors were open. The prisoner sat on a throne inside a buttressed red bubble of retarded time. ‘We only know the name of the man in the leftmost box. Grilse’s cabinet is better than the other three - he’s got a much stronger chance of surviving emergence into normal time. For the other three, I consider the chances somewhat poorer - husking is a distinct possibility. Because of this I will not risk bringing them out of stasis until I am certain I have learned all I can without external coercion. But they do not know that.’ Mezereon opened the control panel in the rightmost cabinet, exposing the same kind of graduated dial I had seen in Grilse’s box, when Mezereon had shown it to me aboard Dalliance. The lever was also pushed nearly all the way to the right, indicating a stasis factor near one hundred thousand: a second for every day that passed in the external universe, near enough. In the time that had elapsed since I had met the other shatterlings for breakfast, the prisoner might have had time to blink once. It would take two or three days of my time for him to complete a gesture, or express a simple statement.
Mezereon tugged the lever to the left, until the stasis factor was a hundred. The prisoner still appeared immobile from moment to moment, but over the course of a minute the rise and fall of his chest was just discernible. He was breathing; alive. The bubble was now pink hued rather than scarlet.
‘He sees and hears only me,’ Mezereon said, looking back over her shoulder at the audience. ‘There’s a privacy screen between you and me. Later, it may be possible to cross-examine the prisoners, but for now I would rather they dealt only with me. I do of course have quorum authority to lead this investigation.’ She touched the face of her chronometer with one sharp-nailed finger. ‘I am about to dial myself up. If you wish to follow the proceedings, do likewise. I suggest you set a six-hour expiration, time enough for a few minutes of conversation.’
As the drug slowed her mental processes, Mezereon froze, falling into a pseudo-paralysis. It was in fact only a retardation of bodily functions, not a complete cessation, but she would have toppled from the plinth had her clothes not stiffened to provid
e the necessary support. Now her subjective consciousness rate had been matched to the prisoner‘s, and her heart and respiratory rates lowered accordingly. Her mouth opened very slowly and sound appeared to come out of it.
It was impossible to speak under the influence of Synchromesh: the physiology of the human voice box simply did not permit sounds to be generated across minutes of actual time. But her clothes were capable of reading her intentions, and they fed a simulation of Mezereon’s voice to both the prisoner and the loudspeakers situated around the room. What we heard sounded as low and mournful as whale song, throbbing with subsonic undertones.
I pulled a black vial from my pocket and squeezed two cold drops of Synchromesh onto my eyeballs. The drug hit my nervous system in moments, dulling my blink reflex. Using the chronometer, I set the six-hour expiration and rotated the dial that would tell the drug how slowly I wished to go. I felt the usual lurch of dizziness as the ‘mesh took hold. Afterwards, the only evidence that I was under the influence of the drug was the whirling progress of the normal minute hand on my chronometer, whipping around like a centrifuge. Most of the audience had dialled up at the same time as me; only a handful were still living in normal time, betrayed by their fidgety, jerky movements.
Mezereon’s voice had upshifted through the frequencies until she sounded perfectly normal and comprehensible.‘ ... of Gentian Line, the House of Flowers,’ she was saying in Trans, introducing herself - I had missed only a second or two of actual speech. ‘You are in our custody now, on a world whose name and location I have no intention of divulging. We’re not interested in justice, merely cold-blooded retribution.’
The prisoner said nothing. But he was fully alive now, shifting in his throne restraints and eyeing Mezereon’s every move.
‘We are, however, prepared to make concessions for information,’ she said, occasionally turning to face her hidden audience, her clothes permitting normal perambulation. ‘There are four of you, and we only need one of you to talk. Your cabinets are damaged - the chances of you surviving emergence into normal time are not excellent. If you are prepared to tell us what we want, I will make sure we do all in our power to keep you alive. But only if you cooperate. Only if you tell us everything, without evasion, without ambiguity.’ Mezereon rested a hand on her hip. ‘What’s it to be?’
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