‘I’m dialling back in a moment. This is your last chance to tell me what I want to know. Why did you ambush us? What is the House of Suns?’
‘You won’t do it,’ Thorn said. ‘You need me alive too much. In here I can always tell you something, even if you can’t force it out of me.’
‘Why did you ambush us?’
‘You had it coming.’
‘What is the House of Suns?’
‘Something you’ll die never knowing about.’
Mezereon twisted the dial on her chronometer, her movements accelerating from my perspective as the drug released her back into normal time. I reached for my own chronometer, but before I could do so Mezereon’s hand had flashed to the lever and slammed it all the way to the left. The cabinet flickered and emitted a sharp coughing noise.
I knew instantly that Thorn had died; a safe emergence would have been much less dramatic.
The details of stasis technology have never been of interest to me. All I have ever pretended to understand is that the cabinet holds its occupant inside a bubble of spacetime separated from that which surrounds it by a microscopic membrane, like the white of an egg around the yolk. As the bubble approaches normal time-flow, the interface between the bubble and external spacetime should evaporate away into quantum indeterminacy. Most of the time, that is what happens. But once in a while, often with old or poorly designed caskets, the boundary behaves very differently. It adheres to the contents of the bubble, sticking like glue. In the same moment of failure, the interior of the bubble tears open and pushes outwards, compressing the contents against the unyielding barrier of that skintight membrane.
We call it husking.
That was what happened to Thorn. His shattered parts, and the pieces of his throne, rained onto the hard floor of the plinth. Mezereon knelt down and sorted through them until she found a piece of his face. It was like a clay imprint of an actor mimicking terror; clay that had been fired until it was glossy.
‘You should have waited,’ said Charlock, rising from his seat. ‘He hadn’t told us enough.’
Mezereon sounded quite unfazed. ‘He’d told me everything he was ever going to. No amount of persuasion would have convinced him I was serious. The only way to do that was to take this chance.’
‘You lost one prisoner.’
‘There are three more. Now I can show them the empty cabinet and let them know I mean business.’ She lofted the piece of his flesh like a trophy. ‘And this - they’ll recognise the face.’
Still holding the fragment, kicking her way through the rest of him, Mezereon walked to the second cabinet. Her hand moved to the stasis dial, ready to bring the prisoner within reach of Synchromesh.
PART FOUR
One day the little boy and his robot guards went up the ramp into his ship and that was the last time I ever saw him the way he really was. I had no idea of that at the time; all I knew was that we had spent another afternoon in Palatial; another afternoon playing the long game of empire. But it was not the last I saw of Count Mordax.
I was thirty-five, by the usual reckoning; by all objective measurements, I was still a girl of around eleven or twelve years of age - an unusually precocious girl, a girl with an adult’s worth of memories (even if most of them consisted of life in the same house) but a girl all the same. But after three and a half decades it was decreed by my guardians that it was time for my development to be allowed to proceed normally again. I was called into Madame Kleinfelter’s office and she asked me to roll up my sleeve. There was a small bump under the skin just below the crook of my elbow. Madame Kleinfelter touched a blunt stylus to the bump and I felt a tingle, and that was the end of it. The bump was gone, and the biological machinery that had held me at a fixed age was no longer inside me.
I felt no different, of course. But a clock that had been silent for years had just begun ticking.
‘Why now?’ I asked.
‘When you were born,’ Madame Kleinfelter said, ‘it was never intended that you would be kept the way you have been. A modest degree of prolongation, yes ... that’s the norm nowadays, throughout the Golden Hour. Why race through childhood when you have a couple of hundred years ahead of you? But to be held at prepuberty for thirty-five years ... that is unusual, even by modern standards.’ She put down the stylus and steepled her thick, wrinkled fingers, as she often did when delivering a lecture. ‘It was done at your mother’s request, Abigail - back when she enjoyed extended periods of lucidity. The specialists convinced her that her madness could be cured, given time. They warned her that it might take a while - decades, even. Your mother chose to hold you in a state of suspended development, so that she could still enjoy your childhood when she recovered. She could have had you frozen, of course ... but this was her preferred method. She wanted to able to look at you when she was lucid, to see you learning and playing. She did not want to look at a doll in a tank.’ Her fingers tensed around each other. ‘But your mother is not getting any better. If I have occasionally led you to think that the prognosis for recovery was better than it is, then I apologise. But nothing I did was done lightly. I was always thinking of you first, Abigail.’
‘Then my mother won’t be cured.’
‘They will keep trying. But her psychosis is now all-consuming. Every measure they have taken - and these are the best doctors in the Golden Hour - has resulted in an incremental worsening of her condition. The moments of lucidity have grown further and further apart. Perhaps they will stumble on a cure tomorrow, but we can no longer count on that. Which brings me to the difficult matter of the family business. Now that the likelihood of your mother recovering her faculties is so small, we must, with heavy hearts, look to the future.’
‘To me,’ I said. I felt faint, as if I had stood up too suddenly.
‘This is no easy path you are about to walk, Abigail. You are going to grow up now. You are going to become a woman. And when the time is right, you are going to assume the mantle that your mother once wore. You will lead the family, as she once did. Everything that she made, everything that she built, all the knowledge and cleverness she gathered, will be in your hands. It will be like an incredibly valuable ornament, a thing of fine coloured glass and rare jewels. In your hands, it will be safe. But you must never, ever drop it.’
When we were done, I went to my playroom and entered the room-within-a-room that held the green cube of Palatial. Although the developmental inhibitor had been removed, it was inconceivable that any measurable change had occurred within me. But I still felt as if the green cube, and the enchanted landscape it held, was something that belonged to my childhood. It was not that the game suddenly held no fascination for me. I could still feel its allure. But it would have been unseemly, inappropriate, even sordid, to step through the portal again.
It may have been a month, or maybe a year later; I do not recall precisely. But there came a day when Madame Kleinfelter summoned me to her office.
‘There has been an important development, Abigail.’
My heart lifted. ‘My mother?’
Embarrassment creased her face. ‘Not exactly. It’s more to do with the family business. Although you have not been privy to the finer details, I do not think it is any great secret that we have been struggling since the armistice. The Golden Hour has little need of clones, not when there are machines clever enough to be our slaves instead. We’ve stayed afloat, but only because of a dwindling handful of loyal clients in the Lesser Worlds. Frankly, the omens have been inauspicious for several years. And with the continued expense of the works on the house, not to mention your mother’s care, our reserves have been draining steadily away.’ She raised a finger before I had a chance to speak. ‘I’ll be blunt: for many years, it was thought that our salvation might lie in the union of two trading concerns. The little boy you used to play with ... it was hoped, by certain parties, that a marriage, a corporate alliance, might come from your friendship.’ By her tone, I was left in no doubt that those certain parties ha
d never included Madame Kleinfelter. ‘That won’t happen now. They have gone with another combine, leaving us out in the cold. I am afraid you won’t be seeing your friend again, Abigail - not until you are old enough to make up your own mind about such things.’
At last I had been told the reason for the sudden curtailing of our adversarial, spite-laden friendship. I suppose I should not have mourned it greatly, but it was not as if I had a hundred other friendships to turn to.
I said nothing, for I sensed Madame Kleinfelter had more on her mind.
‘But, as I said, there has been a development - and a potentially very fruitful one. Have you heard of a woman named Ludmilla Marcellin, Abigail?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Generally speaking, that’s to your credit. Ludmilla Marcellin is the heiress of one of the richest families in the Golden Hour. Unlike the Gentians, however, her familial wealth was not founded on any expertise in the natural arts. They simply made a lot of money by trading in financial instruments during the Conflagration. Not that there isn’t a skill there, but it’s nothing compared with our knowledge of cloning. And cloning is very much the issue here.’
I don’t understand.’
‘Ludmilla Marcellin has decided to embark on a project. It’s an ambitious one, and it will make her many enemies - not that that’s ever stopped her. She’s going to venture beyond the solar system and explore the known universe. Ever since the armistice, the Marcellin combine has been gathering the wisdom and materials to make this happen. Now the final piece must be put in place, which is precisely where we come in. Ludmilla Marcellin needs Gentian wisdom. She needs clones.’
‘Our clones?’
‘Exactly, Abigail. And she’s prepared to pay for our services. This is the lifeline we’ve been waiting for; a chance to set our finances on an even keel. Ludmilla Marcellin is a trendsetter - where she leads, others will follow. But we must demonstrate our sincerity and commitment. The board of governors thinks it would be a good thing for you to meet with this woman, so that she can see for herself that the Gentians have a future.’
‘Will she come here?’
‘No, we must go to her.’
‘I have never left the house.’
‘There’s a first time for everyone,’ Madame Kleinfelter said, before dismissing me.
Not long afterwards, I was escorted to the shuttle pad and I left my home for the first time. As we pulled away from the planetoid, I saw the house for what it truly was: a kind of rampant architectural fungus, spreading from horizon to horizon. It had not been the entirety of my world, for it had also contained the world-within-a-world of Palatial. But as it fell behind us, hazed in the wake of the shuttle’s exhaust, I realised how pitifully small and limiting it had really been.
The shuttle took me through the thick core of the Golden Hour, where the sky was dappled with the false stars and transient constellations of close-packed Lesser Worlds. By the time of my journey I had read all I could about Ludmilla Marcellin, but even though the story-cube was more forthcoming than it had been when I was younger, it still had nothing to say about her plans for exploring the universe. I kept thinking back to what the little boy had said to me during one of our visits - how one day humanity would burst forth from the Golden Hour, into the wider galaxy. It had been his father speaking, but he had believed the words. I had countered by pointing out that there was nothing out there worth seeing, that probes and telescopes had told us all we could ever wish to know about the planets around other suns. Now I wondered what Ludmilla Marcellin knew that I did not.
Before my audience with the heiress herself, I was taken to see her shipyard. The shuttle passed through a Marcellin security cordon into the private airspace around a large, spherical asteroid. Gathered around the asteroid were dozens of huge, ugly-looking ships, each of which was larger than anything I had ever read or heard about. There were traceries of construction scaffolding around some of the ships, the occasional flicker of a welding torch or laser, a handful of spacesuited workers, but to my untrained eye there did not appear to be much more to do. I counted thirty-five ships, then noticed a thirty-sixth slowly emerging from the asteroid.
The rock had been lanced through the middle, like an apple on a spit. With our shuttle under remote control, we passed into the opening. We came very close to the emerging ship, its hull sliding by only metres from the shuttle’s windows. It was the same as the ones outside, except that the flower-like intake on the front had not been folded open. There would not be room until the spike-nosed craft had cleared the asteroid.
The ships, I was informed, were ramscoops - vessels of a type that had been dreamed up a thousand years earlier but never built until now. The only previous interstellar expedition had reached a mere fifth of the speed of light, but these ships would go much faster than that. By the time they stopped accelerating - when the friction from their intake fields equalled the thrust that was being generated - the ramscoops would be travelling at eight-tenths of the speed of light. They would be able to make round-trip journeys to the nearest stars while only a decade or so passed back home.
But that was not what Ludmilla Marcellin had in mind. She was going to go much further out than that. She had no intention of returning to the Golden Hour.
We passed into the core of the construction asteroid. It was being eaten from the inside out. A spherical cavity had been excavated in the middle, slowly widening as material was gouged away and transformed into ships. The hulls of partly formed vessels - some of which were close to being finished, while others were little more than skeletons - formed a forest of spikes pointing inwards. There were hundreds of them, but there would be hundreds more by the time Ludmilla Marcellin was done. The asteroid would be nearly depleted; little remaining except a gauzy husk, like the papery corpse left behind when a spider has digested an insect.
In the middle of the open sphere was a free-floating station, to which a dozen or so shuttles and runabouts were already docked. We joined them and disembarked, and were met by Marcellin representatives. We were given food and drink, shown presentations and models and made to feel suitably important. A great many adults made a point of talking to me, most of them struggling to tread a path between condescension and plain speaking. They all knew I was thirty-five years old, but it was difficult for them to remember that when dealing with someone who looked and sounded like a twelve year old. Slowly, however, I got the gist of what Ludmilla Marcellin was intending to do.
There would be a thousand ships when she was finished. They would be launched into interstellar space on separate trajectories, each with a different solar system as its first objective. Some of the ships would have to fly only a dozen or so light-years before arriving at their first port of call. Others would travel for twenty or thirty, or even further.
And each and every ship would carry Ludmilla Marcellin.
Or rather, each and every ship would carry a duplicate of Ludmilla Marcellin: a clone, with the same personality and memories as the real woman. She was going to shatter herself into a thousand facets and scatter them into interstellar space.
Eventually she made an appearance, arriving on a shuttle from an inspection visit to one of the new ships. She was tall and glamorous, with a charisma that lit up the room as if she was the only source of light. She had a deep, commanding voice. It gave one the utmost confidence that she would follow through with her plans, no matter how outlandish they appeared.
‘I have faith in the human spirit,’ Ludmilla Marcellin said. ‘Faith that says we won’t stay here for ever, in this little campfire huddle around an undistinguished yellow star. We’ve been in space for a thousand years, long enough that the Golden Hour has been in existence for much longer than any living human. It’s easy to think that it will last for ever; that this stable arrangement will suffice for our needs until the sun peters out. It won’t. Against the future that lies ahead of us, this thousand years will be just a moment, a drawing of breath, before the begi
nning of the real adventure. I have faith that that adventure is about to begin. I also intend to be one of the first participants. Soon I will have my ships - my fleet of a thousand beautiful ramscoops. The clones that I will make of myself - the shatterlings, if you will - will each ride one of those vessels. The ships will take care of them - there need be no crews beyond a single copy of myself. My clones will be frozen until they reach their initial destinations, whereupon they will be thawed. They will make observations. They will leave their ships and travel down to new worlds and moons. They will look on things that no other human being has ever seen. When they have seen enough, they will continue their journeys. Each ship will make three predetermined ports of call, heading further and further out into the galaxy. After the third, the shatterlings will be entering territory for which we now lack hard data - visiting systems where the worlds are too far away to be resolved by our telescopes, and which are beyond the range of our robot probes. The shatterlings will have to make their own minds up about where to travel next, factoring in the knowledge they will already have gained since leaving the Golden Hour. Then they will lay in new courses and push further out. By this time they will have been gone from the Golden Hour for more than a century. Many of you will be dead and buried, but I will just be getting into my stride. The shatterlings will visit more stars, taste the air and soil of worlds that have never known a single strand of human DNA. They will swim in alien seas, adding to their store of memories. And then - four or five hundred years from this day, somewhere around the middle of the present millennium - they will turn their great ships around and set course for home.’
Ludmilla Marcellin paused. She regarded us all with a forbidding demeanour before continuing, ‘But that home will not be ours. The Golden Hour may still exist in five hundred or a thousand years, but I’m not counting on that. My shatterlings will convene in another system, around a world for which as yet we have no name. It is my conviction that by this time, humanity will have begun a migration into interstellar space. Perhaps my example will even spur it into action. On the long leg of their return journey, my thousand ships - or however many remain by then - will revisit some of the worlds they explored out the outward leg. They may find that those worlds have been settled since they left. If that is the case, then they will be strange visitors indeed - fugitives from the past, envoys to the future. Because even then I will only just be beginning. After this circuit of a few hundred light-years, a thousand human years, my shatterlings will convene again. They will meet, and exchange memories of what they have experienced. And then they will get back into their ships and head out again. This time they will surf ahead of the expansion wave, not stopping until they are hundreds of light-years out. They will visit more worlds. At the limit of their circuit - longer, this time - they will be nearly a thousand lights from the Golden Hour. By then, they will be in range of some of the anomalous structures we have begun to detect in deep interstellar space. My shatterlings will be the first people to reach out and touch those dark forms. They will be the first to know for certain whether others came before us; whether we are the first species to claim the galaxy as our own, or not. Or perhaps other people will get there first, riding similar ships - I am talking about a thousand years from now, after all. But you see my point. Someone must take this first step. It might as well be me.’
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