House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

  Soon we were close enough to see him clearly, as I brought the flier in for landing. He was on the plinth where we had left him, lying on his back completely motionless. Even as the flier passed over him, he remained unmoving. The only change since we had last seen him was the absence of the fused mass that had connected him to the remains of Vespertine. The Spirit had obviously understood enough to see that the mass did not belong with Hesperus, and it had repaired the parts of him that had been lost or concealed within that mass. But it had evidently not taken the extra step of restoring him to life.

  We parked the flier and got out. Campion fished a set of levators from the rear compartment and pushed them through the air ahead of him until we reached the plinth.

  I knelt down to examine Hesperus, running a hand over the golden prominence of his chest. ‘He’s perfect again,’ I said quietly, unwilling to disturb the sleeping form. ‘There’s no sign of damage at all. Even his arms are the same size now. I don’t think there’s any human flesh inside him any more.’

  ‘It did all this, but it didn’t make him live again?’

  ‘There are still lights in his head. There’s still something going on inside him.’

  ‘But no more than what was there earlier.’

  ‘This isn’t the way I thought it would happen. I thought if we got him back, everything would be right.’

  Campion attached the levators and lifted Hesperus from the plinth. He remained completely rigid, his limbs stiff even though they were not supported. He might as well have been cast from a single piece of metal.

  I scowled at the horizon, but there was nothing there. I felt angry and reproachful, as if I had been let down. As if there had ever been a bargain between us and the Spirit of the Air.

  ‘We’d best be going,’ Campion said.

  I turned my face away because I did not want him to see my tears.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mezereon had arranged the two hundred and fifty-six slices of Grilse into a floor-covering mosaic, sixteen tiles to a side. The tiles were arranged according to a complicated scheme, one that looked random but was in fact much cleverer than that. The governing principle was that no adjoining tiles on the floor should correspond to adjoining slices of the original body. The effect was that one tile might contain a full-body slice, showing the human form in profile, whereas the one next to it might contain only disconnected islands. The tiles were illuminated from below, and all were still oozing with slow, laboured life. Fluids flowed sluggishly like rivulets of oil trapped between sheets of glass. His lungs expanded and contracted, the rhythmic movement echoing across many tiles in the arrangement. Between the tiles, framing them in a grid, was a series of narrow stone walkways. It looked for all the world like an arrangement of rectangular fishponds in a formal garden, with strange, pulsating blooms lying on the dark water. Mezereon was striding down one of the walkways as we arrived, an energy-pistol swinging easily from one hand. She was in the middle of hectoring Grilse, going over the same questions she had already asked him dozens of times.

  ‘My time is not limited,’ she said. ‘Yours, sadly, is growing shorter by the hour. I can keep chipping away at you until you’ve got less nervous system than a crayfish.’ She raised the energy-pistol, made a micro-adjustment to its yield dial and directed it at the pane to her right. ‘Can you feel any difference yet, Grilse? Am I speeding up? Are your thoughts turning foggier? Is it becoming more and more difficult to remember how you got here, why you ended up in our custody?’ Screening her eyes with her free hand, she squeezed the trigger of the energy-pistol, directing a lance of crimson light into the pane. She had aimed at his head. The pane did not shatter, but the weapon bored a neat hole through it into the cross section of Grilse’s brain, the tissue crisping back in a dark-edged, widening circle. ‘Any difference now, Grilse? You won’t have felt that, but I just took out a few billion brain cells. You’ve hundreds of billions more, but we both know it’s not an inexhaustible supply. The panes will route functional pathways around the damage, but they won’t restore the memories you just lost. The unfortunate thing is, you won’t necessarily remember losing them. You’ll just feel emptier, more dispersed, like a room being cleared of furniture.’

  His voice boomed loud. ‘I have told you everything I know.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Why do you imagine I was told more than I absolutely needed to know for the purposes of the operation?’

  ‘You wouldn’t - unless you instigated it, which is at least a theoretical possibility. Until I know more about the structure and extent of the House of Suns, that’s a possibility I can’t discount.’ Mezereon hop-skipped to another pane six rows to her right. ‘In any case, I still don’t think you’ve told me everything you were told, even if you’re not the linchpin.’ She aimed the nozzle of the energy-pistol again and shot into his abdomen. This time Grilse screamed. Across the mosaic, the slices squirmed under their prisons of glass. ‘Yes,’ Mezereon said approvingly. ‘A good cluster of nerves there. That must have really hurt. Maybe it’s still hurting?’

  ‘She’s out of control,’ I whispered to Purslane.

  ‘This we knew.’

  I looked around the scattered audience until I spotted Aconite, Valerian and the other shatterlings who were supposed to be keeping an eye on Mezereon’s antics. Still in their funeral clothes, they formed a huddle of black. Betony was only a row or two behind them, sitting next to Charlock.

  ‘Wait here,’ I said.

  ‘Aren’t you in enough trouble?’

  ‘They forbade me from entering the interrogation room. We’re outdoors now.’

  I made my way to Aconite and the others while Mezereon continued tormenting Grilse. I had crossed only half the distance when I heard the crack of another energy discharge. No screaming this time, which meant she must have taken out another cluster of brain cells.

  ‘Campion,’ Aconite said, patting an empty space next to him. ‘Take a seat, old man. She’s on fine form, isn’t she?’

  ‘For a lunatic.’

  ‘She’s displaying a certain ... zeal. Would we want any less of her?’

  ‘She’s husked three prisoners. You’ll be lucky if there’s anything left of Grilse by the end of the day.’

  ‘He knows that as well. Can’t you see that he’s on the verge of confessing?’

  ‘He’s on the verge of not having a language centre.’

  Valerian coughed and said, in not much more than a murmur, ‘Campion may have a point. We’ve given her a very long leash. She means well, and we all feel the same way about Grilse, but the only thing that matters is getting information out of him. We can’t let personal feelings endanger Line security.’

  ‘You think we should reel her in?’ Melilot asked, her sentence punctuated by another energy discharge. ‘That won’t look good, not in front of our guests.’

  ‘This isn’t looking great either,’ I said. ‘From where I’m sitting, it looks a lot like Line-sanctioned torture purely for the sake of it.’

  ‘And how would you run things, Campion?’ asked Betony, who had left his seat to join us. ‘I’m sure you’re brimming with suggestions.’

  ‘I’d take that gun out of her hands, to begin with. You can sever the data connections between those panes without destroying any physical patterns. If you want to make a point, do it that way. Grilse won’t know any different - he’ll still feel bits of himself dropping away. The plus side of that method, however, is that you can always put him back together again if you don’t get results.’

  ‘If he gives us nothing while we whittle him down to nothing - regardless of the method we use - he’s hardly likely to behave differently the second time around,’ Aconite said.

  I shrugged. ‘So make it real the second time, or the third. But at least try it that way first. Call his bluff. See how close to the bone he’s prepared to take things. Maybe he is on the verge of cracking, but the way Mezereon’s going, it may be too late by the
time he does.’

  ‘You really are determined to undermine this investigation,’ Betony said.

  I shook my head, more exhausted than angry. ‘No. I fully endorse any activity that might get reliable data out of Grilse. If I believed taking an axe to those panes would do the job, I’d be the first in line. But this isn’t going to work.’ I tried to look deep into his eyes, anxious to connect with the reasonable, rational man I had always believed him to be. He was ambitious, but never misguided. ‘Betony, you know this is wrong. I listened to you talk about Cyphel last night.’

  He glanced away with a sneer. ‘I knew you’d find something to object to.’

  ‘I had no objections whatsoever. What you said about her was perfect. I stood there and thanked the stars you were the one speaking, not me. You did her justice.’

  The silence that opened between us seemed to last a thousand years. The other shatterlings had pulled away, giving us the space to speak in private.

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t approve,’ he said eventually.

  ‘It was good. It was right and true. If Cyphel were here, she’d tell you the same thing.’

  ‘I just wanted to say the things that needed to be said. I didn’t know Cyphel as well as you, but I know she wouldn’t have tolerated anything that wasn’t absolutely true, absolutely to the point. She didn’t want her life embroidered or romanticised.’

  ‘You hit the right note.’ I sighed, conscious that I was treading a narrow course between alienating him for ever and bringing him around to my point of view. ‘After the ceremony, I knew I’d been wrong about you. Because of what happened with Purslane, it had crossed my mind - just crossed it, mind - that maybe you had more to do with all of this than any of us realised.’ I swallowed hard. ‘Then when Cyphel died—’

  ‘You thought I was implicated?’

  ‘It was stupid. But one of us must be responsible for her death. I’m sorry that I allowed my suspicions to fall on you, even for an instant. But that’s what happened.’ Now I was finding it difficult to speak - my chest was rising and falling as if I had just climbed a mountain. ‘You licensed Mezereon to continue with this interrogation. I began to wonder whether maybe you wanted her to fail.’

  ‘So that the information wouldn’t come out.’

  ‘Surely you can see why I might think that.’

  Betony’s eyes gave no clue to his opinion of me - the processes of his mind might have been going on light-years away for all that they showed in his face. ‘And now?’ he asked, equably enough.

  ‘The speech changed everything.’

  ‘I could still be your murderer. A few well-chosen words? Easily faked.’

  ‘But you didn’t fake them.’

  ‘No,’ he said, after a lengthy pause. ‘They weren’t faked. It was hard for me to talk about Cyphel. Harder still knowing that the person who killed her was probably only a few paces away.’

  ‘Then we agree on that.’ I turned to face the square, with Mezereon and her array of luminous, squirming panes. ‘Which is why this has to stop, before she goes too far. Mezereon isn’t the murderer, but she’s not doing us any favours. I understand her hatred, her need for revenge, but now isn’t the time or the place.’

  There was another discharge from the energy-pistol. Grilse screamed again.

  ‘Mezereon,’ Betony said, raising his voice so that it rang across the open space. ‘Would you mind ... stopping for a moment?’

  She spun around with vivid rage in her eyes, the pistol almost aimed at us. Here there were no safeguards. Unless the weapon had been instructed not to fire on Gentian shatterlings, it would only take a twitch of her finger to wipe out another five or six of us.

  ‘Is there a problem, shatterling Betony?’

  ‘Not at all, Mezereon.’ Despite his best efforts, there was still a quaver in his voice. ‘I just think this might be a good time to pause ... to take stock, to assess what we’ve learned, before continuing.’

  ‘We’ve learned nothing.’

  ‘Nonetheless ... it might still be wise to review our approach, to see if there aren’t any refinements we might make.’

  To my considerable relief, Mezereon lowered the pistol and twisted its yield dial to what I presumed was the safety setting. She let go of the weapon and it hovered in the air where she had left it. Then she stalked over to us.

  ‘This is unacceptable. I was making progress.’

  ‘You were getting nowhere,’ I said.

  She glared at Betony. ‘I thought Campion was banished from the interrogation.’

  ‘That was different,’ I said. ‘This is a public space. Banish me and you’ll have to banish the Ymirians as well.’

  She ignored me, directing her remarks at Betony. ‘Grilse was beginning to crack. I could feel it.’

  ‘The problem is that we don’t know how long you’ll have to keep drilling holes in him before he starts talking,’ Betony said. ‘He’s a finite resource. We don’t have another Grilse backed up somewhere, for when you finish with this one.’

  ‘I only need one of them.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s talking sense,’ Aconite said, offering her a conciliatory smile. ‘You’ve done a fine job until now, and we’re all grateful to you for that, but the time’s come to try something else.’

  Betony shot me a glance, then looked back at Mezereon. ‘Can Grilse hear me now?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘No. I turned off his auditory feed when you interrupted me.’

  ‘There’ll be no more physical harm inflicted upon him - not until we’ve exhausted every other possibility. Set the yield on your pistol low enough that it won’t penetrate the pane. We’ll simulate damage by shutting down the data connections between his slices.’

  ‘He’ll know the difference, Betony. He won’t feel pain.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to make do without it. He’ll still feel himself being deleted, slice by slice. That’s got to be unpleasant enough without adding pain into the equation.’

  ‘He’ll know the process is reversible.’

  ‘Not for certain he won’t. There’ll still be that doubt, especially if you keep discharging the pistol. At the moment there’s a chance he could be put together again, a walking, talking human being. Keep deleting panes and he’ll be like a book with half its pages torn out. There’ll come a point when he’ll have lost too much to be reconstructed, and he’ll know that.’

  Mezereon did not look convinced, but neither did she look as if she was ready for a showdown with Betony and the others. They were offering her a way of saving face before the audience, by allowing her to remain in charge of the interrogation. Her hands would be tied, but it would still be less humiliating than being removed from the role entirely.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ she said.

  ‘But you’ll do it anyway,’ Betony finished for her. ‘That’s how it has to be, Mez. If we’re wrong, if this gets us nowhere, then I’ll be the first to admit my error. But until that point, we’re doing it my way.’

  Mezereon scowled. She turned around and stalked back to the waiting weapon, snatching it from the air as if grabbing a wasp. She adjusted the dial again, then looked back at us, her fingers white around the pistol’s grip.

  ‘Have it your way, boys and girls.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The robots came to see me in the early afternoon. I had left Campion watching Mezereon’s continued interrogation of Grilse and had returned to the private room where we had left Hesperus, exactly where he had been before we had taken him to the Spirit. There had been no change in his condition since morning, but I felt obliged to keep vigil in case there was a flicker of life, a momentary attempt at communication that ould otherwise be missed.

  ‘It was a very good effort,’ Cadence said, making me start by appearing at the door without warning. ‘You should not blame yourself for the lack of success.’

  ‘It isn’t a total failure,’ I said, noticing Cascade lurking just behind the female robot. ‘He�
�s not attached to that mass any more. He’s been put back the way he used to be. Even his arm.’

  ‘His arm?’ the male robot quizzed.

  ‘There was human flesh beneath the metal skin of his left arm. He was trying to disguise himself as one of us, so that he could enter the Vigilance.’

  ‘We had no idea,’ Cadence said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now. But the point is, the Spirit did something - it didn’t just put him back on the platform exactly as he arrived. It saw what was wrong with him, what was damaged, or not to be expected.’

  ‘Superficial matters,’ Cascade said.

  ‘Maybe. But what’s to say it didn’t look deep into him and fix what was wrong with him there as well? His broken memory, the damage he sustained in the attack by the H-gun.’

  ‘The evidence would suggest otherwise,’ said Cadence. ‘Although it pains us to admit it, he does not appear any more cognitively functional than when we last observed him.’

  ‘There are still lights in his head.’

  ‘But faint, and hardly moving. You would be unwise to put too much stock in them.’

  ‘Do you think he’s dead?’

  I had the impression that the robots were exchanging thoughts - the air grew momentarily tense, as if accumulating charge before an electrical storm.

  ‘He is not beyond hope,’ Cadence said, sounding more doubtful than certain. ‘But with every day that passes, patterns may be lost. The sooner he is on his way to Machine Space, the better.’

  ‘We did not want to press you after the death of Cyphel,’ Cascade said, managing to sound kind and firm at the same time, ‘but if it is not too painful, perhaps we might discuss the matter of transportation again?’

  ‘I think we agreed everything that needed to be agreed,’ I said. ‘We’ve said goodbye to Cyphel and I’ve got Hesperus back. If you want my ship, you can have her today.’

  ‘Are you certain?’ Cadence asked.

  ‘Totally. Take her. Get her out of my sight.’

  ‘That would be most satisfactory from our standpoint,’ Cascade said.