Then came the sound. Lagganvor was the first to notice it, I think. He reached up, quite unconcernedly, and tapped the side of his helmet, just as any of us would have done if our squawk boxes had started malfunctioning, giving off a buzz or static.
I heard it too. It was a whistle, not a buzz or a hiss. It was gaining in both intensity and frequency, and there was a cyclic rise-and-fall to it that exactly mirrored the throb from the quoins.
“They’re singing,” Fura said, raising her voice.
The whistling was growing louder. I reached up to turn down the gain on my squawk. Prozor and Lagganvor did likewise.
The whistling remained. It was inside our suits, perhaps inside our heads, but turning down the squawk had done nothing to dampen it. Now it was becoming unpleasant, pushing into the margins of pain.
“They ain’t singin’, girlie,” Prozor said. “They’re screamin’.”
“Send them back!” I called out, immediately starting to reverse my winch. The trolley began to descend back down the tunnel, but barely any faster than it had ascended. It needed hardly any effort to work the handle now, not with the weight of the trolley working to my benefit, but some brake or governer in the winch was preventing the trolley from picking up any speed beyond its previous crawl.
The pitch and intensity of the whistle was still climbing. I had experienced curious and disturbing auditory phenomena while under the influence of the bones, but this was a different sort of noise. It was choral: not a single tone, but an assemblage of them, amplifying and resonating the total effect. And although I knew that it was being produced by a hoard of metal quoins, that there was nothing sentient or feeling about them, I could not dispute Prozor’s observation. It did not feel like singing to me. It was a great and terrible lamentation, a collective expression of agony and misery and all the colours of sadness and regret and despair, and above all pain, more pain than the universe ought to have contained, and all of it concentrated in this one room, in these collections of quoins.
The whistle was too much to bear now. Lagganvor fell to his knees, his winch abandoned. Prozor was still trying to send her trolley back down the tunnel, but as with mine the trolley was only descending at a crawl, too slowly to undo the collective effect we had unleashed. Fura had begun to work at her winch as well, but her trolley appeared stuck on the level rails.
We had seconds, I thought, before the whistle squeezed consciousness from our minds. Seconds or less. Trying to block the pain and the despair filling my head, I plodded back to our tools and looked for something that might cut the cables. It was all I could think of doing: anything to get those quoins as far from each other as possible.
The tools were useless. I knew it instantly. A flame-cutter that needed a minute to be primed; diamond-headed jaws that ran off a hydraulic pump that was not yet connected; saws and blades that might sever a line but would need minutes of preparation and patient work to do the job. None of it anywhere near fast or dependable enough for what we needed.
“Fura!” I said, bellowing her name above the whistle. “Ghostie blade! Tell me you brought a Ghostie blade!”
She looked back at me, a dull incomprehension showing in her face. It was as if the idea I had mooted was both peculiar and foreign to her thinking. Something, be it the glowy, or the mental pressure of that whistle, was dulling her concentration.
“Ghostie!” I shouted.
At last she understood. She stepped back from the stuck trolley, and with a slow and deliberate motion reached to extract something from under the sleeve of her suit. It was no use to her, not there and then, so she dropped it to the floor and gave it a firm kick in my direction.
The Ghostie blade sped across the floor, spinning end to end. Of course, it was all but invisible unless I averted my eyes, and also my mental focus, as if to hold the idea of it in my head, the sharp and dangerous actuality of what it was, I was first obliged to forget that it existed at all.
I stepped out of its way. It spun to a halt, and—still looking anywhere but at the direct location of the blade—I reached out for its handle, or where I believed it to be. My fingers closed. Had I misjudged, and closed my mitt on the blade itself, I would have felt a cold clean absence snip the fingers from my knuckles.
I had not made an error. I squeezed the handle, took the blade with me, and leaned out beyond the winch to touch the edge to the still-taut line of the cable.
It severed instantly. Whatever braking mechanism had slowed the trolley until that moment, its effect was now negated. The trolley began to gather speed, carrying its glowing, shrill-singing cargo with it. The yellow glow dropped to a sepia emanation, then darkness ruled again—at least down the length of my tunnel.
I went to Lagganvor’s trolley and severed his cable. He was still on the ground, writhing with his hands either side of his helmet. It was bad for me, but not so bad as it seemed to be for him, and I wondered if the neural mechanisms of his eye were enhancing the effect, giving the whistling an additional pathway into his brain. I watched until his trolley had also taken its glow with it. Then I went to Prozor and she took the Ghostie blade from me, motioning—because it was now impossible to speak—that I should go and assist Fura.
Her trolley was still stuck on the level part of its tracks. Fura leaned into it from behind, though, and so did I, and with the two of us applying all the force we could the trolley began to budge. Once it was moving, it was easier. We got it over the lip of the tunnel and then the cable snapped to tightness. Prozor had severed her own line by then, and came back to us with the Ghostie blade. She cut Fura’s trolley, the last of the four, and we watched as it rumbled back down the tunnel.
The yellow glow had faded, but Fura’s little bag of quoins was still ablaze, and I did not think the whistling had lost any of its intensity. Perhaps, in bringing the quoins into proximity, we had unbottled something that could not now be contained.
“See to …” Fura was trying to say, nodding at Lagganvor, who was still squirming.
I had made a step in his direction when the first impact came. It was a soundless crash, transmitted through the fabric of the chamber. A few seconds later came a second, then a third, and by then I understood that these impacts were due to the trolleys, running into the far ends of their shafts. The fourth and final one soon followed.
The whistling stopped. It did not fade away, or phase out of our range of hearing. It simply abated, as if a door had been slammed shut.
The quoins in Fura’s bag went instantly dark.
I went to Lagganvor and helped him back to his feet, steadying him until he had found his balance.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I think so. Do we know what happened?”
“Only that it stopped.”
Fura stooped down to pick up her bag. Then she and Prozor came over to us. Now the only light in the room came from our helmet lamps, casting a warm brassy glow instead of the former yellow. Fura opened the bag fully and took out one of the quoins.
“They’ve gone back to how they were,” she said, sounding less as if she believed it than if she were presenting the statement for our validation, more in hope than expectation.
“Let me see,” Prozor said, taking the quoin.
She examined it between her gloves.
“We were in time,” Fura said. “Something began, some reaction, but we broke it in time. There’ll be a pile of quoins at the base of each of those tunnels, but no harm done. They can’t be destroyed that easily.”
“Look at the quoin,” Prozor said, offering it up before her visor. “Look at it. Properly.”
We did, all of us. The quoin was dull again now, no longer glowing. But it had not reverted to its former state. The pattern of bars on its surface, the interlocking arrangement that signified—according to our custom—the denomination of the quoin—that pattern was in a restless, fluttering flux. Bars were appearing and fading, the quoin’s value impossible to specify from moment to mome
nt.
“Something’s happened,” Lagganvor said. “Or is happening.”
Prozor took another quoin from Fura’s bag. The same effect was playing across the face of that one. I scooped out another and observed a similar flux.
“This had better stop,” I said. “If it doesn’t, these quoins are all but valueless.”
“You can bet it won’t be just the ones in that bag,” Lagganvor said. “All the ones that were in this chamber—they’ll all be affected. And not just those. Those were just the ones we saw. There’ll have been others, countless others, at the bottom of those tunnels.”
“No,” Fura said. “I won’t accept it. This wasn’t our doing. We just brought some quoins together. Maybe more than was ever in one place in any bank, but Bosa had been stockpiling them here for centuries. Why didn’t the ones at the bottom of those tunnels set off the same reaction?”
I did not wish to dismantle her argument, but one of us needed to say it. “We don’t know what’s down those tunnels, sister. Not even Lagganvor. For all we know all her quoins are stored in separate vaults, branching off down other tunnels, just as in this room. This whole rock could be riddled with sub-vaults, purely so that she never had to gather too many quoins in one place.”
“No,” Fura said, but with lessening conviction. “We didn’t do this. This wasn’t our fault.”
“Wait,” Prozor said sharply.
“What?” I asked.
“The pattern’s slowing.” She was still holding the quoin up to her face, her expression full of wonder and apprehension. “I think it’s settlin’ down again, goin’ back to a fixed denomination.”
I stared at the quoin, desperately hoping Prozor’s suspicion to be the case. And it was, I realised. The flux was definitely slowing, and out of that shift of permutations a particular pattern of bars was beginning to reassert itself, becoming dominant.
“She’s right,” Lagganvor said. “They’re stabilising again, regaining a fixed denomination.”
“All of them?”
Fura dug through the bag, her mouth lolling open in breathless anticipation. “Yes,” she answered finally. “All of them. They’re all right. They’re all settling down.”
Prozor’s quoin had stopped its fluttering completely. But she was still holding it before her, some cloud of doubt showing in the angles of her face. “It’s gone back all right.” She locked her eyes onto Fura. “Did you make a record of the denominations in this bag, before you brought ’em here?”
“No,” my sister said. “I just … no. They must have gone back to the same denominations. They can’t have changed.”
“I want to agree with you, girlie. But the thing is, unless we kept a tally, we don’t know what any of these was worth.”
“There was a fifty-bar quoin. One of them was a fifty-bar quoin.”
Prozor took the bag and delved through it quickly. After all her years on ships, she still had the keenest eye of any of us for reading denominations. “You sure about that, Fura? Cos there ain’t one now.”
“I swear it.”
“Then the denominations have scrambled,” Lagganvor said, with the reverence of someone witnessing some rare and fantastic phenomenon, perhaps for the first time. “All of them here, I’d wager it. Every quoin in The Miser, scrambled.” He let out a small, desperate laugh. “Doesn’t mean they’re valueless, by any means. The low ones might have got higher, for all we know. But different … certainly. Whatever the net worth of this cache … we can sure it’s not the same now. There’ll have to be an accounting.”
“What if …” I started saying, but interrupted myself before I allowed the full flowering of the idea, the dark and terrible notion that had begun to present itself.
“What if what?” Fura asked.
I held back before answering. I did not want to give voice to the thing that had settled in my head. But sooner or later it would occur to each of us.
“What if it’s not just these quoins,” I said, almost stammering as I forced out the words. “What if it’s every quoin. Every quoin everywhere. Every quoin in the Congregation.”
“No,” Fura stated, with a bold and categoric finality.
“No because you have an argument against it, or no because you don’t like it?”
“We’ll know,” Lagganvor said. “Soon enough. We’ll know. A thing like that … a scrambling of every quoin? It can’t have happened. But if it did … we’ll know. And quickly.”
None too gracefully, Prozor shoved the bag of quoins back to Fura. “Here’s your loot, girlie—for what it’s worth. Now why don’t we get back to the ship, and put our fears to bed?”
“It won’t be all of them,” Fura said. “It won’t be all of them.” As if repeating that incantation, like a prayer, might in some way make it true.
*
We winched the large trolley back up the slope of the first tunnel, passing the mute robot that I had not had—and still did not have—the courage to kill, and a few minutes later we were in the launch, on our way back to Revenger. While Fura worked the controls she also had the general squawk open, with the gain turned high enough to pick up the chatter and babble of the twenty thousand worlds of the Congregation. We could see it very handsomely, too, in the launch’s windows. The Old Sun’s spangling, shimmering light, all shades of ruby and purple, the glint and glimmer of all that was familiar, all that was homely, all that we had chosen to leave behind.
Voices scratched in and out of the speaker grille as Fura worked the squawk dial. Voices, declamations, laughter, bursts of music and song, high hysterical sports commentators, warbles and pulses of telegraphic code, banks and financial institutions muttering to each other across the intra-Congregational void.
“It’s all right,” she said, turning to us from her seat. “It’s been half an hour since whatever happened … happened. There’s nothing on any of these channels—just business as usual.” But she adjusted the dial a little more and a word tumbled out of the squawk that had each and every one of us turning cold.
“Quoins.”
She had gone past that channel and there were so many competing signals that there was little hope of locking in on that one transmission again. So she worked the dial a little further. The pattern of voices was starting to shift a little now. The dramas and musical broadcasts were being interrupted, the sports commentaries abandoned. The telegraphic codes were growing strident and repetitive: not routine signalling now, but urgent requests for clarification and re-transmission.
And more words, with one commonality.
Quoins.
Quoins and quoins.
Quoins, quoins and more quoins.
Reports of anomalies, developing rumours of unrest and confusion. The banks and chambers of commerce urging calm. Citizens being urged to conduct their business as usual. Promises that the unfolding situation was under urgent review and that normality would be restored very shortly.
“I didn’t want this,” Fura said, plaintively, directing her statement at me and me alone, as if I had the power to revoke the entire chain of actions that had brought us to this point. “I just wanted to know. I just needed to know.”
“Think of it,” I said, while Prozor and Lagganvor looked on, saying nothing. “Nothing’s guaranteed now. If those quoins really have scrambled, then there’s no continuity. The rich will probably still be quite rich, when all the accounting’s done. But not all of them, and maybe never as rich as they were. Some of those fortunes, if they were tied up in a small number of high-denomination quoins … they might very well have evaporated overnight. And there are people down there, people who were poor yesterday, down to literally their last quoin, who might be as rich as we ever were on Mazarile. If not richer.”
Fura swallowed. “They say they’ll put things right.”
“What else do you expect them to say? The word of the banks is the only thing standing between the Congregation and complete chaos. But you can bet they don’t know anything more about
this than we do. They’re grasping for answers.”
“The Crawlies will know. The aliens will know.”
“They may know what’s happened,” I said, correcting her gently. “But that doesn’t mean they’re in any position to put it right. Face it, Fura. You wanted to shake things up a bit. Well, you succeeded. Whatever we’re seeing the start of now … this is going to make every other financial crash look like a pleasant breeze on a summer’s day.”
She was still turning the dial. The clamour of voices, urgent and panicked, continued. But there were starting to be gaps in that clamour: the hiss and crackle of empty frequencies. Some of the stations were going off-air.
“This isn’t it,” Fura said. “This won’t be the end.”
“May not turn out to be the end, girlie,” Prozor said, chipping in at last. “But it ain’t going to be good, that I’m sure of.”
Fura’s hands were shaking. She was in no state to complete the final docking, so with a little persuasion I eased her from the control chair and finished the procedure myself, sliding us tail-first back into the maw of Revenger. After a little while, Surt and Tindouf made good the docking seal, and we were free to drift back aboard. We stripped out of our suits, barely speaking, until we gathered with the others in the galley. Doctor Eddralder and Merrix were already at the table, magnetic tankards set before them, but seemingly untouched. They had a troubled, diffident look about them. Strambli was at the squawk console, repaired now, occasionally turning the dial from one blast of static to the next.
“First, we thought the Old Sun was coughing up a storm,” she said, looking no happier than her companions. “Drowning out the transmissions. But that ain’t it, is it? We got snatches, just before the stations started going silent. Some talk of quoins going mad. Not just one or two, but all of them, everywhere. Suddenly no one being sure what they’re worth anymore. Now, I ain’t the shrewdest cove who’s ever sailed—”
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