Hirz spoke from inside her own, smaller version of the armoured suit. ‘You’d better not be taking the piss.’
‘Forqueray?’ Childe said. ‘We’re nearly there now. Put us down on the surface two klicks from the base of the Spire. We’ll cross the remaining distance on foot.’
Forqueray obliged, bringing the triangular formation down. Our suits had been slaved to his, but now we regained independent control.
Through the suit’s numerous layers of armour and padding I felt the rough texture of the ground beneath my feet. I held up a thickly gauntleted hand and felt the breeze of Golgotha’s thin atmosphere caress my palm. The tactile transmission was flawless, and when I moved, the suit flowed with me so effortlessly that I had no sense of being encumbered by it. The view was equally impressive, with the suit projecting an image directly into my visual field rather than forcing me to peer through a visor.
A strip along the top of my visual field showed a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view all around me, and I could zoom in on any part of it almost without thinking. Various overlays - sonar, radar, thermal, gravimetric - could be dropped over the existing visual field with the same ease. If I looked down I could even ask the suit to edit me out of the image, so that I could view the scene from a disembodied perspective. As we walked along the suit threw traceries of light across the scenery: an etchwork of neon which would now and then coalesce around an odd-shaped rock or peculiar pattern of ground markings. After several minutes of this I had adjusted the suit’s alertness threshold to what I felt was a useful level of protectivity, neither too watchful nor too complacent.
Childe and Forqueray had taken the lead on the ground. They would have been difficult to distinguish, but my suit had partially erased their suits, so that they seemed to walk unprotected save for a ghostly second skin. When they looked at me they would perceive the same consensual illusion.
Trintignant followed a little way behind, moving with the automaton-like stiffness I had now grown almost accustomed to.
Celestine followed, with me a little to her stern.
Hirz brought up the rear, small and lethal and - now that I knew her a little better - quite unlike any of the few children I had ever met.
And ahead - rising, ever rising - was the thing we had come all this way to best.
It had been visible, of course, long before we set down. The Spire was a quarter of a kilometre high, after all. But I think we had all chosen to ignore it; to map it out of our perceptions, until we were much closer. It was only now that we were allowing those mental shields to collapse; forcing our imaginations to confront the fact of the tower’s existence.
Huge and silent, it daggered into the sky.
It was much as Childe had shown us, except that it seemed infinitely more massive; infinitely more present. We were still a quarter of a kilometre from the thing’s base, and yet the flared top - the bulb-shaped finial - seemed to be leaning back over us, constantly on the point of falling and crushing us. The effect was exacerbated by the occasional high-altitude cloud that passed overhead, writhing in Golgotha’s fast, thin jetstreams. The whole tower looked as if it were toppling. For a long moment, taking in the immensity of what stood before us - its vast age; its vast, brooding capacity for harm - the idea of trying to reach the summit felt uncomfortably close to insanity.
Then a small, rational voice reminded me that this was exactly the effect the Spire’s builders would have sought.
Knowing that, it was fractionally easier to take the next step closer to the base.
‘Well,’ Celestine said. ‘It looks like we’ve found Argyle.’
Childe nodded. ‘Yes. Or what’s left of the poor bastard.’
We had found several body parts by then, but his was the only one that was anywhere near being complete. He had lost a leg inside the Spire, but had been able to crawl to the exit before the combination of bleeding and asphyxiation killed him. It was here - dying - that he had been interviewed by Childe’s envoy, which had only then emerged from its hiding place.
Perhaps he had imagined himself in the presence of a benevolent steel angel.
He was not well preserved. There was no bacterial life on Golgotha, and nothing that could be charitably termed weather, but there were savage dust-storms, and these must have intermittently covered and revealed the body, scouring it in the process. Parts of his suit were missing, and his helmet had cracked open, exposing his skull. Papery sheets of skin adhered to the bone here and there, but not enough to suggest a face.
Childe and Forqueray regarded the corpse uneasily, while Trintignant knelt down and examined it in more detail. A float-cam belonging to the Ultra floated around, observing the scene with goggling arrays of tightly packed lenses.
‘Whatever took his leg off did it cleanly,’ the Doctor reported, pulling back the tattered layers of the man’s suit fabric to expose the stump. ‘Witness how the bone and muscle have been neatly severed along the same plane, like a geometric slice through a platonic solid? I would speculate that a laser was responsible for this, except that I see no sign of cauterisation. A high-pressure water-jet might have achieved the same precision of cut, or even an extremely sharp blade.’
‘Fascinating, Doc,’ Hirz said, kneeling down next to him. ‘I’ll bet it hurt like fuck, too, wouldn’t you?’
‘Not necessarily. The degree of pain would depend acutely on the manner in which the nerve ends were truncated. Shock does not appear to have been the primary agent in this man’s demise.’ Doctor Trintignant fingered the remains of a red fabric band a little distance above the end of the leg. ‘Nor was the blood loss as rapid as might have been expected given the absence of cauterisation. This band was most likely a tourniquet, probably applied from his suit’s medical kit. The same kit almost certainly included analgesics.’
‘It wasn’t enough to save him, though,’ Childe said.
‘No.’ Trintignant stood up, the movement reminding me of an escalator. ‘But you must concede that he did rather well, considering the impediments.’
For most of its height Blood Spire was no thicker than a few dozen metres, and considerably narrower just below the bulb-like upper part. But, like a slender chess piece, its lower parts swelled out considerably to form a wide base. That podium-like mass was perhaps fifty metres in diameter: a fifth of the structure’s height. From a distance it appeared to rest solidly on the base: a mighty obelisk requiring the deepest of foundations to anchor it to the ground.
But it didn’t.
The Spire’s base failed to touch the surface of Golgotha at all, but floated above it, spaced by five or six clear metres of air. It was as if someone had constructed a building slightly above the ground, kicked away the stilts, and it had simply stayed there.
We all walked confidently towards the rim and then stopped; none of us were immediately willing to step under that overhang.
‘Forqueray?’ Childe said.
‘Yes?’
‘Let’s see what that drone of yours has to say.’
Forqueray had his float-cam fly under the rim, orbiting the underside of the Spire in a lazily widening spiral. Now and then it fingered the base with a spray of laser-light, and once or twice even made contact, skittering against the flat surface. Forqueray remained impassive, glancing slightly down as he absorbed the data being sent back to his suit.
‘Well?’ Celestine said. ‘What the hell’s keeping it up?’
Forqueray took a step under the rim. ‘No fields; not even a minor perturbation of Golgotha’s own magnetosphere. No significant alterations in the local gravitational vector, either. And - before we assume more sophistication than is strictly necessary - there are no concealed supports.’
Celestine was silent for a few moments before answering, ‘All right. What if the Spire doesn’t weigh anything? There’s air here; not much of it I’ll grant you - but what if the Spire’s mostly hollow? There might be enough buoyancy to make the thing float, like a balloon.’
‘Th
ere isn’t,’ Forqueray said, opening a fist to catch the cam, which flew into his grasp like a trained kestrel. ‘Whatever’s above us is solid matter. I can’t read its mass, but it’s blocking an appreciable cosmic-ray flux, and none of our scanning methods can see through it.’
‘Forqueray’s right,’ Childe said. ‘But I understand your reluctance to accept this, Celestine. It’s perfectly normal to feel a sense of denial.’
‘Denial?’
‘That what we are confronting is truly alien. But I’m afraid you’ll get over it, just the way I did.’
‘I’ll get over it when I feel like getting over it,’ Celestine said, joining Forqueray under the dark ceiling.
She looked up and around, less in the manner of someone admiring a fresco than in the manner of a mouse cowering beneath a boot.
But I knew exactly what she was thinking.
In four centuries of deep space travel there had been no more than glimpses of alien sentience. We had long suspected they were out there somewhere. But that suspicion had grown less fervent as the years passed; world after world had revealed only faint, time-eroded traces of cultures that might once have been glorious but which were now utterly destroyed. The Pattern Jugglers were clearly the products of intelligence, but not necessarily intelligent themselves. And - though they had been spread from star to star in the distant past - they did not now depend on any form of technology that we recognised. The Shrouders were little better: secretive minds cocooned inside shells of restructured spacetime.
They had never been glimpsed, and their nature and intentions remained worryingly unclear.
Yet Blood Spire was different.
For all its strangeness; for all that it mocked our petty assumptions about the way matter and gravity should conduct themselves, it was recognisably a manufactured thing. And, I told myself, if it had managed to hang above Golgotha’s surface until now, it was extremely unlikely to choose this moment to come crashing down.
I stepped across the threshold, followed by the others.
‘Makes you wonder what kind of beings built it,’ I said. ‘Whether they had the same hopes and fears as us, or whether they were so far beyond us as to seem like Gods.’
‘I don’t give a shit who built it,’ Hirz said. ‘I just want to know how to get into the fucking thing. Any bright ideas, Childe?’
‘There’s a way,’ he said.
We followed him until we stood in a small, nervous huddle under the centre of the ceiling. It had not been visible before, but directly above us was a circle of utter blackness against the mere gloom of the Spire’s underside.
‘That?’ Hirz said.
‘That’s the only way in,’ Childe said. ‘And the only way you get out alive.’
I said, ‘Roland - how exactly did Argyle and his team get inside?’
‘They must have brought something to stand on. A ladder or something.’
I looked around. ‘There’s no sign of it now, is there?’
‘No, and it doesn’t matter. We don’t need anything like that - not with these suits. Forqueray?’
The Ultra nodded and tossed the float-cam upwards.
It caught flight and vanished into the aperture. Nothing happened for several seconds, other than the occasional stutter of red light from the hole. Then the cam emerged, descending again into Forqueray’s hand.
‘There’s a chamber up there,’ Forqueray said. ‘Flat-floored, surrounding the hole. It’s twenty metres across, with a ceiling just high enough to let us stand upright. It’s empty. There’s what looks like a sealed door leading out of the chamber into the rest of the Spire.’
‘Can we be sure there’s nothing harmful in it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Childe said. ‘But Argyle said the first room was safe. We’ll just have to take his word on that one.’
‘And there’s room for all of us up there?’
Forqueray nodded. ‘Easily.’
I suppose there should have been more ceremony to the act, but there was no sense of significance, or even foreboding, as we rose into the ceiling. It was like the first casual step onto the tame footslopes of a mountain, unweighted by any sense of the dangers that undoubtedly lay ahead.
Inside it was exactly as Forqueray had described.
The chamber was dark, but the float-cam provided some illumination and our suits’ sensors were able to map out the chamber’s shape and overlay this information on our visual fields.
The floor had a metalled quality to it, dented here and there, and the edge where it met the hole was rounded and worn.
I reached down to touch it, feeling a hard, dull alloy which nonetheless seemed as if it would yield given sufficient pressure. Data scrolled onto my visual readout, informing me that the floor had a temperature only one hundred and fifteen degrees above absolute zero. My palm chemosensor reported that the floor was mainly iron, laced with carbon woven into allotropic forms it could not match against any in its experience. There were microscopic traces of almost every other stable isotope in the periodic table, with the odd exception of silver. All of this was inferred, for when the chemosensor attempted to shave off a microscopic layer of the flooring for more detailed analysis, it gave a series of increasingly heated error messages before falling silent.
I tried the chemosensor against part of my own suit.
It had stopped working.
‘Fix that,’ I instructed my suit, authorising it to divert whatever resources it required to the task.
‘Problem, Richard?’ asked Childe.
‘My suit’s damaged. Minor, but annoying. I don’t think the Spire was too thrilled about my taking a sample of it.’
‘Shit. I probably should have warned you of that. Argyle’s lot had the same problem. It doesn’t like being cut into, either. I suspect you got off with a polite warning.’
‘Generous of it,’ I said.
‘Be careful, all right?’ Childe then told everyone else to disable their chemosensors until told otherwise. Hirz grumbled, but everyone else quietly accepted what had to be done.
In the meantime I continued my own survey of the room, counting myself lucky that my suit had not provoked a stronger reaction. The chamber’s circular wall was fashioned from what looked like the same hard, dull alloy, devoid of detail except for the point where it framed what was obviously a door, raised a metre above the floor. Three blocky steps led up to it.
The door itself was one metre wide and perhaps twice that in height.
‘Hey,’ Hirz said. ‘Feel this.’
She was kneeling down, pressing a palm against the floor.
‘Careful,’ I said. ‘I just did that and—’
‘I’ve turned off my chemo-whatsit, don’t worry.’
‘Then what are you—’
‘Why don’t you reach down and see for yourself?’
Slowly, we all knelt down and touched the floor. When I had felt it before it had been as cold and dead as the floor of a crypt, yet that was no longer the case. Now it was vibrating; as if somewhere not too far from here a mighty engine was shaking itself to pieces: a turbine on the point of breaking loose from its shackles. The vibration rose and fell in throbbing waves. Once every thirty seconds or so it reached a kind of crescendo, like a great slow inhalation.
‘It’s alive,’ Hirz said.
‘It wasn’t like that just now.’
‘I know.’ Hirz turned and looked at me. ‘The fucking thing just woke up, that’s why. It knows we’re here.’
THREE
I moved to the door and studied it properly for the first time.
Its proportions were reassuringly normal, requiring only that we stoop down slightly to step through. But for now the door was sealed by a smooth sheet of metal, which would presumably slide across once we had determined how to open it. The only guidance came from the door’s thick metal frame, which was inscribed with faint geometric markings.
I had not noticed them before.
The markings were on either s
ide of the door, on the uprights of the frame. Beginning from the bottom on the left-hand side, there was a dot - it was too neatly circular to be accidental - a flat-topped equilateral triangle, a pentagon and then a heptagonal figure. On the right-hand side there were three more figures with eleven, thirteen and twenty sides respectively.
‘Well?’ Hirz was looking over my shoulder. ‘Any bright ideas?’
‘Prime numbers,’ I said. ‘At least, that’s the simplest explanation I can think of. The number of vertices of the shapes on the left-hand frame are the first four primes: one, three, five and seven.’
‘And on the other frame?’
Childe answered for me. ‘The eleven-sided figure is the next one in the sequence. Thirteen’s one prime too high, and twenty isn’t a prime at all.’
‘So you’re saying if we choose eleven, we win?’ Hirz reached out her hand, ready to push her hand against the lowest figure on the right, which she could reach without ascending the three steps. ‘I hope the rest of the tests are this simp—’
‘Steady, old girl.’ Childe had caught her wrist. ‘Mustn’t be too hasty. We shouldn’t do anything until we’ve arrived at a consensus. Agreed?’
Hirz pulled back her hand. ‘Agreed . . .’
It took only a few minutes for everyone to agree that the eleven-sided figure was the obvious choice. Celestine did not immediately accede; she looked long and hard at the right-hand frame before concurring with the original choice.
‘I just want to be careful, that’s all,’ she said. ‘We can’t assume anything. They might think from right to left, so that the figures on the right form the sequence which those on the left are supposed to complete. Or they might think diagonally, or something even less obvious.’
Childe nodded. ‘And the obvious choice might not always be the right one. There might be a deeper sequence - something more elegant - which we’re just not seeing. That’s why I wanted Celestine along. If anyone’ll pick out those subtleties, it’s her.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 315