by Philip Reeve
The tear reached the end of Threnody’s nose, thought about hiding in her nostril, then fell with the faintest sound onto her tunic.
“Go through the next gate,” said Mordaunt 90. “You will be safe there.”
The centaur vanished, like a flame blown out. On the tracks ahead the mobile gun stirred like a waking dinosaur, swung its massive turret away from the Ghost Wolf, and stepped with surprising daintiness off the line. The Ghost Wolf moved forward, gathering speed, a few of the Guardian’s drones flying alongside as it ran toward the K-gate.
“What is the next world, train?” asked Threnody. “Where is the Guardian sending us?”
“End of the line,” said the Ghost Wolf. “A world called Tristesse. A station called Desdemor.”
When it had passed, the monstrous gun squatted over the rails again. Through its sights, Mordaunt 90 watched the Prell wartrain approach, slowing as it came in visual range. It projected its armored sentry hologram into the crew compartment and said, “This is a closed world. The gate ahead is barred to you. Reverse, and return to your permitted lines, or you will be destroyed…”
16
In the afternoons, when the rings of the gas giant Hammurabi stood like emerald arches above the Sea of Sadness, Yanvar Malik would sit on the balcony of his suite at the Terminal Hotel and play chess with the golden man. He always lost, because the brain of the golden man was linked to the vast mind of Mordaunt 90, which now took up almost all Desdemor’s data raft. But Malik did not mind losing. He felt flattered that Mordaunt 90 respected him enough not to take pity on him and let him win.
Malik had arrived on the water-moon Tristesse with a mission led by an interface of the Guardian Anais Six. They had been trying to stop Raven from opening a new K-gate, but they had failed. Malik sometimes thought he could see the colorless glow of the new gate reflecting from the clouds on the southern horizon. Raven had died out there, on the island where his new gate stood. The interface of Anais Six had died too, and Malik had let Raven’s young companion, Zen Starling, and the Motorik Nova take their old red train and vanish through the gate. Then he had walked back along the viaduct to the city of Desdemor.
When he reached it, he found that Mordaunt 90 had already taken control of the place; it was filling up the water-moon’s empty data raft and sending surveillance drones to examine the new gate. Carlota, the Motorik who had kept Malik company on his walk back to Desdemor, had her memory wiped of everything relating to Raven’s schemes and went calmly back to her job as manager of the hotel. The other survivors of his team, who had been left to guard the station and had no knowledge of Raven’s gate, were sent home. But Malik was ordered to stay.
The Guardian spoke to him from the Datasea, through the speakers in the hotel lobby. It questioned him about what he had seen when the new gate opened, and he told it everything. The only thing he kept from it was the fact that he had killed the interface of Anais Six himself, to stop it from harming Zen and Nova — but perhaps Mordaunt 90 guessed that part.
Malik assumed that the Guardian would kill him when it had finished with its questions. He had learned a lot about matters that the Guardians had long kept secret; it could hardly risk sending him back to share what he knew with other people. He did not much care. He had spent a long time hunting Raven, and now that Raven was dead, he felt that he was ready to die too.
But he did not die. He moved into Raven’s old suite, high in the hotel. He wore the clothes he found in Raven’s wardrobes: crisp summer shirts, suits of white linen. He swam in the hotel pools, walked on the beaches. And one day the golden man arrived to keep him company.
Sometimes, in the months that had followed, Malik had wondered if he was dead, and this was some sort of afterlife, because everything was very pleasant and nothing ever changed. But this particular afternoon, something did. Just as the light was fading, and Mordaunt 90 was getting ready to checkmate him, he suddenly paused and looked up.
“What?” asked Malik.
The eyes of the interface were like small golden suns. They looked through Malik, concentrating on new information that was spilling into the data raft. “A train just came in on the old Dog Star Line,” he said. “Not one of mine. It seems that the version of me that was guarding the gate on Pnin has decided to let us have some visitors.”
The Terminal Hotel was built directly above Desdemor’s K-bahn station, but it was a very tall hotel — its architect had won an award for taking full advantage of Desdemor’s low gravity — and by the time Malik and the Mordaunt 90 interface had made their way down to platform level, the Ghost Wolf had already pulled in.
The interface waited in the hotel lobby while Malik walked out along the platform to meet the newcomers. Two young women, not much more than girls. One tall, the other short and runty. The runty one was holding a gun in her hand, but it was not pointed at Malik, just hanging there by her side as if she were too tired to lift it. They both looked exhausted. Malik thought there was something familiar about the tall one. He could not place her at first, and then he remembered that night on Sundarban, just before he came here. The proud, angry girl whom Lyssa Delius had said she would turn into an empress.
The short one squared up to him like a fighter and said, “Hey, is there anything to eat on this planet?”
*
There was. The Terminal Hotel had five restaurants, and their freezers had still been half full when visitors stopped coming to the water-moon Tristesse. Carlota and her Motorik staff were able to provide just about any meal you could think of. But Threnody and Chandni were almost past thinking, so Malik ordered for them: big bowls of red and saffron rice, flatbreads, spicy little curry dishes that made their eyes stream, fish from the Sea of Sadness cooked in coconut milk, sweet fried seaweed and rice dumplings. He sat with them in the empty restaurant while they ate, checking the news updates that the Ghost Wolf had just uploaded to the data raft.
That was how he learned that his old friend Lyssa Delius had been killed.
“Where’s the interface gone?” asked Chandni Hansa, looking around the big, dark restaurant while she helped herself to another heap of honey-fried banana chips.
“It’s listening, I expect,” said Malik. “It’s not just a cloned body. It’s everywhere. The drones that shadowed your train when you arrived were Mordaunt 90; it’s in the Datasea, the raft, the hotel’s systems… It’s listening.”
“I don’t know why he’s a golden man,” said Threnody. “Mordaunt 90 is supposed to be a centaur, isn’t it? The Shiguri Monad is the one who appears as a golden man.”
“He’s cute, though. Maybe he’s designed to appeal to you,” said Chandni.
Threnody blushed, saying, “He looks like the boys I had posters of on my bedroom wall when I was twelve. I used to like ponies better in those days. It should have stuck with the centaur.”
“I think he’s designed to appeal to me,” said Malik.
“Oh,” said Chandni and Threnody, and were quiet for a bit, because although they’d heard stories about human beings who had love affairs with the Guardians, they had never expected to sit down at table with one, and if they had, they certainly wouldn’t have imagined that he would look like battered old Yanvar Malik.
“Why is it here?” asked Threnody after a while. “What’s been happening? Is Raven still here? Zen Starling? That Moto girl?”
Malik shook his head. “They’re gone. I don’t want to talk about it, though. If I tell you too much, Mordaunt 90 might never let you leave.”
Threnody shrugged, a gesture she had picked up from Chandni. “I can’t leave anyway,” she said self-pityingly. “Where would I go? What would I do? I’m nothing now. I’ve gone from a Noon to a no one in the space of a few days…”
(Chandni rolled her eyes and started to play a tiny invisible violin.)
“Except I was always a no one, really,” Threnody went on. “I was just Lyssa De
lius’s puppet, and now she’s dead and there’s nobody to pull my strings—”
Malik banged the flat of his hand on the table. “You think she chose you at random?” he said. “Of course she didn’t. She saw something in you. I did too, that night on Sundarban, after you’d walked out of that crashed shuttle. Most people would be helpless with shock after something like that, but not you. You wanted a fight. That’s why Lyssa made you Empress. Because she knew you were strong.”
Threnody looked up at him half hopefully. She wished Lyssa Delius had told her that in person. She didn’t feel strong.
“You too,” he said, turning his fierce eyes on Chandni Hansa. “I know who you are. Last time I saw you, it was through the window of a freezer. You worked for Raven, and Raven was the smartest person I’ve ever come up against. He picked his little helpers carefully. You’re both extraordinary. That’s how you made it here. And that’s why you’re going to be all right.”
There wasn’t much to say after that. Even Malik seemed a bit shocked by his outburst. After a while he said, “You should get some sleep. Carlota has made up rooms for you. Rest. Maybe tomorrow Mordaunt 90 will let us know its plans for you both.”
*
They went to their rooms. Threnody was asleep on her feet in the elevator, but Chandni never slept easily. It was as if her body knew that she’d had enough sleep in the freezers to last her a lifetime. She dozed for an hour in the big hotel bed (not as soft as the one she’d had at the palace, but not bad). Then she woke and lay trying to process what had happened in the past few days, but it was all just a blur of noise and fear.
Long after midnight she got up and went out onto the balcony. Weird birds were hooting somewhere. Yanvar Malik walked alone in the hotel gardens. Chandni watched him climb a little ornamental hill that looked out through a wide space between other buildings to the sea. The sky was dark, but a faint greenish phosphorescence showed in the waves, making a silhouette of him. He lifted a glass he had been carrying, drained it, and raised it high, saluting the night or the ocean or something — saluting, she suddenly realized, Lyssa Delius. She thought about how kind he had been, even though he must have wished that the Ghost Wolf had brought his old friend here, not two lost girls. She liked the old soldier, and she almost trusted him. He was the first person she’d met who seemed as out of place as she was.
Far off, where the sea met the sky, a light the color of nothing at all reflected very faintly on the clouds.
17
On the line from Coalsack Junction to Luna Verde there is a station called Baidrama where nobody ever gets on and nobody ever gets off. Most trains race through it without stopping, but sometimes the Timetable Authority makes one wait a few minutes there to ease congestion farther up the line. It is a night-bound planet, far from its sun, lifeless and airless. The huge blocks that the lamps of passing trains light up as they race across its surface are not houses or offices but data storage centers.
From a spur that runs away into darkness between some of those blocks, a strange locomotive makes its way onto the mainline. It is long and featureless, striped in black and yellow like a wingless wasp, and it hauls no cars. It heads through one of Baidrama’s K-gates to Nokomis, then Glorieta. It is night on both those worlds, and people living in the trackside towns hear the train go by and stir in their sleep, wondering if it really was a train. It makes almost all the noises they associate with trains: the engine roar, the whoosh of air over carriage roofs, the rattle of couplings, the thin sewing machine sounds of wheels on track. But the noise that really makes a train a train is missing. This loco does not sing.
And on the next world, Przedwiosnie, it vanishes onto the Dog Star Line, and no one hears it at all after that. Not until it rolls through the K-gate into Desdemor, where the interface of Mordaunt 90, out for a stroll on the empty seafronts, feels another Guardian uploading itself into Tristesse’s Datasea.
*
The hotel had printed a new headset for Threnody, but she had taken it off when she went to bed. Chandni had to come into her room and shake her to wake her up. The green light of the gas giant Hammurabi poured through the big windows like mint sunshine. Chandni said, “It’s nearly midday. You’ve been asleep fourteen straight hours. A new train’s arrived.”
Threnody rolled over and tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes. “What train?”
“I don’t know. It hasn’t come into the station; it’s waiting back up the line, near the K-gate. Malik and his boyfriend seem to think it’s important.”
Threnody went to use the bathroom and splash cold water on her face, then down to the ground floor wearing the loose summer clothes that the staff had left in her room for her while her own were being cleaned. Breakfast or lunch or something was being served on the veranda, but Malik and the Mordaunt 90 interface looked so serious that Threnody abandoned any thought of eating and said, “What’s happened?”
“Another visitor, Empress,” said Malik. “A new train just came in carrying a Guardian.”
Threnody looked around, expecting to see some weird fairy-tale figure lounging at one of the veranda tables. There was only the golden man, who said, “Not an interface, Threnody. Our guests have arrived in information form; they are waiting in the Datasea to talk with me. I think you should join me.”
Threnody thought differently. She’d dipped in the Datasea to meet a Guardian before, and it had been a frightening experience. But she could not think of any way to say no to the Mordaunt 90 interface, who was smiling kindly and holding out a golden hand to her. He was beautiful, she thought, as she went toward him. His skin didn’t look as if had been painted gold; it actually was golden, as if the color lay just beneath the surface, or he had honey-colored light instead of blood.
She reached out, his fingers closed around hers, and suddenly she wasn’t on the veranda anymore.
The last time she dived in the Datasea it had looked like an actual sea, and then there had been a room where Anais Six was waiting for her. This time, she found herself in a garden. It had high, dark hedges and black trees. Snow was falling steadily from a sky that was almost white. There was a fountain, but it was frozen and festooned with thick icicles. The air wasn’t cold, though. It wasn’t even air. Everything here was an illusion made of code. Even Threnody herself. She looked down and saw the virtual body that Mordaunt 90 had given her. It seemed to be based on one of her coronation photos, and was dressed in a long gown of red silk with an embroidered K-train spiraling around the skirts and up onto the bodice. She had hair again too! But when she reached up to touch it she felt the tufty stubble of the emergency haircut Chandni had given her, and sensed for a moment the veranda tables around her, and Malik and Chandni looking on.
“You are in no danger, Threnody Noon,” said Mordaunt 90, its golden interface looking the same in this virtual world as it did in the real one. She smiled at it nervously. It was certainly a more reassuring sort of Guardian than Anais Six had been. It was not looking at her, though, and when she turned to follow its golden gaze, she saw something approaching down one of the long paths that stretched away between the hedges. She wasn’t sure what at first — a cloud of butterflies? Birds? Drones? Then she saw that they were fish: two shoals of small black and white fish, swimming through the virtual air the way real fish swim through water.
The fish came closer, circling the fountain.
“This?” said Mordaunt 90 suddenly, answering a question that Threnody had not heard. “This is a meeting place I have made, where our human guest can feel at home. Talk so Threnody can hear. You are the ones who drove her here, you and your cruel Prells. You owe her that.”
The fish darted toward each other, scales shimmering in snow-light. They poured past each other, and somehow each shoal solidified and became a girl. One was black with long white hair, the other white with long black hair. They were both naked. The black and white hair tangled, blown on breezes Threnody co
uld not feel, until the two girls were knotted together by its ends.
“As you have probably guessed,” said Mordaunt 90, “these are the Twins. None of us is quite sure if they count as one Guardian or two. Some of us constructed Twin 1 soon after the first K-gate was opened. It was designed for security purposes — a warrior who would defend us in case we found anything beyond the K-gates that posed a threat. Perhaps we made it a little too paranoid, because it instantly made a backup copy of itself, and it has existed as a dual personality ever since…”
“Are there any more of our secrets you wish to share with your new pet?” asked the Twins, stalking toward Threnody, parting to pass on either side of her so that she had to duck to let the scarf of their knotted hair pass over her head. They turned behind her, looking her up and down. “Why did you bring her here?”
“It was a whim,” said Mordaunt 90. “The version of me on Pnin felt sorry for her. Poor child, hounded halfway across the Network by those beastly Prells. I can’t think what you see in that family.”
“The Prells are a useful tool,” hissed one of the Twins, the white one.
“More use than your soft Noons!” sneered the other.
Mordaunt 90 sighed. “We have been through all this. We agreed — at least the others agreed — that you should be allowed to install your Prells as the ruling family, and you promised a bloodless takeover. But a hundred people died, Twins!”
“A hundred!” scoffed the black Twin. “What are a hundred humans, for we who have seen a hundred billion live and die! Humans are all the same, anyway. A hundred will not be missed.”