They felt the pain as fully as Childe did, even if they were not willing to admit it.
‘How long did you spend awake each time?’ I asked.
‘No more than thirteen hours. That was usually sufficient to tell if the message was interesting or not. I’d allow myself one or two hours to catch up on the news; what was going on in the wider universe. But I had to be disciplined. If I’d stayed awake longer, the attraction of returning to city life would have become overwhelming. That room began to feel like a prison.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Surely the subjective time must have passed very quickly?’
‘You’ve obviously never spent any time in reefersleep, Richard. There’s no consciousness when you’re frozen, granted — but the transitions to and from the cold state are like an eternity, crammed with strange dreams.’
‘But you hoped the rewards would be worth it?’
Childe nodded. ‘And, indeed, they may well have been. I was last woken six months ago, and I’ve not returned to the chamber since. Instead, I’ve spent that time gathering together the resources and the people for a highly unusual expedition.’
Now he made the table change its projection, zooming in on one particular star.
‘I won’t bore you with catalogue numbers, suffice to say that this is a system which no one around this table — with the possible exception of Forqueray — is likely to have heard of. There’ve never been any human colonies there, and no crewed vessel has ever passed within three light-years of it. At least, not until recently.’
The view zoomed in again, enlarging with dizzying speed.
A planet swelled up to the size of a skull, suspended above the table.
It was hued entirely in shades of grey and pale rust, cratered and gouged here and there by impacts and what must have been very ancient weathering processes. Though there was a suggestion of a wisp of atmosphere — a smoky blue halo encircling the planet — and though there were icecaps at either pole, the world looked neither habitable nor inviting.
‘Cheerful-looking place, isn’t it?’ Childe said. ‘I call it Golgotha.’
‘Nice name,’ Celestine said.
‘But not, unfortunately, a very nice planet.’ Childe made the view enlarge again, so that we were skimming the world’s bleak, apparently lifeless surface. ‘Pretty dismal, to be honest. It’s about the same size as Yellowstone, receiving about the same amount of sunlight from its star. Doesn’t have a moon. Surface gravity’s close enough to one gee that you won’t know the difference once you’re suited up. A thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, and no sign that anything’s ever evolved there. Plenty of radiation hitting the surface, but that’s about your only hazard, and one we can easily deal with. Golgotha’s tectonically dead, and there haven’t been any large impacts on her surface for a few million years.’
‘Sounds boring,’ Hirz said.
‘And it very probably is, but that isn’t the point. You see, there’s something on Golgotha.’
‘What kind of something?’ Celestine asked.
‘That kind,’ Childe said.
It came over the horizon.
It was tall and dark, its details indistinct. That first view of it was like the first glimpse of a cathedral’s spire through morning fog. It tapered as it rose, constricting to a thin neck before flaring out again into a bulb-shaped finial, which in turn tapered to a needle-sharp point.
Though it was impossible to say how large the thing was, or what it was made of, it was very obviously a structure, as opposed to a peculiar biological or mineral formation. On Grand Teton, vast numbers of tiny single-celled organisms conspired to produce the slime towers which were that world’s most famous natural feature, and while those towers reached impressive heights and were often strangely shaped, they were unmistakably the products of unthinking biological processes rather than conscious design. The structure on Golgotha was too symmetric for that, and entirely too solitary. If it had been a living thing, I would have expected to see others like it, with evidence of a supporting ecology of different organisms.
Even if it were a fossil, millions of years dead, I could not believe that there would be just one on the whole planet.
No. The thing had most definitely been put there.
‘A structure?’ I asked Childe.
‘Yes. Or a machine. It isn’t easy to decide.’ He smiled. ‘I call it Blood Spire. Almost looks innocent, doesn’t it? Until you look closer.’
We spun round the Spire, or whatever it was, viewing it from all directions. Now that we were closer, it was clear that the thing’s surface was densely detailed; patterned and textured with geometrically complex forms, around which snaked intestinal tubes and branching, veinlike bulges. The effect was to undermine my earlier certainty that the thing was non-biological.
Now it looked like some sinewy fusion of animal and machine: something that might have appealed in its grotesquerie to Childe’s demented uncle.
‘How tall is it?’ I asked.
‘Two hundred and fifty metres,’ Childe said.
I saw that now there were tiny glints on Golgotha’s surface, almost like metallic flakes which had fallen from the side of the structure.
‘What are those?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t I show you?’ Childe said.
He enlarged the view still further, until the glints resolved into distinct shapes.
They were people.
Or — more accurately — the remains of what had once been people. It was impossible to say how many there had been. All had been mutilated in some fashion: crushed or pruned or bisected; the tattered ruins of their spacesuits were still visible in one or two places. Severed parts accompanied the bodies, often several tens of metres from the rightful owner.
It was as if they had been flung away in a fit of temper.
‘Who were they?’ Forqueray asked.
‘A crew who happened to slow down in this system to make shield repairs,’ Childe said. ‘Their captain was called Argyle. They chanced upon the Spire and started exploring it, believing it to contain something of immense technological value.’
‘And what happened to them?’
‘They went inside in small teams, sometimes alone. Inside the Spire they passed through a series of challenges, each of which was harder than the last. If they made a mistake, the Spire punished them. The punishments were initially mild, but they became steadily more brutal. The trick was to know when to admit defeat.’
I leaned forward. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘Because Argyle survived. Not long, admittedly, but long enough for my machine to get some sense out of him. It had been on Golgotha the whole time, you see — watching Argyle’s arrival, hiding and recording them as they confronted the Spire. And it watched him crawl out of the Spire, shortly before the last of his colleagues was ejected.’
‘I’m not sure I’m prepared to trust either the testimony of a machine or a dying man,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to,’ Childe answered. ‘You need only consider the evidence of your eyes. Do you see those tracks in the dust? They all lead into the Spire, and there are almost none leading to the bodies.’
‘Meaning what?’ I said.
‘Meaning that they got inside, the way Argyle claimed. Observe also the way the remains are distributed. They’re not all at the same distance from the Spire. They must have been ejected from different heights, suggesting that some got closer to the summit than others. Again, it accords with Argyle’s story.’
With a sinking feeling of inevitability I saw where this was heading. ‘And you want us to go there and find out what it was they were so interested in. Is that it?’
He smiled. ‘You know me entirely too well, Richard.’
‘I thought I did. But you’d have to be quite mad to want to go anywhere near that thing.’
‘Mad? Possibly. Or simply very, very curious. The question is—’ He paused and leaned across the table to refill my glass, all the while maintainin
g eye contact. ‘Which are you?’
‘Neither,’ I said.
But Childe could be persuasive. A month later I was frozen aboard Forqueray’s ship.
TWO
We reached orbit around Golgotha.
Thawed from reefersleep we convened for breakfast, riding a travel pod upship to the lighthugger’s meeting room.
Everyone was there, including Trintignant and Forqueray, the latter inhaling from the same impressive array of flasks, retorts and spiralling tubes he had brought with him to Yellowstone. Trintignant had not slept with the rest of us, but looked none the worse for wear. He had, Childe said, his own rather specialised plumbing requirements, incompatible with standard reefersleep systems.
‘Well, how was it?’ Childe asked, throwing a comradely arm around my shoulders.
‘Every bit as… dreadful as I’d been led to expect.’ My voice was slurred, sentences taking an age to form in whatever part of my brain it was that handled language. ‘Still a bit fuzzy.’
‘Well, we’ll soon fix that. Trintignant can synthesise a medichine infusion to pep up those neural functions, can’t you, Doctor?’
Trintignant looked at me with his handsome, immobile mask of a face. ‘It would be no trouble at all, my dear fellow…’
‘Thanks.’ I steadied myself; my mind crawled with half-remembered images of the botched cybernetic experiments which had earned Trintignant his notoriety. The thought of him pumping tiny machines into my skull made my skin crawl. ‘But I’ll pass on that for now. No offence intended.’
‘And absolutely none taken.’ Trintignant gestured towards a vacant chair. ‘Come. Sit with us and join in the discussion. The topic, rather interestingly, is the dreams some of us experienced on the way here.’
‘Dreams… ?’ I said. ‘I thought it was just me. I wasn’t the only one?’
‘No,’ Hirz said, ‘you weren’t the only one. I was on a moon in one of them. Earth’s, I think. And I kept on trying to get inside this alien structure. Fucking thing kept killing me, but I’d always keep going back inside, like I was being brought back to life each time just for that.’
‘I had the same dream,’ I said, wonderingly. ‘And there was another dream in which I was inside some kind of—’ I halted, waiting for the words to assemble in my head. ‘Some kind of underground tomb. I remember being chased down a corridor by an enormous stone ball which was going to roll over me.’
Hirz nodded. ‘The dream with the hat, right?’
‘My God, yes.’ I grinned like a madman. ‘I lost my hat, and I felt this ridiculous urge to rescue it!’
Celestine looked at me with something between icy detachment and outright hostility. ‘I had that one too.’
‘Me too,’ Hirz said, chuckling. ‘But I said fuck the hat. Sorry, but with the kind of money Childe’s paying us, buying a new one ain’t gonna be my biggest problem.’
An awkward moment followed, for only Hirz seemed at all comfortable about discussing the generous fees Childe had arranged as payment for the expedition. The initial sums had been large enough, but upon our return to Yellowstone we would all receive nine times as much; adjusted to match any inflation which might occur during the time — between sixty and eighty years — which Childe said the journey would span.
Generous, yes.
But I think Childe knew that some of us would have joined him even without that admittedly sweet bonus.
Celestine broke the silence, turning to Hirz. ‘Did you have the one about the cubes, too?’
‘Christ, yes,’ the infiltration specialist said, as if suddenly remembering. ‘The cubes. What about you, Richard?’
‘Indeed,’ I answered, flinching at the memory of that one. I had been one of a party of people trapped inside an endless series of cubic rooms, many of which contained lethal surprises. ‘I was cut into pieces by a trap, actually. Diced, if I remember accurately.’
‘Yeah. Not exactly on my top ten list of ways to die, either.’
Childe coughed. ‘I feel I should apologise for the dreams. They were narratives I fed into your minds — Doctor Trintignant excepted — during the transition to and from reefersleep.’
‘Narratives?’ I said.
‘I adapted them from a variety of sources, thinking they’d put us all in the right frame of mind for what lies ahead.’
‘Dying nastily, you mean?’ Hirz asked.
‘Problem-solving, actually.’ Childe served pitch-black coffee as he spoke, as if all that was ahead of us was a moderately bracing stroll. ‘Of course, nothing that the dreams contained is likely to reflect anything that we’ll find inside the Spire… but don’t you feel better for having had them?’
I gave the matter some thought before responding.
‘Not exactly, no,’ I said.
Thirteen hours later we were on the surface, inspecting the suits Forqueray had provided for the expedition.
They were sleek white contraptions, armoured, powered and equipped with enough intelligence to fool a roomful of cyberneticians. They enveloped themselves around you, forming a seamless white surface which lent the wearer the appearance of a figurine moulded from soap. The suits quickly learned how you moved, adjusting and anticipating all the time like perfect dance partners.
Forqueray told us that each suit was capable of keeping its occupant alive almost indefinitely; that the suit would recycle bodily wastes in a near-perfect closed cycle, and could even freeze its occupant if circumstances merited such action. They could fly and would protect their user against just about any external environment, ranging from a vacuum to the crush of the deepest ocean.
‘What about weapons?’ Celestine asked, once we had been shown how to command the suits to do our bidding.
‘Weapons?’ Forqueray asked blankly.
‘I’ve heard about these suits, Captain. They’re supposed to contain enough firepower to take apart a small mountain.’
Childe coughed. ‘There won’t be any weapons, I’m afraid. I asked Forqueray to have them removed from the suits. No cutting tools, either. And you won’t be able to achieve as much with brute force as you would with an unmodified suit. The servos won’t allow it.’
‘I’m not sure I understand. You’re handicapping us before we go in?’
‘No — far from it. I’m just abiding by the rules that the Spire sets. It doesn’t allow weapons inside itself, you see — or anything else that might be used against it, like fusion torches. It senses such things and acts accordingly. It’s very clever.’
I looked at him. ‘Is this guesswork?’
‘Of course not. Argyle already learned this much. No point making exactly the same mistakes again, is there?’
‘I still don’t get it,’ Celestine said when we had assembled outside the shuttle, standing like so many white soap statuettes. ‘Why fight the thing on its own terms at all? There are bound to be weapons on Forqueray’s ship we could use from orbit; we could open it like a carcase.’
‘Yes,’ Childe said, ‘and in the process destroy everything we came this far to learn?’
‘I’m not talking about blowing it off the face of Golgotha. I’m just talking about clean, surgical dissection.’
‘It won’t work. The Spire is a living thing, Celestine. Or at least a machine intelligence many orders of magnitude cleverer than anything we’ve encountered to date. It won’t tolerate violence being used against it. Argyle learned that much.
‘Even if it can’t defend itself against such attacks — and we don’t know that — it will certainly destroy what it contains. We’ll still have lost everything.’
‘But still… no weapons?’
‘Not quite,’ Childe said, tapping the forehead region of his suit. ‘We still have our minds, after all. That’s why I assembled this team. If brute force would have been sufficient, I’d have had no need to scour Yellowstone for such fierce intellects.’
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.
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 313