‘A mountain doesn’t enjoy doing it, for a start. But the Spire does. It’s alive, Childe, living and breathing.’
‘It’s a machine, that’s all.’
‘But maybe a cleverer one than anything we’ve ever known before. A machine with a taste for blood, too. That’s not a great combination, Childe.’
He sighed. ‘Then you’re giving up as well?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Fine.’
He stepped through the door which Hirz had just used.
‘Where are you going?’ I said.
‘To try and talk some sense into her, that’s all.’
SEVEN
Ten hours later — buzzing with unnatural alertness; the need for sleep a distant, fading memory — we returned to Blood Spire.
‘What did he say to make you come back?’ I said to Hirz, between one of the challenges.
‘What do you think?’
‘Just a wild stab in the dark, but did he by any chance up your cut?’
‘Let’s just say the terms were renegotiated. Call it a performance-related bonus.’
I smiled. ‘Then calling you a mercenary wasn’t so far off the mark, was it?’
‘Sticks and stones may break my bones… sorry. Given the circumstances, that’s not in the best possible good taste, is it?’
‘Never mind.’
We were struggling out of our suits now. Several rooms earlier we had reached a point where it was impossible to squeeze through the door without first disconnecting our airlines and removing our backpacks. We could have done without the packs, of course, but none of us wanted to breathe Spire air until it was absolutely necessary. And we would still need the packs to make our retreat, back through the unpressurised rooms. So we kept hold of them as we wriggled between rooms, fearful of letting go. We had seen the way the Spire harvested first Forqueray’s drone and then Trintignant’s leg, and it was likely it would do the same with our equipment if we left it unattended.
‘Why are you doing it, then?’ asked Hirz.
‘It certainly isn’t the money,’ I said.
‘No. I figured that part out. What, then?’
‘Because it’s there. Because Childe and I go back a long way, and I can’t stand to give up on a challenge once I’ve accepted it.’
‘Old-fashioned bullheadedness, in other words,’ Celestine said.
Hirz was putting on a helmet and backpack assembly for the first time. She had just been forced to get out of her original suit and put on one of the skintights; even her small frame was now too large to pass through the constricted doors. Childe had attached some additional armour to her skintight — scablike patches of flexible woven diamond — but she must have felt more vulnerable.
I answered Celestine. ‘What about you, if it isn’t the same thing that keeps me coming back?’
‘I want to solve the problems, that’s all. For you they’re just a means to an end, but for me they’re the only thing of interest.’
I felt slighted, but she was right. The nature of the challenges was less important to me than discovering what was at the summit; the secret the Spire so jealously guarded.
‘And you’re hoping that through the problems they set us you’ll eventually understand the Spire’s makers?’
‘Not just that. I mean, that’s a significant part of it, but I also want to know what my own limitations are.’
‘You mean you want to explore the gift that the Jugglers have given you?’ Before she had time to answer I continued, ‘I understand. And it’s never been possible before, has it? You’ve only ever been able to test yourself against problems set by other humans. You could never map the limits of your ability; any more than a lion could test its strength against paper.’
She looked around her. ‘But now I’ve met something that tests me.’
‘And?’
Celestine smiled thinly. ‘I’m not sure I like it.’
We did not speak again until we had traversed half a dozen new rooms, and then rested while the shunts mopped up the excess of tiredness which came after such efforts.
The mathematical problems had now grown so arcane that I could barely describe them, let alone grope my way towards a solution. Celestine had to do most of the thinking, therefore, but the emotional strain which we all felt was just as wearying. For an hour during the rest period I teetered on the edge of sleep, but then alertness returned like a pale, cold dawn. There was something harsh and clinical about that state of mind — it did not feel completely normal — but it enabled us to get the job done, and that was all that mattered.
We continued, passing the seventieth room — fifteen further than we had reached before. We were now at least sixty metres higher than when we had entered, and for a while it looked like we had found a tempo that suited us. It was a long time since Celestine had shown any hesitation in her answers, even if it took a couple of hours for her to reach the solution. It was as if she had found the right way of thinking, and now none of the challenges felt truly alien to her. For a while, as we passed room after room, a dangerous optimism began to creep over us.
It was a mistake.
In the seventy-first room, the Spire began to enforce a new rule. Celestine, as usual, spent at least twenty minutes studying the problem, skating her fingers over the shallowly etched markings on the frame, her lips moving silently as she mouthed possibilities.
Childe studied her with a peculiar watchfulness I had not observed before.
‘Any ideas?’ he said, looking over her shoulder.
‘Don’t crowd me, Childe. I’m thinking.’
‘I know, I know. Just try and do it a little faster, that’s all.’
Celestine turned away from the frame. ‘Why? Are we on a schedule suddenly?’
‘I’m just a little concerned about the amount of time it’s taking us, that’s all.’ He stroked the bulge on his forearm. ‘These shunts aren’t perfect, and—’
‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’
‘Don’t worry. Just concentrate on the problem.’
But this time the punishment began before we had begun our solution.
It was lenient, I suppose, compared to the savage dismembering that had concluded our last attempt to reach the summit. It was more of a stern admonishment to make our selection; the crack of a whip rather than the swish of a guillotine.
Something popped out of the wall and dropped to the floor.
It looked like a metal ball, about the size of a marble. For several seconds it did nothing at all. We all stared at it, knowing that something unpleasant was going to happen, but unsure what.
Then the ball trembled, and — without deforming in any way — bounced itself off the ground to knee-height.
It hit the ground and bounced again; a little higher this time. ‘Celestine,’ Childe said, ‘I strongly suggest that you come to a decision—’
Horrified, Celestine forced her attention back to the puzzle marked on the frame. The ball continued bouncing; reaching higher each time.
‘I don’t like this,’ Hirz said.
‘I’m not exactly thrilled by it myself,’ Childe told her, watching as the ball hit the ceiling and slammed back to the floor, landing to one side of the place where it had begun its bouncing. This time its rebound was enough to make it hit the ceiling again, and on the recoil it streaked diagonally across the room, hitting one of the side walls before glancing off at a different angle. The ball slammed into Trintignant, ricocheting off his metal leg, and then connected with the walls twice — gaining speed with each collision — before hitting me in the chest. The force of it was like a hard punch, driving the air from my lungs.
I fell to the ground, emitting a groan of discomfort.
The little ball continued arcing around the room, its momentum not sapped in any appreciable way. It kept getting faster, in fact, so that its trajectory came to resemble a constantly shifting silver loom which occasionally intersected with one of us. I hea
rd groans, and then felt a sudden pain in my leg, and the ball kept on getting faster. The sound it made was like a fusillade of gunshots, the space between each detonation growing smaller.
Childe, who had been hit himself, shouted: ‘Celestine! Make your choice!’
The ball chose that moment to slam into her, making her gasp in pain. She buckled down on one knee, but in the process reached out and palmed one of the markings on the right side of the frame.
The gunshot sounds — the silver loom — even the ball itself — vanished.
Nothing happened for several more seconds, and then the door ahead of us began to open.
We inspected our injuries. There was nothing life-threatening, but we had all been bruised badly, and it was likely that a bone or two had been fractured. I was sure I had broken a rib, and Childe grimaced when he tried to put weight on his right ankle. My leg felt tender where the ball had struck me, but I could still walk, and after a few minutes the pain abated, soothed by a combination of my own medichines and the shunt’s analgesics.
‘Thank God we’d put the helmets back on,’ I said, fingering a deep bump in the crown. ‘We’d have been pulped otherwise.’
‘Would someone please tell me what just happened?’ Celestine asked, inspecting her own wounds.
‘I guess the Spire thought we were taking too long,’ Childe said. ‘It’s given us as long as we like to solve the problems until now, but from now on it looks like we’ll be up against the clock.’
Hirz said: ‘And how long did we have?’
‘After the last door opened? Forty minutes or so.’
‘Forty-three, to be precise,’ Trintignant said.
‘I strongly suggest we start work on the next door,’ Childe said. ‘How long do you think we have, Doctor?’
‘As an upper limit? In the region of twenty-eight minutes.’
‘That’s nowhere near enough time,’ I said. ‘We’d better retreat and come back.’
‘No,’ Childe said. ‘Not until we’re injured.’
‘You’re insane,’ Celestine said.
But Childe ignored her. He just stepped through the door, into the next room. Behind us the exit door slammed shut.
‘Not insane,’ he said, turning back to us. ‘Just very eager to continue.’
It was never the same thing twice.
Celestine made her selection as quickly as she could, every muscle tense with concentration, and that gave us — by Trintignant’s estimation — five or six clear minutes before the Spire would demand an answer.
‘We’ll wait it out,’ Childe said, eyeing us all to see if anyone disagreed. ‘Celestine can keep checking her results. There’s no sense in giving the fucking thing an answer before we have to; not when so much is at stake.’
‘I’m sure of the answer,’ Celestine said, pointing to the part of the frame she would eventually palm.
‘Then take five minutes to clear your head. Whatever. Just don’t make the choice until we’re forced into it.’
‘If we get through this room, Childe…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m going back. You can’t stop me.’
‘You won’t do it, Celestine, and you know it.’
She glared at him, but said nothing. I think what followed was the longest five minutes in my life. None of us dared speak again, unwilling to begin anything — even a word — for fear that something like the ball would return. All I heard for five minutes was our own breathing; backgrounded by the awful slow thrumming of the Spire itself.
Then something slithered out of one wall.
It hit the floor, writhing. It was an inch-thick, three-metre-long length of flexible metal.
‘Back off…’ Childe told us.
Celestine looked over her shoulder. ‘You want me to press this, or not?’
‘On my word. Not a moment before.’
The cable continued writhing: flexing, coiling and uncoiling like a demented eel. Childe stared at it, fascinated. The writhing grew in strength, accompanied by the slithering, hissing sounds of metal on metal.
‘Childe?’ Celestine asked.
‘I just want to see what this thing actually—’
The cable flexed and writhed, and then propelled itself rapidly across the floor in Childe’s direction. He hopped nimbly out of the way, the cable passing under his feet. The writhing had become a continuous whipcracking now, and we all pressed ourselves against the walls. The cable — having missed Childe — retreated to the middle of the room and hissed furiously. It looked much longer and thinner than it had a moment ago, as if it had elongated itself.
‘Childe,’ Celestine said, ‘I’m making the choice in five seconds, whether you like it or not.’
‘Wait, will you?’
The cable moved with blinding speed now, rearing up so that its motion was no longer confined to a few inches above the floor. Its writhing was so fast that it took on a quasi-solidity: an irregularly shaped pillar of flickering, whistling metal. I looked at Celestine, willing her to palm the frame, no matter what Childe said. I appreciated his fascination — the thing was entrancing to look at — but I suspected he was pushing curiosity slightly too far.
‘Celestine…’ I started saying.
But what happened next happened with lightning speed: a silver-grey tentacle of the blur — a thin loop of the cable — whipped out to form a double coil around Celestine’s arm. It was the one Trintignant had already worked on. She looked at it in horror; the cable tightened itself and snipped the arm off. Celestine slumped to the floor, screaming.
The tentacle tugged her arm to the centre of the room, retreating into the hissing, flickering pillar of whirling metal.
I dashed for the door, remembering the symbol she had pressed. The whirl reached a loop out to me, but I threw myself against the wall and the loop merely brushed the chest of my suit before flicking back into the mass. From the whirl, tiny pieces of flesh and bone dribbled to the ground. Then another loop flicked out and snared Hirz, wrapping around her midsection and pulling her towards the centre.
She struggled — cartwheeling her arms, her feet skidding against the floor — but it was no good. She started shouting, and then screaming.
I reached the door.
My hand hesitated over the markings. Was I remembering accurately, or had Celestine intended to press a different solution? They all looked so similar now.
Then Celestine, who was still clutching her ruined arm, nodded emphatically.
I palmed the door.
I stared at it, willing it to move. After all this, what if her choice had been wrong? The Spire seemed to draw out the moment sadistically while behind me I continued to hear the frantic hissing of the whirling cable. And something else, which I preferred not to think about.
Suddenly the noise stopped.
In my peripheral vision I saw the cable retreating into the wall, like a snake’s tongue laden with scent.
Before me, the door began to open.
Celestine’s choice had been correct. I examined my state of mind and decided that I ought to be feeling relief. And perhaps, distantly, I did. At least now we would have a clear route back out of the Spire. But we would not be going forward, and I knew not all of us would be leaving.
I turned around, steeling myself against what I was about to see.
Childe and Trintignant were undamaged.
Celestine was already attending to her injury, fixing a tourniquet from her medical kit above the point where her arm ended. She had lost very little blood, and did not appear to be in very much discomfort.
‘Are you all right?’ I said.
‘I’ll make it out, Richard.’ She grimaced, tugging the tourniquet tighter. ‘Which is more than can be said for Hirz.’
‘Where is she?’
‘It got her.’
With her good hand, Celestine pointed to the place where the whirl had been only moments before. On the floor — just below the volume of air where the cable had hovered and t
hrashed — lay a small, neat pile of flailed human tissue.
‘There’s no sign of Celestine’s hand,’ I said. ‘Or Hirz’s suit.’
‘It pulled her apart,’ Childe said, his face drained of blood.
‘Where is she?’
‘It was very fast. There was just a… blur. It pulled her apart and then the parts disappeared into the walls. I don’t think she could have felt much.’
‘I hope to God she didn’t.’
Doctor Trintignant stooped down and examined the pieces.
EIGHT
Outside, in the long, steely-shadowed light of what was either dusk or dawn, we found the pieces of Hirz for which the Spire had had no use.
They were half-buried in dust, like the bluffs and arches of some ancient landscape rendered in miniature. My mind played gruesome tricks with the shapes, turning them from brutally detached pieces of human anatomy into abstract sculptures: jointed formations that caught the light in a certain way and cast their own pleasing shadows. Though some pieces of fabric remained, the Spire had retained all the metallic parts of her suit for itself. Even her skull had been cracked open and sucked dry, so that the Spire could winnow the few small precious pieces of metal she carried in her head.
And what it could not use, it had thrown away.
‘We can’t just leave her here,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to do something, bury her… at least put up some kind of marker.’
‘She’s already got one,’ Childe said.
‘What?’
‘The Spire. And the sooner we get back to the shuttle, the sooner we can fix Celestine and get back to it.’
‘A moment, please,’ Trintignant said, fingering through another pile of human remains.
‘Those aren’t anything to do with Hirz,’ Childe said.
Trintignant rose to his feet, slipping something into his suit’s utility belt pocket in the process.
Whatever it had been was small; no larger than a marble or small stone.
* * *
‘I’m going home,’ Celestine said, when we were back in the safety of the shuttle. ‘And before you try and talk me out of it, that’s final.’
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 319