Mark was silent for a moment. ‘Believe what you want. I think she’s trying to say something. But we don’t have sound yet.’
‘How very inconvenient.’
‘Wait . . . Ah. Here it comes.’
Now Uvarov heard it, heard the voice of the impossible image from the past. At first the timbre was broken up, the words virtually indecipherable, and, so Mark informed him, badly out of synchronization with the moving lips.
Then, after a few minutes - and with considerable signal enhancement from the data desk processors - the message cleared.
‘Lethe,’ Mark said. ‘I even recognize the language . . .’
My name is Lieserl. Welcome home, whoever you are. I expect you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here tonight . . .
Against the dull red backdrop of the ruined, inflated Sun, the accretion disc of the Jovian black hole sparkled, huge and threatening.
Once more a pod from the Northern carried Spinner-of-Rope - alone, this time - down to the surface of Callisto. Spinner twisted to look down through the glass walls of the little pod; as she moved, biomedical sensors within her suit slid over her skin, disconcerting.
The craft from within the ice, dug up and splayed out against the surface by a team of autonomous ‘bots, was like a bird, with night-dark wings a hundred yards long trailing back from a small central body. The wing material looked fragile, insubstantial. The ice of Callisto seemed to show through the wings’ trailing edges.
Louise and Mark had told her that the craft was alien technology. And it had a hyperdrive, they thought . . .
She scratched at her shoulder, where one of Mark’s damned biosensors was digging particularly uncomfortably into her flesh. When she landed, Louise was damn well going to have to tell her why she’d been buttoned up like this.
The craft was more like some immense, black-winged insect, resting on a sheet of glass, Spinner thought. Its elegant curves were surrounded by the stumpy, glistening forms of the Northern’s pods, and by other pieces of equipment. Spinner could see a small drone ‘bot crawling across the surface of one nightdark wing, trailing twisted cable strands and scrutinizing the alien material with clusters of sensors. The Callisto ice around the craft was scarred and broken, pitted by the landing jets of the pods and criss-crossed by vehicle tracks.
The craft was immense. The activities of the humans and their machines looked utterly inadequate to contain the power of this artificial beast . . . if it were to awake from its centuries-long slumber.
Spinner’s fear seemed to rise in inverse proportion to her nearness to the craft. It was as if the sinister insectile form, pinned against the ice, radiated threat.
She shivered, pulling the fabric of her environment suit close around her.
The streets and houses around Morrow were empty. The endless, ululating cries of the klaxon echoed from the bare walls, of the ruined buildings and the steel underbelly of the sky.
A grappling hook - a crude thing of sharpened, twisted partition-metal - sailed past Morrow’s face, making him flinch. The hook caught in some irregularity in the floor of the Deck, and the rope it trailed stiffened, jerking. Within a few seconds Trapper-of-Frogs had come swarming along the rope, across the Deck floor; her brown limbs, glistening with sweat, were flashes of colour against the grey drabness of the Deck’s sourceless light, and her blowpipe and pouch of darts bounced against her back as she moved.
Morrow sighed and dropped his face. In zero-gee, they were abseiling across the floor of Deck Two. The metal surface before his face was bland, incongruously familiar, worn smooth by countless generations of feet, including his own. He twisted his neck and took a glance back. His other companions were strung out across the surface of the Deck behind him, their faces turned to him like so many flowers: there was Constancy-of-Purpose with her powerful arms working steadily, and her dangling, attenuated legs, the Virtual Mark Wu, a handful of forest folk. The Virtual was trying to protect their sensibilities, Morrow saw, by making a show of climbing along the ropes with the rest of them.
The Temple of the Planners was a brooding bulk, outlined in electric blue, still hundreds of yards ahead, across the Deck.
Many of the houses, factories and other buildings were damaged - several quite badly. In one corner of Deck Two there was evidence of a major fire, a scorching which had even licked at the grey metal ceiling above.
Morrow tried to imagine what it must have felt like to have been here, in the cramped, enclosed world of the Decks, when the GUTdrive had finally been turned off - when gravity had faded out. He imagined walking along, on his way to another routine day at work - and then that strange feeling of lightness, his feet leaving the Deck . . .
The klaxon had called out ever since they’d climbed down here, into the Decks, through the Locks from the forest; perhaps it had been wailing like this ever since the zero-gee catastrophe itself. The noise made it difficult even to think; he tried to control his irritability and fear.
Trapper twisted and grinned at him. ‘Come on, Morrow, wake up. You climbed all the way down the elevator shaft with Spinner-of-Rope, once, didn’t you? And that was under gravity. Zero-gee is easy.’
‘Trapper, nothing is easy when you get to my age.’
Trapper laughed at him, with all the certainty of youth. And it was genuine youth, he reflected; Trapper was - what? Eighteen, nineteen? Children continued to be born, up in the forest, even all these decades after the opening-up of the Locks on Deck One, and the provision of AS treatment for the forest folk.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you remind me of Spinner-of-Rope.’
Trapper twisted easily, as if her small, bare body had all the litheness of rope itself; her face was a round, eager button. ‘Really? Spinner-of-Rope’s something of a hero up there, you know. In the forest. It must have taken a lot of courage to follow Uvarov down through the Locks, and—’
‘Maybe,’ Morrow said testily. ‘What I meant was, you’re just as annoying as she was, at your age.’
Trapper frowned; there was a sprinkling of freckles across her small, flat nose, he saw, and a further smattering that reached back across her dark-fringed patch of shaven scalp. Then her grin broke out again, and he felt his heart melt; her face reminded him of the rising of a bright star over the ice fields of Callisto She craned her neck forward and kissed him lightly on the nose.
‘All part of the package,’ she said. ‘Now come on.’
She scrambled up her rope again; within seconds she had reached her grappling hook and was preparing to throw the next one across the Deck, in preparation for the next leg of the trek.
Wearily, feeling even older than his five centuries, Morrow made his way, hand over hand, along his rope.
He tried to keep his eyes focused on the scuffed floor surface before his face. Why was he finding this damn jaunt so difficult? He was, after all, Morrow, Hero of the Elevator Shaft, as Trapper had said. And since then he had been out, beyond the ribbed walls surrounding the Decks, out into space. He had walked the surface of Callisto, and watched the rise of the bloated corpse of legendary Sol over the moon’s ice plains; he had even supervised the excavation of that ancient alien spacecraft. He’d shown courage then, hadn’t he? He must have done - why, he hadn’t even thought about it. So why did he feel so different, now he was back here, inside the Decks once more - inside the metal-walled box which had been his only world for half a millennium?
He’d been apprehensive ever since Louise had asked him to lead this expedition in the first place.
‘I don’t want to go back in there,’ he’d told Louise bluntly.
Louise Ye Armonk had come down to Callisto to congratulate him on his archaeology and to give him this new assignment. She had looked tired, old; she’d run a hand through grizzled hair. ‘We all have to do things we don’t want to do,’ she said, as if speaking to a child, her patience barely controlled. When she’d looked at him, Morrow could detect the contempt in her eyes. ‘Believe me, if I had someone else to
send, I’d send ’em.’
Morrow had felt a sense of panic - as if he were being asked to go back into a prison cell. ‘What’s the point?’ he asked, his desperation growing. ‘The Planners closed off the Decks centuries ago. They don’t want to know what’s happening outside. Why not leave them to it?’
Louise’s mouth was set firm, fine wrinkles lining it. ‘Morrow, we can’t afford to “leave them to it” any more. The Universe outside - we - are impinging on what’s happening in there. And we’ve evidence, from our monitors, that the Planners are not - ah, not reacting well to the changes.
‘Morrow, there are two thousand people in there, in the Decks. There are only a handful of us outside - only a few hundred, even including the forest on Deck Zero. We can’t afford to abandon those two thousand to the Planners’ deranged whims.’
Morrow heard his own teeth grind. ‘You’re talking about duty, then.’
Louise had studied him. ‘Yes, in a way. But the most fundamental duty of all: not to me, or to the Planners, or even to the ship’s mission. It’s a duty to the species. If the species is to survive we have to protect the people trapped in there, with the Planners - as many as possible, to maintain genetic diversity for the future.’
‘Protect,’ he said sourly. ‘Funny. That’s probably just what the Planners believe they are doing, too . . .’
Now he looked around at the abandoned houses in their surreal rows, suspended from what felt like a vertical wall to him now, not a floor; he listened to the silence broken only by the plaintive cries of the klaxon. All the people had gone - taken, presumably into the Temples, by the Planners - leaving only this shell of a world; and now the elements of this oppressive place seemed to move around him, pushing at him like elements of a nightmare . . .
Perhaps it was the very familiarity of the place that was so uncomfortable. Coming back here - even after all these decades - it was as if he had never been away; the metal-clad walls and ceiling, the rows of boxy houses, the looming tetrahedral bulks of the Planner Temples all loomed closely around him, oppressing his spirit once more. It was as if the huge, remarkable Universe beyond these walls - of collapsing stars, and ice moons, and magical alien spacecraft with wings a hundred yards wide - had never existed, as if it had all been some bizarre, fifty-year fantasy.
In the old days, before his first encounter with Arrow Maker and Spinner, he’d thought himself something of a rebel. An independent spirit; a renegade - not like the rest of the drones around him. But the truth was different, of course. For centuries, the culture of the Planners had trained him into submission. If it hadn’t been for the irruption of the forest folk - an event from outside his world - he’d never have had the courage, or the initiative, to break free of the Planners’ domination.
In fact, he realized now, no matter what he did or where he went in the future - and no matter how this conflict with the Planners turned out - he never would be free of that oppression.
Now he reached the end of his rope. He let himself drift away from the Deck a little, and launched himself through the air across the few feet to the next rope Trapper had fixed. He glanced back again; the little party was strung along the chain of ropes which led all the way back to the ramp from the upper levels.
There was a rush of air above his head, a sizzling, hissing noise.
Instinctively he ducked down, pressing his body flat against the Deck; infuriatingly he bounced away from the scarred surface, but he grasped the edges of Deck plates and clung on.
The noise had sounded like an insect’s buzz. But there were very few insects within the Decks . . .
Another hiss, a sigh of air above him. And it had come from the direction of the Temple which was - he sneaked a look up - still a hundred yards away. Another whisper above him - and another, and now a whole flock of them.
Someone behind him cried out, and he heard the clatter of metal against the Deck.
Trapper-of-Frogs came clambering back down the rope towards him; without inhibition she scrambled over his arms and snuggled against his side, a warm, firm bundle of muscle; her shaven patch of scalp was smooth against his cheek. She was no more than four feet tall, and he could feel her bony knees press into his thighs.
‘It’s the Planners,’ she whispered into his ear. Her breath was sweet, smelling of forest fruit. ‘They’re shooting at us from the Temple.’
He felt confused. ‘Shooting? But that’s impossible. Why should they?’
She growled, and again he was reminded of a young Spinner-of-Rope, decades ago, who also had spent a lot of time getting annoyed at him. ‘How should I know?’ she snapped. ‘And besides, why hardly makes a difference. What’s important is that we get out of here before we get hurt.’
He clung to his rope, disoriented. Maybe he should have been prepared for this. Maybe the Planners really had gone that crazy.
But if that was true, what was he supposed to do about it?
Now someone else came clambering up behind him. It was Constancy-of-Purpose, pawing her way across the Deck with her huge, powerful right hand; she clutched something shiny and hard in her left. Those AS-wasted legs, Morrow thought irrelevantly, looked even slimmer than Trapper’s; they clattered against the Deck, pale and useless.
‘Morrow.’ Constancy-of-Purpose opened her left hand. The object nestling within it was a piton: sharpened, the coarse, planed surfaces of its point glistening in the sourceless light. ‘This look familiar? The Planners are using their damn crossbows on us again.’
‘But why?’
Constancy-of-Purpose looked exasperated, even amused. ‘Why hardly matters, does it?’
Trapper punched Morrow in the ribs, lightly; he winced as her small, hard fist dug into the soft flesh. ‘That’s what I’ve been telling him, too,’ she told Constancy-of-Purpose.
‘At the moment they’re hitting the Deck behind us,’ Constancy-of-Purpose said urgently. ‘They are shooting over our heads. Maybe they’re trying to find their range. Or maybe they’re just trying to warn us; I don’t know. But as soon as they like, they’ll be able to pick us off . . . Come on. We have to retreat.’
Morrow, still confused, twisted his head to study the Temple ahead of him. The building’s tetrahedral form, with its outline of electric blue and triangular faces of golden-brown, was no longer a seamless whole. Windows had been knocked out of the nearest face, leaving black, gaping scars. He saw small figures in those windows: men and women, dressed in the drab, uniform coveralls he’d worn himself for so many centuries.
They were raising bows towards him.
‘All right,’ he said, wishing only that this were over. ‘Let’s move out of range. Come on; Constancy-of-Purpose, you lead the way . . .’
The pod landed close to the stern of the night-dark craft. Spinner climbed down onto the ice of Callisto.
Around her waist she’d tied a length of her own rope, and within her suit, suspended on a thread between her breasts, was one of her father’s arrow-heads. She raised her hand to her chest and pressed the glove against the fabric of her suit; the cool metal of the arrow-head dug into her flesh, a comforting and familiar shape. She tried to regulate her breathing, looking for bits of comfort, of stability. Even the gravity here was wrong, of course; and the presence of the heavy suit over her flesh, with Mark’s biostat probes inside, was a constant, scratching irritant.
Louise Ye Armonk walked up to the pod, leaving shallow footprints in the frost of Callisto. The engineer had turned up an interior light behind her faceplate.
‘Spinner-of-Rope.’ Louise held out her hand and smiled. ‘Well, here we are again. Come on. I’ll show you around the craft.’
Spinner took Louise’s hand. Slowly, her feet crunching softly against the worn ice, she walked with Louise to the craft.
The rings of Jupiter arced across the sky, a plain of bloodstained, frozen smoke. The craft lay against the ice, dark, vital.
They drew to a halt perhaps ten feet from the edge of the nearest wing. The wing h
overed a few feet above the ice, apparently unsupported; perhaps it was so light it didn’t need support, apart from its join with the central trunk of the ship, Spinner thought. Beyond the leading edge the wing curved softly, like a slow, frozen billow of smoke; its form, foreshortened, was sharply delineated against the bland ice backdrop of Callisto, but its utter darkness made the scale of the wing’s curves hard to judge. At the trailing edge of the wing, the material was so delicate that Spinner - bending, and peering upwards - could see through the fabric of the wing, to the wizened glow of the stars.
‘In form the ship is like a sycamore seed.’ Louise glanced across at Spinner. ‘Do you have sycamores in your forest? . . . Here are these lovely wings, which sweep back through a hundred yards. The small central pilot’s cage sits on top of the “shoulders” of the ship - the base of the wings.’
Lovely, Louise had said. Well, Spinner reflected, perhaps there was a certain loveliness here - but it was a beauty that was utterly inhuman, and endlessly menacing.
‘This isn’t a human ship,’ she said slowly. ‘Is it, Louise?’
‘No.’ Louise set her shoulders. ‘Damn it,’ she said sourly. ‘We find one reasonably complete artifact in the rubble of the Solar System, and it has to be alien . . .
‘Spinner, we think this is a Xeelee craft. We’ve checked the old Paradoxa projections; we think this is what the Friends of Wigner - the people from the Qax occupation era - called a nightfighter. A small, highly mobile, versatile scout craft.’
The leading edge of a sycamore-seed wing was at a level with Louise’s face; now she raised a gloved hand and made as if to pass a fingertip along that edge. Then, thoughtfully, she drew her hand back. ‘Actually, we wouldn’t advise that you touch anything, unless you have to. This stuff is sharp. The wings, and the rest of the hull, are probably made of Xeelee construction material.’
She ducked her head and sighted along the plane of the wing. Spinner had to stand on tiptoe to do the same. When she did manage to raise her eyes to the level of the wing, the Xeelee material seemed to disappear, such was its fineness. Even this close it was utterly black, returning no reflections from the ice, or the Jovian rings above. It wasn’t like anything real, she thought; it was as if a slice had been taken out of the world, leaving this hole - this defect.
Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring Page 110