We followed Ratko out of the pipe room. His expression was difficult to read, since his eyes were hidden behind grey goggles sprouting various delicate sensory devices. He wore a coat patterned like Vadim's, but of shorter cut, its patches a little less rough and more lustrous.
"So, friends," Ratko said. "What brings you down here?"
"Call it a quality inspection," I said.
"No one's complaining about quality, that I hear of."
"Then maybe you haven't been listening too well," Zebra said. "The shit's getting harder and harder to track down."
"Really?"
"Yeah, really," I said. "It's not just the Fuel shortage. There's a problem with purity. Zebra and I supply Fuel to a portfolio of clients all the way up to the Rust Belt. And we're getting complaints." I tried to sound menacingly reasonable. "Now-that could mean a problem somewhere in the chain of supply between here and the Belt-there are a lot of weak links in that chain, and believe me, I'm investigating them all. But it could also mean the basic product is getting degraded. Cut, watered, whatever you want to call it. That's why we're making this a personal visit, with Mister Quirrenbach's assistance. We need to see that there's still such a thing as high-quality Dream Fuel being manufactured in the first place. If there isn't, someone's been lying to someone else and there's going to be more shit hitting the fan than in a Force Ten shitstorm. Either way, it's bad news for someone."
"Hey, listen," Ratko said, holding up his hands. "Everyone knows there are problems at source level. But only Gideon can help you with the why."
I threw out a line. "I hear he enjoys his privacy."
"He doesn't have much choice, does he?"
I laughed, trying to make it sound as convincing as possible, without understanding what I was laughing at. But the way the man with the goggles had said it, he obviously thought he had made a joke of some kind.
"No, I guess not." I changed the tone of my voice, now that he and I had established some shaky grounds for mutual respect. "Well, let's put our relationship on a more friendly footing, shall we? You can put my doubts about the immediate quality of the product to rest by providing me with-how shall we say-a small commercial sample?"
"What's wrong?" Ratko said, reaching into his coat and handing me a small, dark-red vial. "Got high on your own supply once too often?"
I took the vial, Zebra passing me her wedding-gun. I knew I had to do it; that only Fuel would enable me to unlock the final secrets of my past.
"You know how it is," I said.
Sky and Norquinco pushed onwards, always keeping a wary eye on the inertial compasses. The shaft branched and twisted, but the head-up displays on their helmets always showed their positions relative to the shuttle, together with the route they had so far followed, so there was no real possibility of getting lost, even if they might encounter obstructions on the way out. The route they had taken led more or less to the middle of the ship, and now they were heading roughly forward, towards where the command sphere should be. They had been carrying on for perhaps five minutes when there was another bell-like reverberation, as if the entire hull had been struck like a gong. It seemed fractionally stronger this time.
"That's it," Norquinco said. "Now we're going back."
"No, we're not. We lost the line already, and we already have to cut ourselves out. Now it just means we have some more to cut through."
Reluctantly now, Norquinco followed him. But something was changing. Their suit sensors were beginning to pick up traces of nitrogen and oxygen instead of hard vacuum. It was as if air were slowly building up inside the shaft; as if the two clangs they had heard had been part of some immense alien airlock.
"There's light ahead," Sky said when the air pressure had reached one atmosphere and begun climbing beyond it.
"Light?"
"Sickly yellow light. I'm not imagining it. It's like it's coming from the walls themselves."
He turned off his torch light, ordering Norquinco to do likewise. For a moment they were in near darkness. Sky shivered, feeling again the old, never-entirely-vanquished terror of darkness which the nursery had instilled in him. But then his eyes began to adjust to the ambient illumination and it was almost as if they still had the torches on. Better, in fact, for the pale yellow light reached far ahead of them, revealing the tract of the tunnel for tens of metres.
"Sky? There's something else."
"What?"
"I suddenly feel like I'm crawling downhill."
He wanted to laugh; wanted to put Norquinco down, but he felt it too. Something was definitely pressing his body against one side of the shaft. It was soft now, but as he crawled further (and now it really was a kind of crawling), it increased in strength, until he felt almost as if he was back aboard the Santiago , with her spin-generated artificial gravity. But the alien ship had been neither spinning nor accelerating.
"Gomez?"
The answer, when it came, was incredibly faint. "Yes. Where are you?"
"Deep. We're somewhere near the command sphere."
"I don't think so, Sky."
"That's what our inertial compasses say."
"Then they must be wrong. Your radio emissions are coming from halfway down the spine."
For the second time he felt terror, but now it had nothing to do with the absence of light. They had not been crawling for anywhere near the length of time needed to get that far down the ship. Had the hull somehow reshaped itself while they were inside, ferrying them helpfully along? The radio emissions must be correct, he thought-Gomez must have a reasonably accurate fix on their positions from signal triangulation, even though the mass of the intervening hull made his estimate imprecise. But that meant the inertial compasses had been lying almost as soon as they entered the ship. And now they were moving through some kind of static gravitational field; something intrinsic to the hull rather than an illusion created by acceleration or rotation. It appeared able to tug them in arbitrary ways depending on the geometry of the shaft. No wonder the inertial compasses had given false readings. Gravity and inertia were so subtly entwined that you could hardly bend one without bending the other.
"They must have complete control of the Higgs field," Norquinco said, wonderingly. "It's a pity Gomez isn't here. He'd have a theory by now."
The Higgs field, Norquinco reminded Sky, was something that was believed to pervade all space; all matter. Mass and inertia were not actually intrinsic properties of the fundamental particles at all, but were simply effects of the drag imposed on them as they interacted with the Higgs field-like the drag imposed on a celebrity trying to cross a room full of admirers. Norquinco seemed to think that the builders of the ship had found a way to let the celebrity slip through unmolested-or to impede its progress even further. It was as if the builders could turn up or turn down the density of admirers, and restrict or enhance their ability to pester the celebrity. That was, he knew, a hopelessly crude way of imagining something that Gomez-and perhaps even Norquinco-might be able to begin to glimpse without layers of metaphor, seeing straight to the glistening mathematical heart of it, but for Sky it was sufficient. The builders could manipulate gravity and inertia as easily as they manipulated the sickly yellow light, and perhaps without giving it much more thought.
Which meant, of course, that his hunch had been right. If there was something aboard this ship which could teach him that technique, imagine what it could do for the Flotilla-or for the Santiago , anyway. They had been trying to shed mass for years, so that they could delay their deceleration to the last possible moment. What if they could just turn the Santiago 's mass off, like a light switch? They could enter Swan's system at eight per cent of the speed of light and come to a dead stand-still in orbit around Journey's End, cutting their speed in an instant. Even if nothing that dramatic was possible, any reduction in the ship's inertia-even if it were only a few per cent-would have been welcome.
The external air pressure was now well above one and a half atmospheres, although it was climbin
g less quickly now. It was warm, heavy with moisture and some other trace gases which, while harmless, would not have been present in the same ratios in the air Sky normally breathed. Gravity reached a plateau of half a gee; it occasionally ducked below that value, but it was never higher. And the sickly yellow light was now bright enough to read by. Now and then they had to crawl across an indentation in the floor of the shaft which was full of thick, dark liquid. There were traces of it everywhere: a bloodlike red smear sliming every surface.
"Sky? This is Gomez."
"Speak up. I can hardly hear you."
"Sky; listen to me. We'll have company within five hours. There are two shuttles approaching us. They know we're here. I risked a radar bounce off them to get a distance fix."
Fine; by now he would probably have done the same thing himself. "Leave it at that. Don't speak to them or do anything that would let them identify us as having come from the Santiago ."
"Just get out of there, will you? We can still make a run for it now."
"Norquinco and I aren't done yet."
"Sky, I don't think you realise-"
He broke off the link, more interested in what lay ahead. Something was coming towards them, moving down the same shaft. It transported itself with grublike oscillations of its fattened pink-white body, like a maggot.
"Norquinco?" he said, bringing his gun to the fore and pointing it down the shaft, "I think someone's come to welcome us aboard." He wondered how frightened he sounded.
"I can't see anything. No; wait-now I can. Oh."
The creature was only the size of an arm; not really large enough to do either of them any physical harm. It lacked any obviously dangerous organs; no jaws that Sky could see. At the front was only a crownlike frill: translucent tendrils which waved ahead of the creature. Even if they had been venomous, he was still safe in his suit. The creature appeared to have neither eyes nor manipulative limbs. He repeated these reassuring observations to himself, examined his state of mind and was slightly disappointed to find that he was still just as frightened as before.
But the maggot did not seem particularly frightened by the newcomers. It simply halted and waved its ghostly tendrils in their direction. The thing's pale pink segmented body blushed a deeper shade of red, and then an arterial red secretion oozed from between the segments, forming a fresh scarlet puddle beneath it. Then the puddle extended tendrils of its own, creeping forward as if running downhill. Sky felt his sense of what was vertical shift dizzyingly, as if there had been a local change in the direction of gravity. The red fluid trickled towards them like a scarlet tide, and then it was flowing up and around their suits. For a moment Sky felt that he had been turned upside down, and he was falling. The red veil passed over his faceplate, as if seeking a way into his suit. Then it passed.
Gravity returned to normal. Breathing hard, still terrified, he watched the puddle of red return to the maggot and then seep back into the creature. The maggot was red for a moment, then the blush slowly faded back to pink.
Then the maggot did something very odd, not turning itself in the shaft, but reversing itself; the tendrils retracting into the body at one end and popping out the other. The creature undulated back into the shaft's yellow depths. It was as if nothing at all had happened.
Then a voice spoke to them. It boomed through the walls at Godlike volume, and it sounded too deep to be human.
"It's good to have some company," it said, in Portuguese.
"Who are you?" Sky said.
"Lago. Come and see me, please; it isn't very far now."
"And what if we choose to leave you?"
"I'll be sad, but I won't stop you."
The reverberations of the Godlike voice died down, all as it had been before the maggot had arrived. The two of them were breathing hard, as if they had just been sprinting. Long moments passed before Norquinco spoke. "We're going back to the shuttle. Now."
"No. We're going onwards, just as we told Lago we would."
Norquinco gripped Sky's arm. "No! This is insanity. Did you just erase what happened from your shortterm memory?"
"We were invited further into the ship by something which could already have killed us if it had that in mind."
"Something which called itself Lago. Even though Oliveira . . ."
"Didn't actually say that Lago was dead." Sky fought to hold the fear from his voice. "Just that something had happened to him. Personally, I'm interested in finding out what that something was. And also anything else this ship, or whatever it is, might be able to tell us."
"Fine. Then go ahead. I'm going back."
"No. You're staying here, coming with me."
Norquinco hesitated before answering. "You can't force me."
"No, but I can certainly make it worth your while." Now it was Sky's turn to place his hand on the other man's arm. "Use your imagination, Norquinco. There must be things here that could shatter every paradigm we've ever recognised. At the very least there must be things here that can get us to Journey's End ahead of the other ships, perhaps even give us a tactical advantage when they arrive behind us and start contesting territorial rights."
"You're aboard an alien spacecraft and all you can think of is petty human issues like squabbles over land rights?"
"Believe me, those things won't seem so petty in a few years." He grasped Norquinco's arm even tighter, feeling the layers of suit fabric compress beneath his grip. "Think, man! Everything could stem from this one moment. Our whole history could be shaped by what happens here and now. We aren't small players, Norquinco; we're colossi. Grasp that, just for a instant. And start thinking of the kinds of rewards that come to men who make history happen. Men like us." He thought back to the Santiago ; of the hidden room where he kept the Chimeric infiltrator. "I've already made longterm plans, Norquinco. My safety is guaranteed on Journey's End, even if events turn against us. If that should happen, I'd also arrange for your own safety, your own security. And if things didn't turn against us, I could make you a very powerful man indeed."
"And if I should turn around now, and go back to the shuttle?"
"I wouldn't hold it against you," Sky said softly. "This is a terrifying place, after all. But I wouldn't guarantee you any sanctuary in the years that lie ahead."
Norquinco dislodged Sky's grip from his arm, looking away until he had found his answer. "All right. We go on. But we don't spend more than an hour in this place."
Sky nodded, though the gesture was wasted. "I'm pleased, Norquinco. I knew you were a man who'd see sense."
They advanced. The going became easier now, as if the shaft was always sloping downwards-it hardly required any effort at all to slither down it. Sky thought of the way the red fluid had moved around him. The local control of gravity was so precise that the fluid had looked alive, flowing like a vastly accelerated slime mould. The creatures that had built the ship had learned to do far more than alter the Higgs field. They could play it like a piano.
Whatever they are, he thought-whether they were all like the maggot-they had to be millions of years in advance of humanity. The Flotilla must seem inexpressibly primitive to them. Perhaps they had not even been sure it was the product of intelligent thinking at all. And yet it had interested them.
The shaft opened out into a huge, smooth-walled cavern. They had emerged a little way up the side of one of its scalloped walls, but the place was so thick with cloying vapour that it was difficult to see the other side. The chamber was bathed in foetid yellow light and the floor was hidden beneath an enormous lake of red fluid which must have been many metres deep. There were dozens of maggots in the lake, some of them almost completely submerged. Many of them were of slightly different sizes and shapes to the one they had seen so far. Some were much larger than a man, and their end-tendrils included specialised appendages and, perhaps, sensory organs. One in particular was looking at Sky and Norquinco now, with a single human-looking eye on the end of a stalk. But by far the largest maggot sat in the middle of the l
ake, its pale pink body rising metres from the water; tens of metres long. It turned the end of its body towards them, a small crown of tendrils waving frondlike in the air.
There was a mouth beneath the frond; absurdly small against the size of the maggot. It was human in shape, fringed in red, and when it spoke-emitting an immense, booming voice-it formed human sound shapes.
"Hello," it said. "I'm Lago."
I held the vial up to the light for a moment before slipping it into the breach. The way the red fluid twinkled, the way it flowed sluggishly one moment and then with blinding speed the next . . . it reminded me far too much of the red lake at the heart of the Caleuche . Except that there never was a Caleuche , was there? Just something much stranger, to which the ghost ship myth had attached itself like a parasite. And hadn't that memory of Sky's always been there, at the back of my mind? I had recognised Dream Fuel from almost the moment I saw it.
There was enough in that red lake to drown in, I thought.
I slammed the wedding gun against my neck and pushed the Fuel into my carotid artery. There was no rush; no hallucinogenic transition. Fuel was not a drug in that sense; it acted globally across the brain rather than hitting any single region. It wanted only to arrest cellular decay and to repair recent damage; bringing memories back into focus and reestablishing connective pathways that had recently been broken. It seemed to tap into a recent map of what had been, as if the body carried a lingering field which changed more slowly than the cellular patterns themselves. That was why Fuel was able to fix both injuries and memories just as easily, without the drug itself knowing anything about physiology or neuro-anatomy.
"Quality shit," Ratko said. "I only use the best myself, man."
"Then you're saying that not everything that comes out of here is as good?" Zebra asked.
"Hey, like I said. One for Gideon."
Ratko led the three of us along a series of twisting, makeshift tunnels. They had been equipped with lights and a rudimentary floor, but they were more or less bored through solid rock. It was as if the complex had been tunnelled back into the chasm wall.
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