“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 some-one’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 short-term 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 lake, 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 re-minded 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 it-self 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 re-establishing 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. “I keep hearing rumours,” I said. “About Gideon’s health. Some people think that’s why he’s letting the cheap stuff hit the streets. Because he’s too ill to manage his own lines of supply.” I hoped I had not said anything which would betray my ignorance of the true situation. But Ratko just said, “Gideon’s still producing. That’s all that matters right now.”
“I won’t know until I see him, will I?”
“He’s not a pretty sight, I hope you realise.”
I smiled. “Word gets around.”
THIRTY-SIX
While Ratko was leading us towards Gideon I allowed the next episode to happen. That was how it seemed, anyway: that now it was up to me when it happened, as if it were simply a case of digging through three-hundred-year-old memories, sorting them into something like chronological order and letting the next lot flood my mind. There was nothing jarringly unfamiliar about it any more. It was as if I half knew exactly what was going to happen, but just hadn’t given the matter much recent thought, like a book I hadn’t opened in a long time, but whose story could never completely surprise me.
Sky and Norquinco were climbing down from the shaft where they had emerged, negotiating the chamber’s slippery, scalloped sides until they were standing near the shore of the red lake.
The maggot which rested in the lake, tens of metres away, had just introduced itself as Lago.
Sky steeled himself. He felt a tremendous sense of fear and strangeness, but he was convinced that it was his destiny to survive this place.
“Lago?” he said. “I don’t know. From what I gather, Lago was a man.”
“I’m also that which existed before Lago.” The voice, though loud, was calm and strangely lacking in menace. “This is difficult to say through Lago’s language. I am Lago, but I am also Travelling Fearlessly.”
“What happened to Lago?”
“That’s also not easy. Excuse me.” There was a pause while gallons of red fluid gushed out of the maggot into the lake, and then gallons more flowed up into the maggot. “That’s better. Much better. Let me explain. Before Lago there was just Travelling Fearlessly, and Travelling Fearlessly’s helper grubs, and the void warren.” The tendrils seemed to point out the cavern’s sides and ceiling. “But then the void warren was damaged, and many poor helper grubs had to be… there isn’t any word in Lago’s mind for this. Broken down? Dissolved? Degraded? But not lost fully.”
Sky looked at Norquinco, who had not said a word since entering the chamber. “What happened before your ship was damaged?”
“Yes—ship. That’s it. Not void warren. Ship. Much better.” The mouth smiled horribly and more red fluid rained out of the creature. “It’s a long time ago.”
“Start at the beginning. Why were you following us?”
“Us?”
“The Flotilla. The five other ships. Five other void warrens.” Despite his fear, he felt anger. “Christ, it’s not that difficult.” Sky held up his fist and opened his fingers one at a time. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Understand? Five. There were five other void warrens, built by us—by people like Lago—and you chose to follow us. I’d like to know why.”
“That was before the damage. After the damage, there were only four other void warrens.”
Sky nodded. So it understood something of what had happened to the Islamabad, anyway. “Meaning you don’t remember it as well?”
“Not very well, no.”
“Well, do your best. Where did you come from? What made you latch onto our Flotilla?”
“There’ve been too many voids. Too many for Travelling Fearlessly to remember all the way back.”
“You don’t have to remember all the way back. Just tell me how you got where you did.”
“There was a time when there were just grubs, even though there had been many voids. We looked for other types of grub but didn’t find any.” Meaning, Sky assumed, that there had been a time when Travelling Fearlessly’s people had crossed space, but not encountered any other form of intelligence.
“How long ago was this?”
“Ages ago. One and a half turns.”
Sky felt a chill of cosmic awe. Perhaps he was wrong, but he strongly suspected that the maggot was talking about rotations of the Milky Way; the time taken for a typical star at the current distance from the galactic centre to make one complete orbit. Each of those orbits would take more than two hundred million years… meaning that the grub’s racial memory—if that was what it was—encompassed more than three hundred million years of space travel. The dinosaurs had not even been a sketch on the evolutionary drawing board three hundred million years ago. It was a span of time that made humans, and everything humans had done, seem like a layer of dust on the summit of a mountain.
“Tell me the rest.”
“Then we did find other grubs. But they weren’t like us. Not like grubs at all, really. They didn’t want to… tolerate us. They were like a void warren but… empty. Just the void warren.”
A ship with no living things aboard it.
“Machine intelligences?”
The mouth smiled again. It was quite obscene, really. “Yes. Machine intelligences. Hungry machines. Machines that eat grubs. Machines that eat us.”
Machines that eat us.
I thought of the way the maggot had said that; as if all it amounted to was a mildly irritating aspect of reality; something that had to be endured but which could not really be blamed upon anyone. I remembered my revulsion at the thought of the maggot’s defeatist mode of thinking.
No—not my revulsion, I told myself. Sky Haussmann’s.
I was right—wasn’t I?
Ratko led the three of us through the crudely excavated tunnels of the Dream Fuel factory. Now and then we passed through widened chambers, dimly lit, where workers in glossy grey coats leaned over benches so densely covered with chemical equipment that they resembled miniature glass cities. There were enormous retorts filled with litres of dark, twinkling blood-red Dream Fuel. At the very end of the production line, neat racks of filled vials waited ready for distribution. Many of the workers had goggles like those worn by Ratko, specialised lenses click
ing and whirring into place for each task in the production process.
“Where are you taking us?” I said.
“You wanted a drink, didn’t you?”
Quirrenbach whispered, “He’s taking us to see the man, I think. The man runs all this, so don’t underestimate him—even if he does have quite an unusual belief system.”
“Gideon?” Zebra asked.
“Well, that’s part of it,” Ratko said, obviously misunderstanding her.
We passed through another series of production labs, and then were led into a rough-walled office where a wizened old man lay—or sat, it wasn’t immediately clear—before an enormous, battered metal desk. The man was in a kind of wheelchair: a brutish, black, armoured contraption which was simmering gently, steam whispering out of leaking valves. Feedlines reached from the chair back into the wall. Presumably it could be decoupled from them when he needed to move around, gliding on the skeletal, curved-spoke wheels from which his chair was suspended.
The man’s body was hard to make out under its layers of aluminised blanketing. Two exquisitely bony arms emerged, the left placed across his thigh, the right toying with the army of black control levers and buttons set into one arm of the chair.
“Hello,” Zebra said. “You must be the man.”
He looked at each of us in turn. The man’s face was skin draped over bone, worn almost parchment-thin in places, so that he had a strangely translucent quality to him. But there was still an aura of handsomeness to him, and his eyes, when they finally looked in my direction, were like two piercing chips of interstellar ice. His jaw was strong, set almost contemptuously. His lips quivered as if he were on the verge of replying.
Instead, his right hand moved across the array of controls, depressing levers and pushing buttons with a dexterity that surprised me. His fingers, though they were thin, looked as strong and dangerous as the talons of a vulture.
He lifted his hand from the levers. Something started happening inside the chair, a rapid noisy clatter of mechanical switches. When the clatter stopped the chair began to speak, synthesising his words with a series of chime-like whistles which—if you concentrated—could be understood.
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