by Paul McAuley
No one answered. And with a swooning falling feeling that gripped him from fingertips to feet Hari realised who his captors must be. Somehow, the hijackers had infiltrated the city and made their move. They’d avoided the trap set by Ma Sakitei, the trap for which Hari had been bait, and now he was in their power, aboard Easy Does It or some other ship (which must be accelerating, because there was a definite sense of up and down), or somewhere else far, far away. Beyond Jupiter. Orbiting Saturn, or even further out. Beyond any hope of rescue.
‘He’s ready,’ a woman said.
Something wet was swiped across Hari’s forehead and cheeks. A brief cold spray on his eyelids dissolved the glue that had held them closed; fingers pried them open. He saw a shadowy figure withdrawing, saw a flock of small shapes move in.
He was hung vertically on some kind of board, glued there like a specimen, naked and vulnerable. A swarm of drones hung in front of his face, little white balls slung under the blurred halos of tiny rotors. He couldn’t turn his head because it was glued to the board. His arms were glued above his head. His legs were glued together. When he tried to blink he discovered that his eyelids, once glued shut, were now glued open.
He used his peripheral vision to look around. A distant overhead speckled with bright stars. Small islands scattered across a black flood, low and flat and covered in white moss, long tendrils floating out from their edges. He was raised up at the centre of one of these islands. And it was cold, so cold that his breath plumed from his nostrils and his naked skin felt tight and frozen.
The little drones began to flash stuttering patterns of light. A constellation of novas exploding in his face. Pain pulsed: jagged screeches of tearing metal. Cold hummed in his ears. The insistent pitter-patter of the drums prickled across his flanks. Pale mosses tasted like icy grit; black water like burnt plastic. Synaesthesia cross-wiring his senses until everything went blank and for a moment he hung in the still centre of silent and absolute whiteness before sight and hearing, touch, taste and smell, returned.
Figures moved beyond the stuttering stars of the drones. Four, five, six of them. Two appeared to be children. They were dressed in long white coats and their faces were masked with luminous green dots and dashes and swirls, and they carried poles topped with swaying bouquets of skulls. The skulls were hung from coloured threads strung through holes drilled in their bony caps, and painted with the same luminous patterns as the faces of the pole-bearers, who stepped forward one after the other, planting their burdens in the soft ground and stepping back and clasping their hands before their chests and beginning to sing. A polyphonic chant founded on the insistent patter of the drums, slowly building and falling away and building again.
The lights of the drones began to pulse in time to the pulse of the chant. The luminous patterns painted on the skulls and on the faces of the celebrants of this strange ceremony were pulsing too. And with each throbbing beat Hari’s sense of self expanded outward. Dissolving by steady increments into the pulsing chant, the pulsing patterns of light. He felt questing intelligences drift past his unknotting thoughts, felt them sink into the substrate of his mind . . .
And then, all at once, everything stopped. The chant broke off in the middle of a phrase; the beat of the drums was suspended; the patterns of light winked out and the drones fell out of the air. Hari’s senses, abruptly unconstrained, expanded like gas escaping from a punctured p-suit. He saw the module entire, like a transparent model of itself. He saw a city stretching away above it, and realised with a quick sharp stab of hope that he must still be in Fei Shen. He could see the radial pattern of its avenues and the outlines of its buildings, a honeycomb of virtual rooms and spaces. And in one of those rooms the ghost of the p-suit’s eidolon turned to him and asked him why he had taken so long to get in touch.
Help me, he said. And with a falling feeling he was back in his body, hung naked on the board. Something was picking its way through the twilight towards him. It was inhumanly tall and thin and radiated a fell menace, but he could not move, could not shut his eyes, could not look away. He could only watch, heart banging in his chest, sweat pricking over his entire body, as it grew closer. Then a pale translucent figure leaned past him and swept up the fallen drones. It turned and smiled at him, a sly, shrewd, familiar smile, then spun and hurled the drones into the twilight beyond the skull-laden poles. Someone screamed, a sharp cry of rage and fear that echoed off the overhead. The figure smiled at Hari again, and faded into the dark air like a sketch erasing itself.
The patterns painted on the skulls were likewise fading. People in white coats sprawled on the mossy ground, eyes rolled back, faces contorted in rigid grimaces as they twitched and fitted and at last passed into something like sleep. One was the proctor, Gabriel Daza. Two more were Free People.
Hari hung there a long time. Shivering, passing in and out of consciousness. His eyes dry stones. At last, he glimpsed a movement far off in the scatter of pale islands: a low and narrow boat gliding across the water, poled by two upright figures. As it drew nearer, he recognised Rav and the neuter Taqi Koothvar. He tried to call out, but his mouth was still glued shut.
The boat nosed through the fringe of moss at the island’s edge and Rav sprang ashore and cantered towards Hari, telling him everything would be fine. Behind him, Taqi Koothvar’s anxious expression betrayed the lie.
9
Rav and Taqi Koothvar lowered the board to which Hari was fastened, found a canister of spray, and used it to dissolve the glue. Hari sat up, moving slowly and carefully. His back felt as if it had been flayed. His shoulders and arms ached stiffly. His hands throbbed as blood began to circulate in them again.
While Rav moved from pole to pole, methodically crushing the skulls hung from them, Taqi Koothvar used a cloth wetted with spray to remove the glue that sealed Hari’s mouth and held his eyes open, wiped green stuff from his face, and pasted several patches on his chest that eased his pain and turned the world as soft as a daydream.
Taqi Koothvar helped Hari to stand and walk about. His former captors were still unconscious or asleep, sprawled in their white coats. They were skull feeders, according to Rav. An antique cult that practised a peculiar form of amortality.
‘They infect themselves with mites that construct molecular archives in the bones of their skulls, and record every moment of their lives. They feed the skulls of their ancestors with infusions necessary for the survival and operation of these archives, and every skull,’ Rav said, mashing one between his hands with a dry, snapping crunch, ‘is plugged into a network via patterns of tweaked bacteria, so that they can communicate with each other and with their keepers.’
‘They painted the same stuff on you,’ Taqi Koothvar told Hari.
‘They were trying to link your bios with their network,’ Rav said.
‘I know one of them,’ Hari said. ‘He approached me when I visited the bourse, helped me gain access to my family’s credit, made inquiries on my behalf. He pointed me towards a head clinic, too. I suppose that if I had followed his advice I would have been taken here directly. Instead, they kidnapped me.’
‘This one is different,’ Taqi Koothvar said. ‘Also, she is dead.’
The neuter was standing over a slender woman dressed in a black, close-fitting bodysuit, sprawled face down on moss tinted by her blood. She had been pierced many times in the back and head. When Taqi Koothvar and Rav turned her over, Hari recognised her at once. Her hair was cut close to her skull and dyed white, but her pale, angular face was the spit of Deel Fertita’s, the proteome specialist who, according to Agrata, had murdered Dr Gagarian.
There are many of us, one of the hijackers had told Hari, on Themba. Many sisters.
Hari told Rav and Taqi Koothvar who she was. ‘She must have followed these . . . What did you call them?’
‘Skull feeders,’ Rav said. ‘It looks like she tried to sneak up on them, and something sneaked up on her instead.’
Hari remembered the face of the translucent
figure. His father’s face, his father’s sly smile.
He said, ‘There was a djinn. It took control of the skull-feeders’ drones and threw them at the woman and killed her.’
Rav said, ‘This was while the skull feeders were opening you up, or while they were trying to unlock the tick-tock’s head?’
Hari tried to focus through the drowsy haze of Taqi Koothvar’s patches. ‘They got inside my head, and everything stopped. The song they were singing, the drums, the lights. I saw the eidolon. The eidolon of my p-suit. I saw that woman, too. She looked like a demon. Like she was made out of knives. And then the djinn appeared.’
‘You reached out to this eidolon, or it reached out to you,’ Rav said. ‘It penetrated the skull feeders’ network, and sent a djinn to help you.’
‘It claims that it has been weaponised,’ Hari said.
Kinson Ib Kana’s book and the flask containing Dr Gagarian’s head lay next to the dead woman. Rav stooped and picked them up, then plucked something else from the moss and showed it to Hari. A slim, silvery drone the length of his little finger.
‘Is this one of the skull feeders’ drones?’
‘They were smaller,’ Hari said. ‘Like little white balls.’
Rav thought for a moment, weighing the drone in his palm.
‘I think I know what went down here,’ he said. ‘The skull feeders wanted to get inside the tick-tock’s head. They tried and failed to unlock it, and then they opened you up, looking for a key or a code. And while they were busy with you, the hijacker took her chance and knocked them out. She probably used this drone to attack their network. Their minds were linked together. When the network went down, so did they. That gave you the chance to contact your p-suit, its eidolon dealt with the hijacker, and then it called me. That’s how we found you. Someone or something sent me the coordinates of this place. Have I got it right or have I got it right?’
‘More or less.’ Hari remembered the eidolon, turning towards him in the virtual room. But she hadn’t thrown the skull feeders’ drones at the hijacker. The djinn had scooped them up. The djinn with the face of his father . . .
‘You have some serious protection, youngblood,’ Rav said. ‘I shall have to mind my manners.’
‘How long has it been?’ Hari said. ‘How long since they took me?’
‘A night and a day,’ Rav said. ‘We have to get off this rock before the commissars find out what happened here.’
‘It was self-defence,’ Taqi Koothvar said.
‘The commissars might not see it like that,’ Rav said. ‘Especially as two of the skull feeders are their bosses.’
Taqi Koothvar helped Hari into a white coat and sat him in the middle of the little boat. He clutched the flask and the book to his chest while the neuter and Rav poled through channels of black water, between the pale islands.
They beached the boat at the entrance to the flooded chamber and walked down a long corridor lit by dabs of sharp blue phosphorescence, its stone walls everywhere carved with diagrams and crude drawings and epithets in languages long forgotten. Taqi Koothvar pointed to runes carved at the bases of the walls. Made by rats, yo said. The floor was thick with dust that formed little drifts and dunes, marked with footprints and the tracks of animals. A disabled bot lay on its back, a human-shaped shell of corroded plastic, memory clay inside its skull gone to white dust that seeped from empty eye sockets. Hari felt the age of the city, the crushing weight of its history.
They reached an intersection and turned left, following a narrow, steeply sloping passage. Presently, Hari’s bios registered Fei Shen’s commons, and soon afterwards the three of them emerged through a small hatch into one of the hutongs that ran between the avenues, this one lined with single-storey flat-roofed modules – buildings, homes – painted in bright primary colours. Taqi Koothvar led Hari and Rav to the station, and they rode a capsule that dropped them through the core of Fei Shen’s rock to the docks on the far side. Rav was impatient to get away, but Hari insisted on retrieving his p-suit.
In the airy hub of the public storerooms, a slender bot checked Hari’s ID, stalked away down one of the corridors, and returned some five minutes later, pushing a wheeled frame in which the scuffed, dust-stained p-suit hung like a flayed trophy.
The eidolon drifted behind the bot, unseen by any but Hari.
Rav and Hari settled their bills for use of the city’s services, and Rav slung the p-suit over his shoulder and picked up the helmet and started towards the exit, followed by Hari and Taqi Koothvar, and the eidolon. They hadn’t gone more than ten steps when the bot called out. Hari turned, expected to see a posse of commissars hurrying towards them, or a flock of drones vectoring in with weapon-pods everted. In the screen set in the bot’s chest, Ma Sakitei smiled at him.
‘You are leaving. I am sorry to see it.’
Hari thanked her for her help and hospitality. He felt a freezing apprehension, wondered if she knew about the skull feeders, if she was a friend or sympathiser.
‘We feel somewhat used,’ Ma Sakitei said.
‘I didn’t mean to bring trouble here.’
‘We think you knew exactly what you were doing.’
‘I won’t forget your kindness.’
‘May we give you some advice?’
‘Of course.’
‘You believe the Ardenist can help you. You are wrong.’
‘Have I broken any laws?’ Rav said.
‘We don’t know,’ Ma Sakitei said. ‘Have you?’
‘I owe this city nothing,’ Rav said. ‘The youngblood owes nothing. We are free to go.’
‘There is no need to leave,’ Ma Sakitei told Hari. ‘Your enemies cannot touch you here. And we can help you find out who they are. We can help you in many ways.’
‘You told me to look for justice elsewhere,’ Hari said. ‘That’s what I’m doing.’
‘We have been investigating your story, and the circumstances of the hijack of your family’s ship,’ Ma Sakitei said. ‘We can be useful to you, if you let us. And you can help us.’
Hari said, ‘What did you find?’
And Rav stepped up and struck the bot’s cluster of sensors with the tips of his fingers, once, twice. It froze in mid-gesture, and its screen went dark.
‘She’s trying to delay you until the commissars get here,’ Rav told Hari. ‘Time to go.’
In other parts of the large space bots turned from conversations with their clients, stepped forward from niches. Ma Sakitei’s face floated in their chest-screens. Her voice called Hari’s name in an overlapping chorus.
‘Run,’ Rav said.
They ran. Hari in his borrowed white coat, the cryoflask slung over his shoulder, Taqi Koothvar in yo’s bright silks, Rav forbiddingly tall and massive, shouldering past a bot when it tried to intercept Hari, sending it spinning away.
At the jetty to Rav’s ship, Hari told Taqi Koothvar that he needed one last favour, asked if yo would witness an agreement between him and Rav.
‘What agreement is this?’ Rav said.
Hari took a breath and said, ‘That in exchange for the help you have given me in the past, and for whatever help you may give me in the future, you will receive a share in any profits realisable on the research of Dr Gagarian, those profits to be divided equally between you, any surviving members of my family, including myself, and any living relatives of Dr Gagarian.’
He had composed this on the short ride to the docks, and hoped that Nabhomani would have approved.
Rav laughed. ‘You traders probably tried to monetise the cosmic egg before it hatched. Suppose I don’t agree? Will you refuse to come with me?’
‘I want to make sure you get your fair share. Especially if you survive this and I don’t. Will you swear to uphold the agreement?’
Rav shrugged with a leathery rustle. ‘Why not?’
‘I so swear,’ Hari told Taqi Koothvar.
‘And I so witness,’ the neuter said.
Rav said, ‘Are we done?’
Hari asked Taqi Koothvar if yo would be all right.
‘Of course. I have done no more than help one of my guests.’
‘I meant the skull feeders.’
‘I doubt that they would want to draw attention to themselves and their crimes. And my people are not without resources. We ruled an empire once.’ Taqi Koothvar paused, then said, ‘Give me your hands.’
The neuter’s grip was hot and surprisingly strong. Yo looked into Hari’s eyes and after a moment yo’s warm brown gaze went out of focus and yo said, ‘When people go looking for something, Gajananvihari Pilot, they often find something else.’
‘Is that one of your predictions,’ Rav said, ‘or a scrap of folk wisdom?’
Taqi Koothvar let go of Hari’s hands and smoothed the blue-black wave of yo’s hair with an elegant gesture. ‘It is what it is.’
‘Any words of advice for me?’ Rav said.
Taqi Koothvar smiled. ‘Would you listen to them?’
‘Good point,’ Rav said, and pushed Hari forward, and then they were running again, bounding towards the ship.
PART THREE
THE CAVES OF STEEL
1
Rav claimed that his ship, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, was named after an ancient blasphemy. He also said that he’d won it in a dice game while riding the elevator from Phobos down to the surface of Mars, and that he’d had to dispatch three reivers who’d been hired by the unlucky former owner to stop him taking possession of his prize. It was an old design: a froth of spherical pods, all different sizes, clustered around a motor and utility shaft. Rav and his son lived in the largest pod, a mostly empty, unpartitioned volume with padded walls; the others were used to store cargo or accommodate passengers.
Ardenists were exclusively male. They quickened their sons from templates derived from artificial recombinations of their own genome and that of a temporary or permanent partner, and treated them as bonded servants. Rav’s nameless son was a slight, austere person about Hari’s size who deferred completely to his father and had been arrested in prepubescence: he would not achieve maturity until Rav died. Whenever Hari tried to talk to him, he’d shrug and turn away. Hunch into himself, as if trying to minimise the space he occupied. He hardly ever spoke, and when he did he always glanced at his father for permission. Saying once that he did not need to be thanked for carrying out his usual tasks. Saying another time that he was older than Hari thought he was, and could take care of himself.