But Childe was speaking again. “Oh, you shouldn’t sound so surprised,” he said. “I always knew he’d turn back as soon as the going got tough. That’s always been his way. I shouldn’t have deceived myself that he’d have changed.”
I bristled. “That isn’t true.”
“Then why turn back when we’ve come so far?”
“Because it isn’t worth it.”
“Or is it simply that the problem’s become too difficult; the challenge too great?”
“Ignore him,” Celestine said. “He’s just trying to goad you into following him. That’s what this has always been about, hasn’t it, Childe? You think you can solve the Spire, where eighteen previous versions of you have failed. Where eighteen previous versions of you were butchered and flayed by the thing.” She looked around, almost as if she expected the Spire to punish her for speaking so profanely. “And perhaps you’re right, too. Perhaps you really have come closer than any of the others.”
Childe said nothing, perhaps unwilling to contradict her.
“But simply beating the Spire wouldn’t be good enough,” Celestine said. “For you’d have no witnesses. No one to see how clever you’d been.”
“That isn’t true at all.”
“Then why did we all have to come here? You found Trintignant useful, I’ll grant you that. And I helped you as well. But you could have done without us, ultimately. It would have been bloodier, and you might have needed to run off a few more clones…but I don’t doubt that you could have done it.”
“The solution, Celestine.”
By my estimate we had not much more than two minutes left in which to make our selection. And yet I sensed that it was time enough. Magically, the problem had opened up before me where a moment ago it had been insoluble; like one of those optical illusions which suddenly flip from one state to another. The moment was as close to a religious experience as I cared to come.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I see it now. Have you got it?”
“Not quite. Give me a moment…” Childe stared at it, and I watched as the lasers from his eyes washed over the labyrinthine engravings. The red glare skittered over the wrong solution and lingered there. It flickered away and alighted on the correct answer, but only momentarily.
Childe flicked his tail. “I think I’ve got it.”
“Good,” Celestine replied. “I agree with you. Richard? Are you ready to make this unanimous?”
I thought I had misheard her, but I had not. She was saying that Childe’s answer was the right one; that the one I had been sure of was the wrong one…
“I thought…” I began. Then, desperately, I stared at the problem again. Had I missed something? Childe had looked to have his doubts, but Celestine was so certain of herself. And yet what I had glimpsed had appeared beyond question. “I don’t know,” I said weakly. “I don’t know.”
“We haven’t time to debate it. We’ve got less than a minute.”
The feeling in my belly was one of ice. Somehow, despite the layers of humanity that had been stripped from me, I could still taste terror. It was reaching me anyway; refusing to be daunted.
I felt so certain of my choice. And yet I was outnumbered.
“Richard?” Childe said again, more insistent this time.
I looked at the two of them, helplessly. “Press it,” I said.
Childe placed his forepaw over the solution that he and Celestine had agreed on, and pressed.
I think I knew, even before the Spire responded, that the choice had not been the correct one. And yet when I looked at Celestine I saw nothing resembling shock or surprise in her expression. Instead, she looked completely calm and resigned.
And then the punishment commenced.
It was brutal, and once it would have killed us. Even with the augmentations Trintignant had given us, the damage inflicted was considerable as a scythe-tipped, triple-jointed pendulum descended from the ceiling and began swinging in viciously widening arcs. Our minds might have been able to compute the future position of a simpler pendulum, steering our bodies out of its harmful path. But the trajectory of a jointed pendulum was ferociously difficult to predict: a nightmarish demonstration of the mathematics of chaos.
But we survived, as we had survived the previous attacks. Even Celestine made it through, the flashing arc snipping off only one of her arms. I lost an arm and leg on one side, and watched—half in horror, half in fascination—as the room claimed these parts for itself; tendrils whipped out from the wall to salvage those useful conglomerations of metal and plastic. There was pain, of a sort, for Trintignant had wired those limbs into our nervous systems, so that we could feel heat and cold. But the pain abated quickly, replaced by digital numbness.
Childe got the worst of it, though. The blade had sliced him through the middle, just below what had once been his ribcage, spilling steel and plastic guts, bone, viscera, blood and noxious lubricants onto the floor. The tendrils squirmed out and captured the twitching prize of his detached rear end, flicking tail and all.
With the hand that she still had, Celestine pressed the correct symbol. The punishment ceased and the door opened.
In the comparative calm that followed, Childe looked down at his severed trunk.
“I seem to be quite badly damaged,” he said.
But already various valves and gaskets were stemming the fluid loss; clicking shut with neat precision. Trintignant, I saw, had done very well. He had equipped Childe to survive the most extreme injuries.
“You’ll live,” Celestine said, with what struck me as less than total sympathy.
“What happened?” I asked. “Why didn’t you press that one first?”
She looked at me. “Because I knew what had to be done.”
DESPITE HER INJURIES she helped us on the retreat.
I was able to stumble from room to room, balancing myself against the wall and hopping on my good leg. I had lost no great quantity of blood, for while I had suffered one or two gashes from close approaches of the pendulum, my limbs had been detached below the points where they were anchored to flesh and bone. But I still felt the shivering onset of shock, and all I wanted to do was make it out of the Spire, back to the sanctuary of the shuttle. There, I knew, Trintignant could make me whole again. Human again, for that matter. He had always promised it would be possible, and while there was much about him that I did not like, I did not think he would lie about that. It would be a matter of professional pride that his work was technically reversible.
Celestine carried Childe, tucked under her arm. What remained of him was very light, she said, and he was able to cling to her with his undamaged forepaws. I felt a spasm of horror every time I saw how little of him there was, while shuddering to think how much more intense that spasm would have been were I not numbed by the medichines.
We had made it back through perhaps one third of the rooms when he slithered from her grip, thudding to the floor.
“What are you doing?” Celestine asked.
“What do you think?” He supported himself by his forelimbs, his severed trunk resting against the ground. The wound had begun to close, I saw, his diamond skin puckering tight to seal the damage.
Before very long he would look as if he had been made this way.
Celestine took her time before answering, “Quite honestly, I don’t know what to think.”
“I’m going back. I’m carrying on.”
Still propping myself against a wall, I said, “You can’t. You need treatment. For God’s sake; you’ve been cut in half.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Childe said. “All I’ve done is lose a part of me I would have been forced to discard before very long. Eventually the doors would have been a tight squeeze even for something shaped like a dog.”
“It’ll kill you,” I said.
“Or I’ll beat it. It’s still possible, you know.” He turned around, his rear part scraping against the floor, and then looked back over his shoulder. “I’m going to retr
ace my steps back to the room where this happened. I don’t think the Spire will obstruct your retreat until I step—or crawl, as it may be—into the last room we opened. But if I were you, I wouldn’t take too long on the way back.” Then he looked at me, and again switched on the private frequency. “It’s not too late, Richard. You can still come back with me.”
“No,” I said. “You’re wrong. It’s much too late.”
Celestine reached out to help me make my awkward way to the next door. “Leave him, Richard. Leave him to the Spire. It’s what he’s always wanted, and he’s had his witnesses now.”
Childe eased himself onto the lip of the door leading into the room we had just come through.
“Well?” he said.
“She’s right. Whatever happens now, it’s between you and the Spire. I suppose I should wish you the best of luck, except it would sound irredeemably trite.”
He shrugged; one of the few human gestures now available to him. “I’ll take whatever I can get. And I assure you that we will meet again, whether you like it or not.”
“I hope so,” I said, while knowing it would never be the case. “In the meantime, I’ll give your regards to Chasm City.”
“Do that, please. Just don’t be too specific about where I went.”
“I promise you that. Roland?”
“Yes?”
“I think I should say goodbye now.”
Childe turned around and slithered into the darkness, propelling himself with quick, piston-like movement of his forearms.
Then Celestine took my arm and helped me towards the exit.
THIRTEEN
“YOU WERE RIGHT,” I told her as we made our way back to the shuttle. “I think I would have followed him.”
Celestine smiled. “But I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“As long as it isn’t to do with mathematics.”
“Why did you care about what happened to me, and not Childe?”
“I did care about Childe,” she said firmly. “But I didn’t think any of us were going to be able to persuade him to turn back.”
“And that was the only reason?”
“No. I also thought you deserved something better than to be killed by the Spire.”
“You risked your life to get me out,” I said. “I’m not ungrateful.”
“Not ungrateful? Is that your idea of an expression of gratitude?” But she was smiling, and I felt a faint impulse to smile as well. “Well, at least that sounds like the old Richard.”
“There’s hope for me yet, then. Trintignant can put me back the way I should be, after he’s done with you.”
But when we got back to the shuttle there was no sign of Doctor Trintignant. We searched for him, but found nothing; not even a set of tracks leading away. None of the remaining suits were missing, and when we contacted the orbiting ship they had no knowledge of the doctor’s whereabouts.
Then we found him.
He had placed himself on his operating couch, beneath the loom of swift, beautiful surgical machinery. And the machines had dismantled him, separating him into his constituent components, placing some pieces of him in neatly labelled fluid-filled flasks and others in vials. Chunks of eviscerated biomachinery floated like stinger-laden jellyfish. Implants and mechanisms glittered like small, precisely jewelled ornaments.
There was surprisingly little in the way of organic matter.
“He killed himself,” Celestine said. Then she found his hat—the Homburg—which he had placed at the head of the operating couch. Inside, tightly folded and marked in precise handwriting, was what amounted to Trintignant’s suicide note.
My dear friends, he had written.
After giving the matter no little consideration, I have decided to dispose of myself. I find the prospect of my own dismantling a more palatable one than continuing to endure revulsion for a crime I do not believe I committed. Please do not attempt to put me back together; the endeavour would, I assure you, be quite futile. I trust however that the manner of my demise—and the annotated state to which I have reduced myself—will provide some small amusement to future scholars of cybernetics.
I must confess that there is another reason why I have chosen to bring about this somewhat terminal state of affairs. Why, after all, did I not end myself on Yellowstone?
The answer, I am afraid, lies as much in vanity as anything else.
Thanks to the Spire—and to the good offices of Mister Childe—I have been given the opportunity to continue the work that was so abruptly terminated by the unpleasantness in Chasm City. And thanks to yourselves—who were so keen to learn the Spire’s secrets—I have been gifted with subjects willing to submit to some of my less orthodox procedures.
You in particular, Mister Swift, have been a Godsend. I consider the series of transformations I have wrought upon you to be my finest achievement to date. You have become my magnum opus. I fully accept that you saw the surgery merely as a means to an end and that you would not otherwise have consented to my ministrations, but that in no way lessens the magnificence of what you have become.
And therein, I am afraid lies the problem.
Whether you conquer the Spire or retreat from it—assuming, of course, that it does not kill you—there will surely come a time when you will desire to return to your prior form. And that would mean that I would be compelled to undo my single greatest work.
Something I would rather die than do.
I offer my apologies, such as they are, while remaining—
Your obedient servant,
T
Childe never returned. After ten days we searched the area about the Spire’s base, but there were no remains that had not been there before. I supposed that there was nothing for it but to assume that he was still inside; still working his way to whatever lay at the summit.
And I wondered.
What ultimate function did the Spire serve? Was it possible that it served none but its own self-preservation? Perhaps it simply lured the curious into it, and forced them to adapt—becoming more like machines themselves—until they reached the point when they were of use to it.
At which point it harvested them.
Was it possible that the Spire was no more purposeful than a flytrap?
I had no answers. And I did not want to remain on Golgotha pondering such things. I did not trust myself not to return to the Spire. I still felt its feral pull.
So we left.
“Promise me,” Celestine said.
“What?”
“That whatever happens when we get home—whatever’s become of the city—you won’t go back to the Spire.”
“I won’t go back,” I said. “And I promise you that. I can even have the memory of it suppressed, so it doesn’t haunt my dreams.”
“Why not,” she said. “You’ve done it before, after all.”
But when we returned to Chasm City we found that Childe had not been lying. Things had changed, but not for the better. The thing that they called the Melding Plague had plunged our city back into a festering, technologically-decadent dark age. The wealth we had accrued on Childe’s expedition meant nothing now, and what small influence my family had possessed before the crisis had diminished even further.
In better days, Trintignant’s work could probably have been undone. It would not have been simple, but there were those who relished such a challenge, and I would probably have had to fight off several competing offers: rival cyberneticists vying for the prestige of tackling such a difficult project. Things were different. Even the crudest kinds of surgery were now difficult or impossibly expensive. Only a handful of specialists retained the means to even attempt such work, and they were free to charge whatever they liked.
Even Celestine, who had been wealthier than me, could only afford to have me repaired, not rectified. That—and the other matter—almost bankrupted us.
And yet she cared for me.
There were those who
saw us and imagined that the creature with her—the thing that trotted by her like a stiff, diamond-skinned, grotesque mechanical dog—was merely a strange choice of pet. Sometimes they sensed something unusual in our relationship—the way she might whisper an aside to me, or the way I might appear to be leading her—and they would look at me, intently, before I stared into their eyes with the blinding red scrutiny of my vision.
Then they would always look away.
And for a long time—until the dreams became too much—that was how it was.
Yet now I pad into the night, Celestine unaware that I have left our apartment. Outside, dangerous gangs infiltrate the shadowed, half-flooded streets. They call this part of Chasm City the Mulch and it is the only place where we can afford to live now. Certainly we could have afforded something better—something much better—if I had not been forced to put aside money in readiness for this day. But Celestine knows nothing of that.
The Mulch is not as bad as it used to be, but it would still have struck the earlier me as a vile place in which to exist. Even now I am instinctively wary, my enhanced eyes dwelling on the various crudely fashioned blades and crossbows that the gangs flaunt. Not all of the creatures who haunt the night are technically human. There are things with gills that can barely breathe in open air. There are other things that resemble pigs, and they are the worst of all.
But I do not fear them.
I slink between shadows, my thin, doglike form confusing them. I squeeze through the gaps in collapsed buildings, effortlessly escaping the few who are foolish enough to chase me. Now and then I even stop and confront them, standing with my back arched.
My red gaze stabs through them.
I continue on my way.
Presently I reach the appointed area. At first it looks deserted—there are no gangs here—but then a figure emerges from the gloom, trudging through ankle-deep caramel-brown flood-water. The figure is thin and dark, and with each step it makes there is a small, precise whine. It comes into view and I observe that the woman—for it is a woman, I think—is wearing an exoskeleton. Her skin is the black of interstellar space, and her small, exquisitely featured head is perched above a neck which has been extended by several vertebrae. She wears copper rings around her neck, and her fingernails—which I see clicking against the thighs of her exoskeleton—are as long as stilettos.
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 47